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Andy Blow is the founder of Precision Hydration and a former elite triathlete. In today's episode, we delve into the misconceptions around sweat & hydration advice and how to individually tailor a fueling strategy to help your performance. Andy also answers your questions around cramping, running in cold conditions, gels for a sensitive stomach and if hydrating days before a race is necessary. Check out precisionhydration.com and enter code RUNSMARTER to get 15% off the first order of electrolytes and fuelling products. Click here to book in a free 1 on 1 chat with the precision hydration team Click here and use the code PODCAST15 to get 15% off our on-demand Science of Endurance Hydration course Become a patron! Receive Run Smarter Emails Book a FREE Injury chat with Brodie Run Smarter App IOS or Android Podcast Facebook group Run Smarter Course with code 'PODCAST' for 3-day free trial. Blogs that were mentioned in this podcast: Cramping Preloading sodium before a race Sweat testing
Expand your running knowledge, identify running misconceptions and become a faster, healthier, SMARTER runner. Let Brodie Sharpe become your new running guide as he teaches you powerful injury insights from his many years as a physiotherapist while also interviewing the best running gurus in the world. This is ideal for injured runners & runners looking for injury prevention and elevated performance. So, take full advantage by starting at season 1 where Brodie teaches you THE TOP PRINCIPLES TO OVERCOME ANY RUNNING INJURY and let’s begin your run smarter journey.
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On today's episode, understanding sweat science, hydration and cramping with Andy Blow. Welcome to the Run Smarter podcast. The podcast helping you overcome your current and future running injuries by educating and transforming you into a healthier, stronger, smarter runner. If you're like me, running is life. But more often than not, injuries disrupt this lifestyle. And once you are injured, you're looking for answers and met with bad advice and conflicting messages circulating the running community. The world shouldn't be like this. You deserve to run injury free and have access to the right information. That's why I've made it my mission to bring clarity and control to every runner. My name is Brodie Sharp. I am a physiotherapist, a former chronic injury sufferer, and your podcast host. I am excited that you have found this podcast and by default become the Run Smarter Scholar. So let's work together to overcome your injury, restore your confidence and start spreading the right information back into your running community. So let's begin today's lesson. The gym is ready, the rehab studio is ready. It has been a crazy 48 hours, but if you've seen on social media, my, what was once a Rumpus room when I moved into this house in Rosanna, it is now carpets gone up. The rubber tiles have gone down. We've got a squat rack, a Pilates reformer, a treadmill. We have all these kettlebells, dumbbells set up and it just looks amazing. The mirrors are up as well. Like I said, I've put it up on social media for you guys to check out. It's been a long time coming and I am super pumped. It's, uh, essentially I have a few little things that I'd like to add to the clinic, but the bulk stuff is done. I now have a fully kitted out clinic that is, um, the level one of my house. And yeah, I think the new year is going to bring a lot more, um, business to the company. I'll still. predominantly be online, see people in person and that's just going to slowly grow. The in-person stuff is going to slowly grow. I'm in no rush since I am quite busy with the online sort of thing. I thought I'd keep you guys updated so yeah, like I said, super excited about that. I have Andy Blow on here today and this was an interesting one that his team at Precision Hydration reached out to me about a potential... episode, like someone on the team listens and loves the podcast. And I was a bit skeptical to start with, you know, if someone says I'm from a product company, we come onto the show to talk about their, um, the premise of the products, always a little bit skeptical, just my nature. Um, there's always like hidden agendas or like the incentive to sell products. And I was actually really, really impressed with Andy and his level of knowledge, he was. really transparent, he had this non-biased approach, very, very evidence driven. And he just says like, these products aren't for everyone. It's only under certain conditions. It's only, um, in certain environments where these products will be more suitable. And it's not like, you know, these hydration tablets or these gels, these formulas are for everyone all the time. And what I really love is that the tail, the products are tailored to different people because as we'll discuss, people have different sweat rates, people have different sodium concentrations and they have a product line for all those individuals and how to get that tested out, how to suit it, tailor it towards the individual, the tests that can be done and then the products that will suit. Yep, really loved it. And before recording Andy was saying that he has his team and Precision Hydration have like distribution channels all over the world. And so they sent me like a gift packet. You might've seen that on social media and it arrived in a couple of days. And I'm like, aren't they from the UK? Why, why is this arriving so quickly? And apparently, you know, they shipped to, well, they have, um, uh, a factory in Australia and distributes to Australia and New Zealand. Then they have some in the U S they have some in the UK and they can quickly deliver these products all over the world. And They didn't mention it. Andy didn't mention this on the podcast, but it was only a follow-up discussion afterwards, they decided to provide you guys with a discount code. And so, um, if you're looking for presence, if you're looking for products for yourself, if you've struggled with hydration, if you struggled with cramping and, um, those sorts of things, they have a discount code 15% off your first order of electrolytes and fueling products at prec use the code run smarter. I'll leave all this in the show notes for you guys to follow. And yeah, there's a few other call to actions. Andy did say that they have free one-on-one calls similar to how I do my free injury chats. Just if someone has a few questions about their hydration and fueling strategies, they can go to this link. Again, I'll leave it in the show notes. And they also sent me a free online course around hydration and... sweat rates and all those sort of things and you guys can have that for a discount code as well. Again, I'll leave all that in the show notes. If you are thinking about doing some, if you are thinking about buying some products, I'd love to know the level of interest you guys have towards products like this. And so the, um, the right, the amount of times people use that discount code will come back to me and I'll be like, Oh, people really enjoy this and it'll help me for, for the future as well. And so, yeah, I'd love to know. Love to hear your feedback if you want to reach out on social media about certain products as well. That'd be great. So I've given a fair bit away. We answer some of your patron questions as well and some from the other podcast listeners. We talk about the hydration, like sweat rates, we talk about cramping, we talk about how to get it tested yourself. We talk about some misconceptions and even just the narrative and advice that has changed in terms of hydration and nutrition, all those sort of things throughout the decades, which I found really interesting. So I look forward to introducing you guys to Andy. He's the founder of precision hydration and he's a former elite triathlete as well. Let's dive in. Andy blow. It's a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Thanks for joining me today. Yeah. Good. Good to be here chatting with you, Brody. I am really fascinated about this topic. And I know a lot of the listeners are as well based on the questions that have been coming in and the amount of, I guess, diversity of the questions as well, which we'll get to in a second. But before we do that, would you mind like introducing yourself and I guess your exercise history and how you founded and came up with this precision hydration? Yeah, no, no problem. Um, so I've, I've always been an athlete. Really. I grew up in a pretty sporty family. Like most, like most kids in the UK, I played a lot of football, a lot of soccer when I was young. And my dad was really keen on encouraging me to run as well. So I did a lot of cross country and that sort of thing at school. In my mid teens, it became clear that I was probably a little bit better at running without a ball at my feet than with a ball at my feet. So I moved, I was starting to focus a bit more on cross country and swimming and, you know, sort of long story short, that led me into early days of triathlon. And I really sort of fell in love with the sport of triathlon. I got very inspired. watching in those days, like early VHS videotapes of Mark Allen and Dave Scott doing the Hawaii Ironman and that sort of thing. And so pursued triathlon pretty passionately for a number of years. And it was through the triathlon journey when I started doing, as I got older, when I started doing races that were longer and hotter, that I really started to have problems. with my performance in the heat, which ultimately was related to hydration. And kind of in parallel to that journey, I was I studied sport and exercise science at university and worked with athletes. So I had this kind of dual interest in the topic of, you know, improving people's performance, then specifically this problem with hydration myself in hot weather that the eventually led me to really looking in depth at that subject. Would you say that those hydration issues were one of the main sources of like your hindrance in performance when it came to those longer and hotter conditions? Yeah, I would say I went into a lot of Ironman races when I was younger in what, what seemed to be like really good shape. I would, and, and when I got an opportunity to race in cool or cold conditions, I tended to perform at or close to. what I felt was my potential at the time. In the heat, it was like I was a totally different athlete. It was a completely different story and I would, I'd be an absolute mess and I would fall apart. I ended up in the medical tent quite a lot of times. I was, it was just, and when I sort of got on top of that issue in terms of getting my, basically I was getting into horrid, dehydration, electrolyte balance issues. once I learned to get on top of that, it was like night and day for me. It meant that it, it wasn't like it was an performance enhancer. It was like it enabled me not to, not to cave in these, these longer and hotter events. Okay. And how did the precision hydration come about? And, um, before we started recording, you said you had like sweat labs, um, dropped around the world. Um, do you want to just talk a little bit about that? Yeah. What, what happened when I started this journey of, you know, trying to unpick why my performance in the heat was particularly poor. It led me, this is in the early 2000s, and it led me into kind of like early running forums on the internet where I was reading stuff that ultra runners, people that were running predominantly 100 milers and stuff in hot conditions, and there was a lot of chat about sweat loss, sodium loss in terms of electrolytes and sweat rates and things. a lot of it started to resonate with the problems that I was having, people discussing the fact that some of them lost more salt than others and were having to replace a lot. And so I ran all of this sort of kind of like theory past a friend of mine who's a medic, a heart surgeon called Dr. Raj Jutley, and asked him about, you know, how can you sort of test how much electrolyte you're losing in your sweat? I knew how to test sweat rate, obviously, because you can weigh yourself before and after exercise. And he said to me, well, there is a... there's a medical diagnostic test you can use to test sweat sodium levels, and it's used for cystic fibrosis diagnosis, which is a genetic disease. And he offered to get me one of those tests because having like weighed it all up, he said to me, I think you're probably losing loads and loads of electrolytes, and that's the problem. And so I went along to a hospital, had a sweat electrolyte test, and sure enough, Dr. Jutley's... guess was right on the money and I'm in the top sort of 5-10% of what's normal for electrolyte loss in people and he explained to me that there's a huge range in this number. When you take 100 people you'll find some have very low, very dilute sweat in terms of electrolyte loss and most people will be somewhere in the middle, it's like a bow shaped curve and on the extreme end there's a few people out there like you who lose a lot of sodium in their sweat. And so that for me was an incredibly useful piece of information. Once I'd found it out, it was what enabled me to then do some basic maths and figure out how much electrolyte I need to be replacing in races. And at the time, working as a sports scientist, as well as competing, it struck me that this was a test that may be useful to a very wide range of athletes. So I sort of started testing, I bought one of the testing units, put it in our sports science lab, started testing athletes. more and more people got to hear about it and it's snowballed a little bit from there. And we actually now work with the, and we have them for 10, 11 years now, we work with the company that produces the testing units and make working to make them more widely available to the athletic and also nowadays to the occupational health community. That's, that's really cool. A really nice story. And when I was listening to previous podcasts you've been on, and I also got to check out the science of endurance hydration course, the sort of online course that you guys offer. I was really fascinated about the, how the narrative has shifted so many times as the decades have gone on, as the years have gone on around hydration advice. Um, could you, because I was so fascinated about, would you mind sharing that to the listeners talking us through how that narrative has changed? Yeah. I mean, it's one of those subjects where when you dive into it, a fair bit has been written. it and I got really interested in researching you know the history of all of this but you know a hundred or so years ago in the early days of really properly organized sports so the early 1900s the typical advice given to athletes around eating and drinking was that you know you shouldn't eat and drink when you do sport you should try and even if you're running a marathon you should try to do it in a kind of nil by mouth way it was just assumed that it it was you could train yourself to do without it and that anything you tried to take in would probably be more disruptive to your performance than it would help. And then the various, you know, sort of that general philosophy of like eat and drink as little as you can or nothing if you can sort of seem to be the predominant wisdom for a very, very long time right up into the, you know, 60s, 70s, that was typically what athletes were told to do. And even in say the Tour de France in the 60s, there's some famous instances of riders being denied water bottles and the team trying to limit the amount of drinks they could have because they thought that it would slow them down. And then in the sort of late 70s, 80s, Gatorade had come along in the US in the late 60s, but was being commercialized through the 70s and really started to hit its stride in the 80s. And... Obviously what the physiologist behind that had figured out is that actually when you're sweating a lot, if you can replace a proportion of fluids, electrolytes, and in that instance carbohydrates as well, you can have a pretty profound and positive effect on performance rather than letting people just dehydrate. And then that became a huge selling point for what became the first ever sports drink. And then kind of... in through the 80s and 90s, and in the 90s was when I studied sports science, there was this kind of prevailing wisdom that it all changed that we've been told before that you should drink as little as possible. And now not only should you not drink as little as possible, you should almost drink as much as possible during exercise because dehydration was all these papers came out suggesting that dehydration was catastrophic for performance. And it resulted in this and you see this a lot in different areas of sports science and other areas of life, you see these pendulum swings from, you know, this idea that we shouldn't really drink to suddenly we should be drinking as much as we can. And I very much went through university with this kind of undertone in the background that actually dehydration is a huge issue for athletes, you should drink as much as you can. And that, I think, is a message which stuck and in some circles still sticks to this day. The problem with, there's obviously problems with both approaches though, because If you don't drink during exercise, you at some point, if sweat rates are high enough, you will dehydrate and that will indeed have a catastrophic effect on performance. On the other side though, if you drink too much during exercise, especially if it's fluids that are low in electrolytes, you can create a nasty condition called hyponatremia, which is where you dilute the sodium levels down in your blood. And that can not only have a massively negative impact on your performance, it can really make you quite ill. And unfortunately, through the 90s, the 2000s, and even to this day, there are a few deaths which are attributed to hyponatremia in marathons and ultramarathons, triathlons, where people have just drunk far too much, usually far too much water or dilute sports drinks. And along with the sweat losses, they dilute their sodium levels down and create all these problems. So there's been this sort of pendulum swing. And then since the advent of... Well, since the early 2000s, probably when hyponatremia started to come to the fore and a few researchers started to question, like, where are we going with this advice to drink as much as you can? There's been a new movement coming in to say, actually, well, you don't need to drink nothing, but you need to drink something. And the best way to figure out how much to drink is to listen to your body and drink to thirst. It's kind of fall back on your body's instincts. And that's been, I guess, quite a prevailing... wisdom in the last 10, 12 years and is starting to get more popularity. And one of those is kind of trying to find the middle ground between the two. You know, obviously not drinking is bad, drinking too much is bad. So what we should maybe do is drink, you know, to thirst. And that's a very plausible solution to the problem in a lot of situations. And for a lot of people that works for a lot of the time, but like these other methodologies, it's been touted as the be all and end all. And I think that is also not true. There are situations where actually you need to be more proactive and more pre-planned than drinking just when you're thirsty, especially when you're doing extremely long or hot events, or if you're someone who has a high sweat rate. And so I think where pH, where precision hydration comes into the picture is we're trying to navigate that. there's these black and white opinions and we're trying to navigate this kind of dirty grey area in between to try and educate people on where the situation is where you need to listen to your body, where the situation is where you need to hydrate in a more planned and premeditated way. I reckon that's a really nice lesson that we'll probably touch on a couple of times throughout this, um, interview. But the other one I also hear is, um, you're fine. Your hydration levels are fine. If your urine is clear or if your urine is not clear and quite yellow, then just drink more. And is that good advice to go off or is that, um, you know, not being proactive enough? Yeah. Again, that's one of those kind of. common pieces of received wisdom that all athletes allegedly know. You know, basically, if your wee is clear, you're hydrated. If your wee is dark, you're dehydrated. And whilst there's a logic behind that, and the logic is that when your body water is topped up, your kidneys will be able to flush more water through because you've got either an excess or at least got adequate amounts on board. And so... Your urine will show as clear because it's more dilute. Your body has effectively got water. It can afford to give up at that point. On the flip side, when your urine is very dark and you're not producing much of it, that can be a sign that your body's working hard to conserve water, which can be an indication that maybe you're becoming a little bit dehydrated. So on the face of it, there's obviously some sensible physiology and logic behind it, but... The problem with treating it as a be-all and end-all is there's many, many things that confound the colour of your urine. So, you know, if you get up in the morning and the first thing you do is drink a couple of cups of coffee, then it may be that the caffeine in that coffee can cause you, is a diuretic, and it can cause your kidneys to start excreting more water than it ordinarily would. You could then have a very clear pee not long after. and actually still be relatively dehydrated. On the other side, when you exercise, your body releases hormones to stop you from weeing so much. So it's not unusual sometimes to go for a run, have a pee afterwards, it's quite dark. But if it might've only been a relatively short run, it doesn't mean you're suddenly extremely dehydrated. So I think it's one of those things where it's... colour of your urine is a potential sign pointing you in the direction, but it's not the be all and end all. And we certainly recommend with athletes that the only kind of urine analysis that gets done is looking at the colour of the very first pee you have of the day when you first get up in the morning, because that is the most likely indicator of whether that's going to show you a little bit about your hydration status. And we only normally recommend using that alongside other measures such as a very simple, you know, ask yourself, are you thirsty or not? And if you can, if you track your body weight in the mornings, you know, has your body weight fluctuated? Because if you, for instance, get up in the morning, you see a drop in body weight, you feel thirsty and your urine is very dark, that's a pretty slam dunk indication that you're getting dehydrated. If you just, you know, urine's just a little bit dark, but your body weights normally don't feel all that thirsty. It could be, you know, it could just be that your body's conserving fluid and, um, by not peeing out as much. So it's good to take it. These things need to be taken into in context. Basically. It's not an easy answer to say, yeah, you're clear. Urine is hydrated. Dark urine is dehydrated. If that all makes sense. Yeah. I always liked the approach, like the tailored approach, tailored advice. And if someone is having say. performance issues or exposing themselves to like you say, long durations, hot climates, and they're really, it just takes out a lot of the guesswork with doing these sweat rate tests and these sort of concentration sweat concentration tests. Do you mind like maybe just walking us through a process of what that test actually looks like and what people are actually administering and how long it takes like those sort of things? Yeah, so as you've identified, there's kind of two main components to sweating that matter. There's how much you sweat and there's what's in your sweat. And if we start with how much you sweat, that's the easiest one for an individual to measure themselves, because you can do a pretty basic sweat rate test. There's actually a blog on our website where you can download a free spreadsheet to put your numbers into that does the maths for you. And what you do is you do a training session of a given duration in certain weather conditions, you weigh yourself immediately before that session and then you weigh yourself again immediately afterwards. If you've drunk anything, you have to take into account how much you've drunk, but ideally you do this without consuming anything. And the difference in your body weight, which will normally be a body weight loss, will be roughly what you've lost in fluid because one litre of fluid weighs one kilogram. So in really simple terms, if you run for an hour and you end up, you started off at... 80 kilos and you end up at 79 kilos, you will have sweated out approximately one litre of fluid. And that litre of fluid, that sweat rate is only specifically relevant to the weather conditions that you ran in, the kind of clothing you were wearing, the pace you were running at. But if you do that over a number of times in a number of different conditions, you can start to gain a pretty strong appreciation for what you're... range of sweat rates are as an individual. And then there is decent information online. We've got some of it on our website as to whether it can kind of categorize you as someone who's got a light sweat rate, a moderate sweat rate, a high sweat rate, or a super high sweat rate. And that in and of itself is very useful then in painting a good proportion of the picture as to whether you're gonna need to be someone who is more aggressive with your approach to hydration during long exercise, or whether... you're probably going to be okay, you know, drinking to thirst or, or listening to your body a bit more. The sweat composition test is the slightly more technical one. The way we do it is we use a piece of technology that stimulates the sweat glands in your arms. So two electrodes sit on your forearm. They stimulate the sweat glands in a small area about the size of a coin. And then we put a collector on, collect the sweat and run it through an analyser that tells us how much electrolyte you're losing. And sodium is the predominant electrolyte you lose in your sweat and the range in sweat sodium loss can vary hugely between people. It's about a tenfold difference we see when we measure a large group of people and that means that at the lower end some people are losing around about 200mg of sodium in every litre of sweat and at the high end some people are losing over 2000mg. And once you know that figure, that figure, the sweat, the sodium loss in your sweat is relatively stable within an individual. So that test only, unlike the sweat rate test, that test only really needs doing once for most people. And you can then kind of amalgamate those numbers and say, well, if you're someone who's in the middle of the normal range and say you lose a thousand milligrams of sodium in a litre of sweat and you sweat about one litre an hour when you're running, you know that within a reasonable... level of estimation, when you go out and run for an hour, you lose a liter of fluid and a thousand milligrams of sodium. Then you can extrapolate that and start playing around with different levels of replacement based on different lengths of run and see how you feel and how you, how you sort of respond to that. And that's that in essence is kind of the basic process that we will run through with, with most people who, who come to us for help with their hydration plan. Has there been any explanation as to why there's a 10 fold difference in the concentrations like I assume if you're human, you know, it should be fairly similar. Why such a discrepancy? Yeah, it's a really interesting question. And from the reading that I've done in the people that I've talked to, I think it's got a lot to do with the functioning, the way that individual sweat glands function. So the way sweating works is obviously you it's triggered, you start to sweat, predominantly because of a rise in your core body temperature. So you're in your brain. the hypothalamus detects a rise in your core body temperature. And it's a bit like the thermostat in your house. When it gets to a certain temperature, it clicks in and gets, in this case, it's actually like actually the thermostat for say putting on an air conditioning system. It kicks in to cool you down before you get into trouble. So your core body temperature goes up to a certain... level, that clicks the hypothalamus to start the cooling mechanisms. And one of the cooling mechanisms is to start you sweating. So neurotransmitters get passed through the system to the sweat glands. The sweat glands start to produce sweat and sweat comes from your blood plasma. So in your blood, you've got different, you've got cellular, you know, you've got the cellular component, the red blood cells, the hemoglobin, that sort of stuff in the. Then you've got this kind of salty. water mix, which is the plasma, which is what makes the blood liquid and dilute. And in everyone's electrolyte levels in their blood are very, very similar. So if we took 100 people and measured the sodium level in their blood, it's very tightly homeostatically controlled. So if everyone that we measured was healthy, their blood sodium levels would be between 135 and 145 millimiles per litre. So that's kind of the starting salinity. That's about that's about 3,600 milligrams of sodium per liter. So effectively the base fluid for your sweat is very, very salty liquid. As it goes into the sweat gland from the capillary bed, before it gets pushed out onto the skin, there are little channels in the sweat gland that reabsorb some of the electrolytes because the electrolytes are very valuable to the body and we don't wanna just waste them all sweating them out. And I think it's at that point. where the differences between people show up. So there's a study that looked at biopsies of people who have very salty sweat and found that the channels for reabsorption of electrolytes were either less abundant or didn't function as well in people who lost a lot of sodium in their sweat compared with those who lost more normal amounts. So there may be other factors at play as well, but I think at heart there's probably a genetic variable there in the... you know, the sort of ability of your sweat glands to, to reclaim electrolytes that drives the major difference in people's sweat sodium. And I think that answers my next question, because my other curiosity was if you're testing, if you do a sweat concentration test, just with an electrode that stimulates sweat, and then you just test the concentration of that, the small amount of sweat, whether exercise or different types of exercise would produce different sweat. I guess concentrations or sodium concentrations, but based on what you described that sort of step by step process, it would be fairly identical because those sodium channels are still functioning the same way. And so the concentration levels in the sodium concentration levels in your sweat would be fairly consistent, no matter if you're nervous in your sweat or if you exercise in your sweat, if it's, you know, cold, hot, it should be fairly similar. Yeah, I'd agree with that broadly. I think, you know, there are things, for instance, sweat rate can influence the ability to reabsorb sodium. So there's been papers that have been published to show quite clearly that the faster you're sweating, the less sodium you reabsorb. So the saltier sweat gets presumably because the time for reabsorption in the sweat gland is reduced because the sweat is basically pumping through it a lot more quickly. So there is a theory that... If you're sweating more slowly and at a lower rate, then you may conserve slightly more sodium than you would if you're sweating at a high rate. From the testing we've done though with lots of athletes in lots of different situations, we tend to sort of go with the simple explanation that, as you described, that basically it's pretty similar for you as an individual all the time, because really we're only interested so much, or it's only impactful when we're talking about relatively heavy sweat losses anyway. So the kind of, although you might conserve a bit more sweat sodium when you're sweating more slowly, you're also not gonna be in a situation there where you're putting serious pressure on you and you need to rehydrate rapidly. So we don't really need to worry about that situation. And the way we describe sweat sodium to people is that although we can give a relatively exact number from a single sweat test and say, Okay Brody, you lose 1126 milligrams of sodium per liter of sweat. In reality, what we're doing is putting you in a bucket between like low, moderate, high or very high. And all of the testing that we've done has shown that although your exact number might move around a bit based on circumstance, based on day of the week, whatever, you're unlikely to fundamentally move out. If you're in a... a medium category, a moderate category, you're not going to suddenly become really low or jump to really high. So you're kind of in the right ballpark. And that was then what we based our range of hydration products on was having different levels. Essentially, it's a bit like having t-shirt sizes, you know, small, medium, large, extra large. We have a low, moderate, high and a very high strength electrolyte drink. And we try to match the most appropriate one to your... physiology and activities in the knowledge that actually the body is phenomenally good at self-regulation and homeostasis. If you give it roughly the right amount of fluid and sodium, it will sort out the details. And what I really liked what you said before is you can calculate these things and, um, theoreticize the concentration levels or, um, if you are competing in a, in an event and then try these things out. And that's the key is just to try it out and see if you feel a lot better because your lack of performance or symptoms or whatever it might have you, um, might not be sweat rates. It might be something else, but try out these, um, solutions. And if you feel X amount better, then you know, you're onto something. And even if the testing is just like rough if you decide to do it yourself and just use like very loose estimates, but then you feel a lot better once you hit, once you try something out. I'm a big fan of just trial and error or like, you know. If there is an increase in performance or if there's a profound benefit, then continue with that. And if there isn't, then try something else. And so I really like how the tests themselves take out a lot of the guesswork, then the ultimate goal is trying it out and seeing if it has much benefit on your performance and, um, yeah, your ability to, to athletically perform. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that trial and error piece is, is a huge part of the puzzle. I mean, it's how effectively early on it's how I you know, solve my own problems with this. It's how most athletes solve their own day-to-day problems, you know, all the time anyway. What we're doing with the data from sweat testing is not, we're not turning something that from a complete guesswork into a nailed down certainty. What we're doing is narrowing the gap. We're making sure we're guiding the trial and error for me. The trial and error for fluid and sodium intake was all about stepping outside of the realm of what was... what the average person needed to do, because that's what you read in the textbooks and that's what you read in the magazines and actually having the evidence to say, right, well, probably what I need to be doing is taking three, two, three, four times more sodium than the average person, because the tests indicate that that's in line with the level of losses. But then you are absolutely going to refine it by trial and error. And it just helps you essentially narrow that starting point for where you're... ballpark of trial and error is going to happen, if that makes sense. Yeah, it absolutely does. I think it's because what you're dealing with, with hydration, nutrition, you know, and lots of aspects of human physiology is a very, very complex system where we can measure certain variables like we can measure sweat rate, we can measure sweat sodium composition and that sort of thing. And infer lots of, we can then effectively you can put that into an Excel spreadsheet and model. what it would look like. I'm losing X amount of fluid over Y amount of hours with Z amount of sodium in it and you can come up with a mathematical model that will give you a prediction for how much you're going to lose. Then you can look at how much you might need to replace and you can do all of that and that helps to guide your process but in reality if you can't measure all of those things closely enough and to the nth degree to get them precisely right. It's kind of the difference between, if you look at something which is really complicated but computational, is, you know, when they send a rocket to Mars or to the Moon or something, there's a lot of very, very precise calculations that can be done. And then they do these incredible, they pull off these incredible feats because all of the variables, they can measure all of the key variables, lock them down, model them, and then reality behaves in the way that the models do. With things like human physiology and the state of your body, because it's a dynamic fluid system the whole time, it's far more complex than even the most complicated models can be. So you have to kind of do a hybrid approach, which is like get as much data and information as you can within reason to make an educated guess, but be humble enough to realize that your actual solution is gonna lie in a bit of messy field trial and error. I'm excited to hear some of these patron questions and, um, they've been coming in through both the, the patron, um, group and also the regular podcast group. We'll start with Reese. Reese said that he followed his nutrition plan for his first, uh, Ironman in Cairns, which in Australia is very far North, very hot and humid. And Reese was saying that he cramped up when jumping off the bike and getting into his run. It's never happened in training before getting those cramps. And he says he's naturally a wet salty sweater managed to just like, just was just managing the cramps the entire way throughout the run. And he asks, is there a better way to judge the loss of salts? And I think you've already sort of alluded to that already, but in regards to Reese's scenario, anything that you can, I guess, advise around cramping in those particular scenarios. Yeah, for sure. I mean, cramping is a really controversial topic in sports science. And we've written one of the most read blogs on our website, actually, is about why athletes get cramp. And so I would definitely say as a side as a sideline, it'd be worth putting a link to that into the notes with your show, because that if anyone's interested in cramp, that's a great resource to start with. But the summary with cramp is that. it's very fickle, it's very difficult to study and pin down. And as is the case with Reece, it often happens to athletes, predominantly in racing and in situations where they're pushing their body that much harder in harsher conditions than they've encountered in training. It was certainly the case in my own triathlon. That's almost the exact carbon copy of what used to happen to me. I could train, do long training brick sessions, but it was in races where I'd start clamping up at the end of the bike or on the run. What I found with that was that For me, the secret was in actually being more aggressive with my sodium intake, particularly on the bike. And it would be interesting. And if Reece does want to reach out to us to do some analysis on his plan, on an individual basis, we'd be very happy to chat with him. But I would say, not all cramps are related to electrolyte imbalance and sodium loss, but quite a lot are, especially in the circumstances that he describes there when sweat losses are high and you're pushing your body really hard. So, you know. Taking in some additional sodium, we would usually recommend for a crampers somewhere in the region of a thousand to fifteen hundred milligrams per hour on the bike would be a really useful place to start to see if that helps to alleviate the problem. And, you know, there's other things to explore, but that would be an obvious place to start with a case that's presented like Reese's. If you want to take your running wisdom to the next level, then I highly recommend signing up to receive regular Run Smarter emails. Once you sign up, you'll receive my weekly blogs, research paper summaries and podcast insights. You might be aware that I regularly post information across Facebook and Instagram, but I know not every blog will reach you. There are simply too many posts competing for your eyeballs and I'd rest a lot easier knowing that runners who want this content are receiving it safely into their inbox. the additional links and resources I include within my emails means you will get the upper hand than reading it on social media. So if this interests you, there'll be a sign up link in the show notes. did have a previous podcast episode on cramping and it seems like we're, we're falling in a line in agreement with each other. There's kind of two main theories around the, the primary cause of cramping. And depending on your scenario, depending on your situation, it could be one or the other and one of them. theoretically was the sodium loss, the high sodium loss and the other just being like a neurological, I guess, overload, uh, because we know when it comes to say typewriters getting a cramp or like, I use the example of when people, um, are in the pool and they get a cramp in their foot, that's not sweat loss, that's, um, something happening to the muscles of the feet being overworked or, um, the muscles themselves, just like not used to contracting in that it way too much. And so there's been a really nice research study, you're probably well familiar with it with industrial workers, how they were working outside working in like, you know, layers of clothing and high sweat rates throughout the entire day. And they report the amounts of cramping and then just split them off into different groups and had one group just take more salt tablets, put salt tablets in their water and the incidents of cramping reduced to dramatically and you could easily, that's a really nice test. It was a really large numbered study and, um, you could easily point to, okay, all we need to do is just give them more salt and their likelihood of cramping significantly reduces. So you've got those two competing theories of what, um, what's generating the cramp. And I guess it just depends on the scenario because it can, you can cramp for different reasons, anything to add with that, or are you totally in agreement with that or anything to, contradict it? No, I'm very much in agreement with it. What I'd probably add is that what you started to just point out there is that with most instances of cramping, you can kind of do the detective work early on and you highlighted two great scenarios there. The Reese scenario is cramping late on in a long endurance event, which has accumulated heavy sweat losses where electrolyte imbalance and fluid imbalance is highly likely. And although it doesn't mean correlation isn't causation. always, there is a high likelihood that type of cramping seems to respond well to additional electrolytes. The other kind where you mentioned like in the swimming pool or the typewriters and that sort of thing, absolutely is more likely to be a different cause, a different sort of flavour of cramp if you like, and the electrolyte intervention is unlikely to work. I actually read a paper that came out very recently which was, I think was actually... published out of Australia where a researcher did an interesting study where they looked at loading athletes up with either water or an electrolyte drink and tested the... they tried to stimulate cramping in the calf muscle by attaching electrodes and measuring the frequency of electricity they needed to use to stimulate a cramp to occur and they found in the group that threshold frequency was increased. So it was harder to get the muscles to cramp in the group that had been given a strong electrolyte drink before. So again, that was another really interesting indication. And like we said about early on about this sort of what with the cramping stuff, you'll have no doubt talked to a lot of people as I have, and there appears to be something of a, you know, a black and white divide in, in some areas between people who firmly believe in the sort of neurological issues is what causes cramping versus electrolyte dehydration theory. And my message has always been I think those two things can coexist, but researchers with, especially the researchers who have a foot in either camp tend to be very dogmatic about wanting to rubbish the other theory. And that always straights me a little bit because it gives mixed messages out to people. The amount of people that we get right into us to... say how phenomenally pleased they are that having used some of our stronger electrolyte products it's reduced their cramping, increased their enjoyment and ability to do the athletic events that they want to do is off the charts. But we still get some people who... who are like so convinced because they've read a counter argument, which rubbishes the idea of electrolytes that they're not even willing to give it a go. And that always just that kind of stuff frustrates me because trying taking more electrolytes is very cheap, a very safe and a very quick intervention to try. So I'd always encourage people who are cramping to try it with an open mind and see if it helps because like, like we're talking about before, trial and error is the best way to figure out if something works in the real world. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds very reasonable. Uh, what I loved about these questions, like I said, the start was just the diversity of them. Pam asks, um, what race advice do you have around nutrition, hydration for those who have a sensitive stomach? And she was saying that, um, in most cases she pukes or vomits when she tries sports drinks or gels of sorts. Um, any advice for Pam? Yeah. So there's when, when people get upset or sensitive stomachs, during exercise or other times when you're consuming sports nutrition, I would say there's kind of two distinct variables to try to get to the bottom of. One is that is there something in the products that you're trying, you know, an ingredient that disagrees with you specifically. So that might be a type of sugar, a type of flavor or color or whatever it is. Is there something, you know, common in the products, which is really not agreeing with your digestive tract for whatever reason. That could be down to your microbiome, it could be down to anything. So that's one kind of route to rule out. The way to narrow that down is through a process of elimination and looking at common ingredients and trying to try different food types, different drinks, different supplements that eliminate different individual ingredients or groups of ingredients that might cause upset. The other reason why people get upset stomach during exercise, which is perhaps slightly more common, is the sort of volume consumed in whatever timeframe. So in other words, you could maybe tolerate taking in sports drinks or sports nutrition in small amounts, but taking in large amounts in a short space of time gives you GI distress because you're overloading the stomach and the gut. That, the approach, I think, with the second problem is if you're finding that, if you're someone who finds that taking stuff in when you're exercising is difficult because of the volume overload, the route to improving that is like any aspect of training. You can train your gut a little bit to absorb more calories, more fluid, more carbohydrate when you're exercising, but you need to just do it very slowly and start off with the, start off with taking in amounts in training. that you know you can tolerate, even if those amounts are tiny to begin with, and then very gradually tweaking them up over time. Because like other organs, you know, your, your GI tract has the ability to adapt. And it will, and there's plenty of evidence to suggest that, you know, elite athletes, especially a very good at training their gut to take in more food. So I would say it's those, those are the two areas of investigation to go down. If you're struggling to take on much in the way of calories and fluids when you're exercising. Yeah. Fantastic. Jill, thoughts on dehydration slash sweating when running long distances in cold weather, like minus 30 degrees centigrade or Celsius, because it's hard to tell if it requires more. if you're losing a lot of sweat, it's really hard to tell. And also she says that some of the fluids that she carries freezes in that temperature. So I know we've talked about the importance of the long distance hot, humid conditions. What about, how can we tell when it's like really, really cold climates? Yeah, well cold... poses lots of different challenges, obviously, and lots of, you know, but lots that can be related to hydration as well. So for example, if you're out, I would imagine, I've not been out in minus 30 myself, but we have worked with a few athletes doing like crazy sledge pulling things in the freezing cold and that. And they often obviously have to wear layers and layers of clothing, which keep them relatively warm. or are able to keep them alive when they're not moving around too much, but then when they're exercising, because you generate so much heat when you're doing exercise, even in cold weather, you can actually sweat a hell of a lot when you've got all those layers on. So that's one thing to be aware of, is that just because you're in the cold doesn't mean you won't be sweating a lot. And you'll probably be aware if you are sweating a lot, but it will be down to the, you know, exercising within very insulating clothing. And that needs factoring in to your... you know, approach the hydration. The other things are that when you're in very cold conditions, often the air is very, very dry. So you lose more moisture through when you exhale, when you respire, you know, you can see your breath freezing and a lot of that is obviously water vapor that you're losing. So that's where you get a more dehydrating effect. And then if you are also in the cold weather, because a lot more of your blood flow circulates centrally, you vasoconstrict in the peripheries to sort of say to keep your core body temperature warm, then that tricks the kidneys a little bit and you get you can get something like a diuretic effect in the cold so you basically pee more because your body is tricked into feeling like it's got more fluid on board because your central circulation is pumped up and it's it happens it's called cold water diuresis because it happens a lot to and then very quickly need to pee because of that central vascular boost. And so if you find that you're peeing more, you may need to drink more to counteract that. And actually, one thing we did find working with a guy who did a bit of a sled pull in Norway in very cold conditions was that by adding a significant amount of electrolytes, he used one of our products called pH 1500 and was adding it to his water bottles. It does. have a positive effect on the freezing point of the water as well. So as well as allowing your body to absorb and hold on to more fluid when you drink it, although I couldn't say for sure what temperature it goes down to, it definitely improves the freezing point so that you're less likely to get the liquids freezing. So there's kind of a dual benefit in adding some electrolytes to your water in those conditions. Do you know if in these conditions, like we said before, like weighing yourself before and after, would that be a reliable method to use? It would. I can only imagine the logistical challenges involved in that though. You know, that would be the, that would be your biggest problem because obviously what, when you weigh yourself, you need to basically strip down to naked or almost naked because any clothing that you've been wearing that's absorbed sweat will skew the results and it would need a dedicated individual, I guess, to strip down in 30 degrees, that minus 30 degrees to weigh themselves or whatever. But if you can do any sort of simulation type stuff, then yes, looking at changes in body weight would definitely be helpful. I think the other thing as well, chatting with Mike, the guy who did the sledge pulling in Norway, he observed, and I've heard this before, that in very, very cold conditions, you kind of... lose a bit your sense of thirst and taste, you know, because I guess just because of the numbing effect of the cold air. And so it becomes a little bit harder to rely on that. And so drinking a little bit more to a schedule might be more sensible so that you don't allow yourself to get too dehydrated. Yeah, great answers. And last questions that have been submitted, and I think this one is my favourite. James asks, how significant is hydration like in the days leading up to a warm, long event when you know there's going to be a high sweat rate? And how much does preparing, how much time do we need to prepare to make sure we stay hydrated or is it more of like a couple of hours beforehand? That's how long it takes to hydrate the body. Yeah, that's the you're right. That's an excellent question. It's one we get asked a lot and a bit like with the cramping one, we've got a hugely well read blog on our website called How to Start Hydrated, which is worth kind of referring to for a more complete explanation of the science. But we in essence, a lot of people, a good comparison to draw is that most athletes, most runners in particular will understand the concept of carbohydrate loading in the. You can, you rely on stored glycogen in your muscles and your liver when you do a long or a hard run for energy. And in the days leading up to an event, you can stockpile some of that glycogen. You can carboload and actually store a little bit more carbohydrate than normal if you feed yourself extra carbohydrate, which then pays dividends in an event. With fluid and water, it's not quite the same because you're your body controls and regulates fluid levels really quite closely and you can't super hydrate in a really meaningful way. So if you drink more water in the days leading up to an event, you'll tend to pee more and you'll just stay in balance. If you do what some athletes unfortunately do and drink loads of extra water in days leading up, you can actually start to dilute yourself and become mildly hyponatremic. And that is a real issue in ultra runners that we've seen. There's data out there to suggest that sometimes, especially in hot ultra events, a proportion of the fields that are standing on the start line slightly hyponatremic because they've drunk so much water in the days before. So there's this kind of conception that people realize they don't want to turn up dehydrated, so they drink a bit more, but if you take that too far, it becomes problematic in another direction. So... What you obviously want to do in the days leading up to a race is not get dehydrated. And the best advice for that really is to drink relatively normally, listen to your body and whilst, you know, don't overdo it, but don't restrict fluid intake. And then in the last 24 hours, what you can do, which can be beneficial is to increase your sodium intake. So a little bit more sodium on your, a little bit more salt on your food. And then we recommend having a. around about half a litre of a very strong electrolyte drink the night before a major event, or a major training session when you know you're going to sweat a lot, and the same about 90 minutes beforehand, so usually with your breakfast before whatever you're doing. Because what that, it's called a preload, and what that does is the additional sodium in that drink, it's usually three or four times stronger than a regular electrolyte drink. That pulls more... sodium, the sodium pulls more fluid into your bloodstream through the gut and boosts up your blood plasma volume temporarily and allows you to capitalize on having a little bit more, you know, being a little bit more well hydrated, but the effect is relatively short lived. Your body will normalize relatively quickly and pee out any excess. So you need to do it relatively tactically in order to get the most out of it. Rather than that. excluding that very last like hit of sodium, I was more thinking of like your body being like a cup of water with a certain sodium concentration and if you tried to you can't max that out like you can't pour more water if it's filled to the brim it's just gonna pour out the side and if you're just replacing that with water and some of that existing sort of concentration seeps out the ends as well. It's gonna slowly get more diluted. So you If you're talking about like preloading with hydration levels, you can only reach a certain amount. And I guess what you're saying here is the main goal is to before an event, make sure that you sort of close to the top of your cup with the right concentration levels in order to, to help with performance and, or as be prepared, I guess, as you can be. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And it's, it's also, it's also worth pointing out that if you take on additional carbohydrates in the immediate build-up to event, that actually has a positive effect on your hydration status as well because glycogen is stored in the body along with molecules of water, and as you burn that glycogen when you exercise, that water gets released and becomes metabolically useful. So by carb-loading and taking a little bit of extra salt, which also helps retain a little bit of extra fluid, you can kind of squirrelle away a little bit more water. Um, and, and that's more useful than just, yeah, just drinking tons and tons of water and your cup analogy is, is pretty much spot on. Once you reach the top level with that, if you just keep pouring in, it's just going to start, you know, dribbling out the sides and getting more dilute. The probably more accurate than a cup would be to say that it's a, it would be a flexible vessel. So there is a limited amount for it to be able to expand a little bit, but it's still good at some point, it still tops out and you know, you'll know that because. And this harks back to one of your earliest questions in this interview was like, when my pee is clear, I'm, you know, am I hydrated? Well, a lot of athletes will drink and drink and drink in the days before a vase, start peeing very clear, thinking fantastic, this means I'm really well hydrated. And actually they're on that journey towards a little bit of mild dilution already. So peeing absolutely clear in those situations is probably... heading for a bad sign rather than a good sign. You'd like it to be a bit more, you know, straw colored and normal rather than lots and lots of clear P. Andy, as we're wrapping this up, do you have any other misconceptions that you um, come across in your line of work and a lot of people submitting questions and athletes getting tested? Do you, are there any other misconceptions that we haven't covered yet on this episode? I think the main ones are that people are often looking for a very quick and simple answer to how hydration should work, so what are the main rules for hydration? And whilst it doesn't need to be, my goal is not to overcomplicate it, it's also to say to people, you know, like things like for instance the idea of like just drink to thirst, whatever you're doing. It's becoming quite heavily promoted and although it works in some scenarios, it doesn't work for everyone all the time. We're working with an Aussie triathlete at the moment who has a very high sweat rate over two liters an hour and a very high sweat sodium concentration, 2,200 milligrams of sodium per liter. He's been admitted to hospital into Ironman events with hypernatremia and he's been doggedly following this kind of drink to thirst argument for a while and realized that, you know, it's kind of a light bulb's gone on that despite the... eminence of the people who've been recommending it to him. It's just not working for him. So one of my main, the main misconceptions is just like, look, don't go looking for the sound bite, one size fits all answer. Be prepared to do some digging and figuring out what individually works for you if you wanna get the best out of your own performance with this. It's an area which requires a level of physiological understanding and then a level of, you know, going out and figuring it out for yourself in the real world, what works for you. And I thought I might ask with pickle juice, when it comes to cramping, have you seen a benefit with that? We've, we've definitely come across that a lot in the U S we do a lot of work with, um, you know, the NBA, the NFL, the MLB, where there's quite a prevalent use of that, certainly there has been over the years. I mean, pickle juice is essentially just a very, very strong sodium solution. So, and vinegar, so it, there's two theories as to why it might work. One is that if it replaces, so in the South, in the, where it's very hot and humid, they'll often drink it in practice time during football practice and that sort of thing. And there's a theory obviously where that can just be replacing an element of sweat electrolyte losses. And therefore, you know, there's plausibility there. The other, the other reason it might help with cramping and that sort of thing is that There's a theory that it stimulates the nerves in the mouth, the vagal nerve, which then produces an immediate relaxation of a cramp based on the neurological theory of cramping. And part of me feels like it's sort of an old wives' tale. But at the same time, it's one of those things that's persisted for a long time now and is sworn by, by a lot of people who work in sport. So you can never write those things off. So I don't, I don't think it's conclusive proof one way or the other, but there's certainly, if it's not proven, there is an element of plausibility that it might help in some cases. I've seen like, um, national, uh, cricket players, they, they've gone for the pickle juice and they just swish around their mouth and spit it out. And they're, um, apparently that's, that's helped them a lot. And yeah, I guess maybe there's a bit of placebo in there as well. Um, who's to say, but yeah, if I guess like we said, the staff tried out and if it works for you, then maybe it's, um, maybe it's a good solution, but I guess in the best case, you want to try and avoid that scenario in the first place. Cause if we're talking about endurance athletes getting a cramp, you surely don't want to get to that stage. You want to, in order to perform, you want to try and do the best you can to prevent that scenario happening in the first place. Definitely. I'd say that prevention is not always possible clearly, but prevention is definitely preferable to cure when it comes to cramping and those kind of pickle juice and the other, the other more modern, um, the more modern products that have been marketed to, to act as like cramp alleviators, which you, which you swish around the mouth and spit out or swallow, which stimulate the nerves, they're very much sort of a last gasp. effort, whereas I think getting ahead of it with a decent hydration plan, understanding your sodium losses and that kind of thing is, is ultimately, hopefully going to be more productive in the long run. You've, you're very, um, you've got a wealth of knowledge on this topic, obviously coming from your experience and you know, that your, your business side of things, as well as your performance side of things, and you're explaining these concepts extremely well that anyone without any experience in this field can just instantly get. Um, as we wrap up, are there any other final take takeaways, any other little tips, any other reminders, um, before we, before we finish up? No, I think the main one, Brody would just be to say that as a, as a business, we are extremely passionate, although people see us on our website as, you know, we're a company that produces sports nutrition and sports hydration products and that kind of thing. What we are at heart is a a small team who are very passionate and committed to helping athletes achieve their goals and be at their best. That's why the company started, because I learned something which just revolutionised my own performance. I think if one thing that we offer, which is very unique, are 20-minute free online video calls with people just to talk about their hydration, their nutrition, their fuelling and see if we can help them and pick problems. So people like your man um, 70 and a half Ironman and that kind of thing. We, we would just love to hear from people on an individual basis, because ultimately that's often the best way to get to the bottom of, of these issues. So if anyone's listening to this and thinks, you know, any of what we've talked about resonates with them, I'd encourage them to hit our website, go to the footer and find the book of free video call and then come along and talk to us and we'd love to hear from them. Amazing. And while we're on that topic, um, Instagram, Facebook, just precision hydration, you've got prec the website. And I think you and your team have been grateful enough to offer us the science of endurance hydration course with a, um, a promo code to give 15% off for those who are interested as well. Yes, that's a, that you, I think you went through the course yourself. It's a, it's kind of a, a knowledge dump of everything we, we know to this point about hydration for endurance athletes. It's available on the training peaks platform. And it's normally $99, but I think there's a, yeah, there's a discount code for your, for your listeners. Great. Thank you. And I'll include all those links in the show notes, as well as that cramping blog that you mentioned earlier, um, in the interview and anyone, like I know you mentioned a couple of blogs throughout the episode, just head to the website and, um, check all those out. Andy, this has been great. I haven't really had much. I had one cramping episode on the podcast before, but never really had. had a deep dive into hydration. I couldn't think of a better person to talk about it. So thanks for coming on. No, it's been great chatting Brody. Thanks for the opportunity. And that concludes another Run Smarter lesson. I hope you walk away from this episode feeling empowered and proud to be a Run Smarter scholar. Because when I think of runners like you who are listening, I think of runners who recognize the power of knowledge, who don't just learn, but implement these lessons, who are done with repeating the same injury cycle. over and over again, who want to take an educated, active role in their rehab, who are looking for evidence-based, long-term solutions and will not accept problematic quick fixes. And last but not least, who serve a cause bigger than themselves and pass on the right information to other runners who need it. I look forward to bringing you another episode and helping you on your Run Smarter path.