There Is No Off-Season - A Coach Roundtable | Koopcast Episode 95

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast and welcome to probably what is the most timely and relevant episode of the KoopCast to date i'm recording this on let me check my watch september 14th and this is going to come out two days later which is a pretty quick turnaround turnaround turnaround time for me that's what i wanted to say on september 16th and it is all about what you should be doing in the next three to four months which most people are going to call their off season and i hate that vocabulary but what you can do in the next three to four months to make sure that 2022 is an excellent year for you i've been coaching for over 20 years and i've seen athletes do this perfectly and i've also seen them screw it up royally and the athletes that manage their transition phase the best they not only have a great next year but they also tend to have great years after that and after that and after that because of the whole setup because this time is so confusing for athletes should i take a lot of time off should i continue to train do i need to even pick up schemo or something like that i brought on the podcast today four fantastic coaches that also have a wealth of experience to talk about

specifically what they have done and what they are doing with their athletes during this critical phase you're going to hear from one of our longtime coaches and a coach that i have worked with a lot in darcy murphy we'll hear from her first you're going to hear from stephanie howe is a former western states winner and also one of our coaches you're going to hear from the preeminent andy jones wilkins otherwise known as ajw on his wealth of experience going through a lot of these transition phases himself and finally you're going to hear from one of our newest coaches and i'm really impressed with this guy ryan anderson all the way from tennessee he has a really sweet tennessee dialect that you guys will pick up on immediately i had a lot of fun with this conversation not only because it's relevant but because we all have this shared experience in working with athletes during this time i hope that all of you listening out there do take this to heart because next year can go a whole lot better if you choose to make it go a whole lot better because of what you do over the next four month four months as i always say endurance training is chronic it is not acute and what i mean by that is the work that you do six months prior nine months prior 12 months prior to your actual goal race that matters a whole heck of a lot hope you guys enjoy this conversation we're going to jump right into it here it is my conversation with our coaches all about how to manage your transition phase the genesis of all of this is that for years i've kind of loathed the term off season because the word

off right it it implies that there's like no season at all like there's nothing there should be nothing happening right off off means like you you're literally taking kind of off days and you guys know me i'm kind of a stickler for for vocabulary and i tend to take things in a very kind of literal sense but coaches for years have tried to like jerry-rig this into being a transition phase or weaknesses phase or you know kind of whatever and i don't think that we have the best ways to to describe it but this same cycle happens every single year of where we get to september october november and here we are on september 14th recording this and we see collectively and collectively we probably represent a couple hundred athletes just the five of us right here um we see athletes have this whole range of how they approach the next three months and that range goes from i'm going to disappear off the face of the earth to i'm going to make up for all the lost time for kind of whatever what whatever has happened during uh during the year and so what i wanted to do was i wanted to try to set up something for the listeners to go through a little bit of that range of experience and go through some of the things that we're practically doing right now with our athletes in order to better them for next year and i'm assuming that the listeners that are out there are doing so because sometime down the line they don't know when

that they might not know when that is uh yet but they're going to want to perform at some race right in 2022 and 2023 there there's likely nobody listening to this podcast that is going to be completely out of the ultra running game in 2022 i think that's a fair a fair enough assumption and so i want to put like the long-term goggles on a little bit uh because that's what we have to do as coaches with our athletes to start to think about next year and the year after and go suit and go through some practical things of what we're doing with our athletes right now in order to to to set themselves up for it so i'm gonna kind of pick on the coach that i know the most that's been coaching for the longest that's you darcy you've gone through this a lot because you and i started coaching kind of like right around the same time and i i kind of want you to start out with like what your range of experience has been with these athletes who kind of really are all over they really come they come into these situations kind of all over the map in terms of what they're practically going to do during this winter time frame sure and i always really emphasize keeping things simple um i think complexity for most athletes just add unnecessary layers so really i take a three-pronged approach um as you mentioned in your article this morning i have a discussion about strengths and weaknesses that's one and two and then i put a lot of emphasis on their overall fitness like i rely pretty heavily on the

big picture performance management chart um i know it's not a perfect measure of fitness um but i i've been lucky enough to coach a lot of my athletes for seven eight ten plus years so i have a lot of data so it's pretty easy for me to pull up hey this is what things have looked like over the past x amount of years these are the seasons that went especially well these are the ones that didn't go so well where was your fitness in let's say march april may where where do we want that fitness to be march april may 2022 where do we want your fitness to be for goal event and you can kind of use basic math and work backwards and wrap in the strength weaknesses into that that's kind of where i start this time of year the the pattern is really important here because and this is why i wanted to start with you darcy and for those of you listening i didn't give darcy the heads up that she was going to get the first part of this she's just that good um but the the the reason i wanted to start with you is because of that longevity piece right you mentioned that you have been working with people for seven eight nine ten years and that's that's extremely important context to have not only as a coach for those athletes because you have recognized their patterns in terms of when they perform really well and how to set those things up and when they perform really poorly and how to avoid those things but also how to translate some of those into kind of into other athletes

so is this one of those situations where you're kind of like backtracking sometimes five six seven years with those athletes and you're looking at those patterns and saying okay here's what we did last september october november or or this is the september october november that you performed really well the next year and then trying to to not exactly copy paste it but do something similar to follow up with that pattern for a year that might look similar coming up yeah absolutely i'm thinking of one athlete in particular that historically didn't ride too much up until december or january or run too much um and then over the past 18 months he um really put a lot of consistency into the winter training and he really crushed it this year um so just the keeping that frequency there it doesn't necessarily need to be the same sport you can add in some quote cross training activities but if you're just keeping those anchor points there um i think that that helps you roll into adding time and training volume throughout the winter versus reinventing the wheel where am i going to find this time because i've started dealing with other activities i've got i can relate to that darcy and i have one athlete uh older gentleman's in his mid-60s and we have just sat down to talk about this next fall and we look we did

exactly what you did i've been with him now for three years so we look back at the last three falls and he got it right twice and wrong once and the time he got it wrong was was not surprisingly when he he didn't really trust in the uh let's not call it off season but he didn't trust in the down season and it was it's very i find talking to athletes about taking some downtime if you will uh they have a certain fear of it and it's they tend to be the same people who have a fear of tapering before a big event that it's the same kind of mentality that i haven't done it before i don't really know how to do it but if you've had an athlete for a period of time you can say well look remember in 2019 when you when you decided to throw in that race in december and we were still playing catch up on it when we got to march whereas in the in 2017 and 20 uh in 2018 and 2020 you didn't do that uh so i think having that past experience really helps and if you can get comfortable enough with some of your other athletes you can say well you know there's this guy i'm working with in so and so and this is how it worked for him and give them some some context where maybe even they have some similar as uh similar qualities or similar things that they're into so i find that using past experience as a guide for the future really helps in this this time of year to add on to that i think a lot of runners are afraid of suddenly dropping their volume and instead of thinking of it as off season um i like to use the word

unstructured training so you're still going to be out running you know maybe even five days a week but it's you're not doing workouts there's no agenda you're not doing you know like a long run or a temple run every single week it's more like see how you feel and if that means maybe one day you're you're going to wake up and go to yoga instead or go for a ski or sit on the couch that's that's an important part of it and i think when you give that freedom to an athlete to kind of just feel out each day each week it's much more um it it doesn't feel as stressful of like oh my gosh off season i'm going to get out of shape and i'm going to gain 500 pounds and i'm never going to build a run again i i think that we know a lot about detraining from tapering actually if you go back and you look at all the tapering research of which there is copious amounts of we use that as like the initial kernels to determine okay how much does fitness deteriorate over this time frame given this reduction in training load because that's what you're doing during a taper right you're typically reducing your training load by 25 50 percent one week next week and things like that and then that's even been extended into these really extreme circumstances like with astronauts right of where they're in a zero gravity environment for months and they have very good research to to see how much their muscles have deteriorated their cardiovascular system is deteriorated and things and things like that and to ping off of stephanie's point the biggest thing that you can extrapolate from all of that research

is that it does not take much to maintain within about five or maybe eight percent of your peak fitness and what i mean by that is is if we had an athlete they came into our physiology lab and we did a proper workup on them lactate threshold and vo2 max testing and things like that and they did that during the like when they were the most fit when they just set a pr when they were just getting ready for a big race and things like that and we compared that to another test that we did during a transition phase or an off season where they have reduced their training by a certain amount that difference is only going to be if only going to be a few percent as long as they maintain something and to ping off of darcy's uh uh theme of keeping it simple i like to keep this simple as well and it's 50 as long as you're not going below 50 of your average weekly volume or training stress score or hours per week however you want to however you want to define it for more than four weeks i think you're going to be in good shape on the other end of it now interestingly enough athletes and particularly very good athletes they over exaggerate the meaning of that small percentage of difference in their head because they're so attuned to what this climb feels like what this pace feels like what this route feels like they're so heavily attuned to how that feels that any small perturbation or adjustment and what that

feeling is on a day-to-day basis automatically sends the alarm bells off but i'm telling you when you actually measure it from a physiological percent uh perspective it is it is really it is really imp it's it's like all it's almost nothing i mean even if you put them out in a time trial it's just so very very very narrow as long as you're maintaining that that kind of minimum amount of volume that this fear of fitness deterioration i think does not have to be a very big one yeah i was just gonna say i uh back that 50 that's like the stat that i use is like the absolute lowest like let's say you know an athlete's level is x 80 ctl at their peak fitness don't let it drop below 40 that's like the guardian don't let it you know whatever we need to do you know that's sort of the the cutoff when the bells start going off and i think i think we can actually use the ctl as a little bit of a guide post here so what darcy is referring referring to is the ctl which is chronic training load which is a metric that we use in training peaks and it's a 42 day weighted rolling average of training stress score and that's all a whole bunch of jargon but i think for the listeners what's really important is it's averaging how hard the train the individual training sessions are over 42 days that's six weeks so even if you reduced 30 of those days by 50 that ctl doesn't move like all that much right because it's a 42 day weighted rolling average and so i think that when

we kind of and the reason that it's 42 days is kind of backed by the science of how long it takes from a training input to actually result in a meaningful output or the opposite right the removal of that training uh input to a meaningful output but the point is is we can use that as a little bit of a guide post to say okay how long do these transition phases need to be and how deep do people actually need to recover and like i said just keep it simple and kind of meet in the middle of where it just needs to be it just needs to be reasonable as long as you're not falling off the face of the earth nor are you maintaining your current level of fitness and frequency i think you're going to strike kind of the right the the right balance between those two and so athletes they definitely i think we all as athletes have the fear of losing fitness but this is this is a big part where the coach can come in it's like okay don't go below 50 and you're really supporting them through this of like hey maybe you needed this break if we want to go hard april through june july to get ready for that fall race it's okay to it's okay to be down right now it's okay that you're doing less this is where the coach comes in and really reinforces and is the cheerleader and is like hey you're you're gonna be okay yeah because we've got the perspective of a lot of different athletes right ryan like i think that that's one thing that athletes have a hard time wrapping their heads around is they're their own kind of n of one and they don't realize that their experience is usually shared amongst a lot of

their cohorts in the athletic field and unless you work with a lot of athletes and this goes back to our other point with darcy right once you've got like 10 or 15 or 20 years of experience working with dozens of athletes every single year you start to you start to pick up on that and you realize that yes everybody is a individual but some of those de-training experiences really aren't all that unique we're still we're still bound to human physiology at the end of the day and that human physiology typically has a a fairly standard set of rules that um uh that it that it that it tends to abide by um i want to switch gears a little bit and talk about something that we were originally talking about off air that andy uh brought up we've been talking about a lot of like fear of d fear of d training right which is ingrained in a lot of athletes head oh i don't want to i don't want to lose uh that much but andy brought up something where a lot of athletes actually fear gaining weight during this time because their output because their output goes down and i think this is a relevant conversation to have because it does get tied into performance but yet it's not one that that a lot of people want to talk about given the current climate around weight management with athletes it's a very tricky subject and it's a very touchy subject but i don't think it's one that we should avoid particularly during this time of year so andy i want to get your kind of initial thoughts on it and then steph we're going to bring in you since you were the nutrition expert in the room and i think your

advice is going to be really poignant here i i'd like to start by saying interestingly enough particularly in the last year as we've come through the pandemic i think it's well known lots of people put on some extra pounds during the pandemic as they were working at home and and a lot of them ultimately came and uh and looked for coaching and i i probably have half a dozen athletes they happen to all be male currently who basically was as they came on board with cts and we had the conversation it was like they wanted to be fat get faster and and and you know sign up for a race and have a successful summer race but they also basically said and hey andy you know i put on i've put on 15 pounds since high school and and i really want to lose some weight and you know and then of course they went through the spring and summer and they lost a lot of weight and they felt good about themselves and they were climbing mountains faster than they ever have before and now they're really scared about gaining it back and so while while i we can look at their ctl and i love that 50 don't go below 50 percent and find that workout on wednesday that can really make a difference so that they may not have to do as many uh intervals as they as they did back in uh back in may but that fear of losing weight is is something that's very tangible for for many of my athletes and i and i think that that informs a lot of our conversations as we go into the fall and in fact it merges into conversations about cross

training about strength training and e and especially about diet uh during that time so it's a it's a fascinating dialogue to have when we've been going from focusing so much on training and preparing for an event to some more lifestyle things like you know they want to still be able to wear those pants that they were excited to buy in june because they lost a couple inches on their waistline steph all right this is your wheelhouse what do you have to say about this yeah yeah i mean it's it's tough because a lot of times when we're taking this rest period or recovery period it also is um you know usually during the fall and winter months when um the food that's available tends to be a little bit more energy dense uh it's cold it's dark outside we tend to to move a little bit less and there's a lot of um more holiday celebrations that always are revolved around food and so it's just kind of a natural shift that suddenly we're training less and we're eating more and um so it's a really common time for athletes to put on weight but when i work with someone i try to get them to take a step back and look at the big picture and that's that's a normal process for your body to put on some weight in the quote-unquote off season or whatever we're calling it but not an unrealistic amount and so when it comes to our body composition it's more impacted by the foods that we eat than the activities that we do although exercise and training is important and it does help with body composition it's more what

we're eating and so just having that basic knowledge of like even though you're resting or you're taking time to just be unstructured with your training it doesn't mean that you can be unstructured with your eating or you can do whatever you want um you still need to eat the right foods and maybe be a little more conscious about it i think uh one thing i have athletes focus on when they're not training high volume is just getting a little more protein um because that keeps you full longer and usually you can um get in a little bit less and still feel good during that off season but it is normal to have some fluctuations you can't control your weight and be at the same same amount the entire year that's unhealthy unrealistic so know that just take a step back and just know that it might go up a little bit but as soon as you start training again it's probably going to go back down and with the the foods that are available in the spring and summer they're much more low energy dense and um that's going to help as well so it's that that's not a great answer for how to avoid it but i think you should expect some weight gain but not necessarily you don't want to put on like five or ten pounds because that's hard to take off and you starting a season and trying to lose some weight as well as make training gains it's really difficult so it's better to just kind of like let the fluctuations kind of roll i kind of

view this through the lens of like the individual athletes so if i have a high performance athlete that is that is that needs to kind of focus on their body composition in order to optimize performance or if an athlete that has had a stable weight throughout the last four or five years they're i realize that they're going to fluctuate up and down and they should right where the winner they're going to gain a few percent and then during the competitive season they're going to kind of lose that few percent that's one lens the other lens is for and andy i think a few of the people that you mentioned earlier might kind of fit into this category if you have somebody that needs to lose 40 or 60 pounds and we all have athletes that you know come into to coaching that have that as a goal it's not a big percentage but it is a percentage that weight loss is going to happen throughout the course of years if they're trying to make it sustainable and they're still going to have up uptrend fluctuations in it and so it's a matter of where the line is going if you look at it over the course of like two or three years is it flat like for the competitive athlete and then it goes up a little bit and then comes back to baseline or is it continually down like a bad stock market chart or like a bad stock chart right is it continually down with these gradual like kind of upswings and so i think that that like the difference in the background of the athletes really needs to be kind of taken into context that that not everybody's going to fit this like stare like the stereotypical you know the stereotypical pattern um it is totally natural for any athlete under any circumstance whenever they're going to reduce

their training volume to put on a few pounds i think that's just that's just physiology right because you can adjust your energy input output much more readily than you can how many you know calories you're you're you're taking in taking out you can you can take a day off right and your energy output from an exercise perspective goes to almost zero in that perspective but your eating habits are going to are not going to change that are not going to change that dramatically from uh from day to day so it's it's enough this is another interesting perspective of this whole off season so the next thing i want to kind of transition to is we've been we've been talking about well before i do stephanie wants to jump in really quick go ahead do it well i i was just gonna say i i just want um to mention to also be careful with that because even though if your energy expenditure goes to let's say zero that doesn't mean your body doesn't need energy and the problem with um reducing your intake too much is that you start your metabolism will start to shut down and then when you get to the spring and you're trying to train your body is going to be all out of whack and you know if you're only eating you know say say your your intake is way too low then when you go to train on top of that it's just going to kind of backfire so although yeah you want to be you want to be mindful of your intake you don't want to to reduce it too low that it sets you up for failure the next season yeah i think the theme it almost is just like the training piece right it's be reasonable avoid the edges of the bell curve avoid the really stupid

mistakes and then you're gonna you know you're gonna have a natural adjustment period once training kind of kind of kind of picks back up um it's it's interesting that we spit this whole time on like focusing focusing on things like how much fit like people being fearful i guess is the word that i was really looking for for people being fearful of either weight gain or fitness loss but all too often there are these athletes that just like fall off the face of the earth right and i honestly thought more of the conversation was just going to kind of revolve around that and and and why that actually occurs and so i'll start out with this one right there are there there are categories or there are athletes that are going to take off season as very literal i'm going to run or exercise one day per week or no days per week for the next six months and then once january comes around and all the lotteries kind of shake out then i'm going to hit the oh shit panic button because i got into western states or i got into whatever my goal race was going to be and i realized that i've lost you know kind of 20 or 30 30 percent of my fitness i've always viewed that at viewed that as a lack of long range thinking like you haven't thought about six months in advance nine months in advance even two years in advance and because you don't have that you're not even meeting the minimum you know the minimum effective dose that we just talked about that is really not all that much that it takes to

maintain whatever fitness whatever fitness that you have but at the same time that needs to be counterbalanced with you do need a period to rejuvenate yourself you cannot have the pedal down 12 months out of the year 18 months in a row and things like that because eventually people just psychologically and physiologically whether you want to call it burnout or they just can't they just can't sustain it or whatever so i wanted to hear what you guys have to think about that particular aspect trying to balance this element of not burning out with this desire that they that you actually do have to take some time to just like physically and psychologically regroup because of a hard training year that a lot of people have had i see the burnout is i don't know i don't know if you can put a percentage on it it's a lot mental um i think that the training load can not change significantly but the mental focus and the mental pressure one puts on themselves can and should change significantly this time of year it might be scheduling more group runs it might be um stopping in the middle of a run to journal or draw but just i think a mental emotional spiritual rejuvenation um can go so far and it really bleeds into the physical rejuvenation so i really encourage my athletes to take that time to

rejuvenate outside of the physical realm as a as a veteran of uh probably half a dozen of the fall off the face of the earth athletes uh i have you mean you yourself are the people that you coach andy like you like half a dozen of the years that you've been training you fall off the face of the earth so so i i i i've done a lot of thinking about this and i think i think sometimes it's a temperament issue i think sometimes people come to coaching because they can't do it themselves right they for whatever reason maybe they've tried a static training program or something or they want to know more about the science so they come to the the training because it's not in their natural tendency to do that and left to their own devices they just kind of do what they do and so then they come to us and they get coached and they lose weight and they run this great race and and everybody feels great and then they're like oh thank god now i can fall back off the face of the earth again and even though we've told them you know it's good you're going to benefit from doing this you know focusing on a year round that there's a certain person out there that the the mental energy of looking at that workout schedule and going in training every day is just too much for that's why i like chef's word of unstructured training not off season but unstructured time i remember coop a couple years ago you know in a conversation like this and one of our continuing eds you talked about an athlete of

yours who was just like what are you doing coop it's just like one recovery run after another whereas you know that is really that's the time you know that time of year is 30 minute recovery run 45 minute recovery run so i think i think athletes need to ask themselves you know are they in that are they that kind of a person because they might benefit even more from not falling off the face of the earth even though that's kind of their tendency yeah i can't i keep coming back to this story i'm going to tell a personal story here about an athlete that everybody knows and that he wouldn't he wouldn't mind me uh reiterating the story and i i don't coach i just know him as a friend and it's zach miller so is a lot of as a lot a lot of the listeners will know for a long time zach was the caretaker at bar camp which is this log cabin in the middle of bar trail it's very hard to get to it's six miles you know that i can't do it's a lot of hikers that will stay there overnight and it is a tremendous amount of work to upkeep that place you can imagine people are coming in they're throwing their backpacks around it's not like you can call an electrician and have them like come up there and fix your stuff like you've got to fix all the stuff yourself and i went up there one winter and i was just hanging out in in the cabin and it was zach's off-season transition phase kind of whatever whatever you want to call it and i asked him what his training looked like and he's like i'm working i'm doing the incline a lot i'm like well why are you doing the incline a lot he's like well i suck at really steep uphills and the incline is this 45 grade old railroad uh it's this old cog railroad that people

use to hike and the point is it's just very steep and i'm like well why are you doing the incline he's like well i suck at it and it's just like this cabin you always should be working on something and you know zach's not coached he's a very intuitive guy but he kind of used this like cheeky way of how he took care of bar camp and like relayed it into his training quite well and i think this is something the listeners can understand as well is that you can also use this time to work on some of your weaknesses that you have identified and a lot of times those things don't come at a high physiological cost so let's say it's strength training or let's say it's technical downhill running or let's say it's you know some element of even like your nutrition programming or your nutrition game you don't have to put a lot of physical cost in the into those things in order to reap a high reward and so it kind of meets both it kind of satisfies or satiates both the desire to reduce your training load by 50 and then also improve some aspect of your game now zach wasn't doing that don't get me wrong he was running hard up the incline every every single day but he's a different you know he's a different anomaly but this this this theme of always working on something i think is i think that resonates with a lot of people and the trick is and this is where we can kind of come in as coaches is what is that something that has maybe a low physical cost to it that is also

going to improve their performance come next year and also leaves them kind of rejuvenated once the kind of kind of once the spring rolls around so i want to hear from you guys if you guys have done that specifically with any of your athletes and and what that in particular looked like for those athletes i'm just going to say shout to the pts this is a great time we all have pt exercises that we should be doing and uh this is a great time to do it it's like you said it's it's not a big load um it's not going to be that stressful in the body but a really good time to set that foundation so that you're able to run without uh imbalances so as the coaching load goes there the training load goes down the physical therapy load should go go up well it should because you have more time generally that's the biggest the biggest reason people don't do it is they say i don't have time to do it which i also think is kind of um not true but when you're not running as much it's like okay i can use that time where i'd be out for a run um to get into my pt stuff so i think it's it's a really good time to do it i always feel like those things are just like the last thing that people are thinking about right and so like you said they just kind of run out of time and now you do have time so you might as well make the you know make the effort to do it so yeah shout out to the pts that give all those exercises that a lot of times don't get done what what are some some other some of some of the other coaches experiences in terms of we did this really deliberately with this athlete and it worked out for the next season in terms of

like weakness training and things like that yeah i was gonna also say the same thing that stephanie did okay let's that niggle you've had all throughout training let's go see the pt um but i think geography can influence the off season quite a bit um so obviously out west in the mountains it's going to be schemo and things like that but in tennessee in the south we can keep running all winter so there's there's nothing really stopping us of like oh we need to get better at that technical downhill do i want to get better at running trails um so use your geography to your advantage to to plan that unstructured training to target the weaknesses i almost think to ping off of that ryan i almost think that that people in more fair weather climates have a harder time like polarizing their season with these breaks because the racing is more year round in the mountainous states it's been it's a lot bound by just the seasonal weather patterns and snow gets up on the mountains and you can't get permitted for this or that or whatever and so there tends to be this gap of racing between september and february or march that that kind of naturally leads to other people's gaps but you know when i lived in when i lived in texas you know i'm a native texan so i can speak to this you know personally it we we raced year round i mean two weeks out of the year 5k 10k marathon like it was like non-stop all year and i think it

like i think if anything it forces you to be more deliberate because you do have those options out there and you're not forced into this you know hibernation period and you're going to naturally take a break because of you know just because just because of the seasons yeah so yeah there's races year round i feel like pacing is a big thing athletes are always questioning trying to figure out find some 10k trail races maybe 5k road races because you can you can definitely hit that 50 threshold and stay stay fit and be able to go go do those faster races and feel like oh that 5k um yeah that's definitely too hard i'm gonna remember that facing when i get into my my tempo phase of training um uh oh i did that half marathon on the trails i can push a little harder on on the downhills and uphills and recover faster and even if your weakness is speed you can jump into some of those races and there's still once again if you're looking at your training load in terms of weeks not days it'll most likely be reduced if you're going into that 5k phase and it doesn't take much like to incorporate just a little bit of speed in the in the flavor of like doing some strides or some simple repeats on the track you might only have to do it once a week or once every 10 days but your 60s if you're tracking this on training peaks right your 60 second pace or your two minute

pace or your 5k pace however you want to uh however you want to divide it up that's still going to improve pretty remarkably for most ultra marathon athletes because they're literally running twice as fast as they would during any normal endurance run right ultra running and in road running have that have that have that polarizing aspect to them where the races for ultra running are typically slower than most training runs and on the road that's flipped over where the races on the road 5k 10k are typically faster than most training runs so simply making that switch even at a reduced volume for several weeks can have a huge positive huge positive impact on things so one one area that's related to this working on weaknesses uh and and that can be fun in the off season for the right athlete uh we all have athletes that uh have that will have you we talk about our a races our b races and our c races and sometimes in our c races we say you're just going out and doing this 50k as a training run and people are universally they have a great deal of difficulty doing that well in the winter time it's an awesome opportunity because you're kind of taking some downtime anyway so you're actually doing this 50k as a training run it's gonna it's gonna be cold it's gonna be on trails that are not at all specific to what you have lined up in june but you're really going to do those things you're going to run a 50k and eat as if it's a hundred miler and i think that's that it provides a little bit of mental training but then it also allows you when you get to april and you say now you're really going to do

this run as a training run remember this race is a training run remember the one we did in december well you're going to do the exact same thing now they're more fit now they're you know their their their ramp rate is going up but you're still going in and doing it as a training run so you know ryan tip that off for me because you're right in the south you could just go and go and go but if you go ahead and the other thing is you could sign up for a race and do it with somebody where you say we're going to go step for step and do it together maybe it's your spouse maybe it's one of your kids you know and that's you're doing it for the experience but you're also getting in the practice of doing a race as a training run so it's an interesting little way to use that off season and maybe still stay a little bit motivated but make sure you're being careful i have i have definitely have different training partners in the winter intentionally just because i want to do different things but definitely not my spouse because that would cause more problems down the road you'll get a you get a 50 50 you know split on that i think if you took a poll of runners whether that would be a positive or negative for their running or for their relationship i've known i've noticed athletes um if the if the spouse and themselves are runners they will plan their whole season around okay i've got my a race now and then my my down season is when now i'm going to support my spouse and doing that so that goes back to really long range planning not of spur of the moment race and then your spouse is like wait i was i have a race like a month later who's i thought we were going to split up watching the kids to train and

everything like really go long range planning and planning your your seasons your a races whatever around your significant other darcy you were kind of chomping at the bit to jump in this as well yeah i was just going to pivot i guess a little bit back to what we were talking about on the physical therapy and integrating that i work with a good number of hairy and post-menopausal females and older gentlemen as you age it's really really important and beneficial to do some strength training throughout the season especially uh building up to lifting quite heavy weight and integrating some plyometrics so really as soon as that last event happens i'm having that conversation of how soon do you feel like we can start integrating some light strength training going through those motions getting the structural adaptations in place those connective tissues so that in december we can do a heavy strength phase because that's really going to benefit you structurally uh in terms of injury prevention so that's something i really try to push with the athletes in that um age range for athletes that have never done really heavy strength training and that they're training really hard that's like the almost the only opportunity you have to start to incorporate it because it's extremely difficult to incorporate that heavy strength training load when you're not used to it and you're training hard at

the same time because most of the times it's just too much overload so then by default to darcy's pattern right there you get into a transition phase the whole training load is reduced and then you go through this gradual strength training buildup of you incorporate some you know some kind of like lighter more found more kind of like foundational work from a strength training perspective maybe it's reps of 10 or 12 or something like that and then you transition into the heavy stuff because you have that time and you need that time to do it right you can't just you can't just transition into the heavy weights because of the training load that's part of it but the other part of it is is if you've never strength trained that's the last thing that you would do anyway right to start to incorporate that heavy stuff right out of the get-go you need to incorporate it but you've got to give yourself time and normally the only time that you have because everything else is going on is during a time where you reduce your overall endurance training volume by as much as you would during a transition phase absolutely it's a really different stimulus and for somebody that isn't familiar with strength training in general especially heavy strength training i think it's really important to have some oversight hire an additional professional that strength coach that can ensure your form is proper even if it's for the first two or three sessions maybe they don't need to hold your hand every single time you go to the gym but again to prevent injury thinking with that long range in mind how is this going to benefit me and how am i going to keep myself safe yeah that's one of the issues that i've always had with people who try to

shoehorn strength training into their into their run program usually it's just not it's either too risky because they're trying to do it at home or they just don't know the basic movements or things like that or it's just not enough stimulus to to to have an adaptation and so in order to have the strength training load to be big enough you have to kind of almost like concentrate it in one air in one phase first and then carry it through the season versus dropping it in in the middle of the season because they heard so and so likes to you know lift heavy weights and all of a sudden in april they're just starting they're doing the heaviest training and they're doing their heaviest strength training all all at the same time those of you not watching the youtube version everywhere everybody's chuckling because they're thinking of somebody who has that who has done that um okay i want to bring up one final aspect so ryan you brought this up and it is really specific with athletes who are obsessed with schemo this is like taken over the trail in ultra running world and i think it's a cool thing but the coach in me looks back on it and says we're taking away people's regeneration phase because they're moving from racing hot and heavy in august september to racing hot and heavy in november december and january and then where do you plan out the down phase and we all have we all have athletes that have been bitten by this like schemo bug they're getting the gear and they're just and it's

kind of almost like an obsession when they initially kind of like get into it and i personally my tendency with those athletes is to this is not dissimilar from anything else that i do is to back the lens out is to start to look at things from 12 months 18 months 24 months and say okay this is a cool obsession that you have let's absolutely start to incorporate this but let's look a year down the line two years down the line so that we can incorporate natural recovery processes into the training program and you're not stuck in this 10 or 12 months out of the year racing two times a month because that's the tendency that most people get into is their racing phase goes from six months out of the year which is a normal trail and ultra running racing phase to nine or 10 or 11 or 12 months down the year because they've incorporated this new not only this new sport but this new sport that's like completely taken over their lives into their into their training program so ryan we're going to start with you like what has your experience been like with some of those athletes so obviously ultra athletes we love exercising but we still need the break just because there's no pounding doesn't mean i can do it as much as i want rather if that's skiing or cycling you still need a break don't don't try to justify it and think like i'm just pedaling all day i'm i'm not sore i can keep going and going and going um and then

that's that's where your coach comes in and that 12 18 month outlook it's like okay you love this new skiing you you got that new gravel bike that's cool but we still gotta we still gotta be careful with it we can't go over the top with it we can't train 12 15 hours a week all year round ryan i think you get uh the gold star for the best quote just because you're not pounding doesn't mean it's not training load which is perfect because a lot of people fall into that cross training trap right whether it's cycling or even getting on the elliptical or scheme or schemo because it is less weight bearing or it's not a greater than uh weight greater than one times your body weight type of sport we think that we can a either do more of it or b do it in conjunction with our normal with our normal run training which is what you see a lot during the summer right i'm going to do all my normal run training and i'm going to start to ride the gravel bike on top of that and i think it's true it's important for uh athletes out there who might be listening you you have to tell your coach about doing those workouts no sneaking no no sneaking in that stuff and pretending like it didn't happen i find that happens a lot so until oh my gosh i was so tired on my long run i don't know why and you have a talk with them a little bit and they're like well it turns out you know they crushed it on their on their gravel bike on thursday and didn't tell you about it didn't put it in their training plan or whatever so i think it's

i see that happen from time to time well i don't need to tell any about this because it doesn't really count i've had athletes go through a couple weeks of thinking that their cycling computer was automatically uploading to training peaks and it wasn't and then yeah for whatever reason yeah there's an extra 10 hours of training that magically shows up when they actually figure that piece of it out it's where automation fails us when we start when we start when we stop communicating and we start relying on automation that's where technology actually fails us uh devil's advocate really quick and then i need to jump off um what if this person really loves schema and it's mentally rejuvenating for them so i would go back to what i think it was what ryan was saying is it has is that this transition phase has to be both physically and mentally rejuvenating if it's one and not the other you're eventually going to drain that battery at some point down the line and that's the conversation that i have with athletes that pick up this obsession with schemos that's great i love the fact that you love it i i actually i do i do really love the fact that you love it you're going to come into march april may at a superior level of fitness because you've been training your butt off schemo during the winter however that that emotional battery is going to get drained at some point sometimes it's not that summer sometimes it's not even that that fall but it might be the following

winter or even the following spring because you can only run you can only i'm using the word run not literally you can only run that uh that high performance engine so long before either the physical side or the emotional side or both kind of or both kind of like break down and so yeah i mean it's they they could absolutely love it you need to foster that but that's where long-range planning starts to come in and i think that really is really what what what shows you and you can pick up on previous athletes patterns in terms of how long they can maintain that level of training before needing some sort of break because many athletes have had an asynchronous season i mean the stereotypical one is somebody does hurt right which is in which is in january and you have to completely rearrange that athlete's winter and then usually their spring afterwards because of that one race you can kind of use those patterns i think going forward when athletes pick up these schemo or whatever it happens to be during the winter just to see what potentially could happen when they when when they go so long without the without the stereotypical break i have been that athlete that does all the sports because i kind of enjoy dabbling in everything like fall cyclocross uh winter schemo and nordic skiing spring gravel riding but just because you enjoy those activities doesn't mean you need to race and you need to go all in you can

still get out and do the activities and enjoy them and i think when you have that long-range plan and you kind of know like hey i want to do western states i'm probably not going to do a schemo race every single weekend because i think it's more the emotional psychological burnout of like getting a race start and going through those motions that if you use all of that during the winter you get to the spring summer and you're kind of just out so i think encouraging those activities especially during the winter is great but you don't have to race here's the here's the problem with that stuff is you're talking to a bunch of ocd ultra runners that have just found a new sport with all the fancy gear and it's in the winter and there's so much stoke around it like it's one thing to say oh yeah just you know just just just take it easy but i mean we all know how that practically plays out in reality when people get you know they got a new toy at that point right they've got a new physical toy to like go play around with which is now schemo and i'm going and playing in the mountains so anyway that's uh i think that might be i appreciate the sentiment but it might be kind of pie in the sky thinking i think one last thing to kind of wrap up is like don't get attached to these anecdotes that you hear of these athletes i feel like the whole schemo thing exploded when when rob carr like made his big ultra running splash i remember all these articles of like oh he schemo'd all winter and showed up to this race barely having run and won everybody's like oh that's what i'm gonna do or um oh i had this

buddy that rode his bike all summer and cut down his running to twice a week and he had this huge gain it's it's always like in of one like trust your coach communicate all these things with your coach so you're not kicking around these ideas in your head um and just um as darcy said like keep everything simple with your training don't try to go to the edges and try to find these marginal gains i think the same thing could be said with uh gravel biking and uh with tony when tony and i love you tony i love you to death if somebody's listening to this and tells tony i mentioned i mentioned him on this podcast tony i love you to pieces man i've known him for a long time but when he picked up when he when he picked up the gravel bike everybody else looked at that and said oh man that must be a great way to train and you know that's a realistic consideration is a lot of people will idolize these elite athletes necessarily so because they're normally great people and they're obviously great athletes but i think ryan to your point uh you can only take that so far and you have to realize that really good athletes are in a different class and they typically will adapt to anything including all these cross-training modalities and things like that so we have to be very careful when we pattern our normal athletes training around those elite athletes that might not quite be a fit we're gonna put a pin in it there i thanks to ryan ajw darcy and steph for coming on the uh for coming on the podcast today sorry i'm kind of like losing my mind already this is a really fun conversation it was one that that is going to be really pertinent for a lot of athletes that are going into their

transition phase ryan i appreciate all you guys all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to darcy to steph to ajw and and to ryan for coming on the podcast today and explaining exactly how they are managing this transition phase this winter with their athletes there are a lot of nuggets of wisdom there and i can't tell you how many years of coaching and athletic experience that we all represent collectively there's something in there i think for everybody there's something for the athletes that want to pick up something really hot and heavy during the winter like schemo there's something for athletes that continually fall into this trap where they do too little training and there's also a lot of patterns in there for how to actually do it right so i hope you guys and gals the listeners out there picked up on something that you can take with you this winter in order to improve your game for next year in the next year and the next year after that i mentioned in the coaches mentioned a number of times during this podcast that we were bringing up very specific examples from our athletes i firmly believe that this time frame is one of the best to actually start coaching and that is because as i mentioned during the intro all training is chronic it takes six months nine months 12 months to reap a lot of not all of but a lot of the adaptations that you get out of endurance training starting coaching now gives you the most

runway for whatever your goals are this summer it's not the last three months of training you're cramming at that point but if you start today with reasonable structure reasonable architecture and you begin to build the platform for what you for which you will use during the actual heat of the season during june during july during august when all these big events these big goals that you have actually come up you set yourself up for success the most so if anybody out there is curious about coaching with any one of our coaches on this podcast or any of our coaches period you can go ahead hit me up on social media you can go to www.trainright.com and find all of our coaching packages a link will be uh in the show notes to that particular website but i encourage everybody to think about it now because once april may and june roll around hey we'll coach people but it is a much better setup if you've got more time to work with that's it for the podcast today appreciate the heck out of all of the listeners and as always we'll see you out on the trails