Episode Transcript
Zach Bitter: So these are all things where I think by looking at those failures as not just failures, but lessons, if I can go to that and say, okay, I made a mistake there. It's a mistake where if I could go back, I would like to correct that. I can't do that. So the next best thing is to take that lesson, learn from it, apply it to a future event so that when I get in that situation again, it won't happen the way it did. And now I know that. I've convinced myself I've ran through the process of reflecting and analyzing things that were actual problems versus perceived problems and just fine-tuned it a little bit more. And all of those end up, I think, providing the right process and the right tools to get that race where you feel like you kinda did everything right or push past those few levels you had before, like I was talking about before. And then when you have that, all of a sudden, all those previous failures don't feel like failures as much as they just feel like stepping stones or lessons. And I've been fortunate enough to be able to, I guess, process it that way enough times where now that to me is the norm, that's the process. So my default is, okay, something went wrong. Where's the lesson here? I need to find that out. There's some value in this failed attempt even though on paper it may not look like it right now. Therefore, if I can find that, that's gonna be a gem that I can use. And once you can make that kind of your default mindset, it comes a lot easier. I'm Zach Bitter, and this is the Tom Rowland Podcast.
Tom Rowland: What's going on, everybody? Welcome to the podcast today. We got a guy on the podcast today that I've been wanting to get on for a long time. He is an ultra marathon runner. His name is Zach Bitter. He holds the American record and the world record for 100 miles. 100 miles. Running 100 miles. It's one thing to be able to run 100 miles, just to cover the distance successfully, but Zach has been able to do it faster than anyone else in the world, and that is eleven hours and nineteen minutes. I find that to be absolutely incredible. That's a six-forty-seven pace, I think. And, you know, that's faster than most people can run a single mile, and he did it for 100 of them consecutively. Zach is a cool guy. I hooked up with Zach through our mutual sponsor, Buff, that makes a great face mask that we wear in the Keys when we're fishing, arm sleeves, so many awesome products. And Zach wears the same products as well, and he does it in the running world. And, anyway, what a fascinating conversation that I had with him just about mindset, about where his mind goes when he's on these long runs, training, nutrition. He has a different nutrition philosophy than a lot of runners. And, man, just a really, really interesting guy. A lot of comparisons actually to fishing, to other sports, and how you can apply the lessons that he's learned through ultra marathoning to your own life, to your own nutrition, to anything. It's a very cool conversation. Really happy to have Zach Bitter on the podcast, and here we go. Alright, Zach, I'm glad you're here, man.
Zach Bitter: Thank you. Yeah, thanks a bunch for having me on, Tom.
Tom Rowland: Well, I gotta say I'm a big fan. I've been listening to you on a lot of other podcasts, and I'm just fascinated with what you've been able to do. I think that it's amazing. I have just enough running experience to understand the difficulty of what you're taking on and what you do and what you've accomplished. And I ran a marathon, or several marathons, and I've done a lot of twenty-mile runs and stuff like that, but nothing like you. I mean, you've set the world record and the American record for 100 miles. You did that on a treadmill as well as a track. I mean, my gosh, that is amazing. What, how did you get started in this endeavor? I saw that it was like 2010 or something when you started ultra racing.
Zach Bitter: Yeah, it was kind of interesting. I'd been a big fan of endurance for a few years at that point. I ran in high school and college and took running pretty seriously once I got to be a college athlete, and just kind of learned a lot more about the sport. And I found myself just kind of looking around on the internet for a race to train for in 2010. And when I went in, I was thinking probably I'd find a marathon. I didn't even know ultra marathon existed in Wisconsin where I was living at the time. And I stumbled upon this event in just kind of the southeast part of the state that was maybe a little over an hour from my house at the time. So I was like, oh wow, 50-miler. Maybe I'll just give it a shot. And I had read Dean Karnazes' book and stuff like that, so I knew ultras were out there. I just didn't realize there were any in Wisconsin, and I didn't realize that there'd be one sitting in front of me on a computer screen that I could potentially sign up for that year. But for whatever reason, I thought, okay, I'll just give it a shot, see what happens. And if I don't like it, I don't have to do one again, or if I feel like I'm not ready to kinda take on ultras yet, I can just push it down the road and maybe do them when I'm in my thirties or something like that. And I went there, did that race. I actually won it. So that was pretty reinforcing, I would say. And that kinda got me hooked, got me interested. Then after I did that race, I was pretty certain I was gonna start doing more ultra marathons sooner than I had originally planned or ever thought I would. But that was where I originally got hooked.
Tom Rowland: I think it's interesting that you just kind of looked for this extra challenge. What distances were you training for and competing when you were in college?
Zach Bitter: Yeah, in college it was basically a 5K to 10K spread for the most part. Our cross country teams would run 8K for the most part. And then when we'd get around to track in the second half of the year, I was mostly a 5K, 10K guy. We'd do a 3K every once in a while just as a workout, but I wasn't gonna do anything too incredible at that distance. So, yeah, it was a shorter end of endurance, as it is in most collegiate experiences, I think, unless you're like NAIA where I think they do the marathon in some of their national championships. But, yeah, it was that. And then after college, I started getting into some longer stuff, but more out of just interest. I was more or less sick of speed work for a little bit there after doing that basically throughout the collegiate experience. And the workout that I always looked forward to was the long run. So I started just basically doing a lot of long runs, and that led me into doing a few marathons just off of what I guess you'd consider kind of like base training. And then I did a few that I trained a little more specifically for. I still would have liked to have maybe done a more detailed higher-end training block preparing for a marathon, but ultimately, by the time I got around to reintroducing meaningful speed work into my training again, I was basically in the context of doing the things that I think prepare you for some of the longer, slow stuff that you end up doing on the day of an ultra marathon. And that's kinda where I've been focusing most of my energy since then.
Tom Rowland: That was one of the questions I had for you. You see all the different training that you're doing. You got this transatlantic thing that you're getting ready to train up for, and you've been pretty descriptive on a lot of the podcasts, like Mark Bell's podcast. I really enjoyed that. That was really good. But you were talking about all the different types of training that you do, and you're pretty scientific with your training and what you're doing. And you've obviously learned a ton about diet and nutrition and everything. But one of the things I was gonna ask you was, which one of the workouts do you look at and kind of dread or cringe when you see that coming up? Because some people would be like, well, obviously that's gonna be the 40-mile run, but I don't know if that's what it is for you. It sounds like maybe, I don't know, you said the speed work was you were kinda getting tired of that. What is that for you?
Zach Bitter: Yeah, no, that's a great question. It's funny because I've trained a few different kinds of strategies over the years, and the one that I've probably done the most of the last few years is a setup where you categorize the different intensities that you're planning on focusing on, and you really fine-tune them, and then you're going to move from one to the next. So you're going least specific to most specific. So for like ultra marathon, that would mean short interval stuff kind of earlier in the season, longer intervals, tempo runs near the middle. And then as you're spending that last four to six weeks before you taper, you're just putting a lot of your energy into a long-run development, race-specific intensities, the things that you're going to use most directly on the day of the event. So I always find when I do that cycle, it's by the time I get to the end of one particular intensity that I start kind of thinking, nah, this is the one I hate the most. And then you get excited about starting the other one. But generally speaking, it's been when I just blend the stuff, when I do a more traditional buildup where you're doing short intervals one day, tempo run or long intervals another day, and then a long run on the weekend or something like that. In those contexts, it's usually the short intervals I dread the most. They do offer an interesting payout afterwards, I would say. They're always the ones which you're just like, you get a little more anxiety heading out for it, and you're always in the back of your mind thinking, oh, well, maybe I shouldn't do this today, looking for excuses just to bail out on it. And then you do it, and you're just like, oh man, I'm really glad I did that one. So I do really value that kind of delayed reward, I guess, with those, even though they are maybe some of the ones I look forward to the least. Whereas with the long runs, I more or less look forward to those for the most part, unless I'm really getting a little too fatigued from training or doing a little too much of them, in which case then you start kinda losing a little bit of the interest there.
Tom Rowland: Yeah. One of the things you talked about on Mark Bell's podcast too was, it was interesting because he does such a good job on his podcast of taking people from other sports and bringing them in and kind of comparing not just mindset, but training strategies and different things. And they made some good correlations between, like, even power lifting and what you're doing. And one of the things you guys were talking about was just kinda shaking it up a little bit and doing something different, and maybe you get to a point where you're tired of something or you've lost the fire, for maybe it was like what you were doing in college, that 5K kind of distance and all the training that goes into that. And then you start into something else, and it launches you into this new thing. It reinvigorates you about the sport, even though it's almost like a different sport. Like the requirements that you have to have for running 100 miles versus running a 5K really fast, it's almost like two different sports, really. And the same thing happens in fishing. That's where we got introduced through our mutual sponsor, Buff, which is interesting. I wanna talk to you about what you do with them, but that's how I got to meet you and everything is through them. And my sport is fishing, really, and very competitive fishing in the state of Florida, and it can be very physical, pushing a boat with a stick into the wind all day. So that's my interest in fitness, is how it benefits me in my career, and that started with running. But even in fishing, where you're doing something like tarpon fishing for this one particular species every single day for hundreds of days in a row, you get kinda tired of it. And you're like, man, if I could just break away from this and do something else for a little bit. And you go and you try a different species, and it reinvigorates you about this whole thing, and you start learning more, and you start being more creative and inventive. And it just kind of takes you down a different path sometimes, or you get a new boat that does something different. And it sounds kinda like that's what happened to you with this opportunity of trying to seek out this longer distance. And it was kind of interesting how you guys were talking about that, but did you think that you would have had the longevity in the sport if you hadn't kind of tried some of these longer distances?
Zach Bitter: Yeah, it's a good question, and I love the comparison too, because I think that's probably the reality for anything that you put enough focus into where you have the mindset of knowing all the ins and outs and what's actually available where. You know, running, people often probably think running is what it is, whether you're doing a 5K or a 100 mile or 24-hour or whatever it happens to be. Or you'd think fishing is fishing, but you could be doing river fishing with waders, or you could be on a boat out on the lake, you could be on the ocean, all that stuff. So, yeah, I think part of the reason why I've been able to stay excited with the sport is that range of diversity, where my high school experience was quite a bit different than my collegiate experience, even though the distances weren't that different. Then my post-collegiate experience was quite a bit different than my collegiate experience. So there's always been these different chapters that have allowed me to kind of reenergize myself. And then the career in running that has lasted the longest for me so far has been my ultra-running one, and that one tends to be the most diverse in the sense that there's just such a range of different events you can do. And even if you just look at terrain, you can do these on a track, you can do them on a road, you can do them on trail, mountain. And then when you get out onto the trail side of things, it's just a wide range of different types of trails. So there's that, and that's just the terrain. Then you look at distance, where 50K, 100 mile, everything you can kind of throw at it is there and available for you. So I really was probably fortunate that when I first did my first ultra, it was when the sport was kind of heading on another really big uptick. So the popularity of ultra-marathon running has just grown exponentially since I started. And that has opened up a lot more opportunities in terms of the different types of racing to do and things like that. So what I find is I'll pick races that I like the most, types of things I like to do the most, and those will usually be included in my racing and preparation on a yearly basis. But often, if it's getting close to a couple of years of focusing on a specific type of racing, I need to kinda take a break and step back and say, hey, I'm gonna train for something that's different enough from what I've been doing so that when I start the process, there's a much wider gap between where I'm at and where I need to be. So I have a greater return on that kind of incentive of the day-to-day of seeing improvements being developed and just kind of removing some of the small things that dull out on you as you do things over and over again. My best example of that was in 2019, when I stopped for about a full season preparing for these flat, runnable 100-milers and trained for the San Diego Hundred, which is more trail, technical, rocky-type terrain, and just kinda put my focus on that. And that introduced a lot of different training environments. Some of the workout intensities were very similar, but they were in different areas. And running hard uphill is gonna be different than running fast on flat ground. It opened up a different set of routes that I hadn't been doing as frequently. So now there's that fresh set of training areas, and I don't have to be like, what route am I going to do today? So that's always kind of exciting. And then I definitely underestimated how much of an impact that would have on the refresh of my mind. So then later that year, when I finished that race, recovered from it, decided to build up for some more runnable stuff later that year, I was really surprised when I started doing those workouts again. It was like, oh, this is really cool, this feels like I'm kind of doing it for the first time again. And you see your old fitness catch back up on that particular environment, and you just remove yourself from it long enough where you start to miss it and crave it a bit. So I think if you get curious enough to try a lot of different things, you can even do this within the same, and we can probably look at it as there's the environment. So the terrain you're gonna race in is one lever you can pull to add some variance.
Tom Rowland: Yeah.
Zach Bitter: But then the way you prepare, I don't necessarily think there's one perfect way to train for an ultra marathon. I think there's probably, quote-unquote, perfect ways for individuals to prepare, but ultimately that's going to be different from one person to the next. And there's also a lot of iterations of different types of workouts that you can do that are going to essentially get you the same thing from a physiological standpoint. So at that point, if you're just going to roll out the same twelve to fifteen workouts every training block after training block, you do have to ask yourself, am I gonna actually maximize what I'm gonna get out of this workout if I'm even a few percentage points less motivated than I would be if I just add a little more spice and flavor to this workout, where I'm gonna get excited about it and give that extra two percent because it's different, it's new. And that's where I think it gets kind of interesting when I'm coaching others, as well as kind of just trying to get myself worked up to do specific things and get ready for races.
Tom Rowland: Yeah. There's certainly a big difference between trying to set a world record, or trying to do something on your level, and then someone else trying to just maintain fitness. But a lot of the same things apply. Like, when you get bored just trying to go to the gym and get a workout in, you get bored, and it's easy to skip, and then you kinda backslide, and then next thing you know, you hadn't been there in a long time. Whereas if you can keep it kind of interesting to you in some way or another, either seeing improvement, noticeable improvement, or something that's shaking it up a little bit, I'm sure it does make a giant difference in someone's ability to maintain that. But when did you want to excel at the sport at the highest level? Like, you had it in mind that you might want to try for a world record, and then that led you to the type of flat, runnable stuff that you were doing. Is that what was the evolution there, to finding this flat, runnable, and that's where your sweet spot was?
Zach Bitter: Yeah, that's kind of another funny thing. Kind of similar to when I did my first ultra marathon, where I wasn't even really aware that those existed in the state of Wisconsin, I was equally as unaware that there were track ultras and road-race-type stuff. I think I probably had seen some and was semi-aware, at least on the road side of it, but my mindset at the time was just basically this is mostly a trail sport. And that side of the sport has certainly grown a lot, so there was a lot more opportunities to do those types of events when I first got into it. So when I did my first 50-miler, it was a 50-mile trail run. Then the next one I did was that same race the following year. I did a flat, runnable 50-miler later that year. I kinda got a little bit of an idea of, oh, okay, this type of terrain is much more similar to what I'm training on, so maybe I should skew a little more towards that. But I hadn't gotten around to really hunting down opportunities within that until around 2013, where I did some 50-milers that were more road-based, but even the road-based ones had a fair bit of elevation. They weren't like marathon-race-course flat, where, you know, I think that's the funny thing. I think when you get into the road-running circuit at the Olympic distance, a lot of it is people avoiding hilly courses. If it's a hilly course, it's gotta have some sort of other draw to it, because you're gonna miss the people who are going for their PR if you put a bunch of different variables in there that slow you down. Maybe like—
Tom Rowland: The Big Sur marathon, that's supposed to be the most beautiful marathon or something like that, that somebody would choose to do just for the experience rather than, I think I can run my fastest marathon ever here, which would be maybe like Disney. I mean, that one was super flat. That was one that I ran, the Disney. Yeah, it's flat as a pancake. It's Orlando, there's no elevation change there.
Zach Bitter: You get an overpass here and there, but other than that it's flat. Yeah, so I did what I would consider my first pancake-flat ultra in 2013, in Chicago. It was a Chicago Lakefront 50-miler, and it was basically, you would go 10 kilometers out and 10 kilometers back for about twelve and a half miles, and then you essentially did that four times. And I remember running it thinking, wow, it felt like I had just everything click on a slightly different level. Just like I had one more gear, essentially, and that's where I kinda made the connection. I think how much of a different specificity of the environment you prepare in, when it's that similar on race day, you can kinda pull yourself forward a little bit further. So I lucked out at that point, where that race result was just good enough that the race directors for Aravaipa at the time, Jamil and Nick Corry, who put on this event every December called the Desert Solstice Track Invitational — basically it's an invite-only event, and they bring in folks to try to chase age-group records, world records, American records, from basically 50 kilometers all the way up to twenty-four hours. And Nick had reached out to me after that and said, hey, we saw your time at the Chicago Lakefront, we think it'd be cool for you to try going for whatever it is you wanna go for at Desert Solstice. I think they may have mentioned the 100 mile might be an interesting one to try out, since I had only finished one 100-miler at that point. They probably were thinking the twenty-four-hour might be a stretch for me quite at this point, and they would have been right. So I'm glad that they did offer the 100 mile up to me first. And, yeah, so I went there thinking — I had just run five hours and twelve minutes for 50 miles, and the American record had just gotten set, like a month earlier, by a guy named John Olsen. He had been the first American to break twelve hours in a 100 miles, ran eleven fifty-nine and some change. And I remember thinking, well, if I can do fifty in five-twelve, I could slow down to five-forty-five for the first 50 miles and still have wiggle room. So then if I even run, like, six-ten for the second 50 miles, now I'll be under it. So I thought that's a reasonable goal, and whether that was naivety or not is anyone's guess. But I went there with that goal or that expectation on myself, and I paced myself accordingly with that strategy. And that's where I kind of, probably had a race that was recognized a little more nationally, versus just, like, oh, cool, my friends and family and some of the people in the general region were aware of who I was and what I was doing. Now people are kind of interested in this kid from Wisconsin who ran eleven hours and forty-seven minutes on this track out in Arizona. And that got me really interested in that particular aspect of the sport of ultra marathon. And I decided kind of after that event that I wanted to make that part of my training and racing over my career, was just to see how fast I could run 100 miles in these really controlled environments, where you really know it's just you and what mistakes you make or don't make and how you kinda plan that. And you just remove a lot of the obstacles, and that introduces new challenges as well as it gets you to the finish line quicker. Doesn't necessarily make it easier, but it makes it a little more, I think, comparable from one year to the next, or one generation to the next, when you can kinda control other variables, because then it's less about, oh, well, I ran this time on this course, but it was twenty degrees cooler, so technically the guy I ran ten minutes faster than probably had a better race. There's a lot less of that. And I thought that was kind of interesting.
Tom Rowland: So there was a period of time there where you saw the light. You were like, I think I can — if that's the record, I think I can beat that. What was that like when you really identified that? And then what steps do you do to be like, well, I would have to knock off, you know, whatever, how many minutes? Twenty, thirty minutes over the 100 miles to beat this record. And then what do you do from there? That's what I was thinking about with your story. And, one other thing before you answer that, just to let people know what we're talking about and how difficult this is — I ran, I tried to qualify for Boston. I ran a three-hour-and-thirteen-minute marathon at Disney, and I missed it by three minutes. So the Boston qualifying time is kind of a benchmark. I mean, it's a good benchmark. If you can qualify for Boston, you're doing pretty good, that's a pretty good marathon. So for me, that was seven minutes and fifteen seconds, I think, is a three-hour-and-thirteen-minute, or maybe a couple seconds more. If I had run seven-fifteen, I might have made it. So you're running 100 miles in eleven hours and nineteen minutes as your best record. Is that right? That is, like, what, six-thirty-five per mile?
Zach Bitter: Six-forty-seven and a half.
Tom Rowland: Six-forty-seven. So you're running 100 miles every single mile faster than I was able to run 26 miles, and faster than most people can run a single mile. That is unbelievable. And obviously it's unbelievable, it's a world record. But just to set the expectation, it's not just about covering 100 miles. What Zach is doing is doing it at a pace that is really incredibly impressive, I think. Well, obviously impressive, it's a world record, but to keep that up is incredible. So to get back to what I asked you before, when you saw the light that you thought this was possible, where do you go from there?
Zach Bitter: Yeah, so I would say breaking the American record in 100 miles, and then I actually broke the twelve-hour world record that day, which I wasn't even aware of going into that event. I didn't know there was a twelve-hour world record. They told me that at mile 90. And that was an interesting experience too, because I had this shift in mindset then, as to, oh, I've got kind of tandem goals going here, and that really helped me speed up in those final miles. But after that, after running eleven-forty-seven, I was aware of the world record for 100 miles going into the race. I didn't necessarily think that was something I would be realistically able to target at the time, so I didn't. But after running eleven-forty-seven, I was like, okay, well that's the next step, right? That's the next one, is how do I find a way to shave nineteen minutes off how I did. And I was trying to remember how old I was at the time, it would have been twenty-six, twenty-seven. So I was young enough that I was just thinking to myself, it was the first track ultra I've done, surely I could take nineteen minutes off of 100 miles with a little bit more training, just knowing what I'm getting into. I had taken a few swings at it. So in my mind at that point, it was like, well, I'm going under — and actually it was 11:28 that was the world record at the time. So I was thinking to myself, I'll probably try to break this in 2014, 2015 at the latest. As oftentimes plays out, I think you learn there's a little more to it than that, and you do have to have things lined up to have a really good day. And when you start getting down into the eleven-hour range for 100 miles and dipping under seven-minute pace, there's a little thing that goes wrong that can be the difference between running under what the 11:28 was or running a good race but not quite that fast. So I had a few failed attempts along the way. I won in 2014, actually up at an indoor track in Alaska, where I think I was about as fit and ready to run close to 11:19 as I was in 2019, and just had a whole bunch of digestive issues. So I stopped, I think, like 17 times over the course of the majority of the race, but they were mostly congested near the end of the race. So I had tons of non-moving time, which is the big variable to try to control for. When I've had good races, it's usually been between not stopping at all, or at most about five minutes, and if I can keep it in that tight margin, those are usually the races where I'm able to get a good chunk underneath twelve hours. So just having a race where you kind of have everything play out well, where you're not stopping, everything's going smoothly, nutrition's going in great, and your consistency is something that proved to be a little more difficult than I maybe anticipated after that first really positive experience. But ultimately it put me in a position to learn a lot along the way. I think every race I did where I didn't break the world record had some value-add. Some of them were really good races. In 2015, I ran 11:40 and broke my American record, but I had been on world-record pace all day through 80 miles and kinda had it fall apart a little bit at the end. And, you know, that was very much an experience that I carried into the races I did in the future, where it was kind of this point of interest where I gotta get to that mark at 80 and fix that mistake I made, or remedy what I did wrong there. And that became kind of an interesting drive for me, to figure out what do I have to do to make that last 20 miles a different experience than it was. And, you know, what causes that? Is it pacing? Is it nutrition? Is it just different training strategy? There's the interesting thing about ultra marathon — I think we've learned a lot over the last ten years as to what is gonna move the needle on your performance, but they tend to be very big, moving things, so there's a lot of wiggle room within them. So there is a lot of questions that are still semi-unanswerable, and that is what I think is really exciting about the sport, because that puts you in a position where you do have to probably spend a little more time working on yourself at the individual level, versus some of these more researched, finely tuned sports and disciplines, where when you look at the data and the science behind it, it's like, if you really wanna be the best or be great, this is probably the pathway forward, and you need to find a way to make that pathway work. And if you don't, you'll probably get weeded out. Whereas with ultra marathon, I think we're narrowing that path a little bit, but I still think it's quite wide in terms of the different strategies that can be used at the individual level, to get someone to their best based on what we currently know, which is really exciting to be a part of.
Tom Rowland: Well, it's a pretty interesting time. It almost seems like the sport — I wouldn't call it in its infancy, but maybe it's a teenager or something, compared to some of these other sports, like swimming, or even something like wrestling, one of the oldest sports in the world, one of the first Olympic sports, or football, a big-money sport that's studied inside and out over and over. And this sport, there's certainly not the money that there is in golf, or one of these giant sports, baseball or football. And so the other thing that's interesting about this is, you had a mistake at mile 80, so in order to learn from that and then apply what you've learned over this period of time that you train for it, and then go back and repeat that, now you gotta run 80 miles to get to that same spot to see if all this stuff worked. Unlike a football player who fumbles the snap or the handoff or something like that, and they can go rep after rep after rep and get that done, or like a CrossFitter can try these little five-minute workouts, or a ten-minute workout, or maybe a really long workout, like forty minutes, they can do that multiple times. But to get back to that 80-mile spot, that is — I don't know, it's super interesting to me, because so much of what I enjoy about exercise and these endurance pursuits is not necessarily about the physical, but it's more about the mental game that goes into it, and the mental-physical game, like how your mind affects your body and how your body affects your mind. And I would think that in your pursuit — that's one of the reasons why I was so interested in talking to you — because in what you do, it seems like that is everything. It would seem to me that the mental aspect of what you do is not that much different than other sports, it's just over such a longer time, and there's so many more things that have a chance to go wrong, like one of your splits on one of those laps is really slow, and then where do you — and you're like, oh, I'll never make it like this. How do you deal with all that? I mean, you're dealing with that for eleven hours. Other people are dealing with that for thirty seconds, or five minutes, or a forty-five-minute game, or a three-hour marathon. You're dealing with that for eleven hours. What is the internal monologue like on your training runs, on your races? Where do you go in your mind?
Zach Bitter: Yeah, it's really interesting, because I think with the shorter endurance events, you have this kind of almost sharper pain, or more laser focus that you can get away with, because you won't exhaust your mental strength over the course of fifteen minutes, or whatever the race distance is gonna take you, from a time standpoint. So it's more like, if something happens, you just make a decision and you go boom boom boom, and it's all fast, and then by the time you — you don't really have time to process any of it until afterward. Whereas when you're doing 100 miles, it's so slow relative to the other distances, that if you make a mistake, or something happens that you weren't expecting, or even if something happens that you are expecting, will happen and you just don't know when it might come up, you have plenty of mental energy, and it's slow enough, and things are coming at you slow enough where you can process it right then and there and kind of weigh the pros and cons and really get into this kind of mental, psychological battle with yourself. So the way I look at it is, everything that happens, you can look at positively or negatively, or at the very least, neutrally. And how you start directing that in your mind is gonna determine kind of how steady and steadfast you're able to be throughout the course of a race. So to me, it's not really a question of if something's gonna happen that I didn't plan for, or that I didn't expect, or didn't know when it would happen, in a 100 mile. It's just a question of when is that gonna happen and how am I gonna respond to it. So it gets difficult to practice that when we're talking about spots in the race where we're 80 miles in, because for a 100-mile flat, runnable race, or maybe I should say a race that's gonna be around twelve hours, I'm probably not gonna do long runs that are gonna stretch much past, say, three, four, maybe five hours. It gets interesting when you get out on the trails, the mountains — I think you can do longer long runs from a time standpoint, because the impact's a little different. When you're training for a flat course, like a flat track, the time that you can spend doing a long run, I think, comes down a little bit, because you're doing the exact same mechanical movement over and over again, and you have much higher risk of hurting or aggravating something, because you're kinda hyper-focusing a lot more on certain areas that are gonna take the brunt of that load from that particular mechanic. So I might do some back-to-back three-to-four-hour runs, but ultimately I'm getting nowhere near 80 miles or nine to ten hours in my training. And I have to find a way to practice that kind of battle that's gonna go on in my mind between the positives and the negatives in training. And the best way I found to do that is, once I get into the point of training — it's usually about four to six weeks out from the race, or the taper for the race — I'll start building up my long runs, where maybe I'm doing a Saturday-Sunday combo of, you know, 30 to 35 miles on both days. I'm at a point there where, especially on that second run, there's probably enough residual fatigue from the training load of the week, or the previous weeks, where it's gonna be a little more difficult to kind of get motivated and get up to running. And then, in theory, you can maybe get the physical and mental drainage that you'd experience 70 miles or 80 miles into a 100 mile, and just try to replicate it. And I just started to use those experiences a little more strategically, by putting myself in a position where I'm gonna pretend for this entire run, I'm going 30 miles, I'm starting at 70. I'm gonna pretend this whole time. I'm just gonna visualize when mile one clicks off, it's like I hit 71. When mile two clicks off, it's like I hit 72. And I'm gonna process it the way I would there. And that gave me an opportunity, I think, to do a lot more trials, dress rehearsals leading into the race. So then when I get to that point in the race, it's less about me reflecting back to last year when I did this, or six months ago when I did this. How do I respond? It just gives you a little bit of a chance, I think, to also have some experience with that back-and-forth in your mind, and just develop kind of a list of different strategies to try to skew your mind positive versus negative. Because I think that's the big part on the races where I find myself being able to push past more lows and get myself as far as I can get. They're the ones where I'm much more precise and quick in redirecting negative stuff. And it gets tough, because you'd think it'd be like, oh, you see a negative thought coming in, recognize that's not good, redirect. And that is true, but it's so much different catching that and doing that with a 70-mile brain versus a zero-mile brain. So it's just a mental energy — think of your brain as like a fuel tank as well. Every time I have anxiety or nervousness, or I have to process a piece of information, I'm pulling a little bit from that. So 20 miles into a 100 mile, I've got this full-tank energy-wise, from a mental standpoint and a physical standpoint. So if I start having second guesses or doubts, it's pretty easy for me to rationalize why I shouldn't let that be a factor. I can easily say, well, look, I did this in training, I did that in training, I'm physically prepared for this, all the data points to I'm doing what I should be doing, therefore get focused, get back in track. Little harder to do that at 70 to 80. It just gets harder to dig those positive things out. But ultimately you have to, and the more you can practice it in training, I think the better you're able to do it in a race.
Tom Rowland: Yeah, no, absolutely. I'm just fascinated with what goes on in your head. I'm fascinated with what goes on in my head. It's a surprise all the time. Like, wow, I didn't expect those thoughts. And I feel great today, why is it that I'm looking at this workout and going, I don't really wanna do this? Why is it that one day you are just killing it and the other day you just really don't wanna do it? Or you just encounter these demons in your head of doubt, self-doubt and emotions. And I always just think that exercise and workouts and the whole thing is like a microcosm of your entire life, all just kind of put into whatever time domain it is, whether that's a twenty-minute workout or an eleven-hour workout, and you're experiencing almost your full range of emotions pretty much through everything. And then you can hit a flow state, and you're just like, yeah, I don't even really hardly remember mile 20 through 35, and then the next thing I know, everything's going great, and then something else happens, and it's like, boy, but 37, 38, 39 were really, really tough, and then I hit the flow state again. I don't know, I mean, I've never run that far, but I have done lots of other challenges that are twenty-four hours and different things like that, and there's periods in there where you're just cruising, man, and then there's times where at the end you're going faster than you were at the beginning, and it just has so much to do with your mind. And all of those things have taught me so much about not just how you can influence your body in a physical pursuit, but how you can influence your behavior, how you can influence your outcome, how you can influence your performance through the use of your mind. And the training, the exercise, the workouts are like training for life, and it just flows into there. And I find myself being able to handle other things outside of the workouts better through the lessons that I've learned, and I'm sure that you do the same, with directing these negative thoughts and what kind of challenges you're going through. And then how does that affect your regular life? How do you apply all these lessons that you learn in training and races to your regular life?
Zach Bitter: Yeah, I think one of the more interesting lessons that I've learned with ultra marathons, and specific to the 100-mile distance, is when you do have a race where you kinda push past previous blocks — where, for me, that 80-mile spot was one — and then when I did push past it, now I've kind of almost redefined what I'm capable of doing, which has obviously the payoff, that knowing I just ran a race I've never run before, I redefined what I'm capable of. I showed myself, and anyone who wanted to follow along, what my high end is at the moment, and that's higher than it was when I started this, which is obviously a cool achievement to have. But then it's also like this reminder that you were able to go this far, now you know you can, therefore now the expectation is that. So there's that side of it too, where I think in life we see that as well, where maybe it's just your career, where your expectations are at a certain level the first five years at your job, and then you get a promotion. And once you get that promotion, well, now if you just do what you did to get that promotion, it's not enough. The expectations are that you're gonna build on that, and you're gonna get to this next level, and you're gonna kinda keep progressing. So I think taking that to those types of situations, and then continuing to grow after them, are huge life lessons, because it just really shows you how far you can get at something you put your mind to and when you focus on it and really fine-tune it, how dialed in you can get. I use it all the time in my day-to-day life, especially when it comes to the planning of things, where if I set a goal for myself of where I want to be in a specific aspect of my life, whether it's coaching, podcasting, marketing for some of my sponsors and stuff like that, I need to find ways — well, this is where we wanna be at the end of this year, or in three years — and that's great, but what do I put in place along the way to both build incentives to keep it exciting and fresh enough to wanna get to that endpoint, but also give me progress checks along the way, to show that we are getting there at a rate in which we need to. And these are all lessons that I think I learned the first time through running, and then have been able to place that transparency of that process on top of other areas of life and look at them through that lens. And that's been a very important piece, and something where even if I never ran a race again, I would have that skill set or tool set that I developed from that, to be able to use in whatever I get excited about doing. And that's something I think will be a really big kind of life lesson.
Tom Rowland: Yeah. Let's talk about the races you said you had a couple of failed attempts. When you have these failed attempts, what's that like? Is it just an injury that you can't go on, or is it something in your head, or is it that you got just behind enough to where you think it's not gonna happen today, and we're better off waiting for another time? What tell me about a couple of those events and how they might have helped you eventually get to success.
Zach Bitter: Yeah, it's a good question. I think, in terms of failed attempts, those probably range from anything from an injury or something that could potentially become a bad injury, so you decide it's not worth it, because I'm probably not gonna hit my A goal with this aggravated area anyway. So do I really wanna put the rest of my season at jeopardy by pushing through it for a suboptimal performance, to a situation where maybe I expected one thing to happen from a weather standpoint, and then it ended up being different, and I tried to stick to the original plan, and that was a bad idea. So improper execution, leading me into a place where I get partway through and I hadn't done the right things to that point to actually have the best day I could given a set of circumstances, all the way to a mental lapse or mental weakness, where in the moment some of these other things are what you perceive or use as the excuse as to why things didn't go well. But then after you've given it a few days to sit down and reflect on it, you're like, you know what, in hindsight I think I was looking for an excuse, and that slight pain there was a great excuse, or the fact that it was ten degrees warmer than I expected was a bit of an excuse. And maybe I needed to bail out on my A goal, but the B goal was very much alive and I gave it up, and I didn't necessarily need to. So these are all things where I think by looking at those failures as not just failures, but lessons — if it's like a 100-miler, sometimes it just depends on what the failure was like. So if it's something where I was pretty big going in, and I just made a bad tactical decision that resulted in me dropping out early and not necessarily taking on the level of physical and mental deterioration that I would by doing an all-out 100-miler where I felt like I just ran myself dry, I might be able to just take a little bit of time off, less than a week, maybe even, and let everything catch up, and then repeat with an abbreviated buildup that could be even as soon as probably a month. And then there's the scenario where I have a race where I just nailed it, and that fatigue from the race itself, as well as the preparation I needed to do to get there, was enough that I was right up to a set of fitness that's just not gonna be sustainable to hold onto for very long, before you have to let it go, let your body and mind recover and build up again if you wanna be at your peak. So in a situation like that, I'm usually gonna take probably at least another four months before I do another race. And realistically, in order to get a consistently good result, you can — and I've done this plenty of times — where you do something a little sooner, and you just go in knowing it's gonna be a little bit more of a coin flip, because I don't know how much of my peak fitness I was able to hang onto, if it's a different event, how does it actually even translate, and all sorts of other things too. So that's where the sport gets a little bit interesting, I think, is there's just so many opportunities to do different races, and if you have a really good race, there's no shortage of other ones reaching out and saying, hey, you wanna check out this one? And it might be a really cool event, but if it's like, that's eight weeks after I just did this one, maybe I should pass on it this time around and focus on something that's four months down the road and really make sure I'm ready for it. And those are just things you kinda learn through trial and error a little bit, watching other people try to navigate those waters and see what's successful and what isn't, and kind of having a conversation with yourself about what you're maybe capable of, from a physical standpoint versus others, where your strengths and weaknesses are, and what you can maybe get away with or can't get away with.
Tom Rowland: Yeah. So one of the things we haven't even discussed is also your diet, which I know that you're very vocal about. You talk about it a lot, because really for so long, marathon runners and people who ran a lot would follow this ultra-high-carbohydrate diet, which you don't choose to do. And when we first talked earlier, you were saying that you had gastrointestinal issues on a couple of your races, where you had a lot of non-moving time. That happened to me in my race too. I believe that's why I finished three minutes slower than I did, and I look back at that, and I'm like, man, could that have just been something nutritionally? I mean, I never thought that eating a bag full of bagels before the race was a good idea, even though that's what every running magazine said at the time — you cannot get too much, you need to carbo-load the night before and then everything right up to the race. And I'm like, this isn't the way that I would normally eat, why would I do this now? And I try to pay a lot of attention to the diet as well, because you can see definite improvement in your performance and the way you feel and the way you sleep and all that. So how did you kind of — what was the way that you're eating now, like a low-carb, almost keto kind of thing? Is that an evolution of just trying to eliminate the gastrointestinal issues, or did you learn about that? What started you down that path? Because, or did you always eat kinda like that?
Zach Bitter: Yeah, I think with this one, it's like context is everything, right, where you have a scenario, I think, especially in endurance performance, where we have a lot of really well-designed studies that would point to the more carbohydrates you can get in, the better your outcome is going to be, when everything happens properly, when everything is controlled. So that kinda puts you in this window of — if you are a professional athlete competing at a very high level, you can build your entire life around just peaking for that, and we may have self-selected for folks who are able to tolerate a moderate-to-high-carbohydrate diet better, by looking at the research and literature and just kind of pushing that message on everybody. If you're someone who's gonna respond negatively to that type of diet, you're just gonna get weeded out, you're not gonna get to the professional level before you have issues. So there's a lot of moving parts with that question. So sometimes you'll see a lot of the back-and-forth talking about this at non-ultra distance, and it just gets a little bit goofy, because there's always somebody who says, well, I get that I run shorter endurance races, but then why am I PR-ing by going low-carb? Why do I run thirty minutes faster in my marathon when I switch to low-carb versus high-carb? For them, it's very easy to think, well, low-carb is just better and everyone should do it. Just like the person looking at Eliud Kipchoge and saying, well, this guy's run basically too flat in the marathon, he follows a very hard high-carbohydrate diet, therefore everyone should do that or they won't run their best race, this guy's the world-record holder after all. And really it just comes down to the individual — there's gonna be a lot of variables that impact your performance, one of those variables is your nutritional approach. So even if you're doing a race that on paper is gonna maybe make it a little more difficult for you to run as fast as you possibly could in a perfect scenario, if the other variables that improve based on your dietary switch, and this is going to be super individual — it might be something as simple as this person just happens to be able to stick to a low-carbohydrate diet easier, and therefore is at a much better racing weight and a much healthier physique going into this race, and that variable's improvement was so great that it overshadowed any deficit they maybe had from not having quite as much carbohydrate availability to them. That's very specific though, to an intensity — that's what I like to call a gray-area intensity, where it's just long enough that you can deplete your muscle glycogen, but also just fast enough that you're actually gonna do a meaningful amount of dipping into your muscle glycogen. Once you get up into ultra-marathon-distance stuff, things that are double-digit hours long, I think there's a much bigger window of options that are neutral, or in some cases an improvement, from being lower on carbohydrates, just because the intensity of the race itself is low enough where we're not nearly as concerned about maximal oxygen consumption, like you'd be in a marathon. So then you also need to consider other things like digestion — you go to any big-city marathon, or any road race essentially, and it's like a porta-potty rental company's dream, they're like, sweet, we're gonna rent out 300 of these things. So it's like, when you weigh in those options, and you look at some of the data around that, where it's essentially like a 50% chance in some of these longer endurance events where you're gonna have some sort of gastrointestinal issue, you have to ask yourself, can I actually tolerate the fueling strategy that's gonna be required for me to maintain a moderate-to-high-carbohydrate diet on race day? And some people can, some people train their body physically to be able to do that. I think if you're gonna be doing what they call a train-the-gut process, where you're essentially eating a lot of these sports products into your day-to-day life, in basically every workout you can do, in order to get your body more receptive and able to process and digest them — that's great if you're doing the training and your goal is 100% performance. The average person who's gonna maybe run thirty to forty minutes three days a week and a long run on the weekend, they probably don't wanna be mainlining goos and sports products at that level. Because these folks are also trying to control health, and that's probably one of the drivers for them doing this in the first place, so for them it's just not really a really intriguing scenario either. So I think really, at the end of the day, what it comes down to is, first, let's get to context at the individual level. What's this person's goals? Where are their strengths and weaknesses? What relative advantages or disadvantages is this dietary intervention going to have for them, versus some arbitrary person that is completely irrelevant to them? And then start deciding, and then you can always reverse course. I think when I'm working with someone on this, it's like, hey, if you're interested in trying this approach, we can do it. This is why I suspect it will happen, based on what I've seen with the other people I've worked with, or myself, given what you've explained to me, your specific context. But if we get to a point where we know, hey, this is — we're putting our heads up against the wall here, we need to make a change, let's make sure we stay open-minded enough to do it and don't get dogmatic as to, we're gonna jam this square peg through a round hole no matter what. So I think when you start putting it out like that, people are a lot more receptive to it, they're a lot less defensive about it, because that's how it sometimes comes across, I think, where you get someone who had it alter their life or their race or their performance in a drastic way, and I don't blame them for wanting to tell everyone about it, because it's a paradigm shift, and you want to share that. So then you get the folks who are a little more skeptical, or it didn't work for them, they tried it and it backfired on them, and it's like, you're telling me I have to do this or I'm a failure because it didn't work on me. Then you get into these really interesting kind of back-and-forths where it becomes like an ideology versus—
Tom Rowland: Yeah, people get so worked up about it. Like, I remember when Paleo was like the thing, and it was so in, and that was when Michael Phelps just dominated at the Olympics, and there was this video of him eating 13,000 calories a day. I mean, he's cramming everything he can down, and people are like, man, if that guy would just learn how to eat right, imagine how good he could be. And I'm like, what? He just won more gold medals than anyone. I think he's got it pretty well dialed in. Like, that was just silly to me, and that's exactly what you're talking about, where people get so dogmatic about this approach, that they shaved four minutes off their 10K time, and they think that if they could do that, then Michael Phelps should be doing that too, where he's got a lifetime of people and scientists and himself experimenting on him, and he has hit his peak. Obviously he's the best in the world, he's just proved it 13 times over, and they're critical of his diet. That's just kinda funny to me. And the same with you — people are critical of your diet, like, oh, I don't know how you could do it with no carbohydrates. Well, maybe you couldn't do it with no carbohydrates, but he's done it and continues to do it and is the world champion and record holder. It's obviously working. Maybe we could learn something from that, and maybe you don't go as deep into it as he has, but maybe some of that could apply to someone else's training and they could get something really good out of it, or maybe it doesn't work for you at all, I don't know. But I just think that's kind of an interesting place. With your coaching, are you coaching regular people, or do you coach only elite athletes or racers or only runners? What do you do? Because one of the things you're talking about is your understanding of how your body works, and where you're getting this energy from, and how much you're burning, and the way that you're burning at these different time domains, it seems like you could coach other sports and kind of at least work with people to understand what's going on in their body, and then let's try to figure out the best approach. Have you done that through other sports, like long-distance swimming or triathlon, or has anybody else come to you and talked to you about nutrition?
Zach Bitter: Yeah, I'll do a lot of it through my consultation. Usually that's kind of an interesting avenue of my coaching business, because it does open up the door for other athletes that are not running ultra marathons — I mean, I can coach a 5K runner, no problem as well. But if someone is coming to me from triathlon or swimming, they're not gonna get a whole lot of value out of me sitting there and programming their workout, but they may get some value out of me programming or helping them program their macronutrient ratios and the timing of that, as well as different things like electrolytes, the starting points with that, and their fluid, and all the other things that are kind of transferable from one sport to the next. So I do see a little more range in that. I still definitely see more folks that are running ultras, or distance, endurance-running-distance-type stuff, from 5K to marathon. I get a lot more, I would say, just hobby runners than I do real top-end runners for the most part. A lot of the — especially when it's my personalized coaching — those are mostly folks who maybe have a successful business, but they're also mindful of their passions outside of work and they find running to be a vehicle at which they can express that. And they want me to draw them up a coaching plan specific to the race they're doing, or they've got a job, a family, kids, and all that stuff, and they're like, I've got nine hours per week that I've set aside to build up for this race. I want you to take what you know and build a program within that framework, in order for me to be at my best possible place, given my life circumstances and things that I prioritize throughout the day and the week and the months leading into the race itself. So that's kind of really an exciting side of things, is working with folks from either kind of the back of the pack, the middle pack, and occasionally some of the folks near the front of the pack, on that variety of different stuff. So it is interesting — I think sometimes people think, well, he probably coaches folks that are winning races or finishing on the podium, and I always chuckle about that, because it's actually quite a bit more folks who are looking for a PR, which is just as much of a challenge sometimes. I think my sweet spot is working with folks who have more obligations outside of just the running side of things, than it is having someone who's got the flexibility to essentially focus the majority of their time and energy on perfecting said workout and ultimately race.
Tom Rowland: Yeah, well, there's a guy — when you're talking about all the stuff that you've learned through ultra marathon — Chris Hinshaw in the CrossFit world, he was a really, I think he got second place in the world Ironman, a very accomplished Ironman athlete, and he was contacted by one of the CrossFitters, Jason Khalipa, and he started looking at what he was doing and started to apply some of his training principles. And he's like, well, I see what you're doing, and if you can do this, then you would be able to — really, it wasn't about you need to do more work, or it wasn't even about you need to do more recovery, it was about, let's teach your body to get rid of this lactic acid faster. And these are some things that I've learned through triathlon that have worked, and they're probably gonna work over here. And it was incredibly successful — Jason Khalipa went back and did amazing at the CrossFit Games, and he worked with Rich Froning, who was a four-time champion, he worked with Matt Fraser, who was the five-time champion, and it has changed a lot of the training protocols in CrossFit, because he's been able to apply something that came from a different sport and apply some of those principles here. And what you're talking about, with the way that you know how the human body works, as well as with nutrition, it seems like in one of these sports, it is going to really — maybe it's CrossFit, maybe it's swimming, maybe it's triathlon, I don't know, but it seems like there is going to be one of those sports where the things that you've learned in these much longer time domains will apply wonderfully, and probably have somebody performing really, really well, maybe in an unexpected sport, like CrossFit. Who would think that ultra marathoning and CrossFit would have something in common, or power lifting or something like that? But your electrolytes are super important, your nutrition is super important, and if you can get those things perfect, you're gonna do better, there's no question about it. One of the things I heard you talk about on one of the podcasts was one of your training runs, and I think you said that you went through 500 ounces of water. Is that possible?
Zach Bitter: Yeah, I think the question is how well my body did processing it, more than anything. I mean, I live in Phoenix, so this time of year, it's always, if you're gonna do any big efforts and stay in town for it, you're gonna hit 100-plus-degree temps, there's really no way around it. And I was doing a simulation for the transcontinental project, which I postponed due to a little injury I picked up, unfortunately, but it'll happen eventually, just maybe not on the timeline I expected it to. But regardless, I was preparing for it before that, assuming it was gonna happen in September. And I had myself in a situation where I was running — I can't remember how far exactly I was going that day, I think it was maybe somewhere in the neighborhood of eight to ten hours or something like that.
Tom Rowland: You said it was gonna be like 40 miles, and you did a portion of it outside, and then you came in and finished it up on the treadmill, and you were saying that on the outside portion alone you went through 500 ounces. I think I heard it correctly, and I was like, 500 ounces? That's like four gallons of water.
Zach Bitter: And that's when real electrolytes are huge, because you're putting that much fluid through your system, you can easily dilute your electrolytes when you're processing that much. Your body is gonna do a very good job of regulating how low it lets that go, but the way it's gonna do that eventually is by tanking your performance. So making sure you're having enough electrolytes in it — and I think some people forget about that. I usually like to start with about five to seven hundred milligrams of electrolytes per liter of fluid.
Tom Rowland: So like, when you say electrolytes, are you using something like a Hammer Nutrition product, or some kind of product like Endurolytes? That's the one that I use. Are you using something like an electrolyte product, or are you doing it through food, or how are you getting it?
Zach Bitter: Yeah, it tends to be a combination of things, and you can count it through anything. So usually I'll start with, well, what am I gonna eat during this effort, and then account for the electrolytes that are included in that and add that to my baseline. And then, depending on how much fluid I take in, I'm gonna need to add five to seven hundred additional milligrams for every liter of water that I take in, on top of whatever I've already accounted for. So when you get up to the neighborhood of 500 ounces, you're using quite a bit. There's a ton of electrolyte supplements you can use — I've been using a product by a company called Element. They make these little tiny packets that have like 1,200 milligrams of electrolytes, with a thousand milligrams of sodium in it, so one of those can go for about two liters. And on that particular workout you were talking about, I had a pack with a little bladder in the back of it, so I put two liters of water in that and a packet of the Element in there, and then just drink to thirst at that point. And then when that ran out, I reloaded with the same ratio of electrolytes to water, and then kept going. And that just happened to get me to 500 ounces that day.
Tom Rowland: So with what we do, we're fishing in the Florida Keys, it's super hot, it's active, it's very humid, you're sweating all day, you're going through gallons of water just like what you're talking about. You're not running, but it would be not crazy to drink two gallons of water in a day, so with your electrolyte consumption, that's super important. And what is happening when, like you're saying, your performance is tanking? It's really easy to see when you're running, all of a sudden now you're running two minutes slower than you were before. But what if you're just fishing, like hanging out, drinking so much water, pushing all this through, where is the indication that your electrolytes are low? What would happen to you?
Zach Bitter: Yeah, no, it's a good question. I mean, you're gonna get some of the same symptoms, it might just not be quite as drastic upfront, where when you're trying to run through things, it's like lethargy and fatigue, it's just gonna be that much more painstaking. Whereas it might creep up on you a little more, where you notice, oh, I'm starting to get a little more tired, I'm starting to get sleepy, I don't have as much energy, I feel like my arms are just weighing me down, or if you're sitting up and standing up and sitting down a bit, you're just unmotivated to do that sort of thing. Those are some of the signs that I think can show up. And for something like fishing, I think it's almost more important to pay attention to, in the sense that it's gonna be a little harder to recognize, because it may just be something like, okay, I've been out here for four hours, we haven't had a lot of luck today, I'm gonna call it, versus I'm gonna give it thirty more minutes, and I hit that spot and we catch some really great fish or something like that.
Tom Rowland: So it's like a mental fog that you would have, or would it be fatigue? Sometimes I don't know — in my workouts right now, I work out in the morning, I'll go through a half gallon of water, if I start at five I'll be done with a half a gallon of water at seven, and then I will drink another half gallon of water before eleven. And then I'll continue drinking stuff all day long, and I do supplement with the Endurolytes. But oftentimes I get really tired, and I've always wondered, could that be an electrolyte shortage, or is that something else? I don't know.
Zach Bitter: Yeah, it's hard to tell for sure, because fatigue can be influenced by a variety of different things, but assuming everything else is constant and you're getting a little low on electrolytes, then I would imagine fatigue would be the symptom that you would notice. And I find it interesting, where it'll be like, kind of like you described, middle of the afternoon, and normally I'd be motivated enough to stay on top of myself, be very efficient, that's what just kind of moves down a notch, where now instead of it taking me fifteen minutes to finish a task, it takes me thirty, because I'm kind of just mulling around, not necessarily focusing the way I would if I had that laser focus. And sometimes I've noticed, where I don't notice it more readily when it's something like that, where I'm feeling just a little lethargic, a little unmotivated, a little more tired, and I'll drink like a liter of water with some electrolytes in it, and then five minutes later it's like, oh boom, it's like I almost felt like I had a cup of coffee in the morning.
Tom Rowland: It does hit you very quickly. And we had did this one event called Sealfit Kokoro, it was a forty-eight-hour or fifty-hour thing where you go train with these Navy SEALs, and they were careful, they gave us electrolyte water, we were only to get water from their source, they had electrolytes in the water, and I never had any problem. But then there was another event called GoRuck Selection, where they only gave you plain water, you couldn't drink — you couldn't replace anything, there was no food. And the difference was incredible, I mean, you were flat, really, really flat, everyone was. And then the reward, if you made it twenty-four hours, is they gave you one bottle of Gatorade, and the people that got there drank that one Gatorade and it's like, wow.
Zach Bitter: You know, like you say, a cup of coffee, it's like even better.
Tom Rowland: It's like, oh my god, that's like the lifeblood right there, the electrolyte.
Zach Bitter: Best-tasting Gatorade they ever had, probably.
Tom Rowland: Absolutely. But the electrolytes are such an important thing, and I never know what the appropriate balance is. I just always, if I'm drinking a ton of water, I will supplement, but I don't know how many I should be doing, or exactly what — you've got it down to a science, you put this one pack in your bladder and you feel like that's gonna be really good. But that's something I need to work on, certainly, the electrolyte balance. But I know what it feels like when you're out of balance, and it's not pleasant at all.
Zach Bitter: Yeah, it is interesting, I think the five-to-seven-hundred milligrams per liter is a starting point that they recommend for single-day ultra marathons, when it's essentially kind of normal temperatures. But the reason I like that is because then I just drink to thirst after that, and if I'm drinking more because it's warmer, then every liter of water I'm consuming due to thirst has that additional five to seven hundred milligrams, I'm kind of raising that as I increase my fluid intake, versus saying I need x number of electrolytes per hour, but then each hour is a drastically different range of fluid intake that doesn't really square out often. So that's kind of just a good starting point. And then you're gonna have a range of people who are heavy sweaters that lose higher rates of electrolytes in their sweat, versus people whose body is less likely to lose as much, and you can get tests done that will kind of tell you that, like a patch test or something. I've never done one myself, but you go in — I'm not exactly sure what the process is like, but essentially they take a sample, and it can tell you, based on your sweat rate, this is how much electrolyte you can assume you're gonna lose per hour, if you're sweating at a specific level or something like that. And I guess then you could start running numbers, where if I lose x pounds of water per hour in this temperature, I should probably ballpark this much electrolyte. The nice thing is, like I said before, your body is very good at regulating that, so it doesn't have to be super exact, as long as you're not way off, you're probably gonna be okay, you're not gonna notice massive performance issues. So it's when you have a situation where someone is drinking water consistently with no electrolytes, or just not drinking at all or something like that, where they're gonna probably run into issues.
Tom Rowland: What about the color of your pee? Is that a good indicator of electrolytes, or just a good indicator of hydration, in your opinion?
Zach Bitter: Yeah, I think that's been one of the things where I think they thought there was a pretty good correlation there at one time, between if you have a really dark urine, then you're really dehydrated versus perfectly clear, you're over-hydrated. And I think there's some general truth to that, but there's a lot of scenarios in which it can be wrong, so you don't necessarily want to lean your entire process onto that. So there's a little bit of variance there, context there that would be needed. I think, generally speaking, if you're in a warm environment and you're just not going to the bathroom at all for long periods of time, that's probably a pretty good indication that you're behind. Or if you're in any environment and you're peeing every forty-five minutes, chances are you're just going way past what you would technically need. So anytime your body probably deviates from the routine that you would normally have when you're kind of functioning at an optimal level, I would say you're probably heading outside the range of what you want to be doing. So whether you're running all day long, or if I were sitting at my desk all day long just working on a computer, or running all day long — either one of those scenarios is less than ideal if I never once get up to go to the bathroom. So it's one of those things where I think there's a little bit of just intuition there, and if you kind of know, well, when I'm feeling hydrated, this is kind of the frequency I can expect, so if I'm deviating too far from that, then chances are I'm behind or ahead of whatever I'm trying to target.
Tom Rowland: Gotcha. So you're coaching — do you ever coach people on overcoming injuries and stuff like that? I mean, obviously people are getting injured when they're trying to hit a PR or something like that. But do you help people with that too?
Zach Bitter: Yeah, it usually depends, this runs along the line with nutrition as well, where there's a level of support that I can offer, based on just what I know from being in the sport as long as I have been, and just having maybe a surface-level understanding of a wide variety of things that someone who's brand new is going to have none of, where I can kind of direct them in the right direction, or at least share with them kind of what the population-level advice would be on a specific topic. But then ultimately, if it gets to a point where there are certain things where people spend years and years learning about specific body parts operating in a specific way, and they're gonna have a lot better of an understanding of what is going on in this person's unique situation. So if someone comes to me and says, well, I've been having this pain in the back of my ankle, and it's been bothering me for a couple of weeks now, and it's tight in the morning, it loosens up a little bit over the course of the day — I could drag it and say, you know, you may have aggravated your Achilles tendon, and you should probably just scale back on the volume and intensity of your training a bit and let that settle down. If it keeps bothering you, avoid the activities where it bothers you, try to get some mobility in the areas, get some blood flow heading down there — that sort of advice that isn't gonna necessarily do damage.
Tom Rowland: So what would you do if somebody gave you that advice, and you were getting ready for your 100-mile?
Zach Bitter: Well, I would definitely double down and start training twice as hard.
Tom Rowland: See, that's what I mean, like the doctor told me not to do it, well, you should definitely do more than that. Because that's what always happens — somebody's so excited about running or this activity that they're doing, and they love it, and they get injured, and then they go to the doctor, and the doctor's like, yeah, you shouldn't do that anymore, and it's like, oh, that's not at all what I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear that you can work through this, that you can make it, give me a cortisone shot, something, you definitely wanna do this race.
Zach Bitter: And I mean, there's a fine line of discomfort that's just part of the game versus discomfort that's just gonna get worse. So some of that you do kinda learn over time, where if I go out and I have a little bit of an ache or a pain somewhere and it loosens up over the course of the run, chances are I've got something tight that is impacting that area. The hard part sometimes is just, well, what is that? So, for example, I have a little bit of pain underneath my knee when I go for an afternoon run, but it just loosens up and goes away after a mile. It's easy to think, well, maybe there's a little bit of tendonitis under my knee, maybe not. And when you get down to it, you find out, oh, I've got really tight hips, and those tight hips are pulling on my tendons and ligaments in a way that's creating a little bit of discomfort under my knee. But once that loosens up, then the next one is, well, what's causing that? People are sitting a lot at the end of the day, so running, you have the forward lean, which is gonna stretch your hip flexors out a little bit more, versus sitting, where they're gonna collapse in. You collapse them in for long periods of time, they get comfortable in that more compressed point, whereas now you go running and you're stretching them beyond what is even an upright position, it's just going to take a little bit for that to loosen up. So it's like, what can I do to loosen that up before I go out for a run, so I'm not using the first couple miles to do it? And then you start looking at things like stretches for your hip flexors and things like that. And I think people who do the sport long enough find out areas of their body that tend to be problem areas, and there's some problem areas that tend to be a little more universal with runners versus other sports. And you get to know those areas of your body and what parts trigger them, and you can do a fair bit of self-recovery tactics and that sort of stuff. And sometimes, for me, what usually happens is, if it's manageable, I'll work it out myself, it gets to the point where it's not, I'll go see a professional and they'll fill me in on where it's actually wrong versus where I expected it to be wrong. And then I have a little bit of a roadmap as to how to manage it on my own, as well as whatever service I would need from them.
Tom Rowland: Gotcha. So how did you hook up with Buff?
Zach Bitter: Yeah, they reached out to me after 2019. I had been kinda using some of their products, similar to what they specialize in, and yeah, they wanted to partner up, and some of the stuff that they've made over the last couple of years has been pretty cool. I know the session I'll be out in Phoenix — it's funny, because you get these hot days and people think you want to get rid of as many clothes as you can possibly get rid of, because you're in this really hot heat, when in reality, direct sun like that — and you can probably appreciate this with fishing, when you're out there all day in the direct sun — direct sun on your skin is less efficient actually at cooling. In fact, the topical cooling mechanisms that your body would produce in that direct kind of dry-sun heat are not as effective, having your skin exposed, you're going to overheat quicker. So Casey at Buff was telling me about the arm sleeves, that they have this technology where it actually helps keep that skin cooler, even though you're putting a layer of something over it.
Tom Rowland: Right.
Zach Bitter: And then on top of it, you have that, plus I'll use those to put ice down there. So a topical cooling is a much more efficient way to bring your core temperature down than, say, drinking cold water or something like that. So anytime you have something that can get wet and hold onto water, or something you can jam ice into, in those really hot, dry climates, you're gonna keep your core temp down a lot longer. So using the head or neck buffs to hold ice, or even just keep wet, staying wet, damp, and dripping on you and stuff like that is just a great resource out in the dry heat. And then face coverings and things like that, so I'm not just blistering my forehead and nose.
Tom Rowland: Do you run with the buff on your face sometimes?
Zach Bitter: I'll use my standard will be a visor, since my hair is long enough where I don't have to worry about my head getting burnt.
Tom Rowland: Yeah, just wait, you'll have — mine used to be too, and all of a sudden one day you come back and you're like, I don't know what is the problem, but my head is hurt, I think I might've bumped it somewhere, and then you're like, no, I just got sunburned. That's the end of the visor for me.
Zach Bitter: Funny story about that — I used a visor and a headband at the road 100-mile national championships this year, and I did a really good job of skin protection, so I got very little burning during that event. But the one thing that I didn't account for was I had just gotten my haircut, so my hair was really short, and I was dumping water on my head all day, and since that caused, like, different grooves to separate or parts to separate, I had a few lines on my head where my scalp was partially exposed all day long that got burnt. And then those two to three days after, I was like, why is my head hurt? And then I started having like skin peel up there, I was like, I've never had an issue with dandruff before, why is my hair flaking? And then I realized after that, I was like, oh, I just burnt my head. So like, you do have to worry about that to some degree too. But usually I can get away with a visor, so I'm covering my face and still leaving my head open. I'll usually put a neck buff on to hold water, keep the back of my neck from getting burnt, the front of my neck from getting burnt and stuff like that. And then if it's really hot, I'll actually jam ice in there and roll it up like a tube, and then that ice melts over a little bit longer period of time, keeps you cool longer, creates a little bit more drippage down your chest and back, so it doesn't just dry up right away, like your sweat does in these dry climates. And, like I said, the arm sleeves are great to cover from the direct sun as well, you can jam ice down those too. Those are usually my go-tos.
Tom Rowland: Yeah, that's cool. I found the Buff really early, and it was not available in any fishing stores at all, and I was like, we were wearing bandanas and stuff, and in worse, we're wearing big, floppy hats, and it's often very windy down there, so the hat — they don't call it a floppy hat for nothing, it's blowing up and blowing off and blowing everywhere. And so when I got the buff and put it on with a baseball cap, I was like, this is better. And then you covered up, and all the clients, nobody had ever seen that before, I used to get stopped by the marine patrol, they were like, what are you doing out here? Today it's every guide in the Florida Keys, every guide wears one at some point, every mate, lots of people, even the road workers out there, you see people working on the road, they've all got buffs on, because it is just a better way to cover your skin and you don't get burned, but you're also cooler, just like you say. And if you look at any kind of desert culture in the world, that is the dress, they're covered in white, all the way from head to toe. And anyway, that's been great with Buff, they've come out with so many different sun-protective products that are awesome. But it's cool about the ice in the arm sleeve, I'll have to try that, I'd get them wet, but I never put ice in there.
Zach Bitter: Yeah, they just add a little, it just kind of elongates how long they stay damp, which helps that topical cooling a little bit, because when you think about it, the reason your body cools from sweat is the evaporating process of it, so the more liquid you have on there to evaporate, the cooler you can stay. But the arm sleeves are interesting too, because when Casey will send me over the catalog, I'll always look through the whole thing, and I'll see the fishing stuff, and I saw they had arm sleeves that had insect repellent.
Tom Rowland: Yeah.
Zach Bitter: And I was thinking to myself, that makes so much sense. I remember when I would go fishing, when I lived in Wisconsin, it was pretty buggy there too, there's lots of mosquitoes up there. I go out, like if we'd be walleye fishing at night on a lake, you're just feeling these bugs everywhere, and you didn't really realize how many there were until you shine a flashlight on your body and you just see this cloud of insects around you.
Tom Rowland: I would imagine — some places in Wisconsin, there's this place in Yellowstone National Park called Slough Creek, it can be terrible, I mean, you look in front of you and there are just mosquitoes all over the back. But the king of all the king of all places is the Everglades for the mosquitoes. The Everglades, when you go there and see the mosquitoes, and just the heat, and you don't have air conditioning, you're just like, man, this is a rough place to live, this would be really rough. That's the way the whole state of Florida was — before they sprayed for mosquitoes, before they had air conditioning, Florida wasn't the vacation capital of the world, most people did not wanna go there. So those two things, spraying for mosquitoes and getting air conditioning, that really changed everything in the state of Florida. But, man, it's not a pleasant place, so you want as much bug protection as you can possibly get, because there is no joke there, it is serious. But listen, man, I have so many questions and so many different things I'd love to ask you about training philosophy, we're never gonna get to it in one podcast, I hope we can do this again. I'm really fascinated with your mindset and your approach, and the way maybe that I could take some of the things you've learned and apply them to what I do. It's just fascinating, whether that's fishing and electrolytes or whether the CrossFit world or whatever, I just think that you're really onto something, and you're in this unique position of a training ground, just like we were talking about, in some ways it's so much different than somebody that can just get reps on a football and practice not fumbling the snap, they can do that over and over and over again, but you're in this much, much longer time domain, and it's really hard to replicate. But at the same time you have this opportunity to be experimenting on the human body like all of these other sports are not able to. And I just think there's gonna be some really profound kind of understanding of what's going on in the human body coming from you and what you're doing, and I just think it's fascinating. So, man, kudos to you, and thanks for coming on the podcast. If somebody wanted to get coaching, if somebody wanted to follow you, what do they do?
Zach Bitter: Yeah, first, thanks for having me on, it's been a blast. I love talking about this stuff with folks, and it's always cool to hear from people who have a huge drive in a different area that others would maybe think aren't necessarily comparable, but it's great to chat. And yeah, for folks who want to reach out to me, in any capacity, kind of the one-stop area is my website at zachbitter.com, that links to my coaching services, podcasts, social media channels, and things like that. And probably most active on Instagram, which is just @zachbitter, but you can follow me on Twitter and Facebook as well if you want.
Tom Rowland: Right on. So you said that you're gonna postpone the transcontinental run?
Zach Bitter: Yeah, unfortunately I aggravated my right ankle a few weeks back, and it was bad enough that I took a few days off, and then it was just really tight after that, so I went and got an MRI, given the project I had on the schedule, I wanted to make sure there wasn't anything structural. And I actually had two partially torn ligaments kind of on each side of my ankle bone on my right side. So I need to take a little bit of time off for that, and I actually just recently was down in Austin and got some stem cells put in there, and that seems to have helped quite a bit. So I've been able to get back into training as of last week, but I have to do a really kind of gradual buildup, just to make sure I don't reaggravate it. So given TransCon is an interesting one, where if you wanna have as much luck as possible with weather and things like that, September, early to mid-September is like this tight window you kinda gotta start on. So since I essentially missed my peak training buildup due to the ankle issue, and then I'd be pushing right to the start of it without even knowing for sure if it would hold up, everyone involved decided it'd be smart to just kind of postpone it to a different year.
Tom Rowland: Yeah. Was that gonna be a supported run or a self-supported run?
Zach Bitter: Yeah, it was gonna be supported the whole deal, where you kind of have an RV following you along, and you're sleeping in there and getting up and spending the majority of each day just moving very slowly, as consistently as possible.
Tom Rowland: Yeah, so I noticed on your Instagram, when I checked it this morning, I think you were saying that you're doing a lot of cycling as well as running, so is that because of the ankle injury or what?
Zach Bitter: Yeah, so I didn't really necessarily need a significant reduction in volume and training load from just a sustainability standpoint, in terms of being able to do, let's say, a race in the second part of the year here. So I'm trying to maintain a little bit of fitness without necessarily getting too aggressive with the impact of running. And as I'm building back into it, I'm gonna do a dual strategy of, as I'm building up my running, having some cycling alongside it, and I'll gradually phase the cycling out and introduce more running, as I get more strength in that ankle and get it to a point where I can trust it to be able to get me through a full day of running and that sort of stuff. So it's been kind of an interesting little side piece to the training puzzle this time around, that hasn't historically been there at this capacity, which is kind of like we talked about before, there's positives in everything, and it's kind of fun to explore that side or use that tool that I wouldn't have normally used.
Tom Rowland: Well, that leads me to the last question, which is, as you're injured right now, you have to back off on training. And for a guy like you, I'm pretty sure I know the answer — is it harder to run 100 miles, or is it harder to back off on your training?
Zach Bitter: Yeah, it's definitely at first harder to back off training. I think what I try to do a lot of times is, inevitably, every time I get into a real big buildup for a race, I'm sinking like twenty hours a week into running, mobility, strength, and all this stuff that comes into it. There'll be things where I'm like, man, I'm spending so much time doing this, if I wasn't doing this I could do this, that and the other thing. And you start to gather a list of stuff that you would have maybe wanted to focus a little more time on or pay a little more attention to, and you just gotta kinda keep those close to you, so that when these types of things happen, you're like, okay, I've got some options here that are gonna entertain me in the meantime and keep me distracted from the lack of running, and you can gain some value from those. And then when you do get the running back up, it doesn't feel like you're just sitting there biting your nails the whole time, so to speak.
Tom Rowland: Yeah, I can imagine, you might be a hard person to deal with if you can't run or cycle or something. Everybody that does these kinds of pursuits, that has this endurance kind of obsession, man, when it goes away, you're like, you should be in a padded room.
Zach Bitter: Yeah, I've been much worse about it in the past. I fortunately just had so little time where I've been hurt for any meaningful amount of time, where I haven't had to deal with it too much. But, yeah, you go through these processes a few times and you realize what's going to actually bear fruit and what is just creating more problems than solutions, and you realize sitting around complaining about it isn't going to do anything, and then you find ways to fill that time instead. And the side benefit there is it doesn't aggravate the wife nearly as much when you're keeping busy, versus—
Tom Rowland: See, there's another metaphor for life that comes from training — sitting around complaining about something doesn't do anyone any good, you or anybody else. But anyway, Zach, man, thanks for being on the podcast, I really appreciate it, and, man, we'll do it again, I'd love to catch up before you do this transcontinental race and see what that's all about. And, man, good luck with everything, good luck with your training, and we'll be following and watching.
Zach Bitter: Awesome. Yeah, well, thanks, Tom, and definitely anytime you want me to come on, let me know, I'd be thrilled to come back.
Tom Rowland: Okay, great, thank you. Alright, we'll see you, Zach.
Zach Bitter: Alright, take care.