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The Relaxed Running podcast is a behind the scenes conversation with the best athletes, coaches and professionals in the world of distance running. From training, hydration and nutrition to racing and recovering, we learn from the best in the world.
Relaxed conversations which are packed with actionable takeaways to help you take your running performance up a notch. Save yourself years of guess work and learn from the people who are doing it at the highest level.
Tyson Popplestone (00:00.078)
It's interesting with popular episodes. Not only do you have the fans, you have the critics and with regards to Phil Maffetone, I couldn't believe the amount of emails I got from people who are upset about what he was saying in regards to Indyatt, specifically for endurance athletes. But I mean, I've heard you speak about him with regards to longevity. And I think whenever people hear your name, they can't look far past the fact that there was some incredible results over a long period of time.
And I mean, sometimes if you're honest, it's really difficult to look past what's behind such a long -term career. And I thought maybe we could start this conversation in a place where you might not have expected to. And that's just in regards to the style of training and the influence behind that training that led to such a long and successful career, one that so many athletes break down around you.
Yeah, you know, it's an interesting question. Like very early in my career, I was doing a lot of training in Boulder, Colorado, where, you know, you've got world -class runners, cyclists, triathletes. I did a bunch of running with Rob DiCastello back in the day when he was training and got my ass kicked every time by him for sure. But anyway, one of the things I saw is that a lot of the people who had really been at the top of their sport, they either
They either went too long or they just pushed it too hard somewhere and they paid a price and they were forced out of the sport. You know, like the performance drop, they got injured, they, you know, they slid and then they fell off the cliff kind of thing. And I thought, you know, I don't know how long I'll race. This was maybe just a few years into my career. I don't know how long I'll race, but when I walk away, I want to walk away uninjured, not burned out and healthy.
And so that was really my sort of that little accountability voice in the background every single day, every single week, every month, every year that I kept checking in with. And I kept asking myself, you know, what kind of training will give me results, but at the same time allow me to walk away healthy. Like, you know, like I'm 66 years old now and can still pretty much do whatever I want. It's slower and it's definitely not performance oriented, but
Tyson Popplestone (02:22.254)
a lot of the guys that I competed against have had some major issues. Like both Dave Scott and Scott Tinley had open heart surgery a couple of weeks ago. Was it because of what they did in the sport? I don't know, but that might've contributed to it. So anyway, when I came into the sport of triathlon, I came in as an age group swimmer growing up. I swam from the time I was 10 all the way through university.
And back in the, you know, seventies and eighties when I was swimming, the, you know, every workout, the coach would dream up the hardest workout they could think of. And you went as hard as you could. And then you came back and did the same thing the next day. And you can kind of get away with something that stupid, you know, as a swimmer, because there's not the same muscle breakdown that you get when you, you know, if you're cycling really hard for hours on end, or especially running.
But when I got into the sport of triathlon, obviously I'm adding cycling and running, but I came in with that summer mentality, like go as hard as you can. At some point in the workout, you know, like I was looking at what the, the fast guys were running and in their, Olympic distance races and you know, they were, they were approaching 30 minutes for the 10 K at the end. And so I thought, well, I, at some point in my workout, I have to do like a three minute K.
just to train myself to be able to go that fast. Stupid, right? And in the beginning, I saw that I got really fit pretty quick, that my fitness and the way I felt was really up and down. I'd have a good race and then I'd get sick right afterwards. And then I'd have a little injury where I couldn't really go as hard as I'd like to and just, I was stumbling. And then...
about a year into my year and a half into maybe two years into my racing, somebody introduced me to Phil Maffetone. And they said, you know, just listen to what he's got to say. Okay. It's he, his stuff works. I've tried it. You know, he, he trains by heart rate. He, you know, you, you regulate your workout, you split them up into aerobic anaerobic. You don't do speed work all the time. Like you've been doing. He'll get you to slow down.
Tyson Popplestone (04:44.366)
And over time though, you're going to actually be a lot better and a lot stronger, a lot more resilient. And so I'm like, okay. So we met and we went to the track and he said, I'm going to have you run a mile and I want you to get your heart rate up to 155 beats a minute. He said, that's based on your age and checking you out. That's going to be about your maximum aerobic heart rate. Meaning if you train at that or lower, you're training that.
to develop that endurance fat burning engine. If you train higher than that, you're going to be going into more carbohydrate burning. And he said that the real key to that is that aerobic is low stress physiologically, anaerobic high stress physiologically. And the way you've been training all this period, all this time now, since you got in the sport is anaerobic every day. So every day your body's under stress and a human body isn't built to sustain that.
So I'm like, all right, so right away, you know, I put on the heart rate monitor, which way back then it was not this cool, sleek little, you know, thing on your wrist. It was this massive box that you had to take an ACE bandage and wrap it around my chest so it would stay on there. And the readout was on the top of the box, you know? And so I'm running along, I had like two t -shirts on because this thing looked very strange, you know, and I kept...
having to look down to see what the heart rate was, you know, so anyway, I felt like I was barely moving and right away my heart rate was 155 beats a minute. And he said, great, now we're going to time a mile. My mile time was about, well, I only know it in minutes. It was about almost, it was over three minutes slower than I had been trying to hit in every workout. And I'm thinking at this pace, it was about an eight and a half minute mile.
At this pace, I can't beat guys that are twice my age. This is ridiculous. He said,
Tyson Popplestone (06:50.19)
just try it for a month. Just train aerobically every day. I know that your training partners are going to be pulling away from you. Don't worry about it. As you do this, your body will develop those fat burning enzymes that break down fat for fuel and you'll get faster at these same heart rates. So I went with it and, you know, at first I was like, ooh, this is ridiculous. But the thing that was sort of like, hmm, you know, the light bulb was starting to go on was that
When I got home from my workouts, I actually felt good instead of wasted and trashed and like, you know, I got to lay down for an hour. And, I also saw that my consistency was starting to go up like day after day, I could put in some decent hours of training and day after day I was recovering and my sleep was better. And just, you know, I felt like my moods were more steady, you know, just like everything was evening out. And then eventually, you know, he had me add in some speed work.
And then I went to my first race off of this kind of aerobic, anaerobic, splitting things up a little bit more. And, I crushed, I like killed it. And I'm like, my God, there is something to this. And eventually, you know, when I was, after a number of years of doing this, you know, my aerobic pace was fast enough that let's say at the Ironman in Hawaii, I could stay completely aerobic on the bike.
and stay up with the lead pack. And so, you know, when I'm still aerobic, I haven't dipped into, you know, that little bit of carbohydrate reserve you have in your body, about 2000 calories stored as glycogen. I didn't have, I wasn't dipping into that the same way that the other guys were, whose heart rates were five, 10 beats higher than mine. And I was that much further away from my max heart rate than those guys. So, you know, that was sort of...
That was a key to me having that longevity. I regulated my workouts pretty well. I didn't overdo the fast stuff, which is always where people get in trouble. Nobody gets in trouble because they're doing too much moderate training. They get in trouble because they do too much high intensity training. I also, I passed up a number of races that I would have loved to have gone to.
Tyson Popplestone (09:18.894)
But I knew that if I did them, the stress on my body over the course of the season, one, I wouldn't have a good Kona at the end of the year, which was always my main goal. But secondly, I just felt like it might burn me out for forever. And so, you know, I was racing maybe six or seven races a year and the other guys were doing at least twice that. And so my race load was a lot less too. And so, you know,
In the end, I'm super happy that I did it that way. You know, I, I would much rather have seven great races than 14 where 12 of them are mediocre and maybe one or two are pretty good. Yeah. and I really, was super happy when I walked away from the sport, like I'm not injured. I'm not burned out. I'm full of vitality and you know, hopefully I'll have another.
20, 30, 40, 50 years of doing fun exercise stuff. You know, like now my, I live in Santa Cruz, California and my go -to is surfing. You know, I've done that since I was a kid and you know, nobody will ever confuse me with McFanning or, you know, any of the greats, but it's so fun, you know? And a lot of guys in their sixties, they're not surfing anymore. There's only a few that are.
It's really interesting to hear your perspective, even from such a young age to be thinking about the longevity beyond the sport. Cause the same is true in the world of distance run, which I grew up in. And I shared that similar mindset growing up of, all right, well, if the top athletes at my age group or beyond running X time, then surely it sort of makes sense to go, well, I have to at least get a little bit used to practicing running that pace. But I guess as a young athlete, what you're not considering
is what you sacrifice in terms of trying to hit that particular time in a particular session. And that is consistency and recovery and even a sense of confidence in what you're able to lay down consistently. And where did that mindset of longevity come into things? Cause that seems like a unique focus point for an athlete of that age. Well, you know, I, as a,
Tyson Popplestone (11:40.174)
professional athlete, I knew that my lifetime, my lifespan is short. You know, and at some point I would be moving on past what I was doing in that immediate moment. And, you know, I kind of like, I love my off seasons when I was racing. And so my off season was like a window into what hopefully I'd be able to be doing a lot more of when I was not competing anymore.
And a lot of what I love to do in the off season was very alternative kind of, or different kind of activity, active activities that were not specifically swimming, cycling and running, you know, like I served and I, you know, I did these pretty cool hikes and just different things like that. And I'm like, you know, I want to be able to do this the rest of my life. I don't want to use it all up now. And it seemed like it.
And with that perspective, it also seemed it made it easier for me to have a little more patience with what I was doing in the sport because I didn't feel like I had to I Didn't have to accomplish everything in my life that would be good and fun and fulfilling in a 10 -year span You know, I knew that there'd be a bunch of other stuff coming down the road in in the 40s and 50s and 60s hopefully and so anyway
And a lot of guys didn't have that patience, you know, even in their own training, they, they were trying to, you know, do that meteoric rise in fitness every year. And yeah, they were super fit in January, February, maybe March, and then they'd plateau April, May, June, and then July, August, September, October, they're sliding, you know, that they're hanging on for dear life. And, you know, me, the way I just sort of plugged along and was very steady and consistent, you know, January and February, March, I was.
I was off the back in a lot of workouts, but I didn't care because I knew that I was building and that, you know, then in that mid -season part where everybody's sort of, they're plateauing, I'm still on the rise. And then toward the end of the year, that's where everything just completely came together. And that last, you know, 10 or 15 % of your fitness that you gain over the course of, you need an entire year to get it.
Tyson Popplestone (13:55.662)
That's what makes that huge difference at the very end of the year in the biggest races that count most and the ones that I remembered that most and the ones that everybody else talks about most. So yeah, I guess that's kind of where that perspective came from. Yeah, I always find it interesting, like whether I'm talking to you or Phil Maffetone, Joe Friel, one thing that...
Joe says that I really liked is he'll ask someone six months into training or even a couple of months into training. What stands out to you about the style of training that we're doing? They always say, well, it's a lot easier than I was anticipating. And it's interesting because you look at athletes or coaches who have operated a high level for a very long time, a very long time. And I feel, I don't know if it's just I've become aware of it or it's become more popular recently, but
There seems to be a lot of high level athletes and coaches that are really drilled into taking this approach now. And yet still depending on the athlete, there's a lot of hesitation to get involved despite the outcomes that we see. But you said, even though when you got started with the Maffetone method with that trial and like the shock that your heart rate was so far beyond what you imagined it should be for the pace that you were running, you decided to stick with it.
What was the incentive to actually stick with it? You said you were inspired to, or encouraged to get involved from a friend that you trusted, but so many athletes, they start and they go, I do want that meteoric rise. So I'm going to ignore this and just keep going with what I've been doing. Well, you know, I had seen that the way I was training gave me fitness and some decent results, but it wasn't dependable. Like I didn't know if I would, you know, my training was always up and down because of, you know,
little niggling injuries or getting sick or feeling burned out or have, and then I have a few good days and I'm like, okay, I'm back, you know, and then I, you know, and I thought there's gotta be a different way to do this. And just the way that the woman that introduced me to Phil was this woman, Colleen Cannon, who was one of the early triathletes in the area. You know, I trusted her opinion. She'd been sort of experimenting with this and had met Phil and, you know, and then when he had sort of explained things to me, it's like, okay.
Tyson Popplestone (16:13.264)
I can wrap my brain around it intellectually. And initially it was like, this is a leap of faith to forego those 1K hard in every run that I did just to make sure I can run that fast. You know what I mean? But it didn't take long to see that my consistency was up. And for me,
That was something that I had seen was the absolute key to any kind of really great result is consistency in training. Now, if you're training consistently, you're going to get better. If you train and then you got to stop training and then you train and you have to stop training, when you're not training, you're not getting faster. You're getting slower. And so that's, you know, and Phil's approach to that really helped me to do that. And, you know, there's, there's been a lot of,
tweaking of research on how this all works and how it can work best. And a lot of philosophy now is that you can actually do some of that fast stuff in the beginning of the year to really, as we see, get that quick jump in fitness because your VO2 max goes up from all the speed work you do. Just a bunch of quick improvements come. And then with that, you're at a high point really quickly.
And then you add in a lot of that pure aerobic stuff. You're adding that pure aerobic stuff in at a high level so that actually gets optimized even more. So it all made sense. And later after I was retired and doing some research on stuff, it was pointed out like in the human body, we have enough fat to go like 700 kilometers.
something ridiculous if we could use every molecule of fat in our body, right? But we only have enough carbohydrate in our body to go about 20 miles. And so that's why, you know, in marathons, people bonk around that 20 mile mark because they have burnt through all their carb calories. They don't have any more left. And when you've done that, you don't just immediately go back to fat burning. It takes a while to turn that back on. So anyway,
Tyson Popplestone (18:33.711)
If you just look at our basic physiology, human beings are meant to move aerobically, utilizing more fat than carbohydrate for fuel. And it's not an either or, like, you know, in basic physiology, fat burns in the flame of carbohydrate. So you need a little bit of carbohydrate to spark that fat breakdown process to release the energy. And that's why a lot of people, you know, when they're...
when they're on a, let's say a keto diet and they've really cut their carbohydrates back, the only way to utilize that fat is to break down muscle, turn that into glucose and then that fuels the fat burning and that's a slow process and that's why somebody who is keto,
Hold on, it's saying I'm not recording again. Let me just finish this thought. That's why somebody who's on a keto diet, they'll feel okay if they're going slow, but they feel like crap if they try to go fast at all. And so it's not the best, in my opinion, not the best diet if you're actually trying to optimize your athletic performance. In regards to the diet, it's a really interesting thing. I said before we hit record that...
with regards to Maffetone, that was the one that I had the most criticism. People were saying to me like, I can't believe that you're discrediting the carbohydrate fueling in marathon running and things. And I was like, I don't think Phil's necessarily saying that. He's just saying that there is a crossover point. So it's interesting to hear you say that it's not one, it's not the other. There's going to be some unique blend because in the world of marathon running, as far as I'm aware, most of the world -class marathon runners are still fueling.
predominantly with carbs. Like I know there's some exceptions to that rule, but obviously once you start getting into the Ironman distances and you're out there for, you know, seven to eight, you know, a little bit more hours, it starts to change the game in terms of how you're fueling. Did you make any, any dramatic changes or any subtle changes even from what you were doing towards fueling with fat for the longer races that you were doing? No, I never.
Tyson Popplestone (20:48.495)
fueled specifically with fat. It was all carbohydrate. Like I said, you have so much fat stored in your body that you got plenty of that to utilize in a race. I would take some medium chain triglyceride capsules with me and that would sort of help keep that fat burning going. But I wasn't taking them to specifically use that as a fuel source. It's more like it just kept the fat.
burning physiology going in that environment.
You know, like I said, fat burning doesn't happen purely with fat burning. You have to have carbohydrate to break it down. And so anybody who says, well, you just just feed your body fat and you'll get better at burning fat. Well, you might get better burning fat, but you still need carbohydrate to break it down. And like I said, if if you don't have the carbohydrate, you go into ketosis, the keto diet, and your body breaks down protein.
turns that into glucose, which then breaks down the fat to release the energy. And that again is a slow process. And I don't know about you, but I want to hold on to as much lean muscle as I can. I don't want to be using that as a fuel source in any of my efforts. You know, a lot of what Phil says, at least I've seen over the years is kind of like, you've got this
this sort of accepted range of what a good diet might look like or how many carbs, fat protein you need. And most people, it's kind of way out of whack, right? And so you need somebody like Phil who kind of tries to push you way in the other direction to get you to come back actually to the point where it's sensible. It's sort of like when you're swimming and you're crossing over like this and your coach says, have your arm go out.
Tyson Popplestone (22:53.391)
go out straight in front of you and you go, I am putting it straight out in front of you. And they go, no, it's still coming over here. And the coach says, feel like you're putting your arm out of a tree. And you do that and it actually comes where it's supposed to. And it's sort of like that with Phil and his recommendations for diet. I think, you know, that's sort of how I viewed it. But I didn't do anything specifically different. I, you know, I ate a pretty well balanced diet. You know, one of my...
main things I was looking for every day is make sure I had enough protein, because for sure, you're using a lot of protein, you're breaking down a lot of muscle, you have to repair and rebuild it each day after the workouts. It also helps stabilize your blood sugar, protein does, and stable blood sugar is a good thing. And then I was never fat phobic. I love avocados and olive oil and all this stuff.
In the beginning, I should back way up to the beginning. In the beginning, when I started competing, there was this guy, Dr. Pritikin, and his diet was high carbohydrate, don't eat any fats because it's good for people who have heart disease. Don't take in any fats. And so people were like, if I want a healthy heart, I'd better not eat any fat. And so everybody was eating rice cakes and bagels and pasta. And I tried that for about three meals. And I'm like, I need some protein.
So right away I saw like, okay, I don't care if research says this works, if it doesn't work for me, then it doesn't work for me. And so I tried to use that as my experiment of one all the way through my career. I took what I felt had the most chance of actually delivering on the guarantee that it says it will do for you and trying it out and see if it works, not just for a day or a week or a month, but over the course of a year.
And that's what I did with Phil in the very beginning. I thought, okay, let me give this a year training like this and see how it manifests because you know, all of the, a lot of the research in sport physiology is done in a very isolated sense. Like they'll take a group of athletes and they'll have them do a specific protocol for a week or two weeks or three weeks, maybe even six weeks. But what you, what you will get benefit from over the course of
Tyson Popplestone (25:19.535)
three weeks is very different. It's not always the same thing that you'll get benefit from doing over the course of three years. And so, you know, I tried to look at it from that perspective too. Like, you know, yeah, if you do track work, your VO2 max is going to go up. Great. So should I do track work all the time? Well, it works for three weeks, but if you do it every day for three years, you end up like I did, burning the match at too many ends and people's careers ending too early when they had potential and all that kind of stuff. So.
Again, it's, I guess it's like you were saying, I guess I had that. Is it helped not only just helping me today, but will it help me way down the road? Yeah. It must've been interesting to watch some of the reactions to how it was that you were performing based on where you started with the slowness of running. But I know it's to a degree in the context of things, it's a relatively small scene, like distance running. Like there's plenty of people doing it, but when you get to the level you were doing it at, obviously.
A lot of you know each other and you would have been turning heads surely producing the results that you were and people go, hang on, but he's, he's taken an approach which is quite different to what so many of us are doing. Did you notice much of a trend of people coming towards you and trying to navigate how it was that you were producing the results so consistently over so long or were people just so buried in their approach that they had that they tried to ignore it or just not pay much attention to it?
Well, they couldn't ignore it because the results spoke for themselves. And so, you know, so many of the guys that I was in and around training with, they try to stick with it for about a week or two, and then they're like, screw it, you know, my physiology is different than everybody else's on the planet. So therefore I'm going to do something different than what this guy's doing. Maybe it works for him, but it's not working for me. And which that's why I was.
I was more than happy to tell everybody what it is that I was doing, how I did it, how I put it all together, because I knew that most of them, 99 % of them, didn't have the patience to stick with it. And that's what it took was a lot of patience sticking with it. And a lot of what I did was like that. I worked on sort of that internal landscape that is so important, learning how to deal with yourself and stressful situations by...
Tyson Popplestone (27:43.727)
through studying with a gentleman who teaches shamanism. It's one of the traditions that comes from central Mexico. And, you know, so I was working sort of on that mental spiritual side of what I was doing. I was working, obviously, with that physical side with a different kind of perspective and patience that a lot of the guys didn't seem to exhibit at that time. And I think that, you know, you've seen in recent times a lot of...
the top athletes having very inconsistent results. Like they'll have great races and then boom, then they're no good for a while and they're injured. And I think a lot of it is probably not having that right balance between going hard recovery, you know, choosing your races wisely. Just, you know, it's a, it's a whole thing that goes into it. Yeah. I mean, I'm a, you and I competed at very different levels and
Obviously in relatively different sports. I was a distance runner. I'm 37. I was, I was decent here in Australia, but on an international level, I wasn't making that much of a dent. There wasn't much going on. but until honestly last year, so I retired from competitive running in 2014 and I was relatively just throw it at the wall and see what sticks even until that point, which I'm kind of ashamed to say now, because for whatever reason, it was, it was the philosophy of
myself, the group that I was training in, it was just, hey, go out, see what you can handle. If you get injured, it's just part and parcel of the sport. And I look back now and I go, hey, where was, like, where was what I know now back then? Because I think it would have been a very different game. But I say that to say that probably the last 18 months, my eyes have been really open to this method of training that you're talking about. You know, thanks to the people that I mentioned earlier, yourself, Maffetone, Joe Frill, you know, just to name a few.
And the results, I'm training for the Melbourne marathon here later in the year and not aiming to break any world records, but I'm about 40 weeks of consistent training in my body feels great. I've been taking the approach to training that we've been speaking about for the last half an hour. And as you say, the results speak for themselves. You look at the intensity of any of the workouts, you go, there's nothing wild on a real regular basis, maybe once a week or once every 10 days, I'll have a bit of a hit out.
Tyson Popplestone (30:04.367)
But the Strava weeks are starting to stack up and there's confidence and fitness and everything that comes with that. But I've noticed now the way I look at athletes, even around me at the level that I'm running at, which is very much just a social level. I had a friend of mine actually reach out the other day cause she had been injured once again, only came back from a stress fracture a couple of months ago. And I just jumped across to her Strava and it was wild just to have a look at some of the intensities and the buildup in kilometres that she was running. And I go, I think.
Like I think I can see what the problem is here, but it's not really my position to jump in and say, Hey, I, I think this is where you need to improve. That must be a constant frustration for you. Is it whether it's athletes you coach or athletes you watch just seeing the mistakes so blatantly and just being seemingly oblivious to the mistakes that they're making? Yeah. Like most, most athletes who come to me for coaching, they don't need motivation. They need me to help them put on the brakes a little bit.
And they need me to be that sounding board that allows them to take an easy day when they need it, when the rest of life is going berserk for them and they just can't handle the volume of training that would be ideal. Ideal meaning if you don't have anything else going on in your life, you know? And so, yeah, basically if an athlete is not getting the results that...
they should based on the training that they're doing. You can almost always trace it back to them being under more stress than they're able to handle. Whether it's you misjudged a little bit on their training program or something else is going on in their life that's just adding to that ball of wax. Like I said, anaerobic training is high stress on the body. It activates your adrenal system. Your ancient.
And when that happens, your ancient genetics are reading that like there's danger, there's a saber tooth tiger, there's a bear, there's a who knows what that's going to eat me, shark, you know? And so you don't want your training to be like you're being chased by a wild animal every day. Of course you have to do some of that if you are trying to hit that real performance level and see what you're truly capable of. What is the
Tyson Popplestone (32:30.703)
best that you can get out of yourself, whether you've got world -class genetics or not, it doesn't matter. If you're really trying to get the most out of yourself, at some point, you have to do that very hard, uncomfortable training that you've got to get psyched up to do. Don't get me wrong. I had some hard workouts that were just like brutal, but I spaced them out and I didn't do them mostly. I didn't do them too much.
Of course, like everybody else, you know, there were times where it's like, oops, that was a little too much. And, you know, I feel like, I feel like I want to just quit the sport right now because I'm so exhausted. And so, you know, everybody makes those mistakes. That's fine. But if like your friend who had a stress fracture, if you have a stress fracture, that word stress and fracture, you know, speaks for itself. Yeah. Yeah. That's really interesting.
I mean, there's a lot of technology at the moment that helps monitor your reaction. I had Marco Altinion here, who's a creator of an app called HRV for Training. And so each morning it just takes you at heart rate, it looks at the variability and asks you a series of questions just based on, you know, sleep recovery, yesterday's session, how you're feeling, are you sick? And then it gives you some practical advice based on your history of data as to like the intensity level.
that would be good to go today, which I've found very helpful as a bit of a, what do you say? Like a bit of a blinker. It's been something to help keep me on the straight and narrow, but things like that, you know, in the early nineties wouldn't have been as prevalent. What were you making decisions on intensity of training based on? Was it purely based on feel and based on the intensity of a week? Or did you have some data points that you were looking at to sort of help guide you? Yeah, I meant to...
To fine tune that aerobic, anaerobic blend, I would have aerobic blocks where basically all my training was aerobic. And I'd kind of watch my pace running because we didn't have a power meter, so I couldn't gauge through cycling. So if my running pace was getting faster at those aerobic heart rates, then I kind of stuck with that until things plateaued. And at that point, then I would add in anaerobic work.
Tyson Popplestone (34:56.207)
and see how that affected things. And usually when I started adding that back in, then my pace would continue to get faster. And then at some point, pace would plateau. And then I would say, OK, let me see. Let me cut back on the speed work and throw in just more aerobic stuff and see how that affects things. And usually it would continue to get faster even more. So I had kind of ways of measuring that.
things like measuring HRV or really any measurement that you take is good for an athlete to be able to measure, to match something they experienced during the workout with a number that gives them kind of like a visual thing. Like, you know, one of the challenges with
at least in the early days of using HRV, a lot of it was subjective. You're in this range, you're HRV, and how do you feel today? I feel fine. Well, if somebody's overtrained, they're fine, might be somebody else's, I'm ready to fall off a cliff. And so it's really the more fine tune we can get so that athletes, especially when they first come into a sport,
to give them a reading that says, okay, this is how you're feeling now. And this is what we're measuring. And as that changes and your feeling changes, you start to understand like, okay, when I have this feeling and this is happening in my workout with my power related to my heart rate or my pace related to my heart rate or whatever, that means that I'm getting faster or it means that I'm actually getting too tired. Yeah. You know, yeah. Cause ultimately, you know,
Our bodies are super good at giving a signal of what's going on. So, you know, when you can start to put a sensation of how you're feeling in a workout with an actual number, then you really have a window into what's going on physiologically. And that's why I used heart rate. You know, so like on a cool day, you know, I can be running really fast at a given heart rate.
Tyson Popplestone (37:22.479)
On a hot day, as you know, you run a lot slower at those same heart rates. And the perceived effort is different, but what's taking place is you're seeing the impact of heat on your body. All the blood's going to your skin, not to your muscle. So you have less oxygen. So your whole exercise physiology is slowing down. And if you try to push and heat based on perceived effort, you're going to cook yourself. And that's just a...
So like, for example, in the, as the cool thing, I have all my coaching in this platform called Tridot and the workouts, the zones that the athletes get will vary based on the temperature of the temperature at the time of day that they're going to do their workout, which is so great because I have people that, you know, in the winter it's, it's where they live is very cold, but in the summer it's super hot. And if I just purely have them trained by their, their zones that are set by their FTP,
If it's a hot day, they're going to be over training. But with Tridot, it adjusts that down, adjusts their zones down or the pacing down based on the temperature, which is such a cool thing. That's a cool feature. That's a really cool feature. What Tridot, is that like a sort of an alternative to final surge in training peaks? Yeah, I wouldn't say it's an alternative to it.
It's a whole self -contained sort of AI -driven generated training plans where everything under the sun is taken into account. Age, gender, weight, experience, threshold tests, all that kind of stuff. Where are you living? Are you at altitude? Are you sea level? Is it hot? Is it cold? Where are your races compared to where you're at in your training? And so what it does is it's based on
You know, over 20 years of taking training data from thousands and thousands of athletes and seeing what works, seeing what doesn't work, seeing how it works through different ages. You can even upload, your, your genetic profile from like. Whatever it is, 23 and V or something like that. Wow. Cause different, different physiology makeups will respond differently to different kinds of training. Some people respond a lot better to.
Tyson Popplestone (39:47.631)
long slow steady, different distances, other people respond better to a little bit shorter, but a little bit higher intensity training, more in the volume of the mix. And so, yeah, I moved all my athletes over there a couple of years ago. And at first, the training looked different than kind of what I had done, had people doing in the past, but a lot of the way I had been having people do it, I had a software that did similar stuff.
It was based on the physiology of, you know, 1980s and research at the time. And like I said, a lot of that has changed. And so this has been a great platform. And, you know, one guy that I had, you know, he's like, I'm not doing enough long rides and it seems like I'm doing too much fast stuff. And I go, yeah, it's starting you differently. And when you get close to your Ironman, he was going to be doing Ironman Cairns down there in Australia. You know, you'll see that
Actually the speed stuff is going to drop off and you're going to start doing more aerobic training as you get close to the race so that your physiology is pushing into that fat burning as you get close to the race. You don't want your carb burning to be turned on. You want that sort of tempered a little bit. Anyway, he ended up setting a PR by over a half an hour and he was a good athlete. Okay. I guess that worked.
It's so incredible. Like it still blows my mind, especially the last 12 months, but just the features that you spoke about with Try .in comparison to what I was doing for so many of my training sessions, didn't matter whether it was hot, cold, slight hills, windy, how I felt. It was like, no, you've got eight by K and you do that at three minutes. Good luck. And if it was harder than it should have been, well, so be, you just consider that one a little bitty bang for your buck.
But yeah, it's, it's exciting. I've enjoyed, I use training peaks for the athletes that I coach. And, I mean, so many of the features there still get me excited, but yeah, try dot. I'm going to have to have a look at that. Cause it's a, I feel like you've put through a nice little pitch for it. So yeah, I'm very interested in finding out more. One thing you said, Mark, which, really sort of stood out to me earlier in that was, you, you do some work up until a point aerobically. And once you started to see performance starts a plateau or pitter out a little bit.
Tyson Popplestone (42:08.655)
you would go, all right, well, it might be time for some more anaerobic work. And this is where I see, not only in my own running, but in so many of the athletes that I work with starts a struggle is because obviously there's the, the data points of that. And there's the emotion points of that. And the emotions often say, no, let's rush towards getting some more anaerobic work in. Because obviously that's where we'll see that meteoric rise, but the actual, physiological ability to handle that work might not quite be ready yet. And so.
Have you got any advice or any guidance or any points that you use to know, okay, hey, how much more intensity should I add based on where I'm at aerobically? Because the classic formula here in Australia forever was you do four days of relatively easy running. One of those days is a long run. And the other three, you're doing something pretty hard, whether it's like short and on the track, medium intervals like K's, and then you might go out and do a threshold or a tempo run.
But three, for a lot of people is a lot, a lot of work.
Yeah, and it also varies with age, like younger people can handle more speed work and get benefit out of longer periods of speed work, anaerobic work, than somebody who's older. The interesting thing, though, at least according to research, is that it takes more anaerobic work for a younger person's mitochondria to respond to, you know, get more changes in them than an old person. An old person
older person, somebody let's say 50 or 60, they do a little bit of speed work and they get these huge changes in their mitochondria, but they can't handle as many weeks of anaerobic work in a row before they start to go off the edge of the cliff. So there's no black and white number that, like I said, it depends partly on age, it depends on what else you have going on in your life. If you lived in...
Tyson Popplestone (44:09.327)
in a tent at the top of a hill and you didn't have any responsibilities and everybody cooked your food for you and you got a massage every day, you could probably handle twice as much anaerobic work as you do right now. But with a job, a family, commitments, you name it, what a research study might say you can handle may not be anywhere close to what you're actually capable of doing yourself. It might be a lot less than that.
So you just have to self monitor and kind of see where, okay, three days a week, I'm wasted and I'm not even completing the session as well when I do them. Let's cut back to two. Or maybe we do two one week, one one week and three the next. You know, mix it up a little bit. And that's sort of also why you kind of do that mix of aerobic, anaerobic, throw them in and stuff because the human body gets really good at
It gets efficient at anything you do. And after a while, if you do the same thing over and over, you won't, you won't, you'll stop. Your body will stop responding with that fitness gain. So there is that need to sort of mix it up without always mixing it up and your body never optimizes any part of it. So, you know, it's, you know, there's all these, all these factors that go into it. But, you know, when I, one good, great story, when I was, training in Boulder, there was one track that
all the top dogs ran at, you know, the Australian runners, the Mexican runners, the African runners, the American runners, the triathletes, you know, we all ran up to this one track. And so I got to see a lot of different styles of track workouts. And, you know, like the African guys who were the best in the world who were training there, they do...
you know, maybe 5k worth of intervals on the track. Wasn't much, was very, very fast. And then when I, when I see them running around town on other days, they were running so slow. It was, it was mind boggling. The runners who were at the track, who were not quite at that level, they were professional, but not at the very top. They were doing like 10k on the track hard, 15k on the track hard.
Tyson Popplestone (46:36.687)
And I'm like, okay, would it not make sense to maybe do less, but do it faster? That classic idea of success leaving clues. I just finished a couple of months ago, I finished reading the book running with the Kenyans. And I don't know if you've heard of it or read it, but it's a book about a guy who moved to Kenya from Great Britain in his late thirties to see if he could figure out what it was that they were doing so well. And exactly what you just said, he said he saw
When he got over there, in fact, he said on his first couple of runs, he thought the Kenyans were mocking him because they would go out for their easy runs and they would go out at six minute K pace. He's like, okay, I know I'm not as fit as you, but you don't have to do this. This is embarrassing. He said he went and had a chat to the coach afterwards. He's like, can you tell them not to do that for me? He's like, they're not thinking about you. This is just what they do. Yeah, which is, yeah, it's mind blowing that.
the best athletes in the world in so many regards, particularly with regard to the Kenyans, are taking a philosophy which seems to work for a lot of them. Granted, there's a lot of Kenyans who don't make it as well. But the flip side of that is, all right, well, if you're gonna be trying to model, if you wanna run like the best, you may as well start to train similar to the best, but for whatever reason, I'm not sure if it's ego or emotion or a combination of things, but it just seems to be something that mentally a lot of us struggle to buy into.
Yeah, there's no shame in going easy. But the thing is, if you look at their form when they're running easy, their form is still perfect. So their cadence is still up, their form is still perfect. It's just their stride's a little shorter and they're going slower. And they're visibly going slower. And then when, so they're...
So they're like still patterning in kind of that faster pacing into their cadence, even though they're going really slow. And so I think a lot of people, when they think, I'm going to go slow, it's a waste of time. They slog, you know, they plod, the cadence rate goes slower, you know, and then when they get to the track, then it's like to have to reshift that and then get into the fast cadence and everything else is harder. but yeah, I think, I think a lot of,
Tyson Popplestone (49:01.359)
I don't even want to stereotype, but a certain number of athletes are just wound so tight. They just don't know how to take some of their training as relaxing as opposed to performance driven. But that easy stuff is part of being the best that you can be. And I always say, save your best for the race.
Don't have your best performance on your weekly track session or your group ride. Have your best performance in your race. Yeah, you're using those to prepare for it. You're doing elements of your race in those workouts, but save your best for the race. Yeah. Would you notice that noticeable difference between the pace that you would train at and the pace that you would race at? Yeah. And Rob DiCastello said it best one day, we were doing a track workout and he goes,
He goes, you know, I, when I'm, I'm running 450 pace for these mile repeats, he said, I've got to do 26 of these in a row with no rest. And he goes, it blows my mind to think, I don't know how do I do that? I don't know how I do that. You know, so it was just a great perspective. It's very true.
It's very true, Mark. I've got one eye on the clock and I realize you got plenty to get done. So I'm not going to hold you much longer, but it's, it's hard to let you go because I know we've had an hour and it's hard to condense 35, 40 years worth of conversation into a 60 minute chat. So for anyone listening, I'm going to have your website and your coaching links and stuff included in the show notes to this episode. But is there any way anywhere else that people can find you that you think's worth pointing out? Yeah, you can find me.
MarkAllensports .com, kind of a lot of things I got going. Definitely you can find me if you go to Tridot. They have Tridot and RunDot. So they have running specific programs. They've got triathlon specific programs. They'll be launching BikeDot soon. But yeah, I have my premium coaching on Tridot. So anybody who's interested in getting coached, I still have a few slots open for the season and I'm always happy to help people out.
Tyson Popplestone (51:22.704)
Yeah, awesome. Hey, thanks so much for coming on. All right, Tyson, this is awesome. I appreciate it. Hey, right back at ya. See you later, everybody.