KoopCast
Coach Jason Koop covers training, nutrition and recent happenings in the ultramarathon world.
KoopCast
Strategies for High-Quality Training with CTS Coach Adam Pulford #224
Jason Koop and Adam Pulford discuss training quality and how we can define and improve it.
Study on training quality-
https://journals.humankinetics.com/view/journals/ijspp/18/5/article-p557.xml
Additional resources:
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Information on coaching-
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Koop’s Social Media
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trail and ultra runners. What is going on? Welcome to another episode of the coop cast. As always, I am your humble host, coach jason coop, and I am back from a two-week hiatus. The cause of that hiatus is neither here nor there, but you can probably hear it a little bit in my voice and throughout the course of this podcast.
Speaker 1:This podcast is with one of my favorite coaches on the entire planet, one of the best mountain bike coaches in the world, one of the best cycling coaches in the world and somebody who I have had the privilege of working with for nearly 20 years now, and that is Adam Pulford. Adam and I wanted to dissect this recent paper coming out of Norway, all about training quality and how we can define quality training from the get-go, starting from the plan that you actually develop way before you put pen to paper and determine that you want to run two hours today or two hours tomorrow, whatever your training plan actually looks like for the week. The reason that this is so important is because I know many of you are ramping your training up right now, in advance of this race season that is continually unfolding right in front of us, so I hope the content of this podcast helps you direct the training that you do day to day, week to week, and also the plan that you put behind that training. We also spend a little bit of time bantering on one of the things that is my new fascination and that is high performance coaching, or some of these coaching groups that we have started to wrap around athletes. Adam happens to have a little bit of experience in that, and he's also on one of the high performance teams with me, and so we offer a little bit of our perspective in terms of how we might actually see this shape up in the trail and ultra running realm when it has already been established in other endurance sports like cycling, running and in triathlon.
Speaker 1:Okay, folks, with that intro I am getting right out of the way. Here's my conversation with Adam Pulford all about what constitutes quality training Figure. We're going to talk about quality training, what constitutes quality training? Then, if we have a little bit of time, we'll talk a little bit about some of this high performance stuff that we've been doing, about some of this high performance stuff that we've been doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's good and I think, to that point, this all got brought up because of the podcast that I run, the Time Crunch Cyclist. I was answering an audience question and I said something about quality training and blah, blah blah and make sure quality remains high. And so an audience member wrote in and they said you know, I basically know what you mean by what you said. You're basically saying intensity needs to remain high, but a lot of endurance athletes and coaches just throw around the term quality. And so can you specifically define quality? Train more. And I was like, ooh, so I started doing my research. It led me to Alex Hutchinson, who I'm a big fan of. I got him on the podcast, we had a good conversation about it, but more and more I think it is a very relevant thing to talk about with our athletes, amongst our coaches, and just like, what the heck is it? How do we define it? How do we track it?
Speaker 1:Well, I think we need to start with our coaches, to be honest with you, or coaches in general, like maybe not so much our coaches but coaches in general, because you're right that we tend to throw around that term a lot. But I would guarantee you, if you let me lay a bet down in Vegas on this if you really pinned a coach down and asked them, how would you objectively define quality training? If this training session or group of sessions is of high quality, how would you and you can have subjective metrics as well how would you define that? And they would have a hard time coming up with the answer. That's. The bet that I would make is that people would be like blah blah, blah, blah, blah, like they they, they cause they haven't thought about it.
Speaker 2:Well, that's it, coop. And I think even for me. I've been coaching for almost I mean, we're coming up on 19 years, almost 20 years now and when I got that question I was like, boom, push me, because I need to get organized about this and have and communicate in. But I needed to pull someone else in and it was an expert field, so okay, so let's encapsulate that a little bit to start out with.
Speaker 1:So you already did your research, like now you can give us the elevator pitch and we can be done with this podcast in like three minutes yeah.
Speaker 2:so elevator pitch is start with the plan hopefully it's a good one Communicate the plan, have aspects to track within that communication to the athlete, and then the athlete does it and then does what they did line up with the plan in terms of RPE, pace, power, total time, whatever the objectives were. Then you talk about it, see how closely it matched, and then does that session fit into the global pan plan overall. So it's really the big picture plan, the individual session plan and then how that tracks, depending on how long you want to go out.
Speaker 1:Okay, can I poke a hole in your elevator pitch? Oh, you can freaking poke away. Of course I can, cause I've been doing this to you for almost 20 years, as you just mentioned. That is all fine and good, but it is contingent on the plan.
Speaker 2:Oh, for sure, and that's oh. I'm not done yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the plan fitting what is going to be conducive for performance to the athlete For sure, but that's where you said so to be fair, you said elevator pitch right and so you have to. You didn't go to the very top floor. You're not on the rooftop deck yet. Is that what you're saying?
Speaker 2:And that's it. Because if you're like, okay, give it to me in 90 seconds, it's like you got to start somewhere. Start with a print and my podcast with Alex he brought it up. He's like what if your plan is shitty?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, no, I mean because we see this all the time in coaching. It's like, okay, yeah, that session accomplishes what you say, or it will probably accomplish what you say it's going to accomplish, but is what you're trying to accomplish actually going to matter for performance? Those are two very different things that you can kind of get at and you can get one right and not the other. You can get neither one of them right and we see, know what the determinants of performance are from a physiological perspective, from a psychological perspective, like what are the things that are going to enable performance the most? And then how are you going to tune the knobs, so to speak, or dial the training this, that or the other, with workout structure and overall architecture, to, to to achieve those ends? I kind of view it as a sequential process that starts with what are the performance determinants first, and then designing the training from a global perspective and then also from a session by session perspective around those performance determinants.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a very good way of putting it and along those lines, I think it's fruitful to put in there the performance um aspects, like you said, as well as the strengths and weaknesses too. Sure, yeah, yeah. So you put that in and then we have this grand plan of how we go and, what's interesting, we can take it down this direction too. But, like you and I work with athletes one-on-one individual, and so you're usually just driving that ship when it comes to big picture plan, annual plan, monthly plan, weekly plan, to the session. Then we work with elite athletes where there's other cooks in the kitchen and we got to be on the same plan, the same page, for those planning things, and sometimes you're the one with the master plan as well as the individual session. But then there we're pulling on threads from all this other stuff to make sure that who's ever doing stuff psychologically or nutritionally, or coach all edgy wise.
Speaker 1:Coach all edgy wise. You're making that up right now. Yeah, made it up. Coachology-wise. Coachology-wise Are you making that up right now? Yeah, I made it up.
Speaker 2:That we are all kind of funneling into high-quality training, high-quality coaching, and that's a tricky one too, when you got multiple cooks in the kitchen.
Speaker 1:We're going to talk about that probably at the end of the podcast, since you and I are on a couple of these high-performance teams and it's been a recent fascination and fixation of mine. Again, it's my podcast, so I can talk about whatever I want to, but let's kind of go back to the basement, right? So these are the performance determinants. I'm going to lay out a really simplistic scenario to hopefully drive this home and I'm going to bridge both the cycling world, which is your world, and then the ultra running world, which is my world, both the cycling world, which is your world, and then the ultra running world, which is my world. Just to set the table, how long is it going to take an elite athlete to do a one kilo, one kilometer race on the track? Just so the listeners can know.
Speaker 2:For men less than a minute, okay, perfect. 50 seconds For 50 seconds okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was recently out at the Canyons 100 and the lead men were eight-ish hours and lead women were nine-ish hours. Just kind of a ballpark there, right? So we've got these two different events Cycling event on one side, running event on the other side. Cycling event is less than a minute, running event is eight or nine hours. Needless to say, the performance determinants for either one of those races are markedly different. Fair statement, fair statement. Okay, now let's tailor this down a little bit more. Give me an example of an eight. Oh, I'm going to give you an example, because I just came up with the best one. Let's look at the Leadville Trail 100 mountain bike. Yeah, okay, how long does it take the leaders to do that race Six?
Speaker 2:and change Six 40-ish 630-ish.
Speaker 1:Yeah, six-ish. Now let's compare and contrast that with once again, I was just at Canyons this last weekend eight-hour race. You have a six-hour race, you have an eight-hour race.
Speaker 2:that's not that different from a time, this is a better example.
Speaker 1:This is why I started with the easy one and now we're going to get to this one. That's not that different from a time perspective. Right, they're close. Let's just say we're coaching a nine hour Leadville trail 100 mountain bike finisher. That would be me. The only year that I did the Leadville trail 100 mountain bike, I did it at nine hours. So now we have the time. The duration of the events being very similar, are the determinants of those events similar as well?
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:Okay, you're the cyclist I'm going to go for you can first start out and then I'll do the running side. What would the determinants of the cycling side be? What would enable the athlete to succeed in that race from a physiological perspective? What things do you need to accentuate during the training process that are extremely important in that type of race?
Speaker 2:yeah. So overall big picture is build the aerobic engine. This is kind of our classic general base building phase, building up time in the saddle up to a point where we can determine okay, now the now the aerobic system, we can move on and start to add intensity, but from that volume standpoint, because I've got some hard markers on that. But at some point I'm going to change and really focus on functional threshold power, ftp, because that's going to be the biggest determiner when it comes to performance. If we have some performance goals sub nine, whatever, whatever but the volume for that one is still high. However, the intensity, especially at ftp, is super important. So I want to make sure that is as high as I can get it four weeks out, do a couple more long rides, come to it fresh, and we haven't even talked about altitude okay, let's leave the altitude piece of it out, not to confound it too too much.
Speaker 1:An athlete during that. What's the range of physiology that they're going to elicit Just from like?
Speaker 2:an energy system standpoint.
Speaker 1:Well, energy systems, or percent of VO2 max or percent of FTP, you can create the anchor point wherever you want to, whatever listeners you think it will resonate with, because I'll be out on my side.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a shit ton of time in zone two and three and then we're hitting low zone four on key hill climbs and watch it there. So we don't blow up so supra like harder than threshold for some of those climbs yeah, like at and depending on, like that athlete right, like careful because again at altitude, like you don't want to burn it too hot in zone four because you can blow up.
Speaker 1:That's the volatile spot, how much time would they spend above an intensity factor of one? So just to explain to the listeners, an intensity factor of one would be basically at your functional threshold power or your functional threshold pace, which is the pace you could sustain for about an hour. Like how much time during the Leadville Trail 100 for an elite athlete would they spend above a intensity?
Speaker 2:factor of one. Well, an elite athlete, I would say, is different than a sub-nine.
Speaker 1:Are you trying to tell me that I'm not elite? I'm just barely sub-nine.
Speaker 2:I just told you that in a very roundabout way. All right, fair enough, let's do elite athlete Cause.
Speaker 1:I'm going to match it, I'm going to match you, matching on the elite side.
Speaker 2:Okay. So for an elite athlete I wouldn't be as concerned about spending more time in that, say, zone four or intensity factor of 1.0, especially if they spend some time at a bad altitude. They're going to have to do that, but you don't want to super hang out there because that's the point at which you're going to fatigue faster, so I want to stay under. And then how much time at? I actually haven't had an elite do Leadville in some time, but I would say no more than 75 minutes of time spent at like a 1.0, and that's dosed throughout the whole time. Yeah, for my non-elites, less and don't again it's more like a shit ton of time in zone three yeah, okay, fair enough, all right, so that now let's go to the running side of it, right?
Speaker 1:so the the hallmark is, from a performance determinant uh perspective, the elite athletes in a race like that are running at the high end of their zone two or endurance zone, for pretty much the entire time more intense than the descending, and if you break the files down, the climbs are at about an intensity factor of like 0.85, maybe 0.9 for some of them.
Speaker 1:The climbs are 30 minutes long, 20 minutes long, things like that, and you know four or five chunks and the rest of the race is at an intensity factor of like 0.7 or 0.75. So I guess my point is there's zero time spent at threshold and not a lot of time even really all that close to it. There might be five minutes at an intensity factor of 0.1 or something like that. So my point with the compare and contrast is, even when the time domain is very similar, the performance determinants or the physiology that's elicited during the race can actually be markedly different depending upon we're picking running and cycling. But even if you look intra-discipline, an eight-hour cycling race or six-and-a-half-hour cycling race at the level of TR100 can be markedly different than another type of six-and-a-half hour cycling race, in terms of how the race actually plays out and what physiology is actually elicited.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, 100% agreed. And as I'm sitting here thinking too, and then maybe somebody will be like oh no, here's Keegan Swenson's file and he had this much time at zone four and five.
Speaker 1:There's always going to be somebody that does that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there always will be. But I think the other thing that I think about is I'm like visual too is two things. One with cycling we, when we rack up time and zone, it's very stochastic, so right. It can rack up over time and a lot of spikes, right. So that's different too, because it's like intermediate or intermittent, as it goes. And then, the second thing, three things. Second thing is we have a ton of time descending where we're not.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's nothing zero.
Speaker 2:So we have this like kind of u-shaped curve when it comes to a very high performing athlete in a race like this, where it's a ton of time in zone one, ton of time in zone four, some up in five yeah, in that time, ton of time in zone one. Or recovery is coasting downhill. Where you guys are running downhill, yeah, they're much more medium. So that that polarization, that contrast is actually it not to be overlooked when you're looking at the performance disciplines or the performance indicators of what we're talking about yeah.
Speaker 1:So the descents as opposed to, I'm gonna I'm gonna try to use intensity factors and anchor points. I think a lot of people that'll kind of resonate with. So the the descents. For a Hilly 100k I'm using canyons as an example because I was just there he's gonna be around 0.75 or 0.70 for the elite athletes. That's still Running at a reasonable pace. Yeah right, that's not zero watts, not even close.
Speaker 2:It's not zero watts and I would say that, Leadville, even I consider it not to be technical, but if you're not proficient descender it's also not zero watts, but for those who are better at descending.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, so, so, anyway, my I forget the, my exact point with that exercise. Oh yeah, now I remember. It's the set set, this basement, this ground floor principle of what are the performance determinants in terms of how you are actually going to gauge what is high-quality workouts. And I think, from a coaching perspective, the first step in that is know what the freaking demands of the event are. You and I have been through coaching hiring rounds, rounds, and I can tell this story because it's been circulated around the sphere for a while.
Speaker 1:One of the screening tools that we use is to give people case studies, and we give them a case study.
Speaker 1:It's usually based off of one of our real athletes and then they go back and figure out a training plan for them and they describe that training plan to the group and more often than not, we'll have a decent handful of potential candidates that come back and they have this elaborate plan with all these intervals and structured this and psychology, that, and I'm going to do high intensity over here and this is going to be a three-minute interval and then I'm going to change to three and a half minute intervals and all this kind of nuance.
Speaker 1:And then you ask them what the time duration of the event is, and they usually flub it Very basic. This is the demand of the event. It's a six hour event, it's a nine hour event, it's a 12 hour event, and then you can drill into okay, well, how much time are they spending in whatever intensity construction that you want to come up with, whether it's a zone based intensity, you know construction, or heart rate, or power, or pace, or rpe or whatever so anyway. So my, my pathway right, the map that I'm reading at least, to what is high quality training starts out with what are the freaking demands of the event and what are the things that you want to elicit in order to ready the athlete for the demands of that event yeah.
Speaker 2:In that, so at the very highest level, you're ensuring that you have a good plan to start from to work with. Yeah, and that will trickle down. Even though trick on economics doesn't work, this will trickle down. Sorry, let's not get into policy trickle down a proper high quality training program to your athlete.
Speaker 1:in my, my opinion, Okay, so now we can go into the next component. Right, let's just assume that we get the plan right. Right, we have a good overall plan. Now let's go to structure and to the individual sessions, which I think the paper that we're referencing that I'll link up in the show notes. It's not its exclusive orientation, but it's primary orientation. There's a lot of dialogue being spent around how do you organize a session or a series of sessions such that it elicits a high quality training? You can take the lead on this one. So, in your estimation and you're figuring out, how do we look at the individual sessions and ensure that they are high quality?
Speaker 2:Well, this goes back to my elevator pitch and to be brief about it, and then you can whittle some holes in it all you want. Once you have a good plan pulled out of Coop's basement, you can then create sessions. Right, and let's say that you have a planned session for the day. You communicate that to the athlete, goes and executes it. Then you have a kind of a debriefing or some evaluation of the athlete, uploads the file and see if the RPE matches with what we're trying to do or the power of the pace, whatever. Then I would then say that a good coach or a good coach athlete process goes back to the planning and preparation aspect of it to say, okay, is this really doing what we want it to be doing based on this overall good, yes, and then we keep on cycling down.
Speaker 1:Yes, and this is once again. We got to come back to coaching. Does the workout actually do what you want it to do? So classic example JT Kearney actually gave me this example when we were talking about it in a podcast a long time ago, and he probably did it to me when we were in person.
Speaker 1:He's like listen, I could give you a workout that would absolutely floor you Like you would be annihilated afterwards, yet it probably wouldn't serve the purpose of eliciting any sort of remote endurance adaptation. Let's just do this. I want you to do 50 burpees, run 100 meters. Do another 50 burpees, run back. Do another 100 meters. Do another 50 burpees, run back. Do another 100 meters. Do another 50 burpees, run back. Do another 100 meters until you have 1000 meters of distance covered. That would probably take an hour. You would probably be absolutely annihilated afterwards.
Speaker 1:Your heart rate would probably be pretty high during that entire session. If you were just to not know what was going on and then just look at the heart rate response for it, it would look like a hard endurance effort, right? Yet it's not going to accomplish anything that you would remotely want to accomplish in an endurance application, right? I use that as a silly example. Nobody is actually doing that, but we do see you and I, both professionals, long-time professionals we do see sessions that are designed and don't accomplish the goal that they were designed for. And I'll give you a very practical one that I see all the time in the running sphere and I bet you see this in the cycling sphere as well time in the running sphere and I bet you see this in the cycling sphere as well. So you can elicit a vo2 max adaptation in kind of two fundamental ways you can do it through a shit ton of volume low intensity volume and you can do it with a reasonable amount of high intensity work.
Speaker 2:Now we're going to leave the zone 2 conversation in the rear view mirror for now because let's leave it there, but some of the terms that I've been using, if you want to use it is you can push it up aerobically or you can pull it up with intensity. Yeah, sure, yeah, I think that's totally fine.
Speaker 1:But on, on the intensity side of things, you have to have two fundamental components the intensity has to be high enough and you have to have enough of it. You might say that you need enough of it continuously and that's a kind of debated nuance that we'll shove that into the corner for now as well. And they've done a lot of research on it. In fact a lot of the original research on this was done by a trail runner, varonk Balat, and everybody who's been training for a long period of time will recognize the BA 3030s right 30 seconds hard, 30 seconds easy, until you accumulate 12 minutes or 20 minutes or whatever at intensity. She did a lot of the original research on it and I believe she won the Gama trail race in like 1982 or something like that Long time ago. Fun little factoid, anyway.
Speaker 1:So my point with the high intensity side of it is you have to have both the intensity side correct as well as the volume of that intensity side correct and through all of this research it's about over 12 minutes. You might be able to justify 10 minutes for an early stage athlete of time at intensity above 90% of your VO2 max. So the intensity side is above 90% of your VO2 max and the time that you need to eclipse is probably 12, maybe 10 in some cases, and you can come up with all kinds of architecture to do that Two-minute intervals, three-minute intervals, one-minute intervals, 30-second intervals like the BA intervals, four-minute intervals and things like that but those two fundamental things need to exist. The error that we have both seen that I see a lot in the running side is 10 by one minute hard, one minute easy for a good athlete, and that's not enough of the second component for a good athlete and that's not enough of the second component the time and intensity to elicit enough of a response for it to be a robust adaptation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, correct and I think the best way I can describe this with my athletes, what I try to do is teach them while I'm coaching and when we're talking about the reason why we're using intervals to do VO2 max or whatever interval.
Speaker 2:But VO2 max is interesting in this response is because we call this as aerobic crossover point, where, if you have continuous exercise of around 75 seconds and longer, you start to pull in oxygen or you start to become using oxygen as a primary fuel source over that 50% marker. And this is that crossover point of that continuous effort that I show athletes where they start to go a little bit more aerobic and me and I could get filleted for this because, no, the glycolytic energy system is super hot at 75 seconds and fair, but that continuous, that's what we're really talking about. So when I'm, the very minimum that I would use for a great interval is 90 seconds even, yeah, as a standalone interval and that's setting aside like the on off stuff right now. But I use at least 90 seconds if I'm trying to do something from a vo2 standpoint and then I make sure that it's kind of over 15 minutes. I know 12, 15, whatever and then I probably go up to 25 minutes total, with an asterisk.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm in zone per session so there, I mean for the audience, that's that it's kind of getting lost in the weeds. Here there's a I describe workout structure, a lot in training essentials for ultra running, and what I'll do is I'll link like an excerpt of how to design some of these intervals in the show notes, because there's a reason why I've set out the structure the way that I've set out the structure, and the reason is because when you do any combination of intervals you can prescribe a power output or a pace output, but just by way of the combination of the interval time, the recovery time and the number of intervals you're going to get the athlete into the right intensity just by a byproduct of that. So there's a reason why. There's a very deliberate reason why you see the structure that you actually see, because each one of the workouts is kind of targeted at a specific piece of the athlete's physiology.
Speaker 1:Not that's the only thing that gets developed continuum. It's. They're not, you know, buttons that we're pushing, it's their knobs that we're turning up or levers that we're gradually dialing up or dialing down, but they're very. The architecture of any of those workouts is very deliberately designed to hit both the intensity component that I mentioned earlier as well as the volume of that intensity, depending upon what we want to do throughout various pieces of the season. So my point is you don't need to be a physiologist to figure out like, oh, you need over 12 minutes at over 90% of your VO2 max. If you just construct the workout correctly, you can paint by numbers to a certain extent, and this is what a lot of coaches do. They don't know the physiology behind it. They're just painting by numbers from previous coaches. Right, you can just paint by numbers and you can achieve a high quality session, if that's the thing that you actually want to identify.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and don't church it up. I think, like what does that mean? Don't church it?
Speaker 1:up, don't church it up. I've never heard that phrase.
Speaker 2:Watch Joe D like what does that mean? Don't church it up?
Speaker 1:don't church it.
Speaker 2:I've never heard that phrase watch show dirt man I don't go to. I don't go to church. Well, no, you don't even need to go to church of it. I don't church it up. Don't make it fancier than. Okay, got it. And that's what I see coaches do all the time. They get it and you're made a nod to that before. It's like three minutes here, 30 seconds here, two minutes there. It's like what the hell are you doing?
Speaker 2:it makes me want to bang my head against the wall training, like effective training, is actually monotonous and kind of boring. Like it can be boring right, and the longer I coach the more I see that. So I would say training prescription is easy or fast, but actual coaching takes good. That takes time Knowing what to deploy, building something whatever 30 seconds for a session.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I recently had to do this because I think I told you I'm working on this AI project. Yeah, and one of the engineers asked me to like categorize all the workouts that I prescribe. There's only like 20 of them. I thought I had like hundreds of permutations of workouts and I actually started looking at it. I'm like, no, you know what. Like probably 90% of this prescription, or 95% of the prescription, comes down to like 30 workouts, not even 100, not even close to 100. Like 20, 30, where I can't remember what the actual number was. I was like, oh man, this is way. And then I was like, yeah, you know, but though, I don't need to complicate it more than that yeah, it should be that simple.
Speaker 2:And then so if the listener is like, well, how come, like we have all these variations on trainer road or uh, zwift or I don't know what's the equivalent in your world, I don't you'd go zwift coupling for three hours on a customized squiggly we don't do that, but they're definitely.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean there, there's all different ways that you can contrive these intervals, with different permutations of the recovery, right? Do you want to do a recovery, as they call it, float recoveries in the track world? Right? You want to do a recovery at a slightly higher intensity? Or do you want to, like, undulate the work period and do like you know, one at 110 percent of your threshold, the next one at 106 percent of your threshold, and all this other. So, anyway, they exist, but they're not as codified as a swift and some of the virtual cycling platforms have done yeah, and I don't mean mean to diminish some of those other platforms, because variety and entertainment leads to some motivation.
Speaker 2:So if you want to do that once in a while, all good to change it up, but I would say Be honest about it.
Speaker 1:That's what I like. If you're designing a workout for entertainment purposes or you're creating a permutation of a workout just for entertainment purposes, just say, hey, this is different because it's entertaining. It's equally or slightly less effective than the original one, but I just want a little bit of right. There's nothing wrong with that. But don't like church it up, to use my new vocabulary. Don't church it up and say, oh, glycolytic pathway, this and lactate, and like like, come up with with some stupid, nonsensical answer of why it's actually different. Just be honest and say listen, I don't want to be boring.
Speaker 2:Here's one good example in the cycling world. Saturday comes, got an athlete, we're in the shoulder season, it's March, whatever. And I say plan A, hit the group ride. Plan B do this workout. And it's intensive threshold mix and it's just a compilation of zone two and five. This sounds like Adam's random sandwich of workouts.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a sandwich, right, but it's not a crazy sandwich. And that's where, when it comes to intensity factors and time in zone, I make sure. But have like a copy of that, I just like tweak a couple things here and there, make sure it's appropriate for the athlete boom, done, it's all it is but you're on it, but you're honest about it's not like you're not coming up with, like oh, this is the magic reason why this workout is here.
Speaker 2:Like you're like this and you're mimicking the variety or the stochastic nature of a group ride exactly because the way I build that workout, the intensity factor is going to be very close to what they'll get in the group ride overall and the intensity, the absolute intensities, may be higher on the group ride. It meant the average power may be higher on the indoor intensity mixture cocktail because they're not a coasting yeah anyway okay, so back to performance determinants well we, so we went through that.
Speaker 1:Then we went through the workout construction, and my honest, simple advice to people out there just go look at the workout construction that's publicly available that I've come up with. I'm not going to say that I'm the only one out there that's done it. I beg borrowed and stealed from people before me, but I think it's a pretty good synopsis of if you wanted a high intensity workout, here are your different permutations of it. If you want a threshold e workout, here's your different, you know variations of it. Like it's all out there and it's free, freely available. Just start there. You don't have to make. You don't have to make it up.
Speaker 1:Let's go to after the fact though, because I've started putting a little bit more emphasis on this to well, I'll tell everybody why later, but I've been putting a lot more emphasis on this after the fact piece to kind of elicit a high quality training session. But I want to know what you do. I mean, I know what you do because we work together, but I want to hear, I want the listeners to hear, what you do first, and then we can riff off of that a little bit what I do first in in what so on the feet, on the feedback side of things. So athlete goes and does a workout, you obviously analyze the file, right? Yep? What is the rest of the feedback loop? I don't want to take that for granted. Hold on, let's put a pin in something Every file that comes across the wire, for every single athlete that you coach, gets some level of scrutiny.
Speaker 2:No, okay, which ones don't. So that's a great question and I'm going to say no, like straight up, but it is not true. I would say so. Here's why. Great question, and I'm going to say no, like straight up, but it is not true. I would say so. Here's why yeah, I want to know which ones don't.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so when I start working with an athlete, I'll tell them I'm going to over-communicate at the very beginning, make sure that you get educated, get up to speed on how coaching works. Then I make sure that they're good, they're not confused and we have a good rhythm going. Then I make sure that they're good, they're not confused and we have a good rhythm going. And I tell them that the sessions that we'll scrutinize over, that we'll get feedback over, are mostly structured stuff, intensity stuff. But even at the very beginning, if I see things in the aerobic training side of things, we're going to press into that. So I'll scan the zone two, endurance stuff, to make sure we're on board there and I'll make quick comments on great job.
Speaker 2:Yes, that was good, especially initially. But as I get going with my athletes, I'm not going to comment, I'm not going to thumbs up on a zone two, three hour ride Like you're a big girl. You're a big boy. You should be able to do that. If there's a problem with it, make a comment on training peak, send me a text message, whatever, but like that sort of scrutiny doesn't get on my end, but you at least hold on yeah, I think we're.
Speaker 1:Just we have different definitions of the word scrutiny. You're at least seeing that there's a three-hour ride there oh yeah, so I guess like okay.
Speaker 1:So my point is, let me rephrase it every single file that comes across the wire gets some I'm going to emphasize this just so we're on the same page some level of scrutiny. Some of those files get a lot of scrutiny. Some of those files get very little, maybe none, maybe slightly above none and like so you just check is the time there is the average power, reasonable, right, that kind of stuff yeah, so, okay.
Speaker 2:So to answer your point, or answer your question a little bit more every week, I'm like at least scanning, making sure that there is like green week on training peaks, if not green week why not?
Speaker 1:what color?
Speaker 2:If those who know training peaks, green means great, you did it in terms of the volume. Orange means somewhat in there.
Speaker 1:Red means you didn't do it before You're so off, I love the people who gamify the percentages once they know that they can change them? It's another topic.
Speaker 2:Once they know it's green all the time. But the reality is it's Christmas tree.
Speaker 1:There's stuff going on in people's lives Red, green, yellow, blank whatever, okay, so make sure green.
Speaker 2:But then the way I also, I would say, house my data and analyze my data. Everything's going into what I'm looking at in order to see what athletes are doing from a TSS total volume, uh training impulses on various uh short and long-term levels, as well as mean max power curves over time. So on one sense, you could say I look at every single second of every single data piece that an athlete does, because that's what a mean max power curve shows. Meanwhile, the performance management chart is the athlete's story and their responses to it. So, from a big data standpoint, I'm looking at stuff all the time that influences them, and it's a very powerful way of looking at it, and I think that's what athletes need to understand is, a coach doesn't need to go in every single day and make comments every single day. They need to scan and then use better tools to faster evaluate in order to give feedback on what they're doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the way I describe the process is zoom in and then zoom out and then zoom back in again, so you get the file. You zoom into the file hey, what's going on here? Okay, zoom back out how does that file fit in the big picture of things? And then zoom back in for the feedback. So let's get over the pedantic scrutiny vocabulary a little bit.
Speaker 2:Don't get scrutiny, man.
Speaker 1:I'm going to figure out how to soften that up. The next time we have a conversation about it. Let's go through the feedback loop, because I think this is super important. My point with the scrutiny side of it is you're looking at the files in some way, shape or form, right, you've got a structure, you describe the structure in which you evaluate them, but there is something there and other coaches are going to use a different way of evaluating their athletes' workouts and things like that. But I want to go through what a reasonable run of show would be from a feedback perspective. So if all comes across the wire, let's just assume it's a group ride, a race, important workout, something like that, something where you have to apply some level of acute analysis to right Something on that one particular one. How are you orienting yourself to provide the feedback to the athlete in order to facilitate this quality training?
Speaker 2:that was the origination of this podcast I would say the first thing is I look at the comments. So I read the comments actually and I used to not do that as much, by the way. More and more I read the comments first, then I look at the data, then I see the outline. If there's no comments, I look at data and the first question I ask is how'd you feel? What was perceived effort today? How did the legs feel? Those sort of questions various iterations Kristen's made. My wife has made a joke. It's like the only question you know is how'd your legs feel? Because I'm just asking that all the time. But the perceived effort is so important because if I get data, let's just say they freaking crush it right, they hit all these peak power numbers and they just obliterated all the time stuff.
Speaker 2:All the Strava KOMs all the PRs, everything, all the medals, all the crowns, male and female crowns they went so fast they were stacking them up right. But if they felt like shit, that is very different from I felt awesome, yeah, right. And now the story starts to unfold because if they felt like poo, okay. What about fueling? If they felt great, what about fueling? What about sleep, all this kind of stuff. So I think first I read comments I look for lately training peaks has done. They've been doing some cool stuff in terms of the frowny faces, the smiley faces.
Speaker 1:I love the frowny faces and smiley faces. I love it and it can go either way, like I love it frowny face because it was super technical.
Speaker 2:I thought I was gonna die and oh my god. But you know I was producing good power I'm here for it Versus man.
Speaker 2:I was crushing that power. I almost died a few times but that was awesome, smile face, so all. And I call that qualitative data because it's the quality of how the quantitative data went. So I'm first looking for qualitative, then I look at the quantitative and if I have any further questions I will reach out to the athlete. But I have a couple of varying things of. I look at peak powers relative. I will reach out to the athlete, but I have a couple of varying things. I look at peak powers relative to where we're at right now and then current time zone, to if that was the point of the workout or not, to shape up how it went, and so that's that first starting point.
Speaker 1:So that's first off.
Speaker 1:I'm going to get to the next point of this, but I want to circle back on a couple of really cool points that you mentioned.
Speaker 1:You're starting with the subjective or the qualitative data, to use your vocabulary. Even though you have cyclists with power meters and you have really good data, I mean I would say with the vast majority of those athletes you have really good data. I mean, there's shit power meters out there, just like there's shit other technology. But I think that's remarkable because you could very easily say I'm going to go to their best five-minute power or I'm going to go to the training stress score first, or I'm going to look at what the power duration curve looked like or some technical component that is readily and easily accessible by virtue of having an onboard power meter. You're still coming back to the framework, starting with how did you feel and then going to the quantitative data from the power meter and seeing if they're matching up or providing some level of analysis between the subjective and the objective uh, and I'll see this like I used to not do it that way.
Speaker 2:I used to kind of the opposite. But the more I coached, the more I'm like I got this wrong. It needs to. It provides a better output.
Speaker 1:So I have to do that because our data is shit in trail running. If you learn how to read through the GPS files onto the technicity of the surface which kind of that's the biggest obscuring factor with the data that you're getting if you learn how to do that, you can get reasonable information from the gps files. But I still start with the subjective, almost as a it's kind of where I have to, but I also think that it's the best, the best framework. In fact, my outstanding request that I've had for 20 years now Dirk Friel, if you're listening to this, please make this come true 20 years, 20 years is I want to customize what I see first in the email notifications from Training Peaks. So for the athletes that are out there, the coaches that are out there that aren't listening to this, that don't use training peaks, there's this notification system that the coaches get.
Speaker 1:Adam Pulford has completed XYZ workout and the way that it works is file gets uploaded, that file gets kind of held in a queue for the post activity comments to come through the wire and then, after the queue expires or the post activity comments get entered, that triggers this email off to the athlete and to the coach. That the workout's kind of completed. The structure of that email is hero metrics first time average heart rate blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Post-activity comments second. I have always wanted to be able to customize those emails to see the post-activity comments, the subjective data or the qualitative data first, and then the hero metric second. And I've never won that battle yet yeah, 20 years, dirk, come on brother.
Speaker 2:Well, they should have a coach. And then the athlete side, because that athlete said they're just feeding kind of the ego of the athlete with the hero metric. The coach. I would say, yeah, if we can flip it, that that's a great idea. I never even thought about that you know what.
Speaker 1:I'll give another example. I remember years ago, sunto and I don't like their watches, but this is probably the most ingenious thing that they did. They baked into the user flow within their watches this smiley faced subjective feedback tool that came up when you stopped the workout. So you go and do a workout, you hit the stop button and then it asks you how your workout went, and you get, you can give it a little smiley face rating, like right then and there, which I think is really powerful, because you've just finished and that's the time that you should compress the.
Speaker 1:Okay, how did I feel like I actually remember that now, versus like 10 minutes later, when you're sitting down at your computer after the file's uploaded and you get to, you know, the keyboard, blah, blah, blah, like that, the just the workflow, excuse me of doing it. Right then and there. I thought was really really nifty. Okay, let's get to the second part of this. So we're both saying we're both samesies on this. We go to the subjective first and then the objective second and see how they match up. So I want to know what adam pulfer does next.
Speaker 2:Oh, go ahead, sorry well, I was going to say, and for audience members, because coop doesn't prepare anything ahead of time, we didn't even collab on that. No, we didn't because I don't.
Speaker 1:There's certain guests where I know I can get away with not having much of an outline. You're one.
Speaker 2:No, that's true and I love it when that stuff happens, especially like in real time, because that's like a very good indicator, like good indicator that we're on the right page and also you better be on the right stage two.
Speaker 1:Stage two okay. So I want to know this are you giving your athletes kudos? For lack of a better word, I had to invoke the strava kudos a little bit like, are you saying, like good job and then what's the context? Good job, bad job, and then what's the context of that? You know, like, are you wrapping it in with the data? Is it meaningful to the process? And somehow, like, how does that work? Yeah, good question.
Speaker 2:I thought initially you were asking me if I follow all my athletes on this problem.
Speaker 1:I don't. I hate you.
Speaker 2:No, neither do I, man. It's different, like honestly, it is different because there's times where I would say I give, like kudos sandwiches. That's a thing, because I want, like I I'm here to give you feedback, I'm not here just to be a cheerleader, but there's going to be some cheerleading that goes on because I want you to know that I care, I want you to know I see effort. That's good. So great workout today. Benita, you need to get that heart rate down during the recovery periods a little bit more. So try a fan this is a technical piece right.
Speaker 2:There's a technical piece, but I really like the way that you finished and it's usually, if I in 30 seconds of assessing the way I do things, it's usually a kudos sandwich with a little nugget of here's how to improve if we do. But if they absolutely crushed it, everything's like, let's just say, an interval workout time. In Zealand's great Recovery periods are cool. 75 minutes was prescribed and they did 75 minutes in one second because they're type A. I love that Awesome workout. Double kudos, double kudos that's the way I do it. Then the one asterisk here too is, I think, the way, and that's like kind of on a per session basis, but I would say like quarterly, monthly. For some of my athletes who are after like big builds or stage races or something like that, I do what I call deep dives into the data. I do a Zoom recording where I look at their data and I describe how things are being influenced right now, what they're doing well, what they're not doing so well and then a future forward of where we're headed. So that's more analytical though.
Speaker 1:I like that framework that you do. Since you and I have been working with the same athlete, I've gotten to see it kind of up close in person and I've actually started doing it more just solely based off of that prompt you doing it. I have a similar framework where I'll first off if the workout's good. It's good. Job Like this is really hard. If I always point out when I'm like really pressing an athlete which I do, like I prescribe hard workouts and groups of hard workouts. There's no doubt about it. Whenever it's really challenging, I always make it a point that to point out that, yes, this is really challenging. This is as much as I would give anybody. This is as much volume of intensity that I would give any elite athlete at any point of the year. And you crushed it.
Speaker 1:So they both know kind of the context of the overall workload as well as the performance within that one particular workout, whether it was good, bad or average. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And then the second piece of it is it's a little bit akin to what you just mentioned is a lot of the feedback I wrap into the context of what it means at the time. So we're building X, y, z at this point of the year when we move to another type of intensity, it's going to be supportive of that next type of intensity, whatever that context is.
Speaker 1:I always want to keep a little bit of a finger or make sure that I'm communicating, to keep a finger on the pulse of that particular athlete so they understand where they are in the entire process. Particular athlete, so they kind of understand where they are in the entire process, because a lot of people want to be in 100 race shape year round and that's just not the case, like you can't and you shouldn't be and you shouldn't be doing that. So I think a lot of those like touch points that really focus on here's where you're at this one particular time this is why it's meaningful for you right now go a long way with the buy-in process exactly, and I think to what we were talking about before, where endurance training can be monotonous and boring at times, the periods where training just to train or general base period and the reason I use that it's a tim cusick ism.
Speaker 2:I think it's wonderful because it's like it's just a general training period. We could do all the things, including jt kearney's burpee barb fest well, I like that, we're gonna.
Speaker 1:We're gonna patent that name. Sorry, jt, we took it. I'll give you royalties on the back end perfect, thank you.
Speaker 2:And so to stay ahead of that for the athletes, yeah, another four hour run like another one we're doing these four hour runs, so that done, and then I use like on training peaks or even in wko5 you can do uh, like performance management chart, like a future build, 45 or 90 days, and you can just model the fitness of what's gonna happen. If you build the training, so build the training. Then they see, oh, my ctl is gonna go up to 112 by July, cool, oh, that's why I'm doing it.
Speaker 1:Got it. That's why the ATPs are so I think that their power, because you and I we can coach without doing annual training plans Fair statement. Just because we know We've been doing it for so long, we're like, okay, well, you have this kind of race in July. That means in April you're going to be doing this, and then in February we've been through that routine so much, but it's still important to get it on paper in some form or fashion, electronic paper in some form or fashion, mainly from a communication tool to the athlete, like hey, here's a heads up on what's coming up.
Speaker 1:Yes, we are actually thinking about what is coming up in July, august here's where your longest long runs are going to be blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. July, august, here's where your longest long runs are going to be blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is, even though we know telling the athlete that this is what is coming down the pipeline, even though it might not be like the most precise thing, because you've always got to adapt to training in our forecasting. I don't know about you, man, but my forecasting window it doesn't extend beyond like two weeks.
Speaker 2:I try to do four, but it doesn't work with everybody.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I try to do four, but it doesn't work with everybody. Yeah, I try to do four too, but I'm just like I'm just going to do three, like you probably used to build off of the recovery cycles, right? So just build from one recovery cycle to the next. I might do that in like 10% of cases. Now I'm just I'm building to my level of comfort of what I can predict. That's the best way that I can describe it.
Speaker 1:I don't go into the thing saying, okay, I'm going to build out, for I look at what's coming up, what are the anchor points? Is it a race, is it a piece of travel? Is it? I have to deload Whatever the anchor points coming up in the calendar are, and I go, okay, I'm going to build to here, and I don't do it based off of a religious. I'm going to build three weeks or a month at a time, or to the next phase or to the next race or to whatever. I'm literally looking at it and going I'm comfortable with predicting this much and I'm going to build to here, and then I still have to change it based on whatever's going on in the ground.
Speaker 2:Like it's just like Jesus and that's a workflow from our end standpoint. What I've been doing recently and it's helpful, I think, for both the athlete and coach is I tell them I'll try my best to build out in detail three to four weeks in advance. That helps you planning what's coming and it helps us to see what's going on. But then I'll build out in general maybe eight to 12 weeks, and so what I'll do is just like on the training peak says like weekly goals. I'll put in weekly goals. We're doing intensive threshold development, volume increase and two times strength training each week. That's what we're going to do, and so I'll have like that general model out. What I find is whether the athlete looks at it or not, if I go in and I anchored at like two weeks and be like oh yeah, that's what we were doing here. Check the ATP, which took me four minutes to build.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I make those. Yeah, when you're actually typing, you do the done Really dynamic build. I don't want to. I don't want to know that part of your workflow.
Speaker 1:I guess my point is to kind of like circle back on the high quality training session is making sure that you are continually reinforcing where you are in the plan and even if you're designing your own training. This is probably one of the biggest mistakes athletes who design their own training, who even know what they're doing when they design their own training, actually do, is they get lost in the daily detail of I'm going to do this super hard session or whatever, and they don't zoom back out to where that actually fits into the overall master plan that you got right from the beginning, which is what we went through on the ground floor of things. I think excuse me, consistently reminding yourself of where you are in the entirety of everything, the entire context of everything. I've got a huge race in August and I'm now in June, and what does that mean? That actually is really powerful in making sure that the workouts actually sink in.
Speaker 2:Agreed, and as a young coach I used to do that often where it's just like too fast coaching, I don't look back on the plan, that I actually and I would say I overdid the annual plan and then I wouldn't remind myself of it.
Speaker 1:And I would just be in a hurry of building a week Like I was a terrible coach.
Speaker 1:I have one, one other thing in terms of how to create a high quality training that I've started emphasizing more with my athletes, so I'll go through it and I'll get your take on it and that's to leave space after the workout is done to physically and psycho-emotionally wind down and chill the F out. And it's way easier to do with the elite athletes that you and I work with because that's what their job is than it is with the normal people who have to go back to soccer practice or go back to the office, or they've got an hour to work out and they're going to freaking shoehorn that 55 minutes of a workout and their hour-long lunch break, but just reserving a little bit of time afterwards to go from, especially during the hard workouts, to go from fight or flight mode, where you're just like crushing yourself, to okay, I'm just going to sit here for three or four minutes and just like wind down and realize that I'm not working out anymore. I've started to emphasize that more with my athletes, just as it's almost a way to enhance the adaptive response right, because you have all this stimulus and it kind of doesn't mean anything if you don't achieve the adaptations, right. Just going back to the JT workout analogy. You can create a huge stimulus and not get any adaptation from it for a whole variety of reasons. Well, one of those variety of reasons that you're not getting the adaptation from it is that you're not leaving any space between the end of the workout and when you're going to transition back into normal life.
Speaker 1:I've just I've started seeing more research and just found other practitioners in the area that have started to focus on this more, and I've started to incorporate it a little bit more and kind of the instructive part of how to actually execute a workout is yeah, go do the workout, this is the pace, this is the RPE, this is blah, blah, blah. But afterwards chill out for two to three minutes and don't do anything, don't turn your phone on, don't open up Strava to see how many KOMs you just got. Like, just sit there for a few minutes and chill out and then transition to the next part of your day it's beautiful.
Speaker 2:I've been doing the same thing and when I I tell my athletes two things, tell me remember that stress plus rest equals adaptation. Stressing is the training, resting is really everything else. Adaptation is the goal. And then say well, I have two hours to train, got two hours, let's train for 100 minutes. Because I want to take five of those minutes just to like. I tell them lay at the foot of your bed, or lay on your bed and put your legs up against the wall, or lay at the foot of the couch and put your legs up on the couch.
Speaker 1:It's so dumb, but it just makes them sit still.
Speaker 2:Just sit still. And there are people like, what about my Norma text? It's like cool, but still just sit still, like. And there are people like, what about my norma text? It's like cool, but like the whole setup is gonna take longer than what I want you to do, and so it's almost like some mindfulness and meditation, but it's also resting and relaxing. Do that for five minutes, take a quick shower, get some food way to go, rather than as a time trial on to life, which everybody ends up doing too often self-included. But I would say, when I do it right and when my athletes do it right, we get a better adaptation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and there's once again there's like reasonable research to suggest that that is actually true. But this is something I don't know if you're ever going to like randomize control, trial, something like this, because it's just so hard to execute in the research world that you've got to go off of just a little bit of okay, what is a reasonable best practice. I just think that space and this is an, I think, statement in full effort of full disclosure I just think that you get a better, a more robust adaptive response if you just give a little bit of time, a little bit of time, especially after the hard workouts or the long workouts, to just chill for like three to five minutes. It doesn't take long, just a few minutes. And however you want to do it, put your legs up against the wall, meditate.
Speaker 1:I've got athletes that do mindfulness practice like kind of like right then and then, or a breathing exercise. I kind of don't care what the conduit is right. All those things are conduits to the exact same goal, which is just chilling out, right, as long as you're just chilling out and not focusing on doing anything. I think that is. I think it's a worthwhile enough practice that we should almost bake it into the training process. Maybe we can come up with like a segment in the workout builder. It's like chill the F out segment. Final step stare at the wall. I'm good with that. You can like transition your, what transition your? Watch onto it. We're on.
Speaker 2:we're onto something there. For sure Kristen will like my wife again, like I'll be sitting there like, like, what are you doing?
Speaker 1:I'm like staring at the wall, like I'll be sitting there, like, like, what are you doing? I'm like staring at the wall. Yeah, I'm adapting, I'm achieving. No, that's what you can say. I'm getting a more adaptive response. That's exactly what you do.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's pivot, because I wanted to talk to this about, talk with you about this on air High performance coaching model. I'll make a bold statement. I am hell bent on bringing this to trail and ultra running. I'm going to leave links in the show notes to a couple of other podcasts that I've done on this topic. I think this is. I mean, I've dedicated, I think, two or three of them just to this. It's not anything new. I'm not inventing anything that I'm going to take a lick of credit for. It's been around for a long time and it's incredibly effective when done right. It's not easy to do it right, and I've just started to roll it out with, oh, maybe four or five of my elite athletes, and so for the listeners out there that won't go and listen to the previous podcast just to get this context, I'll give you the too long didn't read TLDR. Is that what that stands?
Speaker 2:for.
Speaker 1:Too long didn't read a summary, the synopsis, the nickel version is you, instead of one coach, me being everything to the athlete. I'm the sport programming coach, I'm the run coach, right? I'm the sports psychologist, I'm the sports nutritionist. I try to stay in my lane with all of these various things that inevitably go into athlete performance. Instead of one person doing that, we bring a whole team of professionals, a whole team of domain experts, and wrap them around the athlete. So I would do the run programming. I bring in a specific strength training coach, bring in a physical therapist, we bring in a nutrition coach, we bring in mental skills and they all do their little part and we're coordinated in all of our efforts. I'm convinced that it's remarkably effective in the sport application that I'm in right now, which is tronal training. We've seen it be effective in other sports, but you have to do it to see the proof point. I've seen enough of a proof point that I'm going to figure out how to formalize it as a product that people can buy. So it's not so ad hoc, but it works exactly the way that I describe it. An athlete comes in and I try to figure out if they're a good candidate for it first and if they are a good candidate for it, then I start going through my digital Rolodex of practitioners that I've used over the years. Some of them are CTS coaches, some of them are people that I just know. Some of them, the athlete already has on board. That is the case every once in a while where they'll have a nutrition professional that they've worked with in the past, and then we just add people to the mix and then we all become coordinated at some point.
Speaker 1:And the genesis for me as a coach and I think this illustrates the point quite well is when I was doing a year-end evaluation with one of my athletes who's already very good, and this athlete was asking me how do I get better? And I had to be very upfront. I'm like, listen, I can only move the physiological needle. So much You're already really good and sure, we're going to push and pull on all these physiological levers and use good training and all the things that we just talked about for the last hour. Adam, sure, I can do that, but at a certain point you got to realize how very marginally limited that is going to be, and the proposition that I came up with was you are going to improve just as much, if not more, in all of the other areas as otherwise specified.
Speaker 1:Day-to-day nutrition, race day nutrition, psychology. Even equipment can make a. I know you guys talk about this in the cycling world a lot, but we don't talk about it nearly enough in the running world. Even equipment can make a pretty impactful difference when you get it right.
Speaker 1:Sports psychology, all of those kind of like things that we typically think about as duties, as otherwise specified, they are going to make a bigger difference in your performance improvement than what I can do on the training side. And so, since that's the proposition, here's the solution we're going to bring the best people into this ecosystem of you and they're all going to be this is going to be your team so that you can continue to improve, because I'm not that I'm like at the very end of my limitation, but I'm getting closer. I'm very acutely aware of that. That's the genesis of it, at least with me personally, is working with professional athletes and them asking me how am I going to get better? Me realizing that the run programming gets more and more limited in that capacity and the things is otherwise specified are going to take up a bigger proportion of the improvement pie, so to speak.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think too, it takes a mature coach to realize that, to say I can only do so much, let's get other people on board, so I think that's good. Second is ultra running. I can only do so much, let's get other people on board, so I think that's good. Second is ultra running. You guys and gals are just you're younger, right Like you don't have.
Speaker 1:You're shaping this world, so younger is a sport, is what you mean.
Speaker 2:Yeah, younger in sport.
Speaker 1:Not you're. I think you're even older. We're like 10 years behind. Everybody else's is usually within with any of these things Like these high performance models have been around at least have been around in other sports for like well over a decade. And I continually and people who have that other sporting context I don't have to describe this as elaborately because they know, but that's relatively rare in the ultra running sphere and I have to take time to like okay, this is how it works, like we've got this and that.
Speaker 2:And even when you brought it up to me I was like, why do you guys not have this? But then I'm like, oh yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, so we're 10 years behind everything.
Speaker 2:So, like my like quick background, I mean, look at Red Bull athletes. Yeah, look at the structure there. Read anything about them. That's really what we're talking about on the cycling side of things. We have it established, but it is just, it's like messy there's.
Speaker 2:I've been parts of organizations that have got it dialed and it's awesome. And I'm part of some of those organizations right now and I've got some organizations where it's just a hot pile of stinky flies everywhere. So and I'm like and it's frustrating, but in the hype, in like the ones that are working really well, it's awesome. Athletes are just like fine tune going everywhere. This other one athletes can be running into each other and so it's not so much staying in your lane, it's about getting the specialists in so that they can go deeper for that high performance athlete. But I think our role as coaches we need to be specialists in endurance, athlete programming and coaches, but we need to know how all those specialists orchestrate and work together, and so we need to become a little bit of a generalist in that sense to keep that like thing flowing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree, it's it. It's been a really humbling experience too, because all of these things that I used to do for my athletes and I still do with some athletes the nutrition programming not not so much on the day-to-day piece, but the race nutrition programming I'm, you know, I'd say I'm heavily involved with a lot of my athletes and or some of the strength training pieces. I just realized how terrible I am at that compared to the professionals, compared to the people who are like actual domain experts and do it for a living. And I would say that I'm somebody and you know this about me, adam when I did do a lot of those things, I made sure that I knew my shit.
Speaker 1:When I was doing a lot of strength training program, I was in the gym. I was in the gym teaching people how to freaking squat and how to deadlift and how to do an overhead press and all these other things, and I would do it alongside of just like a personal trainer, and then I'd look at how to program. We'd go over to CSCS or the NSCA and we do specific, you know, endurance, strength training programming. It's not like I'm just like copy pasting from where. What are you pointing me for did you get up to 400 pounds on your deadlift? 410 or 4? I'm gonna get stuck like right below 430.
Speaker 2:I'm not gonna be able to bridge the last yeah, like seeing you, whether it was I was pulling pretty good, I was like you're not broken yet.
Speaker 1:Keep going, man, I was pulling, it's gonna take it would take me like four years to get up to 500, and I'm not willing to like do it that much. I cheat, though, and I do sumo, so people always.
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:There's a lot, yeah, I know Anyway, um, but my point with that is is I'm just not making shit up Right, I tried to do as best as I can and even with all of that, I realized that it's different if I bring in somebody who's been doing it for for 15 years. The other thing and I didn't anticipate this, and this is not relevant to the athletes, but it's actually relevant to the coaches it makes me more efficient because I can punt. I can punt that stuff. I'm just like what does Steph say?
Speaker 1:Steph is one of the go-to nutrition people. Stephanie Howe, a lot of listeners will recognize she's one of. She's not the only one, but she's one of the nutrition professionals that I've started using in these groups. Steph, you figure this out. Punt to you and I don't have to deal with it. Just give me the nickel version, give me the synopsis. You want strength training? Okay, sarah Scazzaro or Nicole Rasmussen, two of our coaches. They both have fantastic strength backgrounds. I can punt that over to them and they can spend all the time doing the programming, getting the feedback and sending the videos back and forth and all that other stuff that frees me up to do what I really do well, which is communicate with the athletes and do the run programming. It takes me out of the things that I'm not so good at or I'm below average at or average at, and puts me more into the things that I'm really good at, which I think is, just professionally, actually really super rewarding really good at, which I think is just professionally, actually really super rewarding.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so when we have an athlete like at this level and it could be an elite athlete or it could be just a serious amateur too, in my opinion yeah, once you've identified that they are at this level, it I think this concept makes a ton of sense and incorporate all these people in, similar to, I don't know, a general practitioner, the cardiologist. The medical world has some of these aspects of it too coming in. It's a whole defunct thing, especially here in america, but from that concept it shouldn't be like super crazy. Just know that, you know. However, you kind of do this.
Speaker 2:It's like if you want that next level, like you know, be ready to pay for it in some form or fashion, and if you're super into it, if this is your thing, let's go, because these people exist and it's become super efficient. And, in my opinion, I would say, too, what's going to come down to that some sort of AI will become part of a high performance team as coaches. I want it to because I think, just like Stephanie helping you out, it's going to make you more efficient.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the AI tool that I've been working on, adam, it's not to let the cat out of the bag too early because we're still a long ways off, but it gets the programming side like 90 of what I would do, because it's modeled after me and it uses both like algorithmic type of logic as well as what what traditional ai would be, and it's kind of scary. It's like I I actually would pro, like given the situation, like when we've been testing, I was like I would program that, yeah, I might change this thing when this one one workout here or 10 minutes over there or whatever, like based off of whatever bias that I'm coming into the day with. But it's remarkable, it's remarkably good. I want to kind of go back, though, to the for me.
Speaker 2:I'm like I want to chat apt. Yeah, bring it on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, bring it I, I think I. This is neither here nor there. I think that once people start to figure it out, the bottom 20% of the coaching market and what I mean by that is is like the, the kind of like the mill house coaching. That's just like program building and not coaching Right that just goes away and gets replaced, or 90% of it just goes away.
Speaker 2:Static program yeah, All that's. It's all gone Cause it's a superior product, One asterisk. So in case listeners were like that guy's an idiot, it's chat GPT. I threw in a quick joke Chat APT and Holford Training Systems would be my tool, that I would develop.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's move on. I'll have another conversation about AI with somebody Coop's like we're gonna edit. I mean, I've been very public that I've been working on this and I don't think I have to like from a business perspective, like try to be all, like work on it in a black box and then reveal it all Like I don't care if somebody beats me, everybody's working on it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, everybody's working on it. I won't have first mover position, I understand that, uh, but I think I'll have the best mover position once this thing gets up and running, which that's another story, anyway. So, okay, let's go back to this value proposition, right? So I agree with you on the like, the Intuit, amateur side, that some of the value that they get out of it is they're just all in right and this is just a way for them to be all in. It might not produce like superior results, or maybe it's very marginally superior as compared to them. Just training, right, like for an amateur, meaning if you just did it versus you wrapped a whole team around some high level amateur and then you could compare a, b, compare the results. Maybe the high performance thing is a little bit better like, maybe not, maybe it's marginal or whatever. But you have a hard time making the case because, unlike the situation that I originally presented you with, where the things, is otherwise specified, constitute a bigger piece of the pie than the programming with the amateur, the programming with the amateur, the programming still can dominate the improvement, the improvement side of things, I think on the professional side of things, where one to two percent absolutely makes a difference and you can go to any freaking race and ultra running is starting to get this way.
Speaker 1:You can dissect the top 10 on a few percentage points. That is absolutely. That becomes absolutely material at the end of the day. Western States 100, top 10 might be separated by 30 or 40 minutes. In a 15 hour race that's not a lot. And when you get down to those like small fractions is where you need to kind of uncover every rock and stone and you know, look underneath the moss and try to find, you know, whatever else is kind of it and it does. I mean we, we give we give the term marginal gains a little bit of a bad rap. But there's a time and a place to where all those little marginal things actually add up to something that is meaningful from a performance standpoint, and it's when the differential in the performances between first, second, third and fourth is so small. That's where it can actually make a material difference.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I fully agree on the professional athlete side of things. Professional athletes need this, in my opinion, and I think that like needs a strong word man.
Speaker 1:Oh need I like that no, I mean man.
Speaker 2:Again you're, I'm coming at the lens of cycling. Yeah y'all are.
Speaker 1:It's a requirement. I mean, it's a requirement like the higher up you go.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you need that, otherwise what are you doing? You can't compete, you just like. You literally can't compete, yeah, you're edged out. And then, to that point, for anybody listening, here too, I've been leading some of these teams where I am like the generalist and I'm getting the specialist to come in and do this, and it's really hard to orchestrate unless you have some of those ties and connections. Yeah, I chose the coaching realm of things and it makes me more happy. But I would say the professional athlete side of things.
Speaker 2:In an amateur, I think it goes down to like identifying, because, whether they're pro or amateur, identify when they need that team. Because when the professional athlete is still aspiring, it's like, ah, you got some development to go, I can take this. Identify when they need this. If the amateur is like I just want to learn as fast as possible, you're ready, like I want it. It's like you're not going to benefit from it, I want it anyway. Cool, here you go, I want it. You're not going to benefit from it, okay. Well, when in a year? Okay, yeah. So it comes down to us being the filter of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have actually had to do that with a few athletes that a few more kind of like recent athletes that I brought on board. Now that I have a template for it and I kind of have a choice, like do I just coach them or do I kind of like wrap a team around them and it? And it is a choice and you've got to suss it out in terms of is it beneficial, is it necessary, do you want to get ahead of it, you know, so that they're used to the program or whatever. And I have not gotten that equation 100% correct. I will say it's not that it's like egregiously, like difficult or anything like that, but especially with the new athlete, you don't always know how they're going to react to things until you actually put them in it. And because of that, because that human equation is so unpredictable, sometimes you just get that evaluation wrong.
Speaker 1:And I've done that at least once with these, where I put somebody in team and just wasn't the right kind of fit for anybody. I wasn't the right coach for them, team wasn't the right team for them. The whole kind of thing didn't work out, and that's fine. Some of that's on me in terms of not assessing up the situation, but I do think to use your cycling analogy, I think this is a bold prediction. We can come back three years from now and see if this comes true. I think that three years from now, it's going to be a requirement in the ultra running side, just like it is a requirement on the cycling side.
Speaker 2:I am on the very cusp of ultra running world and I would say, why not two years? Why not?
Speaker 1:We need a little bit of time. I think the first thing is there's absolutely an economic component to this where the athletes have to be able to afford it, and that it's not universally true quite yet. Now that's going to come around and it's you know how these things go. I mean, you see it, on the cycling side, it works way slower than anybody wants it to, in terms of how people upgrade their individual pay and how the whole ecosystem gets, you know, upgraded in their pay and things like that. That's gradually happening in ultra running and that gets upgraded in their pay and things like that. That's gradually happening in ultra running. And then that economic reality will be the case more universally in a few years. I'm convinced of that, but it is not there now. I mean, they just don't earn enough money to be able to spend one or two grand a month on professional services, which is about what it takes. But the other side of it is, I still think that just from a performance perspective, there's just a little bit more tide that needs to get turned.
Speaker 1:There are some athletes that do it, athletes that I don't coach, that do it themselves. Tom Evans, who was the Western States champion last year. He's been very public about it. I have nothing to do with Tom's coaching, but he has a fantastic team around him and he did it himself right. The athlete like this is going to be my coach and this is going to be my nutritionist, this is going to be this and this is going to be that, and he coordinates them all. He acts as like the high performance coordinator. So it does exist in certain flavors and you'll see more of it, but it's just going to take time because the performance context just has to, just like anything else. It just has to season up a little bit and mature, but it's cool to see develop. To be honest with you, like you know, five years ago I couldn't even get people to do coaching, maybe a little bit longer than five years ago, maybe seven or eight years ago.
Speaker 1:I can't even get people to do coaching. It was hard like people like I don't need, I just need to run more, which is not.
Speaker 2:I remember sitting in on meetings about that. It was like how we're going to actually charge runners for coaching because they like balk at a 20 entry fee to a race. On the cycling side of things I should clarify road cycling has this as a culture make kind of a mainstream for the elite athletes.
Speaker 1:The teams direct it. I think that's an important distinction. The teams dictate it, so you get onto a professional cycling team and the team actually has all the services available. Good teams, yeah exactly Good teams.
Speaker 2:And when you go off-road, that's when things vary. If you actually have a team mountain biking they will. There's good teams and not so good teams. High-funded teams, I should say, and teams and not so good teams, high funded teams, I should say, and then not high funded teams. And then you go into the wild west black hole of gravel racing and you I could provide examples of everybody doing anything from what we're talking about, a high-end, very professional, and then the people who are like I don't know, probably smoking peyote, out in patagonia, showing up to bwr and crushing it you know, what's funny, as an analogy to that, before we wrap up, is some of the brands in on the trail running side have tried to do this, Most notably Solomon, and I've had a Gimier who's been the kind of head of this program.
Speaker 1:I've had him on my podcast twice one of them to talk about this very specifically and it hasn't been a universal sell. You know it's hard for the brands to do it and I'll give a really good, just a really poignant example of this to try to illustrate it. The brands are caught in this position where they are the employer and when your employment tie is also the same entity that is providing some of the performance services, the athletes are kind of hesitant, or can be hesitant, to engage in those performance services because they might not want to know that the sports psychologist that they're talking to is getting paid by their employer. They might not want to engage in physiological testing that might show that they're an inferior athlete or whatever kind of like conjured up in their head when it's getting paid for by the brand that is actually paying their salary. There's like some hesitation. There's some hesitation there. Now, I don't think that's warranted. I don't think any of the brands would be using some of this high performance context to make economic decisions. Who's getting contracts, who's getting support, who's not getting support? I think that they're genuinely. I believe that they're genuinely doing this in the betterment of the athletes, but because of that potential conflict right, Just the potential conflict I'm not convinced that it's the best setup.
Speaker 1:I think that the best setup is for an independent group of coach like me who my sole charge? I want to see athletes perform. I have no other agenda. I don't have a marketing agenda. I don't have, I don't. You know, I certainly don't pay the athletes Like I. I my agenda is an athlete comes to me I want to win a race, Okay, let's go do it. That's my agenda period.
Speaker 1:I think that is the most pure way to set these things up, where they're unadulterated and unencumbered by any of the other nonsense that can float around things. And you even see this on the cycling side, where it's very professionalized, where that conflict between one area marketing, finance or whatever and the coaching side or the performance side. That's where the conflict actually arises. So I kind of take that as a little bit of a cue as I've been navigating this space on the ultra running side of things, where I just think the right vehicle for it is to exist outside of the brands and within something else, that's more of a coaching entity. So anyway, I don't know if you had any thoughts on that, just based on your experience on the cycling side, in terms of how the team is actually getting facilitated, whether it's through a brand, through a team, or where the athletes are actually doing it themselves.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it can be a little bit of both and I would say some of the most, some of like the best ways with, because on teams where I've been associated with and somebody has to share their training peaks, the athletes are even like share with who?
Speaker 1:yeah, that sort of thing, they're not even exchanging dollars, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:so when the, when the athlete has autonomy and trust, and who's ever going on? And that's why I agree with you that an autonomous, standalone coaching company that has a reputation of high performance, that's great. And if that funding can come from a governing body or the team itself, that's good. So if Solomon gives $500 a month to Jane Schmo to pay you, that would be great bucks a month to jane schmoe to pay you.
Speaker 1:That would be great. Um, I don't know. I mean I don't know. I don't know how everything's going to get routed and I'm sure it's not going to be universal, whether the athletes pay for it or the brands pay for it, or the athletes pay for it through the brands or whatever that economy. I, in my framework, I'm being really transparent on this podcast, but I'm figuring this out in my framework. I'm figuring out the economy. Last, I'm figuring out all the other performance stuff.
Speaker 1:First, I'm like how do I set up a team? Who's the right person for a team? Who are the right people I want, like in these teams, who's going to work together? Well, like, how are we going to exchange the data? How are we going to be transparent? I'm figuring all that crap out right now and then I'm just going to figure out the economic reality of it later. I'm kicking that can like far down the road because I want it to work first, and then I just know I'll be. I just know I have a hunch of a good hunch that I'll be able to model it out second. But I'm not concerned with that right now. I'm not starting with your prototypical like oh, I've got a thousand dollar widget, let's figure out who to sell it to. I'm figuring out how it works first and then figuring out the reality of it second, or the economic reality.
Speaker 2:Second, yeah, as long as someone you or whoever can handle that economically to figure it out, that's what an entrepreneur does, that's what somebody making something, that's what a craftsman does, and it's the better way because you'll get buy-in over the long run versus selling the widget, pissing a bunch of people off and that sort of thing. And I think that in the coaching world we've had to do that in some sense, where I'll give you one example, one of the elite athletes I work with. Initially I was like, hey, I'm not doing this for free, so here we go, what comes from the governing body. It was like, yeah, because they have, so she could have a strength coach, a psychologist, a nutritionist. They had allotment for all that, but because they had coaches on staff, on like the governing body, they couldn't hire out so we had to like kind of back channel a little bit, shoehorn you into the psychologist side of it, and so what?
Speaker 2:you did, so it like do whatever it takes, but I think, like you know, get results, be open about it, be, and the rest will figure itself out. But I think for anybody in the ultra running world just look at red bull, look at the road cycling side of things it's not perfect but like, the structure is there yeah and if you want the highest performance, you will have to go to those high levels and get more people involved to get those percentages.
Speaker 1:My opinion I, I'm I modeled. I've modeled it kind of after like five or six different key ones. I remember I drew this all up on a whiteboard one day when I was going to figure it out and I, way over, complicated, iticated it because I'm like this exists and here are the people that I know and here's what I think are the most impactful. I picked four or five different categories and I'm like this is what I'm going to do and, very fortunately, I already had the people, the professionals that I knew were really good and that I personally trusted. That was actually a big part of it is like I had to like personally trust the recommendations that I was giving to the athlete, because it still falls back on me, right? So if an athlete comes to me and says, okay, let's go build this team Nine times out of 10, they're not going to know the people to go to, they're going to rely on me and my network to find the right people. And if I screw that up, that's my fault. That's not anybody like, that's me not making the correct match. And so, very fortunately, I just happened to have not like hundreds of people, but I have a small network of people that I trust a lot and are really good at what they do.
Speaker 1:I don't know what I would have done had I not previously had that, because it's not like you can go and like start like interviewing people for it, you know, because you have to work with them for a period of time, because it's your, it's you're the primary coach, it's your athlete that you're trusting them with and like it's really I would have a hard time, maybe because I'm high control. You remember our fibro B scores, adam. I control. You remember our fibro B scores, adam. I'm high in expressed control. Yeah, I mean chain. I'm high in expressed control and I'm not going to flick that recommendation over to somebody that I haven't worked with for a decade, and not a lot of people fit in that category.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I wouldn't consider myself low control, but I wouldn't consider myself high control, but I'd probably mess it up enough to know that there needs to be some control to do this Right. And what's tricky about what you're doing is I mean, you're doing business and people will be like, oh yeah, people do business with those who enjoy doing business with and achieve results, so that's not anything new. The tricky part with you is, once your people get filled up with the capacity, now who yeah? Once your people get filled up with capacity, now who yeah, exactly? So you're going to have to continually.
Speaker 1:How do you scale? How do you scale?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, how do you scale?
Speaker 1:I mean, fortunately it's not a rapid scale problem to solve Like it's like we're talking about a handful of people that are going to come into this, not like dozens. I mean, maybe it's dozens and dozens, you know, maybe 20 by the end of year, two or something like that. I think that's a kind of a reasonable amount. But I just keep coming back to like I'm telling you, adam, every meeting, every text message, every group, you know a WeChat or WhatsApp that I have with these teams, I keep coming back to the same sentiment. I'm like this is fucking cool, like just everything.
Speaker 1:Every time I go to, just even when I work with you on these things, I'm just like this, like it's just so neat to see it unfold and I don't I know that's a lot of personal sentiment that people are going to like, listen to, people are going to listen to and go. This doesn't make a difference, you know one way or the other, but it's been. I don't, it's just been really neat to unfold, even in its early stages, that I'm going to continue to push the envelope and just do more of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, man, and I would encourage you to keep pushing and refining, because what you're kind of saying there is, when you invite these professionals in to work with your athletes, the COOP algorithm gets smarter too. Oh for sure, you learn something from Stephanie over here, you learn something from Sarah over here. I'm like, ah, that's that little missing link there, and you get, and then your athlete gets better and it that's kind of like the iron sharpens iron sort of analogy, as you go that high performance teams and networks provides.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it 100% makes me better, but I mean on all levels. I mean it makes me a better generalist, as we were talking about earlier, because I get to see how the specialists do it and then if I ever have to do it, I've just got better framework for it. It makes me more. It literally makes me more efficient as a coach. If you wanted to take the most raw measure of efficiency, how much time does it take me to work with any one single athlete? This reduces that time because I can punt, as I was mentioning earlier. I can punt a lot of things that I was previously spending time on and it's a double win. The prescription is better, the prescription analysis is better because you have a real domain expert doing it and I save time. It's's a triple win and the athlete's obviously better.
Speaker 1:Right, and the last thing I'm we're gonna let it go after this one that I that should not go you'd be remiss to not say this is that the athlete has so much confidence when they've got a team around them and they know and they and they know that the prescription is correct, that the analysis is correct. That just engenders so much confidence that when they step on the start line. They're like I've done everything right. Like I, here I am, I'm at the start line of this big race and I've done everything. Like that element is it's more, it's worth more than my programming Fully, admit it. The confidence side of it at that level, like sure I'm going to program smart, like that's my deal is doing programming, I'm sure I'm going to get that right. But like the confidence that they get from like having that network around them is I think that's worth more from a performance perspective than when I can actually program.
Speaker 2:No, you're absolutely right, it gets that. Confidence gets built through a good process, you see. But when I've got an athlete that gets to the start line, that has the sports psychologist, has the nutritionist, has the strength and conditioner, has the coach, has the team director, has the tactic director, like everybody in their ear, she's going to be like fuck yeah, you see like it's palpable.
Speaker 1:I didn't anticipate that. I didn't anticipate how palpable the confidence piece of it was, because I can compare and contrast and I'm not. Once again, I'm not saying that like every athlete is a candidate for this, I'm not saying that but it is palpable when you have an athlete transition from just me working with them to a team, that confidence Pete, everything is palpable. I mean the fact that they have a professional strength coach is absolutely. Sarah doing their strength programming is 100 times better. Shout out to Sarah Scazzardo she's a freaking wizard Is a thousand times, a million times better than me doing their strength training program and I'm not bad there.
Speaker 1:I'm a Brazilian times and I'm not bad at it, I'm okay at it. Like I'm not a freaking dummy in the in the weight room. I can like get myself around some freaking iron, but she is a gazillion times. She is a gazillion times better, better at it. But the the whole confidence piece of it, having seen it like during the transition, at least with the athletes that I've transitioned and I think that I've picked the right ones to do it with it hasn't been everybody, but it will be more and more as the years go on because you have that ab comparison. It's just palpable, like I don't know how else to say it. Like I just like I see it in the programming, I see in the conversation, I see it in just like even the workout feedback, right going back to that, like the like, the context of the feedback has more, just, has more confidence associated with it.
Speaker 2:It's cool, I don't know. It's cool. Yeah, and you can't overlook the element of self-belief when it comes to achieving a goal or winning, because, I'll guarantee you, the person who believes they're going to win may not win all the time, but the person who believes they're not going to win won't win. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Typically yeah, that's very rare, Like you, don't? You hear that like every once in a while, like oh, I didn't think, I didn't think I was going to do it, Like that's a really rare story. You know, At that level, yeah, at the highest level Like sometimes I didn't think I'd make the cutoffs right that I get that you hear that a whole lot more often. But at the highest level, you do have to have a lot of belief that you can do what you're setting yourself out to do, whether it's win or set a course record or get in the top three or kind of whatever that goal is. You have to have the belief behind it.
Speaker 1:And I think having a team, not just one person, a team behind you I think that in most situations not in all, but in most situations engenders more of that belief than a single person, than having one single person can One single person can actually can make a big difference. That's what I did for years, right. One single person can actually can make a big difference. That's what I did for years, Right, and I had a lot of success with that. But I just think it's better when you get more professionals in there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, anyway.
Speaker 1:Agreed. All right, we're going to call it there. We're going to do this more often. Let's do it. This is not the time crunch cyclist podcast, so I can go on for two hours, you keep. So you keep your podcast to like what? 30 minutes or something like that Tight and to the point.
Speaker 2:Tight and to the point.
Speaker 1:We're verbose and all over the place.
Speaker 2:For sure I love. I actually love podcasts like this because the time is not the pressure. I think like, if anybody is interested in what I do, check out the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast. It's great Anybody loves, like the John Oliver sort of thing where he just has one big topic but then has these other little things that he weaves into.
Speaker 2:That's essentially what it is for endurance coaching and training stuff. But yeah, it's straight into the point no fluff and stuff, no philosophical rabbit holes, but I think that fits for some people. I think having dialogue like this with what Coop's doing on the podcast and what Coop is doing in the ultra running space 30-minute podcast, doesn't fit for what?
Speaker 1:You've got to have a long run, man 30 minutes. People won't even lace their shoes up for 30 minutes.
Speaker 2:Come on now Coop's just warming up right now and I'm like, can I get me off this microphone?
Speaker 1:I think the next thing I'm going to do I microphone. I think the next thing I'm going to do, I'm going to bring on a whole, like one of our whole teams and we're just going to go through it all. I just want to go through it all, like just here's how we did it.
Speaker 1:Just be transparent about it. You know it's not like I'm. I don't want to gatekeep anything. I do think it's cool but I think that listeners would get it would get just get a kick out of how it actually works, and then maybe we can kind of cajole some of the athletes into some like real-time examples of it. I think that'd be super insightful and I always, whenever I do it in podcast form, I always learn something yeah, that'd be really cool.
Speaker 2:I'd listen to it oh sweet.
Speaker 1:Oh, there you go. There's my limits test right there. If adam listens, all right, man, I'm gonna let you go. Thanks for coming on the podcast today, man appreciate it. Thanks, coop. Thanks for having me on all All right folks. There you have it. There you go.
Speaker 1:Much thanks to Adam for coming on the podcast today and enlightening us a little bit about his framework on what constitutes quality training. I hope you guys got a lot out of that, perhaps made you think about your training and how you design your training and how you give feedback on your training just a little bit differently. I also hope you guys enjoyed the banter at the end about some of this high performance coaching stuff which I am determined to continue to bring to light, and I am absolutely thrilled about what we have been able to do with it thus far with some of the athletes that we have, that we have on these teams. Hope you all enjoyed the podcast.
Speaker 1:If you did, go, give it a rating or review in iTunes, or you can just share it with your friends and training partners. This always makes a great long run companion, and so, if you like this podcast, which always comes to you without any advertisement, sponsorships or endorsements of any kind. The best way that you can help the podcast out is just to share it with your friends, give it a like and whenever you see me out on the races, tell me what episode that you like the most. That is always very meaningful to me. All right, folks, that is it for today and, as always, we will see you out on the trails.
