How to Prepare for The Races with CTS Coaches AJW, Corrine Malcolm and Michelle Foster | Koopcast Episode 129

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 on this episode of the podcast it's one of my very favorite formats to produce and to be a part of it is a coaching roundtable discussion with some of our fantastic cts coaches and i decided to pick a topic that is going to be extremely relevant for most of the audience listening today so on the podcast today i got a group of coaches together to discuss what we are doing with our athletes that have races in the next six to eight weeks maybe even 10 weeks out and what training themes and themes overall are emerging with our athlete base so i got together with coaches ajw coach corinne malcolm and coach michelle foster all of whom have been previous guests on this podcast you long-time listeners will definitely remember those names and we go through from a very practical point of view what we are doing with our athletes who have races coming up in the next several weeks for the here and now and i think what you will find extremely interesting within this podcast is it's not all about the training x's and o's yes we go through some of that what types of workouts should you be doing how you should

arrange your volume and intensity but much of what we talk about are the things outside of your daily training run that you can do to get prepared for the races that are coming up as always i had a ton of fun during the course of this conversation i love talking with our coaches they're so bright they're always on point and they provide a wealth of experience not only to their athletes but to the listeners of this podcast so with that as a backdrop i'm getting right out of the way here's my conversation with a group of cts coaches all about how to prepare for the races that are right in front of you so the race season is here um i just got reminded of this because i went through a race and as you guys know i try to arrange my race season so that i don't race at any point in time when my athletes are racing because i like hate doing it which means i have to pick obscure things but um the the the important point with that is is i had to go through this process with myself about two or three months ago in terms of what to do during this last phase of training whether it's from a training perspective or whether it's from like a logistical or operational perspective or even getting kind of your crew on board to make sure that i could you know kind of succeed in this race and now it's coming full circle with the athletes that i work with where it's almost kind of taking that blueprint and then phase shifting it forward a few months so what i wanted to do during

this podcast is hear from all of y'all since you've got to you know each of you have a good stable of athletes and they're all going through this this this uh this this race transition phase where they're starting to race in may june july august in terms of what you are doing with your athletes and what are some of like the most common themes that are getting pulled out of that so the audience can kind of learn from that and go okay this is what i need to start thinking about right here right now since i've got a race six weeks down the line eight weeks down the line and things like that i just came up with another one just during that intro that i just made up so i'm going to go over that too all right so andy you're going to kick us off what are you going through with your athletes right now as they're entering the race season thanks coop great to be on again by the way uh hi michelle hi corinne um you know i'm gonna i'm gonna share a little tale of two athletes uh if you don't mind i have two athletes i'm not going to use their names they're both they're both in western states uh 41 year old female uh from kentucky who was selected by raffle ticket at last year's um pre-race meeting so she's known for an entire year she's in western states that's a big bill versus versus a 58 year old male who lives in the sacramento area uh who also has known he's been in in the race for a long time because he's a very very active member of the sacramento buffalo chips running club that hosts the um devil's thumb aid station and he has

the aid station spot in western states i've been working with both these athletes since about december and uh right now i am on the one hand with the 41 year old female from uh kentucky trying to keep her calm and with the 58 year old male who practically lives on the course try and make sure he realizes that this is a big deal uh he has he he's he's he's a very experienced runner but he's run western states exactly once which was 17 years ago in 2005 he has one other 100 miler which is rio del lago in 2017 so while he's an experienced runner experienced racer he's a relatively inexperienced 100 miler um uh my uh my runner from kentucky has exactly 100 mile finish at the 2021 burning river 100 so the training has been very uh traditional western states with some some speed work and vo2 max in the late winter and building in the tempo in march both of them did 50k tune-up races and then 50 milers or 100ks and so they're coming down to the wire uh in their training um the gentleman from sacramento will be able to go to the uh western states camp and he'll have he already has knowledge of the course uh the 41 year old from kentucky

unfortunately can't she has a wedding that weekend so she's doing her a modified western states training camp the weekend before in kentucky so i have one athlete uh who's never seen the course before and will only see the course on race day and another athlete who knows the course like the back of his hand and so working with these two athletes and their goals has been a real strong theme of the last month oddly enough the gentleman from sacramento is really worried about the heat he's doing a lot in the sauna starting his sauna protocol right now the the woman from kentucky is not at all worried about the heat they have plenty of heat out there uh she's worried about the course and the climbing and so forth so what i'm the mess i guess the takeaway is i'm talking about managing as corinne and i have talked about before managing the hype or lack of hype of a big race like this not getting we're recording this in mid may it's still five and a half weeks from western states so there's still a fair bit of training to be done so taking care of doing the training taking care of the logistics uh my my woman from kentucky has everything dialed in pacers crew everything else the gentleman from the area is like oh i still got time to figure that out so it's a little bit of a challenge and it's actually one of the reasons i think it's really nice to have a coach because we can work with different athletes in different ways and i can assure you that with these two there's no like cookie cutter recipe that uh that they're

doing it's it's really different and really unique and this is where managing the training with managing all the other stuff that goes around getting ready for a big summer race is really a balancing act the enthusiasm could be a blessing and a curse right i mean we've seen this uh time and time and time again in training where you get athletes that are extremely enthusiastic about getting into a race and normally it's those bucket list races it's the utmbs it's the western states the hard rock and they don't want to screw it up right and their their tool that they decide to deploy to not screw it up is usually copious amounts of volume they just want to run and run and run and they're can't they can't do enough long runs they want to do 100k long run 70 mile long run like all these kind of things and and and you're and you're right andy that in those cases having a coach to balance that out or to make sure that the appropriate amount of load is distributed on the athlete is is uh is is the right way to go but enthusiasm can also be a curse in the opposite way where you don't have it it's rare to have it at a bucket list type of race like western so it's where it's rare not to have it i guess is what i should say at a bucket list type of race like western states because normally you're like for every nine athletes you're tempering them down and maybe one athlete you're having to like pump them pump them up for it so it's an so it's an interesting tale and i'm wondering like how did that like how did that even come about other than the fact that he lives near the course and

i think i think part of it is his own his and this is part of the interesting thing about working with this athlete i think part of it's his own psychology where he doesn't want to get too caught up in in overly being overly enthusiastic um he wants to follow the training plan he wants to um do what's right but he doesn't want to get ahead of himself i don't think he hasn't said this but this is my interpretation he doesn't want to get ahead of himself um you know he's doing silver state this weekend so he's that's relatively late in the game to do a 50 mile race but that's something that he's done quite a bit he loves the race it's it's up there in reno it's a it's a beautiful course and so forth so he's coming he's coming at it a little bit differently than someone who might put all of their eggs in that basket but it's also i mean he's a 58 year old guy so not only does he have a fair bit of running experience but he has a fair bit of life experience i should also add too that he's currently unemployed he's on a leave of absence from his job so he can pretty much devote as much time as he wants to this uh endeavor whereas my my athlete in kentucky has a full-time job with the nature conservancy it's stressful it's she's out in the field a lot so there's it's an interesting compare contrast i i don't want it to seem like the the the athlete from the area is unenthusiastic i think he's just tempering and dosing out his enthusiasm um and and it's probably going to help

him and keep him calm when it comes to race day i hope i actually think that from a training perspective that's kind of the best setup he's got all the time in the world but he doesn't have all the enthusiasm in the world and those kind of like offset each other to a certain extent right because when you have all the time in the world to train we see this with elite athletes all the time right when you have all the time in the world to train and you're highly motivated to train that can actually be super toxic in terms of just doing too like too much right i mean it's really easy to do to do too much when you're not limited by time especially in the sport andy you mentioned something else about the western states training camp that i want to bring up so you've got these two athletes one of them is doing the training camp but the other one is doing a semi or a or a copy paste of the western states training camp at the same period of time how often for this particular race are you using that specific time frame to do one of those training camps and just you can probably give the you can probably give a better overview of it but that but the western states training camp is always over memorial day weekend which leaves a certain amount of space to the race do you find that as a really uh like a conducive setup for that type of training bump and leading into the race i think i i most of them most of the time um you know when i when i when i mapped out long range plans for my my what are 14 or so athletes that are doing 100 milers

sometime we're talking about the window right from june to august so when i think of the 14 athletes i have right now who are doing 100 milers between june and august for all of them i in the initial long range plan suggested a three-day training camp preferably on the course but if not on the course if that's prohibitive somewhere similar to the course uh between four and six weeks out from the race um you know the the the mileage of the western states training camp is is 70 miles you know you do you do the last 70 miles of the course spread over three days that training camp can vary from you know 60 miles to 75 miles but i really like the idea of the of the three days um and in fact i've even tweaked it a little bit more this year where day day one is kind of a long day in the mountains time on your feet social time eating and drinking day two is a little bit more up tempo a little bit a little bit more less wasting time at the aid stations you know kind of and then day three is you know seeing what you have left in the tank and um and running running on tired legs if you will and i find particularly for athletes i happen to have a five athletes in the western states 100 this year who are not from the area who are going to be seeing the course for the first time on memorial day weekend

it's very helpful for them to get out there to see the course to experience it not in a race environment and so i think both physically and even more psychologically that sort of three-day camp makes sense and i've seen you you do you can do it in the last you know sort of the latter part of june for hard rock uh often around labor day weekend for wasatch or some of the ones that go into september so it's kind of it's kind of nice if the people can afford the time to do that and what's the multiple i'm always curious about this because we have our own you know or we have had in the past our own memorial day camp here out in colorado springs what's the multiple in terms of their daily volume how much does it go up during the camp oh a lot a lot right i mean they they might have so let's take someone who's someone who's going to memorial day next weekend you know they might be running a you know a seven hour long run this saturday but but maybe not much more than two hours or so on sunday so their volume is going to increase their their biggest volume week is going to be that week that ends with the memorial day training camp um and i think volume depends on the athlete i have some quote unquote high volume athletes i have some lower volume athletes but in general it would i would give it a percent it might be as much as 20 percent more than their next

biggest volume week so far yeah so sometimes from like peak to trough we'll see like two to three x coming into our camp where you know they might only do a lot yeah which you i mean logically this is what's always been fascinating to me about the camp setup you would never prescribe that not never but you would really rarely prescribe that in training unless you had the camp setup where you get to remove all the other training stress and you've got the addition of the aid stations and the camaraderie and kind of you're setting the time aside and all those other things where you can replace some of that stress that's removed with with running stress and i'm always i don't know why i should be shocked year after year because i've seen it so many times i'm just always shocked at how well people absorb that much of an that much of an increase and interestingly enough like when i talked to some of our like international colleagues like i think uh gi malay who's been on the podcast before he mentioned this when we were just talking offline he's like oh yeah we do this all the time like in europe weekend comes around and it's six hours whatever during the week it's one hour of whatever and he's like we just we can handle it and we don't know why it seems stupid on paper but for whatever reason we can actually we can actually handle it um is i think the other the other thing i'd just like to add before we move on is i also think it's really it's a really great um time to take care of you know the shoes you're going to wear in the race and the nutrition you're going to take in

and if you're going to wear a pack or use handhelds or or use poles or you know to get all of those kinds of variables taken care of over this three-day period is really really helpful uh you know in sort of removing those questions when you get closer to the race here's the key with that i'm so glad you mentioned it is there's time to course correct if you've screwed it up like if you have if you do something on one of these long runs or during this camp nutrition wise equipment wise or whatever that you have then decided you are not going to use during the race you generally have enough time to find an alternative solution to find a new pack to find a new pair of shoes to find a new lube combination or kind of like whatever like whatever it is if you're doing that two weeks before the race that that's typically what puts you in trouble because then you end up you know doing the proverbial don't do anything new on race day you're kind of forced into that position or you've like backed yourself into a corner where you actually have to do that so i'm really glad that you mentioned that it's an opportunity not just to reap all the physical pieces of this but in addition to that look at some of the equipment choices look at some of the nutrition choices that you're making and things like that and get that ironed out as well it's never going to be the same during the race but you've got it's your closest proxy possible sweet okay we're going to move on to michelle michelle what are you going through with your athletes i know you've got a lot of athletes

that just race recently what are you going what so you can either take us back in time or you can go forward to the future so you guys actually got into a little bit what i was just going to get into about all the gear and things like that um because i have some athletes that are going into some mountain races and time where they're going to be out all night or at least most of the night and it's kind of a change from those maybe 12 hour day races um so like right now like with the poles and the lights and all and just i mean if you're not the people out there winning the race you've got some time between aid stations you're going to be carrying more on your back that you might not be used to and if you do all of that on race day that's gonna be a lot to take in and just fumbling around and trying to use it like i don't know how many people like i hate poles because they use them for one run and they're tripping over them and i love them but i use them as much as i get a chance to um yeah i mean the tools aren't any good if you haven't taken this time leading in to get used to them and know how to actually utilize them best i've had my athletes run in the daytime with headlamps before even though they obviously don't need them but just because they have no opportunity to like put on that piece of gear for six or eight hours and you know that they're going overnight

just to make sure it's comfortable like you can usually you can look at the specs and determine if there's enough light and then maybe you're making a guess if they actually like the light pattern right that's the kind of leap of faith that you're making but yeah go out and run with your headlamp for a five or six hour long run at one in the afternoon you might look like an idiot but at least now you know you're not fumbling around with it it's not like front heavy right which is issue with a lot of a lot of headlamps especially if you haven't used them uh all that often it gets front heavy and starts banging you in the eyes you don't want that happening during the race have you ever done anything else like that where you know they're not going to need to deploy and anybody can answer this they're not going to need to deploy that piece of equipment during the training run but you have them carry it or you know lug it around or whatever during the training run anyway poles for sure like getting those in and out of a pack and or just i mean you don't need poles for an hour run but if it's steep enough hill that you can actually practice with them why not i mean just get so you're not even thinking about them anymore i haven't done the headlamp thing but that's it i've definitely had those morning runs where you only need it for 15 minutes but then you've got to carry it around with you for the rest of the time i was carrying around my poles constantly before tour de jant and i'd see like some local runners around here that i knew really well and i'd be on some trail that i obviously didn't need poles on they're like what are you doing with

your poles like you don't need these out here and i'm like i'm practicing walking so get off my case like pack weight pack weight's like huge like my i i've had an athlete in mds the last couple years and like we to get used to carrying the weight of the pack like they were doing runs and workouts not necessarily with their mandatory gear in the pack because a lot of it's food weight but he would literally bring like you know he'd put bars of weight in his pack so that it was the right weight because you know and then we were trying to cut weight you know like how how how few you know kilograms are going into the pack type of thing but getting used to that pack weight even for races like UTMB with those mandatory kits or cocodona or any of these 200s like that's a huge component like is your pack comfortable yeah who knows and it takes time i mean we're talking about like like what to do in the last like four to six weeks during a race you have to realize that that's usually not a one shot that's usually it's almost always not a one shot deal where you get your pack weight and distribution correct uh right right from the get-go you have to kind of work on it the second thing that i'll mention i'll pass it back over to you andy is that uh uh it's becoming more and more common i don't know if you guys have started to recognize this for the u.s races to have mandatory kit and it's befuddled i've seen this out on out on courses before it's kind of befuddled a lot of runners because it's something that they're not used to and they're like oh well i've got to have a space blanket and where does it fit and where do i have a whistle on my uh you know on my pack i had to

give somebody the whistle off of my pack recently uh right before right before a race because this one runner didn't have him they wouldn't let her check in so anyway i just think that that theme of having mandatory gear which we're not used to here in north america is going to start to become more and more common in this this this this greater emphasis on training with all that stuff more consistently is going to be another another theme andy did you want to tack on to that yeah because i i'm going on the other side of the boat to this i had a i have an athlete training for a hundred he's realized he's pretty fast and he's he's not going to need a pack on race day he's going to be able to go with handhelds and he's never run with handhelds before he's running i was like dude you don't you don't need them the eight stations are five six miles apart you can just so he went and did a 50 miler orcas island 50 pretty hard 50 up in the northwest and he used handhelds it went great but he was like annie my my shoulders and arms were killing me so again i mean so he's so i was like well okay dude you're gonna have to go out on your daily one hour recovery runs with two handhelds so he's so he's similar similar to the to you running around you know with your poles when you don't need them this guy's running with two handhelds filled with water you know for an hour run in the cold of seattle yeah because once again i mean during during your big training runs right you want to use a different

kind of equipment setup so i mean that makes all the sense and that makes all the sense of the world a little bit rare to go the other direction though old school andy using handhelds no i had an athlete i had an athlete who experienced that at javelina a couple years ago like he was running with like the lead women and he was like i'm carrying so much stuff he's like i watched them blow through aid stations and it actually changed how he approached like different races like he'll do races like UTMB and mogi on these really hard technical slow races but then he'll also do races like javelina and you don't have to carry the same gear for those races so i think that's that's a great like you can go lighter you can remove the security blanket of the pack sometimes and take that bottle or whatever it is which is pretty cool here's a good round robin question maybe we can kind of like go around the room and answer this at what point before the race do you start to determine with your athletes what equipment they are going to need during during the race my i'll give you my window i'll i'll be the guinea pig on this mine is about eight weeks like before that i'm kind of like man we can figure it out you know at that point maybe it's 12 weeks but somewhere between that you know then that's a significant chunk of training right there that's where i'm like okay this is the gear that you're going to use not that you use it every single day in training but at least you know so then you have the time if you need to buy any pack if you need to buy new shoes you need to like get your gaiter sewn on for any of these like desert races and things like that you're not like trying to shoehorn it

all pun intended into the last like two two weeks of training i've always just felt that that time frame gives me and gives the athlete enough time to like basically go on amazon and buy stuff i don't know how to put it like because you're gonna have to like purchase some equipment what do you guys think what do you use with your athletes i'd be about that time range too though i would say too like if people are scared of the race you have to watch that there's not too much like last minute what's gonna make me finish this race like what are all the extra things i can get and shove in my pack and like i've had people um decide that because of the weather they were gonna start the race wearing like an extra jacket and pants and things that they would never wear at that temperature on a normal day and then they got too hot and it got kind of into a hole at the beginning so some of it's making sure like you said um starting that time out and not panic buying i think i think another advantage of it i want ajw and current to jump in here too i think another advantage of it is is for some races if there's an anomalous section like the one that's really short or one that's really long that's the that's what usually the more problematic situation so every aid station is like two hours between eight stations then you've got one that's like eight which that happens a lot in races it forces you to think about that scenario

like am i going to change my gear do i have the opportunity to change my gear right before that or am i just going to go do i have to go the entire time and i have a sometimes an empty pack is just as uncomfortable as a as a heavy pack because it's meant to carry stuff so corinne i don't know what your experience is with your athletes when you start to line that stuff up or not i'd say probably generally not soon enough i think you're a procrastinator procrastinator by nature well yeah maybe it's me maybe it's that maybe it's all of us i don't know um i think so for races like UTMB for example or mds these races that are in air quotes here like so extreme that you like have to have stuff dialed ahead of them as opposed to like most u.s races where maybe there isn't a that kind of thing like i'm working right now with all of my UTMB athletes on a lot of them are having to buy a new pack yeah right and they're like they're trying to acquire all their mandatory gear now so they can practice with that at some upcoming like long weekends um same with like mds like way in advance and then i feel like sometimes we okay i'll say me or we get caught off guard maybe too close to some races with with you know that that are in less of the extremes just assuming that what we normally do is going to work and that that has definitely probably caught myself or athletes off guard sometimes and in that or not we've had anomalous weather like a certain race like hellbender was horrendous recently like the weather there was the weather there is generally not good but it was

really not good a couple weeks ago so i think it's like i don't know it's it's i would say i generally probably don't do it soon enough with particularly in regards to races that i have not deemed extreme which does not mean that they're not extreme it just it means it's not mds UTMB western states or badwater but that's like i should probably be thinking about this at other races as well okay i'm gonna call you out on this correct i know why you specifically not you as a coach but you as an athlete leave it to the last minute and this is the this is a failure point of many many many elite athletes is you have so much crap from your sponsors you think that you have everything and you probably do but you don't like use it actively or pack it actively during training so then when the race goes around or when the race starts coming around you're like man i got everything i need like you know i've got seven big boxes of stuff behind me in a hole it'll be fine for the adidas athletes a whole five closets worth of coats because that's like that's adidas thing is they just give everybody copious amounts of jackets but i see this with elite athletes a lot is because they get so much gear they fail to realize this is the gear that i'm actually going to need during the race and i'm going to need to figure out how to carry this around how to deploy it on race day and they are typically the worst they are the worst last minute people because you see them at UTMB they're trying to like futz their jacket out of their you know pack because they've never done it before and is this really that waterproof or not like it's just hilarious it's super light yeah no my

my mandatory tights are definitely nylons with the feet cut off so um no but i get that i definitely was sewing a pack at western states in 2019 the day before the race because the packs they sent didn't have the pocket i wanted so classic i but i have very specific wants and that means they're very specific wants and sometimes those do not come through so honestly like yes do i have copious amounts of jackets sure do i have a single t-shirt i can race in because i'm not a tank top person no no because t-shirts are not part of our kits and i would really like a t-shirt and i would really like shorts that have more than more than a three inch inseam so nobody is fun yeah let me so let me just say for the record nobody should feel bad for the sponsorship athletes at that point or for the sponsored athletes at that point because it's their own undoing we don't want to let you guys off the hook oh yeah no it's definitely our own fault all right ajw you know i'm i'm in the i'm three months out coop i'm gonna i'm gonna have them because i i'm a big fan and if if you have something if an athlete has something to worry about and be stressed about they're going to be stressed about it so the sooner they can decide what gear they're going to use what gear they're not going to use when they're going to even if it's an extreme race right an extreme race where it's 90 degrees during the day and 20 degrees at night or where there's a chance of snow or UTMB is going to require their winter gear do get all that if you know my UTMB athletes they're doing that like corinne's they're doing that

right now my western states athletes decided two months ago whether they were going to go pack handhelds or some version of both right because let's keep in mind you can swap these things out you can you were mentioning you know you can have five miles five miles five miles and all of a sudden 12 miles between aid stations you might you might go handheld handheld handheld handheld then get your vest and go for the 12 mile section so i'm i'm more of a planner certainly more of a planner than corinne in this regard and so i would say you know if you could talk to any of my western states athletes and i'm drilling them like okay what shoes what socks what what what headlamp um what packer handhelds or some mixture of both i think i'm just a fan of that because it just removes the the worry about that of sewing the night before or oh crap i forgot this or whatever i'm a i'm a big i'm a big believer and advocate for not panicking the day or the week really of the race with all the stuff like if you can just chill sit back kick your feet up you know that all your equipment is in order you know that your crew right is in order and you don't have to stress about all that stuff great i don't know a number of you her in my touch on this but indy and i've talked about this before have your crew meetings two three four days before the race not the night of because then everybody what about this aid station do you do you want the you know quesadillas folded in half or do you want them cut into thirds you know you shouldn't be worrying about that stuff at 10 p.m on friday night

before it's saturday rays but that's what everybody wants to do because sometimes it's logistically you know the easiest thing to do but if you really think about it's like let's just get on a zoom call and do all this on tuesday and then it's out of the way you guys can come out to olympic valley and enjoy yourself or you know do whatever um i did my crew meeting with my wife before tour de jaunt like when i was in chamonix the week before so that way she got here she could tour around italy we don't have to worry about anything here's the one pizza place you need to go to done so easy i'd say to make sure you're actually reading the rules and the mandatory gear list i have been the person doing the gear checks and had people argue with me about it the day of and be like i don't have gloves i'm like do you have an extra pair of socks i'm not going to be picky about it or arguing about nowhere did it say this race is coupless even though it's listed in four different places but like just actually read the rules didn't go over it and read the rules in advance like usually when usually the way that the that the races roll the runner's guide out usually there's like a final version of it at some point unless there's a fire or something like that which tends to be all too common now but read it right when it comes out not the day or a couple days before the race and figure out that it's a couple's race or you need to whistle right i was giving somebody a whistle the other day just as i mentioned him all right coach corinne you're up what are your athletes hearing from you right now yeah so i ajw and i sat down and recorded an entire podcast about crewing so i would

just go listen to that we're just not going to talk about it i'll link it in the show notes um i think it's coming out right now i don't know we'll talk to cory um so that's all about assembling an all-star crew ajw is a wealth of knowledge on this so it's really great i would recommend anyone who is running or racing or crewing someone this year to listen to it because it's important that you know you know what you're getting yourself into um so what i'm going to talk about is that you know how okay let me set this up you know how humans sometimes look like their dogs and vice versa yes yeah okay we're all on the same page here i'm a dog person we're okay dog people yeah maybe um i think i've attracted a group of misfit toys into my own coaching stable because i myself am in this heard other coaches say this um i don't know wait about me or about them no i've heard other no i've heard other coaches say the exact same thing that they attract whatever athletes that they are like or they are their athletes take on their own behaviors which is natural right and i mean like attracts like yeah so i currently am coaching not everyone i'm gonna have athletes listen to this and be like am i a misfit toy no not everyone in my cohort is a misfit toy i was about to say hold on you need to clarify this a little bit your athletes are going to listen your athletes are going to listen corinne you might want to shut off your phone when this comes out yeah we'll see about that so but i do i have so obviously i was out all last year before that we had the pandemic um i was injured i've got a lot of athletes coming off of various things who have medical conditions that have come up who

have had a hard time professionally or personally who maybe they've missed time maybe they had a baby which is great we love babies but like they haven't raced in a while and they're lining up for like a big a race and so i've got all these athletes and i fall into this camp too who are struggling with comparison and it's not comparison to jim walmsley or courtney de walter or whomever it's comparison to the runner they were two years ago or three years ago i don't know if the pandemic aged us all and we're like just realizing that we've all gotten older but i feel like that is the boat of the boat that a lot of my athletes are in that we're stuck in the cruelest form of comparison the comparison to the runner we think we are supposed to be or the runner that we were most recently and it's putting athletes in like this funky headspace going into races of you know thinking that they should be running something faster being uncomfortable being mid-pack or back a pack or chasing cutoffs and it's so i feel like while while we're doing all this training and needing to do the training it's a lot of like the mental headspace stuff too of being like you know you have to take it a day at a time right like you got to run the mile you're in you have to take the take training a day at a time like i'm thinking about the big picture for you we're going to be opportunistic but you have to stay in the moment in the day because if you worry that this workout was horrible today and we we dwell on it for the next four days that doesn't serve us either and so i feel like while i'm not a therapist and people should just see therapists in general um i feel like there's a lot of that going on

in training logs right now of you know like we got to stay in the moment we got to run the mile we're in we got to take this one day at a time um because we are getting caught up or for some reason my i've got a cohort of athletes caught up in kind of this this comparison loop that's so vicious and so we're working through that right now in a big way so you recently went through that yourself at madera can you talk about that like just personally in a way that a lot of athletes can also learn from yeah like madera for me i like i read about this recently and i said i'm not speaking in cliches like getting to the start line was huge and getting to the finish line what like totally was a victory um like i was so happy with that performance even though you know i was i don't know four hours behind courtney or something um but i think that in the year two years going into that race like there was a lot of doubt that crept in right like am i gonna like running am i gonna enjoy ultra running again can i run ultras again is it gonna bum me out if i'm not as competitive um what are my expectations for myself like i had to go through all of that and what i found too was truly like the day-by-day thing was so important but also just like going in without expectations like going in just to just to do the run like i did not feel like a veteran at all i felt like a total rookie on the start line and i've definitely made some rookie mistakes um as well but i had to go in without expectation because i had to put the ego aside because it was going to be a really long run

if i spent 18 and a half hours or whatever it was like beating myself up for not being faster so i had to go in ego aside i don't want to say i had to put my competitive ambitions on the back burner because that's like hard for anyone to do but i had to just be in every single moment and not worry about place or time or you know feeling like there were external expectations for my own race i had to know i had to lean into like what my like what i needed out of the race versus what i thought anyone else needed from me in the race that's not easy to do when you've been i mentioned this to elite athletes all the time it's that's not easy to do when you've been to the top of the mountain like when you've been really good and you've been on fire and everyday athletes can you know relate to this as well when you've been that person irrespective of how long it was ago it could have been six months ago it could have been six years ago it could have been 16 years ago it's it's it's hard to come back to that level that you just mentioned corinne where you want to respect the training that you have done for that specific thing and that alone has to drive the process and the value that you get out of the entirety of it and i think a lot of athletes are going through that right now just post covid just because they haven't raced in a while you know they're coming behind they're behind the eight ball for a myriad of reasons right yours specifically was compounded by injury but there's a lot of other athletes out there that just you know they just didn't train that much over the past couple years that's fine there's nothing wrong with that but you got to realize that that's where that's what you're coming to the table with yeah or athletes

who maybe they were able to train a lot over the pandemic because their job went remote yeah i've got athletes who are going back to the office who are traveling from work again right like oh my god yeah they have to have to go to the office that have to go commute again who have to you know go to boston or dc or wherever they need to go to like do these work meetings right and that i think is also throwing athletes for a loop because we not to say we're backtracking on training but we do have to like we have to adjust to whatever their current reality is and i think that that is been really hard for athletes who are stepping up to big races to be like well my training looks different this spring than i did last spring like yeah you had different life stresses last spring than you do this spring and i think that's true you can i like i don't know people get really hung up on this idea of like their peak week has to be x their long runs have to be y or z their you know they need to do this specific training race and if any of those things do not happen how could they possibly do the race successfully and i've had athletes and i've had myself included in this i've had have gone back to the same race year after year with very different training and things turn out just about the same or better and so i think it's important to recognize that like what you were able to do in one season or one build up might not look the same like once again comparison to yourself the next season because maybe you've added a new family member maybe you're traveling more for work maybe work changed altogether like all those things are super important and are stressors and so you have you you can't you can't expect things to stay the same well i i think i think one of the best things about

this sport long distance ultra running is we don't we really don't ever have to retire i mean uh i i pound on this a lot there are a lot of athletes who were elite and they're not elite anymore and so they're not entering races and to them i'd say come on come run races you know get get a sense of what it's like in the mid pack i remember when it happened to me it happened pretty suddenly where i went from being sort of in the top 20 of races to being in the mid pack and when i really realized it is when i looked at an aid station and i said this is what a picked over aid station looks like you know i had i had never i had i had always been to aid stations where like they had just filled up the cups with the m&ms and all the sandwiches were fresh and everything else and one day i get there and it's like a picked over aid station with with aid station volunteers asleep on the cots and i was like ah this is what i've been missing but i really i really really really do believe corinne's got such a great point you have to change your mindset you you can't compare i mean this is what i hate about strava i get these updates about you know someone who beat my um you know beat my my my segment somewhere and i was like oh my god that was like 12 years ago that's not me anymore but but i think it is important if we want to continue to stay in the sport to constantly readjust our goals and i think it's been i think it's been accelerated by covid right because people have been out of the sport not by any desire of their own and then they're like coming back and it's like whoa it's

different now uh it's different for me it's different for them and how am i gonna how am i gonna function in that so i think i think we need to remember we all do this because we love it and that's what makes it the most meaningful to us not winning not having boxes full of adidas jackets i mean i i said for years you know eventually i'm gonna have to buy my own shoes again you know eventually corinne's gonna have to buy her own jackets i don't know and that's okay i've got jackets for years i was about to say i've got them cashed away corinne's gonna have jackets till she's like an old grandma this right um i i can tell i can tell a humble experience just from being a coach as long as i as i have been i've made more mistakes coaching through the failure to realize that people are different from year to year to year that's that by far has been one of my if not my biggest source of coaching error and even with young athletes even with athletes that are in their mid-20s or early 30s not recognizing that they're a different athlete from year to year to year in whatever way either from a work-life perspective or just an athletic perspective and the way that that manifests in like the coaches coaching x's and o's is that you're not adapting to the individual nature of that person that person is a different individual in 2022 than they were in 2021 than they were in 2020 and sometimes that's

subtle you know you don't change all that much sometimes it's a lot and as andy you mentioned right you went through a very drastic change from one year to the next and if you were to have just copy pasted your training from you know the early 2000s that would certainly be a failure point in you trying to like figure out your your own training so you know message to the athletes that are out there irrespective of your whether you're diying your own training or you've got a coach you're a different person from year to year and your training needs to be reflective of that in the same way that it's reflective of the different nature of the events that you're training for right you need to individualize for both of those both of those components i think that's really important part i'm glad you have the mid state the mid pack aid station story now andy to tell that everybody can relate to you're a common folk just like everybody okay so i've got two things first one the first one's the easiest one so i'll tackle that right off the bat first one don't get covid seriously so i i traveled this weekend i flew on a plane for the first time in a while the first time since they lifted all the mask mandates and i'm not going to get political about any about about anything like that but still i think not getting covid is an athlete's biggest ergogenic aid right now outside of whatever other recovery modalities you want to use and nutritional supplements and things like that if you just avoid the negative of not getting covid in the last

six weeks leading up to your rights and i've had athletes recently that have that have gone through this and it's getting we'll figure it out but it's problematic don't get covid especially if you travel a lot for work and especially if you're in like a high risk environment still treat it like the freaking pandemic is raging just because everybody else is letting their guard down doesn't mean that you need to let your guard down that's the only soapbox that'll get on with this particular thing so that's number one don't get covered leading your race and you can you can do things every every individual out there has worked so freaking hard to get to whatever race they're doing i think about all the hours of training hundreds hundreds of hours of training that you put in for a singular race take a little bit of precaution to not getting sick and i would give that advice to anybody even outside the pandemic we should tell this to athletes that went to the olympics all the time carry your own pins stay away from sick people wash your hands all the time like we just say we were saying this in like for forever when athletes would travel around internationally because we realized that getting sick unwinds unnecessarily in many cases a lot of the hard-earned training that that that you've done so first thing don't get sick don't get covid second thing is as you're mapping out your last six or eight weeks of training fight the urge to do your hardest bout or your longest bout of training right at the very end

and some i forget who just mentioned this i think it was you corinne everybody wants to think that if they do some magic combination of back-to-back long runs or one single long run or three days in a row or kind of whatever that that makes them ready and there's something to that right there's something to getting the confidence to doing all those miles and stuff like that but when you're looking at your last part of training put that in the most strategic place possible and in almost all cases it shouldn't be right before your taper week if you're doing the biggest volume of training your biggest acute volume of training right before your taper week you could be making could be and many times you are making the classic mistake of having your highest acute training load coincide with your highest chronic training load and you could get away with that you might you might be able to get away with that it might be a benefit we can you know debate that or whatever but in most cases that's going to be too much or counterproductive or kind of extend your taper or have some other sort of negative consequence so what i would encourage athletes to do is whatever magic you think is going to come about from those two or three days your training camp or whatever give yourself enough time to do that and then fall back into normal training so that you're not trying to shoehorn it in all at the very end and everybody won't i've made that mistake

i've made that mistake personally like it doesn't i used to go to leadville trail 100 i have a 50 mile run like right before the taper and finally when i look back at my training thanks to my fellow coaches they'd be like you're an idiot you're doing the longest you're doing your longest training run right at the very end like how dumb is that like you should you should be smarter than this so anyway that for the athletes that are out there that especially the ones that are kind of diy in their training be you always want to do something to kind of crescendo your training be sure that it's not all at the very very very end and give yourself enough space to do that big block of training such that it's not going to have any residual coming into the race so that's what i'm going through with with my athletes particularly that are racing in like the july and august time frame we're trying to orchestrate when the training camps that andy mentioned when the training camps would typically occur for those athletes and i'm just trying to give them as much space as possible yeah i think that i've kind of looked at that as like i don't like necessarily like like a long taper but it's kind of like we start the taper and it's this kind of gradual thing like i'm a big fan of really big weeks like three weeks out five weeks out that kind of thing with even like kind of a like that that um that three four and five week out window is kind of like a little block and then they still have a long run the following weekend after that third week after that three week out mark and then it's kind of like

you still have like 12 you know you still have two weeks after that in a way that's like the true like quote unquote taper yeah i just think i see this time and time again and it just happens all too often i think with self-coached athletes where they think that every week kind of builds off of each other naturally right but it's actually the opposite right you get more fatigued as the weeks go on and then you remove the stress and then you become less fatigued so when it whenever i see that i kind of i see it enough to understand that you can get away with it because the longest single training run that you're going to do or the longest single training block that you're going to do is typically at a relatively low intensity so sometimes you can get away with that mismatch of having you know all the cumulus stress and all the acute stress being at the same time you couldn't get away with it if there was a lot of intensity in there that would definitely be a huge red flag but sometimes you can get away with it when it's all low intensity but i just think that there's a better way to orchestrate it and plus here's the other thing i just thought about what if that run goes wrong yeah what if it's mentally or physically right like if it's a huge risk like i've had this conversation with athletes recently too about like practice races as well as like like because they want they've got a b race on this on the calendar and it's like well and they'll be like is the timing wrong on this i'm like yeah i'd be more keen if that was a week earlier right like because if if for some reason you know it does go wrong you do tweak something like i want enough time for you to come out of this type of thing and i feel

like if you do a 50 mile training run two weeks out from leadville right like that's just the the amount of risk to like the risk reward ratio there is way off i think it's i i think it's kind of playing with fire you know because once again physically you got to get it right psychologically you got to get it right and there's no if you're doing it here's we talked about this earlier in the podcast i think it's great that it's coming back full circle right now if you're using those longer long runs to go through your nutrition go through your equipment all these other things now you don't have as much time to course correct right and so you've compounded all of these errors like all at once like just that that's my message is just give yourself a little bit of space right so that a you don't feel like you're pressing the whole time and i think that that just makes the training more reasonable when people are setting it up if you just give yourself more time and more space but b if you want to change something if you want to try to tweak something or optimize you're not under this like huge time pressure to do it in the last two weeks where you know you might make compounding errors and you know change your shoes at the last minute or go on a three-hour run because you want to test your new socks out or something like that yeah you don't have enough time to course correct any of those things that you're quote-unquote trying out for the first time like that that should be happening on those big weekends those big runs seven nine twelve weeks out type of thing getting

like lots of time to make those changes and those tweaks as opposed to yeah your last run before the big day yeah here's so i had a lot of questions about this i'll answer this in podcast format and i've been trying not i've been trying to do less and less of this this year just talk about my own training but i think this is a decent segue so for cocodona i did a four-day training block about a month out from the right i'm looking at right now i'm trying to count the days yeah about a month out from the event and then the week after that i basically took that training block and i cut it into two days so once again the highest acute block was four weeks out it was coming kind of right off of a little recovery phase but it didn't increase it the next week i literally like cut it in half and the week after that i cut that in half so i could make and this kind of all went out the window because the fire situation but that's neither that's neither here nor there if i needed to make any sort of like you know equipment changes or i like overcooked myself you know during those four days or whatever i had enough time to like even back off more in the subsequent weeks that's the other thing that i think that's dangerous about leaving the last thing until the very end is you're always guessing a little bit right in training you try to make the most educated guess possible in terms of training load or training volume but it's still a guess and even if you're a super experienced coach you know we're all experienced really good coaches here you can still get that equation wrong you can still do a

little bit too much or not do you know or not do enough and when you're and when you have more time to course correct right it's just a better situation because you can course correct in either direction if you did a little bit too much you're a little bit over fatigued you can course correct on the on the doing less the next week and then if for whatever for whatever reason if you don't feel like you got enough out of that last long block you can titrate up a little bit there's nothing wrong with that and then all that all that training stress just kind of ends up coming out in the wash but the catalyst for coming out on the wash is giving enough space so that you have the time later down the road and you're not trying to freaking shoehorn everything at the very last minute like we've been talking about this entire time well i'm not putting like too much emphasis on that one big run like i just got my first dnf at quad rock 50 not because i couldn't make the cutoffs but because it wasn't my a race and i was behind goal it was hot i didn't want to be out there anymore and 10 more miles of beating myself up just didn't feel worth the risk anymore and i felt like i got what i needed out of it and so i called it a day and i don't think that means i'm suddenly going to have a horrible 100 miler in a month because i dnf this one race yeah i just had the same conversation with an athlete 100 like and it was it was quad rock and it was really hot it was the hottest day i think y'all have had like i think that colorado's had this spring at least the like

fort collins boulder denver area and yeah same thing like b race you know big goals are down down the road the goal was to go in and just like kind of test things out in part because we were working through a knee thing and you know the knee held up which was great but there was no reason to kind of be out there longer so it's like exact same thing and having to have that conversation of like okay well you know going into a race with the mindset of like if i need to drop i can type of thing i think was really hard on this athlete but also recognizing that like this has no this this has no like future like forward-looking negative implication for your ability to complete the big goal coming up like you made the right decision on the day and i think that's what athletes have to hear a lot is like you know that was the right decision and this is not an indicator of your ability to complete the a race or the a goal that's coming up and i think that that is a really that once again is like that risky line with you know these big long runs or these big long training races is that like you might have to have that conversation at the back side of like did we accomplish what we wanted to accomplish with it even if it wasn't you know a 50 mile finish like yeah 100 and i think that's like what needs to resonate with an athlete needs to resonate with your own your own experience out at quad rock too it's like nope we got what exactly what we needed out of it perfect okay now we're ready for the hundred you guys have heard me you guys have heard me opine on this in any kind of number of formats you know the most common question that i get from the running public at large is what should my longest long run be for x case and i you know i've answered that in any number of

ways from trying to be cheeky about it to like technical and so on and so forth but what i've come to what i've really come to appreciate about the frequency that that question comes up is it really it really illuminates the athlete's psychology that there's some magic litmus test that if they pass that in training they therefore are qualified to do the race and it's it's kind of reminiscent of like really old school marathon training where you know pretty much any marathon training book out there or training program that you see will use an 18 mile long run and it's so common it's almost de facto right so athletes go into those things they're like okay if i can do 18 miles i only have eight to go eight is a normal run and so now i've passed this you know i've passed this magic you know i've passed this magic test in training and i'm automatically qualified for it well the fact of the matter is is if your freaking last long run was 17 miles or 16 miles that two miles in the entirety of all of the hours the hundreds of hours that you've trained for that race is such a small fraction that from a physical standpoint it's it's really not all that meaningful but when we look at it into an ultra marathon world because the distance is so audacious and the duration is so audacious it puts a bigger magnifying glass on the those those types of litmus tests and i think once we realize

that yes there are benefits to long runs right yes there are benefits to back it back to back long runs but there's no magic in eclipsing a certain duration or a certain distance that therefore is it like a you know an automatic kind of kind of prerequisite into things and to corinne your point of it's okay if you you know drop out uh you know in this race it really speaks to understanding the context of the entirety of the training process that enables you to have that scope right if you didn't have context of the entirety of the training process you might think that 50 miles is some sort of magical prerequisite not 45 miles 50 miles exactly is some sort of magic prerequisite to being successful at the ultra marathon distance and that's just unfortunate not unfortunately but that's just not it's just not the case and i think it's psychology that we've got to kind of work on with everybody well and i think like you get to a point where you're tired and i think especially if you're new to a distance you think oh if i'm this tired at four hours how am i gonna feel it eight hours and sometimes i don't know like not that you can't keep getting more tired but i feel like there's a point where you're tired and you just stay that amount of tired and you just kind of fit into that groove and it's not you're not going to suddenly necessarily be in agony at mile 70 like like unless something's going wrong

like and so getting that experience in a long run it's not necessarily you're the amount of time you're tolerating it it increases but you're not necessarily getting some big new stimulus i literally had that conversation before we jumped on this podcast with an athlete who's doing leadville this first 100 mile race and he did a 22 mile long run 22 22 mile long runs uh over the weekend he was like my legs hurt so bad after the second one's like am i gonna have to go 80 more miles with my legs feeling that bad and to be honest with you i gave him the spiel from the book right so i wrote about this in the book how we are we are really terrible at extrapolating past a certain time frame there's this there's this construct within the psycho biological model of fatigue called the perceived exertion and point interaction and i know that sounds like a lot of cycle babble but it's it's literally it's literally how it's described is that when we when you're doing a task when an endurance athlete is doing a normal task they're going on running 10k they're doing intervals or whatever we're pretty good at running to a certain point and then taking an internal check of this is how i feel this is how much i'm suffering this is how much i'm willing to suffer and this is how much further i have to go or this is the time

frame i have to go and drawing an internal line and saying okay that's reasonable i'm going at a reasonable intensity or you know what i'm not willing to suffer that much six minutes from now so i'm going to dial my intensity back down we're very very good at that process for short durations under a couple of hours we suck at it in an ultra marathon distance and that's why people drop out at mile 75 of bloodville trail 100 because they feel so horrible and they're like i can't possibly endure this much more pain for 25 more miles going up power line and things like that they get in their car they go to their hotel room and they immediately regret what they do it's not a failure for them being tough because they got to that point they were certainly tough enough to get to that point it's a failure of trying to extrapolate how they were feeling at that moment in time and and and trying to extrapolate that to the finish line which we are just really really really awful at i have this distinct memory from our training run before leadville and it wasn't like a big long run so leadville was my first hundred in 2017 i remember this and uh i remember getting in and i was supposed to do ccc that year as well and i was like i've got to choose just leadville um but i went out for a training run it was like an eight mile training run and it was a loop like there's no way to cut the loop it's it's a it's a loop and it the loop itself is six miles and i was planning to add on and i felt horrible i mentally wasn't in it and i just remember panicking like i can't even do an eight mile run how the heck am i going to run a hundred miles in two weeks

like this like this distinct panic over this like the fact that i like could not bring myself to run eight miles and so i think it's just it's this very interesting phenomenon that like we've all we've probably all experienced right of being able to like understand what we're going through in that moment and extrapolate it out and it's just like it's it's i want people like in my mind like that's the like this happens to everyone's story um of being like you can be caught in an easy day and have the same the same feeling it doesn't and it's not an indicator of future failure by any means you know it's so funny i can't tell you how many times i've been at aid station where i've seen athletes come in and go what mile is this and they like literally they don't know yeah they know no clue 30 miles 80 miles it's like totally indifferent what what mile is this but where's the next aid station and they end up being super successful and for years i was miffed at that proposition i'm like how do you not know that you're 22 miles into this race like like how did you not do your research do you not have like a little cue sheet or whatever and finally after you know maturing a little bit i guess i've just come to i've just come to appreciate that the fact that they didn't care or even have the sense of how much further it was to go was the ultimate catalyst for them being successful because they weren't making that extrapolation because they couldn't they didn't have the faculty or the tools or whatever they didn't care whatever it was they knew they were fit enough to do it they knew they're well in cutoffs and all these other things but the fact that that that they didn't know literally

where they were in the race was so befuddling to me but now i've come to appreciate that you know what that's not the worst thing in the world because you're not thinking about 50 miles from now which is kind of weird to think about you can't you can't count down you can't you can't you can't internalize that we were really cognizant of that with tim out on the pct like i think that those those types of like uh really long efforts you know like few hundred miles 700 miles in tim's case a couple thousand 2600 miles like those really emphasize the fact that you can only plan out so much further in advance before it starts to become a detriment to yourself that you just this whole cliche of staying in the here and now which i always say you stay in the here now but you have to have a reasonable amount of forethought i think that's there's a balance point there but anyway my point with that is is this whole notion of we suck at extrapolating really gets exaggerated as the distance kind of goes on with these 200 milers and fkts and things like that because it's just the proposition is so absurd we can't internally comprehend what's going to happen that far down the road that's why mile 60 to 80 i think is like the worst of any hundred and you could probably figure out what that is for 200 for example it's like if someone's going to drop out it's going to be between mile 60 and mile 80 because you've run so far and you still have so far to go particularly when you're cognizant of how far you have to go and so it's like when i talk to people who are pacing

like western states for example i'm like mile 60 to 80 your job is to distract them your job is to make sure that they just blast through 20 miles without thinking and then once they get to 80 it's like oh we've all done a 20 mile run right same with like the 18 mile thing like oh we've we've we all know what that is like counting down finally type of thing and so it's like yeah you can't really extrapolate that but it's yeah it's that crux of like that's 60 to 80 percent i guess is maybe what it is like you've been out for so so long but you can't quite figure out how far you have to go still well the research backs that up and i can't remember the name of the author right now i'll link the paper in the show notes the research backs that up and it also happens to coincide with kind of the worst time early in the morning for most reasonable runners not elite athletes obviously but for most people that are running kind of in the middle of the pack of where it's right around 2 to 4 a.m you know for a morning start type of race and so you've got this confluence of all of these negative events they've been out for a long period of time they're coming around to the prototypical witching hour which has biological significance around it as well right around 2 to 4 in the morning and they you know they've got 60 or 80 miles underneath their legs and underneath their minds and sometimes that that confluence events is just too you know it's just too much for uh for for people to handle but corinne your point is actually really well taken where there tends to be like a kind of a linchpin and i actually think that we're like going down a crazy rabbit hole here i actually think that athletes are really well served

to know that by like looking at the race and coaches too looking at the race results from years previous and figuring out where the failure points are this isn't like not indifferent from any you know scope of training type of activity that we go with our athletes but looking at a race and i always bring up blood bill because it's so apparent and saying everybody drops out at outward bound right there's more there's more dnfs there than at any other point in the course if you know that and then you get your crew on board and you get your pacers on board and whatever there are other resources that you have locked the car don't let me get in the car at miles anywhere else you can let me get in the car don't let me get in the car here just drive the car away right which is what people have done there before like just drive away don't let don't give me don't give me the option if you know where those more common failure points are they're there for a reason is what i'm trying to say right there's usually a biological reason for it there's a physiological reason for it and a psychological reason for for why those all happen to occur right around the same time or the majority of them occur around the same time and you can use that knowledge and leverage it for your everyday athletes to be more successful and just by avoiding those pitfalls right because as we know corinne's very famous for saying a lot of uh ultramarathon training and racing success is just terrain trap avoidance right you're just trying to avoid the negative and then you just find you know the very stereotypical and cliche success by lack of failure i want to just point out that wasn't that was an edit in the book that

i had to fight for what are terrain traps i'm like welcome to avi avalanche education 101 where these are things we're going to avoid um yeah people i mean that's why like people know that the first 50k of high lonesome is so hard as a people know that you've got to get your athlete out of corinne air at UTMB like they're a very specific place in the morning right yeah two in the morning or or later or it's like you've already had a hard 50 miles and you can't imagine going 50 more miles i called you during UTMB because you were the one number i could get a hold of who i knew was awake at that time of day to just tell me to get to the next aid station and that's like sometimes all it is right it's just like just go to the next aid station just we'll see you at the next aid station just keep moving and generally that's enough i think to get you down the road so we'll add that to our list that we are our very illustrious list of what athletes should be looking at right now if you're in the mid pack or the back of the pack look at where people drop out identify that point and bring your reinforcements to that point right bring your psychological reinforcements to that point knowing that you're going to go through that at that point in time or you're likely to go through that point in time but bring your crew in tell them that that's a prototypical failure failure point if you happen to have pacers let them know about that as well bring the red bull and freaking coffee and chocolate covered espresso beans and kind of all the you know uh all of the uh all of those little tricks to to stimulate uh yourself through those wee hours of the morning or

whatever i think that's another point that we can add to this list in terms of what to be looking at in this last six weeks or what are the potential failure points of the race yeah it's like western states where your crew sees you at the top of a big uphill at like every major crewing point and it's like yeah your runner's probably gonna look bad and maybe unhappy because they've been going uphill for an hour and it's warm out so like maybe don't ask them how they're doing and like put some ice on them and then just make them go run down the next downhill yeah and things will be better everybody looks this bad up here yeah everyone looks horrible up here you're doing great yeah there are yeah i think that can go for anyone for the front of the pack to the back of the pack as far as like knowing where those key moments are that are going to be really hard and prepare yourself prepare your crew know what your goals are right like my UTMB experience was one where i wasn't prepared to be out there for 30 hours mentally i knew exactly what i wanted to run and when i was super sick and was walking a lot like i wasn't mentally prepared to be i could have walked it in for sure well under cutoffs but i like wasn't mentally prepared to do that so you've got to figure out those those plan b's and c's and what you actually want out of it beyond being under x y or z time or x y or z place because not that's not going to happen every time you have to know why why you're out there otherwise people don't appreciate how hard that reset is in real time like because i've seen a lot you know i go to a lot of races you guys know that um i've seen a lot

of athletes that have had to go through that well i wanted to be here and now i'm here reset and sometimes it's like just give them 20 minutes at eight station you know i watched you give a give a friend of a friend of pep talk at ccc one year in which you said okay you feel bad okay like are like you're not doing well and the guy was like no yeah i'm just not doing well and you were like to whose standards to your standards or to someone else's standards and he was like to my standards and you're like okay well that's just like you got to decide if you're going to get over that or not yeah yeah i mean he was otherwise fine but he wasn't willing to like reset yeah that's what it needs yeah it's like i've my approach with that this is once again we're gonna end up with a four hour podcast here my approach to that is just give them space they've got to make the decision but you have to like arm them with what they don't know at that point and usually what they don't know at that point is that like they're so hyper focused on what just eluded them the time that just eluded them the place that just eluded them or whatever that if they really wanted to they could walk to the finish line and they could do what andy just what ajw just mentioned enjoy the picked over aid stations and making new friends and you know the locomoting at a different speed and seeing a course at a different time of day and stuff like that and if you can get your head around that it's that that's not the experience that you thought you were going to have but it's the experience that you are going to have now because of whatever the situation is if you can kind of like get over

that most people are so incredibly grateful after the end of that that they you know were 10 hours behind what they thought they were going to be or kind of whatever it is i've always found a lot of meaning in that but i think that the common catalyst and i haven't always been successful at this the common catalyst has always been just give a lot of space especially for people who have the space they're not pushing the cutoffs or whatever sitting down in an aid station for 20 or 30 minutes just to like get your head wrapped around your new experience that you're going to have that's usually 20 30 minutes well spent as you know you can kind of like make that up over the course of the next you know 30 or 20 miles or whatever it is that time doesn't simply evaporate usually getting in a better mood that's enough of a rabbit hole y'all have been good sports about this um thank everybody for uh coming on the podcast today i hope the athletes uh that are listening out there now have at least a few things that they can put on their punch list in the last six or eight weeks leading up into a race it is getting that time of year right now my uh driving calendar with my van is now currently packed for like the next eight weeks so i'm super excited about i'm super excited to see y'all out at some races as well this year it's race season and if you're one of my athletes listening to this uh hit me up we'll talk about the gear that we haven't talked about yet

yeah michelle you have uh you have any uh messages for your athletes that are listening to this oh i think basically the same thing don't make the mistakes that i'm making right listen to everything i just did wrong hit you out all right thanks to both of you guys i appreciate it and he had to jump off a little bit early thanks to andy in retrospect this is really fun all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to coaches ajw crim malcolm and michelle foster for coming on the podcast today i could do this format for forever i mean i really have a good time talking to those folks and we actually have a coaching continuing ed going on right after i get done recording this outro and i can't wait to talk to them again about something right then and there i think we're going over an athlete schedule review or something like that i hope that this podcast provides a little bit of a peek into the window of what our coaching practices are like because i do feel like pulling back the curtain a little bit is extremely enlightening for the athletes and the audience out there and i hope that all of you that are preparing for the races are not only thinking about your longest long run like we talked on the podcast but also about some of the other things that you can do to enhance your race experience and take advantage of all of the training that you have done throughout the entirety of the process 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 Thank you.