Real Life Runners with Angie and Kevin Brown

398: The Evolution of Training Plans: Ditching the High Mileage Model

• Angie Brown

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Do more miles really lead to better performance? We discuss why recreational runners should not follow elite training plans, taking into account the genetic, recovery, and lifestyle differences. The episode explores the science and benefits behind polarized training, which emphasizes easy and hard training days while minimizing moderate efforts. We highlight the importance of a training plan that fits one's individual life circumstances and current goals, especially for women over 40 experiencing hormonal changes. The discussion includes the impact of polarized training on endurance and body composition and advocates for more flexible and adaptable training strategies to maintain motivation and achieve better results.


00:38 The Science Behind Polarized Training

02:35 Debunking the 'More is Better' Myth

05:08 Understanding the Risks of High Mileage

08:03 Tailoring Training Plans for Real Life Runners

25:25 The Importance of Polarized Training for Women

28:44 Adapting Your Training Plan for Optimal Results

35:09 Conclusion: Train Smarter, Not Harder 


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Angie:

For decades, marathon training and really endurance running training in general has followed a pretty simple formula, run more miles and get faster. But what if that's not the best approach, especially for you? most training plans today are just watered down versions of elite. programs. They assume that recreational runners are just slower elites, when in reality the differences go much deeper. Elite runners often have genetic advantages, different recovery capacities, and a lifestyle built around training. So why are we, as real life runners, Following the same blueprint and expecting the same results. In this episode today, we're going to be diving into the evolution of marathon training and also just training in general. So even if you're not training for a marathon, this will still apply to you. And the science behind polarized training. So little. spoiler alert, more miles is not always better and why your training plan needs to adapt to your life, not the other way around. We've talked about that multiple times on the podcast, but today we're going to take a little bit of a different spin on it. So by the end of today's episode, you're going to understand how to train smarter, not just harder and how to build a plan that works with your body and not against it. So stay tuned. What's up runners. Welcome to the show today. We're talking about polarized training, the best way to train, which I know is a topic that a lot of you love talking about, especially you, Kevin.

Kevin:

I do. I do love training. I think I should be wearing a headband and some tall socks so we can talk about how to train like 80s athletes.

Angie:

Ooh, in really short shorts. you still

Kevin:

have really, you already

Angie:

rocked those. Yeah, exactly. But it is funny because those of you might not know this. Kevin does have different lengths of running shorts depending on where he's running, which is good. if he's doing our school 5k, especially if our high school daughter is going to be present and nearby, he opts for the longer shorts.

Kevin:

Yeah. As the, as our daughter got. older. The shorts that I wore to run that race definitely got a lot longer.

Angie:

Yes. did you used to wear short shorts? I don't think you ever really wore the short shorts. I never wore

Kevin:

my like, my normal racing shorts. Normal.

Angie:

I like your shorty shorts. Yeah.

Kevin:

My racing shorts is what I would like racing

Angie:

shorts. Yeah. So today we're going to get into training plans in general. And a lot of runners have this idea that more is better. if I want to get better, if I want to improve my endurance, if I want to improve my speed, if I want to improve my pace, all I have to do is keep running more. And you might even think I also just need to keep pushing myself harder. And today I hope by the end of this episode, you're going to let go of those faulty beliefs because they are not true for most runners. Especially if you are a recreational runner, what we like to think of as a real life runner over the age of 40, we have to let go of this whole idea of more is better and harder is better because those don't always apply.

Kevin:

It's such an easy idea to fall into because when you first get into running it almost Does apply universally across the board that when you, you start running and you're doing like five to 10 miles a week and you move that up 15 miles a week, you get faster and you're like, Oh, this is fantastic. I should just keep running more. But you can see the problem with this. If 15 is better than 10 and 20 is better than 15 at some point, you're going to hit a number that's not better. Like at some point, like 3000 is not better. So clearly there's an upper limit to this. There is faulty logic. But when you first get into running, when you're first trying to make these connections of how do I improve a little bit more is very often better.

Angie:

Yeah. And I want to really. Make this point because a lot of people don't understand like where traditional training plans come from like you go into an app or you go On a website and you look up a training plan You're like, okay I'm gonna train for a half marathon or a marathon and you look up training plans, right? You go into Google and say like marathon training plan. What pops up is oftentimes based on plans that were developed for elite runners. And then they just scale back that mileage. Cause most recreational runners are not running a hundred to 150 miles per week, which is what a lot of elite marathoners are running.

Kevin:

Oh yeah. You take most elite marathoners. I think at the low end, you're probably going to get, especially if you dive into the female side, you're going to get probably 70 to. people putting in crazy miles, 130 ish miles a week, which used to be even higher. Like it used to be almost unheard of to get top marathon, especially male marathoners to be doing anything below triple digits. Now you're looking at ultra runners out there who are not even hitting triple digits per week and still winning high level ultra marathons.

Angie:

Yeah, so this whole idea is definitely starting to shift, which I think is a really good thing, especially as a physical therapist, because I understand how many runners get injured every single year for money injuries. One of the, one study I just looked up, it was published in 2023, they did a review of other studies based on kind of an anonymous study that they sent out to runners. There was over 600 participants that responded to this survey. 84 0. 4 percent of people said that they had experienced some running injury at some point in their lives, and 76 percent of these respondents were female, which I really liked because so many times you'll get it the opposite way, and I love how many more females are getting into running too, but it is really important for us to know this is 84 percent of people. Of runners get injured and like about 46%. It was just under 50 percent said that they had some sort of running related injury in the last year, like within that last 12 months. And so this is really important for us to look at, because based on another study that I had looked at, it said that people that run over 19 miles per week tend to have a higher risk of injury. And I'm not saying that nobody should run more than 19 miles a week, because clearly that's not the case, especially if you're training for a marathon. But. It's the time period for us to look at this and say, okay, we've got these different studies that are showing runners get injured, very frequently. Then we've got this other study that's showing that, there is this kind of mileage threshold that they see above and below, that kind of mileage that they're. does tend to be an increased risk of running injuries. So what do we do with that information? Because it's not that it's just the mileage alone. That's the problem. It's the way that we're training. I think that becomes more of the problem. And that's why we really have to look at the training plans and so many of these training plans. We're based on this idea of just running more or taking a plan from an elite runner or an elite coach There's lots of historical coaches you know, you're much more familiar with those guys than I am and just watering them down and bringing them down to a Quote unquote, normal Mileage level, but that doesn't really work that way. It's like trying to make a loaf of gluten free bread based on a traditional bread recipe. You can't just substitute gluten free flour, even though they tell you that you can. There's that one to one substitution right of like gluten free flour. You can't just put in almond flour or like coconut flour instead of whole wheat flour. You're not going to get the same loaf. At all. It's not going to taste the same. It's not going to look the same. It's probably not going to rise like there's gonna be all sorts of problems with that loaf. So you can't just substitute one for the other.

Kevin:

theoretically, you can substitute the bag suggests that you can sub the one flower for the other. But

Angie:

even that one to one flower is a combination of flowers. It's not just one. So I think that's really important, too.

Kevin:

Yeah, because it doesn't really work. I want to go back to that. You pointed out that they found that this magic number of 19, which is clearly Yeah, That was just statistically where that study happened to find a change in numbers. That's not where it is, but what's behind that? And this part is us creating some speculation off of it. Once you go above a certain mileage, you probably start losing certain other important things out of your training. You probably are now so focused on making sure that you're hitting enough mileage that maybe your strength training goes by the wayside. Or maybe at lower mileage, you didn't need as much strength for your body to handle the load of mileage. And so maybe it wasn't that strength training went by the wayside. Maybe you were getting by without like you were in the danger zone, but you hadn't pushed it quite far enough that the fact that you were too weak was actually not creating an issue yet. And then you went over whatever that threshold was. averaged out among that group to be 19. It said that 19 is number. It was probably 15 for some people and 30 for others, but there's a number.

Angie:

Yeah. It's the same thing as cadence, right? 180 steps per minute is not the magical cadence number, but that was just the median between, like when they looked at the different studies, there was some people at one 60, there were some people at 200 and one 80 was in the middle. So that's where they landed.

Kevin:

Got to hate that study. That study is five people and the median was 180. That was such, it's only five people. It's five. It's five ultra marathon runners. That's wild. And the person that won the race had a cadence of 180, or sorry, of one 60. And the person that got second had 200. And so how could, how come 180 is the best?

Angie:

Yeah, I mean it's the average of the two. but this is the point too, right? We real life runners are not just smaller, slower versions of elites like we have different ingredients like elite runners that are winning marathons all over the world and in the Olympics, those people have different genetic makeups than most of us, I would argue. I'm just

Kevin:

going to say it. They're genetic freaks in the best way possible. They are genetic anomalies and you can do a lot of different training with them that most people cannot necessarily do and adapt in the same way.

Angie:

And the way that their lifestyles are. Also adapted for that kind of training, whereas we have all sorts of other life demands like we have family and we have stress and we have recovery limitations and we've got work and we've got all these other things and so our body, even if we did put the same recipe in right, like the same mileage and shrink training, all the things that the elites are doing, we're not going to get the same output. We can't take a two hour nap every single day. We don't have access to a massage therapist for our daily massage or a nutritionist or a chef, like all these things that the elite runners have to help make them into the best runners on the planet. That's not how most of us are operating the majority of us

Kevin:

No And then you get those stories of the Olympians that are like they're also a parent like the mom Olympians where you're like, okay, but they do have real existence like with it They're trying to figure out like can I get child care coverage that I can go work out for a couple of hours? Like how do I make this all work and I go back to genetic anomaly like There's a reason why that person was an Olympian before they were, they had a kid and there's a reason they're going to be able to go back and be an Olympian after they have a kid. And it's that there is, there's some genetic component to this that they won. Like they won genetic lottery and yes, they're putting in an insane amount of work. But if I put in that same amount of work, I'm not necessarily getting those same results. It's just not happening.

Angie:

Yeah. And I think that's really where. All of this kind of comes in is why are we trying to use someone else's ingredients for our body? Wouldn't we get better results if we had a plan that was designed for your unique ingredients your body? And that's really where that smart adaptable training plan comes in that balances the stress and the recovery and the performance for your best results for the way that your body operates in your Real life because so many runners think, if I just run more, then I'll get faster, then I'll get stronger. But what we have to understand is that more is not always better. Sometimes more is just more stress on our body without the results that we want. And sometimes it even leads to more breakdown in the. Yeah,

Kevin:

I would argue that if you look back to when more was better, was like a big push. We're looking at like 80s and 90s, even like 70s, 80s, 90s. One of your premier coaches at the time is Alberto Salazar, and everybody can have their own thoughts on Alberto, but he pushed the limits on everything that he could possibly push. And one of them was how much miles can we possibly throw at a human and see if it works? You look at colleges at that time, there were a lot of programs that were basically throwing as many miles at runners as they could. And whoever was still standing, those were your diamonds.

Angie:

There's still high school programs that do that as well. There are some around us.

Kevin:

There are plenty of programs that do this because If you throw a whole lot of mileage, what are you going to get? You're going to get some hurt athletes, but you are also going to be able to find the cream of the crop really nicely because those ones that didn't break. So this is going to work. It helps you find genetic anomalies. That's what you get left with. And you're like, man, my team is only filled with great athletes. No, it's not. You broke all the athletes that couldn't handle your program. You, your team could have been full of a whole lot of great athletes, but you only went with one method. the reason why the world records from the eighties, as long as they weren't caused by illegal substances are all getting broken is because we found better training techniques. Just throwing more mileage is not the solution to this. We don't

Angie:

forget super shoes.

Kevin:

okay. Yes. There's super shoes also. I'm not going to say that everything is necessarily the cleanest now because there was certainly a time when EPO was just blazing through the world. But, there, there are other reasons that world records are dropping like crazy right now. And it is one of the reasons is we're not just saying more mileage is always the correct answer.

Angie:

And I think that while it is really important for us to. Acknowledge that elite runners aren't just faster versions of everyday runners and we, or vice versa, we're not just slow versions of elites like we have to understand that these elite runners do have the genetic advantages in VO two max in muscle fiber composition in running economy, like their body just responds to training differently than most of us. And that is something that we definitely need to recognize. At the same time, while we don't want to take their exact training plan and just water it down and just decrease the mileage on it, we can look at what the elites are doing and adapt them to our real life, take what they're doing as an example and say, okay, I see that they're adding in more strength training, not necessarily that, okay, we have to perform six reps of this exact thing at this amount of my one rep max, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like sometimes if we get too deep into the details and in the weeds, that's what I think where we start to get into a problem here, but we can look at overall what they're doing, how they're balancing the running and how they're balancing strength training. But what we have to also understand is so many of these elite runners and so many of these. Classic traditional marathon plans are based on six days of running at least right six to seven days of running and sometimes they even have two runs per day like a lot of the elites are doing that most of us aren't training that way like there are some people out there that really like to you're one of them you know you like to run most days taking a rest day every seven to ten days right you are someone that does like that higher volume higher mileage running every day kind of thing. But I would say the majority of people that are training. Aren't that way? I would think

Kevin:

I completely agree. And I like to run six or seven days out of the week, but no one would look at my training plan and suggest that I am a high mileage athlete for the distances that I am racing. No one is looking at my plan and being like, Whoa, that is a super high mileage runner. I'm just not, I don't have the time involved to put up the mileage that would suggest high mileage runner. But like you said, you can look overall at what. Elite athletes do and try and get some vague takeaways. It's when you dive into the details and try and be like, okay, they're doing this. I run slower. So I will do this version of that exact workout. I think the more details you dive into the trickier it gets to train equate an elite to a non elite. I was just talking with a friend about this the other day of how is it that these world records are going down? How are they able to run that fast for that far? That just seems nuts. In this case, we were talking about, someone going after the hundred mile world record that the hundred mile world record is, I think it's roughly six 50 per mile. That is insane to be running six 50 per mile for just under 11, 11 straight hours. That

Angie:

is insane,

Kevin:

but here's where the crazy part goes. He said, how does he possibly go that fast? I'm like, because it doesn't feel fast at all. Because you're talking about somebody and then I immediately go to Kipchoge because people know the name and it's a good name to drop. When he broke 2 hours for the marathon, he was running about 4 minutes and 20 seconds per mile, roughly. We're going to round for easy numbers. That means his ability to run for two straight hours was a pace that he could do for 20 miles. Most people listening may struggle to hold four minutes and 20 seconds for a lap of the track, a half a lap of the track. He's doing it for two hours. So when he goes out and runs at six minute pace, that's a jog for him. Which means if he'd slowed down to seven minute pace that feels a walk jog That's how people are able to run that quote unquote fast because for their running efficiency They're running economy. It's not fast It's so much slower than a pace that they could sustain for an hour for two hours That it feels so much more comfortable for them So when you're trying to make a workout Their numbers are so ridiculously different that you can't compare the two numbers. You can compare efforts, but trying to compare paces just does not even make sense.

Angie:

Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And we talk to our athletes about this all the time on our team, like someone that will look at your workouts and your paces and are just like, Oh my God, I can't even imagine. It's yes, but that's his RPE. That's his. effort level five, right? That's his effort level three. So for you, that seems like that's going to be your effort level nine, but that's not what it is for him. And so that's why effort levels and RPE, your rating of perceived exertion is so important. And that's a perfect segue into the next thing we want to talk about, which is polarized training. And polarized training, there's been a lot more research done on the effectiveness of polarized training. So let's first define what that means so that you understand and then we'll get into why this mode of training is something that you're going to definitely want to consider if you are following any sort of training plan right now. So basically polarized training means that like you're focusing on the two ends. if you think about a line or a pole, the, slow end of the pole, like where the pace feels really easy versus the high end, the opposite end of the pole, where your pace feels really hard. So I like to think of it like as a number line from zero to 10. So on one end, we're looking at zero to two is the easy and then not really zero, but like one to three, I'll say is your easy. And then at the other end, your hard is like that eight, nine, 10 level. And so polarized training is basically spending most of your time training at those two ends of the spectrum and little to no training in the middle, depending on what your focus is. But that's essentially the definition of polarized training is really, you have easy days and you have hard days and you don't have a lot of that medium to moderate effort levels in your training,

Kevin:

right? And I think that this came. I want to say nineties training. I think this was a big push that came out of eighties nineties where Jack Daniels got very popular. because he talked about the middle area as being like a gray training dead zone,

Angie:

the junk miles

Kevin:

where it was like, you don't want to really train in the middle cause you're not getting anything out of it. And. That's not exactly true. There's a lot of benefit for training there, but when you're looking at polarized, it is very much your training looks like a barbell. You got a bunch of stuff on one side, you got a bunch of stuff on the other side, and you have very little in the middle so that you can work your very different energy systems within the body. You get really good at running slowly, but you're also making sure that you're focused on power and speed by doing your fast stuff plenty fast.

Angie:

Yeah, so you if you want to think about this, it's brewing the perfect cup of coffee. if your water is too hot, it burns the beans. If it's too cold, you don't extract enough flavor. So your training needs to have the right balance of intensity, just like your coffee needs the right brewing temperature. So Most runners and a lot of training plans out there that don't really give you, effort levels in your training or paces, a lot of runners when they go out and run, they just go out and run at that moderate effort almost all of the time. And if you're someone, if someone that's new to running, you can just ask yourself on a scale of 1 to 10, how hard do your runs feel? And when I ask most runners that question, they say somewhere around a level 5 Some say 4, some say 6, some say 7. Some are up in the 8910 range, so that's just what most runners naturally fall into is that moderate level of intensity, but what if you could get better results by going easy? Most of the time. Now we're talking about like a level two to three out of 10 and then also adding in some harder stuff, which is actually really fun. And when our athletes come into our program, we train a lot of people using this polarized method. and we do. Depending on what they're training for, we also do add some. moderate intensity stuff. Again, this depends on who you are, how long you've been running. So it's not that you only do the two ends of the spectrum. there is some room for that moderate training, but it's probably less than you think it is.

Kevin:

Yeah. And it is. very much from one person to the next. It depends on your training experience, where you pointed out a lot of new runners come in and they're doing almost all of their running at moderate. if you change that and eliminate the moderate, where you've got a whole bunch of experience. And move it to easy running and hard running. This is going to give you a brand new tube, brand new stimuli, and you will see massive improvements all of a sudden. If you're new to running and you're just trying to figure out where do I go, then making sure that you include some moderate running might be beneficial. If you've been running for a long time, making sure that you have all sorts of different zones is going to be important. But as a brand new runner, it's tricky to find all of these zones. Because, you say. that the runners come back and they tell us, Oh, all of my runs feel like a seven and eight. It feels like a nine. It feels like I'm just going to drop and collapse to the ground when I finish. That's because a lot of brand new runners, as soon as they start running, it feels really hard. And their body's just ah, this is super, super hard. I can't do this. And everything just feels brutal. They're going too hard and it might be medium effort, but their brain freaks out and says, this is super hard. This is impossible. I can't do it. And they go as hard as, as far as they can and they finish and they're just exhausted. And that feels like an eight, nine. And if you get comfortable with slowing down to easy, and then you can realize that you can actually go faster than what that eight, nine felt like. As long as you do it for shorter periods of time.

Angie:

Yeah. And I think that this is really what leads a lot of people to say that they don't like running and that's what breaks my heart, right? Cause it's running is so good for you and it can be so freeing and so fun and such an amazing way to get outside and enjoy nature and challenge yourself and all of these different things. And. But when you have that experience where running feels terrible and you just want to just lie on the ground after your run and take a nap, of course, you're not going to want to continue to do it day after day, like it makes perfect sense why you're going to lose motivation if your runs are feeling that way. And that's why this polarized training model is so important. Making most of your runs easy. It's going to make running way more enjoyable. First of all, and when it's more enjoyable, you're going to be more consistent. And if you're more consistent, you're going to see improvement. And when you see improvement, you're going to want to keep doing it, right? So it's this beautiful cycle that's going to actually keep you in it. I also want to talk about why this model is even more important for women. Okay, it's important for men, but even more so for women, especially if you're a woman over 40 and you're noticing a lot of hormone changes as you enter perimenopause and menopause. So women in general have a higher reliance on fat oxidation for endurance, which means fat is our preferred fuel source for endurance running. Whereas men typically use more glycogen, which is the stored form of glucose in the body more than women do. Okay. So here's the kicker. Fat oxidation requires oxygen in order to. Operate. And if you don't, if you're breathing too hard and you're not getting enough oxygen into the body, it's going to be very difficult for your body to oxidize fat in order to use for endurance. So when you run at a slower pace and do more of that lower intensity type of training, it helps to improve the efficiency of your fat burning system, which means you're burning more fat, which is what a lot of women want and why a lot of women get into running in the first place. Now, those women do. That are over the age of 40, which I'm pretty sure is the majority of the people that listen to this podcast. We have to understand that as our estrogen and progesterone levels are declining as we enter and get closer to menopause, this can also affect muscle recovery and energy levels, which makes our rest and our lower intensity in our easy days much more Important and even more essential than they were before we were 40 because our body just doesn't recover from those moderate efforts the same way that it used to and this is why so many women when they get into this phase are like, I don't understand what's going on. I am training the same way that I've always trained. I'm running the same distance. I'm trying to run the same pace and all of a sudden my normal paces feel. awful. They feel so much harder. I feel exhausted. It's taking me forever to recover in between my runs. what is going on? It's because your body's not able to recover the same way that it used to because of the changes in your hormones.

Kevin:

Yeah, on the male side. men, it Running at a slower pace. You don't fat ox as well as women do which is unfortunate And there's not really a good way to train it, which is also unfortunate. So you just have to feed it but on the other side men because of their testosterone levels need to especially as they crest over 40 need to focus on the sprinting side. And in order to actually be able to run fast enough that you can hit L8, 9 and 10, you need to balance that with L1 and 2. You can't really balance it as much with L5 because you're not recovering at all.

Angie:

Yeah. And we as women also need to be focusing on those higher intensity levels as well. If we want to maintain muscle, build stronger bone. And it also helps with, epoch, which is, your fat burning after exercise as well. it's that post exercise oxygen consumption that can lead to fat burning even after you're done exercising. So high intensity. Work is very important for both sexes in this case

Kevin:

for both sexes. And the only way to really hit the high intensities is to make sure that your other days are easy enough that you can then hit high on the high days.

Angie:

Yeah, and it was interesting. that's really why it's so important for you to build a training plan that's going to fit you in your life and the current goal that you. Our training for because I think that's a really important piece that a lot of people miss is they think, okay, my training should just look the same year round. And that couldn't be further from the truth. It's important for you to focus on different things during different cycles of your training. And when you use these training cycles wisely and stack them onto each other, That's when you can get really good benefits. So I found this really interesting study about polarized training and it was looking at the difference between polarized training and pyramidal training and different things specifically, in endurance athletes and what they found was that. Polarized training has a greater impact on key endurance. Variables, right? So your endurance actually improves when you use polarized training, but one of the interesting pieces of this study that's not in the headline is that when you're looking at body mass and body composition, polarized training is not necessarily the best thing for you to do. It's more of that high intensity interval training. So If you're going for fat loss and body recomposition, high intensity interval training is more of what you want to focus on. So you can see why, okay, polarized training you're telling me is more, is better for helping me to improve my endurance, but high intensity interval training is better for my body composition, but I want both, right? I want both and I want to do both at the same time. Can you see how that can be a problem? Because one is going to be more effective. And it's not that polarized training doesn't work for body composition, because you can definitely see body composition changes when you do polarized training. But again, this depends on you. It depends on your body type. It depends on your level of experience. Like, how long have you been training? What have you been doing as far as strength training goes? there's so many different key variables that play a role into how your body responds to training, but this is why cycle stacking and having a different. goal for each cycle and each training, segment of your year, it can be so very effective and stacking those together in a way that is right for you and the goals that you want to achieve. That's what makes your plan more personalized.

Kevin:

you go back to your metaphor that started this sort of concept here of when you're trying to brew coffee, it depends on what type of coffee you're trying to brew. it depends on what mood you're in on that particular morning. Do you want it to be a stronger cup of coffee that morning? Yes. You always want to. Dark

Angie:

roast for the win. Strong, bold. Yes.

Kevin:

Can I chew it? Perfect. It sounds like a win, but I think that's important. And that kind of highlights, it rolls your marathon, your metaphor through of, it really depends on what the results are, because it's tough to get all of the same results simultaneously. And if you are trying to chase multiple results, At the exact same time. It's going to be really difficult to achieve all of them. And in which case you might actually achieve none.

Angie:

Yeah. And that's where I get really sad for people, because like people that are putting in the work, like if you're listening to a running podcast, chances are you are out there putting in the work and if you're not seeing the results that you want, that can be a really frustrating place to be. And it makes sense why people start to lose motivation. And they're all asking, ask themselves, what is even happening? Is this even worth it anymore? And a lot of people end up falling off the wagon and I hate that for you because I want you, if you're someone that loves running or did love running at one point in time and maybe you're not loving it right now because of the way that your body's feeling, I want you to understand that. But it is possible for you to go back and feel that love, that joy, feel like that amazing feeling that running has given you in the past. You just have to change how you're doing it, right? Because if you think about Google Maps versus a traditional road map, when you drove across the country to move from California to Florida and you went to triple a, right? To get all of the. I had

Kevin:

every state that we crossed through. We crossed through some states so briefly, I had the full state map.

Angie:

Yeah, but you had to look at the actual paper map and. But those don't adjust in real time, versus Google Maps, which is such a beautiful thing. Google Maps will reroute you if you just take the wrong exit. All of a sudden it'll be rerouting, and it'll tell you exactly what you need to go. Or you'll be driving down the highway and it'll recognize that there's an accident up ahead or that there's construction up ahead. And it'll change your route for you. It can adjust in real time. And so this is why it's so important for your training plan to also be able to do the same thing. you, your training plan needs to adapt to you, to your current life situation, and needs to be able to adapt to some of those unexpected things that might pop up in real life.

Kevin:

But it can't be finally tuned that it sees a small accident that's going to cause a five minute detour within the next 10 minutes, but you've got a 10 hour drive up ahead and suddenly it's sending you on this crazy route. It's no, it's only going to detour you. If it finds a more efficient route, like the paper maps did a pretty good job because the answer for most of my drive across the country was get on 10 and drive east. I didn't really need a lot of adaptation along the way because it was get on 10 and go until it's time to sleep. And then it was find a hotel for the most part. There was just a route. There wasn't a lot of need for rerouting. if you have a lot of need for rerouting, if there's a lot of variability coming up in your life that you need the ability to have some more fine tuning, that's important, but if you also have big goals that you'd like to accomplish over the next five, 10 years, it's also important that you are not getting too far thrown off of the main direction that you're moving in.

Angie:

Absolutely. And that's why, last week I talked about nervous system regulation and the importance of your nervous system in it. Learning how to adapt your training and the tools of heart rate variability using your HRV or your resting heart rate or just your rating of perceived exertion again, like checking in with yourself and asking, how do I feel today and then understanding, okay, I can make these small adjustments to my training plan based on how I feel, how I'm recovering all the other things that are going on in my life, because that is ultimately what's going to lead to the best results. So basically you can. Okay. Choose right now. You can decide to keep grinding through a plan that doesn't work for your body That has you feeling exhausted and sore all the time or you can choose to train in a way that gives you more energy fewer injuries and better results so ultimately that choice is up to you and we just want you to understand that the way that you're training is Makes a really big difference in how you feel in the results that you get

Kevin:

It makes a big difference in the enjoyment that you have and you said this already, but I think it's always worth repeating is The way that you feel when you run leads to the amount of joy you have on that run and the joy Helps lead to consistency Every day you're not going to come back with a giant smile on your face like woo. That was amazing But the better experience it was the more positive it was the more consistent you're gonna be and the more consistent you are Beats anything like whatever training plan method you have as long as it doesn't get you hurt The more consistent you can be with that plan, the better your results are going to be. So I think that joy is leading the drive for most of your training success. Not necessarily how much miles can I put in, but how much smiles can I put in? That's right. I came up with that on the fly. Do you like

Angie:

that? Was that influenced by our girls trip to the orthodontist today? Ooh, it was perfect. So yeah, check out the way that you're training and understand where your training plan is coming from. And consider polarized training where you're doing more mileage, spending most of your time in that easy range and then doing harder, high intensity types of training. That's often going to lead to some better results. And then you can also throw in some cross training in there, which we didn't really have the time to get into today, but maybe we'll do that in an upcoming episode. So let us know on Instagram at real life runners. Are you someone that practices polarized training? What have you seen? What questions do you have? Reach out, shoot me a DM. I'd love to know any questions that you have after this episode. And as always, this has been the Real Life Runners podcast, episode number 398. Now get out there and run your life.