How Mood Variability Affects Ultramarathon Performance with Paul Burgam PhD | Koopcast Episode 140

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your humble host coach Jason Koop and this episode of the podcast is going to be specifically aimed at the second half of the racing season and one particular aspect that i think goes unheralded in how to prepare yourself for the races and that is how are you going to manage your emotional energy your mood and your attitude throughout the race for yourself and also how you can tailor those expectations better for your crew so they can help you out the most so on the podcast today i have paul bergam who is a PhD researcher at durham university and in september of 2021 he wrote a fascinating piece of research that caught my eye that is entitled reduced mood variability is associated with enhanced performance during ultra running and i don't need to cut through any of the scientific jargon this just means if you have a more even keeled mood you're going to perform better and so i wanted to bring paul on the podcast to discuss the results of that particular study and more importantly how we can apply them to our attitudes and how we approach racing today ultra running is extremely difficult we don't need to make it even more difficult by having

these shifts in mood which are all too common out on the race course today and y'all know you've seen it you've seen runners come into aid stations all frazzled and discombobulated and make no mistake that is time out on the race course that simply evaporates that type of energy is energy nonetheless just like the physical energy that it takes to climb up and down mountains so with that as a bit of a backdrop i'm getting right out of the way here is my conversation with paul bergam all about how mood variability affects ultra marathon performance thanks for coming on the podcast today i appreciate it um i'm always i'm always a little bit remiss when i bring people on the podcast who i've written about their work before and i haven't actually had like uh like a conversation with them in advance um it's because it's always a treat it's always a treat for me because when i write articles that go out in our newsletter or even when i produce social media content i'm very selective about the research that i mention or the research that i use to frame up a particular argument or whatever because as you know there's a lot of research out there and some of it's great and some of it's garbage so i don't i try not to grasp at straws as much as i can so whatever i actually get to get a hold of somebody whose work that i've written about in kind of almost in

arrears so to speak it's like equal parts uh it's like equal parts honorable on my part that you'd come on the podcast but also a little bit terrifying because i want to make sure that i've represented your work that i have repurposed in some form or fashion the most accurate way possible yeah well i must say i obviously i read the article um before we sort of touched base and um it was great because it was it was your interpretation of what the meaning might be in real terms you know in terms of coaching and um strategy which is the part that we really want to get to you know and exactly but you can't always make those claims as clearly you know without stretching the bounds of your your evidence somewhat so it's it's nice to have conversations on what things might mean that you can't necessarily i've always described coaching is we we create logical extensions of the research right because we can't treat our athletes like research subjects in almost all cases in some cases you can get pretty darn close because they're all individuals but what we try to do is we take the research is we take the research and we create best practices around those research that's what i mean by logical extension of the research however in the in the area of the this broad umbrella of sports psychology and how to apply that into an athletic content uh context that's where i think we're

creating the largest extensions or the longest extensions and and that's not to say that that's a bad thing i think because you got to do you got to work with you know the cards that you're looking at in front of you right and if you've only got one card you got to kind of like guess at the rest of them um but i i think it just goes to say to show how how complex some of these uh issues are and i think we'll get into that a little bit in in throughout the course of our conversation but before we before we dive into it too much just so the listeners can know you a little bit a little bit better can you give a bit quick background on yourself and the type of work uh uh that you do and what you in what you do for a living yeah so um as of now i'm just coming into my final year of a PhD in the psychology department at durham university over in the uk and um i'm also a member of um durham arctic uh multidisciplinary research group so i'm currently studying um the resilience of polar expeditionists so people are doing really long distance endurance activities real endurance there wonderful um or polarizing constructive resilience which will be a whole of the um we go down that road um and i must just if you don't mind give a quick shout out to some of my colleagues in durham arctic who were having a social get-together this evening and a great bunch

of people over in durham and i'm here at home uh right now so some wonderful people um but prior to that um i was very lucky to get a scholarship um i was an undergrad when this study was created that we're going to talk about tonight and um i met my wonderful supervisor he's still my second supervisor right now um professor dan smith and he's a very keen runner like myself um as i say an average ultra runner myself um love to run long and sort of see you know what are the things that will stop me running what's the thing that makes me stop and um a great fascination with kind of introspection maybe the simplest tool of a researcher to think what am i thinking what does this mean and so on and so thoughts and and just tracking back a little bit prior to that um quite open and honestly um and as i mentioned before we started jason i was a carpenter in a former life working construction but i'm also very open about some mental health challenges um with depression and um alcohol and running has been my um freest expression throughout life from being maybe 11 year old and so i kind of came into um distance running as just not for competitive reasons i was a rugby player that was my primary sport but i've always ran since being 11 um so i'm quite blessed i've got to study

the things that intrigue me massively um and i'm still like a boy in a sweet shop that i get to say my day job is studying these fascinating things and people um and just some in terms of my own experience i've probably ran about 20-25 ultra marathons um longest race is 160 mile um you know single single um continuous ultra marathons over in the north york mowers um and one really curious experience which was completely wainwright's coast to coast which is a 200 mile journey across the hills and fells of england barefooted and that was a ridiculous idea why i decided to wear no shoes on that one but these were all things about me wanting to to explore my own limits and um so on and so forth but forgive me you said this was a short intro and i probably took part of the show already it's all good no i always i love bringing on people who are they're kind of living their passion and it's important for the listeners to know like many of the academics that i bring on the show they are also authentic endurance athletes and part of the reason that they get into academia much like yourself is they're trying to solve questions or answer questions that they themselves as an athlete have had come up throughout their athletic career maybe even continue to come up throughout their athletic career so it's it's it's interesting this this story that you just told that has unfolded a

very similar way amongst almost every single academic type that i that i bring on the podcast and i just think it's fascinating that's reassuring as well jason i must all say in terms of the research um that that kind of intrinsic understanding of races to you know to be a researcher a field researcher asking people to do things in the middle of these races really interesting if you're not from the field then you go into a race and try and get a response from people under significant uress it's a really interesting experience i'm sure well okay here we'll we'll put a we'll put a point on uh that aspect with uh a conversation that i've had with a sports psychologist in the field and the listeners of the podcast will recognize his name uh one of the sports psychologists that i lean on a lot as a man by the name of justin ross uh who just happens to be proximate to me in in denver colorado and um he he's also an endurance athlete and he and i have this like standing bet that we have yet to resolve where we're going to go out to the leadville trail 100 and we're going to sit at the aid station at outward bound which lies at about 75 miles of of the run and we're just going to observe people coming in to to that aid station and figure out who drops who drops there and who continues on and we want to observe them in this fashion almost like you did with your study where we're asking them

things about their emotions and who they're running with and all these social social psychological types of factors that they're going through they're in no way or shape or form related to the physiology and the reason we want to do this is is we've we've both had this experience where we've seen people drop out at that aid station get back to their hotel rooms and immediately regret that decision because they realize that from a physical standpoint they could have gone on there were something else outside of the physicality of the race that prohibited them or convinced them to drop out at that one point and you very much did that with this piece of research that we're gonna that we're gonna talk about here and so for the listeners i'll leave a link in the show notes the title is reduced mood variability is associated with enhanced performance during ultra running and if there ever was a simple title to a research paper that just went right straight to the heart of the matter and also correlated to that story that i just mentioned it's this one right here a lot of times you read the titles and you're trying to figure out what they're about this one is actually very very simple so to to start out with can you describe to the listeners what you were actually doing in this piece of research and and and the type of research that you were doing uh uh to to to to start to solve this problem yeah so so it's worth following on from your point there that um some of my thoughts and the design of

this study came from competing in um different hard members races and um actually inspired by some very good running friends who i won't name but if they listen to this probably know who they are exactly um who are fantastic runners and should complete lots of races and often don't um potentially because of the psychological aspect more than the physiological the running ability and so on and so forth and that was something that really intrigued me versus other runners who you know on any other day um shorter duration races there would be a massive difference between them in terms of ability and just the longer the duration the more that seems to narrow and the you know the psychological aspects becomes more and more important so that was something that really interested me with with the the study and i'd um i'd been lucky to um as a my first study was looking at navigation abilities of experiencing and experienced uh trail users um to look at their ability to navigate it was based on this famous study with the hippocampus of taxi drivers in the uk that the ability to do this was a lot stronger in people who regularly were out there doing it and uh so that that actually showed me that it may be feasible with this great community to ask them to do things that you maybe wouldn't

which the simple thing is asking them to complete survey measures in the middle of a race rather than just pre and post and that was the critical thing in the literature of looking at that of this we've got to measure before a race and after a race and we can see that things like fatigue increases um you know vigor declines um a lot of studies with similar measures to what we use here on on mood scales um but not what goes on in the middle and what might influence people to to quit to have a dnf um so on and so forth so that's when i i realized there was the opportunity to try and get these measures however i must mention the first race i did this one and there is a pre-print a pre-print that didn't make publication because i did this with the 110 mile race twice and i actually had them complete measures at six six checkpoints throughout the race um through a 110 mile race and it was a 40 item measure and i wince as i say that now and basically we only had five finishes in that race because the attrition rate was so high so it's another problem with field research right your participants drop out in the middle of it oh absolutely i think i went for something like you know 25 starters to five finishes in the end of the race um but there's a piece of work out there in the public domain on that one as well um and in effect we want to look at things like so so tension has been mentioned in some

studies about what's going on um but wondering whether whether this you know whether this was throughout the race or whether it dissipated fairly quickly was it pre-race anxiety um the effects of things like tapering on runners and what their mood state might be these were some of the things we were kind of broadly interested in but it was a really exploratory study in terms of can we actually get the data within race as well and then that simple association a correlation of will mood state changes correlate with performance of runners and we were also interested in whether certain moods might be important so literally talks about you know anger and depression has been really really negative things to see coming up in a runner's profile um but we didn't we didn't find any significant results within the race for them but what we did have was this pooled measure um so just so i'm not kind of um lumping this in together too much um the brums measure which is a brunel mood um survey is a 20 item measure that measures six um different categories um of tension or anxiety depression depression anger fatigue confusion and finally the more positively valence one or vigor and what you can do is create a sum score to basically the five negative um moods get sum together

and you take off the score of the positive one and it gives you a mood deviation across the race and this was kind of the the finding that the titles associated to that was as you've said yourself is quite a simple finding that those who had a bigger fluctuation in the race with mood more variability performed worse and people who were um lower on that finished the race quicker and there's so many reasons that we can obviously talk about for why that might be the case and what i would say really clearly is mood regulation is one piece of a massive jigsaw puzzle but it's a piece that's worth considering and i think that's you know not making large claims on this paper but it it's healthy for it to be taken into account by runners and coaching i'm aware it's something that you do obviously yourself but i wonder you know a lot of runners still it's still like the dark arts somewhat in terms of you know psychological support and uh so on and so forth jason well so much so often runners have a tendency to put an inordinate amount of time around the physical aspects of their race and it kind of becomes the and i think a lot of this is just that's the easy part right i mean not that the training is easy but it's easy to conceptualize hey if i'm doing 100 kilometer race or 100 mile race or whatever i've

got to run a lot i've got to put a lot of physical uh effort towards that but really what we end up seeing is is there's a very small physiological sphere which everybody sits in once they get to the start line it's really not that big doesn't matter whether you're looking at vo2 max or power lactate threshold or any sort of you know very classic cardiopulmonary or physiological variable but then when we get to the end of the race they're separated by double sometimes two and a half times in terms of the performance and that and the reason i mentioned that is that solely cannot be explained by physiology right if physiology were the sole explanation for things they would stay within the the finish line separation would be the same percentage as their physiological attributes at the start line and so then we enter all of these other variables in and it's kind of like well duh yeah of course if you have a better you know outlook or less mood variability of course that makes a difference but what was really interesting to me in this particular study is the way that i the way that i interpret it was how well defined that point actually that kind of like point of inflection was and then how dramatic the difference it was from person to person and how well it tracked with the the kind of the ultimate outcome but then when i think about it it kind of goes back to that initial point that i just mentioned is

that everybody's fairly homogenous on the grand scheme of things from a physiological scale and this ends up being the big the big separator so did my one of my questions for you did you expect it to be that telling when you were looking at people's mood variability and how well it was actually going to correlate no no honest answer um there was a there was a i guess there was a my inclines were were intuitive from um um personally speaking being quite an angry person in the past and i'll just go on a little segue here that is relevant because so the first time i um i came into ultra running and uh prior to that played some professional level rugby um and i'd done long distance walks of well the span of europe and and um and i came into ultra running very much that um well if i want to run 160 miles i'll run 160 miles with a very naive um viewpoint and so i went from running a marathon to 100 miler to 160 miler in three races got to the 160 um and i take band trouble at 55 miles and being a rugby player so this is maybe an interesting point in terms of specific skills and context uh where um there's a lot of um testosterone um anger aggression so on and so forth i thought that i could use these traits to get around

160 mile race and i had knee trouble at 55 and i got 120 miles and i was completely finished i was finished mentally yeah because i completely depleted myself um i just expended so much energy surpassed the physiological and when i looked at the top runners the people i really respect in the uk ultra runners they're in a place of complete stability so this was anecdotal but this was i watched the race winners i've trained with a lot of the good runners they just are in a place so you know i'll say peace is a word i would use they're trying really hard but they're not fighting themselves constantly for the duration of the race because of the longer distances it's just simply not sustainable that was the bit that really triggered you know the the the finding we got that makes you think about it that it's that efficiency and as the distances go up you've got to be efficient in every way you can i hope that makes sense by the way jason that was a bit of a segue off there but uh here's here's i'm totally with you on that um i'm gonna give you my core my coaching corollary to that and then what i want to do is i want to explain a little bit more in detail the procedures that you were using during this particular piece of research and then we'll kind of wrap up with okay what does this all mean

so when i go i go to a lot of races as a coach i'm here recording this in my van uh in advance of the high lonesome 100 which is actually out in colorado and one of the things that i've learned to do over the period of time is is that i'm kind of a best utility to the athletes that i'm working with when i can see them just in advance or you hopefully just in advance and then if i can't do that just after they get into all the aid station chaos and what i've learned to do is to observe them and compare to compare them to how they were how they look physically and also just how they look emotionally from aid station to aid station to aid station and the reason i try to do that in advance of all the aid station chaos as much as as much as i can or the rules will allow me to is because the aid station influences all of these you know pieces of you know all of these pieces of emotion and this is probably this is probably something that kind of like confounds the the study that you were doing as well but my point with that is is is i'm not necessarily looking at what they are how they are reacting and what they're doing at that one time at that one point in time and comparing it to how i saw them a few hours ago and saying is this normal or are they artificially trying to inflate themselves or are they artificially down or for whatever and then i provide counsel based off of that and then they come into the

aid station and then hopefully they've got you know their head wrapped around the situation uh a little bit more and everybody who who's not a coach will identify that will identify with how we follow race coverage so inevitably during the race coverages out there that people are kind of tuned into there's kind of like two pieces of data that we get out of every little checkpoint the first one is the time and then how the person looked right and everybody makes their own interpretation of like how people look coming in and out of aid stations and they're all pretty horrific meaning you most people without a trained eye observing so and so coming into it they can't predict how they're doing however further down the field because they're not actually in that person's psychology they're just saying oh they look good or they look bad or whatever but the point my point with that is is we still recognize that that is an important part of the performance we just can't right we just can't we don't have the right vocabulary or the right skills yet to properly evaluate it so i'm totally with you on that i've seen it i cannot tell you how many hundreds of times with athletes where the performance decouples from the physiology and one way or the other and that decoupling is in large part due to to to their psychology one component of which which is what we're going to talk about is their mood variability it's just such a huge deal

so before we kind of go into it any further i want the listeners to really appreciate what this subject group was going through when you were studying them so can you take them a little bit into kind of like through the eyes of one of the participants what they were actually going through during the race absolutely so i mean just for context and knowing this is an ultra running community listening so they the hardmill was 60 um is a 62 mile race that takes place on the northeast coast of england um i think off the top of my head it's about two and a half thousand meters of ascent um massively undulating up and down um takes place in september um for the two years that this race took place there were very warm days um goes fancy hot days in the uk context there um and what we did is so firstly we took a measure with the participants a week before the race as well we took some baseline measures so relatively speaking because when i say baseline actually that's that's a misnomer because some of the findings about tension and anger and things we can we can talk about tapering and so on and so forth and what that means pre-race but we took them a week before the race and then then what we did is we met the participants just prior to starting the race um and that meant we took a measure with them between an hour and for the later arrivals about 15 minutes before i actually

started racing which i'm going to talk about kind of confounds again with some variability in that and some of the participants were a little bit close to starting the race on on that measure and then we met them again not the accurate distance of the but around 20 miles into the race at an aid station and and again maybe worth noting these were aid stations where participants had drop bags so they were they were more likely to be stopping rather than at a station where you just didn't get your number and through again which was obviously to minimize the disruption we caused to runners and at these points we would meet them with a team of um i say team my friends and my older brother very kindly um helped me out here to to take the data collection but we'd meet them while they were collecting their drop bags at the first point and they would complete a survey measure where we would verbally state the items to them and it's a it's a 20 item measure with single words used um give a a lot of vigorous uh on a scale of zero to four and we'd go through that list and they would give us a rating and we would note it down and interestingly again because you put me on the spot and mentioned compounds the things the second checkpoint was at a lovely place by the way in north york's called ravenscar um very just outside whitby and it was a village hall so you'll know yourself when we talk

about checkpoints and what's going on there's a lot of variability in checkpoints themselves yeah so this is an inside checkpoint the second one so there's a lot going on within that checkpoint and that was at 40 miles we take that just coming to for the slower runners getting towards late afternoon for those guys and then we met them at the end of the race at filey and further down the course and took the measure again so we took the measure four times pre to to finishing the race during the day and i think the measure would have took um two or three minutes in real terms however it's worth noting that for some participants to simply complete that measure when they are feeling tired you know it's a big undertaking yeah um and i i must say i i wince and every time i see anyone who took part in my study with the 110 race i give them a cuddle because the fact that they were i still sort of i was learning my skills on that one so there was a lot of commitment from the from the runners to actually complete but everybody who started completed um which i'm quite proud about the fact that we obviously nothing right to get the data um with the participants um yeah sorry i'm kind of uh problem a little bit is that enough is that enough detail in terms of what players chase and i kind of go on and yeah that's perfect because i wanted the listeners to understand that these people were

going through a hundred kilometer race and every 15 to 15 to 30k ish they were having to meet with a member of your team and fill out a survey one to four scale 20 questions based on based on their mood so it's it's an actual representation of how they were feeling at that one moment in time or how they were interpreting their feelings at that one moment in time so now let's get to the the results and i kind of presented this as is like the title is kind of a duh but when i like or like which that happens a lot in science i'm saying that with all due respect to anybody who does who does that work a lot of times we're just confirming whatever the hypothesis was but what struck out to me and i know that this i know you mentioned this is you didn't um expect to see as stark of uh uh as stark of a correlation as i as what was actually there take the listeners through from a just from a pragmatic standpoint what the results mean yes so what i'll do is um i'm gonna i'm gonna talk about this in kind of um sequential order if you like and and look at the scenes a little bit before the race um so that that data we collected in terms of um tension anger depression and just just note in the fact that levels of anger and depression were higher a week before compared to previous right there's some sort of anxiety

associated with it yeah and so this this this this i'm quite you know anger is something when we see elevated levels of anger that's that's that's something to watch that's something to be interested right um and so this this for me is interesting in terms of tapering and our preparation in the lead up to races and and have an awareness of these things that might go on with us so we've got people who are putting a lot of training in high volumes you know running many days within a week every week strength and conditioning sessions so on and so forth and then you cut back significantly within the lead up and this is putting it in layman's terms your body and mind go what's going on um and we get these things so we've seen this elevated level of anger and depression that um goes down by pre-race but i just thought it was interesting to note that having plans for the taper period obviously we've got the plans physiologically about what we'll look and achieve but thinking about what we might do psychologically in that period might be something worth worth noting with people and um so some of the things that i personally think about doing is maintaining the um some of the time in nature in the natural environment and for me the north york mill is where i run uh 20 minutes in the car taking out the long run or whatever but actually getting that fix of nature being outside the gentle walk so on and so forth and just maintain some of the

patterns that are similar to what our body might be expecting um so that that's one thing i thought might be worth knowing from a kind of coaching perspective jason that wasn't the big takeaway finding this to me but the one thing that i thought you know as i'm gonna i'm gonna be more aware and actually tell your wives girlfriends partners boyfriends uh husbands i'm gonna get a big current and be some research that's telling me it's okay you have you have permission to be a little bit more on edge because of the taper it's scientifically validated i'm with you i'm totally with you there once again this is what i this is what i'm talking about about the logical extensives extensions of the research we can see these patterns they clearly manifest themselves and what you're talking about is what most people will colloquially colloquially describe as the taper tantrums everything that would not irritate somebody while they're training because they have deteriorated faculty because of the training they're training so hard now irritates them 10 times more because they have all of this reserve that's all of a sudden been been freed up everybody has experienced has experienced that and like i said we've got generally you know i'd say we have okay vocabulary to try to try to describe it but now we have you know not just now but this along with other research we have some scientifically like validated or evidence-based reasons to why this this actually is is happening and and and and we've been able to study it and actually

observe it in a scientific context so i completely i i like that strategy of spending more time in nature just to satiate that that component i also think that just knowing just knowing that this is going to potentially be a part of it like just preparing an athlete hey you're going to go through these taper tantrums and you can describe you can bring in the science if you want to depending upon the athlete but just giving a heads up is a really good shield against those negative emotions that you just mentioned absolutely and leading on i mean the the we talk about tension as well within the um the baseline measure and i said that relatively speaking a week before the ribs and and kind of how um tension was elevated and then then dissipated um but what what i want to kind of come back to just quickly is that there may be some cost with the level of elevation that we might be able to negate and might have a a functional benefit to us as runners so you know if we are angry and we've got higher stress levels even things like digestive system you know the race we want to reduce that as much as is possible and and we're talking small games aren't we across like most things we'll true that these might be things that are worth a little bit thinking about of how can i limit stress response as much as possible to put me in the best shape in the lead up to the race um and that leads into this fandom with tension

where so tension went up the week before um tension was elevated um sorry sorry up to um pre-race tension's higher and then literally falls really quickly by the first checkpoint it's down to minimal levels um so that's that that that pre-race anxiety quite clearly and i think the nice thing with this finding is um i work a lot with or speak a lot with people who might be novice ultra runners people who get quite nervous and anxious about these races especially large races busy starts you know a lot going on uh the the starting point of having an understanding that listen this will reduce we'll get running it will settle down and you'll feel okay and anecdotally it wasn't recorded but the amount of runners who were so aware of yeah yeah i'm not i'm not feeling tense anymore and i've just had a lovely run down the coast there's some benefit in that again for strategies on race day about thinking what we might do if you know looking at individual difference factors of personality and things is if we're more likely to be stressed by that situation what safeguards can we put in place so examples i'm going to cite now are things like well i might decide to get check-in at the earliest possible time versus the latest time i might beat the rushes get me number get sorted get away get my space these are things that might not matter to somebody else you know i might go down the day earlier when i don't

necessarily need to but i know that everything's settled and calm so these again are kind of functional things and we think about how can i reduce this as much as is practical to just put me in the best shape come the start there is and then actually take this finding and think okay this is going to reduce and i'm going to i'm going to deposit and self-talk to reinforce that and say yeah once i get running it will all be a lot better and i'll be surrounded by lovely ultra runners in that busy stage where you're all fighting to get through a style or a gate or something and you have a chinwag with you know a load of great people um sorry jason no no this is so what i'm i pulled up a figure one from the from the paper uh and i was reminded when i was looking at this and specifically looking at the tension line and i'm going to this is a little bit of a failure of audio i'm going to try to describe this uh verbally the tension the tension line that we were just describing has two kind of equal points before the race and then at race start and then as you just described at the first checkpoint it kind of plummets precipitously and then stays relatively at the same level or kind of goes down right after that and when i saw that i remember this very distinctly i remember this uh quote from an old old coach of mine who he was trying to counsel us on how to deal with pre-race tension or pre-race anxiety he would just look at us and say listen kids once the gun goes off it's all going to go away

this this line right there once again it's you know validation that that is that is in fact the case once the gun goes off a lot of that tension goes away and i think once again knowing that is a big part of the combative strategy but you know but if you know you have high tension or high anxiety going into a race there are also other things that you can do pre-race to try to alleviate that trying to pre-plan as much as possible any of the things that happen at the last minute check-in going to the bathroom making sure that those are not come compounding this tension and anxiety issue is extremely important as well yeah i must just mention the other thing was you know we did collect collect some data um we took a measure six weeks before and for various reasons that data wasn't reported in the end it took out but but i mean what's likely going on is it obviously that that tension level's gone up that's gone up more than it's shown there um and i think it's just as you say this idea of awareness and that's such a power to to actually know okay this is this is almost normal this is this is normal response rather than something that's out of the ordinary and lots of other runners are the same and uh you know and finally what i mentioned on this point because i'm quite passionate about mental health awareness and stigma and things is just i found personally the

the ultra running community is a wonderful open community and if you were to say to people i am so bloody nervous i don't get it that you'll get rewarded for that because people you will get looked after and you will make some amazing people so you know don't worry about that one too much totally don't worry too much about worrying too much let let let let me move on to one area of fascination um with with with me personally and i think this is with a lot a lot of athletes we tend to pigeonhole endurance sports into being an individual endeavor and i think that that's largely true partition particularly like recreationally 5k marathon 10 you know uh 10k and stuff like that yeah you're going to have your training partners and physical therapists and things like that but in the ultra running scheme as as you're very well aware of it does become a team sport in many in many in many in most cases you have crew out there your family has to support you during the training process and things like that and i've always been fascinated with the crew athlete interactions at these races of my previous dialogue isn't you know any sort of indication of that of that fascination and almost universally crews tend to adopt a counterbalancing strategy and i don't know what the origin of this is but i see it time and time again and like i said it's almost universal to where for whatever reason they feel compelled to counterbalance whatever emotion or psychology the runner is going through

at the time the prototypical one that most people are familiar with is the runner comes through really low and they just try to amp them up they do whatever they can and i'm i'm i'm i'm remembering for whatever reason all these anecdotes are around ludville i don't know why but the medical race director of the ludville trail 100 is famous for giving this like pre-race rah rah speech and one of the components of it is is if your runner is coming in bitching and moaning just lie to them tell them that they look great tell them that they smell good tell them that they're the most best looking person out on the course just lie and i guess my point with that is is there's this universal counterbalancing strategy that these crews try to adopt to whether they're really low they're going to try to amp them up and if they're really high i've seen this as well they try to like calm them down and i've always looked at that and i've genuinely wondered is that the best approach to try to get to swing from one end to another i i understand the need to get somebody out of the chair and coax them you know if they're trying not to if if they're trying to dnf or being a weenie or whatever you know i get that point but this emotional counterbalance piece i've always kind of looked at it and i've just been really curious like is that the right approach and so i want to know from from like your perspective for the runners out there that are preparing for races they're going to bring on crew or for the people that are going to be crew like me this

weekend what what do you have to say to that so one thing i mentioned about with um looking at the social spots support because this is one of the things i'm touching on my work right now with with polar expeditioners and field researchers out in antarctica in the arctic is about the fit the fit between the person and the crew of the situation and the being a fit there and obviously this this can vary a lot in terms of what the best fit is for that individual and that situation that that it isn't a simplistic sort of binary um choice between and the to high heaven or bring them down it's a bit more nuanced than that as we probably all will accept uh and i think um one of the things i kind of put the caveat with optimism and kind of doing that is realistic optimism so there's got to be some ground in reality for me as a crew um and i think sometimes that you've got to ground them in that reality and then then bring them back um rather than just to be unfounded you know because because i think what the word you could bring this back to milk fluctuation is because you get an overly inflated high that wasn't realistic to the situation and then you get a bigger fall off and that's my as far as i'm concerned if we bring it back

to this finding you're more likely to have a kind of an incongruency between their perception and the reality of where they're in you know in a race and then they're going to get out that chad point a couple of miles and go shit i'm well behind the foot and there's the uh there's the back the back mark as they cut off marshals right behind me now you know and so i think that's where i would kind of caveat this is say some realism is always helpful um but again i just want to note on this one um in terms of the person who's crewing for you and you know so we've got a lot of family um we've also got people who've got other ultra runners crewing for them and i think there's a massive um the relationships are very different so people who are kind of um principal um caregivers in life you know that you're about your partner that's a completely different relationship to a fellow ultra runner and i think that's something i would note in terms of i can only do that it's a different thing with that and i've seen a lot of runners where you know family it's so hard to see you look on struggling that much isn't it because their personal goal might be to not drop out with this race at all costs and put themselves out of work for six weeks and you know hospital or whatever family members don't necessarily want to see that and maybe don't share that goal in that way

versus another ultra runner who gets totally where you're coming from you know is setting similar goals and you've got that fit then with the the strategy of the crew to the person is is congruent um sorry i'm probably making a little sense on you i'm kind of have formed up uh thoughts on this one but what again what i'd say is is on this um is that there's some prior knowledge in terms of what the expectation is from the crew um and and for that to be defined prior prior to the race time because once the race starts and if we bring this back to kind of samuel mccora's work about shifting goals and how the motivation and goals will shift downward um if people have got an agreement of what the expectation is and what the levels are prior then that's consistent on both sides and both sides are more likely to accept the situation does that make sense jason that's one of the kind of more prosaic let me let me add two points to that so one when when i started going out and supporting athletes at at a lot of races it was kind of a it was a deliberate decision uh on my on my behalf because i realized that this context of ultra marathon coaching i would be a much better coach if i could get out in the field and learn by observing athletes in the field and also it helped them you know achieve

what they were kind of achieving uh in races and i i was very fortunate that right during that process i had uh an absolutely amazing mentor who's been on this podcast before his name is jt kearney he's one of the head physiologists at the olympic training center for a very long time so he'd said he's seen athletes in all different kinds of high performance contexts from the you know uh greco-roman wrestlers to the endurance athletes you kind of you name it and he he told me and this has stuck with me to this day he said listen coop when you start to do this you have to you have to do everything you can not to fall into the trap of being dissociatively enthusiastic that those are the two that was the key term that he used dissociatively enthusiastic because you're going to want to be enthusiastic and everything is good and the sky is blue and there's a rainbow around the corner and unicorns and leprechauns and you know whatever else whatever else you can kind of kind of come up with at all costs because in in some athletic context you can get away with that you can get away with that because the duration of the event is short enough and you can provide some sort of stimulus to the athlete that they can you know jump higher run faster or whatever but in an ultra marathon situation it's too long

so you always have to start with re with realistically what's going on if the athlete's running really great you can tell hey you're running awesome if they're not running really great you have to be honest with them as well because then you can course correct it being dissociatively enthusiastic is one of the biggest fallacies or one of the biggest points of error i think is what he said of of coaches because it's in their nature to do it we're optimists by nature but we need to we need to fight that nature when we're out in the field working working with athletes so to your point that you have to start with a realistic perspective and then move towards optimism as my colleague justin ross would be famous for saying move towards optimism or try to course correct into some or try to course correct into some other sort of psycho-emotional state i think is the better play there versus automatically assuming that everything is awesome and then you just create this false narrative that is not you know is therefore not sustainable so that's the first point the second point with the crew i've seen this so many times it's become comical where there's this there's no there's no matching of the athlete goals with what the crew is supposed to do and then once again they're just kind of they're not professionals right so you can't you can't really blame them for this counterbalancing strategy the athletes that have the most successful crews are the ones that sit down with them in advance

and not only go all over the x's and o's i want potato chips here and a goo there and water it you know that's easy you know you can have a high school kid do that um they can drive around aid stations and hand off stuff that's that's not the complicated part but the most successful ones sit down and say this is how you i want you to help me when this happens this is my goal for the race i want to be super stable here i want to do this that or the other and then the crew is the facilitator for that because at the end of the day they're not mind readers right and so the runners that are really smart take that mind reading component out by going through the non x's and o's of how they think the race is going to play out and how they can actually help them so that when they actually get to those stages then they actually know what to do yeah do you know i just follow on from that point there because it's something um really interesting if we kind of we're looking at sort of um mental strategies uh mental skills and so on and so forth so you know one of the things with sort of high levels of mental fatigue um you know physical fatigue is the effect on memory and and actually sometimes the recall or the cue and of the strategy we might need to apply as an individual what numbers if they have an awareness of the strategies we're likely to use in a certain stage of a race or a certain move you know are you using whatever that strategy is you know i'm a big lover of reciting mantras and counting and so on and so forth are you using this now are you

you know yeah exactly uh if you have that really detailed relationship where the mental approaches is on the table clearly you know you can really really you can get functional use instrumental support from somebody yes um because sometimes you can be too tired to to actually get that strategy that might get you through that moment and and having a buddy there who does some of that work for you brings it out the locker then you've just got to get running again and apply it it can make a big difference and that's one i'll often say to people and i still play as a runner myself um i had a really great friend of mine martin kerr last year the hard nose 160 and uh second night of sleep deprivation um you know i speak about we need a high arousal state because when we're going to sleep and try and stay awake and uh running with another great guy mark simpson i was like i might need a little bit of anger or mock anger as we turn but something to really just to kick start so we don't fall asleep and and it was you know it's that honesty of relationship you know help me with the toolbox i know what's in there but you might have to pull it out for me and i think that's that's that's a level you may be able to go to and i'm sure there's more esteemed scholars than me a lot further down the track on that one the the the key term that i think

you just had there paul's instrumental support right not just logistical support not just nutrition support which all all of those are important right but if you're providing instrumental support that's support across all the systems and that's ultimately what's going to be the the most effective absolutely and i just really quickly while i'm throwing all my thoughts and you know i've got the chance with your good self here of just you know things like um nutrition and um you know digestive systems that kind of um stress response you know that that kind of bio psychosocial model of whether the interaction is so important you know a reduction in a mood or physiologically maybe a little gain that means you can hold down some food you wouldn't otherwise if you're in a different state of mind that actually then does give you a physiological difference i think that's the bits that we start putting it all the way that it's not just being a bit happier it's i'm not getting stomach cramps so bad now you know i might pull some fluids in and one percenters all the time everybody's had the cascading issues effect right that's that's the way that i term that is where you you start having multiple failure points kind of all at once and it becomes a hard thing to unwind because you don't really know how to like like how to approach it but i think understanding that if you for example if you start to have gi issues

you get anxious about those gi issues which then perpetuate the gi issues even further just understanding that that's a normal psychological loop gives you the i think it gives you the initial part of the capacity saying that very delicately the initial part of the capacity such that the next time you have gi issues you recognize that part of the reason you are is because you're anxious and then you can kind of learn to accept the position that you're in so that hopefully those gi issues don't perpetuate so i think that a lot of this and this is one of the great aspects of the of the research that people like you produce even though it might be you know on the surface a big nothing burger i don't know if that translates it's across the pond or not even though it translates into big nothing but it's like yeah of course if you're moody or you're going to perform worse but a lot of it a lot of it gives us the tools to not not so much to understand but just to go okay like yeah absolutely this i should be feeling this way and so now that i know this knowledge is power i don't have to suffer as much or i can course course correct that much better absolutely you can apply some strategy at some level can you that's you have that awareness to then almost like a flow chart of yeah exactly this you know is this physical support i need you know is this some kind of supplement or

whatever is this psychological you can begin to unpick that and actually if you take some actions during a race you you're more likely to remedy something than just fixating on um you know the gi issues and and that's one thing that kind of leads into the world of no brick and the attention issues of this massive focusing on sensory monitoring of literally just getting fixed on the gi issue and from then on it's this trail down over of just gets darker and darker and you just stuck on that one train of thoughts um and and that that was the bit i was going to come under jason in terms of then how we implement those different types of approaches um for different situations and and we have that flexibility that depending on what the issue is the strategies match to it it's not one size fits all we then i've got a repertoire like you have for running uphill or downhill or flat or whatever we've got we've got subtleties in the technique we apply the same technique to you know you could say the mental approach to running uphill or downhill or whatever you do exactly it's it's a different skill set that you can work on and develop well and that's why we i wasn't planning on talking about this and this seems like a stupid shameless plug for my book which i don't care about i'll plug my book all day on my podcast when i went through the mental skills chapter of of my book i made sure to have some of those

options there for kind of two reasons is one i realized you know you you probably realize this but i don't know if the listeners appreciate it just like you don't like and you like certain physical workouts i like to do climbing i like to do high intensity i don't like to do this i don't like to do that it's the same thing with mental skills and compliant compliance just like any other aspect of training or diet which has been you know illuminated quite well in in the in a lot of the research compliance drives so much of improvement and adaptation it's the same thing with mental skills if you find a few mental skills that you just for whatever reason you just really take to it you can leverage those to a greater extent as opposed to the ones that you don't enjoy now that's not to say you can't be fully well-rounded but it provides an initial uh foothold the other reason that i included kind of several different types of of of mental skills that were periodized in uh uh in a fashion is to is to just your point right there you have different tools in the toolkit to perform better you're not just leveraging one single thing which you would never do right what if you just did one just think about on the that on the physical side what if you just did one workout nobody does that right they've all got a variety of workouts it's the same thing on this mental skill side of things if you have a variety of different tools in the toolkit you've got not only options when you need to solve problems but you also have

like more effective arrows in your quiver for whatever is coming up whether it's anxiety or a lack of confidence or some other physical issue that you've encountered in the past that you've got to kind of use psychological work to kind of to move through all of those things are are interrelated so your point's really well taken that developing this robust skill set is a is a is a is a huge advantage for especially athletes in ultra marathon where they're always going through trials and tribulations at some point absolutely and just to follow from that quickly jason the probably two things here on this is you know the the first one being you know any strategy that's not a usual strategy you use you're highly unlikely to persist with it in you know asleep deprived incredibly you're just not going to use that strategy yeah and so we're not developing their uses they won't click into place i mean we're sort of leading the habits and things like that with this but once we get them drilled once they're in there they're more likely to come out you know they will click into gear and if you can practice in the situation if you can use that matching in training and the same is saying whether that's a hill session and say right well this is going to be a certain approach i'm going to take you know i love counting steps which comes from navigation where you want to to calculate distance and just look counting steps but i love the rhythmical nature of that i find it

regulates person i've never wore a watch in my life but i'm not a fast runner so i never to worry about yeah other than beating the cut off i'm not willing to win anything but but you you match the strategy and you you think about when will i use this in a race and i'm going to train with it in the same situation situation so then those those associations and those neural pathways are more likely to be formed up and things happen and and that's the wonderful thing of training isn't it when the pressure's on you know they all nightly say they just do it things will just come um and the second one quickly just just to say with with ultramarathons where we're talking about potentially a full day and night cycle or longer in a normal day of our life we will have ebbs and flows we will have fluctuations and that's natural and so having an awareness of our natural ebbs and flows throughout the day might be something to think about as well in terms of moon fluctuations of you know whether we are uh you know thinking about security and risen things where we are in that whether we're a morning person afternoon so on and so but there's natural things going on as well and again just having awareness of helps us think about the strategy you're going to use how how can you use that specifically though because a lot of people will as i mentioned earlier they're kind of take a counterbalancing approach like if i know i'm not i'm no if i know i'm not a night person during the night i'm going to have to bring in extra reinforcements

you know i'm going to have to bring people who bring the energy is it really is it is it as simple as that or there's something there are other considerations that we need to take into account so i i would say that that you know that then is that that's training that's training to that specific area that you identify as a potential weakness if that's the word then when you focus on your training regime to that so i know you know i always shift i always shift my long runs to to the night runs in the league to long races and just put them as overnighters and i don't have the time to train as much as i'm not like but you know that sleep deprivation is going to be a significant issue you put a little bit more focus there than less focus and i think that's you know that's one thing you use use that acknowledgement of i'm not so strong then um to to to put a bit more work and put that conversely and equally importantly um your body gets used to things so acknowledge the areas when you're naturally in a good place and a very specific example here is as a as a mediocre ultra runner every saturday of my life i head to the hills for my run whether i'm training for a race whatever and i run and i'm going to come into music by the way which i know you mentioned before but i run to a a radio show i don't control the playlist i go with what i get and and i know saturday afternoon i am really strong in races so i'll quite often be feeling really mediocre in the morning going

sad afternoon comes however far i've gone this is saturday afternoon this is your wheelhouse man when my body's used to feeling good and it's a bit of positive self-talk it's a bit of this but it's also about the body is used in these certain times and i think what you have to do is i'm going to pull out one of my favorite mantras clouds in the sky when the sun shines yeah you have to take it for all it's worth and you enjoy it without getting overly carried away by it like party checkpoint don't fall into party checkpoint too much but you can acknowledge it and you can feel a bit good hold on to it and then when it goes you know it'll come again and that's that's ultra marathons i like most of the time it's these genuine fluctuations that we've just got to weather and accept i think i think you're on to something where if you realize you're really strong or really familiar with one aspect whether it's a time of day or a type of terrain or even a type of weather pattern and you know that you're going to encounter that at some time you can absolutely use that as a a lighthouse right to aim the race at to where you know you like i don't care i just get me to here you've hear you've heard runners say that right just get me to here and i'll be okay and that's an acknowledgement of just what you mentioned right they understand what their strengths are what they're comfortable with or familiar with and if they get there it doesn't matter how tired they are how much

their stomach hurts you know how delirious they are whatever they'll be okay because of whatever that is their strength their degree of familiarity or whatever so i'm gonna i'm gonna uh take some pointers from that absolutely and in the races that i'm going to support my athletes for uh for the rest of the summer make sure that i'm more keenly aware of some of their strengths so that they can use that as a magnet to get to so to speak that's really pertinent paul this was awesome man this is awesome and as as it is with any conversation it always takes a few turns that i don't expect you know so i i really appreciate your time can you tell the listeners a little bit more about um where they can find more about you and your work yeah so i'm i'm not quite a full recluse these days but i'm only currently on twitter as a platform um as at p bergam which is obviously my name um and i think that's it in terms of i've got a website which i will freely admit hasn't been updated for a while um paulbergham.com um it does include um some blogs from races i've done myself over the years as well and and so more personal takes on probably some of the things i've mentioned here as well jason there so there's some there's some interesting things talking about optimism and uh other things in there as well that might be of interest to people um yeah and if anyone is interested anymore in the way or anything

i've said please do drop me a line it's it's always lovely to chat about your your favorite topics well i appreciate you coming on the podcast but more importantly paul i appreciate what you do because it helps me as a coach and i know it's a lot of there are a lot of athletes and other coaches out there that i can speak for that whenever we see things like that come up in the space we are always thankful because it gives a little bit of method to our madness yeah that's fantastic before i go jason do you mind as well if i if i just pay a very sincere thanks to uh john and shirley steel who run the hard movers uh ultra series in the northeast of england and the whole community because as we all know researcher on individual these communities are incredibly precious and uh i wouldn't be sat here as a PhD student if it wasn't for all these ultra runners by the way so i want to acknowledge that in this podcast right now a lot of wonderful people absolutely it's team sport just like ultra running absolutely absolutely thanks for coming on the podcast paul i appreciate it pleasure thanks for it's time jason all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to paul for coming on the podcast today as i mentioned during the intro i do think that this is one area in ultra marathon performance that goes neglected by a lot of athletes and one of the more important pieces is how to match up your cruise energy with your energy we

talked a little bit about this counterbalancing strategy that a lot of crews tend to deploy and i think that a better solution is to more subtly match that energy to your runner's energy in order to help them down the trail because we want to try to keep things on even a vequil as possible and when we do need course corrections they don't need to be so abrupt but i hope you all learned something from this particular podcast like i said we are in the second half of the racing season a lot of this is immediately applicable to what you can do on race day so if you appreciated this podcast please feel free to share it with your training partners or your crew if it's going to be applicable and useful for them absolutely share this podcast with them so they can help you out in your particular race appreciate the heck out of each and every one of you and as always we will see you out on the trails you