Impossible FM #001: How To Run 100 Miles with Matt Frazier

Hey everybody. Welcome to Impossible FM the show where we talk about pushing your limits and doing the impossible in fitness, gritness, business, and life. I’m your host Joel Runyon, welcome to the show. Let’s get started!

Hey everybody. Welcome to episode number 001 of Impossible FM. On today’s show we’ve got Matt Frazier of NoMeatAthlete.com talking about how he ran a hundred miles. Yes, 1-0-0 miles in a single day. We’re going to talk about mental preparation and toughness that it takes to prepare for something like that. The training you have to go through, as well as his new book, No Meat Athlete. Great name, right? But even if you’re not an ultrarunner, a marathoner, or a vegetarian, (and I’m definitely not a vegetarian), you’ve got something to learn from Matt Frazier, because the mental toughness, grit, and preparation that it takes to train for something like an ultramarathon – that’s a hundred miles – is a little bit ridiculous, a little bit impossible. So without giving too long into, lets go to the interview. Without further ado… Let’s do this.

JOEL:
Yeah I’m here with Matt Frazier of NoMeatAthlete.com and recent author of No Meat Athlete the book. Welcome to the show, Matt.

MATT:
Thanks Joel, glad we are able to finally do this.

JOEL:
I know, it only took us a few weeks, or even months, to actually get this going. But we are live and we are doing it. Really happy to have you on the show. I’ve known Matt for a couple of years now, and he writes over at nomeatathlete.com. Based on running and other athletics on a plant-based lifestyle, Matt, you wanna just give a quick run-through of what you do at the site and kind of your approach to running and fitness in general?

MATT:
Sure, you summed up most of it. That’s what it is – it’s the crossroads between running specifically indoor running for the most part. We’re not talking about 100-meter dash or anything like that. And then plant-based diet which could be vegan, vegetarian, or just kind of in between. A lot of it is whole foods-based. There are I think more than a few readers who are paleo dieters like yourself and I try to keep things as simple as possible. I’m not the type of guy that gets crazy, all the technical nutrition or all the technical running stuff. I have 2 kids and a normal life and everything else going on. I have a lot of the same aims as I think you do. It’s kind of trying to find the 20% that makes the 80% of the difference. Not getting super super crazy and technical. Making, doing stuff that works that people are going to use in regular life.

JOEL:
Yeah, so you’ve been doing it for.. geez, how many years now?

MATT:
Five years.

JOEL:
Five. Man. You’re like a veteran here. How did you get started? What prompted you to start the site? And how has it evolved since you started it? I mean with me, I kind of just started because I was like, “oh, maybe I’ll try this indoor triathlon” and I started this list and tried a couple of things and then it evolved into some __ thing. Did you started out knowing that it was going to be this big vegan plant-based lifestyle community? Or did it start somewhere a little bit different.

MATT:
No, I had no idea that it would grow into this. And by the way, I had no idea that indoor triathlon was what you did first. I never heard of that.

JOEL:
Yeah, it was the first time I ever did. It was a crappy indoor triathlon at Lifetime Fitness. I did it because I was scared I was gonna drown in a pond, in a real triathlon. If I drown in a pool, they can fish my body out a little bit easier. So that was my rationale.

MATT:
Yeah, you seem like a liability suit. Watch over that. Anyway I was training to qualify for the Boston Marathon. That was my big goal. Had been for 5 or 6 years at that point. My first marathon took be 4 hours and 53 minutes. So to get down to a 3:10 was at point, that impossible goal that seems bizarre. For some reason I got the idea that I could do it. Started taking major time off my marathon and finally got to a point, about 20 minutes away. So I was about a 3:30 marathon, when all of a sudden I started to started feeling this urge to be a vegetarian. Entirely for ethical reasons. I though that if I would grow vegetarian. That would screw up the entire training. Either the protein, the calories, everything else. Just didn’t know that there are people out there that who, you know, weren’t just making a plant-based diet work, but actually chose to do it at the highest level because of the way, what it did for them and how they recovered from it. But I didn’t know that stuff. I said, I’m going to just start a blog. I don’t care about Boston, I’m gonna do the ethical thing here. So if kinda running goes to hell so be it, but I’m gonna try it. And I started a blog about it thinking that it will be interesting to share recipes and just kind of connect with anyone else who had done it– I thought this rare combination of trying to be an indoors runner and a vegetarian. Within 6 months of that, the site had definitely gained an audience – that was encouraging. But within 6 months I qualified for Boston. And I guess at the time when I actually decided to go vegetarian I was going 3:20 marathon. But I really kinda plateaued and I was frustrated. That’s what prompted me to say, you know what, this trajectory’s not gonna get me to Boston so why not just mesh with it and just see what happens. So I took off the last 10 minutes of my marathon time in those 6 months that I was vegetarian and from there I just kinda didn’t look back. Went further into plant-based towards completely vegan which I am now, and got into ultrarunning for a while. So I did some 50-mile runs and then recently my first 100 mile run.

JOEL:
Yeah it’s interesting because I don’t necessarily think a lot if my audience is plant-based. We’ve got quite a few vegetarians and we have few vegans pop up every once in a while and so, I think readers I might say tend to shift a little bit more Paleo or whatever. But the thing I’ve always said is that I don’t have necessarily any innate things against plant-based lifestyles. It’s not something I’m personally very familiar with because I haven’t done it a lot myself. But it’s one of the things, I always say, I never argue with results and if you can make a change and you drop 20 minutes off your marathon time like that. That’s crazy to me because I’m not like this superfast runner, you know. I’m not Jason Fitzgerald. I’m not the Speedy Gonzales runner or whatever. It’s always really interesting to me to see someone like you drop from like – you said your first marathon was 4:50. That’s a HUGE drop. That’s 2 hours, basically. In a matter of just a couple of years.

MATT:
Yeah, to me it was a good 7 years in total before I finally got there. But still, I’m still as proud of it as I would be otherwise. But yeah, what you were saying about you can’t argue with results – that’s why I wrote the post about the Paleo thing. That vegans, Paleos, are not quite diferrent. And you contributed to it. You know like I said if people say.. A lot of people in the vegan community will say, well meat is poison that’s why you say vegan athletes doing way. But you also see Paleo athletes doing well and winning events. So I really think the common ground, at least in the short term, makes the big difference is the whole foods thing. You know focusing on whole foods versus processed foods and that’s a common thing that vegans and Paleos have if you’re doing either one of them right. 95% of the eaters don’t have. It’s not like it’s all that different. Like you said. You can’t argue with results. On either diet there’s long term results, you know that are still not totally clear. But in the short term you see both, because they are on whole foods- you see they’re doing well.

JOEL:
No, it’s one of the things you know, you cut out the crap out of your diet, which is what most people eat. And all of a sudden like it doesn’t even matter what diet you’re on. It’s the non-crap diet and all of a sudden, performance boost across the board, and you’re like, whoa. Maybe I wasn’t… it’s not rocket science after all. You said you started to get into ultrarunning. How long have you been doing that? Because that’s one of the areas that I’m personally interested in. Not because I’m necessarily, I don’t even love running that much. I’m not even that great at running. but I really like endurance running from the mental perspective of, listen, you’re out here and at some point when you’re doing these ultras, like you’re in pain or you’re hurting or it’s tough. It’s not a unique experience but it’s one of those things that you have put… it’s basically a competition with yourself and you have to decide how far you’re gonna push yourself and how far you’re going with things even if you don’t feel like continuing. So you got into it a couple of years ago. But how did that happen?

MATT:
It was 2010, I had just qualified for Boston at the end of 2009 and was kinda like, you know, I’ve had this goal now for 7 years. This huge, this north star basically of my life. This is what your life is for right now. And all of a sudden that was gone and I didn’t know what to do. So I was sort of confused and kinda oddly, in a weird place. But also really relieved to be done with this huge goal that had been my singular focus for all this time. So I just started thinking, what do I wanna do, what seems impossible, what seems like, right now I could not do this, what seems unthinkable. And to be that was running 50 miles. More than getting my marathon down to another 10 minutes to 3 hours or something. And I said, you know I’m just gonna do it, I’ve seen people do it and as has hard as it seemed I believe I could do it with the training. So I did that so I ran the first one. The first 50-miler in June 2010. And 3 months later I did another one up in Vermont. A lot harder for sure. And then I just kind of got addicted for the exact reasons you said. The ones that have become so much of a mental thing than a physical thing. It doesn’t mean that I’m not.. you know a 3:10 marathon is great but that’s not a physically gifted marathon. That’s someone who worked really hard to get there and manages to barely squeak into Boston. But you know, with the mindset thing. When it becomes a mental battle against yourself– how long you can endure this? That’s what kind of interested me and that’s what made me stay with that.

JOEL:
That’s awesome. And you said you did a couple of 50-milers and then you recently did the 100-miler this summer, right?

MATT:
Yeah, first time was back in the end of July at Burning River in Cleveland. From Cleveland to Akron, Ohio. A good mix of trails and roads, I think that’s about 80% trails and it was amazing. It was an incredible experience.

JOEL:
How did you pick that one out? How did you even get into like, hey I wanna run, I wanna head to Cleveland, of all places. And do this one and then how did that race go? Was it a whole hundred? Was it rainbows and unicorns, or you get past 26 and things started to go downhill. How did that race happen for you?

MATT:
Yes, so I knew I had wanted to do a 100 for a while and I actually signed up for one maybe a year and a half or two years before I even started this training. And just for whatever reason – never got out and even started the training for this race that I have signed up for. And now through my blog, it’s like, get the accountability and all that and never even when I’m quitting one run. And I think at that point for me, the 100 mile goal was just kind of too much, it was unthinkable that I would want to get myself to run 100 miles and I never even started. So it felt like this monkey on my back almost that I had to get this thing done. There were times for sure that it felt like it was not going to happen. I was not in the right mindset to do that. But I read a couple of books, Scott Jurek who’s a famous ultrarunner put out a book called Eat and Run last year. I guess,no I guess it was in the very early beginning of 2012 or Spring 2012. I read that one along with Rich Roll’s book, another vegan endurance guy.

JOEL:
That’s Finding Ultra?

MATT:
Finding Ultra, yep, by Rich Roll. And just.. you know, it felt like. I read those two books, and in the same two weeks, I was like, I’m gonna get this thing done somehow. I went out and started training. I kinda just picked the race because it was convenient. I live in Asheville, North Carolina, so it was the nearest race to me with the timing was right, the difficulty was.. I didn’t want Western States in my first one. Not that I’m..thinking.. I need to do a lottery to get in and all that to get in there but, you know 100 miles is daunting enough for me as a challenge, I don’t need the 14,000 foot peaks and whatever else this first time around. So I found this one in Cleveland that wasn’t too easy because I didn’t want a totally flat road one. Which brings its own challenges of course. But you know, it seemed like a real 100 miles. It seemed like a typical 100 miler. I wanted the full experience but not the crazy out-west experience. Then I started training. I used a plan from Brian Powell’s book, he has a book called Relentless Forward Progress. This is the guy who runs irunfar.com. Just did that. It was a 6-month program, did that, put it all in, got it, and probably 90% of the runs of so. And then and went out there and did it. It was certainly, uncertainty going into it because the most that you do in the training to 100 miles, in any one day is around 50 miles. You do 50, maybe 100k which is 62 miles. You can’t practically much more than that in the training. You can do back to backs and all sorts of things to try to get more. But I went out there and it wasn’t all rainbows by any means, but it also was not the worst day of my life, which what I fully expected. I thought it would be just total misery, miles, 70-80 when you’re in the pitch black and thinking I’m really not close to being done. That’s just the lowest of lows and that’s when the real test comes. But for me that moment came around mile 50 when it was super muddy, when 3 of the miles took me an hour and a half. And I think about that time I was doing about a 13-minute pace or something for the miles which is what I was shooting for. But 3 miles took an hour and a half and I wasn’t even halfway done, it was super muddy, and I was sliding downhills and I was just thinking, I don’t know if I can finish this thing. And I had a moment I sat down to change my shoes because all my feet were blistered up, it was muddy and I hadn’t bought socks with me for this 26-mile stretch. I forgot to bring socks or put on the right kind of shoes on, because I wasn’t expecting it to be so muddied. Yes, so the feet kinda went really bad and I sat down, I was being bitten by mosquitoes, and I was thinking. I’m in mile 45 now, if I get to 50-mile, the 8th station, and quit, that would be so much better than continuing. It would feel so much better and within like 30 seconds of considering this, the answer just kinda came to me. You’re not going to quit this race. All the stuff you’ve done, all you’ve written about it. You know you’re not actually going to quit, right? Once I thought that, that was it. It was the entire last 50-55 miles which, everyone says the worst, the hardest. I never thought once about quitting. it was certainly painful, the blisters got worst and worst, but the idea of quitting never really came up again. Which was amazing. I’m still affected by that experience. Just that moment. It was just incredible. And that’s what ultrarunning is about.

JOEL:
Yeah it’s that mindset shift, where you shift from this idea like, oh, can I do it? It doesn’t matter if I’m going to be.. my feet will be bleeding. At that point, it’s happening, you know? You shifted from, oh I think I might be able to hopefully do this, possibly, one day, to maybe. I’m imposing my will in this situation I’m going to do this.

MATT:
The analogy to like, real life, to any other challenge, is that– it almost sounds like we’re rehearsed this to make this analogy so perfect, but that’s.. in any huge challenge, that’s such a viable mindset to have.

JOEL:
I did this 112-mile bike race in May in Indiana, of all places, and I basically showed up and I was like showed up, and was like, okay I’m gonna do this. I didn’t train for it at all. And I got probably 50 miles in when just everything went to hell. It started raining, we started to have 40-50 mile per hour winds. We started to get hail coming down. The back half of the bike race was just hills out of nowhere, you know, in the middle of Indiana. You don’t have any hills in the rest of the state. And just rolling hills, and when you’re getting these 40-50 mph winds.. and they’re taking riders off the road. And I remember specifically having a very similar moment, I got of my bike at one point and I was getting some water and I just thought, I don’t care, I will walk the rest, I will, you know, I will fall off my bike, I will skid myself up. I don’t care but I’m finishing this race. I’m not gonna let this stupid weather. It just came to a point where my mind shifted. It says, I’ll be out here for 20 hours, I don’t care how long this takes me. I’m not losing. This is a personal thing. Me versus the race. And when I shifted it sucked and it still sucked but it was like.. it’s only going to suck for so much more time before I’m done and I win.

MATT:
Right. And it does suck. And that’s why people do this stuff. In Scott Jurek’s book, like I mentioned, he says, the reason he does this, and I mean, he’s great, he’s running these things twice as fast as I am. But he says the reason is when you get to that point when it does totally suck and all the comfort you possibly have is gone, and all the strength is gone, and the only thing that feels like is still there pushing you is your will, what’s inside you. He said that’s what it’s about. You see all that exposed and you feel it for the first time. In many people’s lives. Because a lot of people would never get themselves to that point in any endeavor. They said that’s like a meditative experience. It wasn’t that for me, but it was definitely a self-discovery moment for sure.

JOEL:
No, I mean that is… whatever that moment is, I think you know if there is a word for it. But that is the thing that I’m always chasing. Just figuring out.. there’s no one else around, you’re by yourself and you have to figure out if you’re made of whatever it takes or not. But I know we talked earlier and sitting down and thinking about this. 100 miles seems not for a lot of people. I’ve done a 50k, I’ve done some longer runs here and there. I’ve done ultras a little bit and hopefully I can be doing some more in the future. But 100 miles seems so out of the realm of possibility for most people. But like I said, you know, until you do it, you don’t really even get close. You get 50 miles here, you might do 100k here, but you never really get to 100 miles until you actually sign up for the race, you show up, and you do it. So if someone’s sitting here and they’ve maybe done a marathon, maybe they haven’t done a marathon yet but are thinking about it and maybe a couple of years down the road they’re thinking of doing a 100-miler, what are some practical ways that they can get started with that. How can they actually go and make that happen?

MATT:
The first thing, the most important think that you can possibly realize at first is that it’s not as hard as you think. I remember when I had done a few marathons and a friend told me that this other guy from high school had done a 100 mile race. And this is the first any of us had heard of this. And he’s like, this guy ran 100 miles. And I though I was great for running marathons. I was just like, I was almost in denial, because I didn’t know people did this. And I was like, do you have any idea how it feels to finish a marathon and just collapse in the grass and be totally done. And I thought, it doesn’t seem possible. I almost didn’t believe that someone could do that. And what I’ve learned from doing all the 50s and then.. all the 3 50s. And then doing a hundred, is that it’s not hard in that way. Yes it’s hard, for the ways we’ve talked about. You have to really learn how to be okay with discomfort and how to not quit. But it’s not some elite physical accomplishment who’s reserve for some elite few. It’s about practicing, you get up to 50 miles with training, and there are some painful moments there just like there are in 100. But it’s not like you’re keeping up your marathon pace the whole time. For most people marathon pace seems slow, because it’s a marathon compared to a 5k. But if you try to go at a marathon pace and keep doing that, you would die after a marathon and that would be the end of it. So my first marathon and then 100 took me 5 hours and 45 minutes when I probably could have done it in 3:20 or 3:30 on that day. You intentionally go way way slower. The mindset along with the pace just shifts entirely. You stop at 8 stations for rest. You get your blisters worked on in the middle of the night like I did. You walk up hills. I mean, it’s a very very different experience from the marathon stress or the half-marathon stress where you hurry to the water stop. You don’t want to stop and even walk. So it’s just really different. It’s not as hard as people think. And along the same line, it’s not nearly the mileage that people think. If the marathon takes 30 or 40 miles a week, then to do a 100 must take 100 miles a week. And for me it took 100 miles a week at most. That was the really peak of the training. Most weeks were 40-50. You do a lot of long weekend things. Most of my training was 7-mile runs on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or so. And then a long run Saturday and slightly less long run Sunday. Weekends were, you’d be gone 3-4 hours on a Saturday but you know, it wasn’t this insane crazy commitment all of sudden. So I would say those are the important things to know first, and then you can get into kinda of what you can do too. What would be the first things to start with, you wanna get into that too.

JOEL:
Yeah, just real quick. The first thing I noticed when I did the mile ultra. You see all these people you would not expect doing ultras. You see all these guys. I saw this one guy. He had to be like 75+ years old and he’d done marathons in all 50 states I think twice. And he was working on ultras in all 50 states. He was barely even running. He was so old. He was shuffling all over the place. But this dude just had… I can’t even imagine at that age. He had this, rock solid mentality that he was gonna do it. It might take him 7 and a half hours to 8 hours to finish this 50k but he was gonna do it. But yeah, let’s jump into the practical things that people can really do to start getting into ultras and maybe 100 mile, if that’s something they wanna do.

MATT:
Sure. You’re right- it’s so much a mental thing, that you see people who just don’t look like they’re in shape for it. And I’ve run with so many people who just go out and do their normal 30-miles a week, whatever, and keep that all year round. And then they’ll go do the 50 if it comes a state away or a 4-hour drive. Or they go to 100 miles that they do every year. And they just go out and do it because I’m telling you it’s about being good at not quitting. Leo from Zen Habits along with Scott, they just did a 50-mile run. And Leo, I think had not planned on it, wasn’t that prepared, what I told him going in I said, you are good at not quitting. All the stuff you do, and most people listening to this call probably would imagine, along with you, yourself Joel, have some experience and skill at not quitting things and learning how to persist. So we’re talking to a good number of people who have a very high chance of success, I might say. So, anyway, how to actually get started doing it? Besides, you have to get up to marathon distance. You have to run a marathon first. There are so many training plans and you can pick any of them and do the one that fits for your schedule. And then it’s a matter of extending that into a 50k which is really just a matter of learning how to do trail running. Maybe do some longer runs on the weekends, like lengthen your run. But mostly just, you can keep a marathon plan and just lengthen the long runs by 3-5 miles for the most part. And you can get that ultrarun if you are on trails. The jump to 50 is a bit one. But the interesting thing about that is that just like the 100 where you don’t train over a 50 or a 60 mile run, you don’t really go over 30 miles when you go out and do that 50. So what you can basically do if this was your way of doing it. You can go run that first 50k and use that 50k as your big 50 mile training run. That’s a very common thing to do. A lot of people like to put in back-to-back 20 miles. Do 20 on a Saturday and do 20 on a Sunday. That’s a good thing to do, kinda simulates the experience of being out there, running on tired legs, but even that jump isn’t that huge. I didn’t really follow a plan for mine. I just did a marathon plan and made sure that I got in a 26-mile training run and then a 30-mile training run. Then you just go out there and do it. You do it slowly, of course. You walk hills, take it really slow, even take some walk breaks in the beginning if that’s going to be what it takes to slow you down. The other big thing I guess, I mentioned, walk hills. That something that you should train on. Because if you’re gonna walk hills, which is an essential strategy for the first 50+ mile ultramarathon. Even a 50k, I’d say you should be walking from the beginning, and have a much better day than if you don’t. Assuming you’re not out there trying to win the race. But you should practice walking hills. And practice running slow. Because those are entirely different muscles from your normal 8-minute pace, if that’s what you go out and do all the time. And walking uphill is huge. You’re entirely shifting the muscles you’re using and the way that it feels, so go get that training in as much as you can.

JOEL:
That’s like a mental shift. You have to like force yourself to do it because there’s this ego piece of you, that goes, “if I’m not running this whole thing, then I’m not.. then I’ve given up and I’m being weak.” Then you start realizing in ultras almost everybody walks hills. Like it’s almost a bad… well not everybody. The guys who are killing it aren’t, but it’s almost a bad use of your energy to try to run a hill the same speed you’re gonna walk it. It’s almost mentally defeating to try to run some of these hills. When you get to these hills you purposely walk ’em because you can save a lot of energy and you kinda give yourself a resting period, right there too.

MATT:
Yeah, that’s exactly what it is. You don’t go that much faster by running up a steep hill and you save a lot of energy by not running. One of the things that you will see– you know who are the first-time ultrarunners are, or the first time trail runners are, because they’re the ones who pass everybody on the hills and then they get passed on the downhills or later in the race. It definitely comes back to bite you. And you’re right– you need to just like, it’s hard the first time. Just like it’s hard in the first marathon you do to understand that you have to start slowly. I made that mistake, everyone makes some mistakes. And I made that mistake in my first ultra, too. You have to just kind to swallow that pride and understand this is what happens. In a 100 when I was running there at 8AM, I had to keep telling myself, you would probably be out here running at this time tomorrow. You absolutely cannot burn any extra energy right now. And you should take that same mindset into a first 50-miler or first 50k. Not just a 100. So the very last tip is that you have to learn about nutrition. It’s about.. ultrarunning is about being good at not quitting like I said. Having that mileage base and having the basic capacity to run for a while without getting tired. But then it’s about who can fuel themselves without having disaster happen. And the only way you’re really gonna figure that out is by testing it for yourself. Testing is a very common thing in a lot of endeavors besides ultrarunning but a lot of people don’t think to do that during runs, but even when you’ve kinda figured out the nutrition, I think you should still use your longer days as these precious few opportunities to actually vary it and see if some food makes you feel a little bit better or see if something makes you worse, then absolutely eat that no matter what. If you come across that in the 8th station and you’re hungry and it seems good… because in an ultra there’s all kind of junk food and weird stuff in the 8th stations.

JOEL:
M&Ms and coca cola and stuff like that I’d never seen before. I was like okay, what’s going on here.

MATT:
Yeah, because I suspect the reason that’s all there is because that’s what makes people comfortable. And 90% of the people out there are there to finish the race. That is the victory if you finish the 50 mile or the 100 mile or whatever. That’s the victory for you. So that food is not gonna do anything for your performance. It’s just not. Sugar is gonna be better if your stomach can handle it. That stuff is about keeping your brain happy and your stomach just satiated.

JOEL:
It’s a morale boost, almost if nothing else.

MATT:
Yeah, it’s like one of few things that actually feels good that is going right so you might as well have that happen rather than eat the sugar and have your stomach feel like you wanna puke again. So, again, the guys who are winning this thing for the most part are the women winning the women’s division. Well, winning outright. Which just happened, by the way. A lot. They’re eating the performance food. Like buying large. Some who will eat the junk food, sure, but they know what to do to win. But for most people, like us, it’s about staying comfortable. So, it’s okay to eat that junk food, I kind of learned to save that till the end. Because it has some negative side effects and it could be a good boost at the end but it’s something you would do the entire time.

JOEL:
Yeah, but I really like the tip about actually practicing nutrition on your long runs because a lot of people, especially if you get up to those distances you’re gonna have a couple of long runs by the end of it that are not comfortable, but at that point, you’re more just like getting used to the mileage and you’re not dying on the 20 miles. It’s gonna be tough, but you’re not dying on it. And so if you get to the point when you’re getting to some of those longer runs and when you’re getting to the point when they’re not necessarily comfortable but you’re getting use to them, well use those times to actually practice nutrition and try out different things because it’s way better to do that in a training run and you know, experience the consequences than it is to try something on race day and then have something bad happen.

MATT:
Yeah. Yeah. Which happens all the time to people. The more you can test it, the more you can avoid that stuff. And simulate that race day by doing a shorter race and get the exact same experience. The same wake up time, all that stuff. Nothing beats experimenting on yourself when it comes to nutrition for a race.

JOEL:
Yeah, definitely. We’ll that’s awesome man. I’m glad we’re able to pull this interview together, actually get you on the show together. Finally, it’s been a couple of months in the works. But as far as all the other work, nomeatathlete.com. What else can people find if they come to your site, and what are the things that are happening with you.

MATT:
Yeah, I mean nomeatathlete.com is the place to go. We’re on facebook, google plus, and all that, under No Meat Athlete, twitter. But yeah, we have a podcast too, also called No Meat Athlete in iTunes store. I wrote a book, as you mentioned, also called No Meat Athlete. It seems to be the name of everything I do. And actually just finished a book tour, I went across the country in my car for 2 months basically. That’s where we met in person, in Chicago. At the Chicago Diner. Yeah, so I just got back from that and I’m very much chilling out now but still trying to put together some ebooks and working on a little bit of a community-type site. So anyway all that is going, it’s at nomeatathlete.com, there’s recipes, training plans, general nutrition guidelines, my ramblings. What you expect from a blog with that name I guess.

JOEL:
So, nomeatathlete.com. If they wanna get your book it’s on Amazon right.

MATT:
Yeah, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Independence, all that. I have a page in my site called nomeatathlete.com/book-info where it’s just like links to all that, a bunch of blurbs from cool people, so.

JOEL:
Alright, we’ll keep all that in the shoutouts along with your podcast. And then you have a Boston qualifying site right, too?

MATT:
Yes, runyourbq.com with Jason Fitzgerald, so you mentioned who is much faster than either of us. He’s the actual fast guy. My job there is to be the guy who started out at 4:53 and got down to Boston. Which is useful I think. Because there’s a lot of people who joined who are at that level and you gotta know how to do that, because it’s a lot way to go.

JOEL:
It gives you something to relate to because, look at Jason running like a 2:20. And it’s like, man, when you see that progress. That was the big thing from me. You get models out. You get people saying, Matt’s a normal guy. Got 2 hours off his time. You gotta put them to work. You gotta put in a lot of work. But if you put in the work, you can do a lot of really cool things, so. Awesome man. So I will have links to all these in the shoutouts. Matt Frazier, No Meat Athlete. Thank you so much for being here, and we’ll talk again soon.

MATT:
Alright. Thanks Joel. This is fun.
Hey everybody thanks for listening to the Impossible FM podcast. For more tips, blog posts, podcasts, videos, and a whole lot more, check out ImpossibleHQ.com. Until next time I’ll see you guys next Monday morning, right here behind the mic at 8:00 AM Eastern Standard Time. Until then, get out there, go do something that pushes your limits, and do something impossible.