Podcast Topics: What are your questions:

General
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We’re busy preparing for our next round of podcasts. Here are the topics: What are your questions?

  1. We’re interviewing Ashley Eckerman, a sports psychologist about mental performance. We’ll talk about what we can do to improve our mental skills.
  2. Race Day Anxiety. How do we deal with the nerves of the race, especially our A race.
  3. We’re interviewing Mikki Williden (our first repeat guest) to talk specifically about the constrained energy model, a theory proposed by Herman Pontzer in the book Burn which says humans have adapted to only being able to burn a certain number of calories, regardless of activity. We’ll get into how we should be fueling our training and racing to get the calories we need to be successful.
  4. We’ll dig into the science behind the Athletica 30/30 workout and why we do it instead of 4x4s or 5x5s.

What are your questions? What do you want to know? This is a great chance for you to get your questions into the discussion! Thank you in advance.

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Re 3:

  • discussing these ideas by Pontzer and others sounds really cool. Hope to learn how my body can be convinced to better loose weight (without loosing muscle:-o) :wink:

Re 4:

  • What are the differences of 30/30, 30/15, 40/20?
  • How should we decide on repeats per set vs. number of sets? Or, maybe, what’s the points and tradeoffs to consider here?

One other topic I would really be interested in is the discussion of tapering for different events, esp. with respect to adjusting tapering for multi-stage/multi-day events, where often the first stages are not the most important, but create a lot of load already…

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Good questions! I’ll add them to the episode. And good idea on tapering.

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These may or may not fit into the upcoming podcasts, but a few ideas and topics that I’d find interesting:

The Stoic mindset and controlling what we can control and gratitude etc., whether in #1 or #2 or both or a separate episode. Maybe see about having a Stoic guest? William B. Irvine is one I’d suggest.

Cross training, especially during the off-season, but also during, would be another great topic to dig deeper into. Mixing in boxing, rowing, skiing, even pickleball and golf, and how Athletica can or will translate the impact into load and into our plan. Flexibility to do other things for the mental and physical break…

A beginner session, and/or how to help your beginner friend/partner/family member start with Athletica. FAQs, frequented stumbling blocks and shortcuts around them to get the most out of Athletica quickly, what to do if they don’t have a power meter for example, how to help them with “feel” when they don’ have feel yet, warnings to help them not overtrain by blindly doing the plan w/o that feel, and milestones to look forward to.

Thanks for all you do!

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Thanks, Kimber! We’ll add these to the topics!

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1. Psychology

Some things from ultra cycling

We accept that every event will have low points. We also know that if we can just keep going, however slow that is, things will improve. During low moments we reduce our horizons to maybe the next hill, the next 10 minutes, the next food opportunity. But we keep moving.

Never quit at night. Never quit before you have eaten, rested or slept some. If you’ve done that and still thinking of quitting, just try turning the pedals and see how that goes. Your thoughts of quitting will evaporate or solidify but you’ll know you’re making the right decision. Most often they evaporate.

The distances and durations are so great, that the challenge would overwhelm you if you thought about what was still ahead of you. Take care of the here and now, and be present in the moment.

If you can’t eat, you can go a very very long way without, whilst your stomach recovers.

Be interested to hear what he has to say on the subject.

  1. Constrained energy model

I have a friend who attempted to beat the annual cycling mileage record for 3 years in a row. He was cycling for 16 hours a day for over 1000 days. Annual cycling mileages over 70,000 miles.

Then Mark Beaumont’s world record of cycling round the world in 78 days

On the subject of fuelling a recent study found that in a sample of ultra runners they were all capable of hitting 1g/min fatty acid oxidation despite none of them following a low carb diet. The authors speculated that a major reason was back to back long runs (at least 3 hours) and a frequent state of low muscle glycogen led to adaption to up regulate fat oxidation. Some of them were over 1.5g/ min. Anecdotally I think we have the same capabilities in ultra cycling.

I think ultra endurance has much to teach, but has hardly been studied.

I’d be interested to hear your guest’s perspective on such feats and capabilities in ultra enduranc

30 / 30s

If my heart rate is not getting over 90% of max by the end of a set of 30/30s should I try higher power in on intervals, higher power in off intervals, something else. Is fish breathing out of water what we are aiming for?