261. ASK THE COACHES

1. Muscle cramps at 38k. How much sodium an hour should I be taking? Only drank water and 1000mg of sodium in gels

2. Best snacks during carboloading & traveling

3. My HR zones and different in training peaks vs Garmin: which is accurate?

https://help.trainingpeaks.com/hc/en-us/articles/360017420092-Zones-Calculator-Overview

4. What are your personal favorite gel brands to use?

https://www.cranksports.com/comparisons/gu-energy-gel/

5. How to ideally pace a 5k. I struggle to nail negative splits!

You may have heard the phrase the ‘reverse taper’ lately. It can be all the rage on social media to use the term, but what does it really mean? I personally don’t love to use this term because after a goal race you don’t literally reverse the taper. If you did literally reverse the taper, you would probably end up injured and burnt out. The idea behind the reverse taper is that you would gradually get back into training slowly. It is important to take time off after a goal race. Sometimes athletes will experience a ‘come down’ or ‘post race blues’ after a goal race because the endorphins all start to wear off and the building towards that big goal has stopped. It can feel like a strange time, but this is a great time to start planning for your future and not get lost in the post race blues

Intentional training is key to success. We all know this in regards to marathon training or half marathon training. We will try to find the perfect plan leading up to our goal race. We stick with it, we train with a purpose! We practiced our fueling. We hit the mileage. We run the workouts… But marathon training blocks are usually only 12-20 weeks long. What are we doing the other 40-32 weeks out of the calender year? Those weeks add up and they matter! A lot of athletes as we head into the offseason or winter months will throw in the towel on following a plan and instead just do what feels good or run when they want to. As a runner, you may find improvements doing this approach in the early years of your running journey, but if you are inching towards wanting to reach your potential in the sport, the law of diminishing returns will come in. You will be to be more intentional about how you train during the MAJORITY of the year not just the 16 week marathon block

With fall marathons occurring soon, we are right around the corner to offseason training. If you follow runners on social media you will notice a few trends… Either there are the athletes who take time off after their goals races and then there are those athletes who appear to continue to train and put in some serious mileage even after 2 back to back marathons this fall. Why do some people appear to never take an offseason? Can you get away with that? Is it helpful or harmful in the long run?

Today we are going to give you the guidelines to perfect your offseason and avoid any burn out or injuries in the future. We always take a little bit more of a conservative approach for this reason. Whenever we talk about any topic in running it’s important to remember out background is to help you stay in the sport of running for decades and reach your potential along the way.

Pacing properly in a race is key to actually racing to your potential and being able to run a time that is reflective of your fitness. The biggest mistake more athletes make is going out ‘too fast’ in a race. There can also be the mentality of holding back too much or starting too slow, but they are rare. We want to aim for our races to be even split or even a slight negative split. In recent years, we see more elites and pros positive splitting races and some even setting records doing so, but historically the way that MOST world records were set was from negative splits. This means starting a little slower than you finish. In a marathon it might look like a 3:59 marathon splitting 2:00 the first half then 1:59 the second half. It doesn’t have to be drastic. 

The biggest barrier to pacing is not necessarily knowing where your fitness is at going into the race, but it is more the execution of the pacing plan. We need to remember that you are NOT a robot. Pacers and pace bands are a great idea in theory but today we are doing to do a deeper dive as to why it may not be the best approach

256. HELPING WITH RACE NERVES

Worrying is suffering twice :) We have all been there. We all get nervous on race day to an extent. Some suffer from more race day anxiety than others. We care about our performances. We put a lot of time and energy into our training, and we hope that it all pays off on race day. It is good to care about your running, but we don’t want to be so nervous for a race that it makes us miserable! Today we are going to be chatting about ways to find zen and peace in the days and weeks leading up to race day!I like to find what my triggers are and things that really make the race day anxiety worse.

may happen, we can then ask ourselves ‘realistically, if this did happen, would you be okay?”

1.More confidence

2. Experience racing when things go wrong

A lot of our content on the podcast and social media is about running marathons. Naturally many people want to improve their running which is sometimes measured in running your ‘fastest times’. This podcast episode is going to be talking about all the ways you can run your fastest marathon time. We won’t limit this episode to just ‘training tips’ but we will also add ways you can select a fast course, fast shoes & fueling optimization to get the best performance you possibly can. Why would someone opt for the fast shoes and a fast course? If you have a specific time goal you want to run to qualify for Boston or something, this is going to help you shave the most time off. Remember: revel races are BQ races. Not everyone ‘agrees’ with that, but Boston is the one who makes the rules, not us!

As we get closer to fall races, more athletes are getting ready to run their fall races. As we get closer to these races, it is good to talk about one of the most important parts of your training plan: the taper! What exactly is the taper? It’s not exactly a time to kick back and relax/do nothing. The taper is going to give you a chance to peak for your race at the right time. If you do too short of a taper, you run the risk of feeling heavy legs on race day. If you do too long or extreme of a taper, you might feel out of the swing of things when the gun goes off on race day. We will be tapering by reducing the volume but keeping in some intensity so that your legs still have the bounce in them. During the taper, you may feel worse because your body is in recovery mode. This might cause athletes to freak out mentally, but don’t worry! This is all apart of the process.

We focus a lot on setting time based goals. Round numbers always sound and look cool, but what else is there when it comes to setting goals? Did you know there are other ways to measure progress?

Non-time based goals can be great for all athletes because they allow us to measure progress against

We always hear about time goals. I want to break 4 hours in the marathon. I think I can run X pace for this race… but what about non-time based goals? Are there other ways to set goals for your races? Is there a benefit to setting non-time based goals? 

Time goals are great for figuring out about what pace you want to run for the race, but what if you have a rocky day. You don’t want to feel like a failure if you don’t hit an arbitrary time goal.

YOU PUT IN SO MUCH WORK & already are a big winner! The training is the hardest part of things. You committed to something and worked hard to get there. Race day is a hard day but it is a cherry on top of the training cycle.

Setting Time Based Goals

Setting Non-Time Based Goals