Could you have pushed harder during your last race?

Finn Melanson [00:00:14]: Hello, fellow runners. I'm your host, Finn Milanson, and this is the Run to the Top podcast, the podcast dedicated to making you a better runner. With each and every episode, we are created and produced by the expert team of coaches@runnersconnect.net, where you can find the best running information on the internet, as well as training plans to fit every runner and every budget. How many times have you finished a race and thought, I could have pushed harder? If you're anything like me, then this likely happens to you quite often. But one thing I learned from interviewing some of the best runners in the world is that you can actually train your mind, just like your body, to overcome your brain, telling you to slow down and learn how to better push your physical limits. To help you learn how to do this, I've brought on one of our favorite guests, Matt Fitzgerald. He's going to teach you the science of inhibitory control and the benefits of practicing inhibitory control, how to deal with your thoughts during a long endurance race, how to unlock neuroplasticity for better performance and perception of effort, and how it affects physical and mental capacity. If you're tired of finishing races like you could have pushed yourself harder, this is a must. Listen, countless research studies have shown that pillow selection can have a dramatic impact on sleep quality. Lagoon specializes in making pillows designed specifically for runners and athletes to help them optimize their sleep and recovery. We'll talk more about the specific benefits later in the episode, but you can learn more@lagoonsleep.com top and get a 15% discount. If you're looking for the most effectively dosed electrolyte drink for runners, check out LMNT pronounced Element. It's loaded with everything you need to replace your electrolyte balance, and for a limited time, you can try Element's new grapefruit flavor. Plus, get a free sample pack by going to Drinklmnt.com RunnersConnect. Hey, Matt. So let's start with a quick story about how you got into endurance running and how you built up mental toughness as an endurance runner.

Guest [00:02:34]: Yeah, I've always been fascinated by the psychological dimension of running, ever since actually, I talk about this in the book, but the first endurance race I ever did was in the fifth grade. It was just like a field day type of thing for the fifth grade, and it was roughly a mild race around some soccer fields. And I just remember being kids like to run, but kids sprint kids don't voluntarily do long distance races unless their teachers make them. And I just remember being blown away by the type of suffering that was involved. It was just something new to my experience, and I won the race, but it was very painful and I just came away from it. My dad was a runner, so I sort of felt like it was in the family. I had an interest in it. Winning feels good, so it made me want to do more. But even from that first experience, I had a sense that this sport was all about that suffering and your ability to face it. And obviously it's about heart and lungs and legs as well. But I've never really changed my mind about that. And then as a high school runner, I really struggled with the mental side of the sport and ended up actually quitting and not running in college because I felt like I couldn't dig as deep as some of the other top runners in my state. I grew up in the small state of New Hampshire. I was one of the better runners, and I just couldn't make the jump to the next level. And it was just because, quite honestly, I was mentally weak or mentally unprepared mentally unfit. So when I got back into running later, I really wanted to work on that and sort of see myself as a different way. I wanted my mind to be a strength versus a weakness. And it just so happens there's a lot of really interesting research going on. It's kind of a breakthrough era in understanding how the role of the brain and the mind in endurance sports. And there's a lot of cool discoveries being made, progress being made in terms of the practical applications of those discoveries. So that's why I wanted to write this book, because I felt like I'm not the only one who struggles or who has struggled with the psychological dimension of the sport. And there are answers out there. The science sort of explains what the nature of the challenge really is in ways that even if you're not well versed in neuropsychology, you can still sort of understand it as an athlete and then benefit from all that stuff that's going on.

Finn Melanson [00:05:13]: Do you find that your mental preparedness and psychological welfare affects performance?

Guest [00:05:19]: Yeah, I mean, that's absolutely the case that aspects of your psychology as well as physiological attributes determine your success in a race. So the physical stuff is obvious and we've known about for a long time. If you're fast, you're more likely to win. If you have a high Vo Two max, you're more likely to win. But what some of the newer psychological research is showing is that if you're confident, you're more likely to win. If you're passionate, you're more likely to win. So there are studies being done now where athletes are just sitting down and filling out questionnaires or doing computer tests to gain insight into their psychological characteristics, their mental traits, and some of these characteristics and traits that are purely psychological and are tested in street clothes on a computer. They are as predictive of success in endurance racing as something like a Vo Two max test, which is, pardon the pun, kind of mind blowing. If you have that traditional perspective, which is very sort of physiologically oriented. It's all about the body. We have proof now that is not the case. So there was one recent study, so it can be positive and negative. So there was a study done involving Chilean age group triathletes a couple of years ago and they found that those who tested high for anxiety tended to perform less. So just in a large pool of amateur triathletes, those who were highly anxious just didn't perform as well, irrespective of anything else, any other factors, like age, gender, whatever. And then some of the ones that on the flip side, there are other characteristics that are performance enhancing, like pain tolerance. You can just sit a bunch of people down and give them non lethal pain tolerance tests and those will be highly predictive of endurance performance. So yeah, I check the research almost weekly and there's something new almost every time I check.

Finn Melanson [00:07:33]: So what is inhibitory control and what are the benefits of practicing inhibitory control?

Guest [00:07:41]: Yeah, so inhibitory control is one of the ones that has been studied and I withheld it in answering your last question because I knew this one, but yeah, it's a fancy term that basically just means restraint or focus. It's the ability, when you want two or more different things simultaneously and you can't have both of them, your ability to choose the one you want the most and sort of push away the ones that would be distractions from that overarching goal, that's inhibitory control. So an example I like to give is you want to lose ten pounds and you want that delicious looking slice of German chocolate cake sitting in front of you. You can't have both. You have to make a choice. And usually if it's like a deferred type of gratification that calls on inhibitory control even more. So eating the cake will give you immediate satisfaction. Not eating the cake will only help you lose ten pounds in long term. So it's not something that dogs and monkeys are as good at as humans because of our more powerful and sophisticated brains. But not every human is really good at inhibitory control, sort of resisting impulses and staying focused on the thing they want the most, even if the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is at the end of a very long rainbow. So there have been a couple of recent studies showing that athletes who score high for inhibitory control perform better as endurance athletes. So two years ago, some Italian researchers did a test of inhibitory control on 30 ultra runners and then they actually ran an ultra marathon. And their scores for inhibitory control were highly predictive of how they would perform in an ultra marathon. Which is just incredible because these tests, you're just sitting in your jeans and t shirt in front of computer like you're not being physically tested at all. The main test for this type of thing is called a stroop test, which is very if you've ever done it, you can actually do them online, but it doesn't require like intelligence or anything. It's all about just staying focused and making choices and resisting distractions. So last year, Samuel Marco, who wrote the foreword to my book, How Bad You Want It, he was involved in a test involving professional cyclists versus recreational cyclists, and he found that the pro cyclists scored better on this Stroop test. So as they grouped, they had higher levels of inhibitory control. And then separately, he found that the pro cyclists were their performance in a time trial was less negatively affected by mental fatigue. If you have preexisting mental fatigue before a race or a time trial, you'll tend to perform worse because the parts of your brain that affect inhibitory control are sort of depleted by fatigue. Yeah, actually, in high school, I took the Sat and ran the state championship on the same day. So compared to the recreational cyclists, their performance in a time trial was impacted much more by preexisting mental fatigue. And it's because the pros had just greater resources of inhibitory control, a greater ability to stay focused when the chips were down.

Finn Melanson [00:11:15]: How do you deal with your thoughts during a long endurance race?

Guest [00:11:20]: Yeah. In essence, the psychological situation you find yourself in during any type of endurance race is that one part of you wants to get to the finish line as quickly as possible. Another voice in your head wants you to quit or at least slow down, wants to not bear the suffering that is required to get to the finish line as fast as possible. So that's just a fundamental contradiction. It's binary. It's like, push as hard as you can or spare yourself the suffering. You can't have both. But if you're in a race, you are presented with that conundrum in every race, no matter how mentally strong you are, there is a part of you that's not strong. That's what it's all about. Now, you may get halfway through a race and decide, you know what? I really don't care, and that's fine. But if you do actually care, then you want to make the right choice, which requires that you stay focused on that. You repeatedly choose to keep pushing. So, yeah, that's what's going on there. Obviously, it is trainable. Some people are sort of naturals. They come out of the womb with some of this psychology in place. But then there are athletes like me who have to develop it. It did not come naturally to me, but I worked at it and made a lot of progress.

Finn Melanson [00:12:57]: How does improving and working on the mental side of things translate to the physical performance on the roads?

Guest [00:13:04]: Yeah, so, I mean, there's various ways to do it. One, I mean, what worked for me, first off, was just intent. If you want to strengthen your mental game, it should be an explicit goal. Like a lot of athletes, their goal is to PR. Their goal is to get a ribbon or whatever, and they sort of know they have to get mentally stronger to achieve those goals, but they never make getting mentally stronger a goal in itself. And I did, I went through a period when I just it's not that I didn't care about my times, but they were the second thing. Like when I finished a race and analyzed it and sort of graded it, I graded it on the basis of how much had I left out there? And then the performance was secondary. So the power of intent, that gets you started down the road and then you can kind of figure it out from there. That that's what I did. But I mean, there, there are other tools that you can also employ. One of them is that inhibitory control is sort of transferable so you can develop it in one part of life and then transfer it to another. So you can practice it outside of running and then apply it to running. So if there's a bad habit that you're trying to quit and you think, all right, well, that's a little bit easier, I think I can manage that a little bit more than just becoming a mental giant on the race course right off the bat. It's sort of like the low hanging fruit approach. You just think of something in your life that will give you an opportunity to practice resisting temptations and choosing the thing that you really want most, and then sort of bootstrap your way to becoming having a greater capacity to focus that you can then transfer back to your running.

Finn Melanson [00:15:01]: How do coping skills improve performance as an endurance athlete?

Guest [00:15:06]: Yeah, so in the book I talk about a number of coping skills as I refer to them, as psychologists refer to them. So those are really when it comes down to it, those are the mental abilities you need to have to succeed as an endurance athlete. And that term coping skill doesn't come from sports, it comes from general psychology. But you're the same person on the race course as you are off the race course. So inhibitory control is just one of them. But the one I consider the mother of all coping skills is resilience. And it's a term that's out there. A lot of people listening probably are familiar with it, but resilience really just refers to the ability to get back on the horse after you've been knocked off, just not giving up. So everybody fails, everybody gets knocked down. But the people who in the long term tend to achieve the most success in running and in other areas of life are those who don't quit. Psychologists refer to that aptitude as resilience, and it's another one of those things that is partly innate. So some people are just born resilient, but it's clear that life experience trains resilience because think about it, you can't have a strong capacity to overcome adversity if you've never experienced adversity. You know what I mean, it's just like you can't get stronger by thinking about lifting weights. You got to lift them adversity. You don't want to fail, you don't choose to fail. But failure has a benefit in that regard, in that it does train resilience.

Finn Melanson [00:17:05]: How did you manage your fear of failing as an endurance athlete?

Guest [00:17:10]: Yeah, so a few things. One is I recommend getting in the habit of taking risks and sort of viewing the challenges you set for yourself in those terms. Because resilient people take risks and people who know they're not good at bouncing back don't put themselves out there. So it's one of those things where it can be scary, especially if you are a little more risk averse to start with, but then you put yourself out there and then you fail and you realize, well, that didn't kill me. So that first time where you take a risk that just scares you and maybe you do fail, but then you're like, well that didn't kill me and people aren't laughing at me. Whatever your worst fear was for the outcome, I could do this again. And then when you choose to take another risk, then you've got a little more momentum and you've begun a process of developing resilience. But there's also in terms of like, after the failure or after the setback, what really matters most is sort of how you process it psychologically. So people who have low resilience, they tend to personalize their failures. So they'll say, I fail because I'm no good, whereas someone who's more resilient will say, I failed because it was too hot or I failed just because I wasn't ready, or I failed because of corrective old mistakes that I made. You know what I mean? It's an explanatory style. So it requires a little bit of self awareness. Like when you experience a failure, you need to not personalize it and also not well. It's really catastrophizing. It's like making a mountain out of a mole hill. So they'll fail and they'll just make it bigger than it is. Whereas someone who's more resilient will say, well, that was one race, that was one bad day. Big deal. So just in terms of like just to throw more psychology jargon at you, the process is referred to as cognitive restructuring. So you can't change reality, but you can change how you frame it, how you look at it, how you interpret it, the meaning you ascribe to it. And that's really what you want to focus on. It begins with just awareness. So instead of just having a negative thought or personalizing a bad outcome or making it more pervasive than it needs to be, catch yourself doing that. It's okay to have a negative thought, but you can't just let it run the show. You need to sort of step back from yourself and say and realize, wait a minute, I'm thinking about this in a really unhelpful way. And that gives you the whole knowledge is power thing. That awareness gives you a foothold to start thinking about it in a different and more constructive way. It's not a matter of denying reality. Don't tell yourself it was hot if it wasn't really hot.

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Guest [00:23:11]: Sure, maybe a good example to familiarize people listening with these concepts is I think we've probably all heard of about children who, for example, lose their sight early in life. They develop extraordinary hearing and that that's a function of what's known as neuroplasticity. So your brain is is a lot more adaptable than the rest of your body is. So neurons that your brain might normally use to help you see can actually just be reassigned to other duties if you lose your sight. So you become pretty naturally good at hearing compared to other kids just by virtue of having lost your sight. So that's the sort of workaround I'm talking about. And these things can happen in athletics as well. There are plenty of athletes, and in the book I give examples of Olympic champions or national champions who technically don't have the right body for their sport. So they're too tall or too short, too broad or too narrow, whatever it is. Their vo, two max isn't as high as it's supposed to be to be an Olympic champion. And yet there are many examples of athletes who sort of overcome these physical limitations by figuring out different ways to use their body. And also an example of that type of athlete is Janet Evans, the highly decorated swimmer who was just I can't use that term, but very small compared to like she had the quote unquote, wrong body for her sport. Because she was short and she had small feet. But she was just a determined little bugger when she was a swimmer and she wanted to win. Another girl with her body who just didn't have that kind of drive might have thought, well, because, you know, the coaches told her, like, you're too small, and she would have doors shut in her face, but she had a will. So she developed this kind of windmill style technique. It was like it was not the way any coach would have coached her to use her arms in freestyle swimming, but she figured it out, or her brain mostly just on a subconscious level, just figured out a more efficient way to swim that would overcome for being shorter than most elite swimmers are. So that's one example where you just quote, unquote, have the wrong body for your sport and you find a way to make the best of it. Other examples that actually are a little bit more useful for every runner out there is when you have a setback that takes away some of your physical capacity, such as an injury or something like that or even aging. And you have to find workarounds for those sorts of things. So we all encounter those types of setbacks at some point or another where the physical wherewithal that we've counted on to achieve our goals is suddenly diminished by injury or some other factor. And there are examples of workarounds for that. The one I focus on in the book is Serena Burla, the super successful American runner who she was not a superstar in college and then a couple of years out of college, she got cancer and she had to have almost an entire hamstring muscle removed from her leg to get rid of a tumor. And the thinking there is like, well, even her surgeon who took the muscle out said he didn't tell her this, but privately thought, well, that's it for her professional running career. But she didn't want to give up, so she started running again and then she actually became a better runner missing a hamstring muscle than she was. And what's interesting is that the first time her coach didn't live in the same city she lived in. So the first time her coach saw her run, sort of post recovery, he noticed that her stride was completely different. So she had basically, again, mostly on a subconscious level, her brain had found a different way to run. She had sort of reinvented running for her new body and did so in a way that made her better than she was. So unquestionably, physically, losing the muscle was not a good thing. She did not get better because she lost the muscle. Unquestionably, she lost physical capacity, but she more than made up for it just by this sort of biomechanical workaround effect.

Finn Melanson [00:27:53]: How does one unlock neuroplasticity?

Guest [00:27:57]: Yeah, well, it takes sort of again, it begins with belief. Janet Evans had belief. So even though she was like, I don't know, six years old when she started swimming, and she had adults saying, you'll never amount to anything that's hard to overcome, you're not fully developed physically or psychologically. And yet she just had this belief. It's like, no, I can win. I can find a way. She didn't know how she was going to win. That really just sort of has to happen on an unconscious level, but it really happens through experimentations. But the experiment won't happen unless you have belief. Serena Burla after cancer, after surgery, she thought, I don't care what my doctor thinks. Though he didn't discourage her, I should point out he just had private, private thoughts. But she thought, who knows, I could still be as good as I was before. So you have to have that mindset. And from there you just have to be open to exploration because it's not a process you can consciously control. When you have to figure out a way to become more efficient with reduced physical capacity, you can't just write out a bunch of formulas and then just go out and do that. It's like, oh, here's how I become a better, here's how I reinvent my stride to make up for not having a hamstring muscle. Doesn't work that way, but what you do is just try stuff. I give the example also in the book of One Arm, willie Stewart, who was a young man who lost an arm in a construction accident when he was only like 18 years old. And he was a rugby player then, and he sort of became depressed for a while and got out of shape. But then he got back into rugby with one arm and he became a better rugby player than he had ever been before. Just by he developed new techniques, just new ways to carry the ball, new ways to defend himself, new ways to tackle. But, you know, he he couldn't have just sat in a chair and said, like, here's what I need to do. You know what I mean? He just like, I'm going to give this a try. And then maybe the first and second and third thing he tried didn't work. But then he came up with something. And the reason he's in the book is that he became a triathlete and a runner later on when he decided he wanted to do the Iron Man with one arm. And the first time he swam, he practically drowned. Because arms are really useful for swimming, I would imagine, but same, he had to just kind of figure out how to swim efficiently with one arm just through sort of trial and error. So it can be a little scary. It's one thing if you know what the solution is and you just have to work on it. It's another if you don't know what the solution is going to be. And then it just requires just belief and sort of an openness I'm just going to put myself out there and trust that eventually I'll figure it out or my body and my brain will figure it out.

Finn Melanson [00:31:14]: What do you think is the formula for success in running?

Guest [00:31:19]: The formula for success in running is there's not one formula? People who are the experts on the genetics of endurance performance will tell you. It's like there is no such thing as a genetically perfect runner. And so if you take ten women who can run a 230 marathon, genetically, they're all over the place. Like, yes, they're all going to be lean and have a high vo, two max. But the recipe is different. There's a funny tweet from Desiree Linden just today that I saw. She's in New York to run the marathon. I guess she was in Central Park. She was in Central Park doing strides, and she passed by Shalane Flanagan. She said she had this kind of moment of embarrassment because Shalane is really, really fast, and Des, who's arguably just as good at the marathon, is not really that fast. So Shalane is just flying and Des is like, I feel like a hippopotamus here. But she said she just laughed because a less confident person, they would let that get to them. It's like, oh, I can't be as good at as Shalane if I don't have the top end speed. Desiree doesn't believe that. She believes exactly she has the mindset you have. It's like, Well, I've got something else for that. And that's true of everyone at every level of the sport. You have strengths and weaknesses and you'll get the most out of yourself overall if you do focus on your strengths. I mean, you have to short your weaknesses, but you can't I mean, if you don't have. Fast witch you're never going to be just whatever.

Finn Melanson [00:33:03]: How important is mental preparedness before the race?

Guest [00:33:07]: Right? So obviously we've talked a lot about what you do, what happens inside your head during a race, but also what happens inside your head before a race or workout, as you suggest, matters. And there are two I mean, it's more complicated than this, but one aspect of it, there's kind of two orientations you can have about an upcoming experience that you know is going to be unpleasant in some way, and every race is or should be. And one is that you sort of accept it. I know it's coming, and, hey, that's just part of it. As some famous middle distance runner said decades ago, it's just pain. That's one attitude. The other is the other attitude is you can sort of try to deny it or resist it. So your thinking might be, boy, I hope this is one of those races that you just feel great the whole way and you still are like, okay, that's a little bit of magical thinking. And those races do happen, but not very often. So what the research shows is that the first attitude sort of accepting the pain, which almost sounds pessimistic a little bit, it's like, man, this is really going to hurt. But it actually helps you perform better because the more pain or discomfort you expect to feel and accept, the more you'll actually be able to handle. And your performance performance in a race, it's going to be determined in part by how much you're willing to suffer, and you just will be willing to suffer more if ahead of time, you've quote, unquote braced yourself for it and said, hey, I know it's coming. Part of the sport, no big deal, versus, like, just saying. This is just kind of living in a fantasy world where I just hope I'm riding on a magic carpet for 26.2 miles. There's a really cool study that I mentioned in the book that it was done in 2014 by a woman named Elena Ivanova where she took non athletes and she subjected them to one of these high intensity endurance bounce to exhaustion. So they get on stationary bikes and ride at like 85% of V O, two max, until they fall off. This is how they do this type of study. They did it like a few weeks apart. And these were non exercisers, non athletes. So they didn't do physical training between the first test and the repetition of the same test a couple of weeks later. But some of them were subjected to what's called acceptance and commitment therapy, which is basically just training in this, bracing yourself instead of wishing it wouldn't hurt, just accepting that it will, and their performance. So they lasted I think it was actually 55% longer in this endurance ride to exhaustion. The ones who had had this training with no physical exercise. So it is an endurance test and they got way better at it just because of what they were taught to think before they did it. Whereas the control group, they just watched like, documentary films as just an alternative to this, they didn't improve at all. So it's just amazing. Obviously, workouts help, but quite apart from workouts, things you can do to train your mind and your thought patterns will also perform better.

Finn Melanson [00:36:42]: What is acceptance and commitment therapy?

Guest [00:36:46]: Well, I can't speak to how it's done, like, in a clinical environment. Like, what this acceptance therapy that Dr. Ivanova did? I don't know the details of that, but the way I use it is just I think once you understand the concept and the value of it, it can happen just kind of organically. Like, when you have a race coming, you will find yourself anticipating the discomfort. It's going to happen. So it's just when you have those moments when you're thinking. So I ran the Chicago marathon a couple few weeks ago. Okay. Yeah. So there was one of the professional female professional runners in the field, a woman named Sarah Crouch. I saw her before the race, but as far as I saw her, it was sort of like a gallows humor type of thing because she's very mentally tough. But I saw her before the race and she's like she just kind of joked. Nine weeks ago, this seemed like a great idea. But that's what happens. It's so normal. You get close to it and you're like, nine weeks out from a marathon, you're like, I'm going to PR. But then as it gets closer, you're like, oh, jeez, I've kind of set the bar high for myself. So if it happens to Sarah Crouch, it happens to everyone. And so just when it happens, it's one of those things where you take a step back from yourself and say, like, you know what, it is going to hurt. And I do accept it. I've been there before, it's not going to kill me. I don't necessarily love it, but I'm just going to take it as it comes versus like, just trying to push it out of your head and pretend like it's not going to happen because then it will sort of surprise you. You don't want that.

Finn Melanson [00:38:42]: What is a quote unquote perception of effort and how does it affect physical and mental capacity?

Guest [00:38:49]: Yeah, so perception of effort is a critical concept in the psychology of endurance performance. And it just refers to sort of in a global sense, how hard you feel you're working at any given moment when you're running. And there's an abundance of research now showing that it is, in fact really perception of effort that directly limits endurance performance. So obviously you have physical limits, but you're never able in any type of true endurance race, you're never able to run to the point of an actual physical breakdown. So in theory, any of the things physically that could stop you. They don't actually happen in an endurance race because you encounter a psychological limit first, which is your maximum tolerance for perception of effort. So basically, if you feel you can't run any faster, you can't run any faster, even if physically you could. So that's your limiter. So the thing about perception of effort, though, is that it is mutable to a certain degree. So what feels like your limit today might no longer feel like your limit tomorrow, even if you haven't gotten any fitter, even if physically you're no longer better. So there's a little bit of room to play with there. So what you want to do as a runner is sort of close the distance between that psychological limit and your true absolute physical limit, which you'll never get to. And there's a million different ways to do that. Some of the research, sort of the space age stuff that's proving that this reserve capacity actually exists. There have been studies done, including a very recent one involving actual endurance athletes rather than just college students or whatever, but what they'll do is they'll zap your brain with electromagnetic energy and then have you do a time trial and you go faster. You'll do two time trials. One, you just get on the bike and go, and another one, you have your brain zapped first, and you go faster. After you have your brain zapped. Well, that's proof that when you did the time trial without having your brain zapped, you could have gone faster. It simply works by making the same intensity of exercise feel a little bit easier. And if it feels a little bit easier, you can do it longer, or you could go the same distance a little bit faster. I understand that especially the athletes out there who like to think of themselves as really mentally tough, they don't want to believe they have reserve capacity at the end of the race, but you just do.

Finn Melanson [00:41:50]: Thanks for listening to the Run to the Top podcast. I'm your host. Finn milanson. As always, our mission here is to help you become a better runner with every episode. Please consider connecting with me on Instagram at Wasatch, Finn, and the rest of our team at Runners Connect. Also consider supporting our show for free with a rating on the Spotify and Apple podcast players. Lastly, if you love the show and want bonus content, behind the scenes experiences with our guests, and premier access to contests and giveaways, then subscribe to our newsletter by going to RunnersConnect. Net podcast. Until next time, happy trading.