You’re Doing Zone 2 Wrong (Even If You Think You’re Not) | Scott Johnston Round 2

Zone 2 training has really become such a buzzword.

This has been my pet peeve of mine for years, ever since Zone 2 hit the internet. And what annoys me is that people who I think should know better, people who have a lot of influence on the internet, have been talking a lot about this, um, again, as if it were newly discovered. But they omit a really critical component that I think you overlook at your peril. I have had athletes that improve their aerobic threshold running pace for 10 years continuously. Then you can't do a lot of zone 2 training. Or if you do, you're going to end up overtrained. First, they plateau. They didn't continue to improve, and then they began to exhibit symptoms of overtraining and fatigue. So when you get into overtrained state, you are looking at usually a minimum of several months to pull yourself out of it. Trying to train like a professional is a mistake unless you are a professional.

What is the number one thing that you think people are getting wrong about heart rate training at this point? 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. I've always said that for runners, sleep is not just for downtime, but it really is where the recovery happens. I aim to sleep for about 8 hours per night. That's literally one-third of your life spent in bed. The ROI on a solid sleep environment is huge. To maximize it, I stick to a consistent bedtime, and I also make sure that the room has total darkness. But the most important piece of the puzzle is the foundation. You can't out-sleep a bad mattress. That's why I use a Bear mattress. They're specifically built for athletes to help the body naturally restore and recharge. It's also incredibly convenient. The mattress arrives in a box, and you can easily Unpack it, unroll it, and it's set up within minutes. They have a 2-minute quiz on their website that matches your body type to the perfect mattress. I've been sleeping on the Elite Hybrid. It's super comfortable and I'm waking up feeling refreshed and way less stiff. It features a Salient infrared recovery technology to help your body recharge at a cellular level. Bear offers a 120-night sleep trial and a limited lifetime warranty. If you're looking for the best sleep for your active lifestyle, check out bear.com/FlorisGierman. And use the code Floris, that is F-L-O-R-I-S, to get 40% off your Bear mattress. Hope you enjoy my conversation with Scott Johnston round 2. Coach Scott Johnston, welcome back to the Extra Mileage Show.

Thanks, Floris. It's good to be back. Yeah, it's been kind of a wild ride since you published that last episode.

It was quite eye-opening indeed. We recorded that podcast and we launched it about 2 weeks ago, and in 2 weeks there more than 120,000 views, plus a whole bunch of podcast downloads. So your message absolutely resonated, and I'm thrilled to take a deeper dive into some of the follow-up questions, some of the follow-up details. So, yeah, let's dive, dive right in. I think one of the first things is zone 2 training has really become such a buzzword. What is the number 1 thing that you think people are getting wrong about heart rate training at this point?

Well, first, let me say I'm really excited to see that it's become a buzzword. You know, this is not a new concept. Although if you paid attention to the internet, you'd think that this had just been discovered and it's all of a sudden this new thing you should be doing. I mean, this has been the standard operating procedure for, you know, endurance athletes for many decades. You know, coaches, athletes of all stripes knew that, oh, you need to establish this big aerobic base first. And once you have that, then you can start layering on all this other more interesting and maybe more event-specific competition types training. But that got lost somewhere along the way. And when I was a kid, you know, you— we didn't even consider that people wouldn't have a well-developed aerobic base. I mean, every kid, you came home from school, you were outside running around all, you know, till your mom called you in for dinner. And every day we were super active. That's how a kid develops, you know, starts young and developing the beginnings of this aerobic base. And now we have a population that hasn't been exposed to that as much. And, you know, I'd never heard of the concept of, or I'd never encountered a, a real person who had aerobic deficiency until I started this business, you know, 12 years ago, and I had people coming in who could not run and maintain an aerobic effort. And I know one of the— your previous guests, Phil Maffetone, and I, you know, we— he and I crossed paths in 1983, and he was the first person to introduce me to this concept of aerobic deficiency syndrome. Um, and but I, I— it didn't, it didn't apply to me, so I just kind of pushed it to the side. But it was only later when I came to, you know, start interacting with people who were truly aerobically deficient that I pulled out this old pamphlet I had gotten in Phil's office in 1983 that had big letters, Aerobic Deficiency Syndrome. And, you know, he understood it back then. So it's been around for a while. But I think the biggest thing that irritates me about the fact that not so much that, I mean, I think it's really good that people are paying attention to this aerobic, this concept, We didn't call it zone 2 back then. We just called it the aerobic base. And we knew you had to run a lot of miles, cycle a lot of miles, or swim a lot of miles, whatever it was, at this moderate intensity in order to develop this aerobic base. Or if you're a kid, just play a lot. Um, but what annoys me is that people who I think should know better, people who have a lot of influence on the internet, have been talking a lot about this, um, again, as if it were newly discovered. But they omit a really critical component that I think it— you, you overlook at your, at your peril. Um, and that is that, you know, what we talked about before, uh, last time we were speaking was that we want to elevate this first threshold, the aerobic threshold, to be as high as possible, whether you're measuring that in terms of heart rate or, you know, maybe more importantly, let's say running pace. And at some point, that pace is gonna begin to get very fast. And I'm gonna use a really extreme example right now. So the marathon is an event that's competed at about the aerobic threshold, maybe a little bit above, slightly above it. Well, think of, you know, and again, a very extreme case. Eliud Kipchoge's marathon pace is a 4:30 mile. That means that his aerobic threshold running pace is roughly a 4:30 mile. Do you think he can go out and do zone 2 training every day at 4:30 mile? Heck no. He would be broken and overtrained in a matter of a week or two. And so what gets, what gets omitted here is, first of all, I think this idea that this, this is not a fixed thing. It's going to improve over years and years. And one of the things I believe I mentioned last time was I have had athletes that improve their aerobic threshold running pace for 10 years continuously. So as it gets faster and faster and it gets closer and closer to this, like, the second threshold, what the one we often, let's say, more like your, your 10K, uh, running pace, that as the, as the first and second thresholds become very close together, then, you know, training at the first threshold isn't very different than training at the second threshold in terms of the, the neuromuscular standpoint. Now metabolically, they're a bit different. But, you know, primarily, we're thinking about the neuromuscular loading of running fast. So what I feel has been grossly oversimplified in this concept of presenting the value of zone 2 training to people is the fact that, hey, you know, as you get— the reason I've put this 10% spread between the first and second thresholds as an indicator of, of, okay, once you've closed that gap down, to about 10%, or, and in some cases, I have athletes that are down in the 5 or 6% range. That's, you can see that's, that's just a few heart rate beats or a few seconds per mile difference between those two thresholds. Then you can't do a lot of zone 2 training. Or if you do, you're gonna end up overtrained. And I made that mistake once years and years ago with a couple of cross-country skiers I was training with. I just saw this increase in their aerobic threshold pace, going on and on and on. I got really excited. I thought, this is fantastic, they're getting so fit aerobically, let's just do more of this zone 2. And what happened— and luckily I caught it in time— first they plateaued and they didn't start, they didn't continue to improve, and then they began to exhibit symptoms of overtraining and fatigue, long-duration fatigue. And so the point I'm trying to make here is You know, for most people that are, especially if you have a 30% gap, you don't have to worry about this problem for quite a while. But for those people with an extensive training background that do have a pretty fast, or high aerobic threshold, fast running pace at their threshold, then those workouts, those sessions, let's call them, and in zone 2, actually become like real workouts.

Yep.

They're gonna leave a, they're gonna leave an impact on your body. Whereas the person who can barely run at aerobic threshold, from a neuromuscular standpoint, that's not very hard for them. You know, that they can, they can accumulate a high volume.

I wanna, I wanna share two examples to kind of make this applicable with some numbers in here. The first one is when I discovered Dr. Phil Maffetone in 2013, I just used 180 minus age. At the time it was 30, and I ran at 150 heart rate. At that time, that was about a pace of about 8:40 minutes per mile. I did a lot of my training significantly faster before that, but 8:40 felt like significantly slower. Sometimes with warmer temperatures, that was 9-minute mile on the trails that became 12-minute mile. However, over an 18-month period of time, I ended up training like initially like at that zone 1 or zone 2 top end of 150, and it felt very slow. It felt super easy. And as my pace improved, it became an 8-minute mile, 7:30-minute mile, and eventually I got it down after 18 months to about a 6:09-minute mile and a heart rate of 148 at the time.

Mm-hmm.

And at that time, gradually increasing mileage as well from like 30 miles a week to 50 miles a week, 70, and at, at some point, 80 miles a week. And I noticed exactly what you were talking about. Like, it became harder and harder to, like, the effort was just there, especially once your training load start increasing and you start running more too, is that when you're running 6:30-minute miles or 6:15-minute miles, at that point, your recovery, you, you kind of watch out over there as well. You just feel the need to start training in zone 1 at that point.

Yes.

Because you just, you just can't recover in time.

Right.

So I thought that was a pretty eye-opening one for me.

Yeah. I think until you've experienced that or more seen it in action. Um, I mean, it's hard for most of us, or we can think about these numbers like, you know, again, using this extreme example of Kipchoge, but I think it serves a purpose to look at that. Yes, running— most of us couldn't run a half a mile at that pace, let alone, you know, 26 of them. But yet this guy can do that in a race, but it would— and it would be— but it would be suicidal for him to train that way. So he has to train much easier than that. You know, and one of my favorite coach mentors, Renato Canova, who I think I've mentioned, he calls this training pace that a lot of these African runners do stumblingly slow. So for somebody like Kipchoge, their easy runs might be, you know, 6 or 6:30 miles.

I actually, I, I asked him that question specifically. Like, I asked him, what is your recovery pace?

And, and what was it? What was it?

It was like, so you were saying his marathon pace being a 4:30, and it was like 3, 3 and a half minutes slower. So it was like 7:30s, 8-minute mile. And yeah, but then again, look at his training volume and then some of the other runs he's doing very hard again in training. So it's like that balance between the two. Right?

Right. But they, but there are a lot of this, what we might consider their recovery running or even just maintaining that aerobic base. He's running at, you know, 50% or 80% slower than his actual zone 2. So that would mean for somebody, let's say, who has, you know, so maybe for some easy arithmetic here, let's say they have a 10-minute per mile aerobic threshold running pace. You know, they might need to really run a lot slower. You know, if, if they're aerobic, if that threshold pace is very close to their second threshold, they might be needing to run at a 13-minute mile pace in order to 15-minute mile pace to not be overdoing it. Now, those are, you know, not the right numbers to be using, but I think you get the idea. And I, I just— so I think we've covered that topic. But this has been my pet peeve of mine for years, ever since Zone 2 hit the internet, and people who have been talking about what it— what an amazing thing it is. Well, of course it's amazing, but we've known that for a long time. But without giving that kind of caveat of, you know, Don't abuse this because if you had kept running 6:05 miles every workout, you know, you would first plateau and then probably overtrain a bit.

Totally. On the flip side, what are people getting wrong about high-intensity training?

And this is probably— it's more complicated than the, than the zone 2 issue. The zone 2 issue is really just this one bug that I think exists, but with regards to high-intensity training. And a lot of people, you know, I've publicly stated, for instance, with someone like Ruth Croft and Tom Evans, they've never done a single what we'd call a VO2 max session in 5 years working with me. And so people think, oh, you're really down on high intensity. And I'm not. I understand. I've also trained Olympic-level cross-country skiers for the sprint event, which was a 3.5-minute event. Which entails a great deal of intensity training. So I understand them, but I think what this is— again, I believe a product of whether it's social media or people looking for clicks— is, you know, you know, get fit fast, you know, run your best whatever, 10K, do these, you know, do 3 zone, 3 VO2 max workouts a week kind of thing. I mean, it is not a quick fix. First of all, and it needs to have a substantial aerobic base underneath it to use high-intensity training properly. But it's often sold by and accepted by the public as, you know, a quick way to get yourself fit, as, as if raising your VO2 max equated to better performance. And that's not just not the case. Now granted, you know, if you're Kilian Jornet with a VO2 max of 90, you are always going to beat a person with a VO2 max of 50. There's just the 50— even though 50 is not a— on— it's a pretty decent number, it's never— you're never going to beat Achille Jornet. Um, but it's being sold as if it's the target is to raise the VO2 max, but they don't give the awards. I mean, if all we had to do was show up at the starting line and show our lab results, then we wouldn't need to race. But the race is based on your performance, and there's a lot of other things that go into a performance in a race, an endurance race, than VO2 max. And of the 3, primarily the, the most common markers of as potentials of, let's say, kind of correlating to endurance performance are VO2 max, and economy and the speed at that second threshold. But the difference is I'm just listed them in reverse order. The, by far the worst predictor of performance is the VO2 max. By far the best predictor is the speed at the second threshold, which is actually truly performance. Now, having a high, I had once a coach that told me, and I'm not trying to be sexist here, But I had a coach one time who told me having a high VO2 max is like getting invited to the school dance. It gets you in the door, but it does not guarantee you get to dance with the prettiest girl. And I really think that's what people have to understand is, yes, having a high VO2 max is a fabulous thing for an endurance athlete, but it is not a guarantee of high performance. I had a young man that I coached for a while in cross-country skiing. Who had a VO2 max of 92. You know, this is among the highest ever recorded by a human being. He was not competitive at the World Cup level with a 92 VO2 max. And I had other athletes with quite moderate VO2s, you know, from a, for a world-class athlete of in this like mid-70s, which would be, it's great for the average citizen, but as a world-class endurance athlete, it's not super high. Who could easily beat this guy and were actually on World Cup podiums. And so I, I just want people to understand that, you know, VO2 max is not the be-all and end-all of endurance performance. There are so many other components to it. And one of the, the things that the coach and an athlete— it's, it's great if you're a scientist and you're going to do this experiment in a lab with, you know, we're going to take these, you know, 12 people and we're going to put them in a couple different groups and They're going to do these different kinds of workouts, and we're going to measure the VO2 max improvement over the course of 8 or 10 weeks. And that's, that's pretty typical for these kinds of studies. And we'll say, oh, look at, they, this group improved their VO2 max this much in these weeks using this protocol. And so suddenly that becomes big headlines all over and say, oh, this is all you need to do is, you know, well, you can, I can think of Jan, Jan, um, Jan Helgerud, Norwegian, who came out 25 years ago and said, all this long distance stuff is a complete waste of time. All we need to do is 4 VO2 max workouts a week and no other training, and you'll, you'll be, you'll improve your performance. And those workouts are the— you, everybody knows this kind of recipe now, 4 by 4 minutes, right? That's the— at 95% of your maximum heart rate. That's this Norwegian method of improving VO2 max that was published by Jan Olbrecht. And that study was so full of holes. First of all, it was done on cardiac patients, and so anything you do with them is going to improve. But also, it had all kinds of other issues about it that I'm not going to go into. But the problem is that it completely backfired when a couple of world-class athletes attempted to train that way. They had terrible results from it. And so I think it's important to understand these contexts. But then I wanna go back to what I was about to say in that as a coach and as an, a self-coached athlete, you have a limited amount of time and a limited amount of energy in which to put into training. And you have to decide, how am I gonna allot that time and energy? Now, a professional athlete, is not so much limited on time, but they're still limited greatly by the energy. Where do we spend our energy dollars in order to get the best results? So with somebody who's running a 20-hour race, do I think it's worth spending a bunch of energy dollars to, to try to improve their VO2 max? No. I think what I want to do is improve that— their speed at that first and second threshold, get it as high as I can. Because these types of very high-intensity workouts, like, again, the classic example of VO2 max, what's called VO2 max training, which, by the way, to me is quite questionable. The only way you can know if that's working is did you go into a lab and test before, and then did you do, like, 8 concentrated weeks of this and then go back into the lab? How do you know it's actually changing your VO2 max? So few people have opportunity to do that. They just believe what they hear. So, but they're very taxing. That kind of workout leaves a big global fatigue impact on the body. As a result, you're gonna have to reduce your volume of training if you're doing a lot of it. You know, doing one every 10 days, probably for most people, is not a big deal. But if you're trying to do what many of the internet gurus are suggesting of trying to do 3 of these in a week, okay, where, where's that energy gonna come from? What are you gonna have to give up to do that, and what's the trade-off? So if you are, let's put, you know, going again to a kind of an extreme, if you are aerobically deficient, then doing VO2 max training, that's not a great way to spend that energy. You know, you need to get your aerobic house in order first. Then you can contemplate what are some of the more effective ways to improve endurance and, you know, higher output. So I, I think it's been, a little bit like the zone 2 has been oversold and under misunderstood or, and certainly poorly explained to people. But for me as a coach, I have to look at this energy balance and time expenditure. It's like, okay. I've only got, you know, the athlete's only gonna be able to put this much work in this week. Where am I gonna have him do that? And what I have found, and you and I talked a bit about this before, is that I have seen huge results by training just below or of that second threshold. Because I can— the athlete can— when you go above that second threshold into this zone 4, you know, high intensities area, the stress on the body goes through the roof. It's exponential increase. Whereas if I take a half step back and I'm down below that second threshold, then I can accommodate hours, you know, with an athlete like Tom Evans, I can do— he can do 3+ hours at that intensity. Whereas if we stepped over that threshold, he might be able to do 45 minutes in a week. So to me, the benefit is I can get more volume, and, and especially in a, you know, 100-mile racer, that's not, that's not an intensity they're ever gonna go close to in a race.

Quick break. This is important. Coach Floris Gierman, and we just launched the Personal Best Running Club. If you've been watching these videos and you wanna apply it to your training, this is where it's actually happening. You get structured heart-based training plans, live coaching with me and our team, and a community of runners all working towards their next breakthroughs. We also have daily discussion topics to keep you consistent and monthly accountability challenges so you actually follow through. Plus, you have monthly masterclass sessions with experts like Coach Scott Johnston, Laurens van Lingen, and Dr. Phil Maffetone. Mark Gugazella, and much more. You can get a free 7-day trial and there's zero risk involved. Find out more info at pbprogram.com. There's a lot of others. pbprogram.com. Let's get back to the conversation. Let's talk about the recovery times and the adaptation periods because you have a really good graph on page 103 of your book and it shows zone 1 to zone 5. Plus strength training, and it shows the actual recovery hours. So I'm just gonna pull up the graph because I know it's part of your book, The Uphill Athlete. And it— this is the graph. And so I just wanna talk through that for a little bit because you mentioned the difference in hours between these different zones. For example, here, if you do a 2-hour training session, when we're talking about when are you back to baseline from a recovery standpoint, If we look at or below your aerobic threshold, it's zone 1 or 2. It shows here it's about 5.5 hours. However, if we're doing an, between aerobic threshold and lactate threshold, so zone 3, it would be just a bit over 8 hours. Above lactate threshold, so zone 4, it shoots up to close to 24 hours. If we go to max intensity, so zone 5, it would be 28 hours just to get back to base over here. But then if we look at actual strength training, it's north of 40 hours. And so we see the type of training and the type of intensity significantly adjust over here. But maybe you can clarify and add some more detail there.

Well, first, I need to thank Jan Olbrecht for letting me use that graph. It's in his book called Science of Winning, and which is a one of the— if you wanna learn about lactate, how to use lactate in training, it's the best book out there. He's a a researcher. I think he's in Holland. But his, his most of his work has been with swimmers. And that graph came out of his book, you know, which The Science of Winning is basically about training swimmers. But it was the first time I'd seen even an attempt at quantifying those numbers. I believe that for a sport like running, that you need to extend those numbers substantially. You know, swimming, you can recover from a swimming session a lot faster than you can from equivalent running session for several reasons. One is you're horizontal in the water, so your heart doesn't have to fight gravity to pump the blood around. The water cools you. And then those are big factors in terms of the amount. I mean, swimmers are notorious for handling high, a lot of high intensity and a lot of volume in their training. And I'm pretty convinced it's because of those factors that they're, you know, It's just not as stressful as running.

Yeah.

So I think we could take those and extend those numbers substantially because the, the way you just read that, and I hadn't looked at that graph in a while, 24 hours to recover from a zone 4 workout. Well, heck, why don't we just do a VO2 max workout every day?

Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. And we know that does not work. Most of us would not recover from that because the— because of that, you know, the impact loading of running that fast It's, it, yes, maybe metabolically you can recover, but neuromuscularly you won't recover.

Well, and you don't have the supercompensation yet because if we're talking about supercompensation, where you start having the benefits, we're often many hours beyond that. So this is just to get back to baseline where you start getting a workout.

But I would caution people when you look at that, don't think, oh, these numbers are cast in stone. Think of that as a qualitative representation of how these, these concepts work. That, yes, the one of the reasons that, you know, professional runners often train 2 and sometimes even 3 times a day is that if they're doing relatively easy running, their recovery period for them is very short. You know, they can recover within, you know, 8 hours and do, you know, do one in the morning and one in the afternoon and recover by morning and do it again and again and again. Most of us won't have that capacity to do it. But I think it's mostly my, my idea in pushing, putting that out there is to show that these different types of workouts have different costs to us in terms of the amount of time they take or the amount of time they take to recover from, the density at which you can do those particular workouts in your, in a week or in a microcycle of some sort.

Earlier, you mentioned Norwegian workouts. And I wanna, I wanna share an interesting one. Last week, I was in San Francisco with Jakob Ingebrigtsen, and we were talking in detail about the double threshold workout.

Mhmm.

So I want to, like, that podcast is coming out in May, but, like, just to kind of summarize one of the things that stood out to me. He was saying in 1 week, he does 14 runs in total. So he does 2 runs a day every day. Out of those 14, he does 8 at a low intensity. He does 6 at a high intensity. 5 out of the 6 are at that, just at his lactate threshold. So 5 out of 6 are at his lactate threshold. So about 400.

What we would call zone 3. Yeah.

Yep. However, one of these workouts, he actually does it as an 8 to 10 millimole. So that's a really hard and brutal workout. And so he's doing double threshold, so morning and evening. So that way, at least he has, like, 8 to 10 or 12 hours in between. So he has some of the recovery time in between. And then the alternative days, he actually has low-intensity running. And but the fascinating thing to me is, is when he is in those peak training weeks, and he's pushing also those workouts of, like, really hard, like, 8 to 10 millimole, and then still being able to do another high-intensity workout about that day. He mentioned a concept I hadn't heard of, which was threshold fever, which means he literally noticed some of the overtraining symptoms, meaning getting, like, more irritable, almost feeling sick, almost feeling ill, yet it's that border of, like, overtraining and being able to recover from it. And I asked him, how is he dealing with that? And part of it is purely to have barely anything else going on in your life. Meaning to live, he said, I avoid the stairs when I can. And he is like really trying to keep it super mellow. And I think you see similar approaches with other elite athletes who train hard but also try to keep a really relaxed lifestyle. And this is where I think the biggest difference between how elite athletes manage their intensity and their recovery versus recreational runners who simply would not be able to recover from that. So I'm very curious to hear, based on what you hear here and that energy comment that you made earlier, do you have any additional thoughts here?

Sure. I think that trying to, trying to train like a professional is a mistake unless you are a professional. First of all, they probably have some phenomenal genetics. That they were gifted with that you may or may not have. They do nothing but eat, sleep, and train. And as you said, they try to structure their life so there are as— it's a, it's actually quite a monastic, boring life, frankly. I've, I've lived with people like that who, you know, you go to these training camps with them, or, you know, I'm in contact with some of them almost daily. You know, they, they get up in the morning, they have a little bit to eat, they go do a workout, they come back, they go to bed. They, you know, a few hours later they get up and they do another workout and they come home and eat and go to bed. I mean, that's it. That is their life. And so I don't think people recognize, first of all, most of us would not want that kind of life. We might want the glory of standing on the top of the podium, understandably, but we wouldn't make those sacrifices in our lives. Most of us don't have the mentality to do it, to live that type of a life. We want social interactions. We want to do other things, and most of us are going to have to have jobs and families and all that kind of thing that make it impossible to train like a professional. Now, we can learn things from those professionals. For instance, there's a reason why he has structured that sort of balance between, you know, 8 of these workouts are, you know, quite easy for him, 5 of them are medium-hard, and 1 is hard in the course of the week. And there's a reason he structured it that way. And there's definitely, you know, we could have a great conversation with him or whoever about why do you think he's doing this? What are the benefits? And yeah, great. But how many of us would have the work capacity to do that exactly like that? You know, if we could, we would be the Jacob Ingebrigtsen ourselves. And so, I think it's Yeah, we have to not pretend. And then one of the things that I think is, is it's a little depressing, but it also should relieve people from feeling like, well, like maybe why am I not good enough? I'm not training hard enough. No, you probably just didn't, like I said in our first interview, you didn't choose your parents well enough. You know, like you did not get that gene that he has or that, you know, uh, Kipchoge or Kilian Jornet have. You know, they, they were born with this gift that sets them above the rest of us. No matter what we do, we will probably, you know, only a tiny sliver of humanity can achieve that level regardless of the amount of training you do. And so a huge amount of the performance that's, you know, so remarkable to see in these top athletes is— was gifted to them in a way, you know. And, and, you know, hard work— and I've had I've been there myself as an athlete, work very, very hard and get almost to that level. Or I've had athletes who, you know, I talked about this. I'm not sure if you and I spoke about, but I had a young woman that I coached in cross-country skiing who was, you know, from a talent standpoint and a VO2 max standpoint, she should not even been probably on the World Cup circuit. But she ranked 4th in the world, 5th in the world for 4 years running, competing against women with way more talent and much bigger engines than she had by just dint of a hell of a lot of hard work. But it was quite clear by the end of her career that she was never going to be a world champion. She didn't have what it took to make that next step to the very top of the podium. And so I think it's a reality check. We all need to look in the mirror and say, yeah, I've got, you know, First of all, I started running when I was 36 years old. I've got a career. I've got 4 kids. You know, you're not gonna be a Kilian Jornet. Just forget about it. It's not gonna happen.

And realistically too, right? Like, what are your priorities? Because like you said, some of these athletes only, like, train, sleep, and eat, whereas many of us just prioritize other things in life. and there's different stages that you can have different priorities sport-wise. Even when, when my kids are young, I would rather, like, spend more time with them and max out my training at maybe 6 or 8 hours a week. And then once they're a bit older and they can start doing more things, maybe then I will have a bit more time to train, or maybe there's other priorities at different stages of life. And I think that's, that's a big one too. I feel I've had personally several periods where even once or twice a week high-intensity running was too much for me. It would put me over the edge, and that's why I really enjoyed low heart rate training for certain periods. And I see that in our own running coaching program and different podcast guests that I've had on there that are recreational runners. They have improved significantly just from low-intensity training for quite a while. It brings them a lot of joy. And sometimes, like, the high intensity, either it gets them injured quicker, or it might put them over the edge from a stress perspective where they start having some of these overtraining symptoms too.

Most of the people— and I, because I've written so much and spoken so much about overtraining, in fact, I had Phil on my podcast a couple of times. One of them was to talk about overtraining because it's such a rampant problem in most endurance sports, but especially in the ultra running world where more would be— you would think more was better. And, but I have, because of that, I've had encounters with consultations with many overtrained athletes. And almost without a doubt, it's because they had too much intensity in their program. I mean, across the board, you know, that's one of the reasons I'm hypersensitive to, you know, high-intensity training has a place in endurance sports for sure, but it's not the be-all and end-all. It's not the answer. It's not, um, and it gets so overused. And when it gets overused poorly, then you end up an overtrained athlete. And you're— once that happens, you're looking at months of recovery time. And maybe if it's severe enough, it's the career ending. You know, I've had, I've had athletes that I— not that I coached, but came to me whose careers were ended with a bout of overtraining. They never recovered their former strength.

There's a graph on page 137 in your book, and it shows the overtraining And I'm, I'm actually gonna pull it up over here because I think for recreational runners listening here, I think we're living a stress pandemic at this point. Everyone glued to their phone, what's happening in the world. Like, there's, there's just a lot going on outside of, like, just going out for a run. I think it really impacts the stress levels that people experience on a daily basis. Here is an actual graph of the overtraining and the lack of recovery that I wanna just briefly talk through. So that's the graph over there. I'll put it up.

Yeah.

For those listening on the podcast, I'll make sure to link to the blog too that will have these graphics on there. Can you just explain, because I think quite a few people don't realize that they have been overtraining and there's different stages of overtraining. However, like, you start seeing slight, like, some people clearly are in the far overtraining stages, Some people are in the earlier stages. Can you explain a little bit more what are some of these symptoms and what can people do to turn things around when they might recognize some of these symptoms?

I think so. However, I will start this conversation with saying I have a book back here, a 400-page book on overtraining, and you could read every word of it and in no place in it does it actually define what overtraining is. I don't think it is well understood medically. I have my own, you know, sort of pet theories about it. But, um, then there's been tons of studies, but no one really knows what happens. I mean, lots of things go haywire. It's not just being tired. It's a, it's a medical condition. And it's often not recognized. Like if you went to your, if most runners go into their doctor's office and tell their doctor, yeah, I'm feeling really tired. They're gonna look, the doctor's gonna look at that runner and go, you are in the peak of fitness compared to 95% of the people I deal with every day. What do you mean you're telling me you're tired? So they can't relate to what overtraining is. And because it's not medically very easily diagnosed, it gets overlooked. But I can give some people— give people some idea of, you know, what might— what they might want to be looking at. So that— but first, go back to that graph. Essentially, just like that first graph you showed about the, the stress— applying a stress which drives you into a state of fatigue, then allowing the body to recover and come back up to a point of hopefully a little bit of supercompensation where you get a little bit stronger from that stress you put on your body, and then doing that again and again. And if you do it properly, your fitness increases over time. If you do it improperly, if you don't get enough, um, rest and if you, you know, or recovery is not adequate, fueling is not adequate, what happens is each time you apply the stress, you come up to a slightly lower level, and you actually de-train over the course of, of a period of time. And the most— the first symptom that people will recognize is a drop in performance. For— so for the same perceived exertion, the same heart rate, Maybe you're running your same little course that you run a couple times a week, and you're noticing, whoa, I'm 4 minutes slower on this thing than I was, you know, 2 weeks ago. What's going on? Heart rate's the same. And the first thing you'll notice— but the next thing you'll notice after this noticing a performance drop, so it could be in a race, it could be in a hard workout, it could even just be, like I said, you know, one of your normal easy runs, you're just moving slower. For the same effort. The next thing you're gonna notice is an elevated resting heart rate. Now, there's also nowadays this, you know, heart rate variability technology that can help show these things as well. But that's gonna be, that's getting way down in the weeds. So we're gonna, I'm gonna, I'm not talking about heart rate variability. I, I'm going to not talk about heart rate variability, not because I don't think it works or it's a valuable tool, but it's a very complex subject. And, but you can get a pretty good idea if your resting heart rate is 10% elevated, 10% for several days in a row over its normal, then you can say, okay, I'm— my body is not adapting. And this is a neurologic thing because, you know, the, the heart rate is driven by this, the balance between the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems, which are part of the autonomic nervous system. That's the stuff that runs things in the background on our body, you know, digestion, all that, that. And so normally you want this, the parasympathetic, which is what we call the rest and digest component of the nervous system. It's the thing that calms things down before bedtime, for instance. Um, and, and it's in balance with the sympathetic side of the nervous system, which is the, the— that's the saber-toothed tiger jumps out from behind the tree and you need to sprint and run away. So, um, it elevates resting heart rate, and it does a lot of other things, but it elevates resting heart rate, whereas the parasympathetic system will depress the resting heart rate. And in a well-balanced training system where the stress is appropriate, then those two remain somewhat in balance, and then you have a nice, even, low resting heart rate. You know that, okay, I'm, I'm well recovered from the day before. Heart rate's back down to normal, I'm ready for the next thing for the day. But if you overtrain yourself, and you're going to notice a maybe even a slight increase in resting heart rate, but you'll see at least a 10% jump and sometimes much higher in resting heart rate. And that's a big red flag. And so you couple— and then there are a bunch of symptoms that I list in the book, um, that, that are— that go along with this. The another very common one is disrupted sleep. Night sweating at night would be another indication of an overactive sympathetic nervous system. It's just, it's cranked up all the time and can't relax. Um, lack of libido is another really good— grumpiness, like you were just talking about with Jakob Ingebrigtsen, you know, kind of irritable, or, and lack of motivation to train. You know, most people who engage in these kind of sports are— they don't need a kick in the pants to get out the door. They often need somebody to restrain them, in fact. So they're not lacking motivation. But if you wake up, you know, you have some of these other symptoms, and all of a sudden you just don't feel like running, that is a massive— another— it's your body trying to tell you, hey, wait a minute, this— um, we're not into this, you need a rest. And the problem, much like some of these other pet peeves I had about the high intensity in the zone 2. The problem is I have seen this over and over again. The athlete goes to the coach and says, coach, you know, I'm just not feeling as good. And they think, the coach or the athlete can think, well, something must be missing from my training. I think we need to add some more intensity, which is the exact opposite of what the body, body needs at that point. But it happens so often. You can't believe how many people come to me with overtraining stories. And I say, okay, what did you do? Well, you know, I was just feeling like I didn't have enough top end, so went to the track and did all these 400-meter intervals. And, you know, and it didn't help. Well, no shit it didn't help. I mean, your, your body is worn out and exhausted right now. You just piled a whole bunch more stress on it. So when you find yourself in a situation with all, you know, several of these overlapping symptoms that I just mentioned showing up, You know, that especially that, you know, the elevated heart rate, the lack of motivation, all of those things play into this. The only thing you can do is stop. You have to stop training. There is no way to say, well, I'm just going to back off a little bit. No, your body by that time is in this serious medical condition. This is not your father's, you know, fatigue. I mean, this is not your granddaddy's fatigue. This is really serious medical condition. And if you don't put the brakes on immediately, and you— especially people will say, well, I'm going to rest a couple of days, I'll be all better. Well, if it was normal fatigue, yeah, a couple days of rest would probably put you right again and you could start training. But if you're exhibiting these symptoms I talked about, it might be at least a couple of weeks before you're even ready to test the waters again. And then, then you go and test the waters with something easy, and you go, oh, I guess I'm really not ready. And then it goes another couple of weeks. So when you get into overtrained state, you are looking at usually a minimum of several months to pull yourself out of it. That's why it is so important that an athlete doesn't step over this edge and get into an overtrained state. Now, should they do what we're talking about is not allow themselves enough time to recover, sneak in workouts because they think, well, if I don't train, I'm gonna lose my fitness. Well, hey, your fitness is lost. If you're in an overtrained state, you've already lost the fitness because you can't perform. And, but people will try to sneak stuff in. And then what happens is they move from the sympathetic nervous system over being overexcited to the parasympathetic nervous system being dominant. And then you'll actually see resting heart rates drop. And that is really serious. That is career-ending type overtraining. When you start to see this parasympathetic nervous system dominating the sympathetic, and, you know, you're going, whoa, I must be really fit because all of a sudden my heart rate is 36, you know, and, um, and normally it's 45. Well, no, you're not really fit. You're just so exhausted. So this— the overtraining danger is so prevalent in endurance sports because in general more is always better, but it's more— it's better until it's not better. And when it's not better, it can get ugly really fast. So I just tell people who— and coaches too, you know, if you show any signs of overtraining, stop today and take— in fact, I had a phone consult last night with a guy who was— the way he talked to me, I said, this sounds a lot like overtraining. I'm going to tell you that, you know, you need to take— let's take a week off then I want you to try one of your normal easy runs and see how you feel. So, but that's a hard pill for most people to swallow, to stop training.

And I want everyone who's listening to this conversation to take really good note to what Coach Kyle just said. Because I think the whole part of health first and your running performance will follow is something remarkable that we have to pay attention to. And two things here that come to mind because you mentioned the part of like some of these body signals, like your resting heart rate changing, possibly it might be elevated, or if you're so overtrained, it might actually drop down quite a bit and you think have a nice low heart rate, but actually something much more serious is going on. The other part you mentioned was motivation. And I think one thing that right away comes to mind was a conversation with Courtney DeWalter, where I asked her, how do you go about seeing if you recovered or not? And one of the first things that she mentioned, when I wake up in the morning, I check in with my body and just check in, how, how do I feel? And motivation is one of the elements over there. How excited am I to go for a run? And make that part of the determining factor. Because once you start realizing like, ah, today I have to go out for a run. I don't really feel like doing it. If that happens one day, that's one thing. But if that happens multiple days in a row, ask yourself, is, is something else possibly going on over here? And why don't I just skip a few days of running, give my body and my brain a break, which is such an important part of the component. One other part that came to mind was a conversation with Taylor Knipp. She's a world champion triathlete, and she actually brought up the part of some athletes might be in such a state of overtraining that one way that they might have to do what is the best for them is take 6 months or 12 months where they don't do any training, and it's purely gonna be walking. It's purely gonna be spending time outside in nature, spending time with community. But how many people are willing to invest that time? Very often they end up, like, training too soon again, training too hard again, and not wanting to face reality of where they're at. So I'm, I'm really thankful that you actually addressed that in such a serious way.

Well, it's something that I overtrained myself leading into Olympic trials for skiing in 1988. And just as an example of— I don't want to drag people into my career as an athlete, which was rather modest, but leading into the Olympic trials the year before, or the fall before the Olympics, Olympic trials. My— I was ranked in the top 5 of cross-country skiers in the US. I was finishing consistently in the highest in all of the— like, what we have are kind of our selection races and tryout races. So I made the first trip to the World Cup races, and I went to what they call the pre-Olympics in January, and I was already beginning to feel like, oh, it didn't feel very good, I'm feeling a little flat. and 2 weeks later, I went to the Olympic selection races, and my best finish was 47th. I mean, I just went off a cliff big time, and it, and it took me over a year to recover from that. And it was me getting greedy and thinking, I need a little more of this. I need a little more fitness, and I can't take a break. And, you know, overracing, overtraining, you name it. It was just so I've experienced it firsthand, and I've dealt with a lot of athletes that have had to work through this. I think it's, it's a very hard pill to swallow for an athlete to hear, um, that, you know, hey, you gotta stop. Yeah. But I don't know any other way. I don't know of any medical intervention. I think rest is the only thing that works.

Rest, sleep, being gentle to self. Absolutely. Let's talk about the whole run-walk reality that quite a few listeners are familiar with. Like earlier, we were talking about having to possibly go from a 10-minute mile, and if you run quite a bit of volume, you might have to back that off even further, and you might get to that point where you had that walk-run interval. If someone has to walk to stay in zone 2, how should they approach that training?

Yep. This is quite common, actually. We see this a lot with folks that come to us that are in this aerobic deficiency, um, sort of place, especially with the military athletes. You know, with a lot that we deal with, we deal, we work a lot with some of the special operations groups in the US. And, you know, these guys are generally really big and have come from a strength training background or maybe a speed and power sport like football. And they're not, you know, first of all, their bodies aren't really designed for running. I mean, they're, they're kind of the opposite look of somebody like Kipchoge. But so for them, and it's— and they also have, you know, they're the manly men, you know. To think about running a 14-minute mile for someone like that, you know, it's embarrassing to, to have to do that. And so what, what we find is that we can do incline hiking on a treadmill to start building this.

And when—

so when somebody's quite aerobically deficient, and let's say, you know, a 13-minute mile or 14-minute mile is kind of their maximum running pace, which means, you know, tiny little steps, and it still could qualify as running because if you're good, if you learn to be good at it, you can still have both feet off the ground at the same time, which gives you that feeling of running, the flight phase. It's just a very short flight phase. But we can also add in a lot of other types of aerobic activity, whether it's especially hiking uphill, that seems to transfer over to running pretty well in terms of the kind of strength you need in your legs, but also this aerobic adaptation. Cycling is another component that can be added in to people who just need more aerobic base volume. But when it comes to this kind of run-walk dilemma, yeah, what we typically do is find the, the speed at which, you know, for, you know, and it's an awkward transition, I should point out, shifting from walking to running. There, it's a, there's a technicality to that, that, you know, it's, it can become very energy consumptive to walk really fast, and it can become energy consumptive to walk, to run really slowly. And so there's gonna be a point where these two techniques sort of overlap with one another. But what we'll try to do is target that potential, that area of overlap. And so let's say maybe it means, you know, walking at a 14-minute mile and running at a 12.5-minute mile. And we'll just bounce back and forth between those. So we might even start with, okay, 30 minutes of a minute walking, a minute running, minute walk, a minute run for 30 minutes. And then when that begins to feel comfortable to the athlete. We usually use kind of their sense of how this is feeling, or they might notice, hey, I actually accidentally ran 2 minutes at, you know, 12.5-minute miles, and it felt pretty good. Okay. Well, now we're gonna bump this up to 2 minutes of running and 1 minute of walking. Excuse me. And we make this progression over time. So we might end up, you know, somewhere along the lines with a 10-minute run, 3-minute walk. And by the time they get into that range, they're ready to, they're ready to run. And they may have to do an interval style run. I mean, I'm not talking about high intensity intervals, but maybe they're gonna do, okay, you know, 4 by 6 minutes of running with a 3-minute walking recovery between these. So it, it's a very gradual approach. And it, and it is, it's challenging. I know how difficult that is.

And so one of the main things would probably be if we wanna measure progress, one of the ways could be how long can I run until I feel the need to, like, walk, right? Mhmm. Are there any other ways that you would measure or test progress if you're not able to continuously run?

Well, just that feeling of, like, this felt— I will, if we're coaching someone with this, You know, if I see their comment in that work after that workout that says, this felt really good today. You know, I, I feel good. I know, then we know, okay, they're making progress. Let's try increasing the run duration without shortening the, the, the walk duration. But it almost has to be, I mean, unless you had a laboratory where you could measure, you know, all kinds of info, you get all this information from the runner, we're sort of stuck with Yeah. We, we wanna try to keep your heart rate, let's say, under 140. Well, you can run for 5 minutes now before it gets above 140. Alright. That's— and now we need to walk for a couple minutes to let it calm back down and get down into the 120s again, and then we're gonna do this again over, over and over and over again, and your body will adapt to it. Rather than trying to continuously run and have it, you know, 5, 5 minutes into it, you started at 130, 5 minutes later, you're at 145, more, a little later, you're at 155, and 5 minutes For air.

Yeah.

That would be not productive.

And that would be the typical runner workout in any, any cases. Yeah, exactly. So what would a sample week of training look like for a person like this who is in that walk-run interval area who still wants to put in like enough effort for zone 2 training or low-intensity training without overdoing it?

Well, typically people who are aerobically deficient, People can be aerobically deficient for two reasons. One is, you know, lack of activity, you know, just sedentary life. And the other is too much hard, you know, too much high-intensity training, or they come from, let's say, a strength training background. And you have to determine which one is the case there. And if they're very new to exercise, then we have to be more careful with them because the impact loading of running, as you know, everybody listening to this knows, is You know, there's a good reason why, you know, like 75% of people who start running are injured within a few months. You know, there's— because the impact loading is, is quite high. So if we're starting with somebody like that, we'd have a lot of, additional, modalities, cycling, elliptical, StairMaster, you know, hiking up a treadmill, steeper treadmill, anything like that to stimulate the aerobic system. Now, if it's somebody who's coming in with, let's say, I'm not naming names here, but a CrossFit background, we know they have tremendous strength. We know they have their, their, their musculature and their connective tissues are probably quite strong, and they're used to a lot of hard work. So those people, we can have do more work than, let's say, a beginner can, because the— they both need the same thing. They both need a high volume of this low to moderate intensity work. But the person with a, a high-intensity strength-type background, they're gonna be able to handle a higher volume without so much worry about injury. But both of them, basically, the, the secret will be, or not the secret, the, the method to improve that, as we mentioned last time, is duration, duration, duration. It's, that's all.

That's the word.

The more volume you accumulate in this low-intensity realm, the bigger the aerobic base becomes.

And there is a gradual adaptation period, right? Because getting someone from the couch to all of a sudden start running 8 hours a week, that's a recipe for disaster too. So it's this, like, I sometimes think we almost have to clarify because there's different listeners. There's very advanced runners that are listening to this, and there's those who are literally trying to get into some low-intensity running. So do you have a ballpark number? Because Sometimes even when I'm working with athletes, it might be like start out 3 times a week for like 20 to 30 minutes, and that's a walk-jog interval, and see how the body responds. Like, and, and from there on, we gradually— but everyone is so individually different, right? Do you have any guidelines or thoughts there?

Well, yeah. Well, I don't know if I have any great advice, but you're right. We're very individually different. The good news is that our species was designed to run. So most people, if they have trouble running, it's because they've developed some kind of— maybe they have a structural problem that's beyond, you know, maybe, you know, it's not something that can be fixed by going to a running technique coach. But most people will be able to learn to run effectively and pain-free if they're gradual and work their way into it. The older you are, the harder this is going to be because first of all, you're carrying around a lifetime's worth of bad habits, probably, and imbalances and weaknesses and whatnot. But look around the playgrounds. I mean, kids know how to run right off the bat. You know, every kid can run. And, and, you know, they're not in pain when they're running. You know, you shouldn't be in pain when you're running either. And if you are, then you need to figure out why you're in pain. But probably one of the biggest reasons you're overdoing it. And so I agree with you that run-walk progression is key. And then don't be afraid to alternate. You know, you don't need to run every single day. You know, these, these other modalities that I was talking about, these non-weight-bearing type activities or hiking, um, are great ways to, to just build up the structure that's needed to handle that kind of impact loading. Because you're right, there's so many people that overdo it, get started too aggressively. And the, you know, and the worst thing I think is to say, I'm gonna run a half marathon in 4 months. Well, no, don't do that. You know, that the half marathon, by the time you get ready to, you should have already gotten 6 or 8 months of running under your belt before you even think about running goals. Because if you have a target like that and then you read out, oh, I need to be running 60 miles a week. That's a recipe for disaster.

I have a question about dealing with injury. So if someone is listening and they are completely sidelined from running, are there some other activities like swimming, cycling, aqua jogging, or anything else that you think would be good to implement? And how would you implement it for them to minimally lose fitness during that period?

Well, yeah, I've had to deal with, you know, almost anybody who coaches runners has had to deal with injured runners before. So, and then you, yes, you have to, especially a high-level athlete. You know, we can't afford to just stop and sit on the couch. So we've gotta find other ways of, of getting, keeping the fitness going. So we'll, first thing is to get with a good physical therapist, have them identify the problem, and then give you a program that's gonna, that's effectively gonna get you back, to the place where you can run again. And then, you know, like, I will work with different athletes, physical therapists, to— they'll call the shots in a way. So, okay, they're not— athletes can do this, but they can't do that, kind of like they'll tell me those things. So we do look at alternatives. Typically not so much swimming just because it's so far removed. You know, it's not, you know, as we talked about earlier, it's not weight-bearing. You're not vertical. I mean, it's a great exercise, and I think swimming is a wonderful thing, But if you're trying to get in shape for a marathon, it's not ideal. If you're gonna be in a pool, then as you said, aqua jogging would be the way to go. When, if you don't have a deep enough pool, just getting in a pool that comes up to, you know, the, your chest or middle of your belly, you know, and, and kind of jogging back and forth or walking back and forth fast, it, you know, can give you a pretty good stimulus. But aqua jogging, you can get your heart rate high. And it, of course, there's the famous story of, of, Um, Joan Benoit, um, doing aqua jogging in preparation for winning the gold medal at the, uh, 1988 Olympics— no, '84 Olympics, I think, was the first women's marathon. Anyway, so that's a great tool. Cycling, ellipticals, another good opportunity. For those that have access to it, there are devices that allow you to remove some of your body weight to and run on a treadmill. Um, and the, the, the Lever is one of those devices, um, which is basically, it's a frame that you strap to the hand, the arm, the rails of your treadmill, and you wear these special shorts that have these hook-like bike shorts, but they've got these hooks in them, and there are these adjustable bungee cords that you can take— I can't remember, I think up to 40 pounds, something like that, off your body weight. So you can start to reintroduce the running mechanics once the, the athlete can, can withstand some impact. So those are the ways we typically try to, to do it.

I have one question about that because I, I recently saw Jakob Ingebrigtsen. He went through surgery and he is recovering, and he started running with some of those tools indeed. And, of course, he is— he has all the professional elite recovery equipment and whatnot available. But to those listening, like, I don't have experience with that type of, like, that tool. Is that something that is available to the public as well? Like, to anyone listening here, are you able to buy something like that at a store where you can just install that on your tractor?

You have to order it online. The only one, there's two basic types. There's this, I don't know whether they pronounce it lever or lever. It's spelled L-E-V-E-R. Um, that's this framework that I was talking about that I'll get into more detail in a minute. Or there are these very expensive, you know, $100,000+ treadmills where you kind of have a, a little bit like a life preserver around your waist and an inflatable bag below that that lifts you off of the treadmill with air pressure. But those are astronomically expensive. Usually only you see them in, you know, high-end physical therapy offices might have them. There are water treadmills. I've seen those as well where you can vary the depth of the water, but the treadmill is basically in a small pool. And you— I actually had an athlete that you had to use one of those ones. But this, this lever or lever, however you say it, idea is quite handy because I don't know, I can't remember exactly how much they are. Maybe it's a maximum $1,000, I would say. Somewhere under $1,000, I think. And it has this frame that you can disassemble, put all the, all the parts into a moderate-sized duffel bag, and take to the gym with you. And then it mounts onto the handles, and it's got these universal, very clever universal mounts to go on virtually any treadmill with handrails on the side. And then you mount that part. I mean, you're gonna get a lot of odd looks from people in the gym, but I have used one. Some of my athletes have them for when they are injured or just, like, if you feel your legs are feeling beat up, but you wanna continue to run and do, like, an easy recovery run, and you knock— take 30 pounds off your body weight and go for a run. And it's— it feels amazing to use one.

That's an interesting one. One, like, one year, I had a few back-to-back marathons. I got into— I want to finish the world majors and get the medal. And so I had a short period of time between some of the world majors. I think it was the Tokyo Marathon in March and then the London Marathon in April, I believe it was.

That's close.

And in between, my body was feeling a bit off, but I still want to do some high intensity. And one thing that actually worked for me, because I was a bit afraid to go outside and do high intensity and, like, just do some damage that I couldn't run the last one, and it was a very important one for me. All the flights were booked and everything. So instead, I ended up going on an elliptical, and I did some gentle elliptical workouts. But even that one where I would do 3 minutes on, 1 minute off, and put some extra layers of clothing on, like, do, like, 6 or 8 of those rounds. And that for me was a wonderful way to get my heart rate up to, but with minimal impact on my body actually. I felt that one worked well.

So, yeah, I mean, I think most of us look down our nose at the elliptical because we see people on the elliptical in the gym and they're reading the newspaper and we think, what the hell? But it is a useful tool. You know, it's quite a useful tool. So I think it's another one of those things that's in the coach's toolbox to recommend to people when they need for exactly that reason. Yeah. You don't want the pounding.

Totally. So question, when someone is coming back from an injury and they're able to run again, like, how would you approach? Because some people really feel like, hey, I lost all of this fitness. And do I have to start all the way from zero again? Would you, would you suggest like a 2 to 4 week base building period? Or would you like, I know every, I know every comeback story is different, but I would love to hear some high-level thoughts on coming back into running again.

Well, that, and I think that's, I could say this could apply to injury, illness, or let's say post-race recovery. And so let me start with just a little bit of physiology. But when you stop giving your body that aerobic stimulus that we have been talking so much about, the one that, you know, as you point out from that one chart, it looks like it really kind of can accept a stimulus every 8 hours or so. The— this aerobic base, you know, training like running in zone 2, you could— your body can adapt in that 8 or 10, 12-hour window. You can do it every single day and sometimes even twice a day if you are trained for it. Um, when you take that stimulus away, that's one of the fastest declines in, in the, in our physiology, because the body is going, oh, I guess we don't need all these mitochondria or these aerobic enzymes, um, so we're just going to not have them. Body doesn't like to keep things around that it's not using. And I once, I think in that, I'm not sure it's in that book, it might be in the first book, Training for the New Alpinism, I show that in 5 days of bed rest, the, one of the markers for aerobic, the aerobic metabolism is this, this aerobic enzyme called cytochrome C. And you could see in this graph, they had— they did this 5-day bed rest routine, and I don't know how many people were involved, and the cytochrome C levels just drop off a cliff in 5 days. It's like— and the mitochondrial density within a week or two was down 50%. So the body's— yeah, just— okay, well, mitochondria have a half-life of like 2 or 3 weeks, I think. And so they're constantly being renewed all the time. But if your body says, hey, we don't need all those mitochondria, they go away. So, but the beauty of that is that that stuff trains back up a lot faster than it took you to train it the first time. And I have a, a little, let's call it, it's a rule of thumb and it's very much a rule of thumb. It's a, you know, don't, this is, don't take it for gospel here, but my belief is, and I try to do this with people. For every day you have missed in training, you need to have that many days of, you know, gradually— you go gradual training to come back to where you were. Because let's say you miss a week because you got a bad cold, and you're, you know, you were smart enough to not go out and try to train with a bad cold because you didn't want to turn it into bronchitis and miss a month. But you missed 5 days, or you were injured, you know, and you missed, missed 3 weeks because you had an Achilles flare-up. You missed 3 weeks. Well, then you wanna take 3 weeks of very gradual, gentle training before you start adding intensity or doing anything else because your aerobic system is the part that has taken the biggest hit. The strength will still be there. The speed can be— have been maintained pretty well. That stuff doesn't decline nearly as fast. So I think this kind of, you know, the equal amount of time of, of that you lost, to training should be respected and allow you to come back. And when— nor— we've all experienced this, where you start training again after this break, whether it's, you know, 5 days or 5 weeks, and you just feel terrible. You think, what happened? I've only got one lung now. Um, but very— you notice how quickly, 3 days later, you go, ah, I'm actually starting to feel pretty good again. The, the return to that base level of fitness you had comes so fast. So it, it leaves frequently, but it comes back pretty quickly.

So to those listening, don't get discouraged when you notice your, your fitness level feels like they've gone out of the window. And partly of that is true, but it will.

It is. It has.

Sooner again.

Exactly. But it's not the end of the world. You just have to be patient and let it come back. Don't try to force it. Like, you know, that first week back to training after a 3 weeks off, you're not going to the track and doing hard intervals. That would be a big mistake. You're, you don't have the aerobic capacity yet to, to, to handle that. You could do the training, but it would not end well for you.

Currently, we are in a transition period coming out of the winter months going into spring. And it seems like summer is already over here, at least in Southern California. We have full-on hot heat. There are little, like, heat wave warnings. Like, I'm going to the Grand Canyon next week to run 26 miles with a bunch of friends over there. And I looked and it was triple digit temperatures. So for those in Celsius, that's whatever, 30, 35 degrees temperatures already Celsius. So for those who are getting used to the hotter weather again, do you have any thoughts on how to approach training? Because obviously, as many of us know, once the temperature start going up, it's much harder to run at a specific heart rate.

Yes.

So do you just slow it down, or are there other protocols that you would advise here?

Until you adapt, yes, you have to slow it down. And some people are not gonna be good at running in the heat. I mean, famously, Paula Radcliffe, Beijing Olympics, you know, she had to drop out because the heat and humidity were too much. And, you know, then there's somebody who If anybody should know how to run that race, it should be— was her. And yet she— and I'm sure she did lots of preparation for it— she still couldn't handle it. And so there are going to be people who are better at running in the heat. You know, I don't know whether that's genetics or training history or what, but there are going to be people who are terrible at it. So I think the only thing you can do is train to become heat adapted. You have to give yourself— you give your body some time to adapt, just like you do with all these other things. And the main— the primary adaptation that will make is adding more plasma volume to the blood, because you're sweating more, you're losing more liquid through the sweat. And so your body says, oh, we need to make more, you know, increase the plasma. It'll start retaining some water. So that's the number one benefit, is you get better at sweating. But there's also the problem that, you know, when your core temperature— as your core temperature becomes elevated, and especially when it gets up in there to, let's say, even speaking— I know this only in centigrade because that's what we work in. You know, when you get into the 38, 39 degrees centigrade, then the alarm bells start to go off in the body, and it's saying, well, this is not safe anymore. And one of the ways our bodies cool itself. We've all had this experience. The reason you start sweating is the capillaries in your skin dilate to get more blood flowing through the skin to cool you through, you know, convective cooling, airflow across the skin. But that means when they do that, that's less blood that's available for those leg muscles. So that's why you see an increase in heart rate in high temperatures, is that the, the, your, your legs are still calling for this oxygen that they need to run at a certain pace. So the heart, the only response it can have is to increase, you know, the heart rate to pump higher. So you will see a higher heart rate in hot temperatures. Now, whether that's, you know, okay, let's say you have a, yeah, that you have to do a zone 2 test. So if you're gonna be training in, you know, Fairbanks, Alaska in the wintertime, That's gonna be a very different aerobic threshold than when you're training in Phoenix, Arizona in July. And so you would actually want to be able to do, you know, a threshold test to determine your running threshold pace and heart rate in Phoenix and in Fairbanks.

Yeah. It's interesting. We, like, on this channel, I've talked quite a, like, I've indeed interviewed Dr. Phil Maffetone several times, and he talks about the MAF test. So you, you run at your aerobic zone and you just see what is your drop off per mile or per kilometer. And one of the things that we internally in our program talk about is just writing down 2 elements with the test results. One is what is the temperature? And the second one is how much sleep did you have the night before? And I found both of those 2 to have a pretty significant impact because at least when you go back to like the last 6 or 12 months of test results, at least you can see, like, okay, I only slept 5 hours before that test. And, and even though the temperatures were the same, when I sleep 7 or 8 hours, I see this is the impact. And, and vice versa with temperatures, you can see differences between summer and winter months.

So one of the, one of the reasons that we try to encourage people to use a treadmill for these types of threshold tests is that you have more control. You know, they're often in air-conditioned spaces, so you don't have that variability. There's going to be no wind. And so, yeah, I think, you know, we're— first of all, we're trying to— we're not machines, but we are trying to quantify data as well as we can, but with an incredibly complex organism ourselves. And to think that we can dial in a threshold to within, you know, 2 beats of the heart— no, we can't. We don't have that. It's gonna vary so much depending on these factors. And you just pointed out two really important ones, the temperature and how rested you are. And so we try to encourage people to recreate the same conditions you had, and maybe you don't have access to a treadmill. Maybe you have to go to the, you know, go run around the block to do this test. Well, don't do the test in February and, and in July and expect the same results. You know, they're very likely not gonna be.

Yeah. Totally. You, you mentioned something interesting in a previous conversation about the aerobic threshold changing. Like, as we get fitter, does the aerobic threshold heart rate go up, or is it mostly the pace that improves?

Initially, they'll go up in tandem. We'll see the pace and the heart rate go up. And normally the way we do that or suggest it to people is, like, as I mentioned earlier, prob— most people have a standard running loop that they do. And they know, okay, this takes me an hour. Well, if one day you're running that loop and you're doing a pretty good job of maintaining your heart rate below this threshold, you know, maybe it's 140 and you're kind of bouncing around from 135 to 142, pretty much staying right around 140. But you get done to— you get to the end and you go, whoa, I was 3 minutes faster than that. 3 minutes faster today than I was the last time I did this run a week ago. Well, the only way that can happen is if your aerobic capacity has increased. Now your aerobic system is able to produce more energy than it was a week or so ago. Then you should go, I probably should retest my aerobic threshold now. Because there's a good chance my aerobic threshold heart rate is a bit higher. But so that being said, initially, there, you know, there, the heart rate and the pace will go up together. Eventually, the heart rate's gonna plateau. Like, I will not see Tom Evans' aerobic threshold heart rate increase. And, but what we still try to strive to do is, you know, increase the pace at that threshold. Same thing with Kipchoge. You know, you can imagine with someone with his training history, he's maxed. He, his heart rate may actually be going down with age. You know, his max, his heart rate at his aerobic threshold, but his pace can continue to improve. So certainly, maybe in the first year or so of consistent training, you'll see both the pace and the heart rate increase together, but eventually, the heart rate will plateau.

In my conversation with Dr. Stephen Seiler, I asked him what he was excited about outside of, like, he obviously talked a lot about 80/20 running and the different zones and whatnot. And towards the end of the conversation, he talked, and this was a few years back, he mentioned he was very interested in some of the progress that's happening with breath rate and breathing patterns, and there were some tools getting developed around that.

Mm-hmm.

Do you mostly look at heart rate and at blood lactate levels, or do you also like work on breathing patterns or, or any type of perceived effort from that perspective?

We, I don't, I know there's a device, I think I have one sitting over here somewhere. Um, I can't find it right now, but I have— it's a— it's almost— it looks like a heart— you put it on your heart rate monitor strap, chest strap. I think it measures the expansion between the ribs basically when you're breathing. Um, so you can measure— you can get a ventilatory equivalency, um, measurement like heart rate. And I think there's some real value to that. I don't know if it surpasses heart rate or You know, it's not, it's funny though because there's a, there's an, you may even know this because you're kind of a student of this, of the history of running. Do you remember there was a famous American runner named Fred Wilt, and he wrote a book called Run, Run, Run? You ever heard of that?

I, I've heard of the book.

It's a little yellow book. I'd have to dig around to find it. Little yellow book like this. I think it was written in the early '60s. You know, before portable heart rate monitors, And he talks about, um, the breathing cadence matched to the running, you know, the tempo of the running. And that was how they controlled intensity. It was like, okay, you know, 3 strides in inhaling, 2 strides exhaling was a certain intensity. And, you know, you could— he could build the whole intensity scale off of your kind of breathing frequency. So I think it could be. I mean, ventilation, ideally— I mean, it is in a laboratory because it's easily— not easily, but it's measurable and so quite quantifiable. It should be a perfect marker for metabolism, you know, because as ventilation— as the metabolic load increases and we go, you know, start adding more anaerobic component to the aerobic energy production, then ventilation is going to increase because you're going to have more CO2 being created. And, you know, when you increase your breathing rate, it's because your body's not trying to get more oxygen in, it's trying to blow out the excess CO2 that you've created. So ventilation should be a great marker for— but I haven't found it to work very well in practice outside of a laboratory.

It's an interesting— the one part where I have a hard time looking at heart rate, um, once I go on a mountain adventure and I'm going in particular on altitude, like a few weeks ago I was in Powder Mountain, Utah at 9,000 foot and we're going for a run and we're up in the hills. When I'm trying to run, like I was like, oh, let's just get an aerobic zone in, or like an aerobic run in. When I'm here at sea level and I'm running at like a 135 heart rate, it's doable. When I go over there to altitude, even to get my heart rate up to 135, I feel like my breathing pattern is much harder. And so obviously the air is thinner and it's different. So in particular, when, when trying to get to certain zones when I'm at altitude or, or even several hours further into a race, like, it, it's been an interesting one just to pay attention to. But I've heard of those tools you mentioned. I've never personally used them, but it is something I'm interested exploring.

So, yeah. And, you know, and often I deal with people who, you know, live at one altitude and train at another frequently. And so I'll say, okay, we're gonna want to establish some zones for 10,000 feet.

Yeah.

Because you're gonna be going to Breckenridge on the weekend and training there, but you live in Boulder, Colorado at 5,500 feet. So we actually need different training zones for these two places.

It's interesting. We've been talking for an hour and a half again, and We've gone through about half the topics we were going to talk about. Sorry. I want to be very respectful of your time over here. And who knows down the line at some point we can pick up where we had left off. But two last questions over here. Where can people learn more about you? Where can they find your books, your coaching programs, all of your socials?

Yeah. So the business that I run and have for years is called Evoke Endurance. And, I was previously— so when I wrote that, both these first 2 books, Training for the New Alpinism and the one you have, Training for the Uphill Athlete, I had another business called Uphill Athlete. And I left that business along with all but one of the coaches, and we, we formed Evoke Endurance about 4 years ago. And so it's the same principles and everything else is just a new name. And, so people can find us at evokeendurance.com. There's, we have a subreddit under Evoke Endurance. We have an Instagram account, of course, under Evoke Endurance. I personally have an Instagram, although I'm not super active on it. It's Coach Scott, Coach_Scott_Johnston. So you people can find me there. We do, you know, we're, we're basically maxed out on our coaching capacity at this point. So, I, I love the fact that people have shown a lot of interest in working with us, but we just don't have the capability of handling more athletes at the moment.

Right on. Well, I can absolutely highly recommend your, your website, the book, and all of the resources available there. In closing, do you have any final advice for recreational runners who wanna improve without burning out?

One, I think it was one of the questions you were going to ask about is motivation. Um, I honestly believe that you can't coach motivation. Um, I, in fact, I have a, there's a sign in my gym that says you can't coach desire and you people need, you need to find somewhere within yourself, this desire, this, you know, this flame that is burning to do these things and you better love the process because The process of this kind of training is not glamorous. It is not— doesn't make great social media, does not look good on YouTube in watching somebody run slowly for hours at a time. But that's what 99% of your training is gonna look like. It's gonna be— you're gonna be alone. It's gonna be kinda boring. So you have to find— you can't be looking externally for that motivation. I think that's very important. You know, you either have it or you don't have it. And there's nothing wrong if you don't have it, but you can't fake that. You maybe you can fake it for a little while, but eventually it's going to catch up with you. And so when people come to us, it's like, you better be highly motivated for this thing you're coming to us to do because we can't supply that for you. It's, it's, if we were to try to supply that, it would be only be artificial. And so if you're feeling like you need to do this to impress your friends or family, or it's, you know, whatever, that's not going to work out well for you. Yeah.

So well said. Thank you very much for sharing all of this. Like I mentioned earlier, there were a lot of views on the first conversation. I think probably 10 of those views were from me because I went back to that conversation several different times. And even in today's conversation, there were a lot of different things that were eye-opening that I really appreciate you sharing. And Hopefully at some point down the line we can meet in person either later this year or next year. Would love to sit down and record another one at some point.

I would love to do that too, Floris. You're a great interviewer. I have enjoyed this immensely.

Same here. Absolutely. Thank you so much and we'll talk more again.

Okay, thanks.

All right, bye now. Thank you for listening. Coach Kot is such a legend and I'm so thankful for him for sharing all of his insights. We'd love to hear from you. What was one of your favorite lessons, takeaways, or quotes from this episode? Let us know in the comments below on YouTube. If you would like to join our running coaching program for a free 7-day trial, check out pbprogram.com. This is a new platform on school, our Personal Best Running Club. A variety of athletes from all around the world helping each other out. There's the different personal best coaches and myself guiding athletes. We have training schedules, we have videos that are only exclusively available for the members there, and amazing daily conversations about a variety of different topics. You can learn more at pbprogram.com and join the 7-day free trial there. Um, later this week I'm driving over to Arizona for some exciting new episodes that I'm going to be recording. So on Friday, I'm meeting up with Molly Seidel, Olympic athlete turned ultra marathoner. Going to have a record a conversation at her house and then going to drive over to Ryan Hall to join him for a strength training session, which is going to be an interesting one. Afterwards, we're going to record round 2 of the podcast and the first one was a blast, so it will be fun to spend some time with him at his house. And then Sunday, running the Grand Canyon, we're going for a long adventure with Ryan Hall, with the Believe in the Run guys, with the Mount the Coast crew. So I'm slightly nervous, I'm not going to lie, because it's going to be a scorcher hot one and some of these guys are fast. And so we'll see how that goes. But hopefully I'll be there to tell the story afterwards. And yeah, more videos coming soon. Thanks for tuning in and have fun out there on your runs.

Bye now.