I go to this competition, I cleared my opening height, which was phenomenal.

I realized I'm an athlete again after all these years.

I'm competing my first attempt at my second height, I blew out my knee, 100% tear of my ACL, my left leg.

I had two tears of my meniscus, three lateral tendon sprains, and two small fractures of the tendiopolidi, all in one joke.

Hello and welcome to the April 4, 2025 edition of the Tridock Podcast.

I'm your host, Jeff Zankoff.

The Tridock, an emergency position triathlete, multiple ironman finisher and triathlon coach coming to you as always from beautiful sunny Denver, Colorado.

That voice you heard at the beginning of the program was that of my guest today, David Bonham.

David is not a triathlete.

David is not an age grouper.

David has actually nothing to do with the triathlon world whatsoever.

But he does have a good story to tell and it is one that is going to resonate, I think, with a lot of my listeners who are age group triathletes themselves.

It certainly did with me.

You see, I met David through my daughter, who is a pole vaulter at the Drift Motion Pole Vault Club, a club that David, too, is belonging to as a master's athlete.

He was a pole vaulter in his youth, stepped away from the sport for many, many years, and then was kind of dragged back in by his daughter, who needed a pole vault coach at her high school.

And as he returned to a sport and rekindled his love for a sport that he had so much affinity for as a youth, he went through a lot of the same kinds of trials and tribulations and I dare say even more than a lot of us do as age group triathletes.

His story is one that I think is really compelling and it's honestly kind of inspiring.

I hate to use that word, but honestly, it really is.

It was really a joy to get to know David a little bit through my daughter at her pole vault practices.

And so I wanted to have him onto the podcast so he could share his story with you.

I think you'll enjoy it.

That interview's coming up a little bit later on, and one thing that David asked me to express is, was his deep gratitude for a couple of pole vault clubs that he has had the opportunity to work with as he has learned, relearned the sport and really become quite proficient at it as a masters athlete.

And that is the Drift Motion club that my daughter is a member of and also the strive High Pole Vault Club.

I wanted to be sure to mention that at the top of the program because David had himself forgotten to mention it during our interview.

And so again, the Drift Motion Pole Vault Club and the Strive High Pole Vault Club, two clubs that David is deeply indebted to.

And he wanted to make sure that that indebtedness and gratitude was expressed right off the top.

Before we get to the interview with David, I am going to be speaking with my friend and colleague Juliet Hockman, as always, during the Medical Mailbag segment.

And this time we're returning to a little bit less out there kind of question.

We have another listener question, though, that comes to us and this time it's about lactate sensors.

We have all kinds of different devices that have been marketed to us as endurance athletes as a means of getting more and more metrics to help us understand our training, racing and recovery.

Some of the more recent kinds of things that have come out are wearables that give us the opportunity to sort of peer beneath the skin and get a sense of what's going on physiologically in our muscles.

And one of those are the lactate sensors.

This promises if they're actually going to do what they say they can to give us real insight to things like lactate threshold to whether or not we are training in the appropriate zones and how well we recover.

But the question, as always, is do they actually work and do they provide the kind of information that we really need them to?

Well, we're going to dive into the evidence and give you the answers that we've been able to find and whether or not you should be excited about this tech or if it's something you need to kind of wait on just a little bit longer before taking the plunge.

And that's coming up in just a short bit.

Before I get to those two segments though, I do want to make mention of the fact that I am going away on vacation for a couple of weeks.

I'm going to be out in Indonesia reliving my 25th.

Well, not reliving, I guess, actually going for my 25th wedding anniversary with my beautiful wife Sandra.

We, when we got married, we honeymooned in Bali.

And so we are going to be spending a few short days in Bali before we head off on a live aboard dive trip in eastern Indonesia, where I hope to be getting a lot of amazing diving and a lot of amazing underwater photography.

As you probably know from listening to this podcast for a long time, diving and underwater photography, big passions of mine next to endurance sport.

So I hope to be partaking of a lot of really fun stuff while I'm down there.

Now, what that means is that I will not be producing my usual episode in a couple of weeks time.

Instead of that, we are going to have a guest episode from a different podcast, a podcast that I have worked a lot with in the past and collaborated with.

I am going to be very proud to be bringing you one of their episodes on my usual date on April 18, so you can look for that coming in your feed.

I just want to let you know that there won't be the usual try talk podcast, but instead a special podcast episode that will come out on April 18th and then I will be back with the usual medical mailbag and a guest segment two weeks after that.

The other thing you need to know is that April 18th episode will not have a YouTube video.

So if you are one of the subscribers or one of the people who watches the podcast on video, you'll have to get that one as audio only.

There will not be a video for the April 18 episode.

All right, with all of that out of the way, let's get right to it and move into the medical mailbag where we're going to discuss lactate sensors, myself and Juliette.

Ha.

It is just a couple of days before I embark on a flight across the Pacific Ocean.

But in the time that I have remaining, I still get to chat with my dear friend and colleague, Juliet Hockman of LifeSport Coaching.

Juliet, I get every or I take every opportunity to remind people that I am headed off to a wonderful spot.

I'm pretty excited about it, but how are you this evening?

She just.

Where are you going?

I don't know.

I might be going to a lovely 25th anniversary trip with my betrothed and we will be spending a few days in Bali before embarking on a live aboard dive trip.

I think we're in for some good times.

Oh, amazing.

Amazing.

Definitely, definitely.

Pay attention to the socials.

There will be some vacation spam headed your way.

There will be lots of pictures of underwater fish and turtles and I hope, I hope.

Good.

How are you, Juliette?

How are things?

Yeah, I am very well.

Yeah, I had a great weekend.

I had a road race this weekend, a bike race.

So that was really fun.

And we also.

I had an incredibly fun race and I got nipped in the sprint in the last hundred miles.

It's that.

It's that last little surge, right?

Actually, it was very funny.

I was trading comments with this woman the whole way through the whole race and she's a Much more experienced bike racer than I am.

And as we entered the last 500 meters, I kept shouting over my shoulder, it would be really nice if you would tell me when you could go.

When you go, can you just let me know?

So I'm ready.

Totally giving her a hard time.

She was laughing.

So, yeah, it's.

I think the women's competition is much more friendly and relaxed.

I think, think that is awesome.

She's a bike racer, I'm a triathlete.

I didn't know what was going on, so it was a lot of fun.

All right, so let's talk about this question from one of our listeners.

Yeah, please bring it.

What are we discussing tonight?

All right, so this comes to us from Richard Waite.

Richard, thanks so much for sending this in.

We always appreciate our listeners when they send in questions.

And he wants to know about lactate sensors and in particular the transcutaneous lactate sensor.

He was asking about a product made by Owner Labs that he has experimented with.

And I know we're going to talk about that particular product, but just I think that we can back up a little bit and talk about lactate sensors in general, whether they're transcutaneous or another type in a more general sense, in terms of what do they do for us, are they useful, how does it apply, and is it a good tool for age groupers, et cetera.

So let's dive into all things lactate sensors.

Yeah.

I am just so excited to not be talking about pseudoscience for a change.

We've had a couple of episodes that are way out there, so it's nice to bring it on back.

So thank you, Richard, excellent question.

Lactate threshold, something that I know that most of our athletes will have heard those terms, heard those words, and maybe you're familiar with exactly what it means, but maybe not.

So it's probably a good idea just to go over what it is and then we could talk about the sensors and what they measure and how we get to it.

So basically when we exert ourselves, as we increase the intensity with which we do, we need to increase the amount of oxygen being brought to our hard working cells.

And we do that first through increasing our heart rate and then by increasing the volume of blood basically squeezed out of the heart with each beat.

So all of that to say that you are increasing your cardiac output and thereby increasing your oxygen carrying capacity, so you're increasing your oxygen delivery to the cells.

So as you go from a zone one, zone two effort, where it's very conversational, very easy, you're just going along, everything seems so comfortable.

If you ramp that up to zone three, you will have an increase in your heart rate.

You'll feel the exertion, you'll start breathing more deeply because you need to get more oxygen into your lungs to oxygenate the blood that's coming through.

And as you go up to zone four now you're approaching what is called the lactate threshold.

And basically, when we talk about zone four and then even zone five, what we're talking about is the point at which the oxygen demand by the cells, as you are increasing the amount of work that you're doing, suddenly tips past the point that your oxygen delivery is capable of keeping up with.

So you have an imbalance between oxygen need and oxygen supply.

And once that happens, then you go from an aerobic metabolism, a metabolism that you are burning carbohydrates.

And each time you burn a molecule of sugar, it is being combined with oxygen in order to produce water and carbon dioxide.

Suddenly, you don't have enough oxygen for the amount of energy that is needed.

And so while you will still be aerobically burning carbohydrate, you will now also have a second pathway that kicks into action.

And you will now anaerobically start to burn through glucose as well.

You will produce less ATP per molecule.

So you will produce.

It's a less efficient way of producing energy from glucose.

And the byproduct, instead of being water and carbon dioxide, now becomes an acid component in the form of lactic acid.

And when lactic acid dissociates, it dissociates into a hydrogen ion and lactate, lactate is the thing that causes that burn that we feel.

It's the thing that actually makes you feel nauseated when you really eclipse your lactate threshold and you start producing large quantities of lactate in the blood because it spills out of the cells, it goes into your bloodstream.

It does.

It makes you feel gross.

And my son Adam, he's really funny.

As he's gotten better and better at track and cross country, he has become ever so familiar with his lactate threshold and knows how over time to be able to hold his effort above his lactate threshold.

And he used to hate it.

He used to.

In fact, my daughter, who's the pole vaulter, Lauren, she used to be a really good cross country runner.

And she got out of it because she just could not stand being anaerobic.

She hated it.

She just.

I, Dad, I hate being that feeling of pushing too hard.

And I would try to explain to her what's going on, but she just wanted nothing to do with it.

Pole vault is much more her speed, just a short sprint, get up in the air and over the bar.

And she doesn't have to deal with lactate, but that's what it is.

So the way that I've heard it explained, and often explained to my athletes is your lactate threshold is the point at which your body can no longer flush lactic.

And so you begin that.

Is that correct?

You begin to build that up, you begin to feel it in your muscles a little bit more, and you.

It's that burn like when the woman pulled around me in the last 200 meters and took off.

It's really interesting that you have described it that way.

That's super interesting.

So lactate gets produced, but it also then gets metabolized.

And the metabolism of lactate is generally pretty efficient, but it does take some time.

And that's why after you finish an effort, you still have that kind of nausea, you still have that kind of gross feeling.

But over A usually about five to 10 minutes, that lactate gets metabolized to bicarbonate and it goes away.

The metabolism of lactate is not the issue here.

Like, flushing the lactate is not the issue, it's just the production of lactate.

So it's the fact that you're exceeding your ability of your body to provide enough oxygen to adequately fuel the need for metabolism.

Because, remember, for every sugar molecule, you need to keep pumping oxygen into the furnace in order to burn for metabolic processes.

Once you get past your ability to do that.

So we do these ramp tests.

Ramp test is very right.

If you're familiar with galactic threshold, it's doing a ramp test.

And that means basically you're producing.

So you could do it on the bike, you could do it on the run.

They're very much the same thing.

You basically get yourself warmed up and then you basically start increasing your power output or your pace run every two minutes or so.

And you just keep doing it by 5 to 10 watts every two minutes until you just collapse.

You can't do it anymore.

But at one point, just before you get to that collapse point, your heart rate is going to shoot upwards.

It's going to become unsustainable.

And that is a parallel for your lactate threshold is.

And you can actually measure, as we're going to talk about very briefly, you can measure your lactate and actually graph out your lactate and see that it corresponds very nicely with when your heart rate kind of decouples.

From your effort.

And again, it just is this concept that as your effort increases, you need to increase your oxygen delivery, but at some point, you're going to exceed your oxygen delivery.

And oxygen delivery is basically your cardiac output times your oxygen carrying capacity in your blood.

So when we talk about this, another great little aside, when we talk about doping, we talk about how EPO helps people do endurance sport better.

What EPO does is it increases one of the things that is the factor in determining oxygen carrying capacity.

So oxygen carrying capacity is almost 98% determined by your hemoglobin concentration.

So remember I said oxygen delivery is your cardiac output times your oxygen carrying capacity.

If you can increase your hemoglobin just a little bit, then your oxygen carrying capacity goes up.

And even if your cardiac output doesn't change, you've just dramatically improved your oxygen delivery to the cells.

And your lactate threshold.

Unchanged.

Lactate threshold is still going to be pretty much the same in terms of at what point it tips over, but it's going to tip over later now, because you could deliver more oxygen.

That makes sense.

All of this to say, knowing your lactate threshold is very helpful in determining what's your maximum output, where you still retain anaerobic capacity, and what is your output where you suddenly tip over.

And we have a couple of indirect ways of figuring that out.

We could do these ramp tests and follow our heart rate.

We could chart our heart rate along and we could see where our heart rate goes off.

We could do an FTP test on the bike.

An FTP test is a poor man's version of determining your threshold number and heart rate.

Yeah.

And then running as well.

We could get a threshold heart rate at a threshold pace.

And so we have indirect ways of figuring out, with reasonable accuracy, but not perfect, to determine what our lactate thresholds are.

One of the big issues with using FTP or run threshold pace is that I.

I don't know about you, Julia, but what happens when you tell an athlete they have an FTP test?

I know the truth.

How reliable is that test?

Yeah, yeah.

And it like getting people to do the test in an accurate way is sometimes really difficult because it's hard to do those tests.

And getting athletes to actually do them in a way that is representative and is going to be accurate can be difficult.

However, over time, we can lie.

Yes, true.

But however, over time, we can gather enough data from tests indoors, hill climbs, race efforts.

We can aggregate and get to the point we need to get.

No doubt.

And there's software now, like wko that I use that actually is continuing continuously collecting data and is getting real time FTP without the need to actually do tests, because it generates a model based on all of the data that you're providing to it all the time.

So there are ways to come up with pretty accurate means to do this.

But there is a reasonable amount of literature out there that talks about lactate threshold as the gold standard for this.

So let's talk a little bit about lactate threshold.

So the why to use a lactate sensor is really just to do this kind of test.

And how do you do it?

So you do the same thing.

You do the ramp test on the bike or on the run.

Not sure if there's a swimming one.

There must be a swimming equivalent.

Are you familiar for a ramp test.

In the pool or some.

To find out a lactate threshold?

We see the Norwegians pricking their finger in every single activity in every possible scenario.

So I'm sure there's something.

Yeah, there's probably something.

Yeah.

Anyways, so you do one of these tests, but instead of charting out your heart rate and charting out your power and everything else, what you're doing is you're actually getting a blood sample every two minutes and measuring your lactate and then charting that on a graph versus the power versus your heart rate and getting all of this data.

And what you're looking for are some numbers on this graph.

So you're looking for basically four numbers.

An LT1, an LT2, an LT3 and an LT4.

And all that means is the threshold at which your lactate in your serum becomes 1 millimole per liter, 2 millimoles per liter, 3 and 4.

So what was your power output when your LT crossed those numbers?

And the.

There are a couple other metrics that are useful.

One of them is obla, which is the onset of blood lactate accumulation.

So for a while.

Exactly.

So for a while there, you're going to be trundling along and you're not going to be producing any lactate in your blood because you be aerobic.

But then when you suddenly become a little bit anaerobic, you'll start to see lactate rise, but it's.

It won't rise quickly.

It stays around 1, then it'll suddenly go up to 2.

But the amount of time you have before you see any lactate is quite lengthy.

The amount of time once you start seeing lactate tends to be pretty quick.

So you'll see, like, the line will trend along and then it'll shoot up from one it just goes right up.

And then once you hit four, that is considered the true lactate threshold.

Because a lactate of 4.

Yeah, lactate of 4 is considered to be the number at which you're truly anaerobic and not able to do much.

All right, so that's what you're getting.

And you could chart this graph out and then you can back, back out once you have that number.

Let's say your power is 200.

I'm making it up here, but let's say your lactate threshold is 200.

Then you can use some calculations to back out to determine what your zones would be based on a lactate threshold.

If 200.

Okay, so that's how you use the info.

That's how you get it.

That's what the metrics are.

Now how are you doing this?

There are the gold standard lactate sensors, which are these stationary machines that are lab based.

Those are the ones that.

Juliet, you said you've had athletes who have paid to go to these labs and do official lactate testing.

Those are the ones that are really the most accurate but little difficult to do.

Especially if you want to make use of lactate testing.

You like they threshold testing, you need to do it on a regular basis.

Getting it once is not terribly helpful.

And that's where the calibre comes in.

We talked about how the calibre gave a reasonable, reasonable recording of all kinds of different exhaled gases.

And there seemed to be some mathematics.

One of my athletes, who's an engineer, looked at this and he said he thought the math actually was pretty sound on the calibre.

And he felt that it's, it's translation to lactate threshold was pretty reasonable.

The price of the calibre that we said was about 400 bucks.

It turns out that's gonna end up being the cost of some of these lactate sensors.

So the traditional sort of immobile lactate sensor you have to go to a lab for not very practical.

So companies have come out with these portable handheld ones.

The big ones are the lactate plus, the lactate Scout, the Tydock, the Lactate Pro, it doesn't matter.

They're all handheld devices.

They use a little strip.

You have to have a little blade that you either cut your ear or your finger.

Get a blood sample.

You use a strip to collect that blood sample.

You put it into the machine and it gives you a number and you just follow it along there for the whole kit and caboodle, for the little sensor, for the strips, for the lancets.

It's about 500 bucks all in.

So pretty similar to what you saw with the calibre.

Right.

So then how do they work?

Basically they work by kind of interesting little thing that's going on in those strips.

Those strips have an enzyme in them that converts lactate into pyruvate and hydrogen peroxide.

Hydrogen peroxide is then oxidized, which releases electrons.

All of this is happening in that little strip.

And then a lactate testing device will measure the magnitude of electrical current within the strip.

That gives a number for lactate.

So interesting.

There is a way to get lactate in sweat.

And that is the company that Richard initially was interested in and got us to go down this rabbit hole that ONA Labs, right?

Yep, Ona Labs.

And I think he was using something called the Ona Sport.

The Ona Sport.

So ONA is a.

ONA Labs is a Spanish company.

They make a couple of different wearables.

One of them is a traditional sort of heart rate sensor that transmits, I think, a few other biometrics.

And then they have one that actually collects a whole bunch of things, including lactate that is measured within your excreted sweat.

Unfortunately, that is a technology that is pretty new.

Doesn't seem, its reliability is not clear.

Richard actually sent me some data, tried the product out.

It did not seem to be terribly accurate for him.

And he, he sent it back.

He was not terribly happy with it.

And that's not to say that this won't be a way to do it at some point, but for now, I'm afraid if you it to be accurate, you're going to have to get blood.

And that is a huge limitation of this kind of testing.

You mentioned to me you've had athletes who've done this.

Do they do it at home or are they going to labs?

They are mostly going to labs.

And so they would go once cuz they were super curious and then they would send me the results and we would talk about them.

But again, that you've got to be able to go with some frequency on.

A.

I know a couple of people who have done this and have the meters at home and do them on a semi regular basis.

I think just pricking your ear.

And one of the papers that.

Cosette Rhodes was, the intern that worked on this one, she looked up a bunch of papers on this and one of the things she found was that depending on where you take the blood from, you're gonna get wildly different lactate levels.

Oh, that's tough.

Yeah.

And so if you take blood from the ear, the lactate tends to be lower than if you take it from the finger.

And there's no consensus as to which one is right.

But most authors feel like it's probably better to take it from the ear.

And I don't know about you, but the idea of somebody pricking my earlobe 20 times over the course of like 45 minutes doesn't sound super exciting.

Yeah.

Some reason it's better in your have your finger pricked, isn't it?

Both of them don't sound wonderful, but yeah.

Anyways, then there's the accuracy of the sensors themselves.

They're reasonable.

The best ones tend to be the more expensive ones, as you might imagine.

But even then, 10% error, about 10% variability.

And that can turn into meeting your.

Meaning that your lactate threshold is off by as much as 15 to 20%, because a 10% variability on the measurement translates to 4 as a threshold becoming as low as 3.4.

So it could be a pretty substantial difference in what you're actually measuring and what you're actually seeing.

Now, is that better than doing an FTP test, which we know is inherently inaccurate?

Maybe it might still be better.

So, just something to think about.

A couple other things that she.

That came up in the papers that she looked at, I'd be interested in.

I didn't know this.

She presented some of this evidence to me and I thought it was super interesting.

Do you think there'd be any difference by age in terms of reliability or in terms of even the difference of using this data to train?

I guess I really should ask.

Yeah.

I mean, there's often variability in other metrics that we use, so it wouldn't surprise me if there was, but I don't.

I can't argue why or why not.

Yeah.

So I, and I.

I want to be clear, I didn't ask the question correctly.

The question shouldn't be whether or not it's accurate by age, but actually whether or not using lactate threshold to train is better at different ages.

And it turns out that the younger you are, the better lactate threshold is for training.

Now, it's not that it's not good when you're older, it just doesn't seem to be as efficient.

And the way you use lactate threshold is, as we said, it helps to determine your zones.

But once you know your lactate threshold, training at or near your lactate threshold helps push the lactate threshold up and then also shifts your zones.

And that's the whole Norwegian method.

Right?

You referred to it earlier.

Yeah.

Right.

The whole Norwegian method is doing quite a bit of training at or near lactate threshold to try and boost your lactate threshold and thereby pull the other zones up with it.

How you do that, how often you do that, is where this art comes in.

And we're not gonna get into that here.

There is, I do wanna mention one of the papers that she brought to my attention did talk about the accuracy of measurements being very determined by a few things.

Number one, how much carbohydrate you still have on board.

So as you deplete carbohydrate and start using different fuels, you actually get less accuracy on your lactate threshold.

Which exercise you're doing can impact your accuracy.

Ambient temperature, which I thought was interesting.

The warmer it is, the more lactate you produce.

And therefore you may get an erroneously low lactate threshold at a warmer temperature.

And then overtraining.

Overtraining can also increase lactate concentrations, giving a falsely low lactate threshold.

So a variety of things can.

Yeah, a variety of things make this not as straightforward as you might think, which I think is interesting because these devices and the whole concept of lactate threshold, you hear that it's very cut and dry and that it's very scientific and a way to dial in your training.

But the data that's out there makes me question whether the juice is worth the squeeze.

I also.

One thing we haven't touched on yet is even if you leave the accuracy of the test itself aside, how useful is this for our age group population?

You can argue, even amongst the pro ranks, you know, there are some that test all the time and there are some that hardly test at all.

And now you extrapolate that down to the mass group of age groupers.

For whom is this.

Even if the test was 99% accurate or a hundred percent accurate, for whom is this test useful really, given all of the other things that interpreters I.

Would add also for when is this useful?

Because I, I.

The way I coach, and we've talked about this before, is I don't like to give a huge amount of lactate threshold or VO2 max type work during endurance type of training season.

And that's where we are transitioning to now with my athletes, is getting them into more endurance work and pulling back from this.

I would look, I'm a data wonk and I like to look at data for my athletes and I have some athletes who like to look at it too.

And I can think off top of my head of my roster, I've probably got three or four Athletes who probably would like to do this and I would work with them to do do this and we would generate their lactate threshold and then we would work with it during the winter months to try and push that and move it up.

But I wouldn't use it beyond the early spring because I think once you get to early spring, I think you want to stay away from that and I think you want to move into again, as we said, staying lower than that, being more cognitive of endurance type efforts and keeping them very aerobic.

Now it would be nice to know the lactate threshold over time and see how it tracks and certainly later in the winter and as you're getting into that endurance time, see what their lactate threshold is and base your zones off of that.

Combine that with what I'm getting out of wko.

See how I almost use it as a check and see if that data is accurate.

I don't.

I think it's interesting.

Do I need it?

No, I'm not gonna go get it.

Although I'd love to.

If somebody gave me one, I'd be like, oh cool, I'll try this and see what I get from it.

I think it's really interesting.

Could definitely make use of this.

But like you said, how, how useful.

Not I guess it's.

I think it could be the same utility for everybody no matter what your skill level is.

But do you need it for every skill level?

I don't think so.

I think we have other ways of figuring it out.

And also I also feel take your sort of.

You take the vast majority of age groupers and there's so many things we have to work on in triathlon, swim, bike, run, transitions, nutrition, so many things.

And it just seems like there's other low hanging fruit for us to gather before we start chasing down the rabbit hole of Are we close enough on what your FTP is or what your, your lactate threshold is in run pace and in bike power, if you even use bike power.

I once talking to an athlete who was coming to me with reams and reams of data on all their so much testing, so much analysis of every training and every race and this athlete spent 13 minutes in T1 and I thought we don't need to go any further.

Let's talk about transitions.

It just seems like for so many not.

It's interesting and certainly there are people who are going to be more interested in it.

Perhaps if there was a way to test regularly, the athletes on the pointy end might get a lot out of it.

I don't know.

I just think there's so much to think about without worrying about that.

I think it is similar take home point to what we said with the calibre, which is this is super interesting.

This is a little bit in the weeds.

It does what it says it does.

It can help us train more scientifically, maybe a little bit more accurately.

But does everybody need to really need this?

No, of course not.

But if you want it and if you want to, as long as your coach is willing to work with you and make use of it, why not?

If you've got, if that's your, if that's your jam, I wouldn't talk you out of it.

But I agree with you.

I think it's not necessary.

Listen, both of us have managed and.

We'Re just fine with that.

Interesting.

Yeah.

We know several other people who are very high performing athletes also not doing this.

I would be fascinated.

I could think of somebody who listens to this podcast and is a frequent contributor on the Facebook group.

I would love to know if he, he does this.

I would not be surprised if he does.

I'm not going to call him out, but I'll be very interested to know if he does this.

He knows who he is.

He lives in Arizona and he knows who he is.

I'm talking to you.

I'll be fascinated to know if you use this.

So let us know.

Send us an email, put a comment in the Facebook group.

We would really love to know if you're using this, how often, how have you found it helps and informs your training?

Or is it something that you just find it's interesting and nothing more?

We'd be fascinated.

Share your experience with others.

And Richard, thank you for the question.

We very much appreciate it.

And we have a few other interesting questions that are coming along in the next few episodes, but that shouldn't stop you from submitting your own.

So if you have a question you want us to answer on the podcast, please do send it in.

You can email me at tri.

You could drop it into the Facebook group that I previously mentioned.

And if you're not a member, please do search for it on the platform and answer the three easy questions.

We'd love to gain you admittance.

If you're not getting the newsletter, you don't know what you're missing.

The best part about the newsletter is that you're going to learn about our guests.

There's a whole section coming out on Juliet and actually, I guess it just came out.

I think it came out.

Yeah.

Yeah, you got to See all kinds of factoids, a picture of me and Juliet and then you, you get all the references for the Medical Mailbag.

So you can actually go and check our work and make sure we're telling you the truth.

Don't take our word for it.

We give you the science here.

But seriously, I hope you will consider signing up for that and you can pass that along to someone who needs to know about lactate testing as well.

Juliet, I have rambled on long enough.

I think we are at the end of a medical mailbag for this week.

I did want to mention I have had a lot of really positive feedback about our segment where we discuss coaching philosophies.

So there has been a clamoring for a second.

Clamoring, clamoring.

Knocking down the door.

My door is reinforced.

They've been coming at it so hard.

We will do that, I promise.

We have a couple of things coming up in the next couple of episodes, but Juliet and I will be back to do a follow up on that and discuss some of the things we didn't get a chance to talk about.

If you have questions you want for us to answer on that segment that we do, please do send those in as well.

We'd love to entertain those as well.

Juliet, thanks so much for joining me as always on the Medical Mailbag.

It's always a pleasure to have these conversations.

I look forward to seeing you when I get back.

Yes.

Have a great vacation, Jeff.

Can't wait to see all the pictures.

All right, talk soon.

Bye.

My guest on the podcast today is David Bonham.

And no, you have not heard of him.

The reason you don't know who David Bonham is because he's not a triathlete, he's not a swimmer, he's not a biker, and he's not even a runner.

Don't leave.

I promise this is an interview that you're going to enjoy.

I met David through, not my son, who you've heard me speak about innumerable times on this show, but rather through my daughter.

My daughter, as I've mentioned, I think a couple of times at least, is a pole vaulter.

And pole vault is something that I probably, like many of you, I didn't really know a whole lot about.

It was something that my daughter was drafted into from gymnastics.

And it turns out she's good.

She was picked out by her coach as being someone that he thought would have a lot of potential.

And she has joined a club called Drift Motion where she jumps now.

She was jumping four times a week.

She's jumping three times a week with them, on top of jumping with her school another four times a week.

So she is like flying through the air on a regular basis.

Anyways, over the winter, Lauren was jumping at some meets, some indoor meets at the Colorado School of Mines.

And while I was there, I happened to notice there was a couple of older gentlemen, people more of my generation than some of the kids who were jumping.

And I got a chance to meet one of them.

Who is my guest today, David, at one of the Drift Motion practices.

And I got to talking to him and I realized that in doing so, David's story is so similar to some of the stories that so many of us as age groupers have dealt with over the years.

We pursue a sport because we love it.

We pursue a sport even though it leads to innumerable amounts of sacrifices that we have to make both to our own bodies and also to just the time commitments we have to make in order to excel at it and dedicate to it.

But we get so much out of participating in triathlon, and David does by participating in pole vault.

And so I wanted to bring him here and talk to him because when I got a chance to speak to him, I really enjoyed our conversation and I thought that you, my listeners, would get something out of it as well.

David's an extremely affable guy.

He just has a passion for pole vault that I think will resonate with a lot of triathletes.

And let me just tell you a little bit about him before I bring him on.

David grew up in Ohio.

He lives in the suburbs of Denver and he and his wife have been together for 31 years, since they met in middle school.

He's 54 year old.

He's 54 years old now.

So a contemporary of mine, he has a daughter and she is currently in her first year of college.

He works as a game warden, or as he calls it, conservation law enforcement for the past 33 years.

And he and his wife and daughter have a hobby farm with horses and other livestock.

But he's also the volunteer pole vault coach at the Conifer High School.

And it's a sport that he did as a youth when he was a high school athlete, but he got drafted back into it when his daughter asked him to coach at her high school.

David Bonham, thank you so much for joining me here on the Tridoc Podcast.

It's a pleasure to have you here to share the story that you shared with me with my listeners on the podcast today.

Yeah, I appreciate it, Jeff.

I am Moved by what's happened to me over the last three or four years.

Yeah, let's go there.

You were a pole vaulter as a adolescent when you were in high school and then you went away from it for quite a long time.

What got you back?

What got me back was my daughter came home from track practice.

She was our sprinter, everything.

Her head coach had gotten them together that day and asked him if anybody was interested in pool.

And she said, I raised money and then found out that they didn't have a football coach.

And so I was like, maybe I can find somebody.

So she asked me to be their football coach.

And I was, I love my daughter dearly.

We tried to support her every way we can.

I was reluctant though, because in high school I didn't jump in college, loved it in high school.

And I had four different track coaches in high school all four years and none of them knew anything about pole vault.

And so I was self taught.

And so I knew how to pole vault.

I did fairly well.

I did 14ft in high school, but I didn't know why I was doing what I was doing when I definitely did not know how to coach it.

So reluctantly, kisser fulter, I said, sure, I'll see if I can help.

And so that brought you to Drift Motion.

That's how you met coach Andy, who's the coach at Drift Motion.

And how did he get you back into actually jumping yourself?

Yeah, really a couple things transpired there.

We didn't get into drift motion until 2023, but I really started messing around a little bit with the vaulting because I couldn't stand my daughter having all the fun.

Right.

And so I'm like, maybe I have to get into this.

And one day I grabbed a pole and said, I'm either going to do this right about 51 at the time, I'm close to 200, probably a little over 200 pounds.

I've been in an office desk for over 10 years, totally out of shape.

But I said, okay, this is going to happen.

So I tried it and I actually, within an hour I was holding almost 10ft.

And so that got me hooked.

I was really limited on what I was able to do just because the school had a very narrow selection of holes.

And because of that I would just play around here a little bit.

I never really took it seriously.

I was just having fluid with it.

And then something happened to me November 27th of 2022.

So a little over a year later I had a massive heart attack, which I was told by my cardiologist.

About 3% of the people survived was a hundred percent blockage of the right coronary artery.

And I spent five days in icu.

But the good part about that was when I felt something going on in my chest, I paid attention to it, and I knew it was different.

That's one of the things that I try to tell people is we know the aches and the pains of our body and how our body reacts to things.

When you feel something different, pay attention to it because it could be something serious, right?

Because I paid attention to it.

I had a full recovery from that heart attack.

And they told me that I could do anything I wanted to and go forth and do good deeds.

And so at that point, I decided I need to get a little more serious to make a life change.

And what better way to make a life change than to do something that I love to do?

And so that's when I started getting more seriously into pole vaulting.

I signed my daughter up to Drift Motion for a couple reasons.

One was selfish, and one was her.

So she could get some adequate coaching and so she could increase her ability to do the sport to meet her goals.

And two, so I could learn how to coach.

I could understand why we do the drills we do and all of that, right?

So that's what got me to Drift Motion so I could continue this.

She.

What we learned from Drift Motion was.

And this was what the fall of 23, what we learned was that they had these winter track events at the Mines, which is where me and you first met.

And I knew nothing about competitions and things like that.

And so when I heard they had these high school events, she wanted to participate in it.

And I'm like, that's great.

And I actually asked the India Drift Motion, do they have, like, a geriatric league?

He laughed.

They call it the Masters.

And I'm like, oh, okay.

What's that?

Because I had no idea anything about the Masters or anything.

So he kind of explained to me, and thankfully, those meets were open and I could sign up for those meets.

So I did.

And I'm like, this is great.

Over that first year, I'd lost 30 to 35 pounds, started getting in shape, started exercising, started getting into pole vaulting, but still was limited.

When I got to Drift Motion and found out that they had these meets.

I had asked Andy, can I joke with you guys a little bit?

And he's absolutely.

Come on and jump.

So it's interesting being the old guy with about 15, 20 high school kids all out jumping and Having fun.

And for me, getting back into athletics after so many years of being out, I would kid with the, with everybody there and tell them the difference between me jumping and you guys jumping was tomorrow you'll be out here doing the same thing.

And it's going to take me about three days to recover from this because the pain and the soreness and everything from just one 2 hour session at jumping was just crazy.

But it's something that, that I've accepted as part of this journey.

And I think I'm getting to the point where it's quite so painful anymore that the next day I think my body's getting into that.

Right.

So many of the things that you've said have resonated with me and I know will resonate with listeners because they've heard me talk about them on this program before.

Listening to your body, I have talked.

We unfortunately, triathlon has issues with sudden death and sudden death from cardiac events, mostly during the swim.

And when you look back at those events, invariably if you the retrospectoscope of course is 2020, but if you talk to family members or friends of the deceased, you'll invariably hear that, oh, they were complaining of something being off or they had mentioned that they had some discomfort or more shortness of breath than they did previously.

And I have said many times that you have to listen to your body, you have to.

We are so good at dismissing things, at saying, oh, it's just I've been training so hard or I just, my heart rate variability is just whatever it is because we have so many metrics as triathletes, we just put all our faith in metrics and I think that we forget that we need to pay attention to those little signs.

And I think what you said was so important for people to hear.

The other thing you said was just the value of a coach and the value of how a coach can inform not only how you do the sport, but also can inform how you teach others to do a sport.

And just such an important lesson that I think we all know from being in a multi sport situation where it is very difficult to know how to balance our training, how to race properly, how to do all of those things, having a mentor in the form of a coach is just huge.

And then the idea that at our advancing age it takes time to recover and we have to give ourselves that grace.

We have to know that, look, we're not going to be able to bounce back and do things the way we did when we were younger.

And that's okay.

That's okay.

We still.

It doesn't diminish us as an athlete.

It just means that we have to adjust to the fact that this is the way it is when we're in our grayer years and we're going to be okay with that, because it doesn't mean we can't do what we want to do.

It just means we have to pay, maybe modify how we train for it and how we recover, especially how we recover for it.

You mentioned that you lost like 35, 40 pounds.

How did you.

What did you undertake in terms of your lifestyle changes to be able to do that?

Because I know we've talked a lot on this program about managing weight gain or managing body composition, managing weight.

And there are a lot of people who come to multisport looking specifically for ways to change the way they look and how they feel.

And it becomes difficult because especially in endurance sport, you really have to take in a lot of calories to fuel your efforts.

So how did you manage to.

To lose that kind of weight?

So really, I contributed to my diet and I love to eat.

I love chocolate, and I still eat chocolate and I still love to eat.

I've decided maybe I only need one portion instead of two, that type of thing.

But I think that the main thing that I did was, which was one simple thing, my saturated fats.

I used to eat a lot of potato chips.

I used to eat a lot of ice cream.

I used a lot of high saturated fat food.

My.

My cardiologist has told me that my cholesterol and my health condition is hereditary.

It's not really based on food.

So you don't care what your diet is.

We're going to attack this a different direction, but it's important to me, given what I want to be doing now.

I changed my diet mainly because I am to the point where if I want to have a steak for dinner, I'm going to have a steak for dinner, because I like that and life's work.

I don't want to restrict myself that much.

But when I snack now, I have pretzels, which is zero saturated fats.

I have Wheat Thins, which are zero saturated fats.

So I've tried to cut that out.

And I don't think I've really sacrificed anything because I still like what I'm snacking on.

It's just a better choice of food.

I'm not a health by any means, but.

But just making a little change like that for me has made a huge difference.

And it's enjoyable still that it to me, that's the big thing about it is, again, if you're something you love to do, you're passionate to do, so you're gonna stick with it.

And so when I get hungry and I want a snack, I'll grab something a little more healthier for me so I can still enjoy that.

And I'm not gonna be wanting to say, gosh, I wish I could eat what I wanted to eat.

So it's been a big deal.

Another thing that you have in common with so many triathletes is I know you had a pretty bad injury that kept you out of the sport that you rediscovered pretty soon after you got back into it.

So tell us about that injury.

Tell us about how you manage, because the injury you had is one that actually one of the athletes I coach has had.

And it can be a real challenge mentally, because when you're just getting into something you really love and your training is starting to click, and then you have an injury that puts you out for a good six months, that's a tough one.

So tell us what happened.

It was so we got into driven motion.

My daughter was doing good.

Found out about the winner qualification or the winner competitions.

I told my daughter that I would love to get into these also so we could do it together as father, daughter and have a great time together and everything.

The first competition that that came up was on November 30th.

I love you guys.

Paying attention to my days.

11-27-22 is when I had my heart attack.

Now we're at November 30, 2023.

So a year and three days later, the same week I go to this competition, I cleared my opening heights, which was phenomenal.

I realized I'm an athlete again after all these years of competing.

My first attempt at my second pipe, I blew out my knee.

100% tear of my ACL, my left leg.

I had two tears of my meniscus, three lateral tendon sprains, and two small fractures of the tibial condyle all in one jump.

I actually came down on the mat, and I did what the cardinal rule for pole vaulting is.

Don't land on your feet.

I was a little off center.

I came down at an angle.

I landed on my left foot, which, when it goes down and sinks into the mat, it kind of grabs hold of your foot, but your momentum, obviously, you'll still carry you back.

Something had to give.

And so all of that happened.

That, needless to say, set me back.

They told me it would be at least a Year before I would be able to forcibly run.

And so I was somewhat devastated from that, but determined that I wasn't done with this.

This was, this is a life change that I needed to stick with it.

Something else to say that just goes towards families and I think probably a lot of us can relate to this because we need to have that support structure.

November 30th, that happened on December 25th, Christmas, my wife bought me a pair of track spikes which threw me over the edge.

She has been terribly supportive of all my training and all the injuries because at that point you had mentioned that we had a small farm that we live on.

I'm a slave to hay.

I have to move hay uphill a couple hundred yards every day to feed the horses and the goats and the sheep and everything else.

But when I had that injury, it all fell on my wife and my daughter and I couldn't help.

And here she is buying me various track spines saying continue on.

Yet another way that you with pole vault are sounding so much like a triathlete because something else I talk about all the time is the importance of your team.

Pole vault, just like triathlon is a very independent sort of sport, you're doing it alone.

You have your coach, obviously, but without your support structure, without your team, who is almost always your partner, your family.

And what a wonderful example of that.

And that's such a great story.

So how long did it take for you to get back and how long did you look at those spikes every day just dreaming about putting them on?

Yes, no doubt.

So January 16th of 2024 is when I had my surgery.

So I went almost a month and a half, had a leg brace immobilizing my leg.

And the other thing that, that I wasn't expecting, being in my mid-50s, was the amount of atrophy in that leg.

And my, my wife said I looked like I had a 90 year old's leg and not a triathlete 90 year old.

But I was very surprised to see the amount of strength left gone in my leg.

So no, January 16th, I had my surgery.

Thankfully, the best part of the whole thing was the meniscus tears were minor enough that they could just clean them up.

They didn't actually have to repair them.

So because of that, I was able to get weight bearing immediately after surgery and they told me if they would have had to have repaired that I would have had another six weeks of non weight bearing.

But immediately after that I started physical therapy and for the first two weeks straight, seven to eight hours of PT a day.

They had me on the flexing machine and all of that in between hours of that, working on different strength building and stuff.

Another thing that you guys can probably relate to as well, I think it was in May.

I was doing two to three sessions of PT with my trainer a week, but then obviously PT on the side to try to build strength and things like that.

In May, I was at track practice and I was warming up a little bit, and I'm like, you know what, I'm gonna try to jog a little bit.

I had a brace, but still really early in my recovery of that.

And so I started to jog.

And I don't even know if you could call it a jog.

More like a fast walk with a little up and down to it just to see if I could move a little there.

I went about a hundred yards and I'm like, I can do this.

This is coming along.

And so my next PT session, I told my physical therapist like, hey, I tried to jog the other day, and she's all, stop right there.

You are not ready to jog.

And I'm like, no, really, it was just a basket walk, nothing major.

I just went about 100 yard.

You are not ready to walk.

And I'm like, really?

I can do it.

I was doing it.

And she's sitting down in that chair there.

And I said, okay, now I want you to stand up, not using your hands with your right leg.

And I'm like, okay.

So I stood up with my right leg.

And she's like, how many times can you do that?

I started standing up and after pointing, I'm like, is that enough?

And she said, yeah, that's very good.

I'm impressed.

Now do it with your left leg.

I could not stand up.

I did not have the strength to stand.

And she said, you're not ready to jog.

So they did a great job holding me back so I wouldn't further injure myself, but really pushed me along.

Such a valuable lesson.

Such a valuable lesson.

Yeah, it was great.

It was great.

10 months.

It took me 10 months until I could get clearance from my, my orthopedic surgeon for a full force run.

And so that put me in October, which was my goal because November started the competition right.

But it was a long, slow road and I'm still not a hundred percent.

My.

The strength in my left leg isn't quite what it is in my right.

You can look at it and see the size difference, but I have enough strength and power.

There's and Then I can continue on with it.

So it was long and hard, but.

That'S, that's really valuable.

Having been through my own issues with a hip surgery, I remember that was the number one thing the PT had to do with me, was to restrain my enthusiasm to move forward.

It was.

I told them when I started, I said, you're not going to have a problem with me complying with what you tell me I can do.

It's going to be keeping me from doing more.

And so they were very strict with me as well.

And I know I have other athletes and at least you have a good ACL terror story.

You tore your ACL jumping who knows how many feet.

Some people, they.

They walking out to get the paper and they slip on the ice or they're getting off a chairlift and some teenager next to them knocks them over.

They have lame stories.

Yours is a good one.

So at least you've got that.

That really goes back to the support that I'm getting from my family because there's been so many people, my extended family, brothers and sisters, and my mom and all of that, telling my wife, aren't you mad at him?

He did this.

And it's crazy that he's full on.

He shouldn't be doing that.

He's 54.

Listen, my wife is.

You can do this same imagery, walk him down the sidewalk doing something to keep himself healthy and do it that way then.

So we're right.

And I joke about how you do it, but the reality is it doesn't matter how you do it.

It's.

If it's done, you still face the same recovery and all of the same frustrations and all of the same issues.

It's.

It's just amazing that you're back and doing what you love.

And we're talking about pole vault, which if you're like, I am, or was that you probably.

It's something you see on TV every four years and you don't really know much about it.

I will tell you, having gotten much more immersed in it, it's an amazing sport.

It's incredible how much it marries speed, technical ability and strength.

And I really didn't appreciate that.

And you could watch it on television and not recognize that because the people who are really good at it, you just don't see how much is happening and how much all of these things come together.

But as I'm watching these kids learn how to go all of the different steps that they have to do in order to be able to evolve higher and higher.

It's really been interesting to see how those three things, the speed, the strength and just this technical part of it all come together and it's really quite astonishing.

So if you ever get a chance to either have a kid who wants to do it, encourage them to because it's quite an amazing sport, or if you get a chance to watch a practice and ask the coach who's there about some of it.

It's just fascinating.

Anyways, David, I can't thank you enough for coming and chatting with me today.

I think this is a great story.

I really enjoyed chatting with you and learning about you and your background and how you've just gotten through all this adversity to continue doing something that you're very passionate about and has obviously given you just a zest, right?

A zest for life.

On top of all of the great things you've got going for yourself, you now have this athletic pursuit that really adds a layer to it.

And that's something I think as triathletes we all share in.

We all have this thing that we pursue as a way to add enjoyment to our life and you are personifying that very much.

And I really appreciate you sharing that story with us.

Absolutely.

I appreciate it.

One last thing.

This isn't the end of my journey, but my next step here I am so excited about so February B they had the All American Regional Championship for track and field at Colorado Springs.

And so I got to compete in that which was my first master's competition.

There were six vaulters there.

We had a great time.

One guy was 80 years old pole vaulting and he actually set the national record for his age class.

I I placed first in mind so I got my first gold medal.

That's why I was excited about that and I set a new PR for me that meet.

But what I'm looking forward forward to now is the World's Masters Championship for track and field is actually the week of March 23rd.

So here in two and a half weeks in Gainesville, Florida.

And I've been accepted for that too.

So I'm going to go compete in.

The world's Masters, which that is fantastic.

Never thought I would even consider doing it before my life.

So I stoked and so excited about that.

That is so awesome.

And again just I get to go to the World Championships for the half Ironman.

I've done that several times.

I've been to the Ironman World Championships and I'm not doing it for money, not doing it for.

I'm not going to win.

But it is such an amazing experience and such a great feeling to know that your hard work pays off that way.

So I know exactly how you feel and I'm so happy to hear that.

So congratulations to you David.

Good luck to you.

Thank you again for sharing your story.

We are all going to be pulling for you on March 23rd and I will definitely update our listeners if you keep me posted as to what happens there.

We will definitely share your results with our listeners.

David Bonham is a 54 year old pole vaulter extraordinaire.

He is a heart attack survivor and a ACL comeback athlete and he is going to be competing at.

What is it, The World Masters Games.

What is it?

Championship.

Yep.

For Track and Field.

World Masters Championship for Track and field.

Congratulations again and thanks so much once again for sharing your story with me here on the Trident Podcast today.

Thanks for having me.

Hi, my name is Justin Rayfield.

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