Finding your Edge and Creating Resilient Athletes with CTS Coach Adam Pulford⎮KoopCast Episode 22

what's going on trail runners welcome to another episode of the KoopCast i'm psyched that you are here with me today maybe you're out for a run maybe you're out on a commute or maybe you are just getting ready for the day but in any of those cases today is a great episode i got to sit down with one of one of my favorite coaches actually is probably a coach that most of you are not familiar with his name is adam polford i've worked alongside adam polford cts for over 15 years he came into cts just as i was starting to manage and mentor coaches and he was part of a group of coaches that i really got to cut my teeth on in terms of mentorship and development and i'm incredibly grateful uh to adam not only for the camaraderie and the council that we've been able to offer each other throughout the course of the last decade and a half but really to put up with a lot of the mistakes that i made early on as a coaching mentor and we talk about a lot of that early journey at the very beginning of this podcast but what you athletes will really get out of this are two concepts that we go into depth on and the first of which is how to create resilient athletes if you have been in ultra marathoning for any length of time you know that being resilient not

only during the ultra marathon itself but also during training on a daily basis weekly basis monthly basis that resiliency is invaluable and it doesn't happen overnight it's something that has to be intentionally cultivated and then we also talk about this concept of edge finding finding your edge with intentionally really hard time trials and workouts and how that plays into creating a resilient athlete for the athletes that we coach and something that you guys can take at home if you happen to be coaching for yourself i thought the conversation was awesome every time i get together with adam we always have a really good time adam's also the co-host of the train right podcast which is the official podcast of cts that he does in conjunction with hillary allen who is another one of our coaches who most of you will be more familiar with they alternate weeks where one week adam will take a cycling topic and the other week hillary will take a running topic they've got a lot of good uh really good guests lined up and guests already in the pipeline i encourage everybody to check out that podcast as well and hopefully this introduction to adam will have you listening to both the cycling and the running side of it but even if you don't listen to those give a listen to this i think all athletes can take away something from this conversation that i had with adam on how to create resilient athletes and how to find your edge

with certain workouts and time trials and things of the like so kick back hopefully you don't go too hard if you're running on this particular podcast you can certainly see how you can get inspired to do an edge finding exercise of yourself sit back relax open your ears up for my conversation with adam polford on creating resilient athletes and edge finding thanks for having me over on this i know it's late yeah no on super tuesday super tuesday in dc so it's really it's it's a fitting time and place did you vote or did you already vote i've already voted you already voted yeah yeah no i didn't vote actually you didn't vote actually i didn't vote i didn't vote i i feel like we're still in this uh time period maybe in life where like uh taxation without representation is still happening you're still hung up on that i'm still hung up on it my license plate reads that now taxation without representation seriously i'm gonna have to go validate that on my way out no taxation no taxation without representation that's a long license plate so what is it actually abbreviated to well it's not my license license plate but that is a official like you know how it's like the sun sunshine i thought it was like a vanity plate i know that's what i was thinking the vanity plate that would be how people get in trouble bold vanity plate i should well maybe next

year when i when i renew my plates so that's the first commonality we didn't vote i didn't vote because we have a closed primary in colorado and i'm a registered republican yeah and all my choices sucked yeah i i would i would agree with that it was bad yeah i am i'm a registered uh voter here in dc now though like that just changed oh okay but you've been here for two years now right yeah what took you so long uh it was busy coaching i can see it getting married yeah and getting married i mean riding bikes uh setting thresholds you know that kind of thing so we're we're both pretty lame if we're in our nation's capital neither of us voted in the primary it's pretty bad yeah i wasn't really ready for this question so you kind of i kind of threw you off guard you really just went for it now everybody's gonna judge me and make all these like thoughts about me you know that's fair enough there's a lot of thoughts yeah fair enough all right well anyway thanks for having me over on super tuesday nobody wants to hear us talk about politics though so we'll skip that it's true that's true um we'll talk about coaching let's do that um so we want to talk about building resilient athletes building resilient athletes um but before we get into that i think a good like transition to into it is is something that we actually both share about kind of our coach mentoring like our coach mentorship that we've received when we're both young coaches and there's a reason that this is going to be important eventually so you're going to stick with

me for a while but both of us we kind of got the shit kicked out of us when we first started coaching true statement yeah because neither neither of us knew much about the sports we were working with i was a i was a runner so i was an endurance athlete but i was working with cyclists and try a lot of cyclists and triathletes and runners i was a meathead you're a meathead so why don't you give the listeners just a quick kind of like athletic athletic background for you personally so my my background is is pretty unique in comparison to a lot of the endurance athlete coaches out there and i grew up northern minnesota where it was there a lot of shoveling snow uh splitting wood and uh those are official sports of minnesota official sports yes by the way it's it's a whole like a minnesota olympic thing we don't need to get into right now but but uh i was a fat little kid growing up like just eating chocolate chip cookies and like loving life being out in the middle of the woods doing nothing and at some point i found sports i found uh my brother really started playing basketball but i didn't want to do it he did so i started wrestling and that really started to change the way that like i felt and that i like interacted with the world and i was also obsessed with football because i mean you're a man in minnesota right in the 80s and 90s you know so um so sports really changed my life and i played team sports all the way through college i wrestled and i had a good friend who introduced uh the mountain

bike to me and i started riding and racing mountain bikes and from there i changed my major from chemistry to exercise physiology and we had a coaching minor which is actually really unique oh yeah totally unique and uh at the university of wisconsin in lacrosse and so i was i was wrestling i was competing and coaching anything on that i could internship at carmichael training systems turned into a job and cue the meathead walking into carmichael training systems and i remember i remember very very distinctly because you came in maybe you came into cts maybe four or five years after i came in yeah and so i had some i had some sort of like management or mentorship responsibility at that point and i can remember a lot of our senior coaches coming at the time coming to me directly and saying this freaking kid adam has no idea what he's doing like no clue like what are we going to like what are we going to do with this guy like literally what are we going to do are we going to fire him are we going to try to give up the speed this is going to take a lot of my time do we really want to keep him on board can you really catch on and blah blah blah and that was a common experience that i had as well like our mentors were really hard on us is that fair statement oh yeah yeah totally like there was a lot of hey what like excuse my french but hey what the fuck are you guys doing yeah like really come on you get you have to be better than this this is terrible you should know this you should know that yeah and somehow we both kind of we were probably just dumb enough to

stick it out we appreciated it enough one of the two yeah you know it's funny i don't know why i was thinking about this the other day and yeah we were probably dumb enough but i was thinking the other day that whatever happened to all of a sudden i think it was i i somehow got through the hunger games of internships at cts and jim was like you know we're thinking about jim layman was okay we're thinking about hiring you on blah blah and then dean was like just cross-armed like staring at me and i'm like what is the problem he's like you gotta look different which is a terrible statement to make like now it's even worse like just with like athletic culture and body image culture and things like that but but the same time coop like it wasn't wrong either because like i had a lot of upper body mass yeah are you are you a track rider no i was a wrestler i raised triathlon yeah and then every like every cyclist was like head down walk away yeah and you know i was wearing low socks at the time and mismatch kits and all this kind of crap so but needless to say we both turned out okay and the jury's the jury's still out on that i guess we we both turned out okay we both turned out okay at our professions despite not having a background in the sport that we were primarily coaching at the

time and i'll say a lot of that is a byproduct of the hunger games as you were talking about and having mentors that were relatively hard on us and i think one of the kind of the advanced coaching skills that we both took away from that is what we're going to talk about today which is how to create resilient athletes because as you and i have talked about a lot it's one thing to give an athlete a training program like anybody can do that computers can do that you can get them online for free you can rip them out of a magazine and you know uh put tape them up on your fridge or whatever but tape but translating that into to an athlete that can be self-sufficient and resilient through thick and thin and be able to compete irrespective of what level they're competing at right local criteriums local road races local trail runs whatever up to the you know pinnacle the sport those are two very those are two very different things and the programming the x's and o's within what we actually might give one athlete versus another might be exactly the same but creating that that resilient athlete that's going to be able to you know put it down all the when all the chips are when all the chips are down that's a completely different thing wildly different and and but i think it's actual coaching you know in and where where that comes from or how you how you develop it i think is if you ask me how do you do

that adam i i that wasn't a question but okay okay like i was gonna say i couldn't give you a great answer to answer though let's try to come answer adam hitting his head against the microphone um i don't know how to communicate how i do that but i know how exactly how to do that okay so let's walk through like the practical scenario right you get you have an athlete and this is what people are going to be most interested in because there are going to be a lot of athletes that are listening to this podcast some of them are coached by other coaches that have our cts coaches that have some semblance of this of a framework that we were that we're about to discuss some of them coach themselves they kind of figure out themselves and some of them have other coaches but irrespective of kind of any of those categories the athlete can still do things completely on their own accord to help build up this this kind of like level of resiliency and base it off of kind of what we do as coaches and what and and how we translate that uh kind of translate that to our athletes but let's kind of start out and let's like i think that this is something that might be pretty ill-defined that we can kind of work out first like what is the definition or examples of an athlete that is resilient beyond their own innate capabilities that they have at the time i've got my answer you can do you want me to go through

your mind and you can think about it yeah you go go for it okay so a resilient resilient athlete in in in my mind is one that requires very little direction and will compete at the highest level that they're capable of day in and day and by let me expand the the word compete will come will compete but also perform day in and day out during workouts that's crucial at the hot at the highest and smartest level that they can every single day with very little direction and do so in the simple pursuit of becoming better that's what i think is resiliency and it's in and if i were to put if i were to like put a spotlight on one quality it's the day-to-day aspect of it it's not the singular heroic workout or heroic race or things like those are awesome don't get me wrong you know when you have that you know once in a lifetime type of performance or workout or whatever great but resiliency in my mind has more to do with the day in day out consistent grind than it does any one highlight aspect that you can that you can pinpoint so that that's my definition of resiliency going in day day in day out

and kind of performing at your at your best with very little direction yeah i like that a lot and i and i agree with it um those athletes are gritty aren't they such a cliche word gritty well you use quid quid pro quo that's hard it's hard to say yeah i'm coaching quid pro quo you said that earlier tonight and that was very cliche so i figured i'd throw a gritty but i like gritty because gritty everybody knows what you're talking about when he's like that guy's gritty yeah and and i so i agree with you in that those athletes perform at their best every day with little or no directions that we said yeah but but i would i put an asterisk on perform every day and you you probably mean this but you can correct me if i'm wrong perform that doesn't mean that doesn't mean go hard correct that doesn't 100 yeah it's a good good clarification that means they have an awareness of the impulses that have already been given to their body induced to the body whatever in can in relation with the resting time periods with all the other crap that's going on in life with the task at hand uh plan at hand whatever whatever the the case is and they can make those adjustments on the fly based on their own awareness and intuition yeah so here here's here's

how it would actually unfold if i put a recovery run on the calendar the athlete will go out and do the recovery run at the right intensity if i say go and do these hard intervals they'll go out and do the hard intervals at the right intensity not because they're being a training robot but because they know that they they have a like an innate level of confidence that's been deliberately built up through weeks and months and sometimes years worth of training that they know that that's exactly what they need to do every single time time in and time out yep and with that if they're feeling like the recovery run or uh the recovery ride or that hard ride is is scheduled and they feel like nope no it's not happening today they have the confidence to take rest day yeah and it's that's always been such a really interesting line because there are times where an athlete should push through that and then there are times where you're absolutely right they should back off yeah and that's something that's really easy to say well of course if you're too tired you shouldn't do this workout and the opposite is also true i was just gonna say the opposite is true because i i give my light my athletes a green light like if they're feeling good if they're and they and they're riding like man i got good

legs today and say we got threshold set or see we say it's like endurance or something green light to freaking go for it yeah and it's interesting that you mentioned the green light and this is why it's hard to do yet easy to say because there really is no green light it's not like you know in your case in coaching cyclists they roll out the door and all of a sudden their power meter turns green they're like sweet i get to go hard today i mean we laugh at that but that's what a lot of athletes are kind of like looking towards i mean they want the stoplight system that says okay red i need to stop yellow i need to proceed with caution green i need to go and it's never really that simple and there's there's been you know how many you know dozens and dozens of iterations of training devices that have tried to put these stoplight you know programs on uh how hard to go or how easy to go or when to train when not to train and they you know they they always need there always needs to be a human element in that but um for the athletes that are out there that are trying to figure that out themselves should i go easy today should i go hard today should i make an adjustment should i actually stick to the plan when they're doing it themselves there's this interesting there there's this there's this interesting division in the athletes that i've observed doing this the athletes that are self-coach some athletes have no problem like making that decision they're like yep i absolutely know blah blah blah other athletes will like put their head down and do whatever they have pre kind of pre-programmed

and that's not to say either one of those are right or wrong but i think that it's it's just what i'm trying to say is just hard for athletes to like figure that piece of it out and i'm torn as to when we talk about creating a resilient athlete if either one of those situations like lends more to that resiliency or not well i think you need both and i think you need failure and i think you need that success to uh build the algorithm in the athlete's head right oh i love that and build the algorithm in the athlete's head i'm going to use that you should totally totally take uh take credit for it you should totally do that and and and but what because what we're all looking to with you know and i'm not knocking the devices out there the whoop devices the the aura rings and all this kind of stuff but like i think it's somewhat can be hindering to the athlete for all the things all the reasons and whatnot and maybe setting some people back it may also help to bring awareness to certain recovery states and whatnot but when we're talking about athletic performance and resiliency and how to make decisions on the fly and we could go down a rabbit hole right now and talk about like well how much can i do and there's a certain time period right throttle wide open for a long period of time and let's see what happens and then there's a time period to dial that back and you don't know i have said this multiple times on multiple podcasts but like you don't know where the edge is

until you go find it so go find your edge and that's going to be a good benchmark to see okay you learn a lot about the athlete you learn how gritty they are how resilient they potentially could be but it's also as a coach you also have to understand that that is that's a that's the point where they're at in their development right now and that's where the algorithm is sitting if you will well for it's so interesting that you bring that up because for like normal athletes i hate to like put people on buckets like that but for the athletes that are not like trying to win world championships i would rather have them step over the line a little bit and find that edge like you're talking about or just fail trying to find it in an in kind of an effort to build a complete athlete or resilient athlete that we're talking about and then bring them back from that then not then be fearful of overstepping it because here's a opinion that i'll step on a soapbox for um for a little bit i think a lot of athletes are unnecessarily fearful of quote-unquote over training or being over fatigued or whatever category that you want to put on it because it's been it's been kind of it's been posterized in the you know endurance media as this pervasive prevalent everybody's over training it's so easy to do it and

the fact of the matter is it's really hard like it's really it is really really really difficult to like truly over train especially for a normal person who's got a job and things like that sure you can under recover and that's a that that's a related but different conversation but to truly do too much training too much training too hard whatever combination of those two things it's really difficult to do and so when i look at it when i look at this proposition through through that lens i would rather have athletes kind of overstep it a little bit because you can always bring them back as long as you're looking at the training yeah it's you know we might ruffle some feathers here but that's okay i'll ruffle feathers there's no such thing as overtraining make that statement i agree with you man okay so for those who want more on that just go search for overtrain the latest on that underperformance syndrome ups and in in start to in and then actually think about it relatively speaking we've we've turned it corinne and i your good friend corinne we did we did a podcast on that kind of early in the in the KoopCast days which is so early in the KoopCast days but you know i think that there's this so we've talked about it on this yeah we talked about on this podcast no no no no no no no we can we can rehash it totally because i once again i think that i think there needs to be a little bit of a course correction in people's mind because right

now there's too much hype too much drama too much everything that oh my god i can't overtrain wow the overtraining boogeyman is going to come and get me and the fact of the matter is it's just like very few individuals have the capacity to train too much and by capacity i mean physical capacity emotional capacity time capacity like the whole nine yards and so what became overtraining morphed into overtraining syndrome which is honestly like with all due respect to the sports scientists out there it's kind of a chicken shit way out of it because you're just you're taking the same phrasing and then just adding this you know syndrome to it because you don't want to describe it differently but really it should just be called like the purple syndrome or like just something like something like totally like totally different because you can get into an over fatigued or under recovered state but saying that it's solely the cause of overtraining i think does athletes a disservice because in their mind they're thinking oh my gosh i'm going to go to today's going to be too hard right and that's not the right way to build athletes yeah yeah i would agree with that and i in a it gets back to the point of just how you think of training in in recovering where you're going because it you in order to get better you have to you have to get tired you have to get worse to get better kind of thing is this so you've been recently on on a kick for edge finding kick man that's where i live my

life all right well like i want i want everybody to understand this correctly because i actually think it's really cool why don't you like describe this edge finding in your like your recent passion for it it just seems like a recent passion passion to me because i've seen you post a lot about it yeah and i think it is i think it may be a recent passion if you will and i i don't think i can take full credit for it because it's a slurry of uh steve dr steven seiler uh tim kusick uh general field testing parameters and uh you know all the other knowledge that i've tried to tried to learn in my life in in in really what it what it means is you find your edge of your capacity your capacity of whatever you can do whether it's a a certain uh pace duration power duration or call it a total tss for a week or a day or an event and you try to quantify it as best you can and see what you can do go up to the edge the reason why we call it the edge is the edge of a cliff right it's kind of scary especially if it's a 2 000 foot drop down but if you go and you dangle a toe over it or you crawl up to it or if you're like bold and ballsy and jump off it with the squirrel suit on you know you start to learn a lot about yourself in those moments and that's why i give it the analogy of edge finding

and i and i chose that i don't know if tim kusick you can correct me if i'm wrong if you're going to listen to this i don't know if you actually use that but he used the term ftp edge and frc edge i want you to find those two sorry yeah uh running audience here that's not going to be used to it that's fine yeah functional threshold power um we can also call it functional threshold pace if you prefer right and and uh what that means is uh about the power that someone can maintain for about an hour in a steady state manner so a maximum capacity right around an hour kind of floats plus or minus 20 minutes if you will depending on the phenotype of the athlete so what you can do we've also called that field testing before where you go out and you run as fastest you can for x amount of time so see what your capacity is see where your edge is what what's scary where's the line that's super scary of like i'm going to which is for me is like 100 meters well well yeah i mean you use this analogy of like dropping off a clay and what you're describing is is like literally going out on a workout and like spilling your guts out for an hour yeah like just seeing where it is just really super hard and you fall on your face yeah yeah and sometimes you get to the 50 minute mark and everything totally collapses and sometimes you get to the 62 and minute and 30 second mark and everything collapses or whatever but you're constantly trying to find like where like where that edge is through the intensity and the duration

of the workout yep and i don't think that i think that you can be a normal person and an abnormal person to go find your edge you're not a didn't have to be a special person how often how often have you been doing this uh not often not super often sure yeah so maybe i would say maybe one depends on if they're racing a bunch but if they're at once every 90 days okay but this is a workout that or workout or time trial or whatever that's intentionally designed to be heart like harder than a race almost yeah got harder than race yep and you describe it as what so first off i'm gonna i'm gonna make the statement that i think that's a good exercise for all types of athletes to do around that type of frequency not roughly every 45 or 90 days some somewhere around there not every week not every year but every three months is pretty reasonable and i think it's a good exercise for for for two reasons well actually for a few reasons and i'll make some of these up as we go along obviously the first one is obviously just normal workout benefit totally yeah right it's not like that workout isn't good for anything simply because you've gone so hard the second reason is is that although we're presenting it as this proposition of stepping up to a 2 000 foot cliff in reality the consequence for stepping over that isn't really that big of a deal

and i i use this i use the same analogy kind of in the opposite way when athletes miss training so when an athlete misses a day of training for whatever reason they get sick they have some sort of crisis happen at work or home and the day just goes away that day of training doesn't evaporate into thin air you get to replace that training stress somewhere down the line and in a lot of cases it gets replaced to 90 or 100 percent of what you would have done before you're literally just swapping kind of one thing for the other the same thing is true as in this edge finding if you do a workout or time trial or whatever we're calling it that's only slightly too like too hard whatever that means like physiologically you need a little bit more recovery all you're doing is you're swapping the stress for that one day that you just did for something that would have happened down the line and so it kind of like it kind of comes out on the wash and i always go back to the principle that your body can only handle so much training stress over long periods of time and it's going to kind of even itself out so if you go a little bit too hard on one day no big deal that means you just have to go a little bit easier on the next hard day you miss a day you can just replace that training stress in some form or fashion down the line so that's that's the second reason i like it is because

you get this awesome workout and even if you do go a little bit over the edge there's no huge consequence the third reason i like it is kind of back to our initial point is that when you're finding those edges you're finding that limit and you do it consistently and frequently that's the key you can't just do it once you've got to do it with some type of repetition that's what ends up creating a resilient athlete because they know that they can handle that level of pain tolerance and going that hard and then there's it's a big commitment and they get confidence from it even if it's a bad quote-unquote bad time trial you could still derive a lot of confidence from it as long as you kind of like talk it through with your coach uh afterwards so that's why i like those types of things is because they serve this entire this entirety of a physiological purpose from the workout stress to psychological purpose making sure the athlete can like gain confidence from it and then long term if they repeat it time and time again it builds up this resiliency aspect because they know they have confidence they can kind of like go to the well on a consistent basis yeah you know i think the more i coach the more i learn that that psychological aspect is probably more important because whether it's you know one by 60 time trialing on a road bike or mountain bikers if there are any listening to this uh you pick a course you pick a 5k loop and you just motor it for you know 40 50 60

hard commitment to do it's a hard commitment but man if you can do that solo just think of what you can do in the race and in the group you know for for trail runners i i would say you know pick a course pick your somewhat technical with some uphill types and just you know field test it yeah as hard as you can hard as you can and i think no let's go let's go back to my wrestling days we would have three hour practices three hour practices and we would have live goes what we call it it's just live wrestling so and but we'd have um uh we'd also call them threesomes by the way and we're so what so let me explain this uh you're in a yes please do yeah you're in a you're in a big room with a bunch of grown men you got t-shirts on and tight shorts and what you're and you got three guys one sits out while the other two live wrestle and you're trying to score points pin them all this kind of whatever but the guy that's out he's doing pull-ups or push-ups or squat thrusts or whatever the coach like yells out at the time so you don't get to rest and oftentimes that exercise was harder than being out you know in that live good wrestling yeah interesting so and it never and it doesn't make sense to anybody listening to this don't think that this is the way to train but wrestlers were notorious for just training way too much that's true because we competed we had like uh two two two

like in high school uh or three three three in college and it was so we wrestled for what nine minutes less than 10 minutes yeah that's what you with a break in between in between so it didn't make it doesn't make a lot of sense to practice for three hours but you got really fit and i remember a coach saying at some point like we train harder in practice so that when you're out there on the mat it's easy and i remember thinking i was like huh all right so maybe some of my athletes listening to this i'm sorry if if that has carried over to the way i coach sorry because it's gonna make a better athletes come on now for all the successful people i've coached out there you're welcome i guess so here's a here's an interesting proposition that i want to get your take on and this is a this is actually a big difference in your world being in cycling and mountain biking in my world being in ultra running is that you can absolutely take that strategy we want to train harder in practice than we do on race day however you want to define it intensity factor kilojoules of work whatever you could do that in cycling quite easily it's almost impossible to do that in ultra running yeah especially especially at the 50 mile and 100 mile distance you're not going to go out and time trial 50 miles in order to prepare for a 50 mile race you're not going to go out and time trial 100 miles and in order to do 100 mile race now that's not stand that by the way yeah no no no i know i no no no no i know that you get it but still there still has to be some component of the training that's over right that is

harder in some form or fashion or multiple forms or fashions so that the athlete is as prepared as they can be for that level of physical psychological emotional type of stress on race day but you can't solely rely on the physicality to create all of that right so in your wrestling situation you're wrestling for three hours for what might be a nine a nine minute in totality type of event so the physicality of it the overload on the physicality side of it also creates or is the catalyst for the overload on the psychological side of it and that's also the overload for the emotional side of it you've got all of them but it's kind of created by the physical overload and ultra marathon running that that doesn't exist so what what would you think or what would you like you're just kind of you're not coming into the situation blind but it's not like your wheelhouse what do you think about that proposition where you don't have that tool in your tool belt yeah i just i would take the long term approach to it right and and and you gotta that's resiliency by the way the long term yep yeah and i would rather be conservative in the short term to be successful in the long term and i so yeah that's the short answer i could keep going if you want no i'll keep going man so in in cycling we kind

of have our ultra uh hundred milers too and we call them uh grand tour riders and the first time something like dk or even something like dk because it's 11 hour event for the winners yeah 11 hours right yep yeah and that's a that's a really good example so sorry so let's let's define yeah dk is the dirty cons of 200 it's a 200 mile gravel uh race in emporia kansas yeah and and to that to that end let's use that as an example kind of like the first time that you ride your bike for over 10 hours like that's you don't you don't really do that in training right 100 yeah but you you do that at dirty during cancer yeah holy moly do you uh by the way i will never do dirty cancer never have never will that race this is an aside so the the the first and second i think the third year actually we went out as a company and supported athletes during that race i went out there with everybody and i have at the time i now have a little bit more experience so this is no longer true but at the time i've i had never seen athletes so depleted and so deteriorated at the end of a race as they were after dirty cancer i mean just not not just our athletes i i stood at the finish line from the time the first rider came through to the time they shut it down and 80 of the riders were like i don't want to see my bike ever

again no more i'm done i can't i can't do it's hilarious it's a gnarly event people yeah but i mean not dissimilar from a lot of the 100 milers that you guys are doing out there yeah guys the runners yeah yeah um and and so i guess to that point i think the first time you correct me if i'm wrong first time 100 miler that you do in running you're kind of dipped in the baptismal waters of 100 milers you are if you survive yeah right and if you come back to running again yeah you're a different runner yeah and that's where i was going with uh the dirty canza example with uh grand tour riders like the first time you do something like that if if the listeners haven't done one like this before you have to just go into it with really no expectations because you're gonna get better you will be different afterwards and the first time is usually not your best time no it usually sucks yeah usually really bad remember my first leadville oh god i remember your first leadville you were a total shit show like the absolute proverbial every sense of the word like physical gear everything went wrong like body went wrong how many flats did you have five five yeah didn't you like break some part of your bike yeah my fork um my fork somehow uh broke it was a clapped it's a long story so somebody had a a fork pump so and it would just it was getting droopy for those who don't know anything about my

biking so it's a suspension to work so it was droopy so i couldn't climb i couldn't do anything so i just pumped the hell out of it to make it fully rigid so i was riding this fully rigid like 10 year old bike and all this kind of stuff i was getting flats everywhere um and anyway to make a very long story short it was the worst day i've ever had on my bike but i didn't give up so i remember i was coming up to st kevin's and i was like way off pace maybe like 90 minutes to two hours off the pace that i was like told everybody that i would be doing but good old coop i'm gonna stay there until last soldier's home he's at st kevin's so i'm riding up which is where and he's like taking a nap under a tree i was like holy shit polford and he gets up and he's like hands me a bottle i'm like i'm like what you're doing i think this is like a fish story i'm taking a nap well you probably weren't napping under a tree but you were surprised i was surprised to see you because i thought you were going to drop out i wasn't giving you enough credit yeah yeah exactly you you thought old meathead was gonna drop out yeah but i didn't no you didn't it's and to your credit and just to give the listeners a little bit of perspective you finished that year i want to say it was just under 11 hours 10 52 29 god man my memory is pretty good so just under 11 hours like you're a legit 8 30 leadville rider i've done 8 17 yeah like you're a legit like you're a legit good mountain biker so to finish that not that day not that day but to finish that race like you're not close to

the cutoffs but you're you're you're not in this group that you should be in right and i think getting back to resiliency and i'm not i'm not anything special but i again i think the way i was raised in minnesota i think with wrestling the background and stuff i was i was taught not to quit and there's a certain time and place where pulling the plug for safety's sake it happens but if you start something finish it and i think to add to the element of resiliency is just you know don't don't give in to the the what's going on between your head you know all the all the negotiation all the self-talk when it goes sideways and i think the resiliency will what's what makes a resilient athlete it's like when shit goes sideways what do you do yeah i think you learn a lot about yourself and you learn a lot about the athlete when you get that race report when you build that hard workout and their reaction to it well and the edge finding exercise is a great conduit for that yeah because you're not always going to set a pr you're not always going to succeed and by like constantly reinforcing this learning process that i'm going to go hard i might fail and it's okay and when it is going bad i'm going to reset my expectations i'm not going to give in i'm still going to see you know where that edge is and if i'm not as close to the edge as i was last week that's no big deal if you consistently reinforce that exercise after exercise after exercise and if you're

doing it every three months this might take two or three years to actually do which is fine that's long-term athlete development 101 right long-term athlete development if you're consistently doing that i think that that is the real difference between athletes that have a high level of resiliency that are going to do the that are gonna they're gonna do the work whether it's hard work or easy work or whatever day in and day out and the ones that are not going to they've just simply tested themselves more right yep yeah yeah that's that's it 100 and and you know it's important in our both of our sports uh for like you said the workout development aspect the cognitive aspect of it the pacing aspect of it the the the technical negotiation under throttled feeling aspect yeah yeah that's the best way that's good that's a decent way to describe it it's same thing in trail running no it's the same thing in trail running where you need it's not just a physical task right so in trail running you're putting out maximum physical effort while having to negotiate some level of technical terrain for example adam following coop down bar trail after following him up the incline oh yeah yeah we've done that a lot yeah really yeah with ice and snow yeah how many times have i almost died oh i have anybody of all of us almost died on that trail

well i took my hardest trail fall ever on bar trail i still remember this it was during the pike's peak marathon one year and i was coming down of course and it was just before you get to bar camp which is the halfway point on the bar trail so this is like mile like maybe 20 into the uh into the marathon and i hooked a toe on a rock on a relatively benign section of trail you know what this is like as a mountain biker you always wipe when the trail is not very technical so i was flying downhill i was actually having a really good race hooked a toe and i landed on my greater trochanter or my hip pointer right is the colloquial term for it right on a rock oh my god and it just sent this i mean it's like it's the equivalent of having your funny bone hit except with the full weight of your body falling down on it and my leg was numb almost the entire rest of the descent i could still run but i couldn't i had no proprioception so i couldn't i literally couldn't feel the ground and if you if you have never if you if you've ever had an appendage without proprioception and you're having to use it for like kinesthetic feedback it's impossible to do anything like when you hit your funny bone you try to grab a glass of water or like write with a pen or something it's it's like impossible to do because you you don't have that sensation like coming back to your brain i was trying to run full speed with that and it was so klutzy like i probably fell like three or four more times in kind of a benign

way because it was just like yeah i was just weird it's like a little noodle like a little leg noodle kind of like flopping around and it did like it it hurt a lot at the time it sounded even worse like it was just a horrific thud sounded even worse but the after effects were way worse than rolling an ankle or doing it like doing anything else like that because i literally just could not feel my foot it was hilarious did you finish i did finish of course resilience yeah i don't know but i mean kind of going to that i mean i i so in all honesty i've been i would say i've been fairly successful at at ultra marathon running i've had dns when i shouldn't have dnf'd and things like that i mean that's just part part of the game but i chalk a lot of that up personally and i use this i kind of use a similar theme with my athletes i chalk a lot of this up personally to going through a collegiate track and field and cross country program it which is very similar to your wrestling analogy i went to a big university and we i was a very very mediocre runner on a very mediocre team but the the thing that i took away from that program at texas a&m is we went to the well every single workout every single week for nine months out of the year because we ran cross country indoor track and outdoor track we had very

in fact might have been 10 months out of the year after it was all said and done and just the consistency of working out with a a group of people that were all duking it out every single day for five years took me an extra year to graduate for for five years nine months that consistency every single week every single month for five years just created this confidence in this mentality or grit right to use your vocabulary that i could draw i still draw upon i'm 40 years old now you know i graduated 20 years ago two decades ago i still draw upon a lot of that because it was it became so ingrained in like my soul for lack of a better word yeah no i i don't know i probably said this to multiple people multiple athletes yeah but whenever i'm having a mad day on the bike i just think of any like not one but any college wrestling practice i'm like nope so easy i'm fine i'm fine right now nobody's trying to punch me in the face rip my arm off like i don't have to do this for three hours with a sledgehammer banging against my head i think that the key with that adam that's such a brilliant statement is you said any any not just one yeah right any that is exactly the point meaning you've had so many other experiences that are over right going back to over training right that are over the experience

that you're having at that particular time that you just kind of look at like man whatever yeah that's it that's the lesson right there is to have those over in air quotes experiences and do them repeatedly and not be afraid of whatever the consequences are yeah even if you're coming at even if you're coming at sports late in life because that's what a lot of people will say well you know you're 20 and you're more resilient at the time because your physiology is different and you're younger and you've got all this testosterone and you know you can recover faster and blah blah blah there's still an appropriate level for an endurance athlete that comes into sport like later in life where they can consistently like consistently and resiliently like challenge themselves in order to create this athlete that can handle all those situations yeah no that's it we we would also um it was kind of funny old man strength was was something that we talked about god i love i love the fact that that term exists everywhere it's everywhere it was in wrestling and then it was in cycling when i got there and all this kind of stuff we talked about old man strength like right the guys that were just super gnarly back in the day they can still smash it out now and and and it's in so you talk about it but yet and it's what we're talking about here it's resiliency it's grittiness and they can you know sit on the couch for a couple weeks show up and still kick the crap out of you but it's but it it's more here right it's not old man it's not like they got

a bunch of like mitochondrial that is exponentially growing in their legs and all of a sudden they show up to the group i know it's like they went through some crap old man strength is really resiliency in like a different format that's right i love that oh my god i'm reminded of um oh my gosh i'm totally blanking on his name mountain biker from the 90s uh old woman strength i think that thing too though well old person i'm so i'm i'm i'm sorry if you're listening to this but rebecca rush that's like the first thing that comes to my mind like she will eternally be a total badass yeah because of the totality of training and racing that she's done i'm gonna change my definition of resiliency to rebecca rush that's just the definition you have the best alliteration ever yeah that's right a whole bunch of r's r cubed r cubed r cubed we'll coin that rebecca thank you for that i'm gonna go bottle it and sell it now she's riding the iditarod on a snow bike right now that's such a badass yeah insane anyway tangent we we tangent no i mean but that's totally relevant i mean so um were you around when andy lapkiss was an intern i know the name may have i think he came in like right before you so as i came on so anyway um oh yeah so andy lapkiss um nobody nobody listening yeah nobody listening to this podcast is gonna uh

is gonna is gonna i think that this name is remarkable but he's actually he is a very remarkable very remarkable individual and i'm very fortunate to to know him and work alongside him for a few years he was one of the most renowned guides on everest for several years and very and very tragically uh lost part of both of his feet uh in the end of thin air year uh while he was uh trying to save and did save a client's life and at the time i think this still might be the case they recorded the highest bivouac ever on that mountain because they got caught up in that storm and he was known first off he's one of the few people that have summited everest without oxygen so it tells you what an aerobic beast he is but he was very well known for the care that he took for um uh for his clients and it kind of showed up in this very big way saving his client's life by lying on top of them during one of the most epic storms uh ever on everest but the relevance to this is is while he was a mountain guide he was also big into the adventure racing scene i raced for team bale and things like that which that's kind of where rebecca grew up and i can't remember whether they were on the same team for a couple years or they competed against each other but anyway one day when he was kicking my ass you know riding bikes around carl spring because once again i mean he's a you know he i was 25 and he was 55 and he was old man

strength right like not not close like he was just totally destroying me on these rides and uh he would tell me you know some of the things that they would do in adventure racing and he would all this is before i knew rebecca he always say that that after the second night rebecca was the strongest person on her team she'd carry all the weight she'd boss everybody around i believe it i mean 100 and you know she was just total like very very proverbial badass yeah so she's gonna kick ass it i did a bike yeah i did a bike then golly yeah there's a running race that does that too yeah no thank you no i'm not that resilient okay i was gonna say you didn't sign up did you no uh no thank you where's the tangent there we started talking about rebecca oh yeah so resiliency we're still on it man we're flowing i know i i think that once again an example of somebody who has kind of consistently gone to the well and she's done her own version of edge finding throughout the years adventure racing mountain biking 24-hour world championships i mean she has the the moniker the queen of pain for a very specific reason it's that reason going through an exercise just like you described many times in competition out of competition over the course of for her i'm sorry rebecca decades decades not just years right decades of doing it that that's something that's like super powerful yeah yeah and i and i would even i'll throw this into the mix don't know if it's what we're going to

talk about but there's there is a different level of doing that for years and decades in comparison to a season or a workout right what do you mean by that what i mean is like she has been at the top of that endurance crazy game of like just setting different levels of what it means to be like a pioneer of endurance athletics um for for so many years right and to and even the way that she does it as well and even get back to like 100 milers too like it's just such a gnarly ultra way of finding an edge and in this there's because of the longevity because of the longevity that's what i'm talking about to be able to do that for year and year and year i mean that's it's not only like like really good self-care and habits combined with amazing genetics combined with a very healthy mindset and having some fun i've always considered to ping off of that aspect the athletes that do like the leadville trail 100 mountain bike or the leadville trail 100 run or the western states 100 and they get their 10-year buckle in 10 consecutive years i think that that is a like a more amazing accomplishment than almost any course record any one single day awesome event because of the

consistency that that takes to just one to get to the start line right you know how finicky that is just to get to the start line and then to get to the finish line in those types of arduous events events a decade in a row yeah i i just i don't know like what else tops that right i mean you could even say that like let's just take the most extreme example right we're just talking about rebecca she wins i did a bike that's one that's not one single day that's one single event right one single event i would still say that a decade of of finishing whatever ultra endurance whatever yeah trump it's hard to say that it trumps that because it's like but i i just think that it's a better example of resiliency to come back to the theme than that one single event because of the longevity of it yeah and again that's why i propose this as like it's a next level of resiliency because of the the longevity or the or the time component too because the that mindset that you bring in and i don't know maybe those 10-year buckle guys and gals never started with that goal so can't speak to the yeah maybe they did i i don't know but um what i mean by that is for them to keep on coming back it's a different all-in mentality versus that i'm all in on the i did a

bike or i'm all in on that right 100 miler and it is completely different it's just another tangent i was listening to a podcast pacing mcleven with his adventure stash if you haven't listened to it it's pretty good he he interviewed some adventury people but he was talking to justin williams who's a sprinter and payson's a endurance guy yeah williams is a sprinter and they were talking about the differences of like the patient's like man i don't know how you do it's like 1900 watts for you know 10 seconds he's like he's like that ain't nothing compared to your six hour time traveling through the woods you know what i mean and so but it's a it's it's fun to talk about that edge finding because you can you can take that edge finding principle concept whatever and you apply it to any duration right that you want and you explore yourself in all those aspects and you make it sport specific as well yeah i love that exercise man i'm really glad we kind of came back to that yeah i mean it's i'm glad that it's been a recent fascination of yours and i just happened to have caught on to it recently one that's one good thing that instagram is good for one good thing that's one thing that instagram is good for so i find out about adam's fascinations i mean who can stay in touch that's sad i'm just gonna call you next time dude what are you up to i'm edge fighting right now jason all right don't answer if i'm doing that all right let's put a pin in it there man otherwise this is gonna get too silly thanks for having me over on super tuesday man i'd be remiss you guys should check out uh coach uh adam polford's and coach uh hillary allen's

podcast a train right podcast which comes out weekly adam you want to give the listeners kind of a uh an overview what the vibe is there i think it's a cool format yeah yeah the vibe uh we are we are trying to spread the gospel of endurance performance whatever it takes to kind of elevate the listeners game and uh to kind of help you not only between the ears but you know with the legs and lungs uh get you the education from the latest uh athletes the latest physiologists and coaches to help you in your journey so uh hillary's taking the running i'm taking the cycling and triathlon and we're we're dishing them out weekly as best we can and this episode might even land on there as we as we share who knows but yeah check it out train ride podcast and you guys have already had like the likes of alex hutchinson on who else alex hutchinson dean carnasis dean carnasis was on there uh christy ashwanden was just on there uh i just interviewed jim miller oh wow which we talk oh wow jim yeah google jim miller he's an interesting interesting guy for sure uh but we were talking um a little bit about this edge finding and also like what it takes to uh to to build a strong mind we were talking about the athlete mindset so we were talking a lot about this grittiness and all this kind of stuff so it's an interesting podcast it's evolving as well um i'm learning how to capture sound better and i'm learning a lot from Jason Koop here so uh but yeah go check it out yeah it's it's

a good one you guys it's it's a good one to put into your uh rotation but thanks for having me over to your beautiful house in washington dc on super tuesday man yeah i appreciate it i'm glad you could come and thanks for doing what you do with your athletes it's been awesome to see your growth as a coach over the years as we alluded to at the very beginning of it from somebody who really didn't know anything about anything to i mean you're a master class coach now seriously thank you it's awesome man i'm glad we were able to get beat up together car michaelized version of things i still get beat up a little bit we've built up good teams and good mentors around us that they still they still keep us honest right that's right that's what it's all about any other way all right thank you my friend appreciate it there you go trail runners another great conversation with one of our cts coaches a little bit outside the space of trail running but certainly i think a lot of the lessons that adam has tried to describe uh in this concept of edge finding can apply to trail and ultra runners certainly it's an exercise not for the faint of heart if you're scared about doing it don't do it but if you do want to challenge yourself a little bit you do want to kind of dig into the well kind of see what you're made of and take the data from that and find new things about yourself new things about what you're capable of i do think it could be an important part of your training regime thanks a lot to adam for having me over to his house putting up with me late on a tuesday night super tuesday of

all nights uh really appreciate your hospitality and for putting up with some of my scheduling conflicts that came up uh earlier in the day as i was getting up there always have also appreciated adam's friendship uh over the years he and i have uh kept in touch since our early days of kind of working out of the same office together and now that we're on not opposite sides of the country but a couple thousand miles apart we still can uh lean on each other for experience and expertise and guidance with our own athletes always appreciate you adam love you brother appreciate you guys for listening if you had not had the chance go ahead on over and uh check out itunes and give this podcast a like or give it a review helps the podcast out a lot appreciate everybody listening and as always we'll see you out on the trails