8 Pillars of Marathon Training

Welch gydwch yn ffordd, ac ffordd yn ffordd y ffordd y ffordd, ac ffordd y ffordd y ffordd y ffordd y ffordd y ffordd y ffordd y ffordd y ffordd y ffordd y ffordd y fford oeddwn i'n gweithio. Mae'n gweithio oeddwn i'n gweithio oeddwn i'n gweithio oeddwn i'n gweithio yna. Mae'n gwaith i'n gweithio gwneud i'n gweithio gwneud i'n gweithio gwneud i'n o'n gweithio, ac yn gweithio i'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw Ys yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n y Mae'n gwneud yw'n gwneud ac mae'n gwneud yw'n gwneud i'n gwneud ac yn gwneud ac mae'n gwneud ac mae'n gwneud ac yn gwneud ac yn gwneud ac yn gwneud ac yn gwneud ac yn gwneud ac yn i'n gweith i'r gweith i'r gweith i'r gweith i'r gweith i'r gweith i'r My partner over in Kenya, or business partners, if I say, just not to get confused there, giving the trolls something else to grasp hold of, was on Sunday evening and there's a lot of rumours flying around and so I'm not going to divulge what the rumours are because that's what they are rumours and I can't substantiate them. However, the one thing that I do know for fact is that the athletics also, the director of criminal investigation and the anti-doping agency, Kenya, linked in with the AIU now and they've been subsumed in because there's some other investigation going on about systemic doping in Kenya, which is beyond the same thing. So I think it's all intermingled. Now I know that that's concrete because my partner, business partner, rather, who told me this on Sunday evening, wouldn't have a clue about this at all. So I know that that's fact and I actually did pick up something on Twitter this morning about the athletics integrity unit and some investigation that's going on in Kenya. I didn't read it about it properly but that's what we know at the moment and just because what's been happening recently is there are a few trolls who go way back with me, got a little bit history with me and they're entertaining me at the moment with some of the things that they're saying. Just to be clear, all that I've done is what anybody else could have done. I've contacted the director of criminal investigations in Kenya and passed on the information about where Zane said that he brought in the EPO from Ethiopia into Kenya and then handed it on to them. They're dealing with it. I'm not in charge of the criminal investigation. I'm not in charge of anti-doping Kenya. I'm not some undercover agent or anything like that. I've just passed on the information. I've been told that whenever there's anything that happens that they'll inform me. However, I suspect that now with the AIU and the anti-doping agency, Kenya involved, that they'll control all the media stuff. When everything happens, it'll be released to the world and you'll hear about it when I hear about it unless I get a nod in a wink, so to speak. But if I do, I'll let you know. So just on that point, why I'm referred back there to the trolls, is that some of you won't know. Well, I don't think any of you will know this, but I have been emailing with Weldon Johnson, who's one of the owners of Let's Run. I haven't been discussing a few things that have been going on in Kenya. As I mentioned to him, I don't take life too seriously, and I take the coaching part of things seriously. That's one of the reasons why I passed on the information to the Director of Criminal Investigations in Kenya, because I want to see things sorted out over Kenya and they're getting worse, really. I think that's evidence from what's happening now with the AIU investigation. So, yeah, a few of the trolls have been saying things, I think they think that I'm sort of running the anti-Dofon Agency of the world or the universe or something like that, so it's quite amusing. But in a few episodes time, we'll go back and we'll deal with the trolls, because it's quite an interesting story, and I can tell you about the origins and the inception of Staza Stable, the Strava group and how it's grown from a few trolls, so we'll save that one and we'll name a few names and have a little bit of fun with that. But for now, let's sort of kind of you know, stick on that, so if anything happens within or that, I'll let you know, but you'll probably hear at the same time as me, but so let's kick on and talk about what we're all here for really, and I'm basically trying to give people some free information about, you know, running to help them and we've discussed so far about the challenges of the marathon and about getting a coach and all the coach in history, so we're kind of at that stage now, we're sitting down and if you're a runner and you don't have a coach and you're looking to have to plan your year, you're probably thinking how I know if I do this, you pick a couple of races and start working back from there, or if you're a coach and you're looking at somebody's, you know, training for the year or a block of training and you want to know what to do, I think you'll find that this is going to help. Now on the surface, what I'm going to be talking about, these eight pillars of marathon training or eight principles of training really, sound pretty straightforward, but they're nuanced and when we get into them and talk about, you know, how you use these pillars of training, then you start to see, okay, it's like a 3D jigsaw puzzle, it's not quite as simple as banging out, you know, a 65 minute runner or workout, there's a lot goes into it and a lot of thought, and how you craft this is really important, okay? So, so if we look at it, you know, while there are hundreds, it's not maybe like thousands of workouts that we can sift through our toolbox, what we have to do is we have to sort of pluck out the right tool for the job and then design an outline that's going to guess in tip-top shape, you know, for race day. And previously, I think it was two weeks ago, we touched on how science, while not being the best model for preparing for the marathon, it does help us a little bit provide some data and gives a platform from which we can build and create. In fact, one of my athletes recently, I think it was a week ago when he had all the lactate figures done because, you know, we were trying to sort of do things out with his running as well and to get some markers really to see where he was at. And all it did really was they just married exactly what the training saying, but there was a couple of interesting things in there as well. So, you know, whilst the science wouldn't dictate the training, it's useful just to get some data from. And in fairness as well, you know, these principles that I'm going to be talking about, they haven't just been plucked out of thin air, they are what you call in invert, commerce, proven principles, which have come from science as well, okay. So, and you can use these, you know, to design your program. So, the first one, you know, that we're going to have a little look at to help us improve is the overload principle or the overload pillar. And basically, we have to look at this in individual progressive instruction and specific manners as quite a little bit in there. It sounds simple, overload principle, straight forward. And to a large degree, it is common sense, okay. It isn't rocket science, although science have proven it as a principle. So, we all know that basically, we have to increase the workload in some way shape or form. If we're going to create stimulus in hearts, our fitness levels, okay. If it's weight lifting, you have to increase the weight. We've run in, it might be the distance of the speed or cutting back the recovery, okay. Because if we just keep plodding around during the same old run, we're not really going to improve that much. There might be a little bit of improvement, but not a great deal. And that's not how you really want to go about, you know, if you're planning on a marathon abroad, you don't want to just be plodding around and just hoping for the best when you get there, okay. But there's so many different ways that we can overload the body. And this is where sort of craft experience and knowledge come in. And the skill comes down to really knowing how to overload the body appropriately and how much and what type of recovery to prescribe to facilitate the desired adaptations. So, you know, meta-bolic overloads one thing, but muscular skeletal overload is a far trickier thing to deal with. And we'll get stuck into that in a minute, okay. So, we also have to decide how often we're going to stress the body and how long we're going to stress it for, what type of stress will it be strength, speed, endurance, whatever. And if it's, you know, like a run, what sort of pace we're going to get at, and, you know, to hit the body we have to get the best results. So, if we kind of summarize that in like a sentence or two, basically all over the overload principle means is we've got a stresser body in the appropriate way to make, to create a stimulus so that we get the necessary adaptations, okay. So, that sounds straightforward. So, you say to yourself, okay, I don't really need to know that. All I need to know is yeah, I've got a design, my weekly training, I've got to put in a workout here, long run there, and you know, and it will happen. But this is where the nuance of this comes in now in knowing how to overload the body properly or in the right manner, you know, based on the experience of the athlete. So, if we take, for example, a beginner marathon runner or somebody who say like free 30 to 4 30 in that area there, you wouldn't overload their body in the same way that you would overload the leads. But the principle is the same thing is that you've got to give them a little bit of stress so that they recover from it and the adaptations kicking. So, for somebody who might be only running, say, four or five times a week, let's say five times a week, they're running, let's say, 350 for the marathon, just pop your figure out of the air. You might give them one long run, one workout, and the other three runs would be like easy runs. So, it's knowing how far to give them as easy runs and it's knowing what to do with both of the workouts like the long run and the faster session. And if you would give them a faster session, will it create the desired adaptation? Because one of the things, you know what I've mentioned is in the previous episodes is that with slower runners, if you give them a session, I don't know, say six times five minutes or six times one mile or, I don't know, 15 times one minute, they might not improve off those sessions because it might be something to do, they might be like a shuffly stride and they run at the same pace for five K, ten K, the half marathon and the marathon. And there are a lot of runners out there like that. So, what you might have to do is work out what you necessarily would need to do with them to get them to improve. And it might not be giving them a hard workout, it might be something more technical in terms of trying to improve their their running form or running the economy and it might require like heel sprints, it might require stride, it might require strength and conditioning. So, you have to look at all the different things, you know, with the individual and it has to be done in progressive structured way too. Whereas, if you come to something sort of what I would call, like let's say an intermediate runner, somebody I don't know from free 30 to 230 in that range there. Most of these people know quite a bit about running. They've probably ran a few races, a few marathons and they probably normally they're doing two marathons a year and they finish off a marathon block with a race and then they'll do some speed work and then they'll go back into marathon training again. But obviously, one of the things that we've spoken about in this podcast as well is about moving away from two marathons a year to one a year so you can attack it properly and we're going to get more into that as we move forward. But let's just take for example, run and focus on the super base which I've done a podcast on and we're going to come back to that again. Let's talk about the marathon bridge because I didn't speak too much about that so it helps people then to understand the marathon bridge a little bit more. So, what we do generally is we have the super base which lasts about four months or so, it will go well four and a half months and then we transition into the marathon bridge which is about four months again, four or five months. It tops I think five months will be the maximum we would do there. And what we're trying to do is we're trying to transition out of the super base and into the marathon and in one of the previous podcasts as well a couple of weeks ago, I talked about temporal flow training which is the name that we give to the training that I, the Prince of Philosophy I suppose, that I use and it's about increasing the resistance to fatigue generally and that's you know a lot of training methodologies are like that as well. But there's some specifics that we use that aren't commonly used. We don't spend loads of time working in with VO2 max and measuring lactate and things like that at all. So we'll get into this again when we get into the nitty gritty of the specifics of training but just to give it, just trying to give you some sort of idea you might have let's let's pick some, let's say if somebody is a three hour marathon runner, they're run three hours and one minute for the marathon and they're looking to obviously break three but really if they're going to do a marathon buildup and they're going to spend a year and they've already run ran three oh one, we're probably going to be looking to get them down to about 240 eight somewhere around there. So we've got to get them faster over the half. So this is where we would focus a lot of the effort in in the marathon bridge would be doing a lot of work to get them faster over the half. Now that means giving 10k type sessions a tickle, 10 mile, half marathon and then some structural runs as well. And one of the the basic principles that I use for it in terms of overload is the endurance spine and the structural run again I've spoken about those on previous podcasts but how do we incorporate this in a progressive structured way in overload in the body in you know in such a way that we're going to get a stimulus from it that's going to create the adaptations that we're after. So if we were to say the guys come out of male or females come out of the super base and they're they're quite strong which normally people are when they come out but they're not quite as sharp as you know they might like to be to start racing. So what we'll do here now is in the super base the recoveries are very generous. So for example one of the sessions people are doing the super base is 10 times three minutes of a three minute recovery. Generally that three minutes have done that around about 10k effort. So one way of progressing that from the super base into the endurance spine is you can give them that same session but just cut the recovery down to two minutes. It makes them a bit grittier and tougher and gets it a little bit more race specific as well. So that's just one example there of taking that one session from the super base transferring it into the endurance spine showing how you can progress it and using the overload principle. So again it's a different stimulus that you're after you know creating from in the super base as well and you can do that with any of the sessions from the super base. So again you know in the early stages of the super base after about four weeks I think it is the runner does two times 20 minutes of a five minute recovery. So what you could do there is you could shorten that recovery to three minutes and it gives it again a different stimulus or you could take one of the 20 minute tempos, keep it around 10 mile race effort if the person's about 60 minutes for 10 miles and then you could do a short recovery say like three minutes and then you could give a different stimulus there by throwing in some one minute efforts maybe eight times one minute and then from a progressive structured way and in terms of the overload principle how we would develop that maybe two weeks later is it could be a 20 minute temper at 10 mile effort followed by 12 times one minute and then two weeks later by 15 times one minute so you can see there how it progresses in a structured way and then the runner sort of feels that fitness developing in between those two in between the the sessions there so you'd like say week one week three and week five so we have to look at what we're doing week two and week four and week six so we might try and attack a different area so it could be rather than using like the 10 mile pace and so one minute efforts we might say to ourselves okay let's give them like something that's around five mile pace of a short recovery so we might give them something like five times five minutes off a two minute recovery there at five mile effort and then the two weeks later we might say okay how do we progress that and give it a different sort of a stimulus and progression it on from there do we add an extra rep to make it six times five for me I would do that if the person was around three hours for a marathon and around 60 minutes so they're getting 30 minutes with a volume in there so you can progress it that way or if they're a bit faster I might look at them as you cut down the recovery from two minutes to one 30 so again you can see the idea of the overload principle being used with you know with the specifics of the sessions okay so that's what you can see now how the overload principle works again without you can then stop going into like the elite level runner as well and what would you do with them the same thing the things are there you know at the same tools you either cut the recovery down increase the number of reps so a good way in terms of temporal flow training so let's take an elite runner so for example Riley cooked 41 years of age qualified for the next year's Olympic trials marathon and sort of sessions he might do he's just coming out of kind of super base time now really and we've got a long way to go before the race but we'll probably put him onto more sort of half marathon bridge training as opposed to marathon bridge training so what does the difference between half marathon bridge training and marathon bridge training is we're specifically trying to bridge the super base training towards a half marathon goal which will then feed then into marathon bridge training and then into the marathon because we've got a little bit more time to play with so how to give an example of how I'd use the overload principle with Riley okay so a couple of things we've got to be careful with the speed because Riley's 41 so we don't want to be you know banging out such things like 10 times 400 six times 800 six times 1k the old fashioned sort of sessions where we really need to be going with Riley is to to kind of progress or develop his ability to resist against fatigue and that's the key thing that we're looking at so a session that we might do with Riley let's say the super base is finished with eight for Riley eight times one mile at five minute pace and this is at altitude as well off a three minute recovery so where would we go from there kind of we could drop in something like seven times two k a half marathon effort off a three minute recovery just something nice and easy there again a bit more volume in there so there's 14k worth of work slow in the pace down a little bit and then from that point there you've got a nice platform where you can start playing around so we could drop in something then say in a couple of weeks later something along the lines of one times three k and then a three minute job recovery three times two k offer three minute job recovery and then five times one k offer three minute job recovery all in one workout so you've got quite a bit of volume there was that three and six is nine and five is what 14k worth of work all at good paces and you're cutting you're cutting the session down as well from three k to two ks to one k so it progressively gets faster as the athletes getting in for teed as well and how you'll progress that then in a couple of weeks time as you might revisit that session and look at it say okay what do we want to do here so there's a couple of things we could do is we could increase the first reps to three an extra three k so we can go two times three k three times two k five times one k so we've added an extra three k in there or we can add an extra two k in and keep it so three k and four times two k or we could go three k three times two k five times one k and we could add some four hundred in at the end as well nice and controlled nothing too fast so you can see all the different ways you can go with that how you would apply the overload principle there depends on what say Riley would need what you know what you needed most would it be better to work on giving him some four hundred or five hundred to add on to tag on the end of the one k reps to get a little bit more speed into him or would it be better just to keep working on his straight or work actually his weakness which is more the endurance side is better on the speed at the side because he's a three forty one fifteen hundred meter runner back in there at three forty one three forty two fifteen hundred meter runners as speeds never really been an issue for him so whereas the endurance is main the main thing and he does like working on these big volume sessions so we might probably with Riley go like two times three k and then three times two k and five times one k and that would be two weeks later and then know how would you mix in different types of sessions in with that as well to keep the stimulus going and keep pushing things forward now one of the things that I had said in the previous podcasts as well was about the runners always going to have space to grow into does matter if they're 20 years of age or 60 years of age there's always got to be somewhere for them than to grow into and that's what you've got to be careful of as well you don't need to because you've got all of these different tools in your toolbox you don't need to back the athlete with everything all at once so if we're working on say working improving Riley's half marathon time so that gives him more scope and more strength going into the marathon specific training and the marathon bridge training then we need to look at maybe give him a little bit of 10k work in there as well so we would look at some sessions that are 10k specific and we might just drop those in in between these kind of big volume sessions as well not too fast because of the risk of injury one of the things that we will be working on on Riley and this is going to be interesting to see how this all pans out and you heard it here first almost the well I've heard and there's about eight months away from the race is now Riley ran to 17 and and some change at CIM and the guys who are going to be the top end guys in the Olympic trials are going to be running I don't know on the course I imagine on the course and on the conditions not too fast because it's going to be a tough course in tough conditions so there are some factors that we have to think about there from Riley's development as well and the reason why I'm staying in this area is to show you about the overload principle and where you start from and where you want to take it to while I'm giving in these sessions now just I'm just pulling these out out of the hack to give you an example but it's kind of what you will be doing and I've got one eye on you know what he's going to be doing in November and December as well so they we know that the Olympic trials are going to be it's going to be hot it's going to be humid and the course is going to be tough so there's no point trying to get Riley at 41 years of age trying to run 213 that's going to be you know pointless because the course is going to be tough and the conditions are going to be tough so what we want to work on is making him stronger so what are the things that we're thinking about now it's first of all just to get me a bit quicker over the half and then so you've got a little bit more scope so if we can get him in in in half shapes so that it transfers across to let's say like he's in 213 shape on the flat sea level course in good conditions but what we want to do then is being able to close the gap between the hock humic conditions and the tough course and close that gap down and be smart with his training and his racing because what's going to happen in the Olympic trials is a lot of people are going to go off fast and blow up so one of the best ways to get Riley to run better is just get him to run really smart and sensible and having prepared for the heat and humidity and the conditions of the course and that's going to be difficult because Riley's in Utah and in the summertime it's not normally pretty dry heat they get a lot of good heat there so 100 degrees Fahrenheit whatever that is in Celsius but it's not humid so how do we prepare him for the humidity which is one of the harder things to prepare people for as was evidenced again in support in Japan and we you know we saw what was going on there but we have got a few things that we can do and these are interventions that we can bring in later on you wouldn't bring these in now so you know we could have him running in more clothing to you know to put him on a treadmill indoors and simulate the humidity so that's one thing that we can do we could move him down into the area that's something we're looking at we're looking at getting a house down in the area sending him down there you know for a good while beforehand and getting him to climatise a little bit more and then prior to doing that the intervention would be maybe soon a little bit more clothing and running on the treadmill because in November December in Utah it's you know it's going to be snow they've had like five foot snow I think all through the winter so you can't really prepare in that for the heat in in Florida so I think you can see there that there's a lot to think about it's not just about the session the overload principle can apply to interventions that you can bring in to help somebody for a specific race as well so it's a little bit more nuanced than just saying okay yeah do ten four hundred ten twelve four hundred and fourteen four hundred and sixteen four hundred there's a lot more to it than that and that's where that skill and craft comes in and experience that you need to think about so just think just on that line then when you're designing your program you know if you're sitting down thinking stuff okay I've got a lot of. most people probably going to do this they've got 16 weeks out okay I want to do a marathon program I want to run this sort of time and they'll work the way backwards with the sessions and the workouts and what you'll find is that won't work most of the time because you won't be able to finish the sessions in that order so you need to be a little bit more flexible with it and make sure things are progressing in that structured way as well also give yourself some scope as well so you know when you're designing your program from that overload principle point of view is that to give yourself some little bit of a step back week as well and we're going to talk about that in the the other principles the other seven as well in the in the future weeks okay so that's just giving you an outline there we'll make more sense of this and I'll show you some specifics with real athletes at the elite end I like with Riley for example you know some of the stuff that we've done with him and we've Edwin and then we'll look at some intermediate runners as well people are trying to break three hours and then we'll look at some people on the slower end of the scale as well or the slower end of the spectrum and show the specifics how I've applied the overload principle with the other principles as well so it's better to speak about it more with the other principles because you can see the jigsaw puzzle in that 3d way when we're trying to stress what give the again the action that I always bleed on about is appropriate stress recovery and adaptation so we'll see how that's working okay so right then the competition this week former issues and the superstuers let's find it a good question what is the name of the 41-year-old male that has qualified that I coach who's qualified for the US Olympic trials next year okay lives in Utah around 217 and CIM okay when you've got your answer once again you can send me a WhatsApp message plus 353 08 3 0 4 3 5 269 or you can go to the staza stable website stazastable.com drop me a message through there or Instagram staza underscore stable or on Facebook John Sarah I think that's on the wrong Facebook although I don't really use Facebook that much so thanks again for listening and anybody's got any questions or anything just fire them across to us and speak to you soon