Ask Me Anything - Cross Training, Base Training and What Young Ultrarunners Should Focus On | Koopcast Episode 105

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your humble host coach Jason Koop and this episode of the podcast is one of my favorite types of episodes to record is an ask me anything opportunity for you the listeners to reach out to me and ask me your most pressing questions on training and preparing for ultra marathons and one of the reasons i like this so much is that it really gives me an opportunity to put to put my finger on the pulse of some of the most pressing questions that the audience you guys the listeners have inevitably when i open up this every wednesday on my instagram account to an ask me anything wisdom wednesday i get kind of the same like 10 or 15 questions and what that demonstrates to me is is there's a common theme of things of which people really want to know about they're really either confused about it in the space or it keeps coming up within their circle of training partners and the three questions that i have loaded up today are a great reflection of that but it's not just me that's going to be answering this question these questions i have brought on the podcast today a absolute brain trust of coaches that i have that i have the great pleasure of working

with in andy jones wilkins ajw coach darcy murphy and coach chantal robitaille all three of whom have been on the podcast previously and everybody should check those episodes out they are always a wealth of information but we have queued up three great questions for all of you first off we talk about one of the phenomenons that we that we are starting to see more and more in trail and ultra running and that is what to do with younger trail and ultra runners as they come into the sport and what they should be focusing on and then we move on to something that actually confuses me as a coach having done this for 20 years is what is base building what purpose does it serve and what workouts should you focus on during this base building phase and finally i threw a curveball to our coaching staff and i asked them the all-important question about what to do about cross training should you be cycling should you be skiing should you be incorporating other types of workouts into your ultra running routine and what are the value of those workouts as always this is a lot of fun i'm going to get right out of the way here's my conversation with our coaching group all about these frequently asked listener questions so let's get into it we're going to answer audience questions today which is always really fun because they

come in a variety of different formats and they all kind of typically have the same theme and so i'm going to pull out two of the big the bigger themes uh that i got and i think that listening to what you listening to the perspective that you guys have uh is always really insightful because i'm sure you get the same questions from the athletes that you work with as well so it ends up being its own like little microcosm um so the first one we have is from andrea and he says that or he asks what should a younger trail and ultra runner focus on people keep telling me i need to focus on speed while i'm young and i want to be really i want to be really mindful uh about this question that we're not just focusing on elite young trail and ultra runners that we kind of like broaden you know broaden things out because one of the things that we're seeing is we're seeing more and more younger people enter the sport uh i was at javelina uh just this last weekend and it was really famous or infamous depending upon how you look you depending upon how you're looking at it i think it was two years ago or maybe three years ago where they had a 14 year old run the 100k and it it drummed up a little bit of this you know a little bit of this conversation of how young is too young but it made me think about that there are more younger and younger people kind of becoming intrigued and coming into the sport as opposed to taking the traditional like cross country route or mountain biking or things like that and so i think we need

to be mindful of this as these younger people are entering the sport and so what advice would we give to andrea as he is an up-and-coming younger trail and ultra runner what actually should he uh focus on who wants to take a first crack at this okay chantal go ahead first of all i would say who are the people i would ask him who are the people um what do they know about you as a runner and and your goals so it's kind of tricky if we don't know right it's that standard coach answer it depends because we don't know andrea's age we don't know andrea's uh background in running or in sport in general so those things you know definitely would would have some factors and i would say if you think about uh you know andrea's question about being a young younger run runner versus maybe a more mature runner i think we would approach it in this in the same way we want to know who the athlete is as a person what is their background in sport and in running and what are their goals and then move ahead from from there um i know one of the questions are you know people say he should work on speed but again that would be really dangerous if andrea came from a background in wrestling and didn't have any experience you know didn't have much experience in running if andrea came from a cross-country background you know we might approach it differently i i have an interesting real life example here and i'll

change the names to protect the innocent but a couple of years ago i was coaching a middle-aged woman mary and uh coached her to a couple hundred mile finishes and then life changed with covid and she had to take a little break from training and about uh six months ago i received a query from her son uh her son johnny who had just graduated from high school and had a uh had a um cross-country and track background and wanted to sign up for a coach and so she said well why don't you sign up with ajw he's at cts and i was he was my coach for a while and and and uh johnny came specifically he interested in building his volume he's like i've had plenty of speed you know running cross-country and track in high school and now i'm in college he lives in florida incidentally so he doesn't have a lot of experience with hills he does have some trails but not a lot of experience with hills so he came specifically with the with the goal of expanding his endurance and figuring out how he could run longer and the same thing happened many of his colleagues and people he run with said oh you're going to lose speed if all you do is run long uh and and so he he kind of has had this back and forth of you know how much speed should he continue to do and when he builds his endurance and i think more to the point learning how to run slow uh i think is a key factor for young people who are used to doing

a lot of training at a at a faster pace when they're going out for two three hours which for an 18 19 year old is a really long run at times how can they run slow enough to last that long and get the endurance benefit from you know andy can i ping off of that story a little bit with like a little bit of a personal anecdote so when i moved uh from texas to colorado i came from a collegiate track and field background i started running on the trails here and because i had such an established training base i didn't need to use any sort of gps type of technology and it's really nascent at the time wasn't very very well developed in the first place because i knew where all the mile markers were right and my point is is i could go and i could clip along seven seven thirty pace i knew you know mile marker one was the stop sign mile marker two was the tree and mile marker three was the white house and kind of on and on and on and when i moved here to colorado i i i i lost all of those bearings and at the same time gps technology started like become more and more prevalent and so i started running with a wrist top gps monitor and i kept looking down at my watch going holy shit i'm running so slow a combination of the altitude and the technical trails and i couldn't i like couldn't get over it because the effort level was higher right but the pace was not just a little bit slower like markedly slower like 30 slower or something like that and so i literally had to teach myself to run slower even though ultra running was

like far far far off in the distance just because of the nature of the trails right coming from that coming from that collegiate background and it took me what i felt was a good three or four years before i could really wrap my mind around it's okay to run nine or ten minute pace even though i'm used to running seven minute pace kind of on the flats and at sea level so i i agree with your point there that that running slow piece is a skill darcy why don't you go ahead and jump in here yeah sure uh i would kind of second chantelle's approach in asking questions um what are we talking about when we say focus on speed does that mean uh uh one mile training 5k training or does that mean shorter distance ultra running so those questions i think are really important at the same time recognize there is a change in physiology as we age um younger runners have the ability for stronger um muscle contractions which may or may not allow a runner to run faster um and as we age generally age 45 for women 55 for men the ability to tap into fat storms as your fuel source increases and you have a little uh more limited ability to tap into that glycolytic system as you get older so speaking from that aspect maybe it makes sense to focus on speed when you're younger a little less as you age but also what do you enjoy

like is running fast really fun to you or like chantelle said is your background in cross country and track and you've done a lot of that and maybe you're ready to extend into to slower running and longer duration so yeah it always goes back to it depends it depends on that a lot of these athletes that are coming in they kind of don't know what they don't know right and so one of the things that i always counsel not only young runners getting into the sport but also people who are kind of coming of age and they come from either no sport background they're in their mid 40s or something like that which is a pretty you know that's a that's a pretty uh routine prototype that we see uh come into coaching uh and the those athletes are in the position where they're going to rep they're going to improve as long as you don't screw it up the first four years and i you guys have heard me tell you this in our coaching meetings the first four years that you have with an athlete as long as you're not screwing up you're going to get them to improve now you might get them to improve a little bit more with like perfect training and all this other stuff that we talk about but really if you just kind of get out of the way and you give them a little bit of guidance they're gonna they're they're gonna improve regardless so what i would say to an athlete in this situation is don't focus on the improvement side of things because that's just going to gradually happen yes you should develop good habits around your training and your nutrition and how you approach the sport sleep all of these all of these things that are kind of like fundamental i think are really important as you're getting into trail and ultra running

but don't worry about the outcome and the improvement side of things because as long as you're not screwing it up you're gonna you're gonna be on the right path once you get four years down the line then you can put in perfect structure and periodization and focus on this you know during the off season and this during the competitive season and things like that but for those first four years explore enjoy it and figure out what you're really drawn to because we we we have a really broad umbrella of what we call trail and ultra running it could encompass anything from you know a sky running type of race which is a really fast high intensity activity to i just signed up for cocodona 250 miles it's going to take me like four or five days or something i don't even know i mean but the order of magnitude is on days in terms of how long the event is actually going to take and and and because of that there's just a lot of room for different flavors for what everybody can enjoy to to to find and you should use those opportunities if you are new to the sport to kind of explore a little bit of all of that i wouldn't say that you should focus on one thing or the other you should just do a variety you should just do a variety of everything throughout the year i'd like to also riff off of chantelle as well and that the the second part of andrea's question is really telling people keep telling me how and of course chantelle's being nice it's like well who are people i think the thing is everybody's an expert

right everybody's got their thing that works and so forth and so i think part of the the the wisdom in andrea's question is is coming to you and saying look these i'm getting all this i'm getting all these messages you know how do i and and we we see it all the time there's more sources things coming from through the internet and through social media and so on how do i sift through all of the the noise and do what i mean maybe it's true maybe what people say is i should focus on speed maybe there's some sort of mixture but i think i think what one of the things that young athletes and new to the sport athletes do is they try to listen to everybody right and then end up having you know and distill it down to kind of well and in that way you can listen to everybody but don't take any action until you have like a year's worth of data we chantelle i can't remember if you were around uh for this particular experiment that we did with their interns or whether it preceded you but one year i had our interns track all of the advice that was given out in a lot of the uh popular literature so trail running magazine runners world bicycling magazine we kind of took a wide swath of all the endurance sports and i had them track it for like three months and then we went through it all it was a hilarious exercise because you had all of these conflicting opinions as andy was mentioning and this is with you you figure when they get to the like the publication level even though it's lay publication that there's some sort of like expertise filter that would make

the advice a little bit more homogenous and maybe it is but still i was i was just really struck about how wide and how far how far apart some of the pieces of advice were coming from the same publication sometimes in subsequent months and sometimes from the same author so yes listen to everybody but follow nobody as the cliche goes right yeah all right anybody else want to add on to that facebook groups yeah facebook that's another one that's a whole other animal i think also just being young i think this this could apply to maybe a younger athlete or also even an athlete that's new to the sport they're really excited yeah right so they're they're they're learning as much as they can they're going to variety of sources they're trying out a variety of different you know trying out a bunch of different types of advice maybe trying out a lot of different events i would caution particularly younger if it's a you know younger athlete below 20 around those early 20s caution them to not compare themselves against what experienced athletes are doing because they're not there yet and so we do see a lot of athletes that are either new to the sport with a lot of amazing potential or they're young and they're really strong and they can get away with a lot of mistakes to just burn out really really quickly right they get they get injured they get um they get sick they get over trained whatever that is so i think for a person who's new to the

sport or someone who's young developing those fundamental habits that support your training are really important getting enough sleep getting enough rest um not just getting out there and running as hard as you can every time you go out and run right having a good training plan that has you know some opportunities to run your hard runs your your do your hard runs hard and your easy runs easy right but also making sure that you're taking care of yourself in the meantime and not just getting out there and pounding away as much as possible i can't keep going back enough to the you don't need to focus on the specificity of training which is really ironic for me to say because i preach that a lot for experienced athletes and i think that that makes a big difference when you have a certain level of experience because that's what you need to extract that last few percent of improvement but when you have 95 percent of your improvement to go you're really just avoiding terrain traps honestly at that point and yeah you can make the improvement rate go up a little bit quicker or make it safer and things like that you should you should absolutely do it but really if you're just hitting the middle of the bell curve on everything i think that it kind of takes care of itself and so at the end of the day i think the focus on one thing or the other really is to not focus on a whole lot of that specificity and do over into a variety of things particularly for the young runners that are coming into the sport that don't have a previous endurance sport background because it just takes so long to develop all of those aspects it really is a

a long game that you have to play um okay let's move on to the second one we mentioned earlier how confusing all of the advice is and i think this next question from rachel really it really encapsulates one particular aspect that gets very confusing for a lot of athletes and this is about base building so rachel wrote in and she said i'm confused about base building and what it means first off rachel i am too so you're you are not alone there and i've been doing this for a long i've been doing this for a long time she goes on to write are there benefits for going low and slow and what workouts should be done during this period i kind of don't even know where to start here so i'm going to like chunk it over to somebody who wants to kind of take it over i think i think let's do this i think what we need to kind of start out with is is fundamentally where base building came from in this terminology and i can jump in here as the kind of like the long time the long time coach for what seems like for forever endurance coaches have used this analogy of building a athlete to building a house and we have all heard this especially if you've been around the sport for a long time first you build your base and those are your aerobic miles and that's like the foundation of the house right we're simultaneously using base and foundation is kind of the same the same term and then you do high intensity work and that's kind of like the frame of

the house and then you do even high intensity work and those are like the pictures you hang on the wall and things like that but the point of all that is is if you're doing things correct or the notion is if you're doing things correctly you should do them in this very particular sequence base building first implying that it's at the bottom something next that's higher intensity and then something high intensity after that and runners i'm emphasizing that intentionally for decades have kind of followed that pattern i'm going to go low and slow first and then i'm going to raise the intensity sometime down the season and i'm going to raise the intensity after that once the competitive season kind of comes around in fact i could probably look over my shoulder and find five books that have got some pyramid type of structure and at the bottom is base building and at the middle is some type of lactate threshold type of intensity at the top is some sort of even higher intensity than that or specificity so that's the background of it and we're starting to find out more and more and i would say this is not even all that recent that the order of that shouldn't be as ubiquitous as building a house right you would never build a house by starting out with the frames around the outside or hanging pictures you couldn't do that but with an athlete it might not work out all the same way yeah i'll jump in here i think um going back to what you said is this an endurance athlete that has a lot of um built up cardio respiratory adaptations or are we starting with a wrestler um if you don't have the

mitochondria and the systems that deliver the oxygen to the muscles we probably do need to start with some long and slow um endurance paced workouts um and that's also really important to build those structural adaptations those muscles um the tendons the ligaments that attach the muscle to muscle muscle to bone if those aren't pretty solid you're going to run into injury quite possibly pretty early um and doing slower miles um is a more gentle approach to that versus jumping into sprinting right um and i think there's a large component that doesn't get talked about it's the um the mental component knowing that you can move for one hour three hours six hours steadily that takes time to create right if you're starting with someone that has um really never done endurance stuff they're not sure that they can keep themselves moving for hours at a time um maybe it's just hiking to start with so yeah that's base building um on a mental side that makes sense well one of the one of the i love this topic because i think as you mentioned in our pre-conversation poop there's really no right answer necessarily i mean you when i first came to cts you shared with all of us the new coaches your belief in building the aerobic engine and then what what does every workout do to help build that

aerobic engine uh and and you know furthest away from the event you don't necessarily need to work on quite as much of the race specificity one of the coaches that i really admire he's not a running coach but it's rick capala he's the cross-country ski nordic ski coach at sun valley ski education foundation in idaho and i lived there for five years and it just so happened that my my young kids were in that program when we were living there and he would you know he was waiting for the snow to come right and so like they would be doing this dry land training in in august and september and october and a lot of it was high-end intense like hill sprints and stuff or just playing capture the flag or ultimate frisbee and i would look at him and say why aren't you guys just going on big long hikes you know and and build and he's and he wanted and this was with young athletes so maybe related to the first question but he was really pushing and emphasizing that kind of burst of speed that you might need you know in a youth like 3k or 5k cross-country race that once the snow came he might you know they might spend longer days of you know 90 minutes of consecutive skiing but while there was no snow and there's mountains and trails he would kind of hit it hard and it was a little version of that reverse pyramid that i saw happen to these young kids you know they were between the ages of say 10 and 16 years old and it really worked it was a it was a recipe that worked for the sun valley ski

education foundation and and he even you know then um you know elaborated it with the older sort of olympic development athlete so it's kind of an interesting thing that see now now a lot of times speaking of your four four years model you know that's what the nor Norwegian ski team does they build everything on on four year sequences so they have a lot of time to to sort of build do base building if you will but i was fascinated by that and i think there's a time in anybody's training uh regimen for that when people ask me if they should start out base building one of the first questions i go to is is what comes before base building and if you answer that question from the perspective the new york city marathon just happened this past weekend uh as we're as we're recording this this podcast will come out a little bit later but if you're taking like the prototypical elite marathoner what came before that is likely some period of downtime or inactivity right they took an off season or transition phase whatever whatever you want to kind of call it so of course you want to start back really easy but if you're running ultra marathons you just finished with the base building phase like if you ran 100 mile ultra marathons people that did javelina as we talked about earlier they just did a huge base building phase so why would you continue to do that after the race as your next phase so you're absolutely right completely depends on the orientation of the athlete that you're talking about in terms of what should like what should come next and i think the the learning lesson in that for everybody out there

that's listening is that it's really hard to copy paste the models that we have used in the prototypical endurance sports into ultra running because the intensity of the events are so much different so much so much different and almost so much that you flip the pyramid as andy mentioned kind of like back on its head right i'd like to offer up one more anecdote because you sparked this in when you made that comment about javelina and the i have an athlete i've been working with him for three years he lives in new jersey he just completed a 12 hour event a really difficult event with lots of vertical in the delaware water gap and we had a call afterwards and he's like yeah i really want to have some downtime but before i have some downtime i want to beat all my buddies in the thanksgiving turkey trot 5k and we had this conversation last week right so it's like well perfect we've got three we've got three weeks now until uh until this turkey trot he's got all the endurance in the world he just did this 12 hour event he's doing he's doing like two vo2 workouts a week and like one minute intervals and things like this and and it's perfect and of course he has the benefit of having the base built but so he can he can basically say i did this 12 hour and now i want to go beat my buddies at a 5k you know his volume his his weekly volume is probably going to be six or seven hours over these next three weeks after he's been doing you know 12 to 15 hours building up to the 12 hours so it's kind of that's

almost when it becomes fun to to flip things on their head yeah 100 go ahead chantelle you wanted to jump in here too i was just going to say for your for your um listener who who wrote in with the question i think what's another thing to to maybe point out to help understand like what is base training what does it come from you know base training is based on a particular training philosophy right i think it came like probably popularized more in the 60s yeah who was it uh lidiard arthur lidiard yeah who came up with that right so that that pyramid and so now if we think about a lot of the things that we've learned about physiology and training and a lot of a lot of the the work that you've done coop in learning about um endurance athletes across a variety of sports um a lot of the work that uh great work that steven seiler does is based on a totally different model right we're talking about a a periodized training model because endurance we're building that over a lifetime it's not just a you know a focused block and so if we think about our our training we're doing a lot of work at lower intensities we're doing some work at higher intensities but we're we're we're having that work throughout the year in different you know in different forms maybe and in different um different amounts of volume of it different different philosophy really an approach to training yeah and the connotation is you have to think about the word base right it means it's supportive of

something else that's more important and so if you go back to the lidiar example he was training 5k 10k marathon athletes right so this base building phase literally being the base of something else that you wanted to build down the line so one of the reasons i wanted to switch the vocabulary and call base training and endurance phase is because it's more specific right you're building you're building your long-term endurance from an ultra marathoners perspective you're not building the base because that's what's the most important right you're building your endurance like uh closest to the race and so when when when when i encourage athletes who are trying to design their own training and you guys know this of the of the coaches that we work with we've got this pretty standard like prototype when we're looking at a whole athlete season and how we want to arrange the different training phases first we start at the end and we figure out what's most important right and you could take this philosophy i think you could take this philosophy into the team sports to be honest with you like that's how much it that's that and you see this actually play out they do scrimmaging right closer to to to games and matches and tournaments and things like that but you you you know you're going to end with the most important thing so you look at everything that's happening physiologically tactically even from a nutrition perspective and you want to do all that stuff that's the most important close to the end and then i think you can jump to the beginning and say okay where are you at because you always need to train from where you're at are you coming from zero miles a week or 10 miles

a week or 10 hours a week or 20 hours a week are you coming from low intensity right now are you coming from high intensity right now and then that sets the tone for the first part and then you just build the bridge in the middle you try to do a little bit of everything try to go from one intensity the other one volume to the other but once you have those bookends of this is where i want to end and this is where i'm at it kind of becomes clear from a philosophical point of view what you want to do and then the coaching part of it is is okay we're going to translate that philosophy into 10 hours a week or 12 hours a week or these types of intervals this kind of structure and things like that but it all starts with that overall philosophy and it doesn't have to follow that that that stereotypical prototype of low intensity to high intensity all while maintaining roughly the same roughly the same volume i'll jump in and just point out a simple fact that occurred to me so base is the base term of the word basic right what are the basics right of your training so just to like spin off of what you said context matters um but the basics for any training whether it's basketball for team sports or ultra running nutrition matters and establishing that training routine and the mindset that i'm an athlete those are the very basics of training no matter what the specifics look like so i feel like that

should be base training that's almost like it's almost like what we mentioned with our younger athlete right focus on those habits and things like that and that becomes base training i kind of like that darcy but then everybody would be confused right because we're just using this base training we're bastardizing the term even more so add more add more mud to the water yeah more mud to the water all right i got one more question for you guys i'm going to spring it on you and this is last minute wasn't in the outline so everybody's getting a kind of an unfiltered version of our coaches opinions this one comes all the way from france it's from laurent you guys can excuse my terrible french accent hi jason this is laurent from france uh hope it's not too late to to ask a question for your podcast i would like to you to to expand your view about uh cross training for ultra running especially uh bike training or even uh cross country uh skiing i know you you're um you emphasize the fact that to to run well you have to run a lot uh which i agree but uh in france particularly we we use a lot of bike rides uh on the road uh in the mountains to to train for ultra running and uh even at the elite level there are there are good results with this so um i would like you to to explain uh why you don't recommend it so much and uh if so uh uh if you do it uh how uh can it be um implemented in a training plan thank you jason

so so first off coming from france whatever the french did UTMB this year just do what they did i mean i think we should just kind of go with that right they rode their bikes all year i'm not gonna i'm not going to uh i'm definitely not going to argue with that but this is not just a european phenomenon we start to see this in the states we've talked about this in our coaching group schemo is like taking over all the u.s runners they're all trying to find their little pockets of mountains and they are they are they are very small pockets where they can do schemo and bike ride and i do think that this is another area where athletes get extremely confused because they have either heard from the experts out there or told from their friends that they should cross train a lot either for one reason or other or another yet when reality actually unfolds and what i mean by that is is like the last three months leading into an ultra marathon you see what the you see what prioritization starts to shake out people are doing a lot of running and not as much and not as much cross training and so this is a really broad area so let's kind of start about this let's start with this first in terms of since we were just talking about the base building phase right and what can happen during kind of the time of training that is furthest away from the event what role do you guys think cross training plays in that particular scenario where you've got an event nine or 12 months down the year which is the case for a lot of ultra runners right now sitting on the you know the the lottery

system or waiting for the lottery system and to unfold what role should cross training play in that particular circumstance i think it's a great mental break honestly i'm a proponent of cross training generally speaking for most every athlete unless they absolutely despise everything except for their one particular um you know mean of means of um moving but i think it gives the athlete a chance to just do something different and take a break from the same thing so just the mental benefit um ties into the base building because it's probably going to set you up to be more enthusiastic about the specificity but they have to like it i think is an important point that that darcy's trying to bring out is is that it if you don't like cycling or backcountry skiing or whatever don't force it into your program just because it's a cross training activity and that's but and that's what you're supposed to do like you you you came out from the onset darcy and said i like it as a mental break that is the tool that i'm using cross training for it's for this specific purpose which we always harp on in coaching what is the purpose of this workout and if you're using this workout or this phase or whatever to hey i want i want you to take a mental break and then all and then they like you know doing whatever cross training activity that they're doing that's the mission accomplished right there go ahead yeah exactly i've got i've got a related take to darcy but it is specific to working with older athletes

let's just call older athletes 45 years older older come on i'm almost there 45 is like damn it well i said i said older uh remember stephanie howe our colleague who called me old like right to my face in our last continuing end so i still have a bone to pick with her but the point is i find particularly cycling and cross-country skiing uh give older athletes a chance because of the the the the lack of pounding a chance to really push up to the anaerobic level even so it could be you know it could be hill repeats on the bike or or something where they might not be able to get the intensity out of a workout so while darcy sees it as a way to maybe take a mental break i actually see it as a way to supplement the training for these older athletes who may not be able to do a vo2 max workout running simply because of the impact it would have on their body but they could do a three by ten minute tempo on their bike or on cross-country skis uh and really get a tremendous um adaptation out of it so it's almost like a little bit of injury avoidance too right go ahead uh chantelle um i was just going to say kind of along the same lines what's your purpose for doing it is it a sport that you really enjoy is it a sport that you have experience with then absolutely it's great to have a a bit of a break right and also for athletes who maybe live in the mountains or live somewhere where

there is a definite winter it gives you an opportunity to experience uh you know that that particular season if you might be limited to where you can run i think we also though it can be a break but also we have to make sure that um that it's planned out within the athletes program because if the athlete goes from a really heavy season of training and running and racing and then they go into a winter let's say they're skiers and they go into the winter and they're training really hard to race the ski season and then they come into running in the spring then they can definitely get overloaded that way even if they think it's not as hard or i'm not as tired um they're just on for 12 months out of the year and that's not necessarily healthy yeah i i think it's really important with the schemo athletes who are starting up we'll be starting up right around now when this podcast kind of comes out and that also have events during either the late spring or even kind of the early summer and throughout the summer they really have to take a hard look at the entirety of the year and say when am i going to rest and anchor that rest period just to because their season is just so unlike anything else it's like all gas and no breaks from november to you know june you know in a lot of cases uh yeah super super important what about i want to give you guys this take on this other

concept which uh laurent kind of he hinted at but i see this in the states a lot where you're using a non-weight bearing cross training modality so cycling or elliptical uh running or something like that simply to add more aerobic volume and i see this pattern play out with a lot of train with a lot of people's training where they'll run in the morning and they'll ride their bike for like 60 or 90 minutes at a recovery or endurance intensity kind of in the evening or they'll commute right they'll kind of try to fit that into into their schedule so it's not what andy mentioned doing something hard it's not what darcy mentioned doing something as a mental break you're doing it specifically to just increase your base building or something like that to make off of that you're doing that in an in an endurance effort what do you guys think about using that is it is this is is cross training a good use case for that and what are maybe some caveats to it it just and it kind of depends you know is the person injured and so they can't run as much you know they can't get as much running volume in as they need to in a particular training block then maybe that's an opportunity for them to to add add a little bit more volume to their week and keep them safe is it because they're feeling insecure about how much they're running and they see some elite athlete like rob crarr who's you know running 70 miles a week and riding his bike another 70 and they feel like well that elite is doing it and that that person

is performing really well so that's what i should do i think we always have to think about what's the what's the why and if it is genuinely something that they enjoy doing make it fit into the into the training plan and there definitely are times during the year where it can fit really nicely but if you're coming up to you know you're eight weeks out from a race and you're not injured right you're not you're not using it as additional volume you're eight weeks from a race there's no reason why you should be running 20 hours a week and then riding your bike in another 20. Yeah I agree with Chantel in that it can be detrimental when we think about longevity in sport I remember lining up at the start line I was 23 this was Olympic trials and they announced the the likely winners right they were in their 30s and I thought that's so old how can they still be that fast that was old to me at age 23 right probably most of us hope to be doing this into our 50s our 60s our 70s our 80s so look at bone health more cycling swimming skiing is not going to help bone health you can't really add to that after a certain age menopause for women so you probably need something multi-directional stress strength training to boost that bone health so that you can keep playing at this for decades to come point Darcy let me jump in here so I kind of look at this from a time efficiency proposition

and the amount of time that you have to add to an athlete's schedule to get any meaningful improvement for if you're doing that using a cycling modality or any sort of sort of other cross training modality is so large compared to other things that you can do that normally I would just say listen if you if if you want to do a cross training activity let's do something different as Darcy mentioned let's move in multi planes right let's do some strength training let's do some other something else that is more efficient from a time perspective and is going to help you improve in the long run if you just like riding your bike there's nothing wrong with it as long as you can keep up with the energy expenditure and it's not kind of like wearing you down and things like that but it's not let me just put it this way it's not the first thing that would add to an athlete's program if I'm looking to gain additional improvement I've probably got five or six choices ahead of that one add more run volume if it's if it's possible right um but there's there are other things that are just so much more time efficient and that's that's because when you look at it from an energetic expenditure standpoint it's about your minute for minute or per unit time you're probably expending about 25 to maybe maybe a third less calories on the bike as compared to the run and then therefore the improvements that you reap correlates to that energy expenditure so it's not as as time efficient of an improvement mechanism

as running itself so if I had an athlete that had an extra 60 minutes a day right to go and I just go have him run an extra 60 minutes a day maybe that'd be way more time effective than cycling 60 minutes a day as long as they're not injured and all the kind of all those other calories that's always the issue that I've had with just riding your bike to like go and ride your bike if you like doing it great but you got to realize that the other everything else has to fall on the line you have to realize like where it falls in the order of priority of things that you can do in order to seek additional improvement go ahead Andy are you going to take up cycling now that you're old and you need to like maintain your longevity I I cycled a lot when I was younger but uh you know one well I would add I have had a couple of interesting uh conversations with athletes over the years who bike for they cycle to and from their jobs so their their cycle commute uh or or they they're mainly a runner but they have been going to this Sunday group ride for five years and they go with all their buddies and you know they do that whole group ride thing that cyclists do you know which means they start at like noon and they stop for coffee and all this stuff you know and it's there's a very social component so I think there's some practical components to these things as well as maybe some social components and I don't really want to get in the way of those at the same time if someone's riding their bike you know 10 miles to

work and 10 miles back from work every single day that's definitely going to have an impact on their running training right and so you need to you need to I mean I had with this one athlete who who didn't who didn't tell me they were doing that you know it doesn't count so it's not running that has to that that counts as your training so uh I think those are some things that are helpful to work out with your athletes as well I keep coming back to the time efficiency thing because this is like make it practical right if you have an athlete that's doing 10 hours a week I really think you need more than four hours a week of cycling volume to make an impact for that athlete like it can't be one hour that's useless two hours me three three hours we could probably debate but let's just call it four right for reasonable sake four hours I would rather have that athlete run two more hours so now you've just saved two hours of stress the run workouts are which are more important or higher quality and you can kind of go on and on and on about the other list of benefits once again as long as they're not injured as long as that extra two hours of running is not going to injure them but I think that I think a lot something that goes underappreciated especially with experienced athletes is how much volume it takes to produce a reasonable adaptation and so when you're introducing a novel modality and in this case we've been talking about cycling but you could apply it to you know skiing or elliptical running or anything like that when you introduce that novel modality for the first couple of hours a

week it probably doesn't make enough difference because it's not enough stress load on that athlete to make a difference for our earlier athlete that we were talking about earlier for Andrea yeah I mean all that's going to make a difference right because they're so new to the sport they're so new to endurance training all that type of cross training is absolutely going to make a difference but for the really experienced athletes you're just kind of unless they once again they really enjoy it they want to use it as a mental break you have to have like a minimum volume of activity within that modality for it to really make an impact and I just think that threshold is is in many cases not all cases but in many cases really high and I just rather do something else with the athlete's time or just rest go ahead I think it's important I think it's important too and this was obviously the the genesis of Lauren's question was around things like you know endurance things like cycling and cross-country skiing and the like I think it's important to separate that kind of cross training from what we've been talking a lot about at CTS the last six months strength training flexibility mobility those kinds of things so to your point Coop I'd rather have somebody you know run two more hours I think I definitely would in the case of if they were going to cycle instead of run but I think if they were going to be thinking about their strength training their off-season mobility and the like again that wasn't Lauren's question but I think we probably want to separate cross training into those maybe a couple different buckets so the second bucket right if you're using cross training in order to elicit a

specific adaptive response and this is kind of your point to your athletes that are doing intervals on the bike Andy I think that that's a good use case but you have to make sure that the intensity is right and this is a this is particularly problematic with running because the cardiovascular intensity of running and cross-country skiing you could say to a certain extent those are the two highest of the endurance sports so if you're using cross training and we'll keep picking picking on cycling or even swimming in order to improve the cardiovascular capabilities of a runner or a cross-country skier you have to train at such a higher intensity a higher rate of perceived exertion in order to elicit a similar cardiovascular response that you're almost kind of like overdoing it in fact when I whenever I'm whenever I'm using the bike as a tool for a runner it's almost all what we would call power intervals which is a vo2 max interval because I know the intensity has to be that hard in order to in order to elicit the right in order to elicit the right right response and so it kind of keeps coming back to like what's the most time efficient way to do things so as always it depends and it depends on what your goals are I think the most the most uh interesting uh answer that probably speaks to it all was darcy's right at the very very beginning I like using it for this and the for this part you have to be very specific and directive and make sure it actually has an impact on the athletes all right

we're gonna leave it at that thank you guys thanks for putting up with the last minute question that I throw a curveball as always you guys handle it well appreciate it thank you to see you guys all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to coaches ajw darcy and chantal for coming on the podcast today always appreciate their insight in these types of conversations just are really informative to me and they reinforce just how good our entire coaching department is if you would like to support the work here once again there's no patreon channel for this I don't take any sponsorships or anything like that you can share this podcast with your friends and or training partners and if you think that coaching is right for you either with one of the three coaches that we had on the podcast today or any one of our other fantastic cts coaches feel free to hit me up on social media or go and check out train right.com for all of our coaching package options and if you have a burning question that you would like to ask for a future episode of the podcast check out either one of the social media links or the speak pipe link in the show notes to this episode I appreciate the heck out of each and every one of the listeners out there and as always we will see you out on the trails video play video