The None to Run Podcast

Hi, everyone. I'm Mark Kennedy, and this is the none to run podcast episode 35 with guest Alex Hutchinson. Alex Hutchinson is a national magazine award winning journalist whose work appears in Outside Magazine, The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and other publications. His latest book came out in February as Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. He lives in the same neighborhood as me in Toronto, but is sadly too fast for me to run with.

In this episode, we talk about how Alex improved his PB in the 1,500 meters when he had been stuck at the same time for years. This is a crazy story, which you're gonna love. What is the central governor theory and why your body works so darn hard not to hurt itself? Pain tolerance. How the heck do pro athletes and Olympians push through pain in ways you can push yourself more than you thought was possible?

Tips for optimizing both your physical and mental performance when you're just getting started running. What we can learn from Olympians about the common cold and some rules for you to decide whether you should run or whether or not you should take a rest. Treadmill running, is it actually different than outside running? If so, what can we do to make it more realistic? Running on a low carb diet, what you need to know and much, much more.

Please enjoy my chat with Alex Hutchison. Welcome to the show Alex. Pumped to finally have you on the podcast. I think it's been a long time coming. To give the listeners a bit of background where we met, I think I first met you at your book signing, your Cardio Awaits book signing, about seven years ago.

You can correct me how many years ago that was.

Eight eight years ago. That's a it's a you're drifting way back into the past. Yeah. You're it's it's been a long long time.

Way back in the archives. Anyways, welcome and it's, yeah. It's great to finally chat.

Yeah. Thanks. It's been, it's it's it's been good to, keep in touch over the years and nice to have a chance to chat in this context.

Yeah. And also, on a side note, we live in the same neighborhood and see each other periodically at the butcher and, walking down the street. So, that's kinda cool too.

Yeah. It it it's it it is weak of us to be doing this by Skype, but we've yeah. I've Yeah. We both have young kids. Mine are asleep upstairs, so so this is the the way of the modern world.

Exactly. As I said before we started recording, that we yeah. Next time, we definitely have to do this with, perhaps a beer in our hands in person.

Yeah.

So I wanna get going here. So I wanna talk mostly about, I guess, the the topic of your latest book, which is entitled Mind Body and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance and I guess, yeah, that would be a great place to start. Can you tell us sort of why you got interested in that topic of sort of the mind and body connection and why you thought you wanted to write a book about the topic.

Yeah. I mean I guess it I mean, the the basic question I was trying to ask in the book was what defines our limits? What like I didn't start out thinking it was going to be in the mind or the body. Just was curious like what what is it when you're pushing as hard as you can that what is it that's maxed out? What is it that's holding you back?

And that's a direct kind of an interest that comes directly from my experiences running. I started running in high school. I think you start out with the impression that your limits are purely that there's something sort of mathematical about it that, you know, Oh, I can get faster if I do x, y, and z to my lungs, my heart, my muscles. But if you run long enough, you realize that it is very difficult to predict how you are going to perform on any given day. That it is never the same from one day to the next.

Know there must be some other element in there. That is what I wanted to explore in the book. What is it that makes every day different and that determines how dig how deep you can dig on a given day.

Okay. And and you've got a really interesting story I'd love for you to share with my listeners because, probably many of them or most of them haven't heard it before. But can you share that story about when you had your breakthrough race? I believe it was in the 1,500 meter race, in Quebec, I believe.

Yeah. For sure.

Yeah. That that's a great story. And if you could sorta tell that story, that'd be awesome.

Yeah. I think I think it kind of, it it gets to the heart of what I mean by the curiously elastic limits of human performance. Mhmm. So when I was in university, my my goal in life was to run a sub four minute fifteen hundred meters. And, excuse me, you know, four minutes is a is a is a sort of mythical barrier for runners for the four minute mile, of course.

1,500 meters is a little shorter than a mile, so this was this kind of poor man's four minute mile barrier that I was trying to break. And, and it's something I initially thought would be fairly straightforward. I ran four zero two in high school, in my second year of running, I guess it was. And I thought it would be pretty straightforward to just keep getting faster from from year to year. But I actually hit a plateau and so for four straight years, I ran either four zero one or four zero two.

And so by the time I was 20, I really had the sense that I was kind of exploring my body's ultimate limits. That I've been training hard for four years, was running the same times over and over again. So I thought I could run three fifty nine, but I didn't think there was much more because clearly, I just kept running the same times over and over again. And and basically, to to sort of cut a long story semi short, I was running this totally meaningless race and, in in, in Sherbrooke, it was, as in, this was 1996. And I came through the the first lap, and every 200 meters in an indoor race, you have someone yelling out your the the time so you know how fast you're going.

Mhmm. And the timekeeper yelled out twenty seven seconds for the first lap, which is way, way, way too fast. And so I had this, you know, thought in my head of I'm doomed. This is gonna be a miserable four minutes. But I also was had this other sort of thought in my head.

It was like, I feel pretty good. And I came to the second lap and it was fifty seven seconds and it was the same thing. That's way too fast and yet I feel pretty good. Third lap was the same thing. And so at that point, I was kinda like, I I don't know what's going on.

I but I I'm having a great day, so just stop worrying about it. Stop thinking about it and just run. Yeah. Just push yourself. And so I put my head down and and just ran.

And I ended up running three fifty two point four, which was a nine second personal best after four years of running basically the same time over and over again. And, you know, the the the postscript is I was celebrating with teammates and saying then one of them had had time you know, taken my lap times for me so that I could put them in my training log. And, I was sort of saying, man, I really started fast. He was like, yeah, not really. You know, you're thirty or thirty one seconds.

Was like, what? I thought I went out in twenty seven. And it turns out the timekeeper, he he must have I I'm not sure exactly what happened, but he must have basically missed the start and started his watch three or four seconds late or something. So he basically tricked me into thinking I was having this amazing day, the greatest day of my life. And as a result, I did.

Yes.

And so that was a that was a weird thing. But what was maybe even more what stuck with me more is that I never had trouble breaking four minutes again after that. And in fact, I I ran faster in my you know, the race after that, I ran three forty nine. And the race after that, I ran three forty four. So there was this kind of huge breakthrough for me that it it wasn't all in my head.

Obviously, my training was going well. But but there was this moment where I was able to get away from my expectations of what I thought I should be able to do and and and sort of unshackle myself from from all those thoughts. And so after that, could never think about limits in the same way. I could never think, oh, I finished a race. Well, I guess that's as fast as I can go.

That's as fast as my body's capable of. There was always this question of, well, that's as fast as I ran, but was there more in the tank if I could have found some way to to uncork it? So I think that's kind of that question lurking in my mind is what sort of bubbled up again ten years later when I you know, in in the mid two thousands when I started writing about the science of endurance as a journalist, then and then it's what sort of built up over about ten years, then finally culminated in the book last year.

I love that story. So were your other times under four minutes on indoor tracks as well or outdoor track?

So, yeah, the the three fifty two was indoors, and then that was the end of the indoor season. Went outdoors around 03:49 in my first race outdoors, and then 03:44 in my second one. And then he he do get it. Outdoors tends to be a little faster. The conditions are less reliable, but but it's a it's a bigger track, and and and it's nicer weather, and it just tends to be faster.

Yeah. So I was thinking, I mean, the the indoor track, I mean, that that's a lot of running on the curves. So, technically, it should be a little slower, but, anyways, but I love that story. So did you know about the, like, the central governor theory? And for people who don't know what that is, can you explain what it is?

But did you know about sort of that at that time, or is that something you dove into sort of once you got into your training evolved and you got more interested in the the running performance?

You know, it's it's not something I knew about at all during my running career. Like, I what as so now and I'll get to what what it is. But

Okay.

During my during my running days, I was very much a a a sort of, I don't know how to put this, a sort of nuts and bolts. Don't don't waste my time with sports psychology. Like it's all about what your muscles are capable of, what your VO two max is and that's all I thought that was all what it was all about. And so after my my serious competitive career was done and I was I was I shifted careers and started became a journalist and started writing about the science of sport, I started, you know, I started out in in that very traditional vein of of the the sort of the body as a machine. You learn how the parts of the machine work and then you improve the parts of the machine.

And I was writing that sort of like, here's how you hydrate, here's how you train. And I came across this research from a guy named Tim Noakes in South Africa who had proposed something called the central governor theory. And he proposed it back in the nineties, I just didn't know about it. Mhmm. And the basically, the the main gist of the central governor is that you cannot push your body to its limits because you're wired in some indeterminate way.

You're you're wired. Your brain is wired to protect you, to prevent you from pushing right to those limits. Because if you push right to those limits, you'd be you you know, if you run until you keel over, you'll do yourself irreparable damage. And so, you know, you notice that you can you can watch the Olympic marathon and there might be a finishing sprint for the gold medal. And the guy who's already run 42 k and comes second by a few seconds, he doesn't keel over and die.

He looks a little disappointed then he jogs off to do his warm you know, grabs a flag and jogs jogs around the track. So it's like even when people should be pushing to their absolute limits, they're not pushing to the point that their muscles stop working or their heart stops working. And so this is a very, very controversial idea in exercise science because the the whole twentieth century was basically, built around trying to understand trying to understand humans as if they were sorta like cars where if you under if you know the size of the engine and how much gas is in the tank and the temperature of the radiator, you can know how fast and how far a car will go. And and and, you know, you don't really need to feel worry about how the car is feeling or anything and the car doesn't try and slow you down if it if it's worried about running out of gas. And so this in the in the early two thousands, this idea was starting to really generate a lot of controversy and so I started writing about it.

Excuse me. And, I initially thought, you know, circa 02/2008, if you asked me, I would have said, I'm gonna write a book about Tim Noakes' central covenant theory and how the brain holds you back and what that means for people who are trying to, you know, push their limits and and learn to run and things and learn to push themselves in endurance sports. It didn't end up being that simple and I ended up as I dug further into it, I realized, okay. Noakes doesn't necessarily have all the answers either. People who criticize his ideas and there's a lot of debate about, yes, the brain is involved in determining when we reach our limits, but how is it involved and what does it mean to say that the brain is involved?

Is it all subconscious or all voluntary? And there's there's a whole bunch of sort of academic debates going on and it ended up that's why it ended up taking me sort of nine years or whatever to write the book. The deeper I dug, the less simple it was and the more nuanced there was in trying to understand how both mind and body kind of work together to give you the sense that you've pushed as hard as you can.

Yeah. That's great. Thanks for, for clarifying what it is and and sort of how it relates. Now I guess that somewhat ties into pain tolerance and the fact that what people perceive is that, you know, Olympic athletes and professional athletes are born with this ability to endure pain more than us regular folk. Can you talk a little bit like how are those Olympic athletes and professional athletes able to cope with the pain and do is that something they're born with or is that something that we can enhance as we, become more and more trained and and fit ourselves?

Yeah. I think that's a that's a really excellent question that sort of gets to the heart of this because there is there's lots of evidence that even though it's a cliche, it is true if you do some sort of pain tolerance test and, you know, you can inflict pain in various ways with sort of ice baths or, cutting off circulation or whatever. And and the people do these studies Mhmm. And they find that well trained athletes are have a higher pain tolerance in pain tests that have nothing to do with their sport than the average person. And in fact, they find that elite international athletes have higher pain tolerances than well trained, you know, amateur athletes.

So there really is something that athletes learn to tolerate pain more. But what's not necessarily the case is that they were just born that way. Now we can't answer the question really fully and say, you know, exactly, you know, it's it may be that some people are born with a sort of more, let's say, some benign masochism. They they enjoy Mhmm. Pain a little more than others.

Yeah.

But but it's undeniably true that you can that this is something that gets better with training. And in fact, even in elite international athletes, what you find is their pain tolerance, if you test it repeatedly, it goes up and down throughout a year. It's highest when they're in their best fitness, when they're preparing for a race, it's lowest in the off season. What that tells us is that we can all get better and there's studies that show this too. The process of training, the process of going out for a run will have a measurable effect on your ability to tolerate discomfort in other areas of your life, but also during running.

One of the ways I think about it sometimes is sort of like eating spicy foods. When, you know, if if you try a, you know, a spicy curry for the first time and you've never had spicy foods before, I mean, and I'm remembering some some very spicy a very spicy curry I had a long long time ago before I knew much about spice. It there's no pleasure. You can't feel anything but like screaming pain. And over as time goes on, you just let you you learn to turn down that panic reaction and just understand, okay, this is this heat is part of the experience and part of the taste.

And instead of just feel hearing like alarms ringing in your ears, you start to detect you start to enjoy the flavor a little more and and be able to tolerate higher levels. And I think that happens to everyone who, you know, begins running or any other sport like that, where when you start out, if you just try and go out for and run a mile, you get all these signals that feel like serious alarm signals. Your legs start, you know, you're out of breath, you can't breathe, you can't get enough oxygen into your lungs and your legs might be hurting and your heart is pounding, and it feels like something is seriously wrong and you know you have to slow down or you're gonna die. Six months later, if you stick with it, for sure you're you're fitter, your heart is stronger, you know, what your muscles are are more efficient, all these things. But what I think people often don't realize is is that they've learned to contextualize that discomfort in a different way.

So they're getting the same signals and it's just like, oh, yeah. I'm breathing hard and that means that I can't keep this pace up forever, but it doesn't mean I have to stop now. Mhmm. And you start to explore that, being able to think of feel this discomfort not as an alarm signal, but just as information that tells you what's going on in your body. I think that's I mean, I don't mean to overstate it, but I think that's one of the most important things that happen when people start training.

I mean, physical stuff is very, very important too, but I think the mental stuff is underrated both in terms of what it does for you to allow you to run farther and faster, but also what it does for you in the rest of your life.

Are there any particular strategies other than the the obvious of just, you know, keeping at it, keep your momentum and getting fit, but any particular strategies for coping with pain? Other mental shifts or strategies that you know of that professionals use?

Yeah, there's a bunch of things. I mean, one of the ones that I like because there's been a bunch of research on it recently that tries to quantify its effect. Like you can there's a lot of things that people do and I'm sure they work. I'm a big fan as as a science journalist of things that people do and at work and people have tested in the lab and and done their best to quantify how it works. So one one important technique is motivational self talk.

And this is basically the process of becoming aware of your internal monologue. We all have words running through our heads. Maybe not at all times, most of the time. And so in the context of you go out and you're going for a run, and if it's a hard run, if you stop and listen to what you're saying to yourself, you may well find if, you know, if you're like me, you may well find you're saying things to yourself like, you know, this sucks. Why why did I why do I why did I sign up for this race, you know?

Why am I doing this? This is pointless. This is I'm there's no way I'm gonna be able to sustain this pace. And and there's a lot of evidence that those sorts of words, those sorts of messages make it make it more likely that you're gonna give up or slow down. Because fundamentally, one of the things that comes out of this sort of central governor research is the idea that, the master switch that determines whether you're you can keep whether you can keep going or whether you're gonna stop or slow down.

The master switch is your your perception of how hard you're working. That it's not there's no physiological thing. You don't slow down because your lactic acid is too high or because your oxygen is too low. All of those things stay in a sort of in a reasonable range. But and when they affect how hard the exercise feels.

And when it feels too hard, you decide to slow down. But if you're telling yourself, this sucks. I can't do this. You decide to slow down a little bit earlier. And so if you can learn to replace those negative thoughts with positive thoughts with, I've trained for this.

I I can do this. It's supposed to be hard and and I can push through it. It makes it For a given level of physical discomfort, it makes it more likely that you're willing to say, alright, I can keep going for a little longer at this pace. And it sounds kinda like, I I gotta be honest, it it it sounds kind of cliched and and cheesy and hokey. And that's why when we I had a sports psychologist that was working with the my university track team back in the nineties and we just ignored her.

We just we we couldn't take it seriously, which is why which is why I like the fact that there have been a couple of really powerful studies recently that that show how much these these sorts of techniques work. So I'm able to sort of put aside my skepticism and say, okay. The science says it works.

That's interesting. So okay. We got motivational self talk. Is there any other sort of quick, tips or strategies that, have been proven to be effective?

So I I would again, it it it's almost painful to be here dishing out the the the same cliches, but but, I think mindfulness is, you know, obviously, it's been a big buzzword for the last five years or so. Mhmm. But the basic principle of mindfulness is nonjudgmental self awareness. And when it comes down to it, that's also the basic principle of what it takes to run close to your best, close to your limits. You have to because you there's actually some really interesting research that shows if you can't feel pain, if you don't feel pain, and you can block pain by injecting fentanyl into into your spine, You and that'll you that's a one way block so that you can't feel discomfort or pain from your legs, but you can still send, like, send messages to your legs to tell to tell you to keep running or keep cycling.

If you do that, you get slower rather than faster because you it's you can't pace yourself. You can't sort of ride that edge of being right on the edge of sustainable. You need pain and discomfort to allow you to understand where your limits are. So mindfulness is a way of being able to be in tune, be aware of what your body's telling you, be aware of what you're feeling, how your legs are feeling, without interpreting that, but doing it non judgmentally. So you're not saying, this hurts, oh my god, therefore I need to stop because it's the worst.

You're just saying, this hurts to this degree and that's where it needs to be. If I'm if I'm gonna run this five k as fast as I can, I need to be hurting this much at this point in the race? And so you you you're in tune. You're feeling the discomfort, but you're not judging it. You're just aware of it and you're letting it pass on.

I think with the experience of running, over time people get better and better at that. I think maybe a way of fast tracking that, and this is not something that has been tested rigorous. There's been a little bit of research on mindfulness for athletes, but it's quite hard to do a proper placebo controlled trial of this stuff. It's a little more speculative, but I think that's a powerful way whether you do a formal mindfulness practice or whether you just you know, use one of these apps that's available or or or other sort of guided techniques to to get towards that space where you're able to feel negative things without without overreacting to them. And again, I I I'm sort of flicking quickly at some research here, there's there's very interesting research in, like, elite adventure racers compared to normal people showing that when and they put them in brain scanners and they

Yeah.

And they're basically breathing through through a straw and then they pinch the straw sometimes. So you're you're sitting in this tube, of the of the brain scanner doing cognitive tests, breathing through a tube, then all of a sudden it gets really hard to breathe. And most people, when that happens, they freak out and they get a lot worse at the cognitive tests that they're doing. The big adventure racers, along with other people like Navy SEALs, when that tube gets pinched, they respond to that. They actually get better at the cognitive task because they they they they're aware, okay, this is now getting hard.

So they realize things are getting serious and they get they get more focused and they they they really zero in and they actually get better at the at the cognitive And so what they're avoiding doing, if you look at the brain activity, if you look at the areas that sort of responsible for monitoring how their body is feeling, when they're when they're breathing normally, it's at one level. And when things go crazy, when the breathing is restricted, it stays at that level. They're just always being aware of their body. Whereas for most people, under normal circumstances, they're kind of not aware of what's going on with their body. The brain activity in that region is low.

And then when something when things get serious, it goes way it goes through the roof. They overreact. Mhmm. And so instead of under reacting and overreacting, you wanna just be constantly aware of what's going on in your body and not overreacting to it. So I think mindfulness in that and and so they've done some tests showing that you can produce that sort of brain pattern with an eight week mindfulness, training programs.

So so I think that's another technique that's kind of interesting to consider.

Yeah. Absolutely. There's, yeah. As you said, it's become quite a popular topic over the last five years, and I'll put some links to some different sort of mindfulness, or meditation type, apps. I use I use one basically every day.

It's called Calm and, yeah, I could say the effects of the positive effects of the meditation and mindfulness have hit like many levels of my life including athletic endeavors in my running and cycling. So, yeah, far from a scientific experiment, but I can say that it definitely helps. You become more focused. And like you said, when things do get tough, you tend to focus on it less. Like, you're like, yep.

It's hard. It's supposed to be hard. Let's keep going. So, yeah, I'll put some links to that in the show notes. This is a good segue too because I know a lot of people are addicted to their devices and data.

And, you know, people lot a lot of my beginner runners, they have Garmins or Fitbits, whatever. Are there reasons to sometimes leave those at home?

Yeah. This is a this is a a touchy topic. You don't wanna tell people that their devices are not cool. Yeah. And I and I think it's a there's a lot of personal choice involved.

So I don't wanna prefacing here that I'm about to say that I think there times when it's important not to be tethered to the device. Let me put it this way. Ultimately, if you want to push your limits, you have to be able to feel where those limits are. There is no chance any device connected to your body is going to be able to feel more accurately than you yourself are when you are pushed to your limits. Now, when you are starting out running, you have no idea where your limits are.

And so I think there's a really useful role for various sorts of devices whether it's heart rate monitors, GPSs, power meters and things like that. Of helping you quantify and learn the feeling of what what is sustainable, what is unsustainable, because it's just as important. To learn your limits, you sometimes have to go past your limits. It's really useful to feel to know, okay. That was too hard.

Now I know what too hard feels like More importantly, now I know what it feels just before it gets too hard. I think there's a useful role for those devices. I think you just have to have a note of caution to to know that sometimes you need to be tuning in tuning into how you feel. And not and by tuning into how you feel, that doesn't mean looking at your wrist Mhmm. To to to ask what it's telling you about how you feel, but to actually know how you feel.

Because that's going to be the best way for you to get the most out of yourself. Let's say you're running a race or you're trying to push yourself, there's only one way to know whether you're at your limits and that's to feel it. Now the the one thing the one other thing I'll add about devices is just everyone's different. Everyone is responding to different cues, different motivations. So part of my device skepticism is the knowledge that I am an absolute obsessive data geek.

I'm a guy that in the nineties, you know, before it was easy to collect a lot of data on yourself, I did it by hand. I would do things like every morning for years, I would measure my heart rate as soon as I woke up just by counting and putting my fingers on my wrist. And then and then stand up and fifteen seconds later, measure it again because the difference between those two numbers was thought to be a good predictor of your or a good assessment of your overtraining and whether you're, and and your recovery status. And I would plot all that data in LOTUS one, two, three, and have running averages. Like, I love data.

And so the problem is in the modern era, it's so easy to collect lots of data Yeah. That I can easily I could turn it into just this thing where I was constantly looking at my, you know, this every every kilometer split, every average pace, every rolling average pace. And so I need to be be careful that I don't spiral into that. There's other people who have the who are completely at the other end of the spectrum who, you know, who barely know what day it is, let alone how many miles they ran yesterday or whatever. And for them, a device might be a useful motivating tool or a useful kind of accountability tool.

So so there's a lot of different so I I'm I I guess what I'm saying is there's no, like, one answer about what's right or what's wrong. Mhmm. But the bottom line is make sure that you're sometimes tuning into how you feel. And a great thing to do is if is if you like your device, if you think it gives you good information, and so on. Sometimes, just, you know, put it on the underside of your wrist or put a piece of tape over the over the the display so that you've got it and you can record it, record your activity.

But see see if you see what happens when you don't know how fast you're running, when you don't know how how far you're you've gone or whatever and see how that workout plays out. And then you can you can go back afterwards, download the data and say, wow. I ran a lot faster when I did or a lot slower or whatever the case may be when I didn't know how fast I was going because that's always a good exercise.

Yeah. I I tried it. I've never actually covered my my Garmin with tape or anything. I do I try to see how long I in the run I can go without looking at it, but it's so funny. Your mind's like, take a look.

Take a look. Take a look. And, yeah. I I don't think I've ever probably got further than, like, fifteen minutes probably without having to look at it.

Well, I'll I'll tell you something about that. I I I, for a few years, I trained with a coach in The States named Matt Matt Centroit senior, a very sort of prominent coach whose whose son actually won the Olympics, the Olympic fifteen hundred, in 2016. And he was a very he's the opposite of me, But I'm saying there's spectrums. He he's a totally intuitive coach, not a data guy. Whereas I was always a, you know, an anal obsessive data guy.

And so he we'd be doing track workouts and he'd say, okay, I want you to guys do okay. Go run a mile and and run the four laps in, you know, seventy, sixty eight, 60 six, 60 four. And so if it was my turn to lead, especially at the start, I'd be really paranoid. You know, he had to give us specific instructions. I didn't wanna screw it up.

You know, if you did screw it up, he'd yell at you. So I would be checking my watch and, you know, if I the lap the the track is 400 meters outdoors, you don't wanna come through 400 meters and realize that you screwed it up. So I'd be like, okay. I gotta check at 200 meters. Make sure I'm on pace.

And then you don't wanna be off pace at 200. So I got to the point where every workout, I'd be like, we if I was leading, I'd be checking at 100, then checking at 200, then checking at 300, then checking at 400, and then, you know, checking at 600, checking at 800, like, just constantly checking my watch. And and Centro would get the coach would get furious when he saw me check my watch all the time. You've gotta feel you should be able to run 68 plus or minus half a second without any watch and without thinking about it. Stop checking your goddamn watch all the time.

And I'd be like, okay, coach. And then I'd try and learn to check my watch just without without noticing, but he'd catch me. And so we'd be in the middle of a hard interval and he'd say, you know, Hutchinson, take your goddamn watch off and throw it in the infield. And so I'd to I'd be running along at a very fast pace, taking off my watch and like tear rolling down my cheek as I threw it to the infield. And then doing the rest of the workout.

And then and the worst thing was like so then he's like, don't worry, I'll time you. And so he'd yell times at you as you ran by and I would try and memorize them because I wasn't gonna have them on my watch and I needed to put them on my training log. And then, like, after I've been training with them for a while, I you know, sometimes, I I was hurt, you know, you'd be hurt or whatever. You wouldn't do running and so you'd just be standing around watching the other guys and you'd notice that he'd say, okay, here goes a group. They're starting their interval.

And he turned around and say, oops, I missed the start. And so they'd run the first lap and he just make up a time as they went by. He'd be like, 68. And I was like, holy crap. All these splits I've been writing down, he's just been making them up half the time.

So anyway, sorry, long rambling story to the point of which though is that this was one of the times when he would make me take my watch off. I realized how hard it was and I realized how dependent I was. I I I knew on a rational level. It's it's insane for me to be looking at my watch every hundred meters. I need to be able to feel it.

But as long as I had it, I couldn't stop myself from looking at it. And so sometimes I needed someone else to say, take the goddamn watch off.

Yeah. So there you go, everyone. Tell your, your brother, your sister, your partner, your kids to, take your watch for a run and hide it. So I just got three more questions, and they kind of all center around some articles you've written on, Outside magazine that I think would be interesting for, my, None to Run audience. First one being, you wrote an article about, what we can learn from Olympians about the common cold.

I do get that question a lot. People, you know, when they get sick, should they run, should they not run, other things they can do so they don't get sick. So, yeah, I'd love just to get your your your coolest notes on on that article.

Yeah. I mean, this this was actually a really cool article. I I can't remember.

I think

it was the Norwegian Olympic team, where they they brought, like, this special machine that can diagnose not just are you sick, but what is the specific virus that you have. So they could figure out who is passing viruses to whom at the last Olympics. And, you know, a lot of people got sick and you could see that they they could see the patterns. They would trace, like, who passed it on to whom. And so they could see it's like, oh, here was patient zero for this particular infection.

How did it pass on? Oh, look. This person was sitting in front of that other person on the plane on the way over to PyeongChang or whatever. Yeah. And that person got sick two days later and then this person was rooming with the other person so they got sick two days later and then this person was competing, you know, in the same event as this other person so they got sick.

You could watch these infections move through and you see that proximity is a real issue. First thing you can learn about the common cold is wash your hands. You you know, like, really pay attention to those things. It makes a difference, the people you're with. And and, you know, people could probably hear, have a I have a sore throat and a cough right now.

I have a a three year old and a five year old daughter daughter. So it's just like, I wash my hands as much as I can, but but

Your body's getting exposed to germs. It hasn't seen probably twenty years.

Yeah. Exactly. And, you know, at some point, I just have to hope that both my daughters and I rebuild some immunity quickly. In terms of dealing with it, just the one thing that's worth keeping in mind is basically the neck check or the neck rule. If you have symptoms above the neck, if you've got a sore throat, you've got a runny nose, you can run through that.

I won't go so far as to say it's going to cure you or anything like that, but getting outside, getting some exercise is probably good for how you feel. If you've got something more serious deep down in your chest or a fever or anything like that, then it's probably better to just back off and let your body recover. And even if you are even if you are, it's just a runny nose or whatever like that. You know, it's not the time to try and push through through to new levels. Get out, get some fresh air, get some exercise, but, you know, live to fight another day.

Yep. Okay. Another topic that, comes up, a lot is, especially with the winter coming throughout much of North America is a lot of, my runners head to the treadmill. And a lot of them actually just prefer the treadmill in general, even, you know, throughout the nicer times of the year. So how does treadmill running actually differ from running outside?

And are there things that people on the treadmill should be doing on the treadmill that, you know, should they wanna make the transition will make it, easier for them?

Yeah. So there's a ton of studies on this and they all produce different results. A hundred different studies will tell you a hundred different things on how different treadmill is from outside or why and what you can do about it. I think one of the themes that emerges when you try and look at all the studies together is a big factor is just familiarity. The less the less you run on a treadmill, the more you're likely to be different.

Wow. When you you're the the more the more differences there are between running on the treadmill and running outside. If you're comfortable on the treadmill, then for the most part, you know, you can run very similarly to how you run outside. Fundamentally, it's it's the same thing. Now if you do most of your trading on a treadmill and then you want to go run a five k outside, there are some things to consider.

One is that, in terms of pace, treadmill doesn't have any headwind so theoretically it's slightly easier to run on a treadmill than to run outside. One way of getting over that is to or to compensating for that, you can put the incline at half a percent or maybe 1% depending on how fast you're running. Half a percent for slower paces, one percent for faster paces. That'll sort of simulate the effects of of air resistance outside. The other thing is that the treadmill belt's generally softer than the roads.

If you go from all treadmill all winter and then you head outside and do all roads, there's for some people at least, there's a risk that your legs will will sort of suffer from the pounding a little bit because they're not used to it. So it's a good idea to make the transition gradually. If you've got a road five k coming up and you're doing all treadmill, then start by, you know, getting one road run a week and then move up to two or whatever just to just to make sure you've got your your legs are familiar to the slightly harder surface of the road. So it's it's do do nothing suddenly, I guess, is the the the sort of thing to remember.

Okay. And, last question here, and, I don't think we've talked about anything about diet yet, but, anyways, a lot of people are interested in incorporate the ketogenic diet right now. So what what are the the what's the research saying right now with regards to the ketogenic diet as it relates to, running and endurance sport in general?

Yeah. So I'll speak to that on on in the context of endurance sport. The the the health aspect is a whole another Yeah. Yeah. If you'd asked me this question ten years ago or maybe even five years ago, I would have said, don't be crazy.

I mean, if you especially if you wanna run something longer like a marathon or something like that. There's no way you can run it with no carbohydrates.

Yeah.

And the fact is now we know that's not that's incorrect. You can you can run a perfectly good marathon on a ketogenic diet and as a result, of course, can run a good five k on a ketogenic diet. If you wanna run your best possible five k or marathon or whatever, I think although this is controversial and debatable, my reading of the evidence would be that you're not gonna do it, on a ketogenic diet. That that, you the in exchange for getting really good at fat burning on a ketogenic diet, you give up a little bit of carbohydrate burning. And if you're gonna run at high intensity, like especially in a five ks, you need to be able to burn carbohydrates fast.

Because fat the advantage of fat is that you have tons of it so you don't run out which is great. But the advantage of carbohydrate is you can burn it much more quickly. Even if you get far better at fat burning, carbohydrates are still faster and so they're able to fuel you at a higher rate of exercise, the high intensity stuff. If you want to go to the Olympics, you're almost certainly going to need to eat a relatively high carb diet. If you want to run a reasonably good five k within your personal goals, I think you can probably choose whatever feels fine for you.

If if you're on a ketogenic diet for whatever reasons, whatever reasons, motivate you and and you're doing it, you know, properly and and getting the calories you need and so on, there's no reason that you can't run and and and incorporate running or other endurance activities into your into your routine and and, and do it very well. So I think that's that's probably the message I would wanna look, it's a controversial topic, but what what I would say, yeah, is, you you can do it either way. But I I guess the one the one last caveat I would say is I would not, despite some of the hype, I would definitely not say, oh, if you wanna run faster, should switch to a ketogenic diet. That's not a reason to switch to a ketogenic diet, but if you're on a ketogenic diet, that's, you know, more power to you.

Mhmm. And just before we wrap up, so is there any particular science research in the running world or endurance sport world right now that's exciting you?

You know, it's it's that's a a good question because, you know, my my book came out last year and I've been trying to figure out what I want to write about next. And it's like, man, it's it's a hard it's a hard thing to figure out something that I really, really wanna spend a ton a ton of time on. But, you know, the there's there I mean, to me, the the thing that I came away from my last book thinking is that sports psychology is more real than I thought it was twenty years ago. What's exciting is that people are now studying it in a more quantifiable and rigorous way. They're trying to say, Well, let's give a bunch of people one sports psychology intervention and other people will give them a different one and we'll see which one does better.

We'll see what, you know okay. We talk about motivational self talk. Which works better if if people tell themselves, you can do this? Or if people can tell them tell themselves, I can do this. And starting to get and then it turns out that there seems to be a positive effect if you say, you can do this.

That there's something about distancing yourself from the struggle that that works better. So that that I'm finding really interesting and exciting that it's it's sort of moving beyond the sort of let's go with our intuition and and and sort of do what, you know, the the gurus tell us to do. So let's test it. Let's figure out what works best for people. And there will never be a universal answer.

We're all different. We all respond to different things. But yeah. So the sort of quote, unquote, the new sports psychology, the the science based version of it, I'm finding pretty interesting.

So I think this is a great place to wrap up. Alex, I just wanna say thanks so much for taking the time to chat. As I said, hopefully, next time we'll do it in person with a beer in our hands. But, where's the best place for people to connect with you or follow your work?

Probably Twitter's the easiest place to find me. My my handle is sweat science, all one word. And, you know, when I have whenever I have a new article or when I read something that I find interesting, I I post it there. So that's the easiest place to find me. I do have a a a website, alexhutchinson.net, that has a little more detail on some old articles and has been updated as recently as, like, 02/2006 or whatever.

But, yeah, Twitter's probably the more the more up to date place to go.

And your books available on Amazon and all other places where books are sold?

Yeah. All other places including your your local independent bookstore, but, yeah, definitely Amazon too.

Awesome. Okay. Thanks again, Alex.

Thanks, Mark. I really appreciate the chat.