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Scott Johnston Talks with Luke Nelson on training for ultra running.
2.2k Plays4 years ago
Join Uphill Athlete co-founder Scott Johnston in his conversation with elite ultra runner Luke Nelson as they discuss their history and Luke’s connection to outdoor sports and activities. In this episode Luke and Scott do a deep dive into UA's Muscular Endurance progression. Luke has used it multiple times with great success for races and and FKTs. They discuss its role in providing increased fatigue resistance without super high mileage. They also touch on Luke’s balancing of career and family with his athletic ambitions; the appeal of fastest known times or FKTs; honoring the recovery process; how to encourage fatigue resistance, and how to program that into a training regime; the nuances of concentrated loading and shifting to tapering; the importance of the craft of daily practice as process-oriented goals; how to take the long-view and how to honor that process; how to construct the recovery process; "swimming like a cat" and using swimming as a recovery tool; and mastering efficiency on multiple types of terrain. There is much to be gleaned from this episode. Join in and give it a listen!
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Transcript
Intro to Podcast and Guest
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to the Uphill Athlete Podcast. These programs are just one of several free services we provide to disseminate information about training for mountain sports.
00:00:10
Speaker
If you like what you hear and want more, please check out our website, uphillathlete.com, where you'll find many articles and our extensive video library on all aspects of training for and accomplishing a variety of mountain goals. You'll also find our forum where you can ask questions of our experts and the community at large.
Luke Nelson's Background in Ultra Running
00:00:30
Speaker
Our email is coach at uphillathlete.com, and we'd love to hear from you.
00:00:35
Speaker
Welcome to another episode of the uphill athlete podcast. With me today is my good friend, Luke Nelson. Luke's going to be talking with me today about his experience in the ultra running world. And we'll probably dip our toes a little bit into his ski mountaineering racing stuff as well. Luke and I have been working together, been consulting with him on his coaching now for several years. And so we've kind of
00:01:05
Speaker
got enough of a history together that I think we might be able to shed some light on, you know, some of the things we've worked and that we've done that have worked really well, you know, how we've worked through certain circumstances, whether in regards to injury or fatigue or how we prepared for certain races. And I think there might be some valuable insights in there. But welcome, Luke. Thanks for showing up today. Thanks, Scott. Super happy to be here.
00:01:32
Speaker
Well, thanks for making time. We're going to talk a little bit more about this later because I know you are an incredibly busy person. You might be the busiest person I know. And so it's remarkable what you manage to pack into a day and a week and a month.
Outdoor Influence and Transition to Snowboarding
00:01:50
Speaker
And myself and everybody else I know that knows you all says exactly the same thing. So I don't think we're exaggerating this. But let's not go there quite yet.
00:02:03
Speaker
We've got a lot of fun things to talk about today, but let's start. First of all, how did you get involved in mountain sports? I know you were kind of a competition rock climber when you were a kid, right? Yeah, so I grew up outside. My dad works for the Boy Scouts.
00:02:20
Speaker
So every summer of my life was spent at a Boy Scout camp growing up from when I was an infant all the way until my middle teens. A lot of that time was unsupervised because my dad would be at work. My mom was working alongside of him. And so I would just spend time kind of free ranging as a young person in the woods. And so I think that that's where my connection to being in the mountains and wild places was formed just as a youth being outside.
00:02:49
Speaker
It also, because of his work, it made it difficult for me to participate in normal sports. A lot of those things like t-ball or whatever happened during the summer when we would be gone. But I was introduced in kind of alternative sports. He took me rock climbing for the first time when I was five years old.
00:03:09
Speaker
Um, and we did some mountaineering when I was young and backpacking. And as I think that my first climbing competition was when I was 10, uh, that was the time when gym climbing competitions were just starting to happen in the early nineties. Uh, one of the last major competitions I did, I remember getting beat badly by this guy named Tommy. Uh, it turns out that was a Tommy Caldwell. Yeah.
00:03:35
Speaker
Who has gone on to some pretty notable accomplishments. He's done all right in the climbing world. And so rock climbing was a passion of mine for quite a long time. Alongside that, I also was very passionate about snowboarding and skateboarding.
00:03:51
Speaker
led to a career about a six year long career as a sponsored professional snowboarder, which was super cool for me in the heyday snowboarding in the late 90s and early 2000s and created all sorts of wild stories that we could share on a totally different setting.
00:04:11
Speaker
And as I kind of aged, those sports, the snowboarding in particular, the kind of huck and chuck lifestyle started to catch up to me and I wanted to find a little better relationship with the mountains.
Trail Running and Professional Sponsorship
00:04:26
Speaker
When my daughter, who's now 13, when she was born, I was also really into kayaking as well. And there was an experience where a friend of mine was killed kayaking. About the time she was born, it helped me kind of reevaluate my relationship with risk, what I was willing to do. I'd had a rock climbing accident prior to that. I fell lead climbing, fractured my skull, which kind of took the wind out of my rock climbing aspirations.
00:04:53
Speaker
And when she was born, a friend introduced me to trail running and it became this incredible
00:05:01
Speaker
way for me to continue with my connection outside in wild places in the mountains, but bringing the risk level down to what I felt was a lot more comfortable and controllable. And it wasn't long after I started running that I started to make a profession out of it. My first sponsors came on about a year after I started trail running.
00:05:25
Speaker
And when was that roughly? That would be 14 years ago now. So is that 2006, 2007? Are you giving away your age here, Luke? Yeah, I may be. I may be a little bit. I think I'm getting old. You did just do a remarkable thing on your 40th birthday that we're going to get to in a little bit. But so that you've been in this essentially professional athlete, a good part of your
00:05:55
Speaker
adult life than in one form or another. But you also have this closet career. How does you describe what you do when you're not in your Superman suit, when you're in your Clark Kent suit?
Balancing Career and Athletics
00:06:11
Speaker
So I work as a physician assistant. I'm a partner in an orthopedics and sports medicine practice.
00:06:18
Speaker
And just actually in August, I celebrated my 10th year of being a PA. So all of this kind of blossoming into trail running and endurance sports happened while I was going to PA school and while I'd been managing a career as a PA. And anybody who has ever spent a lot of time standing on concrete,
00:06:43
Speaker
can have a great deal of sympathy for how you spend a large part of your day. And that's remarkable to me. When I was going through college and I had a part-time job working as a machinist and for actually a small climbing company, you might remember Forest Mountaineering a long time ago. So I was the head machinist for Forest.
00:07:05
Speaker
And my legs would be so dead at the end of the day that the idea of going out and running 10 miles after standing on concrete for several hours. Do you think you've just conditioned yourself to where that doesn't phase you as much? I know there are times when you tell me, boy, I just had a 12-hour stint in the operating room. I don't think I'm going to do this workout today. But how do you think you managed to handle that kind of
00:07:34
Speaker
Yeah, it's challenging. I mean, part of my job is first assist in the OR on spine cases, and those are notoriously long cases. So at least once a week, sometimes twice a week, I'm in the operating room for extended periods of time, and those surgical cases could be six to eight hours long for one case. And I'll be standing in one place for
00:07:55
Speaker
that entire time really without moving much. I've adapted several different small things that helped me during those cases, things like wearing compression tights or compression socks or both in the really long cases using
00:08:11
Speaker
a sequential compression device, something like a Norma tech in between cases. And sometimes, you know, a lot of ways it's the hardest thing that I'll do in a week as far as physically, I'll come out, you know, pretty tired from those. And the best thing for it a lot of times is to go for a run or go for a get on my bike and, and shake the legs out. The way that training works out, sometimes that's a hard workout on those days. And
00:08:39
Speaker
Like you said, there's times where I just don't have it in the legs to do it. And the smart choice is to delay those workouts for another day. Um, but there's other days where it's, it's okay. Once you get things, get the crud busted out after standing all day and warm up for a half an hour and you can still get the workout done. I feel pretty decent at the end. Yeah. It's that it can be hard getting out the door.
00:08:59
Speaker
But I think there's nothing worse than standing still. I mean, I think standing still for four hours is worse than running for four hours. Oh, absolutely. I absolutely feel way worse after standing in one spot than I would for running.
00:09:12
Speaker
Well, that doesn't even take into, we've now covered you're running a little bit about your athletic career, your work life. But I also know you have a really, you have a big family and you have a very close knit family and you spend a lot of time with your kids. Tell us about your family.
00:09:30
Speaker
Kids, tell us about your wife. My partner in ITA, we have three incredible children. Our oldest is 13. We have a 10-year-old and about to be six-year-old. Two oldest are girls, little boy. My oldest daughter is on the mountain bike team and is an incredible athlete. And our younger two are blossoming into that as well. So we certainly make it a priority to
00:09:57
Speaker
to introduce them to these mountain sports that we love so much, you know, skiing or snowboarding and trail running, mountain biking. And that takes time too. It's tricky finding enough time in the day often, but it's a priority of mine to be able to spend some time with them and with my wife on a daily basis. Keep that connection. It's important for sure. They need to remember who I am at least. Yeah.
00:10:26
Speaker
And I think she must be incredibly, I mean, I know she is incredibly supportive of what you do. I mean, she has gone to a lot of your races with you and supported you on a number of big challenging things you've done. And I mean, it's great to see that bond that you guys have developed.
00:10:43
Speaker
And it is truly a partnership that when you have someone like that that you can lean on and and vice versa. You know, I know you just gave her some support on a long run that she did in the mountains not too long ago.
00:10:58
Speaker
Yeah, I feel really fortunate. I mean, I would absolutely not be where I am professionally as an athlete or in my medical profession without her just unwavering support. She's amazing. I don't know anyone on the planet who is incredible as she is.
00:11:16
Speaker
And this summer, she set some big goals. Both of us turned 40 this year. And for her 40th, she wanted to accomplish a few things. And one of those was to run 50 miles. And it was awesome to be able to flip the roles and have me be able to crew her for her 50 mile run. And she also wanted to climb the Grand Teton. So we did a couple of warm up events. And then the day before her 40th birthday, we summited the Grand Teton together, which was outstanding.
00:11:41
Speaker
It's a great way to spend a birthday, isn't it? Absolutely. Cool. Well, speaking of birthdays, I just had my birthday a couple of days ago and I didn't do anything nearly as interesting as you did, except I got my knee replaced on my birthday. Still a big deal.
00:12:00
Speaker
That was definitely a big deal, but not the kind of thing you're going to celebrate, I suppose. I mean, I'll be celebrating it in a few months from now when I'm out there running again, but it's been a little bit of a rough week for me. So you've kind of done the gamut of these mountain races, you know, both of their races or a lot of events that are known as FKT's or fastest known times on certain courses.
Races vs. FKT Challenges
00:12:30
Speaker
And what appeals to, I'm sure they have different appeals, the races versus these FKT challenges. What do you get out of the two of them that it's different? For me, I think it's been quite an evolution. Early on in my running career, I was most interested in racing and particular races, mountain races and difficult mountain races. I spent
00:12:58
Speaker
a decade racing around the world, particularly interested in sky running races. I spent a lot of time chasing the sky running world series. And as I progressed in my career and had success and did good, even on the international stage with races, one of the things that I found as there were
00:13:15
Speaker
limitations to where races could be held and places that inspired me. And those didn't always line up where a race might be held in the US at a ski area because that's the place they could get a permit and the mountains next to that ski area were far more inspiring to me. I felt this drift or a pull towards FKT's and a fastest known time can be run anywhere. There aren't restrictions on permitting because you're doing it on your own time. You're not doing it as a big organized event with other competitors.
00:13:44
Speaker
And it boils down to the athlete, the terrain, and the clock. It really simplifies what the competition becomes. And those could be done in places that were really inspiring to me. And so for the last several years of my career as an athlete, those have been the things that I've been most excited about chasing are particularly challenging mountainous FKTs.
00:14:10
Speaker
And you've racked up quite a few impressive ones. Why don't you run us through a short list of those, if you don't mind? Yeah, I mean, I think the highlights for me would be, some of these have since been broken. Actually, I think most of them have.
00:14:28
Speaker
Idaho 12ers, FKT, so the continuous push through all nine of the 12,000 foot peaks in Idaho. The Utah 13ers, so the 13,000 foot peaks in Utah. The Wasatch Ultimate Ridge Link-Up, which is an incredible run slash scrambling route in the Wasatch Mountains. And then most recently, for my 40th,
00:14:52
Speaker
was able to crack the fastest time on a hundred mile route also in the Wasatch Mountains near Salt Lake called the Millwood. Yeah, that was and that was just a few days ago. Yeah, or a week ago or so. A week ago now. Yeah, yeah. And that one was
00:15:12
Speaker
kind of a cap for the end of the season really wasn't it i mean that was the way you viewed this as okay you've everything's been cancelled this year there's really not much it's hard to travel and so you know you and i talked to mike foot just a couple weeks ago similarly about this kind of stuff and i think a lot of people have been casting around looking for you know what do i do with all this fitness that i've just spent months and months building up and um what
00:15:39
Speaker
Drew you to this other than the fact you I know you like the Wasatch Mountains a lot and they're not too far from where you live Yeah, the Millwood was was intriguing for a couple of reasons One was the low number of people who have actually been able to finish the route. It was created in 2010 and up until this summer there had only been 10 finishes and
00:16:02
Speaker
This summer alone, there had been six more, and I think it might even be to 17 or 18 now, total finishes.
Pandemic Motivation and Race Reflections
00:16:13
Speaker
But the difficulty of the route was one of the big draws. It wasn't going to be a gimme. It's almost exactly to the decimal point, 100 miles. It has
00:16:27
Speaker
just shy of 40,000 feet of ascent. And it was also a combination of off trail and trail. There were some sections that were pretty significant bushwhacking even. So just the additional elements that made it less likely to finish was what drew me to it. And that may sound ironic, but the nearness to impossibility was what I found exciting.
00:16:55
Speaker
And that's got to be the similar allure to the Barclays Marathon. It is. I know you were very disappointed. We were both very disappointed when that got canceled this year because I think you were in a really good place training wise, fitness wise, you were really ready for that. Have you heard any word about that race for next year? Do you think there's any chance it'll happen?
00:17:17
Speaker
You know, I think it's pretty likely that it happened and I hope that I get accepted again. Rumor is we might get a good chance to be accepted because of being accepted last year and not having the event. And I was so disappointed initially when it was canceled that the training leading up to that had been
00:17:40
Speaker
I was seeing benchmarks that I'd never seen before in training. I was really excited to test that. And then to cap off the training was the trip to Nepal with Mike and David and Mike, where we had really experienced a lifetime training at altitude in Nepal. It came back to the world being changed with COVID.
00:18:02
Speaker
Interestingly, was able to carry both motivation and fitness from that moment all the way through the summer to this kind of cap off with Millwood, which I think as I watched the running community as a whole, a lot of people struggled with motivation during the summer. Once races got canceled and people's events or goals kind of fell apart, but it wasn't hard for me to stay motivated, which,
00:18:31
Speaker
I found kind of interesting. Well, you got a pretty high level of stoke most of the time, I think. Motivation does not seem to be in short supply when I'm talking to you about usually, as soon as you're done with one brutal thing, it's okay, what's the next deal we're going to do? Do you hold the record for
00:18:56
Speaker
being turned down for the hard rock more than anybody else? I mean, I'm pretty close. I think there might be one or two other people that are in the application process about where I'm at, but the next time that I'll be able to apply, which will be next year because they rolled everyone over from this year's canceled event, I think I will now be at 12 years. 12 years of being turned down. Yeah. Okay. Well, we'll be
00:19:17
Speaker
Keeping our fingers crossed for that one, I know. One day. Maybe not for your 50th birthday. There we go. Another 10 years. What's another 10 years? Yeah, exactly.
Endurance Event Recovery
00:19:30
Speaker
So when you do these grueling FKTs, like, I mean, you did Nolan's just a couple of years ago, right, with Jared? Did you do that, Jared?
00:19:40
Speaker
Yep, Jared Campbell and I did that. And several of these things like the world and the Idaho Twelvers have been pretty demolishing. And you've written about that in some detail for our website, which is great because I think it's nice when you can bury your soul like that. And a lot of people, when they hear of feats like this,
00:20:10
Speaker
they just assume that oh you must be so superhuman how you know i mean it is an amazing accomplishment but it takes a toll on you right i mean those are you're not bouncing back from stuff like that really quickly yeah and i think as the older i get the more um impact they take or the longer the recovery is afterwards um but the the draw to these events that are so challenging the it
00:20:38
Speaker
brings up the importance of taking care of yourself, both leading up to an event like it and doing the appropriate training and then honoring the recovery process afterwards and not jumping back in too quickly.
00:20:49
Speaker
That's what I see. I've written about this on the website. You and Mike helped me put together that article on the over-training elephant in the room and the ultra-running world. And I see it a lot with endurance athletes. And I hear these stories, and some of them are amazingly impressive about people doing 100-mile races and then doing, a month later, doing another one.
00:21:16
Speaker
So far that has not been my experience certainly with you and Mike and I wonder if that has had something to do with your longevity and your ability to continue building from year to year rather than having a year or two that are just packed full of hard races and hard training and then
00:21:35
Speaker
It's just very hard to maintain that level of both psychologically and physically. Would you say that this honoring that recovery process has been a key component to your ability to sustain this really high level? Yeah, absolutely. Over the last decade I've watched
00:21:55
Speaker
I would say it's probably dozens at this point of incredibly gifted runners just bury themselves. They come in, they're excited. They race one race after another race after another race. And then they disappear from the scene. And the back story that a lot of people we don't get is what happened. And I think that they just get too deep physiologically for their body to recover for them to be able to even train or perform at the level they once did.
00:22:24
Speaker
I often joke with friends that are in the community that the best thing that's happened to my professional running career is my medical career. Because it limits how much I can do. You know, I have to be able to go to work and I have to be able to maintain. And so it, you know, it cuts back on the number of training hours and it forces recovery periods that otherwise a full-time athlete, only professional athlete, wouldn't have those restrictions.
00:22:53
Speaker
One of the workarounds that you and I have developed over the years that people I think might be interested in is people, I think the normal view of ultra runners is that they're out there logging 100 plus mile weeks, every week, week after week after week.
00:23:12
Speaker
And you and I have taken a different approach because of your lifestyle and your profession. You could not run 100 mile weeks, even if you chose to do it really. Even if we decided that was a good thing for you, it just wasn't on the table. And you and I have developed some workarounds and some strategies that I think would be worthwhile talking to people about
00:23:34
Speaker
And maybe even giving some examples leading up to, for instance, a really notable race for you was the Tour de Géin, was that now three years ago almost? In 2018. Two years ago.
00:23:50
Speaker
all these numbers run together at my age. So anyway, two years ago, and that was in early September, and give us some details about that race, the length and the time and the vertical and that sort of thing.
00:24:06
Speaker
The year that I raced at the course was 231 miles long. The vertical gain was just shy of 100,000 feet of ascent and 100,000 feet of descent, held in the Italian Alps, the Italian side of Mont Blanc, Cormaire, the Aosta Valley.
00:24:24
Speaker
which is probably one of the most beautiful places on the planet to go for a long run. And the race, for me, went incredibly well. As a first-time Tour de Jean runner, I finished eighth. My time was 85 hours, 21 minutes, and some odd seconds. And just a demanding event to the levels that I had never experienced prior.
00:24:51
Speaker
And I think my weekly mileage building up to that was around 53. I think I recall the number correctly. I did a little calculation about this and I believe that the nine months prior to that race, your average weekly mileage was 48 or 49. Wow. Yeah. So pretty low mileage for somebody training for an event like that.
00:25:15
Speaker
But so I think it bears us talking about what did we do that helped make you as fatigue resistant as you were
Muscular Endurance in Training
00:25:26
Speaker
for that race? Because one of the principle mechanisms of fatigue for long distance events is that the sort of neurologic neuromuscular fatigue where your legs just kind of give out after a while.
00:25:40
Speaker
I mean, you're able to fuel enough because you're not moving that fast. You can actually eat and keep your carbohydrate intake at a reasonable level. So it's not necessarily, if you do a good fueling strategy, you're not running out of energy, you're not bonking. But anybody who's run long distance in the mountains can appreciate the fact that when your legs go, they go. And they usually go from all the downhill.
00:26:08
Speaker
Um, you know, from that pounding on the downhills. And so to my way of thinking, one of the ways I've approached training ultra runners is what you really want to achieve is this, uh, Unfatigue ability of the legs. Let me use it that way. We want to make the legs so they just are much more fatigue resistant. And there's, I believe there's two ways of doing that. One is with accumulating a really high volume.
00:26:36
Speaker
of training in the mountains, on the trails, a lot of up and down. And the other is to, you still need to do a lot of that trail running in the mountains, but what we did is we reduced the volume of your normal running and we added in these specific muscular endurance workouts that I believe have
00:26:57
Speaker
a really powerful training effect on this durability factor that we're talking about or this fatigue resistance in the legs. I've used that now for almost 20 some years with different athletes. Actually, no. It started in 1992.
00:27:18
Speaker
when I was coaching a guy right before the Olympics in cross-country skiing in 92, and I started playing around with some of these ideas that I had learned from a speed skating coach about what they call local muscular endurance.
00:27:33
Speaker
and i began to play with different ways of doing it and then i experimented on myself and other athletes and i went whoa this is like secret sauce here and since then i've been refined it and played around with it and i've come to realize that there's about a thousand different ways to do this that are probably all really effective that i don't think there's anything
00:27:55
Speaker
especially special about the way we have approached it. What we do, I think, works quite well, but it's not the only way that it could be done. And people that are interested in that, we've got quite a bit of information, both in the Training for the Uphill Athlete book, as well as on the website. We've got a PDF you can download and take home and read and follow. This is essentially the same workout that Luke was doing, leading into the Tour de Jean, and that
00:28:23
Speaker
I haven't counted how many other events we've prepared you for using that, but it's kind of become our go-to prep thing, wouldn't you say? Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned the kind of potency of the training effect of this. And I very clearly remember the first couple of weeks of incorporating this.
00:28:44
Speaker
And we were doing the gym-based ME at the time. And I would do the workout. I'd knock through the workout and feel really good. And then four days afterwards would just be almost crippled with soreness. And it took probably three months or so of doing this on a regular basis before I felt like I was actually
00:29:09
Speaker
able to use that workout and run well and do additional things because it was such a powerful workout. And just doing it once a week was initially all that I could handle. And I think that highlighted two things. One, how powerful of a workout it is, and two, how untrained I was on those systems. So it made it just this incredible space for growth. And in Tour de Giance in particular, going in with relatively low weekly mileage,
00:29:39
Speaker
The last, from cold in Malatra down, so I don't know, 15 miles, 10 miles, somewhere in there, I was able to run, like run and move quickly. And my legs were held up. They weren't.
00:29:57
Speaker
They weren't the noodles, the wet noodles that I would have expected them to be after being out for three days of running through the mountains. So it is awesome.
Recovery and Injury Prevention Strategies
00:30:06
Speaker
It is a powerful training tool, but it's a little bit like playing with dynamite and you got to know what you're doing. You've got to ease your way into it. And yeah, it's easy to get too excited with it and maybe ramp up too quickly.
00:30:21
Speaker
But it's certainly something that I've come to rely on working with a lot of athletes and a lot of coaches here at uphill athlete have adopted it using it with everything from mountaineers to runners and seen really powerful training effect with it. Before the Tour de Gea, you did 16 week block of that.
00:30:46
Speaker
So it was long enough to get through that initial phase of the super sore, like the worst delayed onset muscle soreness you may have ever had in your life. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. And interestingly, what I have noticed with that workout is the fast twitch athletes don't have much problem with it.
00:31:10
Speaker
They recover really quickly from it. But most of the people we work with are kind of on the slow twitch end of the spectrum, and they suffer mightily. And the further you are on that slow twitch end of the spectrum, the more you suffer from those workouts.
00:31:25
Speaker
So a long training block, like you did, can have this really powerful training stimulus. But what I've noticed is even four, six, eight weeks of that, if you can get a little, and we've done that with you, kind of some little mini blocks we just didn't have time to get in, that full progression still works quite well.
00:31:47
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And so I would encourage people to mess around with it. Again, there's nothing scientific about this. I mean, I could explain, I think, the science behind it. I've gleaned a bit of information from this, like I said, from the US speed skating coach back in the late 80s, early 90s. And then from Yuri Vrkashansky, the famous Russian
00:32:11
Speaker
strength coach who wrote kind of a whole dissertation on this process that really opened my eyes to, oh, there's a possible thing here that we could be using. And I've used it with a lot of top cross-country World Cup skiers as well and seen big gains with it.
00:32:30
Speaker
So for those of you that don't have either mountains near your home or 25 hours a week to spend out there in the mountains, this can be a pretty good way to make up for some of that. And I think that, as I mentioned, the
00:32:48
Speaker
the standard routine would just be to go out and run 100 miles a week with a lot of vertical in it. And that will build this durability in your legs, but it also comes with a pretty high cost of its own in terms of, you know, whether it's joint injuries or its own delayed onset muscle soreness that can come from that kind of stuff. And what I feel like we've found as a really good recipe for you with these workouts has been that
00:33:16
Speaker
that we know they're going to be hard. We know we can plan two or three easy recovery days afterwards, but it's kind of concentrating all of that loading into just one workout. And rather than going out the door and beating yourself up with 20 mile runs, four or five times a week on really hilly terrain. And I feel like we've been able to sort of
00:33:40
Speaker
keep away from the injury area almost entirely with you. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that the important part is that the ME workouts do need to be coupled with running. You can't eliminate running completely, but it allows you to have a much lower volume and still carry through. And it's just, it's incredible how effective it has been.
00:34:05
Speaker
Well, and would you say that has contributed to, well, obviously things like you just mentioned in the Tour de Jean, that last 15 kilometers of running downhill, in a normal case, you would have been really struggling with super fatigued legs going down that, and you weren't. I remember you excitedly told me right after the race, I ran the fastest of the whole race in the last 10 kilometers. Yeah, it was incredible.
00:34:33
Speaker
I mean, if I look back to events that I did prior to working with you and prior to working with these ME workouts is I often was finishing just on fumes and just destroyed at the end of these big long runs and multiple times now the tour bowl
00:34:53
Speaker
millwood leg strength and been able to push and chase at the end those last little bits of time that I was hoping to gain. And I think that the ME has a significant amount to do with that.
00:35:04
Speaker
Well, in the Millwood, it made the difference between actually cracking that time, getting the fastest known time or not, because you only broke it by how many minutes? Six. Six minutes, yeah. Six minutes after 31 hours and 33 minutes. It was only six minutes faster than the previous record. Yeah.
00:35:23
Speaker
So you had to put the hammer down. Yeah, I came into the final kind of crew spot and I had done the math wrong in my head. I thought I had seven miles left. Turns out I had 11. I thought it was about 3,000 feet of climbing. It was 4,300 feet of climbing. And it was three o'clock in the afternoon and I had to be done to break the record before 5.40 in the afternoon. And so that last 11 miles with 4,000 feet of climbing had to go down in two and a half hours.
00:35:53
Speaker
And it didn't even compute. My brain was so just mashed potatoes from being awake all night and pushing that, you know, I had friends that because it was my birthday run, we had a party lap for that last 11 miles and four friends went left the trail, that last trail with me and we pushed and pushed and pushed and I ran as hard as I could just hammering and
00:36:21
Speaker
come in just hot. The friends that were waiting at the finish line and my wife was there and they were surprised at how quickly we came down those last 100 yards where they could see us because it just wouldn't be normal to finish an event like that so quickly.
00:36:39
Speaker
Well, I think it's cool that you have, well, I mean, it's a fun thing that we've stumbled on this and been able to refine it and now it's we can rely on it and we know how to do this pretty much to get you ready for these things and we can tweak things and lengthen or shorten the training block with them.
00:37:01
Speaker
What, before we leave that subject, I want to mention to folks that it has been my observation using now this muscular endurance for all these many years is that you will feel, and you can reconfirm this because I think you really noticed it in the Tour de Jean, but you will feel the positive training effects of an extended block of muscular endurance training for about as long afterwards as you did the block. So in other words, if you do 10 weeks of muscular endurance training,
00:37:30
Speaker
you're going to have about 10 weeks of positive training effect as it will, of course, slowly taper off. But you'll be doing something else during that 10 weeks, hopefully, to keep the stimulus going. But that's kind of an interesting
00:37:47
Speaker
concept. It's another one of those Verkhoshansky concepts that he called the long-term delayed training effect, where a concentrated block of a certain type of training will have this delayed training effect that you'll feel the benefits. And so we were able to, in your case, with the
00:38:03
Speaker
We had a fairly extensive, like when we ended that period of muscular endurance, we went into a more conventional period of uphill, high-intensity aerobic intervals like people would normally do on your hill near your home that we call the Stupid Steep Hill.
00:38:21
Speaker
And, but that was relatively short. That was only about maybe six weeks, I think five or six weeks of that. Yeah. Yeah. And I think overall the time from when we did the last muscular endurance workout until I was at the starting line, I think it was about seven weeks, maybe eight.
00:38:36
Speaker
And that's one other thing I would note with this is it's actually important to make sure you do have some taper time between that last ME workout and your event because it does take such a toll on your legs that you need to make sure that it's properly recovered and that you're fresh instead of kind of the mushiness that it can create for extended periods of time. Absolutely. That's a really good point to have that.
00:39:05
Speaker
some sort of recovery between, and usually, as I recall, when we ended the ME block of training and we shifted to intervals, you were seeing gains every week in your interval workouts for about the first three to four weeks. Like every workout, you'd get faster and stronger. I think you were coming out of that hole of fatigue that we had created with that long, that extended muscular endurance block of training.
00:39:32
Speaker
It was quite surprising to me that even the first time when I still felt like a lot of the effect of the ME workouts, the times were faster. And then it was literally on that stupid steep hill. It was PR after PR after PR. Even when we were increasing the number of intervals up the hill, the PRs just kept coming. And it was definitely highlighting just the potency of that workout.
00:39:59
Speaker
Well, I don't want to tell people this is a magic bullet, but if there is one, this is as close as I've ever found to one. And it works for, like I said, for all these different sports, it works really well.
00:40:13
Speaker
Some of the things we've talked a little bit about this, how you've been able to maintain this stoke, especially through this COVID period where everybody's had their rug pulled out from under them with regards to plans and races and that sort of thing. Would you say that one of the keys, because this is annoying you now, the way I do, that for you, that the process
00:40:38
Speaker
is important, if not more important even than the end result, what it takes to get there, and that you actually embrace that process incredibly well. Anybody who does these things has to embrace it to some extent, but it seems like that has allowed you to weather, especially this summer, this rough patch where there were no real races, but can you speak to that a little bit?
00:41:01
Speaker
Yeah, we've talked about this, and I've talked about it with friends. And I think that for me, I see myself more as a practitioner of the craft of moving through the mountains. And the daily practice is as important to my life, my well-being, my soul, whatever you want to define that as. It's every bit as important, if not more important, than races are.
00:41:30
Speaker
And the interesting part is balancing training versus practicing the craft where they often overlap, but there can be differences there. And so I find it really easy to stay motivated to go out for a run because I love.
00:41:46
Speaker
going out for a run and the being able to have a big event or a race is a way to celebrate the craft but it doesn't define the craft for me. The craft is that daily practice and the variety of workouts or pushing myself physically during that practice is really what makes it just almost no-brainer to keep the stoke high because I just love to do it.
00:42:15
Speaker
Well, you know, when I first started, not first started, but when I'd been working with Steve for some time, this is, of course, you know, what now, 20 years ago.
00:42:24
Speaker
he said that his friends stopped calling him to go climbing because they would call and say, hey, we're going to go climb this or that. And he'd go, well, I'd love to go climbing, but I have to train. And so he had developed the same sense of this craft that he was trying to perfect. And sometimes it overlapped with climbing, but other times it didn't necessarily overlap with climbing. And it can be very,
00:42:51
Speaker
Some of it can be pretty routine and boring and you know to get your and put your shoes on and get out that door and Go for a 10-mile run or whatever it is, you know, it's on the same trail. You've run a thousand times But it has to be done and I think having that
00:43:07
Speaker
sort of process-oriented goals versus outcome-oriented goals has certainly been one of the factors that has helped me and I know obviously it's helped you and when I was coaching a lot of young junior cross-country skiers
00:43:24
Speaker
you know they would come to me with these I want to go to the Olympics and I said well that's great that's a wonderful dream to have but why don't we make this about this process that will get you to the stage where then that might become a reality for you and so we can develop these sort of intermediate
00:43:42
Speaker
goals that are all moving you in that direction with the process, but they may not look like the Olympics. Maybe for skiers it's going to be certain technical skill sets that they need to perfect or strength training. There's a whole myriad of things that go together to make up a good athlete.
00:44:05
Speaker
And some of them may look like the Olympics, but most of them are going to just look like some kind of boring thing you've got to do. But I've found that by breaking this process down into smaller, more incremental steps, that gives somebody a roadmap.
00:44:24
Speaker
Like, oh, this is what I need to do. And I'll do these things for this next six weeks. And then I'm going to shift and do these things. And my goal is going to be to, in this few weeks, is to develop these skills or these strengths or this capacity, whatever it is. And over years and years, like you've done now, you've got this enormous base that has allowed you to do all this. Whereas if you had,
00:44:51
Speaker
And going back to that thing where you talked about earlier where a lot of the folks you know that jumped into the sport and just went, you know, whole hog with it for a couple of years and then completely blew up. It was as if like the race was the important part for them, you know, the results of that race. And without it, they didn't seem to, they didn't maybe have the stoke like you've developed over these years.
00:45:19
Speaker
And the percentage of time that an athlete spends preparing for an event, you know, use the Olympics as the example. I mean, it's thousands, tens of thousands of hours of process for an hour-long event, you know. And if you don't absolutely love that process, you won't make it to that.
00:45:42
Speaker
event, that celebration of the process. And if the whole process is defined by succeeding at one event, I think you're setting up a house of cards, that one bad event, and then you question whether the process was worth it or not. Exactly. Yeah. Speaking of that, I heard a
00:46:07
Speaker
interview with, I've forgotten his name now, the man who was Usain Bolt's coach. And so this was before, when he first launched himself onto the scene, maybe was it 2012 in London when he just blew everybody away. I mean, everybody can probably remember watching that race and think this is inhuman. So he ran two events there.
00:46:34
Speaker
The first one was the 100 at roughly 10 seconds, and the second one was the 200 at roughly 20 seconds. And his coach said he had about over a thousand hours of preparation that year, that year alone, for less than 30 seconds of event.
00:46:51
Speaker
And that's not very much payback. At least your events last for hours and hours and hours. But it just goes, it's kind of, it's obviously on the very extreme end, but I think it can help people wrap your head around the fact that, you know, that's what it takes. And, you know, he obviously, you know, he is a phenomenal person to have achieved what he's achieved, but he had to have embraced that process because he did it for years and years of this enormous time commitment
00:47:21
Speaker
For it in the guy said that even in the course of a whole season He only raced about four or five minutes the entire season but with a thousand hours of training so well on top of that thousand hours of training a thousand hours of recovery and Thousands and hours of good nutrition and you know that all of the peripheral things that that are included in that exceptional performance
00:47:50
Speaker
Well, so besides, we've talked about these, you know, you and your phenomenal performances and Usain Bolt and his phenomenal performances, but a lot of folks aren't at that level yet or, and they do aspire to that. What kind of advice would you give to folks that are kind of getting started and dipping a toe into this arena of mountain running or other mountain sports? What are some sage points of wisdom that you'd hand out?
00:48:20
Speaker
Well, now that I'm an old man, I think I can give out advice. I would think that the first piece of advice, especially if it's a younger athlete, the advice I'd give them is take the long view. Have a plan of what you want running or moving in the mountains to look like for you in a decade or in two decades.
00:48:44
Speaker
not just fixate on what next race season looks like or what your next event is, but look down the road and make sure that you're honoring that process, that you're training appropriately that can be maintained for a long period of time, that you're looking at your work and home life balance and accepting the fact that there may be additional stressors that reduce the amount of running that you can do or the training that you can do and just embracing that process so you've got the long view.
00:49:14
Speaker
I think that would be one of the big things that I would share. And it's certainly easy. I mean, again, having coached juniors for so much of my coaching career, I think that's one of the biggest mistakes that kids, but especially their parents, make with them is thinking, oh, if my kid's not setting the world on fire by the time they're 18 or 20, there's no hope for them. And certainly there are sports like that, gymnastics being one of them. But in these kind of things that we're talking about,
00:49:43
Speaker
People aren't going to be coming into their prime years until at least they're 30 years old. And it takes years and years to build to that. And I can recall with one of the young women that I coached in cross-country skiing who ended her career very successfully. She had the last two or three seasons on the World Cup. She was ranked in the top five or six overall.
00:50:11
Speaker
And in her junior years, she was good for sure, but she was never like head and shoulders above all these other girls. There were so many girls that were just incredible standouts in their teens compared to her that within two or three years were gone. They were just not even skiing anymore.
00:50:33
Speaker
I think what the mistake that many people can make, and I want to bring this back around to you or to people trying to train like Killian, for instance, we see a lot of that. People trying to, I want to be like Killian Jornet. And that's a pretty dangerous thing to do. But what people will do is look at what high level athletes do. Look at something like what you do, the amount of work you can pack into a week.
00:50:57
Speaker
or look at what a World Cup cross-country skier does for training and think, oh, that's appropriate for my 16-year-old. And I think that's the biggest mistake I see or even appropriate for themselves when they're just starting out at 24 years old or 26 years old or something and they don't have much training background and they say, oh, but look at how Iliad Kipchoge does these workouts and he just broke two hours for the marathon, so I should do those workouts.
00:51:25
Speaker
And I think that's a terrible disservice that in some ways the running community as a whole and the media does is they running magazines will put this out there. Here's Ilya Kipchoge's workouts for the last six weeks before he broke the world record. Well, that's great, but it's what he did the last 15 years that really counts, not these last six weeks. He could have done probably almost anything in the last six weeks and still performed very well. And I think that that mistake of copying what
00:51:54
Speaker
the elites do, there's things to be gleaned from it for sure. There's definitely things to be gained by looking closely at how elite level athletes train.
00:52:07
Speaker
But I think that it's such a dangerous thing to try to copy. Let's say somebody who's a genetic freak like Usain Bolt or Killian Jornet. You copy somebody like that and if you don't happen to have their training history and their lucky draw of the genetic cards,
00:52:29
Speaker
you're probably going to end up in a heap in a matter of a few weeks or months with injuries and overtraining and that sort of thing. And so that's where I think the stuff we've done, you and I have done when we're working together, these things are doable by normal people. You don't have to be a Killian Jornet to train this way, would you say?
00:52:51
Speaker
I totally agree. I mean, if you pull back and look at it from a big lens, I mean, I have a full time job, I have a family, and I train 15 hours a week, kind of at the top end of it, you know, and I think that
00:53:08
Speaker
That number of 15 hours is something that represents decades of work that I can tolerate that workload combined with the stresses of work and family. And someone trying to come into this new maybe as a young athlete or someone who's joining or starting running in their 30s or 40s or 50s or whatever it is.
00:53:29
Speaker
It just needs to be approached with a long-term view and trying to do what I do, which is probably more manageable than what Killian does. It would just be asking for a much shorter career than they aspire to have.
00:53:44
Speaker
Most people, yeah, they aren't thinking that long term either. And we all think we're bulletproof until something breaks. And then once it breaks and we're stuck picking up the pieces. Well, let's wrap up by, I want to ask you, you mentioned Norma Tech.
00:54:01
Speaker
And I think that, you know, and I think most of our readers, listeners know that we feel that recovery is as important as the training and that people don't give it enough credit. They don't take it seriously enough.
00:54:17
Speaker
and don't really devote the time and energy, but I think your approach to recovery is one of the things that has allowed you to sustain this high workload, high professional workload as well. So give me a few of the things you've learned over the years in terms of recovery.
00:54:38
Speaker
Sure. I think that one of the things that I haven't done too much recently, but as I think about the Tour de Jan's training, swimming is extremely underrated. As much as I am a terrible swimmer, it's probably one of the best recovery workouts that can be done. And when we were trying to put in those big ME workouts and
00:54:58
Speaker
holding a running load. Swimming was an exceptional thing to do just to help freshen legs up and get back on hard workouts quicker. More recently, I made the investment in some Norma Tech boots, which is sequential compression for the legs. For me, I think that that helps tremendously in between workouts and after long work days on my feet to just
00:55:24
Speaker
flush the legs out. And I found after using those for a period of time now that it's also incredibly important to stay adequately hydrated. It's easy to be in a constant state of dehydration as we suck down our caffeinated beverages during the day to keep our eyes open. But being adequately hydrated so that when you are using these kind of flushing methods, that you're replenishing the tissues with the hydration that they need.
00:55:52
Speaker
those would be the real key things for me at this point. Yeah, well thanks for bringing up swimming. I know that you were a little resistant when I first broached the subject to you and a lot of people are. I mean, I've had people who I've suggested that they swim and in fact, you know,
00:56:12
Speaker
In the training program that you and I developed that we have on our website, Luke Nelson's intro to ultra run, there are swim workouts in there. And they're not really workouts, they're swim recovery sessions. And I've had people say, I'm not a swimmer. What do you think? I'm not training for a triathlon. Why should I be there? Exactly. You can swim like a cat and still get a benefit by getting. And my, my.
00:56:40
Speaker
my thinking behind this is one of these things that I noticed it because one year when I was doing training for cross-country skiing someone talked me into doing some professional triathlons and I did a bunch of triathlons that summer and of course I had a swimming background.
00:56:56
Speaker
So that part was really easy for me. But what I noticed when I was accumulating all this time running and cycling that I'd come out of those swimming workouts and these were real workouts. They were hard, you know, many thousands of yards with intervals and all that sort of thing. I'd come out of them. I'd go into them with dead heavy legs and I'd come out of them feeling like I could go for a run.
00:57:16
Speaker
And so when I was doing a lot later, as I began to get more and more into cross-country ski racing, I started using swimming workouts as a recovery for me. And I think if you are a really competent, good swimmer, you can actually swim and swim fast, and that really speeds up the recovery process. But you don't need to be. Even if you just hang on the side of the pool and flutter kick, or grab a kickboard or something like that and flutter kick around. And I think my
00:57:46
Speaker
You're a medical person. You would probably tell me what you think of this idea. I think it's because you're horizontal, so the heart's not having to work as hard, yet you're getting a lot of circulation. It kind of flushes out the legs. And I think there's the cooling effect of being in 70 degree water.
00:58:04
Speaker
I think those two combination of those two things where you're you're working moderately hard So your heart rate is elevated and you're pumping a lot of blood through the muscles But anyway, it's a I know I hear very few people talk about using swimming as a recovery tool and when I bring it up, you know, most people kind of
00:58:24
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I definitely was like that, and I probably swim a lot more like a cat than an actual swimmer. And I think you're absolutely accurate with why being horizontal. I think that the compressive factor of the water around your limbs as you push them into the water as you swim is super helpful. And the advice that really rang to me, because I was resistant, you kept putting those recovery workouts on. I was like, ugh, we're going swimming again? This sucks.
00:58:51
Speaker
Um, but, but when you, when you said to me, just moving in the water, because I'd go to swim, I would, I would be frustrated because I couldn't swim well. And I'd be like, Oh, I see like this old lady's lapping me like four times every time I do one length. And, um, cause she swims and I flounder, but just moving. And when I accepted the fact that it's the movement in the water, it allowed me to, to calm down enough to, to get the recovery benefits instead of.
00:59:17
Speaker
I think even vertical running, you know, you can get in the deep end of the pool and it's almost like treading water, but you're running your arms and legs, removing that can have a similar effect. Well, that's a great, now we've given away pretty much all of our tricks, Luke. All secrets, they're all out.
00:59:34
Speaker
My, my feeling is there are no secrets, you know, and the more that we get this information out there that people give feedback and we play, you know, the way I've come up with most of this stuff is like you and I have over these years. We try stuff, we see if it works, you know, if it works, we, we stick with it or we refine it. And if it doesn't work, we either reject it or we change it so that we try it in a new way.
00:59:56
Speaker
I think it's important to stay curious about this stuff and not be just so close-minded and focused and say, oh, this is the way so-and-so trains, so I better train just like them, or I've got to run 100 miles a week. There's so many dogmas that exist out there about training that I think are, some of them are valid for sure, but not all of them, and they may not be always valid for you,
01:00:20
Speaker
in your case, and so each individual has to decide what's going to work best for them.
Technical Skills in Mountain Running
01:00:29
Speaker
Yeah, I think that that's just the approach to becoming a master of the craft and realizing that the master is the one who recognizes how little they know. And that there's still so much to be unlocked and discovered by maintaining a curiosity and playing at the margins, you know? Yeah, yeah. I used to use this with skiers because as a cross-country skiing is a highly technical sport.
01:00:58
Speaker
And what I would say to them is that the skiers as we were learning and doing all these really boring drills that have to you know balancing on one leg going downhill for a long time and that sort of thing and skiing backwards downhill on one ski and just all these tricks we would do to become more adept at finding our center and balance over the skis was that
01:01:20
Speaker
The true master would be the person who has the most technique arrows in their quiver and can pull out the appropriate arrow for whatever the terrain and snow conditions dictated. And the more of those arrows you have in that quiver,
01:01:37
Speaker
And the more masterfully, the more you have mastered those techniques, the more easily you can move between one technique and another technique as terrain varies. And I think we don't think of running as or mountain running, perhaps, as a highly technical sport. But it certainly is in terms of agility and balance and lateral movements and all that kind of stuff. And that's where, like you were saying, even with these muscular endurance workouts, as powerful of a training effect as they are,
01:02:06
Speaker
you got to get out there and run around of the mountains. If you do all your running on flat ground, even if it's on dirt trails, that's not going to feel the same as when you're having to take big high steps over roots and rocks and that kind of stuff. And you really need to spend a lot of time training that sort of thing.
01:02:25
Speaker
I love the concept of the multiple arrows in the quiver. I think that that's something that very directly could apply to mountain running when you start to pick it apart in its detail. That's an incredible analogy. What haven't we touched on? Anything that we should
01:02:45
Speaker
Do you feel like I've overlooked, we haven't talked about your scemo racing history. I mean, yeah, there was that, there was that stint of some scemo racing that I did. Did you get, did you, were you, I know you spend all, you spend your winters as another thing that you pack into your life in the wintertime, you are a ski patrolman.
Ski Mountaineering and Running Balance
01:03:04
Speaker
And as if things weren't already busy enough. I mean, I do know you get some good training in when you're on your skis out there patrolling. But yeah, tell us, how did you end up getting into Skimo?
01:03:16
Speaker
I know obviously you had that snowboarding background but yeah well that's the interesting thing is I didn't I didn't know how to ski until the literally the season before I started skimo racing and that the story behind that itself is a little bit
01:03:33
Speaker
humorous as I had gotten a job working for a heli ski guiding operation in Utah Diamond Peak heli ski and I showed up for my first day to tail gun and I was on a snowboard and they're like great here are snowboard guests but tomorrow it's all skiers we'd like you to guide on skis. Thrown into the deep end of the pool. I've never skied before.
01:03:57
Speaker
So I worked with the guests the rest of that morning. That afternoon, I rented some skis. And the next day, I was on the helicopter with skis. And it wasn't pretty. I'm sure that the other guides had plenty to say for me when I wasn't around. But I learned how to ski. I learned how to backcountry ski. And then because of the friends I was hanging around with, the bad influences in my life, I got invited to a ski mountaineering race that next winter.
01:04:23
Speaker
and did well as I was on this uphill ascent with my running career. And the first season I did a couple of the local races and the next season was at the national championships and finished just outside of the top 10. And then over the rate of about the six years followed, I made two US teams, won a national championships, got second at a North American championships.
01:04:51
Speaker
internationally representing the United States at the international championships a couple of times as well. Do you feel like you can race at a high level in these two seasons? How compatible is it to have those two sports? I think for a time it was compatible.
01:05:13
Speaker
Skimo training for me required a lot more time on skis than running does. Part of that has to do with accessibility to skiing. I would have to drive about 30 minutes to the ski area where I could access snow regularly. But the skimo workouts also just took more time to accumulate the appropriate volume. I didn't feel like I could get the training effect as quickly as I could running.
01:05:36
Speaker
And trying to maintain a high level of running and schema racing at that time, there wasn't really a year round running season. And that has changed the international aspects of the sport as it has grown is there are running races year round. And in those days now, you know, eight, 10 years ago, uh,
01:05:59
Speaker
running kind of chilled out in the winter. And so I could focus on schema and then in this transition to running and then run all summer and fall and then go back to schema in the winter. I look at athletes that are trying to do both and carry running and schema feasible not to be at a high level competitive spot.
01:06:19
Speaker
It does seem like a challenge. I mean, we certainly see it in the more conventional sports. It's so rare to see somebody compete in the winter and summer Olympics. At a high level like that, it really takes a year-round focus. And one of the struggles I've had, both with you and working with Mike, is coming off of a ski season where your fitness level is really high, but you haven't been doing much running.
01:06:46
Speaker
And we have to be really careful starting to ease people back into running, especially when their fitness is high, because you feel really good and you could go out and run a whole bunch in April. Yeah, but the tendinous structures aren't attuned to it, right? Exactly.
01:07:04
Speaker
And I think that's something that folks have to be cautious about. I know I've said this before and I think you agreed with me on it that I believe when you've had an extensive layoff from running or you're new to the sport that it takes at least a hundred miles in your legs before you can actually consider that you can train as a runner. And I believe that that's because the tendons gain strength at so much slower rate than the muscles do.
01:07:30
Speaker
And you probably could verify this because you cut them open all the time, but tendons aren't very well capitalized, are they? Now they don't bleed it out. And so they don't see the adaptation process nearly as quickly. And this is going back to your rock climbing. I've trained a lot and I've had you probably, did you ever have any finger injuries and pulley tendons?
01:07:51
Speaker
Unfortunately, no, nope, I stayed strong throughout, unfortunately. And those are pretty common with climbers, and the reason is that the forearm muscles gain strength.
01:08:02
Speaker
pretty darn quickly. And I've actually read that the rate of conditioning, the difference between muscles and tendons is about one seventh as fast in a tendon as in a muscle. So you go in the gym and you climb or you hand the hangboard and your fingers get really strong really quickly and you can start loading them and loading them and loading them, but the tendons haven't had a chance to develop the strength to hold together. And that's when people hurt themselves. And it's the same thing happens with people that
01:08:31
Speaker
ramp up too quickly in their running mileage, especially after a season of ski racing where they're quite fit, but they haven't been pounding on their legs. And I think people need to be aware of that and be cautious with that when they shift from one sport to the other.
01:08:49
Speaker
And I think that there is potential for athletes to cross over to do both, but they have to look at their seasons realistically and say, you know, after you get done with the schema season that you give it a good stretch of time to.
01:09:03
Speaker
train appropriately and to build up before you race. And then at the end of the running season, you have to give yourself appropriate time to recover before you jump into another season because right after another, after another, just too much breakdown, I think. I agree. I think, I think rest is underrated.
Lessons on Recovery and Rest
01:09:20
Speaker
Absolutely.
01:09:23
Speaker
You're probably one of those people that rests less than the average person. I think that's one of the most important things that you brought to our relationship though when I started working with you. I remember some very hard conversations early on where you would call me out for doing too much, trying to do too much.
01:09:43
Speaker
you know, taking the appropriate amount of recovery and rest has been one of the most valuable things that I think that I've learned.
01:09:52
Speaker
For sure. Yeah, that is a tricky thing because people who are attracted to the kind of things that we like to do are always type A personalities. And for them, more is always better. More is more. Yeah, more is more.
Podcast Conclusion
01:10:05
Speaker
Until all of a sudden, more isn't better. So you don't do anything. Right. Until the wheels come off. Yeah. You're on the couch like me with your leg up and ice packs around your knee.
01:10:16
Speaker
Well, Luke, this has been a great chat. Thanks so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Folks that are interested in knowing more about Luke, he has written a number of articles on our website. And so if you go and enter Luke Nelson into the search bar, you will see you can learn more from him about some of his thoughts and some of the crazy things he's done.
01:10:41
Speaker
And you on social media too, I suppose, some sort, right? Yeah, I occasionally surface on Instagram. You can find me at S. Luke Nelson. It's probably the best place on social media to find me. Good. Well, thanks again, Luke. It's good chatting, and we'll have to do this again sometime. Sounds great. Thanks, Scott. All right. Thanks for joining us today. For more information about what we do, please go to our website, uphillathlete.com.