This is episode 428 with author elite running coach, former collegiate athlete and PhD holder in biomechanics, John Davis.
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.
And guys, it's a special time of the year.
It's marathon season.
I just had one of my private clients race a PR at the Portland Marathon.
And you might remember Dan from our marathon coaching call episode last August.
He just ran the Twin Cities Marathon and also ran a new PR.
We just had the Chicago Marathon and coming up are the Philadelphia New York City Marathons.
What a time to be alive.
If you're running either Philly or New York coming up soon, don't miss our past episodes, on course, strategy chunking and how to strategize these races.
And if you'd like to get your training right for your next big goal race, go to strengthrunningcom slash coaching to browse all of our training programs for endurance runners.
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My guest today is John Davis.
Last year I read John's incredible book Modern Training and Physiology for Middle and Long Distance Runners.
It's short, it's concise and it's a great overview of the most important principles of exercise science for endurance runners.
I highly recommend it.
And I had to have him on the podcast to talk about zone three and aerobic threshold.
You can check out that past episode as well.
Now, his newest book is now available.
It's called Marathon Excellence for Everyone the Comprehensive, Evidence-Based Approach to Training and Racing.
What I love about this book is the addition of new science and the latest research on how we should approach marathon training, and it sure is comprehensive.
It's made for beginners to elite runners.
So, even if you're nowhere near a pro, if you're curious about some of the more extreme training strategies of world-class runners, this book is for you.
John also has a rich coaching background, recently helping elite marathoners, but also working with high schoolers.
Between 2013 and 2017, he was an assistant cross-country coach at Edina High School, helping them qualify for the Nike Cross-Country National Meet four years in a row.
He holds a PhD from Indiana University's School of Public Health and Biomechanics focusing on you guessed it running injuries.
All right, so our conversation today focuses on marathon-specific physiological resilience.
This is fast becoming a big buzzword and often considered just as important as our other markers of success, things like your lactate threshold or VO2 max.
Physiological resilience is your body's ability to resist deterioration of those metrics, your lactate threshold, running economy and VO2 max.
While we runners are always focusing on gaining fitness, it's also probably a good idea to figure out how to prevent that fitness from deteriorating on race day.
Without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with John Davis.
Here we go.
John, welcome back to the podcast.
Thank you.
It's great to be back.
Well, after our first conversation all about zone three and aerobic threshold, which was a really interesting conversation on you know I mentioned this offline, a topic that had sort of become the boogeyman among runners.
Now we're going to get into marathon training and, more specifically, training physiological resilience.
So let me just first say congrats on your new book, Marathon Excellence for Everyone.
It's out now.
It's amazing.
I even like holding it.
It's just the really soft cover that you picked out.
It's incredible.
Well, thank you.
Yeah, I'm really glad to get it out.
Fun fact about the cover the design was actually done by one of my college teammates, so i had, like a cross-country teammate do the cover.
We worked together on it for, you know, a year and change, and so it's uh it, even if you don't read it, it will look fantastic on the shelf.
Yeah, that is for sure.
Let me maybe ask a weird question to start.
It's a big question.
It's a marathon training for years.
You've included some of the latest research in your book and the training plans that are included, which I think is fascinating.
I'm curious what's something that you've changed your mind about when it comes to marathon preparation, after doing all this research, after putting together the book?
Because I'm sure before you ever started on this book, you had a pretty good handle on how to train for a marathon.
So let's compare John today to John pre-book.
What has changed for you?
I think a few things.
The first of which is actually related to our discussion, the physiological resilience aspect.
When I first started coaching marathons marathoners like 10 12 years ago in my head I had it as oh, if someone's slowing down in the last five, six miles of the marathon, that's because they're running out of fuel.
It's a fueling issue.
So that's hitting the wall.
That's bonking.
Okay, that's a fueling issue.
We'll address that.
After reading some of this research on physiological resilience and thinking about the mechanisms behind it, I have a much more nuanced understanding of how to approach situations where someone is like running good, feeling good at 10 miles, 12 miles into the marathon, and then they slow down.
And that has to do with, like trying to really analyze what is happening to like what's happening to their body over time.
I can give a specific example here about a mistake I made a few years ago.
I had a few athletes who I was training for CIM, California International Marathon.
There's a race here in the United States in December.
A moderate net downhill course very fast.
Lots of people qualify for the Olympic trials there.
And we were doing our training here in Minneapolis, which is very, very flat.
And the workouts are really good.
And my athletes went out and raced and just kind of faded a little bit after 16 miles.
And I couldn't really put a finger on exactly what went wrong until I did some of this research on resilience.
And I discovered oh, when you run downhill you are doing damage to your muscles and that's hurting your running economy.
So what happened was because we hadn't done downhill training.
They got into the race and like after 15, 16 miles, the running economy is much worse.
And so they would have been okay if the race had been flat, but we hadn't prepared for that.
And so that was like not so good.
And so the next time around, the next spring, we did a lot more specific training.
Up and downhill work.
And the result was was much, much better.
And then another thing I've changed my mind on is like the technical approach to maintaining fitness with when you, when people are injured or, if they like, get sick or whatever.
I used to have kind of this like, general like, oh, your fitness just goes down.
But one of the interesting specific technical things I discovered writing this book is that if you like, let's say you do some hard training, you boost your view to max.
Most of that increase in your view to max is modulated by an increase in red blood cells.
And then you take some time off and then maybe you get out of shape.
Well, the physiology says that decreasing your shape when you take time off in the first week or two weeks can't really be coming from a drop in red blood cell supply, because the lifetime of them is like 120 days.
So something else must be going on.
So that pointed me to thinking more about like okay, can you maintain blood volume when you take time off?
Even if you can't run, can you do things like take a sauna or like a hot bath?
More creative strategies like that.
So that's another more like technical thing.
And then one third kind of high level thing is I have a more I don't know what the right word here is, but like utilitarian or like mechanistic sense of when mileage matters and when it doesn't.
Similarly to the fueling thing, I used to think like oh mileage, that's.
You know, mileage equals fitness.
You know, you run as much as you can, then you taper down and then you race.
And now I think it's more important to actually de-emphasize mileage in the last four to six weeks before a marathon because of some of this like foundational stuff about specificity, where you want like big specific stress and then big recovery afterwards.
So I'm still a big mileage guy.
I have people running sometimes 80, 100 miles a week.
But during the most critical periods of training, when we're doing specific work, I think of mileage as less critical during that specific time.
Yeah, I'm really curious about that, John.
Is this a little bit more, because you're just doing those marathon specific workouts that are sort of, by definition, long and kind of fast.
And so you have to get the recovery from somewhere, and easy mileage that surrounds those big workouts is sort of the lowest hanging fruit to take the mileage from.
Yeah, one way of thinking about it too is like you have a certain amount of like intensity you distribute into the week.
And as you progress in training, like throughout the season, early on when you're doing general training, people call base training.
It's kind of relatively like distributed evenly throughout the week.
But as you do longer, faster workouts that are more marathon, specific and actually this applies to other events too, it might also be 5K, 10K specific events you take that same amount of intensity and you like, concentrate it into like little, like discrete peaks, but then you have to recover afterwards.
So there's one story in the book that I tell about somebody who came to me for coaching and he'd run like 234 in his last marathon.
So like pretty good runner.
And he was running like a hundred miles a week and he would do like 20 miler on Saturday, 15 miler on Sunday, a big workout on Monday.
And what I actually did with him is I brought him down to more like 80 miles a week.
And we still did the 20-miler on Saturday, but we did it faster.
And then Sunday, instead of 15, we did like five.
And then on Monday, instead of a workout, we did like eight.
And then maybe Tuesday or Wednesday, we were able to do a workout again.
So a bigger stress, but then also bigger recovery.
Yeah, I've always found it interesting coaching runners, where you often are much more aggressive on some workouts, some aspect of training, but then very much more conservative in other aspects of training.
And I found that for any runner who might have hit a plateau, there is probably some real value in just figuring out what you can emphasize a little bit more and then what you can de-emphasize.
Because probably...
The key to your breaking through that plateau is, from a general perspective.
You're probably emphasizing a lot and we need to maybe de-emphasize a little bit less and really focus on what truly matters.
I think that's a good framework for almost any runner, but particularly the runners who might be experiencing that kind of plateau.
Yeah.
And one way to think about it is like OK, you build up some capacity in training to maintain that same capacity.
You don't need to keep doing the same level of whatever that is.
You can do some reduced amount of it or you can do it less often.
You can you can like have that same workout recur less frequently.
And so suppose there's like we'll talk later, but there's kind of these like four factors for the marathon.
If you're bottlenecked in one of them, yes, you need to push harder on that one.
But those other three that you're kind of like, you know at a good level, for you don't need to be continually trying to push the envelope on all those aspects at the same time, necessarily.
Right.
I actually just had a conversation with a runner who was kind of stuck in the marathon.
And he's like, I've been running 90 miles a week on hills and doing strides for a year and a half.
And that's actually kind of the only training he's been doing.
And I thought, wow, this is actually really great general preparation.
You're running a lot.
You're getting in this hilly terrain.
But now we probably need to cut back the volume perhaps a little bit.
Do some workouts really just change that emphasis and focus on kind of the next step with your training?
John, one of the big topics that we wanted to talk about today was physiological resilience.
Now, you mentioned it earlier.
I especially loved hearing about it because it's one of the things that you've changed your mind about, or learned a little bit more over the last couple years.
And I've been seeing so many coaches and runners talking now about physiological resilience.
And really elevating it like it's as important as something like VO2 max.
And it does seem like, as one of the metrics of your performance, it may be just as important as some of these other really key figures.
What is physiological resilience?
So, in a technical sense, physiological resilience, which some people call durability.
Like, some cyclists and some ultra runners refer to it as durability, although I don't use that term because sometimes it also means just your ability to not get injured and run a lot.
And physiological resilience is something different.
It is specifically...
What is the rate at which your other physiological characteristics so running economy, view to max and your steady state max which are associated with your threshold?
What's the rate at which those characteristics deteriorate over time?
In the scientific literature it's often quantified as the percentage of your steady state max, which you might estimate with LT2 or critical speed or maximal lactate steady state.
Some lab measure of what's the highest metabolic steady state you can sustain without your blood lactate and oxygen consumption and heart rate rising uncontrollably.
What percentage of that steady state max can you sustain for the marathon?
Because, you know, your marathon pace is slower than your half marathon pace, right?
And your half marathon pace is slower than your 10 mile pace.
Lord, I hope so.
Even though all three of those events are at a metabolic steady state meaning, if you like, grabbed some of the Twin Cities 10 mile, for example, was this past weekend right.
If you grab somebody at three miles, six miles and eight miles into that race, test to their blood lactate be about the same, which is not the case with, like a 5K right.
And same thing.
Grab somebody at miles three six eight 10 12, 15 in the marathon blood lactate.
Same, you know, same level over time, no change.
So it's at a steady state.
But clearly people slow down.
Why do they slow down?
Well, because over time, the physical condition of their body deteriorates.
And it's not just a fueling thing.
It's not just that you run out of fuel and then you slow down.
This is why, by the way, when people talk about hitting the wall in the marathon, most people who have a bad experience in the marathon don't actually feel like they're running.
Great great great great, and then suddenly they feel terrible.
It's usually like I feel great, I feel good, I feel okay, I feel not so good, I feel bad, I feel really bad.
So physiological resilience is a way of quantifying what is the rate at which your fresh fitness results.
So it's a very important factor for people who find that hey, I'm quite good at the 10K, pretty good at the half marathon, but I just can't put together a good marathon.
That is fundamentally a physiological resilience problem.
And I mentioned those three factors, view to max, running economy, and steady state max.
The one we know the most about is deterioration in running economy.
I think that's because it's probably the easiest to measure.
It's harder to measure those other two.
Like you'd imagine, like you know, like grab somebody in the middle of a marathon and then have them do a lactate threshold test.
Like, good luck.
But it's pretty easy to put somebody on a treadmill and just measure their oxygen consumption as they continue running, and then you can just calculate running economy.
So that's the aspect of which we know the most about.
But it's probably likely that you see deterioration in VU2max and in steady-state max, even as a percentage of VU2max as well.
This seems like the holy grail of endurance training right here, because it seems like runners and coaches are always so obsessed with driving up those figures right.
More running economy is good.
A higher VO2 max is good.
The higher lactate threshold or steady state max that you have, that's a good thing.
But it seems like we've never thought about okay, once we get that number high enough and you're performing at that level Well, it doesn't do you much good if you can only maintain your lactate threshold for 20 minutes.
You need to be able to do it more to actually be able to perform in some of these really long races.
And I think one of the things we don't realize is even a half marathon, it's a really long way.
Especially the marathon.
I do want to put the marathon on a little bit of a pedestal.
It is unique.
It's very challenging.
It's sort of like the...
You know the final boss of road racing, that you know you got to defeat the lesser bosses first, to give yourself the skills to do that.
So I want to talk about that, how we make all of these different physiological figures more resilient.
I do want to go down one little tangent here.
You mentioned that feeling in a marathon where you kind of just progressively feel a little bit worse and a little bit worse starts at mile 14 and by the time you hit mile 22 you're just so over the marathon.
And then you contrasted that with the runner, who feels fine, feels fine, and then they fall off a cliff.
I have had both experiences in marathons, kind of the gradual fade, and then within a five-minute window, I literally hit the wall and go from running my goal pace to nearly a minute slower.
What's happening in these two scenarios so we can diagnose kind of the problem with these two hypothetical performances.
So I'm more confident in what's going on in the slow fade.
So we'll start with that one.
The slow fade.
Probably what's happening is that your running economy and, to some extent, those other two aspects few to max and steady stay max is deteriorating over time.
And you can see this.
There's really nice research where they'll put people on a treadmill and have them run for 25 miles.
And then just look at what is the oxygen cost per kilometer of running.
That's what your running economy is.
That's one way to measure it.
And you just see this gradual linear increase over time, meaning it's getting more expensive to keep running the same speed.
What's interesting about that, though, is that the variation is very large between people.
So the average from this this is like a study from 1991 the average across individuals is about 5.
So running gets 5 more expensive per mile by the time you get to the end of the marathon versus when you start.
But The individual variation ranged from as bad as 10, meaning like by the end of the race.
If you're running six minute pace at the beginning, now you're running like 640 pace for the exact same metabolic effort.
So 10 at the low end or the bad end up to like basically no change at all for the very highly resilient people.
So if you imagine just one muscle fiber or two muscle fibers starts getting damaged, failing every step, that just gradually increments, increases over time.
And you can connect that also with maybe your carbohydrate reserves at critical locations inside the muscle gradually, gradually getting deteriorated.
You have to progressively recruit more and more and more muscle fibers just to do the same thing.
So that's where you get that slow fade.
Now, the very sudden hitting the wall aspect, that might be more related to fueling.
That's harder to pin down to a specific cause.
And it's also harder to study because it's hard to quantify like, okay, like, How bad of a slowdown?
How quickly?
And can we disaggregate that from like?
Suddenly you got to Heartbreak Hill in the Boston Marathon and like you know that then it was then the demand skyrocketed.
And so that's why you felt so bad.
So the sudden the sudden breakdown one is harder to really pin down like a precise cause.
My guess, though, would be you.
One way of thinking about that constant slow deterioration is like.
Let's say your marathon pace is six minute miles and your, your.
Your classic lactate threshold is like 540.
But that that cost of running is like going up.
So the cost of running six minute miles at the start is the usual cost of running six minute miles.
But 10 miles into the race.
Maybe now it's crept up so that the metabolic effort is like 550 pace, even though the actual speed you run is still only six minute pace.
But okay.
So you're still a steady state, but now, by 20 miles, maybe you hit the point where that metabolic demand to run six-minute pace is no longer a steady state.
So instead of oh, six-minute miles is my marathon pace.
Now you're running what is effectively like, metabolically speaking, 5K pace.
And you're trying to, and that is something you know.
You run five minutes at 5K pace like you're going to feel pretty bad, pretty quickly.
So maybe what's happening is when you start colliding with that wall- you are no longer at a steady state and your body's like feeling the same way.
It feels like a mile or two miles into a 5K where you're like oh, this feels really really, really bad.
And I do not like this at all.
I think that's probably a really good guess, because I didn't give you the context around these two experiences of mine.
But when I absolutely fell off a cliff, it was my first marathon.
It was the New York City marathon.
I don't think I fueled enough.
You know, this was 2008.
I was two years out of college.
I'm a track guy coming out of college track and cross country, not really thinking too much about fueling.
And so I definitely think that was a fueling issue.
Never experienced it to that extent in any future marathons, because I did manage my carb intake a lot better.
Not as well as we know today, but nevertheless it really helped me kind of avoid that classic hit-the-wall experience which, if anybody hasn't experienced it, I don't recommend it.
I think it's probably one of the worst running experiences you can have.
All right, so let's now dive a little deeper into resilience and how we actually build resilience.
Because if we're talking about the decline of your second threshold, your VO2 max and your running economy, we're going to go about building resilience in slightly different ways to target the different metrics here that are declining.
So you know, can we maybe start broad and then get more specific at how you might build up some resilience, for let's just keep using me as an example.
You know, I keep falling apart in my marathons, John, just this gradual fade.
I can keep it together until mile 21 or so.
What are some things that you might work on with me?
So here's a really high level view of the problem.
The high level view is, OK, you're running a marathon.
You are in pertinent to our previous discussion.
You are in that zone three high end aerobic running.
You're above LT one.
You're below your steady state max.
And what is characteristic about that range of speeds is that the mechanisms of fatigue are very different than doing easy running.
So one of the classic things that I see with people and maybe the hypothetical, you might have this problem.
Maybe you're like ah, I did a bunch of 20 22 mile easy runs in training.
And then I get to the marathon and I fall apart.
What happened?
Well, when you run 20 or 22 miles easy, That is not the same kind of stress and fatigue on your body as running, let's say, 20 miles at 90 or 95 of marathon pace.
The mechanism of fatigue is different.
Just like trying to run 10 minutes at 5K pace is a very different mechanism of fatigue, versus like running 10 minutes at I don't know half marathon pace.
Different physiological zone, different domain of intensity, different physiological response from your body.
So the first most basic thing is, are you doing these long, fast marathon specific workouts?
And if you're not, your body's not going to be ready for the kind of demand it encounters.
We talked about fueling earlier.
One of the reasons why fueling is much more important in the marathon competition and in marathon workouts than in plenty of plenty of college runners will just like roll out of bed.
Go run 15 miles easy on a Saturday, like no fuel, no problem.
I feel attacked.
The problem though, is that's fine, because when you're running easy, your fueling needs are not as high, because the proportion of your energy coming from carbs is lower.
And the faster you run, the higher the fraction of your energy needs to come from carbohydrates.
So a useful thing to know about running is that...
The calories per mile that you burn is like basically constant as a function of speed.
So you jog five miles easy, you run a five mile race, all out, basically the same caloric expenditure.
But the fraction of those calories that come from carbs increases the faster you run.
So, like at marathon pace, could be like 80 plus percent of your energy, whereas might just be, you know, 60 at an easy pace.
So when you are running faster, you're spending on your carbs more.
So again, like that, okay, that's another thing.
It's like, let's really get serious about fueling.
A third aspect is well, like what you know, you mentioned, you had a very bad experience at New York City Marathon.
That's a pretty hilly race.
So what's happening when you're going through hills?
Well, you're putting a lot more eccentric stress on your muscles.
That's causing muscular damage.
And when you like, let's say let's just for the sake of argument.
Let's say you had like.
Normally you could recruit 100 muscle fibers to run a certain speed, but then 10 of them get damaged and their force output goes down.
Well, now you got to recruit 110 or 115 or 120 muscle fibers to run the same speed, to produce the same force.
Very easy to see how that leads to an increase in metabolic cost, right?
So we got to do some training that is going to prepare you for you know, if you're like okay, I ran New York City, I'm going to go do it again.
We got to do some hills, right?
Same with Boston, same with my example earlier from CIM.
Um, so that's another, like, you know, kind of basic stuff.
Like let's, are we doing long, fast stuff in long, fast marathon specific workouts?
Uh, is your fueling on point?
Are you prepared for the terrain of the race?
Like that's where I start with people.
Thank you so much for having me.
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How would you potentially deal with a client who wants to run a marathon?
It's 14 15, 16 weeks away, but their current long run is short enough where just getting them up to about 20 miles over the timeframe that we have available is is going to be doable, but a little bit challenging.
And so you may not be able to, you know, not only get up to say, 21 miles for a long run, but then do a significant chunk of it at marathon pace.
How do you balance the time it takes to properly build both your volume and your long run distance with the need to do some of your long run at goal marathon pace?
So I actually like to separate those two things.
So if it's like you were saying you were fresh out of college and going to do a marathon, maybe you'd never done long easy runs before.
Okay, so we'll bring the long, easy run distance up.
And then separately in a different training session.
We'll do a training session where the whole thing is something fast and within 5 of marathon pace.
Maybe you only go eight miles, nine miles, 10 miles.
Maybe that's your biggest workout at that intensity.
That's fine, but it's actually i found it in practice it's easier to start with short and fast uh and then make it longer, versus take like okay, let's get up to 20 miles and you know you've never done 20 miles before and you're really tired at the end.
And then your next run is like okay, 20 miles and the last five are like progressive um Uh it's it's, that's.
That's a very tough uh cell and it's really hard to go from like 20 easy to like 15 and five and, and you know, or like eight or 12 and eight and 10 and 10 and eight and 12.
Um, it's just, it, that's too hard on your body I found.
And so.
This time around, this marathon, OK, do the long, easy run.
And we'll do like we'll try to just do like a midweek workout.
That's like nine miles at one term.
I've seen a lot recently that I really like is predicted marathon pace.
Maybe you can't actually do that for the marathon right now, but sort of on paper your 10K or your half marathon says this should be your marathon pace.
Just try that for eight miles, 10 miles as its own independent workout.
So we're not doing long and fast at the same time for someone for whom that's completely new.
And then next year, next fall, next spring, you can start combining those.
Once you're able to get through 20 miles easy, once that's not such a big stress on your body anymore.
So it sounds like that's the advanced option that you don't necessarily have to get to if you're not ready for it.
But you can get a lot of those benefits by keeping the long run easy but then doing the weekly workout.
And it doesn't have to be marathon pace.
I kind of like the predicted marathon.
I'm old school, so I would just say goal marathon pace a little faster than probably what you can run.
Yeah.
So it does sound like you're someone who thinks marathoners should do speed workouts during the week.
Glad to hear that.
What should those workouts be from a resilience perspective?
You know, are we training VO2 max during marathon training so that you know it's high and can be more resilient later on in a marathon.
Or do we not even really need to touch that?
So my way of thinking about this is like throughout, let's say, training 20 weeks for the marathon, I would say those last six weeks, that's your marathon specific training.
That's when you got to be doing the most marathon specific sessions, whatever that is for for the level that you're at.
You know, maybe that's the point where you're really pushing your long run up and doing a little bit of these.
You know eight, 10 miles of marathon pace during the week.
That I just talked about.
If you're kind of a more beginner, intermediate or someone who's really advanced, you know they might be doing 24 miles at 90 percent of marathon pace and, like you know, 20 kilometers alternating fast and moderate float like really big technical workouts and big recovery in between.
But.
Before that we're going to do marathon supportive training.
That's a little bit wider, you know a little wider range of speeds.
And then, like general training, I think about as building up just the individual components of fitness.
Because the thing with resilience is like it goes from zero to 100%, right?
Like the theoretically perfect marathoner, could run 100 of their max steady state for the whole marathon right.
Nobody can do that, but the very best marathoners in the world can get to like 96%.
But you know, percent of what?
Well, percent of basically your view to max, multiplied by your running economy, multiplied by your steady state max.
And if those numbers aren't very high, you could be the most resilient runner in the world.
It wouldn't be that helpful.
So I do think early on in training further out from the marathon, you do want to build up those other fundamental components of fitness.
And so I don't think it's the case that, oh, resilience is the most important thing.
It's like... which of the tires on your car is most important, right?
It's like, well, if you only have three of them, you're going to have a bad time.
And like, certainly if you spend all your time training resilience, like I was trying to drive your car with one tire on it and like, it's not going to go very well.
So I have this general to specific progression where early on in training, you can do training.
That's not that different from what you might do for like 5k, 10k half marathon, maybe doing some longer long, easy runs, but Maybe you're doing some more stuff through hills.
If you train for a hilly race, that's fine.
You just have these individual components of fitness that you're working on.
And then late in training, that's when you put it together and you do long and fast running at speeds close to marathon pace, at whatever is appropriate, you know, for you, not necessarily trying to like do the biggest, craziest workouts ever.
Yeah.
So the way I'm thinking about this is like, just like training kind of goes from general to specific, we can kind of think of resilience as going from general to specific because it sounds like those big.
You know, since we're talking about the marathon, this is obviously specific to marathon training, but you know the workouts that are going to not only help you run your best marathon but also build the most marathon.
Or also workouts that you probably don't want to do for a very long period of time 10 miles at goal pace, 15 miles at goal marathon pace, maybe on hilly terrain.
I mean, these are probably workouts that are going to take a lot out of you.
So you kind of want to periodize them into that really late block of the plan, six-ish weeks out from your race.
And then you can just be more general early on.
Because most of us frankly, probably aren't ready for the really big marathon-specific resilience workouts.
You know, like 20 miles with 10 of it at marathon goal.
Pace is actually pretty advanced.
And I know a lot of really good runners who...
Maybe we'll do one of those workouts per season, but a lot of them are lesser.
I'd love to spend a little more time on the general principles that might come earlier in the block.
That might honestly be more appropriate for a wider segment of our audience today.
So...
Yeah, I'd love to get runners doing 22 miles with a big block of it at marathon pace.
But what are some easier versions of workouts that can build marathon resilience?
And let me ask maybe a follow-up question is – and I think this is related –
What if your marathon is coming up in November or December?
We're recording this in early to mid-October.
You don't have a ton of time, but you want to take advantage of some of this amazing John Davis wisdom here.
How do we do that too?
So the place, the place you always want to start is like, what can I do now?
And then I want to increase my capacity, uh, a modest amount.
Now I it's like, maybe if you only do easy runs, and then you hear this podcast and you're like, all right, I'm going to get out and do 20 miles with 10 at goal marathon pace.
Like, no, you should do a little bit.
Maybe.
Maybe you increase your long run distance a little bit and you do a little bit more at marathon pace in some other workout.
Right.
You want to like break these things down into individual components.
And I think you want to use the same uh, that same approach for like, how do I, how do I build up general, like general components of resilience?
So, okay.
Like, let's say, someday maybe not even this training cycle, but someday you want to do 20 miles at 90 of marathon pace.
Well, okay.
You gotta be able to run 20 miles.
Can you run 20 miles?
No, I can only run 14.
Okay.
Let's try to do 15 or 16 miles.
Maybe you're going to try to do that 20-miler someday through hills.
Do you run any hills now?
No, I don't.
Okay, let's try doing your normal long run, but do it through some rolling hills, or do it through some bigger rolling hills than you usually do.
Okay, that's another thing.
Maybe you can't even run the duration yet.
Like you can just run, like maybe you can't even cover the full distance, but you can do a really easy like time on feet run, where you're just going for the correct duration.
You can work on your fueling, right?
That's like a general component of these resilience workouts, because you're going to want to be fueling pretty aggressively.
That's another like individual component you can work on.
So I think you want to whatever and this applies to any event Whatever like the biggest, most important specific work you want to do is you start what you think like, you project yourself out into the future.
Okay.
What's the kind of runner I need to be to be able to do that kind of work.
And then you break it down into like, what are the distinct individual components of that?
So if you're going to run long and fast, close to marathon pace well, there's long, there's fast and there's close marathon pace.
And you might add in, you know, through hills while fueling.
Well, can you do each of those pieces individually?
Do you do any of them at all in training?
Maybe the answer is no.
So you start out.
Maybe you run like some people.
I haven't.
Okay, we're going to run four miles at you know.
Sort of I'm going to work out what your marathon ought to be based on your 5k.
We'll try that for four miles or five miles.
And maybe that's hard.
Maybe you're like, wow, this is like pretty tough. that's fine.
Two weeks from now, we'll do five and a half or six miles.
And then you know, a year, two years from now, then you can be at a point where you're doing um, you're doing like much more of it, but you always got to remember like you are um, your body is in, whatever situation it is in right now.
And you, you have to work with um.
You have to start where you're at and present your body with some new stimulus.
That's appropriate.
That's not too big.
Uh, that will then get you up to a newer, higher level, and then you can rinse and repeat.
I love it.
I love how you just made that not very complicated.
Like, let's take the next logical step based on wherever you're at.
And I assume that applies to the person who may hypothetically have a marathon in a month or two and want to take advantage of some of this guidance here.
I think it means that just do something a little bit harder, a little bit more challenging than what you have been doing.
Continue the game of progression, in other words.
Is that right?
Yeah.
And I would add to that, make sure you recover well afterwards too, because it's very important to remember you do a big stress.
You need big recovery afterwards.
So if you're like if you do, you know 10 miles easy.
Now you take maybe one easy day or no easy days.
Maybe do 10 miles easy with your friends on Sunday and then you run a interval workout Monday with your run club.
The thing to keep in mind about these really big workouts I'm talking about.
Let's say, I have some high-level marathoner.
They do 22 miles and 95% of marathon pace on Saturday.
Guess what?
They're taking Sunday off.
Monday, they're jogging super easy.
Tuesday, they're going to do an easy run.
Wednesday, light workout.
Thursday, easy run.
Friday, easy run.
Then Saturday, a week later, now we're ready to go and do a full blast session again.
So the bigger the stress on your body, the bigger the recovery you need to.
And this is, I think, where periodization comes from.
It's like why you can't just do like oh, why don't I just do you know marathon, specific training year round.
Because the bigger, the tougher the session, like you mentioned, 20 miles with 10 marathon pace.
That's a tough workout.
You need like three easy days.
After that, then a lighter, not full blast workout, then a couple more easy days before you're really ready to go again.
So throughout the season you can increase the difficulty and stress of the workouts, but that needs to come with an increase in the amount of recovery afterwards.
One thing that you mentioned that we haven't really talked about is fueling.
And I don't think you can be resilient in a very long event like a marathon without proper fueling.
How does that play a role in resilience?
Because I assume that, for example, running economy is very much dependent upon you being properly fueled, whereas maybe a different physiological parameter like VO2 max is is potentially less dependent on fuel because it's much more of a shorter duration training metric.
Yeah, there's a few subtleties to fueling.
It is not quite the case that you can say oh well, I'll take 120 grams of carbs an hour and I'll just never run out of carbohydrates.
Because it is true that a big part of resilience is running out of carbohydrates, specifically glycogen, in muscles as you get further into the marathon.
But some of that glycogen running out is happening at these very specific locations inside muscle fibers.
So even when you have fuel coming in, like to your bloodstream and then into your muscles, you can't fully, perfectly replace everything that you're going through like at the rate that you need to if you're running as fast as you can at marathon pace.
But probably fueling can slow down that deterioration by allowing you to access people called exogenous carbohydrates from outside your body to slow that rate of of depletion at these critical locations of glycogen inside your muscles.
Another aspect of it is the there is a direct connection between fueling and running economy in like a couple percentage points order of magnitude because I mentioned earlier, as you run faster a greater proportion of your energy comes from carbohydrates.
Um, carbs actually have a better energetic yield in running than fat does, and i know this sounds counterintuitive because, like in biology class you learn fat has a nine grand nine calories per gram.
Carbs have four fats more like fuel dense.
What i mean is energetic yield per unit of oxygen.
So let's say you're running and your body's consuming three liters worth of oxygen, like you know, three one-liter bottles full of oxygen gas.
You're burning that every minute.
So if you use that oxygen gas to burn pure carbohydrates, you get a certain amount of energy.
Or you could use that same amount of oxygen to burn pure fat.
Now, your body never burns pure fat.
But if you did burn pure fat, the energy you got out from that constant amount of oxygen will be about 7 lower than the carbohydrates.
So the carbs, the greater the fraction of energy comes from carbs.
You do get a slight uptick in your running economy.
And if you're fueling aggressively you push up, you kind of shift that curve of carbohydrate utilization up where, at a given speed, you use more carbs and less fat.
So the example I used earlier of, like the college runner who rolls out of bed on Saturday morning and just goes run 15 miles easy, no fuel.
They're burning more fat than someone who like, wakes up, has some oatmeal, does their 15 mile run and takes gels, even when they're running the same pace.
So you can push up a little bit and use carbs and get a little bit more efficiency that way from fueling as well.
Yeah, and I think what we're learning now about high-carb fueling.
It seems like every marathoner and ultramarathoner is pushing up on that 120 grams of carbohydrate per hour.
It seems like one of the lower hanging fruit that you could pick to give yourself a bit more resilience.
I sort of wish I could go back in time and tell old Jason from 2011, when I was running my best marathon that hey, you probably need to eat about 80 more carbohydrate.
There's actually a really funny picture of me finishing my PR marathon, and my form just doesn't look good.
And after reading your book and having this conversation, I really wish I had more carbohydrate there, because isn't it also true that the rate of force production declines as your body gets lower on carbohydrate?
Like you, literally cannot run as fast because your brain is protecting your body by not having such forceful muscle contractions.
Yeah, that's part of why, for a lot of people, that like wall experience isn't a sudden like suddenly dropping a bunch of time, is because your brain is actually sensing like how.
How much is like?
What are my fuel reserves and do I have any fuel coming in?
And it will slow you down, similar to the effects of heat.
Actually, heat works the same way where your body actually starts, your brain starts slowing you down by generating the perception of fatigue before your core temperature gets into a dangerous level.
But it can sense that your core temperature is rising at an unsustainable rate.
Similarly with your carbohydrate reserves.
As they deteriorate, your brain can sense this and will generate more fatigue in response.
And that actually manifests as inability to um create muscle force production.
There's other stuff that's going on too, that's also inhibiting muscular force production.
Um, this is actually one of the core mechanisms why um, that fatigue in the, this sort of zone three high end aerobic domain is different mechanistically, than than fatigue running easy.
I will say, though um, if you are like, if you, if you, if your muscles are sustaining damage because you haven't like sufficiently prepared them for the full demands of the marathon um, Gels and sports drinks will not save you.
Carbs aren't like a magical solution to muscle fibers that are physically bursting because they're not strong enough to withstand 20 22, 24 miles of running through hills.
Um, so it's not, uh, it's not just like, oh, great resilience is fueling.
So I'm going to take a bunch of carbs.
This was the mistake I made like 10, 12 years ago is thinking oh, people are slowing down at the end of the marathon.
It must be fueling.
So there's other mechanisms at play as well.
Let's talk a little bit about the appropriate place for either fasted runs or what we might have previously called depletion workouts.
And I even hesitate to ask because it's often considered taboo because of our sports history with eating disorders, not to mention the fact that high-carb fueling just helps you perform better.
So why should we worry about fasted running or depletion workouts in the first place?
But you do mention it in your book.
And, and I do, I would appreciate a conversation about if you think they're appropriate and when.
Yeah.
So for context, the chapter on depletion workouts in the book comes from.
From what I recall it comes, it's in the advanced train technique section.
It comes right after a chapter about running 140 miles a week.
And it comes right before a chapter about doing workouts with like 25 miles of quality in a single day.
So that's the level of advancedness that i'm talking about in terms of like.
This is not something that i would use for like, even even like a, you know, maybe a 240 female maybe, but not a 240 male, not a three-hour marathoner, not someone running less than 80 90, 100 miles a week.
Basically, it's a really extreme version of can you put a really big stress on your body in a way that really tries to empty the tanks, to restore them then with more carbohydrates or increase the level of ability to access all the carbs in your body?
I honestly like I don't think it's something that and I'm very clear about this in the book that like I'm including this because I want this book to be a comprehensive guide to like every like, all the way up to the highest level of marathoning.
And there's a sidebar in that book that talks about a case study of um, three canadian distance runners who, very carefully and you know, under the supervision of um of an exercise physiologist, use depletion training to run, like you know 211, 212 and 214 in the marathon.
So um, There is some experimental evidence that it might be it might generate some potentially useful adaptations in very very, very high level athletes.
But I don't think anybody who's had any history of disordered eating, I don't think anybody who's not already maxed out in terms of mileage, maxed out in terms of big stress, big recovery issues like marathon, specific sessions, and someone who's not already really on top of fueling, really needs to worry about it at all.
Well, thanks for putting it into that proper context.
I think that's very important.
I also think it's fun and interesting to kind of see maybe the end of progression.
You know like okay, not everyone's running 160 miles a week for the marathon, but it's interesting to see pro runners doing some of these extreme things for some of those final last tenths of a percentage point of performance.
Now, John, I know we could probably do 90 minutes on every chapter in your book.
And please don't tempt me.
I would love that.
But we'd be here till my next book is done.
You wouldn't have time to write your next book.
So yeah, this is by no means a proper overview of your book, or even the enormous topic of marathon training.
But, based on our conversation here, is there anything about physiological resilience when it comes to marathon training that you'd like to add that we didn't cover?
I know one of the things that I would love to talk about a little more is just kind of like hill training and the role that hills play.
But you know, I would just love to hear your perspective on some of the major pillars of this topic that we didn't discuss.
So one thing I should mention is that you will kind of see discussed in the broader resilience cinematic universe is heart rate and something people call heart rate drift or heart rate decompensation.
And all I want to add is be careful about analyzing heart rate as a function of speed.
Basically, what can happen is...
If you make a plot of like your speed in the marathon and your heart rate.
Sometimes when people blow up in a marathon you can see their heart rate start to go up at the same speed before they even slow down.
And that is potentially evidence that what's happening that I was talking about earlier, meaning the metabolic cost of running is going up.
So their oxygen consumption is going up at the same speed and their heart rate is rising to deliver more oxygen, even though they're running the same speed.
However.
However, you want to be very careful about interpreting heart rate data, because heart rate is not always measured accurately.
Heart rate can increase at the same speed for reasons that are not connected to deteriorating running economy, such as it's getting hotter or your blood volume is going down because you're sweating.
And so your heart rate is just going to increase to keep delivering the same results rate of blood delivery, same rate of oxygen supply.
You might be encountering a gradual hill and even like a 1 grade is enough to bump your heart rate up a little bit.
Or you might be speeding up, right?
Maybe you're running 10 seconds a mile faster.
So there is some really interesting research that uses like massive scale.
I cite a study in the book that uses like data from like 80000 people's Strava accounts where they ran a marathon and they had a heart rate monitor on.
But I've seen people on the Internet, I think, quite honestly, misinterpret their heart rate data or worse.
They're in the marathon and they're looking at their watch and they're like, oh no, my heart rate is going.
My heart rate's usually 160 at marathon pace and now it's 163.
The blow up has started.
It's all over.
When maybe they just went up a hill or like got a little excited and their heart rate went up, or they're sweating more, and so on.
Their heart rate view to relationship is changing.
So be careful and thoughtful about heart rate as it is related to this resilience topic.
Yeah, I mean I know my heart rate went up a couple beats when I passed by Wellesley College when I ran Boston, but that's neither here nor there.
Couldn't this also be said about kind of like training in general?
Like your heart rate is not always indicative of your effort.
Because, you know, this is something that as a coach, I deal with every summer.
And this is part of our first conversation where we talked about zone three and And a lot of what's happening now with everyone wearing heart rate monitors you know, right before our conversation I had to pull off my Coros armband that I had on earlier is the fact that now that we have all this data, we can see the data.
It's such a granular level, but it doesn't always mean what we think it means.
And every summer when I go running at noon because I do not plan my time appropriately and my heart rate goes from 140 to 160 over the course of a mile at the same pace.
I know it's not because I'm running harder and I don't really feel too much different.
And so I think that's probably a scenario that most runners are very familiar with.
Side question when our heart rate gets higher but it's not indicative of a harder effort, What is the mechanism for increasing our heart rate in that scenario?
So there's a couple of mechanisms that are at play.
One of them is related to this – if you sweat and you lose some blood plasma – um you what your heart rate will um shift so that you can deliver?
Basically, you shift from a strategy of like uh, a really powerful heart contraction and a low heart rate to deliver like, let's say, you're delivering, i'm just making up numbers here, but like i don't know, five liters of blood per minute to to your body, like that's the rate of that's it's flowing through your arteries.
You can achieve that with, like a high heart rate and like a smaller amount of blood pushed out of your heart.
Each heartbeat, or a lower heart rate and a bigger amount of blood pushed out.
And it seems to be the case that um over time, at a constant effort, Your body gradually will shift towards preferring, for whatever reason.
It's.
Some of it's related to core temperature, some of it's related to sweating, but it happens even if your core temperature is stable.
And even if you're not, even if you're like taking fluids and replacing your sweat losses, it seems, for whatever reason your heart rate prefers.
Your body prefers to gradually shift over time to a somewhat higher heart rate and lower stroke output.
It's like how much blood is pumped out of your heart per beat.
So that's part of it.
And then another part of it is there's this phenomenon that has gotten almost no popular coverage, which is shocking to me, because it's one of those things where I read the paper and I was like wow, this is super important.
But there's something called the slow component of heart rate. where you start running.
You're standing on the treadmill.
You bump the treadmill up to six miles an hour.
You start your run.
Your heart rate goes up and then it stabilizes, right?
Well, there's this interesting phenomenon called the slow component of heart rate where, if you really look in like high resolution detail, what happens is your heart rate shoots up.
It almost stabilizes after three minutes.
And then over the eight 10, 12 minutes, it will gradually rise up and then plateau at a somewhat higher level.
There's a similar phenomenon with oxygen consumption.
It's called the slow component of oxygen consumption.
So your VO2 will do something really similar.
But and this is why this paper blew my mind the heart rate slow component is not connected or indicative of the oxygen slow component.
So there's these amazing plots where they put people on an exercise bike in a temperature-controlled, nice cool lab and they tell them maintain 150 beats per minute heart rate.
And they look at their oxygen consumption and the mechanical power output on the bike and they show that it goes up and then it goes back down.
It drops like 10%, 15%, 20%.
Meaning these people are actually exercising less hard at a metabolic level.
They're burning fewer calories when they try to maintain the same heart rate.
And if you want to create the correct physiological or, like I'll say, a stable metabolic stimulus, a stable calories per hour or stable VO2 over time, you actually need to let your heart rate rise a little bit.
And there's...
It's one of the things where, like the paper, like ends with this conclusion and I'm like wait, like what's next.
This seems really important.
Like why is nobody paying attention to this?
We've got everybody obsessed with their heart rate and like nobody knows about this.
So this slow component is a really big mystery and I think it's really important.
I want to do another podcast just about that, John.
Yeah, well, you should have to track down the, somebody did a PhD dissertation a few years ago.
You have to track down that person and get them on because they'd be the person to talk to.
Well, we're going to leave this as a big open loop at the end of this podcast.
John, thank you so much for your expertise.
I think people like you are helping us better understand the demands of the marathon and what it puts our body through, much more specifically, you know, from an energy system perspective, from a mechanical perspective.
And once we have that knowledge, I think we can then design training interventions and programs that better prepare runners for the demands of this race.
Because I know I said it earlier, but I think of the marathon as the final boss of road racing.
It's such a difficult race.
And while I love to see runners signing up for the marathon, it also makes me a little nervous because you know we have a lot of beginners doing a intermediate to advanced race.
But you're making it a lot more manageable for folks.
So I hope everyone picks up your book Marathon Excellence for Everyone the comprehensive, evidence-based approach for training and racing.
And let me just add one more thing, John.
I love that it is for everyone.
It is for the elite and the beginner, no matter where you are on that spectrum.
And I think that's...
I don't know.
I'm a running nerd.
So I like seeing where I can start training today, but where I might be a year from now or three years from now.
I think that is really exciting, and your book provides that.
So thank you so much.
Yeah, thank you.
I wanted to write something that has.
I didn't want to write a book just called Fast Marathoning or Sub-3 Marathoning.
I
I do believe that everybody can aspire to run an excellent marathon, and you get to decide what that means for you.
If your goal is to run well, whatever that means for you, then there's something for you in the book.
John, where else can folks find you?
My website's Marathon.
Well, my main website is runningwritings.com.
That's a place to follow me.
Marathonexcellence.com has all the stuff for the book.
So like training plans and tools and all that.
Best way to keep in touch with me is my email newsletter, actually.
So runningwritings.com slash news.
That's the place to go.
Amazing.
We'll have links to all that in the show notes, so don't miss that.
John Davis, thank you.
Thank you.
What an episode.
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