Sweat Elite Podcast

"I'll never forget one race, one of my best 5km races was last year at Payton Jordan (2019) and that was when I was really at the height of my mindfulness practise. I was meditating every day - I would wake up and meditate for 10 minutes, I was so aware of what I was doing and how I was feeling throughout the day through mindfulness. I would meditate at night. There was so many moments in that race where I wanted to give up, I was not in shape to run 13:22 for 5km that day, hell no! But I kept giving myself opportunities. I kept giving myself opportunities to keep pushing. Every moment I wanted to give up and let off the pace and let that gap open up I just gave myself one more step, I gave myself one more breath, and I just kept going and going. I kept telling myself that this pain that I'm going through, it's okay, it's not something that I possess, it's just something that's there. It's not a part of me, it's just something that is present currently and that was the huge breakthrough for me. I was like "Holy shit, if I can learn to continue to breath through things, I can push myself to a whole new pain tolerance and to a whole new place that I never knew I could get to before."

Sam Parsons (Tinman Elite) is back on the Sweat Elite Podcast to discuss everything mindfulness with Sweat Elite's Tait Hearps.

"You can achieve these certain states of being through running. Running can be such a meditative endeavour. It can be a way to free yourself from darkness, anxiety, stress, whatever it may be. Running is an escape for a lot of people. That hour that you head out your door can be the best hour of your day. It can be the one hour where you're not stressing about the test you have the take, or the work that you didn't do or whatever might be coming up. Learning to take moments in your day just to breathe. I always had this huge misconception with it."

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This episode is a conversation with Lee Troop - the coach of USA Marathoner Jake Riley who has been selected for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games and will toe the line in a little over four months.

Lee Troop was a superstar athlete himself, posting personal bests of 13:14 for 5000m, 27:51 for 10000m, 1:01:00 for the Half Marathon and 2:09:49 for the Marathon between 1999 and 2003, well before the carbon fibre plates entered the scene.

Lee shares his and Jake's challenges over the last 12 months - a 12 month delay on competing at the Olympics and an injury that has side-lined Jake recently that he's hoping he can bounce back from fast. Lee also shares some of the plans moving forward.

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In Part 2 of our interview with Alex Hutchinson we discuss:

* Ways to diminish your perception of effort and therefore enhance your performance.
* Why self-belief and positive self-talk can be so significant when trying to push to your limits.
* Alex’s involvement with Nike’s Breaking2 Project.
* Where does technology fit into all of this?
* Where Alex sees marathoning in the future.

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Alex Hutchinson is a Canadian journalist, Cambridge University trained physicist and ex-national level runner. He is also the author of a fantastic book called Endure – Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. The book is the product of a decade-long quest to explore the limits of human endurance, collating the experience and data of hundreds of athletes, explorers, scientists and experts in the field.

In our conversation Alex shares some of the findings from his work exploring the factors that determine the limits of endurance, as well as how we can do our upmost to push beyond the barriers that our minds and our mounting sense of effort can begin to erect when we are approaching our limits.

“The essence of pushing your limits in Endurance sports is learning to override that instinct so that you can hold your finger a little closer to the flame – and keep it there, not for seconds, but for minutes or even hours.”

Some of the topics we cover in Part 1 of our conversation include: * The Central Governor Theory and why our brain stops us from going over the edge. * The trainability of pain tolerance and why embracing discomfort is integral to endurance performance. * Fallacies around hydration and what the science says. * Nutrition – why low-carb high-fat diets have been promoted so heavily in the world of ultra-endurance, why glucose is still the fuel of choice for the top marathon runners, why making binary categories like I’ve just done is completely wrong when discussing fuelling a run with carbs/fat.

In Part 2 (coming next week), some of the topics discussed include: * Ways to diminish your perception of effort and therefore enhance your performance. * Why self-belief and positive self-talk can be so significant when trying to push to your limits. * Alex’s involvement with Nike’s Breaking2 Project.
* Where does technology fit into all of this? Where does Alex see marathoning in the future?

Three chapters read aloud from the book Eliud Kipchoge - History's fastest marathoner: An insight into the Kenyan life that shapes legends.

Detailing the experience of spending several weeks immersed in Kenya’s rich running culture – an incubator of running’s elite – and the most striking components of Eliud’s training, the book explores the ascetic devotion of this group of men and the aspects of Eliud’s life that have supported and propelled him to reach such vertiginous heights.

The book is available on Amazon.

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German Silva is a retired Mexican Olympic distance runner, winner of the 1994 and 1995 New York City Marathon and the Mexican half marathon record holder (60:28).

Silva made a name for himself after his dramatic 1994 New York City Marathon victory. With under a mile remaining, Silva was running stride for stride with co-leader and training partner Benjamin Paredes. As the pair ran through Central Park, the camera car veered right, pulling off the course and Silva followed. Silva calmly turned around when he realised his mistake, mustering the strength to regain the pace he had been setting, and set about reeling in the twelve second handicap he had just given himself. Silva timed his surge perfectly and passed Paredes with only about 100m remaining to claim his first World Major Marathon victory. This win changed a lot of things for German, it also earned him the moniker ‘Wrong Way Silva’.

In this episode we share a conversation Sweat Elite's Tait Hearps has with German Silva covering:

* German’s journey into athletics as a young boy growing up in rural Mexico
* Early racing (running his debut marathon in preparation for a 10,000m)
* Many anecdotes from his time as a junior
* Transitioning to the marathon distance
* Wrong Way! How this mistake changed his career
* Dealing with other mishaps, what went wrong before the Atlanta Olympic Marathon
* Training at very high altitude, including on 4680m Nevado de Toluca
* Training sessions he used to run
* How he manipulated altitude to prepare for different races
* The conditions he and his training partners used to train in
* Why Mexicans were so much more dominant on the roads then than they are now.

Read: German Silva – The Wrong Way to the Top https://bit.ly/2ZA2F9Y.

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Part 2 of our interview with ultrarunning and skyrunning extraordinaire Kilian Jornet. Sweat Elite's Head of Journalism Tait Hearps chats with Kilian Jornet about:
* Training – what a week of training looks like for him and how he has been changing training over time
* Nutrition – how he fuels his adventures
* Self-experimentation and the importance of exploring your own limits, including a few experiments that some might just call crazy
* What he has learned from his mentors
* Journaling training and following progress
* Altitude training and a lot more

Continued reading: Kilian Jornet – Exploring The Limits Of Human Potential, Above The Clouds www.sweatelite.co/kilian-jornet-exploring-the-limits-of-human-potential-above-the-clouds/

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Some people defy what we can conceive to be within the realm of possibility. Some manage to do it again and again.

A hero to many, one of the most accomplished and inspiring athletes in the world, a man with a beautiful message. Kilian Jornet has been an enigma since he took the world of mountain sports in the late 2000’s (I can’t just say mountain running because he also was winning world championships in ski mountaineering and taking on FKT expeditions).

Having the opportunity to sit down with an idol was such a privilege, and Kilian did not disappoint. From his home in Norway, Kilian generously gave a few hours of his time to discuss his adventures, the training that powers these incredible feats, and what is driving him. Kilian is a long-time subscriber of Sweat Elite and he was happy to delve into the specifics of what his training looks like (more of that in Part 2). He is charming and beautifully expressive, with a humility that belies his jaw-dropping list of achievements.

This is Part 1 of the interview with Kilian Jornet. Part 2 will be released next week.

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New articles on the Sweat Elite website:

Kilian Jornet – Exploring The Limits Of Human Potential, Above The Clouds: https://bit.ly/2YTuA4m

Emil Zatopek – How Grit, Innovation, And Sportsmanship Created A Legend: https://bit.ly/3boXITK

Taking To The Trails – How It Will Help You Be A Better Runner: https://bit.ly/2LkLqBh

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A selection of three of the most popular articles read aloud from the Sweat Elite website focused on the elite Japanese running scene.

In the marathon distance, Japan comes in third place behind Kenya and Ethiopia when looking at the number of athletes in the top thousand marathon times in history. Japan has over one-hundred athletes that have run sub-2:10 in the marathon. Compare this to the USA: with a population nearing triple that of Japan – and massive infrastructure surrounding their collegiate athletics system – the States have only twenty athletes that have run sub-2:10 (thirteen if you exclude record-ineligible Boston).

Our interest piqued, we decided to plunge headfirst into the Japanese running scene and investigate what was going on.

(02:07) The Perplexing Depth Of Talent In Japanese Running Part 1 https://bit.ly/3foKZDN | (15:15) The Perplexing Depth Of Talent In Japanese Running Part 2 https://bit.ly/2YK97L4  | (24:58) Training With Tokai University – Ekiden Winning Team https://bit.ly/2YA1fvP

Additional training data of Tokai University training for Hakone Ekiden: https://bit.ly/2A3AKEQ

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Sara Hall became the 6th fastest female American marathoner of all time when she ran 2:22:16 at the Berlin Marathon in September 2019, lowering her best time over the distance by four minutes.

Sara has competed at the elite level of distance running for 15+ years, transitioning from the middle distances on the track to the road in 2014-2015 with coaching assistance of her husband and past elite distance runner Ryan Hall. Since the move to the half marathon and marathon Sara has experienced remarkable progress. 

In this conversation with Sara Hall we discuss her plan to race 3 marathons in 5 months between September 2019 and February 2020 which included the USA Olympic Trials, how and why she prepared differently for these marathons, what it's like being coached by her husband Ryan Hall, her reflection on the USA Olympic Trials and more.

Sara Hall on Instagram: www.instagram.com/sarahall3/

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Trending articles:

Kenenisa Bekele – Training Leading To Berlin Marathon 2019 (2:01:41): https://bit.ly/3bF7t14

The 3 Key’s To Eliud Kipchoge’s Training: https://bit.ly/2YcOPcY

Nick Willis – Olympic medals, Balance and Longevity: https://bit.ly/2W3wbSd

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