View all show notes and timestamps on the KoopCast website.
Episode overview:
Didn't we all, at some point, feel that prick of regret at a mistake made or a lesson learned the hard way? As your devoted trail and ultra running coaches, we've had our share of missteps over the past year. From seemingly minor issues like failing to thoroughly educate athletes about the World Anti-Doping Agency's rule on IV fluids to more significant ones, we've seen it all. And today, we're pulling back the curtain on our successes and missteps alike to help you avoid the same pitfalls.
Episode highlights:
(2:04) Nicole’s mistake: IV fluids are banned in and out of competition, reasoning, example where an athlete gave themselves IV before a race, the role of coaches as educators
(18:41) Ryne’s mistake: considering weather and training, factoring in heat and humidity to long range plans, key training blocks happen May-July, examples, being proactive with scheduling, using cooling strategies in training
(25:23) Sarah’s mistake: assuming athletes make good recovery decisions, example, forcing athletes to take recovery when they need it
(41:43) Koop’s mistake: accounting for the stress of travel, time zone changes and long-range travel for athletes, examples
Additional resources:
Time Shifter app
SUBSCRIBE to Research Essentials for Ultrarunning
Buy Training Essentials for Ultrarunning on Amazon or Audible.
Information on coaching-https://www.trainright.com
Koop’s Social Media
Twitter/Instagram- @jasonkoop
View all show notes and timestamps on the KoopCast website.
Episode overview:
Didn't we all, at some point, feel that prick of regret at a mistake made or a lesson learned the hard way? As your devoted trail and ultra running coaches, we've had our share of missteps over the past year. From seemingly minor issues like failing to thoroughly educate athletes about the World Anti-Doping Agency's rule on IV fluids to more significant ones, we've seen it all. And today, we're pulling back the curtain on our successes and missteps alike to help you avoid the same pitfalls.
Episode highlights:
(2:04) Nicole’s mistake: IV fluids are banned in and out of competition, reasoning, example where an athlete gave themselves IV before a race, the role of coaches as educators
(18:41) Ryne’s mistake: considering weather and training, factoring in heat and humidity to long range plans, key training blocks happen May-July, examples, being proactive with scheduling, using cooling strategies in training
(25:23) Sarah’s mistake: assuming athletes make good recovery decisions, example, forcing athletes to take recovery when they need it
(41:43) Koop’s mistake: accounting for the stress of travel, time zone changes and long-range travel for athletes, examples
Additional resources:
Time Shifter app
SUBSCRIBE to Research Essentials for Ultrarunning
Buy Training Essentials for Ultrarunning on Amazon or Audible.
Information on coaching-https://www.trainright.com
Koop’s Social Media
Twitter/Instagram- @jasonkoop
Trail and Ultra Runners. What is going on? What's happening? Welcome to another episode of the Coupe Cast. As always, I am your humble host, coach Jason Coupe, and on this episode of the podcast, I gathered our crack team of coaches together and we are going to swallow our pride and eat a little bit of crow and go through some of the most egregious mistakes that we made through this past year and, more importantly, how we are going to correct them. So on the podcast today, I have a team of, say, aris Guzzaro, ryan Anderson and Nicole Rasmussen, and we each picked some of the worst mistakes that we made, the context that wraps around those mistakes and how we are going to correct them.
Speaker 1:You longtime listeners of the podcast will recognize that nearly in every single episode I recognize something in the past that I have done incorrectly and how I have gone through a course or a course correction in order to correct that mistake. I am not infallible. In fact, one of the reasons that I am at where I am at today is making all of those mistakes when I was a younger coach, bringing in expert counsel and correcting those mistakes so that I don't make them in the future. So I hope, regardless of whether you're an athlete directing your own training or you're a coach directing other athletes training, listening to this podcast that you can take a little bit of inspiration for, from not only what we did wrong but actually how we came into correcting it, so that you can apply it to whatever situation is actually in front of you. All right, folks, with that out of the way I am getting right out of the way. Here's our coach round table about what mistakes we made and how we corrected them.
Speaker 2:If anybody here was raised Catholic, this sort of feels like confession, it's with a healthy dose of Catholic guilt. Forgive me, forgive me, father, for I have sinned.
Speaker 1:I did this past year. I'm sure there's a number of different analogies we're going to go through. The one that I like is we're all going to eat crow for the next hour and a half, right, All right. So Nicole gets the first bite of the crow. Nicole, why don't you kick us off here? What did you screw up this year? And be honest with it.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I actually shared this story in a continuing ed with our coaches, but I feel like it's just come up so frequently in the ultra running world that I wanted to share it today too. If you're not aware and if you don't know, the world anti-doping agency has IV fluids listed on their list of prohibited substances. Right, you can't get an IV in or out of competition except for a legitimate medical reason in a legitimate medical facility. The reason for that is that you can enhance your performance by increasing blood plasma volume and you can also mask banned substances by taking in a lot of IV fluids. If you're not aware, that's the situation.
Speaker 4:I had an example this year where I went out to a race. After the race, after the fact, I had an athlete who mentioned to me like oh, you should have been here earlier. I got my IV fluids right before the race. This person had a medical background and had the ability to administer their own IV and just thought, like this is a great idea, why not start the race super hydrated? I think it'd be really easy to say as a coach I wasn't there, I didn't know or I wasn't aware. I don't think the mistake was made by the athlete, right, this athlete was not trying to dope or cheat on purpose. Right, they were just unaware and uneducated and that this was something that's against the rules. The mistake wasn't made by the athlete. I feel like the mistake was made by me as a coach, in failing to cast a wide enough net and a wide enough umbrella of education, an example to all of my athletes.
Speaker 4:As coaches, we definitely have a role in mentoring and educating our athletes and it's our job to put our best athletes on the line without the use of any performance enhancing measures. It's our job to have integrity and to promote clean sport. I think that it's easy to have these conversations sometimes with your elite athletes or your professional athletes, and it's easy to make sure that you're covering your bases and keeping some of these things from happening. There really is opportunity, as coaches and leaders in the field, to make sure that we are educating and casting a wide enough net so that everybody knows we talk about, we make mistakes, what are we going to do differently? I think it's pretty easy in an onboarding situation with an athlete or in the intake form with your athlete, to just ask the question up front what medications do you take, what supplements do you take? It just starts the conversation from the start, so you make sure you cover your bases and are able to have some of those conversations with athletes from day one.
Speaker 1:Nicole's coming out swinging with this. I thought people were going to come to like with it. My long run was eight hours instead of seven hours, or something like this. Nicole comes out with the doping piece right out of the gate.
Speaker 4:But don't you feel like? Even if you follow Coop, every Wednesday somebody asks you this question what do you think about an IV?
Speaker 1:before a race To add a little bit. Let me add some context to this right here, just based on my experience, and we can kind of bat it around the room. So, nicole, you're right, that rule is in place. It was one of the original anti-doping rules that WADA initially put in place, because way back when WADA was kind of concerned with basically two classes of performance and enhancing drugs. One of them was anabolic steroids, mainly in strength of power sports, but also somewhat in the endurance sports, and the other one was blood doping, and the only tool that the anti-doping officials had at the time when this was very when this was instrumented very early on to combat blood doping was hematocrit. That's all they did, and they set this very, somewhat arbitrary threshold in the very early days of anti-doping efforts and said if your hematocrit was above 50, then that was a red flag. You just couldn't have it and that's not the best way to do it. We have way more sophisticated tools now to track down blood doping, but in the initial, in the old days when this initially started, that was the only tool, and so the athletes that were doping and the doctors that were managing the doping protocols, they were kind of smart and they were like we can manipulate this hematocrit very easily by just giving somebody an IV. So hematocrit is just the ratio of red blood cell volume to total blood or to total plasma volume, and by simply infusing saline into the bloodstream you're automatically diluting it and then you can kind of go below the. You can go below that 50 hematocrit, which would be half and half, half red blood cell volume, half total, or then the red cell volume comprises half of the total total plasma volume. And so my point was that was a very easy way to circumvent the rules and that the no needles, no IV policy has really persisted since then. But it has very early origin, so it's one of the oldest rules, like, if you want to kind of put it into historical context, and that's juxtaposed by the way that we think about the inoculus IV.
Speaker 1:Now that first off is used in legitimate medical setting for a number of different reasons to rehydrate, just to keep patients stable and things like that. And if you're under the supervision, if you're under the care of a physician and that's a necessary medical intervention, by all means go ahead and do that. That's we're not saying like avoid that at all costs, but to simply do it to rehydrate after a race or pre hydrate in advance of a race, irrespective of the efficacy of those interventions. We're going to put that aside for a second. That would certainly be a certainly be an anti doping violation, and one that a lot of athletes view as relatively innocuous. Right, because it seems benign. I'm just, I'm just literally injecting myself with sailing or a sailing drip. But it is a big problem in the anti doping world, not necessarily to mask things now, because there are better ways to go about that, but mainly because of the what you just mentioned, nicole, just the under education that it actually is a method that is controlled or prohibited by water.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to do all the listeners a favor and I'm going to put two resources up in the show notes If you're curious about this stuff. The first is you saw it as anti doping 101 resource and they have resources for both athletes and coaches, so you can pick your flavor of that. I would encourage athletes and coaches to look at both. That will give you a general orientation of how the anti doping process works, where to go for other resources and things like that. And the second one and this one is actually, I think, the kind of the most important tool that you can have in your cool toolkit and it's called the global draw or the global DRO, and all it is is a resource that's in several different languages, that any athlete or any coach or any practitioner from any sport that can use, and it is a huge database of all of the medications and compounds and suppin substances almost said supplements, that's not true substances that exist in all of their chemical and colloquial formats. So if you look up Tylenol, for example, it will show you the same thing as acetaminophen, right, you don't have to be a sophisticated doctor and look up all of the technical names for things and it will tell you whether or not those substances are approved out of competition, banned out of competition, banned in competition, under what conditions they are, because some of them are conditionally approved. It will give you resources if some can be approved through the TUE process, and something that I'm having all of my and I have had for the last few years to be honest with you, all of my lead athletes do whenever they have anything new is run it through the global drill, even if I know, and they know, that it is like it's going to be approved in all conditions just to set the habit of doing that. Because the last thing you want to have happen is somebody gets some random heart medication for a legitimate medical condition and not go through this process in advance and run into a problem after the fact and have to try to retroactively declare TUE, which usually causes some sort of anti-doping infraction of varying types of penalties or varying length of the penalties, and it's just problematic kind of across the board. And mark my word I mentioned this in the coaching conference that none of you guys were at, so you guys will get the spiel now.
Speaker 1:Out of competition testing is coming to trial and alter running.
Speaker 1:We already have in competition testing and that's really problematic to introduce that as the first piece of anti-doping that anybody has right after a race. That's not a thing that a lot of anti-doping agencies want to do because of a lot of the complications with it. But out of competition testing and treating trail and ultra running similarly or with a similar fashion as a lot of the other traditional Olympic sports are treated, that's coming in the next two to three years. It is going to be an interesting process once that actually does come down the line, because it's very hard to get everybody on the same page and reading from the same playbook. Even though people genuinely want to do the right thing, it's going to come with a lot of at least initially unintended consequences, and that's just part of the gig when you introduce anti-doping into a new sport. So kudos to you for swinging for the fences on that one, nicole, that's definitely not one that I was anticipating, owning up to the fact that we don't script this too much, but that's a big one.
Speaker 4:Yeah, there you go, start off big.
Speaker 1:I don't have anything else to add. I'm still in shock.
Speaker 2:I just appreciate that vulnerability and sharing that, nicole, because I guarantee you I mean I for one have had an athlete I think I mentioned to you in the past that had mentioned to me offhand this was a couple of years ago like, oh yeah, I went and got some IV done before my event and it was like didn't even cross my mind to say something about, like you should not do that. And I think now it's something that coaches are becoming more aware of, that those are the conversations we need to have with our athletes, or that even athletes who are not coaching need to be thinking about this. That that's not a protocol you should be doing and it's not something you think about until you face it. But hopefully people will learn from people like us that you know. No, these are conversations to have with your athletes and athletes should be aware of this. So I appreciate you sharing that.
Speaker 1:Well, it's not just for the elite athletes, right? No, no, you know, athletes can always take on their own. They can do whatever they want to right. They're grown adults, as I like to say. On the elite athlete side, and especially if they are subject to some sort of rule, structure, right, which includes, which includes anti-doping, obviously they need to be a whole lot more careful because there's real consequence. There's real consequence to the race results and there's real consequence to their career and their sponsors and their kind of like umbrella of people that they have, that they have around them. But the everyday athletes are kind of caught. They're kind of caught in the crossfire a little bit.
Speaker 1:I do think to Sarah's point that it's important to educate athletes on this so that they can kind of make their own decisions. But don't rule out the fact that something might appear in ultra running that's akin to what USA Cycling does. So USA Cycling does randomized drug testing, race day testing, across all of the events and across all of the categories. So some random category four masters like me you know, I'm 45 years old, I'm never going to compete for an Olympic medal. I can join in my local criteria with a, you know, usa Cycling license. They could easily pull me aside, joe Schmo, nobody and randomly test me. That is not out of the realm of possibility. A few years down the line, I'm not going to say that that is likely to happen, because the thing that catalyzed that in the US in cycling is the fact that it has a national governing body and they made it kind of one of their priorities. But I wouldn't put it past it to actually have that degree of formalization. Outside of the formalization, that formalizing process, the athletes can make their own decisions on whether or not they want to be water compliant or not, and that's a whole you know other mess that is probably outside the scope of this podcast and we need to bring in an ethics committee and all that stuff to tackle that. We are not going to tackle that at this time but, needless to say, I would encourage athletes out there, whether they're a lead athlete or not, just to start to consider these things, because it's going to be part of the sport and then also, when it is part of the sport, if you want to have an opinion on it, you're now more educated, which is also a big problem at the public at large, meaning it's really easy to cast, you know, shadows and throw stones and things like that when you don't know anything about anything.
Speaker 1:But when you actually figure out that, hey, listen, a lot of people have been, I mean, I'll give you guys a great example. It actually happened at the Pikespeak Marathon. So the Pikespeak Marathon, which had anti-doping control at it, right For the lead athletes, they're randomly testing the top 10 and probably I think they had some sort of standardized testing in the top three. Maybe they actually had an IV provider as part of, like, the sponsor booth in the expo. So you have this clear.
Speaker 1:You know, once again, that's a very clear miss with the race management not recognizing that they had somebody providing services that was technically against the rules for the lead athletes, just for the lead athletes. Those rules you know. I don't even know if they actually applied to everybody. You have to go look at the Pikespeak rulebook. But the fact but the summary of that is, or the point that I'm trying to make is is even you're going to see those types of that type of lack of education and those discrepancies kind of across the board because of the lack of education and because it's a new thing for a new sport. That always happens with new sports, where people just get caught in the crosshairs or don't realize or whatever. But I'm telling you guys, once out of competition testing comes around, people are going to get shocked and there's going to be no excuses. We'll be ready.
Speaker 4:We'll be ahead of the curve.
Speaker 1:We'll be. Yeah, hopefully we'll learn from our mistakes. Yeah, you soak my dad used to always tell me it's okay if you make mistakes, just don't make the same one twice. So that was a good one, nicole. Thanks for thanks for being vulnerable, ryan. I don't know how you're going to follow that up, but you get the four next.
Speaker 3:Okay. So one thing I screwed up this year was considering weather and how that is going to affect training into the long range plan. I've always been mindful of that for athletes out West who are going to be impacted by snow, but factoring in those athletes that are going to be impacted by heat and humidity in the summer, because most big races are taking place end of summer, early fall. All key blocks of training are taking place between May to July and, like I had several athletes in Houston, it was record temperatures all summer and just their interval work is compromised. It's just the heat and humidity. Everyone was compromised and the ability to get in quality training just wasn't there. And so, being mindful of that from the get go, I was like, okay, instead of this specific block, we're focusing on high intensity. Let's flip flop that to maybe cooler months or be proactive in the conversation, and like, hey, do you have access to a treadmill? No, okay, let's try to make that happen. If you don't, we're going to work around it. And yeah, being more proactive there. And when they are going to do their intervals, add recovery time to the interval instead of maybe going three interval sessions in 10 days. We space that out more, give them more recovery time, being more deliberate of using cooling strategies in training Don't just save them for race day and using your ice bandana, your ice sleeves and all that. Set yourself up for best success in training when it's 90 degrees and 100% humidity.
Speaker 3:And factoring in all those things and then also with that, you can be more mindful as the heat is approaching and like hey, like realize your paces are about to slow. Don't like start having that conversation maybe weeks later, because their confidence is going to take a hit if you aren't mindful of that ahead of time. And it can be hard to backtrack and reassure the confidence of your athlete If you haven't already addressed that. Because subconsciously we know these things, but we're driven by data. We're using training peaks. The data is right there. When you see these changes in your paces all of a sudden I'm not hitting the same splits from my tempo intervals your confidence is going to take a hit. Yes, you know your performance is going to go down from the heat, but really face that a lot with a few athletes in warm climates Like, oh my gosh, I'm feeling so slow, I'm just, I'm a little more tired and factoring in all that to get ahead of it Be one big thing I learned from.
Speaker 1:I feel like we need to do this podcast in like or something similar in April to tell everybody get ready for the summer, because I think we all have athletes, and probably us ourselves, that first day that the temperature dramatically increases.
Speaker 1:everybody makes the same mistake and they take the exact same hydration out that they took you know a month earlier, when the weather was 10 degrees, the weather was 10 or 15 degrees Fahrenheit cooler and that's not that material. I'm like an hour run or an hour and a half run. But then when you do it on like a four or five hour run and you run out of fluids and you're just like, oh my God, like this, I really I really kind of like screwed this up. It has a cascading effect to your point, ryan, of you need to include extra recovery and just be mindful of it and things like that, because not only do you have like the physiological ramifications of digging yourself a little bit of a bigger hole now, you also have the psychological ramification of I'm a lot slower, I'm performing a lot, I'm performing a lot poorer.
Speaker 1:Why is like? Why is that? And if you address that in advance, it is far more powerful than just stating the fact of oh, it's hot, so you're slowing, so you're slowing down. That psychological seed has already planted once the action has already happened. So certainly you can mitigate it a little bit after the fact with the, with any sort of conversation. But make no mistake, like you have a bad workout, or not even a bad workout Workout, where you're unaccustomed to the paces that you're actually running, because that's partially facilitated by the, by the heat. If you know in advance, going into that workout, that that's going to happen, it's a whole different psychological setup than if afterwards you're wondering why was I so terrible?
Speaker 3:To your point that that 60 90-minute run that's in material to maybe not change up your hydration strategy, I would say it is All right. We do sweat testing with our athletes anywhere from like two to five pounds. You go for that 60-minute run. You lose three pounds of sweat and you have a hydrated deering. You're in a hole and trying to catch up the rest of the day. You finish your run at eight. You're trying to chug a bunch of water before bed. You're waking up to pee throughout the night. Your sleep's compromised, and on and on it goes.
Speaker 1:You're coming up with like seven degrees of separation there when I get to play. Anybody else have that experience?
Speaker 4:We did a lot of adapting and auto balls with athletes in the South and the Southeast this year. It was a hot and good year.
Speaker 1:Do any of you use the Weather app in Training Peaks? It's a feature that you can bolt on to it and it'll show you. I think it's the 10-day forecast. So when you're actually building workouts it'll show you like what the forecast is localized to that one particular athlete. Do you guys use that?
Speaker 4:I've never seen that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'll show you guys where it is after the call. But from a building perspective you can't always match it up because sometimes you're building longer than that time frame. But if you're constantly checking in with the athlete and like evaluating here's the workout, here's what I've got coming up next, sometimes it doesn't automatically flag it, but if you're looking for it, those big temperature swings you can actually like bring into your coaching practice and all it does is it just embeds, like I believe it's the high and low temperatures just at like the top of the each individual day square. But you have to add it onto Training Peaks. It's not something that's like there by default. Okay, any other banter on that particular topic? Lawrence Guzzaro, you're next.
Speaker 2:Okay, my biggest mistake this year was assuming which is always a good idea that the athlete will make the best decision in when it comes to how their recovery is going. If I'm gonna say that simply had an individual training for a marathon, wanted a sub three goal, was doing really, really well. Everything was lining up, metric wise, no issues. They had trouble, sorry. They had some travel and then they had some poor sleep because of some kid issues with their kiddo. They would say that, oh no, I'm fine, I'm good to go and metrics would reflect everything's fine. But they then put in their notes fatigue, heavy fatigue, didn't sleep well, we talk every week. They say no, I think I'm good and I say, okay, well, if you're feeling this fatigue tomorrow, I want you to take that as a rest day, like, kind of like let's call an audible on that, assuming that they would make that call, and I think a couple of the other coaches that I've talked about this that when you get these highly driven athletes, sometimes they see that workout they're like I know coach said to take a rest day if I need it. But I'll power through, I can do it because it's on the calendar. I had to eventually step in and be like this is a rest day. And later on they're like thank you for making that call, because I wouldn't do it myself.
Speaker 2:But it took me a longer than it should have for me to start making that call for this individual, not because any metrics were reflecting this, but because they were just constantly making comments about fatigue and travel and whatnot, and then they were getting sick and then they were missing training because of sickness. So it was really just having to be those guardrails for those really driven athletes. So I'm not going to give you that. This isn't a choose your own adventure day. This is you're taking a rest day. And here's why I've got quite a few athletes that you give them the choice and they'll be like oh, I got a rest day, thank you, that's great. And then others are like absolutely not. If it's an option, I'm going to do the training day. I'm don't let me pick, don't leave it me up to my own devices. And so you have to step in and say no, this needs to be a rest day, because this is, you know, what I'm seeing, and this is how you're responding to training.
Speaker 1:Were you only using the conversations we're having? Were you only using the subjective feedback to make that call?
Speaker 2:Yeah, at that time. Yeah, I had to, because well. Well, what happened was paces were being hit, but he would comment that they were felt harder than they should have. So he was still hitting the paces, he was still hitting the workouts, but it felt harder than it should have. Legs felt heavy, sleep wasn't good and then he got a cold and then he recovered and then he got another. You know, it's like this. We started having this pattern and so, even though he was doing the workouts, it was costing him a lot more than it should have. So we just had to start institutes some rest days, extra rest days. He has one a week, but he's more of a. We needed to have two with everything going on, and that was hard at first, but it's definitely been a lesson of that. Subjective feedback is so important in having those conversations with our athletes, because the metrics don't always tell the whole story. So what's the learning?
Speaker 1:lesson to get ahead of that next time, right.
Speaker 2:Oh, having the athletes that I have the most conversation and communication with, that's paramount because if you having those conversations and asking those questions, you're going to be able to get ahead of those things, not letting it get that far. If I see I've kind of instituted, if I see more than two or three days where they've said, you know, poor sleep, this feels harder than it's like, okay, we need to probably have that extra rest day or lighten. Lighten a day or reduce some intensity. If it becomes more of a trend thing and if it's more than two or three days where I'm seeing that, that's I want to get ahead of that early.
Speaker 1:I think one of the things that helps with that is, looking at the training period over like a six or an eight week time frame. Because to the psychology that you just mentioned oh my God, I just don't want to miss this one workout. It's very, very rarely entirely evaporates into thin air. Most of the time what happens is if you look at the architecture that you either have planned either formally in training peaks is what we use or kind of like informally, and more of a long range plan is that stress can be rearranged. So it either appears in some form or fashion two weeks down the line, three weeks down the line, four weeks down the line, and that's really what matters is just things over long periods of time. So one of the ways that I've actually combated that is to try to switch the athlete's psychology not to just what they're doing that week but kind of what we've got for the next four or five weeks. So the audibles are a little bit more palatable because they know that there's flexibility down the road.
Speaker 1:Sometimes it's a one-to-one replacement, right.
Speaker 1:We're just like doing a rest day over here and we're moving that workout to the end of the phase or kind of jerry-rigging things, you know, in some other form or fashion.
Speaker 1:But the point is, is it very rarely 100% evaporates into thin air, because your body can only handle so much stress over long periods of time. And so if you're removing that stress over a short period of time two or three days right, that's the timeframe that you're looking at making that change. It gives the body the opportunity, or the athlete the opportunity, to do more stress somewhere down the line where it's actually smarter. And then you add to the fact that, like not that, we should get into like this, like total optimization pattern. But especially when you're doing hard workouts, it's always more advantage, it's always more advantageous to do a hard workout when you're the most ready for that hard workout, not when you've got five or six other things kind of come like, kind of conspiring against you to like to do that workout. So sometimes it actually ends up working out better when you make those adjustments because the workouts are higher quality.
Speaker 2:Agreed and that, luckily, with this athlete, we were able to turn things around. But it's been a not only a lesson just for this individual, but for somebody higher, higher achiever. You know, the people that are just really, really want to push hard all the time, and we've been able to turn that around with his current block of training too. So we've completely changed how we're doing it in terms of me being those firm guard rails for him and he's responding really, really well to it. So it's been like really nice to see that the difference between the spring and now and just yeah, it's just been really good to see that Sara has got the hammer coming down.
Speaker 1:I think she kind of likes that. Just like, give me the power.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, if anybody knows me I think Ryan and I were talking about this I'm. You know it's hard sometimes because you never want an athlete to feel like you don't believe in them or that they're not capable, and so you have to have those conversations. It's not that you can't handle this, it's just right now you're either communicating to me or I'm seeing something in your training that this is not the opportune time for this and we need to reevaluate and just make it so that it's going to be like you said Maybe next week. An extra day, rest day this week is going to make you stronger next week and then you'll get those quality sessions in. It's not because you don't believe in your athlete, it's like you want the best for them. So you have to be those, those guardrails and that voice of reason at times.
Speaker 1:Or let's make a better decision, right, it's not that you can't handle it, let's just make the best decision. And I mean, I've actually said that exact phrase to athletes when I've had to make those manipulation and it's like listen, you can handle this, but the better decision is deviation XYZ, whatever kind of it actually moves to.
Speaker 1:And I think that framing is actually an important part of the movement process as well, because you're you're set, you're setting the expectation that you're trying to do everything in a more optimal way, versus just terrain trap avoidance, Like oh we're just going to try to avoid the negative. We're trying to spin it into whatever the best situation possible actually is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I often find that after you have those conversations and they see the difference, it's easy, but trust there's that trust that's gained there and that it's that's a very valuable thing to have.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it takes a couple of cycles. Normally, when that one workout that you moved, when they friggin crush it, then you get all the confidence of the world and it's kind of like game over, and then they're asking you to like tell me if I need to move this or not. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:Any of you other guys had a similar experience?
Speaker 3:Similar, yeah. And then you get these eager athletes and you want to keep giving them the work because they're enjoying it, it's, it's part of what they do and just, yeah, still hold them back right, zoom out. There's more workouts to come. We want those to be of high quality and, like as a coach keeping your emotions in check because you're getting so fired up for them and you're seeing how well training is going and to just be patient. Remember what our job is. It's not to crush the one workout or the one week of training. It's to get them ready for their A-Events two to four months down the road.
Speaker 1:Are you more or less sensitive to the movement depending upon the like, the type of workout, whether it's like a high intensity workout or a high volume workout or whatever Like? Have you found yourself like more sensitive to move, something based on like where that workout? I'm I'm directing this at Sarah, since it's her category based on kind of like the category of workout, right, high volume, high intensity, whatever.
Speaker 2:So meaning if, if I'm sensing this fatigue, or we're having these conversations and their next workout is going to be high intensity, do I slide that forward a couple of days?
Speaker 1:Well, are you just more sensitive to actually make? Because, at the end of the day, it's a decision, right? Yeah, it's a decision based off of subjective feedback and not objective criteria, and so you need to decide hey, I'm going to move this and you can. One of the filters that you could apply I'm not saying you have to one of the features that you could that you could apply to that filter is what is that workout? Is it extremely important? Is it extremely intense? Is it? Does it have a whole lot of volume to it? And what I'm asking is is do, does the, does the features of the workout or the construction of the workout that you're looking at potentially moving, factor into how sensitive you are on? Do I need to move this or not?
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 1:So, what would you be more likely to move versus keep in place?
Speaker 2:So if fatigue is is incredibly high and they're having trouble sleeping and the next workout is a high intensity workout, they're not primed in a good position to do that and they're also fairly, I feel like they're going to be more in a position and to have negative impact from that. So I'd rather push. You know, maybe have it rest day and push that out and see.
Speaker 1:But what if it's just like a long run, like a long endurance run or something like that?
Speaker 2:That's still a tough one. If they have the flexibility for us to move that, we will. Again. If they are just sleeping four hours a night for three nights in a row, going out and doing a three hour run is probably not a good call and they're not going to feel good. If it's endurance runs, those tend to be more of like hey, those are okay and usually if we can keep the effort good which, if I have that trust and then a visual, we have that relationship and I know they really are good about true endurance runs they can keep that effort low. If it's an intensity run or like a high quality session where we are going after a very specific adaptation and we need to have you showing up, kind of all cylinders, I'm more likely to move that one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I based on the available research. That's a better construction and it's really not so much. Can you do the workout it's, can you adapt to it?
Speaker 1:So we know that under fatigue, the adaptive process is going to be blunted and that blunting is more sensitive on the higher intensities versus on the lower intensities and you can actually go to. You know a lot of listeners are familiar with this and you guys are familiar with this as well.
Speaker 1:Worker Altini's app, the HRV for training, when you go through that. Ryan is familiar with this because I saw I'm taking this heart rate variability every morning in Chamonix when we're over at UTMP. When you go through that process there's a few different flavors of advice at the end of the run a show. So you take your heart rate variability, you go through the subjective questionnaire and then the app takes all that information and gives you advice on what to do and that advice is proceed as planned, limit intensity or take the day off those three. So notice it's not limit volume or take your long run easier or something like that, it's limit intensity and once again, that's recognition of the fact that the adaptive process is blunted in these high fatigue states, particularly on the intense types of workouts.
Speaker 2:I appreciate you also bringing a heart rate very Billy for training the heart rate, because that's something that I'm going to be rolling out with athletes I want in general, but with some of these athletes that are having these harder times making these calls or are in as in tune, I think that's going to be a very powerful tool. So that kind of like looking forward, that is going to be something that I'm going to be adding.
Speaker 1:Yeah, get ready to brew the morning coffee and change your workflow.
Speaker 2:We've been through that before Up at 430 in the morning ready to start the day. But I think that will be a powerful and helpful tool for many of those athletes as well to help them assess kind of for the day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a good tool.
Speaker 1:I'll leave links in the show notes to the podcast that I did with Marko and Corinne on using that yeah, helpful tool, a helpful tool, not the sole driver of everything.
Speaker 1:I think is the right way to think about it because ultimately, even when you're using only subjective feedback, it's still a human at the end of the day determining am I going to do this next workout or not.
Speaker 1:That can be something that you roll into it if you know the proper context with it and you're taking the measurements correctly and you can get the workflow correct as well. That's actually a big consideration for a lot of coaches out there that are considering this, because the workflow part of it is absolutely integral into making sure that you can actually orchestrate correctly, because sometimes, from a workflow perspective, you just can't be sensitive enough to it, since you're taking a measurement in the morning and deciding what to do with that measurement literally minutes or hours later. So all those things need to be taken into consideration and kudos to you for incorporating that in some form or fashion. It's not as easy and I wish it was as waking up and going through the morning card on your Garmin. People with Garmin's are familiar with this and it will go through all the different things and then, following that it's not as easy as that You've got to actually provide some sort of human interpretation.
Speaker 2:A tool, not the tool. Yeah, A tool.
Speaker 1:All right, any more banter on Sarah's workout movement sensitivity.
Speaker 3:And say, in regard to keeping the long run when they're fatigued, it's like, hey, it's my lady right, Good time for some mental training. You can tell her flip it, flip it that way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm less sensitive to moving the long runs based off of a lot of fatigue. Sometimes you'll downgrade them based on time. But here's the proposition right, sometimes you have a long run on a day because that's the most time availability that they have. Right, you're going to do a four-hour run and it only can occur on Saturday because of life. Now, four hours is a lot of time to take out of life and you can get away with just simply downgrading either the time and or the intensity and still come up with a similar, reasonable adaptation from that. So my sensitivity personally has to be a little bit higher to move those things around much, and normally I'll downgrade first versus absolutely move. Versus a hard workout, which I know I can always move somewhere else in the calendar, it's got more flexibility associated with it and you want to move it more, I'm much more sensitive to kind of push those things around.
Speaker 2:What you got Coop.
Speaker 1:Okay, you guys want to know what I screwed up. Huh, like you guys, my list is long, but I had to pick one out of all of them and the easiest one was travel. So I have a lot of athletes that go transatlantic and sometimes trans-specific. So it's a big time zone change. It's a big chunk of travel. You normally are in the air for eight to 12 hours and the total tip to tail travel time is 16 to 24 hours and then the time zone shift is right around eight hours. You combine all of those things and athletes just kind of get messed up.
Speaker 1:I made a couple of mistakes this year where I did not appropriately account for the stress of the travel, meaning somebody would get to another location US to Europe or Europe to the US and I would throw them into harder workouts, more workload or kind of whatever just too soon. And too soon was the third day after they arrived. So arrival day would be day one, the next day would be day two and then I would do something on day three in most kind of normal circumstances. I made the mistake where, for a variety of reasons, that was just too early and very clearly too early athlete would go out and somebody got injured. Other ones was just too much. I kind of had to backtrack and so, going forward, I'm taking kind of a two-pronged approach to fixing this. One of them is something that I've done in the past that I'm just going to do more of, and the other one's the low-hanging fruit. So the low-hanging fruit is just to give more time. Just give them more time once they get wherever they're going, to kind of acclimate to the time zone and things like that, before kind of pouring on any sort of intensified training intensified from the intensity perspective or intensified from the volume perspective. The second one is I'm going to start incorporating more More I've done this before, I just have not been very diligent on it Just using a time shifter app to shift their time to the time zone, shift their time zones whenever they've got transatlantic type of travel where the time zone that they're landing is six or eight or 10 hours different from where they're used to.
Speaker 1:I'll leave a link in the show notes to that. It's a really effective app. It doesn't erase the time zone deficit, like, let me be clear, it's not a magic wand. It makes everything perfect once you land and you can hit the ground running, but it does kind of feather the shift so that it's not as dramatic.
Speaker 1:So using that in conjunction with just general good travel habits, which, honestly, most of my athletes already have, I think that's the bigger. I'm going to do this. I'm going to put a little bit more emphasis on this when I have athletes kind of go back and forth and I was actually just looking at my athlete roster before we got on the phone 80% of my athletes had some travel in the last 12 months. That was more than six hours different from their home base at some point. So my point with that is is it affected the vast majority of the athletes that I work with like personally, so it's a big thing for me to have some sort of Like, not a I don't know. I'll just say systematized, systematized way to work through that, which is get them on the time zones shifter app and then have them focus on good habits when they travel and then, even when they get there, just being a little bit more patient or when they're in their new location on the training load ramp rate going up into things.
Speaker 4:Coop. Can you, sorry, explain the time shifter app? Does it prompt you when to sleep? When to eat Like what exactly yeah?
Speaker 1:it's pretty simple. It's like here's your current time zone, here's where you're going, here's your current sleep schedule and then it shifts that based on those time differences. So it's very, very simple. You probably don't even need an app for it, but because it can include all of the reminders and the scheduling and how long in advance you need to start shifting your sleep, it becomes a remarkably effective behavioral tool. More than anything else. At the end of the day it's telling you when to sleep and when to wake up. It's pretty simple and in most cases you're incorporating it anywhere between like three and six or seven days before the jump. So it's really not all that invasive from a scheduling standpoint.
Speaker 1:I'm not saying it's uninvasive. Like people with, like you know, kids and really strict, you know schedules and I gotta get you know to the gym at four am and all this other stuff that are probably gonna freak out about it. But at the end of the day it's kind of small changes that if you can get it close, you know 80% compliant, just like any other kind of training plan, can actually make a pretty big difference. And for the athletes that I know that are going, it becomes really valuable when you got a few jumps because you can kind of work with it and massage it to accommodate. You know, I'm gonna be here for a week and then there for three weeks and then somewhere else for four weeks or something like that, which I do have a few athletes that do that. It can be really helpful on that, just to basically have their lives be less interrupted by all kind of disturbed sleep if you can get ahead of the game. You guys use that. Have you ever used it before?
Speaker 2:I have not, but I should have when I lived in Europe and traveled back and forth all the time Time shifter.
Speaker 1:I kept screwing up the name. It's called time shifter, not sleep shifter. This is, you know, I think I have one or two choices, either sleep or time. But anyway, I'll include a link to it in the show notes. It, like I said, it works pretty well.
Speaker 2:Would you say Coop for those that can't use something like that, like those people like you mentioned that have kids and maybe like four or 12 hour shifts with their work and they can't do this if their option is more of that push out when they start that kind of that more deep dive into the training, what do you, what have you noticed with your athletes is kind of like a good. I know it's very independent, you know individual, but it's three days was maybe too soon for some people. Looking back, what would you have maybe seen?
Speaker 1:looking historically Well, I mean if you couldn't do anything right.
Speaker 1:If you had no opportunity to time shift your sleep schedule Correct. The first thing I would look at is just habits when you actually sleep. If people have the opportunity, this is gonna sound like ridiculously pretentious and like I'm some sort of elitist or whatever, but if people have the opportunity to upgrade their seats to a business class seat or use points or pay for a first class seat which I know is ridiculously expensive, but there's a lot of ways that you can, jerry, read the system. I mean, united has a first class upgrade option that costs you like between two and 500 bucks and 30,000 miles or something like that, which is pretty reasonable for serial travelers like myself. And I actually did this when I went to Chamonix this year, because I upgraded my seat to a first class seat because I had to give a presentation when I got there and I knew I was gonna be effed, but after being up for 48 hours or however long it was gonna be.
Speaker 1:But anyway, my point with that is is focus on the habits while you're actually traveling. That can actually make a really big difference and then just give yourself more time than you think you need to. I think you can keep a normal, a normal hour and a half two hour runs, those types of whatever's in the norm for your athlete for two to three days then there's no penalty for that and then waiting to the fourth day or maybe even the fifth day of being in the new time zone to intensify things. So either throwing a hard workout and or throwing a long workout or something like that. I really think that timeframe of just being on the ground is for. That period of time is extremely important.
Speaker 2:I think a lot of people will find that helpful when they're out traveling.
Speaker 1:I mean, once again, it's a little bit of a luxury position, traveling kind of all around, but it is very disruptive on all different markers of health and stress and things like that, and I think we gotta kind of respect that. Any new parent who's gone through that phase can kind of recognize that. In fact, you could probably apply the same principles of just being more patient with the recovery process and with how sleep impacts things. You can apply those lessons to kind of like new parenthood as well, which none of us mentioned. By the way, I've got a couple new moms actually in my athlete roster and that's something that I've done is just brought everything down, recognizing that it's gonna be chaotic for a period of time.
Speaker 3:For the next 18 years.
Speaker 1:I don't think it ends there. Yeah, it might not, even not for me. I was pretty chaotic for well beyond 18 years. To put it that way, anything else on the travel.
Speaker 2:I just wonder if, potentially, this could even be a future podcast as people prepare to like plan their travel for a UTMB like next year, like a head of just like ways like when you should plan to get there ahead of time and strategies when you get there. I mean, I think there's quite a bit of Americans that fly out there that could probably benefit from some guidance from that if they're not working with an awesome coach like us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've been trying to get any bender or somebody from that like sleep disruption. There's a few experts in that area on the podcast. It's definitely something that I've wanted to do. I just haven't really been very diligent at facilitating it yet.
Speaker 3:And this can be applied to traveling within the US If you can give yourself an extra day also luxury. Not everybody has that. Give yourself an extra day, you can make a big difference. Athletes go into a race, got there the day before, brought the family too much stress. Next race he got an Airbnb by himself before the start. Again, that's a luxury. But if you can give yourself an extra day to settle that stress going into your race, that's something we'd all love to do.
Speaker 1:There's this really famous sleep researcher, sherry Ma, that I can't remember if it was her or her team who actually created this, but they created this prediction model for basketball outcomes. So who's gonna win an NBA game, based on what team was traveling to what time zone. And if you were to just I'm not condoning people going to Vegas and putting their mortgage on this but if you were just to take their predictions, it was accurate like 65% of the time or something far above the majority. If you were just to take that and lay bets down in Vegas, you'd be actually remarkably successful. Not that anybody should do it, but it kind of shows the power of how much sleep can actually impact athletic performance across a wide variety of things endurance, skill, strength, power, all that other stuff and we definitely need to respect it. I agree that we need to do something very specific.
Speaker 1:Once the Euro travel season starts around UTMB, because there's so many athletes going over there. Maybe we can package it together and a whole thing like what to do from sleep, how to get there and where to stay right, like all those kind of like good habits, what to do when all your stuff gets lost. We had an athlete that happened to one of our athletes who's traveling in on like Wednesday or something like that, at all of his stuff kind of go awry. That's gonna continue to happen because the airlines are pretty terrible at keeping track of our stuff. So yeah, you guys just gave me an idea for next August. I'm gonna get that on the track. All right, I'll open the floor up. Does anybody have any burning? Does anybody have the burning desire to confess something else that they screwed up?
Speaker 4:I'll jump in again, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Now Nicole's swinging for the fences.
Speaker 4:I'm not counting like this isn't in my roots, but no, yeah, maybe like a little context on this one. As coaches, one of the first things we'll do when we're building a strategy or a long range plan, right, one of the very first things we have to do is identify the demands of a race, and it's very typical practice for us, right, like we always put time into this, and that means looking at what is the terrain like, what is the environment like and the weather. What is the climbing rate gonna be? You know, like this is all part of what we do normally, and I had a situation this year where I'm, like, doing my research on this athlete's race and I keep bumping up against all these roadblocks. Right, this race was international. I could not find anything in English about it. My athlete was an American, recently moved to this country. They could not find that much about it either, right, so we just keep bumping up against.
Speaker 4:It's just hard to get any information on this race and eventually I at least could get the climbing rate. I knew how much the climbing was per mile and you know what I mean. There was enough there to go off of. We train, she works hard, comes to the race the day of and was shocked to find that this was actually located in a national park or a national refuge of some kind. Hundreds of people on the trail. So the trails are very crowded, constantly having to move around people. Even though we knew the climbing rate, they got there and we realized the trail was steps. You know how you can put trails are built this way, kind of like the Grand Canyon.
Speaker 4:There's sections of the Grand Canyon where it's steps and just like miles of these big giant steps. And so, even though we had known about the climbing rate, we were surprised by the steps. We were surprised by the crowdedness and the people on the trail. And so now I have this athlete that's in a situation where there's a mismatch between the expectations of what pace she might run or how quickly she's gonna make it through this. So there's this mismatch of expectation of performance versus the reality of the course.
Speaker 4:And then we also it was a mismatch between what we had available in training in terms of she got plenty of climbing, but the climbing steps is almost a different modality than running and walking it's almost its own thing, and if you've ever spent time in the Grand Canyon climbing and descending 4,000 feet of steps, it's a huge eccentric load on your calves and your soleus and like it really destroys you if you haven't spent time doing that. And so, anyways, as a coach I've now had this athlete. He's in a situation she's frustrated because she's dealing with people and really we just set the wrong expectation right, like we could have known about that. And then you're not feeling frustrated in the middle of your reach because you're not doing as well as you thought, like that could have been easily. Maybe not easily because this was hard to find information on this race, but I don't know.
Speaker 4:I think, in terms of going forward and how you would fix this and how you would, what I might do better in the future is that I mean number one as an athlete or a coach. Like, take the time and preparation to know your course and to know the demands of your goal. But like, if you run up against a roadblock and if you're having a hard time finding information, there's ways to get creative right. Like this athlete did not live that far away, we could have gotten her on the course beforehand. Right, we could have sent her out to do some course recon. I think there's always ways to utilize the community. So maybe there's a language barrier, but she still has friends in the community and still has ways to reach out to people who maybe have done the race before to try to get some, you know, some help in that way. But I don't know. Just is a good reminder that you can set yourself up for success by taking the time necessary to really know the demands of your race.
Speaker 1:The expectations mismatch is a total mind F, right, because when you get out there you're like, oh yeah, this is a thousand foot climb, you know it's at 8% grade, like whatever you research it in training, and then like literally it stares instead of trail, like yeah, it changes the physiological demands, but more so you're like I thought I prepared for this but I didn't, and that's a total mind screw for a lot of people and kind of like rightfully so. So I think the course correction there is actually great. But then the other piece that is worth mentioning is if you don't know, it's okay to say you're not gonna know until you get there. And so then that sets the expectation of unknown, and that's not the worst thing in the world. And so that way, if it's crowded or if it's on stairs or whatever feature that you haven't been able to get, that you haven't been able to kind of like quite track down, there's no expectation set. So then whatever they're encountering is kind of expected at that point, right, because they haven't had some sort of inherent expectation in their minds in the first place. Really common with new races, right. Like I had a couple of athletes that I mean even with I am tough, so this is public knowledge. I'm not like divulging anything that people don't know.
Speaker 1:I paced Casey Licktie for I am Tough which is a race that's been held for forever. The information on that race is so horrible. Like the race director is lovely, they're very nice, it's a very well run race, but there's just not a lot of information anywhere like about kind of like anything. The trails are actually really great out there too, and so going into that race like not having those expectations, was actually a really big advantage. Because then when you got to the section that was like super steep and loose, you're like, okay, let's super steep and loose. You get to a big talus section. You're like, okay, I'm in a talus section. This is like this much of the course profile and it's gonna take me two hours to move over it because it's all talus. That kind of like making sure that you kind of recognize what's unknown and accepting it as the unknown is actually pretty powerful.
Speaker 4:Well, that's probably an important piece, whether you knew the race demands or not. Like it's just an important piece of being an ultra runner. Like we are gonna encounter anything and everything and, yeah, be ready Be ready for the unexpected right.
Speaker 1:Things never go to plan. Adapt, as I always say, that's your best skill that you can bring to the table. All right, this was fun Eating a little crow. We could do this all day and all night, because we've made a ton of mistakes. We always try to correct them, though, and I appreciate you guys being humble and honest and transparent about this, because it's not always easy to admit when you're wrong. But, more importantly, I hope the audience learned a whole lot about where we're vulnerable or where we have made mistakes in the past, but, more importantly, how to correct those in the future, and I think each one of us came to the table with something that's actually tangible for somebody who's going to UTMB, who's going to a race, who's never seen anything before that's going to experience, you know, weather changes during the year, and who's communicating with their coach about how things are going and how that actually impacts the, how that actually impacts the workout flow. So very, very tangible stuff, and I appreciate you guys coming on the podcast today.
Speaker 4:Thanks for having us. Yeah, awesome. Thanks, you guys All right folks.
Speaker 1:There you have it. There you go. Much thanks to our coaching staff for coming on the podcast today swallowing their pride a little bit and going through what they did wrong and how they are going to correct it. That is not easy to do in any circumstance, but to do it publicly to an audience and all their all the years are going to be turned on them is just another level. So I'm very appreciative of the staff for coming on the podcast today and enlightening me and enlightening the audience into some of the things that they've done wrong. I hope that the audience can take away something from this, regardless of whether you're in the exact same situation as any of the ones that we mentioned here or if there's something parallel. If you are working with athletes or you're an athlete self-directing your training, you can always learn from somebody when they have, you know, maybe not made the right decisions. In some cases I went over when I have kind of pushed my athletes too much when they are traveling, something that I am definitely going to course correct.
Speaker 1:If you like this podcast, keep in mind that this podcast is not directly monetized in any way, shape or form. I don't bring advertisers on. I don't bring sponsors on or anything like that to pay for any of this equipment or any of the post-production or paying any of the guests. That all comes directly out of my pocket and I'm happy to do so. I gain a lot from doing this podcast by talking to all of the wonderful guests that I've had on.
Speaker 1:But if you want to further support it, there's no better way to do that than to subscribe to my research newsletter research essentials for ultra running. There will be a link in the show notes to that. For $9.99 a month, you get access to a monthly newsletter that reviews three unique papers in the ultramarathon space that are broken down in an unbiased and unfiltered way with actual domain experts and written in plain English, the goal of which is to just level up your information in the ultramarathon space. So, regardless if you're an athlete or a coach, that in of itself is a valuable resource to have, because it's hard to do this. It's hard to keep up with the research as it comes out in rapid fire succession and then proliferated across social media with all the non experts out there. I get it if you're confused. So if you want to support this podcast or you just want to level up your game. It's a great way to actually do it. All right, folks, that is it for today, and, as always, we will see you out on the trails.
Speaker 4:Thanks for coming guys.