How to Build an Unstoppable Aerobic Engine (Even If Starting From Zero) | Scott Johnston

We often see people coming to us who can't run very fast. Some of them can't even run at their aerobic threshold. They need to walk to be in that energy zone. Those people we call aerobically deficient.

You will never maximize your endurance potential without first maximizing your basic aerobic capacity. Why is that the absolute starting point for a recreational runner?

I have yet to meet anyone who has not responded positively over the course of months and months to aerobic-based training. I have seen athletes improve their aerobic threshold speed for 10 years running. For most of us, almost unlimited potential to increase our aerobic capacity speed.

Scott Johnson coaches some of the world's top endurance athletes. He co-authored this book. It's one of my favorite books in the running and endurance space, Training for the Uphill Athlete. And he co-authored that with Killian Jornet and with Steve House. And this book has really changed how serious runners and mountain athletes train.

You can nudge these thresholds upward from below, but you cannot drag them upward from above. If you train above the threshold, you're basically telling the aerobic metabolism, oh, I really don't need you. I need more anaerobic capacity than aerobic capacity.

When you work with athletes and you discover, all right, they have a lot of aerobic potential, they're underdeveloped at this point, but let's see what we can do to improve them. What high-level advice would you have for them? Thanks to LMNT for sponsoring this episode. If you're running in the winter months or in the summer months, even at a low intensity, you might notice you lose quite a bit of sweat. And you're not just losing water, you're also losing sodium. The problem is that most electrolyte drinks are basically colored water with a bunch of sugar added to it, and that's not what we need. LMNT is different. It is a simple electrolyte package that you mix into your water. No sugar, no no food dye, no junk. Just a meaningful dose of electrolytes: 1,000 milligrams of sodium, 200 of potassium, and 60 of magnesium. I use LMNT all the time on my runs, in the gym, while traveling, even before podcasts over here. It helps keep me mentally sharp, it improves my recovery, and I generally feel better throughout the day with enough electrolytes in me. If you want to try LMNT, go to drinklmnt.com/flow to get a free sample pack with any order. That is drinklmnt.com/flow. Hope you enjoy my conversation with Scott Johnston. Scott, welcome to The Extra Mileage Show. I'm glad to have this conversation with you.

Well, Floris, thanks very much for asking me. I'm excited to dive into a whole bunch of topics with you.

Yeah, same here. So it was several years ago when I first came across the book that you wrote. Training for the Uphill Athlete, and you wrote that together with Kilian Jornet and with Steve House.

Mm-hmm.

First of all, tell me a little bit more about, like, this is such a phenomenal piece of work and you have written this. There's so much thought and detail that went into this. I think this is really a classic for any athlete to read. How did this book come about? And you mentioned earlier that there's sometimes the timing of these things works out well, so that would be good to hear a bit more about that.

Sure. Well, the, I'd written another book prior to that called Training for the New Alpinism. That was— I wrote with Steve because Steve was an alpinist, and I coached Steve through most of his professional climbing career until he had a very serious, almost, almost fatal accident that kind of— that pretty much ended his climbing career. Um, and that book covers most of these same topics Shortly after the book was pub— that first book, Training for the New Alpinism, came out. Both were published by Patagonia. The first book came out, I think, in 2012 or '13, somewhere around there. We got this email from Kilian who said, "Hey, I like what you've done with this book. It's got all this great information in it, but many people are going to take one look at the COVID with that crazy wild-looking climbing picture on it and go, whoa, that's not for me. I'm not a climber. But he said, I think you should write something like this that is kind of directed towards the mountain runners and ski mountaineers. And then I, I said, well, that's a great idea. I would be happy to do that if you want to chip, you know, join in in the process and do it with me. And so Steve acted as kind of the photo editor for the book, collecting pictures and that sort of thing. And then I did most of the, pretty much all the writing, but Kilian and I collaborated a lot on, you know, the ideas that behind it, you know, the training theory and then some of the actual applications of that training theory. And as I mentioned before we started recording, that, you know, that winter Kilian was on the couch for a number, you know, a couple of months with a broken leg from skimo racing. And so it was easy for us to find time to work together to put it to get, to get, get all the pieces together. But then it took me another year perhaps to, you know, kind of get it all finalized and get it through the editing process with Patagonia. But it was really quite an accident, you know, that Kilian just happened to reach out and say, hey, I think there's an audience for this that's much bigger than the climbing audience. So why don't we try that? And so that, you know, suddenly launched the whole thing. And then, you know, suddenly we had people contacting me asking about training for running and mountain running especially. But yeah, that's sort of the story of the genesis.

It's funny how the universe works sometimes, and I'm glad that Kilian reached out to you. And I have a tremendous amount of respect for anyone who has written a book. I've recently written and published my own book. And for someone to write a second book, that's like a whole nother level. So much respect for you to put all that.

Well, especially when you're not a writer. It's quite a project, you know, when you're not That's not your job professionally, writing. So yeah, I learned a lot through the process. Luckily, I had a very good editor for both books and he taught me how to write.

Totally, totally. There's one part on page 65 that I want to talk about. There's one sentence in particular over here that stands out. You will never maximize your endurance potential without first maximizing your basic aerobic capacity. AET. Why is that the absolute starting point for a recreational runner?

Well, actually, and this is something I think would be important for people of training for endurance, it's the same across all endurance sports. I mean, obviously they have their own technical differences. I mean, there's obviously a lot of difference between swimming and running, but your muscles don't really know the difference. And, you know, the muscles are just doing their job of contracting and relaxing and contracting and relaxing. They're driven by metabolic processes. So the, the metabolism of endurance is the same regardless of the sport. Bicycling, running, hiking, mountaineering, it's all— that's what makes these ideas so universally applicable is when you can understand, you know, what it means, what the different methodologies are about training for endurance, you can apply them to different sports. I mean, my main coaching history and background for 15, almost 20 years was coaching cross-country skiers, years at the World Cup level. And, you know, again, that's the same when they're going uphill. Their legs are doing the same thing that a runner's legs are doing. I mean, the technique looks different for sure. I think that's important. So if people can grasp that is what, what endurance is. When you— endurance is a metabolic effect because it is the metabolism that is turning over The producing the energy that is used to contract the muscles, you know, to, without going into the whole exercise physiology of it. And essentially we have this little energy producing plant within every muscle cell. We have, of course, it's in every single cell of our body. That's what keeps us alive. But we're gonna just talk about what's going on in the muscle cells. The faster the metabolism can turn over this energy. The faster we can move. And if it's done, we have, we have essentially to, to grossly oversimplify this, we have two ways of producing this energy that I'm talking about for, for muscle contraction. One uses oxygen and it's called the aerobic metabolic pathway. And then we have another one that's called the anaerobic metabolic pathway that doesn't require oxygen. The aerobic metabolic pathway has a far greater capacity for producing, um, this energy. It's rather, it's a bit slower in terms of creating this energy, but it can go for, you know, hours and hours and hours. And in fact, you know, even days at a time, whereas the anaerobic system can produce a lot of energy quite quickly, but it has its built-in negative feedback system. If anybody has ever heard of the term lactate or lactic acid, you know, that is a metabolite that's produced by the anaerobic metabolic system that not necessarily has a negative feedback, but it's an indication of a negative process going on, meaning that if you are over-reliant on that anaerobic metabolic pathway, we see fatigue occur more quickly in those athletes that are over-reliant on it. So Now I'm coming back to your question, which is why is this aerobic metabolic process or aerobic, what we call the aerobic base, why is it so fundamentally important to an endurance athlete? That is because for any of, any event that goes over 2 minutes or a little more than 2 minutes is becomes an endurance event. And once you get past about 2 minutes, The, the bulk of the energy is gonna be produced through this meta— this aerobic metabolic pathway. So when we're talking about normal endurance events for most people, which are gonna last from, you know, a bunch of minutes to a bunch of hours, the aerobic metabolism is what's providing the energy for that. So our training, even for somebody who's running relatively short distances,, you know, of just a few minutes, maybe a 10, a 5-kilometer race, you know, something that could be in the 15 to 25-minute range, that the energy system that, that is producing 90% of the energy for that is the aerobic energy system. So that needs to be the, the, the focus of the training is to increase the capacity of the aerobic metabolic processes in the muscle to produce energy. So that, that's why that sentence says that you will never maximize your endurance potential until you maximize your aerobic capacity.

One thing that I've come to realize is I've had a few different conversations with triathletes as well. I had a conversation with Mark Allen, 6-time world champion Ironman, and he described that it takes many years to build up your aerobic system and to properly develop it. Yes. What have you noticed from athletes that you have worked with over the years? How many years is it until you feel like you have truly utilized or like maximized or optimized that? Because it can be a long period of time. And I think a lot of people are thinking it's, it's a relatively short period of time.

Right. Well, you can make gains, of course, on the order of months. But, you know, typically what— this is one thing I think it's interesting from an evolutionary standpoint is that our species is predisposed towards endurance. I mean, we are evolutionarily not— we're not very powerful. We're not very fast, but we have amazing endurance in the animal kingdom. Um, and it's because of their evolutionary background. So we come genetically from the factory. With this capability. I have yet to meet anyone who has not responded positively over the course of months and months to aerobic-based training. They do have not— we've not seen gains, and I'll talk about how we measure those gains in a minute. Whereas the, the training that it takes, or the, the, this, the— to improve, let's say, your speed and power capability. We are, because we're not genetically predisposed in that direction. You have to have been almost freakishly born outside the bell curve of standard, you know, that way, 3 standard deviations out of the bell curve to be a Usain Bolt, for instance. Like, there is no way, even if you and I had started as children, probably, that we could have trained to become a sprinter of that caliber. Whereas most people can improve their endurance capacity manyfold over the course of a few years. Um, so that's kind of a good, that's a positive thing for most of us. So we have a lot more potential to become good long-distance runners, for instance, than we are to become sprinters or jumpers or that sort of thing. Um, and the way we do this is I mentioned this whole metabolic process, but there are a couple of metabolic markers that take place. In this aerobic, um, system that we're talking about that allow us to identify these two things that are often called thresholds. And the first threshold that you encounter as you increase the intensity of exercise is often commonly referred to as the aerobic threshold. It can also be for— it's referred to by several names. The exercise science has not done us any favors with their naming of a lot of these things that get tossed around like lactate threshold and that sort of thing. There's often many names for these, these, these things that we're gonna be speaking of. But the, the aerobic threshold or the, what's often also called the first, um, ventilatory threshold or the first lactate threshold. This is a rather low intensity, um, uh, threshold that, that it, it indicates a shift in the metabolism that's going on.. And then we have a second higher threshold that is often people in termin— in some terminologies often just called the threshold. I think that's a little confusing, but it could also be called the second threshold or the anaerobic threshold or the second ventilatory threshold. There's, again, there's more names for that. But we, we have these two pretty distinct metabolic events that define our res— the aerobic system's response to increasing energy demand or increasing intensity. Um, and we can, we can identify those through some very simple testing, can be done in a laboratory, can be done out in the field. And so, but one of the ways of measuring this aerobic base capacity is how fast can you run at that first threshold, that aerobic threshold. And this is, this is a, an intensity that a person could typically run for a few hours. Um, so it's, it's an intensity at which for many people that would be the intensity they would compete a marathon at. And so if we can take, if we can improve the athlete's speed at their aerobic threshold, the way we're doing that is by increasing their, the aerobic energy production that's going on in that intensity zone. And we can see over years and years an increase in the athlete's speed at the aerobic threshold. And so, and I have seen athletes improve their aerobic threshold speed. Now, this is not like top-end speed. This is just, you know, this would be a moderate intensity. Most people would consider a moderate intensity. I have seen athletes improve their aerobic threshold speed for 10 years running. These are serious, you know, full-time athletes training, um, You know, so that means there's all, for most of us, almost unlimited potential to increase our aerobic capacity speed or aerobic capacity. We often see people coming to us that aren't, who can't run very fast. Some of them can't even run at their aerobic threshold. They are, they're needing to, they need to walk to, to stay, to keep that energy system to be in that energy zone. And those people we call aerobically deficient. They just, their aerobic system really can't produce enough energy to sustain high, a very high output. But we've seen people come to us who are, um, you know, a 12 or a 13-minute mile maximum speed at their aerobic threshold. You know, just a bit faster, like a fast walk. And in fact, who 6 months later, their aerobic threshold speed is 10 minutes per mile. Mm-hmm. Another 6 months later, it's 9 minutes per mile.. And so we, again, we see massive potential for improving the aerobic threshold, aerobic capacity, which we are measuring by their speed at their aerobic threshold. And again, like, like I said to you before, that can go on for years and years and years.

There's page 152 and 53 in your book that talks about that system in more detail. And you have two very good graphs, and I will put them actually on the screen as well.

Whoa.

Oh yeah. So it's basically about the athlete that is aerobically well developed and the athlete that is aerobically not well developed. And so the one thing that I found very interesting, and I would like to talk through this in a bit more in here, it shows like the low aerobic capacity athlete has a very small zone 1 and 2. A very broad zone 3, and then the zone 4 and 5, which is not that big. Then if you look at the well-trained athlete, has a very wide zone 1 and 2, a relative small zone 3, and then a, like, almost similar size zone 4 and 5. Can you speak through that a little bit more? Because it was two very interesting graphs to look at from that perspective.

So one of the— when I was talking about just moments ago, we improving the athlete's speed at their aerobic threshold, we are essentially moving their aerobic threshold upward in intensity. You know, it's, you know, their aerobic threshold is becoming more— it's able to sustain a higher and higher power output. And it eventually is going to come pretty close to that second threshold I was talking about, which would be for most people, that second threshold would be, let's say, your speed in a 10K. Let's say you're a 45-minute or 40-minute 10K runner. That's pretty close to your, your anaerobic or that second threshold I was talking about. So let's just say your anaerobic threshold is a 6-minute mile. Well, when you started, your aerobic threshold was a 12-minute mile. But now over the course of a year and a half, you have moved your aerobic threshold where now it's an 8-minute mile. So now these two thresholds are quite close together. And as a consequence, you have a bigger zone 1 and 2, as you talk, you mentioned, meaning that you can operate aerobically at a, across a much broader range of, of speeds or, you know, intensity. However we met, we can measure intensity by heart rate, blood lactate, you know, speed. I'm using speed because I think most of us can visualize it pretty easily. And I often see with, you know, aerobically deficient people that come to us that the spread between these two thresholds will often be as high as 30, 30 or more percent in terms of, um, heart rate or speed. And we can get that down typically with proper training in this. And I'm, you know, many people have probably understand or have heard about zone 2 training. I mean, it's all the rage now. It's something that, you know, people like me and others have known about for decades, but now all of a sudden it's become a, a really catchy thing to talk about on YouTube and social media. But that is making that zone 2 area bigger is means you're improving your aerobic base. So if you can run, you know, effectively run a, let's say I said an 8-minute mile at your aerobic threshold, and your anaerobic threshold is a 6-minute mile. Well, those two are still kind of far apart. What if you could run a 7-minute mile at the aerobic threshold and a 6-minute mile at your anaerobic threshold? Now these two things are very close together. And when we get the two threshold speeds within 10% of one another, then we say, okay, this person is no longer aerobically deficient. In a world-class athlete, I will often see the spread between these thresholds at around 6 or 7%. So what— and what that means then, and this is something that has been grossly underrepresented in all this talk by influencers about zone 2, is that when that zone 2, that's the aerobic threshold, is that close to the anaerobic threshold, training at your aerobic threshold is no longer easy. Mhmm. Because you're from a— it's, it's the same metabolic process that's, that's driving it. But from a neuromuscular standpoint, it takes a lot more power to run a 7-minute mile than it did to run a 9 or 10 or 13-minute mile. And so it becomes too stressful. So world-class athletes can't train in zone 2 very often.

Yeah.

Certainly at the upper end of zone 2 because it's so stressful. That would be the— so let's take someone like Eliud Kipchoge, who's Famous marathoner. Well, his pace in a 2-hour marathon is what, a little over 4:30 miles.

Well, he's running—

when you think about it, he's running at just a bit over his aerobic threshold in that marathon. So you can imagine he doesn't get to train. He can't train every day at a 4:30 mile pace. He would be injured and overtrained very quickly. And it's the same with any really high-level endurance athlete is they can't train in, especially at the upper end of zone 2 very often because it's way, it's just too taxing for them.

Yeah. So it really depends on how well developed are they aerobically and even how much training volume do they do, right? Because sometimes a recreational athlete might only run 3 hours a week. And at that point, I think you can get away with running everything at the top end of your zone 2, even if you're well developed. But then the athletes who are training 8, 10, 12 hours a week, they get in trouble indeed when they do everything close to that.

If they're, yeah, well-developed and can run fast, then it becomes a big load neuromuscularly. And the nervous system is really what's driving the muscle contraction. It's what's telling the muscle to contract. And the nervous system becomes fatigued. In a similar fashion. You know, well, it's a different mechanism, but, you know, the nervous system gets fatigued too, just like the muscle gets fatigued. So we have to consider, like, how much nervous energy the nervous system can produce over the course. And so that's why someone like Kipchoge, you know, they, they can't run, they can't run at their marathon pace very often, or very high volume, I should say.

It is very motivating to see your monthly pace at the same heart rate improve and becoming more efficient from that perspective. Yeah. When you're coaching athletes, because you have your own running coaching program, and I'll make sure to link to that in the notes as well. When you work with athletes and you discover, all right, they have a lot of aerobic potential, they, they, they're underdeveloped at this point, but let's see what we can do to improve them. Mm-hmm. What high-level advice would you have for them? Like, for even for those listening here right now that that realize, hey, I definitely wanna improve my aerobic running capacity, how would you go about that?

I, the first thing we would do is we test these two thresholds to determine, you know, is this person, does this person have a lot of low-hanging fruit in the aerobic area or are they aerobically very well developed? And then we base the training that they'll do on that. How, how do you find that this person has this a big spread between these thresholds? The the first order of business is we need to move that aerobic threshold upward, you know, to get it closer to the, the second threshold. Because until we get the aerobic metabolism capable of, of producing more energy, you're going to the sexy, cool interval training and, you know, all that hard stuff. It's gonna be, it can actually be counterproductive because if you train, when you train a above either one of these thresholds, it pushes that threshold down. And one of the reasons that many people who come to us are aerobically deficient is that they've been involved in some kind of exercise program, whether it's running or CrossFit or something that has done a lot of high-intensity training. And basically that reduces their aerobic capacity. Because the, if you train above the threshold, the threshold being the upper limit of what the aerobic system can produce, this aerobic threshold, if you train above it, you're basically telling the metabolic, the aerobic metabolism, oh, I really don't need you. I need more anaerobic capacity than aerobic capacity. So the signaling mechanism, which is what training does when we, when we exercise or especially when we train routinely. It's sending a signal that goes all the way down to the genetic level that causes adaptations to be made. And you want the signals that go to this, the right genes that tell it, no, I want more aerobic capacity. And the only way to do that is to train in this area below that aerobic threshold. And that's what, so I like to say you can nudge these thresholds upward from below, But you cannot drag them upward from above. And so, so what we would do with that person is we would try to get them to do as much of their exercising in that, this person who has this aerobic deficiency here, we would say, let's, we're gonna do as much of the exercises you have time for in that aerobic zone, in that what we would call zone 2. And because the biggest stimulus to developing aerobic capacity is volume, duration and volume, which is the reason that, you know, professional marathoners run 100+ miles a week. I think they need to do that to send a powerful enough signal to the genes to say, hey, we need this adaptation. It's the reason professional cyclists are riding, you know, 30 to 40 hours a week. Week. They need that signaling. They can handle it because there's no impact. Um, you know, runners can't hand train that, that quite that volume. But, but the, the, the idea is the more you expose the muscle to this type of stimulus, the more it's gonna adapt. So in this case, and I'll caveat this, but in this case, more is better. You know, so more is always gonna be better up until it's not. And the trick is figuring out where it's not. Now, for most amateurs, they're more time constrained than they are energy constrained. And so it's very, you know, somebody who's, you know, running less than 4 or 5 hours a week probably are not gonna run into— they're not gonna have to worry about doing too much volume. So they could do a lot of their training in this zone 2, and they would see pretty significant, uh, improvements coming from that. Someone who's, you know, able to train 12 or 14 hours a week, you know, they would have to probably be a little more careful with the volume of running that they were doing.

I do have a few follow-up questions on that part, but I wanna backtrack first. You mentioned the first thing we do when working with athletes is measuring their first and second threshold. Mm-hmm. How would you go about measuring that? Or for anyone listening here, if they wanna measure that on their own, how would they go about that?

Yeah. So, well, the classic way of doing this in the past has been to go spend hundreds of dollars in a laboratory. And, and that does work. You can do that. There's two problems with that. And I will, you know, we'll probably, I'll send you a link to the, on our website that people can go to. I have a whole article that explains these tests, that they're self-administered and they're free. And the reason I prefer them, they're what we call field tests, or they're actually measuring your performance. The reason I, I prefer those, unless you're a professional athlete who can, has ready access to a laboratory and it's the same lab with the same technicians and the same protocols, you know, randomly going to a lab, you know, twice a year, you're, you're getting a little snapshot and maybe in us it's the same lab and it's the same technician and it's the same machine and the same protocol. You can't compare your app. You're comparing apples to oranges. So, and it's expensive. So unless you're a professional, I strongly recommend people use these self-administered, um, testing, which field tests, which both basically involve, um, measuring. The first test we do to determine that first threshold is what we call a heart rate drift test. So we would, we would maybe for someone we've never worked with before, um, we'd say, what feels like an easy, comfortable running pace to you that you could sustain for an hour? So we would have them, we'd have them run for an hour. We typically would like to have people do this on a treadmill because then the speed of the treadmill doesn't change. So we would say, we're gonna gradually warm you up until we get to this heart rate that feels sustainable to you and a speed and a heart rate that feels sustainable. Let's say it's 130. And so we're running along at 130 heart rate.. And over the course of the hour, we're gonna notice that heart rate will begin to drift up even though the speed of the treadmill has not changed. And if the, the heart rate upward drift, I mean, this heart rate drift is an, an old concept. We didn't understand it particularly well until portable heart rate monitors came around in the mid-'80s, cuz you didn't have a way of measuring it. But you would see that, oh, I've been out running for an hour and I've, I'm going at the same pace, but my heart rate's 10 beats higher. Why is that? Well, there's a lot of physiological reasons behind it, but what we, what's a lot of studies have shown is that if, if the heart rate is, doesn't, and the temperature is relatively moderate, heat has a big effect on heart rate drift. So if you're running in, you know, Texas in the summer, you're gonna probably have a, you're gonna have a very different reading than, you know, running in Wisconsin in the wintertime. But all those things put aside, because it, it can get too complicated and unusable, is that when we see the heart rate drifting up less than 5% over the course of an hour, then we know we are at or under the aerobic threshold. So let's say this, we had you run at 130 for an hour, and at the end of that, you know, run, your heart rate's 134. We say, okay, so you're probably, you're, you're, that starting heart rate was probably very close to your aerobic threshold. So we could say, we're gonna set the top of your zone to at 130. Very simple test. And the, the beauty of this test is that when you— most of us run on the same courses frequently. You know, you have a favorite trail you run on or a favorite loop in town. And one day you're running on this, you've been training, doing, you know, doing all this training now under 130. And so you're care— and you're being careful to control the intensity and the speed to keep it you know, keep that heart rate under 130 in all of your daily runs. But one day you notice, wow, I just ran my same loop that's an hour long and I'm 5 minutes faster, but my, but I kept my heart rate under 130. Well, the only way that could happen is if your aerobic capacity has increased, your body's ability to produce energy aerobically. So when you noticed that increase in pace for that hour, that, and, and you put 2 and 2 together and you say, oh, my aerobic My aerobic capacity has improved. I should go retest my aerobic threshold so I can, I can anytime I want, I can do one of these heart rate drift tests. They're relatively moderate intense. They're kind of moderate intensity. So they're, they're not a huge stress on the body. So that's one of the reasons I like these field tests is we can have people redo them every several weeks as they see improvement. And we just keep— so the next time we do this test, it's a good chance your, your aerobic threshold has moved to 135. And then 6 weeks later, it's likely to be a 140. You know, it's gonna continue to creep up. So that's the aerobic threshold, the, the first threshold test. And then the second threshold test is more stressful. It's basically a time trial. You're gonna be, you know, run as hard as you can in this, and we're gonna look at what your average heart rate is. As I mentioned earlier, you know, for somebody who's maybe a 40 or 45-minute 10K runner, they know what their— if they've measured their heart rate in a 45-minute 10K run, that's their anaerobic threshold. That's their second threshold. So we can, so we have these two. Now we've got these two anchor points for the intensity zones. You know, I'm one, I'm one of my pet peeves is that people like to prescribe intensity zones as a percentage of something like a maximum heart rate. And I feel like, first of all, we're not all the same. And as we just pointed out, some people who are aerobically deficient, their, their aerobic threshold is gonna be very, very low. Might not conform to this, the kind of the classic, you know, 60% of maximum heart rate, those kinds of numbers. Why not do an actual test or two actual tests that now you know how your physiology responds rather than relying on some, you know, percentages of, which you may or may not. It's a little bit like the old 220 minus your heart— minus your age is your heart rate. Well, if you tested 1,000 people, the average would probably be 220 minus your age. But how do you know how you stack up to 220 minus your age? Probably, you know, the chances of, you know, the spread above and below that average is huge, and you could fall somewhere along. So these two tests are very simple. They're free and you can redo them anytime you see performance improvements.

One question about the second test. When you're talking about this is an all-out test with 10K runners, you'll see like that is typically like if, if there will be a 10K 45-minute, like then they know that that would be their second threshold. Mm-hmm. How long would you recommend people doing that test, that second test?

Well, the, the first, um, for an elite athlete, We often will have them, you know, a world-class athlete will do this for an hour. It's a— so it's, it's basically a world-class half marathon time, roughly around an hour. And but for most people, they will fatigue muscularly during the course of that long of a run at maximum effort. And as a consequence, they're— you won't get a good reading because their muscles are getting too tired, and so the heart rate will begin to drop. So, what we'll generally pick based on, you know, if someone is rather new to this, we might even do as short as, you know, 20 minutes or 30 minutes. But generally, for the amateur, we'll try to stay somewhere below 45 minutes, you know, somewhere in the 30 to 45-minute range. Because if you notice, like, we haven't spoken about local muscular fatigue yet, But I'd like to address that subject with you. That's the single biggest thing that causes people to slow down. It's like at endurance events, you're not operating at your heart's maximum pumping capacity. We have excess. You're not operating what they call VO2 max. You're not, you're not maxed out when you're in an event that lasts more than a few minutes. So your heart has excess pumping capacity, but you still slow down. In the course of an interval workout or a race. The reason you slow down is the, the muscles that are propelling you become fatigued. They're not— you're not slowing down because your heart can't supply enough oxygen. Slowing down because the muscles can't use that oxygen effectively. And so that's why we have to keep these tests somewhat shorter for less well-conditioned athletes.

I made a lot of notes because I, I just absolutely love your book. So I want to go to page 73. Page 73 talks about— here's a quote by Renato Canova. Canova. Yeah. About the training effect. Training is not the work you do, but the effect it has on the body. And there's a really good graph that basically shows the training effect. It basically talks about the workout. The fatigue phase, the recovery phase, and then the supercompensation. Can you explain a little bit more, like when you're training too easy, when you're training adequate, and when you're training too hard, what you're seeing happen throughout these different stages?

Yeah, the training effect is, I mean, we don't get stronger during the training. We get stronger when we recover from the training. And one of the biggest mistakes I have seen over many, many, I've been doing this for 30-some years is that there's not adequate recovery for many people. And so they're, they're driving themselves into a state of fatigue, which is what signals the body to adapt to become stronger. But they apply another significant training load before that first load has been absorbed and adapted to by the body. And as a consequence, yeah, they're training hard and they're they feel like I should be getting fitter, but in fact, their fitness may even be declining. And this is the classic overtraining syndrome, which is, you know, you, you're doing all the training, but you're not recovering well and you're getting basically weaker and weaker and weaker over time. Let's say zone 1 and zone 2, easy aerobic training. Generally, you're, you should be able to recover from that within 24 hours. If you're not, either the volume was too much or in the intensity was too high.. And that's the reason that most high-level endurance athletes are training at least twice a day. They're giving that aerobic system this stimulus twice a day. Because they'll recover from these workouts because they're relatively easy on their body. They can recover from them in, you know, 6 to 10 hours. And so they're, they go in the run for a run in the morning and they'll run in the evening. As you move up in the intensity scale, the, the recovery period gets longer and longer and longer. And what can happen with is people don't respect that recovery period. And also what complicates it, I mean, that, that graph that you show in the book is a beautiful graph. I stole it from Jan Ullbrecht, who wrote a book called the, the, the Science of Winning, which is a book about training for swimming. The problem with it is when we go out and train, we're, we are, we're training with an amalgam of all these different intensities usually, you know, and maybe you're run— running uphill and running back downhill. Well, the, the muscle load of running downhill is quite different than it is from going uphill. So we're not quite as simple as that graph. That graph is a, is a very much a simplification, but it gets the idea across that there is a recovery period that's needed. To, in order to, to see supercompensation, supercompensation, meaning where the body has responded to the stimulus you've given it, and it is becoming fitter in that way. So if you give it a strong aerobic stimulus, it's going to become more aerobically capable. Um, the next day. Now it might only be 1 or 2%. You might not notice. That's why the aerobic, as you mentioned, Mark Allen said, it takes years to fully maximize the aerobic genetic potential of an athlete because the incremental changes are quite small. They're not, you know, this is where again, special, uh, like influencers and Hollywood have not done us any favors. There are, there are no magic thing. You're not going to become, you know, suddenly become an amazing endurance athlete in a matter of weeks.

Just can't happen. Yeah.

Yeah.

You can't fast track that progress. You can only run so many hours per week before it starts to have a negative impact too, right?

And these adaptations we're talking about, they take time to occur. And you have to give them that time to occur.

The other thing too, I sometimes see people even overtraining with low intensity, meaning if they start from relative low training volume, really ramping it up, sometimes their muscles, joints, ligaments, tendons are not developed enough to handle that much running, even at a low intensity, that's still quite a bit of training load.

Probably the biggest problem for runner— the reason people quit running is that they've ramped up either the intensity or the volume too fast. I mean, something that I think many people don't take into consideration is so that the connective tissue in the body, the fascia and the tendons especially, they are so poorly vascularized that they adapt much, much slower. In fact, there are a number of studies I've seen that say that they, they gain strength at about 1/7 the rate that the muscle improves in its strength. So you go out and run and yes, your muscles become fitter, but the connect— the things that are holding you together, the, the ligaments, the, the tendons, then the, the fascia that are connecting everything, they're not gaining the strength anywhere near as rapidly as your muscles are gaining the fitness. So you feel good. So you think, oh, I'm just gonna double my mileage this week and then I'm gonna double it again the next week. And then, you know, on the third or fourth week, suddenly your plantar fasciitis or plantar fascia, you know, blows out or your Achilles tendon goes because those things are not capable of handling the volume or the intensity that you're putting into them. So it takes so long to increase the strength of the system that's holding everything together.

Totally. Knowing what you know now, you have a tremendous amount of experience in the coaching and guiding of athletes. What advice would you give to your younger self or to other athletes in the earlier stage of their running career to improve their running?

First is to have chosen your parents very well because there is a genetic component to talent that is untrainable. You know, we do have, you know, our bodies do have the capability of responding to the training epigenetically. And, but, but if you were not— Eliud Kipchoge is, you know, 1 in 100 million, or 1 in 10 million people could be like that. And, um, you know, Usain Bolt, same sort of thing. And so people, most of us are somewhere in the middle of the bell curve. Those guys are freakish on, you know, the other end on that way out on the tail of the bell curve. But so that would be number one is to be lucky in the, the genetic lottery. Um, the other would be to start as a child. Many people are attracted to endurance sports, especially long, long duration endurance sports like ultra running and marathoning and those sorts of things because they're not very fast. They can't, they can't run very fast, but they can, you know, And as I've said, we don't adapt to speed training very quickly, especially as we age, but we can continue to improve aerobically and, and endurance-wise, our ability to sustain for a long time, for years and years, and then well into midlife. So people get attracted to that. But if you wanted to be successful, then you would start as a child developing the qualities that help you become faster because those are primarily developed in the nervous system. The ability of the brain to recruit a large mass of muscle and do it very quickly. And when our nervous system is really plastic as children, you know, and up and through, even through puberty, we are, we're so moldable. I mean, I coached kids for a long time and it's very rewarding for good for your ego as a coach to coach children because you just think, wow, I must be a great coach. Cuz look at all these kids are, they're such good, they're becoming so good cuz almost anything you have them do will make them better. But it's so learn doing age-specific training. So as a child, you know, you don't want, you know, 8-year-olds don't need to be going out and running 2 hours. First of all, they don't, they're not structurally capable of handling that. Their, their muscles wouldn't really adapt to that very well. And their, their, their little brains would go, this is boring as hell. I'm not gonna do this. And so with, yeah, with children, we have to have more gamification of, like, what'll make this fun for them so we can train them in, and especially developing skills, you know, agility, speed, power, you know, jumping. Then those can all be done in a playful, game-like way. And then as you— a person matures into, you know, teenage years, now you're getting to the point where a person can— they can start handling bigger loads, whether it's strength training. They can, they can Their muscles are ready to adapt to longer duration, and their frontal cortex is at the stage where they're not gonna get so bored going out for a, you know, 45-minute run. And so age-appropriate training is very important. You know, trying to train a, a, a child like, you know, an adult is a, a mistake. And a lot of people make that. So I think that would be the first thing is if you could start early enough, first, choose your parents, then start early enough, and then do age-appropriate things. Those are all really beneficial. And up through, certainly through the 20s and into the 30s, people are still quite malleable in terms of their adaptations to training. But what we see in middle age and older, and now I'm 72 years old, so I've lived this whole life. I've been through it from childhood to old age now, we become less and less malleable as we age in terms of, yes, where our recovery is slower, the adaptation processes are not as robust. We don't, we don't respond as quickly. So like the, I have to train really hard just to keep from getting, not hard, hard's the wrong word. I have to train a lot just to keep from getting slower, weaker, and more injured. So the, more, it's more maintenance when you get old. But, and you know, while it's, it's always, you know, it's always a good time to start exercising. It doesn't matter what age you are, but the later you, the later you push it to, and I think this is something that is unfortunate is when we are in our twenties, we don't recognize this quality called youthful vigor that, you know, you can stay out till 2 in the morning partying with your friends and then go and go into the mountains and do a long run that day, and you'll probably be fine. You know, maybe you'll be a little stiff and sore, but we don't understand that that's just youth. That's not necessarily fitness, it's youth, and that's gonna go away. And a lot of people through their 20s, and I think even into their 30s, they're coasting along on that youthful vigor without recognizing that, oh, if I wanna be able to continue having a life like this, I need to have some more structured, you know, whether it's strength training, you know, uh, endurance activities, speed and power, whatever it is, I need to include those in my lifestyle so that when I'm in my forties, I may not be able to stay out drinking till 3 in the morning and then go run a marathon, but I can, I can still be very active. The problem is I think many people coast through those twenties and thirties. And then they wake up when they're 45 and they go, holy shit, what happened? Where'd all that youthful vigor go? And then they are faced with, oh, I better start training and exercising. And then it's hard to change things in, you know, 45, 55, 60 years old. It's kind of hard to make those changes. So I don't know if that was exactly what you had in mind for an answer.

No, it is. And it is fascinating to hear you say that. And sometimes I also come across people that have been not very active during their 30s, 40s, or 50s, and they discover a joy of working out pretty much for the first time in decades. Yeah. And their base fitness might not be that well developed. And literally in a matter of 6 months, they look back and they see, wow, I'm becoming faster at the same heart rate. Or like, now I discovered a joy of running at low intensity that I didn't even know existed. I only thought It was no pain, no gain, pedal to the metal. And that's the fascinating part. Like, absolutely, I see how much easier it is in your 20s and your 30s. And then I also see these people in their 50s and 60s and 70s just thrive by the second wind they're getting too.

Absolutely. I mean, that's why anybody can respond to training and will respond to it. You know, in my particular case, and I've seen this with a lot of other athletes who have been operating at a pretty high level their entire life, is, you know, in my case, I will never run another 14-minute 5K in my life. You know, it's just never going to happen. And so I, I will never be able to achieve the things I did in youth. But now, if you had had a sedentary life, then yes, you're going to be able to run faster at 60 than you could at 30, probably. Which is gratifying, and it is wonderful that people can do that. But you can't expect to be, you know, there will be a limit to how much improvement you can make just due to the age.

Totally. And even going back to the point you made earlier is the whole realization of starting earlier when you can, not just with the running component, but even strength training, for example, which I think quite a few listeners they might have X amount of time available to train and they put all that training into running. And I think for me now at age 43, also now I'm very consistent about strength training and I know the importance and I notice the difference when I'm strength training or I'm not strength training. Sure. Whereas in your 20s, you might also feel like, I don't really need this as much. But I think when you can start those routines earlier, that, that helps build up the foundation for later.

Absolutely. And, you know, with, with the runner, runners typically just like to run. And it can be a little bit of a chore to get runners to get in the gym and do an organized strength training program. But all the professionals I work with are— do a lot of strength training. And part of it's for health and well-being and maintenance and not— and injury prevention and that sort of thing. But there is a significant significant improvement in performance. Your, your endurance, your endurance performance will improve if you are stronger.

And so we do quite a bit of strength training with athletes I work with. Talk to us about fast twitch versus slow twitch athletes. How does a runner determine which they are, and how should they approach their training goals and racing goals with this knowledge?

If you were the kid that excelled in let's say ball sports, probably when you were a child, you know, that you, you could, or, you know, you could sprint around the bases of a football, baseball field, or, you know, you typically fast twitch athletes are drawn towards short, high intensity exercise exercises. So things like, you know, in, in America, at least often these would be ball sports because they, they lend themselves to that. But if you were the kid who wasn't ever very good at ball sports, but you could go out and, you know, run or hike all day long, then you're probably in that slow twitch category. Now, the only way to really determine your composition is they do these things called muscle biopsies where they actually take a core sample out of the one— usually it's one of the quadricep muscles, very painful. And then they look at it under a microscope and they determine, you know, what is in the— it'll just be in that particular muscle, but they kind of generalize from there to the whole body. What is the, the composition of your muscles of fat made up of fast twitch fibers and slow twitch fibers? Now, one of the misconceptions is that there are slow twitch and there are fast twitch. They actually are on a spectrum from the slowest slow twitch fibers that maybe are in your forearms so that you can, you know, slow twitch fibers can be asynchronously engaged. In other words, your brain has very fine motor control over these slow twitch fibers, which is allows you why your fingers are so dexterous. It's why people can play beautiful musical instruments is that, you know, and those tend to not fatigue very much. I mean, people don't get tired playing the piano. You know, their forearms don't get tired because those, those muscle fibers have a lot of endurance. Slow twitch fibers have lots of endurance. And they're asynchronously fireable. In other words, they, we can very carefully regulate the pressure, whereas some, a muscle like some, let's say gastrocnemius, the big muscle in the calf, is gonna be a lot of fast twitch fibers in there. And it's either on or off. You know, fast twitch fibers tend to be, you know, 100% on, 100% off. It's not quite that simple, but they don't have this asynchronous capability. Um, so, but they're, but they're still on a spectrum from the, the very slowest slow twitch, least powerful fibers to the highest force fast twitch fibers. And all we're, they generally are on this spectrum. The fibers are gonna be existing somewhere on that spectrum. And the interesting thing for endurance athlete is we can, through the type of training we're doing, we can influence those faster twitch fibers to develop more endurance characteristics. This is what happens when we start training up around that second threshold that we were talking about. We're having to engage more powerful fibers, the faster twitch fibers. And if we expose them to longer duration activity, they will start to get the message that, oh, I need more endurance, and they will develop these characteristics that'll give them more endurance. That's what really improves your endurance, the ability to run faster for longer is those fast-twitch fibers taking on more aerobic endurance qualities. So, and there are, have been longitudinal studies, many longitudinal studies done on animals, but there have been a few longitudinal studies done on young people where they, they monitored the, the, um, transition of those fast-twitch fibers or into slow-twitch fibers over the course of an athletic career.. So over, let's say, 15 years from the age of, you know, 15 to 30, they were— the one study I'm referencing was done on Finnish junior cross-country skiers. And through that, you know, from puberty roughly to 30 years old, they saw that the volume of slow twitch fibers in these same people became much, much greater. So the fast twitch fibers were becoming more like slow twitch fibers. Because these kids were doing lots of endurance training and they were ski racing and doing that sort of thing. So we are plastic in that way too. We can affect, um, but fast twitch— people that are fast twitch dominant tend not to enjoy endurance activities because they're more painful for them. They tend to be— they tend to like to do sprinting and jumping and those sorts of things. That's what they're, they're good at. And people who are fast twitch oriented who do want to do more endurance training, it requires a slightly different approach. They generally don't handle a high volume of training as well because they're having to use these fast-twitch fibers in a way that the fast-twitch fibers aren't really designed to be used. And so they— it requires a bit more gentle touch and a different approach, um, than— but it's not a very big population, honestly, because those people tend not to end up wanting to do, you know, marathons, for instance.

Do you have a favorite workout for that lactate threshold, or any workout that comes to mind that you feel like this will really help?

Yeah. Yes, I do. There are several there, but I will preface the description of those workouts by saying it has been thought and promoted in kinda the popular press and the popular media world that all you need to do is train up around that second threshold because that's where that, that second threshold really represents your endurance limit. That's basically the, the fastest you can run for however long. And so people think, well, if, if I'm, if I can't run a 10K any faster than this, Then I just need to train at that limit all the time. So I'm gonna train at my endurance limit all the time. But as I talked about earlier, training in that, at that endurance limit all the time is actually gonna move the aerobic threshold in the wrong direction. It's gonna lower aerobic capacity. So we have to be kind of careful training around that endurance limit. It doesn't make up a very big percentage of the training. Less than 10% of the training would be done. In that intensity area. So the way we would— first, first thing we need to do is identify that second threshold, the lactate or anaerobic threshold, and then we can train typically just below it. Now, another— something that has been popularized recently, you may have heard of it, and since I know you're an Ingebrigtsen fan, you do know about this, these things they call the Norwegian doubles. And I just wanted to go there next. Yes.

Yeah.

Well, that's what they're doing is they're trying to target this training just below that second. Well, not just below, but below that second threshold. There'll be many ways to do this. It could be a long steady state. So you could maybe go to, um, 20 minutes at, let's say we identified this threshold as 160 beats per minute with your heart rate, or maybe it's a 6-minute mile pace. And so we could say, okay, we're going to do 20 minutes at 155 heart rate or 20 minutes at a 6:30 pace. Even though we know you could run this at 6 minutes per mile, we're gonna have you train a little easy, just a little easier than that. And the, and the reason is when you get right to this endurance limit, and especially when you step above it, the global fatigue component that comes with that, just astronomically higher. It's, it's an exponential change. Whereas if we stay a bit below it, we can handle a really high volume. The reason these, this whole Norwegian double threshold stuff has become popular is that by controlling the intensity that you're below, staying below that second threshold, these guys can do 2 workouts a day, 3 days a week of that same intensity because it's not that structurally damaging. They recover metabolically quickly from it. I do this same type of, done this for years with my athletes. We do a similar thing. My theory on why this is so powerful, a training tool, is that it allows you a very high volume of this high-end aerobic stimulus, which is again what we're after as endurance athletes. Remember, we want to be as fast as possible, as aerobically as possible. If you were to do the classic VO2 max workout, go to the track and do, you know, 6 by 800s, 6 by 800 in 3 minutes per whatever, that's gonna be an incredibly stressful workout at, because you're operating at 90% of your heart rate max probably. In this. It's gonna take a toll metabolically. It's gonna take a toll neurologically. It can take a toll structurally. So that, here you go, 6 times 3 minutes. That's 18 minutes of hard work that it might take you 3 days to fully recover and, and adapt to that training. So maybe you could get 2 of those workouts in a week. So you, there's 36 minutes of this hard work. The, the potential in my mind be questionable whether it was actually doing what you think it's doing anyway. But, you know, let's just say it was a good thing to do. There's, you, you got 36 minutes of that. If we go to this Norwegian model that has become popular, I like here, I'll tell you what I will do with one of my athletes in the morning. They might do 10 by 1 mile at this subthreshold intensity with a 1-minute rest between those miles. Just long enough we can actually check blood lactates. We use blood lactate a lot to control the intensity. And in the afternoon, they might do a 30-minute, tempo run at, you know, in their case, you know, 5:30 miles. So now we have accumulated 10 by 1 mile. There, let's say, and for them, that's a 5 and a half minute mile pace. There's 50 and a half, 55 minutes of training. And in the afternoon, we're doing another, you know, 20, 30 minutes of hard work. In that one day, we've done more work than you could get in the whole week. And we can do that probably two, at least two times in the week, that same type of. So we're getting a massive amount of training stimulus now. It's, and it's not directed into that above the second threshold, because remember this concept of if we train above a threshold, it will actually push that threshold down. This is something that's not well appreciated by most, most people. This is the whole no pain, no gain. I gotta train really hard. I need to finish this workout in a pool of blood and sweat, lying on the ground, gasping. You know, when you look at professional endurance athletes, they don't train like that. Maybe 1% of the, their whole training, maybe they're training 1,000 hours a year. Maybe a couple of, couple of hours a year are trained like that. They don't do it. And yet that's the, that is the mentality that that's been pushed on us by Hollywood, the media, social media influencers, all that.

And it's nuts. Nobody trains like that. And just to clarify, the 5:30 minute mile that you were talking about, that is not the threshold, that is under the threshold.

It's probably under. Yeah. So one of the guys I work with, yeah, his aerobic threshold pace is right around a 3-minute kilometer. That's his aerobic threshold pace. So for him to go do, you know, that's roughly a 5-minute mile, right? You know, within a few seconds. So for him, when he does these workouts, he's training at around, you know, in his case, but in his case, his aerobic threshold and his anaerobic threshold are only separated by a few seconds per mile difference.

For a recreational runner listening to this, who has an aerobic pace of 9 or 10 minutes per mile, would you still think double threshold workouts as something they could benefit from?

Or would you say— Yes, but gently and, and not over— it's something you need to ease your way into. And I would want to do these two tests and determine the, the spread between the aerobic and the anaerobic threshold, the first and second thresholds. And if we saw that there was a really big spread, I would say, hey, before we get onto this fancy Norwegian double threshold stuff, we need to fix your aerobic deficiency. First, because once we get that fixed, then the whole world of intensity opens up to us. We can do all kinds of interesting things with intensity. But until then, throwing intensity at somebody who's aerobically deficient, all it's gonna do is increase their aerobic deficiency.

So glad you explained that, Scott. I wanna be respectful of your time here. Literally, I know we could have kept talking for the next 3 hours. So I would love to at some point have you back on the podcast again because I really enjoyed this conversation. Good question. Two last questions here.

One, where can people find more about you and where can they find your books? So the books are available on Amazon, Training for the New Alpinism, and for most of your audience, probably be interested in the Training for the Uphill Athlete. I have a website and a business that I run. I have 20 coaches working for me. It's called Evoke Endurance. You can see my little logo right there. Yeah. I do have a small Instagram presence. I'm terrible at social media, but people told me a while ago I needed to be on social media, and so I do. It's called Scott underscore— or Coach underscore Scott underscore Johnston. So if people want to go there, I don't post that often on it, but— and then Evoque Endurance has its own social media profile, which we post frequently on. On our website, you'll find huge. There's no paywall. Everything is free. All this information that I've been talking to you about is talked about in great detail on the website. There's a lot of articles. I'll send you a link to that article that explains how to do these 2 tests we've been talking about. We do have a Reddit forum as well, an Evoque Endurance subreddit. So people can go there and ask questions, and the, the WeCoaches are on there answering questions for people.. So, we have all of those avenues. We have our own podcast. So, if people go to our website, they'll be able to see these episodes. You know, after this fall in September, 2 of my athletes won one of the most prestigious ultra-endurance races called the UTMB, the Ultra Tour de Mont Blanc. Amazing. So, 112 miles. And, I— my athletes won both the men's and the women's category there. And, after that, all of a sudden, things got kind of crazy. But I did 2 podcasts right after that because all I was getting deluged with, you know, DMs and texts and emails. Like, the first part, I think these are podcast number 120 and 121. They're what we don't do for training and what we do do for training. And I just basically laid it out there. This is how we train. This is how, this is how we don't train, and this is how we do train in these 2 different podcasts. So kind of a summary if people are interested in those.

Yeah, please send me the links to, to that, and I'll make sure to add them to the show notes. Sure. Last question here. Do you have any closing thoughts, any advice for athletes to become a stronger, healthier, and happier athlete?

I think especially as endurance athletes, you have to enjoy the process. And that's a mentality. And I have a sign in my gym that says, you can't coach desire. You know, if the desire, the desire has to be intrinsic within the athlete. You have to find joy in the process of all of these things. Whereas if you're relying on extrinsic things to motivate you and to give your desire, give you a desire to, let's say, to exercise or to run or to train, then it's not going to last very long. People have to look inside themselves to find ways of improving. It's fun to see motivational videos and listen to cool podcasts. I get it. And I do the same thing.. But in the end, it's really in here that it has to come from. And so I think for my recommendation for people is to find things that do give you that joy and that, you know, the long-term reward of striving towards something. I believe struggle is one of the most valuable things that human beings can do is to struggle with stuff, struggle, learn, grow throughout the process, but absolutely enjoy it. So well said. You do need to enjoy. That's why I was thing with children, you have to gamify things because if they don't learn to enjoy it first, they have no hope of extending that into an adult.

Totally, totally. That's why I usually call it, let's go play on the trails. Yeah, there's never like, let's go train. Let's go on an adventure and look at some snakes or frogs or whatever.

Yeah, exactly. It has to be like that. And even for, you know, I think one of the reasons that trail running and, you know, the mountain running thing has become so popular is that you do get that joy when you're out there because you have all these beautiful things to look at. And every— just around the corner, there's a whole new view. You're not just staring at sidewalk. So I think that's one of the reasons that kind of, you know, this sport has grown so much, the trail running world.

Absolutely. Scott, thank you so much. Hopefully our paths cross in person either in Montana or over here in Southern California.

Would love to go for a run with you at some point. Well, thanks, Floris. I really enjoyed this. I appreciate your asking me to be on your podcast.

And yeah, maybe we can do this again sometime. Absolutely. Sounds good.

You have a good one.

We'll talk more soon.

Okay. Thanks.

Bye-bye. Thanks for listening. Scott is such an established, smart coach, and I love all of the insights that he shared. I would love to hear from you. What was one thing that stood out from you from this conversation? Please let me know in the comments below on YouTube. Very soon here, I'm flying out to San Francisco to meet up with Jakob Ingebrigtsen. This is an interview that I'm very excited about, and we're definitely going to discuss the Norwegian training approach in more detail. So stay tuned for that. If you haven't already, check out the new movie that Jeff Pelletier just came out with. This is about his experience of the Badwater 135. I had the pleasure of pacing him and crewing him last summer for that adventure, and I can highly recommend the movie he just came out with. I'll make sure to link to that as well. Have fun out there on your runs.

We'll be back more soon. Later.