Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Expand your running knowledge, identify running misconceptions and become a faster, healthier, SMARTER runner. Let Brodie Sharpe become your new running guide as he teaches you powerful injury insights from his many years as a physiotherapist while also interviewing the best running gurus in the world. This is ideal for injured runners & runners looking for injury prevention and elevated performance. So, take full advantage by starting at season 1 where Brodie teaches you THE TOP PRINCIPLES TO OVERCOME ANY RUNNING INJURY and let’s begin your run smarter journey.
:
On today's episode, your sub-3 hour marathon blueprint with Dr Will O'Connor. Welcome to the podcast helping you train, rehab and run smarter. When I first started running in my 20s, I knew it would be something I'd be passionate about for the rest of my life. But, unfortunately, developing injury after injury disrupted my progress and left me under-trained at the start line on race day. Even with my knowledge as a physio, I still fell victim to the vicious injury cycle and when searching for answers, struggled to decipher between common running myths and evidence-based guidance. That's what this podcast is here to help you with. So join me as a run smarter scholar and let's break the injury cycle by raising your running IQ and achieving running feats you never thought possible. Hey Run Smarter Scholars. I am pumped to introduce you to Dr. Will, who is, uh, he's got a ton of stuff going on. Uh, he's got a podcast, the performance advantage podcast. He has a ton of stuff on his website, YouTube channel. You check it all out. It's Dr. Will O'Connor. I'll leave all the links in the show notes, uh, as I introduce him to you. And you're going to just instantly. Realize how much wisdom he has, how much knowledge in the space, working with athletes and some experience himself. And. his academic career because he's a running scientist and he's done, he's got a wealth of knowledge in this topic. And before we start off, if you don't have a goal to run a sub three hour marathon, but you do have the goal to improve your marathon or just get faster in general, you are going to take so much away from this conversation. Interestingly, which I'll point out at the end of this conversation, Will's tips, especially towards the end, It's stuff I've never heard, not on this podcast, not in any other podcast I've listened to. And it is a change in mindset. It's, there's a lot of stuff in here that you're really going to take away. And it's going to be really new. It was new for me. Hopefully it's new for you. And hopefully you really get a lot out of it. So yes, we are talking about if you do want to run a sub three hour marathon, these are the numbers, this, the training, this is what you need to focus on. But. We talk about all a whole bunch of like 1% is some tips, some mindset shifts. And yeah, you're going to love it. So if you want to improve as a runner, you're going to take plenty of way. Let's introduce Dr. Will. Dr. Will, thanks for joining me on the podcast. Hey, happy to be here. Excellent. Let's, uh, let's dive into an intro. Where do you hail from? And let's dive into your running career and also your academic career. Yeah, sure. So I guess. Now I'm 35 and I guess running specifically has probably been a passion in my life for about a decade now. Kind of concentrated. Before that it was triathlon and before that it was rugby. You're in Aussie so Melbourne I guess you're a bit rugby but mainly AFL right? We're mainly AFL. I do watch the Wallabies, but it's very hard to be a Wallaby supporter for the last decade or so. Yeah. Especially with the coaching issues. So as a, as a Kiwi boy, like you grow up playing rugby. Um, and then in the nineties, like it was just all blacks, everything. Jonah Lamu, like the professional, professionalization of rugby and the franchise with the super rugby franchises that came on. just exploded rugby more so into the New Zealand culture. So, and being like World Cup contenders as a small nation, like you just, you play rugby. So that's what I did. And through school, it's like all amazing and everyone's competitive. The school boy rugby scene is just absolutely massive. They actually televised it live for a while, for a few years just recently, but they've stopped because of was just getting a bit too out of hand at that high school level. And yeah, so that, that was me. And then going into university, I was fully into the rugby culture. And what that means in New Zealand is heavy binge drinking culture. Um, and it was, you know, a for the boys kind of scenario. Um, and so along there, I was studying engineering and I just, I I didn't fail miserably. I did all right, to be fair. But at the end of the year, I just was like, Oh man, I need I need something else like coming from schoolboy rugby where it's all so regimented. And we're training, you know, almost every day of the week, plus all our gym work and everything. You come into the club scene, and it's just a lot different. You have, you know, I was 19, you have guys who are 23, and they're kind of in work. And it's not. their main focus to be a good rugby player. And so I'd always had this kind of passion interest in triathlon ever since 2004 when Bevan Dokiri and Hamish Carter went gold and silver in the Athens Olympics and the triathlon. And this just happened to be televised at around 6 p.m. or 7 p.m. I think it was like just after the news. And this is 2004, so no one's on streaming. Everyone's actually watching. like cable TV. And we all saw it. And I just remember that is that is amazing. That is just that just intrigues me. And so I was like, I'm gonna do triathlon. And yes, I was I mean, about 20. And it just took off from there. Along with that, I started studying biology, which turned into biochemistry, which turned into exercise physiology for an honors project. And over that kind of four years, I got like pretty good at triathlon and the, you get out what you put in aspect of it and working towards specific numbers and goals, worked alongside my, like, I guess, development of an understanding of the human body and passion for self-experimentation on the stuff I was learning in university. So then I went away to Australia, over to the Gold Coast to train full-time, where I... quickly got overtrained, chronically, chronically overtrained, which put me in a hole for, honestly, like looking back two, maybe three years before I was fully out of it because I never fully took my foot off the gas. And when I first had that first initial intensive bout of overtraining, I was like, I do not wanna be a professional athlete. Like going up against athletes who are providing for their family. And like, I was like, 22, 23, I had no money and I could have no money, it was fine, kind of thing. I was enjoying the lifestyle and the journey, kind of. But I realized like, I don't, in order to make this a living, like you need to shut it down. This needs to be your, be all and end all. And I just loved teaching and learning. So I went back to university to do a PhD. And that was all centered around low carbohydrate endurance performance at the time, metabolic flexibility. And yeah, from there I spent another, I guess, like five years at university. And that took me through to just before I was 30. And then I had a bit of work to still finish off on my PhD and other kind of little research projects. So it would have been about 31. 35 now, so about four years ago, started entering into doing a bit of teaching and my, I guess, like professional life as it is now, which is like a running scientist and coach. And yeah, and then, and me, I just kind of, yeah, did triathlon, then needed to finish my thesis. So got into ultra running because triathlon is just like too much. client too much time consuming, energy consuming. Yeah, and ultra running has been, yeah, I did my, I don't want to say last ultra run, but I did in May, and I'm going to take a couple of years off and focus on track, athletics. And there's a bunch of marathons and everything thrown in, in the mix. Very cool, mate. Yeah, sounds like it's, a lot's happened to bring you to this point and- What are you passionate about at the moment in terms of like helping runners or like content creation? Uh, what are you gravitating towards? Um, content creation, just in general, like it's really been what I've, what I've been trying to figure out for a few years, like, uh, as you know, like you're on YouTube, you're doing this podcast, oh man, you've like, you've got to make money, right? So there's an actual job there, um, that you need to. figure out how to bring that in. Because in the initial stages, no one pays you a salary to do all of this content creation, even though it's this massive passion. And it's only been recently that I've been able to, I guess, figure out my voice within how I fit in and who my client base is, who I'm speaking to. So since doing that, I've been able to curate my information in a way that I enjoy. Like... with a science backed approach, with a educational and experience approach thrown in there to an audience that I understand. And that's led to actually being able to do it in a way that draws in a lot of clients. So now it's almost like it is part of the advertising space. When you're trying to operate online as I do, like I think 95% of my... world exists online, like I work with clients all around the world. I know only a couple of locals now. Um, it's a journey, you know, everyone as an expert in the space just continuously changes from Facebook ads to Instagram ads to like even podcasting is completely changed. And yeah, so, so right now it's, it's like my client base or like fear is probably similar yours. Like it's like a 35 to 50 year old male. working professional who's decided I need to sort my shit out before it's, you know, I'm too old and I've got a bit of time, like, um, work stable. Like let's try and get what we're probably going to be able to talk about. You know, let's get the sub three hour out of the way before it's just that too hard basket. Yeah. Well, that's what drew me towards you to start with, because you actually popped up on my, um, YouTube feed and it was about a sub marathon. mistakes or, um, benchmarks and things for sub marathon, uh, to achieve a sub three hour marathon. And you could tell like, as soon as I started listening to you, you know what you're talking about. You're confident, you spit out the literature, you've got experience with working with athletes and it's, it resonates very well. And I was having the idea of, um, compiling a YouTube video with pro runners and also some experts about how to run a sub three hour marathon, which sort of eludes a lot of people and is a goal for a lot of people. And so, I'm glad that you agreed to come on and share this. And one of the things that you talked about, which I was intrigued about was some sort of like prerequisites or like benchmarks for runners that they should be ticking off before they should consider attempting or entering the training phase of a, with the goal of, you know, doing a sub three hour marathon. What do you say for runners? What might be some of those benchmarks and prerequisites? Yeah, so I consider it all around your threshold. And when I say that anaerobic threshold, so that's the point at which you're predominantly in contributing or generating energy from an anaerobic metabolism. We all know lactate, like the accumulation of lactate. So when we go over that line, that threshold, we're in diminishing returns. We're above the red line and our time above that is kind of finite. And from that point, we can calculate and establish with the body of knowledge we have now, like we've got a pretty good understanding as to when you have a threshold of X, we can work backwards from that to understand what your capacities are underneath that threshold. Not so much above it. but definitely underneath it in a running context because in running we're really blessed in that we run fixed distances. And that's kind of it. Like we have the marathon, half marathon, 10, five. When you look at cycling, it's so dynamic and putting out any of an ultra running with the terrain and everything, like with running and we're looking at a marathon, it's like, well, we know like people have been running marathons for 100 years and we have data on them for... at least 60 of those, like really good quality scientific data. So I look at the threshold and that threshold, so if we're looking at minutes per K, needs to be around that four minute mark, four minutes per K. And the way I'm looking at that is, it's like you need to be running under a 40 minute 10K. Like if you don't have a sub 40 10K on, on the books and so if we're talking about miles, some of your North American listeners. So plenty of them are so you know the conversions. So it's 626 minutes per mile. But that's why I say like a sub 40 10K, everyone's kind of, everyone knows that, right? Look, if you're not hitting that, we'll get into the science of that later, but that's just a real benchmark. It's like, that's, doesn't necessarily need to be right at the start, like you could be doing a 41. say, and depends on your lead time into the race. But I mean, if you're not, then the science says it's going to be really challenging for this to be a realistic goal for you physiologically. It's OK. So if we're talking about your threshold, so we're looking at as a runner gets, as they're running, as they get faster and faster and faster, there'll be a certain point where They simply can't run at a steady state without accumulating more and more lactic acid and then it's going to, you know, like you said, it's going to be finite, they're going to blow up eventually. And so if you can achieve a 10 K in 40 minutes or under where sort of assuming that you sort of comfortable around in and around that pace. And so that is somewhat a little bit below your threshold to generate lactate and, um, enter that anaerobic state and therefore it's kind of like, okay, we've got enough base here to then build upon to, you know, reach for that sub three hour marathon. Is that fair to say? Yeah. So we've, we've got the number and then we're working backwards from that because we're not going to do a marathon at our threshold. We're going to do it a percentage below that. So we've got, that just says, all right, we've got a big box ticked here that now the development of another threshold. It can be our main focus, so that when we are running the desired pace, which is like 415, 416 minutes per K, around a 652 minute mile, around low 650s, it means when we're running that, that we are actually steady state. And so we need a... a certain amount of buffer. So we want that to be around 90% of our threshold. And so that's kind of what our numbers give. And so again, that's based off of the physiological data we have on humans running and running for certain durations. So that's where we're at. And so I actually just looked up here. So I've also got like a 126 half marathon. So some people don't race tens that often, but like a 126 half is gonna. Be another indicator where it's like, all right, these, like you've ticked these, so it is capable for you. Like this is a sub three is a realistic goal. Now it's about like getting in there and yeah, like doing it is a completely, completely different thing. What about if someone says, oh, look, I want to run. a sub three marathon eventually. It's not going to be in my next training phase, but it's, um, you know, a goal that I have in the next couple of years, but I'm not hitting that benchmark yet. What would you suggest to them? Like how can they structure their training or what can they do to, you know, strive towards that benchmark? Yes. So I get, you sent me a couple of these questions early and I did put another question to that. It's one I get a lot like, is it too soon to do a marathon or do another marathon? And it's like, yeah, what is your goal? Like when people are like, oh, I want to do this. It's like, But I guess if we're looking to structure, someone's going, this is the ultimate goal. People come to me and say that, like, how long do I need? How does my training need to change? I guess there'll be two scenarios here. The general is where you've got someone who's pretty new to running, you know, so they haven't done any marathons and that's their goal. So within six months, we need to do like, I like to do the full preparation phase from like, building the foundational fitness for about three months and then three months of dedicated marathon. Do the marathon without a performance goal in mind. Like have the, all your process goals are around like pacing, nutrition, and just trying to execute the race. Once you've done that six month system, then you know where you're at. Like you know what? what didn't work, what felt good in training, what your weekly training stress was, your mileage, your time, your duration, all that stuff, and then how the race actually panned out. And so, I mean, if you're executing everything perfectly and you're a 315, there's a while to go. There's probably another 12, 18 months at least. If you're a 305, it's like, okay, well, next round, we should be on, like we should be. pretty close if we've seen things we need to alter in training. But the first point is to do that six month process. And then, but if you are a season marathon runner, say you've already done your 305. So now we need to look back and see what, what is it that could change? And it's not, and it's hardly ever more training, which most people think it is. Um, it's just a Altering the, the levers, you know, and the variables we have within our week to try and get us to the point where, where the race itself goes well. And then looking at the race itself to make sure everything in the race is ticked off. I don't do that answer question. It does. Yeah. Um, you sort of making sure that you're the right type of, at the right type of time in your career where we can start doing the right things and like. pushing for it, but like you say, time experience for some, getting some data under your belt, making sure that we're, you know, we've got some structure to follow and learning your strengths and weaknesses and that sort of stuff and then launching from there, I guess. Yeah, yeah. So like you have to do a marathon, you know, like unless, unless you're coming from like a lot of halves where that was kind of your thing and you and you've done heaps and you've done a lot of training cycles. Otherwise, it's You just got to go do it, figure out what needs to be done before you can. Yeah. Optimize. Yeah. Perfect. Okay. Um, and so going back to the example where someone's, you know, maybe running a 45 minute 10 K or doing a marathon and, you know, not really hitting those. It seems quite evident that threshold that we're trying to strive for is well below where they need to be. Um, what can they do to sort of reach that prerequisite? What, how can they structure their training? Uh, I would be focusing on the threshold development and overall aerobic capacity. Uh, so for me, that looks like a lot of. sweet spot threshold tempo intervals. So that would be zone three, four for a lot of zone systems. So that 90 to 105% of your threshold range. So that would be like one mile or say, I don't know, five to 10 minute repeats at threshold. Now what most people are gonna make the mistake here is if you're doing say three by 10 minutes at kind of threshold. They're trying to run 10K, 5K PB, like PB pace. It's actually not that hard. It's very much a massage of the threshold, a low dose continuous chronic stimulus over a long period of time that enhances your ability to metabolize lactate. So lactate's not the enemy. Like we can remetabolize it back into glucose. and other muscle cells like adjacent to the muscles generating lactate can do that. And so you can optimize that whole process as well as optimize your utilization of fats, oxygen, and carbohydrates at these required intensities. But the actual output itself doesn't really matter. That's why running power is really good for those of you who are kind of a little bit aware of running power or the stride running power meter risk base, that's where that's good because it can kind of take away those benchmarks, Strava, like, you know, validation numbers where you're like, well, if I'm not running four minute Ks, then it means I'm not running threshold. Like that's my goal. And it's like, well, on a given day, on a given train, that's probably too much a lot of the time. So if you're running 420s or like a, yeah, like. or would that be just under a seven minute mile? That's fine, that's fine. We're looking at a chronic development over time. And then same going for your longer tempo runs. This is over undulating terrain, maybe trail, where you can kind of leverage heart rate more because it's gonna be a longer duration. And you're looking like 30, 60 minute tempo efforts. And in the initial phases, it's like, we're not trying to hit marathon pace. There's no specific pace output that we're looking for. We're looking for the metabolic and physiological specificity to develop you to be more efficient and more, yeah, economical at these given intensities. The speed aspect and the marathon specific pace that we require, like that's the final kind of eight weeks even that we can massage that. But if you haven't, built the underlying infrastructure, I guess, within your physiology, then this is what I see being the biggest mistake, is people just trying to be seeing those outputs, seeing exactly what they need, seeing the numbers going straight there, and essentially they're not doing threshold training, they're doing close to this medium VO2 max stuff, and then the tempo training, threshold training, which you'd never try and do for an hour. and then the slow stuff's not slow enough and you're just over trained, you just end up gray, gray zone training. So what we'll be looking at is those threshold efforts where you're looking like a mile to like 10 minutes, three to five reps of those, plenty of rest, like two minutes rest, and then integrating some like 30 to 60 minute undulating. tempo runs and these are legitimately tempo where it's probably what you have used to being running when you run with your mate who's too fast. Like you're like, shit, I would like to slow down but I'm still kind of okay. That's like, that's tempo. Tempo is not, oh yeah, sweet. I just ran half marathon pace for an hour or whatever. It's like hard, but not too hard. Got you. And so if we're doing these threshold sessions, um, like you said, three to five repeats of about 10 minutes, um, at that sort of threshold zone and then two minutes rest, are we, and are we doing that once a week? Um, twice a week. And so we're looking, so I guess 30, around 30 minutes of the work, threshold work, you know, cumulative time, um, to start with, and then maybe you can start to build. build that up, um, yeah, once a week and a tempo session once a week, and then we have the long run for the aerobic capacity. And for some people that's, that's all they've got, you know, they've just got the three days and for people who have more, it's just building more aerobic foundation. And so that's just layering on more easy miles. Yeah. And that would just be really, really easy. Intensity and just whatever suits your availability and what you can tolerate. And, um, yeah, just trying to sensibly build up to small more mileage per week. Yeah. And then on occasions you can integrate the tempo into your long run. So as we start to, uh, let's say in the, if we've got the six month program. So I'm just trying to word this sounds right. So about four months out. four or five months out, that's where we can start to throw in some of these like introductory marathon sessions, your classic progressive run. You run for a couple of hours, then you push it for 30 minutes and like into that tempo zone. Do that kind of heart rate controlled, and then you can see what your pace output is. And you go, okay, all right, so I'm around a 430 at the back end of a couple of hours. That's not too bad. That's, you know, it's not where I need to be right now, Um, so when you, I have so much like history of training, all these different runners, I can kind of do all these conversions in my head, but yeah, if you're doing a heart rate control, so you allow yourself to get into up to like a hundred percent of your heart rate threshold over the last 30 minutes of like it. So you do two hours aerobic 30 minutes tempo. If you're running five minute case, it's like, well, we've a lot of muscular conditioning to do. Because if you can run two and a half hours and you can push the last 30 minutes, like you're fit enough. There's definitely, if you're training a few times a week and you're close to like, you know, you're doing a 42 minute even 10K, it's like you're really fit, you're really fit. But if you're struggling to push the intensity at the back end of two and a half hours and you wanna run hard for three hours, then it's, you're going to need to lift your miles. And you're not like, it does not need to be intensive or, it doesn't need to be a lot of specifics around it, but yeah, you are going to need to increase your muscular conditioning because it's clear that your muscles are breaking down over, you know, once you're getting into the cup, yeah, over a couple of hours. Yeah, like you said, you're gearing up your physiology to meet the conditions of the sub three hour marathon, you need your physiology to work differently than what it is now and it's just trying to build upon those capabilities. Yeah. So it's like, uh, the way I like to work with the data is like this in the training is a series of continuous feedback loops, right? Where you're like, okay, I need to kind of be around here. And this is the important part. You don't need to be here. You don't need to be at. the benchmark, you need to be around it. You go, oh, I'm a little off. So I probably need to slow down all of my training. You know, you do that and then everything starts to come up and you're like, okay, that was a recovery issue. It wasn't a training issue. And you start to, you can manipulate the variables, get the feedback and start to try and align yourself with these, the end goal. You already have the end goal and you already have the numbers associated with it. So it's like, just keep working with your. physiology, like what you have available to your training and your energy and your family and your work and everything, then keep feeding back and holding yourself accountable. I was going, cause we started the conversation on, okay, if someone's not reaching these benchmarks, how can they structure their training to get that threshold zone to a level that we're where we like? Um, I was going to ask about what if, okay, if someone is doing some benchmarks and benchmark training and to see if they're ready for a training stint of training for the marathon. If they're reaching those, how does their training look like to then push for the marathon? I don't want to really answer that question for you, but it seems like it might be something similar. It'd be like one threshold session a week, one tempo session a week, long run, maybe integrate the tempo stuff into the long run on the occasion and then just building up mileage around it. Is it different? Does it change once we actually get into that training cycle? Yes. I guess there's again, like kind of two scenarios that I've seen, which is one in which we can just keep developing time at pace and we just keep building that conditioning and specificity. So maybe that's like just 10 Ks at. Marathon 10, so let's, yep, that's all good. And we can progress that into like 10 miles and we can do kind of two by 10. That classic kind of long run marathon specific progression. And then during the week, yeah, is it threshold or is like high intensity VO2 max approach going to be more efficient? So kind of polarizing the training and that's really gonna depend on the runner. some runners you can tell love threshold and love the development like love that you can see the progress continuously and just it just works whereas others need a more polarized approach so that's like going from you know like 1k intervals or kind of like preparing for a 5k as well as alongside the marathon so You're doing like 400 meter repeats, 800 meters, one case, real anaerobic development. And we're not really concerned about the anaerobic capacity at all. We're concerned about the... running the improvements and running economy, that training at high intensities gives you. So because when you're running say 1K hard and for a lot of these, if you're going for sub three, you're gonna be running say like 330s. So fast, you know, like 18Ks an hour. When you do that, although there's a high anaerobic component, you're maximally stimulating the oxygen component. Like so the maximal extraction of oxygen. which helps to improve overall VO2 max. So that can help to, I guess, relatively reduce the relative intensity of the marathon. So let's just say you do this and you increase your, not necessarily your VO2 max, but the percentage at VO2 max that you're running your marathon, maybe it was 91%. Now you've done this hardcore kind of high intensity stuff. and now it's like 89%. That's massive. Like that is real, like when you're on the cusp, you've just saved yourself three seconds per K, which is like what, 30 seconds, like two minutes. So. So that's the stuff you kind of learn in that three month block before your final three month block. You can kind of play around with that. And then similarly with the marathon stuff, some people just respond really well to volume. Like you just go, okay, let's do another two by 10, okay? Like this week, this week. But others need to go more like, they can't just do 30K runs every week or every other week. sometimes I'll have to alter, do more of like an alternating half marathon intensity. So be like one K, one mile, say like times 10. So it's still a large session, but you're pushing pretty much threshold every single rep. So while the like, you might do a 20, 25 K, probably more like 20 K for the total session, that's your training load of the session. would be the same as doing 30Ks but at a lower intensity. And sometimes time availability and kind of concentration availability and then just like, I don't know, whatever it is metabolically, hormonally that allows them to recover, sometimes that gets a better response. And this is why I say you need to do a whole cycle first because you'll figure it out. You'll be like, oh man, I did three weeks of like 30K runs in a row and I was just cooked and I never came. back out of it, and that's where an alternating weak approach might be better. Yeah, so I guess two schools of thought. You either go polarized, right, with your high intensity, kind of 5K specific training, and then on the marathon side, the zone three stuff, or you go threshold and zone three, and you just kind of keep massaging those two thresholds, aerobic threshold and anaerobic threshold, building efficiency and volume at those. And then in the weekend, you might, you just can't handle two to two and a half hours of running every weekend. So you drop it all the way down to like 90 minutes or an hour 45. So those are the kind of the two. And then together, you know, the permutations mean there's kind of like four different to six different scenarios that you could be working with. Yeah, I like your approach to not one. plan fits all because everyone has different ways of training, different physiology, different genetics, you know, muscle makeup and all that sort of stuff. And, um, reminds me of, uh, I had Owen Everard who was on the podcast and he talked about two different types of athletes. You've got this neuromuscular athlete and then you've got this aerobic athlete and he wasn't basing this off much research, just what he's seen in, in the past and saying people, some people respond really well to the really high intensity stuff. And they. really tend to thrive and enjoy those really high intense intervals. And the aerobic athletes tend to be more of your race pace, high volume, low intensity, you know, type of volume and respond really, really well to that. And so kind of flows in with what you're saying, give it a go, maybe train for a marathon, see where your strength and weaknesses are, maybe try a few different things and see what you gravitate towards. what you bounce back well from, what you adapt well to and, um, gravitate towards that, and then you've got three months. Your first three months of your six month block is giving it a good test, testing it out for a couple of months and seeing if that really is to your advantage. Should that be fair to say? Yep. Yeah. That would, that'd be exactly right. And just making sure you're recording everything and just touching on like the literature side of things. And. literature doesn't do a good job at showing responders and non-responders because we specifically take cohorts to filter that out. Right. So, because if we just picked the people who really respond well to high intensity interval training versus the aerobic dominant, you'd come up with, uh, I can't remember if it's type one or type two era, but like, you know, you're not going to bring out a, uh, like a scientifically valid. point, but then what happens is you kind of, you find the middle of the road explanation, which is like both work at different points, uh, points in time and periodization, and that's why a big push in sports science over the last decade has been individualization of these approaches. Yep. I think it's good to get that message across because people are looking for the training plan, like they're looking for the answer and. You know, you might find a training plan that works really well for you, but might not work very well for the person next to you. And, um, it's good to fall back on that and let people remind people that everyone's different. Everyone responds differently to training. That's the, um, you know, the stuff that I talk, just talked through about these different variables, like different kinds of training sessions. That's, that's like the art, I think of the coaching side of things, because, uh, If you're talking to someone, so it depends if you're one-on-one with them, I know you're like being physio, you're one-on-one with a lot of people, you can already tell, you're like, I'm gonna give you a more basic kind of exercise regime because I know, like you've just come in here completely stressed, 15 minutes late, talking about like having to travel, it's like, you're just not gonna do it. Like you're not gonna, you know, don't say you're gonna run two and a half hours, but I know it's gonna put so much stress on your life outside of. the two and a half hours, it's like, let's go pretty hard for 90 minutes, and I can guarantee you can sleep for 30 minutes longer, and you're not gonna get straight in the car and go watch your kid play cricket for four hours. You know, it's like, it's that kind of stuff, which is no bearing on the data, or the scientific literature of saying, well, you're preparing for a marathon, you need to do X. That's like, yeah. the other aspect of it. Very true. Um, I want to get your take on some mistakes that you've seen with maybe the clients that you've worked with or haven't worked with and just talked with runners and those sorts of things. If someone's striving for a PB marathon and they're really sort of giving themselves a good goal and ambitious goal with the marathon, you've already mentioned sort of some people diving straight into, oh, these are the numbers I need to hit. So this is how I'm going to train. And they end up just overtraining and, um, Not doing that sensibly. Is there anything else, any other mistakes, common mistakes that you say? It would be around not training to the physiology. So I'm all for setting a goal, you know, whatever your marathon, half marathon, 10 K time is, but most people would do that. And then like you said, train, train towards it. And that's whether it's realistic or not, it's the number they've chosen. It's the number that their mate did. It's the number they did when they were 26. It's like. So that's why I say go do a threshold test. So I've got all these calculators on my website, but essentially just go run hard for 30 minutes. It doesn't need to be all out, it's just go hard and you'll get the numbers you want. On your watch, take a lap at the start, take a lap at 10 minutes, and take a lap at the end with the lap button on your watch. That 20 minutes, so after 10 minutes, you're kind of reaching that, not metabolic steady state, but. close to and that last 20 minutes, take those averages and that's your threshold. Then what you can do is you can just work off of percentages of that we know relatively well, like I said through the literature, like you're gonna run a marathon about 90%, you're gonna run a half marathon about 95%, you're gonna run a 10K around 105%, you're gonna run a 5K around 105%. So from that then you can go, all right, like here's my level. So thinking I'm gonna run 36 minutes when my threshold is like four minute Ks, like there's stuff that you can work on there. So alongside that, I put a note there, over training is the biggest one. So they set the goal, often the goal doesn't align with the physiology. And so the training exceeds actually the demands of the goal. and you end up cooked. So, yeah, not, yeah. So there'd be the physiological side of things and then laying out like a long-term progression plan. So there you go. I'm here. These are the workouts over the next six weeks that I'd need to do for this 10K. So I have to do the workouts, they are what are gonna prepare me for a 10K, whether you got them online, whether you got one of my plans, you got them from you, you got them from a podcast. It's like, well, that's your goal there, just so set that out. And now just keep working towards it, but work towards it knowing your physiology. So if these are five by two K threshold intervals, do them at your threshold, not your goal 10K time. And when they are 10K race efforts, six by one K do them, you know, do them at your goal. And if you can't do six of them, then it's another feedback loop to say, we need to adjust the goal. Um, but yeah, that would be, it's such a mindset shift. Like people are just like, oh yeah. Um, they see a whole bunch of people training for, uh, three and a half or like even a four hour sub four hour marathon, they're like, okay, let me just choose a number and let me train for that. Um, that's. extremely common. It's, uh, it's such a mindset shift to be like, okay, let me do some testing. Let me do some VO two max or threshold testing on my behalf. And let me just see what the numbers are producing for me as a runner. And let me train to that. And I'm just thinking to myself, that's going to lead to more tailored stuff for you. It's going to allow you to be more successful, less risk of overtraining, like you said, and able to just to build. Year after year, season after season, it seems like a, an obvious approach to take, but it seems like rarely people do. Yeah. Um, and it's just the way we've been there. Like, you know, it was, I was forming a K everything when I started. It was like, all right, like I want to run this. So I run this pace. Like that's just, there's the information online. Is. Like SEO optimized, how do I run X? Well, this is how you do it. You know, it's not scientifically optimized to say, well, you know, it depends. Yeah. And, and that's just where we, where we lead. And then the age of Strava as well, you want to look good online. Yep. Always the case. How about like during training, sub three hours is really pushing. It's a really ambitious goal for a lot of people and everything needs to go right. What can be some 1% is that people can do within their training to increase their odds, like, you know, so it's learn, turn the tide into their favor. Slow down. As in slower running, bigger volume. What are we talking? Um, just slow, slower running. So slower running and a lot of instances, slower running on your easy days. slower running on your aerobic days, slower running even in some of your interval days. So I always, like I said, tempo and threshold is not that hard. It's not an all out park run. You know, it's massaging these metabolic reference points and sometimes, yeah, it's like really challenging, but other times it's not that bad. And so I often. often get people going, oh, smash that workout. Like I was above all of the numbers you set. Like so I was at the top of the range and then I just smashed the last one. It's like, well, okay, you still have two hours on Sunday. You know, like, so it's like just slow down for a couple of weeks, everything. Let's say if you're looking at pace, so everything down by 10 seconds per K. And the other one would be if you're looking at heart rate, slow everything down by five beats on average of what you normally do. And just let me know. Like, see how that feels. Because like I said, we're trying to optimize our physiology and the stimulus to work towards an end goal. So often the exact output isn't the... You know, that's not what we need. It's the input that we're looking for. And we're generally pretty tired these days. Like it's a life's coming at us, you know? So, so we can just, yeah, notch down the stimulus slightly. We can enhance the recovery, which enhances the adaptation. Uh, if most people have listened to this podcast, we'll be very familiar with me sort of promoting slow things down. Uh, go really easy on your easy days, really, you know, we've heard 80, 20 running and that sort of, that sort of philosophy. And, um, I've talked about the benefits a lot on that, but I haven't really talked about slowing down your threshold and tempo stuff. And I think that's a game changer for a lot of people because they could have an assigned, these are the tempo, these are the intervals I need to hit and anything above that, anything faster is a pass. I guess is what they would say. Big one. Yeah. And the higher they are above those, the bigger the win because it's a speed session, but exactly the same as why 80 20 works really well, 80 like running slow on your running really easy on your easy days works well cause you recover and you bounce back, um, from, uh, so you can do more quality stuff and knock it niggles, knock it injured bounce back week after week. Um, and like you say, it's massaging into these physiological zones that, that allow you to adapt and we're doing it the easiest way possible, which minimizes the risk of injury and you just still reap the rewards. So a good reminder. I don't think anyone's ever said that on the podcast before. So thank you very much for enlightening us on that. Um, what about on race day? One percent is that we can do. Is there anything that when they get to the start line or even just preparing for the start line to increase our odds for success, pacing and planning. And they to go. hand in hand, pacing is the biggest one. I was just, just had a runner, we're just prepping for the, he did a half marathon in San Francisco yesterday, smashed it. Banking time is just the biggest myth I've ever heard. I mean, I guess course dependent and, but time is not really the variable we're playing with when we're looking at running our marathon, it's energy. So you have, let's say you've got like 100 calories, it's like how do you spend those 100 calories to optimize your average pace? Because that's what we need, it's just, what does the average pace start to finish that's gonna get us under our goal? So we know it's like 416, so how can we do that most energetically efficiently as possible? Well a lot of people think to do is like, well, if I run four 10s early when I'm feeling good, I'm winning, right? I'm like bank now at the end when I feel crap, I've got a bit of time, you know, I've got a couple minutes in the back. And yeah, the inverse is true because actually, yes, like the thinking in that you feel good and you will be running more economical at the start of the race is entirely true. It'll feel easier and like all your Very like metrics like your ground contact time, vertical oscillation, like breathing, everything will be better. Heat, so you might as well use that to run the actual goal pace or slightly slower. And then you're not banking time, you're banking energy for when you need the energy the most, the last 10K, the last 5K, the last 10 minutes. Because as you get through the race, ignore all numbers, you know you're gonna be tired at 35K. everyone is. And when you get tired, you lose running economy. Like you know you're not gonna be as smooth and silky bounding along at 35 as you were at five. So actually to run your required output, this 416 or this 652 minute mile, like, you are gonna, it's gonna cost you more energy. So if you haven't, if you're. tried to bank time and spend a lot of energy early, now when you need that energy, not only do you not have it, but you're also running slower and you don't have the energy to run slower. So it's like, it's confounding. And we've all been there, like you've blown up. It's a horrible feeling. Like you're trying as hard as you possibly can to run like 30 seconds slow, maybe more sometimes. So by starting just like, five seconds per case slower, you're banking so much energy so that as you begin to get tired, you have that energy to then start to notch down the speed and you also have hopefully, depending on the day, been able to manage your heat, the rate of heat accumulation. And so that all comes into planning and then planning around the nutrition, hydration, planning for the course, where are the hills, like what K or block of Ks or miles is gonna be, you know is gonna be slow, right? So just mentally preparing for that. And what all that planning does is means like when you get to race day, you just, you can switch off. You don't have to run with the three hour pacer. You don't have to feel bad if the 305 pacer's like right behind you. It's... You don't care that the massive person huffing and puffing over the first K is running away from you. When there's no way they should be faster than you. There's all these thoughts, you just go, I've got my plan. I'm looking at my watch, I'm looking at my heart rate. I know in 10 minutes I've got to take a gel. The aid station's coming up and it's on an uphill, so this is gonna be slower, so I just need to relax. I'm gonna roll into a good rhythm on the downhill. Like it's all that process that keeps you in. the moment. Um, cause what most people do is they go, all right, sub three, we're on, got to stay ahead of this guy. And then, you know, you've been there 10 K's in you're like, I'm on for one today. And then, uh, with, you know, and then you're not. And then we're getting our heads a lot. And, um, it's the worst. Like we know exactly what to do. And we even know like, what would be really enjoyable is just smashing a good marathon. Just having nothing go wrong, you know, just in, and that could be a 302, it could be real hot day or the course was a bit long or whatever. And you want that to be really enjoyable rather than just feeling like you. fell way short. Yeah. Well said mate. And like, you know, ego gets ahead of us as well. And we're our own worst enemy sometimes, but, um, it's a great way to finish up this episode. Um, I think a lot of people right now have, you know, listened to you. No, you obviously know what you're talking about. Obviously got a lot of expertise, worked with a lot of runners, got a lot of experience, like obviously you're talking about all these numbers and, um, thresholds and paces and zones and all those sorts of things. If people want to learn more about you, where can they go? What platforms can they find you on? And I'll include all of those in the show notes. Cool. It's pretty much like at Dr. Will O'Connor, pretty lucky to get that across the, across the socials and drwilloconnor.com. And yeah, I got running with Dr. Will, a podcast, um, as well as a, another, uh, podcast I do with the sports science made of mine. where it's not running specifics, just sport science specific and endurance specific, I guess that's performance advantage podcast, but I mean, yeah, it's in the show notes. Perfect. All that they'll all be there. Um, Dr. Will, thank you very much. Um, no doubt. I'm probably going to get you to come back on to talk about a lot of stuff that you've mentioned, um, probably the, um, low carbohydrate sort of stuff that you mentioned at the start as well. I think is a pretty. popular, interesting topic. Um, but once thank you for your time, your wisdom, and yeah, thanks for joining me on the podcast. Cheers Brodie. Appreciate it. If you are struggling to overcome an injury, you can jump on a free 20 minute injury chat with me, which you can book through my calendar in the show notes. While you're in the show notes, elevate your running IQ by jumping onto my free email list so you can receive material to help rehab your injury, lower your injury risk and increase your performance. emails aren't for you, consider my Facebook group, Instagram and YouTube channels. And remember, each insight you get from these resources brings you one step closer to your next running breakthrough.