From 4:18 To 3:59 In The Mile: How Riley Witt Built Bicarb 3.0 From His Dorm, The Talent Myth, And Why If You're Not Willing To Spend $2,000 On Your Running, You're Not Serious

About this episode

Riley Witt discusses his journey to breaking four minutes in the mile and the philosophy behind his product Bicarb 3.0.

Website: ⁠bicarb.shop Riley Witt doesn't think you need talent to break four minutes in the mile—he just thinks you need to want it bad enough to spend $35. The Northwest Missouri State senior came on to break down the philosophy behind that take, and what followed was one of the more honest conversations about athletic ambition, economic reality, and the compounding edge of doing everything right. Witt grew up in a class of 36 students in Osage, Iowa, ran a 4:40 mile his freshman year of high school, and genuinely believed that was fast. He didn't have the training partners, the competition, or the context to know otherwise. What he had was an Exercise Science background, an obsessive attention to marginal gains, and a willingness to do things differently. That's where Bicarb comes in. Witt launched Bicarb 3.0 out of necessity (he wanted a sodium bicarbonate product that actually worked without the GI catastrophe), and built it into a business from his dorm room after going from a 4:11 mile to a 4:03 in two weeks on his first homebrew version. He walks Dominic through the science of how bicarbonate buffers hydrogen ions at the cellular level, why the longer distances are…

People in this episode

Host: Dominic Schlueter

Guest: Riley Witt

Topics covered

• athletic ambition
• economic reality
• marginal gains
• sodium bicarbonate
• running performance

Keywords

• mile
• running
• Bicarb 3.0
• sodium bicarbonate
• athletic performance
• marginal gains
• Division II

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Bicarb

Places: Osage, Iowa

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