Welcome to the primal endurance podcast. Slow down and enjoy the show, where we wrap, literally,

about everything you need to know. I'm your host, Brad Kearns. Are you ready? Let's go.

Hey, endurance athletes, do you want to go faster with less stress, pain, and suffering? Sounds good.

Let's title this show, Minimize Stress, Maximize Improvement. Going to share some recent science

highlights from previous shows, bring in it all together, some personal anecdotes,

things I've learned over the past six months, making some dramatic changes in my long-time

training patterns to great benefit and propose something to you to change your mindset,

your mentality about how you approach these ambitious endurance goals.

The basic premise here, the argument is that we presented at the start of the book

Primal Endurance, too. The centerpiece argument is that endurance athletes are engaged in

overly stressful training patterns and lifestyle patterns such that we are working really hard

in the wrong ways compromising our potential and tempting breakdown, burnout, illness, and injury.

So raise your hand if you're listening and you had a season of competition or pursued

some ambitious goals in recent years and suffered some consequences of overdoing it. Could have been an

injury. Could have been just a sense of burnout where you had to take time off or you got sick,

even minor illnesses. I reflect back.

Now you can hear the stuffy nose that I have that I get a very, very mild cold, maybe at a

frequency of once a year since I've been eating primarily. This is now 11 years into my experiment.

And boy, before that, I would get three to four colds every single year when I was a racing athlete on the circuit,

traveling a lot, training really hard.

I would get at least six times per year a knockout cold where you feel really crappy for a week.

And then the second week, the symptoms are somewhat clearing,

...