Episode 485: Long Term Running Improvement | Brant Stachel

Brant Stachel guides high performing athletes and individuals to reach their goals. Brant has worked with elite athletes representing Canada and the United States, including Olympians and international competitors. Brant has been working with Thomas Nobbs who has continually progressed towards a 2:09 marathon and win at the McKirdy MicroOTQ Marathon. 

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Brant: runfastandfree.com | IG: @brant_stachel 

Timestamps:

Episode Transcript:

Awesome. Brant, thanks for coming on the show. I'm looking forward to chatting. Yeah, man. Thanks for having me. This is gonna be a blast. I'm excited. Yeah, there's just I feel like for whatever reason things lined up perfectly for this one, just with the state of where Marathon is going and more recently between the Boston Marathon, the London Marathon, you're coaching efforts and successes with with Thomas sabs has been just really interesting stuff for those of us who are watching the sport and trying to make sense of all the cool new things that are going on.

But, um, before we maybe jump into some of that stuff, tell us a little about yourself, your background, what kind of got you into running marathons and coaching and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, no, it's, it is a fun time. I don't know, I've been like up and down over the last five days, or it's been a week, I guess, kind of thing with Boston and London.

Yeah, I started in high school. I was like, I say average and I don't mean this like just to be humble. Like I graduated high school at a 1730 5K pr, like not anything crazy. I ran for our local college up here in [00:01:00] Canada, so I think like JUCO in the US, not even like D three kinds of things.

And I came out and, and my mentor and one of my close friends who's one of the best coaches in Canada, Steve Boyd was like, Hey, I need an assistant. And I was like, oh, I got a kin degree. Why not? And it kind of just sparked from there. And I was fortunate enough for. About 10, 12 years to be in the Canadian high performance scene.

So coaching at a very high level, at the high school level. So the equivalent of, we have provinces instead of states, but I went every year having at least one medalist in cross country and track. And fun fact, Ontario, where I'm from, has the biggest state slash province cross country meet in all of North America.

So bigger than California, bigger than New York. Um, coach at the university side. Um, with some national champions and such. I've had about 25, I think 26, 25, 26 national team athletes and I've represented Canada four times. And so now I'm outta the high performance world a little bit. I still have one, one foot kind of in with Thomas Nobbs here, just around 2 0 9.

And I coach a bunch of really amazing age groupers who just like to grind and get it out and, you [00:02:00] know, that's been so fun nowadays. And then I'm also a mentor, performance coach, and a registered psychotherapist. So depending on the state, it's like a licensed therapist or licensed clinical counselor.

And I work purely on sport performance, so I joke, I have the best day job. I talk to athletes all day and get to see them. Facets of the sport from like kids getting into it to like athletes trying to make an Olympic team to the mom who wakes up at 4:00 AM trying to figure out how she can be q or just be the best version of herself.

I get to talk to those people every day. It's like the most I don't know, I'm biased, obviously it's my job, but I think it's the best job in the world. So that's kind of why I'm here. I think we share a lot of interests in terms of the high performance and, and coaching world and such. And so that's why it's gonna be a blast to talk to you for a bit here.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm excited for it. And another kind of funny thing that happened is before we actually connected I had been, I, I shared something on social media about a guy I follow on Strava who he just churns up these like 200 mile training weeks at a relatively slow pace compared to what he can run in you know, [00:03:00] anything, any like 5K, 10 K type event.

But then he'll just show up to an event like that randomly and then. Just blast you know, 4 40, 4 50 cases. And it's just such an interesting concept that like him, he's just out there like consistently putting in what, to be fair, I think is a pretty unsustainable amount of mileage for most people to be able to do.

But it really highlights that side of the sport and the development of, you know, that slow running at the right volume can produce a pretty good meaningful movement, even kind of higher on the aerobic intensity spectrum. And when I was just kind of talking about his Strava account, someone mentioned you gotta check out Thomas Nobbs.

He's been doing all his training on a treadmill and he does really slow recovery runs too. And then like shortly thereafter you reached out. So I was like, I don't know, I was, I wasn't sure if something you maybe saw that comment or. No, I didn't, I didn't even see that comment to be honest. So that's very serendipitous.

But I've just seen your stuff and I like the way you think. We were [00:04:00] talking just offline right before we started recording about the idea of competitive pressure and how I'd never been able to put a phrase to that with all the like high perform it's like they will choose, like we used to joke with running, it's like athletes choose with their feet in terms of who they get coached by and such, right?

Mm-hmm. And I think it's the same thing with, you know, product bicarb, ketone iq, no string, like all this stuff, right? Like my litmus test has always been. If a pro athlete who's not sponsored by it is willing to use it, there's something there because like mm-hmm. I don't blame a pro athlete for being like Ketone IQ or No strips or whatever, wants to sponsor 'em and put a couple Gs in their pocket.

Like I don't blame 'em, they don't get paid. Right. Right. But it's if you've got a litany of pros doing it, there's something there and we gotta listen to this. Right. So that competitive pressure idea to me was like, oh, that, that's it. That's the term. So that's what I'd seen your stuff over the years, but that for me was like, man, this guy's, this guy's got it.

He figured that point out. So that's why I was like, I wanna talk to this dude. I wanna learn from him and, and have a conversation. Yeah. I mean, I would say that phrase was almost born out of frustration because it's [00:05:00] like, you, you, you follow the sport and I mean, you try to be evidence-based, right?

So you're looking at the evidence hierarchy. The first thing you think of is like a very controlled, laboratory type of a, a task that shows this happens or this doesn't happen, this. Yep. You know, all that sort of stuff. And like the more I thought about that, the more, or the more you actually read those studies and figure out how many questions they usually end up generating versus answering and how removed they often are from what is actually happening at the top end of a sport.

And then you introduce, I mean, you hope this doesn't happen too often, but you introduce like a bunch of strong biases into the equation where now studies are structured around this bias then mm-hmm. Set up in a way where it's gonna say what you want it to say or at least directionally enough so you can continue your online rhetoric of whatever that happens to be.

I wonder what you're talking about here. Did that blow up on Twitter this week? Yeah. Yeah, it's just been something that I've been like, it's been, it's been on my mind a lot lately. And yeah, and, and then I started [00:06:00] thinking about it. It's well, where do you remove the most bias? And you remove the most bias when winning is the only variable of concern.

So now we have these and then we, and then you have to look at, well, what does winning mean? What does winning take? 'cause you know, you have sports like I do. I've been ultra running since 2010 forever, and it's gotten a lot more competitive. There's a lot more pressure applied to this sport.

So I saw firsthand how approaches consolidate as you add more competitive pressure. And I would say ultra running is maybe just getting into the realm where we can look at the top in the sport and start to kind of tease out at least like reasonable directions with things. But when we get into the world of pro marathoning, tour de France cycling and things like that, there's so much money and so much competitive pressure and so much precision placed on the top in this sport, under this whole concept of we need to be 10 seconds faster or the story and the narrative changes, like what we saw at the London Marathon, you know, the two guys going under two hours. One of them is the second guy going under two [00:07:00] hours, and doesn't even have the world record or the win at London. Yeah, yeah. And you know, it's just like the amount of, and then I'll add one more thing to this, this, this Long Street, there's creed.

But the thing that I always, that, that really kind of like I shake my hat at is at the end of the day when you see what SWE did on race day. Yeah. Technically that's an anecdote, right? Like technically that's just, okay, he did X technique and one. Yeah. No, yeah. It's, it's, it's what he did that day.

And he's a very unique person at a very high, like the pinnacle of the sport. But what people miss is you cannot compare that anecdote to just some random clown on Reddit saying oh, I did this. And it worked because Sowe had. Months, if not years of being put under a microscope, put in a lab, developing with a team exactly how he's gonna respond to different doses and different combinations of things and how, and what, how it interacts with certain places.

And then stress testing these things. So it's actually like probably one of the more [00:08:00] higher pieces of evidence we can find when you control for as much as they ended up having to control for, to get him in a place where they could trust that process to, to break two hours of the marathon.

Yeah, and I think one of the things that I've been trying to reconcile, I think we all are like people who are paying attention, but like reconciling what this means and breaking two hours and how we got there. And I've been looking at it from the idea about, you know, let's say the, the person who doesn't believe that high carb works right?

And it's like. All these companies are spending all of this money, like he has the best team I would argue right now. Mm-hmm. In, in, in marathon performance. Right. And yes, we have to be cognizant that there's a branding and marketing arm to all of this for sure. Right. Adidas, Morton, et cetera. But if you are the best athlete in the world, let's say arguably he is the first person to break two hours in a legit race, you are looking for 0.1 percent to move that needle.

And you're not going to spend that money and waste that time on things that don't work. Like I just, I just firmly don't believe that. And so I think athletes are always going to find what works. And I think [00:09:00] sometimes they pick the wrong things for sure. But it's then when you amalgamate it I think what's gonna happen now if Berlin is cool, we're probably gonna see a handful of people. I think that org is gonna want to bring in people to get there, would they have eight of the last 10 world records?

I think we're set in Berlin. Mm-hmm. I think they're gonna do it. We're gonna see more of it and we're gonna get more of those data points to be like, Hey, this is what the people who are breaking two hours are doing. And we're gonna have a concrete answer on, okay, here are the 3, 4, 5 things that are actually moving the needle, I think.

Yeah. Yeah. And it is, it's a good point too. 'cause it is one thing if just one random person or, yeah, I shouldn't say random 'cause we are talking about guys breaking world records here, but if one person does it when the whole sport moves a certain direction, that's informative to me. Yeah. That's something where it happened probably with one or two people or one team initially, and then everyone else saw that and they said, well, if we want to compete, we have to at least put this through the pressure cooker of our own training and figure out if what they're doing actually works or if this is just [00:10:00] smoke and mirrors.

They try it, it works, they apply it, and now all of a sudden everyone's doing it. Totally. So that's where that, that's where the whole high carb thing was. I think so obvi, once it got put in, once it got understood as something that's worth trying, it didn't just kind of pop and then fizzle out. It has gained and gained momentum in a very short period of time.

Versus you take other approaches. Um, and this is the, this is the debate I've been having with the hardcore keto folks online right now is just they want to introduce this, what they consider a novel approach of getting keto adapted and introducing 10 grams of carbohydrate per hour. And it's okay, well I mean that, that some of their, I don't wanna say their, their research is useless 'cause I think there's some interesting stuff in there that can be used.

The problem is the communication around it is, alright, we need to make performance claims on this in order to generate the attention that's gonna be required for this to become something. What gets missed in all of that is that it's not novel. Because like the, [00:11:00] the pushback sometimes I'll get is well these guys haven't tried this yet, so how do we know, like Sowe doesn't run a 2 0 7 with a keto diet and 10 grams.

And I like it, because that approach got tried. Like you're looking at this as a novel approach. It's not, it's been tried and it's I remember 'cause I mean I did a low carbohydrate for 14 years. Yeah. In a totally different, I shouldn't say totally different sport, but in a sport that optimizes for a totally different intensity.

And, and one of the things that I found really interesting about that experience is when I had my first decent result with that approach, that got like some national and somewhat international attention, I had people reaching out to me that had no reason to know who I was, care what I was doing, that were in the performance world.

Working with Olympians, working with top tier, like cycling teams and things like that. Not because they were gonna say, okay, well this guy's got the secret, let's apply it. But they wanted to know the specifics because on the off chance that I was doing something slightly different than that, they had already [00:12:00] tested, they wanted to at least know about it.

Yep. So it's like we can, we can make assumptions on certain approaches if they're not novel. Now, someone could come up with a novel or an actual novel approach that none of these guys have tried. None of these guys and gals have tried. And maybe that does change the direction of the way we do these, but, but we don't have another one other than the high carb stuff right now.

So. Well, I, I think what's interesting too is if you go back to the 20 Os and the 2010s, a lot of elite marathoners at that time, were doing fasted long runs to try and get like this literal pathway that the, the keto people are going through to push the marathon performance. Mm-hmm. And I think one of the big problems right now is that they can give them.

I don't wanna say credibility, but give them an abil, like an out almost is, there's the confounding variable of shoe tech at the same time. Mm-hmm. And so it's very hard to argue how much of it is shoe tech. And we don't know what the new Adidas shoe to be clear, because it's not like Nike , Asics and Puma and everything that we have a bunch of data on, we don't know the new [00:13:00] Asics shoe publicly yet.

Right. So I think they could be like, well maybe it was, or what if he did do this? Or if I do that, there's too many variables, unfortunately. But I think one of the things I learned early on, I was very fortunate that I got to travel all over and talk to coaches. And my mentor had a very in-depth conversation with John Brown, like two time Olympic medalist in the marathon and.

For them. It was always like everything that it comes back to in listening to big coaches, and I speak specifically to the marathon, but I think this carries over to Trail and Ultra as well too, as almost everything is predicated off an aerobic base first, and then everything kind of stacks on it. So like I describe it as the marathon hierarchy, right?

If you don't have the aerobic and for, you know, so we, that's 140, 150 miles I've heard reported, right? Yeah. Yeah. Then it's like that, the rest of it doesn't matter. Right. But I also think what people aren't really talking about with the high-carb in particular is the recoverability that comes with it from fueling really well in the long run.

And then compound that with the super shoes saving, as the backend would say, the muscle [00:14:00] tone that you're gonna get from the increased intensity and duration. And I think those two things I think are actually bigger than just what the shoes give or just high carb kind of thing. I think there's a combination approach that allows for a recoverability standpoint so they can actually stack more.

What are your thoughts on that? I've been trying to workshop that idea. Yeah. And I actually think we are somewhat missing the forest for the trees when we look at the race day fueling for this. Yeah. Because unless that person is planning on hopping back on the course a couple days later, you know, whether they, whether they, they increase recovery by directly fueling a session isn't really gonna move the needle in most cases on what their future prospects are from a race result standpoint.

But if you start stacking that in training, where now all of a sudden over the course of a 12 week training block, 16 week training block, whatever happens to be, you're able to squeeze in half a dozen to a dozen extra quality sessions because you've compressed the recovery demands that are required to get you back to a spot where you're able to execute at a high quality.

That makes [00:15:00] a big difference. And I think we saw that in the Tour de France with. When they a thousand percent when, yeah, when they started going like these hyper high carbohydrates approaches it and, and, and in that particular vet does matter. 'cause they gotta get on the bike the next day and do it again and again and again and again and up a mountain.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, I think I, I, I think one of the other cool things that you're seeing, and like you, you would know this better than I, I've never explored the trails. Like personally I've coached trails, but I've never done it. But I have to imagine as you were kind of coming through, like in some of those, like pre-high carb days, like somebody's at the top of a mountain, an aid station, they give you a Coke, or they give you like a chalk and you're like, my life is frigging changed right now.

Yeah. Right. And I think even that mentality of never having to go to that place, like most of us who like to race before the high carb revolution, knows that 30 K. 30 5K. You're like, I, I just want this to be like, I can't, you can't even do math at this point, right. Let alone now being fully alert, right?

Where you're like, I can make moves, I can make decisions. I don't feel like I'm depleted at all. [00:16:00] And I think, you know, the trail people, that's really where, you know, when I was moving more towards the marathon myself and, and coaching, I was like, I wanna learn from the people who are there for frigging 24 hours.

What the heck are they doing out there? Guys, like you guys that have figured it out. 'cause you're out there for so frigging long going, Hey, we gotta survive. Not just thrive. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And it is interesting too because like you said, like when I first got into ultra marathon, the fueling was different in the sense that we didn't have as good a protocol in place.

And there were assumptions made that were, I think, reasonable at the time, which was just, okay, the cyclists are doing this, but they're on bikes. We're running up and down. Inclines, jostling around and it's just gonna be different. So there'd be, there was this like, there was this, this hurdle to get over from a digestibility standpoint that made it a very real consideration of how to engage with race day fueling and in what quantities.

So to some degree, if you can figure out that puzzle in multiple ways, now we can start testing these multiple [00:17:00] ways and figure out which one actually yields the highest amount of performance. So it was like, my direction at the time was, well, let's lower the carbohydrate requirement into race in order to.

Not get yourself in that position where oxidation needs exceed what you can take in. And then either you flip a coin for digestive issues or you know, slow down at the end. Yeah. And then guys like David Roche went like a different approach, um, and said, okay, well let's challenge this idea that you can only take in this much, or that there's gonna, it's a guaranteed digestive issue that you, this isn't as trainable as we think, or this is maybe more trainable than we think it is.

And then you see him reporting totals of 150 grams per hour for 14, 15 hours at a time. Now all of a sudden it's okay, so this is possible, even if David's a freak digestively, he may very well be. But like then we start seeing data get reported more frequently with the top 10 finishers at Western states.

And we start seeing, like most of the men, like somewhere between 90 and a hundred grams of carbohydrate per [00:18:00] hour. So even if David's a freakish outlier, it's like we're still hitting high enough carbohydrate intakes. In a race that long that would cover their oxidation needs at the intensities they're racing for, for that, for that long.

And now it gets interesting 'cause now we've sort of removed that hurdle if you're willing to do the things dietarily mm-hmm. And gut training wise to get to that. And, that's just sport development at the end of the day. Right. It's figuring out where these, what hurdles are permanent things that you're not gonna be able to move outta the way with something that we have on the table and which ones are, and then being willing to kind of move around that as we learn more about it.

You're right. I look at David, like I give him full credit. Like my wife listens to his stuff. I listened to it every once in a while and she's the one who first kind of told me years ago and some of the trail guys I coach about it and I was like, I don't know, I took two gels in my marathon. I was like, I don't know.

That's what you're supposed to do. Right. And, but I very much compare what's happening now with, I'm gonna give him credit because he's the first kind of person I know that was like openly talking about it in the, the running sphere. There could be others, and I apologize if I'm [00:19:00] incorrect, but.

Where they like, sorry, my computer froze. Sorry. If you look back at the nineties and the two thousands, which was historically the worst period for track and marathon success in North America. And then eventually people were like, Hey, we gotta run more miles again. 'cause we're doing this like low volume speed stuff, right?

It was this thing that everybody thought, no, we can't do that. Right? That's gonna burn, that's gonna injure people. That's gonna burn people and it's not gonna help performance. And I think what you're saying is the exact same. Everybody's no, no, no, no. Low carb oxidation, all this stuff, right? And he was like, wait a second.

I think there's another way to do it. Mm-hmm. And just like we've seen the resurgence in North American distance running over the last decade and a half, let's say two decades, I think it's the exact same reason somebody was willing to go. I don't like this status quo where I think there's a better way to do it.

So yeah, it's, it's super fun to watch as a, as a performance fan and somebody who's trying to go in the trenches and, and make things happen. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I think the mileage thing is another example of this too, where there were guys doing what David, maybe not 150 grams per hour, but there were definitely guys doing a hundred around [00:20:00] that a hundred grams per hour decade plus ago.

And, they were having a lot of success 'cause they figured it out before everyone. So they actually probably had a relative advantage that was greater than it is today. 'cause there were fewer people but there was Right, exactly. And I think, I think with the mileage thing, it was one of those where the application needed to be done right in order to get there.

'cause it's one thing to run 150 miles per week. It's another thing to do it at the right intensities at the right time so that you're still getting the quality out of the specific work you're trying to do and the higher aerobic intensity stuff, but not overcook yourself. You have this kind of, this combination where I think like when, when the US went back to kind of higher mileage, it was like, okay, well yeah, we have to do it the right way.

Yeah. And that may mean running an eight minute mile pace on your easy run versus a six 30 pace. And I, I do wonder with the carbohydrate stuff, how much that's impacted it too with respect to now it's, you know, it's, it's, again, it's one thing to run 150 miles per week, like with no [00:21:00] fuel during those training sessions.

It's a whole nother thing to do that with a lot of fuel coming in. What kind of messages that's actually sending your body from just a sustainability standpoint over years of development versus just, okay, I made it through this training cycle. Now what. Well, it's in, it's interesting. I am always in favor of triangulating across multiple fields to come to an opinion.

And so, um, in my clinical world, I used to do work with disordered eating and one of the gold standards over there in recovery is what we call within our energy balance. So you're trying to create more homeostasis around, um, body composition stability, let's say would be the nice way to say it. Right? And so I think that one of the things that's working really well with the high carb people doing it in training is the body's going, Hey, this is natural now this is, nor this is my homeostasis, is that I will be fed while doing this.

Right? And so I think that's what's you know, pushing the adaptation even further because like back when I was training for, it was like, you go out for a 18, 20 mile long run and you maybe have a gel or a honey stinger goo or something, right? And that's it. It's like you're not gonna drive [00:22:00] adaptation from that.

You're gonna drive adaptation obviously, in some way, but in terms of a refueling and repairing type perspective versus, mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and that's a really interesting point too. 'cause like when you get into the relative energy deficiency stuff Yeah. It's, like the poster of that scenario where the person just gets progressively wasted until they look like they clearly have an eating disorder.

Yeah. And then get injured and fatigued and can't race quality. That's like a very clear, obvious scenario. But then there's like the relative energy deficiency where the person's actually not changing in weight or appearance all that much, but they're so under fed during their like high energy outputs.

And then they're maybe hyper compensating in the times of day when their body's not demanding energy at a near rate. And it just creates such a weird kind of scenario of like in unsustainability as far as the body's concerned. And I think that's probably where we're, we're making a lot of progress with just nutrition as a whole.

How do we support this athlete within [00:23:00] the context of you having these two or three hours during the day where your energy output is massive. You may be burning more energy than the average person in two days in this block of time, and then the rest of the day they're probably quite lazy just to be able to recover from that step.

Yeah, and it's just such a dichotomy of lifestyles kind of all wrapped into one. Yeah, it's, it's, it's super interesting. I think one more point on the, the eating disorder and red acid, I think the high carb movement, let's say, like I'm even seeing, I don't know if you see this, but like high schoolers in cross country talking about doing like carb races or carb like during races and stuff, which I think is hilarious.

But yeah, I do think from a like knowledge. And informative perspective more so on the women's side because that's honestly where more of the eating disorders are in our sport. Mm-hmm. It's empowering them to actually feel a little bit better. And so it's probably helping, I don't have any data on this, but probably helping either minimize the effect or minimize the amount of disordered eating.

'cause it's now such a cultural piece. Whereas if you look at like the eighties, nineties, two [00:24:00] thousands, it was a very different culture around food and eating and running. Mm-hmm. Yeah. The culture's an excellent point too. And I remember the first time I saw this was when I was coaching high school in Wisconsin and they did their annual coaching conference every year where they would bring in different people and they would almost always bring in some of the UW Madison coaches.

And I can't remember what the woman's name was, they had just hired her on the women's side. I'm, I'm getting old enough now where people have said things that have impacted my thought process. I can't remember their names all the time, but she said something that was so interesting to me at the time.

'cause we were kind of at the, the. Almost the pinnacle of endurance sport eating disorders where people were starting to recognize this is a problem, but we hadn't really put anything in, most people hadn't really put anything into action yet in terms of solutions that were gonna change that culture.

And she said she recognized that. She was like, this is a culture thing for the most part. And if my athletes are looking around them and they're seeing their [00:25:00] teammates restrict, then they're gonna do the same thing. So she started putting in the training structure. Like we have designated times where we eat snacks as a team.

And like it was just set up in a way where the culture became based around, we feel for performance, we don't restrict performance. And since the whole team was doing it together, it made you, you almost ostracize yourself more by developing an eating disorder, whereas in the past you might feel like you're fitting in by developing an eating disorder.

Yeah, it's, it's such a tough thing, like as a college coach, as a high school coach, or former, I should say, it's so hard once. It takes in like it's a pervasive culture thing. Like I, I used to have this idea. From a team dynamics perspective. I would call it social determination to the norm. So if you have a 15 person roster, the like 7, 8, 9 person is actually the most important.

'cause you know, your top five, top six, hopefully they're in a good direction. Your back half, maybe they're, they don't care, they're just there kind of thing. But it's those middle people that are gonna drive which direction [00:26:00] that team goes. And I think that's for things like training, eating disorders, culture, like all cultures inclusive.

And I think I, to go back to the kind of high carb conversation, we're actually seeing that now where the majority of people are high carb. And I think it's pulling everybody along with it from a, if you look at a culture of performance, I guess we could call it in terms of the, the high card. Yeah. Yeah.

It's interesting stuff. I did want to ask you or jump in a little bit to Yeah. Your work with Thomas Nobbs because he's an interesting guy, as we kind of alluded to earlier in the chat here is just recently ran a 2 0 9 marathon. I was listening to a conversation you and he was having with a, on another podcast and.

The other interesting thing about his, his trajectory, which was, if I'm not mistaken, a two 19 down to a 2 0 9 over the course of a few years. Yep. One thing that stood out to me was he, he's just progressed. He hasn't had this almost kind of goofy rollercoaster ride to get to 2 0 9 where he blew up to a two 30, a couple times in the middle [00:27:00] there.

It was just like gradually moving down towards where now he's a 2 0 9 marathoner, so I'm really curious about just the structure you put in place and maybe a little bit about him as a personality that makes that sort of a scenario play out versus what we maybe see oftentimes with marathon trajectories.

Yeah. I hope this will be a good story because he is. Very much like the typical analytical like driven type athlete that we see. He very much is. And so I coached him at university and then when he left university, he wasn't sure which event he wanted to go to. So I believe he graduated with a 1408 pr, I think 5K, 1408, and he'd run 66 and a half.

There's a local half in Vancouver where he went to school that he ran. It was 66, so he's not a slouch, let's say that, right? But I don't think anybody was like, this guy's gonna be a 2 0 9 guy in three years, four years kind of thing. And so I said to him when he graduated, I said, I actually think you should do the marathon young.

I think you should try one. Because he was the guy who would always press in [00:28:00] training and he'd be at the upper end of the paces. It had to be perfect. He had to nail it. And I said, this is either gonna break that tendency, which I think is a great thing for you as an athlete long term, because the sustainability of that is nearly impossible for what it actually takes for a 10 to 15 year career to reach the, the, the peak, let's say on, on the aggregate of the average North American is what it takes.

Let's disregard the two oh fives and two oh sevens that come at nowhere these days apparently. Yeah. But on, on average, right? So I said it's, it's not sustainable. And so the, the. The story is much better. I would say like going through two 19 to 2 0 9, when you look at what we picked and why we did it.

So in Canada Toronto Waterfront Marathon is our typical marathon champs. It's in October. And at that time, he was very comparative to others and felt like he had to really be, know, be up there if he was gonna do it. And so I said, why don't we just go do a low key marathon? We're not gonna announce it.

We're not gonna do it to anybody. We'll go to Philly. I was there the year before with my wife. She had run 2 55, 2 55 the year before in a hurricane. And I said, let's go there. It's a little hilly, but [00:29:00] there's gonna be no Canadians. There's no comparison. You just go and race a marathon. I think he averaged like 60 grams an hour on that one.

And um, he runs two 19. He blew up in that one. Um, to be fair, he went out and was like leading the group and having fun. You know how everybody does their first marathon? They're like, marathon's not hard. And then the marathon goes, hold my, hold my beer. Right? And so he was on like two 16 high, two 17 pace with 30 2K and it, anybody who's run Philly.

You kind of go out on, I think it's Kelly Ave and it rolls a little bit and then you come back in a headwind along Kelly Ave, typically to the finish. And so we blew up a bit there. So I wanna be clear. It's a bit of a better story than it is, but it's still, I think there's some important takeaways.

We waited a full year after that to do another marathon. 'cause I said we learned a lot from that, but you're young and I don't want to just go like fall, spring, fall, spring, fall, spring. Because we're thinking about 2028, not 2024 at that point. And so I said, we're gonna wait a year and we're gonna go do the Canadian champs in Toronto, which was, he ran two 15, so he took four minutes off.

Part of that was the blow up part of it's Toronto's a bit of a faster [00:30:00] course, but it was also windy and he was more or less solo with another Canadian that he went to school with Thomas Brooch, who was a Canadian champ I think two years before that in the marathon and at, at the time, a two 10 runner.

And then we said, okay, we've got good data now that you're actually gonna be decent at the marathon. And he's adapted his training where he is not pushing all the time, he's respecting, doing his easy days. I think in Toronto we peaked at maybe 110, 112 miles a week, I think is what we peaked for Toronto.

So we said, let's go and actually do a fast course now. Let's go do something deliberate. So we did the marathon project. That was in December of 25. He ran two 12 there. I actually thought he was in two 10, high, two 11 shapes. It was a great course. Everything went well. He actually paced a little bit better, but four hours after the race we're on a flight and he's got a fever and is sweating and he had to fly home from back in Canada and Ottawa to Victoria.

The next thing he was getting was hallucinations on the plane. So we were like, that said to me, okay, there, there's, there's some more there. Like you obviously had a viral load for that race, right? Mm-hmm. And [00:31:00] he wanted to do McCurdy. And I've said this publicly, I did not want to do McCurdy and it's nothing against the race.

I think the race is great, but I like to look at history. There's no Canadian in Ontario and we could be in the upper northeast of the US as well too. That's trained through a winter of snow and ice. And all that crap and run fast in the spring. And I was you gotta be an n of one man. And so he's no, I really wanna do it.

I think I can do it. And he had done a lot of treadmill work the year before going into project 13.1, where he ran 63, low in the half. And so I said, okay, let's try it. And so I laugh at myself 'cause I've always loved the Bill Bowerman quote of there's such a thing as over coaching and I'm against it.

And I actually had to like, like embody that in that moment. Right? And to his credit, he crushed it. But the, the, the keys and the things people have taken away from it. And it's fair because it is a little bit sensationalist. He did about 120 miles a week. He had 1 28 miler. Now to be clear, I don't prescribe in miles, I prescribe in time.

So it was just, that's what it was. Um. [00:32:00] And he averaged a little bit less than the marathon project. I think he averaged about 1 15, 1 17 miles a week average before the taper in the build. And two workouts were outside. And to be clear, that was out of necessity. Like our winter up here was brutal, like ice snow.

Like it wasn't worth it. You couldn't do anything outside. But the one thing we've always maintained, and this is um, something I took from, you know, my mentor, Steve's conversation with John Brown is you need to do as much volume as you can without disrupting your marathon pace and tempo runs. And so we've been trying to push that volume, but my belief is in order to have high volume, you need to run slow on it so you can actually hit the hard days.

And I actually don't think that there's any. Physiological difference. If we speak like zone one to zone two, like I think that, the physiological value that you get from that by switching is negligible. But if you look at a mechanical load perspective and what that's gonna do for your workouts, I think it's [00:33:00] degrading if you're pushing on those.

And so that was really the kind of work behind it. And when he ran 2 0 9, that was unexpected. To be clear, I thought 2 0 10, 2 10 30, because we found out the day before he was gonna be completely solo except for the murmur that was pacing him four miles. That was it. That was all he had. Mm-hmm. And so it was cool.

I'll pause there so you can ask questions. I just threw a lot out, but if you have questions about the specifics, let me know. I'm happy to answer them. We've been very open with it. Yeah, I mean it's really fascinating and I also appreciate that he puts his training on Strava. I know that's not always common when you get to a certain level, but there's a, I think there's a great crop of guys and g gals now who are like, kind of like, alright, we're the new generation.

We're gonna share our information and the sport's gonna grow because of it. I put Rory Linkletter in that category as well. John Courier actually used to post a decent amount on Strava, at least some big blocks of training. He has since stopped, but he left up what was there before, so we get a glimpse into what he was about.

I think that, I, I think the interesting thing to me [00:34:00] about this is that we, we oftentimes have this conversation around quality versus volume, and really I think that's getting really myopic in how we view it, because there's gonna be, and it sounds like Thomas is a great example of this. It's 130 miles per week when you started working with him.

There was too much volume. Yep. To maintain the quality he needed to do to realistically reach his potential for the first race you had on the schedule. But then that next layer of training and racing was a little bit higher and then a little bit higher, and then a little bit higher. So you sort of look at it through, like the goal is to build this huge low intensity base over years, but not necessarily spend three to four years just doing that.

Yes. Correct. You know, you could also kind of go that well, I'm just not gonna, I'm just gonna, you know, lock myself into a cabin out in the woods and train for three years and do low intensity volume and then start doing quality work. I think that misses it a little bit, but. You, you gotta be mindful of that.

What does that mean from just a long term [00:35:00] window versus the short term, this is the next race. And that makes a ton of sense to me. I think that that is what we typically see when someone has a sustainable, relatively consistent trajectory the way he has. Well, I think you, you, you've, you gotta come at it from two perspectives.

I believe that if there's ingredients to a successful marathon, we could make that akin to, there's ingredients to bake a cake, right? There's flour, there's baking, baked soda baked, I don't know, you tell how much I bake, but eggs, you know, milk, whatever it is, right? And it's like you can put all those ingredients in and your cake can still be trash 'cause you got too little flour, you got too little liquids, whatever it might be.

Right? And I think that's the same for Marathon. And I hate this conversation online and I, I know you hate it too. I'm pretty sure you hate it too. Basically what I've seen is mm-hmm. Where it's like it's all zone two or it's all hit, it's like nobody cares. If you look at what anybody who's like actually doing stuff does.

They do all of it in the correct proportions for the athlete at that stage of their development. But I think in order to recognize [00:36:00] that as a coach or an athlete, you have to have the prior that it's about development. So did I think with a hundred percent certainty in 2023 when we started the marathon with Thomas, that he would go to the Olympics?

No, nobody can predict that in five years. But he said, we're gonna treat you as if you're on that track. You're five years out. So what does that look like from where you are now to what the gap is? So it's a gap analysis of what are the top marathoners doing that are running, either making it in the world rankings or hitting auto.

Okay. And you're here. They're there. What's the gap and how do we take the next logical step each build and each year that actually ascends you that way? And I think when you have that prior as a coach or an athlete, you start to see. The patterns that make people successful. And as an athlete, you don't have racers that are like this, you get more consistency because you're, you're not chasing something for the sake of chasing something to do it, to try to get there, like I call it the Amazon effect.

I want the, I want it right now, order it today, [00:37:00] here tomorrow, kind of thing. Right? What does this actually look like over four or five years? A quad, right? And I hear all this talk about progression and development and yearly training plans and thinking in quads. I'm like, people don't do that.

They just go, okay, well if I go run 130 miles, I'll run this marathon. I'll run away. It's okay, but how sustainable is that? 'cause you don't just have to do it today. If you're in the US you gotta do it today, then you gotta do it on trials. And then you gotta do it at the Olympics. Mm-hmm.

Right? If that's, if that's your goal. And I just think without that prior this is a developmental problem and we need to solve that by running a gap analysis and working backwards and going, okay, we're here. This is the next logical step. Let's test and see what they actually respond to based on, you know, are they a high responder, low responder, their personality traits, even in terms of how they attack workouts and attack races.

I'm a big fan of trying things for the marathon in a non marathon build for a big half. Well, how did you respond to high volume? How did you respond to stacking double thresholds in there? [00:38:00] Responded really well. Okay. That's a good data point for now. If we're going to a trial or a big race, we already know that that's probably gonna work for him.

We're not just experimenting on the fly. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. You are gonna get that variance too, from one person to the next as to what the, how quickly a specific input actually moves the needle on what their performance looks like. So, yeah. That's really interesting. I'd, I'd be curious what your thoughts are, because I'm, I'm playing a little bit of a different game training for a hundred milers.

Sure. Yeah. So real, really I think sometimes people look at that and they think it's wildly different. In reality, we're working with the same basic training types of, or training workouts. It's just an order of operations thing for the most part. And for me, I'm kind of optimizing for aerobic threshold.

'cause that tends to be right around where you end up racing a hundred milers at. And one thing I learned over time was when I peak for that race, I have to do a lot of things like zone two, zone three work in that [00:39:00] six to eight week block leading into the race itself. And because of that. I mean, you can do a ton of zone two, zone three work if that's your specific target.

And you know, so I'd have some weeks where I would do like over a hundred miles at a high zone two. And that's not very sustainable in my opinion either when you get fast enough to a point where, like you were saying before, like the loading for that much volume at high end of zone two for me is pretty harsh.

So I can speak like that, but I don't want to be doing that year round. And then when I come off of a hundred miler like that, I don't really need to be doing a whole lot more zone two or zone three. In the short term. I probably need a lot of zone one. Like I need, I need to maintain the volume once I recover, but I don't need to maintain it at that high-end zone two.

And I'm probably more likely to respond to some like short intervals or long intervals at lactate threshold and VO two max now that I'm further away from my next race. And so for me it's like I kind of have that, like that, that back and forth of just alright. I just came off [00:40:00] a round of training that had a high focus on this.

That's probably not my immediate need. My immediate need is probably the stuff I did the least of during that last, and then you kind of like phasing that sort of thing in. So that's sort of how I've done it, like historically you'll, you'll look at like my peak for a hundred mile race. Wow, he runs six 30 pace almost every day for a few weeks.

And then it's okay, now he has recovered from that race. Why is everything between a seven 30 and an eight 30 pace? And then there's like short intervals in there and it's basically like what you said, it's like in order for those short intervals and those long intervals to be sustainable, I can't be running my, my quote unquote easy miles at six 30 pace on a frequent basis.

Yeah. I think there's a handful of variables. I am a firm believer, aside from the technical components of downhill trail running, you know, handling elevation descent, et cetera, I am a firm believer that good ultra training is just good marathon training with the odd, depending on the person, how many bouts and experience they have.

Like super long, six hour, seven hour, kind of like [00:41:00] low zone stuff. I think you know what you're talking about. And, you know, I, I don't know, you're training enough to say this would be the gap, but I, I tend to look at it and go, if performance is the surface area of a triangle, right? You can affect the surface area of a triangle in two ways.

You can pull up from the top, which is intervals, or you can pull out from the bottom, from the base. Right? And I think what great athletes and great coaches do is they maximize how much they're pulling both ways throughout the year. Mm-hmm. Right? So like for you getting ready for a hundred miler, it might be that like LT one, LT two, whatever language you wanna use on one zone, two work that you need to get in there to actually be able to sustain the demands of what it is you're trying to do.

But then I think when you go outside of that after, and you do the shorter intervals after it's well, why would I waste this that just built the surface area of the triangle this much? I could just pull it up because I look at it and go, okay, what did you gain from that build? How did you enhance it after that actually then make the gap for your next, let's say a hundred miler, or maybe you're dropping down to a 50 miler, your fitness is that much better, right?

So, I [00:42:00] think you're essentially just solving for. How do I maximize what I just did in terms of an order? I maximize my base, let's say, now I'm gonna pull it up. So now my surface area is even better. So when I hit the next one, hopefully I can pull the base a little bit more. I keep, keep pulling it up and you know, for you it's gonna be whatever the gap is.

Maybe it's technical, maybe it's fueling, maybe it's, you know, LT one, LT two, maybe it's speed. Well, I mean now it seems like it's a frigging track race in the ultra as it feels like, but, um, but I think that's the way great athletes navigate it. I see too many athletes that go, well, that worked last time, so I'm just gonna do that and then I'm just gonna easily run into my next build.

And then I'm gonna repeat that last build. It's almost the stock training plan problem, right? Where it's if I just repeat that and I, I got that result, I'll just get this result. But I don't think physiology works that way. No, no. It is funny too, the different populations. 'cause I would say if you take, if we step away from people optimizing for performance and living as a full-time athlete in the ultra running space.

And just grab your [00:43:00] average ultra runner. I find more often than not, and this has changed somewhat because there's just better education around I think training protocols, but a lot of times you get people who their draw to it was, I just want on a Saturday and a Sunday to go out on this trail and spend as much time as my body will tolerate.

Yeah. And the only way to do that effectively is a lot of zone one work. So you'd end up getting these people somewhat kind of. Lopsided training weeks in the sense that you know, they had full-time jobs. They weren't doing four or five hour training sessions during the week. They were probably recovering a little bit in the first half of the week, and then adding in some runs of an hour, hour and a half midweek, and then all of a sudden going on the weekends for hours.

So you almost got this scenario where they, if you look at that, the triangle example you gave, they had a very good spot there and they were gonna benefit from kind of pulling up a little bit on that and, and doing some short interval work. And then as you get closer to the race, working on kind of some of the specifics with co, with course profile type stuff and [00:44:00] uphill and downhill running and everything, that kind of goes into the specifics of what they'll actually be doing out there.

Yeah, and I think like if, if I was an age grouper just picking up an altar right now, the question I would always be asking is, what can I do in training that has the maximum return with the least amount of risk? Because for newcomers, like you don't know where, like everybody's got an injury spot that they're like, that's always my spot, or that's the spot that breaks up.

They don't know that yet, right? Mm-hmm. They also don't know their potential. They don't know their limits either, right? And so the question I'd always be asking is, what can I do today that has the biggest reward with the least amount of risk that I'm not gonna be able to run tomorrow or in three days, whatever their, you know, calendar is.

And I think even for the first year or two, for most beginners that didn't come from track cross or whatever, that's probably where they're gonna see the most bang for their buck and figure out where their limits are, both physically and physiologically. Yeah. Yeah, it makes sense. I, I wanna jump back to just like your coaching approach with the marathon Sure.

And things like that too. And some of the specifics [00:45:00] when, when you kind of get into things, when you come off of a, like a race, like mcc, it sounds like McCurdy was like a big, big target race for, for Thomas, and then kind of you, you let him recover and then you kind of start getting back into things. Are you doing any sort of like indicator workouts or like field test type things that give you a sense of where things are at?

Or are you, is it proximity wise close enough where you can just kind of pull from the prior training block when it comes to just kind of structuring the next phase of getting back into it? Yeah, it, it, it's a bit of both. It depends. This was actually his worst recovered marathon and I think in part of that was because we were going through agent conversations and there was so much additional stuff and I think that's what.

A lot of athletes at getting to that level or people just watching don't realize it once you get to a high enough level, like people think it's great to just do a press tour or go talk to it's actually draining its exhaust for athletes. It's exhausting. Right. And so his recoverability wasn't great.

Like he wasn't injured, [00:46:00] he wasn't Ms. Day. Like we took I think two days off, which is the most he's taken post marathon. His choice. Not exactly mine, I'm not against it 'cause he recovers really well. But so he didn't recover all that well. So it took him about 10 days, maybe 12 days before we did the first workout.

And it was just like, I think it was like eight by 40, 45 K space kind of thing, like from Daniel's language. And now we're into it. He just did a double threshold workout yesterday. He's maybe 105 miles. We're stacking a little bit of intensity, a little bit lower volume, more intensity. 'cause he's gonna do a couple 10 Ks.

So we talked about a hypothetical plan. Post marathon. But I always say to people, nothing is set in stone until we're recovered from the marathon. I don't care what we thought we were gonna do, but we're gonna go back to the 10 K. Actually, I'm a big fan of post marathons. This is the exact conversation we literally just had about you coming back to the shorter stuff.

Mm-hmm. I think it's really great to go back down, use that amazing base, top it up, add some of that higher intensity stuff on it and race, like I think [00:47:00] also road racing experience is really hard to come by at that level. A good road racing experience. And I think at that level, I think everybody can benefit from this.

But at that level in particular where Olympic teams, shoe sponsors, you know, getting into big races like Chicago or New York or Boston or you know, London or Berlin for North Americans depends on placings and foot races at the end of a marathon. Right? So I think those things are really important. I also think from a psychological perspective, just changing it up like.

If, if, if we're trying to make 2028 and we're always pulling from the same well, it's like he's gonna get bored of that so quickly. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Um, and so it is the same as you. You don't go like a hundred miles, a hundred miles, a hundred miles, a hundred miles, a hundred miles. Right. Like you try to break it up and have some fun at different distances.

So we've gone back to a little bit more of a 10 K build. He's gonna do Ottawa 10 K, which is our 10 K road champs, and then about 10, maybe 11 days later, he is gonna do our 10 K track champs actually. So he'll be throwing down against Cam Levins, Ben Flanagan. I don't know who else is in there yet. That's all I've seen announced, but [00:48:00] Awesome.

Yeah, I mean that's a, it's such a good point too. 'cause we oftentimes think of this through the lens of physiological responses and training progression and whatnot. But there's the mental side of it and between Yeah, like the press tour stuff, hiring an agent, figuring out what kind of lifestyle changes I'm gonna be able to afford to make if this works out the way I hope it does.

And. And then just like the repeatability of something that has, is that has very little novelty to it. And, and this is why Sarah Hall is so fascinating to me. Amazing. It seems like she's probably as good as I've ever seen, being able to just kind of keep going back to the road marathon.

Back to the road marathon. Yep. Back without me, I'm sure she's got her own set of tricks and processes that allow her to do that, that give her that mental reset. But on paper it makes it look like she's just the most strong-willed person I've ever seen. Because I think of myself and it's yeah, if I did that much repetition at the exact same event without some sort of variance in there, then I mean, I just know [00:49:00] from when I get to mile 70, it's like you just don't have that last little bit that you need once you've been stripped raw.

Sure. And it's you know, that's important when you get to that point where you're trying to pr on a, on a, on a full career of work. I think the other thing too and you're right, like I was fortunate enough to meet Sarah in Flagstaff last year. My wife and I did a three month camp up there and like she likes for people I've met her, she's as genuine and as nice as she seems anyway.

Like she is legit like the nicest human. And I don't know how I don't remember the last time I saw her race a half, like even a half. Like it was just, it's just full, right? Like we're not talking about going 5K tank, like even a half. Like I haven't seen her do one in years. But I also think age groupers will experience this for sure.

But I think it's different at a higher level. And you've probably experienced this too, when you have such a great race like Nobbs did or you know, maybe your best a hundred miler. There is a little bit of fear as an athlete, a bit like, am I gonna be able to do that again? Right? Can I repeat that?

And I think for me, that's one of the reasons why I try to keep going, like when they have a big breakthrough like that, let's not go back to that. Let's have. You know, recovery, have a [00:50:00] different phase and then go back into the marathon hungry actually feeling like I'm a little bit more fit and feeling like I do have a bigger gap that I can go in because I find just going back and chasing, it's like, what if I can't do it?

And I don't know about you, but I don't want that thought in my head when I'm going into my next, like frigging, you know, 12 in and out Ks getting ready for a marathon, going well, what if I can't run 2 0 9 again or something, you know what I mean? It's so I, I just, yeah, Sarah's amazing. I don't know, I don't know how she does it.

I like, was it five marathons in five months or six in six months? Something, something like that. And Kudo man, she's, she's phenomenal. It's incredible to see. Yeah. There's, there's rumors of her doing some trail races in the future. So I think everyone in the ultra running community's got their eyes set on that potential.

Well, I mean, she'll have the world's best pacer. I mean, look what Ryan's done, right? Like with his crazy f kts and everything after his career, right? So she'll have some good inside knowledge, so that's for sure. No doubt. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I'd be, I'm curious, like maybe we go back to the fueling side of things.

Yeah. With [00:51:00] Thomas, what kind of process did you two do with respect to figuring out kind of his race day fueling strategy? Yeah, so this is a hidden benefit of the marathon is nobody steals your fueling table that you've left out trying to run loops around. So your fuel's all right there. So we got to test a lot of things.

And it's also hotter, typically on the treadmill, which, you know, can have a little bit, um, higher risk of GI problems, let's say. And so we got to try everything. So, because McCurdy is a looped course, that is, it's just shy of three miles every loop. So we knew that basically every 14 to 15 minutes he was gonna be taking fuel.

So we broke down. We were comfortable at about a hundred grams per hour. I think he ended up, it's hard to tell 'cause you toss your bottles, you don't know if there was a little bit left kind of thing, but, so we're gonna say a hundred for round numbers. But we were comfortable with that. So we actually broke down the a hundred into four bottles because at McCurdy there was a bottle every lap essentially.

Mm-hmm. And so we [00:52:00] basically had 25 grams per bottle because the agreed upon pacing was 1449 per loop. He had different ideas, thankfully, and it worked out pretty well. But he was taking in roughly 25 grams of carbohydrates every 15 minutes. I would probably depending on the major and where the bottles are and all that kind of stuff, we'd probably do a little bit more.

'cause some of them are spaced out a little bit more than 5K or sometimes a little bit more. But that worked out really well. He has an iron stomach. He, you know, we've been texting back and forth this week after he saw Sebastian's and other people's, and I told him after, was it New York or Hu Houston where Joe Kleer had 150 reports an hour.

And I was like, this guy's running like two Two. Oh right. That's you're, that's what we're hearing in the trails, like Roche and you guys and stuff. Right. Is one 50 an hour? 'cause you're doing. Eight plus hours or whatever, right? And so we're gonna experiment with this build going up to 1 20, 1 30.

And so his fueling, what was he using? He did scratch high carb, and I think he had a couple Morton gels, if I'm correct, Morton Calf that he had. Okay. Actually this was [00:53:00] interesting. So at most races. You can label bottle one, bottle two, bottle three, bottle four, and so on. Right. At McCurdy, they just had a box that was yours and the person just put the next one in the air.

Okay. They didn't label them, so he actually had a calf early. 'cause you could tell by the, you know, you could tell by the taste sometimes with the calf stuff, right? Yeah. In his, in his bottle. So he had a calf early. He was kinda like, whoa. All right. That's, that's good to know that that came a little bit early because normally we'll take it at 25, 30, give or take, has been the typical like fueling pattern for him.

And so he had it early, which is something we took note of that we're actually gonna apply in subsequent builds. But it wasn't anything crazy. It was kinda. By today's standards up the middle, I would say on the high carb, like not lower end, not super high. Um, but I mean there's certainly it feels like pressure is probably the wrong word, but like anytime you're going into one of these and you're trying to do really well, there's almost like the pressure of maybe I'll up more on race day.

You know, as athletes get a little nervous and finicky in [00:54:00] terms of trying to control it on race day. And I just said no. Like we gotta plan per bottle. 'cause we know the time. Do it that way. It's not how much are you getting per bottle per se? It's how much you are getting per hour is what we're looking at.

That's the number not per bottle, it's per hour. So relatively basic fueling pattern for him, I would say. And he's never had GI distress, you know, with any of it. So I don't know, maybe we'll find out at one in 50. He does. I don't know. And then we'll go down to one 30. We'll find out. Well if he could get up to one 50 before those signals come, I think he's in a pretty good spot, so, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Absolutely. Which, which is crazy to think you know, let's say he repeats, even if he repeats a 2 0 9, like that's gonna be 300 grams of carbohydrate in two hours. Which like, I mean, five years ago it was unfathomable. I think I did my 2 46 in 2022 on 80 grand. I think I had two Morton forties. I think that's all I had for that race.

And now it's like he's gonna what's that five x that I think yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's bananas. It is interesting. And I. When I, I tried high carb last summer for the [00:55:00] first time within the context of a hundred mile race and, you know, lifestyle training and racing, the whole shebang, so to speak.

And I thought it was gonna be a lot more challenging on the gut training side of things. Mm-hmm. To make it feel natural on race day. And that was probably my biggest surprise outta the whole first round of that was I did a, I mean, I did a pretty introducing car quite frequently during training sessions.

Um, oftentimes below race day totals, but pretty frequently, like at least probably two or three times I was taking in some carbohydrate source during one of my workouts. And then my long run. Would include higher amounts per hour. And then when I got near the end and was stacking long runs, I was pushing up to like the race target numbers and things like that.

But I was still a little worried because it was, you know, my longest long run was three and a half hours. Granted, I'd done, I'd do a couple of 'em in a row some weekends, but it was, it was one of those things, it was like, okay, I'm gonna have to go three to four times as long as this and I need to be able to [00:56:00] also do that same thing with the fueling.

And it almost felt easier on race day to me. Like I never at one PO at all, felt any real pressure digestively. I actually felt more pressure on my highest training. Session with the carbohydrate. And that may have been 'cause I was running a little bit faster than Goal Ray Pace and it was probably 20, 30 degrees warmer too.

So, yeah. Maybe you are outta curiosity 'cause I've seen kind of mixed results with people. Are you doing predominantly fluid like your tailwinds, Morton, scratches, whatever you know, products you use? Or are you doing gels? I'm doing about one third fluid, two third gels. Okay. So out of a hundred you're roughly 33 grams from fluid, 66 grams from Okay.

Yeah. You know, you know the way I do it, I have all my bottles mixed the same with the same concentration of fluid, electrolytes and carbohydrate. And then what really determines how high my carbohydrate per hour in sleep is, is the temperature and fluid loss. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if I end up taking twice as much fluid in one hour 'cause it's a little warmer, then I'm gonna be skewing a little bit higher towards my fluid carbohydrate total.

Just 'cause [00:57:00] I'm, you know, that hour maybe I get 50 grams from fluid or even 60 on a really warm hour. Versus it's nice and cool and I have one bottle or one bottle worth of 30, or maybe it's two smaller bottles, but it's 30 grams of carbohydrate in which place? Case then I'm doing, you know, 60, 70 grams from the gel.

And are you seeing across your athletes? 'cause I'm interested in this 'cause it's, it's very split across my athletes that I find more people do better with the liquids from a GI perspective than the gels. What are you noticing? Um, I don't know what I see. Huge variance there. It gets a little, little goofy when we get into a lot, a lot of the folks I'm coaching are doing like a hundred mile races.

Yeah. So, and, and oftentimes like mountain ones and, you know, 20 plus hours. Right. So then you enter the world of solid foods too. Yeah. They're gonna go to the bathroom anyway, so Yeah. Right, right, right. So it's it, it almost becomes like a mix. It adds a whole nother variable where now you have a solid food [00:58:00] option, some gel options and some liquid options.

So I would say within the ultra running world, one thing you, the big, the big thing that people are often considering is how do they want to, how much do they want to tie their hydration strategy to their fueling strategy? Right. Okay. And people vary there quite a bit, where some people are like, I want that totally separate.

I want water and electrolytes, maybe the tiny amounts of carbohydrates in there just to help with the fluid absorption. But they mostly want to be independent. Manipulable because there's such huge ranges where like my, like with, with a marathon, you're probably not ranging your hourly fluid intake by any large margin.

Well, if you're only out there for two hours, there's only, yeah, yeah. Two swings at it anyway. Yeah. But like now you're out there for 12 to 24 hours. Yeah, maybe more. If it's even a longer race. Now all of a sudden, it could be something where your fluid intake per hour could be double what it is in some spots versus others.

So then it gets a little more dependent on the temperature, I guess, where I think when we get into those higher temperature ranges, then we start seeing people move more towards [00:59:00] liquid calories because they're already gonna be taking in a liter of fluid in most cases. And at that point, it's if you know you're taking in that much fluid, then I think bringing the carbohydrate in with it, either logistically or just because it's one, it's, it's one less variable to try to, to try to juggle.

People will probably lean a little bit more towards that versus a nice cool day where maybe they're topping out at 500 milliliters per hour. I think I see a lot more gel in like gel fuel sources for those types of settings. Yeah. That, that, that makes sense. I've just had some people where they're like, Nope.

The fluids, they, they make me have to go and some people's the jealous. But one thing like, man, if there're marathoners listening to this that are avoiding this, and I have so many of 'em that I coach, I don't know what it is, but marathoners refuse to carry hand flasks. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you notice that?

I'm like, like guys, there's people doing eight hours out here holding a freaking hand flask and sipping on it and like changing them out and stuff. Right. And I, the amount of people are like, I just can't do it. It feels weird. I'm like, [01:00:00] but you're gonna rely on some kid pouring the right amount of frigging Gatorade powder on the side of the road.

Yeah. Into a thing to get your car behind. Or you could, like your thing. It's it's, it's like right here, 500 miles. Like it's, it's the best thing in the world. Yeah. It's so odd. The fueling things. I see. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well the funny thing about that too is you could not possibly find a worse setup than a marathon course's hydration set.

Where Don't do it ever. Yeah. If you're not, if you don't have an elite, if you're not an elite runner and you have the fluid table setup for you, then you should probably be planning on carrying something to put fluids into because it's, or unless you're gonna be like super dialed on okay, I'm gonna do a fast walking break through these eight stations Yeah.

And make sure I'm actually getting some of those fluids in. 'cause it's, it's next to impossible to do, to do that. Right. And, and I, I don't know why, but. I did the, the comrades marathon in South Africa is huge. It's like almost 30,000 people. Yeah. They have these like little soft, [01:01:00] they're like those soft flasks, but they're made of a recyclable plastic that's more thin and there's just these like little tubes of water and sports drink.

You can just bite the corner off of it and then pinch it and just like, just like a little soft lasts basically. And when I did that race, I had bottle service at that race. Yeah. And I just abandoned it altogether. 'cause it was easier just to go through these eight stations, which are every two kilometers.

Those comrades are a little excessive, but, and they were long too. So I could grab like water at the beginning, sip some of it, ditch it, and then grab a sports drink at the end of it, and then sip that for the next 400 meters or whatever happened to be. And it was just like, this is just so much logistically easier than trying to find in a crowd where my, my bottle guy is.

But I just don't know why these big city marathons haven't adopted something like that from an average runner standpoint. Yeah, it's, it's interesting, like my wife did a foray in Ultra. She, um, we attempted Berlin last year, but if you recall, it was like stupid hot. So she did NFD at like 21 K and we had our honeymoon.

So we took two weeks off. We were in Italy and we came back. She didn't want to come back, do another marathon. So we said, why don't you do some of the trail stuff? [01:02:00] We've got a flat, like a road rail trail or a gravel rail trail here. So she did a 50 k, an 80 K, and then an FKT 104 K. All in four weeks, like super easy kind of thing, except for the 104 K.

And she carried Fields in all of her marathons and it was like a game changer for her. Like I would just go between, you know, eight K to 10 K Trailhead just, oh, here's a new hand flask, here's a new hand flask, here's a new hand flask kind of thing. And I use that as an example for athletes to coach all the time.

Just do it. If she can run 104 K at sub five minute Ks with it, like you can run two, three hours with a handful asking a marathon. Yeah. It's mind blowing to me that it doesn't go that way. Like people don't compute it. I don't know. We need to watch more trail runs apparently. I dunno. Yeah.

And I, I wonder how much of that is just, you do all your training without having to do that. And the idea of doing it in a race becomes just annoying. And I could see that. 'cause it's like the average trail runner's probably so used to having a bottle in their hand, at that point they almost feel weird.

Yeah. Or a, or a pack. They just probably feel for more, feel more awkward without it. Yeah. What do you think is the next [01:03:00] frontier in terms of performance development? Like reading, thinking, watching, hypothesizing is the next thing that high performers should be looking out for. Yeah. Um, is it specifically ultra running or just in general an endurance sport?

Yeah. Indiscriminate. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good question. I think, I mean, of the things we, there could be something totally novel, I think is probably gonna be the most likely thing, where we find something that has a, an improved, like a perceived effort reduction factor similar to caffeine or something like that.

Now all of a sudden there's this whole new lever that people can pull, but it might just be like further optimizing some of that. And to the degree that. We're not doing that yet, is probably just what we're not privy to from what the top end of the sport are doing. 'cause I actually think it's pretty new for the most part, that we're seeing some of this stuff come out to the degree that we are.

I think maybe with ultra running, I think it gets a little different because now we're stretching out duration where processing limits [01:04:00] and like performance doses aren't necessarily the same. So it's kind of figuring out how to extrapolate this forward in a way that actually produces the performance we're looking for.

Yeah, I mean, caffeine's a big one there where I see such a wide range of ways people use caffeine in these races. And it, it kind of, in my opinion, veers away from the literature in the sense that you don't really want a performance dose of caffeine in an ultra marathon unless you're doing it like late in there and you haven't been doing it.

I think you're much better off thinking of it as like a cognitive supporter of, yeah alright, I need, I need to kind of like, there's a lot of noise in my head right now. My pace is starting to get a little shaky. I need to narrow this in. And I think a low dose of caffeine does that. And if you can preserve your ability to tap that more frequently, you're gonna just save a lot of mental energy.

Not thinking about things that are ultimately not gonna impact your performance or potentially draw from your performance versus, alright. I started the race, now we're halfway through. I'm gonna take [01:05:00] 200 milligrams of caffeine and be shot outta a cannon for the next 10 K and then blow up and then think okay, what do I do?

Do I hit that again or do I try to avoid that situation? So I think like just getting a little more precise with some of the, some of the, the stuff we know works. And then I actually think where, where it gets interesting for the average person is probably there's a lot of friction to the access that the pro athletes have with respect to dialing those things in.

Yeah, like Sowe had to a gram probably what he needed to be doing. Yeah. But how does the average person get access to that sort of a protocol specific to them? Because they can't just copy and paste his, his approach. So maybe it'll be some sort of wearable type thing or better access to certain services that allow someone to kind of step in and essentially replicate those biological responses to certain things and they get a better, a better look at for them carbohydrate per hour caffeine type of.

Setups, like hydration, electrolytes, all those other things, and how those all kind of mix into it at, [01:06:00] at the dosage, right. For them. It's interesting you mentioned off the top of that answer, the like fatigue resistance kind of central nervous system stuff. I, I haven't read it fully, I don't know if you've seen this, but gel's t he's with some new fueling brand.

I don't know the name of it. I saw that. Yeah. But they talked about how he was taking it as either a part of a gel or a pill that was like tart cherry juice, which was supposed to decrease his, or yeah, it was supposed to increase his fatigue resistance and that he actually missed one now. Mm-hmm.

I think there's a branding marketing arm to this that he missed, therefore he could have bowed. He would've been the world world record. It would've been. But, and, and I'm always cautious 'cause I think you're right. Like even just something that will drop your rp. 'cause essentially that's what caffeine does, right?

Mm-hmm. Like it drops your, your rate of perceived exertion is probably the next frontier if it's on the, the legal side, let's say, right? Mm-hmm. But I'm always cautious when I see that, I think it was a tweet or maybe it was let's run or something. I can't remember what I saw. 'cause I flagged it. To go back to it is that the thing?

Or is this the marginal gains thing? Look over here. Well we do this over here kind of [01:07:00] thing. You know what I mean? Where yeah. What was that? What, what was that cycling, the UK cycling team, was it the UK cycling team that had the marginal gains theory where they're gonna do all these one percents, but they were just like doping in the background.

Yeah. Right, right. Yeah. Right. So it's 10%. It's like this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, I, yeah, but I think, I think you're right on that. I think it will be something, and I think this is probably what doesn't get talked about with carbs. You guys know this on the trail side and I think marathoners are experiencing it is not.

We talked about this a bit earlier, not having that, oh my God, I'm screwed moment because your RP is so much lower because you're actually fueled, right? Mm-hmm. But I think you're right. There's gonna be something in that domain if there isn't already. And hopefully it's legal, not illegal, but yeah, it's interesting to think about.

Yeah, it the other thing too, 'cause I mean you made a good point where it's like you gotta be careful trying to grasp at things that may move the needle by half a percent when there are things out there that could move it quite large or, or that are one or more of the foundational things. And I think like in ultra running, one of the kinds of ongoing discussions around it is just with [01:08:00] training protocol.

And how specific versus how unspecific can you get to try to help with the durability component? Mm-hmm. And the end stages of a longer race, or in other words, it's like you've got these people with these huge engines that can go forever, but if the body starts breaking down, you can't access that engine.

Like what's the point? And you know, you have like maybe diverging theories there where it's like somewhere where we need to make them, we need to stay as specific as possible with respect to fatigue resistance. Mimicking it by back to back long runs. Versus there's a group that has been kind of pioneering this muscular endurance approach mm-hmm.

Where they're doing like uphill treadmill weighted sessions where they're, they're trying to kind of isolate that component versus generating too much just global fatigue like you'd get by adding an extra running stimulus and everything that goes with it. Or they've also got like a bunch of different like strength protocols like you do in the gym around it too, where it's, it's kinda one of those things where it's like, you can kind of see the logic there, but it's also starting to get a little bit [01:09:00] less specific to the actual demand of what they're doing.

So then you get pushed back from groups that are like, okay, well if we're talking about adding more training, why are we doing it that, why are we doing it in a way that's not as specific as we can get to the actual race framework that is gonna be competed in? Well, I think that's essentially the triathlon problem.

Your engine is so big, but your chassis breaks. Mm-hmm. Right? Yeah. That's what happens with triathletes all the time. They train 15, 20 hours a week and then the second they run, they break something. Yeah. 'cause they're so strong for their body. Right. And what's interesting about that, I can. I can understand the arguments by all of those camps and see the application.

Mm-hmm. But I think it's like the zone two versus hit thing. It's not about doing it, it's about what does that and what's that athlete's gap? Right, right. Um, and I, I could see the merit for both of those things. Right? If I moved to an altar right now, like I famously, I created this in college, it was like a flow chart of will I run hills?

And it was basically like, is there a race and is there prize money? Yes. Okay, then I'll do it. If not, it's flat. That was me in college and so I still, to this day, [01:10:00] I'm like, ah, that, that, that trail's got too many hills. I'm not doing it right. But if I move to trail. I need some of that specificity of what it's actually gonna be like from a muscular perspective to go up and down for a bazillion hours.

Right? I don't need more aerobic stuff, but I need that. But like for you, you might, your gut might be aerobic, probably isn't given your background, but whatever, right? I can, I can see the camps for that. I just, I don't know. I hate when people go, this is my flag, I'm just gonna stay right here. And there's no other way that there's anything outside of this.

Like land that I took over is correct and Right. Yeah. Well, and then you get brands, right? Like your brand has to stand out somehow. So it's like, how does my coaching organization attract, attract more people? Because we have something novel that the other group can't offer or that is more appealing to you.

So you do get some of the marketing side that you know. To your point though, I had Rory a while back and one thing he mentioned that kind of fit in that world was I asked him about double threshold training. Mm-hmm. And he said it like this. The way he's doing it and where he sees the problem is just like you said, it becomes this all or [01:11:00] nothing thing, where now all of a sudden it's if you're not doing double threshold, you're leaving something on the table.

And he's I think the double threshold's important. But I think a bunch of other things are important too. So it becomes an opportunity cost thing of, maybe every other week I'm gonna be doing this like a double threshold session or a couple double threshold sessions, but that doesn't mean I gotta do it every week, week in, week out.

It just means I need this to be structurally in place to a degree where I'm gonna extract the benefits from it, but also not so over consuming that it takes away from something else that on top of lesser of, that actually yields better results for me. Well, and I think there's a difference at Rory's level than like an age grouper where he's always this close to his best.

Right? Versus age groupers tend to move around a little bit more. And I, I, I, I believe Rory, I think he's a thousand percent correct in that. And I think if you look at his training with him and John. They, my interpretation of it, I shouldn't say I haven't talked to either of them about it, but they're always doing every type of speed, double threshold, long run, [01:12:00] long run fatigue, everything, um, within a 14 to 21 day cycle.

So like everything's getting touched upon all the time versus is if you look at a traditional double threshold like the, what the Balkan says or what you know, the ritson do, it's like they do it for months. And I think both applications are correct depending on the athlete that you're trying to do.

If you look at what the bears are doing, they're trying to build this massive engine that they can just dump a bunch of speed onto for the 15 and five. Right. Versus Rory's trying to push that up a little bit. But still has to do a long run, still has to do a bunch of volume, still wants to do you know, um, fatigue sessions.

Hi, what does he call it? Intensity, what does he call it? He's got a term for it. Density of intensity mm-hmm. That they do together. Right. And so you can't do that if you're doing double the threshold every week and hitting 40 km, you know, 26 miles every Tuesday or something, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. It gets really interesting when you apply the recovery side of the equation because these things are fun and exciting.

Yeah. It's well that's the thing, just because you can, doesn't mean you should. And just because you can once doesn't mean you can for 12 weeks or even 12 months [01:13:00] if you really extend it out to, you know, I firmly believe that nobody runs their best marathon, their first one. So why are we training all eight for the first one or two?

Same as, same as alters. Nobody's first hundred in biology is gonna be their best one. It's a good point. Yeah. Yeah. If you, when you, look at it through that lens, then you, you take some of that pressure to try to do too much off of that first one. I think that's really, really smart. But maybe I'll reverse the question for you.

Is there anything you're seeing that's coming up that you think is gonna change the game? I think that the shoe stuff, I'm really interested to see what the differences were in the Adidas shoes for sure. I think I might be a bit late, late to this per se, but I don't know if it's caught on very well. I think cross training for non elite, elite marathoners is a big frontier and I learned that the hard way.

Like my marathon, and I'm not the greatest by any stretch, but I ran 2 46 off about 30 miles a week by 15 hours total of training with the majority of that being cross training. But I think for most age group athletes, and [01:14:00] I like doing this with mine, if they're not. Strong enough, let's say to handle volume, like their chassis breaks down, I'll put cross training in.

And I think it works wonders for so many people. I just think that in running and specifically marathoning, we have this must hit mileage. I actually did a video on this recently where it's I don't even care how many miles you hit. I prescribe everything in time. I don't think the body actually cares what a mile is.

It cares what 10 minutes was, which I got a lot of pushback on, oddly. But, um, so I think that's the thing here. If I could add your total training hours and we don't have the risk of breaking down the body as much as running does because of the impact forces, I think that's where it's gonna go.

And I learned that to be clear from rowing, like if you look at rowers, not all their training is rowing. They'll swim, they'll bike, they'll run, they'll, they'll go on the urge, they'll do everything. And you look at rowers and cross country skiers who tend to reportedly have the biggest VO two maxes. And I wanted to be clear.

I'm not saying that's the thing you should strive for. Mm-hmm. But it's part of the mile, so Yeah. Yeah. You'll, yeah, you'll get pushback from the fractional VO O2 max folks, if you start getting too into this. [01:15:00] I got so much pushback. I, simply, this was my response. I think you'll like this. So my video was talking about how the body doesn't care what myalgia cares about.

I care that you run an hour a day, not eight miles or whatever. Mm-hmm. And somebody says well no, there's a difference between eight miles and an hour. And I was like, okay, so what did the people do before we had GPS watches and didn't know how many miles they were running? Was their training suddenly invalidated and didn't work?

And it's like crickets on that response. Yeah. Because you can't respond to that. Right. But I think the other thing is if you go out and run 10 miles on a trail right now and I go run 10 miles on that same trail, it's probably 20 minutes more for me. And it's probably way harder. 'cause I suck at trails.

Remember my flowchart, I don't do hills. Right. And like you are a better trail runner than I'm, you're more efficient at it. Right. And so your 10 miles is completely different than my 10 miles. Mm-hmm. So I think it's time at X intensity, not X amount of miles. The other example I use is like for Nobbs to run a hundred miles in a week, he could do that at three 30 Ks, like five 30 miles and get it done in whatever the math is on that eight hours or something.

Mm-hmm. Right? Like for [01:16:00] me to do that, like I'm gonna be out there for 15 hours trying to do it. Right. You can't tell me that's the exact same training stimulus. There's no way. Mm-hmm. And, and yeah, I think you're right. That's where the cross training probably carries an additional value for someone who's sub elite because they have probably gotten nowhere near their aerobic capacity.

The aerobic exposure to adaptations that they can tolerate, but physically maybe they have because they don't have that Yep. Multi-year foundation of a hundred mile week averages and things like that where they can, they can essentially maximize their time spent running with, with running miles.

'cause they've, they're, they're durable enough at that point to tolerate it. And, and I think maybe there's even some, I think we're seeing this too with a lot of top, top of the kind of podium type runners introducing cross training stuff for that same reason where they're recognizing, oh, well you look over at the triathlon world, it's oh, these guys are doing more volume than we are.

So maybe there's some room for us to get some low hanging fruit [01:17:00] exposure to volume without the additional impact that maybe takes away from the performance on my next quality session. Well I also think too, um, especially younger, I remember I coached Kieran Luman University in his first year post collegiate when we were looking for 20, 21 games.

And he was a very high level cross country skier. Beforehand. Mm-hmm. And he just came to the sport with this amazing ability, like well earned, to be clear. It wasn't like he was just like gifted it, it was well earned, but it was so easy to stack upon with that. Mm-hmm. And, and I just think, um, if you look at a lot of the research about when running injuries occur, like the majority of people have the most running injuries in the first one to two years of their training because their body's getting used to everything, right?

Mm-hmm. It's well, if you could get a lot of that value that you're trying to get the aerobic side and decrease the amount of injuries you have, the sport's gonna be way more fun. You're gonna be more consistent, which is the backbone of whatever training plan you're doing anyways, which is all gonna lead to more performance.

And I think it's, it's, it's a win-win for people at all levels from, you know, elites to. [01:18:00] Those starting out would be, I would posit that as an opinion. Yeah. And it, it kinda goes back to what we were talking about before too, like the psychology and the mental side too, where too much of something you love can eventually get boring and less appealing.

Whereas if I'm adding in, like if I'm, if I'm like adding a couple bike sessions in, in place of what otherwise would be just a low intensity zone one run, it's like when I get to that interval session, I'm like, I wanna be here. Yeah. Yeah. I want, I love that I'm here. Yeah. Yeah. Um, well, it's totally true.

There's a lot in there. Yeah, it's good. I, I think, um. It, it, it, it's so funny. It's, was it, I think it was your stuff I saw a while back that talked about it's totally okay to walk up hills while you're running on zone two. Mm-hmm. Keep your hiring down. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like people just don't even comprehend that either.

Like the idea that like, that's good training. It's like I do it all the time 'cause I suck now, but it's great. Like I keep in the right zone, I do the right thing. And it's, I think it's the same argument with cross training. It's almost like a belief problem that it can actually be helpful. I don't know.

[01:19:00] Yeah. And that's a question I'll get a lot of times too because I mean, I program all my stuff by time as well where Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot of ratios of like time spent at a certain intensity and then a recovery and then repeat and, you know, you have your, your structure set up and one of the questions I'll get a lot is well, can I walk in between these?

And I'm like, well, to some degree it depends on what the session is, but sure. More important than that is we are getting you. The exposure we're looking for is at the maximum amount of volume that we're looking to get to, are we preserving quality at the volume intended? If we're getting that by you doing a walk for a couple minutes versus a light jog, then let's do the walk.

Yeah. And I always like starting with that level of just being a little conservative with that space because that's something we can always develop too. And if we can see the signal there more clearly, it's gonna be more informative to us. Versus if I have someone who starts out that way and then all of a sudden we get to the end of their training and they don't even have a desire to walk in between, they're just like, oh, you know what?

It feels fine. I can still execute and I'm jogging. And then that's a [01:20:00] very clear message in their mind. Outside of just running, I'm running faster at these intensities. I'm also doing more total running. I don't feel like I need to walk. I can run easily now. It's like there's just a lot more kinda positive reinforcement built into it.

I think hidden in that is also a bit of a confidence metric. So if you start with walking and whether they're tracking heart rate, RPE, pace, whatever it is, right? You start with that 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 months later, they're like, well, for the same RPE I'm jogging now. Yeah. On the, my heart rate is the same BPM as it was walking then.

And so I think there's like a hidden confidence metric that actually comes with that. Mm-hmm. For sure. Yeah. Interesting stuff. So, so what do you get coming up? Anything fun? I'm doing 10 k. I haven't raced in like a year and a half. I'm gonna race our national champs here in 10 K on the road. Hope the idea is lost by less than 10 minutes to Thomas.

That's the goal. So, so talk about outcome goals, but Yeah. Yeah. Does Thomas have a goal yet? Is it just to race? We're it, it's [01:21:00] more like a foot race at this point. Mm-hmm. Like Cam's gonna be there. Flanagan's gonna be there coming off an injury. I'm sure there'll be a couple other guys. Ottawa is always hit or miss.

It was. The best conditions I've seen in like 10 years last year. Like it's always the first hot weekend of the year up here in the northeast, you could say. So it'll depend on conditions really. It's a great course. Ottawa puts on an amazing race and he'll just be going in there to kind of race.

It's a hometown race for him. He lives in Ottawa now. Um, so he'll do that 'cause it's in his back door. But other than that, no. My wife and I are expecting our first kid in August, so it's kind of, you know, navigating all around that stuff. Yeah, yeah. Well, awesome. Congratulations. Yeah, thanks man. What about you?

What are you doing next? Yeah, I'm, I've got there's a race that every year I try to do if I can at the Petit Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 'cause it's an indoor Olympic training facility. It's got a 443 meter track. They climate control it at 55 degrees of Fahrenheit. So, um, I, I lean a little bit. More like Thomas with respect to I love the, the data and the controllability of things when I can get it.

And that's about as good of a [01:22:00] spot as you can find. So, um, I mean, just come on up quick. It's in eight weeks, so I'll, and I haven't decided whether I wanna do it. I'm gonna do something there. Most likely. It's just whether I do a hundred miles or try to see how far I can get 24 hours. I've been toying around with trying to, I've, I've just blown up so epically in the 24 hours so far that, and, and so an event I'm, I'm legitimately interested in and I just need to like, give it its own, its own time and attention at some point versus treating it like, you know, the second event.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I think I'll have to decide in the next week or two probably which one I wanna do there. But that'll be, that'll be the race for me. And then this fall I'll probably do a little more racing than the first half of the year. I'm thinking I'll probably go to Tunnel Hill, which is really fast, it's like a crushed limestone rails to trails course.

It's pretty much a road race for all intents and purposes, but Well, they host marathons there. I'm pretty sure they do. Yep. Like me, I think they're banned now for BQs, but I think they still host. Yeah. Yeah. So [01:23:00] it's a pretty good spot to do it, and it's just grown so much the last few years. I mean, that's what Charlie Lawrence ran the 50 Mile World record.

It just got surpassed. But Katriana Jennings ran the Women's a hundred Mile World record there. Camille Herron broke a world record there in the past. Yeah. It's just a cool spot to go to. So yeah, I'll probably try to do The hard part is that time of year there's like some of my favorite events cluster.

You get Tunnel Hill within two weeks of Javelina a hundred, which is it's, it's a very runnable trail, but it's a trail and has a heat component. So I really like stepping into that one where I can still express okay, I'm gonna run this whole thing, but there's also these variables that make it a little more interesting than just kind of purely based on controllability and performance.

Um, and then Desert Solstice is kind of the one of the big timed events that happens like a few weeks after, after those two. So I'm always kind of trying to pick between, between those three or on a really good year, maybe try to get two of them in. Two or three. Yeah. Um, yeah, so that's kind of my direction.

Well, it'll be fun. I, I'm keen to follow along and I, I appreciate you [01:24:00] having me on, man. This has been a blast. It is flown by. Yeah. Absolutely. I hope listeners like it too, but this has been amazing. Yeah. We'll have to have you back on. I think it was a lot of fun. I'm sure we can go on for hours on a multitude of different topics.

Yeah, anytime. It's been a blast chatting with you, man, and hopefully everybody takes away some good nuggets for their own training and whatnot. Cool. Awesome, man. Before I let you go, do you mind just sharing where people can find you if they wanna tune into what you're up to? Yeah, absolutely. I might be a professional coach, but I'm an amateur YouTuber, so you Nice.

Search my name Brant Stale. I just started that five, six months ago. It's not influencer stuff, it's literally just education. I'm just trying to talk all the time about different topics and then Instagram's the same way. Um, so yeah, those are the two big ones. Each of those has all the links if you ever wanted to talk to me or you know, whatever.

Um, all those things. And yeah, I try to keep it pretty simple. I just like sharing information. It's a blast to interact with people. Perfect. Well, you got a lot of great information, so I'm sure some people will come over and check it out. I'll make sure to link it to the show notes so people can drop down in there and click on it and head right on over.[01:25:00] 

Awesome. Thanks man. Happy training. Yeah, take care.