What does it take to win one of the world’s longest and most grueling endurance events—and how do you do that aged 52? Listen in to find out!
Episode Transcript
Rob Pickels 00:04
Hello, and welcome to Fast Talk, your source for the science of endurance performance. I’m your host, Rob Pickels, here with Coach Connor. Ultraman. Believe it or not, there is a bigger challenge than Ironman when it comes to triathlon, and this World Championships covers three days and 320 miles while circumnavigating the big island of Hawaii. Today we’re discussing the unique needs of this event, and the training needed to be successful. However, there are many takeaways for endurance athletes of all kinds, regardless of the distance you’re tackling. Today, we’re learning from Dede Griesbauer and, as you’re going to find out, she knows a thing or two about success across multiple sports and distances. We’ll be sharing her unique insights into training, planning, dealing with setbacks, and ensuring longevity in the sport that you love. We’re fortunate to round out our team today with our very own EK Lidbury. So get your crew ready, because you’re going to need them and let’s make you fast. Hey, listeners, it’s Rob Pickels here from Fast Talk Laboratories. We love sharing our endurance sport science content with all of you. To help with that we’ve taken fasttalklabs.com out from behind the paywall. Now, non-members have limited access to our hundreds of articles, videos and pathways from experts like Trevor Connor, Dr. Stephen Seiler, Alan Couzens, Dr. Andy Pruitt, Dr. Stephen Cheung, and even myself. Head over to fasttalklabs.com to learn from our endurance sports science knowledge base today.
Trevor Connor 01:40
Well, today, we have a bit of a special episode, not only are we going to talk about Ultraman, but we have the newly minted World Champion of Ultraman and, very excited to dive into this, but just to give you an idea, we’ve all talked about Ironman, which – your winner of that event is going to be about eight hours and it’s pretty crazy, you do a very long swim, you do 112 mile bike ride and then you run a marathon – and that, compared to an Ultraman, is…
Rob Pickels 02:11
Nothing?
Trevor Connor 02:12
Nothing. Short.
Rob Pickels 02:13
Nothing.
Trevor Connor 02:14
Warm up.
Dede Griesbauer 02:15
It’s shorter.
Trevor Connor 02:17
So, welcome, Dede.
Dede Griesbauer 02:19
Well, thank you. Thank you for having me.
What is an Ultraman?
Trevor Connor 02:21
And, why don’t we jump there first, tell us a little bit about what an Ultraman is and why anybody is insane enough to even think about doing this?
Dede Griesbauer 02:29
Well, Ultraman is essentially an ultra triathlon – I think a lot of people assume that it’s sort of a – either a double Ironman or some sort of factorial of an Ironman distance, but they are truly distances all unto themselves, the similarity being that it does combine swimming, biking, and running. So the distances for Ultraman, it’s across three days. Day one, we start with a 10k or a 6.2 mile swim, straight into a 91 mile bike. That’s the end of day one. We go home, we go to sleep.
Rob Pickels 02:58
Real quick – that’s the day one and you started with a 10k. I’m like, that’s an easy run – and then she said “swim” and I said, “Oh, we’re in for a ride here”. Here we go.
Dede Griesbauer 03:10
We’ve only just begun.
Rob Pickels 03:11
Day one.
Dede Griesbauer 03:11
So day 1, 10K swim, 91 mile bike. Day 2, 171 mile bike, and then day two is a double marathon. So if you add up the distances, for me as an athlete, and anyone who knows me, it is the perfect distance because it’s a longer swim than a double Ironman, it’s a longer bike than a double Ironman, but it’s just a double marathon. So it’s a relatively short run, which is right up my alley.
EK 03:37
Wow. First time anybody’s ever said that on Fast Talk. “It’s just a double marathon.”
Dede Griesbauer 03:41
“It’s just a double marathon.”
Trevor Connor 03:42
Do you even bother tying up your shoes?
Dede Griesbauer 03:46
I just stuck a gel on my pocket and off I went…
Rob Pickels 03:48
Oh, there you go. Well, that would work for me because I would be walking the entire thing start to finish so…
EK 03:56
Yeah, but Dede, you’ve got like some serious pedigree and caliber in the sport. So Dede has been a professional athlete for – she’s been racing for nearly 20 years, and Ironman 70.3, and your Stanford swimmer, three time Ironman champion, finished in the top 10 at Kona twice, so –
Dede Griesbauer 04:08
Three times.
EK 04:09
Three times. I’m sorry, I just knocked one off there. Diddling you on the resume… but, uh, so, yeah, this is, this is quite a caliber of athlete we’re talking about here. And you’ve also done some 12 hour races too, right? 12 hour, I know you –
Dede Griesbauer 04:23
I did the 12 hour time trial world championship back in 2016, yeah,
EK 04:27
Yeah.
Rob Pickels 04:27
I didn’t even know these were things.
Dede Griesbauer 04:30
Oh, yeah. You gotta dig a little. You gotta dig a little, you gotta want it. But yeah, they’re out there. There’s a whole community of us nutters out there.
Rob Pickels 04:37
I am so impressed with you right now.
Trevor Connor 04:40
And you didn’t start with this fresh out of college?
Dede Griesbauer 04:43
No, I didn’t. So as EK mentioned, I swam collegiately, I swam for Stanford University and was part of the US National Team and was actually one of the first swimmers to swim post-collegiately, believe it or not, in this day and age, you know, more than half the US National Team is post college and there’s a great number of resources available to post-collegiate swimmers but when I left college, it was sort of presumed that your swimming career was over, that – why would you swim after college, there weren’t the resources, there weren’t the training groups to support post-collegiate swimming. I got to the end of my college swimming career in 1992, and was still swimming best times and still in love with the sport and I thought, “Well, why, why do I have to quit?” So actually swam a couple of years post collegiately, I didn’t make the world championship team in ’94, and was starting to feel like I was falling behind my peers, so to speak, and so I retired from swimming, and took a hiatus from sporting life and got my MBA and went to work on Wall Street – so I thought, you know, my sporting life was over, I was running some marathons and training a bit just to keep up with my swimming eating habits. And then sort of happened upon triathlon. I just turned on the TV one day while studying for finals when I was in business school, and saw the Ironman and, just, my jaw hit the floor and I said, I have to try that.
EK 06:01
Yeah. And then, so you started racing as an age grouper for a few years, right? And then you connected with Karen Smyers, who’s a former Ironman World Champion, and she kind of took you, took you under her wing and she, she became your coach and really helped you become, well, step up to the professional ranks.
Dede Griesbauer 06:19
Yeah, Karen was the one that had first encouraged me to consider the idea of of racing professionally and it didn’t take that much prompting, I think the word “would you ever consider racing professionally”, they came out of her mouth and I had said “yes” before she had finished the sentence and luckily, I have an incredibly supportive husband who, that evening when I suggested the idea to him anticipating a little bit of what the actual heck are you talking about, his response was “if you don’t go in and quit your job tomorrow, I’ll quit it for you”. So he was fully on board, I don’t think either one of us had the idea at the time that it would last for 20 years. But it, it has, it’s it hasn’t all been, you know, rainbows and butterflies and unicorns, but it’s been a hell of a journey. And I think at the time, we thought it would be a year or two and it would be this crazy story we could tell our friends in a bar one night, but it just, one thing led to another and here we are.
EK 07:13
Yeah, and so yeah, as we said, you obviously had, have had a great Ironman career racing across 70.3 Ironman, but I guess for me an interesting question is why then the step up into like, the Ultra, the ultra distance like what’s the – you know, a lot of people race Ironman, and that is the, that is the holy grail, right, and especially if you race Kona, what was the allure? What was the pull to go race even longer than Ironman?
Dede Griesbauer 07:39
I think the funny thing is that for all of my sporting life, both as a swimmer and as a triathlete, coaches have always said “you know, Dede,you get better as the distance gets longer”. As a swimmer I was a backstroker but somebody had the amazing idea one time to have me swim the mile, which is typically a freestyle event but “Dede, you get in and swim backstroke”, and I did and I actually swam it really well. swimming backstroke, which is slower than freestyle, made a US national cut and swam nationally, qualified for the US National Championship, you know, swimming the event backstroke. So I knew the physiology was there that – I noticed it on group rides with my triathlon team back in Boston, when I first started in the sport team Psycho – we’d go out for a three or four hour ride, and I’d have to hang on for dear life in the first hour, but I noticed the longer the ride went, I was moving further and further to the front of the group, and by the end, I was sort of towing everybody home and just knew physiologically, I’m a slow starter, it takes me a couple hours to get warmed up and get going but as the event goes on, I tend to feel stronger and stronger and again, in 2016, I had a number of run injuries and my coach Julie Gibbons suggested that I raced the 12 hour time trial World Championship and I thought it was a little crazy, but I thought, well, what the heck, you know, it gave me something to sort of sink my teeth into competitively when I was sidelined with run injuries and couldn’t compete in triathlon. I got into the 12 hour time trial World Championship and I was about maybe seven plus hours in and sort of had this realization that I’m happy as a clam, like I’m not unhappy right now, I’m perfectly happy to go another five hours, I wasn’t slowing down – if anything, I was feeling stronger – and I thought I might actually be good at this Ultra thing and I’m not sure I want to be but the seed was definitely planted. And then Ultraman came about because one of my very good friends, a woman named Hilary Biscay who is a former pro triathlete as well, she had done Ultraman and I was doing some training – she and her husband lived in Arizona at the time and I had escaped the Boston winter, I lived in Boston for a number of years, to go out and do some training in Arizona and I was staying with them and Hillary was invited to a bike shop to do a talk about her Ultraman experience and they were going to have drinks and snacks so I came along, obviously, to sit in the back and have some free snacks and just listen to Hillary talk about this event and just like the first time I saw the Ironman on TV, sort of my jaw hit the floor and I thought “one day, I’ve got to try that”.
EK 10:06
Oh, okay. So it was like that.
Dede Griesbauer 10:07
Yeah. It was, it was a long – I think, I mean, that goes back to 2013, maybe, that that happened and the seed was – Hillary won the Ultraman World Championship in 2013 – so maybe it was 2014 she gave this talk and I just was sucked in and I thought “one day”.
EK 10:08
Okay. So you’ve had that tuck behind your ear all that time and it’s, it’s just the – in 2020, you did your first Ultraman right in Florida?
Dede Griesbauer 10:29
Yes.
EK 10:29
And so this was your second one, the one in Hawaii, you’ve just done?
Dede Griesbauer 10:31
Yes. So, Ultraman – so the race I just completed was the Ultraman World Championship and there, they do make you qualify for that –
EK 10:38
Yeah.
Dede Griesbauer 10:38
So when I competed at Ultraman Florida in 2020, it was a means to qualify for the Ultraman World Championship, which was then for two years cancelled because of the pandemic – so finally, this year, we got a chance to come back to the big island of Hawaii, which is you know, where the World Championship takes place. We actually literally race all the way around the island.
EK 10:58
Yeah, I was looking at the course map. So it’s super cool that you go all the way around.
Dede Griesbauer 11:02
Yeah, it presents some logistical challenges, certainly, because when I did Ultraman Florida, we would start and finish at the same place, you know, every night, perhaps like the Tour de France, where you’re in a different venue every night, certainly, operationally, it presents challenges for the crew that supporting the athletes – have to be in a new venue, get them fed, take care of equipment in a different place, get access to a new, you know, place to stay overnight, etc, etc. and you’re sort of sleeping in a different place every night – of course, for us, it was only two nights, but still logistically very different than what I experienced it at Ultraman Florida.
Training for an Ultraman
EK 11:37
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I’m fascinated to hear about the training that you did for this because I know, I mean, obviously training for Ironman is, is a big undertaking, whether you’re an age grouper or professional, whatever racing, whatever level you’re racing at – run us through what your training looked like for Ultraman, and how maybe that differed to what training for Ironman.
Dede Griesbauer 11:58
Now well, full credit goes to my coach Julie Gibbons, were it not for her, I probably would have killed myself in the training, because I had some ideas about training that I sort of run the few ideas by her and she’s like, “okay, good thought, but we’re gonna modify that a little bit”. As it is with regular triathlon training. swimming and biking aren’t really the quote, unquote “problem” – the issue comes in with running, right, so when you’re running Ultra distances, if you go out and, it’s not like I went out and did a seven and a half hour training run in preparation for the double marathon at Ultraman because you open yourself up for injury potential, etc, etc. – so swim and bike were fairly similar to what you do for an Ironman where you’re building distances, building race specific pacing at those distances. So in the pool, we swim a fair amount anyway, I’m in the pool, five to six days a week, we swim anywhere from 4000 to 6000 yards per workout, so anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half each time we’re in the pool. But to get more specific for Ultraman, I would take one session a week and get in a bit earlier than my squad – so for the first couple of weeks, I just get in and swim an extra 1000 yards and then it was an extra 2000 yards and then it was an extra 3000 yards and oftentimes, because it is, it’s an open water swim and you’re allowed to swim in a wetsuit, I would then do those Ultra swims, the longer swims in training in my wetsuit, which in a swimming pool – The pool, the whole workout, in the pool – which again, typically you’re wearing a wetsuit, in open water, where the water tends to be a bit cooler. So you go to your typical swimming pool, it’s 80 degrees in the water, you tend to get a little warm, but we also knew in a wetsuit in Hawaii, I was going to get pretty warm. Ultimately, I elected to go with a sleeveless wetsuit, where I gave up a bit of buoyancy and perhaps a bit of speed and we did test that in training, how much slower am I in a sleeveless wetsuit versus the full sleeved wetsuit, and it wasn’t drastically slower, but what I did realize is that across, you know, 8000 meter workouts in the pool, I wasn’t overheating as much in the sleeveless wetsuit and we thought that in terms of the preservation across the three days of racing to set my core body temperature a bit lower when we got on the bike the first day was definitely a smart thing to do. So that’s what we learned in the pool. In the bike, again, we, as we got closer to the race, we would sort of replicate what the race itself would be – so on a Friday, I would do a medium long ride, so maybe a four to five hour ride with some harder intervals in it to replicate what day one was like because day one in Hawaii, there’s quite a bit of climbing. So we would do maybe a four hour ride after a long swim to set up the rest of the weekend and then Saturday, we did build up, I did a number of sort of six to seven hour rides and then I did two rides of eight hours and that was largely not only to test the endurance, but to test the nutrition was a big part of that – so going out there for eight hours and trying to replicate the caloric intake that I would need for Ultraman, that was a big part of that. And then the running is, as I said, where we needed to be careful, my longest run was only three hours and I know that sounds insane, right? A three hour run is, is a bloody long way to go – but it’s nowhere near close to the eight hours I took to run the double marathon or whatever it was seven hours, 40 something minutes, but we would supplement – so I would go do a long run and then come home, change of clothes, and quickly go out and hikes Sanitas for an hour and a half. Some days, I just did a really, really long hike, I did a four-hour hike for instance, we did a lot of eccentric running to try to load the quads and get the legs ready for that. But from a mileage perspective, I came nowhere near running as far as I would run in the race itself.
Trevor Connor 13:33
In the pool.
Rob Pickels 15:56
Dede, I also like to do some longer things – not like you, let’s be honest, but some longer adventures – and a few times throughout, you mentioned these experiments that you’re doing to learn, right, because this is in some regard, relatively uncharted territory. And I almost think those learnings oftentimes can be more important for success than physiology or increased training, right? The physiology of somebody who’s going to be really successful at Kona is maybe not that different from the physiology of somebody who’s going to be successful at Ultraman, what becomes even more important is, as you said, practicing nutrition, what works and what doesn’t work, what works in the first hour might not work in our eighth or on day three –
Dede Griesbauer 16:38
Sure.
Rob Pickels 16:39
This wetsuit might not be the absolute fastest thing in the world but it’s really good for these other parameters. Your shoulders might have been a little bit less fatigued because of the increased range of motion as well – those things are oftentimes the secret to success and it’s not necessarily always just about more miles, better intervals, lower resting heart rate, and all of these physiological variables.
Dede Griesbauer 17:01
It’s 100% about specificity of preparation – and that’s a universal concept no matter what sporting event you’re preparing for or what event in life you’re preparing for – the specificity of your preparation. If you’re going out to race a super hilly bike race, you’re not best served spending hours and hours time trialing on the on a flat road, right, you want to get out and prepare in conditions and on terrain that is as specific as you can be in preparation for your event and that’s really what we tried to do to the point where I actually went out to Hawaii, and made a pretty significant investment of both financially and in terms of time, I went and did the training camp out there in September on my own to sort of recon the course. I’ve been to Hawaii 1000 times, both to do the Ironman World Championship, for training camps – I do some commentary for Ironman so I’d been out there in a capacity as a commentator, and I’ve written those roads for the Ironman World Championship a bazillion times – but Ultraman is sort of everything but the Ironman course, so I went out there to get a sense of what I was in for so that when I came home, I knew both days on the bike finished with sort of long climbs at the end. So all of my riding around Boulder, I would try to finish you know, climbing up to Jamestown or up to Ward – obviously I had to get down so it’s not 100% specific, but I would finish those eight hour days with a big long climb to try to replicate that. So yes, specificity of preparation was was really, really key.
Rob Pickels 18:28
And I think that that’s important both on the physiological side but also on the psychological side. When you’ve done these long training rides and you know, you can successfully do this big ol’ climb up to Ward, come race day, come event day, you know that you have it as well. You’re not second guessing yourself –
Dede Griesbauer 18:43
Well, there’s a certain amount of second guessing anyway, because intimidating race and, um… that no matter how prepared you are, there’s always nerves, right? But the nerves are good. It means you, you’ve invested, it means you care. But yeah, so I started that race and I had said ahead of time to my coaches, you know, what’s going to make me feel most confident is to know that we have prepared so precisely. And we did just that, both through the training, through the nutrition, my strength programming changed a bit to prepare myself a lot of eccentric loading again, to prepare the legs for that kind of demand. It was all so specific in preparation for this event that it gave me a lot of confidence going in that I had prepared as precisely as I thought I could have based on what I learned from my first Ultraman, and based what I learned from my training camp out there in a few months ahead of the event.
Rob Pickels 19:37
Right.
EK 19:38
There’s another fun part of this that I think is part of the appeal and part of the allure of Ultra racing, whether it’s triathlon, whether it’s running, whether it’s bikepacking, and that is you can be prepared, you can dial in all the details, but the longer you’re out there, the more chance there is that something goes wrong. You have no idea what’s going to be right and I think there’s a certain appeal, right, to a certain type of athlete, a certain type of personality, that it’s like, “Oh, I’m gonna have to problem solve on the fly”. And you – I cannot imagine that there was anybody more prepared for this race than you were Dede, like and your team, and so I think there is, there comes an element of you’re just signing up for some unknowns that you’re gonna have to problem solve on the fly. And so I guess two part questions sort of, like, how do you feel about that? And I also want to hear about some of the things that you did end up having to problem solve, because I’m sure there were some fun ones in the mix.
Dede Griesbauer 20:29
Yeah, definitely some interesting things that happened in – one of the things, again, that gave me a tremendous amount of confidence was my crew. And part of my love for Ultraman – and we say this in triathlon all the time and in any sporting event where you’re, you’re putting your whole heart and soul into preparation, it takes a village, right? You don’t do it – even if it’s an individual sport, you don’t do it on your own. You may have coaches, you have a supportive spouse, a supportive family, a training group perhaps that you lean on to help push you that extra bit in preparation. But Ultraman is truly a team sport – you cannot do it alone. You have to have a crew. So I had a crew that came out, we rented so that we’d have the space and again, we’re spending the night in a different place every night so you’ve got to take everyone’s overnight bag, my massage therapist came so we had a massage table on day three because I’m running, my bike has to fit in to the crew vehicle and the minivan just wasn’t big enough. So we ended up renting this Sprinter van that, I tell you, like I could write a book about the Sprinter van by itself. It was probably the first Sprinter van ever made and the rental company had named their fleet and our particular van was named Disco Vana – but she adopted a nickname during the race of Burgundy Betty, she was this color that we long debate it was a burgundy was at mauve, was it, it was this sort of weird sort of pinkish purple wine-ish colored vehicle, velvet cushions on the inside. I mean, it was, it literally – we were afraid she wasn’t going to make it around the island. And in fact, one of the things that went wrong and was something I did not know – she had a soft rear tire that my crew literally every time they stopped to give me aid, it was someone’s job to jump on the bicycle pump and pipe up Burgundy Betty’s rear wheel. So we have hysterical pictures of my crew literally pumping up the tire on this 1972 Sprinter van with a bicycle pump. I didn’t know you could do that with a bicycle pump.
Rob Pickels 22:30
Well, with enough time and effort you can do.
Dede Griesbauer 22:34
Exactly.
Rob Pickels 22:34
This was an Ultra-Ultra event in itself there.
Dede Griesbauer 22:37
Yeah. So, I mean, the number of things that went, that could go wrong, yeah, you name it from mechanical with a bike to your own physical, nutritional, emotional – but the crew I had with me are people that I work with day in and day out in my training as a triathlete, and they know me very well and they were just as invested. And we were, I hate to say, we were the envy of every other crew. I mean, my crew worked with NASCAR like efficiency but they had so much fun doing – every time the van went by, I could hear that like laughter and screaming in the van and I was like, I want to be in there – so much fun in there. There were some very funny stories from the van. One of my nutrition items that the sort of the deep into each day, I relied a little bit on the Mexican Coke, right. And what we forgot was a bottle opener, right because they come in a little teeny glass bottles, and we didn’t have a bottle opener. But Kate Legler, who is my strength coach and was in charge of my nutrition, she tracked all of my calories and tracked everything, she went to open one of the cokes to put it in a sport bottle with some ice for me and she sort of wedged it in the door of Burgundy Betty and sort of flicked the cap off, bingo, it worked. But then when she went to open the door, she had wedged the lock of the door and they couldn’t get out of the van. They all had to funnel out through the front door of the van so I mean a lot of these things just again, super funny. But in comparison to some of the other athletes. I mean, some of the other athletes had pretty significant issues. One guy was, unfortunately hit by a truck, he’s fine. Somebody else had hit a bunch of gravel, wiped out out of the race with a bunch of road rash, somebody else’s crew van that was like a 2019 minivan like fresh off the line, they actually got a flat tire and had to get an entire new vehicle brought in so you do have to be prepared for a lot of different things to go wrong. But I had so much confidence in my crew and their capabilities that I knew we would be prepared for most of the things that might happen out there.
EK 24:38
Yeah, yeah. Sounds like it. Yeah.
Trevor Connor 24:40
That’s one of the things I want to ask you. I’m really interested in the training for this, because we’ve talked about Ironman before where we basically say, that’s a low intensity event. It’s not where you’re gonna have to worry about that that one minute jump or anything like that. You’re just kind of –
Dede Griesbauer 24:55
It depends on your physiology, I think it of it like a sprint. Now I do.
Trevor Connor 24:59
This is certainly – you’re not going to be doing this at really high intensity efforts, it’s almost seems like this is as much about being able to get to the finish line as the pace that you’re getting.
Dede Griesbauer 25:13
I think you might be surprised. I mean, I think for a lot of people and everyone’s goals are different and that’s what’s amazing about sport in general – I mean, you have a lot of people in an Ironman, the winners are winning these events in eight, nine hours, but you have 17 hours to finish the race. So that’s a pretty wide range, and you have a lot of people that step up to the line to the start of the Ironman saying, for me, getting to the finish line is a huge win. I think you look at any professional and the expectation is that they’re going to finish, it’s how fast and how high up the rankings they can finish and the same holds true for Ultraman. I think a fair number of the athletes went in saying “for me to finish under the time limits” – and there are time limits, there’s a 12 hour cut off each day and each discipline so the swim has a six hour cut off, so if you’re not out of the water before six hours – and they’re great because they do allow you to continue you’ll just be an unofficial finisher and quite a few people did continue despite being unofficial finishers, they were either unable to make time cuts on previous segments so everyone’s goals are different but there are a good number of us that toe the line at Ultraman, prepared to race it, not just finish it but absolutely race it. And so yes, it’s a different effort level, certainly, even than Ironman and my coach had given me, you know, wattage targets on the bike, we had wattage targets for steep climbs, gradual climbs, flat sections, sort of a normalized power target each day, we had paces and heart rates on the run that I was not to exceed. And so there was a degree of it as a controlled effort. But I absolutely was racing.
Trevor Connor 26:44
Yeah, so that wasn’t, I wasn’t implying you weren’t racing. I was saying that it’s racing it a different way. Like you said, it’s a controlled intensity, you’re not going out and saying, “Let’s go as hard as I can and just see how it goes. I have to keep it at this pace, or I’m not going to make it”.
Dede Griesbauer 26:59
Right.
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Ultraman Speeds
Rob Pickels 27:47
Can I ask what sort of speeds are you riding at on average? And then maybe even like, what percent of FTP, if you could go in to – I don’t know that we need to give away the secret sauce of exactly the watts you were riding – but can we put this into perspective of the intensity that you’re going at?
Dede Griesbauer 28:02
I was actually surprised and a little bit wide eyed, I sat down with my coach and I had an idea just based on my performance at Ultraman Florida what I was able to hold across these distances and when I sat down with Julie the night before, and we went day by day – so when I sat down the night before day one and we talked about power targets, she gave me a pretty long leash, I was surprised that I mean, I was upwards of my 70.3 race pace on some of the climbs, there were a lot of defense where I knew I was going to be able to recover, but on average, I think I average just below Ironman race pace for both days one and two and on a normalized basis.
Rob Pickels 28:40
Yeah.
Dede Griesbauer 28:41
So it was a lot harder effort that I was able to sustain and a lot of that comes down to my nutrition and I learned a great deal between Ultra man Florida and the Ultraman World Championship, how to fuel that and that is so much a part of it. And that, I think a big part of what makes the difference between kind of getting through the day and really attacking it and racing it in a controlled manner, but, was the nutrition that I was able to fuel the effort and sort of sustain powers that I thought across that distance were pretty aggressive.
Rob Pickels 29:11
Yeah.
EK 29:12
So you raised it around Ironman power?
Dede Griesbauer 29:14
On a normalized basis, I was not far – I was below, but not far below, Ironman race pace for both days.
Rob Pickels 29:19
If we think, if everybody closes their eyes and envisions the power duration curve, right, it starts and drops off very steep on the short durations, but as you get to the right side on that long tail, one hour, two hour, three hour, four hour, it’s relatively flat and horizontal at that point. There’s not much of a difference between a three hour and an eight hour race pace. There is a difference, don’t get me wrong, but we’re talking a couple percent there.
Dede Griesbauer 29:44
And for me it’s actually even more pronounced, I had done some testing in the lab with Jared Berg at CU before it shut down and, literally, we’re going about the test and I was, I look at it the other way – sort of the, the “Price is Right” game where the little mountain climber climbs up the thing on the price and falls off the curb at the end, my slant is so gradual, but then all of a sudden in a minute, like, I go from one extreme to the other almost instantaneously, like he looked at me, he’s like, what happened?
Rob Pickels 30:12
In terms of lactate?
Dede Griesbauer 30:13
Yes.
Rob Pickels 30:13
Yeah, yeah.
Dede Griesbauer 30:14
I can go forever. My physiology definitely reinforces the fact that I’m good at Ultra. And not good at sprinting.
Rob Pickels 30:20
Yep. It makes a lot of sense.
Dede Griesbauer 30:23
The opposite is true as well. I’m not going to win any Townline Sprints.
Rob Pickels 30:28
You’re naturally probably oxidize a lot of fat, I would assume, you know, another great key determinant to success in events like this because you’re needing to supplement or maybe everybody, it’s kind of an eating contest, I bet, while you’re out there, right, but you might run into less of a caloric deficit because you do have a higher fat oxidation rate and less carbohydrate oxidation than some other people.
Dede Griesbauer 30:51
And we got a whole lot smarter about my nutrition. One of the things I learned at Ultraman Florida – and I went into Ultraman Florida thinking I’ll just replicate my Ironman nutrition across three days of racing.
EK 31:00
Ooo, yeah.
Dede Griesbauer 31:01
No. Wrong, wrong answer.
EK 31:04
Womp, womp.
Dede Griesbauer 31:05
Yeah, we learned very early on, on day two, where I was, you know, taking the sort of sugary sports drinks in on day two and was dreadfully ill right out of the gate. And thankfully, on my crew for Florida, I had a training partner who had raced Ultraman in the past, and they literally pulled into the nearest convenience store and just stocked up on a lot of other things to try. But the remainder of Ultraman Florida was a guessing game as to what can she get down and what can she hold down and so we got a lot smarter going into Ultraman Hawaii in preparing with real food sources, for as long of the event as we could, early in on almost all days taking real food as nutrition as opposed to sports nutrition because you get overloaded on sort of the sugary stuff, and your stomach starts to reject it. So to the extent that I could take real food, particularly on the bike on day one and day two, so that day three, I really could lean on the simpler sports nutrition type stuff was very, very important as well. And then another thing that we focused on, you think you get to the end of the day, you have your recovery smoothie, everything’s good, gonna go back, have dinner, get my massage, go to bed – no, we had a very specific nutrition script for once we finished, so every hour on the hour, I had certain things that I had to get down the hatch, because you’re you’re basically starting – the tank is empty, and you’ve got to refuel, so that you fill the tank up before you go to sleep. And it sort of depletes itself again to get ready for the next day, so very specific nutrition protocols for after the race as well, each day.
Rob Pickels 32:31
Something I want to point out is Ultraman in itself is a very unique event but the takeaways that we have here are mirroring a lot of the advice that we would have for anyone doing events like this, multiple days of this six to 10 hours per day, it doesn’t matter if you’re backpacking around Iceland, it doesn’t matter if you do an Ultraman, it doesn’t matter if you’re doing the Tour de France, there’s so many similarities and takeaways across all of the events that anyone listening, you can apply everything that Dede has learned to what you’re doing – even if you never do an Ultraman, this is really applicable information.
Dede Griesbauer 33:10
Well, even if you’re doing a 10k, I think it’s applicable. I mean, it’s a different nutrition strategy, but you need to practice it ahead of time. You can’t just wake up race morning and be like, “Okay, how’s this gonna go?” Like, you need to think about it ahead of time and test your theories in training to see what works and what’s going to be successful for you. And I think that’s universal across any distance in any sport or any sort of adventure type activity you take on.
Nutrition for Ultraman
EK 33:33
Yeah, I’m super keen to learn what you had on the menu for your nutrition because I know like you said, you obviously had the sugary sports drinks on, and products, on final day for the double marathon, but what were your go-tos when it came to real food?
Dede Griesbauer 33:45
Again, I don’t want to give away –
EK 33:46
Oh, no!
Dede Griesbauer 33:49
We had to go with things that were obviously pretty simple, simple to eat, you can buy anywhere –
Rob Pickels 33:54
Hostess doughnuts.
Dede Griesbauer 33:56
Actually no, but –
EK 34:00
Jerky, any boiled eggs?
Dede Griesbauer 34:01
No, none of that – I actually used quite a bit of organic baby food, but not the vegetable kind – so like the blueberry-banana oats and the plain banana. The only issue with those is that they’re very difficult to open, you need two hands and a pretty strong grip to open them – so that’s where my crew came in. I just had open baby food pouches at my disposal whenever I wanted.
Rob Pickels 34:24
I spent a year of my life when my kids were young stealing their – and when you said the oat one, oh, it is so good – stealing their food when I would go out for a bike ride.
Dede Griesbauer 34:34
It’s great and it’s real food.
Rob Pickels 34:36
Yeah.
Dede Griesbauer 34:36
I was mindful of the fructose because that tends to disagree with me when you overload on the fructose – they don’t have a lot in it but enough that we needed to use it sort of in moderation, so baby food was a big go-to and that was tested a lot in training, ironically didn’t work as well on the run and that’s why we went back to the sport specific nutrition on the run – but the baby food on the bike and the other thing that was a big part of our nutrition were King’s Hawaiian rolls. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the sweet rolls, they taste really good – they’re super mushy so you can sort of grab it and squeezing into the palm of your hand and make it into just this little like tightly and it sort of – I can hold on to the Arrow bars and hold on to the roll at the same time and just sort of take a bite and go back to my bars and take a bite and go back to my bars. And the other thing that’s great about him is that when you take a sip of water with a bit of King’s Hawaiian roll in your mouth, it just melts.
Rob Pickels 35:30
Wow.
Dede Griesbauer 35:30
It absolutely just melts because one of the things I learned at Ultraman Florida is that I don’t do well chewing when I’m working.
EK 35:39
Yeah.
Dede Griesbauer 35:39
So on the bike, I can’t do solids, it’s got to be something that’s sort of easy enough to sort of chew and digest. I can’t chew it a lot. It was just too much and certainly running there was, there would be no chewing so those were two big food items. There were a couple of white chocolate, macadamia nut cookies, and a few Pop Tarts. I’m gonna say yeah, a few Pop Tarts.
Rob Pickels 36:01
Staples.
EK 36:01
Yeah, Pop Tart is like Ultra, Ultra-anything winner.
Dede Griesbauer 36:04
I think, you know, the pop tart is just something – and I talked about this with my nutritionist Andrew Doyle quite a bit – and when I roll into a gas station in the middle of a long ride, my go-to is usually like a Coke and and a Pop Tart because it’s a treat, like it’s, “Hey, you’re halfway through your long ride, what do you want to do to celebrate?” Well, I want to eat a [op Tart and drink Coke – and we tried to include those things into the nutrition as well. So there are a couple of Pop Tarts down the hatch – I’m not embarrassed to say.
Rob Pickels 36:31
Are you a strawberry frosted or are you a cinnamon type?
Dede Griesbauer 36:34
You know, it depends on the day but for Ultraman it was definitely the strawberry frosted.
Rob Pickels 36:37
Yeah.
Dede Griesbauer 36:38
And do you know they make a gingerbread one?
Rob Pickels 36:40
I did not.
Dede Griesbauer 36:40
Yes, they make a gingerbread one
EK 36:43
Is that a holiday special?
Dede Griesbauer 36:44
Might have been a holiday special but I found it in the grocery stores out in Hawaii and we did have some of the van because I think the tagline for my crew is “fueled by Pop Tart”. Pop Tarts going down the hatches of my crew as well.
Rob Pickels 36:57
That’d be the sponsorship to have right there.
Dede Griesbauer 36:58
I know, I’ve tagged them in socials a couple of times, but strangely, they haven’t called.
Rob Pickels 37:04
A different demographic.
Trevor Connor 37:05
So the thing I’m interested in going back to a bit, I mean, you really have to plan out this event, you have to figure out everything – you have a nutrition there who’s figuring out what you’re eating every hour, you’re figuring out the pace that you’re going to be doing on every climb and every flat stretch. This all has to be mapped out to survive – so to give you a contrast, you know, I’m a road racer, so a lot of my races are two, three hours, I can’t tell you how many races I’ve shown up to and gone. Oh, I forgot my race food, I forgot my water bottles, whatever – and you just go and do the race and all you’re worried about is making that breakaway or whatever. You can get away with the “I don’t plan this out perfectly” because it’s two hours, you might feel a little worse at the end of the event, but but you’re gonna be fine.
Dede Griesbauer 37:46
Yep.
Trevor Connor 37:47
But here, you do that – you’re not finishing.
Dede Griesbauer 37:49
The mistakes get magnified, the longer the distance gets, certainly. You can rock up to a 5k and skip breakfast all entirely, right, and run your 5k be like “Well, that wasn’t ideal, but how much did it really hurt me right?” Not that much. Take that to a half marathon, you’re probably going to get hurt if you don’t eat breakfast, if you forget your bottles, if you forget your sports nutrition for the race, probably going to hurt you a little bit more. You get to a marathon? That’s even worse – now, take it across three days, yeah, the mistakes get magnified. And again, going back to things like the decision on the sleeveless wetsuit, it wasn’t necessarily, I probably would have swum slightly faster had I worn my full suit but I thought across three days, the better dividend would come from keeping that core body temperature down so a lot of decisions are made, not in the context of what’s going to make that segment the fastest, what’s gonna make that day the fastest, but what’s gonna give me the best chance to have my three best days. Exactly. So every decision is made in the context of a three day event.
EK 38:48
Yeah, you’re kind of looking at the big picture, like the longer lens view versus just trying to hit the fastest times and yeah.
Ultraman Training Considerations
Trevor Connor 38:54
How does this translate into your training? Is this something that you think about in training, that you work with in your training of not only doing the intervals, right, getting out and getting the time on the bike or running or swimming, but also, how do I make sure I get through this most effectively, so that tomorrow I can train well?
Dede Griesbauer 39:12
That was at the forefront of my mind and sort of my theme, and I did a lot of my preparation solo, my squad – they were all preparing for the Ironman World Championship and different events – and so I was doing a lot of solo training, in fact, almost all of my bikes and runs from September 1 until the event were done alone. And so my mantra in my head became “just because you can doesn’t mean you should”. So I would get to the end of some of these super long, long rides and have the climb to finish and be like, “Hey, I got a lot left in the tank, I’m just gonna go for it on this climb and see what I’ve got in the tank”. No, because I’m thinking, “I’ve got a three hour run and a 90 minute hike tomorrow and I don’t want to jeopardize my performance tomorrow just to see what I can do on this climb today”, so it did take a lot of patience – and especially when you’re alone and your coach isn’t there sort of finger wagging saying “no, no, no” – so literally throughout a lot of my preparation, just in the back of my mind, “just because you can doesn’t mean you should”.
EK 40:12
That takes an enormous amount of discipline because especially athletes, I think you can be wired to, when you feeling good, you want to press “go”, yeah.
Dede Griesbauer 40:19
You want to make hay while the sun is shining –
EK 40:20
Right
Dede Griesbauer 40:20
And, to a certain extent, there is a lot of balancing of that in that, yes, we took day three in the run, and it starts with, the first 17 miles are largely all downhill and so you take that in the context of the overall day and yeah, your pace is going to be slightly faster because you’re going downhill, but in the back of my mind was this race does not start until I get up onto the Queen K, which is about mile 18, 19. So even though I wanted to take advantage of the fast downhill sections – and when we started, the field literally ran away from me – and it’s something that I had practiced mentally with my sports psychologists. And the good thing is that I do it in training all the time, because my entire squad runs faster than I do, so the start of any group run, they all run away from me, it makes you feel a little panicky, like “oh my god, I’m not good enough, I have to go, I have to go, I have to go, I have to go” – but because I had sort of experienced it in training every single day, at the start of day three, a lot of the field just went. You start with this glorious downhill section, and everybody was running so fast, but I was like, race does not start to get on the Queen K, I just kept telling myself this and by the time we even got to the Queen K, I had reeled back in four or five people and was in, I think, fourth place overall, which is where I stayed for the rest of the day. So a lot of people go out too fast and even though it feels good – my goal was yes, it feels good, appreciate it now and make it feel good for as long as you can – just because it feels good, don’t, don’t milk that, let’s see how long you can make it feel good – so hold back, if nothing else through this downhill section so that the feel good bit can you know last longer when you get out onto the Queen K.
Rob Pickels 41:57
And that’s a huge mistake that people make – if this feels good now, I should do something to really take advantage of it. And it’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Dede Griesbauer 42:05
It’s a delicate balance – it’s a delicate balancing act for sure. And it does require – I learned a lot of patience and EK, EK’s trained with me before, she knows that doesn’t come easy for me, but it taught me a lot of patience.
EK 42:17
Yeah, and I think this leads nicely into – I was gonna say like this, yeah, this is obviously about discipline. It’s about patience. It’s about smarts, right? A lot of this that you’re talking about, you only get to when you’ve been doing a sport or you’ve been training for as long as you have. I think this isn’t something that the young whippersnapper just pops up and you know, there can be too much enthusiasm, there can be too much of “Yeah, I feel great, let’s go”. I think that you learn it – and there’s probably an element of nature and nurture here too – but like, Dede learned it, but you have to have that discipline. You have to like, have that patience. And I think that takes us nicely to the topic of age, right, and experience. Yeah.
Rob Pickels 42:56
Longevity. How about longevity?
EK 42:58
Dede winced when I –
Rob Pickels 43:01
Oh, man.
Dede Griesbauer 43:03
I knew, I knew it was coming. I had a sneaky feeling…
Trevor Connor 43:08
I gonna be the nice one and raise it since we’re both early 70s children, so…
Dede Griesbauer 43:14
Yes.
Rob Pickels 43:14
Sorry, I thought you were going somewhere else with that.
Dede Griesbauer 43:16
I’m not embarrassed to admit I’m older than Burgundy Betty, I’m older than our Sprinter van – absolutely. No, it’s – it’s the thing and I actually, it’s funny you say it EK, because I was thinking about it this morning, I don’t want to say it’s bothered me, but when I’m in the middle of a race and I go through a tiny mat and one of the announcers is there and you know, through the halfway point of the marathon, “it’s 52 year old Dede Griesbauer” and it started to sort of bother me that the most interesting thing about me was my age. It’s all they’d say –
EK 43:47
That’s not true.
Dede Griesbauer 43:47
I’d finished, they’d be like “and can you believe she’s 52 years old” and I really, going into Ultraman, was like, “I just want to give them bloody something else to say other than I’m 52”. Now they can say World Champion Dede Griesbauer and maybe 52 comes after that.
Rob Pickels 44:02
Two year old world champion, unfortunately.
Aging in Sports
Trevor Connor 44:06
So you would appreciate it – a few years ago, I was at a race called Bucks County and I was broken away and you do these laps and I kept going by the announcer and the announcer every time was like, “Look at this guy go, this young whippersnapper, he’s going somewhere in this sport”. I’m like, “I’m 45!”
Dede Griesbauer 44:27
Yeah, I don’t want to take away from it – and you know this, EK, from just our conversations off the side – my biggest pet peeve is when people say that age is just a number – because it’s not. Age is a really, really real thing but I think what I’m seeking to prove is that we can be successful in spite of age. Age is something you have to take into consideration and you do have to account for the fact that things are different when you’re 52 than they are when you’re 45, than they are when you’re 35, than they are when you’re 30. I joked I’ve raced 70.3 in September, largely to break up the Ultraman training because if I had done this huge block of Ultraman training my coach is like “you’re going to kill yourself” – so even though we’re not specifically prepared for a 70.3, we’re just going to go race it to give you a break, freshen you up, get a fitness boost from the race itself, and then dive right back in. So I went to Augusta 70.3, had not a very good swim and I was back a couple of minutes from the lead pack of women on the bike – and again, I could see them and the thought popped through my head “just because you can doesn’t mean you should” – I thought to go after them on the bike, and little by little I did, I reeled them back in. And as I passed the group of four at the front, and I, at first I thought, well, maybe I’ll just sit in, I’ve caught the lead group. And I was like, Yeah, I’m still feeling good, I’m just gonna go. And I rode past them and I thought, “I’m old enough to be your mother” – and it feels good, right? It feels good. Because I am finding success in sport at an age where most people think you have to be done. And I just think – it’s the same way I thought when I was in college when I graduated, and everyone’s like, “Okay, well, your swim career is over”, I’m like, “Why does it have to be over?”
Trevor Connor 46:03
Yeah.
Dede Griesbauer 46:03
Why, when you turn 45, 46, 47, does your sports career have to be over even as a professional – so I think I’m redefining what success is – I’m never going to win the Ironman World Championship but you know, and but the fact is, when I came to the sport as professional, I didn’t necessarily think that was going to happen when I got into the sport, I just wanted to see how good I can be. And now at 52, I’m finding I’m in a lot of ways better than I was when I was 35.
EK 46:30
Right and you’re setting personal best watches on the bike and same, same in the pool and same on the run – so it’s like, yeah, you’re proving right there that you can keep doing it, you can keep pushing those those barriers.
Dede Griesbauer 46:40
What age is doing is it’s forcing me to be more thoughtful. Yes, forcing me to be more thoughtful in all of the details, I think, you know, when I was 35, 36, 37, I just was like, “Well, if I do the training, I’ll be, I’ll be successful” and now I’m having to think more about the training, I’m having to think, “well what ways that aren’t” – my aerobic engine is developed as it’s ever going to be, I’ve been an endurance athlete for more than 40 years of my 52 years of life so my engine isn’t gonna get any more robust, but finding improvements and other things nutrition – the gym, I spend a lot of time in the gym, and I take it as seriously as I take my swim-bike-run training and I think that’s incredibly important, particularly for people as they get older and particularly for women as they get older. And so I’m a huge advocate of gym work with a caveat of, yes, we have to pick up heavy stuff, but don’t do it by yourself, find a good strength coach because if you try to go in and front squat or back squat or deadlift, and your your form is not good, or you’re not moving well enough to pick up a heavy load, it is going to cause an injury that at our age you might not come back from so these things are important, but do it with with good guidance. I’ve gotten a lot of help with nutrition, this tends to be my way and I defer a lot of credit, but I am extremely well coached and well supported with my community, my triathlon coach, my my strength coach, my nutritionist, my sports psychologist, my training partners, my friends are all incredibly supportive, and it feels really, really good.
Trevor Connor 46:43
Yes.
Rob Pickels 48:10
I want to look at this, from a different point of view, are all of the things that you’re mentioning your friends, your training partner, your thoughtfulness – is this the key to the longevity that you’ve had? Because to me, that’s almost what’s more important than your quote, unquote, “age”, right, is that you’ve been doing an incredible job for 20 years, you’re getting better year over year, you’re still performing extremely well – how have you managed to do that when a lot of other people don’t seem to be able to have as long of a career as you’ve had?
Dede Griesbauer 48:38
I’m not sure because I don’t live in other people’s heads and hearts. I consider myself incredibly lucky to love what I do, so much that I wish I didn’t love it so much. I really truly, I mean – EK knows this from from her career – you love it so much and as a result, it breaks your heart that much more. It hasn’t all been sunshine and unicorns, I mean, I – there have been injuries that have brought me to the verge of retirement and that it’s just too hard, I can’t, I can’t do it anymore. It’s a difficult sport in that we’re not a mainstream sport and so financial support sponsorship, incredibly difficult to come by. So financially, it’s a very, very difficult sport to carry on with particularly long term because the financial support isn’t necessarily there – but I love it. I absolutely love it. And you know, I said to my husband after Ultraman, once you’re done, you’re done forever right for me anyway, I would not come back and race as an age grouper – I think it’s great people that do, but I think you know, part of what I love is pushing the edge and pushing the boundary and I think once my turn is up, my turn is up. But I want to make sure when that turns out that I’ve gotten everything out of it, and I still feel like there’s more to be had and I just love what I do. So I think in addition to the fact that I’m – a part of what motivates me to be smarter and make these smarter decisions as I get older and to look really dive deep into the details, to go to bed at seven o’clock at night and sleep for 9, 10, 11 hours a night, because you need that, you know, recovery, particularly as we get older, to pay attention to those type of details. I do it because I love it and I just want the music to keep playing a little bit longer. Eventually, there’s not going to be a chair for me to sit on and I know that time is coming. But for now, I just want to – I want the music to keep playing.
Trevor Connor 50:28
So we did an episode a while back – few years ago now – where we really dived into the science of aging and that science has been changing a lot. There really was a belief for a very long time of, here’s exactly what happens, this happens to you at 30, this happens to you at 40, this happens to you at 50, this happens to you at 60, most of it sucks and there’s nothing you can do about it. What the new research is showing is – it looked at how that original research was done and said there’s actually flaws in that – and when they redid the research, they said it’s not quite that inevitable. So what I would throw out – I agree with you, age is not just a number, but the argument I would make is age does affect you, but it’s not an inevitability – it’s not a “here’s what’s gonna happen, there’s nothing you can do about this”.
Dede Griesbauer 51:15
I agree 100%. And I think age hits us each in a different way, I mean, I have friends that are slightly younger that are being, you know, they’re feeling age, you know, at least by what they’re saying more heavily than than I am and in ways that I am not. I think there’s something to be said that I spent the first 24 years of my life as a swimmer. I wasn’t coordinated enough to do anything else.
EK 51:36
I think swimming, above most other sports, builds that endurance engine.
Dede Griesbauer 51:40
It builds the endurance engine but it also mitigates the pounding, right? I wasn’t playing soccer, so my knees are okay, I wasn’t putting the wear and tear – I wasn’t a crosscountry runner, right, so I don’t have – I didn’t start professional sport until I was 35 – most people are thinking about retirement, by their mid to late 30s, from at least endurance professional sports where 40 seems to be this sort of tipping point where if you’re over 40 and racing endurance sports, you’re pushing it – I didn’t start till I was 35 so I think all of those little things inadvertently, being 52, for me is different than being 52 for somebody else. And I think, oh, some of it’s genetic or maybe I just have the genes that for whatever reason, I am able to sort of keep going with this right now but I also have the heart for it in that I choose to keep doing it because it’s not for everybody it is, it is in so many ways incredibly thankless and yeah, I can sit here and say I’m a world champion, but in the same breath, I can say “and so what?” right, what difference does that make – it really doesn’t make any difference at all, in terms of my career going forward? It’s not like this windfall of “oh, now I’m made, it’s like, I won an Olympic gold medal and you know, the phone just won’t stop ringing”. No, it’s not – that’s not the case, right, so…
Rob Pickels 52:52
You’re stooping to these low level podcasts?
Dede Griesbauer 52:54
I will not have the heart to keep going –
EK 52:57
Pop Tart sponsorship’s just around the corner.
Dede Griesbauer 52:59
Yeah, you know, the phone just won’t stop ringing. I just love what I do. I love it and I think that speaks as much to my longevity as anything.
EK 53:09
Yeah. And I think what I’m hearing you say is, and I think I can definitely relate to this, too, is I think, in your 20s and 30s, when you’re training, you can simply turn the boxes green on Training Peaks and you get fitter, and you get faster, and it’s all great and fun and cool and you go to a race and you show up on the podium, whatever. As you get older, and your 40s and your 50s – all those other things that sit around the periphery of training, sleep, nutrition, strength, bodywork, you know, I know that you’re meticulous about that, like all these other things have to be so dialed. And if you let one or two of them slip, it’s like “womp, womp”, you’re gonna start seeing the inconsistencies.
Dede Griesbauer 53:44
Yeah, the demands for perfection are a lot higher as we get older. And that’s not to say I’m still not perfect – so that’s what makes me excited, and that there’s more for me still to learn about how to keep pushing the envelope in spite of age.
EK 53:59
Oh, so that leads me to the next question, which is “what’s next?” If you’re still pushing the envelope –
Dede Griesbauer 54:05
I’m still pushing the, you know, it’s funny – at the awards for Ultraman, they said… it’s kind of a cool awards celebration because every athlete is invited, they get three minutes on the mic to say whatever they like, thank their crews, thank their families, tell funny jokes about their experience out on the course, and before I got up to give my three minutes, the race organizer said, we never give away free entry but because you broke the course record, if you want to come back and play again next year, your entry will be free and I stood there and I looked them in the face and I said “Oh, hell no.” Yeah, you know, it’s funny – I look at this event and I think I don’t know what more I could have done out there. I – to go back, yeah, there’s a couple of things that didn’t go right and, you know, yeah, I’d love this one course record, but conditions weren’t right for it on the day but who’s to say next year they’re going to be at be different and the undertaking – it was everything I wanted from this experience and I just, I don’t want to, I don’t want to mess with it so I kind of think that that story has been written, but I won’t say that there aren’t other stories I’d like to still write. I’ll leave it at that.
EK 54:42
(laughs) Cliffhanger.
Rob Pickels 55:17
I think you can go bigger. Super-duper Ultraman.
Dede Griesbauer 55:21
Well, there’s like a Decaman – believe it or not, there’s 10 days – an Ironman every day and then there’s like, one-by where it’s like a one by Decaman where it’s 10 times the distance but straight, in a row – “you sleep when you can”-type thing – I won’t say that RAM doesn’t intrigue me slightly, but I think I’d rather do it as a team of four, not as a solo effort, because I like to sleep even just a little bit. There were things that certainly intrigued me but yeah, I have a couple – I’ve another chapter to go I think but –
EK 55:48
Watch the space, huh?
Dede Griesbauer 55:50
Watch this space. Little eyeball emoji.
Final Remarks
Trevor Connor 55:52
So this is a special episode so we aren’t going to finish out with our normal takehomes which is your one wisdom to share but – so we’ve kind of hinted at this, those of us are a little older, tend to be a little wiser, a little better looking.
EK 56:11
Where’s this going?
Rob Pickels 56:14
He was looking at me but in my head I’m like “dude, I’m 40, I feel old as it is so he’s obviously not talking about me”.
Dede Griesbauer 56:20
He just looked at you as if you’re the young pup and that was definitely directed at you.
Trevor Connor 56:23
I think you are the young pup here, so…
Rob Pickels 56:25
I am here, because you guys are all so old.
EK 56:28
Are you younger than me?
Rob Pickels 56:29
How old are you?
EK 56:30
42.
Rob Pickels 56:30
Ha, I got you beat – the big four-oh girl! Come in this February, I’ll be 41, I’ll be catching you.
Trevor Connor 56:37
We’ll give Rob a lollipop when we’re done.
Julie Young 56:48
Hey, it’s Julie Young. Dede and I have had a blast recording a new podcast series that’s all about the female endurance athlete called Fast Talk FEM. We’ve had an amazing experience sharing knowledge and gathering with experts like Dr. Dana Lis, Jen Sygo, Dr. Emily Kraus, and Catherine Cram to talk about the female physiology. We’re looking forward to empowering female athletes and their coaches with the best evidence based information available to enhance and improve their performance. We begin releasing episodes this January, so be sure to come back for this pioneer launch.
Trevor Connor 57:27
So getting back to it, you have done something very unique. You obviously have really dialed this in and figured it out so I’m very interested in, with 20 years of experience and a lot of really unique and interesting sports and obviously a lot of success, any wisdoms that you would have to share with our audience?
Dede Griesbauer 57:47
Honestly, just love what you do and surround yourself with the best people that you can find and follow your heart. I’ve traveled the road less traveled for sure and I’ve learned so much and had such a great time that I have zero regrets, but I’ve had a lot of help along the way. So find your passion. Surround yourself with excellence and go for it.
Trevor Connor 58:05
Well, it was great having you on the show.
Dede Griesbauer 58:07
Thank you for having me.
Trevor Connor 58:08
And a huge congratulations on, not only finishing, but winning such a tough event.
Dede Griesbauer 58:11
Thank you so much.
Rob Pickels 58:12
That was another episode of Fast Talk. Subscribe to Fast Talk wherever you prefer to find your favorite podcast. Be sure to leave us a rating and a review. The thoughts and opinions expressed on Fast Talk are those of the individual. As always, we love your feedback. Join the conversation at forums.fasttalklabs.com or tweet at us with @fasttalklabs. Head to fasttalklabs.com to get access to our endurance sports knowledge base coach continuing education as well as our in-person and remote athletes services. For Dede Griesbauer, Emma-Kate Lidbury, and Trevor Connor. I’m Rob Pickels. Thanks for listening!
