Defying Convention with Low-Carb Performance | Zach Bitter

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (0:00)
I think, you know, we're talking about ultra-marathons, but this is very applicable to life.

**Zach Bitter** (0:06)
You know, a lot of times, what I'll do if I hit a dark spot, I'll think to myself, like, is this as bad as I'm perceiving it at the moment? Because what I'll try to do before a race is prep myself with, I'm further along than just starting this race. I just went through a huge training phase. I try to bring my mind back to, you're like 99% of the way there.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (0:32)
Welcome to The Dr. Gabrielle Lyon Show, where cutting-edge science meets innovation and practical application for everybody. You don't want to miss this conversation with Zach Bitter, 100-mile record holder. This guy, if you can run it, he does it. This guy is a champion. And we're gonna talk all about not just the mindset, but also the tactical application in nutrition to run a race and so much more. Join me in conversation with world record holder, Zach Bitter. Zach Bitter, welcome to the show.

**Zach Bitter** (1:09)
Thanks so much for having me.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (1:10)
There are many reasons why I wanted to come on, but before I tell you about those reasons, let's talk about the fact that you are an ultra marathon athlete, and not just any ultra marathon athlete. You have multiple records.
You have a 100-mile American record. You're a record holder, 2019, and there's this six days in the Dome event in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and you ran 100 miles in a total of 11 hours, 19 minutes, and 13 seconds. Bananas. 12-hour American record holder during the same event, and that covered a distance of 104.88 miles, and I'm sure the.88 miles, every step counts.

**Zach Bitter** (1:59)
You earned those last year.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (2:00)
Yep, and then 100-mile trail record holder, and that was 2018 The list goes on, four-time national champion, and you have secured titles in various ultra-marathon distance, including 50-mile, 62-miles, which is 100 kilometers, and 100-mile events. Treadmill world record, and one would ask, were you born to do this or not? And it looks like in college, you were running track and field.

**Zach Bitter** (2:36)
Yeah, that sums it up.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (2:39)
My first question to you is, can anyone do this?

**Zach Bitter** (2:44)
Yeah, I think so. I think that's what's interesting about ultra-marathoning, is you get a pretty wide range of people that are coming into it, and they're not all traditional. I have a pretty traditional running background for the most part. But a lot of people now are coming in from widely different disciplines. I actually had a former Division I offense alignment reach out to me not too long ago about, hey, I want to run a 100-mile race. Is this something I can do? How do I do it? So yeah, I mean, you get all sorts of folks, too, like the ones that may be popping people's mind, like Cam Haynes or David Goggins, not really look like what you would expect to see, like on the starting line of an Olympic marathon or anything like that. But those guys are doing 200-plus mile races and things like that. So I think it's really just about being realistic with yourself in terms of like what your expectations are at the event and then giving yourself enough time to kind of prepare for the specifics of it so that your body is able to go through the gauntlet, so to speak.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (3:37)
The gauntlet. Do you find that, and you actually coach people, by the way, you coach my husband Shane, who is not in it for the 100 miles. We'll just keep it marathons for a while because I cannot imagine how one would train for that just from a time commitment standpoint. You know, I always think about at what point is it 90% training and 10% mentality? Is it 50% training, 50% mentality? Do you have a thought of how that kind of plays out?

**Zach Bitter** (4:07)
Yeah, it's a good question. I would say like it gets tough because I think these things blend a lot where you find yourself in a position where if you're just training the physical and ignoring the mental, you hit a spot in the race where you just don't have a lot of good past experiences to know what to do or to feel confident about what to do or to play the mind games that are required to kind of stay focused. So one thing that I learned most specifically around like 2019 was like you really have to take kind of the training that you're doing physically, but layer kind of visuals that you're going to use on race day into that. So you're actually working on kind of what you're going to be doing mentally during the event itself as well when you're out there running. So like an example, that would be if I'm out there doing a long run, like maybe three, four hours or something like that, I'm going to be like visualizing a section of the race and just kind of working through those paces of what I want to feel like, how it's likely going to be. I will pull from past experience to know like, okay, there might be this hard spot at say a mile 70, I'm going to pretend like I'm hitting that in this workout and then just visualize myself kind of pushing through it and having a successful outcome versus falling apart. And then I find in the race itself, you have these, you just get a little more intuitive about pulling from those experiences and doing the right thing versus wasting a bunch of mental energy worrying about what you did and if it was right or wrong, because the way I like to look at it is kind of your physical battery and your mental battery. If you're in the best shape of your life, but you're constantly overthinking things or fixating on something that went wrong or aiming for perfection when that's probably not technically on the table, you have to be ready to respond to stuff. You're just going to drain yourself mentally and then when it comes to the end of the race, we really need a call on that is not there anymore. So the more things you can kind of do intuitively by rehearsing in training, the better off you're going to be able to kind of do that in the race itself without kind of over fixating on things too much.