S3E6: 4 Things Every Runner Must Do This Summer

(upbeat music) Hey guys, welcome back to the consistently good podcast. I am your host Jeff Cunningham, and I'm here today to talk to you about some things that are sort of recurrent in my conversations with you guys, things that are sort of rattling around. I think in a lot of people's heads as we march into, kind of the middle is part of this sort of summer block before we get into our half marathon, marathon specificity that we characterize training for those races in the fall. This is to maybe help get things onto your plate to be thinking about it perhaps, take some things off of your plate, right? As we sort of progress into the mid part, actually of season three of the consistently good podcast as well. There's really four things, and it's four things that are recurrent that I think need to be addressed or can be addressed, that I think are gonna help you with focus, execution, with understanding how to meet out our resources emotionally and physically, and then just sort of some basic understanding, sort of of what we're doing and how we need to be analyzing things like pays, goals, and what races we're running and how they're playing out. The first thing that I want to come back to, and I addressed it, I think it was back in season one, was race distance, race distances, as far as looking at our GPS data, versus looking at maybe the fancy, fancy website, that the race has that says how long the race is, if it's a marathon, we understand it's supposed to be, 42.195, technically, kilometers or 26.2 miles, right? One of the things that I still am seeing is some people talking about watch time versus the actual race time, talking about, well, I think the course was long, right? People saying, well, some people said the course was long and I asked, well, has the race actually announced that the course was long? Has the race had to come back and sheepishly admit that they messed things up, maybe in the days prior to formally setting the course up? Sometimes those things can happen. It is extremely rare. When a course is USA Track and Field certified, there are certain protocols that must be adhered to in measuring that course and then remasuring that course, then having it officially certified by USA Track and Field such that there is some consistency between races so that you can accurately then use them for Boston Marathon qualifying. If it's USATF certified and it is a USA Track and Field sanctioned race, then it can be used for record ratification or qualifying for US Olympic trials, global championships, things like that. World ranking points, obviously, are contingent on you running on courses that comport with world athletic standards and part of those standards are accurately measured courses. I know it sounds like a well done, right? And so many times I'll have people come to me and say, hey, that course was long or that 10k was long or that half marathon was long and they'll say, well, I ran for instance 26.47 miles. And what I'll usually say is no, actually I don't think that the course was 0.27 long. It's just that that's the way it goes. Really quickly to certify a course. There are certain standards that need to be adhered to. And USA Track and Field requires you to actually file a formal registration request, right? And then USA Track and Field has actual course measures, people who are trained to know exactly how to measure a course and get the course certified, right? And they'll send one of those individuals out. You pay a fee if you are trying to get your course, USA T of certified, they'll come out, they'll measure the course and then there's certain paperwork that's going to be on file so that you can then go look up course certifications and there'll be a number or a code assigned that will correspond with your course. How is this done? Well, there's something called a Jones counter, okay? And it's actually put on the front wheel, all right, of a bicycle, okay? And it's calibrated on a 300 to anywhere up to a 500 meter course. And this 300 to 500 meter course is laid out in a straight line and it's actually measured with a metal tape measure, okay? And then it's calibrated with the Jones counter on the front bike of your bike to make sure that if you're riding in a straight line, you are at exactly 300 meters or at exactly 400 or 500 meters as matches the measured out, laid out course that was measured with a metal tape. Once that's calibrated and you know that you're able to measure things accurately with your bicycle, all right? Then that is what is used to actually measure courses. Now here's to trick though. When courses are measured, you don't swing wide around the turns, you don't swing wide around large arcs and curves in the courses. You, if you're the measure, okay? The measure will measure the course within 12 inches of a curve or a corner or 30 centimeters, okay? And so you can imagine it if you're watching on video, you can see my hands about 12 inches apart here, okay? That's really, really close to the edge of a curve. That's really, really close to the edge of a corner. Well, you can imagine that it almost no point, almost no point during a race, are you gonna run within eight, nine, 12 inches of a curve? Well, mainly because that's pretty close and a lot of times people are scared they might even clip their foot on it. But pragmatically, if you're running three, four, five abreast, especially if you're in the early stages of the Berlin marathon, London marathon, New York City marathon, you might be swinging eight feet, right? So eight times the distance from the curve where the courses measured might be where you're actually running, swinging wide around a 90 degree right hand turn, right? Or a long arcing turn on a road, you might not be quote, running the tangents. If you're running down the middle of the road, instead of running within about 12 inches or 30 centimeters of the edge of the road. So here's what happens. It adds a few inches, maybe a couple of meters here, maybe a couple of meters there, maybe five meters, eight, 10 meters, you know, for a long arcing turn if you are swinging wide. Have you ever watched a track me? And you've got eight lanes, up to nine lanes on a typical track. And let's say they're running the 400 meter dash. And as you can see, they use quote, staggered starts, right? The second lane starts quote, unquote, ahead of the person in the first lane visually, but the distance they're actually gonna run is gonna be identical, right? So you can imagine that when you are running wide around turns and everything's measured is if you're in the first lane of the track, but you are running, okay? Maybe a certain distance away from a curve or a turn where you're running in the equivalent, maybe of the fourth lane of the track. I think when you visualize it, when you're, say, watching a track and field race, right? Or you're watching NASCAR, everybody's turning left. Obviously, the shortest line is on the inside, right? And so when we look at this very typically, 26.4, 26.5, 26.3 comes up on people's Garmin data. The Boston Marathon course, the London Marathon course, the New York City Marathon courses are not long. You will not find one piece of Garmin data where somebody runs exactly 26.2 zero miles in the New York City Marathon or the Buffalo Marathon or whatever marathon it might be. You're not gonna see anybody run exactly 3.1 miles in a 5K, right? You might be out running the Carlsbad 5000, right? I mean, Carlsbad, California, and it might come back 3.18 miles. That's just a natural consequence of having to run around turns, running around cones, running around corners, or having to veer back and forth across the course, especially in your longer races to go get a cup of water in a date station, right? So before I did this last time, I put a query out onto Instagram and I said, "Hey, everybody get me your Boston Marathon data." I wanted to use data from one recognizable course on either the same day, but definitely the same course at the Boston Marathon, so I could do some apples to apples comparison of some data. I had a ton of data sent to me regarding distance run. And all I asked for this, give me your GPS data on actually how far you ran, starting line to finish line at the Boston Marathon in 2025 or 2026. And the data came back and it was really, really interesting. 24% of the respondents had distances that were between 26.3 miles. and 26.4 miles. Most of those came back at 26.38, 23, 26.37. And when I say most of those, most of those of that 24 percent, okay? There was 10 percent of the respondents who had their data that was over 26.5 miles, right? So 24 percent were under 26.4, 10 percent were over 26.5, right? Then we had if the, I don't know, or 66 percent, 66 percent of you guys were 26.4 to 26.49. So literally, right at exactly two thirds of the respondents all ran within 900s of a mile of each other, 26.40 to 26.49. The average of 100 percent of the respondents to my little query, my little statistical study here, 100 percent. And I didn't even throw out below and I didn't even throw out the high, okay? All 100 percent average together came out to 26.28, 26.489, right? So we're looking at 26.4 mid, okay? How far everybody ran? Now, what does that mean in real time? Let's say you run 26.40 on the nose. Let's just say that for the ease of doing, running the numbers on this. Let's say you ran 303, you ran seven minute pace for your marathon, right? That means you're taking 420 seconds per mile. So for every one tenth of a mile, it's taking you 42 seconds. So if you ran 26.4 miles, okay? From starting line to finish line, that means you're adding 84 seconds to a race if you were actually magically able to run exactly where the courses measured and run 26.2. 84 seconds. That's a minute and 24 seconds. So if you ran 303 on the nose, you actually went through 26.2 miles, right? And like 30137, 30138, right? If I'm doing my math, right? But that's not how we do it. You don't get to say my watch time was. That's not the way we do it. Okay? You are required to accept what the official race time was. The course was not long, right? I remember Desilinden three or four years ago. Maybe it was two. I'm getting old. I'm very fed. Posted her data from Boston just for I'm grand so that people could take a look at it. My recollection was it was 26.434244 right at what my statistical analysis average gave us. And I think she ran 227 that day as my recollection in that particular year she ran 26.422 26.444 miles, right? Which at that pace added about 75 seconds to her time. That's the way it goes, right? Now you'll be further surprised that there is what is referred to as a short course prevention factor that all course measures are required to use when measuring a course. Simply put, this requires the course to be measured 0.001 percent longer than the actual race distance. Simply put, this is what it means. If you're running a 10k, that's 10,000 meters, that course is going to be measured at 10,010 meters. It's 42,200 meters, right? In a marathon, you're going to add about 43 meters to 42 meters to that course. So the course at the Boston marathon, the New York marathon, the Buffalo marathon, right? The Miami marathon is measured at 43 meters longer than the actual technical course distance. Why? This is to prevent courses from coming up short. This is to prevent the course from being anything other than the race distance as prescribed so that we can comfortably ratify records. We can comfortably use them for qualifiers for the Boston marathon, the world majors, for the US Olympic trials, etc. So understand, when you show up in Austin and you run the capital 10,000, it's actually 10,010. When you show up and you run the New York marathon, it's going to be measured, actually measured, and turned into USA track and field and it's a world athletic sanction race. It's going to be 42 to 43 meters as measured longer than an actual marathon and that's the way it goes for all course certification. All right. So the next time you're looking at your data and you said that you ran a 10K, you ran 6.31 miles or 6.28 miles, that's actually pretty normal. That's what we could refer to as a standard deviation from the actual race distance that we thought we were running. Typically, for a marathon, you can expect 26.35 on the low end. Okay. All the way up to 26.5. Sometimes even 26.55 miles. One of the things that I've noticed with the Boston marathon data was not typical, not, not, not, not, I'm shall we say globally and hands down the system case. But generally speaking, the people who were at the front of the quote unquote a corral were in the actual profiles. Many times ran shorter distances than the people who were running in the higher traffic, more congested corrals where you had to do a bunch of weaving and swinging wide around turns because you were running with a massive pack right of people, right? I found that a lot of the people who were running in the two under 240 down I have one runner, okay, whose data was reported to me. He finished fourth in the Boston marathon. Okay. And I looked at it and he ran 26.31 miles. Notice that is on the very, very lowest end of the day that I retrieved why? Because when you're in four places in the Boston marathon, there was no tangent running impediment. You literally can run really, really close to where the course was measured. That's why it only came out to 0.11 more than the actual marathon distance. All right. So rest easy. The courses that you're running for the most part have been measured accurately. Typically if the course is really, really long due to having to move a cone or police say, hey, I'm sorry, you can't run through here. We're going to need you to change the course slightly and go up there or or or or just how you had cone placements to regulate traffic flow, right? Sometimes a race will say, hey, we're really, really sorry, but this course actually is a tenth long. And I had a runner recently told me that that announcement was made prior to a half marathon. And they were very unabashed and saying, hey, guys, we just got to let you know this is 13.30. That's where the course is actually measured. We can when I don't remeasure it, we're really, really sorry, right? Next thing that's on my mind, you guys are training really hard to get to said marathon. Many of you were training really, really hard to get to the goal half marathon in the fall, whether it be the Philadelphia distance run in September, the Indianapolis half marathon November the 7th, San Jose and October, right? Right now, many of your coaches or advisors could be prescribing you far like sessions. I know many of you who listen to this podcast might have actually been coached by me or might be currently coached by me, assigning far like sessions. I want to specifically address executing a far like workout because I think that I'm going to go ahead and fall in the sword here. I've been running since 1984. I've done so many different kinds of workouts. I've had to execute so many different workouts well that I believe that sometimes I forget that things are not quite as obvious to everybody as maybe I think that they are. I don't want to say should be. Maybe is I think that they are only because I'm clouded by my own experience, right? I grew up running in the non GPS era and I think that what happened was we ran a lot more on field back in the 1980s and 90s and even the early 2000s. When it coaches say go out and run a far like but didn't have as much anxiety about pace. I didn't have the same level of shall we say focus on pace. I don't want to say obsession with pace, but he borders on that for some of you calling the couple of you out, couple of you were laughing right now because you're like, yeah, he's calling me out. Why not so much your fault. GPS is wonderful. GPS is amazing, but as I hit on in the course measurement conundrum where everybody's convinced that course was long and probably not, we are very, very measured in our approach, but we are so dialed into our GPS. data that we forget that it's not entirely accurate, but also it allows us to have cerebral saturation. We're saturated with so much incoming data that we lose, maybe our sense of feel. We lose our connectedness to the nuance of pace. So what I find is people will ask me if I assign them, let's say 10 by 1 minute fast, 2 minutes easy, I will get a text message or a phone call saying, well, what pace is that? What pace should I be hitting? And my response is, hey, this is far like, far like is the sweetest word for speed play, where we just come in of pace and then out of pace, in pace, out of pace, up, down, up, down, ebb and flow, ebb and flow. And I always tell everybody, let's make this effort based. Let's lower your cortisol levels, let's lower your neurologic stress. Let's make this be sort of a fun, fast, neurologically decompressive way to either kickstarted training block, to insert some speed stimulus without pace obsession, pace anxiety, pace focus. Let's focus on effort, right? Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, you're running on a criss-crossed granite trail, just sort of getting invested in the rhythm, right? Maybe running down a nice shaded path or a shaded neighborhood that you've always enjoyed running in, in pace, out of pace, in pace, out of pace. And when people say, well, what pace should I be running? You could almost hear the anxiety in their voice. I can sometimes feel sort of the indecisiveness and maybe somebody feeling maybe a bit unsure of them spell themselves because they've been so married to Garmin data. I averaged X, Y, Z pace on my easy run. Now, care about pace. I just want to know if it was easy, right? That we look at data, we look at data, data, data, data, data. And so suddenly when I say, I run an effort, it's like, well, wait, how do I do that? Because I'm married to running six minutes per mile pace on this or eight minutes per mile pace on that. So here's what I'm telling everybody. On these pharit like sessions, allow yourself to have some emotional disconnectedness from your GPS, from your watch, okay? Use your watch to simply time the segments. One minute on, two minutes off, one minute on, two minutes off. When I had my old gnarly, time X, Iron Man triathlon watch, analog watch, right? The one that I still use today. I was just used the watch to time the pharit like if my coach has signed, you know, two times one, two, three, two, one, ten times a two minute, I would simply use it go, okay, two minutes starts now. Okay, I'm at four minutes. So when I get to six minutes on my watch, I know that I can now slow down back to my easy run recovery. All right? Here's my recommendation on pharit like workout. When you get to a fast section, make sure that you are controlled. If the coach says, or if I say up tempo, that means faster than easy, but easier than fast. It should be a pace. This is what I tell people where you're not gasping for air. You feel this intense desire to just stop and watch or walk or you're going to beg for a mercy killing by the end of the workout at the end of every fast segment. If your gasping for air, embanging for a mercy killing such that you cannot easily transition seamlessly into your easy run recoveries that typically should not be pit or pat or jog. There should be a pace that you're running on all of your easy runs, maybe even a little faster than easy run pace, even on your recoveries. If you can't run those kinds of paces on your easy run recoveries, then you need to slow down the hard sections. Okay? This is not hardcore speed work. I don't want you guys to being so pace obsessed where I've got to hit this pace to where you're literally turning it into a sprint diet workout rather than a speed up, slow down, speed up, slow down workout. In vision, this, you're in the left lane. You're on the interstate. You need to be taking your car on a fart-leg workout between 45 or 50 miles an hour and then 70 or 75 miles an hour. right? 50, 70, 50? 70. If we're using miles an hour not 20 miles an hour, 90 miles an hour, 20 miles an hour, 90 miles an hour. That sprint die, sprint die. That's not a fart-leg okay. That's interval training posing as fart-leg. Far-leg workouts typically is let's get a good stimulation. Let's run at an up-temple pace. We're breathing like this. We're running pretty hard and then okay, let's come down for a minute two minutes, three minutes. However, the workout is prescribed. Now if you're doing 30 second repeats with minute and a half recoveries, you might be able to get a little chipier with that pace. You know, right? You might be able to get a little bit more starch in your chores for 30 seconds, right? But you still don't want to end up with a little hitch and you're giddy up because you ran too hard and then suddenly you're like gasping for air, you're turning blue, you're looking left looking right for some tree that you can dive behind. So some observer doesn't see you out there dying a slow, horrible death, you know, maybe eight reps into a 10 rep two minute on two minute off workout. Speed up, slow down, speed up, slow down. Why are we doing fart-leg? Builds a robot capacity. It helps you get a little bit of a quote unquote speed stimulus without having to be so split-centric and pace-obsessed that it creates anxiety. It can create almost just OCD in measuring everything. It's very neurologically decompressive. It should be emotionally decompressive and allow you to get some speed stimulus, right? Get some aerobic development where you're straining your system just enough where you can enhance mitochondrial respiration, right? Without it being a full-on stress fest, it's a nice segue. It is a nice bridge that you can build from maybe coming back from a down period, maybe a rest period after a marathon or a half marathon where we're sort of getting back into structured training. They can be used intermittently through all of your training blocks as ways to get a fitness stimulus without it being a super, super stressful workout. Many of you know that maybe after your last long run workout, maybe four days later, five days later, I might just give you 12 times a minute on two minutes off. This is with two weeks left in a marathon block, right? It can be used for many different purposes, but I never want, and I can guarantee you that your coaches never want fart-like workouts to be these anxiety-inducing experiences where you quote, get in your head. All right? Now, that transitions to my third thought of the day that I want to address, which is getting in your head, having anxiety, having a sense that you're, quote, falling behind, that you've, quote, lost fitness or failed to achieve a goal because of a skip workout, a mediocre workout, a bad workout, a workout that had to get moved, a workout that never occurred. In a calendar year, you've got 365 days. You've got 52 weeks. Let's say you're training for 50 weeks, and you have two weeks off, maybe a full week after a couple of marathons completely off of running, right? And you're doing running of some sort 50 weeks a year. The chances are good that you're going to run anywhere from 50 workouts up to 100 workouts a year depending on what you characterize as a workout, whether it's a Friday speed development session in Jeff Cunningham's world, a long run workout on a Saturday that you're going to do in half marathon blocks or marathon blocks, even training for a 10k. You're doing a midweek workout. Some of you may be training for the mile or the 3k on the track, and a 5k on the track. So I might have you run a workout on a Tuesday, and then follow up with another workout on a Friday, up 50 to 100 workouts a year. You have to miss three workouts, four workouts during the year because you have a sore shin, you caught coronavirus, you were late to the airport because of a traffic jam. You were late getting in to a bar mitzvah that you had to attend, so you just literally just didn't get the workout in because you literally didn't have time to do it. I'm here to tell you everything's fine. Everything is good. Do not quote, "Get in your head." Although it's a natural inclination because caring is cool. And most of you who listen to this podcast care, most of you who hire a coach care, most of you who bother to pay $210 to run the Houston marathon care. So caring is cool. Caring then can lead you to being harder on yourself than maybe you'd need to or should be sometimes. Caring can give you quote anxiety or that feeling of having frittered away an opportunity or somehow came up short because you didn't hit a workout, because you didn't do the workout or because you had to move the workout. Don't do that to yourselves. Don't do it. So goes the eggs is in season of life guys, right? If it was perfect, then we wouldn't be living in reality. That would be fantasy. When you read fantasy books or you watch movies that are fantasy, we in turn like that it is not by definition reality, okay? You're not gonna have your best day of work every day. You are not even gonna be the best driver every day. You're gonna forget to turn your lane change signal on, okay? You're gonna possibly get stopped and give it a warning. Maybe every once in a while by state trooper because you were going eight miles an hour over the speed limit because, you know, I don't know. You were lost in thought. So we're never perfect at anything that we do. We're not perfect drivers. We're not perfect parents. You know, we're not perfect at anything we do. So don't expect your training to be the same way. Grace giving. Man, I'll tell you what. I'm a big, big fan of saying that because I believe it. You've got to give yourself leeway, AKA grace. You are going to have workouts that don't go well. In fact, you know, many professional runners will say, it's sort of this, this, this rule of thirds, right? Where you're gonna have a third of your workouts go exquisitely well, possibly even go beyond expectations because you're just so fabulously just rapturously amazing. You're gonna have another third of your workouts that you just kind of get it done. You just kind of check the boxes. And then there's the other third, right? Where you just might fly out, not meet preconceived expectation, pre-prescribed expectations. You might not even do the workout at all. That is not the expectation when it was written down on paper three weeks ago, a week ago, two weeks ago. However, far in advance you schedule your workouts. That's the way it goes. But you know what, that tracks life. That tracks life. Heck, guys, I mean, you know, episode whatever, 30 something, 20 something, right? Of the consistently good podcast. Not every episode has been my best. Might be nuanced. A lot of you might go back and listen to an episode if you wanna brush up on iron and go back to season one and listen to the iron episode, right? Some of you might wanna be like, hey, I remember coach talking about the progression of the women's world record in the marathon. I'm gonna go back and listen to, what was it? I think episode two of season one. And then you're gonna realize, man, Jeff sounded a little off that day. Or, hey, that episode was way better than others. Why? Because you wanna know what? My success, the quality of everything that I do isn't always linear. I'm just gonna be better some days, right? Hopefully, consistently good. 'Cause that's the name of the podcast, right? So aim for consistently good. Not perfectly good, right? I'm gonna go ahead and pause it. There's only one perfect person, whoever I've ever heard of, and that's the big fella. He's upstairs, okay? The rest of us, we are delightfully by design, imperfect. And we're gonna lead in perfect lives. We're gonna have imperfect marathon bills. We're gonna have imperfect workouts. We could even have parts of workouts that don't go well. In parts of workouts that do, I had a young lady text me last night from Canada. She had four times a 200, four times a mile, four times a 200 on the schedule. We got four times a 200 done, we got four times a mile done, we got one times a 200 done, and guess what? She has a new puppy. She has a new dog. That dog, I don't really know what the emergency was, but she had to stop. Probably pooped her peed in the house, be my guess. Or maybe puked on the, you know, the family's favorite area, right? Maybe it was a family heirloom. Guess what, the last three 200s didn't happen, but guess what? The first part of that workout, she got about 75, about 80, 85% of that workout done from a volume standpoint was absolutely nails, absolutely fantastic. Give yourself grace. What, tell you what? She's not gonna get to the starting line at the Indianapolis marathon, which is the race that she's running on. November the 7th, it's a boy. Post three 200s, I didn't run on June the 9th, or June the 10th, or June whatever it was, I'm doomed. It's not the way it works. So what I want you guys to understand is that one bad race, even, one bad workout, even, one workout that is skipped, okay? Doff not write the final chapter on you as a runner, on you as a human, and you as a competitor. Understand, we're gonna have, and we're gonna have flow to this, okay? It's just like a fart like workout. We're gonna be up a little bit, we're gonna be down a little bit too. Just be really consistently good over time. You're gonna wake up in two years, three years, five years, whatever timeline you're putting yourself on. I wouldn't posit that if you were in your early 20s, you're probably on a 15 to 20 year timeline as far as maximizing your potential. If that's a goal of yours, just an half to be. But if that's a goal of yours, you've got to find a way to internalize that it's not always gonna be perfect, but it's gonna be just like the stock market. It's gonna be maybe a little up and down, little up and down. You ever gone onto the stock market app, looking at the S&P, maybe the Dow, if you have an iPhone, and you can go all the way back to like the S&P, I think 1984, the S&P 500, first started, it is fantastic to go and look at all time and looking at where it started at, I don't know, 300, 400, 700 points, something ridiculous like that. Now it's up at 7,000. Bottom left to top right. All right, you need to invest in yourself, you need to make fitness deposits in the fitness banking account, the same way you would investing in your 401Ks, your Sep IRAs, your traditional Roth IRAs, you make your investments, your improvement line is be on the bottom left to the top right, until you get to the predictable point in life where that can't be an expectation. We know that 70-year-olds are not winning the Olympic championship with a hundred meter dash, but that's okay. But if you're 25, 30, 35 years old, you're gonna have some down days, down weeks, possibly even down months. Do not quote, get in your head over it in a way where it becomes self-loathing where you start flogging yourself, where you start sort of marching to the beat of a drum of self-doubt. Don't do it. You're good enough, you're hardworking enough, you're conscientious enough because you're cool. And why are you cool? Why is every single last one of you cool is the other side of the pillow? Because you care, and caring is what breeds anxiety. Carrying is what can sometimes breed unnecessary self-flogging and self-loathing through a perceived failure when I want you to understand it's normal. You haven't failed. The success was that you ever bother to start trying, okay? So let's go easy on ourselves and understand that your running career's just gonna be like that S&P 500. It's gonna go from the bottom left to the top right, you're gonna have micro dips, right? You know, like the stock market did in 2020 when COVID hit, like the stock market did in 2008, right? But don't panic sell. Don't panic sell. Don't sell yourself short. Don't sell your dream away. Don't compromise your goal for the fall. Don't panic sell. Keep putting money in. Keep putting money in that is that easy run, that is that workout, that's that fart like that tempo run, that interval workout. That training session in the gym, that long run on Saturday, keep making deposits, okay? You're gonna end up living a life of fitness and performance wealth in the running world. Last thing, my fourth thing is that I'm seeing a lot of people who are taking their eye off of the most important ball and they're trying to swing a bat, like you're down at the batting cage, you're trying to hit three or four balls at one time. You can only hit one ball at a time. Now, what I'm telling you is is when you're 24 a running race, when you're training for a foot race, whether it is the Carmel marathon in Carmel, Indiana, right? Whether it's a training for the Cooper River Bridge run or Gasparilla, doesn't matter what race it is, understand these are running races. Let's focus on the running as the primary sort of dialed in-edness, if that's a word of the way you progress through the weeks and the months in the lead into these events. And then you've got to be a great sister, brother, spouse, mother. You've got to be a great colleague if you work, okay? And understand that we have limited amounts of bandwidth. When we start over investing and hyper focusing on all the different components of the fitness journey, kind of like a flea market of ideas, but we're just simply focusing on each thing way too much, right? Do not get your bandwidth stretched so thin to where you don't have enough left to really be focused on the running weight training, strength, mobility, right? Diet, magic supplements, BPN has some magic supplements. I will have you know, but don't be so focused on exactly how many grams of carbohydrate per day you're eating. Don't sit down with a calculator, okay? And sit down and add up every carb, every milligram of sodium, every gram of protein that you ate that day and start going, oh my gosh. I had 22% of my diet was XYZ and it should have been at 20, uh, don't do it. Listen, eat a diet that your grandma would recommend, not as you'd have to die it that your mama would be proud of. Make sure that you have something green, something colorful, okay? Something carbohydratey, something protein-y. Make sure you're getting in vitamin D, vitamin K, vitamin C, calcium, plenty of iron. You're probably gonna be okay. Don't hyper obsess about it to the point where it starts destroying your bandwidth, the focus on the stuff that really matters is, hey man, we're trying for a marathon. We probably need to go run. Don't be so dialed into the point where you get anxious 'cause you missed a lifting session or you're not doing the perfect lifting. Oh my God, I saw the little Betty Sue did exactly 12 Bulgarian, you know, this, that, and the others, you know, and 70, you know, 75 hip thrusts, you know, once every 10 days, and if I'm not doing that, then I'm leaving quote, so much on the table. Ah, you know what guys, it doesn't work that way. Because once you start trying to over-control everything, you lose sight of the fact that you could wake up, right? And it's gonna be 75 degrees, blowing 28 miles an hour and be 91 degrees on race day. And suddenly the exact number of Bulgarian, whatever squats and the, you know, 75 hip thrusts and all that other stuff, that's not the window 'cause you try to over-control everything. And then suddenly the stuff out of your control, you realize is omnipresent, it's ever-present. Be good enough. With diet, be good enough with your fueling. It doesn't mean don't incrementally get better. But what it means is don't worry about if you only were able to take a gel every four miles when somebody told you from some, you know, a platform in the sky that you must take three or you're not doing it right. Now, man, I tell you what, let's focus on the running. Let's make running the focus of training for running races, keep that kettle of water on the front burner, keep that kettle of water boiling in the 10, 12, 14 weeks before the Chicago Marathon. And let's make sure the other stuff gets the requisite level of attention. So you don't want it to go cold, let it be on simmer. Tweaking your hydration strategies, tweaking your carbohydrate intake strategy during long run so that you can then train your GI tract for the race. Figuring out what works for you as far as training for posterior change strength, right? Whether we do barbell squats, whether we do body weight squats, whether we're doing Bulgarian or Hungarian or Tasmanian split squats, or you know, cross your eyes and count to four, whatever it is you're doing in the gym. Good enough, it's good enough. I tell everybody be doing something on the strength and mobility side. You're going to be okay. Couple days a week, probably fine. Be paying enough attention to your protein and carbohydrate intake with an understanding that carbohydrates need to be at the forefront of your thought processes when you're running big workouts, running big volume because that's what we use for fuel. About 85 to 90% of the fuel that we burn when we run is from carbs. So just make sure you're eating carbohydrates, eat you some taters, eat you some rice, go have a little sweet potato, right? You're probably going to be fine. Rice crispy streets, it's not junk foods, probably pretty good fuel for you, you know, before you run late night snack, you're fine, right? But don't start counting your sugars. Don't start counting your carbs. Don't start counting your protein to the point where it makes you crazy. Don't self-assign homework projects that will then take away from your ability to be a good spouse, to be a good friend to yourself. Don't do things that then take the oxygen mask off of yourself. Make sure you put the oxygen mask on yourself and that you love yourself, you take care of yourself. That means not getting to your band which threats so thin that you take your eye off of, hey, train it for running race. I'm going to really, really be dialed in, have my running training on boil on the front burner. I'm going to make sure I'm addressing strength, mobility, making sure I'm paying attention to my diet. That kettle of water is going to be on the middle burner for a back burner. On simmer, always got to keep the water hot. You can't have it all on boil because you will end up be setting yourself up for more anxiety, some self-loathing, some flogging because my weight workout didn't go perfect or I had to miss my strength and mobility workout because I had to bring cookies to my child's end of a school year party in May. It's okay. Skip your darn strength workout. It's going to be okay. Take the cheap cookies from the public, so the HEB down there to your kids classroom. Go and be a great parent and make sure you should got your run in that day. Come October at the Chicago Marathon. I promise. All right, guys, those are four things that have been on my mind. Don't over obsess about your GPS data. Understand the courses are probably almost always measured correctly. Understand that you don't need to be perfect on everything. Simply be consistently good, be good enough in all that we do. Understand what your points of primary focus need to be. It's certain stages of your life, certain stages of your training, certain stages of your year. Focus on those, be really good at those things. Make sure that you have other things that matter but aren't primary focus on simmer, okay? And then be kind to yourself. Lean into these workouts, but understand the work, understand the goal of the work, understand your why, why you're doing the work. Ask your coach if it's me or if it's somebody else, it doesn't really matter. Hey, is it okay if I did it this way? I'm sure your coach or your advisor's going to say, "Yeah, you're good, man. Good enough. Often is plenty good enough." All right, guys, as you know, most episodes, I like to dig into my mail back. What is the mail back? It's a virtual mail back. I have you guys submit questions a lot of times. Sometimes even unsolicitedly, I'll get questions. I like to dig in and look at what you've asked and try to get some things answered. So I'm going to dig in there today. I'm going to see what we've got. And I am going to need to put my spectacles on. As I like to always reiterate, I've got 51-year-old eyes. Just bear with me if you're watching this. Bear with Campbell. You are one Campbell. Hey Jeff, I just listened to your season three opener on Breaking Three. And like how you stressed, the easy ones need to actually be easy and not just slightly less hard. And how most people often can sabotage themselves by maybe pushing too much on recovery days. I'm curious of all the runners that you've coached who've gotten to sub three are some of the biggest breakthroughs coming from adding more volume or from finally slowing down on the easy days and letting the hard work actually absorb. Really good question. I really appreciate it. That's a thoughtful question. And one that I'm going to answer, hopefully, pretty simply. The answer is, when I get people to recognize that when you enter long races, you have to run long volume. You have to run long workouts. That also then requires you to understand the requisite effort level. We can't just go with our beat our head against a locker every day until blood sports out of the corners of our eyes every day. While attractive and while that satisfies our natural inclination to want everything to be linear, get 1% better every day when people slow down and truly make the easy runs easy. OK. Conversational the whole way so that you can complain about coach Jeff's bad accent. You can complain about the way he trims his beard. And you can complain about the way he cuts his hair. You can't do all that in a engagement, a full-on conversation with Eddie Earl, Betty Sue, Little Tawakini and Cleofis. If you're out there running too hard in your easy days, will you breathe in hard? Keep it nice and easy. And then guess what happens. You show up rested. You're from a muscular skeletal standpoint. From a neurologic standpoint, you show up rested so that you can really maximize your potential to make gains on the hard workout days, whether it's repeats, whether it is a lactate threshold session, it doesn't matter what it is. And then the other byproduct of keeping those easy runs easy is typically then you don't roll over a ton of fatigue from when dates at the next and it allows you to handle running more volume. I mean, we can have a scholarly debate on this, okay? And I understand there's a few people who philosophically might take issue with this. That's fine. I would rather take a guy that runs 70 miles a week at eight minute pace than a guy who runs 40 miles a week at 730 pace, going into a marathon, any freaking day of the week and twice again on Sunday. All right, keep your easy runs easy. invest in what truly easy running means on your your easy days, especially in this hard to manage, high heart rate summer months when we're in the heat. Easy, easy, let's let hard, hard, let there be a major bifurcation between your effort levels on those two days. You're going to be able to run more volume. You're going to be able to absorb more fitness from your hard workouts if you invest in that. Thank you for your question. I really, really appreciate it. So with that, I hope y'all got something out of this. I hope somebody got some little tidbits, some factoids, or just, or a sitting here going, yeah, I got to go easier on myself. I'm doing pretty good because we're all doing pretty good. All right. So if that's what you got out of this, I hope that you all proceed in being consistently good. And that's what I want you to focus on. So y'all go be good. Be consistently good. Go Jal. [MUSIC PLAYING]