Episode 642: 6 Hours or Less of Training Per Week

0:09Welcome to The Running Public with Bracken Crocker and Kirk DeWint. Whether you are a brand new runner or you already have a great mustache, we're here to help you increase your running knowledge and present it at a practical level. This is The Running Public.

0:30When you're ready to take your training or racing to the next level, go to the running public.com. We have both monthly subscription training plans,$19.99 a month. And Bracken and I both offer one-on-one customized coaching. Again, go to the running public.com and check out our offerings. Right to it today, Kirk. This is a business trip today, Bracken. I think that's what we're doing. Thursdays are my worst days of the week. In terms of schedule. Mine as well. So of course we record on this day. We may have to talk about that. Yeah. It's tricky. This is my longest day of teaching. We record a podcast.

1:11Ayla has soccer tonight. There's Thursday night football starting back up. Football's a thing in my household. Yeah. And traditionally Thursday was a quality session for me and should be right now. Yeah. I got a 445 alarm. I go to the gym. I open the gym. I lift for an hour. I train clients for a handful of hours. I got home five minutes before this recording. Then this is a double day for me. So as soon as we hop off the recording, I go for a run. Then I catch up on emails. Then I have athlete calls and I go back to the gym and I don't get home until about 730 at night. And the only time I get a breather is in the car ride to and from the gym.

1:52But sometimes I schedule calls on that time anyways. So they're heavy. They're heavy days. I don't do much commuting anymore driving outside of karting. Our drives are all like 11 minutes or under where I live. It's a very specific number, but 11 or under. So I don't do that anymore, but I used to schedule a lot of calls when I was driving. And it's the best use of your time known to man, but it doesn't give you a breather. That's exactly right. Yeah. I don't mind though. And if I don't have a call scheduling, I enjoy my podcast listening time, so it works. All right, so do we want to get right to it?

2:31No foreplay today? We just dive in? We have a little foreplay because we had requests, and we said we would at least once per week talk about the best workout we've done in the past week. Sure. So I do want to do that, and then we can move in. But it doesn't have to be a deep dive into the workout. It can be the nuts and bolts in why we did it and why we liked it. I'm going to interrupt you right away because I forgot to mention this on our last podcast and we'll move on from this after this. But thank you, thank you, thank you to you listeners. We asked for ratings and reviews and you guys like showed up in spades.

3:05I think, I don't know, 30 written reviews or so. And we went from 660 or 670 ratings to well over 700. So thank you to those who took the time. We got some really nice reviews. but I just checked again and we made it. We blasted through 700. So I feel really, really accomplished. Nice. And I did nothing. So thank you. I like that. Yeah. Now go. What's your best workout of the week, Bracken? Well, I did a back-to-back-ish day for the first time. So I did 10 paved on Saturday. Okay. And finished with a 1 ,000-foot vertical climb. Not vertical, 1 ,000 feet of vertical feet on the treadmill. A 10-mile run immediately into 1 ,000 feet of vert.

3:54Yeah, call it a half hour. What effort level? Fully aerobic, trying to stay, again, on this run, I was not allowed to breach 145 on the heart rate. And then, but it was very, very, very, very humid. So that always makes it interesting. And then the hike was aerobic threshold. And it was a hike? Yeah, I did not run this. I didn't want to... In building up, each time I do this, my rear chain is more and more sensitive as I'm old. So I don't want to run into what you're getting and what other people are dealing with right now, which is planter. I don't want to run into Achilles stuff. The incline work is so nice for my front chain, but it's starting to stress the rear chain a little.

4:41So I didn't want to run. So I hiked. What grade? Started at 20, went 25, touched 30, didn't like it, moved back down to 25 and finished at 20. 30 is strenuous. Yeah, I got to earn 30. You do. But you're going to be doing a lot of that at Grindstone, the back half. So I guess it's, you know, start seeding it in now. Yeah. Now, Grindstone is a race, but so is Ironstone. I'm doing Ironstone. Grindstone's an awesome race as well. It is. That comes to mind before Ironstone. And then I followed up the next morning with three by thousand feet of gain with light little planning the seed of bulletproofing in between.

5:20What does that mean? So I have the curve treadmill and mine has that resistance levels I can add. So I turn up the resistance and get on the top of the curve facing backwards and do fast resisted backpedaling. Oh, sure. It kind of lights up that front of the quad low part right where descending does. And then banded monster walks, things like that. But just 60 seconds to two minutes in between, nothing big. Just planning the seats. So those back-to-back had me feeling good and pretty worn out come Monday. Aerobic threshold limiter one day. So it wasn't back-to-back qualities, but it was back-to-back purposeful work.

5:59And then the second day you let your heart rate. 90 minutes each day. I assume, okay. And I assume you let your heart rate get up a bit on those thousand foot gain reps. Yeah. I wasn't trying to search for a heart rate. I was doing what my legs would give me without dressing the rear chain too much. So again, back-to-back days of vert, 4 ,000 feet between the two days. That's a lot for me right now. And three by thousand, again, roughly 30 minutes per kilometer of vert. So back to back 90 minute days. So that was my biggest chunk of training I've had. Hiking again for your three by one K? Mostly I jogged a little bit at 20, 15 and 20%.

6:39I'd kind of go five minutes hike, five minutes jog back and forth. But I stopped the jogging as soon as my legs are like, let's just, let's not yet. Stay available. That is the name of the end. This is good volume. This is big volume for you though. This is, this is a jump a little bit yeah a little bit but not three hours of aerobic work in two days is a is a jump yeah yeah good so so that was my best of the week what about you i haven't had anything good happen this week well technically this was sun saturday sunday so it was last week i mean i had a really good 12 by 1k session last week on a minute rest 12 by 1k uh i said you're not going to breach threshold the first six and then if you breach it the back six i don't really care as long as the majority of the rep is spent under.

7:26And it was, I was between, I don't know, 512 and 522 or 23 pace on a minute rest. It was good. Uh, this week, not good. I did a, uh, on Tuesday, I haven't felt really good on any of my runs this week. Jess had strep throat and a bug of some sort. And I don't know if I got like, just like a downgraded version of it, but I did a six mile tempo on Tuesday and then I finished with 60, 60s. Um, Ooh, little finisher. Yeah. Well, I was not feeling great. So I was going to go eight mile tempo and call it. And I got into it and my heart rate was too high and it was really humid. And I waited just too long in the day.

8:08So it's like 10 30 in the morning and it's eight, you know, the deal. And I just said, this isn't smart to try to draw this out to extra miles. So why don't we still get the volume in, but, um, pivot to some turnover work. So I tempoed about where I wanted to at pace wise and then three minutes jog recovery after the six mile tempo. That's all I gave myself. And then I hit six by 60, 60 sub five. And it was a good finisher. Actually, I left the session feeling good versus if I reached for those extra two miles and went eight. I think I would have. It wasn't feeling good to start with. So it was a nice little session, but I didn't really enjoy myself.

8:40If I'm being completely honest. Yeah, that's too bad. That happens. And mama said there'd be days like this back. Sometimes it's just work. It was just work. You know when it's like when you're working hard and you've been out there a while, I know it's humid and muggy. Like if you are like in the bath too long and your hands get wrinkly or your feet get wrinkly after like a wet race. And like after a sweaty, longer session that was still 11 miles, like my hands were wrinkly from like the sweat running down them. and I was like yeah we're still in the thick of it when I got wrinkly like bath hands at the end of a run you ever get that I don't know if I've ever got the full hands but my fingertips will start to get a little pruney and that's yeah that's when you know you've been sweating a long time every time you move your arms or sweat flying off your fingertips it's like yeah you're wearing the thick of it but that's it for me okay so what are we gonna do with our last 44 minutes here kirk um we are going to talk about uh getting the most bang for your buck out of low volume training bracken um you know i would consider myself what would you consider me a low to middle volume athlete for a for a everyday runner i would say you're medium high and for a high level runner you're you would be medium low for an ultra runner i would certainly be low medium even low yeah What's the highest week you've hit in the last 12 months?

10:0960, low 63, but probably like 10 ,000 feet of gain in there, something like that. I would still say that's medium low for an ultra runner. You get 10 ,000 feet of vert. So many people, they're doing trails that they're not all getting 80 to 100. A lot are. Yeah. One of those sessions would be on trail and one would have been on the incline treadmill, which cuts mileage, of course. On five days or on six? On five. On five. singles. Yeah. That matters. And for perspective, what's your biggest week you've ever hit? 70. Okay. Ever. So you're up near your highest mileage, but with 10 ,000 feet of vert and all on singles.

10:48In five instead of six, when I hit 70, it would have been six. But yeah, I just learned. So a little history would be I had, let's call it three to five years of some sort of overuse injury popping up. I've had a couple of foot stress fractures, tibial stress fracture. Two stress fractures in my foot took me out for five months. And I think after coming back from that, it was like such a slow progression. I was running three days a week and cross training between and seeing good results. We had the U.S. National Series for Spartan and I was racing pretty well on a three or four day a week program.

11:24And eventually now I've been up at five and I just don't really care to tempt fate. It's a longevity thing, right? And so I've been running, I would say, relatively low mileage by comparison to people who I'm running against for, I don't know, how long would you say now? For five years? Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Something like that. And you have been low mileage, not by choice, but by circumstance. I was never a high mileage athlete, but I got to that medium high volume where I went a couple years of 60 to 70 miles per week, but always hitting five digits of vert. Yeah, it's a lot of vert. And I think that's worth time on feet.

12:06It's worth 80 to 90 miles per week. I mean, a thousand feet of vert's got to be worth at least an additional mile of volume at minimum, probably more. But right, would you say that's probably somewhere in the - Yeah, I mean, it's a 30 minute per K usually at aerobic for me. So if that effort would normally get me an eight-minute mile, it's getting me a 30-minute vertigo. It's hard to really tell, but it's at least double. Yeah. Yeah. You don't go back when you're descending, but... Yeah. We had a question come in about how to make the best bang for your buck, busy people, you know, wife stuff.

12:44And so I got a strike when I strike, but I might have two big days I can afford a week and I got to try to figure this out. And I do want to be an ultra athlete or I do want to race even up to a half marathon. Well, but I'm going to be at 40 miles and that's it. Like when I said and done, like I got five hours a week or I got six hours a week and that's it. So I just thought it would be worth chatting out like how to get the most bang for your buck out of low, low mileage running, whatever that means to you. And to be clear, there's low mileage and there's low volume training and we're talking low volume training because mileage becomes subjective yeah right but you're saying we have an hours limiter six to seven hours per week five to seven is that what you're saying let's call six or under aerobic uh development time okay so six hours or less of training time that you can count on means that you're going to be lower mileage and lower volume anywhere you want to slice it.

13:44Because some people are low mileage, but high volume, where they do tons and tons of cross training. And that's really what we say usually. Yeah, just spam the cross training and you're fine. But if you can't spam the cross training, how are you going to be ready for long races off low hours of training? And some people are going to hear six hours and think that'd be a great training week for me. And as we always say, everything's relative. But in the grand scheme of training for performance, dedicating less than an hour per day, for the week would not be considered anything other than low volume.

14:18I know, which is kind of icky to even say or think about because six hours of devotion a week is a lot of commitment when you have a busy life, but it's not high volume. I'll tell you that much. The asterisk is that this is for performance, not for health, not for feels, not for mental balance. This is for performance. So you want to perform at long distances. We're going to say marathon and longer. but you only have six hours or less to spend on it. How are we going to spend that each week? Well, you have two schools of thought, right? And this is where it gets really tricky and it can be divided.

14:55I'm guessing you're going to agree with my two schools of thought, but it is one, it is a grease the groove theory and it is I run an hour every day and I do it consistently and I do it six days a week and I'm just consistently getting time on feet. And the other school of thought is I need my big days and I can, so I need a couple of big days each week and I can fill the cracks with just short aerobic work. So you have, uh, the Mark Bottras theory where we, we talked to him and he said, I would just run 10 miles every day for my prep for his ultras. And he wasn't lying. That was the truth for the most part.

15:30Or the, uh, I got a big Tuesday and I have a big long run Saturday and everything else is just pebbles by comparison. Those would be the two schools of thought different variations of that, but is that where your head was at? Yeah. And the dividing line here, unfortunately is speed. Mark can run 10 miles a day, six days per week and barely exceed six hours of training. So I'm not saying he does that, but he could, if he wanted to relatively sustainably. To me, there's just not even a question that I would not explore that route with most people. The grease the groove thing is so powerful and good, but it will not help you on hour three through 24 of an ultra.

16:16I think it works so well for 10K and under. Yeah. I don't know if it extends much beyond that. So I think the first thing I want to be clear about is that this example right here is why blanket rules in training just aren't a thing in my world. I do not usually subscribe to blanket rules, even though that sounds like a rule. I put the word usually in there. The whole long run can't be more than X percent of your weekly total goes right out the window when you're a low volume athlete. That was traditionally told to us back in our track and cross country days when everything was very metric based and calculated.

16:57The terrain was all consistent. And I don't even know where that really came up with that or why, but that stems back to our college days. I haven't heard that much in recent years, but it felt like when you're metric oriented, that seemed to be a thing. Honestly, as many feathers may ruffle in this moment, I lump that into pseudoscience along with the same type of rule, which is 180 beats per minute. Which is also don't increase your volume by more than 10 % a week, which is smart. But the reason people are trying to cap your long runs is because it's an injury prevention rule. Yeah. It's a good way to not risk things, but it's a real good way to totally limit your overall endurance development.

17:48I have not seen a convincing study ever that says anything along the lines of don't exceed 10 % or 15 % of your weekly volume in your long run. I, on a six hour per week, I mean, you could, I, if I had to choose Kirk, I would do two, three hour workouts per week. That's it. Rather than six, one hour workouts per week. If I were prepping for 50 K or longer. And then fill the middle with cross training. If I can't exceed six hours, if I only have six hours to play with and I have to choose one end of the extreme, six one hour workouts or two, three hour workouts. I'm going to choose two, three hour workouts and 50 K is the distance I would be most concerned about 50 mile and up.

18:33There's not a doubt in my mind. I'm going to be better off two, three hour runs than six, one hour runs. Not a doubt in my mind with nothing between nothing between because I can't spend any more hours. No, that's nowhere near ideal, but I'm saying that 60 minute runs will not prepare you for a 50 mile or above because they neglect the most important components of ultra training. Yeah. Damage. What if it was three, two hour runs? I would choose that. You would choose three, two hour runs. Or three, two hour sessions. Yeah. I'm not moving for two hours straight three times per week, but yeah, the middle ground is almost always the best option, but just that the grease the groove approach, oh, it's really hard to trust.

19:17A stud runner could probably do well in a 50K off that. With a big piggy bank of history and volume in their legs. But all the magic for long races happens after 60 minutes. You would have to be so creative in your 60-minute workouts with how you would do them that I just, I wouldn't ever feel prepared for an ultra off six hours of training, never being able to exceed an hour. I mean, you chose exceeding an hour for your 5K question a week ago. An hour or more, correct. An hour or more versus never breaking an hour. You chose that for 5K. If I were to do it, we could get on so many tangents today, and today's the day we need to stay on point.

20:00But if you were to pull off the 60-minute time cap, it would be like 20 minutes of walking lunges into 40-minute run. And then I'd give myself like a normal 60-minute aerobic run the next day. And then I'd be like every three minutes I'm doing 20 jump squats. And then one other day a week I'm literally doing heavy back squats and heavy lunging in the gym. And then I'm always just beating myself up before my run would be my only – within that 60 minutes. I would give up run time a few days a week to do – I think that's what I would do. Tons of weight vest work. tons of it. Damage, damage, damage.

20:43In all gray zone almost. Yeah. Probably two days of zone two in between those gray zone damage days. Anyway, point is we're not even going to worry anymore about trying to parcel out the work evenly. I don't think that's the route when you have six hours or less to devote to long races. You need to go 90 minutes or longer. I would say at least twice per week. That's my first rule. 90 minutes or longer, at least twice per week. At least once per week. I'm not going to say at least twice. I'm going to say at least once. You have to breach an hour at least twice per week. I'm sticking to that. You have to go longer than 60 minutes at least twice per week.

21:23Well, yeah, that for sure. I'm trying to allot time for the true long run, which is just important. And if you do that, then spacing things out previously in the week, I think, makes sense. If you had a three-hour long run and a 90-minute run, now you have 90 total minutes left for the rest of the week, which isn't a whole lot. Man, it adds up so quick, doesn't it? It adds up really quickly. Which is funny because so many people listening are like, I have a hard time getting six hours of work in. But as soon as there's a race on your calendar and it demands a long run, it's like, how am I going to fit all the rest of the training in?

22:01I want more, not how can I find it? I think the pillar of your week here, first of all, in a limited, limited, I'm assuming you're like a hardworking woman or man, like, you know, you should be. So you're limited due to schedule that way. I think first of all, and this is a duh thing to say, but the weekend has to be your big hit. It has to be scheduled, planned, accounted for. Kids are taken care of. This number one is going to be, what am I doing with my pillar weekend day? Would you say that's fair enough? Yeah. Yeah. Whichever day that week you can get big work in, non-negotiable. And I don't care if that takes up half of your weekly volume, by the way.

22:39What do you say? Yeah. I'm probably running A and B weeks because of our limited. I think you have to get creative, but at the very least, every other week, half my weekly volume is going on one day. On the long run. Or 40 % minimum, right? Like it's two and a half hours plus at least every other weekend, if not every weekend. So the B week be like a grease the groove week where you have some mid range stuff and maybe a little shorter long run, like two hours or something. Closer to hour and a half, hour and a half, two hours, maybe on the in-betweens, but it's still a big chunk of your week. Yeah, I think, I think the, the, you know, it's a suck it up and get up early one day a week.

23:22And I think the important parts of this, right? You need to get on your feet for a long time in your long run sessions to just accrue the damage and feel the thing. That's very important. And then two, I think it's a quality day on steroids in the sense where there's a big time or volume commitment to that. That doesn't mean that you need to do an hour of zone five work, which would be a near impossibility. It means like I got to find a way to get in 40 to 50 minutes of quality. Maybe it's a float session. Maybe it's an uphill fart lick. I don't need you like tasting pennies. Like we're looking to draw these out and get a good amount of volume and in the quality session pillar, the pillar quality session early in the week.

24:04So that may be a 90 minute session as you were talking about, like a very between a warmup and cool down and then 60 minutes of a five, five float, or you're doing this uphill on off or whatever it might be. And then I could not care less where the rest of the mileage falls. What do I have left? If I can only squeeze in 45 minutes, another two or three days, like that's, you're there. So I would even take, like, I may say if I only had six and I had to stick to it, I may say, you're going to be a four day a week runner. And two of those days are going to be big. And two of those days are going to be roughly an hour.

24:39And that's going to be that. Okay. Would you choose five and spreading it out more or six and spreading it out more? Or would you, what would you do? If I could only do one week schedule, I would do five. You would, okay. And I would do four one-hour sessions and one two-hour session. But I would feel much better having the option to go two and a half and sometimes three and then give up one of my other sessions that week. I think it's that important. I think it's important first to say that we are not the big long run guys. That's not our platform. We don't prescribe many runs past four hours.

25:18I don't prescribe many runs past three and a half. I've begun to. At times you need it, but it's not frequent. I get for sure. Yeah. There are people who like every other week, you're out getting six to eight hours on feet pretty regularly. That's not us. No. Yeah. We're training Hannah for the Tahoe 200 and she crushed it and she had to be on foot Have to. For six hours. You have to cross two hours. Yeah, I agree. You have to. So my take is that on race day for ultras, one of the most effective things you can do with execution is looking back to our OCR days and you're stealing seconds and you're stealing minutes.

25:59Where in and out of aid stations, you are stealing seconds and minutes all the time. being more efficient with your power hiking. You're stealing seconds every climb, minutes over the course of the race. Your transitions in and out of hiking, doing it at the absolute perfect time rather than missing by 10 seconds every time of walking when I didn't need to or running when I shouldn't have. Nailing all of those things, they're seconds here, seconds there, and they add up to minutes or sometimes hours counting aid stations over the course of a race. So that's huge. And I would apply that logic to my training week.

26:36I would become a master of the minimum effective dose of warm-up and cool-down and recovery during reps. By nature of this, I'm not doing a lot of interval work. At most, one day per week, I'm doing interval work where I'm working and then actually resting. One time per week maximum. But I am finding how little warm-up can I get away with. where my only goal is to be ready to start the first rep without risking hurting myself. I will sacrifice the feeling of like, I will feel crappy on the first rep of every workout if I have to, to save myself five to 10 minutes of time so that I can get an extra rep or two in.

27:20You just become a master of stealing seconds in your week, eliminating most of your cool down so that you can get more time in the workout, but don't let there be any fluff. like your phone is not allowed anywhere near you during this type of training it just can't be yeah yeah yeah that's a good yeah how short of a warm-up do you think you could get away with again with an ultra emphasis where we're i think it's safe to say we're never doing something that'll pull a hamstring you'd think from a bursty standpoint yeah uh i think that it's a safe thing to say that five minutes of work warm up is going to be plenty for any workout i can conceive i think i need for sure eight okay walk me through what would that eight look like uh five minutes of gray zone running right out of the rip and then three by 30 30 from minutes five to eight and then i could cut it at eight that'd be it bracken's got some noise in the background he's telling me what's going on over there there's sirens i would just held up the fingers that we just stay silent and then it just pulls it out when I strip silence and I ruined it.

28:29You announced it that I'm do this. No, that's rude. No, I'd take someone. Yeah. And this Reynolds would not approve. So, so yeah, I think that's fair. But even then, like we're arguing over three minutes in the week, that's a good place to be. When you start arguing over single digit, especially the low single digit minutes, you're, you're in a good place. I don't need five minutes. I would like five minutes of jogging, but I could get away with three. I do actually a little better with more dynamic work. And so that's a time killer sometimes. When you do 10 meters of dynamics, turn and walk back or stand around.

29:12That's the thing I would have to cut out. You lose a minute real easily right there. But you're still focusing on minutes, but I'm saying you don't need a 20-minute warm-up. You just don't. Now, if we're talking, you're a miler, you're a 5K person, there's times you might need that. But even that, we can almost always get away with less warmup and cool down than we think if we're smart about what we prioritize. If we're smart about that. What do you mean by prioritize what? Like what we're doing with our warmup? Yeah, I had a routine of dynamic exercises that I followed from college on that when When I really started to look at it, when I was practicing, what's my minimum effective warmup dose for race days when I'm running late, which was a Spartan thing, unfortunately, because of the way their registration often would go and parking, I realized I'm doing a lot of things that don't have much of a bearing on how my first rep goes.

30:06It's just part of the overall routine and it's good for me. But a lot of warmups, especially track warmups, which is what many of us grew up on, they are like a mobility session and active yoga and a little bit of skill work all rolled into a warm up. And if you really were prioritizing your time, you're better off saving your mobility work and your yoga work and stuff like for when you're watching TV with your kids or when you're at your kids practice or in like little moments throughout your week, you can get that stuff done then. You don't have to have this like all encompassing warm up, just the nuts and bolts.

30:44get my heart rate up, get a little bit of sweat moving, make sure my range of motion is ready, and then sample the speed I'm about to use a couple of times and let's get rolling. Yeah. And to back up something you've said a couple of times, like the making time for the cool down, like I never generally feel that great on most of my cool downs. You can justify for ultra training, like an extended cool down could be good time under duress, right? Like I think that's an angle that you could take, but I still think if you had to pick and choose, I would be focused on the work. The cool down can go, I mean, almost entirely if it has to.

31:20You know, you could always, to get that type of duress, you could always front load a long run with, I am going to leave no uphill behind the first half of my run. And then I'm going to, which means you're going to work pretty hard on all your climbs. And then you're going to leave no downhill behind on the back half of your run. You've pre-fatigued output. You can get that tired time under tension, even stuck into the long run. So you don't need to draw out cool downs for volume in the ultra. It's not a bad strategy. But I don't think, I think you could save that for the long run with the first half purpose, I don't know, quality long run component and then finish out on dull legs.

31:59Yeah. And to be clear, if I had all the time in the world, I'd be doing all of these things. But we have to, something has to give with six hours per week. And it's not going to be my anaerobic and aerobic capacity work. It already will a little bit. So it really has to be prioritized. So let's do this because I really like the A week, B week, which is how I generally trained myself for my ultras on 60 miles a week. Why don't we design our A weeks? I think this might be the best use for our listeners. Let's just design what we're going to do on our A week and our B week. Okay. Sorry, you give your first week and we'll go back and forth.

32:38My A week, I'm having a medium long run and a quality long run are the tent poles of my week. So medium long run, 70 to 90 minutes, and then quality long run, let's call it double digits mileage of work, or again, minimum 75 to 90 minutes of time on feet, but spending time above aerobic threshold. This is where I'm going to be ripping downhills. This is where I'm going to be doing threshold work in and amongst, let's say for you, a 13 to 16 mile run. Quality long run, not the longest run. I'm probably not going past two hours total on these sessions. And then medium long run, 70 to 90 minutes.

33:23Those are the 10 pulls of the week. And then as much easy work as I can fill on the other days to cap up to my six hours. That's what A week looks like. And then B week... What's the effort on the midweek long run? Easy, optional cut down. So that could be a day where... So I prescribe that, especially on the long run, traditional long run with optional progression. You see that on a running public training plans too with optional cut down. Would that be a run? So I run under the philosophy. If you're not doing a Tuesday pillar quality session, for example, if on your midweek long run, you want to cut down and even finish as fast as marathon pace and heaven forbid, end in zone four, I'm good with that.

34:03Go grab a little threshold and build some fatigue. That is if you don't have a pillar session on top of that and then a long run quality on top of that. I think that midweek long run can be a little gray and then even productive. My opinion, I guess I'm just curious your intent. uh like exactly like you said if i'm not doing if these are the only things of note that week all the rest are easy hour runs then yeah that one you can you can let her rip if you want especially in the second half but most likely i'm doing uh a light interval session a threshold session or so like tuesday thursday saturday let's just call it tuesday i'm probably doing a threshold session or uphill intervals is this in your b week now there's a week so let's say but like the time on feet so let's call it 90 minutes and two hours on thursday and saturday and then monday tuesday friday are hour ish sessions whatever that put you at six and a half you get two and a half hours left so okay so 60 60 and 30 perfect so one of those 60 whatever so one of those 60 minute sessions would have a quality component to it yeah some threshold intervals some uphill that's what the people want to hear yeah so that would be like your tuesday Yeah.

35:15You still do this? Okay. Yeah. And then the B week, I'm doing the same thing, but instead of the midweek long run, it is a medium length bulletproofing session. So it might be a leg builder. It might be in like one of your uphill grind workouts where you're just getting two to 4 ,000 feet of vert. And I'm probably doing hip and quad and glute exercises in between to compromise it. but a session where it's not about mileage, it's about engine and durability, and then real long run that weekend. I like pairing the leg builder style workout with my long, long run because I'm not pounded beat up, but I am fatigued from the leg builder.

36:00So I save all my damage of hitting the ground for the long, long run. And I like to pair my midweek long run, which beats you up a little bit with the quality long run because it's not as much time on feet. I can be convinced to do the opposites, but I generally don't. I really like that. Build me out your perfect leg builder. Okay. So the one I end up using the most is upscaling reps. My classic one is I'll do, let's say I do 100 feet of vertical gain on the treadmill and then 10 walking weighted lunges with sandbag on my back, then 200 feet, then 20, then 300 feet, then 30, then 400 feet, then 40, 500 feet, then 50.

36:47At this point, you've done 150 weighted walking lunges and you've done 1500 feet of climbing. And you either continue that out or then I reset with two different things. Now I might do banded monster walks and something else and reset on vertical feet, or I continue all the way through to 100 and 1 ,000. Now that's a full-on long session. Or you can sub out the incline for tenth of a mile run, two tenths, three tenths, four tenths, five tenths, all the way up to one mile run. And by the end of that, you get five and a half miles of running and 550 lunges. Is it always lunges? No, it's not. For vert-based ultras, it's often lunges.

37:27It can be box step-ups. It can be, uh, what I do is reverse stairs, step backs. You stand at the bottom of your stairs and you just push yourself backwards up onto the stair and come back down just to get that VMO area a little bit. But you choose the exercise that's going to work on the area that's going to be most overworked on race day. But I like the ascending rep style because even though you get to the fifth round and your rounds are halfway done, you don't get halfway done with your reps and vert until you finish the round of seven. And so that really mirrors the demands and the mentality of an ultra, which is the halfway point is not the halfway point.

38:05And in this workout, the halfway point is the three quarter way point. So it teaches you to anticipate that point, but it also works on how do I pace early when it feels easy so that I have options later when other people around me don't have options. Because if you pace it correctly, all the time you spend not resting on your 80, 90, 100 lunges make up for any time you gave away going slower cadence early on. Because slower cadence, you might lose two minutes early in the workout. And standing and shaking your legs out, you might lose five minutes on the last three rounds. That's very ultra specific with that mentality and pacing.

38:44So that is my ideal leg builder. I like it. So you believe in it so firmly that you would replace mileage with that. Now, that session, though, that sounds like that could take people much longer than an hour. It can. So what – well, that's replacing my medium-long run. So I have up to – Oh, that's a good problem. Yeah, okay. Yeah. A bit. But like early on, I cap people. I'll say like this is the workout, but it's AMRAP 40 minutes and then up to AMRAP 60. You generally have to go past at least 50 minutes. The first one I ever did was assault by calories and unweighted lunges. And that's a 50-minute workout for a stud.

39:22Most people aren't getting done under 70. Yeah, what I like about that is I actually, under the belief in ultra training, believe that you should be going into your long runs fatigued most of the time. so heaven forbid you even create a little doms uh from that session or have some duress still sitting in your legs and you roll out of bed saturday morning for your long run and you're like ah i am so not up for this because i'm achy and such that's almost a good thing because when you back off going into race day uh it feels like such a gift so i like the idea of even like creating a little doms with that session it doesn't have to be like you can't put your socks on doms but like just like yeah yeah you could be sore yeah and i think that that's really important that's why i like to pair to to a long run that week because then from mile one you're running slightly gingerly and so right away you're figuring out what stride do i use to avoid damage rather than i'm running at 135 heart rate who cares what my strides doing and that's again it's an ultra skill and it's how you steal seconds and minutes and races is you don't take undue damage but it's really hard to put yourself in a place of how do I work now to avoid damage later if you're not facing damage later.

40:40That's why I like finishing with 80, 90, 100 lunges because it tells you what you did wrong pacing early. So many people listening would be absolutely ruined by that. Even just body weight to do that much volume, that's 550 lunges if you want to do the math on that. If you did the full boat up to a thousand feet and 5 ,500 feet of climbing for a long run, oh my goodness, I would be absolutely astronomical. People wouldn't walk right for a week. And you build to it. Coming off my knee surgery, I started that workout on the assault bike and body weight, gentle, not even knee to the ground lunges yet.

41:17And by the end of that 13 week block, I did full round of 100 with, I want to say I started with the 50 pound sandbag and dropped down to 35 for the last two rounds. That is an astronomical leap forward. Huge. But it scales appropriately. And when you're done and you're trashed, you shake your legs out for a little bit and then you go walk on the treadmill for another 20 minutes uphill and you've taken no impact yet. So it's a safe workout and you can do step back lunges. You could do lunge pulses. You can do air squats. You could do box step ups. I mean, you can choose whatever you want to do, but that's my ideal leg builder style.

41:57Cool. So do you want to outline your two weeks again? Cause people, you know, forget. So let's just say every Tuesday we're doing threshold work. I just think it's so beneficial. And for an ultra runner, maybe just make it gray zone work, like sweet spot work, run a, a three by 15 minute interval session slower than threshold. I don't really care. I want you working faster than race pace and slower than damage pace. Thursday is a 60 to 90 minute workout, depending on A week or B week. A week, it is done running on terrain. B week, it is done in form of a leg builder or a vertical-based session.

42:33It can even be just find your hillyest terrain or rep a hill for 70 minutes. I guess just balancing out, clean running one week, work on grinding and bulletproofing and staying power the next week. A week, my quality long run means that I am having above race pace work in there. At least half the time, this includes downhills. If I'm running, if I'm facing a real mountain race, every single one of these is going to have some sort of downhill emphasis and uphill. And then my B week, the long run is truly long. This is the one we're probably doing our two and a half to three hour long runs and efforts, not an issue.

43:14We're not working on that. Like if you want to attack a few downhills, you always can. but time on feet and fueling is the point for this. Filling in the middle with 30 to 60 minute aerobic sessions that don't compromise your next time that you're supposed to be working hard. Perfect. I would get on board with that plan. If you were like, this is how I'm going to get you there, I'd be like, I think we're going to get there. I'll do that. That sounds great. Okay. So I approve. I'm going to take a little different approach, not for the sake of being different because this is what I did and it worked for me.

43:48And I've prescribed this as well. But the thing that goes in my system is the midweek long run, which is almost unholy. Because I think that's very important in ultra training. If you can afford it, we'll call it. But I'm ditching it, actually, every week. So a week for me is going to be a big pillar Tuesday session where I'm probably working for 40 plus minutes. It can be threshold based. It can be float-based. It can be uphill. It can be flat. I don't really care. But it's probably when it's done with warm-up and cool-down, it's going to eat up about 80 minutes of my time, 80 to 90 minutes. It's going to be big.

44:30And then that's going to be the same week. I'm going three hours on the weekend. I'm going three. It may have a quality component, an uphill or a downhill focus. I may play a little bit in that. But those are the pillars. And let's say that brings me to four hours and 20 minutes worth of time. That only gives me 140 to play. And I will play with a 45, a 45 and a 55 minute run somewhere in there in the week. My other week. That's too much. That is too much. That's too much. Call it. You're at. Oh, so you're at 420. So you've got an hour 40 left. Are you splitting it amongst two or three runs? I'd split it amongst three.

45:13Three. 40, 40, 20. That's hour 20. Yeah. Somewhere in there. But I'm prioritizing two big days that week of high value. The other week is going to be roughly a 90 to 120-minute long run. But I'm going to do – and that's going to be very easy. I'm going to do quality on Tuesday and Friday. Followed. But the point is I'm going to do threshold intervals Tuesday. I'm going to do something real punchy and short on Friday. pre-fatigue vo2 maxi type stuff and then i'm just going to run an easy shorter version of a long run no output necessary on saturday and then i'll fill the rest of the volume so i will go on and every other so two quality sessions one week i just believe in what quality can make up for and i also believe in i also really believe in like if i do a really like a real punchy friday quality session.

46:06I don't need to spend a ton of time doing it. If I go run six by 800 at 5k or something, I'm probably going to wake up a little fatigued on Saturday for my two hours. And so in that week I would be doing, and one of those qualities would be uphill and one would be flat by the way, whatever it turned into be. So mine would be a quality Tuesday, quality Friday, and then shorter long run Saturday. And by that you could still maybe get two hours and then you have three runs left of like 45 minutes to an hour that week still. So it works itself out that way. I know that's a little bit unorthodox, but I ran most every long run of mine in my last builds.

46:46I was generally flat quality on Tuesday, big session, uphill quality Friday, usually punchier and long run Saturday, fatigued almost every time. And I feel like it was very powerful. So I've lived it. So that would be my A week, B week. I like it. Yeah. I think yours is probably safer for some reason. It feels a little bit more balanced. It covers all the bases, but maybe not any individual one quite as strongly as yours would cover two of the bases. Yeah. So I don't know. Yours may be the better option. I just know that I really thrive on quality. I really find it helps me draw out. And if I get one long run of three hours every other week and the in-between week is less, I'm pretty good with Yeah.

47:31The other option I thought about going with were A week and B week. A week is consistency and B week is big. So A week, I'm going like 60, 60, 90, 60, 60, 90. Those are my runs. That's too many. That's seven hours, but yes. Is that seven? If you're doing six runs, yeah. okay you could do 660s you could do five with a nine whatever it's going to be just like the most consistent mileage and just run it all or under aerobic thrush it could be math training for a week and then be weak i hit big long run and uh other session now the leg builder to me is indispensable because i believe so powerfully in avoiding breakdown in races but the cleaner the running becomes in the goal race, like Javelina versus Leadville, Javelina versus, let's just say, Ironstone.

48:29That changes the way I'm going to do. Tunnel Hill, I'm probably not doing this type of leg builder in the second half of my build. I'm very much doing more just flat volume work. Yeah. I think all those, I mean, I think that the main thing really, if you're, if you're going to distill it down is quality doesn't leave because you're an ultra runner. Okay. Step one. And then two, just like the way we physiologically hold onto fitness and adapt is even if a big pillar long run happens every other week and we're choosing volume elsewhere throughout the week, that two weeks between the big pillar long run, that is enough to adapt, be durable.

49:12As long as the work between is purposeful, you don't have to go out for three hours every weekend because you're running a fit you're racing a 50k you do not i think that that time could be just as well or better served with some nuances within your week so every two weeks prioritizing that extended time on foot and then filling the gap with some medium stuff in between should be a pretty good formula for a low mileage time limited athlete the exception to this are people who are going to spend an extraordinary amount of time walking on course. A, I don't know if that falls under the umbrella of training for performance, like we stated at the beginning of this, but those are the people where probably at least every other week, you've got to go spend four to six hours walking.

50:00Because for a running-based athlete, spending six to eight hours extremely slow really doesn't do much for you other than get you used to that feeling of being extremely tired. you're better off ripping for two to three and accruing the engine benefits and taking the damage but if you're going to have to just have your legs durable to walking for 24 hours you should there are weeks you're just going to have to go do a six-hour walk like let's call it realistically it's only a hike i think it's only a hike if it's uphill what if it's on terrain i think that's hiking. I think that's walking. I think hiking is when, well, maybe I can call terrain.

50:43Hiking is when the terrain forces you to not run. And that can vary based on your ability level. Just because I'm on a dirt path, it doesn't mean I'm on a hike. But if said woman can, or man can, they could run downhill for an hour, but they can't run flat for an hour. So now does the flat walking become hiking because the terrain is flat and it gets in the way of them running when they could run downhill? I don't know. Maybe I can't. I'm really spending time on something that doesn't matter, but I was just curious. Anyway, I just don't think I'd rather have you work shorter and harder than just long and slow, long and slow for performance.

51:22Yeah. Well, I think we did our best. Last thing with this, Kirk. Always. Is that if you can find a Saturday or Sunday where you can get six hours in, Like that's not going to mean that you lose all your other hours during the week of your normal schedule. It means you cleared your schedule on one day. So the hack to all of this is that if you know, Monday through Friday, I have four hours available every week. You're going to be able to find longer weekends in there just by saying, listen, I'm taking a me day next Sunday. I'm doing four hours of work, even though I'm doing four hours of work that week as well.

51:58Like you're going to find bigger weeks. Most people like don't actually have this. I can't exceed six hours no matter what rule. You could always take a personal day if like a big week needed to happen. Having a me day once every three weeks would be the perfect cadence, wouldn't it? It would. We can find a me day once every three weeks, can't we? Make that a seven, eight hour training week. I believe so. I believe in you folks. All right. Is there anything else you want to add in? Anything else come to mind? No, we're at our limit here, Kirk. We've reached our limit. I know we got a window today to work with, but and we're also, my goodness, the Q &A is still bracken.

52:33You don't see the back end anymore, but holy, we got days of Q &As piling up. Next Tuesday, are we Q &Aing? Next every Tuesday for perpetuity to get these things answered. That sounds like heaven to me. If anything resonated with you on today's episode and you're curious about taking your training to the next level, check out therunningpublic.com where we have a training plan to fit your needs.

53:03Thank you.