Mental Skills for Ultrarunning-Part 1 with Dr. Justin Ross | KoopCast Episode 167

Trail and ultra runners, what is going on? What's happening? Welcome to another episode of the KoopCast. As always, I am your humble host, Coach Jason Koop. And the next two episodes of the podcast are going to be focused on one of the things that everybody should be keen on developing right here, right now. Don't take another step before you start doing this. And that is mental skills specifically for trail and ultra running. To kind of crack the code on this a little bit, I invited two of my favorite mental skills experts back on the podcast to discuss this in sequence. So today you will hear from Dr. Justin Ross, who has been on the podcast before and also helped me design the mental skills for ultra running chapter in my book.

What I want the listeners to come away with throughout the course of the next two podcasts, which I guarantee you are absolutely fantastic, and it will completely revolutionize the way that you think about developing your mental skills, is I want you to come away with first and foremost, the type of framework that you can use to develop mental skills. And the second thing I want you to come away with is what are those specific mental skills and how do we go about developing them and honing them throughout the course of a year in a logical fashion so that one can build off the next so that when you come into your key event, you are completely prepared for whatever lies ahead of you, whether it's trials, tribulation, or triumph. I hope you guys enjoyed this podcast. I enjoyed it very much.

Justin is a very good friend of mine, and he is also very good at what he does. If you can't tell from this particular podcast, y'all can go check him out. Links to everything that we talked about will be in the show notes. So I hope that you dig into it after the podcast as well. All right, with that as a little bit of a backdrop, I'm getting right out of the way. Here is my conversation with Dr. Justin Ross. Welcome back. Oh man, you got your dog this time. Well, this is, um, look at that for timing introduction. This is where puppy's sitting. And so this is Deli who's six months old and decided that now would be a great time to hop on my lap. That's perfect. That's perfect. Well, you can work on your, uh, focus skills, having to answer questions about psychology with the frigging dog looking your face. That's totally fine, man. I appreciate you coming on, man. We, we spent some time off air, uh, kind of talking about, uh, the uptick that you have seen and also a few of the other, uh, sports psych practitioners that I've talked to have seen as well. And the people that are kind of requesting their, their, their services, and especially at this time of year. So I'm going to start, I want to start with that.

Like, are you seeing that? And why do you think that you're actually seeing that? Yeah, I definitely have been seeing that. And it's really been noticeable in the last, gosh, well, up to 18 months in general, but especially at the beginning of the year. And why I've really wrapped my head around it is I think like the, the mental game or the more psychology pieces, it's kind of like the fourth wave in terms of our understanding of performance. Right. And we started with like, you know, the first wave was really on physiological adaptation and systems. We know a lot about that now, and then became like ideas around strength and then became the third wave around nutrition. And now this fourth wave, if you will, is really around performance psychology. So I just see more and more people interested in understanding that.

I think we all intuitively have this understanding that, you know, the underlying mechanisms of how we think and how we feel and how we relate to ourselves is a driver of performance. And more and more people are just now willing to think about enhancing that. And then to bring it into this time of year, yeah, the beginning of the year, a lot of people are kind of, you know, getting excited about their season, about their events and their races and wanting to make this just as much a part of their training plan as anything else. Well, it's interesting that you mentioned the fourth wave and specifically the sequence of those waves, because that is the sequence of my coach education. If you just went through that, that's how I was educated as a coach, like to like to the letter. And what I've always said is, because of that specific sequence, I'm always going to be stronger in physiology than I am in nutrition. And I'm always going to be stronger in nutrition than I am in sports psychology. And then therefore, I have to spend a disproportionate amount of time now to like try to get them to the same level, realizing they're probably not going to be just because that my like lifetime or my not my lifetime, but my career exposure to those earlier elements is or to those later elements is just less. Yeah, yeah. I mean, accumulated knowledge, right, is just different, right? This really the whole idea around performance psychology, especially in endurance is, I mean, this is relatively new, all things considered. And

I think in a lot of ways, we're still just figuring it out, right? And a lot of this is getting updated and tweaked. And so much of this process of self discovery is, it's really about learning what works best for you as an athlete, and not having a kind of one size fits all approach. Because some of these skills, like, especially when we talk about like things like mental imagery, they just flat out feel funky for people that don't work. Why do you think endurance has been kind of last to the table? Because, you know, I, you and I both have the privilege of kind of going over the training center and surveying the landscape over there. And I see that I see in the like the combat sports and in the more technique driven sports, that they have kind of a more robust sports psych practice to draw from, either due to just kind of like some sort of legacy effect from the coaches and the athletes there, and or a demand component of their, of their particular sport. And I've always thought that the reason for that, or the reason that endurance sports has been kind of laggard is just because we just think of the sheer physicality that's that that kind of dominates the sport landscape or the performance landscape the most. But I wanted to get your take on it, because you see more of the non endurance athletes than I do and have a better and have a better impression of everything's why do you think we're the laggards here?

Well, I think maybe maybe a couple of things like one, you know, when, when the professional sports leagues are involved, there's a lot of dollars at play there. There's just a lot of monetary incentive to be at the top of your game to recover well, to be able to perform and endurance sports. The thing I actually love most about endurance sports is what draws us into this is just the pure love of exploration. Right? I think so many people are out here where we're just kind of deeply curious about these events and about our capabilities and about what happens. And so it's not monetized as much, there's less financial incentive to be to be driving these skills home. And yet, the flip side of that is, I think endurance sports, when you're out there for a very long time or a very long distance, what are you left? What do you spend a lot of your time doing? You're in your mind, you're praising the environment. That's the sport that probably needs it the most.

That's so ironic, right? I think the same thing, like we, there's a lot of time to, to talk yourself in and out of things. When you're out there on the trail, you're out there on the road, like the sheer duration presents a lot of issues or can present a lot of issues. Absolutely. Absolutely. And the, like the skills are a little different in my opinion, when we have, I tend to think of almost like start and stop sports, play oriented sports, right? So football, for example, right? There's a play, it's really intense. And then there's a momentary reset, right? And then you repeat that for, you know, four quarters. Endurance sports, once you start moving, you start moving, right? And so the continued nature of the activity offers a different set of skills that need to be employed versus when you have this chance to stop, to reset, to refocus. So it's like a lot of the skills overlap, but there's also some nuance in endurance sports that, that are different than some of those other professional sports.

I think when we like the, the takeaway lesson from that, uh, from, uh, people listening to this podcast and also for me who don't, or kind of aren't in the profession is that when you listen to other sports psych applications and other sports, realizing that that translation might not be one-to-one. So if you're listening to somebody, I gave this example to, to somebody that actually interviewed the other day where I was listening to, uh, this MMA fighter, this famous MMA fighter and his like kind of psychological framework, so to speak, there's certain things that you can take away from that, but there are certain things that you can't take away from that because of the, like the context of the sport. Right. Right. Absolutely. So why, so, okay. Give me the pitch, right? You're a practitioner in the area. You can give me the pitch. Why this time of year, why should we start focusing on developing these skills right here, right now in February of 2023, knowing that a lot of the events are going to happen in May, June, July, August, September. Why should we start now?

Yeah. Well, the, the first pitch is the very broad pitch, which is this is already happening, whether you think it's happening or not, your, your psychology is impacting and directing your decision-making around all things related to your performance, your training and your racing. And so you might as well just take advantage of that by learning some of the mechanisms, some of the ways in which you can skill build, because again, it's happening, right? The, the second, the why now approach is, you know, I think that the longer you have to really work on understanding these skills during your training, the more likely you're going to develop them. Right. So I have this weird saying, right? Like if you're going to learn a foreign language, let's say you want to learn Spanish. The first thing you don't need to do is you don't need to unlearn English, right? But you, you need to have a dedicated practice for Spanish and you're going to learn some Spanish in a week. You're going to learn more in a month. You're going to learn a lot more in six months. So the longer runway you give yourself, the more application, the more it's just going to, it's going to sink in. It's going to be easier to apply when you need it.

I love that analogy. That's pretty hilarious. You, you touched on this one, you touched on this element that I think is really important. It's happening, whether we like it or not, right? Just by the act of training, there's some mental skills development going on. I want you to expand on that a little bit more because I think for a lot of people that can help provide some sort of framework or gateway into formally working on these skills, as opposed to thinking about something like learning Spanish, right? It's a completely different, it's a completely different language. And I have to set aside, you know, two hours per day or whatever. I'm not going to naturally learn Spanish just by walking around the neighborhood and speaking to my neighbors in English. So like, how, how does that actually happen naturally just as a by-product of going and training?

Yeah. So I, the, the first element for me is, and I think about, you know, sports psychology is really having four core elements that are both influencers of, but also trainable mechanisms of. The first is really just our identity and our core narrative, right? And we carry that thing around wherever we go in and out of sport, right? We, we have this narrative about who we are and what we're about and what we're capable of and what we're not capable of, what our limits are, right? And that is influenced over the duration of our lives and the various, you know, the various encounters that we have and experiences that we have. That's the very first thing that we take into training and our lifestyle is a big influencer of that. So if we are walking around with a heavy load of stress, just because our lives are stressful, right? And we take that both physiologically, but also psychologically into our training, right? That is going to have an impact of some sort, right? So the very nature from that very beginning, personhood first, humanity first, gives you an opportunity to bring awareness to what's happening. So one of those first core skills is awareness. So when you're out there, even before you train for the day, can you bring awareness to your thoughts and to your attitudes and to the story that you're telling yourself when you're out there, you know, what happens in your mind when it's easy, when you're doing like an aerobic day, where does your mind go? How does your narrative shape your, your thoughts when it's a harder effort

or a longer effort or a more challenging effort, what happens in your thinking then, right? All of that is influenced and a by-product of all of our life experiences. And that is a fundamental place that we, we can all start. And so what, when you design, when you start to design mental skills, work for athletes, I'm guessing that you have some sort of like overall frame overarching framework. I want to do this first and this second and this third and this fourth. Yeah. We're all kind of doing some component of some of those during our natural training, but if you could kind of explain either like the list of things that you want to accomplish or the overall framework, or maybe even it can be encapsulated in like a training philosophy, right? All my peers, all my coaching peers, like, oh, what's your coaching philosophy? And they're all like the same version of five or six different things. I want to treat the whole athlete and be holistic and, you know, taking every aspect of their lives and it tends to be relatively redundant, but I'm wondering just as kind of like a starting point, can you provide some sort of like big umbrella to describe what you would do with an athlete? Yeah. So three parts to that, if I may, the first training philosophy is your mind is a highly trainable skill period. Right. And think about the Spanish analogy, right? Like if you want to learn Spanish as an adult, have never spoken Spanish before you could, right? You can dedicate

time and energy to learning that language. Your mind is highly trainable. We have to start there to the four categories of psychological experiences that both influence performance that are there at baseline, but also can be trained are the first one we talked about a little bit identity and our core narrative. The second are skills around emotional regulation, right? Our ability to regulate ourselves. The third is around self-talk, which includes a number of different areas of cognitive appraisal and, and how we're talking to ourselves, directing our narrative. And the last is really around attention, focus, and concentration. And the core skill there is often referenced as attentional control. So that's the overarching framework and how I think about when we build a plan, I think about it having sort of a, a bit of a periodized sequential approach, right? The first is around foundational elements that again, this time of year, you hear a lot about goals, motivation, but it's important as you're planning for an event, you have to know what you're doing, what you're trying to strive for, because that's going to structure your training, right? If you're training for a hundred mile race, your physical training is going to look different than if you're trying to run one mile all out, right? Your training is just going to be fundamentally different.

Same with the mental game. So foundational skills are first, high performance mental skills come in second. And this is where, again, based on the event that you're seeking, you start to work on a plan for that self-directed self-talk, focused attentional control, strategies around emotional regulation. And then the third is what I call executing when it counts, right? Now, everybody in this space wants to talk about mental toughness, right? That's where, that's where this skill fits in and, um, and getting ready to really perform in a given environment with given demands, being prepared for that is that final, final constellation. So that's how I kind of think about building a plan and building a structured program with the athletes that I get a chance to work with. So what are the foundational skills? If we, you know, once again, we're starting here in February, this podcast is going to be released in mid February sometime. People are thinking about starting versus I already know I have these foundations or most people are going to think about starting versus I already know I have these foundation or I already know I have, I have the foundation. How do they go about developing those foundational skills? Because what I'm hearing from you is that there is a logical sequence that you don't have to go through. You can go through any sequence you want to at the end of the day, right? But it's probably more effective to go through this because they logically build on each other in some capacity.

Totally. It's, it's sort of like you don't do an event and then set up your goals for that event, right? You start with setting your goals. We have people that do that though. You do. Again, that's one way to do it. Right. What am I doing out here? Yeah. It's the same thing. Like, like everything we do starts in the mind, right? Including that goal orientation, including understanding your motivation for that event and including setting up a program for how you're going to train it. So one of the foundational skills I think about from the sports psychology side is recognizing that every training practice that you have exercise session has three core components. You have sort of the pre-session, what you're doing to get ready for it. You call that priming the mind, if you will.

You have the session itself, the meat and potatoes of the workout, but being clear of what you're going to do from a mental skills perspective during your workout to enhance that. And then you have the, how I say, I call it putting your workout away. How do you put that away in your mind? That's really important because that builds what we call self-efficacy, right? So self-efficacy is a long-term psychological skill by Albert Bandura, which is really our understanding and our beliefs around how we, how we do challenging things. Now, why that's important is it builds into mental toughness. So one of the core elements around mental toughness is self-efficacy. And we need to be training that every single day because it's going to show up when your goals are challenged in a tough environment. You have to draw upon your reflection and your history to say, wait a minute, I know how to do this. I know how to be challenged. I know how to ride through, through the moments of discomfort or whatever it may be. You know, one of the big things that I kind of strive to do as a coach or try to pull out of my athletes is this wrap up within the post-activity comments, right? I'll use training pieces of vocabulary because that's what they kind of call that, that field in the calendar and always really press athletes to put something in there. Part of that is for, for me to say, Hey, how did the workout go? Was it too much? Was it too little? You know, can you go a little bit more longer the next

day? What does the training load look like type of questions? But part of it is, is just what you mentioned. It's literally, it's a space for the athletes to put the workout away and realize that they've done something productive because then what I'll do like kind of like leading into an event and say, Hey, go back and look at your training, which is both the, Hey, I did 15 hours five weeks ago or whatever the technical component is. But also I really felt good at the last part of this last long run. I really nailed my hydration strategy for this type of thing. And it kind of reinforces that self-efficacy piece because this history has, you know, a catalog to it that you can then go back and reference. It's so huge. It's really important from that coaching relationship. It's really important from that internalized athlete identity relationship with yourself because the, you know, the antidote to anxiety is always not to remove anxiety. It's to build trust. And how do you build trust? How do you build self-efficacy? It's through your own personal accomplishments, not just in the outcome of, Oh, Hey, Coop, I hit your workout. I hit, I hit the numbers that we were striving for today.

But underneath it, it's a reminder of like how I showed up in that moment, right? How, how my performance standards of how I chose to be in my mind and my spirit and my attitude, that's a really important reminder, especially as you're getting ready for an important event. I want everybody to like listen to this podcast to remember that quote that Justin just had as an antidote to the taper tantrums to start. Like when you start second guessing yourself during the tapering process, which a lot of people do, even when the training is really good. And even with very, very good athletes, they still doubt themselves during the tapering process. And did I do enough? Am I good enough? Is this, you know, am I at the right fitness level and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The, one of the key antidotes, not the only one, but one of the key medicines for that is having this robust training history that you can then go reflect on and say, yeah, you know what?

I have done enough. Or just to be honest to say, you know what? I missed a little bit of training over here, but it's okay. Like that part of it is just incredibly impactful because then you go into the race with an honest set of expectations. Absolutely. I think like that part, we can skip ahead to that because it's so important. And one anxiety before a key event is completely normal, right? It's in a weird way. I think about like celebrate the anxiety before a key event, because it's kind of like a beautiful part of the process, right? I really do think that people, they feel that anxiety and they, they get anxious about the anxiety. Like now celebrate it. It's really cool. We don't need meta anxiety on top of it. Embrace it. Trust can be built in three ways, in my opinion. And the first is exactly what you're talking about. It's, you know, this, the cliche saying, trust your training, which I always push into and say, you have to trust something specific about your training. So go in and look at the volume and the data and the metrics that matter, but also remind yourself of all those qualitative aspects of how you showed up.

That part is invaluable. So that's part one, trust something specific about your training. The second part for so many athletes in this space is to broaden that a little bit. So what do you trust about who you are as an athlete? More generally speaking, most people are going to the starting line, not for the first time, right? You've done other events. You've had other seasons. You've been training for X amount of months or years. You have a lot of time and history under your belt. So again, what do you trust about your life as an athlete in metrics, but also in terms of those moments that you remember, like, Oh, it was really hard. I did it anyway. Those moments are priceless. And then the third area, you broaden it even further. What do you trust to that, you know, to be true about who you are as a human being? Cause everybody listening to this, you're a human being first, you're an athlete second, and nobody has gotten to this point in life without hardship, without adversity, without challenge. It takes a lot of mental toughness, a lot of fortitude to just get through life sometimes. And so when you can remind yourself of all those hardships and all those ways you've gotten through it pretty soon, that, that trust builds a little bit. And that anxiety, it starts to match. It doesn't go away, but you match it and you show up and you're like, Oh yeah, I, I'm, I can do this. I'm envisioning people like these are the things that they put on the note cards that they pick up at aid stations. And I've always thought the key to that is, is having some, having a strong

element of being deliberate to which those are, and not just you're awesome, right? It has to tie back to like an actual experience that the athlete has had. That's either about their training or about the moments within their training or about them, you know, being a human and kind of like conquering something because then like the, like that emotional connection is actually very visceral when they go and they, and they read that thing and they're like, okay, yeah, I instantly identify with this. And you know, it's, it's motivating. It pulls them out of a hole, whatever the, whatever the cue for the actual, the actual card is, but it's like, that's a really common like strategy that I see athletes deploy is write these like motivational quotes and things like that on whatever their water bottle or wristband or the back of their hand or whatever. But the ones that are always the most effective are the ones that are deliberate. And the way that they're deliberate is, it's kind of like tying it back to some component, some experiential component of their training.

Absolutely. You're, you're awesome. Why? You're awesome. Why? Because yeah. And that, again, if you go back into self-efficacy, really the personal experience is the greatest builder of self-efficacy that we all have as human beings. So tying that into a reminder is, is really powerful. I want to kind of go back to the beginning a little bit. Cause we, I think we went through like four months of one part of training and like the last 10 minutes, Justin. So I want to go back to one of the first things you said, and this is like goal orientation and motivation, right? We need, this is, this is a component that we need to start with. What do you do when you don't have that? What do you do when I got into the Leadville trail 100 lottery because I threw my name in the hat and I'm not very motivated to train, right? We have this a lot in December, maybe not so much in January and February. So maybe we're coming late to the table, but, but people can empathize with this.

What if those elements are missing and how do you go about kind of finding it essentially? I think part of it. So a lot of what I tried to help direct the conversation around is we, we love outcome goals in sport, right? Outcome goals about the race and the time and what we're trying to accomplish. And that's all great. That's a big part of this. I really try to direct a lot of athletes towards what we call performance standards and performance standards sit just underneath the idea of outcome goals. And again, it's more about the qualitative approach to what you're trying to do. That is far more controllable than an outcome goal, right? Cause you could, you could get into Leadville and say, I want to run X time. Well, that's great. Like you can work towards building towards that, but there's a lot of variables that may interrupt that from being an outcome. Performance standard is, is something around saying, I want to enjoy this experience, right? I want to show up and feel as though I had the right perceived exertion or right effort level.

And I maintain that throughout the race or that I executed the plan. And the time was what it was. Now, what I see happen, and this is right now, this is a great time of year to think about this. My morning right before our call was it just coincidentally filled with people who are training for the Boston marathon. And half of the people I met with today are really focused on the performance standards, right? I want to enjoy the day. I want to get as fit as I possibly can. I want to train hard, but then when I show up, I want to have the decision that's mine around if I go for it or if I, if I don't, if I just enjoy it as an event, right? And those people, they're excited. They're enthusiastic. They're enjoying training. The other half are, oh, it's PR ER, right? It's, I mean, they're going to PR or I'm going to blow up, right? I've never heard that. That's hilarious.

Yeah, it's hilarious, right? But it's like, that's their authentic experience. And in the moment, they, they're anxious. They're anxious already. It's two and a half months out, nine weeks out, whatever it is. And they're fueled with anxiety. And that leads to this micro appraisal of, oh boy, I, I missed my workout just a little bit. I don't think I'm getting ready. I don't think I'm getting prepared. And that level of obsessive hyper-focus rigidity leads to a lot of anxiety. And again, it misses the point. I'm a big believer that a lot of endurance sports at this point, for most of us have an element of self-discovery and have an element of enhancing our lives, not hindering. And when it's such an anxiety producer, it constricts that, that sense of wellbeing for people. So with these performance standards, Justin, a lot of people might frame that up as a process goal, right? That's a, that's a typical kind of like a framework that I hear a lot.

I actually kind of use that in my book. Would you consider those synonymous or, or is there a, is there a, some sort of nuance that, that is, that should be appreciated with a performance standard versus a process goal? Yeah, I think there's similar, but I do think there's nuance. A process goal is, is a day in day out checkbox, right? It's like, if we use the parlance of training peaks, you know, did the box turn green, right? Meaning like, did you get it done? Did you go out and did you execute? Yeah. Or within reason, like, were you close, right? Process goal, I did the work, but you could do the work and have hated it the whole time. Or been in your head saying, I'm not doing this right. I'm not getting fitter, right? The performance standard is the qualitative nuance to the process goal, the performance standard. And these are things you can train.

Like you can train, I'm going to show up and I am going to be kind to myself. I'm going to talk to myself in a positive way. My performance standards are going to be around, you know, these mental skills of emotional regulation, potential control, what have you. So I think the nuance, that distinction is important there. So let's move beyond the, the fundamental mental skills and kind of go on to the next rung in the ladder or the next stage of the process. You get somebody that's, you know, relatively well grounded. They're, you know, they're highly motivated. They're very authentic to who they are. They've got, they've got good goal orientation. They're very clear and deliberate about it. Then what do you go to? Yeah. So then we start to build, you know, these high performance mental skills. And if we think about one of those being self-talk, right, we can actually break self-talk into a number of different ways.

So you can think about one of the areas of self-talk being sort of organic versus strategic plans. Organic is that natural, right? Like, oh, I speak English. And so English comes up naturally for me. Strategic would be, you know, when this comes up, you can say like, yes, my mind wants to say that that's one, but I also know it's uno. So it's the ability to deliberately talk to yourself in a meaningful way, adding another language system, if you will, right? There's motivational and instructional self-talk, which is another way to break this down. A lot of times people think about self-talk as just being that cheerleader, that coach, right? That motivational voice. We also know instructional self-talk is really important, especially when you're on technical terrain, or you're hitting a certain part of a, of a course that requires you to be really focused.

Instructional self-talk is talking to yourself about the mechanics of movement in a deliberate specific way. That can be really, really helpful. Again, depending on the course, certain parts of your, your race are going to require that. There's some distinction between speaking to yourself in an eye versus a you voice as well. Right. And especially later on, what the research shows there is when you click into this sort of you voice, you got this, you're doing great. You keep going. We find a way to, um, to perform better. Let's leave it at that. You can go longer. Um, you can take on, you know, um, higher speed, higher output than you would when you're talking to yourself in the eye voice. Again, part of the plan around that is understanding where somebody is and then building in the nuances of that for that person, for that race.

The last piece of self-talk that I'll highlight is what we call cognitive appraisals. And we all do this. We all have a relationship with data, right? We'd spend a lot of time talking about a relationship with data, but one of those is understanding like what happens in your mind as you're appraising both data on your watch or your cycling computer or your whatever. And what happens as you're appraising your body, this relationship, the voices, the narrative you have, and in terms of appraising situations, because that can be a big tipping point for people either performing well or blowing up. I ask my athletes that whenever we kind of go through data and I'll say, listen, here's what I'm seeing in the data. These intervals are faster than these intervals. And then I'll ask them, what do you think about that? And what I'll find a lot of times is like, they'll either take it in this really kind of like better, worse, right? This most simplistic kind of like distilling it down to the most simplistic answer, but the more advanced athletes will always tie it back to how they felt.

Yeah. I felt like I was going faster. You know what? I really didn't. And this kind of proves that, you know, my sensation on this was wrong. And I'm not saying that either one of those is like the kind of the correct answer, but the tie back to how they were actually feeling at the time has always kind of illustrated to me like an, like kind of an advanced knowledge or concept of what's going on. Yeah. I think the, the, the grounded athlete, I liked that language a little bit earlier. You said, like being grounded is understanding that the metrics are one data point, but our own sense of things is really important as well. And if we just let the data make decisions and we aren't listening to that, yeah, we can, we can really get ourselves into a troubling spot. You know, what's interesting is this is just more banter between you and I, both the really good sports scientists, like the data oriented people, as well as the, the sports psychologists, people like you agree on that. Isn't that kind of, isn't that really interesting?

I think it's like, again, it's like when you cut under it, psychology to me is just all about understanding our humanity. And a big part of this, our humanity, one of those elements is yeah, our fundamental experience in the moment. Like we can't lose sight of that. I mean, kind of a funny example. I, I slept like garbage one night last week, just terrible. I woke up, I didn't sleep well. I woke, I got up in the morning. I was like, Oh, I feel terrible. I looked at my Garmin. It was the highest sleeps for my Garmin ever read. And I was like, that's hilarious. Right. And you know, I just chuckled to myself because I, I know that relationship and it's kind of meaningful, but not really, but my experience was more important. And then, you know, a few days later, the exact opposite happened. I slept great. I woke up, I felt amazing. It was like the lowest sleep score my Garmin ever registered. I'm like, man, it's so funny. Like we have to just, we have to be mindful of what our relationship with that. It really is.

Yeah. Don't get me started on the random number generators that are watches and smart, you know, smart watches and whatever that are giving us these recovery scores and body battery this. And I know that's another, they're not smarter than your own experience. And I think that's a big part of it. Your own experience is just such a vital component of this. And we can't let that get lost in the data. Well, and here's kind of where I come down to it is, is I try to set up the relationship that I have with the athlete and their athletes own perception of what's going on. I try to set that table such that whenever there's a tiebreaker between the data and how the athlete is feeling, the data says, go right. Athlete says, turn left. I'm going to turn left. Not everybody starts out like that. You need to, that's a trainable component is being using data to become more informed about how you feel. But over the course of long periods of time, that's how I try to set up the data situation is that if there ever is a split 50, 50 split data says, go right. Athlete says, go left. As long as they're grounded and have good orientation, the direction is going to be go left. And once again, it doesn't always start out like that because people want to push, push, push, push, but that's the goal.

Right. Yeah. I think that's really wise. Again, back to that, that experience, it's valuable. So, okay. So we, we've got, we've got some advanced skills now. Let's go to the apex of everything, right? We're going to talk about mental toughness and attentional control and to use your vocabulary, executing when it counts, right? Actually taking it into the singular moment that you've been training for months for. How does that transition start to occur? Yeah. So again, if you're doing it right, you're building the skills that make it accessible. You're building those skills now. And if you think about like, if you get into the weeds on mental toughness research and what they're trying to understand from that skill application, one of those core elements really is self-efficacy, which you can enhance every single day that you're out there. Again, the reason coop that you have people write in, right? The feedback that builds self-efficacy. So this research, I don't know if you read this study, the study was just published at the end of December that was looking at mental toughness. And they did, they did two iterations of this study. The second part I think is really interesting. They took cyclists and they did sort of an FTP test, 20 minute power output to get a baseline. And they had them come back in a week.

And on that second test, they said, all right, give yourself a challenging goal, how you want to perform relative to week one. Now the average, most people wanted to perform slightly better because that's what humans do. Two and a half percent better was like the average rate of what they wanted to do. So they started going on this 20 minute retest and halfway through the computers malfunctioned, meaning they shut off their data screen. Right. So for two minutes at the halfway point of the 20 minute test, they just completely knocked their computers out. And the researchers said deliberately for the people who are watching the YouTube video with the air quotes, they did the researchers deliberately took the computer screen down. They did, but the athletes didn't know that. And the instruction was, Oh, keep, keep going. We're working. We're scrambling. We're going to get it. We're going to get it figured back out. Right. And two minutes later, they magically did.

And they wanted to test what would happen. And the hypothesis is that mental toughness is in mental toughness is impacted by a few things. In this definition, mental toughness is what's called a state, uh, a state, not a trait. So it's something you can deploy in the moment. It's not something you have like you and I sitting here right now, talking to people, we don't need to be mental, mentally tough to have this conversation. Yeah. You just wait till the end of it. When challenge arises, when challenge occurs to threaten your goals, that's the moment that a mental toughness skill needs to kick into action. That's a really important distinction, right? You have to have a challenging goals already established and be something needs to occur to put that at risk. So in this case, like turning the data off for two minutes was that challenge.

Uh, self-efficacy is one of those very first things that we draw on. So everybody listening, you think about that situation. The first thing you're going to think about is like, Oh boy, do what do I keep going? Or do I not keep going? Should I keep pushing? Do I let off the gas? What's the point of this, right? People who have that meaningful goal, why goals are important, have self-efficacy that they can continue to be successful, that they can continue to put in the right effort, right? That's part two showed, um, showed great success in being able to move forward. The third part of that study was in self-control. So self-control is this idea of really two things. One resisting the urge to stop, right? Endurance sports are all about that moment, like resisting the urge to stop for whatever input reason and being able to deploy psychological skills to maintain focus. That's where the mental skills idea is really important around this is being able to focus having a mantra, having positive self-talk, having some kind of ability to change your focus, to keep going despite that goal feeling challenged.

So should athletes practice that in training? And I actually, I'm going to drop a link in the show notes now that I'm just thinking about it to a piece. I think it was an opinion piece that was just produced about this very specifically. Should coaches program in challenging situations for their athletes during the training process? And I remember this whole story about, uh, Michael Phelps, this coach who, you know, he would break his goggles at the beginning of practice right before he was going to do a time trial or something like that. Some, some, something in the context of practice to kind of reinforce this, things are going to go awry. Let's see how you can actually handle it. What is your take on that? What is your take on building those types of, uh, those types of kind of like difficult training activities or advert, like some sort of adversity that you have to deal with in training from a, like deliberately doing it? I think it's, I think it's actually really great, but it's hard to do, right? Cause so much of our relationship with athletes is one-to-one through training piece. We assign something and then they go out and do it. I was talking, uh, with, um, Ben Rosario a few years ago about this. And we were talking about this idea and one of the recommendations I threw out to him, he has the opportunity to train his athletes in a group, right? So one of the ideas that you could do with this is you could say like, all right, today we're doing five, five repeats of whatever, right? We're going to do five repeats.

When they get to five, you say like, well, actually we're going to do another one. Right. And everybody's gonna be like, are you kidding me? I don't have the ability. All right, shoot. Here we go. And then they do six and you're like, actually one more, right? It's like the once in the runner phenomenon, right? We're just going to keep adding, you don't, you don't break people down, but you insert that challenge that was unexpected. The hard variable to play with as a coach in this scenario, it's, it's hard to throw in that unexpected challenge for people. One of the ways I'll often recommend it to athletes is I call it the metric mix-up type of workout. And this is where you do a challenging workout, whatever that may mean for you, but on your data screen, on your, on your watch or your bike computer, rather than miles per hour, you flip it to kilometers per hour or vice versa, where the data has less deep internal meaning. You could still play numbers games to figure it out, but you start to insert that variable where you're, you're appraising your effort more than you're appraising what's being shown on your, on your wrist.

You know, um, it's almost like we used to do this sometimes just to prove to athletes that they're like better than they think they are and they can do more than they think they can to pull out a little King Clover quote and just blind them to the data. Like just go on, go as hard as you can either during a race or during a workout. And what you find more often than not is they can actually do more than they think they could, they, they could do and they're better than they think they are. Absolutely. I mean, how many stories are there? I've, I've heard countless stories of people who've said they, Oh, my watch didn't work or they didn't charge or I forgot it on race day. Um, I didn't have access to that data. And the question is, how'd you perform? And the answer is IPR. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Cause they're, they're running off of rate of perceived exertion, not relationship with numbers. Yeah. I mean, you can even argue this is for your Boston marathon people, right? That even when they're trying to achieve a very specific time to qualify for Boston or qualify for the Olympic trials or whatever, there's a, there, there is part of the strategy that is you just got to go as hard as you can. Not, I need X, Y, Z for my first 5k and X, Y, Z for my next 8k. And like that mental energy takes up some, some part of your total energy capacity. Yeah. That was the other interesting thing in the study is they, that's an element that they, a variable they played with, which is self-control can be depleted, right? And you can deplete that cognitively by putting on a cognitive demand, but you can think about that in our day-to-day life as stress and recovery and cognitive demand. So when, when your energy is depleted from a mental standpoint, you have, you know, presumably less reserves, right? And so your ability to exert that self-control is limited. And when that is limited, it's harder to access some of those mental toughness skills to push through. Right. I think Alex Hutchinson did, did this for a while, a couple of years ago when he was analyzing the impact of depleted self-control on, on performance. And that mental exhaustion really does play a role in our ability to physiologically perform.

I want to, uh, so first off, I just found the research paper. So I'll mention it, uh, just verbally here that it's called, uh, pressure makes diamonds, a narrative review on the application of pressure training and high performance sports. And this is in the international journal of sport and exercise psychology. So a link to that will be in the show notes. I found it a real fascinating take on just this concept of, do we train Pete? Do we intentionally put adverse situations in front of athletes and have them go through it in order to prepare them for those things, uh, on race day? It's a, it's a good read. It's an intuitive read as well. Um, I want to go to, I want to skip forward though, to kind of one of the final components, and this is executing when it counts, right? We've all been there and you line up for race day. You want to, hopefully you've had everything kind of put into the plan in place beforehand. I know exactly what my nutrition is. I know, you know, I'm going to be at the May Queen aid station and kind of whatever time, how do you go about making sure that it does go to plan? And then when it, when you do have to take deviations from the plan, you're able to cope with them. How do you actually execute when it, when it counts?

Yeah. So it's a, it's a great question, right? Cause that's ultimately what so many of us are searching for. So part of that is, again, if you, if you go through a training program like this, you have sort of a mental training plan for your race. Now, part of that is I think kind of breaking it down into core components, right? So for the first quarter, I don't really need to do a lot of mental skills, right? I'm going to have my attentional control be external and broad, right? As the race goes along, as you get to those latter stages, the third quarter, the fourth quarter, you're going to have like more goal directed, more specific mental skills that you're working on. Self-talk goes from you to I, attentional control, maybe goes more to that internal narrow, right? You start to develop this repertoire internally about what works. You also then need a heavy dose of psychological flexibility at the end, because the farther in, the more likely things are going to pop up that you were not expecting. And so whether that's a, you know, GI issue or mechanical issue or a pacing issue, you have to have flexibility of mind to be able to bounce through those skills. And so that's another area that people need to really be thinking about implementing throughout their training plan. Cause again, what I see so many people do is, oh, it's off. It's, it's deviated from my plan by 1% or by 50%. And I am freaking out because of that.

And I don't, I can't get a grip of, of my mind because of that. Well, the switch of being able to deploy all of these different mental skills, I think that's the hardest thing for people to like really kind of conceptualize because most of the time they're thinking about some sort of like endure component, right? To the, to the, to the race. I need to find out a way to dig when I really need to dig, but really what they're seeking is, is there's sometimes when I need to be able to just dissociate from what's going on, especially in endurance sports, the long race, a lot of it's really monotonous. You don't need to be focused on like how much your feet hurt, you know, every single, every single time your foot hits the ground, because then it's going to kind of overwhelm you. But then there are some times where you need to flip the script on that and be hyper-focused on whatever sensation is going on at the time, your perception of effort, some sort of thing that's going on with your knee, even, you know, how your stomach is reacting to, you know, the foodstuffs that you're taking in and things like that. And that ping pong back and forth between those, those two different skills and all the other myriad of skills that, that you can deploy. I've always found like the most challenging thing because people just want, it's, it's, it's not like just the effort level where it's steady the entire time, pretty much. You have to deploy these things, these things differently.

And people have a hard time wrapping their head around that. Well, the attentional control piece, I think is a, it's a skill that isn't talked about enough in this space. I would argue it's maybe one of the more valuable skills that we have. The basic idea around attentional controls first, again, you have the ability to shift your focus, your attention, and your concentration. We all have this ability. Even as you're listening to me right now, you can be paying really close attention to my words, but you can also expand that and you can feel the world around you. You can see the world around you. You can have this openness to experience. Attentional control is really the understanding. We have two broad dimensions, internal and external. So what's happening within me, what's happening outside of me, and then overlay that with a broad and a narrow perspective. So you can be broadly aware of what's happening, or you can be narrowly focused. Now, what I often recommend, I have this training exercise I'll have people do is you take any training session and you work on shifting your attention through this. You start with a broad external focus. What's the world like around you? What can you hear? What can you smell? What can you see? You keep it broad, not focused on any one thing, but then you narrow that in. So if you're out on the trail, can you keep your eyes on the horizon and just really pay attention visually to that tree or the bend in the trail or whatever? And when you get there, then you use that as a marker to shift. Then you go internal broad. How's my body feel? Where's my breathing at? How's my posture?

Where's my mind? What are my emotions like? Broad overview. And then you bring that into something internal, narrow. And that could be a physical thing like, oh, I really feel my knee or my foot or my foot strike or my gait, or I'm really focused on this one thought, right? But that's like one, the skill of shifting through that is really invaluable in long distance races and events. And that internal narrow is really important because Koop, as you were saying, if you're internally narrowly focused on my foot hurts, my foot hurts, my foot hurts, my foot hurts. What's going to happen? Like it's a no brainer, right? So being able to say like, oh, I'm noticing this. Let me shift out of it. What's another way I could think about it. What's another thing I could focus on. It's a really important skill for people to play with.

And that's like when I've had to counsel athletes at aid stations or like when I'm pacing or occurring or whatever, that's typically the strategy that I'll try to take. It's like, okay, let's recognize that this is going wrong. Let's put a plan in place to potentially fix it. And let's get you out of here. Right? So you recognize that, hey, listen, you're actually feeling this. Let's try to mitigate whatever, if it's negative, let's try to mitigate whatever's going on. But at the end of the day, let's shift everything out more broadly and just start putting one foot in front of the other. Right. Yeah, that's it. Shift the focal point. Right? Yeah. I want to, I want to get your take on one final thing. So the physiological world to go back to our earlier conversation for a long period of time and still even now has been focused on this concept of overtraining and under recovery. I'll just put it in those two terms, right? There is a, there is a certain point at which you can do too much physical training and or you apply not enough recovery. Right. Can the same be true for mental skills?

Yeah, it's a really good question. And I think that the honest answer is we don't know. Right? My gut is saying it's sort of like, if we go back to the framework of all of this is like learning Spanish, already knowing English, but learning Spanish, can you learn too much Spanish in a day? Like, I don't know, but I would imagine at some point you get to a point where you're no longer able to process more information. You are cognitively overloaded and you can't really take in any more meaningful learning for that day. I think there's probably some truth to that. Like all the skills that we talk about, if I put them all on an athlete's schedule in one day, that's not going to work. It's one of the reasons that we think about, okay, the human brain is completely modifiable. We can learn all kinds of things, but we have to structure that learning sequentially. We have to do it at the right rate, the right intensity level. One of the reasons I really recommend, you know, every single training day that you have every session, you're out for a run, take five minutes of that run to apply one of these skills, to just learn it and to see how it works and how it feels. And if you do that over the course of your life as an athlete, like, wow, think about you are going to learn a lot about yourself. You're going to learn a lot about what works. And then in a moment of need, you're going to be able to go back, have self-efficacy to remember that and to apply it. I want to expand on that a little bit because, um, using the physiological

analogy, you can absolutely make training mistakes, right? You can increase volume and intensity at the same time. That's a classic one, right? You increase your total volume or your long run or ride volume, and you increase the intensity and or the total like volume of intensity at the same time. And that's something that in our coaching, continuing education sessions, those stick out like sore thumbs. Like you have to have a really good reason in order to do that. Really, really, really good reason. Can the same be true for either like the order or like the, and or the weight, right? The emphasis that you're putting on different mental skills. Like you should absolutely do this before this, or you should put more focus on this thing versus that thing. And the reason I'm bringing this up is, is I kind of want athletes to understand we've gone through the framework.

I kind of want them to understand like if they're naturally inclined towards one or the other, is there anything to be concerned about? Like if they really want to focus on something versus something else, what do they need to take into consideration? Yeah, I, I, it's a great question, right? Because I think it's like the mental game is maybe not quite the same as the physiological game, but I do, I do think there's a sequential order to some of this stuff. Awareness always has to come first, right? You can't change what you're not aware of. So we need to bring deep awareness to what you're thinking, how you're responding to what's happening. That's part one. Goals need to be in there as well. Kind of at the starting point, like what are you training for? And what is this about, right? What is it going to look like? What are the demands now from there? I think a lot of this stuff, the way I've always thought about it is every week, when you look at your training schedule, different types of workouts are going to offer you different types of mental skills to work on, right? So maybe like your more aerobic based days, kind of your endurance miles, those probably aren't great mental toughness days. Those are great attentional control days. Those are great days to really focus on moving your attention around and playing with that. The days that present challenge to you, whether that's by distance or time or by effort, energy output, those are great days to work on shifting your self-talk from I to you.

Those are great days to think about that mental toughness skill of what you put into dealing with discomfort or challenge. Those types of practices are better akin to that. So that's kind of how I think about this work. Look at your training days and apply the skills in those moments to really bring it into cohesive. I dig that simple framework. Start with the two fundamentals, which are awareness and goals. Those kind of have to come first and then make sure that the mental skills activity is compatible. Is that the right word? It's kind of compatible with the physical part of the workout that you're actually doing kind of in that order, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And knowing again, I think every workout, three timeframes, the preloading, the meat and potatoes of the workout, how you put your workout away every day, whether it's an endurance day or a challenging day, when you put it away, you can build that self-efficacy. And again, so vital when it comes to achieving goals.

I'm going to start doing that. My framework for that now is going to be just like little sticky notes. Like before, before I'm going to write down a sticky note and then during, I'm going to write down, or I'm going to have the during like with me and I can just have the sticky note. And then afterwards, I'm going to write something down on a sticky note. Yeah. I love it. All right, man. I want to spend a little bit of time and talk about this, uh, training plan that you've got in training peaks. Yeah. And, uh, so I, I have it, you gave me a copy of it. I thought it was like a really, it's training peaks is not initially designed to, to deliver mental skills, right? Right. So it's a little bit square peg in a round hole. Like you might think about it as a little bit of square peg around hole. Cause people buy training plans on training peaks all the time.

But when I've got, when I got it, I was like, this really makes sense. Like somebody can read it and go through it. And as long as they apply what we just talked about, making sure the activities fit on the days that are compatible. So the round peg goes in the round hole. I, I, I would use that. Like I'm looking at this going, I would use something like this for an athlete that I work with. So why don't you describe it a little bit more? Cause I'm not going to be able to do it justice. You came up with the plan. Yeah. Well, yeah, thanks. I mean, you know, you and I have been talking about finding a way to make this accessible for like an actual training application for gosh, for a few years now. And it's challenging, right? Because it doesn't follow the same rules of engagement, like a static physiological training plan does where you do week one and then you build on it for week two. And yet I think I have a really keen interest in helping people learn the basics of these and finding a way to apply them without having to do that in either a one-on-one coaching environment or, um, with a team, right? Because that can become, you know, time intensive and costly for people. So the idea behind this was, okay, I'm going to build a 12 week static training plan that covers evidence-based best practices. I'm going to lay it out in this framework that has, has education and understanding research articles, links, some kind of like blog, like posts, people can read them, but it builds on this idea. The first couple of weeks are on foundational skills,

how you build self-efficacy, how you think about that in your training, right? Goals and motivation. What are some of the nuances of that that we then build into that second order around, you know, high performance mental skills. What are, what are those skills? What is motivational instructional self-talk look like? How do you do that in training? What does cognitive appraisal look like? How do you do that in your training? Right? The third session is then around executing when it counts, building in skills around mental toughness, some other ideas around how curiosity and optimism and willingness are probably components of that. And then the last one is like all about the taper, right? Managing and regulating around anxiety, but also then like a week after a race, like what are some of the common things that people experience and how can you manage that? Now it's not perfect. It's really hard to do this because training is very dynamic and this is very static, but the whole idea is I want to arm people with information and education in a way that's five minutes a day or so that that can be really impactful in terms of their life as an athlete.

You missed one key component that I actually dug a lot. It's the post-race reflection. Oh, sure. When I saw that in there, I'm like, yes, you're not just stopping when the training or when the race is over, there's some sort of carry through. Like I thought that was a really ingenious way to do it. So for the listeners at home, I'll leave a link to this in the show notes, but essentially if you can think about what most people envision as a static training plan. So you go to ultra running magazine, they have a 20 week plan to your first 50 K or whatever. It's that, but mental skills specific, like specifically for endurance activities that has applied over 12 weeks. And, you know, when you reached out to me about, Hey, what do you think about this? My first piece of framework was, okay, what do people normally do with training, with static training programs? And the thing that they first start to do is, is they have a 12 week program, but inevitably they've got 16 weeks to train or 10 weeks to train. And so my mind initially went to how would I adapt this over a longer timeframe or shorter timeframe or some sort of difference within the timeframe or whatever. And to be honest with you, the, the, the answer is really easy. I keep the same order, but then I would just move the pieces into the things where it was logical for the athlete to kind of like work on them. Right. So it, it, it, like I said, when I saw it, it was really intuitive to me. And part of that reason is because I've seen so many static programs

get adapted longer timeframe, shorter timeframe, different strengths and weaknesses and things like that. I do the same with this. Right. Yeah. My, my goal for that really, again, is from an education standpoint, you know, when, when you start to read these ideas and apply these skills, it's not like you just do that one idea today and then you never see it again, that will hopefully carry forward and build this cohesive. So that was the sort of the intent behind, uh, behind the development here. Yeah. I hope you get some traction on that. It, like I said, it's a unique platform for it and I don't think anybody knows the right answer, but, um, it's one that made a lot of sense to me. So I hope people go in and check it out. All right. Last question. I'm gonna put you on the spot. When are you going to write a book? Come on, man. We all want it. I got, I got you back too.

I know how to give you the direction on it. Come on. I know. I know. That's another idea that we've been talking about for a while. And I, you know, I hate to say this. I, people don't read the way they used to. And I worry, you know what I mean? I worry I'm going to put time and energy into this. And I think people are more into the, like listening and finding it a part of their training plan. So part of what I may develop from the training piece plan is, is there a way to make this actionable where it's audio based video based that can live online as opposed to writing a book? So one of those ideas will, will percolate and cover the surface next. I think I got, uh, I got an idea for you. What's up? Almost like a novella, but audio book style where it's drip content and it feeds into, you know, somebody's audible or whatever their audio book platform is on like a weekly basis in like short 20 minute or hour long chunks, almost like a podcast, but not through Apple podcasts, through, through something else where it's like highly produced. That's your ticket.

I think that might be it, man. I like it. All right. We're going to work on that TBD 2024. There we go. Thanks Justin for coming on, man. Where can, uh, people find more about you and everything. All the links will be in the show notes. Yeah. Probably the easiest way is just go to my website, drjustinross.com. Um, there's a link on there to the training peaks plan. I do have, if people are interested, mindset 20, we'll give you 20% off as a coupon code on training peaks. So plug that in. Um, and then for my website, you could find other, other articles and other courses that are, that are out there that I've created as well. Awesome, man. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Again, we're going to come back when the audio book book novella sports psychology, Justin Ross has come out. I guarantee you we'll have a good one then. I love it, man. Thanks for having me on. Good to see you. All right, folks, there you have it. There you go. Much thanks to Dr.

Ross for coming on the podcast today and helping us lay a little, a little bit of the groundwork that we can use to improve our mental skills for performance and ultra marathons. I think that Justin's outlook on this is absolutely fascinating. It's also something that is very relatable to a lot of athletes out there. I hope that you, the listeners related to a lot of pieces of this particular strategy because Justin lives and breathes it. He's also an athlete himself, but he works with a lot of people in the endurance and trail and ultra running community links in the show notes will be to anything that we talked about during the podcast, including Justin's course that he has in training peaks. I think this is a really unique delivery mechanism that he got that he started up here.

And also I think it's something that's extremely accessible for most of the public. When I initially took a look at it, it's something that just made sense to me. And I'm certainly going to deploy some of that framework and some of what he has in this training peaks course to my athletes and also to myself. So y'all go and check that out. I hope you also brought notes to this one. I hope you continue to take those notes for our conversation next week with one of our CTS coaches, Neil Pallas on this very same subject. And at the end of the day, you come away more fortified with your mental skills, have a better outlook on them and have a better framework for actually how to develop them to ultimately improve your performance. Appreciate the heck out of all you listeners out there. This podcast is nothing without you. If you like this podcast, all you got to do is just share it with your friends, your running buddies, your training partners, anybody that you think can gain value and gain insight from this podcast. It means a lot to me. As always, it's not monetized in any way, shape or form from sponsors or advertisers. I rely on you, the public to spread the word about this podcast. And it means a lot to me when I hear you guys out in the field and out at races, taking some of the advice that is contained within this podcast and applying it to your training and your racing.

That is all for today, folks. And as always, we will see you out on the trails. We'll see you in the video. Thank you.