View all show notes and timestamps on the KoopCast website.
Episode overview:
Frederic Sabater Pastor is a CTS ultrarunning coach with a PH.D. in Exercise Physiology and experiences coaching athletes for a variety of challenges. He is also a Postdoctoral researcher at the Inter-university Lab of Human Movement. His areas of focus are running, trail, performance, physiology, and fatigue.
Episode highlights:
(32:02) Training differences: road runners 20 hrs/week, trail runners 10 hrs/week, road runners cross train and strength train more, overall road volume is double despite race duration being up to 10x less
(37:11) Why are trail runners stronger: do runners self-select, is trail running innately better strength training, strength training is a broad term
(51:38) Specificity of running economy: train for specificity, changing protocols from road training, strides over technical terrain, differences in strength training
Additional resources:
Fred’s paper
Trail Runner Magazine’s coverage of this paper
Fred’s CTS Coach Bio
Fred’s Researchgate profile
SUBSCRIBE to Research Essentials for Ultrarunning
Buy Training Essentials for Ultrarunning on Amazon or Audible
Information on coaching-
www.trainright.com
Koop’s Social Media
Twitter/Instagram- @jasonkoop
View all show notes and timestamps on the KoopCast website.
Episode overview:
Frederic Sabater Pastor is a CTS ultrarunning coach with a PH.D. in Exercise Physiology and experiences coaching athletes for a variety of challenges. He is also a Postdoctoral researcher at the Inter-university Lab of Human Movement. His areas of focus are running, trail, performance, physiology, and fatigue.
Episode highlights:
(32:02) Training differences: road runners 20 hrs/week, trail runners 10 hrs/week, road runners cross train and strength train more, overall road volume is double despite race duration being up to 10x less
(37:11) Why are trail runners stronger: do runners self-select, is trail running innately better strength training, strength training is a broad term
(51:38) Specificity of running economy: train for specificity, changing protocols from road training, strides over technical terrain, differences in strength training
Additional resources:
Fred’s paper
Trail Runner Magazine’s coverage of this paper
Fred’s CTS Coach Bio
Fred’s Researchgate profile
SUBSCRIBE to Research Essentials for Ultrarunning
Buy Training Essentials for Ultrarunning on Amazon or Audible
Information on coaching-
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. As always, I'm your humble host, coach Jason Coupe.
Speaker 1:In this episode of the podcast, it's about the physiological differences between elite, trail and road runners and what we can learn from those differences in order to drive the training process. On the podcast today is one of our CTS coaches, frederick Saboteur Pasteur, who is also the lead author of the paper that we are discussing, which is titled Elite Road versus Elite Vs Trail Runners Comparing Economy, biomechanics, strength and Power. This paper appears in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. A link to that paper will be in the show notes For you longtime listeners of the podcast. Frederick first appeared on the podcast way back in the middle of 2022, in episode 130, where we discussed another paper that he was a co-author on, and since then we hired him on as one of our crack coaching staff, and in this particular podcast, we dive deep into his paper and discuss exactly what it means for your training. This paper has also been covered by Alex Hutchison for Trail Runner Magazine, and I'll leave a link to that in the show notes, but I think that Fred and I get to the meat of what this paper might mean and include some commentary that only the lead author can provide An example of. That is specifically some of the strength training practices that these athletes were undertaking and how that actually might affect how we view the results. That's enough of a tease I'm going to get right out of the way. Here's my conversation with Frederick Saboteur, pastor all about the differences in Elite Road and Elite Trail Runner's physiology. I just came over the perfect way to tie all this together initially, and I didn't realize it until literally five minutes ago when I was grabbing a glass of water. You and I is kind of mutual colleague. You know more than I do.
Speaker 1:Guy Mie, one of my first like introductions into the science of ultra running when I was first starting to coach ultra running athletes was a presentation that he gave in 2011. And I don't know why I can remember that date. It was from 2011. So it's over 10 years ago. 11 years ago, no, 12 years ago now Jesus, I'm getting old. It was a presentation that he gave super grainy YouTube video at some random like kind of like random conference and the title of it was Fatigue and Ultra Marathon, which is not what we're going to talk about today.
Speaker 1:But there was one specific piece that I think really illustrates some of the research that we are going to talk about is he was going through the differences in fatigue from a marathoner to an ultra marathoner and how they might actually be different, and one of the ways that he kind of illustrated the difference was visually how did the top athletes look? And he had this one slide of a Kenyan or an Ethiopian athlete I don't remember who it was, and one slide of a top ultra marathon athlete, and you could, very, you, just visually, right, just tell the anthropometrics were different. Right, the ultra marathon was more muscular. The Ethiopian runners were, like, skinnier, they have different stride lengths, you know, just everything right off the gate, right out of the gate, was just so, so starkly different. And it leads into what we're going to discuss today.
Speaker 1:Right, what are the actual differences and characteristics between elite road runners and elite ultra marathon runners? That's not so cliche, it's just like looking at them, kind of looking at them visually. But you have a really neat background story on how this paper all kind of came to light. Why don't we just start out with how it came to light and then we can get into the design and what it actually means.
Speaker 2:So yeah, absolutely I remember that presentation, but I think the first time that I saw that slide was when I was doing my masters and he was teaching a class and he put it there. It was like, oh yeah, they are really different.
Speaker 1:So yeah, absolutely. We've never talked about that before. That's good. I'm glad you remember that too.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, the way this study came together was like during the academic year 2018-2019. At the beginning of 2019 was when I started my PhD, but then during that academic year, there was a master's student at the University of Jamone in France, where I did my PhD. While she was doing her master's degree in performance optimization and I don't remember what the letters stand for but then she was, at the same time, the physical therapist for the trail running team of the French athletic federation. So I think the way they had it organized. She was like for everything that is outside the stadium, so that is trail running, road running and walking. So she was the physical therapist and then what happened was that she had to do her end of master's thesis and she said, well, we can test the athletes in all of these things because I'm going to be going to a training camp. So she was our in-into the training camp. So the French athletic federation. So we go on and do all of these studies.
Speaker 2:What we decided to do for our project I was not there at the very beginning which we just decided we're going to test, but then we were going to test road runners, trail runners we're going to test me and some females. And then we're also going to test road and trail runners or recreational, not elite, which we did in the lab back home. That is not part of this paper and that is part of another paper that should be coming out that will be showing differences like between levels and level differences and sex differences in all of these variables. So what happened now was that well, great, now we have access to the training camps, so we want to measure what are the differences between road runners within elite road runners and trail runners. So now it was like well, what are the variables that we want to measure? And this was a tricky thing because we're doing with elite athletes within the federation and we had to choose things that were going to be important or relevant for us but, at the same time, that the coaches would let us do.
Speaker 2:And that is one of the big parts why we don't help, for example, view to max test as part of this, because a view to max test like, oh no, we're at this point in the season, we don't want the athletes to be doing that or it's going to be too hard. At the same time, we need some of the strength testing. We need to sprint on the bike instead of running. We can talk about that later. But, yeah, we had to do things that the coaches would let us do because they had their schedule in the training camp and we're like injected there in the training camp, right? So, yeah, either the coaches or the athletes didn't want to go too hard on some of these things. So that's why we were somewhat limited in what we could do. Yeah, those were the.
Speaker 2:That was one of the limitations, and the other one was that we had to travel, so we had to pay the lad. We'll be in a van and go. We went one twice to different training camps in print and one to put well, which was like a 20 hour driving total. So it was like it was great three of us in a van. We stopped at like at my most place in Spain because it was more or less midway, so we slept there Like, yeah, it was like 20 hours to go there, two driving days to go there and then two driving days to go to come back, to do like basically 15 hours of testing. So it was all very cool, all very exciting, but, yeah, this is how this study came together.
Speaker 1:Oh, I want everybody to appreciate for you to get two things. First off, we can look at these and kind of scrutinize them left, right and center, like why didn't you do this, why didn't you do that? A lot of times there's just like you said, there's real world implications that coaches didn't want to do them. So yeah, you'll take. You'll take what you can get. Second thing is like literally you're kind of you're not going to the ends of the earth but you're going to the ends of Europe. These to actually to actually conduct a study, and I hope everybody appreciates this. A lot of times these things are way more complicated to way more complicated to pull together than what might appear on the pages of the research. So let's dive into it. Man, describe the study in general and what you were trying to, what you were trying to compare and contrast here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, all right. So the goal of this study was to really find out, get a bunch of, like, very good world runners and then a group of very good trail runners and then do some testing that variables that we thought would be relevant performance in both road and trail running, or one or the other and then test if there were actual differences between those variables, between one group and the other. Right, so then and this had never been done before, like we had zero data. It happens with a lot of things in trail running or like in an old time after running, very, very little data. So it was that, like, check those data that we thought would be different.
Speaker 2:So one of them was because they like trail running as such a big upheaval and downhill component. One thing that we thought was well, you have to buy gravity and what you were saying before trail runners tend to be more muscular, like when you look at the pictures, sort of things. We was like maybe they are stronger. And then we tested for strength in two different ways. One of them was isometric testing and the other one was a screen test on a bike. And the screen test on a bike it's a specific product.
Speaker 1:I think I'll explain it later, so like the listeners can hobby like as one block of information, but you've got two what you're calling like elite groups of athletes, right, and maybe you can provide a little bit of like color commentary that's outside of the paper on this how similar were those groups? Because that's always the kind of discrepancy that we kind of run into when we're comparing elite road and elite trail runners. Are they really kind of similar in terms of their I don't even know how to describe it like their eliteness or their competitiveness or whatever we want? However, we want to say it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that is a very good question Because, like, we had a very clear criteria that I'm going to spend right now, but still, we don't know if, like their physiology is the same, because the sports are different. So, like to like have a completely like, different experience. If you're comparing like I don't know runners to like American football players, they might have the same level of being elite, but then, yeah, what does being like help us? Being elite in one relate to being elite in the other? If they are completely different sports, right, right, so here they are very similar sports from the perspective that they are both running, but they are very similar, very different in culture, like how much price money there is.
Speaker 2:So they may be attracting different people, but then our execution criteria was, were very clear. It was like they had to be part of the, of the team that the national team was taking to these training camps, so that means they were like top level in France. Now, what happens that top level in France? So, like, basically, french national team, like in the world team, there are people that have run under two to 10 for the marathon, I think, like 207, like there's two or three that have run under 208 or under 209, like since then. So they were like best in France for the road team and some of them were like up and coming, going to be best in France. And then they were like maybe transitioning from the track and running half marathon, so the time, but basically like the trans federation had decided that they were like we sort of outsourced that, so the French Federation saying that they are elite, okay.
Speaker 1:Okay, same thing. So yeah, that's what I was gonna ask. What's the equivalent on the trail side?
Speaker 2:Yeah, on the trail side it was basically the same thing. The people that were going to this, to this training camps that All of these people are like most of them had already been in some like national and not national championship, but like international championship, and actually all the. I think we tested like 11, 10, 10 trail runners that were including the study out of those 10 trail runners there were before that season, like a few months later, were like the winning team in the World Trail Championship, right, so like they were the. So basically, as, unlike we know that about the French Trail runners, some of them are very good, yeah, like the French ones are like at the very top of the sport, so well, one. Or, yeah, france is one of the countries that is always like fighting for those positions. So they were like that, like the best among the people who were basically it's a 10, like a few months later piping with both people to get on the World Championship thing.
Speaker 1:It meets the reasonability test, meaning you're not cut. You're comparing, like you know, kind of two different or two very similar apples, right? I mean, yeah, it's never, it's never gonna be exactly the same. But I think when we're looking at, okay, what can we really extract from the study, the two cohorts that you had and the fact that it was basically the French teams, right, I think it takes care of a lot of that and kind of almost takes the bias out of it in terms of we're gonna take People's like it's a scores and compare it to the 210 marathoners or kind of whatever it. I just appreciate the degree of similarity that these two groups would have within their particular Sport context.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly. So then actually we report that on the day graph, for example the day trust score and with the Itch trust score that they have, and then the stats that the each upper lights separately for that year. All of them were, for example, in the top 260 H-Rail runners in the world because they're of the category of like each upper. If they were in and I think that they were all in the top 200, like the worst one was better than the top 200, and then there were some of them like that, like the world champions. All that year there was at least one runner that had won the UTMB, like within two or three years, I don't remember. It was like before or after because I sense you're one TBS.
Speaker 1:So they were like yeah, good runners, yeah, very good runners. Okay, so Take the listeners through. Well, one of the things that you, that you already mentioned, that you're kind of limited by, is the coaches only want to have them do certain tests. Right, what are the tests that you kind of settled in on to run the, to kind of run the runners through?
Speaker 2:Hey, so, like, the first thing that we wanted to test here was that strength, that what we said before. So, like, for strength, we had Two different type of tests. We had isometric strength tests, which was like with the runners in like a chair that is more or less like a knee extension machine that you will find, but like if that has a very precise force measurement device, so like you can measure both when, like, they are Extending and flexing well, it's isometric, they are not moving right, but like when they are pushing out and when they are pulling in, so you can measure basically the chance of the knee extension and the knee flexors. In summary, of the quads and the hamstrings, right, we wanted to do that because that, these very precise numbers, they are very reproducible, you can measure it. If I'm not sure right now, it's in the paper, but if we probably took three measurements with at least one minute of rest between them on each one, it's like a three second contraction, and then you take the highest one of your them that are very close. So that is very precise data.
Speaker 2:The other way that we did was, of course, velocity break up, and this I may have to explain. So, like when you have a force velocity profile. It tries to draw a line of like where are you like when you're producing some power, some like when you're in some movement? What is your physiology in terms of? Do you use more force for that or do you use more Velocity, like the easiest way to explain it? I find it's like it so you can have someone hitting 1000 watts. But to hit 1000 watts are you doing? Can you do that at 60 rpm, to like a low rpm, but like putting a lot of force on the pedals? Or do you Go to very high rpm with less force on the pedals, right? So then, is that are you more like the image that we of the user? Are you more like a tractor, that is, that has a lot of power, right, but they will look like slowly, with lots of strength? Or more like a Ferrari, or like a some low one car that has like many more revolutions, right, so it gets more speed, even if they have the same horsepower right at the end, right? So for that we use a bike test.
Speaker 2:It is one thing that the reviewers criticize us for, as that's the question, like why then you use a running test? Because you can't do it with a screen test and that is exciting. They're the thing that the coaches are like. It's a true runner. This is her ultra-mather runner. This guy run the UTMB. They don't know how to spring you're going to.
Speaker 2:Made them think maybe we believe Road runners. They will have led it like, but absolutely not with a trail runner. We were like what? No, we're not, definitely not letting them scream and actually we get the worst data because Screen piece has more of a skill component. Yes, it's just like stomping on the bells.
Speaker 1:I'm? Yeah, that's actually what I was gonna mention is when, sometimes, when you do that in one of the groups is novel to the Activity, you're bringing out the novelty or the the fact that they don't do it, as opposed to the actual physiological profile.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and I think that piece pretty. I mean, I think what result? I another way in which you can test for that, but with a series of jumps like squat jumps without our and they were like, like most of the truck riders don't train train Like you're not. They've made a jump with forum in the back Like they're going to break themselves. I'm like sometimes like what's funny? But like seeing them move like I will not be surprised if they got in trouble by doing that. Yeah, yeah, that was for strength.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you have to, you have to basically quote-unquote strength markers, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly that would be like this strength and power and the bike, and then the strengths and the isolated muscle peaks, okay, and then we also had cost of running. So basically running economy. That was like we Took our treadmill from France all the way to Portugal and to everywhere else that we went, and then on that little treadmill so he had to travel. It was not the most powerful treadmill in the world and that was a problem because then we've got to choose speeds that were low enough for the treadmill to not go crazy and also the in-plane go past 10% in line. So what we settled on was Making them run at 10% on a flat treadmill at 14, I mean at 10 kilometers per hour, flat or 10 kilometers per hour. I should translate that to like miles per hour at least, so like then is going to be like about 6.2 miles per hour.
Speaker 2:Right, and go on. The power is actually a 10 minute pace, yeah, 10 minute pace, yeah, yeah. And then for the kilometers per hour, which is going to be about seven minutes Hangar, right, yeah, yeah. So so their faces that are not super fast for these runners. But we also wanted to unburden with the women, oh, okay. So yeah, this is part of the reason that, like, we want it all the elites to be Seminar in that way and then, like, when the other paper comes out, hopefully we'll see more of that. But that's always one problem that you have one measure running economy. You measure the same absolute speed, but we measure the same relative speed. The problem is that to know the relative speed, you need to do these maximal tests exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because you want to be under threshold for the running economy test.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly yeah, so that's why we could not put them at the same relative intensity. So we chose like the other option.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you got running economy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, up at 10% grade at 10% grade, exactly Okay. And then after that the article was that during that we measured biomechanical parameters. So like we believe it's a little device that has like a leisure thingy, like Causing the elevator and basically like every time you got it knows that your foot is on the ground no, it's not like your foot is near right and so we're mentioned like contact time, flight times or that during the running economy test. So what? All of those streets on an incline?
Speaker 1:so you got a little bit of strength and power, a little bit of classic endurance and the running economy side of things and some biomechanics. Right, those kind of three general categories that you're comparing and contrasting against.
Speaker 2:And then the other thing that we had was a questionnaire, which is something that I will kick myself for ever. That we just use a questionnaire Is the come on? Like they all have watches, like I wish I had been there earlier in the decision process for all that stuff and maybe I don't know. Then we will have running to the go to saying we don't want to share that, david, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like we have a questionnaire in which they report it, like during the previous I don't remember right now for six months or a year, like they're monthly training hours, yeah, or different things, like running total endurance training, like including cross training, while they they either like steam by steam and then we last year they've been like running only and run training, which training?
Speaker 1:which includes cross training, strength training, and then build out training All the previous hours so you can compare and contrast the strength, you can compare and contrast the running economy in a couple of different variables, you can compare and contrast the biomechanics and you can compare and contrast the, the overall training volume and Modes and things like that, yeah big gross, big gross comparisons on the training side of things. Good, okay, so now everybody wants to know what's this, what's similar and what's different.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay. So then, first of all, when we measure the strength with the isometric machine, like just pushing and then finding the resistance, there were no differences, okay. So there were no differences when compared to body weight, okay, which is what we measure. The trail runners were a bit bigger on the road, so then there was absolutely no difference. They were basically the same Bound for time.
Speaker 2:However, when we mentioned on the force loss, which was like a dynamic exercise, if this time they were pedaling on the bike and to do this test, like we said, two different resistances on the bike and they start from, like the stop, start and then they start pedaling, so basically the first one, the first pedal, so to require a lot of force, right. And then, like, you require less force and it's hard to go like force because you're going at a higher speed. So this is how we measure it. In that case, we did measure higher forces and higher powers, like absolute, in absolute terms, and then we measured still higher forces in relative terms to relative to body weight, which means that basically, at the end of the day, then the trail runners are stronger, like these four ortho trail runners were stronger than the road runners. Yeah, oh, we're hot.
Speaker 1:I like your couch there. This group of trail runners is stronger than this group of road runners. Very accurate.
Speaker 2:So that does make us think that like these, like they are different in potential strength, and it was actually very interesting when I came getting a bit ahead of myself because the road runners did much more chance training.
Speaker 1:Which is so interesting. We're going to get to that in a little bit, so that's kind of the first material thing right Across these two groups. The trail runners are stronger.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly Trail runners are stronger. Okay, so only way, and this is very important point when you do this dynamic movement, if you just measure it isolated, we will have missed it. We were just measuring that. So it's very good, we just have this dynamic movement which we would like to measure it.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's move to the second piece, which is the running economy piece.
Speaker 2:And that we can go to running economy and biomechanics together, because the biomechanics, like I, will just spoil it. There was nothing interesting which was surprising to us because in general, yeah, people with shorter contact times have better running economy and stuff like that. But, like we saw, it might have been like lack of statistical power, but we saw no differences.
Speaker 1:Which is once again super interesting yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but like, at the same time, as a caveat, we're only measuring like time that the food spends on the ground. Right, if you have entry, that you have the whole set of like cameras which are measuring the angle of every single joint, we would be able to see more differences, right. But like the way that we were, that we were taking the time, we were measuring like that, like flight time, contact time, the ratio between the flight time and the contact time, that sort of stuff. There was no difference.
Speaker 1:Can you extrapolate a little bit in terms of do you think that the conditions that you were able to test under with the speed and the grade, do you think that had an impact on not seeing those differences, Like it wasn't fast enough and or it wasn't steep enough? It's kind of what I'm getting at.
Speaker 2:I do think so, like to one extent be objective of what I was saying about, like the method of measurement that we were using, which is the most basic, like in the lab, we also have all of these like cameras, which you can measure like the animal of your pinky basically right so if you start doing that, like, you will see differences like, even like in how you carry your arms, and that's true.
Speaker 2:The stuff which was like this was interesting because for us, as we're seeing you like, oh, look at how different runs and look at how this one runs and look at how this one, we were appreciating some differences, but at the level of the foot contacting the ground we're not seeing that. And then that, like I'm sure that if we had gone to like 18, 20 kilometers per hour, which would be like, yeah, getting closer to five minute miles, yeah, we will have seen it, because then definitely the trail runners are not used to running at those speeds. Yeah, and yeah, a couple of them that actually came to the lab later to do some testing and stuff like that, we've made them run faster speed because we did an incremental test with them the time nothing to do with this study yeah, like you could see that at faster speeds, like they're on short play a little more on that sort of thing.
Speaker 1:So you don't know this. I had our head lab technician, renee, who I've known for years, does all of our lactate threshold and VO2 max tests. I had her at my house yesterday recording a podcast that will come out before this podcast, and we were theorizing a little bit on how we would take a standard graded exercise test and adapt it into the ultra marathon world and her, the nickel version of that, of that brainstorm not to rehash the podcast that people probably listen to is we just make it slower, like that's kind of it. Right, we just somehow we'd make it slower, we'd increase the grade earlier, we would, you know, even start them out of walk or something like that, but just slow the whole thing down so that the speed doesn't confound what we want to see from a bio energetics perspective, which can get problematic when you don't train at those types of speeds. So yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:That is also something that we have seen in our lab when testing trail runners that for some reason we're testing them on like lab for like other different studies, or testing them on a using a flat desk. Like we had that problem like arm slimming and then saying, yeah, the problem is that my legs cannot keep up with the treadmill, like I'm not, but it's hard, but it's not that hard, it's my legs cannot keep up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, people have to keep in mind that, like the graded exercise testing protocols that we use, they were designed for a very specific cohort and that specific cohort is elite marathon, 10k and 5k runners in the emphasis on the word elite. So when we try to do it with like normal, just normal runners, right, normal marathon runners sometimes those protocols don't show you the same things you know, or you have to adapt them to a certain extent and it's not quite an apples to apples comparison. But then when you take it across another sport group and we see this a little bit in triathlon, right, because triathlon will use a cycling test that's meant for a cyclist and a running test that's meant for a runner. But when you take those tests that were developed for a specific cohort and then you take them into another running cohort right, in this case it's trail ultra marathoners even when they're elite you kind of run into some just issues with the runner show in terms of the testing, that's neither here nor there. So no differences in running economy or any of the biomechanical properties.
Speaker 2:No, no differences in the biomechanical properties, but there were differences in running economy. We found differences in running economy 14 kilometers per hour for about seven minutes a mile, please. At the faster speed we did find differences and the road runners were faster, which was like our initial hypothesis was okay. At the during cluster road, faster, flat speed. The road runners will have better running economy because it's their specific thing, right? And then the trail runners will be more economical when running uphill.
Speaker 2:The surprising part for us was that we didn't find any differences during the uphill running. I think that a big part of that is the fact that we tested better, but 10% decline, and at the 10% decline they are still running. What I think is like what if we had done one of those, like what they used to do in Roger Cram's lab in Boulder, right, like, put them up at like 20% decline, 30% grade, something like that? I mean, like they're not running, they're going to be walking. What is their walking economy in that phase? Right? Or like these, like running the walking transition. How are they managing it better to adapt to their sub? Better running economy the trail runners on the road drives.
Speaker 1:So yeah that you know that's a common theme in a lot of compare and contrast type of literature, especially with elite athletes, is you kind of have to go to the extremes to figure out where they're really different. And that's just because they're so good, right, they're just such good, they're just such good athletes across a variety of situations. You got to kind of get into the nuance or the extreme of the nuance to really kind of tease out some of those. So there was a slightly higher cost of running, higher running economy, worse running economies. It kind of put in layman's perspective with the trail running group at the faster speed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, at the faster speed on background.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which makes sense.
Speaker 2:It was like yeah, it makes sense Like we had marker runners that their EC runs were being done, probably between seven million miles and six million miles, Right, so that, although they were probably, these guys were from like the marker runners who probably put in I don't know like six to 10 hours per week at speeds within I don't know like 10 or 20% of that right were the marker runners, like that EC pace, like for many of them, maybe like spinning up a hill, right up a mountain, which might have like very high vertical speeds but not really.
Speaker 1:Yeah, probably a little bit of a weakness of the study is the speeds are just a little bit too slow for the groups.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that the speeds are a bit too low and that the 10% in length is like too small, and that was like it was the treadmill that we could put in the vinyl transport. Yeah, I wish it would have taken the one of those 20 kilometers per hour, but I have tried to move that treadmill and we needed a ton of people in the lab to move that one treadmill that we had. That was great, and then that can go like forwards and backwards, so you can also go down.
Speaker 1:Trust me, we've moved our wood way and our testing facility three times. Everyone. It's like a superhuman, all hands on deck. Effort that requires, you know, a lift gated truck and it's a nightmare. It's a total nightmare.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that like we've got three guys on a van, yeah you're not moving those big treadmills like that Hope.
Speaker 1:Once again, I hope everybody appreciates some of these limitations because they're real. Okay, let's. So let's go to the training because it's super interesting. Then we're kind of going to like back into the non. Most of the non differences, I think, in the compare and contrast, because the training piece of it is that is is a little bit fascinating to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the training would be is like total training duration was higher for road climbers to trail which is really interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, which I found really interesting because then, is that we had so like I'm set the numbers right now in front of me so the road runners were reporting 79 hours training the month, which is about 20 hours per week you can't just for weeks tomorrow and the trail runners were reporting 43.6 hours per month, which is about 10 hours per 10 hours per week. And like a big part of that was the fact that the trailer, that the road runners, did much more cross training and much more resistant training, but even then they were doing more running training.
Speaker 1:Right. So even if you just took out everything else, the run training was still higher.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you count, I think that the average running training of the road runners was bigger than the total training of the trailer.
Speaker 1:Do you know about average how much strength training the road runners are doing?
Speaker 2:It was like it was there were some, but worse year old but like it was between like a year, on about 10 hours per week.
Speaker 1:That's a lot of stretch.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I mean not 10 hours per week, 10 hours per month. Oh, okay, got it. So, yeah, like that would be like the ones that were doing a lot of training, of training, training. I think they were doing about three hours per week and the average must be from what I'm seeing right now in the data channel of those specific number in front of me about five hours per month. So I would say like either one session per week or two, like 30 minute sessions per week.
Speaker 1:So what jumps out to you on the training side of things?
Speaker 2:initially the biggest thing is like what you said before, like that the volume of the training of the road runners is basically double. Yeah, it's crazy when the road runners are training for races that, in this case, are like less than two hours from 15 minutes. Yeah, and the road runners are on the trail runners are training for races that, for some of them, the UTMB, the world championship that year, I think it was like 80 kilometers or about the 50 mile where I think it was like 84 kilometers or two or something. But yeah, to me it was like crazy when I was seeing that. But then we can go into the reasons why and what I was seeing at the training camp.
Speaker 2:So, for example, at the training camp, when we were testing the runners and like we were like on an indoor track facility that they had there and there were other athletes that were. They were there like they were taking pictures and videos for their story, for the Instagram, for their sponsors, basically right. Whereas in conversation with the coaches of the trail runners, there's a documentary, like one of them. But this is like the team that won the national champion day, not the national day, the world championship. Yeah, I think he was part of that team. He's a baker and gets up every day.
Speaker 2:Four in the morning or something like that. Like every single day of the week he wakes up at four in the morning, works on people, whatever it is like then, and then he goes for his run.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, here's where the compare and contrast is kind of like outside of the paper right. The two groups might I was giving you a lot of credit for them being like, equally matched from a competitive or an elite in this standpoint. They're certainly not matched on professionalism, which you couldn't do, and I mean that with all due respect, but in terms of how they treat the craft of being a professional athlete as a professional, very clearly, on the trail side of things, they have to, you know, be a baker as well or whatever other side job that some of them have in order to kind of meet ends, make ends meet, and that 100% impacts the amount of training volume that you can do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and like that talking to another one as a coach is saying like, oh yeah, this guy, like he has to come out, he's training is his community.
Speaker 2:But that's basically he's training because then three kids at home or whatever it was like. There was all of that stuff. That is very interesting at the same time because they were like the best road runners in France but like you haven't seen any like headlines of people like these French running runner is the best in the world and the French guys were the ones that won the World Championship.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, you can make a case that they're better, right, like proportionally they're better.
Speaker 2:They are better in their sport.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, that's why are they really better if they are training less? They are less full of these, eat the whole kind of thing, but then, like trail runners, will get mad at me.
Speaker 1:Well, we'll leave that debate for some other time. That's more of a. That's more of an in bar debate versus over the podcast debate. Here's what's stuck out to me. I completely agree with you on the training side of it, but actually combine it with some of the other results. So you have trail runners who are training less, markedly less, doing no strength training, hardly any strength training, especially compared to the road running group. Yet they're still stronger.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So you can kind of take that one or two ways right. One there's just, for whatever reason, they're self selecting into that sport, because they have some physical property that you know that where they're stronger. Second thing you can tell you it is just the act of doing the sport itself, because they're clearly not training for strength, right? Clearly, just the act of doing the sport itself elicit some sort of strength response that is superior to all the strength training and all of the additional training and all of the faster training. Let's remember that, right, marathon training is going to be faster training, that the marathon group is actually going to. That part of it was actually not the fact that they were stronger, but they're stronger despite what all of those which you could perceive as headwinds right In the strength department to actually fight. The fact that they were actually still stronger despite all of those was absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 2:There are two things there that I think are like one problem with this study. That is like we asked them what are you doing for strength training? But that is basically like time spent in the gym.
Speaker 2:But some of them might be doing and I have seen some of them train on like we could have a big argument about what if we're strength training between like it was not like, for some of them, big heavy strength training on, like going and squatting, like repetitions with their six, one or M, with their six or M weight, basically right, so getting close to this muscle, yeah, that's heavy weight.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's heavy weight yeah.
Speaker 2:And some of them were just doing like I will go lose some squats and some lunges and some of these like pre hub exercises and all that stuff. All that stuff, like there was a component of both of them, and then there was a huge variety between like. They were much more similar in terms of like how they train than in terms of how, like how they run than how they stretch. We did not capture all of those details because, like our question was limited.
Speaker 1:That's a constant flaw of everything in strength training. I mean anybody who's listening to this podcast for any length of time. Anytime I bring Sarah and Nicole on and we talk about strength training. One of the things that we just go around and round on is it's an umbrella, that we put too many activities underneath and we call it by the same thing. We put physical therapy exercises with very, you know, minimal amounts of resistance. You know there are bands and body weight and things like that in the same category of something that's super heavy, that you're doing five repetitions of right, where you're getting really close to that like six or eight rep max range. Those two things wouldn't be different. Those two things shouldn't be the same category.
Speaker 1:But yet we kind of always do it, but still, though, like despite those differences, it's still a something to nothing comparison. Right, that's kind of what I'm saying, because I'm going through the same things in my mind when I'm reading through the lines. As you just went through, there's probably a variety of strength training activities that the road runners are doing, but still it's a something to nothing comparison. And still you see the greater strength being elicited in the trail running group. So what did the group think about that? When you found that out, what did you guys discuss amongst yourselves?
Speaker 2:Yeah, like one of the possible things that might be happening is that so much running training, which is so much running training, with the lack of the strength component, right, maybe harming the muscle mass for a chunk of all this stuff. So like, maybe I'll tell you that the strength training, what they're doing, is upsetting that a bit, right. But then that is the other thing. And I would also say that the roadrunners were not super skinny, super worried about keeping a very low body weight, so this is like a wild guess as well.
Speaker 2:But, I'm thinking that the trail runners may be like recovering better in terms of nutrition, Not thinking about it much like in terms of trying to be super skinny. I like leaving that. I'm like right before the race, right. But then I'm wondering this is like something that I wonder like were the roadrunners like short-drain protein or something like that, or like in a more kind of a bollocks state? In general, the extra strength training could not compensate for, and that would be because of nutrition or because of the higher training volume or the combination of.
Speaker 1:I mean, here's what I would look at it. Here's the way that I would look at it if I were one of the roadrunners. I'm doing strength training and I'm not stronger than somebody who is not doing strength training. That to me is a training error. If you saw that difference get teased out and I were these athletes' coaches, which I'm not, I would look at that and go crap. We need to figure out something. Something is not working here. That's neither here nor there because we don't know like the intricacies of the programming, but through my coaching lens, when I see things like that, I think of Instantly. What I think of is there's some sort of programming error Whenever you are trying to elicit a specific adaptation, and with strength, hopefully, if you're strength training, you should be training for strength.
Speaker 1:You should be able to elicit not just a little bit markedly higher strength profiles, no matter how you're testing them as compared to a group that's not doing any strength training. That would be like me saying listen, I'm going to take an endurance trained group and a group that's not training for endurance at all. We would expect the endurance training group to have better physiological parameters across all the endurance things that we're measuring VO2 max and lactate threshold and things like that. If we were to see that in the endurance world, we'd look at this and go on. Something that this endurance group is doing is not doing its job correctly because they're not performing any better across. The thing that they're supposed to be training for is compared to this other group that's not doing any training, that's more.
Speaker 1:I don't know how to solve that, but it kind of leads us into the final piece of this. Right, we've got this compare and contrast across two groups who are reasonably well matched. You know, the training part of it is certainly weird, that's the only way that I can describe it. But what can the athletes take away from this that can kind of impact their training or their knowledge of how to train? On a day-to-day perspective, we tend to draw and the reason that I get into this is we do draw a lot of inspiration from training, from the traditional endurance sports, mainly marathon, somewhat, to a certain extent 10K maybe even like long distance triathlon or Ironman triathlon. We do draw training inspiration from that. What can we learn in that whole process, from looking at these two different groups and coming up with how they're similar and how they're different?
Speaker 2:What I do think is that the biggest thing that we saw was what we were happy just talking about, like this strength component the strength and power component being better in lead to a better virtual runner. So then I think that there is a need to train that. What the next step there is? Okay, yeah, they need to train that. Does it come from actually doing strength training or is it going to come from maybe just doing the heel training and focusing on the heel training and doing well programed heel training, taking into account that that is going to be a big part of how you develop your strength, which could be more like this specific strength or strength, and this illustrates that second point.
Speaker 1:You can't out strength perform an athlete who is doing strength training just through the trail running mode of exercise. You can get superior strength adaptations just by doing that as compared to strength training Not to say that you can't combine them and make them even better. But once again, I think that's the fascinating result in all this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that is one of the takeaways. But even then, I would love to see the study of someone like comparing that, like having trail runners and actually putting them to strength training, Like in one of those traditional particles of heavy training, and seeing what happens to both their strength, but especially like their uphill running performance or the downs to running performance. Whatever you want to choose to do, to think that it's going to be the best. Actually, there is some research now going on that is looking at that and like this durability thing, like is it going to improve your running economy after a few hours, for example?
Speaker 1:Well, here is yeah, because I'll keep going, sorry.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that is like one component. Yeah, maybe strength Training improves your running economy when you're not cutting by 1%, but then, like after two hours of running, like in the last two hours of your short line race on the last 10K of a marathon, maybe it has like a big impact on allowing you to get to less and worse.
Speaker 1:Yeah, here's another takeaway, another training takeaway that I take. He seems to keep coming up time and time again and I feel like the more it comes up and the more I recognize it. Like 10 years from now I'm going to get burned for making this statement. But the fact that you see 14K an hour result in a difference in running economy between the two, I wouldn't think that would be fast enough. Like when I looked at that I'm like this is not fast enough for this, these levels of athletes, that it's really going to make a difference. The fact that it actually does make a difference kind of reinforces some of the earlier stuff. That like man, it's like traditional running economy. What I mean by that is put somebody on a treadmill of 14K an hour in a flat level condition Traditional running economy. That might not be the best thing to aim for from a training perspective and certainly, kind of using this more of a compare and contrast model, it's kind of become like a hero maker right in the road running world where it's like the not the only, but the main kind of like separator in the elite category.
Speaker 1:People chase that variable around, right, they chase it around with strength training. You see that in your cohort, right? You see that in your elite road marathon cohort they're doing strength training by and large not exclusively, but a big reason for that is to improve their running economy. They chase it around in other ways nutritional interventions, equipment with the, you know, carbon fiber plated shoes and things like that, and when I see these differences it just kind of reinforces that man. Maybe that variable is not. It's certainly not as material as it is in road running. How material it is kind of up to the eye of the beholder. But that's another thing that I take away from that is is that we see these running economy differences that you I really wouldn't expect it at 14K an hour you might have, but I just don't think it's fast enough. Even with the trail runners I don't think it's fast enough. But it just kind of comes back to me and maybe that might not be something that we chase around.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that is one very good point, that like one reason why it is chased by the elite runners. I think it is that it's like all the endurance determinants, like the physiological determinants of endurance, being like a view to my eyes, like threshold. Whatever you want to call that one endurance running economy, it is the one that you can change with like non-training interventions, and legally, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Because everyone else involves doping basically right, yeah, or like maybe that thing can help you with endurance further or something, but like basically everyone, everything else involves doping and there's where you can put like stuff like that. In three-term interventions, the technology, like the car will be, choose all that sort of stuff. What happens then is that in trail running I think that we have I have mentioned this to you and the other people who have CTS before but the in trail running like there's many things that make it different from running on the treadmill.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like between road running and treadmill running. You're running on a flat surface at this completely level that you just have to run on, and there are differences because the treadmill is moving on the road, there's no time, blah, blah, blah. There's a wind and there's going to be turns, right. But then if you go from there to trail running like if you're running like every single step that you take in a 100 mile race, which may be like 100,000 steps you need to choose where you put your foot.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's a technical race like every single one of them, like that's just like from the mental perspective. And there is one study that I saw in my pieces about this running economy thing in which they put and they put road runners, or I think it were track runners and orientation. If they made them run on a track, the running economy was not different, but then they made them run through the forest go from this point to this point, moving these course on the forest, and then the track runners got much worse.
Speaker 2:Yeah right, so it's like it's a very specific adaptation of and it may be that it may not be physiological maybe choosing where you put your foot picking your line or this, all that skill and concentration that might be much more important than the physiology of whatever your legs and tendons or mitochondria are doing when just running at a steady pace. Also, that all the changes in, like the micro changes in pace that are going to have an impact.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I did study that you mentioned. I'll link up in the, I'll link up at the show notes because I think that's an interesting one. But yeah, I keep kind of coming back to this and you could, once again, you could kind of take two flavors of it. You can just say listen, for whatever reason, it's just not as important. The speed makes it less important, the terrain makes it less important or whatever.
Speaker 1:Or the other thing that you could take into consideration is trail and ultra running is more complex. The preform, like the ultimate performance, is more of a complex soup of things that go into it. As compared to road running that's not to denigrate it at all it's kind of the fact that it's longer, it contains more skill. It goes up and down trails and all those other things. It's more complex and because it's more complex, each individual variable is going to just matter less, because there's more of them. There's just simple math. So I think that one of the hero takeaways here is we don't need to chase it around in the same degree we do in marathon running. We're not doing that principle of. We derive a lot of training inspiration from some of the other sports. Here's something where we need to temper that inspiration down a little bit in order to meet the relevance of it in the sport that we're actually talking about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that is a very interesting point. If we look at the typical ways in which you will try to enhance running economy in road runners, they will be like a strength training part and then the mileage itself and then maybe bring stuff like strides or higher speed running and all that sort of stuff. What happens is that, even if it's true that running economy matters, what matters is the running economy running on the trail Right, and you're going to get that by running a lot on the trail. Yeah, maybe actually what this happened is that every training minute that you're spending, I don't know, bling fast strides or stuff like that, you could be spending the training on your specific terrain, whatever, like if it's gravel for your race on gravel routes, and then if it's that, if it's super technical terrain like Rocky and Ruti, then training on that will help you improve your running economy in that specific compass, even if it doesn't nothing for your running economy on the trail.
Speaker 1:You know, your trail running cohort kind of accentuates that. Right, because they have such a lower training volume and they're probably doing it in a more specific way. Right, because they know they can't like waste. They can't like waste time doing other things. They're like, hey, if I'm going to be at the bakery at 4am I'm going to be hitting the trails like, right when I get off of work and that's what I'm going to run, I'm going to run trails the entire time, because all this other stuff it's not specific to the deal, but your point is well taken that I do think that there's some sort of I don't know what to call it.
Speaker 1:You know there's like a specific locomotion economy, you know, over trails or kind of whatever. But I do think that it's a much different context in trail and multi running. I do think that the way that we train for it, we at least need to think about a whole lot differently and not just say these are the standard ways that we improve running economy in the road running world and just copy pasting those into the trail world. I think we need to scrutinize that a little bit more from a training perspective and the easiest way to scrutinize it is to put those interventions into the environment where they matter the most. So, like you said, strides over you know kind of technical terrain. Right, might be a great, you know, might be a great type of way to do it. Strength training or plyometric types of training that are not in a gym, that are more in a more natural environment, can accomplish those things.
Speaker 1:I think that those are the types of training strategies that people need to look at when they're trying to figure out. Okay, I've got 10 more minutes to do an adjunctive intervention here. What am I going to do? Am I going to do strides on the track? Am I going to do strides on the trail? No, good to do strides on the trail.
Speaker 2:Exactly Like strides on the trail or like trying to do I don't know like stuff that I have tried that. I don't know if people work or not, right, but like you're on the trail you're not running the technical trail and then try to take longer steps than you would take normally, so like you have to choose that. Yeah, you're bouncing from Dr Rocher. You're doing some kind of like low level plyometric training in a way that includes whatever it is, the instability, but not just like what you're doing like box jumps in the gym.
Speaker 1:I think there's something. I think there's something to that. Once again, I'm not saying completely sell out, don't get in the gym, but I just think that thinking about it in a specific way is super important. Okay you ready for some pure banter, pure entertainment banter.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely no relevance to yeah.
Speaker 1:Natural running banter, exactly, exactly. That was the original tagline of this that I'm going to move away from, but we'll do it anyway for this one. So, in your estimation, after actually doing these research, can the we'll make it specific Can the French elite marathon runners come into the trail and ultra world and dominate? How many years, as is they? Just take their physiology and they're training twice as much. Take their physiology and training and then come into the Ultra World.
Speaker 2:I think that it was Jim Walshley that said at some point bring them with me to the canyon and then we'll see who comes out first.
Speaker 2:I think he was right With that? I think that, absolutely not. I think that, to understand, using Jim Walshley as an example, he said that his mountain training was not good enough to succeed at the UTMB, so he had to move to trends to have more mindfulness and environment. Even then, I think that the marathon runners are good at running and I think that the ultra marathon running is much more than running.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the other day I was talking to an athlete that is considering going, trying to set a world record in my Spanish race. He was like well, yeah, so how good are you at running at night? And I was like well, I never run at night, except in races. And I said well, I don't know if you have to run at night, I don't mean that you have to spend all night long, but you should be comfortable running with headlamp, right? Yeah? And then he told me a story about, at some point, what was the key Beginning of the race. He started raining. He said oh no, I'm not going to put my shell jacket on, I will warm up once we start Exactly.
Speaker 2:I like that's not going to happen in marathon runners, except for that time that, like Kawahuchi, won.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's what I remember, that.
Speaker 2:That one time right, and it's one time, remember. It's like it can easily be every other race into running which, like that, like weather, has like a very big impact. And then at that point it's going to be like small decisions, like why put the jacket on? No, do I take it off or not, and that must be trained. They cannot just come and do it. Even if they have probably better physiology, they will not be able. Here's the point. There's the jump of the physiology from there to the ultra, like with the heels and everything. But then there's the all the decisions making.
Speaker 2:So, like a true runner or like an ultra marathon, true runner is somewhere between a runner and a mountaineer. I would say Right To some extent. And like then it depends like more of that in Europe, in America, more of that for hard run, but for western states maybe Right, but there is a bit of a combination between the two sports. That's why I think we have, we see very good like ski mountaineers doing that, because ski mountaineers and getting into it down, like every time that you reach the top you have to do 15 things with your back. Yeah, exactly. And then like you use that time to feel and all that stuff, like well, yeah, you have to do many things. Like how close are you with your like putting things on in the back and leaving them out? Like, can you find things in your backpack with your ice gloves? Right, yeah, a marathon runner has never, ever done that.
Speaker 1:Here. Well, yeah, you're absolutely right. A marathon runner has probably never done that, unless they have that experience, which hardly any of them do. Here's what I think. I think it's worth about 10%. I think if you take 10, like a 10% better physiological road runner, right, they're going to perform at about the same level as that 10% worse person on the trails. That's how much of the, and it might even be more than that.
Speaker 1:I might be undershooting that now that I'm thinking about it, but it takes that much. So if you take somebody with you know 70, you know 70 VO2 max trail runner, you're going to have somebody that's 77 or 80 VO2 max and whatever the running economy you know like to hit threshold. Equivalents of those are on the road running side. Transplant them on the trail to even get it close. That's how much I think it actually makes a difference, not to say you should maximize all those variables, but I just think this specificity component that we're talking about makes that it's not trivial. I guess that's what I'm saying. I think it's one or two percent.
Speaker 2:I think it's yeah, absolutely, I absolutely think that this is right, like it's not trivial. Just the fact that, like, bring that, like I'm thinking about doing a ring to ring in the brand Canyon, basically right, which is like a buff, at least on like the south side, which is the one that I thought is like a trail, that is, there's no road. It's not technical, it's like big downhill and then big uphill, right. So then, if you do that and then you put a trail runner and over another road runner, I would like to see one of the marathon runners after they get to the bottom, which is like what? Like 10 miles, no remember.
Speaker 2:Like it's about 10 miles in which you lose like more than 1000 meters, or more people. Right.
Speaker 2:So it's like, well, are they going to be able to come out the other side and start doing a ring to ring to ring when they get to the top of the other side, are they going to be able to come back and repeat that? And I think that physiology is going to have a very big impact, which is like one of the things that will be trainable, that they could train for. That's why it's like in how many years?
Speaker 1:right, yeah, there you go.
Speaker 2:And then the other thing that I thought was important. There is that one problem that we see many times in trail running is that we have things that multiply your race by zero, like one bad nutrition and decision, kind of like then it's a BNF and I think that, like road trail runners make those mistakes all the time. Like in every big race you're like oh yeah, last UTMB, this guy and this guy didn't finish Right. It's your own multiplication Much more likely for that. So like it's the 10% plus the increased likelihood of all those things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm with you on that one too, totally. All right, that's enough banter, fred, we're going to let you go. Man. Cool paper, I'll link it up in the show notes. Man, I'll link up all the accessory stuff in the show notes. And I also think one that if we read between the lines a little bit which we always have to do we can come up with some really practical takeaways that will actually drive the training process and not just be something that we discuss in the show, something that we discuss in the bars. Yeah, so I appreciate you coming on, man.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:All right, folks, there you have it. There you go. Much thanks to coach Fred for coming on the podcast today and providing some insight into the paper that he was the lead author on, and I do think that some of this insight is something that only somebody who is involved with in the research can actually provide us with. Yes, they have to produce a paper and that paper is available to the public at large, but when you actually talk to the researchers themselves, you're able to glean a lot more insight into what was actually going on, some of the strengths of the paper, some of the weaknesses of the paper and, most importantly, what we can take away from that in order to drive training practice. I hope you all appreciated that, especially some of the banter in the end around strength training. Somebody is going to yell at me afterwards and say that I am not an advocate for strength training because of that commentary, but I do think the fact that the trail runners had greater strength than the road runners despite doing no strength at all, is a super interesting finding that you can provide your own color commentary on. Appreciate the heck out of Fred for coming on the podcast. I appreciate the heck out of you all, the listeners out there, for bringing this podcast to life, as always it has brought you without sponsorships or endorsements in any way, shape or form whatsoever, in order to prevent any sort of financial entanglement with any of the commentary that we are providing on this, on this podcast. So it's you, the listeners, that are responsible for proliferating the podcast and making it what it is today, and I thank you very much for that.
Speaker 1:If you like this podcast, please share it with your friends. You can do it right in the Apple podcast app, if that is your preferred podcasting platform of choice, or you can do it across Spotify. It's very easy Just click the share button, send a text message to one of your training partner Homies and hopefully they will enjoy this content as much as you did. That is it for today, folks, and as always, we will see you out on the trails.