TriDot Podcast .129

Examining Athlete Case Studies for Nutrition Insights

Intro:  This is the TriDot podcast.  TriDot uses your training data and genetic profile, combined with predictive analytics and artificial intelligence to optimize your training, giving you better results in less time with fewer injuries.  Our podcast is here to educate, inspire, and entertain.  We’ll talk all things triathlon with expert coaches and special guests.  Join the conversation and let’s improve together.

Andrew Harley:  Friends, family, fellow athletes, welcome back to the TriDot podcast.  We've got a great show lined up for you today.  I've got Andy and Abby joining us.  So in total, it's an Andrew, an Andy, and an Abby sitting around talking about real world, race day nutrition case studies.  What can we learn from studying the race day caloric intake data of other athletes? Today we will find out, and podcasting simply doesn't get better than this.  Our key guide to the world of fuel and hydration is Andy Blow from Precision Fuel and Hydration.  Andy is a sports scientist with a degree in sports and exercise science from the University of Bath.  An expert in sweat, dehydration, and cramping.  Andy has worked with multiple Formula 1 Racing, NBA, NBL, MLB, and Premier League sports teams, as well as many professional triathletes.  An elite level triathlete in his younger days Andy has finished in the top ten of the Ironman events, as well as winning an Xterra World title. Andy, welcome back to the show.

Andy Blow:  Good to be back, Andrew.  Thanks for the invite.

Andrew:  Also joining us from Precision Fuel and Hydration team is Abby Coleman. Abby is a sports scientist who completed her degree in sports and exercise science at the University of Bath.  She previously worked at the Porsche Human Performance Center as an exercise physiologist before joining Precision Fuel and Hydration as their resident sports scientist.  Abby, thanks for coming on the show today.

Abby Coleman:  Thanks for having me.  It's great to be a guest, Andrew.

Andrew:  I'm Andrew the average triathlete, voice of the people, and Captain of the middle of the pack.  As always, we’ll roll through our warm up question, settle in for our main set topic, and then wind things down with our cool down.  Lots of good stuff.  Let's get to it.

Warm up theme:  Time to warm up!  Let’s get moving.

Andrew:  We can control a lot of things in endurance sports, but the weather is not one of them.  Abby, Andy for our warm up question today…from all your time training, racing, and just all around outdoors adventuring, what was the worst weather you have found yourself exposed to?  Abby, it's your first time on the show, so we’ll lead off with you today.  What was it for you?

Abby:  I suppose mine is somewhat artificial in that we couldn't really call it weather, I suppose.  Environmental conditions would be more accurate and I'd have to go for when I was working as an exercise physiologist out of the performance center and jumped in the heat chamber.  So this is about 38 degrees Celsius.  That's around 100 Fahrenheit.

Andrew:  Thank you for that conversion.  I would not have known.  Yeah, I needed that.

Abby:  Very, very hot.  Very, very humid in this chamber.  Andy will attest to that.  He knows it well as well.  No fan.  It gets very, very sweaty very quickly.  Static treadmill and just very rapidly.  So within sort of 40 minutes, I was spent.  I was completely done, came out and felt rather ill.  Now, when you're in a heat chamber, you measure core body temperature and that just was spiking close to 40 degrees.  So at that point, you really do want to pull a person out and that was–  I've always hated the heat.  I'm a redhead.  So I've always struggled in hot weather, but that was by far the worst thing I've ever experienced.

Andrew:  So on that particular occasion, like, why were you in the heat chamber?  Was it just for heat adaptation protocol?  Were you studying something in particular that day?

Abby:  It was really to get a taste of what we put athletes through.  So we’ll go and experience it for yourself and this was a week in advance of having some ultra runners come and join us in the lab that were going out to do an event called Marathon des Sables in the Sahara Desert, which is a seven day, six stage race across the desert.  So they had come for a series of heat acclimation sessions.  Prior to that, you know, I was relatively new at this point.  So, you know, “Jump in the chamber Abbs, and get a taste for what these guys are going to go through.”  And I naively said yes.  What you'll find is when you go into those kind of conditions, you don't stand a chance of running at your normal pace.  You know, you want to dial that pace right back.  But I was quite content at the start, you know?  “Oh, put it up.”  You know, put it up.  It feels unnatural to run that slow, but you've got to really manage your pace to manage your core body temperature.  And yeah, I really struggled.  So a lesson learned.

Andrew:  Yeah, what an experience.  And like you said, not inherently outdoor weather conditions, but I think all of our listeners will give you a pass on that because that sounds rough. That sounds rugged. Yeah, great, great response there.  Andy Blow, what is the wildest, most extreme weather conditions or foulest, I suppose, weather conditions you've found yourself in indoors or outdoors?

Andy:  Well, I reckon…So I've got a few tales about the heat.  One of those would be racing at the Laguna Phuket Triathlon in Thailand, which I was saying to Abbs earlier when we were chatting that I got off the plane on like Thursday evening I think it was and was racing on either Saturday or Sunday.  I got off the plane and thought “I am not going to be able to race in this heat.”  I have zero tolerance for it, right?  I ultimately did end up racing.  It is kind of amazing what you can put your body through when your mind wants to.  But they took me off the finish line and put me in a cold bath of water and like covered me in cold towels because I was in trouble after that.  But actually probably the worst I've had is at the other end of the spectrum, which was during a bike race, a stage race on the bike in the UK.  I think it was sort of early spring time maybe?  So when the weather can be one way or the other, and this day was particularly wet.  Like horizontal rain with sleet in it.  So little bits of ice and snow in there.  I remember not really having adequate gloves and just couldn't couldn't feel my brake levers racing in a pack, you know, downhill at 50 miles an hour and I had one of the worst crashes I’ve ever had.  It was just– it was a day a day to firmly forget.  I think it was called the Tour of Wessex, and it's just one of those races I've almost managed to put to the back of my memory.

Andrew:  Until podcast host Andrew Harley just made you relive it right here in front of our entire audience.

Andy:  Trauma.  Traumatic.  Very traumatic.

Andrew:  This just this just became a therapy session for Andy.  That’s all.  Guys, as we always do on Monday, when the new podcast comes out, we're going to throw this question out to you, our listeners.  Make sure you are a part of the I AM TriDot Facebook group.  We just have thousands of athletes talking swim, bike and run every single day there.  So this question will go out to you.  I'm excited to hear your stories and kind of like Andy, Abby, and I.  We had a lot of different stories represented today, and I can't wait to hear what you, our listeners, have to say here.  

Main set theme: On to the main set.  Going in 3…2…1…

PRECISION FUEL AND HYDRATION:  Thrilled to have Andy and Abby from Precision Fuel and Hydration joining us today.  Precision Fuel and Hydration has a range of tools and products to help you personalize your fueling and hydration strategy so that you can perform at your best.  Longtime listeners of the show will know them as Precision Hydration, but they've changed their name to reflect the fact that they've been helping athletes nail both aspects of their performance for a long time now.  Everyone sweats differently, and the amount of fuel we require varies just depending on factors like duration and intensity of our activity.  So a one size fits all approach to fueling and to hydration just doesn't cut it.  Head to PrecisionFuelandHydration.com and use their free online sweat test and quick carb calculator to understand your own fluid, electrolyte, and carbohydrate needs during training and racing.  From there, you can book a free one on one video consultation with the team to refine your hydration fueling strategy for your next race.  As a listener of the show, you can get 10% off your first order of fueling and hydration products by using the code TRIDOT10 when checking out at PrecisionFuelandHydration.com

Andrew:  So, Abby, I'm going to throw you into the hot seat first thing here today.  Our listeners know me way too well.  They've gotten to know Andy a little bit already from I think Andy, this is your third time with us on the podcast.  But Abby, you're brand new to our audience.  So just kind of tell us what piqued your interest in sports science and how did your journey bring you to working with Andy at Precision Fuel and Hydration?

Abby:  Well, I suppose mine’s quite a classic tale of a lot of people that work in sport science.  I'm a very competitive person.  You might not know it if you know me socially, but I ran a lot of track in my teenage years and was very competitive.  If I wanted to win, I wanted to win, but was just never a good enough athlete to really do it seriously.  It was very much a recreational hobby that I did around everything else.  So, you know, I had a big passion for sport, big interest in it, and I've always loved biology.  I've always found the human body very fascinating.  So for me, it was a natural combination of the two to pursue sport science as a career.  So I went to study sport science at the University of Bath and then alongside your studies at Bath, you get the opportunity if you wish to be a professional policeman.  It was on my placement that I met Andy.  At the time he'd already started Precision Fuel and Hydration.  It was very much off the ground.

Andrew:  And he's an alumni of the University of Bath.

Abby:  He is, yeah.  And then post my studies, I joined the team full time, having kept in touch and doing a bit of part time stuff with the team.  And now several years deep and it's completely evolved, really, hasn't it, from where I started doing far more now than we ever were.  But yeah, that's how I met Andy was really through the University of Bath, I suppose the link there.

Andrew :  Yeah, I think for years now, I think my first recollection of your name just as a Precision Fuel and Hydration customer, you know, when when the email blasts would go out from the company, it would it would often be, you know, Abby from Precision Hydration at the time would be who the emails would come from and so now it's great to put a face to a name on an email.  So again, thanks for joining us.  We're obviously glad here at TriDot to have you over there crunching the numbers at Precision Headquarters and we're just happy to be learning from you and Andy today.  So our main objective here is learning everything we can learn from the information that y’all have learned as you've studied athlete nutrition intake in real race context.  So as you started looking at what athletes needed in terms of on course fuel, what sparked the idea to do these athlete case studies?

Abby:  I would say it came about very organically in that it was what we were already doing in the background.  Certainly on the hydration side of things, we were already helping athletes refine their hydration strategies.  You know, probing how much fluid they were drinking in a race, what that equates to per hour and how much sodium they were having alongside that.  And naturally hydration goes pretty hand in hand with fueling.  So the discussions were already happening in the background and then I suppose the first time we did a more formal case study, we started to call it a case study, was a friend of the business Mike, that Andy knows very well was riding the South Downs Way, which is a lovely part of the UK, and he was going for a record.  It was a 100 mile record, wasn't it?  Across the–

Andy:  A 100 and a 200 mile.

Abby:  A hundred on a 200 mile.

Andy:  So he did that and it’s like a point-to-point.  He was going to do it one way and then he was also going to go for the there and back.  So it was a pretty big undertaking.  

Abby:  A big, big challenge.  So Mike approached Andy and said, “Look, I'm planning to do this in a couple of weeks Andy.  What do you think of what I intend to eat and drink?”  We did what we've done plenty of times with athletes.  We looked at the carbs, sodium and fluid intake.  Then post-race because he was off to go do a 200 mile a couple days later, we crunched the numbers and we said, “Look, Mike.  This is what you did.  This is where it lines up with what science would tell us is really correct.  How did you feel?”  You know, that's really important.  Gather that subjective feedback.  How do you feel it went?  And then gave him some feedback, and we wrote him a little report.  So it was really, really low key, but we internally found it fascinating.  So we decided to put it in the newsletter and we said something along the lines of, you know, this is the numbers that Mike hit.  If you want to know how we hit them– you know his menu is what we called it, let us know and we were inundated with responses of people saying, “I want to know what Mike ate.  I want to know what Mike drank.”  So that was the first time we realized that athletes are hungry for this information and it's not out there.  You can't really Google “What did Sam Appleton eat and drink during his gold medal Ironman performance?”  You can't get that information.  So it all tumble weeded from there, I suppose.

Andrew:  Yeah.  So Mike's case study was the OG.  That was the original one, and it just kind of went from there.  At the time that we're recording this podcast, there are 40 case studies published on PrecisionFuelandHydration.com with just a variety at this point of athletes, different types of athletes, different types of races, different temperature ranges, you know, all represented in the case studies.  Tell us what we can expect to find when we visit the case studies page of the website right now.  What's all on there for athletes to peruse and see?

Abby:  We should say, Andrew, we've got 40 triathlete case studies.  I think we're close to, not far off 100 total case studies now.  So around 90, but 40 triathlon case studies, and that's definitely our biggest sport on there given that's our sort of leading sport that we work with probably.  If people visit the website, what they'll see is the home page is a bunch of tiles; different athletes names and the event that they competed in, the conditions, and the duration of time is the kind of front tile they’ll see.  If you were to hover over any tile on there, you will then see their headline numbers, and what we call the headline numbers is grams of carb they hit per hour, milliliters of fluid they hit per hour, milligrams of sodium they took per hour, and then relative sodium concentration which is a measure that factors in that ratio of sodium to fluid.  Where the two work closely together.  If someone took a really high sodium intake but not much fluid their relative sodium concentration would also be very high.  If they took maybe a moderate sodium intake, but lots and lots of fluid, their relative sodium concentration could be really quite low, even though in isolation you look at their sodium intake and you say, “Oh, they've done a pretty good job there.”  But because they've diluted it with so much fluid, the two together, they might have done what we’d class as a poorer job.  

Andrew:  Gotcha.  Yeah, it's interesting, just going back just a moment to where you were talking about how you found there to be such a hunger in athletes for this kind of information.  And we found that just with our podcast, I mean, when you know we're in the– at the time we're recording this– the 120s on how many episodes have come out.  You know, this one will probably be close to episode 130 or so, and so just routinely the episodes that get the most downloads and listens, we have a pretty stable listenership. There's always a spike on nutrition episodes.  It's just fascinating and people certainly are hungry for this.  I think, you know, they can go out and do the swim, bike, and run training.  But just nailing that nutrition is just such a key thing and it's just always great to see what other people doing?  What are other athletes doing and what can I learn from that?  So we're certainly thankful to have y’all out there studying it, and we're certainly thankful to be able to learn from you.  So, you know, Abby, you're one of the sports scientists conducting these athlete case studies.  You said you've done close to 100 at this time; 40 on triathletes.  What is the process like from just initially making contact with an athlete to publishing an athlete's case study?

Abby:  It's really quite simple.  It's largely a conversation be it via email or via video call and video call is obviously preferable because you just gather so much more information and you build a rapport with the athlete, which is really important.  We'll try and sit down with an athlete pre-race and get an understanding of what they plan to do.  Make sure it's sensible.  Of course, that's what the athlete really wants.  Whilst what we would like to get from it is a great case study, at the end of it, we want to see these athletes perform well.  So I suppose in some ways they are, and me and Andy had this conversation earlier.  The data set there is somewhat skewed towards positive performances because we've often worked with these athletes for a period of time before.

Andrew:  Ahead of time. Yeah, it makes sense.

Abby: We sat down with them beforehand and we try to prevent them doing anything too silly.  But the most important step there is to sit down with them post-race quite quickly after that race within a day or two, or if circumstances allow even the evening after the race, get them to send over what they ate and drank so it’s fresh and it's much more accurate.  Then following that, we have a calculator that we've built where we input what they ate and drank, and it spits out the numbers.

Andy:  When Abby says it's simple, I think it is simple in the respect that the goal is simple, and the process is a conversation and a trading of emails, but it’s what sets it apart in the way this is done when we do it, is the rigor with which it's done.  It's done extremely rigorously.  We know that in triathlon, for example, it's relatively easy to quantify what people have consumed on a bike normally because it will be X amount of bottles of either one or several different fluids and bottles are fairly easy to predict the amount that people have drunk.  If they say they've had a whole bottle, we know exactly how much it was.  If they say it’s a half, yeah, you can get a good handle on that.  We built this incredible tool, and I say we because I've had very little to do with the building of this, but in the company Abby and Emily have done a phenomenal job building this amazing spreadsheet that really you can put different, we can put the branded gels and energy bars and all sorts of other common foods that athletes eat into the spreadsheet, and it will break them down in terms of the sodium content, the carbohydrate content, and any other macronutrients and calories so that we we can pass out that information pretty quickly and understand if it's representative.  Then on the run in a triathlon, we're trying to interrogate athletes about that.  If they're drinking from cups at aid stations, like how many cups.  We've done testing here.  I was literally in the kitchen here again the other day, reconfirming some of the how much is a cup size?  You know, is it 2 ounces a mouthful or 1.5 ounces?  So we get all of that information and then basically plug the numbers in and it spits out kind of those headline numbers.  Then from the quality of the data, when you look at our case studies, if you go right to the bottom, you see something which is a data confidence score.  Which is essentially Abbs and Emily and myself sometimes having a conversation around how accurate do we feel that particular athlete's recall was.  For example, we did a 24 hour running race with an athlete where because all of the food was handed up to them from the side of the track, we could measure everything.  You could be incredibly accurate in terms of the rigor with which you recorded what was consumed.  Way easier actually than in an Ironman as you know from your study.  You know, it's kind of you have to just recall what…

Andrew:  Yeah.  

Andy:  But what we found is that by doing– I think in each study, there's always going to be an inherent small amount of error just because some of these things are estimated.  But the power in this comes with the volume of data that we're gathering and the trends that it shows.  And I think that's an important point to make as well.  As much as one case study can be incredibly useful for an individual, collectively they're really powerful in telling you trends about what people tend to do and what tends to work for people or not.

Andrew:  So Andy, as you alluded to, one of the 40 triathlon case studies features an alarmingly average age group athlete, Andrew Harley, yours truly, and several of our TriDot athletes they've already seen that case study, and they thought it was funny how when you look at the page of triathlete case studies, you have names like Sam Appleton, Emma Pallant-Browne, Jeanni Metzler, Sarah Crowley, Ruth Astle, I mean, just name a few.  And you see their eight-ish hour full distance finish times, their four-ish hour 70.3 finish times.  And right next to them on the page is Andrew Harley and his 12 hour and 49 minute finish.  So I mean, it was an honor to be included on the list.  I was certainly happy to do it.  And after the race, Abby, just like you described, I sent off all the information to you and Emily as well as I could remember it and it's challenging, right?  Andy, you talked about just measuring OK, in the on-course race cups.  Like how much fluid is actually held in there?  And then as you're going through an aid station, you're grabbing two and pouring some on your head and drinking some and even from my own hand-held bottle, Abby, when I was trying the recall, OK, how much fluid did I drink from my hand-held bottle?  I would fill it up at aid stations.  I would take a sip and I'd pour half the bottle on my head.  So recalling how much I was taking in was a little difficult on the back end.  I think my, you know, accuracy of information on the back end was somewhere in the middle of your rating, whereas that 24 hour race you referenced had a high degree of confidence in that data set.  So, Andy, Abby, once you have that list of what was consumed by an athlete, you know, what are you looking for in the results?

Abby:  We're looking at how many grams of carb we take per hour, fluid intake, and sodium intake.  What we describe as the three levers.  That's any endurance activity you’re doing; race, training session.  You've got three acute costs of that exercise.  You’re burning through energy, your carbohydrates.  You're losing fluids through sweat and you're losing sodium again through sweat.  And they’re the three things that you want to be replacing in different proportions depending on your individual physiology, but also the conditions that you're in, the intensity and duration that you're exercising for, and a bunch of other factors.  So that's why you'll see such variation in those case studies.  Different numbers for fluid, carb, sodium.  But on occasions, they'll each receive green, although there's a spread because they were appropriate for that scenario for that athlete.  And so you kind of touched upon it, Andrew, a little bit.  The case studies, they are a great learning tool for individuals to look at.  Hopefully, they can go there, read what other athletes are doing, and learn something from it.  Take something from it.  They're not to be directly copied.  They’re an example of what worked for one athlete, and we're happy to have individual discussions with athletes.  We do free 20 minute video consultations with athletes where we can discuss their circumstances, their racing, what's worked for them.  But everyone is individual and so the headline numbers are what we're looking for, but then we sit down with an athlete and we dive into what worked for them, get their feedback, and then we do a full write up, which hopefully dissects those headline numbers and explains perhaps why they've received an amber for one, a green for another.  But then on the next race it might have changed, and that's why the full case study is important.  We didn't touch upon it in the previous answer, but once you click into one of those tiles, you receive the headline numbers again at the top and many beneath that and race information down the side.  

Andrew:  It's very thorough.  There's a lot to digest there on each individual case study.  They’re very fascinating to look at.

Abby:  There is.  Some of them are lengthy pieces.  You know, they’re bedtime reading, for sure.  But it's often required we feel.  You need to tell the full story.  The numbers are interesting at the top, but you need the context alongside that.

Andy:  I think there’s a case of zooming in and zooming out because when athletes first talk to us usually, the typical athlete conversation around fueling starts off as a description of the products that they take and we immediately try to change that conversation to look at the numbers.  So rather than them telling us, “Oh, well, I like these kind of energy bars, and I have a few of those that have this,” and that's like, whoa, that's not what it's about at this point.  At the planning point, it's all about having an appreciation for what you're trying to put into your body, why and how much.  And as Abbs has said, it's about boiling it down at that point to simple carbs, fluid, sodium.  Once you get beyond that, then you kind of can zoom back in a little bit onto the products themselves, and all of a sudden it's like not, “Oh, I'm going to take X amount of these bars per hour.”  It's like, “X amount of these bars per hour gives me Y amount of carbohydrate.”  So actually, I know now I need two and a half bars or whatever that number is.  So the reason we've made just so much on the headline numbers and the green, amber, red system for coding them is that we believe that that's where the conversation needs to start, and then as Abbs has said, getting into the case study detail, that's when you get the context, the nuance, the actual menu, and you start to piece the story back together.  But without anchoring it around those numbers, you’re just talking about what you might fancy eating on a bike ride or something and that’s not– even though that's typically the way a lot of people approach it, it's probably not the most productive for performance.

Andrew:  I'm excited for our listeners to go find my case study and see how much of my inputs were green versus amber versus red, because you keep alluding to those color codings.  The green is you nailed this part; you took in the recommended ranges of this particular part of your nutrition plan.  The amber is you were just outside of the recommended ranges and the red is you were well outside of your recommended ranges.  Is that correct?

Andy:  Yeah.  

Abby:  I think that's a fair comment.  I'd say if something's red, it's that it's far enough out that it might have affected performance, you know?  Amber is you did a pretty good job, it just could have been slightly better.  And green is spot on.  We're really happy with this.

Andy:  We've got to always remember that triathlon, like any other sport, performance is measured by performance outcomes.  So you've definitely got case studies in the armory where people have achieved the goal that they set out to achieve and you'd be one of those people.  You know, you completed, that was your first Ironman.  You completed it in good shape.

Andrew:  And that was the goal!

Andy:  Yeah.  And so to an extent, you know, we've given you amber on most of your nutrition intakes there, but you hit your goal.  So the fact that we might advise you to tweak some of those numbers to get them closer to green in your next race, if you're going to go again in order to sort of support a higher level of performance is significant.  But you can definitely have a good race occasionally with poor aspects to your nutrition.  I would hesitate to say that in a really long race, you can completely screw up your nutrition and still bluff through.  But there is a huge– we've got to remember that in triathlon, especially, it's a very physical sport. Performance is largely dictated by fitness level and nutrition, fueling, and hydration just is a big pillar that supports that.  But the fitter you are, the more leeway you've got with having a little bit of wiggle room to get some of those things wrong.  I don't think you can always say that it's always an aim, really, to get your nutrition metrics in the kind of green zone.  But you certainly– it’s not a barrier to performance to be just outside of those some of the time.  Ultimately, there's bigger factors than what you eat and drink that drive your performance.

Andrew:  Yeah, great point.  And there's something Abby said earlier, you can book a 20 minute call with a member of the Precision Fuel and Hydration team on the website and find out what your needs are.  That way you can look at case studies that are a little bit closer in the ballpark to probably what your needs are and learn what those people did.  So that's also a great tool that you have set up for athletes to take advantage of.   Let's talk a little bit about what you've already learned from the data that's come in.  You've talked about just the power in the cumulative data set.  So from the 40 triathlete case studies, the 100 or so of the overall case studies, let's just kind of go metric by metric here.  What have you learned about carbohydrate when it comes to athletes from these data sets?

Andy:  I would say one of the biggest things that we've learned is that a lot of the data that we've got is currently with high performance athletes.  You know, people who are closer to the front of the race and the figures that they're hitting on carbohydrate are nearly all, if not within the guideline recommendations; either within them or above them in general.  There's very few cases where people are skimping on 18 carbohydrates being at or near the front of a race.  That's not the same as saying if you eat a lot of carbohydrates it will get you to the front of the race.  But it's saying if you are fit enough to be there, you know, punching your way at the front of an Ironman…

Andrew:  And if you've trained your gut a little bit, probably to tolerate that.

Andy:  Yeah, those two things go hand in hand.  Then you probably not only will benefit from taking in quite a lot of carbs, but you’ll need to.  When we say quite a lot, the entry level, even for quite a lot, is probably 60 grams an hour and the optimal is probably closer to 80 or 90 with a few examples going beyond that.  So I think that would be a fair trend to start with.  The other one that's really interesting, which Abby’s already kind of covered, was with just this idea that we would always prescribe an athlete to aim for more carbohydrate per hour on the bike than on the run in an Ironman.  But we're seeing quite consistently with some of the faster runners that they're holding up the intake on the run, but that at 70.3 and middle distance races, you can definitely be economical with what you eat and drink on the run if you front load the bike.  Which again, if you're aiming to run fast, is probably an advantage because clearly we all know what it’s like if you tried to eat and drink when you're running on an Olympic or sprint distance, 5 or 10K, it's really difficult to do.  If you're pretty fit, your half marathon running pace is going to drop from your 10K pace, but not by a huge amount and I think that's perhaps one of the explanations for that and is a good reason for athletes to consider being a bit more aggressive with their intake on the bike during middle distance races because it allows you the latitude to skip a few aid stations on the run and keep powering forward if you’re going for a good time.

Abby:  I'll add one bit on carb Andrew, because I think it's a topic that people like to talk about.  

Andrew:  Yeah, I love carbs!  

Abby:  We don't see big differences between what males and females are doing.

Andrew: Very interesting.  

Abby:  In that we get a lot, are there differences between males and females.  We get it on the hydration side, we get it on the carb side.  What we're seeing in the data, the averages, are virtually identical.  Again ranges on both sides, but the average comes out very similar.

Andrew:  Yeah, very interesting.  Another metric you track past carbs is overall fluid intake.  Is that the same on fluid intake as well?

Abby:  It is. Yeah.  Again, ranges both sides, fluid is a little bit all over the place.  It's very dependent on what the conditions are.  But we see averages setting very, very close.

Andrew:  Very cool.  What are the other trends that you see when it comes to just fluids and what people are drinking during their races?

Abby:  Much like carbohydrate.  Typically, athletes are drinking on the bike.  It's just a great opportunity.  They've got their bottles there.  It’s far easier and you see that tapering in fluid on the run.  That's probably, you know, there's noise on the run there.  Like Andy said earlier, there is a lot more estimating going on with estimating how much fluid athletes are taking on the run section because it's cups from aid stations.  We’re having to estimate how much fluid.  When was it a mouthful?  Was it a gulp?  Was it a drink?  Like you, Andrew, they're throwing it on their face and some’s going in, but much of it’s flying around here.  So we do see a tapering.  But yeah, fluid is far more difficult to draw trends and patterns from because there's just so many variables involved.

Andy:  I think I'd stick my neck out and say, you know, the fluid conversation is one to have in another twelve months’ time when we've got a much bigger data set because those numbers really are all over the map.  You do need to start to draw some conclusions when you've got a much larger data set to begin with.  But I reckon what we're going to continue to see is wider and wider outliers.  I mean, I remember just using myself as an example at a middle distance race.  I raced in the UK one year, a race called the Weymouth Triathlon which was kind of a small town, moderately competitive race.  And I was one of the first out of the water.  I jumped on the bike.  It was a rainy cold day, even though it was in the summer and went over a speed hump in the road, you know, as you leave the kind of car park where the transition was, and one of the one of my two bottles for the bike ride bounced out of the cage.  But I was with another guy who is like 15-20 meters up the road and at that point, there is no way I'm stopping to go back and pick it up.  So I just put my head down and went.  There was one aid station on the course.  I classically failed.  I put my hand out, tried to grab the bottle, knocked out the guy's hand.  So…

Andrew:  And that was it.  That was that.

Andy:  And I had a 16 ounce bottle for the whole thing.  Then it was wet and cold and I remember doing that whole race and I probably only managed to– I was running flat out the run. I probably managed a couple of cupfuls of water on the run at the most the whole way round.  So I would have predicted that my fluid intake on that race, even though I did pretty well and put in a good time, was absolutely pitiful.  It would have been absolutely tiny.  I think as we test more, as we get more case studies, we'll find a few more outliers like that and a few more outliers like our Luke Henderson example at the other end of people who are drinking more and more and more.  And that then, at least, at the very least, enables us to kind of bookend this, which is the first place you start when you're when you then try to tell people what's plausible.   Over time what I really hope is that we get a nice bell curve kind of situation going on where we can at least say to people, “Look not only based on what science might tell us, but based on hundreds of thousands of case studies, we can actually see that the median amount of fluid or the the mean amount of fluid that people are taking in certain races and conditions is this.”  And that would give people something to key off.  Because at least then you can know if you're a higher than average sweater, the chances are your number is going to be higher than whatever the average in our database is.  Or if you are lower than average sweater, you're probably safe operating a little bit lower than that.  So I think that's the kind of longer term aim with the fluid side.  

Andrew:  Yeah, no it makes sense.  And at least at that point, we as athletes would have a bell curve to reference and kind of know where on that curve we should position ourselves.  Another thing that could be an evolution of this, you know, just tracking fluid, is just to have Abby run alongside a couple of athletes for their Ironman marathon or half marathon and just jot down some notes on how much are they drinking to try to–

Abby:  That has been suggested.  I kind of have turned that down.

Andy:  Rollerblade.  We’ve said rollerblades.

Andrew:  Actually rollerblades is–  Yeah, that's brilliant.

Andy:  To be fair, as well, Abbs stayed up for 24 hours to do the full record at the 24 hour running event as well.  So you know, we've got form for ridiculous, ridiculous suggestions.  

Abby:  The one and done.  Yeah.  

Andrew:  If I think of anything else, I’ll shoot it y’all’s way.  So something obviously that goes hand-in-hand with tracking fluid is tracking sodium.  That is probably the heartbeat of Precision Fuel and Hydration is tracking the sodium to fluid relationship.  So what are the trends you're seeing cumulatively from the data set and what athletes are doing with their sodium intake?

Abby: I think at the moment what's interesting is we of course, have the advanced sweat test where we can measure an athlete's sweat sodium concentration.  And we've done thousands and thousands of tests now.  Just like Andy was discussing with the fluid building this bell shaped curve, we've already built that in the sweat sodium concentration and we see the average set around 950 milligrams of sodium per liter lost.  Again, you can– People are right down end and everyone in between.  But that's what the average, the peak, the bell shaped curve is falling.  From the case studies that we've done so far, the average relative sodium concentration we're seeing athletes consume is just shy of the 900 milligrams per liter mark.  So that's a nice marrying up there.  The average that people are losing per liter is around 950 and we're seeing the average of the athletes replacing in racing just shy of 900.  I think that tells a nice story and it's just like Andy said on the fluid side, we need to wait really a good few more months; another season of data collection, get far more case studies to really draw any solid conclusions.  But the averages are lining up nicely and we're seeing a big, big range.  You know, Luke Henderson is right at the top end of that continuum and then we've got people that don't sweat as much, haven't got as high sweat sodium concentrations, and we're seeing them replace far less.  You know, it's nice to see what we've been talking to athletes about for years.  It's nice to see that out in practice, really happen.

Andrew:  Yeah.  

Andy:  I think I'd add to that as well with the sodium a couple of cases.  Because looking at yours in particular and also there was another example, one of the early ones when we worked with Jeannie Metzler, who is a pro athlete who is a podium finisher at the 70.3 Worlds last year.  So Jeannie had a test and found out her sweat sodium concentration was relatively on the high side and then from that information, especially when she was going into a hotter race, was relatively aggressive or very aggressive with her sodium intake.  One of the first things we ended up doing with her was actually dialing that back a little bit because we tend to see that when athletes, if they have knowledge of having relatively high sweat sodium losses and they're going into hot races, there's a bit of a nagging feeling of taking a bit more salt as an insurance policy.  I think that may have even been the case with yours to an extent.  You know, you're looking at the average sodium concentration on yours.  It was pretty punchy and it was a hot, hot day when you raced in your Ironman.  

Andrew:  In Waco.  Yep.

Andy:  On average, I would say we're encouraging athletes to take a little bit more sodium, but there is a cohort of athletes and sometimes in hotter conditions, people get that message and take it a bit far and we we're always mindful to be saying, “Look, this is very possible to take a bit too much as well.”  The penalty for not taking enough is relatively severe, but there are penalties for taking too much.  So that's another thing that's been borne out rather than the big numbers, is a couple of individual studies and I think that's affecting how we communicate this to athletes to make sure that we’re saying, “Look, it's not always more is better.”  I think we've been pretty strong on that message for a long time, actually, but it's doubling down on it to make sure that people– Because I know what it feels like when you’re going into a race yourself.  Especially when you step into the unknown with more extreme conditions and that's probably the kind of stuff that we need to help people avoid, so they just don't go too far the wrong way.

Andrew:  So to Abby and Emily's credit, when we were talking before Ironman Waco and they asked for kind of my plan, what I was going to take, I had a pretty well thought out plan that I had practiced in my longer stamina sessions.  When I was sending them my plan, the one thing I changed that I had not been doing in my own long stamina sessions was I was used to taking, on the run, a Precision Hydration salt pill every 20 to 25 minutes.  And just going into the race, I was like, “You know what?  It's going to be really hot.  I know I sweat a lot. It's going well, taking them every 20 minutes in training.  I'm going to up to taking one every 15 minutes because why not?”  So I had that in my head.  I put that on my plan and I don’t remember if it was Abby or Emily, but one of the two of them emailed me back and they're like, “Hey, your plan looks great.  You know, with the numbers you've crunched, we think it’s going to go well for you.  The one thing we'll say, you shouldn't take a salt pill every 15 minutes.  That is way too aggressive.”  So they talked to me off the exact ledge you're referencing, Andy, and I was able to take an appropriate amount and still like, you have alluded to, I probably took too much salt and could have used...I think we'll talk about my case study in a little bit, but if I remember correctly, one of the findings was I could have benefited from more water and less salt on the run.  But we'll talk about that in a little bit.  One more thing that you guys track is caffeine.  And we will at some point in the future have a caffeine podcast episode.  But just in terms of today with the case studies, as you're asking athletes to report the caffeine they're consuming during a race, what are you learning from that?  

Andy:  Where to start with that one?  I think caffeine is misunderstood, which is one of the reasons why it is going to be good to have a proper podcast chat with you about it.  Everyone is–  The concept to say carbohydrate is very simple is that you need an amount per hour. It's fuel, it gets burnt, and when it's gone, it's gone.  It's sort of in and out of the body.  With caffeine, the way that caffeine behaves in the body is it obviously has an effect on the brain and the nervous system which is not directly linked– It is linked to the dose, but it's not an immediate effect and it's not an effect that goes away quickly.  So with caffeine, a trend that we see is that people often use caffeine pretty late on in races because they want the perceived kick that they think they will feel from taking caffeine when in actual fact, we know that caffeine doesn't hit your bloodstream for 15 minutes and can take up to 45 or 60 minutes to actually peak in the bloodstream.

Andrew:  Wow.  

Andy:  It's got a huge what's called half life, which is the amount of time it takes to to decay in the body to the point where it's half as potent as it was and that can be five or six hours with some people.  So you kind of, you know, you get this I take it, it ramps up slowly, and then gives you its maximal effectiveness 30 to 60 minutes after you've taken it, and then it's a very slow decline.  So for a lot of endurance sports, pre-caffeinating is the way to go because you take the caffeine in the build of breakfast and a small top off before the start.  So you’re starting with high levels.  It helps to suppress fatigue, and it's only in really long races like Ironman; arguably for some people, maybe a half Ironman distance, you might take some caffeine in the middle part to give you a boost at the end.  One of the trends we see is caffeine being taken left a little bit late.  Then the other trend is people just having absolutely no idea on dosages.  So, probably, Abbs is well-placed to talk about that.

Abby:  So when we’re collecting that data on caffeine intake we do look at total caffeine intake.  So milligrams they've taken across that race, but it's actually the better measurement to take is milligrams per kilogram of body weight.  It's unusual in that sense, unlike carbs, which we measure in grams per hour.  We don't factor in an athlete's body weight and there is a reason for that, but that’s a bit of a digression.  

Andrew:  Sure.  

Abby:  But caffeine dosage is prescribed per kilogram of body weight and the sort of general guideline for performance is that between 3 to 6 mg of caffeine per kilogram of body weight is like the sweet spot.  Now, as Andy just discussed, I would include pre-caffeinating in that because of how long it stays in the system for.  Again, the average half life is around four hours, but caffeine is muddied.  It's a difficult topic to sort of coherently educate someone on because it's muddied by individual tolerances, individual sensitivities, different people's metabolism.  You've got habitual users that there is some evidence that people kind of get more tolerant to the effects.  So all of those factors.  Again, it's very individual.  So how much an athlete should be taking the phrase “It depends” does kind of come in.  

Andrew:  Yeah.  

Abby:  If we were to pull a trend from what we've seen triathletes doing, the average dose is looking at about 3.8 mg of caffeine per killogram in our triathlete case studies which is again, you know, nicely within that boundary, that 3 to 6.  But we also work with a lot of athletes that go for long, long, long races.  You know, ultra races.  Andy’s discussed with some athletes doing 24 hour events.  Now where that guideline, that 3 to 6 mg of caffeine per kilogram starts to fall down, it's completely independent of time.  So because of that half life of caffeine, in theory, every four hours, the amount you've got in the body is decreasing by half.  So by hour 12 that caffeine could be completely out of your system and so you want to be, of course redosing and that's what we do see athletes do.  They kind of drip feed caffeine throughout their performance. Once they start, they often don't stop.  But if you then look at– if we take a 24 hour runner and look at that total dose, it could be way above 6 mg of caffeine per kilogram because cumulatively they've had to take a lot more to keep that acceptable dose in their system.  So it's something that we are very, very interested in.  It's something we're entirely doing a lot of research on and it's something that we get a lot of questions about from athletes.  I think if you guys are going to record, you know, you've got this other recording coming up soon, I think it will be a very, very interesting listen.

Andrew:  From all this learning you've done, you know, tracking fluid, tracking carbohydrate, tracking caffeine, you know, just all the takeaways and understandings that you've cumulatively gathered from these case studies.  How has all this information influenced the development of your fueling products?

Abby:  I'd say one example is anyone that's familiar with our fueling products, we make really clear on the front how many grams of carb…

Andrew:  Yeah, I love that.  

Abby:  …a drink has and now we've got the PF90 gel, which is 90 grams of carbs per single pouch.  So what we've learned from trying to prescribe athletes, you know, helping them hit these numbers is let's make that as easy for them as possible.  Let's make it really clear because other brands out there of gels, some have 20, some of 22, 24, 25.  There's a right old range and granted you could say it’s somewhat in the noise, but we want to help athletes make this easy.  Take something off their plate.  There's a lot of stress that goes on prior to race day.  So let's take one thing out of the equation so that would be, from my perspective, the numbers and then I know Andy would say the jumbo gels, as we affectionately call it.  The jumbo gel. Really the idea for that came from these case studies, seeing what athletes are actually doing.  A lot of athletes will on long course run with a small flask on the run, and they were decanting three or four gels into a little flask.  You know, why not just– It was one of those things…

Andy:  Why not just make them a pouch with 90 grams of carbohydrate gel in it already?   And that's what we've tried to do.  But I think, you know, overall, we do– product feedback, we've got a good bunch of people in the team who are doing these kind of activities, and that's where we always start, obviously, when we put things out.  Then our approach is usually make sure that it's tested thoroughly within our group.  It goes out to our ambassadors and then it goes out into the wider community.  Then we're constantly where we can make feedback and changes.  One of the things, we haven't got a date and, you know, this isn’t in our immediate product partner, but from the case studies we learned that on Ironman– we kind of knew this anyway– but a lot of people will put all of their gels into a bottle on the bike to make it easy.  So there is a school of thought, we're discussing at the moment, as to whether we produce– our energy gel, as you know, is like a very mild, neutral taste and rather than going down the road with lots and lots of different flavors and fancy sort of tastes for the product.  One thing we are exploring doing is making a thinner gel specifically to go in the bike bottle so effectively, not actually increasing the water content, necessarily because you don't want to water it down and decrease the carbs, but creating a consistency and a viscosity that works really well to come out of the nozzle of a bike bottle verses on the run, people want something with a bit more texture and a bit more mouthfeel and something a bit thicker.  So those are the kind of things that from doing these case studies and talking to athletes about how they’re using the products in anger, we can then feed that back into development.  Another one is, for example, we've got an energy chew coming fairly soon because there are a cohort of people– I have never had a problem eating energy gels and…

Andrew:  Yeah, same.  

Andy:  …I think energy gels are really good.  But there is definitely a cohort of people out there that just have put their hands up and said, “Look, I just can't deal with gels.”  Maybe it's a texture thing or they've had a bad experience with them in the past, and just it's very off-putting.  So we've got an energy chew, which again, 30 grams of carbs.  So we wanted to make them interchangeable units in your plan to make it as easy as possible.  And then I guess another thing that we've really learned from the case studies was just how many athletes were using caffeine and in what way.  So we always had a caffeinated energy gel in our product pipeline, but we've pulled the development of that forward massively to the point where it should be coming out in the next few months just because we know that the people are wanting to use it.  You know, they're crying out for something like that. So yeah, they would probably be the main areas.  Overall, I would say the case studies are just a wonderful way of us keeping really, really closely in touch with how our products and other products and foodstuffs are being used by athletes.  So it keeps you about up to date with what everyone's doing.

Andrew:  I highly encourage athletes to head to the website PrecisionFuelandHydration.com and go look at some of the case studies on there.  It’s just like we've discussed.  They’re really interesting to read.  You know, just to see what people are doing to fuel for their races.  Andy, Abby, for folks that are heading to the website, what are a couple case studies there that they should go look at where an athlete really nailed it?  And maybe what is an example where an athlete kind of sort of maybe could have done things a little bit better?

Abby:  I think Luke Henderson is one example to look at as an individual who got it right for him.  He totally did what he needed to do for his circumstances.  Emma Pallant is interesting because there's plenty of hers on there, so they're worth clicking through and seeing when she got it right and potentially sometimes when it went a little bit wrong.  Then the third one, I'd say, is Leon Chevalier and in particular his Ironman Mallorca case study where Leon is very meticulous in his approach.  He's really on it with his numbers and his understanding of this process.  He pays real attention to it, and he really bought into it from the off.  And at Mallorca, he had a, much like Andy losing his bottle, coming out of transition in the race he spoke about.  I think Leon might have been going over some cobbles or something and lost one of his bottles, which was very carb rich and very sodium rich.  Now Leon being Leon knew exactly how many grams of carb he just lost,...  

Andrew:  Wow.

Abby:  …didn't panic and just worked off of gels that were available in the aid stations to make sure that he still is needs, which sounds really, you know, relatively simple, but you'd be surprised how many athletes would completely lose their heads…

Andrew:  Absolutely.  

Abby:  …and start doing really silly, rogue things.  What was not sad, but that was incredibly carb, sodium rich his bottle and that he did struggle to replace.  But fortunately he had enough kind of precautions.  He had some salt capsules with him that saw him through.  Leon’s quite salty.  But he had an amazing performance and he got gold that race.  So I think any of Leon's a great reads.

Andy:  Yeah and I think what's interesting there is Leon won Ironman Mallorca, and he had done very well on one long distance race in the past before that.  But they were– and this was his first season of doing long distance races and the journey that he went on and the learning curve that he went on was very steep and rapid.  He didn't do things too badly in his first race at Beaute, but we worked pretty closely with him through that.  The Alpe d’Huez long course through Embrunman which is an Iron Distance race in France, and he basically evolved incredibly quickly because he'd got the data on each one.  And you can see the kind of evolution through the stories to the point where by the end of the season, I mean, he did have a big year and did four big, long distance races, but his improvement in those from a fueling perspective and a hydration perspective was marked and that's probably quite useful for people to look at as to how you can evolve.  

Andrew:  Yeah, no kidding.  

Andy:  If you’re prepared to look at the numbers and look at the data because otherwise what happens, the typical approach is people do it, don't really understand what they did.  If it doesn't work, they have to go back to the drawing board and completely try again.  But whereas for him, he's kind of come through strong and we're excited to be working with him this year because he's got a really big year ahead with Ironman St. George in Utah and the World Champs, where he's qualified as a pro and then looking ahead to maybe also trying to get to Kona later in the year.

Cool down theme:  Great set everyone!  Let’s cool down.  

Andrew: We have a healthy amount of podcast listeners and TriDot athletes in the UK, and I mean, the UK actually ranks third behind the United States and Canada in TriDot podcast listenership and several other European countries are in our top ten.  We talk about races in the United States just by default as that's where our team lives and trains and races.  So while I've got Andy and Abby with us today, I thought we could close out today by hearing Andy and Abby's top five, must do, UK based races.  Andy and Abby have firsthand knowledge on the race scene in the United Kingdom, so if you're one of our European athletes that this can serve as a close-ish to home recommendation list, and for our non-European audience, maybe you'll hear something you decide is worth a racecation.  Andy, Abby, from all the races you've done and all the races you've seen, anything and everything in the endurance sports sphere is fair game here.  What race experiences make Andy and Abby’s top five, must do, UK based race list?

Andy:  Well, I think I'm going to start with one I've not done myself, but it's got such a reputation in recent years that it is about the only triathlon that I've heard about that makes me want to get on my bike and go and get involved again and it's the Helvellyn Triathlon it’s called, up in the Lake District in England.  It’s marketed and is genuinely perceived to be one of the hardest triathlons in the world.  On the bike ride it's got unbelievable elevation, including a hill, a sort of mountain climb which is called The Struggle.  That's the name.  That is the actual name of the hill on the bike.  

Andrew:  Perfect.  

Andy Blow:  The run goes up and down Helvellyn which is one of the highest peaks in the Lake District.  So it’s a foul run up and down there.  A swim, I think it's an Ole's water, which is one of the nicest lakes in the Lake District, and that is, I think, just apart from anything else, if you've never been to that part of the UK it is one of the most beautiful places you can go and visit and probably one of the hardest events on the calendar.  I think it's in September time.  So the Helvellyn Triathlon would be a definite must do for me.

Abby:  Hmm.  That's a tough one to follow.  I'm going to also say an event I've not personally done, but that I am going to support later on in this year and that would be…  It’s part of a race series called The Castle Series, and it's the one at Hever Castle.  It's called the Festival of Endurance.  It's a whole weekend of racing.  It’s in Kent so relatively central in the UK, you know, close to London.  Lovely scenery again and you can do almost any discipline.  It is a weekend of triathlon, but you can do a duathlon, you can just run, you can just cycle.  

Andrew:  Oh, very cool.

Abby:  Swim. You can do an aquathon.  There's almost something for anyone and it's in early July, so it should be, you know, nice sunny conditions.  Touch wood.  I mean it’s the UK, so you can't guarantee the weather even in July, but fingers crossed.  And as I said, we'll be supporting that one.  So you athletes, anyone doing that can come and meet some of the members of the team, meet myself.  We’ll have product there and we can just have a chat.

Andy:  Yeah.  Another real classic one is the Windsor Triathlon in the UK, which has been around since, I think probably the late eighties, certainly the early nineties.  It's been won by some of the biggest old school names in the sport, like Spencer Smith and Simon Lessing, and more recently, British Olympians like Tim Don and Stewart Hayes have won.  The race is a non drafting Olympic distance race.  You swim in the River Thames.  You bike around Windsor, near Windsor Castle, which is one of the Queen's residences, and it's just…  That's a definite one, which you're not really a proper Brit triathlete if you've not done the Windsor Triathlon, I would say.

Andrew:  It sounds like it. Yeah, it sounds like it would qualify for that.

Andy:  If you were visiting, you can fly into Heathrow Airport, which is probably about, I don't know, 15 - 20 miles from there at the most and in and out.  It's really easy.

Andrew:  All right. So there's our one, two and three.  We got two more slots here to fill what's number four and five?  

Abby:  I'm going to go a bit rogue and step away from triathlon.

Andrew: Please do.

Abby Coleman:  I've got an event coming up in August, at the end of August. There's an event here in the UK. I don't know if they are global, but it's called the OMM.  It's the Original Mountain Marathon and I'm not actually doing that one, but doing an event which is the same premise and it's fell running and orienteering over two days.  Doing the on up in Scotland on the Isle of Arran.  The scenery looks stunning, so hopefully that will distract me from the pain.  I've never done something that's more than a day long, but I think it's a good mix of running endurance and something a bit fun with some orienteering, and I know they do an Irish one and one up in the peaks.  So again, if you want to see some beautiful UK scenery and after something a little bit different, I'd check those out.  This one's called the Kong Mountain Marathon which is rather fun I think.

Andy:  Yeah, that sounds good.  I would say another one which is closer to triathlon, but not quite all the way there, because I know you and I have chatted about swim run before a little bit, Andrew.  

Andrew:  Yep, yep, yep, yep.  

Andy:  There's a few great swim run races popping up in the UK and I'm a huge advocate for that sport because especially as someone who's really time crunched, training for the bike is often the most difficult and time consuming.  

Andrew:  Absolutely.

Andy:  And I've managed over the years to keep myself relatively swim and run fit so I can go and do some of these races.  You can race in pairs.  There's a few series in the UK now, but we're good friends with a guy called John Yelland, who organizes the Mad Hatter Swim Runs, which is down in Cornwall.  It's a really cool place to go and visit.  You’re swimming in the Atlantic Ocean.  So there’s waves, or there can be waves and kind of cold water and jagged rocks and that kind of stuff.  It’s kind of grassroots and rough and ready, but really, really cool scenery.  They put on a number of swim run races.  So the Mad Hatter Swim Run Series is like a must do.  Certainly a real antidote to the big race day where everything’s very expensive, and very corporate and…

Andrew:  Very, very branded.

Andy:  Yeah.  These are far more, you know, everyone ends up in the same pub afterwards for a few pints, and it's a really authentic experience.  So I'd say that's worth checking out.  

Andrew:  Well, that’s it for today, folks.  I want to thank Andy Barlow and Abby Coleman from Precision Fuel and Hydration for giving us nutrition insight from their work with the athlete case studies.  Remember that you can book a call with one of their sweat experts to form your own race day fuel and hydration strategy.  Head to PrecisionFuelandHydration.com to check out the case studies, learn more about your own fueling needs, and use the code TRIDOT10 for 10% off your first order.  Enjoying the podcast?  Have any triathlon questions or topics you want to hear us talk about?  Head to TriDot.com/podcast and let us know what you're thinking.  We’ll, have a new show coming your way soon.  Until then, happy training.

Outro:  Thanks for joining us.  Make sure to subscribe and share the TriDot podcast with your triathlon crew.  For more great tri content and community, connect with us on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.  Ready to optimize your training?  Head to tridot.com and start your free trial today!  TriDot – the obvious and automatic choice for triathlon training.

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