Life at the Elite Level - GB Runner Alfie Manthorpe | S3EP.06

0:00MARCHON Head Of Running:Alfie Manthorpe, welcome to the Without Limits podcast. Thank you for having me. I'm very excited. I don't know when this episode is going to go out, but we are recording basically the first episode of what will be season three. So this is a big moment for me. It's been a long time coming. And like I said, irrespective of what episodes go out first, this is the start, hopefully, of a big season for me. So thank you very much for joining me. It's obviously under a very special occasion with bringing you down to launch you coming on board as the head of MARCHON Running. a massive um opportunity for our brand hopefully an opportunity for you and your career as a coach as well as an athlete and um yeah hopefully the start of something that's um super successful for all of us so yeah i'm excited uh and without further ado my first question is always what does

0:46Alfie Manthorpe:without limits mean to you i think for me without limits means that whatever you do in life you go and within the intent that you can achieve whatever you set out to achieve as long as you have the right mindset and plan behind it i don't think you should ever set yourself limitations on what you can do as long as you have a strategy to do it then you are without limits to to a certain degree obviously there's certain factors what can affect that but i think whatever you do in life you want to go into it with the mindset of being able to achieve whatever you want as long

1:20MARCHON Head Of Running:you put the work in I love surrounding myself with I mean people of any ages but particularly when when there's like young hungry people that are kind of coming up in their sport or in their career their profession whatever it may be and it just reminds me to like to stay on stay on your game and I think you're someone that is you're quite a quiet softly spoken character you know quite quite shy by all intents and purposes but someone that's been on a bit of a meteoric rise both through social media some of the brands that you've been working with you know 247 etc but also for what you've achieved now in the sport over the last couple of years I think it's very easy for people to see the here and now and I've talked to this a number of times people see the here and now they see the they see this kind of success in the moment and think that maybe you know it's happened overnight but to get to your level you know I've been running now for quite you know quite some time with a bit of intent but nothing to the to the extent of what you have but to get to your level I've got a real appreciation for just like how much time you must have committed to this so where where did that all start as a runner and how does someone get to I I know you've called yourself sub-elite just before we came on air, but you're an elite runner by all accounts.

2:26MARCHON Head Of Running:How do you get to becoming an elite runner? Where does that start?

2:30Alfie Manthorpe:I mean, I probably started a lot earlier than a lot of other good runners now. I think in terms of people who ran when they were really young, it's not that great of a conversion into being a good runner when you're in your 20s or 30s. Generally, I think in the UK, that's just because of the culture of training when you're younger is a bit backwards and a bit different to maybe other countries but I think across the board it's normally you start with a different sport like football and things like that and then build into running as you go um but for me I kind of ran really young so six seven eight I was doing cross country in school um whatever like year three year four um kind of I grew up watching my family run and because my mom was pretty young when she had me she was still running and I can remember like watching her do races albeit very few because I think after I came to the picture it was a bit of a downhill performance thing from there for her but I can remember that and then my grandparents from my dad ran so it was always natural for me to run and I think maybe because from a young age I was really sporty I loved doing karate, badminton, football, swimming and running I was generally quite good at running anyway because I just did a lot of other sports and the fitness was kind of there so first few years at like 11 I was pretty good at running and then as I sort of transitioned maybe as more people came into the sport I instantly started getting worse and worse by proportion people grew quicker than me and for quite a few years I was pretty mediocre at a national level or compared to what I was maybe when I was 11 when I was one of the best in the country and then kind of going through the teenage years and you know when you're at school you don't really at that point look at maybe trying to educate yourself a bit more on the sport so I was just kind of going through the motions being coached by someone who looking back was a terrible coach and also the nutrition what I was doing was terrible at the time as well and I just gradually got worse and worse again proportionately in the sport and I just wasn't improving and then I think maybe around 18 I started to try and do a bit more learn a bit more about the sport and then from there that's kind of compounded year on year on year even though my training has grown like progressed for each of those years i wouldn't say there's been any massive increases in training since then it's just been compounding the fitness and building and building and maybe where people have slacked off um people generally at university have to see a dip because of going out and drinking loads i'm not really into that so I've just really been fortunate with injuries and illness that's never really taken too much away from my training so for the last few years it's just been building and building and with that the consistency I just keep getting better and better so it's kind of taken me to a point now where it's kind of been a big step up and now I guess, I know I did say I was a sub-elite but I've kind of transitioned to that elite level at the minute which is a bit of a long transition and obviously a hard one but yeah at this point it's probably i'm training like a pro and an elite so hopefully i'll get

5:32MARCHON Head Of Running:there within this year there's two bits to pick up on there one i think you mentioned there about the sort of culture in british running you know starting at a young age and be able to maintain that then into you know late teens early 20s i've seen a lot of stuff obviously the closer i've got into running over the last or two three four years looking at other runners at the elite level and some of these people that are very aspirational inspirational characters and yeah their ability to stay at the top or their lack of ability to stay at the top through issues surrounding largely just like fatigue and fatigue where they put their body through too much stress, under fuel, getting fractures in certain places, just like.

6:11MARCHON Head Of Running:So is that kind of what you're alluding to in terms of like culturally within running? I think just keeping an athlete healthy through those formative years?

6:19Alfie Manthorpe:Yeah, I think especially when I was growing up, it was no educational nutrition from an athlete standpoint, you kind of just listen to the coach and go, yes, okay, I'll do that. But most of the time these coaches, in the UK system at least, it's a lot of volunteers or maybe a lot of people don't quite have the skill set to actually coach safely and know what they're doing. Yes, you have a coaching qualification, but it's pretty low level education in terms of what they need to do to complete that qualification. So it kind of just builds up a sort of innate mindset about running which is generally lighter means faster which just means you're not feeling as much as you need to and then also you just got to work hard and push hard and that's how you get results which ultimately the combination itself leads to being fatigued injured ill and then it just compounds and compounds and it's really hard to sustain fitness and sustain being healthy when you're under fueling and overworking it's not really a great combination especially as you get older and you get other stresses in your life as well it's pretty much an impossible combination to stay injury free i suppose then in that instance like the people

7:30MARCHON Head Of Running:that kind of get through the other side are naturally the most resilient to sort of the trials and tribulations of of trying to get lighter trying to stay injury free and trying to increase your mileage and maybe some of the more talented athletes if they were brought up in a different way you know through that system they may still be you know on their game coming into their late teens and early 20s. It's certainly something I've seen. And I think it's quite a mature perspective for you to have as a 25-year-old. So when did the realization of like, that was the kind of culture and I need to maybe just tread carefully around it.

8:00MARCHON Head Of Running:How did you have that level of perspective? Or is it only now that you've kind of got it looking back?

8:05Alfie Manthorpe:It's probably built subconsciously over the years just from experiences of getting injured myself and maybe speaking to good coaches and high-level athletes. But I'd probably say it came off the back of lockdown because generally because the tracks were closed and we weren't training in groups it was pretty much we had one session a week and then the rest of it was kind of easy running or tempo or threshold work never any really strenuous work and that's actually where I saw a lot of improvements so in my head it was like okay I'm not training this hard I'm probably training more but more relaxed and I've seen the biggest improvements I've ever seen and that was I'd say a turning point for me because at the same time Jakob Ingebrigtsen who's a Norwegian runner who's probably I'd consider the best middle distance or distance runner on the planet and maybe probably of all time his training is very much about threshold training and not really going over the edge and really keeping a good control intensity so just those sort of bits of information and experience I just combined and was like it is just about how much you can build over time and not just do this fancy session and maybe go oh that looks really great on paper I must be fit because at that point you're probably already too fatigued to take into the next session because you've it really should be saving those efforts for race day so it was just something that is so obvious looking back but maybe at the time and growing up it was just it is really hard to in hindsight look at it and go okay I should have known that because why would you when you think in most other sports as well it's all about just putting in the work and like in basketball for example you hear stories about how Kobe would just be the first at the gym and the last to leave in running if you're the first to start on a run and then last to run last to be running you'd just get injured and be too fatigued so it's quite a different mindset shift to other sports because you can't just continue to grind and grind and grind and I guess maybe that hard work comes into actually the nutrition recovery side of it which you can kind of do limited off and that's kind of why you've got to put the work in the most.

10:06MARCHON Head Of Running:One thing I've kind of learned by spending the kind of bits of time around you, which has been more frequent recently, and obviously the conversations we've had is there's a lot of athletes that are, you know, have the physical attributes, have the mindset, the mentality, and they're great. They've got all their attributes to be a great athlete. You then get the guys that have got all of that, guys and girls, but then also have this kind of like IQ around the sport and real students of the sport. Again, you mentioned you started very young at six, seven years old, you know, a family history of runners.

10:34MARCHON Head Of Running:what's giving you such a i guess just like a keen eye for for the for the detail and following some of these these alternative methods of trying to get to the top in a in a kind of british system that maybe isn't you know naturally that wouldn't be what what athletes come into contact with

10:46Alfie Manthorpe:i'm pretty obsessive of everything i do so even if it wasn't running um if it was business related or like social media i was big on social media so it was the same there i researched everything to do with the algorithm and everything to do with when you should post and things like that and it's just kind of the same with running so I've gone through so much research over the years some obviously doing it myself where I'm reading certain papers about how different scientific methods are and how they affect fitness down the line and listening to high-profile coaches I've just really trying to be a student of the sport so it's just always been rooted in that really I've always wanted to learn as much as possible and that's kind of led me to a point where you you learn things which on paper should be good and then you try them yourself and see how they convert into maybe how you are as a runner but also on the bigger picture because things aren't always the same on paper as they are in actual practice so it's just really been a trial and error on that front as well um using myself as a bit of a dummy a bit of a guinea pig in that front where i maybe do some training and i go okay maybe that's too much uh too much effort and then take a step back and go okay let's try this and now it's just got to a point where I kind of am confident that what I do is maybe the best for me and probably the best for quite a lot of runners as well.

12:01Alfie Manthorpe:But it's easy to see just following, I guess, the greats of the sport or people I'd consider the most knowledgeable or the best in the sport and just see what they do. And it's not really rocket science from that point. You just kind of copy them and maybe look at it and how you can convert that to an everyday runner, but also then someone like me. And it's quite easy to pick up on the needs of a certain runner and then go, okay, I can adapt this quite easily to you.

12:25MARCHON Head Of Running:as well yeah I think um not only can you see that with you know how you're speaking now through your own training but then also with what you created with that social media page track style which I know you know people may or not know the page but I think I follow it and I think just as a resource in terms of just like I'll use the word holistic but just like a an overview of everything that's going on in the track and field world or in the running space I mean it's such a great resource and I think when you're when you're so passionate about your own performance but you're equally is passionate about all these other essentially competitors and athletes in there and documenting some of the fastest times that are going on in the world at varying different distances you can see just how immersed you are in kind of running culture in the sport as a whole

13:05Alfie Manthorpe:yeah i also think going back to trex is like with you obviously doing this podcast you've probably learned so much from the guests you've had on where i was doing a podcast for like two or three years with pretty much every week like interviewing elite athletes and coaches and you just absorb so much information from those podcast episodes and doing the research for that podcast episode as well is probably definitely where I've got probably most of my knowledge from over the years

13:28MARCHON Head Of Running:it's really cool uh you've alluded to the the sort of you know six and seven get to 11 years old one the best in the country fall off for whatever reason maybe that's to do with you know kind of maturation rates of athletes at that sort of sort of age come back into 18 18 years old and maybe that progress starts to accelerate again because other people are distracted by various other bits and pieces so I think I've got a kind of timeline of when it's kind of been a hobby when it's been more serious and how that's going to progress but how do you turn a hobby such as running into a profession and what does that transition look like in you know in actual terms obviously you've alluded to you know elite level training training like professional what

14:06Alfie Manthorpe:does that look like I definitely think you can't chase the aspiration of transition from a hobby to profession because I think chasing that fitness or maybe chasing that goal would be detrimental because you'd always almost have an extra pressure which would ultimately mean that you probably may be training too hard or you're putting too much pressure on yourself which then psychologically affects it so for me and what I'd always say to other people is you just have to work on being a better athlete than you were last month and that doesn't have to be necessarily the times you're running that could just be how your complete training is as a whole because ultimately running is as close as scientific as you can get obviously there's probably cycling which is a bit more just pure science but it is just on paper fitness and then psychology and as long as you're fresh and healthy if you've got the higher hemoglobin count and better mechanics then you'll run faster on race day as long as you're willing to work as hard as the other person so it literally for me you just break it down to the scientific level and go this is how I build fitness this is how I stay injury free and just work on that month on month on month and just stack the consistency and that's kind of how you get to a point where it transitions away from a hobby to a profession is you have to also have the intent of improving you can't just go I've been doing this for six months so I'm going to keep doing it for six months and just keep doing it and keep doing it you maybe you have to go okay maybe this isn't working very well this is working well let me focus in on the things that work well carry on doing them and then also maybe try to look at ways to innovate in the areas that maybe I'm struggling the most and just carry on building it's just literally a constant building game really.

15:51MARCHON Head Of Running:I hear you and I like that right because it comes back to just like trusting the process now luckily for you the process starts at six seven years old because of external influences of your mom your dad and your grandpa etc for other people you know that they might not start that early in which case then there's a delay in terms of when they can get started and you know trusting the process and building the fitness you know you always want to try and ride the line of like doing as the as much as you can to make sure the progress is as quick as possible for a lot of people obviously then you throw into physical attributes you know mental resilience all those kind of bits and pieces um but at some stage if someone is just like trusting in the process and trying to turn this hobby into profession obviously a profession means uh probably more commercial opportunity from doing the hobby.

16:32MARCHON Head Of Running:We spoke about this at the track the other week, you knowing your physical capabilities and limitations around limb length for certain distances, etc. At what stage does someone kind of give up on the dream or would you suggest someone just holds on indefinitely? There's got to be, given your understanding of this, there's got to be some moments where you can go if I'm not running this time at this age or whatever it may be, is there any examples of that where people can...

16:56Alfie Manthorpe:So I think actually maybe until the last 18 months or maybe even the 12 months I was kind of set that I'm still going to try and be a better runner but I was almost accepted that I wasn't going to be definitely an Olympic level runner or professional runner um so I think unfortunately I do think it is the long game regardless of um the case of maybe if people aren't where they need to be and it's like well how can I get there or else I'm just going to quit sometimes it is that might actually take twice as long as you the initial goal is so I mean I've definitely had times in my career where that was the case I wasn't really improving from ages of like 15 to 18 19 until I changed quite a lot of training and then there was a massive shift and at the time you could probably go there's not really an explanation for that shift but looking back there probably was definitely a big change in training so I do think it's ultimately where people what expectations they have on their running as a whole or whatever sport there is and if that's I want to be a professional athlete then you've just got to kind of do it indefinitely and you might make it you might not but even if you're let's I mean obviously you can't drop everything to do it if if it's not working because at certain points and that's why I built a social media presence and that's why I was working on a few other things was because it's not really having a backup plan but it's making sure you can sustain continuing to have that athletic endeavor so I had to you know get a job do other things side hustles and everything like that just to make sure I could continue to try and train to the best of my ability because I wasn't sure when the date was going to come that I'd be good enough at running to be able to call it a profession so yeah I mean you've just got to stick at it unfortunately it's uh it's quite a long game and it might never come so who knows what does uh what does calling

18:57MARCHON Head Of Running:it profession mean to you in terms of like what does it what does a professional athlete mean what's the difference and I guess just like objectively black and white once you're a hobbyist it's like this is what it kind of looks like and when you're professional it looks like this because I think um it's quite a gray area right yeah I guess by true definition it would be

19:13Alfie Manthorpe:main source of income being out of the sport I kind of I guess a lot of people could also look at it with how much intent you have behind the sport so my lifestyle is very much structured around running so obviously after this podcast I'm going for a run and then having some lunch I tried to lay in bed as much as possible this morning so I could have got out this morning and ran but that means I would have woke up an hour earlier to run then which wouldn't have been optimal for recovery so for me at this point it's pretty much everything in my life revolves around running or how even if it's not running on that day how i'm going to be two days from now so everything i eat everything i do today will be looking for the next week or the next month of training like you can't really slip and i think that's probably the biggest difference other than the the earning the money aspect it's just everything has to be dialed to performance and staying healthy and you can't really slip on that because that's how performance goes out the window and when you're relying on those performances or relying on training being a certain way or a certain block being of a certain quality to get you to a certain fitness level you can't really allow it to slip and that's kind of the biggest difference I think.

20:26MARCHON Head Of Running:You've alluded to you know the side hustles and the ways in which you had to you know you have to make ends meet so in order to put food on the table and to fund the lifestyles of pro athlete and I can I can completely relate to that I've also spoke to a number of different athletes or track and field athletes or British Olympians that kind of thing and I know the sport is quite heavily underfunded for the amount of you know effort and time it takes both you know on the come up in training and then also even when once you quote unquote make it obviously in this day and age you know alluded to brands that you may be working with and opportunities that can come up for athletes now outside of I guess the sport but the sport is maybe the vehicle that offer those opportunities what um what's your kind of perception now and the kind of commercial opportunities for becoming a professional athlete in let's just let's say running but I guess just like track and field or whatever you categorize running um as part of

21:16Alfie Manthorpe:I would say I guess a lot of people out there if they were like I wanted to fast track not fast track but if they wanted to make it a feasible fight like a feasible career path it would be obviously that focuses on performance but how you communicate through social media your story is is definitely the most powerful thing in fact i'd say that actually outweighs results and running performance it definitely helps like if i can make a reel about how i ran a 28 minute 10k it'll certainly get a lot of views um but yeah i'd say everything right now is on social media so you see what the influencers and they make considerably amounts like crazy amounts of money than and just a standard professional and then you kind of have a people who overlap i guess even in the high rock space like jake dearden for example he's obviously one of the best high rockers in the world but he's also got 600 and something thousand followers which definitely helps his career more and then it kind of overlaps as well so in the running space you've kind of got people like philly bowden who i don't know whether to call her an influencer anymore because she's a professional athlete she's ran 225 226 marathon but i believe when she started becoming an influencer so to speak she was running the 230 marathon 232 marathon and i'd say and i'm sure she would say as well in terms of having doors open for her and allowing more time to actually train as an elite athlete um it was actually influencing what opened those doors and the commercial opportunities she got from social media that actually allowed her to train fully you know even just being able to pay for training camps being able to have the nutrition you need being able to have the running shoes you need it's a massive expense and there's so many ways to make that easier and that is generally through having opportunities through social media at the

23:06MARCHON Head Of Running:minute so that's definitely the key yeah i don't think there's any you know way to skirt around the the fact that you know being able to make your you know grow your personal brand and making yourself more commercially viable for brands to be able to support you in your endeavor of being an athlete is super important i think the athletes that lean into it and that straddle the line really well are the ones that are kind of the superstars in the space because they're able to marry up their athletic performance with also their ability to communicate and relate and inspire a generation of people.

23:33MARCHON Head Of Running:I think there are many people that maybe don't lean into it enough, but also I think culturally maybe within running, it's something that I guess the coaches of old or the old school people probably don't care for it. Case in point, they're volunteers in the sport. But you can't train like a professional athlete and not earn any money. So I think is something that's that is very important you've obviously shown your natural uh i guess connection to wanting to to learn about that that that place you know with track star but also your own social media is that something you proactively put time into and what's the kind of i guess the strain on your energy and resource um when you are having to eat sleep breathe you know running the strain kind of all those extra deliverables um be it socials they put much strain on it are you able

24:17Alfie Manthorpe:to kind of manage and balance both right now it's i'd say most of the time it's actually a good balance i'm not sure if we had this conversation in six months 12 months time if that'd be a better balance or a worse balance i kind of maybe need to at the minute i'm in a position where i don't want to say no to any new opportunities but i'm sure at some point that will change to i'll have to start saying no to things because ultimately i definitely noticed it's not happened recently but a few times i've been doing too much travel before a race or I've been too many places at once and then you get a bit ill from you know not sleeping as much and having to change your training around or maybe not eating optimally and it very quickly goes south if if you're doing too much of that so I mean it's definitely a trade-off and you've got to definitely balance that but it's just kind of with everything in the sense that I could look at this and go a year ago I was maybe working a nine-to-five job and then having to train around that I'd definitely pick this now uh so i'm i'll never really complain and this is why i'm i guess saying yes to everything at the minute is because what would i rather be doing and what's actually better for training it's definitely this option right now and yes hopefully in six months time i'll be fortunate enough to have built it up to a point where people are asking me to do things i have to reluctantly say no but i guess that's again a luxury where i'll be at a point where okay now I can focus a bit more on performance because I've got these other things built up as

25:43MARCHON Head Of Running:well you kind of alluded to that sort of timeline over the last 12 months and yeah the next six months I think I think you know everything you're sort of suggesting could happen a lot quicker because the landscape of running now is the opportunity is so vast right for for people just getting into running and the opportunities and the low barriers to entry and the opportunity to be accepted by a certain run club or get into a recreational race um you know done a marathon accepting more people than ever before so the landscape's really exciting as a runner um I suppose it would have to be for me to be giving up so much time for me for me running as well right so what do you think about that running landscape as someone that's obviously been in it for the last 19 20 years you know this has been a sport that maybe back when you were you know early 10 11 12 all your mates are playing football running isn't very cool doing cross-country now everyone wants to run what's your kind of thoughts on that i think initially it's definitely made it easier to

26:33Alfie Manthorpe:wear half tights to the supermarket after a run to be honest i don't feel as uh as weird going into a shop with short shorts on or a lycra on uh to buy some protein shake after a run or something so that's that's nice um yeah i've kind of seen both sides of it where i grew up with the traditional side where i love watching diamond leagues or watching the world championships or the olympics um and in that i kind of cross paths or just talk with a lot of traditional runners who maybe would hate the new sort of wave of run clubs and influencing and things but for me I love where it's at right now and its trajectory what seems to be hopefully growing still where I think it's just great that people can actually come into the sport and do whatever they want to do in the sport because again going back to what it was like when I was a kid it was like you've got to do this you've got to do this it's kind of why I don't run the marathon yet because it's still I followed the traditional build of you do 800 meters you do 1500 meters and then you go up to the 3k and then the 5k and then the 10k but you can't run a 10k until you're 18 for example or you can't race the 5k until you're 16 really is that is that kind of the yeah set wave there's a few exceptions with road races but on the track i can't i don't think i raced a 5k on the track until i was at university what do you mean you can't run one they just say you can't run one yeah it's just um like the common thing where you race 600 meters when you're 11 and you race, you move up to 800 meters when you're 13.

28:05Alfie Manthorpe:Obviously, the decision they put those meets on is maybe the governing body who decides that, obviously, is the structure, depending on which age group you are. But even outside of that, I can't remember ever really having a race where I'd have the opportunity to do that. Maybe that was just me not looking on my mum, not looking for those races, but it was definitely, there's a certain stigma about athletes who step up to do a 10K at a young age or step up to do a half marathon at a young age or a marathon. and it's just a massive part of the sport really you've kind of got to follow this traditional path like even jake did and was doing cross country races with me when he was at school because that was what you that's what you did you did cross country or you race on the track at short distances that's basically it whereas now you've got people doing marathons when they're 20 23 which was would never happen when i was growing up you'd see everyone who's a marathon runner in the 30s um so that's definitely changed which i like because it just i don't know why that would ever be the case in the first place that you couldn't do things until you're a certain age obviously not telling a 16 year old's going to do a marathon but if i think if you can healthily handle the training you should be able to do whatever you want really in the sport yeah nice

29:12MARCHON Head Of Running:let's let's talk talk some like running uh specifics last time we did this was actually actually with the with jake didden um you've alluded to uh sort of training now you know post covid a large volume of your training kind of being easy sessions and you said a few times a few terms i also hear runners talk about sessions and when they talk about sessions they're not and they go i've got one two sessions this week they've still got eight in my turn they've still got eight sessions that's like eight runs they're doing but two of them are sessions so just talk to me about running terminology at that elite level you've got sessions you've got threshold you've got easy you've got tempo you've got all these different things can you just give me a quick breakdown of the lingo so i can be down with the kids yeah so i guess you class the

29:53Alfie Manthorpe:session as a workout or i mean i coach george heaton as well and he always calls it speed work or sprints no matter what it is if i set him four by 2k he'll call it sprints so i'm like it's not a sprint um so yeah session i'd class as a workout so most commonly now that's threshold training which is in broader terms half marathon to marathon pace for me but if i wanted to go down the the scientific route i mean you've had the test in this it's certain lactate levels and certain paces and things like that and then the rest of it is kind of just easy running which is i people would say zone two but i i'd probably say it's like zone one and a half for me or one i don't think i'd actually go into zone too much on an easy run i've never really looked at or tracked the zones too much um so i just class it as an easy run and i think a lot of people might get too caught up on the metrics on that i would say if you can nose breathe on an easy run brilliant a lot of people have hay fever or deviated septums as well so if you can hold a conversation on an easy run i don't think it matters if that's a zone whatever it's it's is it easy and other than that it's kind of despite really there's steady which i'm sure people get confused with um steady's kind of in between where it's like not easy but it's not hard and people often think steady is easy but it's not so a few different things we're running lingo it's a bit

31:18MARCHON Head Of Running:they're confusing but that's kind of the gist of it yeah i think when we first uh we sort of set out the running programs last time we were looking at all the terminology of like you know easy runs recovery runs long runs tempo runs threshold runs speed work it can get quite confusing but are you saying just to distill it down into simple terms like your sessions are threshold work so tough intervals yep and then everything else should be easy runs and there's just a there's different

31:42Alfie Manthorpe:categories within easy running yeah just to simple it down that would be um the best way to look at it i think easy and then not easy it's probably the yeah the easiest way to distinguish it distinguish it um there's a lot of in between work like threshold stays in between but it's definitely on the harder side of the of the effort and the only thing what kind of floats in the middle is steady runs where people i guess maybe marathon runners would do that more often where in the long run they kind of go as sort of a sustained effort what isn't quite race pace but a sustained effort what's not easy either just to get the heart rate up but yeah most of it can be distinguished by easy or running a bit harder and people talk about this kind of like 80 20 kind

32:23MARCHON Head Of Running:of ratio of like you know 20 percent of training this isn't isn't just like running specific i think it's training in general but 80 percent 80 percent of running is just like easy work 20 is maybe towards that kind of higher heart rate work where you're working considerably harder uh do you think those kind of general rules of thumb a good good place for for you know people running um obviously it's very context dependent right if like if someone's very new to running i don't necessarily think that their heart rate is their biggest determinant of whether they're going to get injured or ill uh it's more to do with their just ability to handle volume or ramp the volume up in it in a way that's um is manageable and it's graded in terms of their exposure to it more so than like you know if they ran 20k tough heart rate effort then the next week they ran 60k an easy effort the 60k easy effort is probably going to be more detrimental but just because of the volume and the tissue tolerance and those kind of things yeah i think uh just like in

33:19Alfie Manthorpe:i guess any sport if if for example in gym if you were like getting someone going you go i can't think of the gym terminology now so i'll try to think of a different example but yeah the 8 to 20 thing works just how you explain it to anyone else new in a sport like in football you'd go i'll just kick the ball around that's like me saying 8 to 20 whereas if you get to a certain level you maybe go okay it's a lot more intricate than that you break it down but it is quite a good starting point but like you said there if if someone goes and does 8 to 20 of 30 kilometers it's a lot different than doing 8 to 20 doing 100 kilometers um especially when you're new to the sport um it is i would definitely say for everyone but especially people who are getting into the sport it's purely just about fatigue management and that could be you might do a 1k really hard or you might do 2k easy probably relatively similar um but if you're not recovering it's you could kind of be doing even less than that and still struggle so it is just purely how much effort and impact am I putting on my body and how am I allowing it to recover and if they don't match up then you're going to get injured it doesn't matter if it's 80 20 doesn't matter if it's 70 30 if the recovery doesn't match up with the intensity then that's all that matters

34:35MARCHON Head Of Running:I think you you kind of already alluded to maybe an answer here for this question but obviously heart rate zone training has become very popular within running particularly for beginners getting getting started you know a zone two effort go run and people say my heart rate's kind of above zone two and i'm like two minutes into the run do i just stop um and the general advice is you know run for a bit walk for a bit etc but i think you've kind of made it actually a little bit easier for people it's like the conversational pace or the nasal breathing pace that kind of thing what do you think of zone sort of zone training with heart rate and things is it is it helpful for begin and we're talking beginners here right because i think they're the ones that probably get the most confused about this i think it can be helpful but i also think

35:15Alfie Manthorpe:it could be detrimental but purely because the it's determined on the trackers of the heart rate and also determined on how you set those zones so unless you've had a test done in a lab how do you know truly know what those zones are yes there could be a rule of thumb out there but then that's there's a difference between um running that is quite a fine window between running easy enough and then running too hard so if that if that's not accurate in the testing then it's relevant um and then also that same applies to the tracker if it's a wrist heart rate monitor compared to a chest strap or an arm strap it's it's even 10 beat 10 beats per minute is going to be a massive difference or could be a massive difference in effort so i think it does help new people maybe visualize how they should be training but ultimately the quicker people can learn to know their body and their efforts that's it's the number one priority like sometimes heart rate can be high because you're fatigued sometimes heart rate can be too low because you're fatigued it's never an exact science of telling you how you are i've had sessions where i'm absolutely dying my body feels terrible and my heart rate's not even scratching the first threshold and i've had times when i feel great and my heart rate's really high it doesn't always line up so i think tracking zones even though it can be good especially for new people it's not the end goal for sure it should be getting used to the effort yeah i think that's really good advice i think