Ready, set, go!
This is episode 425, with the coach behind both UTMB victories this year.
Author of Training for the Uphill Athlete one of my favorite training books and multiple endurance sport expert, Scott Johnston and other thought leaders give you the best guidance possible to take your running to the next level.
I'm your host, Coach Jason Fitzgerald.
I'm a former cross country and track athlete for Connecticut College.
I've been coaching runners since 2010, and I'm a former columnist for Trail Runner Magazine.
You can learn more about me and strength running at strengthrunning.com.
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All right, my friends, our guest today is one of the top coaches in the world, especially in mountain and high alpine sports.
Scott Johnston.
He's worked with Killian Jornet, arguably one of the best ultra endurance athletes on the planet and a host of the country's top cross-country skiers.
And this year he coached both winners, Tom Evans and Ruth Croft, of the world's most prestigious ultra trail race, the UTMB.
I'm so excited to learn from one of the best coaches in the world, and he's also author of one of my favorite training books Training for the Uphill Athlete.
I highly recommend it and you can find a link in the show notes if you'd like to check it out.
So our topic today is fatigue resistance.
Sounds actually a lot like endurance, right?
That's what we do as runners.
We resist fatigue and endure.
But Scott is going to outline what we really mean specifically by this term how we can organize our training around building fatigue resistance, example workouts, no matter what kind of race you might be training for, and a lot more.
Don't miss Scott's other appearance on the podcast in one of the most popular episodes of all time, episode 206 on the Tripod of Endurance.
And now without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with coach Scott Johnston.
All right, Scott, welcome back to the podcast.
I'm excited you're here.
It's great for you to have me.
I really appreciate it.
I look forward to this opportunity to kind of get down in the weeds with somebody who understands this stuff.
Yeah, well, not nearly as much as you do.
You know, I had you on the podcast, I think back in 2021.
And we talked about the tripod of endurance, the major physiological principles of endurance.
And if you want to be a good endurance runner, what you have to focus on.
And today we're getting a little bit more focused.
We're going to do a deep dive on fatigue resistance.
This is one of the hot topics in the running community right now.
And I'd love to just start with a working definition and allow me to be flipped for a second, Scott.
Isn't fatigue resistance just a fancy way of saying endurance?
Are we just sort of describing the same thing?
Isn't that the whole idea to resist fatigue as an endurance athlete?
You're absolutely 100% correct.
But it is sort of when I think of fatigue resistance and the way I've been talking about it for years now is I think we can think of two types of fatigue.
One is the sort of global fatigue, that sensation of just feeling tired, that would make you want to slow down.
And the other is what I think we want to target when you and I are going to want to have this conversation about mainly is local fatigue fatigue in the propelling muscles.
You know that heavy dead leg, feeling like I just can't push any harder because my legs are giving out.
That's the kind of, that's something we can really target with this sort of specialized fatigue resistance type training.
And so that's, I think, the way it's a little easier to understand if you think of it in that term, that kind of context.
So fatigue resistance for specific to endurance runners is that ability to resist fatigue at a more local level as well as that global level.
But you tend to focus it a little bit more.
Do I have that right?
Yeah.
So when we think of global fatigue, we might think of whole body fatigue. which is a real thing.
I mean, I'm not trying to pretend it doesn't exist.
But what I believe happens and I'm not alone in this is that at one's limit of their endurance and this would be different whether you're running, you know 1000 meters or 100 miles, those are at that limit of the speed that you can maintain for that distance.
The principal limiter will come from local muscular fatigue in the propelling muscles, the muscles you're using to drive you down the trail or the road.
And we wanna target.
In order to combat that type of fatigue, we can design special training that will target those propelling muscles to make them more fatigue resistant.
So then the global fatigue limitation isn't as severe either.
Because think about, well, I will...
You said I could go down in the weeds a little bit here.
So I'm going to start right into it.
So one of the things that this is a subject that I have studied for 30 years and implemented probably decades.
At a professional level for over 25 years in different sports.
And I happened to bump into the writings of a very famous Italian coach named Bernardo Canova, who some of your readers may be, or listeners may be familiar with.
And Canova had a sentence in one of his writings.
I don't know if you remember, but he was publishing in the early 2000s on the Let's Run forum.
And there was a sentence in there that caught my attention.
I, one time I read it a couple of times and I thought, huh, this makes a lot of sense to me.
And he said, I'm going to paraphrase here.
He said, but in the past few years I have focused my attention on developing the strength, endurance of my runners.
Now that strength endurance, muscular endurance fatigue resistance, they all kind of fit into that same basket that we're talking about right now.
He was just using a slightly different term.
I've come to focus my attention on improving the strength endurance of my athletes, because I have found that that was the most significant limitation to what he refers to as a maximum lactate steady state, which could also be thought of as the anaerobic threshold, or Sometimes people will even call that, like the second threshold that we have, that that was the limit of endurance.
And I in my previous work as a coach.
Before that I had noticed this, but it was the first time I'd actually read it.
Somebody else was thinking of the same way as I was.
It's like, wait a minute.
It's the fatigue in our legs.
It's causing us to slow down in most endurance events, because you think about it.
Most endurance events are, especially when we start talking about things that last many, many minutes to a few hours or even many hours kind of.
My current area of expertise is in races that last 20 hours even.
We're not limited by the heart's ability to supply blood at those submaximal intensities.
You never get anywhere close to your VO2 max in those types of races.
So the limitation's got to be peripheral.
It's got to be out in the muscles somewhere or the central nervous system.
Because your blood has, you know, let's say you're running a marathon.
That's going to be maybe 75% of your VO2 max average, somewhere in that range.
Well, that means you've got plenty of pumping capacity to supply oxygen to those muscles.
It's more what's going on down in the muscles that is limiting your ability to maintain your desired pace.
And I thought well, if someone like him is thinking that way and I've been seeing this in athletes I'm training maybe there's something to this whole idea.
So what is happening out in the muscles?
Do we actually have an answer to that question?
Because that seems to be perhaps the million dollar.
Question is, if we can figure that out, what's maybe going on that's causing this peripheral fatigue?
We might know what to do to combat it.
Well, I'm not sure there's a lot of science on that, but there is a lot of experiential information out there from coaches who've tried different techniques, myself being one.
But I think that it has been addressed.
And we can go.
So I'm going to go into the physiology a little bit, but only at a fairly basic level.
So most people know that we have these muscle fibers that range along a spectrum from what they're called the slowest and the slow twitch up to the fastest fast twitch.
So a sprinter or an Olympic-style lifter with an explosive movement is going to be using the fastest of the fast twitch muscles.
Those are the most powerful, the most forceful.
And when you're out walking your dog you're going to be using – the muscle fibers down at the very slow, slowest end of the slow twitch fibers.
So these are, and at the slow twitch, and we have muscle fibers, that don't?
They have a fairly small cross section.
They don't produce a great deal of force, but they're very well endurance endowed.
And they don't take much.
And I'm going to use the term mental energy is slightly wrong, but they don't take much of a very powerful signal from the motor cortex, the part of the brain that fires muscles.
It doesn't take a very powerful signal to fire those.
So that's why when you go out walking your dog, you can have a conversation.
You could do long division in your head.
It doesn't take much brain power to fire those guys.
Whereas if you were running as fast as you could for half a mile, You're not doing long division then, because it's taken a lot of bandwidth for your nervous system to fire those very forceful fibers.
But these fibers exist along this spectrum.
They can be divided into sort of arbitrary different types of fibers, but we can just think of them as the spectrum running from fast to slow twitch.
So think of, And this is quite well documented from studies in science.
So I think everyone can kind of agree on that.
We also have...
Another principle that's been known for many years, called the size principle in muscle fiber recruitment, and that is that the nervous system, the motor cortex of the brain, recruits the lowest force fibers first and then, as more force is needed, they move up the scale in forcefulness of the fibers until you reach the force that's needed to produce the outcome the muscle that the body needs to have happen.
And this would be true.
So we could think of in a very simplified manner.
We could think of we have a group of muscles, muscle fibers, in look and we're.
Since we're talking running, let's just say you know, in the vein propelling muscles of the legs and the hips, we have a group of muscle fibers that the brain is really good at recruiting because it does it all the time for running a 10 minute mile pace.
And those fibers, because they're fairly low down on the slow, twitch end of the, they're very well endurance endowed.
They know they've got a lot of mitochondria they've got.
They're very heavily cap capillarized um.
But as we move up the scale and we move up to the eight minute, then there's going to be some more fibers that your brain is going to need to recruit to run an eight minute mile.
And then when we get up to five minute miles, we're starting to get up into some much more forceful fibers.
Well, as we move up the force scale of this recruitment model, those fibers have less and less endurance, which is intuitive, because that's why you can't run as far at a five-minute pace as you can at a 10-minute pace.
I think that would make intuitive sense to most people.
It's because that bunch of fibers that allows your muscles to contract forcefully enough to propel you at a five-minute mile pace, they're not as well endurance endowed.
So now we have this, now you understand that there's a spectrum and now you understand this size principle, how these fibers are recruited.
So those fibers that are at kind of your endurance limit.
So let's say you're gonna be running a marathon and your goal is to average a seven minute mile pace for a marathon.
Well, those fibers at that seven minute mile, those those fibers that have the force to propel you at a seven minute mile, they may not have the endurance to last for 26 miles.
So we need to target those fibers to give them more endurance.
So we need to find out where we need to target them with special endurance training at that seven minute mile pace.
Now, you can't do all your training there.
It would be too hard and too exhausting, and you'd quickly become overtrained.
But if we have – let me back up a step.
When we're running at this, let's say, the seven minute mile pace, when those fibers that are needed to propel you at a seven minute mile pace, when they begin to fatigue, what will happen is you will slow down because the fibers that have more endurance, that are just below that on this spectrum of forcefulness.
When those fibers have, they have the endurance to last but they don't have the force.
They can't produce the force that those seven minute fibers do.
So what fatigue resistance training is is to focus and we use some special training for this.
It can be done a number of different ways, but is to target those fibers at that pace that are needed to propel you at that pace and improve their fatigue resistance.
Because those fibers that propel you at a 10 minute mile pace, they got plenty of endurance.
They just don't have the force to.
If you recruit just those fibers, they don't have the force to propel you at a seven minute pace.
And so the way we train fatigue resistance is through directly focusing on these fibers that are at the kind of at the frontier of your endurance or the limit of your endurance.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, and I'd love to stick with this very specific example of a hypothetical marathoner.
They wanna run a marathon at seven minute mile pace and their goal is to really target these particular muscle fibers to enable them to gain that very specific endurance, to allow them to run seven minute mile pace for a marathon.
What's an example of a workout that would do that?
Just to kind of really give a good example of how it's done.
Okay, there's two.
There's the traditional approach that has gained popularity.
It's kind of universally accepted and it does work and i've used it.
And that is when we do high intensity interval style training.
Because when you do high intensity training you are recruiting those very fibers that are at that, at that limit, and maybe even going above them.
So let's say you're going to be going and doing you know mile repeats at, you know a six minute mile pace, and And that for that workout well, you're certainly recruiting those muscle fibers that allow you to run at a seven minute mile pace.
But you and you're having to break it into intervals because those fibers that you're running that produce a six minute pace, they fatigue.
And so you have to stop after a mile and let them rest a little bit and then come back and do another mile.
And that has been historically the model that has been used for building endurance.
In almost every endurance sports is high intensity interval training.
The issue, the problem that I have experienced with this is that that imposes an enormous global fatigue on the body.
Anybody who's done a lot of interval style training, especially at quite high intensities, knows what I'm talking about.
It's going to take quite a bit of time to recover from that training session, which will impact training down the road.
Um from you or for you.
And, um, and there's, there's part of that is hormonal disruption.
When you lower the blood body's pH, meaning you increase the acidity of the body.
Doing high intensity training that throws our hormone or endocrine system kind of out of whack.
And you start, you get very high cortisol levels, which then has some negative.
You know it's, cortisol is a very powerful hormone and it has some really positive effects.
But it does impact your ability to recover from the training.
So it just ends up producing this global fatigue that in my experience, there is a time and a place for high-intensity intervals.
I'm not saying that they shouldn't be included.
But here's how I discovered this.
Years ago, I used to coach cross-country skiers at quite a high level, world-class level.
And what I would notice was we'd go to do an interval session.
And maybe it's kind of a classic high-intensity interval session, five by four minutes uphill in their case.
Uphill because cross-country skiing the intensity is really on the uphill segments.
And the first couple repetitions of that would go fine.
They'd get to where they were supposed to get to in that five-minute or four-minute segment.
But then what we'd notice that they would jog back to the bottom of the hill and we'd do it again.
And maybe by the third, they can't quite reach that high point anymore.
The next time they can't reach it, they're even further down the hill.
And by the last one, they're quite a bit down the hill.
And so we see their speed is dropping and heart rate and as a reflection of the amount of they're not doing as much work and as short a time, so their heart rate drops as well, and i think so we're not getting the global effect we would like from this in terms of the cardiovascular benefits, because the muscles are fatiguing as we go up this.
You know these.
Each, each subsequent repetition be like going to the track and having You're doing your mile repeats and having each one get 20 seconds slower each time you did one.
Well, and heart rate drop.
So you're not getting the cardiovascular benefit because now the heart's not as stressed as it was in the beginning.
And you're teaching your body to work harder and go slower.
You're not getting the muscular benefits, you're not getting the cardiovascular benefits.
And so what's the point?
Why are we doing this thing?
That's really really hard, but making us really really tired and slower.
And so I thought well, if the muscles, if the fatigue in the muscles is what's slowing us down, what if we did something to make those propelling muscles more fatigue resistant before we moved into a traditional interval style training block?
And so I started doing this with my skiers and immediately saw the benefits.
Like we might do, you know, eight or ten week build, of sort of what I'm going to call muscular endurance training, which we can go into more detail on in a bit.
And then we would move into a traditional high-intensity interval training block of a few weeks.
It didn't usually take that many weeks.
Four to six was plenty.
And we just saw tremendous.
First of all, they could make it through the whole workout at the desired pace.
They were getting as far up the hill each time that we were looking for.
So that seemed like a positive thing.
And then I started using it with the same thing with runners.
And now, when we go into that high-intensity interval block of training, we're getting the neuromuscular training effect, because we're able to recruit those, those muscles that would, those muscle fibers that would normally be fatiguing and dropping out of the what we call the recruitment pool.
They're no longer able to be recruited by the, by the central nervous system.
So we're getting the benefit to the muscle fibers and we're getting the benefit to the heart, because now the heart can is working harder for the whole workout instead of getting you know heart rate dropping.
And, That was kind of a breakthrough for me.
And then I began to read of other coaches, especially in the Soviet system, that had discovered this same principle back in the early 80s and started using it with athletes there.
And so what would a workout would look like?
So again, to answer your question, you have that traditional method which is to just go do high intensity intervals.
And you will get a muscular endurance training effect from that.
But you will also pay a pretty heavy cost from the fatigue standpoint.
And you may not get as the maximal benefit.
That's my humble opinion on it.
Or we could do something.
We did the high intensity intervals and that something is essentially doing exercises with additional resistance added to those main propelling muscles right.
So we can do them, you know, with essentially muscular endurance.
Training is a lot of repetitions with a moderate increased resistance to those.
So it could be like I did with I've done with runners.
You know short repetitions on a hill, like two minute repetitions dragging it, running up the hill with dragging a tire.
That would be, you know, a really typical kind of muscular endurance training for, let's say, somebody who's running up everything from a 5K to a marathon.
There are other gym-based muscular endurance routines that we use.
Actually, one is published on our website with a full 12-week progression of it.
Some people could download that for free on the Evoke Endurance website.
It's also in my book, Training for the Uphill Athlete.
This whole progression is laid out there, so it's available for free.
Then I've used it with literally hundreds and hundreds of athletes with good success.
But basically what you're trying to do is overload those propelling muscles.
I keep using that term because it's important.
If you went into a swimming pool.
You know swim with I don't know anybody who does.
You know many of your listeners do any swimming.
You know you have pull buoys and other resistance devices you can use in swimming and those will overload.
But they're going to overload the swimming propelling muscles.
They're not going to do much for the running propelling muscles.
So you know, if we're training for running, we need to target the specific running muscles and add additional resistance to them.
It could be.
You know, Back 100 years ago not quite 100 years ago the famous Australian running coach, Percy Cerruti, had his runners running up sand dunes.
You know to because, as anybody who's ever run in sand knows how tiring that is.
I think he also used running in the surf, like shin deep water in the surf and right along the beach.
Yeah.
Arthur Lydian, famous New Zealand coach, coach Peter Snell and others to tremendous results.
They used hill work to do some of this same kind of thing.
But when you start running uphill, all of a sudden those propelling muscles we're talking about have to work harder because they're having to lift you against gravity.
So that's one way of doing it.
I don't necessarily recommend flat running with a weight vest.
I think you can get a training effect from it, but the injury risks go right up through the roof.
So for most runners, even training for flat ground, it's going to be hill running of some kind, and or with resistance.
Canova used a special, what he called his hill circuit, And it involved a long hill, like a kilometer, where they – and I've written about this pretty extensively.
It's one I use consistently with elite runners is they'll do a segment of running.
Maybe it's 20 or 30 seconds.
And then they stop and they do some kind of jumping exercise like a split jump squat 10 repetitions of that.
Run for another 15 or 20 seconds and then do like a squat jump.
Or there might be hurdles in the middle of the hill where they'll run to the hurdles and do hurdle hops over these hurdles.
So they're getting the running effect, which is very specific to their sport, but they're also adding this extreme muscular load during the run.
And then they would turn around the top of this kilometer hill, jog back down, repeat this a few times.
But anything that increases the muscular load, and what you find with this is it's muscularly very taxing.
So there's a very powerful local muscular fatigue component, but the global fatigue is nowhere near what it would be to do, let's say a hard interval workout.
You know, it strikes me that running up hills or using some form of resistance to aid your workout, whatever it might be it's almost like we're just trying.
We're using a very specific type of exercise to make the athlete stronger too.
It's not just this focus on the aerobic system.
There's an element of strength in there as well.
You know, I think everyone has heard that Frank Shorter quote, hills are speed work in disguise.
I think it's strength training in disguise too.
I mean, is there a component of strength to this idea of fatigue resistance specific to those you know running specific propelling muscles?
Absolutely.
I mean, so we can think of strength.
I would call this, we'll call it muscular endurance training.
That's kind of how it's referred to most of the time nowadays.
We can think of strength, let's say, forget weight rooms and barbells for a moment.
I believe the most specific strength training for a runner are hill sprints.
So I mean you can do sprints on the flat ground and that's a very effective tool, except that it's also an incredibly easy way to get injured, unless you are a well-trained sprinter.
I've just seen way too many distance runners who've not done much sprinting in their life get pulled a hamstring.
And as most of you know, a pulled hamstring is nothing to mess around with it.
You know, you could be facing years of recovery from a pulled hamstring.
So I prefer to have athletes sprint uphill because, first of all, there's a higher strength load and power load, with much less injury risk, because you're just not moving that fast or not moving as fast.
And these are sprints in the range of 10 to 15 seconds, with long recovery in between, so that you can be powerful for each repetition.
And you might, the whole workout might only be, you know, six of these repetitions.
It might take 30, 40 minutes, 30 minutes or so to do that workout because you're resting more.
And endurance runners hate resting.
So that's a really strong.
I have a lot of when I tell people they're going to be doing these hill sprints.
The biggest issue is they want to cut the rest too short.
Yeah.
Scott, I feel attacked.
Well, then they become, that becomes an endurance workout.
Now you're just doing heel repetitions with short rest, which has a benefit, but it's not power training anymore.
Anyway, so we have that on the very extreme end of the high power, high strength production.
But then we go all the way to the other end of the spectrum, on strength, and we have this muscular endurance component which is many, many hundreds to thousands of repetitions, which in a race you're doing, thousands of repetitions of this movement.
With much less force.
So just like we had this, you know, slow and fast twitch muscle fiber spectrum.
Now we've got the strength spectrum that runs all the way from some, you know, kind of the highest power fibers you can recruit all the way to these other fibers that are really more endurance oriented.
And I just think that that's the way we have to think about it.
But you're right, it is a form of strength training.
And most runners will see gains in strength from muscular endurance training because they're not especially strong people.
Because for running the force production, When you're running an event that lasts many minutes, the force production is so low compared to your maximal force that you don't get a very big strength training effect from that.
And so most runners actually most runners will benefit even from doing barbell type strength work, just making themselves stronger.
Yeah, and it certainly strikes me as if a runner came to me and they said Jason, I want to train for a marathon, but I haven't done any real training.
I just run a lot of miles on hilly terrain, and I run sprints twice a week.
I might say this person is incredibly well-prepared to start almost any training program because they're working at both ends of the spectrum that you've been discussing.
You know they're doing the potentially uphill sprints for the maximum muscle fiber recruitment, but they're also running a lot on hilly ground and getting those submaximal contractions over and over again with incredible repetition.
Is.
Is that like general approach of like hey, you know, if all else fails, running a lot on hilly ground and doing some hill sprints at a minimum is probably pretty fantastic for you?
Absolutely.
Yeah, it's it's quite it's pretty simple.
I mean, that's I've heard it said that, you know, the.
There's not much secret to training for endurance running.
You run a lot and some of it fast.
It's that simple.
And we can parse it down into these more carefully segmented types of training.
But that's in general the way we have built endurance and certainly the way we're evolutionarily predisposed for it.
We're not a very powerful animal.
But we do have, we are predisposed for endurance.
So yes, I think that if someone was training for a road race, they probably should include some flatter, faster running.
But in general you're right, as in terms of laying a foundation of training to prepare them to do um a marathon, having the background of what you're saying for several months would be a great place to start.
And then we could.
Then you could move on to say okay, now I'm going to go do these.
You know mile repeats at race pace, my target race pace, or even you know maybe they're longer.
You know, maybe they're three kilometer, five kilometer tempo runs at race pace to prepare them, you know a little more specifically for a race like the marathon or honestly, any flatter race.
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Scott, I'd love to ask you about a specific type of approach at targeting fatigue resistance that I've seen a lot of other runners and coaches talk about.
And I noticed that you haven't in this discussion of fatigue resistance.
And it's this idea that If you wanna develop fatigue resistance, one of the best ways to do it is to become fatigued and then do the thing that you're trying to target.
So, for example, if I wanna run that marathon at seven minute mile pace, I might run 15 miles at my normal easy zone.
Two like effort.
And then I might run the last five miles of that long run at my goal marathon pace of seven minutes per mile, with the understanding that, because you're doing that five mile segment at the end of a long run instead of, you know, only after a mile or two of easy running as a warmup, you're almost getting more out of it.
And you're teaching your body to resist fatigue at that specific pace when you're already fatigued.
Is that an approach that you think has merit?
And if not, why?
No, it definitely does.
And I use that.
We do do that with athletes.
It's, you know, it's a little, you know, My background, well, my current coaching position as I'm training ultra runners for mountain races that have a phenomenal amount of vertical in them. one of the problems with that is that pace just has to go out the window because you know there's the whereas when you're running on a road you know it's pretty flat for most people then most races i should say then we can use pace as a very good indicator of effort and you know the stimulus that we're trying to give those muscles so yes you're right so we do bulk of that the longer run at, you know, whatever an easy pace is for you.
And then we're going to do those last five miles at this target race pace.
And we do the same thing, but we'll do it using well, it's a little.
We often have to use blood lactates as a way of really closely controlling that.
You know, we'll know that okay in the final.
You know hours of a 20 hour mountain race.
You know we we're going to be targeting somewhere in the range of three to four millimoles of lactate.
So this i want, this rate, i want this.
The first two hours of this three hour run are going to be done.
You know what's going to feel like a two millimole pace for you.
And then i want this the last hour at this sort of three, three and a half millimole effort level.
And with the athletes that I work closely with, we do a lot of lactate training, a lot of control of intensity.
So they begin to get a pretty good feel for what three or four or two millimoles feels like from more structured training.
So that when they go outdoors, when I say okay, I want this to feel like three millimoles, they got a pretty good idea.
They don't even need to take the lactate meter with them.
They just know, okay, that's what this is going to feel like.
Or I can tell them You know, I want your training for a hundred mile race, while I want the last hour to be done at what's going to feel like a 50 kilometer effort to you know.
Um, so that they've, But I agree with you completely.
And that's another thing that Canova used to promote quite a bit was he called them progressive distance runs?
And I've used this with athletes where, you know, you're doing a three hour run.
Well, the first the first hour is going to let's call it even zone one.
And then the second hour is in zone two.
The first the next 45 minutes are in zone three.
The next hour.
10 minutes are in zone four, and then the final is as hard as you can run whatever you've got left in the tank for that last five minutes.
So progressive run, and that will definitely build fatigue resistance for sure.
I'd love to ask you about other types or other elements of fatigue resistance.
We've talked mostly about developing this muscular endurance, which is sort of this idea of strength endurance and fatigue resistance is sort of that skill of maintaining the ability to produce power or pace when you're under high stress, when you're fatigued.
But what about declines in running economy, or you know, when you're running low on fuel, or even you know the the cognitive side of things that we might call mental toughness are?
Are there ways that you develop uh fatigue, resistance for those specific things, rather than, on this more local muscular perspective?
Yeah, i'd say that the the um.
Well fueling, i mean that's certainly a hot topic these days.
I mean it.
You can see that the market has responded with a million different brands of fueling supplements that people can take.
And I think gone are the days when people are trying to minimize the amount of carbohydrates they take in.
I think the jury is still out a little bit on these mega-carbohydrate fueling strategies.
So I think that rather than trying to... build resistance to that.
I think we just have to.
We and the way I've worked with this we just embrace the fact that yeah, you need this many grams of carbohydrate an hour to perform at this level.
And if you don't have that, there's no amount of mental toughness in the world is going to overcome the fact that you just don't have the gas in the tank to do that.
So, rather than train for that well, we do gut training, of course, because in these long races that it's easier for people to get sort of gastrointestinal distress and not be able to even eat anymore or even become dehydrated, which has catastrophic consequences, as you might imagine.
But we do.
We don't really try to train people.
Resistance to that.
If you get what i'm saying, it'd be like saying well, i'm not going to drink while i'm training.
Well yes you, that might make you tougher mentally, but it's probably going to make you slower as well.
So i would say we don't do it too much in that category.
We just try to find out what the fueling requirements for this athlete are for this type of session, and make sure they're well, well fueled.
Um, what was the other thing you were thinking we might train?
I'd love to hear you speak to running economy, because that does speak to the nervous system aspect of things.
And I wonder how that plays a role in how you structure some workouts to combat fatigue resistance.
So again, because my athletes are typically running at a slower pace on the trails than they're capable of running on flat ground, we do our economy running on flat ground.
They're going to build what we call a speed reserve.
The speed that they can maintain on flat ground is going to be much higher than the average speed they'll maintain in a mountain race.
We do quite a bit of training on a track.
Um, working on, and again, using lactate.
So I'm not there to, if I send them to the track and they're doing, you know, 10 by one kilometers at a certain pace.
Like you know, Tom Evans, who just won the UTMB, he'll do 10 by one K at a three minute kilometer pace, with a one minute break between each kilometer at which, during which we measure lactate.
And we're shooting to keep the blood lactate low.
In his case, it'll be as low as like two to two and a half millimoles.
So he's very economical.
Um, I mean, this is a guy who's also run a 103, 103 half marathon, um, 14 minute 5k runner.
So, I mean, he's, he's a good runner, a good fast runner.
Um, And we do do some of that type of training, even though much of his race, like the race, his UTMB race, I think the average pace was 11 minute miles.
But there was 34,000 vertical feet of elevation gain and loss in 107 miles.
So there's a lot of walking in a race like that.
Steep uphills, they're walking in that.
But by having this sport of speed reserve when he's running like when he won Western States, the end of that race.
He's running six-minute miles after running 100 miles.
That feels really easy for him because he's capable of running sub-five-minute miles.
And so a six-minute mile pace, even after 100 miles, is something that's manageable.
So this all involves – this gets to running economy.
How much is it costing you to run at that pace?
And we want to minimize the energy costs of the athlete.
So this would mean we have to –
We can't do that as easily on rough terrain and trails, so we don't really train that kind of running economy.
We do a lot of training on the trails, but we try to do our economy training on flat ground and often a track or a treadmill, because it's easy to control.
And the way we do that is.
I want to find out you know how fast, especially for these very long races.
And I think certainly in the marathon, this would count.
And even the shorter, you know, 10 kilometer races would, it would matter.
We want to find how fast can you run faster before you start moving out of the aerobic realm and having to utilize the glycolytic metabolic or the anaerobic metabolic pathway to supplement the energy supply?
We want them to be able to run as fast as possible, but as aerobically as possible, because then they're gonna be able to sustain that pace for a long time.
And what I think people get wrong with sometimes with their economy training is they're training well above that anaerobic or aerobic zone and relying very heavily on the anaerobic zone.
So they're not giving an appropriate stimulus to the aerobic metabolic pathway.
They're overstimulating the anaerobic.
So let's say you were, as an example of this, normally for economy running we'd be doing things like you know, a half mile or one kilometer type repeats, um.
And let's say you had a target pace of i don't know.
You were shooting for a six minute mile pace to run.
That was that would be your race pace.
I see too many people training at a.
They'll take that at runner and have them training at a five minute pace which is well above what they're aerobically capable of doing, thinking that well, we're just going to train speed, but what they're training is what's called speed endurance.
So I think you have to train in the aerobic realm to stimulate the aerobic metabolic pathway.
So I want my athletes, when we're doing this economy running, to be training in that aerobic realm or we're training at well above those speeds but we're doing a very short repetition, like 100 meter repeats or even maybe 200 meter repeats with long recovery so that we don't accumulate a lot of lactate.
We don't overstimulate the anaerobic system.
I think we have too many people train too much in the anaerobic realm for these distance races, in my opinion even relatively short.
There's a time and a place, like all this training, for some of that, but I don't think that's the way you build economy, by forcing people to run exhausting repetitions on a track, for instance, faster than they can aerobically do it.
I honestly think my experience is that actually pushes down.
It will make them less economical and pushes down that aerobic capacity.
Yeah, it seems like you prefer to be on either end of the spectrum.
You don't like this middle ground where it's kind of fast but it's not fast enough and you're not getting enough recovery.
And it's also, you know, not aerobic enough.
So it's either it's both not fast enough, but it's also not aerobic enough to which nowhere near where you want to be.
Well, I think you can think of it not so much – don't think about it in fast.
Think about is it hard or is it sustainable?
So you can run fast very aerobically.
I just mentioned to you, Tom can do easily 10 by 1 kilometer at a 3-minute pace and can be very aerobic, because we can measure the lactate and see that, oh yeah, he hasn't even come close to that second or anaerobic threshold yet.
But it's very fast.
Most people would struggle to run one 3-minute kilometer.
And so that's what we that's.
The goal of all of endurance training is to make the people move as fast as possible, as aerobically as possible.
And it's like this idea that I mean we can let's take a brief side trip into zone two which, you know, since you and I last talked has just taken over the internet sphere.
This idea of you know everybody's talking about zone two and some of them i think we're saying the wrong things.
Frankly, zone two training is easy if you are not, if you are aerobically deficient and you can't produce very much energy aerobically.
You know, i work with i'm not currently, but i've worked with athlete, with people who've come to me um, who can't run a 13 minute mile, they have to walk because they are so aerobically deficient.
They can't generate or they can run a 13-minute mile, but it's well out of their aerobics zone, they're well into the higher intensity zones, so they're having to utilize that anaerobic or glycolytic metabolic system to run that fast, meaning that they are aerobically deficient.
They cannot produce enough energy from their aerobic system to maintain a 13-minute mile pace.
So for them, when i tell them okay, you need to be training below this 13-minute mile pace to be aerobic, That's going to be ridiculous.
They're going to feel like this is silly training because it's so easy.
What could this possibly be doing?
Well, it's important training for them, because that's the only way they're going to actually improve their aerobic capacity.
But when we get up to someone like Tom, for whom a three minute kilometer pace, or about a five minute mile pace, is still aerobic, that's not easy training anymore.
It's very fast.
It's very aerobic, but he can't train like that every day.
It's sort of like I think it was Canova who published the training plans or the training work that Moses Mosop, who some of you might remember, I think it was back in about 2004 or 5, he'd run a 203 marathon.
At that time, it was the second fastest marathon ever run.
And he published what the distribution of Mosop's training looked like in terms of intensity.
And the amount of training he did at marathon pace was like in the single digits percentage wise, like maybe two or 3 of his training time was spent at a marathon training pace.
And that's because running a four minute and 35 second mile it might sound.
It sounds really fast and it is and it's not easy, even though it's very aerobic for a guy like that.
So when people talk about zone two being easy well yeah, it's easy if you're not in very good shape.
But zone two suddenly becomes quite hard.
So with a top level athlete, they can't do that much zone two training.
That's a workout to do a zone two workout for somebody who has the capability of running whatever a four minute 40 second mile for 26 miles.
If you sent them out to do that, you know, for somebody who's not fit, they could go out and do a zone two every single day, and they'll be, and that's actually going to benefit them.
But with somebody like Mosop or the top marathoners today, I'm sure that they're, they're probably doing something very similar than a zone two workout or, you know, tempo run at marathon pace is not something they're doing very often.
ZONE 2, EFFORT.
But they're not going to run 540 pace every single day for all of their quote unquote easy runs.
But then on the other side of the spectrum you have these beginner runners who can't really run in zone two.
They immediately go beyond it and have to walk or engage in a different form of exercise.
So I'm really glad you brought up that nuance.
Scott, I would love to maybe put a bow on this conversation by giving almost a case study.
And maybe we can discuss how you might coach this hypothetical runner who's having some fatigue resistance problems.
So let's imagine a runner who, you know, has been, is, you know, quote unquote fast.
They have put down some good times in races, you know, middle distance times.
They've run a marathon.
Let's say they're pretty good 230, 240 in the marathon but they can never pull it together for an ultra marathon.
They get to about mile 20 in a 50K, and they sort of just fall apart physically.
Their legs just sort of fall off.
They're not aerobically or anaerobically taxed in any way.
It's just that they just keep getting almost injured every single time they're out there attempting, let's say, a 50K.
And I don't know if it's the trails that they're on.
Most ultras are on trails these days.
But what kind of process would you undergo with this runner who's undeniably talented but is really just struggling with even feeling good for most of a 50K Ultra?
Well, that's a good case study, and I've actually done that exact same thing with a guy who was a 230 marathoner.
All right.
Let's do it.
So when you get someone who's like that, very accomplished, and that kind of good speed obviously, great cardiovascular, good endurance, then that's a lot to work.
This is a great place to start for somebody.
This person is definitely not aerobically deficient.
And they have more than adequate speed to run a competitive 50-kilometer race where speeds are going to be much slower than that kind of marathon pace.
And again we're going back to this local muscular fatigue problem.
This sort of fatigue resistance building is what gives out.
A lot of it's coming from the downhills.
Because of the eccentric loading, the impact loading on the legs, You know, running downhill even.
There was a study that I read just a couple of years ago.
I think it was a very gradual down gradual relative to mountain races.
It was something in the range of like five to eight percent downhill on grass at a nine minute mile pace.
So fairly moderate downhill pace.
And they were measuring that the impact loading on each leg of these runners was somewhere in the range of four to five times body weight each time their foot hit the ground.
And that's not a very steep downhill and not a super fast pace.
And this is the kind of numbers we're seeing.
Think when you're running on flat ground.
The impact of running a nine minute mile pace on flat ground is something in the range of two to three times body weight.
So we're doubling the impact loading.
So that means that those legs need to be stronger and they need to be more fatigue resistant.
They need to have greater muscular endurance.
And that's because it's the, I'll give you a little story here about this.
What first really lit up in my brain when I read this.
So some Italian researchers Went to the UTMB, probably the biggest ultra running race in the world, or most important one perhaps.
And they took some runners and they measured them on a – for those of you that don't know what a dynamometer is, it's a – think of it like a leg extension machine in a gym.
But you're – it's measuring the amount of force you can generate there.
You know, with just the knee extension.
So they're measuring just this extension in the knee.
So they're measuring primarily the force the quadricep can generate.
And they measure this in some of the runners before the race.
And then, when the race was over, they took those same runners and they put them back on the dynamometer to measure the force again.
And it was dramatically reduced, as you might expect that.
You know, and it would vary.
You know different people at different times.
But it was somewhere in the range of as much as 50 reduction in force production, but somewhere between like 25 and 50 reduction in force.
But then they electrically stimulated the quadricep muscles.
So any of you that have ever used an e-stim type of machine or had done that with a physiotherapist it basically takes the brain out of the equation.
And you're going to fire those muscles with an external electrical source.
And what they found was that muscles could still generate the same force then that they did before the race.
So what that tells you is the central nervous system that is no longer able to fire the muscle fibers after this long period of racing.
And so that's where, again, this tells you this has nothing to do with cardiovascular fitness.
This is purely in the ability of both the central nervous system to fire and the muscles to react.
So one of the things we do with and I would do and I did with that particular athlete is, you know, he lived in Manhattan.
So we did we didn't have access, easy access to mountains.
He did a weighted training in his the building.
He was working with some crazy number of stair floors.
I can't remember.
He would go in the fire stairs at lunchtime and do weighted repetitions, like 50 floors, and then ride the elevator down another 50 floors with the, you know, and I think we were using somewhere in the range of like 10 or 15 of body weight.
And then On other days I'd have him run down those fire stairs, take the elevator up, run down the stairs, take the elevator back up and run down the stairs.
So we're building both the kind of specific uphill propulsion muscular endurance that he needs to go uphill.
And we're also building the downhill muscular endurance in that both both in the muscles and the nervous system.
And I don't think anybody can tell you how much of it is muscular and how much of it is nervous system.
We don't I don't think there's I certainly don't know. but that would be the approach i would take is you need some fat i think the biggest most ultra runners experience this kind of my my legs just give out my legs just go and that seems to be predominantly due to that eccentric loading i was talking about before so there has to be eccentric downhill running training built into your program.
Running downstairs is a great way to do it if you don't have access to downhills.
And so yeah, that would be the approach.
You know that for this marathoner it's going to be.
You got to get stronger and more durable legs going uphill and stronger and more durable legs going downhill.
And when you do that, you can then take this great big engine that this particular guy had and now we can turn it into a competitive ultra runner.
Scott, I have a confession.
That was me.
I just used myself as a case study.
I attempted an ultra actually 10 years ago, almost to the month now.
And exactly that happened.
It was after a very long downhill experience.
And my old IT band injury cropped up again.
And you know I really was not struggling or in any way stressed or fatigued, you know, in any kind of serious way.
You know I had been running for two hours and 45 minutes, which was a long way for me coming from the marathon.
But I just couldn't get my legs to do what I wanted them to do, even though I had a lot of middle distance times that probably an ultra coach would love to see an aspiring ultra runner have coming into the sport.
But it was probably exactly this issue.
And Scott, where were you 10 years ago?
I needed you, man.
Well, you know, this is something I've actually talked to 10 years ago.
I was asking the ultra running crowd and people I was working with what is going to happen when these Kenyans figure this out, this sport out.
What's going to happen when they shift over from the roads to the trails?
And we are seeing that more.
You know there are some very talented and high level African runners coming into the trail running world.
But they tend to be competitive in the shortest distance mountain races.
And all of them across the board have said, yeah, look at those guys' legs.
I mean, there's no way they can run 100 miles with legs like that.
They've got these legs that are built for speed.
And they're very powerful in some cases going uphill.
But the general consensus was no.
I'm just not sure those guys are going to have durability in their legs to handle the punishing pounding of running downhill for miles.
30,000 vertical feet.
And so far, that's the case.
There hasn't been too many African runners, you know, breaking into that the ultra long, ultra distance races.
Although, who knows, that could change too, because there's certainly an enormous talent pool there.
Yeah.
I wonder if UTMB offers you know, a 3 million prize purse if, if that might change over the course of a few years.
Yeah.
I think when the prize.
But you know there's going to be a second tier, people who can't win Chicago, who you know they, they can't win Chicago.
So let's go do a mountain race that I potentially could win.
Um yeah the, the.
There is now much, much better money in the mountain racing circuit, but nothing like the road running circuit.
Um, But yeah, money will be a motivator, I'm sure.
For sure.
Well Scott, I really appreciate your expertise and your time today and helping our audience figure out this somewhat new.
We're just talking about it a lot more these days, but very interesting topic of fatigue resistance.
Is there anything that I might have missed?
I know I probably could have done this for two and a half hours, but anything that you feel you'd really like to add about building this very important physical skill for runners.
Well, I don't want to oversimplify what I've talked about, although it isn't building muscular endurance.
There's a million ways to skin that cat.
So I'm not going to say you have to do it this way or that way.
As we said, you can do it with one of those more progressive distance runs and that will work.
High intensity intervals work.
This adding resistance works.
There's a lot of different ways you can do this.
But I would end with saying that that is important.
There's no singular attribute that an endurance athlete should have that's more important than that aerobic base.
If you don't have that, then fancy diets, crazy supplements, wild interval training protocols, You name it.
Those things don't matter if you don't have that aerobic base.
And it's like that person we were just talking about.
If you're struggling to run a 13-minute mile and staying aerobic with it, then...
None of this other stuff matters at all.
You need to get your aerobic house in order first.
Then you can start layering on much.
You know, all these others kind of cool sexy, interesting sounding types of training.
But without that base, it doesn't really make any difference.
Yeah, the base is the base for a reason, right?
Yeah, it supports everything that's layered upon it.
Yes.
Absolutely.
And probably a very good call to action to our listeners to re-listen to our conversation in 2021 about the tripod of endurance, all the kind of different aspects of you know, the very broad general physiological skill of endurance and when we went into that.
So, Scott, thank you so much for your expertise and your time.
I really appreciate it.
And where would you like folks to go if they want to learn a little bit more about you and your work?
I know your book, Training for the Uphill Athlete, is still available.
It's one of my favorite endurance training books, partly because it's not all about runners.
And so it brings in this very almost multidisciplinary approach, this wide-ranging perspective on endurance that I really appreciate.
But besides your book, which I will definitely link to in the show notes here, is there anywhere else you'd like to point people to?
Sure.
Our website, evokeendurance.com.
I mean, there's a ton of free information.
There's no paywalls in any part of the website.
And we've been for many, many years now trying to get information out about training that we know this is training principles that work and they're sound.
They've been tested by thousands of people.
And we're not trying to influence the world to make them do crazy stuff.
This is really basic things that endurance coaches have known this for 100 years.
There's really nothing new under the sun.
So when you hear about some wild new strategy for training well, it's probably been done sometime in the past already.
So we're trying to educate people by giving away all this free information in the form of articles.
We have an active forum that's on Reddit.
But yeah, evoked endurance.com.
Just go there.
There's we have a podcast, the evoke cast, where we discuss these things.
You know there's those.
Some of those have actually just released.
I got deluged, as you might imagine, after Tom both Tom and Ruth won the UTMB athletes I coached, um.
I've just been kind of overwhelmed with people asking questions like what do they do for training and that sort of thing, and i've just released two um relatively short, like 30 40 minute podcasts.
Well, the first one called what we don't do for training and the other one called what we do do for training.
Um, so that could be, might be, of interest to folks.
But yeah it's, it's all there on our website Amazing.
I'll include a link in the show notes to that as well.
You've certainly piqued my interest on the training of UTMB champions.
Clearly, I want to know what they're doing.
So thank you for that, Scott.
I appreciate your time.
Thanks a lot, Jason.
It's great being here and seeing you again.
Those reviews are incredibly impactful and helpful for this small business.
If you have questions about your running, feel free to email me at support at strengthrunningcom, or you can search our website at strengthrunningcom.
For more digestible tips, videos, memes, and more, follow me on Instagram at jasonfits1.
We'll be in touch.
