Episode 366: Race Course Specific Training

This episode looks at how important race course specificity is relative to other aspects of your training, and how this may vary depending on where you are in training, lifestyle, and degree of course uniqueness. 

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Podcast Episodes Mentioned:

Episode 344: Endurance Training Simplified

Episode 346: Short Intervals Simplified

Episode 348: Long Intervals Simplified

Episode 356: Easy Run - Simplified 

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Episode Transcript

All right, folks, welcome back to another episode of the Human Performance Outliers podcast. I'm your host, Zach Bitter, and today I have a topic based episode for you. Today's topic is race course specificity, where I'm going to break down. How important is it to train on the type of course you're going to race on? Or the way I like to look at it maybe is how important is it amongst other things, so you can know what sacrifices are worth making to get terrain specific to the course that you're going to be on versus staying closer to home and running on whatever's local to you? I actually got interested in recording a podcast on this topic after following all the events at this year's Ultra Trail Mont Blanc. The whole series of events, to be honest with you. But the featured event is their 100 plus, roughly 100 mile event that is fairly unarguably the most competitive trail, 100 miler the world offers at the moment. So it just gets a lot of attention. It's very well covered. They have next level video feed and race information for those following. So if you really want to get into the sport of ultramarathon running and follow runners throughout the day, it's a next level experience because I mean, they have things that are as intimate as interviewing at aid stations. The crew members of the participants, watching the runners come through those aid stations and sometimes even catching the dialogue between them and their crew and really kind of following the race as close as you can be for something that is essentially out in the wilderness, running around for what ends up being 19 plus hours for whomever you are following. But you know, that's the fastest you see finishers finish in. So it's a long time to be paying attention to stuff. So the level of content that is required to make it engaging is just really, really extensive. So they do a great job of showcasing all of that and it hooks you in. And the thing about it this year that got me interested in race course specificity were some of the storylines coming into the event itself. So here in the United States there were essentially two big storylines going into this year's race, and those were Jim Walmsley on the men's side, where Jim decided that in order to win the ultra trail mont-blanc, it was going to be in his best interest to move out to France, be able to train like the European champions have passed in the mountains on the course specific to that and actually even work with or I shouldn't say work with, but train with the prior champions more or less. So it was a topic of conversation because. Jim. Is a great ultrarunner I mean, he's won the Western states 103 times in a row. He's got the course record there. He is likely going to be considered by most the most dominant trail ultra runner in North America and in some cases in the world. And he had this sort of monkey on his back, so to speak, with the ultra trail Mont Blanc not being able to win it, having had some races where by all metrics, solid performances as far as race results go. But for someone whose expectation is to win, if not break a course record, you know, falling short of where his full potential really was at. So it became a storyline because last year he had already moved out there and prepared for the race itself in that similar format, living in France and had a rough end of the race and fell back after being up front for good portions of the early stages. So the spotlight was on him to see if this will pay off? Will he get that Utmb win? And with that just became the topic of essentially do you need to live on the course, which is maybe a bit of an extreme way to look at this particular topic. But. 1s Loosely speaking, how important is actually preparing for the course that you're going to be on, specifically terrain wise versus, say, just training wherever you have access to and hoping for the best, I guess is maybe one way to put it. But generally speaking, when I think about this topic, it's less about whether course specificity is needed or not needed. It's more about a question to me is I think getting on course specific terrain is going to be a value add. It's hard to argue against that. It's hard to argue against there being an advantage to preparing on the exact terrain that you're going to actually compete on. I mean, it would be like saying, Oh yeah, it doesn't really matter if you practice basketball on an outdoor court versus an indoor court, yet you're going to play all your games on the indoor court or vice versa. It's sort of like that. It's like, yeah, it's going to be better to be on that terrain that's specific. All else held equal, but. Sometimes I think that this topic gets almost too much traction where people put too much emphasis on it to the degree that they make sacrifices in their training in order to try to get that sort of an experience when there are much bigger things that they could be considering. And you have to be looking at these things as an opportunity cost because most people aren't going to be like Jim, where you've checked all those other boxes and now it's just like finding these really fine details that you can still manipulate. For him, one of those was actually moving out to France, U1 training right on the course and training with former champions. So it's a really interesting topic I'm going to dive into. So people listening to this who are training for an ultramarathon can sort of weigh the pros and cons behind the how much effort you should put into trying to say get out to the mountains if you're not living close to them. But you have a race that's coming up to that and how you should look at that and your training. But back to the storylines to just a little bit more. One of the things that kind of made it really interesting was Jim went on to win. He won Utmb. An awesome story to follow. And the really interesting thing about it was that it made him the first American male to win the ultra trail Mont Blanc. And that was something that has been a storyline for years now along the sport as well. But the kind of secondary story along with that was the second place finisher who was leading for a portion of the day and wasn't too far behind. Jim was Zach Miller, also an American male. So the US went one two this year and it was kind of a big step I think for us based ultra runners for that particular course showing that they can arrive on the top of the podium. But even had Jim faltered, Zach would have still claimed that first time type of experience. So what made it further interesting for this topic was Zach didn't move out to France and had Jim faltered, he would have won. So we would have had an American male winning the ultra trail Mont Blanc without moving out there to train. Now, don't get me wrong, Zach trained about us specifically, I think as one probably can and should without living out there year round. He did a lot of the things that you see a lot of the strong European mountain ultra runners do in training to prepare himself for it and he periods well from what I can tell, I don't know his specific training, but the way he described things after the race made it sound like he did all the right things throughout the course of his year and then finally peaking for the race to put himself in a position where he was going to be strong on that course. And if he executed properly, he was going to be a tough person to arrive at the finish line in front of. So. I'm going to use those guys as examples, I think, to show like or highlight, I should say, kind of where I would put racecourse specificity into the plan in terms of the importance, more or less. One other quick story before we get going. I just have to mention, since we're talking about Alta Trail Montblanc's, Kourtney de Walter, Kourtney did something this year that is somewhat unthinkable in terms of how we view this sport, where she arrived at the Western states 100 and not only one, but broke a course record that was considered a very strong course record. It was one that was set in a year. It was about as cold as you're ever going to get in Western states. And that's important because on hot years in Western states, it can get into the triple digits in the canyon. So if you get a cooler year and it's not too unbearable in the high country, in the early stages, you can move a lot quicker through those canyon sections and then usually also move a lot faster than the last third of that course where it's much more runnable. And the record there was set on one of the cooler years by just a legend in the sport. Ellie Greenwood So Courtney went there and broke the course record by over an hour and ran what would be considered a competitive male finishing time that year with 15 hours or this year with 15 hours and 29 minutes. But she didn't stop there. She went out in less than three weeks, won and broke the course record at the Hardrock 100 and then managed to recover and make her way out to ultra trail Mont-blanc and win that race as well. So in a matter of what ends up being just a shade over two months, she won three of the most iconic 100 milers and set course records on two of them. And the one that she didn't set a course record on was one that she has the course record on. So it was just a, you know, I have to give a shout out to Courtney for being such a champion in the sport and doing it in a way that I think is just great. Courtney is one of the nicest people you'll ever meet, so it's always fun to see her be successful and be able to compete at an international level the way she does. And obviously with this particular topic, you know, Courtney, I think would consider herself more of a trail Mountain Runner than anything and probably a longer distance the better type of a mindset. But those three courses are very unique to one another. So to be able to nail all three of them in that short of a time frame without kind of taking an off season and rebuilding your plan in a way that's going to best suit that course is going to be a challenge to get over. And she mastered it about as well as one could expect. So congratulations to Courtney. Congratulations to Jim. Congratulations to Zach. All three of you crushed it this year at Utmb, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you do next, but it definitely takes a much needed recovery after that one. All right. So let's get into the topic at hand here. We have a situation where you had core specific training by all three of these people. So to argue that core specific training isn't important is kind of silly to me. The question really is how important is it and what sacrifices should you make for it? Or in other words, what should you make sure you have locked down solid and wrung out all the benefits from before you start getting overly worried or overly emphasizing core specific, especially if it adds a hurdle in your day to day life to get to. So the way I like to do this, I like to back up and go through things I think are more important or what are things that you should first really fine tune before you even start worrying about core specificity. So to me, the biggest value you're going to find in ultramarathon training and possibly even endurance training in general is a heavy, heavy emphasis on easy running, which I kind of break into two categories. 2s I actually talk in detail about these two categories on episode 356 Easy Run simplified, and I talk about them within the context of training on a podcast episode I did called Endurance Training Simplified, which is episode 344. So if you're looking for more details on the topics, I will go over some of these training intensities, I would suggest checking out that episode. I'll mention the other ones as we hit on them throughout the course of this episode. But that specific kind of easy category is the foundation of where you should be spending the vast majority of your time and building up volume within it over not days, not weeks, not months, but years. And that's where you're going to see the most benefit in your training and racing is being able to get quality time spent at that. 1s The reason I break that into two categories is it is a big category. So I think there's a difference between just going out on a really easy, comfortable recovery run versus kind of pushing up to the top end of that easy intensity, what I call base. Some people will call that like zone two or aerobic threshold. I think generally speaking, when you're thinking of the years that you're training, spend as much time as you can within reason in terms of what you have available to yourself and where you're currently at and what kind of stress load you can tolerate. Kind of in the top end of that category is a great spot to sit. So just below that aerobic threshold. Then I think once you've been doing that for a while, and especially when you get to a point where you run out of time, which is going to be most people's situation eventually going to get to a point where, hey, I'm running X number of hours per week. I can't add any more without upsetting my family, losing my job and starting having all sorts of other consequences by doing more than what you have available to you. So I like to look at this as what are your non-negotiables? So first, figure out what your non-negotiables are and then figure out how much time you actually have available and then strive to maximize your volume within that time frame, because to plan for more is just going to be something where you're going to run up against things and you're not going to be consistent. And really you're looking for consistency within the amount of time you have available and then build your structure around that. So once you've hit that, the next session, that I think is just going to really add a ton of value. And this is something where you can kind of think about where are you placing these type of workouts year round versus necessarily I only can do these a few times a year or in certain phases is what we call a threshold running or an intensity that I would define as something you could do for roughly 60 minutes in a race day setting, sprinkling a little bit of that in along with some of these base miles or this easy running miles, you can go a long, long way with just those basic two intensities and really building the amount of volume you can tolerate with some of that threshold work sprinkled in is going to be the huge foundation that you're going to want to build anything that you do off of. And really, to be honest with you, if I had to tell you like. This is the simplest only thing you can ever do for training. I would be focusing on those two intensities and you're going to get the most value out of those versus trading either of those two things out for something else. So be honest with yourself. Come up with your non-negotiables to figure out how much time you actually have available. Really, really fine tune, that foundation of that easy running with a focus on base or aerobic threshold and then sprinkle in some lactate threshold or the 60 minute type of intensity that that you could do on race day in there to kind of help move that along a little bit. And you're going to go a really, really long way with that. If you're interested in more details about that lactate threshold intensity or that 60 minute race day one, I actually do have a podcast episode for that as well, and it's called Long Interval, Simplified, Simplified, and that's episode 348. Just a side note, I will link those episodes into the show notes of episode two so that if you are interested in checking all of the markers, there's a bunch of other ones that may be interesting for people who haven't heard them that are trying to kind of structure things around. Those will be easy to access in the show notes. All right. So let's say we have an example or a situation now where you've really done a great job of maximizing the amount of volume you have available to you. You've sprinkled in some threshold work. Your fitness is really, really good relative to where it's been in the past, where if you go out for a run kind of at the high end of that easy category, that aerobic threshold, your pace is faster than it's ever been. And it's just great to see that time quicker than it usually was at that intensity. What do you do next? What's the next value add there before you start worrying about core specificity? I think some form of speed work development is going to be more important than that. So before you decide, I'm going to take this. This foundation I just built and take it to the course that I'm going to race on and start fine tuning that and jumping over hurdles to get onto that stuff. If it's not close to where you live, I think you should go through some speed work development there. So that's just going to be a series where you're going to focus a little more heavily on that. Those long intervals that are tied to that threshold work that you've already started sprinkling in, as well as some short intervals that are going to be more closely tied to your VO2 max. So for those of you interested in the details around those short intervals, I've got an episode on that one episode 346 short intervals simplified where I go over the specifics of that and the intensity. Essentially I like a 12, maybe 15 minute race day intensity for those 1 to 1 work to rest ratio. But really what you're going to do is you are going to add some of those in alongside or separate. If you're doing a long enough race, you can compartmentalize and do a block of training where you're focusing on short intervals and then maybe transitioning to a focus on long intervals and then transitioning to a phase of race intensity specific stuff, if you want to do it that way. But generally speaking, a speed work development phase where that is kind of the priority and you're being maybe you're looking at it this way, you're looking at I've got about as fit as I can in this period of time with volume at the lower intensity. I'm running out of actual time to add or I've run out of time to add to that. Now it's time to do some speed work development to sort of pull that whole system up. And you're going to go a long way with focus on long intervals and short intervals at those moderate to higher intensities. And you're just going to probably need a lot more really easy runs in between those versus kind of base up to aerobic threshold type sessions in there in order to properly recover from them. So you sort of have to be mindful of how your training load shifts because when you think about training load, it's a combination of volume. And intensity. So when you change one of those, you change your training load so you can, in theory, reduce your volume and increase your intensity and take on a larger training load. And this is one thing where I find ultra runners maybe have to really think about because we get very fixated on workload being time spent out there because our races are a lot of time spent out there. So you might go for a speed work session that's only 60 minutes or even less and take a huge training load from that session. But in your mind, you might be thinking, well, it wasn't a three hour long run, it wasn't a four hour long run. So you don't necessarily break it down that way in your head and you start trying to force things after that. So be very mindful about how much recovery your body requires from that speed work and let that side of the equation set in after those sessions so that you're not putting yourself in a situation where you're doing the work, but you're not getting the benefits because you're not giving yourself proper recovery from them because you get hung to a number of volume versus training load as a combination of volume and intensity. And that brings me into the next step, which is something that I think is. Something you should be thinking about and planning before you start getting overly fixated on race course specificity. And that is just recovery in general and recovery. The first thing I lean towards is sleep. Sleep is where the majority of this is going to happen. Generally speaking, though, you do want to make sure you have your stuff balanced out where let's say you sit down and determine I have ten hours a week available to me to train. But you've only been training three hours per week at the moment, if you decide to ramp right up to ten hours immediately without any buildup or jam a bunch of speed, work into that ten hours, along with the lower intensity stuff that you're doing, you could easily put yourself in a position where, despite the best sleep in the world, you're not going to recover from it. So be realistic as to where you're at and increase your volume and intensity gradually over time versus taking big jumps or trying to match what someone else is doing that they may have spent months or years developing versus what you've potentially done. So recovery is the next thing you want to optimize before you even get too overly concerned with race course specificity. Sleep is a huge component alongside just proper training load starting where you're at and building up to that. The reason I mentioned sleep, I think people probably hear that like, well, no duh. Like, yeah, of course sleep is important. I need to get good sleep in order to maximize potential. The reason I say that isn't because I think you need to know that or hear that. What I want to say is that I don't think you should be putting yourself in a situation where you're continuously or constantly losing sleep in order to gain better race course specific conditions. And an example that may be let's say you do have really great core specific terrain, but it's a 90 minute drive from your house. So you decide, I'm going to wake up at 330 in the morning. Get out to that trail before work, do a run on it, and then drive all the way back and then go through the rest of my day. And you do that on a routine basis. And by doing that, you cost yourself two hours plus of sleep every day. That's going to catch up to you. And that's not going to be a value add you want. Like it doesn't matter that you're getting more time spent on that course. What you're losing in return for that in recovery and rest is going to far exceed that. So in your order of importance, place that rest and recovery above race course specificity. The next part is nutrition. So this kind of feeds into both the performance side in terms of executing those workouts, the training even at low intensities and the recovery side, because it's going to be what fuels you and it's also going to be what helps you recover. So when you're thinking about nutrition, what I like to tell people when you're training for an ultramarathon, let's say you're doing something a little bit longer, like 100 miles or beyond, I think proper intake is going to far outweigh any macronutrient ratio type of things that you could get hung up on. Like, do I need more carbs, less carbs? Do I need more fat, less fat HIV, strict keto? Should I be high carb and all that other stuff? Like I think that is all sort of second tier questions that you can ask yourself. The first one is getting proper intake and that is obviously going to be different from one person the next someone who is at a healthy body weight, one where they're racing great and have no reason to lose weight. That's going to be a number they may need to chase, meaning. You need to make sure you're getting enough in. And if you don't, you're going to see your performance suffer. And then it doesn't matter how creative you get with your macronutrients, it's going to be a no go for you in terms of consistent long term development. If you're not getting that proper intake, obviously there's going to be people on the other end of that spectrum who are maybe using running to some degree to lose some weight or they know that they can afford to lose some weight, in which case proper intake is going to be a little bit of a different starting point for them, at least anyway, in terms of what they want to be taking in to get to the spot where they want to become race day. I always do like to share in this particular thing whether it plays out this way or not for you, thinking of it as conscious weight loss, meaning you're actively trying to lose X number of pounds or kilograms, you should see that as something that is at least somewhat counterintuitive to optimal performance. So if that's a goal you have, you're much better off focusing on that early in the season or early in the year when you're focusing on more lower intensity stuff and you're not into that speed work development phase or that peaking phase where you're going to be building out your long run and things like that, where you're going to want to be able to do things like practice your race day fueling strategy and stuff like that. So that's something where if you can get that squared away early before you get into like the real rigor of the training plan, you're going to be a lot better spot so that now you can just focus purely on performance fueling versus having this dual goal that may be counterproductive towards performance depending on the situation. So nutrition is important. The other thing I like to share with this is since personally I think the macro stuff is kind of secondary or something that it's going to be individual to you in terms of what direction you go. And I think when we get to the ultra marathon, that window is quite wide. So finding things like preferences and things you can be consistent with is probably more important, which is going to lead to that proper intake. I think the next thing that you maybe do want to be mindful of to at least some degree is protein intake. So the reason I say this is because you can go too much with this, you can go too low with this and neither of them are ideal. So what I like to tell folks is if you're looking for the maximum of all protein you would ever need, you're looking at about one gram per pound of goal body weight. So if you find yourself drastically below that, it may be in your best interest regardless of what type of dietary practice you're going to follow to try to get closer to that number. Or if you're in another situation, maybe you're getting way more than that. Maybe you're getting two X that of protein. Well, you may be putting yourself in a position where you're telling your body, Hey, some of the fuel I'm taking in is an excuse for what it's true role is in my body. And I'm going to make you go through extra steps to break that down and use it as a fuel source. So if you think of things like carbohydrates, fats and proteins, if your body had to use those three things as fuel, it's going to be able to use carbohydrates, the fastest fast fats, the next fastest and protein, the slowest. It takes a lot of energy for your body to break down protein and use it as a fuel source. So I get this question all the time. We'll talk about gluconeogenesis. I can eat protein and use it as a fuel source. Yeah, you can, but that's not something that you should be striving to do because it's just a rigorous process for your body to do. To the degree I can have an example that will highlight this, If you eat a carbohydrate or a fat, your body is going to use a very, very, very small amount of that to actually break that down and turn it into a fuel source, like a couple percent of it. Whereas you get up to protein and you can get up to almost a quarter of that from an energy output standpoint required to break that down and use it. So you're asking your body to work a lot harder to break down and use that protein source. So think about that when you're thinking about how you want to behave around that. So once you kind of hit what I would consider that maximum necessary amount of one gram per pound of body weight approximately. You know, you should be mindful of how much beyond that you're getting. If you find yourself kind of leaning toward protein from a preference standpoint. I just like running this stuff sometimes through an app called Chronometer or any of these online apps, just to kind of get a ballpark figure of where you're really at. So you can start kind of playing around and see if you're, you know, anywhere near where you should be or if there's something that you can easily just tweak a little bit here and there with some data that you can collect. And then from there you can start building things out. All right. So we've gone through kind of the biggest value with that easy running volume based stuff with some thresholds sprinkled in some speed work development. 2s Recovery, focusing on high quality sleep and not losing that in effort to seek out things that aren't as important, like race course specific stuff, paying attention to training load within that so that the work you're putting in is being maximized by a proper recovery. And then the nutrition side of things, eventually you get to the point in your training where you're going to get very specific to the race you're actually doing. And this is what I like to call the race intensity specific training. So this is going to be varied by a large margin, depending on what you're doing. I've been talking a lot about ultramarathons for this episode, so I'm sort of skewing things that direction, which in which case would make long run development and lower intensity stuff more important during this phase of training versus, say, someone who's training for something shorter like A5K or ten K, in which case they're going to be doing a lot more short intervals, a lot more race pace workouts that are pinned to their five K ten K intensity and likely leaning more heavily still on even some of those long intervals during this phase of training versus trying to add more volume to their plan at that point. So there is going to be a little bit of a different order of operations depending on what your goal race intensity is. But if we stick to the theme of ultra marathons, this is the time of year where you're really working on what exactly it is you're going to do on race day. So at this point, you've already established that strong foundation. You've already done the speed work development, you've already fine tuned your rest and recovery balance between working out and recovering from it. Got a good sleep schedule. You've already built out a lot of your nutrition protocol and things like that, and now you're kind of in the last phase of training where you're going to really start doing the things that you're going to actually do on race day. So if there's a time to maybe do some sacrificing in terms of getting on the race course, this would be the time to really start taking those sacrifices or making those trade offs. So the way to think about it is and I talked to Pam Smith about this, who's won the Western states, 100 and a whole host of other things, where she would she would just get to a phase of training where it's like, okay, now it's time to really start peaking for this race. And there are things I'm going to give up during this time frame in order to be able to do the things that I know are going to be helpful for me to sort of polish things off and be optimally ready for the race course. She's not looking at those as like, Oh, I'll never get to do these things again. She's looking at it. This is a phase during the year and it's worth sacrificing some of these things in order to do that. So I think one of the examples she shared was that she reads a lot of books. So. During this phase of training. Maybe instead of reading a book on the weekend, she's spending some of that time driving to an ideal workout location, doing a long run, and just spending a lot more time out there preparing for the race specific stuff. And that's the way I like to look at it. So if you're going to start placing race course specificity into a part of the training where it becomes a little more valuable, it's because the opportunity cost is a little lower this time of year for it because you've already done the speed work development. So it's not a training load question of do I do this long run on course specific terrain in exchange for a short interval session or a long interval session? Because at this point in training that may be a fair trade off to do likely is a fair trade off to do in terms of what's going to actually get you to the course, to the finish line of the course the quickest. So that's where I would place it. I would say it's still not something that you need to do. It's still not something where if you don't do it, you're in trouble. It's just a value add. So where I think it becomes a little bit more nuanced is looking at the actual course. So if you're running on, say, just a gradual rolling, smooth trail versus running on the roads. The value of doing course specific stuff. And that situation is going to be much lower than, say, you're going out to a very steep technical mountain course where you might be doing steep technical downhill running. So there is going to be a spectrum of importance within this to where when you start getting to things like this type, of course actually requires a learned skill set like technical downhill running. That may be something where in that particular situation, if you're not already competent at that or if that's a weakness for you, there's maybe some value in trying to seek that out earlier in the plan and working on those skills. But again, I don't think it's necessarily something that would be a value add. If it's going to be a situation where you start sacrificing recovery, you start sacrificing your biggest value, which is those easy running and those threshold sessions and things like that. So I still think you want to be looking at it through that lens. It's just one of those things where you might. 1s If you have access to it, find yourself looking to skew things more towards that and giving yourself some opportunities to practice that a little bit sooner in the plan so that you aren't taking a hit on a skill set versus something that's just like a conditioning side of the equation. All right. That is my overview. Of course, specificity and where its importance lies, amongst other things within the training perspective. I'd love to hear your feedback. You can reach out to me and share with me what you think and anything that I miss that you think I should touch on in future episodes, or just other general questions and topics that you'd like me to touch on with this podcast as well as guest interviews and things of that nature.