Pete Julian: Coaching The World's Best

Hello and welcome to the Endurance Lab podcast. My name is Dr. Bill Evans, Professor of Exercise Science, and as usual this podcast covers the physiology of some of the best athletes on the planet as well as talking to sports scientists and coaches. And today's guest is Mr. Pete Julian, who is one of the most accomplished distance-running coaches in the United States. Pete is coach Olympic medalist world championship finalist American record holders and dozens of athletes who've represented Team USA on the world stage. After coaching at Washington State, he spent about a decade with the Nike Oregon Project before founding the Union Athletics Club, which is currently based in Boulder. He's recently also started a podcast that we'll talk about during this podcast that you guys should definitely go check out. When talking to him, it was like I was sitting in his office and he was like mentoring me about coaching. I thoroughly enjoyed it. At Union Athletics Club, he's been crushing it. Emily McCuy has been one of his top athletes who's just been tearing it up this year on the pro-circuit. Before becoming a coach, Pete was an elite distance runner himself, little known fact, he represented US, the United States at the 1999 World Championships in the 10K. He even won a bronze medal at Pan American Games, which he doesn't like to talk about because he coaches a bunch of pros and he's humble. I hope you guys enjoy this podcast. Pete was really, really, really insightful and it was cool because you'll notice I'll throw out some interesting ideas or theories that I have and Pete's totally opened them and so it was cool. He's open-minded. You can tell he's got a lot of experience in the sport. He knows a ton of things and he's definitely at a different point in his career than he's ever been at before and so it's just interesting and cool to talk with him considering all the different places that he's been. 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We put the exact figures from the papers inside the newsletter so you can take a look at it and make your own inferences for yourself. And finally, apply online. If you're interested in being coached, you can check us out online in duranslibratory.com. We've got a pretty awesome roster of athletes that's been growing. We're starting to build some community which is really, really cool and really fun. Yeah, so if you're interested, be sure to do that. You can give me a call and we'll do a free consult and you can see what I'm like as a day-to-day person on the phone and then you can make the decision for yourself. So yeah, check us out online and hope you guys enjoy the episode. Thanks for listening. My name is Dr. Bill Evans and I want to welcome you back. Today's podcast I'm joined by an awesome coach and I'm pretty excited to have them on the podcast. I don't want to glaze them too much as the kids say, but I'm super excited to have them. So I want to welcome Pete Julian to the podcast. He's recently started his own podcast that he's been working on so Pete, how's that podcast going? What's it called? Tell the people about it. Sure. It's on the record. It's with Rob Vermillion who's the voice of track and field, at least in the stadiums at the big meet. And then along with Tim Riley, Dr. Tim Riley, PhD in neuroscience, who is a coach for about a decade and a half at the D1 level. And then myself and we've all, we're just Oregonians. We've been boys and friends for a long, long time. And we just said, hey, it would be fun just to get a podcast going. It's gotten some, it's gotten a little traction. It's been fun, as you know. It's just kind of a good way to just sort of rant about topics that you have on your mind and just build a talk track and really that's all it is. It's kitchen table, track talk, just with my buddies. It's been a lot of fun. And we'll keep it going. So it's been good. I sent you the questions beforehand. So if you had to have like a pillar of training, right? What would those be, whether that's formal or informal pillars, whether they're physiological or behavioral, you know, what would those be for you? I go back to, I remember what somebody asking Mark Wetmore, the coach, legend that as I said, hey, and I, I heard the story 20 years ago, so it could be completely wrong. But I remember someone said, hey, Mark, you should write a book about your training philosophy. And he's like, I don't have a training philosophy. Anybody who has a training philosophy, if they're good coach, they'll realize they're just kept to change it for athlete in per season. And I've always, that's always how I've thought about this too. I don't really have pillars of training. I joke with my athletes, hey, if running backwards 100 miles a week is going to get you to win a medal, Olympic Games, we're running backwards 100 miles a week. So that is walking backwards is a new trend, I don't know if you're seeing this. I love. Right. So it's, and that's kind of a, just a funny way to say, I don't really have these pillars of, of course, there's the basic ones, I, you know, I have, listen, I've had Jack Daniels in my kitchen, right, with for dog, I am so jealous of you, I never got to meet him. And I wanted to, yeah, just, I've had, you know, I was coached by Ben Lanana, I, my wife ran for Universe Colorado and Mark Wepmore. I've had Mike Dilly, I was a Brown Howard O'Cellazar, I just, Steve Joe, I, I just have this gags, I have this massive knowledge because of just all these different exposures and these training things that, what that I've been exposed to, and there are some fundamental things in there, of course, right, we, a strength work in the volume. And those things have changed pretty dramatically, I would say over the last few years, and we could talk about that in a little bit, but honestly, the developmental piece, it really almost always comes down to trust in the process. There's no secret workouts, stay healthy, enjoy it, you're gonna probably be there at that very top percentile. If you can just do those things, not get so caught up in just all these tiny, and simply if you come so, and we'll probably get into this, I mean, everybody now is talking about millimoles and VVO2 and VO2, and most of us don't even know what the hell we're talking about, but it's also very specific, I was out with a coach this morning, just talking to a coach this morning, and just the specifics of it all, and should we go this eye or this low, and heart rates and millimoles and these sort of things, then yeah, I just kind of keep going back to the same principle is, is the athlete happy? Are they enjoying themselves? Are they healthy? Now, maybe I get to be blessed with some of the most talented runners in the world, but I was also a high school coach for a while, I was also a college coach at a very small school, then I was a college coach at a D2 school, then I was a college coach at a D1 school, and then I was part of one of the most famous pro teams ever, right, and so it's, I've seen it all, and it always comes back to that same thing, is the athlete happy and healthy? If they're happy and healthy, they're kind of crushing it. Yeah, no matter what they do. Yeah, it's interesting you say that I had a conversation with an athlete two day where I asked him, how are you feeling about the training, like how do you feel? And the, the athletes I'm working with are some high schools, some post college, some or older, this was a high school athlete, and I said, like, how are you feeling relative to last year? And his response was, I feel good, and I just flat out told him, look, don't lie to me, like I can take it. If you're not, if you're not enjoying this, if you're not feeling good, you need to tell me, because we can pivot, there are things we can pivot on and things we can't. But this is something we're at a point where we can make some changes. And if you're not believing in the process or happy, I need to know because there are studies that show that if an athlete is not bought into the program, the outcomes are not as good. One that comes to mind is actually in physical therapy, if you have someone supervising, the, the activities, they'll return to sports sooner and the rehab will be more effective. And I think you can take some of those principles and apply them as well to, you know, an athlete believing in a program, because that's part of it, right, is when they're supervised, they're more bought in. And so, you know, like, that's one thing I try to encourage my athletes is, like, be honest. Like, do you trust this process? Because if you don't, this isn't going to work. Like you're going to, you're going to I want to make so many changes. And I heard Grant Fisher's teammate where I forget who his coach and who the athlete was, but he said his coach grabbed him and was like, no more adjustments, like no more changes. Like you need to trust the process. - Yeah, that makes you a good coach though, Bill. It's just having that communication, that open communication with the athlete. So I guess if we are talking about pillars, that would be one is to have, you have to have an excellent rapport with your athlete. It really has to be a partnership. I know people talk about that a lot. And it's tough when you're a college coach, when you've got 40 student athletes or so in those kind of things. And certainly it gets, there's dynamics even with the pro team 'cause a lot of these athletes are coming in with a lot of knowledge themselves and what works and what doesn't. I'm always, and that's something where I've grown a lot as a coach in just the last few years is really making sure that communication is flowing in both ways. If you just listen to the athlete 'cause they know quite a bit. I mean, they know more about their own personal running than you do. 'Cause they're actually in that skin, right? They are actually feeling it. If you listen to them and talk to them on a daily basis, and they actually see that you are listening to them, not just by nodding your head, but actually making the changes in their training program, they start to take ownership of that. And they actually feel as it's a true partnership. So Guru Asako is a great example that, with me, right? I've been with him now for 12 years and he's probably the best Asian distance runner of all time, right? I mean, he's broken the Japanese marathon record three times and we all know that thing is just a sick record, right? He's-- - That's awesome, man. - Three Olympic teams. He's still got the 5K national record. It, we, if just, just the communication and the dialogue just over so much time that we can actually have some real and frank conversations. Sometimes when I get a new athlete, let's say maybe an Emily McKay, who I've only been working with for about a year and a half, there's some reservation there. It's just like, "Hey coach, just tell me what to do." And I'm like, no, that's not how we do it this. I need to know exactly how you feel about it. Now, if they say, you know, if you know that, "Hey, we gotta work on some certain things," and they're like, "No, I just wanna do it." Two hundred, five days a week. Yeah, as a coach, you have to sort of step in and say, "Let me explain why this isn't the best idea for us for you to become a medalist." And explaining that and using your knowledge to explain things in a real patient manner. But having that given that athlete, the confidence to speak up and to communicate with you, again, everybody's kind of doing the summer. You know, we're all maybe doing things a little bit too fast or a little bit too slow or not doing enough of this or not doing enough of that. But again, if the athlete is healthy and happy and they feel like they have ownership of their training, they're gonna be pretty damn good. Now, if you get somebody's already talented. Hey, you're healthy. You're healthy. Yeah, you know, I mean, I've been blessed to be able to work with people like Matthew Centrowitz and be adjacent to you guys like Mo Farah. And certainly some super talented athletes have coach Donovan Brazier, Raven Rogers. With them, you're just sort of, hey, let's just get from this morning to night, you healthy and happy and working on communicating and you're feeling good when you show up for the next workout. 'Cause if you do that, you're gonna go to these races and you're just gonna absolutely just decimate people 'cause you're so talented. But let's not think this whole thing and make it complicated. - I was talking with, where I was listening to a podcast and talking with a coach named Mike Young. He is, I don't know if you know Mike, but he's here in North Carolina. He's worked with a lot of soccer athletes. He was a former coach at LSU who worked with bootchexinator. And he said, he gave an example when he was, I don't know if he was at Air Force or something like that. But he said, when I was at these schools, the athletes were more like a workhorse as opposed to a racehorse. And he kind of described the Donovan Brazier's of the world as, and I don't know Donovan or his training style, but the way you described him is almost like a racehorse. And the types of things and stimulus that you give to a racehorse is very different than you give to a workhorse. And he was like, I'd get some guys in the weight room and they would lift a ton of weight and respond well to that. But I'd go to LSU and the athletes just did not necessarily respond to the amount of weightlifting that we traditional strength work we did there. And so we would do different types of work at a place like LSU with the athletes that he had there. And so when you're working with someone like Donovan Brazier, for example, would you categorize him in that racehorse category first before I ask my question? - That's just by you saying that I would start going through my mind who's a, I think at the very highest level there's both. And so I would even, I think probably even at LSU and a P4, there's men and women all Americans who are work horses. And I think there's two different types there. I even have it on my teeth. Raven Rodgers would run 10, 15 miles a week. So Guru Osaka would run 150 miles a week. - Right, right, right. - He was always the same, right? I mean, it's that, but you're right. It's like, okay, but I wasn't, but Raven would have run 50 miles a week or 80 miles a week if that's what it took. Which is that we just, it's like, hey, let's accentuate the positives of your training. I think it's too often we're always trying to accentuate to try to improve the negatives of an athlete. You get more bang for your buck by accentuating the positives of that athlete. We just get them for such a small amount of time, right? A handful of years that accentuate the positives of them. Donovan, though, to that question, I would almost, of course he has this legendary talent. But he's more of a workhorse than people understand. He's a guy that likes to run. I was always trying to get him to run less. You know, he just would, oh, he would, I mean, 'cause his boys were Eric Jenkins and Craig Ingalls, and they could just go for a run and just shoot the shit and just, they wouldn't come back, right? 'Cause they're just, they enjoyed running. They loved running. So I don't have to waste a ton of weeks. Yeah, how many miles a week did you want him on? I would, I do like, yeah, a guy like Donovan. So, you know, that type of a type of 800 runner. I was, I like somewhere in that 25 to 35 mile and a 30, 35 mile range right in there. I think that's a good mix because your workouts don't, aren't very long and just in terms of volume, the specific stuff you do, you might, one workout might be two times a 400 with a minute rest. Okay, well, you, you do the warmup and the cool down, your total volume of the day is only four or five miles, right? And 800 runners are just classically sandbaggers when it comes to cooling down. So you're not even gonna get those miles in, right? So you're gonna get the warmup, you're gonna get the workout, and then you're gonna see that they're just hanging out 45 minutes after the workouts with, you know, with their shoes not on and you're like, okay, at this point, just get out of here. Right. So it's, but I, for half mile or I'm always I like less. I think less is more just in terms of the volume because I just think the specifics of that event are just so insane. Now, of course, you have, I've obviously had some good people run 800s coming from the other way. I mean, am I just ran 158.1? What, two or three nights ago, right? Can we just acknowledge that she has been like tearing it up? I mean, like, from the start of the season till now, she has been, I actually asked her to come on the podcast and she was like, I don't really know what I can say about my training and I was like, well, then fine, I'll just go have Pete on the podcast. I'll tell you about her training. Yeah. But anyways, so she, she has been like crushing it. And like, she's running 80 miles a week. I was gonna say, she's, she's doing more volume and she's running a good 1500, obviously. Yeah. So like, yeah, talk about her 800 training. What does it look like for her? Well, it's not 800 training, right? It's, it's, it's 1500 training. But you know, I, I trained my 800 runners like 800 runners. I trained my my words like five K runners. I trained my five K runners like my words. And I trained my, and I trained my, my marathoners like 10 K runners, my 10 K runners. That's probably, that's one of the one event group. I've kind of struggled at, to be honest, the 10 K. It's the 10 K. Yeah, I, I wonder, now that I think about it, it's, I haven't, I believe, I think I feel like we've had a lot of success and a lot of events. But I think of the 10 K, I think that's one place where. It's tricky. Yeah, the 10 K maybe I don't do well. That and I have a hard time having people run fast in May. I think those, there's a couple of things that I can't do very well. But yeah, it's, I think each event group has these balances that you actually have to look at and say, well, what's actually really important for this, for this event? And especially the world class, five K now, you've got to just be fast, man. Yeah, you got to be able to kick. So that's a good, good point too. Like you said that you, you almost have your, I believe you said your, your mylers, train like five K runners. So do you feel that you do that from a deficits perspective? In other words, let's say that you're just bear with me here. But if you're a five K runner, you're probably less likely to have world class closing speed. Not saying it's impossible, but just by nature, you're probably not going to be able to rip a 48 last 400 in a workout as opposed to Donovan Brazier's or Isaiah Jewel to the world, they can rip these 400s really, really hard. So you still need the closing speed to win the race, however. And so is that where you're deriving the thought process like. Look, they have to be able to close hard. They already have the talent aerobically, we just need to push up their kind of deficit areas. - Yeah, so go on backwards. So with the 1500, I say the train like five carriers, it's just an aerobic event, the 1500 really is. I mean, it's 1500 runners that train like 800 runners, what they just can't even get through the rounds, honestly. - They suffer. - They suffer, and at least at this level for us, a lot of it, so much of these careers are not defined by the fast times they run, but how do they do it, championship compete, the championship event, so you have to be really strong. And I've just found, even more so on the women's side, that, you know, look, it's an aerobic event, right? I mean, it's just, you know, you can be fast, but if you can close in 59-60, that's not that fast. I mean, just for an open four, for a woman, that's 10 seconds slower than a moral cost 400, 'cause it's not that quick, but if they're strong enough, and they have that natural speed to at least be able to run at 58-59, they can do that, they can find that gear. Now, with the 5K, yeah, I think most, the thing here's the funny thing about five carriers, five carriers are already natural distance runners. So when they come to you, they already love cross-country, right, they already know how to run a 10K, they're already thinking about running a marathon at some point, they're already used to running anywhere from 80 to 120 miles a week, they're already doing their, they're already, their internal engineering is already, they're already distance men and women at heart, right? So now we have that whole problem is, okay, well, these 800, or these five Ks now are closing, lastly, 152, right? Just to make teams, right? So you can't just be sort of this aerobic beast to be a great five K runner. You got to be faster, shit, and you look at even what Grant was talking about early this year, he's like, I just got to get faster and you saw it with his last five K that he won, was it Stockholm? Not, it wasn't Monaco, it was the one before then. Yeah, but he won the five K, and he just closed incredibly fast. He's having to work on a speed a lot, right? That's been a big thing, of course Grant is doing the volume, of course he's doing the big mileage, and of course he's doing the threshold work. But I found with five K men and women, as you can really do just a lot of pretty intense sort of 1500 type stuff. And that's just gonna make them, as long as you're sprinkling a lot of that in, because the five Ks hard, because on the men's side at the world class level, you're rolling 61, 62s per lap, you know? I mean, you're not jogging, you're kinda sprinting for 13 minutes, you've gotta have those mechanics and that economy and all those buzzwords, whatever else. If you can't run 61, 62 times 12 with no rest, well, I mean, how you gonna do that? Well, you better sure as hell be able to run 55 second quarter repeats. If you wanna run 12 times 400 with no rest in 61, right? Like it's all that stuff. When you first said that, when you first said that, I didn't put it together that that's just a five K. That was like a crazy workout. Right, that's just a five K. That's just a 13 minute five K. That's what you have to do. It's like 12 times 400 at 61, 62 with zero rest. And then- Right, right, then a 200. So you've referenced championship racing a lot and how you have to close well to be in these championship races. So let's say that you live in a universe independent of racing and you're just gonna time trial. You're just gonna go for times, okay? Would you change your training at all? - Yeah, yeah, probably. I would do, on the men's side, I would do way more threshold stuff. - Okay. - And you see that and that's why we have the track foration and the five K and so forth. 'Cause you have all these colleges that are just only doing double thresholds twice a week and they can go out to BU and they can rip these time trials. And then when it comes to any sort of championship or race where they actually have to race, they're just, they can't. They don't wanna do it, right? They can't get through these rounds, they can't make teams and these sort of things. So yeah, if you really, if you just wanna rip a time trial and just where if time meant everything and placement nothing, then I would say just get as strong as you possibly can. You don't have to really worry about closing in 52, 53. Try to put all that energy into. - Do you have crap tonne of work? - Do you have crap tonne of work and just try to move that instead of going 60, twos for 11 laps and then go in 58, 26. Just try to go 61s for 12 and a half laps and you can just really build that row base. But the problem with that is at the world class level, if you're that guy you're just gonna get absolutely frickin' torched. - Yeah, there's gonna sit on you. - They're gonna sit on you. So you have to, at least at the world class level. Now I think even you see at the, at the collegial level and the D1 level, I mean, if you can't close, you're not getting on the podium. So you have to train for the close, that's gotta be in your training. It has to be and if you're in, the only way to do that is you are going to have to take away a little bit from that time that you're spending on your strength work. - Yeah, it's interesting. I was talking with a collegiate runner who he was at Nationals. He didn't perform as well as he wanted and I'd asked him like, what happened? Like what do you think happened? And he was like, we just never did any intensity. Like we never did, he didn't say never. He said we didn't do enough intensity. Like we just hammered threshold again and again and again and again and that made him perform really well early in the year, but then late in the year, he just like wasn't ready to race. - Yeah, those kids will fly at your Brian Clay's and your mount sacks and your Stanford invites. Those kids will fly, but when it really comes into the late in the season, in a lot of coaches will make the mistake that they'll start doing the intensity. Okay, all right, we're four weeks out. Let's start sharpening up and do intensity, but if you really don't want it to be this toxic event for your body, you should really be having small doses of intensity throughout the entire year so that your body becomes adjusted and adapted to it, right? It's okay to do that. It's okay to do speed work year around, even in cross country, all these cross country runners are track runners, just a month or two later. It's okay to do two hundreds and four hundreds at just a nice gentle speed pace that's maybe just a 1,500 meter pace. You should always be adding in these small doses of your entire training system. - So throughout the year. - Would you say that here? So would you say that if you have someone doing threshold workout, big threshold workout, maybe six to eight miles with a minute rest, that you're a fan of doing something like 400 or 200s on the tail end just to touch that, or is that something that you'd hit on a totally separate day? - That's individual for the athlete. And what event they're in, sometimes we'll do that. Usually, I try to keep the fuel systems the same generally. So if we're gonna be working on the threshold, we're just gonna be working on the threshold. I used to maybe add like, okay, five times 200 at the end or something. Now I don't really do that anymore. And maybe that's because, just because of, I do have a handful of athletes doing some double threshold that I know they're just gonna be coming back in five or six hours anyway. And we're gonna be doing a speed workout 48 hours later. Anyhow, here's a good example. - Some morning, here's a, here's a, if we want to talk about MWS training. So she obviously, if you give me, if you give me a week of life. - MWS, MWS just ran an 800 at the Sunset Meat in Los Angeles, 158.1. Afterwards, she did a workout. It was more VO2-based, some longer repeats, like three times five minute type stuff. But just a little more aggressive, not faster than threshold, right? Okay, she came back this morning and we're just gonna do eight times a K tempo. So for her, that's chill is, anywhere from 3.30 to 3.20 per K, often minutes rest. She does nothing else today. That's it, that's the day. But when you look over the last 72 hours, that's a lot of work, right? Because she raised, she did a little post-race. I mean, I don't do a lot of post-race workouts anymore, but this was just an 800 for Emily. It's like, okay, we're not gonna fly all the way out to LA and get some actual 21% oxygen, you know? It do have all these. - Let it go. - Let it go to waste. - Yeah, like it always gets something out of the three days and all the money we spend on this goddamn thing. So, you know, so we did a little work, but then she, and then so, and then, but we'll come back in just two days and then we'll do some 1500 specific stuff. So when you, that's from, she raised on Saturday. So race Saturday, Saturday night, or right after the race, do a workout. Two days easy, threshold, one day rest, speed endurance. That's a pretty nice little block right there, right? - So, of training. - Yeah, like, and then she feels good 'cause nothing's, the 800 was hard. That was it. That's the only really hard piece of the whole thing. - Yeah. Yeah, and I think it's interesting because the threshold boom that I've kind of seen right now are that we're seeing. Yes, it's effective, especially in these younger runners to 10, 20 years ago, you just didn't do threshold runs. You didn't do tempos. Everything you did was like a V of two max. - You hammered it. You're just hammering it. - Yeah, you're just hammering it. - Hammering it was just hammered your boys, and that was it. - Every day. - All the time. - Yeah, you're easy runs were six flat. And so I think, you know, one thing that I'm cautious with is that when you're doing so much threshold, I think there's almost like people struggle a little bit to hurt sometimes in some of these situations where they're so used to doing threshold, which is like uncomfortable, but it's never horrible. Like, I don't mind threshold workouts. I'll do them all day every day. I do double thresholds. They don't feel that bad. But, you know, you tell me, like, all right, we're going to do some 800s hard at 3K pace. I'm like, oh man, that's going to hurt. Like, I don't want to do that. And I wonder if I wonder what will happen in coming years because as you know, things have been flow. Like, we'll go through this double threshold boom, some things will come back. It'll circle around. At least that's my opinion. I'm wondering when the VO2 trend will come back in invogue. And I think it already has for the women. So, yeah, go on, tell me more. Women need to do more VO2 work. - Yes, I just made a podcast on this. - I saw it before. - And I saw it and I was thinking, well, I saw something you put out, maybe it might be. - Yeah, that was, yeah. - And I was like, oh, it's tarnished. There are people are catching on. - People know. - People know. - People are catching on. Yeah, it's, yeah, I, of course, hey, look, this is not, these aren't these things where this is the way it is for everybody. These are general things. We're talking about here. In general, I've found that we women benefit more from more VO2 work. I've found that men, we eat men benefit more from more threshold work. It's, but it's almost sort of makes sense because women are naturally stronger. They have more endurance, they have more pain tolerance. You can almost see it the longer the events go. It almost seems like there's more parity. You know, you've got, even in these Hunter Mowers, you've got these women who are running faster over the last 10 miles than the men are. And yes, things. So it's just, if you just look at it through that lens, women are stronger, tougher, have more endurance, more sustainability. Men have to be more, men are more explosive and powerful and hunter, those sort of things. Whereas men have to work more on their endurance, their pain tolerance, these sort of things. And that's a really general way to look at it. But I'll say that, without giving too much of our training away, actually, I won't even talk too much of the specifics, but I think that's, at least I'm comfortable saying that is our women do much more VO2 work than the men do, or the men on their team, yeah. - Yeah, and it's, you know, like one of the things I find interesting, what I was going to say, interject there is like, I have a paper right here in front of me, and I'll tell you this, in women, their lactate threshold tends to occur at about 85% of their VO2 max. Whereas in men, their threshold tends to occur at about 82% of their VO2 max. Now men have higher VO2 maxes, but in the same breath, women are more economical than men. And this is one of the reasons why I think that, and I'm curious to hear what you think on this, is that in my observation, anecdotal observation, there's a lot of sub-lead and collegiate runners that are females, their easy runs, sometimes will be faster than the men on the team. I don't know if you've ever seen that or they'll be similar. - Oh, I joke all the time. I tell my guys never even run with the women on the team for their easy days. - They run too fast. - They run too fast. - For right. Nobody wants to run with Coco. Got the Constance Closter, I don't know what to do. And our Siphon is on. Like the guys knew back then, even back in the NOP days, even Mo Farron, these guys were like, I'm not running with Siphon, I can't keep up with her. - What was her easy run pace back in the day? - Oh, they, they would be some six, six minute mile pace. Even Coco, I had to get Coco to slow down. She'll go sub six easy on her easy run. - Now, is that one of those situations where you were like, look, it's what the athlete likes, it's working for him, we're just gonna keep it. - Hmm, it's different for every athlete. I think at some point we had, and Coco learned that that youthful feralness was probably not going to be great for a long career. But it's, I certainly believe that there is, I, this is C-level, out two different things. I think if you're a program, that's at C-level. I think you could probably get away with running closer to those Jack Daniel paces for your easy run, because as mostly runners, if you're at the Jack Daniels book, you would go out and try to hit those sort of easy run paces. You're like, this feels a little too fast. - They're too fast. - Yeah, I see, I would disagree. I think, I know, you're gonna go look for that book. - I got the book, it's right here. - Yeah, I think that Jack was actually right, and I think that you need to learn to run those paces, and I think you're gonna be okay at C-level, where it gets all real crazy as if you're an altitude, or maybe if you're doing a lot of high intensity stuff that's really making you fatigued. Of course there's a lot of reasons, but I think he was actually more on it, because the more I see at the world class level, when I'm at these meets at these diamond leagues, and I see these athletes that are actually in these, that's the best in the world. They don't run slow. They don't. They don't run slow, like they're easy, they run, and it's not a big deal for, I mean, Gail and Rob, easy. His job was 545, when 545 pays. Seguru, he'll run 140 miles a week. I'd say he's averaging, maybe after a hard workout day, he'll really just go slow, like a really big sort of day, but it just naturally just turns into 545, 30 pays. - That is so, that's so interesting. I did talk with Joe Klecker, and he said, he granted, he's an altitude, that his easy run pace was like closer to 630, so maybe at sea level, you know, it creeps down there. - It's different for everybody. Hunter first, what's obviously what Joe is doing is working for Joe. I mean, he just ran 205 or something for the marathon. - Yeah, 25 miles and yeah. - So it's definitely everybody's different, but I've seen some women, Jordanus say, would run, when she was at her prime, it was just her regular conversational jog, 605 to 610, based. - So you wouldn't really wanna take away that aerobic, that's kind of a superpower, right? If you can go out and you can do all your volume at that sort of speed, and it truly is, it's, you know, we didn't have lack to show there around, but we weren't using them back 10, 15 years ago. I, you know, well, here's a funny story. This is, you'll think this is weird. So Constance, Cost of Coco, everybody knows her by. So she had run the German athlete and they'll test everything Germans, you know, every, it's every component of your physiology, they'll test and measure and so they had built out this whole, you know, she did a full VO2 test, but with her lack everything in there, so all the numbers and these things. And they were willing to die in a hill that her threshold pace was about 325, 320 to 325 per K, right? So that was her, we're a lactate threshold, okay? - Yeah, I mean, that seems normal. - Yeah, it's kind of normal. - Okay, it might even be, it might even be faster. - So Bill explained this though. So after they did all this testing, about three weeks later, she ran a half marathon and she ran 105 debut, that's three minutes per K. So it doesn't line up. - So they only, yeah, the only thing I can figure is that their test wasn't appropriate or, you know, they test it a couple of times. And it was right. - I would just need to see the data and the protocol, but you know, one of the things that you can see sometimes. So for example, I've done lactate threshold training or last lactate threshold testing on the track and the treadmill and when you do it on the track, you can get some really inflated numbers. And part of that is because you're constrained to your position on the track. So you can't do a three minute rep. I mean, you could, but then you're running around and you know, it's any of elements to on the track that are, well, for example, but yeah. - Yeah, so interestingly, when I tested some people on the track, their thresholds were, oh my gosh, I wanna say like 50 something. And they ended up running their 8K at a slower pace than what their threshold tested, right? Now, conversely, I had to have people, I had a guy on the treadmill the other day and his resting lactate was like two. And I was like, what is going on? And his, the onset of blood lactate accumulation is usually we say that's four, right? Usually at four, you start to see people like cut upwards. But in him, his like, he was at like five for like two or three stages and then he cut up. And I had him do an adequate warm up. He wasn't, it's not like he had like this insanely car bridge meal, some of that stuff get influenced it. And you know, it was just weird and surprising. And so I think one of the things about lactate testing and lactate metabolism is that, and you'll probably agree with this, is that A, everyone's different and B, context matters. Like everyone's different and context matters. And I think one of the issues I see [BLANK_AUDIO] is theologist behind all of this lactate testing is that context is often not controlled in a lot of these settings. You know, you don't, these athletes aren't dialing their diet to the point where they're like, before on every Tuesday, I eat exactly this, right? I have, I mean, some do, but by and large, there's variance, right? There's variance. - You can't even control for the training that they did the three days before, everything. - Exactly, exactly. So when someone's like, oh, I have to hit two-five, or I have to hit two-seven, or I've got to be three to four. I'm like, at some point, like it's a piece of information, but you would never prescribe intensity based on heart rate. Like you'd never be like, hey, Emily, your heart rate's 180, you need to slow down on those myelpase 400s. Like you wouldn't do that. And I think we're starting to get to the place with lactate threshold testing where we're towing that line. And at some point, I'm like, look, just go run, you know what your race pace is. Like go run race pace if the purpose is to run race pace, stop worrying about the lactate. And so anyways, that's my quick-- - Yeah, I think you're right. - You're right, it's, we would, it's, when-- - You don't strike me as someone that would live in, you don't strike me as someone that would live and die on lactate. - Absolutely not, no, absolutely. - Do you use it? - Do you test it? - We do, yes, we do, the men use it more than the women. We are not a slave to it by any means, but we do use it. It's really great at altitude and when it gets really hot, because you can certainly, it helps you control your, I'm always using threshold lactate almost more of like, I don't want you screwing yourself for the intensity stuff we're doing in two days, or three days. - Oh, I need-- - It's almost like, hold them back. I don't want to see, I need nine, 10. - Yeah, I need, if I have a guy like Sam Ackens, who's trying to run 12, 55 or 5K. I, you know, like 48 hours, bud, we got to do 10 times 800, starting at 206, down to two flat off a two minute. So if you're out here screwing around and doing this threshold too hard, and we can't actually do the stuff that we need to do, to really get you ready for that specific. So that's more of where I use it. - And then I think that's really easy, yeah. - Well, I think that's really helpful at altitude and with the heat, because we know that heat is gonna potentially inflate it at any even intensity, and then I'll show you how to treat up. - Yeah, at altitude, you're not gonna know exactly what their threshold is at sea level, and so even if you're like, look, I know you can go run, I don't know, in a half marathon, 65, and that's three flat per care, whatever. That's not that at altitude, it's different. And so I like the idea of using that as a barometer, like a speed gauge of like, all right. - That's what we do. - It's our governor, and that's what we use it for. And it's been great for Segeru, and I think it's one of the reasons he had the big breakthrough this year, is that it allowed us to just get some more work in at appropriate pace, so that he could actually do his specific marathon stuff, which is absolutely brutal. So it do act a threshold, double threshold, and those sort of things can work well for marathon training, but there's really no way to train for just running your ass off for two hours. It's such a brutal event. You have to be so hardened to the realities of the event that you actually have to train for that, and double threshold training isn't going to ever get you there, just in terms of how brutal it is of an event at that level and how hard you're going, because he's averaging 256, 257 a K, times 41, or whatever it is, 42 with no rest. - With no rest. - Yeah, we talked about that with the 5K, right? 12 times 461, so he's doing the rest. - How do you train for that? Well, how do you train for, today's workout is 42 times a K, and 257 with zero rest, let's go, right? So you can't, there's no double threshold workout that's going to get you there. - So what do you have to do? - You have to do some pretty intense and sane things, honestly, that's where the marathon is just so incredible. The recovery is, the shoes make a big difference in the marathon, not just the speed, not talking about the plate, I'm just talking about the cushioning, right? It just don't get beat up from the training like you might have 10 years ago. - Have you? - Yeah. - It's interesting you bring that up. I ran a marathon this past fall and spring, and I hate the marathon, I'm too big for it, but I'm too big for it to be as good at the marathon as I am at something like the mile. So what I noticed though is that the, this is a little scientific, but the eccentric loading just from all the pounding cooks my legs on the day of the race, because we still don't fully know why people fatigue in a marathon. Your blood black dates aren't that high, your heart rate's not that high. We know you're gonna have some muscle damage, but in theory, you should be able to sustain that, and then there's a fueling shouldn't be a problem anymore. So then in theory, you're just left with either some neural fatigue or some central governor, like some kind of cognitive or structural issue in the muscle, and one of the things I thought about is the structural issue seems to be, to me, as a scientist, something to think about. And so one of the, this is crazy, but one of the things I thought about as a potential marathon primer, and I know ultra-marathoners have started doing this, is almost some like eccentric loading prior to marathon work. So you've probably heard people using some kind of pre-fatiguing bow and then going into a workout at pace to kind of simulate the idea of running on tired legs. And one of the things that I thought about was like, I wonder if I could do some like negatives and then go run Ks at marathon pace or mile repeats at marathon pace, or some downhill running as like, to put you in a place where you're feeling that structural fatigue and then go run. - Bill, once again, you're barking up the right tree here because there's one of these things. One of the things that we've done, at least, I've only coached two marathoners, Cigaro, and then this other guy, is Chris Maxson, who debuted at 210. - I know Chris Maxson, he used to train with H-PAC. You trained Chris Maxson? - Yeah, Chris is my guy, just wonderful guy. Love coaching. - He worked, I've worked out with Chris before. He used to live here in North Carolina. He was working with Brandon Hudgens and doing at H-PAC. That's a small world. - Just a wonderful young man. So I've only coached two, but one of our that we do quite often, is we have this great hill, we call it old stage, left hand canyon, it's in Boulder, but it's about four miles down. It's like down and then it takes you into that Boulder Valley. But I would say the grade is probably three or four, sometimes five percent. But I will start, I'll drive them all the way to the top and they'll run five or six miles down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down. Then they start the marathon. - Marathon Temple. - Oh gosh. - And that's not even to get ready for Boston. That's not to get, it's just any, because you have to, there's something to that, where you have to be able to handle that, it's that. - There's a pounding, there's a pounding, you can't down something, yeah. - You can't mirror that any other way. The only other way to do it is to run 18 to 20 miles of X. And at that point, your recovery is screwed. So it's like another good way to struggle to think about this. So tell me your other way. - Another good way is after long runs and immediately go to squats, head right, finish at the gym and do like some, some pretty heavy Olympic style squats and jumps and those things. - My plan. - That trick type explosive. - No, actually like with some heavy weight. - With weight. - Yeah, after if you do a 22 mile run, you finish off with getting underneath the rack and actually doing something. - Basically some negatives, yeah. - Yeah, I'm so glad you're saying this. - Yeah, he's not body to, to expect some things, you're having, it's all about adaptation, right? I mean, everything that we try to do, everything about our human body and our physiology is adapting in microdose, is it's, right? It's what's the, what a Darwin say, adaptor die. That's really what we're doing with any track event is you sort of look at what sort of adaptions do I need to make for this event and then how do I give it to myself in these small little doses so that I can adapt to it and not die from it, right? And if you do it over a long period of time, you're gonna be in a better spot. And so it's really almost looking at it in a different way from just the track coach ones but really looking at almost from an engineering standpoint or just maybe understanding human physiology and just say, okay, we talked about a good example of that is the four minute mile. It's four times 400, well, what's called it? - No rest. - No rest and 60, right? Now you can go to any high school and you can probably find 100 guys in that high school that can run under 60 seconds for a 400. And their gym shorts, whatever, right? The speed component of the four minute mile is not that hard. Okay, so they have enough speed to run the four minute mile. But then instead of looking at from the, instead of the track coach perspective, we'll get it just from a purely engineering thing. So okay, mathematically, how would I get, you got 100 kids that can all break 60 so they're fast enough to run a four minute mile but how do I actually be able to get them so they can do four of them with no rest? - Yeah. - Right? You just, you start to, you can almost mathematically plan that out and you get to the point [BLANK_AUDIO] Probably two of those kids are going to be able to do it over the course of a couple of years. And that's, okay, well, they got to be able to run 60s easy. So they sure as hell be able to run 227. And they got to do a lot of those. And they better be able to run their hundreds in 12. And gosh, if they're going to be out there for four times four times 60. Man, we better try to make the two minute 800 kind of easy. So maybe they should at least try to do four of those. Like you can start, and then you can bring all those numbers down. You wouldn't start right at those numbers. Yeah, of course. But you can just build all those down. And it's so much of that is, you know, and to give credit to Alberto, that was, Alberto Salzer, that was a lot of his principal, honestly, his working at training almost from a mathematical standpoint. So this is what you have to do, right? Because we didn't, it was less about, okay, well, this is what it takes to win a medal, right? We have to be able to run 27 minute pace, and then close in 52, right? So let's forget about whatever the physiology says, heart rates, we didn't have lactate meter and back, whatever those something. But it's, we have to train at that. So what, how do we actually build a whole program over the course of two or three years to get to that, to get to that? Like just look at it purely as just a math problem. Now, as a college coach in the high school coach, it's different because we have this, we really have to develop these young men and women, right? And everybody that were Mofera's, that might have been where we had to plan for Mofera, but that might be different from a high school junior girl who's trying to break six minutes for the first time. But the principal is almost the same, right? You can say, well, she has to run 90 seconds per lap. And right now she can only run 630, but over the next two years, if that's her gold, run under six, well, how do we chip away to that? How do we make the numbers line up? Because then when the athlete actually gets on the line, it's no longer, I wish, I hope for, and you'll never hear my athlete saying that. I hope I have a good day. All right, I would, you know, I gosh, it's, I hope it's just going to be a great day tomorrow. I hope everything feels good. It's like, that's not really part of this. We've already done all the, we've done all the work and all the math already winds up. Like we just go actually done it. Yeah, just go execute because you've already done everything in the math lines up. And I remember even when Coco had her first breakthrough in the 3k at Diamond League, Eugene, four years, five years ago, I just, she was doing the, the stuff. And I'm just looking at it from a math prospectiveness. Coco, you're going to run about 820 today. And she, it's like, you got to be as like Coco, just, just trust it. Trust it. She ran 820, right? Yeah. It just, it wasn't me just giving her a big pep talk or any of these sort of things. And I've had the same things with Emily, just the workouts that she's been doing. We know she can run quite a bit faster. She just hasn't been in these races and I've got, like you've seen in these other athletes. It's like, okay, from just the math standpoint, you don't, I don't want you ever get on the track thinking, oh, I can't do this because you kind of already have in the training. The math lines up. You're engineered now for this job. I love, I love the idea of that. And I often tell my athletes like, you should not be surprised on race day. Whether good or bad, you should not be surprised. We should know that. Yeah, that's great. We should know exactly how you're going to run or capable of running based on the workouts that you do. And I hear different opinions on this. I don't, this is just my thought, but I'm a big fan of broken, broken races, I guess, or a dirty 800 or a dirty 1500. So you get the example of, yeah. Like a two by four hundred with a minute rest or whatever you said, like that's a dirty 800. It's a broken 800. It's basically the race. And guess what? The physiology in one minute, you're not recovering that much like you're running the race. It's just you're breaking it up really for the mentors, the mental load. And if they can execute that workout faster than race pace or goal race pace, they're capable of doing it. They just need to go execute. And I think that is like a piece, I'll call them spec workouts where I'm like, look, we are going to, we're going to spec you in. We're going to see if you're, you got the right X and Y and Z's. And if we find that one of these areas is deficient to me as a coach and I'm not doing it at your level. But that's where I hone in where I'm like, okay, I'm noticing that you're good here with this workout. You know, you can do 10 by 400 at X, you can do threshold at this. But hey, on VO two days, you really struggle. Like you're not running, you're barely running 227 for these 800s and, you know, we need to run 224s on a 5K day if we want to break 15, something like that, you know. And so I'd say, all right, we got to put a little more heavy focus on this for, you know, X amount of weeks. And that's why like, you know, periodization is really important. But a piece of me likes to do things very iteratively and saying like, I know this is the time course for this adaptation. If you're at the end of the season, that may or may not go out the window, but I think there's something to be said about like looking at things and saying like, hey, let's focus on this a little bit more right now. And if you look at it with a two or three year lens in mind and sometimes you have that privilege, sometimes you don't, I really do think that you can kind of optimize that training for that athlete, which maybe goes back to your original point is like, I don't have like a pillar or a fixed way of doing something. And you've often said during this podcast, like, it depends on the athlete, it depends on the athlete. So is that like a, is that an approach that you've adopted ever is to maybe be a little bit more iterative, depending on the need? Absolutely. I have this, I often talk about with my team, the 1% rule. You should never be more than 1% off that erase. And that people like 1% might do the math over the course of a 5K or 10K, 1% is probably 5, 10 seconds. Your worst day shouldn't be more than 1% off of your best day. If you've done the proper training and the development over the years, we can take this all the way back to our conversation about college kids and American kids. You can get those Parker wolves and those Ethan strands if you just do the work. You take these kids that run 408 for the mile. You can get them to be world beaters in four or five years if you just do the work and you just look at it methodically and you just build this culture of like, hey, like, where are you in your training right now? But even when you go raise, we have this 1% rule. It's, you should never be worse than this and you're probably never going to be better in this. If we actually have done the right sort of training, it, I love it. It's, it, it, it, it confused people like, how you, what are you saying? I can't be more than 1% off of every bad day. It's like, add up the number. You shouldn't be. I mean, think about Emily, right? Like, she's around 158, for example. So that's roughly 1.2 seconds is 1%, I think, 112 seconds. Yeah. I think I'm doing that right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She really shouldn't be running over to flat. Right? Like, she should run over to that. And she's probably on that day probably wasn't going to be running under 157 based on where her fitness was. So it's, it, it really sort of adds up now, of course, an athlete can be hurt. Sometimes they have to compete hurt if it's a championship. They might be sick and they might have to compete in that situation. Obviously that changes things, of course. And we know that sometimes we, even though it's coaches, we hate to see that. Sometimes that just happens. An athlete is sick, they, they're fifth man on the team. Hey, as long as they're not going to do any peril damage to their physical being, that kid will go out there and run for their team and always run badly. And you can, I'll be a little bit more flexible on the one percent rule, right? Yeah. Hey, I will have you for it. You're out there just giving everything you've got. You're competing. If everything is good and you're healthy and the training's gone well, that one percent rule is it should hold. And it really just, it creates almost a standard for your athletes and say, you, it almost gives them confidence because it's like, what do you have to fear? This is where you are. This is where you will land. Yeah. That's cute. You're raised. I want to ask you one more question after this, because we're getting to an hour. But, uh, yep. No problem. Oh, you're fine. It's, it's, uh, so what I was going to say is, is I had a friend years ago. He was like, you don't need to be afraid because your body is going to do what it's going to do. Like, you're not going to deceive your body. And I always, like, you're not going to do something super physiological. You're going to run up. If you run hard, you're going to run to your fitness. That's just, that's just the way it is. And that's why kind of my training slogan is training works, right? And training does work like it's, it's physics, training works. If you, if you train, you will get, you will improve unless you're fighting aging or injuries or whatever else. And even then, in the aging body, you can still improve. It just might not be a world. It might not be your career best, but it might be a 55 year old best or a 50, 50 to 60 best, whatever. So, you know, I always tell people, like, you're, you're not going to defy, to defy biochemistry and biophysical principles, like, that's what we're working with at a fundamental level. And I, I just say, if we get more specific and things get harder and, you know, we're consistent, you'll get better. You will. Like, it's, you're right, that, that piece, that's, that's the coaching piece. That's the engineering piece we're talking about, you're saying it's just physics, the math, but racing is tough and there's a psychological, there's that whole piece and we have to work out in that separately, the anxieties, the nervousness. It's a water pressure at every level, and if you're a middle school kid, I think it's all relative. I think they are just as the men and women that I have that get super nervous now even walking into the Olympic Stadium, it probably felt the same for them even when they're walking into the state meet for the first time. It's something that it gets a little bit better over time, but the best get nervous, the rest, they all get the butterflies, and you can tell them that all day long as you're ready, you're fit, and just do what you're prepared to do, but sports, man, that's why we love them, right? It's fun, yeah. There's some emotion there, and those, you're scared, and the parents are scared, and the coach is up there a little bit, it's kind of scared, even I get a little bit nervous. It always does, and I think that just makes it exciting, but it is a whole other piece that we try to work on as well, and that's probably another podcast, but how do we just prepare the mind to lead the body, not fall of the body? Yeah. I like that, the mind leading the body. I made a post recently where I, it was a meta-glasses cut of somebody doing a hard 200, faster than 800 pace at the end of a workout, and you can hear the wheezing, you can hear the pounding, you can just hear the exhaustion, and several people were like, "Oh my God, that's triggering." It feels like good, you should probably watch this ten times over, you should expose yourself to this, so you're prepared. Exposure therapy is the best therapy, it really is, because it is just running, it is just running. We're running around in circles and spandex, the sun will come up tomorrow, your boyfriend will still love you, your parents will still love you, yeah, yeah, oh boy, yeah, yeah, it's exposure, it gets getting back out there over and over and over, if you want to just got to do veins like Matthew Centroids, well, you got to erase a lot. You got to erase? I tell people, the rust accumulates fast on the mile, like for the mile, rust accumulates fast, and it knocks off slowly, and so, in my opinion, you've got to do it four or five times before you're really feel comfortable being like, "Okay, I know exactly what to expect." So last question, Pete, because I've kept you a long time, and this has been awesome. I feel like I've gotten like a, you know, I felt like I've been in your office getting like mentored and I've enjoyed it. So let me ask you this, outside of an Olympic gold for your athletes or world records for your athletes, either what has or what do you want to be the crowning achievement of your career? When it's all said and done, what do you, what sticks out to you? I think that's changed over the last few years. Obviously, I've gone through a lot of changes myself, I've been through a lot of adversity as a coach, I realized about a year and two years ago that my North Star wasn't where I needed to be and where I was aligned. I started, my dad was an high school coach for 30 years, and I admire him, he's the greatest person I know, and his North Star was always, "I just want to make a change in young people's lives." I realized I was falling away from that for quite a long time, just with all the bright lights and the big city of Nike and all the money quite frankly and the resources and just over the last couple of years, that's all changed and my North Star's back where it belongs and that's, I just want to make a positive change in people's lives and my way of doing that is coaching and that what we have now in Boulder with this group of 17 athletes, that's when I get in the car and drive to practice and when I leave practice, did I give my best self and am I making a positive change in their life, hey, the records and the medals and running fast, of course that's why they're out there, but that's not my driving force anymore. I want them to be like, "Hey, you know what? Pete was a man in my life that actually saw the bigger picture of who I was and he actually cared about me and we got to run fast and we got to do some fun stuff and we got to travel around the world but end of day, he was always in my corner and that's been probably my biggest growth over the last two years and I think it's kind of showing up in just the actual racing and the performance of the athletes. I think there's just more love there and support and they can just see that, "Hey, you know what? If you're 2% off and set a 1% off, you're still going to help." You're still going to get a hug from your coach and we're just going to, you know, we're going to work on it but I'm going to be there no matter what in the morning. The next day of practice and we're just going to try to be better humans and better athletes and I'm really grateful that these athletes have given me that opportunity to do that and I really feel like I know where my North Star is again and it's been really just a wonderful thing. It's encouraging and I know a lot of coaches will benefit just from hearing that, especially given your experiences both, you know, in the coaching world and the athletics world. So Pete, it's been a pleasure having you, I would absolutely love to have you back on it. We're going to have you on our podcast because we-- Oh, I will happily come. We've got a neuroscientist Tim Riley, but when it comes to exercise, Fizz, we need some help. We need a guy that actually knows what he's talking about. There's so many things from no-mail to buy-carb to all these other stuff out there, even we are confused. So I'll be like you're a little fact checker in the corner and like, "Well, actually, no, that's--no, we need a smart guy like you and I absolutely love your--what you're doing. We're on social issues." And these things and I--haffees were always showing them, and Ford had to be like, "Yeah, I see them too. Guys, don't worry. I got this." Yeah. I saw this. Well, I appreciate that. I saw this on his Instagram. I'm like, "I want--I saw it too. Yes, he's right. I won't make a post about downhill running, okay?" That's fine. You can. Well, Pete, I appreciate it. Thank you so much for staying on. Hang tight. I'm going to press the end button. Just hang tight. Make sure it loads up. Sure.