Strategies for High-Quality Training with CTS Coach Adam Pulford #224

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
trail and ultra runners.
What is going on?
Welcome to another episode ofthe coop cast.
As always, I am your humblehost, coach jason coop, and I am
back from a two-week hiatus.
The cause of that hiatus isneither here nor there, but you
can probably hear it a littlebit in my voice and throughout
the course of this podcast.

(00:31):
This podcast is with one of myfavorite coaches on the entire
planet, one of the best mountainbike coaches in the world, one
of the best cycling coaches inthe world and somebody who I
have had the privilege ofworking with for nearly 20 years
now, and that is Adam Pulford.
Adam and I wanted to dissectthis recent paper coming out of
Norway, all about trainingquality and how we can define

(00:54):
quality training from the get-go, starting from the plan that
you actually develop way beforeyou put pen to paper and
determine that you want to runtwo hours today or two hours
tomorrow, whatever your trainingplan actually looks like for
the week.
The reason that this is soimportant is because I know many
of you are ramping yourtraining up right now, in
advance of this race season thatis continually unfolding right

(01:17):
in front of us, so I hope thecontent of this podcast helps
you direct the training that youdo day to day, week to week,
and also the plan that you putbehind that training.
We also spend a little bit oftime bantering on one of the
things that is my newfascination and that is high
performance coaching, or some ofthese coaching groups that we
have started to wrap aroundathletes.

(01:38):
Adam happens to have a littlebit of experience in that, and
he's also on one of the highperformance teams with me, and
so we offer a little bit of ourperspective in terms of how we
might actually see this shape upin the trail and ultra running
realm when it has already beenestablished in other endurance
sports like cycling, running andin triathlon.

(02:00):
Okay, folks, with that intro Iam getting right out of the way.
Here's my conversation withAdam Pulford all about what
constitutes quality trainingFigure.
We're going to talk aboutquality training, what
constitutes quality training?
Then, if we have a little bitof time, we'll talk a little bit
about some of this highperformance stuff that we've

(02:22):
been doing, about some of thishigh performance stuff that
we've been doing.

Speaker 2 (02:24):
Yeah, I think that's good and I think, to that point,
this all got brought up becauseof the podcast that I run, the
Time Crunch Cyclist.
I was answering an audiencequestion and I said something
about quality training and blah,blah blah and make sure quality
remains high.
And so an audience member wrotein and they said you know, I
basically know what you mean bywhat you said.

(02:45):
You're basically sayingintensity needs to remain high,
but a lot of endurance athletesand coaches just throw around
the term quality.
And so can you specificallydefine quality?
Train more.
And I was like, ooh, so Istarted doing my research.
It led me to Alex Hutchinson,who I'm a big fan of.

(03:05):
I got him on the podcast, wehad a good conversation about it
, but more and more I think itis a very relevant thing to talk
about with our athletes,amongst our coaches, and just
like, what the heck is it?
How do we define it?
How do we track it?

Speaker 1 (03:18):
Well, I think we need to start with our coaches, to
be honest with you, or coachesin general, like maybe not so
much our coaches but coaches ingeneral, because you're right
that we tend to throw aroundthat term a lot.
But I would guarantee you, ifyou let me lay a bet down in
Vegas on this if you reallypinned a coach down and asked

(03:41):
them, how would you objectivelydefine quality training?
If this training session orgroup of sessions is of high
quality, how would you and youcan have subjective metrics as
well how would you define that?
And they would have a hard timecoming up with the answer.
That's.
The bet that I would make isthat people would be like blah

(04:02):
blah, blah, blah, blah, likethey they, they cause they
haven't thought about it.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
Well, that's it, coop .
And I think even for me.
I've been coaching for almost Imean, we're coming up on 19
years, almost 20 years now andwhen I got that question I was
like, boom, push me, because Ineed to get organized about this
and have and communicate in.

(04:27):
But I needed to pull someoneelse in and it was an expert
field, so okay, so let'sencapsulate that a little bit to
start out with.

Speaker 1 (04:33):
So you already did your research, like now you can
give us the elevator pitch andwe can be done with this podcast
in like three minutes yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:40):
so elevator pitch is start with the plan hopefully
it's a good one Communicate theplan, have aspects to track
within that communication to theathlete, and then the athlete
does it and then does what theydid line up with the plan in
terms of RPE, pace, power, totaltime, whatever the objectives

(05:01):
were.
Then you talk about it, see howclosely it matched, and then
does that session fit into theglobal pan plan overall.
So it's really the big pictureplan, the individual session
plan and then how that tracks,depending on how long you want
to go out.

Speaker 1 (05:17):
Okay, can I poke a hole in your elevator pitch?
Oh, you can freaking poke away.
Of course I can, cause I'vebeen doing this to you for
almost 20 years, as you justmentioned.
That is all fine and good, butit is contingent on the plan.

Speaker 2 (05:32):
Oh, for sure, and that's oh.
I'm not done yet.

Speaker 1 (05:34):
Yeah, and the plan fitting what is going to be
conducive for performance to theathlete For sure, but that's
where you said so to be fair,you said elevator pitch right
and so you have to.
You didn't go to the very topfloor.
You're not on the rooftop deckyet.
Is that what you're saying?

Speaker 2 (05:53):
And that's it.
Because if you're like, okay,give it to me in 90 seconds,
it's like you got to startsomewhere.
Start with a print and mypodcast with Alex he brought it
up.
He's like what if your plan isshitty?

Speaker 1 (06:03):
Yeah, yeah, no, I mean because we see this all the
time in coaching.
It's like, okay, yeah, thatsession accomplishes what you
say, or it will probablyaccomplish what you say it's
going to accomplish, but is whatyou're trying to accomplish
actually going to matter forperformance?
Those are two very differentthings that you can kind of get
at and you can get one right andnot the other.

(06:25):
You can get neither one of themright and we see, know what the
determinants of performance arefrom a physiological

(06:48):
perspective, from apsychological perspective, like
what are the things that aregoing to enable performance the
most?
And then how are you going totune the knobs, so to speak, or
dial the training this, that orthe other, with workout
structure and overallarchitecture, to, to to achieve
those ends?
I kind of view it as asequential process that starts

(07:09):
with what are the performancedeterminants first, and then
designing the training from aglobal perspective and then also
from a session by sessionperspective around those
performance determinants.

Speaker 2 (07:21):
Yeah, it's a very good way of putting it and along
those lines, I think it'sfruitful to put in there the
performance um aspects, like yousaid, as well as the strengths
and weaknesses too.
Sure, yeah, yeah.
So you put that in and then wehave this grand plan of how we
go and, what's interesting, wecan take it down this direction

(07:44):
too.
But, like you and I work withathletes one-on-one individual,
and so you're usually justdriving that ship when it comes
to big picture plan, annual plan, monthly plan, weekly plan, to
the session.
Then we work with eliteathletes where there's other
cooks in the kitchen and we gotto be on the same plan, the same

(08:05):
page, for those planning things, and sometimes you're the one
with the master plan as well asthe individual session.
But then there we're pulling onthreads from all this other
stuff to make sure that who'sever doing stuff psychologically
or nutritionally, or coach alledgy wise.

Speaker 1 (08:23):
Coach all edgy wise.
You're making that up right now.
Yeah, made it up.
Coachology-wise.
Coachology-wise Are you makingthat up right now?
Yeah, I made it up.

Speaker 2 (08:28):
That we are all kind of funneling into high-quality
training, high-quality coaching,and that's a tricky one too,
when you got multiple cooks inthe kitchen.

Speaker 1 (08:37):
We're going to talk about that probably at the end
of the podcast, since you and Iare on a couple of these
high-performance teams and it'sbeen a recent fascination and
fixation of mine.
Again, it's my podcast, so Ican talk about whatever I want
to, but let's kind of go back tothe basement, right?
So these are the performancedeterminants.
I'm going to lay out a reallysimplistic scenario to hopefully

(08:58):
drive this home and I'm goingto bridge both the cycling world
, which is your world, and thenthe ultra running world, which
is my world, both the cyclingworld, which is your world, and
then the ultra running world,which is my world.
Just to set the table, how longis it going to take an elite
athlete to do a one kilo, onekilometer race on the track?
Just so the listeners can know.

Speaker 2 (09:14):
For men less than a minute, okay, perfect.
50 seconds For 50 seconds okay.

Speaker 1 (09:19):
Yeah, I was recently out at the Canyons 100 and the
lead men were eight-ish hoursand lead women were nine-ish
hours.
Just kind of a ballpark there,right?
So we've got these twodifferent events Cycling event
on one side, running event onthe other side.
Cycling event is less than aminute, running event is eight
or nine hours.
Needless to say, theperformance determinants for

(09:43):
either one of those races aremarkedly different.
Fair statement, fair statement.
Okay, now let's tailor thisdown a little bit more.
Give me an example of an eight.
Oh, I'm going to give you anexample, because I just came up
with the best one.
Let's look at the LeadvilleTrail 100 mountain bike.
Yeah, okay, how long does ittake the leaders to do that race

(10:07):
Six?

Speaker 2 (10:08):
and change Six 40-ish 630-ish.

Speaker 1 (10:11):
Yeah, six-ish.
Now let's compare and contrastthat with once again, I was just
at Canyons this last weekendeight-hour race.
You have a six-hour race, youhave an eight-hour race.

Speaker 2 (10:20):
that's not that different from a time, this is a
better example.

Speaker 1 (10:24):
This is why I started with the easy one and now we're
going to get to this one.
That's not that different froma time perspective.
Right, they're close.
Let's just say we're coaching anine hour Leadville trail 100
mountain bike finisher.
That would be me.
The only year that I did theLeadville trail 100 mountain
bike, I did it at nine hours.
So now we have the time.
The duration of the eventsbeing very similar, are the

(10:44):
determinants of those eventssimilar as well?

Speaker 2 (10:48):
No.

Speaker 1 (10:48):
Okay, you're the cyclist I'm going to go for you
can first start out and thenI'll do the running side.
What would the determinants ofthe cycling side be?
What would enable the athleteto succeed in that race from a
physiological perspective?
What things do you need toaccentuate during the training
process that are extremelyimportant in that type of race?

Speaker 2 (11:07):
yeah.
So overall big picture is buildthe aerobic engine.
This is kind of our classicgeneral base building phase,
building up time in the saddleup to a point where we can
determine okay, now the now theaerobic system, we can move on
and start to add intensity, butfrom that volume standpoint,

(11:29):
because I've got some hardmarkers on that.
But at some point I'm going tochange and really focus on
functional threshold power, ftp,because that's going to be the
biggest determiner when it comesto performance.
If we have some performancegoals sub nine, whatever,
whatever but the volume for thatone is still high.
However, the intensity,especially at ftp, is super

(11:50):
important.
So I want to make sure that isas high as I can get it four
weeks out, do a couple more longrides, come to it fresh, and we
haven't even talked aboutaltitude okay, let's leave the
altitude piece of it out, not toconfound it too too much.

Speaker 1 (12:02):
An athlete during that.
What's the range of physiologythat they're going to elicit
Just from like?

Speaker 2 (12:07):
an energy system standpoint.

Speaker 1 (12:09):
Well, energy systems, or percent of VO2 max or
percent of FTP, you can createthe anchor point wherever you
want to, whatever listeners youthink it will resonate with,
because I'll be out on my side.

Speaker 2 (12:19):
Yeah, a shit ton of time in zone two and three and
then we're hitting low zone fouron key hill climbs and watch it
there.
So we don't blow up so supralike harder than threshold for
some of those climbs yeah, likeat and depending on, like that

(12:40):
athlete right, like carefulbecause again at altitude, like
you don't want to burn it toohot in zone four because you can
blow up.

Speaker 1 (12:47):
That's the volatile spot, how much time would they
spend above an intensity factorof one?
So just to explain to thelisteners, an intensity factor
of one would be basically atyour functional threshold power
or your functional thresholdpace, which is the pace you
could sustain for about an hour.
Like how much time during theLeadville Trail 100 for an elite

(13:08):
athlete would they spend abovea intensity?

Speaker 2 (13:11):
factor of one.
Well, an elite athlete, I wouldsay, is different than a
sub-nine.

Speaker 1 (13:18):
Are you trying to tell me that I'm not elite?
I'm just barely sub-nine.

Speaker 2 (13:21):
I just told you that in a very roundabout way.
All right, fair enough, let'sdo elite athlete Cause.

Speaker 1 (13:26):
I'm going to match it , I'm going to match you,
matching on the elite side.

Speaker 2 (13:28):
Okay.
So for an elite athlete Iwouldn't be as concerned about
spending more time in that, say,zone four or intensity factor
of 1.0, especially if they spendsome time at a bad altitude.
They're going to have to dothat, but you don't want to
super hang out there becausethat's the point at which you're

(13:48):
going to fatigue faster, so Iwant to stay under.
And then how much time at?
I actually haven't had an elitedo Leadville in some time, but
I would say no more than 75minutes of time spent at like a
1.0, and that's dosed throughoutthe whole time.
Yeah, for my non-elites, lessand don't again it's more like a

(14:10):
shit ton of time in zone threeyeah, okay, fair enough, all
right, so that now let's go tothe running side of it, right?

Speaker 1 (14:17):
so the the hallmark is, from a performance
determinant uh perspective, theelite athletes in a race like
that are running at the high endof their zone two or endurance
zone, for pretty much the entiretime more intense than the

(14:41):
descending, and if you break thefiles down, the climbs are at
about an intensity factor oflike 0.85, maybe 0.9 for some of
them.
The climbs are 30 minutes long,20 minutes long, things like
that, and you know four or fivechunks and the rest of the race
is at an intensity factor oflike 0.7 or 0.75.
So I guess my point is there'szero time spent at threshold and

(15:06):
not a lot of time even reallyall that close to it.
There might be five minutes atan intensity factor of 0.1 or
something like that.
So my point with the compareand contrast is, even when the
time domain is very similar, theperformance determinants or the
physiology that's elicitedduring the race can actually be
markedly different dependingupon we're picking running and

(15:28):
cycling.
But even if you lookintra-discipline, an eight-hour
cycling race orsix-and-a-half-hour cycling race
at the level of TR100 can bemarkedly different than another
type of six-and-a-half hourcycling race, in terms of how
the race actually plays out andwhat physiology is actually
elicited.

Speaker 2 (15:48):
Oh yeah, 100% agreed.
And as I'm sitting herethinking too, and then maybe
somebody will be like oh no,here's Keegan Swenson's file and
he had this much time at zonefour and five.

Speaker 1 (15:57):
There's always going to be somebody that does that.

Speaker 2 (15:59):
Yeah, there always will be.
But I think the other thingthat I think about is I'm like
visual too is two things.
One with cycling we, when werack up time and zone, it's very
stochastic, so right.
It can rack up over time and alot of spikes, right.
So that's different too,because it's like intermediate
or intermittent, as it goes.
And then, the second thing,three things.

(16:19):
Second thing is we have a tonof time descending where we're
not.

Speaker 1 (16:23):
Yeah, there's nothing zero.

Speaker 2 (16:25):
So we have this like kind of u-shaped curve when it
comes to a very high performingathlete in a race like this,
where it's a ton of time in zoneone, ton of time in zone four,
some up in five yeah, in thattime, ton of time in zone one.
Or recovery is coastingdownhill.
Where you guys are runningdownhill, yeah, they're much
more medium.
So that that polarization, thatcontrast is actually it not to

(16:49):
be overlooked when you'relooking at the performance
disciplines or the performanceindicators of what we're talking
about yeah.

Speaker 1 (16:56):
So the descents as opposed to, I'm gonna I'm gonna
try to use intensity factors andanchor points.
I think a lot of people that'llkind of resonate with.
So the the descents.
For a Hilly 100k I'm usingcanyons as an example because I
was just there he's gonna bearound 0.75 or 0.70 for the
elite athletes.

(17:16):
That's still Running at areasonable pace.
Yeah right, that's not zerowatts, not even close.

Speaker 2 (17:23):
It's not zero watts and I would say that, Leadville,
even I consider it not to betechnical, but if you're not
proficient descender it's alsonot zero watts, but for those
who are better at descending.

Speaker 1 (17:34):
Yeah, okay, so, so, anyway, my I forget the, my
exact point with that exercise.
Oh yeah, now I remember.
It's the set set, this basement, this ground floor principle of
what are the performancedeterminants in terms of how you
are actually going to gaugewhat is high-quality workouts.
And I think, from a coachingperspective, the first step in

(17:57):
that is know what the freakingdemands of the event are.
You and I have been throughcoaching hiring rounds, rounds,
and I can tell this storybecause it's been circulated
around the sphere for a while.
One of the screening tools thatwe use is to give people case
studies, and we give them a casestudy.
It's usually based off of one ofour real athletes and then they
go back and figure out atraining plan for them and they

(18:18):
describe that training plan tothe group and more often than
not, we'll have a decent handfulof potential candidates that
come back and they have thiselaborate plan with all these
intervals and structured thisand psychology, that, and I'm
going to do high intensity overhere and this is going to be a
three-minute interval and thenI'm going to change to three and
a half minute intervals and allthis kind of nuance.

(18:41):
And then you ask them what thetime duration of the event is,
and they usually flub it Verybasic.
This is the demand of the event.
It's a six hour event, it's anine hour event, it's a 12 hour
event, and then you can drillinto okay, well, how much time
are they spending in whateverintensity construction that you
want to come up with, whetherit's a zone based intensity, you
know construction, or heartrate, or power, or pace, or rpe

(19:04):
or whatever so anyway.
So my, my pathway right, themap that I'm reading at least,
to what is high quality trainingstarts out with what are the
freaking demands of the eventand what are the things that you
want to elicit in order toready the athlete for the
demands of that event yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:21):
In that, so at the very highest level, you're
ensuring that you have a goodplan to start from to work with.
Yeah, and that will trickledown.
Even though trick on economicsdoesn't work, this will trickle
down.
Sorry, let's not get intopolicy trickle down a proper
high quality training program toyour athlete.

Speaker 1 (19:43):
in my, my opinion, Okay, so now we can go into the
next component.
Right, let's just assume thatwe get the plan right.
Right, we have a good overallplan.
Now let's go to structure andto the individual sessions,
which I think the paper thatwe're referencing that I'll link
up in the show notes.

(20:03):
It's not its exclusiveorientation, but it's primary
orientation.
There's a lot of dialogue beingspent around how do you
organize a session or a seriesof sessions such that it elicits
a high quality training?
You can take the lead on thisone.
So, in your estimation andyou're figuring out, how do we

(20:26):
look at the individual sessionsand ensure that they are high
quality?

Speaker 2 (20:30):
Well, this goes back to my elevator pitch and to be
brief about it, and then you canwhittle some holes in it all
you want.
Once you have a good planpulled out of Coop's basement,
you can then create sessions.
Right, and let's say that youhave a planned session for the
day.
You communicate that to theathlete, goes and executes it.

(20:54):
Then you have a kind of adebriefing or some evaluation of
the athlete, uploads the fileand see if the RPE matches with
what we're trying to do or thepower of the pace, whatever.
Then I would then say that agood coach or a good coach
athlete process goes back to theplanning and preparation aspect

(21:14):
of it to say, okay, is thisreally doing what we want it to
be doing based on this overallgood, yes, and then we keep on
cycling down.

Speaker 1 (21:24):
Yes, and this is once again.
We got to come back to coaching.
Does the workout actually dowhat you want it to do?
So classic example JT Kearneyactually gave me this example
when we were talking about it ina podcast a long time ago, and
he probably did it to me when wewere in person.
He's like listen, I could giveyou a workout that would
absolutely floor you Like youwould be annihilated afterwards,

(21:49):
yet it probably wouldn't servethe purpose of eliciting any
sort of remote enduranceadaptation.
Let's just do this.
I want you to do 50 burpees,run 100 meters.
Do another 50 burpees, run back.
Do another 100 meters.
Do another 100 meters.
Do another 100 meters until youhave 1000 meters of distance

(22:09):
covered.
That would probably take anhour.
You would probably beabsolutely annihilated
afterwards.
Your heart rate would probablybe pretty high during that
entire session.
If you were just to not knowwhat was going on and then just
look at the heart rate responsefor it, it would look like a

(22:29):
hard endurance effort, right?
Yet it's not going toaccomplish anything that you
would remotely want toaccomplish in an endurance
application, right?
I use that as a silly example.
Nobody is actually doing that,but we do see you and I, both
professionals, long-timeprofessionals we do see sessions

(22:51):
that are designed and don'taccomplish the goal that they
were designed for.
And I'll give you a verypractical one that I see all the
time in the running sphere andI bet you see this in the
cycling sphere as well time inthe running sphere and I bet you
see this in the cycling sphereas well.
So you can elicit a vo2 maxadaptation in kind of two
fundamental ways you can do itthrough a shit ton of volume low
intensity volume and you can doit with a reasonable amount of

(23:16):
high intensity work.

Speaker 2 (23:17):
Now we're going to leave the zone 2 conversation in
the rear view mirror for nowbecause let's leave it there,
but some of the terms that I'vebeen using, if you want to use
it is you can push it upaerobically or you can pull it
up with intensity.
Yeah, sure, yeah, I thinkthat's totally fine.

Speaker 1 (23:35):
But on, on the intensity side of things, you
have to have two fundamentalcomponents the intensity has to
be high enough and you have tohave enough of it.
You might say that you needenough of it continuously and
that's a kind of debated nuancethat we'll shove that into the
corner for now as well.

(23:55):
And they've done a lot ofresearch on it.
In fact a lot of the originalresearch on this was done by a
trail runner, varonk Balat, andeverybody who's been training
for a long period of time willrecognize the BA 3030s right 30
seconds hard, 30 seconds easy,until you accumulate 12 minutes
or 20 minutes or whatever atintensity.
She did a lot of the originalresearch on it and I believe she

(24:17):
won the Gama trail race in like1982 or something like that
Long time ago.
Fun little factoid, anyway.
So my point with the highintensity side of it is you have
to have both the intensity sidecorrect as well as the volume
of that intensity side correctand through all of this research
it's about over 12 minutes.

(24:39):
You might be able to justify 10minutes for an early stage
athlete of time at intensityabove 90% of your VO2 max.
So the intensity side is above90% of your VO2 max and the time
that you need to eclipse isprobably 12, maybe 10 in some

(25:01):
cases, and you can come up withall kinds of architecture to do
that Two-minute intervals,three-minute intervals,
one-minute intervals, 30-secondintervals like the BA intervals,
four-minute intervals andthings like that but those two
fundamental things need to exist.
The error that we have bothseen that I see a lot in the
running side is 10 by one minutehard, one minute easy for a
good athlete, and that's notenough of the second component

(25:26):
for a good athlete and that'snot enough of the second
component the time and intensityto elicit enough of a response
for it to be a robust adaptation.

Speaker 2 (25:31):
Yeah, correct and I think the best way I can
describe this with my athletes,what I try to do is teach them
while I'm coaching and whenwe're talking about the reason
why we're using intervals to doVO2 max or whatever interval.
But VO2 max is interesting inthis response is because we call

(25:54):
this as aerobic crossover point, where, if you have continuous
exercise of around 75 secondsand longer, you start to pull in
oxygen or you start to becomeusing oxygen as a primary fuel
source over that 50% marker.
And this is that crossoverpoint of that continuous effort

(26:17):
that I show athletes where theystart to go a little bit more
aerobic and me and I could getfilleted for this because, no,
the glycolytic energy system issuper hot at 75 seconds and fair
, but that continuous, that'swhat we're really talking about.
So when I'm, the very minimumthat I would use for a great

(26:37):
interval is 90 seconds even,yeah, as a standalone interval
and that's setting aside likethe on off stuff right now.
But I use at least 90 secondsif I'm trying to do something
from a vo2 standpoint and then Imake sure that it's kind of
over 15 minutes.
I know 12, 15, whatever andthen I probably go up to 25
minutes total, with an asterisk.

Speaker 1 (26:59):
Yeah, I'm in zone per session so there, I mean for
the audience, that's that it'skind of getting lost in the
weeds.
Here there's a I describeworkout structure, a lot in
training essentials for ultrarunning, and what I'll do is
I'll link like an excerpt of howto design some of these

(27:20):
intervals in the show notes,because there's a reason why
I've set out the structure theway that I've set out the
structure, and the reason isbecause when you do any
combination of intervals you canprescribe a power output or a
pace output, but just by way ofthe combination of the interval

(27:44):
time, the recovery time and thenumber of intervals you're going
to get the athlete into theright intensity just by a
byproduct of that.
So there's a reason why.
There's a very deliberatereason why you see the structure
that you actually see, becauseeach one of the workouts is kind
of targeted at a specific pieceof the athlete's physiology.

(28:05):
Not that's the only thing thatgets developed continuum.
It's.
They're not, you know, buttonsthat we're pushing, it's their
knobs that we're turning up orlevers that we're gradually
dialing up or dialing down, butthey're very.
The architecture of any ofthose workouts is very
deliberately designed to hitboth the intensity component
that I mentioned earlier as wellas the volume of that intensity

(28:27):
, depending upon what we want todo throughout various pieces of
the season.
So my point is you don't needto be a physiologist to figure
out like, oh, you need over 12minutes at over 90% of your VO2
max.
If you just construct theworkout correctly, you can paint
by numbers to a certain extent,and this is what a lot of
coaches do.
They don't know the physiologybehind it.
They're just painting bynumbers from previous coaches.

(28:49):
Right, you can just paint bynumbers and you can achieve a
high quality session, if that'sthe thing that you actually want
to identify.

Speaker 2 (28:57):
Yeah, and don't church it up.
I think, like what does thatmean?
Don't church it?

Speaker 1 (29:02):
up, don't church it up.
I've never heard that phrase.

Speaker 2 (29:04):
Watch Joe D like what does that mean?
Don't church it up?

Speaker 1 (29:06):
don't church it.

Speaker 2 (29:06):
I've never heard that phrase watch show dirt man I
don't go to.
I don't go to church.
Well, no, you don't even needto go to church of it.
I don't church it up.
Don't make it fancier than.
Okay, got it.
And that's what I see coachesdo all the time.
They get it and you're made anod to that before.
It's like three minutes here,30 seconds here, two minutes
there.
It's like what the hell are youdoing?
it makes me want to bang my headagainst the wall training, like
effective training, is actuallymonotonous and kind of boring.

(29:28):
Like it can be boring right,and the longer I coach the more
I see that.
So I would say trainingprescription is easy or fast,
but actual coaching takes good.
That takes time Knowing what todeploy, building something
whatever 30 seconds for asession.

Speaker 1 (29:49):
Yeah, I recently had to do this because I think I
told you I'm working on this AIproject.
Yeah, and one of the engineersasked me to like categorize all
the workouts that I prescribe.
There's only like 20 of them.
I thought I had like hundredsof permutations of workouts and
I actually started looking at it.
I'm like, no, you know what.
Like probably 90% of thisprescription, or 95% of the

(30:13):
prescription, comes down to like30 workouts, not even 100, not
even close to 100.
Like 20, 30, where I can'tremember what the actual number
was.
I was like, oh man, this is way.
And then I was like, yeah, youknow, but though, I don't need
to complicate it more than thatyeah, it should be that simple.

Speaker 2 (30:31):
And then so if the listener is like, well, how come
, like we have all thesevariations on trainer road or uh
, zwift or I don't know what'sthe equivalent in your world, I
don't you'd go zwift couplingfor three hours on a customized
squiggly we don't do that, butthey're definitely.

Speaker 1 (30:47):
Yeah, I mean there, there's all different ways that
you can contrive these intervals, with different permutations of
the recovery, right?
Do you want to do a recovery,as they call it, float
recoveries in the track world?
Right?
You want to do a recovery at aslightly higher intensity?
Or do you want to, like,undulate the work period and do
like you know, one at 110percent of your threshold, the
next one at 106 percent of yourthreshold, and all this other.

(31:09):
So, anyway, they exist, butthey're not as codified as a
swift and some of the virtualcycling platforms have done yeah
, and I don't mean mean todiminish some of those other
platforms, because variety andentertainment leads to some
motivation.

Speaker 2 (31:26):
So if you want to do that once in a while, all good
to change it up, but I would sayBe honest about it.

Speaker 1 (31:31):
That's what I like.
If you're designing a workoutfor entertainment purposes or
you're creating a permutation ofa workout just for
entertainment purposes, just say, hey, this is different because
it's entertaining.
It's equally or slightly lesseffective than the original one,
but I just want a little bit ofright.
There's nothing wrong with that.
But don't like church it up, touse my new vocabulary.

(31:54):
Don't church it up and say, oh,glycolytic pathway, this and
lactate, and like like, come upwith with some stupid,
nonsensical answer of why it'sactually different.
Just be honest and say listen,I don't want to be boring.

Speaker 2 (32:07):
Here's one good example in the cycling world.
Saturday comes, got an athlete,we're in the shoulder season,
it's March, whatever.
And I say plan A, hit the groupride.
Plan B do this workout.
And it's intensive thresholdmix and it's just a compilation
of zone two and five.
This sounds like Adam's randomsandwich of workouts.

(32:30):
Yeah, it's a sandwich, right,but it's not a crazy sandwich.
And that's where, when it comesto intensity factors and time
in zone, I make sure.
But have like a copy of that, Ijust like tweak a couple things
here and there, make sure it'sappropriate for the athlete boom
, done, it's all it is butyou're on it, but you're honest
about it's not like you're notcoming up with, like oh, this is

(32:52):
the magic reason why thisworkout is here.
Like you're like this and you'remimicking the variety or the
stochastic nature of a groupride exactly because the way I
build that workout, theintensity factor is going to be
very close to what they'll getin the group ride overall and
the intensity, the absoluteintensities, may be higher on
the group ride.
It meant the average power maybe higher on the indoor

(33:15):
intensity mixture cocktailbecause they're not a coasting
yeah anyway okay, so back toperformance determinants well we
, so we went through that.

Speaker 1 (33:24):
Then we went through the workout construction, and my
honest, simple advice to peopleout there just go look at the
workout construction that'spublicly available that I've
come up with.
I'm not going to say that I'mthe only one out there that's
done it.
I beg borrowed and stealed frompeople before me, but I think
it's a pretty good synopsis ofif you wanted a high intensity
workout, here are your differentpermutations of it.

(33:46):
If you want a threshold eworkout, here's your different,
you know variations of it.
Like it's all out there andit's free, freely available.
Just start there.
You don't have to make.
You don't have to make it up.
Let's go to after the factthough, because I've started
putting a little bit moreemphasis on this to well, I'll
tell everybody why later, butI've been putting a lot more

(34:08):
emphasis on this after the factpiece to kind of elicit a high
quality training session.
But I want to know what you do.
I mean, I know what you dobecause we work together, but I
want to hear, I want thelisteners to hear, what you do
first, and then we can riff offof that a little bit what I do
first in in what so on the feet,on the feedback side of things.

(34:30):
So athlete goes and does aworkout, you obviously analyze
the file, right?
Yep?
What is the rest of thefeedback loop?
I don't want to take that forgranted.
Hold on, let's put a pin insomething Every file that comes
across the wire, for everysingle athlete that you coach,

(34:51):
gets some level of scrutiny.

Speaker 2 (34:53):
No, okay, which ones don't.
So that's a great question andI'm going to say no, like
straight up, but it is not true.
I would say so.
Here's why.
Great question, and I'm goingto say no, like straight up, but
it is not true.
I would say so.
Here's why yeah, I want to knowwhich ones don't.
Yeah, so when I start workingwith an athlete, I'll tell them
I'm going to over-communicate atthe very beginning, make sure
that you get educated, get up tospeed on how coaching works.

(35:15):
Then I make sure that they'regood, they're not confused and
we have a good rhythm going.
Then I make sure that they'regood, they're not confused and
we have a good rhythm going.
And I tell them that thesessions that we'll scrutinize
over, that we'll get feedbackover, are mostly structured
stuff, intensity stuff.
But even at the very beginning,if I see things in the aerobic
training side of things, we'regoing to press into that.

(35:38):
So I'll scan the zone two,endurance stuff, to make sure
we're on board there and I'llmake quick comments on great job
.
Yes, that was good, especiallyinitially.
But as I get going with myathletes, I'm not going to
comment, I'm not going to thumbsup on a zone two, three hour
ride Like you're a big girl.
You're a big boy.
You should be able to do that.

(35:58):
If there's a problem with it,make a comment on training peak,
send me a text message,whatever, but like that sort of
scrutiny doesn't get on my end,but you at least hold on yeah, I
think we're.

Speaker 1 (36:10):
Just we have different definitions of the
word scrutiny.
You're at least seeing thatthere's a three-hour ride there
oh yeah, so I guess like okay.
So my point is, let me rephraseit every single file that comes
across the wire gets some I'mgoing to emphasize this just so
we're on the same page somelevel of scrutiny.
Some of those files get a lotof scrutiny.

(36:32):
Some of those files get verylittle, maybe none, maybe
slightly above none and like soyou just check is the time there
is the average power,reasonable, right, that kind of
stuff yeah, so, okay.

Speaker 2 (36:45):
So to answer your point, or answer your question a
little bit more every week, I'mlike at least scanning, making
sure that there is like greenweek on training peaks, if not
green week why not?

Speaker 1 (36:57):
what color?

Speaker 2 (36:59):
If those who know training peaks, green means
great, you did it in terms ofthe volume.
Orange means somewhat in there.

Speaker 1 (37:06):
Red means you didn't do it before You're so off, I
love the people who gamify thepercentages once they know that
they can change them?
It's another topic.

Speaker 2 (37:16):
Once they know it's green all the time.
But the reality is it'sChristmas tree.

Speaker 1 (37:21):
There's stuff going on in people's lives Red, green,
yellow, blank whatever, okay,so make sure green.

Speaker 2 (37:30):
But then the way I also, I would say, house my data
and analyze my data.
Everything's going into whatI'm looking at in order to see
what athletes are doing from aTSS total volume, uh training
impulses on various uh short andlong-term levels, as well as
mean max power curves over time.

(37:50):
So on one sense, you could sayI look at every single second of
every single data piece that anathlete does, because that's
what a mean max power curveshows.
Meanwhile, the performancemanagement chart is the
athlete's story and theirresponses to it.
So, from a big data standpoint,I'm looking at stuff all the
time that influences them, andit's a very powerful way of

(38:17):
looking at it, and I thinkthat's what athletes need to
understand is, a coach doesn'tneed to go in every single day
and make comments every singleday.
They need to scan and then usebetter tools to faster evaluate
in order to give feedback onwhat they're doing.

Speaker 1 (38:28):
Yeah, the way I describe the process is zoom in
and then zoom out and then zoomback in again, so you get the
file.
You zoom into the file hey,what's going on here?
Okay, zoom back out how doesthat file fit in the big picture
of things?
And then zoom back in for thefeedback.
So let's get over the pedanticscrutiny vocabulary a little bit
.

Speaker 2 (38:48):
Don't get scrutiny, man.

Speaker 1 (38:51):
I'm going to figure out how to soften that up.
The next time we have aconversation about it.
Let's go through the feedbackloop, because I think this is
super important.
My point with the scrutiny sideof it is you're looking at the
files in some way, shape or form, right, you've got a structure,
you describe the structure inwhich you evaluate them, but
there is something there andother coaches are going to use a

(39:11):
different way of evaluatingtheir athletes' workouts and
things like that.
But I want to go through what areasonable run of show would be
from a feedback perspective.
So if all comes across the wire, let's just assume it's a group
ride, a race, important workout, something like that, something
where you have to apply somelevel of acute analysis to right

(39:33):
Something on that oneparticular one.
How are you orienting yourselfto provide the feedback to the
athlete in order to facilitatethis quality training?

Speaker 2 (39:45):
that was the origination of this podcast I
would say the first thing is Ilook at the comments.
So I read the comments actuallyand I used to not do that as
much, by the way.
More and more I read thecomments first, then I look at
the data, then I see the outline.
If there's no comments, I lookat data and the first question I
ask is how'd you feel?

(40:06):
What was perceived effort today?
How did the legs feel?
Those sort of questions variousiterations Kristen's made.
My wife has made a joke.
It's like the only question youknow is how'd your legs feel?
Because I'm just asking thatall the time.
But the perceived effort is soimportant because if I get data,
let's just say they freakingcrush it right, they hit all

(40:27):
these peak power numbers andthey just obliterated all the
time stuff.
All the Strava KOMs all the PRs,everything, all the medals, all
the crowns, male and femalecrowns they went so fast they
were stacking them up right.
But if they felt like shit,that is very different from I
felt awesome, yeah, right.

(40:48):
And now the story starts tounfold because if they felt like
poo, okay.
What about fueling?
If they felt great, what aboutfueling?
What about sleep, all this kindof stuff.
So I think first I readcomments I look for lately
training peaks has done.
They've been doing some coolstuff in terms of the frowny
faces, the smiley faces.

Speaker 1 (41:05):
I love the frowny faces and smiley faces.
I love it and it can go eitherway, like I love it frowny face
because it was super technical.

Speaker 2 (41:12):
I thought I was gonna die and oh my god.
But you know I was producinggood power I'm here for it
Versus man.
I was crushing that power.
I almost died a few times butthat was awesome, smile face, so
all.
And I call that qualitativedata because it's the quality of
how the quantitative data went.
So I'm first looking forqualitative, then I look at the

(41:34):
quantitative and if I have anyfurther questions I will reach
out to the athlete.
But I have a couple of varyingthings of.
I look at peak powers relative.
I will reach out to the athlete, but I have a couple of varying
things.
I look at peak powers relativeto where we're at right now and
then current time zone, to ifthat was the point of the
workout or not, to shape up howit went, and so that's that
first starting point.

Speaker 1 (41:53):
So that's first off.
I'm going to get to the nextpoint of this, but I want to
circle back on a couple ofreally cool points that you
mentioned.
You're starting with thesubjective or the qualitative
data, to use your vocabulary.
Even though you have cyclistswith power meters and you have
really good data, I mean I wouldsay with the vast majority of
those athletes you have reallygood data.
I mean, there's shit powermeters out there, just like

(42:15):
there's shit other technology.
But I think that's remarkablebecause you could very easily
say I'm going to go to theirbest five-minute power or I'm
going to go to the trainingstress score first, or I'm going
to look at what the powerduration curve looked like or
some technical component that isreadily and easily accessible

(42:37):
by virtue of having an onboardpower meter.
You're still coming back to theframework, starting with how
did you feel and then going tothe quantitative data from the
power meter and seeing ifthey're matching up or providing
some level of analysis betweenthe subjective and the objective

(42:58):
uh, and I'll see this like Iused to not do it that way.

Speaker 2 (43:01):
I used to kind of the opposite.
But the more I coached, themore I'm like I got this wrong.
It needs to.
It provides a better output.

Speaker 1 (43:10):
So I have to do that because our data is shit in
trail running.
If you learn how to readthrough the GPS files onto the
technicity of the surface whichkind of that's the biggest
obscuring factor with the datathat you're getting if you learn
how to do that, you can getreasonable information from the
gps files.

(43:30):
But I still start with thesubjective, almost as a it's
kind of where I have to, but Ialso think that it's the best,
the best framework.
In fact, my outstanding requestthat I've had for 20 years now
Dirk Friel, if you're listeningto this, please make this come
true 20 years, 20 years is Iwant to customize what I see

(43:54):
first in the email notificationsfrom Training Peaks.
So for the athletes that areout there, the coaches that are
out there that aren't listeningto this, that don't use training
peaks, there's thisnotification system that the
coaches get.
Adam Pulford has completed XYZworkout and the way that it
works is file gets uploaded,that file gets kind of held in a
queue for the post activitycomments to come through the
wire and then, after the queueexpires or the post activity

(44:17):
comments get entered, thattriggers this email off to the
athlete and to the coach.
That the workout's kind ofcompleted.
The structure of that email ishero metrics first time average
heart rate blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Post-activity comments second.
I have always wanted to be ableto customize those emails to
see the post-activity comments,the subjective data or the

(44:40):
qualitative data first, and thenthe hero metric second.
And I've never won that battleyet yeah, 20 years, dirk, come
on brother.

Speaker 2 (44:51):
Well, they should have a coach.
And then the athlete side,because that athlete said
they're just feeding kind of theego of the athlete with the
hero metric.
The coach.
I would say, yeah, if we canflip it, that that's a great
idea.
I never even thought about thatyou know what.

Speaker 1 (45:04):
I'll give another example.
I remember years ago, sunto andI don't like their watches, but
this is probably the mostingenious thing that they did.
They baked into the user flowwithin their watches this smiley
faced subjective feedback toolthat came up when you stopped
the workout.
So you go and do a workout, youhit the stop button and then it

(45:28):
asks you how your workout went,and you get, you can give it a
little smiley face rating, likeright then and there, which I
think is really powerful,because you've just finished and
that's the time that you shouldcompress the.
Okay, how did I feel like Iactually remember that now,
versus like 10 minutes later,when you're sitting down at your
computer after the file'suploaded and you get to, you

(45:50):
know, the keyboard, blah, blah,blah, like that, the just the
workflow, excuse me of doing it.
Right then and there.
I thought was really reallynifty.
Okay, let's get to the secondpart of this.
So we're both saying we're bothsamesies on this.
We go to the subjective firstand then the objective second

(46:10):
and see how they match up.
So I want to know what adampulfer does next.

Speaker 2 (46:14):
Oh, go ahead, sorry well, I was going to say, and
for audience members, becausecoop doesn't prepare anything
ahead of time, we didn't evencollab on that.
No, we didn't because I don't.

Speaker 1 (46:24):
There's certain guests where I know I can get
away with not having much of anoutline.
You're one.

Speaker 2 (46:28):
No, that's true and I love it when that stuff happens
, especially like in real time,because that's like a very good
indicator, like good indicatorthat we're on the right page and
also you better be on the rightstage two.

Speaker 1 (46:44):
Stage two okay.
So I want to know this are yougiving your athletes kudos?
For lack of a better word, Ihad to invoke the strava kudos a
little bit like, are you saying, like good job and then what's
the context?
Good job, bad job, and thenwhat's the context of that?
You know, like, are youwrapping it in with the data?
Is it meaningful to the process?
And somehow, like, how doesthat work?

(47:04):
Yeah, good question.

Speaker 2 (47:05):
I thought initially you were asking me if I follow
all my athletes on this problem.

Speaker 1 (47:11):
I don't.
I hate you.

Speaker 2 (47:12):
No, neither do I, man .
It's different, like honestly,it is different because there's
times where I would say I give,like kudos sandwiches.
That's a thing, because I want,like I I'm here to give you

(47:33):
feedback, I'm not here just tobe a cheerleader, but there's
going to be some cheerleadingthat goes on because I want you
to know that I care, I want youto know I see effort.
That's good.
So great workout today.
Benita, you need to get thatheart rate down during the
recovery periods a little bitmore.
So try a fan this is atechnical piece right.

(47:54):
There's a technical piece, but Ireally like the way that you
finished and it's usually, if Iin 30 seconds of assessing the
way I do things, it's usually akudos sandwich with a little
nugget of here's how to improveif we do.
But if they absolutely crushedit, everything's like, let's
just say, an interval workouttime.
In Zealand's great Recoveryperiods are cool.

(48:15):
75 minutes was prescribed andthey did 75 minutes in one
second because they're type A.
I love that Awesome workout.
Double kudos, double kudosthat's the way I do it.
Then the one asterisk here toois, I think, the way, and that's
like kind of on a per sessionbasis, but I would say like
quarterly, monthly.

(48:35):
For some of my athletes who areafter like big builds or stage
races or something like that, Ido what I call deep dives into
the data.
I do a Zoom recording where Ilook at their data and I
describe how things are beinginfluenced right now, what
they're doing well, what they'renot doing so well and then a
future forward of where we'reheaded.
So that's more analyticalthough.

Speaker 1 (48:58):
I like that framework that you do.
Since you and I have beenworking with the same athlete,
I've gotten to see it kind of upclose in person and I've
actually started doing it morejust solely based off of that
prompt you doing it.
I have a similar frameworkwhere I'll first off if the
workout's good.
It's good.
Job Like this is really hard.

(49:23):
If I always point out when I'mlike really pressing an athlete
which I do, like I prescribehard workouts and groups of hard
workouts.
There's no doubt about it.
Whenever it's reallychallenging, I always make it a
point that to point out that,yes, this is really challenging.
This is as much as I would giveanybody.

(49:44):
This is as much volume ofintensity that I would give any
elite athlete at any point ofthe year.
And you crushed it.
So they both know kind of thecontext of the overall workload
as well as the performancewithin that one particular
workout, whether it was good,bad or average.
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then the second piece of itis it's a little bit akin to

(50:07):
what you just mentioned is a lotof the feedback I wrap into the
context of what it means at thetime.
So we're building X, y, z atthis point of the year when we
move to another type ofintensity, it's going to be
supportive of that next type ofintensity, whatever that context
is.
I always want to keep a littlebit of a finger or make sure

(50:31):
that I'm communicating, to keepa finger on the pulse of that
particular athlete so theyunderstand where they are in the
entire process.
Particular athlete, so theykind of understand where they
are in the entire process,because a lot of people want to
be in 100 race shape year roundand that's just not the case,
like you can't and you shouldn'tbe and you shouldn't be doing
that.
So I think a lot of those liketouch points that really focus

(50:53):
on here's where you're at thisone particular time this is why
it's meaningful for you rightnow go a long way with the
buy-in process exactly, and Ithink to what we were talking
about before, where endurancetraining can be monotonous and
boring at times, the periodswhere training just to train or
general base period and thereason I use that it's a tim

(51:14):
cusick ism.

Speaker 2 (51:15):
I think it's wonderful because it's like it's
just a general training period.
We could do all the things,including jt kearney's burpee
barb fest well, I like that,we're gonna.

Speaker 1 (51:24):
We're gonna patent that name.
Sorry, jt, we took it.
I'll give you royalties on theback end perfect, thank you.

Speaker 2 (51:30):
And so to stay ahead of that for the athletes, yeah,
another four hour run likeanother one we're doing these
four hour runs, so that done,and then I use like on training
peaks or even in wko5 you can douh, like performance management
chart, like a future build, 45or 90 days, and you can just

(51:51):
model the fitness of what'sgonna happen.
If you build the training, sobuild the training.
Then they see, oh, my ctl isgonna go up to 112 by July, cool
, oh, that's why I'm doing it.

Speaker 1 (52:02):
Got it.
That's why the ATPs are so Ithink that their power, because
you and I we can coach withoutdoing annual training plans Fair
statement.
Just because we know We've beendoing it for so long, we're
like, okay, well, you have thiskind of race in July.
That means in April you'regoing to be doing this, and then
in February we've been throughthat routine so much, but it's

(52:22):
still important to get it onpaper in some form or fashion,
electronic paper in some form orfashion, mainly from a
communication tool to theathlete, like hey, here's a
heads up on what's coming up.
Yes, we are actually thinkingabout what is coming up in July,
august here's where yourlongest long runs are going to
be blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,whatever it is.
July, august, here's where yourlongest long runs are going to
be blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,whatever it is, even though we

(52:42):
know telling the athlete thatthis is what is coming down the
pipeline, even though it mightnot be like the most precise
thing, because you've always gotto adapt to training in our
forecasting.
I don't know about you, man,but my forecasting window it
doesn't extend beyond like twoweeks.

Speaker 2 (52:57):
I try to do four, but it doesn't work with everybody.

Speaker 1 (53:06):
Yeah, I try to do four, but it doesn't work with
everybody.
Yeah, I try to do four too, butI'm just like I'm just going to
do three, like you probablyused to build off of the
recovery cycles, right?
So just build from one recoverycycle to the next.
I might do that in like 10% ofcases.
Now I'm just I'm building to mylevel of comfort of what I can
predict.
That's the best way that I candescribe it.
I don't go into the thing saying, okay, I'm going to build out,
for I look at what's coming up,what are the anchor points?

(53:28):
Is it a race, is it a piece oftravel?
Is it?
I have to deload Whatever theanchor points coming up in the
calendar are, and I go, okay,I'm going to build to here, and
I don't do it based off of areligious.
I'm going to build three weeksor a month at a time, or to the
next phase or to the next raceor to whatever.

(53:50):
I'm literally looking at it andgoing I'm comfortable with
predicting this much and I'mgoing to build to here, and then
I still have to change it basedon whatever's going on in the
ground.

Speaker 2 (54:02):
Like it's just like Jesus and that's a workflow from
our end standpoint.
What I've been doing recentlyand it's helpful, I think, for
both the athlete and coach is Itell them I'll try my best to
build out in detail three tofour weeks in advance.
That helps you planning what'scoming and it helps us to see
what's going on.
But then I'll build out ingeneral maybe eight to 12 weeks,

(54:24):
and so what I'll do is justlike on the training peak says
like weekly goals.
I'll put in weekly goals.
We're doing intensive thresholddevelopment, volume increase
and two times strength trainingeach week.
That's what we're going to do,and so I'll have like that
general model out.
What I find is whether theathlete looks at it or not, if I
go in and I anchored at liketwo weeks and be like oh yeah,

(54:45):
that's what we were doing here.
Check the ATP, which took mefour minutes to build.

Speaker 1 (54:51):
Yeah, I make those.
Yeah, when you're actuallytyping, you do the done Really
dynamic build.
I don't want to.
I don't want to know that partof your workflow.
I guess my point is to kind oflike circle back on the high
quality training session ismaking sure that you are
continually reinforcing whereyou are in the plan and even if

(55:13):
you're designing your owntraining.
This is probably one of thebiggest mistakes athletes who
design their own training, whoeven know what they're doing
when they design their owntraining, actually do, is they
get lost in the daily detail ofI'm going to do this super hard
session or whatever, and theydon't zoom back out to where
that actually fits into theoverall master plan that you got

(55:35):
right from the beginning, whichis what we went through on the
ground floor of things.
I think excuse me, consistentlyreminding yourself of where you
are in the entirety ofeverything, the entire context
of everything.
I've got a huge race in Augustand I'm now in June, and what
does that mean?
That actually is reallypowerful in making sure that the

(55:56):
workouts actually sink in.

Speaker 2 (55:58):
Agreed, and as a young coach I used to do that
often where it's just like toofast coaching, I don't look back
on the plan, that I actuallyand I would say I overdid the
annual plan and then I wouldn'tremind myself of it.

Speaker 1 (56:10):
And I would just be in a hurry of building a week
Like I was a terrible coach.
I have one, one other thing interms of how to create a high
quality training that I'vestarted emphasizing more with my
athletes, so I'll go through itand I'll get your take on it
and that's to leave space afterthe workout is done to
physically andpsycho-emotionally wind down and

(56:33):
chill the F out.
And it's way easier to do withthe elite athletes that you and
I work with because that's whattheir job is than it is with the
normal people who have to goback to soccer practice or go
back to the office, or they'vegot an hour to work out and
they're going to freakingshoehorn that 55 minutes of a
workout and their hour-longlunch break, but just reserving

(56:54):
a little bit of time afterwardsto go from, especially during
the hard workouts, to go fromfight or flight mode, where
you're just like crushingyourself, to okay, I'm just
going to sit here for three orfour minutes and just like wind
down and realize that I'm notworking out anymore.
I've started to emphasize thatmore with my athletes, just as

(57:16):
it's almost a way to enhance theadaptive response right,
because you have all thisstimulus and it kind of doesn't
mean anything if you don'tachieve the adaptations, right.
Just going back to the JTworkout analogy.
You can create a huge stimulusand not get any adaptation from
it for a whole variety ofreasons.
Well, one of those variety ofreasons that you're not getting

(57:38):
the adaptation from it is thatyou're not leaving any space
between the end of the workoutand when you're going to
transition back into normal life.
I've just I've started seeingmore research and just found
other practitioners in the areathat have started to focus on
this more, and I've started toincorporate it a little bit more
and kind of the instructivepart of how to actually execute

(58:01):
a workout is yeah, go do theworkout, this is the pace, this
is the RPE, this is blah, blah,blah.
But afterwards chill out fortwo to three minutes and don't
do anything, don't turn yourphone on, don't open up Strava
to see how many KOMs you justgot.
Like, just sit there for a fewminutes and chill out and then

(58:21):
transition to the next part ofyour day it's beautiful.

Speaker 2 (58:23):
I've been doing the same thing and when I I tell my
athletes two things, tell meremember that stress plus rest
equals adaptation.
Stressing is the training,resting is really everything
else.
Adaptation is the goal.
And then say well, I have twohours to train, got two hours,
let's train for 100 minutes.
Because I want to take five ofthose minutes just to like.
I tell them lay at the foot ofyour bed, or lay on your bed and

(58:48):
put your legs up against thewall, or lay at the foot of the
couch and put your legs up onthe couch.

Speaker 1 (58:53):
It's so dumb, but it just makes them sit still.

Speaker 2 (58:57):
Just sit still.
And there are people like, whatabout my Norma text?
It's like cool, but still justsit still, like.
And there are people like, whatabout my norma text?
It's like cool, but like thewhole setup is gonna take longer
than what I want you to do, andso it's almost like some
mindfulness and meditation, butit's also resting and relaxing.
Do that for five minutes, takea quick shower, get some food
way to go, rather than as a timetrial on to life, which

(59:17):
everybody ends up doing toooften self-included.
But I would say, when I do itright and when my athletes do it
right, we get a betteradaptation.

Speaker 1 (59:26):
Yeah, and there's once again there's like
reasonable research to suggestthat that is actually true.
But this is something I don'tknow if you're ever going to
like randomize control, trial,something like this, because
it's just so hard to execute inthe research world that you've
got to go off of just a littlebit of okay, what is a
reasonable best practice.

(59:46):
I just think that space andthis is an, I think, statement
in full effort of fulldisclosure I just think that you
get a better, a more robustadaptive response if you just
give a little bit of time, alittle bit of time, especially
after the hard workouts or thelong workouts, to just chill for
like three to five minutes.

(01:00:08):
It doesn't take long, just afew minutes.
And however you want to do it,put your legs up against the
wall, meditate.
I've got athletes that domindfulness practice like kind
of like right then and then, ora breathing exercise.
I kind of don't care what theconduit is right.
All those things are conduitsto the exact same goal, which is
just chilling out, right, aslong as you're just chilling out

(01:00:28):
and not focusing on doinganything.
I think that is.
I think it's a worthwhileenough practice that we should
almost bake it into the trainingprocess.
Maybe we can come up with likea segment in the workout builder
.
It's like chill the F outsegment.
Final step stare at the wall.
I'm good with that.
You can like transition your,what transition your?

(01:00:50):
Watch onto it.
We're on.

Speaker 2 (01:00:52):
we're onto something there.
For sure Kristen will like mywife again, like I'll be sitting
there like, like, what are youdoing?

Speaker 1 (01:00:59):
I'm like staring at the wall, like I'll be sitting
there, like, like, what are youdoing?
I'm like staring at the wall.
Yeah, I'm adapting, I'machieving.
No, that's what you can say.
I'm getting a more adaptiveresponse.
That's exactly what you do.
Okay, let's pivot, because Iwanted to talk to this about,
talk with you about this on airHigh performance coaching model.
I'll make a bold statement.

(01:01:20):
I am hell bent on bringing thisto trail and ultra running.
I'm going to leave links in theshow notes to a couple of other
podcasts that I've done on thistopic.
I think this is.
I mean, I've dedicated, I think, two or three of them just to
this.
It's not anything new.
I'm not inventing anything thatI'm going to take a lick of
credit for.

(01:01:40):
It's been around for a longtime and it's incredibly
effective when done right.
It's not easy to do it right,and I've just started to roll it
out with, oh, maybe four orfive of my elite athletes, and
so for the listeners out therethat won't go and listen to the
previous podcast just to getthis context, I'll give you the
too long didn't read TLDR.

(01:02:01):
Is that what that stands?

Speaker 2 (01:02:01):
for.

Speaker 1 (01:02:02):
Too long didn't read a summary, the synopsis, the
nickel version is you, insteadof one coach, me being
everything to the athlete.
I'm the sport programming coach, I'm the run coach, right?
I'm the sports psychologist,I'm the sports nutritionist.
I try to stay in my lane withall of these various things that

(01:02:25):
inevitably go into athleteperformance.
Instead of one person doingthat, we bring a whole team of
professionals, a whole team ofdomain experts, and wrap them
around the athlete.
So I would do the runprogramming.
I bring in a specific strengthtraining coach, bring in a
physical therapist, we bring ina nutrition coach, we bring in
mental skills and they all dotheir little part and we're

(01:02:47):
coordinated in all of ourefforts.
I'm convinced that it'sremarkably effective in the
sport application that I'm inright now, which is tronal
training.
We've seen it be effective inother sports, but you have to do

(01:03:09):
it to see the proof point.
I've seen enough of a proofpoint that I'm going to figure
out how to formalize it as aproduct that people can buy.
So it's not so ad hoc, but itworks exactly the way that I
describe it.
An athlete comes in and I tryto figure out if they're a good
candidate for it first and ifthey are a good candidate for it

(01:03:30):
, then I start going through mydigital Rolodex of practitioners
that I've used over the years.
Some of them are CTS coaches,some of them are people that I
just know.
Some of them, the athletealready has on board.
That is the case every once ina while where they'll have a
nutrition professional thatthey've worked with in the past,
and then we just add people tothe mix and then we all become
coordinated at some point.

(01:03:51):
And the genesis for me as acoach and I think this
illustrates the point quite wellis when I was doing a year-end
evaluation with one of myathletes who's already very good
, and this athlete was asking mehow do I get better?
And I had to be very upfront.
I'm like, listen, I can onlymove the physiological needle.
So much You're already reallygood and sure, we're going to

(01:04:14):
push and pull on all thesephysiological levers and use
good training and all the thingsthat we just talked about for
the last hour.
Adam, sure, I can do that, butat a certain point you got to
realize how very marginallylimited that is going to be, and
the proposition that I came upwith was you are going to

(01:04:34):
improve just as much, if notmore, in all of the other areas
as otherwise specified.
Day-to-day nutrition, race daynutrition, psychology.
Even equipment can make a.
I know you guys talk about thisin the cycling world a lot, but
we don't talk about it nearlyenough in the running world.
Even equipment can make apretty impactful difference when

(01:04:55):
you get it right.
Sports psychology, all of thosekind of like things that we
typically think about as duties,as otherwise specified, they
are going to make a biggerdifference in your performance
improvement than what I can doon the training side.
And so, since that's theproposition, here's the solution
we're going to bring the bestpeople into this ecosystem of

(01:05:17):
you and they're all going to bethis is going to be your team so
that you can continue toimprove, because I'm not that
I'm like at the very end of mylimitation, but I'm getting
closer.
I'm very acutely aware of that.
That's the genesis of it, atleast with me personally, is
working with professionalathletes and them asking me how

(01:05:38):
am I going to get better?
Me realizing that the runprogramming gets more and more
limited in that capacity and thethings is otherwise specified
are going to take up a biggerproportion of the improvement
pie, so to speak.

Speaker 2 (01:05:50):
Yeah, and I think too , it takes a mature coach to
realize that, to say I can onlydo so much, let's get other
people on board, so I thinkthat's good.
Second is ultra running.
I can only do so much, let'sget other people on board, so I
think that's good.
Second is ultra running.
You guys and gals are justyou're younger, right Like you
don't have.

Speaker 1 (01:06:07):
You're shaping this world, so younger is a sport, is
what you mean.

Speaker 2 (01:06:13):
Yeah, younger in sport.

Speaker 1 (01:06:14):
Not you're.
I think you're even older.
We're like 10 years behind.
Everybody else's is usuallywithin with any of these things
Like these high performancemodels have been around at least
have been around in othersports for like well over a
decade.
And I continually and peoplewho have that other sporting
context I don't have to describethis as elaborately because
they know, but that's relativelyrare in the ultra running

(01:06:37):
sphere and I have to take timeto like okay, this is how it
works, like we've got this andthat.

Speaker 2 (01:06:44):
And even when you brought it up to me I was like,
why do you guys not have this?
But then I'm like, oh yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:06:48):
Oh yeah, so we're 10 years behind everything.

Speaker 2 (01:06:51):
So, like my like quick background, I mean, look
at Red Bull athletes.
Yeah, look at the structurethere.
Read anything about them.
That's really what we'retalking about on the cycling
side of things.
We have it established, but itis just, it's like messy there's
.
I've been parts of organizationsthat have got it dialed and
it's awesome.
And I'm part of some of thoseorganizations right now and I've

(01:07:13):
got some organizations whereit's just a hot pile of stinky
flies everywhere.
So and I'm like and it'sfrustrating, but in the hype, in
like the ones that are workingreally well, it's awesome.
Athletes are just like finetune going everywhere.
This other one athletes can berunning into each other and so

(01:07:33):
it's not so much staying in yourlane, it's about getting the
specialists in so that they cango deeper for that high
performance athlete.
But I think our role as coacheswe need to be specialists in
endurance, athlete programmingand coaches, but we need to know
how all those specialistsorchestrate and work together,

(01:07:54):
and so we need to become alittle bit of a generalist in
that sense to keep that likething flowing.

Speaker 1 (01:07:59):
Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree, it's it.
It's been a really humblingexperience too, because all of
these things that I used to dofor my athletes and I still do
with some athletes the nutritionprogramming not not so much on
the day-to-day piece, but therace nutrition programming I'm,
you know, I'd say I'm heavilyinvolved with a lot of my
athletes and or some of thestrength training pieces.

(01:08:21):
I just realized how terrible Iam at that compared to the
professionals, compared to thepeople who are like actual
domain experts and do it for aliving.
And I would say that I'msomebody and you know this about
me, adam when I did do a lot ofthose things, I made sure that
I knew my shit.
When I was doing a lot ofstrength training program, I was

(01:08:44):
in the gym.
I was in the gym teachingpeople how to freaking squat and
how to deadlift and how to doan overhead press and all these
other things, and I would do italongside of just like a
personal trainer, and then I'dlook at how to program.
We'd go over to CSCS or theNSCA and we do specific, you
know, endurance, strengthtraining programming.
It's not like I'm just likecopy pasting from where.
What are you pointing me fordid you get up to 400 pounds on
your deadlift?
410 or 4?

(01:09:05):
I'm gonna get stuck like rightbelow 430.

Speaker 2 (01:09:08):
I'm not gonna be able to bridge the last yeah, like
seeing you, whether it was I waspulling pretty good, I was like
you're not broken yet.

Speaker 1 (01:09:15):
Keep going, man, I was pulling, it's gonna take it
would take me like four years toget up to 500, and I'm not
willing to like do it that much.
I cheat, though, and I do sumo,so people always.

Speaker 2 (01:09:27):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:09:28):
There's a lot, yeah, I know Anyway, um, but my point
with that is is I'm just notmaking shit up Right, I tried to
do as best as I can and evenwith all of that, I realized
that it's different if I bringin somebody who's been doing it
for for 15 years.
The other thing and I didn'tanticipate this, and this is not
relevant to the athletes, butit's actually relevant to the

(01:09:48):
coaches it makes me moreefficient because I can punt.
I can punt that stuff.
I'm just like what does Stephsay?
Steph is one of the go-tonutrition people.
Stephanie Howe, a lot oflisteners will recognize she's
one of.
She's not the only one, butshe's one of the nutrition
professionals that I've startedusing in these groups.
Steph, you figure this out.

(01:10:09):
Punt to you and I don't have todeal with it.
Just give me the nickel version, give me the synopsis.
You want strength training?
Okay, sarah Scazzaro or NicoleRasmussen, two of our coaches.
They both have fantasticstrength backgrounds.
I can punt that over to themand they can spend all the time
doing the programming, gettingthe feedback and sending the
videos back and forth and allthat other stuff that frees me

(01:10:30):
up to do what I really do well,which is communicate with the
athletes and do the runprogramming.
It takes me out of the thingsthat I'm not so good at or I'm
below average at or average at,and puts me more into the things
that I'm really good at, whichI think is, just professionally,
actually really super rewardingreally good at, which I think

(01:10:51):
is just professionally, actuallyreally super rewarding.

Speaker 2 (01:10:52):
Yeah, and so when we have an athlete like at this
level and it could be an eliteathlete or it could be just a
serious amateur too, in myopinion yeah, once you've
identified that they are at thislevel, it I think this concept
makes a ton of sense andincorporate all these people in,
similar to, I don't know, ageneral practitioner, the
cardiologist.

(01:11:12):
The medical world has some ofthese aspects of it too coming
in.
It's a whole defunct thing,especially here in america, but
from that concept it shouldn'tbe like super crazy.
Just know that, you know.
However, you kind of do this.
It's like if you want that nextlevel, like you know, be ready
to pay for it in some form orfashion, and if you're super

(01:11:34):
into it, if this is your thing,let's go, because these people
exist and it's become superefficient.
And, in my opinion, I would say, too, what's going to come down
to that some sort of AI willbecome part of a high
performance team as coaches.
I want it to because I think,just like Stephanie helping you

(01:11:55):
out, it's going to make you moreefficient.

Speaker 1 (01:11:57):
Yeah, the AI tool that I've been working on, adam,
it's not to let the cat out ofthe bag too early because we're
still a long ways off, but itgets the programming side like
90 of what I would do, becauseit's modeled after me and it
uses both like algorithmic typeof logic as well as what what
traditional ai would be, andit's kind of scary.

(01:12:20):
It's like I I actually wouldpro, like given the situation,
like when we've been testing, Iwas like I would program that,
yeah, I might change this thingwhen this one one workout here
or 10 minutes over there orwhatever, like based off of
whatever bias that I'm cominginto the day with.
But it's remarkable, it'sremarkably good.
I want to kind of go back,though, to the for me.

Speaker 2 (01:12:40):
I'm like I want to chat apt.
Yeah, bring it on.

Speaker 1 (01:12:43):
Yeah, bring it I, I think I.
This is neither here nor there.
I think that once people startto figure it out, the bottom 20%
of the coaching market and whatI mean by that is is like the,
the kind of like the mill housecoaching.
That's just like programbuilding and not coaching Right
that just goes away and getsreplaced, or 90% of it just goes

(01:13:03):
away.

Speaker 2 (01:13:04):
Static program yeah, All that's.
It's all gone Cause it's asuperior product, One asterisk.
So in case listeners were likethat guy's an idiot, it's chat
GPT.
I threw in a quick joke ChatAPT and Holford Training Systems
would be my tool, that I woulddevelop.

Speaker 1 (01:13:19):
Anyway, let's move on .
I'll have another conversationabout AI with somebody Coop's
like we're gonna edit.
I mean, I've been very publicthat I've been working on this
and I don't think I have to likefrom a business perspective,
like try to be all, like work onit in a black box and then
reveal it all Like I don't careif somebody beats me,
everybody's working on it.
Yeah, everybody's working on it.

(01:13:40):
I won't have first moverposition, I understand that, uh,
but I think I'll have the bestmover position once this thing
gets up and running, whichthat's another story, anyway.
So, okay, let's go back to thisvalue proposition, right?
So I agree with you on the like, the Intuit, amateur side, that
some of the value that they getout of it is they're just all

(01:14:03):
in right and this is just a wayfor them to be all in.
It might not produce likesuperior results, or maybe it's
very marginally superior ascompared to them.
Just training, right, like foran amateur, meaning if you just
did it versus you wrapped awhole team around some high

(01:14:23):
level amateur and then you couldcompare a, b, compare the
results.
Maybe the high performancething is a little bit better
like, maybe not, maybe it'smarginal or whatever.
But you have a hard time makingthe case because, unlike the
situation that I originallypresented you with, where the
things, is otherwise specified,constitute a bigger piece of the

(01:14:46):
pie than the programming withthe amateur, the programming
with the amateur, theprogramming still can dominate
the improvement, the improvementside of things, I think on the
professional side of things,where one to two percent
absolutely makes a differenceand you can go to any freaking
race and ultra running isstarting to get this way.
You can dissect the top 10 on afew percentage points.

(01:15:10):
That is absolutely.
That becomes absolutelymaterial at the end of the day.
Western States 100, top 10might be separated by 30 or 40
minutes.
In a 15 hour race that's not alot.
And when you get down to thoselike small fractions is where
you need to kind of uncoverevery rock and stone and you

(01:15:31):
know, look underneath the mossand try to find, you know,
whatever else is kind of it andit does.
I mean we, we give we give theterm marginal gains a little bit
of a bad rap.
But there's a time and a placeto where all those little
marginal things actually add upto something that is meaningful
from a performance standpoint,and it's when the differential

(01:15:51):
in the performances betweenfirst, second, third and fourth
is so small.
That's where it can actuallymake a material difference.

Speaker 2 (01:15:57):
Yeah, I fully agree on the professional athlete side
of things.
Professional athletes need this, in my opinion, and I think
that like needs a strong wordman.

Speaker 1 (01:16:08):
Oh need I like that no, I mean man.

Speaker 2 (01:16:11):
Again you're, I'm coming at the lens of cycling.
Yeah y'all are.

Speaker 1 (01:16:15):
It's a requirement.
I mean, it's a requirement likethe higher up you go.

Speaker 2 (01:16:18):
Yeah, you need that, otherwise what are you doing?
You can't compete, you justlike.
You literally can't compete,yeah, you're edged out.
And then, to that point, foranybody listening, here too,
I've been leading some of theseteams where I am like the
generalist and I'm getting thespecialist to come in and do
this, and it's really hard toorchestrate unless you have some

(01:16:41):
of those ties and connections.
Yeah, I chose the coachingrealm of things and it makes me
more happy.
But I would say theprofessional athlete side of
things.
In an amateur, I think it goesdown to like identifying,
because, whether they're pro oramateur, identify when they need
that team.
Because when the professionalathlete is still aspiring, it's
like, ah, you got somedevelopment to go, I can take

(01:17:03):
this.
Identify when they need this.
If the amateur is like I justwant to learn as fast as
possible, you're ready, like Iwant it.
It's like you're not going tobenefit from it, I want it
anyway.
Cool, here you go, I want it.
You're not going to benefitfrom it, okay.
Well, when in a year?
Okay, yeah.
So it comes down to us beingthe filter of it.

Speaker 1 (01:17:21):
Yeah, I have actually had to do that with a few
athletes that a few more kind oflike recent athletes that I
brought on board.
Now that I have a template forit and I kind of have a choice,
like do I just coach them or doI kind of like wrap a team
around them and it?
And it is a choice and you'vegot to suss it out in terms of
is it beneficial, is itnecessary, do you want to get

(01:17:42):
ahead of it, you know, so thatthey're used to the program or
whatever.
And I have not gotten thatequation 100% correct.
I will say it's not that it'slike egregiously, like difficult
or anything like that, butespecially with the new athlete,
you don't always know howthey're going to react to things
until you actually put them init.
And because of that, becausethat human equation is so

(01:18:07):
unpredictable, sometimes youjust get that evaluation wrong.
And I've done that at least oncewith these, where I put
somebody in team and just wasn'tthe right kind of fit for
anybody.
I wasn't the right coach forthem, team wasn't the right team
for them.
The whole kind of thing didn'twork out, and that's fine.
Some of that's on me in termsof not assessing up the
situation, but I do think to useyour cycling analogy, I think

(01:18:32):
this is a bold prediction.
We can come back three yearsfrom now and see if this comes
true.
I think that three years fromnow, it's going to be a
requirement in the ultra runningside, just like it is a
requirement on the cycling side.

Speaker 2 (01:18:47):
I am on the very cusp of ultra running world and I
would say, why not two years?
Why not?

Speaker 1 (01:18:58):
We need a little bit of time.
I think the first thing isthere's absolutely an economic
component to this where theathletes have to be able to
afford it, and that it's notuniversally true quite yet.
Now that's going to come aroundand it's you know how these
things go.
I mean, you see it, on thecycling side, it works way

(01:19:18):
slower than anybody wants it to,in terms of how people upgrade
their individual pay and how thewhole ecosystem gets, you know,
upgraded in their pay andthings like that.
That's gradually happening inultra running and that gets
upgraded in their pay and thingslike that.
That's gradually happening inultra running.
And then that economic realitywill be the case more
universally in a few years.
I'm convinced of that, but itis not there now.

(01:19:38):
I mean, they just don't earnenough money to be able to spend
one or two grand a month onprofessional services, which is
about what it takes.
But the other side of it is, Istill think that just from a
performance perspective, there'sjust a little bit more tide
that needs to get turned.
There are some athletes that doit, athletes that I don't coach,
that do it themselves.

(01:19:58):
Tom Evans, who was the WesternStates champion last year.
He's been very public about it.
I have nothing to do with Tom'scoaching, but he has a
fantastic team around him and hedid it himself right.
The athlete like this is goingto be my coach and this is going
to be my nutritionist, this isgoing to be this and this is
going to be that, and hecoordinates them all.
He acts as like the highperformance coordinator.
So it does exist in certainflavors and you'll see more of

(01:20:23):
it, but it's just going to taketime because the performance
context just has to, just likeanything else.
It just has to season up alittle bit and mature, but it's
cool to see develop.
To be honest with you, like youknow, five years ago I couldn't
even get people to do coaching,maybe a little bit longer than
five years ago, maybe seven oreight years ago.
I can't even get people to docoaching.
It was hard like people like Idon't need, I just need to run

(01:20:45):
more, which is not.

Speaker 2 (01:20:47):
I remember sitting in on meetings about that.
It was like how we're going toactually charge runners for
coaching because they like balkat a 20 entry fee to a race.
On the cycling side of things Ishould clarify road cycling has
this as a culture make kind ofa mainstream for the elite
athletes.

Speaker 1 (01:21:05):
The teams direct it.
I think that's an importantdistinction.
The teams dictate it, so youget onto a professional cycling
team and the team actually hasall the services available.
Good teams, yeah exactly Goodteams.

Speaker 2 (01:21:17):
And when you go off-road, that's when things
vary.
If you actually have a teammountain biking they will.
There's good teams and not sogood teams.
High-funded teams, I should say, and teams and not so good
teams, high funded teams, Ishould say, and then not high
funded teams.
And then you go into the wildwest black hole of gravel racing
and you I could provideexamples of everybody doing
anything from what we're talkingabout, a high-end, very

(01:21:38):
professional, and then thepeople who are like I don't know
, probably smoking peyote, outin patagonia, showing up to bwr
and crushing it you know, what'sfunny, as an analogy to that,
before we wrap up, is some ofthe brands in on the trail
running side have tried to dothis, Most notably Solomon, and
I've had a Gimier who's been thekind of head of this program.

Speaker 1 (01:22:00):
I've had him on my podcast twice one of them to
talk about this veryspecifically and it hasn't been
a universal sell.
You know it's hard for thebrands to do it and I'll give a
really good, just a reallypoignant example of this to try
to illustrate it.
The brands are caught in thisposition where they are the
employer and when youremployment tie is also the same

(01:22:26):
entity that is providing some ofthe performance services, the
athletes are kind of hesitant,or can be hesitant, to engage in
those performance servicesbecause they might not want to
know that the sportspsychologist that they're
talking to is getting paid bytheir employer.

(01:22:46):
They might not want to engagein physiological testing that
might show that they're aninferior athlete or whatever
kind of like conjured up intheir head when it's getting
paid for by the brand that isactually paying their salary.
There's like some hesitation.
There's some hesitation there.
Now, I don't think that'swarranted.
I don't think any of the brandswould be using some of this
high performance context to makeeconomic decisions.

(01:23:07):
Who's getting contracts, who'sgetting support, who's not
getting support?
I think that they're genuinely.
I believe that they'regenuinely doing this in the
betterment of the athletes, butbecause of that potential
conflict right, Just thepotential conflict I'm not
convinced that it's the bestsetup.
I think that the best setup isfor an independent group of

(01:23:28):
coach like me who my sole charge?
I want to see athletes perform.
I have no other agenda.
I don't have a marketing agenda.
I don't have, I don't.
You know, I certainly don't paythe athletes Like I.
I my agenda is an athlete comesto me I want to win a race,
Okay, let's go do it.
That's my agenda period.
I think that is the most pureway to set these things up,

(01:23:51):
where they're unadulterated andunencumbered by any of the other
nonsense that can float aroundthings.
And you even see this on thecycling side, where it's very
professionalized, where thatconflict between one area
marketing, finance or whateverand the coaching side or the
performance side.
That's where the conflictactually arises.

(01:24:12):
So I kind of take that as alittle bit of a cue as I've been
navigating this space on theultra running side of things,
where I just think the rightvehicle for it is to exist
outside of the brands and withinsomething else, that's more of
a coaching entity.
So anyway, I don't know if youhad any thoughts on that, just

(01:24:32):
based on your experience on thecycling side, in terms of how
the team is actually gettingfacilitated, whether it's
through a brand, through a team,or where the athletes are
actually doing it themselves.

Speaker 2 (01:24:44):
Yeah, it can be a little bit of both and I would
say some of the most, some oflike the best ways with, because
on teams where I've beenassociated with and somebody has

(01:25:13):
to share their training peaks,the athletes are even like share
with who?

Speaker 1 (01:25:17):
yeah, that sort of thing, they're not even
exchanging dollars, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:25:20):
so when the, when the athlete has autonomy and trust,
and who's ever going on?
And that's why I agree with youthat an autonomous, standalone
coaching company that has areputation of high performance,
that's great.
And if that funding can comefrom a governing body or the
team itself, that's good.

(01:25:41):
So if Solomon gives $500 amonth to Jane Schmo to pay you,
that would be great bucks amonth to jane schmoe to pay you.

Speaker 1 (01:25:52):
That would be great.
Um, I don't know.
I mean I don't know.
I don't know how everything'sgoing to get routed and I'm sure
it's not going to be universal,whether the athletes pay for it
or the brands pay for it, orthe athletes pay for it through
the brands or whatever thateconomy.
I, in my framework, I'm beingreally transparent on this
podcast, but I'm figuring thisout in my framework.
I'm figuring out the economy.
Last, I'm figuring out all theother performance stuff.

(01:26:14):
First, I'm like how do I set upa team?
Who's the right person for ateam?
Who are the right people I want, like in these teams, who's
going to work together?
Well, like, how are we going toexchange the data?
How are we going to betransparent?
I'm figuring all that crap outright now and then I'm just
going to figure out the economicreality of it later.
I'm kicking that can like fardown the road because I want it
to work first, and then I justknow I'll be.

(01:26:36):
I just know I have a hunch of agood hunch that I'll be able to
model it out second.
But I'm not concerned with thatright now.
I'm not starting with yourprototypical like oh, I've got a
thousand dollar widget, let'sfigure out who to sell it to.
I'm figuring out how it worksfirst and then figuring out the
reality of it second, or theeconomic reality.

Speaker 2 (01:26:54):
Second, yeah, as long as someone you or whoever can
handle that economically tofigure it out, that's what an
entrepreneur does, that's whatsomebody making something,
that's what a craftsman does,and it's the better way because
you'll get buy-in over the longrun versus selling the widget,
pissing a bunch of people offand that sort of thing.
And I think that in thecoaching world we've had to do

(01:27:16):
that in some sense, where I'llgive you one example, one of the
elite athletes I work with.
Initially I was like, hey, I'mnot doing this for free, so here
we go, what comes from thegoverning body.
It was like, yeah, because theyhave, so she could have a
strength coach, a psychologist,a nutritionist.
They had allotment for all that, but because they had coaches

(01:27:37):
on staff, on like the governingbody, they couldn't hire out so
we had to like kind of backchannel a little bit, shoehorn
you into the psychologist sideof it, and so what?
you did, so it like do whateverit takes, but I think, like you
know, get results, be open aboutit, be, and the rest will

(01:27:59):
figure itself out.
But I think for anybody in theultra running world just look at
red bull, look at the roadcycling side of things it's not
perfect but like, the structureis there yeah and if you want
the highest performance, youwill have to go to those high
levels and get more peopleinvolved to get those
percentages.

Speaker 1 (01:28:16):
My opinion I, I'm I modeled.
I've modeled it kind of afterlike five or six different key
ones.
I remember I drew this all upon a whiteboard one day when I
was going to figure it out and I, way over, complicated,
iticated it because I'm likethis exists and here are the
people that I know and here'swhat I think are the most
impactful.
I picked four or five differentcategories and I'm like this is
what I'm going to do and, veryfortunately, I already had the

(01:28:39):
people, the professionals that Iknew were really good and that
I personally trusted.
That was actually a big part ofit is like I had to like
personally trust therecommendations that I was
giving to the athlete, becauseit still falls back on me, right
?
So if an athlete comes to meand says, okay, let's go build
this team Nine times out of 10,they're not going to know the

(01:29:02):
people to go to, they're goingto rely on me and my network to
find the right people.
And if I screw that up, that'smy fault.
That's not anybody like, that'sme not making the correct match
.
And so, very fortunately, Ijust happened to have not like
hundreds of people, but I have asmall network of people that I
trust a lot and are really goodat what they do.

(01:29:24):
I don't know what I would havedone had I not previously had
that, because it's not like youcan go and like start like
interviewing people for it, youknow, because you have to work
with them for a period of time,because it's your, it's you're
the primary coach, it's yourathlete that you're trusting
them with and like it's really Iwould have a hard time, maybe
because I'm high control.

(01:29:44):
You remember our fibro B scores, adam.
I control.
You remember our fibro B scores, adam.
I'm high in expressed control.
Yeah, I mean chain.
I'm high in expressed controland I'm not going to flick that
recommendation over to somebodythat I haven't worked with for a
decade, and not a lot of peoplefit in that category.

Speaker 2 (01:30:00):
Yeah, I wouldn't consider myself low control, but
I wouldn't consider myself highcontrol, but I'd probably mess
it up enough to know that thereneeds to be some control to do
this Right.
And what's tricky about whatyou're doing is I mean, you're
doing business and people willbe like, oh yeah, people do
business with those who enjoydoing business with and achieve
results, so that's not anythingnew.

(01:30:21):
The tricky part with you is,once your people get filled up
with the capacity, now who yeah?
Once your people get filled upwith capacity, now who yeah,
exactly?
So you're going to have tocontinually.

Speaker 1 (01:30:29):
How do you scale?
How do you scale?

Speaker 2 (01:30:30):
Yeah, yeah, how do you scale?

Speaker 1 (01:30:32):
I mean, fortunately it's not a rapid scale problem
to solve Like it's like we'retalking about a handful of
people that are going to comeinto this, not like dozens.
I mean, maybe it's dozens anddozens, you know, maybe 20 by
the end of year, two orsomething like that.
I think that's a kind of areasonable amount.

(01:30:52):
But I just keep coming back tolike I'm telling you, adam,
every meeting, every textmessage, every group, you know a
WeChat or WhatsApp that I havewith these teams, I keep coming
back to the same sentiment.
I'm like this is fucking cool,like just everything.
Every time I go to, just evenwhen I work with you on these

(01:31:12):
things, I'm just like this, likeit's just so neat to see it
unfold and I don't I know that'sa lot of personal sentiment
that people are going to like,listen to, people are going to
listen to and go.
This doesn't make a difference,you know one way or the other,
but it's been.
I don't, it's just been reallyneat to unfold, even in its
early stages, that I'm going tocontinue to push the envelope

(01:31:35):
and just do more of it.

Speaker 2 (01:31:37):
Yeah, man, and I would encourage you to keep
pushing and refining, becausewhat you're kind of saying there
is, when you invite theseprofessionals in to work with
your athletes, the COOPalgorithm gets smarter too.
Oh for sure, you learnsomething from Stephanie over
here, you learn something fromSarah over here.
I'm like, ah, that's thatlittle missing link there, and

(01:31:59):
you get, and then your athletegets better and it that's kind
of like the iron sharpens ironsort of analogy, as you go that
high performance teams andnetworks provides.

Speaker 1 (01:32:11):
Yeah, it 100% makes me better, but I mean on all
levels.
I mean it makes me a bettergeneralist, as we were talking
about earlier, because I get tosee how the specialists do it
and then if I ever have to do it, I've just got better framework
for it.
It makes me more.
It literally makes me moreefficient as a coach.
If you wanted to take the mostraw measure of efficiency, how
much time does it take me towork with any one single athlete

(01:32:33):
?
This reduces that time becauseI can punt, as I was mentioning
earlier.
I can punt a lot of things thatI was previously spending time
on and it's a double win.
The prescription is better, theprescription analysis is better
because you have a real domainexpert doing it and I save time.
It's's a triple win and theathlete's obviously better.
Right, and the last thing I'mwe're gonna let it go after this

(01:32:56):
one that I that should not goyou'd be remiss to not say this
is that the athlete has so muchconfidence when they've got a
team around them and they knowand they and they know that the
prescription is correct, thatthe analysis is correct.

(01:33:16):
That just engenders so muchconfidence that when they step
on the start line.
They're like I've doneeverything right.
Like I, here I am, I'm at thestart line of this big race and
I've done everything.
Like that element is it's more,it's worth more than my
programming Fully, admit it.
The confidence side of it atthat level, like sure I'm going
to program smart, like that's mydeal is doing programming, I'm

(01:33:38):
sure I'm going to get that right.
But like the confidence thatthey get from like having that
network around them is I thinkthat's worth more from a
performance perspective thanwhen I can actually program.

Speaker 2 (01:33:52):
No, you're absolutely right, it gets that.
Confidence gets built through agood process, you see.
But when I've got an athletethat gets to the start line,
that has the sports psychologist, has the nutritionist, has the
strength and conditioner, hasthe coach, has the team director
, has the tactic director, likeeverybody in their ear, she's
going to be like fuck yeah, yousee like it's palpable.

Speaker 1 (01:34:13):
I didn't anticipate that.
I didn't anticipate howpalpable the confidence piece of
it was, because I can compareand contrast and I'm not.
Once again, I'm not saying thatlike every athlete is a
candidate for this, I'm notsaying that but it is palpable
when you have an athletetransition from just me working
with them to a team, thatconfidence Pete, everything is

(01:34:36):
palpable.
I mean the fact that they havea professional strength coach is
absolutely.
Sarah doing their strengthprogramming is 100 times better.
Shout out to Sarah Scazzardoshe's a freaking wizard Is a
thousand times, a million timesbetter than me doing their
strength training program andI'm not bad there.
I'm a Brazilian times and I'mnot bad at it, I'm okay at it.
Like I'm not a freaking dummyin the in the weight room.

(01:34:57):
I can like get myself aroundsome freaking iron, but she is a
gazillion times.
She is a gazillion times better, better at it.
But the the whole confidencepiece of it, having seen it like
during the transition, at leastwith the athletes that I've
transitioned and I think thatI've picked the right ones to do
it with it hasn't beeneverybody, but it will be more

(01:35:17):
and more as the years go onbecause you have that ab
comparison.
It's just palpable, like Idon't know how else to say it.
Like I just like I see it inthe programming, I see in the
conversation, I see it in justlike even the workout feedback,
right going back to that, likethe like, the context of the
feedback has more, just, hasmore confidence associated with

(01:35:37):
it.

Speaker 2 (01:35:38):
It's cool, I don't know.
It's cool.
Yeah, and you can't overlookthe element of self-belief when
it comes to achieving a goal orwinning, because, I'll guarantee
you, the person who believesthey're going to win may not win
all the time, but the personwho believes they're not going
to win won't win.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:35:57):
Typically yeah, that's very rare, Like you,
don't?
You hear that like every oncein a while, like oh, I didn't
think, I didn't think I wasgoing to do it, Like that's a
really rare story.
You know, At that level, yeah,at the highest level Like
sometimes I didn't think I'dmake the cutoffs right that I
get that you hear that a wholelot more often.

(01:36:17):
But at the highest level, youdo have to have a lot of belief
that you can do what you'resetting yourself out to do,
whether it's win or set a courserecord or get in the top three
or kind of whatever that goal is.
You have to have the beliefbehind it.
And I think having a team, notjust one person, a team behind

(01:36:38):
you I think that in mostsituations not in all, but in
most situations engenders moreof that belief than a single
person, than having one singleperson can One single person can
actually can make a bigdifference.
That's what I did for years,right.
One single person can actuallycan make a big difference.
That's what I did for years,Right, and I had a lot of
success with that.
But I just think it's betterwhen you get more professionals
in there.

Speaker 2 (01:36:55):
Yeah, anyway.

Speaker 1 (01:36:56):
Agreed.
All right, we're going to callit there.
We're going to do this moreoften.
Let's do it.
This is not the time crunchcyclist podcast, so I can go on
for two hours, you keep.
So you keep your podcast tolike what?
30 minutes or something likethat Tight and to the point.

Speaker 2 (01:37:09):
Tight and to the point.

Speaker 1 (01:37:10):
We're verbose and all over the place.

Speaker 2 (01:37:13):
For sure I love.
I actually love podcasts likethis because the time is not the
pressure.
I think like, if anybody isinterested in what I do, check
out the Time Crunch Cyclistpodcast.
It's great Anybody loves, likethe John Oliver sort of thing
where he just has one big topicbut then has these other little
things that he weaves into.

(01:37:33):
That's essentially what it isfor endurance coaching and
training stuff.
But yeah, it's straight intothe point no fluff and stuff, no
philosophical rabbit holes, butI think that fits for some
people.
I think having dialogue likethis with what Coop's doing on
the podcast and what Coop isdoing in the ultra running space
30-minute podcast, doesn't fitfor what?

Speaker 1 (01:37:55):
You've got to have a long run, man 30 minutes.
People won't even lace theirshoes up for 30 minutes.

Speaker 2 (01:38:00):
Come on now Coop's just warming up right now and
I'm like, can I get me off thismicrophone?

Speaker 1 (01:38:05):
I think the next thing I'm going to do I
microphone.
I think the next thing I'mgoing to do, I'm going to bring
on a whole, like one of ourwhole teams and we're just going
to go through it all.
I just want to go through itall, like just here's how we did
it.
Just be transparent about it.
You know it's not like I'm.
I don't want to gatekeepanything.
I do think it's cool but Ithink that listeners would get
it would get just get a kick outof how it actually works, and

(01:38:25):
then maybe we can kind of cajolesome of the athletes into some
like real-time examples of it.
I think that'd be superinsightful and I always,
whenever I do it in podcast form, I always learn something yeah,
that'd be really cool.

Speaker 2 (01:38:37):
I'd listen to it oh sweet.

Speaker 1 (01:38:38):
Oh, there you go.
There's my limits test rightthere.
If adam listens, all right, man, I'm gonna let you go.
Thanks for coming on thepodcast today, man appreciate it
.
Thanks, coop.
Thanks for having me on all Allright folks.
There you have it.
There you go.
Much thanks to Adam for comingon the podcast today and
enlightening us a little bitabout his framework on what
constitutes quality training.
I hope you guys got a lot outof that, perhaps made you think

(01:39:01):
about your training and how youdesign your training and how you
give feedback on your trainingjust a little bit differently.
I also hope you guys enjoyedthe banter at the end about some
of this high performancecoaching stuff which I am
determined to continue to bringto light, and I am absolutely
thrilled about what we have beenable to do with it thus far

(01:39:22):
with some of the athletes thatwe have, that we have on these
teams.
Hope you all enjoyed thepodcast.
If you did, go, give it a ratingor review in iTunes, or you can
just share it with your friendsand training partners.
This always makes a great longrun companion, and so, if you
like this podcast, which alwayscomes to you without any
advertisement, sponsorships orendorsements of any kind.

(01:39:43):
The best way that you can helpthe podcast out is just to share
it with your friends, give it alike and whenever you see me
out on the races, tell me whatepisode that you like the most.
That is always very meaningfulto me.
All right, folks, that is itfor today and, as always, we
will see you out on the trails.

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Strategies for High-Quality Training with CTS Coach Adam Pulford #224

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