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Team SweatElite | Eurotrip
112 Plays1 year ago
In June, Team SweatElite claimed victory over 16 other teams in Eurotrip - a 400km non-stop relay run from Cologne in Germany to Strasbourg in France.
EuroTrip has very few rules; teams are made up of 8 people, 2 of which must be female, there are 5 checkpoints to hit and motorways are not allowed.
Teams must combine running ability, ordering and shift strategy, fuelling and wayfinding to succeed.
Working alongside Precision Fuel and Hydration, Team SweatElite was made up of runners from UK, Ireland, USA, Sweden and Australia most of whom had never met before.
Despite being one hour behind at one point, they pulled through hard towards the end, picked a very fast route into the finish and pipped Team Volt by 14 seconds for a dramatic finish.
A fascinating episode with 4 members of the team about the physical demands of this epic event, and the logistical approach that was needed to take the team to victory in this unique event.
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Transcript
Introduction and Race Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to this episode of the UK Run Chat Podcast. Today, we're joined by Team Sweat Elite, who claimed victory over 16 other teams in the Euro trip. It's a 400 kilometer nonstop relay run from Cologne in Germany to Strasbourg in France. Working alongside precision fuel and hydration, Team Sweat Elite was made up of runners from the UK, Ireland, Sweden, and Australia. And despite being an hour behind at one point, they actually won the race by
00:00:30
Speaker
14 seconds. What a dramatic finish. So I'm joined today by some members of the team. Hello, everybody. Would you like to introduce yourselves? Matt, do you want to get started?
00:00:41
Speaker
Really appreciate your invitation, Michelle. Yeah, we had such a phenomenal experience, but yeah, so I'm Matt. I founded Sweat Elite, which is a media company in the running space that's been around for a little over six years now. And yeah, we came up with the idea to enter a team in EuroTrip a few months ago. I'd been working alongside precision fuel and hydration in a few different aspects with different media projects over the last year or so. And I originally approached Andy
00:01:08
Speaker
for a sponsorship opportunity and Andy actually said we'd love to, some of the team would love to come along and join and support and actually be part of the team if we hadn't already finalised our members. And I said, that sounds great. And turns out it ended up being essentially, even though the team's names were deleted, it was actually probably a dual team with precision fuel and hydration as they brought so many members. But yeah, the other guys are on the line, so it'd be good to hear an intro from them as well.
00:01:37
Speaker
Yeah, please introduce yourself and your team, Andy. Yeah, for sure.
Race Strategy and Planning
00:01:40
Speaker
So my name's Andy Blow. I'm the founder and CEO of Precision Fuel and Hydration. We started as a company back in 2011 and really a lot of athletes in our team, as you'd imagine, we work a lot with endurance athletes, particularly runners such as Matt. And so when, yeah, Matt told it best when he originally
00:02:02
Speaker
approaches for sponsorship for this event. We thought, well, not only would we love to get involved in the sponsorship point of view, we would actually love to run as well. And he was kind enough to include a couple of members of us into the squad. And two of the guys are here with me today as well. So I'll let Chris Minty Harris introduce himself. Thanks, Andy. Yeah, my name is Chris. I went by a few names during the trip, which I'm sure will
00:02:25
Speaker
uncovered during the course of the recording, one of which became Waitrose. Minty is my name in the office, but Chris is my actual name. Much to a lot of people on the trip's surprise, I had a real name. I'm a sport scientist here at PF&H. I've been in the team for about 18 months now. And it was a last minute call up to actually run the race. It was supposed to be support bike rider, van driver. And the day before the race, ended up wearing a pair of shoes and getting involved with 50k of my own running for the team.
00:02:55
Speaker
Wow. And I'm Ralph. I'm one of the other sports scientists here at PF&H. Mainly while we're out there, I was working on logistics and van driving and mainly trying to keep eight individuals happy when they've been awake for 25 to 30 hours at a time, which is no easy task, especially when you lose a few people or
Challenges and Adaptations
00:03:20
Speaker
take a couple of wrong turns along the way, which again, I think we'll probably cover in the next few minutes.
00:03:24
Speaker
Yeah, that sounds really tough, but a really important team member there, Raph. So just tell us a little bit of the background about EuroTrip then. So what is it? What are the rules of it? How far is it?
00:03:38
Speaker
Yeah, sure. So EuroTrip started last year. It's by a Dutch runner. He goes by the name of Indie Runner. And he decided, I think, essentially to create something similar to what's already existing in the US called the Speed Project, but make it a little bit different. So the Speed Project is a point-to-point race that happens every year that's the same course from Santa Monica in Los Angeles to the welcome to Las Vegas sign, obviously, in Las Vegas.
00:04:06
Speaker
It's around about, from what I understand, a little over 250 miles. It could be slightly more. And he wanted to create a similar thing in Europe, but make it, as I said, a little bit different in that this won't follow the same course every single year. So I'm actually mind blanking what last year's course was, but I do know that it ended in Cologne, because the point of this Euro trip is that every year, the previous year's end point is the following year's start point. So we started in Cologne and ended in Strasbourg, and next year,
00:04:35
Speaker
The event starts in Strasbourg and ends in another location in Austria.
00:04:40
Speaker
So similar duration, similar distance around the 250 to 300 miles. And in this case, it was pretty close to 250 miles. And yeah, it's a relay. So you get to, there's some sort of vague rules that you have to follow. In this case, it was a team of between six and eight. You had to have a minimum of two females in the team, but you had
Energy Management and Team Dynamics
00:05:00
Speaker
to have obviously a minimum of six overall and a maximum of eight. And then the only other rule is that there's five checkpoints along the way that you have to hit and you have to get to
00:05:10
Speaker
And that basically is just a check to make sure that the teams are passing through the points that the race is instructed to. But it also made it a little bit more interesting in this case in that it actually took us through a third country and that it included a sort of a little side loop through Luxembourg, which if you just did the direct path on Google Maps from Cologne to Strasbourg, it wouldn't have actually included Luxembourg. But I think part of the sort of appeal was that it goes through three countries as well.
00:05:38
Speaker
So yeah, point to point, you start at a certain time and then other than that, there's pretty much no rules. It's just the first team to the certain point in Strasburg. And like I said before, I came into it so inexperienced, I didn't realize how much logistics and planning went into this. But Ruff, who was the last person to introduce myself from the precision fuel and hydration team there, he was so instrumental in planning the route and making sure that we were taking the right turns. Of course, there was more.
00:06:05
Speaker
There was also Johnny, who's not on this call from Precision Fuel and Hydration, who was also doing that role. And even Chris, who was part of the team in the end, he got called up late because one of our original runners withdrew with about six days to go because he had an injury that he wasn't able to overcome. He was a friend of
00:06:21
Speaker
a friend of mine from the US so Chris took his place. Very thankful that he did because it was either that or we go down to a team of seven which would have meant we were disadvantaged for sure because more every runner would have had to have run further and you know that would have really taken its toll towards the back end of the race.
00:06:38
Speaker
So yeah, there's the basics of
Reflections and Future Plans
00:06:40
Speaker
the Euro trip, but there were so many little stories that went in amongst the whole 25 hours of the race, but it's a really unique event. There's not very many of these events run around the world.
00:06:55
Speaker
you know, a certain distance, like a 10K or a half marathon or a marathon where it starts and finishes at the same point. And it's very clearly marked. In this case, there was no markings really. It was just, you know, you figure it out and get to the end. And if you get to the end first, then you win. Yeah. So it sounds like you need a lot more brain power to kind of, it's a lot of planning beforehand, isn't it? Raph, do you want to talk to me a little bit about the route? Because the race, I believe, suggests the route for you.
00:07:23
Speaker
but how did your route compare to this? How do you go about deciding where you're going to run? Absolutely, yeah. So on the kind of race information that we get provided, the suggested route was on there and that would have taken us around 420 kilometers to complete the event. Of course, going through each checkpoint like Matt described just then. We spent a solid few hours in the hotel in Cologne the day before the race.
00:07:53
Speaker
and actually using some kind of bike packing software on websites like that to try and nibble away parts of the course, which we essentially take shortcuts off of the suggested route. A couple of those shortcuts were through kind of forests and things like that, which again can cause some difficulty.
00:08:14
Speaker
but mainly we nibbled away unnecessary things that the bike packing software could
Closing and Contact Information
00:08:20
Speaker
see. And then that got us down to just under 400 kilometres. So it took over half a marathon off the overall distance, which is obviously fairly significant when you end up winning the race by just 14 seconds. Yeah. So, I mean,
00:08:37
Speaker
I do. I understand you did have a few navigational issues, didn't you, with lack of phone signal? Do you want to talk to us a little bit about those and how they impacted the race? Indeed. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, um, with events like this, I think you can, you can always expect some things to go wrong. Typically they'd go wrong between kind of the, the, um, grade shift between 11 and 4am.
00:09:01
Speaker
Actually, it hit us a little bit earlier. First of all was going through a forest section just after the first checkpoint in which the Johnny who is not on the call, so I'll speak as nice as I can about him. He was on the bike and took a pretty treacherous trail through a forest where the other leading team of the time went the other way and that's actually where they overtook us.
00:09:31
Speaker
He ended up going off of his bike. Sarah, who ran the route, did a phenomenal job of staying upright and getting through with our cameraman, but we lost both phone signal, radio signal, and actually Johnny's phone decided to eject itself from his bike. And so we had to spend a little bit of time rummaging around to find that too. So that was the first major setback. And then there's a couple others kind of a little bit later in the race, which we managed to keep under control, but I think I'll let
00:10:01
Speaker
Chris tell you, or Minty, sorry, tell you about the major one that put us a little bit behind, because I'm sure his rendition is a little bit different to mine. Yeah, the most memorable mishap from the route was taking over from Jen, another runner on the call, and she
00:10:22
Speaker
passed over to me at the bottom of a pretty long steep hill. It was about six to seven percent for about three kilometers. Raph had to do a little bit of what I took over from Jen. Raph was hopping on the bike, had to do a little bit of maintenance on the bike. And so he's going to catch me up. And because of the steepness of the hill, it's, you know, you get to a point where the runner is actually traveling faster than a cyclist can up a hill. Yeah. And Raph, unfortunately, just never caught up. And I miss the turning at the top of the hill and carry on running for
00:10:52
Speaker
about three or four kilometers before I realized that my stint should be coming to an end and there was no one in sight. And yeah, did a U-turn. It was high 20s degrees. I was getting pretty dehydrated. And yeah, Raf arrived at the checkpoint and was like, where is he? And they said, well, I don't know, you were following him. And so they sent the search party out to come and look for me.
00:11:15
Speaker
Obviously we couldn't set off again until, you know, I handed over to someone. So even getting back to the checkpoint, the guy sort of caught up with me and then we relayed it back to get back on track as quick as possible. So I think, you know, we lost probably half an hour to 40 minutes just there. And just by going completely the wrong direction, unfortunately, but yeah, it sort of. Thankfully that happened as rap setting daylight hours because.
00:11:38
Speaker
I wouldn't have had a clue and probably would have carried on running if I hadn't been able to see ahead of me that there was feeling no checkpoint and no team around. Yeah, look at your notice then early on and that didn't go further. I mean, how does that impact the team? Does that, you know, that must be really frustrating for you all to deal with? Do you just have to kind of get on with it?
00:12:00
Speaker
Yeah, I think the team actually, the team rallied around Chris at that point and everyone stayed remarkably positive because I think what we felt was it was less than we were probably just under halfway in at that point. So we knew that although we were maybe let's say 10 hours in,
00:12:17
Speaker
we still had 15 hours of racing to go. And at that point, you firmly believe that anything can happen. And we knew that if we'd made a navigational error, there was a very good chance that that would happen to other teams further down the line. We were also very confident in the fact that we'd picked a really, really direct and fast route in the last sort of 15, 20 kilometres into Strasbourg, because that's where
00:12:41
Speaker
Johnny and Raff had spent a lot of time really interrogating the route. So I think although it was a bit disappointing and there was a bit of a, there was a little bit of a sort of low mood in the camp, it didn't last for long and everyone just got on with it and ran even harder. Yeah. I mean, how do you train for those low moments? Because obviously it's a very, it's a very long event and you do expect moments like that, don't you? Particularly overnight, as we've already discussed. How, how much does that factor into your training?
00:13:11
Speaker
I think with experience of having done other events that go, that last for 24 hours or more, you appreciate that there will be ups and downs in the mood. And I think what was amazing, one of the most amazing things about this particular team experience for me was the how well, how well everyone gelled together and what
00:13:32
Speaker
what a great complimentary bunch of characters we had in the team. The amount of encouragement that the runners gave one another and across because we split into sort of two different car groups and we had radios so that we could talk and the amount of the amount of joking and laughing and support and sort of camaraderie that came out of it was was incredible. So it was really a case that even if you were feeling a bit low and a bit tired and a bit stressed, there was there were people around you who were willing to support and pick up the slack and
00:14:01
Speaker
For me, that was a particular highlight of the weekend. Yeah, because some of you were actually not met before, had you?
00:14:10
Speaker
Yeah, that's true. Quite a lot of people that I, when I first came up with the idea, I sort of, before I spoke with Andy, I had, I think it was five or maybe six of the eight positions filled. And so they were sort of all friends of mine that were from parts of the world in which they'd never even met each other. So yeah, quite a few of the, I think I was the only middle point that knew everybody. Everyone else sort of, you know, obviously the precision fuel and hydration guys, they'll be working together. But other than that,
00:14:38
Speaker
There was very few that sort of knew everybody else. Yeah, there was no one. Yeah, so how does that impact the race? Do you just all kind of get on with it? And I guess you have to learn one another's personalities, don't you?
00:14:54
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, we did get there a little over 24 hours before we started. And I think that first day, so we all got there on the Thursday afternoon and the race started at 6 a.m. on Saturday. So we spent all day Friday sort of hanging out, getting to know each other. As Raph mentioned, we spent, well, Raph undersold there, he said a few hours planning, they ended up spending most of the day as a team planning the route. But yeah, we sort of had that first day and a half, few meals to sort of get to know each other a little bit.
00:15:23
Speaker
Yeah, like Andy said, it was sort of surprising to me how well everyone got on and just gelled as a team and just had a perfect mix of motivation and just people that wanted to do their best for the team and yeah, it ended up just being such a good experience.
00:15:40
Speaker
And afterwards there was just, even though we were so tired, we hadn't slept, you know, everyone had slept a maximum of sort of less than an hour over the previous 36 or 48 hours. We were already so pumped to do something like that again. Maybe even enter the speed project in the US. That was an idea as well. But it just goes to show that just being, you know, we'd all run well over a marathon in distance over the previous day and a half and we'd all hardly slept
00:16:08
Speaker
But we've just had so much fun with it that we were already thinking about doing something again. Yeah, that's amazing. So just talk to me before we get into the fuel and hydration aspects, just talk to me about how you actually organise the relay itself. So how far were you running at a time and what you were talking about, two teams in two cars later on in the event?
00:16:31
Speaker
Yeah, sure. I can start with this. There was a few different ideas in the beginning and some of the experience that Johnny and Andy had had in different similar long events sort of gave us some ideas as well. But what we ended up going with was splitting into two teams of four.
00:16:47
Speaker
So we had two cars, we actually had three cars, but one car was essentially just to bring luggage. So there was really two cars for the runners and we split into two teams of four that were pretty equal on overall sort of abilities of pace if you teamed us as a team of four.
00:17:05
Speaker
And we ended up thinking that the best way to do it would be to do the first 80 kilometers. We'd essentially do legs of 10 kilometers each. So backtracking just a little bit, the teams of four didn't actually kick in or were activated until after the first 80K. So the first 80K, everyone did around about 10 kilometers each. Give or take 1K.
00:17:28
Speaker
So I started, did the first leg, I think it was about 9.3K, and then I handed off to a German friend of mine called Niki, who'd 11K. Fast forward, we did 80K, and then after the 80K mark, we split into two teams of four, and then every team was responsible for around about 45 to 50 kilometers until they would tag onto the next team. And then we would alternate team one, team two, team one, team two through until the very latest stages of the race.
00:17:55
Speaker
And we thought that would work well because it would then mean that every team would have a fairly lengthy recovery period because 45K around about three hours, you know, it will take 20 minutes and it wasn't exactly 45K, it was sort of between 40 and 50K each time. That would then mean that every team would have a period of time where they could eat properly, they could have a good meal, they could even have time to have a nap and a sleep and just have a little bit of a rest instead of feeling like you're just never able to catch that break of having a good meal and a bit of a reset and a bit of a recovery period.
00:18:25
Speaker
And yeah, I think that worked really, really well. I'll let Andy talk about how we changed at the very end, because that was actually his idea to combine the teams, him and Johnny. But that basically took us, that strategy took us to around about 340K mark. So about 50 to 60 kilometres to go, and then we sort of got together as a team and finished it off.
00:18:51
Speaker
Yeah, okay. So yeah, do you want to tell us a little bit about the last leg of it then, Andy? Yeah, I mean, we came so at that point that Matt's talking about sort of 340Ks in, it was about three o'clock in the morning. So everyone's body clock is at its lowest ebb. But we were getting relatively hyped as a group because we were closing in on the leaders. There was a live tracker because every team carried a tracker. We were tracking the team that we'd lost 40 minutes to earlier in the day.
00:19:20
Speaker
they were down to probably i'm gonna say something like 15 minutes ahead at this point and we would we would demonstrably chip it into their lead and the way we would we the way we'd started doing that is by shortening the legs that each runner was
00:19:33
Speaker
was doing, we were enabling ourselves to keep the pace per leg a lot higher. So rather than running 10 and 5k legs, we started running three and two kilometer legs each and having a rapid handover. And then shortly after that, as we combined the team so that at one point all eight of us were running
00:19:52
Speaker
one after the other we were down to running between one and two minutes each but really running flat out and then of course having somewhere in the region of 10 15 maybe 20 minutes of rest and it's amazing how quick you can actually run when when you do repeated sprints like that because for a minute you really are sprinting flat out
00:20:11
Speaker
And then getting 15, 20 minutes of recovery and going again. And so we were just rolling down the road. At this point, it's probably more like four or five in the morning. The sun's coming up. Everyone's feeling a bit more lively. The car's just rolling ahead. The roads are dead quiet. And we were just throwing people out of the car.
00:20:31
Speaker
tagging the runner as they came in, leapfrogging ahead and the guys were running some phenomenal times. I think particularly hats off at this point goes to Nikki who Matt mentioned and Luke who were absolutely running well under three minutes a K for the majority of their stints and it brought our overall average pace, well increased our average pace significantly so that we were really chipping into the lead.
00:21:00
Speaker
Yeah, that's incredible that you can get those paces over such a long distance, because I was going to ask how you balance, you know, what your strategy was, speed versus endurance, because you need both of them, don't you? Yeah, I think what we learned was that it would have been very difficult to do what we did there from the very start, you know, that would be 25 hours of that of repeated intervals would be impossible. But I think what we learned was that actually flipping into shorter intervals
00:21:28
Speaker
relatively early on is a good idea because as soon as you've got 20 or 30 kilometres in your legs as an individual the ability to hold a high pace continuously really drops away but you can stay focused for short distances. A particularly memorable bit for me was during the night time I was paired up with Nikki and we were running away from the road at this point so we were running along essentially a river path
00:21:51
Speaker
where the cars couldn't get to it so we had a bike between us and we were just riding three kilometers on the bike next to the runner and then switching over and we did about three or four stints of three kilometers each but the pace we were able to hold was probably
00:22:08
Speaker
30 seconds a kilometre faster than if we'd have just run that distance straight and it was a really good strategy and I think if we were to do it again we might even consider whether we could just extend the range at which we started doing that because it was what enabled us to go fast. Yeah well it's clearly worked for you and you were victorious in the end so yeah well done.
00:22:33
Speaker
Yeah, I can't stress enough the point Andy first made though is that if we tried to do that strategy in the final 40K early on, it just wouldn't have been sustainable. I feel like we could only sustain that for a couple of hours. So we saved it for the very end and it worked out well. Shall we get on to the challenges then of fueling and hydration over that distance for a team of eight runners? Where do you begin to plan for that? How does
00:23:02
Speaker
Talk us through how you planned for fuel and in hydration. Well, I think the first thing we decided to do was that the strategy around eating was going to be little and often because eating and drinking, because we were all going to be on the go pretty much every... There wasn't more than about two, two and a half hours there.
00:23:27
Speaker
maybe three hours at any point when you weren't gonna be doing anything at all. So, although we did stop and have a couple of meals along the way, basically, I think both teams managed to find takeaway pizza places to get some hot food in. The rest of the time, there was just a lot of grazing and a lot of snacking. And one thing that we were aware of as a team, obviously, is precision fuel and hydration. We worked with athletes doing pretty extreme endurance events the whole time.
00:23:57
Speaker
And it makes you very aware that actually under-fueling and under-hydrating in a long event like that can, if you don't fuel and hydrate enough early on, it can really bite you in the backside later on. So we made sure that we'd got lots of energy gels, lots of chews, lots of bottles of electrolyte drink mix in both of the vehicles.
00:24:18
Speaker
And it was really on the support crew to make sure that when a runner finished doing their leg, something was shoved in their hand to eat and drink and to really keep on top of that. So that was one of the major things. Chris and Raf might be able to talk a little bit more about this sort of, because they do a lot of work with elite athletes, case studies looking at fuel and hydration numbers. So might be able to talk a little bit in more detail about that side of things.
00:24:46
Speaker
Yeah, talk to us about recommendations then, are there any specific guidelines? Sure, well it's a bit of a niche one really, because most of the athletes, all the athletes we work with are dealing with fueling and hydrating whilst they're exercising, whereas because of the stints we were doing were so relatively short, as Andy said, the maximum was 10 kilometres,
00:25:08
Speaker
there was never a point where the runner was actually needing to eat and drink whilst they were running. It was more a case that as soon as they get in the van, they tag over the next runner was sort of thinking about, you know, how do I, how do I get some stuff in, get enough liquid in, get enough fuel on board so that when I go again, I'm not feeling full or sick or, or, you know, leaving the loo or something. So it became a, it evolved quite a lot.
00:25:33
Speaker
along the way. And as Andy said, playing catch up is a very, very difficult game to play. And, you know, for Raf and I, it became, you know, early on sort of ingraining to everyone else that, you know, this this will catch up with you. We all feel good right now. And, you know, because we're doing shorter stints, it probably makes it seem like you don't need much. But it will catch up with you. And so it became exactly as Andy said, rather than only
00:26:00
Speaker
general recommendations. It became just little and often making sure that you were encompassing the whole picture of we've done 10K now and you've got a couple of hours off, but we also still want to be able to run this fast and if not faster in 15, 16 hours time. So keeping an idea of what you've already done as well as preparing for what you were going to do. And I think one of the key things that we learned as a team during that was
00:26:26
Speaker
how well we can incorporate things like caffeine into overnight trips like this. And I think Andy's got a pretty good recollection of how he utilised caffeine in a similar way to what we recommend to athletes, but saw it firsthand basically. So I'll let Andy chat about. Yeah, that was an important one we felt for this event because normally you'd recommend if athletes use caffeine
00:26:48
Speaker
for their events then you would normally recommend they take it before they start and then if it's a long event top up regularly with caffeine throughout in order to keep the levels fairly high in your system but for this event we thought it was it was maybe a bit more strategically wise to have
00:27:04
Speaker
to have a minimal amount of caffeine during the daytime or even close to zero and then actually try and utilise caffeine during the night time when you're starting to feel fatigued and needing to stay awake. So I'm usually a fairly
00:27:20
Speaker
moderate to heavy coffee drinker. I actually stayed largely off coffee and caffeine on the day of the race but then around about 1am, 2am started to take gels with caffeine in. The gels we have have 30 grams of carbs and 100 milligrams of caffeine in each and as soon as I started taking those within 15 or 20 minutes I could really feel the effects of it far more strongly than I normally would because of that little
00:27:48
Speaker
period of abstinence. I think that that really helped with getting through those last few hours when all the hormones in your body clock are trying to send you to sleep and you need to be still firing on all four cylinders. Yeah, that must be tough running through the night actually. I mean, what are you looking out for in athletes? What are the warning signs that they perhaps haven't taken enough fuel or haven't drunk enough?
00:28:16
Speaker
Mood is always a big indicator. When people start to get, you know, start to feel grumpy and tired and hangry, it can be a sign that they've not got enough energy in. And that's certainly one thing. With the hydration side of things, really, it's like you're looking for two things. It's like, do you feel thirsty because you shouldn't really be letting yourself get to a point where you feel really thirsty? And also, are you peeing reasonably regularly? Not like more than you normally would, but it's easy to
00:28:45
Speaker
to sort of go three hours and realise you haven't stopped and had a pee because it was really quite hot during the day. So we were just kind of making sure that we were keeping up. And the other thing was making sure that we kept Raph and Reem and Angus, the people who were doing the driving and bike support. It was a very tough day for them as well, like staying up and driving that distance or riding that distance on a bike.
00:29:09
Speaker
was important and they had to be mentally sharp so making sure that they were fully stocked with electrolyte drinks during the day and cans of coke and things like that was really important. Yeah, I mean just you've mentioned electrolytes there, just talk to us about the importance of those when you're running a summer event, when it's hot outside, why are electrolytes important?
00:29:31
Speaker
Basically, they're important because sodium is the main electrolyte you lose in your sweat. That's the one that's predominant in most good sports drinks. And when you're sweating a large amount over several hours, you can really become quite depleted in terms of both fluid and electrolytes. The more fluid that you drink after a certain point, the more electrolytes you need to take in in order to absorb and retain that fluid in your bloodstream. Because if you just replace water,
00:29:56
Speaker
hour after hour when you're sweating a lot you can actually dilute your body's electrolyte levels down so making sure that we were making sure that we were putting electrolyte tablets in the majority of the drinks that we were having especially during the hotter part of the day and also when we had when we did have the opportunity to stop and have some food we were making sure that we put a little bit of salt on our food or had some things like crisps and other other foods that were salty because
00:30:22
Speaker
Your taste buds do a great job of telling you when you need salt and I have to say a few times, especially late in the evening once I've done a shift in the hottest part of the day, the crisps tasted amazing because my body was obviously craving salt and you have to learn to listen to that and make sure you're getting the electrolytes in as well as the water.
00:30:39
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So is electrolyte something that you would just take during the race? Because we talked about maybe abstaining from caffeine beforehand to have an effect. Is there anything you need to do pre-race to help with fueling and hydration?
00:30:54
Speaker
fueling before the race, we all actually, we carb loaded pretty, pretty handily. We went for pizza and then also went to a pasta restaurant the night before and sort of cleaned their kitchen out pretty, pretty handy when like eight
00:31:09
Speaker
Runners turned up so carb loading is definitely something which is beneficial bits before these kind of events and we did a good job of that with the electrolytes you can take on a little bit more ahead of time usually that's just a bit of salting your food and maybe having a really strong electrolyte drink before you start on the day but
00:31:27
Speaker
you can't do as much, there's not as much capacity to store fluids and electrolytes in the body as there is carbohydrate. So really the pre, the sort of, all of the emphasis on the, on the day prior was about getting enough energy on board. Yeah. Yeah. So it's really crucial to have that support in place, isn't it? To make sure you're getting all that. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I mean, is there anything else we need to, to chat about regarding fuel and hydration, anything we've missed that was important during the race?
00:31:57
Speaker
One thing I'd like to add was in our band, when we sort of split into the two teams, Raf and I had a team of brothers, Andy and Johnny were in the other band. And we sort of, we tried to be team members, as in we were all runners rather than being sports scientists and sort of saying, do this, do that. And a couple of times it was really evident that
00:32:25
Speaker
The symptoms that individual runners, you know, they're all very talented runners. So I've obviously had a lot of experience with fueling, hydrating and long distance events, shorter events, training seven or eight hours a week of running. So highly experienced and just identifying different symptoms. Like Andy said, a couple of times people would jump in the van and just say, I'm really fancy about some vinegar crisps.
00:32:48
Speaker
that to us was sort of a clear amber if not red flag, but they need to do something about getting some electrolytes in because they're potentially a little bit depleted, their bodies are craving it, and all it needed was just a little nudge to suggest that they might need something. You give it to them and then maybe 20 minutes, half an hour later, and they're absolutely right as rain, different person, moods increased and it was
00:33:12
Speaker
Yeah, like, like day and night. And I think it was for us, it was quite easy to sort of identify those symptoms. But then as we started to become, you know, affected by sleep deprivation and tiredness, it sort of became the owners became on all of us. And we had some of the runners that had limited experience with feeling hydration, nagging me to keep eating when I was sort of in and out of the van every
00:33:36
Speaker
20 minutes or so doing a run leg and sort of suggesting that, you know, you need to eat, you need to drink, rolls are reversed. Exactly, as the constant kind of not nagging, but just friendly reminders that you need to keep on top of your hydration, especially through the hotter parts of the day, it got really quite warm. I'm sure Matt can tell you about one particular uphill stim that he had just leaving Luxembourg, where I think he passed through three countries and covered some pretty savage elevation.
00:34:03
Speaker
where he would have been losing a significant amount of fluid and electrolytes in his sweat. And that's the kind of thing that if he doesn't replace when he gets back into the van before his next run, he could find some detriment to his performance later on in the event. Yeah, do you want to tell us a little bit about that, Matt?
00:34:21
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. It was pretty close to halfway through actually the entire journey, potentially just further than that. I think it was our third stint as a team. We handed over from the other team just at the border of Luxembourg and
00:34:36
Speaker
Well, there was a couple of kilometres of Germany before transit. There's this little sort of region around the south end of Luxembourg where Germany, France and Luxembourg are all very close to each other. But yeah, so I started in Luxembourg only for maybe the first couple hundred metres and then I had about two kilometres in Germany of which were very uncomfortable because I was just running straight uphill.
00:34:59
Speaker
And then transitioning to France, and yeah, as Raf put it, I was, my heart rate was just me and Max nearly the whole time because I was just, there was just this particular section that was just going, you know, very, very steep elevation and more or less straight uphill. And finally, Raf said that because he actually didn't see me do this because he's out in the black, but after that I, because I had
00:35:21
Speaker
quite a bit of experience now in bonking and running out of fuel and having cramping in training and in racing. Not actually directly after that leg because I had to have a very short break to do another leg after that.
00:35:37
Speaker
I actually did take in quite a lot of the drink mix that the precision fuel and hydration team brought along, which is very high in sodium, and also one of the caffeine gels that was mentioned before that has 100 milligrams of caffeine, which is essentially the same amount of caffeine as a pretty strong coffee. So I was cognizant of these things and knowing that
00:35:57
Speaker
This is 7pm, 7.30pm. We're going through until 7am. We've got 12 hours left. I've got a lot of running left, probably close to a half marathon left. If I don't stay on top of this fatigue and I don't replace the electrolytes pretty quickly, I'm likely not going to be able to finish very well.
00:36:15
Speaker
I'm very susceptible to muscle cramping. Anyone that's listened to other podcasts I've been on will be probably tired of me talking about it. But the replacement of sodium particularly is helpful for that in preventing them and stopping them from getting a lot worse. So I had a little bit of a load on those things around 7.30 or 8 p.m. So yeah, we're sort of, yeah, it must have been just after halfway because the 25 hours and we finished at 7 a.m.
00:36:43
Speaker
Around that time, I made a point to take quite a lot of the product that the Precision Fuel and Hydration team actually brought along that was in the cars. I didn't have any cramping or really any energy problems in the final stages. Just the context on that leg, I think Matt was down playing it slightly. The man runs or has run under 220 for a marathon.
00:37:08
Speaker
was having to walk at some points up that elevation. I think you covered more than the Boston Marathon in that seven kilometer stint and covered three countries. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty brutal. Yeah, it was a tough leg. And I think that maybe the reason why I walked was because I try to throw blame here. But of course, it's just a fun game, this. But I had no warning that that was coming.
00:37:35
Speaker
that elevation. So I sort of exploded out of the blocks after having a three hour break and sort of took off at, I don't know, three, maybe six minute mile pace or 340 per K or something thinking, you know, I'll be able to hold this for seven K, but little did I know what was around the corner. And I had a little go on camera. I had a little bit of a playful go at Chris for saying, did you know this is coming? And if you did, why didn't you tell me? Because
00:37:58
Speaker
because I went so hard in the first kilometre and a half as we were progressing up the hill that my heart rate got so high. So quickly I started producing lactic acid at a rate that I hadn't been producing for a long time, which forced me to actually have to stop and walk just to let my heart rate drop for about 30 seconds.
00:38:17
Speaker
So, yeah, I think it was poor pacing on my behalf to go out so quickly. I probably should have been a little bit more conservative, you know, because obviously I could see ahead that there was a little bit of, you know, elevation coming, but I didn't realize how it's difficult to describe unless you can sort of obviously see what I was looking at, but I didn't realize how hilly it was really going to be.
00:38:40
Speaker
But, you know, in retrospect, it was one of the funnier and more memorable moments of the whole journey for me, even though it was incredibly tough for that 20 minutes. Yeah. Well, yeah, that was going to be my next question, actually. What were the most memorable moments of the race? What were your favorite bits for each of you?
00:38:58
Speaker
Yeah, I can start. That was one just because it was so unique and so funny. And it was all caught on camera, which we published on YouTube. So I think that also made it funny just to relive. But there were so many, really. I think one really, yeah, there's so many. But the ones that come to mind, I'll just share two quickly so the others can share some. But there was one point
00:39:21
Speaker
at around 2.45 in the morning when our team, which included Chris, who's obviously on the podcast here and also Raf was planning, we were taking a short nap, ready to tackle our next block of 45K. We're sitting in cars in a car park in the middle of nowhere in France
00:39:48
Speaker
outside what seemed to be like an abandoned building. I don't know what it was, but it was dark, so we couldn't even really tell what it was. It probably wasn't abandoned, but it just looked like this building that there's nothing around. We have a quick nap and Johnny, who's riding his bike with the team that's currently
00:40:10
Speaker
running their leg through France. He wakes up the entire team with a very, very funny message that I'm actually probably not allowed to say on a podcast call, which got us very quickly realizing that we have to get ready to get started again.
00:40:24
Speaker
It's cold, it's pitch black, we're in the middle of nowhere with a highway sort of to our left a few hundred meters away and we're running down this dark road with no lights. And you know, there's no way you're going to do something like that on your own. Like you're only rallying to do something like that with a team like we had.
00:40:41
Speaker
But to get started and to get back into it at that time was something that took a little bit of time for us to really get back warmed up. I did the first leg of that block and I just remember thinking when I got given the relay baton, so to speak, that this is rough. This is dark. We've been going for 18 hours now. I just napped for 45 minutes. I feel so tired.
00:41:06
Speaker
My legs are just like bricks. That was a memorable moment shortly after the sun came up. But I think the most memorable moment by far, and I'm sure pretty much everyone would agree, was just the last half an hour when we're looking at the trackers and being like, this is going to come down to a sprint finish.
00:41:25
Speaker
And just the whole team being so pumped to know that we could win this knowing how far behind we were only a few hours earlier. And that we were just in such a positive spirit coming into Strasburg, changing over, as Andy said, every couple of minutes and doing these short, sharp legs. It was just such a unique experience that I've never had anything, never experienced anything like it.
00:41:53
Speaker
And obviously just crossing the finish line and knowing that we'd won. And I don't know if people listening has seen videos, but we literally crossed the line, you know, had a big team harder than with, you know, fist pumping each other and then just behind us and the next team come in like 14 seconds later. We just, we just couldn't believe it that we, it had come down to just being such a, such a close race. But I'll let the other guys share some stories as well. Yeah. Yeah. Please do.
00:42:19
Speaker
Yeah, I'll share a couple of my favourite parts. As Matt said, it was such a unique experience. It's sort of not really comparable to anything I've ever done before. And the first main core memory from it was just probably in the middle of the night. Again, I'm unaware of what time it was, but sort of looking around at these zombie-like people that are total strangers. And the two that were in our team, Luke and Jen,
00:42:47
Speaker
had flown from Houston, they'd flown 10,000 miles to be flying out of a minibus at three in the morning and trying to run at three minutes per kilometer up a steep ass hill. And she just looked at us and said, like, are we absolutely crazy? And I said, well, we are, but you've flown halfway across the world to do this. That makes you at least twice as crazy as us. And it's sort of put into perspective, like Matt said, there's no way you'd be doing this by yourself, let alone giving the effort that we did.
00:43:16
Speaker
And the other main takeaway or best part was similar to what Matt said, that last 40 kilometers, the last marathon that we covered was, you know, I don't know what the exact time was, but it must be close to sort of 210, you know, sub three minute kilometer pace because we were
00:43:33
Speaker
at some point doing 20, 30 second repeats up steepest part of the hills just because we knew that you can lose so much time by fatiguing yourself or pacing yourself up hills that if we just rattle through it quickly, then we can really keep the pace high. And the lads, Luke and Andy in particular, hopping in and out of the van, having competitions over the radio as to who's doing the fastest mile split in there.
00:44:00
Speaker
They're doing like 435, 440 miles in the middle of the night after having already run 30 kilometers each. So it was, yeah, it was pretty epic the whole time, but those are a couple of things to sit down. Yeah, that's incredible teamwork there. Yeah. I've got two really specific memorable things on the trip. And they're both deeply impressive, but for different reasons.
00:44:24
Speaker
The first one is actually a big shout out to Angus, who's behind the camera for the sweat elite videos, which you can see on YouTube. That man must have ridden his bike for 20 hours and was the happiest person on the planet to be there. And he needed so little kind of maintenance. He talked about fueling the people in support group. And I'd say we mustn't, we can't have handed him more than a couple of sandwiches, maybe a gel here or there to get him through.
00:44:55
Speaker
and pulled the team throughout. And the other one was actually Nicky, who we've mentioned a couple of times throughout the podcast so far. There was one point, and one of the more straver, stacked, inclined people on the call couldn't help me out with how fast he traveled for this thing, but he went so fast down a hill that it actually led to one of the members of a competition.
00:45:20
Speaker
competing team at the finish line thinking that he might have cheated and it was a questionable split was the quote. What happened? The man moves so quickly on his feet and I'm not sure how quick that was. Can you remember? It was 2.45 per kilometer. Yeah. Yeah. That's incredible. For about, I think it was about 1.2K. But I mean, that's like world record, pretty close to world record 10K page. It's not far off that. Like it's, you know, very quick.
00:45:48
Speaker
Just jumping in on that with Nicky. I rode his very first leg and had never met the guy and he, as Matt said earlier, he took over from Matt, so he ran the second leg for the team and I was bike support alongside him. And I was genuinely terrified that he was going to implode after about, you know, 2k at the pace he set off. He just looked like he was hunting the whole time. He was running so quick and so aggressively and he just never slowed down so much so that
00:46:17
Speaker
we picked him for our final leg mainly because he was still running the quickest out of anybody. It was phenomenal. Yeah, he led the charge, didn't he? Yeah, he was sort of the beacon for that. The thing that stood out most of all for me as a funny moment during the race happened really near the end because with about 20, 30 kilometres to go, I jumped in the car to drive the second support car with Johnny sat next to me on the radio because we were
00:46:46
Speaker
we were getting really paranoid that the immediate run into Strasbourg, none of us had ever been there before, we had this route on Google Maps, but we knew that if we took one single wrong turn or didn't take advantage of any shortcut, then there was the chance of not winning. So I was driving the support car at the front, sort of clearing the way and making sure that we were getting through everything. We were also concerned about the traffic lights,
00:47:10
Speaker
and we're having to cross numerous big junctions and so the plan was get the car ahead, see the runner through and then leapfrog the the minibus with the other runners ahead but we knew there was a risk that at some point the minibus would get caught a red light and not make it through. Sure enough with about probably what must have been about two kilometers to go
00:47:31
Speaker
I ended up on the correct side of a green light and the mini bus got stopped. I was in the driving seat and one of the runners was coming round the corner, but he was sort of, it was Eric, he was starting to flag because he'd done a bit of a long stint. And Johnny just said to me, he said, Blow, get out the car and start running. So I just had to abandon the car in the middle of the road. Johnny slid across in the driver's seat. I, at this point, had not planned on carrying on running. I looked at my running shoes on, but my shoelaces were flapping.
00:47:59
Speaker
I had a woolly hat on, my driving glasses and Eric tanked me and I just started sprinting and I thought I hope this mini bus gets through the light soon because someone's gonna have to take over and I think then it was Nicky who took over for the final leg potentially but that was extremely funny and I'm sure Angus has got a funny video of some bloke with his shoes untied and a woolly hat on legging it down the main road into Strasbourg.
00:48:26
Speaker
I would love to see that. The other thing as well is credit to Matt for this one. Matt, he wasn't in charge of the nutrition planning, but the finest nutritional move anyone made for the entire thing was booking us into the best curry house in Strasbourg for an amazing curry, a recovery curry after the race. And that was definitely my favourite meal of the entire event.
00:48:49
Speaker
Amazing. It sounds like teamwork really got you through there and helped you win that race then. Yeah, those are some incredible memories.
00:48:58
Speaker
Yeah, I think for me the biggest thing was I've been doing endurance events, be it running races, triathlons, adventure races, kayaking events, mountain biking things. I've done a lot in the last 25 years or so. Rarely, if ever, have I had more fun than I had doing this event or come away with what I think are more long lasting memories. We had a little WhatsApp group
00:49:22
Speaker
running for the event, there is still almost daily activity in that all the weeks later now because it was just a phenomenal team bonding experience and I would say if anyone as a runner, if you've been, if you're listening to this and kind of feeling a little bit inspired to do something like this, if you are feeling at all jaded with the day-to-day, you know, running marathons, running 10Ks, running half marathons,
00:49:46
Speaker
doing this as part of the team is such a rewarding experience and does like reinvigorate your enthusiasm for the sport if it's flagging. And for me, it made me feel like a kid again, basically doing this is phenomenal. Yeah, it sounds like a lot of fun. Have you all got anything else planned over the next year or so? Are you planning anything else exciting?
00:50:12
Speaker
Potentially speed project. We'll see. We haven't we haven't entered anything or really made any moves, but there's been a lot of discussion in the group chat Otherwise, you know individually we all sort of do different different things Chris backed up the following week and did a was it a half I meant I've got a couple of marathons coming and yeah, we all sort of individually do do marathons and half marathons I think but as a team, we definitely hope to do something similar to that There's not too many things like that around the world as mentioned. It's but
00:50:42
Speaker
I wouldn't be surprised if we're either entering next year's Euro trip, again, not confirmed or not really fully discussed yet. But yeah, like Andy said, we've had so much fun and there's so much chat going through that WhatsApp group even still today about different memories and different funny things that happened that I wouldn't be surprised if we rally together as a team and go after trying to complete or even be on the podium or win another event that's similar.
00:51:08
Speaker
Yeah, there's clearly some talent there as well. So yeah, let us let you do let us know if you're up to anything else. So it's been wonderful talking to you all today. Thank you for joining us for the podcast. Can you just tell our listeners where they can find out a bit more about you? You on social media website?
00:51:26
Speaker
Yeah, sure. I'll start. So, yeah, I'm Matt, obviously, Sweater Lead is on Instagram. We're probably more, well, we're far more active on YouTube and on podcasts than anything else. We tend to feature professional athletes in the running and triathlon space, and we turn up to training sessions of theirs and join them and film it and put it on YouTube.
00:51:48
Speaker
on podcast, all sweat elite branding, so if you're just searching sweat elite, you'll find it. And on podcasts, we tend to interview athletes about training and build ups to certain events so that people can maybe learn a thing or two about how they go. And as mentioned in the side of the call, every endurance athlete needs a, or they're not going to perform to their best without a really solid feeling of hydration.
00:52:10
Speaker
product or partner brand and I've been working with precision fuel hydration in many different ways for about a year now. I'll let Andy take over and share where you can learn more about them. Yeah, thanks Matt. If anyone's interested in a bit more in-depth on the fueling and hydration side of what they're doing,
00:52:31
Speaker
go to precisionfuelandhydration.com. You can also follow us on social media on Precision F and H. The guys who you've been listening to on here, Minty and Raph, are part of our sports science and athlete support team.
00:52:47
Speaker
who offer free video calls with anyone so if you've got questions about your fuelling and hydration for an upcoming event and would like to chat with the team you can find a link in the footer of our website to book a free video call to do that because as a business we're highly focused on it.
00:53:05
Speaker
sharing our experience and educating athletes on the best way to fuel and hydrate for what they do. So it won't be a sales pitch. We won't just talk to you about our products and our services and things. But if you've got questions about fueling and hydration for any insurance event, then come and visit the website and find us and we would love to hear from you. Thank you very much. Thanks so much for joining us. And it's been great chatting. Thanks, Michelle. Appreciate your invitation. Yeah, thank you, Michelle. Thanks, Michelle.