The MicroCast

On this week's call we dive into How to Respond to Training Setbacks! As athletes, it’s important to accept the inevitability of facing training challenges in training. From overuse to serious injuries, to dealing with challenges in life that affect training, acknowledging that you will face challenges and setbacks in your athletic journey is incredibly powerful.

Throughout this call, our coaches draw on both personal setbacks and hypothetical scenarios to give you all important tools and perspectives that will help you through challenges in training.

I hope you enjoy this episode and as usual, if you have any feedback, a question for a future call or are looking for support in your running journey, please visit us on the web at microcosm-coaching.com or contact us at [email protected]

Microcosm Coaching Team Call 09/30/2022:

On this week's edition of Rapid, not so Rapid Fire Friday, we get into a ton of questions from our team and listeners. We start off by talking about traveling internationally with race nutrition and gear as well as protein and fat intake during longer ultras. From there, the conversation shifts to race preparation, from choosing A races to how much time to spend in aid stations and what to put in drop bags during events and how to hack the UTMB mandatory gear checks. Our conversation ends with a deep dive into thinking beyond one race season and giving yourself time to truly improve as a runner before stepping up to longer ultras.

I hope you enjoy this episode and as usual, if you have any feedback, a question for a future call or are looking for support in your running journey, please visit us on the web at microcosm-coaching.com or contact us at [email protected]

Microcosm Coaching Team Call 09/23/2022

The long steep hill is my greatest frenemy! Nothing makes me cringe more when I look at my plan and see something like 6 x 3 minute steep hills mod/hard, 20 minute tempo on tired legs directly after. Having done these before, I know they never get easier and things are going to feel so hard by the middle part of that tempo that I'm going to want to phone in a friend for a pick-up or a SAR team for a rescue. This stuff is brutal!! BUT some tips and tricks, yes some tricks like smiling when running uphill, can really help. We break it all down on this weeks podcast/community call.

Topics:

-Hill Strides

-Form

-Advanced Workouts

-Race Specific Workouts

-Incorporating hills into weekday runs and weekend long runs.

-A beginners approach to hills and improving on hills!

-Poles or no poles?

On this week's call we do a round-table Q&A session with Coaches Kristen Schindler, Drew Conner and Sarah Strong -- Our Conversation touches on air quality and treadmill runs, gear and planning for self-supported long-runs, the ins and outs of easy running and the pros and cons of carbon shoes. We then transition into the mental side of performance, giving advice on how to not get lost in other peoples training and how to cultivate intrinsic motivation. These calls are 100% athlete driven, with all the questions coming from our team and listeners. Big thanks to everyone who contributed!

I hope you enjoy this episode and as usual, if you have any feedback, a question for a future call or are looking for support in your running journey, please visit us on the web at microcosm-coaching.com or contact us at [email protected]

Microcosm Coaching Team Call 09/09/2022

All things group runs! The benefits, the pitfalls, group run doubles, comparison traps & advocating for your training!

Microcosm Coaching Team Call 09/02/2022:

First, I apologize for the length of this call. I know it’s a bit longer than usual, but this was a big topic with many facets and nuances to touch on.

Ok, so this week's call is an attempt at illustrating the long-term process involved in working toward big goals through the lens of my race at UTMB CCC. For those of you not familiar, this is essentially the world championship of 100km mountain running, with 62 miles and 20,000 feet of vertical gain. It’s set in the most iconic location for mountain sports in the world, Chamonix, France.

On this call, Coach Zoë and I take the team through the four year process of preparing for the event, through my recent build, UTMB week and talk a bit about the race too.

There are a lot of great takeaways here, but the main points I want athletes to think about surround our timelines for big goals, the ever elusive balance between work, life and training- that is worth striving for balance but only when you have the understanding that it will never truly be perfect, and that you’re capable of more than you believe, even in the face of a lot of information that might tell you differently.

I hope by talking a bit about my experience at CCC we can further diminish some of the stigma around the incorrect logic that bad days and not hitting performance or outcome related goals on race day are the same thing as failure. They are not.

I also want to diminish the stigma around how races are supposed to go even after incredible builds and great preparation. The course and the day don’t owe us anything and therefore it’s important to remember and emphasize the overall journey. As I mentioned in the call, I had one of the best, most fun builds leading up to CCC and that experience only helps to further fuel everything that will come after this. A good build should help feed your stoke-  when it does you know your goals are truly in alignment with your values and WHY and you’ve created the intrinsic environment necessary for reaching that finish line.

I hope you enjoy this episode and as usual, if you have any feedback, a question for a future call or are looking for support in your running journey, please visit us on the web at microcosm-coaching.com or contact us at [email protected]

Microcosm Coaching Team Call 08/19/2022:

This week's call is all about mental performance! But, before we dive into the goods, I wanted to just take a few minutes to talk a little bit about training for CCC, international travel packing tips and general updates on what we’ve been up to in training and life the last few weeks. From there our conversation stays in the same vein as we talk about pre-race rituals, dealing with nerves and rising up during hard moments in races. This conversation covers some of the most important topics on the mental side of training and provides some insights into what I’ve been thinking about before taking the line at CCC.

Microcosm Coaching Team Call 08/05/2022:

On this week's call, we talk about athlete/coach communication. Everything we do as athletes hinges on how clearly and openly we communicate with our coaches, and everything we do as coaches hinges on the feedback we get from athletes and how we communicate our responses. This symbiotic relationship is one of the key components to the coach athlete relationship. In this call we talk about best communication practices for athletes, talk about the dos and don’ts in the training logs and get into the three vehicles we use for communication at Microcosm: training log, email and text. We also talk about the role of social media in the communication process for both athletes and coaches too.

Microcosm Coaching Team Call 07/29/2022

On this week's call, we talk about race recovery. Big dream races really push us mentally and physically, upping the time it takes to recover, but athletes often forget to adjust expectations around that important part of the process. Through this conversation, we hope to shed light on how long it really takes to come back after big races with the goal of helping you avoid the challenging pitfalls that can occur during long recovery periods. From here, we segue into a related topic and discuss the importance of flexibility in training. We get into each coach's perspective and best practices for staying flexible with their athletes training plan. To finish off the call, Coach Kylee of Fly Nutrition gets into the four different types of sugars that make up the products and whole foods we use to fuel our workouts, long runs and races.

I hope you enjoy this episode and as usual, if you have any feedback, a question for a future call or are looking for support in your running journey, please visit us on the web at microcosm-coaching.com or contact us at [email protected]

Microcosm Coaching Team Call: 07/22/2022  

Silver Rush Takeaways: The Joy Factor, Sweat Tests and Intermediate Goals 

Plus, Was it really a bad run? & Taper Science!