An Inside Look at FitLogic—the Intelligence Engine Powering TriDot & RunDot

TriDot Podcast Episode 316

An Inside Look at FitLogic—the Intelligence Engine Powering TriDot & RunDot

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Carrie Tollefson: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the show. I'm Carrie Tollefson, Olympian, broadcaster and your guide to the world of RunDot.

Andrew Harley: And I'm Andrew, the average triathlete host of the TriDot podcast. Today we've gathered our triathlete audience and our running audience so that we can all learn more about how TriDot and RunDot use AI to optimize endurance sports training.

Carrie Tollefson: I'm super excited for our guest today. He is the one and only Jeff Booher. He's the founder and CEO of Predictive Fitness, the company behind TriDot and RunDot. And I can't wait to learn more about all of this—the TriDot and RunDot train, how it trains runners and triathletes.

Andrew Harley: We treat the show like any good workout. We're going to start off with our fun warm up question, settle into our main set conversation where we'll learn all about this from Jeff, and then we'll wind things down by having Jeff answer an audience question on the cooldown. Lots of good stuff. Let's get to it.

Warm-Up Question

Carrie Tollefson: All right, the warmup. Now, Jeff, some sports give their champions a trophy. Some give a belt, a ring or a jacket. Some, like the Olympics, give a medal. There's even a sport where the champion receives his wife's weight in beer. For our warm up question today, not just for you, Jeff, but for you too, Andrew, across all the sports, what winner's award do you think is the coolest?

Jeff Booher: I don't know. There's a lot that are creative. I've seen a lot of funny stuff—small festivals in local towns, very local stuff. But I guess for a major, I think the Heisman Trophy is a really cool trophy just because it's the actual pose. And so you can grab it and strike the Heisman, you know, American football pose, stiff arming somebody. And I think that's pretty cool.

Andrew Harley: I like it.

Jeff Booher: It's kind of nostalgic, too. Kind of the old helmet, the way that football was played, you know, back in the day.

Carrie Tollefson: And I totally did that wrong. I did the bolt.

Andrew Harley: It's like, we're like dabbing, isn't it?

Carrie Tollefson: Like, what is it?

Jeff Booher: It's a stiff arm.

Carrie Tollefson: Yeah, yeah, I went—I did both. I am so, like, my question or my answer is so nerdy too. I'm just such a runner that I went to bolt and then—but mine is the laurel wreath. I think that it's so cool when any runner gets to wear the laurel wreath. And it doesn't happen very often. I think it's at the New York City Marathon, at the Olympics. When I was in Athens, they did that. But I also love—I don't know if you guys have seen it, the Houston Marathon. They'll put, like, big cowboy hats on.

Andrew Harley: Yeah.

Carrie Tollefson: So at least they did it. I know for sure at the Olympic trials, they had it. And it was so funny to see. I think Kara Goucher and Des Linden had theirs on, and they both had them on different. And so anyway, those are the two I thought.

Andrew Harley: Likes championship headwear, apparently. Championship headwear of any kind.

Carrie Tollefson: Yeah, I do.

Andrew Harley: Jeff, just for our non-American audience, can you explain how a football player wins the Heisman?

Jeff Booher: It's just the most—I don't know. It's voting. I know for throughout the whole season.

Andrew Harley: It's college football. College football.

Jeff Booher: The most impactful player. It's typically a quarterback, running back, offensive, almost always. I don't know if it's exclusively. I know they have a Lombardi Award for the best defensive player of the year, but the Heisman Trophy is kind of the big one of every year.

Andrew Harley: Yeah. Very, very good. My answer here, I want to say that the most recent award I won was this little trophy right here. You can't really see it, but there's like a little iridescent tennis ball in there. Because I won a tennis tournament a few weekends ago, and my wife's like, they sent you a paperweight? And I was like, no, this is a trophy, people. This is a legit—

Carrie Tollefson: I actually really like it, though.

Andrew Harley: It's pretty. Thank you, Carrie. Thank you. I know my answer here is the Stanley Cup in hockey. I love following hockey. I just follow pro sports in general, like a lot of sports fans do. But of all the trophies that teams get or individuals get, the Stanley Cup is such a cool tradition where just over the years, when a team wins the Stanley Cup in the NHL, the National Hockey League, every player on the team, their name gets engraved onto the cup. And so your name goes on there forever. There's just that moment where, like, every player gets to skate around the rink holding the Stanley Cup over their head. And I just—it looks—I'm not a hockey player. I've never played hockey. I can ice skate barely a little bit, but just such a cool—like, it's a cool sport to follow. And of all the trophies out there and all the traditions with trophies, I don't know. The Stanley Cup is really cool. After a team wins the Stanley Cup, since there's only one trophy and the whole team shares it, I'm sure the trophy lives at the team's headquarters all season. But every player gets one day with the Stanley Cup where they can do basically whatever they want to do. And so you'll see on Instagram, like, oh, this player went to Disney World with his family and they took the cup around Disney World. And so anyway, it's always fun to see what the players do with their one day with the Cup. So that's—I thought that was a really cool tradition. We're going to throw this question—hey, Carrie, are you a hockey fan being in Minnesota?

Carrie Tollefson: I am. And actually the Stanley Cup has been to my kids' elementary school, really. But you have to wear certain gloves and you can't touch it. But yeah, because we have a partnership with the Wild and they have the Stanley Cup and they come and read with the kids, some of the players and people there. I know, it's really cool. So, yeah, I haven't gotten to see a Stanley Cup, but the kids have. All three of my kids have.

Andrew Harley: Well, the Minnesota Wild and the Dallas Stars are in the same division, I think. So we're enemies, bitter enemies there. Carrie, we're going to throw this question out to our audience, so make sure you're following TriDot and RunDot on all the social medias. Our team's gonna put this question out to you to see what you have to say. If you're watching us on YouTube or you're watching us on Spotify, you can comment below right here on this video. I go check those comments and see what you guys have to say of all of these sports out there and all the different awards or trophies or belts or headwear or medals an athlete can win. What do you think is the coolest way to crown a sporting champion? Can't wait to see what you have to say. Let's go.

Main Set:

Andrew Harley: Whether you are running with RunDot or triathloning with TriDot or neither, but you're curious about endurance sports training, I'm excited to have Jeff Booher on a microphone today for us all to learn more about effective endurance sports training. Jeff, many of our longtime listeners will already know you pretty well, but for those that don't, let's just get to know you for a second. How did you get your start in endurance sports and what has been maybe a few of your favorite experiences in your time as an athlete?

Jeff Booher: Well, I've always—I've loved sports ever since I was a little kid. I always been a runner. My dad ran. He did sports, you know, throughout his life. But I remember even 5 and 6 years old, he'd go out for a long run in the panhandle of Texas and come back in the last mile. I'd run with him around the block. One or two years old. I loved it. Great memories. I did 5Ks, 10Ks. I did all the sports in US sports, you know, football, baseball, basketball, track, you know, martial arts, everything that I could do. Loved it. And wasn't until 2002 actually after I was in the army, out of the army as a young guy. Did a triathlon and I just loved it. It was a local sprint triathlon. I think what drew me to it wasn't so much the endurance. That was a piece of it. I love the multi-sport aspect. I love the variety. I thought that was super cool. So I love that. Got hooked. And as far as favorite experiences, over the years, I've done four Ironman distance, a lot of shorter ones, halves and Olympics and sprints. But I really love doing it with my family there. And we'll go on a vacation. Went to the Grand Canyon. We did Coeur d'Alene, Arizona Ironman. So that was a great recovery. That was probably the best experience. I worked with the guy that arranged after the race, we got a limo from the visitors bureau there in Sonoma and they took us in a limo to all do white wine tasting and set us up really nice. So that was a recovery day. I'll never forget.

Carrie Tollefson: When was that one?

Jeff Booher: That was like 2008, 2009, somewhere in there.

Carrie Tollefson: Is in—Charlie did that one. They don't have it anymore, right?

Jeff Booher: It became Santa Rosa 70.3 as well for just a few years. But yeah, it was before Ironman bought it. So it was only like 800 to 1,000 people did the race, but it was main—

Andrew Harley: 800,000?

Carrie Tollefson: 800 to a thousand.

Andrew Harley: 800 to a thousand, yes. Sorry.

Jeff Booher: Yeah.

Carrie Tollefson: But swimming with 800,000 people, Jeff.

Jeff Booher: Yeah, that was big.

Carrie Tollefson: Well, along the way though, you weren't only just an athlete. Like you became a coach and you kind of like got every certification you could possibly think of. So talk us through that a little bit. And then how did you transition to TriDot and RunDot?

Jeff Booher: Yeah, I've always loved helping people coaching. In the army, in college I was a trainer, you know, I'd lift and train. I was a catechist briefly and I loved helping others learn. So I was kind of a personal trainer back then with weights. In the army, you know, they'd bring me all the guys that had trouble running, running faster, meeting standard and so I just loved doing that. When I did my first triathlon actually what led to trying it, I was really a selfish, more selfish start. I did the sport, loved it, but I was very competitive. And so I met with a couple guys who were on the podium, they're winning and they started telling me, oh, you gotta train 25, 30 hours a week and you know you're gonna get injured and all this stuff. I'm like, this is not a contact sport. Why are people getting injured? And I have three kids, young kids and wife and career. I'm not training that much. But so it's really how do I become more efficient? I want to win and improve, but I don't want to train as much as everyone's training. And so that kind of set me on quest to become a student of the sport and really learn. And when I started research and I did—I got certified USA triathlon and track and field and cycling and read every book I could get back then as VHS. You know, you buy that, watch the program, subscribe to everything that I could for a number of years and started using my local training group as guinea pigs because I found that there's a lot of people, they talked about data-driven training. Smartwatches just came out about 2003, power meters. Price was coming down, they're becoming more constant. But people were saying data driven, but they were just looking at the data that agreed with their philosophy. And I was reading books and seeing these, you know, video series and stuff, where they had coaches and world champion athletes. They're brilliant people, but they're saying things were very different, they weren't the same. Like how can they both be data driven yet be so diverse? And so that's what set me on best to learn and to capture data and to be very methodical. And that group of people that I was writing training plans for grew from dozens over the next several years to about 2008, 2009, it was several hundred. And so the universal problem was people wanted better results in less time with fewer injuries. So they either wanted to—they were time starved and they were an executive or a parent with young kids. I only have time, but I want to improve, I want to keep getting better, I want to scratch the competitive itch or I just want to conquer a goal. I want to go, you know, I want to train for an Ironman, but I don't want to spend that much time and just be approachable and doable for me. And I don't want to get injured. And so better results, less time, fewer injuries. And so it led, you know, to that point I realized along the way as I was learning and innovating and abstracting data and creating different models and frameworks for how to make it more custom for people, that there's a real value that I could deliver not only to coaches, but to athletes, or to athletes, but to coaches. And we started TriDot in late 2009 and I pushed about 13 or so, 13, 14 professional triathletes. And five of those became the very first five coaches. So when we started, we didn't have an uncoached option. It was coaching from the start. It wasn't several years until seven years after that that we added a non-coach subscription where someone could come just get the training plan without working directly with a coach. And that was after learning about—in triathlons, about 85% of the market does not hire a coach. And running, it's like 92, 93% of the market doesn't hire a coach. So you have all those people that are getting injured spending too much time, not doing as well as they could. And when you translate that, they're not just spending too much time training, but they're missing time with the family, they're taking time away from work, they're doing stuff that's leading them to injuries that are unnecessary just because they're not doing the right thing when they're training. I think that the number one decision any runner or triathlete makes about the sport is how they spend their training time. That's the one most consequential thing. How much time you spend means how much time you're spending away from other things, how often you get injured, how much you enjoy it, how much you improve. All those things are driven to how you spend your training time. And so my vision was I wanted this technology, the system, the engine that was built behind it, that later became FitLogic, the intelligence engine. And just put that out there, not with my name on it. It's not my philosophy, it's not my approach—we go where the data goes. But put that in the hands of coaches and athletes so they can do that, they can get better results in less time with fewer injuries.

Carrie Tollefson: Okay, so I am not this techie gal, really. Like, it took me a long time even to just let Strava have my training. Like, I like to write it down. Yeah, but—and I know that, you know, there's tons of TriDot episodes at the TriDot podcast there with Andrew, but we've done a few starting this.

Andrew Harley: We've done a few.

Carrie Tollefson: Yeah, 300 or so.

Andrew Harley: Right.

Carrie Tollefson: And this is just the second RunDot podcast. So I need you to help me, Jeff. Like, even AI, like, I'm just starting to use ChatGPT. Like I'm trying to use it a little bit for my research when I'm doing commentary and things like that, but I still don't fully trust it because I still want to go and triple check everything. So you talked a little bit about this engine. So it's a FitLogic intelligent engine. Is that AI? Did you build that? Like, you kind of touched on it a little bit. But explain to me the person that has always just gotten almost like a sheet of paper from a coach every Sunday and said, this is what you're going to do Monday to Sunday.

Jeff Booher: Yeah. So AI—it is a very broad and a lot of people—well, and when you're describing technology, AI, anything, it's not like a product that you can point to and see features and touch. So I want to try to paint word pictures here. I use some analogies to kind of walk through, make some comparisons so we can understand it. So the first thing is that the FitLogic, like you mentioned, that's the engine. It's a training intelligence engine that powers RunDot and TriDot and soon VeloDot for cycling. But not all AI is the same. So it is AI. It uses AI, but it uses data science and other things that are technically not AI. It's science and different things with the data. But think of it like the word vehicle. Vehicle is a means of transportation. So a cycle vehicle is a road bike. It could be riding a truck, but a vehicle is also a Tesla. And so when you're comparing which is better, a Trek or a Tesla, well, there are two different categories. They're both vehicles, you know, or if you look at—sometimes people say TriDot is the most advanced AI training app out there. That's like saying, you know, Quintana Roo is a much more advanced bicycle than, you know, or Tesla is much more advanced bicycle than Trek. Like, they're different categories, not an advancement or they're completely different, they work differently, they're built for different purposes, the technology is different. So really understanding and demystifying AI is different. It's important when you're comparing one AI powered app to another AI powered app, because the powering, the thing that's doing the powering can be those different categories. But also like you said, how can you trust it? When you're comparing an AI app to human design training, how can you trust that? How does AI, one type of AI compare to what a human would do compared to another? So it's important app to app to kind of understand the categories, but also the different categories have different relation to how you say, is that better than a human, as good as a human? AI—some AI is built to mimic a human, others is to do more than a human can do. So first of all, AI is not new. It's been around for 60 plus years. In the 60s I was designing neural network models 33, 34 years ago in college. So it's been around a long time. Really what's new is the processing power and cloud computing, which has made it possible to do it at scale, real time. So that's where you see this boom. Most people, when they think of AI, they think of ChatGPT, all of the different—well, they're large language models, they're LLMs, if you've ever heard that. LLM, that abbreviation, it's large language models. And those are not new. They've been around since the 80s. So people have been determined or working on the science and the technology to discover the patterns in language. So it's looking at all this content on the Internet, learning the relationship between words and sentiment and what is a question and what's a joke and what's sarcasm. You know, how do you interpret all of these things so that you can generate, translate and comprehend language. So language LLMs, ChatGPT, that's not what FitLogic is. That's not our type. That's like a Trek, that's the bicycle. It's learning from technology about training. It's not learning from the training, it's learning from tech, you know, Internet text about training. So that kind of LLM, those kinds of applications, AI powered apps, they're automating a template or they're automating someone's philosophy, or they're trained on Internet text in general about training.

Andrew Harley: And we know how reliable all corners of the Internet are, Jeff, right?

Jeff Booher: And that's where you get the garbage in, garbage out. If they're trained on good data, it's better, and bad data it's not. However, they're not trained on training data. They're trained on training philosophy or training text. Our FitLogic is a purpose-built intelligence engine. So it's trained on more than 20 years of training and race data. Specifically for triathletes, it's trained for this purpose. It's a one of a kind application. So I think a better analogy other than ChatGPT, you know, there we talked about all the different kinds of AI. You know, your autocorrect on your phone is AI. You know, it's created for that purpose. That's more of a chatbot. Think of it more like a flight control system in an airplane. Okay? That flight control system is AI, is learning stuff.

Andrew Harley: It's looking—

Jeff Booher: You know, a human would be able to fly a plane based on what they can see in the daytime, clear weather, but they'd be limited to that. But with a flight control system that the pilots have access to that can fly, can look over the horizon for a weather system that you can't even see with your eye but knows to deviate, you can tell if you're in a headwind or a side wind at night or you're not going to run to the side of a mountain because it's bad weather at nighttime, is doing all of those things. So it's more than what a pilot can do on their own. So it augments their ability and can handle all of those other—taking all of that data that a human being can't, it's not just trained on, it's not an LLM trained on books about how to fly, is actually taking in data uniquely that a human can't be processing it so fast and able to fly the plane. And so all that data just gets ignored. So it's like there is the engine. You don't have to be an expert at everything in there. You need to understand that it's happening and what it does kind of. You need to know what the categories are. It's like in an airplane, I'll kind of maybe wrap it up with this. In an airplane, if you're sitting in the seat and you look down the aisle and you see a cockpit door, you don't need to know what that flight management system is doing, but you want it to be there if that—if the pilot came on the loudspeaker says, hey guys, I'm turning off the flight management system. I've been doing this 30 years. I have a PhD in aviation. I got this. Like you'd want to get off the plane. So you may not know what's happening, but you understand what it does, and you understand it does more than what you—and you want it there. You want the pilot there too. But I think that level of knowledge, understanding is really important to understand how FitLogic works, how it turns data into actual intelligence and it actually uses it when it's designed.

Carrie Tollefson: Your training program, does it look at your Garmin or your Apple watch now too, and read your biomarkers and things like that and then kind of, you know, shift things if need be?

Jeff Booher: Absolutely, yeah. So it takes in your data. It takes in a lot of information when you onboard. Maybe we can walk through that in a couple minutes. Like just specifically, it's in your data from all the different devices. It takes in the weather around you and it analyzes that after.

Carrie Tollefson: So cool.

Jeff Booher: Your account prescriptively changes it. Like if you're working out in the morning and it's 50 degrees and then you say, I don't want to work out in the morning, let's go in the afternoon. Once it's 90, it's going to change your paces and your intensities.

Carrie Tollefson: Yeah.

Jeff Booher: So that's appropriate for your environment. So it's that kind of just hypersensitive, adaptive to the actual person.

Carrie Tollefson: That's really neat.

Andrew Harley: Yeah. Carrie. Before I was training with TriDot myself, I had a Strava account. And I loved going out for a run or going out for a bike session. And then like you're jumping on Strava and seeing all these graphs of like what I did in that session. And it's like, it's fun to see the graphs. But then as an athlete, what do I even do with that information? Like, what does any of it mean? Like, it's cool to see and it's cool, you know, they'll tell you like, your fitness is going up and up and up and really, it's just—no, I've just worked out more. And so you're equating that to increased fitness. And when I started training with TriDot, like after like a year or so, it was like the only reason I even kept Strava was just so I could see like what my friends were up to. Right? Like, you know, because TriDot was actually taking all those pretty graphs and the data that was coming in from my Garmin watch and from my other devices and it was giving a meaningful—hey, we saw how your training went this week. Here's what you should do next week. Okay, cool, thank you TriDot. Now we go do the session. Jeff, you said something like talking about ChatGPT. Because I think a lot of people equate AI to something like ChatGPT. And I've seen coaches in the marketplace like almost as this gotcha. Like, oh, you don't need like an AI, you know, tool for your training. Because I asked ChatGPT, what should a triathlete do for their training? And it said this, this and this. Look at how ridiculous this is. And I look, I'm like, okay, one, that's not a gotcha because that's not what we're doing. Like what we're doing is a whole lot deeper than that. And you just expand on that a little bit. But yeah, there's a lot of confusion there because people kind of equate that. So just let's unpack more about what our AI FitLogic actually does in relation to endurance training. Both for RunDot and TriDot training. They're powered by FitLogic. So what is the FitLogic intelligence engine actually doing behind the scenes to optimize our training?

Jeff Booher: Awesome. Perfect question. And that's exactly right. I think a lot of those types of posts, one is they're not informed about what it is. They don't know the difference. And that kind of shows you they don't know the difference between ChatGPT and something that's purpose-built proprietary for that topic. I mean it's the same as you know, the pilot using ChatGPT for how do I get from here to Madrid? And it's not what it's built for. And that's another thing. People look at it and think, well, at best if they have that mimic mentality, it's going to mimic a human's behavior. At best it could be as good as a person, not the purpose built. This can be far exceeding what a person can do. So let's walk through those data. It's a garbage in, garbage out data. Raw data itself is not intelligence. You have to have data science and algorithms and mechanisms that convert that raw data to intelligence, to knowledge, to wisdom. And it knows how to apply that wisdom to your training. And so that's a process. When we specifically look at the training design and redesign of your training programs, there's four phases that need to go through. Whether it's a human doing it or a system doing it or AI doing it. It's assessment, prescription, evaluation and prediction. You have to assess the athlete adequately, accurately, then prescribe the training, then evaluate what was actually done and then based on that athlete, what was prescribed, what was done, predict an outcome and be able to know based on that outcome, here's how close I came, here's how close our actual output, what we predicted. Now we can close the loop and learn and adapt and grow. The system can get smarter. If the system can't do all of those things, it can't improve and it can't learn. And so what I'm going to go through is probably a dozen here, four sections, but about a dozen different technologies that only FitLogic does, only TriDot and RunDot do. No other platform can do any single one of these items. So the first one is assessment, assessing where an athlete is. A lot of people, you know, they'll do a 5k and say I'm a, you know, 26 minute 5k runner. And so they build a training plan or get a template that's 12 weeks to my race. But when we're assessing an athlete, the first thing that we do, we have what we call dot scores. And that is a 1 to 100 scale of your threshold ability, your anaerobic threshold, ventilatory threshold, all happens at about one spot. So it's a measure of that functional threshold ability for that particular athlete with one being barely moving and 100 being world record pace or right at world record pace. So now we have this continuum and we know where on that scale each athlete is. So from that baseline. So that's a standard. So it seems pretty important to have a standard. You can't build a house without a ruler. You need some constant. So that's the constant to correlate data to. We do one thing's called environment normalization. So if you're doing a performance or a workout, we need to know, well, when you did a workout this week it was 85 degrees and 60% humidity. On this other week it was 60 degrees, you know, 20% humidity. And so or you're at elevation or altitude or undulating terrain. So we're environment normalizing not only your ability, but every single workout to bring them back to a common scale, that common standard ability. So the dot score, the environment normalization is key. Then we do what we call personalize, which is to the person, age and gender normalization. And so for one athlete, they might be a 65 at age 25, but an athlete running that same pace at 70 would be 80 or 90 for their age if you took into account their ability. So when you think of why this is important, think of, let's just use running because that's common to both triathletes and runners. If you had an athlete that's running a 26, say 27 minute 5K, you know, is that good or bad? You know, you're like, ah, judgment is kind of in the middle. Well, what if I'm telling you that's an 18 year old cross country runner? Well, maybe that's not that great. What if it's a 63 year old, you know, female athlete that just started running? That's exceptional, you know, based on age. What if one did it in the heat, one did it in the cool. It's a big difference. So even when you evaluate an improvement, 27 minutes to 26 minutes—so a 27 minute to a 26 minute for a male high school cross country runner, that's not a big improvement over a couple months. But if you had a 63 year old going from 27 to 26, that's a very big improvement. And so that sets you up for not only what's done, but it helps you set expectations about how much should we gain over this next training cycle, what should those results be? How can we make meaningful improvements? So you can't goal set, you can't evaluate results beyond that physical ability. In the assessment section, we do what we call physiogenomics, which is actually looking at your genetics. So it's optional. You can, if you have 23andMe or Ancestry.com, you can download your genome, import it into our system. FitLogic will take that, and it will look at your injury predisposition, how likely you are to be injured, your recovery rate, inflammation rate, how you respond to different types of training and your training potential genetically. And so we're able to see all of those things inside because different athletes are very different based on their genetics. And so now we're accounting for the athlete's ability, the environment around them, the DNA inside of them. So now we have a very clear picture of what we're dealing with when we start to prescribe training. The next step beyond that, before we prescribe, is what we call a training stress profile. And that allows us to look at, okay, for this athlete age, all the different things that we're taking into account. How much aerobic stress, threshold stress, muscular stress, neural stress can this individual take for an individual session, a microcycle and a mesocycle. So now we know how much can they beneficially tolerate, you know, without causing injury? Now we know how to start prescribing training. So, again, no other application in the world does any of those things. And that's just the start. So that's just the assessment piece.

Carrie Tollefson: That's crazy. I have to interrupt you, though, because I was just listening to your physiogenomics. I mean, so this is wild, Jeff. Like, I had a hernia. And I know this is just fluke, but I got to tell you, I had a hernia—a number of hernias. I had, like, six hernia repairs.

Andrew Harley: Nice.

Carrie Tollefson: But my grandma had a hernia the exact same time she lifted her riding lawnmower off the—from going off the curb. And she was, like, 88 years old, still doing her lawn, and she got a hernia. My dad had plantar when I had plantar. My mom had osteitis pubis when I had osteitis pubis. Like, it's so weird that actually you can go back into your genetics and see on your heritage and see, like, maybe what kind of injuries you're more likely to get.

Jeff Booher: It's more—we did that research starting in about 2014 until late 2018. So it's about four and a half years. We adjusted all that data, and we didn't roll it out until, I think, October of 2018. We're able to look at, like, for most, it can be bone density, it can be high likelihood of tendinopathy, how your tendons and ligaments and lower extremities—that's where a lot of running injuries happen. And so you're just very prone to those types of things. But recovery rate, there's so many different things that we're able to see, I don't know, more than a couple dozen SNPs, which are, you know, genes within your genome.

Andrew Harley: Yeah. And to be clear, if you're an athlete using RunDot and TriDot and you have not uploaded your genome file, you don't have access to that, you've never done any kind of testing like that—like there's so much, you know, Jeff just went through a list of so many different things that TriDot and RunDot are also using to optimize training for you. So it's like the training is still extremely, extremely optimized. It just gets that much better when that file is in there. And like for me, for example, when I finally uploaded mine, I didn't see these like massively overwhelming changes in my day to day training that there might be certain workouts that I don't get anymore because I'm a more easily injured athlete. There might be some sessions where instead of having, you know, this much recovery in between each quality interval, maybe it becomes this much recovery. So it's more minute changes. So I do want to say that Jeff, as you were going through each of those pieces of technology in the assessment phase, I was just trying to picture like if I'm an endurance sports coach trying to do this on my own, without technology, how on earth would I look at an athlete's data coming in and be able to actually make intelligent decisions for all of my athletes with different body types, different ages, training for different races and it feels overwhelming already. Right. And so when we talk about the four, these four phases, number one being assessment, people have to remember if you're being coached by somebody not using FitLogic, not powered by TriDot and RunDot, they're kind of having to guess at all of this because they still have to do this. They have to assess you, they have to prescribe training for you, they have to evaluate your training. They're just kind of guessing from their personal experience and knowledge. Whereas we do it with the technology, we do it with the data, and we empower coaches to do it with the data. So Jeff, as we slide from assessment into prescription, how does our technology prescribe sessions to athletes?

Jeff Booher: Yeah, well, kind of nail it there. When you're thinking about it, it's not that they're guessing at some of those. Some of those things they're not even considering. They know we know that all of those factors matter, but human beings don't have—they don't know how to apply it. I know that your genetics matter. It's not the coach's guess at your genetics. They just ignore that data. The data is there. So there's a lot of the data that they can't use. And so what data they do have, then that's where they guess and educated guess. And this is not a knock on coaches any more than a flight system is a knock on—they're brilliant people. They make a lot of money. They're educated, you know, so we want—

Andrew Harley: Them in the cockpit.

Jeff Booher: But it's a matter of the tools and the data that technology can provide. So when you go to prescription, it starts with the quantification of training stress. Training stress is a good thing. You stress your body. It's the progressive overload. And how you distribute that and increase that in your progressions is—that's how you manage training. We're the only platform in the world that quantifies accurately, quantifies training stress. So I'll pause a second. How is that? I see my heart rate. Your heart rate is a response to training stress. It's a reactive response to training stress. So let me give an example of that. When you go out and do a workout, and then the next day, Carrie, you mentioned your father and your heart rate—42, 38, you know, low heart rate. So the next morning, your heart rate is elevated or your HRV is lower, or after the workout, wherever you say, if it's resting, if it's the next morning, if it's after the workout, you see this response to your heart rate. Oh, our training stress is high. Well, what does that tell you? Does that tell you that that workout was too hard? Does that tell you that the workout from two days ago was too hard and you're not recovered from it? Does that tell you that the work that you've been doing over the last six weeks has been too hard and you have this residual fatigue still lingering? Does it tell you that you got a lack of sleep or that it was really hot outside, or you're dehydrated or you're starting to get sick? You know, there's all of these things that can impact that. And so it's a shadow metric, a lagging metric that shows the result, but it doesn't show what caused the result. And so the more that you can identify going in and you can look—you can start to look at, well I looked at your rest, you got eight hours and you know you can do some of those things and start kind of if you spend a lot of time guessing at some of the things. But one of the things that's real key is actually measuring the training stress. And that's not just how much time you spend. We use normalized training stress, NTS, which is a metric for that and it takes in all of those different things. Some triathletes on here, runners may not be as aware of the term TSS, training stress score. That's what's used on another platform. It's out there. It's more popular in cycling, in triathlons. But that's about a 23 year old metric. It was great for its time. It was the first one we had power meters and got started cycling. But there's some very outdated, inaccurate stuff that comes with that. It's almost a quarter of a century old. For example, it uses your average intensity over the whole duration of a workout. And so your average intensity, anyone would know if you're going to go do a 30 minute tempo run that the second 15 minutes of that 30 minutes is way more stressful than the first 15 minutes. So there's a relationship between stress and duration. The longer you hold an intensity, it gets more and more and more stressful. Same thing with intensity. If you increase your intensity by 10% it's not just 10% more stressful, it's exponentially—if you got another 10, another 10% and all of a sudden it's so stressful you can't do it. So there's an exponential relationship between intensity and stress. Then there's the environment normalization itself. When you're taking into account one was done indoors or outdoors or in the hot of the day or environments, humidity that's not taken into account. You have to account for that or you're undervaluing. It looked like you went really hard that day, but you didn't—it was just really hot. So your stress by your pace or your power output looks low. But it was really much more stressful because you did that in the heat and it's not taking into account all of that. Another thing is stress is not just one big bucket of stress. You have aerobic stress, threshold stress, muscular stress, neural stress. So there's different zones and the more intense it goes, those are different and you have to separate the stress being imposed during the workout and measure them differently. To measure that stress, you could be really high in one area but low in another. If you have a lot of neural stress, for example, that very high end work, you can still go do low end stress, you're fine there, that's not going to stress you out if you're not doing high. And so being able to determine that intensity mix during your week, during your workouts is key. But you can't do it if you're not measuring it. The next thing with that is being able to separate your NTS, your training stress from the residual training stress. And so I'll get to that in the evaluation a little bit separately, but it's not the same thing. The half life of the decay that the—how that stress goes away over time after the workout is different for different ages, different people, and based on the type of stress it was. You'll recover from a very, you know, low intensity workout, even if it's really long, has the same NTS score, you can recover from that very quickly. The same score, a different workout, higher intensity, it might take you a week to recover. So you have to separate those, not just accumulation of the training stress. So we have normalized training stress, then residual training stress. And they're very different. Have to account for environment and all those different variables. And again, that's something that a person can't do. A person can't look at all the workouts, run all those relationships. There's no other application software that can do that. And so that's what we put in front of the coaches. So when they're working with athletes or athletes, you know, having their training prescribed, it's accounting for all those things. So again, that's something else that's behind that cockpit is happening. You understand that it's happening, you want it to happen. But it's more than you would ever, you know, put a pen to paper or jump on an Excel and try to figure out.

Carrie Tollefson: Well, and I love the fact that, I mean you can use the app by itself, but you also have these coaches that you all train internally and you, you know, they all know the system and all that too. So the system isn't even just guessing. You also have a human that's trying to follow the data as well. So that's kind of cool.

Jeff Booher: Yes, for sure. It's good to spread that expertise. Working with so many different athletes, seeing all these different scenarios and then how does that translate to real life—the data that's not in there. When you account for so much of the data that you can account for, that frees you up. Now you can look at, you know, marital stress, job stress, kid stress, you know, illness, injury, like all of these other things. You're able to account so much more. You're able to adapt for that and work with the athlete for the things that are not contained in the training data. There's no data that shows that kind of stuff. And that's the human aspect. That's just critical.

Carrie Tollefson: Yep.

Andrew Harley: Jeff, you're talking about TSS that a lot of athletes and coaches listening might be familiar with versus NTS, normalized training stress that TriDot and RunDot utilize. And I know coaches that come on the podcast, both shows, I know coaches that are on our staff that like, that was one of the winning things for them, like when they were looking at this is how I'm coaching. I'm thinking about using TriDot and RunDot for my coaching, for my athletes. And that was like the winning ticket that made them realize, oh, I want TriDot in my corner. I want RunDot in my corner. I need FitLogic powering my training. Because even just that metric alone is so much more accurate in quantifying the stress my athletes are getting put on their bodies than TSS that most of the industry unfortunately is still using. And so that's coming in and it's just one of the pieces to us trying to evaluate—how is an athlete's training going. So that's the third phase here. So for our technology, how are we evaluating how the training is going, how their fitness is improving or not?

Jeff Booher: Yeah, so there's fitness improvement that you need to evaluate, the residual training stress. And then actually, how much are they—how much are they doing what you've asked them to do? All those things. There's a lot of things.

Andrew Harley: Athletes don't do exactly what you ask them to do.

Jeff Booher: No, they don't. But sometimes they just don't do what you say. You know, life gets in the way. Kids and things like that just, you know—that's part of life. And so—but you have to have a technology that can adapt to that. Sometimes it's just you want to go out on a ride or a run and I'm doing with some friends. I'm not doing the workout, I'm doing what I want to do. But you got to account for that to say, okay, well, how do we need to change things later for next week? What does that mean for my progression as I'm leading up to a race? So in all of those, it is fair game. It's essential. So residual training stress I touched on a little bit before, but it's that residual effect, the lingering stress that is still in your system for a while. There's a half life. So that stress decays over time and the more stressful it is, the longer it takes for your body to recover from it. Lower stress takes less time. So that's residual training stress. When you go into a workout and we're prescribing, here's new training stress, I need to know what the makeup of that residual training stress is while I'm giving you the new training stress. And so no other app has that. They're just giving you new. And it's usually they look at what we call vanity metrics, which is how much you train, how you know, how many miles, how much time, how fast. So you're looking at these things and those are not the right metrics. So it's not so important, you know, that I've trained 10 hours a week or 7 hours a week or 12, or did 20 miles, 30 miles, 40 miles. How did you spend those 7, 8, 10, 20, 30, 40 miles? Like, what did you do and how do you evaluate the effectiveness of that and the impact on your training stress? A lot of times when people use or almost all the time when you use those other metrics, you get more of what you measure. There's a saying out there, you get more of what you measure. So if you're measuring miles, people equate, if I want to get better, I need to do more miles, or if you're looking at time, I need to train more. I'm doing this longer event, harder event. I want to improve more. And so the response to seeing the metric of quantification metric is more. Plus there's a bragging rights when you post to social—just finished my eight hour long run today or my eight mile short run. You know that there's this, you know, brag about that. So we have another metric. It's called TrainX score. It's your training execution. That's what TrainX stands for, training execution. And it's how well did you do what was prescribed. So it's regardless of if you're training six hours a week or 16 hours a week, whatever you're doing, do whatever's prescribed well. If you say based on my life, I can train six hours a week, I can run four times a week, whatever, three times—do that well and focus on that. So that becomes the focus. And so we look at the types of workouts that you do. So if it's a long run, the duration is what matters the most. We're building stamina. We need you to get the minutes at the proper pace. Another workout might be maybe it's a 45 minute run but it's 20 minutes of intervals and then 25 minutes of easier running in that workout. We want the intervals, that's what matters. So if you only get 15 of the 25 minutes, that's not a big deal. You got the bulk of what we needed you to get in that workout. So it's evaluating the workout according to what the physiological adaptation that you needed from the workout and how well you did. So if you are supposed to do an easy run 20 minutes at an 8 minute pace and you go a 7:30 pace, your score is going to come down if you go too fast, too hard. And so it's not giving you bonus points for doing too much. And so it keeps you spot on doing that spot on 20 minutes at an eight minute pace. That's what you need to do for the next quality run that you need to have. You need to be recovering from it. You need to execute well. And so it helps you over time with every single workout. That TrainX score is a one to a hundred. And when athletes first start they don't always, you know, do their workouts that great. Usually starts in the 60s, 70s. Average is, you know, mid-70s for most athletes as they start dialing in doing more even intervals and watching their pace better, recovering better. So they hit them better in the workouts. And then we have a training score for the week and that looks at overall all of your sessions for the week and how consistent are you being with the week. And that keeps athletes doing—we have a saying that goes: it's about doing the right training right. So TriDot helps you, RunDot helps you do the right training right. It's not a matter of just having the right training built but you need to do it right to get the most benefit out of it.

Carrie Tollefson: We actually—that's how you hook them. You're hooking them that way with the TrainX score.

Jeff Booher: That's right—overachievers.

Carrie Tollefson: We want to keep getting it better.

Jeff Booher: Yeah, if you get 100 you actually get a unicorn and that was funny. It's like you get 100, this thing comes up. And I was—we had a user come on a long time ago. He goes, I see people telling me that getting 100s, I don't believe it. Is that a unicorn? It's kind of a joke. He goes, but I finally saw when I finally got my first unicorn. And Jeff kind of joked and we adopted as the name, it's a unicorn. And you get—if you get multiple in a week, there's different fun stuff, but we did—we do research all the time and try to kind of boil it down. It's extremely granular and complicated. But a simple way to look at it—we looked at how much does it take? Like if you had a training score on a hundred point scale of a 60 and you improve that 60 to a 90, that's going to equate to almost six times more improvement than a 30% increase in volume. So if you just keep training the volume that you were, the hours per week, miles that you were, and improve what you're doing—so your training execution goes from a 60 to a 90. Not perfect, but good. That's more five to six times more improvement than increasing your entire volume by 30%. It's massive. And it's less than that if you're at the high end already, but it's still substantially more. It's like three times more even when you're at the very high power to weight ratio. And if you're more a beginner, it's even more. Doing the right training is so important. So how you train is far more important than how much you train and TriDot and RunDot help you do that.

Carrie Tollefson: Quality versus quantity.

Jeff Booher: That's right.

Andrew Harley: Carrie, when you were in your professional career, how did you know—you're going through your training week, your coach is giving you training. Like how were you deciding at the end of the week, end of the month, end of the training cycle? Oh, that training went really well. I trained the right amount. Like, how are you evaluating your training before technology as a pro?

Carrie Tollefson: Yeah, we weren't super techy, you know, I mean we didn't have a lot of—the heart rate monitor and that's kind of what we could see. We would kind of base off of our heart rate, obviously. But more importantly, we looked at how long our rest was in between intervals. And so we would do similar workouts week to week, whether it was like 6 by 1200 or 8 by 1200. And we would try over the season to see how quickly our heart rate dropped along with watching those paces drop. So we did do some of that. But a lot of it was by feel. And you know, I get that. Like, I think that's fun. But I just always found—and I don't really love a ton of extras. You know, when I—I'm not really training a ton right now, but I did really like seeing the measurements. Once I fully committed and kind of learned the system, then I was like, oh, I love seeing that. I love seeing what my heart rate has done from year to year to year. I love watching all that. But I also really loved having—and I know we can use the app on its own, but I, for me, will probably have to use a coach when I'm really getting serious about something because I needed someone to help reiterate what I was looking at.

Andrew Harley: Yeah, great point.

Carrie Tollefson: And I liked that a lot when I would go to my exercise physiologist and they would be like, okay, here we go. We're going to get your VO2 max test done. We're going to look at your blood lactate threshold, whatever those things are. And you know, we would do all that stuff and then he would explain it to me and then help me train through it. So a lot of it though was just heart rate.

Jeff Booher: Yeah. The one thing that I found very fascinating because you have coaches at that Olympic level that are so smart, so talented, know so much, but if you think about what they're doing at that level, I'm not taking away anything from that. But from a data standpoint, when your coaches were working with you, you were running with other females, you were all about the same age, you're about the same body composition, you're about the same performance level. The whole bunch of those variables were the same. And so you're really working with a much, much narrower—and to get that level, your genetics were all probably very favorable toward endurance sports as well. So they were working with more of a homogeneous body type, person physiology. And so when you start saying, okay, let's do that program, but here's a 63 year old and 43 year old and a heavy person, a light person, someone brand new and someone's been running for, you know—all of those variables change that's overwhelming. So as much time as they spent on what, on the data that they were looking at for you, the bulk of those variables were not present. They were not variables anymore. They're consistent so they weren't having to account.

Andrew Harley: Yeah.

Carrie Tollefson: And it's really interesting that you say that because most of us could use the 220 minus your age formula and it was pretty dang close. But there were a couple times where I had training partners that it did not work for them and they did get injured or they did see like fatigue levels that they just couldn't get out of. They couldn't dig themselves out of holes as quick as I could. So it's very interesting how different everyone is even at the highest level. But yes, there's a lot of similarities at the same time.

Jeff Booher: And back when I got started, that's one of the things I did—all the research back to the original papers and the original works and studies and so many of them. If you go back and look at what current coaches use to base their philosophy on that are not using the data, they're using studies that was usually 30 untrained cyclists, generally male. So a lot more of the studies were done on male, especially now. And they're young, almost always under 35. So when you interject all these other—well, how do 50 year olds, 60 year olds, females? There's all those things that they—they learn relationships in the studies. They're not accounting for everything, but they're only taking in one data set, either untrained or trained—30 untrained cyclists or 20 elite cyclists or runners. So it's really not applicable to everybody. But it's very important work and it has value. But there's so much more that we need to do when we're looking at the everyday, you know, runner, triathlete, cyclist.

Carrie Tollefson: Yeah. And we can get—we'll have to, I mean we're gonna have you on a lot. So we have to get into some more things. But I think the maturing athlete is such an interesting topic because I'm there, right. Like I'm getting closer to 50 and I've been through menopause and like the training that I was doing during perimenopause and menopause now is like my body's so different and you know, my body temperature fluctuates so much. Well before all of the, you know, some of the hormone replacement that I'm doing. But I just think like guys go through this as well in their own way. It's not as evident as it is for a female. But like as we get older this stuff probably makes even more sense because we have to see what we're doing. And you even said like just with the stress levels. Like, our stress levels are way different as we get older. And yeah, I think that's what's—that'll be really cool for us to get into on another podcast, just like the maturing athlete and how we can use this to help us. Because I keep looking like, looking at you on the screen thinking, but all of my markers are going to be way worse than they ever were. Like, I'm never going to PR again, ever. Let's just face it. So how are we going to use this? But I have to think of it in different ways. So we have lots of podcasts to come.

Andrew Harley: I just know that I can just say, I know Carrie at her peak fitness, her 5k time was right at 15 minutes. And at my peak fitness, my 5k time was right at 18 minutes. So I'm only 3 minutes off of Carrie. That's pretty good. An Olympic athlete. I can claim that. Jeff, the fourth phase we want to talk about—it's so cool. Just kind of phase by phase, just knowing what the technology is doing for us as an athlete. And the final phase, the fourth phase, is prediction. Talk to us about what the FitLogic Intelligence Engine is doing to predict our race outcomes.

Jeff Booher: Yeah, well, since we're not just relying on a philosophy or theory and just saying, here's the training, we actually want to say, okay, if you do this—if we know, here's how we've assessed you, here's what we're prescribing for you, here's what we're measuring, what we've done, we should be able to predict an outcome, both race outcomes and training outcomes, and be able to compare how did we—how did our prediction compare to the actual outcome and account for the variance? And that's how you learn and get smarter. And again, all of these I've been through, we're the only platform that does any of these, but this one's kind of the one that ties it all together. If you can't prove your own efficacy, how can you improve? How can a coach improve? How can coach A say, my training is better than Coach B? If neither one can assess the athlete, quantify what they're prescribing, what they're managing, evaluate what they actually did, and compare their outcome to what they thought was going to happen? And that's why they have—they adopt a philosophy and you just go with it. But unless you have that prediction, you have to have that prediction. That's just key. So we have many ways we do that in the training. Outside the training to the racing is probably the most fun part. We call that RaceX. It's race execution. So when we predict an outcome, we'll take into account—say here's what your threshold is in Minnesota, you're going to go do a race in Boulder or Florida. And so we adjust your threshold to account for that particular environment. The heat, humidity, the terrain, elevation. If it's a triathlon and we're doing a race prediction—so here's on that actual course with undulations, we're looking at, you know, I'm going to be on a bike course at 10:15am and riding in a bearing of whatever with the wind angle coming from this and the yaw angle is that my draft coefficient—we're accounting for all of that in the mix to predict the outcome and predict here's your optimal bike pace. We actually give athletes—they can download their bike pace and say here's what you—here's the power that you should push on your power meter on these different hills and sections of the course into the wind, out of the wind, on this incline, this descent and then run—same thing. Here is your target pace for this environment. Is this going to be a hot, you know, four and a half hour marathon or is this going to be rather cool? 4:10—like how long are you running affects what pace that you can hold in that environment in that humidity. And so that part's key, being able to predict the outcome. So it's really key. All of the things from assessment, prescription, evaluation and prediction and even the workouts, that's another thing. Prescriptively and predictive, we give you the right pace. So if it's a hot day, we're going to adjust the paces for you in the workouts and in the races the same so we can account for athletes at different environments and all those different unknowns. So kind of wrapping it all together maybe—FitLogic, the whole system, it is going through this whole process. All of these, all of those phases are things that need to happen for you to have the best training plan for you. Most coaches, most technologies don't do those things because they don't have the data necessary to do those things. And if they do partial—a portion of it, they prescribe something is based on theory or guesswork or educated guesses or a philosophy—it's not based on the actual quantification of the data. So being able to turn that data into actual intelligence is key. And all of those different things I mentioned, all of them are critical components, capabilities for machine learning or AI. If you're not accounting for those things, you can't do AI. It's not that the AI is bad or less advanced or machine learning. You can't do AI if you're AI powered and you're not doing all these things. You're using the LLM and your training is based on Internet text about training. It's like a book about flying an airplane. It's not about the actual data that it takes to fly the airplane or design the training. So it's applicable to both. All of this that we've gone through here is spelled out on—we have a separate website aside from RunDot and TriDot. It's called fitlogic.tech. And it walks through each of the different component technologies, the data set that we've accumulated over the 20 plus years, the intelligence engine, and does some comparisons, kind of walks through even—it walks through these four phases as well. So you kind of understand, okay, here's how that intelligence is actually applied and here's the data going into it. And so it kind of completes the picture. So athletes can kind of understand, you know, what's behind that cockpit door.

Carrie Tollefson: Yeah. And like how much they have to enter. I think too, that's interesting. Like they don't have to enter the weather, right? They don't have to do any of that. Like that's all populated before you hit—you go out for your run.

Jeff Booher: Yep. You connect your devices. That's it. Enter your race, connect your device, enter your race and start doing your training. It's like wake up and take your medicine, you know, and you can move things around, you can edit it. Coaches and athletes, you can change whatever you want to change. You can knock, do it, blow it off, do a group workout instead. Adapt to that. But it gives you—here's the best thing if you want to do the best thing, no other considerations. If you need to change for life and stuff, go for it.

Carrie Tollefson: Yeah. You're out on a run and you see your friend and she's doing 2 by 2 mile tempo and you have a four mile tempo and you alter it. It'll just, you know, keep going with you.

Andrew Harley: Yeah, it sees that.

Carrie Tollefson: Yep.

Andrew Harley: That's cool. And Carrie, that brings up an interesting thing. Just like it's interesting to just nerd out for 40, 45 minutes about what the tech is doing for us. And the other side of the coin is what do we, the athlete then have to do? Because the tech side, if you're not tech savvy, can sound tech complicated, but for the athlete, Jeff, you just wake up, open the app and do your training session. Like it's so easy and straightforward for the athlete. So, you know, we can hear how advanced the tech is. We can get this 30,000 foot view of what FitLogic is doing for us. But Jeff, for the athlete, what are the tangible benefits of having this tech in our pocket as opposed to not having it generating our training?

Jeff Booher: There's quite a bit in different ways. You know, we use a smartphone, I mean we pick that up and we're using a device that is extremely complicated. It's taken decades to develop—it uses satellite technology. If we think about all of the technology that goes into a simple phone. But when you just, you just pick it up and use it and you do so many things with it. So I think a lot of those intangible things, it's really, it's kind of fun. It's satisfying for me. That's where I came. You know, I want to have peace of mind. You know, a lot of people don't want to be a student of the sport and to learn all of this kind of stuff. They just want the stuff done. Like, just do it for me, worry about it.

Carrie Tollefson: That'd be me. I mean—

Jeff Booher: Yeah, exactly. So aim is a cockpit door. I want to know that there's a flight management system up there. Flight control system. I don't know how to run it. I just want to know that it's being run and being used. Someone's using it. I think there's time saving. You don't have time to design your own training plan, figure it out, use philosophies and manage all that stuff. So you just don't worry about it. So the confidence, the time savings, training time savings. You can train fewer hours and get better results. And so if you want to train more, great, you're just going to get better results. But if you want to train less, back it off. That's great, you have less time to train, but it means so much that you can say yes to more things. You're not missing activities with kids or dinner with your spouse or time away from work. And a lot of times that time savings means events are more accessible. So a lot of people say I could never do a full, you know, an Ironman event because I have to train so much but if you don't have to train so much, that becomes possible. Maybe I can do that. Maybe I can train every year.

Carrie Tollefson: Yeah.

Jeff Booher: And not every other year for a bigger race because I'm not having to sacrifice so much. I think another thing is injuries. They're not putting the wear and tear on their body. They're doing the right training. They're not doing too much intensity when they shouldn't. And so that excessive volume, the excessive stress when they should be doing it leads to training injuries. So there's money savings with that. They're not spending, you know, dollars with the PT or, you know, ortho going to get things fixed and looked at. They're not getting those types of injuries. You know, as long as they don't crash their bike or something, they're going to stay healthy. I think they save money. So if you look at time savings, I'm able to work more, do more, pay more bills less. You know, there's that literal time value money or the opportunity cost of money. I think then there's the better results. It's a big thing for some people—was for me. I know a lot of people, it's just a social fun. But I wanted to do better. I wanted to improve. So when you're getting—if we compare, we actually compare. We have surveys, we ask people, you know, if you're not using TriDot or RunDot, what would you do and kind of track that—you get eight times better training than training on your own. I mentioned the other one about the TrainX score. Improving your training score versus more volume—if it's coming to doing your own training is eight times more improvement than training on your own. It's three times more than purchasing a professional plan, like buying a plan, you're going to increase your improvement three times more, 2.5 times more than even working with a coach that doesn't use FitLogic. So a coach without all the information or tech, you're going to improve two and a half times more than that. So for people who want results and want to do better, it's very important. And then the last is kind of like the confidence up front, but it's more of the regret after. A lot of people do big events, running events and they want to do—I'm only doing one. It's a bucket list. I'm doing one marathon and I know for me I would want to do my best. If I'm doing one, I want to do really well. I want to do the best that I can do. I want to look back and know, you know, I won't use a 15:04, but say it's a three hour, you know, so I've got a 3:04 marathon, but I could have got a 2:59, you know, and I'm only doing one. I want to do the best I can. So there's that regret element about it, that just the confidence of knowing that, hey, I gave it all I got. I used, you know, I took advantage of the opportunity and what was available to me and I did and just be, you know, satisfied with that. So I think all of those things and it's different for different people. It's a different mix of those different things, but those are the type benefits. When we say better results in less time with fewer injuries, that's what we're talking about.

Carrie Tollefson: Oh, we all need more time to do other fun things in life. So that's perfect. Andrew, you've been training with TriDot for like seven to eight years. What's your experience been?

Andrew Harley: Yeah, I was an athlete for years before I met Jeff and conversations happened and all of a sudden I'm on the team working on our podcast. But for me, it changed absolutely nothing. And it also changed everything. And what I mean by that, like, it changed nothing in the sense that I get off work and I do a training session that—like, that is the same. I sign up for races, I go do those races. So it didn't overhaul my journey as an athlete because one thing I, I honestly, when I first signed up for TriDot, I didn't think I was gonna like it because I liked being able to get off work as a triathlete and oh, I feel like swimming today, I feel like biking today, I feel like running today. And I thought that was gonna get taken away from me, like, oh, this program is going to tell me to—

Carrie Tollefson: Do this, this, this, this, this, be real rigid.

Andrew Harley: And I immediately—so it didn't change that I'm still doing all the sports. I'm doing all the sports on the correct day. I session, I enjoy the training session. All that is the same. What it changed is exactly what we promised—you train less time, you get better results and you have fewer injuries. I've had way fewer injuries.

Jeff Booher: Cool.

Andrew Harley: Training with TriDot, I've had my best results ever before. Before TriDot just to speak to my runners and triathletes, I was trying on my own. My dream was to go sub 20 on a 5k and I had hit a 20:34, a 20:43, like kind of the mid 20s was the closest I could get on my own. Like three months into TriDot and I had like a 19:30 and like a year on TriDot, and I had—and that's training triathlon. That's training all three sports, not just the run.

Carrie Tollefson: Right?

Andrew Harley: And like we joked earlier, my PR is like an 18:12, 18:14, something like that. My half marathon PR before TriDot was a 1:40:40. I literally, like, I was hoping to go under 1:40, and I'm watching the 1:40 pacer in the distance cross the finish line, and I came through—

Carrie Tollefson: Yeah, it was horrible. It was horrible.

Andrew Harley: I've hit a 1:38 in a half Ironman. So that's doing the swim, doing the bike, and then running a 1:38 off the bike. And that's my half marathon PR today. But so anyway, it revolutionized my performance because instead of me getting off work and doing my workout and just doing what I wanted to do, I was given what to do. And it's like Jeff's talking about—it's the right session, and if I do the right session in the right way on the right day, my performance just skyrocketed because before that I was just guessing at what I should be doing. And the other thing that's interesting as an athlete is it's met me where I'm at, in what season of life I'm at, because for maybe my first four or five years on TriDot, my focus was how good can I get, how fast can I get, how strong can I get, what kind of PRs can I set at this distance, this distance, that distance. And in this season of my life, you know, we have a two and a half year old—longtime listeners to the podcast who have heard me talk about my parenting journey from birth all the way to now. And my priority with my time is my girls, my wife and my daughter. And so TriDot has met me there. I'm not PR-ing right now, but it's recognizing that I want to, when I have time to train, I want to make the most of that training time. And it helps me do that. So anyway, it's changed nothing in the sense that I get off work and I do a training session. It's changed everything in a sense of it's the right training session. I'm making the most of my time. Jeff, I've heard you say over and over and over again that even with the AI doing all of this, you believe in the power of having a good coach. Carrie just said when she starts her run training journey, she still wants to have a coach making sure she's doing it the right way. We believe in coaches. We're not—there are some AI platforms out there that are trying to be your coach. For me, to back up a step, when I first joined TriDot, it wasn't in my budget to hire a coach. Coaches have a price tag. They earn that price tag over and over and over again. It just wasn't in my family budget. So I started without one. And as the budget grew a little bit and I started doing more ambitious races, I brought on a coach. So you could go both routes with TriDot and RunDot and for good reason. But we believe in the value of—you believe in the value of a coach. With the AI doing all the things that we've talked about today, what is the role of a coach in modern endurance training?

Jeff Booher: That's a great question. And it changes. Going back to the pilot analogy real quick, there used to be, you know, 50 years ago, 60 years ago, on the flight deck, there was a navigator position. One of the crew was a navigator. The navigator's position was obsolete as of 1983. So for the last 40 something years, there has not been a navigator as one of the roles within the flight crew. You still have pilots, but one of them doesn't do that job. You know, they do planning ahead of time, you know, but the flight management system, flight control system does that. So AI doesn't replace jobs is the way to think about it. It replaces tasks. So the problem is if a person's job is only a task, then they become obsolete. So there's a process, technology progressing and AI specifically, there's a decoupling between coaching and plan design. So if all a coach is, if all of the value that they're delivering is designing a plan, those coaches will be obsolete. So coaches find other ways to provide value besides just a plan. There's more to it than just a plan. Cutting and pasting—here's your next two weeks. Here's your week. Let me, you know, tweak things around a little bit. So AI is not going to replace coaches. Coaches who use AI are going to replace those who don't. So just like the flight navigator system. So coaches do much more than just provide a training plan. If you think about, you know, the motivation, the education, building relationship, taking into account injury, sickness, illness, travel, relationship, other kinds of training stress, motivation, nutrition, form, you know, debriefing, mental skills, goal setting, accountability. I mean, there's so many things that you need a person to do, only a person. Technology can't care. There's technical things, they can handle the data, they can't care. And so that's important, that human connection. And technology using TriDot and RunDot allows coaches to do more of that. They're not having to spend their time figuring out, applying that philosophy or, you know, working through, tinkering with the training plan. They can spend more time with their athletes. So it gives athletes more of what they want from a person and more of what they want from technology. Let technology handle the data and the coach handles the person. And coaches that don't do that, don't provide those other values they need to do that. That's just part of any career, any career you're in. Technology's coming in and it's going to replace certain tasks. Like you have physicians out there that are using MRI machines to diagnose things that they used to have other means. If those physicians don't know how to use the tools and have other bedside manner or all the other things that make a great doc, they're going to be obsolete. No one's going to go to them. You have to use the technology and there's a window of time that that transition happens. So whether it's a year from now, three to five years from now, coaches that are not using AI and using the tools and upgrading their skills are not going to be working with athletes. Athletes are going to select the ones who are doing both of those things. They want coaches to raise their game. Like athletes need to raise their game. They need to learn, they need to grow. You don't get a certification as a coach and you're done learning. You need to keep learning in the subject matter expert, the domain, but also the technology and the other tools at your disposal.

Carrie Tollefson: So when like—every time I'm listening to you, I keep coming back to what is it going to look like if I start using RunDot or TriDot? Like, is it overwhelming at first or is it not? Like, you know, when I go for a run now, I just come home and I, you know, upload my Strava and that's my training log now. Like, I used to write it all down, like I said. So I have kind of gotten with the times and at least I have it now on my computer screen. But what does an athlete do with RunDot or TriDot?

Jeff Booher: Yeah, it's really simple. You log in, you're going to provide basic information, it'll connect. If you're logging in on your mobile device, it'll connect and it'll pull stuff from your phone. It says here's your name, your location so we can know how to environment normalize, ask you those basic questions. It's going to connect your device. So depending on what kind of device it could pull in back data like here's the last 90 days of my running or cycling and so it learns things about me in that way and then it'll guide you through—connect the device, you'll verify your threshold ability, that dot score, that one to 100. Yeah, sure. A lot of people listening are like, oh, I wonder what my RunDot score is. Yeah, you want to adjust it for your age and gender and all that kind of stuff. And so you'll go through, we'll guide you through that if you know it. Some athletes know what it is, you can just enter it. Others it'll guide them through a couple questions or you can go out and do an assessment, do a 12 minute run, 5k, a 10k. There's different runs that you can do based on your ability level and we're going to dial into what it is initially and then we fine tune it, improve it over time. So first impressions, it's not overwhelming, it's very easy, there's a lot of support, but it's that simple going in. After you connect your device, one of the things you can do is enter a race. If you're training for a race, if you're not training for a race, you just start training and it's just going to make you faster and allows you to—it'll ask schedule—how many times a week do you want to run? And then it'll let you move the schedule around. So if you have certain days that you want to do certain things on, I want to do a long bike on this day and my long run on that day. You can set all of that to your preferences and then it's going to design your training around that. A lot of athletes, the first thought is wow, this is less than I thought. And so some of them have to trust, some of them would want to train more and they can increase their volume if they want to, but it's best just to train what's prescribed and they're going to get more results or recovery, more refreshed and better results. They can increase it, decrease it. So yeah, those are the basic things. It's very straightforward.

Carrie Tollefson: So you're saying it's easy.

Jeff Booher: I'm saying it's easy. It's not a plan either. There are other things. Some athletes come on and they're expecting a plan. Like I'm doing a marathon, it's on this date. So I need to select a 12 week run plan for beginners—a plan. This is a subscription that just keeps changing. You just say what race you're doing. I'm doing Boston, you know, next April. It's going to figure out how much time is between now and then and it's going to design your training, keep changing it as you change, as you train, as you miss workouts, as you go on a vacation, as you have consistent three weeks. If you add another, hey, I'm doing a half marathon in January. Add the race, it's going to add that in there. It's going to be part of your plan. You don't have to scrap my Boston plan, load in this other—now I need a 10 week plan for this other race. It's just constantly changing for you as an athlete. If you go—in the morning I mentioned earlier, it might say easy to go, you know, 7:30 pace for this run in the morning and then change your mind and go outdoors instead of indoors or in the heat instead of the cool. It's going to change your paces for you. So those kind of things are just going to be happening. You don't have to think about it. You just open up your app, push the workout. You can push it to your Garmin, your Apple watch and just do the workout.

Carrie Tollefson: It's cool.

Andrew Harley: Jeff, you know, RunDot as an app and a platform on the product marketplace is fairly new, right? It's been around about a year or so and already thousands of athletes using it to optimize their run performance. Hundreds of thousands of triathletes have used TriDot over the years to complete their races. Right. And so like you said that the technology here has been 20 plus years in development. Athletes using it for their performance has been happening for a long time as well on both apps. And so I know there's a lot of good stories of athletes who have had breakthrough performances, who have had light bulb moments, who have, you know, gotten on the training, learned to trust the training and just seen huge benefit from the training. And so let's maybe end our main set together by just hearing from all the stories, you know, of athletes experiencing success here, harnessing our technology, putting it to use for their training and racing. What are a few of the stories and testimonials if you will that just stand out to you?

Jeff Booher: I think there's countless age group stories. I'll tell a couple. They're unique though—they're not at least—I think the story like yours is we hear that all the time. Like I wanted to beat a 20 minute, you know, 5k or my 1:44 half marathon and I did that. I wasn't even trying to do it. It was on a—you know in a workout and most experienced and it is super cool to hear those. I'm going to share two. One is Billy Monger and this is kind of definitely an anomaly but he's a double amputee. He was a Formula 4 driver in the UK, lost both of his legs but he came back—he wanted to do Ironman world championship in Kona and he did it last year and used TriDot with a coach. They adapted a couple things to take into account, you know, he wasn't running with both legs and cycling so it changed a little bit. But he and his coach Will Usher were able to beat the Ironman world record for his division by more than two hours. So crushed it—was incredible his first one and now they're training for the LA Olympics, so Olympic distance. But so that's like the same physiology has happened. You adapt it a little bit. That's where it gets—it's not so regimented for a particular person. There's that flexibility even when you're doubly amputee. Another one that I think is great—this is more recent—is Andrew Hall. Yeah, in Nice Ironman world championships he was fourth overall amateur and his results there were just phenomenal. He's a couple minutes from second place overall. And he won Ironman Texas last year—that was a North American championship—in an 8:30. So if you think of that time at 8:30 Ironman—so there's several things why I love this example. One is he beat 40% of the pro field so he's a top finishing age grouper the year before too. So he won the year before and this year 2025 he won—2024 he won the next person his age group by 12 minutes—massive margin. But he beat 40% of the pro field as an amateur and he's 40 years old. So in Nice the three people that beat him were all way younger. So he's a 40 year old beating 40% of the pro field who are all 10, like 10 years younger and more, 15 years younger. So that's— Most elites at that level are training 25 to 30 hours a week when they're doing 8:30, you know, Ironman finishes. He trained an average of under 15 hours a week. So he's 40% of the pro field, you know, winning by convincing margin, training about 40% less. If you look at that background, that's 10 hours a week on average over a year. If you say eight hour days, that's three months of eight hour days that he has and he's a busy professional—eight hours, three months of eight hour days. He didn't spend. So they spent so much more, had so much more injury risk, time away, expense, all those things and he produced better results in less time with fewer injuries. He also didn't have a run background. I've shared that before early on and a couple people said, yeah, you're probably a runner in college. Actually he started in his early 30s running. He didn't have a run background. He started running, do triathlons. So about seven, eight—so that's just a massive example on that level. And again, I don't know, you know, how many people are going to win, you know, amateur North American championships or even qualify for Kona for that matter. So it's not a matter of that peak performance, but at that peak level for a regular person to accomplish those types of things with that moderated amount of time, a discipline—hey, here's how much time I have. You know, I have a life, a career, you know, whatever that is for you and being able to draw those lines but still excel and perform well and get the satisfaction out of the sport you're running—your triathlon I think is huge. So I love that one because I think it relates to a lot of different people in a lot of different ways.

Carrie Tollefson: That's so cool. I mean, Andrew Hall, you said he's 40 years old.

Jeff Booher: Yes. Yeah.

Carrie Tollefson: Oh, there's still hope.

Andrew Harley: There's still hope.

Cooldown

Carrie Tollefson: Okay, here's the cool down question. And this kind of relates to Andrew Hall being in his 40s. Melissa wants to know, can TriDot and RunDot be used with youth athletes? So the opposite end, the young ones.

Andrew Harley: The opposite end of 40. Because 40 is—

Carrie Tollefson: Yes. I mean, 40, still young. He's way younger than me.

Jeff Booher: So yeah, 40 years old is pretty far back there in my rearview mirror. But yeah, yes, it can be used for youth athletes. I actually coached a youth and junior team. That's how Andrew and I—Andrew here. Yeah, we met. We met on deck at a swimming pool. I was coaching a junior team, did that for a performance team. National champions, multiple national champions, traveled across the country doing that. It's best used for older athletes, and those are training somewhat independently. So here's the factors. I use a whole lot of the principles, the learnings from TriDot in that training. But there's some big, big, big differences for youth athletes, especially younger. One is the physiologic data set is primarily adults, so it's not children. The reason—it's not for a lot of different reasons, but one is when you're in adolescence, the hormones, the growth spurts, all of those things are unpredictable. You're not seeing it in the data. And they're very, very important. And so we don't want a youth athlete to feel, you know, slave to their training and do things because we don't have eyes on a person, a coach, a parent.

Andrew Harley: Yeah, so true.

Jeff Booher: Use with caution there, especially young, but once past growth spurt, you know, it's much better. And we did—I did have athletes that worked with our squad, but I had remote athletes that absolutely used TriDot and qualified for nationals and do all that kind of stuff. Another thing is that youth athletes tend to have limited control of their schedule, so it's less predictable. I have a homework assignment. I need to stay up all night doing this, you know, or I'm doing, you know, scouts or, you know, all kinds of different things. Family vacations, other siblings have stuff that they can't do their training. So it's not as predictable. And you need to do a lot more adapting in that sense. Just a lot more. And also other sports. I always encourage all of the athletes until they were, you know, certain age to do other sports. Go to soccer and dance and gymnastics, do all these other things while you can. Specialize when you need to, based on talent, ability, passion, you know, commitment level and all that. So that was a huge difference. But one of the most important things kind of with there with the adolescents and the whole hormone stuff was the social aspect of training. And it was so important to so many of the kids on the team to do stuff with the team. And so in that team environment, a lot of the work needs to adapt for them to do it in groups, so they're not doing isolated workouts. They're doing it in groups, which is easy to do. But if they're all, you know, individually having their own plan, that doesn't work. If you're doing that in a group, you can set different—even adults can set up the same weekly pattern saying, I want to do the same number of sessions a week, days a week. And so you're having the same workouts or same types of workouts on the same week. So you can get some of that social aspect as adults. You can go to masters together on the same day. And we did some with the juniors where we're working with them on the same types of workouts. But that social is so important to build that in because that's part of the development that they're doing. They're not just doing physical development. They're doing social development at that age.

Carrie Tollefson: Yeah.

Jeff Booher: So that needs a real important part of it.

Carrie Tollefson: That's huge. I love that. I might have to have—so I have a run club that we started at 5:45am right outside my house called the Horseman Run Club, and we might need to do that. You can do it in a group like—that's really cool. I didn't even think about that, Jeff.

Jeff Booher: Yeah, that's up to the coach to adapt that. So the app itself doesn't adapt for groups, but that's actually something—

Carrie Tollefson: But you can set the same plan, like, you can set the same goal or whatever and do similar workouts.

Jeff Booher: Same thing. Yeah. It's awesome.

Andrew Harley: So, Jeff, the answer from Melissa is yes, it can absolutely be used for youth and juniors. Best done under the guidance of a coach. And you would still encourage, if possible, join a local youth and junior triathlon team if you have one in your area.

Jeff Booher: And best for older triathletes. Post adolescent.

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