A runner hit a plateau in early 2018 and overhauled his basics: eight hours of sleep, balanced diet, no afternoon caffeine, proper hydration. His winter training was too intense on consecutive days, which crashed his immune system and caused a heel injury that sidelined him for nine months. Speed work needs an aerobic base and recovery to stick.
What was that training like and what, what, what changed?
I did, I did a lot of things, mostly my priorities, uh, my priorities and the community of people that I surrounded myself with. Um, I realized in January, I think of 2018, that, that I wasn't improving.. And so I talked to, um, my friend Noel, who's a coach for the triathlon group AK Athlete. And I was like, hey, what do I, what do I need to do? And he's like, okay, well, there's all these lifestyle things that you have to get right. So I started researching a bunch about nutrition and I totally changed like all of my eating habits. I stopped drinking coffee in the afternoons. They're like, okay, after 1:00 PM, I'm not drinking any caffeine. Um, I started sleeping 8 hours a night. And I cut back, very, very limited alcohol consumption, limited sugar consumption, and just really, really cleaned up a lot of the things that, a lot of the basics, nail the basics. Like the hydration, I started taking seriously. I would have a Nalgene at work and I would try to drink a Nalgene of water by like basically every like 3 hours. I would have like, okay, I have to finish this by 9:00, noon, 3:00 PM, and then again by the end of the day. When you start doing all of those things right, it really opens up the door for your body to respond to the training. There was still a lot of things that I was doing that I did wrong. I would did that winter. I did a lot, a lot of hard training. Um, so I would do the AEP group. Um, Todd Lewis coaches a road version of that on Wednesday morning. So I would go and I would do a hard track workout with him on Wednesday mornings. And then I would show up to AK Athlete and I would do a hard spin workout on Wednesday nights. And then I would show up to the Thirsty Thursday crew and I would do a hard mountain run on Thursday nights. And I got really, really fit that winter. And I, But it wasn't, it wasn't sustainable. There's a certain, there's a certain like peak fitness that you can add with speed training, like on top of your aerobic base. Um, but it's limited and it's not sustainable. It worked, but it wasn't going to last. Like I was always a little bit sick. My immune system was shot. Um, I was tired. Uh, I lost too much weight and I performed well at the beginning of that 2018 mountain season. And I did break an hour at Mount Marathon. Um, and I did end up injured by the end of summer and I ended up with a heel injury. I think it was actually due to changing shoes, not to overtraining. Um, but that plagued me for like 9 months where I had to cut all my mileage down. Like I could only run like 20 miles a week. Wow.
That was quite a difference then, like that whole, like from going hard, hard, hard. To all of a sudden having to step back completely, having to cut back a lot of the training volume, um, that, and especially for a 9-month period of time, that's, that's quite a, quite a duration there too.
Yeah. And I made up for it in, so there's things you can, the best approach is to be patient and don't get injured and to train at a level that is appropriate for your current level of fitness. There's things you can— if it's important enough to you, there's things that you can do while you're injured. So I would swim and I would bike. So, but the best approach is to— if you will, if you will be patient and if you'll be consistent and methodical and progressive and just take little, little baby steps in your training where you can get to in months or years is much, much greater than if you train really hard, get super fit really fast, and then have to start over again because you get injured. Your body, the human body, has an amazing, amazing ability to adapt given enough time. It takes a lot of years for all of like your, your ligaments and joints to catch up. I think those actually improve more slowly than your aerobic system. So you just have to be, you have to be patient. Um, one, one thing I learned, and I started listening to your, your podcast at that time and started reading a lot of books. And I would look at training programs across the board for like, if you're doing marathon training or if you're training for triathlons. And you look at these training plans for very, very high-level athletes. And sure, a lot of the focus is on the race specifically, the speed, but, but across the board, these training programs, the vast bulk of the training is what they call their long run pace or their easy pace. And what I eventually came to understand was that the gains that you can make from building from making your slow speed faster, you can increase that for years, year after year after year. There's almost— there's like, there's— it's not capped the same way that your speed training is capped. So if you'll focus on increasing that underlying base, then your progress isn't limited to 1 or 2 years. You can keep improving year after year after year.
