Business of Endurance

From Endurance to Insight: Matt Fitzgerald's Journey in Running, Writing, and Recovery

• Charlie Reading • Season 7 • Episode 3

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Welcome to another episode of The Business of Endurance, Matt Fitzgerald, a prolific author with 35 books to his name, shares his captivating journey as a runner and writer. The conversation covers his experiences from starting as an 11-year-old runner, attempting to go pro at 46, to documenting his endeavours in books such as 'Running the Dream' and 'Iron War.' Matt delves into the importance of mindset, the impact of rivalries on performance, and the principles of mental conditioning for runners. He also discusses his books, 'Racing Weight' and 'Diet Cults,' focusing on healthy eating for athletes. Additionally, Matt introduces the concept of the Dream Run Camp, a unique experience for runners to fully immerse themselves in their sport. The episode also touches on Matt's battle with long COVID and his ongoing recovery journey, including the holistic strategies he's employing to improve his condition. He previews his upcoming book 'Dying to Run,' which documents his struggles and hopes for a full recovery. To conclude, Matt shares his insights and advice for those suffering from long COVID and highlights the importance of persistence and marginal gains in both athletic performance and recovery.

Highlights:

  • Matt's Journey to Becoming a Pro Runner
  • Lessons from the Pros
  • The Dave Scott and Mark Allen Rivalry
  • Mental Conditioning for Runners
  • Pain Management and Training as Treatment
  • Balancing Professional and Personal Passions
  • Diet and Nutrition Insights
  • Dream Run Camp Experience
  • Books and Inspirations
  • Dealing with Long COVID

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Connect with Matt Fitzgerald on his LinkedIn & Website

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Speaker 1:

I'm Charlie Redding and I'm Claire Fudge. Welcome to the business of endurance.

Speaker 3:

Dave Scott and Mark Allen were very different people, but underneath all of these differences there was a core that was the same, and so if you let that tool become a crutch, then it's just going to take forever for you to calibrate those internal perceptions. There's no way around it. No device will ever be invented that does this for us.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Business of Endurance podcast. Today, we're thrilled to have Matt Fitzgerald, a renowned author, coach and sport nutritionist, on. Matt has an unbelievably impressive body of work, including the epic book that is Iron War, which chronicles the legendary rivalry between Dave Scott and Mark Allen. We'll delve into this fascinating story and uncover lessons from the intense competition that drove those two guys to deliver the best Ironman race in the sports history.

Speaker 1:

Matt is the author of 35 books, one of which is Brain Training for Runners, where he explores mental conditioning techniques to help runners push beyond their limits, and in this conversation, he's going to share some practical advice on leveraging mental strength to enhance your performance. And also, matt will open up about his personal battle with long COVID and how it's impacted his life and career, and what he's doing to overcome it. His resilience and insights promise to be incredibly inspiring, and I know you're going to get loads out of this. So join us as we explore these topics and much, much more, gaining valuable insights from one of the leading voices in the world of endurance sport. So I know you're going to love this episode with Matt Fitzgerald.

Speaker 2:

I just love the way Matt talks about diet quality and if you stick around to the end, Matt talks about diet quality and if you stick around to the end, I'm going to be able to show you a little bit more about how you can look at your own diet quality.

Speaker 1:

Matt, welcome to the Business of Endurance podcast. I know we are going to have so much to talk about today. I like when we have an author on the podcast who have done some research and read the book or the books by said author, but when I actually found 31 books, but I think this third I think you said the third five you set me quite a significant challenge by. I mean, that is quite a phenomenal track record in terms of writing. I always love to start with a story and I love the fact that we have too many stories to pick from with you. But, based on the fact that life is a marathon, you know you're sharing so many personal stories that go beyond running. Can you tell me a story about you as a runner, and possibly maybe when you had a stint as being a pro runner, that can capture our audience's attention and tell them what you're about as a runner?

Speaker 3:

Absolutely yeah. So I started running when I was 11 years old and I think most youth athletes dream of going pro. They just have those fantasies whether it's realistic or not. For me it was not realistic. I was a pretty good runner but nowhere near good enough to turn pro. But when I got well into my 40s I was still running.

Speaker 3:

I actually read a book called paper lion by George Plimpton, a true story about he had convinced the Detroit lions professional American football team to let him participate fully in one of their summer training camp. He had never played football, he was just like a middle-aged author, but he got to like be in the locker room, be on the field and just experience what it's like to be a professional American football player. So I thought you know what I'll do that with running. I was 46 years old at the time.

Speaker 3:

Even when I was half that age had never been a professional, but I was all in doing absolutely everything these young Olympic aspirants were doing and it was just a magical experience and at the end of which so the agent for the team convinced Kerry Pinkowski, the race director of the Chicago marathon, to bend his own rules and allow me to actually compete in the Chicago marathon as a pro, which was just incredible. So I got to start the race. You know it's a 40,000 person marathon and I was three rows back from Galen Rupp who won, and I ended up running my best marathon ever by two minutes and performance wise. It was really incredible. But just as an experience hands down the best 13 weeks of my life, what did you learn from being on that start line as a pro?

Speaker 1:

I?

Speaker 3:

wanted to prove a point. This was a fantasy experience for me, but I wouldn't have done it if I wasn't intending to document it. So I kept a daily blog the whole time I was here so people could follow me in real time, which was a bit of a high wire act, because I got injured halfway through and it was looking like the whole thing was going to fall apart, made a miraculous recovery and it turned out okay. And then I also wrote a book about the experience, called Running the Dream. I did all the things that the 23-year-old elite talents were doing and benefited from them just as much as they did at my own particular level. I just had this amazing renaissance as an athlete, and it was entirely due to the fact that I was believing that the pros actually know what they are doing and adopting their lifestyle.

Speaker 1:

Can you give me one example of what they did?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, a good example would be my injuries. I had an acute tendon strain. I felt like I'd just been shot in the groin with a nail gun and I thought it's over. But immediately I was with the team's physiotherapist. He gave me a diagnosis. He said don't worry, this is like a two-week injury. Members of the team, some of the real pros, were just encouraging me. Within a few days I was easing back into training and I was easing back into training and then I got all my fitness back and, like I said, had the help happily ever after in the marathon. So that was really eyeopening. What a difference it made just to have a team around me, cause I know what I would have done back in California on my own. I would have been cross training the very next day. I probably wouldn't have given the injury enough time to quiet down, I wouldn't have known the exact nature of it, the rehab wouldn't have been as targeted and it probably wouldn't have ended up well. So that's a good example of what a difference it makes.

Speaker 2:

It's about looking and seeing what professionals are doing and how you can apply that to yourselves. I mean, you've written so many books but thinking about your amazing book Iron Wall between Dave Scott and Mark Allen and that rivalry, what would you say would be sort of the top three key learnings from writing that book that athletes could take away from that, I'm thinking mindset.

Speaker 3:

One of the things that I learned in documenting that rivalry and their iconic final showdown of the 1989 Ironman World Championship. Neither Dave Scott nor Mark Allen was more physically talented than other top male long distance triathletes of the time. What made them exceptional was between the ears. What's fascinating about them as a case study is that in most respect Dave Scott and Mark Allen were very different people, but underneath all of these differences there was a core that was the same and what I like about that is it highlights the have to. It highlights the aspects of mindset. You must have to achieve that level.

Speaker 3:

Like what Dave did work and what Mark did work in terms of their differences, but where they were the same is two things Like one is they were willing to essentially die to win. But even there there was a difference. Like for Dave it was hard wiring, like he came out of the womb like a shark. If he stopped moving he would die. He put it to me in an interview an exercise addiction to end all exercise addiction. And he was really just from people who knew him, as a little kid said, he's always been like that this kid just cannot sit still Whereas with Mark Allen it was more like nurture versus nature. So he had a very difficult relationship with his father growing up and it just left him with a lot of baggage which actually caused him to underperform. He was a swimmer initially and he thought of himself as a choker where in the heat of competition he would just crumble. But eventually, like, working through, those issues ended up making him strong to take that final step and become as good as Dave Scott was at the Ironman distance.

Speaker 1:

It is an incredible story. I love reading Ironmore and it completely inspired me to get to Kona and race there. So how much do you think the fact that they had each other as significant rivals also played a factor in the fact that, if we take away the bike technology and the times, still nobody's really improving on the times they were doing all those years ago? How much do you think their rivalry had an impact on how they became so strong?

Speaker 3:

It had a tremendous impact. I mean, if they were sitting here talking to you, they would say that certainly in that particular race, the final showdown, where they legally were miles ahead of Greg Welch who ended up finishing third in that race. And there's actually, like there's, science demonstrating that rivalry is performance enhancing. When athletes who are trained and committed to the sport have a rival to key off of, they perform better than if all the same ingredients are in place and they don't have that rival.

Speaker 1:

I can believe that and in fact that leads nicely onto so one of the books that actually have been recommended by at least one guest on here I'm going to ask you for book recommendations later on, but one of the books that's been recommended by another guest is Brain Training for Runners obviously your book, obviously. That dives into the sort of psychological aspects of running. How can runners leverage their sort of mental conditioning to push through those perceived limits and improve their performance in the same sort of ways as mark and dave were in ironwall?

Speaker 3:

yeah, I actually think that the most important piece is is intention. So many athletes they they have vaguely want to improve their mental game. I wanted to compete bravely. Yeah, it took a little bit of time and there were some tactics involved in terms of what worked, but the intention I was already halfway there, just by having it be an explicit goal that I was able to articulate. I want to work on my toughness. If you're able to say that out loud and it becomes a mantra for you, then you'll figure out the tactics of like how to make it happen. But it all starts with that overt, conscious intentionality.

Speaker 1:

I was going to say can you give us some hints as to what those tactics could be though?

Speaker 3:

Yes, one of them is post hoc analysis. So every time I raced, my primary goal was always qualitative versus quantitative. So, yeah, I would pay attention to my finish time and what place I finished in, but I would evaluate my performance based on how close I came to leaving it all out on the race course. There's a good line from the philosopher of science John Dewey. He said we don't learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience. So you get more out of the same amount of racing experience by doing that kind of post-mortem and just having a standard and then measuring yourself ruthlessly against that standard and if you fall short of it, take yourself to task and vow to do better next time.

Speaker 2:

I know there's lots of studies out there in terms of athletes or people being able to push themselves beyond where they think is possible Obviously, the advances that we have in technology to measure training data and output, whether it be power or heart rate or whatever it might be. Now, what are the common mistakes you see athletes making in terms of just looking at data and not listening to their bodies, and how can people potentially sort of push beyond their limits when they're just focused on data?

Speaker 3:

I find myself underscoring this all the time. With athletes, the limits to endurance performance are perceptual in nature. They are not physiological. We have obviously physical limits, but we don't encounter our physical limits when we're racing. Think about it. You can't just take let's just take something like a marathon 26.2 miles, 42.2 kilometers, that's a nice long race. If you're running as fast as you can at any point in a race of that length, you're not going to finish that race. So that is the essence of endurance. Sport is not trying as hard as you can. Physical limits are real, but the ones we actually encounter are perceptual in nature. And just because they're psychological doesn't mean they're not real. Just like you have a limit to pain tolerance, you have a limit to perceived effort tolerance. So the only way you can really reach your full potential as an endurance athlete is to push back your perceptual limit as close as you can possibly get them to your physical limits. Those hard physiological limiters gets a journey for all of us.

Speaker 3:

And the problem with technology I'm a fan of it, I use it, but it's is it a tool or is it a crutch? And what I see happening with a lot of athletes, especially those who come to endurance sports as adults. Without of that, that reservoir of developmental experiences, like they feel, like their device, is god almighty. And so if you let that tool become a crutch, then it's just going to take forever for you to calibrate those internal perceptions. There's no way around it, like no device will ever be invented that does this for us. You need to turn inward and calibrate your own perception in order to reach your full potential.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I like that idea of calibration it comes onto your latest book quite nicely, and the latest book is called Pain and Performance and it's about pain management, isn't it for athletes? And it talks about training as treatment and how you can manage pain to almost enhance performances. Talk to me about that, because that seems to me like it's also a calibration process, almost.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it is. There's definitely a connection there. What we experience when we're pushing hard as endurance athletes. It's often described as pain, but that's technically not accurate.

Speaker 3:

Pain and Performance was co -authored with a gentleman named Ryan Whited. He's a strength and conditioning coach here in Flagstaff. He was the brains of this book. The training is treatment methodology is his, and I was the wordsmith.

Speaker 3:

The reason I wanted to collaborate with him is that his philosophy made sense of my lived experience as an athlete, and one thing we've learned is that we've sort of been taught as athletes that there's a one-to-one relationship between pain and injury. If you feel pain above a certain level, it means that there's a one-to-one relationship between pain and injury. If you feel pain above a certain level, it means that there's significant tissue damage in the part of you that hurt, and we've learned that is absolutely not true at all. There is a very loose association between pain and structural damage in the body. So, as endurance athletes, most of what we call injury is not injury. It's what Ryan prefers to call pain experiences.

Speaker 3:

Pain is every bit as normal as getting tired. There's no way you can train hard enough to reach your potential as an athlete without encountering pain. Like pain is just a warning, it's a guide, just the way. Fatigue is as well, and so training as treatment is just trying to like deprogram athletes from all the sort of like medicalized, structural, medicalized pain, right. So that's why we think of it as different as if you're hungry, you're hungry At five o'clock in the afternoon, do you call the doctor?

Speaker 3:

No, you eat. If you're sleepy at 10 o'clock at night, do you call the doctor? No, you go to bed. You know. If you're tired at the end of a workout, you recover, and if you feel pain during a workout, you work around it and work through it. There are certainly cases like bone injuries and stuff where we need to call the doctor, but for the most part we need to understand that pain is an absolutely normal part of the experience. The goal is to self-manage pain as much as possible, and so training is treatment. You're never a patient, You're always an athlete. You're never in treatment, you're always training. It's one process. Pain is a normal part of it, and so it's just. It's supposed to empower athletes to just be in control. To understand, I don't need to freak out If I experience pain. With these basic tools, I can work through it, the same way I work through fatigue and then only call the doctor for those red flag scenarios when you actually do need to get imaging done or what have you?

Speaker 2:

Do you see any correlation with athletes potentially having more pain or more injury when they've also got this load coming from maybe a lack of sleep, maybe working long hours in their job? Is there any correlation that you've seen through that research for that book?

Speaker 3:

pain is really mysterious. The more we learn about it, the harder it is. We certainly know when we're experiencing it, but trying to actually find it, it doesn't show up on any image, so like pain is. It's never a have to with your brain. And yeah, there's just abundant research showing that all kinds of psychological and social influences will affect pain. A lot of pain is expectation. The more you expect pain, or the more you fear pain, the more likely you are to experience it. What you're referring to is kind of that allostatic load, and this is abundantly demonstrated in research too. If you have just a lot of stress in your life, your pain threshold is lowered. So the same physical insult is more likely to cause pain if you're just at your wit's end and frazzled because of what's going on in your life, there's some interesting research around willpower.

Speaker 1:

It's a similar sort of thing, isn't there? It's a marshmallow test, isn't it? Where they put a marshmallow in front of you and you have to sit there and resist the marshmallow, and those people that have to do that have much less willpower in terms of then doing their exercise later on in the day. So it's a similar sort of thing to that, I would imagine.

Speaker 3:

So, yeah, that's self-control is what we're really talking about. Endurance sports are all about delayed gratification. It's all about I would rather have two marshmallows later than one marshmallow now. So that's all we do, like we're training our mind. The training, the racing it's one big marshmallow test.

Speaker 1:

So I've just been chatting to Matt about brain training for runners and it's amazing how we can use our brains in clever ways to overcome goals. We talk a lot about goal setting within this podcast. When we get towards the end right towards the end of this episode, matt talks about how he's using a similar strategy, but to overcome long COVID. So stick around to the end of this episode, because I think that bit in particular is absolutely fascinating and I want you to relate it to this brain training concept. You've written loads of books which is one of your passions about your passion, which is running and triathlon. So tell us about how you managed to balance that professional career with your personal passions and talk to us about what advice you'd give people that are trying to do the same thing.

Speaker 3:

I feel fortunate. I was nine years old when I decided I wanted to be a writer. When I grew up, my father is a writer and he wrote professionally. So when I was a kid I knew that was actually an option for me. I fell in love with it. It was really one of the only things I was any good at. And then I fell in love with running two years later, at age 11.

Speaker 3:

I did not actually expect to marry them the way I did and I realized, wait a minute, like why can't I just put the very best of my creativity into writing about sports? I was several years down this road. I'm slow on the uptake sometimes, but it was really when I sat down to write Iron War when I realized you know what I can write something great about sports. I don't have to hold back the best of myself for the stuff I do at night. I can put everything I've got and pretend this is the last thing I'll ever write, just exhaust myself. And then that worked out really well. Iron War, I think, was better than anything I had written previously and it gave me sort of a formula to move forward with.

Speaker 1:

It feels like Iron War I mean of the books I've read, which is, like, I say, a few of the 35,. It feels like Iron War is a different book, though, because it's about one single story, isn't it? Why haven't you gone back to that kind of format of the book?

Speaker 3:

One reason is that story only happened once. I just had such great material to work with. The rest of it was just research right, I just had to learn everything I possibly could about the story and the backstory and just tell it. But once I told it, I told it. But I have done similar things since then. For example, I wrote my book about my fake pro runner experience, running the Dream. That is one cohesive story. For that one it's not about a legendary talented athlete, it's about a middle-aged average athlete me. But it was narratively similar. And then I did also I ghost wrote a book for James Lawrence the Iron Cowboy about when he traveled all around the US doing distance triathlon in every state 50 days in a row. And so that was a similar kind of story. My name does not appear on the cover of that book, but I wrote it. Part of what makes Iron War special is that it's a completely unique story.

Speaker 2:

I'm thinking also about racing weights that I've certainly read and, with my background working in performance nutrition as well, what drove you, I guess, to write that book number one and number two? The main problem that you see in athletes with trying to reach this kind of raceway.

Speaker 3:

I probably couldn't even get that book published today, just because the way the public discourse around body weight and body image has changed. So I started writing that book in 2009. And that was the very peak of diet hysteria. It was everywhere. Everyone was obsessed, like everyone was obsessed, and people were making loads of money off of diet books like South beach and Atkins and all this stuff. And what I saw around me was athletes like actually going on the South beach diet, because we live in the same culture and so athletes are like oh, I think I would be faster if I lost some weight and all my friends are doing South Beach, so I guess I'll do that.

Speaker 3:

It's not that it was necessarily a problem for them to recognize that body weight and body composition do impact performance, but they were really muddled on. All right, is it really performance that you care about or is it looking good naked? Can we tease those things apart? And then, what actual methods are you using? Are you doing what the most successful professionals do? Not the ones who just get to the top and vanish, but the ones who get to the top and stay there because they're healthy?

Speaker 3:

For me, my instinct was always like what is actually working at the highest level of the sport, and for me, that was true of gear and technology, it was true of training, it was true of mindset and it was true of diet and weight management. I don't think we get anywhere by lying to people and saying body weight has no impact on performance and for some people, given like their personal history, they just can't go there. I get that, but that doesn't mean that all of us should be forbidden because it's risky for certain people. So, yeah, I was just trying to write a book that, if you're going to do it, this is the way it's done. Good luck trying to get that one published today.

Speaker 2:

I think you're right. I think we might see things balance out a little bit Now. It's in this place of let's not measure body composition, let's not look at race weights.

Speaker 1:

So that kind of leads nicely on to the book Diet Culture. I suppose the thing I love most about that book was the final chapter where you actually gave probably the simplest approach to eating a healthy, balanced diet I'd ever seen. If we're going to forget the paleo diet and the Atkins diet and the keto diet and all of those other diets, what approach should people take to eat healthily?

Speaker 3:

My premise in that book is that there is no single best way for humans to eat. I was trying to walk a thin line in that final chapter and I call it out here. I've spent 11 chapters showing why the paleo diet and low-carb are the only right way for people to eat, and now here I am stepping forward with my own diet. Isn't that a little bit of a? But my point is it's not. I think it is an established scientific fact that there is no single best way for any of us to eat. But that's not the same thing as saying anything goes. So that's what I was trying to do with my notion of agnostic healthy eating. Just say like, here's the framework, and so you'll find your own happy place within this framework, but you got to know the rule that you can't get away with breaking. And really what it comes down to is process versus unprocessed, and my take is humans are naturally omnivorous. It's okay if you don't want to eat meat for ethical reasons or what have you, that's okay. But we are nature's ultimate omnivores and so we need variety, and so as much variety as you can get in your diet within whatever you have intolerances or ethical or spiritual considerations, that's all fine, but try to eat variety and make your variety as much as possible natural versus processed.

Speaker 3:

There's nothing wrong with grains, but highly processed grains not so good. There's nothing wrong with vegetables, but fried potatoes not so good. There's room for a certain amount of junk in everyone's diet, but just like trying to eat variety and trying to eat unprocessed. And then the other thing is just enjoying food is crucial. You have to find a way to eat that doesn't feel like work, that doesn't have a lot of anxiety and guilt around it, where it just has its own momentum. I like breakfast, I like lunch, I like dinner, because if you do and you are within that framework of agnostic, healthy eating, then you're still going to be doing it five years from now and you're going to be enjoying it and getting the benefits you want from it.

Speaker 1:

I really like the way you summarize it in the chapter, in the sense of in my mind I was listening to it rather than reading it. You created this pyramid of that. You eat more vegetables than fruit, you eat more fruit than meat and fish. You eat more meat and fish than whole grains. And you basically go down this scale and say well, you could have anything that's in anywhere, but as long as you're having more of the one above it than the one below it and fried being right at the bottom, which I thought was an interesting point.

Speaker 1:

So I just thought that was a really lovely way of saying just eat more of everything that's gradually healthier and eat gradually less and less of the things that aren't, and it just seemed like a really nice way of creating a balanced diet that was healthy. I'm sure Claire would have an answer to this, but why was fried at the bottom?

Speaker 3:

So this notion of diet quality? The mistake that a lot of the shtick or fad diets make is they try to categorize like good foods and bad foods, and they try to find some philosopher's stone oh, high glycemic foods are all bad and low glycemic are all good. Or foods that humans ate in the Paleolithic era are all good and everything that entered the diet after that is bad. If you ask actual, credential nutrition scientists what defines whether a food is good or bad, they don't look inside the food. They put the food inside human bodies and see if it would affect it on their health. You know what I mean. So it's not what the food is made of, it's what the food does.

Speaker 3:

Studies are hard to do, but there's been enough of them like very large epidemiological studies where they'll have those track what like tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people eat and then they will track health outcomes like cancer risk, all cause mortality, whatever it is, and then they just look for correlation. Oh wow, when people eat more fried foods, they die younger and they have higher cancer risk and they have higher risk for metabolic diseases. That's where quality is determined by the effect that eating more or less of a food type has. Sugar and fried foods are pretty much co-equal in terms of negative health outcomes.

Speaker 1:

Now, one of the things that we've chatted about just very briefly before we started the conversation, but I definitely want to hear more about, is what you call a dream run camp. So I have a feeling that Claire and I are both going to be interested in a dream run camp, but tell us what it's all about. What does it time on the dream run camp look like?

Speaker 3:

It all goes back to my fake pro runner experience here in Flagstaff. You know I wrote this book running the dream, which allows any runner to sort of live the experience I had vicariously. They can see it through my eyes. That's nice, but I'm the one who got to have the experience Reading it. It's mediated, it's not quite the same. I decided to create Dream Run Camp to make a facsimile of my fake pro runner experience available to anyone who wants it. Bought a property here in Flagstaff and just equipped it as like the ultimate runner's retreat.

Speaker 3:

There are a lot of adult running camps out there. I've coached at a lot of them. They're all great but they're all pretty similar. They tend to be like three to four days long, like a week at the outside, and you can have a really great experience in that amount of time. But you can't transform as an athlete in three or four days or even a week. So at Dream Run Camp one week is actually the minimum allowable stay and it's not a traditional adult running camp with 30 people all arrive at the same time, hang out for four days and all depart at the same time.

Speaker 3:

At Dream Run Camp you come whenever it works for you, so people runners come individually and we have a team of special service providers that we're networked with massage therapy, strength coach, physio, dietician, sports psychologist, and then we're also partnered with Hoka Nazli, so you get to go to their team headquarters and meet Ben Rosario and whichever pros happen to be around, then get a tour of their performance center and so it's just. It's an opportunity for runners and we've had triathletes here just to go all in with running and just give themselves permission to make it the center of their existence for one to 12 weeks, and there's a lot of coaching, education and motivation that I provide. We started it just over a year ago, early May last year, and yeah, it's really going well. Word's getting out. I would say everyone who comes through here doesn't regret it, has a really special experience and comes away with some momentum that they can carry into their future training and raising sounds exciting, doesn't it?

Speaker 1:

that's definitely another one for the bucket list, I think I like that team approach like a professional teams have. That's great now, one thing that we always need to talk about in in this podcast is books that have inspired you. Now I can honestly can honestly say that Iron War, amongst your books, is the one that stands out the most, as it genuinely did inspire me, and it's just such an amazing story. But what books have inspired you, or what books do you find yourself recommending to others that have helped you on your journey?

Speaker 3:

So I was a literature major in college and most of what I read today is actually fiction. I read fewer sport-related books than many people would assume, but one I read within the last couple of years that I really liked a lot and kind of wish I had written was Michael Crowley's Out of Thin Air. Michael Crowley, scottish ethnographer, sub-elite runner, very high level runner himself. I recommend it to a lot of athletes. Just as like a perspective shift, read this and understand that it's all true and then think about how that should impact your approach to sport going forward.

Speaker 1:

Brilliant book. One of the things that I took from it is the importance they put in running as a group and learning to run as a result of the other people that are around you. But I'm pleased you picked that book because we're just in the process of sorting out a date with Michael to do actually around the launch of his next book, which we'll keep to ourselves for now. So watch this space, michael on the podcast soon, and then we have a closing tradition on the podcast where we get the last guest to ask the next guest a question without knowing who that is going to be. So, claire, I think you've got the question from Alex Hutchinson, haven't you?

Speaker 2:

So Alex has asked what new idea or activity have you explored in the last year?

Speaker 3:

I have been dealing with long COVID for close to four years. I actually have not done a race in close to four years. Until January of this year I was completely unable to run at all. I've been quasi bedridden during periods of this close to four years and, yeah, I've really suffered and struggled a lot. I've had my athletic identity ripped away from me and now I'm having this experience where I'm like seeing progress.

Speaker 3:

I call it recovery the R word because I'm a little superstitious about using it, but one of the things that has helped me improve is I'm involved in this program with this woman named Andrea Henkel. She's a former Olympic gold medalist and world champion in biathlon for Germany and she's teamed up with a partner who has long COVID and has created like a 12-week recovery program, and so a lot of it is things like neuromuscular relaxation, like vagus nerve stimulation. Is things like neuromuscular relaxation, like vagus nerve stimulation, a lot of, like you know, kind of woo-woo mind-body stuff that for me, like I was willing to pull all the other levers to recover and that one I hadn't really touched and I thought, you know what, I should give it a try. All the other stuff isn't really helping me much and it's just amazing how well this stuff works and like a lot of it has to do with, like eye movements or little balance things, or progressive muscle relaxation, rhythmic breathing things, where, like I went in skeptical like how is this going to help me?

Speaker 3:

I feel like I have a cancer patient, like how is like an eye exercise going to help? But I'm getting so much out of it and you don't really have to have long COVID, a lot of the stuff. It's just it's really great for recovery, for any athlete you know, just tamping down your parasympathetic nervous system. If you haven't explored some of that stuff, just finding ways to help your nervous system relax, which is good for, I think, any athlete who's really challenging their body or has a high allostatic load, in combination with intensive endurance training, it could be beneficial. I should say their program was called Rive 90.

Speaker 2:

It's really interesting to hear, I think, when you're science focused for so many years to actually then explore something different and being open-minded to do that. So it's really interesting to hear the effects that it's having for you as well. But yeah, it will be interesting in terms of the world of endurance sport too.

Speaker 1:

Now I know that with 35 books in the bag, there's going to be a 36th, clearly. So what's next? What are you looking towards at the moment?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I'm working on a book called Dying to Run, which is about actually my journey through chronic illness. So, yeah, I'm documenting my own R word and also the phenomenon more broadly. The pandemic and its aftermath were traumatic for everyone in one way or another, regardless of whether you've ever got COVID, let alone long COVID, and I'm working toward my happily ever after for that one actually. So on January 1st I signed up for a 100-kilometer trail ultramarathon, not able to run a single step. I had 11 months to prepare and I'm now about halfway through that. It's going really well, but I still have the other half of the journey to complete.

Speaker 1:

I love the fact that it's a hundred kilometer run. Set goals are going to step outside your comfort zone for sure. That's awesome. Just one thing on the long COVID piece have you got any advice for other people other than the Andrea Hankel stuff that you talked about? Have you got any advice for other people that are suffering with long COVID that you would share with them? For?

Speaker 3:

other people that are suffering with long COVID that you would share with them the high level advice I would say look around. I've tried, I would say, probably dozens of different potential treatments, almost all of which didn't help me at all, and there are many more that I could have tried but I didn't think were credible. Kind of a tricky spot where I would say you have to keep your eyes open and, because you're not going to get better by doing nothing, but you don't want to put your entire life on pause like a frantic effort to get well now, when it might take a while, I think, focus on trying to live the best life you can, given how you feel and whatever functional limitations, but also just keep one eye out there and be receptive and understand it's not the end of the world if you try acupuncture and it doesn't help you, or if you try salt therapy and it doesn't help you, because there are other things you can try. So what I can't do is sit here and say, oh yeah, take this pill, you'll be fine.

Speaker 1:

It doesn't, unfortunately, work that way, very similar to the whole marginal gains concept, isn't it? Keep trying lots and lots of little things and hopefully you will find something that actually improves for you, and I dare say it's also very like coming back to what we talked about with the diet, in that there is no one solution that fixes it for everyone. Matt, it's been absolutely brilliant chatting to you. Thank you so much for the books that you write. I know I've loved listening to them and have been inspired by them. There's just so much great information in there, as well as amazing stories. Thank you so much. I look forward to dying to run coming out and I'll definitely be consuming that, but yeah, in the meantime, I wish you the best with your recovery and your training for your 100 kilometer thank you so much.

Speaker 3:

I really enjoyed talking to you.

Speaker 1:

So what did you make of the matt fitzgerald episode, claire?

Speaker 2:

that was fantastic. It was obviously a delight for me to listen to from a nutrition perspective, so we'll dive into that in a second. But yeah, tell me a little bit about your thoughts, because I know there were lots of questions that you specifically had for him I'm going to come back to the nutrition piece because I love what he talks about with nutrition and I love iron war.

Speaker 1:

I think the Iron War story is just so inspiring and hearing his perspective on that story is absolutely brilliant. But I think his point of the fact that there is no other real story like that, so he's never written another book like that, because he's never found another story that's as good as that. That was really brilliant. I really liked his debunking of diets and the diet cult. So what was it about the nutrition element that you particularly liked?

Speaker 2:

I've read a number of his books actually, and my background as a clinical dietitian and high-performance nutritionist I think there are so many things in the media, there's so much noise around nutrition and in his books he talks a lot of sense and I love the way that he's talking about science and referencing things and actually so when we spoke to him, it was an absolute delight to listen to him talking about simple things around nutrition. For me, listening to him talk about nutrition in a way that you can include anything in your diet, but actually it is about having a balance and natural foods, and so that for me was fantastic for him still, this many years on after writing those books, to be saying you know to be repeating the same thing. So that for me was fantastic and in line with, certainly, how I work with clients and I know there was a lot that he spoke about in terms of also the mental resilience side and the bit around pain. His new book.

Speaker 1:

Pain and Performance.

Speaker 2:

Pain and Performance, and performance, there we go.

Speaker 1:

It says it in the title one other thing that I must say is those dream run camps sound brilliant. His experience of when he ran the chicago marathon and got to be trained as a pro for 13 weeks is brilliant, and that run camp just sounds like our way of ever getting that opportunity at some point. So I think that we've got to add another thing to the bucket list we've've got to have a whole year Charlie longer to do all these challenges. I think we need a decade. I think I need a gap decade.

Speaker 2:

It was fantastic to speak to him and I think certainly, yeah, from my background, it was great to hear the passion and also the message that comes across. And also he's got such a diverse background, hasn't he, in terms of his athletic training background and obviously his nutrition background as well. It was fantastic to speak to him.

Speaker 1:

One final thing as somebody that's written four books and understands what it takes to write a book, for him to have written 35 books, jesus, that's an endurance effort in itself. That is absolutely astonishing and loads to take away from that. So I'm sure the listeners got loads out of it and for all of you out there, keep on training.

Speaker 2:

So I promised at the beginning that I would give you something to be able to decode your own diet quality, and if you click on the link below, there is a download called the Pyramid of Health and you can track your own diet to see what kind of quality your own diet produces.

Speaker 1:

If you want us to keep getting amazing guests onto the Business of Endurance podcast. We don't ask for you to pay for us. We don't ask for patronage. All we ask for is that you subscribe to the podcast, ideally on Apple. Give us a five-star rating because it shows us you care and, if you've got time, leave us a comment. One word is fine, something like inspiring or amazing or something like that, but we really do appreciate it and it will help us to continue to deliver amazing guests on what we hope you find to be an amazing podcast. Thanks very much. Jeff and Chloe from Big Moose Charity, we featured in episode one of season seven, made such a great impact on the both of us, we decided to make them our charity sponsor for season seven, and it really touched me in the sense that I lost my brother-in-law to suicide in Wales and these guys are working their socks off to help prevent situations like that. So, claire, why did Jeff and Chloe really make an impact on you?

Speaker 2:

Coming from a background in clinical nutrition and working in mental health, to me also it hit a spot in terms of the charity and how they are building therapy to help support people with mental health difficulties, and they've saved over 50 lives now and already met their first target of a million and their new target, 15 million, that they're trying to get to.

Speaker 1:

It's absolutely incredible and 15 million is a huge target they've set themselves, but they're speeding up help that people in desperately in need get, and this help is needed more than ever. I know how problematic mental health issues are in today's world. So if you think you can help Big Moose Charity and they're particularly looking for corporate partners to help them raise that 15 million, if you think you can help them or link them into a company that can help them, the best place to go to is bigmoosecharityco, or you can find them on instagram as bigmoosecharity, or you can even email jeff at jeff at bigmooseco.