David Jacko Jackson played over 300 games for Nottingham Rugby Football Club. In 2013, a month after getting married, he had a seizure on the pitch and a small bleed on the brain. His rugby career was over.

What followed was months of emotional dysregulation, extreme fatigue, sensitivity to light, and a nervous system so disrupted he once burst into tears in a supermarket because he couldn't choose a yogurt. Doctors told him to sit in a dark room and wait. Nobody talked about breathing.

Years into his recovery, Jacko stumbled across research connecting traumatic brain injury with disrupted respiratory patterns, and everything changed. By retraining his breathing mechanics, he knocked a minute off his 5K time in four weeks. He retrained as a strength and conditioning coach, worked with the British Paralympic swim team ahead of Rio, and eventually built an entirely new career around what he'd discovered. His book, Breathe Smarter, Run Stronger, with a foreword by Patrick McKeown of The Oxygen Advantage, came out two months ago.

This week, Rich sits down with Jacko to talk about the brain injury, the recovery, and why breathing might be the most overlooked performance tool in every runner's kit bag. They get into the CO2 science, why your perception of effort is more closely linked to your breathing rate than your heart rate or blood lactate levels, and the three things that should always be in play regardless of whether you breathe through your nose or your mouth.

They also talk about what Jacko is doing next - running 200 marathons in 100 days for two brain injury charities, Headway UK and Head for Change, starting the day after his 44th birthday and taking a clockwise loop of the UK. You can join him for as little as a 5K at 25 locations along the route.

Find Jacko at thebreathrunningcoach.com or on Instagram @TheBreathRunningCoach.

Andy is calling in from Cusco, Peru. He flies into the jungle tomorrow. In 48 hours, he'll be on a start line for 230 kilometres through the Amazon rainforest over five days - four manageable days of 26 to 36K, and then a 75K final stage that starts at 4am and has taken some people 22 hours to complete.

This is the conversation they had the day before all of that.

Rich and Andy talk through what the race actually looks like, the logistics, the terrain, the cut-off times, and why 35K in the jungle can take more than 10 hours. Andy reflects on his desert race - the moment he ran out of water with 4K still to go, his hands swelling up, wedding ring bulging, collapsing into a checkpoint with 45 minutes to spare before the cutoff. And the 10K after that, when the voice telling him he wasn't good enough became the loudest thing in his head.

He talks honestly about fear. Not the fear of the jungle, but the fear of that voice coming back when he's too tired to fight it. About whether, this time, he'll finally be able to prove to himself that the story isn't true.

And then, quietly, he talks about grief. About wishing his dad could be on the end of a phone right now. About wanting to hear him say he's got this.

Rich connects it all back to the people they work with every day - the ones standing at the door, able to see what's on the other side, but not quite ready to step through. The certainty of staying stuck versus the uncertainty of change.

It's one of the most honest episodes they've done.

Follow Andy's dot at BeyondTheUltimate.co.uk from Sunday. All the BTU coverage is on their socials too.

Gab Stone had it all mapped out from the age of 14. Loughborough, sports management, his own agency, 22 athletes at London 2012 - 13 of them medalling. He was 29 years old and at the centre of one of the greatest sporting moments this country has ever seen.

And behind all of it, he was living a double life.

Gab has battled a gambling addiction since university - one that followed him through the highs of his career, took everything he'd built, led to a criminal conviction, and eventually landed him in a prison cell. And it was in that cell, on his first morning inside, that he put his watch on the windowsill, closed his eyes, and ran a 5K around Regent's Park.

This week, Rich and Andy sit down with Gab for one of the most honest, gripping conversations they've had on the podcast. They cover the early warning signs nobody spotted, what online gambling does to remove every last firewall of resistance, the quarter of a million pounds, the Sunday papers, the court case, and the four and a half months inside.

But mostly, they talk about what comes next. Eleven years clean. Running as recovery. And a plan to run 30 marathons in 30 days throughout June to raise awareness around gambling harm - starting in Mayfair on the 1st and making his way up to Newcastle and back.

If you're in Leeds on June 15th, Rich will be running with him.

This one will stay with you.

Follow Gab - https://www.instagram.com/gabstone9/