Written by Christopher Kelly
April 28, 2016
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Christopher: Hello, and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive Podcast. My name is Christopher Kelly and today I'm joined by obstacle racer, Elijah Markstrom. Hi, Elijah.
Elijah: Hey, Chris. How's it going?
Christopher: Good, thank you. Thank you for coming on. I'm extremely excited to talk about obstacle racing today. But before we get into that, why don't we start with you telling us a little bit about yourself?
Elijah: My name is Elijah. I'm originally from Eugene, Oregon. I currently reside in San Francisco, California. As far as athletics -- I know this is athletics and nutrition type based podcast -- I started out as a sprinter. So, I was a 100-meter, 200-meter, 400-meter runner. I went to Chico State and competed on that level. I won the state championships in the 100 and was a part of the state championships 4x100 relay. So, my background was in sprinting, power, getting bigger, building size and just getting faster.
And then when I finished college and moved on to become a professional trainer, I started to realize most people aren't in the world of just trying to maximize force output or get really, really strong. And I started to learn about how to train the general population and then certainly delving more into endurance sports. So, I competed in -- I would say I participated in a triathlon. I got pretty serious about trail runs, long to medium distance, like 20k, 30k trail runs, half marathons, like the endurance sport, and then the strength training that best supports that.
Christopher: Now, I'm just looking at your picture and you do look like a sprinter.
Elijah: Yeah.
Christopher: You're the kind of guy that puts on muscle really easily.
Elijah: This is true. It's interesting though. You're probably looking at -- that Grace had on her--
Christopher: I'm not sure I am actually. You stood on the end of a pier in front of some water.
Elijah: Oh, okay. Yeah, that was in Nicaragua. Since then -- that was about a year and a half ago and I was training. I had a goal basically to get from -- actually in the worst shape of my life, not in that picture but about eight months before that. I was 142 pounds and like 12% to 15% body fat. When I get unhealthy, I lose--
Christopher: 142 pounds? How tall are you?
Elijah: I'm 5'6".
Christopher: You're much shorter than you look in this picture, I don't know why. I've got nothing to compare to but I was expecting you to be much taller than that.
Elijah: Good. Okay. All right. I liked looking tall. I need any chance I can. Okay. When I get out of shape and I lose motivation, I lose weight, muscle mass and gain fat. That's just the way it is for me. People get mad at me because I lose weight when I stop working out. And for me, it's been a lifelong struggle, so to speak, to gain weight. So, I want to be 155 pounds and 6% body fat. That was my goal. It was like an arbitrary thing I threw out. I want to do it, I want to do it quickly. And so I incorporated a specific eating style and with traditional body building. And that picture you see there is the result of that.
But right now, I'm actually more lean. I've transitioned a lot of my muscle mass in my lower body and I'm not carrying quite as much upper body because I'm doing athletics that involves running uphill. There's no need to have huge arms and huge pecs when you're trying to run up a mountain.
Christopher: Yeah, I discovered that as well actually. When I first got into mountain biking, I'd spend most of my adult life doing exercises like bench press which is -- I mean, probably people listening to this are probably hate me for saying this -- I think it's the most useless exercise on the planet. It's so unfunctional, isn't it? When have you ever been trapped underneath a bar and needed to escape from it? It doesn't translate into anything apart from big pecs that you then have to carry up the hill on a mountain bike which is just not helpful.
Elijah: Oh, man. It's so funny you say that because I literally was like I'm not benching anymore. I was running up a hill and I was like feeling my pecs and I'm like, "I'm not going to bench anymore." I have not done bench press for like a year and a half.
Christopher: Yeah, I know. I've not done it for much, much longer than that. I just realized how useless it was. It's just a beach exercise, isn't it?
Elijah: A little bit. I mean, especially if you're trying it like you ride up a mountain or run up a mountain. Anything where you got to carry your weight up, it's probably not going to help you.
Christopher: So, how fast do you run right now?
Elijah: Well, I mean, it depends on the distance.
Christopher: I don't know the distance either, so you better tell me those too.
Elijah: Okay, okay. My 5k is 16:20, 10k, like 34. So, I'm a little bit better as the distance gets shorter probably with my sprinting background. I couldn't tell you what I run in like 100 or 200 right now, probably not super fast.
Christopher: Give me a ballpark with 100.
Elijah: That's provided I don't tear my hamstring in the middle of it, but I can probably eke out 11:05 maybe. I was running like 10:06 in college.
Christopher: But is that what you need to do? So, tell me about obstacle racing then. What was it that first drew you to obstacle racing?
Elijah: I don't know exactly how I got involved. My friend Phil, who's actually on the podcast with me that I do, he was doing like World's Toughest Mudder, these 24-hour events and different Tough Mudders.
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So, I was like I got acquainted to this back then but I always thought it was a little weird. I was like I'm okay. I don't really want to go runn in the mud and deal with all of that. So, I was kind of--
Christopher: I can identify with that.
Elijah: Yeah. I don't know. It just sounded not fun. I don't know. A couple of years back, my friend told me about this thing called the Endeavor Team Challenge. And this was a 20-mile rock with all your gear you need for like two days on your back. So, you've got your food, your tent, your different shoes you may need and all these different things and you're going to climb a mountain and walk around for 16 to 20 miles. And then you get to a competitor's field where you have to carry really large awkward objects across a 200-yard field.
And then there was a swim across a lake and a reservoir and then a miniature obstacle course. And when I got to the obstacle course with like military style obstacles, I was like I love this. You're climbing over walls. You're traversing rings. You're balancing. You're sort of having a -- really navigate and use your body in a way that it's not called upon normally. And I just had so much fun in that part of the actual adventure that when I was done, I just wanted more.
That event actually didn't end that well for me. I tore my LCL and had to take a little break. But once I recouped, I signed up for my first Spartan race at the AT&T Park. I can explain to you all the different styles of these races and whatnot. But basically, it's a--
Christopher: Oh, yeah, please do. I've heard some of these names. Definitely I've heard the name Spartan and I know the name Tough Mudder.
Elijah: Okay, okay.
Christopher: And that's about where my knowledge ends. So, yeah, explain to me how some of these things differ?
Elijah: Okay, great. So, when you look at obstacle course racing, you have a few -- whatever you're intention is will tell you what race you want to do. So, for Tough Mudder, this is for people who they really want some camaraderie. They might be part of an office that goes in and they want do some team building. And they go to the mountain and they wear funny outfits and they have a team name and they run around but there's no clock. It's not timed. There's no finish in terms of ranking. You're just out there having a great time.
With the Spartan race, that's a different race series, there is what's called the elite field, there's the competitor's field and there's the open class. So, the open class is more analogous to something like the Tough Mudder where you're going and you're just carrying on doing your best, everyone is helping each other over obstacles. They're rooting each other on and whatnot. The competitive class is a new division that's more -- people are more serious but maybe they're not super fast.
Then you have the elite class and this is -- I wouldn't call it cutthroat competition because there's always camaraderie especially in endurance sport because everybody knows how tough it is to grind out the hours. But you want to win, right? You want to place higher than the guy next to you. So then, inside of Spartan race, you have three distances and they're named sprint, super and beast.
The sprint is from three to five miles and will have around 20 obstacles. The super is between seven and nine miles and they'll have maybe like 25 to 30 obstacles. They kind of get more spread out as the distance increases. And the beast is between 12 and 14 miles with 35 obstacles.
Christopher: So, what do you do?
Elijah: I do Spartans mostly. There's other events like Battlefrog, Rugged Maniac, there's the Obstacle Course Racing world championship. So there's like many race series but in California there's a lot of Spartan races. It's easy for me to get to them. My main distance is probably the super distance. I'm not quite -- I haven't built a big enough base to really handle the 14-mile distance and stay competitive but when I drop down -- I'm not really good but I will get like top 20 in most of the races I do.
Christopher: In the elite class?
Elijah: Yeah.
Christopher: It differs a lot actually, the endurance racing. So, I'll give an example. When you go to a mountain bike race -- That's why I do. I'm a mountain biker -- it's always a laugh no matter what category. So, I don't care whether you're a pro mountain biker or the CAT 2 or whatever. It's always really good fun and people talk shit at the starting line and all that kind of stuff. With a road race, it's not like that.
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I've only ever done one road race and I never went back. It was just 120 guys in the car park getting changed. We shaved legs. And they didn't talk to each other. It was the worst atmosphere I've ever experienced. I thought this is not for me. And it was almost on paper. It was almost the same thing. It was all cycling. I mean, what difference is it? And I chose a course. It was just like a mountain bike race. But, yeah, I know, people were very, very serious. And I mean, that's to be respected. But it was definitely not very much fun at that time. So, the obstacle racing is not like that then? It's like all the good time.
Elijah: Yeah. I think it is. I mean, people are out there. They're dedicating their lives to training. You have people who are pretty serious about it. But at the same time you realize probably the ridiculousness of what you're doing. You're jumping into a giant mud puddle, you're carrying a bucket up a hill. We can get into all the specific obstacles but everything you're doing out there is super arduous. And so you have a respect for the course. Everybody is blown up. Everybody has gone out there fueled and properly hit, went out too hard and just fell apart.
Everybody has had these hard moments that they don't want to go. Everybody's scraped up their knees on the ground when they're crawling under barb wire. So, you have a common respect for what you're doing out there and that at any given moment -- For example, in the Spartan race, if you miss an obstacle, you have to do 30 burpees. And then there's one obstacle you have to throw a spear into a hay bale. It's easy to miss that and you got to do burpees.
Everybody understands that and no one's going to be thinking they're impervious to what's out there and they're the greatest person on earth. Everybody respects the course and respect the individuals knowing how fickle it can be. I'm thinking about your sort of analogy here looking at cycling. It's so scientific, road racing. It's been measured to the millimeter.
Christopher: Everybody has a power meter.
Elijah: Everybody's got a power -- yeah, exactly. So, it's like the race is almost over before it starts in a way. It's kind of like more sterile.
Christopher: Yeah. I mean, road racing is interesting in that it becomes extremely tactical. So, in the CAT 5 race that I did, just everybody tried to win the race from the gun. Whereas at the elite level, it's like nobody wants to work until the very last 30 minutes and then all hell breaks loose. So, it's quite -- no, it's not quite. It's extremely tactical. But, yeah, it depends on a lot of things. Why don't you walk me through some of the obstacles then?
Elijah: Sure.
Christopher: From what you told me so far, I'm thinking it almost sounds like what I imagine the military do which is running and then maybe climbing up next and then jumping down the other side or something and then crawling under things. Is that what the obstacle are really like or are they different from that?
Elijah: Yeah, yeah. So, a lot of these race series, the guys who design the course have somewhat of a military background. So, the obstacles are military inspired. You have six foot walls you got climb over, eight-foot walls you got to climb over. You have walls that you climb under. You have walls that you have to jump through the top of the wall. So, you've got all these, the simple exercises that they built way back in the day. And that's kind of like what I would say be like the main portion that makes up a lot of the obstacles.
But then you have things like -- they're called rigs. And this is where you're required to hold yourself above the ground so you're hanging on like a ring and then you got to transfer to another ring, maybe four rings, like gymnastics rings. And then from the ring you got to go and you got to grab a horizontal bar that's 12 feet long and shimmy across that all the while you're feet are off the ground, of course.
And then you got to go from that bar to some hanging ropes and go from rope to rope to rope. And then at the end you kick a bell. So, you're in the air for maybe 40 seconds traveling across. And then there'll be like maybe half mile or so running and then you get to the next obstacle and that might be a gigantic A-frame cargo net like you were describing where you climb up and then you roll down the other side and then you run some more and you've got to take a bucket and fill it with rocks and walk it up 20% to 30% grade up the side of a hill.
So, there's a large a variety right there I just described, climbing, carrying, hanging, every system you have is taxed over the course of one of these races and each obstacle causes you to work out a different thing in your training, if that makes sense.
Christopher: It sounds kind of Paleo, doesn't it? I've had great results just kind of looking at what our ancestors might have done and then trying to replicate that or at least questioning why things change and what that might have meant for us in terms of our health and performance. And what you've just described sounds super Paleo, doesn't it? I mean, I know that the [0:14:56] [Indiscernible] on it is not really Paleo but just the kind of the type of movement and the variety of movement that you're describing sounds very Paleo to me.
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Elijah: I have to tell you I'm glad you said that because when you think about it and like you're sitting here and you're a cyclist and you're listening and it sounds a little bit odd, right? But when you get out there and you're on the course for the first time and you're running through water and you're doing all these crazy things, it is the most primal experience you've ever had. And I can say that it's pretty transcendent the first time you do it.
It's really hard and it pushes you. I remember running my first Spartan beast race and I was thinking to myself for the first time I will be happy with myself just to finish this thing. I'm always looking at how well I rank. And this one I'm like, wow, this is so tough. I don't even know if I can finish. And you're going through like a marsh in the middle of wilderness. You're doing all these things and you really feel connected.
You feel primal and there's a carryover there. It changes your perspective on things about how in a way we've made our society to be so easy and so nice and everything is comfy and everything is measured. Well, out there, you can throw all that out the window.
Christopher: Where the heck do you even start with this stuff? So, everything I've talked about on the podcast -- I've done over 100 episodes of this podcast and we talked about a lot of stuff that supposedly improves your health and performance. And I have confirmed it all by doing it all personally. And the exception to that is anything to do with walking. I'm really useless at walking. I hate it. I really hate it. So slow and so boring.
Elijah: Walking?
Christopher: Yeah. Walking is like my worst thing. And I've recently -- we moved to a new home in Bonny Doon near Santa Cruz and it's great. I'm looking out the window right now. I can see redwood trees. I can see birds flying around. It's absolutely stunning. And so there's lots of motivation just to go outside and walk around the garden. And I've set this little pomodoro alarm that goes off every 20 minutes so that I go and do that and that's been quite useful for me.
But all of my other exercise is either some kind of artificial weight lifting thing with kettlebells or spinning little circles whilst in the seated position on either a road or a mountain bike. And when I listen to you describe those obstacles, I am absolutely certain that I will completely explode. I would break something or one of my ligaments would snap or something like that. You said you are a personal trainer, so where do you start with people? Someone comes to you and says, gives you that description, where do you start them to prepare them for this type of event?
Elijah: I know a little bit about you from listening to your podcast.
Christopher: Oh, thank you. I didn't know you were listening to my podcast. I appreciate that, thank you.
Elijah: I do. And I listened to you on Endurance Planet too when you come on with the doctor, right?
Christopher: Yeah, Tommy Woods.
Elijah: Okay. All right. I know a little bit about what you're doing, cyclocross. I've actually done a cyclocross race once. It was tragedy.
Christopher: Cyclocross is, yeah, is such a weird thing. Where did you do it? Was it in the Northern California area that you did it or was it up farther north?
Elijah: This was a long time ago. My buddy Joe Pessano, he was a cyclocross racer. He was someone who would get top five in a race, top three in a race, very competitive. I don't really know how that works but at some point he was sort of like professional. And he's like, "Hey dude, you should try a cyclocross race." And I'm like, "Okay, whatever. Let's do it." Didn't really train, didn't practice, didn't know much about it really. I go ahead and rent a bike from the local bike store and I say, "You got a cyclocross bike for me?" He goes, "Oh, yeah, absolutely."
I get that thing. It's like probably way bigger than it should be. I get out on the course. I got no clips. I'm not clipped in. I got no gloves. Luckily, I have a helmet. And I'm sitting in the starting line and all these guys are just like -- they're pretty serious. And I'm like what have I gotten myself into? I get out there. I get destroyed. I get dead last. I crashed. It was so hard. You don't have much room to like navigate to get your speed up, to get up the little hills and I was blown away by the difficulty level of it. I didn't underestimate it but it takes a lot of preparation to get ready and to be able to compete at that stuff. I mean, I got lapped by twofold by people.
Christopher: Where was this then? Was this in the Bay Area?
Elijah: This is in the Bay Area. I don't even remember where. It was like local.
Christopher: Yeah, I know. It's this kind of own special thing in the Bay Area because it's so dry and bumpy here. The races tend to be very, very fast.
Elijah: It was really fast.
Christopher: Really fast, yeah. Whereas if you were to do one up north, like in Oregon, then it would probably be soakier and slower and there might be more running involved.
Elijah: Okay. So, remind me again. So, you're riding up little hills.
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You're riding and there's periods where you're running and you're carrying your bike, right?
Christopher: In most of the races that I did, and this may not be an accident, like I chose this specific series where you really don't have to get off your bike much at all.
Elijah: Okay.
Christopher: And then if you're riding a mountain bike, it's really not difficult. So, they put these barriers into the course and they're only six to eight inches high or something. And on a mountain bike usually it's quite easy to bunny hop them. And I really suck at bunny hopping and even I can't do it. You just sort of lift one wheel over a time. It's a little bit risky because you do crash sometimes. Sometimes, I'll say, yeah, I could bunny hop that, but there's a really good chance that I'll crash if I do at some point.
If you're doing six to eight, maybe even ten laps, then you're going to cross that barrier many times and so that increases the chances you're going to crash on it. And so I'll choose to run some of them. But for the most part you can hop the barriers. And if you hop the barrier, you don't have to get off and you don't have to run. So I told you like I hate walking and I hate running. So, one of the things I ride the mountain bike, it decreases the chances of me having to get off the bike.
Elijah: Got it. Limited experience running. You're doing a lot of what's called sagittal plane movement. So, you're going forward. So, I would imagine unless you're pretty diligently balancing that out with frontal plane movement in the gym, I would definitely want to incorporate movement that's side to side.
Christopher: I've had someone say this before, one of my buddies that knows a lot more about training than I do. And it's totally right. Like if you push me from the side, you'll probably break my hip or something.
Elijah: Because if you're only strong in one direction, you're going to have a hard time on a trail and you're going to have a hard time when you jump off of a, say, even like a four-foot wall and you're trying to land. You're going to not be perfectly straight.
Christopher: Oh, yeah. I know my ankles would hurt. I know that for sure.
Elijah: Exactly.
Christopher: It's gotten a lot better now actually. I think a couple of years ago, when I was not feeling good, I wasn't really recovering and synthesizing proteins very well. And so I would sustain injuries that wouldn't really heal. My ankles would hurt all the time for this reason, just constantly catabolic.
Elijah: Right, right.
Christopher: And jumping off -- like I would have nightmares about jumping off a three-foot wall. Have you ever had that kind of electric sort of really sharp pain in your ankles when you jump off of something like that?
Elijah: I have not from that but I know what you're talking about.
Christopher: Yeah. So, jumping off of things is definitely not something I've done much of.
Elijah: All right. I would have to think about your tissue. Like how do I prepare your body to manage the demands of the event? Because I think from a cardiovascular perspective, you're probably rather fit. So, as long as you slowly -- let's say you have four months to get ready for this race and it was one of the five-mile races. You would just need to build up so that you could run consistently for about seven to eight miles. So, whatever level you're at running wise, we would start like a progression to where you're able to run that long. So, it would take some time but your heart is prepared to do that, do you know what I mean?
Christopher: Absolutely. Obviously, my cardiovascular system is strong and my VO2 max is probably pretty good. It's just that I lack all the other equipment to actually, propel myself without the aid of a bicycle.
Elijah: Exactly, exactly. So, one of the top racers in the sport was actually -- two of the top racers in the sport were mountain bike racers for years. And so they had these tremendous aerobic bases and they are strong uphill but I'm sure part of their process was actually learning how to run better on trails, learning how to navigate going downhill running, all those things. And then there's the running component and then there's the exercise and strength component.
You said, you mentioned you're doing some stuff with kettlebells. That's definitely applicable. But I really believe in specificity. So, obstacle specificity. So, you go ahead and you look -- what I do was I went on YouTube and I looked up what is in the event. So, there's carries with a sandbag on your bag, 50 pounds. There's carries with a log on your back, 50 pounds. There's carries with a bucket. You have to be able to carry the items for some distance up a hill basically.
I would start incorporating carries. But short and maybe a little lighter too, to just get your body accustomed to like, for example, holding a lug on your back. You have to hold it. So your shoulders get tired from having your arms above your head, so practicing just walking up and down like a very, not a super steep grade, holding like small log and then building yourself up there. And just so you could actually teach your body to deal with these weird types of demands they're not used to that are replicating like work that had to be done in the past. That's kind of the sort of the ethos of like Spartan race, for example. It's like what would you have to do to like build a cabin on a hill?
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Christopher: I might not be as bad as I thought because -- So, one of the guys I've interviewed for my podcast is James Wilson. And James Wilson, I think of him as a Dan John type guy. He's that kind of strength training expert. And he specializes in mountain bikers. But I'm sure a lot of what he teaches is not specific to mountain bikers really. And so he has this concept he talks about which is the concept of a zoo human where you just have one kind of trick that you can do and it doesn't really translate to anything.
And I paid attention to that message and I've really tried to -- I mean, I follow his plan and do the exercises that he recommends. Yeah, that's definitely -- I have some sandbags. The other day, my mother and father-in-law brought a sand pit round for my daughter and the sand was in 50 pound bags. I was surprised how light they were actually. I thought I was going to put my back out. And it was no big deal at all. I guess that's why. It's just kind of not that dissimilar from what I've been doing already.
Elijah: Well, yeah. When you think about it, actually, mountain biking specifically, you are having to deal with the action, the side to side action. You have to have strong anterior tibialis and strong glute med and just these muscles that are going to actually help stabilize you in the frontal plane because you are navigating quick side-to-sides on the bike.
Christopher: And there's a specific hip movement that you use to drive the center of gravity of the bike and the movement which is the most like it that I've done with a kettlebell is a kettlebell windmill. Do you know what that is?
Elijah: Absolutely.
Christopher: And then I do it with a stick as well. I do broom handle and do that same sort of windmill movement and then you kind of have to drive one hip out in order to make the movement happen. And that's the exact movement, that is exactly how you corner on a mountain bike.
Elijah: Yeah, you're shifting your hip to the side and reaching the [0:26:55] [Indiscernible].
Christopher: Exactly. And if you can't do that -- So, James Wilson says this all the time and it's so true. If you can't do a stick windmill, good luck cornering a mountain bike. Just forget about the trail. Just concentrate on the stick windmill.
Elijah: Okay, okay. So, maybe we're not working with as bad as we thought. All right?
Christopher: No, I'm not a total roadie. It's not like on my turbo trainer in the kitchen just spinning into force all day long.
Elijah: Okay. So, there are probably some -- you would want to continue doing -- what kind of strength training are you doing?
Christopher: It's light, I think, compared to what most people with course strength training. My heaviest kettlebell is 80 pounds, which is pretty big for a kettlebell. I can swing that pretty good. I can't do Turkish getup with one that big. I think it's 53 pounds, I think, is the bell that I do with Turkish getup with. So, I tend to do a swing with the bell of that weight as well because I went to see a local personal trainer and he said that really want the two to be about the same, so I went down weight with the bell and then just started doing a Turkish getup in the swing with the same weight.
Elijah: Okay. So, you're doing getup, swings, windmills, those are all great exercises to just make sure your body is prepared to do a variety of things. You probably have a relatively strong core. Probably what you would need to incorporate is a little bit of plyometrics where you're training your body to deal with the impact forces that you would be applying from coming off of the walls. The carries, sustain carries are a little bit different than just one up and down carry. So, walking with the sandbags for a while, doing those sorts of things.
Christopher: How about walking with a 35-pound two-year old girl?
Elijah: Absolutely. Just put her on your shoulder.
Christopher: It's something obviously I've done a lot. I mean, sometimes she has good days but we have a mailbox that's half a mile away now. She's like, "Please hold me. Please hold me. Please hold me." And this is taken six steps. So, quite often we'll end up, either me or Julie, will end up carrying her all the way back. And, I guess, that's kind of good for us in terms of our health and athletic performance but maybe not so good for our kid. But it seems quite applicable here.
Elijah: Well, there you go, man. So, it sounds like you're talking yourself into being almost in shape enough to do one of these right now.
Christopher: No, I totally don't.
Elijah: We don't even need to train. You could just jump in.
Christopher: No. I worry that I'm probably strong and fit enough to hurt myself. I've got just a big enough engine to cause some serious harm. But no, the terrain here actually in Bonny Doon has been, I think, more, lends itself more to this type of obstacle racing because the trails are rugged. Not as many people ride them, and so there's a lot of trails which are really deep in like loose [0:29:51] [Indiscernible] leaves and sticks and stuff and there's some places where I have to hold 500 or 600 watts for sustained periods to ride them. And so some days I just get off and walk.
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Yeah, it's definitely being a more all around kind of movement. And then I have to cross a creek which just got a six-inch diameter log across it and so I have to kind of balance across it holding my bike. And sometimes there's be a big redwood down across the trail and it's been there for the last ten years because nobody has a chainsaw that can come anywhere near it. And the other day actually, I went to leap over one of those things.
I lifted my bike over first so it was on the other side of the log. And then I went to sort of frog hop it. And I thought my feet were going to land on top of the tree and I didn't. I just went flying over it and almost landed on my bike and went [0:30:37] [Indiscernible] and it was because I totally miss underestimated how high I was going to jump, which I think is probably a good sign.
Elijah: Nice. That setting sounds awesome.
Christopher: Yeah, it's good down here. We're lucky.
Elijah: Yeah. Just out on those trails, run a little bit, keep doing your kettlebell work, carry some heavy things and then -- can you do a pull up?
Christopher: I don't know. It's been years since I tried to do a pull up, so I'm going to answer nay to that. How do you get that? What's the easiest way to get a pull up bar?
Elijah: I have this thing you get from online or the TV ad like the pull up door hanger. It's above my door. It hooks on one side of the door and you pull up on the other side.
Christopher: [0:31:18] [Indiscernible] one of those, the first time I did it, it just--
Elijah: Fell off?
Christopher: I pulled the frame off the door or something. And I'm like, "Oh, shit."
Elijah: Get a good YouTube clip out of that. No. If you have home gym set up like your garage, you can order a rig from Rogue. They have these frames you drill into the wall and then you have a bar going across there and you do pull ups there. So, knowing that, definitely you would need to be able to do a pull up, potentially a muscle up, because you have to get over an eight-foot wall.
Christopher: So, it is functional.
Elijah: Absolutely.
Christopher: I should apologize to James Wilson for this actually because he totally has pull ups in his plans and I totally skipped right over them.
Elijah: I mean, pull ups are -- if you had to take three exercises and only do those, it's going to be squats, push-ups and pull-ups.
Christopher: And you think that's -- so that's true even if you're cyclist, you don't want to gain a ton of upper body mass.
Elijah: No. For a cyclist -- I'd like to be able to do a few pull ups just to make sure I can get over a wall if I fall down a hole.
Christopher: Just so you don't slip and break your hip in the shower, don't become so feeble. Or exactly, if you ever had to escape from something, a fire or something, which has happened to Bonny Doon in recent years.
Elijah: You need to be able to pull your body up. But it's not going to lend well to -- But now here's the deal, you can do a lot of pull ups and not gain any weight. You're not going to get bigger by doing pull ups. You're just going to get stronger at doing pull ups. Right now, I'm 147 pounds. My upper body looks like any endurance athlete. I'm not really built up that much. But I can do a fair amount of pull ups, you know what I mean? And I do them all the time.
Christopher: I have to say it's interesting. It would be good for me to do a little bit of something else. I am very one dimensional.
Elijah: Also crawling. Do you crawl?
Christopher: No, never. I mean, I play with my kid on the floor but what do you mean?
Elijah: Yeah, okay. So, I am sort of familiar with this zoo animal, zoo human concept. Definitely like with Daniel Vitalis. Do you know who that is?
Christopher: I will link to all these people. If you're listening to this and you're wondering -- we mention things. I always go through and carefully create show notes and link to everything we talked about. But just the show notes for this podcast, and I'll have everything linked.
Elijah: Well, this guy, he's like -- he wants to replicate -- you've got Paleo and then you've got like super Paleo. And this dude wants to like live in a tent and never use electricity and eat like wild plants and all those stuff. And he's all about this concept of like move not. It's like doing natural movement. You need to be able to crawl on the ground. You need to be able to like flip through, like a break dancing move kind of and just being able to go from standing to the ground and back up and then side to side.
And so, in the actual obstacle course race, you will always have to crawl under something. You'll have to crawl under barb wire. You'll have to crawl under like two-foot opening to get under a wall. And so being able to actually move your body when it's horizontal is integral to this. And that's going to actually help with shoulder stability, core stability, coordination, and so that you are actually more supple of a mover.
I'm thinking right now -- we've been talking about this for a little bit. Basically, you need to be able to do pull up. You want to incorporate some crawling. You want to do some sustained carries. And then you just need to be able to run five to seven miles in a row and you'd be ready to go.
Christopher: That actually sounds -- I know that my daughter would be delighted because it's all the kind of stuff that she would be doing anyway. It's like natural kids play, isn't it?
[0:35:05]
Elijah: Absolutely. There is a, what's called a kids race at the Spartan race. It's like a mile long. And I just saw a clip of it for the first time. It's the cutest thing you've ever seen. There's like four-foot ramps they run up and down. It really becomes a family affair. You see a lot of families out there. They take their kids on the course and then they do their race and they're out eating and whatnot after the event. There's a nice feel of a festival afterwards.
Christopher: Yeah. That's like a mountain bike race as well.
Elijah: Yeah, yeah.
Christopher: It's like the worst thing you can do for your gut, but somehow everyone seems to get away with it, I don't really know, apart from me apparently.
Elijah: Oh, hammering right after the race?
Christopher: Yeah, exactly. So, there's like a bunch of taco trucks and they serve really cheap Mexican food that's been deep fried in the worst type of rancid vegetable oil and then you mix that up with a bunch of cheap beer to a gut that's just had its blood supply removed for the last four hours. Everybody is fine. They're still drinking two hours later. Not me. I cannot do that. I appreciate the environment.
Elijah: I'm in your camp. I've got some sensitivities there that I have to mind. I certainly don't have the beer after the race. I'm not going to lie.
Christopher: But what's it like? So, one of the things I've been thinking about -- I'm 40 years old now and I've been bike racing for quite a long time. And one of the things I'm conscious of is that I'm probably not going to be doing four-hour bike races for very much longer. And the reason is, it seems like a lot of people do a ton of endurance exercise they eventually develop some kind of arrhythmia. And it's a super complex and obviously lots of other diet and lifestyle factors come into play.
I've been stalking an electrocardiologist called John Mandrola in an attempt to get him to come on the podcast and I've had limited success. He's obviously a very busy guy. But he has a great blog that I'll link to in the show notes for this episode. He talks about all the same diet and lifestyle factors that I do and then he talks about excessive endurance exercise as being one of the things that people shouldn't be doing like restricting sleep and not handling stress well and eating a ton of really crap foods.
So, it's something I'm thinking about. And so, the obstacle racing, is it just going to be more of the same? If you're talking about a nine-mile run, then that's something -- how long does it take you to do that? It's still endurance, isn't it?
Elijah: Okay. So, I think there's two components to that answer. So, you've got, number one, I think the problem with people developing like A-fib from, say, a triathlete or somebody -- there was a period of time where people were training at this above threshold level for hours on end. They're just cranking, cranking, cranking and their heart rate is really high and they're pumping all this blood and they're thinking more is better. We found that at this point, that's not necessarily the best case when you're looking at longevity.
So, endurance sport as a whole will be positively associated with longevity if it's mimicking in some ways the lower type intensity that you might have found. I know you have a background with like the Paleo type concept. If you're looking back to where you were doing persistent hunting and working on running for four to five hours during the course of a day, you're not running at 95% heart rate max. You're running at 60 or less, right? So, the higher your heart rate is for the sustained period of time, the less it is similar to what we're sort of probably built to do for long periods of time. So, when you're talking about obstacle course racing, number one, it's intermittent. Your heart rate is coming up and down because--
Christopher: Oh, get out. Nine miles, you're like it's a 190 beats on the outset, isn't it? Don't like to me. There's no way your heart rate comes down in between obstacles, surely.
Elijah: It depends on how well you're trying to do. But you can do it in such a way that you will have some recovery after the obstacles or during the obstacles for that matter. Like the spear throw, for example. You could stand there for a minute and get yourself ready.
Christopher: So, it's more like a skill thing?
Elijah: Yeah, there's a skill element. So, you've got the hanging -- I mean, you're also talking about the race, right? So, in the race, you're going to max. But what supports an endurance event, it's sub-threshold aerobic training, hitting the heart rate between 60% and 80% for your longer duration stuff. And also, the race is only, maximum, going to take you three and a half hours if you're competitive for the longer distances.
[0:40:12]
And for the people who aren't competitive, they're walking a lot of the time. And their heart rate is not extremely high. So, the super distance might take you an hour, fifteen. I don't run longer than two hours in a row in any given time at all.
Christopher: Maybe this will be a good segue because maybe we should wrap this one up here then and I'll divert people. I've been listening to your podcast and I really enjoy it, you and Phil, right? The Obstacle Racer Podcast.
Elijah: The Obstacle Order.
Christopher: Obstacle Order, I'm sorry.
Elijah: That's okay. The Obstacle Order Podcast is something I'm definitely -- We got to talk a little bit about obstacle racing today but this is a pretty free flowing conversation. And so if you want more detail on obstacle racing, what it is, there's select episodes that you can find that have a lot of description about what's going on with the course. We talk about our races and we interview expert obstacle racers who are pretty compelling endurance athletes in general.
I think you can learn a lot from people who are kind of doing different things. Other than that, I guess, you can contact me on Facebook. It's just my name right now. I just love talking about this stuff. This is what I'm interested in. I don't have anything to sell or I haven't written a book or anything like that. It's just like--
Christopher: Are you training people? How do you make a living? You're training people one on one?
Elijah: Yeah, I'm a personal trainer. If you're in the Bay Area, you could contact me. There's only probably two lots open. With training, myself, between ten and 15 hours per week, workouts, and then my training load is pretty high and then doing my podcast, I have a hard schedule to get on. but if somebody's really serious and they want to really be fit and they're going to show up on time and they're not going to complain, hit me up.
Christopher: So, if you need a cheerleader, Elijah is probably not for you.
Elijah: Not your guy. Not your guy. I'm not a good cheerleader.
Christopher: Can you count reps for me as well?
Elijah: I don't count. I tell people I'm an artist, not an accountant. If you want an accountant, go get one of those.
Christopher: That's excellent. Awesome. All right. So, thanks very much.
Elijah: Okay, thank you.
Christopher: Cheers.
[0:42:24] End of Audio
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