#16: Race Faster by Training Slower, with 2:28 Marathoner Josh Sambrook

Yeah, and it's counterintuitive. Every runner has spent, almost every runner has spent their whole life being told that you've got to run quickly in order to race quickly. And it doesn't feel right. It seems wrong. It just doesn't feel like the two things connect at all. This running, training a minute and a half slower per kilometre than you race at just doesn't feel like one that doing that training is going to cause the required adaptations. But if you stick at it and you trust it, as you say, I haven't, I'm yet to come across anyone that doesn't find pretty impressive results from, from doing that.

Hello everyone. My name is Floris Gierman. Welcome to another episode of the Extra Mile Show. On this podcast, I have conversations with the brightest minds in health, fitness, and endurance sports. And we discuss topics about how to become a stronger, healthier, and happier athlete. In today's podcast, I have a conversation with Josh Sandbrook from Leeds in the UK. He's a 2:28 marathoner and he ran his first marathon at the age of 17. He has run 12 marathons ever since. He's only 23 years old, yet he has a lot of running experience that he's sharing on today's podcast. What fascinates me about his story is that he's able to run very fast marathon times while training mostly at low heart rate. Only a very small percentage are of his runs are at high heart rate. In this conversation, we talk in detail about his approach to training and racing. He shares several different recommendations for other athletes looking to improve their marathon performance. We talk about fasted runs and training while fasting, marathon prediction tools, and much more. All notes of today's episode can be found on my website extramilest.com. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode with Josh Sambrook. Welcome to the show, Josh. Glad to have you here.

Oh, great. Thank you very much for having me.

Yeah, I was talking with Jonathan on the podcast a few weeks ago and he brought up your name and he actually said like, you have to check out Josh. He has done some incredible things with low heart rate training. So I'm very excited to have you here and dive in.

Yeah, it's great to be here. Thank you very much for having me.

Yeah, of course. So maybe we can can start out with a little bit more about your running background. I know you're still quite young at this point, only 23 years old, and you already have a 2:28 marathon under your belt. When I heard you were able to accomplish a lot of things with low heart rate, I really want to find out more. So maybe you can tell a little bit more about your background in running and your journey so far.

Yeah, so I suppose I've been around pretty much my whole life. Did a bit of cross-country in school, that kind of thing, kind of a very traditional route there. Did some, was mainly focused on triathlon though, as a triathlete, not a very good triathlete, but did a bit of triathlon throughout my youth. And then I got to, I was age 16 or 17, and my uncle, who's also a marathon runner, kind of just almost jokingly, I think, said, "Carl, when's your first marathon gonna be then?" I thought, well, that's, you know, challenge accepted. So I looked around and actually the Berlin Marathon, 2013 Berlin Marathon I think, was the day after my 18th birthday. So I thought, that's a good way to spend your birthday weekend, isn't it? Go to Berlin with my dad and my uncle and run a marathon, which is exactly what I did. And then it's taken off from there. My first marathon was actually the local marathon around Cambridge, which is my hometown, the spring before Berlin, where I ran a 3:24, and it was just horrendous. I set off at a completely unsustainable pace, struggled, struggled around the last 8 miles, as I'm sure everyone does on their first marathon. And then, yes, it's taken off from there. I've continually got quicker and taken it more and more seriously.

Yeah, so if you look over those years, how many marathons do you think you've ran by now?

A dozen, a dozen, maybe 15.

Yeah, right on. And so when you look at how you trained for the first race, How did you prepare for that and how did the race actually unfold?

Yeah, so the first one I had a very traditional training program. I kind of did the whole, you do your long run on a Sunday and you do your intervals or your fartlek sessions or that kind of thing throughout the week and you take your rest days and all of that. I did a super traditional training program, which it worked, a 3:24 is a perfectly respectable time, I guess. But then it was only after 4 or 5 marathons of me getting a bit better, I ran a 3:24, then a 3:06, and stumbled around at that between 3:05 and 3:20 for a couple of years. And then came across a piece of research that suggested that it doesn't really matter how you structure your training, all that matters is your average weekly distance. An average pace. I thought, okay, well, let's, let's try that then. And since then, it's just— I've just changed completely. I, I spent a lot of time run commuting and just waking up, doing early runs. Yeah, very low heart rate, because the only way to get the miles in, of course, when you're doing— once you understand the concept of it only being about your weekly pace and weekly distance You can play around with these two variables to structure your training program in a way that works for you. I found that just keeping it slow, low heart rate, not even looking at my pace often. When I go out, I have my watch, just shows me my heart rate and then my average heart rate, and that's it. I don't have any idea, well, I know what pace I'm doing because you get a good feel for it, but I don't actually know what pace I'm running when I'm out there. Completely different now to 3 or 4 years ago.

So are you running specific, like, do you look at heart rate at all? Is there like a specific training zone that you're trying to stick with?

Yeah, and I've found it's come down in the last few years. So kind of 3 years ago, 2 years ago, I was training at about 150 beats a minute just all the time. I do all of my training at the same heart rate. I don't bother doing anything quick. I was about 150 beats a minute, and since I've got quicker, obviously with getting quicker you get all those adaptations, a bigger, stronger heart, bigger blood volume, higher hematocrit, all of that kind of stuff. The same effort level means a lower heart rate, so now I'm at kind of 135 beats a minute. If I go out nowadays, assuming I'm not dehydrated or untrained or something, it'll be about 130 to 140 beats a minute, and I'll just keep it in that zone. Regardless of whether I'm running uphill or downhill, or yeah, whatever.

[Speaker] And do you know what percentage that is from your max, and how that is all connected?

[Speaker] A little bit, it's less, it's more about what percentage it is that I can race at. So, a good test for your maximum heart rate is just to see what heart rate you're at at the end of a very, very hard, fast 5K. That's pretty much gonna be your max, but this concept of a max max heart rate, often people use 220 minus their age, is okay, but it is a bit flawed, and there's a lot of other ways, other things that can affect that. So I find that my max heart rate, I've never hit more than about 192 in recent years, which is obviously a fair bit lower than 220 minus your age, but then, It's more about the heart rate you train at, or I find the heart rate I train at is more about how it relates to my race heart rate. So I know for a marathon, if I go out and do the first half averaging 166 beats a minute and then let it rise by 1 beat per minute per kilometre over the next 20 kilometres, ending at 186 beats a minute, and then go hell for leather in the last 2k, That, for me, is a flat-out marathon. Additionally, I've found that with the reduction in training heart rate, the racing heart rate comes down as well because I'm not necessarily limited by providing blood to my working muscles. I'm more limited by the damage I've done to my muscles because my muscles aren't used to that training load. It's just leg pain. That limits me, so I found that the same amount of leg pain now is at a lower heart rate than previously.

Yeah, right on. So what changed training volume-wise, like before you switched to this type of training? Where were you before and how much did you increase it after that?

Maybe a tenfold increase. I was not a very dedicated athlete in the early years. In fact, my cousin, who's also a very, very good runner, she's definitely a better runner than me, got me a, for Christmas one year, got me a training diary that was kind of that big. She had filled in every page, a couple of hundred pages of diary, and they just said, "Rest day, rest day, rest day, rest day. 30-mile training run, rest day, rest day, rest day." So I was probably, back in 2013, I was probably only averaging about 30 kilometers a week. Pretty quick, probably 4:10, 4:10 a kilometer, which is what, yeah, 7, 6 and a half minute miles, something like that. And then since then I now do more like 220 kilometers a week. It's a big, big increase. I mean, it is almost a 10-fold increase. It's taken me a long time to get there and I've slowed down a lot. I now run closer to 8-minute miles, but it's often 3 runs a day. Literally, nearly a 10-fold increase in the volume of running.

That is such a difference right there. The one thing that I noticed, I was just looking through your Strava as well, I saw in the month of March you ran 1,000 kilometers. So that's what, 621 miles if I'm correct? So that's like 20 miles a day, 32 kilometers, 32K a day on average.

Yeah, that was good fun. That was actually my hardest month I've ever done. It was quite a satisfying target to aim for, to aim for 1,000 miles in March. But it's easy once you get used to it. It seems, that seems seems like a ridiculous volume to be doing when you just think of doing that initially. If you're used to a more conventional training program, the idea of running 20, 25 miles a day, something like that, just seems crazy. But once you've built up to it over a few years and you can really fit that in around your life, it's actually achievable for almost anyone. If you run commute, that's an easy way to fit in a few kilometers. If you If you don't have breakfast, you can substitute breakfast for a few kilometers, or the same with lunch. Obviously, you have to make up by eating later in the day. I would wake up at the same time as most of the other people I know, a sensible 7:15 wake-up, and I could be working by 9:00 and have done 12K because you wake up, you're out the door first thing. You do 12K, back home, quick shower, coffee on the way to work. You're starting work by 9, same as everyone else who's wasted their day by eating.

[Speaker] The one part that I have noticed very significantly in your training is that you do quite frequently do multiple runs a day, whether that's 2 or 3 runs a day., but they're all shorter distances. You barely go out for longer than a 10-mile run, from what I could tell. Can you talk about that a bit more?

Yeah, it just takes time. You have to commit a larger portion of your day to, if you wanna go and do more than 10 miles, that's gonna take you quite a bit of your day, and it's easier to find lots of, like, it's easier to find, say, 3 1-hour chunks that you can run in, I can do an hour before I start my day, an hour at lunch, an hour in the evening. That's easy. But trying to find a 3-hour portion of my day where I can go out and do a huge long run is really hard. A 3-hour run is hard. Why on earth would I want to do that? It doesn't, in terms of the training load it has, it really doesn't affect it much. You could do it as 31-kilometer runs if that's what you wanted to do. You could do it as one 30-kilometer run. It's just about how far you run and how fast you do it.

Yeah, can you talk a bit more about the scientific side of this? Because that's what I found very fascinating. There's a few graphs on your website and a few images that you're actually showing how accurate the prediction of marathon time actually is., based on volume and based on pace you're running there?

[Speaker:MARK] Oh, so it's phenomenally accurate. It's way more accurate than any other predictor I've come across. I use it not because it's for any reason other than the fact it's just the best predictor I know of. And it really quantifies it very— quantifies your training load very objectively. So the paper was originally written by an Italian scientist who just measured people's, a bunch of factors about people's training and looked at their race result and kind of threw some maths at it and saw what stuck. And what stuck was that this, your average weekly distance in the 8 weeks before your race and your average weekly pace in that time puts it together in a slightly complicated equation. But once you understand the equation, all you're doing is putting in these two, inputting these two variables And then he claimed he could predict marathon performance to within 4 minutes just by knowing these. It doesn't matter how quickly you— it doesn't matter your max speed, your max distance, none of that matters. It's just these averages. So he claimed he could get within 4 minutes. In reality, I found from my data, other club runners' data, other— I've done quite a bit of looking into this over the years and got kind of a good few hundred data points in total, I found that you can predict someone's race prediction even more accurately than that, assuming you know how they respond to training. So I beat this equation by 15 seconds per kilometer all the time, but I know that my dad loses by 10 seconds a kilometer. So something's going on there. But we also train in very similar ways, so it's not the training style. It's very consistent for a person. Regardless of how I structure my training, I will always beat this equation by exactly, assuming I've run a good race, exactly 15 seconds a kilometer. Other people win or lose by different amounts, but once you've done a race or two, you can say, okay, my, offset from this equation is 3 seconds a kilometre, you just adjust for that and then before you race, you know exactly what you can do. You can line up on that start line not going, "Oh." I see so many people who line up on start lines and you say, "How are you feeling today?" and they say, "Oh yeah, I think my training's gone a bit better than last year. I've done an extra 50 miles or something in the last 2 weeks." Last few weeks, I've been training hard, I've been running faster. You think, how can you not know exactly how? The ability to predict exactly how you're going to perform on the day is just, it's a game changer. It is really, as soon as you know your offset, phenomenally accurate.

Is there a certain range of finishing times that this formula would work better for?

Yes, it does. So the equation was originally designed for people finishing between 2:45 and 3.5 hours. I've actually found it goes a lot quicker than that and is equally valid. So for my 2:28, it was bang on the money. For other people running 2:35, 2:30, it's bang on. When you're going slower than about 3:30, lifestyle factors become a bigger, bigger portion of your, your marathon performance. So for, for the best marathon runners in the world, if they also play squash once a week, it's not going to affect their marathon performance. For you, for a marathon runner aiming to run 4 hours or just finish the race, if they also play squash once a week on top of their running training, that actually has a significant impact on their race performance. So Slower than 3:30, it becomes less reliably predictable because other lifestyle factors, whether you walk to work, whether you play squash, your body fat percentage, stuff like that become bigger.

So anyone listening to this who wants to calculate this for themselves, how would they go about that?

Well, there's a website that will do it for you. Coded by a friend of mine, which is, the scientist's name was Tanda, T-A-N-D-A, and this is just, it's just tandaracepredictor.com. But all that'll do to, it's useful, but that only, you have to know your average weekly distance and average weekly pace, which actually isn't that easy to get a hold of because there's no, unless you've recorded it via Excel or, It's quite hard. It's quite hard. I've spent a bit of time doing this. It's actually quite hard to extract your average weekly pace for the last 8 weeks from Strava. You have to go back per week and record all these individual things. Um, so born out of this, uh, born out of my frustration of seeing my friends get to the start line of races and not know how quickly they were going to run I have set up a marathon coaching business, so I've built a website and a training program that follows this, is up to— that does this for you and calculates. It can either be used just purely to calculate how fit you are before race day in much the same way that website does. That is useful, but the The bigger use is that if you turn up and say, "I want to run a sub-3 marathon," you can work out what you need to do in order to achieve that. For example, for a sub-3 marathon, there's a curve on a graph that if you imagine pace on one, weekly pace and weekly distance on the x and y axes of graph, you can plot a line for a 3-hour marathon. And then say, okay, I can either run an average of 7.5 kilometers a day at 4 minutes a kilometer, or I can run 17.5 kilometers a day at an average of 5 minutes a kilometer. It's two ways of achieving the same result. You'll be in— you'll get the same level of adaptation from these, these two things. And then this, this app I've written will you go out for a run and it will take your data off Strava, put it through a, yeah, this equation and a bit of algorithm, and it'll tell you, okay, yeah, you need to go and do another 5K at that pace, or this week, or put your feet up because you've done enough, or you need to run another 10K or whatever. It'll tell you what you need to do, which is actually, it was something I originally built for myself., and my friends, I've since used it for a few of my friends who have wanted to achieve their goals, and they've said this is really quite good and quite motivating. I've got a big, it's a big like donut-shaped wheel that fills as you do. It starts off red at the start of the week, and then as you run throughout the week, it takes your data off Strava and fills this wheel with blue instead of red, and then when you've filled the donut, you've achieved your week's goals. You don't need to It takes all the thinking out of it. You can just have someone else do the maths for you and know what shape you're in, which is quite attractive.

Wow, that's very fascinating. On your website, so you're a running coach yourself as well, and on your website, I found this quite eye-opening. You wrote some recommendations for someone who wants to accomplish a sub-3-hour marathon goal. Mm-hmm. And that was quite a few double days were in there, but all at lower mileage. Can you talk more about what those recommendations were? Because this, this was definitely a bit more of a non-traditional approach, but I have personally experienced a lot of benefits from the 2 runs a day as well. But the way you had formulated was, was really good, I thought.

Yeah, so, um, 2 runs a day is useful, but it's not inherently the 2 runs a day that's, that's doing it for you. You could do it as 1 run a day, but it just takes, as I say before, for me it just takes a lot of time to turn out your day. Um, so it's about finding a structure that works for, for you as an individual. It's up to you to decide how, um, how to take on the challenge of doing the training to achieve your goal, because that's all it is. As soon as you've done the training, you'll be in the shape to achieve your goal. There's nothing magic or random about it. So the challenge is doing the training. In terms of a 3-hour marathon specifically, again, it's really just about these averages. So if I look at the graph now, you can plot this line and say 7.5 kilometers a day at 4 minutes a kilometer average over the 8 weeks before your marathon, and you'll be in shape for your 3-hour marathon. But if 4 minutes a kilometer is a bit too hard for you, if you can't go and sustain that for 8 weeks, which is hard because you will be, that's quite a speed, you can go at 5 minutes a kilometer for 17.5 kilometers a day. Or even slower. If you really want to go a bit slower, trot round rather than go too quickly, you can do 5.5 minutes a kilometre a day at 24 kilometres. That's going to take a bit more time. If you want to go right to the other extreme and you want to do your 3-hour marathon but you just don't have much time on your hands at all, you could do 5 kilometres a day at 3:45 a kilometre. Which 5 kilometers a day, everyone could do that. That would be, you don't even have to train every day to do that. You could do, train 3 times a week maybe. If you could run that quickly, you could get your 3-hour marathon just off 3 days a week of training. And that's, it just works. There's no, yeah, there's no magic going on here. Read off the graph, go and do the run, collect the result at the end of the day.

So when you look at that amount of training though, let me make sure I get it right. Is your training volume, is your distance then a lot shorter if you are running it faster?

Yes, the distance is shorter if you're running it faster. You can substitute kilometers for speed essentially. You can either run a long way slowly or a short distance very quickly and produce the same adaptation. Exactly the relationship between them gets a bit more complicated, but that's the principle of it.

Right on. And so in the schedule that you had on your website for sub-3 that I had seen, it was 7.5K in the morning. And so that's 4.6 miles, I believe. And then 10K in the afternoon, so that was 6.2 miles. Yeah, that was Monday through Friday. And then a Saturday run as well, that was a park run. And then a Sunday, a longer, longer run.

Yeah, that's just a very much just one example of someone who I be honest with this, I pictured my dad because he's the kind of person who wants to run, is looking to run that kind of time. He's a little bit slower, he's a 3:10 runner, but has a busy life, has a 9-to-5 job, and spends his time doing other things. He has a busy non-running life. I modeled it on what he might be able to do. I thought, He could wake up half an hour earlier and go and do 7.5 kilometers in the morning. That's perfectly achievable. And then, okay, yeah, if he squeezes it in, he could go and do 10K at lunchtime. Let's give him his evenings free because he's doing DIY or whatever other thing he's doing in his evening. If other people wanted to shift that around and maybe go and do a track session in the evening or something, if they have the time to do that and they haven't got kids or or whatever, then the beauty of this is that you could do that. You can toy with when you're doing your sessions as you like. Splitting it in two has the additional benefit of saving time, and it's achievable. That's simply all it is.

[Speaker:MARK] Do you have any concerns about some people looking at this and thinking, I'm just gonna hammer out 3 hard days a week and call it a day, with the amount of increase in injuries? Because that's the first thing that comes to mind when I hear about this approach.

[Speaker] Yeah, no, you're completely right. You've gotta be sensible, you've gotta listen to your body. You can't go, and I've talked about a 10-fold increase in the distance that I've done, in my weekly distance over the last few years, but that really is, that's been a steady, gradual increase. I didn't just wake up and go, "Right, I'm going to do 220 kilometers this week." It was a gradual increase, and you are completely right. If someone chooses to run less distance quicker, they increase their injury risk. You never hear of people getting injured because they did too much walking. The way to avoid injury is to start off right at the slow, big distance end of the scale and creep your way towards quicker. But also, you increase your injury risk if you, as you say, if you only train on a smaller number of days per week. If you do 3 days of training per week where you go and, yeah, smash out a 20-mile run 3 times a week, you're gonna risk, increase your injury risk relative to someone who did the same distance and speed but broke it up a little bit more. It's about what works in your life and how much you think your injury risk is. If you never get injured as an athlete, if you're a very robust athlete, then absolutely go and do those 3 hard 20-mile runs. If you're a bit more fragile as an athlete, then, then break it up.

Listen to your body.

Yeah.

What about cross-training? You were talking earlier about squash, for example. If, if an athlete also rides bikes, swims, any of these kind of things, does that have an impact in this, or do you truly say what is most important in this category, if it's from 2:45 to 3:30 marathon finishing time, actually running the miles is the most important?

Part of that equation. Yeah, for 90% of people, 90% of the, uh, the thing that dictates how quickly you're going to run a marathon is the miles. It's just go out there and buy a pair of shoes, wear them out, buy another pair of shoes, wear them out. That's 90%. But there are, of course, for a few people— because it depends what limits you in your marathon— if you're limited by, like me, leg pain, damage you've done to your muscles, that's probably because in training you're not doing that much damage to your muscles. So when you get to racing, you can't withstand, or the limiting thing is how much damage your muscles can withstand. So I would probably, I don't do any cross-training, I would probably benefit from doing some cross-training and having a bit more of a higher training load on purely the muscular. System. If someone's doing a bunch of cycling, that's good, it's going to boost their cardiovascular system, but the muscular element is a bit less there. So if somebody is— if someone was sat opposite me and was saying, I want to do some cycling, will it help my running? I would be asking them what limits their performance, because if they're limited by blood volume If they find they get to 35 kilometers and they're going dizzy and they're getting cold and hot, that's probably a sign that blood volume's a problem for them and their blood pressure's dropping, then cycling will help them because cycling also positively affects that system. But if that same person was stood there and saying, "Oh, it's leg pain that limits me," or motivation, cycling's probably not, might be fun and it's a brilliant thing to do in your spare time, but probably not gonna be that helpful at solving that limiting marathon factor.

[Speaker] Yeah, and probably age comes into play to some extent as well, right? Like, you're 23 and you're able to handle an average of 20 miles a day, whereas some other people, especially as you get in your 40s and 50s and beyond, the recovery is gonna take longer, and then sometimes taking some of that load off the legs into other ways might help too.

Yeah, very much so. And that plays also, definitely plays into the speed I've increased my training load. This, going from 30 kilometers a week to 220 a week, I say I've done it in 3 years or something like that. That's actually not that long, but I can get away with that because I'm quite young. Athlete who was a generation older than me tried to do that, you would probably turn around and say, okay, take a few more years to build that up because your body is just a bit less robust. You've spent the last 3 decades picking up injuries from life and they're going to get in your way. So definitely age does come into play with how you build your training.

[Speaker:DAVE] What about cross-training? How does— not cross-training, sorry, strength strength training. How does that come into play in this whole approach?

Yeah, well, so you've got to be very— so I find when people ask me this, you have to be clear about what you mean about strength training, because going into the gym and lifting weights with your arms is probably going to be detrimental to your marathon performance, because all you're doing there is building muscle bulk that you then have to carry around, carry around a long way on the marathon day. Day. If we're talking about leg-based strength exercises, then that muscle has a positive effect on your race performance because you can use, you can use your muscles, your leg muscles, to help you run, obviously. Where you can't as well, you can't use shoulder or arm muscles to help you run. So in terms of strength training for the legs, forget about strength training for your arms because you shouldn't be doing it really if you're looking for the best of best possible marathon performance. Strength training for your legs, again, can be useful, but it depends what limits you in the race performance. If your legs are already strong enough and you're being limited by blood volume or something like that, then building more, more muscle mass on your legs is not doing that much for you. If you're limited by leg pain, then go out and do some strength training. It's about identifying what Whenever you're— there's a— because there's 100 different variables in everyone's training programs, it's about identifying what is an important variable for you, what's a limiting variable, or what's where you can make the most gain, and then training or exploiting that. Because not everyone can do everything. And even if the— let's say strength training— someone's already got very strong legs, they're not limited by leg strength, strength training might help them a little bit, but they'd be better off spending that time and effort doing some other form of training. It's about being, train smart, not hard.

Yeah. And sometimes I also think it, not everyone might even be able to truly identify what their limiting factor is. For example, during certain race preparations, I might not add enough strength training at race, and I might not necessarily know that, alright, at the end of the race my back starts hurting, or I'm starting to have certain limiting factors. Yes, if you look back in hindsight, that might have been because of not adding enough strength training, but you also have to truly learn how to listen to your body and identify certain connections over there, which is not always—

Yeah, yeah, listen, that's totally that. I mean, that's the name of the game really, isn't it? If you can do that well, you'll be a cracking marathon runner, but it's hard to do it well. It's hard to just intuitively know what is a limiting factor. So for most people, myself included, that takes years of do a marathon, watch it go wrong, go, okay, what went wrong in that race? 'Maybe it was this, this, or this,' and then you change a few of those things, and next time you race a little bit better. You think, 'Okay, yeah, it was probably that thing that I changed, but, you know, maybe this thing needs to be a bit different.' It's a journey, isn't it? Every marathon running is not something anyone gets right the first time around. So yeah, as you said, it's totally about, in hindsight, identifying what went wrong and then changing it for next for your future races.

Yeah, absolutely. So you are a big advocate of low heart rate training, so, so am I. Do you feel athletes need speed work to become faster runners?

I can tell you from personal experience that they absolutely, absolutely do not. You don't need it. It's a, it's a valid way of getting the training load if that's the way an athlete wants to do it, but you increase injury risk and you do a few other things that are a bit negative perhaps. But you just don't need speed work, and I can think of numerous examples of very quick runners who do effectively almost no speed work. If you look at my PB is 2:28, if you look at the training I did before then, I did roughly 2% of my training at somewhere near marathon pace. It was slightly slower than marathon pace, but 2% I did. I averaged in the 8 weeks before that 172 kilometers a week at an average pace of 4:47 minutes per kilometer, which, of which I only did 5 kilometers a week that was quicker than 4:40 per kilometer. So it really was, we're talking about slow, slow running here. I was running and you can chat the whole way, just going steady chatting running. Then I did 5 kilometers a week where I went to parkrun.

Do you have parkrun in the US?

Yeah, we do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so I went to the local parkrun and I'd run a 17-minute parkrun or something like that, 17 and a half minutes. Which is kind of near race pace, but you have to look at what training effect you actually realistically think that's, that's giving you. I did that mostly for fun and to kind of test myself and watch myself keep improving week on week, but is a 17-minute hard— what's having a bigger impact on my race performance, a 17-minute hard quick run or The other 165 kilometers, 100 miles a week that I'm doing, it's the other thing. I know lots of runners who don't do any quick running at all, don't even do that 5K. I've watched people go from being 5-hour marathon runners to 3:10 marathon runners on no quick training, no speed work at all. It's valid, but you don't need it.

Is that finding what works well for you, but also I think to some extent trusting that you don't need the speed work. And there's a lot of people who are very skeptical about it, and there's a lot of people who start out with slower miles who are truly feeling, how am I gonna become a faster runner by running slower miles? But this is almost where you have to have to trust the system or trust that it will bring you results in the longer term. Because I see too many times around me as well that, yes, people might progress faster in the short term by adding more and more speed work. However, I have a few friends around me as well that are now injured, and they're set back in their training for 6 weeks, and they have to start all over again. So it's more about your longer-term progress than the short spikes.

Yeah, and it's counterintuitive. Every runner has spent, almost every runner has spent their whole life being told that you've got to run quickly in order to race quickly. And it doesn't feel right. It seems wrong. It just doesn't feel like the two things connect at all. This running, trading a minute and a half slower per kilometer than you race at just doesn't feel like one that doing that training is going to cause the required adaptations. But if you stick at it, you trust it, as you say, I'm yet to come across anyone that doesn't find pretty impressive results from doing that.

[Speaker:MARK] Yeah. Well, and obviously, you're quite an extreme case being able to put in 100+ miles a week. Week, but I think even for an average runner who is able to put in 40 miles like this, 50 miles, 60 miles a week, still they can get tremendous benefits from it as well. You don't necessarily need to run massive amount of miles to see that good progress.

Yeah, I mean, I've just, I suppose I'm an extreme example of somebody who's looked at this and understood this relationship, possibly I've put a bit of time into understanding, well no, I definitely have put a lot of time into understanding this relationship. I've gone, okay, well, I know what training load I can do and I love running, so I'm going to go and do as much of it as possible. But yeah, you could run half or a third of that training load and still see significant benefits. We've already shown that you can run a sub-3 or a 2:45 or something like that pretty easily off low heart rate training. It's just about having the dedication and consistency to put those miles in. And go out when it's raining outside and you don't really want to run, but that's when the benefits will come.

[Speaker:MARK] How do you do that? How do you motivate yourself in those? Because you live in the UK. Obviously, weather can get pretty shitty during some of the winter months. How do you motivate yourself on a consistent basis to go out there? You got the London Marathon coming up in a few weeks. Here.

How do you do it? Yeah, so for me, actually, it's this program I've written, this training log I've written. Essentially, it's the screen I have in my office. I have a second screen that is just there for displaying this training log, and the log is programmed to be dark red. The whole screen is is covered with this red hue until I've done enough training for the day, at which point it goes a nice green. I'll tell you, it's really motivating to have a screen flashing a bright red light at you telling you you're not good enough until you've gone and done enough running for the day. Then you do your running and you get to look at a green screen and it seems like a small small thing, I could just turn the screen off, but having a red screen there, I know I've already put in, you've already committed all these hours and miles of training. I just can't fall asleep until that screen is green because you know you've not done enough for the day and then what's the point of putting a hard day in yesterday and every day for the last 6 weeks if today you're going to be lazy and go out, not go out because it's rainy or cold or whatever. I'll tell you, the green screen, the red and green screen is phenomenally motivating to have something glaring at you.

That really does sound like a good motivator right there. For those listening who might not necessarily have the screens over there, one thing that worked for me was actually having just a daily goal and having that easily accessible, so you're actually reminded throughout, whether you have it hanging on your mirror and you're brushing your teeth, or whether it's somewhere else around the house. It's still like kind of in line with what you're saying over here.

Oh, it's the same thing. I mean, I happen to have got a screen showing me that automatically takes my data off Strava and analyzes it and does that, but really, a number works. If you wanna run 50 kilometers this week, having a Post-it note that says, says the number 50 on it stuck on the mirror, so the first thing you see in the morning is that 50, then it's just as good. It's whatever works for you. So yeah, as you say, something stuck on the mirror or on the fridge. You know, you could put— I know people who have put their— put beer in a place that they can only— they know is only accessible once they've done their run, and they kind of I say this publicly. So if you say to your wife, "Oh, yeah, I'm only going to have a beer after I've done my 50 kilometers for the week," or whatever, and then it gets to Thursday evening and you have a beer and your wife goes, "Yeah, but you've only done 50K." It works. Whatever works for you. It's about finding a system that works for you and exploiting that system.

[Speaker:TYRONE] Yeah, very well said. How do you Do you run much by looking at your heart rate at this point, or are you more running by feel?

A bit of both. Normally, I run by heart rate. I keep my heart rate in kind of the 130 to 140 zone, and that's all I have on the watch. I don't have distance even, because I know all my routes. I know how much the distance is at each point. I don't have pace. I just look at heart rate and keep it in a zone.. But I've actually found that I got a new watch recently and I've ditched the chest strap. I switched the chest strap for an optical wrist-based one, and the optical wrist-based one often seems to give me some erroneous readings. So I've had to learn to ignore that because it's— I know that, you know, I'm running along and I know that I'm not beating at 178 beats a minute. Like, that's just absolute rubbish. And I know why it is. There's a couple of glitches with this with the watch that mean it detects, a couple of glitches in fact with optical sensors in general that cause this problem. So I have to go, okay, I've got enough common sense to know that this feels like 130 to 140 beats a minute. So it's kind of somewhere between the two of looking at the watch for the heart rate and running on feel. But the feel is more, I'm not thinking how quick is this, I'm thinking how many beats a minute is this?

I've noticed it a few times now that the accuracy of the optical heart rate watch is less accurate than the actual chest strap across many different athletes that I've talked to as well, where many of them do end up either going back to chest strap or still using the optical with a synced chest strap as well for if they want truly, truly accurate data. It seems we're getting closer, but we're not 100% there yet.

Yeah, no, it's not quite, it's not quite there yet. This is the— it depends what you, what you, again, what works for you. I found that I really like a wrist-based optical thing just because it means I'm ready to train at the drop of a hat, really. I can, I don't have to carry a chest strap around with me. I can kind of, if I'm in my running shoes and I've got I've got my clothes in my backpack, I'm just ready to go immediately. Putting on an optical thing, you have to remember to wash it, putting on a chest strap, sorry, you have to remember to wash it and all that stuff, it's a bit of a faff. And now I know, I'm confident enough assessing how hard I'm working without actually looking at the heart rate, so I don't find a chest strap I don't think I'll need to go back to a chest strap, but I might if I find in a month's time that actually I want to go back to more accurate heart rate monitoring.

Yeah. Let's talk about nutrition for a bit. What have you found works well for you and for some of the athletes that you work with?

Yeah, so nutrition's a bit of a mixed bag because there's lots of it. It's a huge field, really, nutrition. And there's a lot of stuff out there that's contradictory. So nutrition is something that many people get either tripped up on or start to try and learn about. And then the more they delve into the subject, the more confusing it becomes because there's just so much. There's not much out there. I must admit that I definitely fell into that, into that not really knowing what's what for a while. I found what works for me. Again, it's about finding what works for you. What works for me and a lot of other athletes that I've worked with is doing some fasted runs. I mentioned this, substituting your breakfast for a run, which works because One of the big things, the big problems that runners face at kilometer 35, mile 20 of a marathon is this drop in energy. It's kind of hitting the wall. It's lots of different systems crashing all at the same point. One of these systems is the inability to fuel yourself. If you do some fasted runs, so maybe you do your Sunday long run without having breakfast, or for me, I often eat quite late in the day. I eat a lot, obviously, with a lot of running, but I eat quite late in the day, so I often do 2 runs before I've eaten anything in the day. You're kind of, what you're actually doing is upregulating the fat-burning system. You're having to tap into your subcutaneous fat all the time, every single day, because you do a run, you just have coffee on the way to work, then you do a run at lunchtime, and halfway through that second run, You've done all your blood sugar, that's gone. You have to use your fat stores, which when it comes to a marathon, I've now found I don't take on any fuel during a marathon whatsoever. Really? No fuel. You just don't need to. It just makes you feel sick. I don't know why anyone does, to be honest. If you've trained appropriately, you don't need to because it's hard to ingest a gel when you're running.

Lots of people. But even if you look at the pro athletes though, the fastest guys coming through, they still consume some nutrition, right?

Yeah, yeah, they do. And if I ever got that quick, I might. But for me, I just find, it's more expensive as well. Those gels are not cheap. And it's more comfortable. I have no gastrointestinal problems when I'm running. If I don't take gels, and then all of a sudden you race and you start taking these gels and I just feel sick. So I've trained myself not to need them, and I know lots of other people that have done the same. It works for many people if there's nothing inherently wrong with taking on gels during a race. And as you say, many of the pro athletes will do it, but again, you don't need to, and I found what works for me and what seems to work for a lot of other people. So yeah, that's kind of the weirder thing I do with nutrition there is I've built myself into a place where I don't need to take on fuel during a race.

You're such a fat burner though. Like when you're running multiple times a day and you're even able to train yourself to run fasted for some some of these morning and even early afternoon runs, absolutely, you're burning fat like no tomorrow.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's just, it's a useful time saver, isn't it? If you don't need to have breakfast, then that's half an hour saved, and you could do the same for lunch, and that's another, and it's cheaper, isn't it? It's about, but, and it just takes a bit of training to get used to it, because actually, to be honest, It's pretty unpleasant for the first few weeks. Not having breakfast feels horrible. You get very hungry, but after a week or two, your body goes, "Okay, well, I guess I don't have breakfast anymore," and you don't feel hungry during the day anymore. Then you have to strike the balance. You have to make sure you're getting enough fuel on, of course, because you can't just not have breakfast and then not eat more during the evening or afternoon when you do eat. It's not about It's not about getting thin at all. It's about changing what fuel you're burning. If you kept doing that for a long time and not getting the fuel in when you do eat, you'll get yourself into a real sticky situation and then you won't be able to run because you'll get yourself injured. What did you eat when you do eat? A lot. I'm vegetarian. Which is slightly unusual for a decent athlete. Most people do eat a bit of meat, but I haven't found I've needed to. Lots of vegetables, lots of fruit, but then also quite a bit of what many people would probably consider not great nutrition. I just love chocolate, so I eat a lot of chocolate if you're running. Running 35 kilometers a day, then you need to fuel yourself with a lot of food. I'll often eat quite a bit of chocolate every day because you just have to get the calories in. There's only a certain amount of apples and bananas and pears you can eat before you want a bar of Dairy Milk. Chocolate milkshake are two good ways I find to, when you're just looking to get the fuel on board, quick and easy, get the fuel on board, but then also lots of fruit and vegetables, lots of fruit and vegetables.

Yeah, that's funny how you mentioned milkshake, and a few weeks ago, Jonathan, who's also from the UK, mentioned drinking milk right after his long runs.

Okay, well, yeah, it's doing something, doing something, 'cause he got, yeah, yeah, he got a PB recently, so maybe there's something in the milk over here.

Yeah, that was interesting because he came on the show and he had a PB of 2:30 and then he was going for another personal best and he actually, yeah, just broke the 2:28, right?

Oh, brilliant. Well, it's a big barrier to jump over, the 2:30, so yeah, good. I mean, he earned that. I did actually look at, I know Jonathan, I looked at his training and he was in shape. He was in shape to do that.

So he had earned the result in training, worked hard, collected it on race day. Yeah, absolutely. What are some, like we've covered a lot of different topics over here. If you're looking at our audience, there's quite a few different people in there looking to run a personal best. They're looking to run either a sub-4-hour or sub-3-hour marathon. What are some overall recommendations that you would have for them to improve?

[Speaker:MARK] Yeah, so I am a big fan of recording. The first thing you've got to do if you want to improve is keep a record of something. It almost doesn't matter what you're keeping a record of at the start, whether it's your average pace in the week or your distance or the number of runs you went on or your average distance per run or something. Start keeping a record of what you've done and build from there, and then you can see what's working. You can, if you do your, let's say you do your 5K parkrun each week, you notice yourself getting faster. If you haven't kept a record of what you're doing, it's almost impossible to work out what you did to produce that result. So, but if you keep a record, let's say you keep a record of how far you ran in the week, you can go, okay, well, I ran an extra 10 kilometers this week and I ran 30 seconds quicker on my 5K, and then oh, yep, surprise, surprise, I ran a bit further next week and it happened again. So keep a record and then you can work out what works for you and what doesn't, because it is a journey. No marathon runner gets their PB the first time and never breaks it again, assuming they do a second marathon. Everyone keeps improving. No one gets it right the first time. Keep record of what you're doing, critically analyze what worked for you and what didn't, and build on the things that worked and ditch or change the things that didn't work. And then that is the— that's got to be the secret to continual improvement.

Yeah, using your brain. Absolutely. Where can people find more about you? Where can people Where can people find more about your coaching approach?

You have a lot of things. I'm on Strava as Josh S. from Bolton, Cambridge, the UK, or my website which is jset.run, www.jset.run, or they can email me at joshs@jset.run if they're interested in a bit of coaching.

Awesome. And I'll make sure to add links to all of the different articles and different people mentioned over here. Make sure to link your Strava and your website too. Brilliant. Thank you very much. Yeah, definitely.

Any closing thoughts? Any closing words? No, I think that's it. We've had a great chat.

Thank you very much for having me on the show. Awesome. Thank you very much. We'll talk soon again. Bye. All right. Bye now. Thank you for listening. All show notes and links from today's today's episode can be found on my website extramilest.com. There are several more exciting podcasts in the works, so make sure to subscribe and stay tuned. Have fun out there on your runs. Later.