All right, I'm here with a friend, frequent colleague and content collaborator, Brett Hornig,

Brett, I'm sure it's debatable, but at least for me, this is the best time of the year.

We're about a week away from the 2023 Ultra Trail Dumont Blanc, the CCC, the OCC, the rest of the series,

and to share in the excitement and to make sense of all the hype and the top athletes competing and the demands of the series and to share in the excitement and to make sense of all the hype and the top

athletes competing and the demands of the course and just all of the storylines around it.

What we're doing this episode, you know, I always laugh because a lot of times when we record

these, we're just finishing up a conversational pace episode. So it's, it's redundant to say,

how's it going, how are you doing? But for the sake of

dramatic effect and just kind of like the conversational nature of all this, what's up with you?

You know, we just recorded a great shoe review. Head over to the conversational Pace channel to

see what we're talking about. Shameless plug. It's a smoky as all hell here in ashland which is a bummer i've been uh making

you know really good friends with the treadmill but you know i'm going to live vicariously for the

next week through everyone uh hanging out and you know competing over in chamonnie yeah dude it's like

as a trail running or as like an ultra running fan, Christmas comes twice every year.

You know, once at the end of June and then once at the end of August. So that's pretty cool.

You know, there's so many interesting storylines surrounding all the races this week. And, you know, I think, you know, this episode, we're going to dive into CCC and UTMB on the men's

side and then tomorrow we're going to do the same on the women's side but yeah we this is going to be a

fun one yeah we've got some we've got some knowledge bombs many knowledge bombs and I think

broadly speaking just to just to kind of get into it and

will probably be freeform a lot of this. But you said Christmas comes twice a year, which I think

is an awesome way to describe this in relation to other awesome stuff in our sport. But what particularly

about this race, about this series gets you stoked versus, you know, Western

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