KoopCast
Coach Jason Koop covers training, nutrition and recent happenings in the ultramarathon world.
KoopCast
The Race Recovery Cycle with CTS Coaches Adam Ferdinandson & Neal Palles #232
Ever wondered how elite trail and ultra runners manage to stay competitive throughout a jam-packed racing calendar? Join us as CTS coaches Neal Pallas and Adam Ferdinandson unlock the secrets to mastering the race recovery cycle. From developing tailored recovery plans to navigating the intricacies of transitioning between different race categories, this episode is loaded with actionable strategies to keep you performing at your peak while steering clear of injury and burnout.
What happens when you need to balance high-intensity training with essential recovery? Addison lays out a comprehensive framework for categorizing race sequences, helping athletes pinpoint the critical phases of their training regimen. Whether transitioning from B races to A races or tackling back-to-back A races like Western States and UTMB, you'll gain clarity on how to optimize your training peaks and recovery intervals. And let's not forget the psychological aspects—physical healing isn't complete without addressing your mental well-being. Discover how maintaining supportive relationships and engaging in enjoyable activities can help you stay mentally sharp and avoid burnout.
Finally, we dive into the practicalities of tapering and reintroducing intense workouts post-recovery. Neil and Adam share their expertise on individualized tapering strategies, emphasizing the importance of choosing races that align with your personal interests and values. Plus, get insider tips on monitoring your progress and knowing when to push the intensity. From determining appropriate recovery times to the benefits of community engagement at races, this episode offers a holistic approach to sustaining peak performance throughout the racing season. Don’t miss our invitation to join us at the Javelina 100 and explore how being part of the CTS family can elevate your running game.
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Trail and ultra runners. What is going on? Welcome to another episode of the CoopCast. As always, I am your humble host, coach Jason Coop, and this episode of the podcast helps us to manage a topic that I know a lot of athletes have a keen interest in this time of year, and that is how to manage the race recovery cycle. You signed up for a couple of races this year, or maybe even a series of races, and what do you do in between those races in order to maximize your success for the next race that is coming up?
Speaker 1:This is one of the most common questions that I get on Instagram. How much recovery do I need after the first race, or when can I start training after the first race? And I think the answer to that question has a lot to do with what the entirety of the cycle actually looks like. So, on the podcast today, to help us put a dent in the answer to this question, our CTS coaches, neil Pallas and Adam Ferdinandson, who take us down to the root of what they do with their athletes and how they approach it from a framework perspective. So if you have a couple of races or several races lined up, you're going to want to listen close and hopefully, even if you're a self coach, you can apply some of the learning lessons from Coach Adam and Coach Neil to your training and to your race recovery process. Alright, folks, with that out of the way, I am getting right out of the way.
Speaker 1:Here's my conversation with Neil Pallas and Adam Ferdinandson, all about the race recovery cycle. Thanks you guys for coming on the podcast, just so people can get voices to names situated really quickly. First off, we've got Neil Palace, one of our coaches. Neil, you want to say hi?
Speaker 3:Hey, this is Neil Palace. I'm one of the CTS coaches and I'm also a psychotherapist and mental performance coach here in Longmont, Colorado, and Adam.
Speaker 1:Ferdinandson, you want to give everybody a hello.
Speaker 2:Howdy everybody, and I guess I'll introduce myself too. I'm an ultra running coach. I live in Fort Collins.
Speaker 1:Colorado CEO Jeff Pierce to his first ultramarathon period. Finish right. He had never done an ultra before the Leadville Char 100, or did he do one? I'm still confused with this.
Speaker 2:He did a 50k, but there's a pretty big gap between a 50k and Leadville.
Speaker 1:Okay, alright, so just barely an ultramarathon to an authentic 100 mile ultramarathon and you helped him pace that, which is a big ask, because it's the boss and it's kind of it's big if you get it right and big if you get it wrong.
Speaker 2:I like to say yes to things and then realize it was a mistake right before. So glad it went well.
Speaker 1:Well, we can go over how big of a mistake it was before. We had a lot of banter about that waiting at Twin Lakes. So the topic of the podcast today is going to be on the race recover cycle. Like you guys, like a few of you guys, have been through and I've certainly been through this as well we have athletes all over the spectrum of this where they're using the entirety of most of the year, six months or nine months out of most of the year, to race, and sometimes that's one race, sometimes that's two races, sometimes that's one race, sometimes that's two races, sometimes that's three races, sometimes it's 12 races.
Speaker 1:There's all different kind of like permutations in this, and the genesis of this podcast is actually the roots of it are in one of the more common questions that I get asked and that is how long do I need to recover after x being 50K, 50 mile, 100 miler, a specific race or whatever? And I normally don't answer that question very specifically in a public format, because a big part of that question is well, what is after X? Is there something after X? Is there not something after X? And there's a whole host of other things that we're going to get into, but my point with the intro here is there's context, that's, of which there are kind of endless variations and permutations of right, and we're going to try to bucket them off as much as we can to provide athletes some guidance on this, because we're sitting here in the end of August recording this conversation.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of athletes that have either just finished or they're going to do their first or second race or somewhere in the middle of this very muddy process, and they kind of want to know how to navigate this and how to kind of train for them. So I'm going to open the floor up to Addison first, because we're all in the position here of where we've got to, where we have to help athletes kind of manage the entirety of this process, from first race to second race to third race. And so I want to start out, adam, with you is. First off, let's describe the landscape as you see it in terms of helping athletes from race to race. Can you try to like compartmentalize? Compartmentalize it, so to speak, or at least put it in generalized categories.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll do my very best, but first of all, this is a conversation that hopefully is happening not right now in the middle of race season, but this is a conversation that typically happens in fall in winter when you're signing up for these races during lottery season and we'll get to this more later but so much of it depends on, kind, of what your goals for each race are. So I have broken it down into like three and a half categories.
Speaker 1:There is Whoa whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Half a category, so this is like one, two three and then three A or subcategory of something else. You'll find out. All right, a or subcategory of something else. You'll find out.
Speaker 2:All right, all right.
Speaker 1:We'll get there, all right.
Speaker 2:All right. So there is an A race to a B race, there's a B race to an A race, then there's a race to a race in the small caveat. That's kind of a B to an A race is a training race leading into an A race and I think that kind of deserves to be its own category within there and each of these kind of have subcategories of how close together are they, is the terrain similar, and it goes into this kind of flow chart I have in my mind of how you deal with each of those and then you layer it into the athlete's life and their goals and you hopefully come up with a plan.
Speaker 1:Okay, Can I, can we just jump right into the programming piece of it based off of that? Sorry, neil, I know I was going to give you a chance to like silo it off, but I think this is a pretty good launch point. Yeah, you guys, good with that? Okay, so the root of everybody's question that I alluded to earlier is they want to try to get a fix on how much they should train between the races. And the way that I think about it in context of the framework that you just presented, adam by the way, we had no coordination before this, but it kind of perfectly fits into my thought process is where should the apex of training be Like? Where should the most important part of training, which is usually the biggest piece of training, the most hard, the most difficult piece of training? When you're going from B race to A race, it should be in between the B race and the A race. When you're going from A race to B race, it should be before the A race, so before the first race. When you're going from A race to A race and this is kind of where it gets tricky, and I just happen to have a lot of dialogue recently around this with my athletes who did Western States and now we're going to do UTMB in the order of 10 days as of when we're recording this podcast. So that's definitely A race to A race, two biggest races on the planet or the most important races from an elite perspective on the planet Western States to UTMB.
Speaker 1:My opinion, which is not universally held, but my opinion, is you still apex the training off of the first A race for a multitude of factors the proximity of the races, how the training kind of like shapes up, but there's a whole host of things. But I still have or at least with those athletes that I have worked with, I've still had them do their most important their biggest kind of block of training before Western States, as opposed to cramming it in between Western States and UTMB. But I can certainly see a scenario where the A race and the A racer have enough separation between them to where the apex of before both of those races is the same, and we can probably have some dialogue on that in just a little bit. So when? So I think as a generalized framework, b to A to B, a to A the context that is the most important there is where do you want the hardest part of your training, the most important part of your training, and use that as the anchor point for everything else. And as a very pragmatic example of this, when you're talking A race to A race, and because Western States and UTMB somebody can look up the exact weeks in between hand, but it's something on the order of seven.
Speaker 1:Because they are so close, there's not the opportunity to build back up to where you were before you entered western states.
Speaker 1:There's not enough time for the recovery process and the build back up process, and so therefore, forcing that issue becomes extremely problematic, because you end up doing too much and too short of a period of time, and so you have to rely on a lot of your kind of like previously built fitness.
Speaker 1:What is A, b and C or whatever your rank ordering framework is extremely important because it does set the training ramps from an early perspective not in stone, but it sets them a lot, because you have this one thing or these two things that you're kind of like ultimately aiming at, and it's hard to.
Speaker 1:Those are, like a, movable objects right, you can always move the training around, but you can't move the races around because they're a fixed you know, know, there are fixed dates, unless you're doing an FKT or something or something like that, but anyway. So I wanted to lay that down as some of the training context behind that particular framework. Whether you're looking at A to A, to B to A, really look at it from the where's A and then build your training to its kind of most important before that and then everything else kind of takes takes care of itself. So I'm going to turn it over to Neil now, because we're going to go over a framework first. I mean, do you want to either add any context to it or is there a different framework from how you actually approach it from the get-go?
Speaker 3:You know, I think one of the things is looking at those two different races, like Western States or UTMB. To me those are two really big different races in as far as the amount of climbing you're doing at UTMB and how you're layering that in there. But knowing that and yeah, those are seven weeks apart, there's not much you can do, so focusing on the first one makes sense. I was just thinking of my own experience of focusing on. I had a mountain bike race, a hundred mile mountain bike race, followed a week later by 100 mile run, both of them A races. And the reality is, you know okay where's my weakness? The mountain bike, and so that had to come first. Had running been my weakness, that would have probably taken more priority. And I have athletes who are just like that. They're coming from a mountain biking background and they're going back into running and we're still biking, but our focus is on that running, if that makes sense.
Speaker 3:Well, so let me back it up to just generalize the framework right.
Speaker 1:So you're talking about the lead man, which you do, not just the 100 bike and the 100 run, but those are the pinnacles of it all. Yeah, and what makes it problematic or at least challenge problematics at the right word really challenging and also rewarding to do, is the fact that they are two very hard races that are within close proximity of each other, that are different disciplines, one being mountain bike and the other one being running. And so, from a framework perspective, what I'm kind of hearing from you is look at what your biggest limiting factor is and aim most of the training through that limiting factor and kind of leave it up to a little bit of hope and a little bit of faith that your strength will kind of take care of itself.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, you know, I mean I think about. I mean like UTMB in my mind is okay, utm comes last. If someone is not a good climber, I want them to become a good climber in that, you know. Does that make sense? Hopefully that makes sense. You know, and maybe we disagree on that. Does that make sense? Hopefully that makes sense. You know, and maybe we disagree on that, but you know, I want them to be able to do that as opposed to you know some of the other variables, but they're also going to gain a lot of that strength going into Western that way.
Speaker 1:So that's how I look at that. So you worked with one of our coaches, madison, on the cycling piece of it specifically, and remind me how long you two had been working together before the Almost a year and a half, two years almost so shout out to Madison.
Speaker 3:Yeah, to Madison, for sure.
Speaker 1:And you'll fully admit, cycling is not your forte.
Speaker 1:Oh no, especially mountain biking, oh no, okay good, I just wanted to get that kind of like get that out there, because I think that's an important piece of it.
Speaker 1:So one of the principles of training that we try to instill in all of our coaches is that you work your weaknesses as far away from the event as possible, and that is because they typically take the most time to develop and you want to make sure that you leave adequate amount of space to take care of those, such that closer to the race, you can really focus on your fitness and kind of like other areas. So I think the way we're going to talk about cycling a little bit, but I think the way the listeners, who are predominantly a running audience, can also think about this, is the analog being I'm really bad on technical terrain or, as you mentioned, neil, I'm really bad at climbing, or I'm really bad at going uphill. Why don't you take the listeners what you and Madison went through in your weakness from a cycling perspective, starting like a year and a half ago, to ultimately get you ready for the Leadville Trail 100 mountain bike race, which is a hard race to complete?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, you know, in thinking about it and knowing that run was a week later, our focus was really strength and climbing on the bike.
Speaker 3:So doing more it would be force workouts and trying to figure out what a good analogy to running would be. But these muscle tension workouts were you working neuromuscular system, and then that was a primary objective, whereas taking the running was down to a minimum. I think we had 75 minutes as a long run, which is really really a low, short amount of time early on we're talking october last year, you know. You know, and progressing, really focusing on the run and late, or focusing on the bike and focusing on time at intensity, as as we got closer and closer to the race, and yeah, so you know, I don't know if that kind of helps projected, but we, you know. But again, also working on technical skills, you know, and getting out on the trails as much as I can early on, so that's not even a factor. You know that not out on the trails as much as I can early on, so that's not even a factor. You know that, not even a factor when it comes to August.
Speaker 1:So the analog if we want to bring it into the Western States UTMB prototype, which is not the only prototype that's out there, and for the athletes that there are all these similar analogs, and if you're part of this analog group, I think that you can easily kind of translate this into what you're doing is if your weakness, for example, to use climbing as the as one of the examples that we've used before is you would try to shore up that weakness as early as possible October in your case, october before an August next year race. That's eight months, nine months, right, yeah, that's a long period of time to not exclusively work on that but work on it to to to a great extent. And then, as the race kind of comes forward, is where the more classical fitness and periodization and time and intensity and things like that start to take place alongside the other things that you can do. That might make a difference. Right, right, absolutely. Adam, do you want to add anything to that?
Speaker 2:Not too specifically to that, but I do want to almost go back and answer your original question because I like to give specific answers to vague, frustrating questions like how long do I recover after Ultras, because we love to say it depends. We know people are listening. That could probably rip apart any answer you give with some other counterexample, but my kind of framework, just to put some sort of hard numbers on it, is if you're racing a hundred miler, you probably aren't going to be back to your best health and or doing significant training where it looks and feels good for three to six weeks. It's a big range. It can be longer, it can maybe be shorter, probably not. Though 50 miles to a hundred K two to three weeks, and a 50K three days to two weeks, depending on. Is a 50K a giant stretch for you? Was it an easy paced training run? So it runs the gamut. I wanted to give some hard answers that the listeners can at least see if they're in some sort of ballpark of reasonableness.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's expand upon this a little bit. Neil, you can kind of give your framework and then I'll go through mine, because that is one of the bigger. As I mentioned from the onset, one of the bigger questions on everybody's mind is how do I determine how much recover I need after X? So you're trying to provide some hard answers there and people can write in their notebooks or etch in their mind the framework that you've just given Neil their notebooks, or etching their mind the framework that you that you've just given Neil. What do you have to say or add to that?
Speaker 3:I want to know what happened during the race. You know, how was the, what was the intensity, what happened during the race? So if they run a hundred miler and they come out of it with Rabdo, for example, you know, on the extreme side we might want a little bit more recovery, you know. And or if they've been, if they've had races after races, we want, we probably want a little bit more timeframe. I mean, you know, even looking at myself without their five races in a period of two months, I'm looking definitely three weeks, you know, not thinking about another race, psychologically, I don't want to even go there for a little bit.
Speaker 3:Some people, they have that drive to do that. But if we can help them to develop that, to realize that your fitness isn't going to disappear overnight, we're probably jumping into a different question and we could work ways to not have that fitness disappear but also to get that recovery in is, I mean, it's so critical. So, yeah, I think you know, yeah, I'm going to go back to that. It depends on the individual and the response to the race. You know, if they, if their legs are completely trashed or their butt there, they've got the little niggles that we need to take care of, then it's going to be different. You know, if it was a marathon, you know, and I've got a lot of athletes who'll do a fast marathon in April and they want to do an ultra Sometimes they want to do an ultra in May.
Speaker 1:Boston marathon and then an ultra right after that.
Speaker 3:I know you have athletes like that, Okay, okay okay, you know, and we got to you know, structure it. You know, we got to you know, you structure it. So how does that work? And I also convinced that, okay, maybe those three easy weeks is going to lead to that better ultra in a month.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, adam, while while you're going through that and Neil was discussing this as well I went back really quick and kind of spot checked. Some of my athletes that I just mentioned have this like Western States UTMB prototype, and most of those athletes are using about two and a half to three weeks before really turning the training back on. Now that's not to mean that they sit on the couch for two to three weeks, but that generalized timeframe I think is pretty close. Maybe an elite athlete, like I said, two and a half weeks at the very minimum, but your three week timeframe for anybody else who's reasonable, as long as it's a reasonable a hundred and you don't have rhabdo and or you didn't, just you know completely, you know under kind of a contentionally underperform right, use it as a training race, I guess, is a better way to put it, I think as well. I think is very well put.
Speaker 1:And knocking my memory bank around a little bit, I can't remember the time where I've ever, even where there's been, even when there's been kind of like race pressure put on, I can't remember a time ever where I've had an athlete elite or a regular athlete that has used less than a two week period between a hundred mile race and them what I would call serious training, or reasonably training, to something else. I can't imagine that I've ever done it with less than two weeks. It's always been greater than two weeks. So if you want to kind of put a lower boundary on it or some guardrails around it, the guardrail around that lower boundary, I would certainly say, is two and a half weeks and then becomes the other question which we've kind of already gotten into, is what should the maximum amount of time be before you start to see reasonable fitness deterioration? Adam, you look like you're chom chopping at the bit to comment on this one, so what do you have to say about that?
Speaker 2:I was just going to cheekily respond that it depends, but usually along the way in this process.
Speaker 2:It depends on yes, Along the way too, you'll get some period of time usually like a week to 10 days out, where the muscular soreness is gone, the blisters have healed, you no longer remember the pain and you're going to feel kind of fresh and fine walking around and you're going to think you're recovered and that your coach is a big baby holding you back so much. So that's something I see play out a lot. And then you go out and you do say 90 minutes or two hours. You're going to feel that fatigue. So I just wanted to bring that up that just because you're walking around and feeling okay doesn't mean that you're ready for some serious training. There's some deeper, lingering fatigue. But so the goals after the race.
Speaker 2:If there's another race close by, then you don't want to play the game of pushing out recovery as far as you can, while getting away with it, Unless there's some sort of other factors could be your kid is traveling for a baseball team across the US. Those are realistic things that happen all the time. And then you play that game of how long can we maintain If you're going into an off-season? I think it's a different story, Not really what we're talking about here today, but then there's a lot of lifestyle elements there and you can push it out quite a bit. You probably don't want to go no intensity for too long. You want to sprinkle other parts of their life and have those take the wheel for a bit.
Speaker 2:And the question is, legitimately, what can I get away with and maintain? And I know we've kind of said internally no one comes to us to maintain. But I think in the short term it's actually a very common proposition that people have. So you want to be able to have that conversation and if you want to put a hard guideline on it, you know, if you were going into your 100 miler doing 10 hours a week, then you could get away with a month or two of doing five hours a week, maybe sprinkle some intensity. In the second month you could probably even do less than that and I don't think it's not much.
Speaker 1:It's not much is what you're getting to. I mean, that's a 50% reduction that a lot of people would kind of get bored with, but in terms of I'll use the word preserving as opposed to maintaining preserving your fitness and improving other areas of your life that you usually have to put on the back burner. That's why I don't like the word maintenance, because really, if everything is homeostatic right, if everything is the same, then we really aren't doing our jobs. We've got to improve something, and it's not always related to somebody's. You know cardiac output or muscular endurance, or you know lactate threshold, ftp or whatever we want to say. Sometimes those get preserved or at least minimally deteriorated and other areas of their life improve because of the structure that we're putting together.
Speaker 2:And you can even use that time to focus on things like hey, technical running was an issue in this last race. So you know, while you have all this extra time, drive the extra 20 minutes to the trailhead with the technical terrain that you don't like, and if you roll your ankle it's not a huge deal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know what I use this time to do is build brownie points. I do everything I can. You know I put a lot of time into, you know, travel around the summer, during races and doing training and things like that. I definitely burn my fair share of brownie points. And then when I'm not doing that, I build those brownie points back up during the winter or whatever, and then I deploy them.
Speaker 3:You're talking about at home, at home, definitely at home.
Speaker 1:Yes, definitely at home between me and my wonderful wife Liz, who's very supportive of my coaching career.
Speaker 3:I was doing the same yesterday. Yeah, exactly, oh, hey, I can help with that.
Speaker 1:Let me go get that. There's been this coat rack that we were given, I think, at Christmas, and it's now August and I have not I have not installed it on the wall yet, so that is going to be either an activity that I do during tapering for Muggion or afterwards when I'm building my brownie points back up.
Speaker 2:Okay, A very reasonable use of the time and those are literally the conversations that we have with athletes is things like that.
Speaker 1:So, neil along, this isn't the same line, but I kind of want to bring in your expertise on the psycho-emotional side of things. So a lot of times when we talk about event recovery or race recovery, we pigeonhole ourselves into and I'm just as guilty of this as anybody else we pigeonhole ourselves into when are we physically capable of performing like we did pre-race? When are our muscles not sore? When have we repaired all of the physical damage and things like that? And the fact of the matter is that's only one component of the recovery process that we've just been talking about and trying to give some guardrails around. So I was wondering if you could take some time and kind of encapsulate this other component of recovery, which is just as important, if not more important in many cases, which is a psycho-emotional piece of the kind of the toll that the training and the racing process actually takes. What can you say to that part of the recovery process?
Speaker 3:And I think you know, one of the biggest components is preventing burnout. You know, when we go from race to race, we are setting ourselves up to just get emotionally burnt out and, like you discussed, like we are taking away from other parts of ourselves when we're focusing, you know, and some, each individual is everyone's different, ok, and everyone has a life that you know it's going to be different and they're able to focus on things a little bit more so than others. Me, as a family person, you know, I have a daughter. You know what I have neglected, some of those parts, and so I need to refocus on that and so that is fulfilling that need for me and those values that I have that I need to take care of.
Speaker 3:And then you think about the monotony of some of the training. Okay, we're doing this. Okay, now we're back to steady state runs and we're doing it, and there's some monotony that people do get, you know, psychologically, I don't want to say bored, but it's here we go. You know, okay, I'm doing this and there's a grind. When you stop, that grind, just break where you could explore and go, do something totally different, like for myself, even looking at it in a psychological perspective, what's going to help me most is go and just have a random adventures, you know, and just go, and you know, and guess what I'm keeping fitness, you know, by going on a long bike ride or checking things out.
Speaker 3:And, hey, I want to go up and over the pass and, you know, go down into winter park and come back, and, you know, do all that to go up and over the pass and go down into Winter Park and come back and do all that. And that's feeding this other need instead of just training. So taking that mental break I think is huge. And even if someone's not doing that mental break and they've got to get another race, is how can we change the training up so it's a little bit less monotonous and a little bit more stimulating in a psychological way? And it's like bit less monotonous, you know, and a little bit more stimulating and in psych, in a psychological way, it's like oh, this is interesting. Yeah, let's do something a little different here. How are we going to do that?
Speaker 1:you know, what's interesting is like I've begun to appreciate over the course of my coaching career how different everybody approaches that psychological break. And I'm going to give two opposite ends of the spectrum and not to pigeonhole everybody into both of these, because there's endless flavors in between these two ends, but I definitely have both of these types of athletes. There's the one athlete that finishes their apex race and they don't want to see their shoes for three months and I maybe have to encourage them a little bit more. Like hey, listen, like go out for a hike, go ride your bike, go go do something. Don't just like put your shoes in the closet but they don't want to look at it, like that's how it's, like almost, like it almost evokes like a visceral reaction Like oh my God, I trained. I never want to see my freaking shoes again or my pack, or like some something, some sort of visual reminder.
Speaker 1:The other end of the other end of the spectrum is they want to do copious amounts of activity but not train.
Speaker 1:It's like they want to become like a serial hobby jogger or something like that, like they just want to go and explore the mountains because it's there they most people are really passionate about being outside. So they want to go and ride their bike 30 hours a week or they want to go hike 40 hours a week or something like that, if they have the capacity to do that. Both of those, for those individual athletes, are psychologically recharging right, because they're doing kind of what they want to do is what they. But from a physical standpoint we've always got to blend the physical and the psycho-emotional. They're probably too extreme to be like the most effective to do both of those. So I'm wondering I'm going to go back to Neil Adam and then we'll throw it over to you I'm wondering if you have anything to say about that, because we do see these in sports. Right, ultramarathons attract extreme behaviors and it's a prototype that I'm sure a lot of people can identify with.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think you know, just going back to their goals, what are their personal goals? What are the long range goals? You know? And there's that you know, there could be that one person who just, hey, you know they've had this floating from race to race or not. You know, hey, I want to try this one, I want to try this one, maybe next year I'll do this. Well, let's get a good picture of what that looks like. You know, what are the values underneath that? What are the personal values underneath that?
Speaker 3:Maybe adventure really is that driving force and we need to go and, you know, find something that's, you know, an adventurous race. You know, but I think you could find that middle ground by really looking at what the long range, the big picture, is for them. What is their ultimate goal? You know, hey, do I want to improve my fitness at? Okay, as a guy in his fifties? You know, yeah, I want to. I want to be faster again. So, okay, what's going to take to get there while sitting around for three months? Probably not going to help me that much. How can I develop that? You know, yes, I need time off and I could do some adventurous things, but maybe I'm throwing in some workouts in there, a little bit more, you know, and gradually building that, so working with them collaboratively to figure out where that space is. Now, what are your thoughts?
Speaker 1:Well, okay, I promise to throw it back to Adam, but I'm going to just mention something cheeky, since you mentioned 50. Unbeknownst to you, I'm literally in the middle of writing an article for Ultra Running Magazine that I think is going to come out in the November issue, and the title of it, which I completely plagiarized from Joe Ferrell and our mutual colleague Jim Rotberg, is they wrote a book called Faster After 50, but I'm taking a take off, I'm playing off of that a little bit, or sorry. The book is Fast After 50. And so my take on it is fast in parentheses er after 50 question mark and one of the cheeky title aside, one of the points in this short 2000 word article that I make mention of is that when you do reach 50, one of the things that you have to change is being more consistent over longer periods of time at the expense of really big peaks and valleys in your training.
Speaker 1:That's a big change. As athletes ages is that when they're young and full of testosterone and piss and vinegar and things like that, they can handle big, huge 30-hour weeks and then go down to zero weeks for weeks on end and bounce back because they have the underlying youthful physiology to accommodate that when you're in your 50s and that physiology has been compromised. One of the things amongst many that should change is those peaks and valleys. Not that they don't exist, but just that they're smaller, and that makes all the sense in the world, like if you spent three or four months doing nothing. Neil, first off, I don't want to be around your household if that was ever the case but just from a physical yeah, just bad scene, but just from a physical standpoint, that's a way bigger hole to dig yourself out of. As opposed to adam. How old are you? You can, I'm 26. 26 as opposed to half your age, 26, adam ferdin henson. If he took three months off, he'd probably be right back to baseline in like two weeks.
Speaker 3:It's amazing seeing that difference of you, know, and all my athletes, yeah, you know, I mean I have folks that are in their 20s and folks that are in the 50s and 60s and it's definitely that you have to have. You have to have that maintenance and I know personally, if I don't, yeah, there's trouble in the household all right, adam.
Speaker 1:So we picked on your age for too much, so you know you get to jump in you gave it away.
Speaker 2:That's a carefully protected secret there. But as far as managing the athlete's emotional state between these races, I think not exactly what we just said. But a lot of times you hear that we listen to their feedback, we wait until they're excited to race again, and what I also listened to is the feedback before the race, because sometimes everything kind of washes out after a week and they can maybe think that they feel more fresh. But if all of the comments were kind of negative, like oh my gosh, another day in the hot sun, those kinds of comments that will play into how I feel it out. Because as much as I trust all the athletes, I think I'm also here to be the person that says like actually, you were really suffering a few months ago and I know you well and I know that you want to keep pushing and it might be to your detriment.
Speaker 2:So sometimes stepping in and pushing back just a little bit and you'll see the full range, just like Hoop was saying, people that will take way too much off time and just run away with it and, you know, to the detriment of their own fitness, which is fine if they're okay with that. But then there's people where there's a lot of anxiety when the training is taken away and they are texting you every day waiting when is it coming back, when is it coming back? They know what numbers they were doing before, they're very aware of it, and so you have to manage that and sometimes push that out further than they would like. And so you have to manage that and sometimes push that out further than they would like. Even if there's an abundance of excitement and motivation to get back to the training, Sometimes you have to step in a little extra.
Speaker 1:I think the framework that we're all kind of circling around is this kind of like two, this like two pronged gateway to get back into training, and it's not a first prong and a second prong, there's both of them. One prong is the physical side. When are they physically, you know, capable of running again, repair all the muscle damage, repair whatever it's kind of like going on?
Speaker 1:there's a myriad of stuff from you know, aches and pains to rhabdo, as we mentioned earlier, but repair the physical side. Second piece of it is the psycho-emotional side and that's do you want to go and train Like, do you have like the fire inside of you to go back and kind of train? And I know that those are really kind of like fuzzy gateways right, we don't have like stoplight monitoring systems to do both of those. But I think that's fine and if you're paying attention to both, I think you've got a pretty decent framework. I'm going to throw a surprise question at you guys. So if you need to stop and think about it, please do so and you can throw it back to me and I'll help you stall.
Speaker 1:But a common thing that a lot of athletes will want to do and I know a lot of coaches do this as well is to provide some sort of like workout as a little bit of a litmus test to one or both of those gateways that I just mentioned. So instead of just doing easy recovery run 30 minute recovery run, 60 minute recovery run and go spin on the bike for 40 minutes or whatever, providing something of a harder stimulus just to see if that recovery process on one or two of those fronts, or both of those fronts, has gone to completion, or to get a gauge on what percentage that actually is. Adam, I'm going to pick on you first, since we've left it with you. Do you find room in your kind of like repertoire when working with your athletes to do something like that, or what are your thoughts around it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So to be transparent with it, it's actually something I'm just kind of playing with right now. I usually don't. It's something that I've wanted to start doing more and actually there's a guy who's probably doing it tomorrow and we'll see how it goes. But I think it can be hard to see, because I've had the experience where you think it's all green lights, all systems go and you throw a monster workout at them, thinking that it's really ready to get back to training and it can blow up, and then you have to readjust and there's the psycho-emotional component there as well where it's a hit to their confidence. My coach thought I was going to be ready and I'm not. What's wrong? So I think the tester workout gives the coach a buffer and some confidence before throwing them into that. So monitoring the performance, because in all the day-to-day easy runs it's really hard to kind of look through the data and say, oh, they're ready, they're ready to go.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's kind of what I'm getting at. It is easy runs are easy to pass, or easier to pass than a hard workout, and I think that's one of the reasons why you start to see this as common practice, neil. You go ahead and jump in.
Speaker 3:Okay, don't throw anything at me, because here's what I'm going to say. I like using strides, you know, and we'll all introduce strides, because I think there's a neuromuscular stimulus there and if they're fatigued, that you know they're going to, let me know. I can feel like that didn't feel good, that didn't feel right, and so if we're doing something as simple as you know, five by 20 seconds, five by 15 seconds, with, you know, a good minute or a minute and a half recovery, you know, I'll see. Okay, can we move through that? That's good, you're able to handle that. What can we tolerate, you know, can we tolerate something a little bit harder here, a little bit longer? Okay, let's get, let's do a tempo run.
Speaker 3:So it's like the gateway before the gateway, before the gateway you know I think you know, and I know you know that I can speak, I'll speak for myself. When I do that, if I'll do strides, I'm like, oh yeah, my body is not right. It's a bit harder, you know, and that's, and it's really easy, you know really easy without you know a low cost, right, you know it's not. You know there's no, you know fairly little risk. Whereas starting to jump into a temp, you know a longer tempo run, or steady state run, or even a three hour, you know long run, I think that is it's a good entry point and then kind of progressing there, okay, that works, let's see how we feel. That's kind of a progression over a short period of time, I think.
Speaker 1:So I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, neil and I have done that in the past and I do maybe not specifically with strides, but with a smaller workout and then a slightly bigger workout as being like a dual gateway and in the. Why I deploy that as opposed to my normal strategy, which I'm going to go, which I'm going to divulge in a second, is, if I'm not sure, like if, for whatever reason, there's just like something I'm like you should be ready to go, but you're not, and like if I'm just kind of like questioning things, as I'm looking at the data and as I'm looking at their feedback, I will use a very what I would call a very low dose litmus test to see if you can go to the next litmus test, and that's really what you're doing. You're using strides or something relatively simple 20 minutes at a slightly harder intensity, right? Something like that to give an athlete an initial and to give you the feedback of, okay, they're ready for the other litmus test. If I'm questioning what's going on or if I'm unsure about the timeframe, I'll use a two-step process. Normally, when I use that two-step process, it's 50% and then 80%, and what I mean by that is is I take a workout and that's let's just say it's five by 10 minutes, for whatever reason. Right, five by 10 minutes. I'm going to make the math really easy. Let's just say it's 60 minutes of tempo, a 60 minute interval.
Speaker 1:So if I wanted to apply, or if I wanted to use that as a litmus test, in my normal framework I would take about 80% of that, which is 45 minutes or 50 minutes or something like that, and I'd say go do this workout. And here's why I like to do that is first off is if I'm I feel that if I'm paying enough attention to what's going on, I should be able to get the recovery process close so I don't have to use a two-step process, meaning the first step is going to be too easy and it's not going to give me useful data. Not that it's useless, but it's not going to give me useful data. So I'd rather jump to a workout that is hard enough, that gives me useful data, but not so hard that it has the potential to set the recovery process back in. Anywhere between 70 and 80% of the maximum time at intensity is kind of like where I've landed for that, and I would say in nine out of 10 cases.
Speaker 1:I jumped straight to that because I can get a fix on the at least I feel in in, in fairness with many of these athletes. I do have a little bit more of a sophisticated monitoring process that uses heart rate variability and subjective feedback and things like that, and I've gone through that in previous podcasts and I'll I'll link that up, but that that enables me to be a little bit more not that you're ever certain, but it gives you a little bit more confidence that you've got the timeframe right on when that first workout is going to be. So by using that 80%, I feel that both I get first off a productive workout, because 80% of your maximum volume and intensity is still a productive workout, but also a big enough stimulus that you really get a good litmus test of hey, are they ready to go? And then you can kind of like titrate from there.
Speaker 1:Okay, you know, if they're 90% recovered or whatever you want to figure, okay, we're going to give a little bit more space between this workout and the next one. If they're a hundred percent recovered, you just go. You just kind of go on. So to Neil, to specifically to this like two-step gateway or this like what I would call like a minimum dose to get one on. I have done that, but it's where it's, usually in the times where I'm a little bit uncertain for whatever thing and I I just want to test it out. I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I do like to be a little bit, or I think that I can get a little bit more certain, just with other things, though.
Speaker 3:That makes sense. That makes sense. I also love the idea of looking at the other data HRV data Because I think that if everyone could get on that, that could be so powerful. Just having that information and all the other subjective information, even you know you're thinking about just general mood, how you know? How are they feeling emotionally?
Speaker 1:I'm telling you guys, I went through this in one of our continuing guides in terms of what mood, how you know, you know how they feeling emotionally. Yeah, I'm telling you guys, I went through this in one of our continuing guides in terms of what I practically do and it's taken me a long time to like get super comfortable with this. But a morning heart rate variability reading, which anybody can do, you doesn't take an aura ring, it doesn't take a whoop strap. All it takes is the camera on the back of your smartphone and you can get the free version of this and do it combined with some standardized subjective metrics, and with 90% of my athletes I use this, the default metrics that HRV for training uses. I might change it for one or like one or two athletes, but if anybody would get on that program, it takes two minutes in the morning. Do it for three months. And this is everybody's hang up is they want instant red light, green light, yellow light stuff. Do it for three months.
Speaker 1:It took me a year of doing this with athletes before I really wanted to like incorporate it in a in a sophisticated fashion or in a meaningful fashion. So think about that for a second. It took me a year of doing it across several athletes where I was like, okay, this is how I'm going to use this, that is the most effective, low cost, lowest barrier to entry, lowest time commitment, everything kind of lines up that you can, that you can use. And even if you're just using it for yourself, if you're self-coaching far more effective than just relying on the automatic readiness, whatever numbers that your aura ring gives you or whatever. If you just do it in the morning, take the subjective questionnaire, gather a lot of data and then where it really shines is there's two sides of this. First off, when you're training really hard to keep you away from the edge and because you'll see the edge pop up kind of concurrently in the monitoring as well as with just your total volume, right, you'll see it pop up and you can decide how much risk that you want.
Speaker 1:But the second value, really high value piece is just what we're talking about the recovery from the races, because everybody you're going to love this Everybody's subject to recency bias. So especially when you're recovering from a race, you're telling me you feel good, but really what you mean is I feel better than yesterday, and yesterday I felt like such shit because I rode 100 miles on my mountain bike really hard. So it's just like it's not that you felt good, absolutely, it's just that you felt better from yesterday. Because that's your point, because that's your point of comparison. Using this monitoring system and trying to get everything kind of almost to equilibrium is a great way to weed through that recency bias in this race. Recover part Neil, go ahead, yeah.
Speaker 3:No, I have. So I used HRv for training for almost like three years, maybe four years, and I could look back at races and when and you could see when I was actually not recovered and started training. Yeah, yeah, I kept on digging a hole, like after bighorn. I was like, okay, I gotta start trading for javelina. And there was a big hole there the week before the hundred, the hundred run, you know, after the hundred bike I could see a big hole that I dove into midweek and you know, and didn't get out of that and so you know, yeah, it's an incredibly powerful tool, especially once you have that data and you can look back and reflect on it.
Speaker 3:That to me, you know, because everyone's going to be have a little different response, and I could look back at things as well. I had COVID that week. I could see where that went and you start to learn these patterns that, ok, maybe it takes me, maybe it takes me three weeks, maybe it takes me four weeks, maybe it takes me two weeks, and that's why I love it. I've got at least one athlete who gives me the data and will you get a red flag things and slow things down if he, you know, is starting to get into the red here yeah, it's the fact that you've been using it for three years.
Speaker 1:You're starting to see the value right, because it's not just, it's not three weeks and in really three months. I think that's kind of what a lot of people recommend, but I honestly think that's a little bit too early. I, with the athletes that I've worked with that, have done it for over a year really consistently. That's when it becomes a high value proposition, because then you can see the patterns and then it becomes. It can become a little bit more. I'm choosing my language really carefully here. It can become a little bit more. I'm choosing my language really carefully here. It can become a little bit more of a leading indicator versus a lagging indicator, which is the situation you're kind of stuck with for the first three months, is? It's usually always a lie. It's like, oh well, shit. Yeah, I went really hard the last two days and now all of my monitoring metrics are in the tanks. That's a lagging indicator. When you can turn it into a leading indicator and change your workouts for the next two or three days so that they're more effective, that's where all the gold is right there.
Speaker 1:Okay, switch topics, and this is to our last topic and we're going to talk about the taper. I want to specifically talk about the taper going into the second race so we can describe tapering. I've talked about it in my book a lot. I did a podcast with Inigo San Milan and just other podcasts where we've talked about tapering ad nauseum before. So I'm not going to get into the first one but I want to kind of like compare and contrast and if there is a compare and contrast between the taper going into the first race and the taper going in to the second race, so, adam, we're going to turn it over to you first. Since Neil and I just batted back and forth the last topic to death almost. What are the comments that you have in terms of how to actually look at the taper going into a second race comparatively to the tapering that goes on in the first race?
Speaker 2:So there's the proximity of the races and there's also the importance. If you have another A race that's six months away, then you're probably going to be doing a very similar taper because you had great training going into it. It's also something you really care about and it's probably going to be whatever tapers worked for you a solid two to three weeks, something like that. Then you get into the realm and we've all had this where there's pretty close races together, like three to six weeks apart. You know, maybe it's a 50 mile and a hundred K and it just gets weird. It gets awkward.
Speaker 2:No one feels great about it because it's not the perfect structure that coaches like to see and that the athletes like to see to really feel confident. But it doesn't mean that anything bad is happening there. But what you'll usually see is you go through the recovery period that we've described, depending on the length of the race, and then you throw in a couple weird weeks of almost noncommittal. We're not doing heavy training because you weren't quite ready for it, and if you had been doing heavy training before this, well then we'd be in the middle of a more aggressive taper right now. So you use the same principles, but people not to my knowledge. They don't study how to do that taper. They study how people taper when you have a big training load going into it and when you don't, you have to adapt those. And of course, if it's a lower priority then you just do a much less complex deloading phase and give them an easy-ish week before. It's something like that.
Speaker 1:Neil, do you want to jump in on that one? It depends.
Speaker 3:On Depends on. Yeah, it depends on how that A race, the first race, went, you know, and so I have you know, we could probably, you know, okay, so I've got at least one person who's going didn't finish Leadville and they want to go and jump into another race.
Speaker 1:Okay, common scenario. Yeah, totally common scenario.
Speaker 3:Very common scenario.
Speaker 1:Revenge racing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, binge racing, you know, and I wouldn't call it binge racing. I mean, he didn't really, you know, we didn't get really far at Leadville, so we're able to get. Okay, that's kind of more of a trading run. So we really tapered hard for Leadville. You know, I do want to have a little bit of recovery and he's traveling a long distance too, and so how are we, you know? So there's those scenarios too, you know that you're that are playing into it. Okay, this person's traveling overseas. Okay, how do we, you know, manage that? And so I think right now we're probably doing more of a you know what would be a 10 day taper and still having bringing in some intensity that he was able to manage prior to the first, the first race. And it could be a totally different scenario where we have four weeks and maybe we can do a 14 day taper. You know, or maybe you know, or have a lot of marathoners where, yeah, I want a two-week taper because that's been really intense, and now we're going into an ultra, a 50K, and it's maybe a lower priority, maybe it's a B race. Okay, maybe we can get away with something a little bit shorter seven days or even 10 days or okay, maybe two weeks if they're really fatigued from that first race.
Speaker 3:But it's really what's going on with the individual I hate, you know, going back to that what's. You know what's going on with them. What are their, what you know, what are their lists of things they have to do at home. So you know, you know and you know how am I managing that for the you, you know how are they managing that right now. But this guy, you know, going from from leadville, you know, didn't quite get, you know, 30 miles in and then he's going to to possibly another race. Yeah, our taper is going to be, you know, we don't have much volume that we're managing right now and so it's within a two week period really. Even seven days is probably sufficient, okay, so.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to like walk. I'm going to kind of walk the listeners through like how this kind of like looks sequentially when I do it for athletes. Like what are the? What do I look at first? Well, first off, I'm just going to assume that I have a taper that I'm confident that works. The vast majority of the athletes that I work with I've been working with for multiple years and we've figured out a taper that works for them. If you're unsure of how your taper or if your taper actually is working, use a standardized framework and I'm not going to spend too much time on this but use a two-week taper. Cut your volume by 50% that first week and then the week of the race cut it by another 50%. You do the same cut to the volume of intensity. So if you're doing five by 10 minute intervals, normally you would do two to three by 10 minute intervals on that first week of the taper and then one to two the second week. You guys, it's very simple math here. But my point with that is is, assuming I have a taper that I'm reasonably comfortable with works. Well, you guys know how much I like to use previous training to mold and shape future training.
Speaker 1:It's always a constant thing that we're talking about in coaches what worked in the past, what do you want to change, what levers you want to pull, and things like that. Tapering is so highly individual that it's one of those things where, if I find something that works, it might be and I would say definitely is. Actually, I'm thinking about the only thing that I will copy and paste on an athlete's schedule. If I have two weeks that work as a tapering for an athlete, I'll take those two weeks and I'll copy. I'll look at three years ago this worked and I'll copy and paste it into whatever race they're going into. And that's just because if it ain't broke, don't fix it. That's how and I'm using that to relay how individualized that can be and if you find something, don't monkey around with it. So that's the first thing is I'm assuming I have a taper tapering strategy that works over to standardized two week period. So if I do have an athlete that has two races, the very first thing I will do is I will take that taper, however long it is two weeks, 10 days, 18 days, whatever magic formula that we kind of came with and I will literally copy and paste it from whatever race it was, the previous race to the next race.
Speaker 1:I will then look at the space in between. And the space in between hasn't materialized yet, right, because we haven't gone through the recovery process that we just talked about. Is it going to be two weeks? Is it going to be three weeks? Is it going to be six weeks? As Adam had kind of mentioned, is the top guardrail for a 100 mile race, for example. But there's going to be some time in between there. Sometimes it's going to overlap and sometimes it's not.
Speaker 1:But the reason I just take that entire process and I plunk it down to see the spacing in between is because I want to get a gauge on does that space in between create a similar level of fatigue in a similar situation as a normal race? And if the answer to that is yes, that taper remains the same Meaning. If I have enough space between the races to recover and go through a normal training process and generate a normal amount of fatigue, why would I change the tapering process Unless the tapering process didn't go well? Right, that was the first assumption. We know we have a taper that works when that space is compressed down, or let's say that there isn't enough time to generate as much fatigue.
Speaker 1:And this is Western States, utmb to a T, and I think that the athletes that are training for Western States, my opinion is they apex their training before Western States and then they do something on the order of 90% or something like that of what they did at their peak weeks between Western States and UTMB. It's not quite an apex, but I'm using that initial tapering as the framework and I'm shortening it, not making it more or less dramatic, not making the drop off more or less dramatic. But instead of 14 days I'll use 10 days, instead of 16 days I'll use 12 days or something like that. And that's because the fatigue that you had in the first situation where you apexed your training isn't quite as high, so you don't need quite as long of a period of time to recover from it. That's the framework that I kind of go through when I see these two races is also always start at the end, right, I think that's always good.
Speaker 1:Coaching framework is to start at the end, because the end is your hard anchor point, and then the tapering and the resting process is kind of this it's either the heart, the equally hard anchor point or just slightly less rigid of an anchor point. I'll start there and then see where the overlaps and the gaps are and if I have enough time to train, it looks exactly the same. And if it's not, if it's not enough or they have to come off, that apex a little bit, I just shorten the time frame. Very simple process makes perfect sense. That's if you get the tapering right, which that's a whole nother ball of wax. Inigo majica, that's who I was trying to think of. I said inigo San Milan earlier. Inigo Majica.
Speaker 2:When you said San Milan, I was confused. Somebody needs to correct me on that.
Speaker 1:Inigo Majica. Sorry, both Inigos, I apologize for confusing you two. So anyway, any other comments on the second taper of this tapering process that we're kind of like going through, like either on the short side or on the longer side.
Speaker 3:That makes perfect sense, you know, I think short side or on the longer side, now that makes perfect sense, you know. I think, yeah, and it's kind of what I was getting. I like how you structured that and yeah, and how to look at that, okay, I like your framework.
Speaker 1:All right, that's where we're gonna leave it. Then I was gonna open up another ball wax. We'll save it for another. We'll save it. We'll save it for another pot. It was gonna be.
Speaker 2:You can keep going.
Speaker 1:You know it was gonna be the revenge racing which I always it always like comes up. I mean, we just got done with Leadville. We might as well talk about it. We just got done with Leadville.
Speaker 3:You should bring me on for a revenge race.
Speaker 1:We got a little bit of time. Maybe we'll kick it around for 10 minutes. We just got done with Leadville. Leadville notoriously has a 50% finish rate year to year. I don't know what it was.
Speaker 3:It was a little better this year. Oh, what it was. It was a little better this year. Oh good, it was a little bit better, and it was. I think it was warmer, but maybe even last year, maybe not.
Speaker 1:I don't know Well, anyway, it's notorious for having a pretty bad finish rate, anything south of 60%. You got to kind of look at is why is that the case? It's not like it's that hard of a rate. It's hard, but it's not like anomalously harder than anything else. But my point, my real point with that is is it causes people to like want to get revenge on their poor race performance. They start, they look at ultra sign up and either after the fact you know, they call us and say, hey, I signed up for such and such, which is three weeks later you let's go and do this, or they ask you preemptively if it's a good idea.
Speaker 1:But does that change the? Does that change this race recover process when it cut, like unlike what Adam mentioned earlier, it's a conversation that you had very early in the year to set it up. This is something that came up at the last minute and we're picking on the Leadville people for a revenge race. But this comes up in other variations Races get canceled. We all have all these like fire closures and things like that. Every year you might get COVID all the time yeah.
Speaker 1:You get, you get COVID or something like that before the race and you have to, and you have to shift things, shift things down.
Speaker 2:but it's hard to stylize all of those no-transcript, then yeah, you go, bring it to another race. If it's still a race that motivates you and excites you hopefully is a similar terrain, so the training isn't a giant mismatch then yeah, I kind of like it. I think it can be a good motivator for some people, though Make sure that you just still really want to do it and you don't get to mile 60 and realize what am I doing here.
Speaker 1:The similarities thing actually just made me think of this story. I was at a hard rock and Zach Miller as everybody knows, he was not cleared by hard rocks medical to compete there because he had to have emergency. He had to have emergency surgery on his appendix and he had to have it removed. And I was sitting in your a with him and I don't coach. I do not coach Zach. I don't want anybody to get that impression. Zach is probably uncoachable, although I love him to death. But he was asking he's like what should I do now? Cause he kind of, he was kind of in the same thing. He's like I really wanted to race, I was super fit. I was super fit for this exact race. What do I do now? Do I jump into something next week? Do I jump into something two weeks from now? Do I completely pivot and do a race like Leadville, which is completely different? But I can capitalize on my fitness and I just use that. I'm not going to tell you what I gave him, the advice that I gave him, I just use that. I'm not going to tell you what I gave him, what the advice that I gave him, but I use that as an example to go.
Speaker 1:That's a plight that everybody's kind of going through in these situations is how do I find the best fit? And I honestly don't know the best way to navigate that. Like as a coach. I try to find something that is still genuinely interesting to the athlete, because I think that is usually the biggest mismatch. Meaning, even if you went from, let's just say, like utmb to javelina right or I'll use a better example actually, because they're more approximate and more extreme diagonal defu to javelina two very different, very, very different races right, even in those situations, if javelina was really exciting to you, hey, I want to go run loops around the desert or whatever Great, if that's what interests you. Sure you might not have the best training match between those two, but if you're genuinely enthusiastic about doing the race.
Speaker 1:That's usually what I try to lead with when I'm counseling athletes that are in this situation is find something that is genuinely appealing to you, because you have to remember that you are coming from something that you deliberately plucked out of the sky and you decided to devote a lot of your time and energy towards and that shouldn't be discounted the fact that you chose, whatever race that you got, you know, the rug ripped out from under you. I don't think that sentiment should be kind of like discounted by just plunking another race down. That second race that comes up might not be, and probably is not going to be, as equally internally motivating for you or interesting to you, but it's got to be. It's got to be close to give you the best chance of success. Neil, what do you say?
Speaker 3:Oh, absolutely Absolutely. It has to be interesting and exciting to you. I mean, you know and I'll see people who do like a marathon. You know I got into Chicago and now it was a bad Chicago, you know. Or you know I got sick and I couldn't do it. Now what's the next best thing? You know, and it's not a race that I'm excited about. You know, let's go to Philadelphia. You know, and you know it's not going to be as rewarding.
Speaker 3:And you know, again, you got to look back at why are you doing it. You know what is. You know what are the values that you have behind it. Is it just, you know, are you just chasing a Boston qualifier? Or, you know, can we? Okay? You know it wasn't a great race or you didn't get to that race. Maybe we can hold on to that. You know, work on that fitness here. Now you got this base, we take a little time, a little downtime, and then we build up even more and you're stronger because you didn't race hard for three hours or two and a half hours or whatever that is. But really, I think it's most important that they have to be interested in it. It has to be interesting.
Speaker 1:Well, and that's where we can come in. It's like architecture in between the races be damned. We can figure that out Whether you're playing more off of your previous race, training and fitness, or you have to go through a whole new cycle or if it's an awkward time in between. And I think that's kind of remarkable that we're saying that as coaches that, like the coaching part of it or the training part of it takes a far back seat, at least in my framework and Neil from what you're saying as well, and Adam's nodding his head. So I think we're all in agreement here that, hey, we want to put you in the perfect physiological state, or whatever. That takes a far back seat in these types of circumstances.
Speaker 1:To, hey, what else motivates you? What else Can you get into this? Can you get into that? Don't just pick something out of the sky, because you quote unquote want to take advantage of your fitness. That can be true. At the same time, that you also find something that is meaningful to you, that has close to the same amount of emotional engagement which is a word I use in a book same amount of emotional engagement that you had with your previous race. I think that's something that's super important.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely yeah, and it's exactly why I go do lead man over and over again.
Speaker 2:There's this emotional engagement.
Speaker 3:It really hooked me, you know, and I love it, you know. You know why are you doing this deal? Cause I like it.
Speaker 1:You like it, but you're going to get it one day, man, If you like it so much you're going to get your, your your clock is ticket man, but I believe in you.
Speaker 3:I'm looking at a two year plan now.
Speaker 1:Good, I like that. I like that. It's like we mentioned. I hope you don't mind me mentioning this on the air, but because you're so close to the cutoffs in both of those races, it's an exponentially more difficult problem. Not a linear, not a double, because you've got to get everything right in two consecutive weeks, or almost everything right in two consecutive weeks, and a big piece of the firepower that you can put behind it is you're highly motivated to do it. You got to have all those arrows in the same direction absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 3:Now. There was a time when I was not close to the cutoffs. They're actually, you know, way ahead of the cutoffs on the run but because I've been focusing on the bike, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean what a great story. And like learning a new sport and what that actually like with a real person you're a real person, you're a father, you're a professional, like how that actually, even though you're training super hard, detracts from the specificity. Like I think it's a great story from another podcast.
Speaker 3:It's very class. It totally detracts from the specificity you know. But I mean again, you know, the more I think about it is like I love figuring out the puzzle, you know, and I love working with madison on that and figuring out, okay, what's the puzzle here? One of the pieces of the puzzle is recovery right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, you'll get it. I have faith in you, man, like I said, your clock's ticking, but you're gonna figure it sooner. I hope you figure it out sooner than later. Don't say clock's ticking, that's true. Your clock's ticking for the performance. How's that Not?
Speaker 2:in total, All right cool, that's great.
Speaker 1:All right, we'll stop being silly, we'll let everybody go. Thanks you guys for coming on the podcast this time and also it was really cool to see you guys in leadville this past weekend. Neil on the competition side, adam on the support side you guys are wonderful. Everybody has nothing but the best to say about you two as professionals and you two as people, and it's an honor to call you guys colleagues likewise, like, absolutely likewise.
Speaker 3:You know, being on that competitor end of it, um was so amazing to go into our, our tent and just see, see the love from the coaches that is there, that they gave to everybody and that was incredibly powerful to experience it for me and, you know, I know our athletes have experienced the same thing. So that was, yeah. I just wanted to finish with that.
Speaker 1:Thank you Best time of every year going to races. That's why we do it so much with that. Thank you. Best time of every year going to races. We do it so much. All right, folks, there you have it. There you go.
Speaker 1:Much thanks to coaches Neil and Adam for coming on the podcast today and taking us through a little bit of framework and hopefully stimulating everybody else's brains on how to manage your own race recovery cycle. I know there are endless variations of this, whether they're two weeks apart or four weeks apart, or eight weeks apart. A, b, b to A, a to A. I understand that we can't go through every single scenario, but I hope the generalizations that we gave can offer some insight into how you can actually create this for yourself if you are going through this race recovery process. We mentioned at the very end of the podcast the Leadville Trail 100, and I wanted to take a moment just to touch on that just a little bit more.
Speaker 1:Going out to races and seeing our athletes perform and compete at these races is one of the things that, over the course of the last several years, we have started to put a lot more of an emphasis on. We've made huge efforts at the Western States 100 this year at the Leadville Trail 100. This year we will be going out to UTMB, which is coming up very soon, where we have over 40 athletes competing in that race, and we'll do the same thing at the Javelina 100. And the reason for that is, first and foremost, we like it.
Speaker 1:We like seeing our athletes kind of take all the training that we've been giving them in electronic format and actually putting it into the field. That's something that gives us great joy as coaches. But also we feel that we can make a difference for the athletes that are coming into aid stations and maybe they need some tough love or some encouragement or maybe even just gel or to even get their feet patched up. So if that is something of interest to you, come by our tent at Javelina and come and say hi to us. Like later in the year. We would love to see you, we'd love to bring you into the CTS family and hopefully bring you on as a CTS athlete for whatever your race schedule looks like, whether it's a singular race or a series of races like we talked about today. That is it for today, folks, and as always, we will see you out on the trails.
