The Edge of Effort

VOM S2 E1 Alex Hutchinson Transcript

Steve: Truth does not offer you a path that is frictionless and smooth and free of blemishes. Truth be told, you are willing to lose everything to get closer to her, to have the courage to be demolished in her honor by opening up wider and wider to a staggering, awesome, complicated, heartbreaking, brilliant life. To bear witness to what is joyful and also to what is painful.
With the same curiosity, respect and love. Because we live in a world of darkness and light and they are equally our teachers. Welcome to voice of the mountains and the first episode of our second season. Today’s conversation cues up some new themes for this season, perhaps the most obvious being that we will be borrowing our guests’ perspective to examine the quixotic art of becoming, from the outside, looking in.
Our first guest has helped us all think more deeply about what drives us forward. He has lived a life that remained open to choosing the harder path. He has asked himself why our achievements do not resolve our inner restlessness. And he has discovered for himself that the finish line, more often than not, is the starting line for a new kind of journey.
I invite you into a new season, and I invite you to contemplate the tension that exists between mastery and exploration. To examine the paradox of effort, and to think about what it truly means to seek meaning and toil and struggle and reflection. Let’s begin.

Steve: [00:00:00] So Alex, thank you for being on the podcast. It’s really great to have you.

Alex: Thanks Steve. It’s awesome to be here.

Steve: So, you know, our listeners are gonna know you from your work at The New York Times, from Outside Magazine and of course your book Endure, which many uphill athletes are fans of and have shared with me personally. I heard you talking about how you felt like you had sort of reached a professional peak with Endure in, in another interview, and that you felt sort of restless and maybe not completely settled somehow with that. And how did that, how did that play out for you? How did that come up? How did you recognize that feeling and then where did that lead you?

Alex: Yeah, I mean, endure. You know, not to, you know, break my arm, patting myself on the back. But Endear was, was, uh, I was really proud of that book. And it was the culmination [00:01:00] of probably a decade’s worth of, of pretty focused reporting in one specific area. And, and, and it, it resonated like a lot of people read it, and I heard a lot of people say nice things.
And, you know, all in all, I guess what I’m saying is if, if I had written on a cocktail napkin in 2004, I guess it was when I decided to go to journalism school, if I, what, what would be amazing? What would fulfill your dreams in this career? Um, like endure, endure was pretty much it. I’d, I’d had a chance to spend.
Years covering a sport that I’m really passionate about running and to talk to scientists. And so talking to people that I found interesting and engaging in a conversation with a broad audience, not just with my buddies in the long run. So, you know, all the different, and, and it, and it sold a lot of copies too.
So all, all the different sorts of modes of external gratification were being [00:02:00] scratched for me. And I shouldn’t have been surprised, but because you kind of think, oh, well then life will be complete and, and I’ll just settle back on the sofa and there’ll be nothing more I want. But if there’s one thing I should have learned from running, it’s that, um, achieving one goal gives birth to the next goal.
And in running it’s very obvious what the next goal is. If you, if you run a certain time, you wanna run faster than that time. Uh, in journalism it’s less clear. And so I, in the, so in Deer came out in 2018. And I sort of was busy with the end of that year, but by 2019 I was sort of, I realized that I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do next, but I had the feeling that it wasn’t just kind of doubling down, it wasn’t writing end to end two.
And I was really, act, actually a little bit struggling to figure out what it was I wanted to do or, or what would make me happy or, or fulfilled or, or, and so on.

Steve: I can imagine there was a lot of, uh, external pressure [00:03:00] from probably publishers and, and others who were like, Hey, here’s, it’s all teed up for you. Do endure. Two, it’ll be easy. It’s gonna be popular. There’s more to say on the topic, you know, you could probably write an outline in your head in 30 minutes or less, uh, you know, but you didn’t do that.
How did that, how did that play out?

Alex: Yeah, I mean, and I would say as, as much as there’s perceived external pressure, a lot of it was also internal pressure. Like I, you know, I’m a strategic guy. I like making a living. And so I, I was aware of the, the realities of the situation and, and, um, really, I, I’m, I’m also, I, I would say, if you look back over the course of my life, I’ve been pretty good at following the prescribed path, um, at, well, if, if you, if you.
Good at science in high school, you go do a science [00:04:00] degree in university, and if you’re good at physics and university, you go do a PhD and sort of following quote unquote the next logical step. And there’ve been a few times where I’ve deviated from that. And the biggest one was, I was a physics researcher in my late twenties when I was like, actually, and, and you know, the next step is to start looking for a, a professorship or whatever.
And I thought, actually, this isn’t what I wanna do. I wanna be a journalist. And so I, I’d taken that big leap at that point. That would’ve been 2004 when I was 28. And so this felt like another one of those moments where the, the, the science, the, the, the, the ruminations or the, the, the, the, the signs in my head were that actually Alex, this is a time not to just keep doing the one thing that’s expected.
And, and I guess one, one thing I’ll say is, uh, I had role models in this. And on the one hand, you know. Within my family. My dad was an engineer, an oil field engineer [00:05:00] until he was 28. And then he went back and decided to, to go to theological college at that point. And my older brother was doing a PhD in math until he was 28.
And then he decided he actually wanted to be an archivist and he went to library school. So I’ve, I’ve seen people take these, uh, left turns and even within my own, with my own field, you know, someone who I really, really look up to is, is David Epstein, who had written the Sports Gene in 2013, which really set him up to be the, the sort of sports science guy. He was at Sports Illustrated at the time. And it was a sports genre fantastically, it was a fantastic book and fantastically successful. And he left Sports Illustrated and went to ProPublica to do investigative environmental reporting. And then he ended up writing a very different book called Range.
And so I had, I had conversations with David about, about his thinking and, and, but he really, um, his example sort of helped me to believe that okay, you know, you don’t, you don’t have to [00:06:00] do what’s most lucrative or, um, will be most, you know, materially obvious you could do other things. And, and it’s, it’s not totally irrational to think about, uh, what would be fulfilling.

Steve: So you have, you know, these, these role models, let’s say. And I mean, Epstein’s an amazing writer. I love both of his books for different reasons, but just like, I love both of your books for different reasons or in different topics, but what, what do you think having written this book about exploration, what do you think is fueling this kind of urge to take left turns as you put it?
What, where does that come from? Where does it, where does that, you know, and, and I mean you wrote a, a, a lot about this in, in the book, but I’m, I’m very curious because it seems to have affected you very personally and what the intersection between your personal journey with this and what you observed in the scientific literature and talking to all these [00:07:00] experts in penning, uh, you know, many chapters, where was that intersection and how do you, or is it, or did, did it feel, were they divorced these two areas for you?

Alex: No, they were, it was, there was very much a sort of meta kind of. Chasing the tail of, of the dragon, uh, el element where I started writing the book to find out why I wanted to write the book. Once I got into the book, it became its own topic, and, and in a sense that, that sort of faded away.
I, I knew like, this is the book I wanted to write, and so there was no longer this, like, I could almost no longer even remember why I was confused about what I wanted to write. Like, this is perfect for me. But starting out I was like, I know I wanna write something different, but I don’t really know why and, and, and how this connects to all the other times in my life where I’ve felt like I wanted to, I was, didn’t want just stick with the same old that I was attracted to novelty almost for the sake of novelty.
And so, yeah, there’s definitely this element where I was writing, [00:08:00] trying to write, and, and in fact in the initial draft of the book that in the introduction, I, I have a sort of. I had a very long section where I was sort of like a hamlet kind of izing about. Do I dare to write another book about, you know, endurance?
What should I do, you know, to write or not to write? And my editor was like, look, I, I get it, I get it. You can put a paragraph in there, but no one wants to start a book, open a book, and be like, I don’t know what I wanna write a book about. Like, you wanna feel like the author knows, knows what he’s talking about.
So anyway, all of which is to say it, it was very personal. And, and in terms of the answer, in terms of like where this urge to do something different comes from, I, you know, there was no like, simple pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. There was like, oh, now I understand everything about me, my inner workings and, and life is simple.
But I did come away with it, with the feeling that, um, you know, as, as I argue in the book, that that in a very fundamental deep way we’re we’re wired to, to want to pursue the unknown. That we’re not, we’re not wired to sort of get to the [00:09:00] destination and. Um, and be like, all right, we’re here now. I’m gonna do, we’re, we’re, we’re always looking for the next thing in ways that can be very productive or sometimes unproductive.
If it becomes a, if you, if you sort of lose the ability to ever enjoy, you know, getting to your summit or whatever the case may be. But, um, yeah, I think, I think it’s a deep thing that we all experience in different ways and in different contexts, but it is there for the deep, deep evolutionary reasons.
Steve: You talked about this idea of the explore exploit dilemma. Can you explain what that is for the listeners that are, haven’t read your book yet?

Alex: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, when I started digging into this, the literature about exploration, this is the concept that probably dominates the way scientists have. Like, there’s, there’s different ways of thinking about exploration and there’s sort of philosophical ways and, and, uh, personal development ways and there’s science or business ways.
And so scientists. We’ll, [00:10:00] we’ll think, we’ll, we’ll try to put people in situations where you have to choose between exploring something new or exploiting the knowledge you already have. Um, and, and once you start to think about decisions this way, you realize that these decisions are everywhere in our lives.
And one, one of the classic illustrations is you go to a restaurant that you’ve been to before, you know, do you order the hamburger that you know is. It was good. You had it last time, it’s fine. Or do you try, you know, the special, which you have no idea. Maybe it’s gonna be better. Like it’s special, right?
Like maybe it’s the best meal they can make. On the other hand, maybe it’s special because it’s, you know, the fish left over from two days ago that they need to get rid of and it’s gonna be terrible. So, and, and you have no way of knowing until you order it. And of course there’s all sorts of layers of, uh, hope and regret.
Like you, you order the special, you, the someone else at the table orders the burger and then you get the special and you’re, and you know, you’re eating the fish and you’re like, oh man, I could have had the burger. Look how good it is, oh, it’s so juicy. So we, you [00:11:00] know, we agonize at least, I dunno, I, I don’t think I’m alone in saying we agonize about these, about these decisions.
And not just about which one should we take, but why am I doing this? What does it say about me that I always order the burger or, or so, but, so that’s on the micro level, you can zoom out and it’s like career decisions, relationship decisions, uh, do you explore for, uh, a better. Boyfriend or girlfriend, or do you not exploit has is a word that has some bad connotations, but in this case, do, do you stick with what you know if you’re a company is, is it r and d versus research?
If you’re a society, what do you value? So we’re always facing these decisions and they, and the crucial point about the exploring option is that you don’t know how it’s gonna turn out.

Steve: Mm-hmm. Particularly when you, when you zoom out. Of the restaurant example, you start talking about, you know, society. But I’m specifically thinking about the athletes that I work with on a daily basis where they’re [00:12:00] juggling like, Hmm, I don’t know which trip I should do this year. I don’t know which races I should run.
Uh, those types of decisions and all these factors go into who else is gonna be there, how competitive will the field be? Am I going to get, you know, points for the, for the finals that I wanna enter? Like all these factors, right? And at a certain point, like it, it often comes down to values. Like, I value the points because I really wanna go to the DNB world finals, so the points are super important, so I’m gonna choose to go to canyons instead of something else that weekend.
So how does that manifest though, in terms of how scientists. Think about these things when values are something that are very human, very subjective among individuals. Is there, you know, it’s, that’s, I’m, I’m dying to hear your answer about this.

Alex: [00:13:00] Yeah. Yeah. So in the lab, when they, when scientists are studying, explore exploitative decisions, they’ll try and strip it of all these, all this context, right? So the, the, they’ll, they’ll try and, and, and the way they end up studying it is what’s with, in, in many cases it’s with what’s called a multi-armed bandit.
Uh, game where it’s basically, it becomes a gambling game. You go in and there’s a bunch of slot machines, which are one arm bandits, and, and you don’t, you know, some, you don’t know what the payoff or probability for each of these machines are. So you have to kind of explore the different machines and then find which one you think is best and exploit that with your money.
And, okay, there’s an inherent value there, which is that money is good or whatever that you wanna do, or, or, competition is good, whatever you wanna do as well as you can in this game. But it, it, it, it’s this ultra simplified, you’re just playing the odds of what you think is gonna, um, gonna pay off. And so I had this discussion with a magazine editor a few months ago where I was [00:14:00] trying to explain the explore exploit dilemma.
And, you know, using the example of a career decision, like, oh, well what if, because with, with these, by studying, uh, the math of these slot machine games, you can come up with various rules about how you should approach these, or not rules, but guidelines. Oh, you know, you should, you should be optimistic in the face of uncertainty, you should ch choose a path that has.A choose an option that has a route to your best possible outcome, even if it’s low probability, because then you’ll be less likely to regret the choice than if you choose some, you know, if you choose a job that is more stable, but it, but more of a dead end not gonna lead you anyway, so you can go down that path.
But what the editor said to me is like, hang on, this is like, you’re telling people to make this decision based on whether it has a route to their best possible scenario. But we don’t know whether this person, you know, maybe they’re trying to support their, their, they have to support their extended family right now and maybe that, you know, blah, blah, blah.
You know, there’s all these [00:15:00] contextual real life things. And it sort of was a good wake up call for me. It’s like, yes, yes. We can’t make decisions purely on the basis of, um, attraction to the unknown or, or optimism in the face of uncertainty. It has to be embedded in all the other factors that we decide.
And some of those are, are, are, like this editor was pointing out. By if, by exploring, if by taking the explorer option you’re gonna risk not being able to eat tomorrow, then that’s a bad decision independent of your, you know, whatever you’re, you’re itching for. But, but on a more subtle level than just, um, like, can you eat tomorrow?
Like things like values, like you’re talking about the, the, the explorer option, uh, may lead you somewhere. That is it, it’s an itch that you feel, but it’s gonna lead you somewhere that’s not consistent with what you, the way you wanna live your life. And so I [00:16:00] guess the, the, so the short answer to your question is these sorts of explore, exploit, the explore exploit framing of the question is just one dimension in your decision matrix.
And, and, and there have, there have to be others. And sometimes those others have to be more important. And so even going back to my post endured, like what do I want to do? I was in an extraordinary privileged, extraordinarily privileged position that Endear had done well enough that I, I, I didn’t have to just sort of say, let’s do whatever it takes to make sure I can, I can, you know, pay my rent next year or next, or, or next month, or, or whatever the case may be.
So, and I look, so I, I, I started out as a freelance journal in, in 2006, and if you just say, and you, you look at what I used to write about and I, I wrote about jazz, I wrote about philosophy, I wrote about accounting. I went to accounting conferences and wrote for accounting magazines. And on one hand it’s like, wow, that was really [00:17:00] exploratory.
That was awesome. Like, I was pursuing all these different interests, preexisting interests like music and, and sports, but also things that I’d never even thought about. I hadn’t studied philosophy, but I went to a philosophy class, you know, I did stories on a, on a philosophy professor, I, I didn’t. Have any interest in accounting.
But actually that kind of got, so it’s like, that was really exploratory. But if you look back to what was my actual decision matrix, then it was like, I’m a freelance journalist. I need to pay my rent. I will take any assignment I can get, I will leverage any connection I can get. So it’s, you know, it, it would be reinterpreting history to say I was exploring at

Steve: Sure, sure. Yeah. And so that was where I was gonna ask what I was gonna ask you next is, if you look back at these big decisions, do you see them as acts of, of courage or just a necessary course correction that you needed to do?

Alex: There’s a mix. I, I would say so, I mean, I would say the decision to write the Explorers Gene was, you know, and, uh, almost an overly [00:18:00] conscious decision of like, let’s, let’s take a chance. Let’s be exploratory. Let’s, let’s lead down a path where I, like when I started writing the Explorers Gene, I didn’t know.
I didn’t know the science of I wasn’t immersed in the science of this area, so I didn’t even know how much science there was. And so that, that actually made it a very hard book to write because I, you know, two years in I’d be like, holy crap. There’s the whole branch of research that I’d never come across.
How did I miss this? Oh my God. Like, gotta, you know, so I was, I was over a year late on this book Now, you know, the decision when I left physics, for example, and decided to go to journalism school, I can tell that story in like five different ways, uh, in terms of what were the key moments where it crystallized in my mind, you know?
And it’s very hard to get back into my head at that point. Like, sometimes I’d be like, oh yeah, I had, I’d never even thought about journalism. And then I’ll be like, oh, wait, but I volunteered for like a month at a student newspaper when I was in grad school, so I must have been [00:19:00] interested in it then.
So I don’t think I would’ve explicitly framed it as I need to explore at that point, or I, I’m, it’s the call of the unknown. I think that played a role. I think, I think I was just like the, the trajectory in scientific careers is, you know, you start out, you know, in high school you’re taking nine different science courses or whatever, and at the beginning of university, you’re taking still a bro, you know, you’re taking biology and chemistry and physics and math and, you know, calculus and algebra and you just, you start to get narrower and narrower.
And then, you know, you go through your PhD and you’re getting quite narrow. And then I was doing my postdoc and the trajectory is you’re eventually like the world expert on, on almost nothing. Right? Like you’re in this super narrow area. Um, and I think I was feeling the constraints and I mean, brilliant scientists, um.
Can, uh, break out of those shackles, right? They can jump across disciplines and they can, they’re, they’re creative. I, [00:20:00] I was, I was a scientist who was maybe not gonna be able to do that, and I could feel the walls closing in. And I think part of why I left was I wanted, uh, a broader palette to play in.
But, but yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s hard to, it’s hard to rewind the tape and know exactly what was going on in my mind.

Steve: And I didn’t go down that path personally, but I have very close friends who did go down the academic path in different branches of science. Uh, especially knowing them through our twenties and thirties when they were. Working really hard. It was extremely competitive. The chairs that they were aiming for at the end, that they could then, you know, continue to do the research they wanted to do.
I mean, there was a very narrow path to that outcome. So I, I many times thought to myself during those decades, like, wow, I’m, I’m glad, I’m glad I didn’t go down that way because I wouldn’t have made it [00:21:00] that far. And some of them are professors at universities and some of them hold chairs now, and some of them are, one of them, uh, went and opened a, uh. Specialty audio retail shop, you know, so, you know, that’s, there’s, there’s a, a, a wide variety of, of, of outcomes there. So I can, uh, totally understand how, how that would feel those walls could feel, uh, closing in. And I also, under hearing that, you know, and having read you for years and years, you know, you are a, a journalist and, and just perhaps I’m mixing the real Alex with the journalist Alex, you are a, uh, science guy.
Like, you get into the details of what the paper says and how the study was done, and you know, what studies it’s referenced, where you know, where it’s published, who reviewed it. All these things are important in your mind. And, you know, that obviously is partially, I [00:22:00] must, I, I would think has to be somewhat formed from, you know, your science education you underwent.

Alex: Yeah. And, and it is like, I, I Thank you. Thank you for that. That’s nice. And, for sure. And so I, if, if I were to be given a time machine and it’s like, do you wish you’d started journalism when you were 21 instead of 28 or 30 or what? You know, by the time I finished journalism school, um, no. And part of, you know, for a couple reasons.
One is that I had fun, did my PhD in doing some research. That was pretty cool to be exposed to that world. Um, but also it, it, I’m a totally different journalist than I would’ve been had I gone to journalism school at, at 17 or 18 instead of at 28. Now that’s fine. Like some people know they wanna be journalists and I, or they, some people wanna know, they wanna be whatever they want to be at a young age, and that’s great.
I didn’t, and, but I, I definitely don’t view those years I spent in my [00:23:00] twenties. Um, as a waste because, uh, you know, and, and you, you can, I can, I can say cliches like the, the, the journey was more important than the destination. And I, and I think those cliches are true. That’s why they’re cliches, that I enjoyed the journey, but also the destination is different as a result.
And, and I think I’m a, a, a different and hopefully a better journalist than I would’ve been if, even if I’d been studying journalism for those years.

Steve: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, I think this is part of the exploration of Voice of the Mountains is trying to understand why we do the things that we do and why we are so passionate about them. And it brings together a lot of the points that you bring up in your book. And we’ve even touched on so far where you know, it’s.
There’s an exploration component. It’s like understanding who I am. You also talk about an idea called the, uh, effort paradox, which I think [00:24:00] applies here because to me it’s very much a part of doing the hard thing is to become someone because you did the hard thing. You, you, you, you are a different journalist because you had this rigorous hard science education.
You wouldn’t see the world the way you do if you hadn’t done that. You can’t separate that anymore. And that’s part of what makes you a great journalist. And so, uh, how do you talk, how do you think also as a runner, you know, as a lifelong runner yourself, how do you think about this? Paradox and how it connects into ideas like whether it’s, you know, a decision related to which run to do next, or a decision to, uh, what to explore next, uh, academically or, or cognitively.

Alex: Yeah. So I, I I, this idea of an effort paradox is something that really [00:25:00] spoke to me. And, and so basically what, just to state it clearly, I, I, I think the most distinct way of stating it is that we sometimes enjoy things not in spite of the fact that they’re difficult, but because they’re difficult or not just enjoyable.
Sometimes we value things, um, precisely because they’re hard. And so to zoom out a bit and back to, you know, the, the, the beginning of your, your question about, um, like understanding our motivations and the, the different motivations, the first thing I’ll say is that I’m suspicious of anyone who thinks they know, who, who, who’s confident that they know why they do the things they do.
That, at least, you know, I can only, I can only generalize from my own personal experiences, but I find it very difficult, um, to be sure that I know why I’m doing what I’m doing. I know what I, I, I kind of, with enough introspection, I know what it is I wanna do. Whether it’s to leave journalism or, you know, write a book about exploring, why do I wanna do it?
That’s, that’s harder. And there’s, I can always, as I said, I can tell the story in different [00:26:00] ways. And I think we, I think in general, are multi motivated. Like we’re, we’re, we, we have different motivations that come together, but this idea of doing the hard thing, I mean, one thing I’ll say is how did I end up in physics?
Like me, coming outta high school, I liked a lot of things. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was, I was really torn. And I think probably the most influential piece of advice I’ve got, and it was from some friends of my parents just saying, I. If you don’t know what you’re gonna do, make sure you do something hard because you can move from something hard to, excuse me, to, to something that’s a little easier.
But you can’t move up the gradient. It’s, it’s much harder to, like, if I studied English literature, which I would’ve loved I 28, I couldn’t have said, nah, maybe I’ll be a physicist. Maybe I’ll catch up in 10 years. That, that it, it doesn’t go that way. So I, in a sense, did physics ’cause it was the hardest thing I could think of.
Um, and, and that, and that was in keeping with who I was as [00:27:00] a, as a runner. The, you know, like the, you know, the slogan on the backs of the t-shirt as my sport, as your sports punishment. Like, we’re, we’re doing the thing that’s hard. Um, and I, you know, when I think about this, I, you go back to George Mallory, like, why are you climbing Everest?
Because it’s there and it’s like, you know, the classically I. I, you know, we remember that not because it’s a good answer, but because it’s a bad answer. It doesn’t tell you anything. But it speaks to the fact that, as I was saying before, we don’t always know why we’re doing what we’re doing. And so I think the effort paradox was the first time a kind of light went off in my head like, oh, yeah, that’s, that makes sense.
A lot of my decisions are based around this idea that things that are difficult feel, meaningful, feel, they, they, they, it feels like you have a purpose when you’re, when you’re undertaking this hard thing, whether it’s climbing upwards or, you know, veering off to the ride in your career. And so I, I think it’s a pretty good unifying theory, and I think it’s also not a bad kind of organizing [00:28:00] principle for decision making.

Steve: Yeah, I mean it really resonated with me because to me it sort of. Explained all of climbing into words. Because if you think about climbing, and, and I know you’ve, you’ve taken up rock climbing as a, as a hobby according to

Alex: a very low level.

Steve: Well, yeah, but we climbers have essentially created imaginary systems of numbers that are just systems of numbers that we just pulled out of a hat to rank which climb is harder than the other climb, and which climb we value the most, the one that’s the most difficult. And how is that judged? Well, just like how many people can do it if and how hard they think it is compared to other things that they’ve done. It’s all completely subjective. And you know, if you go into Alpinism, like my kind of niche part of that sport, [00:29:00] you know. We were never interested in climbing Everest because that was super easy.
I’ve done it lots of times. We were interested only in doing the really hard, like what’s the, what’s the biggest unclimbed wall in the world that we can find? Let’s go do that. Like nobody let’s what has nobody done before? And then even better what people have been trying to do for 20, 30, 40 years and not been able to do.
You know? That’s the more effort has gone into trying to do it and failing. Then the bigger the prize is when finally somebody pulls it off and all the stars align. And for me, that effort paradox idea just immediately explained all of this.
Alex: Well, I mean, I think there is the, the sort of paradigmatic expression of what is the effort paradox. The effort paradox is that people climb mountains by deliberately taking the hard route, a harder route up. It’s like, so, you know, [00:30:00] you can get all mushy in terms of motivation, in terms of like, well you wanna get to the top ’cause it’s so beautiful up there.
Or ’cause you, you know, ’cause you want the satisfaction of making it to the top. You know, the whole point of, of, or the, the, the whole existence of Alpinism is like, it doesn’t matter. It’s not about who got to the top. How did you get there? What route did you take? And Oh, it’s not, oh, you were so clever.
You found an easier route to make it to the top. It’s no, oh, you were so great. You found a ridiculously hard route. Let’s, you know, it’s like the, and so there’s this definition of, of games, uh, or of playing games from a philosopher named Bernard Suits, that it’s the, the voluntary acceptance of, or the, the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.
I mean, that is a description of climbing mountains. And we all know intuitively that if there’s an escalator on the backside of the mountain, or more realistically if there’s a gondola on the other side of the west side for a certain type of person, in a certain context, you’re not [00:31:00] interested in the gondola.
The point is not to, to be at the top. So yeah, the effort paradox is, I mean, mountain climbing is the example of the paradox and the sort of. The existence of mountain climbing is what tells us that we’re not like rational economic beings just trying to max, you know, get the best view or get, or like that.
There’s something about the effort that calls to us.

Steve: And I would argue that the whole trail running category of running would fit into this too. And I’ve had this discussion with my fellow coaches and athletes where, you know, you have, I. trying to decide, okay, I, you know, I want to go, I don’t know, to a certain location to do a certain race because I’ve never been there before, for example.
Those are valid reasons. And then you also have people who are like, well, I just wanna go do this FKT, because, you know, fill in the blank, whatever the reason is. But all of those things are ultimately decisions be, you know, be, that are [00:32:00] prioritizing, you know, this, this magical point between what they, what they say I can do and what I think I can do that’s a little bit more than what people say I can do.
And it’s not impossible, uh, or at least I don’t think it’s impossible, but it’s, it’s going to change. How I’m, how I show up in the world because all of a sudden I’m the person that can run a two 30 marathon instead of a person that can run a, I don’t know, three 30 marathon. Like those are very common in the running world.

Alex: Or two 30 versus 2 31. You know,

Steve: Yeah, yeah. It’s a huge difference, right?

Alex: Some context.

Steve: Yeah, absolutely. And so though it within those, those social groups, that, that becomes very, very important. So.
Alex: Yeah, and, and, and, and the, I mean what you, this zone you’re talking about just, you know, on the border of what you’re capable of, that is, that is the magic zone. And you know, when, when people talk [00:33:00] about flow states and stuff, that’s one of the preconditions. It’s like you need to be trying to do something that is hard.
But you know, in theory, ACH is achievable. And so, you know, when I think about why people run, we have all these explanations about the runner’s height and, you know, mental clarity and stuff. And, and there are definitely, I think that’s part of it. And there are people whose primary experience of running is just to get out and clear their heads.
But for people who get deeper into it, I think there is. It’s not just about going out and running. You have to find some challenge for yourself that you’re not sure you can do. That that’s what really becomes, uh, addictive isn’t the word I’m looking for here, but compelling. And it’s, it’s like we don’t, it’s not exciting to do something you know, you can do, and that’s just, you know, you, my version of you, you not climbing Everest is me.
Like, can you run a marathon, Alex? It’s like, that was not interesting to me. Like, [00:34:00] I, I could, I ran close to a marathon in training for a one mile race. I knew I could run a marathon and I did eventually run one once for a, for a magazine story, but I wanted a challenge that I wasn’t sure I could do. And, but, but, but one that was possible.
Not, not, you know, my, my goal was not to, you know, run a two minute mile or set a world record. Neither of those things were possible to me. But one of the nice things about running and about any good hobby is you can find. It’s. It’s infinitely scalable. You, you know, like I said, between two 30 and 2:31 for a marathon or whatever, youcan set the challenge at just the level that will, that will keep you interested.
And setting that challenge appropriately is, I think a skill that helps differentiate who ends up sticking with these activities over the long haul. But they continue to find ways that are, uh, or challenges that are, uh, attainable but not easy. I.[00:35:00]

Steve: You’ve, you’ve talked elsewhere and written elsewhere about consistency being one of the primary predictors and keys to performance and. With explorers or these, these people, you know, I’ll throw myself firmly in that basket of people that always have to kinda look around the other corner or ski down into the next valley or climb that next mountain over there that they see, you know?
How does that kind of explorer drive and the need for new challenges balance with the need for consistency to become good enough? You know, again, relative to your goals to master something difficult like running. Like running, people think it’s super easy. Of course biomechanically, maybe it’s to do it at least average, it’s not that hard, but to do running well is extremely difficult.[00:36:00]

Alex: There’s a tension. Yeah, for sure. There’s, there’s, there’s a tension between those things. And, and you can, you can think of that tension in, in the context of, of, uh, maybe this is a bit of a, a stretch, but, but in the context of things like a DHD. So one of the things I read about in the book is, you know, there’s a, and I won’t go, you know, too deep down this rabbit hole, but there’s a gene related to a dopamine receptor that is linked to, um, heightened exploratory behavior in, in people historically and in the present.
And that gene is also linked to a DHD. And so you can see traits that were really adaptive for hunter gatherers. That may, that leads to greater success as a hunter gatherer. All the desire to always find out what’s over the next hill, whether there’s something better to eat or somewhere better to live.
That was really helpful. And it’s maybe not adaptive in grade 11 when you’re supposed to sit still all day and, and listen to the teacher. Um, and so [00:37:00] what, you know, the, the, the need to explore, it’s not inherently good or bad, but it, but it’s context specific. And so if you want to be great at running or at, you know, most other things, there comes a time when you have to knuckle down and just do it.
And I think, you know, this is obviously a complex topic, but what I would say is, one of the interesting insights that comes out of, um, both the, the math of exploration, but also. The, the, the analysis of people’s career trajectories and, and how, you know, how great science happens is that the optimal is to have periods of exploration followed by periods of exploitation.
So if you wanna know, um, what, when an artist is gonna paint some their greatest works, or when a scientist is going to produce their greatest, uh, experiments, if they’re, if they’re in a period that’s purely exploratory, they’re doing something different every week or every month or every year, [00:38:00] that that’s useful, but they’re not, they’re not likely to, that’s not when they’re gonna do their best work in their career.
And similarly, if they’re just kind of exploiting, if they’re just doing the same thing over and over again, they’re not gonna do their best work. But if they have a period of exploration, a wide period of exploration, where they’re really checking out different options until they find the thing that clicks for them, and then they knuckle down into a period of exploitation, that’s, you know, and there this is that, that’s when.
Career hot streaks happen, that’s when people do their best work as scientists or artists or in other fields. So, you know, as a, as a runner for sure, like ultimately how exploratory was I in my twenties? Not very exploratory because I, every morning and every evening I was going out for a run. And that, you know, is often quite hard.
And I was, uh, I didn’t have a lot of bandwidth for anything else, but I, but I had made the choice that I wanted to see how good I could be as a runner. And so, and you know, unlike mountain climbing, trying to [00:39:00] be your best as a runner does not involve, uh, traveling around the world a lot except, you know, during the competition season.
So yeah, you have to, you have to think about the context and, and, um, sometimes you, you have to turn off that ex exploratory junior or, or you have to be willing to, to knuckle down.
Steve: Yeah, I, it’s great to hear you tell that story through your personal experience. For me, it was very similar in that through my twenties, I was trying. I, we, we, we talked to a lot of athletes about how to develop as an athlete, right? And so it’s quite similar to what you said. And it, for me, my story was in my twenties, I was doing lots of different climbing because I knew I wanted to be an alpinist.
And Alpinism is kind of like the decathlon of climbing. You have to be pretty good at everything, but you’re not the best at any one sub-discipline of climbing, [00:40:00] mountaineering. And then I reached a point where I just cut out everything I could and just focused on, okay, what do I need to do, to train, to have enough money to go on these trips to, you know, line up all these things.
And, that was the mission statement and nothing else. And it’s hard, I think, today, especially for the younger climbers in this environment where a lot of value is put on validation of having done, and not a lot of value is put on the validation of being in the process of building, or as you said, knuckle under and just running.
And, you know, that’s, that’s what most of it actually is. How do you, uh, take what you, what you’ve learned from writing these books and talking to people, how do you frame that up for people and what do [00:41:00] tell them?

Alex: Yeah. Uh, the, the challenge is that the best thing to tell people is something they’ve heard over and over about, you know, about journeys and destinations, but you have to keep hearing it. And I have to keep telling myself that this is not a lesson you can learn once. So, I mean, my athletic story is that the most important thing in my life until I was 28.
Was trying to run faster on the track. Uh, I, I really, really, really wanted to make the Olympics and I did not make the Olympics. And so, the most, you know, look, if I had, if, and if I could, you know, alter the trajectory of history, of course I would make sure that I made the Olympics. But not having made the Olympics, it gave me a valuable lesson, which was that, you know, I looked back and to my surprise, you know, as I, as I moved on from that portion of my life, I was like, I don’t regret a damn thing.
That was an awesome time. And, and, and not just that I got to, you know, travel around and race in some cool places, uh, [00:42:00] the feeling of having gone absolutely as hard as I could on this one thing of, of having left no stone unturned or having really. Exposed myself in the sense of like, I’m doing everything.
I have no excuses. I, it’s not like I could have been better if I’d tried harder. I tried as hard as I could and I got as far as I could. And that was such a powerful experience. Like even, and even at the time I was sort of conscious of this, of, you know, being in a race or, or let’s say finishing a, a really hard workout at the end of a really hard training week and thinking, you know, there’s not many people on this planet who have given their all to something in the way that I’m doing right now.
And so that lesson I think, ha has, I’ve taken to, into the journalism world when I was writing Endear, I had, you know, I was, my mind’s, [00:43:00] my mind was filled with doubts about whether anyone else really cared as much about the nuts and bolts about the, of the science of endurance as I did. And be, I, I sort of, and I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but I, I created this.
Sense in my mind that my career was it, you know, hanging in the balance that this, that if this book did well, I’d make it as a journalist and if it didn’t do well, I would have to go mop floors. Um, but I was able to kind of talk myself down from the ledge and say, Alex, just write the book. You wanna write, um, write the best damn book.
You can write about endurance. And, you know, hopefully people will like it, but if, if not, it’ll be just like that, the 10 years of your life you spent running where you didn’t make the Olympics, but you, you, you have no regrets about giving it your all. And so I tried to take that with me for explorers, Jean.
And you know, honestly, it doesn’t mean that I don’t, I’m not, was not, and I’m still not full of doubts and worries and, and like hopes and all this [00:44:00] stuff that all that stuff doesn’t go away. But it gives me a, a sort of, you, you talked about values. It gives me a sort of bedrock where I can, when I’m feeling like, oh crap, I can’t believe that, you know, it’s not going well or whatever.
I spent whatever it was for this book, five years doing it because I thought it was worth doing. So it doesn’t really matter what happens now because the process was valuable.

Steve: Yeah. And you’ve been able to knuckle all down on this process, whatever, at least three or four, I don’t know, probably more times in different areas of your life. And I know people are gonna ask and I don’t know, so I have to ask, it was 1500 meters. Was that your event?

Alex: Yeah, my, I ultimately, look, that’s a complicated answer too. I think I might’ve been better at 5,000, but I had injuries, but I ran 3:42 for 1500, which is right around a four minute mile, which is a national class. It’s not quite good enough to take the next step up. [00:45:00] Um.

Steve: A lot of our listeners are runners and they’re gonna love to know that. So when, when you think back to that, let’s say first, and I’m presuming that it’s running, is maybe that first love or that first thing that you left no stone unturned on in pursuit of, where did that come from? Where did you, what, what was, what was the impetus?
Like, what made you leave? What made you go so hard for that?

Alex: Yeah, I mean, this is a question I think a lot about because my kids are now nine and 11 and I want them to care about things in life and to, to, to put, to push themselves hard. But I really, really, uh, you know, I’m unclear. Like, and so I, I look back and I’m trying to figure out, so what, what was it? ’cause it wasn’t, you know, my parents didn’t push me into running.
They didn’t know anything about running. Um, and so my feeling is, oh, we need, I need to back off. [00:46:00] I need to, you know, I need to model for them what. The way I think people should live, um, without pushing them. And, and not to go too far down a tangent, but my, my wife is, was also a very, very good runner.
And, but she had a very different childhood than me. She was running when she was, you know, eight years old and going, her dad was training for a marathon. So she has him a model of like per parental, active parental engagement and leadership. And hey, let’s get you joining a club at eight. Whereas I have a model of let’s just leave the kids alone and, and see what they stumble into, to see. But then the, the, the worry is, it’s like, okay, if I leave them alone, just let them hang around. They’re gonna decide that actually sitting on the sofa and playing video games is a really fulfilling way to live their life. And then I’ll, and then I’ll feel really stupid. So, I mean, I think honestly though, with, with running for me, uh, this, I think, and I think this is actually somewhat counter to the.
Usual trajectory is that [00:47:00] probably external validation. Got me, got me in the door that I was good at running. So I won races. And so like the fire when I first joined the track club when I was about 15, it was because I was, I had three more months. I left to run in the younger age group in high school.
And I thought, well, I’ll just train for these three months to try and beat up on these little kids. Um, and then, but then I did way better than I expected and I was like, well, okay, I’m hooked. I’ll, I’ll keep, I’ll keep training. And so for me, I would say the clique actually didn’t come until about a year after my undergraduate, when I was, when I was then in graduate school, uh, I got a knee injury that ended up lingering for a couple of years.
And so that derailed my track career and as time went on, my worries went from like, am I gonna miss this season to, am I gonna miss this year? Am I gonna be able to get back to where I was? And then I realized, I was just worried about like, am I gonna be able to run again? ’cause I really liked running. I really wanted, and, [00:48:00] and that was almost an epiphany to me to realize that at some point I had internalized, or I had, had fallen in love with the process.
And that, yes, I still wanted to get back to come to competition, but at that time, I had a different relationship with running at that point, once it was taken away from me. But, but I know, like, so the, the usual thing is that people start doing things they love and then they get external validation.
And the external validation replaces the internal validation. They start only doing it ’cause other people tell ’em they’re good at it. For me, at least as I think about this just now, it feels like it was almost the opposite way that it started out. I was doing it ’cause I was good at it. And then I realized that I loved it, but it was only having it taken away.
That, that prompted me, prompted those, that level of reflection. To realize how much I liked it, independent of the results.

Steve: Yeah. And there’s so many paths to this, right? Like, you know, I have a couple of [00:49:00] friends that have achieved a lot in their lives and, and our joke among the three of us is that we’re the, uh, insecure overachievers club. Like we have to prove it to ourselves because. You know, somehow we weren’t born with that feeling that we can do whatever we want.
And so we have this internal critic that’s always saying, you can’t do that. And it’s like to tell them, show the internal critic that they’re wrong, that I can do this. And, uh, there’s, so there’s there, there are many paths to this. And I also always tell people that these, these, these pathways only reveal themselves as you’re walking on them.
Or another way to put it is these ideas just don’t simply come out fully formed, right? Like in hindsight it looks like a clear trajectory. Oh, I went from this to this, to this, to this. But [00:50:00] in reality it was a bunch of little steps and some of them were left, some of them were right. And, and when you look, when you zoom way out, it looks like it goes forward.
But, you know, the forward could have been in lots of other directions.

Alex: Yeah, I, and so that, yeah, my, I definitely would say distrust anyone who’s, maybe not anyone, other people may be different but di distrust trajectory stories that are too linear and too that, that makes sense. That, that there, there has to be some, some meandering and that that meandering is, you know, in terms of the story or the ideas not emerging fully formed, that you learn them by, as they walk the path.
It’s like what I find often. When I think these things through, I feel like, ah, I understand it all, all now and what, you know, it all makes sense. And then I realized that this, this idea that I’ve understood through, through 10 years of journey is just like, it’s something that people were telling me the whole time.
It’s the advice that I was already, it’s like, and again, [00:51:00] the, the, the sort of most prominent cliche is, you know, that values the journey, not the destination. It’s like, it doesn’t matter how many times people have told me that the, but there, there’s a sense that in living it, you, you know, I, I I could only fully grasp that.
It’s like, yeah, the running, as much as I enjoyed running good times, that’s not really what I mostly remember about running or it’s not even the most positive things I remember about running is, is not the finish of the race. Um.

Steve: And I’m, I’m dwelling on this because this is a big part of, this is one of the larger themes that I want to pull through this season of this Voice of the Mountains project, where I have this theory that learning to do hard things in a field like running or climbing, teaches you that you have the ability to do hard things in other parts of life, whether it’s writing books or running companies, or, [00:52:00] uh.
You know, there’s a million other ways to express, uh, a hard, you know, doing hard things and very often doing a hard thing in, not, not always, but doing a hard thing in sport very often does not have any value to anyone else other than, you know, the per couple people that are involved in, in doing it. But doing hard things in other areas of life, medical literature, all kinds of other things, could potentially have massive benefits and value to other people.
And the process, we, we focus on, oh, well that scientist discovered such and such and that was, you know, penicillin and that led to this, you know, changing the trajectory of the world and changing world history. It’s like, well, how did they learn ? How did pastor learn to try and fail and rerun experiments and, and do [00:53:00] this and do that to, I mean, eventually essentially stumble into a discovery that, you know, was, was probably bound to happen at some point because it, but yet still changed the world.
There was all these things that happened before and the development of that human that allowed them to try and fail and keep going and, yeah, I mean, even the pursuit of, uh, an education in medicine, especially at that time was, was, was, was out of the, out of grass, were, I don’t know what percentage, but the vast majority of, of humans on the planet at that time.
So there’s a lot of steps that happen before the big result.

Alex: Yeah. And, and I, I definitely, obviously, you know, it will be no surprise to anyone that I share your thoughts about doing hard things in one sphere. Can, can, can lead to, or can help inform your ability to do other spheres. And, you know, [00:54:00] again, I think about that a lot with my, with my kids.
And for better or worse, we’ve taken our kids out on some, some fairly demanding backpacking trips and, and you know, we’re not. We’re not assholes. So, so my, you know, my wife and I’ll be like, uh, did we misjudge this time? Like, if, if one of them is struggling. Um, but we really, like, I really, I look at my daughters who are nine and 11, and it’s like, I believe that they have confidence in their ability to endure, their ability to keep going even when they don’t wanna.
And it’s like, you know, I make the analogy to this, even when we’re sitting at the table and it’s, and it’s like, yeah, I don’t like mushrooms or whatever. And it’s like, I, I get it. And, you know, I, I don’t serve you mushrooms often, but sometimes when you get a food you don’t, like, sometimes you just, you just do it.
In fact, I was reading Scott J’s book recently, [00:55:00] and he, that’s one of his, the, his dad’s sayings would be like, sometimes you just do things. And I think you learn that if you’re climbing a mountain or if you’re out on a backpacking trip, um, you know. It becomes real because if, you know, if my daughter’s asking me like, I just wanna sit down, and it’s like, well, this is no longer daddy just being a jerk, making you do something.
We are out in the mountains now, so we don’t have a choice. You can sit down here and die. Or we can keep walking and you know, they may not love that answer, but then much like, okay, well I guess we’ll get up and keep walking. And, or even like, just not even, it doesn’t have to be in the mountains.
It’s like my kids walk to school, it’s about a mile and it doesn’t matter if it’s raining or snowing, they walk to school and it’s like, I think a small thing like that. I like to think I flatter myself to think that they’re learning a lesson about just getting it done.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. And the interesting thing about your story is, you know, on a backpacking trip and sitting down and then having to, when they’re [00:56:00] sitting down, they’re like, no, I can’t. I can’t. And, and, and this is also so true in so many of these sports is like, if you have to, actually it turns out you can, right?
Like there’s, there’s, there’s endless examples of this in sports and particularly in endurance. And your book is full of several of them, but yeah.

Alex: Yeah, like, so I love them, I think it was Andy Barefoot who was a mentor of mine at the runner’s world. His explanation of the greatest workout that you can possibly do is five times a mile as hard as you can, and then when you’re done and you’re lying in the gas, grasping, gasping through breath, the coach comes over and says, do one more.
And you say, well, I can’t, you, I did them as hard as I can. Like you said, it’s tough. Do another one. You get up and you’re like, oh. I did another one at almost the same speed. And, and, and, uh, I mean, even so outside of the sports realm, I had a boss who I really liked. And when I was a postdoctoral physics researcher, the boss was quite a character.
And, and when something was, you know, he [00:57:00] would be requesting some, like, I want, I need this adjustment to my lab or something. I need something built here. And then, you know, the administration response would come back, oh, we can’t do this. And his response is always like, you can’t, or you won’t. And you know, it was an obnoxious response.
But it was also one that I often think about for myself and for other people. It’s like you, when you say you can’t do that, you, you actually just mean you won’t. Right? But you could do it. Just like my daughter, you can get up and walk, your legs are still working, you just are tired.
And I understand that. But you can do it.

Steve: What is going on physiologically when I know I, sorry. We have to go into physiology at least once in this conversation. When you do that sixth mile. And, you know, it’s so interesting because, you know, in, in, in life, we don’t get to do this very often with uphill athletes because we’re, we’re coaching [00:58:00] remotely.
But one of the things when I’ve had the opportunity to coach people live, especially, you know, the old of this trick is in the book, is in the weight room, is, you know, the athlete, you know, you’re just doing, you’re just putting the weights on the bar for them. You’re not, you know, maybe you’re, they think it’s their usual weight, but it’s actually much.
He, you know, maybe not drastically, but 5% more. And they think that they can’t do that. But, you know, they, they start doing it and they’re like, well, this is, this is hard. But they still do the eight reps or whatever you prescribed, and then at the end you just tell them, oh, by the way, did you notice, um, that was a PR or whatever?
So the brain has this. Has this way of tricking us and we can, we can reverse it and trick each other with this tool. Tell me about that.

Alex: Yeah, it, I mean, it’s definitely a trick you can’t play every week, right? It’s a, it’s a, it’s a tool to be used valuably. No, but, so I think a couple things to say about that. One is, [00:59:00] to me, I think the, the way I think about this physiologically, the way, the way the, the, the, the most convincing I. Explanation about this is that the master switch that determines whether you can keep going or maintain a pace or lift a weight is your sense of your subjective sense of effort, of how hard it is.
So you’re, you’re, you’re running along, I’ll, I’ll use running ’cause it’s an easy example for me. You’re, you’re, you’re running along at a given pace. You’re com, your rival, starts to pull away. Um, and your decision about whether to, to try and stay with them fundamentally, it’s not that, it’s not that at that moment in time, you’re running as fast as your legs can, can, uh.
It can physically go at any moment in a marathon, right up until the final a hundred meters or something. If a lion jumped out from behind the nearest lamppost, you would start sprinting. You still have, you still have the ability to go faster, but you’re judging that it’s, uh, not prudent for you to start sprinting with 10 miles to go still left in the marathon.
So you’re making your decision based on a subjective effort. And that effort [01:00:00] does depend on all the physiological stuff, on all, it depends on your core temperature and, and the lactate levels in your blood and your respiration rate, and yada, yada, yada. But it also depends on the thoughts in your head, because if you’re asking yourself, I.
Can I, you know, can I keep, can I, can I maintain pace and stay with my rival? If, if, if what you’re telling, if what you’ve been telling yourself for the last hour is, oh, this is awful. I’m having a terrible day. Obviously, I screwed up my training. Or boy that, you know, that injury I had last month must have really messed with my training.
I can’t do this. I’m just not tough enough. I always fail In these situations, then you’re just far more likely to answer, no, I can’t do it, because you have all these reasons already teed up for why you can’t do it. Whereas if your internal monologue is like, this is good. Everyone else is hurting just as much as me.
It’s hard. This is what I trained for, that I did the best training I possibly could, and you know, I’m ready. This is the day where I want to give. You’re just more likely to be willing to, to push. And so the feeling that you can’t go any [01:01:00] farther, I think that the crux is that it is not. A representation of your legs, inability to, to move.
It’s a warning light. Your brain is getting into that zone where it feels that, uh, you probably better hold off. And so you can turn that warning light off, not indefinitely and not forever, because eventually it’s gonna come back on and instead of orange, it’s gonna be red. But it, it’s, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a negotiation as opposed to an ultimatum from, from your brain that you can’t go.
And, and so if, if you, you, if you fiddle with those settings by, by changing the input, then, then you, you find you might be able to, to squeeze a little bit more out.

Steve: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I like all the, the, the input ideas. You know, we work with a lot of athletes who have, uh, not done formal training before, and so with them, very often I start them with a heart rate monitor or because they don’t have a, a sense of what is easy and what is, [01:02:00] what is hard. They’ve not used training zones before, but once people have been doing that for a while, we get rid of them, often can just get rid of that and go by feeling, because then the train by feel is more like, you have all the inputs.
You, you know what the temperature is, you know what your hydration level is, you know, if you’ve slept well and you know what your heart rate is and your perception of that. That exertion, the kind of RPE idea. And you know, that’s when once we get people to do that, then we can really like, make a lot more, uh, I would say you make less progress, uh, in terms because the biggest gains come in the beginning, right.
But then, you really get to a point where you can really help them understand their body and how it works and how their physiology is changing to adapt to being able to do long duration, you know, running or, or climbing or alpinism or mountaineering, whatever the sport is. And it’s really interesting to [01:03:00] see people go through that process.
And there’s, there’s definitely a, there’s definitely a learning curve for a lot of people.

Alex: Yeah, I mean, I definitely agree that it’s for people who grew up in a sport, like, you know, I started running, you know, seriously when I was, let’s say 15. It’s sometimes hard to remember that the average, quote-unquote civilian has done very few things that will put them in as much prolonged time if they’re lucky, you know, assuming that like leaving trauma and stuff out of it.
But physically has done very, uh, has, has rarely experienced the kind of. Uh, distress that you can go into an interval workout and stay there for an hour and re and, and, you know, you’re not dying because you’ve done this before. But for, for, for someone who’s just, you know, doing a couch to 5K or something, or just getting into something, you, you absolutely have to calibrate those, those feelings and, and help them understand what’s possible through experience, but also through telling them what’s what.
And [01:04:00] then in terms of like, uh, moving to the field-based approach, which is that, that’s certainly how I, I run, I have a, I have a complicated relationship with data. Like I’m fascinated by the science and like, oh, what can we learn from heart rate variability and real time tracking of lactate or glucose, or whatever the case may be.
But I will say, I have yet to see any data that, or any convincing demonstration that all the data we’re currently able to collect can make better decisions or be a more sensitive marker of how you feel than asking how you feel? If you’re someone who’s tuned into your, to your, your sensations. So, um, I, I’m not anti data,

Steve: I agree. Yeah I’m not into data, data either. Um, I think that a lot of people want, they want the right answer, and they want it from a credible source, and they want it to be as digestible and simple and easy to understand and utilize as possible, which are all valid [01:05:00] once. But the reality of being in a human body is often a little more complicated than your HRV.
Tells you to do this today or to not do this today. That’s, that’s one reading on a variety of things. And I understand people are hoping that it captures a bunch more than that. But again, I also haven’t seen that any of these one, uh, features do.

Alex: The other thing is that the reality of training and of doing hard things is. That you’re, you do have to ride that edge sometimes. You do have to, you have to make a difficult decision like, okay, I’m very tired. I’ve been training hard this week, sometimes to do well and running.
You have to train when you’re very tired, but you also like and so you have to face, am I being a coward? Am I saying I don’t want to do this workout because I think I’m getting sick or something? Or is it just that I’m tired and I am, and so I’m, so these decisions become [01:06:00] all sorts of, you know, the internal dilemma.
And so the best case scenario for me is to have a good relationship with the coach and then the coach can make that decision. And then, you know, there, there I have a conversation. The coach knows me. I say, what, what, how I’m feeling? And they’re like, yeah, give it a try or go for it, or back off or go half.
It’s, and so for me, that offloading the moral dimension of making that decision is helpful. Not everyone has a relationship available to them. And so I think people are looking for that from data. It’s like, oh, well my, my readiness scores that I wasn’t ready to go today. So that’s why I’m taking the day off, not because I’m being lazy, but because we all fight with that. Like, you know, that ambiguity of when to push when we’re already tired.

Steve: Yeah. There. You’ve said that, uh, I don’t remember where I heard you say this, but you talked about how ultra running is kind of the, the wild West because it’s so of running [01:07:00] the wild west of running because it’s such a hard place to kind of collect information, collect data, understand, uh, you know, predict performances for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that the terrain is super variable.
The weather can have a really outsized effect on, on performances and, and other things. As a journalist, that is at least my, from my viewpoint, very grounded in the, you know, peer-reviewed research side of things. How do you, how do you pull those, how do you pull that apart? How do you, how do you look at that?

Alex: Yeah, it’s, it, I mean, honestly, it’s a, it’s a struggle and it’s attention because, uh, for my preference, always the way, you know, when I write sweat science columns for outside, almost always the starting point is [01:08:00] a single peer reviewed study. Like someone has done an experiment and they’ve published it. Now I’m not just gonna take that experiment and swallow it whole, uh, I’m gonna try and evaluate where it fits in with a larger body of literature, and I’m going to look for trying to understand what the strengths and weaknesses and what it can tell us and what it can, blah, blah, blah. So that’s where I’m most comfortable.
So how do I deal without ultra running? Like you said, there’s a lot of sources. Of variability, first of all, like it’s a lot. It’s very hard to get, you know, 20 volunteers to come in and say, okay, we’re gonna have you run a hundred miles as hard as you can, uh, on four different occasions under slightly different conditions in the lab on a treadmill.
And then of course, even if you could, it’s like what does that treadmill tell you about how someone is gonna perform at Western States or whatever, or you know, at altitude or in heat or whatever. So there’s all these known sources of uncertainty, but I think there’s an even deeper one, which is, let’s say let we care [01:09:00] about was the, uh, you know, a hundred mile record on the track.
So it’s gonna be very predictable. It’s an indoor track, so we’re gonna control all the conditions and we have a bunch of crazy volunteers who are willing to do it. A bunch of studies for us, uh, where they’re, they’re gonna do a bunch of a hundred miles on the track and we can test all these different conditions.
Even then, my reading of the very patchy literature on, on, on ultra running is that the longer the distance goes, the less predictive physiological variables are. So you, you know, if you wanna know who’s gonna win a mile, if, if, you know, VO two max lactate threshold, running economy, maybe some other parameters, but those three are the big ones.
You, you can go a long way. You, it’s never, it’s never perfect, but it’s like, yeah, you can, all the way up to a marathon, you still, you know, lactate threshold, VO two max Running Economy, you have a pretty good idea of how the race is gonna gonna pan out the, the longer you [01:10:00] go. And there’s been a few studies that have compared like Ultras where there’s, you know, there’s a 50 k, a 50 mile, a hundred mile, and it’s like the, the value of those predictors goes down even within a given race.
And, you know, my, my sort of, um. Interpretation of that is that the longer you go, the more it’s coming down to the mental side of the, of, of performance. And, and we don’t have any ways of, or we have very, um, imperfect ways of quantifying what’s going on in someone’s head. So you know, fundamentally ultra running, I think is a, a demonstration of the, the idea or the claim that, um, the, the mind, you know, that it’s not, we’re not just doing a, a physiology measuring contest, uh, but it means that it’s, it’s hard to write much about the physiology.
Um, and it’s hard to write about psychology because that’s so personal. It’s hard to say, well, here are the four things you should say when you’re halfway through a hundred mile race.

Steve: Mm-hmm. Yeah. [01:11:00] When you, how do you, so when you’re, and this could be ultras, but originally, if we go back to Liddy yard’s time or something, it was the marathon that used to be the, the, the gold standard of endurance. Um, how do you, the way I see that sport, endurance sport specifically, has developed over the decades is that I. Athletes and coaches have trial and error their way to the best practices trial and error. I mean, by trying, trying things like doing a lot of base building, doing a lot of high, high intensity interval training and, and then seeing what happens in competition. Does it stack up to the other people that are the best in the world at that time? [01:12:00] then in most cases, the scientists come along later and explain why things happen the way they happen. of the things I wanted to ask you is how you handle that or how you view that as a science writer. And as you said, you typically start with a piece of peer reviewed research and then try to interpret it if maybe that’s, I’m putting words in your mouth, but you try to interpret it within the context and what’s what we know. Whereas a lot of things, and I, I’ve been part of projects that have failed this, this test, right where we, where we used to think, like at both myself and also with as a team of coaches, if we rolled back six se seven, eight years ago, we were telling people to do a lot of FAFSA trading. Now it’s like completely, we know better.
Partly [01:13:00] because literature science came out and said, actually, you know, this is having some very negative effects on these people and in other ways hormones, balances and all these, these other things. And, then we switched and then guess what? People started to run faster. Now we’re maybe swinging the other way.
Everybody’s consuming as much dehydration as they can and, and, uh, but for the both part, it’s the athlete coach. Test on the test and competition that is, that is leading things forward from my point of view. Do you have a different point of view, and if so, can you explain how you see that progress in the terms of what we know about endurance training?

Alex: Yeah, no. So I, I would a hundred percent agree that, uh, it’s the athletes and coaches who are, uh, who are coming up with the ideas and trying them. Um, inevitably [01:14:00] that process has some blind alleys. Um, and, and, and it’s, I think it’s relatively self-correcting. Uh, that, that it, you don’t need a scientist. If, if you’ve, if you’ve come up with the idea that, um.
Let’s say flashing back to the nineties, which was when I started running seriously, that actually low mileage is the way to go. You should, you shouldn’t do too much mileage, you should do all speed work. Um, that was, you know, it was sometimes cloaked as a scientific approach, but really it was just some, some athletes or, and coaches trying that.
And in general, people got slower. And now the problem is you always have, the, the way this usually works is you have a few examples of people who are like, wow, that guy won the Olympics and he was only doing two miles a week, or whatever. So then a, then a whole bunch of people are doing it, and then it’s like, wow, this whole country is way slower than it was 10 years ago.
That sucks. And so there is this self-correcting mechanism totally independent of any science. Science doesn’t, doesn’t even need to come into it. [01:15:00] what now?

Steve: It is a little bit of a scientific process though, right? Like experimentation getting just not a peer reviewed science.

Alex: Right. You’re right. It, it, it, I shouldn’t call it not so it, there’s observation and hypothesis and, and you know, and, and self-correction. But in terms of the stuff that I write about, it’s like, why am I devoting my, you know, my career to writing about peer reviewed science? Part of it is like, well, hey, that’s, that was my, my, uh, my competitive advantage.
I am comfortable reading the, the, the, the physiology and, and talking to the scientists. And so I, it was something that I didn’t see a lot of when I was younger and, and kind of wished I’d known a little bit more about how this stuff works. But I think science can play a role in an, an important role in testing some of these assumptions and by, you know, by figuring out, um, you know, whether the, let’s say we, something works. There’s different ways of explaining why it [01:16:00] works. Well, if we figure out why it works, then we can probably do it better. We can, we can figure out, uh, a better way of taking advantage of, um, a tactic that, that, that science didn’t come up with. I have a hard time thinking of, um, examples of, you know, training methods or performance enhancing methods that came straight outta the lab as opposed to being validated after athletes that have been experimenting.
I mean, they exist, like people have, you know, there, it’s not that athletes were like, I wonder what ketones will do. Scientists came up with that. Now the truth is, I don’t think ketones do very much. But, but, but there are things that come outta the lab that are, that are science first,

Steve: Mm-hmm.

Alex: But for the most part it’s like. Yeah, like training, low training in a, in a depleted state. It’s like, well, you know, Miguel Duren in the nineties was doing five hour fasted rides. And, I think people have had that idea for a long time. The question is, is it good or bad? And that’s it, it’s hard because there’s so many variables. [01:17:00] is, doesn’t always self-correct quickly enough. And so, you know that, and you know, a cheap example would be, um, if you look at the list of athletes who endorsed power balance bracelets 15 years ago, these are like pieces of rubber, uh, rubber bracelet that’s supposed to align your chakra or something like that.
I mean, they’re very good athletes. These are like, you know, Shaquille O’Neal is claiming that he scored like 67 points one night ’cause he put on the Power balance bracelet. And so experience isn’t the perfect guide. So science can test, um, can test claims that are outright crap like power balance, but it can also try and sort through this complicated thing of like.
How many carbohydrates should you be taking when you’re in a, you know, in an ultra endurance event? And it, it, it doesn’t, it’s not easy to answer and, and it’s not like one experiment is gonna resolve it, but I think it’s going to guide people more accurately and maybe more quickly than just sort of waiting [01:18:00] for the weight of experience to kind of come down on this is how many carbs we should be taking or, or, or we shouldn’t be taking.
Because there’s a, there’s a, you know, David Epstein, who we mentioned earlier, he, he, uh, he had a line that I, that I’ve always liked, which is, just because you’re a bird doesn’t mean you’re an ornithologist. So, you know, if you ask a bird how to fly, you might not get the right answers. So there’s, I think, value in that external perspective, but we shouldn’t put the cart be, you know, confused, which is where the, where the bulk of the knowledge is coming from is athletes and coaches trying stuff.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. No, that I agree and that it aligns certainly with, with my experience and as coaches on our group chat just this week, we’re having a. I wouldn’t call it debate, but uh, uh, like nobody knows what to do with carbohydrates. Like, like there’s all these, like, I did this and my athlete did that and we tried 90 and you know, like, and we had to [01:19:00] do this to get their gut to handle this.
And, we wanna have this conversation with that outside perspective at the same time. Like, what are the people studying this, what are they saying? You know, like, we need to be having more of this back and forth conversation. And I think that that can bring a lot of value ultimately to the athletes that are either just trying to be better runners or trying to run their best race or, or.
Or, you know, in, in many cases, especially around nutrition, the topic is, you know, not make themselves sick because, you know, the, they’re, they’re, they’re, they need to support the training, the, the load that they have on their bodies from training and competing or traveling and expeditions and, and so on.
And they need to stay healthy. And, uh, that, that’s, that’s, you know, as, as you know from your own experience, it’s a massive, uh, it’s a lot to carry. Physiologically to be training a lot.
Alex: And I think that dialogue between, you know, [01:20:00] the practical world and the scientific world, is super important. And the best, the best scientists in, in this field are ones who are highly attuned to what’s happening, uh, to what athletes, what’s going on in the peloton of the Tour de France and who are testing that.
And so you might say, ah, the scientists are always behind. They’re always just looking at what the athletes, and it’s like, that’s what they should be doing. They should be looking at what’s going on at the front of the pack and, and trying to test whether it is a good idea or how it translates to other people.
How individual is it? As opposed to just like, let’s try and make up something completely new. And, uh, you know, that’s, that’s, I think that’s less likely to, to, to pay fruit. So I, whenever there’s questions that athletes are arguing about, I always am thinking like. Even this seems like a boring question. I wish more scientists would study this question because athletes still aren’t sure, like, stuff like stretching.
Like, couldn’t we get some better studies on, on different types of stretching? It’s like there’ve been hundreds of studies, but we still don’t really like, have a good sense of, of what it does in what context for whom and [01:21:00] why.

Steve: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, that’s a great example. We, you know, again, like we get that question all the time as coaches and as coaches, we have earned highly individual responses to that question based on our experiences and, you know, and, and, and, and to a certain, once you have enough experience, if you’ve been doing this for 20 years, you can give an athlete feedback that’s appropriate for them at their.
You know, knowing their body and so on. But that’s, that’s, that’s a narrow case, right? We’re hoping for something that helps, let’s say, everyone with, with that kind of knowledge.

Alex: Yeah. And that may be not to be a downer, but that may be a pipe dream. Like how many carbohydrates should people take? It may be 30 to, to 180 grams depending on who you are and what your specific context is. And who you are part of is what makes it hard to write recommendations.
Um, so yeah, look, hopefully [01:22:00] we, hopefully science continues to progress and we get more specific answers, but like yeah, the, the, the, the, the dream of, uh, there being one answer, maybe, maybe a bit of an illusion
Steve: Yes, of course, of course. But we love the idea that there will be certainty waiting for us, right. Like comfortable.

Alex: around the corner.

Steve: Yeah.

Alex: Yeah. Just over the next horizon.

Steve: one more book.

Alex: Yeah.
Steve: Where can our listeners connect with you online or, or come to any of your book presentations or, or read your

Alex: Yeah, so probably the best place to find me these days is at my website, alexhutchinson.net. And I have a list of upcoming events. There are, there are a few, um, going around wherever I get an opportunity and, uh, giving a talk about exploring and stuff. Um, but also I am on various social media outlets.
There’s links there. Um, usually it says sweat science, sometimes as sweat science, but alex hutchinson.net is probably the best starting place.

Steve: Great. [01:23:00] Well, thanks very much, Alex. This has been a great, wonderful conversation and got us off on a great start for our second season of this, this exploration into, you know, who we are and who we become through doing hard things and thinking about it, how to, thinking about how to do it better. And I really appreciate your voice and keep doing what you’re doing.
You’re, you’re, you’re fantastic out there. And, uh, look forward to connecting again in the future.

Alex: Thanks so much for having me, Steven. It’s really an honor to be part of this conversation.

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