Chris Hauth: Endurance Training For Maximum Results

2x Olympian, renown endurance multisport coach, former professional (and current blazing fast age-group topping) Ironman triathlete Chris Hauth — who happens to also be my long-time coach — joins the podcast to get granular on his perspectives on effective endurance training methods to maximize performance. Turns out there's more to it than just Zone 2 people! Tune in to dial in your training program and take your performance to the next level. As a quick aside. I am contemplating launching an online membership website that will — in exchange for a relatively nominal monthly fee — provide subscribers with: * Premium written fitness & nutrition content not publicly available; * Monthly or bi-weekly interactive video Spreecasts on focused subject matter; * Periodic (weekly?) newsletter; * Private, interactive VIP community with responsive access to me & other members * Significantly reduced pricing on Jai Lifestyle digital & physical products, gear & workshops, retreats & programs * Free swag such as t-shirts & more I am interested in whether there is demand for such a community, given that it will require a tremendous amount of time, energy & expense on my part to configure, design, launch, serve and maintain. I am super excited about the possibilities and completely dedicated to finding the best way to share a healthy message across the broadest and most impactful platform – so please let me know what you think in the comments section below. Thanks for listening and enjoy the program! Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 1:08Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, people. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for dropping in. Thanks for lending an ear. Thanks for taking time out of your busy day to listen to the show. I appreciate it. I just want to thank our last guest, Brian McKenzie. He really, that was a very popular episode, and it definitely broadened the scope of our audience. So if you're new to the show because of listening to Brian, welcome, and I hope you stick around. I hope I can deliver content to make it worth your time. And today, we have another great guest, my coach.

• 1:51Rich Roll?

  My coach, since I started this ultra-endurance insanity, Chris Hauth of AIMP Coaching, sat down with me, and we rolled up our sleeves and got into... Endurance multisport training techniques, where he's coming from in terms of aerobic zone training, how he's trained me, why he's trained me the way that he has, his opinions on Brian's opinions and all sorts of stuff. So it was great. He definitely knows his stuff and you know, he changed my life and he is responsible for turning me into the athlete that I've become. So I owe the guy a lot and moreover, he's just a, he's a

• 2:31Rich Roll?

  great guy, a very solid, solid individual. So it was great to be able to talk to him today and we'll get to that in a minute. I wanted to do a little calendar housekeeping. I'm going to be doing some traveling pretty soon. So let's see where am I going to be? March 10th, I'm going to be in Tucson at the Berger Performing Arts Center, speaking about plant-based nutrition. If you want to find out more about that, if you're in Tucson and you want to drop in, again, it's March 10th, go to HealthyYouNetwork.org. Healthy You, Y-O-U, Network.org. March 18th through the 20th, I'm going to be in Charleston,

• 3:13Rich Roll?

  South Carolina. I'm speaking at the College of Charleston. So I'm really looking forward to that, talking to the college kids. April 14th, I'll be at the Worcester, Mass Veg Fest. So if you're in Worcester or you're in Massachusetts and want to check that out, go to WorcesterVegFest.com. And then April 20th, I'm going to be in Ottawa, Canada with Dr. Michael Greger. If you've been listening to the podcast, then hopefully you listened to the episode in which I had Dr. Greger on. He was fantastic and that was a very popular episode. He really knows his stuff when it comes to plant-based nutrition. So him and

• 3:53Rich Roll?

  I are doing an event there that's being put on by a woman named Deb Gleason, who's getting out all the Ottawa fantastic athletes to spend a day with us. And if you want to learn more about that, go to PlantPowerOttawa, PlantPowerOttawa.com and that's April 20th.

• 4:12Rich Roll?

  Want to support the show, go to richroll.com on the podcast page or the blog page. You'll see an Amazon banner ad on the right-hand side. If you're going to buy something on Amazon, it would be huge if you could click on that banner ad first, which will take you to Amazon and then buy whatever you're going to buy. And it'll kick a few nickels into our coffers and won't cost you an extra cent. So it's a great way to support the show without you having to go out of pocket or anything. Also, we're working on putting up a little donation button on my site too, for people that just feel charitable and want to support the show because it is a huge, huge time

• 4:57Rich Roll?

  commitment doing this. Takes a lot of time and effort and I love doing it. But, you know, I got bills to pay too. So if you're feeling inclined, you can, you know, throw us a couple bucks or whatever. We don't have that up yet. I'll let you know when it's going up, but it should be up in the next few days. So what else do we have? The one thing I wanted to talk about before getting into the interview with Chris is I've been getting a lot of people coming up to me saying, "You should start a membership site." I'm getting so many emails that it has become impossible to respond to all of

• 5:40Rich Roll?

  them. And I really appreciate all of you out there who are taking the time to write, to tell me your story, or ask me a question, or to raise an issue that you'd like to hear addressed on the podcast. And believe me, I read them all, but there's just no way I can respond to all of them as it is. You know, I have to spend way too many hours every day responding to email and it's already taken up way too much of my life. So it's been suggested to me by a couple people like, "Hey, you should set up..." A membership site and for a very kind of low monthly price offer kind of exclusive content and access for members to you and to premium content.

• 6:23Rich Roll?

  So in other words, the idea would be to create kind of a four-wall VIP closed community where members could interact with each other and I could interact with them. We could do Spree Casts on specific subject matters where I could interact with the people on the call and it would only be available to people who are part of this community. And that way, I can focus my energies on helping the people that are members of the community, build that community, provide exclusive video content and maybe even free schwag, wholesale prices on products, sponsored products, high lifestyle products, etc. So I'm just thinking about it right now.

• 7:08Rich Roll?

  I don't have the solution or the, you know, sort of identifiable trajectory, but I wanted to kind of put it out there and see if there would be an interest in the listeners in me doing something like this. So let me know. I'd love to hear your feedback because I do want to be able to kind of build this community and serve the audience that is coming to the podcast in the best way possible. So if you have some ideas about a membership site, what you'd like to see in it, whether you think it's a good idea, a bad idea, what kind of content you would, you would find most beneficial if you were to belong, that would be great.

• 7:50Rich Roll?

  Go to ritual.com where I have this podcast episode hosted and leave a comment there and I'll be sure to, to check that out and take it into consideration. So what else? You want to learn more about Julie Pyatt, my wife and sometime co-host? Go to her music site, srimatimusic.com, S-R-I-M-A-T-I-music.com. You can preview and listen to her beautiful music there and she's on Twitter at Jaised. Okay, people, so. We had Brian McKenzie on the two episodes ago and it was a very popular episode and

• 8:35Rich Roll?

  he was given an opportunity to talk all about his CrossFit endurance program, where he's coming from and what his core principles are. And it was a great conversation. I mean, I sort of expected, "Oh, we're gonna be at odds with each other, have different points of view on this." You know, he's covered with tattoos, he's got a pit bull, he's super strong and intimidating and I'm like the skinny vegan ultra endurance runner guy. And ironically, we ended up hitting it off quite well. And I really liked a lot of what he had to say, especially in terms of how he thinks about form and technique and functional body strength when it comes to overall performance in athletics. And I think there's a lot to

• 9:20Rich Roll?

  be learned there and a lot to be gained. People really enjoyed the episode and Brian and I have gone back on email a couple of times about trying to do more stuff together, maybe doing a monthly segment or getting him on the show more regularly or maybe finding a way for the two of us to do other kinds of things together. So I'm interested in exploring that a little bit more. But today, what's great about Chris Hauth, who's coming on the show today, is he has a little bit of a different perspective than Brian. And, you know, Chris has been my coach. If you read my book, Finding Ultra, you know that I talk a lot about him and credit him with all of my athletic success. And his tutelage

• 10:04Rich Roll?

  has really taken me from the couch to the finish line at, you know, two Ultramans and Epic Five. And I could not have done it without him. And he, you know, he shares some of the core ideas that Brian had to share the other day, but Chris is coming from a more traditional, I guess I would say, approach to endurance multi-sport racing. He's a very accomplished athlete in his own right. Two-time Olympic swimmer for Germany and professional triathlete who has been extremely successful in his

• 10:42Rich Roll?

  triathlon career. He won Ironman Quarter Lane several years ago and is a consistent top finisher at many, many Ironmans and has competed at Kona, the Ironman World Championships at Kona 12 times. And he's now 43 and he's a dad like I am and still continues to compete as an amateur, age group amateur, Ironman and half Ironman distance athlete. So he has some great insights on how to continue to stay inspired and push yourself and keep things fresh and also balance the rest of your life with being a parent, et cetera. And he coaches all sorts of athletes from the professional ranks all the way down to

• 11:25Rich Roll?

  kind of the weekend warrior and has a lot of insights to share.

• 11:39Rich Roll?

  Enough preface. Let's get right into the interview. Thanks for stopping by and I hope you enjoy it. Ladies and gentlemen, Chris Howard.

• 11:53Rich Roll?

  This is not your first podcast rodeo?

• 11:55Chris Hauth?

  Not podcast. I've never done a podcast, but radio.

• 11:58Rich Roll?

  Do you know what a podcast is?

• 12:00Chris Hauth?

  Yeah.

• 12:01Rich Roll?

  Do you?

• 12:02Chris Hauth?

  Yeah.

• 12:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you do. No, I mean, a lot of people, a lot of people don't. It's funny. I get, I get emails like, how do I get the podcast?

• 12:10Chris Hauth?

  Oh, I listen to them all the time while I'm riding.

• 12:13Rich Roll?

  I do too. That's when I first started listening to them because you can't listen to music all day. Go insane. So which ones do you listen to?

• 12:21Chris Hauth?

  Um, I listen to some sports talk radio. Um, Dan Patrick Show is one of my go-tos. Uh, Wall Street Journal this morning and uh, Real Time with Bill Maher.

• 12:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I listen to that one too. And then you don't have to watch it on TV.

• 12:37Chris Hauth?

  Exactly. And you're all caught up on your-

• 12:39Rich Roll?

  Dave Meyer is always giving me shit because he's so right wing. You're like, you listen to Bill Maher on your headphones again?

• 12:47Chris Hauth?

  Yeah, so catch up on my politics with him.

• 12:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, you're listening to Bill Maher, but then you're going out hunting. So you're a dichotomy, you're a conundrum.

• 12:58Rich Roll?

  So, welcome to the podcast.

• 12:59Chris Hauth?

  Yeah.

• 13:00Rich Roll?

  We're here to have you set things straight on proper training advice. A lot of confused people out there, a lot of different ideas spinning around, a lot of popular fads. Not a lot of, it's not sexy to talk about basics.

• 13:17Chris Hauth?

  It never is.

• 13:17Rich Roll?

  You know, but if you look at the guys that are, that are the best in their respective fields, no matter what sport it is, there's no, a lot of shortcuts.

• 13:28Chris Hauth?

  And they actually enjoy the monotony of it. They get the rhythm and their speed and their understanding from that.

• 13:36Rich Roll?

  Right, exactly. And, you know, in fairness, that's their profession and that's what they spend their entire day doing and that's their livelihood and that's not the life of, you know, the average listener of this podcast who's probably a dad with some kids. Oh, we're getting housekeeping here. We're at the Georgian Hotel. That's been podcastus, interruptus.

• 13:59Rich Roll?

  We're all good, lots of towels. So we just finished a lactate test, which if you read my book, I discussed that in detail, the importance of doing that. So Chris is my coach, is insistent that every three months or so, his athletes come in and get on the bike trainer and do a proper lactate test where he can pinpoint with a great degree of accuracy, exactly where your fitness is. And so that's how he designs your program around that. Without knowing that, I remember when I first started working with you, you wouldn't even write me a workout until I tested you. So I don't, I don't even know what to tell you. You got to test because I don't know who you are or what's going on until I can look at that data.

• 14:43Rich Roll?

  So that's a huge cornerstone of your philosophy.

• 14:47Chris Hauth?

  It is, it is. And you combine that with, I didn't have any race results for you.

• 14:52Rich Roll?

  No, that's right. Yeah. Hey, I swam, we swam on the same swim team back in the eighties.

• 14:57Chris Hauth?

  But no data from that, no heart rate data. You didn't have any type of training data. You were just going out and doing some random stuff. So without a test, I was literally flying blind. So, yeah, for sure, we needed a test right to get going. Correctly. And then, once we started a good dialogue, I got a good handle on your commentary and how you were absorbing the training and what you were observing and so on.

• 15:23Rich Roll?

  Right. And I think, you know, coming off of the couch and not really having any experience, you know, not knowing myself, like, how to gauge my effort, or what's what. It's sort of like, the analogy I always use is when, when you're, like, as a swimmer, when we were kids, and let's say you're doing a set of, you know, 10x100 on the 115 or whatever, you could tell without looking at the pace clock, you know what your time is when your finger touches the wall, and you probably know what your heart rate is, because you've done it a billion times. But cycling, running, these were new things for me. So, it's a whole different, you know, it's a whole different ballgame of trying to get used to understanding

• 16:01Rich Roll?

  how the body works in these new disciplines. So, you know, I can't, I can't overestimate enough how important doing proper testing is.

• 16:11Chris Hauth?

  Hence why we did one today.

• 16:13Rich Roll?

  I know, we did. Which I didn't want to do, by the way, because I haven't been training very much. So, I knew my numbers weren't going to be that good. So, there was a lot of backpedaling.

• 16:22Chris Hauth?

  That's the classic test fear, right? And it's just a baseline number. It's a line in the sand. And the only way to move forward is to have a line in the sand.

• 16:33Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 16:34Chris Hauth?

  So, now we have that, and get you back to where you were.

• 16:37Rich Roll?

  That's right. So, let's, let's use this as a kind of launch pad to get into kind of your basic training philosophy. At AIMP Coaching, you've got, how many, you've got, like, 50 athletes now?

• 16:51Chris Hauth?

  Yeah.

• 16:52Rich Roll?

  And they range from pro Ironman triathletes, all the way down to the weekend duffer, right?

• 16:58Chris Hauth?

  Complete beginners, absolutely.

• 16:59Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:00Chris Hauth?

  Yeah.

• 17:01Rich Roll?

  And, excuse me, so...

• 17:07Rich Roll?

  If you read my book, you know that I espouse the virtues of aerobic training, zone two training, the Z2 philosophy, and that all comes from Mr. Hauth, sitting across from me. And I've had a couple of different people on the podcast talking about a couple of different kinds of training philosophies. We had Brian McKenzie on last week, who's kind of coming from a very different perspective, a very high threshold anaerobic-based, high-intensity, strength-focused approach. And Chris's approach is completely different. So why don't you enlighten us a little bit about where you're coming from on all this?

• 17:47Chris Hauth?

  Yeah, I mean, for many of us, aerobic training is based also on the time we have available. So if you're looking at only 30 minutes a day, we're talking a whole different training program than somebody, for example, is you getting ready for Ultraman, where you had a fair amount of hours and we needed to build an engine that was getting ready for an endurance event like that. But there's also a big concern with this sport of endurance athletics, whether it's triathlon, whether it's Ultraman, whether it's even long runs and marathon running, is injuries. The biggest concern you have is with injuries. If you're

• 18:29Chris Hauth?

  going to start this training and you're going to start it seriously, you want to make sure you stay injury-free. And aerobic training allows you to create that platform while remaining injury-free.

• 18:41Rich Roll?

  And that's because why? Because you're ramping up so slowly and allowing your body the time to acclimate?

• 18:47Chris Hauth?

  Acclimate partially, also cartilage and ligaments and your body's entire function and platform in order to become more efficient at it, and preparing for the rigors of what will be a larger platform of maybe some intensity, maybe a lot of intensity, depending on what you need and depending on what event you're getting ready for. So it's an ideal starting point for anybody getting ready for endurance athletics. And then, from there, it becomes a personal... Question, whether it's how you're absorbing the training, what events you're getting ready for, how much time you have available, if you're absorbing the aerobic training at

• 19:28Chris Hauth?

  all. Some people don't work well with aerobic training. And then we have to look at other options, whether that is more quality and less aerobic work, or, you know, completely no aerobic work. Again, it depends on the event, and it depends on the mindset of the athlete and what we're getting ready for.

• 19:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and how much time you have. I mean, the zone two aerobic zone kind of approach that we've taken, or that you've prescribed for me, that has worked very well for me, is a very time consuming undertaking, for sure.

• 19:59Chris Hauth?

  It is. And you, you remember a lot of times how I used to write or tell you in the workouts, it's not about the first two and a half, three hours. It's what you observe those last 90, 120 minutes. That's where things are happening, that you only can get that far into a workout by having done the proper aerobic base and then observing, wow, how hungry am I? How did I hydrate? Was I riding at the proper heart rate? Because now I feel completely different than those first 90 minutes.

• 20:32Rich Roll?

  Right. And it's not about that, you know, let's say you're doing, you're building up the volume on the, on the bike, and, and that last 90 minutes of that ride is the focus. It's not about crawling across the finish line. It's about stepping up the volume gradually and incrementally with the appropriate rest days and, and rest weeks, so that when you get to that key last 90 minutes, you can retain your, your form, your technique, you're very focused on your watts and you're hurried, and you fulfill the, the sort of prescription of what you're trying to get out of that workout, rather than just like, yeah, I did it, I finished it. But you were literally falling apart those last, that last hour.

• 21:09Chris Hauth?

  Yep, falling apart and laying on the couch the rest of the afternoon.

• 21:12Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 21:13Chris Hauth?

  Whereas if you're running around with your kids, or you have a variety of other activities for the weekends. For the weekend and you're actually able to complete them feeling good and you did a five hour ride prior, we know we're getting somewhere.

• 21:26Rich Roll?

  Right, and that's that's been my experience and I think that one of the misconceptions is that you're just throwing all this volume at your athletes out of the blue and actually a lot of times, you know, and I can only speak from my own personal experience, but you know, it's been about holding back and say, you know, there's like we've been, we've just started up again together after taking last year off and I'm anxious to get back at it and you'll give me a 45 minute run and I'm like, really? You know, I can't run longer than that. And it's like, no, you know, just finish it, feel good. And then, you know, the next time we run, you'll feel good and we'll slowly, slowly, slowly build that up. Don't worry, the work is coming, but the work is not happening now. It's just getting

• 22:08Rich Roll?

  the body ready and acclimated for the training to come. But I remember even during super heavy training periods, getting ready for Ultraman, I would do some ridiculous weekend of Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and I'd actually feel like, okay, you know, because because of all of that conscious effort that went into the gradual build so that when I put in those huge days, I wasn't absolutely wrecked.

• 22:36Chris Hauth?

  That's what we're getting ready for. That race simulation and race simulation is different for everybody. Shorter events, you gotta be ready for the intensity. And in your case, race simulation was, you know, get it simulated.

• 22:48Rich Roll?

  Simulating the race.

• 22:49Chris Hauth?

  And we had talked about, let's do 60% of the race this weekend and let's do 75% of the race and so on. So that you at some point were getting close to having done 90% of the race on a training weekend and coming out of it feeling healthy, injury free, ready to absorb another load of work.

• 23:09Rich Roll?

  Right. And the confidence that comes with that, I mean, was the biggest thing, really, going into an unknown like that and knowing that I could do that consecutively over a period of weekends, you know, basically approximate the race distance.

• 23:21Chris Hauth?

  Yep. And if you can do it in training, that's the big thing.

• 23:24Rich Roll?

  Sure, of course.

• 23:25Chris Hauth?

  You're coming in a little bit fatigued. And then the other aspect is that, you know, this is about recovering faster. It's about being able to absorb the workouts quicker. That you can focus more on technique and form and all the things that come with the three sports that you are doing so that then come the next phase block of training, you're doing everything cleaner, stronger, better, recovering quicker so that then again, you know that you're getting stronger without doing it harder.

• 23:58Rich Roll?

  Right, right, and I think that that gets into another misconception, which is that you're coming from a place, or I'm espousing only this place of just doing zone two aerobic work all the time, which I guess I could see that could be an interpretation of the way that I laid it out in the book, which was not my intention. My intention was to say that that has to come first to, you know, from where I was coming from, that was the most appropriate kind of edict to build where I was coming from to where I wanted to be in an appropriate period of time without getting injured. But now we're like five years into our relationship, right? So the training that you're giving me now doesn't

• 24:41Rich Roll?

  look like what it looked like in 2008.

• 24:44Chris Hauth?

  Oh, no. Oh, no. And, you know, the part with aerobic training, Z2 work, as you like to call it, is

• 24:51Rich Roll?

  The church of Z2.

• 24:53Chris Hauth?

  Yeah, everybody like absorbs it differently. Some people can go two, three years just absorbing aerobic work alone and their tests will continue to improve. They'll continue to get faster because their body is like a sponge, just wanting to absorb it. Others run out of that after, let's say, six months, 18 months, 12 months, and we have to prescribe a different type of training.

• 25:15Rich Roll?

  So how do you figure that out when you're doing the lactate test? I mean, how would you measure that?

• 25:20Chris Hauth?

  The testing is the clearest indicator for that. It shows us that despite the work we've been doing, we have not improved the aerobic And anaerobic zones that significantly. And then there's a variety of prescriptions.

• 25:33Rich Roll?

  And you know what, let's, you might, you probably should just explain what aerobic zone is, what anaerobic zone is, if somebody's tuning in who's not familiar with these kind of terms and is just sort of getting interested in maybe doing a triathlon or running or something like that, like get back to basics.

• 25:50Chris Hauth?

  Yeah, aerobic zone is basically your fat burning zone where you're using less glycogen, less sugar, and you are primarily using fat as a fuel. And then your anaerobic zone is your main fuel source that you're using for the, for the exercise, for the activity is going to be glycogen based. And the combination of the two is always happening. People seem to think one turns off and the other one is primarily going, but it's just what you're utilizing more efficiently at in each zone. So when you're going really, really hard, you're using primarily sugars, glycogen.

• 26:32Chris Hauth?

  When you're going nice and comfortable and easy, you're using primarily fat. And so the combination of the two and how hard you're going is just dependent on what the main fuel source is, what the main energy system is you're utilizing. And so for aerobic training, most of the time you're going to be using little glycogen and mainly fat. And then that conversion happens.

• 27:02Rich Roll?

  And what, and what is the relationship of, of that to what you're eating? Because I think there's some confusion that if you're burning fat, then if you're eating fat, that's what you're burning?

• 27:13Chris Hauth?

  No.

• 27:13Rich Roll?

  So, you know, illuminate us a little bit more on that because I think a lot of people get thrown off.

• 27:18Chris Hauth?

  Well, the key there is also that you're, you're, you're not going to lose the, the weight just because you're training aerobically. Now you are creating lean muscle mass and you are thinning out in a different way. As we saw with you.

• 27:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, my body changed completely.

• 27:35Chris Hauth?

  Exactly. But you weren't necessarily getting lighter that dramatically. You elongated your muscles, created a lot more lean muscle mass. And so a lot of athletes are surprised, despite all the training they're doing, they're not losing that much weight. But I'm mainly zone two aerobic. I should just be shedding the pounds. Well, your body's also preparing for the rigors of this aerobic training, which means retaining a little bit more water in order to go for longer rides. It means creating more lean muscle mass so that you might not feel lighter, you might not look lighter on the scale, but you look lighter in your clothes and in the mirror because you're getting leaner.

• 28:18Chris Hauth?

  But no, and that doesn't mean you can eat a box of fried chicken before a long bike ride. It's just a fuel source and the body has enough fat stored in it for years of exercise. It only has about two and a half to three hours of glycogen stored in it. So you have to just become efficient in how you're utilizing it.

• 28:41Rich Roll?

  Right. And so if the way I understand it is, no matter how skinny you are, if you have, you know, 0.001% body fat, it doesn't matter. You have plenty of fat within, you know, that within your stored within your body that you could go ad infinitum forever without, without sort of depleting that source. So then why is it that we have to, then why is it that we have to eat when we're on the bike? Or what is it that, you know, why, why is nutrition and fueling during training and racing so important if we're doing this aerobic zone training?

• 29:15Chris Hauth?

  Well, for sure, like I said earlier, we're always burning a combination of the two. What the primary source is, if it's fat and aerobic in that case, doesn't mean we're not still going through some glycogen stores. It's definitely still supplying. And then also, I mean, you're still burning calories. And so those need to be replenished and you need to have energy readily available and replaced so that you do have the energy to continue on. Fat alone will not help you continue.

• 29:51Rich Roll?

  Right, and fat, actually, and fat won't keep your brain going either.

• 29:54Chris Hauth?

  Exactly.

• 29:54Rich Roll?

  Sugar for your brain, because, or the, the mental bonk will take you out of it.

• 29:59Chris Hauth?

  The mental bonk, but the interesting thing is, a lot of times, these days, a lot of people get enough to counteract the mental bonk with their electrolyte drinks. Because there's a fair amount of sugars in those, unfortunately, these days. But if food is a longer lasting source, it breaks down slower, and we can actually utilize it for a longer period of time.

• 30:22Rich Roll?

  Right. So, aerobic zone training and, and getting your body to burn fat more efficiently and effectively really plays into kind of what, what I had to learn and what became the name of the game for me, which is a focus on efficiency as opposed to strength and speed, where efficiency is, is the name of the game. And one of the most kind of quoted lines out of my book is, is something you said to me early on, which is, the prize doesn't go to the fastest guy, it goes to the guy who slows down the least. And I think that that was revelatory for me, and that seems to have struck a chord with a lot of people reading the book.

• 31:06Rich Roll?

  So, you know, explain a little bit more about what that means.

• 31:10Chris Hauth?

  Anybody can start fast. We all know that from even playing as children on the playground. The tortoise and the hare. We all learned that early on, too. It's, it's more about efficiently getting through the distance and all the things that can get, go wrong during your race during the distance. What becomes key there is that you got through it efficiently, you still have your mind and wits about you to deal with the things that will go wrong.

• 31:42Chris Hauth?

  And then having the fitness to successfully complete it. The other quote I use a lot is, we all want to get to the finish line as fast as we can, but using the least amount of energy. So those two are a complete contrast in terms. Fast as we can, using the least amount of energy, that's not going to work too well. But there is a sweet spot in there, that if you train it efficiently and effectively, that is quite fast, but you're using very little energy to do it.

• 32:12Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 32:13Chris Hauth?

  That's endurance athletics, basically, at its core.

• 32:16Rich Roll?

  Right. And as you explained it to me, what this means is, through this aerobic zone training, and the higher end stuff that we're going to get into a little bit, so there's no confusion about that, is really building those metabolic pathways, increasing the mitochondrial density in your muscle fibers, which allows your body to burn this fat more efficiently, to use less oxygen to achieve the same amount of work, et cetera, so that each pedal stroke or running stride or whatever, costs you less. Is that accurate?

• 32:52Chris Hauth?

  Yes. The ability to carry more oxygen. I'm not willing to say yet that we'll use less oxygen.

• 32:59Rich Roll?

  We should say, neither of us are doctors here, so.

• 33:02Chris Hauth?

  Exactly. It's just more, the more pathways you have to carry oxygen, to deliver to the working muscles, the better. And you have heard me also say in the past, it's like a big network of freeways. And the more freeways you build, the less traffic there will be on those freeways. And so, what we're trying to do at that aerobic, low heart rate zone training, is to build more pathways to deliver oxygen to the working muscles, that when it is time to up the intensity, to go harder, to race, you have a bigger network of pathways to deliver that oxygen. And it's there. It's there. Every time, my athletes are very surprised, as well as you were, back in the day, that

• 33:46Chris Hauth?

  despite spending no time in the upper zones of training, you still got stronger there, at your lactate threshold, versus just your aerobic threshold.

• 33:55Rich Roll?

  Absolutely. And I think the other biggest thing that I noticed is... For example, if I'm out riding and you want to attack a hill, or there's a hill you want to, or you want to pass somebody, or something like that. So you're going to go out of your zone two, and you're going to get into a higher zone, maybe go ramp up to zone four for a short period of time for an attack, or to crest a hill. The better, the more focused I've been on the aerobic zone training, the more quickly my heart rate will settle back down, and I'll recover within that particular effort, and get back to a baseline where I can get back into a rhythm again. If I've kind of overstepped that aerobic zone two, or haven't been focused

• 34:37Rich Roll?

  on that enough, when I want to go hard, all of a sudden, then I'm like depleted, and it takes me forever to kind of settle back down and get comfortable again.

• 34:46Chris Hauth?

  Yep, it's that settling back in, that's the not slowing down.

• 34:50Rich Roll?

  Right. And that's, that's efficiency, really?

• 34:53Chris Hauth?

  It is efficiency, and it's also maintaining control of your output at all times, so that you know, I can settle back into my go all day pace, and that that is not any slower than when I started my endurance event, whatever that is.

• 35:08Rich Roll?

  Right. And so, it's interesting to talk about this, and then to look at race results from, you know, pick any half Ironman or Ironman, and look at the age group results. And without fail, I would, I would say upwards of 70, 80, maybe 90% of the athletes, you'll look at their splits for the run portion, and they'll start out real swift, and then they drop off a cliff to, you know, walking, and we're talking from seven minute pace to 14 minute pace, or something like that. So, that is epidemic in Ironman, and even at, even at the half Ironman distance. So, you know, what is going on there? Like, what

• 35:49Rich Roll?

  are people doing wrong, or overlooking, or why is that, why does that seem to be the biggest issue that people are facing?

• 35:59Rich Roll?

  Well, I don't know if it is the biggest issue. It's just an observation that I'm making.

• 36:03Chris Hauth?

  Oh, for sure. It is a, it is a big issue in the sport. And I say issue.

• 36:07Rich Roll?

  Issue.

• 36:10Rich Roll?

  It's very controversial.

• 36:13Chris Hauth?

  No, it's, um, it's one that highlights just the pacing on the bike and how much it cost you. If you paced the bike incorrectly and it cost you too much, you will no longer have the energy needed to successfully complete the run. And what I mean by successfully completing the run, that is coming within a reasonable

• 36:37Chris Hauth?

  percentage of your training runs. Because I often hear athletes at the fish niche line who are like, you know, usually I can run seven twenties all day in training off the bike. And for some reason today I wasn't able to break eights. Well, you might want to look at your bike pacing. That's an easy way to, easy thing to point at. It might be hydration, it might be nutrition along the way too. But oftentimes it's the pacing and it's a hard event to pace. I mean, it's a long day and you want to get carried away early. You feel good, you're rested, you're tapered. And now you have to wait six hours to test your run fitness. I don't want to wait that long.

• 37:15Chris Hauth?

  You're only caution to the wind a little bit.

• 37:17Rich Roll?

  Right, right. What do you think is the biggest mistake that the average kind of amateur triathlete or marathoner runner makes in, in training and in racing?

• 37:28Chris Hauth?

  The classic going too hard on easy days and going too easy on hard days. So they're constantly training in that gray zone of no improvement.

• 37:40Chris Hauth?

  If you want to have the clear, dramatic improvement in your training, whether with aerobic or anaerobic training, you need to make a conscientious decision to go hard on your hard days and really easy on your easy days. You can't always go in the gray zone in between those two. It's called no man's land for a reason because it leaves you with one speed, the one speed syndrome.

• 38:05Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 38:06Chris Hauth?

  Where you're not going to improve as much as you like. You notice that in January, February, given a normal triathlon season being in the summer, you're going as fast as you go in June. Why? Because you've been training.

• 38:18Rich Roll?

  The same thing, yeah.

• 38:20Chris Hauth?

  The whole time. And it usually comes because easy feels too easy, so therefore it can't be right.

• 38:25Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 38:26Chris Hauth?

  And therefore you're not rested enough and fresh enough to go hard enough to really have that stimulus.

• 38:31Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 38:32Chris Hauth?

  When needed.

• 38:32Rich Roll?

  Right. So you need the discipline to go, to go slow. It's a, it's a, it's a discipline, just like it's a discipline to go hard. You have to hold yourself back and that's part of, part of training is resting, knowing when to rest and treating that with the same level of respect as you treat the hard days.

• 38:52Chris Hauth?

  Fourth and fifth discipline of this sport, of any endurance sport is recovery and rest as well as nutrition.

• 39:00Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. And particularly as you get older, for sure.

• 39:04Chris Hauth?

  Yes.

• 39:04Rich Roll?

  Right? I mean, when you're 20, it's like you can get away with a lot of stuff, so.

• 39:08Chris Hauth?

  As we know from our swimming.

• 39:10Rich Roll?

  I know. And we should point out that it's funny because Chris came into my life, you know, around the, this, you know, getting involved in Ultraman and triathlon. And we had some mutual friends and when I decided that I wanted to kind of dip my toe in this world, I asked around and, and Chris's name kept coming up. So I felt like, all right, well, I was being directed to this guy for some reason. And then as we kind of got to know each other, we realized that, you know, Chris comes from a swimming background as well. And, and we had both swam at the same club team. I don't think we overlapped though. I'm a little bit older than you, a couple of years older than you. So I was out of there by the time you showed up, that the Curl, the Curl Swim Club then became Curl Burke.

• 39:54Rich Roll?

  Now I think it's called the nation's capital swim team.

• 39:57Chris Hauth?

  Yeah.

• 39:58Rich Roll?

  And for those that, that, that have some familiarity with why that name changed, then you get that joke. And if you don't, that's a subject for another podcast, I think.

• 40:08Chris Hauth?

  Yes, you'll have to invite other people for that.

• 40:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Exactly. Cause I could talk for hours about that. But anyway. So, and Chris was far more accomplished in swimming than I. As a dual citizen of the United States and Germany, he represented Germany in two Olympiads, right? In the individual, in the 200 IM?

• 40:29Chris Hauth?

  Yeah.

• 40:30Rich Roll?

  Both times, 400 IM both times. So, two-time Olympian, right? And we had, and you swam with Josef Najy, Naj? You say it Naj, right?

• 40:41Chris Hauth?

  Nagy.

• 40:42Rich Roll?

  Nagy, right? And you had swum at University of Michigan, too?

• 40:47Chris Hauth?

  A little bit, and then mainly at American University.

• 40:50Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 40:50Chris Hauth?

  With, when Josef transferred in there.

• 40:53Rich Roll?

  So you were, you were a club swimmer in New Jersey, right? At, is that where you grew, that's where you grew up?

• 40:58Chris Hauth?

  For when I was in Jersey?

• 41:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 41:01Chris Hauth?

  Yes, I was a club swimmer in Jersey.

• 41:03Rich Roll?

  But you had, you grew up in Germany, too?

• 41:06Chris Hauth?

  Exactly, sort of back and forth.

• 41:07Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 41:08Chris Hauth?

  My first few years in the US, grade school, were here, in the US when I say here. And then from 10 on in Germany, swimming there.

• 41:18Rich Roll?

  And so it comes time to go to college and, or Bancheck, I assume, recruits you? You show up at Michigan?

• 41:25Chris Hauth?

  Um, no.

• 41:26Rich Roll?

  Like, how does that work? Actually, we've never talked about this. I want to hear about this.

• 41:28Chris Hauth?

  It's the other way around, actually. I was at a junior European Championships and Josef showed up. And he was there with a few other swimmers. And he, I was, had my mindset to go to SC.

• 41:41Rich Roll?

  Oh, really?

• 41:42Chris Hauth?

  Because that was sort of the German path, right? A lot of German swimmers swam at SC.

• 41:46Rich Roll?

  At Berkeley, at Berkeley, yeah.

• 41:48Chris Hauth?

  And I was convinced that I was just going to follow that path. I wasn't good enough to really get the full ride that those guys were getting. But I just wanted to follow in their footsteps. And I met him and he saw me swim, Josef, that is, at European Championships, Junior European Championships. And he said, you know what? You should come to this place called Michigan.

• 42:12Chris Hauth?

  I had no clue where it was. I went on a recruiting trip and it was summer in Michigan, you know, late August, early September and beautiful weather, great, great climate, walking around in shorts. Got there about two weeks later, the weather started turning quickly and I learned what a Midwest winter was like. So, and then he transferred.

• 42:38Rich Roll?

  But Joseph was, was he an assistant coach at Michigan?

• 42:42Chris Hauth?

  Yeah.

• 42:42Rich Roll?

  So he was, right. And, and Joseph was a guy who had been a coach in Hungary, correct? And through, does he come from a science background or what exactly is his?

• 42:54Chris Hauth?

  He was a swimmer himself.

• 42:54Rich Roll?

  He was a swimmer himself. And through some sort of trial and error process, and you, you know, Farber than I, so please explain, he had developed a revolutionary new approach to the breaststroke that involved a completely different way of approaching how that stroke works, the fluid dynamics of it and how you train, right? I mean, it was literally like, he took the breaststroke, stripped it apart and rebuilt it from the ground up and is credited as being the, basically the sole person responsible for creating Mike Barrowman's success, who was another curl swimmer who went on to break the world record in, did he break it in both the 100 and the 200 or just?

• 43:36Chris Hauth?

  Just the 200.

• 43:37Rich Roll?

  Just the 200. And was an Olympic gold medalist. And because of Joseph's, basically, he was willing to trust Joseph and rebuild a stroke from the ground up and adhere to this bizarre new way of training, which back in the, this is 1988, yeah, 89 around then, was quite a, you know, it was quite a shakeup. There weren't a lot of people like experimenting with doing new things and swimming at the time.

• 44:04Chris Hauth?

  Especially not the breaststroke.

• 44:05Rich Roll?

  Right. Exactly. So instead of the typical kind of frog kick, he turned it almost into an undulating, almost dolphin-like maneuver where the body moves through the water much more efficiently.

• 44:19Chris Hauth?

  And that helped propel the upper body forward in a wave action. Because you almost threw yourself over the water, but in order to keep that kick going, you had to come back down with the front end of your body in a certain way.

• 44:31Rich Roll?

  Exactly.

• 44:32Chris Hauth?

  To propel your feet to kick that almost wave butterfly kick back again.

• 44:40Rich Roll?

  Exactly. So if you look at the top breast strikers from pre-Joseph, it's a very...

• 44:46Chris Hauth?

  Pre-Soul Olympics.

• 44:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's a very stop and start motion. It's kind of like forward, kind of slower, forward, forward, you know, but it's very herky-jerky. And if you look at the top breast strikers now, it's very fluid. It's like a really nice rhythm and Joseph really is responsible for that.

• 45:04Chris Hauth?

  He said, "Why are we going up and down so much? Why aren't we creating that into a wave, basically?" He said, "There's gotta be a better way."

• 45:23Rich Roll?

  All right. So Joseph meets you, a young, a young and handsome upcoming swimming star. It says, "Come to Michigan. I will rebuild you. I will make you Olympic champion."

• 45:34Chris Hauth?

  And no scholarship, on nothing, because they already had a full plethora of phenomenal swimmers, European swimmers too.

• 45:43Rich Roll?

  And Barrowman was there already or he was like a year older than you?

• 45:48Chris Hauth?

  He was, uh, might have been two years older than me, but he was getting, he had just returned from Seoul where he got a bronze medal.

• 45:56Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 45:57Chris Hauth?

  Or just, just outside of the medals. I don't actually remember right now, but he worked himself straight through the ranks to win that gold in 92 convincingly. And with it... He brought along a few other swimmers that are today still big name coaches in the swimming world.

• 46:17Rich Roll?

  Right. So Joseph convinces you to do this and you're looking at it like, wow, you know, I'm not going to be a scholarship athlete, but I get to train with this coach that did this for Mike Barrowman and I get to train with Mike, train with the best, right? Like, it sounds like a pretty good situation.

• 46:36Chris Hauth?

  Yes, it was. And when his wife got transferred to the World Bank in Washington DC, he left and a lot of us left with him to join him at Kroll Burke where he got an assistant coaching job as well as at American University.

• 46:54Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 46:55Chris Hauth?

  And from there, that's where the group really developed, whether it was other breast strikers from Spain and the US. We had a pretty crazy group there.

• 47:04Rich Roll?

  Oh, yeah. Who's this?

• 47:05Chris Hauth?

  Sergio Lopez.

• 47:07Rich Roll?

  That's right.

• 47:07Chris Hauth?

  As well as Rox Santos.

• 47:09Rich Roll?

  Rox Santos. Was Tom Dolan there too? Or is he younger?

• 47:12Chris Hauth?

  Tommy was younger at the time and he was two or three lanes over and we already knew that.

• 47:19Rich Roll?

  He was going to be the goods.

• 47:20Chris Hauth?

  Yes.

• 47:21Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 47:21Chris Hauth?

  Going through.

• 47:22Rich Roll?

  So, so, so you leave Michigan and did you enroll at AU or you were just training?

• 47:29Chris Hauth?

  Oh, no, I was there. That was my main college education.

• 47:32Rich Roll?

  Right. So you go to school there and, and how does the Olympics come about for you?

• 47:36Chris Hauth?

  They come about as a German national.

• 47:39Rich Roll?

  I mean, does it work like in the US where there's a trials meet and you qualify similarly?

• 47:43Chris Hauth?

  Exactly. You got to get top two and then there's also time standards and in some of the events, I didn't make the time standard. So therefore you can't race in that event.

• 47:53Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 47:54Chris Hauth?

  And the time standards are based off the previous year's rankings in the world. And so, but you get in one automatic entry at that point still. And they even changed that in 96. So at this point though, you still had an automatic entry for if you win or get second in your event and you're within the time standard.

• 48:16Rich Roll?

  Right, cool.

• 48:17Chris Hauth?

  I was lucky.

• 48:18Rich Roll?

  So you went twice. You weren't lucky.

• 48:20Chris Hauth?

  It was right after the German wall came down.

• 48:23Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 48:23Chris Hauth?

  A lot of East German swimmers that should have been on the team and were better than I was actually had to go out and make a living. And their training and their time and their comforts in order to focus on the training went away.

• 48:41Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 48:41Chris Hauth?

  And I was able to sneak into a few places, up a few places in the results at German Olympic Trials in order to qualify.

• 48:52Rich Roll?

  It seems like it was kind of a weird transition time because you're kind of getting out of the Eastern Bloc, you know, crazy giant Eastern German women with the big necks and all of that. Like that was kind of fading into the background and it wasn't clear what German athletics were going to be looking like in the future, right?

• 49:10Chris Hauth?

  And the first combined team ever in 92.

• 49:14Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 49:14Chris Hauth?

  So there was a lot of jostling as well as a lot of confusion on the process.

• 49:19Rich Roll?

  A lot of East versus West.

• 49:21Chris Hauth?

  There was a lot of that.

• 49:22Rich Roll?

  Rivalry still in place.

• 49:24Chris Hauth?

  Everybody pretty much knew each other in the swimming world already. Like you knew who was ranked ahead of you and you knew so.

• 49:30Rich Roll?

  Well, of course. I mean, the world's not that big.

• 49:32Chris Hauth?

  Exactly, especially then two Germanies. But you also knew that things would shake out a little bit differently just because of the hardships of combining the two countries. And the sports system had literally crumbled in the East. Their facilities, their training, their coaches had been something that had been such an important piece of their training and life for the last 10, 15 years was now gone. And so fighting through that while preparing for the Olympic Trials was challenging for them.

• 50:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, interesting. So you have this amazing experience and like most amateur athletes, you know, this chapter has to end and you know, there's not, there's no money coming in. I mean, now you look at some of these swimmers and they're making big money. I mean, it's still, it's only a couple of guys at the top. It's not like, you know, there are a lot of people making a living, but to see these swimmers competing at the, on the world stage like well into their mid 30s or whatever it is, is crazy. I mean, that, you know, when we were swimming, that was, forget it.

• 50:36Chris Hauth?

  There was nobody making that money.

• 50:38Rich Roll?

  Nobody made, you know, so.

• 50:40Chris Hauth?

  But it's like triathlon these days, right?

• 50:42Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 50:42Chris Hauth?

  I mean, the, the top few guys, they make a good, good living.

• 50:46Rich Roll?

  But there's only a couple of guys doing that. And I honestly, I don't know how they do it because the travel is insane, you know, to all these crazy exotic locations and then kind of, you know, chasing the endless summer to train to and always moving around to be in a new place to train. These are, it's incredibly expensive sport and the prize money is nothing.

• 51:09Chris Hauth?

  No.

• 51:10Rich Roll?

  And the sponsor money, unless you're a real top guy, I think there's a perception that, you know, if you have a bike sponsor or whatever, you're getting paid all this money. I mean, it's, that's not what's going on here.

• 51:21Chris Hauth?

  No, but you, I mean, what in their defense of some of these top guys is triathlon in Australia, for example, is a completely different sport from a fan base and from a support level than it is in the United States. Same as swimmers.

• 51:37Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 51:37Chris Hauth?

  And swimmers in Australia, you can't get in a cab without getting recognized. And triathlon is very similar there too. They're very passionate about their triathletes and they have a good history of really, really successful triathletes. So that feeds itself with sponsorship money and with a good salary in some cases.

• 51:57Rich Roll?

  But not in the US, really?

• 51:59Chris Hauth?

  No. And that won't change.

• 52:01Rich Roll?

  So you didn't get into it for the money?

• 52:03Chris Hauth?

  No.

• 52:04Rich Roll?

  After swimming, you thought, swimming, there's no money in swimming. I'm going to go into triathlon.

• 52:08Chris Hauth?

  I chose the one other sport that doesn't make any money.

• 52:10Rich Roll?

  I know. You and I both, I keep changing, like, I know what I'll do. I'll do a podcast. That's where the money is, right?

• 52:18Chris Hauth?

  I'll tell both my kids.

• 52:19Rich Roll?

  Why am I, why are we so passionate about things that don't feed us?

• 52:23Chris Hauth?

  Well, it does feed me.

• 52:24Rich Roll?

  Well.

• 52:24Chris Hauth?

  I should say.

• 52:25Rich Roll?

  Feeding, feeding in a, in a, I guess, yeah, I know, it does, of course, but.

• 52:30Chris Hauth?

  I gotta keep knocking on wood.

• 52:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 52:32Chris Hauth?

  That's not something.

• 52:33Rich Roll?

  But not like, uh, not like investment banking, which I think at one point you were, you started to.

• 52:39Chris Hauth?

  I dabbled in for a while.

• 52:40Rich Roll?

  Right. So swimming's over, time to turn into an adult. I'm not going to be that guy who's chasing, you know, that athletic dream into his thirties, God for, God forbid.

• 52:52Chris Hauth?

  Yep, I walk away from swimming and I become a, a working man. And I finished my grad school and I moved to New York and get a job on Wall Street.

• 53:03Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 53:04Chris Hauth?

  Work my way into some currency trading and for a few different firms and sort of decide from there. I'm not really going to be one of those guys. I don't fit in the same way. So I walk away from that a couple of years later and move out to California.

• 53:21Rich Roll?

  How did you, I mean, what was it about that where you were willing to just say, this is not for me? I mean, was it just like the, what about it? Cause I think one of the things that interests me and I think is, you know, part of kind of like what, where my book is coming from is that, is that sort of getting comfortable with yourself and who you are and, and trying to kind of actualize who you're supposed to be or the best version of yourself and, and not just settle for some job because that's what you think is the best you're going to get and, you know, trying to be more expressive of what it is that you want to do here. So, you know, I,

• 54:01Rich Roll?

  I do want to, like, what is it that was inside of you that said, you know, I just can't do that. I can't be this banker?

• 54:07Chris Hauth?

  Well, you actually just said exactly the words that went through my head settling for this job. I could pretty much take a look at my boss and my boss's boss and see where my career was heading. And it was a lot of money and it was very comfortable, but it was a lot of hours at a lot of, at a, at a, at a large cost on family. And your life in general unhealthy as well as seeing yourself in 15 years and the leisure suit and the big house in the Hamptons, but not living your life, not being a part of it,

• 54:45Chris Hauth?

  but just being dictated by work every day, not just five days a week, but seven days a week.

• 54:53Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 54:54Chris Hauth?

  Was something I say to myself, for me, I was lucky early on to recognize that.

• 55:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think it's, it takes a lot of, you know, sort of maturity and self-respect and courage to recognize that and make a move. And, you know, it's, it's hard, it's, it's hard to break out of something like that. I mean, that's, you know, kind of what we're, it's like, hey, that's, that's the brass ring, man. That's what you worked for. And now here you are. You're gonna, you're gonna like, you know, thumb your nose at that?

• 55:23Chris Hauth?

  Yes, I did. And, you know, when you're at a, at a party or you're out to dinner with, whether it's clients or friends, and they ask you what you do, and you tell them you're a triathlon coach, or you're a running coach or an endurance coach, and you sort of get the brush off of like, yeah, okay, well, that's nice. Well, what else do you do?

• 55:44Rich Roll?

  Right. Like, the adults are gonna go talk over here now, and go, you know, entertain yourself over with the children.

• 55:52Chris Hauth?

  And how could you walk away from that? So there's been definitely some difficult times through that.

• 55:58Rich Roll?

  But that's an ego, that's an ego thing. And that speaks to where they're coming from, and is more about who they are than, than you.

• 56:05Chris Hauth?

  For sure. For sure. I'm very comfortable and I love coaching. That's one thing I learned as I became more involved in coaching. Early on, was that I truly enjoy coaching, every single part of it, from helping people to everybody being such an individual and needing something so different, that it is actually a very stimulating profession, because nobody is the same. Everybody needs a different type of coaching.

• 56:36Rich Roll?

  Right. And I think also, it goes beyond performance. I mean, it's not an overstatement to say that you completely changed my life. I mean, you changed my life. Like, I can't even begin to express how much my life changed because you came into it, you know? I mean, and there was a confluence of other things that were going on, but, you know, the effect that you've had on me is profound, and I could never repay you for that. So, it's not a small thing.

• 57:04Chris Hauth?

  And I'm thankful to that every day, because there's people around me that I've coached all the time that come up and say, "Thank you. And you had a big impact in how I view things now," or "How you've made me healthier, or fitter, or stronger, or mentally better prepared." And those were never my... That was not the intended outcome of the coaching. But because of the dialogue, because of the relationship, because of the communication between coach and athlete, we were able to tap into more than just, "Hey, go swim. Hey, go run. Hey, go bike." There's a relationship that grows from coaching, and everybody, again,

• 57:49Chris Hauth?

  takes it on a different individual role within that.

• 57:52Rich Roll?

  Right, right. And it's an extension of... We haven't even gotten into, you know, your life as a pro triathlete and what that was all about. But, you know, the coaching is just an extension of a lifestyle that you decided you wanted to be what your life was about. So, it's very pure in that regard.

• 58:10Chris Hauth?

  It is, but I've also been extremely fortunate to have some great coaches coach me back in my swimming days. People who were very, very influential and meaningful to me. So, I almost just carry on their coaching and teachings to me, and how they coached me is how I coach my athletes currently.

• 58:32Rich Roll?

  And what would you... How would you articulate that? Like, if somebody had to say, "What is your coaching style? Or what do you think is the most effective way to..." Teach an athlete.

• 58:42Chris Hauth?

  Well, those are two different things. I'm not ready to say yet that my coaching style is the most effective.

• 58:48Rich Roll?

  Chris is a hard ass. If you want, if you want the guy to pat you on the back and tell you how great you're doing and keep going and be your cheerleader.

• 58:55Chris Hauth?

  I'm not the guy.

• 58:57Rich Roll?

  The German side of him comes out. Yeah, he's not, he's not the guy for that.

• 59:01Chris Hauth?

  What did we say? No handshakes. There's a, there's a quote that some of my athletes have out there that it's quite funny because it personifies exactly everything that I avoid.

• 59:14Rich Roll?

  Oh, I mean, the number of conversations that go on amongst your athletes, like even the guys down here, when we're gone, our Saturday rise is like, I mean, because you're not impressed by anything. Like some athlete will have some breakthrough and go, hey, Chris, I did this thing. You're like, yeah, yeah. Keep going. Keep going. You'll get there.

• 59:34Rich Roll?

  Which is good. I mean, I'm not, you know, I'm not a, I mean, I hope you would agree. I'm not a high maintenance athlete. I'm just like, give me the workout. You know, I don't, I don't need you to, you know, I don't, you know, I just need you to give me the, the feed, the honest feedback. I don't need the cheerleading.

• 59:49Chris Hauth?

  And that's, that's exactly my type of coaching. I'm not a cheerleader.

• 59:52Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 59:54Chris Hauth?

  And that takes on different roles. Some people enjoy the cheerleading and are looking for that in a coach. And I'm not the answer to that. But.

• 1:00:04Rich Roll?

  There's plenty of other people out there that do that.

• 1:00:06Chris Hauth?

  For sure. And but for me, it's more about the relationship, once again, with the athlete. It's not about what I give them to work out. I always say, whenever I talk to you or other athletes, don't tell me what you did. Tell me how it felt. Tell me what you observed. Tell me, you know, what you are seeing through your eyes. Because if I can understand that, I can coach you better.

• 1:00:28Rich Roll?

  And that's what it's about. Cause you can, you can buy a plan on the internet.

• 1:00:32Chris Hauth?

  Exactly. You buy a book, get a magazine. So it has all, they all have training plans that are very effective. But coaching is about guidance, is working with somebody, is.

• 1:00:43Chris Hauth?

  Helping them navigate through their day in order to have an effective workout, whether that's nutrition, hydration, scheduling, strategy, all those things. That's coaching. Coaching is being that person that's focused on you in order for you to effectively get through your training.

• 1:01:02Rich Roll?

  Right. And, and as a coach, you're also still a competing athlete and you know, you had a career. How many years were you pro, pro Ironman triathlete?

• 1:01:12Chris Hauth?

  Only about two and a half.

• 1:01:14Rich Roll?

  Two and a half years. And, but during your career, you've competed at Kona, how many times? Like 12, I was gonna say seven or eight, 12 times at Kona. So, you know, an unbelievable amount of experience. You've seen it all. You've, you've done it all and you still have this love and passion for it and you continue to pursue the sport as an amateur now at age 43, 43, right?

• 1:01:39Chris Hauth?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:39Rich Roll?

  Getting ready for Cabo.

• 1:01:41Chris Hauth?

  In three weeks.

• 1:01:42Rich Roll?

  In three weeks. And so how does you, like, how do you stay enthusiastic about racing, you know, in your, in your 40s, having been an Olympic swimmer and having, you know, had these super high peaks of athletic success to keep it fresh and year after year after year?

• 1:02:02Chris Hauth?

  Well, for me now, the curiosity is how to not slow down. And as we get older, if I can keep my speed from the past, then I'll be doing pretty good as an age grouper. Because if I can still go to complete the Ironman in times that I used to in my early 30s.

• 1:02:21Rich Roll?

  That's a win.

• 1:02:22Chris Hauth?

  Exactly. So the focus of my training also for me personally is built around that. What am I doing in order for me to ensure that I'm not slowing down? And that is, like we said earlier, recovery and rest and nutrition and understanding myself better.

• 1:02:39Rich Roll?

  Right. And I would imagine the kind of workouts that you're doing are, I mean, you have so many years or decades of base, you know, aerobic training base underneath your belt and that persists. What, what, what seems to degenerate as we get older is the strength and the speed, right? So how does that, how does that play into how you create your plan for yourself? How would that be different from somebody like myself or somebody who's coming into the sport, you know, later in life?

• 1:03:09Chris Hauth?

  Well, exactly like you said, the aerobic platform is there. And now I just need to be able to sharpen the skills in order to have a successful race. And now for me, the successful skills are, in some levels, speed work, but in many levels, timing my workouts right. Whether that's three days of solid work and then resting two, three days. I'm also in a, in an interesting cycle where because with my kids and combined with my training, that when I have my kids, I can't train the same way. So therefore, I'm forced to rest.

• 1:03:47Rich Roll?

  Nor should you.

• 1:03:48Chris Hauth?

  Exactly. Exactly. So therefore, it allows me to train big and effectively the days I don't have my kids. And when I do have my kids, I'm resting, eating, sleeping, going to bed before them.

• 1:04:04Rich Roll?

  Before them. I know what that's like. Good night, I'm going to bed. My eight year old is watching a movie. It's eight o'clock. I know. I've been there with that one. Well, let's get into a little bit about training philosophies. And I think I would be remiss if I didn't kind of talk a little bit about what Brian McKenzie had to say the other day. He was a very popular guest that I had on the podcast. And he's sort of gotten a lot of press lately. And there was a profile about him and his training methods in the

• 1:04:44Rich Roll?

  recent Outside magazine article, where essentially, he's saying in so many words, most multi-sport endurance athletes and marathon runners are doing it wrong. There's a lot of junk miles in there. You don't need all this aerobic training. What you need and what gets overlooked is a lot of functional body strength stuff, a lot of high intensity sprint work and aerobic work. And he's citing these studies that show that this high intensity and aerobic work actually functions to boost your endurance more time effectively than the aerobic zone training that, you know, that I love that you give me, et cetera. And so, you know, he's coming from a completely

• 1:05:28Rich Roll?

  different place. He came on the show and, you know, I read that article and that's why I wanted to have him on. And I was ready to kind of be very dismissive of a lot of where he's coming from, but also understand like, I only have my own experience. I've never done his program. But he actually shared a lot of kind of interesting insights that I think you would agree with that have to do with form, technique, body stability, core stability, and all of these sorts of things. So I wondered if you could kind of weigh in on your perspective of where he's coming from, because I don't want people to be confused, you know, oh, you have this guy saying this and this guy saying that, like, I don't know what I'm supposed to do.

• 1:06:09Chris Hauth?

  Well, first off, it's individual for everybody, right? So what you're maximizing your training time with is basically what your philosophy is with the coaching and the training. So for example, if you believe in high intensity and you only have a limited amount of time, or you've had success in the past with it, by all means, don't change what worked.

• 1:06:33Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:06:34Chris Hauth?

  The challenge is that for most of us that I'm coaching and working with, we're doing events that are 10, 11, 12, 17, 24, 36, 70 hours.

• 1:06:47Rich Roll?

  Seventy, yeah.

• 1:06:48Chris Hauth?

  Seventy hours. I coached a swimmer who swam 135 miles.

• 1:06:53Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:06:53Chris Hauth?

  I mean, there's no high intensity happening at any point in that. So everybody's individual and everybody has different needs. But that being said, it's also, what is the best use of training time? And then, of course, like we said early on, what is the event you're getting ready for? I would challenge Brian to see how he does with that training for an Ironman, a competitive Ironman.

• 1:07:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think there's a distinction between completion and being competitive, for sure.

• 1:07:31Chris Hauth?

  I call it participating or being competitive, for sure. There's plenty of marathons out there where you can run five, six, seven hours and you're a finisher. And then there's plenty of marathons out there that have tighter cutoff times and you have to be prepared to run 4:30 or faster. It's going to require a different training. And across all sports, you can't compare a certain finishing time or a level of athlete to just the general populace. And what we're talking about here oftentimes is the type of training for the general populace, what works across a larger group, or truly for a level that is looking to complete it

• 1:08:15Chris Hauth?

  in a certain time, place, percentile of finishers.

• 1:08:20Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:08:21Chris Hauth?

  And again, I can't stress enough that all this stuff is dependent on the athlete, the type of training they want to do, the type of time they have available and the event, right? It's completely individual. So, as they call it, HIIT training, high intensity.

• 1:08:38Chris Hauth?

  It works if you have a limited amount of time, for sure.

• 1:08:41Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:08:42Chris Hauth?

  But at some point, whether you are a pro triathlete or you are a beginner triathlete, your body's also going to stop absorbing the high intensity. And you're going to have to return at some point to aerobic platform.

• 1:08:54Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:08:55Chris Hauth?

  You cannot just continue at high intensity forever. Sort of the zone four for you. If you did that for the next six months, you would plateau. And the opportunity to improve is dramatically higher at the lower heart rate, at the lower intensities than it is at number one.

• 1:09:16Rich Roll?

  Right. But it's more, it's more time consuming.

• 1:09:19Chris Hauth?

  Absolutely. And it's mind-numbingly frustrating for many of us. Because we don't have the time, we don't have the patience.

• 1:09:28Rich Roll?

  Like, I have to ride five hours just so that, you know, my body can improve a little bit during that last hour of the ride.

• 1:09:35Chris Hauth?

  Exactly.

• 1:09:36Rich Roll?

  That seems not efficient. That is not a Tim Ferriss way of going about your life in a time-effective manner.

• 1:09:44Chris Hauth?

  Yep, and I mean, it's and we all have well, we all went to to use the quote, we all went went pro in something other than the sport we're participating in.

• 1:09:54Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:09:54Chris Hauth?

  Or taking part in. So therefore, we do have other commitments and we do have limited time. So where is that fair balance between the two? Because don't get me wrong, I absolutely believe in high intensity training at the right time.

• 1:10:09Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:10:09Chris Hauth?

  I, you know, use the old example of a pyramid. The wider the base of that pyramid, the higher and sharper and pointier we can build it. If it's just a narrow little platform, we're not getting very far.

• 1:10:23Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:10:24Chris Hauth?

  So we're going to build it really wide and really thick and really strong that it can carry a huge, huge top to it.

• 1:10:32Rich Roll?

  Right. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's not rocket science. It's sort of, you know, I look at all of this and go, all right, well, what have I learned? I've learned that, you know, aerobic zone training works for me, that building an endurance base is important, becoming efficient is important. I've also learned that technique and form is important. And in order to have that, I have to have functional body strength. I can't overlook that. I need core strength. I need, I can't overstep that gym time.

• 1:11:02Chris Hauth?

  For sure.

• 1:11:03Rich Roll?

  And that, and I, and I also need to pay attention to rest and I need to pay attention to, you know, kind of the rehabilitative stuff, like using the foam rollers and the, and all these kinds of things that you need to make sure you're not getting a running injury and all of that. I mean,

• 1:11:17Chris Hauth?

  It's a lot to think about.

• 1:11:19Rich Roll?

  It is. It's too much. This is what you're supposed to do for me.

• 1:11:22Chris Hauth?

  This is, that's basically our profession, though.

• 1:11:24Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:11:25Chris Hauth?

  And you communicating that to your coach, whether it's me or any athlete, to their coaches, that makes them better coaches for that athlete. That's the key here.

• 1:11:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:34Chris Hauth?

  And another thing on the high intensity stuff is, you've heard me say this before too, whether it's 80, 20, 70% of your time, 30% of your time, that balance between aerobic and anaerobic work. Well, if you put that out into that, say, the 20 hours a week of your training, and we said, you know what, Rich, right now, we need you to be at a balance.

• 1:11:55Rich Roll?

  Whoop. Somebody's calling. Right when you were making the killer point, too, you got interrupted.

• 1:12:02Chris Hauth?

  It's flying in. We'll let that pass.

• 1:12:05Rich Roll?

  You want to answer?

• 1:12:07Chris Hauth?

  We'll let it go. He'll cut this out.

• 1:12:11Rich Roll?

  No edits, man.

• 1:12:14Rich Roll?

  Takes too much time. Very grating.

• 1:12:20Chris Hauth?

  That's probably, um.

• 1:12:21Rich Roll?

  Who's calling you?

• 1:12:22Chris Hauth?

  Jonathan.

• 1:12:24Rich Roll?

  Oh, Jonathan Schwartz? Oh, cool. He can come up. I'm gonna have him on the, I'm gonna have him on the podcast too. He'll talk about his foundation.

• 1:12:32Chris Hauth?

  Oh, awesome. Yeah, so the, the big point here, if you take the hours that Rich is supposed to be training, and we say, let's say that's 20 hours a week, and we're gonna follow currently because based off of the prescription of the test and what we see you need and your event coming up, whether in six months or 18 months, that we want to say 80% of the time, we want to be aerobic, 20% of the time, we want to be anaerobic. Let's, let's limit the time we're spending in each zone. Well, guess what? If you take 20 hours.

• 1:13:08Chris Hauth?

  That was awesome.

• 1:13:09Rich Roll?

  I'm definitely not editing this out.

• 1:13:15Chris Hauth?

  You take that 5% of the time at Z4. Well, over 20, 20 hours, that's a lot of time.

• 1:13:22Rich Roll?

  It is.

• 1:13:22Chris Hauth?

  Working that high of a heart rate.

• 1:13:24Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:13:24Chris Hauth?

  Continuously. We're not talking a minute here, two minutes there, 30 seconds there, but we're talking a steady dosage of one hour straight of Z4 work.

• 1:13:35Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:13:35Chris Hauth?

  And you put that into a long ride, or you put that, that's pretty hard, along with the safety.

• 1:13:40Rich Roll?

  Very, very hard. Yeah. And how much time spent in the gray zone?

• 1:13:45Chris Hauth?

  None, hopefully.

• 1:13:46Rich Roll?

  None. I mean, that's, that's really the biggest takeaway, I think, and I think that's the biggest thing that, that amateur endurance athletes need to really take to heart is, is most people are spending most of their time in that gray zone, and they'll reach a certain level of proficiency, but they're gonna plateau really quick, and they're gonna have a really hard time breaking that glass ceiling, and they're gonna have to slow it down, have the discipline to slow it down, and then at the appropriate time, blast it out on the hard end.

• 1:14:13Chris Hauth?

  For sure.

• 1:14:13Rich Roll?

  And avoid that, and avoid that middle.

• 1:14:15Chris Hauth?

  Your coach, whoever that is, should be prescribing some high intensity stuff, given on the events you're getting ready for. But you are responsible as the athlete to be prepared for that work.

• 1:14:28Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:14:28Chris Hauth?

  In order, if you're following the guidelines of the coaching. You will be ready to knock that high intensity out of the park.

• 1:14:37Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:14:37Chris Hauth?

  And feel really good doing it, absorb it effectively and repeat it again.

• 1:14:41Rich Roll?

  Exactly. And I think, I think there's this, also this kind of momentum behind, you know, developing these different camps and that these two camps are at war with each other. Like Brian is coming from this perspective and you're coming from this perspective where you're going to get in a room and it's going to be like a boxing match or something like that. It's like, hey man, everyone, we're all just trying to get healthier here and get more efficient and faster and stronger. The goal is the same. And, and there are different approaches and ways of getting there. And there's nothing inherently wrong with any of them necessarily, right? So we can all learn and be open minded and learn from each other.

• 1:15:21Chris Hauth?

  For sure, for sure. And one athlete will do really well with one approach and not well at the other.

• 1:15:26Rich Roll?

  Hmm. Right. And I know that I've, just from my swimming experiences, I know that when I've really curtailed the volume and done a lot of high intensity work, it's never worked for me very well. Like I need that base, you know, maybe a lot of that is mental too, but all I know is that I definitely perform better when I'm doing it.

• 1:15:46Chris Hauth?

  And I see it in my athletes all the time that some of them respond really well to volume, others respond really well to quality.

• 1:15:55Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:15:55Chris Hauth?

  And you as the coach have to figure that out for the athlete.

• 1:15:59Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:16:08Rich Roll?

  I remember at Stanford, I showed up as a freshman, early season and I wanted to be really, because like yourself, like we're similar in that, you know, I went to Stanford, I was a walk-on, I was not a scholarship athlete, but I was like, wow, I can go here and I'm going to have the opportunity to train with Pablo Morales, just like you training with Mike Barham. And it's like, you're, you know, you can go be a big fish in a small sea, or you can go be a little fish in a big sea and find out what you're really made of, you know, and, and look back and go, well, I tried, you know, I put myself in this situation to be the best, whether you end up developing in that or not, you know, you can't look back and say, well, I wonder what would have happened if I really took a shot. So I did the similar, that same thing. And it was the first time that I'd been around like

• 1:16:52Rich Roll?

  that caliber of athlete. And, you know, they're like racehorses, right? It's almost a different breed of human being. And I remember John Moffett, who I adore. I love that guy to death. He's an amazing guy and an incredible swimming talent. And he just refused to do a lot of stuff that the coach said. He says, I'm not doing that. Like, he, he literally would take days off all the time because he knew himself so well. And he knew what his body needed. And he really only needed like, some, I don't want to put words in his mouth or whatever. But he didn't seem to need the volume. And he understood himself well enough to know that

• 1:17:31Rich Roll?

  that was undercutting his potential and tiring him out. And he had the wherewithal to say no, even though the coach would get furious and all of that, to do what was right for him. And I'd never seen that before in an athlete.

• 1:17:45Chris Hauth?

  Mike Bearman was exactly the same way. And it would drive Joseph bananas, as well as the swimmers around him. Here we all were working really hard to complete the full workout. And especially a guy like Sergio.

• 1:17:57Rich Roll?

  And you want to impress the coach.

• 1:17:58Chris Hauth?

  Exactly. Or a guy like Sergio Lopez, who was always working his tail off. And then, last set of the workout, when the switch had to be turned on for time, something, 200, 100 breaststroke, bam, Mike would just lie out of the gates and absolutely nail it. And everybody would become frustrated. But he just knew when to turn the switch on and when not. And when it was on, it was really on. But when it was off, it was really off. But he also could tell the coaches, I don't need that. I'll do fine. I'll continue to just do my stuff here. I'll be ready when it's time.

• 1:18:35Rich Roll?

  And that comes with self-confidence, but it also comes with experience. You know, you have to really know your body well, and what you're capable of, and what you need. And that doesn't happen out of the blue.

• 1:18:46Chris Hauth?

  And that's, it's on the athlete to communicate that. Especially as you're no longer in some, you know, 16 year old swimmer who has to listen to your coach on everything, or else it's going back to your parents, or you're looking for like, a scholarship for somewhere. As masters, athletes, all of us. We need to communicate to our coaches what we think we need, what we're observing, what we, how we feel, so that the better coach can come out.

• 1:19:11Rich Roll?

  Definitely. And what do you think is the biggest kind of misconception among the athletes that you coach in terms of sort of misappropriating their time or their focus in their daily training?

• 1:19:25Chris Hauth?

  Well, there's a few things, but the main thing that you often hear me say and have heard me say is you can't go too easy. You can't do any damage by training too easy, but you can do damage, or you increase the likelihood, the potential of doing damage by going just a bit too hard.

• 1:19:44Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:19:44Chris Hauth?

  So just being patient and understanding this is the prescription for now. If it's not working, or if you need to figure something else out, communicate with me.

• 1:19:54Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:19:54Chris Hauth?

  And we will then work through it and figure out what the better plan is. I've had many of athletes change their plan with me.

• 1:20:02Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:20:03Chris Hauth?

  Who said, you know what, I think I need more of this, or I would like more of that. And I say, of course, let's try it. Let's see what picks out. If it doesn't work, we know. If it does work, I know.

• 1:20:13Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:20:14Chris Hauth?

  It's a win-win.

• 1:20:15Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:20:16Chris Hauth?

  So it always comes back to that communication.

• 1:20:19Rich Roll?

  I, I remember kind of, once I got to a place where I was willing to kind of accept and embrace your approach and just, and, you know, do as told, there's a sort of security with that. And a lot of it was like, don't be afraid to go too slow. And I had nothing to compare it against. So I wasn't, you know, sort of running scenarios in my mind of like, well, I should be faster or whatever, because I was just happy to be out doing it. But now with a few years of doing this under my belt, the thing that, that is a challenge for me, especially after kind of taking last year off and not doing anything very serious in terms of training, is to not be hard on myself when I look at the garment, or I look at the heart rate monitor and the pace I'm running, or the

• 1:21:02Rich Roll?

  watts I'm putting on the bike, and, and feel like I should be doing better than I'm doing because I know I've been fitter than I am in this moment. And getting used to the idea of training where I'm at as opposed to training where I think I should be or where I want to be, like not training at the, at, at, at your goal pace, but training where you're at.

• 1:21:21Chris Hauth?

  A lot of athletes like to look at pro athletes or elite athletes and see or compare to how they're training or how they're preparing for a race. And I always compare it, whether it's to runners or swimmers, because they have a very similar training approach with a lot of interval work and steady stuff like that. And none of us, whether as swimmers, or even track runners, or even marathon elite runners, they don't train at the pace they're gonna race in. I mean, early on, you and I talked about, I asked you for your 200 freestyle time. And I showed you, did you ever swim that fast in workouts? For 10, no, not even 80% of that.

• 1:22:04Chris Hauth?

  Well, maybe 80%, but just around there. Well, that's how much slower than race pace we were going. But so many masters athletes, so many athletes in this endurance sports, that world that we're in, want to train at race pace. And they, they still live under the mantra, in order to go fast on race day, you have to train fast.

• 1:22:25Rich Roll?

  And there's a lot of that out there. If you wanna run fast, you gotta run fast.

• 1:22:29Chris Hauth?

  Yeah, if you wanna, you know, it comes across, comes up all the time. And how will I get better at my race pace if I'm not training at my race pace? Well, you've gotta get more efficient at the other paces first, in order to have the setup and the ability to go fast at race pace.

• 1:22:48Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:22:49Chris Hauth?

  The other thing is, and this might be in contrast to what Brian said, but if you can do the motions cleanly and technically sound at a slower pace, as you gradually dial up the pace, as you gradually get stronger, fitter, faster, you will remain technically sound, efficient, and clean in your motions as you get faster.

• 1:23:13Rich Roll?

  Right, that makes sense. I mean, I think Brian, I think he was coming from a place of saying, if you can run, you know, let's focus on you running 100 meters fast, and then you can run it slow. Whereas you're saying, learn how to run it slow first, and then dial up the, dial up the speed, and make sure that that, that that form, it remains intact at the faster pace.

• 1:23:35Chris Hauth?

  As you gradually get fitter and dial it up more and more, speed-wise, fitness-wise, all those things. If you have good form and technique, that will carry that efficiency. It's back to that efficiency.

• 1:23:47Rich Roll?

  Right. And technique is what starts to go when you start to get tired and you see those Ironman splits, you know, starting to drop. I mean, the first thing is, you know, the, the, the head, the neck, the, the neck starts to go out and the head dips down and you get the Ironman shuffle going and it's the form that falls apart.

• 1:24:05Chris Hauth?

  Everybody starts chariot to fire. Everybody ends shuffle.

• 1:24:09Rich Roll?

  And that would actually play into kind of what Brian is saying, which is, you know, with some functional body strength, you can maintain your technique when fatigued better. And I think that there's wisdom in that, for sure.

• 1:24:21Chris Hauth?

  Absolutely. Absolutely. Being, having a strong core, good stability, especially body weight stability, is so key for endurance athletics.

• 1:24:31Rich Roll?

  Right. And it's, and it's, and I don't want to do it, you know, I'm busy, like, I'm the first guy to say, I hate the, I hate the gym. I hate doing core work. I hate all those stupid little box jumps and all that kind of stuff that Jessie Stenzlin tells me I need to do. And, you know, she's super strong and it's obviously, I, intellectually, I get it and I'm on board. Like, I understand that that is important stuff. And I go, yeah, but I just want to get my swim workout and then I gotta get to work. You know, I don't have time. And then that will be the thing that I cut, that I cut out and I, and I don't do. And I know, and I, when I'm, and when I'm doing it, I'm aware that I'm making the wrong choice and I still can't help myself.

• 1:25:14Chris Hauth?

  Yeah, I laugh because I, you know how many times I've, I've committed to starting yoga at least?

• 1:25:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:21Chris Hauth?

  At least going consistently for, let's say, five or six or seven weeks and just then evaluating? Never made it. Never made it even once because you keep putting it aside.

• 1:25:32Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:25:33Chris Hauth?

  You either focus on the discipline, you're gonna be

• 1:25:35Rich Roll?

  And I feel duplicitous because I'll see people at the pool and like yourself coming from a swimming background and understanding technique and been swimming with proper technique since I was six years old. And I look at a triathlete in the water and how they're just thrashing the water and muscling through it. And I go, if you would just let go of being fit and worrying about, let just completely let go of training in the pool and just do drills for the next six months, you know, you will be, you will, it will pay dividends like you cannot imagine. And then when it comes to me and the functional strength in the gym and all of that, I can't like, take that pill. So like, I empathize with that struggle, you know, for sure.

• 1:26:16Chris Hauth?

  Totally get that.

• 1:26:18Rich Roll?

  So you gotta build that into my plan and hold me more accountable for that stuff.

• 1:26:23Chris Hauth?

  Those hours are your hours.

• 1:26:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I know. Well, we should get into a little bit. We could put our propeller hats on a little bit here. And we've gone an hour and 15. So I want to take up too much more of Chris's time. But, you know, we're sitting in this hotel room and there's a trainer to my left right now where I just did this lactate test to, like I said, when we opened the interview to gauge what my fitness is. And it goes to this idea of building the pyramid with a broad, you know, with a broad base so that that, that pinpoint top can be as sharp as possible. And, and, and when you, what happens is, without trying to explain this in too much of a long form, you get on the bike, you pedal for, you warm

• 1:27:09Rich Roll?

  up, and then you do four minute intervals where the watts increase by 20 or 30 watts or whatever, depending upon the athlete. And you have your blood pricked during those, every four minutes to evaluate the level of lactate in your system. And your heart rate is monitored and all this data is sort of compiled. And at the end that you go and you, you increase and you increase and you increase until you reach failure or you're unable to maintain a decent cadence of between 80 and 90 RPMs. And then with all that data, you, you create a graph on the computer and you evaluate that graph. And what you see is an upward slope.

• 1:27:49Rich Roll?

  That as the intensity increases, the resistance and watts increases, the heart rate goes up, the level of lactate in your system goes up, and you try to find those, that T1 and that T2, that aerobic threshold and the anaerobic threshold. And what you want to see, and I've said this before on an earlier podcast, is a very gradual upward swing in the curve, right? And where it kind of starts to really pitch upward at a sudden, steep increment, those are, that's usually where you're hit, you're going from your aerobic into your anaerobic, and then when you're hitting the wall anaerobically, correct? How am I doing?

• 1:28:25Chris Hauth?

  Yeah, I mean, you're doing okay. It's not that black and white. It's not like all of a sudden at a certain wattage or a heart rate, you go, all right, now I'm officially anaerobic. It's like we said earlier, there's glycogen and fat, and the energy systems are at play at all times. But the longer we can go without there being any type of significant increase in lactate in the system, in the blood, as we increase that resistance, the better.

• 1:28:52Rich Roll?

  Right, and that's the point that I was getting to. And that's what comes from this sort of aerobic-based training, is you push that curve to the right. So the longer you can go before it starts to arch upwards, that is really, that is where you see the efficiency, that is the marker of efficiency, right?

• 1:29:10Chris Hauth?

  Exactly.

• 1:29:11Rich Roll?

  And the more gradual it increases, rather than pitchiness, is how fit you are as you start to shift from one energy system into the next. So the more range you have in terms of your aerobic efficiency versus anaerobic strength and power.

• 1:29:26Chris Hauth?

  You don't want that lactate curve going up every single time you increase the resistance.

• 1:29:31Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:29:32Chris Hauth?

  You want to be able to gradually withstand those resistance increases.

• 1:29:36Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:29:37Chris Hauth?

  Even to a point where it's not really... Noticeable enough. And those are the diff- those are the, that's the difference between the two markers, basically. One is the onset of blood lactate accumulation where it's spilling over the body cannot process the lactate quickly enough in order for it to flush out.

• 1:29:57Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:29:58Chris Hauth?

  You know, your classic lactate threshold. And then we also use aerobic threshold where there's an increase in it, there's a, there's a noticeable increase in lactate, but it's still being processed, it's still being flushed out.

• 1:30:10Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:30:10Chris Hauth?

  It's not like it's overflowing. And the good thing is at that number, especially for ultra endurance events, you can go for a very long time because the body is still processing.

• 1:30:22Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:30:22Chris Hauth?

  Washing out that lactate.

• 1:30:25Rich Roll?

  Right, right. And one of the things that, that we realized today, and it's February, so I'm just getting started, and I was sort of like, my test is gonna be horrible and all of this, is that my, my aerobic numbers were not that bad. They weren't as bad as I thought they were gonna be, but there was very little room in between when I switched over, when I kind of was transitioning out of my aerobic zone into my anaerobic zone before I hit the wall. It's sort of like, you know, very narrow window there between, so my, my aerobic work is good. It's really pushed that curve to the right, pretty decent for this time of year for me. But I haven't done any intensity work, any high-end stuff, so no surprise.

• 1:31:07Rich Roll?

  As soon as I start to up the intensity level, I hit the wall pretty quick.

• 1:31:13Chris Hauth?

  You call it hit the wall.

• 1:31:14Rich Roll?

  Well.

• 1:31:14Chris Hauth?

  I call it becoming extremely inefficient there.

• 1:31:17Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:31:17Chris Hauth?

  Because you haven't spent any time there in a calculated way. Because the usual response would be, well then, just spend more time there. Well, you need to build up to get to that point where you spend some time there.

• 1:31:29Rich Roll?

  So that the time, so that the time that I spent there. Pays off in the way that you want it to.

• 1:31:35Chris Hauth?

  Is being absorbed, exactly. Coaching and not coaching, but training, excuse me, is all about absorbing the current load you're given. If you can't absorb it, it's not training.

• 1:31:47Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:31:47Chris Hauth?

  It's just going out and doing something.

• 1:31:49Rich Roll?

  Well, so for the average person out there who's listening who maybe doesn't have a coach, I mean, how do they know whether they're ready to absorb a workout or not?

• 1:31:57Chris Hauth?

  Well, they'll know based off of intensity that they're also feeling. RPE can get you pretty far because if you say you're going to have an aerobic workout today, I want to just go aerobic, I don't want to, I just want to build my base, it should be at a level that I often say should feel too easy. It should not be this, a lot of people use conversational pace, conversational pace can, it's very wide.

• 1:32:23Rich Roll?

  That could be any, yeah.

• 1:32:24Chris Hauth?

  There's a bandwidth of description. It's more about you feeling as though the workout was not really a workout. It was your go all day pace. So if you were asked in this sudden moment to do that same pace for another six hours or longer, that you had the appropriate effort, then higher intensity stuff is where we get into the classic description of it should be out of, short of breath, and it should be hard, and it should be burning in the legs and all those things. But it's the aerobic aspect that most people underestimate how easy that is.

• 1:33:01Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:33:01Chris Hauth?

  Because they go just a tick too hard.

• 1:33:04Rich Roll?

  And, and, and the discipline comes in because you want to feel like you got a workout in, and in order to do this right, you might have to feel like you didn't get anything out of it, even though you actually did.

• 1:33:14Chris Hauth?

  How many aerobic workouts have we come back from and you haven't broken a sweat?

• 1:33:20Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:33:20Chris Hauth?

  It's frustrating.

• 1:33:21Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:33:22Chris Hauth?

  But it's, it's effective, it's, it's there, it's, things are happening.

• 1:33:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:27Chris Hauth?

  And that's also part of the test that you were.

• 1:33:29Rich Roll?

  You have to believe and you have to trust, and I guess, you know, maybe for a lot of people, you have to see some results before you're really willing to, to trust. But if you look at like, all you have to do is like, look at Tour de France riders and how much time they spend, it looks like they're just screwing around. They're just out riding, having a good time, and they're not, they don't, they don't look like they're winded at all, and that's part of the.

• 1:33:48Chris Hauth?

  Nobody sees their time in South Africa, or in Tucson, or in Southern Italy in the preseason with how easy they're actually riding. The average. Triathlete would ride up on them.

• 1:34:01Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:34:02Chris Hauth?

  And these are pro cyclists. They can go way faster than us.

• 1:34:06Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:34:07Chris Hauth?

  But they are at such an easy, relaxed pace. But also keep in mind, they only need to do that for three, four, five, six weeks because they sort of have a pretty big.

• 1:34:17Rich Roll?

  You think so?

• 1:34:18Chris Hauth?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:20Rich Roll?

  One of the things that I get, I get a lot of emails and tweets over, uh, are people send me tweets and say, I've been doing my zone two work. I'm running it. My, my heart rate is at a hundred and forty on all my runs and they're all proud. And, uh, and it's sort of a, a misinterpretation possibly of, of what I say in my book, when I kind of describe how I embraced this philosophy of training and how after, as a result of proper lactate testing, it was determined that the upper threshold of my zone two for running was about a hundred and forty beats a minute.

• 1:34:55Rich Roll?

  And, and so how I, I had to kind of adhere to that and, and stay strict to that.

• 1:35:00Chris Hauth?

  It's now one twenty five.

• 1:35:01Rich Roll?

  It's one twenty five and a run? Not a run.

• 1:35:03Chris Hauth?

  We said one thirty, sorry.

• 1:35:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, one thirty. So now it's different. It's one thirty, right? So it's, it's funny because people are saying, I'm running at one forty. I'm like, no, you don't understand that. That was, that was specific to me at my age, at my, you know, for my body, for my fitness level. Um, you know, I cannot stress enough the importance of you figuring out for yourself, your, your proper zones. But not everybody has access to the kind of situation that you've brought to this hotel room here.

• 1:35:32Rich Roll?

  To get a proper lactate test with this protocol that you've set up. So how can somebody, you know, in a DIY way, either find out where they can get tested in their area or find somebody to work with, or figure out a way to do it themselves so that they know that they can feel, you know, relatively confident that they're training in the right zones.

• 1:35:53Chris Hauth?

  Luckily, there's plenty of field tests that you can do, whether it's on the bike, two times 10 minutes. At ninety percent effort, for example, and recording heart rate before, during and after, maybe resting a few minutes in between each interval.

• 1:36:08Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:36:08Chris Hauth?

  You can even do that interval up to twenty minutes. That'll give you a good gauge at the track. You can do three times or five times one mile repeats, depending on how fit you are. At ten K pace, again, recording heart rate. A lot of those field tests can be found on the internet and actually Training Peaks, and those guys have some great field tests.

• 1:36:28Rich Roll?

  Right, I usually, I usually refer people to Joe Freel's blog or one of his books, or just get the Training Bible, Trial and Training Bible, or whatever, you know.

• 1:36:36Chris Hauth?

  Extremely effective and extremely close. Sure, we, I prefer lactate threshold testing because it gives me sort of more data and charts to work with over time. And it's not dependent on weather and wind and humidity and your diet and all those things leading into the test. It is a snapshot, it is what it is. You can't fake it, there's nothing, there's no tailwind, it's not downhill.

• 1:36:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:00Chris Hauth?

  So it's a little bit more of a lab environment, but for sure, you can definitely get close with some of Joe Freel's field tests, which, which are very good.

• 1:37:09Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm, cool. All right, man.

• 1:37:13Chris Hauth?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:13Rich Roll?

  I think we did it.

• 1:37:14Chris Hauth?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:15Rich Roll?

  What do you think?

• 1:37:15Chris Hauth?

  Yeah, pretty good.

• 1:37:17Rich Roll?

  What else do you want to say to the amateur triathletes out there? Like, what do you see? What do you, because you don't, you're honest, you don't pull punches, you go to these races, you watch these guys out there, and you're just like, ah, can't believe they're doing that. If they only knew.

• 1:37:34Chris Hauth?

  Well, the pacing is a big thing that you brought up. You know, putting your ego and check on the bike. A lot of times I say to people and potential new athletes or athletes that come to me, they often say, well, I'm not much of a runner. Well, why aren't you a runner? What makes you determine that? Well, because my splits on the run are never as good in the percentile of my age group as my bike and my swim.

• 1:37:58Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:37:59Chris Hauth?

  I oftentimes just ask them, well, have you thought about slowing down on the bike in order to find out what you potentially could run?

• 1:38:07Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:38:07Chris Hauth?

  No. Or after working with them for a couple of months, seeing, actually, you are a runner. You've just always biked too hard because you thought you were a biker.

• 1:38:16Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:38:17Chris Hauth?

  And therefore felt you had to ride harder on the bike to get ahead in order to make up for the supposed weak run.

• 1:38:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's a mental construct that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

• 1:38:27Chris Hauth?

  Exactly, exactly. And the, the, the nice thing about this sport is there's a lot of data to be quantified. And if you see you're in the top 10% in each of your three disciplines, you'll be doing fine.

• 1:38:38Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:38:39Chris Hauth?

  So focus on that percentile. And what is it going to take? Do I need to slow down on the bike enough to have my run? I've worked with plenty of pro triathletes who never have the run they're capable of. I said, until we work on the bookends of this event, being the bookends being the swim and the run.

• 1:38:59Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:39:00Chris Hauth?

  Let's slow down completely on the bike. Let's give up almost on the race. If you know you can all of a sudden run a 245 marathon on the back end of even an easy bike. And if you can swim whatever 55 or 50 on the front end.

• 1:39:14Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:39:15Chris Hauth?

  We can always work on improving the bike. That's easy. Just insert more speed and more power in order to not give up on the run. Give up the time on the run. You know, you'll, you'll find your sweet spot quickly enough. But even a pro triathlete isn't willing to do that.

• 1:39:31Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:39:32Chris Hauth?

  They're just, the ego gets in the way of letting go in order to find out just once what I'm capable of running. So how is an amateur athlete supposed to think differently? And I don't blame them. You put a lot of time.

• 1:39:47Rich Roll?

  There's a more, there's more on the line with the pro, though. There's more to lose, I would suppose.

• 1:39:51Chris Hauth?

  There is, you could say there's more to lose, but I also find it interesting because they're not paying the same amount of money and cost and sacrifice with a full time job and or a family and all that. In order to go to these races and paying six, seven, eight hundred dollar entry fees. But wouldn't you at least once like to know your potential in, in the individual or in part of the disciplines? So a lot of work, but. You can find out.

• 1:40:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you can. You can find out. So how, if people want to find out more about what you're doing, how do they do that?

• 1:40:27Chris Hauth?

  They can just send me an email.

• 1:40:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:29Chris Hauth?

  Yep, most already do.

• 1:40:31Rich Roll?

  Aimpcoaching.com is your main website.

• 1:40:36Chris Hauth?

  That's my main website. And then, or just [email protected].

• 1:40:40Rich Roll?

  Right, and AIMP Coach on Twitter.

• 1:40:44Chris Hauth?

  Yes.

• 1:40:45Rich Roll?

  That's true. You've been tweeting a little bit more lately than usual. What's going on?

• 1:40:50Chris Hauth?

  You're not the only one to comment.

• 1:40:54Chris Hauth?

  I've got a lot of time on my head.

• 1:40:55Rich Roll?

  You've got to start, yeah, like calling it like you see it on Twitter, man.

• 1:40:59Chris Hauth?

  Yeah, I try to stay neutral as Aim Coach.

• 1:41:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah, alright, good. Well, thanks for being on the show.

• 1:41:05Chris Hauth?

  Thank you.

• 1:41:05Rich Roll?

  I could geek out on this stuff all day with you, but I appreciate it. And like I said, man, I owe you a lot. You changed my life and you've made me not just a better athlete, but a better man. So I appreciate having you, man.

• 1:41:19Chris Hauth?

  My pleasure.

• 1:41:19Rich Roll?

  Alright, cool. Alright, let's do it again soon.

• 1:41:22Chris Hauth?

  We shall.

• 1:41:23Rich Roll?

  Alright, peace.

• 1:41:24Chris Hauth?

  Thanks.

• 1:42:29Rich Roll?

  The.

• 1:44:49Rich Roll?

  I'm sorry, I can't assist with that request.

• 1:46:49Rich Roll?

  I'm sorry, I can't assist with that request.