Coaching Roundtable-Avoiding a Crisis of Confidence, Crewing and Training Camp Volume with CTS Coaches Chantelle Robitaille and Ryne Anderson | Koopcast Episode 141

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i am your humble host coach Jason Koop and this episode of the podcast is inspired by a process that we go through as coaches several times per year and it is what did we recently learn and how are we going to apply those lessons so that in the future our athletes can be more ready for the ultras that they are preparing for so i brought on the podcast today cts coaching director chantelle robitaille as well as one of our crack coaches ryan anderson to talk about what they learned throughout the course of this year that they are going to apply for next year and it was an extremely interesting conversation about how we can avoid these crises of confidence that athletes inevitably experience as their races are rolling around how we can instruct our athletes better on how they can instruct their crew and their pacers better in order to help them throughout a race and in addition to that how to properly structure training camps which are becoming a more and more valuable and i would say an obviously valuable part of the athlete training process i don't need to tell you guys that ultra marathons are arduous and we are all trying to squirrel away a little bit of time to train for them and these training camps are just a great way to

do that so with that as a backdrop i'm going to get right out of the way here's my conversation with chantelle robitaille and ryan anderson all about what we have learned this year i always find these funny because like when i look back on it because we go through this as a coaching staff in some form or fashion both formally and informally every year they're things that you should have already known but they get re-emphasized for whatever reason and i think the lessons shouldn't be taken for granted i always think that we should like actually pay more attention to them and then come back to them before they actually unfold in the next year so anybody listening to this podcast should actually listen to this in like march or april or may because that's when these these errors start yeah that's actually when these errors start to start to unfold so we've each got like one learning lesson from the year that we're gonna emphasize and apply to next year and probably around that march april may type of type of time frame but i want all that the athletes that are listening to just recognize that the lens that we're looking at this through is our coaching lens in our 30 to 40 athletes that we each you know have contact with every single year and coaching those athletes throughout the year and in addition to that supporting those athletes at races there tends to be some common themes that that that come up that everybody can can learn from so chantelle you've

volunteered to go first so why don't you kick it off all right showing confidence because my my trend is a crisis of confidence and what i have found throughout the race season this year is and maybe this is a holdover from covid where people had a lot of new anxiety in their lives about a lot of things and a lot of things they couldn't control um and they just get to a point where everything is really going well with their training and and going you know going according to plan uh but they start to have sudden like real anxiety about something really small like sudden anxiety about missing a single run and then they're just carrying that throughout the week where they're like you know maybe they miss a one hour run on tuesday and then i see i've prescribed a three-hour run on saturday and they're out for five hours because they missed a one hour run earlier in the week so they're not only adding the hour back they're adding in something on top of it to make up for yeah not to mention the stress that they've been carrying because all week i see in the training peaks comments i'm still really upset that i had to miss that run on tuesday and if you look at the reason why they missed the run on tuesday and it's because their kid had a soccer practice you went to your kid's soccer practice and that's what you should focus on right what you were able to do not what you weren't um and i and i feel like i'm seeing more of that

this year throughout all of my athletes and is that do you think that's amplified the closer it gets to the race meaning if there's a race in august and that one hour gets missed in july or in early august those comments that you just that you just mentioned are are amplified or either on versus being off that same thing happened in may or june yeah absolutely um especially especially in this season now where we have more races happening they're watching other people training they're watching other people racing and i feel like there's that fomo thing or they're looking at someone's strava and they're freaking out because they're like well i should have had x number of miles last week even though i never prescribed mileage you know i should have run x number of miles last week but i didn't um and they're really spending a lot of time worrying about what they feel they should be doing should have done rather than what they did do what they are doing and what's ahead well it that all comes down to people want what they don't have if they don't have vertical they want vertical if they don't have heat they want they want heat if they don't have cold they want cold they don't have a massage therapist that they trust they want a massage therapist that they trust and i i've seen some of that get echoed throughout really throughout my coaching career not just more more recently in the quintessential crisis of confidence that that that i have always kind

of thrown up a big red flag with is starting to do something completely new from a workout perspective in the four weeks before race so workout that you've never done an intensity that you've never done and that's almost always catalyzed by some elite athlete putting it on strava or on instagram i saw killian jornay do this really specific workout so i'm going to start to incorporate it two weeks before the race and we all know that the time course for any reasonable adaptation is not days it's several weeks or even or even months and so the the proposition of that the proposition where that that workout will actually make an impact is actually kind of hilarious because you just simply don't have enough time for the adaptations to sink in it literally is a psychological thing of of craving something that you saw somebody do or something that you don't have or another one is maybe looking at an athlete you know and again it's probably an elite athlete right looking at an athlete that's had success in a particular race over multiple years and suddenly that athlete decides to go all data become a data analyst and look at several years of an elite athletes training and seeing like oh this is how they typically build why am i not doing that or why is you know why am i only running x number of hours a week and again they're looking outside rather than inside looking at where they're at what their capabilities are and probably you don't have

35 hours a week to train so why are you know why are you even worrying about that but the the ads the the ads and what i mean by that is is an athlete misses something and adds either it either adds it back or adds two or three x of that back i've always the combative strategy the combative coaches coaching strategy that i've always used for that and that comes up not just close to the race right as you're mentioning it's a crisis of confidence that comes up kind of throughout the entirety of the of the training process where you know just stuff happens and you have to make this decision of does the missed time actually make a difference and do you actually need to make it up the the combative coaching strategy that i deploy for that is just to look at the percentage of the whole and if the percentage of the whole is material then yeah you should shuffle some things around and try to like get that volume back or you know do something different or whatever because you have long time frames to work with if the percentage of the whole is immaterial then you just kind of you know play on right you just kind of nothing goes to plan nothing's perfect if you get 90 of the you know way there from a training perspective that's going to be good enough that last 10 is probably one percent of the actual improvement that's the ratio that we have to that we have to keep in mind but keeping in mind that there's a bigger picture as opposed to having this laser-like focus of day-to-day and week-to-week i think is the like the best combative

strategy zoom the lens out and look at the percentage of the whole and i think also just helping you know i think with with athletes getting sick as well right with covid they get covid and they don't know you know at the beginning they're really panicked because they don't know maybe there's a million things like this is real anxiety right they've got someone who's immunocompromised in the house or within the family they don't know how it's going to affect others around them and then how is it going to affect them how much time do they have to take off of training how are they going to recover and that's a real you know a real concern and for some even if they they know you know okay i'm legitimately sick i legitimately am not breathing well i understand i can't go do a tempo workout but i should be doing a tempo workout because it was on my long range plan you know and trying to help them understand that training is like training and racing is just like life stuff happens and we have to be adaptable and try to help them understand that in a hundred mile race you're gonna have that perfect plan which is only as good as the day it's written because you can't control all of the things and i think zooming out looking at look at the stuff that you have done look at the stuff that look at how much time we have and here's what we can do to still you know the focus now is getting you to your you know back to running safely and healthily and that's what has to matter for now well and once again what helps with that is just what you mentioned the long range plan and specifically rack and rack and stacking the the prior the order of priority of what's

happening throughout that long range plan it's one thing just to say hey you know the best laid plans and it's gonna go awry or whatever but if you know hey this phase is more important than that phase and that phase is more important than the first phase then when you come up with those bumps in the road getting coveted or travel or getting injured or sick or what like whatever happens you don't plan for those things to happen because we all plan for things to happen perfectly you know what to push and what to shove and what to anchor and that's i think that that's extremely important to that's an extremely important process to do when you're initially starting to map things out so next year when everybody starts going through their planning processes they're going to have their series of events and you know all of our good coaches are going to start to lay out their annual training plans or their long-range training plans one of the key features of that that probably isn't emphasized enough if i'm really thinking about it is simply the order of priority in terms of we really want to make sure that this happens if i can compromise a little bit here that's okay and this is man maybe this doesn't matter quite as much as the like like the first two things i think that that context helps all of those changes actually occur because we all want to do everything and if you don't have enough time as you thought you were going to have at the beginning for whatever reason you're going to have to compromise somewhere yeah and i think that's what's hard you know a lot of our athletes are not professional athletes they are athletes who are professionals they're juggling families and jobs and

everything else and so you know sometimes something has to give for a little bit of time so you know there there will be times where you are going to have to compromise shift things around and i think for for me as a coach thinking about when i do you know the year in review with athletes and looking at how you know what did our long-range plan look like how did the training go you know what were successes for the athlete what were challenges and to use that information going forward i think one thing i would like to do as a coach is to look for some of those uh non-confidence cues a little bit earlier and try to nip those in the bud maybe there are areas that i could maybe there are things i could explain better like you just mentioned you know looking at the long-range plan this is our roadmap we may take some shortcuts we may take some detours but these are the key points of interest along the route well in addition to that normalizing it because if it's a common theme you know all three of us on this call right now we all have athletes that have had a little bit of this this crisis of confidence if you can if you can normalize that to the athlete and say hey listen this is normal like when you get close to a race it's you know you're going to doubt some of you know the training that you've that you've done leading up to it that's fine a lot of people go through that here's why you should be confident right and just kind of like laying out it laying it out in that sequence it's normal you've done all the work let's go back and look at it and here's yeah you know you can be honest yeah

you missed this does it matter all that much maybe probably not maybe a little bit and then when you get into the really honest situations and i think that this is one of those times where if you are consistently realistic and honest with your assessment with athletes this process actually becomes quite logical and less emotional because you can go through and if you have to course correct because of something that happened during the training process process if you have to course correct their goals you now have a reasonable logical framework to do it from and because you've always been honest with them they're going to take you at your word and go you know what okay instead of a 24 hour leadville finish i'm going to focus on a 28 hour leadville finish you know i've been through that with several athletes that have kind of gone through that process where yeah in a perfect year if they had perfect training they can have a big belt buckle type of finish but you know what that perfect year didn't unfold for whatever reason so let's course correct a little bit and i think the key to all of that is honesty throughout the entire process and not just being overly optimistic all of the time or dissociatively optimistic all the time is what jt kearney would always tell me yeah that's that's a good way to to frame it and i think it's a it's a good thing for athletes to look at you know they are really emotionally connected to their running or to a particular race but if their training suddenly starts to take up a lot of anxious feelings in their life and it starts to become you know something veering towards negative and it might even be impacting them negatively within

their family life one of my athletes was telling me this week in a call that he hasn't been sleeping well and his older son in the at the breakfast table said like dad why aren't you sleeping wow my son did holy cow yeah and that really hit him you know and he's like my gosh like if he's noticing it i really need to look at making some changes and so we talked about you know what are some changes that can be made do you need to do we need to change the the training around a little bit do we need to um you know do you are there other changes you can make within your schedule do you just need you know you've got four weeks left before your race can you know your family is so supportive and i know the family because i've met them in real life your family is so awesome and you have your family meetings you know like i feel like they're willing to support you but if you're not willing to take their support what does that show to them you know if your wife is saying like please go to bed early and i'll look after the kids stuff getting them to bed i'll look after it take the help you know ask for support you might be surprised what the answer is yeah and take it if it's offered to you i dig it i think a lot of athletes can resonate with that having gone through a season we're gonna you know post this towards the end of most people seasons and if they rewind their their psychological framework leading into the leading into the race four to six weeks out from it they can probably uh it'll probably resonate with them in terms of some areas of doubt starting to creep in and whether

those areas of doubt manifest in changing a workout or starting to look at the grass is greener on the other side or whatever it is i think that that's a point that's a point well taken so needless to say always look at your training think about the percentage of the hole and as you mentioned at the very tail end of this chantelle take the help when you can get it because this is these are hard things that we're asking ourselves to do for sure all right ryan you're up what did you learn this season a couple points to the crisis of confidence it usually takes place during the taper and here's my plug for keeping really good post-activity comments on your training like if you've been descripted and maybe a specific uh interval block in which you felt really good and you've kept notes of like i felt like i felt like crap going into the warm-up and then i knocked it out of the park like those descriptors like you can really resonate with them when you're going through that crisis of confidence like oh yeah i do remember i felt really really good don't just leave the like thumbs up or like it was it was good like be descriptive so when you go back to read it that memory is really triggered and you and like that that confidence is boosted um and then another thing is if the athlete's been in a rut they've missed several runs give them a good softball workout give them something that's like their bread and butter or one of their favorite workouts um it may not be very specific to their event and you have to stay within

reason um with that concept but give them something that you know will give them their confidence back or if they haven't went and ran with their best friend in a while like hey go meet up with with so-and-so and go run for three hours and then they talk the whole time they catch up they weren't even thinking about the three hours when they ran and they got out of their own heads ryan that last point that's one of the few times that i'll bend training architecture if i know if i know like i really this is not this workout is not the right workout for this race but if for whatever reason it's a bread and butter workout as you know it's the vocabulary you're using or it's just something more in their sweet spot or something that they're familiar with getting the ball rolling back on confidence at the expense of like the perfect training architecture that's usually a good compromise to start the process eventually you have to wean off of things right because you can't use that as a crutch the entire for the entirety because then you're the expense of that is some sort of physiological development and that's a you know that's going to be a short that's going to eventually or the rope on that's going to run out eventually but i agree with you that using something and this is like a parlor trick almost using something to get to get that confidence rolling and that something being something they're familiar with or really good at can be a good trick to just get the ball rolling because there is momentum right we talk about this a lot in sports there's momentum that's involved in confidence

and when you don't have it it's a tough ship to turn around and it's worth it to to do some things actively to get that ball rolling all right ryan so what's on your list all right mine has to do with crewing and pacing and have a plan stick to it and don't be a hero because in the last couple weeks to the race you're talking about this crisis of confidence there's a lot going on but you still need to plan with your athlete here's who's coming to help you your your wife your husband whoever and your job as the coach reach out and you need to plan with them don't leave it up like oh yeah we're all going to get together the night before and throw something together um that can work but it also cannot work because it's kind of hard for everybody to get on the same page when they've had their expectations coming in the day before and then you're trying to gauge what they're thinking actually no we're not going to do this it can be hard for them to switch um so i think having the plan it starts with like designating the crew chief um of like who is in charge start with that because if the the wife wants to take over the best friend or whatever not that they're going to argue in buttheads that day but it's going to like who's leading who's following it's usually the strongest personality that ends up taking over that role right if nothing's designated the person with

the strongest personality will take it over and that's not the best personality to lead sometimes um so like having like knowing who your crew chief is and having the plan going in like talking you you should know what your runner needs on race day and then having that laid out with your crew of like okay i know they need tough love i know um somebody needs to be on the timer to get them out of the aid station because they take too long knowing all these things about your runner so you you're not a liability to your runner um and then i would say like don't try to be a hero because everybody's so excited on race day the runner is put in weeks and months they they mainly finally got into western states what at first hundred miler you want to do everything you can to help them and you're so excited but go back to that plan you had if you said you were only only going to pace 10 miles stick to that because it goes back to you can be a liability because you've been up all day um you're you're pretty tired maybe you skipped a note because you forgot um and then you go to pace extra a few extra sections than you thought and you slow down and what good are you then now you're holding your runner back they're they're worried and stressed about you it's like oh do i leave them they're struggling what's what's going on what's happening um and then it's it's the the silly cliche put on your oxygen mask first you got to take care of yourself throughout the day um um the part like the

best reminder of this is i got to go out and crew and pace at badwater and we had a designated crew chief he had been to the race many many years so he knew the gist um he had a strong personality which was very good and worked out well and he he knew what to do there was three of us that were on crew duties and it's like hey you're gonna work in four hour shifts whoever is in this seat of the van you don't get out of the car it is your job to rest and having very defined jobs in that way so it's like well i'm like if i'm gonna help at 2 a.m in the morning take care of this runner i do have to sleep now um and everybody's taking their turn um and after about 12 hours through the night there was no uh there was no pushback from the crew it was like oh yeah it is pretty nice to rest before your shift um i think a lot of pacers they forget or they fail to realize that the runner still has to run the whole way it's not like they're picking them up and spiking them like a football at the finish line or anything like that they still have to put one foot in front of the other and get to the finish line and i've always kind of boiled down this whenever people ask hey how do i how do i pace right i've kind of boiled it down to to two strategies when things are going well you just get out of the way don't do anything if they're eating they're drinking they're moving down the trail at the speed that they're expected to move down the trail don't do anything let them keep doing that like you don't have to intervene because it's still them running when

things go south then you intervene you switch up the order you're running first you're running last whatever that is you get them to eat you force them to get out of the chair and things like that but as long as as long as things are going good your job is to not screw it up so just get out of the way just get out of the way and give them company tell them a silly story like you know kind of stuff like that like don't they just realize that the runner still has to do they're still doing all of the work don't overemphasize yeah it's nice to have a pacer out there and things like that but don't overemphasize the impact that you can have particularly if things are going good you make your money when things start to go south when things start to go south then you can start to okay what am i gonna do i'm gonna give them a caffeine pill i'm gonna get them out of the chair i'm gonna tell them to quit bitching about their feet like whatever intervention you need to throw in at a time you should throw it in when things go south not if things are going well i had one runner coined this phrase perfectly earlier in the year it's like be the brain as the pacer be the brain when you need to like okay runner you're following my feet i'm reminding you when to eat you just follow or if things are going well then you be smart and sad away like you said but kisss keep it simple stupid yeah be the brain keep them on course words and encouragement tough love whatever they need crack the whip but they like by the time you pick up your runner it's 12 14 16 hours in obviously they're

physically tired but mentally they're very tired too they need to be reminded to eat they need you in front and know you're staying on course but the runner's like unless you're in bad water don't want to get them thrown out no no um yeah follow the rules goes back to knowing the plan and sticking to it um but like if your runner asks like do we miss a flag and you're like i don't know that's no that's not good is the move gonna freak out um but yeah keep it simple for them so they can keep locomoting and get to the next aid station and to the finish line yeah i i'm totally with you on that on that because a lot of pacers they get into it out of like the goodness of their hearts and they want to spend like time out on the trail but they have to realize that it's still a job right i mean it's still like they're the runner is putting some level of responsibility on you to help at a certain point and you've got to take that you've got to take there's some degree of seriousness that you have to that you have to take with that and it goes into you got to prepare download the map on your iphone there's no reason anybody should not have that right that technology is easily it's it's easy it's readily accessible and even on a really well marked course you never know kind of what's going to happen keeping track of how much the runner is eating that's something that you can easily do just listen for the rappers watch them watch them drink and if they're doing it great great if they're not hey when's the last time you drank okay 10 minutes ago okay let's drink again

in five minutes like those kind of simple things it should be easy for the pacer to do because they don't have you know in a hundred mile race 50 miles of deterioration underneath their underneath their body so it should be easier for them to have the this the mental faculty and the physical faculty to uh uh to do that but keeping it simple i think is the big thing run eat drink and then stay on course if you get those four things like what else can you do i mean there's some like advanced stuff you know that you might pull out when shit's really hitting the fan but in most most cases you can get by with those four points pretty easily and if you're pacing have realistic expectations oh it just works out that you're supposed to have a 15 mile long run on your plan that weekend and you're going to get it in pacing it's probably not going to be as fast as you want it to be so you can't get frustrated and bleed that negative energy into them because you forgot you're going to be doing 18 minute miles with them and you had to get this long run in like you have a job it's about your runner don't get disappointed and upset because they're going slower than you thought or um they need they need something else or they have to drop or whatever like you're there for your runner serve them disregard your own training for that weekend chantel whose camp is it i was just gonna say that i was just gonna say that it's not your camp so the background on that just for all the listeners is whenever we run our camps i give this uh what now has become a quite prolific speech to all of our coaches

that come to it and then i relay it to our athletes just so that they that they know it as well and that is it's the athletes camp it's not the coaches camp we don't give a crap about our own training that weekend we care about all the training that that the athletes get to do that particular weekend they've flown in from all around the country they want to come to carl Springs and you know run mountains and things like that and you are going to take advantage of that it's the same thing during a race it is the athlete's day it's not the crew's day it's not the pacers day it is the athlete's day so if you've got training on and i i actually get i get super upset when i see things like this pacers go out and they put in five miles before they start pacing they put in a workout before they start pacing or something like that it's like you know what you can take one day you can take one day in one run not to be so freaking selfish and put all the energy into this person that has asked you to do this and you've agreed like that's not that bit that's not that big of an ask don't be so freaking pretentious about your own training for one stinking day so yeah if you are out there pacing it's the athlete's day it's not your day it's not it's not your camp to use our famous our famous line there okay ryan anything else you want to add no okay that is a great segue because my learning lesson is about camps so for the so for the listeners out there i'll serve up a link in the

show notes to a podcast that ryan was actually on where we talked about camps and every single year i am amazed at the workload increase that athletes can handle in a camp environment it just absolutely blows my mind and every time i look at it on paper when i draw it out in training peaks i i inevitably come to one conclusion this is too much it's too much volume it's too rapid of an increase they're going to altitude there's this other complicating factor kind of whatever and every single year they're able to handle it and the side point i'm gonna i'm gonna talk about the side point first the side point to that is is that the duties is otherwise specified the stress is otherwise specified that is not there during the camp i'm the husband or wife i'm the breadwinner i'm the soccer coach all those other things those things are quite material in the whole stress goulash that is going on in a normal situation but the second thing i take i take from that is that the athletes can like athletes can handle things that you normally would not throw at them if you can remove that stress i was just at a camp with an athlete this week that is training for a tour de jaunt and by the time this podcast comes out we'll see if this camp actually had a actually had a

material impact but the athlete lives at sea level has no access to anything above maybe a couple hundred feet to him so it does not have mountains at all so he brought him out here into the sawwich range uh uh in the ludville buena vista area and just did 14ers ad nauseum 10 to 12 hours a day of going up and down 14ers so from 10 000 feet to 14 000 feet and then back down to 10 000 feet and then back up to 14 000 feet just on and on and on for 12 hours a day for three days straight and he handled it magnificently so not only was there an increase in volume you know it's running an hour and a half or two hours a day this normal normal person normal person not only is there a four to five-fold increase in the normal volume you have the altitude and you have the elevation gain elevation loss so you have all the musculoskeletal stress that comes along with with descending that and was he tired at the end of it yeah sure you know do you have a hard time sleeping every night yeah sure i mean that's just part of the discomfort of going through a big training block but at the end of the day he wasn't injured he handled it just fine and hopefully that'll reap a lot of adaptation that he can kind of use towards tour de jac because he doesn't have the trick like he doesn't have that type of mountainous terrain available so we just had to get it all in one shot but i guess my point with that is is when you set up training camps and you look at your year from a training perspective and particularly if you don't have a lot of the terrain access or you're limited on time and you're setting

up these camps don't be afraid to just go all in and take advantage of the camp the most the worst thing is you slow down and that's not the worst thing in the world because you're still probably running and hiking faster than you will do during the race anyway even in these camp types of situations so that's the learning lesson that i'm going to take forward is is that you we can take advantage of these camp situations much more so than we think we can and when you look at it on paper it's all it's always scary to me that's that's what i can't get over as a coach because when i look at it on paper i'm like oh my god i'm gonna kill this person and you guys know me i'm not a volume monger or anything like that but when i look at the proposition of doing some of these on paper i'm like this is a big huge increase and every single time they're able to handle it i i can't think of more than two or three out of my whole coaching career where the camp has been too like weight like even slightly too much so they've always been able to handle it so that that's what i'm going to take forward to next year is i'm going to just keep like pushing the envelope on that because it's just such a huge advantage i think another takeaway from that is for the the athletes themselves right like if i think about athletes that i've had done and the ones i'm speaking about now they're not athletes that have gone to a camp it's like we've planned uh you know three four days training blocks that we're calling you know their their camp um and in most of the cases they've gone somewhere else so an athlete from

austin that went out to montana an athlete from new york city that went out to um trains uh around logan utah uh things like that but what they've noticed is like getting away from their everyday environment where they're not worrying about like kids family job how much all that stuff um you know takes energy from them because they realize like wow when i just have to worry about running and feeding myself and sleeping i can do amazing things and i can feel really awesome right and it's a good learning lesson i think for us as coaches how much more they can handle without those stresses but i think for the athletes themselves to realize why it's hard to do this in their regular life because they've got so much other stuff that takes time and energy you know what's you know what's funny that i just realized is that um particularly with our colorado springs camp i know people who who have come to it with the intention of working every day so like oh you know i'm connected everywhere i can work remotely especially now right we can like work remotely and things like that and they think in advance they're like okay you know the runs end at like two or three in the afternoon and then i'll have you know i can work during dinner and blah blah normally what happens is they're just so tired that they just say screw it like i'm just taking our coaches do this too at camp they think that they're going to be able to build schedules and things like that and normally that yeah normally that gets either cut in half or completely wiped wiped off the table as well but my point is is is that for i think it i think it's also not only the great training lesson

that we get and the great training bumps that we get from camp but it's also a little bit of a learning lesson that you know what you can put some of those aside i'm not saying you can put everything aside and i know people have you know really high highly stressful jobs and mission critical things that they have to do every day but a lot of those things if you if you really want to maximize your performance you'll find a way to put it aside for a few days and focus on training those things are going to be there when you come out of the tunnel on the other side and they're not going to be any any different than they were two or three days ago and a lot of our athletes learn that during during the camps itself that it's okay to kick the can down the road on something that they thought was material before the camp that they found that is not material after they neglected it for a few days and we're able to kind of like catch back up on it but the total amount of work takes care of that for because they ended up just being so tired out of the day we have this shirt that's like eat sleep run repeat it it is that right eat sleep run rest eat again and repeat i don't know if we wanted to make it that accurate but um when you do that a lot of things that you thought were important end up not being important and you end up surprising yourself in terms of the total amount of work you can do um yeah especially if you're prioritizing your sleep and your rest yeah and i've always the literature teases this out as well one of the reasons i'm a big advocate for these these training camps

is that you get more adaptation per unit of time and that's because the stress is concentrated into a smaller area um in addition to that you obviously get more stress because there's more total time but because you're making it into you know in between two or four days seems to be the sweet spot it like i said the literature will back this up again there's a concentration effect of that workload of where it actually ends up in a superior adaptation as opposed to if you just took that 12 hour run that you did on one day and peanut butter spread it out through the entirety of the week on two hour runs for you know six days or something like that and so it's just such a big advantage from all of these different areas not only the physical part of it but also you get to practice parts of your nutrition that you normally wouldn't get to because of the duration of the runs there's a lot of confidence that's derived from it everybody asks what my longest long run is going to be and that's normally a confidence oriented question right they want some marker of confidence and these camps can kind of serve serve that the ends to that mean a little bit because you've done a big run and a big run and a big run kind of all all back to back so they're multifaceted in terms of what you actually reap from these camps at the end of the day and i think these camps i think we talk about them and for 100 milers 200 milers if it's the athlete's first 50k 50 miler you can still apply these same concepts of three-day concentrated load

okay yeah it's not the the same amount of volume that 100 mile camp would be but if it's your first 50k it's going to be a lot more training that you can concentrate in those three days and like really focusing on your training just because it's not that magical triple digit number of 100 200 miles or whatever you can still plan your own big training camp for a 50 miler that's your first 50 miler when you really care about and you want to pr you can still take that same concept and apply it to your training yeah that's that's a really good point ryan is a lot of people will kind of pigeonhole these things into just the really high volume stuff because of the time proposition but if you're doing 50k 50 mile or something on i would even say a marathon having these concentrated training camps can still be just just as just as effective if anything you get to feel like a pro for a few days which is kind of cool i mean we see that at our at the training camps at the group training camps that we did here is they just feel like that they're getting all that in the are getting all this special treatment because they've got coaches around and the meals are catered for them and there's professional guidance and they can kind of ping things off of the experts and sometimes we bring in you know technology and what's coming up next in nutrition and all that stuff to the table as well but the point that you don't have to like you know i'm giving this example of 10 to 12 hours a day it doesn't have to be that big but i think this at least threefold your normal training volume i think

that that's that can almost be a starting point and that once again even when i say it it sounds super scary like it would be something in our coaching continuing ads if we just saw that on somebody's calendar we'd be like whoa what's going on there like whoa hold on let's make sure that they're not you're not going to destroy them just for those three days i mean that's the way that we would look at it in that type of context but in these training camp contexts it's just that's almost not enough like every year it's just that that ratio just gets bigger and bigger for me i don't know what the limit of it is it's funny you mentioned about the um different race distances ryan for training camps i have an athlete um who's doing this race in utah and he lives in new york city and he just did a three-day training camp around logan i had some really awesome help from uh coaches nicole and darcy to plan it out you know when i told them what race he's preparing for darcy was amazing she made me a a really awesome route that uh was part of the course so he could do some course recce because it's it's a not a very well-known race and it's not the easiest to navigate um and it was great because he went out there he had the map on his watch and at one point he lost gps signal and had to figure you know figure things out like how to get himself safely around so it was you know invaluable in terms of like not just the volume of training but like building confidence being in that kind of

terrain um having him as well prepared as we could have had him but still realizing that you know things can still go wrong but i'm confident that i have the tools to figure my way out and i think from a coaching perspective that's something we definitely have you know within our group that we have so many coaches in so many locations that can provide some guidance and help to really hone things in for athletes well and i think athletes are taking advantage of these more and more because the technology is so much more accessible and you can see other people's routes via the heat maps and things like that on strava like it just makes it that much more tangible because let's face it like going to a new area and people are typically coming to the mountains let's just face it like that's the that's the prototype people are coming from the flats of the mountains part of the hesitation is is i don't know how long this loop is going to take me right or i don't even know how long it is sometimes and the just the accessibility of being able to look at a route through the lens of somebody else's training or having somebody else who has done it that you know like you were just mentioning with one of our coaches being able to plan that out put it on your phone you never have cell phone service but you've always had that track you know that you know so and so did it in six hours you know two years ago and you ran with that person so you kind of know how fit they are like that whole that whole sphere of knowledge and technology can facilitate people doing these on their own to a much greater degree

than it was five or seven years ago when it was actually kind of hard to like figure that for for a lot of reasonable people including myself it was actually hard to kind of like figure that out in terms of how big is this day actually going to be because it's a new environment yeah it was awesome like thanks to their help and the information we had and knowing knowing this athlete of how he's likely going to move in this terrain and i had you know time goals for each day the routes that we chose he was like bang on for each of them wow that's awesome that's usually kind of the hardest part when you're going into a new environment is trying to like figure out this route is going to take me that long like even in a race we talk about this in our in our coaching group we're trying to plan splits for races which you have a lot of data it's still super hard still hard yeah still really hard so you can imagine like when you scale that data down to you know whatever you're scaling it down to um figuring it but see once again i just kind of come back to if i'm plus or minus 10 percent or 20 percent yeah they can still handle it like i just don't i don't like really view that as a positive or a negative it just kind of is what it is the volume just takes care of itself when they when they get out there i hope a lot of people are planning training camps after they listen to this we've like this is probably the fifth podcast i've done this year on training they really should be i mean especially if we come back to you know building confidence and things like that if an athlete does something like this if after the fact they start having doubts i find it's a really nice kind of

play you know thing i can come back to yes but let's come back to what you just did three weeks ago and how well that went despite the fact that you live in austin or new york or wherever it is and i'm like okay right because they just seem to forget it you know and that and then they they're concerned about missing one workout i've brought that i've brought that up both in in those exact situations where you know chantelle you kind of let off with this like crisis the confidence piece my talking about my combative strategy is to look at the whole the totality of training normally a piece of training that i emphasize is some big training block or training camp like you remember when you did this okay that's like 30 hours of work and you're worried about this one hour work it's like come on let's let's like think about this rationally but i've also used it in races either if i pace an athlete which is kind of rare or if i'm just there as support which is kind of like more common to get them out of the chair or you know bring them out of a low spot or even just kind of perpetuate having a good day like hey you've been through all this before you did three 10-hour runs and now you're at hour 20 like you know what this feels like so just keep doing whatever you're doing that has got you this far like those types of things you're absolutely correct especially if the athlete can remember it can serve as big confidence points leading up to and actually during the race and the during the race one can actually be fueled if they've done their camp on the race course which is tricky i know it's like

a totally idealistic situation but still i mean it's super powerful if you can do it or if they've done tried to kind of replicate the type of terrain or the type of or even if it's like i think of my one of my athletes who's doing a race in oregon he was going to do a training camp in montana because he's got family there and a place to have as a as an hq um we couldn't find anything similar it was going to be harder well great you've done something even harder than what you're going to have to do for your race yeah exactly so you're going to be fine you have a 2 000 foot descent in the race and now you've get you've done a 3 000 foot descent in training piece of cake yeah it's going to be easy you know easier yeah perfect well this was awesome you guys i appreciate the perspective that uh you have as coaches once again we can always bring to the table more experience collectively than we can individually and um i hope the listeners really take to heart for next year 2023 when this podcast comes out as they start to plan some of this some of these lessons that we've kind of learned throughout the year and i hope that our coaches actually listen to this as well because i'll come back to and be like oh yeah i remember when we talked about i remember when we talked about that i'm not here's how i'm gonna plan so that that's not as big of an issue next year all right thanks you guys appreciate it awesome thanks all see you all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to chantelle and ryan for coming on

the podcast today and enlightening us with the things that they have learned this year and what they are going to change in order so that their athletes can be more prepared for future years i also hope that everybody in the audience can appreciate the fact that this is a little bit of a window into our coaching education and mentorship process and it is a big part of what makes our coaches help our athletes to be more successful they are able to get far more experience in education than the years of coaching that they have underneath their belts and the number of athletes that they work with because they have this collective group of coaches around them that can help make them better coaches each and every single day and that in turn and most importantly helps our athletes out the most appreciate the heck out of each and every one of the listeners if you if part of this podcast resonates with you or you think it would resonate with your training partners go ahead share this podcast with your friends your family your running compadres i would appreciate it very much it is part of what keeps this podcast sponsorship and ad free and is one of the promises that i made to the audience from the onset of this podcast is i'm always going to give it to you straight and the way that i can do that is to not take any sponsorship or advertising dollars and the way that i am able to do that is just simply because you guys continue to share this amongst your group of friends and family and training partners so thank you guys for doing that that is it for today folks and as always we will see you out on the trails

so thank you guys for watching