JRE MMA Show #135 with Paul Felder

Paul Felder (0:14)

I'm good, man. Thanks for having me, dude.

Joe Rogan (0:16)

My pleasure. I love what you've done, because I think every professional athlete, every fighter, when you're done competition, you need something to drive you, and you decided to go into triathlons, which I think is fucking awesome.

Paul Felder (0:32)

And I kind of, I stumbled upon, I didn't have any idea what I was going to do when it was all said and done. I thought, you know, I'll be like everybody else, I'll do grappling competitions, I'll hit pads, I'll stay active, but that's still not the same as getting to the cage and actually fighting somebody.

And I stumbled upon this guy, Lionel Sanders, who I kind of found on YouTube, just looking up run workouts, because I was getting bored during the pandemic. I was going outside, I was going for these runs and they were getting boring. You just run miles. I was like, how do guys do this?

You're just running to run all the time and there's no structure or anything. And I found one of his workouts in Arizona where he was running, it was like 107 degrees, and he's doing like crazy tempo workouts. And I was like, oh my God.

Joe Rogan (1:19)

What's a tempo workout?

Paul Felder (1:21)

So all your runs break down, you have your easy miles aerobic, and then you have where you go a little bit, you're not quite going as hard as you're gonna go for a race, and that's tempo. So you're upping your heart rate into that zone three area where you're keeping it right there. You're not going threshold, which just below all out.

And he was doing that and it was 100 and something degrees. And I was like, this dude's out of his fucking mind. And I started following all his stuff. And then I started realizing how crazy this sport is. If you really watch these guys, I mean, they're freak athletes, these guys. Plus MMA, right? Wrestling, jiu-jitsu, kickboxing, boxing, traditional martial arts. Well, now I found this other sport that's totally new to me that I know nothing about that I can dive into. And it's all these different disciplines.

So I can be an idiot all over again and not just pick one sport. I can do all three of these things. And I didn't even know how to swim.

Oh, bro, I swam with Balal. If I don't know how to swim, Balal super doesn't know how to swim.

He sucks, but he does it. Just like anything, he gets in there, he does it. I've swam with him. He's done a triathlon.

Joe Rogan (2:31)

Well, really?

Paul Felder (2:32)

Yeah, he did it on like a borrowed bike, a borrowed wetsuit, which was like a surfing wetsuit. Like not what you would go and swim in cold water with for having any flexibility in your shoulders, but yeah.

Joe Rogan (2:48)

So these triathlons, like how long does it take to complete one of those?

Paul Felder (2:53)

Well, it depends. There's sprint distance, which is a really short one. I mean, you can do those. The guys are doing those like under an hour, like 45 minutes, 30 minutes, you can do some of them. It's like a quarter of a mile swim.

It'll be like a 10 mile bike. And then I think a 5K.

Joe Rogan (3:12)

And you always, it's always swim, bike, run?

Paul Felder (3:14)

Swim, bike, run. Unless you're doing like super league stuff, which is this other organization that's now kind of mixing up the order of which they'll do things. A lot of these races, they'll do swim, bike, run, swim, bike, run, swim, bike, run. So these dudes are literally, and women are tucking their caps and their goggles and stuff while they're riding on the bike and stuff like that. And then they pull it back out as they're sprinting to the water, putting their cap back on their goggles and diving in, after having just run, probably sub five minute miles, diving back into the water to not be able to breathe correctly. She's the scariest thing of it all. But the ones I do the most are 70.3s.

So it's like the half Ironman distance.

So it's 70.3 miles. It's 1.2 miles swim, 56 mile bike, and then a half marathon.

Joe Rogan (4:03)

Jeez.

Paul Felder (4:03)

Yeah, and I started with that, like an absolute jabroni that I am. Everybody's like, do a sprint, do an Olympic.

I was like, no, I want to do this one. And I did, and oh my God.

Joe Rogan (4:15)

Well, I remember the first time I saw you when we're getting ready for a show, we were in the green room getting changed.