The Mindset To Break A 100-Mile Record - Zach Bitter

Zach Bitter is an ultramarathon runner and coach who held world records for the 100-mile run and the 12-hour run. Understanding what it takes to run an ultramarathon is one thing, but doing it at a world record pace is something else. I wanted to find out what the mindset of an ultra runner can teach the rest of us about resilience, dedication and commitment. Expect to learn the biggest mistakes that runners make when taking on a long distance, how Zach copes with the pain when things get hard, the best intra-event nutrition he's found, how to deal with negative self-talk, whether he's tempted to do a Back Yard Ultra and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 20% discount on the best quality Kratom from Super Speciosa at https://getsuperleaf.com/modernwisdom (use code: MW20) Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://bit.ly/cbdwisdom (use code: MW20) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Zach's website - https://zachbitter.com/ Follow Zach on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/zachbitter/ Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #zachbitter #ultra #running - 00:00 Intro 00:25 Ultramarathon Trends 09:06 Logistics of Running 100 Miles 16:04 Impact of Age on Running Form 23:53 Developing an Ultramarathon Mindset 31:53 The Competitive Advantage of Having Fun 39:21 Emotional & Physical Phases of a 100-Mile Run 50:00 Knowing How to Push Harder 56:05 Where to Find Zach - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  One of the biggest mistakes I think ultra runners can make is you find yourself at the starting line of a 100 mile race and you just create this monster in your head of what you're going to do and then you try to wrap your head around that and you burn so much mental energy thinking about that all day that when you get to the end and it's time to really push, you've got nothing left to give mentally. You've kind of drained that mental battery, so to speak.

• 0:23Chris Williamson?

  Zach Bitter, welcome to the show.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  Hey, thanks for having me.

• 0:26Chris Williamson?

  How are you finding training now that you're in Austin? Has it got the right requisite trails and running routes that you need?

• 0:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, the biggest transition for me so far has just been going from like a very oppressively hot, dry climate in Phoenix to slightly more, or I shouldn't say slightly, but much muggier climate here in Austin.

• 0:46Chris Williamson?

  Equally oppressive, but a bit wetter, yeah.

• 0:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, I grew up in the Midwest. I spent a couple of decades in Wisconsin, actually, so I got sort of familiar with humid summers. So I have an idea of what's coming and, you know, one of the reasons why my wife and I moved to Austin was because I ended up coming down here, I think, five times last year and she was already kind of interested in moving to Austin at some point. So we decided it was time to make it happen. So, but yeah, adjusting, I'm training for mostly flat stuff right now. So terrain isn't as big of an issue. It's just, you know, normalizing the temperatures more or less.

• 1:20Chris Williamson?

  We don't have a lot of elevation or mountains in Austin, or at least I haven't been to see any yet. I haven't been shown any of them.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  No, they, I mean, they call it hill country, I guess. So you can get some rollers, but not a lot of like two mile ascent type of situations like you're going to find in like the canyons out in California and stuff like that. So it's a little different. I kind of like it though. I like running controlled surfaces a little bit better. I like doing the trail stuff as well, but usually I'll use that as a way to kind of like break up kind of big buildups for more flatter races. And that just kind of keeps, keeps me excited about it, makes it not quite as monotonous. And I think just kind of gives you a little of an edge when you're kind of going back and forth a little bit. But I'm sure once the summers really pick up, we'll head up to Colorado for some, some training sessions up in, in the mountains. If there's a race that's kind of targeting that type of terrain as well.

• 2:12Chris Williamson?

  What are you working towards right now?

• 2:14Speaker 00

  I'm actually preparing for an event that, as silly as it sounds, it's on an indoor track at the Olympic Training Facility in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, called the Pettit Center. And it's a little over 400-meter indoor track. They have a speed skating rink in there. So they keep it at like 60 degrees constants, which is kind of a nice control there from a weather standpoint. And I'm probably going to do 100 miles or distance traveled in 12 hours there, but I'm sort of keeping the door open to do 24 hours, just in case. But that's in June. So everything I'm kind of doing from a training standpoint is kind of moving towards that.

• 2:49Chris Williamson?

  You must be in the thick of it then. If that's what, like, between six and eight weeks away or something, this must be ramping up towards a pretty intense set of training weeks.

• 3:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. And when I do stuff that's kind of like 100 miles and further, I'm usually compartmentalizing the different intensities a little more than what a lot of folks would probably think of with an endurance plan. And the periodization is still there. It's just a little more structured so that I'm working on, say, like, shorter intervals earlier in the plan, longer intervals, or what you call like a tempo run, kind of in the middle, and then spending the last like six to eight weeks working on kind of race specific pacing, which for longer races just tends to be slower versus most endurance races where race day is going to be kind of a more faster paced comparatively to what you're normally doing in training. So I think when you kind of stretch out the distance

• 3:42Speaker 00

  as far as 100 miles and beyond, you get into this kind of territory where you're really not going to cross a bunch of different intensities on race days. If you're doing things right, you're going to kind of dial in the right intensity and hold on for dear life, so to speak. And that just kind of puts you in a position, I think, to be a little more one-dimensional throughout the different phases of training.

• 4:03Chris Williamson?

  Do you still hold the 100-mile record?

• 4:06Speaker 00

  I have the American record for 100 miles in distance running 12 miles, but I I lost the world record to a guy named Alex Sorkin, who's just been on a tear. He actually now holds the world records for 24 hours, 12 hours, 100 miles and 100 kilometers. So he's just been been ripping it up, but it'll be fun to kind of take a swing at some of the times he's been putting up the

• 4:29Chris Williamson?

  last year. Do you know what the times are?

• 4:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, so he he recently just broke the 100 kilometer world record, which was 6 hours and 5 minutes. So he's like sub 6 minute miling essentially for 62 and a half miles or 100 kilometers for that. His 100 mile PR is 10 hours and 51 minutes.

• 4:47Chris Williamson?

  And what was yours before?

• 4:49Speaker 00

  Mine was 11 hours and 19 minutes. So he took a good chunk off of that. Then he went 110 miles in 12 hours. So that's his distance. They do these weird things in ultra running where you see how far you can get in a specific timeframe. So some popular ones are like 12 hours, 24 hours. And then when you get real crazy, you do like 48, 72, and sometimes even 6 days. So he's gone up to 24, which he did. I want to say that was maybe about 8 months ago. He ran 192 and a half miles in 24 hours. So he's been just kind of lighting the the flat runnable ultra scene on fire recently. It's been kind of cool to see see him take a big swing at that stuff.

• 5:29Chris Williamson?

  Is that indoors as well?

• 5:31Speaker 00

  His were all outside. So there was an event, he did 2 of them at called the Centurion 100, where they have an outdoor track that is designed for kind of record chasing. They try to minimize the field size. You're not kind of spending too much time in lane 2 or 3 if it gets real crowded on the track. And he did the 24 hour run, I think it was like a short loop around a mile, little maybe a little over a mile. And yeah, and I think the other, I think the other, so he's he's actually run 100 miles now twice since I broke the world record. And you did once he ran 1114, and that's kind of was his first race. Then he did 192 and a half for 24 hours, went

• 6:13Speaker 00

  back and did another 100 mile, and that's when he went 1051. And then just, I think, was it a week ago, he did the 100 kilometer world record? But yeah, it's been been insane to watch.

• 6:25Chris Williamson?

  So a 6, like a sub 6 minute mile, sorry, a sub 6 minute kilometer?

• 6:31Speaker 00

  A mile for the 100 kilometer, actually. So it's like, I think it's like, it's in the 550s for for mile pace for that. And I think if my math is right in my head, it's like, he's getting around like, for his, he's down into like, sub four kilometer, four minute kilometer pace for some of that.

• 6:53Chris Williamson?

  Which is disgusting.

• 6:54Speaker 00

  It is, it's insane. It's really cool to see the sport kinda, kinda grow, cause like, I got an ultra marathon running in 2010, and that was kind of at the precipice of like, a big surge of popularity with the sport, and it's just kinda continued to get more, more popular over the last decade or so. And a lot of the growth was on kind of the trails and the mountainside of it. And it was kind of a draw away from the kind of more structured running that you see historically. But there's a pretty big history in kind of flat, runable, controlled, short, short loop stuff, timed events and things like that. So as the sports continue to grow, we're seeing this side of it kind of grow as well. And he's certainly doing his fair share of putting a spotlight on some of this stuff.

• 7:32Chris Williamson?

  And the way that it works, because the 100 mile and the 12 hour time tend to be so tightly close together, you have a crack at the first one, and then if you feel like you've got a little bit more in the tank, you just keep on going and see what you've got, and then maybe even have a look at the 24 as well?

• 7:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, the latter is a little more rare, but most, I mean, there's only a few people who've been in a position to go under 12 for 100 and then continue on. So it, but that seems to be the move. I've only, I ran, I did, at one time I stopped at 100 miles in 2015, I ran 100 miles in about 11 hours and 40 minutes and was just like, burning in fumes, basically. So I stopped with a, I always wonder about that one, how much of that one was just my mental exhaustion, which is the likely case there, versus just kind of physically running out of steam. But I think usually when you're in a position to be running a time that's under 12 hours, or in Alex's

• 8:33Speaker 00

  situation, under 11 hours, the motivation to kind of keep going, since you've put yourself in that position is there, and you tend to stick it out, even if it's at a slower pace. 24 gets interesting because there's just so much more dynamics there in terms of what you need to do for that extra 12 hours. So I think it maybe looks appealing when you cross that 12 hour mark, but then as you kind of tick up to 16, 17, 18 hours, it gets a little more daunting to maybe wrap your head around that. So usually people are picking one or the other, or if they do pick both, usually only one of them goes well.

• 9:06Chris Williamson?

  Talk me through a controlled environment for hitting 100 miles. How many breaks are you taking through there? Are you trying to not stop and refuel as you move pretty much for the entire 12 hours?

• 9:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, as much as you can tolerate. Really, the only thing that should pull you off of a track in an event like that, if you're going for just your fastest potential time, is a bathroom break. So what I'll usually do is I'll have like a usually a couple of people out there that are just kind of at a at a table with all my stuff. And as I'm coming around the loop, if I want something, I'll just say what I want. And then a couple of minutes later, they'll hand it to me. So all the like hydrating and fueling and things I'm going to be doing is going to be kind of on the fly, so to speak. And then it's just you you hope for the best digestively and for bathroom breaks and things like that. My most efficient was I did 100 miles with, I think, around between 60 to 90 seconds of total stoppage.

• 10:03Chris Williamson?

  Total stoppage?

• 10:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:05Chris Williamson?

  12 hours, basically.

• 10:06Speaker 00

  Yep. Yeah. And then when I ran my fastest time, 11 hours and 19 minutes, that was, I think I stopped for total, maybe three, three and a half minutes total on that one.

• 10:15Chris Williamson?

  Wow. And then is that where do you because I've seen certain races where people take, they have to recover, they have to either do a little bit of sleep or some sort of soft tissue or just get lift their legs up or whatever. Where's the line? If it's not 12 hours, is it 24? Is it 48?

• 10:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, if you look at just like world record performances and things like that, or record breaking performances, there's not going to be a lot of that. There's, I want to say, the previous American record for 24 hours, a guy named Mike Morton, when he got near like the final hours, he was starting to really tighten up in like the hamstring area, and he would stop every like four loops and do like this stretch that seemed to kind of keep him, keep him moving a bit. But, you know, when you get to like Alex Orkin's world record, his average pace is right around seven and a half minute miling. So, any stoppage there just means he's got to run faster to average that time. So I'm pretty sure he had a pretty,

• 11:16Chris Williamson?

  he had a minimum of- That's for the 24, 730 for the 24.

• 11:20Speaker 00

  Yep. I think once you start getting to like 48 hours is where you start kind of considering, is like say a 20 minute power nap going to actually produce a faster overall distance versus staying out there and slogging it. And it's just, you know, as you stretch out to those, this is too easy, the fields get thinner and thinner, and the data points get, get less and less populated. So you do have a little bit of a variance. I, I remember specifically I was following, there's a popular timed event race, actually down near Phoenix, that they do every year at the end of, at the end of the year. Actually, it's called Cross the Years, because you start in December and end in January. And the six days kind of their, their big calling

• 12:01Speaker 00

  card for that one. And there was a close battle between two guys a few years back. And one of them slept, I think, a total of somewhere in the upper 20 hour timeframe during it. And the other guy was like less than eight hours total over the course of six days. So you do get a pretty big variance.

• 12:21Chris Williamson?

  And they ended up finishing in a not too dissimilar time.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, they were close to one another. That's a one mile, like, kind of dirt loop that they do that one on. And I want to say they were within like a loop or two of one another by the end of it all.

• 12:31Chris Williamson?

  Who's that crazy guy that did the, the race that's kind of orienteering, and now it's one mile on the hour, every hour until, till everybody quits?

• 12:41Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, the so they've got these events called backyard ultras essentially where yeah, you you have like a loop or something that you need to complete in an hour's time and it's just a last man standing is what they'll call it because everyone keeps going out until there's one left. The most recent one, I think it's Harvey Lewis is probably who you're thinking of.

• 12:58Chris Williamson?

  Is he the guy that made, what's that called? There's a special trail that he did for ages and ages and it was a real sort of interesting type of race. The route was always different. It took a little bit of orienteering to kind of get yourself around.

• 13:13Speaker 00

  I think you're thinking of the Barclays Marathon.

• 13:15Chris Williamson?

  I'm thinking of the Barclays Marathon.

• 13:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was another interesting one where it's, I mean, it's all like kind of a mystery. They say it's a 20 mile loop that you do five times, but in reality, they don't really know. It could be like much more than that. And yeah, it's like it's it's total bushwhacking, orienteering. And usually it's got, I think there's been 15 or 16, hopefully I'm not butchering this, but like 15 or 16 total finishes over the years. And it's almost got to be like as ideal weather as you can get for that area. If it's like rain coming in, it's basically a foregone conclusion that no one's finishing that year, even though everyone goes in thinking, all right, I'm going to find a way. So you get some, some crazy results with that one.

• 14:00Speaker 00

  Gary Robinson, one year, he like the way they confirm that you did the loop is they've got this book and you're supposed to pull a page out of it. So when you come back down, you have to show the page that you did it. And he, he came down, but he came down, he had all his pages, but he came down the wrong trail. So like he got turned around somewhere out there, ended up at the finish area, but had taken a different route. So he essentially disqualified himself on the fifth loop at the very end of the race. Yeah, I imagine like spending almost 60 hours out there in the rain and through all that and finding out, oh, I made one mistake and that basically bottomed everything off.

• 14:42Chris Williamson?

  That hurts so much. Are you tempted by doing a last man standing type race?

• 14:46Speaker 00

  I would for that. I like, I like the concept of the idea of that where there's kind of this, you're, you're obviously in a battle with yourself, but there's like, A hundred different ways you can probably structure that timeframe where that hour in which you're trying to pace yourself around and then you're also trying to kind of monitor the field and sense like how much does this person have left and how deep into the, you know, the depths of sleep deprivation and fatigue and might have to go before someone else breaks. So I think I'll probably do some of those eventually. The interesting thing I think is you sort of get these hyper-long ultra marathons where age is definitely still a factor,

• 15:27Speaker 00

  but it's just pushed way back. So you can be a fair bit older and then you have like some of the racing that I've done more historically, like I could call like single day ultra marathon stuff where I do think there's probably a earlier point where like, all right, now I'm likely not physically going to be able to produce the same times I was before, but you still have this door open for some of those like multi-day type stuff. So part of me is kind of holding off a little bit on that so that I don't spend, spend my youth, so to speak, in things that I can wait for and maximize the shorter, shorter distance ultras while I still kind of have a little bit of pop in my legs.

• 16:03Chris Williamson?

  How old are you?

• 16:04Speaker 00

  Thirty-six.

• 16:05Chris Williamson?

  Okay, cool. And is this, are you kind of looking at the precipice over the next, whatever, five to 10 years of the single day ultras maybe being a little bit difficult to keep up with? Does that start to look a little bit more like a sprint when you're 45 or 46 instead of 36?

• 16:21Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm, for sure. And I think, it's actually in my mind, and this is something that I probably had to relearn or reevaluate in my mind, is I've thought that as the sport kind of evolved, we did see kind of like a push of younger folks coming into it where historically it was kind of, you went through a full like, sort of like career, if you want to call it that, or at least like personal like project of seeing how fast you could run like the 5K, the 10K, the half marathon, the marathon, and then you'd sort of age out and then maybe if you still had some, some, some fire in you, you would decide to do an ultra marathon. So you'd see a lot of the winners would be kind of a little bit older than your average athlete would be.

• 17:04Speaker 00

  We started seeing that get a little younger as the sport grew, but then recently, we've seen the men's and women's 100 miles, 24 hours, 12 hours, all go down to 40 year olds. So now I'm thinking to myself, well, maybe I got more time, time left on the single day stuff than I've originally thought. So it is an interesting kind of a thought experiment to run through your mind, but I think the 24 hour is going to be something I'll spend a fair bit of time training for and preparing for in the future. And then I don't know how much of the four, the word on the street from the very experienced multi-day folks is that the four to eight hours, the most brutal one, because that's the one where you could, in theory, probably not sleep at all. Whereas once you get up to like 72

• 17:49Speaker 00

  plus hours, you're probably going to have at least some breaks in there. And it's just a lot to wrap your head around, I think, from the mental side to be going into a 40 hour race and thinking like, I'm going to push through two sleepless nights and try to stay consistent and, and on target for what I'm going for. And that, that one sounds a little daunting. So perhaps I'll skip that and just do some last man standing stuff.

• 18:10Chris Williamson?

  Do you, have you got any concerns long-term about your health? Obviously, I've heard rumors or whatever, seen things online about free radicals from these people that do tons and tons of endurance events, you know, like absolute long out longevity. Is, is that something that you consider?

• 18:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's definitely something I think about. And it's, if, when, when I'm like looking at what I do relative to just running in general, I've clearly gone past like the mark, like the, the health benefits and into like the kind of masochistic territory of like you're brutalizing your body and you're going to fight a little bit of an uphill battle to probably keep things in check. So I think about that stuff. I've just been, I, I sort of look at life more though, through the lens of, I want to maximize my time and enjoy, enjoy it as much as I can. So if that means like, I'm taking some years off the back end in order to be like, really able to go after the things that interest me,

• 19:11Speaker 00

  I'd rather have that than be kind of more. Moderate and find myself, you know, living to be like ninety or a hundred and kind of wondering what if I would have pushed a little harder or trained a little differently. So I'm definitely trying to do things in a way where I feel it'll keep me sustainable and keep me healthy and not, not destroy myself. And some of that I think is just being kind of mindful of when injuries do pop up, making sure you're taking the time to not let them fester into something that's going to be long-term or permanent. I think paying attention to nutrition and things like that so that you don't end up in a situation where you you're constantly depleting yourself and running yourself into the ground and premature aging and things like that. But at the end of the day,

• 19:54Speaker 00

  it is probably the, you know, like I said, I probably crossed that point where I'm maximizing health through the activities I'm doing and leaning a little bit more into performance at the expense of some health. But part of it is also, I don't necessarily see myself as being like this sixty-five-year-old still out there kind of slogging through ultra-marathons for the sake of doing it. My, my suspicion is that when I get to a point where I'm no longer competitive, I'll probably focus my energies on some sort of other physical type of thing and maybe lean a little more into some strength type stuff and hopefully preserve some lean muscle mass as I age.

• 20:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, man. It's, it is interesting thinking about the people at the peak of their sport, you know, you have the hundred-mile record for a chunk of time and then you're going to go for it again this year. Talking about life balance and offsetting longevity and considerations about that, that all of those things are just mitigating performance, basically. All of those things are just going to get in the way, even if it's ever so slightly, like, you know, whatever it is that you decide that you're not going to do with regards to your training or your nutrition or your whatever, it, it's not going to be to the benefit of your performance. So if you are going all out to try and be the best in the world, which you are,

• 21:14Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting, right? Because the role model that we have, that we see in people that give absolutely everything that they have, most people who aren't at the peak of that sport, because there's only a handful that are, take that strategy as the one that they should use in their daily life. And I think that you need to look at, okay, what are the things that they are doing that I can bring into my own life whilst taking into account the fact that this isn't my calling, right? I'm not trying to get a world record. I'm not going for this. This isn't my source of income, my desire for legacy, my highest calling in life. And trying to blend those two things, what is it that Zach's doing that I can bring on board myself that I think is a good strategy?

• 21:54Chris Williamson?

  But also, do I want to be ending myself to the same degree that someone who's trying to create this long-lasting legacy is? Well, if you're just a recreational runner, then maybe not.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a really good point, because I think it's funny. I think actually, like, because I coach people from beginners who've barely ran at all in their entire life, to people who've been running their entire life and are chasing like an age group record or something like that. And the difference, I would, I say, between like someone like myself, who's doing this as a career or a profession, and someone who's doing it as like a passion, but they also have a full-time job, a family, a whole other life outside of it, is they just have a lot more variables that they're actually dealing with. Like, when you put yourself in a position where you decide, I'm going to spend, say, four to six months just living this life of a professional athlete and do everything I can to kind of maximize my

• 22:51Speaker 00

  performance on one singular day, you sort of eliminate so many variables out of necessity, like you said. You start whittling things down where you just draw your parameters so tight that you have like a very short list of things that could negatively impact or impact what you're trying to do, versus the everyday person who simply can't turn those things off, nor do they necessarily want to. And where I find that interesting is a lot of times, we'll take things like studies and research on kind of training methodology or nutrition and things like that. And we'll be looking at like the elites, the tip of the spear, and it's like, To a degree, like you said, there's a lot of useful things you can pull out of that. But once you start introducing life variables that are not present or haven't been fine tuned

• 23:36Speaker 00

  to the degree that they are with a professional athlete, it starts getting interesting and I think it gets more exciting in terms of finding out like, well, why does this work so well for me but not for that person? And then you kind of have to play around with some of those variables and figure out why it's working for someone and not you or vice versa.

• 23:53Chris Williamson?

  I'm interested by the mindset that you need to be able to do that sort of an event. So obviously you're doing your training, you're doing your recovery, you're probably learning about different strategies for fueling and refueling and intra-day workout fuel and stuff like that. How much are you doing formal mindset training? Is there, are you working with a mindset coach? Are you going through any particular types of techniques that are assisting you there?

• 24:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, the mindset side of the sport has been something where I think when I first got into it, I sort of just thought like it would take care of itself more or less, where it was just, you know, I think my mindset about mindset was the reason I'm doing this is because I have a strong enough mindset to push through this stuff. And that was just like a skill set that I didn't necessarily need to practice or that was just kind of unique to someone who's doing this sort of a, this sort of a sport or this sort of an activity. But as I kind of went through it, I started recognizing just kind of how you can train your mind differently and kind of structure the training too. So for me now, when I'm looking at like my training schedule,

• 25:06Speaker 00

  I'm thinking about just like, how do I work on things like visualization during training to try to kind of help me close the gap between, say, the last time I ran 100 miles and the next time I'm going to. Because the mindset of an ultra marathon, the uniqueness comes in the relative limited amount of experiences you actually have at it from a, just like being very specific to it.

• 25:31Chris Williamson?

  Because you never, sorry, you rarely run 100 miles in training. In fact, have you ever run 100 miles in training?

• 25:38Speaker 00

  No.

• 25:39Chris Williamson?

  What's the longest that you've run as not a competition?

• 25:43Speaker 00

  Not a competition, sixty miles.

• 25:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so barely half of the thing that you hold a record in.

• 25:50Speaker 00

  Right, yeah. So when you think about it, like even like the marathon, which when we're looking at standard endurance events is kind of the pinnacle from a distance standpoint. Not uncommon at all that even like, uh, folks that aren't elite will get up to if not at that distance. So at least they can wrap their head around the amount of time they're going to be out there. And you see the elites training for marathons, they're sometimes pushing upwards to like a long run where they're doing sixteen, eighteen miles at goal marathon pace. So they've narrowed that gap between executing their race and what they've done in training to a fairly small margin where as long as something uncertain doesn't happen. Uh, they can almost predict what they're going to do on race day.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  Whereas yeah, a hundred miling, like the last time you experienced mile seventy to a hundred was the last time you did it. So for me, like the mindset side of things is just practicing, like visualizing where you want to be on event day and working yourself through that. And the best spot for that, I think, is always when you're doing things that are specific to what you're doing. So I really start to lean into the mindset side of things a lot more when I'm in about the last third of my training buildup where I'm really starting to build up my long run and add back to back long runs. So I might find myself on say like a Saturday, Sunday, long run double where I'm running thirty miles on both of those days. And on that second one specifically, I'm going to have a little bit of fatigue from the training week.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  Uh, there and I'm just visualizing what is it going to feel like to move from mile seventy to a hundred and just like taking snapshots in my head. Through that, through these long runs, so that when I do get there on race day, I feel like it's kind of a little more close proximity in terms of like what I want to do, how I want to do it. And I find that that's really helped me kind of wrap my head around the whole thing. Because one of the biggest mistakes I think ultra runners can make is you find yourself at the starting line of a 100 mile race and you just create this monster in your head of what you're going to do and then you try to wrap your head around that and you burn so much mental energy thinking about that all day that when you get to the end and it's time to really push, you've got nothing left to give mentally. You've kind of drained

• 27:56Speaker 00

  that mental battery, so to speak. And if you can build that up and put yourself in a position where you can kind of work through those paces in your head on a little more of an autopilot because you've felt like you've done it a bunch of times, I think that's the sweet spot there. So that and there's some other mental tricks I like to use. One is like intra-race stuff where you actually are breaking down different segments. So like when I start a 100 mile race, I'm not going to be thinking about finishing. I'm going to be thinking about hitting that first benchmark of where I'm going to try to get to and what time I'm going to try to hit there and try to crowd out any other thoughts if possible. I'm also going to be thinking about if I find myself standing on the start line of a 100 mile race, I'm essentially like 99% of the way there when I look at it from the entirety

• 28:40Speaker 00

  of the training buildup. So being mindful during the training so you have these reference points to think about, oh yeah, four months ago I was there and now I'm here and you know, three months ago I was, you just have these like mental pictures in your head that really highlight the breadth of everything and help you minimize the big task at hand, which I think is very helpful and kind of getting yourself positioned to be able to stay on top of the the physical side of things with your mindset.

• 29:09Chris Williamson?

  Zooming out is so important. It's such a difficult skill though, right? We're so short-termist as humans, especially if discomfort's in the situation. You're doing this thing and all that you feel is the taste of metal in the back of your throat and the blood in your lungs and the throbbing of your legs and stuff. And you can't, it's so hard. You're totally right. If you've been preparing for, you know, three to six months to go and do any sort of a race and you're partway through the race, but you are, it's 99 point something of the way there of all of the time that you've spent researching and looking at kit and hydrating and diet and going on practice runs and thinking about how the race is, all of that. And you've just, it's just the end. You know, what's the?

• 29:54Chris Williamson?

  It's the final stage of the Tour de France that's basically like a trophy lap, right? It's kind of just a, I can't remember what they call it. The peloton just comes in and it's symbolic, right? It's not, it's not actually part of the race so much. And it's precisely the same as that, but except for the fact that you, if you get yourself in the wrong headspace, you probably can talk yourself into this being this huge, big problem that you need to overcome. And then you're going to be stressed and you know that that's not going to be good for your performance. And because you know, it's not good for your performance, you're thinking about the fact that the thing you're thinking isn't going to be good for your performance and it makes it worse and makes it worse.

• 30:29Speaker 00

  It spirals.

• 30:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 30:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's funny too, because I think, and this maybe goes back to a little bit to one of the questions you asked before. It's like, for me, I think when I don't belong on a starting line of an ultra marathon any longer is when I get to a point where the process of preparing for it is no longer enjoyable or no longer fulfilling. Because when you look at the race as kind of like more of a celebration of all the work you did to get there, then it becomes just kind of part of it versus the end all be all. And when people ask me like, why I run ultra marathons, or if they ask like, what they should do for running an endurance race, I think digging into

• 31:12Speaker 00

  that is gotta be square one. It's like, well, what do you actually want to be doing on the day to day? How, what kind of fulfillment are you going to draw from this? Because if putting in the training is like pulling teeth, then it's not going to be something that you're going to find enjoyment from, even with a good race result long term. So at that point, it's probably more about finding another activity that gets your body moving, that you do enjoy doing on a day to day basis, where the training becomes such an enjoyable part of your lifestyle, that even if you have a bad race, you don't look back at it and think, well, I just wasted that last half year or third of a year.

• 31:48Chris Williamson?

  It's hard to compete with somebody who's having fun. Really, really difficult to compete with someone who's having fun, right? Like, it's a competitive advantage to do the thing that to you feels like play and to everybody else looks like work. That's one of the things. Everybody likes the idea of the end result.

• 32:07Chris Williamson?

  Separate from the process that gets you there. Everyone likes the idea of being a rock star up on stage. Nobody likes the idea of five to 10 years during your teenage years, playing sequences on the guitar over and over and over again. Or like obsessing over the way that your voice sounds or getting going for vocal coaching three times a week for a decade or something, right? The same thing goes for podcasting. You know, lots and lots of people like the idea of doing a podcast. We go, okay, you're going to have to research the absolute best people in a field within the space of a couple of days. They're going to have had their entire life to learn about this. You've got a couple of days to do it. And then as soon as you've done that, you have somebody else waiting in the wings, like an endless conveyor belt that's just constantly coming around.

• 32:49Chris Williamson?

  Like, is that, do you like learning about stuff at a predefined cadence? Like running on a treadmill? Because if you don't, that, that is what being a podcaster is, right? Like what being a podcaster is, is consistently learning about lots and lots of different things. And then managing to try and coax that out of the expert that you're speaking to. And if you don't like the sound of that, then podcasting isn't for you. I know that you like the idea of that, the same as you like the idea of being a rock star. You like the idea of being an endurance runner. But if you don't want to go and do lots of training and get to sleep and miss out on social events and stop drinking and do all of that stuff, the same as learning how to play the guitar, the same as reading the books or doing the research and practicing on your diction and your conversation craft.

• 33:31Chris Williamson?

  The end result is moot because the journey to get there isn't something you're prepared to go through.

• 33:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, I remember before, before I kind of changed career paths and focused more on coaching and racing and stuff, I was a school teacher and I'd have, you know, students who would, you know, they, they generally wanted to be doing something other than being in school. And some of it's not their fault, but they would, the stuff they'd want to do a lot of times were, you know, what most, you know, kids and teenagers want to do, like, I want to go skateboarding, I want to, you know, play guitar, like you mentioned, and things like that. And eventually it would get to a point where you're just like, well, well, like, what's your long-term plan with this particular thing? And like, well, I want to be a professional at it. And if you want to be a professional at it, it's like, you have to look at those examples

• 34:20Speaker 00

  like you described, and I would always share with them, Zach Wild's, the, the lead vocal and guitars for Black Label Society, who When he was in high school, would play guitar, I think something like eight to 10 hours a day, and would just be like, super groggy during school because he was up all night basically playing guitar. But by the time he graduated high school, he was so good, he had, you know, guys like Ozzy Osbourne looking at him. And it's like, that's what you kind of got to do if you really want to be that guy standing on stage and, you know, playing lead guitar for Ozzy Osbourne or something like that. And obviously, there's other off-ramps to success within those things that don't include being the best of the best. But these are things you probably want to think about as you're deciding,

• 35:05Speaker 00

  you know, is this something that I really want to spend my time and energy on versus the endless list of other things that are out there?

• 35:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, and I think it's a good idea to have a couple of pursuits that you decide to try and be very, very good at. I think that makes a lot of sense. But you can't do that for everything. And trying to do that for everything is going to mean that the few things that you should be really focused on, that you could perhaps become the best in your county, city, country, world at, they're going to be diluted down by the fact that you're trying to spin a ton of different plates. But I don't think that it's a bad idea to recreationally have something that you want to do, or to challenge yourself even once. You know, to say, look, I really, really feel like it would be very meaningful to me if I could run 100 miles. I don't think that I can do it, and yet, it's going to be this transformational experience, that it's going to be interesting, and I'm going to learn a lot about it, and I'm going to do that. Like, that's a very different

• 35:53Chris Williamson?

  mindset than I'm going to try and live the life of a professional runner because I want to try and become the best in the world. And, you know, that can maybe even facilitate or improve the thing that you have decided to be really, really good at, whether that's running a business, or being a parent, or, you know, being a creator, or whatever it is that you want to do. I do think that you can facilitate that with stuff from outside of it. But this is the core concept of Greg McKeown's essentialism, where he says, look, there's maybe between one and three highest points of contribution that you have to the world. Everything else gets in the way. Like the ultimate productivity system, as far as I can see, is getting ruthlessly clear about what you want and then culling everything else that doesn't contribute to it.

• 36:35Chris Williamson?

  Now, running 100 miles might actually contribute to you being a really good businessman, because it may teach you to overcome difficulty and to lean into discomfort and all that sort of stuff, right? But again, like if starting up knitting or something isn't facilitating the thing that you're supposed to do, it's taking away from it. Maybe that's something that you need to question. And the same thing goes for whatever other pursuit you try and introduce into your life.

• 36:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, you hit it on the head. And I think it's the really interesting thing, I think, about ultra marathoning. And the 100 mile distance gets a lot of like spotlight for this. And part of it's probably just because it's, it does end up kind of putting a lot of people in this position where they have like, it's long enough where there's just no way around some big ebbs and flows and kind of your, your mind, your, your state of mind and your state of how your body feels that kind of almost is counterintuitive to you going in. And the best example is like, there's like always going to be a point in 100 mile race, regardless of whether you're finishing very last in that group or in the very front or somewhere in between, where you get to a point where you feel like you've hit rock bottom.

• 37:45Speaker 00

  And your mind immediately goes to this spot of like, if it's this bad now, how can I keep doing this and expect it not to get worse? And if you let that continue to happen, your mind to keep going down that path, you're gonna drop out. But if you kind of like hunker down, focus on a short term goal and get through that, it's amazing, like you might have like this scenario where five miles later, you feel better than you did all day long and you're left there almost laughing at yourself, thinking like, how did I continue the activity that got me to feel that miserable? And the continuation of that activity actually now makes me feeling better than I've ever felt before in my life. And you have all these experiences balled up into essentially one day.

• 38:26Speaker 00

  And it's just like you, you can almost live like a lifetime worth of emotions in one day. And the perspective you get from that is like you said, it bleeds into everything. Cause then let's say you are really focused on a business that you started and the 100 mile thing is just like a side hobby that you're doing for fulfillment or for whatever reason. And now you're at a point in your business where you hit a very difficult obstacle and it's like, like what do you do? And you think back to that experience you had running that hundred mile race and pushing through that. And you kind of leverage the same mindset. You leverage the same like visualization tactics or the same attitude and everything. And then you end up breaking through that and you have a similar experience of, oh, now I hit a new height with my business. We've took this to another stage or,

• 39:11Speaker 00

  you know, you another benchmark is met and things like that. And then you laugh at yourself for thinking that you weren't able to do it like earlier on. And it's just a really kind of rewarding experience, I think.

• 39:20Chris Williamson?

  Can you try and explain the typical emotions over a hundred miles from start until finish for those of us that don't intend on running it?

• 39:31Speaker 00

  Sure, yeah. Um, I the way I usually kind of think about it is like you're gonna have essentially for me, it's like the first about thirty miles. Feels pretty good because I have to be running slow enough that it's sustainable for a hundred miles. I've typically been doing like my long runs up to about that distance. So it's something my body's still familiar with. The intensity is low enough where, you know, I'm not feeling a ton of wear and tear yet. And getting to that feels almost like a snap of the fingers. Like you get to, I get to thirty miles and I like look back like, wow, it feels like I just started. And then you start to kind of get into this phase where if you give it opportunity to think about, you think, okay, well, I got thirty miles in my legs. That's the longest long run I did during the build up.

• 40:15Speaker 00

  I got seventy miles to go and that kind of plants a bit of a seed of doubt. So now you're thinking, can I do this two more times and then some? What happens if, you know, I start feeling more miserable by forty? Am I gonna be able to do sixty more miles? And you start kind of getting that like negative spiral? So that's where I typically have to start kind of focusing on like positive self-talk and thinking about, how do I get myself to think about the next goal and block out the end goal? At least until it becomes time to focus on that. So usually I'm kind of like really kind of starting that mindset from between miles thirty to forty, where I'm focusing unconsciously minimizing.

• 40:55Speaker 00

  Rising my targets and getting to them versus thinking too far ahead. And then when I get to the next one, picking the next one. And then there's some kind of like basic benchmarks that I like to use. One is like 50 miles. It's halfway there. Uh, it's also a race distance that I've done a few times in the past. So I have some precedent in terms of like what I'm capable of doing in that time or that distance versus where I'm doing for the pacing. So you should kind of normalize. Okay, I'm, I'm where I need to be. I'm not being too aggressive. I'm not being too slow. This is, this checks out. So then that's kind of a good goal to get to. Next one is kind of like a hundred kilometers. I like to kind of start focusing on that one after I've crossed the halfway mark because again, it's another race since I've done a few times. And have some perspective of how I should feel relative to like going on all out effort there.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  And start kind of using those as kind of like positive things to get to. Once I get to around a hundred kilometers, then I'm within like, you know, five to 10 miles of the longest long run I got to. So then my next goal is get to within the longest long run you did for that buildup. And then you just have one more long run too. So when I can get to that spot, if I've taken care of myself properly that day and I'm in a good like headspace, then I can almost forget about doing a hundred miles and start thinking about, I just got one more long run, which is going to be, uh, you know, something I've done six to eight times at least going into this race. And that just becomes something I can easily wrap my head around comparatively. And, uh, you know, you're gonna still probably hit some rough spots in there, but

• 42:25Speaker 00

  kind of keeping that in the back of your mind as well as any like mini benchmarks. I like to be a little more like present with my goals at that point because you do are gonna, you are gonna get a variety of experiences from that last part. So like determining like, am I going to focus on just getting the next two miles done? Or am I going to focus on a bigger chunk is something I'll usually leave to race day in that part. But I'll definitely be leaning on kind of that mindset stuff I talked about before with the long run development where I'm thinking about like the various stages in there. Uh, and like what I need to do when I have a, have a negative self, self, uh, self thought kind of come in. And the, the part that makes it really interesting is there's always a race

• 43:07Speaker 00

  that you do where you kind of push past some discomfort or a mental block that you hadn't done before. And you have this realization of like, You start second guessing your, your, your mental strength or your willpower in previous ones because you now you kind of redefine what you're capable of and you start wondering, was it my mind that limited me before that didn't get me there or was I actually just not physically able to do this yet at that point? And I think in most cases, it's the mental side of things and that can be both fulfilling and a little depressing, depending on how you process it. So I think you have to be kind of careful, especially post-race then too, is going through the mindset of like, you know, if you achieved

• 43:48Speaker 00

  something you never have before, not to kind of be hard on yourself for prior attempts.

• 43:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, for having never done it before. Dude, that's such an interesting thought pattern. I'm really glad you brought it up. The fact that a success in one moment can highlight your failures previously and you can almost tarnish the thing that you're really proud of in the moment by using that as a retrospective benchmark to gauge all of the things when you, all the times when you didn't do that previously. So interesting.

• 44:19Speaker 00

  And I think it's, there's also like a, something I've thought about before and said is just like, there's really no such thing as a perfect 100 miler because it's just too long. There's going to be a mistake or something happens that you didn't anticipate, or if you did anticipate it, you were hoping it for it not to happen and then it does. And it's a little like nebulous as to how that impacts your final time, but you, when you walk away from the event itself, you, if you, if you really review everything, you can find a few places where it's like, well, if I had done that a little differently, I maybe saved myself a minute or two. So there's almost this like this endless target of like what you're capable of. So I think there is, and perhaps this is me coping, but like,

• 45:01Speaker 00

  perhaps there is like some, some value in just acknowledging that when you're doing something as long as 100 miles, there's really no way that every piece to that puzzle fits absolutely perfectly and there is no uncertainty throughout it. So you, at a certain point, you have to say, hey, I minimized the number of mistakes and I responded to the uncertainty as best I could and that's what produced perfection for what I can, can expect out of this type of a project.

• 45:30Chris Williamson?

  How much discomfort do you go through? Cause you know, for me, somebody who, if I had to run five miles, that would be pretty ugly to me.

• 45:40Chris Williamson?

  Even with all of the training and even with all of the preparation, pain and discomfort, how much does that play into 100 miles as a limiting factor?

• 45:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think the interesting thing, because I always try to compare this to like earlier in my life. Because when I got into running, I was doing more standard distance stuff like 5Ks, 10Ks. And it's really interesting to me because with those type of endurance events, there's like a sharper pain that you have to kind of white knuckle through for however long it takes you. 15 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever it happens to be. And that's just like a different type of discomfort. It's like a really sharp acute discomfort versus in ultra running. It's like nothing really, unless you really get hurt by like falling or something like that, I guess. Like nothing really hurts like super sharp where you feel like it's like a stabbing pain.

• 46:33Speaker 00

  But there's like this low level of discomfort that kind of arrives somewhere around like the point where you get to your longest long run. And it kind of just like stays there and it doesn't go away. So you have this like low level discomfort that just eats away of you. And like every hour, every minute that goes by, it's like just one more hour, one more minute that you had to tolerate that low level of discomfort. And I think that's really the big thing you have to get over is physically you could often push through a lot of that. But do you have the mental currency to be able to actually kind of consciously say, this is uncomfortable. I've been managing this discomfort for X number of hours already.

• 47:16Speaker 00

  I can do it for X number more in order to get to that finish line. And, and this maybe goes into like what I was just talking about where inevitably during that timeframe, there's going to be some moments where you're like, I don't know if I can do this. And perhaps that slows you down for a little bit or causes you to take a break that you maybe didn't necessarily actually need to take. That kind of adds up to the, the totality of the experience. But yeah, that's kind of a, it's an interesting question because it's like the day after walking down the stairs, there's some sharp pain for sure.

• 47:46Speaker 00

  In the moment, it's like, it's, it really is, I think, just like, you know, this big, like, like this long, like. Like subtle discomfort that you just have to be able to, you know, in your mind, you feel like it's never going to turn off and just like the prospect of living through that for however long it happens to be is can get very overwhelming. And that's where I think people usually hit a, hit a roadblock and, and sometimes drop out.

• 48:10Chris Williamson?

  I think you're right by making the comparison between shorter runs that do have a more acute, sharp pain to them because that's what most people have done. Most people don't have a 12 hour or 24 hour event of consistent but prepared low level discomfort that slowly gets worse over time. Uh, so what I'm doing is I'm extrapolating out like running cross, cross country when I was in school or something. I'm thinking, God, how hard was that? Oh God, imagine if that was what it was like. Or you're doing a Fran in CrossFit. It's a seven minute workout. It's not that bad. Did you see that the, uh, rowing erg, the C2 rowing erg 5K record just got broken

• 48:55Chris Williamson?

  this week?

• 48:56Speaker 00

  No.

• 48:57Chris Williamson?

  Homeboy held a 153 for five kilometers. A 153, uh, 1K split. That's just straight up disgusting.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. He was probably a puddle on the floor after that.

• 49:14Chris Williamson?

  He looked, he looked pretty happy in the photo, but uh, yeah, just wild. And that's the sort of thing, especially if you've ever seen the, the 2K record, which I think is kind of like the gold standard for, for the erg. Um, you look at those guys and that is, you know, that's, that's all out effort. There is, there is tiny little bit of pacing, I suppose, within the first half. And then after that, they're just stamping on the face of whoever it is that they hate the most in the world, you know, for three minutes straight. And, um, yeah, I, I, I understand what you mean. I, I understand the distinction between that real sharp, in the

• 49:53Chris Williamson?

  moment, vision has condensed in and all the rest of it. Um, I'm going to guess as well that there's not so much left in the tank that even if you decided to put the hammer down as hard as you could, mile 97 to 100, how much of a difference can you even make to your pace? When you like, if you decide to completely empty it, is there some limitations in there with regards to fatigue and nutrition and, and hydration and stuff like that?

• 50:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, I actually think hydration and nutrition is probably the bigger piece to that puzzle because you know, as you get, as you start depleting your muscle glycogen, I think once you get around about forty percent of the capacities, when your body starts kind of increasing the perceived effort at a given intensity. So you have this situation where like if you find yourself at mile ninety-seven and you're like flirting with that number, you just might not have like the, like to push as hard, if you push as hard as you would to produce whatever fastest time you could run in that distance, that level of discomfort is just going to produce a much slower time. So if you can stay like as hydrated and fueled as possible, which is impossible, actually, like you can't actually consume

• 51:05Speaker 00

  enough fuel or stay hydrated enough, you're gonna have at least some depreciation there that takes a certain amount of intensity off the table at the end there. So then it becomes like a best of the worst type of a scenario where you want to do as good a job of staying as hydrated and as well fueled as you can, but know that you're probably not going to be able to do, do it as perfectly as you would as like when you start a 5K and you're have full muscle glycogen and completely hydrated. So I think that's a big limiter there. I also think it's just like mental fatigue too, because you get to these, like you described it perfectly, you said like, when you're doing like this fast, like, like

• 51:44Speaker 00

  rowing ERG or like, like 3K or 5K race, you are at a point where like the intensity picks up, where you, you tunnel vision in and you really can't even process any other information other than like push, push, push. That's like all you can really think about. Whereas when you're at the, in a hundred mile race, it's slow enough and that pain is dull enough that you can think of a variety of different things and that can either work for you or against you. So like if you allow the thoughts to be like, I can't do this, there's no way I can go any faster, I'm at my limit, then you just defined your limit. If you say that, if you go into that and you're thinking, I can go ten seconds per mile faster, let's

• 52:27Speaker 00

  try it. And then you tempt that and then you try a little more, a little more. You, you can think about these things, you have the opportunity to actually have a conversation in your head where I just don't think you can do that with the shorter endurance events. Like the conversation is basically like, go or don't go, and that's all the further it can really get.

• 52:42Chris Williamson?

  This is why I think the Tour de France is so compelling because you get to see the discomfort and the struggle on the faces of the riders, right? Every single day or every single stage. And you get to watch the the battle between them and themselves, them and their discomfort, right? Especially on the hill climbs. And that's why it's so compelling. That's why I love watching it. So I also love watching the longer CrossFit events. The short ones are fun or whatever, but I much prefer watching the longer ones because you get to see outwardly what's happening, a representation of what's happening inwardly, right? The self-talk, the I can or can't do this. Oh, he's put the bar down. What does him putting the bar down mean? Has he

• 53:25Chris Williamson?

  wanted to? Or is he getting angry? Or is he doing whatever? I had Eddie Jones, who's the England head rugby coach, right? So we've got the World Cup 2023 coming up next year. He'll be the guy that leads England's World Cup hopes, hopefully for that. And he was telling me this story about when he goes to go and see players, he's scouting players in the England club, the Premier League for rugby, and he'll go and watch from before the game begins, from way before the game begins. And I asked him what he looks for in the players that are the absolute best that he's considering bringing into the squad. And he said, well, obviously, they need to perform well, right? They need to be able to play the game of rugby. But that's kind of par for the course. I already know that that's something they're going to do. So that's a bit of the

• 54:09Chris Williamson?

  focus. But most of the focus is actually on the way that they interact with the training staff before and after the game, the way that they help or don't help the other players during that. What are they like as a teammate? If the game's going well, what's their body language like? If the game's going badly, what's their body language like? If they make a mistake, what's their self talk like? What's their posture like? How are they dealing with the discomfort of something being on their side or not being on their side? How much are they looking to the coaches for advice? And how much are they continuing to just stick to their own game plan? He really wants people to be like solitary lone rangers and a self-contained unit within the team. He doesn't want them to be relying on the coaching staff. He wants them to be very much sort of like sovereign individuals when it comes to that. I just thought that was a really interesting way to look at things where you think, well,

• 54:55Chris Williamson?

  Huh, that's, that's kind of interesting that it's, it's less about the performance and more about the stuff that isn't the performance because that tells you what is impacting the performance, right? Where is that coming from? How is this person performing or not? Oh, well, a lot of that might be due to their self-talk and I can see that easily when the other team scores a try or when they just missed their most recent kick of their penalty or whatever. It's pretty interesting.

• 55:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it seems like any of these sports you get into like, I find that fascinating because it's like, I think it's valuable for anybody to have like a deep dive into something physical like that. So you understand like all those details because they're, they're kind of universal for all of them at the end of the day. But if you, you don't know what you don't know. So like if I'm a casual observer just watching the rugby game, I don't know anything other than maybe a layer deep. Uh, but if I've done another sport where I've gone multiple layers deep, I can assume there's got to be some really cool things going on back here. And that kind of, I think, just spurs the curiosity of learning more about like why they're doing what they're doing. And it adds a little more excitement to like the viewing side of things.

• 56:04Chris Williamson?

  Zach Bitter, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with what you're doing, where should they go?

• 56:08Speaker 00

  So the easiest spot is my website at zachbitter.com, just Z A C H B I T T E R dot com. And that's got links to everything from my podcast, social media channels and things like that.

• 56:17Chris Williamson?

  Is there anywhere that people can watch the race that you're doing? Is that going to be broadcast or no?

• 56:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's usually live streamed. I don't think they've announced where it is yet, but uh, if, if folks check out my Instagram page, I'll be putting updates on there with live tracking and things like that as well.

• 56:31Chris Williamson?

  So good luck, man. I'm rooting for you.

• 56:33Speaker 00

  Thanks a bunch. It was a blast having, coming on the show.