Heat Training Interventions with Coach AJW | KoopCast Episode #179 (2022)

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 you regular listeners know what is coming up today this week this week's KoopCast is all about how we as coaches practically implement heat interventions for our athletes we know that a lot of you out there are training for hot weather races such as western states wasatch bad water or in my case the cocodona 250 and last week's re-release with julian perriard was intended to be a little bit of a scientific primer for this week's episode this week what i wanted to do is to take the listeners how we actually do this as coaches with our athletes and i thought no better to bring on the podcast than one of our fellow coaches andy jones wilkins otherwise known as ajw who has a good stable of athletes that are training for hot weather races including western states and we won't run through the whole gamut of how we actually do with this with athletes from filtering down what athletes are good candidates for this to what to do when things go awry or where or when things are imperfect which they inevitably are during the training process i hope all of you listeners take this episode to heart because i know many of you who

are training for hot weather races want to know how to practically do this for yourselves i think that heat acclimation training is one of the best low cost low effort highest rate of return interventions that you can use for a hot weather race and i hope you seriously consider it for any races that you have coming up this summer so with that as a preamble i'm gonna get right out of the way here's my conversation with coach ajw on how to implement heat training interventions for yourself or for your athletes so i i i use a sauna this morning um do you have one in your house no okay you know what this last experience has been has made me started to look at it again because they're not all that expensive like a proper finished sauna you know that you can get like you can get like a barrel you know type of deal that is relatively easy to construct and install and it's the convenience factor like i would love just to like walk into it like you do it in all the houses in europe right every time i get an airbnb in europe there's it's like a standard part of the part of the construction out there but uh no i don't have one of my house it's in fact rob rob rob crarr has a sweet one right in his back patio he got it in vermont it's it's like that thing it's a barrel yeah and and it actually

hooks up the heating element hooks up to like his house heater heater so the tube just comes in from the house and oh it's awesome yeah i'm gonna i i'm gonna look because i use it i don't know i can anticipate using it frequently enough to like kind of like justify in fact i'd probably use it a little bit more and it's just the convenience factor like you know what do you got to do you go to like the ymca or something yeah it's a it's a vasa it's a vasa fitness nice gym you know middle or upper upper you know quarter type of you know gym to have here there's two locations in colorado springs i've no affiliation with them i you know pay full rack rate for you know for my dues there it's it and i like going there it's a nice gym but part of the convenience factor is just the drive back and forth you know i feel like it's like the windshield rule right that we use in running like you can't spend more time behind you know the windshield that you do running it's the same thing here it takes me 30 it takes me 15 minutes to get there and 15 minutes to get back and i spent 30 minutes in the sauna so i'm just like right at the edge of it but the second thing is and i finally just relearned this this like next time around is like the one at the more convenient gym to me actually broke and which seems like okay we'll just switch well you try to like go to the most convenient one and you drive there and it's broken and then four or five days go by and when you're using a six or eight day protocol and you you need lose three or four days it's actually kind of a material part of the

whole thing so i had to have this whole thing with like their manager and i'm like just tell me if it's going to be fixed like just like i called i was like hey is it on they're like yeah it's on i get in there it's like 100 degrees i'm like this is not good this is not good i got it so anyway uh but my point with that with the part of the lead-in is this is the time of year where athletes who are training for hot weather events are starting to think about things like this and i'm and i'm glad this is the type of year because it used to be not until june or july when the heat actually turned on and a lot of the you know places where athletes train where people start to think about it and the thing that normally kind of tips their hat is is the first really hot day or the first couple really hot days where they have a long run so many people screw it up because they take their they take the amount of fluids that they've been taking out for their like 40 or 50 degree days and all of a sudden it's an 80 degree day and they're like oh man i didn't think about this too much and they come back all dehydrated all dehydrated everything so what i kind of want to go over with you is it's a little bit of an extension based on an article that i wrote on the train right website a couple weeks ago that i'll link up in the show notes but it's really from a like a very practical and pragmatic point of view in terms of what are we doing with our athletes i just mentioned kind of all the things that you can run into the sonic and break it's inconvenient and things like that and we can draw these protocols out on paper based on the literature that exists but oftentimes when we

start working with real athletes with real constraints we have to balance their real time which is everybody's most limiting factor when we have to balance that time component there are certain things that come up and i always like to hear from coaches who do this a lot and you have a lot of athletes particularly in western states that are starting to do this what are some of those things that are uh that are coming up so to to start out with you have a whole you know gaggle or basket or whatever of of athletes which ones of them as you're looking through your training peaks list how do you filter how initially do you filter through it and say okay i'm gonna let's let's explore this as a training intervention some sort of heat adaptation intervention with johnny but not suzy and with sally and not jack like how do you kind of go through it and prioritize who are good candidates for this and who you're just going to kind of stick with the normal training so i've right now i've got two sets of athletes a small group to a pair of athletes that are training for the keys 100 which is sooner that's a down in florida and that's at the third weekend in may one of them lives in florida and one of them lives in virginia so i'm working with both of them to organize a protocol but the the gentleman who lives in florida is a little bit more already moving along down the road of being heat

acclimated than the one who lives in virginia he actually lives in lynchburg so it hasn't even spring hasn't really even hit there um so that's that's a that's just a pair then i have eight athletes in western states and they range from uh two of two of them who live in the in sacramento or the bay area uh and then seattle idaho iowa i talked to my athlete i talked to my athlete in dubuque iowa yesterday and he's uh you know he's still running in in tights and a hat uh and so forth new jersey kentucky uh you know so you think a lot about that right and of course over the over the last couple of months or so we've been talking about oh what's the weather like oh my gosh i'm so sick of running in the ice and snow and so forth so so i think about that in the context of who might be a good candidate and then sort of begin to like right about now begin to have these discussions of you know the practical discussions do you have access to a sauna could you get access to a sauna i of course i know my athletes pretty well in their work-life balance could you potentially you know have a day where in addition to doing a one-hour endurance run or a 45 minute recovery run you could also fit in 20 to 30 minutes in the sauna so those practical discussions are really what's going on literally right now in real time but it's it's here's what i'm kind of getting at right it it's i don't know if you could come up with a flow chart for it because it would have so many branches but the general

parameters are obviously you're doing a hot weather race you don't have access to and these are the i'm filtering it down to the people that are candidates you're doing a hot weather race you don't have access to a natural environment that that's that's very warm and it's accessible to you those are kind of like the three like almost punch points to even make it a starting condition right right the accessibility yeah i mean some people may not live within a range of a sauna yeah and that becomes one of those things where where do you balance the training that you would potentially miss and the impact that that has versus what you could actually extract out of heat acclimation method and i mean i i kind of i try to put percentages on this almost um but i think the way to think about it is for an entry-level athlete that's still going to gain a lot from training they've been training for ultras for less than three years maybe four years they probably especially a low volume athlete like they're time constrained anyway right you can only get 10 12 hours a week out of them just because their life or whatever you can make the argument that the training is more important for athletes that have a little bit more time or maybe they're already at their volume cap they can only handle 14

hours a week because of what whatever they get injured or that's just you've you've figured out that's their theoretical volume cap or kind of whatever it is those little ones that kind of make better candidates simply because they have the time i think i think i have a great my great example are my two guys running the keys uh you know third weekend in may one of them's running his second hundred miler the the other's running his first hundred miler they chose the keys hundred for their first hundred miler brutal for those of for those of you not familiar with it it's one of bob becker's races it's a point to point uh out in florida exposed it's on sidewalks and roads and uh it's you know it's kind of it uses you have your own crew almost bad water style your crew goes along with you so uh these guys uh you know are jumping right in and they're they're nervous about the heat and uh and they are they are frankly coop they can they can afford 12 to 14 hours uh training week and so at this point you know as we go into the first the first phase because i've got them similar to your uh what you outlined for your cocodona training personally i've anchored their training in a in a training camp if you will a training weekend with like an eight hour run followed by a five hour run that'll be three to four weeks uh before the key event so right now they're just starting about a 10 day period of trying to get this heat

exposure every single day for 10 days then they get to that training camp they run through that training camp hopefully it's successful they do maintenance every other day every third day from there although the fellow who lives in florida could probably just do his daily runs at the lunch hour and be okay and then do one more dose of a 10 day cycle leading right into the race so i'm i'm very interested because they are really you know they're they're ends of one they one guy's done 100 it was tunnel hill just in november it was cool um and i i'm intrigued by both their willingness to jump right in and do it but part of it's motivated by fear by the way they're just scared of of uh of this and and and another part's motivated by you know i want to be as prepared as i can be for this you know this huge undertaking so you mentioned fear i'm going to ping off of that a little bit uh so the part of the origin at least for me professionally as a coach for using what you just described as a is a two-phase adaptation protocol where you're introducing one concentrated phase of the heat acclimation whether it's a sauna or hot hot water immersion bath about anywhere between four and six weeks out from the event you do that for several days we'll talk about kind of the nuance of that in a little bit and then there is an in-between phase where you're just doing maintenance every second or every third day you're kind of getting in the sauna and then for the last several days leading up into the race

is kind of is kind of the last dose um one reason that i started to adopt that model as opposed to what i would consider the traditional model which would essentially just be the last phase right you just jump in the sauna for the last nine or nine or ten days which is kind of the de facto way to do it for for many many years is i was a i was afraid that i was going to screw it up like as a coach meaning the intervention either was going to be too long or not long enough or the sauna wasn't going to be hot enough i was just mentioning some of the inconvenience of where the sauna breaks right if you're doing a seven-day protocol and you miss out on three days that's like half of it right there so then you know is it kind of really worth it at that point and and so i just kind of like honestly i came up with it i was like okay let's just try it you know a little bit further away from the race and just see how the athlete reacts and then we use that as a little bit of a as a of a blueprint it turns out a few years later i started to know notice a number of other coaches and practitioners in the space most notably uh inigo majika who i've had on this on this podcast as well recommend the same thing but kind of out of a different angle first off you do learn a little bit out of the first round that you can apply to the second round okay your sauna's broken or hey 25 minutes is the right exposure time you know 30 minutes might be a little bit too long 20 minutes is not enough like you can kind of dial in the dose so to speak um but the second thing is is

it tends to have a compounding effect where the second uh round builds off of the first run off of the first one there's not as much what what i would uh what i would deem as like scientific evidence to to to back that up it's just what what practitioners notice in the field i wouldn't say that there's none there's some to uh uh to indicate that but certainly like the mechanistics are there we know that heat uh we know that heat uh acclimation is an acute phenomenon it happened it happens very quickly it also deteriorates very rapidly on the order of you know two to three percent a day but it doesn't take much to maintain you can hit it every you know every third day or every second day and kind of maintain what what what you've got and so it became this thing where you look at the cost benefit of it the cost is it's just more time out of pocket and that inconvenience factor is a big thing but the benefit is is you can dial in the prescription more accurately and potentially get a little bit of a benefit it when you when you weigh those things my light just fell down when you weigh those things that's what that was with uh when you when you weigh those things all out it makes it a very attractive way to do it as opposed to just saving it all at the very end and in one last shot which i every time i've done that it's always nerve-wracking like i always would bite my nails like

every time an athlete would get out of the sun and be like how was it because it has to be so precise and they're doing it during the taper and all those different factors it was just really really really nerve-wracking well i think there's interesting parallel too to other aspects of what we do as coaches to determine how just setting up a training a training race or a training camp where you'll you'll test out your nutrition or you'll test out your gear or so forth so that you have the confidence on and so then like let's say something goes wrong you know you you you use a pack in a training race and you get really badly chafed you know so it's like okay well we got to get a different pack when we it's almost like a dress rehearsal so you do this you do this 10 day sort of first phase uh and you can you can sort of tweak some things when you get into the second phase i mentioned the fear also another anecdotal story one of my western states athletes actually one maybe one of the luckiest people in the world she got selected in a raffle ticket so she got into the race she bought one raffle ticket and got drawn she lives in kentucky so a long time ago she had scheduled to run the zion 100k so she traveled and which was just this past weekend she traveled all the way out from kentucky to zion 100k and the first thing she said when she finishes oh my god it was hot yeah and i was like so how she's like well it was like you know 80s or 90s and so forth so it was kind of like so for her for confidence right out of the gate she's like andy i'm going tomorrow and getting a gym

membership and you know so so you know there's that that and then of course it is a little bit of the fear factor but it's also you know this athlete is now engaged in checking that box you know finding the 30 to 45 extra minutes a day to get in the sauna to uh to take care of the protocol and be where she needs to be when when western states comes around yeah and i see one of the it's interesting that you mentioned that because one of the other things i like about this two-phase protocol it kind of parallels the training as well because personally what i did for coca donna this is what i do for a lot of athletes uh that i work with as well is that your biggest volume week usually follows the like right at the end of the first sauna block and i like that for a couple of reasons is one you're not compiling stress on stress on stress so you do that sauna block and sometimes it's like you know during a i would say like a medium hard week or 10 days or something like that certainly not anything where you're taking a big increase in your total training load or total total training stress then you get out of the sauna you remove the heat stress and you have the opportunity to add some other kind of stress and it's usually training so you can train really hard right you're not worried about you know the extra stress of the sauna and i think that those counterbalance each other really well because anybody that's any anybody that's actually used either a sauna or a hot water immersion

or intervention realizes that it's extra stress and i don't know how to quantify it like i've always think it's worth like somewhere between 5 and 10k of running every time you get in there i mean that's the easiest parallel that i can that i can kind of make it's not it's not the same but when you want to talk about the total stress on the body it's not zero and it's not a long run it's somewhere in between there and you have to and you have to account for that which is hilarious because i've always seen these people who like use their cars right as yeah as like you know like a hot box and they're driving around i'm like if you're really doing it right there's no way you would want to drive around in that condition like that's literally reckless driving like literally a cop could pull you over and give you a ticket for reckless driving if you're really if you're kind of really really doing it right but but anyway my point with that is is the timing of that first of that kind of like two phase protocol it tends to flow with the timing of what i want to do from a training perspective anyway so it makes it all very conducive i'm not changing the training right to or at least i'm not training changing the training that much to get the the heat work in well and coob similar to the way you anchored your coca donut training around a four-day training camp four to five weeks before the event the western states like calendar almost plays itself into that most athletes running western states if they can get out to the memorial day training camp they get out for it and if not if

there's athletes that i'm working with that that are running western states and they can't make it to the camp i typically create one for them right they run a three they run a three and it's perfect it's five four to five weeks before the race it's three days you cover 70 something miles in three days you know it ends up being their longest week of training right so if you can put that first phase of uh heat protocol in advance of that then come out of that uh that three-day training camp have a little week of recovery do you know do the maintenance of every other day or every third day sauna and then just play into the final 10 days it actually works really well and i would say that to people doing bad water to people doing angelus crest or wasatch some of the other sort of sneaky hot races uh that are american hundred milers that are on the calendar even javelina late into the season you know can be sneaky hot i think finding looking at a calendar and finding very much mirroring that kind of architecture uh would really you know really i think benefit uh benefit the athletes in lots of ways a hundred percent on point i just want to make note you call bad water sneaky hot i don't think there's nothing no no no i'm sorry i shouldn't i shouldn't have closer i was mentioning that like wasatch is definitely sneaky hot you get into the the middle of the day of wasatch and it just gets exposed a lot of people think oh september it's not going to be that hot but it can be bad

well because it's cold like catherine pass is like usually really freaking like puppy jacket type of cold oh yeah for most of the pack and they don't realize that they've got to get to catherine pass first through like usually 90 degree weather yeah oh yeah so i i so needless to say like we like that architecture right six weeks out you're doing your first kind of roughly six weeks out you're doing your first intervention it lasts several days after the first intervention you're going to do a huge training camp because you're removing the heat stress you're going to do a maintenance intervention for the next you know three or four weeks or something like that however your training kind of works out and then you're doing your last piece of it the last several days uh leading up into the race um i want to talk about something that that that often comes up when i when i talk about this and that is we like to take a purist approach and use a traditional dry finished sauna but there's a lot of other methods out there and they range from a wet sauna to a hot water immersion bath to overdressed running to an infrared sauna and people kind of like want to know this like what are the substitutes like it does it have to does it have to be this or does it have to be that in your experience where are you steering people towards when you have athletes that you filter them down to the candidate where are you steering

them towards i did well notwithstanding my first choice is the dry sauna um unless they're training for an unusually hot and humid race so you know vermont from time to time can be really humid sometimes people are heading down to costa rica uh and and so a steam bath or a a a wet sauna if you will would be a good second choice i haven't had much i have a current athlete who uh was went ahead and um purchased for his house uh an infrared sauna i don't have enough experience with those i know that we've had some conversations at cts on the infrared sauna um i know that sally mccray who won bad water last year had a great deal of success with the infrared sauna but but i don't i don't personally have a ton of experience with that i am a staunch opponent of the overdressed running uh i just i feel as though it impacts the training benefit of running your everything from your form to your attitude towards running to your ability to i mean i just i'm just i i know some people swear by it i mean i i've spent i spent a decade and a half you know going to the western states course and and watching people with three sweatshirts go through the canyons and you know it's it's it works for some people it doesn't work for me and i'm i'm not going to coach my athletes to do that i will say that you know the

running in regular clothes in the middle of the day um particularly if you can if you can get in an environment where the heat's coming at you from all directions you know in other words the western states and others keys wasatch the hot races bad water you know the heat in very hot places the heat comes up from the ground as much as it comes down from the sky right and so training a little bit of training actually in that setting i think makes sense not a five hour long run in that setting but you know to just get a sense of what that experience is what i what i'm what i'm often coop trying to calibrate is let's say let's take my sacramento runner you know he he might say to me hey andy i could run at one in the afternoon today it's supposed to be 95 degrees or i could go and spend 30 30 minutes in the sauna i might say well why don't you do one run at one in the afternoon today and not go in the sauna and then the next day you know run it crack a dawn and run in the sauna so or go in the sauna so i i'm my hierarchy is certainly the dry sauna uh wet sauna hot immersion hot water immersion uh infrared if i if i knew more about it infrared and then kind of bottom of the list is uh is the overdressing that's a pretty good prioritization um a lot of people ask about the infrared sauna there's just no doubt on it and i mean i've talked to all the experts on it and

everybody's kind of miffed honestly because it's such a popular inexpensive thing to get i mean you can get one in your house for you know 1500 bucks and it wouldn't be that hard to install um but so so the the combination of the ease of putting it in people's houses as well as the cost and the fact that there's like not a lot of research on it it's just it's a little bit befuddling to be honest with you uh to be honest with you the experts that i've spoken with don't feel that it gets people's core temperature high enough to elicit the adaptation that's kind of the main knock on it and i know some people that have done just some kind of n-a-1 trials where they have access to uh a core temperature pill that you can swallow which is the traditional way they would do it in a research setting so you swallow a core temperature pill it's literally measuring your core temperature from your internal organs and then they've gone into an infrared sauna and they they haven't found that it that it elicits the right you know the right temperature response there that's not robust enough to kind of rule it out but that's generally the knock that you'll hear from the professionals out there is that the the intensity of the heat although it feels very hot the actual intensity of the heat in terms of its effect on your core temperature is not high enough now 10 years from now we might reverse that and say yeah you know we studied it now we studied it better and it is a it is a reasonable alternative

um the the instance that you or the method that you mentioned of the overdressing i think is also worth um uh discussing as well because this is something that the badwater crew in at least in the past has been particularly notorious about where you know they'll wheel their you know treadmill into their dry into their laundry room and disconnect the dryer vent and stick the dryer vent in their face and turn it on full blast and then dress up in four or five different sweatsuits and run on their treadmill for a couple of hours and things like that and you know i get it like you know you you're trying to do whatever you can to combat the heat because it's you know just so notorious out there but when you look at it on its face and just try to evaluate it through a neutral perspective a you're violating the rule of you're adding stress on stress right you're adding the heat stress to the running stress intentionally which you can get away with in small doses but when you're talking about chronic adaptations from endurance you got to kind of like pick one or the other but specific with badwater what's always befuddled me is that actually doesn't simulate the environment and there actually is really good research on this where they've studied what the environment is inside of all of those layers like the garment manufacturers are always particularly concerned with this and want to know about it and it's a very humid environment as you can imagine because you're literally trapping all the

heat and sweat in between your skin and the and the garments on the outside which is completely unlike badwater which is a very dry environment and western states which you talked about earlier they're running with their sweatsuits along and kind of along the canyons and so i look at that and it's if it's all you had it wouldn't you know it's something versus nothing if you did it in the right way you know you did it kind of very surgically you didn't allow it to interfere with your overall training load and things like that but if you have other methods go and use them and kind of what you've like what you one of the things that i think kind of went unspoken when you were going through the stuff with your athletes is is for most everybody using a dry sauna is a pretty convenient option not everybody but a large majority of people they can get to a sauna within 20 or 30 minutes you know of their home at a gym it's reasonable quality and it's not that big of an ask so you might as well use it well and i think for for some of these big ticket events western states is the classic example right where many people spend years and years trying to get in everybody everybody hears the stories of oh my gosh i had no idea what i was in for with the heat right and then the inevitable issues that that come from that so making making the sacra if it is a sacrifice right to drive 15 minutes to the gym or to to get a three-month membership of you know a month-to-month membership because of

course we're not we're not talking we're not telling them to you know sign up for a gym and you know be in a gym for the rest of their lives we're saying look in in a couple of really small in a couple of really small doses you can you can accomplish this you know we're not we're not telling you to you know run on the elliptical inside the sauna you know so so i i think that i think that if you if you're the other sacrifices that athletes are making and their families are making so that they can run in these big time races you know is is uh is i think uh commensurate with going ahead and and and finding a way to get access to that sauna it's not that big of an ask that's what i kind of come back to it's like yeah even for the big ticket races most people are like yeah i'll do anything you tell me to like stand on my head and drink water that's what i'm gonna do like because they realize it is the as cliche as it sounds it's kind of like a once in a lifetime type of deal yeah um but for some of the other ones um uh i i kind of come back to the fact that if you're gonna spend 12 or 14 hours a week training a i'm not gonna max i'm not gonna ever push the maximum amount of training onto somebody that they can tolerate you always leave a little bit off the top just to accommodate for things you can you can carve out an extra hour a week or two hours a week at the very most depending upon your commute time to kind of make to to to make this work the other thing that you just mentioned that's always really interesting is the value proposition of doing this all of the

literature is based off of exercising in what i'll call an intense fashion so like at threshold or marathon pace or something more intense than an ultra marathon pace and the advantages that you can have either in a hot or a mild environment at those intensities so you're able to run faster cycle harder and things like that in a hot environment and in a cool environment if you do these heat uh heat interventions that's still true at the ultra marathon distance although the intensity is a lot lower but i think the value proposition actually extends further than this and it's that the heat is not taking up more of your physiological resources and you can re-divert those physiological resources into mainly eating and drinking i mean some of it's going to be moving down the trail a little bit more quickly but a lot of it is is like listen you're going to be able to tolerate more fluid you're going to be able to tolerate more food and move down the trail and move down the trail quicker if the heat is not zapping all of your physiological resources at the same time and when you look at a race like western states and quote unquote the heat got to them it's usually like a death by many many i'm not going to say a thousand because it's not quite that many but a death by several cuts and it's like all of the above where the heat is kind of like the primary catalyst of what initially drags them down well and you know coop my my we've worked like together long enough my favorite topic is mental

training for ultra running and let's it's talking about value proposition there's a mental if you if you've if you've put in your time in the sauna 175 degrees sauna and you know and when everybody's up at olympic valley freaking out about the weather forecast you're going to be like you know what i've done my i've done my homework i've i've i've put in my heat train i'm not going to let that take not only in the race it's going to drain my physiological energy i'm not going to let it drain my psychological or emotional energy everyone knows it's going to be hot you know everyone knows your quads are going to be sore from going down all those downhills so don't so don't waste the energy that you know the psychic energy of being like oh my god and if you've put in the work again not a huge amount 10 days six weeks out a smattering of two or every two or three days and then 10 days you know 12 or 13 days out not a big as you said not a big ask you know it's the kind of thing that an athlete could talk over with their spouse and say look i promise i'll you know i'll do all the dishes and and you know do the yard and do all this stuff when the race is over i just need these couple extra hours a week you know for these this six week period i think in addition that no doubt the physiological adaptation is the most important but there's a mental piece to it too it's like hey i know it's going to be 110 degrees down there el dorado canyon and i'm going to be fine dude that is that is so perceptive because

one of the things that i always insist that my athletes do at bad water and this is what even when i'm on a crew uh at bad water which i've done many many times now is insist that the entire crew do some type of heat training protocol and normally it's the quick and dirty one right you're just kind of doing it all the last week which ends up working out fine versus this elaborate it's not elaborate but more elaborate six week protocol that we were talking about and a big advantage in addition to the physical one because bad water there's no hiding right it's not like you can't get in your car and turn the air conditioner on right because the cars will overheat you're always exposed to the to the heat while you're out there in death valley but a big advantage of that is so that the runner is not worried about their crew because there's so many horror stories of their you know there's a medical event or they pass out i mean i've been on crews that are total shit shows and and in large part due to their fitness and their lack of heat uh acclimation and so this mental component that that you mentioned where yeah i don't have to worry about having some sort of over elaborate you know heat mitigation plan because i've done all my homework i 100 believe that that's a big component to it and it ties into this next topic that i wanted to to talk about because a lot of athletes who've never gone through this are kind of like curious about what to experience so i was wondering if you could

if you could start to describe what the athletes feedback is as they're going through one of these phases day one day two day three day four and what they kind of like normally experience because there is a a fairly stereotypical run of show whenever athletes do this that kind of emerges throughout each you know each individual well most of all for the for for the cold weather people so let's take my athlete in dubuque iowa right the first the first time he goes in there and barely makes it 15 minutes uh at 160 degrees he's like he's thinking how can i possibly get through 10 days of this yeah you know so so there's a little bit of a shocker when at first and and and i'll i'll talk about you look if you're if you're really overheating or your heart rate goes up and you need to get out of there in 10 minutes and cool down and go back in i mean there is a there is a little bit of an art and a science to introducing these protocols i think uh you know and and everyone's different all saunas have a little different max temperature you could end up in one that's like 190 degrees and you could end up in one that's 140 and be like oh 140 that's not so bad i mean i i i like i tell my athletes you know if there's a thermometer on it if you can be in the 160 to 180 range you know but but sometimes that first that first couple of bouts you know the feedback is i can't do this yeah or you know and then it might be okay well let's you know you're going to keep doing it but obviously we're going to have to play with

the the actual running training especially as we're doing this first uh the first phase but invariably coop and the adaptation happens pretty fast and they're like i'm oh i'm i'm so bummed i freaked out after the first first 10 minutes here i am just four days later and i can handle half an hour in there or 25 minutes and so that's the other part of the feedback is you know you the coach has to be like yeah you never you never trust anybody who says trust me right but the coach the coach wants to say trust me you'll feel better in three days just tough it out you know um but but invariably most of the time uh it works out and then the feedback is oh i feel much better uh you know i ran what i what i like to do also if if if it is in this situation where it's like like on the western state's calendar right now they might get to a random tuesday in may and their local temperature it's going to be 85 degrees i might just and they've done this week long this 10 day already and now they're in the they're in the maintenance phase hey go out for a run if it's going to be 85 degrees go out for a run you know at one o'clock in the afternoon and see how you feel and then the feedback is hey you know what you're right i never i never run in at one in the afternoon in 85 degrees in iowa and it feels pretty good and so then that that that feeds into okay well this is obviously working um in much the same way that that a short bout of say vo2 intervals over you know a three-week

period can can have a an aggressive adaptation you know provided they are doing them the right way recovering in the right way and so forth i think sometimes the trickier people the feedback uh is more difficult with people who kind of already live in hot or warm weather climates you take the my bay area athlete right he he you know it's cool in the morning but it's you know if he runs at one in the afternoon or two in the afternoon it's it can be 75 80 degrees it's a little bit more challenging for those people in sort of temperate climates rather than people coming straight out of you know an iowa winter yeah it's it's it's so funny we keep coming back to this you know a cute adaptation which means it happens quick and it happens what i could to what i would describe for most people as a very robust to a very robust extent it actually manifests itself physically while you're if you if you're in a sauna this obviously doesn't work for a hot water immersion bath or or even a steam room but if you're in a dry sauna you start sweating earlier and more profusely and the puddle in front of you is literally bitter bigger it's day to day maybe the first two days it's the same but it's literally day to day and to go back to your mental component i think there is absolutely something by seeing that by actually see like because you have a tangible reference point for some adaptive process which in trail and ultra

running is actually we talk about this a lot of coaches it's really hard to say yeah you're better than you were four weeks ago because of here's what i can pull out of the data because the data is really fuzzy right here it's not very fuzzy like the pools you know this big when it first starts out and then it's three times its size you know five literally like five five days later and that feeds into that into that psychological aspect that you know what i am better like that i you know i can handle this i'm making i don't know what it is but i'm making some sort of physical improvement by or physical difference at least that is going to be some sort of improvement like weeks down the line we actually get in a hot weather environment i don't think that that should be discounted when athletes go through that when especially especially in a dry sauna where it's very very very apparent and you just feel yourself sweating more your clothes are wetter the the the sweat puddle in front of you is enormously bigger like i said sometimes 3x of what it was uh when you very first started out those are those are very real manifestations of the adaptations that you are seeking if you go back in the literature you're going to sweat more you're going to sweat earlier and you're going to sweat less dilute meaning there's less uh electrolyte composition actually in in the sweat itself you literally see that after only a few days of being in the sauna and that's a very very powerful thing let me let me turn the tables a little bit and ask you a question because a lot of my athletes ask me

this what's your ideal sauna temperature if you if you if you can control it and most people are going to a facility and they can't necessarily control it and your ideal a duration of session so i like between 180 and 200 degrees for anybody who's not very very very experienced if you're doing a lot you can get into like the 220s or whatever for almost everybody 180 to 200 20 to 30 minutes and here's what i always tell people is you can err on the side of less because we're talking about acute adaptations this is not training stimulus and this is where i think coaches and athletes they get twisted because typically we think of volume as the overload right i'm doing 20 minutes of intervals or i'm doing a six hour long run or a 50k long run like that volume it sets the parameters and typically the bigger the better i mean that's that's a that's a very prototypical endurance proposition it's not necessarily the case where the difference between 20 minutes in a sauna and 30 minutes in a sauna in terms of the physiological adaptation is 50 percent more right 10 extra minutes off of 20 minutes it doesn't work like that it's more like a titration curve and so i always tell athletes that if you have if you don't have 180 degrees on if you have 160 which is more common in gyms because they don't want to like you know there's like in the one in the one of i saw it it's a deviate for the story just for a second in one of my gym there's a little red bar that starts at 180 degrees and so the gym

owners they don't want to take it past that because they feel that they're going to be liable for something if something terrible goes awry mine's set at 190 you know i mean i think you know and i like it i like i like it like that but most gyms will keep it between 180 160 and 180 simply because of you know this little red thing that kind of exists in most on on most thermostats that are in uh that are in saunas but if you have 160 degree sauna it's fine if you can only stay in it for 22 or 24 minutes it's fine you're gonna get 90 of the way there and that's totally cool in fact you could make the argument that that's the better setup because it's less stressful like you're getting 90 of the adaptation with you know far less of the uh of the kind of the of the overall stress so ideally 180 ish to 200 for 25 to 30 minutes kind of would be more ideal but there is nothing wrong and you're going to get a whole lot of adaptation out of things on the lower end of the scale now if you want to talk about minimum effective dose which i think is important in this i think below 140 it's not worth it and below 15 minutes it's not worth it so if you you kind of like have to exclude the edges of the bell curve you know when you're talking about these things like the lower end of the bell curve it's not hot enough to induce the adaptation and the upper side of the bell curve it's while you might be able to tolerate it there's no additional adaptation like if you're in a 220 degree sauna for

30 minutes like people can tolerate that like that's that's very well documented you're going to lose a lot more sweat but there's no additional adaptation you're trying to get you're trying to get the middle of it and i think that there's a you know fairly tight and defined range there and as long as you're there i think it's totally fine and my one more follow-up we know we know that the that there's a deterioration you know two three percent a day i i tend to say you know when they're doing the final build up during the final dose during the uh taper if the race is a saturday race the last day in the sauna would be wednesday it just seems to me that thursday and friday would be days to just you might lose a couple percent but uh you know i don't i don't want them i don't want athletes to have any additional stress in those last two days do you you kind of agree with that yeah i think i think two days out is totally fine some people will prefer one or three but you kind of split the middle in two days it's totally fine we always have to be careful when we mention these percentages because people will interpret them as an x percent deterioration in everything and that's not necessarily the case right so when we're saying this like okay it's a two to three percent per day deterioration when you aggregate all of the individual components of how you improve through a heat acclimation protocol which includes you know plasma volume expansion and how uh how

much earlier you sweat and how much you sweat per hour like when you kind of aggregate all of those things it's roughly a two to three percent per day deterioration now that doesn't mean that your tolerance to the heat and your performance in the heat deteriorates by two to three percent it's much much much much less than that so when athletes are thinking about this you hit the nail on the on the head you have to think about what's going to be the bigger driver and certainly rest and relaxation and just having the confidence that you've done all of that that's going to be a far bigger driver than trying to like maintain that last little bit on the flip side of that kind of going off of the minimum effective dose theme i i think it gets problematic and this happens with athlete i have this situation with an athlete right now he's going to be traveling internationally to uh uh uh to to like one of those four desert races where he's not going to have access to a sauna for like five or six days i do i do think that that the value proposition gets tricky in that in that situation where you're out for that period of time and you're going to see that amount of deterioration kind of happen without any additional stimulus and if you happen to be in that logistical uh situation normally it's normally it's when you're traveling or something like that you can take a top off you know type of uh uh approach where you research hotels and gyms kind of along where you're traveling and maybe it's not

every day for those five to seven days or whatever it is but if you get in two additional exposures or three additional exposures that could or when you get to the you know you get to the host venue and you're running in 90 degree weather that kind of like takes care of the maintenance part of it i think you can kind of play that game as well so i encourage athletes when they're kind of working this out to be mindful of their travel and how long they're going to be out of it and if they're going to be out for i usually set like a five day kind of cut off i think it's worth your while to find some way to hack it together so something together during those last five days that that that balances a little bit of maintenance there i wanted to i wanted to dovetail to uh on your your your previous comment about uh working with badwater crews i insist that you know i i meet with when i have western states athlete i i meet with their i ask to meet with their crews up in olympic valley you know go to go to go to starbucks or something and i do the exact same i mean obviously they're not going to heat train but i do the exact same thing of the you know you're going to be standing in michigan bluff and the sun you know for eight hours there's there's no water it's pavement you know you're you're going to have to hike down to ride some you know rickety old yellow school bus to get to right so you it's a little bit of mental training but your point it's not directly related to our topic but the the sort of you don't want the runner to worry about their crew right i mean i've seen these

crews dragging huge coolers you know down down the road to michigan bluff and it's like by the time they get there they're they need to go to the medical tent yeah michigan bluff is a mash unit most years and like 25 of the occupants of the mash unit are the or are the ill-prepared crews so anybody listening out there that's got crew for bad water western states or any of these hot weather races like do yourself a favor instruct your crew a little bit because it's it's really meaningful to you at the end of the day that you don't have to worry about it and agonize over it during the race and you know and it's always obviously the the biggest thing is it's safer um so we've talked about crews we've talked about kind of like other caveats with real world like application and interferences that can kind of uh come into uh come into account what other things since you've done this a lot with your athletes what other things have kind of like come up during the course of this that isn't that aren't going to fit the prototypical you know box that we try to put things in and how have you kind of worked around those and formulated best practices to ensure that the athlete is still trying to get the adaptations that they want despite whatever logistical hurdle or constraint or whatever that they that they might have well but by far the biggest is when some some life event comes up they have a last minute business trip and they're not going to be able to

get to a sauna or they're going to they're going to try but it might fail or or you know a family member gets sick or those kinds of uh and and frankly i think because of those unexpected life events it's it's all the more reason to have as you referred to you know way back in the beginning to have the two phases because it almost gives you the the first phase gives you a little insurance you know against it against so let's say you're in the last 10 days and you're called away for an emergency business trip you know eight days out and seven days out from the race and you're not able to so athletes might freak out about that and then i might say kind of like similar to your four desert athlete well look if you can get away at lunch hour during the business trip and it's 90 degrees go for your run then it's going to be better even just go for a walk in the park you know and and try and walk in the places where there's no shade i mean it's it's weird but i i tend not to say drive around with your heat on i mean i i i i will admit that i was guilty of that back in the day before before all this science came by the way there's a whole podcast and stories about how we used to do it in 2000 2001 2002 because it was i mean dr lind dr bob lind the famous western states doctor who studied this a lot i mean he had the 990 theory right nine days 90 minutes 90 degrees uh and you know it's not the worst thing in the world but of course we've evolved we've evolved from there but uh that

was kind of what what we all lived with in those early or for me early years who knows what they did in the 80s 90s um but but i would say life life events are the are the hurdles um sometimes i've had two athletes just really have an adverse reaction to the sauna kind of like getting rashes and i mean this is getting specific but but they skin irritation and things like that which kind of gets in their head you know 10 days out from the race and um a big race and and they come out of a they get a rash or or something like that so the health there are potential i i think it's a small amount but there are potential health concerns and and so that's where i i similar to you would say you know a little bit is better than none and so if you realize that you know 25 minutes you're going to break out and get a rash and you know everyone's going to worry about you but you can be in there for 10 you know for 15 20 minutes not get the rash or maybe you need to do a sauna one day and a run in the heat the next you try to find a way to get something but i'd say life events and sort of weird unpredicted responses to being in that environment um and often both those cases they then freaked out and said oh my gosh if i can't sit in the sauna for 20 minutes before breaking out in a rash what's going to happen to me in the race right so well i'll take i mean you mentioned all the kind of the oddball

life events that happen i'll take the mix and match approach when those when that's the case and what i mean by that is a sauna one day hot weather run the next day sauna you know two days later another hot you know like that that kind of thing i'll take that because i know that at the end of the day they'll be similar enough you're that you're going to get it that you're going to get it close it might not be ideal very few things in life are ideal and perfect it might not be ideal and perfect but you're gonna i think it's worth it particularly if you're managing the rest of the training load correctly even to do those imperfect things and that's another thing that athletes kind of like get in their heads it's like well if i can't do this elaborate thing that we laid out right six weeks out you do this and you need maintenance and then 10 days out you do this other thing if they can't do that they're like all right screw it you know because i can't i can only do half of that i think that this is one of those interventions that if you can get it close if you can get it like 70 or 80 of the way there it's worth it for a hot for a hot weather event because the as we mentioned at the onset the adaptations are robust they're acute you can get them fairly quickly and it doesn't have to be picture perfect to make an impact and i kind of want to leave with that i'm gonna put you on the spot a little bit but i think it's i think it's fair since you work with a lot of western states runners and so it may or may you probably don't have to do a lot of convincing with those athletes but with some other athletes sometimes it does what in your estimation at the end of the day

is the the performance impact on it like if you could quantify you don't do a heat protocol for western states and then you do one what is that delta for most people because people are going to size that up in their head they're like oh god i gotta go do this and we're like what is it really worth at the end of the day and i mean in its most extreme it could be worse depending on how fast you are just sort of physiologically gifted or not it could be the difference between finishing and not yeah uh i mean that's that's the most extreme case but but let's say you're a you're an athlete and we know there's a lot of these there you're an athlete that's qualified for western states would say a 28 hour 100 miler at rocky raccoon or um or you'll have alina and you're you're basically running you know you're you're a potential golden hour finisher at western states right which means you're going to be going you're going to have two hot days you know you're you're at least going to you're going to have the one and you're going to hit the canyons at the hottest point in the day and then you're going to you're going to get out you're the next morning you know when you're at the lowest point on the course and it heats up again you're going to be heating up again so at its most raw level the difference between heat training and not could be the difference between finishing and not finishing you know with a lot of the athletes that that you you and i know we work with you know they they they

get into the race they sign up for coaching and they you ask them what their goals are and they say silver buckle 24 hours yeah and and that can be the big that that can be a big difference you know one of the things that that the heat stress does to many western states athletes is they get to these heat of the day aid stations michigan bluff we've talked about already forest hill and they just collapse in a chair and sit there for 15 minutes and that sometimes they kind of have to they have to put ice on their head they have to get their core temperature down they have but the clock's ticking in those moments you know and if instead of that if you can douse yourself with water keep moving down the trail you know uh i've i i do think doing the heat doing the heat training can be the difference between between success and uh failure both in the in the golden hour runners and the 24 hour runs and then the last would be i have a few you know sub potential sub 20 hour runners you know potential top top finishers top 10 finishers and at that level i think doing the heat training is perhaps most critical just because there's such a small margin for error um and there tends to be a higher dropout rate uh for those front end runners because they are pushing the envelope uh and again if you can remove that variable as a top end runner you know in my in my my experience running western states i found in the hotter years the the uh attrition rate was much more extreme you know i i can think of um i can think

of years where i arrived at michigan bluff and was in 20th place and finished seventh and i can think of years that's a really hot year and i can think of years i arrived in 20th place and finished 14th a not very hot year and it's got to be there's got to be a correlation right between the level of preparation for the heat and how those hot years impact people um so that's that's been my experience and and i think you know for for for for a coach uh again because it's not a huge ask uh and it's this once in a lifetime thing i think that it's um i think it's i think it's completely worth it yeah i kind of pit like performance is always multi-factorial right that's and especially in ultra marathon when we're learning this more and more as the research comes out is we can't really tie certain traditional physiological measurements to outcome whether it's vo2 max or lactate threshold or running economy or like stiffness or power or whatever it's all very spurious you know and and so it makes our jobs as coaches really hard because we can push and pull different physiological buttons you know and what would be the pulling lever buttons and levers um to to elicit adaptation but at the end of the day if you don't know how meaningful those adaptations are it's it's hard to rank order them right that's something that we constantly go through as a coach and i think that this is one of them when you look at their literature it's you know let's ballpark it at five percent right whether you're doing a time trial uh time trial or vo2 max test or something like that from an acclimated individual in

the heat to an unacclimated individual in the heat i i think in an ultra marathon context it's bigger than that i think it's roughly 10 and that's that's my and that's totally it's not a guess but it's an educated extrapolation from the existing research and how those physiological manifestations actually play out in an ultra marathon context i think in a hot weather race it's ballpark 10 meaning it's not i don't think it's two percent i don't think it's that that small and i don't think it's 20 i don't think it's that big split the difference it's about 10 for most individuals and then when you work the math out on that to your point that turns a 29 that turns a 31 hour finisher into a 29 hour finisher or 27 27 and a half hour finisher i'm trying to do my math in my head real quick but but it can very easily turn somebody that is on the borderline of one of those cutoffs whether it's the race cutoff or a silver buckle cutoff or whatever from going over the line to another line over the line under the line back back and forth like that percentage can make a pretty a a pretty huge difference once you sum sum total at all i i don't know if that's if that is the exact right answer but i think that that's a reasonable one when athletes are thinking about an intervention to do meaning if you get everything right roughly 10 is reasonable so if you get 90 percent of the way there you get nine percent i mean that's that's a good like if you told somebody

hey listen do this and you're going to get nine percent better almost everybody's going to take that especially if it's a low cost if it's a low cost intervention that's why i think that these conversations are important because at the end of the day we can do a hundred different interventions not just related to heat stress but related to everything i mean coaching is an intervention altitudes and intervention heats and intervention you can have nutritional interventions and things like that and you always have to determine the cost benefit and and that's big like if i like i'm not i don't want to discount it like i think 10 in a hot weather race that's a big one but i think that that's a reasonable expectation of which you don't have a benchmark against unless you had a before and after you know but well i also coop i also think i mean if i i'd love to do this a study of hot weather races and to get a correlation of people who drop out because of stomach problems and people and and whether or not they did a heat training protocol before you know we we know that the the stomach problems result in the bodies you know the body is working so hard to cool itself that it doesn't have the resources to digest the calories to get the nutrition and so forth and then the nausea inevitably follows and next thing you know you know the trains off the tracks uh i i think it's a way to mitigate against those inevitable stomach problems you know everybody battles a sour stomach at some point in a hot weather race how they manage it how well they're prepared for it or whether it to them is a hot weather race right you know if they've adapted if they've adapted to the heat 95 degrees might

not be a hot weather race and they can process uh process nutrition in the way that a normal person might in 70 degrees so i think there's a lot of layers and i i think you're right i think that 10 is probably about right i could even squeeze it up to 12 or 13 you know when it's if you're because i i'm gonna tell my athletes it's 20 so that's a lot i'll tell you what if you could if you could i mean 10 training intervention is pretty magic you know i mean that's that's i don't use that word very lightly i mean that's a big training intervention normally if we can get a few percent here or there but i think in a hot weather race i realistically think that's the difference and yes you're going to find athletes that do very well at those races that didn't do any of those things to which i will always say they were more than 10 better than the rest of the field to start out with i mean that's just like right so they would have won by more like or outperformed by even more if they had done it i mean that's always that's kind of always the case i hope maybe somebody maybe we can convince somebody over at western states to include that in the runner survey because they already have coaching there which i'm the first time i saw that i was shocked i was like that's kind of cool like i use that as a coach and yeah we should be beating the median and the average and the 24 hour cutoffs and things like that if we're collectively as coaches and we're not the only people in the room that are doing this doing our jobs we should be to one side of the bell curve um uh if they're if they're

taking that stat maybe that can be an additional one that we can uh include because i do think that there could be some some insight there despite all of the issues with you know the biases that presents in terms of are you getting people that are just more prepared in general or whatever but interesting to to look at nonetheless all right andy we batted it around enough man that was that was all right this was great yeah this is great i hope i hope that athletes kind of come away with some some kind of like really practical like cold face view of of doing things like this because now is the time this podcast is going to come out a week from now which is what's the date today april 15th so that's april 22nd this is going to come out it's the right time for it it's the right time to think about it not you know on the week before western states or the week before wasatch or the week before bad water like you need to start thinking about these things now i'm going to have links in the show notes to the article that i referenced as well as a really fantastic review piece from last week's re-release uh julian perryard that are kind of easy reads and even if you just wanted to skip to the more pertinent parts of the summary and read the practical pieces of it um i think that it would be worth uh athletes time so links to all that will be in the show notes so go and check those out andy do you have any last minute pieces of advice or anybody i hope all the listeners know

that our our host here is going to have his own hot weather adventure uh in early may at the coca donat 250 so hopefully you can come back on uh on a KoopCast and talk about how you are how your two phase uh tactics if you got a 10 bump out of it yeah there we go no pressure in your 250 mile journey across the arizona desert yeah and if i totally melt i'm gonna have to come up with a completely different strategy right that's the thing about putting yourself out there you know you do these things they turn out great and you're the hero they don't turn out great and you're the goat so you'll have a great race down there it'll be fun to follow along i'm looking forward to it i do hope it's hot because to your psychological point just i'm in the maintenance phase right now i'm starting to feel not to sound too cocky but i'm starting to feel pretty bulletproof against the heat like i went down there i ran a couple days in super hot weather it was kind of i was no worse for wear so we'll see proof's always in the pudding right that's right thanks coo yeah thanks all right folks there you have it there you go thanks to coach ajw for coming on the podcast today i hope everybody got some insightful information on how to implement this for yourself as i mentioned from the onset i do think that these types of interventions have a very high rate of return

for the investment involved is one of the best things you can do for yourself it's something that we've learned a tremendous amount about throughout the course of my certainly my coaching career but even over the course of the past five to seven years in terms of how to actually do these correctly where they have the least negative impact of training and the most positive impact on the outcome i appreciate the heck out of each and every one of the listeners out there if you like this podcast remember there are no sponsors there are no endorsers and there never will be on this podcast feel free to share it with your friends and your training partners it means a tremendous amount to me when i hear stories of people who listen to this podcast and they take something from it out into the real world you can help out a lot by just sharing it with the people that you love and the people that are training for these events that is it for today folks and as always we will see you out on the trails