Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Human Performance Outliers podcast with Zach Bitter.

All right, folks, welcome back to another episode of the Human Performance Outliers podcast.

I'm your host, Zach Bitter, and today I have a listener topic episode for you. So the three topics that I groups together for this one

include training for courses with climbing and descending both with and without access to course

specific terrain. The actual question that was submitted had to do with training for

trail races that have climbing and

descending but they don't have access to that type of training in their local running setup.

So they were inquiring about whether like a stair stepper would be a tool.

It would be useful for something like this.

So I just kind of expanded the question to include

the entirety of preparing for trail courses that have a component of climbing and descending in it

just to hopefully include some other people who maybe are thinking along the same lines,

but do have access to some course specific terrain. Second question is testing your fitness throughout a training plan. So the exact

question was asking about how often you should baseline your fitness with tests throughout a

training plan. So similar to the first one, I'm going to kind of branch it out just a little bit

and just kind of talk about just the whole concept of baselining

your fitness in order to properly set yourself up for the right types of workouts as well as how

you can maybe monitor status check that throughout the training plan itself. Finally, the third question

is how to fuel for high mileage training to avoid gastrointestinal

issues, especially if feeling hungry and bloated.

So that when I stuck a little more true to form in terms of the question, the specific

question I think was just basically increasing high my or increasing mileage and training,

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