BUILD BASE

“What I would tell my Endurox athletes is, I have this written in the notes, is that decide what you're prioritizing. So, if you're someone who needs to prioritize their endurance, do that first and do your strength second. If you're someone who needs to prioritize their strength, do your strength first and your endurance second. You can just swap them round to, so you're not compromising the thing you're trying to improve.”

“Underrated. I'm huge on the fuel. I take two gels. There has been a race that I've taken three, but two minimally, and that's kind of where I'm sitting right now at two. I take my first one coming into the sled push, and my second one is taken after the burpees, so right before the row.”

“Pace matters. And I don't, care whether you're a one term governor or two or you have unlimited terms. Pace matters in everything. The the greatest greatest detriment to success is going slow. And, in this case, in my term, it was it was reinforced by the fact that I had four years to try to get eight years of work done, and I think we delivered even more than that.”

“Rachel Legacy, she's 29 weeks pregnant. She obviously got her qualification into this race earlier before she was pregnant or early on in her pregnancy, right? And she goes out and runs this race. Very smart. It's like 75 minutes in her solo, came back the next night and ran another doubles race and finished like 11th in the doubles field.”

“So when my son asked, I don't remember how old he was, eight or whatever, he said for Christmas he wanted a toy aircraft carrier. So my wife went on Amazon, just ordered the first aircraft carrier she saw, toy aircraft carrier. And he got it for Christmas. He opened it up and it was a Lao Ning. And it was made in China. Inside the box was a map of the Nine Dash Line in English, declaring that this was Chinese, the Nansha Military District, and the Lao Ning will defend it.”

“And so I decided really at the very last minute to not take the LSATs and instead take the GREs to go into grad school for IR, to study on international relations. And so in many ways, learning what I hated helped to reinforce and to understand what I truly loved. And so from that, I continued to do strategic studies, went to a PhD program at the Fletcher School, again, just maintaining my focus on China's military.”

“And the problem with the First Island Chain, and perhaps it's something I should have mentioned earlier, is that what makes the First Island Chain so important is that there really isn't anything left east of the First Island Chain, right? So like, if you compare the strategic geography of Maritime Asia to Europe, Continental Europe has a lot of strategic depth, right? So it runs from Poland, arguably, all the way out to the UK. With the First Island Chain, you fall back east of Japan, and that's it. It's thousands of kilometers of ocean.”

“And the threat that we face, if we were to try to intervene on behalf of Taiwan, is this idea of a reconnaissance strike complex, which is basically a marriage of modern, sophisticated sensors with long-range precision strike systems. And that's, of course, the large family of ballistic and cruise missiles that China could launch from land, from the sea, from the undersea, and from the air. And this complex is designed to sort of go after our way of warfare that we've developed over the past few decades, and that that way of warfare has specific vulnerabilities.”

“People had some really big knee jerk reactions to that I that I heard online and listening to other podcasts and stuff to some of the changes. But it's like, why don't we wait for everything to come out before we make it the, like, a decision or because these knee jerk reactions, it's like, oh, why are they doing that? Well, now they're showing you, like, hey, this is a transition year. This is coming. Other things are coming. And it's like, oh, maybe, you know, they do have a plan, and we just don't know it all right now.”

“Everywhere I go, every group I I speak with, I always tell everyone that when you go through your midlife crisis like I did, run for office. Run for office. The water is fine. It's extraordinary. I've never felt more purposeful in my life, other than other than when I found my faith and and when my wife said yes, when I asked her to marry me.”

“They're gonna go to Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Texas. I mean, this is the SEC in economic development. I mean, these guys these guys are winning everything. I mean, there are basically 10 states in The United States Of America that are driving the vast majority of job growth, driving the vast majority of economic growth. And by the way, those are the states that are getting the vast majority of population movements.”

“The proposed arch bears a striking resemblance to the Arc De Triomphe in Paris and is topped with two eagles and a winged crowned figure reminiscent of the Statue Of Liberty. On one side, the words one nation under God appear with the phrase with liberty and justice for all on the other. The structure would be more than twice the height of the nearby Lincoln Memorial.”

“I mean, I think it will be a surprise to many people listening that there's a wide strength endurance and your strength, you know, because strength endurance, power development, strength capacity, those three things is basically all your gym work, really. But so why is my gym work at the top? And it comes back to the very similar thing what we talked about with the cake and the icing is that, you know, if you don't have a robust aerobic conditioning, you can be as strong as you like. It would just all fall apart when you get into a Hyrox, when you become fatigued.”

“The way I think about the First Island Chain is what my former collaborator and longtime friend Jim Holmes and I have described as a great wall in reverse, which is that it's not China's great wall, it's our great wall where we have these sentinels lined up from a north to south axis. I think it's this foundation that we're able to thus far maintain a favorable balance of power.”

“We put in an OKR system right out of the box, and we set objectives. We figured out what we were gonna measure, and we had rapid feedback for the entire state government organization. And there was huge resistance at the beginning, and then leadership began to understand that as they were running their agency or their department, they had a they had real guideposts on what success looks like. And when they were behind, we were able to recalibrate with more resources and to support. And when they were ahead, we were able to celebrate and then set even more challenging aspirations.”

“And I could probably state Dylan Scott there, who, if you think about it, Dylan had a fantastic race. And I say fantastic race because he was able to claw his way back, claw his way back, and finish in second place. You know, like, the concept of the sledism, we talk about it all the time, which is valid.”

“So much of that is the the ill fated, decision that was made to decommission base load power around the country. It was it was one of the dumbest decisions that has ever been made. Nuclear and nuclear and and gas and and and a lot of coal plants that are that need to be maintained. They're cleaner today, and we can have an all of the above approach.”

“If you look at how they do their double threshold and their threshold training, the only thing that changes is that as they get closer to racing, the duration of the intervals increases, and generally the recovery between intervals decreases. So you might start off with something really simple, like one minute on, one minute off. Your threshold pace is quite easy, not very hard at all. But then you build on that, you do two minutes on, one minute off, three minutes on, one minute off. And then by the end, you might be doing ten by four minutes with one minute recovery at the same pace.”

“It's better to measure something than it is to measure nothing. So that could account for heart rate. That could account for muscle oxygenation. That could account for VO two max. That could account for really anything. It's better to measure something than it is to not measure anything. So if you're measuring VO two max, you can get a rough idea.”

“What typically you see with, when you compare those two types of individuals or those two types of workouts, you get very quick gains from the threshold individual. So within a few weeks, that threshold individual will be better than the volume and low-intensity individual. But after six weeks, they've stagnated the threshold. And they're not better anymore, whereas the person doing the volume generally keeps on improving. And that's been shown time and time again.”

“One of the cues I teach my athletes, and it's a pretty common one, but it's making sure that you're doing a big exhale when the ball hits the target. And that's kind of like a good target or a good mental cue that as soon as that ball touch, we're doing a big exhale, a big inhale for us to receive the ball for the next rep.”

“This whole idea of the First Island Chain in part started with an important post-war lesson after the Pacific War, which was a lesson of never again. Never let a local power achieve dominance over a key region or a key piece of terrain where that hegemon would be able to acquire the resources and the capabilities to project power to threaten the United States in the Western Hemisphere. Of course, we were thinking at the time, at the end of the Pacific War, about how an isolationist United States essentially allowed the danger to gather in Europe and Asia, that eventually led to a global war.”

“China is in many ways a cooperative adversary to the extent that the actions that it's taking, particularly its peacetime coercive actions, have really raised awareness of the China challenge down the First Island Chain, whether it's their probing against South Korea in the Yellow Sea or whether it's the coercive actions against the Japanese around the Senkakus or the increasingly regular maritime and aerial exercises in the Sea of Japan and now in the Northwest Pacific on Japan's Eastern facing part of the First Island Chain.”

“I think the biggest, one of the biggest tools for pacing is a lot of tabata work or EMOM work. So it's, and tracking that, right? So it's like week to week, like how many reps did you do in this certain time domain that we worked in? Now next week, how many reps are you doing? And progressing that over time, but it's teaching pacing control as well. So like, let's just say if you're doing a eight to 10 minute EMOM and you're working for a 30 seconds on 30 seconds off, it's teaching like that ability to move steadily.”

“I went to the gym with every intention of doing it, tried to do a muscle up and could not pull with my right arm. So when I went to turn over, it felt like my arm was breaking. So I was like, that's weird. I went and tried to get in the dip position, the bottom of the dip, and my arm felt like a flame went down the bones.”

“I should have clarified that I do think that we ought to include South Korea as an element of the First Island Chain. It's clearly a peninsula. It's surrounded by sea on three sides. I think it ought to be considered to be very much integral to that architecture. But I think you do raise an important point. I think this is an issue that the National Defense Strategy also identifies, which is this problem of simultaneity, which is that, would it be possible that the United States focusing on a Taiwan scenario might create an opportunity for opportunistic aggression by North Korea against South Korea?”

“The negotiations in Islamabad are expected to focus on stabilizing a fragile ceasefire that was reached between Washington and Tehran earlier this week. The talks are also expected to include operations in the Strait Of Hormuz. Pakistan's prime minister called the talks, quote, make or break for whether a fragile ceasefire will hold.”

“I would say I'm putting in roughly like three to four-ish hours a day, like depending of work. Yeah, I do have a full rest day on Sunday. So yeah, what's that? I guess, like probably like 18 to 20-ish hours, I would say a week. Usually like my days are structured where I have a day that is more of an aerobic base focusing more on obviously like easy running, easy work on the ergs, strength work, accessory pieces as well. And then the day following would be more of a quality day.”

“If there was, honestly, if there was no racing, I would literally train the exact same way that I am because I love what I do every single day. I find that I just get so much joy out of the process and going, going to the gym and doing my training and challenging myself. The competition is just kind of like the cherry on top.”

“But what I would say is that I think the consistency factor comes in when you go for more frequency because your injury risk is a bit lower. So when you're having breaks in between, you're having more recovery in between, you're not doing repetitive strains on the muscles continuously, and the injury risk is less. There's also some great work that comes out of John Hawley's lab based in Australia, and they looked at the molecular signaling pathways of adaptations. The idea is that you can train in the morning and train in the evening, you're kind of always upregulating that signal to adapt, which I think is a positive thing.”

“Chuseong Lee and I worked well together. We had a rhythm that I think is really important. We spoke every morning in order to clear what we were working on... part of working together and and leading is to make sure you have you have established rhythms, that force you to say, well, there's nothing for us to talk about today. Or listen, you know, there's seven things we gotta talk about, and here they are.”

“I've had a few people that have said to me, I'm not an elite, I don't want to be in the elite field, can I train with you? And I'm actually like, I don't want to train someone that is looking to be elite, right? I actually just love training anyone of any ability. I love getting a new athlete come through my door, having a chat with them, seeing where they've come from, what their background is, what their goals are, and really just going, hey, how can we get this person from where they're at now to where they want to go?”

“I realized how much even, even more so, how much work you could easily overdo in the first half of the race. Because, and like, I, you know, take the sleds for an example, like, as simple as, like, if you overcook the sleds, man, like, it's a, it's a hard way, but it's a long way back, right?”

“I had was not prepared to to do this test, and I felt kinda sick as I as I started to do the test. They gave me these, like, wipes to wipe down. As I was, like, finishing up, they're asking me how I am and, like, walking me through what the numbers mean and stuff. And all of a sudden, I felt sick and there was a trash can right there, and I just start dry heaving into the trash can until finally I start puking into the trash can that was right next to it. We get into the car, the Uber, and we start driving. We're about fifteen minutes into this drive, and I'm like, pull over. He pulls over on the side of London. I open the door, dude, and, like, a gallon of vomit just hopped inside the car.”

“The four astronauts set a new distance from Earth record. They also snapped stunning photos of the moon as they saw parts of its surface that had never been seen by human eyes before. After their safe return, NASA's Lori Glaze said that everyone working with the Artemis moon program is fired up.”

“It showed to me that potentially the difference between racing versus time trialling once again, I think a lot of people are good at the whole time trialling when it comes to a HYROX race and actually just getting races done and performing well when they don't have any other external pressures. But as we all know, when you get to an Elite 15 race, to be fair, I'm a happy man if I don't do a PB and I don't necessarily do a great time but I win.”

“To be honest, the biggest improvement has just been building my aerobic capacity. My aerobic capacity was non-existent. I won't lie. Like at the beginning of my Hyrox journey. And I think actually to share my first Hyrox race, spent looking at my heart rate data, my max heart rate hit like 220, and I spent over 20 minutes above 200 beats per minute. So yeah, to think like that's where I started to where I am now, like it's just incredible.”

“I mean, Loudoun County gets in excess of 25% of their county tax base from the data center community, which is keeping real estate taxes down. It's building fire stations and schools. And, I mean, this is exactly what this big tax base is all about. They have some of the best schools in the world based on based on some of these things.”

“You can increase your VO two max and not get any better. Absolutely. Does not correlate to performance. There are a plethora of studies that show that that, like, they're they're just all over the place. If you took a bunch of people that were from 50 to 70, and I'm fifty fifty eight b o two max at 37 years old, if if you have anybody that's in that range, you could not predict the results of a race just based on our b o two max.”

“At the National Action Network Convention in New York, Harris told reverend Al Sharpton that she might run for president again. It's by no means a commitment to launch what would be her third bid for the White House, but her recent comments come as the former vice president is about to embark on a series of stops to key election states.”

“This is interesting because this is the exact opposite of what we used to do in CrossFit. In CrossFit, you're really narrow for the movements of the open, and then the movements of the regionals expand so you got to open up and then the games can be really wide. They have the open funnel, the reverse funnel, and HYROX, because we know the specific demands of the event, we kind of funnel in as the season progresses.”

“And if anybody saw Vivian's post, she had one second faster here than she did in Phoenix. But it was a minute 15 faster on the run and a minute 16 slower on her stations. So it's like she ran almost the exact same time, but ran a completely different style of race.”

“And the thing now I think we're finding, and I think I said this to James, especially on the men's side, like it's, I really start to think that it's coming down to a big seven run, seven station buy-in, and then a wall ball race. Like, because it's, we're starting to see that, like it doesn't matter where you're positioned at any point in time throughout the race, but you need to make sure that you're getting to the wall balls and you're obviously in a position that you're able to make ground.”

“If you follow Triathlon and Ironman, like, you've probably heard of the name Christian Blumberg who's, I guess is one of the most iconic, Ironman, 70.3 and also Olympic distance athletes in the world. He measured the biggest z o two max score ever in history. He cracked a 100. A 102 is his VO two max score. Long story short, the race afterwards, like his first race after doing that VO2 Max max was three or four weeks ago in New Zealand. He placed seventh at this Ironman.”

“I mean, the DMV, which is the second largest interaction with citizens, the the the the motor vehicles department, still runs off of a mainframe that's 30 years old that was, built and maintained by IBM who doesn't maintain it anymore. I mean, that's what we were dealing with.”

“I am constantly telling everybody, run to the light. Do the do the problem solving. Get into the fact full zone, but don't reject change out of fear. Let's make sure we understand with great facts where we're going and how we get there.”

“But basically, I herniated my disc between my C5 and C6 cervical spine. So it's not big, but it's pushing right on that nerve root. So I herniated, I forget what he said, like three to five millimeters, which to me doesn't sound like very much, because when I herniated a disc in my low back, it was 13 millimeters. But he said like, there's a lot more space in the low back to like have that type of big one versus your cervical spine, which was much smaller.”

“So people tend to sit in that kind of what we call the black hole, the black hole of intensity, because it's just that nice feeling of it's not too hard. You're still moving fast. It's still a bit of work. And that's why a lot of people will tend to sink in to that area automatically. Not automatically, but just on perp, not even without thinking about it. It's just the black hole.”

“So typically we're looking for around about a 50% reduction in your normal training volume. But the key is that you maintain the training intensity, and you maintain the training frequency. So that means the number of sessions you're doing. But you're just reducing the total volume. So if you did 8 by 4 minutes on your build week, you're doing 4 by 4 minutes on the taper week, for example. If you're doing an hour run for your long run in your normal week, you're doing 30 minutes in the taper week. But you're kind of just slowly adjusting it to allow yourself to be as fresh as possible. You can see a 10 to 15% improvement in your performance from a fatigued state with a taper.”

“If HYROX wasn't a thing, you'd still be doing HYROX.”

“I remember one of my coaches from a young age, he explained this to me. He says, you got to imagine your cake. He says, your high intensity and your threshold is your icing. And he said, and then your frequency and volume is your base. In a sport like triathlon or Hyrox, where we are trying to perform and to fatigue. As soon as you fatigue, your icing cracks and your cake falls apart. And if you don't have that base support of your thick frequency and volume, you will just fall apart.”

“Training, the good way to think about training is it's a bit like music. It's like there's basically, what is it, how many keys are in music? Is it seven keys, six keys? But to make music is the order. If you just randomly put everything in there, you just randomly bang keys randomly, it's going to make a terrible noise, but that's the same as training. As a coach once said to me, a good session and a bad session look the same on paper.”

“Matlock revealed that head one is coming, and that stands for head, h e d, is Hyrock's elite division one, which as I understand it afterwards is basically a b heat that'll be run earlier in the day of if first through fifteenth, whatever roll downs, the 15 top athletes compete in heat one at a major next year, the sixteenth to thirtieth rank with x amount of roll downs, it wasn't specific, will be run earlier in the day on the same grid course.”

“I think the problem comes in newer, more recreational athletes or lesser trained athletes, where when doing a Hyrox is very fatiguing for them. They require a lot of recovery after a Hyrox. And then just to get around the Hyrox, they're going to also require to be quite fresh. I think generally that's the issue. It depends on where you are in your training cycle and what your ego is like. If you can put your ego to one side and just accept that your performance isn't going to be optimal, then by all means, race.”

“I guarantee I would I've said this to a a a few people before. I guarantee I'd put my put my house on it that I would not right now, I would not run a sub 6,400 meters. I think Lauren could beat me in a 400 for sure. I know Jess Petro could right now for sure. Lauren, and I think Jess Petro would beat me in a 400 meter dash.”

“The National Weather Service says a flood watch remains in effect statewide as multiple rounds of rain move across the islands. Saturated ground from earlier storms is increasing the risk of dangerous runoff and rising streams. Some areas could see several inches of rain with conditions expected to worsen into the weekend.”

“I think, you know, Hyrox is a race of repetitive power output at a very moderate load. So the pure strength side of things is not really going to move the needle for you in the Hyrox space. I think, you know, depending if you're an athlete that is very limited in strength, there is benefit to you, you know, maybe touching on some pure strength work. However, for the majority of people working in more moderate loaded movements is going to be way more beneficial because we're not looking to move super heavyweight at all through any of the stations.”

“If you wanna increase your VO two max, one of the and you're new, especially, like, I'd say low level, it's basically just move. One of the things you could do as the most simple thing is six days a week, either go for a run or ride a bike. Doesn't have to be long. Twenty minutes, maybe. And one of those days, do it on a as a fartlek. So, like, do 10 or eight by one minute hard, two minutes easy. And do that fartlek once a week for four weeks.”

“That's just so interesting because I think, especially against the elite 15 field of girls, if you compare, if we were just to run a straight 8km race, I think my pure running ability against the field would not be very competitive. I think I could obviously hang okay, but I think when we add in obviously all of the elements of the race together and your ability to run under fatigue, that just can produce a different sort of athlete versus your just solo running type of athlete.”

“And we are going through what's been called the terrible 20s, where our military forces through the 2020s and into the early 2030s, will be their oldest and their smallest in recent decades. So we're dipping into this, what's been called a capability or capacity trough, or a bathtub, whatever metaphor we choose to use. And the question for us is sort of how deep and how long that trough is going to be.”

“We worked for over three years, and we got 25% of Virginia's regulations streamlined. And then I said, well, no. I want 35%. And everybody asked the question, how are you gonna do that? And, and I said, let's go get let's go get some some really innovative AI thinkers here. And what we can do, we we brought in a company called Vulcan Technologies, a startup out of at Austin, Texas. And, and we worked with them for about three or four weeks... And lo and behold, within a few weeks, they came back and said, we think we can get another 15% out. And that now what I laughed about was I said, wait a minute. We worked for three years to get 25% out, and you're gonna work over the next six months, and you're gonna get another 15% out? And they even might have said 20. And I said, where were you guys three years ago? And they said, well, in high school.”