Training Lessons from the Hardrock 100 with Coach John Fitzgerald | Koopcast Episode 137

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 we are going to do something that i have never done before and i've never done this before very intentionally we are going to talk about my training and the lead up to the hard rock 100 and i have to give a little bit of a background before we actually get into our conversation today one of the reasons in fact the primary reason that i've been so hesitant to do this and i know there's a lot of audience members out there asking we're asking me to do this after cocodona but the reason that i'm very hesitant to do this is that i understand that i'm a coach first and not an athlete and what i do for my training may not be translatable to the audience out there and the last thing i would want would would be just for somebody to copy and paste what i have actually done for my training on to them however this is a really unique situation because also in this year's edition of the hard rock 100 one of our fellow coaches and one of our crack coaches john fitzgerald was also in the race and he and i just happened to undertake two diametrically opposed training philosophies going into the race and i do not say that lightly because as you will find out throughout

the course of this conversation at almost every turn from how we handled our volume to strength training to cross training our nutrition strategies almost the entire run of show there were vast discrepancies and more importantly there were very specific and discrete reasons for those discrepancies and i think that they turned out very well because john and i both had great races out at the hard rock 100 so on the podcast today i'm bringing on my fellow coach john fitzgerald and we are going to discuss it we're going to shoot the stuff and talk about our own training and we're going to challenge each other on the on that training process at various points during this conversation all in a better way to understand how you can take some of these fundamental principles that we deployed and utilize them for your training i had a hoot with this this is really fun i did not realize how much differently john and i trained for this particular race until we actually got into the weeds of it i hope you all have a lot of fun listening to this conversation as well but most importantly i hope that you take away all of the fundamental nuggets of wisdom that we are trying to pass on that we learn through ourselves in training for this extremely arduous event so with that as a backdrop i'm getting right out of the way here's my conversation with coach john fitzgerald about our individual training processes for the hard rock 100

dude so it's fresh on your mind right you just got back to montana pretty fresh still kind of processing the whole the whole ordeal but yeah it's definitely quite the experience it's a run it's a big race right i mean it's like the whole course is no joke i mean it's yeah it's a big race i mean it's not a not a lot of runners what's the cap 160 yeah 145 145 yeah yeah so it kind of feels like a small event when you're actually out there but you know considering how long it takes people to get in it took me took me 10 years i thought it was 11 it said it was actually 10 10 years to get in so it's kind of a long time so here here's the like first piece of irony so what we're going to talk about is we're going to talk about both of our experiences training for and then running the hard rock 100 and we're going to try to relate those experiences into takeaways that any athlete can um can uh get can put towards their training and their racing but kind of the first point of irony is you first put in for this race it's 2012 and i can do simple math or 2022 so i can do simple math so if you put in 10 years ago it was 2012 that was the last year that i finished the race so yeah so there's the first point irony i've got two hard rock posters on my on my wall framed up on my wall one from 2010

which is the first year i finished the race and the second one from 2012 second year i finished the race obviously they're both in the same same direction but that's when you first started putting in and i remember when i first got in in 2010 i'd been on the i'd been applying for four years and i thought that that was just an astronomical weight to have to wait for four years to get into to to get into a race and and it was at the time you know 2010 you know it's not kind of the the hype isn't around it as much as it is right now but for for you to wait 10 years to get in it's kind of be almost becoming more the norm like it's still an astronomical amount of time it's a whole freaking decade right you're a completely different person a different man a different husband a different you know just professional like all across the board so to wait to wait that long and have it be the norm is just the kind of the first point of everything right it's kind of great but a small story to this and i don't know maybe i've mentioned this before i know a lot of my athletes know this but actually technically it took me five years to get in so i did get the name called year five um i ended up uh going to a close cousin's wedding instead of the race which i get a lot of crap for but um like my close cousin joey back in new hampshire he called me up uh and it was like he he really wanted me to be in his wedding and so i just i knew i couldn't go to hard rock and know that yeah i was missing out on my close cousin's wedding so mentally i figured that would be tough but

uh yeah they had since divorced so i think they were together for maybe about a year close to a year so so so there is a little bit of so it's technically five but i thought that that was my chance right five years and then i didn't i didn't accept it so then i was like okay i'll never get in so six years later no five years later um i get my name pulled again so wow well good for you well you're you're a better cousin than i am a brother because my younger brother's uh 40th birthday which is a big birthday uh was the hard rock weekend just this hard rock weekend and i told him i'm like jonathan my youngest brother's name's jonathan like jonathan i'm not coming to your birthday i will celebrate with you at another point in time i miss you bro i love you but you'll you get it unfortunately he's you know he's he he was a collegiate athlete as well so he kind of knows how important these things are so anyway maybe that just makes you a better a better a better friend and family member than i do but needless to say it's it's kind of like hard to get in the race and um i think this kind of brings us to our like our first circle around point right the fact that you waited a long time i i waited a long time it's like i said it'd been nearly a decade since i finished the race last from 2012 being my last finish to 2022 now kind of being being in the race and not that i was in a lottery every single year that's just the way it kind of worked out um but many other athletes kind

of go through that experience of where they're just kind of like waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting and finally all of a sudden they get you know the call whether they make it in the lottery or kind of come off of the come off of the wait list and then they usually have this like proverbial moment moment of oh my god what did i get myself into because it is a really big race and they do normally only get you know kind of one shot at their first one because of that waiting game and that kind of weighs on people and i kind of want to know from you like since you had already been through the process before and you thought that you like missed your shot like what did you think about you know getting in the second time getting in the second time around because you got in off of the lottery itself right you didn't get called up off the wait list you knew that you're in it once they pulled all the names out of the hat totally yeah i think part of it was just like just the allure and the excitement i think when you wait that long it just you know when you do get your name pulled it you know it's it's exciting right it's like you know and especially with having that chance i was like hmm shoot you know i think the odds are against me of getting in i had my chance but i don't know let's just see what happens you know and uh yeah i typically would do a hundred hundred mile race each year happened to be the bear which is how i qualified there and so i was like you know i'll just keep throwing the name in the hat and see what happens so but uh yeah i just tell athletes whether it's western states or hard rock or trying to think of any other big lottery uh races but you know if you're

really curious and interested in the event just just keep at it you know and i think there's there's you're gonna get that that jolt of excitement and that's gonna really help you out i think on the day quite a bit well and you had even more motivation than you're kind of leading on to because i feel like that and i didn't i didn't quite put this all together until i saw you and your wife hannah right before the right before the race where the timing is very serendipitous for you right because you've been waiting for so long and your wife is now i'm trying to do the i'm trying to do the math in my head six months pregnant is that right 24 weeks so yeah that's about right so she's doing no she was doing november right so this is i mean it's not like your last hurrah or whatever but needless to say it would be a little bit more complicated if you were to have gotten in the year after in the year after that but also it kind of puts you in a really cool position where she can actually be out at the race for you because i know she's a big part of your whole like support your whole support crew to where she can still participate in a way that's material to you and like be out there and be and be a part of the whole ordeal yeah no i 100 i think the time was was spot on i think also the energy i got you know from that too and i had a few athletes that have have kids and they were just like yeah you're gonna have this like you know uh superhuman strength out

there and uh you know knowing that you're gonna be a father and they're gonna be having a baby boy in november and and yeah 100 that was you know motivating for sure to see to see my wife out there i was out i was out in silvertain a couple weeks ahead of the race as well so it was actually i think a little bit even more special to you know see hannah the baby growing a little bit and all this you know a couple weeks you'd be amazed but uh yeah so definitely good timing and um yeah just really was excited to just yeah i don't know i just had this this energy in me but ahead of the race that was had never felt it before and whether it was the expecting a child in the fall or i just got in a hard rock i don't know what it was but it was just like it was a really weird feeling i've never felt yeah well it kind of i don't know it kind of puts the emphasis on making sure everything goes right right because you have this you have this race where it's extremely hard to get into from the get-go it's ridiculously arduous when you're in the thick of it and we're going to talk about that in a little bit like just how hard all the miles are to uh uh to kind of come by and it's hard for everybody i mean even the best of you know athletes out there i was listening to an interview with uh francois who was you know who was second in the race and he was lamenting about you know he was nauseous and throwing up and you know had all these kind of episodes and things like that and we tend to put these elite athletes on this

pedestal where they you know they don't have any issues but they suffer you know some of the same elements and in fact most of the same elements that everybody else suffers they're just going a lot faster when they uh when they do it but you had you know this added this added kind of like this added kind of fact where like i said the timing was just really was just really serendipitous and i don't know if you kind of like felt that in your prep where you're just like hey i gotta make sure that i get all this right or not so did that go into your like calculus at all or anything yeah there's almost less pressure like i don't know there was any yeah expectation or pressure even though there might have might have been a little bit but or maybe other people perceive that there might be because i'm you know expected father things like this but i think knowing that you know i'm gonna be a father you know i had my you know i had my brother out from massachusetts and and that's really what got me going i typically keep hundred milers pretty simple with just like one or two friends you know hannah and maybe a friend at the race but with hard rock i really wanted to kind of create this experience not just for myself but other people and that was that was kind of a new approach for me and so that really kind of fueled me it was like just seeing my brother come from boston just like jumping off the trees and the rocks just like with excitement knowing that they were out there enjoying themselves was what kind of kept me pretty relaxed and just like yeah i'm just out here you know just having having fun so yeah so less pressure than than i

thought there would be but that's cool let's talk about training a little bit and then we'll get into the the the race itself and i want to like i said like i said from the onset i want to use this as a little bit of here's what everybody can learn from our individual training processes which um i imagine are going to be quite different just kind of knowing each of our ramp ups into things although we're very similar you know runners at the end of the day with similar levels of experience and uh and and and talent so to speak but we had two different two two very different paths that i think a lot of people can um uh can can learn from so can you once you got drawn from the lottery can you try to like encapsulate how you um how how you approached the training process and then what you went through in those next several months and then i'll try to parallel that just to draw a little bit of the of the contrast of what we were both going through yeah definitely yeah so obviously super super stoked and excited to get in uh in the winter time here in montana so obviously it's winter montana montana really winter you have real winters by the way oh yeah yeah it's negative 25 for weeks a couple weeks at least every winter uh but yeah since moving back to montana from colorado in 2017 i kind of got back into winter sports i kind of stepped away not stepped away but i just lived in

areas where it's just more it was easier to just get out and run throughout the year um so yeah big preparation for me kind of started or continued it when i found out i got in with just continuing to to nordic ski um there was this temptation and maybe this kind of draw to maybe start running a little bit more sooner but i just have really enjoyed embracing the winter montana and just another sport um i've learned just a ton about myself but also just like enjoy it like i think that's the key with me and nordic skiing so i ended up skiing quite a bit i think the most i've ever skied this winter um i did quite a bit of racing as well uh i did a couple 50 kilometer races on the skis and then i ended up going up to canada for some ski racing as well but the idea with the ski racing was i knew hard rock was going to be event that um i was going to be using poles um so i i wanted to just have as much experience with poles as possible and i knew that being so far out from the event that i could leverage cross-country skiing to just develop a really big engine and get really fit and i knew that i didn't really need to be i don't know i call it beating my head against the wall just putting in tons of volume at that time so the other thing i wanted to make sure i did for hard rock was there's again this temptation i want to do more running and more just training in general but with it being a high altitude race i definitely wanted to make sure that i was going into hard rock fresh and not fatigued at all uh

coop you and i we did the no one's right i think it was two years ago yeah yeah yeah and just kind of reflecting on that experience i think one takeaway that i had well there's a couple but one of which is i went down there not acclimated the other one was i went down there with a bit of fatigue in the body uh the third one's just a type of an effort that i that i put out i think in the beginning uh that was just a little bit too quick for me so all those combined i think led to not feeling super great pretty quick uh so i i took that experience down on the nolan's route and i was like you know what i need to make sure that i get really fit far out but i need to make sure that i go into hard rock well rested and so i guess going back to winter so i developed the engine i got super fit uh skiing uh i took typically come off skiing like yeah just really fit like a lot of the routes i'll do here in helena running i'm typically the running uphill uh the fastest when i come off of ski season and the way that i approach the ski season is that i'm not just skiing so i ski probably about five to six days a week but i still maintain a pretty consistent uh workload of running so i'm typically running between 20 and 50k a week so the reason for that is well i have two very high active dogs that need to get out every day but the other one is i find that just keeping the connective tissue engaged keeping the biomechanics there um and just the feel for running so that the transition from

ski skiing to more running is easier um i've done it the other way where i've actually really reduced my running workload and i've skied just skied and i find that there's a longer transition period so i introduced uh just that foundation base of 20 to 30 miles every week throughout the winter just to keep that that base of running there so i found that as i started to transition as the snow melted as i started to run more um i had the well-developed engine then it was just a matter of keeping my patient hat on and just gradually building my run volume and at that point really i didn't start building my running until like mid-march so that was the interesting thing because i actually get a lot of comments from uh folks and the uh coaches athletes that i coach like i got a lot of comments like hey when are you going to start running when are you going to start training for hard rock and it was funny because that brought me back to actually when i got into western states and i got a lot of that from co-workers i got a lot of that from athletes that i coach and you know part of me was just like i am training like you know this is still training right it's just not specific yeah so they're just like oh my god like he's not running that much but i'm still putting in quite a bit of workload and i am and how i feel based off different you know routes that i have in town or what have you i trusted my body you know and i trusted that through that approach of of using another modality like skiing that i was keeping freshness and i was keeping the excitement for running there

so that as i got into running it was like i called like a kid you know it's just i just bottled up energy that i have a harder time tapping into when i'm just running more frequently so so i was in a good spot with that so a good base of skiing transitioned into running started to kind of get the long run up a little bit um uh so that was kind of like i had yeah started to build the frequency and then obviously the uh the long run duration the tricky part for me in montana is that the the snowpack kind of held on for quite a while up high so really it was harder for me to get up in in in the mountains in montana without putting on snowshoes or skis uh backcountry skis i don't do a ton of backcountry skiing um so i kind of utilize my trails here in helena which we have a great network right from the door but it's a lot of this like 1200 to 1500 foot climb kind of deal it's nothing that's like like what you have coop like 3 000 foot sustained 4 000 foot or more sustained climb so i had to be creative with that um so i i just made the best of what i had out the door and started to increase my vertical the other thing that i do that's also a little bit different i guess maybe than other runners might take is i i also utilize the bike in my training quite a bit um my i come from more of a multi-sport background i raced triathlons in college i also raced cycle cross and mountain bikes and so i have this history of i don't know if you want to call it cross training but biking and and so i find that uh i can leverage the bike as a tool in my training

it definitely does not replace my running but i find that i can use it to increase my overall workload within a week and for me i like to use the bike to uh specifically get out and do quite a bit of climbing uh i find that then again there's not like a lot of research on this which is interesting but how i how i feel when i increase the climbing on my bike compared to just going out and doing a flat valley bike ride i find that that type of fitness transfers to my hiking so then when i would go hike i would notice huh like i don't feel like i'm losing anything i feel if anything a bit stronger and yeah i really enjoy this so i i kind of kept the bike uh pretty consistent again it never replaced to run specifically but i used it to keep my overall volume up i also used it as a way to keep the density of volume there so instead of doing uh back-to-back long runs i would intentionally get out for like an eight to ten hour bike ride with quite a bit of climbing and then the following day i would get out for my long run where in in past i've done two back-to-back long runs say five to six hours five to six hours but i find that the cost of that type of effort running back-to-back led me to like i wasn't really feeling up for any type of intensity or volume until like say even tuesday or wednesday the following week but when i would do the bike run the cost was less so i would i would feel pretty good come tuesday or monday tuesday um so i i continued to keep that in the mix

pretty consistently up until i left to go to colorado to acclimate so so yeah it was this kind of big foundation of skiing in the winter slowly transitioning to to more frequency and increasing my running volume still leveraging the bike as a tool to keep freshness but also to keep the the fit the overall just engine and fitness there as i gradually got closer to the race i started to get in and more vertical was kind of the the gist of my training did you do any intensity with any of those modalities at any point in time yeah so with nordic skiing is probably the the highest intensity that i'll do at all ever so i i did 50 kilometer races so i look at that from a percentage of my threshold uh i'm working pretty freaking pretty pretty high uh not obviously not 100 but it's similar to like bike racing where on a lot of the climbs ski skiing you're going to be at pretty much your lactate threshold if not over and then you recover on the downhill so uh the the ski season was pretty much like if you were to relate that to running that was like a vo2 max or or lactate threshold kind of focus period um i would also do intervals uh running so as i transitioned to running i did do a 30 kilometer race here in helena uh so that was a don't fence me they actually used to be part of the la sportiva cup it's a fun race in the backyard that ended up being another threshold type effort so

that was in may so i was still doing quite a bit of intensity december january january february march i did the ski races up in canmore canada which is a ton of intensity 10k 30k 45 kilometer so i ended up doing a lot of intensity up really through may and then after the don't fence me in uh for a second week of may is when i really pivoted to more high-end aerobic work lots of strength the endurance work i really didn't do a whole lot of intensity after may 9th what were your maximums like your weekly maximum or your single session maximums yeah yeah that's the other one i get with the cross training because i the the overall running volume is never that high and i would and that's where i would get people like when are you going to start running when are you going to start training for hard rock because they might they would see a 50 mile week right they would see a you know a 60 mile running week i'm just talking about mileage you know hours might be a little bit different but i would say in general the average or my range is between 50 and 70 that's like my sweet spot for running my what does that equate to for hours though yeah i mean for hours that's going to be between eight and say 12 hours so not a lot but i might also do eight to 12 hours of biking so um i can tolerate a pretty high overall workload it just doesn't come in the way of just running so

if you look at and my my training is open on strava but if you follow my training on strava i was pretty consistent and frequent with about 18 to 22 hours a week in the like two and a half to three months out from hard rock what's the limiting factor though and you're not adding more running do you just not like to do it or you just feel like you break down or what yeah i mean i'm i'm a little bit of a bigger runner i'm about 165 170 pounds i find when i get my workload over 80 frequently consistently week after week that i just feel run down so going back to going into hard rock fresh mentally fresh i knew that i'm very much so capable of running more hours but it comes with a cost and i didn't want that cost to take away from that excitement and that energy that i wanted to give forth on the day so i kept my running it intentionally at a workload that i knew was like super sustainable but i made sure that the bulk of that workload came in the way of very specific type of work so it came in the way of a single session that might be yeah more hiking more vertical focus using the poles that kind of thing and then the cross training was more to just develop the engine and uh i was confident that with that say 50 to 70 miles that range i'm just saying mileage again to keep it simple that i was confident that i could keep my connective tissue and i could stay healthy and just how i felt with my long runs and and just overall training i felt very confident that

yeah i could i could do more and it was just in a good space and hard rock was kind of the focus the whole time right i mean you found out that you got in you didn't have or at least i don't think you had any kind of entered like anything in between february and then when was the lottery december and then december yeah december and then yeah so i didn't you know i didn't have any other uh i had a dump fenceman 30k again which was yeah 30k and that was just a two hour and 18 minute really hard effort i ended up doing a local 50 kilometer race outside bozeman old gabe which was the more specific from like the vertical gain and loss per mile but not i tried to keep it close to intensity but it was definitely a higher much higher intensity um and that was a yeah 50k just over 50k with 11 000 feet of climbing and that was like the big like mystery was like i didn't do 100 mile race i didn't do a 50 mile race i didn't go out and do 100 kilometer race so there was this question mark of like okay you're you're leveraging cross training as a tool to develop the engine you're not really running a whole lot like in the grand scheme of things uh for for a tough mountain is 100 and so what the heck are you doing you know again that's what i kept getting and i think part of it goes back to you know again there's not one particular workout there's not one particular block of training

that's going to be this magical preparation for for an event so i drew a lot of strength from the fact that it's it's taken me 10 years to get into this race and i'm a pretty consistent athlete i enjoy the heck out of getting out the door and moving and i've been doing it i've been healthy knock on wood for well over a decade and so i leveraged the fact that i have that that good strong foundation of consistent aerobic work over the years and it was just a matter of just being excited and enjoying the training i i bring that up with athletes quite a bit i think it's important when you're training for such a big event like hard rock that's taking you so long to get into is that it can be easy to put pressure on yourself to get out the door and do types of workouts that are like big and epic and that are going to like really break you down and build you back up but i wanted to make sure that the process was super fun for me and again going back to the number one goal of getting to the start line fresh and excited i knew if i could get to the start line healthy fresh excited and with people family and friends that i care about it's like it's not going to be a piece of cake you know that's like that's the that's the bread and butter the fitness has been it's it's been a preparation over a decade well that's the thing right you just hit the nail on the head right there is that a lot of the context around why that training process and specifically what i'm mentioning about that is the amount of cross

training that you're leveraging and the lack of races that you're leveraging right you didn't have any races in advance of this a lot of that is a byproduct of just the experience that you have which is not which is not trivial i mean you've been an endurance athlete for a long time how many years have you done the bear like 50 10 okay you've done the bear you've done the bear for exactly how many years that you've been waiting for uh hard rock so but i guess what i'm trying to say is is like you're no stranger to ultra marathons and you're certainly no stranger to mountain ultra marathons and you're certainly no stranger to training for these events and all of that all of that experience plays into this theme of i know how much mileage i can handle or how much volume running volume specifically you can handle i know that i don't need a race and that's all that's wisdom speaking right there right i don't need some sort of prerequisite workout or race or whatever in order to prepare for this thing even though it's unique to you you've never done the race before right you could be easily said oh i've got to go out and get on the first 50 miles of the course or kind of whatever it is like all that experience kind of plays through in this no i kind of know what i need to get to the start line healthy happy and excited about the proposition of you know getting around the loop around the san juans right yeah that's a good example yeah that's a that's a great point coop i get that a lot with athletes too it's like hey coach like you know how do i know like what is

that minimum amount of running that i need to get in per week you know i really do like to ride my bike i really do like ski mountaineering like i want to keep that in the mix like what's that minimum dose of running that i can keep in i'm like you know that's where a little bit of that art comes in like you have to that took me that's taken me many many years to figure out like what is that amount of running that i can do each week where i feel really good i feel fit i'm healthy it's sustainable you know and and yeah that that takes time to kind of figure out you can't just stumble upon it overnight so so let's compare and contrast a little bit because this is gonna be fun then you pepper me with the questions i don't care so you you had a program i'm gonna try to encapsulate the main themes here right you didn't start running until relatively late may or you didn't start doing a lot of running until relatively late which is may and i'm pointing that time frame out very specifically because i'm going to bring up my training in may okay very little running very very little running i'm not you know social media but strava is social media yeah we're not making people can look at it it's very little running up until may we're making we're not making this stuff up um so that's the first point second point you're leveraging a lot of cycling 50 50 or 60 40 60 running 40 and skiing right i'm just trying to get some general ballparks around but that's a big percentage of of time cross training yeah um you're getting to the race a couple weeks in advance but no other than that no prerequisite races or reconnaissance or anything like that

well a couple other well one thing to note with the getting there in advance that kind of went from the experience again with our no one's uh attempt and me not being at altitude my house is at 4 500 feet here in helena montana so i did want to set myself up for a chance at feeling hopefully okay above 12 000 feet or 11 000 feet so yeah getting down there was definitely i told myself if you're not going to jump into you know 50 mile training race that has quite a bit of climbing like get down there ahead of time get get used to the climbs get a feel for how nutrition is going at altitude so that was very much so part of my process going into hard rock was to get there in advance and again very lucky that i was able to get down there ahead of time for sure okay uh one other thing to note coop was that i did add in that i know that you and i go back and forth with this and i think it helps yeah it did help but i did do strength training uh i was really consistent with strength training really through ski season and i kind of leveraged it ski this again the ski training um and the strength training that would go with ski training for for the performance of my ski racing but then i found like i like how it went and so i just kind of kept it going one thing i did do is about a month out i started to taper that down so i really because like we've talked about quite a bit is once that volume comes up it's hard to really make the strength training worthwhile because you're just so tired so i ended up phasing out the strength training about a month

out but i did keep a pretty consistent strength training in there for about like i'd say five months at least what'd you do upper body lower body the whole shebang the whole deal i actually leaned towards a little bit of heavier weights i was doing quite a bit of heavy weight deadlift and squatting i also realized that with the trekking poles i wanted to make sure that my arms and felt strong and so i did yeah pull-ups i did push you know stuff like that just to keep a bit of that upper body strength and i did find that just anecdotally though with the race that i was using the poles i was really throwing my body weight over the poles and i was very happy that i used my pole skiing and then i also did a little bit of upper body weight because i have heard people that their upper body is just wrecked after a big mountain race using poles i'll i'll i'll throw back to that that's probably more more of your skiing training than any sort of strength training that's just so specific so need to say that's another compare and contrast we can talk about with the strength training side of things so we've got not a lot of running until may a whole lot of cross training some strength training up until the last month of the race and then a couple of weeks where you're out there at altitude getting acclimated to everything yeah and i know you'll do max men but my max running and i just mileage for simplicity was 90 i want to say it was like 93 like low 90s okay yeah and then my lowest was like probably 10 like again ski season like two two runs with the dog so 10 miles or something so that's a max man from the just the running standpoint so i had almost like

the opposite build where um when i got into hard rock i already knew and i i had already firmly committed to doing coca dona i did not think i was going to get into hard rock i did not i might have had one ticket one or two tickets or something like that i don't i can't yeah i did not i did not have a lot i can't remember right off the top of my head i didn't have a lot of tickets i was firmly committed to doing coca dona and i'd already started kind of like that process of of of getting ready for it and then i get into hard rock and it and my point with mentioning that it is very much an after afterthought so you can you can you contrast that with i've been waiting for 10 years every year my name gets pulled in the lottery and i'm one millionth on the wait list and i'm never going to get in and the next year i'm 20th on the wait list and i might get in and there's some anticipation you know that whole like decade of waiting that you kind of mentioned i didn't really have that that level of enthusiasm because like i said i had already committed to and kind of fully committed to doing coca dona and so my winter looked much much different to where you were embracing all of the snow sports you know skiing and all the cross training and things like that i was doing everything i could to get away from the snow because i had this race coming up in the early part of may which was a lot of running right coca don it's in the desert it's a lot of running yes it's very difficult but it's a lot of like you know just a lot of flat you know kind of flat running and i live

in colorado springs colorado and in the winter you know january february march we get a lot of snow we got like six inches of snow the week before coca dona the week before it and so i'm going traveling out to arizona during the same time that you're doing a lot of like skiing and things like that i'm traveling down to arizona in my van to get away from the snow so i can run more and slog up snow less and to kind of like perfectly encapsulate that i just had to pull this up while i was um uh while you were talking john the last week of may while you were on your skis and you know bundled up and trying to you know put in this as much time as much time as you can off running the very last week in may i did 165 miles over 34 and a half hours of running 100 running not one single second of cross training and it once again it was all in an effort to do this 200 and this kind of like 200 in in 50 mile race but my point with that is is my training by contrast especially during the winter phases of february march and april and then uh well february march and april was a lot of running and very little hiking zero cross training and a very small smidge of of strength training what i mean by a

small smidge is two times a week just on my everything from my waist up nothing from my waist that's how i divided it waist up i can do waist down because i was running a lot right i mean that that's kind of the theme that you're mentioning on the last month is it's very hard to put in i you know i'm doing you know between 20 20 and 35 hours a week for six or eight weeks in a row i'm pretty freaking tired by then my legs don't want to handle anymore running and it's all and it's almost all running and i say that i use that in a very mode specific way where it's not a lot of a lot you wouldn't get a lot of strength if you tried to do heavy strength training leg strength you wouldn't what would you get out of that with under 160 yeah i mean i would want to incorporate it like i'd look at times where i'd be like okay i can go in here and it was convenient for me to do it because i was using the gym and the sauna or i was using the sauna in the gym so i could easily kind of do it that way but i just never it was always last on the priority list and the last on the priority list always kind of like fell off the you know the the side of the wagon so to speak um so you fast forward that to after cocodona and you know this because you've been in our coaching meeting but also a lot of other that my other athletes that i've talked to and colleagues of mine that i've talked to well i was not motivated at all so if you contrast that with this like level of excitement that you were having that you were trying that you were like intentionally trying to preserve throughout the training process which i thought is yeah which i thought is a really a really poignant way to put it

my my my reserve of enthusiasm was completely depleted after cocodona the train the training process took a lot out of me emotionally like i feel i see you're saying after but what about during the process during the process i loved it during the process i absolutely loved it i loved packing up my van right driving down to arizona or out to i went out to moab once i went out to fruta a couple of times where the where i had a little bit more dry terrain access i absolutely loved the process in the middle of it but after afterwards after it was all kind of said and done i was just emotionally exhausted i didn't every time i saw my pack i'd be like i screw you i don't want to put you on like i had you on my back for so long yeah i don't want to fill up my freaking water bottles with scratch anymore i don't want the taste of a pro bar bolt i don't want to you know eat a waffle i don't want to carry my poles anywhere i don't want to put my freaking socks on to go run like every little element of the that reminded me of the training and racing process was just uh kind of an emotional drain and so and so much so that i was actually worried about that uh probably a couple of weeks after coco done i'm like i'm not very excited about running hard rock and that's kind of scary as you know right because you're trying to do everything that you could to preserve it i was like i'm not very excited about this and i'm about to get into a very serious ordeal here where this race is you know going to chew me alive and i'm not enthusiastic enough to to to to persevere so it became one of those things where um i wrestled with

how much training to do in between those two so to contextualize it coco donna was may uh may yeah may second second and uh hard rock was just july 17th or 16th or 15th or something like that um it's not that hasn't been that long since the freaking race i'm already forgetting what day the middle of july we'll put it that way billigized so that's not that that long in between right and so what i wanted to do is i prioritized to your point john this is a page out of your book i i prioritized my enthusiasm over any sort of training that i could do um i realized that i'd done obviously a lot of volume not a lot of specificity but a lot of a lot of training volume a lot of run volume and i could lean on that as well as the experience that i had out on the course and the experience that i had out of the mountains and that was going to be enough and that was going to be fine but i was not going to be fine if i wasn't you know if i wasn't reasonably i wouldn't say extremely if i wasn't reasonably enthusiastic about like towing the start line and having and having a great day out there so the the training process from coco donna to hard rock which under normal circumstances to kind of go back to what you experienced you're trying to do a lot of specificity at that point right you're trying to like you're trying to hike you're trying to do you know long runs you're getting out your poles you're all that other stuff you're you're doing

everything you can to prepare kind of for both the physicality and the psychological qualities of the of the race i kind of threw the physicality out the window and you know just rolled the dice on if i had enough you know physical stuff to complete the race and i really focused on the on more of the psychological side of things just to make sure that i was enthusiastic about suffering for that long right it kind of reminds me of like the athletes that do the grand slam where it's just kind of like you're just so much in this recovery slash yeah you're just trying to get your mind wrapped around getting back out there so soon but i mean just the the build into coco donna i mean you were putting in huge hours like that was just like inspiring but too just like i mean again my body would not tolerate that that has its own physical and mental toll just the training alone but then to finish 250 miles you've done torrey john yeah which is a whole another beast that's almost like a hard rock on steroids um to a degree yeah and then you go and do a race that's pretty different like i mean hard rock what's the vertical gain of loss per mile at coco donna uh it's like 110 yeah feet per mile or something like that yeah i mean a lot of the vertical comes later in the race but still hard rocks is dense you're climbing you're descending you're climbing you're descending so i could see where you were kind of leveraging trying to get your head in it as opposed to just getting out and trying to force your way through training well here's how here's how i knew it too and i kind

of course adjusted i went out to the collegiate peaks john you're you know familiar with that you and i spent some time out on the nolan's course and i was going to do because it's convenient to me and there were 14ers in my backyard so i was going to put together a weekend and do like columbia and harvard and yale and just kind of all those from the standard route i could get 4 000 foot climbs 4 000 foot descents in a very kind of easy session and you know i got out there and it was a little bit premature from uh from a weather standpoint like there's still a lot of snow on the ground which normally doesn't bother me like normally whatever i'm used to snow travel i'd you know live in colorado springs and i travel around snow all the time but for whatever reason in this plays into like the emotional training part of it i got out there and i'm like i do not want to deal with this i do not want to deal with trudging around in snow for the next two hours just so i can get to 14 000 feet and turn back around and trudge right back through this freaking snow field again like in that taught me like instantaneously that taught me right there i was like you know what i could go and i could like try to seek out all the dry climbs you know and try to be specific for hard rock and things like that but if this one little stupid trivial thing is irritating me when it would not normally irritate me that's a sign that i really need to i really just need to back off and so

that's exactly what i did you know i didn't do a whole i did some training i'm not gonna lie i mean i put you know i'm smart i did i did some amount of training but it certainly did not force it just because i what i found is is if the little things are irritating you if you try to make it that much more serious that's when it becomes really counter counterproductive so i just let you know the fitness sleeping dog lie and whatever fitness i built up into coconut i'm like all right this is gonna be good so it kind of the way that i've encapsulated it with a few different people is i had a lot of fitness but zero specificity so this huge base of training not only through cocodona but all the other years you know that you talked about you know very eloquently i had this huge base of training but not like hardly any of it very very very little of a percentage of it was very specific to hard rock because as you know for hard rock it's all hiking on the uphills and hopefully all running all running on the downhills and very slow hiking at that on the uphills it's not just normal hiking because the altitude is very very very slow i didn't have that type of specificity you know available to me i had a lot of flat running specificity and i just it kind of wrapped my head around being okay with that yeah i think that was a smart move to listen to your body when you know if you were to force through imagine if you just said screw it and just grind it through like dense specific training when you really didn't want to be out there that wouldn't be fun and then

you probably would have showed up even more tired and miserable and hating lives and things like that the ace in the hole that i had though is that i had two consecutive years of dnfing out there and i i really wanted to course correct that wrong and it retrospect retrospectively for this year at least that ended up being a blessing in disguise because i was not as concerned about running xyz hour 30 hours or 34 hours or whatever i was more concerned about just getting to like like what you were saying getting to the start line one piece enthusiastic about the proposition and just letting everything else kind of like take care of itself whereas previously you know i'm not the most pretentious person in the world about my performances or whatever but but you know when you've got a couple performances out there it's always nice to run not your worst certainly not your worst but you know try to like beat whatever you've done before and i've got you know history out on that course to to to earmark that to uh um uh to to a certain extent so i kind of threw all that out the window like i just you know i didn't know if it was going to take me 40 hour i thought it was going to take me about 36 hours ish but i really didn't know and i was okay with whatever finish that i could actually muster up because i wanted to first and foremost kind of correct the the dnfs from the years previous

right that was most most most apparent on my mind and do you think that helped you kind of going in with a little bit lower expectations from just this like i say simple it's not always simple to just do the loop and kiss the rock but to make that your your goal of just like well i think i think it helped but i i took a page out of something that you and the rest of our coaches will will will recognize very readily is i did not downgrade the goal to quote just unquote finish right i recognize that that is just as important and as significant of a goal as finishing in a very specific time or setting a pr or whatever like i do mean it when i say that the finish was just as important as any you know spectacular you know graded performance that i've that you know that i've had in my uh in my running career and i wanted to be very deliberate about that so i didn't get lazy out on the course i didn't get lazy in the couple weeks beforehand with you know my sleep or my diet or kind of anything like that like i just i wanted to make sure that i treated the the finish or the goal of finishing with just as much respect as i had with any other thing that i've kind of put in front of me even though i've done it before even though i'm experienced on the course

even all this other kind of stuff because i knew that we're going to get into that we'll probably get into this now i knew that the course is so hard that the instant you let your guard down is the instant that the failure points start to come into the equation oh yeah and it's unrelenting and there are innumerable places where you can let your guard down and have it and kind of have those and have those things happen i knew that because i'd been out on the course and i had i'd done that before and so it's not going to resolve into those same into into that same mistakes of thinking oh just because i'm a reasonably good athlete and just because i've been out here i can finish kind of whenever i could i was not taking that for granted at all right oh 100 and like we've talked about the course it's pretty relentless and you know it's nature of just up and down the whole way the altitude i'd say that the number one theme that i heard from runners post-race is is uh well handies came out a lot of runners had a hard go up and over handies to burrows which burrows is at mile 68 leaving at the new aid station animus forks at about 58 and you get up over 14 000 feet a lot of people it's at you know dark uh i think the leaders might have just got over there just as the sun or no it was definitely light out still for sure yeah yeah but um either way i mean just the altitude has a big

impact on the overall system the body hydration uh you know eating is a lot harder once you get up above 12 000 feet and uh i don't know about you but i definitely had some some issues out there you know i think a lot of athletes you know like wow you did great awesome job you were top 10 at hard rock but by any means it was not smooth sailing like i had i had a rough really really rough patch out there you know and that was the one thing i did going into the races i planted the seed weeks going in that you're most likely going to have a rough patch you are going to have a rough patch at some point right at some point but you have the experience you have the calm to be able to work through that you know and and that's the way i approached it even though i was in a pretty hard spot i didn't panic you know i didn't panic i was like it's okay okay you're you're not able to eat right now that's all right you can keep you can take another step and so i think it was that the mindset i had about just kind of like okay here's the low patch here's the struggle i'm not the only one going through this there's other people out there they're having a rough go at some point whether it's stuck in a storm or they can't eat or whatever it is you're going to be okay you know and i think it was just this like state of mind that i had that somehow it actually it brought me back to the nolan route too where i was really sick but uh i was able to just kind of work through it not with ease but

with just like yeah acceptance i accepted the fact that okay you know this isn't going smoothly i'm having a rough patch this is what 100 mile mountain ultra running is about is you're going to work through it and you're going to be okay let me ask you let me ask you this though because i'm gonna humble you for a little bit you've had other bad patches at races oh lots lots lots okay so yeah was it any different at hard rock compared to some of those other races and if so what was the difference yeah i mean it it wasn't different in in what was happening it was gi it was i was not able to eat i was throwing up so that was definitely it wasn't like my quads were blown or anything like this that's typically been my uh a limiter with me specifically with 100 mile mountain races just been able to fuel and keep energy um but it was just that yeah it was again it was the mindset that i had and the way that i the self-talk that i had through that that little patch was quite different than what i've had before did you intentionally cultivate that though because of those previous experiences or were you just kind of like looking at the course going i did i just know this is going to happen so i might as well start preparing for it yeah i think it was a combination of both it was a combination of experiences at altitude experiences at other 100 mile races the bear which i've had quite a quite a

bit experience at in some uh episodes where i was not able to eat and also have gotten quite sleepy um but yeah it was just a matter maybe it was again the whole this whole theme of the experience and drawing from experience that i have and running and racing and working with athletes and things like this that i was able to just keep uh keep calm and not not really panic and i think that helped me step outside of any narrative that i find in previous races that would start to kick in it's like oh my god you're falling behind or this is your race is oh whatever that none of that negativity came up so i almost looked at like by me not being able to move forward quickly or me not being able to eat yeah there was like positivity in it it was a really strange this is exactly what i expected it to be yeah i'm like this is okay i'm like i'm throwing up right now that that's totally fine perfect this is exactly what i expected yeah so again it could you know other folks could have taken it quite a different way and that could have been a lot more time out in the course working through it for me i was able to kind of like somehow work through it and then i was throwing down breakfast burritos and like it was a strange time that i say time it was probably probably lasted about it was probably about six hours yeah this wasn't just like an hour deal it was a six hour kind of i always move i've i've kind of adopted this phrase that uh justin ross uh imparted upon me

about a year ago when he and i were talking about uh this thing so justin's been a guest on the podcast before he kind of helped me craft the mental skills chapter of the book um and i'll i'll leave a link in the show notes to the to the podcast that he that he was on very very well known endurance sports psychologist awesome guy he's coming to our coaching group and done a number of continuing ads he's hopefully going to write this book i'll go to him into that hopefully he gets a hold of this audio clip go into it a little bit more but works with ultra marathoners and all different kinds of endurance athletes and he he would always say you have to accept reality but you can always work back towards optimism and what he meant what he meant by that is is in the middle of it when you're trying when you're puking and throwing up and you know for me personally i was really discombobulated and just dizzy you know and just trying just kind of like suffering whatever whatever your ailment is it's okay to go you know what this is what i'm dealing with right now i'm not awesome i'm not a good runner i'm really slow i feel like crap i haven't eaten in two hours i just puked up my last four gels on the side of the trail like if that's the reality it's okay to it's okay to like live in that reality for a second but you can always work back to here's how i'm going to fix it i'm just going to move down the trail and it's going to fix itself i'm going to keep going like you can always move

back towards that optimistic part and at the same time not fool yourself in the reality of the situation in the situation that you're in that you're in right there and i i used to before i met justin the reason i'm laughing at this um i used i used to always give this and i still do i give this quote to athletes is that it never always gets worse right at some point it's going to get better now that some point might be at the end of the race it might be 10 feet from where you're at right now but it never always gets worse so whatever you're experiencing right that right there and right right then and right there it's never going to always continue to to escalate downwards it'll get better at some point and i think kind of like both of those themes is something that you can for especially for a race like hard rock you can really kind of take the heart because even the best maybe outside of killian but even francois right as we were talking about earlier they're going to have these moments of hey my stomach hurts my you know this gel didn't go down well i got off trail that happened to a number that happened to me that happened a number of other people yeah um i think that that a certain degree like this acceptance of reality and that is not going to be awesome all the time is just a necessary evil of the process 100 if you're comparing your current reality or experience to this ideal right i thought i was going to be crushing it up up uh it is peak and now i suck but again that's

where we start to do how are we going to deal with the situation then it's going to be stressful it's going to be yeah you're going to so i think you're right on that just accepting the experience i also in my i was very grateful to have jeff rome uh a friend uh who ended up pacing me out there he was he's all he's been second at hard rock actually uh he lives in silverton and he was like super calm super relaxed like it's because he's been there he's been like oh this is normal dude this is normal bro it was it was so perfect you know to not you know be so fixated on just that the fact that i was throwing up or not feeling well and he brought up the fact that like oh it's super still right now or you know like so i think the other thing that some athletes can take away is if you're having a low patch you know that's not all that's there right there's more to your reality than just like oh i can't eat like you know the the stillness and the still night or the moon or whatever it was so i did use that to work through it and it was a matter of time he said he comes to the other side and i was eating burritos at six in the morning and previous to that you're puking everything up it was crazy i did go into the race and a lot of people were my crew were really i could tell they were a little nervous i went into the race with the idea that i was going to eat more solid food yeah and then liquid calories and i was actually surprised at how

long i held on to eating solid food um the idea with this was to if the thought of eating solid food sounds like a bad idea you're you're going too hard you're going too quick you need to slow down it's like a governor for you it was a governor so i was like you know eating bacon you know having a little bit piece of bacon having so up oscars i mean i was i was having a pancake and bacon up oscars which is pretty early in the race i had the the one mistake and that i made nutritionally was i had a milkshake at uray and i had it just i sucked it down too quick and then i was out of there so um if i would yeah kind of change a few things from a nutrition standpoint it would have been maybe a little bit more smaller bite-sized pieces instead of we can we can pull on that a little bit i mean i i i've always found that the biggest change that i make with athletes that go into something like hard rock and then western states has a little bit of the same flavor you'll have to excuse the pun but bad water it's it's very very similar to this is that they're consuming the same amount of calories total we're just dosing it in smaller doses and and trying to be really deliberate in those in those smaller doses and and kind of the reason for this and the long-time listeners not a long-time listeners podcast if you listen to the podcast last week

i spoke with meredith taranova which is just in advance of hard rock and that was one of the themes that came out of that podcast is that at high altitude races because your physiological bandwidth is taken up to a greater extent by the altitude you have you have fewer resources to therefore digest food and one of the consequences of that is having to take in smaller doses of calories because your gi system just can't handle it because of the physiological load yeah um but that's the thing that i took to heart is i would honestly john like you know you're talking about how much you're using your poles i had the very same experience of where i was like cranking on my poles but every 20 minutes i'd put two of them in one hand and i'd reach into my pocket and i'd take out two bolts and i'd just eat the bolts as slowly as i could like as absolutely as slowly as i could trying to like digest the calories as slow as possible with two poles in one hand and i just kind of like chug along like knowing i'm just carrying up you know dead weight at this point with my with with my trekking poles but i was okay with that trade-off because i wanted to take the calories in at a slower rate and in slower bits essentially or smaller bits yeah that i was okay with not using my with using my poles that much which i did leverage the heck out of the entirety of the entirety of the race yeah you have

to use your poles at hard rock yeah that's a big one yeah that's you did that from the start or you did that from the start from the very start yeah i mean i would say that i took some pizza in at animus forks and i took some other like bits and pieces of real food uh at uh telluride and uh uh and uray but the first kind of like real not meal so to speak i actually i actually hiked up handies with pizza so i ate this slice at animus forks which is formerly grouse and then i ate another slice very slowly of american grouse pass and then i descended and then i tried to eat it i ate pretty much the entirety of the next one up handy's peak and a couple of different fits fits and starts but that that's neither here nor there um let's get into this man so we've we mentioned the course is hard and i'll start on this one and i want to give you and then you can kind of give me your opinion on it it's hard because of everything and here's what i mean by that i know that sounds like stupid and cliche and whatnot but it's hard because you're at an average elevation of 11 000 feet it's hard because the climbing is very slow at times i mean even for the fast people you're going a mile or a mile and half an hour up some of those passes you're not covering a lot of the terrain comes but you have to earn the terrain i guess is what i'm saying there's very few giving what i would call give me miles right

where you just kind of just fall down or whatever the descending is hard as well in both directions it's very muscularly taxing because of this because of the steepness of it um it's also hard because there are weather considerations i got drenched completely drenched at one point total hail the people me and the people around me we hunkered down underneath the tree to like relieve our sails from getting relieve ourselves from getting pelted and and welted by by the hail that was coming down but in addition to that you can also contrast that with coming down into your ray and tell you right can be quite hot you know it's in the 80s which is which is hot in the summer and i guess my point with all that is is you get a little bit of everything and i know this kind of sounds like like bitching and moaning but it's it's kind of hard at every stage and there's not a lot of stages where you can there's not a lot of stages during the race where you can really back off and say okay i'm gonna regroup here because when you get to that instead of regrouping like any other race you can regroup and just still kind of muddle down the trail and chew up some miles you're regrouping and you're going zero miles an hour i think that i think that's one of the material differences is that everything everything is hard everything is slow and when you need to group regroup you can't it's very difficult to do it at any speed at all and you end up just sitting on a rock which i did a lot of times just sat on a rock and regrouped oh 100% coop i mean it's it's a race

where you can easily leave hours and hours and hours out on the course just because like you said you get stuck in a lightning storm or you know you you're not able to eat and you don't have power to go up hill so you go from one mile per hour to 0.5 or whatever it is you know um and i think that's why if you look at the history of the race i mean sure we've seen the times get faster but not significantly i mean they've gotten faster it's pretty pretty fast to see what they're doing but still there's such yeah 21 hours on there it's like what the uh they're taking advantage of every little section there to run the little dips but yeah it really is a race that you have to just prepare yourself the best you can for all the little elements that you're going to be up against um do you want to guess what my run walk and idle distribution was run idle so so so i know how how much so i have a 34 hour finish we'll just round the time where i'm giving myself the benefit of rounding down no way at 33 33 hour time um what my run time was what my what my walk time was and what my idle time was how many hours it's reasonably accurate yeah you want to take a guess at it i would say you ran 13 hours that's pretty close yeah 11 hours yeah 11 11 hours of running no way and that's pretty you're you're finding that's pretty accurate yeah yeah it's close enough i mean

it's not nine and it's not it's not 15 hours but yeah 11 hours of running okay so what do you think what do you think the walk time is how many logs and rocks you sat on yeah well i'll get so we'll get into that so i have almost three hours of idle time some of some of that is because you're just going so slow it's counting as idle right you're still kind of like moving along the trail but i mean i had you know i spent a good chunk of time in burroughs park underneath a blanket trying to like get my head to stop spinning i don't know how much time time that was specifically i'm sure some aid station volunteer can attest to how long i was yeah i'm sure i'm sure i got to do that before this but um um you know i mean it just goes to the point like you can look at that intellectually and say ah you could easily go three hours faster if you just don't stop well that's not entirely possible right just because it's so hard you're going to stop it you're going to have to stop at some point but what i really take away from that is is it's two thirds walking and one third running when you get down to the run walk distribution right i had 21 hours of running or sorry 21 hours of walking and 11 hours of running right go look at your training and see if that is the mode distribution that you actually trained for it's usually the opposite right 100 percent you know and 100 percent coop and again that that's where again going back to cross training

you might disagree with this and that's totally fine but i find that that that that transfers a little bit that not to say that biking is hiking or anything like that but it's definitely not running yeah you know and i think so if we're looking at a race like hard rock that has all these elements that has this distribution of you're not running purely running that much yeah you see folks come from all different backgrounds that do really well at a race like hard rock that don't run a lot in training yeah well because it's not running i mean here's the counter here's the counter like not that not the counter argument to this but like the polar opposite i was great at the running parts oh all the flat stuff pull creek i was great yeah i was great at pull creek i was great at any of the you know other flat there's just not a lot of them you know it's not even pull creek was like pretty boggy and like yeah but the downhills i could do right because i had all the run training downhills i could do i could do fine i'm a good downhills did you run that yeah i ran all camp birds those are if there are any i was fighting i mentioned this to several people basically from uh oscars pass so just after chapman uh for those of the unfamiliar that's not not that long into the race 18 miles in the race i was struggling from there all the way to burroughs park like it was just a fight every single freaking mile but my point my point with that is is is like when we're looking at we're really looking

at any race but specifically something that's very specific like hard rock we have to take a hard look at the mode distribution and then to your point john of how much cross training can actually matter determine based on that mode distribution does cross training or this type of training or that type of training make a whole lot of sense because it absolutely it absolutely manifests itself during the race and those are those people out there and there's going to be all of you know a lot of them are going to be listening to this podcast right here absolutely know that they were passing me on the climbs because i did not do any or very little specific steep hiking during trainings and during this during the descents and during the flats i could go and pass them back and it just happened to be that there's more there's a bigger percentage of time climbing yeah then there are then there are descending and flats and so over the course of a long race they have more advantage than i do because their advantage is a greater percentage of the whole so i mean that that's why i mentioned that is is that retrospectively i think it's important you know i finished in the top 20 right and i'm still have two-thirds walking two-thirds of the race that's crazy walking and so anyway we we i think of the so the listeners out there can take note of that and take a hard look at what you think your mode distribution

is going to be between running and hiking during a race and try to emulate that as much as possible because it does end up being a it does end up making a big difference huge difference and it all just to note it doesn't have to be a race that has a lot of climbing like bad water for example it's you know i don't want to say it's flat there's quite a bit of climbing at the end but there's a lot of walking yeah because it's hot yeah freaking hot as hell so yeah you know i had an athlete finish 10th female there was pretty stoked on that as competitive but we did a lot of run walk yeah transitions back and forth back and forth even though she was capable of continuous running it was like nope we need to get that transition dialed in so definitely looking at that breakdown i think is huge and and then again you know with a race that's so extreme like hard rock that you are going to hike quite a bit you know maybe there is a little bit of creativity with your approach maybe you do end up leveraging a tool like biking or maybe it's skiing in the winter for preparation you know i would say that that might replace a run session because like who just mentioned you're not going to run a whole lot so well but you got to look at good it's good better best right so best would be two-thirds hiking one-third running in my situation right if i could arrange all my specific training the last 10 weeks of the race two-thirds hiking and one-third running that would be kind of the quote-unquote best yeah past that what's the best right no wait wait good better best right what's better then i think you can kind of make this argument for maybe a type of cross training is better than running

because certainly running right if i just i've got an athlete that's training he wouldn't mind me mentioning this he's training for tour de jean and he lives on the island of anguia which nobody's ever heard of it yeah exactly exactly it's it's in the caribbean it's it's 14 miles long and three miles wide it's very very very tiny yeah very tiny islands part of the bruce territories and uh he's training for tour de jean which is way harder than hard rock way harder sorry everybody finish hard rock tour de jean's way harder um and he has to do a lot of creative training we've got him on the step mill we've got him doing you know hikes around the island and kind of just whatever whatever he can do but i guess my point with with that is is the better part of the equation you can look at what other activities might be more specific to that hiking mode and i would say certainly flat level running is one of the least favorable candidates for that in terms of specificity to the mode of the biomechanical specificity to that to that specific mode not that it's bad right i would still say that that's a good option if all you here's my case right i basically ran because i was training for cocodona that's that's a good a good option from a time standpoint too yeah right like from an energy expenditure we're going to go run for an hour yeah so just a general way to get fit running is a good option but if we're trying to get more specific to the mode think outside the box

you know like you said maybe it's a day a week where you're doing the stair master which there's some crossover to the muscle engagement and the type of yeah the type of muscles that you're going to be using that crosses over to hiking yeah i i i think that that's uh that's worthy consideration in races that have such a large percentage of hiking as part of the mode i don't i don't know if i would i mean this is get we're getting outside of the box of hard rock at this point which is i don't know if i would say that for like for your example of bad water right like i would rather just have somebody do a run walk on flat level terrain than trying to induce some sort of like kind of like cross training because of the biomechanical specificity but for something where hiking is a very specific part of the mode and if you've got other modalities that can better emulate hiking as opposed to flat level running i mean that's a logical substitute at that point in my in my estimation yeah well and the other one why i went to the bike as well because again i wasn't able to access high country so i was only my climbs of order to actually hike or run for 20 minutes but on the bike i could grind away for an hour uphill you know so the muscles that i was engaging for an hour compared to 20 minutes yeah it just made sense um another athlete that i actually follow quite a bit you might know him troy howard yeah he's run hard rock quite a bit he's done quite well there and i remember

listening to a few interviews with him and he comes from a similar background where he actually uses the bike quite a bit in his training um he says he goes out and he rides up mount evans he does you know well over 10 000 feet of vertical on his bike and again it's all anecdotal there's no research that we can point at that says hey biking is going to transfer i'd love to see that research and hopefully that comes about because i'm seeing a lot more athletes in the ultra running world that are leveraging these tools so it'd be interesting to see what is that crossover what is that transfer of fitness from that other mode with these extreme races that the breakdown is definitely leaning more towards hiking um and when we look at the top three or dakota i think dakota skis i don't know but francois obviously spends a lot of time on skis but uh no it's it's an interesting subject and i wish it's not easy to do research on but i'm sure we can get some subjects yeah but you can take the opposite approach and say those athletes don't do very well at a running race like western states right so it's got to be so you have once again i think the key with this with evaluating this is looking at how what the mode distribution is how important that is in the actual race in terms of what percentage are you spending doing this mode or that mode right and then looking at the kind of the training arsenal that you have and figuring out if there are activities outside of running whether we want to call them you shouldn't be calling them cross training at that

point right whether there are activities outside of running that are just more biomechanically specific to the mode in question that's the way that i would evaluate the problem is is it not okay is cycling good or bad right i would say is cycling appropriate given the mode that the athlete is actually going to race in and i mean you can look at the mechanics of that i mean that's not although you're right john the research hasn't been done to say now if we have a cyclist training 10 hours a week and runner training 10 hours a week and cycling and runner training 10 hours a week and running how are they going to perform in xyz you know condition or whatever but you can look at the biomechanics right i mean there have been a lot of biomechanical studies at different grades that's very well established research and trust me as somebody who's looked at a lot of the biomechanics of cycling there's a lot of biomechanics out there where you can look at that and say okay your hip angle's this your knee angle's that your foot angle is this is that equivalent to uphill grade kind of x y or z and the general theme of that is is it's not too far off i mean it's not exactly but it's it's certainly i would say it's certainly more biomechanically specific than flat level running once you get above about a 10 or 12 percent grade yeah and everyone we're talking about uphill not downhill that presents its own unique situation but uh but that's an interesting point time spent hiking was really high and you didn't do a lot of hiking the only thing that i sucked at it too man i'd do it the only thing that you maybe could have done

i think we're kind of in hindsight here but looking through the trees is you could have maybe split your training so maybe done a little bit less specific cocodono training and incorporated you know say 50 50 cro shoot i got hard rock i've got cocodono kind of like how killian is approaching his whole craziness with doing you know 100 mile race there's a gamma hard rock sears and all UTMB this whole thing right how do i how do i kind of you know train for these these changes of intensity changes of terrain but maybe working in two sessions a week where you're hiking well farther out yeah here's the deal though like i was okay with taking a little bit of the performance off of the table for hard rock i was okay with that because i knew that i i was just prioritizing cocodono a lot higher on the list because it was a novel race for me you know i hadn't done it before it was only a second year race i was really excited about the proposition of doing it and so i i get what you're saying i did think about hedging my bets so to speak in that in that fashion but i was okay with the ding that i was going to take and that's a conversation that i had i just had that conversation with an athlete the suit the one that i had right before i got on the phone with with you john to record this yeah we had the exact same conversation you've got these four races lined up where do you want to take the compromise because we can tailor things this way or that way they're not all that similar and you got

to tell me how you're prioritizing them and and i think that's an important conversation to have because we're not all as talented as killian can just kind of go win everything irrespective of whatever else is go is going on like i can apply specificity it's gonna and it's gonna matter and it might matter at the at the detriment to to something else down the line right 100 percent yeah what would you do differently i mean what i'm going back to nutrition i think the big thing that i took away was i would not down a large milkshake at urae um no i i really would still take in solid food i would just do the nibble nibble uh smaller actually kelly uh from rad boulder she was actually giving out little quiches at the start oh i saw that i did have a little quiche but that concept of mini little pieces of food i would take that in the heart instead of just like having like slices of pizza and just big things of food uh i would just break them into small little bite size nibble nibble sip sip man nibble nibble sip sip i just went a little bit too aggressive with uh calories at once so yeah it's never going to be perfect man i mean you know as experienced as you are you're always going to be able to look back on things and find ways to optimize it so all in all though i mean i i know what type of runner you are because you're gonna have run together for

so many miles totally you could probably go a couple hours faster but your first your first foray out there that's about all you could expect you know right totally yeah first experience so i think it'd be cool to go back and do it the other direction and see what we can do what are you going to impart on to your athletes after all this oh i know what i wanted to talk about um one of the things i'm sorry i'm just completely like losing thought it's like coming i just mentioned yesterday i had like a hard time intellectually like just working yesterday maybe it's trickling in trickling into to today one of the things that i that kind of i went that went underappreciated since we've been talking about cocodonna and tour de jaunt um with my race uh specifically is because i had those experiences which are far longer and more arduous and you're kind of just putting yourself out there for a longer period of time than hard rock and specifically with tour de jaunt where i was really suffering for like nearly three days just having a really hard time out there when i got into a bad patch at hard rock i'm like okay i've only got 40 miles left like that's like whatever that's gonna take me 20 hours at the very most like that's not that big of a deal like i that's i've suffered for like way longer than that so the scope of like how long you can be miserable for like my scope on that

has changed because i remember the first time i did hard rock like kind of how you mentioned the first time i got into a really bad patch the only thing i can think of was i'm only here 50 miles or whatever it was i've got 50 miles to go i'm going one mile an hour i'm not going to make the cutoffs like that that was the logical thought process because i'd felt so bad and not and not oh i've done this before and never always gets worse i'm eventually going to work myself out of this bad patch and it'll be fine i just didn't have that yeah you know that that scope of experience to actually realize that the first time out of the gate and this this time i actually did to where it didn't i was really bad up handy's peak you just ask anybody who was around me at the time i was really bad really really bad i loved it your split because they have splits and i was really bad and we had like the same exact split from uh we were both really bad you finished you must have been hurt i was i was really bad up up up up up up to speak but it never bothered me because i was i had the experience of being way more miserable for a longer period of time and having a long a lot longer to go i was just like okay i'm just gonna friggin sit on this rock for a bit and then i'm gonna get up and i'm gonna start moving down the trail very slowly well and just like we touched on earlier it's acceptance you're accepting that hey this is the experience that i'm having it's this is okay yeah you know that can save you so much time and make it kind of enjoyable too even

though in the moment you're like oh my god so okay so let's get back to what were we going to part in part on our athletes after this experience you your first time doing hard rock me my third time doing hard rock both very different end points that we were coming to to to for for what was at the end of the day not that dissimilar of an experience we're both terrible up at hard rock we're only separated by a couple of hours or whatever but what are you going to ultimately kind of take away from this to impart on your athletes yeah well i mean just like getting into the race because i have a lot of athletes that i work with that maybe it's not hard rock it's you know western states or UTMB you know it's an event if it's something that you really care about and you want to do is to keep at it you know it took me 10 years to get into the race and so i think that's important to kind of have that just to kind of persevere with that like yeah throwing your name in the hat and maybe it's not maybe you miss a year that's fine but maybe you get to get out on the course and run the course or something like this so i think just like keep that like that no quit kind of stick with it attitude of trying to get into the event because i think that that that provides a lot of energy once you do toe the line it's just yeah it's it's pretty special once you do toe toe the line and then just like we've touched on coop i think you're gonna you know you train to kind of minimize the the odds of a low patch happening or things like this but it's there's a good chance it's still

going to happen and i think just being accepting of the fact that you might feel bad you're most likely going to feel bad at some point and just know that you have the the mental skills and the tools to be able to work through it and i think that's that's part of the game you know that's what i got from hard rock is that everyone out there i didn't talk to one person i said oh nope it was smooth sailing the whole way up felt great no way you know so i think if you can plant that seed going in it's going to make the experience that much more enjoyable you sound like such pessimists but that's the thing that i came that i kind of came to the conclusion with as well and i kind of came to this in advance of the race and that it's it's never perfect your training is never going to be perfect your preparation is never going to be perfect the week before the race when you're traveling out there that's not going to be perfect your luggage might get lost or you know you might not be able to find your perfect you know gluten-free organic soy-free lactose-free pizza in advance of the race that's made with unicorn tears or whatever you know specificity that you want to put on your last meal like all like it's it's it's it's never never never going to be perfect you're always going to look back and find something that you can improve upon something some kind of like bump on the road but the point of training to to ping off of your theme john is to be good enough to deal with those imperfections and to have them not turn

into catastrophic events that's really what you're trying to do with training in an event like hard rock where finishing is the goal it's the goal for everybody except for a very small handful of people in the race maybe three on each side of the field the women's in the mid side of the field for everybody else training is about trying to minimize the damage and trying to minimize the amount of impact that those small imperfections wherever they are whether it's during the race or during training actually have on the race itself and certain people you've got a lot of bandwidth right we we're both very fortunate that we're reasonably talented endurance athletes and ours have ours we can still get a 48 hour finish and be far from perfect and it would still be very very very hard and not everybody is in that position but irrespective of that i think the point of training is to make sure that all those imperfections don't mount up to not finishing a race that at least you have enough wherewithal to cover them up so to speak yeah showing up every day what's possible what kind of you know i bring this up to my athletes all the time what's possible i don't know let's go find out yeah there you go there you go so yeah awesome man are you gonna go back oh i got to i have to i've got to do it in the other direction man just like you i know you feel the same way we got to do it it'll be like another decade we do it in both if it's a decade from now and we both get our second shot at doing it

the other way let's just run together that'd be sweet well i ran i ran around a lot of really good friends and i didn't get to run with a whole lot of people i ran with a lot of really cool people but there were some people where i'm like i didn't see you the whole race and you finished like 10 minutes behind me like jamil right and it seemed the whole race you finished like you finished like five minutes behind me well you know we could have run the whole race together and had a lot of fun this is we ran for like what a half hour at the start or an hour is it not even that much anyway well congratulations john first one is always a big one man you crushed it out there i'm super stoked for you and uh i hope everybody got something out of this podcast but i hope we get to do it in the other direction as well at some point totally that sounds awesome nice work all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to john for coming on the podcast today and i don't think anybody realized this but john was literally one hour removed from returning to his home in montana from the drive back from hard rock so for him to get up and do this podcast with that short of a turnaround kudos to you i think both of us were a little bit uh intellectually hamstrung with all of the sleep deprivation and the physicality that we went through over the course of the weekend congratulations john on your finish and your first hard rock finish it was a great one and i'm sure you had an excellent time out there also thank you to all the fans that were out at the

hard rock 100 this weekend i cannot tell you how many times i was running around the course on every single section and somebody would say that they're a listener that they're a fan of the podcast that they're a fan of the book and i never ever ever thought i would have an experience like that where i would run around a course for over 30 hours and hear these constant words of encouragement that were emanating from you all the listeners that all take in this podcast each and every week so thank you thank you thank you i'm very humbled that this has had an impact on your lives and on your ultra running careers and your training i i'm just kind of beside myself when i get all this feedback that is it for today folks if you like this podcast please feel free share it with your friends share it with your family share it with your training partners as always this podcast is brought to you without sponsors and that is so people like john and i can talk about our training in a completely unadulterated fashion we're not going to be sponsored by pizza companies by pancake companies or baking companies or anything like that we're going to call it as we see it that was my promise to you since the inception of this podcast and that reigns true today appreciate the heck out of each and every one of the listeners and as always we will see you out on the trails you