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Peter Frick-Wright: From ���ϳԹ��� Magazine, this is The ���ϳԹ��� Podcast.

Max: Hello, hello!

Lauren: Hi!

Peter: My house, a couple of weeks ago. My friends Max, Michelle, and Lauren. My wife, Ellie. My dogs, Abby and Goose.

Max: Excuse me, excuse me.

Ellie: Abby Goose, out.

Peter: My name is Peter Frick-Wright, this is The ���ϳԹ��� Podcast, and on that night a few weeks ago, we’d gathered to watch The Eras Tour. Taylor Swift’s most recent concert film, currently available to rent for the significant, in many senses of that word, price of $19.89. Max and Michelle rented it a few nights ago.

Peter: Welcome to your second viewing.

Max: Michelle said, we only come here for movies we’ve already seen.

Peter: We all watched Heat a couple of months ago. And Max and Michelle also ended up watching that one twice in a week on accident.

The weird price, $19.89 is because Taylor Swift was born in 1989. That's also what it cost, per person, to see the movie in theaters. And just in case you don’t have anyone in your life that keeps you up to date on Taylor Swift, the Eras Tour is Swift’s 6th album tour, but she's released or re-released five albums since the last one. And so this concert isn't promoting a specific album. Instead it's organized by era of her work. Songs from different albums, different times in her life, are all clustered together, definitely not in chronological order, but synced up to costume and staging changes. What I'm trying to say is, it's a long show.

Lauren: 3-hour long movies that you’ve already seen.

Max: Yeah true. Very true.

Peter: It doesn’t feel 3 hours long. The show hardly takes a breath. She's singing and dancing and moving the entire time and her voice sounds incredible for a live performance. Like, ‘how did she do that?’ incredible.

Max: We are not super fans, but we appreciated… we were just curious. Like it’s a pop-culture thing. I mean it’s good. She’s good. She’s good at it.

Peter: Early last summer, when the concert tour kicked off, the Swiftie gossip on TikTok was everyone wondering: wait, how is she doing that? A 3-and-a-half-hour show, three nights in a row. For most people, it would be a significant test of endurance to do one concert. She's at 150 shows and counting. It would be like running a marathon three days in a row. Every week. For more than 6 months. The longer the tour went on, the more people started wondering: How is this possible? In addition to being a world class singer and songwriter, was Taylor Swift also some kind of world class endurance athlete? What was her secret?

And finally, in an interview with Time Magazine for their "Person of the Year" cover. She told us. Her fitness secret was pretty straightforward. She sang through the set list while running on a treadmill every day, for 6 months.

Zoë: She was training for the Eras Tour by doing, you know, three ish hour treadmill workouts and running faster on the fast songs while singing out loud and walking or running slower on the slow songs, still singing. She also mentioned she would up the incline on songs where she was doing more high-intensity dancing.

Peter: This is ultra endurance athlete and ultra Taylor Swift fan Zoë Rom. Zoë is the editor-in-chief of Trail Runner here at ���ϳԹ���, as well as one of the hosts of The ���ϳԹ��� Show on ���ϳԹ��� Watch.

But more relevant for our purposes is the fact she’s also an elite runner herself. She occasionally wins hundred mile races, and also coaches runners who win them. So when she heard about Taylor's treadmill workout to prepare for the Eras Tour—3 hours of running while singing—Zoë was curious. Could she do it? And what was it like to train like a pop star?

Zoë: I think it was more just the length of the concert. Um, doing anything  mildly active for three plus hours is a long time. And as an ultra runner, I feel like I'm naturally drawn to the extremity of exercise. And so just, I think it was just the sheer length of it that really piqued my interest.

Peter: In a lot of ways, Zoë had been training her whole life for this moment. Most runners would have to at least familiarize themselves with the lyrics of Taylor Swift's back catalog. Most Swifties would have to work their way up to a three-hour run. Zoë could do both off the couch. She might literally be the person in the world most prepared to run on a treadmill while singing Taylor Swift.

Other than Taylor Swift, I guess.

So that’s what she did.

Zoë on the treadmill singing You Belong With Me: You’re on the phone with your girlfriend, she's upset, she’s going off about something that you said…

Zoë: I texted a friend that owned a gym and was like, ‘Hey! Do you have a room where I could just wheel a treadmill in undisturbed and do this workout?’ And she was like, ‘Oh, you could just do it in our main gym.’ And I was like, ‘no, no, no. I'm going to be singing out loud for three plus hours. I need a little privacy, please.’

Zoë singing You Belong With Me: But she wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts, she’s cheer captain and I’m on the bleachers…

Oh my god, Taylor. How do you do it?

Peter: It was not an easy workout. But Zoë was also going for it. She ran eight minute miles on the fast songs. And only slowed it down to  nine minute miles on the slower stuff.

This is probably faster than you, me, or Taylor could run and sing, but as a talented, trained endurance athlete, it’s a pace Zoë could sustain pretty well.

And it turns out this line, between being able to sing while running, and not being able to sing while running, it’s important.

Zoë: That is how I try to train athletes that I coach, that you should be running, doing most of your intensity at an intensity level low enough that you could sing along to whatever music you're listening to, or you could speak in full sentences.

That means that you're functioning within your aerobic range, AKA you're running with enough oxygen that you have oxygen to spare, which is how you build endurance.

Peter: In other words, if you can sing while running, you’re operating beneath your aerobic threshold, so your muscles are getting better at using oxygen efficiently. This is universally accepted as the best way to get better at running, lots of training at a pace that doesn’t feel particularly difficult.

Peter: Gotcha, gotcha. So instead of, you know, if you're redlining, you're not building endurance, you're saying?

Zoë: That's correct. If you're redlining and you're like gasping for breath, you are not running with enough oxygen to make yourself more efficient at processing oxygen. You're making yourself more efficient at like running or like exercising at an anaerobic level. Um, but to get good at aerobic exercise, you have to practice that. It helps, um, a process called angiogenesis where you develop dense capillary beds. It makes your mitochondria more efficient. There's a whole bunch of metabolic advantages to running at an aerobic intensity. It also helps you sort of maintain an intensity that's more conducive to not injuring yourself.

Peter: It’s an elegant way to train. Go as fast as you want, as long as you can keep singing the music. If it gets too hard, you’re out of your zone. Slow down. It’s like having a fancy heart rate monitor built into your brain. But, you know, fun. Cause you get to pretend you’re a pop star. And wonder how fast she does what you’re doing.

Zoë: This is a burning question for me, Peter. I'm very, very curious. I would also love to see her heart rate data, um, that as a, as a coach and an endurance runner myself, I'm, I'm very curious about that. Because, you know, it's likely, like, I didn't really want to walk. I wanted to sort, like, I could pretty comfortably keep running, but I would be very curious to know sort of what her top end speed is, like, what, like, it, you being able to complete this even at a quote unquote ‘relatively slow speed’ is still an immense feet of endurance and to me signals that she is very fit and a very capable runner.

So I would be very curious to know what fast means to her.

Zoë on the treadmill singing Love Story : So taking this one a bit slower. We were both young when I first saw you.

Peter: So Zoë was familiar with, and prepared for, the challenge of running while singing.

A little more surprising, but totally relevant to training for a concert tour, was the challenge of managing the logistics of a three-hour run while singing—the fluids, the nutrition, the Taylor Swift costume changes.

Peter: Uh, how many costume changes did you have?

Zoë: I only did two because I only had a sequin blazer and a limited edition Speak Now, Taylor's Version cardigan.

Peter: Oh, okay. Some things you just already had sitting around the house?

Zoë: Just, I, as an adult woman, happen to have close at hand.

Zoë on the treadmill singing Love Story: Begging you please don’t gooooo. And I said, Romeo save me…

Peter: As the hours of running wore on, Zoë started losing track of some of the lyrics she thought she knew by heart.

Zoë: You know, I definitely flubbed the bridge of Long Live  or, um, of, uh, All Too Well, um, the 10 minute version. That's one that like, I feel like when I'm listening to it in the car, in the shower, I'm like, yes, I know the song. And then as soon as you're forced to, uh, do it on mic, I got, I was like, Oh man, I don't know this one as well as I maybe thought I did.

Zoë on the treadmill: What I’m learning is that Taylor is really good at controlling her efforts. I have a lot to learn.

Peter: Yeah. How far into the run were you at that point too? Was fatigue a factor?

Zoë: Yeah yeah yeah. Two-thirds in, I would say.

Peter: Okay. Yeah.

Zoë: Definitely, fatigue was a factor. And like, you know, I'm upping the speed on the treadmill and doing some stuff. I'm trying to drink water and take in calories. And so managing all of the running stuff while trying to remember lyrics was definitely challenging, but in a way, maintaining focus on the lyrics also made the time pass a little more quickly, and made me not sort of over identify with the effort too.

Peter: What do you mean over identify with the effort?

Zoë: Like, be like, ‘Man, this is really hard. This is so hard. Running is hard.’ Which is, um, not uncommon, I feel like, in the back of my head.

Peter: Oh, okay. Like 3 and a half hours on a treadmill is mentally hard no matter what.

Zoë: Yeah yeah yeah. Like, ‘This is is really hard.  I'm so bored, what am I doing with my life?’ You know, um, I'm just singing songs. Which, like, just helps you sort of have like a light grip on the effort.

Zoë treadmill: I always knew the Reputation set was going to be the biggest challenge here because it’s all fast. Reputation era, let’s go! I don’t like your…

Peter: So Taylor used the treadmill to prepare for her concert tour, and Zoë used her concert tour to make the treadmill more bearable.

What I was starting to wonder was: how common is this? Are all pop-stars training this way? Should serious athletes be belting it out on their runs? And the answer was complicated. That’s after the break.

Zoë on the treadmill singing I Did Something Bad: You said the gun was mine. Wasn’t cool. No, I don’t like you. But I got smarter, I got harder in the nick of time…

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Peter: After pondering the effort involved in performing on stage for three hours each night via pondering the effort involved in training to perform on stage for three hours each night, I wanted to know what else stars were doing to prepare for these massive shows. I wanted to talk with someone that trained them. And that led me to an American guy, who’d been living in Germany for 35 years. Charles Simmons.

Charles: I've heard, you know, I know the story about the Taylor Swift workout. I've heard that story also in the 90s, uh, the group Destiny's Child, uh, Beyoncé, uh, that was one of the things that, uh, their manager had them do to train for a tour. They would run around the track and they would sing their songs while they were running.

Peter: Charles is the creator of a music and fitness home workout program called VoxxBody that trains both musicians how to use their body athletically while singing, and non-musicians how to use their voice more effectively under pressure.

Charles:  When I talk about, uh, vocal production and physical activity, I usually talk about communicating, about using the voice. And that can be in a singing, situation, or it could be calling plays on the field. It could be coaching.

Peter: In addition to publishing home workouts, Charles works with performers, executives, and lots of different kinds of coaches to improve vocal communication. His workouts are basically functional fitness combined with vocal warm ups. He didn’t invent this stuff, but he was kind of a pioneer in combining it.

Charles: I was, um, I was a contestant on The Voice, um, the German version of The Voice back in 2011, 2012.

Charles singing: And then the rainstorm came…

Charles: And it was an amazing experience. And I, because it was a very stressful experience, both physically and mentally, I developed vocal issues.

Singing on TV, he says, was a perfect recipe for stage-fright and stress. The TV audience is huge, and literally votes you off the show. The studio audience, on the other hand, is small, and right there in front of you, making eye contact. Combine that with off-screen politics and he found himself straining to sing each night. To the point that it damaged his voice and he had to go see a speech therapist.

Charles singing: I need love, love divine…

Charles: I had a vocal coach, a speech therapist who told me something that pretty much changed my life. And when she said, um, she said the worst thing that a singer could do is sports. And I'm like really? How is that possible? And that got me into my journey into figuring out the correlation between physical activity and vocal production.

Peter: Wait, she said the, the worst?

Charles: The worst thing that a singer can do is sports. And it got me really thinking about why she, from her perspective or from her training, that was the case.

Peter: Charles says there is a belief, among classically trained vocalists, that the key to singing well, is to relax. Your voice, your throat, your diaphragm, your whole body.

And exercise is the opposite of relaxing.

Charles: You’re taught in, in most music schools that, that tension, that physical tension is not conducive to good vocal tone, which absolutely makes no sense given the muscles and the, and the organisms that are used to produce a rich vocal tone, especially in operatic tenors and sopranos and, and all. They, that requires a lot of power.

But, uh, from her training, she was taught that, you know, relaxation is, is key to a good vocal tone.

Peter: That might be true in the context of stage fright. You do have to figure out a way to relax. But Charles was both an athlete and a singer, and he knew muscles responded to training, and singing involved muscles, lots of them.

Charles: What people tend to forget sometimes is that the voice, the human voice is made up of muscles and tissues and cartilages, just like every single. Part of the human body and as such it needs to be trained accordingly. You think about the the small muscles that are That are active in vocal production. You know, these are all muscles that as well as your that can be trained just as easily as your biceps or your triceps or your chest  um. And a lot of vocal injuries that occur among singers or coaches, uh, sports coaches or public speakers is due to, in large part, to muscle fatigue because the voice, because the muscles are not trained.

Peter: Charles spent five years developing his fitness program, and during that time went down a rabbit hole about the physiology of singing. Which muscles you could work out and train to get better vocal tone, better control. And it wasn’t necessarily the muscles you expect.

Charles: I like to focus a lot on on the midsection on the core, because that is the most vital part of the whole singing experience. Like I said, singing is is nothing more than exhaling in a predetermined  pitch or tone. And one thing that really shocked me, uh, in talking with all of my, all of the vocal coaching colleagues that I had over the years is how little they all knew about how breathing actually works. One thing that you hear typically amongst vocal teachers is breathe from your diaphragm.

That is something that you will hear in, I would say, 98% of, from 98% of all vocal coaches. Breathe from your diaphragm. And that, when I hear that, I cringe a little bit because that just demonstrates a fundamental lack of knowledge of how breathing actually works.

Peter: Here’s how breathing actually works, in 15 seconds or less. Your diaphragm is a muscle at the bottom of your ribs that separates your chest and abdomen. When it contracts, it flattens, sucks downwards, and creates a vacuum effect that causes your lungs to expand. That’s how you inhale. And yes, you want to use it to breathe, but remember singing is controlled exhalation. And that’s not your diaphragm’s job.

Charles: When you exhale, the diaphragm doesn't do anything. It relaxes. So it's basically all those muscles in between your ribs, those intercostal muscles, the, your ab muscles, your, you know, your back, the lats. All of that stuff is what aids in exhaling. So, when someone says breathe from your diaphragm, that, that doesn't mean anything.

Peter: So with the diaphragm, it's, it's sort of like saying, you know, like if you're doing a bicep curl or something, you get it, you get the weight up in any way you want, but then singing is like the controlled lowering of that, of that bar.

Charles: Exactly. When you, I've, what I found is that when you sing while performing certain movements or performing certain exercises, it forces you to rethink how you breathe.

Peter: Running while singing teaches you breath control. It forces you to learn how to carry a melody even with your feet hitting the ground, to time your breathing with the song.

Improving breath control has all kinds of benefits for both your voice, and your running.

Just ask the military.

Charles: My father was a career soldier. He was in the army for 20 plus years. And every morning at 5, he woke up, he put his uniform on and he would go with his unit and they would exercise. They would run and they would sing at the same time. You know, the, [vocalizes] and so that's, yeah.

And so that's basically the perfect example of how you can marry vocal training and physical training so that they're both beneficial to each other.

Peter: I guess, you’d like to think this wouldn’t be a soldier tradition if there wasn’t also some physical benefit. Like, they’re not, they’re not training their soldiers to have better singing voices.

Charles: No. But  if you, when you consider, you know, how did, how did soldiers communicate with each other on the battlefield a lot of the time, when they didn't have radios or they didn't have drums? What did they do? They yelled at each other. They called out to each other. They called out commands.

Um, so like I said, there is, there is a precedent for that type of training for both the voice and, you know, physical training. I mean, it goes, it goes back thousands of years.

Peter: The US military may not produce better singers than classically trained vocal coaches, but Charles says that, among performers, there is a growing recognition that fitness is key to having a career.

Charles: More and more vocal coaches and music schools are starting to realize how important it is to be physically fit, um, in order to, you know, create a great vocal performance or a great vocal tone simply because a lot of their students go on and, you know, become frontmen in bands. They become performers. They do musical theater. They go on tour. You know, they do physical things anyway.

I'm currently, just as an example, I currently I play George Washington in Hamilton in the UK version of Hamilton. We're on tour right now throughout the UK the first tour of Hamilton in the United Kingdom and as a musical theater performer. It's typical that we perform 8 shows a week. You know, 2 and a half to 3 hours every night, 8 shows a week, 6 days a week, and you can't do that if you're not physically fit.

Peter: For singers, running improves vocal control, stamina, and may make a career in music possible. For runners and athletes, singing on a run keeps you below your anaerobic threshold, improves breath control, and breaks up the monotony of a long workout.

The military knows this. Taylor Swift knows this. Musical theater performers know this. Vocal coaches and music schools seem to be learning this.

Singing is harder if you don’t run. Running while singing has always been hard.

Zoë on the treadmill singing betty: The only thing I wanna do is make it up to youuuu…

Peter: And after three hours on the treadmill, 2 costume changes, and 48 songs spanning 6 distinct eras of country and pop music, Zoë Rom identified a further benefit.

Singing on your run gives your workout some meaning. Makes it okay to feel something from it. And, according to the people in my life, who keep me up to date on Taylor Swift, the folks on Tik Tok are feelin it.

Tiktok audio of people singing Cruel Summer: And it’s new. The shape of your body. It’s blue. The feeling I’ve got. And it’s a crueeel summer.

Zoë: What attracted me to this workout and what drew me to it is unlike so many of the workout trends and fitness regimens recommended, particularly for women.

Like, I grew up in the 90s where, you know, half of what was written about in health and fitness magazines was like how to eat like so and so or get abs like so and so and it recommends all of these routines and things that are borderline disordered and not super healthy.

What I really liked about this is how much she didn't focus on how extreme and challenging it was, but on how like fun and capacity building and like confidence building it was. And I think that those are the things that our culture often overlooks when we're looking to talk about making healthy habits stick or make, you know, exercise more appealing.

I don't think everything, I don't think anything really should feel like a huge daunting extreme challenge. I think it should feel like a fun and self loving romp through past versions of yourself and toward more capacious versions of yourself. And that is kind of what I keep coming back to is like wishing more people gravitated towards, like, not that this is so extreme and hard and like, I've got to try to see if I can do it.

But like, think about what you can already do right now today and think about what it would mean to just push that slightly and. For a lot of folks, it's not a three hour treadmill workout. That's fine. Like, this was a really hard workout and I won't do it again. It was really hard. And most people without a pretty significant baseline of fitness couldn't and shouldn't do it.

But what I liked about it was that it is, like, in touch with your emotions. It's in touch with your feeling. It's not about like. No pain, no gain.

It's like, let's scream along to songs that I loved when I was 15 and still make me feel things today as you know, as an adult. And I think that we sort of sell ourselves and Ms. Swift short when we just think about the extreme challenge of it rather than the really amazing and compelling emotional component.

Peter: Zoë Rom is the editor-in-chief of Trail Runner and one of the hosts of The ���ϳԹ��� Show on ���ϳԹ��� Watch.

Find Charles Simmons at voxxbody.com that’s V-O-X-X-B-O-D-Y.com

Last week, while we were putting the finishing touches on this episode, a trainer in Colorado, Brookelynn Miller, released a Couch to Eras Tour training plan, with playlists to sing along to for each workout. It’s free. We’ll link to the plan in the show notes. There is now also a Couch2Eras Strava Community with over a thousand members. It describes itself as “a place for swifties to connect and support one another on their couch to Eras Tour journey.”

This episode was written and produced by me, Peter Frick-Wright, with music and sound design by Robbie Carver.

The ���ϳԹ��� Podcast is made possible by our ���ϳԹ��� Plus members. Learn more about all the benefits of membership at outsideonline.com/podplus.