KoopCast
Coach Jason Koop covers training, nutrition and recent happenings in the ultramarathon world.
KoopCast
Thoughts on DNF with Coaches AJW and Neal Palles #235
What drives an ultra marathoner to push through the final miles, or decide to DNF (Did Not Finish)? This episode tackles this profound question head-on, drawing from recent high-profile races like UTMB, Run Rabbit Run, and Leadville Trail 100. We explore the mental frameworks and pre-race preparations that can make or break an athlete's performance. By sharing personal stories and expert insights, we aim to provide guidance that helps athletes make confident decisions during and after a race, all while acknowledging the vital role coaches play in offering emotional support.
Coaches face a delicate balance of celebrating successes and owning failures, especially in the high-stakes world of elite races like Western States and UTMB. Through candid discussions and reflections on personal experiences, we highlight the importance of empathy, self-reflection, and continuous improvement in coaching. We delve into public perceptions of coaching effectiveness, the individualized support athletes need post-race, and the role of feedback in fostering a growth mindset.
Decision-making in ultra marathons is fraught with complexities, often involving more than just physical readiness. Using data from events like the Western States 100, we explore common issues such as nausea and mental fatigue, and how these can be mitigated through training and mental resilience. With insight from coaches AJW and Neal, we discuss lessons learned from DNFs, the integration of sports psychology into training, and the emotional journey of ultra runners. This episode offers a comprehensive look at the intricate dance of mind and body in the quest to cross the finish line.
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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 this episode of the podcast deals with the dreaded dnf and more what to think about before you potentially encounter this situation.
Speaker 1:The inspiration behind this podcast is most certainly the more recent happenings at UTMB and, in particular, the way that the men's field seemed to have been decimated in the middle of the night and a lot of the dialogue that has emerged as a consequence of that in the aftermath of that particular race.
Speaker 1:But really, what we wanted to do as coaches is bring together our collective experiences, both from a coaching lens as well as participants and athletes in these races, to hopefully armor up all of the athletes and the coaches that are listening to this with some sort of framework to think about in advance of having to potentially encounter this situation where you have to look yourself in the mirror and say do I want to continue this or do I want to stop my race?
Speaker 1:Here I will say in advance that we don't have perfect answers and a lot of times we like to kind of pass judgment on people who drop out of races for whatever reason, and that's certainly not the intent of this podcast. Everybody's gonna have their own value system and their own framework of which to draw from whenever they are faced with potentially not finishing something that they actually started. So, regardless of your perspective here, I hope you guys listen with an open heart and an open mind, because we do try to bring to the table all of the various aspects of why this actually might occur and then hopefully provide a little bit of a framework for each individual that's listening to this to draw from whenever they potentially might be faced with that situation. All right, folks, with that out of the way, I'm getting the right out of the way. Here's a conversation with two of our crack coaches, our most experienced coaches on our roster coach AJW and coach Neil Palace. All about this dreaded decision on to DNF or to not DNF. On to DNF or to not.
Speaker 1:DNF. We can get into it now. Since we're already talking about it, let me try to set the table here. So what I want to try to do is create a little bit of a dialogue for people to help them process this decision-making process before they actually get to the time where they have to make it, and we're going to use this lens of experience that we just talked about just off air, talking about run. Rabbit run happened this weekend and it had what? A 50 dnf rate or a 50 finish rate, depending on how you want to put it.
Speaker 3:Ajw yeah, in the hairs division I think, in which is the faster, the self-chosen, self-selected, faster field was about 50 percent. That the tortoise division, I think, had a little bit long, a little bit more, maybe 60 yeah.
Speaker 1:So anyway, we've got that, we've got lead bill, the lead bill trail 100, which notoriously has a poor finish rate right, hovering right around in between 50 and 60% every year. We just went through UTMB and, for whatever reason, it's kind of sad for me to say right now is the kind of becoming a little bit of the norm where especially the elite fields get really decimated overnight and end up dropping out kind of early. A lot of them end up dropping out early in the race or earlier in the race than you would think intellectually If you were to try to like process this in advance. They drop out at Corvallier at you know ADK. They might drop out at Champaix Locke, which is a little bit later in the race, but certainly not getting, they're certainly not getting cut off right.
Speaker 1:These are DNFs by some sort of choice in many cases, and what I want to try to do is use our collective experience, both athletically but more from a coaching perspective, to kind of walk through how people process this and how they can I'm not going to say make the right decision, because who's to say what's like right or wrong in every single scenario, but at least have some sort of basis to intellectualize beforehand what a better decision might be Maybe that's the best way to put it what a better decision actually might be. Because the most tragic ones of all of these which we'll probably talk about in a little bit is the DNF that people regret afterwards, and I've had those personally. I've had athletes that have had those. I've had those as a runner, as a participant, as an athlete. Those are always ones that happen, that are the most tragic, and maybe at least if we can get people in a position to avoid those and hopefully try to make better decisions, so that they're kind of confident after not only during the decision-making process but afterwards that they've made a better decision, we've done the world a little bit of a service. So let's kind of first talk about the easy things.
Speaker 1:Right, we've all gone through this as coaches and athletes. Actually, I want to kind of I want to put the audience first in a position, kind of, where we're at as coaches right, we've both gone through this where we've had an athlete DNF, we've either been there in person, but more often than not we see it through, we see it through electronic means, right, we're watching the updaters, we see the post activity comments or whatever, and I kind of want to know, just from your perspective as a coach, what goes through your mind minds initially. Neil, we'll kind of start out with you Like what, like how does that actually? What's the first thing that kind of hits you and what are your first like steps in this whole process with an athlete?
Speaker 2:With an athlete is immediately contacting them as soon as I can and asking them how are they, how are you doing? Yeah, and not just coming from that. You know performance perspective, but that person perspective, you know who is this person's hurting right now. You know there's an emotional component to this that I really get in touch with. You know I've experienced more DNFs than I like to count, you know, but you know I like to look at it as you know when I think of DNFs than I like to count, you know, but you know I like to look at it as you know, when I think of DNFs. I think there is no wrong choice because that is the choice in the moment. That is the choice that they made right then and there. And that is, you know, and yeah, there's always going to be a regret, but I want to know how they're doing. I want to know how emotionally they're doing. We could dig into it and process it right, you know, later on, but I want to hear from them, their perspective, what was going on, what was happening inside for them that they came to that decision.
Speaker 2:Or, you know, for a lot, you know a lot of folks that I run into. I don't haven't seen a lot of just hey, I'm just going to drop it's. Usually there is some really good reason, a medical reason. You know I had a friend who dropped it, run rabbit and he couldn't see out of one of his eyes, you know, and the medical staff pulled him because he kept on tripping and falling. You know, I think about, you know, people who have some medical issue. That goes on and there's nothing we can control there. You know we can't control it. We can look back and maybe kind of fix some things or prepare them a little bit better. But but yeah, first thing is I want to know how they're doing. You just want to give them a big hug.
Speaker 1:That's what I do.
Speaker 2:You know and you know, and that's who I am, and I think that's how we should, you know, be able to support them, Because I think along with this and I'll talk a little bit about this is, I think there is there can be a component of shame, which is that self-doubt that comes in and also that guilt of I should have stuck to my plan or I should have done this, and I want to be able to support them through that and help them make those decisions a little differently. The next time around is how could we move in more in alignment with who we want to be and how we want to show?
Speaker 1:up AJW, we'll kick it over to you.
Speaker 3:I'm a little bit on the other side of the boat than Neil.
Speaker 1:This is why I had both of you on at the same time because I knew we were going to get some compare and contrast, and Neil mentioned shame, and I've learned, actually, and a lot of the answers to our questions over the years Coop.
Speaker 3:It depends, but in this case it depends on the athlete. If, assuming I know the athlete pretty well by this point which I hope I do whether or not I immediately reach out or wait for them to come to me. I think that there is some advantage with some athletes. In some circumstance there might be shame, there might be embarrassment, there might be frustration, there might be anger, where they might have no interest in hearing from me. I might reach out to them and they just ghost me or something. So I want to be very careful about that. Obviously, I want to let them know I'm there, but I also think sometimes, if they've made a hard decision to DNF you know it's not missing the cutoffs or having a serious injury they might need the gift of time before they come and say, oh, ajw, I lost my stomach or my quads were trashed or I should have brought another jacket or whatever. And so I really think that I hear Neil it's really important for the athlete to know we're there, but sometimes being there is not necessarily being there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree and disagree. Can I throw something out there for you? Because there's three ways people approach when they're experiencing shame. And I'm not saying that everyone experiences that, I'm saying that a lot of people do. But three ways they do is one is they avoid, they'll avoid you. Two is they'll come up to you, know, they'll come to you and they'll want more. And then the other thing is they'll you, they're going to point fingers and pick at you, you know, and not take responsibility for their own stuff that's going on inside. And there's three ways and one of the ways to kind of neutralize that is simply just that empathy and just even if it's even if they hey, they do need time checking in just a moment, you know, hey, they do need time checking in just a moment, you know, hey, phone call text. That I think helps provide that empathy to help neutralize that experience.
Speaker 2:And then, you know, then we started giving them the tools to. You know, deal with that. If they're open to that, they may not reach out to you for a couple of weeks. You know, I've had that, you know. Know, happen where it's like oh, where did they go, you know, and it could be an injury. You know where you could be an injury, where they you know they don't want to. You know they, you know they're experiencing this inside and they don't want to talk to you. So I I just wanted to kind of throw that out. There is kind of thinking about the three different ways people are experiencing that and that for us to provide empathy and help, maybe even teach them a little bit about self-compassion, that can help wonders in this experience and so they can get back up and go again and go hey, I'm here with you, I'm ready to roll.
Speaker 1:So what I'm hearing from both of you for as a point of commonality, is that there's some titration of the intensity of the communication that you're initially providing. Neil's intensity might be, it's just I was going to say a different level, but it's really not, it's just different, right? I mean, neil's going to go from like big bear hug, I'm going to cry with you to text right, that's the intent, that's, those are the levels of titration, so to speak, from one end to the other, and he's going to go from I'm going to contact you initially to I'm not going to contact you at all. Just different range, right? Different ranges for different people. And I think that as long as we're thinking about it as coaches, as long as we're thinking about it deliberately, right and not having some sort of one size fits all solution, I think that's the best step forward, because just the DNF itself, responding to the DNF, there are really no right or wrong answers, they're just better or worse ones.
Speaker 1:I mean, I can tell you I had to go, I had to go through this a lot at a UTMB, not to throw anybody underneath the bus on this, but I had a lot of success in. A lot of urban athletes that I worked with had a lot of success and also a lot of failure at UTMB, and you got to kind of take both sides of that coin, and so this is kind of visceral for me right now, also considering that I was like literally on the ground at this event and my first reaction as a coach and this might not be my first action, but my first reaction as a coach is, what did I screw up? And I've learned that over the course of my coaching career is that, personally, I always make better decisions as a coach from a long-term perspective is if my first gut reaction is how can I fix this? How can I do something differently within my coaching practice to actually make the situation better so that the athlete has better tools, better resources, better training, better you know, psychological capacity, whatever, however you want to put it better, everything to deal with the milieu of what you encounter during an ultra marathon.
Speaker 1:Now, what I do with the athlete after I go through that initial point of processing of what could I have done better, that more resembles both of what you had just went through, and I don't know if I can't point to a decision-making framework that I actually have, like first A then B and if not B then C and then if not C then D. Like I don't go through that kind of deal very deliberately, but it is very individual, based on the athlete. Some of them it's hey, I'm going to cry with you just because that's what they need. Other ones it's you need a couple of days. Just let's just take a couple of days. Go, you know, don't talk to anybody, don't talk to me, certainly. Go hang out with your kids and your wife or you know whoever their support system is, and we can kind of try to manage this on the backend and there's a whole range of things in between. But at least my coaching framework is what it.
Speaker 1:Where did I screw up personally? Cause there's always something, um, there's always something that I can do better. And I think the other thing is I have this general. This is going to be 30 seconds of a soap box and then I'll get off of it. We have this issue in coaching where and this is across the board, and I have been just as guilty of this as any other coach out there where we take too much credit when things go well and not enough responsibility when they don't go well, irrespective of they don't go well as a DNF or an underperformance, or their stomach went south. Right, that's a version of kind of not going well, and I like to kind of course correct that general sentiment by intellectualizing and processing a dnf as what could I have done differently first, and then all the actions kind of flow from there.
Speaker 3:I have to jump in and because I've been stewing over that. What did I screw up for two and a half months? I think most people listening to this know I'm like. My race of all races is western states and I it's always been a point of pride and also not throwing anybody under the bus, but it's always been a point of pride for me.
Speaker 3:You know that when I'm coaching a Western States athlete, you know it's, and for a whole host of reasons that I'm not going to go into right now, I had five athletes in Western States this year and three this past year and three of them did not finish and it's still two and a half months late and that's by far the poorest performance I've had as a coach. Well, ajw coach athletes have had at Western States and I've been kind of and I've spoken with all three of them and the two who succeeded and it's still kind of stewing. I'm still stewing over it, frankly. So I think that is a good natural instinct for us as coaches to first say what did I screw up? Maybe just ask the athlete hey, what did I screw?
Speaker 1:up. That's a really, that's a really powerful lens actually.
Speaker 2:I ask him for feedback. You know, what could we have? I have done differently here. You know, what do you see? At AJW I experienced the same thing, you know a good handful of my athletes at Leadville, and I was like what you know, and it was my own, I was experiencing it in real time for myself, and then I was experiencing it for my athletes. And you know, and that you know, kind of neutralizing that experience of shame too is bringing that self-compassion to ourselves too, but staying in that line of, hey, let's get that feedback, let's get that feedback and dig into it so we can learn from that. You know, there's a combination of different things that happen. But yeah, I actually tend to lean in that direction of where, what did I do? And that's just me. But you know, that I think is I think it's normal, I think it's as coaches, we pride ourselves on the hey, I really want to see them succeed, you know. And how do we get them there?
Speaker 1:So it's always been it Once again. I've seen this play out in the in the court of public appeal many times over my almost 25 year coaching career right now, and the general sentiment that I always get is that when athletes are winning, regardless of what the win is whether it's an actual win during a race or whether it's them setting a PR or them finishing when they didn't think they could finish or whatever that win actually is Coaches in general I'm talking about the whole sphere of coaches, not just our CTS coaches, but all the coaches out there in endurance sport we take a lot of freaking credit that we've got the perfect answers for everything. Oh, double threshold workouts are great. High carbohydrate is great. Ketones are amazing. That's how I did this and we tend to like profess that those are the magic solutions, but the opposite is not true when they go wrong.
Speaker 1:And a great example of this across the board that we just saw is the compare and contrast between the elites at Western States and the elites at UTMB After Western States. I vividly remember all this dialogue. It wasn't that long ago. Why is everybody running so fast? And we all went through the answers of why everybody's running so fast. We have better cooling strategies, we have better training, we have better nutrition, we have better technology. The shoes are better on and on. Those didn't magically go away in the eight weeks between Western States and YouTube. They're all still there. So why is everybody underperforming and dropping out? Not everybody, but a big chunk of the elite field. Let's not get this twisted. It was a big chunk of the elite field underperform and or DNF at UTMB. You can't have it both ways, right. You can't profess to have the magic solution on the front end and then on the back end of it, the other really high profile race where everybody's eyes are tuned into it, just seemingly disregard all of those things that happened. And inevitably, what this really points out is those magic solutions aren't as magic as we thought that they were and we're still left with the same kind of problem solving nature of ultra marathon that always has existed.
Speaker 1:So anyway, let's kind of let's move on to the next piece of it, cause I want to get we're going to get Andy and myself in trouble if we keep talking about this in this context, which is fine. I want to go through kind of easy, medium, hard. So we've seen this for athletes and I've got a great example queued up, so maybe I'll go second on this one, agw, you can kind of go first. There's kind of an easy decision DNFs that are out there. These things are hard.
Speaker 1:Stuff happens. I do think that we not that they are the easiest like perfect decisions, but they are easier decisions than the rest of them and I kind of want to go through those just so we can almost not have to think about it for the remainder of the conversation. Right, we want to get into the meaty stuff, the stuff that is really should I really have done that or not? Was this a really good decision or not? So let's get rid of the easy decisions first. What's the category of those, or how would you describe those in your own mind? Ajw.
Speaker 3:Well, you know, I think right at the top of the list is going to be, is going to be on the during the race injury, right, an actual severely sprained ankle, a twisted knee, a resurgence of a surgery issue or something like that, a serious or something related to not necessarily running, related cardiovascular breathing? Neil mentioned losing eyesight, these kinds of things that you never really predict and it's oh my gosh, I can't do this Right. So so those are sort of. To me, the easy decisions are kind of that injury related. There's just something completely unexpected. They came and guess what? I'm not going to be able to keep doing this race I use. In most cases in my experience, when those decisions are made, there's no regret afterward. That was my knee was flaring up the way it was before and I just had to stop. To me, that's the easy one.
Speaker 1:Here's the thing with that, though it's kind of oversimplistic to say like that that it's a medical thing and I know I'll give you, I'll give you a great example, right, and this is public. So this is why it's a great example out there, and this is stuff that I've received feedback on. So I I crewed Tim Olson for the entirety of his Pacific crest trail, what at the time was the fastest known time, and it, you know, they've made a movie about it. That's why it's very public and all this, all these other things. He was dealing with an injury for last third of the entire thing and not one that was trivial, the last third of the entire thing and not one that was trivial.
Speaker 1:The way they were just portrayed in the movie as a showstopper is every bit authentic. It wasn't overhyped or overblown or anything like that and kind of the framework that we came up with, this and this was directed by the athlete and reinforced by me. This was a hard position for me to be in and I don't, I would have only put my position, I would only have put myself in this position if it were one of reinforcement, not creation. The point of view of the athlete is unless there's a bone sticking out, you are not stopping and that's pretty severe. That's not something that you would say. That's the right decision-making process for every single person out there and the kind of like looking back on that, my kind of.
Speaker 1:I don't have any regrets with how I handled that and how we handled that with Tim, how his whole collective team had approached that. If there were any regrets, it's people misconstruing that they should have the same value set and there's not a good opportunity to do that within the context of a film that's actually being produced. Right, we tried to do it in some of the events and, when it came up, in different like forms of dialogue. But just to say a quote, unquote medical I guess my point with this is just to say a quote unquote medical event. You have to oh my gosh, he's like gestures and zoom Whoever's watching the.
Speaker 1:YouTube version it's going to go crazy.
Speaker 1:I'm going to edit this out of the podcast one, but we'll keep it in. We'll keep it in the real, we'll keep it in the YouTube version. My point with that is is this decision-making process of a medical event could be a reason that I DNF the severity of that medical piece of it is it you can come up with so many different variations of it. I think it's hard to really encapsulate. I kind of put one caveat above them all that I think everybody should adhere to is, and that is is if you have somebody from medical, like a medical personnel at a race not an aid station volunteer, with all due respect to the aid station volunteers, not your crew who's trying to play doctor at the time, but an actual medical professional whose job is to keep everybody safe If they are telling you that you need to withdraw from the race, do it, Don't pass, go, let them make the decision.
Speaker 1:Put it in your mind that you're letting them make their decision because they're a professional and you're not in that situation. That's the one easiest of the easy that I can think of, but all the other ones related to injury, although they're still in this category of easier not easy is the way that I would think about it, it's easier. There's still all these grades of medical issues that make this joke all the time. Everybody's injured after an ultra marathon, so if everybody dropped out?
Speaker 1:because, I mean seriously. If everybody dropped out because of an injury, nobody would ever finish, because everybody's injured to some degree. It's just a matter of how you know how severe it is. So I think, even in the easy ones and this is to our point that these decisions are very hard, even in the easier ones, there's this kind of like grading system that everybody needs to internalize at least a little bit in order to have a good framework. So, neil, I've been talking enough. I'm going to turn it over to you on this easier decisions piece.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, you know it comes. You mentioned it. Values, you know. I mean you think about. You know someone on the extreme side like david goggins. You know he's running with broken legs, you know, and you know other things going on. That's his personal values.
Speaker 2:I'm not going to argue that, you know, for me, I, I look at longevity in the sport. I want to be able to run when I'm 70, 80, you know. And okay, how do that? Well, I have to back off If something cracks, snapples or pops. That's my decision and I totally agree with you.
Speaker 2:The medical you know, having a doctor, having someone, a medical staff, saying you can't go, you know you're also putting the race at risk too. You know now you're putting other people at risk by. Hey, if we have to come searching for you, that's a problem. So you know it comes down to. You know there's this grade. You know, yeah, some cracks and apples pop, yeah, you probably want to stop. But you know, ultimately it's your choice.
Speaker 2:I passed someone at Leadville a couple of years back and I was limping. I'm going up power line and I'm, you know, just suffering and I couldn't move very fast at all. Just suffering and I couldn't move very fast at all. I passed someone, my sister, saying you pass this guy, oh he has a broken ankle. You know this guy was going up power line with a broken ankle to finish and that's his choice, you know. Eventually it was cut off. But yeah, I'm not here to argue it. I do think for longevity in the sport, which is something that people you know probably want to think about. You know, is this something that I is going to prevent me from going to the next race or doing something else that I love, or, you know, even just quality of living?
Speaker 1:you know I'm gonna be limping down the stairs the rest of my life because of this um it's tricky because there's no perfect litmus test for it, right like you don't have something on your garmin watch that says oh well, if you cut out the next 13 miles of the leadville trail 100, you've now cut off 2.2 years of your ultra running career right, there's nothing kind of like that.
Speaker 1:There's no way to test it and even if you could let's just say in a perfect world, let's just say you could right, how would you like I don't know understand how anybody would, even if they had all the data right? Yeah, that's still hard to process. So it's like you're making a guess on top of a guess on top of a guess on top of a guess, and that's all you got.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's all guessing. And coming back to that again and again, self-compassion I mean you're going to make that decision. I've made that decision, valina. Once it was a month after I had COVID and my chest was aching and I was coughing and I was like, ah, this is something bad happening. And you know, the doctor, you know the medical didn't pull me and they said everything's fine. I'm like I don't know, that's the choice.
Speaker 1:Let me skip forward in our outline. I think this is a good part of it. I ask you guys to come up with kind of a learning lesson from either from yourself or from an athlete, however you want to position it, from a DNF. That shouldn't have been and we're going to use kind of the example is what the lesson is learning. I'll start on this one just to let you guys process it a little bit. On this one, just to let you guys process it a little bit. I can't remember what year it was, but it was an odd year, odd numbered year, um that I was doing the hard rock 100 and I'd previously finished hard rock twice in the even numbered year direction, which helped me out. Ajw, that's clockwise right, even number of years are clockwise and the odd or anti-clockwise or counterclockwise.
Speaker 1:In order to be a real hard rocker, you've got to finish it in both directions, which is kind of a silly thing, but it's what everybody likes to do. So I didn't have that finish and I went into that year of hard rock certainly well underprepared and with some underlying health issues that hadn't been, kind of like, completely diagnosed yet. I'm a reasonably fit person, right. I'm a 30, 35 hour finisher and the cutoff is 48 hours, right. So what I'm trying to set up here is I've got a lot of physical bandwidth to actually get a finish done. So I ended up dropping out of that race at Cunningham late into that year. What's the mile marker on that one in those years? Ajw, it's 90 K or something like that, yeah, that year. What's the mile marker on that one in those years? Ajw, it's 90 K or something like that, yeah, anyway, and I had plenty of time I don't remember what the timing was, but plenty of time and although I had a host of excuses going into the race, most of which were what King Clover would call crybaby excuses, but some legitimate excuses certainly.
Speaker 1:I personally regret that DNF the most, not because of the ultimate decision, it's that I didn't give myself as much time as possible to actually get the finish done. That's the regretful part. It's not the decision of I'm going to stop here, it's this decision of I'm going to give myself. I could have stayed there for eight hours, 10 hours and just gone through an entire, like our colleague John Fitzgerald just did it toward the shots. He spent nine hours at one aid station. Sorry, johnny, to divulge that right now, but I guess since it's a publicly available information on the aid station tables, everybody could go look it up. Anyway, my point with that is is not the ultimate decision to DNF, I'm kind of like comfortable with that. My, my personal point of regret is not going through the process of hey, how much time do I have? Do I really want this? Can I let whatever things are ailing me which I had multiple at the time resolve between now and the finish and just being more patient with the entire, with the entire process?
Speaker 1:And I hope that serves as a learning lesson to people, kind of on two fronts. First off, a lot of people have a lot of time to finish races and I was in that very same situation. I probably had at least 10 hours, at least 10 hours to go. 50k probably on the order of 14 hours to go. 50k that's not that big of a stretch. But the second thing is you never know.
Speaker 1:Let me put it a different way. We're very bad at forecasting during events, and what I mean by that is that when things are really bad, our forecast is that they are always going to get worse, and they very rarely, if ever, always get worse. They might get worse for a temporary amount of time, but usually they resolve itself. Either you quit, like I did, and everything gets better right, or you just locomote down the trail at an easier intensity and somehow they fix themselves.
Speaker 1:And what I would like to kind of like remind people as they're going through this is it never always gets worse. You do have time to resolve things if you are not pushing the cutoffs and sometimes if you just give yourself a little bit of space. It might not be the race that you wanted, but it's the race that you got and you'll learn from that inevitably. So that's my, that's like my personal thing, like I've had a DNF that I certainly regret and I just hope some people can learn from it. Neil, we'll turn it over to you from the DNF. That shouldn't have been.
Speaker 2:Which one, you know. I mean, I think you know even to for one of my athletes and I'm not going to even talk about the rate, which particular race it was but it was really warm and I think at this point he was two thirds of the way into the race and was having some stomach issues and they didn't get better immediately, but he had stopped and made that decision to get to end the race. You know, I know, looking back and talking with the athlete, you know there were a lot of regrets and we both talked about is yeah, you know you had plenty of time to problem solve and even just sit there and let it resolve and work through different things so you can get to that finish. You know, and I think that's probably one of your most common scenarios with, you know, gi issues it's not just because something's going on doesn't mean it's over Stop. And you said, the word that I love here is patience is being patient with it. Yeah, your time goals might be out the window, you know, but that's okay. You know to get to the finish, let's see how. You know just taking that time, being patient with yourself, taking care of yourself here there's that self-compassion again and then moving forward with that. It's so critical, you know. You know I could speak in it for another DNF that I did, and it was. You know I had plenty of time. You know I was sitting at Hope Pass, leadville, you know, and I had plenty of time to come down into Twin Lakes, get off the altitude.
Speaker 2:Here's the thing is. Here's the thing is. The you know is our judgment is clouded when we're under fueled, when we're, you know, is clouded when we're under fueled, when we're, you know, tired and and we got to remember this when we have all these physiological stressors, our judgment is going to be clouded and we're not going to do what we intend to do. And this is where, going back to our plan, you go back to the plan. Go back to the plan. And also being prepared to adjust the plan, whatever that is, go back to the plan, go back to the plan. And also being prepared to adjust the plan, whatever that is, go back to the plan.
Speaker 2:Remember, you know all this stuff is your judgment's clouded. You're 60 miles into a race, you're going to be tired, you're going to be hungry, your brain isn't working as well as you'd like it at this point, but we could override that and this is kind of this mental toughness piece is we could override that by having these very processy goals of okay, I'm going to go back to taking care of myself here. How, what do I need to do to fix this? Be patient, you know. Use your mental skills, you know, bring in some self-talk and bring these other strategies into the play here. But I think that's we. You got to go into it knowing that your judgment's going to be clouded here.
Speaker 1:Do you think that's so as a coach, neil, like this is kind of where your specialty would really come through. How well do you have a fix on? Do the athletes actually deliberately develop that in training versus the first time that they have to experience triaging?
Speaker 2:what you just described is on hope pass yeah, well, yeah, exactly, I think you setting it up. You know, in those scenarios in training, you know that you're not necessarily okay. The run without your rain jacket or something like. Don't run with, with any food, don't do something like that, you know. But you know, getting out there on longer and longer periods of time at the end of a block, you know have a hard, long run. That's where you're going to have these situations come up and I love it and processing it with the athletes after that.
Speaker 2:Well, how did that go? What worked for you? The earlier on we work on that stuff and they're prepared, you know, the less likely they're going to get stuck in those scenarios. You know it's yeah, I mean, that's in my opinion, but it's a lot of it also is experiential, you know. I think that's what it comes down to is experiential, you, and the more time you're doing this, more you're gonna oh, yeah, okay, but if we could provide them with that information, take, your mind's gonna be really cloudy here. Get ready for it.
Speaker 1:A lot of this is how, and a lot of the sports psych that I sports psychologist that I work in with my elite athletes, and I've described this in a couple of other podcasts, but I do think this is really relevant here.
Speaker 1:What they'll do is they'll look at the training that I'm prescribing and then they'll design the mental framework that they're working on, kind of big, long training run that the long run can kind of facilitate, or if the run is really intense.
Speaker 1:There's a different kind of set of things that they're doing and they actually kind of list them. And this is what I like about working collaboratively with a team and having all eyes on training peaks, so to speak, is that they actually put those things in training peaks as essentially as workouts right I mean, that's the analog to it or as tasks to do, and it gives this more consistent reinforcement point that the sports psych person doesn't have to solely rely upon themselves to actually be that only point of reinforcement. I can be the point of reinforcement. Training peaks itself is a point of reinforcement where they're like literally like looking at it on the calendar, sports psych is, you know, and kind of their whole team is on the same page. And to my point earlier, what I was trying to facilitate is, if it's your first time, you know, having to encounter deploying some of these skills during a race. That's a hard environment to actually get to, to get it right on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's where practicing. I mean, I love that collaborative environment. You know to be able to work in that collaborative environment because now so let's say, someone's coming to me individually for mental performance work, yeah, that's great, but if I'm not putting you know, if they're not practicing it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you can't do it on an island. I mean you can, it's not as effective if you're doing it on an island Like I do.
Speaker 2:It's not as effective. You know working with a team is, it could be huge.
Speaker 1:Yeah, here's the thing man we're going to. This is going to go off the rails really quickly, but that's fine. I do find that with sports psych we can spend just a couple minutes on this and we'll turn it over to ajw. With sports psych, in particular, in the teams that I've worked with, I find that it's the one that would that has the most resistance to opening up to the rest of the team. And you're nodding like that. All of that that makes sense. The only way that I can like.
Speaker 1:the only way that I can intellectualize that or rationalize that is it's the one that's the most vulnerable for people, or where they have to be the most vulnerable, and opening that up to the other members of the team the head coach which would be me in my case right, the head run coach, their nutritionist, their whoever else is kind of advising them straight training coach, and things like that nutritionist there, whoever else is kind of advising them straight training coach, and things like that. It's just a hard. It's just hard. It's harder for the athletes because it does include these points of vulnerability that not everybody's that comfortable with.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean that that part's huge, I think also depending on the sports psych. I mean, we're bound by all sorts of confidentiality rules and that, you know, and that creates some you know, definitely some hesitancy. Um, however, you know, therapists and sports psych work collaboratively in teams in health care all the time and you know, I think, with the appropriate even just releases just to be able to hey, we're going to have this generalized communication. I think that's important, especially where our goal is to get you to perform, you know, you know, to the best of your abilities, and so that's.
Speaker 1:But that's a challenge, you know, and I definitely understand that, and that's a topic of many ethics courses and also athletes not all athletes perform the best using this like open book, completely open transparency deal, and we see that just to for to really bring it down to a level that everybody can recognize. We see that when the elite athletes go strava dark, that's not all. That is not always just to obscure what they're doing from a competitive standpoint. In fact, that's very rarely the case that these athletes are doing this. There's a whole host of reasons that they're doing this. They don't want to be bothered, they don't want people to see where they're running and you know, like fanboy, fangirl them and things like that. They don't want to deal with the scrutiny that some of the media puts on them. Oh, you're doing too much, you're going to get injured. Oh, this is why so-and-so underperformed because they did a six-hour long run instead of a five-hour long run or whatever. That opens up.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of the reasons for that or I guess my parallel to that is I tend to have this MO that more transparency is always better. I understand that when an athlete is working with multiple people, they're not always going to that. More transparency is better. Theme is not the best for every single athlete that you have to kind of craft. Do you have to kind of craft the dialogue between the team with the athlete's personality and tendencies in mind, so that they react the best? And that's one of the things that I've been learning about these teams is we can't just have the exact same blueprint for everybody on any of those levels, particularly about how we communicate and what's transparent and what's not.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Anyway, all right, ajw, we're going to move on to you. What can people?
Speaker 2:learn.
Speaker 1:What can people? I know you've got a good example of this.
Speaker 3:I've got the best, I've got the best story. You guys, I've got a band. It really does. It ties in Neil's comments about going back to the plan and it ties in you know what you regret and what are some of the things that you need to plan ahead of time for and, if things go off the rails, to make sure that you do it. This was, and one of these days, coop. I'd like to commission a study of all the big races in the world and where people are most likely to dnf, because I think at the very top of the list is brighton lodge at the wasatch 100. Guilty, bear with Bear with me, bear with me here, bear with me here.
Speaker 3:Brighton Lodge at the Wasatch 100 sits at mile 75 at the base of the Brighton ski area, and after runners leave Brighton Lodge they have about a 2,500 foot climb up and over Catherine's Pass to the highest point on the Wasatch course. For most people it's in the middle of the night and for most people it's freezing, cold and dark and terrible. And the Brighton Lodge is cozy and warm. For years the aid station has been captained by a dentist and including in the bathroom. Indoor bathrooms with flush toilets are already toothpasteed toothbrushes for runners to go in. I'm giving you all this because I was crewing and pacing a runner back in wasatch 15 or so years ago. I'm not going to use his name and we had a plan right from the get-go. You are not going to go into Brighton Lodge, you're going to walk in, you're going to tell him your name and you're going to walk back out and we're going to crew you outside in the cold and then you're going to go on up. We're going to start our trip up Catherine's Pass.
Speaker 3:Then race day comes and the runner is rolling along and doing really well, getting a little bit behind on his pacing, but he's doing fine. He gets to Brighton Lodge, he goes in. We are like, ok, just tell the guy that you're here, tell him your bib number, we're going to go back outside. He goes in, he looks around and he's I got to go to the bathroom. So he goes over and he goes to the bathroom and he's in there for a long time you know at least a long time for 100 miles. He comes out and he looks over at where they're cooking stuff and they have quesadillas and grilled cheese and I'm just going to get a little bit of something to eat and I'm just going to get a little bit of something to eat. And so he goes over and he gets a plate of food and then he sits down and he's eating. And the crew and I are just watching this happen and you know, we see him getting warmer and he's eating more food. He turns around and gets another plate of food and he's eating food. He says to his crew I'm getting cold. She's well, you got to put a jacket on, you got to get it. He's like can you just get me that sleeping bag over there? Well, you know where this goes At Brighton Lodge there's also this second room over in the back where people are literally lying down. And he goes I'm just going to go over here in the dark and lie down for a little while. Just let me lie down for a few minutes. Lies down. We finally wake him up. It's about a half an hour later he gets another plate of food Again.
Speaker 3:The whole plan was not even to go into Brighton Lodge and there's still tons of time left on the clock. He was probably in a 36-hour cutoff. At Wasatch he was. You know, it was the middle of the night, he had plenty of time. Eventually he decides yeah, he's going to call it a day.
Speaker 3:Another famous thing about Brighton Lodge is this table. At the front when you just go into the aid station there's one of these wonderful Utah curmudgeons that seem to be everywhere at Wasatch and he's sitting at the table and he's got a clipboard and he is recording the DNFs and it's the AIDS, the bib number, the name and the reason. There's a column for reason, okay, and there's a whole bunch of stuff on there. This would be a wonderful study to get a hold of that clipboard sometime. My runner goes up there. He's yeah, I'm going to have to drive. The guy goes, bib number 674.
Speaker 3:Name Reason, and he pauses for a moment and he looks up at the ceiling and he goes loss of will. That guy wrote it down. The guy wrote down loss of will. He's never heard that one before and mean and that was it. So I mean, there's a lot there, of course, but as the plan was, don't go into brighton lodge, one thing led to another. He's under the sleeping bag. Pretty much. At that point we knew his day was done, and it was, you know, and he regretted it, you guys. He regretted it before he even drove back left Utah. You know it was like why on earth did I do that? And so I'm sure he still thinks of it. I should probably give him a heads up about this podcast, but that was something.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'm going to. I'm going to bring in something that is analogous to the study that you want, ajw. I was reminded of this cause. I was designing a presentation for the upcoming USCA conference which will come out. That conference will be in a couple of weeks after this podcast actually comes out, but anyway, one of the presentations I was designing for it uses this. It's an older study it's about 10 years old now that a former Western States medical director, marty Hoffman, actually did at Western States and they had athletes.
Speaker 1:After the race was completed, they asked them two questions. One, what impacted your race performance? And they could choose kind of anything. They could choose everything. They could choose one thing. They could choose five things. It was really choose your own adventure, and they divided that into finishers and non-finishers. And the second question is what was the one thing that made you DNF and the results of which are kind of interesting to kind of first off compare and contrast between the finishers and the non-finishers but then also look at the rank order of things that either impacted their race performance and or made them DNF as a coach, the one thing that strikes out.
Speaker 1:I'll give two things, but the thing that strikes out to me the most in these studies is amongst the people who DNF'd. They had their standard nausea and or vomiting is at the top of the list, with 23% of the people indicating that was the one thing that made him DNF. Unable to make cutoff times 18.7%. Other not categorized 12.12.2. So it's third. So there's something in this thing, right, the not categorized piece, which is probably the filter of all of these things that you just mentioned, a W J W, loss of will, refuse to continue. I'd lost my you know mojo or whatever, but at the very bottom this is my coaching point here Literally at the very bottom 0.7%. Less than 1%. Less than 1% of the people who dropped out, of the Western States 100, and I think they used 2010 as the year less than 1% cited the main reason that they dropped out as inadequately trained, to which I would say, as a coach, all of these aspects are trainable. So if you're nauseous, if you cannot make the cutoff times, if you have, even if you have blisters and or hotspots on your feet, you have missed something in training. Going back to my very first point, it's something that I did as a coach designing the training program and doing the coaching piece of it that was a component of them actually dropping out. What that actually told me as a coach is a lot of people don't 99% of people don't realize that those elements are trainable because otherwise that's it Number one and everything else is is is below that.
Speaker 1:The second thing that that that I really take, that I take from this, is that when you compare the finishers and the non finishers, there's a disproportionate number almost two and a half times the amount of people have this like other or not categorized component of what impacted their race performance. And I think this goes to the complexity of how an ultra marathon performance actually unfolds, because you see it magnified in the non-finisher, some of them. I don't know what happened, I can't articulate. Was it this, was it that? Was it another thing? Was it something that's not on this list, that I can't speak. It's more pronounced in the non-finishers versus the finishers in terms of what actually negatively impacted their race performance.
Speaker 1:I'm going to link up, I'm going to put a link in the show notes to this study. It's a really great one. I use it from a coach education standpoint to illustrate how athletes are still kind of confused, so to speak, about what elements of ultra marathon are trainable versus not trainable, and I think that the vast majority of them all are. But it's a great window into this lens of why are people actually dropping out to our point right here, and there have been a few studies since then that have that have more or less come to very to come to very similar conclusions. So if you're looking to course correct it, this is a really good place to start, because you already know what people like you've. These are the people that are actually telling you the answers. They're telling you the answers of why they dropped out. Now you have a playbook in front of you to course correct that, to preemptively course correct that before it actually happens.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. You know, the one word that was coming to my mind as he was describing that is momentum. You know, and somehow this gentleman who you know, who stopped at Wasatch, is losing momentum. And I think, you know, if I look back at my own DNFs, or DNFs of athletes that I've worked with, there's momentum drop, it's mental momentum and it's somehow tapping into. How do we continue with that momentum, that excitement that you experienced in that first, when the gun goes off, how is that going to continue? It's not going to stay stable throughout the race, but how can we implement that? You know, through training and through this race. So they know, hey, I need to keep momentum here. I can't just, oh, look at that shiny object.
Speaker 1:And it's easy to do when you're super tired. Absolutely Okay, so AJW, our last category is R there are multiple Categories.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly what are the no win ones? Where either one feels like a terrible, like either decision, I either continue and try to finish, and that doesn't sit very well, or I drop out, and that doesn't sit very well. And these are the ones that, like, I don't know, in some ways they're easy to resolve because you're like, ah well, there's no perfect decision, so I can just flip a coin or whatever. Right, but once again, the thing that I want to go back to is not just to provide banter, to provide some sort of like useful, some useful commentary for people to actually sit through and think with whenever they're inevitably faced with this, either as an athlete or a coach who's working with athletes.
Speaker 1:I know you've had some of these no-win ones where you've actually kind of you as an athlete, you as a coach, kind of combining both of those use. Can you give an example or articulate what some of the no win ones would be, where either decision is just a math? I wish I didn't have to make this in the first place. I wish I could just press rewind and not have to deal with the problem that's in front of me.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I got to go with a personal one, actually, because I have a hard rock story also, freaking hard rock man. Yeah, it was, and it was involved, man. It was in 2016. And so the second time I was doing hard rock, I had done it in 2009. So, as you said earlier, I was going to become a true hard rocker, right, because it was going the other direction and the wheels started to really come off about halfway through the race and I kind of knew it and I felt it In retrospect.
Speaker 3:I was experiencing all kinds of life stress. Going into the event. There were life changes. My oldest son was graduating from high school. We were getting ready to move.
Speaker 3:There was a lot of stuff that impacted me going into the race that I wasn't thinking about, but one thing led to another and I got to Cunningham at mile 90 and I was done. I was absolutely done. My whole family was there. I was about eight hours later than they were expecting me. It was terrible. Of course, like you, I still had tons of time left on the clock. Right I was. I had probably been going for maybe 33 hours or 34 hours that cut off as 48. So my crew convinced me to lay down, go to sleep, take, you know, I took about a three hour sleep. I got back up, got all my warm clothes on and got together with my and it was like, okay, we're going to do this. And you know, my son, my oldest son, carson, was the one who was sort of chosen by the family to take me to finish, cause he's got the best sense of humor and he was going to, you know, and it was an absolutely miserable slog. If you go and look at the splits from 2016 hard rock, there was one person who had the slowest split for that section and boggles my mind to this day. It took me six hours to go nine miles. Six hours to go nine miles. Ultimately, I did cross the finish line 41 hours and 50 something minutes, I think.
Speaker 3:For two-time hard rock finishers, I probably have the biggest delta between fastest time and slowest time, because it's about it was about 13 and a half hours difference the time I ran in 2009 versus 2016 and I didn't regret it at the moment, like at the moment it didn't necessarily seem like a no win because it was like, oh, a finish is a finish, right, but it was like, ah, you know what I, I could have dropped at Cunningham and that would have been okay and I finished in 41, 50 and it's kind of okay. But you know, and it's done, I'm not going to run hard rock again. There's so many people who want to get in. I've done it both directions. I go that that ship has sailed, but it's yeah, you know what that was. You know that was sort of I could stay here and sleep and not win and I could drop out or I could finish, and it just left this taste of you know. Fortunately I've run other hundreds since then and it's been OK. But yeah, that was a rough one.
Speaker 1:Well, because, going back to one of our earlier points, right, you don't want to do anything that compromises your longevity, and it's hard to say if an action is going to do that in the moment, because you don't ever get the proof point on that until you get to the point of longevity which is a decade down the line, two decades down the line, something that that we inevitably can't really forecast. So, yeah, I mean, it's like I look at things like that and I don't I struggle with the right advice to give people or the right advice that I would have. Like I put myself in a coaching perspective, like what would I have told AJW at that point? Cause I remember when you did that, what like what would I would have said?
Speaker 1:What would I have said if I were on his crew and I coached him for this and I don't know if I, once I would I could flip a coin and it would be just as accurate of a decision as if I gave you something and kind of like logically walked through it. So I don't know if no win is the right way to put that, but it's hard to come up with something that's better than the other one, right? Maybe that's the better like encapsulation of a decision like that. It's hard to say that this decision is better than that one or this one has these advantages over this one, because it's just so inevitably complex.
Speaker 3:And when I look back on it I guess I am glad I did do, I did finish, you know, because if nothing else, now looking back on it, eight years later it's you know, at least the hard rock is in is like a finished chapter in my life right right I think if I had only run 90 miles, it would probably still be an unfinished chapter in my life and that might feel, that might give me some feeling of of, of not having, of not completing something right.
Speaker 3:And I think we, as ultra runners, even if we end up dnfing at races, we how many times have you talked to an athlete I know? I have dozens of times where they've DNF to race and they want nothing more than to get back to that race and you know, take it's almost cliche right To take care of that unfinished business that they have there. It's that's just human nature and, frankly, those are some of the most satisfying experiences when they actually happen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I. So the example that I came up with, this kind of no win. I've got to come up with a better way to articulate this because I don't think that having that neither choice being a quote unquote win, or either choice being a quote unquote win or sorry, yeah, neither choice being a quote unquote win, is the right way to articulate it, because there are certainly positives that come out or wins that come about it. You just mentioned closing the chapter, but the example that I always come up with is kind of one of the things we initially alluded to and that's how the elite field, at least in recent memory, has kind of gotten decimated at the Ultra Trail de Mont Blanc. And the reason it's hard for me to kind of come up with the best scenario or to kind of come up with a good framework as a coach is because I understand fundamentally what the athletes are balancing the theory of the longevity of their career and the longevity either being something that they can do, alternatively, in the next four months right as a outcome of them dropping out, or the longevity, when we look at it, over a decade, because I do believe that with most athletes and Ludo's bucking the trend here shout out to Ludwig Pomeroy, who keeps defying logic. But I do think as an elite athlete, you only get so many shots and you only get so much time. It's not unlimited. The time that you can be at the top end of the sport if that is your goal, to be at the top end of the sport is finite. For some it's more finite than others, but for everybody it is finite. And if you can get back some of that finite nature somehow, or maximize that finite nature, I get that component of it. That's the reason to DNF, right, or a big part of the reasons to DNF, but at the same time not that this is the only kind of counterpoint to it, but I do think that this is a big one At the same time. Not that this is the only kind of counterpoint to it, but I do think that this is a big one At the same time.
Speaker 1:Your, their job as elite athletes is hard, like what you were doing, and this is what I'm using it from the elite perspective. But I'm eventually going to drill it down to what everybody can learn from this. Their job as a professional athlete is is inevitably hard. It's almost to suffer. It's a consequence of it, it's going to be very difficult. Nobody else gets to quit at their job when it's hard, not that racing is the only part of their job. I want to be very clear about this. But let's not get it twisted. It's a big component of most elite athletes is racing and performing and that's inevitably difficult. It's very rare that you get to quit when your job is for my job's freaking hard.
Speaker 1:Sure, it's not physically.
Speaker 1:You know physically hard like an ultra marathon is, but AJW, you've seen me like suffer at camps.
Speaker 1:And then you know when we're trying to put work product out or my colleagues will, you know, attest to this and we're doing different projects and things like that, like it's exceedingly challenging and difficult and I don't pull the rip cord or DNF when that. You know when that happens. And so I think that from an every person's perspective, you know this aspect that a lot of people wrestle with. That I think it's okay to wrestle with is this component that ultra marathons are inevitably really hard and it's hard to determine when you're pulling the plug from a longevity perspective or even from an injury perspective that we just mentioned and know that's the right decision when there are so many other components kind of kind of going into it. So when I try to even though I look at this predominantly through a lead athlete lens I do think that there's something that, like everybody can kind of like can take away from this, and it's just that it's that everybody is trying to balance this to a certain extent. It's just their values are a little bit different.
Speaker 3:I want to comment on the hard because I agree, you know, most of us can't just quit our, can't just quit our jobs or go home early. You know when it's hard. But I also am reminded Coop and I wrote an article in Iron Far years ago about this. One of my all-time favorite sports movies is A League of their Own, which is a baseball movie. That was about a women's baseball league that was established during World War II. You know, because Major League Baseball was suspended due to the war, but there was a women's baseball league that was established during World War II. You know, because Major League Baseball was suspended due to the war, but there was a women's baseball league that was established. They made a movie out of it and Tom Hanks played the baseball manager and the lead character was played by Gina Davis. And at one point late in the movie, late in the season, gina Davis is overwhelmed with whatever's going on and she just says to Tom Hanks oh but coach, but coach, it's just so hard and he goes hard. It's the hard that makes it great and it's one of those. It's one of those lines. I mean, it's not necessarily related, but it is one of those things you might want to remind somebody of if they're thinking of quitting because it's hard or dropping out because it's hard.
Speaker 3:Sure, every we know everybody has their reasons for DNFing.
Speaker 3:I was curious. By the way, I live in Arizona and our big race coming up next month is the Javelina 100, which has, over the last several years, kind of been able to assemble a pretty competitive field. And the first thing I thought when I saw so many people dropping out of UTMB is, oh, that's going to be great for the Haleah entrance list Because, like you said, people might drop out, you know, might drop out of Cormier, so they've only gone, you know, 80k or so, and they might be like, hey, I might have time for one more race in my season. I do think too and I know we've talked about this in other circumstances the tank gets a little empty. In the, you know, in our calendar, in the North American Northern Hemisphere calendar, the tank starts to empty out in late August, september, october, and unless you've completely directed your year towards a race at that time of year, it tends to be a time where there's a little bit less gas in the tank and it might be a little bit easier for folks to DNF.
Speaker 1:I do. So here's another thing that's actually like pragmatically happening, at least amongst the elite fields, since we're just talking about this, is many athletes are coming into some of these races as a makeup race. I dropped out, just like you mentioned. I dropped out of utmb. I'm going to go to havelina. I dropped out of this, I'm going to go to that, whatever other athletes are apexing at those races and just like.
Speaker 1:It's exceedingly difficult, but obviously not impossible, to do very well at western states and very well then at utmb, utmb being the harder piece of that because it comes second because of that dynamic that people are apexing for for UT, just UTMB, and they're not running Western States, and you're having to compete against those people when you're doing the double. That's exceedingly difficult to do from a competitive standpoint. It's the same thing when we see this dropout, go make up race. You have some athletes that are apexing for Javelina, for what, like, whatever else is on the calendar, and you have other athletes that are using it as kind of like they are not apexing for it, and here we're using the dnf as the reason that they're not apexing for it. That's exceedingly difficult to compete against because everybody is so good. So I think we'll just leave people with that right.
Speaker 1:We've gone through all these different scenarios and the one thing I'll give you the last 30 seconds on this AJW, the one thing that I want people to kind of remember as they're trying to internally process this is we're just very bad at forecasting. And because we're very bad at forecasting, come up with a plan, come up with a value set in advance. You can't scenario out every single thing, but at least have some sort of framework so that when it comes into real time and you do unfortunately have to make some of these decisions heaven forbid, you have to make them, but they're kind of inevitable. If you're in the game for long enough you at least have some armor, some framework to actually make those decisions yeah, absolutely, and having that laying out that ground.
Speaker 2:I mean I told him the story of my friend who we had a clear plan that he was not going to go into brighton lodge and you know it just didn't happen that way um, but I agree and I think I would take what I'm gonna.
Speaker 3:I'm gonna jump off this podcast right now to get on a call with one of my athletes who is it is absolutely her apex race to do Javelina, which is five weeks from now when we're recording this Right, and so we're literally going to get on the phone right now to talk through these next five weeks and how we want them to look and what we want to do, and I think it's really important for us as coaches to to sort of realize that and embrace that.
Speaker 1:Absolutely All right, we'll leave it there. Thanks for coming on the podcast and thanks to Neil. He had to jump off a second ago to get on another athlete call. We're always appreciative of you guys' time. Yeah, thanks, guys.
Speaker 3:You got it. Bye-bye All right folks.
Speaker 1:There you have it, there you go. Much thanks to coaches AJW and Neil for coming on the podcast today, being a little bit humble and kind of taking us through some of the mistakes they have made as athletes and as coaches. I hope that came across through the dialogue that many times we don't have perfect answers to this, but we try to give our best shot at getting a better answer by processing some of these things in advance so that we're not left to making the entirety of the decision in the heat of battle when it is just oh so difficult to do that. So I'm much appreciative of the coaches for coming on and kind of going over some of the mistakes that we've made, some of the mistakes that I've made as an athlete and as a coach, so that everybody in the listening audience can learn a little bit from that.
Speaker 1:If you like this podcast, you think that one of your friends or training partners can benefit from hearing this dialogue with our three coaches. Please share this podcast with them. That is the best way that you can help this podcast out. As always, from the very beginning I've chose not to monetize this podcast with advertisement or sponsorships or anything. Chose not to monetize this podcast with advertisement or sponsorships or anything other. So the best way that you can help out is just to help a fellow runner out that is probably going to encounter this decision of to continue or to quit a race at some point in time in their career. Share the dialogue with them. I'm sure it will be much appreciative or much appreciated, and I appreciate it as the host of this podcast. All right, folks, that is it for today and, as always, we will see you out on the trails.
