Is High-Carb Fueling Breaking Ultra Runners?

speaker-0 (00:00)
Fundamental principles that came out in the white paper are health is the foundation of performance. you know, I don’t know why, but I always make the analogy here with, horse racing. And we always talk about, you know, flogging a dead horse. And for me, you know, your, your body is the horse and your mind is the whip. And, you know, if your mind is, you know, is choosing to turn, you know, to push your body to limits, to keep going harder, to, know, to.

pump fuel into it and so on. Your body suffers. And the way to think about, I think about nutrition, health and performance is that it’s actually always a trade off. And that as athletes, we do some things that challenge our body, that increase inflammation, that require recovery. And in the field of training, we’ve really got good at this. We’ve now got to a point where Olympic athletes are scheduling

rest into their training program. And 15 years ago, we didn’t do this. 15 years ago, rest was sort of criticized. Back in 2010, when I was rowing, were training 36 hours a week and we were absolutely thrashing our bodies. so training is a stress and we put a stress on our body and we’ve now learned, okay, we put stress on our body and then we recover.

And it’s this cycle of stress and recovery that leads to improvement. But I think, you know, we should expand that to health whereby, you know, doing an ultra marathon is a stress on our body. Um, you know, it puts an awful lot of stress on our health. You know, our guts will be in a worse state than when we started after an ultra marathon. And it’s kind of this constant equilibrium. Um, whereas if we were to kind of, you know, think about, you know, the health of our system,

And the reason the health of the system is important, why is a healthy athlete a high performance athlete? One of the ways to look at this is, let’s think about the digestive tract. So ⁓ first of all, when you eat some nutrition, it has to go into your mouth. So you have to want to eat it. You have to have the desire to chew it. You have to not have sweet fatigue and not be loathing, eating another sugary thing or whatever it might be. So it’s got to be eaten.

then it’s got to go into your stomach. And in your stomach, you’ve got to tolerate it. And if your stomach, if something arrives in your stomach that is very unusual or different or concentrated, your stomach moves to protect you and it kind of shuts down and it closes up. And so if you’re in a race and you smash 120 grams of sugar and you haven’t done that before, your body’s gonna shut down and it’s gonna say, whoa, what’s this poison you’re putting into me?

Okay, yeah, and that might result in, you know, your stomach cramping, it’s going to stop the reduced gastric emptying into your intestine. It might even result in vomiting at some point. You know, now you can overcome this by training your body. You can overcome this by training your stomach and making your stomach more resilient. But then the really interesting part for me is when it gets to the intestine. And in the intestine, you need to absorb all of the nutrients. If you have an unhealthy gut,

If you have, say, example, leaky gut syndrome, leaky gut syndrome is where the intestinal barrier has started to degrade inside your stomach as a result of many different factors, but has been strongly linked to the consumption of excessive amounts of sugar, consumption of ultra-processed not enough fibre consumption, a poor microbiome. But if you’ve got a leaky gut, your ability to absorb nutrients diminishes enormously.

And so, you know, when thinking about this, you know, equilibrium of health and performance, the gut is a really good example. Cause if you’ve got a healthy gut, then you can absorb nutrients more quickly. You can take the nutrition that you’re eating. You can absorb it more efficiently and get it into, into your metabolism, to your muscles where you need it. Whereas if you’ve got an unhealthy digestive system, it’s much harder for you to absorb those nutrients. Now, the trouble is we’ve got this balance because, okay, I want to eat loads of

loads of sugar because I’m racing and I’m competing. Okay. That’s going to do a bit of damage towards my, you know, towards my intestinal health, but you know, okay. So actually, if I eat well for a bit, it’s going to, it’s going to, you know, take the seesaw back a little bit and it’s going to make me more resilient. And so I think, you know, for me, the great way to think of an athlete is that you are, you’re constantly putting yourself in distress, but then you need to recover and you’re trying to find this equilibrium. And when I was, you know, when I was training and racing, the mindset I tried to adopt was

I’m trying to sit just under that threshold of burnout. Yes. Just under that threshold where I am doing the maximum amount of training and the maximum amount of rest where I’ve, you know, I’ve optimized that ratio so that I can sit right at that, that threshold of burnout. And I think that’s a great mindset, you know, that’s easy to adopt in terms of your fatigue and your training, but we can also take that mindset with health and, and your health and nutrition.

And I think that’s a really interesting mindset shift to make.

speaker-1 (05:26)
Now everything’s blending together. can’t remember if we talked about this before we hit record or after. ⁓ But you talked about when you’re working on electric cars, was, you had the closed system where it was, here’s what would be ideal. Like we, and we have mastered that. This is what you, this is what the car is ready until then you introduce it to the human and then the human sort of makes it inefficient and it kind of gets ruined. And some levels I’m looking at this and saying,

Okay, so if this whole food thing is what’s best for me, like on paper, I totally track with it. But in the ultra running world, we lose our minds and we just get hyper focused and it’s no longer about health or performance to some degree. It’s about some weird thing that gets in our head that we have to keep going. And so you throw everything out the window.

when you’re in that race and think I’ve been working on this for nine months, I’ve been dreaming about this for 10 years, and I’m finally doing this race that I’ve always wanted. I got into Western states or I’ve got into UTMB. You just throw every bit of it out the window. I guess partially what I’m curious about is across the research and the assembly of the paper.

you know how much damage to those one times of, know, where we haven’t adapted to it, we’re not ready for it and we still give ourselves 120 grams of carbs per hour for 28 hours. You see what I’m saying? Like what’s the damage of doing that in one time? And you know, you also see that we kind of, move out of health and performance in general because of the crazy mindset of the ultra runner.

Because you’ve got this clean system of like, okay, here’s the nutrition, here’s the stuff, and then all of a sudden, nothing. We don’t want to recycle our shoes or we’re not going to drive the car the way that it needs to be driven because we’re just irrational, ridiculous people. Anyway, curious your thoughts.

speaker-0 (07:22)
Yeah,

you know when I was racing Ironman, you know, I think one of my strengths was, you know, psychological strength and I was able to push myself so hard in Ironman. It took me about six weeks to recover. You know, I would feel weird for six weeks after an Ironman and you know, actually that’s not that’s not too unusual, but that was the level of

Impact, you know, let’s say let’s call it stress. think stress is a good word to use here But the level of stress I was putting on my body was enough that would take me six weeks to recover and you know, why do we do that and I am You know for me, it’s there. Why does type two fun exist? Yeah with with the three types of fun, you know, you’re type one, you know, this like joyous like everyday fun You’ve got type two where you suffer in the minute, you know suffer in the moment. It feels good afterwards Yeah, and for me, know a lot of sport falls into that type two fun

where, you know, okay, a lot of our training is type one, like going out for a long run with your mates in the hills, eating good food, like wow, that’s type one. Competition is 100 % type two. We are pushing ourselves to a place of misery in pursuit of something. And I think there’s many places to go. know, the thing that jumps into my mind is a lot of our education system. You know, we have an education system that’s based on numbers and grades and…

and being the highest performing you can be. And I think it’s very interesting actually when you see education systems which are not based on that. And again, I don’t want to go back to the science and the arts, but where you’ve got a structured numeric system where we’re trying to optimize our grade or our GPA or whatever it is, you’re always aiming for the top. Whereas actually, if you look at something like the forest school, other trends in learning and education that are coming out that are making education less competitive.

and then more about your understanding, your feeling, your comprehension. And I think it’s a little bit like that, where we’re fuelled by this desire to be the best, to optimise, to maximise our grades. from the age of four years old, that’s drilled into us. And we’re in a society, we celebrate the heroes, we celebrate the winners. We only hear about the gold medals.

You don’t often hear about the person who maybe competed the Ironman in 16 hours. Having said that, for me, whenever I stood at the finish line after finishing an Ironman, the bit that always made me cry was the 80-year-old who was finishing one minute before the cutoff deadline. And everyone’s going bananas. And that is not about…

performance that is about achievement that is about the meaning that is about overcoming all the challenges and the improbability of them finishing that race and so I think you know it’s where that’s where the emotion comes in yeah and you talk to athletes you know if you if you initially say yeah why yeah why are you doing your sport people might often come in and say like

got my objectives. I want to do a sub 20 minute 5k or I want to do a sub three hour marathon or whatever it might be. that, you know, the first answer will be quite a rational one. But then when you start asking, you know, but why do you do sports? Oh, cause you know, it’s an escape. Like, you know, it helps me decompress. It helps me de-stress. Okay. But why, why does it help you do that? Oh, it’s because, know, I enter into this state of flow and I escape all of those feelings that

you know, the world just disappears around me and I enter into this state of Flow is ⁓ completely untangible. Like how do you measure flow? You can’t really measure, you people have tried, you know, there’s some really interesting research into the flow state and so on. But you actually get to this element and particularly in high performance athletes, you know, a lot of athletes describe the flow state as being key to their performance.

God, how do you put a number on flow state? Right. You know, we can think about how we get to flow state. Maybe it’s through, you know, visioning exercises. Maybe it’s through through focus. Maybe it’s through meditation. Maybe it’s through, you know, whatever practices people used to get there. But actually, you know, one side, there’s this rational side to sport. I’m achieving things. I’m coming first. I’m getting the sub three hour marathon. But on the other side of sport, there’s this whole world of the irrational. Yes. And I think

I think that it’s you know, it’s a combination of those two things that makes it go and do these insane, stupid feats of endurance that we go after.

speaker-1 (12:15)
I think the banner headline of this interview for me is the engineering part. That really is it. I hear you coming out with, there’s facts and here’s the clean. And then all of a sudden you’re able to blend it almost effortlessly, almost frustratingly into, and this is where it falls apart. I see where you want it, it wouldn’t be great if this, but then there’s this chaotic system over here that just.

kills all of this order that we’ve come up with. And so then I’m curious as someone, I mean, as I’ve had Yanaa we don’t work together professionally. I think it’s delicious. think it tastes great. I haven’t put it to the test on a hard long run or anything like that, but as a product, it’s beautiful. It’s delicious.

Are you saying, so we got this big high carb craze, you want 80 to 120 carbs an hour in your long efforts and you can get that through various companies who, just about every nutrition company now has a high carb, an extra high carb version of what they do for the boom in ultra running and ultra char running. Hypothetically or in reality, what you’re doing with Yanaa.

And give a plug, like, tell us what it is. It’s 100 % whole food. Could an athlete use the 100 % whole food in this package to fuel a very hard, very long run?

speaker-0 (13:34)
Yeah. So first big thing to say upfront, Yanaa is not a replacement for high carb products. Yanaa is a compliment to add into, know, people might call it their fueling system. I like to think it as a toolbox or a quiver of nutrition that you can take with you. So Yanaa is, you know, it’s our first product. It’s kind of the first expression of what we wanted to do in creating this world of real food sports nutrition.

Um, you know, we call it in France here, we’ve called it gastronomy sportive because people do sport for, for pleasure. Now we’ll, you know, we’ll question that because we’re saying, maybe we’ll don’t do it for pleasure, but people do sport for pleasure and you know, food is about pleasure. yet, you know, suddenly when we’re doing sport, food kind of becomes about punishment. Yeah. Kind of like food becomes a medicine rather than the pleasure when we’re doing sport. So the pitch for Yanaa is that it’s our first product, hopefully in many.

They’re savoury purees. They are cooked in the south of France. They are made from a base of leguminos in French. So chickpeas, lentils, quinoa. And they’re then kind of seasoned with all sorts of different ingredients. So we use Camargue salt. We use extra virgin olive oil. And then we’ve got various flavours that get built on that base. So we’ve got pea and mint. We’ve got lemon zest and olive oil. We’ve got an olive flavour that’s really punchy.

We’ve got a curry flavor that’s totally unexpected, but a lot of people love it. And the role of that plays in your fueling system is that after two hours, three hours of maybe eating sweet stuff, you get flavor fatigue. You are craving something that you just want to eat. And Yanaa is there to meet that need of being the thing you mix into your fueling system. That means that you’ve always got a desire to eat and

that can balance out all of the other products you’re taking. And what we recommend with Yanaa is that you start taking it from the start of your effort. So take some as soon as you start. In an Ironman, as soon as I got on my bike, I’d be fueling straight away. And then try to eat as regularly as possible. And start with Yanaa, because it’s a mix. It’s got some carbs. It’s got some low GI carbs.

It’s got some fats, it’s got a little bit of protein, it’s got a of micronutrients in there. And so if you eat that at the start of your race, it’s going to give you a nice base to be fueling on. In terms of the functional role that Janna actually plays, all of the athletes that use it, there’s two things they describe. One is that it gives me a really stable energy. And the reason for that is that if you take a sugary product,

that gives you an energy spike. You know, get a blood sugar spike, you know, last somewhere between 15, 20 minutes. And that spike arrives and then disappears. And there’s two options for that. You can either, you know, can take that spike and then you can crash. You can have a bonk, whatever it might be. Or you can keep chaining that nutrition. So if you can keep consuming a sugary product every 10 to 15 minutes, you can chain that energy spike.

And you can have that, you you maintain a really high energy level and that’s fantastic. But there reaches a point where, you know, you might slip, you know, you might, you might get sweet fatigue. You might not be able to eat cause it’s a technical part of the course. You might, you know, whatever might happen. And Yanaa’s role is to kind of fill the gaps. So Yanaa can essentially provide a reset for your palate because you know, I’m sick of eating sweet stuff like, ⁓ thank God something savory. And you know, you’ve got all these wonderful tales of, you know,

in the UTMB you see people eating sushi. You see people like sat there eating a whole roast chicken. Because you’ve been out there for 10 hours and God you just crave some real delicious.

speaker-1 (17:39)
One of my best meals was someone on my crew read my mind, I didn’t even know I wanted it, and showed up with a whole roasted chicken at mile 55. was just, you’re exactly right. Like you don’t even realize, you’re so focused, mindlessly focused, irrationally focused on your goal that you lose sight of. Yeah, yeah, and so hey, know, maybe something savory would do you good, other than just a couple of chips at the aid station. So yes, to your point, a whole roasted chicken.

speaker-0 (17:58)
Being human.

Yeah, it’s great. And so and that’s it. You know science says consumer hundred and twenty grams of carbs per hour Science says you don’t need Yanaa mmm Yanaa is Yeah, yeah, that is you know, Yanaa is there for the real life. Yeah, Yanaa is there for when I can’t stomach another gel or I’m on a really technical section and I haven’t managed to eat some sugar for 15 minutes and you know, oh, you know Great. I’ve got some low GI carbs and some fat in my stomach. That’s giving me that you know a little bit of

speaker-1 (18:18)
So we’re back in art to some degree?

speaker-0 (18:37)
sustained energy and base that’s going keep me going. Oh, okay. So glycemic index. So this is one of the really common misunderstandings we come across is when people, the science talks about carbohydrates, carbohydrates have different forms. So you have simple carbohydrates and you have complex carbohydrates, simple carbohydrates, the things like sugars, they’re, generally refined. Um, they’re generally give you a very rapid response because

speaker-1 (18:39)
car.

speaker-0 (19:06)
The sugars aren’t inside any kind of a matrix, they’re not kind of wrapped up inside any kind of fibre or anything like that. So you take it, straight passes straight through your system into your intestine, you absorb the glucose or the fructose or whatever it is, you get, know, those molecules go straight into your bloodstream, straight to your metabolism, really fast acting. Generally, you know, 15, 20 minutes, you you get the energy into your system. Low glycemic index carbohydrates.

generally tend to be kind of more real foods, something like a sweet potato or something like that. It’s still got a similar number of carbohydrates, but they just generally tend to be in a more complex form. That might be because they are wrapped up in kind of a in the food matrix, they call it. So it might be because they are in the fiber. That would be if you’re an apple or something like that. Or it might be because they are in the form of a starch. So starch is still a carbohydrate.

but it requires enzymes to break it down first. So you get a starch, gets processed by something like amylase, an enzyme, it breaks it down into its constituent components. And that just takes a little bit of time. So when you eat a low GI, low glycemic index carbohydrate, just because it takes a bit of time, it just smooths out that energy peak. So rather than getting a big spike, you just get a slightly more gentle peak. And so that’s low glycemic.

index carbohydrate. And that’s not talked a lot about in sports. In sport, most people just talk say carbs and we of assume that means sugar.

speaker-1 (20:39)
So it’s a massive catch all. I think what most, so when I first started hearing about this high carb craze, I come from a food industry background, my wife, cookbook author, and so everything about food kinda came through her understanding and I think you two are fairly aligned in how you see food. So I never thought of carb, I wasn’t thinking of carbs as sugar. But now it just feels like in the world of ultra, and I’m no expert, but it just feels like those are interchangeable terms at this point. ⁓ And so that you have, like here’s most,

Most of the time it feels like they’re referring to the type of sugar that hits you fastest. So the carb that we’re having, and maybe help me clean this up a little bit, what I’m trying to say. They’re saying the carb that you are having, that you are gonna consume when you’re trying to hit your 80 to 120 per hour, is one that’s gonna spike quickly. It’s gonna wake you up right now compared to now, I know the term, low GI, the one that’s gonna give you a longer sustained, not gonna be as big, but a longer sustained,

making any sense.

speaker-0 (21:40)
Yeah. And I think you’ve captured a really interesting, um, common kind of misunderstanding. So the science says eat carbs. Yeah. Yeah. Actually doesn’t matter what kind of carbs, carbs are fuel. Your body uses carbs and you can take them in kind of whatever form you like any form, any shape. However, the challenge that we’ve seen is twofold. Um, first of all, whenever someone, whenever I say, what do you want from a sports nutrition?

people immediately say, I want to feel a boost. And okay, a boost comes from, you know, essentially an artificially high level of blood sugar. You’ve probably seen this in your kids. If your kids have a load of sugar, they probably go a bit hyper. And that’s essentially what’s happening. You know, if you take sugar, you get an artificially high level of, you know, blood glucose level. And you know, it makes you feel really good for a period of time. Afterwards, it might not feel so great.

But obviously, like I’ve said before, if you can chain that carbohydrate, then that can work really well. But in terms of the science, which just says ⁓ X grams of carbohydrate per hour, doesn’t matter what form that carbohydrate is in. The trouble is that what we’re now seeing is every single product packaging, puree, gel, gummy, whatever it is, it just says 30 grams of carbs.

I don’t know if people do this, but I suspect that’s a deliberate choice because if you were to say 30 grams of sugars or 30 grams of glucose or fructose, people would probably say like, wow, 30 grams of sugar? Like, yeah, that’s, know, that’s more than a Starbucks blimey. You know, so I think there’s a little bit of, you know, this being a little bit, you know, clever with the wording. Yes. But now what’s ended up happening is that everyone sees carbs and they assume that carbs equals gel, carbs equals sugar.

It’s not like carbs is a huge category of foods. Carbs also come from starches. That’s the study I was trying to reference before. Mashed potato, mashed potato and NGTL, same performance. Yeah, that was one of the studies that was done. So yeah, so there’s one side, the human aspect. People want to feel a boost, like I want to take something. And for me, when I was racing Ironman and I was cramping, you know, if I, you know, I used to have a salt lick and I’d lick the salt like,

Four minutes later, I’d stopped cramping and I was like, whoa, bam, product results. Like this, I’d pay, I’d have paid 500 euros for that salt stick. Cause like I knew that I got a problem, lick salt stick, problem solved. It’s a painkiller. And it’s so easy to know as a consumer, like we love painkillers. We love a medicine. We love, you know, I’ve got X problem. I can solve it with Y. And so, and so there that’s, that’s what we.

You know, that’s, think why we’re in this misunderstanding of sugars and carbs. But from an industry perspective, if I wanted to be a little bit critical, sugar is really cheap and sugar is really easy to preserve. one of the, one of the reasons why, you know, Yanaa took us three years to develop. One of the reasons why a lot of our packaged products are very, very high in sugar is that first of all, sugar is super cheap.

And second of all, sugar is an amazing tool for preservation. And one of the things in our food industry is that a short shelf life really affects your profitability. If your product only lasts for a few weeks or it has to be kept in a freezer or a fridge, it’s really hard to make money on it. If you can get a product that can sit on a shelf for 14 months, you can mass produce it, that is an easy way to make money.

And so what you’ve got in the food industry is, you know, we’re businesses, we need to make money. And actually you can make a product that meets all the marketing criteria, gives someone a boost. It contains all the concentrated products so you can make marketing claims. It’s really affordable to make because it’s just using super simple ingredients like, you know, like sugars that can come from anywhere. And, and then finally it’s got super, super long shelf life.

That’s like the recipe. That’s how, as a business, you can make money from food.

speaker-1 (25:58)
So you’re, I mean, you’re exactly right. Like if you want to, like.

This is probably like a global truth in life. You can either build something that’s marketable or you can build something that’s good. You know what I mean? I’m obviously exaggerating because some people have accomplished good stuff that’s in products and business, but it’s really hard. It’s really, really hard. So this is me backing up your point, but also saying, you know, Yanaa has real food in it, right? I mean, it’s real food. How have you accomplished shelf life?

speaker-0 (26:29)
Yeah, so we… everyone told us it was impossible.

speaker-1 (26:33)
told

you that if you’d have hired me as a consultant, even though I don’t know that industry, Blake, that sounds like you just put something in it and let’s preserve that.

speaker-0 (26:40)
Yeah.

So we ended up having to, you know, this we’re in here in a Nooks kitchen. And, um, you know, initially with the project, we went out to a load of food laboratories, food scientists who said, this is what we want to do. And they said, yeah, sure. We’ll add these preservatives. We’ll get the acidity to this level. We’ll reduce the active water content to that, you know, that point by removing sugar. You know, those are the tools of preservation. It’s like water level, acidity, and, um, know, the bacterial load in the product. That’s the, that’s how people do it.

Everyone said it was impossible. So we said, right. So we bought all the equipment here in a Nooks kitchen. We, you we bought everything here and we started testing them and we ended up finding that we could, if we used a baby food pouch and we cooked the product in the pouch. So a little bit like sous vide. Exactly. So, you know, we took a lot of inspiration from the, from the baby food industry. now the issue with baby food is that.

it tastes awful. And so we could very easily make something like baby food.

speaker-1 (27:43)
I talked about you you gave me some watches yesterday the way I talked to my kids into not eating it So I could save it all for myself was I told him hey guys it tastes like baby food in your life Thank you, so I got all three of them for myself

speaker-0 (27:54)
Excellent, So you cook it like baby food. So we cook it sous vide. The real development thing that took us a long time to develop was say, okay, how do we make this taste good? And how do we keep as much nutrition as possible? And that was what took us three years. And it was so many failed recipes. Because what we found was that certain foods behave differently. We tried making our lemon zest and olive oil flavor.

with real lemon juice, because we’re like, lemon juice will taste great. Tasted amazing. As soon as we cooked it in the pouch and left it for a few weeks, disappeared, tasted awful. Switched to apple cider vinegar, taste stayed, taste was amazing. So that was where the development came, was constantly trying to refine the nutritional profile and refine the flavor profile once it was kind of cooked and it was in the pouch. it’s, you know, going back to sustainability, that was a big trade off as well.

So we, you know, sustainable engineer, like one of the big problems with our products and all sports nutrition is packaging. You know, I love the campaign, don’t be a gel end. You know, keep going with that. But you know, food packaging is really hard. Our packaging that we’ve ended up on is an aluminium and polymer composite. It’s the same as what’s used in baby food. We did the analysis where we had a fully recyclable pouch that we could have used.

The trouble is that with the fully recyclable pouch, the food would have only lasted for two months. With the aluminium pouch, the food lasts for 14 months, maybe more. And we did the calculation and actually with our supply chain, with the supermarkets, with the sports shops, the amount of food wastage that would happen if we only had a two month shelf life meant that it completely outweighed the impact of the aluminium plastic sachet.

that can only be recycled in speciality recyclers that might get dropped on the trail. You know, it’s an imperfect solution. We’ve got some grant money to start looking at, you know, other solutions, reusable product, know, reusable packaging, edible packaging, and we’ve got some great concepts. Again, the issue comes down to the human in that reusable packaging, a lot of people have tried. Most people can’t be asked. Most people, you know, we’d love to like, yeah, I’d love to say we’re all perfect and we can be asked to, know,

refill our little pouch, people can’t be asked. But we’ve got some really great ideas and I think they might nail it, I think we might solve it, but packaging’s for a whole other podcast.

And realistically for Jana, we think our most viable business model in the long run is going to be making a cookbook and publishing recipes. That for me, from a fundamental principle of how do I make a sustainable business that has the biggest impact on athlete health and our environment, is for us to publish a cookbook, publish recipes, and to get people cooking at home. The book Feed Zone Portables, which I can recommend to anyone.

Feed Zone Portables. It’s a cookbook about how to cook your own nutrition for sport. That was my Bible. When I was an athlete, that was absolutely my Bible. I would be cooking my little frittatas the night before. I’d be making my rice balls. I’d be like, you know, making, they’ve got an amazing recipe that’s like, you know, little fried eggs with a bit of bacon on top and stuff like that. That was my Bible. And, you know,

The best thing in my perspective is to make your own food fresh with fresh ingredients and have the time and the money and the skills to be able to do that. Unfortunately, in our modern society, we’re often cash poor, we’re often time poor, we’re often skill poor. Most people feel really intimidated. If I were to say to you, hey, make some rice balls for your training tomorrow, most people would just be like, oh, no way, can’t, no.

But you know, I think, you for me, the long-term dream for Yanaa is to get everyone cooking their own recipes at home and helping people do that. Yanaa is kind of a gateway drug whereby we’re trying to say, ⁓ it’s an imperfect solution. You know, when we cook it, we lose some of the nutrients that, you know, we can’t get past that. Right. Where, you know, it’s in packaging that’s not recyclable and you know, that you might drop on the trail. Like that’s imperfect.

But you know, it’s a convenient solution that someone can go into a store, buy off a shelf, stick in their cupboard and take wherever they need them. And you know, for us, our athletes, you know, often what our athletes do is they’ll have a box at the office, they’ll have a box in the car and they’ll have a box in the cupboard at home because then they can always grab some healthy real food to take with them on a ride. Like, oh, I’m sneaking out at lunch, you know, in between calls. I’m going to go and do an hour on the bike.

you know, great, grab a pouch, take it, off I go. And that for me is, know, what we’re trying to do with Yanaa. We’re trying to make real food fuelling as practical and as easy and as delicious and socially acceptable as possible.

speaker-1 (33:05)
if someone has been, I don’t know the right word for it, hyper focused on optimizing their bodies so that they can go run 100 miles, that’s a lot of my audience.

Everything that we can we want to be ready on race day to do this thing. We’re not really ever considering how we know it’s not healthy You know past a certain point what we’re trying to do Physically, but mentally it’s incredibly satisfying back to the type two thing and you know just being incredibly proud of ourselves giving ourselves a mission and Having a vision for something really hard and never thought was possible But we get hyper focused on it then you know, say we’ve destroyed our our bio our gut, you know, and it’s

And you’re hearing this thing, like, you know, maybe I should do something better for myself. What’s a good first step for somebody who’s never contemplated the larger system within their body, anything like that? you think, hey, you know what? You might perform better if you didn’t just hyper focus on the stuff that you had been hyper focused on. If you introduced some Whole Foods, if you introduced this, like, what’s the best first step for somebody?

speaker-0 (34:14)
Okay, simple answer to this, I’d say, you know, adopt a food first diet. In the world of ⁓ professional athletes in sports science, you know, when I went to the Olympics, I volunteered at the Paris Olympics, for example, and I was very lucky and I got to get to all the athlete areas. I was at the Olympics for two weeks. I didn’t see a single athlete eating a synthetic product. ⁓ didn’t see a single athlete.

eating a protein shake, eating a bar, eating a gel. I was like, what is going on? And I managed to find some of the team nutritionists and they said to me, oh no, it’s food first. I was like, what’s food first? And they said, oh, it’s the scientific principle of sports nutrition that’s arrived now. And I was like, oh, good.

speaker-1 (35:01)
That’s not out there. You know what I mean? That’s not out there. Because even I was at the Kipron Athlete Camp this week with really great athletes, Matthew Blanchard and Blondie Lerondeau. And when I came back to my family, was like, you know, this is funny that you even said this. Like my observation was everything was real food. everything. was it was like such clean eating. There was no dessert. Like it was just everything was real food. And then we went out this little sailing thing. It was so cool. And then all of a sudden they brought up all this stuff and it was more just like

really difficult on probably on the chef to do this on this little tiny boat and it was all real food. That’s interesting that you say that. So food first.

speaker-0 (35:39)
Food first and you know, the pros know this. My co-founder, Anouk, she was a private chef for a top sports team. That’s because she was cooking the recipes because it’s this food first approach that’s so important. Even though there’s some wonderful stories of the Tour de France teams, all the Tour de France teams have got private chefs and the chefs adapt their recipes based on the type of event, what they’re doing tomorrow.

And it’s not, you know, they’re not adjusting the products they’re using. They’re changing from, you know, they’re adjusting how much olive oil they’re going to put into their, you know, the bolognese that they’re serving or whatever, because, you know, real food can adapt to meet, you know, whatever the needs of the athlete is going to be. But, know, the big principle is food first.

absolute golden rule for any athlete out there is make sure you are fueling sufficiently. Um, you know, whatever it is like.

If you can’t eat real, like if you, you can’t eat anything, you eat whatever you can to meet your energetic needs. Because the issue is if you don’t eat enough, ⁓ you start entering relative energy deficiency syndrome at surface level. That’s just a reduction in your performance and your ability to maximize your potential, ⁓ both in training and in racing, you’re not able to maximize your potential as much. talked earlier about, you know, being on the peak of that stress curve. If you, know, if you’re don’t have enough energy that.

stress curve is much lower. So eat enough food to maximize your potential. But if you keep not eating enough food, it progresses into really serious consequences. So it can progress into stress fractures. If you go really extreme, it can move into osteoporosis. It’s a very, very significant subject for female athletes because destruction of the menstrual cycle, even leading to infertility, can all come from relative energy deficiency syndrome. So.

really important to like totally think about that nuance.

really important to, to look at nutrient density, not just, you know, single, single values, but back to, know, what would be my big bit of guidance? Yeah. Yeah. I’m going to step away from nutrition here, but I think the biggest skill that we are

forgetting about as athletes is the ability to listen to our body and I was very lucky because I, you my athletic career started as a rower and in rowing you’ve got your hands full, you’ve got your feet full, you’re as, you know, you’re as a crew. You can’t have a watch, you can’t look at numbers, you can’t look at metrics and it is a sport that relies in, you know, incredibly, huge amount on feel. You have to listen to your body. You have to judge how hard you’re working out. You can’t look up.

and things like that. And I think that the ability to listen to our bodies is one of the greatest skills that we can start to develop as an athlete.

And particularly for people who are maybe starting out or an amateur, it’s so easy to come into ultra running and see all these rules and try and follow the rules. And in the process of following the rules, you completely forget to listen to yourself. so that for me is my biggest bit of advice that I could give.

speaker-1 (38:52)
Well, that’s a perfect way to end because it was consistent all the way through that there’s an objective thing that would be most useful for us to do or the right thing for us to do. And then there’s this reality where it hits a chaotic system, which is us as well. And we kind of navigate and feel our way through it. And sometimes to our detriment, but sometimes to our success. But in the end, you know, we’re all trying to go for something big out there. And I think it’s, it’s not only is it enjoyable to think about this stuff, but incredibly useful if we have these ambitious goals. Thanks for joining me.

Thanks for hosting me. This is awesome. So let’s do it again sometime.

speaker-0 (39:25)
It’s not often you get to discuss such interesting topics. That’s right. Thank you.