Episode Transcript
Speaker0: Hey, what's going on? Welcome to the Mile High Five podcast. This is a little bit of a bonus episode, and that was me playing guitar. Thanks for listening. A few people asked about that, and it's definitely one of those things. I don't want to push my luck. I appreciate people ask, but it's a fun hobby, and I don't want to have people suffer listening to it. So I try to keep but brief, and it's really fun for me to do. So thanks for listening. This episode just has a few little updates. You'll see, probably, you noticed it was quite short. At least that is my intent. So I worked ahead and I made some notes, which I will mostly stick to.
Speaker0: Some are just random updates, things that I have talked about over the years, and then maybe I've realized there's a bit of a change now. There's a few updates from more recent episodes, so I'll just get right into it. One reason I'm doing this episode is I would like to get more questions from you, the audience. So you could send me an email, doug at milehifi.com. You can write an email, of course. That is the simplest way. It's very cool to send in a voice memo. So you can record a voice memo on your phone. Hopefully in a quiet place. 90 seconds is kind of the ideal length. If you need to add more details or anything like that, you can write it in an
Speaker0: email, and then you could just send that via email. It's pretty cool to play the voicemail. And it's like you're joining us here. Often, I will ask follow-up questions, before I record with whoever my co-host is for that particular question. So if you want to do that, you can send it in and we actively need more questions at this point in time. So you can send in what you would like and the folks that are on the buy me a coffee side have priority. A lot of times we can group certain questions together that kind of go with the same topic area. So on to some of the random updates here. So one of them is around shoes.
Speaker0: So zero shoes, that's X E R O. And they are, uh, you know, well-known for having like a zero rise or they're very flat. A lot of them have very, uh, small tread. In fact, I'm wearing some right now. Uh, Brad over at shoes. Fi told me about these shoes a couple, a few years ago, I immediately bought two pairs. And then a few months later, I think there was some sale or something. So I bought two more. So I had, um, I have like four pairs of these shoes at this point, it's been a couple of years and I wear them often. So a couple of them, you know, the treads sort of wearing out, but they're still like, uh, totally wearable. So in fact, some of the ones I'm
Speaker0: wearing right now, they are, uh, the treads wearing out, but they're like two and a half years old. The update that I have is I still really like these shoes. However, I did note that the tread is so thin and the cushioning is so thin. Your feet, one's feet, my individual feet would get sore if I walked on concrete like all day. Like if I walk on a wreck path on concrete, it's hard. And even if I have, I like to think I have rugged and masculine feet that I don't have to baby too much, but concrete's kind of hard. And eventually my feet would get sore just from walking several miles on concrete,
Speaker0: or more likely aspirationally, I would imagine that I'm hiking on trails much more where there's gravel, there's a regular, very hard surfaces, not the same as concrete, but more like gravel and, and, um, sort of sharp rocks. And that would actually like make my feet sore. If I went on a hike for like five or six miles or eight miles or whatever. And I got these boots from Xero. They have thicker tread and also just a little bit more sole. So still very small compared to shoes with a huge amount of tread, but fairly minimal. I didn't get a chance to use those boots out on the trail for a little while,
Speaker0: but now I have like maybe a few dozen miles to get to the beach. On those boots and just got back from the Frisco, Breckenridge, Colorado area and hiked quite a lot. And I can report back the boots solve the problem, right? So there's enough tread and there's enough cushion on those boots that I was able to hike. Um, probably I think just over a couple of days, I maybe hiked. I will call it 15 miles, something like that. Maybe more. I'm not quite sure but anyway my feet weren't sore everything was fine i could recommend those boots now at this point um that said i have realized i like a minimal shoe however because i'm on,
Speaker0: hard surfaces like concrete fairly often um some more cushions more insole is necessary, i still like the zero shoes for um you know most of the time like on like travel like it's great But that said, I'm experimenting with some other shoes. So once I get more data on that, I can report back. But Zero Shoes, they're pretty cool and I like them. All right. The other thing slightly related, Carl and I used to record episodes like quarterly fitness updates, and it was kind of an excuse for us to... Talk about what we were doing in the gym, which, um, you know, while Carl doesn't do the show anymore, I see him at the gym all the time.
Speaker0: We probably see each other like once a week. We're in the zone though. So we just kind of nod at each other. We, we hardly ever talk at the gym, but we see each other. And one thing that I used to do was like track things a lot more. So I've stepped away from tracking certain things, but I'm paying a little more attention to a couple other areas. So one that Carl and I would talk about all the time is sleep. And I believe at least at the time he didn't have a sleep tracker, a watch or anything that he used at night. And I had an Apple watch. I've had an Apple watch for call it six years. I'm And I still like it. I don't really look at the sleep app as often.
Speaker0: I think it was a really good thing to get a baseline when I was trying to understand. What it could tell me, basically. But now, generally, I sleep pretty well. It's a no-brainer for the things that were causing me an issue, like drinking too many beers. Alcohol totally wrecks my sleep. Caffeine sometimes will. I don't have caffeine nearly as much. Anyway, I've backed down off of caffeine quite a bit. That helps me sleep better. And the thing is, like if I sleep through the night, like I know it, like I wake up in the morning and I know if I feel rested or not. I don't need to watch to tell me like, oh, you didn't get enough deep sleep or anything like that.
Speaker0: Like I feel good or I don't, I don't need to watch to like second guess how I feel. And I've heard of people like obsessing and they're like, oh, did I sleep well? And it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If they didn't get enough sleep, then they're like, oh, I'm going to be, um, behind mentally today and that sort of thing. And I was like, I don't need that. I mean, I know if I slept well, I know if I drank too much the night before, blah, blah, blah. I don't, I mean, I I'm curious occasionally and I may take a look, but it is not a thing that I look at every day. However, there is a couple of things that I am watching.
Speaker0: One is, um, VO two max. So I have been doing a little more cardio recently and I'm not paying too much attention. Like, oh, I have to stay in zone two or anything. It's like, if I'm in zone two or higher, like I'm cool with that. Those are, I mean, as far as I could tell, those are like guidelines, right? Those are sort of arbitrary cutoffs that are measured by my watch or some other algorithm, right? And it's not exact. So I'm assuming there's some overlap. All that to say, I've been working out from a cardio standpoint a little bit harder, usually on like the stair climber. It was so warm this summer. I actually didn't hike nearly as much.
Speaker0: I've done like some rowing machine stuff as well, but the stair climber machine is the one that I kind of gravitate towards. So I've been doing that a little bit harder and I've actually improved my VO2 max, um, as reported by my Apple watch, a pretty good amount. I was going to say, I remember, you know, talking to Carl and I was like, yeah, you know, we're talking about hiking. And I was yeah, I, my watch says I'm like in a low cardio zone and I'm like, I don't know. I mean, I do, you know, some light cardio, but you know, it says, um, basically if it was a scale of, uh, one to five, I was like in the two zone.
Speaker0: Right. So it was saying I have a low cardio and Carl was like, I think you're in better shape than that. I don't know if you're in bad, like if you're low cardio, then I must be really horrible. So I was like, I don't fucking know. So I have been working at a little bit more from a cardio standpoint, and at least per the, you know, stats on my phone, I can't remember what it is, but I have moved from the low. To average and then into the maybe above average. So I'm not in the high zone. Elizabeth on her watch, she's some sort of elite person. I'm just barely above average, which sounds about right.
Speaker0: So I have been paying attention to that. The other thing. And I may have mentioned this in an episode a long time ago that I had an Apple watch and then it was like the end of the life cycle. The battery wasn't lasting. And I was like, I'll try to go without, see if I've been obsessing because I have a watch. Turns out I kind of was, but mainly around steps. So one thing that I've done this year is I've tried to get more steps. And I probably mentioned it that I put on a couple pounds like from the like Q4 of last year. So probably starting in September, I just got like a few more, like less steps each day.
Speaker0: And I didn't really pay attention. I mean, I was still getting an okay number of steps, say 12,000 or 13,000, but it was less. And this year I've been trying to get a little bit more. so i did look this up 2025, in the preceding years probably the you know the probably 2020 to 2025 i've gotten roughly 13 500 steps per day on average and in 2026 it's been about 15 500 so that's about 2 000 steps per day more which is about one mile more so not a ton it's just like one extra mile that's, roughly 20 minutes of walking or so for me, i walk slow so not a ton just a little bit more i think i'm a little bit slimmer
Speaker0: i think i lost a couple pounds of ugly fat, hopefully i don't know so related to some of this optimization i was thinking about how. Many of those episodes we're calling out, we catch up on fitness. We would talk about Atiyah Huberman and just optimizing and all these different protocols and this and that. And I think at some point, this has been a few years, I was just like, this is too much for me. I'm not doing half of this stuff. And it seems like it's over-optimizing. I think it might be a thing where it's, um, obsessing over like all these tiny details when it's like, if I get enough sleep
Speaker0: and drink less alcohol, probably good. Maybe don't eat quite as much, eat more vegetables. It's like five or six things. If I can get kind of close to those. I mean, that's all I need to do. I don't need to do all the other crazy protocols. And you know what? I just stopped listening to any of those podcasts. It was kind of a waste for me because I can get most of the benefits, I think, from doing most things right most of the time. I don't need to go down all these rabbit holes. Um i know some people you know they get like a aura ring and they have like another fucking whoop band and i don't know.
Speaker0: I don't know what other apparatuses they have but if it works for them that's great too much for me and i was not super interested, so i kind of tapped out on that one little update is bill and natalie from a few episodes back. I think it was over the summer So Bill actually retired. I got a text from them and they were like, hey, yeah, Bill retired. So I think he had a birthday. So happy birthday, Bill. And hopefully we'll have them back on soon to get an update and congratulations to Bill. So that's it for today. Thanks for joining me for this shorter episode. Don't forget to send in your questions.
Speaker0: If you do enjoy the show, you can support it over on Buy Me A Coffee. You get extra content each month. At least one piece of extra content, sometimes more, but at least one. And you can go back through the archive. So there must be at least several of these updates over the last year or so. I think that's about right. Yeah. So about a year or so, plus other random stuff in there too. So thanks to all the supporters that are out there. It really does help and it helps me understand the people enjoy the show. Thanks a lot. And we'll catch you on the next episode.
