Two Percent with Michael Easter
I Walked a Marathon a Day for 45 Days | Dr. Andy Galpin Made Me His Lab Rat
28 May 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to 2%. I am your host, Michael Easter. If you've been listening to this podcast at all, you will know that about a year ago at this time, I was on a hike through Southern Utah for 45 days straight. I walked about a marathon a day. Now, leading up to this, I had a lot of questions about how to prepare for it physically.
So I emailed the smartest man alive when it comes to human performance. We're talking to Andy Galpin today. And what Andy did is right before I left for my hike, right after and 45 days after, he took a bunch of my biological measurements and then he analyzed them. He wanted to know what happens to the human body during an insane endurance event like I did.
And what he found was really mind-blowing.
Chapter 2: What motivated Michael Easter to walk a marathon every day for 45 days?
It surprised him, it surprised me, and it can give us all lessons about how to approach endurance, fitness, sleep, all these big different questions. So we're not only gonna talk about what he found via all of my blood, urine, et cetera samples, but also what he's found working with the greatest athletes in the world. He's worked with MVPs. He's worked with Cy Young award winners.
He's worked with USC champions. And those lessons actually hold for the rest of us who aren't extreme athletes. So we're going to get into specific tactics that you can use in your daily life to live better, to eat better, to sleep better, to perform better, and just to be a more resilient human who can do anything life throws at you. So with all that said, we're going to bring in Andy right now.
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Chapter 3: How did Dr. Andy Galpin prepare for the study on Michael's endurance?
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All right, Andy Galpin, thanks for coming on, man. It's a pleasure to finally be here. It's been a work in the making, but we're here. Absolutely. We made it work. All right, so here's what I want to start with. February 2025, I'm preparing to do this crazy 850-mile hike across Utah, and I want training advice.
And so I email you, and you completely disregard my request for training advice, and you say no.
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Chapter 4: What surprising findings were revealed about the human body during extreme endurance events?
I want to study you, dude. You are going to be my lab rat. You want to find out what happens to a human during a through hike. So what did you have me do from there and why? Yeah, that's interesting. It's also classic Andy in the sense that when you ask question A, I'm probably going to give you answer B. So, you know, there's tradition.
You want training advice and I just totally go somewhere different. But what I actually thought was going to be interesting about it was, you know, we don't have a lot of scientific data about things like that. If you look at research and physiology, we traditionally have obviously tons of exercise stuff. But when you're like, you know, I'm going to hike 800 miles.
I'm like, well, actually, I don't know what's going to happen physiologically. So I wanted to do a full blood panel and get as many markers as we possibly could. We actually had a little bit, even more of a bolder, ambitious program. Wanted to do full gut microbiome analysis and sleep and a bunch of other stuff.
And so once we kind of started getting into the logistics of what it was going to take on your end, we had to pare that down a little bit. But what we ended up with is a pretty comprehensive blood assessment before immediately after your hike, and then 45 days later. And then we got some stool samples along the way as well.
Yeah, so to explain this, what this means for the listener and how this played out in my own life, lady shows up at my house at like 5.30 in the morning. I have to hand over to her, and this is a day before I left, I have to give her my stool samples, which is quite awkward, but she's done this enough that it was just like nothing. This is everyday work for her.
I had to give her saliva samples from the day before. I had to give her a urine sample. And then she took an unbelievable amount of blood.
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Chapter 5: What specific tactics can listeners apply to improve their fitness and resilience?
There was like, I don't know, 50 vials or something. And thankfully, she had this like... super fast blood taking device that it was just like a NASCAR pit crew pulling it out of me. So what is the role of each of those samples? At the very top, we'll start off with blood.
And this is nice because a blood draw or blood chemistry is what we'll generally call it, will give you information on every organ in your body that has blood supply, which is all of them.
And so we want to be able to complete that picture to not just look at something that is a byproduct or result, but then to go up the chain and say, okay, this was caused by A, B, and C. And so we don't just want to look at things like inflammation. We want to also look at, okay, well, what caused the inflammation? What was the endocrine system doing? What was the immune system doing?
What does your energy availability look like? What does your oxygen transportation look like? What are the micronutrients? What are the vitamins? What are the minerals? What are the enzymes and metabolites? And I could go on and on with as much detail as you like there, but the blood will give us information on all that. So that's home base. Now, urine...
is similar, but it's more specific to metabolites, meaning we can see the end result of the breakdown. And that's critically important because it tells us actually different information because a lot of the times the markers in the blood give us potential. They give us, you know, kind of what's there.
But if I know what was there and then I know at the end what was left in the urine, then I can completely finalize that math equation and we know 100% what happened. Then saliva tells us a different story because we're actually getting some of the same markers, but we can cross-reference them. And we can start knocking off false positives and false flags.
And then there's just some other markers that are better in saliva. Stool is the other part because... Blood won't tell you much about, there's a handful of markers, maybe half a dozen that can tell you a little bit about what's going on in the GI and gut microbiome. But the fastest way outside of like a camera or direct imaging is actually you get a stool sample.
So if I had to summarize that all up, Michael, I would say we wanted to know as best as possible everything that was going to go on or in your body. Yeah, get as much as possible. So then I go out, I do the hike, 45 days. And it's about, I would say we averaged about 25 miles a day. A lot of elevation change, not on trails. So a lot of scrambling, all sorts of bullshit, frankly.
We did have a few down days. So I had a couple of days where we would, you know, sleep in a hotel in the town, kind of recover. You have to restock your food and all that. Then I finish, next day, Lady comes back, takes it all again. I wait 45 days, and then she comes back again, takes everything. You get the data.
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Chapter 6: How do wearables accurately measure health and performance?
I would have anticipated the opposite, to be honest. So I think this is a case of something's happening unique in your physiology that just doesn't, you're not the bell curve, man. Like you're not the normal person. And having done, I can't tell you how many thousands of labs and stuff on people. You just see that sometimes. So the story got very interesting when we got to your endocrine system.
So this is your hormones, right? This is your thyroid. This is your testosterone. There's, I don't know, eight or 10 markers we looked at in those things. And this is the one where I would have had a furious debate with somebody prior to going in, because in general, what we see happen is, and the anabolic system is a classic reactor.
So if your testosterone goes down, it's because you're in chronic low energy availability, or it's because you're in chronic metabolic dysfunction, or because you're in chronic stress or whatever the case is. So it's a reactor rather than a primary driver. And so your testosterone going in, and you gave me, you signed the waiver. I can share your health data here. Send it out to the world.
Total testosterone going into the hike was 750. It's a very, very, very solid number. Most people are going to be really mad. because they're below 400, below 300. You get below 200 as a middle-aged man. You're on medication. That's a clinical issue, right? But most people, even sub-500, are oftentimes reaching for TRT and things like that, right?
So cruising at 750 naturally is well above the average. This would be an atypical number. It's where you want to be. It's actually pretty much perfect. But we don't see it very often. Okay. But I would create your lifestyle with that. Like almost surely your sleep, your stress management, your physical activity, your movement, all those things you create space for.
Now, post-hike, you dropped about 100 points. Okay. So you went from 750 to 650 in the neighborhood. Was that what you would expect or did you think it would drop lower? It's really tough to say. So one thing you want to be careful with is something like total testosterone.
Okay.
There's a natural, what we call analytical variance. So this is, if you take the same, people don't know this stuff a ton, but if you take the same blood sample and send it to two different labs, with testosterone, you're going to get something in the neighborhood of 20 to 30 different score. Interesting. There's also a diurnal variation, so there's a difference between morning and evening. Yeah.
And there's a little bit of a day-to-day variance.
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Chapter 7: What are the main differences between the needs of pro athletes and average individuals?
And so it went, we have to pay the piper because we're under-caloried. Okay, not eating enough. You're not eating enough calories. You have to continue to perform, though. And so this is what we would call like an acute stress response. Your physiology will always defer to keeping organs alive over things like exercise performance.
If given the choice, keep your brain powered, keep your kidneys filtering, and we'll deal with your stomach and your muscles being heavy later. Like who gives a crap? Your hormones are one of the ways that you do that regulation. Because it says, hey, look, we don't have any need to grow muscle right now. We are under-caloried. We're not getting enough blood glucose to the brain.
We're not getting enough to power immune system. We're having this demand to make more red blood cells. So any available energy, divert it to that. And we will pay the hormone consequences later. And so it starts pulling those things down. Gotcha. And so that was very interesting.
But one of the things that was actually also equally interesting was your testosterone continued to drop 45 days later. And why is that? Now it's just trying to figure to get its life back together and it takes a hit? Yeah, it's exactly what you said. It's still a rebound.
And I think one of the lessons we can draw here from this stuff is you do something as challenging as you did, just because you slept better... and you're finally eating food again, antioxidants came back immediately. Okay. Because those are very acute. You eat them right now, I pull your blood, they go up.
Yeah.
Hormones aren't like that. Red blood cells aren't like that. Even 45 days, it's wild. 45 days, because I feel like you think, oh, if I take a week off, I'll be fine. 45 days, I was not fine. Well, you started to be, right? So we started looking, your sex hormone binding globulin was back down to baseline. Okay.
Your free testosterone went from, we'll just again call it 12 and a half to six post-raise. By day 45, it was back up to 10. Okay. So the system is clearing there. But the last thing it's going to do is give you more total testosterone. Got it. The last thing it's going to do is add more muscle. Right. Some of these processes are much longer. And so this is a month and a half.
True overtraining takes months to recover from. So when people go, I did three workouts in a week or three workouts in a row, I feel a little down. Oh, I definitely overtrained. It's like, no, that's very rare. And in probably elite athletes. You could do an ultra marathon and you wouldn't be overtrained.
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Chapter 8: What are the most effective exercise protocols for the average person?
The way you kept red blood cells up is you started robbing all vitamins and mineral in your system. So, you know, the theme we've been on here, that's exactly what happened. And the way you continue to keep the vital stuff alive is you start ripping down vitamins and minerals. So most of those markers for you just fell off a cliff.
If you would have, I'll say it this way, if you would have ate the exact diet you ate for 45 days at home, Not hiking, I bet you you would have held on to most of these things. Okay. But you also got to remember, you're hiking all day long. So it's the additional expenditure that you didn't calibrate for. So the vitamins and minerals you got in those bars were probably enough for a steady state.
So one of the things that I thought was interesting is when I first called you asking for fitness advice, which you ignored and put me on a study... You said one of the reasons you wanted to do this study is because you go, when I work, people I work with day to day, I know what to expect. I know exactly how to get them healthy. But with you, I have no idea.
So the question is, what do you see with most people who are active and what do most people need? I'll answer this in two parts. Because, again, the lived experience of it is real. Yeah. We have worked with the highest performers in the world, every sport you can imagine, the Cy Young winners, the Hall of Famers, the biggest contracts, the most famous CEOs, musicians, actors, all that stuff.
And I can genuinely tell you, the basic 80% is where we get 95% of our wins. I mean, I can... give you names and I can tell you, yes, these people that have done these things and broken major sports records, it is stress management, diet, exercise, light, social relationships, connection. Like it's, it is the playbook. Yeah. That said, it is also true.
Sometimes that last 10 to 15%, we have to go so far in the other direction because And we need extreme precision. Look, the idea of personalized or precision stuff, we're closer to the reality of that than what most people buy and say and sell. When they do that, it's like, oh, I took a questionnaire and maybe a blood sample, and I'm like, give you a precision. That's not really that precise.
But we can do that. When we have people that have enough means... and enough interest, we can get some really fancy stuff done and we can actually be prognostic on that. So we can predict performance weeks in advance with extremely high granularity if we have enough data and we can build those into enough models.
So if it sounds like I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth, I am on purpose, right? Because we have both of those people. We legitimately, that is a real thing and we have... Again, the best in the world in a number of sports right now. And that's what we do. That's legitimately what happens. Yeah.
And then we have those people's teammates and we're still like, yo, take a picture of your lunch and text it to me. Good. Like, okay, like we have vegetables today. Yeah. On one hand, you might have a rock star who's like, dude, you just need to chill out a bit. You need to sleep more. Good.
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