The Challenges of Racing In The Heat And How Eload Can Help; With Dr Stoddard The Creator of Eload

Walker: :

Hi, this is Walker, your mtp.com enthusiast in chief and I actually have a special guest today on the podcast. It’s Dr. Stoddard who actually created a series of incredible and really interesting products based on heat and also our controlling heat I should say. And also in maximizing performance, but of course Dr. Stoddard will give us the full download on what his products are all about, but Dr. Stoddard, welcome to the, your MTV.com podcast.

Dr. Stoddard::

Thanks Walker. It’s interesting for us to be chatting on a podcast. My first one I don’t mind admitting.

Walker:

Oh, good. Well, hopefully you will forgive the hazing that I’m going to give you. Okay. So,  Dr. Stoddard, maybe you could give us a little bit of your background, from my understanding, you’re a mountain biker and you hit the Canadian Rockies every day.

Dr. Stoddard:

You know, I live in a part of Canada that we don’t have much access to the Rockies. I’m more on the eastern side, in Toronto, but we have some decent trails around here and in southern Ontario, our province. And so yeah, that’s usually where I spend my time if I’m out on the trail. What kind of bike do you have? I have a Giant NRS Air, which I got a couple of years ago and it’s been a dream bike, so I totally support giant and what they’ve done with their Air and anyone out there listening. If you haven’t tried it and you’re thinking about it, I encourage you to try it. It’s a fantastic bike.

Walker:

What are the trails like where you live?

Dr. Stoddard:

Well, around here we have a wide selection of everything from double track, an easy grade to single track, a switchback, more technical. So it depends on what you’re after for the day of riding, but really southern Ontario has all kinds of different trails depending on the rider and what you’re after. So we’re, we’re good that way around here. But as I said we don’t have access to the Rockies that quickly unfortunately.

Walker:

So, do you do anything else like running or other cycling related activities

Dr. Stoddard:

I used to run but my career as a sports medicine doctor, it’s kind of ironic. I actually had to stop running because of injuries that I couldn’t get under control, so I’ve given up on running, but I’m happy to be on the trails and I also swim quite a bit as well.

Walker:

Okay. So I imagine that all this activity led you to a late night of thinking and maybe a dream or some kind of a spark of ingenuity that said, gee, I need to get faster on this bike and I need to create something that’ll help me get there. Or maybe it was something else. But what brought Eload, your sports supplement, to the market?

Dr. Stoddard:

As I said, by day I’m a sports medicine doctor and I see patients every day and I have a high proportion of endurance athletes in my practice. And about six years ago, I began to notice that a lot of people were complaining about inability to sustain endurance activity, in the heat specifically. Common symptoms were cramping, muscle cramping, nausea, stomach upset, and, you know, there’s a whole bunch of other ones as well, but those are the most common. And I became really interested in why that was the a case. All my training to that point in time had sort of led me to believe that it was a fluid and hydration. electrolyte issue, for the most part. And you know, we have products on the market at that time, and we have companies, marketing and you know, patients, despite using these products.

Dr. Stoddard:

And there was a whole cross section of products being used by these patients and despite that they were still struggling. So I became really interested in why and began to dig into it a little further and do some more research on it. And what I came up with was pretty simple, really. It,  really came down to the electrolyte composition of the drink. And so, I actually started by simply modifying the drinks that these athletes were using, I would just start with adding a little more salt, calculate it out and then add it to their specific drink and then patients would come back and tell me how they did. I was really amazed that most people were coming back saying they felt remarkably different in the heat with that simple adjustment I had made to their drinks. And of course I didn’t believe it was that simple initially. So we kept at it and everybody’s still kept telling me the same thing. One thing led to another and gradually we felt that there was probably a role on the market for a new set of products that were specifically geared toward athletes in the heat. And our first one was Eload, which is our sports drink used mostly during activity. And we’ve since come out with a bunch of other products to support Eload as well.

Walker:

Now does this, do these products, offer some kind of protection against heat illnesses?

Dr. Stoddard:

Yeah, well they do simply because the major issues with heat and tolerating the heat, as I said earlier, really is hydration and adequate electrolyte ingestion. The electrolytes in sweat are sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, zinc and chloride, those big ones in terms of quantity, sodium, potassium, and chloride being the most prevalent. So the issue is, that as you sweat, you lose quite a substantial amount of these substances through your sweat if you’re not replacing them as you’re losing them. Meaning if your drinking them, as you’re ingesting your drink while you’re racing or training, if that drink isn’t giving you enough back compared to what you’re losing then over several hours in the heat, you gradually start to deplete those substances inside your body, which then can start to lead to many of these heat related illnesses. Again, cramping, nausea, stomach, upset, headaches, these are the common ones. So simply by increasing the amount of electrolyte and having the spectrum of electrolyte that I just mentioned in adequate quantities, seems to have quite a dramatic impact on athletes abilities to stand the heat and to tolerate some of those, or rather prevent, those symptoms that we’re speaking of.

Walker:

So imagine that you put together Eload, you provided it to some athletes; athletes came back with their stories and their input. Did you ever have a pro athlete, like a premier athlete or any athlete say, listen, I’m going to go run a marathon, I gonna ride a 24 hour race in death valley and, or I’m going to be in the most humid climate. I’m going to be riding in the longest ride in the world at the most humid time of the year. And did that athlete provide any kind of story back to you saying it was great.

Dr. Stoddard::

Yeah, we’ve been fortunate that way. For the first five years of our existence we were predominately, a Canadian company with Canadian product sold in Canada. And even during that time, we managed to infiltrate, I guess a lot of elite level athletes who were struggling and they range from elite cyclist to elite triathlete, to Ironman triathletes. The problem with naming names is simply that a lot of these people are sponsored by other companies. And so, they would approach us sort of on the sly, really just say, look, I’m having these problems, can you keep it quiet, but I’d like to try your stuff because I’ve heard that it can help in the heat. And so of course we have kept it quiet, but time and time again, we’ve received very positive feedback from our users. Our website filled with testimonials that are un-doctored by us and unsolicited really. They are legitimate people writing us and telling us how they felt about what we were doing with the products and how they were helping them. So we’re pretty happy with that and you know, being a physician, and knowing about the physiology of these things, I’m very confident that it works due to some very grounded physiological principles that we’ve explored and exploited in terms of putting into our products.

Walker:

Well, I actually have some Eload right here and I’m actually going to try it. One of my issues is stomach issues with sports drinks. And I noticed on your website that stomach pains hasn’t really been one of the major complaints of the athletes. So I actually have it right here. It’s the, natural lemon flavor and I’m actually going to open it and I have a glass of water in front of me. I’m just going to give a quick little pepsi challenge here to taste it. So I’m opening, opening up the packet. Actually opening the packet up, this is for those athletes that care about this type of thing, It was actually really easy about as easy or actually a little easier than an emergency.

Walker:

So if you have it in your Jersey pocket and you’re opening it up, you could do this with your teeth easily. Now of course if you’re opening a water bottle while you’re on your bike this is a little more challenging. I’m pouring it into the glass of water that I have and it seems to, it seems like it’s got a light load to. It seemed to mix almost instantly like an emergency or a light load of gatorade. Not a big heavy load of gateway. It doesn’t, clump. I have a clear glass. I’m looking at the bottom of it and I don’t see any clumping. And there’s no colors in there. Yep. That’s pretty much dead on white. Yeah. there’s a little clarity into the water as well. So it’s kind of maintained that. Alright, here we go. My first,  sip of Eload on the natural lemon flavor. Wow. That’s a really balanced taste. There’s nothing overpowering. It’s really smooth. In fact, the taste is, imagine the taste is there, just so it’s not water. I mean, the taste is really, really mellow, really smooth.

Dr. Stoddard:

We’ve actually purposefully created it light. there are a lot of products out there, but this is all in keeping with creating products for the heat because you know, as you and your listeners know, and those of us that have been on the trails in hot weather know, we’re really grinding it out. The last thing we can tolerate are overly flavorful products and overly sweet products. They just lead to more nausea, stomach upset.

Walker:

It seems like the sweeter products also tend to clog up the Esophagus, you know, you get that sugary back end in the back of your throat that you hock it up a thousand times. It never seems to go away.

Dr. Stoddard:

Yeah, and it clogs up your tube and your camel back as well doesn’t it?

Walker:

Yeah.

Dr. Stoddard:

So Lots of reasons for sweet products not being really well tolerated in the heat. And that’s what we worked real hard on;  our very light flavor and very low levels of sweetness.

Walker:

What other products are available to us? As the earth rotates around the sun. I.e. summer returns.

Dr. Stoddard:

So we have, Eload for our Endurance formula, we call it, we have emend which is our heat recovery formula that’s used after a workout in the heat specifically. We have electrolyte containing capsules called Zone caps, which bump up electrolyte even further. The reason for that is because between people, there’s at least a 50 to 100 percent variation in what you sweat out in terms of the amounts of electrolyte in your sweat. So one formula can’t possibly be a applicable to all users and therefore we have these capsules, Zone caps, that can be added in or swallowed separately with the Eload and in fact, they work with any drink you may want to use. Any time you want to increase electrolytes, you can use the capsule format to do it. We’ve got a gel about to hit the market in about a month, again, created for the heat and we’re working on a few other things as well so that heat continues to be our focus. And, that’s where we continue to plug new products into the pipeline.

Walker:

Is there any other company that focuses on heat related products?

Dr. Stoddard:

You know, we’re daily, I’m in touch with what’s going in the market going on in the market in North America and even internationally. We’re not aware of any, any company, any products that have specifically taken a stand with their products and trying to develop them specifically for the heat and it’s interesting because products that are good in the heat are also very good in the cold. The demands of digestion in the cold, there are a lot less than what they are in the heat and a product that’s good in the heat, will be good in the cold because it’s just a lot easier to adjust to things in the cold. However, a product that’s good in the cold may not necessarily be good in the heat again, because it’s a lot easier to absorb and digest things in the cold, so even though our platform and our stance is heat and the products do very well in the heat, there’s nothing wrong with training with these products. Also in the colder months, if you’re in parts of the country where there is cold.

Walker:

Let’s say, if you can relate a story here, have you ever been to an event or have you ever, been walking down the street and someone says, I’m about to fall down from heat exhaustion and you hand over. Eload and say “drink this my god”!. Has that ever happened to you? Is there any kind of a, a medical tent, experiment, or anything along those lines that really, saved someone from heat exhaustion?

Dr. Stoddard:

We’ve had a few of those experiences because do sponsor a lot of events. Last summer we actually were in the medical tents of the hotter than hell 100 down at Wichita falls, which your listeners I’m sure will know all about, gruesome grueling race, in temperatures that personally I’ve never felt before. I went down to check it out and  see what’s happening. Anyway, we, our products, were in the medical tents down there. They were more for the athletes as they came in and were having trouble with heat. We’re very happy with how it was received. We had a lot of feedback that athletes that were succumbing to the heat, once they got into the tents and started trying to rehydrate with our products, the results were great. So, again, it can be used as a rescue, but, of course, the preferences is to use it as a preventive, while you’re actually training and racing so that you don’t hopefully have to go into the medical tent.