Uphill and Downhill Biomechanics with Wouter Hoogkamer PhD | Koopcast Episode 87

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast glad everybody is here with me today in today's episode of the KoopCast it is another biomechanics focused one this one all about how we generate force and how we can run uphill faster because let's face it everybody wants to do that my conversation today is with the PhD biomechanics researcher and professor at the university of massachusetts amherst walter hookemer and walter has this incredibly unique experience where he's worked on the roadside and in particular with some of the aspects dealing with the nike sub 2 project and also on the trail and steep running side with his work previously at the university of colorado boulder with their steep treadmill and those listeners that will be familiar with the conversations that i had with jackson brill and roger crumb on that particular aspect and he can tie all of those things together i had a lot of fun with this conversation it was a really good one we recorded it actually in the midst of recording the audiobook version of training essentials for ultra running 2 where walter also makes a guest appearance there you guys will have to wait on bated breath for that to come out it's going to be maybe i don't know four six more weeks before it is and uh he uh he has an awesome contribution in

that particular book i cannot wait to release it as an aside but anyway enough about that here it is here's my conversation with walter hookemer all about biomechanics of running uphill downhill how they're different and how we can get better i do want to know before we get into things properly so do you have the steep treadmill or are you in like negotiations with the university of colorado to actually get it where is it right now it it is in boulder um but we we have agreed on everything it's just um it's it's a it's a beast right so it's not just uh drop it off at the fedex and it and we'll get here so we're we're looking into best ways to ship it talking to maybe some of my grad students go for a road trip with a van or something like that so we're still in the process of uh figuring out how to get it here but um it will be here eventually the the listeners will remember the podcast that i did with uh roger crom um who's i i mean he's emiratis right now so it's not even really him but we referenced the steep treadmill a little bit and he described the construction of it uh very well so i think the the listeners that do remember that they can conceptualize that it's not something that you just put in a box and ship first off it's a treadmill but second it's a really it's a really beefy one at that exactly so yeah but um yeah i was just talking to a student too and we were sort

of like yeah when if we have that treadmill we could do that so i i hope that uh in the next few uh before next fall it gets here so we can do that actually yeah well we're going to talk a little bit later about how you have used the steep treadmill and how you want to use the steep treadmill and what the impacts are for for trail and ultra runners but i kind of want to start out with some just running economy basics because a lot of the listeners are lay lay listeners um and you've done a lot of research on how different things can impact running economy and i've always thought that this is like a humpty dumpty problem right where we're trying to isolate okay what does arm swing cost what does leg swing cost what is adding mass in these particular areas cost and things like that and then eventually all these you know parts of humpty dumpty get put back together into this picture of running economy um you're involved in a really cool study where you change the mass of of the shoes that athletes were going to run in and you measured performance and running economy that way but you did it in a really in a really clever almost uh uh subversive type of way why don't you describe that research project to the listeners to start out with yeah so so that was a really fun project so basically yeah we as scientists we like to test how things affect running economy so running economy is sort of your energy cost of running and we know i mean theoretically it makes sense if if you run in a way that costs you less energy measured in a lab

then you can probably run faster right but then one-to-one relationship um we we didn't necessarily know that at that time so even though we had a lot of research that everybody has been doing in a lab setting controlled environment coming to the lab you test shoe a versus shoe b quickly um but then we we don't necessarily um let's say example one shoe saves you four percent metabolic energy your running economy is four percent better does that mean we can run four percent faster right and um we uh that was sort of the big question for that study so to do that and that was before we we we had that shoe that did actually four percent but sort of to to set that framework we wanted to know um all of these things we do in the lab do they actually translate to to running faster and by how much so that's sort of the the question we had and then the way we went about it um was we we took a pretty consistent intervention so shoe mass we already know since the early 80s 1980s that if you have a heavier shoe usually when we make it 100 grams heavier so the shoe on each side so general shoe is like 250 grams maybe a trainer um and then we if you add 100 grams to that shoe you're going to be uh using

uh one percent more energy um so that's sort of the other background that we had at that time and then we like okay so let's do that again make some shoes have a control shoe make it 100 gram heavier and have a really beefy one that's 300 grams heavier and then test if that still is true that it's about one percent more energy and three percent more energy and then see if actually people run slower right because it's it's a heavier shoe and if they run slower is it's going to be one percent at three percent um is it the same is it a one-to-one relation is it's going to be slightly less less and that's sort of um what we did uh and then as you said uh we had to sort of deceive people because um on the one side we had our left test on the one side we had the time trials and if you show up for a time trial to see how fast you can run with the shoe and you get there and i'm the researcher and i said okay today you're going to be running in this heavy shoe now run as fast as you can and then the next week you show up and i say like oh today we got this very fast lightweight shoe now let's see how fast you can run with this one right then just because of the fact that i just told you that it was a heavy shoe or a very light shoe you're probably going to be running slightly faster or slower because you expect something right so we didn't want any of that so to prevent that we had to uh sort of leave

all the runners sort of in the unknown about why they even were doing time trials and what was going on and and they didn't even know that was about shoes that was the whole goal so did any of them pick up so we had to do a lot of no no go go ahead i want you to describe the research protocol a little bit so it's it's a ruse essentially they didn't know the shoes were heavier yeah no they came in and they thought we were gonna do a study on the rep repeatability of time trials and if we could predict time trial performance based on lab-based measures of feo2 max and running economy and they didn't know it was about shoes but we were like oh nike is funding this research and they have these shoes we want you to wear these and so the thing what we did we had three shoes three pairs of shoes in each size that looked exactly the same and then we didn't just um put a beefy mess on it but uh we really hit the some lead bbs in the tongue of the shoe and and some in the side pockets there were some double layered um shoes where the the bbs were hidden and then the other thing is um that uh so they looked all the same you wear the one shoe the one week and the other shoe the other week and if they're on your feet you don't necessarily feel a difference uh but we all know if you if you have a shoe in your hand you can you know you you pick up the mess pretty quickly right everybody in a running store walks up to the wall and picks up and sort of feels is it a heavy or a light shoe so that was the

thing we had to uh avoid too so we had to come up with another rouse to make sure that the people weren't just putting on a shoe and feeling how heavy it was so um there we um we came up with the idea of using some sort of fake imu accelerometer uh unit that we then um so the person came in took off their shoes they sat down on the chair and we kneeled and placed this it was actually not even a real accelerometer it's just a 3d printed empty thing that we placed and we said like we need to precisely put this on on this bone in your foot and needs to be here and it's really delicate and sensitive it needs to be here so let me pull on your sock over it and it seems to be in the right spot now let me put on the shoe and then put on the other shoe and now you can lace it up um so at that point the runner has shoes on didn't touch them with their hands and um and and interestingly enough people are pretty bad at feeling shoe mass on their feet if if you're not just doing the one shoe first and then a minute later the other shoe this is a week apart and they had no idea that we did even do anything with the shoes that they weren't uh cue to to sort of feel it so it worked really well um people had no idea where we're doing this they thought they were doing time trials repeatability studies um we we did sort of gave them that um accelerometer on their feet

also afterwards obviously we had to take it off carefully so let me take off their shoes and then put them away so they don't uh pick them up and weigh them um so yeah it worked um people had no clue we were doing this and so this was all for the time trials and then in the final visit what was the time trial by the way to actually measure running economy what was the time trial by the way because i think that's important time trial so yeah so for the time trials we did a three kilometer time trial on the indoor track at um teo boulder so this is actually the old one um before we had the fancy new one um this is the um um the dark shaded um uh indoor track um where um it's a 200 meter unbanked track um so we were in there um um people were doing a time trial so they know it was a 3k these were all experienced runners they had run a 3k before or at least a 5k um and um well there there were some other things to the study like we we they couldn't wear a watch so they they weren't pacing themselves um we uh we took all their splits um we didn't want to like get over excited ourselves sort of being really excited in the in the in the light shoe or less excited in the heavy shoe so we scripted our cheering script and every time they came through it was it was really a suralile experience

because people were in there by themselves doing a trial we as researchers couldn't get too excited um so they were just plugging away on their 15 labs and every time they came by we say we had the script so we either said good job or nice one still looking good going strong but every week we said exactly the same thing at exactly the same lab um so that they didn't get um sort of biased by our own uh excitement or or other things um so so we did three of those like i said so we had a control shoe 100 gram heavier pair and another pair that was 300 grams heavier per shoe as well three weeks apart and then so 3k so i think some folks ran about nine minutes some folks ran about 12 minutes we we had sort of that range um and then we we did see that uh afterwards when we looked at the data that indeed with the heavier shoe they were running slower so at least that worked and then going back to sort of um how they weren't supposed to know about uh the shoe mass then in in the final visit they came to the lab and we did running economy and running economy you kind of want to do it in one session because you have your analyzers and you calibrate it and you have your day-to-day variability and heart rate and and everything else your training of the day before so at that point we had to do we we we choose to do it

in one session which meant we had to change their shoes within one session too uh and we were still trying them to not to pick up on that but you can do that once like they run on the treadmill and chew a and then they come off and so there was something with that accelerometer there let me check it and then you sort of quickly try to switch shoes behind your back like a magician but if you do that once or twice it's at some yeah um but most people sort of after two or three of times we did that picked up and it's like wait a minute there's something with these shoes because why do i need to take them off all the time and um and then it was still interesting to see that even that they know that it was something with the shoes um some of them still didn't know that the ones were heavier they were like oh i've there's something with is this is this a different art support or or what's going on here uh um so so it worked really well sort of confirming again if you have shoes on your feet you don't always have good sensation of how heavy they are but the whole context of this and we can jump to the actual conclusions i i just wanted to tell i wanted the listeners to hear the story of how how much deception was going on for this particular piece of research because i thought i mean there's a lot of point there's a lot of points of deception too i mean it's on the track it's on the treadmill you're measuring running economy you're measuring actual performance the context of all of this is

three kilometer performance and running economy at sub maximal speeds which i think is important for the listeners to kind of understand it's not the typical long slow distance that we talk about an ultramarathon running but what was the what's the nickel version of the results from this how much did the extra mass actually impact running economy yeah so we sort of confirmed our long known that adding 100 grams per shoe um worsens your running economy about one percent now interestingly enough people didn't run one percent slower and um so in the paper we we we spent a whole story about why we thought that that it was less but it actually took a couple of years for us to fully realize that it actually made sense and and that that's why we're seeing it now too in in the marathon too with the four percent shoe um it's it's less so there's something with the relationship between energy and velocity and air resistance and things like that but overall sort of um we we do see that there is an effect but the effect in speed uh in performance that we see is depending on your level of running is is about two-thirds to to to 80 percent um of of your normal impact of of the footwear or whatever you your intervention is um so so yeah it was really cool and it was um good to see that that it does translate

but uh it wasn't a one-to-one that we always expected and even when we did the study we were still expecting it until later we realized oh it it actually makes sense it's not a one-to-one well and here's the translatable point that's going to bring us to the second part of this conversation you also did a lot of work with roger on some of the initial calculations for nike's breaking two project which uh started which started out as just a theory right a long time ago even before nike got involved that we could run a sub two-hour marathon then the researchers at nike and i had a i had a podcast with their uh uh with their research lead uh several weeks ago that i'll link that i'll link in the show notes but they got together in the same vein and said listen if we have the right constellation of variables we have the right athletes we have the right condition we have the right equipment we have the right nutrition we have the right weather all of these things we we've got we've actually got a shot at this but you did a tremendous amount of work and actually mathematically calculating how all of those how all of these things could come together how humpty dumpty can actually come back together and produce a sub two-hour marathon what were the major i mean i can't even say major because it seems like it was just a lot of little things but what were some of the things that went into this like you know goulash of sub two-hour marathon that you eventually predicted yes i think the that that study uh really resulted out of of the one we just discussed sort

of knowing like okay if we need to run two and a half minutes faster we need to sort of run uh or we need to run three minutes faster at that time right so we we needed to improve running economy about three percent ish based on knowing that this is what you need to run that much faster and um and then we just started thinking what what what all is there that we can do what can we do to make people run faster and we sort of focused on sort of the fundamental biomechanical understanding of running and focusing what's the most important thing and the most important thing is kind of like the energy you take to to just run which means you have to support your body weight over a short period of time when your foot is on the ground and that's the most important one and unfortunately also the one that's impossible to change right so we came up with this scenario of running it on mars or or maybe could find a place on earth with the lowest gravity um but because because otherwise i mean you you can't necessarily change the gravity or or or running right fundamentally right so so so uh we we did some we we i think we we looked up the the place with lowest gravity and i think it's probably mount everest which because it's further from the center of the earth right um but as you all know um at mount everest

because of the elevation uh and the oxygen pressure that's not going to work um so um so that that was the most sort of that we started there and said okay that that's not possible it's the most it's you get the biggest bang for your buck but there is no buck because you can't do anything it's a non-starter yeah um so then we like okay what's the second biggest thing and and that is sort of like yeah moving forward and and that's related to air resistance um and um there's two ways or a couple ways to deal with it so we have either tailwind uh you draft behind other runners um or you just sort of use gravity in your advantage and you run downhill and sort of we we quantified all these options um and then there are some rules to the marathon and we also did for this paper we sort of like let's try to do this within the world athletics regulations for marathon so a point to point is not necessarily allowed for world record purposes uh or fresh pacers are also not allowed um so basically all the some of the things that they did in in vienna when kipchoge broke the two-hour marathon it's still not the official world record right because he used these fresh pacers and uh and maybe the footwear but um so we sort of said okay can we do it within the rules so we sort of said okay you can't do a point to point with the full tailwind but maybe we can find a loop where you go as far as part from a to b as the rules allow

and there you have the tailwind and then the other part you just need to run in a shielded environment or between trees or something like that um and then again for the pacing too we said like okay ideally fresh spacers is not allowed can we sort of make some sort of basically cycling based approach where people take turns in the lead and then they they they sort of uh recover back in in uh behind the other runner so sort of uh a track pursuit or or some rotation um pacing line where people take their turn and run ahead take the wind and then go back to the back of the pack and recover um so those were for us so the the scenarios we uh explored and then the other one finally was the footwear which was an interesting study by itself because at that time we had already seen the prototypes but that was still all on the down low we were not supposed to talk about that so we had to sort of play down the role of footwear in that review because at that point there were there was no existing scenario of saying like hey you can make shoes a lot better we just like we knew that the shoes that kim meta was wearing when he set the world record were fairly heavy so we just said like oh let's make those shoes slightly less heavy and that's probably all you can do even though we already knew well you you can come up with a new foam or a carbon fiber plate and and it probably can can do

something extra but at that point um we didn't have that data yet so we didn't talk about it and so the the the result of all of this of putting the running economy and running performance humpty dumpty back together is you theorize that yeah it actually is possible for a human to run under two hours in the marathon if we had if we line up all the variables we line up all the stars and i remember when that i remember when that paper came out and you lived it so i'll let you you tell the story it was not i mean it was not without controversy is kind of the wrong word it ruffled people's feathers unnecessarily because there's the because it's not a competition right and that that was the knock that ultimately became of the these projects which kind of stemmed from this initial piece of research that you did what was it like kind of living that out because you're a scientist right you're an academic you're trying to solve problems and things like that and then once the event kind of takes over that's a different kind of a different animal but like what was it like on your end like seeing your research play out in that way yeah and that was definitely an interesting story so a lot of things happened in parallel so some of the the people that read our paper are like yeah obviously if you run downhill you can run on two hours and it's like yeah i mean none of these ideas were necessarily things that we thought of we just quantified it the best way we could and then the other part was

like and that's where roger sort of might have uh fooled me in a way but so at that point i i had no idea that nike was planning this right so i was just working on this together with chris ariano and and and and roger crumb out of being a running scientist and just liking this idea um because other people had talked about two hour marathons before and we thought that yes sometime in the next 20 years something is going to happen and we say let's see if we can quantify if it's possible now and then while we're in this process um and roger probably knew all along but never told me um there is this nike press release that says hey we're gonna do this in may and it's like whoa um so then we quickly uh wrapped up our paper and and sent it out so that um at least we we weren't the guys that after it happened sort of said like hey it's possible um so yeah we we we set out the paper um nike had announced that it was possible and that sort of gave this whole uh idea about like yeah is it just about the records and and uh and and how are we going to do with it but for us as scientists it was it's really great to see if we work as a team and put the best runners together and and and try to like yeah we use all these major marathons and we know that boston is point to point and downhill isn't great and and probably

newton hills are are not at the best location um so why don't we design a course that can have people run as fast as they can obviously that's it takes away a lot of the um sort of history of some of these courses as well so there's this sort of trade-off um but as scientists where it's more like yeah why why would you run force um and that's why we uh yeah we got excited about the dance interesting you see it again so first they tried it in monza then right um they uh kipchoge broke it in in vienna but now recently um there were other races on a really close short courses where they control everything as flat as possible so both in um the marathon project and and recently in the netherlands sort of the replacement of the hamburg marathon that was cancelled they went to an airport again and just um took a course that that is as flat as possible and with very few turns and we do see that people are running faster again for various reasons one of them being the courses yeah and the ultra running audience will recognize jim walmsley's recent 100 kilometer world record attempt that was uh put on by hoca is kind of in that same vein where you're just trying to optimize optimize all the variables one quick point of clarification before they before there's like some sort of you know uh theorized

beef between you and roger we all love each other that you you were a former student of roger's and there's the utmost respect between uh you and him although sometimes there's ndas that the lawyers make you sign when you're working in these projects where you can't tell you know somebody who you who you work with what's actually going on so this concept of putting humpty dumpty together in a road running situation or a marathon situation i kind of feel like it's trail and ultra running's time to start to do that as well where we're not only looking at we're kind of like looking at performance globally and i just did a really interesting uh uh podcast with uh gi malay who has initially come up with some ultra marathon framework in terms of how how performance actually works which is much different than in a marathon context but in terms of biomechanics which is your which is your wheelhouse we're starting to kind of do the same things where we're looking at okay what does it take to generate force uphill what does economy look like in an uphill condition or in a downhill condition and we're breaking the we're breaking those specific ways of locomoting apart to try to determine what influences what and all ultra runners are going to be concerned with me with the uphill condition because people even think they climb great or they climb sucky and they want to be able to improve that so some of the work that you did is looking at particularly force generation in an uphill condition and trying to

figure out what can what what are the contributing elements to generating force in this uphill condition what can what can we learn from some of that research yeah so so that um was one of the first studies i did and um that that it's mainly sort of a fundamental physics bringing physics back to running biomechanics sort of project um but uh i think the the uh i think the biggest takeaways from that research where we basically just quantified the change in energy cost of running with grade and speed and and sort of measured some ground reaction forces um the biggest takeaway from that is that um i mean it's different right so for cycling it doesn't really necessarily matter if you're using all the power you put at the pedals to overcome air resistance or to go uphill um however for running uh there's a huge difference between level running and uphill running and um we try to to take it apart we we didn't necessarily take it apart as best like again fish we couldn't because of physics and and physiology but we were sort of going back and it like well if you look at this data and think about it from a physics perspective then this could very well be the case and and the downside of the study was we can't necessarily test that directly because um if you for example start

pulling people upwards when they run uphill um you're changing a lot at same time right so um we we did a lot of these experiments before for level running right to find out how much uh is the cost of of supporting your your body weight versus how much is the cost of propelling yourself versus leg swing versus arm swing um for uphill it's all there including going up and um the thing with going up hill and going up during uphill running is that you basically go up by going forward so now they're mixed up so going forward also contributes to going up right and uh you can't take the two apart and that sort of makes this really tricky um from a scientific perspective to to find out what's more important and then because uh going forward in level running um when you don't go too fast there there's nothing like that you lose energy to there's a little bit of air resistance but for most of us that's that's not too much so mainly what we're doing is just bouncing around um and and the cost of running is really involved in the bounce of that and not necessarily in going forward for uphill running um there is that part and there is the part where the forward going goes uphill so um when we want to quantify the energy cost of actually gaining vertical potential energy so raising your your body uphill in gravity um it gets confusing because um

to part where you go forward is now different than it was when it was in level running and and we sort of come up with the framework to place that but basically um it's still it's still a concept and we like i said we can't separate the two so it's maybe just a different way to look at it but it does for me explain uh for example when when i'm out on a run and there's somebody on a bike commuting and we go up hill it's a long road so on the level they pass me but then we go to uh we come to a hill and actually i i start to make up on them so um relatively uphill running is easier than uphill cycling um and i mean i think people have experienced that right you you can't imagine that if you have an overpass on a road or something you you actually do gain on that cyclist it it's not supposed to be somebody on a road bike who's out there for exercise because they're going to way faster but if somebody is commuting sort of going slightly faster than you run as soon as you hit that hill you will see that you you're going to gain on them because for you as a runner the uphill is not as much harder um as it will slow the cyclist down and and that's related to to that that sort of distinguish between the cycling and the running again where for level running um to forward backward motion sort of not necessarily mattering for uphill it is but at same time it helps with going up and

i mean i'm butchering this explanation and i've tried before and it's really hard complicated so i i don't think there's a better way to get it yeah i think the way basically the way a lot of runners will conceptualize it is is that level running is harder from a musculoskeletal uh standpoint and it is that way because the impact forces are higher right every time you hit the ground it's anywhere between 2.5 or 2.7 times your body weight uphill running tends to be cardiovascularly harder more difficult in most situations maybe not all situations but in most situations but those impact forces are obviously much less and i think runners like wrapping them kind of like wrapping themselves around like okay why does this why does this dichotomy exist why is it harder from a cardiovascular standpoint uphill but yet it's not as strenuous on my legs muscles and joint is compared to the level condition but what can they take away i always try to drive this back to the training component right and and you've done some work in determining what are the thing what are like muscularly what joints what muscles actually generate the force of uphill running what do we know about that and maybe we can translate that to a training perspective yeah so exactly so the these two differences or these differences between level and running um are really related to that like i said so you need to you go up the hill by pushing yourself forward along that hill and um in level running you

you just bounce around so for uphill running if you want to become better at uphill running um you have to focus on the end of driving right right um and and then there's even parts where you're like you you can and that comes back into like a lot of people think that that's how you should run on a level but there there's ways with food placement uh where you can sort of minimize how much you slow down every step as well um but without going into that debate i think the driving part for the uphill is really there and that's what we see too and um so the bouncing on the level is often ankle work achilles tendon is definitely doing that a lot um but but going up if you run um there's going to be way more driving from from higher up so more proximal so the hip joints and the knee joints so that's going to be your glutes your butt and um and your quads um that's going to be doing more of that um the quad though is is also pretty important in the bounds that we see on the level um but then the other thing is we we do all this research on treadmills right and and that's great because we can control it um but as you know as ultra runners and trail runners a trail is not a flat concentrate exactly um and and that's where it gets interesting where um there's there's root placements and rocks where you know that okay here i need to

use a little bit more of that ankle push um or or the placement of your foot sometimes is flat versus on our treadmill it's it's always your foot is always going uphill too right um and and those are some some small differences there but um it just points to the specificity of uphill running so getting stronger in that drive is going to be helpful um how do you do that some people say we see correlations between strengths and trail running and ultra running performance so you should do strength training could be the case i i would argue well maybe those that correlation that we see that the better trail runners are stronger is not because they spend more time in the gym but they actually spend more time trail running and being stronger um so yeah definitely um even though there's always relations we know that people that are good at level running are economical are also the ones that are more economical going up um but if we look at the steeper stuff that might fall apart and that's where again we know all of your listeners know there is some folks they know that are really good going up uh and and some folks that are not and that's where um that that is related to that driving mechanics and getting stronger the way that i've looked at it as a coach is that the skill that you learn in level running because almost everybody listening to this is learning how to run in a level condition they learn it in grade school they might take up you know couch to their half marathon you

know training program in college or in adult life or whatever but the point is is almost universally with very rare exceptions people are coming into trail running from road running and so they're learning to they're initially learning to run in a level condition that skill in running is a skill of learning how to run in a level condition only translates so much to running uphill which only translates so much to running uphill on trails which as you mentioned has obstacles and roots and rocks in the way and things like that and the the i i think of those as different sports just like basketball and baseball basketball and baseball have you know fundamental skills where strength skill speed eye hand coordination overlap those sports but uphill running on technical terrain is a different sport than running on level terrain that are that is interconnected with basically the cardiovascular system that's how that's how i've kind of always viewed it yeah no i i fully agree i'm i'm a former track runner i'm i'm i'm relatively a good level runner uh growing up in the netherlands that's all i did um and and i am not as good on the trails as i am on the road by far not i'm really trained and i've optimized and maybe have talent uh for for bouncing around what we just talked about i'm really good at little air resistance just bounce around uh i'm really economical from all the running i do i do get strong cardiovascular so when i do go uphill i still have my cardiovascular

um capacity and i'm still a good runner but i'm not as strong and and experienced in in in in the technique of running uphill which is is way less bouncing and it's way more driving um and um that's why um folks i i i beat on the road um just leave me behind on the trails as soon as it goes up um do you analyze that as a scientist when you go out of the trails you're like oh man i know what's going on behind the curtain here and i potentially should know how to fix it as well yes and no yeah i just often just use it as an excuse to and go running it's like i have a couple of folks that we are as good of runners usually but i beat them on the road and they beat me on the trails and i i think like when they do i'm like okay that's just because they're better at it but at the same time i also know like oh but i can become better at it i just need to become stronger and then just thinking should i spend more time in the gym or should i just be running these trails more often and to get that more strength than a different technique but at the same time i also kind of like um doing fast bouncing level road workouts you like doing what you're good at yeah i mean i i do mile intervals on the level road and then a few weeks ago i i decided to do an

uphill workout and it was just a total different ball game it was just cardiovascular so much harder and so much less fun um and and even the great adjusted pace that i got out of it i mean i know that you have uh looked into that too that that that didn't do any justice what i was feeling you're getting robbed you're getting robbed by great adjusted pace and normalized created pace is what you're saying um okay so we we talked at the onset of this podcast about how the steep treadmill which has made its appearance maybe four or five times on my podcast now it's like a guest i think it's got a person you guys need to name it it's got personality and everything you're gonna get your hands on it soon and i always want to know so what's next right you i'm sure you've been chomping at the bit to do some things with this it's a really cool tool it's very unique in the research world there's you know another one that that uh that that exists but you've got ends of twos right where you guys can pioneer a lot of uh a lot of specific research in a very specific area of uphill locomotion what do you want what do you want to do with it when you get your hands on it and you can use this to drum up research subjects please do yeah yeah no i i mean there's there's a lot of things i'm i'm really still trying to i'm not done with with this study that we just talked about like i said i was having a hard time even explaining it i'm definitely not done with it i want to dive more into and getting a better

understanding of why we we if you look at efficiency mechanical efficiency of uphill running the numbers are weird and that's because of some of these assumptions but now going even steeper that will allow me to to take that apart even more um so more fundamental sides trying to get a more relation with physics and mechanical work and metabolic power there which is probably not what most of your listeners are are excited about so nobody paid attention the other thing is foodware right yeah um so so for us as scientists it's kind of the tool to better understand it and then we we often don't know what we're going to do with that later but we will get there when we get there um but then again like eventually a lot of the work that was done 20 years ago was applied for the two-hour marathon which we didn't know at the time right so um but going back to the steep treadmill application side i think there's still a lot to be doing with foodware and and i'm not sure if you've talked about foodware before but there is obviously we saw this revolution after the four percent shoe on the road and and and things are happening on the trail but a carbon fiber plate um there it's complicated again uh but i i my idea is that at steeper slopes it's not going to be really helpful for various reasons um so that's kind of what what we want to do next as well sort of trying to explore some of these super shoe concepts

and and see if they work as well and if not what do we need to do to make them work as well and then the other part is sort of building on the research about the walk to run transition sort of the local fatigue what's going on there um that was what i was just talking with my student about what she wants to do next year uh which would be great if we have that treadmill at that time sort of going back to do that question and and can we quantify some of that fatigue better and um how does it differ when you alternate walking and running versus just walking or versus just running um and then uh other things we're looking at again not on the treadmill it's sort of like what's the cost of switchback running where there's a lot of turns we know theoretically taking a turn doesn't necessarily cost you a lot more energy um and specifically if we're looking at a steep uphill trail running you're probably not going as fast um but um it hasn't been quantified so ideally my goal is sort of like as we had our two-hour marathon paper where we could quantify all these different things and how they add up and and your Humpty Dumpty putting together um i want to build on that but make it more specific and include trail running applications and uphill running uh too and and uh at some point we need we we can use fancy treadmills all we want but we need to get out there too and and and quantify these things on the trails

um and uh and see what's going on there and again inform that and and and let people know i mean there's always advice about you need to hike this section and you need to save energy for later and and this is where you need to bank time and this is where you need to do that and that's all from coaches and experiences but as a scientist i want to kind of put the numbers on those things uh in the future yeah and you hit you hit the nail on the head because that was going to be my vote so if i get a vote which i don't so you could take this with a grain of salt if i get a vote if you if if you can use the steep treadmill to get a better fix on when to hike and when to run because that is immediately applicable in a trail ultra running situation that you can use to gain time save your legs and all those other things and the best advice that we have right now is go by feel right yeah and i've seen advice all over the map you should hike at this grade and run on these grades and you should hike at this heart rate and run like i've seen all this stuff and i just go no no no no nobody knows the answer to this if you feel like you're better off hiking go ahead and hike if you feel like you're better off running go ahead and run we can fundamentally describe how running and hiking are different we went through that a little bit in this podcast right running's more musculoskeletally stressful and hiking in most situations is going to be more cardiovascularly stressful and you can play that trade-off and there's also also localized fatigue and things like that that go into it but we really we really don't know

from a performance context what should drive the run to walk transition in an uphill condition which i think is a critical component in all of ultra marathoning not just not just elite ultra marathoning all ultra marathoning if we could do that better everybody would perform better instantly yeah no and and but at same time like you said go by feel and and and i'm a strong believer in human self-optimization and and and and we we often know how to do it um and um so it often works but yeah there are still things that we can learn and tweak it and uh do it slightly better um so so that's what we're trying to find out in the in the next years in our research too so coming research we're going to bring you back on when you start to get into this and i'm going to cajole you just like you know just like the cu research lab is cajoled there cajoled their subjects and this research scientist in between them you and roger and everything i can cajole you to come back on the podcast before the research is released and talk a little bit about it how's that sound that sounds great and and actually now i want your help too in this respect where um the big difference between well there's a lot of difference between boulder colorado and and west michigan i know where you're going with this is um sometimes we have great ideas but i just don't have um my nicola giovanelli runner um or or jackson brill that

that just or any wecker who who would be saying like oh yeah i can run for you if you want and be crazy good at it um um we're struggling sometimes so anybody in new england who's into this kind of stuff definitely uh i would be willing to come in to run on a steep treadmill and things like that just uh throw me a line and uh we're we're gonna be uh we need you to do the research that we want to do too valter what's your uh twitter handle how can people get a hold of you uh that's valter sina so um that's my first name and sina's is s-i-n-a-s perfect i'll include links to the show notes in that any but any great runners any good runners in your area which is you're in the amherst area right now right yep yeah any any amherst massachusetts any good runners in the amherst massachusetts area valter needs research subjects to trick into whatever is going to come next out of out of this steep treadmill go check it out valter thank you for coming on the podcast today i really appreciate you coming on the listeners appreciate it and more importantly we appreciate what you do to contribute to what we know about performance we know it's an ever-complicating problem but it does absolutely make an impact and as we look back to the the sub two saga that's going to have impact for forever that's going to be written about in history books and you played a really important role in that cool yeah it was great to chat about these things uh i can do it all day so awesome man we'll have

you back on soon cool sounds good all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to valter for coming on the podcast today and i really apologize in advance and in retrospect for completely butchering probably your first and your last name i know we went over it during the audio book but dang man freaking foreign complicated names it's just hard for me and i apologize that shouldn't stand in the way of the information though so thanks for coming on the podcast and enlightening all of us about how we can actually generate force going uphill and what some of the limiting factors are hope everybody enjoyed this podcast if you have not done so already head on over to apple podcasts or your podcasting platform of choice hit subscribe that is the best the easiest the fastest way to get these podcasts right into your platform of choice whenever they come out otherwise you're behind the eight ball sometimes you gotta wait a day sometimes it's several hours if you want them right away hit subscribe it'll get to your inbox or whatever the equivalent is on the podcasting platform immediately upon release which is every single thursday morning weekend and week out even while i am out on the pct yes i recorded eight of these eight of them this is just one of them in advanced and banked them all before i head out there to keep the show on the road even though i'm indisposed and out on the trail hope you guys appreciate

that effort i appreciate you guys and as always we will see you out on the trails