Sole Sisters - Bad at Running

The sisters are back! Kylie and Justine document their experiences following the "bad at running" plan. Kylie celebrates a major milestone by completing her first 5K without walking breaks, motivated by a Taylor Swift-themed virtual race and the supportive community on Strava. They discuss their preparations for the Reno Tahoe Odyssey and the 5peaks grit in Canmore, Alberta emphasizing how the plan helps beginners build endurance. They also highlight unconventional training methods, such as a Taco Bell-themed run and a spreadsheet-based treadmill game synchronized to pop music. Ultimately, the hosts advocate for a customizable approach to fitness that focuses on personal progress and finding joy in the journey.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I'm Kylie, one of your co-hosts of today. I'm coming to you for now. I have running coming up, and I wanted to document my journey for you guys. I'm going to get into it after my run a little bit more, but essentially I have been following this running plan. It's called the bad at running plan. Only I can think I'm bad at running. You're not allowed to think I'm bad at running, but I can think about it running. Okay. I'll get into the running plan a little later. For now, I'm about to hit a big milestone in this plan, which is to attempt a 5K with no walking break. I have been working towards this goal for 12 weeks, and today's the day that I get to see. Can I run three miles without something? I think yes. I'm bringing my child along with me. I was hoping to go solo without the stroller, but my husband ended up having some plans. And I was like, you know what? This is motherhood. It's not always perfect, and always how you want it to be. And I love my baby, and I love bringing her with me. So even though it's going to be a little more challenging, we accepted the challenge. Don't we, honey? She has her water, I have my water, I brought an extra water just in case either one of us runs out. I have my running bed because for Christmas. You gifted me two virtual 5Ks that are today I am doing the Tortured Coach Department 5K, which is called the Tortured Runners Department. So I have my bed that comes with a kid, and I have my medal to award myself once I'm done. And we're just gonna do our own little solo virtual 5K today. I'm so excited. I'm home. It's 1145 right now for me. It's a cloudy day, great conditions, little breeze in the air. So I think this is ideal running conditions personally. I'm going to listen to the album. It's a bit of a slower album, so we'll see how that affects the pace. Maybe it'll be good. I didn't want to go too crazy. I think without further ado, wish me good luck, and I'm wishing everyone out there good luck on their runs today. Run a 5K with me. Why not? Listen to a 5K while you listen to this episode and let me tell you about the bad at running plan after I'm done. We're off. Alright, guys, I just hit a mile. Instead of telling you my mile time, I'm just gonna tell you what the song I'm listening to. And I'm currently on down bad. Probably the best song on the original release of TTPD. It's going really well. So the first half mile, I just spent trying to find my pace. And then the second half mile went really nicely. I can feel myself slowing down now that I'm talking. So I'm gonna go and let you know when I hit mile two. Just finished mile two. I'm currently listening to But Daddy, I love him. And my baby fell asleep. Whoops. Kind of led into her nap time here, but that's okay. Hopefully, she'll nap some more after the run, because otherwise I am in for a rest of my day. Kind of sucks. I miscalculated the route, and I still have a mile left, and I'm by my house. I hate running by my house and then run. I started telling myself, oh, it'd be so easy to give up right now. I just gotta move on, keep pushing. And actually, I might make a left turn here and go away from my house just to shut those cuts up. 1.1 more miles left, and I'm dead! And I'll let you guys know when that comes. And I just wrapped up the 5K. I'm so proud of myself. That last mile was definitely the hardest I ended on the song. Who's afraid of little me? Great ending song. Just to kind of talk about something like that. My right foot went um quarter into the third mile. And by the end, the number had to make up my knee. As soon as I finished, I could feel the back of my leg right now. So I don't know what that was about. So it's not like I was nervous about anything because I don't have to do that. Something happened, but I feel better now about that. I could also get my happening to be honest. I'm feeling it now. I have a minute 30 now. But I think at the time is like not the best thing. I felt myself kind of feeling down. I don't want to be killing my feet. I want to be picking up my feet. How do I feel for that? It says hitting the wall, heal repeats, black toenails, heartless shaking. I'll fear the love of running. This might have been my first time doing a 5k with no walking brakes. I'm a walking brake fan. Normally when I'm training, I'm doing like walk-run method. This might have been the longest distance I've done without doing the walk-run method.

SPEAKER_02 4:32

Soul Sisters runs out of Reno, Nevada. You know what else runs in our area? DJ Trivia! Both Kylie and I love playing at different bar locations throughout the Sierra Nevadas. From Minden to Carson City, Reno to Sparks, Cold Springs, and everything in between. There's a game that's running distance near you. Wait, Justine, I'm not running. And if you're in the northern Nevada area like us, DJ Trivia just added weekend games. So now trivia runs can happen every day.

SPEAKER_00 4:58

I'm not liking where this is going. Guess I'll just have to check out DJ Trivia.com and find the game closest to me.

SPEAKER_02 5:03

DJ Trivia is across the US, so you can check online and find a game near you too. And unless you're Kylie, there's no running required. We're out here running. It's been a while since we just did a podcast where all we're doing is running and talking, but we've been busy training. Let's talk a little bit about the things we're training for. I have coming up the RTO, Reno Tahoe Odyssey in the Reno, Nevada area. It's this giant relay race where you and your team. I'm on a six-person team. There's also options for 12-person or anything in between, really. You leg by leg run from Reno up to Lake Tahoe through Carson, all the small towns on the way back. It usually takes a day and a half to do that. So that's a biggie. But another biggie race that is coming up for us is our Five Peaks Canmore race in Alberta. Kylie and I were invited to go and race their trail circuit in Canmore, which is near Banff. So beautiful national park type area. We've encouraged our family to join us on our venture. So we have four family members doing all the different lengths of the trail race, starting with Kylie doing the 7K. And then me and two others in our family, I know, are doing the half marathon distance. Whatever that is in kilometers, we don't know. We're from the states. And we're about to get our first walk break here. Maybe now's a good time for Kylie to give us the rundown of what our running plan is for today. We are running week 14, day one of the Bad At Running Plan. And this is a plan that I have been following for 14 weeks. It was created by influencers, Maya and Hunter, who we really enjoy their content. Maya and Hunter, they are like a couple influencer.

unknown 7:06

Couple goals.

SPEAKER_02 7:07

Couple goals for sure. Hunter's big thing is that he's really into running, and Maya's thing is she's really into reading. It's very much giving Justine and Kylie over here because Justine's the runner and I'm the reader. Just like me and Justine, Maya and Hunter kind of encouraging one another to partake in each other's hobbies. They do this in a few different ways. One of the fun things they do is since Maya is like a crazy fast reader, they'll kind of have a competition of who can finish first, Maya reading a whole book, or Hunter doing a long run, but I digress. What we're talking about today is the bad at running plan, which hunts are designed to help get people into running, people who think that they're bad at running. It starts you from having absolutely no running experience whatsoever to being able to run multiple miles without stopping. I decided to try this plan out because I was feeling pretty bad with my running. And I was like, well, if I feel bad with my running, let's do this. I've been working on it for weeks, months. I have thoughts. I honestly love this running plan so much. It starts off already extremely easy. You feel immediately like I could have done more than that, and that's the point is to ease yourself into these distances and increase your endurance very slowly, but surely. Just this past weekend, I did a 5k without stopping with my stroller and felt fantastic during it. If you're someone out there who feels like you're bad at running, I really encourage you to look at this plan. It is a walking-running plan. It's based on distance, not time. So it's do it at your own pace. It's easy to manipulate the plan based off of your own needs. There are weeks where I was injured, we're traveling, I wasn't able to run as much. And it's really easy to alter the plans, redo certain weeks if you feel like you're not ready to move on. No one's judging you, do it at your own pace. And there's also a Strava Club for it, which the community there is just very amazing. Everyone's sharing their wins, big and small. Everyone's super supportive. They even have an Instagram now, so it should be really easy to find the bad at running plan. Did you say what today's workout is? Not yet, why don't you tell them? Okay. Remember? Yeah, it's on my watch. So today's workout, and it is super helpful if you have a watch to do it. Otherwise, you kind of have to. How did you do it? Kylie used like your notes app. Yeah, I would open my notes app and just calculate the distance. Today's workout is 13 times. We are going to be running a quarter of a mile and then taking a 45-second walk break in between. So it's like quarter mile, 45-second walk. Quarter mile, 45-second walk. Kylie would like everyone to know that she's above warming up and cooling down, which is actually the true runner way. I was doing the warm-up and cool down at first, and then after two months into it, I didn't feel like I needed it anymore. And that's what I'm talking about with making the plan customizable for you. The only time that I personally would want to do a warm-up or a cool down is if I have on my training plan like an 18-mile run, and that's already so daunting. So it's like if I could pretend that the first three miles are a warm-up and the last three are a cool down, now it's a 12-mile run. And then if you break that up into like snack breaks, actually it's only a six-mile run, and before you know it, you're done. Okay, no one who considers themselves bad at running is doing 18 miles. But whatever works for you, Queen. Wait, who's our audience? I don't know who listens to this. You know what's funny though? We both think we're bad at running. I think that's just like imposter syndrome. Like everyone thinks they're bad at running. You think like you're saying Bolt thinks he's bad at running? No, I think he's the only one on this planet who thinks he's good. Yes, he should. He's earned it. Literally, the person behind him is like, I'm so bad at running. Screw that. And you know what? You are. And and true that. Yeah. No amount of carbon plating in your tennis shoes is gonna save you. Now that I'm at week 14 of this plan, every single month your goal is to increase your mileage by one. So at the end of month one, you're going to do a one-mile run without stopping. End of month two, a two-mile run without stopping. And honestly, I was gonna stop at three miles, but now that we have this Canmore race coming up, 7k is about four miles. I'm keeping up with the running plan to go to four miles. I feel like you should just do it forever until one day you're like, and then this month we got up to 44 miles without okay. They stopped it at five miles. But after that, I think I'm gonna focus on increasing my speed for my 5k distance. Ended up doing my 5k with the stroller, and I obviously do go a little bit slower with the stroller. Regardless of that, I was still quite proud of my time. Makes me excited to try to do that again without the stroller. There's little baby ducks on the piece of plastic that's floating in the water. So cute! It was kind of cute. Yeah, this trail area here is very nice by my house. It's like a lake. I was gonna say wetlands, which is such a strange thing to do. I call it a marsh. A marsh because we're there's gets all over the place. We're in Nevada, so it's a desert climate, and I don't know where this water is coming from. Well, we're also in the mountains, so just yesterday it was hailing, and it's May. I forget we're in a high desert. We're a different kind of desert. Ew, I hate running here though because of all the gnats, but they really are everywhere. The sidewalks here are wide. I figured it would be good for me to just see it. And it is very beautiful scenery, and people even fish over here. Oh my god, there's fish in yes! There's fish in these waters! There is! I hope they never destroy it and build apartment complexes. Fast forward three years. Is that what you mean? No, I mean that they'll probably do it eventually. No way. Oh look over there. Yeah, there was a water over there. I know because I used to bike to work over there. And there was no water there. I can't look over there. If you want to run faster, just run in an area with a lot of gnats. Yeah, that's true. Very motivational. Oh. Okay. If you want to run faster, go outside when it's about to start raining. Yeah, ignore the fact that it's raining. And then soon it'll be thundering. Or go run lightning right before sunset and don't bring any nighttime gear. Oh yeah. These are the ways to get you to run faster. Yeah. In like true fear. That's the running scared way. You want a PR, your 5K, your marathon, your whatever. Just do it at a very crazy time of day or at night. You'll be on your way to a PR in no time. You know what? I'm running pretty scared right now because I have a gnarly paper cut and some sweat starting to drip in it. Oh my god, it hurts! And you know what cut me? I was opening mail, I got a promo for life insurance. I've never felt paper that sharp in my life. Dude. They were threatening me. It was a setup for sure. How dare you triple A! We talk a lot about why we run on running scared media, but never answer our listeners' real question. How do I become a better runner? The truth is, the better you feel in your own skin, the better you run. Kia Peak helps you achieve your best running self with innovative products using high quality materials and the coolest designs. Kia Peak is ahead of every season with fleece skirts, ice bandanas, ear wraps, visors, hats, and more. Made by runner for runners, Kia Peak will make you feel so good. You'll be running ultras just to show your fit off for longer. Save 20% off on all your Kia Peak needs when using the discount code RUNNISCARED at checkout. Kia Peak.com, K-E-A-P-E-A-K.com. Speaking of trying to run during a thunderstorm, one of the runs I was planning on doing this week was with my friend Stacey. We were gonna practice one of the legs in RTO that I am actually assigned to do. It's notoriously hard, it's like eight mile stretch all uphill on a trail. It's usually ran in the middle of the day. I go up to Dog Valley Sunday at 4 p.m., which is already like a wild time to try to run eight miles on a trail. We get out there, it's actually raining in Reno, but these things here are like, you know what? It's still raining over there. I end up chickening out because I see the lighting and then the thunder comes seconds later. I'm like, we're really gonna die out here. And we decide to do a treadmill indoor run instead at our gym, and we were very down about it. God, treadmill suck. How do we make them fun? Stacy has a game that she plays for her hill repeats. It's essentially every minute she does another incline on the treadmill until she gets to 10. 10 incline, can you imagine? So no running the same speed the whole time. She's a beast for sure. What's that treadmill one? That's the what is it, the 5330? What the heck is that? I think it's five incline, three speed for 30 minutes. It shakes your ass. Let's do it like every day. That's Stacy's Hill game. I'm like, well, I have a game that I play when I'm on the treadmill too. It's basically listening to Taylor Swift's albums and then running the fast songs, walking or slow jogging, the slower songs. I made a spreadsheet, calculated the beats per minute of every Taylor Swift song on an album, and then divided it by 10-minute pace and figured out what speed I'd have to run each song on the treadmill in order to run her entire album with an average pace of 10 minutes per mile. And so we have all these numbers for each song. Stacy's like, okay, let's play your game and let's do reputation. But Stacy, like I said, is a beast. She's a speed queen. So there's a few songs on reputation. You wouldn't think it because the album hits so hard, but some of her songs are slower. Like delicate. Honestly, that's it. Yeah, everything else is a bop. So Stacy's reading the numbers. She's like, you know what? Instead of doing speed three on a treadmill, why don't we do incline three? And you just pick whatever speed you want for the hills. So we start going back and forth between sprinting like speed seven, eight, nine on a treadmill to one song. We would do like a three-minute reset where we're either walking in my case or slow jogging in Stacy's case. And by slow jog, I mean Stacy's slow jog is my regular jog, speed six. Oh my god, she ran over a mile more than me by the end of this treadmill workout because she's just going, going, going. Every time the number was like six, five, four, three for the pace that you should be doing on a treadmill part of the spreadsheet, we would do that as a hill instead. I really like this game. I don't know how to do a speed workout. Stacey's like, I don't know how to do a chill hill workout. And so when we put our minds together and with the power of Taylor Swift, we came up with the perfect speed hill workout that gives you that rest in between so that you are re-energized and able to actually put in your all on the next song's hill or speed segment. All you need is the power of Taylor Swift and you can accomplish anything. That's the biggest takeaway you should get from listening to our podcast, really. Another fun run that I did since last chatting with all of you that also kind of gave me life in this training plan that I'm doing because I'm following a marathon training plan to train for the RTO and for the Five Peaks Canmore race because they're back-to-back weekends for me. So I figured why not overtrain for both and do a marathon training plan. Why not? No, actually, it's more like meeting in the middle because my first race is uh ultra and then the other one's a half marathon. What's the distance of the ultra? It's like 30 miles, but I know that sounds crazy, but I'm gonna run it in three separate sections on an average of 10 miles per each section. Does that make it sound better? No. Oh, to me it does. How much break do you get in between? I don't remember. Like eight hours? That's a complete guess. This idea came from Sarah Rader. You guys might know that name. She was our first ever guest on the pod. You should listen to that episode if you haven't already, because that episode is so fun. It was a trick-or-treat mile. She does all sorts of crazy miles. She calls them dipshit miles or like dipshit series, where she does either a beer mile or a peeps mile for Easter, trick-or-treat mile for Halloween. We will not spoil that anymore. You go and check that out. So her latest and greatest is a Taco Bell half marathon. Count me out. Oh my gosh, dude, count. I'll meet you at the eight stations for that one. Wolves. Count me in double time. I'll do a damn marathon for Taco Bell. Actually, she's a little bit injured. For Sarah, that just means let's run six miles instead of a half. And then that also means we accidentally ran eight miles in total because Taco Bell was farther than we anticipated. But so the general idea is this. I heard some Ubers had to be called. It was me, I called the Uber. Oh my god. It was me, I was the Uber, and I called myself eight Uber. Didn't tip though. What the hell? Left some fries in the back of my seat. More like Taco Bell shredded lettuce. Not the dehydrated, rehydrated lettuce. Girl. That jerky lettuce. Yum. I want it to bite me back, you know? Well, maybe this is the race for you because your body is biting you back for fueling it with Taco Bell. We start at a park, run about three miles, get to our first Taco Bell. And Sarah actually wrote out some rules. Rule number one: at the first stop, you are allowed to have anything off their small value menu, which is essentially just meat and tortilla lettuce cheese. So the lightest of the light when it comes to Taco Bell. I'm vegan, so I had to sub the meat for black beans, and then I felt like just taking the cheese out was kind of cheatsy. So I subbed the cheese for potatoes. Whoa. So I really like cargo loaded. I carved it up at the expense to feel like I was on a more equal playing field with the others doing this race. Thank god the walk break hit us on the uphill. Yeah, oh my god. Dude, we are actually getting so lucky with this run. I'm thinking that we're gonna have to run through those gnats again, though. Well, hopefully that's at least a run and not a walk section. Ugh. Some protein mid run, mid-run snack. Ew. You don't have to pack it. Just bring your flower tortilla. Taco gnat bell. Some of us, actually, I think goes only me, only ate my one Taco Bell order. Everyone else got a Baja blast. Unhinged behavior. That is crazy. And more than just that, but Sarah and John, her fiance. Ooh, that's also in use since last episode. I think we might have given them a shout out earlier, but they deserve another shout out. They deserve a shout out for every single episode. Yeah. I told them you guys are goals. I want me. And my bae to go to three Taco Bells within the course of two hours and run to each one. I would kick my bae out of the house after that. I'd eat the house to myself after that. John ends up filling his handheld water bottle with Baja Blast and the midnight version. Ooh. So he's double Baja Blast in it. Mimi a midnight. And we track on to our next Taco Bell stop. We were supposed to have three. We end up just doing two because again, Sarah's injured. She's wanted to push herself.

SPEAKER_01 22:28

I know this girl has an Eagles back. Should I say something? Flat Eagles Fox. Fine. Go Eagles. Yeah. I made a friend.

SPEAKER_02 22:37

Oh my gosh. Just keep running this section every day until you catch her name. That's like out of a room's novel. Yeah. And she was the coach for the Philadelphia Eagles the whole time. She owned the entire team. Nick Seriani, is that you? Nickie. Nicole. It was an alias the whole time. A 12th night. Oh, you must be mistaken me for my brother that I've been pretending to be in order to attend this school. She's the man. So we get to the second location. At this one, the rule is it has to be a supreme menu item. But the Taco Bell we go to, dining room is closed. Oh. They're doing construction. A parking lot Taco Bell. So we go through the drive-thru. We're like, please let us order our Taco Bell. We're trying to accomplish something here. So we convince the drive-thru people to let us order so that we can save our run and complete it. Because it was kind of hectic ordering in between cars. I just ordered fries instead of a Supreme item because I really didn't want to be that annoying one that's like, hold the sour cream and cheese, add beans. I guess I didn't have an official Taco Bell half marathon experience, but it was not gonna be that from the start, and I'm excited to try it again next year. I hope they do it also before RTO. Because I actually think it's like great training for that type of race. Over 24-hour relay. You're gonna have to eat and plan your meals around all these runs that you're doing, all of which are three to five mile leg segments. It's just good practice, honestly. Good gut training. One time I was discussing with my team what we were gonna do for nutrition on our race because I've been with the same team for a few years now, and I literally mapped out every single Taco Bell on the course and can confirm that that is a good way to sustain yourself during the race. There will be a food desert of Taco Bells on the like west side of Tahoe, but fear not. Once you get to South Tahoe, they're back. Just want to also say Sarah took it to another level as well. She takes a verde avocado salsa, eats it like a gel or a goo. That was badass behavior. Unhinged. Alright, guys, to wrap this episode up, I'm gonna share a running scared story that I had during my training for the bad at running training plan. I had just bought a new white running shirt. I was excited to wear it. It's very cute. As I'm running, I go through an area with gn. I look down at my shirt. There's just like a million blood spots from these gnats.

SPEAKER_01 25:06

Shut up.

SPEAKER_02 25:07

No cap.

SPEAKER_01 25:08

That's disgusting.

SPEAKER_02 25:09

And then the rest of the run, I'm just so disturbed how many died on my cheek, in my eyeball, in my mouth. If that many died on my shirt. And now I can't run through gnat areas without thinking about such a thing. Speaking of which, yeah, we're in the gnat area right now. I think it was also though like the type of material that the shirt was. I got it at Ross. I'm a frugal queen. Call it what you want, but you're fashionable AF and cost efficient. Alright, you guys, if you take anything away from this episode, don't wear white in a gnat filled area. And that Taylor Swift will always be there for you. I'm ready to take me away. Bye. Bye.