How to Design Ultramarathon Training Camps with CTS Coaches Ryne Anderson and Cliff Pittman | KoopCast Episode #185 (2022)

Trail and Ultrarunners, what is going on? What's happening? Welcome to another episode of the Koop Cast. As always, I'm your humble host, Coach Jason Koop, and on the podcast today, we have another one of our coach round tables, and this time it is about a topic that is going to be of particular importance for a lot of you athletes that are training for upcoming races that are looking to put a little bit of an extra oomph into your training, or maybe you're behind the eight ball and you want to catch up. This is all about how to design training blocks and training camps in preparation for your summer's ultras. In order to get to the root of this problem, I invited two of our crack coaches on the podcast today. We have got Ryan Anderson, who you guys will remember from a previous podcast, and Cliff Pittman, who I currently coach and is also one of our new CTS coaches. And we discuss the very practical aspect of how to design training blocks to fit within the constrains of your life and also be of particular importance to your event. And also we discuss the very different little nuances and very specific little techniques of how to arrange those big training weekends such that you get the most bang for your buck and you can avoid any of the pitfalls, which are oh so common when designing these types of aspects. I always have a lot of fun when I discuss this because the origin story of a lot of these training blocks goes back to some of our original training camps, which we used to host out of my house in Colorado Springs, Colorado. And we'd bring in all different athletes of all different levels of experience training for all different types of events, and we would put them through a three-day training camp that that departed and arrived from my house every single day. It was a real treat. We'd have dinners there and things like that. And whenever I discuss this particular topic, it brings back a lot of those very fond memories. So, with that as a little bit of a backdrop, I'm getting right out of the way. Here's my conversation with coaches Ryan and Coaches Cliff, all about how to design training blocks to fit your schedule. Let's do it, man. It's the this is the time of year, right? Everybody is getting ready for their races. As I was mentioning, off air, um, I'm still in I'm still in Truckee, California. I haven't made it too far away from Western States, and a big and a big reason for that is like this is the busy season. This is the busy season for coaches. We're always like putting the last final touches on our athletes' training programs. And whenever that's the case, and you guys have been coaches for long enough, that you can recognize this, but for the from the audience's perspective, there it's usually a lot more workload for us during this time because of the frequency of contact, and you want to make sure that everything's right, and you know, now everybody's getting COVID, so we're having to manipulate training, you know, left, left, right, and center. But it's it's always been this time of year, it has just always been really, really hectic for uh for coaches. One of the reasons it's hectic, and this is what I want to talk about today, is a very specific programming element that I think is critically important for athletes that are training for ultra marathon, but it's not new. Um, I was originally introduced to this training camp concept way back in the early 2000s. If you kind of go back to like my cycling coaching heritage, where we would take a page out of the playbook of the professional cycling teams that all went to Solvaine, California, and that's near the Santa Barbara area. Most trail runners will kind of like not recognize that specific town, but they'll recognize Santa Barbara for their great um uh for their great trails. But the reason that all the professional cycling teams, particularly the U.S. domestic uh cycling teams in the early 2000s and late 2000s, is because it's the best cycling in North America. You've got climbs in every single direction, you've got any number of routes, it's a relatively small community, so you don't really get harassed. The roads are very, very quiet, so you don't have to deal with traffic. And you can take a group of 15 or 20 or 25 professional cyclists and go on a six or seven-hour training ride and really only see a couple of cars. And so much so that we actually opened a training facility to deploy all of these training camps uh out of that area. Um, so what was once a training camp that we ran out of the San Inez Marriott, and I've spent more days there than I care to than I care to confess to. Um we we we relocated that that single training camp into an actual center, and it was very, very successful uh for a number of years. And so now enter ultra-marathon training, where we can look at this blueprint of it's an ultra-endurance event, right? The events are six to twenty or thirty hours in length. We have normal people that are training for them, and part of the part of a key element of their entire training process is squirreling away a couple of weekends during the actual training process to put in big kind of copious amounts of volume. And I wanted to get you guys on the horn on the podcast today to to basically describe what that looks like from a practical perspective with some very specific examples so that the listeners out there can identify with one of those examples, either because they're training for something similar in terms of the you know, the race or even the same time frame, and also who the athlete is, and basically use it as kind of a blueprint. Um, because it's one of those things where I do think that if athletes do this correctly, there's the the benefit far outweighs how much volume they actually do or how much workload they're actually able to do. There's a disproportionate amount of benefit to the workload increase. And it's I I just feel that's something that every athlete should put on their calendar. So Ryan, we're gonna start with you, and let's kind of go through a like a very practical example of these types of things that you are setting up for your athletes either recently or ones that are coming up. So go ahead and describe that for the listeners.

So this athlete I'm going to discuss, uh, they're training for hard rock. So we're about three, four weeks out now. Um, she's did the bulk of her training. So um the often you saying the hay is in the barn by now.

Yeah, it's getting there.

Yeah, yeah. And so um, she has a very unique work schedule in that she's a nurse, she works three to four 12-hour shifts a week. Um, so then those other days she has off. So this athlete is very unique and that you can really uh implement this training camp type scenario. Um, and as you get specific to a race like Hard Rock, where it needs to be as a big volume as that athlete can sustain, this works out nicely because you can chunk three days together of a lot of volume because especially in the last eight weeks to Hard Rock, you don't really need to be doing intensity. Maybe you do more intensity if you're limited for time. Um, but in this case, if you yeah, if you've got your typical Saturday, Sunday off or people doing their, they work their 10, eight days and have the Friday off every other day. Like whenever you can find days in your schedule to concentrate more volume, like get the and it doesn't have to be the traditional back-to-back, you know. Um for this athlete, it could be they had Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday off. And it's like, well, okay, you got that whole day off. Let's get in as much volume as you can. Um, and that's yeah, again, hard rock, obviously a lot of climbing, get as specific as possible. And yeah, if you're not picking a four-hour route where you're running the whole time, you're hiking a lot because that's as specific as you need to be.

You mentioned something really interesting. So you're actually leaning into the schedule that she sh that she should that she kind of naturally has, right? If she has a three to four day kind of shift work schedule, usually what that presents is a three or four-day open schedule of which constitutes like a weekend and one other day, or maybe it's even three or four days kind of like during the week. Am I envisioning that correctly, where you're kind of like using the natural attributes of her schedule to be as conducive as possible to these types of training camps?

Yes, absolutely. Yeah, because she's got her schedule a month in advance, so it's all right there. So can make the outline, and hopefully everything goes to plan and we follow it. But obviously, individualized coaching and getting up to the volume she's doing is really pushing the limits of her training because you want to do for a big race like this. Um, so the the second big piece that comes in with that of trying to get as much volume as we can in this phase and utilizing, yeah, the maybe it's two days off in a row, or or two days, like Monday, Tuesday, and Friday, and she's gonna get her training. Like those are really big days, and that increases your risk for getting a niggle, getting an injury. So the communication piece also has to be big in terms of, oh, I finished today, felt great, perfect, let's keep it going. Or this came up, um, foot started hurting really bad, and it's four hours tomorrow. She can't not let me know that and just go straight into it. So um, that's another thing with the training camp piece of maybe your typical like Western States training camp weekend, it's three days in a row. A good plan should have potentially definitely some recovery time after that and leading into it so they're fresh for that training camp weekend.

So you mentioned you mentioned something that's kind of interesting. I want to come back to this. Is I started off with the podcast saying that you know, this is the typical busy time of year for coaches because we're trying to make everything as specific and accurate and just detailed as possible. Part of that, which you just alluded to, is being very reactive during these training camps, because as you mentioned, they're it typically you're increasing your volume. We're gonna talk about what that increase is gonna look like, but you also want to be sensitive to how they're feeling during the camp itself, particularly if they're DIYing it and they've got the flexibility to do a little bit more, a little bit less one day or another. And normally, just for the listeners, and you know, this is probably a little bit of uh coaching inside baseball, what that results is is a lot of text messages right around 7 to 9 p.m. on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday night that you're responding to to make sure that the volume is appropriate. But that that inside baseball side, Ryan, let's paint the picture of what the training looks like first. So go through before kind of what the week would look like in terms of daily volume, and then go through what the training looks like just to paint the picture of what the discrepancy between those two those two time frames are.

So, first it starts with the unique schedule, obviously. Work backwards. Okay, this is my schedule for the next two weeks. I can get off work early on Friday, or uh Sun has a baseball game on Sunday, work backwards from that and figure out your schedule. Um, so go from there. And then okay, are you coming in recovered? Are you coming in fresh? Go and like back to the scheduling piece. You have to take a full assessment of everything that's going on professionally, family-wise, and and take in all that stress because maybe maybe the the mom of two also working a full-time job, she can't get in the big back-to-back weekend. So she's got to make the most of maybe four hours on a Saturday. So that's that's starting very broad and somewhat vague of like, okay, work backward from their schedule. Um, and then if we're talking in this last six to eight weeks, whenever it's getting close to the race, well, what is your race? What are the demands? Let's get specific. Um, as I said, hard rock, lots of hiking, boom. Um, let's say you're doing um Rocky Raccoon in the winter. Well, that's that's kind of a lot of running, so you need to be more focused towards that. Um, so work backwards.

What's the the I'm gonna interrupt here because I'm trying to get this, I'm trying to get it specific out of you. What's the typical daily volume for this particular athlete training for hard rock? I you know, she's probably gonna finish in 40 hours-ish just to paint the picture of this athlete. What's the typical daily volume compared to what you're prescribing on the training camp?

So her daily volume, so she had she has a big work week where it's Monday, Tuesday, Saturday, Sunday. So she's got three days in the middle there. Um so we started six hours because she's coming into that rested.

That's the training block. This the six hours.

So the training block over three days is 13 hours over those three days.

Okay. And then how does it get how does that get distributed?

So in this case, it's over three days successively. Um go, she's most fresh on this first day, so let's do the biggest day, six hours. Boom. Okay, and then we're gonna decrease because she's gonna accumulate more fatigue each day. And why why 13 hours? Why not 14 or 10? And then it gets more individual to the athlete. Like, look back at your training history, look back over the several weeks and months. What was the most training you fit in that was sustainable, and then try to try to go over that by 20 to 30 percent if it's possible. So if 10 hours a week was the most um sustainable, biggest block you did, and if you can carve out the time, try to what would that be?

10 times. 13. So 30 percent.

Yeah, yeah. Go to 12, 13 hours per week.

Um, so so but the framework, this is what I'm trying to get at that the listeners can start to internalize. If you have a normal week, they're training 10 hours a week, that's great because that makes the math easy, and I love easy math. They're training 10 hours a week, and what you're doing is you're taking 130% of that 10 hours a week and you're compressing it down into three days. Essentially, what that means is it's over a double if they're training six days a week, right? Once again, I like the I like the easy math. They're doing 10, you know, they're doing 10 hours a week. Let's just say it's over five hours a day, or sorry, sorry over five days per week. That's two hours per day. So you're saying you're you're taking that to six hours, that's a double or a triple on the normal daily volume compared to what they would normally do. Is that accurate? Okay. And what I wanna what I want to point out is when you look at look at that on paper, it looks like a gigantic jump. Like you would bring if you brought that schematic into some sort of coaching 101 session or whatever without any context, people would look at you and go, What in the world are you doing? You're gonna kill this person because you're you know tripling or doubling their daily volume over a three-day period. But they end up handling it just fine. So the next thing I want to discuss, Ryan, you can take a first crack at that, this, and then we'll go over to Cliff's example is why is that the case, right? If they can handle it for three days, what surrounding the camp are you doing such they can handle it? And we talked about this a little bit uh earlier. What during the camp itself, what checks and balances are you putting on the athlete during the camp itself to make sure that it is in fact sustainable, particularly for the athletes that haven't done it before?

So, yeah, going into the camp, especially for an athlete who has never tried this format before, it if you take your typical three-week block, it can't be in that second week where you've already did in the 10-hour example you did, you did 12 hours before or anything like that. You you have to come into this very fresh and ready to roll. And then as best you can, it's not only getting getting the miles, getting the hours in, you've also really got to focus on nutrition and hydration. Yeah, runs because if you if you're just focused on the six hours or whatever, and you're you're being lazy and doing 150, 200 calories an hour, you're those next two days are not gonna go well. But that run's not gonna end as well as it needs to. So it's it's a big, big opportunity to really practice your nutrition and hydration. So that's that's great for 100 milers, obviously. And you're gonna recover quicker and you're gonna be better fueled going into that, into the next day, the next two days, whatever it is.

Here's so for the listeners, here's what we did at our Memorial Day training camp that I used to host out of my house in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Very similar setup. We did it over Memorial Day weekend. It was a three-day camp. Most people came in and they ended up doubling or tripling their volume, very kind of similar. We had uh both an intensity and a volume focus, so that structure was a little bit different where we did the intensity first and then we kind of did the volume second, but that's neither here nor there. One of the things that we did to catalyze what you were just talking about, Ryan, is we had everybody keep all of their wrappers, not that they would throw them out of the trail anyway, but very deliberately keep all of their wrappers from all their nutrition products in a little plastic bag. And at the end of the day, they dump that out on a table and we would just count everything up. And it was simple math: this many calories, this much fluid, this much sodium. And we literally filled out a report card for them for every single athlete, and graded them on calories per hour, fluid per hour, and the amount of sodium per uh per milliliter per liter of fluid that they were taking in, and literally gave them an ABCDF grade based on a 10% deviation from what was ideal. So if we told them they needed 200 to 300 calories an hour and they were at 180, that's 10% below the range, so they'd get a B, right? And what we did, what what we were really doing that to illustrate kind of these fundamental components of nutrition that you need to keep in mind during ultramarathon, calories, fluid, and electrolyte composition. But it ended up having the side benefit, Ryan, to your point, that they were able to recover more quickly, handle the workload better because they're not so chronically under hydrated and under-fueled during the run. And ultimately, what that is going to produce is a better adaptation. Because anytime you're more on top of your fueling from a during perspective, it'll typically result in a soup, like a more superior generalized adaptation. Um, and in addition to that, whenever they would finish, we'd shove a recovery drink in their hand and make sure they downed it kind of like right then and right there. And the final part that like catalyzed all of this, you know, increase in training load and then being able to handle it, is because it was at my house, once everybody, and I didn't realize this going into it. This, so I'm not taking credit for this master design. It was just an observation that uh we made afterwards, is that when everybody finished, we would chill the F out for 20 or 40 minutes, as opposed to getting in your car, going back to your office, showering for three minutes, jumping out of the shower, putting on your suit and tie, and jumping into your next meeting within a 30-minute time frame. We would literally sit sit out, we'd sit out on the porch, we sit out in the yard, we'd play with the dogs, we'd hang out with each other, kind of swap war stories. And that like come down from that big training activity is just another piece of this training camp puzzle that everybody can kind of put in their pocket. And and the way to bring that to light is to try to put as much of the other stuff on the back burner as possible when you're doing this, so that you're not waking up at two in the morning to do a six hour run and then you have a board meeting at 8 15, right? That's just a kind of a recipe for you know over fatigue and and and and disaster. So, really important part that you just Mentioned is um making sure that all the nutrition and the recovery elements are in there as well, in order to in order to facilitate these things. And I would not take that normal two to three X that we've talked about this on a few podcasts before, and it kind of comes to light in practice. I would not normally take that if those things are not in place.

Two quick asides to that, and then we'll let Cliff jump in. So if you're counting your calories per hour, you need to look at the carb distribution of that. Because, okay, it is annoying to carry three gels to get 300 calories an hour. A nut butter packet or a different type of gel could have 250 to 300 calories in one pack, but that's going to be mostly fat. And that's something you can use later in a long race or towards the end of the run. But if you're if you're focusing on that one gel that hits the 200 to 300 calorie mark or whatever maybe homemade concoction you have, it still needs to be mostly carbs. You need to account for that. Don't just look at calories, look at your carbs. And 60-minute run, especially now that's summertime, ultra runners can get through that without water. 90-minute run can get through that without calories. But during your during all training, if if you're finishing the run behind, you're playing catch up the rest of the time. So even though it's annoying to carry a handheld, your vest or whatever, take that stuff. Stay ahead of the game with your hydration and nutrition.

Well, and this is why habits are so important early, right? If you start to set the habit of going through whatever your whatever or whatever you think your race day nutrition program is going to be, if you start doing that during the two-hour runs, the three-hour runs, the four-hour runs, even though you can get away with, in quotes, not doing that, or doing it to 50 or 70% or something like that, if you start the habit of doing 100% all the time, once you jump up to the six, eight, and 10-hour runs, it's like habit. And you don't get caught behind the eight ball. Because it is a big deal. And once again, leaning on this experience that we've had at our Colorado Springs camp, I do notice a difference with the athletes who get all Fs on their nutrition report card the first day, and the athletes that get A's in the way that they can recover and repeat the effort day after day after day. Because by the time they've given themselves an F or they've earned the F, it's a little bit too late because they've dug a little bit of a hole. And that's fine. That's part of the learning lesson, right? They just have to go slower the next day, or you know, it's a little bit harder for them the next day. There's really no huge consequence to it. But they certainly don't recover as well. And the third day actually illuminates this the best because usually it's another day that it takes to like compound the fatigue. But they certainly don't recover and perform as well as the athletes who have been to the camp before. They kind of know the grading system, they know what to do, they know they're going to get hammered on their nutrition, and they are stellar in that first day nutrition, uh, in that first day uh nutrition program. Um, they just end up recovering and performing a whole heck of a lot better, particularly, particularly on the on the third day. Um before we let you go, Ryan, and we switch over to Cliff, I want to bring out one additional element of this because you have an athlete that is that has a very specific terrain requirement that they're going to have during the race. And it's hard rock, where it's all hiking on the uphills and hopefully all running on the downhills with very, very, very, very little flat level running. And that type of terrain, in the inclusive of the altitude that the race is at, is very unique to that race. I mean, even if you go over in Europe, you you would have a hard time finding something that is as similar to hard rock as that course is actually going to present. And so, what considerations did you make for that particular element, the climbing, the descending, and the altitude for this athlete? Because I'm assuming she doesn't live in Silverton, Colorado and has access to the course 24-7.

No, unfortunately not. Um, and then this is where training can become a bit contrived, unfortunately, if you're you're limited by your terrain, but that's got to be part of the conversation. It's like, okay, where can you get to your steepest climbs? Where can you get to your rockiest trails? And it's it's on the plan of like, okay, four-hour run, hiking, climbing, get to this trail that we've identified as as as similar as it can be, because nothing, yeah, depending on where they are, can be as similar, but it's got to be specific and planned out. And yeah, maybe you can't get a lot of climbing in one run, but maybe you can get on that technical trail to mimic that. Um, but it's yeah, figuring out what you have to work with around you, and unfortunately, it may become a bit contrived when you have race demands like hard rock that are an outlier, but it's a big race, you want to do your best, so sorry.

Yeah, I mean, no, I mean that's kind of our job is just to lay it out how it is. And it it once again, if you're presenting these one or two or maybe even three-shot camp opportunities to athletes to get big training bumps, if they're gonna go out of their way to put their life aside for a few days, it usually is worth it for the additional extra effort of trying to include specificity as much as you can get it. You know, everybody wants to get hyper-specific and go and train out on the course and you know, do all these things. And that's nice. That's that that's you know, gold standard type of deal. But the fact of the matter is, is most people, A, if it's a hard rock course, you usually don't have access to all of it until a couple weeks before the race, just with the snow melt and everything. B, usually it's more of an inconvenience than it's worth to even do that when the courses are clear. So you just get it as close as possible. And to your point, Ryan, if if you have to over-contrive it and make it kind of silly, then you know, on a what's the lifetime race, something that's super hard, especially if there's little margin for error, it's kind of worth it, you know, and you just gotta kind of suck it up because if you know you end up not squeezing the last, you know, five percent out of training and you spent hundreds of hours of doing it, you're gonna kick yourself in the butt for not, you know, having that extra, you know, that extra little bit when you actually need it. So Cliff, we're gonna switch over to you now. Same setup let's describe the athlete and the race that they're training for and how you set up a training camp for them.

Yeah, absolutely. So this athlete actually just raced, and he just came off uh the Western States uh finish just last weekend. So um he came to me in in in January. He was uh he last year he did uh Western States qualifier with one ticket and got in. And so this is uh everybody's jealous. No, he was the one percent, right? And so he he got in, he he knew this was gonna be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Uh coaching made sense, and so we got to start working together in January. So we had our long ramp up time, and we spent you know, January, February doing a lot of high-intensity work, uh, low volume training, and then um we we we worked into you know the tempo block and and and medium volume, and then we got into the more race-specific endurance work uh about 10 weeks out. And so we started planning this training camp. And we planned a camp for five weeks before race day. And one of the things that we learned in the training process is just that um after big efforts, he did a 50 miler in April April, and it just took a little bit for him to bounce back. And so one of the adjustments we made in that race-specific block as the volume was getting its highest, which he averaged about 10 hours a week, um, which was good for him, and um you know, we got up to like 12, 14, and then with the training camp, it was a 21-hour week. Um, but we we noticed that we could kind of concentrate that workload on the back end, and so we did a lot of recovery, you know, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then heavy on the last four days of the week. Um going back to his specifics, he had a pretty traditional uh availability, right? So it was like a standard like Tuesday through Sunday with wide open opportunity for training. So he didn't have a lot of constraints. But one of the unique things, and actually it's not unique, it's probably very relatable to everybody listening right now, is he lives in a part of the country in Arkansas, and he didn't have the means and the availability to go out and go to the Western States training camp or train on any trails out on the West Coast. And so we kind of went into that a little bit blind and did our best with the terrain and then the elevations that we had here in Arkansas. And so um, you know, we did a pretty good job with that. And the training camp, it's it's kind of funny. He you look at his Strava, he named it the the Western States Great Value Brand Training Camp. And it's even funnier because it's like you know, Walmart is is headquartered right here in our area, and so everything is, you know, it drives our economy and great value as a recognized brand in this area. So it was the it was the great value brand, uh Western States training camp. Um going into that, you know, he was a little bit reserved. Like he was a little bit concerned because we we identified just the time it took to recover from some big efforts, and he was a little bit concerned about the volume that that we were putting on the table for this three days. We planned uh uh a seven hour, a five hour, and a uh, well, actually the seven hour, four hour, five hour. And we had to adjust that a little bit because of life circumstances. He had a wedding to attend to on one of those days, so it wasn't quite the way we drew it up initially. But um so went back and forth on that, and and you know, one of the things that we talked about was just you know, he really was consistent throughout the entire training process since January, and so that put a whole lot less pressure on him to be able to completely nail you know all of the hours in this training camp. Um, it's a lot less pressure to have the longest run of the training, right? And so because he was so consistent, and we had so much chronic uh training load, so much fitness that he built up over time, because he was so consistent, we were able to go into that with like, hey, you don't have to completely nail this. This is the prescription. Let's go out and let's learn some lessons, let's put you in some situations where you are forced to problem solve. Like I think that's a really big part of a training camp, is we got to put you in a situation where it's not like your regular training or your regular weekends. And in order to do that, we have to throw some volume at you to get you into that state where you're forced to think and to adapt and work through some of these issues. And so that was one of the really big takeaways was being able to kind of, you know, very, very rarely do we go to the well, right? But it we did that in this camp, and and he was able to work his way through it. And the byproduct of that is probably one of the best things, probably even a bigger attribute than increased fitness, right, is confidence. Yes, like he came out of that camp, just being like his self-belief, um, self-efficacy. He knew he could problem solve, he knew he had what it takes to go out there and crush the race. And that's from a mental perspective, that's huge because for the next five weeks we got to talk about it, right? We got to be like, you know, if we had any self-doubt creep in, it's like, hey, remember that day three when you went out and had your strongest day of the training camp? You know, you're you're gonna be able to perform late in this race, even if you may not be able to see that when you're at mile 50 or 60 or whatever. And he had to do a lot of problem solving in the race, and it and he leaned on a lot of those lessons that he learned.

Well, I so once again, I'm sitting here right outside a truckie. I the Wednesday after the race, I haven't traveled too far since then. I can't tell you how many times I used some coaching cue like that last weekend or at any other race. The remember you have done XYZ in training. And that XYZ, whatever you're pulling up as the carrot, right, at for that particular athlete at that particular time, is always more powerful when just to your point, it was outside of their normal comfort zone. Because if you just pull something, I remember that time you did the three by eight minute tempo run that you did every Tuesday, like that's not going to resonate at the time where they're having a problem solve and they're just digging deep and everything. But if you bring the thing out, hey, you remember when you did this, you didn't think you could do it, you survived it, and we talked about it for the last five weeks. That resonates. And you know, we always we can't always be there in those moments of adversity for our athletes. But to your point, part of what part of part of the brilliance of a great coach athlete relationship is when you know they're going to have to dig into that well of I've done this before, and you can constantly reinforce whatever it is they need to bring up during the training process for five weeks, that makes it that much easier for them to bring it up and train in in the race when they actually need the they need it the most. So you cliff, you hit the nail on the head for something that we haven't talked about a lot, is part of the reason, part part of the big benefit you get from this, from these types of training camps, is to illustrate to an athlete that they can go further than they have before, and that they can problem solve things when asked to, and when they really need to dig deep during the race, they have some framework to work with that they can then deploy on race day. None of which is possible if you just do your 10 hours a week, every single week, your two workouts per week, every single week ad nauseum. That's going to produce physiological and physical improvement. Absolutely, given a good construct. But these like things as otherwise specified that make tr that makes trail running unique and also good trail runners very successful, those are highlighted by some of the other training activities, like these training camps, if you as you pointed out.

So I've employed this strategy in a little bit different situation, too, that's quite unorthodox and was maybe even I'll say downright risky. But I had an athlete that I started working with who was four weeks out from 100K. And she said, I'm underprepared. I haven't done the training, and I don't think I can get through this 100K. And so we did a training camp, a three-day training camp two weeks out, which is like terrible training architecture, terrible training architecture, right? And so we had to worry about you know what are you tapering from if you don't accumulate a lot of training stress. And so I thought, well, we can we can put a little fitness here, um, and then have a very like very uh aggressive taper, you know, for two weeks. But the big thing is is just a confidence piece. And she went through it was a it was very um conservative three days. She got through it and she did so many things she never thought she could possibly do. Running, you know, on a trail out in in California at nighttime by herself. That was a big win. She's never run with her headlamp, you know. And so she was able to do the same thing and worked through, and it led to a 100k finish.

Let's do so, Cliff, you just spurred my imagination. So I'm gonna put you guys on the spot. Um, this is not anything in our outline, so this is true, like in our very prototypical coaching development one-on-one. The listeners can kind of like listen in on this right now. I want to go through some like min's and maxes that that you would be that you would consider realistic to deploy. And what I mean by that is Cliff, you just went through one end of the spectrum. What's the minimum amount of time that you would deploy a training camp like this between the camp and the race, and you said it was two weeks. And we can take that min-max proposition across any elements. You can take it off of time, you could take it off the volume increase, like we were talking about earlier, like what's the multitude of the volume increase, you can take it on the total number of days that you um that that that you would do. I think the listeners have a good idea of what's more idealistic, right? Because we've painted that picture through the lens of the athletes that we work with, but not everybody is going to have these perfect opportunities, Cliff, as you've kind of kind of alluded to. So for the athletes that are out there that have four weeks to their next race and they're legitimately underprepared, or have other sort of some sort of logistical constraints, maybe Ryan, you can take the first shot at this, and I'll definitely jump, I'll definitely jump in as well. On where like how it what are the boundaries in terms of when maximum amount of time you would leave from the training camp to the race, minimum amount of time to from the training camp to the race, and also the volume increase that's worth it and too much. And I know it's individual and we're gonna present that and things like that, but let's just like let's try to put it in as in a in as practical a box as possible so people don't go out there and 10x their volume one week before their race and blame us for it.

Okay, so I'll say the most ideal time is six weeks out. Yeah. Because if you follow the typical three-week on, one week off, which we can argue that that's lazy structure and everything, but we're keeping it generalized. Yeah. All right, if you're doing three-week on, one week off, then that puts you at your last biggest block is starting six weeks out. You do it that six week out, you're hopeful, you're coming off a recovery week, boom. Biggest load when you're most fresh. And then you're still going to accumulate volume miles over the next two weeks, and then boom, it's time to taper. So I would say that's the most ideal time.

Um and let me let me add on to that while you're thinking, not only structurally does that work well, you take a recovery week or recovery phase, you do the training camp, which is the biggest load, you continue to train for another two to three weeks, you take another recovery deload phase, you do another phase of training, and then you taper. You run through that whole thing, and that's about six weeks, maybe seven weeks, depending upon how it works. I totally agree. But also, from an adaptive point of view, that's probably the amount of time that it takes for all of those adaptations to sink in, right? We know that endurance adaptations are most of them are very slow, they're very chronic in nature. And unlike Cliff's example of two weeks beforehand, that's probably on the short end of the spectrum in terms of from a physiological perspective, how long it takes from the impulse to the adaptation. Four to six weeks is a more common time frame if you look at all those physiological underpinnings. And so that's another reason, not only from a structural standpoint, that's another reason that that six weeks tends to look like more ideal, which then begs the question, right? I already kind of set up a little bit of the framework, so it's a little bit of a layup for you guys. What are like the other boundaries on the short end and then on the long end of the spectrum? And then we can kind of talk about the volume increase that we've batted around a little bit.

Yeah, I think he Oh, sorry, go ahead.

No, no, Cliff, go ahead. You got you got it on the tip of your tongue.

I was just gonna say that it that that boundary is is when the the psychological benefit may outweigh the physiological one.

Yeah, yeah.

And that was my my rare case that I will probably never ever ever see again in my coaching career.

Yeah, you never know, but I get yeah, that's a really good, that's a that's a really good that's a really good way to put it, is you have to understand what benefit you're getting. We talk about this all the time as coaches. What is the benefit of the workout that you're doing? Are you giving enough load to achieve that benefit? And do you have enough time to reap that benefit? So that's good structure, right? I know the primary benefit I'm getting is psychological. I know the load is some multiple of their normal training, and I know it doesn't take a lot of time, two weeks, less than two weeks probably, to achieve that psychological bump, which you are primarily, but not exclusively, getting that's a logical run of show. If you would have said the opposite, I'm getting a physical bump, then you get a F for your coaching route for the day. Yeah, for sure.

I'll say to the listener. That are just gonna latch onto that, like, oh, two weeks out, I can do it. I would say realize how we were just saying that's a that's a psychological stimulus and adaptation, but you you have to temper your pace, your effort, and realize, okay, I'm I'm going out for these longer days, I'm going to practice my nutrition, I'm getting myself into, oh yeah, this is kind of where my pack chafed me after hour five. Yes. Like you don't think, don't think like, oh, I can do this two weeks out and I'm good. It's more about all the other extra variables that you're dialing in that that that big load is going to serve you.

Such a great point, Ryan, because we didn't have a you know, going into that two weeks out, we didn't have a nutrition or hydration strategy yet. And there were so many things that we had to check the box.

Yep. Yeah, and how many of those can you actually check? You know, in one in one in one trading block. Um, okay, so we got this like six weeks is ideal, and I'll tack on to this. If I have a completely idealistic situation, sometimes I'll do like seven and four weeks, which it's kind of mirrors the structure, Ryan, Ryan, that you mentioned, where it gives enough time to go through a training cycle, and then the four-week one is the next hardest thing of the next block. And I always design the first one to be harder, longer than the second one, because you're kind of playing with fire a little bit, even though it's three or four weeks out from the race, you're still kind of playing with fire. But if I have a completely idealistic situation, that's what I would do, is I would do two. Personally, I think the point of diminishing returns starts there. Meaning three, yeah, you're kind of like shoehorning things in, and it's really problematic, and maybe it's worth it, but it's probably not. But, and this is so all the normal listeners out there that are trying to like figure this out with their you know, PTO that they've got banked for the last five years and things like that. I encourage athletes to try not to make it perfect because every single athlete that I work with, when I start to design this for them, and it's a point of consideration. In for example, in Western States, we start talking about this in February. They always ask me what is the most ideal time, and some of them can get that ideal time. I'll give it to them. Ryan, what you mentioned, six weeks, seven, four weeks, whatever, it kind of works out. Some of them can actually get that, very few, most of them can't. And so, what I do is I give them the whole range, and this is what I was getting at eight weeks before the race to two weeks before the race. And I say, pick the times that you can put this in that are the most convenient for you. I don't care whether it's four weeks out or five weeks out or seven weeks out, pick the three or four-day window that's the most convenient for you because the convenience to my earlier point of people aren't running around like chickens with their heads cut off at my house, we're all chilling out afterwards, that's more important to the adaptive process. And also those training loads are so big and they're so concentrated, which is what we're going to talk about next, like how big they can be compared to normal day-to-day training, that the rest of the architecture can orbit around that with very little consequence. We're good coaches and we can rearrange that stuff. And if we understand that these training camps end up being a little bit of a North Star from an architectural standpoint, you can work around the rest in terms of the recovery cycles and things like that, especially if you have long time frames to work with. If you know that they want to do a Memorial Day training camp in March, you can you can structure things from uh you know last to first perspective and reverse chronology to make sure that they're hitting the right kind of the right things at that time. So that's what I encourage athletes to do first is not necessarily to look at the ideal, particularly if they can't get to the ideal, or if they can't get to what I think is the most idealistic situation. Pick the one that's most convenient for them from a scheduling standpoint where they're not having to shoehorn it in, you know, whatever else is going on. That usually presents a better situation from an adaptive point of view than trying to find a picture perfect window from a timing perspective. So let's move on to volume. And everybody wants to know this, longtime listeners of this podcast will know that my biggest pet pee question is how long should my longest long run be? And the the kind of the cousin to that question is how long should these or how much volume should these training camps actually be? And to generalize it, I always like to present it in terms of a multiple of their average daily volume. So if you look at a week of training, they're doing 10 hours a week over five days, that's two hours a day. What multiple of that are they typically doing during the training camp? Day one, they're doing eight hours, that's a four X, and then they do six and six, those are both three X's. Once again, all the math is really easy in my head. But I think that presenting it in a multiple of their day-to-day training is practical for most people because they wake up, they do an hour and a half, and they go to work, and then they can think about okay, I if if I have the opportunity to increase it, this is about how much I can increase it by. So, what do you guys see outside of the very specific examples that you brought up? Ryan, we're gonna start with you, in terms of what that multiple, what are the boundaries on that multiple? How small can it be to be effective, and how big can it be at its maximum so that people can start to get a sense for how they could actually DIY the this themselves?

So yeah. Hour and a half is the the run in the middle of the week, hour, two hours. So I would start from there as that's your your multiple you're gonna work from because the long run can change weekend to weekend. Take your long run and try to deal with like that's completely different.

Yeah, so I like that strategy. Yep.

Yeah, yeah. So take take your your median midweek run, and then if you have a 3D, a three-day training camp, maybe go 3x, 3x, 2x, or you have you just have a big back-to-back you want to get in, then you could go four to 5x, maybe so six hour run, six-hour run, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And then if it's two days, then close to that as well. So maybe like a four and a five. And like another point with this is like, you know, like go find a 50k race, do that on Saturday, and then get out for a week. Like, that's that's a really fun way to get through a 50k training run with eight stations and course markings, right? And then and then just plan to get out the next day. And if you're gonna get out the next day, you have to you're wearing the bib, but you can't race. Um, that's another way to approach because we we keep saying the three-day training camp, the three-day training camp, that's not practical for everybody. So yeah, it can still be your old classic back-to-back.

Yeah, yeah, totally. You you okay, you brought it up, so we're gonna dive into it right now before we get to you, Cliff. Sorry. Using the race as part of the catalyst, which you're you're right, Ryan. You can absolutely use the race, it's a fun way to do it because there are aid stations and talking about our nutrition point from earlier, it can help you stay on top of your nutrition if you're not having to carry it around. I don't think that's a good excuse, but you guys can kind of see how that ends up working out practically. But it can be a double-edged sword because most people are gonna race faster than they're gonna do a normal endurance run. And when you look at it from that perspective, you're kind of adding stress on stress, right? You're adding the increase in the specific volume for the day, the three to six X that you were just talking about. And on top of that, you're adding an additional intensity stress. It might not be much, but normally that's something from a coaching perspective that we try to limit, right? We try to limit these times of compounding stress. You either increase volume and you keep and you keep intensity the same or you bring it down, or you or you increase intensity and you bring the volume down or you keep it the same. Not both, increasing volume and increasing intensity. That's the classic mismatch. You guys have heard me in a number of continuing ads. Whenever I see that, you better have a pretty darn good reason for doing it. Otherwise, you get a coaching fail for the day. And this is one of those areas where it's super tempting to do those races. And I I I'll throw it over to you guys. I'll I'll kind of tell you how I manage it. If I know the athlete will not over race the race, go ahead and do it. But if they're going to, then I tell them just to go DIY something else. Like, because it's just too because some people when they put on a bib and they're starting finish line, they're just too tempted to run too hard.

Yeah, so I I look at this as a coaching opportunity because one of the things that you know we struggle with a lot of times is holding athletes back in the early parts of long ultra races. And this is an opportunity to discuss pacing strategy and discipline. And so we can work through that process of, hey, this is you've got to you gotta be at RPE5 here, you gotta be at RPE6 here. Like, do not cross over. And this is an opportunity for an RPE4. This is an opportunity to really work with that athlete and kind of have a pre session going into a big race and practice of properly pacing an event. And especially if this is on day one or day two, um, this is you know extremely important. Um and then the second piece that I was gonna comment on is that I think it's really good to have these races mixed in into these camps or for your longest run or whatever, because a lot of times these athletes are just in a grind for so long. So many solo miles, right? There's not a whole lot of communities that will come out and and and run these amount of uh hours with these athletes. And so there's so many solo miles that are taking place, and it's just like you know, it's another carrot that you can dangle, it's another piece of of motivation, it's another little mental trick to get people to get excited, to be motivated, and then to go into these training camps with something to really look forward to instead of all right, another 16 hours by myself in the forest.

Yeah, exactly. Well, and Cliff, you bring out a good point in terms of controlling the exertion level. I already mentioned the counterbalance that we typically try to deploy where volume goes up and intensity has to go down. And sometimes it's just subtle, right? So instead of being at the upper end of your endurance range, you'll go you'll be at the lower end of your endurance range. But I think that this is a pretty good opportunity, these are usually very good opportunities to actually practice that. And you actually need to, because other sometimes the training load can be too much, right? This a 6X easily goes from sustainable to unsustainable if you're maintaining or certainly increasing the intensity compared to that normal one and a half hour run during the day. If you bring that intensity down, that six-hour run or that six X becomes extremely sustainable. If you increase that intensity even just 10%, right? Average intensity over the entire run, you increase it even just 10%. That goes from a reasonable effort to a ridiculously hard one very, very quickly. And so intensity control, Cliff, to your your point, I absolutely agree, is a huge, huge part of this. Um, I want to stick with you, Cliff, and kind of come back to you because we already got Ryan's perspective on the volume X. Do you have anything to add to that um in terms of when you set this up with your athletes, what the typical or what the ideal uh increase or multiple is uh from their however you want to define it, whether it's their weekly volume or their weekday volume or their average volume to these to this long-run volume. Can you kind of put that in a box for people?

Yeah, I really liked Ryan's math. Yeah, I'm with you there. I'm gonna start using that by the way. I liked Ryan's math. Um, I'm gonna slide with that. It seems that like I've I've kind of as I go back and think through some of the training camps that I've designed, that they've turned out to be that, but I don't think that I've gone into it with that much precision. It it somehow turns out to be that every time. And I don't know if that's some type of um, you know, it maybe it's the art side of coaching, right? Um, but Ryan, I'm gonna start using your math going forward. Thank you for that.

Here's another way that you can do it. Oh, go ahead, Cliff. Yeah.

I was just gonna say, speaking of stealing things, I'm also gonna use the the report card on in the in these training camps with the A through F. Brilliant. I haven't done that before. And so we'll now be getting report cards.

Everybody's been to school and everybody's fearful of their six-week report card. I was a terrible student, so I know that very specifically. Um, here's another way that athletes can actually get at that. If you have training history, you can go back in your training history and you can look at times of intensified training, especially for experienced athletes. Most ultramarathon runners have some reasonable amount of experience, and you can draw some conclusions to that, maybe or from that. Maybe you extend it a little bit. Maybe you take a little bit of a bigger risk and you extend it even more. And you guys will remember this. I mentioned this when I went over my Coca-Dona training with um uh with the coaching staff. And one one of one of our coaches, John Fitzgerald, he asked me how I came up with the volume that I was doing for these training camps that I put together. And quite simply, it was a blueprint that I took from Tour de Jant. I trained for Tour de Jant and I came up with that blueprint simply because I wanted to see parts of the course. That was a little bit more of a guessing game. But and and those parts of the course were going to take me certain amounts, certain amounts of time. But I learned I took that and I used that as a learning lesson and said, okay, I know I can handle this in a different type of environment. Can I handle this the the uh the the the same amount? And so I would encourage athletes that um have a reasonable amount of training history to use that as part of the blueprint for coming up with what these camps are. The the final thing that I want to throw a little bit of discussion around, and then we're gonna let you guys go, is how does mode change the equation? And Ryan, you have a very you started off this with a very specific answer uh example of an athlete that's training for hard rock, and I'm guessing that the athlete is going from primarily running during their training week to primarily hiking encouraged by you for their intensified training block because you want the mode run versus hike to be specific. We understand that specificity rules that's absolutely something that you want to include in these blocks, but how does the mode affect the multiple that you just went through in terms of you can do more if you switch from X to Y, and you can do less if you could if you switch from mode Y to mode Z? Do you ever take that into uh account as a point of consideration when you're designing this?

Absolutely, yeah, especially for 200 mile races, because you're gonna be hiking quite a bit more. Yeah, so lower intensity, yeah, you can increase your load, absolutely, and it's getting specific. So, yeah, if you're 200 miler, mountain hundred miler, whatever it is, you're gonna be hiking a lot. So instead of your standard back-to-back, whatever it's been, hey, we can make that longer, but you do have to take down the intensity. We we've been hitting on that point, yeah.

Clips you're just working.

I'm just working through that scenario right now with uh for someone for for Bigfoot. And and it's just you know, it's a four-day camp. We've got a 50 mile race in in the middle of it, and they'll just be everything else is hiking. And even you know, he's gonna be on a very, very strict, disciplined hiking within that 50 miler as well.

So yeah, yeah, I mean, experience and the the the physiology backs this up as well, but I've never I I'm less hesitant to use an aggressive multiple, so an 8x as opposed to a 6x, right? 8x is more aggressive than 6x. I'm less hesitant to use a more aggressive multiple if I know that the that the mode is switching from more running to more hiking, andor the intensity goes down. Because at the end of the day, it's training stress, right? It's not volume of time or anything like that. We need to be concerned with training stress, and and typically hiking is less stressful, cardiovascularly or cardiopulmonary and musculoskeletally, as opposed to running. And I think that that's kind of the final point of consideration that tag teams into the specificity side of things, is that if you know you're going from, or if you know that your more of your mode distribution is going to get shaded towards hiking, you can choose to err on the side of a bigger multiple. And the opposite is also true. If for whatever reason, if you live in Silverton, Colorado and you're training for the Badwater 135 and you're switching to more running for your training camp, I mean, that's not that common, but let's face it, you know, that kind of stuff happens. You have to be cognizant of the opposite to where the mode is going to make the time more stressful per unit time. Not that you can't still use a multiple, you just might not use as aggressive of one. And you could take the same thing if you're managing an injury, or if just logistically the athletes started to they start, they they're not well rested going into the camp or something like that. Like you can shade that total training load down in a number of different ways based on all those considerations. Mode just being one of them. Important, super important consideration. Okay, so I'm gonna try to encapsulate it. You guys jump in for anything that I missed or come up with a final point here. So training camps. Two to four days. We didn't really talk about anything longer than that. I've certainly used that every once in a while, but it's honestly pretty rare. Two to four days long, roughly six weeks out from the event. I would say the top side of that border is ten weeks, and the bottom side of the border to Cliff's example was two weeks. I wouldn't design it that way, but if that's what you had to do and you're trying to get psychological versus physiological, A plus there. Realize that you're gonna get a multitude of benefits. You're gonna get the physiological benefit, but you're also gonna get the confidence benefit from doing it, as well as be able to go over nutrition and any sort of equipment considerations. Um, you also have the opportunity to practice the mode that you're doing during the during the event. And for almost everybody, it's more hiking and less running. So it presents this brilliant opportunity because the the volume is increased so much that you have the opportunity to walk and hike a whole heck of a lot more. And then in terms of how much you can increase your average day weekday volume, we're all gonna steal Ryan's calculation for this. Whatever you do during a normal weekday run, anywhere between two and six X. And that would be pretty big. I think that's a fair encapsulation. What else would you guys add? Pretty good. Now everybody can go and DIY their own training camps.

That's right. You already know the know the goal of your training camp. Yes, if it's psychological, work on nutrition, specificity to terrain, climbing, yeah.

Yeah, all of that stuff go into it with a purpose, right? You all should always should have a purpose with your with your runs. Um, sweet guys, thanks for coming on the podcast. Um, I'm gonna link up in the show notes an article to uh a training camps article that we recently produced on the train right website. So if anybody wants any more in-depth stuff, as well as both of your bios will be in there. Um, Cliff, you want to start out on if people want to reach out to you where they can find you, either on social or however you want people to reach out to you. You want them to show up to your house or show up to the next race you're at or whatever it is.

Please do not show up to my house. Uh the best way to reach and connect with me is through Instagram, and that uh handle is at coach Cliff Pittman. Pretty active on there. Love to connect with you on there.

Perfect. Ryan, how about you?

Yeah, Instagram's my most used form of social media, and it's Ryan R-Y-N-E one Anderson on there.

You do a better job of pronouncing the Ryan, the Y in your name than I think everybody else does. You're probably used to it by now.

Yeah, it's the southern part. You gotta get in touch with your southern twenty with it.

I I grew up in Texas and I lost it a long time ago. So both of those links will be in the show notes as well. Check out their Instagram handles, Ryan. You've done a really good job of pointing out when you've been at races with athletes uh recently. It's been fun to uh fun to watch. All right, that's it for today. Thanks for being on the podcast, you guys. We'll uh catch up at some later point. All right, folks, there you have it. There you go. Much thanks to Coach Ryan and Coach Clift for coming on the podcast today. I hope, irrespective of whether you are one of our coached athletes or if you are DIYing your own training, that you got some ideas on how to arrange some of these very critical training blocks or mini camps, whatever you want to call them. Because I do think that for almost all normal people and even the professional athletes, they become an important part of the training process because you get so much benefit out of them out of such a short period of time. You get the physical, you get the psychological, you get a lot of the tactical and nutritional elements all wrapped up with the same training camp. And it's something that on paper, as we mentioned during the podcast, it might actually seem that's a little bit audacious and kind of like outside your skill or comfort level. But if you do a really good job of eliminating all of the uh all of the distractions and giving yourself the opportunity to focus on training, eat, sleep, run, repeat, you would be surprised at how much you can actually handle during these weekends and how much they actually benefit you at the end of the day. So that is it for today, folks. If you like this podcast, please share it with your training partners, your teammates, your friends and family, any ultra runner out there that you feel would benefit from this information. As always, this podcast has been and will always be brought to you sponsor-free. And that is because I want to keep the information contained with this in this podcast as unadulterated and unencumbered as possible. You sharing this podcast and giving it a rating or review on Apple Podcasts helps a tremendous amount and also means a lot to me personally. That is it for today, folks, and as always, we will see you out on the trails.