Winning Ultra Trail Marathons at 66 on Carnivore! | Mick Sullivan

welcome to the plant-free MD podcast with Dr Anthony chaffy where we discuss diet and nutrition and how this affects health and chronic disease and show you how you can use this to optimize your health and happiness both mentally and physically hello everyone thank you for joining me for another episode of the plant-free MD podcast I'm your host Dr Anthony chaffy and today I have a very special guest Mr Mick Sullivan who is going to tell us his quite amazing story um of Athletics and health so Mick thank you so much for joining hi anony thanks great to be here absolutely so um for people haven't come across you before can you tell us a bit about you sure um I'm uh my wife Jenny and myself we live in Australia in a small town in the snowy mountains um where um it's basically a fine wool sheep and beef cattle grazing area U so it's it's quite Rural and um most of grazing down there is all Native pastures uh which is nice it's very little tilled Agriculture and um yeah Jenny's my soulmate we've done a lot of things together um since since we met and she's also carnivore and she runs Ultras like I do so um yeah we're currently in Shang Ma and Thailand we've just done an event last weekend um that went well we sort of um both sort of got in our placings on in our age groups for the 100 kilometer event uh I won my age group and Jenny got the second in hers so oh nice it's it Carnival does work yeah absolutely so so how did you were you doing um Ultras and marathons and things like that prior to to going carnivore yes yes um we we've always done a lot of urance activity so uh for about 30 odd years we were cross country skiers and we uh do CrossCountry skiing competitions which is great um endurance and arobic base and then in um 2015 we retired from managing a ski lodge so we realized we weren't going to be able to ski most days like we were in Winter and we looked for some kind of retirement challenge um so we decided to take up trial running and um yeah that little challenge has become an all consuming passion now but um yeah it definitely challenged us because we went from a a non-impact sport to an impact sport so it took some time to adapt um but it wasn't long and we were both running ultramarathons and um gradually increasing in distance you know what seemed really long and daunting at first now is sort of yeah easy and we're moving on to the next next level so um but yeah um kind of when we did initially we did ke and then carnivore um but that changed quite a bit with our performance and our ability to recover and yeah okay so what what made you switch over to Kido and then carnivore um I've had a lot of um joint muscle issues for over 30 years since was in the mid-30s um it never stopped me from doing the activities I want to do but um yeah it was always there making it hard to get out of bed in the morning I was often pulling muscles when I was trying to you know run or cross country ski yeah just a lot of little little injuries and um uh it got to a point in sort of 2021 I was doing a a couple of Ultras and I kind of really hit the wall badly in them and about the 30k mark and uh at first you know wasn't sure what was happening thought it could could have been the heart or something so I had all those that testing done through C cardologist EOC cardiogram and a stress test on the treadmill Etc so that was thoroughly checked out um they said basically there's nothing wrong with my heart so then the other consideration is whether it was nutrition so I think i' lost a lot of fat adaptation especially through covid years because we weren't going tracking in the pole we often would go tracking in the Nepal Himalaya and that's long sustained um work with sort of less um car less food intake anyhow um I then Janie decided first of all to try keto she had a few more health issues than I had and was trying to sort of get on top of them so she tried it first up she'd heard of a guy called sherper herb who had this Elimination Diet for I think 21 days to try it out so she tried that and found quite a good Improvement so it's easier if both people in the household are eating the same figs so I joined in and uh it's been all go since then that was keto of course at first um and then within six months my endurance level had improved considerably and I um it was put 20122 early that year I think we both went Carnival it was it was an evolution but once it started it was obvious to us especially me my inflammation levels had gone down even my left knee which has always you know been a bit of a problems kind of worn out and um all the the the faces of all the joints in there are quite degraded but all of a sudden I was even getting on top of that knee issue so uh obviously the food was making a big difference yeah oh very good and so you you mentioned that you had changes in your performance and your and your recovery it sounds like you have reduction in your inflammation and better recovery is that right correct correct uh I think after an ultra like a longer let's say 50 km plus uh the body's uh been Hammer pretty hard and I find that the less carbs or anything like that I would have after an event and after an event you've often got food given to you post event Etc so it's it's tempting to have it but I find uh the less of it I have uh the quicker I seem to recover and I know I've heard of a um there a American Ultra Runner called Jeff Browning and he does a lot of like uh long events especially like 200 miles and 250 miles and these sort of things and he stated that in a 48 hour period after event if he doesn't have any carbohydrates at all uh then he actually finds his recovery is so much better and he competes at the elite level yeah so I took that on board and I I'm still it's still an experimentation we're still working it out but that appears to be what happen so yeah well I mean obviously i' I've noticed a huge difference in like the Doms the delay onet muscle soreness that you get after you you do a big workout pretty much non-existent as long as you're not eating any plants whatsoever or coffee which is a hard one for people to give up so they don't always necessar fully experience it but the carbohydrates and especially you know the things that come along with the carbohydrates you know the grains and potatoes and things like that I find those can be quite inflammatory and and cause quite a lot of um pain after working out and then slow recovery you know you see these people talking about well you need to have longer recoveries to you know only lift weights once every five days or these sorts of things and certainly an argument for that but I I would argue that it's not the case for us because I just I don't get that inflammation and I don't get that that pain and soreness I'm not sort of desperately trying to you know recover after I could I could do the same thing next day every day and obviously you need time to recover you need time to regrow but from a a pain and inflammation side of things and Recovery side of things it's absolutely not an issue for me when um when you made that change to keto because this is something that especially in the athletic Community you know people are very concerned about their their performance dropping off or not being able to um you know compete at the same level when they transition to like a ketogenic I mean there's plenty of studies showing that you get the same output or even improved output months down the road um you weeks to months down the road uh on a ketogenic diet but they're they're quite worried about that transition how did you find the transition from going from a a more standard approach to then a ketogenic approach did you did you find that your performance dropped off for a while well I would say that some of my daily energy did drop uh my performance in events not so much it seemed to be that once I got into event and got going I might be a bit slower to stting the event but once I got going the metabolism just seemed to pick up and away I went but dayto day for initially I I did find the energy level lower and we've got a really good um doctor um we we see in Sydney Sydney low Cub specialist Dr deeper and um we once we started we went and saw her and said what we wanted to do and she did all you know kept monitoring the blood work and then she said you like Jenny's adapted really well quickly to it she said I might need to do a little bit of carb periodization for a while until um I I adapt I might be slower adapted to it so for a few months I did do um reintroduced a little bit of carbs uh a little bit like Zack bitter and Jeff Browning doing their their training and then yeah worked it helped it eny level in training and day-to-day was a little higher uh but within a few months I was then able to win off that and uh don't seem to need anywhere near as much as what I did then so it it was an adaptation in my case that happened over time and Jenny it was very quick so obviously different people respond differently to it so yeah great so but at this point you've been doing this for a number of years really so yeah so yeah perfect so and now full carnivore as well so what what is it like training now and competing now as a as a as a carnivore versus prior to that what is is that as far as your energy levels how your performance how you're doing I mean you've done some some huge races and and had some very very good results and maybe walk us through some of those and um and then and then the recovery afterwards what does that all that that look like now that you're presumably older but also very different diet yes um well I'm in sort of certainly one of the oldest age classes for competing in these Ultras and but I would say in the last two years since going carnivore I'm feeling younger not older right performance is improving not going backwards so it's kind of interesting to be at this point in life but then it's almost like having a a new lease on life thinking well what else can I do with this you know new found sort of ability to perform so um yeah so this this year I guess was the culmination of a couple of years of hard training uh I've been trying to get into the ultra child of Mount Blanc for four years because you got to you got to qualify you got to get enough points you've got to go for a ballot process and so this was the fourth time and I finally got into it um and it is like the torto Francis for cycling or the Boston New York marathons is for Road running it's the Pinnacle event of the trail running calendar it's the all the professionals that's the one they want to win the big one uh so I finally got into it and it um uh is in France it starts in Shan and finishes in SE so it does a full circle navigation of Mount Blanc it's 1706 km and 10 just under 10,000 M of vertical so it's equivalent of going the top of Mount Everest from sea level and then adding another thousand meters and coming back down again so um it's pretty demanding and um um yeah I had the race of my life basically um you know everything worked well um and uh I won my age class so that was nice proof of a pudding that uh these changes in lifestyle can have some very positive effects yeah that's amazing and and like you said I me this is this is the competition that that professional runners would be in as well were you competing against other professional runners as well or is it not the professionals obviously at the front of the field it's open damages as well if you make make all the criteria so there was 2,800 Runners started that that event they have a number of events in in the festival but that's the big one so 2,800 Runners started that event and about 1,1 Runners withdrew throughout the race it's pretty has very high attrition rate um and so yeah there was about just under 1,800 Runners finished the event yeah wow yeah yeah what a monster um and then okay well first of all congratulations that's amazing you did that that's that sounds awful like for me know like the reason I would I would run was because you know I wanted to get in good shape so I could go and hit people but like there was a there was an NFL guy I saw in this um film NFL crunch course is one of like my favorite old school ones uh videos um and there's a special teams guy and he's just like you know like yeah you know I want to you know on the kickoff you know I'm trying to get to the ball carry I'm trying to move around and you know get to you know try to make a play and you know make a tackle but you know if I if I if I can't get to the ball carrier like I'm hitting someone like I'm not run running 40 yards and not hitting somebody you know it's like that's sort of I feel like I you know I'm I'm doing this you know to smash somebody at the end of this you know so like running for a 100 miles not GNA hit anybody you know it's um you know you're hitting yourself yeah what is that fact you know if I could check people into a tree or something like that as I'm walking by that would give me some motivation to start in the back and work my way up and just smash people all the way and that that motivate me to sort of move up you know but um probably not going to let me do that but that's fine but that that's amazing it's an amazing race I mean obviously you know Mount Blanc is that was stunning you know so you're going to be in these gorgeous locations but very grueling you know 10,000 meters of elevation is is is Pretty Wicked on the body how did you feel after that race and how long was your recovery um I surprised myself actually normally after an event like that it it take me over a week before I could even think of running um but was pretty active about 3 days later and starting to jog around on some of the the hikes and about four five days later so recovery was pretty quick considering that was the longest race I'd ever done and probably the hardest that deep my surprise so yeah oh very good um so you and your wife are doing this are there and and now you're you're coming in top like you just said you just won another race up in up in Thailand are other people starting to take notice do you know other other Runners that are starting to take a ketogenic approach to their to their run I mean obviously there are there are ultramarathoners and Iron Man athletes that that do this already but have have what are you seeing from the inside it's It's tricky in that uh Ultra trail running has an element to it that the more steady state sports like Triathlon and Road running um doesn't have and that is we have mountains so you've got periods whereby the intensity potentially can be a lot higher uh and then periods where you're running down a hill which doesn't mean it's easy but it's nevertheless the cardio demand and energy demand isn't quite as high so it makes it quite hard in trail running uh to I think for a lot of people to to manage that low carbohydrate approach but once you do it does work well but you've got to really moderate your intensity in the event so that you can sustain yourself sort of for longer and then towards the end of event as as I found this year in UTMB um I'd had such a steady state for the first 120 kilm and then the last 50 I had plenty of energy to burn so I used it and overhauled lots of people who m much we dying at that point but understand it's a long way you know so it takes a different approach and and we're kind of in the trail running space there's a huge amount of emphasis being put on on carb doping 120 grams per hour of carbohydrates is even 140 grams per hour and look it might work for some people especially the elites uh you know those who take the time to adapt to it but it's it's not something I would want to have to do for performance and probably I wouldn't be willing to do it for performance but then there's the unanswered question what happens in the in the long term if you're ingesting that amount of carbohydrate yeah in events and that hasn't been answered yet so yeah is all these studies saying oh yes you know with this little carbohydrate might be able to improve your performance but what's going to happen in two 5 10 years time hey everyone really happy to a new sponsor for the show for everybody down in Australia Stockman Stakes who are delivering highquality grass-fed and finished pasture raised beef and other meats flash frozen and vacuum sealed tood door something that I've been enjoying a lot of myself recently as well they also have a great range of specialty items such as high fat keto mints and carnivore beef and organs mints with liver kidneys and beef heart as well so use code chaffy today for free order of beef mints or another specialty gift along with your order at Stockman steaks.com and I'll see you over there thanks guys yeah well you know I mean the well the thing is we do know a lot of these guys are getting pre-diabetic and diabetic and they their bodies are breaking down and just that excess uh glucose um you know um damages the body and it also damages the joints and we're seeing this in in in arthritis that de generation of the articular cartilage in your knees and your hips and your shoulders and and also in the discs in your spine that a lot of these are are finding high levels of glycation so Advanced glycation end products the damage that you get from ramming in carbs in your face all the time because above physiological levels blood glucose is toxic to your body and your body you know treats it as a toxin by trying to detoxify it and keep it below um basically four grams you only have about four grams of glucose in your entire bloodstream at any given time which is not all that much and so you get a lot of damage it's interesting from a from an athletic point of view because you actually use less oxygen to make the same amount of ATP from fat oxidization than you do from glucose and you also use less NAD plus actually use um one NAD plus molecule to make the same amount of energy as you do um as glucose so glucose will require four times that four times the amount of NAD plus to make the same amount of ATP and so uh then the inflammation side of things you know your high ketones suppress the nlrp3 inflammosome you just you just get less inflammation and you're eating less inflammatory foods people say meat so inflammatory who told you that right it's like it's um you know it's not actually true and uh you know people just have said it and they just believe it because oh yeah meat meat's evil so obviously definitely going to cause more inflammation it doesn't and there's no evidence to show that it does and in the real world evidence shows that it does and people's inflammation reduces and going into ketosis reduces it as well so you you get all these benefits um I'm testosterone I mean I've men's testosterone doubling or tripling when they do this I mean you you try to tell me that that's not going to improve your performance as an athlete you know it's of course it is and um the interesting thing about saying well you need to ramp up how many grams of carbs you have per hour as a high performance athlete or an ultramarathon or something like that that's really only in the context of those Studies have only been in the context of people that eat carbs anyway and so saying okay well if you're already eating carbs then more carbs may be better and there's other ones that say actually even the carb athletes you don't actually need more than 20 grams a day or or an hour you know and as a carb athlete so you know if it were saying well 50 150 500 grams of carbs an hour that's the best it's still only going to be in that context of of someone who's already eating carbs um you know the the amount of energy that you make through fat oxidization um it far outstrips the amount of energy that you can you can actually um use in in an hour so you actually are more than capable of of producing uh adequate energy levels you know that's something that um Dr Paul Mason talks about he's he's one of the top exercise Sports Medicine doctors around really he's over in Sydney but I was talking to him about that and it's just like actually you know you broke out the numbers and it's just like you know this is like maximal exertion you're just killing yourself in a in a as a topf flight athlete per hour is actually far less than your capacity to um generate energy and so you know it's um it's not actually like an energy sort of thing that you're you're lacking you know you mentioned um that uh that sometimes you know like like Zack bidder and some of these other guys you have the sort of carbohydrate um periodization you might you might have you know what you what you now you you mentioned this when we were talking Offline that during your training you're just fasted you're just ketogenic the whole time and you feel great but then on performance day you will use a bit of carbs is that right yes uh what I do is um B basically I I I don't use carbs generally in training I don't feel I need to I can go out for three five six hours of of um running um even in the mountains in Europe and I don't feel the need to have to eat just I have a nice steady flow of energy and this is just proven itself time and time again so I don't feel I have the need for carbs in that um when it comes to race time if if it's an an a race like one that's really important at this point in time I'm still experimenting with with a low carb approach to those events uh in time I I will with some B events but I haven't had one for a while then I'll experiment with um you know trying to to do without and with those I usually now I'm down to about 20 to 30 gam of carbs per hour and that's every 30 minutes on the hour and half half hour I have a small dose so I'm not sort of overla the stomach or a GI but it's enough to keep the GI system active because in a long event if you don't uh put something in your stomach then blood flow will go from your stomach to other parts of your body and it's harder to get it back so the idea is you got to just keep a little bit of digestion ticking over to keep the GI system working um and so I'll the carbohydrates that I have are basically glucose BAS I try to avoid or minimize the fructose component so I make my own carbohydrate jelly um out of gelatin and um glucose basically and we use that and it's a it's basically 10 gram per per jelly so I'll have one of those every half an hour and then if I'm running through an AG station or something I might grab a bit of something extra it might be a piece of watermelon and um or a bit bit of rice but that's about it most of I've F in the a stations I just don't touch um in Europe it's got plenty of cheese and salami which is great but here in Thailand was just all sugary food and the only Savory Foods were had a lot of um gluten and wheat in them which I didn't want to touch so was little bit more challenging the food here in Thailand in the racing compared to Europe you yeah yeah definitely so do you do you feel that you've noticed the difference like on those race days that that it's changed like from your training because obviously you're doing very high load on your training days and you're saying you feel great do you have you noticed that you you feel any better with that addition or is it is it more of a safety precaution at this point no it's it's really because of the mountains um and in the race It's usually the bigger mountains and more of them it's in in my thinking at the moment and this is only at the moment this this idea can evolve of course it's about um maintaining the the glycogen that's within the muscle anyway that's there through eating a non-carb diet that's there before the event is to try during event to at least sustain that level without draining it too quickly on the first couple of big climbs and we're talking 1 2,000 meter climbs so they can be quite taxing on the carbs if you if you hit them too hard um so through moderating the pace and then just having a very small amount of carbs it seems to work um for me quite well I don't feel any particular adverse effect at that level but when I was having 50 60 70 gram of carbs per hour which is not high by normal standards yeah I didn't feel that that worked well for me and about a month before UTMB this year I was listening to a podcast out running and uh Jeff Browning was being interviewed about one of his 200 mile events and he mentioned in that that he found that uh if he was running at you know like the the 50 um 60 G carb per hour level uh he didn't feel as good and when he sort of dropped it down a bit uh he felt a lot better in the events but they're very long events so again there's that threshold if you go up to a certain point and your body tolerates it it it seems to work for me but I go over that level then all of a sudden rather than being an advantage it's detrimental and if you look at uh in traal running at least and and running generally often they say about 70% of of did not finish um Runners is due to GI issues and that's a huge amount and now if it's super carbohydrate loading that they're doing um it wouldn't surprisedly that number is going to be amongst the elites as well as the you know the Midfield as well well because the amount of carbs they're consuming is huge and if they haven't completely adapted to that I think GI issues is a natural consequence yeah it was Pete Jacobs who's uh a you know a Iron Man world world champion and he won that I think it was 2015 but he he just he was horribly felt horrible had horrible gut issues and horrible issues health issues and um you he was able to do it but then he just felt absolutely wrecked because of it and it's just like okay well is your body actually getting the best performance that it can when you actually feel like you know you know rolled over garbage you know I couldn't imagine how um and he subsequently went carnivore actually and um you know talked about how actually reversed all of his issues and his gut issues he felt amazing he was just like yeah I'm I'm you know back training again I feel great whereas before he basically peaked at the you know winning the championship and from you know the reading an article about him I haven't spoken to him it sounded like he basically he just sort of took a step back for a while because he just had so many health issues he just couldn't train properly and then but when he went keto carnivore that that all healed and now you know he was able to sort of chart chart training again a few years after that uh which is interesting you know like you said you know is can this Caro carbohydrates give you a performance Advantage you know there's arguments both ways I would I would argue that that you don't need them once you're fully fat adapted but let's say that it does you know is it is it sort of worth it I mean why wouldn't it be a better approach to do like you're doing which is you know train without this stuff and use a very small amount if that were to help you and and not so much that you're actually causing serious metabolic harm and distress you know because you shouldn't you shouldn't be diabetic as a as an ultramarathon Runner Elite athlete around the world I mean you should be exercising enough that this is fine but you know you can't outrun a bad diet you know even even though there there are people out there you know like you know Dr petera is a big proponent of exercise things this is just really the main thing that you need to do for for Health and Longevity but you need this in combination of a proper diet because you have all these people that are brilliant athletes just train harder than anybody else and and perform better than anybody else and they're dying I mean they're getting they're getting serious metabolic disease one of my dad's favorite um Runners marathon runners that was I don't know back in the ' 80s and '90s this guy said that um doesn't matter what you eat as long as you train and so he would eat McDonald's and junk food and sodas and all that sort of stuff and he dropped dead of a heart attack at 40 you know so is that is that really getting you where you want to go you know probably not and um you know it is interesting you're talking about the glycogen side of things there was a there was a a study in 2016 by volik and Finny called the faster study that that looked at this and and um looked at Elite um Ultra endurance athletes who um who were already uh doing keto and so they had to be they were all at least nine months on and um the maximum was the highest one was like 36 months was like three years and the average for all of these athletes were about 20 months and he compared this other you know Elite Ultra endurance athletes and they so you sort of looked at f oxidization you because the argument is that you after 60% V2 Max you know you get out of this Zone 2 cardio stage and you start burning carbs but they actually found that that was only in in the carb athletes and so um that the keto athletes that had been keto adapted for you know quite some time so they' been this wasn't like a just just started off you do need to adapt there is a period of adaptation that they uh were not only performing at extremely high levels but they uh were still burning fat at over 90% uh V2 Max to a significant degree and um and so you know we didn't see that the interesting thing about the the the VC trial the faster study was that they actually looked at glycogen they looked at muscle glycogen and so they did muscle biopsies um before a big trial some sort of you know three-hour run or something like that um and uh they did a muscle Bops before immediately after and then 3 hours after after they had a chance to recover and they found that at all three points both the keto and carb group were nearly identical even though the carb athletes were sucking down sugar packets and and sweets and carbs and things like that and and the keto athletes were not taking in any carbohydrates whatsoever and still had the same glycogen and so it's telling you your body your body is going to you when you're in the right metabolic state is going to be able to provide the energy that's required which is obviously important you know when you're when you're high endurance athlete so you know that's what what sort of makes me think that this is probably something that um I mean certainly myself as an athlete I I never hit that point where I was just like oh I'm I'm really dragging you know the harder I pushed myself the more my body gave me and um you know I I was able to outperform everybody um around me in in rugby um and it makes me sort of curious you know because especially because you you know you obviously if you're if you're if you're coming in top of your of your age group in this uh you know massive M Blanc um run obviously you're training hard as hell you can't you can't you can't win without training hard as hell but you're not using carbs during your training so you're you so you're doing that you did mention um off there that you actually tried a marathon fasted um and so you didn't eat anything including carbs and and um yeah can you tell us a bit about that yeah so before France's year I wanted to test my fat adaptation and to see if I really was oxidizing fat efficiently uh because it's been couple of years that I've been you know on on the carnivore diet and um so I heard Alex McDonald's um talk about his five marathons in five days fasted and um I thought oh that's that's kind of inspirational so I kind of took that idea and then applied it to a trail uh Marathon so it was 42k it was near CRA called the Cohen and it's got elevation it's not mountainous but it's 1 half th000 or 17,000 M of vertical so enough to kind of be taxing and I did that one fasted um I uh bettered my personal best on that course by five minutes now I I chose that event because I had had previous results I didn't I didn't see a lot of Point going out uh doing a a faster event in something I I hadn't done before so that's a reason for choosing that and I wasn't actually expecting to better my time I was expecting to have a good run or I wasn't thinking I was going to actually get a PB on it I did and what I found was that my energy level was just constant right through the event it was it was it was the first time i' really felt that um just smoothness from start to finish um and yeah it was a very nice feeling considering I had no had electrolytes we make our own bch of home brew electrolytes got nothing but the minerals and that in it um so long as I was having that it was good and then a few weeks later I tried another one it was a 36 km event up near Sydney uh called rafiy and that was involved um hilly coastlines and running on beaches and things a little different um and that one I did Fast it as well the difference between the the 42k is I had uh a little bit of rice uh 48 hours before the event and in the rities I ditched um that element all together um and that was not only was fasted on the day but um had been sort of um carb free that whole week up to it so that was a difference there the reason uh I sometimes before a big event I'll have in my taper period uh if I think that in the event I'm going to have to have something like rice or fruit then in the tapered period one at one point in there I'll have uh one or two pieces of fruit probably four five days out and then maybe uh a cup of rice two days out and it's just to switch on any metabolisms and um enzymes and things I might need in the event for digesting those items just to reduce potential GI issue but I'm finding as time goes on the need for that's less and less so probably down the truck I probably won't even bother with it but because I seem to be able to handle the race food anyway I've always had a pretty strong stomach fortunately um I've been able in the past to eat anything without much consequence a lot of people have GI issues and come to keto and Carnival for that reason J Jenny had reflux so it was one of her reasons for coming to keto in the first place um and you know she's resolved all that now but um yeah I've been lucky I've had that sort of cast on stomach so nice yeah I I wonder if there you know there's this idea of um insulin preloading where if you've been ketogenic for a very long time you you don't pre-make insulin in your pancreas and so you have a you have a slower reaction to a carbohydrate oral carbohydrate load whereas and you know but when your insulin comes up then it you know the your um you know everything works very well in fact because you you're even more insulin sensitive and so that drives that energy into the cells more quickly but it can take a couple of days to basically tell your your pancreas like oh we're doing this again okay all right you know start making some some insulin ahead of time so I wonder if there's something an element to do with that um but you know the you know one of the things that I was speaking to Dr Paul Mason about on this was that you know there's something called the the central governor of fatigue and this has only been tested in carbohydrate athletes so you know it's um it's uh you know is what it is but when when people max out even though they say like okay well there's energy available in their body you know they still have glycogen they still have you know blood sugar and you know they're bat oxidizing you know part of this sort of thing their their body can sort of start shutting down a bit and um and you start hitting this wall and you start feeling pretty wrecked and and one thing that they can do is you give them a little bit of carbohydrates not enough to actually give them a lot of energy but just enough to like get that sweet sweet response on on your tongue really you know some sort of like simple simple sugar something something sweet and you sort of get that on your tongue and then you you know would swallow that that can actually break that that slump and then all of a sudden you have this ramped up energy again and they tried that with just tasting that sweet thing and then something something sweet and you just tasted that held it in your mouth for a while swish it around and then spit it out they had the same energy jump uh jump so it wasn't the carbohydrates they were consuming it was just their body saying hey look we you're using a lot of energy you need to slow your rooll and so you're in a conservation sort of um uh approach your body just starts governing the amount of um energy available and starts tiring you out saying Hey look this is a bad idea um possibly have something to do with like what Runners used to talk about you know back in the '90s ' 80s and 90s that you'd hit the wall and you'd have to push and fight and fight through and then you'd break through the wall and then you'd have your second win maybe that's that where you you're fighting this Central Governor fatigue but then you're just like no we're doing this and they fight through that could also be biochemically where you run out of glycogen and now your body's having to struggle to make energy and then sort of forcing yourself into a more key ketogenic approach and and running on your fat it could be a combination of both but um it is interesting I never ran into that as an athlete I mean you you you'd get worn out at a certain point when I was training but I I was able to train hard enough and long enough that that eventually I got in such good shape I just didn't get tired and I just didn't couldn't wear myself out um and um so I never even I can't even look back on a time and say oh maybe I could have tried that but you know that is a thing you know that that is a phenomenon that's that's been studied in in sports medicine um it'd be interesting to me you know if it um if that has a lot to do with it with these ultramarathoners and marathoners and high performance athletes that that do ketogenic but they say well maybe just you maybe just have a little bit you know and then and that sort of helps them through um I would wonder if that's if that's part of it as well and it may that you I mean you know because you running a marathon is I mean that's a warm-up right you know you're um you know you're training you're running for five six hours and you're feeling great the whole time well Marathon doesn't take that long unless you're walking you know so it's like you know you can crush this Marathon you know in in half that time and um and so you you you're probably not going to hit that that Governor where your brain saying like no no no no you got to slow down which is why I was sort of wondering you know is that something your body actually requires I'd be really interested to see that you know if if if there's event or maybe even like a training that you're like okay well I'm just going to run you know 100K on this training event or just a practice run or something like that um and you and you saw and you saw how you you performed and how you felt I'd be really interested in that because you've been doing this for a long time you're fully K definitely keto adapted and uh you're in great shape so you know I would imagine that you you could probably you know do this and get some some real I would not if not improvements in your performance at least you're not going to drop down I would I would bet that you would actually get improvements but I would bet even more that you'd at least not drop your performance yeah that's an experiment yet to happen but yeah it's the way I'm thinking yeah testing things in the future it's like all this stuff it's a um I believe it's an evolution not a revolution quickly it's you know you burn yourself in the process but yeah well you know and the thing is too is that I mean a you haven't you haven't hit that wall yet right so it could be you know that and obviously you're trying to preempt that you don't want to you don't want to hit in the first place but you know could be that you know if you if you were to try this you just say okay you know I've got my my jellies on me and so if there's a problem you know I know where to I know where to turn but maybe let's see how far I can go and while I'm feeling good and if I'm not feeling good okay you know I've got 10 grams of glucose right there you could also think about okay well if there is a problem maybe try just putting in your mouth or having something sweet or you know bit of Honey or something like that or you know watered down honey and just rinsing that just having that in your mouth and getting getting that sweet flavor in your mouth hitting those those receptors on your tongue and just spitting it out and seeing seeing what that does for you too I would think that um well I I would I would actually bet that you probably would go through without using either because you probably just feel great the whole time but it would be interesting to see okay then you know is it is it actually you need energy or is it that that Central governor of fatigue you know I would bet it's the central governor of fatigue that's um that's what you know people like Paul Mason and and um I believe Tim NOS is is on board with that as well but um it's a it's a very interesting thought obviously we're sort of at the sharp end of this um you know with uh you know with with Elite athletes such as yourself and you know trying these different sorts of things but it's very interesting all the same most people um just living their day-to-day life or even even performing in in you know fairly decent and strenuous recreational Sports and activities probably just not even going to run into this and then they're definitely not going to need any carbs they hands down going to get everything that they need just from their body um being in ketosis or being fasted so it's interesting to sort of think of this at at the very sharp end of elite Athletics but I would still I would I still have that um suspicion that well I I I'm sort of more inclined that it's probably um you know just can be fully done all on its own and very very at the very most sort of the the the governor sort of issue I would bet that would be my bet anyway the um putting a little bit of sugar or sucking something sweet under the tongue uh has been used in running for a long time as as a trigger if you're um you know hitting the wall and don't have a lot of nutrition on hand to trick body um I have heard that you do get an it does trigger an insulin response but I've also heard that if you don't have um the fuel that um to then back up the insulin response in time uh you can actually sort of then get a bit of an energy trough afterwards as well so you cat your your hit but then a bit of a Down Downer so be interesting to know the science if that's if it really is the case or hey guys just want to take a second to thank our sponsors at carnivore bar I don't promote many products because honestly all you need to be healthy is to just eat meat for those times that you're out hiking road tripping or stuck at work and you want nutritious snack that is just meat fat and salt if you want it the carnivore bar is a great option so I like this product not because it's just pure meat but also because I want the carnivore Market to thrive as well and the more we support meat only products the more meat only products there will be available in the mainstream so if this sounds like something you'd like to get behind check it out using my discount code code Anthony to get 10% off which also applies to subscriptions giving you 25% off total all right thanks guys yeah it's I I I suppose it would be how much you do because yeah you can you can get a bit of an insulin trigger but again you know is that going to be as much of an issue with ketogenic athletes who don't pre preload insulin right and so if you have insulin pre-loaded and ready to go and you and you do this you know you you yes you'll probably release some of that but if you don't have it preloaded is your body going to sort okay maybe it starts making it up but maybe it has to get into your bloodstream before it actually starts using it that's typically what you see you know people say that that your insulin resistance actually goes up when you go ketogenic because they don't know how biology works but um you know the the reason being is they say well your your oral glucose tolerance test your ogtt that can can go up you know when you've been ketogenic for a while but then you you check it again you know 2 hours later 5 hours later get a better response and if you check that with insulin called a craft test then you'll actually see that you actually don't have insulin your blood sugar up because your insulin isn't present right it's very low and then as your insulin goes up blood sugar go go straight down so actually there is a there is a perfect insulin response it's just that you know you have to you have to actually know how how the body works and and to be able to um you know recognize those patterns so if you're you're not if you're not preing that insulin you know you may not get that that at all but you if you do get a bit of an insulin yeah you can get reactive hypoglycemia but it just depends on how much if you're just having a bit of a taste of of sugar you're not going to get a huge hit of insulin okay you should get a corresponding hit of insulin right because it's not it's not like a massive amount I mean we we have bigger doses of insulin because we're eating hundreds of grams of carbs in a sitting you know bu pizza and rice and cakes and all that sort of stuff sodas so your body has to make a big large amount of insulin you like the ogt ogtt is 75 uh grams of of oral glucose you know that's a lot you know you're just sucking that down in one go and so you know it's um and even then you it's a it's a very delayed insulin response when you're ketogenic and you've been KET enic long term because you're not you're not producing that but it would be interesting and so you know the thing is that you know if you're if your blood sugar does drop a little bit you still have ketones and you know they've done studies back before they had before they had an Ethics Committee on these sorts of studies and they got people's ketones nice and high and then they started dropping their blood sugar lower and lower and lower to the point that they normally you'd be in a coma and they were talking to them hey how you feeling yeah fine why what's wrong nothing nothing no just carry on and so you know there was um you know so there's that so you I mean your brain your body you run on ketones you know as as we saw by the you know the bik and and phiney study um even upwards of 90% V2 Max you're still your muscles are still burning fat you know so you know people say oh you have to have burn carbs your muscles only run on glycogen no that's not true yeah you have glycogen but the majority of it is is fat oxy ization and so um you over that 3-hour trial they actually were testing you know what fuel source they were using and it was really 90% um of fat oxidization the entire way it was very steady cross it was it was nearly exactly 90% U fat oxidization that they used as energy so uh while you do need uh glycogen for certain things which is why you have glycogen which is why you make glycogen it's uh it's not it's not the you know the prevailing energy source when you're in a ketogenic metabolism in a carbohydrate metabolism yes but not not the ketogenic metabolism and we even know this in in wolves I found a study from 1981 that looked at wolves and because this is height of you have to eat carbs to burn carbs there's there's no way around it and and you know the the premise of this study was like well you know wolves don't car blo before they chase Caribou for 10 hours so you know do they even have blood sugar do they have glycogen like well let's check and they found yes they do and it's rock solid you know it's very consistent no matter what they're doing they're loping around chasing down Caribou for 10 hours and or they're they're at rest or they're playing or they just before they eat just after they eat it's just here blood sugar just did not vary and glycogen was very consistent as well so it um uh you know so we at least know in them and you know now we know now um from volik and Finny that you know we get the same thing even when you're eating carbs you're actually not going to get a glycogen Advantage um not certainly not in recovery anyway and even prior to the exercise they had the same glycogen it wasn't like one had way higher muscle glycogen but they both had the same performance no they had the same muscle glycogen glycogen before after it was lower and then 3-hour recovery it recovered and they they all had sort of um nearly exactly the same muscle gly glycogen the other thing to remember is as athletes and you you probably know this but um for people that don't for let's say for a 65 kilo individual with maximal glycogen storage in their body um in their you know liver and their muscles so the max amount of glycogen that their their liver and muscles can store they can store about 2400 kilo calories of energy so that's certainly a good amount that'll last you for a long time but it's not going to get you through marathon it's not going to get you through an ultra certainly not going to get you around Mont Blanc but that same 65 kilo individual at 6% body fat so Elite body composition actually has over 35,000 kilo calories of energy available to him just in that 6% body fat right so when you raise your insulin you you sort of block that off and now you can't mobilize those fat stores until that insulin comes down so now you're once you once you do that you raise your insulin enough you really can't burn fat and now you you really have to go to carbs um unless you want to fight through the wall and maybe force yourself into a fat oxidization mode if that is indeed what's happening but it's it's much much more you know there's 15 times more energy available if you're just in a in a ketogenic State and so especially for for uh you know a high performance athlete who needs a lot of energy for their sport it's um you know it's it's a huge huge Advantage yeah do do you find that you I mean you're having your little gels and maybe you know a bit of something but I would imagine that your you know your your compatriots they're they're probably just sucking down all sorts of calories and just just gels and goo and food how what does that yeah oh as it's it's it's all aimed at carbs especially here in Thailand in Europe um they have a little bit more of a broader Bas of sort of um the macros they got protein and fat um because Europeans like to have their their um their fat and their protein as part of their their their meals here here in Thailand it's really carb carb orientated so uh yeah it was particularly interesting seeing them all here and a lot of Asian runners in the event here too from China Japan Korea and they seem very carb orientated as well so it it suited them but um yeah it um there was definitely a few people sort of heaving on the side of a trail Jenny was a little bit behind me and she said she saw a lot of um people vomiting and yeah marks where they had so obviously people having a lot of GI issues it's also very hot like it was 32 degrees in the day a little bit cooler at night but there wasn't a lot of relief there so the heat also takes a toll on people and I I reckon when it's really hot the sugary things are even harder to handle yeah especially if you're having sweet drinks you really want to be having water with electrolytes not syrupy drinks and some of the drinks they had on offer yeah gross well also you don't want to be digesting food you know you want to you want to be running you know you're you're you're trying to run you're trying to move your body has rested and digest fight and flight you have the parasympathetic and sympathetic sort of you know processes that come on uh accordingly and and you try to mix those two and you try to perform while you're going through a rest and digest like you how how would we expect to have the best performance that that we could have obviously it's going to I think it would it would definitely dampen your performance just in general but would also just make you feel rotten and you may not even finish the race like a thousand people didn't um how long was that was that um Ultra the one around mon Blan in distance 176 kilm been in time um it took me 39 hours and 40 minutes yeah wow it starts at 6:00 p.m. you run through the first night the next day and then the next night and then I finished about 10:00 in in the morning um I was lucky that the cut off time was uh 46 and a half hours so there's still people coming in almost seven hours later but the hard thing about that event is it's two nights running like one on the weekend here we started at 7 in the morning and I finished just after midnight so yeah one one one night's mocked up a bit but um I wasn't running all night and um your body can cope with that but two nights is really challenging yeah especially the second night you just uh you know you're pretty tired and your body clocks fighting against you and I find that's the hardest thing in the long events is this fighting the Cadian rhythms not not the nutrition yeah yeah no kidding um that's um that's a that's a that's a grueling run and not being able to sleep at all you just have to run 30 39 hours straight is do they even have lights you have like a head lamp or something like that oh yeah falling Cliffs and things like that Tech yeah well it's yeah unfortunately it does happen there's been people killed in these events oh gosh by falling off the yeah well I mean I would imagine I mean you're exhausted and it's pitch black and you know you're you're just you're not going to have this your footing yeah that's pretty that's pretty rugged well you think about okay so call it 40 hours and you were averaging 20 gram of carbs per hour I mean that's not even what what like a you know a small child would eat in a day you know it's 400 gram of carbs over the course of you know 40 hours you know and then you're doing this ultra marathon so that's not a lot of a lot of energy that's not even just going to take care of your basil metabolic rate let alone you know your performance you know which is sort of again you know sort of makes me a lot more confident that like it's that that's you know not what you're running on you're using way more energy than that and um and were you eating other things as well is it really just those those gels and and in then in France uh basically it was the gels the jellies not gels the actual gels you get in pouches I can't stand them I've had one of them in my life and that was enough these are homemade jelly quite a dense jelly and then uh watermelon one or two slices went available probably cheese um salami they do naturally fermented salamis which are really nice um oh and rice with clear broth on it occasionally when they've got the the hot meal sort of counters in the AG stations but they don't have them in everyone and then what I'd do is so every half an hour I'd have Mel's jelly but if I'm in an AG station near a half hour mark then that what I have in the a station will be my food and I won't have the jelly for the next half hour and then i' i' do a mental calculation on how much I've had to you sort of try and not go over the um in that in the UT I tried not to go over 40 grams per hour and here in Thailand it was 30 gram limit okay and then so with this sort of thing would would you take a bit of a break to go and get the a station get some water get some electrolytes and have a bite to eat or would you sort of like grab cups on the run and just keep going no you you stop reload but you try to keep the time down uh in the ultra Tri to mount Blanc event they gave me a statistic at the end of how long I'd spent in rest stations and it was 3 hours and 10 minutes which surprised me yeah right was a lot and yet I actually did a lot of them quicker than I have in previous year years doing other events there so yeah yeah I hate to imagine what the statistics were the previous years but yeah getting better but I need to improve a lot more so here in Thailand I was uh there's only one AE station where I sat on a chair and that was one where you get your drop bag and it had all the hot meals and things um that was a longer stop but other than that five minutes probably enough to sort of put the pack down get the water bottles out uh rearrange the food get the nutrition on for the next SE section and then go you know yeah well I mean just just right there now you know you can just cut off three hours by just you know skipping the aid stations and uh couple at least anyway yeah well that's great how long was that that um your your PB on the the marathon how what's your your fastest marathon at the moment uh well I've never run a raid Marathon so we're talking trial events um so it was about um 4 hours 50 I think yeah because of the vertical component okay never tried a raid Marathon yeah yeah few of these Trail events I might have a go one day but I'm not really a Road Runner where we live in Snowy Mountains 15 M from our front door we've got a a dirt single Track Trail so never really been tempted to run on the road too much yeah yeah well that's great yeah well obviously with that elevation and the ups and downs it's that's pretty brutal it's all it's very different than just you know running on a flat track or or road or anything like that very different conditions so yeah that's great that's good all right well M thank you so much for that that was great to hear it was really interesting to hear your your um experience with that and uh again absolutely congratulations on such a like amazing set of performances it sounds like you're just getting started and just starting to hit your stride now so looking forward to seeing a lot of uh you know big things from you so thank you very much for coming on thank you thanks for having us it's been good to Able be able to sort of uh put the story out there that endurance can go along with carnivore so two marry together quite well yeah absolutely got a lot more to learn along the the way so yeah and improving your health and and allowing people at any age to all of a sudden you go out and and and run a 100 miles around a mountain and uh and go up and down the other side of Everest in in elevation so that's amazing it's really really impressive um do do you have social media or any way that people can follow you and and uh see your pro your uh performance and progress uh I've started a Facebook group um for carnivore and low carb Ultra runners okay and um yeah that's that's got a um few people joining at the moment it's only very new but um that's basically going to be place where we can exchange information about that particular approach to ultr running you know doing carnivore and low carb minimize the carbs and um you know Tri tricks and tips in doing those long events what sort of you know can help you make the finish and because they have a high attrition rate and it's people sometimes travel Halfway Around the World to do these events so it's nice that somewhere where you can uh learn some of the nuances of it so hopefully when you have a go at it you'll stand a better chance of finishing it so yeah yeah well that's great well we'll put that up in the um in the description and people people can can go and check that out I think that's that's great to have an online community for people that are you know trying to do this and um uh yeah and so I'm sure there's a lot of people out there that you know are looking for something like this and um interested in checking that out so hopefully they can they can go and find you there Mick thank you so much it's been an absolute pleasure uh thank you again for taking the time thanks Anthony no problem thank you everyone for watching I really appreciate you taking the time to watch as well if you like this please do hit the like and leave a comment and let us know what you think and share this with someone you think that would benefit by it and if you haven't subscribed please do hit that Bell And subscribe as well because it lets uh lets me know I should keep putting out uh things like this so thank you all very much and we'll see you next time hey guys thank you very much for taking the time out to listen to what I had to say if you like it then please like And subscribe to my YouTube channel and podcast and if you're on YouTube then please hit that little bell and subscribe and that'll let you know anytime I have a new video out which should be every week if not more more and if you could share this with your friends that would help me get the word out and let me know that you like what I'm doing thanks again guys