Differences Between Elite Road and Trail Runners with Frederic Sabater Pastor PhD | KoopCast Episode 164

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your humble host coach Jason Koop and this episode of the podcast is about the physiological differences between elite trail and road runners and what we can learn from those differences in order to drive the training process on the podcast today is one of our cts coaches frederick saboteur pastor who is also the lead author of the paper that we are discussing which is titled elite road versus elite versus trail runners comparing economy biomechanics strength and power this paper appears in the journal of strength and conditioning research and a link to that paper will be in the show notes for you longtime listeners of the podcast frederick first appeared on the podcast way back in the middle of 2022 in episode 130 where we discussed another paper that he was a co-author on and since then we hired him on as one of our crack coaching staff and in this particular podcast we dive deep into his paper and discuss exactly what it means for your training this paper has also been covered by alex hutchinson for trail runner magazine and i'll leave a link to that in the show notes but i think that fred and i get to the meat of what this paper might mean and include some commentary that only the lead author can provide an example of that is specifically

some of the strength training practices that these athletes were undertaking and how that actually might affect how we view the results that's enough of a tease i'm gonna get right out of the way here's my conversation with frederick saboteur pastor all about the differences in elite road and elite trail runners physiology i just came came up with a perfect way to tie all this together initially and i didn't i didn't realize it until literally five minutes ago when i was grabbing a glass of water um you you and i's kind of mutual colleague you know more than i do guillemot mie one of my first like introductions into the science of ultra running when i was first starting to coach ultra running athletes was a presentation that he gave in 2011 and i don't know why i can remember that date but it was from 2011 so it's over 10 years ago 11 years ago no 12 years ago now geez i'm getting old it was a presentation that he gave super grainy youtube video at some random like kind of like random conference and the title of it was fatigue and ultra marathon which is not what we're going to talk about today but there's one specific piece in it that i think really illustrates some of the research that that we are going to talk about is he was going through the differences in fatigue from a marathoner to an ultra marathoner

and how they might actually be different and one of the ways that he kind of illustrated the difference was visually how did the top athletes look and he had this one slide of a kenyan or an ethiopian athlete i don't remember who it was and one slide of a top ultra marathon athlete and you could very you just visually right just tell the anthropometrics were different right the ultra marathon was more muscular the the ethiopian runner was like skinnier they had different stride lengths you know just kind of like everything right off the gate right out of the gate was just so kind of so starkly so starkly different and it kind of like leads into what we're going to discuss today right like what are the actual differences and characteristics between elite road runners and elite ultra ultra marathon runners that's not so cliche it's just like looking at them kind of looking at them visually but you have a really neat background story on how this paper all kind of came to light why don't we just start out with how it came to light and then we can we can get into the design and what it actually means hey so yeah absolutely i remember that presentation but i think the first time that i saw that slide was when i was doing my masters and he was teaching a class and he put it there it was like oh yeah they are really different so yeah absolutely we've never talked about that before so that's good i'm glad you remember that too so yeah the like the way this study came together was like during the like academic year 2018 2019 and at the beginning of 2019 was when i started my PhD but then during that academic

year there was a master's student at the university of jamone in france where i did my PhD and she was while she was doing her master's degree in like performance optimization and i don't remember like what the what the letter stands for but then like she was at the same time the the physical therapist for the trail running team of the french athletic federation so i think like the way they had it organized it was like for everything that is outside the stadium so that is like a trail running road running and walking so she was the physical therapist and then what happened was that she had to do like her end of master's thesis and she said well we can test the athletes in all of these things because i'm going to be going to a training camp so like she was our in into the training camp so the french athletics federation so we could go on like do all of these studies so what we decided to do for her project and like i was not there at the very beginning which we just decided we're going to test but then was we were going to test road runners trail runners we're going to test males and females and then we're also going to test road and trail runners were recreational not elite which we did in the lab in the lab back home that is not part of this paper and that is part of another paper that should be coming out that will be showing like differences like between levels and like level differences and sex differences in all of these variables so what happened then was that well

great now we have access to their training camps so we want to measure what are the differences between road runners within elite road runners and elite trail runners so now it was like well what are the variables that we want to measure and this was a tricky thing because we're doing with elite athletes within that federation and we had to choose things that were going to be important or like relevant for us but at the same time that the coaches would let us do oh and that is like one of the big parts why we don't have like for example vo2 max test yeah as part of this because like a vo2 max test like oh no we're like at this point in the season we don't want the athletes to be doing that or like it's going to be too hard like at the same time like we did some of the strength testing we just sprint on the bike instead of running and like we can talk about that later but it's like yeah we had to do things that the coaches will let us do because like they had their schedule in the training camp and we're like injected during the training camp right so yeah like either the coaches or the athletes didn't want to like go too hard on some of these things so that's why we were somewhat limited in what we could do because like yeah those were the that was one of the limitations and the other one was that we had to travel so like we had to take the lab put it in a van and go like we went one twice to different training camps in france and once to portugal which was like a 20 hour driving total so like it was like it was it was great three of us in a van we stopped at like at my mom's place in spain because it was more or less midway so we slept

there but yeah it was like 20 hours to go there two driving days to go and then two driving days to go to come back to do like basically 15 hours of testing so it was all very cool all very exciting but yeah this is how this study came together oh i want everybody to appreciate for you kind of like two things first off we can look at these and kind of scrutinize them left right and center like why didn't you do this why didn't you do that a lot of times there's just like you said there's real world implications that coaches didn't want to do them so yeah you'll take you'll kind of like take what you can get the second thing is is like literally you're kind of you're not going to the ends of the earth but you're going to the ends of europe at least to to actually to actually like conduct a study and i hope everybody appreciates this a lot of times these things uh are way more complicated to way more complicated to pull together than than what might appear on the on the pages of the research so let's dive into it man like describe the study in general and and what you were trying to what you were trying to compare and contrast here yeah all right so the the goal of this study was to really find out like get a bunch of like very good world runners and then a group of very good trail runners and then like do some testing that of variables that we thought would be relevant to performance in both road and trail running or like one or the other and then test if there were actual differences between those variables uh between one group and the other right so then um and this has never been done before like we had

zero data it happens with a lot of things in trail running or like in ultra marathon running very very little data so it was that like check those things that we thought could be different so one of them was because the like trail running has such a big uphill and downhill component one thing that we thought was well you have to fight gravity and what you were saying before trail runners tend to be more muscular like when you look at the pictures sort of thing so it was like maybe they are stronger and then we tested for strength in two different ways one of them was isometric testing and the other one was a sprint test on a bike and the sprint test on a bike it's a specific protocol i think i'll explain it later so like the listeners can have it like as one block of information but you've got two what you're calling like elite groups of athletes right and maybe you can provide a little bit of like color color commentary that's outside of the paper on this how similar were those groups because that's always the kind of discrepancy that we kind of run into when we're comparing elite road and elite trail runners like are they really kind of similar in terms of their i don't even know how to describe it like their eliteness or their competitiveness or whatever we want however we want to say it yeah that is a very good question because like we had a very clear criteria that i'm going to explain right now but still we don't know if like their physiology is the same because the sports are different so like to like have a completely like different experience if you're comparing like i don't know runners to like american football players they might have the same level of being elite but then like well yeah what

does being like how does being elite in one relate to being elite in the other like if they are completely different sports right right so here like they are very similar sports from the perspective that they are both running but they are very similar like very different in like terms of culture like how much price money there is so like they may be attracting different people but then our inclusion criteria was uh were very clear it was like they had to be part of the of the team that the national team was taking to these training camps so that means they were like top level in france yeah now what happens that top level in france so like basically french national team like in the road team there are people that have run under two to ten for the marathon i think like 207 like there's two or three that have run under 208 or or under 209 yeah like since then so they were like best in france for the road team and some of them were like up and coming going to be best in france and that they were like maybe transitioning from the track and running half marathons at the time but basically like the french federation had decided that they were like we sort of outsourced that so the french federation saying that they are elite okay okay same thing so yeah that's what i was gonna ask what's the what's the equivalent on the trail side yeah on the trail side it was basically the same thing the people that were going to this uh to these training camps that all of these people are like most of them have already been in some like national uh not national championship but like international championships and actually of the i think we tested like 11 uh 10 10 trail runners that were including the study

out of those 10 trail runners there were the four that that season like a few months later were like the winning team in the world trail championship right so like they were the so basically as like i'm like we know that about the french trail runners some of them are very very good so like like the french ones are like at the very top of the sport so like i don't want to yeah france is one of the countries that is always like fighting for those positions so they were like that like the best and then like the people who were basically at them like a few months later fighting with those people to get on on the world championship team it meets the reasonability test meaning you're not you're comparing like you know kind of two different or two very similar apples right i mean yeah it's never it's never going to be exactly the same but i think when we're looking at okay what can we really extract from the study the two co the two cohorts that you had and the fact that it was basically the french teams right i think it takes care of a lot of that and kind of almost takes the bias out of it in terms of we're going to take people's like itra scores and compare it to the 210 marathoners or kind of whatever it i just i just appreciate the degree of similarity that these two groups would have within their particular sport context yeah exactly so then actually like we report that on the paper after like for example the itra score and like with the itra score that they have and then the stats that the itra provides like separately for that year all of them were for example in the top 268

trail runners in the world because they're of the category of like itra points they were in and i think that they were all in the top 200 like the worst one was better than the top 200 and then there were some like that like the the world champions of that year there was at least one runner that had won the UTMB like within two or three years i don't remember if it was like before or after because i also won tbs so they were like yeah good runners yeah very good runners okay so take the listeners through one of the things that you're that that you already mentioned that you're kind of limited by is is the coaches only want to have them do certain tests right what are the tests that you kind of settled in on to run the to kind of run the runners through okay so like the first thing that we wanted to test for was that strength that what we said before so like for strength we had a two different type of tests we had isometric strength tests which was like put the put the runners in like a chair that is more or less like a knee extension machine that you will find but like instead of that has like a very precise force measurement device so like you can measure both when like they are extending and flexing while it's isometric they are not moving right but like when they are pushing out and when they are pulling in so you can measure basically the strength of the knee extension and the knee flexors in summary of the quads and the hamstrings right we wanted to do that because like that gives very precise numbers they

are very reproducible like you can measure it like if i'm not sure right now like it's in the paper but like if we probably took like three measurements with like at least one minute of rest between them and like each one is like a three second contraction and then you take the highest one of like three of them that are very close so that is like very precise data the other way that we did was a force velocity profile and this i may have to explain so like when you have a force velocity profile uh it like tries to draw a line of like where are you like when you're producing some power some like when you're doing some movement what is your physiology in terms of like do you use more force for that or do you use more velocity like the easiest way to explain it i find it cycling so you can have someone hitting 1000 watts but to hit 1000 watts are you doing like can you do that at 60 rpm so like a low rpm but like putting a lot of force on the pedals or do you go to very high rpm with less force on the pedals right so then is that like are you more like like the image that we often use like are you more like a tractor that has a lot of power right but develops it like slowly with lots of strength or more like a ferrari or like a formula one car that has like many more revolutions right so it gets more speed even if they have the same horsepower right at the end right so for that we use a bike test it is one thing that like the reviewers criticize us for like ask us the question like why didn't you use a running test because you can do it with a sprint test and that is exactly the like the thing that they go to

say like these are trail runners these are ultra marathon runners like this guy run the UTMB they don't know how to sprint like you're going to break them maybe with the road runners they will have let it fly but absolutely not with the trail runners they were like what no we're not definitely not letting them sprint and actually we get worse data because sprinting has more of a skill component yes like stomping on the pedals yeah that's actually what i was going to mention is is when sometimes you when you do that in one of the groups is novel to the activity you're bringing out the novelty or the fact that they don't do it as opposed to the actual physiological profile yeah absolutely and i think that is like uh pretty like i mean i think i think what result another way in which you can test for that is with a series of jumps yeah like squat jumps with like a bar and they were like like most of the trail runners don't try and train like you're not going to make them jump with a bar on their back like they're going to break themselves and like sometimes like what's funny but like seeing them move like i would not be surprised if they got in trouble by doing that so yeah that was for strength okay so you have two you have two basically like quote unquote strength markers right yeah exactly that would be like the strength and power from the bike and then the strength from the isolated muscle groups okay perfect and then we also had cost of running so basically running economy that was like we took our treadmill from france all the way to portugal and to everywhere else that we went and then on that little treadmill so it had to travel it was not the most powerful treadmill in

the world and that was a problem because then we had to choose speeds that were low enough uh for the treadmill to not go crazy and also like the incline to go past 10 percent incline so what we settled on was making them run at 10 percent on a flat treadmill at 14 i mean at 10 kilometers per hour flat 14 kilometers per hour uh and i should translate that to like miles per hour at least so like then it's going to be like about 6.2 miles per hour right so like 10 kilometers per hour is actually a 10 minute pace yeah 10 minute pace yeah yeah and then 14 kilometers per hour which is going to be about seven minute pace if i'm correct right yeah yeah so so there are paces that are not super fast for these runners but we also wanted to compare them with the with the women okay so this is part of the reason that like we wanted all the elites to be similar in that way and then like when the other paper comes out hopefully we'll see more of that because like that's always uh one problem that you have when measuring running economy you measure at the same absolute speed or do you measure at the same relative speed the problem is that to know the relative speed you need to do this maximum test exactly yeah because you want to you want to be under threshold for the running economy test exactly yeah so that's why we could not put them at the same relative intensity so we chose like the other option okay so you got running economy yeah at flat level and then up a up a 10 percent grade 10 percent grade exactly okay and then after that the other thing was that during that we measured

biomechanical parameters so like we put like it's a little device that has like a like a laser thingy like what goes in the elevator and basically like every time you cut it knows that your food is on the ground and when it's not like your food is near right um so we're measuring like contact time flight times all that during the running economy test so at all of those speeds and on inclines so you got a little bit of strength and power a little bit of classic endurance and the running economy side of things and some biomechanics right those kind of three general categories that you're comparing and contrasting against and then the other thing that we had was a questioner which is something that i will kick myself forever but we just use a questionnaire instead of like come on like they all have watches like yeah yeah like i wish i had been there earlier in the decision process for all that stuff and maybe i don't know because then we will have running to the coaches saying like we don't want to share that yeah yeah yeah uh like we have a questionnaire in which they reported like during the previous i don't remember right now but like six months or a year like their monthly training hours yeah for different things like running total endurance training like including cross training well they maybe like thing by thing and then we clustered even like running only and run training which training which includes cross training strength training and then total training yeah includes all the previous hours so you can compare and contrast the strength you can compare and contrast the running economy in a couple of different variables you can compare and contrast the biomechanics and you can compare and

contrast the the overall training volume and modes and things like that yeah big gross big gross comparisons on the training side of things okay so now everybody wants to know what's this what's similar and what's different yeah okay so then first of all when we measure the strength with the isometric machine like just pushing against any lower resistance there were no differences okay so there were no differences when uh when compared to body weight okay because which is what we measure the trail runners were a bit bigger than the road runners so then there was absolutely no difference uh they were basically the same pound for pound however when we measured it on the on the force velocity profile which was like a dynamic exercise this time they were pedaling on the bike and to do this test like we set two different resistances on the bike and they start from like a dead stop start and then they start pedaling so basically the first ones with the first pedal strokes require a lot of force yeah right and then like you require less force and it's harder to apply force because you are going at a higher speed so this is how we measure it in that case we did measure higher forces and higher powers like absolute in absolute terms and then we measured still higher forces in relative terms relative to body weight which means that basically at the end of the day the the trail runners are stronger like these cohorts of trail runners were stronger than the road runners yeah yeah yeah i like your couch there this group of trail runners is stronger than this

group of road runners very very very accurate so that that does make us think that like these like they are different in terms of strength and it was actually very interesting when i'm getting a bit ahead of myself because the road runners did much more strength training which is so interesting we're going to get to that in a little bit so that that's kind of the first material thing right this the the trip that across these two groups the trail runners are stronger yeah exactly trail runners are stronger okay so but only when and this is like very in like an important part but when you do this dynamic movement like if you just measure it isolated like we may we will have missed it if we were just measuring that so it's very like very good that we decide to have this dynamic movement yeah in which we could actually measure it okay so let's move to the second piece which is the running economy piece and that we can go through running economy and biomechanics together because for the biomechanics like i will just spoil it there was nothing interesting which was surprising to us because in general it's like yeah people with shorter contact times have better running economy and stuff like that but like we saw it might have been like lack of statistical power but we saw no differences which is once again super interesting yeah yeah but like at the same time as a caveat we're only measuring like time that the food spends on the ground right like if you have i'm sure that if you have like the whole set of like cameras and which are measuring the angle of every single joint we would be able to see more differences right but like the way that we were that what taking to

know we were measuring like that like flight time contact time the ratio between the flight time and the contact time that sort of stuff there was no difference can you can you extrapolate a little bit in terms of do you think that the conditions that you were able to test under with the speed and the grade do you think that that had an impact on not seeing those differences like it wasn't fast enough and or it wasn't steep enough it's kind of what i'm getting at i do think so like to one extent because like the other thing what i was saying about like the method of measurement that we're that we're using which is the most basic like in the lab we also have all of these like cameras in which you can measure like the angle of your pinky yeah yeah yeah basically right so like if you start doing that like you will see differences like even like in how you carry your arms and that sort of stuff which was like this was interesting because for us as we're seeing it like oh look at how this one runs and look at how this one runs and look at how this one and we were appreciating some differences but at the level of like the foot contacting the ground we're not seeing that and then that like i'm sure that if we had gone to like 18 20 kilometers per hour which would be like yeah getting closer to five minute miles yeah we will have seen it because then definitely the trail runners are not used to running at those speeds yeah and yeah a couple of them that actually like came to the lab later to do some testing and stuff like that and we made them run at faster speed because we did an incremental test with them that had nothing to do with this study yeah like you could see that at faster speeds like their arms are flailing more and that sort of stuff so you you don't know this i had uh our uh

our head uh lab technician renee who i've known for for years does all of our lactate threshold and vo2 max tests i had her at my house uh yesterday recording a podcast that'll come out before this podcast and we were theorizing a little bit on how we would take a standard graded graded exercise test and adapt it into the ultra marathon world and her the the nickel version of that uh of that brainstorm not to rehash the podcast that people probably listen to is is we just make it slower like that's kind of it right we just somehow we'd make it slower we'd increase the grade earlier we would uh you know even start them at a walk or something like that but just like slow the whole thing down so that the speed doesn't confound what we want to see from a bioenergetics perspective which can get problematic when you don't train at those types of speeds so yeah absolutely that is also something that we have seen in our lab when testing trail runners that for some reason we're testing them on like a flat for like other different studies and we're testing them on a using a flat test like we had that problem like arm slailing and then saying like yeah the problem is that my legs cannot keep up with the treadmill like i'm not that like it's hard but it's not that hard it's my legs that cannot keep up yeah people have to keep in mind that like the graded exercise testing protocols that we that we use they were designed for a very specific cohort and that specific cohort is elite marathon 10k and 5k runners in the emphasis on the word elite so when we try to do it with like normal just normal runners right normal marathon runners

sometimes those protocols don't like show you the same things you know or you have to adapt them to a certain extent it's not quite an apples to apples comparison but then when you take it across another sport group and we see this a little bit in triathlon right because triathlon will use a cycling test that's meant for a cyclist and a running test that's meant for a runner um but when you take those tests that were developed for a specific cohort and then you take them into another running cohort right in this case it's trail ultra marathoners even when they're elite you kind of run into some just issues with the with the runner show in terms of in terms of the testing that's neither that's neither here nor there so no differences in running economy or any of the biomechanical properties no no differences in the biomechanical properties but there were differences in running economy we found differences in running economy at 14 kilometers per hour so about seven minutes per mile pace at the faster speed we did find differences and the road runners were faster which was like our initial hypothesis was okay at the at during faster road faster flat speed the road runners will have better running economy because it's their specific their specific thing right and then the trail runners will be more economical when running uphill the surprising part for us was that we didn't find any differences during the uphill running i think that a big part of that is the fact that we tested them at 10 percent incline and at 10 percent incline like they are still running yeah like the and i like what i think is

like what if we have done one of those like what they used to do in roger cram's lab in booter right like put them up at like 20 percent incline 30 percent grade something like that and then like they are not running they are going to be walking what is their walking economy in that case right or like these like running to walking transition how like are they managing it better to adapt to their have better running economy that's what runners on the road runners so yeah but you know that's a common theme in a lot of compare and contrast type of literature especially with elite athletes is you kind of have to go to the extremes to figure out where they're really different and that's just because they're so good right they're just such good they're just such good athletes across a variety of situations you got to kind of get into the the nuance or the extreme of the nuance to really kind of tease out some of those so there was a slightly higher cost of running higher running economy worse running economy to kind of put in layman's perspective with the trail running group at the faster speed yeah at the faster speed on yeah which makes sense it was like yeah it makes sense like we had marathon runners that their easy runs were being done probably between seven minutes and six minute mile yeah it's right so that like all they were probably these guys were probably like the marathon runners were probably putting i don't know like that's easy six to ten hours per week at speeds within like i don't know like 10 or 20 percent of that yeah right whereas the marathon runners like that easy pace might like for many of them may be like spinning up yeah yeah right up a mountain like which might have like very high

vertical speeds but not really yeah probably a little bit of a weakness of the study is the speeds are just a little bit too slow for the groups right yeah yeah but the speeds are a bit too low and that the 10 percent incline is like too small and that was like it was the treadmill that we could put in the van and transport yeah i wish we would have taken the one that goes to 20 kilometers per hour but like i have tried to move that treadmill and like we need a ton of people in the lab to move that one treadmill that we had that was great and then like that can go like forwards and backwards so you can also look down to the right yeah trust me d we've moved our woodway at our in our testing facility three times everyone it's like a superhuman all hands on deck effort that requires you know lift gated truck and it's a nightmare it's a total nightmare yeah so that like we had three guys on a van yeah you're not moving on those big treadmills like that hope once again i hope everybody appreciates some of these limitations because they're real okay let's so let's go to the training because this is super interesting then we're kind of gonna like back into the non most of the non-differences i think in the compare and contrast because the training piece of it is that is is a little bit fascinating to me yeah so the training piece like total training duration was higher for road compared to trail which is really interesting yeah which i found really interesting because then like is that like uh we had so like i have the numbers right now in front of me so the road runners were reporting

79 hours of training per month okay which is about 20 hours per week if you count just four weeks to a month and the trail runners were reporting 43.6 hours per month yeah which is about 10 hours per 10 hours per week yeah and like a big part of that was the that the fact that the trailer that the road runners did much more cross training and much more resistance training but even then they were doing more running training right so even if you just took out everything else the run training was still higher yeah like if you count i think that the average running training of the road runners was bigger than the total training of the trail runner do you know about average uh how much strength training the road runners were doing it was like the it very because there were some that were zero but like it was between like zero and about 10 hours per week that's a lot of average yeah i mean i mean not 10 hours per week 10 hours per month oh okay got it so yeah like that would be like the ones that were doing a lot of training of training training i think they were doing about three hours per per week and the average must be from what i'm seeing right now in the graphics i don't have those specific numbers in front of me about five hours per month so i would say like either one session per week or two like 30 minute sessions per week so what jumps out to you on the training side of things initially the biggest thing is like what you said before like that the volume of the of training of the road runners is basically double yeah it's crazy when the road runners are training

for races that in this case are like less than two hours and 15 minutes yeah and the road runners are on the trail runners are training for races that for some of them the UTMB the world championship this year i think it was like 80 kilometers more or less so about the 50 miler i think it was like 84 kilometers so like 52 miles or something but yeah to me it was like crazy when i was seeing that but then like we can go into the reasons why and like what i was seeing at the training camp so like for example at the training camp when we were testing the runners and like we were like on an indoor track facility that they have there and there were other athletes that were they were there like they were taking pictures and videos for their stories for the instagram for their sponsors basically right yeah whereas in conversation with the coaches of the trail runners like there's a documentary like one of them that isn't like the team that won the national champion the not the national day the world championship yeah i think he was part of that team he's a baker and gets up every day at like four in the morning or something like that like every single day of the week he wakes up four in the morning works on people whatever he is like 10 and then he goes for his run well i mean here here's where the compare and contrast is kind of like outside of the paper right the two groups might i was giving you a lot of credit for them being like equally matched from a competitive or an eliteness standpoint they're certainly not matched on professionalism right which

you couldn't do and i mean that with all due respect but in terms of how they treat the craft of being a professional athlete as a professional very clearly on the trail side of things they have to you know be a baker as well or whatever other side job that some of them have in order to kind of meet ends make ends meet and that that 100 impacts the amount of training volume that you can do yeah yeah and like that talking to another one of the coaches saying like oh yeah this guy like he has to commute and like that's his his training is his commute yeah yeah that's basically his training because then he has like three kids at home or whatever it was like there was all of that stuff that is and like this is very interesting at the same time because they were like the best road runners in france but like you haven't seen any like headlines of people saying like these french running runner is the best in the world and the french guys were the ones that won the world championship yeah exactly you can make a case that they're better right like proportionally they're better they are better in their sport yeah but like that's why are they really better if they are training less they are lots of all of these so it opens this whole kind of form but then like trail runners will get mad at me well we'll leave that debate for some some other time that's more of a that's more of an in bar debate versus a over the podcast debate here's what struck out to me i completely agree with you on the training side of it but actually combine it with some of the other results so you have trail runners who are training less markedly less doing no strength training hardly

any strength training especially compared to the road running group yet they're still stronger yeah so you can kind of take that one to two ways right one there's just for whatever reason they're self-selecting into that sport because they have some physical property that you know that where they're stronger second thing you take it is is just the act of doing the sport itself because they're clearly not training for strength right clearly just the act of doing the sport itself elicit some sort of strength response that is superior to all the strength training and all of the additional training and all of the faster training let's remember that right marathon training is going to be faster training that that the marathon group is actually going to that part of it was actually not the fact that they were stronger but they were they're stronger despite what all of those which you could perceive as headwinds right in the strength department to actually fight uh the fact that they were actually still stronger despite all of those was absolutely fascinating and there are two things there that i think are like one problem with the study that is like we asked them what are you doing for strength training but that is basically like time spent in the gym but some of them might be doing and i have seen some of them train and like we could have a big argument about like what is really strength training oh yeah like between like like it was not like like for some of them some of them did heavy strength training and like going on squatting like

four repetitions with their six one rm yeah with their six around weight basically right so like getting close to this that's heavy weight yeah that's heavy weight yeah and some of them were just doing like i will go do some squats and some lunges and some of these like like prehab exercises all that stuff like there was a component of both of them and then there was a huge variety between like they were much more similar in terms of like how they train than in terms of how like how they run than in how they strength train and like we did not capture all of those details because like our questioner was limited that's a constant flaw of everything in strength training i mean anybody who's listening to this podcast for any length of time anytime i bring sarah and nicole on and we we talk about strength training one of the things that we just go around and around on is is it's an umbrella that we put too many activities underneath and we call it by the same thing we put physical therapy exercises with very you know minimal amounts of resistance you know there are bands and body weight and things like that in the same category of something that's like super heavy that you're doing five repetitions of right where you're getting really really close to that like six or eight rep max range those two things wouldn't be different or those two things shouldn't be the same category but yet we we kind of always do it but still though like despite those differences it's still a something to nothing comparison right that that's kind of what i'm saying because i'm going through

the same things in my mind when i'm reading through the lines as you just went through there's probably a variety of strength training activities that the road runners are doing but still it's a something to nothing comparison and still you see the greater strength being elicited in in the trail running group so like what did the group think about that when you when you kind of like found that out what did you guys discuss amongst yourselves yeah like one of the possible things that might be happening is that so much running training which is so much running training with the lack of the strength component right maybe harming the like the muscle mass for example all that stuff so like maybe actually the strength training what we're doing is upsetting that a bit right uh but then like that is the other thing and i would also say that the road like the trail runners were not super skinny super worried about like keeping a very low body weight so like this is like a wild guess as well but i'm thinking that the trail runners may be like recovering better in terms of nutrition and like not not thinking about it much like in terms of trying to be super skinny i like the i like we didn't test them like right before their race right but then like i'm wondering this like something that i wonder like were the road runners like short-term protein or something like that or like they in a more catabolic state in general that then this trend the extra strength training could not compensate for and that could be because of nutrition or because of the higher training volume or the combination of both i mean here see here's what i would look at it here's the

way that i would look at it if i were one of the road runners i'm doing strength training and i'm not stronger than somebody who is not doing strength training that to me is a training error like if you saw that if you saw that difference get teased out and i were these athletes coaches which i'm which i'm not i would look at that and go crap we need to figure out something something is not working here that's neither here nor there because we don't know like the intricacies of the programming but through my coaching lens when i see things like that i think of instantly what i think of is is there some sort of programming error whenever you were trying to elicit a specific adaptation and with strength hopefully if you're training if you're strength training you should be training for strength you should be able to elicit not just a little bit markedly higher strength profiles no matter how you're testing them as compared to a group that's not doing any strength training that would be like me saying listen i'm going to take an endurance you know trained group and a group that's not training for endurance at all we would expect the endurance training group to have better physiological parameters across all the endurance things that we're measuring vo2 max and lactate threshold and things like that if we were to see that in the endurance world we'd look at this and go on something that this endurance group is doing is not doing its job correctly because they're not performing any better across the thing that they're supposed to be training for is compared to this other group that's not doing any training that's more i don't know how to solve that but it kind of leads us into the like final piece of this right we've got this compare and contrast across two groups who are reasonably well matched you know it's

the the training part of it is certainly weird that's the only way that i can describe it but what can the athletes take away from this that can kind of impact their training or their knowledge of how to train on a day-to-day perspective we tend to draw and the reason that i that i get into this is we do draw a lot of inspiration from training from the traditional endurance sports mainly marathon somewhat to a certain extent 10k maybe even like long distance triathlon or ironman triathlon we do draw the we do draw training inspiration from that what can we learn in that whole process from looking at these two different groups and coming up with how they're similar and how they're different what i do think is that like the biggest thing that we saw was what we were happy just talking about like this strength component the the strength and power component being like being better in elite trail runners compared to world runners right so then i think that they're like there is a need to train that what the next step there is like okay yeah they need to train that does it come from like actually doing strength training yeah or is going to come from is it going to come from like maybe just doing like the heel training and like focusing on the heel training and like doing well programmed heel training taking into account that that is going to be a big part of how you develop your strength which could be or like this specific strength for yeah running and this kind of illustrates that that second point right like you can't like you can out strength

perform an athlete who is doing strength training just through the the trail trail the trail running mode of exercise right you can get superior strength adaptations just by doing that as compared to strength training not to say that you can't combine them and make them even better but i once again that i think that that's the fascinating result in all this yeah i think that that is like one of the big takeaways and but even then i would love to see the study of someone like comparing that like having trail runners and actually putting them to strength train like in one of those like traditional protocols of heavy strength training and seeing what happens to like both their strength but especially like their uphill running performance or their downfall running performance whatever you won't like choose to do thing that is going to be the best like actually there is some research now going on that is looking at that and like this durability thing like is it going to improve your running economy after a few hours for example well here is yeah because i'll keep going sorry but yeah no no that that is like one component like yeah maybe strength training improves your running economy when you're not fatigued by like one percent but then like after two hours of running like in the last two hours of your trail running race when the last 10k of a marathon maybe it has like a big impact on like allowing you to get less worse yeah here here's another takeaway as another training takeaway that i take that this seems to keep

coming up time and time again and i feel like the more it comes up and the more i recognize it like 10 years from now i'm gonna get burned for for like making this statement but the fact that you see 14 kilometers an hour result in a difference in running economy between the two i wouldn't think that that would be fast enough like when i looked at that i'm like this is not fast enough for this these levels of athletes that it's really going to kind of like make a difference the fact that it actually does make a difference kind of reinforces some of the earlier stuff that like man it's like traditional running economy then what i mean by that is put somebody on a treadmill at 14 kilometers hour an hour on in a flat level condition traditional running economy that might not be the best thing to aim for for from a training perspective and certainly kind of using the like this more of a compare and contrast model it's kind of become like a hero maker right in the road running world where it's like the not the only but the main kind of like separator in the in the elite uh category people chase that people chase that variable around right they chase it around with strength training you see you see that in your cohort right you see that in your elite road marathon cohort they're doing strength training by and large not exclusively but a big reason for that is to improve their running economy they chase it around in other ways nutritional interventions equipment with the you know carbon fiber plated shoes and things like that and when i see these differences it just kind of like reinforces that hey man maybe

that variable is not it's certainly not as material as it is in road running how material it is is kind of up to the eye of the beholder but that's another thing that i take away from that is is that we see these running economy differences that you i do i would really wouldn't expect it at 14k an hour you might have but i just don't think it's fast enough even with the trail runners i don't think it's fast enough but it just kind of comes back to man maybe that might not be something that we chase around yeah i that is one very good point and like well one reason why it is chased by the elite runners i think it is that it's like of the endurance determinants like the physiological determinants of endurance being like built to mass like pressure or whatever you want to call that one endurance and running economy it is the one that you can change with like non-training interventions and legally yeah yeah everyone else involves doping basically right or like maybe caffeine can help you like the endurance part or something but basically everyone everything else involves doping and there's where you can put like stuff like that the nutritional interventions the technology like the carbon plate shoes all that sort of stuff what happens then is that in trail running i think that i we have i have mentioned this to like you and the other coaches at cts before but the in trail running like there's many many things that make it different from running on a treadmill yeah like between road running and treadmill running you're running on a flat surface but it's

completely level that you just have to run on and there are differences because treadmill is moving and the road is not done blah blah blah there's a wing and there's going to be turns right but then like if you go from there to trail running like in trail running like every single step that you take in a 100 mile race which may be like 100 000 steps you need to choose where you put your foot yeah it's a technical race like every single one of them like that just like from the mental perspective and there is one study that i i said in my thesis about like the this running economy thing in which they put through and they put road runners or i think were track runners and orienteers if they made them run on a track the running economy was not different but then they made them run through the forest like go from this point to this point in this course on the forest and then like the track runners got much worse yeah right so it's like it's a very specific adaptation of like and it may be that it may not be physiological it may be like choosing where you put your foot in your line yeah skill skill skill and concentration that might be much much more important than the physiology of like whatever your legs and tendons or mitochondria are doing when just running at a steady pace yeah also that like all the changes in like the micro changes in pace that are going to have an impact yeah i i the study that you mentioned i'll link up in the uh i'll link up at the show notes because i think that's an interesting one but yeah i keep kind of coming back to this and you could once again you could kind of take two flavors of it you can just say listen for whatever reason it's just not as important the speed makes it less important the terrain makes it less important or

whatever or the other thing that you can take into consideration is is trail trail and ultra running is more complex the perform like the ultimate performance is more of a complex soup of things that go into it as compared to road running that's not to denigrate it at all it's just kind of the fact it's longer it contains more skill it goes up and down trails and all those other things it's more complex and because it's more complex each individual variable is going to just matter less because there's more of them right that's just this simple this is simple math right so i think that like one of the one of the hero takeaways here is is is we don't need to chase it around in the same degree we do in in marathon running like using that principle of we derive a lot of training inspiration from some of the other sports here's something where we need to like temper that inspiration down a little bit to in order to kind of like meet the relevance of it in the sport that we're actually talking about yeah and i think that that is like a very interesting point because like if we look at the typical ways in which you will try to enhance running economy in old runners they will include like the strength training part and then like the mileage itself and then maybe doing stuff like strides or higher speed running and all that sort of stuff yeah and what happens that like even if it's true that running economy matters what matters is the running economy running on the trail right and you're going to get that by running a lot on the trail yeah maybe actually what is happening is that every like training minute that you're spending like i don't know doing fast

strides or stuff like that you could be spending it training on your specific terrain like whatever like if it's gravel for your race on gravel roads and then if it's uh that like if it's super technical terrain like rocky and rooty then like training on that that will help you improve your running economy in that specific contest even if it doesn't nothing for your running economy yeah you know your your uh trail running cohort kind of accentuates that right because they have such a lower training volume and they're probably doing it in a more specific way right because they know they can't like waste they can't like waste time doing other things they're like hey if i'm going to be at the bakery at 4 a.m i'm going to be hitting the trails like right when i get off of work and that's what i'm going to run i'm going to run trails the entire time because all this other stuff it's not specific to the deal but your point is well taken that i do i do think that there's some sort of i don't i don't know what to call it you know there's like a like a specific locomotion economy you know over trails or kind of whatever but but i do i do think that it's a much different context in in trail and ultra running and i do think that the way that we train for it we we at least need to think about a whole lot differently and not just say these are the standard ways that we improve running economy in the road running world and just copy pasting those into the trail world i think we need to scrutinize that a little bit more from a training perspective and and the easiest way to scrutinize it is to put it into put those interventions into the environment where they matter the most so like you said strides over you know kind of technical terrain right might be a great you know might be a great type of way to do it strength training or plyometric

types types of training that are not in a gym that are more and more natural environment can accomplish those things i think that those are the types of training strategies that people need to look at when they're trying to figure out okay i've got 10 more minutes to do an adjunctive intervention here what am i going to do am i going to do strides on the track or am i going to do strides on the trail could you strides on the trail nothing wrong with that like strides on the trail or like trying to do like i don't know like stuff that i have tried that i don't know like if it works or not right but like you're on the trail you're on a relatively technical trail and then try to take longer steps like than you would take normally so like you have to choose bouncing from rock to rock so you're doing some kind of like low level plyometric training in a way that includes like whatever it is the instability the not just like what you're doing like box jumps in the gym yeah yeah i think there i think there's something i think there's something to that uh once again i'm not saying completely sell out don't get in the gym but i just think that thinking about it in a specific way is is is super important okay you ready for some for some pure banter pure entertainment banter no no relevance to yeah no running bunker exactly exactly that was the original tagline of this that i'm gonna get i'm gonna move away from but we'll do it anyway for this one so in your estimation after actually doing these research can the can't we'll make it specific can the french elite marathon runners come into the trail and ultra world and dominate how many years as as is like they just take their take their

physiology and their training they're training twice as much take their physiology and training and then come into the ultra world yeah i think that it was jim waltzy that said at some point like bring them with me to the canyon and then like we'll see who comes out first and i think he was right with that like i think that absolutely not because it's like a completely i i think that to some extent like using jim waltzy as an example like that he decided that his mountain training was not good enough to succeed at the UTMB so like he had to move to france to like a more maintenance environment and like even then i i think that the marathon runners are good at running and i think the ultra marathon running is much more than running yeah i think to that like the other day i was talking to to an athlete that is considering like uh going trying to set a world record in a spanish race and like it was like well yeah how good are you at like running at night and it was like well i never run at night except in races and i said like well i don't know if you have to run at night like i don't mean that you have to spend all night long but you should be comfortable running with a headlamp right yeah on and like and then like he told me a story about at some point i what was it like he like beginning of the race it started raining he said like oh no i'm not going to put like my my shell jacket on because like i will warm up once we start right exactly mistake i like that's not going to happen in marathon runners except for that time that like kawachi won boston yeah that's linda i remember that that's one time right like and

it's one time that we remember it's like it can easily be every other race into a running yeah which like that like weather has like a very big impact and then at that point it's going to be like small decisions like do i put the jacket on or not do i take it off or not like and that must be trained and like they cannot just come and do it like even if they have probably better physiology they will not be able like first of all there's the jump of the physiology from there to the ultra like with the heels and everything but then there's the all the decisions making making skill like a trail runner like or like a ultra marathon trail runner is somewhere between a runner and a mountaineer i would say right to some extent and like then it depends like more of that in europe in america more of that for hard rock than for western states maybe right but like there is a bit of a combination between yeah the two sports like that's why i think we have like we see very good like ski mountaineers yeah doing that because ski mountaineers i'm getting into it now like every time that you reach the top you have to do 15 things with your backpack yeah exactly think of the skis and do this and then like you you use that time to fuel and all that stuff like it's like well yeah you have to do many things and like yeah how fast are you with your like putting things on in the backpack and in the mouth like can you find things in your backpack with your eyes closed yeah yeah yeah here's the one has never ever done that here well yeah you're absolutely right marathoners probably never done that unless they have that experience which hardly any of them do here's what i think i think it's worth about 10 i think if you take 10 like a 10 better physiological

uh road runner right they're gonna perform at about the same level as that 10 worse person on the trails like that's how much of the and it might even be more than that i might be undershooting that now that i'm thinking about it but it takes that much so if you take somebody with you know 70 you know 70 vo2 max a trail runner you're gonna have to have somebody that's like 77 or 80 vo2 max and whatever the running economy you know lactate threshold equivalents of the of those are on the road on the road running side transplant them on the trail to even get it close i that's how much i think it actually makes a difference not to say you should maximize all those variables but i just think this this specificity component that we're that we're talking about makes that it's not trivial i guess is what i'm saying it's not one or two percent i think it's yeah absolutely i absolutely think that this is right like it's not trivial and like just the fact of like that like bringing like i'm thinking about like doing a ring to ring in the brand canyon basically right like which is like it's like above like at least on like the south side which is the one that i've done it's like a trail that is like there's no rocks it's not technical it's like big downhill and then big uphill right yeah so then like if you do that and then you put a trail runner on a road runner i would like to see one of the marathon runners after they get to the bottom uh which is like what like 10 miles i don't remember yeah yeah yeah 11 miles 10 miles in which you lose like more than 1000 meters or yeah yeah right so

it's like well are they going to be able to come out the other side and start going to ring to ring when they get to the top of the other side are they going to be able to come back and repeat that yeah and i think that that physiology is going to have like a very big impact which is like one of the things that will be trainable that they could train for that's why i said like in how many years yeah yeah yeah there you go the other thing that i thought was important there is that one problem that we see many times in trail running is that we have things that multiply your race by zero like like one bad nutrition decision kind of like then it's a dnf it's not like yeah and i think that like pro trail runners make those mistakes all the time like in every big race you place it's like oh yeah last utmd this guy and this guy didn't finish right zero multiplication much more likely for that so like it's the 10 plus the increased likelihood of all of those things yeah i i i'm with you on that one too totally all right that's enough banter fred we're gonna let you go man cool paper i'll link it up in the show notes man i'll link up all the accessory stuff in the show notes and i also think one that if we kind of like read between the lines a little bit which we always like have to do we can come up with some really practical uh practical takeaways that'll actually drive the training process and not just be something that we discuss in the bars yeah so i appreciate you coming on med yeah thank you thank you for having me all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to coach fred for coming on the podcast

today and providing some insight into the paper that he was the lead author on and i do think that some of this insight is something that only somebody who is involved within the research can actually provide us with yes they have to produce a paper and that paper is available to the public at large but when you actually talk to the researchers themselves you're able to glean a lot more insight into what was actually going on some of the strengths of the paper some of the weaknesses of the paper and most importantly what we can take away from that in order to drive training practice i hope you all appreciated that especially some of the banter in the end around strength training somebody is going to yell at me afterwards and say that i am not an advocate for strength training because of that common commentary but i do think the fact that the trail runners had greater strength than the road runners despite doing no strength at all is a super interesting finding that you can provide your own color commentary on appreciate the heck out of fred for coming on the podcast i appreciate the heck out of you all the listeners out there for bringing this podcast to light as always it is brought to you without sponsorships or endorsements in any way shape or form whatsoever in order to prevent any sort of financial entanglement with any of the commentary that we are providing on this on this podcast so it's you the listeners that are responsible for proliferating the podcast and making it what it is today and i thank

you very much for that if you like this podcast please share it with your friends you can do it right in the apple podcast app if that is your preferred podcasting platform of choice or you can do it across spotify it's very easy just click the share button send a text message to one of your training partner homies and hopefully they will enjoy this content as much as you did that is it for today folks and as always we will see you out on the trails you you