Emil Zatopek: The Man Who Changed Running (Part 1)

There's so many good high level athletes who never win a gold medal, who never win a national championships. This is not the analogy we're making. We're talking about your ability to improve from what you were doing previously. And that's why we're wanting to give examples of people who are at the top of their it's hard to beat people. It's hard to beat 20 people who are all equally as good.

This podcast is brought to you by Trivalo Coaching, where we help triathletes and cyclists like you train smarter to race faster. I'm your host, Jordan Donnelly, and on my left is former Australian Ironman champion and head coach of Trivelo Coaching, Jared Donnelly. In Today's episode, a 23 year old Aussie runs 47 ultra marathons in a row across Australia. We review some of the Kona World Championship performances and we're really excited to bring a new segment we're going to be doing on the podcast telling great sporting stories. And the first is the story of Emile Zatopek, the man who changed running with five Olympic medals, 18 world records to his name, and the innovator of interval training throughout a very tumultuous period of World War II. This is a story worth hearing about dad, welcome to another exciting episode. Let's start. What is your, what is your gratitude for the week?

Thanks, Joy. This is a, this is going to be fun delving into the career of Zatopek. For those who don't know him, it'll be, it's pretty eye opening and that's kind of what my gratitude's based on. When I was thinking about the podcast we were going to do on him, I was thinking about the risks that he was willing to take to become the best person that he could be as a person, as an athlete, as a human being. And he was just so accepting of I'm not going to repeat the same stuff that I've done before. If it's not working, if it's working well, I'll carry on with it. But if it's not, I need to change something. And that's kind of what my gratitude is. For the people who are really on board with us, who are willing to change their ways and whether they've been doing it for two years or 20, they're just willing to trust the process and just completely change everything about what they've been doing, what they think is, has been right for their potential improvement. And the reason they're reaching out is because they want to get better. And I Suppose on the negative side, those people who reach out, who want to get better and aren't willing to change, they're the opposite to what I'm talking about. I'm grateful for the people who join us and completely willing to change everything. And I've got a. I asked myself this. Why would I be reluctant to change if what I've been doing hasn't helped me improve? And that's kind of. I'm grateful but disappointed in others who want to improve but don't want to change anything about what they're doing and want to do the same old stuff. And that kind of frustrates me a bit. But I don't want to take away from the gratitude that we're talking about. The people who do succeed with us are the ones who. Who are willing to 100% commit to change and they're not fearful of it. Why are we as human beings, we don't like change, we're reluctant to change. I've experienced this in so many different fields. You get comfortable, you get used to it. It's what I do. That's what I do on Tuesday. I'm comfortable with that. I don't want to be out of my comfort zone. I'm not sure why, but there is a reason. It's because you fear that you're going to be tested or there is a failure factor there. And so that that change of whether you're changing your job at work or whether you're changing houses or changing cars or changing your training program, we are kind of questioning is this the right thing to do. You really got anxiety about it, you've got fear and it's normal human reaction. And I've experienced it many times myself. I'm really comfortable in what I'm doing, where I'm doing it and the routine that I've got. And we also about having good routines. But sometimes you have to step out of your comfort zone and try something new and be prepared to fail. That is the key thing because you will absolutely learn more from the failures than you will from your successes. And I can testament to that because I've done so many failures in my journey as a coach and as an athlete, as a human being, as a dad, as a brother and a son. I've got failings, but. But the problem is if you're not willing to change, then you do have a problem. And so I'm really grateful for the fact that when people decide to join us, they're accepting. It's almost like you go into confession okay, What I've been doing hasn't been working. And now I'm willing to do my penance, which is you tell me what to do and you just tell me how hard to jump and I'll do it. And I love that. And that's what I'm grateful for, is the people who come on board and who are just going to do whatever it takes to. And look, if you don't, if you do 90% or a version of what we give you, you're not 100% sure at the end or any way along the journey whether it's going to be completely effective. Because the only way to test something is to do it properly. If you half do it, you're not sure when the outcome happens, what was good or what was bad about it, because you didn't do it 100%, you've done a version of it. So therefore you can't actually say it did or didn't work. The only way you can say this did not work is if you do it properly, 100%. If you do a version of it, the bits you miss could have been the bits that caused you not to succeed. So it's a funny gratitude. I know it's got both negative and positive connotations, but I am the majority of people who come to us, they've got to that point where I stuff this, I can't improve. I'm going to go almost to the dark side and sell my soul and just trust in the process. Because one of the things that as humans, we will gravitate to success, the minute your football team, whether it's soccer, cricket, football, basketball, the minute they're successful, everybody wants to know how they were successful, what did they do? And they want to copy it. The Norwegian method in triathlon, if they weren't winning, no one would be worried about them, but they're dominating. So we want to learn and gravitate to the six successful people. So. So, you know, when you're experimenting with new stuff, like we'll find out with Zatopec, it's hard to trust that process because it hasn't been successful yet and you're breaking new ground. So, you know, even it's more admirable to see these type of people succeed. That's why it's gold that the Norwegians are doing what they're doing, because they weren't sure about whether it was going to be successful or not. But, boy, everybody's pretty sure now that this is an unbelievable, successful way to.

Train and race funnily enough, it is easier when a new athlete joins Travelo because you say to them, look, it's worked for hundreds of athletes before you. So. So you do have a lot more belief. It's not like you're trying something new. But it is one of our Travelo principles. And we have a lot of principles that we really instill in our athletes when they come and train under us and get coached by us and do our coaching programs. Because it's not just about the training, it's about the mindset around it all. And one of them is trust the process and embrace the change. And we really draw that in because you have to have that mindset to do exactly what you're saying, to do new and try something new in the hopes that it gets you the result you want. And I really like that question that you said, why? Why do we fear change? Why do we resist it? I personally believe that one of the reasons we don't do things is because we don't truly believe that the outcome will get us the result we want. Because if we truly believe that, then we would do it, no doubt. You know, if you knew for a fact, with 100% certainty that this session will get you the result you want with your FTP, you would do it. And unfortunately, you never can know that 100%. And so you're going to have to some sort of risk and say, okay, well, I don't know for sure, but it looks like all these other people have had success with it, so I'm going to trust the process and embrace the change. So I really like that line of gratitude and questioning. My gratitude is a similar theme to the topic of the episode with Emil Zatopek. And I am grateful also for innovators and for people who are willing to make the changes for us and create solutions to problems. And mine's a little bit more specific, but I've been surfing out in the water a lot in some pretty dirty water, which I shouldn't have done in the first place, but I ended up getting an ear infection from doing it, and it was a disaster. It really affected me quite harshly, the ear infection. Then my ears are better and I want to go out surfing again, but the water's still dirty, but I still want to be able to surf. And so I'm grateful for people who invented earplugs and ear drops, because now you can. You can flush your ears out before the surf with some ear drops. You wear earplugs to protect your ears, and then when you come out you flush your ears out again with these aqua drops, and it keeps the ear clean. So I'm really grateful for the innovators who invented that allows me to keep surfing, which I really, really enjoy. Moving on to the next segment. What has caught your attention in the world of sport for the week?

Yeah, and I know we do bang on about our hero, Lionel. And for those of you who didn't see what happened at the world championships in Kona, he had one of the worst events, and he's had many bad events at Kona, by the way. He has come second at Kona, but he. He doesn't mind doing videos or whatever you call it.

Interviews. Vlogs.

Yeah, vlogs. And he wears his heart on his sleeve, there's no doubt about that. And I think that's what I love about. About him.

He.

He's not holding back. He's telling the truth. He's transparent. So what's caught my attention is when he had a poor result, he fronted up to the camera to have to explain himself. And can you, you know, can you imagine? You've been. You put yourself out there. I want to win this race. And you end up coming nowhere. You are, you know, you're basically walking the marathon. But he finished, to his credit. He just had one of the. One of the worst days you could possibly have. And. And when you prepare so well. And so he has a great team around him. He's embraced change.

Yeah.

You know what we're talking about. He's done. He's changed his whole training mythology, which I'm absolutely excited about, and so are you, and I think that's what we love about him. He's got to a really good level as a triathlete. The top. He's right at the top. He's won many good races. Championship races are the ones that he wants to dominate in. And that's why he's gone to the next level, to get all of the people surrounding him that he thinks can take him there. And the thing that that's caught my attention is it's not always successful. You don't always have successful campaigns. Even if you think that you've been the most prepared you've ever been in your life, there's no guarantee that you're going to get the right outcome. And I think I've learned that lesson a lot over the journey is, you know, there will be a reason and explanation as to why you don't get the outcome. And it's hard to take, but, you know, you've Got to be the same person in victory as you are in defeat. And you've got to take the. Humbly take the glory of victory and respectfully praise those who beat you when you're defeated and not shy away from it. And I just love the way he goes about it. He is absolutely perplexed as to what went wrong. He's got a few theories, and so have his coaches, and actually, I've got a few theories as well. I just think he raced too much. I think he'd done too many Iron Mans. I think he said he'd done, you know, the stats better than I will. But.

Eight Iron Mans in 15 months. And he also thinks that his training race simulations meant he'd probably done another six or seven. So he'd almost done one Iron Man a month for 15 months.

Plus he'd done 70.3s as well. Collins cup, the PTO events, and.

Yep.

So you just mentioned Iron Mans, but he'd done way more events in between that. And that's a great lesson. And I think that's the standout. And you know how we always say there's never one reason. There's always a majority of things happen because of one reason, but there will be a whole lot of little things that will tip you over. And it could have been that, you know, he raced well at St. George in Utah at the World Championships. He came second. You know, that was only. How many months ago was that?

Six.

Six months ago?

Seven months ago? Yeah. No, Something like that. Yeah. Yeah.

But that shows you he. He has the ability to perform well, but it just didn't happen on the. On the day. And I think it's a really good message to every age grouper out there who thinks that they're going to perform every single time, even the very best of the best, no matter how well prepared they think they are, they can still have a bad performance that can maybe not be explained. And it's how you deal with those performances that I think is the measure of the person, male or female, you know, if you don't go away sulking and woe is me. And he's not doing that at all. He's is owning up to, I did something wrong. I've made mistakes. We've. We've done something wrong, as in his team. And I just love the way he's going about this. And what's caught my attention is I think he will be better off from this outcome down the track. This will be. It'll either two things are going to happen which is probably obvious. It'll. It'll break him and he'll never, never perform well again, or he. This will make. This will make the man into a championship winner. And you'll think twice about his program scheduling. And I think that's a key thing. You can not race enough, and then you can over race yourself. It's a fine line. It's a tough one, but, you know, the best form of training is racing. But too much racing is just going to flatten you to a point where he felt shocking on the bikes right from the outset, and that shouldn't be the case, you know, but he felt shocking in the lead up. So everybody was saying it was. It was in his mind. And, you know, he knows his body, and that's another point. He knows his body better than anybody, and he's trying to tell all of his surrounding help that there's something not right. And they're saying, oh, you're thinking too much about it. You're putting too much pressure on yourself. But in actual fact, in hindsight, he was 100% right. He was. He was training himself into a hole.

No one believed him, including us, because we watched those videos. And he's just going, I just. I feel like crap. I'm hitting the numbers. His lactate levels are all good. And he said, I just feel disgusting. And we kind of agreed with coaches where they were saying, it's just one. It's just one session where you feel like that, you know, compared to everything else that's been going well. But like you said, he was right.

Yeah. So that's what's caught my attention. I think it's a great lesson for us, but even the people at the top of their tree can have bad outcomes, and, you know, you just got to deal with them. And we don't want to see that happen. But it is going to come your way eventually. So, you know, we all aim and try and prepare and plan to get the best possible outcome, and the majority of times it does. That's the way it goes for the people that we're in charge of. The majority of times it doesn't go that way for the rest of the triathlon field. They're always doing the same result or worse. But, you know, it is important to understand that it's not always there's going to be things that don't gel and just be okay with that and live to fight another day.

And I love the way he didn't blame anyone else. He didn't blame any external factors, and he didn't blame his coaching staff or his team. You know, he said, we went into it like this, we messed it up, you know, and he's saying, and we'll learn from it. And there was no animosity towards his coaching staff where he was going, I told you so. There was none of that. And it was, I just really found that also a great part of the story because he's, he's in there with his team and yeah, they, one of them will make mistake, he will make mistake himself as the athlete, the coaches might make mistakes and that's okay. They're all just willing to learn together and move forward and not, not play a blame game on anyone. And I really like that. I just wanted to quickly mention in the female category because we did pick two potential winners. We wanted Lionel to win and that was an absolute disaster. And we picked Lucy Charles which was looking like it was, she was gonna do it. She was going to come out as the underdog, underprepared, like he said, no mental pressure. So she led from the start and she was in front on the run. And then barring a insane run from Chelsea Sadaro which no one could have predicted, I know she's absolute gun runner but no one could have predicted her to come through the field and pass Lucy Charles and win the race and become world champion. Lucy Charles looked like she was on her way and she gets another second place which is every year she's lost to previous world champions, you know, Daniela Reef cup multiple times and she'd beaten all those people that she was supposed to beat before. It's just no one predicted Chelsea Zadara to come through and win. So that was, that was very fascinating race to watch and it was awesome and it was a great race by Lucy Charles regardless given where she's come back from.

Yeah, it was, wasn't it? Exceptional. Both male and female races were riveting and how, how I could be sitting there twice during the, you know, in seven days and watch a race from start to finish trying to do work around it. I, I just can't believe it. It is an eight hour thing that you're. And it was just captivating, you know, the way the women's race panned out. You know, there was so many things happening and even Lucy Charles Barkley getting chased down and getting passed by Chelsea Sodaro. But third place was also chasing Lucy Charles and she got within 20 seconds and this is where I was so impressed with Lucy Charles Barkley. She could have capitulated there and just come third. But she just lifted and hung on and, and stayed 20 seconds ahead from the last 5K out and, and ended up holding on to second place, which was outstanding considering the lack of training and preparation she had going into the event. I just think her, her will and desire to, to compete is, is really that showed out even though she didn't win. Boy, that was outstanding.

I absolutely agree with that. Look, we said we weren't going to go on about this too long, but there was one more thing I want to talk about with the world champs and that's I loved your insight. I asked you what you thought of when Gustav, who was the winner, passed Sam, laid low on the run and laid low, had a six minute head start going into the run leg. And Gustav slowly but surely, and Christian slowly but surely called their way back before Gustav broke away from Christian and he passed him and he was going a much faster pace. And I said, what did you think of him? You know, it was great sportsmanship. He clapped him on the back, gave him a handshake, they gave each other a high five. I said, what do you think of that? Because it's so great to see sportsmanship in sports, but also this is your world championship and Gustav is a ruthless competitor. You know, would you just want them to focus on racing? I was just asking you these questions, just what you thought on it and you said, make no mistake, in an iron man, you are not changing pace. So what he does when he goes past him then doesn't matter because he's running his pace, Sam's, Gustav's running his pace, Sam's running his pace, they're not changing. So it's in your head. You said it was great to see that sportsmanship because there's no way Sam Laidler is going to hang on to him in an iron man. I just thought that was a really great insight into what's actually happening at that level. Event there's no, there's no mindset where Sam Leather is suddenly going to be able to lift his pace and start running Gustav space.

Well, he tried for 10 seconds. He ran into the, ran in behind his slipstream and gave 10 seconds worth of effort. And then within 40 more seconds he was 100 meters behind him because he just realized after 10 seconds I will not finish second. If I change pace right now, Christian will pass me. So I've got to go back to what I was doing and I'm holding off Christian, so, you know, I can't keep up with Gustav's pace. I can't change pace. I will end up coming fifth. And, and he. And I won't beat Gustav because he's already caught me in two K's, put a minute and a half into me. So, yeah, so it sounds. It sounds like it's all good and proper, but it's. It's actually, you know, both athletes know that that's an unsustainable pace. I've got to do what I'm doing.

Yep. One more question on the sportsmanship thing. It came out that a couple of the guys were riding way harder in the pack than the whole pack anticipated the pace would be, and they were really burying themselves a little bit, and Gustav was holding them. And then one of the guys said to Gustavo, no, we've got a 10 minute penalty or a five minute penalty, so we're overriding because of that. And you found that pretty interesting as well, that that would give him that information because he was trying to hang on to them, going, I don't know if, excuse my language, I don't know if I can sustain this pace. And then they told him what was happening. And so he was able to adjust his race plan, which potentially saves him, you know, if he blows himself off on the block. He's not running that well in the run.

Yep. I just found that astounding, to be honest, that the guys who had the time penalty would give that information across that. That's. I don't know whether it's naive or I don't know. I don't know why they did that, because they've just handed Gustav and Christian a reason to not follow them. Whereas before they would be questioning Christian and Gustav would be questioning because Sam Laidlaw's already up the road. You know, is this another group of guys going to ride away from us? What are we doing wrong here? They would be starting to question everything about their preparation and what's happening in this race. People are riding away from us. We're supposed to be the gun riders here, and yet there's guys who are riding harder than we are. And then when someone gives you an explanation as to why, then you change your strategy straight away. Whereas if they had kept quiet, they would have possibly forced them into their own plan, which, as you know, I've said on this podcast about my Kona experience, where one of the guys I kind of changed my plan around had no intentions of running, and I did exactly that mistake and lifted my riding pace, only to find out after the end of the bike ride, which got me in a great position, but I was pretty much Blown from riding above my level. And the guy tells me he's not running and I'm just going, oh well that's great now. And had I known that I would not have chased him. And, and Christian is exactly the same position now he knows that information and he makes a better decision. Yeah.

So was in the name sportsmanship, but bad tactics.

Yeah, bad tactics. Yep.

Interesting. All right, that's enough of the Kona World Championships. What has caught my attention was if you're in Australia, you will no doubt seen the young 23 year old Aussie trading Ned Brockman who took the whole of Australia by storm. And I think it's caught everyone's attention this week. And he ran from Perth to Sydney across the entire Australia. Now Australia covers, if you put Australia on the map of Europe, it covers most of Europe in terms of width. It's just insane how far it is. 4700 km wide. It is. And he ran, people do that feed on the bike and it's an incredible feat. He ran it which was averaged out over 47 days to something around 85-100km a day. So he's running an ultra marathon every day and he's getting through it. You know, he's not, he's not slowly running. He was averaging between 5, 45 on some days for 80 kilometers to 640 for 100 kilometers. And you know, he's, he's running along there and you see footage of him and it is absolutely astounding and I honestly still can't get my head around it. It just, it is so unfathomable. It's unfathomable to anyone, let alone if you are in running, if you're in the sport of endurance and you know, these kind of feats, it's just, I honestly still can't wrap my head around it. And I guess just hats off to him. He did it for homelessness, charity. He raised I think around or over $2 million by now. The, the stories of what he was doing daily. He would do a daily update on Instagram at the end of each day, how far you're on the pace, how he was feeling. And after like a week or two, he already had, he had almost broken ankles and he just had all sorts of problems. He was doing a journal saying that he feels like every single bone in his body below his waist has arthritis or tendon, something. He's in agonizing pain constantly. He had a physio with him on the road massusing him every break. He could get just an Absolutely astounding effort. I mean, you hear stories of people doing, you know, 50 marathons in 50 days and that's the world record, you know, yet he's doing 47 ultra marathons in a row. And I don't know if it's like stupid or I don't know if his body will be ruined for, for a long time. I don't know what the recovery be like for him. Supposedly he has some really gruesome injuries right now, but big hats off to him. It is an inspiring, miraculous, goosebump worthy effort. And my favorite part about the story, not aside from the fact of how much awareness and money he raised for charity, was his mindset. He just, he's. Some of his taglines were just keep showing up, you know, just show up. And I just absolutely love that every day. His whole thing was just show up. His tagline at the bottom, which is a favorite quote of mine for a long time, get comfortable being uncomfortable. Comfortable. And he was just, he's always saying that the mind is stronger than the body. And every day he was in so much pain and he would, he would write in his little Instagram post and say, body is shattered but head is as strong as ever. And for me that was just super inspiring that if he can do that, it really lifts your spirits to, to be able to go for your, for me, what felt, you know, I went for a pissy little 20 minute run the other day and I thought, well, jeez, he's, he's pretty inspiring to get out there and get your shoes on.

It's perspective at its biggest level, isn't it? When you see something doing, see someone doing something exceptional, it's inspiring. But it's also almost belittling to what your concerns are in your little tiny world. And I'm talking about myself here. And you just think, far out, what can the human being, the human body withstands. There are so many examples. And that's kind of what we're talking about today is some of the great feats that have happened in history. And so, you know, this is a modern day, you know, brilliant feat, I feel, which I don't know if anybody will be able to do that.

He was going for the world record and he didn't get it. Yeah, the record and he didn't get it. And then I sat there thinking, who the hell has the record? And it's this ultra marath German ultra marathon runner who did it in 2005 and ran across Australia and he did in 44 days or something. He did three days faster, which to me is just astounding. But this one obviously has a lot more publicity and the whole story is being tracked, which is why it's got a lot of attention. Yeah. So both those stories shocked me. And yeah, you're right. I don't know who's wild enough to take that on again. So it's an inspiring story and another inspiring story that we want to tell. And a big part of this episode is this story of Emil Zatopek, the man who changed running. And I can't wait to get into this. It was, as a runner, you do know a lot about him. But it was really fun diving into this, the history books and finding out as much information about him. And we'll take you through who he is and why he's so important integral in revolutionizing the sport of running. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1922, which is now split up into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, he started training seriously as a runner at the age of 18, which is in 1940, because he was working in a shoe factory. And the sports coach at the shoe factory got all the workers to run in a race. And at first he wasn't interested. And this is really fascinating. There's a quote of him where he said, I protested that I was weak and not fit to run, but the coach sent me for a physical examination. The doctor said I was perfectly well, so I had to run. And then once I got started, I felt I wanted to win, but I only came second. And that was the way it started. And he's talking about his love for running, his competitiveness and the start of his career. And he was second in this race. And supposedly there was about 100 people in there and he's just jumped in and done well. And his love for running began. And for the next four years he developed his own training program modeled off Finnish interval training and Swedish fartlek training. And he was modeling one of the greatest middle distance runners of all time, Finland's Pavo Nurmi. And he was. Back then, information wasn't as accessible like it is now on social media, where you can just get access to Lionel Sanders exact training program and diary. But he found every bit of information he could on Fartlekin interval training. And interestingly, Paavo Nurmi was one of the first people to introduce the even pace strategy to running. And I found this really fascinating that he was one of the first runners to pace himself with a stopwatch in training. He was one of the first ones to do our trivalo principal dad of spreading your energy evenly and uniformly over the race. And he ran with a stopwatch to make sure that he didn't overexert himself. And he was one of the first ones to come out and say that sprinting at the start is stupid and use a stopwatch to run even pace. And I know you love hearing that.

Yeah, it's funny because my dad just used to talk about the runners of the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s to me all the time when he was training me in the. I was born in 59, so I started to do some training in 1969, 1970, 71. All those early years when I was 10, 11, 12, 13 and, and he would tell, dad would tell me these stories and I don't know, as a 10, 10 year old, I just loved hearing them. And he would mention the great Emile Zatopek and I knew zatopek as a 10 year old and that seems a bit weird, doesn't it? But, but you know, I know of Pavo Normie because my dad would talk about him and, and, and we would do some of the training sessions that Pavo Normie did and we would do them the same way. Not allowed to sprint at the start, not allowed to burn to, you know, we didn't talk about them as increasing lactate in those days. No one had a clue about that. But dad was saying, you know, you've only got a few matches, don't burn them. He was talking about that back in 1969, 1970. And then, you know, understanding championship races where, you know, you have to sometimes go a little bit harder at the start because every kid you're running against has no idea about pacing yet. You do or I do because that's the way I'd been training. And every kid would run the first 150 meters at their best, 100 meters sprint. And dad would say to me, let them go, just let them go. And here we are in 800 meters, letting someone go who's 50 meters ahead of you. Pretty tough to do as a 10 year old when it's super competitive. But you know, it's stories like Pavo Normie and Emil Zatopek and Ron Clark and Herb Elliott and he would just rattle off all these guys. And this is fun because we're going to talk about a lot of the people that I've grown up knowing and you've learned about them from just researching. It's great that there's so much information out there about these people. But Zatopek, well, what a story. And I'll let you continue.

Yeah, and I can continue the story. Basically, over the next four years, he continued to train well and he ended up just superseding himself as a runner. And he broke the national records in 2k, 3k, 5k. As he continued to race more and more. And it was. It was only in 1944, so basically four years after he started that he started to break these records. And that's a really important point that I wanted to touch on, because we see this pattern a lot in our top performing tribalo athletes. All athletes get some sort of improvement with consistent training, and we see that with diminishing returns. But the principle of diminishing returns can sometimes be a little bit demotivating because it feels like the longer you go, the less reward you're getting because you've got less potential room for improvement. And so, like we speak about all the time, you're trying to improve by 1 watt or 2 watts at a time. But those 1 watt or 2 watt improvements aren't necessarily the whole story to how good you are as an athlete as a whole, and how strong you are and how strong your base is. And we just see so many athletes really start peaking and reaching their potential after three to four years of seriously consistent training. That's such a key point here. And. And this story follows the exact same pattern where after four years of him seriously training himself, now he starts to break all these national records. And obviously he was improving the whole way until there. But this is a really important point for age groupers to think about, because we have a lot of age groupers who do this over 3, 4, 5 years of consistent training, start to hit numbers that they've never seen before and start performing in races like they never have before. And that shouldn't happen as you're getting older. Technically, you're supposed to get weaker or less fit as you're getting older. But it's a really important pattern to recognize, isn't it?

Yeah. And don't be put off by the fact that we're not saying that age groupers will come to us and then start winning races. We're saying you will be a better improved athlete than you were before. And it might take four years, might take three years for you to change the habits you've had. Like we talked about earlier in the podcast, be willing to change to get a better result. But it might take two years, 18 months, it might take 12 months. Very rarely does it happen in 16 weeks. You get improvement, but not to the level that we're talking about here where we've had people join us who might have been in the bottom third of their age group. You know, out of 200 competitors they might have becoming 160th and then after 16 weeks they might be 130th. After a year they're 90th. After two years they're 70th. After three years they're in the top 30. After four years they're actually vying for the top 20. And that's the progress I'm talking about. And that's what we're trying to say. It's not. There's so many good high level athletes who never win a gold medal, who never win a national championships. This is not the analogy we're making. We're talking about your ability to improve from what you were doing previously. And that's why we're wanting to give examples of people who are at the top of their. It's hard to beat people, it's hard to beat 20 people who are all equally as good. So this is the thing that we're trying to get across here, that it does take time. And even at the highest level, if you stick at it consistently, you will be a better athlete. Whether that makes you the gold medalist at the Olympics or, you know, you stay at the top of your tree for longer, it doesn't matter. It's still the point is improvement.

It's now it's actually another one of our traveller principles and it's patience. And it's almost, we call it the stop and think principle or appreciating your progress. And we force athletes to make sure that they stop and think and appreciate their progress as they go. And when you do that, you can objectively see where you've come from consistently. And if you just keep doing that after one or two or three or four years, you're at a point where you, you probably couldn't fathom that you would be at compared to the impatient athlete who doesn't stop and think, gets frustrated after 12 weeks, 16 weeks, 24 weeks and gets impatient, doesn't stick to the program and they repeat this kind of cycle of stop, start, stop, start because of their impatience. And then over two, three, four years they haven't had that consistency and don't end up to where they could be.

Yeah, and it's always easy to look at that in hindsight. But when you're in the cut and thrust of preparing for a race and in the middle of your program, it is something you want to see. Outcomes don't you? We as humans do better when we're rewarded with improvement. Naturally, we get endorphins released when we have a satisfying event or training session. It's a good feeling when you know you've succeeded in one day or. And so we're all the time striving for that. But, you know, it's like we like addicts for fitness, for improvement, for success. No different to an addict who's a smoker or a drinker. You know, you've got the same addiction where there's impatience and you just want things to happen right now, and that's setting yourself up for failure. And you have to be patient and you have to be trusting the process and, you know, give hundreds of examples of that. But we don't want to go into that. But let's get on with talking about Zatopek and how well he did.

So we're in the mid-1940s, and Zatopek is really making a name for himself as a runner. He's breaking national records, he's winning races, and he's really coming along. And don't forget, we're in the middle of World War II here. So just think about how much Covid interrupted the world and how much Covid interrupted athletes ability to train and compete heat. And imagine trying to become a professional runner in the middle of World War II here in Europe. So he had to. He enlisted in the national army, but because of his status as a runner, over the years was given more and more leave to train. And he took his time to train. He took that opportunity by the horns. And one of the most famous things about him and what made him and this story so revolutionary was his ability and willingness to experiment on himself and become an innovator of training. And this is the part of the story where we want to go through Emil Zaderpeik's training and how it had an impact on running to this day. And he is basically known for some incredibly quirky training habits. And it is said sometimes that he invented interval training. This isn't quite factually correct. He did not invent interval training, but he was seriously a leading innovator and revolutionized it and he used it to transform running. And he basically, his philosophy was that he was convinced that the secret of running for him was learning to run fast. And he was a really good runner and he could run quite endlessly. He had great endurance and aerobic capacity, as we know now. And his quote was, already know how to run slow. But he developed the interval training system to teach himself to continuously run fast repetitions with short recovery jogging. And the, the key point there that I really like is the recovery jogs, because in running it is fine to have stationary recovery, but he was really big on recovery jogs. And that's still a very big theme among running groups to this day is, is the recovery jog forcing your body to recover while still running slowly and forcing your body to adapt to actually recovering quickly while still running?

Look, he almost took fartlek running and interval running and combined them. That. That's kind of what he started to do. And, and the second thing he did really well was a lot of people did short sessions of intervals and that was their session, but he made them into endurance sessions. So he was doing endurance, high intensity tempo and some recovery all in the one session. That kind of goes against all the scientific research that we've sort of grown up with in the modern day. But he was just throwing almost all of the vegetables into the soup pot at the one time and seeing what happened. And, and what happened was he, he was almost unbeatable at one Olympics.

At the, at the time, it was, you know, really, interval training wasn't absolute commonplace. It was known, but it wasn't commonplace. And at the time, to train for the 5,000 or 10,000, which were his pet events, you would run 5,000 meters or you'd run 10,000 meters. You do that consistently. And he really broke that down and his intervals into interval amounts that added up to that 5k or 10k. We know now that that doesn't necessarily have to be true, but he would start with 5. An example session of what he would do is a famous session of his was he would start with five two hundreds and that was his speed work. And then he would do 2400, which is still that upper speed work. But he was doing, if you're doing 2400s, you can't possibly do them sprinting pace. And then he'd finish with five two hundreds again for that speed work. And that session became really famous of his because he didn't just keep it there, he ended up increasing that amount of 400 work to 40, 50, even higher, 400 repetitions, which is just an insane amount. And that took his ability to sustain race pace at that level to a whole new degree and would allowed him to be such a champion across 5 and 10K.

I did hear, Jord, that he did do 1004004 once. And I don't know if that's actually true, but just think about that. That's ridiculous.

I saw that as well and I couldn't verify it anywhere. But if it's out there, then we'll pretend it's true because it's a great. What you said before is spot on. The mix of training he was doing, he, he, this is the quirky habits that he had. You know, he thrived on, on making things hard for himself and challenging his body and forcing his body to adapt and that adaptation principle. And when he was in the army, he would train at night and wear his heavy combat boots because he was almost wanting to do strength training and get strength in his legs while doing endurance running. And also he found that he had less chance at night when he was training to twist his ankle or injure himself when he was in his, his combat boots compared to wearing light running shoes. But he did a whole bunch of things that we ended up finding out. You know, he would run on the spot when he was standing still on duty in the war, he would run on the spot for hours on end just to try and keep his fitness up. He would. There's a famous story of him running on the spot in the bathtub when he was doing his laundry for an hour. What did you say? It was like an old version of a treadmill.

He said he was the first inventor of the treadmill because he was already doing that in the bathroom, moving his clothes around underneath him while he was jogging on the spot. And that was kind of the precursor to the treadmill.

Yeah, he would do things like he was trying to, he knew he was trying to increase his lung capacity, so he'd run as far as he could while holding his breath. And so yeah, he really took all these methods of training to a whole new level, experimenting. And some of them are just absurd and some of them are still sound principles to this day. And the point of the, at the start of the episode that we made was how much of an innovator he was. And when you look at it now, what his training was made up of was long running. You know, he was doing regularly, hour and a half, two hour long easy runs in his combat boots. Not always, but sometimes he was doing this, this training at lactate threshold, you know, improving that lactate threshold marker, which obviously they didn't know what it was then. But these, these 20 times 440 times 400 at. At approximately his race pace. There's no official, there's not many official records of what kind of pace he was running, although there is some journals that said he was running 67 to 75 seconds, which again is at the time is about that race pace, that 5, 10k race pace. And then he had that speed work in there as well, which is that top up VO2 max work where he would do 150 to 200 meter sprints or even sometimes he would do 20 times 100 meter sprints, which was revolutionary for a middle distance runner. So he was kind of hitting all areas without knowing exactly why I was working.

I do love that because, you know, as age groupers, we want to bring our whole kit bag with us. For example, if we were asked to go on holidays and we had to select, you know, two things, we would stand there and go. But I want all seven things that I've got. You know, I want to bring recovery, I want to bring tempo, I want to bring high intensity, I want to bring endurance, I want to bring sweet spirit spot. These are the things that I want to be a part of my program. So you don't want to have the theory that do everything and you should be okay. That's not what we're saying. It's just important though that you're not missing out on any aspect that can improve you. And I think his theory was good and it paid dividends because he ended up breaking three world records and three events at the Olympics. So you can't get any better results than that from. And he was not to know that this was going to be successful. He was just experimenting on himself and trusting in his process. But yeah, what you're saying is true. He was an innovator in just different methods of training, principles that had everything in it. That's the key thing, what we're trying to say day and we were laughing.

About some of the lack of science behind some of these methods because again, there's not extensive records of exactly what he was doing, but there are records that indicate that there was one time where for five days in a row, he ran 44 hundreds in the morning and then 4000 four hundreds in the afternoon. Same sort of session, all 200, jog recovery. And we just know that that's not effective training. You know, that's not. We don't know exactly what he. That's right.

The thing we don't know is how hard he was running them. He could have ran in the morning, he could have ran 70 seconds in the morning. In the afternoon, he could have been doing a minute ten for those four hundreds. And even though it reads on paper that he's done the same session, the intensity is different. So I Can't imagine. We don't know for sure, but the body's not going to cope with that five days in a row. It's just not if you tried to run that morning and night. So we can't fill in the blanks. So we're just presuming that he varied the intensity.

But what we do know is there are records of his total kilometers and he was running massive kilometers. Again, the long run, the endurance run, the cornerstone of our programs now was still a key cornerstone of his, his running back then. And he was running upwards of 150 up to 200 kilometer weeks, some weeks, which is higher than a lot of athletes even due to this day. But that, that is just interesting that, you know, back then we, he was understanding the power of these endurance runs, even if he was doing them in combat boots. But that is some massive volume and we know the power of how effective that is for endurance athletes.

Well, I did see some research I think was in his autobiography. I think it was 150 miles in some weeks he ran. And I was trying to convert that to kilometers. It was well over 200k in some of his big weeks. And again, we don't know the detail. There's not a lot of, of he, you know, there's no spreadsheet of what he was doing. He had a lot of training pics, files. Yeah, no, there's a lot of written notes that he'd taken, but they were all about just time. How much time was he spending in his runs? And so we don't know the intensity, but we're not saying that you just run more that, that'll be it. You know, it is a help to be aerobically fit. But the strength work that he was doing that was, was, that was the thing that was, you know, obviously running a lot in army boots is, is really going to take its toll on you on your strength and conditioning. And when you get into a really nice pair of fast running shoes and they didn't have very good equipment in those days, but geez, imagine the difference between running in those boots and then running in a pair of shoes. You'd feel like, you feel like you just got springs in your feet.

So over that decade he continued to make a name for himself in the way he trained and the runners around that he raced against and competed against and that started to find out about his training, were just shocked at his ability to change the way everyone was going about it because he was basically training harder than anyone else was. That's what it Kind of came down to. And I just love that there's a quote from a runner at his time that said before Zeph, nobody realized it was humanly possible to train this hard. Emil is truly the originator of modern intensive training. And I just think the combination of everything he was doing just wasn't being done before and that, that culminated in, in such a successful career once he gets to the back end of this decade. And I really want to touch on his, his pain tolerance and the fact that he was known for being so mentally tough. And like I've mentioned already, he was known to train in crazy conditions and to be honest, some of the worst European winter conditions possible out in the snow. And some of the quotes that he said about this is just, it's, it's the same theory as Ned Brockman, what we spoke about earlier with you know, mind of a matter and he said there is great advantage in training under unfavorable conditions. For the difference is then a tremendous relief in a race. I want to touch on each of these quotes individually because that is just such an important point for when, if you've experienced it in training and it's tougher than it's going to be in a race, then the race suddenly feels good. And that's really important for endurance race.

You don't want to have the opposite, do you? You get to a race and it's harder than you've trained, that's a really bad feeling. You start questioning yourself right from the outset, you're going far out. How am I going to cope with this? And I've got another. If you're doing an Ironman or a half Ironman or a marathon, I've got another two hours. If you're doing a four hour marathon, I've got another four hours of this. And that shouldn't happen because you should already know all that data and you should be able to, to run at the pace that's, that's that you're trained to. But, but if you're actually going to an event and you, you don't know any of this stuff and you find out that the event's harder than you've trained you, you're in trouble.

I even take this principle and apply it to my warmup before races and it's the same whether it's a bike or running race and you know, you do the same thing and you implore athletes to do the same thing when warming up for a bike race and that's, you know, making sure you're doing some really hard efforts right before the race in the last 10 to 15 minutes in the lead up, doing some really hard 15 to 30 second efforts on the bike. They look like, yeah, hard, hard, just put your head down. Efforts for 15 to 30 seconds and running, they just look like stride throughs. But I always find that if my goal pace is X in the race, I want to be building up my stride throughs to the Last couple running 30, 40, 50 seconds, sometimes a minute quicker than my goal pace of the run for 30 seconds because you're absolutely flying, you're basically sprin. But then when the race starts, that pace that's a minute slower from that sprint you just did feels so much easier compared to. I know that every time when I do my first stride, it's normally around that race pace and it feels really uncomfortable. And I go far out. How am I going to hold this for 5 or 10k when I'm struggling for 15 or 20 seconds here? It's because your body's not warmed up. It's the same thing on the bike. When you do a 30 second effort with your head down, 150 watts, 200 watts or 300 watts higher than your goal wattage for the, for the race, it's really uncomfortable, the first one or even the second one. But by the third one you're a bit more used to it. Then when you start the race and you're holding a wattage 200 watts lower than that in comparison, it feels so much easier.

So many guys who have come to us and have seen our warm up routine are quite shocked. They're saying, I'm exhausted before the event started with your warm up. And it's kind of laughable really because it is a really proper warmup and you don't have any question mark over your head as to when the race starts. If someone, if someone, if it's a bike race, if someone took off straight from the gun, you're in every good shape to follow. Whereas if you haven't warmed up properly, you're in bad, bad situation because your legs aren't going to cooperate until maybe 10 or 15 minutes later when you feel like that saying, my legs, I couldn't feel my legs today. It was just shocking. And then all of a sudden, halfway through the race, I started to feel good. And that's really about warm up up and all the things you just said about the important things of warming up and doing stuff that's a little bit harder for short periods than the race is going to be. And when the Race comes, whether you're a runner doing an 800 or a marathon, you feel like you've got this confidence, this aura of confidence, because, boy, this feels really easy compared to what I was just doing 15 minutes ago. And that's the beauty of actually the same analogy of training. You know, as hard or as hard as it's going to be in the conditions that are maybe worse. You know, you're trying to, you know, for example, riding your bike with training wheels as compared to your race wheels is a really good way of making the bike heavier, slower. You're having to push, push harder to get the thing going as fast. You know, not wearing your skin suit, just wearing your normal clothes and, you know, all the little things that you can do in training to make it a little bit harder. You know, you've heard example, one of these, One of the myths that they said was Zatopek would carry his wife on his back as part of his training routine. Well, I think you told the story from the actual autobiography, was it? Or another biography that happened once because she was injured. I think.

Yeah, yeah. But the point, the premise is still the same. And one of his other quotes is that when a person forces himself to do something over and over, then he certainly develops in ways more than physical. He said, is it raining? Is it snowing? So what? I'll go out and train. Am I tired? That doesn't matter either. If you do it once, you feel pain, if you do it a thousand times, it means nothing. Willpower becomes no longer a problem. And I just love that so much. And it's for him to have that wisdom to say that back then and still apply. So true now. Exactly what we're talking about. It's just awesome.

It's a driven athlete, isn't it? I mean, just like a lot of the stuff I've read about him, he had some gold nuggets of sayings, and they've stood the test of time before races. In the middle of races, he would say things. After races, people would ask him questions and he would come back with. Without even thinking about it, he would say, People would say, why do you do this? Why do you train like this? And he would have some gem come back. I can't remember half of the stuff that I've read where he's just come back and it's put people in their place going, you know, basically because I'm determined and I love doing what I'm doing and I'll do whatever it takes. That was kind of his summary of Every answer he had was, because I love it, because this is what's going to make me better and I'll do whatever it takes. And if there's consequences with uncomfortableness, then, as you have always said, be comfortable being uncomfortable. They're the things that he had. And his mantra, that was his philosophy, that was his whole drive. And it's no wonder he was so successful. I'm sure there's other people in the world who've got those same capabilities who aren't reaching the same height, but they're still a better human being than they are before that if they got this mindset that I'm just trying to be better, whether it's better runner or a better person or a better dad or better husband or mum or whatever it is. You just got this philosophy of I can do better with myself. And I think this is one of the things that's so good about him, is he led by example here, and I think we'll talk about it later. But he's such a really good human being as well as a brilliant athlete.

So I think we'll end the episode there. We've touched on his early life and, and how he really trained to become one of the world's best athletes through that decade. And we now get into his first Olympic Games in 1948, and his next two Olympic Games, 1948, 1952, and how he actually ended up going there. And he had a disappointing result in 48, which really drove him for the next four or five years. And it's really exciting once we start talking about the actual races and results, results of what he was able to achieve. And that is enough for this episode. We have gone a long time. So there's part one of the Emil Zatopek story, the man that Changed Running, and we'll come back in the next episode with part two. So we can't wait for you to hear that. As always, if you enjoy these episodes, the best thing you can do for us is leave a review or tell a friend, share it with a friend. Share it with someone in the triathlon, cycling or running community that would be interested. That is the best way to help us spread the message of this podcast. As always, thanks very much for listening and we'll see you in the next episode.