476: What Running and Sourdough Have in Common

In this episode, I’m introducing the newly rebranded Running Reconnected Podcast, formerly Real Life Runners. The name reflects what I’ve always loved about this work: helping runners reconnect with their bodies, understand what their bodies are telling them, and recognize how running connects to the rest of their lives.

I also share a surprisingly useful lesson from learning to make sourdough with my daughter. Building a starter took patience, consistency, and a willingness to trust the process even when it looked like nothing was happening. Running is the same way. Sometimes the most important progress is happening underneath the surface. We talk about the four foundations I believe runners need most: mindset, training, nutrition, and recovery, along with why progressive overload, sleep, and hard efforts all have their place.

Most importantly, I want you to walk away remembering that your training doesn't have to be perfect to be valuable. Every season, every race, and every training cycle can teach you something.

00:00 Welcome to Running Reconnected

01:03 Why I Chose the Name Running Reconnected

02:53 Why I'm Focusing More on Pain and Injury

03:50 A Solo Episode and a Sourdough Story

06:15 Building Your Running Base

09:06 When Progress Seems to Disappear

11:59 Your Body Is the Variable

14:13 The Four Ingredients for Running Progress

19:45 Progressive Overload and Stretch & Folds

28:08 Sleep, Recovery, and Adaptation

33:27 Why Your Training Plan Matters

36:34 Easy Running, Hard Efforts, and Performance

39:36 Learning From Every Training Cycle

41:49 Keep Feeding Your Starter

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To the Running Reconnected podcast. This is episode number 476, previously the Real Life Runners podcast. Today I'm gonna be talking about how sourdough is directly tied to our running journey, and how me learning how to make sourdough bread directly correlated to so many things that I know about running. So stay tuned What's up, everybody? Welcome to the Running Reconnected Podcast. Yes, formerly known as the Real Life Runners Podcast. We are doing a little rebranding around here, and I'm really excited about it. We have been Real Life Runners for 475 episodes, which is insane. So someone might say, "Why the heck are you rebranding after 475 episodes?" And the short story, there's a long story, of course, but the short story is that I just thought it was time, and we're gonna be moving in a different direction with the business. Not different direction, because we're still talking about running, we're still talking about all the things that you guys love and have grown to love here on the podcast. So you don't need to go anywhere. But I just genuinely thought that Running Reconnected is a better name for what we do here. Yes, we talk about real-life runners, and we talk about how running is connected to your real life. And you're not professionals, you're not elites, and that was a big part of our story for a long time. And if you've been listening for any length of time, you also know that one of the things that I love to do is to connect the dots. I love to connect running to other things in our life, and I like to use the lessons from life to apply to our running and the lessons from running to apply to our life. And so, reconnected really is a great word to describe exactly what we do here on the podcast and also what I do in the business when I coach my clients. And part of what I like to do and, and part of, you know, the things that I've been seeing, both in the running world and also just in the, our world at large, is how disconnected we've all become from ourselves, from each other, from our bodies. And we are relying on AI, and we're relying on external devices to tell us if we're doing a good job. And our goal here always has been to help you reconnect to your body, help you reconnect to yourself so that you can actually understand the messages that your body is trying to give you, because so much pain and suffering is caused when we don't understand what is going on inside of our body. And so, as far as kind of the shifts that we're gonna be making in the business and in our coaching program- It is gonna be more shifting towards talking more about pain, because as you know, I am a physical therapist, and I've been a physical therapist for the past 20 years, which is absolutely insane to say. And I'm just seeing more and more people in pain. You would think that with all this technology and all this information, we would be seeing less incidences of running injuries, and it's definitely not that way. I think it's just more and more people are trying to find the quick fix, push harder, do more, because AI and immediate gratification and all these things are just leading people to try to do too much too soon, and it's leading to a lot of pain. And so, as always, I'm going to be exploring both the physical side, the mental side, and how all of that is connected. So welcome to the Running Reconnected podcast, formerly known as the Real Life Runners podcast. Today, I'm doing a solo episode because Kevin is not feeling well. He is a teacher, like most of you know, and he's back at school. He's been back at school for a couple of weeks now, and all of the kids are bringing back all of the germs. So poor Kev has been sick this weekend, so don't you-- He's still gonna be on the podcast. It's still gonna be a combination of, uh, du- duo episodes, so Kevin and I together. there's gonna be some solo episodes from me, and then also some interview episodes from experts and other runners. So the, the format is basically staying the same, and, uh, we've got a lot of really fun, exciting content coming your way from now on, which is great. But Kevin today is not feeling well and woke up this morning with a sore throat, and so I just thought, you know, it's gonna probably better-- be better if I just record a solo podcast episode today. So that's what we've got on tap for you, and we're talking all about sourdough. What the heck am I talking about? Sourdough bread. How does that have anything to do with our running? So as a little backstory This summer, we were hanging out, and my youngest daughter decided that she wanted to learn how to make sourdough bread because one of the influencers that she follows on YouTube put out a video or I guess has been making sourdough, and I don't know the extent of everything that she saw. But basically, this YouTuber, inspired her to learn how to make sourdough bread. And so back in, I wanna say this was in June, we decided to go on this sourdough journey. I said, "Sure, sounds good. I will do this thing." And so we started from scratch because if you know anything about sourdough, you need to have a starter. And you can purchase a starter, you can borrow a star- or not borrow, uh, but I guess, obtain a starter from a friend or if you know someone that bakes sourdough bread, you can get some starter from that person to then make your own. But I decided let's do it from scratch because I wanna kinda s- go through the entire process of this. You guys know I like to get down to the nitty, nitty-gritty, and I like to build that foundation because I don't know anything about sourdough, so I'll tell you that. And I will also tell you that my, nature, I'm not really much of a baker. Um, I'm more... Or much of a cook. I h- have become one throughout the years, but it's not kind of an innate natural ability that I have. So in June, we decided to start this sourdough journey, and basically, at the beginning, you just have to combine flour and water on a daily basis. And so this is where we started, right? And I, as I was going through this whole process and as I was thinking about today's episode, I was like, "This is genuinely such a good metaphor for running." And part of the reason I thought about this is because I currently have a sourdough, uh, some dough on the counter that I, that I'm working on. And so What do we do? Okay, so we are essentially building a starter from nothing, and that is where a lot of us started on our running journey back in the day. Maybe for you, that was a year ago, maybe it was just a couple months ago, maybe it was 10 years ago or 20 years ago when you went out and took those first running steps. You didn't know what you were doing. Maybe you knew a little bit. Maybe you looked up some information. Maybe you listened to some podcasts or read a book or found some information. And ultimately, b- you didn't really, didn't know what you do- were doing, right? You just had to get out and get on the roads, and so that's really where we started. I looked up recipes. I looked up, different blogs and information on how to make s- a sourdough starter, and I followed the instructions. I started to do what they told me to do. And it was just flour and water. You mix them. You let it sit overnight, and then the next day, you discard it, most of it, and then you take a little bit of that and then you do it again. You add more flour and water, and then you let it rise overnight. And then the next day, you do it again. You discard it, then you add more flour and water. And so basically, the purpose or the, kind of what's happening is that it's taking wild yeast and bacteria from the air and from your surroundings, and it's creating an active yeast s- yeast culture, um, with the flour and the water and all the stuff that's in the air from your own environment. And it takes time to cultivate this active starter because, you know, it'd be great if you could just jump ahead, and a lot of people do. Like I said, you can buy them or you can obtain starters from other, other people. But this starter that I was making took time and patience. And That is exactly what's happening in our running, right? Every single step that we take, we have to put in some miles, and then rest and let it just sit. And then put in some more miles, and then we just rest and let it sit. And this is exactly what was going on with the starter. And for days, it didn't really seem like it was doing much. I was watching it, and it really didn't look like it was doing much. And then it started rising, and this was really cool. So it was starting to form little bubbles, and it would start to rise overnight, and I was getting really excited. And admittedly, I was probably getting a little bit more excited than even my daughter was. But then after maybe a week, uh, maybe like five, five or six days, it st- it was, like, doing its thing and it was starting to rise and bubble, and it... I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is working. How cool." And then it went through this dormant period, and I didn't know what was going on. I was like, "Oh, shoot. Did I kill it? Did I... is it dead?" And of course I'm, like, looking up all these informa- all the information on the blogs and trying to figure out what's going on. And the one blog that I looked at said, "No, no, no. This is normal. This is... there... It goes through kind of this dormant phase for a few days where it doesn't look like it's making any progress." Does that sound familiar? Right? Like, how many times does that happen in our running also where we're putting in the miles day after day after day, week after week, and then we go through a plateau where it doesn't really look like we're making progress? But what was actually happening was all under the surface. I couldn't see what was visibly happening. I couldn't see the bubbles, and it wasn't really rising. Just like in our running, sometimes we don't see that progress. We don't see how we're getting better. But under the surface of this starter, that active yeast was actually trying to establish itself. The culture was building beneath th- the surface in ways that just were not visible yet. And so this plateau that I thought my starter was on, or even worth- worse, a, a death of my starter, was just building the foundation. And this happens all of the time in our running, right? Base building looks exactly like this, these early miles that feel like... uh, let's be honest. At the beginning, they feel terrible, and especially, like, if you are... Maybe you've been running for a while, right? but maybe now you're training for a race distance that you've never done before, and so you're trying to increase your running distance. And sometimes when you're in that process where you're trying to build something or you're trying to start something from nothing, or if even if you do have a little bit of, of a base, it feels like it's not working sometimes. It feels like nothing's changing, right? Your pace isn't improving visibly, or you question whether the process is working, but it is. And this is exactly what is happening inside of our bodies. Your aerobic base is building. You're building those mitochondria. You are building new capillaries, which are your blood vessel networks that are going to bring blood to your working muscles. Your connective tissue is adapting because there's a lot of stress that we place on our body during running, and your muscles and your connective tissue, all of these things need to adapt and get stronger. And none of them, frustratingly enough, are visible in your daily runs, most of them, right? Like, they're, they're just not... You can't see how much stronger your connective tissue has gotten or your fascia or your tendons, all of these things, right? And this is exactly what was going on with the sourdough. And the cool thing, too, about sourdough that one of the things that I learned is that my starter, the starter that I was making in my kitchen, is actually unique to me. There's no other starter that's exactly the same as mine because of my environment, because it's taking the bacteria and the yeast from the air and the environment w- of my house and the humidity and the temperatures and all of the different environmental conditions, and it's creating this starter. And so my starter, if, probably if you, analyze it, uh, under a microscope or something, it would probably look different than someone else's starter. And that's how running is, too, right? Like, you can follow the same plan as someone else and get a completely different result because you are the variable. You have to learn your starter. You have to learn your body. And you have to keep doing the thing even when it looks like nothing is happening, especially when it looks like nothing is happening because that's when the foundation is being built So I got the starter. So after two weeks, y'all, it freaking took two full weeks to make this starter. And I was, like, reading these blogs, and some of them were saying five to seven days, and some of them were saying seven to 10 days, and mine took a full two weeks to actually have a starter that was active and bubbling and looking like, okay. And then it had to passed, it had to pass the float test. If any of you know about sourdough, basically you take a little bit of the starter and you put it into, uh, a cup or a jar of water, and if it floats, that means that there's enough air in it that it's ready to use in baking. So two weeks of consistency, of adding flour, adding water, mixing it, letting it sit overnight, discarding it, doing it again. not, you don't discard the whole thing, right? You discard the majority of it, otherwise you just have too much of it. It grows exponentially. So doing this day in and day out, every single day, getting through that plateau period. Same thing with running, right? Same thing with running. And then all of a sudden, you've got an active starter. Now you are ready to bake. And so in baking, in making sourdough bread, one of the cool things about it is that it only takes four ingredients to make sourdough bread. You need the starter, water, flour, and salt. That's it. None of the other stuff and junk and whatnot that goes into bread, especially bread that you buy in the grocery stores nowadays. Holy n- Lord knows how many chemicals and ingredients are in some of those loaves of bread. It's absolutely insane, right? But it's four simple ingredients. No additives, no shortcuts, no special equipment. The magic is in the process and the simplicity of the ingredients, and that's really cool. Think about running In running, to get better as a runner, you need to run. That's ingredient number one, right? You need to strength train. That's another absolutely essential ingredient. You need mobility work so that your body doesn't get com- tightened up and, uh, restricted, and then have problems and injury and pain later on, right? We need simple ingredient- and rest. We need rest. We need lots of sleep. We need good nutrition, right? If we look at what we need to improve as runners, there's, there's really four main ingredients that I like to break it down to, and this is, these are the four main pillars inside of my programs. The first one is mindset. It's the psychology of running, because what you tell yourself about running means everything. Whether you think you can or you think you are c- you can't, you are right. That is accurate when it comes to running, and also when it comes to sourdough, apparently. But mindset and psychology is everything. Not overanalyzing, not worrying, not throwing out the starter just because it went through this dormant period, trusting the process, understanding that it's okay if your progress is not visible every single day. That's all mindset and psychology. The second part is training, right? So I don't know what, we were on our starter, now we're on our flour, right? The, the training is important. The running that you put in, the strength training that you put in, the mobility that you put in, extremely important. That is the bulk of it. That's why I'm gonna call that the flour that we are adding to the bread. Then we've got the water in the bread. The water is your nutrition, right? You need food. You need hydration. You need to make sure that you are fueling your body so that your body has the energy that it needs to get stronger as a runner, to make the progress that you want. And then in sourdough, you also need salt, and that's what I like to call nervous system regulation or recovery. You need recovery because it's not just about hard- how hard you're pushing yourself in the training, it's how well you are allowing your body to rest and to rise, just like sourdough, right? The rising happens when the dough is resting, not when I'm stretching and folding, like I'm gonna tell you about, right? So the temptation, I think, a lot of times is to think that something simple can't produce something extraordinary. But complexity is not what creates a great loaf of bread. Consistency with simple, quality ingredients is. And so it's the same thing with our running. We need fundamentals, right? Progressive overload, strength work, miles, sleep, fueling. the four ingredients that I just talked about, that is the whole recipe. But I feel like we as runners are oftentimes con- trying to just look for more ingredients. We want... You know, there's so much information nowadays in the world about all of these tricks and hacks and, um, supplements and all of these different shortcuts that are gonna get you faster results Is the consistency with the ingredients that you already have. And the simplicity, that is the sophistication. The perfect sourdough loaf doesn't need 17 ingredients, it needs four. Just like a stronger runner doesn't need 17 supplements, it needs those main four things first. We have to get our mind right. We have to get our training right to make sure that we're ma- managing that training load with a combination of strength, mobility, and running. We have to get our nutrition dialed in so that you're actually eating enough to support your body. That doesn't mean that you have to count every single morsel of food that goes into your mouth, but most people are just not eating enough of the right things to actually support their body. And number four, you have to recover. You have to help regulate your nervous system so that your body can actually recover from that training. Most people are so sleep deprived and are in constant states of stress that their body's just not able to make the adaptations that they want. So the, it's, it seems simple, right? It i- it is simple. There's four things, but that's not easy, right? Simple does not mean easy. Just like sourdough is not easy. Once you get the hang of it, I think it does become pretty easy, but for some reason out there in the world, people think, "Oh, a sour- sourdough is so complicated." It's really not. It's simple, and it's easy, but there's a lot of things that can affect the outcome. The temperature, the humidity, the stretch and folds, all these things, right? All these things can affect how the sourdough turns out. Now, speaking of stretch and folds, okay? So when you're making sourdough bread, you spend all this time making the starter. Now I have an active starter, so we're good. So now it's time to make the bread. And so I combine the starter, the flour, the water, and the salt into a bowl, and I mix it up with a whisk, and I let it sit for 30 minutes, okay? Again, listen to this pro- I'm gonna explain to you the sourdough process so that you can understand how similar to running this is is. So then it sits for 30 minutes, right? Then we enter the stretch and fold period. Now, stretch and folds are basically where I go in and I grab the dough with my hand, and I pull it and stretch the dough. If you're watching me on YouTube, you can see me, uh, demonstrating this. Actually, actually, I should actually, uh, bring my bowl over here because I just paused my recording to go do a stretch and fold because I've got an active sourdough, dough. I'm in the process today of doing the stretch and fold. So it, and this is the other thing about sourdough that I forgot to mention, is that it's a three-day process. So I have to feed the starter at night, uh, on day one. So day one I feed the starter, and then I let it sit overnight and that doubles in size. Mine actually, this, this one rose like crazy, today. I- it probably tripled in size when I got it today, so that was awesome. And then, so that's day one. Day two I make the dough and then I do the stretch and folds, and then baking is on day three. So again, even just the process of making one loaf of bread takes time. So now let's talk about the stretch and fold. So after mixing the dough you leave it alone for 30 minutes. Then for the next two and a half hour- next two hours I do these things called stretch and folds where I basically go in, I grab the dough with my hand, I stretch it and then I fold it over. And you go around the bowl and you do that like four or five times. Stretch it, fold it, stretch it, fold it. And then I cover it with a damp towel and I let it sit for 30 minutes, okay? So in between every set of stretch and folds the dough just sits. And during that time, I, I looked up this information because I wasn't sure, why are we doing this? What is, what is going on here, right? During that stretch and fold time the dough is actually strengthening. The bonds within the dough are strengthening to make a stronger, like springier, more airy dough I guess. And it's really cool because you can actually see it happening over time. In the first 30 minutes, like so when I first mix all the dough, I combine all the ingredients, the dough is so, so sticky. It's super sticky. It's like all over the whisk, my hands, like whatever it is that you're using to mix. It's super sticky and it just kind of falls apart Then we start the stretch and fold, and the first time you do it, again, same thing. Pretty sticky when I... 'cause I, I just do it with my hands. Don't worry, I wash my hands of course before and after. But that first stretch and fold, it's, there's a lot of residue left on my hands when I'm done with that stretch and fold. And then every progressive stretch and fold that I do, it, there becomes less and less dough on my hands because that dough is getting stronger, right? So you stretch it up as far as it will go without tearing it, and then you fold it back over on itself. And so this is developing that gluten network that gives the bread its structure and strength. And so it's really cool because as you do this, like, you can feel the dough becoming more elastic, and more resistant, and more capable of holding its shape. And with this, just like with our running, you can't do all of the stretch and folds at once. You have to do a set of stretch and folds, and then sit for 30 minutes, and then do another set, and then sits, sit for 30 minutes. I think I do four total, so it's like a two-hour process. And then when you add in the first 30 minutes, it's like a two and a half hour process, the first 30 minutes before the first stretch and fold. So you can't skip straight to the end. Timing matters, and the rest in between the stretch and folds matters just as much as the fold itself. Same thing with our running. Every single run that you do matters. Every strength session, every mobility session is a stretch and fold, right? You are developing the network. You're developing the muscular, the neurological, the connective tissue, and how all of those things work together to give your body the strength and the resilience to keep you strong out on the roads without getting injured Now progressive overload, if we wanna kind of bring this down even more, progressive overload is that stretch and fold principle. A little bit more stress and then we rest. A little bit more stress and then we rest. That's exactly what progressive overload is. We add a little bit more load. We add a little bit more to the body, and every time I do the stretch and folds on my sourdough, I stretch it a little higher. That first stretch and fold, I don't pull very high because you're supposed to pull as high as you can without it tearing, without it ripping. And so you can feel it. You can feel it. Oh, I'm like, I'm at the edge here, and then, then I fold it over. And by the end, by that last stretch and fold, I'm, like, hanging the whole thing of dough, and it's super stretchy and super strong. So that rest in between the folds, that is not laziness. It is the mechanism by which that dough strengthens itself. The elasticity increases. The gluten is actually reorganizing itself during rest, just like your body is adapting during recovery. Skipping the rest does not get you there faster. It gets you a collapsed loaf, right? Like, thank goodness I haven't had that experience yet. So far, I, I feel like I've been pretty darn successful with this whole sourdough thing. I haven't... 'Cause I've, I've been good about following the steps, right? Like, just like in running, I'm good about following the steps. If we follow the progressive overload steps, we continue to get better. Now, I will say that My first loaf came out, the bottom was a little too dark. Like, it, it wasn't burnt, but it was a little too dark. And so I've learned how to v- how to adjust the temperature a little bit. I've learned a trick of, like, putting a pan underneath the Dutch oven so that the heat doesn't b- overcook the bottom of the loaf. the first loaf that I made also was, uh, more dense. And as with time, and I think part of this is because my starter is continuing to get more active and more bubbly, and, my starter is more mature. That's the word I'm looking for. I have a mature starter now. And so it's making airier bread because there's more bubbles that are h- that are built into the starter. Just like with time, we are stronger. Our bodies can go through more. They're more resilient. Things, little things aren't going to derail you if you've been running for 10 years and you've built a really strong base. This is one of the things that I talk to my clients about all the time, that, you know, if they miss a, a, a period of time and they maybe were inconsistent, life gets in the way, they're very worried that something is wrong and that they've lost all of the fitness that they've built. And hey, and I always reassure them because I tell them, "No, no, no. You're good. Like, you've got 10 years of running under your belt. You've got five years of base built." When you go out and start running after a period of an inconsistency, it's probably not gonna feel great at the beginning, but you are not back at square one by any means. You still have a base. Your body remembers. There's muscle memory, and that is a real thing. And at the same time, you can't expect to jump right back in where you were, and that's a big mistake that I see a lot of runners making as well. They know that they have this base. They know that they've been running for 10 years. And after an extended break, they sometimes try to jump in where they were the last time that they were consistent, and that doesn't work either. That's also going to learn to injury. So it's really important for us to understand, kind of going back to our, our sourdough and our progressive overload, it's the reps that we put in that builds the capacity, that builds the strength, that builds the elasticity and the resilience. And same thing with our training sessions. Every training session that you put in, even if it's 20 minutes, it puts something into the body. Even if you can't see the results right away, it's building that network. Now After the stretch and folds are over, basically then comes the bulk rise phase, right? Where I just leave the dough. So I have the dough in a bowl. It's covered by a damp towel so that it doesn't dry out, and then it goes... Oh, so then it, uh, bulk rises. I, I forgot a couple steps here for a second. Forgive me. Uh, it's been a, maybe a month or so since I've made sourdough, and I'm like, "Good thing I'm remembering this," um, as I have sourdough sitting on my counter. So after the stretch and fold period, then it goes through the bulk rise phase, where it basically sits out on my warm counter for about eight hours. It kind of depends. Like, we're in summertime now, and I live in South Florida, so it's very warm, so I have a warm kitchen, and the temperature of the kitchen makes a big difference. And so I can get my sourdough to rise within, like, six to eight hours. So basically, I leave it there until the sourdough has doubled in size, and then I shape the dough. Okay, so at the end of that day, so the, the whole morning, on day two, I make the dough. I do all the stretch and folds, then it sits for eight hours, and then at night before I go to bed, I shape the loaf, okay? So I put, I take the, the doubled, uh, dough size, I put it out on my floured counter, and I do this thing where, like, you, you, like, push it and pull it to, create the pretty little ball of sourdough bread that you want, right? So to create your dough into the shape that of the, the bread that you want. And so, during that process, right? So a- actually, let me go back to the bulk rise phase, like, before I shape it. When it's just sitting on my counter and it's going through that bulk rise phase, that's when everything is fermenting. That's when the wild yeast is eating up all the little sugars in the flour. It's producing carbon dioxide that's gonna create those beautiful little air pockets, that open crumb structure which makes sourdough so delicious, right? The flavors are developing. The complexity is being built. And if you rush this, if I try to shape my dough too early or bake it before it's ready, that's when it becomes that dense, flat loaf. The flavor's not there. The structure's not there. It's very dense because the ingredient that we skipped was the time, right? And this is exactly what we need as runners. The sleep is the bulk rise phase. That's when adaptation actually happens. Muscle protein synthesis, hormone restoration, glycogen replenishment, nervous system recovery. All of those things are d- what happens during rest and recovery, during the bulk rise phase where I don't even touch the loaf. It's just sitting there adapting The training sessions that we're doing, those are the stretch and folds. Sleep is where those stretch and folds actually become improvements in your fitness. That's where the body actually adapts, and that's why we cannot shortcut sleep, just like you cannot shortcut a bulk rise phase when it comes to sourdough. If you don't get enough sleep, your body's not going to make the adaptations that you want, period. Like, plain and simple. I cannot say this any more simply. Sleep is the missing ingredient for so many people, right? If you're an athlete that trains really hard but sleeps really poorly, that's the same thing as a baker that does wonderful stretch and folds, but then tries to bake the loaf two hours later. It's just not going to work. The transformation was not allowed to complete. You, it might be okay, but it's not gonna be as good as it could be. And this is the same thing that our body needs. You know? It's, it's recovery, and this is why we also build r- down weeks into our training cycle. I hope if you're not training with us, those of you that are training with us, you know that we, you have recovery weeks built into your cycle. We have, um, down weeks when it comes to running. We have down weeks for our strength sessions to allow your body to rest, recover, and adapt, right? We can't be building all the time. This is one of the reasons why so many people that want to train for race after race after race, and j- they just put races back to back to back, they wonder why they're not improving. It's because they don't have that downtime. They don't have the recovery time where the body's actually building and rising and becoming stronger than it was before. Okay. So after the bulk rise, I do the shaping. So I, I do the pull, the push and the pull, and I get it formed into this pretty little ball, and then I put that ball into the fridge overnight to, do a second rise. Okay? So it actually doesn't really rise much, to be honest with you, but e- everything is still happening, right? The same thing as, things I just talked about, um, during the bulk rise. The fermentation is happening, the gluten structure. All those things are happening as the dough is rising overnight. So the next morning on day three, I take the loaf out of the refrigerator and... Oh, before I take it out of the refrigerator, I have to put the Dutch oven into the oven. So I heat my oven to 500 degrees, y'all. It i- this, it's, like, high-temperature baking. So you put the Dutch oven into the oven at 500 degrees and let the Dutch oven, um, heat up for, like, an hour before starting to bake it. So once that oven and Dutch oven are preheated, then I take the dough out of the refrigerator, and you have to score the top of the loaf. Okay? So I take it out of the bowl, and on the top you take a knife and you score it, which means you just cut, like, a slice into it, and this is to help the air release. Okay? We, you make deliberate cuts with a very sharp blade In a specific pattern. And this is why sourdough looks so pretty, 'cause a lot of people make like leaf patterns or like different patterns. The pattern that I like to make is a starfish because I have a big connection with starfish. And so you make this, this cut, the score in the bread, and this creates a controlled place for the loaf to expand as it's baking. Okay? So without scoring, if you don't do that, the bread is still going to expand, but then what happens is it will burst at its weakest, most unpredictable point. You don't have any control over it. So that's why, you wanna score it so that the bread can expand where you want it to, because then it makes these really pretty designs and pretty patterns and it looks really aesthetic, but it's also really good for the loaf. Because if you forget to score it, it's still going to expand and it's still going to burst. It's just going to be at a place where you might not want it So the scoring doesn't limit the rise, it just directs it, tells it where, where to go. And this is, is exactly what, what our training plan is, right? Your training plan is the scoring. It creates that intentional place for growth to happen. It has hard weeks, we have easy weeks, we have race-specific work, we have recovery, all of it built in. And without a specific training plan, that growth does still happen. If you're still, if you're following the s- the correct principles, if you're following the principles of progressive overload, if you're making sure that you rest, you can still grow as a runner. You can still get better. But it tends to happen at the weakest point. and a lot of times when runners aren't following a plan, they experience more overuse, more injury, more burnout, because there's no structure to kind of guide that expansion. So we like to say that the plan helps to guide your potential. It doesn't limit your potential. A lot of people feel like a plan limits them, but it really helps to guide you. So after I score the loaf, then I place it on, a piece of parchment paper, and then I put that parchment paper into the 500-degree Dutch oven, and you bake it. Okay? So it goes into the oven for 20 minutes, and with the lid on, and that first 20 minutes apparently is to help trap the steam in. Um, and then you remove the lid after that, and then I bake it for another, I wanna say 15 to 20 minutes. Um, and I decrease the temperature also because I, I don't want it to brown too much. and then that helps to really develop the crust. So to give you that really beautiful, crisp, brown crust on a sourdough. I'm, like, so excited right now. My mouth is starting to water already. but I'm not gonna have my sourdough until tomorrow, which is a bummer. But that heat, uh, that extreme heat is helping to, create the crust, the color, the texture, the flavor, and without that extreme heat, that bread will never develop into the type of loaf that it's capable of. And so same thing with our running, right? Your harder efforts, that extreme heat, because I-- Think about what you bake on a daily basis or, or what you cook. You, you're never at 500 degrees, right? Like, this, this might be the first time I've ever put my oven at 500 degrees is when, in this sourdough process So that is a high extreme temperature. That's the harder effort. That's the stuff that helps that loaf develop into its full potential. Just like the harder efforts, you know, your speed sessions, your tempo runs, those training blocks that really push you, that's the oven. That's the heat that transforms you. It, it bakes you, especially in this summer heat of South Florida. Holy heck, right? So that's what helps to really transform you, but it- you can't get to that step without the base of all the two days of preparation that came before day three, where I actually get to bake the bread. I can't get to that phase if I didn't have the days, and that's where easy running. Easy running builds that base, and then the heat of that hard effort is what takes that base and converts it into real performance capacity. Both are necessary, right? You can't just do hard efforts and expect to get better as a runner. You need both. You need the easy runs and the base-building and the strength and the mobility that builds that foundation in day one and day two of sourdough baking, so that when you put it into the heat of the oven on day three, when you test your body with hard runs or races or things that you've never been capable of before, you now have the capability to do that thing Right? Both are necessary. If you're a runner that only does easy runs, you're not going to be as fast as you could be if you were to also include sprint intervals, and tempo runs, and harder effort runs. But if you're a runner that only does hard stuff, and every single time you go out and run, you're running at, like, a medium effort level, and then sometimes you try to throw in some hard works, hard, uh, runs, that's not going to work either. You're just gonna end up injured and burnt out, right? So both are necessary, and this is exactly what is required for both sourdough and running. So I think by now I have really beat or kneaded this metaphor, and, hopefully you guys see it, right? Like, pretty cool how directly they correlate to each other because... And, and here's another thing to remember, too. every sourdough loaf is not the same, just like every training season, every race is not the same. You could put in the same effort. You can put in the same work. For every single sourdough loaf that I make, I put in the same ingredients, the same four ingredients: starter, flour, water, salt. Same recipe, same process. But just like sourdough, sourdough apparently is finicky, and it's affected by humidity, and temperature, and the batch of flour that I'm using, the timing. All of these things affect the outcome. So I'm guessing, haven't done it yet because I've only been baking for, like, two months, but I'm guessing sourdough in the wintertime is gonna be a little bit different than sourdough in the summertime because my house is warmer. My house is different temperatures, right? And so sometimes the, the loaf is gonna come out with a better crumb structure, with better air pockets. Sometimes the... it's gonna have a better crust. Some may be denser than expected, and I'm not gonna really understand why, but you learn from every single one, right? And just like the baker doesn't throw out the bread if it doesn't turn out perfectly- we can't just throw out our training either. Like, maybe one training cycle didn't go the way that you wanted to. Okay, what can you learn from it? What can you learn so that you can come back stronger next time, that you can come back with a flakier crust next time, or with a better air pocket structure, right? Some, some training cycles don't go the way that we want, so what can we learn? And just like your starter is unique to your environment, your training is unique to your body, your life, your season. So we have to also stop comparing ourselves to other people out there. We have to not compare our sourdough loaf to somebody else. I mean, it's good when we use it to learn, right? There's people that have been baking sourdough far longer than I have, and I can learn a lot from those people. It's gonna be silly for me to compare my loaf to them, but if I can look at my loaf compared to their loaf and say, "Okay, well, what did you do differently, and what can I learn from you?" Then that's a great thing, right? But not just if I'm gonna be like, "Oh, yours is better than mine." I mean, that's silly, right? Same thing with our training. So sourdough, like your running, is not fast. It requires time and patience and consistency, and doing the same thing day in and day out until you build an active starter, until you build a strong foundation. It can't be rushed. It requires you to show up and do the simple things well, right? Simplicity over complexity every single time. And then you have to trust the process. And when the process calls for rest, you give it the rest that it needs. And trust that what's happening under the surface is real, because that's when the real work is being done, is when your body actually gets the rest that it needs. So keep feeding your starter, keep showing up. The rise is coming, and it's gonna make a delicious sourdough loaf or race cycle or running accomplishment that you want, or muscle growth. I mean, this, this applies to everything, right? It does- it doesn't just apply to your running. It also applies to you if you're trying to build muscle, if you're trying to foster a good relationship with a partner, with a friendship. I mean, it's, it applies to everything, right? We need the consistency. We need the rest. And with those things, we will rise, just like our sourdough. So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. I enjoyed making this, reconnecting this, uh, making this parallel for you all. and if you liked it, I would love for you to leave a review on your favorite podcast player. Uh, share it with a friend. Share it on social media. Anything that you do to help us get the word out about the podcast is very much appreciated. And as always, thanks for joining us. This has been the Running Reconnected podcast, episode number 476. Now, get out there and run your life.