Hey everybody this is Peter and I am out sick this week so we are replaying one of our

favorite episodes from the past few years about a mysterious sort of semi-illness

that was going around the endurance athlete community.

We originally produced this story for our Sweat Science series.

And it's fascinating.

Enjoy. This is the outside podcast. A few years ago journalist Megan Brown started noticing something strange in her local

ultra-running community. I had a couple of friends who were struggling with something that seemed kind of unplaceable.

Basically they would do really, really well for like two or three years and then totally fall off the map.

Megan was working it outside, living in Santa Fe, and hanging around with elite runners.

And these guys were mysteriously slipping down the ranks,

right when they should have been at the top of their game. were mysteriously slipping down the ranks,

right when they should have been at the top of their game.

You have a really successful athlete

who's like top of the podium, breaking records

for about two years, maybe three,

and all of a sudden, they're not.

Like it's not stomach, it's not an injury,

it's just they don't seem capable of performing

at the same level anymore.

And then they just disappear from the sport. So Megan

started poking around, asking the runner she knew if they'd felt or observed

similar loss of ability. And a few of them said yes, a few of them pointed me in the direction of some runners that were

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