Real Life Runners with Angie and Kevin Brown

409: If I Only Had 10 Minutes to Help You Run Better…

• Angie Brown

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You need two things to improve your running: strength and stress. If you've been feeling stuck in your performance or sidelined by recurring injuries, this one's for you. We share why simply adding more miles or intensity isn't the answer—and how focusing on quality over quantity can unlock a whole new level of progress.

We explore the essential role of strength training in building a more resilient, efficient runner—especially as we age. And just as important, we talk about managing the right kind of stress—both physical and mental—so your body can adapt, recover, and thrive.

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This challenge is tailor-made for runners over 40 who want to run strong, stay injury-free, and feel more confident with every step. You’ll get daily, actionable steps to help you build muscle, improve efficiency, and make strength and recovery work for you—not against you.

👉 Ready to reignite your running?

Join us for this powerful five-day reset and start training smarter, not harder.

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Let’s get you feeling stronger, more energized, and more in control of your running journey!


02:07 The Complexity of Running Advice

02:54 The Myth of the One Thing

05:03 Strength and Stress: The Core Elements

08:36 Understanding Strength Beyond Lifting Weights

12:05 The Importance of Resilience and Adaptation

19:58 The Importance of Metabolism for Runners

20:48 Strength Training for Runners

21:14 Balancing Running and Strength Training

22:50 The Role of Stress in Running

24:30 Avoiding Overtraining and Burnout

27:11 The Importance of Recovery

28:43 Individualized Training Plans


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Don't forget: The information on this website is not intended to treat or diagnose any medical condition or to provide medical advice. It is intended for general education in the areas of health and wellness. All information contained in this site is intended to be educational in nature. Nothing should be considered medical advice for your specific situation.

Angie:

I am often asked what I would tell someone that was struggling with their running. If I had about 10 minutes and was sitting down to coffee with them, what would I say? Where would I start? Where would I direct them? How would I help? And so today we're gonna talk about that answer, and Kevin's gonna tell you his answer as well, because there's a little bit of overlap and there might be a little bit of difference there too. So stay tuned. What's up runners? Welcome to the show today. Before we jump in, I have to remind you that enrollment is open for our free challenge. Right now, running reignited is our free five day challenge. We are running it May 12th through the 16th of 2025. So if you are catching this episode. When it is released, go over to real life runners.com/challenge and get yourself signed up. It's a free five day challenge, and over the course of these five days, we are going to be helping you with so many things and you're running. This is not your typical running challenge. I am not gonna tell you go out and run a mile today, go out and run two miles today. I am not gonna give you paces or anything like that. I'm gonna actually get into the root of what is going on with you and your body, especially after 40. Why your body feels different, what is changing and how you are running and your training, and even your sense of self, who you think you, you are, and your identity needs to start to shift after 40 no surface level things around here. I want you to actually dig in and change your running from the inside out. So head over to real life runners.com/challenge and get yourself signed up for that free challenge. Today. Alright, Kev, are we ready? Yeah. Let's do this thing. Let's do this thing. Alright, so this is one of those conversations where, I get this question from, and I've heard it from multiple people, but also, especially when I'm talking to people about business and they're trying to get clear on do you do, how do you help people? and they often say to me, if you had 10 minutes and you were having coffee with a client, someone that was struggling with running, what would you tell them? Where would you start? And. I have my answers. And so Kevin and I started talking about things off the microphone and we said, let's bring this conversation right onto the microphone.

Kevin:

it got real heated.

Angie:

It got real heated. because you didn't wanna answer me at first.

Kevin:

It's'cause they, I disagree with the premise.

Angie:

I know because it's never that simple. Like it's, and this is one of the conversations that Kevin and I have all the time. Is this idea of, it comes down to this one thing. There's a lot of people out there, especially in the world of social media, especially in marketing, that want you to believe there's one thing. Is

Kevin:

it zone two? Is it zone

Angie:

two training? there's one thing that you can fix and that will revitalize your running and it will lead to all sorts of amazing things.

Kevin:

that's the only thing holding you back from a PR at every single race distance. There's one thing. Zone two. Yeah, zone two. Sorry, there's two things then it's a zone.

Angie:

I even had this comment on Instagram the other day. I posted a reel and someone made a comment that they've slowed down their runs and they've been doing a lot of easy runs and they keep getting slower and what gives what? What's happening here? And the answer is. that's not the full picture. That's just one piece of the puzzle. That's just one ingredient in the recipe. And we have to look at the full recipe, the full picture for us to really see what's going on. And that's one of the reasons that you really hated answering this question. I'm like, come on, it's me. Let's just. Let's just chat.

Kevin:

if you just focus on the slow running. Yeah. That's like my trying to make spaghetti sauce versus you trying to make spaghetti sauce. Like I've seen you put some things in. So I'm like, oh. So I put the jar of tomatoes in there and then I mashed them up the

Angie:

jar of tomatoes.

Kevin:

Can of tomato, they, the whole tomatoes and it mash those guys up. But then you have all the, the other things that go in that actually makes it taste good. Whereas mine is like a mashed up whole tomatoes simmering on the stove. it's all those other things.

Angie:

No. You know that onions and garlic going in there too. There's

Kevin:

Yeah, I know. But you have you don't have measurements of any of this? No. There's so much of a. Feel of all the different things, and that's why it's very tricky to be like, oh, this is clearly the thing that has to go in there because maybe it is that it needs a little bit of garlic in there, but you just taste it and you're like, oh, you need to add this and this. I'm like, how did you know that?

Angie:

It's the Italian in me.

Kevin:

I know, but that's like being like, okay, if. If you were gonna sit down with somebody and tell'em how to make a spaghetti sauce, right? Like you wouldn't tell them, oh, it needs a little bit of salt. But my sauce usually needs a little bit of salt. But your first ingredient, you'd be like, you need to put tomatoes into it. that's

Angie:

not the first ingredient though. Okay, fine. But yes, that is one of the main ingredients.

Kevin:

God, I'm so Irish. Oh my gosh,

Angie:

you're so cute. Ultimately it does, in my mind, comes down to two things at the core of all of this. And I think that these two elements really do determine whether you adapt and improve or break down and burnout. And I would love to, as we. Get into this discussion, you can decide if you also like these two ingredients or if, yeah, we'll you've got other stuff going on here, other stuff. And, because it's not that simple, right? And, but these to me, are the foundation and these are going to be the foundation. Of what we are gonna be diving into in our challenge next week as well because, and that's why it's a five day challenge, because I can't give you all the information that you need to know in an hour, in even a couple hours. I can't even give you the, all the information you need to know over the course of the five days. That would be impossible because Kevin said, and this was his argument when. I brought this up to him, is that it depends on the person. It depends on what they're already doing. And do you wanna talk a little bit about how you were talking about, where the holes are in their situation?

Kevin:

Yeah. So you said if someone came and they wanted help with their running and I had 10 minutes with them and I'd be like, I'd, I'd try and figure out what's going on with their plane. You're like, Nate, you have 10 minutes. I'm like, sure. So I could sit down with a person and talk to them about what it looks like they've done over the last two weeks and over that. Those two weeks is gonna give you a decent idea of what it is that they basically are doing with their training. And you can spot holes. Yeah. are you not really running very much at all?'cause it's hard to get. much faster. Prs, if you're very volume limited, it's hard to run real fast. If you never run fast, it's maybe you don't have enough strength to increase certain things. Maybe your stress levels are through the roof. There's all sorts of different areas inside of running. You running easy, running medium, running hard. Are you going uphill? Are you doing There's so much variety inside of running. There's so many things that could be missing. So if you talk to somebody about what they've done over the course of oh, what'd you do in the last two days? That's probably not enough to get a picture. But if you look at two weeks, I'd be like, oh, you, it looks like you're probably missing this. But that's gonna differ. Like you put five people in the chair across from me, I might get five different answers. So that was my issue with your question is. It really depends. And also what's their goal and how long do they have to get to it.

Angie:

Yeah. And so like the woman and wife that I am, I continued to press him on this and make him come up with something. So

Kevin:

then I fell into the fetal position and cried.

Angie:

No. So then you just agreed with me. Essentially

Kevin:

it seemed like the safest play.

Angie:

we're gonna talk about if you actually agree with me or not, because I really don't care if you do, because I know I'm right. so let's first dive into why strength is the foundation. So I told you there's two things. My two things are strength and stress. And this is really what we're gonna be diving into in this episode today. And there, of course, is nuance to it, and every person is an individual and different people need different things. All of that is true. It's also true that strength is the foundation for any progress that you want to make. In your running or truly in the rest of your life too, because if you are weak and you just buckle at the sign of stress or of challenge, it's gonna be hard for you to progress in any area of your life, including, career or family or all sorts of different things. there's a certain level of strength that we need to have both physically and mentally. And so I want. Us to start thinking of strength beyond just lifting heavy weights. Yes, that is important and we've talked on this podcast many times about how it is very important for runners to lift weights, especially lifting heavy weights. But today I want you to also understand that strength is the capacity to handle load. And that includes physical load, that includes a mental load that's metabolic your body, your mind, your brain, is able to handle a certain amount of load, and that's really the stress that we're talking about. And so do you have the strength to handle. Load or to handle the stress. And that's really why I think it comes down to those two things as the main thing and a lot of what Kevin was talking about as far as like volume and speed work and all the other things that, moderate intensity training. That is all part of the stress. That is part of the stress that we place on the body. It's the good stress, right? Because a lot of times we think about stress as a bad thing, but there is good types of stress as well. We need stress in order to adapt and in order for our bodies to improve, we need that. But we can't have stress without strength. And that is why strength is the foundation. It's what keeps you stable, efficient, and injury resistance. And that's what one of the things that we really have to understand as runners.

Kevin:

Okay. So when you say strength and then you give it all of that background, I hear resiliency in there also. Yes. Like the way that you, that's part of it

Angie:

for sure. The way

Kevin:

you're defining strength feels a whole lot like resilient. You have to be able to handle whatever load is coming at you. You say strength and like you just said, I often go to an actual lifting of weights. Like you have to be physically strong enough to handle this thing, which is true to a point, but you also have to be able to handle the. Mental load of whatever you're undergoing also. Okay. So I don't disagree with that.

Angie:

Do you agree though? Like why did you phrase it as I don't disagree,

Kevin:

because I thought it would be more humorous. That's what I bring to the podcast. I thought this is how this works.

Angie:

That's how this works. Okay. As runners, what do we need to understand when it comes to strength? And again, this is a podcast that's usually about 40, 45 minutes long, so we can't get into every single detail today. And again, I'm gonna invite you to come join us in the challenge because we will be going deeper into this and also giving you action items to help you assess your strength and start to understand the importance of strength for runners and what type of strength you'll need. But as an overview of that. We as runners need to build. Muscle strength, right? We need to lift heavy weights. We also need to really think about single leg strength because running, if you think about what running actually is, it is jumping from one leg to the other over and over again, and that's a lot of stress on the body. And your body has to be able to adapt and has to be strong enough to handle that, and that strength is. A combination of both. Just the strength to handle the body weight, and it's actually, when you're running, you're actually placing about two to three times your body weight through that leg as you're running. So it's not just body weight, it's two to three times that. Plus I think it's two and a half to three times that. plus you have to have the stabilization, especially those little muscles that are able to maintain your balance and not. and not have your joints kind of crash in on themselves during that whole running movement?

Kevin:

Yeah, and so as someone who got into running through the running side and less of, I'm a physical therapist, so I, my first point of order is always to throw more strength at the thing, which is a wonderful perspective. On almost any sort of injury that comes up, you can point to a muscle weakness that is causing the injury.

Angie:

Yeah. Unless there's some sort of traumatic event. Yes. But outside of an acute traumatic event,

Kevin:

most running injuries are related to some sort of overuse, I would argue. Yes. But I got into running through would just go run. And if you run and you gradually increase, your body will naturally adapt to increased levels of stress and it should naturally build up the strength. That's not exactly how that works. Correct. Like you have to actually overload the body through heavy weight lifting in order to actually build enough physical muscle that you can actually then handle the running load. If you go, there are always exceptions to this because I'm looking at you go and look at crazy Olympic runners world class runners that have super wonky form. They've literally just built up enough compensation movement in their body that certain muscles are super, super weak and other ones are just. Taking the load for it and they're absurdly strong,

Angie:

I would argue that's going to catch up to them at some point in time, because for most of them it does.

Kevin:

the ones with multiple medals, it seems like it hasn't caught up to them yet.

Angie:

go look at those people with multiple medals and ask them how many times they've been injured. Yeah. Just because they have medals doesn't mean that they have been absent from injury.

Kevin:

No, but I think if you look at people pushing it to a world class level Almost all of them are going through an injury cycle on a regular basis. Because they're pushing so close to the edge,

Angie:

correct. The, and that's not, most runners aren't doing that. But yes, as an elite professional runner, where this is literally. Your financial future rides on your performance of these races. Yeah. like your mortgage payment might ride on the race, results, you're gonna be trying to get every single ounce out of yourself. And when you're riding that very fine line and pushing the envelope day after day. There's going to be times where you go over the edge, but most runners aren't necessarily training that way, and I don't think that most runners should be training that way. I think that's a good thing that we're not training that way. But one of the things that I wanted to say when you were saying about, how. You are taught to just build up the load in a progressive way and in a way with a long enough timeline that you're giving the body time to adapt and get stronger. The problem with that is that if you have dysfunctional running form, you're just. what's the word I'm looking for?

Kevin:

Reinforcing.

Angie:

Reinforcing it, essentially. Yes.'cause it, you're just going through that same form over and over again. And yes, those structures do get better at tolerating it, but there's always. A breaking point for any tissue in the body. There's going to be a breaking point. It's just a matter of do you reach that or not? And that's why a lot of runners, they, sorry, but a lot of runners have a hard time when they start to train for like half marathons and marathons is they were fine before, right? With five Ks, 10 Ks, even half marathons. And all of a sudden they're doing longer runs and now their body's finally found the breaking point.

Kevin:

Yeah. They could handle slightly wonky form when their longer run was an hour. But you stretch the long run to three hours and it's wait. We're not good with this anymore. It's like what? And

Angie:

the level of fatigue that you're then putting on the body as well.

Kevin:

yeah. Then that goes to the stress, right? Is you had enough strength to handle a certain stress load, but not necessarily the strength to handle double, triple the stress load. Because going out there for drastically longer runs, switching from being. like a road runner to a trail runner. You got a completely different stress load and you're like, oh, but I'm doing similar distances. But if you're doing on uneven surfaces now you're putting different stresses through different planes on the body. That's gonna cause some challenges also.

Angie:

and that also ties into connective tissue resilience. you brought up the word resilience earlier, and it's not just our muscles that we're looking at, it's our tendon. It's tendons and ligaments and cartilage and all of these other connective tissues in the body, especially for us as runners Over 40. The health of our tendons are very important. And the tendons are where the muscle is connected to the bone. And tendons are not well vascularized, meaning they don't have good blood flow. I was

Kevin:

just gonna say that I had the vocab word. I was ready for it. You

Angie:

ready for it? Yeah. Good. Is it because I just taught you about peace and love yesterday?

Kevin:

No, I just know like vascular, I was, they're nonvascular is what I was gonna say.

Angie:

Kevin and I were talking about peace and love. I don't know if you guys are familiar with the new recommendations for injuries, because our youngest daughter just sprained her ankle yesterday. She went to one of those trampoline parks and was jumping and landed funky on her ankle, and so she sprained her ankle and Kevin mentioned something about rice and I said, oh, do you know that's not the recommendation anymore? Because everybody knows when you sprain your ankle, when there's some sort of acute injury. We've all been taught rice. I'm totally going off on a tangent right now, but it's okay because if you haven't heard this, it's important for you to know.

Kevin:

So it's critically important. Yeah, so

Angie:

it's not critical, but rice is no longer the recommendation. So rice used to stand for rest, ice compression and elevation. That is what all of us were taught to do when we sprained an ankle. But now the recommendations are changing because they have seen. Shown that like rest, especially, a lot of people think, oh, you have to rest right away. Not necessarily the best, the best. Option.'cause especially because people stretch it out too long and just rest and don't do act activities and that can actually hurt the healing process in the long run. ICE can blunt the inflammatory response, which actually helps the body heal itself. compression and elevation are still. Recommended, but now the acronym is Peace and Love, which is so long and to me is a little overdone. it stands for, I'm gonna have to look it up to remember what it all stands for, but I remember that P is protect, E is elevate. let's see. A is avoid anti-inflammatories. C is compression, E is education. Let's see if I might actually hit it. l is load, so you wanna load the tissues appropriately, and gently increase the load as you're able to take it. let's see. What is OV is vascularization, which made me think about this in the first place. E is exercise, so you have to modify your exercise until the body is healed. oh, do you remember the o?

Kevin:

No. you, I think you had to look this one up yesterday. Yeah. But you get to, what was it? The. What was L? Load. Load, yeah. Which is the exact opposite of what rice was.'cause rice started with R for rest and now it's L for load. And here's the thing and how I'm gonna try and bring this back into the actual podcast topic is there's a certain level of stress that you can handle. There's a stress that you can handle, physical stress that you can put on the body when you're running based off of the strength that you actually have. But it's also based off of, if you're injured, you can handle a certain load. If you're not injured, you can handle another load. Depending on your current strength levels, you can handle various loads. That is a matter of how much stress you can put onto the body.

Angie:

Okay. I remember the O. The O is optimism. The O is optimism. Yeah.

Kevin:

They're literally fighting for Theron, the three E's, because they had to have an E for education and over for optimism, Sure, Google it and then high five your friend, like these are not super critical things.

Angie:

Optimism.

Kevin:

No, not critical.

Angie:

anyway, so going back to strength is the foundation. I'm

Kevin:

so glad you remembered O for optimism. I

Angie:

know you are and now you're like beside yourself. We're here. We're gonna high five

Kevin:

at the end of this podcast.

Angie:

Strength is your foundation because it is going to make your tissue stronger. It's going to make your body more resilient. The other thing that you wanna keep in mind is that muscle mass. If you in have increased lean muscle mass in the body, that also helps to improve your metabolism. And as a runner. Your metabolism matters, and this is regardless of whether or not you want to lose weight, because metabolism is your body's ability to convert energy. It's your body, it's your energy system in the body. And so muscle mass is going to make your body more efficient and metabolism and energy, metabolism and converting energy for you to be, for, the energy to be usable. during running or during lifting or during whatever activity you're trying to do or just when you're trying to sit down and do your work? all of these things depend on your metabolism and your body, is your body's ability to convert energy, especially if you are dealing with some of this unwanted weight gain. You're gonna wanna make sure that you focus on building strength. Okay?

Kevin:

So someone comes to you with their running and they'd like to get better as a runner, and you tell them, go strength train. But they're

Angie:

not running. What do you mean they're not running?

Kevin:

they're like, I would like to get, I would like to be a better runner. And you say, okay, time to hit the gym. We're gonna lift these weights. There's no running involved in that.

Angie:

So are you telling me that they are not currently running and wanna become a runner? Yes. Okay.

Kevin:

Yes. Is the first thing. Still put them into the gym.

Angie:

that is a very interesting question

Kevin:

because when kids show up and they wanna run cross country in the fall I don't spend three weeks making sure that I've appropriately built the appropriate strength through all of the muscles in their legs. True. And their glutes and all the various things. And then be like, all right, now let's try for an easy 20 minutes. At some point they have to be able to actually just go run. That's true. And an easy short run is not a huge load on the body. So is there a point where you're like, okay, the stress is low enough that we don't have to initiate strength training and only when we're trying to then evolve and continue building that stress that we have to make sure the strength. comes along with it.

Angie:

Yeah, I see where you're going with this and I would agree, and again, this is why there is nuance to all of it. So yes, if there was a brand new person that wasn't running at all and came to me and said, how do I start, I would say, buy a good pair of running shoes. And then I would tell them to go run because I wouldn't want them running in, their. Random cross trainers.'cause then things would hurt and that could lead to them not wanting to do this anymore.

Kevin:

Yeah, fair enough.

Angie:

So there are different starting points, but I guess the conversation that I was referring to is if I was talking to someone that was already running and they were having problems, they were having pain, they weren't making progress, they were fatigued all the time. I would, one of the first things that I would go to would be strength training.

Kevin:

Okay. So I'm. I agree with that. Yeah. Because I feel like that is very often a missing ingredient. if someone already has like a quality strength training plan, then you gotta find something else that's missing. But you are correct that most often there's a quality, appropriate strength training plan.

Angie:

But then you bring us to the second thing that is necessary, which is stress. Because all stress is needed for growth. And if you want to be a runner, you have to run. And so you have to put. That level of stress on the body because running is a physical stress on the body, and oftentimes that's one of the reasons that strength becomes an obvious thing that they need people need to work on is when an injury pops up. That's obviously me as a physical therapist. When people come to me, it's usually. Reactive. And so they already have pain or problems, and I know the first thing that we need to do is find their areas of weakness and start to strengthen those areas in order to help get that pain under control. So pain often is a result of overload on tissues, almost always a result. Especially like Kevin said, running injuries are often repetitive use injuries, not necessarily related to trauma and. All repetitive use. I should, oh, I always am careful by when I use the world, all or every, but repetitive use. Injuries are from overload. When you're putting too much stress on the body and that tissue, that part of the body is not able to handle that stress, that's what leads to tissue breakdown and then injury.

Kevin:

Okay. So you still need stress in order to actually improve at whatever it is that you're doing though. Correct. So it's just a matter of finding that actual appropriate level of stress. That is enough that you're able to advance not so little, that you're advancing ridiculously slowly, or that you're actually going backwards.'cause if you don't. Kind of progress, the stress, you're just gonna plateau. And if you plateau for long enough and you don't change the stress, you're going to go backwards.

Angie:

And that's really where it comes in. That whole Goldilocks principle of stress is you don't want too much.'cause if you're doing too much, that's going to lead to injury and burnout and. Even more disruption of your hormones and your nervous system and all sorts of things. You don't want too little because then, like you said, if you're not giving your body enough stress, then you're not going to progress. You're not going to make, the progress that you want or you are going to eventually decline. because you can't just stay the same. But if you have just the right amount of stress, that's going to lead to adaptation and progress and confidence and that feeling of this is really fun. Like I'm actually. Seen progress in my running, but then the question becomes, what is just right? And that's where things get very individualized and very nuanced, which was bringing us back to your coffee conversation,

Kevin:

right? that's where my head went. Yeah. Is you have to figure out what stress they're missing. Because. Or are they trying to hit every single stress? Because that's the thing is there's running at high end, there's running at moderate, there's low intensity, there's strength training. There's all these different things. Is someone trying to check out all the boxes and based off of whatever goal they have coming up, they're. They're doing just a little bit of everything, but not enough of anything. Yeah. there's, there's an overall volume that's missing. this tends to go back to like my cooking analogy, sometimes I get a little nervous when I start putting different herbs and seasonings into it that there's gonna be too much of that. So I just put a little bit of a whole bunch of different things, and it doesn't always turn out to. Actually have enough flavor to it. Then you come in, you're just like, try some garlic with that.

Angie:

Always garlic

Kevin:

or some salt, maybe it should actually have some flavor to it.

Angie:

Those are two of the things that we often go to first. Kind of like polarized training, right? Like when we're going in and looking at someone's, Kevin's over here making I just gave you a soft toss, like to you the easy ball there. Polarized training basically means that we need to do the majority of our training. At an easy effort level, and we need to do some that feels harder because, and we, those two things should not be equal. We should be doing much more easy than hard. And I think that most runners get that backwards. Most runners think that most of their trainings should feel hard, and if they know that they should do some easy runs, it's probably the smaller percentage. And this is what leads to overstressing the body, overloading the body. Which will lead to injury and burnout and lack of progress.

Kevin:

It also leads to the hard days not being hard enough. Yeah. Too, like that's the other thing is if you're doing most of your days hard, I guarantee none of them are actually pushing yourself to a hard level because you're just too tired all the time. you're not hitting the appropriate stresses. you've gone to the bad stress place. You need good stresses on the body. And when you're newer to running, easy running can be a substantial stress is, or if you've been running for a while. Easy running. When you start increasing the volume is now that's a good stress on the body, but you can't do all of the stresses at the same time. That's just too much. Yeah. Like you just need to find what area am I gonna lean into, and then make sure that you're able to recover from that area. Before you lean on the next stress. It can't be lean on this stress and now lean on that stress and now lean on the next stress. There needs to be some recovery time. Yeah. I think a lot of people are like. if I push my like higher end speed on one day and then I push in on strength training the next day and then I push on stretching my longer run the next day. These are all different stresses and it's yeah, but you've gone big stress three days in a row and stress is still stress. that, I think that's where sometimes what all looks like good stresses becomes overall just too much,

Angie:

right? Because they are individually good stresses that we do need, but we can't have all of them at the same time. And I think this is where a lot of runners get into trouble, especially newer runners that are trying to increase their volume and their speed at the same time. Or people that start to. Listen to running podcasts, which is great. we're glad that you're here. but then you hear us talking about speed work. You hear us talking about strength training. You hear us talking about mileage and volume, all these different ingredients, and you try to increase all of them at the same time, and that does not work. Please don't do that to yourself. This is one of the reasons that coaching and an appropriate training plan is so important and actually working with people that. Know what they're talking about, because there's a lot of people out there, or like some of these generic plans that you can just get in these apps that will just throw all of the things at you, because all of those things are important, but you can't do them all at the same time. If you want the best results,

Kevin:

some people might be able to handle this if you don't have a lot of other stresses, maybe you can handle all of this. Maybe you are just very stress resilient and it's gonna work for you. This is the benefit of working with a coach is Yeah. Even if you have a plan that should theoretically work, what if you're not adapting quickly to it? What if other things come up? Coaches are there to help build in some patience. Yeah. To be like, all right, maybe we need to stretch your eight week plan into 12. Maybe you need to repeat these couple of weeks because you haven't fully adapted to these changes or other things came up. There's some excess stress and you're not adapting to the stress of running'cause you're so busy trying to adapt to the stress of life. So you need to make sure that all of these things are being able to take being taken care of before we continue to progress. just having someone to talk to you to be like. Let's just be patient with this. It is working. We just need to have a little bit of extra patience put into it. Yeah. because I made my joke about ZO two training earlier. It's great, but you don't see a lot of amazingly fast adaptation to it. It takes time. if you're trying to build up volume, you can't rush the buildup of volume. It'd be great, As, it's Florida. We've basically hit summer at this point in time. But you can't go from alright, this was like, this was my winter and now I want to have my summer bathing suit body in a week, like my, my, jacked up body that I like to build up over the summer. I can't hit the,

Angie:

let's not look at body, I don't like that. But we could, but we can look at your tan. How about that? Sure. Let's use your tan.

Kevin:

Oh, that's a great one. I know. Because you can't build up the tan over the course of a week. That's just a sunburn.

Angie:

Exactly. Because

Kevin:

we've highlighted my Irishness earlier, like that is just a burn waiting to happen. And that happens sometimes when I come through the winter and I hit that first track meet of the season. I come back, I know that

Angie:

redneck many year after year, you know that the back of your neck?

Kevin:

The back of the neck or that little triangle in the front where the polo shirt comes down?

Angie:

Yeah.

Kevin:

If you have to gradually increase this and having someone else saying, Hey, it is working. You might not be able to see the progress because you're too close to it, but you are making the progress. Have some patience to it.

Angie:

Yeah. It's like when our 15-year-old comes in is look at my tan lines, and then over the course of. Weeks. The tan lines keep getting more and more prominent, right? Yes, because the skin gets darker. Because the skin has time to adapt. But like you said, if you just try to sit outside and fry yourself for eight hours, you are just going to be a Red Lobster. And we see so many of those. Tourists down here that end up with them. And I just feel so bad for them. Like I look at them and I'm like, that looks so painful. It is. It just, it looks so painful. And it's, we, you can't do that. And it's the same with your strength and with your stress. You need time to stress the body in a way that your body is able to adapt and build strength, because stress is what builds strength. Stress is what builds resilience. Like you can't be resilient if you don't have stress. You can't adapt. You can't progress unless you have stress. Stress is a very good thing. We all need that. We just need the right kind of stress and the right amount of stress. In order to give us the results that we are looking for, and that again, is why it is individualized and why Kevin wanted to sit down and have, figure out what that person was doing because the goal might be different. That alone, what is your goal? Like you wanna run, you wanna improve your running, but what does that mean to you? What does improvement look like to you? Because someone that's trying to improve a 5K time, their training, their holes are going to look a lot different than someone that's trying to run a marathon. They're still. The same holes that we need to fill. But some of those things are, some of the holes are deeper than others.

Kevin:

it's the juggling metaphor. Yeah. There's a whole bunch of balls that you're trying to juggle, but some of'em made outta glass and you have to pay a whole lot more careful attention to those depending on what your goal is. Different. Different of the balls that you're trying to keep juggling become a lot more important. And some of'em you're like, oh, I kinda missed that one this week. it's okay if you drop that one for a week. It bounces off the floor. Others are a little bit more careful that you've gotta make sure that you're keeping a focus on that one at all times.

Angie:

And so we need to make sure that we are stressing the body enough and. That we are giving the body enough time to recover from the stress, and that's where a lot of people get into trouble also, is that it's not just about the amount of stress and the type of stress, it's also giving your body the amount of recovery that it needs to adapt to the stress. And if you realize that, okay, you know what? I think I overdid it a little bit here. It's okay. It's not like you're totally screwed. You just have to add in a little bit of extra recovery to give your body a little bit more time to adapt. And that is more necessary for us after 40, especially women in perimenopause and post menopause because we don't have the support of estrogen in our hormones backing us up like they used to. So our body becomes less resilient to stress. Our body takes longer to recover. That doesn't mean that we can't make. Progress. That doesn't mean that we can't get stronger, it just means we need to start doing things a lot differently than we were doing things before.

Kevin:

Yeah. all that makes perfect sense. It's just a matter of making sure that you have enough recovery, making sure that you give yourself the grace that if you are exhausted, that you can take a day off. That's gonna be completely fine. It just, that can't then become the consistent pattern. The consistent pattern can't be, oh, I feel tired today. I should take a rest day. And we often feel tired. Sometimes you have to push through a little bit of tired. Yeah. It's that general exhaustion from one day to the next. Yeah. That maybe that's a sign that your stress levels are too high sometimes you just need an off day.

Angie:

Yeah, absolutely. So we would invite you, number one, sign up for the challenge, real life runners.com/challenge. But it will take a couple of minutes just to think about what we've been talking about today. This idea of what if the answer isn't more, what if it's not more effort, more mileage, more speed, more, but just better inputs, the amount of stress, the type of stress, like maybe you just need to change what you're doing. There's a lot of people that always think, okay, I'm missing something. I need to add more. But you could just change up what you're already doing and get different results. Take a look at your strength training. Are you being consistent with your strength training? Are you focusing on all of the muscles that you need? And if you're not sure, come to the challenge. I'll be talking more about that. Are maybe you should try tracking your recovery. are you feeling better? Are you just getting more tired? Kevin said, it's not about one day like feeling tired on one day. We all have those days. But track the trends. Are you feeling. Tired day after day, or are your levels of exhaustion even higher than they normally are? That could be a sign for you

Kevin:

or you getting sick once a month. I played that cycle for, what, four or five months? Yeah. if you are regularly getting sick every 2, 3, 4 weeks, that's not just oh, I probably got sick. There's some colds going around. That might be a sign of you overextending yourself and your body saying, no. This is what apparently what we have to do to get this guy to relax and to recover and take a break. We're just gonna get you sick.

Angie:

Exactly. So if you want more information, we are breaking this down in simple daily steps. Next week during our challenge, we're gonna be talking about how to build strength, how to apply the right kind of stress, and how to feel better in your body. Starting now, there's gonna be. Four main ingredients that I'm gonna be talking about next week. Four ingredients that all runners need. If they wanna make progress after 40, you can't be missing any of these four. Okay. These four ingredients are absolutely essential. Every runner that makes progress. Has to lock into these four things. So we're gonna be breaking one thing per day in that challenge, giving you action items to go along with it so that you can start seeing a difference, like you will see and feel a difference by the end of the week. I guarantee it. Okay. That is the, guarantee and the bold claim that I will make to you is this challenge is unlike anything you've ever done before. And you will feel differently by the end of the week. Maybe you're not gonna be, five minutes faster in your 5K by the end of the week. Of course. I'm not gonna promise that. That would be awesome. It would be awesome. But you will definitely feel a difference if you go through this challenge. So I invite you these challenges only take about the action items are about 15 minutes per day. I'm gonna be going live every single day at 1:00 PM Eastern Time so that we can go deeper and do some coaching around this. You can start to experience what it's like to have a coach and to understand these different things on a deeper level to get your questions answered. I love coaching. I love connecting with people all around the world. That's one of the reasons I do these free challenges. So come make the time for yourself. And if you can't, if you absolutely can't be there live, live is absolutely the best option, but if you can't be there live, make time for the replay. Go in, we're gonna be putting the replay on a replay page, so you always have access to that. We'll be emailing out the replays every single day, and then we'll also be putting them here on the podcast. So make time to listen to the replays because like I said, this challenge can completely transform your running if you allow it to. If you don't just listen to the challenge. The information is great. you listen to the podcast every week, right? You know that we give good information, but it's about implementing and putting it into action. And that's really what the challenge is about, is to get you into action. So come to the challenge, invite your friends. Everyone is invited. The more the merrier. I would love for this to be over a thousand people. That is my goal is to get over a thousand people into this challenge. Help us out. Help us out. Share it out.

Kevin:

Excellent real. Share it

Angie:

to the world.

Kevin:

Real life runners.com/challenge.

Angie:

Yep, nailed it. Or five day running challenge.com. You could also do that. I know I got fancy and bought all sorts of URLs. Excellent. Five

Kevin:

five day running challenge.com.

Angie:

Five day running challenge.com. Alright, share your, share it with your friends, do all the things. As always you guys, thank you so much for joining us. This has been The Real Life Runners podcast, episode number 409. Now, get out there and run your life.