How to Avoid a Pre-Race Crisis of Confidence-Coach Roundtable | KoopCast Episode 172

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your humble host coach Jason Koop and this episode of the podcast is going to resonate with all of you athletes out there that are racing in april may and june and you are looking at the proposition of doing one of these races and thinking to yourselves have i done enough training am i good enough have i worked on my long runs enough have i developed my nutrition program to the appropriate extent and you're going through those normal doubts that always happen when we enter these last several weeks of training this is so common that i wanted to get several of our coaches on the horn and talk through it just in a way that we would talk through it with our athletes so on the podcast today you're going to hear from andy jones wilkins coaches adam ferdinanson and ryan anderson all together collectively we're going to share our experiences that we have with our athletes of this very common plight to improve their self-confidence and self-efficacy in the final several weeks of training as they are leading into one of their critical races and i think what you will find is is that a lot of these experiences are shared we go through the same doubts the same issues and also the same course corrections with each one of our athletes in a variety of different situations

it's something that you can utilize in your last several weeks of training regardless of whether you're working with a coach or you are doing your training yourself and you're trying to diy it with that as a backdrop i'm going to get right out of the way here is our coach roundtable all about improving self-confidence and self-efficacy in the last several weeks of training the racing season is here it's like finally here i feel that like i've had this same conversation with my athletes ad nauseum over the last two weeks where everybody starts looking at their calendar and a little bit of the panic button gets pushed because they feel that there is not enough time and i've always kind of viewed that as it's a little bit of a reflection of the fact that they might not have the amount of self-confidence or the amount of confidence in themselves that they should have and it's exacerbated by this time frame so we're all going through this as coaches right now and the people listening to this podcast that have races in may and june are probably going through this as well i don't have enough time and we tend to do a lot of this a lot of the same things with our athletes to kind of reinforce that just reinforce that hey you've done the training you're ready for it you don't have to do anything stupid from now until the race and so i wanted to use this podcast as a little bit and try to bring some of those conversations and techniques and ways of looking at

training to light since everybody seems to be going through the same thing at the same time right now so andy we're going to start with you right what are you doing with your athletes right now that have these races in may and june to essentially kind of like demonstrate to them that they've done the work and even if they haven't done the work saying that that part of it is okay like what are you going through with your athletes right now it's interesting because for those athletes with may and june races you know back in december january you know kind of saying oh you have plenty of time you don't want to overdo it too early you you know we're going to build on this and then you get to where we are right now which is getting into late march and it's like holy crap you know we're we're here you know what i've done i can think of three or four athletes that i've done this with as in terms of building out the schedule where it's like hey the schedule's built out i mean we're going to evolve it's going to change and there'll be tweaks here and there but the schedule's built out the the the big weekends are set the training camps are set the recovery periods are set so you know trust me on this now that's it's one thing to say trust me and it's another thing for them to actually trust you right um so the other piece of it is and i'm a i'm i think i think everybody on this uh in this podcast is kind of in the same boat i also like to put in have athletes put in you know tune-up races assuming they're disciplined enough to they're disciplined enough to run those races as training runs i think if they have a tune-up race to look forward to it's something that can can be

used to build their self-confidence to grow from that experience and and take even if it's a bad experience i had an athlete who you know had just had really horrendous stomach troubles at a race last week a tune-up race ended up dropping out early not not super early but early and it was like hey you know what live to fight another day you still were out there eight and a half hours we can build from that and we have something to work on we have you know what what was it that brought this stomach issue on at this particular moment so it's a blend of building a program that can add to their confidence showing them that it's already here you know the program is set we're going to make some adjustments but we're going to do our best to get you to the starting line as as fit and ready to go as possible and as i think everybody knows you'd always rather be slightly undertrained going into a big race than overtrained and so that's that's a lot of the uh calibration that's going on with my athletes especially with those may and may and june races right now you know what's funny about that slightly undertrained versus overtrained statement is that we make that all the time yet everybody wants two more weeks of training like and it doesn't matter how good it's gone or how poorly it's gone you always want two more weeks like you you get like four to you know four five six weeks out from the event and you look at your training and you're like god if i if i just had if i if i

just had one more long run if i just had like one more week of training if i just had like you know two more days to like practice to practice my nutrition it's so consistent with each and every single athlete that they they kind of like what what they can't have almost right because you can't have two more weeks the training the or the the race has a fixed date associated with it you can't like move the the data around and i've always i don't know i've always like looked at that phenomenon at just really curiously because i would say out of all the athletes that i've ever coached throughout my entire coaching career which is in the hundreds right now at least 80 percent of them have that that sensation when they get it i just want i just want one more run i just want one more week i just want you know two more long runs or something that's kind of like relatively relatively trivial i'll kind of throw that out to the group do you guys have that experience as well and what do you what do you how do you kind of manage that with your athletes so with that um this scenario actually played out because athlete texted me two weeks two weekends before the race like hey should i get that three and a half hour run in that i missed the weekend i was sick i was like no you're good be ready to go then the week of his race this week it got pushed back three weeks because of all the rain in california so he could have very easily been like oh cool i can get that run in now but he was actually pretty confident he had got over that and he wasn't feeling the urge that like oh good i get to cram this

run in there um and so when when i get that text from the athlete it's like going to training peaks and look specifically at this run like hey you're ready read your feedback here you felt really good nutrition went well um and try to hone in on the one or two runs the weekends that just went really really well it's it's never about one long run that makes or break training but it can be helpful to look back at that one run where you just felt like you were on top of the world there's something to the the ryan i think what you what you're mentioning is is the totality of training right looking at the entire training process and all the hours and all the miles and all the workouts and all the intervals and all the long runs and all the times you practice your nutrition program that entirety of training and trying to encapsulate that or highlight that to a certain degree when athletes are kind of going through this these like feelings of inadequacy so to speak i think that that totality of training becomes becomes extremely powerful because you lose sight of that in real time like we're sitting here you know it's the middle of march right now we've forgotten how many times we woke up at four or five in the morning and you know put the headlamp on in january and february when it's you know 20 degrees outside and kind of just like slogged it out you forget about those things because we have this like recency bias right is what it's called we have this recency bias within

our training and we we tend to forget everything that has kind of like gone into it so i i think that that's like one of the bigger anchor points is looking at the totality of training and making and just kind of reinforcing that you have even even when it's gone kind of like mediocre right that you actually have done a lot of work and this final whatever it is one hour or one long run or brian in your case like i want to make up this one run is such a small percentage of the whole when you compare it to that totality of training it tends to put things into into perspective can i i'd like to offer up something it's a little off topic but not really ryan mentioned california and the conditions out there with the you know the snow and the rains and everything else i think that's a i i think many of us have athletes for example in let's just name these three races canyons western states and the tahoe 200 all three of those races right they're coming up in the next three plus months and there's a lot of uncertainty about them yeah right there's a lot of uncertainty about what the courses are going to be because of fire and flooding and snow there's uncertainty about where you're going to be able to have your crew there's uncertainty i mean i i hope there's not uncertainty about whether they're going to happen at all but there could be right and that only adds to the challenge that we as coaches face in building the confidence right you know because somebody who lives somewhere where there's no

snow it's like how am i going to practice for all the snow that's going to be in western states this year and so i think another part of our job is to just work with them and work within the uncertainty uh because that's just the deal and uh you know we this is a an epic winter that that we're living through in a lot of parts of the country and so i think that's just part of our job right now 100 adam you're chopping at the bit here so you have athletes that are kind of in this trifecta of races is this something that you're noticing with them too exactly there's always going to be an element of a race that you're not able to train for and we do our best to incorporate everything we can with heat training but there's always going to be something left on the table that you don't have direct experience with and that's when you have to dig into past experiences of i've faced this uncertainty before i faced this in training something i was very uncomfortable with and knowing that you have experience with uncomfortability rather than the specific challenge you're going to be facing on race day and lean on that and know that everyone else had challenges too everyone else at the start line had things they weren't able to train for they might not be the same as yours but everyone's in a similar starting point that's a really poignant aspect like training is never perfect right it's never perfect it doesn't matter how good it goes and you know we've all coached athletes that have had like prs and their best days ever and you know won epic races and things like that even in those cases it's the training process is never perfect it always has blends and moles and

hairs and flaws and scars on it when you when you kind of go back and you and you dissect it so seeking out like the perfect part of training or trying to train for absolutely everything ends up being a fool's errand because there's always going to be something that you can't be prepared for whether you know it or not because sometimes those things just come up on race day right it's just one of those things where you're not going to know what you're going to encounter until you actually encounter it and sometimes it's you know vastly different from from what you had what you had anticipated you know it's funny we mentioned those three those those three races i have an athlete that is he he's doing canyons and he's done ultra marathons before but he he's not what i would consider part of like the uber endemic ultra crowd you know like he's he doesn't follow the podcasts and you know he probably doesn't have a subscription to ultra magazine and kind of all that stuff he just he just kind of like likes likes doing it he is handling the uncertainty the best it's almost as if like ignorance is bliss right because there's like he's he's just going to get to the start line and they're going to tell him where the course is or he's good they're going to tell him where the course is and he's just going to go out on his merry way and i think that there's something to to be gleaned from that type of attitude that yeah he's doing everything he can to like physically and mentally and things like that prepare and prepare i'm not you know trying to paint that picture but the fact that he's not completely

like i don't know whether ocd is like the right word for it or not there's something to that because i think he's going he is right now handling the uncertainty the best and then i think on race day whenever the course changes for the umpteenth time you know five days before the race which is now which is probably going to happen with these series of races he's just going to be okay with it he's just going to be like okay i'm good yeah rather than like checking the weather every day in the last two weeks which we all do it's just like if it's hot i'm going to have extra water bottle if it rains i'm going to have my raincoat we'll just see what happens yeah yeah i give i give my athletes i give my athletes a three-day rule they cannot check the weather until three days before the race and then they get to check it once per day and then that's it you're checking the weather more than once per day there's absolutely no there's no value in that other than to satiate whatever demons are kind of like going on in your head at the time i mean beyond that you have an athlete who goes into it not too concerned that's helpful for a lot of people and that's going to work for some people but if you have an athlete that previously had a lot of doubts overcame those doubts they might be coming into it with a bit of a stronger foundation that's been tested in previous trials and when you know when in the eighth round of this ultra they get punched in the face they're actually going to be be ready for that punch in the face and not be so taken aback by it by saying i've been punched in

the face before by you know they're throwing up on the side of the trail they tripped and fell something unexpected happened if they've had doubts and overcome them then i think they're coming from a slightly stronger place um but that's just one benefit to someone uh working with some of the more ocd worried clients well andy mentioned this kind of right out of the gate is is that when you do have bad training and you can work your way out of it there's a lot to be gleaned from that you can derive a lot of confidence from that because it's you kind of learn that it's not the end of the world right and then that way when you've got something that is similar it's never exactly the same but when you've got something similar that the race is actually going to serve up it you can literally go hey i've been there done that yeah i've got a particular athlete fits right into this category he's a he's a european based athlete and he his white whale is the madeira island ultra trail run he's dnf there five times various places you know sometimes not making it halfway other times making it within 10 kilometers of the finish so that's a late april that's a late april race he's right in the heart of it you know he wants to do as much as he can that madeira does not have the the weather concerns of california so he can be pretty confident you know what the weather is going to be like and and so on and so forth but that's an insane you know it's 127 kilometer race that's just insane it starts at sea level ends at sea

level but in between those two places it goes into like all four or five different climate zones so you can only prepare for it so much but to adam's point if you've dnf'd something you know five times you have that experience of dnfing he keeps going back you know he gets punched he gets knocked down but he signs up again and i love that i love that so in that context you control the controllables right he has his favorite pack he has his shoes he knows works he's got his poles he's got his backup poles you know those kinds of things so i think i think there's a part of it too where you have to have a little bit of a sense of humor about it as a coach and and and not lighten it up because it's a it's a serious undertaking but to have a you know to to project an attitude of hey we're doing everything we can and and at the end of the day it's all going to be okay i want to i want to unpack and and maybe dissect a little bit that type of conversation so when something goes awry and we've all had athletes that have dnf'd races or had bad training runs and things like that and and i i know that through that lens of experience you develop a little bit of a pattern with the conversation that ensues in the immediate aftermath of that type of failure because as we've all mentioned we want it to be a learning lesson we want it to be something that we can turn into a positive and and and like kind of like forge a stronger athlete out of but i do think that that for the people that are listening to this podcast

that are either working with a coach or self-coach giving them a little bit of of a window into how we approach those types of conversations with our athletes so that they can they can actually learn from the mistakes and just like not let it die there right i think that's a really important part of actually making a mistake is not letting the mistake just die out on the field doing something with it and moving forward so i'd like to hear you guys's perspective on how you actually set that up with your athletes whenever you have had that well i try to not go into with a tone of a doomsday tone uh because they're already there mentally they're already thinking the worst thing in the world has happened to them um and if you can bring a bit more of a lighthearted perspective and like ajw said not that um it's not an important thing but you know ultras are really freaking hard if you messed it up that's okay that's we do these things because there isn't a guarantee of success so the fact that you had a failure one day doesn't mean you're not going to have success the next and you signed up for this thinking i'm not quite sure if i can do this that's part of the excitement to it um it's just a matter of time before you do experience the other end of that and don't have a very successful day and if you can bring just a little bit more um yeah lightheartedness to it get them out of their head and then they can look a bit more objectively and get outside of the um whatever emotional punching bag arena they're in right now i i like that i like that perspective and i i don't think

i've ever kind of like thought about it like that like they're already in the dumps you don't need to like reinforce you don't need to like dig their hole like any deeper so to speak i dig that adam that's something that i'm immediately gonna get it taken the next time i have this happen ryan what say you um so uh been working with an athlete over the past year they dnf'd bad water cape fear last year so they like i said they were down in the dumps like pretty pretty upset and it's like okay well we have to do the post-mortem when this is fresh on our mind what led to this what what were the things you would change and then let's work on that over the next year because they wanted to go back and get the finish and like it's important to analyze after the subpar race the dnf whatever it is like what went wrong what was the root of it because if you don't figure that out you can't work on it um and so for this athlete it was the pre-race nerves going in so nervous about it so nervous so so why were you nervous okay training didn't go that well okay well let's you know let's train let's let's give a longer runway instead of you know starting to focus on this eight weeks out getting a coach at the last minute all right we're gonna work together over the year um and we're gonna build towards this let's get some more races to work on those race day nerves build the confidence and then uh did that lots of success

in going through a race week breaking it down day by day of i've got everything laid out on wednesday um thursday i'm eating this go-to meal like you take comfort in what you can control and so coming up this year on the race every day on training peaks had like hey it's mile zero through 10 this is what you're thinking just giving them like homework to do you know visual yeah and working through it um so they could they can gain confidence in the in the areas that plagued them before and breaking it down that way and it all starts with the post-mortem figure out what went wrong why were you anxious why were you worked up and all that and then we got to solve that it's more of like a chronological dialogue right i think it's kind of like where you're coming at it from or like like going through it from start to finish yeah andy what about you from well i want to touch on a practical piece first and that is that i like to have a few days pass uh from the failure to some and some athletes want that to happen too but others are like you know the race goes south on saturday and they want to talk on sunday and i i do feel i do feel like a little bit of passage of time maybe two or three days i know it might seem like a little thing but whether they are ruminating on themselves or talking to their significant other or their friends you know but if we if we do the deep i mean i have a debrief call that's going to be now scheduled for thursday from a from a not so

good race that happened on saturday right so i i think from from that it's just a practical thing but letting some time pass letting letting the athlete dwell sort of dwell in their own whatever for a little while is good and it and it and it does add to some self-efficacy by the way where it's like oh man and so maybe you start the conversation on thursday and it's like oh i really felt like crap and a failure on saturday or sunday but now i've had some thinking about it and you know i had a long a long-term athlete older gentleman who he was really really wanting to get that western states qualifier uh at the can at the uh uh black canyon 100k which you know black canyon has a 20 hour overall cutoff but the race within the race is a 17 hour you have to do 17 hours to get the western states qualifier and he ran it he finished it and ran it well but it was 18 hours so i was forced with this this uncomfortable problem of wanting to celebrate the finish 18 hour finish but it was unsatisfactory because he didn't get the western states qualifier which brings up the whole other issue of people chasing qualifiers and what that does to people mentally but i think that there's you've got to take the good with the bad and if we can build from that 18 hour finish at black canyon which was a perfectly respectable finish just not enough for this external standard that says nope you got to do 17 to come to our race uh so i think you've got to you've got to give some time you've got to give

some reflection time you've also then got to provide the feedback that's appropriate like in this case look 18 hours is a good finish at black canyon and then he says well it's not good enough and i'm like well let's take that not good enough and make it good enough in the future but you're using i mean it's to encapsulate the time piece of it you're almost using time as a little bit of a buffer for the emotion part of it because people whenever they've got a failure they're like super emotional about it like at that moment in time and it's almost as if giving that two to three day buffer which i'd like that as a strategy andy and i've used that before as well it almost brings more clarity to the situation because you've like had a chance to like go through all the emotions yeah don't get on ultra sign up in that two to three day window like you dnf do you sign up for the redemption race and then a week later like well crap i don't want to do that in eight weeks i want to train more or it went really well and you sign up for another one that goes with yeah give give your significant other change your password and forget it and yeah i thought you signed up yeah i would i would say it's like coops three day rule on on weather i would say you know no ultra sign up you know within two weeks of a of a bad race you know you're banned from that website that's so hilarious so i'll kind of give you guys my i go through three things when i whenever i have to do this with an athlete the first one is more of an

umbrella and it's i always like to keep it real and you know everybody who knows me those knows that i'm a pragmatist i kind of like shoot straight and things like that but i i do think that that's important because you can't bullshit your athletes they know and i would say this in training and i also say it during races they know when they're really good they know when they're really bad they might be faking it to a certain extent but they know that they're faking it and almost in almost all cases not not in all cases so i do like to keep it real and and the way that that is kind of how that kind of practically unfolds is yeah you were really bad during this section or you really made a big mistake here or you didn't believe in yourself and you could have there like just keeping it very you know just just very very practical because i think that that's the i think that's the best pathway forward but then i also have i also try to find one tactical piece to take away and one emotional piece to take away because i've i've found over the course of years whenever athletes have a really bad race or a really bad experience or or you know dnf or kind of whatever it is usually have both of those things that compound on top of each other they're greater than the sum of their individual parts they usually make one poor emotional decision i think i can't go on i'm gonna stay in the chair you know i'm not good enough whatever and then they make one bad and or not it not it not necessarily in this

sequence but and they make one bad tactical decision i didn't run this section hard enough i ran this too slow i you know i stopped paying attention to my nutrition and things like that and that emotional piece and that tactical piece like i said they kind of dog pile on each other they're it's a multiplying effect not an additive uh additive effect from a from a negative perspective i try to find both of those and normally they're really easy to to to kind of pull out because one catalyzes the the other and kind of going through you know ryan's sequential you know strategy of hey let's kind of move this kind of kind of move this start to finish that's a good way to make all of that unfold that emotional piece and the tactical piece whatever order that they kind of occur in but i tried to bring both of those into the conversation as what to course correct because nine times out of ten it's going to happen in some flavor at some point in time if you're in the ultra game long enough these things like they're they're common themes right i mean we kind of mentioned the same things over and over and over and over and over and over and i do think that if you go through that process to to deliberately bring the emotional piece and the tactical piece back up with the athlete it's not like they it's not that they won't make the mistake again it's just the magnitude of it is isn't as big because they kind of catch the they kind of catch themselves in the mistake earlier when it's not as

dramatic and they're able to to to kind of come back out of it so nutrition like we'll just bring this up as like a tactile as a tactical piece you forgot to eat for two hours right i mean that's like that happens all the time right two hours that's a that's a really long period of time so they're going to forget to eat but it might just be like 45 minutes or 30 minutes so you've taken this like big problem and they'll they're still going to encounter it but they've kind of they have the tools to kind of course correct it earlier so that that's what i always try to focus on is keep it real first and foremost and then find something tactical and something emotional that you can that you can bring into the conversation and and and use as a learning lesson um i want to pivot a little bit and go back to the very beginning of our conversation because we we started talking about one of these things to kind of drive confidence and self and self-efficacy is to bring up the training right and all the training that has has has transpired i want to know what you guys do when the training has not gone very well and we've all had this we've all had athletes that you know ryan was mentioning earlier they signed up for a race you know they want to get coaching in you know four or eight weeks or whatever like we're some sort of like you know physiology magician we can like create something out of nothing but we've also had athletes that we that we've been working with for a long period of time that for whatever reason life circumstances or they get injured or whatever

the training just hasn't gone very well what do you do in those situations and let's just say the race is still possible right still want to do it it's high priority event what do you do in those situations to give the athletes and to help the athletes kind of realize some semblance of confidence and self-efficacy when you don't have as robust of a training history to draw from i think you kind of you can't make it up out of thin air uh and if they're going into a race not uh very adequately prepared then they don't have to be sure that they can do it whether their goal is to finish or they have some higher performance goal they don't have to be sure but i'm asking them to meet me halfway and at least be curious at least be curious that they can be uh to see what they're capable of and maybe they can do it and as long as there's that maybe in that curiosity rather than clinging on to this rigid idea that in the back of my mind they know isn't realistic anymore um and having an acceptance of the fact that it might not go very well but you're going to do your best i think that's where you're going to be able to get the best results out of that athlete so be realistic curious and flexible right or the themes there i i think that that's something i i like that i really like that a lot that when things haven't gone as at like haven't gone to plan you do have to be just going back to my theme you have to be realistic and say hey yeah you know what you should have done 30 more work you

should you should have had in this case the four weeks extra that everybody else wants like you should have started training in january instead of april you know for your july for your july race i think that that that that umbrella of realism is a really important one but also like you mentioned just being flexible with what you you know with with what your goals are because you kind of don't know that's one of the things when the training isn't going hasn't gone so hasn't gone so well you don't have as many of these proof points to say yeah you know what you're going to run 24 hours in this race and get that big belt buckle right you don't really know what you're bringing to the table because the table hasn't kind of been set from the training process so being flexible with what what your kind of like outcome goals are so to speak during the race is absolutely a critical uh a critical part of that because sometimes they actually surprise you right and we probably had athletes that have done that as well where they're going into the training totally half-baked and just because they have a huge history of training decades worth of training they can kind of draw from that during the race and you know pull a rabbit out of the hat so to speak so ryan we'll kind of like move on to you like have you had this happen with your athletes where they kind of go into a race not fully prepared and what do you do leading up to the race to just help them realize that you know whatever you know whatever they're trying to do is still reasonable and realistic yeah if if they're going in underprepared or have

missed a lot of training then we've seen that in the weeks leading up and like adam said i have to be honest throughout so having the conversation of okay you're missing a few runs the kids got sick then you got sick work trip whatever it is and just start the dialogue early of okay you're missing training things aren't going to plan so let's already start thinking about how we're going to readjust the goal all right it's it's not going to be the big belt buckle this time or or the pr at the race you go to every year start that dialogue early and then it's like okay let's let's slow down this race and see if we can solve the stomach issues and not have the pressure of going for the time let's let's focus on one thing that's not a pure outcome time goal let's let's use this as practice per se so like being honest early realizing hey the training you needed to have to go for this goal give yourself the best chance it's not happening that's okay let's learn from it and if there's an area that has not led you to have a lot of self-confidence before or something that's always played to you let's just hyper focus on that and see if we can get better at it and learn things and improve i like the early theme of that because i've made that mistake as a coach and incorporated that like that hey let's bring things into reality conversation too too late and it's way harder and i don't i don't

know why quite what the right time frame is on that i think it's about three to four weeks because at that point you really can't do all that much with the training when you're kind of that that that close to the race but i do think having that like reality check conversation earlier rather than late rather than the week of the race is is important because it gives it it gives time almost to andy's theme of giving it a few days it gives a time as a little bit of a buffer just to accept things as they are right and once you accept things as they are you're kind of like okay well i got it i got what i got and we can kind of we can move forward with it yeah if you do it too early it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy and that's not good true true no that's not true either the timing is tricky the timing is tricky for sure i i take a this is a really challenging one for me and over the years i've taken a page out of out of my career in education when you think of a you know a kid you know a kid has not done all his homework assignments and he's been late for class and maybe he's been absent a little bit too much and he's just distracted and he he knows or she knows that they're you know the big test is coming up and they're probably you know not going to get an a you know best best case scenario they're going to get a c and at that in that circumstance you can like make them feel bad about not doing the homework and blowing off class or you can say hey you know what you're probably going to get a c but if you buckle down whatever it is over these next two weeks or whatever or go meet the teacher for extra help and so in that metaphor

you know you want to i i i want to avoid that i told you so right when you look at training people i told you if you had done this tempo block you would have been fine right because that's what i mean as parents as teachers as coaches it's kind of easy well i told you so if you guys had just you know if you'd just done the drills better or whatever so i think that that first you want you want to figure out a way to have them realize hey this is probably substandard and you're going to have to as ryan said adjust your goals but then also try to make the best out of it and in that context you're like okay well what can we control here what can you do to make this experience that's still maybe two or three weeks away you're not going to be able to make it better with with you know crash course and training that's where it's different you can stay up all night for four nights and study you can't really do a version of that for for you know endurance training but you can do the other things that might make the race experience a little bit more pleasant so i think i think part of it is a little bit of a psychological and emotional uh you know uh back and forth that has to take place and then coop is your point you know what can we do practically you know you do it in the debrief but what can we do practically going into the race that might you know you're going to walk a lot more you know maybe you're going to need uh you know extra water between aid stations because because it's going to take you longer than we thought it might six weeks ago when we made a uh you know a plan for a 24-hour finish or something like that you know what's so andy you just brought something up that just like crystallized in my mind whenever i've had to do this within with an athlete that if we

know they're going to walk and run on certain parts of the course i usually i i i have and i i will continue to use that as one of the anchor points and what i've done is i pick out one section of the course and kind of make it memorable almost to a certain extent with the athlete so you know what you are walking this climb and just to make it hey listen that's your goal and so you've kind of like reframed some of the race flow from you know this and that and the other and like have five or six different things so you know what you just have to be prepared to walk this climb and i want you to hike it as hard as you can and i've i've found that focusing on maybe that like one that one piece it kind of like eliminates a lot of the other distractions and almost puts like the horse blinders right on that uh for the athlete to where they don't they're not that they're minimizing other aspects of their race but they just they they have something then that they can focus on okay i'm going to get to this climb and i'm going to hike the whole thing when maybe if their training went awesome they could have run the whole thing i just found that picking out that like one thing that like one thing during the race that we're going to change out of the whole host of things that you might change when the when uh the training's gone back like picking out that one thing it kind of brings it all into reality and gives them something that they can actually focus on and control because that's the biggest thing with with the with the lack of confidence is you feel that you're out of control

right or you don't have the same amount of control that you that you previously had and giving them something that they can control and in this case it's you're controlling it by reducing the intensity on this climb that you thought you were going to be able to run and now you're going to walk i just think i think just adds to their like self-efficacy going into the race because they know that they can actually perform that i have this right now with um this whole aspect of being underprepared going into races with athletes who are coming out of schemo season and they've all got races lined up in april or may and they're still in like the the thick of the schemo season and they're super fit because schemo is hard it's intense you know they've been you know racing kind of like every weekend or every other weekend so they've got like the cardiopulmonary type of fitness but they don't have like the trail running specific pieces of it and to my earlier point it's like yeah you don't have the running specificity it kind of is what it is at this point let's not cram train here's practically to come back to that word how you need to wrap your head around managing this race you're going to run the descents easier so the one thing right it's not the then we get into the overall race management process but by seeing that one thing that's really practical it's very tangible like okay this is how i'm going to be able to control this i'm going to run the descents or this one descent a whole lot easier now that i don't have you know my my my running legs so to speak but i think

that's a great example of an athlete super fit right they've done all the training but it's still inadequate because they haven't run more than i mean i have athletes right now that are going to run like six times before you know they do like a 80 kilometer or 100 kilometer running race but they've been on skis for 15 hours a week right so they have a lot of training they just don't have any specificity so you've got to kind of like plan for that type of discrepancy i think tactically that's not a lot that's not really indifferent from when the training just goes south because of an injury or an illness or work life stress or kind of whatever i think as coaches we can we can use very similar tactics to manage both of those types of processes and all those suggestions are very simple simple and easy to control like you can walk a climb unless something's really bad and you're struggling to do that um but like get to the bottom of the climb and eat one of your gels boom that's that's very simple and something you can control get to this part of the course and get in the river and cool off for a bit i think that's that's a good point to just keep it simple and if you're going to give them these anchor points to simplify things give them something to look forward to it's really really simple it's not complex so i like i like that a lot yeah i've always found the schemo to to run transition like psychology really fascinating because you have this dichotomy where

most of the times they're really fit coming out of that schemo season because like i said they've they've been training hard they've been racing hard it's a short very intense season for the most part but they lack almost completely trail running fitness and so how do you manage like being able to manage this really high level of overall fitness but low level of specificity that is absolutely going to impact the the race and they kind of know it you know i mean it becomes very apparent they do you know a two-hour run and they're sore afterwards because of the descending right i mean that's kind of a scary proposition right you do a two-hour easy run your quads are sore afterwards and then you think holy shit i've got this 80 kilometer race that i'm doing with you know 4 000 meters of vertical or kind of whatever like whatever it is something way more daunting than two hour you know easy easy run around your around your local trails you start to you it's just like i said it's just this weird dichotomy to manage because you have the super high level of fitness but you know you know based on those early runs that you are lacking some part of the whole complete training process and you can't make that up in that period of time managing that that that that psychology of i've always found like really i just think it's really interesting and really good like kind of like coaching lesson that you can that uh that

you can kind of take into any other situation i think that's true also for people uh taking on a new longer distance where that that notion of the unknown right they're doing their first hundred or i'm seeing it a lot with people doing their first 200 where it's like oh my gosh i was i was hating life at the end of that hundred how am i possibly going to run 200 to which you say well you're the one who signed up for it you know so you know we'll have to figure it out but uh but i think i think that that notion of you know my you know like you said this two hour run is going to make this person coming from schemo just sore and like oh my gosh i'm why am i so sore it's sort of similar you know i can nail 50 miles and 100k or even 100 miles but then the reality sets in like we were talking you know three months now until tahoe 200 and then they might come to me and say oh you know i've got to do a hundred mile tune-up race or i've got to do a five-day training camp and you know get on the course and all of this kind of stuff and so i think that a similar sort of emotional practical challenge uh that you're describing applies to people taking on something that might be bigger and more unknown here's something the audience can can can take to heart i talked about this uh in my last podcast with carla there's this um component of the psycho-biological model of fatigue which is kind of the it this this model that samuel mallorca uh has or marcora sorry has come up with has kind of been the one that is that that has kind of risen to the top in terms of how athletes actually perceive for

to perceive fatigue and what what actually makes us slow down so within the psycho-biological model of fatigue there's this component of it called the perceived exertion endpoint interaction and i know that's like really jargoning or jargony but all it means is is that when we're performing a task and normally those tasks are shorter endurance activities i'm going to do a 10 minute interval or i'm going to do a marathon something kind of in that range as we are performing that task we internally draw a line from where we're at right now and how do we feel and where do i think how do i think i'm going to feel at the end of the task and we use that internal drawing and redrawing of the line to modulate our effort so i'm doing a 10 minute interval i'm two minutes into this you subconsciously and you can actually consciously do this as well say i'm running this hard is this effort sustainable for the entirety of this 10 minute interval yes no i'm going to go slower i'm going to go faster so you're you're literally forecasting your effort at the end so it's the perceived exertion endpoint interaction turns out it's a pretty good that's a pretty good way to modulate your effort for tasks of that length we suck at it in the ultra marathon world and we see this play out like time and time again it did this two hour this two hour run where i got sore this this is a complete reflection of that

perceived exertion endpoint interaction i finished two hours what am i going to feel like after eight hours i've done an 80 kilometer race how in the world am i going to do a 200 mile race we're taking how we felt at those you know kind of like moments in time and we're trying to extrapolate how hard the effort is going to be over whatever duration the unknown actually is it turns out we suck at it we suck at it past a certain point and this whole notion of hey stay in the moment and all these kind of like cliches that's the reason that you do it is because we suck at this forecasting model that's been so ingrained into our brains from all the training activities that we've done where we actually are pretty good at it for 10 minutes 20 minutes an hour maybe two hours and so i think that that if we understand that we're not very good at this extrapolation that is all too common in the ultra marathon world if we understand that it kind of it kind of empowers you to a certain extent when you're sitting in the chair at mile 80 of your 200 mile race and you're thinking oh i can't do this because i feel like this at mile 80 how in the world can i do another 120 miles you can think you know what i'm not very good at forecasting this so i'm just going to get up out of the chair i don't know how i'm going to feel you know 50 miles down the trail or whatever and you just get up out of the chair and you just kind of motor on i i just think that that notion of we're not very good at forecasting

our efforts in these big long races i think that that's really empowering from a self-efficacy perspective because it kind of gives you permission to just like be oblivious you know be oblivious to like oh you know 100 miles later i'm not i might feel better and that happens a lot we've all this is another way that i always bring this out we've and i personally have done this i'll raise my hand as making this error we've all seen athletes and maybe we've done it personally where we have either down regulated our intensity and or dropped out and immediately regretted the decision it's more it's like it's more stark when you drop out and you get back to your hotel room and you're like god damn it why did i actually do that i actually don't feel that bad but you also like down regulate intensity almost in the same way because like i said we're just not very good at it i think that that that happening particularly particularly the dnf that's instantly regrettable that's that's the way i term it it's an instantly regrettable dnf like once you get your band cut like right afterwards you're like god dang it i could i shouldn't have done that i think that that highlights this fact that we're not very good at forecasting our exertion levels in these long in these long events i think that that highlights it kind of more than any other happening yeah i think for athletes that are going into a new distance or they've never really gone past the 30-ish mile mark and they're doing their first 50 mile they don't have that experience to lean on to know that oh last time i did a big jump and up and

distance the the discomfort during the race didn't necessarily double or it wasn't proportional they kind of have to take our word for it and just just know that that's a phenomenon and try to trust that as best you can going into it because ultras are weird you might feel horrible at mile 50 you could feel better at mile 70 and then you might only feel 10 worse at the finish line but it's not going to be this linear relationship you experienced when you were doing your four hour long run and it just progressively got more and more painful until the end and you think it's going to spiral out of control but a lot of people have anxieties going into that and i think i'm sure we were going to bring up training camps at some point here but the doing a training camp and using that as an opportunity to realize oh doing a drastic amount more than i've done in my typical training is actually not that bad yeah well yeah we can talk about training camps now i mean andy and i've seen this like ad nauseum at our memorial day camp where people come in and they like triple or quadruple their volume and they're kind of like fine afterwards and yeah we set up the situation for success and kind of try to remove all the distractions and it's eat sleep run and all that other things but adam to your point i think one of the things that they take away from that is is the leap right whatever that leap is 2x 3x 4x from my longest long run to the race or my longest long run to the camp or whatever it reinforces the fact that you can't forecast it i think that that's the big learning lesson there

you wake up on the third day your legs are a little bit sore and you've got a 50 kilometer you know run in front of you that tags mount rosa which is a you know 12 500 feet most people haven't you know been above 5 000 feet you know for their for the entirety of their training they get there and they do that and that drives a that drives a lot of self-confidence and a lot of self-efficacy the fact that they can that they that they can do it but i also think we'd be remiss not to point the learning lesson out that see you can do it and we and we're really bad at forecasting if we can actually do it or not because you ask a lot of the athletes before that last day half of them are gonna say i don't know if i can do this or not and everybody finishes like we ever everybody finishes that last run but yet not everybody has the confidence going into that last run that they're actually going to be able to finish it or perform to you know however however they ended up performing during the day so i i do think that one like to your point adam one of those things that the training camps can kind of like pull out is is yeah you know you feel bad but you never know if you're going to feel better you know kind of later in the race or later in the camp or later or later in the day it points out this thing that that we're just not very good at at at extrapolating how we're going to feel now to how we're going to feel 10 hours from now i'm i'm so glad adam brought that up when you when you think i mean as as i mentioned on an earlier podcast i'm insisting on training camps this year at least for athletes doing 100 miles or above but it's it's an interesting uh study would

be to uh to hang out at the memorial day training camps at western states for example at the end of the sunday run which is the second run and you're sitting around the waiting for the bus to come and everybody's like oh my gosh we have to run again tomorrow 20 miles you know and they're making up excuses and maybe going home early and then you fast forward and you get to the everyone getting on the bus on monday morning and they get out there and you know by the end of that run they're like oh my gosh we've done it we just did 70 miles of the western states course in three days so i absolutely think coop and adam and ryan to your point not only is the physical benefit of training camps you know unquestioned but the self-confidence and the mental benefit of it as well whether you're able to eat sleep and breathe running for three days or get to the top of mount rosa that the the confidence that comes out of that is is immeasurable and uh and i really i know i've i've been this has been my drum i've been beating all year but i really i think now we've been doing them enough that there's enough data or enough accumulation of anecdotal data to prove that these training camps this training camp concept works you know how i how i've been escalating that like escalating the training camp because it's like you can only do so much right like let's just let's just be real like yeah we you can do a lot during training camps but you can only do so much i always think the first for most people the the first couple times you do that try to get them into a group environment or at least have them have a

training partner and the group or the training partner kind of catalyzes the whole situation and introduces this this this element of accountability i'm gonna do this because so and so is gonna run with me if the western states camp there's like two two or three hundred four hundred people how many people go to that yeah almost four hundred yeah like yeah yeah yeah so there's hundreds of people around and you're just gonna like go a lot you're literally just going along with the herd right you're getting sucked along the trail because there's just like so many other other people around you the those groups and those training partners help catalyze it the way that i've escalated it with a few athletes is do it yourself go out rent an airbnb a lot of people have vans i have a van i did this when i was training for coco dota go out there and do it all by yourself and then you come back with an even an enhanced more forged degree of self-confidence and efficacy because nobody goaded you into it you got up every single day by yourself you rose to the you know to your alarm clock or kind of whatever you got back you took care of yourself you did you did kind of everything but you did it on your own accord right without any you know goading or poking or prodding or artificial this that you know your friends are kind of like goading you along i think i i wouldn't do that with everybody and not everybody can do this but i do think that that's another way to kind of escalate the confidence not just the physicality not just the physiological attributes but escalate the confidence that you can

get out of a big training block or a camp is just do do it by yourself initially you can do it with a bunch of people and it's fun and it's social and it like i said it helps catalyze it it reduces the the kind of anxiety that's associated with oh my we have this at camp everybody thinks that they're going to be the slowest the fattest the ugliest the last you know kind of the worst properties of everything like coming into the camp because it's such a big leap right they don't think they can do it and the group helps catalyze that because they just realize there's going to be other people around them once you've got that and you kind of realize that you can make that leap then do it by yourself and then i just think that adds just like a little bit of an enhanced a little bit of an enhanced confidence like coming out of it because you can look back at it and go you know what i did this all on my own accord all right this is fun we're gonna leave it at that you guys i appreciate you guys coming on the podcast today hopefully some people picked up some nuggets you still have time to train but not that much so if you're pushing the panic button i think if everybody can like if everybody can empathize with this um with this part of of the emotional part of the training process you're always going to want a little bit more and you're going to think that the races are creeping up on you but just realize everybody is going through that and hopefully that gives you guys some solace all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to our coaching panel for coming on the podcast today and peeling the curtain back so to speak on conversations that we are starting to have

with our athletes right here right now as the racing season is starting to get underway i hope everybody out there listening got something that they can take into their last several weeks of training appreciate the heck out of all you listeners out there this podcast is nothing without you there are no sponsors or advertisers as always so the best thing that you can do to help this podcast is to share it with your friends and your training partners that is how we get the word out about all this fabulous content and in addition to that my new research newsletter research essentials for ultra running is live you can sign up for it right now on jasoncoop.com what we do is every single month we break down three to five research papers that are specific to the ultra marathon world and we explain the results and the application in a very practical straightforward manner that everybody can understand i know research is sometimes difficult to wrap your head around because the language is very obtuse and sometimes the meaning of it can get obscured and even when it's presented in some of the more pop literature the magazines and things like that the results can sometimes get distorted so we put together a panel of experts to cut through all of that clutter and provide actionable information that you can take into your training day in and day out once again there's going to be links to the show notes to sign up for that as well as you can just go to my website jasoncoop.com to sign up for it that is it for today folks and as always we will see you out on the trails

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