Reshaping Not Reinventing.
Last September I decided to make a coaching switch. The point of this write-up is not to outline why I came to that decision or what I felt like I was looking for, but to share insights on the shift in philosophy from my POV because I think it is interesting.
Training philosophy, while developed through objective physiological data and science, is subjective. This is even more true when it comes to ultra trail running as there are so many systems to develop to create success. There is no “one size fits all model” and what may work for me may not work for the person next to me. But this also is not a post to share my training, just more birds-eye-view holistic takeaways from a new program and a new philosophy dictating my training aka life.
I started training with Jason Koop three months ago and am about to finish my third structured block under his program. Each block/phase/cycle (whatever you want to call it) lasted about 3-4 weeks with a few days of deloading in between, and each had their own priority focus - intensity, threshold, and volume.
Running has felt really great lately, but I’ve also shed a lot of other stressors out of my life recently. At the end of the day, I’m enjoying the process, treating training like my full-time job, and loving the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other, sometimes fast and sometimes less fast. Here are my favorite takeaways from the last couple months:
The week is irrelevant.
Weekly mileage, number of workouts in a week, weekly elevation gain. While sexy on Strava, these are all toxic ways to look at training. Training should be looked at as a block and the workouts should be planned within the confines of that block. A block should be much longer than a week in order to properly stress it. Sometimes you need additional recovery runs or full rest days too to absorb the training too.
Your body does not know the difference between Sunday or Monday. It knows when the last time it went hard is so plan the training according to that. I have fully removed myself from the concept of a 7 Day Week and try not to look at weekly stats anymore and I’ve never felt more free. I like to call my recovery days my weekends now and chunks of hard days my work days.
Ditch the heart rate monitor.
One of my favorite Koopisms has been trusting your body and trusting you know how to go hard. You don’t need to stare at data. If you are doing 5x10min at threshold, at this point you should know how hard you need to go to feel gassed by minute 9 of the final interval. You should want to motivate yourself to go hard enough to feel like you nailed the work. And in a race, you should know how to self-regulate and be in tune enough with your body without looking down at your watch when you’re going toe to toe with someone at Mile 50 up a climb.
Recovery is sacred.
Honestly the thing I’ve been most proud of. Recovery runs are all around an hour once a day with no extra stressful interventions. Sometimes I probably run them too fast but I’m absolutely okay with them being as slow as I can go. There is one unambiguous purpose to them - to reeeecoooovvverrrr. Days off mean days off. I used to itch to do another activity on days off like ski or bike. In my mind, those days off are as important as any other key session now. I need to fully recover to be able to put in the work and unfortunately those things I do love don’t allow me to do that. There is a time and place for those things, but in the middle of a highly stressful block is not it.
If you have the time, do it at once.
With the exception of an evening strength session a couple times per week, I don’t double anymore. More time in between sessions to recover. I do understand that this is a luxury I have in my schedule though, and the priority should always be getting the volume in. If that means in two runs, do it.
Repeat the work in a block to have a need to adapt to it.
The workouts are repetitive, but that is the point. If you keep switching things up, your body does not know where the stress is coming from and what it needs to adapt to. Stay focused and do the work you are trying to get better at.
Repatterning is everything.
At the end of the day, the actual work and workouts I’m doing are not that different from my previous program. What feels different is the sequence of the workouts and when we work on different systems throughout the year. I don’t think anyone needs a coach to tell them they need to do 5 or 6 hour long runs to get better at ultra running, or tempo intervals to get more efficient, or high intensity intervals to get faster. What I need a coach for is to tell me when to do those things throughout a week/month/block/year and when to recover to actually get better from them.
No reinventing the wheel here, just reshaping it.
