July 2024

Feels like an eternity since my last newsletter. This year has been a blur of travel - I’m currently on my 13th trip of the year - and the newsletter has been a victim of that. I’ll try to catch you up on what’s been on my mind although it’s been pretty narrowly focused on just two things.

The main focus has obviously been growing Calorify. I’ve been to a half-dozen events to tell the story and meet with clients & prospects, as with any startup it’s been a series of ups and downs, mostly up and we continue to be very bullish about the prospects. Of course no new company gets going without some bumps in the road. As we engage more in the medical & research market we’ve been digging into a variety of disease states that have been evaluated using doubly labeled water, in particular diabetes and renal failure. If you’re curious about some of the research in these and other areas that have used DLW, you can find a sampling of the references in our research index here.

This paper came out a few months ago and I found it pertinent, the authors analyzed injury rates of runners vs. their use of running tracking technology. I’ve always been interested not just in tech but in how users interact with the data and the psychology of how it impacts behavior. I’ve had my own struggles with this over the years. Just like financial investing, success requires sound emotional regulation. I’d be very interested in how these data would break down between those who publish their data to social media (Strava etc.) and those who don’t. I bet that would be illuminating. I’ve learned to mostly use my wearables & data sources to get me to slow down and pace myself better - which over the long run, makes you faster.

I continue to be amazed at brands jumping on the culture war bandwagon to their own detriment. The Olympics choosing to mock the Last Supper (at an Olympics held in a traditionally Catholic country no less) was a classic shoot-yourself-in-the-foot exercise. Seems like they succeeded in getting millions (maybe tens of millions?) of people to utter the Olympics brand name in disparagement. I doubt they gained many new fans. Not that I was following the games closely, but I’m now more actively seeking to avoid Olympics coverage, and I’m not even a practicing Christian, I’ve just grown weary of the idea that mocking people’s beliefs is OK as long as it’s one particular group. Besides, my favorite events are off the beaten path and increasingly covered using Starlink and a few people running around the woods with cell phones. Speaking of which, the thing that’s occupied almost all of my remaining bandwidth after work…

A year ago I got hooked on the idea of doing the Hardrock100 course over a few days (“Softrock 100”). In mid July I gave it a go and although I was not successful (I completed 60 miles of the course over 3 days), I saw amazing scenes in the San Juan mountains, visited some iconic old mining towns (Silverton, Ouray, Telluride and Lake City), and got quality time with my brother. As with all ultra endurance events you have a lot of time to think.

One awareness that came to me after day three centered on the utility of pain tolerance. I recalled a comment from Courtney Dauwalter in the excellent video from Salomon on her 2023 three race challenge. She shared that in Hardrock she used the pain cave she had “chiseled out” at Western States to tough it out and win. It made me ask the obvious question - what am I going to do with my bigger pain cave? I didn’t have an answer. Truth is, at my age, I’m not looking to spend more time in the pain cave, and I will never achieve anything athletically that matters to anyone but me. If you increase your skill and strength, you can enjoy bigger adventures without going into the pain cave at all. So I really clarified my own goals and approach to mountain sports/cycling/running/etc. adventures. At this point in my life I just want to work hard and try to be a bit better tomorrow. If I have to settle for only covering 17-20 miles a day in the mountains (that seems to be my comfort zone, at least for now), I’m good with that.

Of course I measured the effort with doubly labeled water, not surprisingly I was in the overreaching realm (PAL = 3.15) and given how much of my time not running was spent on the bed there was definitely some compensation going on, I’m sure my NEAT was minimal. It’s a bit hard to get a read on my exercise energy expenditure (EEE), my HR strap was dead after day 1, and Stryd isn’t likely to be accurate on some of the more technical terrain of days 2 & 3 (Virginius & Grant Swamp Pass in particular). Garmin gave me some really contradictory calorie expenditure numbers that I have to more or less ignore.

As for now, I’m focusing on cycling and weight lifting, taking about 5 weeks away from running completely while still aiming for plenty of time on feet with daily morning + evening walks and some longer hikes on the weekend. If you get the chance to visit the San Juans, I highly recommend it: