Planning Your Season-Coach Roundtable w/ John Fitzgerald, AJW & Duncan Callahan | KoopCast Episode 165

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 the year of 2023 this season is upon us now that all of the ultra lotteries have shook themselves out everybody knows more or less what they're going to be doing for the remainder of the year and i bet all of you listening have some semblance of the races that you want to train for all of our coaches are in the same mode we have all of our athletes their calendars are all laid out and now what do we do so on the podcast today we're going to talk about just exactly that how do we lay out a whole season's worth of training for a particular athlete on the podcast today i have coaches duncan callahan coach ajw and coach john fitzgerald to talk about what we do with our athletes now that their calendars are laid out what things do we take into consideration when considering their planning how do we develop their strengths and weaknesses over the course of time and the all-important question how much racing is too much racing i know that a lot of you listeners out there have that question right on the front of your forebrains we go through it all in a very practical manner this is very much

a coaching exercise this is a coaching exercise that we do with any of our coaches in our group this is how we would lay it out for our particular athletes so whether you are a coached athlete whether you think you want to take on a coach for this next season or if you are trying to diy your own training process i hope that you gain some valuable insight into how we do it as professionals with our particular athlete group all right with that as a backdrop i am getting right out of the way here's my conversation with our coaches all about long-range planning and how to lay your season out dougan was aware of this because he's on the coaching call uh earlier today and uh i was looking over the the sheet of where all of our athletes are going and where all of our coaches are going this year so far so far as we know and pretty much all the lotteries are done right i think the last one is tour de jaunt for the last big one is true wasatch is still this yeah wasatch is this weekend as well you're right but for the most part say 90 everybody's seasons are kind of like set and so i know that all of us as coaches have been kind of going through this process of okay all right all not only all of our athletes but each individual athlete now has their kind of like race calendar and also their training and camp calendar uh flushed out for the most part and the next step in the process is is what we would call long-range planning but it's really determining what the

workout flow is generally going to look like throughout the course of a year and so what i wanted to do with this conversation is is kind of like bring to light how we do that hopefully we learn a little a little bit from from each other and then the audience whether they're working with a coach or whether they're trying to like plan out their own uh training can take that as a little bit of a cue for what things to look for how to set it up and then down the line how to make course corrections because that's probably where i've changed a lot as a coach is just trying to make those course corrections as things go along so we'll like kick it off with now that we've got like the like the racing part of it planned out what are the things that each of you take into consideration when trying to determine this overall long-range plan this overall flow from january to whenever these races are are happening in the summer john since you're on my immediately on my left and we haven't talked in a long time i'm gonna pick i know i'm gonna pick on you first yeah so kind of you know the first part i like to start with is just where the athlete currently is so you know i like to just talk about physical health you know are there any because sometimes that's just you know an athlete starts to get their race calendar kind of dialed in they kind of it can be easy to kind of neglect the little things like how you're just feeling right now so i think it's a good conversation to have it's like how where are we where are we right now from a physical standpoint are there anything any niggles anything that we should kind of take care of now before we start getting super excited about this build into these

events and that also goes to the mental side because that's you know if there's a mental uh piece that's holding us back or that's you know preventing us from enjoying the training or getting into some good training let's start to work through that now as opposed to you know a month or two down the road we're in the thick of training and you know we're coming off the rails and things are harder to kind of work through so i think the first thing kind of called setting the stage is like mental physical health and then i think we can tie that into takeaways from the previous year um again i think that's something that's often overlooked as we get super excited the races are on the calendar but then we don't really have this reflection point on what can we work on what can we improve you know what are some things that went really well and using the data that hopefully some good data we've collected over the years to kind of make some adjustments but again that's more of the here and the now and that way is kind of that platform for the decisions that we ultimately will make and the conversations about the blocks of training weeks and months that we're going to get into so john brings up a really interesting point that where you always have to meet the athletes where they're at at the present time and you know inevitably this the following sequence of events usually happen around this time i get into race xyz and that's in july what does my longest long run need to be in june what do i need to do to build up into that longest long run in may and the point that they're forgetting is john was you know so eloquently saying is is well where are you at right now you can't you can't neglect that

piece of it because you're starting from somewhere and we've always used this like coaching analogy where we're trying to build a bridge between where the athlete is right now and where they kind of where they want to go the building of that bridge you need to have some structure behind it that's what we're talking about today but the building of that bridge is more influenced by the first point where you are right now versus where you want to go and that's because you can only handle so much right you can only handle so much training so much mental skills so many you know strength training activities or whatever you're throwing at you based on where you are kind of like right here and right now so that's a really that's that's an extremely important point john that i completely agree with you is that yes all this overarching architecture is is important but you've got to start with where the athlete is at the current moment in time yeah and one thing just to add i mean sometimes that's really hard to do you know sometimes we want to be a little bit potentially in denial of the fact that hey this is nagging me my knee is not 100 healthy or whatever it is because we're we might be so fixated on this super fun event that we have coming up so i think when if we train to the reality that we're in and we train to where we are currently then we're not going to make decisions that might be a little bit rushed or you know hey we got to get the ball rolling we got to get the long run out this weekend or do we really we're not healthy yet so maybe we shouldn't so i think that's just a good place personally for me that i like to start with uh just a reflection point and i don't know if duncan or andy if you

guys have something similar that you guys do i think we're all we're all on the same page that we like to have some kind of a a season review of some sort with our athletes yeah yeah for sure season review i i was going to look at it from the from the perspective of a new athlete coming in and you know obviously you've got to do an assessment okay where is this athlete at with your current training current injury current life etc but i did want to highlight i think it's interesting i've experienced some athletes that contact cts and come through my pipeline and they say things like i want to do you know leadville or moab or name the race in two years three years you know a couple years out i want to get in the pipeline now and i've seen some great success with that i've got one i just had one today reach out and i'm in leadville uh this year want to get in coaching do you think six months is too much time for coaching you know and so i i think that's an interesting point to make is that i think both extremes are maybe extreme but if we can get people in the door sooner rather than later i think it helps uh with outcomes absolutely so that's an interesting take and then we of course then yeah you've got to look at the assessment of the athlete training history uh you know i've come athletes that have a robust training history strava training peaks otherwise some have none uh recorded you know that's a tough spot to start from because you're you're basically trying to cajole the answers out of them you know verbally or in a written form so yeah

i've got this is a real timely topic for me because i had a planning conversation with one of my athletes just earlier this morning and it was basically oh crap i got into UTMB and uh he and he was an athlete that i that i've been coaching a couple years he did western states last year so i know him well he lives in dubuque iowa so a lot of the training for UTMB uh challenge that folks who don't live in the alps have to deal with so a lot of our this initial conversation after oh crap i'm in UTMB is how are we going to do this right so it was so you the the thing is out there right he's lucky he got picked he knows he's going to chamonix you know at the end of august how am i going to get there john to your point then of course i'm like well you know right now you're doing six to eight hours a week and right now you it's been a while since your last tempo block your long run is about you know two and a half hours you know dubuque iowa is covered in snow you know so we've got a lot of work to do and so in my case and i i said this in an earlier podcast because with my athletes that are in big target races this year i'm insisting on the training camp model whether they're in western states and they go to the actual training camp or they're in leadville and they go to the actual leadville training camp or they build their own training camp so literally after talking to tom and just for you know a few minutes and figuring out you know where we're

thinking of for the next couple of weeks i was like okay we've got to get your training camp on the calendar right now yes right so go let's count back five weeks five weeks give or take from uh UTMB and let's get that on the calendar that's that's actually more important pretty much than getting in in in my view at this point we can figure out where it's going to be and you know obviously we're gonna we have time to do that but i find that then that that then leads to breaking the whole rest of the calendar down in the little pieces instead of this one big target which is UTMB obviously the biggest one now you have this secondary target which is the three days whatever we whatever we do you know 75 miles or you know 20 hours in three days or something like that then we sort of backfill on the other things the other key thing by the way and i'm sure you guys do this too when you're looking at a the overall whatever it is like in this case it's seven and a half eight months i will say right out of the gate okay what life things are coming up what weddings do you have to go to what big work trips what baptisms is your spouse uh got a big work trip uh or do you have a child graduating from high school or something get all that stuff in there too all of that life stuff so that those variables are removed and then we can get down to planning right so i mean let me add like the next component to this because we've got we're going to start where they're at we've got this anchor

points type of finding to do whether it's a race anchor point a life anchor point or a training camp anchor point those are kind of the three categories that we just missed the thing that i'll add to the mix are what are the athletes weaknesses and strengths and regardless of whether i get a new athlete in or i've been working with an athlete for a long period of time speaking to john's let's start where you're at right now i always use the initial part of the training process which is normally now december january february type of time frame to round out the athlete's weaknesses in as kind of complete of a way as possible and a lot of athletes know this kind of intuitively like they just run with friends and they know that hey i'm always falling behind on the technical train or i'm always falling behind on the uphills or i'm always you know bonking or whatever it is like they just notice what their kind of weakness or their discrepancy is and to duncan's point of of trying to find out you know sifting through the training process with a new athlete one of the things that we can do as coaches is to pour through their previous training and i ask kind of like i ask two fundamental questions when were you training at your best when were you the most fit the most confident when when were you kicking ass and when were you at your worst and i go back throughout that training history this is why training history is so incredibly powerful when you start working with a new athlete or whether you've

been working with an athlete for a long period of time and if you can find those two polarizing end points when were you when were you at your best and when were you at your worst you can typically ascertain what was going on during that time that made those two end points unfold hey this type of intensity i was just really kind of like bad at it's some sort of physiological weakness this time during this time frame i was really doing well as a super high volume you know period and i performed really well okay you react you adapt really well to to high volume that strengths and weaknesses component is kind of the next point that i that i fold in and i spend not an inordinate amount of time but a reasonable amount of time six to eight weeks or something like that just working on that low volume type of setting let's let's try to develop all these skills or whatever it is to start to to start to round it out and do it as far away from the event as possible because then you're not then you're not trying to like jam too many things into the shoebox so to speak right you're not trying to jam all the fitness all the race prep and everything else like that you can round out these weaknesses with it with enough of a space and give them the the kind of proper time to grow what one of my athletes recently mentioned this on a on dylan's free trail podcast abby hall where her weakness was downhill technical running which is a big deal for the events that she's training for ut and bccc and things like that and for the last two years really we've made it a point in the early part of the season to work on

that as a skill get on a lot of technical downhill terrain run some of that downhill terrain a little bit faster and just use repetition to to to improve that area and now i wouldn't consider her like the best descender you know in the women's pack but she's pretty freaking good you know and her ccc result this year was a was a real testament uh was a real testament to that where she's making up a lot of her time on the descents as opposed to the as opposed to the essence so that's the final like point when we're planning a season out we've got these big things to get the anchor points right where are you at right now and what your strengths and weaknesses are i think if you take an inventory of those three things you've got a really good basis for to set the whole season up so now the next question is is like how are you going to do it right you've got an inventory of all these things what do you do first second third fourth and how do those things like generally flow for you guys and duncan we'll start out with you on this one yeah well i'll just first i'll add to what you just said about you know the the off season or or furthest out from your target events being the time to make changes you know you see this with athletes who may need to lose some weight of some kind like this is the time to be making some dietary changes and or you know if you're going to ever have a caloric deficit it's when you're running eight hours a week pretty easy versus when you're training hard so i've seen this with numerous athletes so i think that's a key point but to your your next question coop it really

is i mean it's it's out of the textbook it's least specific to most specific for the target event you're manipulating the intensity obviously you're manipulating the volume obviously and then you're manipulating the terrain and or vertical or footing to your point as well uh for specific races at least specific vo2 max type work potentially flat road running for an athlete getting ready for a technical race most specific close to the race six to eight months from now higher volume perhaps steady state intervals and i think a real key during that block immediately posed immediately prior to their event is the terrain both vertical and footing and i think the footing is the thing that gets lost in the shuffle sometimes the technicality piece right one thing i'd add to that as far as least specific to most is you know what i like athletes to do is i call it throw the event out in front of them and so i think when an athlete does that here's grindstone right now right and so i think it doesn't hurt if a race is off in the fall to have a conversation about the course about the race itself and pick something apart from that race and and i i like athletes to kind of start to slowly you know if we do it in large chunks it's too much right now but if we take a little like koop is talking about technical downhill running you know or a technical section of the course but how can we maybe layer in a little bit of that now even though we're months out and start to kind of get that confidence because then we can go back and say hey look we started this technical downhill running in january

or february right and then as we get going we start to get into the more nitty-gritty and the specifics and the athlete has already kind of dipped their toe into it so i would say i like to add like a sliver of specific work but specifically to the to the event itself if we can with you know and your athlete and that was at iowa yeah that's tricky right and that and that's where you can get the creative juices going right and that that makes it a lot of fun you know i think yeah he immediately is going out to buy one of those you know 40 degree treadmills or something but i'd like to pick up on the least specific the most specific too because if i know my athlete well enough so i'll take one of my western states athletes for this year who lives in the auburn sacramento area so has access to the environment has access to i know that he for example so this is again no know your athlete i know that he likes using races as training runs and is and more importantly is actually able to do it right we are you know we we have a we have a a coding system with little stars asterisk you know one asterisk is target race two asterisk is medium you know training race and three asterisk is run with your friends or whatever else so what we we created these chunks so this the least specific chunk that he's in right now flat and fast right is gonna is gonna culminate with a relatively flat and fast i think it's a 30k right there's weekend there's races every weekend up up in that area so it's like

a flat fast paved 30k at the beginning of february uh then he transitions gill gets a little bit more hilly and runs way too cool now way too cool is a one star right it's far enough away from western states it's on the course so he can he can kind of empty the tank there and then there's a couple of more races that are two star and three star and three star and are getting into more vertical and more specific um and so the using races i know we might be getting at this later but i i think that really i mean we say it all the time right it depends on the athlete but for this for clinton this athlete he can he's not going to be have a problem being in seven seven tune-up races going into western states whereas there might be another athlete who could barely do one right just because you know they'll turn themselves inside out in that one race so i think it's important to ask those questions and then of course look at the calendar and make sure they can get into these races and that they work in their lives and everything else but i i love i mean that that's that's been as true the the least specific the most specific is is is as true now as it was you know years ago coop when you first told told us all about this this concept and the science backing it up i mean but i i like to find ways to chunk those so that so that the the athlete knows okay now the most the least least specific block is ending and we're getting a little bit more specific now and then four weeks from now we're going to get a little so they they know in their head oh this is why we're doing this i'm adding another chapter

what is the least least specific better vocabulary for that for sure for sure um yeah i mean the the thing that the thing that i'll add to how do you actually arrange it is i do like especially with athletes that i've worked with i do like to take inventory of where their general like volume lines of demarcation were in particular during particular phases and this is this is really tricky because it's it's hard for me to just it's hard for me to describe i create almost like earmarks for them like really soft ear marks for them in the calendar just to say listen you're training 20 hours a week during this block last year that's about where i want you at this year i think the coaching key to our earlier point of meeting athletes where they're at is not artificially influencing the trajectory to hit that target because we've seen this all too often where an athlete is starting at a different level than they were in previous years and so if you have this artificial target out there if they're starting out at a higher level you might want to aim a little bit higher than that year mark and then if something happens in the middle of it and this is going to be our next year this is going to be kind of our last topic if something happens in the middle of it they get injured or they have some sort of like life event or whatever now that earmark needs to be softened up a little bit so i have a really hard time i try to create that's why i say it's a soft earmark if it's 20 hours a week

i might give it like a little bit of a 10 spread but it's a point for me for check from a checks and balances perspective to say okay generally at these times we're going to try to kind of closely mirror what you did in years previous as long as it worked if it didn't work then you've got to kind of go back to the drawing board if you think you can do it better you've got to draw go back to the drawing board and and and kind of change some things but with athletes that have that that have generally found successful training patterns i want everybody listening out there to to really take heart to this next statement if you generally have had a successful training pattern a lot of times all you need to do to improve further is just to get out of the way and do it again and repetition becomes the way that you improve it's not necessarily more it's the same over longer periods of time go ahead john you know i know you wanted to jump out on that i'm actually an interview and this is kind of a little bit off slightly different sport but actually iron man world championships and it was sam laid low who ended up finishing they called it the norwegian sandwich i think he was second yeah he was like who's this guy and he anyhow so you know the norwegians are getting all this hype and how they train and this and that and it's you know it's mainstream but he did he talked in a little bit about his training and he just said you know i have data from year after year and i know what works for me and i didn't want to kind of make things yeah you know over the top fancy i just i wanted my

training to be okay and he and i loved that statement that he had and it wasn't this exuberant this over the top i've got to do more and more and more he's like this works really well for me i'm just going to hold it and stay steady with it and i mean other factors go into play too but i like that statement that he had with about his training here's the temptation that a lot of people have and you can probably resonate with this because i'm going to use a western stakes example i finished in 25 hours last year and i want to finish in 23 59 59 right or i got a big belt buckle last year in this race i want to get smaller belt buckle on the elite side i got third last year and i want to and i want to win and a lot of times the answer that that that people will come up with and i think erroneously come up with to solve that riddle of how do i get better is just to do more of something more more volume more volume of intensity higher intensity type of training sometimes all three combined at once like we're just going to more strength training altitude interventions supplement you know nutritional supplementation like there's usually some something to add into the mix and i'm not saying that those are invalid i think a lot of in a lot of cases tweaking some of those can kind of like bring the balance out and that's a that's definitely an art of coaching things but in many cases just doing the same over long periods of time can help unlock that that that potential you don't have to change much you're changing a couple of things around the edges maybe the overall volume is kind of the same but just kind of doing it again year after year after year and

like getting once again getting out of the way makes a really really big difference in the developmental process yeah a total another podcast you know for sure but this idea of quality training right um and you're talking about doing the same thing i would even argue i just wrote down recovery on my little uh my little thing here but uh it's just to you know to actually give your give your body an opportunity to actually adapt to the training and absorb it and that's been coming up a lot with athletes have been coaching it's just actually potentially even doing a little bit less to give yourself an opportunity to get better and i think that's a fear a lot of athletes have is okay i hit this mark like you're saying coop i got to do more and then they're neglecting the recovery piece and then they're not getting better 100 100 i'll add the flip side of that is you know i've got an athlete here in colorado for a few years have done uh done training for leadville generally is a fast runner flourishes on flatter smoother footing and then last year she uh went to ccc and you know quite a bit different technicality footing wise vertical wise and obviously a shorter distance um and uh anyway two to two and a half extra amount of vertical june july august compared to the previous years so it was a she was willing to make that change and do something that she didn't even enjoy as much or historically hadn't enjoyed so she made that pain training duration increase uh training vertical obviously increased uh training distance either flatlined or slightly

decreased in her case just because the terrain was slower so just bringing that up as an example of here's an athlete who's found success for many years loved running injury free and it was very willing to make a training change because her target race change and i see a lot of people that kind of just stuck in their ways you know self-included like i'm gonna do the same loop i always did well yeah but your race is totally different why would you do the same thing again so right well and i and i would argue that that was a quality training right there you probably had some structure with an athlete that allowed that to happen so yeah yeah for sure yeah yeah well and sometimes it's looking at the overall calendar and figuring out how to avoid the zeros you know there's this just i'm gonna link i'm gonna link this up because it actually just came across my wire like yesterday or the day before there's a piece of research that just uh came out that analyzed the strava data of i can't remember what the actual number was um so so don't quote me on this but a few thousand marathon runners and they found that the ones that just avoided a couple of zero weeks i think the number was two had like a four percent faster finisher time so a lot of times when we're like analyzing all this stuff like look at the low-hanging fruit like once again this is why training history is really powerful and if you look at it through the lens of what are the simple things that we can solve eliminating the zeros maybe changing something slightly structurally looking at where those big polarizing kind of strengths and weaknesses are those are usually pretty easy things to do as opposed

to something more ridiculously complicated like trying to do an altitude intervention or or something like that so i'm going to kind of move on to the like the next part of this and we're going to have to do a little bit of forecasting everybody who's listening will have to like think okay i'm going to get into this training process i know where my anchor points are i know what this flow is generally going to look like what causes you to change course and we've all been through this as coaches we lay out you know six months of generalized training not specific training but this is how the training is going to flow and things like that and some kind of like something happens what are some of the biggest uh reasons for these course corrections that you that you guys have encountered and andy we're going to start with you for this one well i i think you know since the vast majority of the athletes we coached are are have have professional and family lives outside of running um i would say the biggest time when i end up changing course is when some life thing came comes along that was not part of the plan in january and upset the apple cart in march and it's really where the coach has to put on a counseling hat and say look it's okay that you missed those two tempo runs you coop your good point at least we're not going to have a zero week it's okay that we didn't plan for this we can we can move stuff around we can make changes but number one is when when something happens at someone's job or in someone's family and it happens

to everybody and it disrupts the training i think frankly that's a really good reason to have a coach because you can talk to that coach you can say you know and the coach can tell you look you look you're you're going to be fine it's going to be okay you know you're going to um you're going to get through this we'll make some adjustments this has happened before i think the other one is determining if they have if they're doing we i've talked earlier about tune-up races if they do a tune-up race let's say and it goes horribly right they do a 50 miler and they you know go three hours slower than they hope to or they have major nutrition problems or or something happens you know maybe something that was that was unexpected happens in that 50 mile race and then a couple days later it's time to sit down and have that phone call with your coach and you know really try and dive into you know well what went wrong and why did it go wrong and was it my fault me the coach was it the circumstances was it you know and you try and get away from blame and be like look it's nobody's fault we had but let's make sure we don't we don't repeat this so i think for me those are the two that have caused change courses you know if i'm we're talking about like a seven eighth month plan let's say like we were all talking about people have gotten it through the lotteries it'd be it'd be at you know those kinds of things and if you if you've had experience with those happening as a coach then you can assure the athlete hey this you know with the obviously without using any names but you know i had something similar happen with an athlete last year when they were building up to UTMB and it worked out okay and and here's what we did

and because the athlete needs assurance needs understanding and you know you know because because here we are in january saying up we got to do all this we got to nail it you got to and then march comes around and something disrupts it it's like oh yeah so you you kind of have to be ready to finesse that so i think a way to finesse that and that i've learned uh over the course of years is when we're creating this long-range planning as opposed to just kind of showing it to the athlete and we use a couple of different methods you can do it kind of natively within training peaks or you can use a google sheet like is kind of outlined in my book not just using that and like hucking it over to the athlete but then saying these are the things that are going to matter the most because to your point andy when those things happen and you have to move and you know kind of push things around typically the strategy that you're using is you're taking away or you're adapting more of the things that are less important so that you can keep the things intact as much as possible that are more important and having gone through that before then the athlete can kind of internalize it's like okay like this is an okay change because i know that the more important stuff we're going to change less or kind of not at all one thing i like to bring up with athletes and i think coop i heard this on your podcast rebecca rush was on your pod queen of pain yeah yeah she's pretty good at this because she's always got she's always doing dangerous stuff and haven't been course correct you know

one liner that really stood out to me and maybe i heard it somewhere else from her was uh i like to be 100 consistent 80 of the time is that a rebecca quote i think that really holds a lot of truth for athletes you know particularly non-professional athletes where hey i've got a training plan in place it's 365 days if i nail 322 of those i'm doing pretty damn good you know and i think keeping those athletes engaged even though they're missing their tempo run or they miss a tempo block or they change their training race uh just reminding them of that number i think is is pretty vital 100 and i mean i always just remind athletes it's not set in stone and and i i don't know lately i've been kind of chuckling a little bit at the long-range plan because you know we're trying to predict the future we're trying to say hey two months from now we're going to be getting into this type of work and that would be great but like like andy was saying life comes up you know things are going to shift and so i think that's i whenever the athlete realizes that that hey this isn't going to be to a tee i don't know if anyone else that any of us us here ever coached an athlete through a long-range plan where it's gone to a tee it's always shifted a little bit and why is that you know how are they responding to the to the workload and the training you know uh like andy was saying you know things pop up um and so yeah you have to be flexible um for sure it's going to shift so the the whole you know i created this acronym adapt right and it's it was

kind of the main orientation for that was is what what do you do when shit hits the fan during a race the same can be true for long-range planning i mean you have an injury whether it's an acute injury or a chronic injury or you have a life event like andy was mentioning earlier i think you can take some of that strategy is first off don't panic right and the panic never gets anybody anywhere and that's the first thing people think about when they whenever there's a training interruption is like oh my god i'm gonna i'm gonna miss out and i'm gonna comment on this in just a second i'm gonna miss out on whatever whatever i was supposed to do at that one particular time the the key is is just to move forward okay how are we going to rearrange things and how are we going to how are we going to emphasize the things that matter more and de-emphasize the things that matter less i think that that's the general strategy for adaptation whenever you're in a long-range situation you have to miss several days a week two weeks of training is to look at the entirety of the picture these things matter the most we're going to try to anchor them as much as possible and then the things that do not matter as much we're just going to de-emphasize and i think that that's a better way to do it as opposed as opposed to trying to play the makeup game like oh i missed this week of training so now i'm going to try to like shoehorn it in like eight weeks down the line or whatever the other thing to to that i think everybody needs to keep in mind when whenever they do go through this because it is a win not if is that your opportunity cost in most situations is removing

the ability to improve so let's just say you wiped out two weeks of training and you had to cross train for those two weeks for what for whatever reason whether you know personal life circumstances and things like that as long as you can do a bare minimum amount during that time and it's not that much three days a week 30 minutes on the bike or something like that your fitness probably won't get that much worse you'll feel a lot worse but in reality if we were to stick you on a treadmill and do a graded exercise test before and afterwards those they'd look almost identical if not exactly identical the opportunity cost is whatever you could do during those two weeks to get a little bit better it's not getting worse you're just kind of you're you're just maintaining at that point if you reframe that missed time in that type of opportunity cost i think that that helps a tremendous amount on the back end whenever the sky starts to clear out and those thunderclouds start to roll away because then you're not in this panic state of i have to make that stuff up so keep that in mind whenever there is an interruption in training that you're you're not losing anything the opportunity cost is the the improvement trajectory that you've just then put the pause button on for that period of time right okay yeah so last point when is it when are there too many things on the calendar because we all have eyes that are bigger than our stomachs

we want to race too much we want to do you know too many training camps and things like that and this is a question that i get asked that i honestly don't have a good answer to so maybe we can kind of like flush it out here i get asked on social media about this all the time how many races is too much how many hundred miles are too much in a season how many hundred k's are too much should i do 100k four weeks before my hundred miler that like too much question comes in a lot of different varieties based on you guys's experience when you're kind of laying everything out and i'm gonna start with you because you've got a shit eating grin on your face i'm sure you've got a good story on this when when is it too much and you have to like realistically pump the brakes a little bit all right i i'm dying to jump in here because i i i'm not going to use her name but i have an athlete and i know she would she won't be upset that i share this she she's one of these streak athletes right she's been running every day for like 10 years or something she's in the she she she lives in pittsburgh pennsylvania she's in the tahoe t 200 and she runs with a different group like five days a week you know she runs twice a day sometimes she you know she's got her her talkative group her run with the dogs group she's got her and literally i think the reason she reached out to cts to get me to coach her is to have her tell her you know you're doing too much put the brain so i mean honest honestly it is very much like maybe you should just run with four groups this week or you know just so i mean that's an extreme example but i think there are athletes

out there that are definitely in them more is better by the way this athlete probably does 95 percent of her training at you know recovery pace or you know very very easy aerobic pace almost all the time so she's not at risk you know like a lot of streak runners the main goal of their run is so they can run the next day but she is uh she is adapting to this and realizing that if you look whether it's looking at a week or a month or a whole season going all the way out to tahoe 200 you know that's the goal and so some of this stuff is going to have to be taken away and we're going to have to have an honest conversation of you know one of these two things is going to be taken away which ones are going to be i'll let you decide which one it is but one of them's going um i think those are the conversations and and they do vary athlete to athlete right now this athlete's an extreme but there are others maybe maybe they already have eight races on the calendar between now and UTMB and they should have four or they you know they're they're they want to pace there's a lot of people these days who are social and they want to go with their buddies to pace and crew and and that you know it screws a whole weekend for them because they stay up all night and they pace a few miles and you know uh so i think those are the kinds of conversations that really are important to have and when you work with the athlete of what how much is too much fitzy what do you think i mean i think it definitely depends i'm curious your guys thoughts on this the the distance of the race and the

athletes approach on the day i think andy was talking about your athlete there that could in a way kind of gain momentum with these races it wasn't like these events were taken away from this athlete they were you know they were going into them with very much so a level head putting ego at the door not trying to crush it so i think it very much so depends on the individual and how they might approach these events if it's full gas right i would even go down to the 30k yeah you know they're you know 30k if we look at the demands of a 30 kilometer race you're you're working at a very high percentage of of effort and for athletes that are building off of that i mean that can be that can be really hard for them so i think it really depends on the individual and how they the the key word is approach the event are they i call it like a laid back kind of weekend training run that's going to have such a different impact because the cost of the recovery clock is going to be much different compared to full gas race mode so i think it totally depends on the distance here's the dichotomy in that though john like the less experienced you are the more performance you're going to get out of learning how to race just the race like the whole race environment like you just you gain a lot of performance just by like hey i gotta go run 100 miles i don't know what's going to happen and each one gets a little bit better because of that learning process kind of like irrespective of the distance and that's more important the with the the less experience you have the more experience you have that racing component becomes less important because you've kind of like

learned all the tricks you've learned how to adapt like we were talking about earlier you've learned how to kind of avoid the failure points and things like that the the kind of the the dichotomous piece of it is is as you become more experienced your opportunity to use races as training is better because you have better control over the effort right because you do have that experience versus an inexperienced runner like you just mentioned they're going to go into like the shorter races and just you know kind of annihilate themselves every time and so i think that that's something to recognize right because it definitely is a push and pull on the experience side i kind of think people need to like inexperienced people they need to kind of race a lot just to get their feet wet and just learn through the trial and error process and kind of like learn learn by fire but they're going to screw it up like that's just part of the nature of it you're going to make so many mistakes you know your first 10 20 50 you know ultra marathons and eventually you figure out like 10 of it it's usually the curve right so anyway i i just wanted to tack on to that to that particular comment comment that there's this dichotomous type of relationship between experience and how you can actually execute a race from a training perspective right and then as coaches i mean it's up to us obviously to help these athletes balance the other work the other training with these events that's where i think a lot of athletes get it wrong is talking about quality training they end up being there we look at time that intensity how much you know intensity is there it's too much right so i think if we can dial back we're really going to leverage using training races you know make sure that we're kind of having this balance and

the recovery again is there for these individuals um i think it's huge but i'm getting a lot of athletes that want and i'll admit i and maybe we have all been here but i've done i want to say i've done 500 milers in a calendar year i think it was like my second or third year running ultras i was just like on a roll you know i was kind of picking up a little nugget every time i did it and uh but what are your guys's thoughts as we get into these 20 you know 24 hour plus events what is like do you guys have like a rule like hey i'm only going to allow an athlete do 200s you know the typical spring fall are you guys what are your thoughts on the longer 100 i would even go up to 200 milers that you know i once again going back to the questions i i get that's another one i get a lot of like how many 200 milers can i do in a year or is the recovery different between race x and race y and the the duration being kind of the difference between those two yeah and obviously you can throw it it depends but did you guys have a general like have you had athletes you know that you've coached through four or five plus hundred milers in a year and they're successful and that's a sustainable kind of way about going through things or is it just kind of like a one-off year that an athlete might push the envelope with a lot of racing or what do you guys see a special circumstance you know a special athlete special circumstance and a grand slam triple crown right right um yeah no real hard rule but i generally think you know the the two a races either 100k 100 mile or further

per year as a maximum two supporting races in that 50 mile maybe 100k realm and two other supporting races maybe in that trail marathon 50k realm now if i had to boil it down to to a generic boilerplate that is my general guidance to happen it's like hey you got six races you got a six hour race you got a 15 hour race and you got a 30 hour race maybe do that twice and very individual but that is boilerplate yeah yeah and what i've said fits is if if it's something like the slam or the triple crown so the two like big examples i encourage them to get around the mindset of thinking of it the the grand slam is one big 11 week long event right in other words so that they get they get their mindset around the event starts at old dominion or western states and it ends at wasatch right and that's all about the recovery in between the races and area similar with triple crown right a month apart uh maybe now there's a little bit more than a month apart because tahoe's a little earlier but but that you know but aside from aside from that i'm with dunk and i think i mean we've talked about 200s on podcasts several times i think the 200 is an interesting nugget both of my 200 athletes this year are doing a 100 training race you know which is you know several months out but that's and and a lot of that is about dialing in their gear and their nutrition and overnight and because as we've talked about and coop knows this better than anybody you know their pace is so much slower in a 200 there's so many other

things you need to work out around sleep and lighting and gear and pacing and nutrition that i think getting 100 you know a training race 100 uh is a smart is smart full gas i'll just chime in too i think back to the previous question too about when do we intervene and change training schedules or whatnot the biggest thing i see is it isn't necessarily recovery from these events it's the the cost to the rest of their life yes it's their family currency it's their employment currency it's the time off it's the travel it's that is a thing that people overlook like yeah you can run eight of these things a year and you'll likely be okay as long as you're not an idiot but it's what else are you spending are you spending that family currency you know that you're gonna lose your job you know and uh that's the thing i think people need to really factor in when they're making these decisions so i'm gonna ping off of that to and i'll answer i'll answer john's question directly i think that the longer duration races the 200 the 250s and things like that take longer to recover from because of all of that and it's really interesting because if you look at this through a pure physiological lens and this data is early stage but i think that it's going to play out like this if you just look at muscle damage which is typically our that's kind of like our hero barometer for how much recovery you need after a race how much physiological recovery i'm adding that caveat in there specifically how much physiological recovery

you need after a race it tends to peak at like the 100k or 100 mile distance and then actually come down at the 200 mile distance we can look at guimiais you know our mutual colleague here has been on this podcast before all of his research after tour de jean it's and it's and it's very clear that the markers of muscle of muscle damage are typically less after those long duration races as opposed to 50k 100k 100 mile type of distance especially for the especially for the faster runners however to duncan's point recovery is not solely predicated by the physiological muscle damage that has incurred there's a cost to doing all of the training going into it and i also i i strongly believe that there is a huge emotional depletion with doing a lot of these longer ultras anytime there's an extension of what you've done before you go to tour de jean you go do the tahoe tahoe 200 you go do cocodona which is going to come up here pretty quickly in may the the emotional toll that that takes just the event itself just the event because you're going so much further and you're digging so much deeper than you have before it just takes time to like recover those emotional bullets and then you add on to it everything that duncan was just mentioning the duties is otherwise specified all of the brownie points that you have expended with your significant other which for me is a lot i'm constantly in a in a state of building those back up with my wife liz um i think in some in some total

the balance of the recovery leans to the longer ones you just need more of it as compared to the shorter distance irrespective of the physiological makeup however we can kind of quantify that at the end that these other factors that we were talking about supersede the physiological ones that we can you know draw blood and and figure out what you know biomarkers are higher or lower and whatever type of type of athlete i just think that the things is otherwise specified are a greater component right and i think all of us here can agree or hopefully all of us would agree on we want more than anything our athletes to kind of have this be a lifelong kind of endeavor right and i think that's an important thing to kind of fold into this is like i always like to remind athletes like is this something that's going to align with kind of you know you sticking with the sport for many years to come and yeah you know sometimes it's worth the risk but i think yeah there's a lot of a lot on the line there too well to to that point john to kind of keep this theme going of of when is it too much right what i like to do a lot with my athletes that have this you know perpetual you know racing uh satiation that they need that they need to have is to kind of prevent the or to kind of present the performance context that all of those different events kind of mean for each other and that's not that's not easy to do it is a lot of like educated guessing you know okay you're going to take three percent off of your time you know everything else being equal for this race if you do this race kind of beforehand but i think starting that conversation

is important because a lot of athletes are okay with that like if you say listen i want to do to john's point 600 milers or 500 milers in a year you know the fifth one you're probably taking five percent off of the top as opposed to if you just focused on that right throughout the entirety of the year they people can rationalize that and say you know what you know i don't want to do that i want to perform maximally at this event so i'm going to forego or they can make the choice and say you know what that's not that big of a deal for me i would rather have the experience of doing all these five races even if my whatever like last race is compromised to kind of some some certain extent i'm not going to say that i have like a perfect formula for determining that but you can at least say better worse are the same right you can at least like look at that performance context and say okay well here's how we would rack and stack these is that an appropriate like trade-off for you and it helps contextualize this how much is too much with how meaningful is the performance at the end of the day compared to the experience of doing all of these things yeah john you presented i won't name the athlete but a couple years ago you presented on a an athlete you coached who did the grand slam and my one major takeaway from that was i don't think he had a single training day you know at for nine weeks right you know he was done training on june 3rd or june 15th you know two weeks before and so if you're one of these athletes who's a streaker or you're one of these athletes who

loves the training process you really need to think like okay you know do i want to give up an entire eight to 12 weeks of not doing my favorite runs in my local area not hitting my favorite mountain not doing my favorite group runs you know you got to be willing to make that trade-off i think people mostly if you're going for the grand slam you're thinking about that but it's a good reminder yeah yeah totally and one thing this athlete valued was spending time with family and what it allowed for was hey look i'm going to go to lake tahoe on the stand-up paddleboard with my kids yeah i really enjoy this moment you know and so i think if you can factor that in and find you can find that it's it's it's great here here's the physiology behind that for everybody to start to like contextualize how much racing is too much racing and how to set up the training that we all mentioned from impulse to improvement meaning if i do a workout today that's the impulse when do i actually see that improvement from a time course perspective it's about four to six weeks for an endurance for an endurance activity meaning if i do a workout today we're recording this on january 26th i'm not going to see any realistic performance improvement from that unless i keep doing it until the end of the end of february realistically it takes that long to build up all of the cellular mechanisms and things like that to result in an actual improvement and so when you think about the training proposition of i've got an ultra marathon here and ultra marathon six weeks down the line and another one like four weeks down the line sometimes you can paint the do i want

to train and how much do i want to train with knowing that knowing that proposition that it's going to take about four to six weeks and a lot of the times what you're just missing is as i mentioned earlier on the you know the training interruptions piece it's just the opportunity cost to improve you're going to hit your first race at peak fitness and the opportunity cost is you can't improve from the first race to the fourth race if we're looking at a grand slam type of deal so i encourage athletes that are thinking about doing a lot of races to not only think about the the cost and the tax and the duties as otherwise specified and how many bullets are you expending and kind of whatever area but also realistically how do you expect to improve and what the time course of those improvements are relative to the breaks in between the races and if you don't have enough break between a race that's cool there's nothing wrong with that but make sure you realize that you're going to reach peak fitness kind of before that first race and then just almost like hold on for dear life life afterwards yeah and that's not for everyone it sounds kind of maybe fun and sexy but it can be that's some athletes kind of go insane because they're like oh my god i just want to run and i'm like probably rest yeah i feel good well so you run into the thing where they feel really good after one race and there's not enough timing to have like a training impulse that is actually extremely difficult to manage that's when you have to really put on like both your counseling and your physiology hat and say whoa whoa like let's just have a minimum viable product here

to make sure that the deterioration isn't too steep or it's it's not at all at all and then like that's all you need and like you said john that's hard for for a person to do when they're used to training like 20 hours a week and then you're telling them to train like four six hours a week that like that on the that on face value it's like what do i do with all this extra time and energy yeah you know run club wednesday evening it's like well shoot yeah you know um make more brownie points that's what i tell it to do just like my good my good friend joe kulak who did the grand slam 20 years ago he said the summer he did the grand slam he got more housework done than any other summer of his life because basically he just came home from each race and sat around did his wife just made him do housework as he wasn't running that's perfect that's what i tell people during a taper like replace all the light bulbs that you haven't replaced you know do all like the easy like the easy home renovation projects that aren't that physically tasking to taxing just to like fill the void of whatever energy expenditure that you're deficient on during your tapering process awesome that's a great place to leave it guys i appreciate your time i hope the listeners uh can come away with some kind of reasonable ideas of how to uh arrange their training calendars i always appreciate you guys's insight because you three have been in the game for a long period of time collectively how much coaching and running experience do we have between all of us maybe 60 years right 20 i'm only five years at andy's got 60 by himself because he's old i would guess i would

guess coop that we have 80 i mean i've got 28 duncan's gotta have 20 i've got 18 19 yeah so it's 60 between the three of us and then fits and then fits you're you're the young you're the you're the young buck yeah right now yeah i'm over a decade it's over a decade yeah so 70 wow we're like uh years yeah yeah wow man we're we're headed up in the age group there anyway that's not the answer for now thanks you guys i appreciate it awesome let's do it again yeah hey that was a lot of fun that was great great all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to coaches duncan ajw and john fitzgerald for coming on the podcast today and enlightening us with how we do it with our athletes always have a great time talking with those uh coaches because as we mentioned at the very end of the podcast we have just a tremendous amount of collective collective experience amongst the group of us and i always learn something something that i'm going to take away for the athletes that i work with in particular i hope you guys garnered some valuable nuggets of information on this mainly that you can set your anchor points first what your races are and what your life events are and what training camps that you want to undertake throughout the course of a training season second ascertain what your strengths and weaknesses are look at where you're good and where you are not so good focus on

the things that you might have a weakness in first and then gradually move towards your strengths third then once you have all of those things laid out take a hard look and see if you've got too much on the calendar too much racing too many life events too many things that cluster around each other that might not leave enough space for the training and for the adaptive process and finally once it's all said and done don't be bashful about having to change course life events happen injuries happen things get in the way of the training process and you shouldn't feel bad about those things happening realize that the opportunity cost is not necessarily a loss in fitness the opportunity cost is not being able to progress with the training or the time that you have actually missed always be willing to adapt your training to the current situation that you have and if that current situation is i'm injured or i'm missing some or i'm missing some training because of a life event that's okay everybody is going to be okay if you have a solid plan laid out if you think that you're a good candidate for coaching you like this dialogue between all of our coaches feel free to reach out to me on social media or you can go to train right.com we'll get you set up there a link to that will be in the show notes and i hope if anything this podcast highlights some of the things that we do as coaches and how we try to help our athletes

achieve the most amount of success possible appreciate the heck out of all you listeners out there as always this podcast is nothing without you the listeners it's always brought to you endorsement and sponsorship free so we can have conversations like this that are kind of unadulterated and as unfiltered as absolutely possible and none of that can occur without you the listeners out there enjoying this podcast and perhaps sharing it with your training friends and running buddies that is it for today folks and as always we will see you out on the trails you