Real Life Runners with Angie and Kevin Brown
Angie and Kevin Brown are here to help real life runners to improve their running and their life through conversations about training, mindset, nutrition, health and wellness, family, and all the crazy things that life throws at us. The lessons that we learn from running can carry over into all aspects of our life, and we are here to explore those connections through current research, our experiences, and stories from real people out on the roads and trails, so that you can become a physically and mentally stronger runner and achieve the goals that matter to you. We are Kevin and Angie Brown, husband and wife, mom and dad, coaches, and runners. Angie holds her doctorate degree in physical therapy and uses running as part of her integrated fitness routine. Kevin is a marathoner who has been coaching runners for over a decade. Together, we want to help make running more accessible to more people, so that more people can gain the benefits of being a Real Life Runner.
Real Life Runners with Angie and Kevin Brown
Kevin's Road to the Daytona 100 - Part 3
Ever wondered how to safely bend the rules of running training to increase both speed and mileage simultaneously? Well, you're in for a treat! Join us as Kevin, your host and passionate runner, shares his unique approach to preparing for the grueling Daytona 100 race. His strategy defies conventional wisdom by boosting mileage by 5-10 miles per week and involves a delicate balance of hard training and necessary rest. Gain an inside look at the tapering process, the vital role of sleep, and the importance of listening to your body.
Now, imagine tackling this intense training while championing a cause close to your heart. Kevin isn’t just running for the finish line; he’s running to raise awareness for epilepsy. In this chapter, we discuss the mental and physical hurdles of training for an ultra marathon, setting achievable objectives, and staying motivated. We invite you to join us on this journey, not just as passive listeners, but as active supporters. Why not sponsor Kevin's race and join the fight against epilepsy? Get ready to be inspired to run your own life, your own way.
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Speaker 2:This is the Real Life Runners podcast, and we're your hosts, kevin and Angie Brown. Thanks for spending some time with us today. Now let's get running.
Speaker 1:What's up runners? Welcome to part three of Kevin's Journey to the Daytona 100, or Kevin's Road to the Daytona 100, I think, is what we are calling this mini series. So today we're talking about Kevin's recap of the past week. So we're looking at the week of Thanksgiving. Now is what we're recapping today on the podcast and looking ahead. We are less than two weeks away from your race. Can you believe that it is coming up right like very soon?
Speaker 2:No, no, not at all. That is really close and it's still a really far distance. I haven't yet. I don't think I really fully wrap my head around it.
Speaker 1:I don't think I will until I cover the distance. I don't think you can right Because, like until you actually do it, no one knows what it's like to run 100 miles.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I know what it's like to run 30 plus miles short of that, which makes like normal runs then seem remarkably short. And I was out the other day on like a nine mile run, which is a pretty good distance of a run, and then I realized that I have to run 11 times further than that in order to cover the distance.
Speaker 1:Oh, my gosh, that's so crazy.
Speaker 1:So let's talk about how the past week went in your training, and today we're going to highlight especially what Kevin did in his last quote, unquote big week of training, because now that we are inside of the two week mark toward the race, it's time for Kevin to kind of start tapering and we're going to talk a little bit about tapering.
Speaker 1:I think we can focus more on the taper next week's episode and really this week we can talk about that last quote, unquote big week of your training and what that looked like, especially with Thanksgiving thrown in the mix and you had the week off of school, which was really nice, so you were able to focus on sleep. So we're going to talk more about the importance of sleep in this whole process, because in an undertaking like this, people often think about the training and what's involved in the training and not as many people think about the recovery and the sleep and the fueling and all the other things that we're talking about here on the podcast. So give us a little insight on what this week looked like with your training first. All right.
Speaker 2:So I knew that with the week off from school I was going to be able to get more sleep than you know, than days where I have to get up at five, get in a run and then get ready for school day. Like I still make sure that I get to bed on time, like plenty early on those nights and over Thanksgiving we were stretching it, the girls were getting to bed a little bit later, I was getting to bed a little bit later, but then I just didn't set an alarm, like I wasn't waking up. I didn't. I don't know if I did a run in the dark other than Sunday long run, because we had scheduling things that had to make sure that that worked in.
Speaker 2:So I really knew that, since I was going to be able to get a whole heck of a lot more sleep than normal, that I could increase my mileage a little bit, and that's that's what I did, like it wasn't that I had a super super long Sunday, like I did a few weeks ago you know there was a few weeks ago. I think we covered that on the first one that I did like a 20 mile followed by like a four hour long run, heading into this one, the Sunday book. At the start of the week I did 20 miles and pushed for the last two miles like drop the pace down, pretty good. And then all week long I was doing like nine ish miles a day instead of somewhere between like seven and eight, which is what I normally do. I was doing somewhere between like eight to 10. So I just kind of up the mileage of every run throughout the whole week.
Speaker 1:Okay, so what then did your weekly mileage? If we're doing the math really quick, what did your weekly mileage look like previously? And then what did it look like this week? It was essentially an increase of five to 10 miles overall for the for the course of the week.
Speaker 2:That sounds about right. I mean, normally I do. I don't know if you ballpark it at six. Six runs, no, five runs of around eight. That gets you 40 miles plus a 20 miler. That gets you around 60. And then I come up a little bit short of that. So I'm usually in like the mid fifties, and this time I was doing five by nine, so 45 plus 20, that gets you 65. And I was actually pretty consistent with that. So yeah, 10 ish more miles.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that's a pretty significant increase. When you look at it that way, Like when you think about your daily runs, you're like, oh, basically like another mile or two on each of your daily runs and that doesn't seem that big. But when you do that to every single run, it is actually a significant increase. And talk a little bit about why you felt comfortable doing that, even though that violates oh I don't know if it really violates the 10% rule right, it does violate so talk a little bit about that idea I mean you can.
Speaker 2:So the 10% rule is you can't go in training from one week to the next and jump your mileage more than 10%. So if you're doing 20 miles in a week, in theory that next week can't go higher than 22. Otherwise I think your legs fall off. I think is how the rule is written Right. Um, one of those classic coaching rules of thumb, that 10 miles per week, but there's a limit on that. Also, you can't just keep adding 10% each week, and they've done tons of studies on this that you don't have to actually limit yourself as long as you're making sure that you feel recovered the whole time.
Speaker 2:So I knew, since I had the ability to eat throughout the day, snack whenever I wanted it wasn't, like you know. Today, first day, first day back at school, I went five straight classes without a break. It gets hard to shove a snack into those days. When you're home, you can snack whenever you want. I could sleep in and I could put the run where I needed to and stretch the time a little bit because there wasn't a whole lot of other time commitment. So you, I stretched it. I mean 55 to 65, you're looking closer to 20%, but it was fine because none of it was huge and overwhelming. It was a little bit more each day, but then I boosted the recovery a little bit more each day than I was used to Like. I was definitely, on average, sleeping more than I was in the previous weeks. I'm always keeping an eye on how much I'm sleeping so that it never, on average kind of dips too low, but this week I was I was averaging, I think, almost an hour more per day, which is nice.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really nice. So that really lets us know. And then, how did your body feel during that process?
Speaker 2:I was fine Like that. Not only did I up the mileage, but I I closed my Sunday long run with speed and then I did a good speed workout on Tuesday and a good speed workout on Thursday, another Sunday long run, like it was just a good week throughout, with, I mean, three speed days inside of five days. So that was. It was good. Nothing was overwhelming, but I was able to really ramp things up.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you broke a lot of rules here. Then, when we talk about in the podcast of like ways that you are setting yourself up for injury, right, or that will increase your risk for injury, if you guys have listened to the to the podcast before, we tell you don't increase speed and distance at the same time and don't ramp up your mileage too quickly. So you ramped up mileage and you added in speed and increase your distance at the same time.
Speaker 2:Okay, so I increased mileage and I didn't increase like the amount of speed that I did, because I put in a little bit of speed on my last Sunday long run and it wasn't like a lot and I didn't crank it up a ton. I just upped the speed of the last couple of miles to like marathon pace, which is not like super aggressive speed. And then on Tuesday I didn't do a huge volume of speed but I was going at a real good, a pretty fast pace for me, like 5k effort. And then on Thursday I was going that was my most volume of speed. I did six by a mile.
Speaker 1:On Thanksgiving morning On. Thanksgiving morning, that's when I saw you.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, that was a good one because I passed you on my way out. It was like a mile out, turn around and then run back, and I passed you on the way out and I'm like I think I might be able to catch her on the way back. I think I've got this and I just barely got you, just barely missed me, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, I was already done with mine. I was like waiting at the light.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, they caught you at the light.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that was fun, so I provided a little motivation.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:All right, I like it, but so what were you? What I want you guys to understand, as we're listening to Kevin talk about this, is that there are no hard and fast rules. There are definitely really good guidelines, and the reason that Kevin was able to work his training this way is because of his experience as a runner and also his experience as a coach and also his ability to read his own body. And I think that that is the most important thing of all is that during this whole process, you were doing these daily check ins with yourself and checking in to see how am I feeling right now as my body feeling good. Do I feel recovered from the day before or from the couple of days before? And that's going to determine what I go out and I do during my run today. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%. And then I took Friday off, like it's not, like I'm like, oh, this is going to be an up mileage, so I'm going to go seven out of seven days. I still put an off day in there. It happened to fall on Friday. I thought it would work best to fall on the day after Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving dinner tends to be a lot of heavier food and I enjoy eating, you know it not just like eating for the sake of recovery and fuel and stuff like that, but there's a lot of treats and stuff with Thanksgiving and I wasn't going to bet you just really like Thanksgiving dinner.
Speaker 2:I love Thanksgiving dinner. Like every aspect of it is delicious. There's stuffing and then potatoes and turkey and stuffing and I say stuffing twice, because we have two kinds.
Speaker 1:We do.
Speaker 2:Every cranberry sauce and multiple helpings, oh yeah, and multiple plate loads of stuff. It's just, it's so delicious and I enjoy the holiday. I love the food that comes with the holiday. I enjoy the whole holiday experience. It's wonderful, and so I thought I'm probably going to end up taking Friday off because I'm going to be tired from the workout and just I don't need to run on Friday. So it worked out for me.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the importance of sleep and recovery in this whole process, because I think that's really what this week highlighted was it allowed you to up your mileage safely and you felt completely fine in the process. Body is feeling good, which is amazing, and a lot of that is because of the way that you were fueling, which we talked about on our last episode. So if you missed part two, go back and check out part two for more of Kevin's fueling throughout this whole process. But talk a little bit about the importance of sleep and recovery in your whole training process and then you know, if you want to highlight a little bit more about this week, you can do that too.
Speaker 2:I mean overall. So I've got the Garmin watch and so it tracks sleep for me and it'll give me like a seven day average. So I know everyone's well. I'll have a day where we're up late for one reason or another and then I need to get up early and run the next day. I have stopped pushing the boundaries on that. If we're up close to like 11 o'clock, I'm not getting up at five the next morning, like I'm not getting less than six hours, especially not getting less than six hours and then trying to push the pace on a workout Every once in a while. Life just works out that it's not going to work for me to run in the afternoon. I need to get that run in the morning, and so sometimes it'll happen. I usually end up with an off day the next day.
Speaker 2:I knew for this particular week that I was going to be able to get extra sleep.
Speaker 2:I think there was a day that I got almost 10 hours of sleep because I woke up when my body's like hey, this is normally when you get up to go run, and I went to the bathroom and then went back to bed for another three hours and it was amazing, and I think that's why it was able to essentially treat Thanksgiving sort of like a mini personal at home training camp is I was getting more sleep and able to optimize fueling as best as possible, and so sure I was able to make sure that I had higher speed, a little bit higher speed than normal and definitely higher volume than normal, but I was able to recover perfectly because sleep. Sleep was good, I mean all year long, for years and years. If my sleep average ever starts dipping lower than seven, I'd take an off day and just make sure that I get the extra sleep, push that thing back up there. I don't like my seven day average to ever get near seven hours of sleep.
Speaker 1:What do you typically average for your sleep? Like your seven day average seven and a half. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, something like that. I mean it's tough to keep that up there. If you're getting up at five in the morning and you want over seven hours of sleep, that means you get need to get to bed before 10 o'clock at night.
Speaker 1:Right, and I think that goes back to priorities, right. This has been a priority for you for pretty much this whole year. Definitely for the last three to four months when you've been actually in this race training cycle, but really this whole year you've been looking ahead to this race and putting this on the calendar and you waited to sign up for a little while, but this really has been in your goal sights all year long, where you have been trying to increase your strength and increase your mileage and do what's necessary to prepare yourself to run a hundred mile race, like you didn't know that it was going to be this specific one, but you knew that your goal was to run a hundred miles, and so that does mean needing to get to bed earlier because you know that you have to wake up earlier. And I think this goes back to the discussion of what's a priority in my life and what is it going to take for me to achieve that thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, when you're trying to run so many miles, it's tough to squeeze them in before school without getting yourself up at four o'clock in the morning. And getting up at four o'clock in the morning is just going to be really difficult to have enough hours of sleep, like it's just going to be tricky to do unless you're going to bed at eight o'clock at night. And we have kids. They don't want to go to bed at eight o'clock at night, like they're trying to stretch their bedtime.
Speaker 1:So yeah, it has gotten more challenging as the kids have gotten older.
Speaker 2:It is a hundred percent, because they don't want to go to bed and it's like well, you need to go to bed so that I can go to bed. Is has been a challenge, especially since the start of this school.
Speaker 1:There's been some pushback on that one.
Speaker 2:Yes, definitely, from from all sides.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you know, hopefully, what you guys are hearing and I know this is definitely what I'm hearing is that Kevin was able to do the training that he did last week because of the sleep that he was able to give himself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I mean I think one of the things that can be taken away by a lot of people is this sort of mini training camp philosophy. You don't have to go somewhere, like I used to go to running camp when I was in high school. In college, during fall break we would go get away and have like a cross country training camp. You can do this at home. When a vacation shows up Like this happened to hit my schedule that I had the week off I knew I was going to be able to get some extra sleep and so it fit nicely for me that I would have upped my wage. It happened to also fit out really nicely for where the race was going to go, but if I didn't have this race on schedule, I still probably would have treated this as let's, let's give it a chance to up my volume a little bit, because I knew that the recovery was going to be available.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so if you have somebody that is trained for a big race and might want to implement this idea of a at home training camp, how many weeks before that big race would you suggest they put that weekend Like, if you want to, you could take a week off of work, right, and actually make this a reality for you If you've got a big race on the calendar.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, if I had to just pick a perfect number for it. Some of them are between six and eight weeks out. Um, this one worked fine for me. Like, what if, five weeks out, I did the big weekend run and then I didn't go crazy on mileage for this thing, because you know, the race is still coming up here pretty soon, Um, which is why it was like let's add 10 miles to it instead of. You know, I could have tried to go double digits every day. I don't think that would have been overwhelming for me.
Speaker 1:Well, but even if you just look at what you did throughout the course of the week, like you ran around 65 miles, that's still not what you're going to do in the race itself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's also still relatively low mileage compared to what a lot of ultra runners are out there doing. Yeah, I get still a reasonable amount of running because, you know, our kids were off of school also and I wanted to be able to spend some time with them and if I'm not going to get up super early and go run before they wake up, if I'm running during daylight hours they're probably going to be awake, so it's nice to have some time with the family.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely All right. So any other final thoughts as we wrap up this part three?
Speaker 2:get some sleep and eat well.
Speaker 1:There you go. I like it. All right. You guys stay tuned. Our normal podcast episode will be dropping on Thursday and we will come out with part four next week, which will be actually the week of the race, which is so crazy that it's here. We're super excited. If you don't follow us yet on social media and you want to track Kevin's journey, I will definitely be putting updates on Instagram at real life. Runners is our Instagram handle, so follow us over there If you want to follow along with Kevin's journey on the day of the race also, I will definitely be posting to the stories and doing some live videos throughout the course of the day as I crew the race.
Speaker 2:Yeah, your Instagram is going to have a lot of good updates for it. We'll put my race number up there. I think I have to run over several timing mats so people can get updates through that also.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, and if you want to sponsor Kevin's race, kevin is doing this race to help also raise awareness. He's he's doing it for himself, obviously, and to challenge himself in this way, but also to raise money for the epilepsy foundation because of everything that he's gone through in his own experience with epilepsy. So if you, if you would like to sponsor Kevin's race, you can check out the details over at Kevin 100.com. You can sponsor any amount, um, anything that feels good for you is well appreciated, um, and we'll go to benefit a great cause. So, as always, guys, thanks for joining us today. This has been the real life runners podcast, kevin's road to the Daytona 100, part three. Three, now, get out there and run your life.