Ask Koop Anything- Toughness Training and Separating your Calories from Hydration | Koopcast Episode 94

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast another very special episode in which i reached out to you the community on twitter on instagram and through my speak pipe channel on what questions you wanted me to answer for you i cannot tell you how much fun i had combing through all of these and i had to i had to pick two that's all i could handle for this particular episode so i appreciate everybody that did contribute i'm sorry that i did not get to them i promise i'm going to try to get to them in the future whether it's through this podcast or whether it's through the wednesday wisdom forum that i offer out on instagram you guys should check that out every wednesday morning you can ask me anything and i will try to answer it but this episode of the podcast centers around two particular questions the first one of which is how much adversity training should you actually be doing in training this is a really big topic it's one that i'm very passionate about and it's all too cliche now to talk about these things like grit and suck it up and everybody wants to just tough it out and goggins through it so first and foremost i wanted to put my coaching hat on and determine how we can in the most efficacious manner possible incorporate adversity training with an athlete for any particular circumstance

second question is a nutrition one this is one that came up a lot on twitter in twitter and a lot of different flavors and this is should you separate your hydration from your calories or should you go with a one source fits all solution like a roctane or some other sort of high calorie type of drink we see a lot of athletes do this and they kind of purport that this is a great way to do it in a lot of interviews and so i go through what i think about that particular strategy in the second part of this podcast so sit back have a listen and get right out of the way here is the ask me anything episode of the KoopCast once again i can't thank you guys enough for participating in this it really was a hoot for me here we go all right we are going to get into our first question and this is from long time listener and KoopCast fan this is from mark and it is all about this really curious aspect of training that i actually have changed my philosophy on over the course of my career and i'm going to go over that just a little bit and that is how do we deal with adversity training and training for toughness here is mark's question hey coop i know you love the question how long should my longest run be before my 50k 50 mile 100 miler but one thing i do think that is important at least for me is learning

on those epic long runs that things are hard i need that dose of humility and perspective before i go do something super big so how do you get that in a long run if it isn't the thing that you're doing itself all right really cool question uh appreciate you uh tuning into the KoopCast mark and submitting that question and as i mentioned from the onset this is something that i have changed my philosophy on over the course of my coaching career and let me give the listeners a little bit of a perspective on that before i go into this answer proper my traditional coaching background and the way that i was essentially brought up as a coach was from a really strict physiological lens i came into this environment where we had a lot of coaches that were from the olympic training center and their primary focus was to optimize physiology and as a consequence to that the way that we set up workouts and the way that we set up training architecture was almost solely revolved around creating the exact ideal situation to produce the best physiological result and so we were always arranging workouts and arranging training blocks in that particular manner where we were trying to optimize specifically the workload for that one one particular bout of training or the workload over the course of several weeks in order to

achieve some sort of optimal physiological response and we could measure that physiological response in the lab with tools out in the field and that strategy really permeated through to a lot of my training that i that i gave to my athletes when i was in my 20s and my 30s and then when i started to coach ultramarathon runners i started to realize that there was this aspect of ultramarathon performance that really superseded the physiology that you could achieve with training athletes absolutely needed to be able to handle tough and challenging and changing mainly environmental conditions but also competition conditions as well and so what i started to think about is how can i as a coach deliberately deliver training that would at the same time maximize or at least improve physiology as well as include this element of training for adversity or toughness training and certainly it is a tricky aspect to get right because you can't always just throw hard stuff at athletes and have them succeed time and time again you need a mix of training that is trying to optimize physiology as well as training that is trying to induce some sort of some sort of

condition that the athlete is going to have to experience some amount of adversity in order in order to overcome and it's not as simple as balancing this ideal physiology versus this toughness training because there is a venn diagram overlap between the two but make no mistake you can't you can't optimally optimally do both with the exact same architecture and i can pick apart individual training sessions and i can pick apart uh uh training structure that covers months and even years and say well this one is going to optimize physiology and this one is going to optimize this other area of performance and it's really the confluence of all of those different variables that creates an effective training program it's not just one or the other and i will say that in my observation of a lot of athletes and in particular a lot of elite athletes they mess this up all the time and the very classic example is the athlete that refuses to run in the rain and the cold and the snow and they are always getting on their treadmill in the vein of wanting to optimize their workout they can't stand running at a mile minute per mile or two minutes per mile slower than they normally would and they don't want to layer up and deal with the icy conditions and things like that and so they essentially relegate themselves to running on the treadmill for sometimes months and we see this here in colorado a lot when

the weather turns very nasty and the people up in the pacific northwest see this as well and i always look at that and say okay you're doing a great job of optimizing your training for your physiology specifically but are you doing enough training to optimize your capabilities to adapt to different environments and to adapt to when you actually need to be tough and what i will say is at the elite level their physiology is already optimized pretty pretty darn well those athletes are very good and so turning the screws even more so on days where you have the opportunity to do some toughness training or to do some adversity training i think in many cases is a big mistake because those athletes are already good enough anyway and you might only be able to optimize physiology a very very very small fraction of a percentage with that one particular workout but you have the opportunity to toughness train or to train for different environmental conditions uh so so very infrequently compared to the really good days that you have that you should do anything you can to take advantage of those bad days we see this play out in the field of competition for example a few years ago at UTMB where the weather was particularly bad and a lot of athletes didn't know how to cope with those bad conditions when to put on their rain jacket when to

take off their rain jacket when to take an extra 30 seconds to put on extra warm clothing and things like that it's those types of things that end up mattering just as much if not more in an ultra marathon setting as compared to the classic physiological things that we're trying to improve like your vo2 max pace at power lactate threshold and all those other things and so i use that as a little bit of a preamble that athletes would be are are very well served to consider both training that optimizes their physiology but also training that that allows them or enhances their ability to deal with tough conditions and to deal with conditions where they're going to adapt and many times that training is in opposition to one another meaning you are going to have to substitute what could be a perfect physiological workout for a workout that is specifically intended on training for toughness interestingly enough just last week i talked with sports psychologist kareem ramadan about this and we brought this element up very specifically and i'm going to play a short four or five minute clip from him and get his perspective on exactly what this what this equilibrium or this balance needs to be between toughness or adversity training and training for the optimal physiological state i like the athlete to be mentally aware of like i'm doing what i like

i'm doing what leads me to a good state okay so what i'm getting from you is is you're trying to set up the entire environment based on previous behaviors in previous patterns in order to kind of like stay out of this negative space in the first place so this is and i've heard i've heard a lot of sports psychologists kind of talk about that that environmental you're looking at the whole environment right training partners time of day what you're eating all these things you're trying to make conducive to the training session and the kind of athlete as a whole my thought always goes to overload and adaptation though because that's my that's my background right it's more of a physiological construct and when i hear this we're trying to create this utopian environment for the athlete the thing that that my mind drifts towards is reality isn't like that and they need to be able to cope with stressful and unideal environments just as they need to be able to know how to set up the environment to thrive you know i'm wondering how like how you balance that because they do seem and the listeners are probably you know thinking about this in their heads right now those do seem at kind of like polar opposite types of of construct where there are times where i want an athlete to be able to work out

and to perform in an unideal or a hostile type of environment right just so they can learn that they can get over whatever they need to they need they need to get over that's almost on the polar opposite of we want to wake up at the perfect time every day and have rice instead of pasta and like create this like you know like i said this utopian environment so i'm wondering like what your thoughts are on that kind of like bifurcation of of strategies that you see out there a lot in practice with coaches and with athletes it is a thin line to make a certain balance it's important to do both it's important to be aware of what suits you most but also it's important every now and then to do something uncomfortable to train at an hour that you dislike to train with someone that you dislike because in competition if you're a competitive athlete you're going to be racing sometimes with people that are going to push the effort from the beginning you kind of want to stick with them it's it's a lot of elements but to challenge ourselves with environmental factors or uh mental factors i like to do it consciously with the athlete like to tell them okay we're gonna do this to feel uncomfortable and to see how to deal with it but every now and then like once a week once every two weeks because for the amateur athlete they they want to enjoy the activity so you kind of want them to collect things that allow them to enjoy but for an intermediate level athlete actually more than the elite because

the elite already has been through a lot the intermediate athlete needs to be more conscious about those and to know okay this element or this situation makes me uncomfortable we're gonna have to do it every now and then to adapt more uh some of the athletes that i worked with and get amazed by how much they deal well with the uncomfortable are professional alpinists they deal with brutal environments in their case it's very hard to put something that suits you very well in in alpinism you might end up climbing 20 days sorry 20 hours straight sometimes staying in the tent and not climbing for four or five days so in that case we really need to highlight what suits them or something that brings them comfort uh it could be a comfort meal like a little candy bar that they keep with for emerging situations or i've had this case of this athlete that took with him on his expedition a sample of his favorite perfume it just made him feel fresh on let's say summer day he felt fresh i mean two months without shower uh it really made him feel nice so collecting these little things in such extreme cases it's a very important practice so here's here's what i think is really important from that from that example right there is the amount of adversity training we'll call it that we'll put the we'll put that in a bucket right where you're intentionally asking or athletes are intentionally asking of

themselves to go out into a harsh unideal environment and go in training and go and compete the amount that you're asking the athletes to do that in training is somewhat proportional to what they need to experience during in the field of competition or kind of during a task so your alpinists need to do it more than your endurance athletes who they're still they're still competing in harsh environments but not as harsh as an alpinism type of environment and my personal coaching ratio is about one to five meaning when we're when i'm looking at organizing an athlete's schedule and things come up they don't sleep really well for a couple days in a row or the weather is crap for a few days in a row one out of every every five of those instances or maybe two out of every five of those instances i'm telling them just to suck it up just suck it up get it done you need some adversity training we'll it's not going to be the perfect training day out there you'll kind of get it done the other three or four out of five times i'm reorganizing it to to suit a more ideal outcome for the particular workout or for the particular phase and that's because i know during race day you know unless they're doing something kind of off the charts from an fkt perspective or we know they're going to be in a really challenging environment it's not going to be so off the wall that they're going to have to have a super honed skill set in that and from that perspective the level of the

athlete that's true too all right there was some perspective from a recent KoopCast with kareem ramadan and to to to my point with uh with mark's question he didn't know this podcast was coming out when he submitted this question so anyway it was rather ironic that uh it just happened to come up in the next week but to wrap this up i really want to focus on two things that kareem went over uh during the course of his particular answer and this really brings the practical element to the answer to this question the the first one is this this this statement of well you need to do this every now and then and we tried to focus on this or refocus on this through the latter part of this answer how much does this how how often are you actually doing this and i think for any normal athlete in a normal situation normal ultra marathon athlete you're training for a 50 mile event you're training for a 100 mile event you need to do this on the order of maybe twice a month the upper end of that would be four times a month i don't think that doing it any more than that offers any sort of other kind of concrete uh advantage to kareem's point where he works with all these alpinists that are in a constant state of uncomfortableness and constantly challenging themselves they need to incorporate that more in training and they naturally do so because of the environment that they're in day in and day

out from a training for from a training perspective so the frequency needs to match what the athlete is actually trying to accomplish and i think that for most athletes in most normal situations of a frequency of about two to four times per month is really all you need to do to deliberately focus focus on the second thing is it needs to be very conscientious you can't just go out and make the training hard that's something that you can do but it's not as simple as that and here's what i like to do with my athletes is i like to look at what are the things that they are potentially going to encounter on race day that they are going to have to overcome and the training has to be reflective of that so going back to my example with as i mentioned earlier with UTMB one of the challenges that is realistic in that type of event is really shit weather the weather there are changes constantly the same could be said for uh for hard rock maybe even leadville on uh on some years and so absolutely when the weather is crap every so often i'm gonna tell them just to go out and suck it up doesn't i don't care how much it's raining i don't care how cold it is i don't care how much it's snowing go out there test your gear out get comfortable being uncomfortable because you might have to experience that on race day and we're going to part of training is you're honing your entire skill set

not just your physiology you're honing your entire skill set for what you are going to encounter on race day the same could be said for heat or some sort of other low point but the point is is if you're if you're designing your own training you have a realistic viewpoint of these are the potential things that i that i could encounter on race day what am i going to do in training to overcome them those are typically not the failure points because when you get to them on race day you have some sort of recollection of going through that type of adversity and training the failure points on race day are when you're faced with something that you have not faced on uh in a training day and that you have to overcome on the fly and sometimes you have the wherewithal to overcome that and sometimes you don't so to wrap it up the frequency of this type of adversity training i think is on the course of a few times a month for most reasonable people and i think you need to be deliberate by which you do it in terms of what type of adversity are you introducing is it a difficult environment is it simply making the training hard is it working through a low point is it working without a particular piece of equipment that you are so leveraged to leave your phone at home leave your pack at home and take handheld water bottles i mean those types of things i think when you do them deliberately in training when you encounter something that's remotely similar during a race you are less likely to have that be a big failure point

or a point where you could actually underperform so thanks a lot for that for a lot for that question mark is something that a lot of athletes are going through and i think a lot of athletes that either underperformed during their key races this summer or dnf during their key races this summer that had one of those particular failure points they're thinking about how they can adjust that moving forward all right so that wraps up this question i'm going to take a quick break and come back to the next one okay this next question comes it's really an alchemized question from twitter that i put out there and it has everything to do with this really this really particular nutrition situation of separating your calories from your hydration or whether or not you want to combine them and so i'm going to go through a couple of different flavors of this you'll have to excuse the pun and then i'm going to try to alchemize the answer into into into one cohesive narrative so robert on twitter asked asked asked what are your thoughts on separating your calories from your hydration for ultra racing and for long long runs of over 30 miles i've always used a combo of tailwind and water and gels to carry with me i'm just curious of what your thoughts are thanks and then peter has a question that's just kind of in the same vein but it's really based off of advice that he's heard from other athletes in in interviews

and he says a few athletes have mentioned in recent i run far interviews that they went with liquid calories in high altitude environments you're meaning me usually a proponent of separating the two so i'm interested in your knowledge on this topic so both of these kind of get at the same thing is should you try to combine your calories and hydration into one source and usually that's a heavy a more calorie heavy drink like roctane or maybe even concentrated tailwind or something like that or should you separate your hydration from your calories and peter is correct that i am more of an advocate of separating your calories from your hydration and here's why while it is true that a lot of athletes can get away with combining their calories and their hydration into one source and get away with all liquid calories for a particular period of time that only works it only works when the temperature is in your favor meaning if your fluid replacement requirements are exactly such that they are going to be matched with the calories that you're taking in from that fluid that's when that works and there are conditions they're mainly cool conditions with which that works that is not always the case particularly in very hot environments and the classic

example that i always bring up is when you're in a hot weather environment such as western states or bad water or any of these hotter weather races where you have to take in a liter of fluid an hour based on your fluid loss uh based on your fluid losses if you're drinking a drink like roctane which is 250 calories per 16 ounce serving simple math will tell you that you're taking in 500 calories an hour if you're using roctane to replace all of your fluid and deliver your calorie needs there are very few athletes on the planet that could that can tolerate that amount of calorie intake now you might say okay well what if i went with half roctane and half water that would be a reasonable strategy except for the fact that now you're diluting the sodium concentration of all of the fluids that you're taking in and you run the risk of having low blood sodium or getting hyponatremia so i'm not an advocate for combining these two sources unless the environmental stars just align such that your calorie intake can be perfectly matched with your fluid intake we started with the clip from the most recent KoopCast and as irony would put it i interviewed roxanne vogel who is the head of goo energy labs research and development department and i asked her this very question specifically about that roctane drink let's go all the way back

to KoopCast number two and hear what roxanne had to say about this particular topic no matter what the strategy is even if they're fat adapted they're still taking in calories during a race like it's not mutually exclusive but by any means and so i always as you do i'm sure advocate training your race day nutrition while you're out there on your long runs um getting as comfortable with it as you can even down to like which flavors work for you in different conditions because that is a thing people don't realize is you know it's hot outside and maybe your favorite flavor is sea salt chocolate which is mine but not when it's 85 degrees not a western states rocked angels right so you might want to go with like a lighter citrus flavor something that's gonna be lighter on the palate and encourage you to want to take in more versus something that's going to kind of sit there like a chocolate and you're like oh man this is just not the right environment for this at all i totally agree with that yeah okay that was roxanne vogel from goo energy labs and before i start out with this last piece i'm always i'm always remiss not to mention i like roxanne she's great she's fantastic i love the people over at goo i've known brian bond their ceo for a long long time and in fact i didn't i didn't i didn't realize this until i was just listening to that i got a hold of a lot of the very first batches of roctane that they produced and they came in these you know gray cans of these white labels they were

just kind of r&d'ing the flavors and things like that and the flavors were horrible to like start out with you could barely stomach it but they were pitching it at the time during this r&d process as the only thing that you needed during endurance events and and ultra endurance events and thankfully they smoothed the flavors out and they actually are are great now but they continued that line of marketing through kind of throughout the launch and that was my original contention with this question is that if you're pitching this from a marketing perspective is the only thing that you need during an ultra marathon event or an ultra endurance event you need to couch that with it's the only thing you you can get away with it being the only thing if these conditions exist and that was to roxanne's point of the context is key to which i will say yes the context is key but the main context is the environmental context and so in order for liquid calories to be your only source of calories to work out you really have to have this right constellation of environmental conditions to exist to which the amount of fluid that you're replacing is going to exactly equal the number of calories that you're going to need and that is so very rare it happens certainly it does happen that's why you see athletes that are able to succeed on liquid calories alone but it's so very rare that i don't think that that is the right approach to start with so what i think is the right approach to start with is to think about how you're getting your body

to re to how you're getting your or how the nutrition that you're providing to yourself from a hydration perspective to be put in your bottles and the nutrition that you're providing to yourself from a caloric perspective to exist outside of the bottles yes you're going to get some calories in a in from that particular drink for if you're as long as you're drinking some drink with kind of calories if you're not taking a noon or plain water or whatever but if you set up your drink to be to serve the purposes to serve the primary purpose of hydration the caloric content of that drink is going to be somewhere on the order of 80 to 100 calories per 16 ounces or 500 milliliters 500 milliliters so that's a product like scratch labs like osmo cliff has a very similar product to that i'm not endorsed by any of those those are just my favorite three that i always go to and what that allows you to do is to go through a liter or a liter and a half per hour in those really hot conditions and not tip yourself over the caloric requirements or the or your caloric needs that you would have to take in so you can take in a bottle and a gel or a bottle and some chews or a bottle and a bar or even two bottles which would be 200 or 160 calories and a gel which would total 250 calories at that point so i don't so to to summarize all of that is first off you need to have a strategy for how you're delivering your hydration

and you're deriving that from how much you're sweating in different environmental conditions and i've written a lot about how to do this sweat test i'm going to leave links in the show notes for the listeners that are out there that want to go do this at home i recommend doing doing a sweat test to figure out how much you sweat in about 10 degree increments at home during training that needs to be the foundation for your hydration strategy and the foundation for your caloric strategy can start with how many calories are you getting from those bottles and those different environmental conditions and then you're adding calories on top of that and ultimately what that enables you to do is to independently regulate how much fluid you're taking in from the amount of calories that you're actually doing you want to be able to independently regulate those variables because as i mentioned in the setup question to roxanne in most ultra marathon settings you're going through a wide temperature range and because of that wide temperature range your hydration needs are going to are are going to change as well and so if you start out from this premise that i'm going to get all of my calories from whatever's in my bottle your your calories are going to be inherently tied to what whatever is in your bottles and it's going to fluctuate with how much fluid you are trying to replace and you don't want that you want to be able to independently regulate both of those variables as you go along so have a

strategy first and foremost second i think it is a better i think it is a better setup to separate your hydration from your calories which you get from uh your bottle should serve the purposes primary primary purposes of hydrating and what you have in your pockets your gels your chews your bars any homemade goodies and things like that those should serve the purposes of fueling so thank you guys for the questions on twitter really appreciate those that is a really common one because we do see this play out a lot especially in the elite fields for whatever particular reason where they're trying to get all their calories from their bottles and i think that that is a mistake that a lot of athletes and in particular a lot of new athletes make because they can get away with it in a very narrow temperature range but once they have to deviate outside of that temperature range that particular strategy starts to fail all right folks that is it for this episode of the KoopCast i really appreciate mark and robert and peter for submitting those questions through my speak pipe channel as well as through twitter if you have any questions that you want on uh that you want answered on a future edition of the KoopCast go ahead and submit them through that speak pipe channel or the voicemail that i have set up links to that will be in the show notes or you can just hit me up on social media i will be compiling another ask me anything

i really do like the this format because uh most of you most of you most of the long time listeners are aware that i have this weekly forum on instagram uh or that i call wednesday wisdom i have a hard time saying that for whatever reason and i get this huge variety of questions including the one that mark mentioned from the onset of what is my longest long run need to be and i always poke fun at it and i'm sorry for the people that uh that submit that question i have to poke fun at them but it really is becoming quite cliche now but i really do enjoy that format i enjoy answering questions because everybody out there they always have something specific that they want answered and my goal one of my goals as a coach is to just proliferate the knowledge out there so that everybody can succeed in their ultra marathon goals so i appreciate all of you guys out there as always this podcast is coming to you ad free sponsor free that is a commitment that i made before i even interviewed roxanne on the second episode of the KoopCast that i would always keep this podcast ad free and that is because at the end of the day i am a purveyor of advice and just as i went through on the nutrition side i can recommend or not recommend whatever products i want to because i'm not inherently tied to any one or the other from a financial perspective you can help this podcast out by sharing it with your friends you can subscribe or you can leave a rating or review on itunes i really appreciate all of those as always you guys i had a had a lot of fun with this and i will see you out on the trails

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