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Navigating Training Plans Through Time
1.5k Plays4 years ago
A question we are often asked is how to utilize our training plans through time as many people re-cycle the plans year after year. Scott Johnston and Sam Naney discuss: Knowing how to get the best possible results for each individual; the difference between a training plan and coaching; objectively evaluating training plans and progress as a self-coached athlete; and much more.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to another episode of the Uphill Athlete Podcast. I'm your host and co-founder of Uphill Athlete, Scott Johnston. And today, I'm gonna be discussing some of the lessons that I've learned and that we've learned about how to manage a training plan, a stock training plan that's laid out for you. And to help me with that discussion, I'm gonna have my good friend, Sam Naney, one of the lead coaches at Uphill Athlete,
00:00:28
Speaker
join me in this discussion. Welcome, Sam. Hi, Scott. Thanks for bringing me on. Yeah, this is something that you and I have lived through many times over. And so I think we might be able to inform people on some of the things. I mean, I would say that one of the best things about a good coach is that they've made a hell of a lot of mistakes.
00:00:50
Speaker
And I think you and I know these things. I mean, I certainly made mistakes when I was coaching you. Any of you that are listening that haven't heard it, Sam and I have a long history as coach athlete. And if you're interested in knowing a little more about that, one of our earliest podcasts when we started this whole thing was me interviewing Sam and kind of going over that history.
Importance of Adaptability in Training
00:01:10
Speaker
So Sam and I have been down this road, the mistake road, and certainly I think one of the biggest mistakes that we see repeatedly with
00:01:20
Speaker
People that are not being coached, but people who are following a training plan, is that they approach the training plan as if it was an act of God. It's perfect, it was handed down from on high, and it's going to say what you're supposed to do six Thursdays from now.
00:01:39
Speaker
And I think that what we want to do is explain to people the error of that thinking of that process. Would you agree? Yeah, exactly.
00:01:51
Speaker
It's easy to misconstrue getting a training plan as the thing which you are just supposed to follow and that's what the dedication of being an athlete is. You have this plan and no matter how challenging it is, you accomplish all of those tasks and in doing so you achieve this outcome.
00:02:10
Speaker
that doesn't take into account the fact that we're human beings and all the other things that come into play in life as well as with training and recovery and how you respond to any given stimulus are going to affect that plan. We can't make specific, you know, it's hard enough to make specific plans about our general life two weeks from now, much less how we're going to feel physically under all of these physical loads.
Personalization vs. Set Plans
00:02:34
Speaker
Yeah, we get people coming to us from time to time who buy our stock training plans. And something I've said a lot to people privately, and so I'll make a public statement here that really any idiot can write a training plan. But really, the skill is in effectively actualizing that plan and getting good results from it.
00:03:00
Speaker
And so, and I don't care who writes the plan. I mean, I think we write great training plans. And there are lots of great training plans out there by other coaches. And so that it's not that the problem is in the actual writing of the plan, it's in how do you administer it so you get good results. And, you know, we're not here today especially to sell you on coaching.
00:03:21
Speaker
But the difference between a training plan and coaching is that with coach and athlete communications and feedback, the coach can suggest, hey, maybe we ought to try this tomorrow. Let's change up instead of doing that, because I can see you're still tired from whatever we did on Thursday or Wednesday or whatever. And that flexibility, that dynamism that you get with a coach situation is missing for most people with a training plan.
00:03:53
Speaker
I think you can have a plan that is either written generally for you or for the general public that has good substantial work in there and it progresses. And so you can safely say that if the plan dictates that you need to be at this starting point, whether running 30 miles a week or doing this much work at the entry point of the plan, that you can proceed and have a reasonable assumption of success.
00:04:14
Speaker
Yeah, and well, and I...
00:04:23
Speaker
As you said, it's impossible to account for the variables and how people recover and being able to determine that stuff on a day-to-day basis is really difficult for an athlete to do, to be able to evaluate it objectively without somebody looking in who's not necessarily personally immediately invested in you driving as hard as possible to the finish line.
00:04:51
Speaker
And I think that something that we've taken that into consideration, knowing this very well about these stock training plans that we or anybody else writes.
Self-coaching Resources
00:05:03
Speaker
And our audience, I think, knows this. We have written literally millions of words on this subject. And we've got two books out. We've got lots of articles on the website. And the purpose of that
00:05:17
Speaker
information if you haven't taken advantage of it so you understand why it's there it's to help you learn how to coach yourself because we know very well that most people are not going to be able either whether they have the desire or the financial wherewithal to hire a coach they're going to be self-coached
00:05:34
Speaker
And in order to do that well, you need to understand how a coach would look at this training and be able to make reasonable decisions. I mean, obviously, you're going to be at a little bit of a disadvantage because you're emotionally and physically completely immersed in this training. And it's hard to separate yourself out of it. And that's the beauty of the coach is that, as Sam said, we're kind of objective third party standing off to the side.
00:06:02
Speaker
You do have the opportunity to learn this stuff so that when you get into situations where there's any sort of doubts in your mind, you hopefully have at least a few guidelines to kind of keep you moving in the right direction. You're going to make mistakes. That's a given. This is not an easy thing to do.
00:06:25
Speaker
I mean, it's very easy when we're writing these books or on the website to talk about the theory of how the mitochondria work and what will happen if you do 30-30s and all that kind of stuff. We know those things pretty well, but how are they going to work in the real world on a day-to-day basis and how are you going to deal with
00:06:43
Speaker
the variability that inevitably comes because we're not machines. The same input on this week might not yield the same results as that same input last week or the week next week. Well, I think the mistakes part is critical to the process. It's through making those mistakes that we hopefully learn something from it.
Individualized Training Responses
00:07:05
Speaker
You think about the different training techniques and methods that
00:07:11
Speaker
we were playing around with years ago and still somewhat to this day. We never hit the mark the first time with the muscular endurance workout or the track interval progression, things like that. Usually you sort of hit somewhere near it and something falls short or you overshoot and you kind of readjust, recalibrate and you move forward to the next one.
00:07:34
Speaker
I think that's when people are evaluating how to put together their own training plan from the materials that are out there. As you said, not only the stuff that uphill athlete puts out, but the myriad other options that you have and books and literature and talks to learn about training. Part of the process is learning, okay, well, these are the methods I need to use. I need to determine my aerobic threshold and do this much mileage and do this kind of strength workout.
00:08:04
Speaker
But it's taking it a step beyond that and understanding what's going to be the impact on me personally when I do this much mileage per week or when I go uphill at this rate or when I do this strength workout because it's going to be totally different than the person standing right next to you.
00:08:27
Speaker
The response I get from the first workout of the first stage of the muscular endurance progression is going to be very different than the person standing next to me. The way I approach it or they approach it is we need to be cognizant of that. When we talk to athletes or write about this and certainly talking about it now, that's what I really encourage people to be looking at is not only saying, well, I know muscular endurance or
00:08:56
Speaker
a certain amount of volume at aerobic threshold is really critical. So I'm going to put that in a plan, I'm just going to go do it. It's thinking about how do I respond to strength training or I want to be observant of how I respond to strength training. And in turn, then you can better craft how that plan is going to best serve you because it's all incredibly individual.
00:09:17
Speaker
Certainly, that comes, I think, from the experience of having coached a lot of people. I'll go back to this. I think one of the reasons we are pretty damn good coaches is that we have made a lot of mistakes, usually on ourselves years ago. We have the system pretty well figured out, I think, now we try not to do it.
00:09:39
Speaker
It's like we're a little bit like doctors. First of all, do no harm. But one of the most influential coaches in my career reading what he's written and listening to what he's said has been Renato Canova, and I've referenced him many times over in my writings and in the books.
00:09:57
Speaker
And a couple of things that Canova has said that I think bear repeating here is, first of all, that training is not what you do. It's not the work you do. It's the effect that that work has on your body. And that echoes what Sam was just talking about in terms of people being different. And another, I think, Canova is widely regarded as one of the greatest running coaches ever to live.
00:10:24
Speaker
He's coached more world champions, world record holders, Olympic champions in all distances from the 800 meters to the marathon. So he's got a vast amount of experience. And another little nugget that I dug out from his writings years ago was that he could have, and he's talking about elite level here, he could have 10 of his athletes do the exact same workout and he would expect 10 different responses.
00:10:49
Speaker
Because we're not the same, you know, we're going to be, and I think when you, these are all people that are highly trained and so had a very concentrated approach to their training. So you would think if anybody is going to be physiologically pretty similar in their response would be this group. So when you take it down to an amateur recreational level.
00:11:06
Speaker
where we don't really know what are these people's backgrounds, what is their history of training, we don't know their age, we don't know of course anything about their genetics and how they're going to adapt to this stuff. And so
Purpose and Flexibility in Training Exercises
00:11:20
Speaker
I think that makes it much more important to
00:11:24
Speaker
at least make an attempt to become kind of a student of the sport and like understand why this is happening and not just blindly said okay it's supposed I'm supposed to do 10 reps of blah blah blah or I'm supposed to do you know 10 400s at this kind of a pace or whatever it is
00:11:41
Speaker
and understand why you're doing it so that if you, you're the observer on the ground right then, if you say, this doesn't feel like it's doing what I think it should do, then it's good to question that stuff. Maybe it isn't doing what it's supposed to do.
00:12:01
Speaker
As you said, it's not as if in a coaching situation where you, the athlete, has this advocate and observer and assistance from a coach. We're still doing that same thing. When I have an athlete who is aiming toward a particular objective, in my mind, I can think of, well, these are the various strategies that have been helpful in the past for different athletes, or maybe for that athlete in another context. And like, well, let's try this. And you apply it.
00:12:31
Speaker
with the best understanding you can have about that person as well as what the workout tends to produce in terms of an outcome but also how people need to recover from and such. But it's always a best guess when you're creating, whether it's a laid out stock plan of many weeks or it's a week by week progression that you're providing.
00:12:59
Speaker
You're taking your best guess at what you think is going to create a desired return and without causing undue harm. But you're doing that knowing you might need to adjust. And so that's where, again, that
00:13:14
Speaker
always observing. And I think listening to your conversation with Mike Foote on the podcast that we just released. And you guys were talking about how, especially now with races in 2020, have been put on the back burner. And it's sort of forcing a lot of us to evaluate what do we really appreciate about sport and how valuable it is to really
00:13:42
Speaker
look at training and the process as a craft, as the process that it is, and so kind of embracing that and thinking about it more holistically, like we're saying, what is this workout going to do for me, and how can I evaluate the returns on it and move forward from it? That's where I think athletes can get the greatest gains, not by just trying to be an automaton and saying,
00:14:08
Speaker
I need to accomplish A through Z, and when I get to Z, then the outcome is this, and then there I am, and I race. It's just not linear in that way, and I think if we can look positively on the idea that it is a process that needs to be dynamic, it's enjoyable as well as being more functional.
00:14:30
Speaker
Yeah, sort of embracing the process and thinking about, okay, this is a long-term thing. I'm going to learn how to do this. It's like learning anything. It's a skill. It's going to take time. If you are doing an experiment on yourself, you only have one person to observe. I think this speaks very clearly about the importance of having a training log.
00:14:54
Speaker
and keeping a record of what you're doing. As people who are familiar with what we do understand we use a third party online platform called Training Peaks that I think does a remarkably good job. We could not remotely coach the people we're doing without it, I think.
Tracking Progress and Methodologies
00:15:14
Speaker
Unless we have to substitute another similar type of platform, there are a couple, but it's really quite a good one. But even if you don't do something as dramatic as putting your stuff onto training peaks, for years, Sam and I and many of the athletes we've worked with, just keep a spiral notebook of what they did on a day.
00:15:35
Speaker
We do have the uphill athlete training log that people can use as a template to develop this, but it's not rocket science. Just writing down, almost like a diary, what you did and then how you felt about what you did. Not just on that day, but maybe, let's say you do one of these muscular endurance workouts or some other really big challenging workout for you.
00:15:56
Speaker
Two days later, your legs are still tired. We'll make a note of that somewhere in your logbook that says, boy, that workout was still in my legs. Two or three days later, I need to consider that moving forward so that I'm not planning a muscular endurance workout on Tuesday and thinking that by Thursday, I'm going to go do some intervals or something like that. They're going to be dramatically affected if you do that.
00:16:21
Speaker
And this, another really simple thing that I'm quite certain I put this in both the books, it's certainly, I know it's in the Alpinism, Training for the New Alpinism book, and that is grading, subjectively grading workouts with an A through F, essentially. So that an A was a workout where you feel like Superman, and B is a good workout, and maybe C is sort of a okay day, nothing special.
00:16:47
Speaker
And D is something where, oh boy, I had to cut it short. And F, of course, would be you couldn't finish. Or maybe didn't even start the workout. And having some very simplistic method like that of tracking how the training is affecting you allows you to, even just with a quick scan, look back through that notebook and say, huh, I had three Ds last week. No wonder I'm feeling like crap this week.
00:17:12
Speaker
And if you don't have that, that you can look back retrospectively, it's hard. We can only learn by looking backwards at what we've done, I think, and the effect it had. And then hopefully learning some lessons from that and applying them going forward so that we either capitalize on the knowledge we gained, which is to say, whoa, that was really cool. That workout turned out really well. Or, oh my god, I don't think I executed that very well or whatever.
00:17:43
Speaker
I believe that one of the things that Sam and I, you know, Sam was really a critical part of developing many of the uphill athlete training methodologies during his ski career. He was kind of a guinea pig for many of these things.
00:18:07
Speaker
And, you know, there were mistakes made and we could, luckily for us, we could fairly quickly, you know, course correct and abandon those things and say, okay, well, that didn't work so well. Or we could say, hmm, that has promise. Maybe we'll try that this way next time, do it a little bit different. And you do that, you know, in our case, for seven or eight years.
00:18:27
Speaker
And you're going to end up with a pretty darn good idea of, especially in this case, I learned about what worked well for Sam, but I also at the same time was coaching a lot of other people and, you know, I've had previous experience with what worked and what didn't work. So I wasn't coming at this from zero.
00:18:42
Speaker
But it's that trial and error process and learning from those mistakes, rather than just saying, well, I was reading a Runner's World article the other day that said, if you want to run your best 10K, you should do blah, blah, blah. And I think that's such a disservice to have that kind of literature out there. And there's a prevalence of that now with the internet. I think it's so easy for people to just pontificate about ideas like that. Well, and I think, yeah, it comes
00:19:13
Speaker
It comes around as well to the idea that I think you talked about on another podcast, but we talk about this a lot of sort of managing expectations and how we, I acknowledge and I think it's really important to have, to be able to set goals and set objectives for what you want to do with your training and what you want to achieve and
00:19:39
Speaker
often times we get athletes most of the time when athletes come to us for some sort of training help it's with a goal in mind and that's really valuable because it can it helps us determine okay here's the trajectory of training but it's also really incentivizing and it's motivating because you know it's there but I think it's there's a tricky
00:19:58
Speaker
or a careful balance that you need to strike in identifying the goal or the objective, but managing the expectations as to how you get there.
Setting Realistic Goals
00:20:09
Speaker
Because I think, again, we have this idea that if I do ABC through Z, then I achieve the goal. And that sometimes works, but it sometimes doesn't. And along the way, maybe you determine that it's actually this goal that you're aiming for, or that you need to
00:20:27
Speaker
train more or train differently or whatever might be a myriad of the possible avenues that end up being need to be taken but I think the the risk that is run as you said with having you know the the the culture of you know just do this and then you'll have this great experience or or
00:20:48
Speaker
We're very careful not to guarantee that if you train with us for six months, you will achieve this goal because we have no idea. You don't have any idea where an athlete is coming from, what's going to happen in that time, how they're going to respond to training.
00:21:08
Speaker
overstating or tying yourself too closely to expectations can run a risk of, wouldn't necessarily say failure, but just derailment. And it's just really challenging to manage that. I think, again, it comes back to that.
00:21:25
Speaker
you know, appreciating the process and knowing that it's going to happen differently for you than it did for your friend or someone you've read about and it's also going to happen differently for you at age 45 than at 35 or before or after injury or sickness or anything like that.
Impact of External Factors
00:21:44
Speaker
And certainly with regards to that, the whole mountain sport world that we live in, I think this is doubly true. Because there's so many environmental factors that are just completely beyond anyone's control. You can be in the best shape of your life when you go off on a big expedition to faraway land and you might sit in your tent for three weeks with the weather. Or the avalanche conditions are too hazardous and you can't climb.
00:22:10
Speaker
You know, there are a whole lot of things can go wrong in a 24-hour long race. And, you know, they're pretty much beyond your control. You can try to prepare for them. And we understand, I mean, the reason that our books and our website focus so much on training is that that's
00:22:28
Speaker
When you go into the mountains, that's the one thing you have some control over is your physical preparedness and hopefully your mental preparedness, but certainly your physical preparedness, that's something we are experts at and we do know how to get people as ready as they can probably be given the time frame and all the other extenuating circumstances working with different individuals.
00:22:51
Speaker
There's still going to be a myriad of unforeseen things that can derail your approach or derail your success, I should say. And I think it's really important to, you know, if the summit is all that matters to you,
00:23:07
Speaker
or standing on the podium of the race or whatever, this is gonna be a very disappointing process for most people, because this is really something that, it's the process, it's really the reward, I think.
Endurance Training Realities
00:23:22
Speaker
And I think most endurance athletes can get that, because the training is, to a large extent, repetitive, kind of mundane, not very glamorous or sexy, does not make good YouTube videos,
00:23:34
Speaker
And you have to embrace that and say, that's OK. That's what I want to do because I want to be able to go on and do these other things. It's not going to be all fun and games, that's for sure. No. No. And I'm just thinking about it. It's easy to.
00:23:54
Speaker
Oh, somewhat easy to say that. I mean, I think about the times when I've been injured or gotten sick. I remember getting mono. We had just started to kind of crack the code a little bit on training, ski training. And in particular, what sort of training was going to serve me best for racing?
00:24:21
Speaker
I was starting to navigate that really well and then I started getting these strange symptoms and fatigue and it turns out I had mono.
00:24:30
Speaker
I had so many expectations built up about what that next season was going to be. And the mono diagnosis came in right about now, this time of year. So late fall. I think it was September, really, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah. We were at that training camp in Sun Valley. And the US ski team were there with the US ski team and really motivated and trying to ski strong. And then this thing came crashing down.
00:24:57
Speaker
And then, you know, it just had this sense of like, I don't even have, I don't have the capability to navigate this. You know, it had just been something that I hadn't really encountered before. I hadn't had any significant traumatic injuries prior to that. I hadn't like it, you know, just been steady steps upward that, you know, while we didn't necessarily know exactly what the training was going to be, we could safely assume that, you know, over time things were going to, I was going to improve until this happened. And, um,
00:25:25
Speaker
That was a really, and in saying all this, I'm enunciating despite going through that experience, I still don't have a good, I'm not that great at managing those unforeseen circumstances. And I think that, I'm saying all that to emphasize this idea of knowing how to manage expectations and knowing how to embrace the processes. It's really important, but it's a hard thing to do. It's a hard thing to do on your own
00:25:55
Speaker
you are we're all really motivated people and as you said people that are drawn to these mountain sports and individually oriented things where you're trying to push your physical limits and mental limits we're type A, we're really motivated to do that stuff and so it's really difficult to
00:26:19
Speaker
cut yourself the slack that's needed when that trajectory gets skewed. As I said, I still have difficulty taking the rest day when I'm supposed to, which makes me feel really sheepish to say because I feel like that's one of the things that I'm
00:26:38
Speaker
really pay attention to in coaching athletes. I aim to be really observant about what are people's responses to every day of training. How are you feeling? How did this feel? How about that little niggle that you're feeling in your foot? Was that bothering you today? And reading their responses, reading between the lines, and then determining when and where to provide the rest. But it's always a different story when it's yourself.
The Role of a Coach and Recovery
00:27:06
Speaker
Yeah, it's almost, I mean, it's very, it's extremely rare to see someone achieve a high level of success self-coaching, regardless of their level of knowledge even. I mean, Killian would be, you know, he's an incredible exception in many ways, but the fact that he coaches himself and... Because he takes rest days. The little known fact.
00:27:29
Speaker
But I think we've seen a lot of good athletes try and fail to coach themselves. Again, that was one of the main things that spurred me to write all these words in these books is say, hey, this is going to be hard to do to self-coach, but here's some of the things that I and we have learned over the years about how you can try to manage some of this stuff and how you need to be realistic about it.
00:27:55
Speaker
You know in your case with that mono, I mean it just cut your legs right out from under you But you know it was
00:28:02
Speaker
I remember that, I know I remember the disappointment, of course, when we just kind of came to light in Sun Valley and we just went, what in the heck is wrong with Sam? He just can't get out of his own way all of a sudden. Literally, almost overnight, you went from being one of the fastest skiers in the country to barely being able to finish the workout. So that was a challenge. Then you got home and you got a test and went, oh, that at least explains what was going on. It wasn't a training issue.
00:28:29
Speaker
overtraining, that kind of stuff. And so we go, okay, we got a medical problem here. And the only thing we could do, and it was to follow the doctor's advice. And you basically had to, you know, sit around for, you know, it was like almost two months, pretty much to get over it, I think.
00:28:44
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, it was. Yeah, I mean, and necessarily, I think in the grand scheme of things, I knew of plenty of people who for whom mono and similar illnesses knocked them out for far longer. Like in that way, I was really fortunate. Like it didn't, it wasn't a tremendously long time. And, and I even ended up having a halfway decent sort of recovery and racing season that year. That was a good season. I know that was your best to date your best results. Yeah, US Nationals.
00:29:13
Speaker
So it came back around. So by January, we managed to get you back on track pretty well. I mean, you weren't as fast as you would have been if you'd been able to train for October, November, that's for sure. But we did manage to salvage something of the season. And I think coping with, certainly coping with injury and illness is one of the most difficult
00:29:33
Speaker
things to navigate for an athlete and people who listen to that podcast I did with Mike Foote will know that Mike's been dealing with, or was over it now luckily, but starting late last winter, early spring, he began to develop some, he struggled with some plantar fasciitis and then he struggled with some patellar tendonitis.
00:29:55
Speaker
And it just pretty much, like you, it knocked him out and he couldn't train for a while. And then we could start easing back into it and we started using the bicycle a bit. And so that's, let's say we really kind of became super proactive in dealing with this probably in April.
00:30:15
Speaker
And now it is October and I would say he's back to full training again. But that's a long time for a type A personality to not be able to do the thing they love to do. And he was training, but it was at such a reduced level that he understood that and so did I. But we had to get beyond that.
00:30:37
Speaker
And I think people need to give themselves the grace when they're injured or sick to, like we say this over and over again in the books and on the website and in all the talks we've done, I think is don't try to train through injury and illness. Yeah, maybe you're tough enough or lucky enough that you could do it. Yeah, I know a few people who, yeah, it's just a cold and I'll be fine. And yeah, it turns out to be that they were right.
00:31:05
Speaker
But to me, it's just on a general advice scale, I'd say it's not worth it to risk it because that simple little cold can pretty easily turn into bronchitis and then you're out for a month. And likewise, you get up in the morning and you can feel that plantar fascia. That's when you really feel it usually.
00:31:27
Speaker
And then you think, oh, yeah, but after I walk around for a while, it feels great. I'm going to go out and do those intervals that I was supposed to do. And then the next morning, you can't even get out of bed because the plantar fasciitis is so bad. Well, and that's the, I think in many respects, like the types of injuries that oftentimes at least the types of injuries that particularly runners and endurance athletes incur, they're not often
00:31:50
Speaker
the big traumatic catastrophic injuries. It's overuse or it's something in the case of an illness short of a severe mandatory hospitalization type illness. They're almost insidious. You know that this thing has occurred. You know that it's a setback.
00:32:12
Speaker
It's not so much that it completely puts you on your back and provides you this mandated schedule of recovery. I remember Allison, she broke her leg several years ago skiing.
00:32:27
Speaker
It was horrible, and it was a really difficult time for her, and she had to reevaluate all her goals. But on the other side of that, and I think she'd acknowledge this, it was like, this is your recovery. You have a broken bone. You've got a cast on your leg. You're not going to go do these other things. And by no means did that make the actual healing process easier, but there was no question that she wasn't going to go out and try to ski three days later. In some ways, it makes it easier because then
00:32:56
Speaker
You know, going back to the whole type A thing, I think one of the problems for us type A's is that if we don't complete what's in the plan or what we expect ourselves to do, we're going to feel guilty about it. And then we're going to feel like we're, you know, whipping out or whatever. Totally. And when it's clear cut like that, like you've got 103 fever and you're in bed, well, okay, there's no question about what you're doing. You've got a broken leg, no question about what you're going to have to do. But there's all that gray area where, you
Rest, Recovery, and Social Media Influences
00:33:24
Speaker
know, you
00:33:24
Speaker
You don't feel very good, you can tell something's wrong or maybe you have a little cold or something. And I just feel that there's so much downside risk that it's worth saying, okay, I'm just not training today and hopefully by tomorrow I'll feel better.
00:33:40
Speaker
often times I think for most people the common cold is like a three or four day occurrence and usually you can get back to training pretty quickly so I've just learned over the years as a general rule to advise people that you know when you get sick or have these little niggling things just
00:33:57
Speaker
you know, miss a few days. That's not going to be the end of the world. It's a lot better than having an injury that then hangs on for six months. Totally. And it's different forever. I think you can develop different methods. I know we've told people before that, you know,
00:34:12
Speaker
if you have, particularly with something like a cold, that you should basically take as many days as you were sick and feeling symptoms after that to sort of ease back into work. And that can be helpful for people, so then you actually have this plan. Because we all do, you like to have something to follow, and when I had mono, I remember I had a lot of really valuable advice from a physician here who had himself had mono when he was a young athlete,
00:34:42
Speaker
He had a cautionary tale about getting started too soon. He was really clear with me that I needed to give it the time that it needed because it's a disease that stays in your system. You always have those antibodies in your system and if you're not careful about it, you can
00:35:01
Speaker
You can basically relapse into symptoms of mono. So he basically put the fear of God into me against trying to get started too soon and that information combined with I knew I could every week basically I went in and I had a blood test and checked for what antibodies were present to determine my level of readiness.
00:35:25
Speaker
That was really helpful for me. I think that's, again, coming back to that idea that when you're kind of sick, you're never feeling quite right, or you've got that soft tissue injury that you can get out the door and after 10 minutes it loosens up and you can do your workout, but then it's pretty tight afterward. You can go on for weeks or months like that. Some people do. Yeah, we've all done it.
00:35:51
Speaker
And sometimes you dodge the bullet with those things. Right, sometimes they gradually go away. Yeah, it never gets worse and you never know that. But it can also be the derailment that never gets you fully back on your feet and I think that's, you know, it kind of brings to mind a similar idea, you know, whether it's physical or, you know, in some cases it's mental and I was, Alice and I have been talking a lot about this and I think I spoke with you about it too, this idea that
00:36:19
Speaker
It's important to give yourself a break periodically with regard to training. These sports that we're all really passionate about and mountain sports, it's typically year-long training. You're year-round. You're always in some different form of training or chasing objectives.
00:36:42
Speaker
We get caught up in that cycle and ski season's done, it's time to start running again. Running season's done, the snow's falling in the mountains, we've got to sharpen the skis and get out there. I've become more and more cognizant of the importance of
00:36:57
Speaker
basically taking a full break as a transition maybe once a year, maybe a couple times a year. Maybe it's only a week, maybe it's two weeks, but it can serve as that buffer against
00:37:14
Speaker
you know, physical burnout, you know, overuse injuries and things like that, where we just keep pushing and pushing and pushing. But also the mental one too, because I think, again, we sort of continue to drive and drive toward the next objective. And it's very difficult for us to cut ourselves slack. And I think even more so now, as you alluded to, because
00:37:35
Speaker
we're all the more aware of what other people are doing. If you're on Instagram or social media or really, if you're just choosing to be connected in some way, you're seeing that other athletes are chasing snow somewhere or they're doing FKTs or they're going after their own personal challenge, it's gonna be really difficult for you to then say, I'm content to just sit.
00:38:02
Speaker
And I think it's a challenge that we all have to face in terms of how to allow ourselves to just be part of our own individual process and to cut, as you said, cut ourselves slack and a break when it's needed. I think that's especially prevalent in
00:38:20
Speaker
mountain communities, mountain towns. I coach some folks that live in Chamonix. If there's a place where people are constantly dealing with FOMO, the fear of missing out, because there's somebody's always, every single day, because there's so many people at a high level there, every single day there is somebody doing something incredible.
00:38:42
Speaker
And it's very easy to think, oh my god, I'm such a loser because I'm not doing this, whatever it is. And I've had to counsel them. It's like, hey, don't get caught up in that. I mean, you will have your moment in the sun. I promise you, if you just keep doing the training we're doing. But it's just when it's kind of, especially with the current social media barrage that we're kind of constantly under,
00:39:07
Speaker
It's pretty hard to avoid being exposed to that and it can make you feel that you're underperforming, you're a loser, you're a wimp, you're not out there doing these things. Another little tidbit that I often tell athletes I work with is that because of this type A thing that we keep going back to is that
00:39:31
Speaker
If they have any doubts about whether they're prepared for that training that day, it's probably their body waving, trying to wave a big red flag saying, Hey, I'm not, I'm not ready. Don't do this to me. You know, and we can eat because we're type A's and we're mentally very strong.
00:39:46
Speaker
We can override that warning signal. It's coming in loud. It should be loud and clear But it's often you know muted or we we just disregard it or we kind of take pride in pushing past it Yeah, like I'm this this is where this is where my toughness toughness quotient gets gets elevated I think there's there's a time and a place for that. I mean, you know, there's
00:40:06
Speaker
I've talked to Killian about this and I think we've seen this with you too. There are times when you need to dig deep in training or do a hard workout when you're tired. There are instances where that can be beneficial, but if you make a steady diet of that, things are going to turn up badly pretty quickly. I think that's one of the rocky Balboa mentality of- Everybody wants a training montage.
00:40:34
Speaker
Yeah, everybody wants to just think that, you know, I'm just, every workout, I have to end it in a pool of sweat and blood on the floor or haven't actually had a workout. And real athletes don't train that way. They need, you need to be able to save something in the tank for that day when it really matters, whether it's the summit push or, you know, the last 10 miles of that 100 miler. And if you have, you know,
00:40:59
Speaker
I know when I was a young athlete, some of my best races were wasted in practice. I had some of my very best results in practice sessions. And that's crazy. You broke a record. I did. When I was a swimmer in college, we were doing a set of 10 by 200 meters. This is freestyle. 10 200s with a 30 second rest.
00:41:27
Speaker
between age 200. And it was from a push off in the pool, not from a diving start. And I broke I was swimming at the University of Colorado broke the big eight record for 200 meters and I like the fourth one of those repetitions.
Conservative Training Approaches
00:41:40
Speaker
But you know, and that so that was like, that should have been my race. And you know,
00:41:44
Speaker
the big eight championships or the national championship. There's no medal at the training. Yeah, nobody cared a day out. Coach was kind of going, whoa, how did you swim so fast? Or that he might say, why didn't you swim that fast last weekend? What does it matter? The big meet. And I think there are people like that. And I think it's, I certainly, I was a workaholic as an athlete, and I think it really
00:42:08
Speaker
negatively impacted my results in races where it mattered. I certainly had the same problem when I shifted over to skiing, cross-country skiing, and I could train with the best of them, literally. But when it came to race day, all that effort that I'd been putting out during those workouts would have been better saved for some of these important races, like the Olympic tryouts or something like that. Yeah, yeah.
00:42:37
Speaker
Again, managing expectations and being in it for the process. Again, especially because we're training. If you're involved in these types of sports, it's a long process. It's not the two-month training montage in Siberia that Rocky did or whatever.
00:42:58
Speaker
where you just tend to dig deep and crush yourself for a handful of sessions, and then you come out of the chrysalis as this magnificent specimen. It's... That works great in Hollywood. It works fantastic in Hollywood. We all want a training montage, but it is inevitable that over the course of a long period of training, there are going to be times where you feel fantastic. I mean, I remember, and I still do it on sort of the training diet that I have now, or like some days I'll feel like
00:43:27
Speaker
I feel really strong and I'll see myself having better times on this or that route and wishing that there had been a starting line.
00:43:44
Speaker
coach yourself or evaluate your own training and manage that well and as objectively as possible. It's difficult to see that coming into it or to balance the desire to push versus the sort of long-term reward that you can get out of this careful process.
00:44:06
Speaker
Certainly, I think it's important for people to take away from this discussion we're having right now some tangible
00:44:16
Speaker
points that they can use. I think that whole red flag thing about if you have any doubts while you're warming up or even before you put your shoes on and go out the door, maybe you should pay a little better attention to what your body's telling you. I think that keeping some kind of a training log that you can look back at and remember because we're always thinking about the future where we don't want to look backwards.
00:44:39
Speaker
If you went back and reviewed your last week or two of training, you might go, oh, that explains this, whatever I'm feeling, be it positive or negative. And then another one that I have,
00:44:51
Speaker
come to rely on quite a bit. I just blanked on what it is. Geez, I was just thinking of this. Well, I'll fill in the blanks while you're thinking. I think your first point is really, really salient and I tell that to all the people I work with. Basically, let motivation be your guide in this because, again,
00:45:16
Speaker
making a well-based assumption that we're all pretty driven toward our goals and toward our personal improvement with this sort of stuff. If you wake up in the morning and you're not psyched, and you can tell, there's a difference between waking up and not being psyched because the workout that's on your plan or that you're thinking to do is
00:45:41
Speaker
is one that's going to hurt. It's going to be challenging. There's a difference between approaching something and having some trepidation versus waking up and just having that kind of whole body, I just want to lay on the couch. As you said, if you listen to them, your body gives pretty loud signals and your brain gives them on behalf of your body basically.
00:46:05
Speaker
You're smarter than you let yourself know. And I think using that metric of being led by your motivation is a, if you're honest with it, it can be a good tool to sort of keep yourself from overdoing it. So I recalled what I was going to bring up because I think this is another takeaway that people can actually, you know, can use this in your training. I use it all the time. If you find yourself suddenly
00:46:34
Speaker
Performing at another level you know that you know at the higher much higher level than you're used to like ooh like every workout this week has felt Incredible or you've had just these a couple of A's string of A's or yo whoa I am eight minutes faster to that rock than I normally am on my you know two-hour run
00:46:53
Speaker
That is a time to say, I need to back off because you are at a peak. Maybe it's only a short-term temporary peak, but your body has through the process of training and resting and recovering, your body has adapted to allow you to perform at a higher level than it or you have ever performed before.
00:47:15
Speaker
And I think it's important to recognize that if you're at that level, the chances that you're gonna get better in the future are almost zero. Because you're at the peak. In the short term. In the short term, yeah. In the short term, the only place you can go is down. So when I hear that from the athletes that I coach, and it certainly worked well working with you, is when we would see these incredible results, I'd say, we're gonna have a couple of really easy days, two or three easy days. I wanna let this stuff soak in.
00:47:45
Speaker
And we're going to go back to some base training and we're going to stop whatever this speed work is or whatever we were doing that has suddenly whipped you into this peak shape. I don't want you to be in that peak shape until it's time, until the appropriate time. With regards to that, when I was at a coaching conference in 2012,
Training Strategies and Elite Techniques
00:48:08
Speaker
and Alberto Salazar, who now I think has probably been disgraced, but at the time was coaching probably two of the best distance runners in the world, Mo Farah and Galen Rupp, and who had phenomenal races in the London Olympics, and he was talking about, this was after the London Olympics, it was the next spring, I believe, yeah, next May, and he was talking about
00:48:34
Speaker
their preparation for the Olympics. What they had done was they were living in Park City, about 8,000 feet in Utah. Then they would do some of their distance work up there, their easy days up there, but all of their speed work and hard workouts, they would drive down to Salt Lake and do them at 4,000 feet.
00:48:58
Speaker
He said in the final, then they stayed there until just a week before the Olympics and they flew to London. And one of the workouts they did, I think it was mild repeats on the track at the university there in Salt Lake.
00:49:15
Speaker
He noticed that both of them were faster. He was timing. They don't know the time. He's standing on the side with a stopwatch that both of them were running faster than they had ever run because they had done this workout many times over. Suddenly, oh my God, these guys are going really fast. He lied to them. He told them that their time was slower than it was.
00:49:39
Speaker
did not want them to feel like they were in peak shape then. And then he actually programmed in kind of a lighter recovery week because he wanted them to think, oh, I'm tired, I better rest before the Olympics. And because if he had told them, man, you're just, you know, you're on fire. And then he told him to rest, they would have been, it might have been. Come on, I gotta, I gotta
00:50:00
Speaker
And if you remember those races, I mean, Mo Farah won gold medal in the five and 10,000 meters at those races. So, you know, a little trickery on the part of the coach can even be useful. Now, if you're coaching yourself, you can't trick yourself. Oh, totally. Well, that and God, I remember and I know.
00:50:16
Speaker
you have your own experiences of over-training, you know, and sort of learning how to train and coaching yourself. And I remember it was what preceded us starting to work together. I was living in Montana and I had just finished college and I had this dream of becoming a ski racer at whatever level I could get. And I was just giving myself the training. And I had that experience of over the course of this summer, I don't know how much
00:50:45
Speaker
what the increase had been. It was some very dramatic increase in training volume and intensity and all the rest. I was doing it all on my own with an iPod full of heavy metal. I remember there was a period of time in the late summer, early fall
00:51:03
Speaker
where I was just, for my own way, on fire. I was beating times up these little time trial courses that I had and I didn't know any better. I thought, oh great, I'm finally getting fit. And I just ate it up. I kept planning more. If some is good, clearly I've been doing a lot, so more must be better. And then, of course, the punchline of the wheels completely came off and I had no clue what had happened. I thought I'd gotten sick.
00:51:33
Speaker
And then, of course, I remember calling you and laying it out for you as what I thought was this complete enigma, like, I don't know if Scott can crack the code. And you probably laugh. It's like, oh, you cooked yourself. It's as clear as day. But it's so alluring to feel that way and to want to keep going.
00:51:59
Speaker
And it's not absent in the coaching process either. As you've talked about, we've talked about this and written about it, the coach-athlete relationship is truly a relationship. And you're investing yourself in this person's success. Not necessarily success on paper, but just their personal success, their sense that they've accomplished something, that they're performing better and you
00:52:25
Speaker
You want them to get there and you have this personal connection with them. It's difficult to also see someone achieving these better and better marks and to rein them in, but it's so important to that process to do so and to have those conversations like, hey, I know you're feeling fantastic, or just being a reflection to them of what's going on and offering that guidance. You were a pathetic little puppy when you came to me.
00:52:55
Speaker
very distinctly and I had seen this before so I was kind of I was pretty aware I knew instantly what had happened and I've had this conversation now with you know dozens of athletes who end up in a similar situation of you know you know I mean I the reason I knew about it is that I had done it to myself well I remember that you that was the first thing you told me yeah and I did that to myself in
00:53:18
Speaker
the summer and fall of 1987 before the Olympics in 1988. And I had come off of an incredible season in 1987 and skied at the pre-Olympics, which is kind of like they go to the venue where, in this case, it was in Canmore, Alberta, outside of Calgary, where they go there and all the skiers get to race and test out the race courses the year before.
00:53:44
Speaker
And so I had ended that season on a very high note and thought, OK, I'm just going to go after it. And so that summer, I spent quite a bit of time skiing in Australia and skiing a lot. And I did a lot of races. I did a lot of hard training. I came back. I was living in Bend, Oregon at the time. And we could usually then start getting on snow by late September. So I only had about a few week or a month break where I wasn't actually on snow and went back out and started hammering out the hard training again.
00:54:13
Speaker
And I was feeling like I was on fire. And it lasted through up till almost Christmas, like the middle of December. The Christmas star. I was, to the definition of a Christmas star. And in those early season races, I was in the top five in the US in every single one of the big tryout races I was in. And of course, so I thought, OK, this is going really well. And then something happened.
00:54:39
Speaker
over christmas i thought something is i didn't know what it was that something was going on and i just started feeling weaker and
Lessons from Overtraining
00:54:44
Speaker
weaker and weaker and in january we were at the olympic tryouts and my best place was 47th place i mean i was walking i was so i mean it's so demoralizing and and at the time i didn't know i mean i thought it was some medical thing and and um you know because i'd never even heard of over training and
00:55:04
Speaker
Now, you know, I was a poster boy for it. But I think it's, you know, now that I've seen it, as people probably are aware, I've written a copious amount on this because I feel like it's my mission in life to kind of keep people away from pushing themselves over that cliff. Because once you go over that cliff, it's, as you know, it's really ugly. I mean, there's no way you get back. This is not, and we'll probably have to do another talk just on overtraining. I think it's such an important topic, even though I've written a lot about it.
00:55:34
Speaker
But once you find yourself in the ditch with the wheels off like you did that year, I remember how pathetic it was. You came to me, you know, I tell you what's going on and then you say, well, how do I fix it? In time for in time for national champion. Yeah. And if I recall you, you went to nationals. I think I even told you don't bother.
00:55:54
Speaker
And I thought, no, I was performing so well. A month and a half ago, I'll be fine. I'll get it back. I'll get it back. And then I remember seeing you at nationals and I wasn't coaching at that time, but I think you came into one of the wax rooms I was working in and you just had that hang dog look, lower lip hanging down, like, what's wrong with me?
00:56:14
Speaker
I mean it's like yeah, it's it's all borderline suicidal almost when you feel so bad about what you've done So anyway, we'll we'll do another talk one day about that. But that you know, that's the ultimate like maybe this is a good way to wrap up this podcast because
00:56:32
Speaker
That's the ultimate end if you become a slave to your training plan. If you don't take the time to learn how to monitor your training and then control it and take some of these ideas we've tried to give you today to help you
00:56:49
Speaker
steer around this a little bit, you can end up in that same ditch or going off that same cliff that too many other athletes have done. And so I caution people to, I'm much more conservative now as a lot older, but I'm much more conservative in my approach to coaching people now. And I think people can see that from the training information we give in our books and the plans that we build on our website, they're pretty,
00:57:17
Speaker
Yeah, pretty conservative in their approach because in those cases, we don't know who's going to be buying them and using them. And, you know, we're not expecting that you shouldn't buy one of our training plans and then think you're going to go out and be Killian Chornet. Well, and even and even in the coaching, I mean, I say that very explicitly upfront with
00:57:35
Speaker
Any athlete that I start with, regardless of their training background or what their goals are, I say, you know, we're going to start conservatively because I don't know. I know a little bit about you now. We've had a phone conversation and you sent this in from, but I don't, I don't have a full grasp of who you are as an athlete and how you respond to things and.
00:57:53
Speaker
And we need to start that process and trust that over time, because it's a long-term process to build, over time you will be able to achieve improved performances. That's exactly what careful training does, is that you get better. But the careful part is the critical. And to tack on to your takeaway points for people, another one I would add is
00:58:23
Speaker
having a devoted rest day each week. I think there's nuance there and we'll often talk about the idea of maybe it's active recovery, a 30-minute jog, but I think it's important for people, especially as you're sort of learning
00:58:41
Speaker
how to sort of embark upon training as a process to plug in that one day a week that is dedicated rest. It's not the easy hike or the casual bike ride with friends, it's actual rest because like what we talked about with overtraining or anything else, you can
00:59:04
Speaker
ignore or sort of turn your head away from some of those warning signs when you're actively training because you expect that you're going to feel a little bit tired in your training. At the end of that run or the ski, your legs are going to be tired and you can just sort of chalk it up to training and not knowing that some of those things you're feeling are perhaps more chronic than you're willing to admit but on a rest day, if you take that
00:59:31
Speaker
complete day off of exercise and maybe you get the massage or you do some foam rolling and those symptoms or those warning signs come more to the surface. When your body gets the sense even once a week for just a day that it has an opportunity to rest, it might very well tell you how much it needs that rest and then that can give you just this reset to consider,
00:59:57
Speaker
I'm way more tired from last week's training than I thought I should be. Maybe tomorrow's start of the week and muscular endurance workout in the morning isn't the best way to go. That's either from a self-coach standpoint that's valuable and also from the coaching standpoint, with pretty much all of my athletes I give the day off because
01:00:18
Speaker
Partly because I think it's valuable for them physically, but also because it gives us just a moment of breathing room and reflection. Then at the end of that day, I can get the feedback from them like, hey, how are you feeling? Are you psyched for tomorrow? Are you ready to go? Sometimes when they say, actually, my legs are still pretty whacked. I'm like, okay, great. Let's take a pause on tomorrow. Let's settle it back.
01:00:41
Speaker
Having that evaluation point is really critical, I think. I completely agree because then it might be that you need two or three or four or five easy days to let all this stuff soak in. I'll kind of end this because I think we might have gone over an hour already.
01:01:01
Speaker
Training makes you weaker. It's the rest that makes you stronger. So it's the combination of these two things. You need to stress your body in training and you need to allow enough time for the training effect to be absorbed by your body and build some adaptations into it. So I think that's one of the messages we put out there over and over again. I think people can hear that.
01:01:24
Speaker
So anyway, I think it's just really important to don't be a knucklehead. Don't think you're Sylvester Stallone or that you don't become a slave to your training plan. I don't care who writes it or how gifted the coach they are, it needs to be moderated
01:01:45
Speaker
on a daily basis based on how you feel. Well thanks a lot Sam, it's been fun and we'll have to sit down and do the over training one since you and I have, we have PhDs in over training so I think we could have a nice conversation about that. We could wax in depth about that one. Yeah and I think it's so prevalent in our world with mountain athletes who get themselves over trained.
01:02:12
Speaker
Well, thanks everyone for listening. Really appreciate it. Yep. Have a good day, everyone.