Preventing Perfectionism, Training Camps & Subjective Monitoring-A Coach Roundtable | Koopcast Episode 158

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 going to get right to the very heart of some of the things that you should be thinking about as you are planning out your season for 2023 and as you are thinking about the training that is going to support the races that you have on the calendar i know many of the listeners of this podcast we've just gone through the big lottery season and calendars are starting to shape up and we are starting to think about what we want to do from a training perspective and so in order to offer up a little bit of a lens into that process i wanted to have a conversation with a couple of our most experienced coaches that have gone through many seasons of coaching with their athletes and see what they are doing differently in 2023 compared to 2022 and how you can apply that to your training on the podcast today we have two of the coaches that i've worked with for some of the longest period of time and that is darcy murphy and ajw and we talk about what we are going to change within our own coaching practice to the benefit of our athletes and regardless of whether you are coached a coached

athlete or not if you are arranging your training all by yourself you can take some information from this podcast in terms of how to think about the training that you want to do for next year so listen up folks if you're in the planning process this podcast is for you with that as a backdrop i'm getting out of the way here's my conversation with coaches darcy murphy and ajw who wants to go first or do you guys want to paper rock scissors for it uh ladies first ladies first darcy goes first okay darcy okay with that yeah okay so the construction is is we always go through these reflections right every single year of what we did good and what we did bad and hopefully the the balance is more on the good side of the bad side but um uh i always find something every year that i want to do differently and i thought it'd be a good exercise for us to go over this publicly and hopefully there's something that the listeners can can take from it so darcy you can kick us all off and then andy and i'll bat it around for a little bit what are you going to do different with your athletes next year and more importantly for the audience like why are you going to make that change uh this is a topic that was really exciting to me i've kind of already started on it um before you brought this up a theme that was really reoccurring this year to me in a good number of my athletes was perfectionism or perfectionist tendencies it's a little esoteric a little less scientific

um but i saw it more frequently i feel like than normal i don't know if covid had some effect on it um but i'm committed this next year to uh calling my athletes out when i see it especially when i feel like it's inhibiting their training and or performance um i feel like it can definitely be a tool to be used advantageously but a lot of times and again especially this year for whatever reason i saw athletes struggling with perfectionism in wanting to execute their workouts perfectly so sometimes not even attempting said workout and it would bleed over into other areas of their life i had a conversation with wonderful lady uh wonderful athlete um her house must be perfectly clean before she heads out the door for her workout oh so even like things outside of the workout absolutely yeah and 100% i'll own this is beyond my scope of practice i'm not a psychologist or a clinical therapist in extreme cases i don't hesitate for a second to refer them to a therapist when i think that it's appropriate um but i realized oh this is why you're only getting 30% of your workouts in is because you have this like perfectionist thing that's not even directly related to training

how can we address that so that you can get out the door just to be more consistent in your training so the things that's just one example so it extends outside the scope of hey you got to go do this workout that's the that's the extension of the scope that you're mentioning yeah wow i saw i saw quite a bit more this past year um of athletes for the listeners on the podcast know probably know that we use training peaks for our workout uh as our workout platform and uh the uh you know the green the yellow red coating of the of the workouts i had an unusually large number of athletes this year it's related that darcy who were just really angry if they weren't all green you know to the extent that they'd be you know texting me to ask me to to change things around and pair them so that they come up green and and with a couple of athletes i actually was like okay i'm gonna turn the colors off you know well you know you can change the tolerance too right you can not only change what the color cue is so whether it's you can make it go off of the total amount of time you can make it go off of the intensity you can make it go off of the tss score you can make it go off of mileage if that's the prescription you can kind of pick and choose whatever the the cue is but you can also determine the green yellow amber and red tolerances so to speak so whether it's 20 of the total or 50 of the total or 80 of the total or whatever

it is in those categories you can kind of you can tune those and almost no athlete actually understands that like the ones that are really into their training that are really into training peaks they'll go in and monkey with it but andy you're absolutely right people get kind of obsessed with the color coding and a they don't even know where it comes from that's the first thing right like what what generates a green day versus a red day is it 80 of the volume or is it you know i did all the intervals or did i just log in you know like does that generate the green day or not they get mad when the color when the color coding actually comes up but first you need to understand this is where this comes from and this is why you have these and should we tune these or not specifically based on your situation or your personality but i get the same thing yeah yeah so so this is really interesting to start out with this because we're starting something like you said that's could be considered outside of a scope of practice first off did you notice an increase in this over the past couple years like a deliberate increase in this or do you think your athletes were increasing this behavior over the last couple years or is it just something that you noticed probably both i think i've tuned into it a little bit more for a variety of reasons um and i think certain occupations lend themselves toward perfectionist tendencies i.e surgeons um so i have a new athlete um that i recently

took on she's a surgeon and i mentioned the word perfectionism to her and she gave me a knowing laugh like yes that is something um and it i i broached the subject not as like this is a fault of yours this is something to be aware of um recognize if and when it has an effect on you how to identify it what the outcome is and then beyond that develop tools uh for using it to your advantage and not letting it hinder you from getting out the door from trying even if that means you fail try yeah so you see a lot so you have an hour and a half prescribed and they only have 45 minutes of time so they automatically kind of throw the work out away because they can't complete the hour and a half or even if it's an hour and 15 minutes versus an hour and a half and i i'm completely on board with you another way that this actually we see like the outward manifestation of this is it's kind of inherent it's inherently tied to just the nature of trail running where we don't have a very good way of precisely defining the intensity spectrum so we use this rpe scale which everybody gets tripped up on but the people who are more concerned about precision or perfection get more hung up on it a because there's only 10 rungs and those aren't very granular right those are pretty thick you know uh bandwidths of intensity but b if they come from like a track background where they can

or a marathon or a marathon running background where they can very precisely dial in their intensity via pace or even a cycling background where you have like you know these crazy systems where they have like 20 different power ranges and it kind of like your sons are probably experiencing right now with their power heaters uh it it becomes like uh just kind of another extension of this this desire or need or difficulty to actually let go of that level of precision and granularity with things because it's just a it's impractical but b i've always maintained the i've always maintained the opinion that even when you can dial in intensity that prescription that uh precisely your body still doesn't know the difference even with a cyclist your body doesn't know the difference between 210 watts and 205 watts like that's that's immaterial just get it freaking close so for ours like if you just get seven or eight just get it close anywhere in between there four no ten no seven or eight like just kind of get it that close and some people just have a hard time wrapping their head around the fact that that level of imprecision is actually effective that's the hard part of translation and so to your point of perfectionism it's the same thing on volume whatever other component that you're actually trying to relay to the athlete yeah i kind of did a quick google search trying to understand what like the clinical definition of perfectionism in is in the world of psychology uh and this article that i skimmed through explained that a true perfectionist will

set high standards for themselves if they meet that standard they interpret that standard as being uh too low so even when they do achieve their perfect goal they'll set it higher the next time um so there there really is no such thing as perfect in my opinion and for those that are trying to to be perfect to execute perfectionism uh the rabbit goes just a bit further once you catch it you never really arrive i'm all about continuing to challenge yourself that's largely what this is right set a challenge uh work hard can you achieve it but that's different than um never truly achieving what you set out to accomplish i think uh darcy i love your your comment about the surgeon i'd put a couple others in there uh i've got a handful of retired military uh and they are determined to uh you know get it perfectly get it exactly right uh and then these sort of engineer types uh especially who who geek around in with uh training stress score and things like that so i think i think we get a fair number of those people that come into ultra running at first because it's like laid back and cool and it's trail and and yet they're ultimately there's those true colors comes that come out and that perfectionist tendency is there and and it's a big part of our job and tempering that that perfectionist tendency

while at the same time it's nice to know that you know you put it on the schedule and they're going to do it right you know they're gonna they're gonna do it at 10 at night if they have to so i think it's we want to walk that line of uh of too much and not enough i think your first point about if they can't do it perfectly they don't do it at all is a is a is can be an added challenge uh for us to work with right but i do think those athletes that if it's out there they're probably going to do it i think those are the individuals that have figured out how to make it work for them they're the individuals that have created the whole race planning spreadsheet they send it to me i make a few suggestions we're good um so yeah it's it's just like anything it can can be twisted and manipulated to to be advantageous ultimately you know so here here's an interesting distinction point for for for coaching and coaches that can sometimes be hard to figure out so a lot of times we want to put the the onus on missing a workout or something like that and being a perfectionist or you're trying to be overly perfect or whatever trying to make it overly precise and that absolutely does happen and i completely agree with there is some carryover within people who have a work life that is more dependent upon precision or perfectionisms surgeons accountants are the ones that you know always come to mind for for me because they

have to have the books balance or otherwise you know it just kind of drives them crazy it's the same thing they have to have you know 75 minutes on the calendar and actually do exactly 75 minutes otherwise it's not balanced but sometimes but but sometimes honestly i think that the there can also be an error that we shouldn't conflate with with these two and the athlete just isn't giving themselves enough time or allowing enough space for the workouts so it's not the fact that they're trying to make it perfect it's just that everything else going on around their lives they're not organizing correctly in order to set their workout up for success and so whenever i see this a lot so darcy like the way that you see it in you know an athlete calendar is a lot of red days or they're skipping a lot of days and then you start to dig into it you're like well you know i had 90 minutes scheduled and i really only had 30 minutes and i didn't feel like it was blah blah blah then you then then have to decide well are they just trying to make things too perfect or are there other things going on around in their lives that they're not correctly organizing or prioritizing based on the goals that they put out is there a discrepancy between the goals that they put out there for themselves and the priority that they're putting on the workout and that's that part of social coaching that everybody is you know constantly trying to figure out with every single athlete and the reason why we don't just huck static training programs out there because all that stuff can be completely tailored to the level of the individual in terms of how to figure out what's going to work for them yeah it kind of veers into the

life life coaching realm sometimes but that that's okay i mean we know we wear a lot of hats that's what makes this challenging and fun and rewarding in for me so dorsey you coach across a few different sport groups do you find any like tendencies with one or the other in this area i'm kind of curious about that oh no it doesn't seem to like stand out i think um athletes do more sports tend to be uh lower on the perfectionist scale like if they're riding and skiing and running kind of doing a lot of different things uh those are the athletes that aren't overly caught up in doing things perfectly whereas the athlete that only cycles and has a power meter on all four bikes that might be i honestly like i'll raise my hand i've had a hard time as a coach sometimes moving back and forth with the sport groups because of this like you're calling a perfectionism but i'm making an extension of that and just calling it like the level of the the level of precision that you can apply so when i'm looking at applying workouts to a triathlete or to a cyclist i use a different level of precision within that prescription both on the fundamental volume and intensity side of things versus a trail runner i can give i need to give them a little bit of bandwidth because you know the loop that they take that they do might take them 75 minutes or 85 minutes just depending upon is it muddy or not do they want to go up this

hill a little bit harder kind of any number of different factors and it's just less kind of less controllable and i've certainly made that mistake as a coach and not recognizing that those levels of imprecision kind of exist and i've also done it in both directions right where i've been too imprecise on the cycling and triathlon side and overly precise on the trail running side and i i think that that coaches that are working within those multitude of sport groups it's it's a difficult point of consideration because what you want to do is you want to take your tendencies of your primary sport group and apply them to the novel one so for me it would be taking the imprecision of trail running and trying to apply that to cycling or triathlon which is normally the error that you know that that i've made over the past few years when i've been in when i've been in that situation it's not an easy one because just like we were talking about you know the the accountant the accountant or the surgeon who wants to take their level of perfection into their sport right their normal life is has a lot has a high degree of precision or perfection they want to take it into the things that are novel in their life which is their training it's the same thing with us right i want to take something that i do routinely from a work perspective and apply it in something that's slightly unique or novel and it's just a hard thing to wrap your head around because you get so in the routine of things do you guys ever uh give your athletes a range uh volume or uh whatever so they can uh feel like they're accomplishing i'll oftentimes

i'll give my my athletes hour to an hour and a half a run adjust based on energy or surface conditions especially now that we're in winter um with the understanding that this is our goal for the week we want to reach eight to nine hours total of running etc so they can kind of adapt on the fly that is i trust my my more veteran athletes with that that so so i think that that's this is why i wanted our uh more experienced coaches on this call because i think that that is uh that that's a high level uh that's a high level coaching thought and one that only comes with a lot of experience like the three of us have here so do you intentionally prescribe a range an hour and a half to two hours knowing that the athlete can get anywhere in between there or you prescribe an hour 45 minutes and just tell them that your buffer is 15 minutes on either side functionally those are the same but those are two really different communication propositions depending upon the athlete and i deploy both of those like because i know my surgeons and my accountants and my engineers and things like that they want an hour for they they want they want a level of prescription in the precision right and it doesn't matter how imprecise i tell them to go about it they're still going to try to get it they're going to be the ones that run around their car you know at the end of the run trying to get

everything rounded up to the you know to the nearest tenth of a mile or second or whatever and so i try to play to that personality as much as as much as pragmatic as long as it doesn't detract from the kind of from the overall workout but the the answer darcy is i do both but everybody out and i want to hear andy's thoughts on this as well everybody out there needs to understand though that if you're plus or minus 10 it kind of comes out in the wash anything more than that then you can sort of debate on yeah it's more functional over here more functional over there but plus or minus 10 as long as it's not all plus 10 or all minus 10 as long as there's a balance of going over here and going under there all that stuff kind of comes out in the wash so i for for most people i don't get too too sticky about it i actually don't prescribe the range i do coop in your two models i do the second one i put an hour and 45 on there and then the the athlete knows that they're going to have that back and forth and and part of the reason is kind of darcy started to touch on it looking at that overall weekly volume or monthly volume i think for an athlete to keep that big picture view right i'm sure you guys often get an athlete let's say they're doing a you know classic three by ten tempo and they run out of time and they cut short their their cool down or whatever and the overall time then is you know eight to ten percent less or something and if they're an accountant or a surgeon they're going to try and make up that ten

percent like in the next day's recovery run or something like that but i like to have that specific number as as much for me actually as for the athlete knowing knowing that to darcy's point they may end up doing the range but for me and in kind of managing that overall athlete's training load um i like to have that specific number then i can look at my athlete roster right and i would i will know you know the artists versus the scientists and who's going to be caught up in you know not going exactly an hour and 45 and who's going to be okay with it so i i think it's i think the range piece is something and if you if you work with your athletes long enough and you've had those experiences where they're not able to hit that number you're able to kind of talk through it um but i i go with the second one most of the time i i think that's a perfectly reasonable way to do it i'll give you i'll give you guys a little bit of an anecdote that andy don't think that this is related to that that i'm picking on you but uh it's with a mutual colleague of ours that darcy and i just happen to know for a long time and who's been on this podcast before it's lindsey gollich she was a she's a great triathlon coach and now she's the she's one of the head physiologists over at the u.s training olympic training center and it used to drive her bonkers when she was managing and mentoring coaches that got that that gave a range for the workouts like it would drive her crazy because she always felt that

the coach should be the boss and that's what she'd tell all these younger coaches like you need to be the boss you need to be the kind of the authority figure so if you want them to do something tell them exactly what you want them to do if you want them to run eight minute pace tell them it's eight minute pace sure you can give a little bit of a range on it but if you want them to do two hours tell them to do two hours like you need to be the boss and where that emanated from and she would not mind me telling the story because we've had many many many conversations about this the primary the primary the primary situation around where that emanated from is that she was a young female triathlon coach in a male dominated kind of ecosystem she coached a lot of alpha males i mean the people who are coming into triathlon are these like ceo level 45 55 year old very successful dudes and she always had i and i felt that she always had kind of an extra burden to overcome being a young smart intelligent incredibly good coach but as a female she had a little bit of a authoritative burden to overcome and one of the ways that she overcame that was being extremely precise with the prescription on things and not giving much of a she'd given range on the intensity side but on the volume side it was like i want you to do two hours if i see an hour and 55 minutes like that was part of like the whip that she cracked and the hammer that she kind of brought down it was very effective for and i i've

watched that evolved over you know maybe a decade or so so this whole conversation is interesting because the social backdrop of how coaches choose to manage the prescription of their of their athletes i do think to andy's point of prescribing things very precisely contrasted with why lindsey would do it being quite different it is a deliberate choice right you can't just always give the range or always give the prescription you need to under or you can't you can't do that you just need to understand why you're actually doing it and what the potential kind of like ramifications of it actually are because that's like in my opinion those types of things are like high level coaching because you're thinking about not just do i need two or two and a half hours to create xyz workload you're you're also concerned with how you're presenting that to the athlete and how they are going to react to that presentation which in many cases if not most is more impactful than the actual two hours of workload itself like if they feel that they're getting benefit from it and they react from it that's going to be your bigger kind of tool in a toolbox this conversation i know how this is going to go we're going to go from general to specific so we're going to do andy next because i have something really specific i had a couple things laid out but but i was going to choose based on how the conversation went so before we go on though is there do do are there any wrap-up points with this one i think that was a good one darcy and something that a lot of people noticed like yeah for sure um

what i want the audience to know i made a list of like four or five bullet points to help identify perfectionism and i can go through those really quick if there's no yeah do it i'll just like lift them off number one is the obvious if it's having a negative outcome on your training or performance um identify that at the top of the list um if you're a perfectionist in all things that can be a clue uh if you're an all or nothing person um craving approval can be one uh if feedback makes you defensive uh or you're highly critical of others you may be a perfectionist uh if you tend to be a procrastinator or you're full of guilt um those are some some of the clues that you may be a perfectionist so for the audience listening um if one or two or three of those ring really true to you again there's nothing wrong it's just something is there and what's the outcome of those what about if your aid station splits for your next hundred mile race pacing are to the second we've seen that people come in i'm gonna be here at one hour and 54 minutes and 30 seconds like whoa that's like you you're gonna control a lot of variables over the course of those 20 kilometers of trail with other people around you yes and i'm gonna sit in this chair for 45 seconds

and eat and eat two pierogies and a grilled cheese sandwich and just throw that let's throw that precision out the window all right all right let's move on andy you're next man uh darcy i think by the way that's a great i know you've been writing some great articles uh in the train right uh website that's a great one yeah for the future uh put a put a placeholder on that the the five signs that you might be a perfectionist so so mine's gonna come mine's coming down to architect training architecture and um this is something we've talked about as a coaching group um multiple years and it's something that is is proven effective and this is the time of year and i think you all ever any any coach on this is in any athlete on this is really this is the time of year where we're thinking about okay what's our big what's our big goal for 2023 and for a variety of reasons in my group of athletes i've got big goal athletes who are typically traveling a fair distance from their home area to do an event maybe for the first time western states and tahoe 200 uh come to mind as two that there's a fair number of people that are going to those environments for literally the first time they live in the east coast or the southeast and we're building the architecture up to those events so my doing differently is not so much doing something i've never done before but insisting absolutely in talk

about i'm the boss insisting on this approach rather than saying it would be a good idea to do this and that is and that is the multi-day training camp the whether whether it's the specific i want you to travel to western states to do the three memorial day training camp or i want you to build in your life three to four days where you can focus on simulating the tahoe 200 course or you know travel out like you did coop travel down to arizona and run sections of the cocodona course it i'm not insisting that it'd be on the course but if you i've got a an athlete i'm not going to use a name very very good runner runs a lot lives in pittsburgh and is running the tahoe 200 is worried about sleep deprivation and and so on and so forth runs a lot of hundred milers but as we all know 200 miler is a totally different ball game the training camp and we've talked a lot about the training camp whether it's the do-it-yourself training camp whether it's working with three or four friends and traveling somewhere but this notion of like live eat sleep breathe training for two three four days i think to to our point about prescribing a range in a training camp weekend i'm perfectly cool with a range hey six to eight hours just be out get you know to the top of this peak do this section of the course whatever i've for the

last several years i've put these on the calendars and it's been a nice to have and so in the doing it differently this year as i'm going through everybody you know i'm looking for tahoe i'm looking for western states i'm i'm ready to you know even something like javelina which is a little further away i'm saying find those three to four days right now let's get them more or less on the calendar let's talk about them as if as if it's a race uh and let's make that work and the and basically the reason is in these last two to three years i've seen a much higher level of success however you measure success achieving your goal you know going beyond your goal not dnfing being able to manage nutrition and gear and all of those race day things by having done these training camps um so again it's not something i've never done before but the insisting on it is something that you know i'm having those conversations right now that's super impactful like the fact that i mean or that's not the right word i want to use i think the fact that you're being the boss on that right you're saying it's a non-negotiable piece it says a lot about how impactful those actually are like there are very few things that we're going to say as coaches you absolutely have to do this right and if you're saying that that's what like you absolutely have to run that's probably one right you absolutely have to have some fuel and

some fluids that's probably you know we're doing a sport where you're going to have to carry some of those things around if you're saying that that you're putting like a similar if not that exact same height of importance on doing a training camp or training camps in preparation for event i think that that says a lot about what you feel about the kind of the efficacy of those well and and it's come out of sort of our our unscientific work as a group of coaches where when we get together and we talk especially when we do post uh postmortems on races and you know a coach talks through their their architecture with an athlete and says oh and then we did a four-day training camp you know somewhere where they were able to mimic the elevation gain because because they live in florida and they're running leadville or something like that i mean we now have enough data you know again it's not scientific per se but we now have enough data to say this works and and it works for most people and and not doing it sometimes doesn't work and so i just felt i've just felt like and i mean you know it was a couple years ago coo you wrote about it but i mean i think we can all think of athletes particularly those athletes who come from play come who live in environments and run most of the time in places that are not at all like where they're going to do their target event i think that's a key component and as we've proven especially you coo you don't need that much like three or four days of

that live eat sleep breathing and getting the vertical and working with if you if you're going to race with poles or you're going to have a big heavy pack or whatever the case may be just that that dose sometimes does the trick and so i'm insisting on it this in 2023 so i'm gonna i'm gonna take this part part to be a little bit incestuous and point the listeners to a podcast that andy and ryan was anybody else on that podcast andy i don't want to i don't want to leave them out where we talked about the camp yeah i think that was the three of us okay so i'll link that up in the show notes you guys check that out and it'll give people a very clear direction on some of the structure that andy was talking about because we pin that down uh we try to pin that pin that down a lot in terms of when how much how many days how much you should increase your volume volume and things like that all the mechanical pieces that people have uh questions on if you if you want to reference that as in terms of how we do it as coaches i think that that's a really good that's a really good resource um that that you know i think that was what i changed last year i mean i once again i can't agree more to i want to ping off of it a little bit and kind of move from the science to the anecdote so i would say there's there's fairly clear evidence that whenever you concentrate a training stress you get more out of that training stress when you look at it compared to an iso work situation meaning if you take 40 40 miles a week

we'll do it miles per week because a lot of listeners will be used to that take 40 miles per week and you do that every single week for four weeks and you take another athlete that does 60 miles per week one week and then 20 the next and 60 the next and 20 the next that average is still going to be 40 but the second athlete is probably going to improve more because of that concentration workload you see that you also see that come out in interval training all the scandinavian research and i'll link this up in the show notes as well where they take interval workouts and they pull them into a smaller period of time there's been any number of permutations of this you know across sports science literature but the sum total of it is is when you take 10 workouts 15 workouts or whatever and you concentrate them in a shorter in a kind of a smaller area of time or shorter period of time those are going to have an outsized effect as compared if you peanut butter spread that that that literature so that's the science piece of it then you take the anecdote and a lot of the anecdote is actually driven from the scientific process so it's primarily driven from when we would bring people out to altitude camps which has been done ad nauseum right going all the way back to the mexico city olympics where altitude training became one of the kind of critical interventions or thought we thought that it was a critical intervention and everybody started doing it and everybody started improving from these altitude camps well then what started to happen is is the physiologist started to be able to tease apart the physiology from actual the actual performance and there wasn't as clear of a link between the actual altitude intervention and the performance that they were actually getting on the

on the tail end of it and so what it led a lot of coaches and practitioners to believe is that it wasn't the altitude per se that was causing that was the stimulus for the improvement it was putting them in the environment because as you can imagine the way that they would do this is they would take a pool of athletes and they did this right around the corner from me in colorado springs they take a pool of athletes and they'd relocate them to woodland park colorado which is like at 7500 feet or something like that they would have them eat sleep run eat sleep train sometimes they're triathletes eat sleep ride sometimes they're cyclists in that isolated 8 000 foot natural environment they'd bring them back down to colorado springs or to pueblo so they can kind of train in a lower uh lower altitude environment but the point is is they were in a training camp right they didn't have a lot of the external stimuli to deal with work life kids you know whatever it is for that for kind of that mix of people so it led those those physiologists and the coaches to appreciate that the training camp environment may be the or certainly a bigger stimulus for adaptation than the actual altitude intervention itself and you clearly see that in practice where these altitude camps were highly favorable in the early 2000s mid 2000s and maybe late 2000s almost de facto where you know you used a tent or you went to an altitude camp or whatever and they started to kind of fall out of favor in part because we started recognizing that some of the improvement was coming from the camp environment

itself and some maybe coming from the actual uh uh kind of kind of the actual altitude then you pair that with just like even this is removing it one step further from the scientific process darcy and ajw have seen our camps unfold in real time and people can just do three or four times the volume that they do in a normal situation and not only that they handle it really well and you would look at that as a coach if any one of our coaches put up a training program and training peaks and we're all to scrutinize it and we see a three to four x increase over a three period of over a three day period we would all say the same thing you're going to kill that athlete like they're there that is not that is not tenable but if you add the backdrop of oh it's a training camp right and this is what they're doing in order to kind of orchestrate their lives around that training camp then we kind of look at it and go man okay yeah we've seen it a hundred times before in our athletes the final leg and this is getting the furthest part into it's not really anecdote because i see it so like there's just like a lot of people that observe it right observation at this point is that to andy's one of the points that andy made the the adaptation the improvement that you make is outside is outsized compared to the amount of work that they actually do so not only are they doing three or four x of the actual volume is that they're probably getting

five x of the improvement out of that volume somehow or another whether it's because you know you guys know how it works out when we did the memorial day camp here after the run everybody would hang out and that seems like a simple you know happening we'd hang out in the front yard and you know play with the dog and some people to put the norma tech boots on but what's more important is what they're not doing they're not scrambling around to their next board beating and picking the kids up from soccer practice and you know taking a shower in five minutes and brushing their teeth at the same time and slamming down a you know recovery shake on the way out the door to you know do do whatever that haphazard and kind of rushed lifestyle that we all have to live in order to train 15 hours a week or whatever it is you don't have to do that at the camp you can actually chill out and that absolutely there's actually a lot of science behind the adaptive process is fueled by that down regulation process occurring earlier in the training cycle post uh post post activity so you take this whole chain of events and andy not to you know pat our own selves on the back a little bit but i think you have a lot of like firepower right and ammunition to to essentially mandate it right because there is such a huge powerful advantage and if you're going to spend so much time training you might as well squeak out the extra like three or four days because it has an outside outsized impact well and it's also really directly related to to you know a lot of the high stakes you know people get into something a big race like

western states or hard rock and they think of it as their one shot one one once in a lifetime thing right we've talked a lot about that so why not do everything you can to be as well prepared as you can for that and something like a training camp clearly does that i think one of the one of the challenges is you know especially at this time of year let's say the events in june or july or august right you you're asking an athlete to think about their lives that far ahead of time talk to their spouse about it figure out how they're going to work through with their kids and school and graduations and life stuff and at the same time it's a little bit different you know we we've talked about this in our in our continuing ed meetings the timing of the training camp could be interesting some some people it would four weeks out from the event some people six weeks out from the event i just say if you can do it do it you know find find where you have four days if it happens to be six weeks of that fine you know you don't want it to be two weeks out but you know find that time carve that time out and just like you have you know you have tahoe 200 circled on your calendar right now in december you know have four day training camp in may circled on your calendar uh i think not only does that make a huge sort of training difference but also mentally it's like okay well when i get to may i'm going to be running you know 20 hours over four days that's yeah and like you said no one would ever prescribe that you know we would we would say why the heck are you doing 20 hours and four days but you know you go to a

camp and it's like you do it i do think that go ahead darcy okay i was just going to jump in and say i agree with you but i'm going to pose a devil's advocate question just based on principle yeah did do you have any athletes that did their own private uh running camp and you feel like it was ultimately detrimental to them over the past year i i i i don't i don't think so um here's here's a here's a here's a good here's a good way to pose it though if you can't come up with an example of of it actually being detrimental what would make it detrimental because i don't think we talked about this in the conversation with you you i and ryan uh andy but i do i have my opinions on this and i'll kind of go through them a little bit but what do you think would make it detrimental i mean i would say an injury is an obvious one yeah um the other like softer ones are maybe some mental burnout or not able to recover in time for said event yeah just generally like energetically metabolically or or the mental part of maybe that you you that you had some goals for the three days and they fail to reach them and it kind of gets in their head that uh you know let's just you throw something out there you know you'd like to like to have a lot of energy by the end of this six hours so

make sure you pace to eat and so forth and and if you if you fail at that in the course of the training camp it could be detrimental when it comes to race day so i do think there's some there's some ways in which you want to structure the training camp to set the athlete up for success um so that it they don't come away with it saying oh my gosh i barely survived 70 miles of ford over three days how am i going to do 100 miles i think though that like i mean kind of going back back to how powerful they are i kind of think that the way to answer darcy's question directly you have to really screw it up like it's not something where it's like yeah you know like and i did three hours you know this day instead of four hours or whatever that's probably not all that material yeah if you get injured that's going to screw it up if you do too close to the race yeah you're going to screw it up it's really hard to pragmatically do too much and somebody out there is going to send me some piece of hate mail because of this but let me explain you can only run so many hours during the day i mean it's just like yeah you can run at night too and you know we do camps where we have overnight runs that's part of the leadville training camp you know they do one overnight run you can certainly do too much but from a practical standpoint as long as you're being reasonably intelligent about it it's just it's just hard to do too much in that environment because you're kind of isolating yourself

now i i would say based off based off of that kind of like that statement trying to really shoehorn the camp in where you're not rearranging other aspects of your life could make it detrimental so once again the power as we mentioned before is getting yourself in a more of a isolated non you know uniform type of environment that you're used to every single day because you can handle the increase because you can handle the increase in workload if you were just to do it in parallel of your overall life then you're adding a shit ton of stress without removing some of the day-to-day stress so i would consider that a little bit of an error once again if we saw it on a training calendar without any context everybody would kind of agree that it's that it's nonsensical or untenable so i but i i think the general theme is this is screwed up you've kind of like like like royally screw it up it's not like a uh well over three days i did you know 16 hours instead of 15 hours i don't think that those are the material like uh points of of prescription that are going to make an impact it's like the really big things i don't know maybe there's another reason out there i don't know but like i said i've kind of come to the same conclusion andy has these are so powerful you'd like you got to command them early right i think that that's that's one part of it you got to start putting them on and i just went through my i'm gonna how many how many of them are compliant on this so far andy percentage-wise of the athletes that you're working with uh i mean they're i would say you know at least half of them have said yep i'm doing it and a quarter or you know

because literally this is just happening in real time right and and and then a hand maybe a quarter of them are i got to check with my family kind of thing and i'll get back to you and then the other quarter haven't figured out their race calendar yeah so i mean i've given them the heads up like once you figure out your race calendar we're probably going to do this um but i i mean i think i i mean i i use anecdotes of you know western states athletes in particular and the success because you have this obvious thing where they if they if they're so inclined they can actually go to an organized training camp that western states puts on or i use the example of our memorial day training camps in colorado springs or the leadville camp that's done around uh late june june july and there's enough anecdotal evidence that you know i i had athletes do this and they broke 24 hours or whatever that it's it's not a hard sell um unless unless there's life stuff that gets in the way which is why you've got to do it now it's like okay well we're talking about a race in june let's see if you can find three to four days in early may early mid may and get them on a calendar right now so i would say most people are i would say almost all are on board with the idea and whether or not they can get the practical part you know put into place i think is a is a is a matter of of their lives i mean i had a i had an athlete last year who was she definitely was convinced she lives in colorado she was committed to do her own thing and and you know as as memorial she was in western states and as memorial day got

closer she was like oh crap i'm just gonna get the flight and go out there right i mean she kind of talked herself into it uh and she's someone we both know coop and she's a she's a great person but you know and she had a good successful training weekend and a good successful race so i mean i i think sometimes the athlete does it for themselves um i'm gonna bring up two two points here one i just forgot the second one so i'm gonna go to the first one this is what i do when i get too many things in my head all at once um i do think that this kind of goes back to our earlier conversation of uh what what can kind of screw it up specific with some camps because they're in a like a group environment whether it's our camp that we have run in the past of memorial day or the western states camps are kind of the two examples because it's a highly social environment sometimes i don't think that that's the best for athletes that don't like they just don't want to train in that type of social environment you guys all know those people they just kind of want to train by themselves and so speaking to the adaptive process that is reaped from this down regulation you're actually you're actually countering that to a large extent by having 300 people hang out at you know at rucky chucky after one of the memorial day training camp days and oh how did you run go they don't want to deal with that you know so there are some athletes i think you have to kind of like make sure the situation um going back to our original principle of is it an increase in overall life stress or decrease in overall life stress in terms of the

camp environment that you're putting them in you have to actually uh kind of kind of kind of come to kind of come to realize so that might be another point of consideration uh with everybody i i just while we were going through this i went through my athlete roster and i'm almost at 100 of the athletes that are uh that already have their seasons lined up that have a camp or a placeholder for a camp already already in place i'm almost there and the other ones will kind of tip over fairly quickly and i wasn't even shooting for that so once again maybe it shows our oh that's the second thing i was going to mention we have to recognize that i do think that there is a little bit of selection bias when we are correlating the percentage of people that have success that go to these camps that ultimately have success in their races those are the people that i think are just more committed with all due respect to everybody that are just more committed to the process overall so yes there is a camp catalyst but also the people that are going to those camps are going to self-select to do everything else that is going to be impactful to their race they're going to have their pacers lined up you know two weeks in advance and they're the ones that are going to cross every t and kind of like dot every i like there's a little bit of selection bias in this so we can't like pat ourselves on the back too much with this whole like camp model i do think that those people are predisposed to getting it right anyway yeah there's certainly the people that are also going to drag their butts through the sauna for 27 days you know to do to do the heat

27 days there's a direct correlation between those those groups of people for sure you don't need 27 days i just recorded literally yesterday i recorded a podcast with this uh with uh this guy with this this pair of people who did some research on hot water immersion and um yeah we made that point abundantly clear you don't need 27 days you need maybe seven days okay we're gonna move on um so once again this goes from general to specific darcy had a really general thing and he had kind of a more of more of a specific thing in a training camp it's a really small piece mine actually goes more specific than that this is like a like it literally a daily thing um i'm gonna get i'm gonna get more and more of my athletes on board with a consistent subjective monitoring um procedure that they do that hopefully with most athletes i can pair up with heart rate variability so every day as opposed to just saying i felt good today there's a system to those objective measurements that we put behind that type of objective feedback or sorry subjective feedback and the the reason the the the kind of reason that that i'm deploying this is a lot of athlete first off a lot of athletes need kind of like direction on how to give that subjective feedback and you know i've said any number of times i put the subjective side in terms of rank order

i prioritize the subjective feedback higher than the objective feedback from any number of different things so i'm always trying to get my athletes to do it so having some sort of mechanism behind it is a is an incredibly powerful tool but the kind of the the the bigger reason behind it is is that there's just more and more and more evidence that continues to come out every single year that points to when an athlete can synthesize everything that is going on into some sort of some sort of subjective quality that that is going to be a bigger indicator indicating arrow to do whatever you need to do increase the load decrease the load give them a rest day or whatever than anything else out there resting heart rate heart rate variability that your stupid recovery scores on your whoop strap and your readiness profiles and your aura ring and all this kind of stuff that we've tried to that we've tried to derive through physiology and algorithms if an athlete can competently that's a that's a key word can competently synthesize how they're feeling into some sort of subjective monitoring system that provides a superior way to to give training arrows that's not to say that you can ignore the physiology because you should always look at the performance data and yes you can use heart rate variability and i've had a number of athletes that are using uh hr hrv for training there's no you know affiliation there i just like their i just like their app it ports right into training peaks and i can kind of see everything on

one i have a lot of athletes use that but trying to systematize the subjective monitoring piece i guess is the theme of everything is taking all of these things that are you know left right and center and and and organizing them and i do have a little bit of a pattern for this and it's based off of the heart rate for training app where if the the athletes who are not familiar with this essentially it's a it's an app where you can use the camera on your iphone or android i can't remember i think it's both anyway you use the camera on your smartphone to capture heart rate variability but i think the key and that's not anything that's all that novel but the the key mechanism or the key procedure behind that is is after you take that heart rate variability number and before it actually should before that app actually shows you the number which is a really important part of it so it doesn't bias you to the whole process it then takes you through a list of questions how was your sleep last night let's score that and they use a little slider essentially it makes it easy for athletes how is your are you stable what does your routine look like can you focus on training routine not routine and there's five or six other other questions i should pull it up and kind of go go through them all but athletes can kind of go check it out on their own accord but i guess the point is is it brings some system to that subjective monitoring and then after you go through all that subjective monitoring then it tells you all the data right versus the way that most people are using there's their wearables they in my freaking

garmin does this now i wake up in the morning and now i get a morning report and it tells me without even asking me what i should do right this the way taking that subjective stuff before you get the objective data i think is the right way to do it because then you can integrate it all without any sort of bias versus initially seeing oh my resting heart rate's elevated i must have be having a shitty day day today so i'm gonna score all these objective things in in the tank so that's my coaching movement going forward or my coaching change moving forward is i'm going to start to incorporate more of a systematized approach to collecting all of these objective measurements which i like and i use to a great degree i just want a little bit more horsepower behind it because i just believe in the i believe in the value that they bring to the table in terms of helping monitoring and changing training whenever we need to change training you mentioned a quick question on that i mean i think this is fascinating and i do i mean you've turned us on to like the work of marco altani and with heart rate variability and i think all that stuff is really fascinating and interesting but are you going to like yourself with your athletes determine like the six questions yeah and yeah that's what i'm talking about the likerts yeah so so you know it won't it might not necessarily be the same six questions like that the app has is what you're saying you would just but you'd be working on something like that

with your athletes and also to what degree would it be a one to ten scale a one to five scale a red light yellow light green light like because i i don't want to add more confusion to my athletes by you know remember a few years ago training peaks added that you know smiley face frown face thing on on there for the athletes to do so so could you dive in a little bit like how are you going to do that well so the generalized approach is is i want to use a system for each athlete that has the least amount of friction because the consistency matters more than the precision because we're trending these things over long periods of time right it's not like unless something really dramatic happens it's not like i'm going to look at one whatever score and do anything with that one particular things i'm just kind of trending it and so with some athletes that literally means going through marco's hrv for athlete and i already have five or six athletes uh doing this going through that we're just taking that part and parcel i might not always i might not always agree with the recommendation at the end of the day but it ports all into training peaks and here's the thing that i that that is paired with this and this is coaching inside baseball to be honest with you not many people are going to care about it but me because they're doing it in the morning i have to be super on top of making sure that that's one of the first things that i look at for those athletes on that particular day and either having a system where they text me if anything's out of the ordinary that i can actually get prompted and look at it or

i have a system of i know these athletes are doing this kind of first thing in the morning so i need to be in tune with i need to kind of capture that right away that's more of an like a work organization thing that i have not gone through yet that i need to kind of not change but just alter just the processes what when i do what essentially so that's one that's one kind of pathway to it another pathway to it is just to have the same things in training peaks and just use their stock you know you have any number of different metrics that you can use i mean the list is like in the 40s anywhere from like arm circumference to you know rating of perceived exertion to sleep quality narrowing those down to four or five and then just having those trend over the kind of over the course of time um but the general strategy is is i want to make it as frictionless as possible and try and try to capture how they're feeling how they're sleeping and how much soreness they have that's kind of the three the the three big hit points i might alter it a little bit for some athletes that really want to get into it but if i can get those three how they generally feel are they tired or not how literally how much are they sleeping a normal amount more or less almost use a better worse same type of gauge and how muscularly sore they are musculoskeletally sore they are if i can alchemize those three along with the training data i think it's i think it's really impactful and all of this is you know you're i still don't think you you're going to be able to alchemize those into a stoplight

system you know i've seen and commented and opined on those stoplight systems for 20 years and as much as i appreciate those efforts for trying to turn either a whole host of objective data into one singular direction do this or don't do this right which is what a lot of those systems are trying to do they're trying to alchemize a whole host of physiological data into a directional arrow so to speak or they're combining it with the subjective data and trying to do something like that and that's what marco's app does and it does an okay job with it and it's soft enough on the recommendations avoid intensity today right it's kind of the the the hero you know direction that you might take with with his app i think that that's soft enough to to to warrant some merit but i still don't think that i still think that it's it's a it's i still think it's very much an art form to take all of those and to say we're going to increase the training load we're going to decrease the training load we're going to change the training load or we're going to take a day off like whatever thing that you can change versus what's planned when you're integrating everything that's going on it's still a judgment call at the at the end of the day with a few kind of hard gates right you don't sleep for two nights in a row we're not working out your body temperature is you know one degree fahrenheit above normal we're not going to work out like those are kind of the rare situations it's more the i'm slightly sore and i didn't sleep as much as i should have last night and my last

workout went bad should i take a rest day right it's normally like three or four things that are either trending in the right direction or opposing each other that you have to make a decision on and those are what we're what we're doing as coaches but the theme is is systematizing the subjective measurements with a focus on those three components that i mentioned earlier i would encourage anybody out there if you have no experience doing this and you want to get a better gauge out there use the framework and marco's app you might not like everything and you might some of it might be confusing to you you know that's fine you can download the free version and get this you know kind of monitoring system you can figure out what you like and don't like or what resonates with you and what doesn't what doesn't resonate with you and then you can determine what to do with the data that's the great thing about it is you don't have to take every every single thing with a hundred percent value you can take and marco and i talked about this on the podcast he's like if i was coaching trail runners i would put a lot more emphasis on muscular soreness as opposed to you know some other some other metric because it's such a good indicator of you know fatigue and stress and workload because we're going up and down most of the time we're going up and down hills and mountains and when you increase that you're going to see an increase in muscular soreness so so anyway that would be my encouragement to the people that are listening that are not used to doing this and if i have an absolute talking about andy's absolutes of putting the training camps in there that's the first thing when i take on new athletes put in your post activity comments put them in and now

it's going to be put in your post activity comments and let's use the metric section to start to systematize it so from a pragmatic point of view of how i'm going to change my coaching practice i'm going to layer on that metrics system so in our coaching ed calls you guys are going to see the metrics uh the uh metric square on the dashboard show up a lot more on my athlete schedules what has been your athletes that you've posed this to what has been their reaction thus far it's trying to figure out which ones to use like yeah i think that most of them do a good job of because i hammer home the post activity comments so much i felt good i felt bad like almost kind of like that binary like this went good or like if you want to put it in three categories this one good good average bad and they do a really good job of making the workout or categories and categorizing the workout that way it's getting every it's getting the few other non-workout components that i think is that that's what i'm kind of like layering on if you want to think about it from a true differences standpoint so yeah most of them have just been i'm already doing this on the workout side let's just translate it to like life and i don't think it's that big of a cost it's like 60 seconds every day that it takes you to run through it and and i i i think it's going to be and i think it's going to be impactful because most of the athletes that i'm that i'm working with here here's how i've been able to quantify it for people

not that i need to get people on board but it's the way that i've explained it is that when i have all of that information in in when they do a really good job of of putting in their post activity comments and i get some of this other subjective feedback either via text or whatever other disorganized system that i'm trying to organize it makes a difference of about two to three workouts every couple of months meaning i change the workout well i'd say that's material though i mean if i not not sorry of the key workouts so i have eight workouts a month right let's just do the quick mac eight workouts a month 16 workouts over a two over a two month period so two a week right two interval workouts or whatever let's just say it's 20 to make the math easy if i'm changing two of those that's 10 percent and i think that that's material if i'm changing 10 of what i would call the really impactful workouts the hard workouts and or the long workouts if i change or refine 10 10 of those i i think that that's material over over a long period of time and that so and i think that that is highly realistic just based off of the athletes that i do have that are using marco's app consistently where i do see that information i for sure am changing a couple things every couple months with those athletes so if i extrapolate that into even a less sophisticated system or whatever

i think that it's worth it and i wouldn't make a change if it weren't if it wasn't worth it i mean we've all talked about things that are impactful right i i think that i think that i can relatively uh i can quantify i can quantify this fairly easily because i know the number of workouts that i'm changing this might make my feedback loop a lot tighter instead of planning out two to three weeks i'm only gonna plan out a week that's a theme if i broaden my coaching career out and i use like a decade long lens that's actually a theme that's emerged is i used to plan out like six or eight weeks and then i plan out four weeks and now i plan out two or three weeks it's like every five years i go by i realize how poor i how i am at forecasting much past my own nose the article i wrote uh for the last blog the road trip with the prior olympian uh that's how she prescribes her athletes workouts is weekly yeah she never goes beyond a week at a time yeah i think there's something to that because i i'm just learning more and more i can't forecast out all that much i mean people need people need workouts planned from a practical point of view they need to know like do i need to go to the track on tuesday do i need to drive to the trailhead on thursday and how do i arrange child care and stuff like that i think for elite athletes you can use a week-long loop because they can more they can they're supposed to be able to rearrange their lives around training with

exception of like planning training camps and stuff like that you need to have those somewhat in some sort of master architecture but yeah i mean there's a lot to even using once again going back to marco's app even using that to alter what you are going to do 30 minutes from when you shut that app down like i know coaches that have that workflow with their elite athletes like it's kind of like that granular we're going to tune the workout based off of this i think the medium is one to two weeks and then you alter for anything dramatic so that's what i'm going to change we got a whole host of things not being perfect putting more putting more of an emphasis on training camps and increasing the emphasis of subjective monitoring that like hit all levels there's also it's but it's also an interesting pattern to the three things right because they are sort of um we're doing something differently but we're also uh being a little being a little bit more top down about it perhaps uh you know when when you think of the theme right you know darcy's going to be like you know calling people on this perfectionism in an inappropriate way and and i'm going to be like no find those three or four days and get it done and and coop's going to be like you know let's let's talk about the subjective stuff and systematize it i mean i think i think for us as coaches it's we're it is often a dance right where

we're we we want we need to listen to the athletes we need to understand where they're coming from and meet them where they're coming from and it's why it's not a static training program that that any of us offer and at the same time we also have to from time to time put stakes in the ground uh in the best interest of our athletes success but i mean increasingly as as darcy said at the beginning around issues of life coaching and and mental health and as we're continuing to crawl out of the pandemic i mean these are all roles that we play so i think the themes that have emerged out of each of these three topics actually have have more you know more in common than we might have thought and of course for the listeners out there we didn't know what these were ahead of time we you know coop just said come up with some topics and we'll bat them around so it's pretty cool actually yeah i totally agree i think it's a really good place to leave it too um i expected i expecting nothing less than a variety of opinions on this especially given you guys is uh experience uh coaching and how long i've worked how long i've worked with with each of you individually this is awesome we can go on for forever for the listeners out there a big genesis we're going to do more of these coaching roundtables and a big genesis of this i have to give andy a lot of credit for because when i uh when i let andy and stephanie take over uh the podcast without any restriction true story right i literally hucked it over the fence to you i got so much good feedback from it that it made me take a step back and

and and realize that i need to bring in more of our coaching voices because we have we do have such an incredible ecosystem and i don't need to be solely reliant kind of on myself to produce all the content and the mainly like the research crowd that i that i bring on so you know you got yourself into this mess andy you're gonna have to come back as a guest and all the other coaches are gonna have to come back as guests for a long period of time and uh we have every we have uh you and steph to thank for that well and a big plug for darcy's writing in the blog if you haven't if listeners haven't been on the cts blog in a while i mean i think there's at least 12 to 15 entries in the last year all of which darcy are you know really provocative and and you know insightful and quick quick reads you know with a lot there so uh go check that out if you haven't you know who i vote to be on one of your podcast tunes is mr jim rutberg has he done on the podcast yet he uh talked about a guy that has a way with words he likes to hide behind them i think he may not be a fan of um being on the camera even less than myself well so those are the listeners who don't know jim jim rutberg first off is a great friend of mine he introduced me to my wife and i owe that debt of gratitude for forever uh but he's been a long time colleague of mine he's one of the first coaching colleagues that i kind of ever had when i came into the industry he's also the co-author of training

essentials for ultra running and a new york times bestseller how many people do you guys know who's a new york times bestseller back when that actually meant something uh he has authored many books one of which made the new york times bestseller list which i don't know what the equivalent to that is right now or if there is an equivalent but trust me it's a big deal very talented writer um and he has been on the podcast before when the second edition of the book came out uh we brought him he corinne and i kind of batted around how the how the second edition came to light and what was new and different and mainly as a gigantic sales plug for for for the book that when it came out which was about a year ago today actually as we're recording this but yeah maybe i'll bring him on just to shoot the shit with him because he had he has he does have a really interesting perspective just seeing how athletes have evolved over years and not only basic and and how all athletes have evolved over years so from the elite athletes to the time crunched athletes which he's kind of carved out a niche in that to even like the athletes over 50 like he's got such huge domain expertise on that that and i was recently reminded yeah quick personal story on ruddy too like recently uh he i posted on social media that i did my first ever gravel bike race and he immediately emailed me and said oh you've got to write a blog about it you know of ultra runner doing gravel and i mean it was he was so he was like an excited little kid and he's like i don't care just and darcy knows it's just just just put together just put together some

paragraphs and i'll make it pretty you know it was great like that man is an artist he really is your uh compliments andy on the blog but jim rutberg uh i was uh most most credit goes to jim because he will take something that's not grand and make it grand yeah so yeah coop get him get him let's get ruddy on the podcast shout out to ruddy and uh just as a tease there may or may not be a new uh product coming out that ruddy and i are collaborating on that hopefully in about a month's time from when this podcast is released we'll be out in the wild that leverages ruddy's expertise in making us sound way smarter than we actually are let's put it that way i'll tell you guys about it in the coaching meeting thanks you guys for coming on the podcast this is enough after after podcast banter i hope you guys enjoyed it uh uh appreciate it thanks thanks a lot coop all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to darcy and ajw for coming on the podcast today as we made mention of in the latter stages of the podcast this coaching roundtable format is going to be one that i just do more of that was a big piece of feedback that you all gave me when ajw and steph took the podcast over and i am going to take that to heart we're going to have many coaching roundtables both big and small big picture and very nuanced picture of actionable things that you can

take into your day-to-day training so i appreciate the heck out of all the listeners out there for letting me know what you guys the people the athletes out there actually want because at the end of the day this podcast is nothing without you i don't use this podcast in any sort of monetary sense it costs me money every single month to produce i intentionally do not take on any sponsors or endorsements of any kind and that is absolutely 100 so i can deliver the best information that is unadulterated to you the listeners i don't want to be beholden to promote any sort of company out there and just say what is on my mind at any one point in time so you all can help this podcast out further by not only giving me the feedback of what you want but also share it with your friends if you think that some of the content in this podcast is valuable is actionable to your friends and training partners hit that share button within your podcast app whether it's google podcast or apple podcast however you actually listen to it and let them know how awesome the content is in the KoopCast i appreciate that very much that is it for today folks and as always we will see you out on the trails you