"the following is a conversation with zach bidder ultra marathon runner and coach who held multiple world records in the 100 mile run and other ultra endurance events he is currently training for a run..."

"by david goggins and others like them who seek to find the limits of their body and mind this is the lex friedman podcast and here is my conversation with zach bitter where does your mind go when you'..."

"to keep those emotions and those thought processes at a low and i think when you can keep yourself from letting those thoughts creep in they you end up having better races and it's it can spiral in ei..."

"like any sport with that where you know you always have this balance between the youthfulness that you may have earlier in your career versus the the wise intelligence that you have maybe near the end..."

"pulling some from each i mean there's times where where i need a kick in the ass and then it's like have the strong zack tell the weak zac to get moving but there's also times where you know it's just..."

"quitting and eventually what will happen is you'll find yourself in a position where i'll use ultra marathons for example where you're just clicking on all cylinders for that day and you still get tho..."

"it's necessarily like a like a holistic thing where you need to be in something where it's never quit always do more because then you end up in a situation where you find this like margin of diminishi..."

"i and like i remember that um from the wrestling rooms like that when you're pushed that way when you're forced to the very limit and you don't quit that makes better humans i think people need to get..."

"or evolve maybe is a better way to call to put it and for me like one of my big drives and one of my big passions within ultra running is to first of all find an event that i really really love to tra..."

"at a high level so almost like happiness exactly well and here's the example like i mean i love running in trails too most people would consider me a flat road track runner runnable ultra runner um bu..."

"different skill set and what it did is it allowed me to kind of step away from kind of focusing on like splits on a track uh running flat stuff like preparing for things specifically for a flat enviro..."

"uh once i finished recovered and decided my next event was going to be a flat runnable race that wow i really was way more excited to do the workouts that i needed to do to get ready to run a fast fla..."

"and put me in a position where quitting was going to be much less of a likelihood given the enjoyment i had in the months leading into the race itself yeah even the thought of quitting yeah yeah so yo..."

"of doing it without much preparation but then you start to increase the the goal of performance and you try to get actually a good like the most out of your body that you can how does that start to ch..."

"how am i going to like you know hold myself accountable in aid station transition so i'm not like having a ton of non-moving time uh versus moving time and that's so cool so there's these like big var..."

"because that's another thing i mean you're running slow enough when you're doing 100 miles where if you make a mistake you can sit there and just fixate on that mistake and say why did i do that that ..."

"of the route so like you can compare performances from previous years or are they a little bit more flexible like they redefine the trail from year to year yeah i mean it's definitely hard to compare ..."

"for is it's pretty rare where you get an event where they're just doing 100 miles on a track it's usually like a like an event of like a series of different events where there might be like some peopl..."

"record so 11 28 we're talking about 11 hours we're talking about 100 miles can you mention what the world record was what uh what kind of world record you set can you tell your own story here of uh of..."

"six like in order to break 11 hours would it be pretty steady 635 does it go up and down do you speed up at the very end like what's what's the pacing if you were to and maybe how much variability is ..."

"like are you alternating directions yeah they'll switch directions at most events every four hours so you'll do four hours one way and then they usually put a cone out and once it hits like like let's..."

"this board up to people who maybe otherwise would have never thought about it seen it considered it and to me i think that's like a much more rewarding goal than saying i want to break this record and..."

"generally try to stay out of it i think the caveman if if i had fire i would have done right better with this look at look at these idiots up there with their cars if i had a car back then i would hav..."

"yes and i think that's one of the drivers from just a quality of life standpoint uh just uh you know and in the moment immediate gratification uh standpoint but then there's like i think the bigger pi..."

"day of competition and to do something that i'll be proud of in in an artist way not in a kind of some kind of numerical way but like as a holistic sense like do something cool like in grappling that ..."

"that and then i go back to the drawing board and say okay well i can't do that that didn't work or if i'm gonna do that i need to be more prepared to be able to do it and i love that part of the sport..."

"the if we're looking at it from like a philosophical level or like an approach level i think there's some things that carry over from regardless of the distance so i think working on your weaknesses a..."

"is about as good of a formula as you're going to find in terms of capturing as many people as you can get away with capturing with a kind of a universal thing like any of these things i mean it's more..."

"right maybe i was doing too big of steps not so like playing with a different gate playing with a different kind of um the form kind of you have your form the economy the efficiency yeah so that was t..."

"foundation um where where i think maybe you want to deviate from that a little bit especially when you start to get into these events that are operating well outside that intensity so you take somethi..."

"and you know still have running as part of your life and be a good performer in running i actually think that's that's where you want to get to the problem is most people have a hard time getting to t..."

"but i i like to finish runs with sprints anyway okay because you're already there without right you don't need to the timing i'm afraid of the time of becoming a drug but the flip side of that it's a ..."

"so let's try this lay this out for yourself but for others you you offer ready-made plans for people you know depending on their i think the key the thing there is the distance maybe you can elaborate..."

"avoids a situation where oh my ready-made plan says i'm supposed to do this run today but i don't feel great today so what do i do and then some people are fine with that because they're they're they'..."

"going to be different areas of it so once they're really fit at that you know that foundational level then you know if they're doing say a hundred mile plan they might start doing some short intervals..."

"so then those intervals are gonna be structured let's say they're doing two minute intervals they're gonna do two minutes at that intensity that they could do for 12 minutes at a time trial then they'..."

"yeah i mean you can you can screw it up i guess you can go way too fast then you have this scenario where like oh it looks like you're you know your first two minutes were drastically faster than your..."

"and as you do a few you just get to know the pacing of it a little better and then you start seeing more even splits so like you know their first two minute intervals pretty close within a couple seco..."

"actually use this as an opportunity to relax and have fun for the past three four months plus whiskey and so on and then the training kind of i also let go of the training a little bit just to relax t..."

"to continue eating carnivore which is a whole other topic i'd love to talk to you about i feel great psychologically sort of in terms of mental performance in my work when i eat carnivore and physical..."

"run a marathon in two months ish two months plus and then about three months to do a bunch of competitions and grappling okay with those parameters i think like you actually probably would be a great ..."

"and then maybe after you know four weeks you start noticing you know what this 30 minutes isn't wearing me out near as much as it used to um i feel like i could easily push past that well let's up tha..."

"yourself too you can say well how close can i guess yeah you'll get it so like for me what i'll do is i'll go i'll do the run and then i'll look at the heart rate afterwards and be like oh cool i was ..."

"doing some basic body weight stuff yeah and i think like you're gonna get from if we're not looking at it from like specifically like training at a pace in order to get both the skeletal muscle adapta..."

"just takes care of itself like yeah so you want to do a marathon and then ultimately do a hundred mile after that is that what you're saying i have no no i have no idea what the guy uh oh he's gonna t..."

"[Laughter] it's essential so is there any difference between the goal of marathon or 100 miles would you say should i be prepping for 100 miles if that's at all a possibility the big difference is goi..."

"you want enough overall fitness that you can just do either one of them without absolute misery because you did the couch to 100 miles exactly so i think like for 100 miles the biggest difference i th..."

"next like 24 weeks to be able to run a full hundred a hundred miler would you say it's physical or is it mental discomfort like uh i mean isn't everything physically uncomfortable like what uh do you ..."

"then you're practicing that muscle of um of doing it anyway um i don't know if there's something you can say in terms of advice how to practice the like doing something unpleasant every day yeah frequ..."

"many many times here so there's going to be differences i think in just like what you want to maybe necessarily prioritize uh both for the event you're doing and the intensity that's required for it t..."

"place that picture needs to be carried in to the performance world or the running world too where you know we may have just been identifying that uh you olympic distance athletes that can tolerate a v..."

"at that unless they want to be like a kind of a spark in the pan so to speak i just feel good eating meat performance wise well i think there's that group too and they may just not be the olympians ye..."

"yeah we keep coming back to that year that was a good year for many reasons philosophically and nutritionally yeah only 2020 happened and now i haven't had a really good chance to improve we'll see ho..."

"even on yourself yeah i've referenced my 2019 racing season a few times and it's like it'd be silly for me to put all of the emphasis on my nutrition plan for that because it also comes with two decad..."

"endurance and explosive i mean jiu-jitsu is a special thing it's like more like chess yeah it's not like power lifting no not power lifting olympic lifting where it's like true explosiveness but that'..."

"and it's like we'll tell that to the person who like went carnivore and cleared up some like crazy skin ailment or something like that that's a weird one yeah like where the carnivore seems to treat l..."

"different for racing than it will be for like a big workout just because the interesting thing about ultra running is just like you never do the race even like most endurance races you're going to cov..."

"the morning of so that when i start the race my body's gonna be encouraged to start out burning high levels of fat once i get going probably 45 minutes in i'll start introducing small amounts of carbo..."

"only concerned about performance on that is it the car's that's the problem or is it fiber or just oh from going above 40 grams or just because you mentioned digestion issues like one of the things fo..."

"that's kind of like a a bit of a of a non a non-starter for the majority of people unless we want to talk about like a tiny percentage of the one percent of top performers so maybe you can talk about ..."

"the reason i i'm mostly a minimalist like that the reason i have stuff is i realize like you probably have to fit into society and if you want to have other people in your life you should probably get..."

"um let me ask about the 100 mile world record on the treadmill so for most people running a treadmill is really boring so that's kind of their experience of it that's probably the first thing that wou..."

"bit in the beginning and i noticed even turning it off stepping over and starting the other one up gave me like you know a handful of seconds between was enough of a mental break of just like that rel..."

"to see the purity of those challenges when like exercise hasn't necessarily been deeply great ingrained in your life and you kind of just embrace the challenge anyway and take it on and that's another..."

"yeah so this is uh you know one thing that is exciting about ultra marathons i think in a lot of places especially early in someone's ultra marathon adventure if they decide to do that as a you know p..."

"and then you know have that happen for six weeks and that's if it goes very well so luck i assume is a big part of this yeah for sure i mean there's just so many variables that are uncontrollable on t..."

"itself when are you so you're you're taking the san francisco to new york right yeah and when are you doing the run september 1st is when uh you know barring anything like catastrophic between now and..."

"broken leg and i'm like hey guys uh i guess the donation button's turned off so focus on like don't sacrifice that right that goal but also there's a community aspect to it that i feel like are you go..."

"kind of far off distance things that it never really like actualized in your mind until you put a date down or you know mention it on the joe rogan experience or something like that but then then it's..."

"thinking about like you know do i really need to go out here and travel another 12 hours a day my mind's going to hopefully go to well if one of those women woke up in the pygmy tribe one morning deci..."

"can't wait i i know does joe know you're doing this by the way yeah i sent him i sent him a note a while back because he was the first spot i mentioned it on so i think he he knows i'm not sure if he'..."

"yeah so he did that with the old shoe technology which uh essentially dates back to anything if if you were a nike athlete it could date back to as early as i think early 2016 is when the first protot..."

"and i mean he would the way he would race i think is what really made him interesting for po folks where he would he was just like all guts runner where he's like he's like i mean one of his famous qu..."

"so really unless you're trying to go for the win and that's a tactic that you think is going to produce a win versus trying to run your fastest time you got to run within yourself within your paramete..."

"whole thing i mean he died of very premature death he got in a car accident and died before he would have likely probably meddled at the olympics so he and there was a tragedy the fact that he didn't ..."

"so is it fair to have a piece of equipment that has that big of a range when we're talking about less than a percent determining these races when all is held constant those are fascinating like philos..."

"mean yeah because you can control video games better than you control for genetics and humans well in reality we've been dealing with this problem in other areas just with the performance enhancing si..."

"tiny relative to the stuff we have in the future right yeah you might be the last generation of like natural unmodified humans that we're running and who knows maybe that's already over who knows who'..."

"constraints so um uh elliot kipchoge of kenya as you mentioned ran a one-hour 59-minute 40-second marathon but he had like he said the prototype shoes and he had the the pace setters yeah i don't know..."

"knocking knocking on the door there um yeah the prototype he had since then they put in a regulation where you can't stack a shoe for the roads more than 40 millimeters so you can only have so much of..."

"st all those years and money you spent on that foam yeah you wasted it we're not gonna let you use it but you know if you're another company who uh you know revolutionizes the sport in potentially a n..."

"i'm really into like you know guitar or i'm really into skateboarding or something like that where it's like pretty small like success rate on that avenue versus what you can maybe accomplish by focus..."

"your career into a passion of yours so i think like that is something i would tell tell people um folks on that see the thing you're good at and you kind of sparks that flame and uh go with that even ..."

"layer just there's a bunch of details in the way i pursue the very thing that i currently do that's different than others and it took me quite a long time to accept like you don't need to do it the wa..."

"way for you yeah so that could land you in eating a meat based diet running across the country uh like the the incredible madman that you are zach i'm a huge fan as i told you many times you're an ins..."