Episode 41 - Lori Balue | Fat-Adapted at 63. 100 Pounds gone. No "Just Water" Stops.

In this episode of Run Long After 60, I sit down with Lori Balue — a 63-year-old functional health practitioner from Southern California who was 225 pounds at 40, asthmatic, pre-diabetic, and on an inhaler a doctor told her she'd never get off.

She takes no medications now. She hiked San Bernardino Peak two days before we recorded this. She's got Mount San Jacinto this weekend and Mount Whitney in her sights.

But this isn't a weight-loss episode.

Lori has told that version of her story on twenty-five other podcasts, and she tells it well. What nobody had ever asked her about was the trail — and what she eats to get up it. So that's where I kept steering, and I interrupted her more than once to do it. She was a good sport about it. You'll hear me say "Mark, let her talk" out loud near the end, because I knew some of you were thinking it.

What comes out is a conversation I haven't had with anyone else on this show. Lori walks through her entire fueling protocol line by line — keto bricks cut into pieces in a front pouch, Ketone IQ on the climb out of the Grand Canyon, free-form amino acids, creatine, collagen, and roughly ten grams of sodium on a 110-degree day at the bottom of the Canyon. At the Glacier Half Marathon she skipped every single water station. She was already saturated with electrolytes and didn't want plain water at all.

We also get into where fat adaptation actually holds up for the hundred- and two-hundred-mile crowd, and where it might not.

And there's the woman who started all of it. A 70-year-old who blew past Lori on the climb out of Phantom Ranch back when Lori was 52 and hurting. Legs like a 40-year-old. Ten miles a day. Hiked the Canyon every year. Lori says she didn't understand what she was looking at until years later.

We talk about: