View all show notes and timestamps on the KoopCast website.
Episode overview:
CTS Coaches John Fitzgerald and Stephanie Howe discuss how to navigate winter training for Ultramarathon.
Episode highlights:
(14:39) Structuring the winter season around races: athletes who peak at different times of the year, longer recovery for athletes with longer race seasons, 4-8 weeks of fun or unstructured training, recognize when you need a break
(37:58) Work on weakness at a time: athletes try to change too many things at once during the winter season, examples, pick one weakness to work on
(59:36) Fitz on returning to running: shifting from non-weight bearing to weight bearing activities, strength foundation, working on running while snow piles up, keeping two runs per week
Additional resources:
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:
CTS Coaches John Fitzgerald and Stephanie Howe discuss how to navigate winter training for Ultramarathon.
Episode highlights:
(14:39) Structuring the winter season around races: athletes who peak at different times of the year, longer recovery for athletes with longer race seasons, 4-8 weeks of fun or unstructured training, recognize when you need a break
(37:58) Work on weakness at a time: athletes try to change too many things at once during the winter season, examples, pick one weakness to work on
(59:36) Fitz on returning to running: shifting from non-weight bearing to weight bearing activities, strength foundation, working on running while snow piles up, keeping two runs per week
Additional resources:
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 Coupecast.
Speaker 1:As always, I am your humble host, Coach Jason Coupe, and it is winter and I know a lot of you athletes out there are wondering what you should actually do. Should you reduce your training? Should you work on your weaknesses? Should you take over some sort of nutrition intervention? Should you strength train? Should you do Schimo? I know there are a lot of these questions out there and I think part of the confusion stemming from this is the fact that a lot of athletes are just coming from different scenarios.
Speaker 1:We race later or earlier in the season. Some of our races kick up in February or March and other ones don't kick up until September. We all have different strengths and weaknesses that we need to work on. In order to cut through a lot of this clutter, I brought on the podcast today, cts coaches John Fitzgerald and Stephanie Howe to discuss how we actually work through this with our individual athletes and how you can come up with a blueprint of your own for what to actually do during the winter, based on the situation that is actually realistically practically in front of you At the end of the day. I hope you have a toolkit of sorts to work through these various things that you may or may not decide to focus on during the winter how much you want to tune your training up or tune your training down, and then when ultimately to return to running, based on a number of different factors, including when your goal races might actually be.
Speaker 1:I always have a lot of fun with these coach roundtables. I know that you and the audience really appreciate them because we're coming to this from a very practical side, since we're kind of at the whole face of explaining to athletes what we want them to do and advising them. So I hope that you guys get just as much out of this podcast as I did. And with that as a backdrop, I'm going to get right out of the way. Here is another CTS coach roundtable about what to do during the winter with CTS coaches John Fitzgerald and Stephanie Howe. Thanks you guys. As irony would have it, we got five inches of snow last night and this morning here in Colorado Springs. The fact that we're talking about winter training is actually a really good transition point, steph's inner, to where they call it in France. You still call it a task, okay. So we're all in the thick of it, except for, ironically, johnny Montana, who apparently doesn't have any snow.
Speaker 3:I've got my beard going. Yeah, montana's really dry right now. There's Steph, you went to Montana's, you looked in Bozeman, so there's a big ski festival in West Yellowstone. It's been going on for over 30 years and this is the second year that he canceled it, which is really unfortunate.
Speaker 1:We still went out there rented a cabin, but yeah, it's really dry up here, so Well, I think part of the discussion around what athletes should do in the winter naturally revolves around like how much winter there actually is in your location and then how much winter there actually is within a specific location, that can actually be variable. I mean, everybody remembers very specifically last year the West Coast along the Sierra's, and this impacted athletes you know that live in the classic Western States area, or even the like Reno you know Reno Tahoe area as well as well, where they were literally buried underneath snow for a long period of time and there does have, you know, kind of realistic consequences to that that people need to take into consideration as they start ramping up into training, and hopefully we'll get into a lot of that. But since we're in the thickest, this is going to come out, you know, the week before Christmas. Essentially, this podcast will come out right in the winter. I want to kind of go over first, like why is it important for athletes to even think about training during this time of year?
Speaker 1:And the setup that I would like to use for this is based off of the classic lottery cycle that just happened. So the Western States and the hard rock lottery, two very coveted lotteries not the only lotteries. The two very coveted lotteries have just happened. Everybody either does or does not get into those races. And then what? What? As a natural consequence of that, people start to set up their season either revolving around something that they got into or as a consequence of not getting into what they wanted to get into.
Speaker 1:And now, being December, january maybe into early February, creates the time of okay, well, I'm actually going to start training and I want to use that as a backdrop for why, earlier than that, being now December and in the winter and in the winter months is actually important for the overall part of the training process. So, john, I'll let you kind of take the first stab at that, because you and I were talking off air about you know how many athletes stay and go during the winter timeframe, right? So what's your you know communication point to your athletes when you start to discuss with them why this timeframe is particularly important.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. So you know, I had two athletes that got into both Western and one athlete got in Western, one got in a hard rock. But for other athletes I work with, you know they, you know some might still be working through the schedule and trying to figure out what exactly want to do. Sometimes, as a process, as we know, the races are filling up faster each year. It seems to the bear 100 that I've done quite a bit. I think there's a wait list of I don't know 400 people, just crazy, really. All right, yeah, which is, yeah, I missed that one, yeah, right, but yeah, so it just kind of depends on, obviously, where the athletes are coming from, and if they didn't get into one of the major lotteries, then you know, do they have a race lined up? When is that right? So we kind of have those anchors of when the when that race is, and from there you know, we're working backwards from the race.
Speaker 3:A lot of big ultras have just taken place in the fall.
Speaker 3:So for some athletes it is still appropriate to kind of, you know, take some recovery.
Speaker 3:But I prefer to take just enough recovery, not too much, because I see that can be an easy thing to slip into where an athlete you know finishes 100 in the fall and not even 100, just a hard race, and they end up taking a month, maybe the month slips into a month and a half and now we're going into two months and once we see that fitness start to kind of dip too much, it's just that much harder to build it back up.
Speaker 3:And especially for athletes that are, you know, we're not getting any younger, so as masters athletes especially, it's even more important to get the recovery that you need. But then to start to kind of think about, okay, what do we need to work on and take action there and start getting into buildings of fitness. So yeah, first time, athletes that have snow. It might be mean skiing up in Montana, break out the rock skis because we don't have a lot of snow, but I think the short of it is that we're working backwards, but we got to start getting to work sooner than later, that's for sure.
Speaker 1:I like your point, stephanie. I'll let you jump in here in just a second.
Speaker 1:I like your point of working backwards, because that always should be the orientation point when you're, once you have a kind of an apex of the season identified, irrespective of how you construct that ABC races, this is my goal race, this is my secondary race or whatever.
Speaker 1:Once you have that anchor point, then you can kind of work back logically for how much time you need to build up into that anchor point. And all too often we kind of think, well, what's here and what's now right, and that's what bulls people into this kind of like winter trap. Well, right here, right now, this is kind of what's going on. But they forget that they might have something that they really want to perform well at six months down the line. And then they go through that here and now process for four or six weeks and then all of a sudden this six month process is being compressed down to four. And that's when you start to see some of the compromises in picking and choosing or training mistakes like the ramp rate goes up too quickly or the mileage goes up too quickly. It's kind of forgetting that you need to set that architecture earlier rather than later.
Speaker 3:Yeah Well, I always just tell athletes we want to avoid cramming for the exam, right, which is so classic where it's like, all right, we're eight weeks out, now it's time to progress the long run or whatever. But the classic coming off the fall or just the season of ultra running is that there's. So what I love about it is there's so much we can work on right. We can get back out and just keep doing big volume. But most likely if you're in the meat and potatoes of training for a hard 100 mile or you're not doing a lot of intensity, maybe the weight training has come back. You're not engaging in a cross training, so it's just right off the top. There's just a lot of fun stuff to get into. So I'm sure we'll dive into more specifics with that too, but get excited.
Speaker 1:You want to jump in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I kind of think about it the same way and I have a number of athletes planning to do UTMB, kind of the summer races, and it's hard sometimes to think about why training right now is important for, like August, september races.
Speaker 2:But it's just what you were saying builds consistency, it builds that base.
Speaker 2:You don't have to have a steep ramp. There is a lot of really good that happens with just boring regular base training. And I think when you can have weeks of consistent training, then when it comes to the build up for the race you can just hit the ground running with it rather than have to make sure that you're doing the little things and building up slowly because you have this couple months of really good base. And then what you were just saying of working on the speed and the strength I think the winter lends to that really well because for a lot of people the trails are closed or they're crummy conditions and there's less daylight and so shorter, faster sessions are a little bit easier to get in, maybe a little bit more fun to get on the roads, on the track, get in the gym, and so this is a great time of year to do those little things, to do the speed work, the strength, the cross training, so that when the trails do open up and you're doing bigger volume, you've got that to work off of.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, steph, you mentioned a really good point there in that you don't have to have full throttle training during this time of year. What I mean by that? Some people are going to view that through the lens of intensity. I'm viewing that through the lens of total workload. So if you just do some thing and some little things maybe it's working on a weakness, or doing some cross training, doing some strength training and things like that almost like a minimum viable product of training it ends up going a long way. And I was thinking about this morning.
Speaker 1:We kind of get fooled into this by the vocabulary that we use, where we use this, where we will typically call this time of year that quote unquote off season, and one of the reasons that fools us is that it kind of implies that these two seasons, so to speak, are like a switch. There's an off period where you're doing very little or nothing, and then there's an on period where you're doing a whole heck of a lot and kind of nothing in between, and just like everything else in training and physiology we like to use I think a better analogy that a lot of coaches have adopted is the one of dimmer switches, and that's really all we're doing during the winter is that we're dialing down training a little bit. How much is a little bit? Maybe it's 20 to 30% or something like that. When you just talk about the total everything of training, right, the total workload, the total intensity, maybe even the frequency that goes into it.
Speaker 1:And if you look at it through that, really like course lens, I think that you can.
Speaker 1:Athletes are more successful at spreading this very careful needle between backing down and making sure that your body and your mind get recovered after you've had a particularly long season, but not losing so much fitness that you're climbing out of a hole at the, at kind of the very end of it.
Speaker 1:And that whole can can get created by two different elements it's the total volume of workload and the time that you're spending in this. You know, not off season, but this reduced training season right, if you want to apply kind of correct vocabulary for it. You can make one or one or both of the of those mistakes, meaning you can completely back off the throttle 100%, and that's backing off too much, or you can back off a little bit for too long of a period of time, and they both kind of have the same net effect of where, once you start to get back into the thick of the season, you you've kind of created a not a negative situation, but not the most ideal situation, because the timeframe that you have to train for this ultimate event has just been passed so much.
Speaker 2:One thing you mentioned, coop, that I really liked is the mental aspect of it as well. I think the winter is a time to not burn those mental matches right. So if the weather I can use myself as an example this week it's been really crummy, like kind of raining and like just slop everywhere. So rather than maybe follow what I'd planned to do a two hour run I might do something different. I might get on my trainer, I might do a shorter run. I think this is the time of year to have some flexibility with training and keep it fun, because you want to save some of that mental tenacity for when it really matters, when you're in a big ramp up, and not burn yourself out Running through four inches of slop.
Speaker 1:I've had this continual conversation with one of my high level athletes that I'll keep an honest right now where I've intentionally been doing that during this time of year and giving them an either or proposition to do the time essentially. So it can be either a ski or run and you can choose whatever. It is, based on any number of different factors, the conditions obviously being the most obvious one, but also just convenience. And then to your point, stephanie, sometimes the mental effort of one mode versus another mode is less, and my counsel is, if you're choosing between any of these, pick the one of least resistance now, because when February, this is somebody training for a race in like the June, july timeframe. Because when January and February rolls around, I'm going to want you to just suck it up, because that's when things are going to start to matter more and the modes are actually going to start to matter. And I don't want you to burn those mental or psychological matches right now. I'd rather deploy those a little bit closer to the race, when they actually matter the most. I want to get into another aspect of this, that, since we have literally a worldwide audience listening to this we've got people in Europe, we've got people in the US. We've got people in Australia Summer right now. It's like a different season for people in that area of the world.
Speaker 1:I want to talk about one of the different aspects of this, and that's kind of like the length of time that you might think about spending in your winter mode, so to speak, and what components really go into that.
Speaker 1:I'll kick things off here. I view athletes that have a season that starts in May or June much differently than athletes that need to start their or that are going to start the kind of their apex of their season in August and September, meaning there's a little bit more flexibility on the athletes that are starting later in the year. And similarly, I view athletes that have had a really long year, like I've had athletes that, in 2023, started racing in February and stopped racing in late September or early October. That's a really long year. I'm going to treat their winter season, this point of kind of reduced intensity or reduced workload. I'm going to treat that a whole lot differently than if I had an athlete whose season ended in July or August and really didn't start until May, and so I wanted to get you guys' perspective on this, just as coaches, in terms of how this winter season might actually pan out, based on a couple of different athlete scenarios that you guys can think of and, steph, we'll start with you on this one.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, in the situation of a long season of racing, we need to take a little bit more definitive break, right, Like really carve out a couple months of like you're we're not calling it off season your fun season, your less structured season, your winter season.
Speaker 1:We'll come up with some term, but there's podcasts to get us all on the same page. But I don't have a good one right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think physically and mentally that's really important. And we were kind of chatting about different areas too. You know, some places are true winter, and that's a little easier to do that Other places, where it's still lovely running weather, that's hard to do. But I think you just have to back like zoom out a little bit, look at your season, look at what you want to do next year, and that kind of like anchors the rest portion in and I think you know four to eight weeks of time. And again, we're not talking about off time, where you're, you know, sitting on the couch watching TV, but just maybe unstructured or just fun training. I think is really important.
Speaker 2:Now, if you're an athlete who maybe didn't have such a long season, that time period doesn't need to be as long, right, and you can start structure a little bit sooner. You can start high intensity work. I mean, now if you haven't raced since the late summer, early fall, if you're feeling like I think mentally, I think mentally too you can really check in like how are you feeling? Are you excited to be running, are you like been pushing all season and you kind of need a break? That's a good question to ask yourself as well, and that can kind of determine the length. But you know it's somewhere between weeks to a couple of months. We're not talking about like a four month winter season.
Speaker 1:Yeah, For the athletes that are really excited to start training and might have. Sometimes you look at this and there might be too much runway, right? So they're really excited in December to start training and maybe they live in an area like California where they can train year round. But you know they're training for a race in September, october. But they're like Coach, I really want to go the way that I feather that. I'd like to hear John's perspective on this as well, because I know you probably have a few athletes that you've worked with that fall into this category.
Speaker 1:I actually like to take advantage of the enthusiasm, but the way that I feather it in order to make sure that you're not like peaking too soon or you're not abusing the runway, so to speak is I actually just reduce the frequency of all of the hard stuff.
Speaker 1:So, for example, if I have an athlete that is normally doing two hard workouts per week I've been working with them and I know that's about what they can tolerate I'll back that off to two hard workouts every 10 days, just as like a little bit of feathering of the entire, like we're taking advantage of the enthusiasm but we're just feathering the matches.
Speaker 1:If we want to use those two analogies.
Speaker 1:We're feathering the matches a little bit so they don't get deployed all early in the season. And I found that to actually work remarkably well, because they can still have a release for that enthusiasm, they can go and work out hard and they feel super accomplished and, if anything, the quality of the workouts go up during that period of time just because they're only doing one every four days or something like that, and at the same time the total amount of stress load is just so greatly reduced because they're not having to put that mental energy, they're not having to deploy that mental energy so frequently. So those four intervening days they can go run or bike or ski or even do hiking or things like that. But I just found that little just like taking one element of training right the frequency of the hard days and just manipulating that a little bit. Sometimes you can kind of extend the periodization plan just a little bit. So, john, I don't know if you have any thoughts on that specifically or anything else that Steph touched on.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, I mean, if an athlete has a pretty long runway and they only have one race, is that kind of what you're saying?
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly yeah let's say they come to you and I'm training for the bear right and I want to get going now, like December, it's a long time to train, right, I mean, that's a long time to focus on a big race, like you would normally like as coaches.
Speaker 1:Right, we normally like as much runway possible. But at the same time you just have to make sure that you're not like pouring on all of the training for nine or 10 months because you do kind of risk the you do kind of run this risk of towards the end of it they don't have the enthusiasm for the process, right?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, I could see kind of going a couple of ways. I mean, you know, obviously this, this team and this athlete had a good, you know, recovery period after their last race. They're dealing good, like you suggested, you know, I think if they're, if they're willing to take another recovery period, like an honest recovery period, I actually might take an athlete and kind of, in a way, could do the opposite, where not to hammer them but say, for example, you know, maybe they want to train for a marathon early season. Oh sure, I do believe that we could still do something like this, right. So, but no, I think that's a good way to reduce one element, right, the intensity. But I do right now have some athletes that have that fall 100 mile where we're actually getting after it. They came off of 100 mile in the fall, we had a dip, we had a recovery. Okay, I'm a dog on a leash and I'm like, all right, let's get into some high intensity work. So, quite different maybe from a total volume side, like ours, but we're definitely doing quite a bit of intensity. But I think if it was just training for that one race, then yeah, we'd have to slow some things down. You know, we'd have to tinker, maybe run some experiments. I like to call it too.
Speaker 3:I'm actually doing something a little bit different this winter where I'm throwing out to athletes in the month of January, which is coming up in February, I'm having them do something a challenge, really hard. This might have come from my Arizona trip, but I like athletes to do something in advance of their race. This is for, say, a spring race. I find it too common that athletes will find a training race Two, so like, pretty close to their A race, they get feedback from that training race that might suggest oh shoot, I actually, you know, my nutrition went this way or some aspect of their fitness. So this like challenge that I'm throwing out to athletes in January, february, gives us that time to go.
Speaker 3:Okay, we got to work on this, we got to work on that. And athletes are stoked Like all right, what? And then we're getting creative. What's the challenge? It doesn't have to be a race. You know I have some athletes doing the classic bird challenges. Some athletes are doing how much can I run in a day? But I'm talking like let's really throw ourselves in a tough arena and see what happens right, so that I don't know if you guys are doing anything like that, that's like kind of the opposite of what you're talking about, coop, but there can be some fun discoveries with that too.
Speaker 1:I got to be honest.
Speaker 1:I dig that a lot because I've had the exact same experience with athletes where they line up some sort of test race, not intentionally but like almost as a byproduct of how the race unfolds yeah, almost a little bit too close to their goal race, and you figure out they need to work on X, y and Z and you kind of don't have enough time to you don't have enough time to do that and so if you can uncover as many of those stones as possible not no, unintended with the UTMB system uncover any of those stones as possible kind of early on in the process.
Speaker 1:Going back to the runway analogy, you now have a reasonable runway to kind of like work on those things, whether it's a nutrition aspect or maybe, you know, maybe it's the durability of a joint right that you kind of notice consistently fails during a race. A lot of athletes notice that or it kind of any other you know piece that you just might need a little bit more time to work on now that you've got it by kind of forcing the issue early in the season.
Speaker 2:Like trying out poles. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean that's a really good example. I came up with one other element that might affect how people view transitioning from one season to the other, and I'll this athlete would not mind me mentioning this because it's all been kind of public knowledge but the situation would be when and when your the goal event that you have chosen is kind of dramatically different from one year to the next. And I'll bring up this kind of very personal situation but I think a lot of people can kind of internalize it to something that they might have an internal reference point for. So Katie Schey did a Western States this year and the year before that she did UTMB and before that she was very, a very classic mountain runner. I lived in Europe, had access to all the European trails. It's kind of the opposite problem that all the Americans have had for many years, where they're used to very fast buffed out trails and then they go to Europe and they kind of get shell shocked. And she, once again, she had this, that very opposite problem. So, knowing that she was going from a season that went from UTMB to Western States, one of the bigger challenges in getting her prepared for that was turning her into a runner. Right, she had to be a runner and a fast runner to meet the demands of that course, and so in order to do that, we started a lot of flat level running.
Speaker 1:In February she went out to Costa Rica and did the coastal challenge and even before that was doing a lot of her. The runs that she did have access to on kind of like flat level terrain, on the bike paths in town where there were, at least, you know, groomed or plowed or there was kind of like access to actually run. And my point with that is is because the event demands were so very different and very different specifically from a biomechanical standpoint, which kind of takes some time to turn around. I took a long period of time and she took a long period of time to get prepared for this running component of Western States to where she was actually running, like running in January and February and ran a lot all the way through June and probably could have done another couple months. I mean to be honest with you, like to.
Speaker 1:If we were to extend that a little bit, or if Western States is in August, I don't know if I would even change that, that timing, because that transition is just so difficult, especially when you're going from steep up to the top. You're going from steep up, steep down to flat level running. It's just such a different thing for your body to handle and it just takes a long period of time to go through it.
Speaker 1:My encouragement to athletes is that when they are looking at one season to the next, or coaches that are helping their athletes transition from one season to the next, one point of consideration is kind of taking their normal training mode or their normal training MO I'm running on buffed out trails or I'm running on flat trails or I'm running on steep stuff and how different or similar that their goal event is and that's going to impact how much time do you think that they really need to turn on the training? Obviously, if it's similar you can have a more of a compressed timeframe, but if it's different, you need to allow time to really change those specific adaptations that you're going to run into.
Speaker 2:And I think when you're going the other direction you might have to be a little creative, right? So you're going from, like the US based runner who's used to flat, fast trails. They want to train for a UTMB or a mountain race in Europe. How do you transition that into winter in like early spring? And I think that goes back to a lot of skimo, cross country skiing, hiking, slow running, actually running in the snow, right, it slows you down. It's so different. Even if it's flat, if you're running in a few inches of snow, that's going to slow you down a lot and I think that's a good way to think about it as well, because you can't always get on steep trails to train that in. There's also use of the treadmill for some hiking sessions, but I think it's a little more challenging going that direction, but also worthwhile thinking through how you can start to implement that different type of stimulus.
Speaker 1:I've done that with athletes that are training for Tour de Gente in Swiss peaks, where part of the winter training is. We're just going to use this as an opportunity to be slow. You're going to trudge around in the snow really slow, maybe you put snow shoes on, maybe you don't, but just reducing the speed because that's so hard to do. You know, when you just look at those types of races where you're walking at one mile an hour or one and a half miles an hour, you almost never do that in training, unless you kind of contrive it and so, taking every opportunity possible, whether it's winter or snow or whatever it is to do it, you got to put those in your pocket at whatever time.
Speaker 3:So you guys both brought up snow running. I think snow running is amazing and you mentioned like it's hard, like people think Nordic skiing is hard and ski mountaineering. I have a friend and mentor who swears by that. He calls a big boots log. He throws on his big boots and he goes and trumps through the snow. And I mean we've all done that, whether it was intentional or not. But there's something there, I think, about the slow running through the snow for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you have to reset your expectations when you go out and do that.
Speaker 3:Well, think about every step that we don't. I'm like I'm gonna post a little. I don't know this, but didn't post a little this one does. So you're working on like your mindset a little bit, but there's a lot of lessons to be learned and slogging for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the resetting expectations is actually a. That's an exercise in and of itself that you can advantage of.
Speaker 1:Because, once again, going back to the more extreme examples, right, the Tour de Gens or Swiss peaks or any of these really hard things where your race speed is always so much slower than your training speed A lot of athletes get tripped up in that in the race they're like I've got 10 miles to the next day station but that's going to take me five hours to do, and that for whatever reason, unless a lot of athletes have a lot of hard time conceptualizing that, unless they've done it in training.
Speaker 1:For to a certain extent, and when you go out on your normal training run and it takes you like 1.5 or even 2X of what it normally did I literally did that on a loop this morning it normally takes me, you know, an hour and it took me an hour and 40 minutes to do. When you do it in training and you do it consistently, you just realize like how much that can actually impact things and you get over like the pretentiousness of your speed more than anything else, which, let's be honest, I mean that's a weight in the training process, right If we're using that as a measuring stick or fitness and can absolutely mess with you come race day.
Speaker 2:And that's a little contradictory to what I said earlier about like when it's crummy conditions, like change it up, go get on the trainer, do something different. But I think there's a time and place for both. Right, I've had this. Last week I had a workout and it was like slush city it's like you know what, I'm just going to do it anyways, and some of that is good mentally to go through it. But also, in a race you don't always get perfect conditions and so it's good to go through that mental exercise of struggling a bit and having it take way longer or being way slower. So I think you kind of have to weigh both of those. Sometimes it's not good to force out that three hour run when it's raining and 33 degrees, but it might be worth. Just you know, coop, like you run today, like having it take 1.5, x the time, just moving a little slower.
Speaker 1:You guys know me, I'm not very pretentious about anything in my running, so it's pretty easy for me. So I want to banter back and forward with both of you, specifically John, on this one, because I know, john, you've worked on the kind of the mental outlook and the psychology with a lot of your athletes. Do you intentionally use some of the winter time to do this and, if so, like how do you actually go about doing it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, I mean we just kind of touched on it. I think winter training, just living, you know, in the northern hemisphere, where you have those conditions, that we're not leveraging those conditions to just challenge ourselves to some degree, we're definitely kind of missing out for sure. And we see that with the Europeans that come into the mountain races, that are on skis throughout the you know good chunk of the winter. And when you're on skis in the mountains, where are you? You're on top of a mountain and it's windy and it's cold, and so it's, you know, again, like Steph was saying, you need a bit of a balance. You might be sacrificing a little bit of quality to a session because you are in the elements, but I'm quick my athletes know this to call some athletes out if they've been leaning towards the treadmill or the trainer too often, because as much as that can be mentally challenging to be in one place, it can also turn into a happy place or like your comfort zone too, and so I definitely give athletes a nudge to get out.
Speaker 3:I have an athlete in Bozeman, for example, where it's, you know, it's cold, it's not freezing like it usually is, but to you know, throw the booties on and get out on the bike. He's a multi-sport athlete, so he mountain bikes, you know, once a week. You know, put on the booties, you know, put on your big gloves, your leather gloves, and get out and, just, you know, start with a half hour or an hour and see where it goes. But oh, I'm a big fan of getting in the elements, for sure I think it's the best way to develop what we talk about, that psychological flexibility, for sure.
Speaker 1:I've had a few athletes over the years that have very intentionally either come to me from the onset and said this, or it's kind of been revealed during the course of the kind of training and racing process that I'm just a wimp in the weather. Right, you can use different ways to describe it, but I'm going to simplify it. I just when it's rainy and cold and I just kind of was out on things, and so I've taken the winter as a very classic opportunity to work on people's weaknesses. That's the theme that you know we've mentioned a few times here and I'll we'll point out like listen, the next two weeks, let's just find the worst weather today and you're going to go on it. I make it very deliberate, right, so they know that it's coming and they just don't have to. It's not kind of like it's preplanned, but the precision of it is based off of the weather conditions.
Speaker 1:We'll look at the 10 day forecast or the seven day forecast and find the worst day and say, okay, you've got a five hour run on this day, you just go do it. I don't care what it takes. If you need to do loops around your house to change your gear, you know whatever, let's go ahead and do it and you're. The point with this is, yeah, you're going to get some physical training, but you're going to get used to being kind of miserable for that period of time because, at the end of the day, all you need is better gear and you just need to kind of get used to being uncomfortable, right.
Speaker 1:This whole cliche of being comfortable, being uncomfortable, you can definitely facilitate in that training in the training process, as long as you're deliberate about it and not reckless right, where you're just doing every single day super hard, every single like Navy SEAL type training right, every super hard, every single day, in the worst conditions. That's a different outcome that they're looking for. When you do it very deliberately, it's very it's. It engenders a lot of confidence because they've sat out to do something, they see it on the calendar, they then go and do it and then they reflect on it usually and it's you know what. That wasn't really that big of a deal.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and you know I talked about my Arizona true adventure here in October and one of the big takeaways and Neil actually is, you know, he coaches with us at CTS. He's a sports psychologist, he's fits. You're basically observing yourself for 10 days out there and you know I really was, but like you do, yeah, yeah, but you could take that same kind of you know thought of just you know, being out there for five hours in the snow is who am I when it's 20 degrees and the wind's blowing? You know, and learning. You know developing tools. You don't. You know how do you develop tools to work through hard, you know weather moments, if you don't actually get out there? You don't. I mean, yeah, you could argue you could get home and have a meditative mindfulness practice that might help, but at the end of the day, being an endurance athlete, you have to get out there, you know. So, yeah, I want to get out there right now. Let's go.
Speaker 1:It's so interesting because we've all we've we've gone full circle on this right, because we've mentioned both the need to dial down the training, give yourself a mental and a physical break not earn the dial off but turn it down but also still incorporate elements of difficulty, whether that difficulty is within intensity, whether that difficulty is within some sort of challenge like we were just talking about, and I think that's ultimately the kind of the wrestling match that a lot of people kind of have in their head to where they don't know how to like orchestrate. You know this type of timeframe, because the summer events just seem so far away. You know it's hard to do things that are, that are really deliberate, and then hearing this like almost polarized discussion of go a little bit easier but then also go harder as well, it kind of creates a culture.
Speaker 2:Well, I think you do both right. You do give yourself the ability to have a day where it's. You know, today I just want to be warm and cozy inside, that's okay, but that's not six days a week, right. Like I love getting out in the elements, I do not run on a treadmill, I would rather put on all the layers and go like sludge around for some time outside because I think it is uncomfortable and I kind of like to be uncomfortable and I think that's a great skill to learn and it's kind of fun. You feel like kind of badass after you do something like that. So I think it's for both and I think you need to find that balance for you. Everyone's a little different on which part they need to brush up on. Some people actually need the reins pulled in, right, they're just like go, it's no, actually you should stay home and do yoga today, you know. And some people need to push out the door of oh, it's snowing outside today. Today is not a treadmill day. So finding that balance, I think, is the key.
Speaker 3:One thing with that, too, but the more that you practice it, it won't be, hopefully. The goal is that it won't be miserable, right, it'll be actually something that you end up looking forward to. So that's where the growth is in. That, too, right. I would add something, I would throw something in the middle, and something that I observe.
Speaker 3:What I see athletes do quite a bit is that you know, they end up actually throwing too many things at that one, or introducing too many different stimuli at once. Right, this is a classic. We see this, but I see this a lot in the off season or the dimmer season, or whatever we want to label it. But I'll throw in weight training, a shift in diet, and then and intensity right, because we're an ultra runner, we just came off a big volume block, so why don't we do all the things at once, right? So I don't know if you guys have anything to add to that, but I see that a lot.
Speaker 3:I need to tinker with my diet. I need to, I need to, you know, get swollen in the gym, and I need to do the running intervals in the track, because I haven't done them in six months. So I think it's important to take, you know, one of those pieces, right, you know, and then progressively maybe think about adding another stimuli in. But that's just something I wanted to add. It might fit in the middle of that spectrum is just throwing a bunch of things in the hat at once.
Speaker 1:So it was. Well, I like to. I mean, personally, when I go through this exercise with my athletes, I pick one, yeah, one weakness to do and we're going to bite that off and that one thing off and that's going to be enough. Because you have to realize that when you get better from year to year, you get better across everything. It's only very rare and usually you're deliberately trying to do this where you get better in one area and worse in the other ones, and that's kind of a compromise that you'd be willing to take if you're looking at some really kind of like narrow specificity. So the example of that. But hey, I'm a really good climber and descender right now, but I suck on the flats. If you're doing hard rock, you'll take that every day, kind of every day of the week. I'm not talking about anything anymore and any more dramatic than that, but I do think to the kind of the mental resources and the match burning analogy that we were using earlier.
Speaker 1:I've always found that a really reasonable strategy for most people is to look at one thing that you can improve upon and then leave it at that, and that one thing can come from a multitude of different sources. Sometimes, you're right. It is diet, sometimes it is strength training, sometimes it is speed, sometimes it is using your polls, sometimes it is mentality. But just focusing in on that for a period of time and then getting better at that, making sure that you're not going to turn a weakness into a strength, but you can turn a weakness into something that's really average, which is usually a big advantage. I personally like that approach better versus trying to, like peanut butter, spread Like your lowest five weaknesses and try to make them like 1% better. I'd rather take like the biggest weakness or the most important weakness and make it like 50% better.
Speaker 3:Well, and then if something goes wrong, right, or then you don't, you know, what was it? The nutrition, was it this, you know? So, yeah, I think I'm very similar to you, coop.
Speaker 2:It's just, let's just introduce one thing at a time and not overdo it, and since you guys brought it up, I'm going to have to mention nutrition a little bit.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:So, even though it's less volume, it's not a time to really dial down nutrition in terms of overall energy intake, because a lot of the strength sessions, high intensity sessions, they're higher energy expenditure and you need carbohydrate especially for those sessions to be quality. So I think a common misconception is that you just like really dial everything down during the winter, and that's actually not true. Some of it is naturally occurring because you're not out for long periods of time fueling on your run, fueling post runs, that you naturally kind of reduce your intake but you still need to eat well and you still need to eat carbohydrate during the winter.
Speaker 1:So, Steph, I'm going to put you on the spot a little bit. This wasn't in our outline, but I think you can handle it. I want to talk about weight management during this time and I want to extend it into the competitive season as well, because you've seen that you always see the entire arc of people right To where. They come to you in April or May and they have a target weight or a target nutrition plan that they want to implement, that they're trying to implement in an eight-week timeframe. Right, and I know you're not talked about this. I know you would have liked to start to work with them in December, January, February, so you have a little bit more runway. So I'm wondering if you can kind of quickly encapsulate some of your thoughts on that whole part of this winter timeframe and then how it bleeds into the competitive timeframe as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So you can't work on body composition and optimize fueling for performance at the same time. They're kind of opposite ends of the spectrum. So right now in the winter is a better time to work on body composition than when you're ramping up for a big race. Now it's a little bit tricky because the holiday season throws a big wrench in it. So you kind of have to work through it. You have to be a little more diligent.
Speaker 2:I never tell people to be restrictive. I mean, you want to enjoy food, right, you want to enjoy holidays, but you have to be smart with it. So working with a dietitian or a sports nutrition professional can be really helpful If you're kind of going through it on your own. What I would think about is just being like cutting out the discretionary calories and I always hate to say cutting out, but just like tightening the screws a little bit of okay. So I need to eat three meals, I need to eat good food, and maybe I'm going to have Christmas cookies, but maybe not every single day and that needs to be combined with training as well.
Speaker 2:So if you want to build muscle, you actually have to do strength training right. You can't just eat protein and think you're going to put on muscle and lose fat, you actually have to change the way you're training a little bit. So this is a great time to really get after it and that side of thing. And then think about the timing windows too. With building muscle it's a little bit different than with running or endurance training, where host workout, you're refueling. That's the window.
Speaker 2:With strength training, you want to go into it with protein or amino acids available, so you reverse the timing of having some protein before. And that doesn't mean like you need a protein shake or protein load, it just means don't go into it fasted, but you don't need that recovery window necessarily Host workout. So if you think about those little things and just bring some thought to your eating, that usually helps, kind of takes care of itself when you're thinking about it a little more, rather than just getting home and on so hungry what am I going to eat? And then just grabbing things out of the refrigerator. But if you plan ahead and just be sensible with eating, this is a much better time to do it than come spring when you're trying to ramp up your hours for training.
Speaker 1:If you have an athlete that's got like a recomposition goal of X, right? I mean, we kind of think about this in training as well. Right, I want to get an athlete up into this fitness and I'm going to accomplish this much of it in the next four months and this much of it in the next two months or whatever. Is there any sort of like progression timeline that you can put on it? You just mentioned that you want to do the majority, if not all, of this recomposition during the winter months. I'm wondering if you can encapsulate the entire arc in kind of more of a progression, or if that's even like reasonable to stylize across a lot of athletes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a little more individualized, a little more complex than putting a timeframe on it, because everyone is so different and their goals, like the context where you're starting from, where you're trying to get to, but it's not on the order of days to weeks, it's on the order of months to do it in a healthy way and to do it in a way that's sustainable.
Speaker 2:Anybody can lose weight in a few weeks, but then it's just going to come back on because that's not how you do it. You don't deprive and restrict your body because that has repercussions, so it does take a few months. And the other thing with nutrition it's not like training where you just do the session right and then you forget about it. You have so many decisions every single day about eating and so it's like a lifestyle change which is much more difficult to accomplish than a training goal. The good thing is you feel some of those changes a little bit quicker. You don't need the four to six weeks for adaptation, but it is a constant thing of being on top of it day after day until it becomes a habit. So it is a little bit longer process, but well worth it if that's a goal.
Speaker 1:Well, and you and I have both seen I'm going to re-emphasize your point here, steph just from a different angle. You and I have both seen, like the everyday athletes that try to accomplish that recomposition process, a in a short timeframe combined with B, right up close to their race, and a lot of that is driven by what they kind of see across the elite athlete culture, particularly at the Olympic level where it's a big part of the discussion. I mean, body composition optimization is absolutely a part of the discussion in almost every single endurance sport and even outside the endurance sport, even if you have like weight class sports and stuff like that, it's kind of a mandatory requirement and a lot of times that our everyday athletes will look at that. Oh, my hero athlete talked about how they got into their perfect body composition the last four weeks leading into their race. That's a much different situation than a normal athlete who has a lot of body recomp to do right With elite athletes have very little body recomp to do.
Speaker 1:Normal athletes can typically have like a big just a bigger percentage to actually move. But in addition to that it's compounded by the fact that normally those elite athletes have a lot of resources available to them. They have all things to train and all day to plan their nutrition and professionals around them to manage the entirety of the process. So they don't screw it up, because it really is an easy process to screw up, and I think this is one of those areas. We like to take a lot of blueprints from elite athletes and apply them to everyday athletes. This is one of those areas where I don't think we should be applying it, because the situation and the context is so dramatically different.
Speaker 2:Yep, I 100% agree with that. And, yeah, you don't know everything that's going on behind the scenes and you don't want to undercut your fueling because that can have pretty severe health consequences.
Speaker 1:It's really looking at right and I'm back to you.
Speaker 3:Go ahead, John.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Sorry.
Speaker 3:And I emphasize it again. But that's like the biggest mistake I see people make is that they talk about their diet, reducing calories, dropping weight, and they're trying to train hard, not going to feel good, it's not going to work out, so don't do it. Take one or the other, steph, do you have a? I mean, it's so individual, but is there like a rule that you have as far as if an athlete's training at X workload, like how much they would drop it down if they have a weight loss goal, say for, and they're willing to take that six-month timeframe to lose that weight?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's not like a number or an equation, but it is context to the athlete. So if you're training endurance training six days a week, we might bump that down to four or bump the volume down, like maybe not quite in half, but you just don't want the training to be too much. So what happens when you keep training the same and you lower energy and take, metabolism starts to slow down. And it can actually go the opposite way you can feel stuck, you can actually put on weight which then?
Speaker 2:it's like it makes you tighten the screws and eat less and it just gets worse and worse. So, yeah, you want to keep some endurance training because, one, it's healthy. And then, two, you want to keep that base, but not too much that your energy intake has to be so high to stay within that zone of being healthy. And everyone is different. There's a few ways we can kind of assess where that should fall. One is habitual diet patterns. Two is energy availability. Three is just looking at training volume over the years. So it is really individual. But if an athlete truly wants to focus on body composition, they have to be willing to reduce training volume at least for a short period of time.
Speaker 1:So let's kind of encapsulate the themes there. Right For this particular athlete that they've identified, that's a goal right of theirs, for whatever reason. The theme would be try to accomplish most of the recomposition as far away from the race as possible, reduce the training load. And then what else, steph? What are the other?
Speaker 2:Add some strength training.
Speaker 1:Add strength training in as well, because you have to recalculate.
Speaker 2:That's like a key, that's, you can't eat muscle.
Speaker 1:That's gonna go in the audiogram. Right there, you can't eat muscle. I love it. Okay. Final aspect unless, steph, you have anything to add on this nutrition front, I think this is no, we should do a separate podcast on it.
Speaker 2:Okay, we'll do a separate one.
Speaker 1:Here we go, we'll talk about recomp season. Okay, actually, I am gonna write that down, we're gonna do that. Okay, I wanna talk a little. I wanna talk about something really specific that has been pervasive in the alternating community really for the past like three years or so, and that is the schema culture that exists out there and it seems to get bigger and bigger. People just get into it.
Speaker 1:People like it's fun, it's sexy, cause you get to climb up on mountain tops with epic weather that John was mentioning earlier, and that culture kind of has no pun intended, has a snowball effect where more people start to get interested in doing it as specifically a quote unquote off-season activity.
Speaker 1:And so I wanna I don't know we'll have leave it as a toss up to who starts this one, because you guys are both in winter areas although Steph's getting the brunt of it right now, as opposed to rock skiing John over in Montana but I wanted to get you guys impact just on the perception and more of the culture shift that it has had on the community and then what athletes can really take away from this that are considering incorporating it into their routine in some way. There's gonna be a big swath of it from people who have a full race season to people that use it as a classic cross training activity a couple of times a week. But maybe we can stylize some examples and just how. Just like just some like general do's and don'ts and things like that, since it is a topic of conversation that comes around every single year.
Speaker 2:I have a few thoughts on this. Go ahead, steph. I've skied most of my life and I've raced skimo cross country skiing. I love it and yeah, it's booming right now, right, like everyone looks everyone. I think it's the Instagram and the Strava effect right.
Speaker 2:So, like people see X runner doing it in the winter and that's the trick to staying fit, and so they want to go do it and I think that's good.
Speaker 2:But also knowing that skimo as a racing season can be really intense, like it's pretty intense, it's serious, especially here in the valley I'm like I don't think I'm gonna do that. But the other thing is you have to recognize that it's its own sport and culture and you can't just like get a bunch of gear and go out in the mountains. Right. There's actually like risks involved and I think anyone who's interested in doing backcountry skiing they need to learn about avalanche safety, take an avalanche course, because you're putting yourself out there and it's not just you, it's the people who are gonna be there to rescue you or are gonna be part of this. You know skiing with you or out in the mountain with you, like you need to be responsible if you're gonna go out. So I see a lot of runners just kind of doing it and they have no idea what an avalanche beacon is and I think that's irresponsible. So that's my soapbox.
Speaker 1:Coming, coming right down with the safety piece.
Speaker 2:It just drives me bonkers, but I see it as a really great way to get out and enjoy winter. And it kind of like I was saying earlier. You know, if you're someone who wants to get better at the mountains, it's a great way to get better at going up. I mean, it's basically hiking right, but then you don't have to go down, you just get to ski down. So it's a great form of cross training. But you have to know what you're doing. You can't just get some skis and go out there.
Speaker 1:Bits you have been. You have been sucked in by the culture, so maybe you can talk about this from both the personal experience and the coaching experience.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I would say I got sucked in kind of more on the Nordic skiing side. Actually I do some uphill skiing but not nearly as much as the Nordic skiing. So but yeah, definitely I think we touched on the social media. I think a lot of you know runners are kind of looking up to the Killians and the Emily Ford. You know some of the well-known runners in the space that are leveraging skiing and skiing quite a bit.
Speaker 3:To be honest, the winter is like, oh, if I do that, then that's the bullet to get better, and I think that's a big mistake. It's no, ski mountaineering doesn't equal your better runner immediately. It can be a very, I think, effective tool, like Stephanie said, to build fitness, but it can also be a good way to get really tired too, because even though the mechanical loading is a lot less your metabolism, I mean, it's still a strain on the body that's actually really significant. And athletes again are looking at what people are doing. They're putting in these massive vertical days and they got to go match that, and when they think they're taking an off season they show up to the springtime and they're actually really tired. So I think if you're using it as an effective tool, just like you would with your running and your periodizing the work. I think it can be. I've seen athletes skyrocket their fitness for sure and improve aspects of their trail running, such as their uphill hiking speed, their ability to use trekking poles. They get more familiar with that, so I've seen it go both ways. I think it's just important to kind of think about what are we trying to do here? And then it's I mentioned earlier, it's different If you have an athlete that's actually competing on skis, so that's like a whole separate season.
Speaker 3:I have one athlete now, liza Mazula, and he's building up towards the nationals in first week in March and then he transitions to the trail running season. So we, this athlete has a much different approach than an athlete who you know might get on the skis once a week, you know. So that's something to consider as well. And how do you balance your running around skiing? Do you hang the running shoes up? Do you introduce two runs a week, three runs a week? That's something that maybe we can discuss. I have my own kind of rules around that, how I kind of approach the running around skiing with athletes, but that also can get missed. And then we again talking about these runways if we're not, you know, progressing. At least I'm running in with your skiing. You're just behind the curve there. As far as that progression back to running, and that can lead to well, can lead to injury and underperformance, and running because you're, it's a different mechanic.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, okay let's end on kind of some rules and guidelines of incorporating the running and then kind of returning to running. I think that's a good way to wrap everything up after, like after a skimo season. We can use that as like, the wrap up point to this podcast. But I'll ping off of John what you were mentioning in terms of it can be really different depending upon your use case. So I have a lot of athletes that are racing skimo and they race every weekend, or three out of four weekends out of the month, and the one pervasive theme throughout any of those is that the races are the hardest workout that they will ever do, sometimes even harder and, especially from an intensity perspective, even as hard or harder than any of the running workouts that I'll actually do. And so when I look at how to plan things out through that lens, through, that is the hardest workout. What it makes me do from a programming perspective is just dial everything down for how many other hard workouts are there during the week, because I know that is going to be so freaking hard. It's going to have so much stimulus associated with it. I almost don't need to do anything else.
Speaker 1:You get a little bit of ad hoc intensity when you do skimo because you can only go so easy. Right, it's not, you can't, you don't have like as many you want to use cycling as an analogy you don't have as many gears as you do running. You're kind of your lower. You know, when you're lower boundary of your intensity, especially when you're going up or particularly when you're going uphill, is just, you don't have as much bandwidth between that and kind of the upper end. So what that forces the athlete to do is, even on their endurance days, you know we would say, oh, they're kind of doing a little bit of steady state and that shows up in the heart rate and or the RPE that they do. I think they might even be doing a little bit of threshold stuff. You know, if they've got to get up over a peak or they just get excited because they're in a group or whatever the dynamic is. And so, recognizing that, the practical outcome of that from a planning perspective is sometimes you have the race and then you have a bunch of endurance stuff during the week that might have some ad hoc type of intensity and that's all you need If you start to try to layer on too much more than that, especially for an athlete that is not an elite athlete and can't tolerate all of that workload. You might be, you know, spending too many matches, you have too much volume and intensity or any of these kind of like classic training mistakes. So that's the one kind of like vantage point that I'll add into this is, if you have an athlete or if you are planning on racing Schemo as part of your winter training, you have to recognize that those Schemo races are so ridiculously hard. And then you combine that with the fact that you are not you're not getting perfect intensity control during the week whenever you're doing your weekly endurance Schemo stuff, but there's not a whole lot of pressure to do a lot of additional intensity in addition to those two components.
Speaker 1:Okay, so we mentioned return to running. This is the. This is kind of the last piece. So, john, you opened it up. I know that you've worked through this with athletes and when you do have an athlete that has, let's either say, a Schemo season or a winter period where they are using a lot of non weight-bearing cross training modalities right, they're on the elliptical, they're on the bike, whatever, I think we can all kind of like group this into the same thing, how do we make sure that the return to running, once it ever, once it does actually happen, or 100% running, or 80% running, or whatever happens unproblematically? I don't know if that's a word that I just made up or not, but happens without issue, because we do know that when you shipped from non weight-bearing activities weight-bearing activities, you have a musculoskeletal consideration to take into account during that transition process. What are some of the things that you go through as a coach just to make sure that process is as smooth as possible, moving from non weight-bearing to weight-bearing stuff?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so for an athlete that's competing on the skis, I mean, they're typically having them get going with the strength program well ahead of the snow flying, so they just got a good foundation of just that strength. I think that helps with the downhill, especially on the skis Once the snow starts to fly and we see the frequency of the skiing come up, because that just doesn't happen necessarily. Some places maybe, Steph, you could say it happened overnight in Chamonix, but in Montana people aren't skiing really like six to seven days a week. It's like maybe they're getting like one or two, three days kind of thing. So we're still going to be working in some running while the snow is hopefully collecting. So, for example, an athlete right now is still running probably five days a week, while he's skiing two to three days a week, and so as the snow starts to pile up, we start to cut back on the running, inevitably right, Because the workload will come up, like you just suggested, Coop.
Speaker 3:And what I like and what I've found is I like to keep at least two runs in the week. Even if an athlete is skiing you know it's this powder city, they've got their race, they're in the thick of training I still two runs a week. They don't have to be really long or intense and that's simply just to keep that a little bit of the load, a little bit of the load. And I find that over time starting, even if that's like mid January say, and you know I find that has really helped that athlete transition to, you know, off the skis and they're tempted, they're running five days a week. You know they don't just come back like complaining that their Achilles Hurts or my legs are super sore. And it's only two days a week, that's it. It's not four, five, six, it's just two. So it's that's. My simple rule is two days a week. That can be as short as 20 minutes, 15 minutes even, really.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I want everybody to remember that frequency. You guys who are watching the YouTube version, we'll see this little blue slip of paper that I'm holding up that nobody can read. But we're gonna come back to that two day a week frequency and just a little bit. What are your guide posts here?
Speaker 2:It's very similar, I think maintaining some amount of running, whether it be one to two to three days a week, just depending on the athlete and their schedule, just keeping it weekly, keeping it regular, and then to come out of that sometimes it lends well to like spring conditions right. So you start to gradually have less great ski days, more running days. But I think if we're using that dialing up and down analogy, you just start to dial it back up again, right, you don't just switch. Okay, now it's running season, now we're running five, six days a week. At least I like to gradually add more in, and that can be done either by number of days or by making the sessions a little bit longer. But I think that helps then too, because there's not just the loading part, but then there's the part where when you haven't been running, even if you're really fit, it just feels kind of awful.
Speaker 2:There's that return to run, and so it's let's work through that before we really throw you into full running schedule. So it's kind of more or less the same thing.
Speaker 1:Okay, we got two scenarios here that we did not coordinate on this. In the background by the way, for the listeners that think that we're kind of like making backroom deals and have some sort of elaborate coordination before these A lot of these times I have a five bullet point outline for this particular podcast and we went way beyond those five bullet points. So my point with that is is I have a very similar framework that both of you have mentioned. I kind of divided into two things. So the first one is if I have an athlete that can get that, for whatever reason, they can commit to running two days per week for the entirety of the quote unquote winter season, right, in that scenario, once they come off of that cross-training period or the ski season, whatever we're calling it, I can usually get them up to 70% of their normal volume within two weeks. And I guess what my point? I'm just kind of like I'm putting a little bit more precision on the ramp up, quote up. So the ramp up would be two to two weeks, maybe three weeks in some cases if I know that there's some sort of injury susceptibility or whatever. But it's not two months right, two to three weeks to where I can get them up to about 70% of their normal run volume for that one particular phase. So I can go back, look at their previous training history. If they're normally doing 10 hours a week, I can get them up to seven hours per week of running within the two to three weeks time and that's because that stimulus of just running twice per week is actually really potent from a biomechanical standpoint.
Speaker 1:You don't need much, right, it's definitely a minimum viable product, but you don't need much of it to kind of keep all that, all those systems moving. You can keep a lot of the all, a lot of those weight bearing components moving as well. That's very different from an athlete that goes full time skiing or full time not weight bearing for a winter season that lasts an appreciable amount of time six to 10 weeks or something like that. If that is the case, I usually need four to six weeks for that same ramp up proposition, so ramping back up to about 70% of their normal training volume for that particular phase that I'm putting them in it basically two to double the triples that ramp up timeframe. Now that's not to dissuade people from going full time, non weight bearing or skiing If you have an appropriate amount of time to do that ramp up and then get it all into the training and things like that. But you do have to recognize that it is a much different proposition If you can put in just a little bit, just a little bit of running.
Speaker 1:Two days per week, I think, is a reasonable way to look at it, not one, not five. Two days per week is a reasonable way to look at it. It saves you a little bit on the ramp up piece, which is material for some athletes that have races that are kind of like earlier in the season. So think, like June races, may races and things like that. That's where you're going to kind of want to, you know, do consider something like this so that you don't end up biting yourself in the butt, having this longer ramp up period or trying to ramp up too quickly, and then you end up with an injury or it's just weird, or you just can't like keep up with a workload. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:That makes sense. You know, hard rock, just real quick hard rock. You know that's an example of a big race. It's a vert race, but works out pretty well for folks that do like to ski. Right, Because you can kind of keep on the skiing up until, say, I don't know March and then have that transition, your fit is a fiddle and then it's just mechanically getting sound there. So and you've got enough time there, yep.
Speaker 1:So it's again if you I mean, if you end up being basically full time running in March, right, yeah, all April, all May and all of June to train running, and that's not the like the longest timeframe, but if you've really done a good job in the winter, it's more of a mode change versus an actual fitness build.
Speaker 1:So, once again, I think the big thing, going all the way back to the beginning of this podcast one of the best things people can do to help set their seasons up and if you're a coach out there listening to this is that when you're looking at your athlete season, you absolutely need to consider where they're at.
Speaker 1:You can only train from where an athlete is at 100%. Don't want to discount that, but build your architecture from the critical race backwards to make sure that you give yourself enough time. That's the foolproof way to make sure that you're doing all the right things that you want to do, that you have the time to do them, and then that way, when you have these conversations, either with yourself or with your athlete as in terms of how to orchestrate December, november, january and February you can do it with the context of hey, I want five months to be this. I want four months to be this and you have the entirety of the picture in front of you to have that conversation. All right, we're going to put a pin in it there. I hope everybody gets out in the winter little snowing out here, so tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I'm going to do some snow running. Any final thoughts? Honor stuff for me, you guys.
Speaker 3:Nothing to just enjoy winter. I mean it's it is a fun time to mix it up. It's my. That's why I live in Montana. I mean I couldn't live in Florida, california. So yeah, get out there, enjoy it. You know, throw a challenge in there. That's how you're going to get better too.
Speaker 2:So I'm the same. I love winter. It's great time to mix it up. Do something a little bit different.
Speaker 1:You're from Minnesota, you're obligated.
Speaker 2:I am from Minnesota. Yeah, california, I craved the cold, it was so weird.
Speaker 1:All right, we're going to put a pin in there. Thank you, guys for coming on podcast today. Thanks, All right folks. There you have it, there you go. Much thanks to John and Stephanie for coming on the podcast today.
Speaker 1:I always appreciate their guidance and counsel and the banter that we get to have when we all get in the same room. We talk about these various coaching aspects. The winter time is always an intriguing one because you can take a lot of different taxed depending upon any number of different aspects that you're coming into the winter with, what races you're coming from, what races you're going to, where you live, what type of access you have to various activities. I think if you keep all of those things in mind and use some of the advice that Stephanie, John and myself gave you, you'll have a good framework to work with so that you can have the most successful summer, the most successful trail running and racing season that you have ever had.
Speaker 1:If you have any feedback on this episode, please hit me up on social media. If you like this episode, please feel free to share it with your friends and your training partners. On the way we get this message out about this podcast, I'm always very appreciative of when you guys share this out in the community and when I get great feedback on it. That is it for today, folks. As always, we will see you out on the trails.