#51: Kilian Jornet's Advice to Improve Your Running

Normally you stick to the plan because the plan is like the dream. You think, okay, that's what will make me good. From plan to reality, it's very different. We need to be able to adapt the plan. If you look to the heart rate variability and then you see how is your mood, how is your feeling, like your tiredness on the muscles or in the body, the quality of sleep. If you think about all these things together, then you can understand how ready you are for a session. And that's, that's very important for the day-to-day. Many times, like, okay, no, I cannot miss that session. And it's like, adaptations, they never come from one session. Like, the body, like, will tend always to go to, to balance, to, to osmosis. So that means that if you do only one session, it will happen nothing. The thing is, like, if you do one hard session and then, like, after a few days after you do the same session and after a few days, the same session, then the body will say, okay, my stability will be in another level. 30, 40, 50 sessions hard during the year. That's what makes adaptations. It's not one hard session. Hello.

Hello. Welcome to another episode of The Extra Mileage Show. My name is Floris Gierman, and on this podcast, I interview different endurance athletes, different coaches, and health experts about ways to become a stronger, healthier, and happier athlete. And today we have a very special episode with none other than Kilian Jornet. He's the greatest mountain and ultra runner of all time. I've been following him for many years. He's a huge inspiration to me and to many other athletes around the world. We had an opportunity to record this conversation at his Airbnb in Silverton, Colorado, and this was on the evening right before he was running the Hardrock 100-mile endurance run. And he basically ended up not only winning the race but also crushing the course record over there. And so yeah, we ended up finishing the recording, I think, at 6:30, 7 o'clock at night. Then the next morning at 6 AM, he started the race, ran for 21 hours and 36 minutes, and he ended up finishing there. He has been running since he was 3 years old. Currently, he's 34 years old. So he has a tremendous amount of training and racing experience, and that's what I want to dive into. I wanted to hear his thoughts in particular on ways to improve for runners of all levels. So not just the elite athletes, but also the beginner and intermediate athlete. And a lot of the insights that he's sharing in this conversation apply not only to trail and ultra mountain running, but also to road running as well. I would love to hear from you in the comments. What was one key takeaway from you from all of of the different lessons that he describes in this conversation, please let me know. I'm very curious to read, and it actually becomes this nice compilation of comments with different takeaways from different people. Without further ado, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Killian Jornet.

Let's do this.

Yeah, let's go.

Welcome, Killian, to the Extra Mile Show. Very excited to have you here on the podcast.

Thank you very much, it's a pleasure.

Absolutely. We're here at Hardrock about to start in 12, 14 hours from here. How are you feeling?

How are you?

Yeah, how's the last few weeks been over here after Zegama?

It's been good. Like, I'm excited to be here. First, it's a race that I love for the community that it has, and like the San Juans here in Colorado, they are beautiful. And training has been good. Like, after Zegama, I took an easy week after, and then I had a very good block with 4 weeks of very good training with volume and then also quality. And then last week before here, actually, it was like tapering. So only like kind of 100K. And one of my daughters, she got sick in Bornenhagen and in kindergarten. So I got sick after, and that was a good reason to do tapering too. But now it feels like everything is gone. So looking exciting.

Yeah, that's the thing right now. You have two daughters and that's always a bit of a tricky one when some of these outside elements are, are getting in the mix as well with daycare or some of the viruses or anything like that.

Yeah, it's, it's part of, it's part of the game and then like, uh, it, it makes you stronger in a way.

Like, I think, yeah, absolutely. And I saw on your, like, you had posted a few things on Strava besides like a lot of like vertical gain, like which were used from you. I saw the training volume was still like 210K, 213K, like you were putting in some serious training. Training volume over there?

Yeah, the, the— so after Zegama, the thing this season is, it's a bit, uh, special and strange because like I was doing Zegama, it is a short race or a marathon distance, and then like Hardrock is 100 miles, a long one. But then in 4 weeks is like Cirque du Nil that is a 30K, then 8 days after Cirque du Nil is, uh, UTMB that is a long one. So I— what was super motivating about this year, it was like how to train for 100 miles and a short race in the same kind of— in 2 weeks' time. So the theory was like— or my theory here was like, okay, I want to put the volume to be able to race the 100-mile races, but I want to keep the quality for the short races. So it was to do big volume weeks, like 200K weeks with around 10,000 meters of elevation, but not having long days, but just having like a lot of sessions, like mostly like, uh, 20 to 40K sessions to keep the quality for the short races, but still do the volume for, for like Hardrock.

And I'm still seeing doubles as well, right? So you do a morning workout and like a pretty hard workout in the afternoon as well. Have you still been doing that?

Yeah. And mostly I, I'm doubling, uh, most of the time. Then like, when are the sessions? That depends more about how we organize with Emily, who is training in the morning, who is training in the afternoon. We are sharing the day. One is taking care of the kids in the morning and then the other is training and we switch midday. Mostly I do my longer session either the morning or the afternoon. Then when the girls are asleep, I do my my second session either on the treadmill, because Norway, it's very cold in the winter to go running or that. And then it's not to go out far away in the evening or now in the summer to just do a— it's midnight sound, so it's nice to go to the mountains in the evening.

Yeah, I can imagine. I'm excited to talk with you about training intensity, like low heart rate, high intensity. There's a lot of different ways that you can measure training intensity. And what sort of way do you go about that? Like, do you look at heart rate more, at like breathing pattern, at like— I've heard you talking about nasal breathing at certain points. Like, how do you, how do you look at training intensity?

Yeah. When, like, when we look at the training intensity, like it's looking to what's the metabolic work you are doing. And it's a lot of ways to measure that. Like you can go with heart rate, you can go with lactate, You can go with the oxygen, like the ratio of oxygen, CO2, all this. But some are much harder to measure, like oxygen, CO2. You cannot do that on a daily basis. Lactate, it's easy maybe if you run on a track. It's almost impossible if you are running in the mountains. Heart rate, it's possible. To measure all the time. So I mostly use heart rate as, yes, the measure for my daily basis. But when I determine my zones, I don't determine them by heart rate, but most like I try to link what I'm looking for in the session, like which kind of metabolic activation I want or what it is that I'm looking for to do an adaptation and that then some of those will relate more with heart rate, some they will relate more with breathing, some they will relate more with feeling. So I try to, I normally use 5 zone intensities and the first one, for example, there is not, I'm not looking to the heart rate because that can also be very altered, especially in this lower rate. But I'm mostly looking to a pace where I feel that I'm recovering. And that's like a very easy thing that you are not working harder. It's like I'm able to breathe with the— but I'm not forcing breathing with the nose, but like it naturally— I don't need to breathe by the mouth to do this workout. That's my zone 1, for example. And so trying to understand, yeah, what's the goal of the session in terms of adaptations. And then try to put that. And probably with the years you relate that with some feelings and that it, but yeah, sometimes that can be more related to lactate or to, to the heart rate. Uh, you can measure like in some specific days doing tests, but in the daily basis it's impossible.

Yeah. Well, for like a recovery or like a lower heart rate run, like you said, you have done so many years of this running that Feeling-wise, you kind of have a pretty good understanding of where you're at intensity-wise, right? Sometimes it's just more once you start pushing it in the higher heart rate zones, or once you start, altitude gets involved or heat, or like after a few hours cardiac drift start kicking in, kicking in. Like then there's some of these other factors that make it a little bit more challenging to get a good understanding of where you're at intensity-wise. But yeah.

Yeah. And especially you mentioned the distance. That's very interesting because normally we say zone 2 is the stable, like it's the aerobic stable. And that's not real because it's stable for a couple of hours. But if you run 100 miles tomorrow, I will be running mostly in zone 2. And after 10, 15, 20 hours, my body will not be stable. When we talk about, um, thresholds and stability, uh, we, we need to understand that it's, it's changing all the time, like distance, and like it's, it's some, uh, it can be hormonal change, it can be like, uh, changes in the muscles that they make that this zone of training is not stable. So like a zone 2 to do, uh, is not the same workout if you are doing, uh, for 2 hours than for 7 hours than for 20 hours. It will make very different adaptations. And that's why it's not only to devise the kind of trainings by zones, and that is exponential with intensity. If you do a workout on zone 4, that will be like, in my case, I consider zone 1 recovery, zone 2, it's this easy moderate running. Zone 3 is what I call tempo, that it's a bit lower than racing pace. Zone 4 is like the threshold, that's around racing pace on a short distance. And then Zone 5, it will be like what I call speed. And that I almost never train. I never use this zone when training, but that would be more above the threshold. And when you are training, for example, threshold, Like if you do repetitions of 3, 4 minutes, you will have a very different impact than if you are doing that for 20 minutes. And it's exponential. It's not that it's adding. So that we need to really understand. And even doing these is really not the same if you are like how you are fueling this session or if you are training with sleep deprivation or if you are training with So these have an impact and we don't take into consideration much when we are planning like a season or a session, but it makes a big difference.

Yeah, for sure. And obviously there's different stages of your training cycle as well, right? At the beginning of a season, like your training is going to be much different than it is as you are progressing throughout a training season. So what do you think are like, if we're looking at the recreational runner, the everyday runner, and whether that is like the trail runner or the ultra-endurance runner, or like even the road runners, what do you think are some of the main common mistakes that you're seeing intensity-wise? Is there anything that stands out to you?

I think in general that people go too fast. What we call like regenerative easy running, that would be like the classical zone 1. People almost never go there. Like, uh, people is going on zone 2 or even zone 3 during like, uh, what's supposed to be a easy run. And that, that means that they are not able to, uh, recover from the hard sessions. Or when you are going to do a hard session, you will not be able to go hard because, uh, so then it makes that all the trainer will be most in the same area because you, you are too tired to go, uh, to to push that hard. So I think in general, it's like easy means easy. It doesn't matter if you run at 6, 7 kilometers an hour. It doesn't matter. It's not about going fast. It's about making your body move and have some adaptations, have some regeneration to be able to do very well, to push hard when you have the hard sessions. That's one. One very common mistake, and I would say the other, is to not take into account all the different stresses of the body. Because we think about, okay, this is a workload that makes this training session, it puts a stress to my body of whatever it is, like 2. And then we think about that number 2 to plan the next hard session, for example. But we don't take into account if you had a lot of stress at work, If you had some with the family or all these other stress that it might be bigger. So instead of thinking this was a stress of 2 from the workout, it's maybe like an 8 because all the rest. So we really need to take into account all these things to plan our— yeah, all the week, I think, in the short cycles. Yeah.

And I think a, a good point that kind of goes hand in hand with that is that sometimes I see a lot of athletes, they are glued to a training schedule versus like adopting, like kind of changing it from the day to day on based on some of those challenges that come up that yeah, sometimes unexpected things happen, whether it's at work or in personal life or indeed the adjusting, maybe you had a hard session planned and maybe you have to scale back the intensity a bit or the duration or any of these kind of things. So yeah.

Yeah, and that's a very good point. And people normally, you stick to the plan because the plan is like the dream, like you think, okay, that's what it will make me good. But reality is that from plan to reality, it's very different because all these things, and we need to be able to adapt the plan. And that's like some tools, like it can be how you feel the charge, and it's very hard to to see how much this other stress has affected you. I think nowadays we have tools like the heart rate variability. You can have the sensations of how tired you are, but I think if you look to the heart rate variability and then you see how is your mood, how is your feeling, your tiredness on the muscles or in the body, the quality of sleep. But if you think about all these things together, then you can understand how ready you are for a session. And that's, that's very important for the day-to-day. And also, like, think, like, when you are many times like, okay, no, I cannot miss that session. And it's like, adaptations, they never come from one session. Like, the body, like, will tend always to go to, to, to balance, to, to osmosis. So that means that if you do one one stress to the body, like one very hard session, the body will be stressed and then will go back to his normal. And if you do only one session, it will happen nothing. The thing is, if you do one hard session and then a few days after you do the same session and after a few days the same session, then the body will say, okay, that's my new normality. So I need to— my stability will be in another level. And it's not about one session, it is about like doing this repetition of hard sessions all over the year. So it's not— if you do like 30, 40, 50 sessions hard during the year, that's what makes adaptations. It's not one hard session.

Yeah, it's very well said. The heart rate variability, I think, is an interesting one to look at further. And I saw your wife actually looks at it as well. I saw on her Instagram, she's posted about it a few times. How do you track, as far as for in your training and in your running, how do you track the different paces you're running, the different intensities? How do you go about that?

What I mostly look is volume. So how is the volume of the period, the session or the week? And that comes to the the mileage and the elevation. Also, like, I look to the technicality of the terrain I'm moving. So like, if it's on the road, if it's in a trail, if it's in the mountains, because that so relate, uh, to put these three things into account and together, that's volume on a place. And then the other is intensity. And that, like, I have set these five zones of training on my watch and, uh, I'm using colors, which is good that you can really adapt these, your zones, into like if you want to look on power or if you want to look on the heart rate and using different values for different kind of intensity. Sometimes maybe I will be using power and sometimes I will be using the heart rate. So that's when it comes to intensity. And then like for the charts, like I'm using the heart rate variability and this kind of more feedback when it comes to mood and sleep tracking and that. So I put these things together to adapt the daily plan.

Which Coros model are you running with? Which watch?

So I'm using the Epix Pro. I love it, especially because all these things that we were talking they are there. So this kind of, you can adapt the different intensities on different values. And then also all these recovery tools, they are very good to use there. I think it's important to understand what you are looking. Also, one thing that it has, for example, that it's very interesting is the oxygen saturation. That's something that some sessions, my goal is it's to go lower on oxygen saturation. And then, it doesn't matter if you go zone 1, zone 5, zone 2, it's just like, okay, my goal in this session is to be at 85% of oxygen saturation. So then, I will be looking at that and that will be doing altitude training or apneas. And that, I can be doing that on zone 1 very easy, maybe going in the bike and I'm going at 80 watts, that's nothing. Like I would say, that's not giving you anything. But if you are doing that like at 80% of saturation or 70% of saturation, that's, it's giving you some kind of stress to the body and some adaptations. And that's something that also like, yeah, it's good that, yeah, I can measure that with the watch.

The blood oxygen one is an interesting one to look at. So I had a conversation with Patrick McCowan. On the podcast, uh, a while back, and he was talking about nasal breathing quite a bit and also about different experiments you can do with it. And even with the nasal breathing, it took me several weeks to somewhat more get used to it. But then after a while, I started doing even some speed work sessions with like nasal breathing only and like kind of pushing it to a higher heart rate, 160, 165, and trying to be able to hold like 6-minute mile on flat, just trying to nasal breathe and whatnot. And it was fascinating to look what happened with the blood oxygen levels because all of a sudden you started seeing that dropping as well. And after like some, like the snot bombs out of the nose, start getting used to it. But yeah, seeing what happens in the body even with the blood oxygen levels, or when I'm doing some Wim Hof breathing exercises and you do a breath hold and you actually look at what's happening at that point to the blood oxygen levels and you start seeing it go down and then you start breathing again, it starts going up. It's, it's a Fascinating topic, like the whole breathing pattern.

Yeah. And I think when we talk training, we focus a lot on intensity when it comes to metabolism. But we don't think that much. Or now I think it's much more talk about the energy systems, also to train with big loads of carbohydrate or to do fasting. That makes different adaptations. Or when we are never thinking about breathing or the oxygen saturation when we are training, but we know that these things are as important as metabolism, as speed. So it's important to put the goal of your sessions not only on metabolism, but also on all this. And at the end of the day, A training session is not a race, and it feels that a lot of people is racing the training session. So if you are like having the goal of the session is like to, to break a PB, and it's not like, I mean, like I prefer to do like a session where I'm running at like, uh, 6 minutes per mile, uh, after like, uh, I don't know, like, uh, fasting. Uh, so I haven't eaten for the the night before and after a 15-mile run at zone 3 than to be able to run 1 mile at 5 minutes being fresh and having good recoveries and eating, because the adaptations will be very different. And probably for what I'm doing, that it's trail running and races, it will be much more effective and it will be a slower training at the end, but it will give me better adaptations.

You're very technical in your approach, and I've noticed that too with— you write down a lot of things, you're journaling a lot, like you're, you're tracking many different things in your training. Are there any things that you're bringing to the table with, like, for example, Koros in like some of their product developments? Or are there any things that excite you about some of the upcoming things that are going to be happening over here in the development? Because I think we're still in the early stages of some of these things and they're developing rapidly.

Yeah, and that's an amazing time, I think, because I think the wearables technology is there. We can have a lot of measurements, like we were talking about heart rate variability, we can talk about, or talking about the blood saturation, then also the substrate, like what substrate are we using when we are running at different speeds, It exists now, some devices that you can blow and then it will say if you are carbohydrate or fat and it's the blood saturation on the arm but also on the muscles or all these feelings for the recovery. It's so many things that they kind of exist but on a lot of different devices. To have all them together on a watch, that it's very simple. And then to make it easy, because you don't want to do a session to be looking to the lactate and then looking to the saturation, then looking to the heart rate and all these. It's very complicated. So you maybe use that one every few months or one every year. But if you know what's important to look for you at that session. And you can do all this with the watch. So that's something that is very exciting to talk with the people at Coros because they are very open on this kind of discussions and they are very reactive on bringing up that on the software. And that's something, it's amazing because I think the better we understand our body and our function and Because we are individuals, what works for me, it will probably not work for you because we have a different metabolism, because we have a different threshold, not only on pace, but also on how we adapt to the breathing or to the saturation or to the fueling. And all this, if we are able to track it and to understand how is our body and and then to be able to train better. That's something that it's very impressive with COROS to work because they are pushing on making that possible when it comes to very scientific but very user-friendly. And that's where we should go.

So about 6 months ago, I had an interview with Eliud Kipchoge. And one of the similarities when studying what Eliud Kipchoge is doing and what you're doing in training, it is journaling every workout and writing down many different details. And your journals go back many, many years, just like Eliud Kipchoge as well. So can you tell me a little bit more about how do you approach journaling? Like what has worked well for you? Like why are you journaling and how do you go about it? And then a follow-up question will be, How do you feel other people can improve through journaling as well? Because I know a lot of athletes are maybe not tracking that much.

Yeah, I think it's important to understand what's happening and where you have adaptations, and especially because if we want to trust our memory, it always will remember the good moments. So you always think, oh, last season I was feeling better and my sessions were way better. So in general, that's not real because normally you only remember the the good moments. So I think it's important to journal, and my journal has evolved a lot over the years. I started, I think, and I have recorded since 2006, kind of every day. And it's, as I said before, I have the volume, so that means I didn't measure distance before because I was running in the mountain. So for me, distance was not an important point. Now it is, but I was measuring volume, so elevation and time, but then also the terrain where I'm running because it's very different and the intensity. And then all these subjective things like how I was feeling. And then if it was something specific, then I love to know where I was going. So that's more on at what place I was and then to understand if it was also traveling, I was sick, these things that make— when you look after, you can understand some patterns of why at the time I was strong or why I have this injury. Maybe you start to feel a bit of some small pain at that point and then you see how it's growing, how it's disappearing, how it's coming back. So, To journal, it means that you are able to look back realistically, like you can see exactly why things are happening and how are happening. And yeah, not really trusting the memory because many times memory, it's, yeah, it's not that good.

I've noticed that after races sometimes too, within 24 hours you really clearly remember it. Yeah. And then it was all like the good memories and the bad ones. Like, just kind of disappeared. That's interesting. And then basically transitioning back to the recreational runner, like, do you have any thoughts or insights or advice for people looking to get into journaling? Like, even if they're not tracking much currently, how do they go about this? Not at the beginning, but even maintaining with this a little bit longer?

Yeah, I think that's, that's the biggest problem, that you kind of start like taking a lot of notes and then like you will endure that for one week, one month, and then give out. So it's the same as training. You need to find the load that it fits. You cannot pretend that you are able to do more than what's realistic. So it's the same. If you can journal, take only the feeling, how you felt, it's much better if you can do that every day than if you measure one day the heart rate variability and the tiredness and the feeling and the mood. And it's better to be consistent than to measure a lot for one day. So I would say what matters is to do what feels good for you to do every day. And of course, the more you add, the more data, the better it is. But what's important is to be consistent. That's where you will be able to extract results and to make patterns and that. On having continuity. And nowadays with the tools, it's super easy. The applications on the watch, the watch is recording everything for you, the distance, the elevation, the intensity, so that you can forget about— you can have your app and that goes directly there. And then I would say, yeah, feeling or sensations. I think that's something that not only it's good, but it's also beautiful to read after a time. I was at that time at that mountain and it was like I had that feeling or who I was with. I think just more like written journalism. I did this loop in this trail and I was with that person and it was raining or whatever. I think that's something that it's very easy and it gives also an emotional feedback that I think it's as important as the data at the end of the day.

I want to talk for a bit about mental training and training the mind because I find that quite a fascinating topic. Obviously, athletes all have to train well in actual their athletic abilities, but then the mind is such a big one as well and being able to endure discomfort to some extent and being able to push yourself. Tomorrow, you're running Hardrock 100 miles. How do you go about training with discomfort? To what extent do you go about this? I'm very curious to hear.

Yeah, it's, I think mental, like when you train, it has an impact on the mentally and hard sessions are hard, not only physically, but just like to visualize these sessions, it's hard. You can be stressed because it's coming a big session. And then if you are doing a very long session or if you are doing some kind of terrain that it's technical, that it has some exposure, it's mentally stressful. So you need to also find a good balance on that. First, as I mentioned before, you need to have a good balance on what you are able to do. That's very important to see, okay, I find that I can train this many hours a week to be able to recover from it. If I do more, at a point, it just explodes. You need to find your balance. When it comes to mentally, it's the same. Hard sessions, if you want to, it cannot be a hard day every day mentally. It's too much. You need to also put a ratio on that, like how this day it will be very intense, so the next intense day it will be in the next day, so I'm recovered from that. And of course, you need to go to places where it's not comfortable to improve, and that goes also on the mental state, and especially if you are training for long-distance events or mountaineering, where the mental part is very important to fight when you have pain or when your stomach is upset or you're nauseous or your mind saying, just stop, I want to go home, or it's some kind of exposure and danger and how to feel comfortable with it. It takes training and you need to get used to this kind of discomfort. And that goes with the time, I think, to start with small loads of it, like going to do harder sessions that they became normal after, or going to do some routes that they are a bit more technical and a bit more technical. And then you get more used to deal with these situations, to deal with this pressure. And yeah, I think it's that, to just be realistic about what— first, to be realistic what your capacities are, not to overestimate you, but to really try to push a bit every time and go into discomfort, to accept this discomfort, to be, okay, now I'm here and these problems are happening, but I want to solve it that way. And to not be stressed at that point, it takes time to train.

Well, and you race quite a bit as well, right? I've read somewhere that you have done 30 to 50 races a year sometimes. Like in the last, I think, 15 years you've done 450 races or something. So obviously through the more you train, the more you race, the more you gain that experience as well. So, so on a day like tomorrow, at some point you're gonna get into that pain cave. Are there any mental games you play with yourself at that point?

Yeah. Like in a long race when you start to feel okay, now it's legs starts to hurt and all this. It's like you try to trick your mind and it can be very small things. Like you say, okay, I go to the next station and then I stop. And then when you get there, it's like, okay, no, it's like you lie to yourself. Like say, okay, now it's finished soon. Like you need to divide the race in small portions because if you think, oh, now it's like 80 miles to finish, that's too big. Like if you think, okay, in 2 miles I have this pass and then it's downhill, or in 5 miles is a Navy station. And you need to really cut the goal into small goals into the race. That makes it much easier because you think, okay, it's 2 miles, I can do it. If you think it's 80 miles, I can do it. That's much more difficult. That's a trick. And then it's just like, at the end of the day, why you are there? Okay, it's hurting. It's not cool situation. But you are here because you wanted to be here. We have the chance, it's a choice that we choose to race or we choose to go climbing or whatever. And it's because we love it at the end of the day. So to remember that when you are racing, when you are hurting, it's like, it was my decision to be here and it's part of my experience to to pass through these moments. And yeah, I think it's mostly that.

I noticed that you have a lot of gratitude, you have a lot of positive aura around you. And I think that sometimes helps as well in a way of like, you're not running from an angry place, but it seems that being appreciative of like you running in the mountains, as hard as it is when you go through some of those painful moments. But yeah, I think that's, That's a good approach.

Yeah, I think you need to find also your approach. For me, I think if you go from the beauty of it and it's because you love it and this gratitude of I'm doing something that is really giving me back a lot, that's where I feel good. I have been talking with some very famous coach from football in Europe and he was saying, I love when I'm in a stadium of the opponent and people is insulting me. And they are like just— and he say, there is the moment where I feel my best, where it's like a fight. And when people is like really, like, you know football, like it's not— it can be very harsh. Like they are just saying insulting and he say, that's where I feel good and empowered for performing the best. And I think that's very different from person to person. For me, it's being peaceful and being happy about— there is where I feel like that I can deliver the most. Maybe some people need to fight. Maybe some people need to be in war to be able to perform. And I think that's also— you need to know what what brings your best performance, and then to try to create this environment to be able to deliver.

Yeah, very well said. The one part we talked briefly about earlier, but I want to talk a little bit more about, is training adaptations. And so there are many different ways, like, yeah, we can increase training volume, we can increase training intensity, but also the adaptations to things like altitude or heat or cold. Um, in particular altitude, I'm fascinated about because you spend so much time in the mountains, yet you live in Norway at a very low, low level. Like up to 3 days ago you were in Norway. Here you are like going to do a mountain race up to like really high up. So how do you go about adapting to high altitude?

Well, like it was funny that when I moved to Chamonix, to France, I was super afraid about being that low because I was born at like 2,000 meters. I had lived all my life like above 2,000 meters and then I was going to live at Chamonix that was at 1,000 meters. I was like, wow, I will lose my fitness because like living low and now I live at sea level. But I think it's, of course you need to then reacclimatize in a way, like you need to re-adapt. But science, we haven't been able to see how— it's not shown that it's adaptations from the past that we can use in the future on long periods of time. But we all know that in practice that happens. That when you have been at 8,000 meters the first time, it takes a lot of time to acclimatize. And then, the body knows how to acclimatize, so it goes faster. And that we need to study more why that happens. What are the adaptations or what are the shortcuts that the body is taking for doing that? And that goes to heat, probably to cold, but also to training. If you had been there, the body knows how to go back there on a quicker way. So I think that's important to understand and then to see how long time it takes you to acclimatize for a certain environment because that's also very individual. Some people will take a lot of time to get in very good shape, some people get very quick on this good shape and some people acclimatize much faster than others. So to know how it works for you and to try to trigger this just before you want to.

But in Norway, do you sleep inside a tent? Do you have one of those altitude tents in your room? Do you train in— Obviously, you're going into the mountains to some extent too.

I have. Yeah, I have a tent and I use mostly going to expeditions. Normally, if I go to 4,000 meters, I normally never need to acclimatize. I can go from home Norway to Mont Blanc summit the day after and I don't feel bad. But if going higher in expeditions, then yeah, I pre-acclimatize, especially if I want to have not a lot of time in the country because I don't have that amount of time that it takes, like one month or two months to pre-acclimatize. So yeah, I use that, but then it's the same, it's a big stress to the body. Train a lot and you sleep in altitude or you train in altitude, you need to count that in on that. So now, for example, that I'm training a lot because all these races that is happening and the short ones, then I knew that I couldn't be training in altitude. So I did the last week that I was tapering, then I did some nights at altitude. But before, I was thinking it would be worse to be sleeping in altitude because the amount of training Yeah.

Do you do much heat training at all?

I started doing it because I'm very, very bad at heat. I don't like it. I love cold. I love winters. But so yeah, then I do some training when I'm on the bike in the home trainer, for example, in the room. I just put a bit of warming or I run out with warm clothes. Some of that, yeah, I did, especially the early season before Zegama, for example. The weeks before I was doing a bit because it was very cold in Norway and then going to Spain, it was going to be hot. So yeah, I do a bit on— I didn't do that before and now the last years I'm getting better at it. And especially that's what I was meaning, what's the goal of the session? Maybe that's an easy run, but you can do that on heat and then you are making adaptations or using that for it.

Yeah. Aha moment for me in my running journey was at some point, like earlier you were talking about athletes running like kind of in that yellow zone quite a bit. And for me, once I found out that whole concept of low heart rate training, that for me changed everything. That was like, ah, all of a sudden I can run much lower intensity and slowly but surely become faster at the same heart rate. And that changed quite a bit of my training approach. Has there been any aha moments for you in your training journey over the years?

I would say it was when our daughter was born, because my training before, it was like, I just go out and train and spend a lot of hours out and climb and that. And then naturally it became that I was some days tired, so I was training easier. And then some days I was feeling stronger, so I was going fast. But it was mostly— I had a big plan of the season, like, okay, now this time of the year, I need to prioritize. But on the day-to-day, I didn't have— I had not done any intensity session for 10 years. I was doing races. I was doing a lot of races, like 40, 50 races a year. So every weekend on skis, but I didn't have any intensity training. Maybe sometimes I was going feeling good and then I was pushing, but for 10 years it was really like that. Just do a lot of hours out and then the intensity was coming naturally to what I was feeling and races to do intensity, but nothing planned to that. And then when we got our daughter, the first, then, okay, I don't have that much time to train now, so I need to to think a bit more, like, I cannot be doing that much races, so maybe it's important to do some intensity training and to try to prioritize much. So it was mostly that, to say, okay, I need to optimize more my time for training, and then to figure out that, okay, I'm training maybe a bit less hours, but I'm increasing my performance.

Much more specific.

Yeah, much more specific. I still do, like, my season in general is a big part of the year, especially winter, with a lot of zone 2, like big amounts of hours of zone 2. And then, like, at that point, I know that I cannot do any big intensity, uh, so then it's mostly to create a big base. And then on summer, like, to, to really polarize. So it's like doing really, like, big block of volume and then, like, polarizing, uh, Polarizing the training. Yeah.

Yeah. Let's talk about being a parent for a little bit because you have two daughters, one and three-year-old.

Yeah. One and three there.

How is that? How is that? Like, I'm just curious because you and your wife are both professional athletes. Now you have a one-year-old and a three-year-old. You're now also part of the next chapter in your life of your startup with Normal. Clothing and footwear company. So there's a lot of different changes going on in your world. How are you balancing it out? In what sort of way are you setting yourself up to still find ways to make this all work?

Well, I think it's— I'm very happy that Emily, my wife, she's very Swedish on that. It's organized. So you need to have that. And we are I think we are good on organizing that, like it's time for spending time with our daughters, it's time for training and it's time for working and to really separate that and to not be, and you know, it's not that if you try to do things at half, nothing will work. So like, okay, now it's, yeah, to really separate and organize when is the time to do everything and then I use like, When I do an easy run, for example, I can do a meeting, either I'm listening on a podcast or I have a meeting or an interview or whatever. So it's optimizing the time, but knowing that, okay, if I'm doing a hard session, I know that the hour before, the hour after, and during the hard session, it's only that happening. And then it's, yeah, I think it comes a lot with with having good organization and talking a lot with what is important and where you can reach. You know that maybe I cannot train that amount of hours, but how can I compensate that? Or compensate is not a good word. How can I, if I want to perform that way, can I train differently to reach this goal with less volume, for example? It's possible. And then see if it's possible, then I train that way. If it's not possible, then maybe I need to give up on something else.

You want to hear one, one secret from my end?

What? Yeah, you are more experienced on that.

Yeah, I have two daughters, 5 and 9, and we briefly were talking before this. But one thing that I've noticed that worked quite well for me in some of my early, early training was like actually bringing the double stroller. And it's one thing to do it all flat, but once you start bringing it to the trail, or like, but then again, I've seen some of the ridges that you're running and I wouldn't want to bring my kids on that.

I've done like a few of skiing sessions with the kids in the backpack, and that's, it's hard work.

Yeah, I can only imagine. But that's good. Are you bringing your daughters for the rest? Are you exposed? Like, because you grew up with two very outdoor parents bringing you to the trails from a very young age. Are you exposing your children as well to the outdoor in similar ways?

Yeah, we take walks and hikes and skiing. I think, yeah, since they were born, we were going to ski or we were going to just bring them and they like it, they love it. And also, when Maya, our older, she was 6 months old, we went to Himalayas. We wanted to have some climbs and I was trying to do a thing in Everest and Emily wanted to do some things in, in Island Peak and that. So we were just like, it was a family trip and they were part of it. And I think it's important to take them like at your life and our life is that to be outdoors. So just bring them on. Yeah.

You can just see the presentness in their eyes and them enjoying. And yeah, it's very special to be able to share that as a parent. Very nice. I want to be very respectful of your time. So I have like a few last things over here. First of all, I really enjoyed reading this one about the clouds, and in particular how you were talking about some of the different races that stood out to you, but also like how you were going about your Everest adventures and some of these enormous challenges that you undertook. So that's one that I absolutely enjoyed. There must have been a lot of work to write that one.

Yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's work, but it's fun. I love writing. Like, I think it's a bit like journaling. Like, it's it's just why we do that, why we go running, why we train, why we do— it's because we want to find some kind of emotions and experiences. And at the end of the day, it's not about winning. It doesn't matter. It's very important to have goals for the motivation, but at the end of the day, when it's done, like tomorrow, Hard Rock, I want to win and tomorrow we fight for that. But when I cross the line, it doesn't matter if I'm first, second, or like the last one, because the experience is what's, what's better. And I think like that's kind of journaling and that's like bringing into a book. It's mostly about this. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, and then the other one, Training for the Uphill Athlete with two other co-authors. What an enormous beast of a book that was. And absolutely the amount of thought and detail that goes into the training. It just comes to show that you have really put so much thought and effort into this. So this was really another one I absolutely enjoyed.

No, thanks. Here, yeah, here is more kudos to like Scott Johnson. Like, he did like all the hard work on it. He's an amazing coach too. And Steve House is an incredible climber, one of the best of all the times. And it was very interesting to put down what's our philosophy and methodology on training, because it's not good or bad methodologies, it's just different ones and you need to find the one that it adapts to you. So we try to put our philosophy on training on the book. And yeah, it starts with a few concepts and then you need to develop them and it becomes a lot of them.

You can go down the rabbit hole. Absolutely. So I have one more important question, but before we do, where can people find more about you?

So nowadays, like social media, it's all there. So yeah, on Instagram, Strava, Facebook, Twitter, you can find me. Also my website. And if not, just like probably if you go to the mountains, sometimes we will meet. Like it's a small world. Like if you go to the mountains, it's probably the easiest way to find me.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And then last question. There's a lot of regular everyday runners listening to this show. Do you have any closing thoughts on ways to improve for them to become a stronger, healthier, and happier athlete?

I think it's about motivation at the end. It's like being happy doing what you do. And we do that because we love it. And it's not an obligation. Nobody is like, putting, like saying you need to train. It's if you train is because you love it. And I think many times we lose that on the way that we feel that it's an obligation and it's not a thing that it's giving us fun and it shouldn't. And especially for young athletes, it's not focus on the goals, but focus on the process. And that's like, of course you enjoy racing, you enjoy when things go well, but that's very few days every year. What you need to love is the training. You need to love being out, you need to love to do the workouts, and then you need to find what is really motivating you. Sometimes it's community. It's like you want to go training because you go with your friends. So make that your training environment is that one. Sometimes it's because you want to go to the to the mountains, to the landscape. So make your training that. So really like to think, enjoy the process and feel that loving the process is way better than like, yeah, the results will come, but you cannot, if you focus on the results, I don't think anything can arrive there.

So well said. In closing, I just want to say at home, I have a vision board, with some of my running goals, with some of my different goals I want to accomplish. And I also have some images on there. I'm a pretty visual person, and that includes some people that I really respect and admire as well. So Elliot Kipchoge was on there. I had him on the podcast, was very happy about that. And a photo of you is next to Elliot Kipchoge. So that's really— that means a lot to me that you sat down here for an hour with me to share all of your insights. So I just want to say thank you very much.

No, thank you. Thank you for the time. It was a very pleasant conversation, and I hope that all the, all our listeners have been enjoying that time.

Absolutely. Have an incredible race tomorrow. We'll see you in the mountains tomorrow.

Thank you. See you in the mountains.

Awesome.

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did, and I really, I learned a lot myself, and I would actually love to hear from you. What was one key takeaway, one lesson that actually applied to you over here? I would love to hear that in comments. And sometimes when I listen to a conversation a second time or a third time, I'm actually picking up different things again. So sometimes actually seeing what other people, what other people took away from a conversation can be quite eye-opening as well. And that's what I sometimes do myself too. I go through past interviews and actually look through the comments to see what were some of the key takeaways that people had from this conversation. One more thing to share is once a week I write a newsletter, the Extramiles newsletter, and I share different running strategies for training and for racing and for overall health, either that I'm experiencing in my own life or that I'm connecting with different podcast guests and different other health and fitness experts out there. I'm sharing all of those insights in a short newsletter, typically goes out once a week on Friday. So if you're interested to sign up, go to extramilest.com. Once again, extramilest.com, and you'll receive that in your inbox. Thanks so much. Have fun out there on your runs and enjoy it. See you on the next one.

Bye now.