Training for Trail Running: Muscular Endurance

00:00.33
Steve
Welcome to the uphill athlete podcast. Our mission is to elevate and inspire all mountain athletes through education and celebration. My name is Steve House and I will be your host today along with Alyssa Clark we’re super psyched today to bring you a very knowledgeable guest and one of our coaches Will Weidman, welcome Will.

00:21.92
Will
Hey great to be here talking with you about my favorite topic.

00:25.88
Steve
Will is an accomplished ultrarunner coach and a data scientist. He has over a hundred finishes of trail ultra in road races. He’s taken on and finished with high rankings in the hellbender 100 the utmb the tor des geants to name just a few. Will has coached athletes to over five hundred finishes at races all over the world with an incredible success rate of only 2 dnfs and both of those if I’m not mistaken were due to broken bones right? Well so I don’t know if that’s anything that counts against you.

01:04.53
Will
Unfortunately, yes yeah, falls that created some injuries but that’s right.

01:07.76
Steve
Ah, yeah, well thanks for coming on Will.

01:10.31
Alyssa
Yeah, yeah I would say those don’t really count I mean when broken bones when there’s you know bones sticking out or blood involved I mean some blood is okay I think that’s a pretty solid finish rate.

01:12.25
Will
My pleasure, great to be here.

01:28.11
Alyssa
Ah, but we are super excited to have you on the podcast. I personally love talking to you and I think this is going to be a blast. So first off I’d love to start with how you got into the sport of Ultra running and what your background is in that.

01:47.94
Will
It is wild. How many people got into this sport from 1 of 2 books born to run or ultra marathon man and I was the ultramarathon man generation so that inspired me to run my first ultra which was JFK in 2007.

01:56.72
Alyssa
I was to.

02:06.56
Will
Jfk has about sixteen miles on the Appalachian Trail and then a marathon on a flat canal path and then some road and I realized in training for the race and running the race that I didn’t love the flat and the road part as much but I really love to that trail part and being on the AT and really just went from there and signed up for the vermont hundred and been running mountains and trails since then.

02:32.60
Alyssa
That’s awesome and how did you get from racing to then coaching what led you on that path.

02:41.90
Will
So I had a lot of years between that. You know, after I ran my first couple ultras the first couple went really well I think partially because of beginner’s luck and then I had several years where I honestly struggled a lot. I had I think four hundred mile DNFs in a row and just struggled with training structure and nutrition and just trying to figure out things the hard way and eventually got to the other side of that after almost giving up the sport actually but then after a while I realized you know I’d pieced this together and wanted to help people. Avoid the mistakes that I made and was inspired to get into coaching and hopefully help others and help them have an easier path.

03:23.41
Alyssa
Nice was that ah 2019 is that the year that was really a struggle or.

03:31.23
Will
So I started coaching in. Ah yeah, 2019-2020. The years that were struggles were more 2009 to 2012 or 13 , yeah, then.

03:42.24
Alyssa
Gotcha. Okay.

03:45.79
Will
Had a you know number of years after that where got back on the rails and got back on track.

03:49.10
Alyssa
Nice. Steve.

03:56.17
Steve
So sorry I was off queue there. I know I discuss this often as an athlete but I just want to quickly talk about and actually define the term muscular endurance.

04:00.34
Alyssa
All good.

04:11.91
Steve
I’ll take a first crack at it and generally speaking muscular endurance is the capacity to do a lot of repeated exercise that requires a high degree of strength. Sometimes it’s called strength endurance. And muscular endurance training is sometimes called local muscular endurance training, sometimes called strength endurance. It has a bunch of other names that you might hear kicking around and the way I like to describe muscular endurance isn’t so much through sets of reps. But in terms of perceived exertion and what it feels like to do and you know the overall feeling when you’re doing muscular endurance training is that you know your legs in the case of you know what we’re we’re talking about are kind of working really hard. But you’re able to keep going and your lungs are not the limiting factor. So you know if I put that into visuals. It’s like I’m carrying a really heavy pack up a really steep hill and as I push with each leg one at a time. It’s like I can just get it out and get that step and get the next one and get the next one and kind of keep going at a pretty slow, pretty steady pace and that’s what it feels like I think a lot of denali climbers will know this because it’s exactly what pulling a sled up to only feels like it’s just it’s hard. It’s kind of slow. But it’s an incredible training tool and it’s been one of the pillars of the uphill athlete sort of approach to training. So it’s something that I use for years in my training for alpinism and you know it kind of comes out of you know, classical strength training. We have ways to do it in the gym, ways to do it outside and so on. How would you define that will?

06:23.76
Will
I would define it as the strength you can sustain over the event that you’re doing and I think we often forget how much any kind of running really is a strength and power type of sport. We think a lot about the aerobic aspect and the aerobic systems the lactate and vo2 max systems which are very important as well. But when you actually think about you’re landing on one leg with multiple times your body weight and absorbing that impact and you’re doing that tens of thousands of times and then you take that and you move it to a trail or a mountain where now you’re going thousands of meters, tens of thousands of feet up mountains and down mountains and you’re absorbing those forces and fighting gravity while you’re doing all that and it really is incredibly important when you think about muscular endurance and strength and power. You need to be able to sustain you through those.

07:20.24
Steve
Yeah, and I think that’s also really something that I want to highlight that where you said it’s very related to speed too like power speed is related to power and you know you can’t run fast if you’re not powerful.

07:37.74
Steve
So while Muscular endurance training is often thought of as sort of the slow grind excuse me slow grinding sort of movement that doesn’t mean that you are going to be running more slowly because of it actually quite the opposite. I think it’s actually a great way to you know. Mine with other things like tempo and and other work type workouts to build the neurological connections needed to do the fast paces you can actually gain a lot of speed through this kind of work.

08:12.83
Alyssa
Yeah I think that those are exceptional points. I actually wrote down what you said Will about the strength you could sustain over the event that you are doing. I think that’s a great way of defining it. I also tend to think about it with my athletes too if they come back and say the limiting factor was my legs or the limiting factor was my breath or like my heart rate that to me. It’s like oh limiting factor legs, muscular endurance. That’s what we need to do to limit aerobic fast. We need to keep working on your zone 1 zone 2, so that to me is I love when my athletes come back and give me just that really easy way to define it because then becomes so clear of like oh cool. That’s what we need to work on. So I’m always glad when I get that feedback because it lends itself to the direction. We need to go and I think that pretty much anyone climbing you know the 4-5 thousand foot climbs in ah Tor des Geants probably feels that to a certain extent. But Will you can use muscular endurance to help combat that and we brought you on because and I think I heard this really early on when Steve was talking about you that muscular endurance has played a huge part in your training and also your success in the longer mountainous events. So I’d love to hear what your background is and how you have personally used it in your training.

09:48.91
Will
Yeah I didn’t always use it in my training like I do now. So I found myself after about a dozen years in the sport in early twenty nineteen with a growing pile of injuries and felt like I was just breaking down over time. So I had lower back issues, right hip I had a small tear in my hamstring that wasn’t healing and I realized this wasn’t going to work. I had to figure out what was going on. I had to figure out how to make this sustainable if I wanted to keep doing what I love so much. And so that was early 2019 I was staring down being signed up. I got into utmb that year and it was hard to even run because of what was going on with my body so that’s where I started. You know I was able to find a really great pt to help start that path and read a book that you might have heard of called training for the uphill athlete and I had to start really from the basics. I mean I had to really just start from body weight work, core work, band work just to deal with some of the deficiencies that had built up from doing the sport for a long time and the imbalances and you know one side being stronger than the other so I had to really work on that and then I started to incorporate more weighted strength type exercises and yeah building that up over time.

11:08.51
Will
And then you know moving that towards things like deadlifts and squats and single leg work and just continuing to build over time and over the years and I was amazed just you know the impact it had just from feeling stronger feeling more resilience. These injuries are just fading away and I haven’t really had much of an injury to speak of and four and a half years since then and also just found I was getting better performances and getting faster as well. So in addition to just the injury prevention and feeling better I was actually you know even as I was getting older able to get faster through doing that because like you said Steve. It’s not just about being able to finish or the injury prevention. It is a way to actually improve performance too because you’re able to bring more power to what you’re doing so that was yeah that was a path that I went on and I’ve you know, just continued to have that be a core focus ever since then.

12:05.84
Alyssa
Excellent and I actually want to touch on a specific usage of muscular endurance for you with a race that everyone must think that we are sponsoring or just are personally obsessed with.

12:21.40
Alyssa
I know that you used Muscular endurance for tor des geants. I’d love to hear maybe what that buildup looked like for you and then how you felt it worked during the race.

12:33.32
Will
So I’ve been looking at tor des geants for the twelve years that race has been in existence since I first saw pictures of it in 2010. It’s just such an amazing, amazing course like an amazing challenge. But I had, you know, healthy respect for just how hard it was going to be . But those aren’t as familiar. It is and unless I think you know the stats on it are hard to pin down right? But I think it’s on the order of two hundred and twenty miles and about eighty five thousand feet of climbing and going into the year of training for my number one focus was I knew I just had to get myself as strong as possible. And focus first and foremost on muscular endurance which you might think erases that long you need to really focus more on you know the running side or of distance or mileage or vertical but I knew the reality of it was me so far beyond anything I’d done and the idea of four plus days in that terrain. What was really going to matter most at the end of it was going to be the strength side of things and muscular endurance just to prevent breakdown as much as possible. So I’d had that foundation. I’ve been doing it since early 2019 and really made that more of a core focus. You know multiple muscular endurance workouts a week trying to really progress what I was doing in those workouts. A lot that’s going to be single leg but a lot of you know, do lift squat type movements as well. One way I thought about that was in terms of relative to body weight you know again coming back to like it’s how much power you can put out relative to weight is trying to progress over time in terms of like a power to weight aspect and that was the core I mean I certainly did plenty of running and plenty of other training and plenty of vert over that but throughout that was what I focused most on.

14:20.40
Steve
You mentioned the strength some of these strength exercises did you use and progress like us particularly like all outdoors or did you rely more on the gym-based Muscular endurance approach or what’s your favorite? What’s your favorite flavor?

14:44.29
Will
I usually use the gym base which at this start was maybe not my favorite thing to do. But I’ve come around to actually enjoying it a lot more and you know, find it to be fun with the right structure around it.

14:58.88
Will
But I generally like doing the gym-based version I think for the outdoor one challenge I find and thinking from a coaching standpoint too is there’s a tendency often with a big distance race to just go out and want to do as long of a run as possible at a slow effort and then what’ll happen is over time. You’re going to get slow. You’re going to get less efficient. The running economy gets impacted so what I generally like to do is actually keep that outdoor work and try to focus on moving well and improving some of those other lactate and VO two max type systems and bring more intensity into those which is just harder to do with you know a weighted structure to it so we do a lot of you know hill tempos, hill intervals, hill strides and focus on that for the outdoor portion and then do a lot of the strength work several times a week in the gym. I would say you know even before tor. A pretty big impact like when I first did utmb in 2017 I remember I trained a lot. I had really high volume and height going into that race. But the last 3 downhills. My quads were just totally blown you know I was leaning on my trekking poles. You know, hobbling down at who knows how slow for those last 3 descents. My legs were just gone and then 2019 you know coming off of those injuries and incorporating the muscular endurance training I actually did less running volume that year but I didn’t have those same quads being shot. My legs weren’t gone. I was running to the end. I was about 3 hours faster that year with less running volume throughout the year and I think that you know is almost 100% the combination of the muscular endurance work and then putting more intensity in the trail running longer Run efforts.

16:49.35
Steve
Yeah, yeah, that’s very true, right? Like you can’t let that part of the technique go I mean people forget how much running is a technique.

17:07.12
Steve
That’s not the viewpoint that people start out with but when you’ve been doing it for a while or been coaching it for a while you realize just how incredibly important you know form and technique is and doing all those things like the tempos and the repeats and that stuff so that’s interesting. I also have to say I do think for most people it is easier to wrap their heads around doing muscular endurance in the gym. Because it’s just much easier to control the variables. That’s assuming that people have the background or have access to someone that they can do the workouts with that can teach them the correct form and I think in climbing which is more my which is obviously more my background. But as well in running you know neither of these sports have a real strong history with you know, hanging out in the gym and lifting weights. So that’s ah for a lot of us in all of these mountain sports. That’s a deficiency I think. How did you lean on this physical therapist you mentioned or how did you go about kind of solving that aspect of the problem as you worked your way into this.

18:32.99
Will
I would say having the physical therapist helped a lot just in terms of bringing some structure to it, some direction to it, having somebody actually look at form and technique in person I would recommend that everybody do that. Even just once have somebody who is an expert.

18:52.31
Will
Check out how you’re doing and what the form is like is that make such a big difference and so important to make sure you’re doing it Well so that ended up helping a lot and then yeah that got the path started where I you know started to feel more comfortable with it and was able to build up from there. But I think it’s a good place to yeah, try to get some help. Get that started if you don’t have as much of that extensive background and once you have that and can feel more comfortable and have some guidance on it I think it’s a lot easier to get that going.

19:21.60
Steve
How about you like did you learn this in Lacrosse or?

19:23.43
Alyssa
I think that yeah you know I was just actually having this conversation with one of my friends is that I grew up with a strength background. I lifted in high school and I lifted in college. Especially I went to a ski academy and we lifted. I mean we’re little nordic skiers but we lifted and then I did crew for a year and lacrosse kind of throughout and I actually think that the athletes that I see often excelling I think I mentioned this in the last podcast too. Our athletes have come from having spent time in the gym having developed a pretty strong basis especially in mountain running having sturdy legs makes a difference and having a strong core and having spent a lot of time building up those ligaments to be able to keep everything going in a good direction. Especially in trail running there’s so much ligament strain and stress that I think if you come from a strength background. That can be huge so much as like I look back and go yeah I would probably have liked to spend time on trail. I’m actually really thankful that I played field sports and was introduced to the gym at quite an early age and I think that the more we can help athletes change their mindset about gym work I also think it is like a lot of athletes I think especially when we’re doing the long zone 1 zone two work. Can get really defeated by the slowness of the efforts and so it’s like hey you can go to the gym and rage a little bit. You know here’s your chance to let it out and really go after it. So I think looking at it as an opportunity to cross the aerobic threshold barrier I think is a great way to approach it.

21:34.65
Will
Yeah, and Alyssa what’s also wild as you have people who won’t bat an eye at going out for a six eight hour run on a Saturday but you know 20 minutes of strength work is just oh I don’t have the time but you can get a lot of strength work done and not a lot of time I mean you go fifteen twenty minutes.

21:46.26
Alyssa
Totally.

21:53.38
Will
Hard strength work effort twice a week you can make a ton of progress doing that and you know you’re not even giving up much running even if that comes exclusively at the cost of running time I mean that’s a good tradeoff and in my mind and it’s not that hard to do.

22:06.58
Alyssa
Yeah, you know I think part of it goes to intimidation and what we’re used to. We’re going into a gym. We’re starting something quote unquote new is intimidating and especially as an adult I think. Probably like the threee of us have gotten pretty good at embracing that you have to be a beginner and learn things. I think to do what we do, you have to adopt that spirit. But I think that that can be really scary for other people and so I think going into a gym and you’ve always been a runner. It’s like well what if I’m bad at it. What if someone laughs at me or I don’t know what I’m doing especially if you do have a strong expertise in a certain area that can be a real deterrent.

22:55.49
Steve
Yeah I think that we’re battling human nature here a little bit which you know means ourselves which is where the real good stuff happens. But you know I’ll make an analogy out of the sport. Whenever I go Ski touring I notice the people who are really good on the downhill. They always have the heaviest setup right? And all the people that are really good on the uphill they always have the lightest setup and what they all need to do is switch gear because the people who are really good on the uphill they can’t ski for crap going down.

23:24.16
Alyssa
This.

23:31.38
Steve
Right? So they actually need stiff boots and fat skis for the way down. They’re the ones that need it but they’re like showing up at the trailhead on a powder day with like their you know sixty centimeter with underfoot race skis with you know. It’s completely backwards and we all are like that like we know if you’re a runner and you got into it because you love to run. Yeah, you don’t bat an eye about the Sunday long run but you know. If you’re not used to going to the gym then that’s hard and I think that people who are used and then we’ve all seen this as coaches people who are used to going into the gym. They just actually love going to the gym. They love lifting weights and it’s sometimes really hard to get them to go out and do aerobic work. You know, there’s just tap into any gym culture and they’ll talk about you know they’re always downplaying and making fun of quote unquote cardio and that kind of stuff right? And it’s just like yeah well you guys are just doing you. People are just doing what you like to do and then there is nothing wrong with that of course. But like if we’re training and we’re trying to pull together. Best practices to get better at something like running two hundred miles or running a race with 85000 vertical feet I mean that’s just insane right? Then you know you are actually right? Yeah surprise surprise you have to be.

24:54.33
Steve
Really strong to be able to do that. You know that’s ah it’s a lot of workload.

25:01.39
Will
Yeah, and you touched on this Steve but there’s an aspect of working on what is your what is your weakness right? What are the things that you’re not as good at people can’t see me on the podcast but I am pretty thin right? So I have 50000 plus miles of trail running on my legs.

25:07.78
Steve
Yep.

25:19.21
Will
I got the running part like I need help and my weakness is the strength part. So that’s what I have to make sure I don’t forget and make sure I focus on and I love running on the trails. But if that time in the gym will make me be able to do this sport for a lot longer and 2, get me to the finish line and 3, maybe even get me there faster like that’s a great tradeoff.

25:41.19
Alyssa
Definitely I also want to touch on this idea that when you’re running, you’re kind of just purely running because as we’re getting into races like a utmb like a tor des geants, a moab. We see ah which is an incredible thing and I think is a good direction especially as we get more and more people with less overall mountain experience. There’s required gear and so when you are out on these courses. You’re not just carrying your water and some snacks. It’s a whole lot more involved than that and so I was reflecting on when I did moab two forty and I would guess that my pack was anywhere from 10 to 15 pounds because you’ve got twenty five miles upwards between aid stations. You have unpredictable weather and so well what are your thoughts on muscular endurance being beneficial for these trail runners who aren’t carrying quote unquote weight whereas maybe that’s not the case.

26:55.33
Will
It’s true more and more races are requiring more and more gear and I think there’s a lot of good reason for that and we could certainly debate it. But for safety then the reality is you have to carry more things with you and that is a big difference right? Like you said, if you’re talking about dozens or 100 hundred plus miles and you’re taking that weight and you have to carry that up all these mountains that does take a lot more strength so I do think from a standpoint of thinking about the strength you need to do that and also practicing that in some of your runs too. You know you may not want to do it all the time. But take that set of required gear and take that up your local hill and practice with that and make sure that works and know how that feels going into it and you know there’s also interesting things like you know when I thought back on tor there was probably seventy plus hours where I was using trekking poles. And I was hauling on those things for all I was worth to try to save my legs as much as that possibly could and then you think about the core and upper body strength. You need to be putting force into trekking poles for that long and yes I was certainly doing muscular endurance work. But I also look back. I don’t have a climbing background but my older son started climbing a couple years ago and I just found myself in the climbing gym and I was there so I was going to climb and doing more of it and I think that was actually hugely helpful just to have that upper body strength as well to be able to you know, use poles and help take some of the pressure off the legs for that kind of terrain. So yeah, you have to think about the race you’re doing, the weight, the gear, are you using poles or not because that all comes in and if you if you’re not planning for that ahead of time. It’s going to be really hard the day of.

28:42.83
Steve
Yeah I know we didn’t intend to talk about this but one of the things that I think is beneficial for runners that I’ve coached that have ah that they use skiing as their opposite sport. For those that live in that environment like because you know again like you can ski tour. It’s just enough similar and it’s just enough different that I think there’s really a lot of advantages to you know we see Killian and Emilie and you know there’s a lot of people out there that are doing that to great effect and I don’t think that’s an accident. You know that they’re not like I don’t know road cycling the winner they’re ski touring, they’re not cross country skiing. They’re not like doing there’s a lot of things you can do in the winter not just running. You’re around either because I think that it’s good to give your body a little bit of a break and by switching things up, you know and it’s also certainly I used to do a lot of these upper body ME workouts. Like double polling on cross- country skis. You know, similar kind of thing. You just find that piece of track that just had a slight uphill that was long enough and you know you can do a pretty good ME workout just double pulling on a slow pair of cross-country skis.

30:09.78
Steve
And you know there’s a lot of things that you can do in the off-season as strength training. But it’s still I’m outdoors I’m on the snow I’m in the mountains like it doesn’t feel like work then right like there are a lot of ways to do it and I want to go back to the different types and I want to not pass over the outdoor version of muscular endurance because you know it doesn’t work for everybody especially urban dwellers or urban dwellers are going to have a hard time doing that unless they you know like the staircase at their local Sears tower or something but you know doing those is at least going outside and being on a trail or being on a steep road or like on a something when you’re doing those workouts have you either of you spent much time with ah outdoor muscular endurance.

31:05.55
Will
And see that you it might be helpful just to define that too for the audience and so that would be having weight that you’re carrying and then carrying weight up up a you know steep incline right and being able to do that.

31:19.62
Steve
Yeah I think the easiest way for a runner to understand it is to it’s like ah a weighted zone three interval workout like if you know zone 3 zone 4 intervals of long duration like you know 45 minutes depending and you know pretty heavy weight heavy enough that you can’t just like bound up. You know you can’t walk fast up the hill like you’re having to push hard through your legs and you’re probably wanting to wear boots to protect your feet and ankles. Probably using ski poles because you want that upper body. A fact you want to be as you said well sort of pull on those for all your worth and that’s part of the workout because that’s what you are doing on these big races. I mean you know you I don’t think anybody finishes tor without ski poles right? Just can’t do it probably.

32:16.85
Alyssa
Yeah I think pretty much everyone is using trekking poles. So you know I haven’t done I’ve witnessed muscular endurance because my husband follows the Eiger plan and I’ve seen him go up with 50 pounds on his back and it looks incredibly painful. But I’ve done I guess where I kind of do it is that I do ski tour in the winter and so I’ll often have a pretty heavy pack I ski tour in Lake tahoe. So I always have powder skis on my feet.

32:53.90
Alyssa
That’s a pretty big strength workout and I think that actually prepares me really well for the mountains as you were saying Steve, so not explicitly the muscular endurance work. But through the change of seasons that offseason work is quite muscularly challenging for me and so it’s not the exact definition and I would encourage people to do Muscular Endurance workouts I do think when I go back to Tor I will incorporate those. So yeah, so that’s kind of my short and long answer of yes and no.

33:40.38
Steve
Yeah, no I think it’s a great tool and one of the reasons that I think that like what you’re saying going skiing with heavy skis or whatever. Works because one of the things we have to remember is Muscular Endurance is one of our most trainable qualities as athletes. So there’s a lot of ways to do it the ways we’d lay out and the uphill athlete books and and the training plans and so on you know they’re structured and they’re progressive and you know we’re trying to. You know we’re trying to make it just a little bit. We’re trying to you know, utilize the training effect to continuously improve throughout a season or to get ready to peak for a race. So that can be maybe daunting but I would just encourage people to, you know, give it like eight weeks and tell me and you know tell me if it doesn’t make a massive difference There’s just so many stories I know of people who have tried this for the first time and are just kind of blown away and sometimes it happens you know I was telling you about this just the other day yesterday Alyssa in a separate conversation. There was a guy Neil Beidelman and Neil’s an acquaintance of mine and he’s a friend of a guy that I coached and I was over in aspen and went for a ski tour with them and Neil had just come back from Denali and had climbed Denali for the first time and I don’t know a couple of decades and he’s about your size Will like he’s got a runner build. He’s shorter than you are actually by a good number. He’s shorter than I am but he’s very small boned and he’s I don’t know how many times he’s done hardrock. He’s done hard rock like 20 times or something because he’s one of the you know og hard rock guys and he was saying like man I just can’t believe ever since I’ve been on Denali you know I just I feel so strong and I’m so fast that and my runs are going so well and he said I think it’s the altitude and then I started asking him about it and they were only on the mountain for eleven days and I was like I don’t think it’s the altitude because the altitude would be gone by now. I think it’s dragging the sled for eleven days or nine days because you basically did nine days of muscular endurance workout. And now it’s two months since you’ve been back from Denali and you’re still feeling the effects. That’s not altitude, that’s strength. That’s ME and so you know there’s so many ways to do this kind of work that can get you really significant results, intentional or not and I think that you know you only kind of have to be creative enough to understand the basic principles and creative enough to kind of figure out a fun way to do it that works for you.

36:44.55
Will
Yeah, and as you talk through Steve you know there’s a way that I think for me and for athletes I coach there’s an aspect of getting some of a muscular endurance workout as part of long runs that I’m realizing as we talk here so for me, you know the the bread and butter when I can is to try to get to the shenandoah national park. That’s where I do a lot of my training and when I’m training for a race like a utmb or a tor. What I found really effective is after a short warmup during the long run. Do a high zone three effort on the big climb at the beginning of the long run. So it might be 15 in a warm up two thousand foot, six hundred meter steep climb at the start of that long run at a you know pretty high intensity effort. And the reality is I actually have quite a bit of weight and for that because I’m going out for a long time in the mountains I have a ton of water on me I have gear so it’s probably at least 15 pounds there and then I think what that’s doing is it’s probably getting some of that muscular endurance benefit from pushing hard up that climb that sustained long climb I also really like how that structure of putting that really hard effort at the start of a long run makes a 4 hour long run actually feel like a seven or eight hour long run so you can get a lot of benefit with less pounding on the body. So I think that’s a maybe a yes and no like you said lets say you know it’s somewhat in that muscular endurance realm of getting some of that but it makes sense and you know you’re just building a lot of that power and strength and doing it.

38:13.34
Alyssa
Yeah, so many thoughts but I guess the first one is that I think that often as I’ll say mountain ultrarunners because I think that’s how it fits is when we go out in the long run. We don’t have an aid station. So we’re carrying all of our aid. Much at a much higher weight than we usually would in a race and so right there you have quite a bit more weight than you’re used to. So I think that’s exactly it will with that component be the other thing I would say Steve is thinking about your example with the hard rock is that it’s such low hanging fruit for all of us trail runners. You know we I think that we struggle and push for such marginal gains and here’s this thing where it’s like oh that’s such that could be such a huge benefit and such a huge boost where we’re trying to get you know a second or 2 off of this interval or you know just like these marginal gains here’s something that why not give it a shot because it could really impact how you can do it and it’s something that I think runners are still kind of trying to grasp, but truly the difference is and I talk about this a lot. There is such a difference between walking a 15 minute and a 20 minute mile especially at the end of the race I mean Will you pointed it out right off the bat with your utmb finished that the first year you were barely able to make it down the hills leaning on hiking polls and then you know just be able to run downhills which is not a cardiovascular thing at all. It is a muscle thing that allows you to increase time by 3 ah or decrease time by 3 hours like that’s huge yeah sorry that was my tangent.

40:05.80
Will
See right.

40:14.59
Will
Yeah and with less running volume that year so you know you can go crazy and try to just pour on volume or you can be smart about where you put in your strength work and there’s just a huge benefit from it. But I agree it’s a lot of low hanging fruit and falls in the you know where are places you can train smarter or not harder and I think that’s you know for people who aren’t doing it today. There’s just such big gains to be made there.

40:40.14
Steve
I want to call out one important thing that you mentioned that I want to just emphasize because it’s worth emphasizing that you’re doing this and this style piece of the long run at the beginning because it’s really important for people to understand that you can’t do that at the end. And the reason is for strength training to be effective. You need to be rested enough to be able to activate the largest motor units in the muscles and that’s hard right? Like it’s that’s why you have to grimace and groan so much when you’re trying to lift something heavy. It’s hard. It takes a lot of intention. A lot of focus a lot of like to activate those big motor units and you just can’t do that when you’re already tired so you know this is a pretty key piece. To do what you said well and I think that this is one of the things that I see people making this mistake all the time you know on training lines is like oh I sprinted the last fifteen minutes I’m like you know that actually didn’t help you. Maybe if you’d done the warm up and then sprinted a little bit that might have helped you but you don’t want to do that the other way around and it’s just understanding these little bits. This is kind of what uphill athletes are all about right? Like these little bits of knowledge can really make a huge difference in.

42:09.30
Steve
You know how you can perform if you just understand these basic kind of ideas.

42:17.70
Alyssa
Yeah, absolutely and I guess going to that we talk about muscular endurance benefiting uphill but how does it benefit long downhills because especially when you’re getting into the alps when you’re getting into these longer Mountain Races you can be descending for hours at a time and that takes a huge toll. Ah, and so we’ve talked about how downhills are often overlooked but Will or Steve I mean how do you see muscular endurance helping with these long downhills in it. And Will is that something you saw in Tor that you were able to do better because of it.

43:00.80
Will
I think it’s huge for downhills. I mean the muscular endurance work will make you faster on the uphills as well. But one thing I tell people who have a really big challenge right? It’s a race that’s outside their comfort zone. They think a lot about the uphills. Because they sound scary right? Climbing five thousand feet which is but you know there’s a reality of if you’re getting tired and you’re going uphill, you’ll be okay, right? You’ll go a little slower but you’re going to keep moving and there’s also an interesting reality with these races when you’re at the top of the mountain. You can’t really drop from the race like. You’re up there right? You kind of have to come down. The challenge is when you come down these painful long downhills and then you hit the valley and then you see your crew and then you see your car and then you have all the food there and there’s a pizza shop open. That’s where the temptation is going to hit so I do think Muscular endurance part to be able to withstand the downhills because the reality of these events is you can’t really do anything approaching the event in training and that’s just the nature of the beast with these so you have to find other ways to be able to get that eccentric contraction loading to be able to prepare. Muscles for what’s going to happen. Whether it is, mile ninety going down that 20% grade or mile 170 going down that 20% grade. So I think it makes a big difference in just withstanding it and also being able to run it faster too, like if your legs actually work.

44:28.50
Will
Like my legs did not work. The first time utmb when they actually do work. You can go so much faster on those downhills but that’s really probably the most important thing in my mind to prepare for and I always try to orient people on work backwards from how you survive the downhill. You’ll get there with the uphill, but you have to really pay more attention on the downs.

44:47.88
Steve
Then I would also say that that’s with the outdoor version when you’re carrying the heavy pack a lot of times people use rocks that they pick up at the bottom of the hill or water or something like that then dump them. To have less weight going down and you know for people with a good strength basis and our injury free I encourage them not to dump all the weight. Maybe some of it. You know it’s a case by case but to really try to carry some of that weight down, not just go like full you know body weight only going down. And then I would also say that’s the other advantage to doing this in the gym because you get that eccentric contraction. You have to step off the box. You have to you know do the Bulgarian squat up and down like all those whatever the exercise is. You’re lifting the weight up and you’re putting it down and I think that is super important and in kind of training that both all that full capacity of the muscle full range.

45:57.63
Alyssa
Yeah, and I was actually just speaking this morning with an athlete about downhills. I think we’re programmed the Uphill is the hard part and the downhill is the reward or the recovery.

46:14.56
Alyssa
And actually if we can shift our mindset, especially if you are very good at going uphill, thinking about the downhill is something that requires focus and attention. Ah that we can really actually change the perceptions of downhills and think of them as equally if not more important to be mentally prepared. Mentally strategizing rather than just huh I made it up the hill now I can just you know recover or I can just kind of take the gas pedal off or not think about it because especially I mean running aside but in Mountain Sports I’m sure Steve you can attest to this that when you get to the top of the mountain thought. Ah, the hardest part is still ahead of you of getting back down and so the more that we can frame the way we think about downhill as not so much just this turn the brain off kind of get down it anyway. But rather a tool in a place where you can be. The best version of yourself that you can strengthen yourself on I think that will really benefit quite a lot of people.

47:20.00
Will
Yeah, sinking back to , you know I worked my way to utmb and tor by doing some other races in the alps just because it was such a different experience in different terrain and one of the first ones I did was the trail of verbier course in Switzerland. They’ve changed a little bit but I remember doing that I think it was twenty fifteen and the first big descent. You descended four thousand plus feet in two miles. Basically I remember getting down that descent and you know I was sixteen miles into the race and my legs were just gone just cooked from that descent and that’s when I realized like okay, that’s what I need to actually really train for and focus on and prepare for and you know tor you have that as well. I remember one descent in the night where you go down two thousand feet of scree in one mile. You know just how you get ready for that physically and mentally and be able to prepare for it. So I do think I mean obviously the gym work is huge with that because it’s a way to get that eccentric contraction. That’s just hard to do otherwise and there’s some risk to the downhill steep. You know technical trail training so you do need to manage that risk but including that some intentional efforts towards the end. You’re approaching your race and actually pushing the downs more and doing some of the repeats on some of the steeper parts and both from a building up the muscles to withstand that. But also the technique aspect of it too and being able to get your turnover faster and your body more forward and looking ahead like that’s that’s huge and it’s definitely something that’s important to practice and make as much or more than the uphill.

49:01.48
Steve
So you two have each completed these massive two hundred plus mile races you know you’ve touched on a couple times outside of the ups and the downs. What is it about running that far that if anything that requires a greater strength base and why.

49:26.50
Alyssa
Will do you want to go or do you want me to start ? Okay, yeah, so I think the first thing I’ve touched on is that truly from an upper body and a core standpoint. You’re just carrying a lot more weight in your pack and that takes a huge toll. I just remember finishing Moab and my upper body was so tired. And if you’re going to use poles and I didn’t use poles that much in Moab but for certain sections and so really having a strong upper body and core is just so crucial.

50:02.18
Alyssa
Also having a strong core truly helps going Uphills. I think about this a lot when I’m getting tired I pull from my core rather than kind of dragging along and that to me makes a huge difference. And I think you’re just dealing with just so much more fatigue. Whether it’s mental fatigue or physical fatigue, the stronger you are the longer you’re able to combat that fatigue level and also you know you’re dealing with muscle wasting you’re dealing with huge calorie deficiency and so the stronger you can go into it. And kind of combat that I think it’s probably quite similar to an expedition where you know you’re going to come out of it lighter and muscle wasted but the stronger you are going into it. The better off you will end up.

50:52.96
Steve
Yeah, yeah.

50:56.55
Will
I would agree with all that when I was at tor you know they divide it into seven 50k sections basically and between each of those. There’s a life base where usually you’ll stop longer and there’s more more things around. I remember being in the last life base and it was nighttime. And looking around and realizing just the amount of muscular damage that happened over the course of this race and everybody’s just covered in like kt tape and they have they’re just yeah, everybody’s just held together by duct tape at that point basically because you’re just fighting this muscle breakdown and you can train for that from a running standpoint I mean you’re going so much longer with so much more up and down vert than you can train for so that’s really I think the most important aspect to try to prepare for and you know for my race I took a pretty nasty fall at mile hundred and twenty five or so down this just ugly descent. This you know, Rocky Gully steep descent that was also really wet even though it hadn’t been raining so I don’t know why but I fell on this thing and had to really twist myself to keep from going down and going over this ledge basically and I think I strained my calf at that point in some way and so that was mile hundred and twenty five and it didn’t really bother me that much for the next fifty or so miles and then it became a much bigger issue that you know was challenging towards the end.

52:27.50
Will
But I think the extent of the muscular endurance focus I did before I mean that’s what really got me through I had enough other strength enough other muscle groups to pull on that I could you know, keep forward progress basically and get through it I think if I didn’t have that I don’t think it would have made it. I think you know took all the strength that I had to overcome and amazing that I didn’t really become that significant for so long too. I think that you know is also the benefit of some of the strength work and looking around like I said most everybody seemed to have something similar. You know, a race that long and that hard you’re just going to do a lot of muscular damage and need all the strength you can get to get through it.

53:09.53
Steve
Yeah I think that’s so true I mean a different sport and a different time. You know when in 2010 when I had my bad accident I fell eighty feet and slammed into the wall. Not a ledge or would have been a different result but I slammed back into the wall and I was badly badly injured but I survived and I’m convinced because I was so strong like I was at the end of a big training block. Just in the specific period I was getting ready to go to k2 and I was in by far the best shape of my life and I’m sure that that’s what saved me is just how strong I was and you know we used to joke kind of joke about it. Trying to make ourselves hard to kill that was ah that was sort of the joke we would use about what that’s what we were training for. We were trying to make ourselves hard to kill and you know then it shifted as we learned more that was back in the beginning when we didn’t know what we were doing but I still think these muscular endurance workouts whether they’re done in a gym or carrying a heavy pack or however, you do them. They definitely have that feeling where you come out of them. You feel like you get stronger. I think you know I do want to highlight this. Because I do think it’s a real risk that they are a little addictive because you do feel so much stronger. It’s easy to overdo it and when I’m coaching athletes I really err on the side of recovery with them because they’ll be. People want to do them. You know every three days or something I’m like no no, no, you know you might feel better, but you’re not actually recovered yet like we need to give you plenty of time to like fully fully be into the training effects and of the recovery and before we do this big of a load again, especially the big big ones that are taking an hour of ah you know, accumulating an hour at these kind of zone 3 heart rates with high high loads I mean they’re really debilitating I mean you know you’ll be exhausted. I remember doing these and like literally just going home. And eating and going to sleep. But you know I was just a full-time athlete. So I could have that luxury. But if you don’t then it’s also you got to consider all the other things you’re going to have to do that day and how that is going to affect your recovery.

55:47.80
Steve
And you know people need to be very respectful with these workouts and you know watch themselves and not overdo it because it’s also a way to get overtrained and get injured and and I think it can be addictive, especially when you’re doing them for the first season or so and you’re just like wow this look I feel this pop in my leg that feels so good. I want more of that like crack you just want more.

56:17.21
Alyssa
Yeah I think that’s ah I guess a way to translate it to running is I think when people discover speedwork. Ah they tend to go I’ll just do a bunch of speedwork and look at how much faster I’m going in that initial curve flattens out very quickly and also leads to injury. But oh that’s great Steve I think there could be no better advocating for doing strength work than what you just said.

56:48.13
Steve
Well I mean Will’s story like you know what you said? Well like you know this goes back to the value of strength because one of the things that we didn’t talk about that I also think is worth mentioning. And this is more of a general strength thing if you know your muscles fatigue and you know your muscles are generally what are holding you know besides the ligaments that the muscles are holding the joints together especially badly designed joints like our knees. Ah, you know and so when you lose that strength reserve and you do so and you do go down or you do slide or you slip out or whatever and you get into some funky position. You know that’s where you can get hurt if you don’t have enough strength reserves to kind of keep the joints in alignment and I think that’s like you know a key to longevity and in these sports is to stay strong.

57:51.28
Will
Yeah, when that happened at tor and I was in the depths of you know, just being sleep deprived and struggling with that calf during the race still I was starting to beat myself up of I should have more strength because maybe then right, this wouldn’t have happened. Once I got removed from the race and you know I was able to think rationally again after some sleep and many many calories I realized like no, is there strength that made it so you could go ninety five miles on a compromised body like that’s because of the strength It’s not a deficiency of it.

58:24.84
Steve
Which is amazing. You ran a hundred miles around a pulled calf like I mean essentially right like that’s incredible that and what the body can do.

58:33.10
Alyssa
And probably one of the hardest hundred miles you could run. I mean that the insane thing about tor is like you take any section you’re like that would be one of the hardest 50ks. Or hundred milers in the US if you just did that one part.

58:53.12
Will
Yeah to be clear I don’t recommend it and I would much rather it did not happen and when I go back hopefully someday I will go a lot slower in that descent. So I won’t fall again.

59:03.26
Alyssa
And the funny part is Will brought this up before we started recording and I knew exactly what section he was talking about and agree. It is hellish to say the least but there is a giant pot of polenta at the bottom so that is I mean it’s literally a cauldron of Polenta. So that’s a pretty big bonus.

59:23.70
Will
I joke with my crew that that section got 0 stars. The 0 star rating.

59:25.50
Steve
That’s pretty good in time.

59:33.93
Steve
I think we should instigate negative stars honestly for all of these things like climbing routes and all this. There are certain things. It’s just like that’s like negative five star. You know it could just be like plus one to plus 5 or you know minus one to minus five because things seem to be so bad. They should get a minus five.

59:54.22
Alyssa
So I’ve started. I don’t know when I started thinking about this but I call it type 3 fun where it’s like you know type one fun blah blah type two fun I think the type 3 fun as I did not enjoy doing, did not enjoy afterwards, was not a good story, I deeply regret. Not deeply regret but like don’t look back on it fondly and so I think that yeah negative stars are type 3 fun. So yes I think that it’s like I would not recommend it.

01:00:16.41
Steve
Like negative stars.

01:00:21.30
Will
Yep.

01:00:28.68
Alyssa
It’s like the negative reviews of the national parks where they’re like there was a bear on the side of the trail. What was it doing there? It’s like there are bears in Yosemite, shocking. Yeah , awesome. Well this has been a great episode.

01:00:37.23
Steve
Yeah, they live there. You know.

01:00:47.75
Alyssa
Hopefully if you were not convinced that muscular endurance with caution is a great tool for trail running then I’m not sure what else we can do so anything you two would like to touch on before we wrap up.

01:01:05.80
Steve
Now a great conversation Will and Alyssa. Thanks for putting it all together.

01:01:13.49
Will
Yeah, it was fun. Thank you both.

01:01:15.27
Alyssa
Awesome! Thank you? Well thank you for listening to the uphill athlete podcast if you can rate review subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. That’s really helpful to us and Steve.

01:01:32.60
Steve
It’s not just one but a community together. We are uphill athlete.