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Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray

Ultramarathon

226. What’s the Best Pacing Strategy?

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We’re in the middle of the Spring racing season here in the US and a lot of runners ask me questions about pacing for their upcoming race. Should you start slow and then try to finish …

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Podcast Transcript

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Hey there, and welcome to episode 226 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners. And today, what’s the best pacing strategy? So we are in the middle of the spring racing season, at least we are here in the US.

And a lot of runners ask me questions about pacing for their upcoming race, should they start slow and try to finish fast? Should you start fast and try to make up for some time when you eventually slow down at the end of a race? Should you focus on your heart rate or cadence, your current pace or your average pace? Lots and lots of questions around pacing.

And believe it or not, there is one pacing strategy that has been proven time and again to be the most effective for most runners. So today, I’m going to answer the question of what’s the best pacing strategy so that you can go out there and crush your spring race this year.

But first, if you’re listening to this podcast, that means that your health, your fitness, it’s important to you, you want to feel better, you want to look better, you want to get stronger, you want to improve your running. And I want to tell you that all of that is possible for you. And I also want you to know that I can help you get there.

You know, I’m talking to you on the podcast and you’re listening to this and you’re taking in a lot of this information. I listen to a lot of podcasts, I listen to a lot of books. I hear from a lot of experts and a lot of different topics. I know a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff.

But when it comes to the practical application of all that knowledge, nothing has been more helpful to me than having a coach show me what to do to guide me to mentor me to help me stay on track. I’ve had a bunch of awesome coaches in my life. And I’m a different person today because I’ve had these coaches.

And because I’ve had such an amazing experience with these coaches, it inspired me to want to be a coach. That’s why I do what I do. So I know how powerful coaching can be because I’ve experienced it firsthand.

So for you, if you’re listening to the podcast, you know, keep listening and learning. But if you want help applying this, consider working with a coach. Find someone that can show you the way, that can help you apply all this knowledge, somebody that can help you learn what works for you. That’s very important.

You need somebody that can hold you accountable. And it can’t be somebody that’s close to you can’t be your your spouse or your best friend, that typically doesn’t work. You need somebody to hold you accountable and help you to stay on track and stick to the plan so that you can get the results that you want faster and more effectively than you could do on your own.

Okay, and if you are interested in working with me, I’m always here for you. Just go to my website runningleancoaching.com, click on Work With Me and we’ll get together we’ll get on a call. We’ll talk all about coaching and how it can help you to become the most badass version of yourself yet, cool? Runningleancoaching.com and click on Work With Me. And hope to see you soon.

Okay, so it is spring season spring racing season. And we are in the midst of getting ready for a lot of spring races. Some people have already run, you know, maybe Boston or something like that. So just understand that there’s lots of races happening this time of the year. Typically here in the US, it’s spring and the fall. That’s our racing season.

But you know, there’s lots of stuff that happens in the summer and in the winter as well. But for now, let’s let’s focus on kind of some of the spring races. So if you’re running a 5k, 10k, half-marathon, marathon, and you are considering some sort of a pacing strategy, or you don’t know really what your pacing strategy should be. I’m gonna hope to answer that question for you today and give you a really solid pacing strategy that works for pretty much all runners.

It’s proven to be kind of the most effective pacing strategy. But one thing I want to start out with is just saying that you have to practice pacing in your training, okay, I can’t stress this enough.

You cannot show up on race day and expect for some miracle to happen. Like you can’t do all your training at a 10 minute pace and then just decide that you’re going to run a nine minute pace for your half marathon and be able to do that effectively. You have to practice your pacing in your training. Just stick to the script, okay.

And especially in your in your training, it’s important that you don’t get sucked into, you know, training at somebody else’s pace. You don’t want to get sucked into racing at somebody else’s pace, either. I’ve done that before, I’ve gotten excited at the beginning of a race.

And you know that, oh, I’m gonna run with my friend over here. And this person’s a little faster than me, and I just, I couldn’t hold on, you know, I didn’t stick to the script, I had a plan, I knew what I was going to do, this person was running faster than me. And I was trying my best to hold on.

But it really messed me up, because I wasn’t able to have a good race, because I started way too fast and was not able to handle that, because I wasn’t training that way. But this is important in your training as well, that you are running your paces that you are sticking to your plan so that you are fully prepared to run your, you know, hopefully predicted pace during your race.

But we get caught up in this as well like, especially if you run with a group of people or you want run with friends. And they might be faster than you or slower than you and you kind of get caught up in running with doing all your runs with them. But it’s not really at a pace that that you want to be running at. So you have to sort of do your own thing.

And a good example of this is that for me, I’ve slowed down this past year. Last year, I did a lot of slow running, I was training for this 12 hour event. And the whole point of that was just to, you know, be on my feet for 12 hours running, and be able to finish that and feel good at the end.

So I did a ton of slow running. And I just kind of took a break from the speed work and really wasn’t trying to race anything all last year. So my pace slowed down quite a bit. And then when I started running with my running group in January to start training for this half marathon I’m doing here next weekend, I couldn’t run the same speed as them, I couldn’t keep up with them.

And so it was fine. I was like you guys go ahead, I’m just gonna like hang back here. I actually started, I usually don’t run with headphones on with the training group because I like to talk to people. But I started bringing my headphones and started listening to podcasts and stuff because I was kind of running it at a pace that wasn’t really in line with the one of the pace groups in our in our room group.

So I was doing a lot of training by myself. But that was okay, I wanted to do that. That was what I needed to do, I was sticking to my plan. Okay, so I want you to do the same thing. So make sure that you are sticking to your plan in your training.

And then when you show up on race day, you have to stick to your plan, don’t get caught up in the excitement of the race, don’t get caught up, you know, just trying to keep up with somebody else.

And if you’re going to run with someone, you guys have to have a conversation ahead of time about what the plan is, you know, you might say like you, okay, I’m going to help you, I’m going to pace you for this because it’s your first half marathon, and I’ve done a dozen of them.

So I’m going to pace you, this is the pace we’re going to stay at, I’m going to stay with you no matter what, like that’s a conversation that you would have if you were you know, pacing someone, but if you’re just friends and you’re running, you might have to say, Listen, I’m feeling pretty good. Today, I’m going to you know, try to, you know, maintain this kind of pace. And if I leave you in the dust, you know, just don’t take it personally, you know, you got to have that conversation.

So everybody’s on board, and there’s no hurt feelings or anything like that. I think we put our feelings above, like what we really want for ourselves, you know, I don’t want to hurt their feelings. So I’m gonna try to stay with them. Like, don’t do that. If that’s not in your plan.

Okay, so probably the most important thing to start talking about here is that just stick to the script, do your training, make sure you’re following your your pacing plan, practice it in your training, and then on race day, make sure that you are following the plan that you have been practicing.

Remember nothing new on race day, right. Another thing I wanted to kind of touch on really quickly is this idea of a central governor. So there’s this concept called the Central Governor Model. And it’s not something that has been like 100% proven but it is very, there’s very compelling evidence that this actually is is a thing.

Okay, so the Central Governor Model says that your brain will monitor the body through your brain monitors to the body to make sure that your body doesn’t get too far from homeostasis. Homeostasis is like everything in balance, okay.

In essence, what we’re saying here is that the body is I’m sorry, the brain is the body’s control room. Okay? And it is like a safety mechanism and it’s keeping your body from dying. Alright, so when you’re out there running and you’re pushing yourself, and you’re trying to you know, PR your marathon or half marathon, your brain is going to tell you at some point this is dangerous, you’re going to die, you might feel like you’re going to die.

But a lot of times it is just your brain telling you that your body can continue. And they’ve done all kinds of studies where they’ve put people on treadmills or on on bikes, and they’ve just had them go until they couldn’t go any longer. And the people that could go longer, the way they structured the studies, they would, they would have people run on a treadmill or on a bike, and they would have them go as long as they could, until they completely fatigued, they kept cranking up the intensity.

And then they got to a point where they couldn’t go on any longer. And they repeated this over and over again. So they can only go to a certain distance before they crapped out, you know. But the interesting thing is, when they told them, oh, the person before you was able to go, you know, 28 minutes, well, then they were able to push past that.

And then they said, okay, with the person before he was able to go 33 minutes, and then they were able to push past that. So it’s interesting, because it isn’t the body that’s giving out, it’s the brain that’s telling them that they need to quit.

But if the brain is like, oh, I can go another three minutes, they’ll do it. It’s very interesting, right? So just understand that this has been a concept of Central Governor Model has been around or proposed by a physiologist, guy named Avi Hill back in 1924.

And he had this theory that the heart was protected by some sort of Governor so that you wouldn’t die from really intense activity, exercise. And then Tim Noakes has talked about this a lot. And he’s a modern day professor. And basically, he’s saying that, you know, the subconscious brain, there’s something in the subconscious brain, that sets the exercise intensity, that determines like how hard you are able to push, and just understand that, you know, the brain is going to be telling you that you want to stop, but chances are, you can continue going.

So just understand that that is a real thing. That Central Governor Model is probably something that we all have to deal with, when we’re pushing hard, especially in the late stages of a race. So if you’re trying to PR and you know that you’re getting close, chances are that you can keep going.

But if you’re like, if it looks like it’s not going to happen, it’s easier to give up, right? Because your brain is telling you one thing versus another, it’s telling you this is possible for you, you can do this, you only got you know, you just gotta like push it for the next five minutes, you can do it.

But if it’s like, oh, you’re probably not going to PR, you know, you’re just the the math isn’t going to work out, you’re not going to be able to do it, you might give up, you know what I mean? So it’s very interesting. So just keep that in mind.

I’m just putting this out there because I think it’s very fascinating the way that your subconscious mind can control what’s going on with your body. Okay, so and then there are also some different tools for pacing. So there’s assessment tools to kind of keep track of your pacing.

So, you know, heart rate monitor is one of them, your GPS, watch the time. And then there’s the RPE or rate of perceived exertion scale. So they these all have, you know, sort of pros and cons. You know, with your heart rate monitor, if you’re somebody that’s used to doing heart rate training, and you know that for you, keeping your heart rate at like a 140 is where you need to be, and that’s going to give you the best results, then then do that, again, you have to train with this stuff, right?

If you’re doing the GPS that might give you real time pace, that’s awesome. Sometimes the real time pace can be a little misleading because it bounces around a lot, you know, look down on my watch, you know, you have those different fields, you’ve got like the current pace, that’s your real time pace right now. And then you’ve got your average pace.

Some people like that current pace, because it’ll say, hey, I’m running an eight minute mile. But then you look down and your your nothing has changed. And it’ll say like 8:30, it’ll say 9:00, it’ll say 7:30. You’re like, what is going on here? Well, it’s not perfect. Okay, so GPS is not going to be perfect.

And then if you use your average, that tends to be a little bit better. But again, it’s not going to be perfect GPS, especially when you’re running a race in a urban area with a lot of buildings and stuff like that the GPS can be wildly off. People tell me all the time, oh, you know, this course was long, my watch thought it was, you know, 26.8 miles?

And I’m like, no, they measure the courses, they get that part, right, they get that part. They’ve done extensive measuring of courses to make sure that they are correct. So chances are, they’re not going to be half a mile or more off. You know, they might be a few feet off or something like that, but probably not even that. So just understand that GPS can be a little bit misleading and it’s hard to rely on that as a pacing tool, just so you know.

A better strategy is using time I think that If you’re trying to, you know PR a certain race, you know that if you’re wanting to run a four hour marathon, then you know that you have to cross the finish line, under four hours, like it’s just a matter of time, it doesn’t matter what your heart rate says, doesn’t matter what the GPS says just go by the time.

And at race expos, a lot of times, you can grab a pacing band. And so it is actually a band that you wear around your wrist. And it is a chart of what time you need to be at each mile marker.

Okay, so for me it let’s say, let’s just keep the math simple. Let’s say you want to run a 10 minute mile, that means your first mile, you need to hit that mile marker in 10 minutes or less, the next 20 minutes, 30 minutes, and so on. But once you get into like 16 miles or whatever doing the math can be kind of hard if you’re like trying to hit a 9:30 or something like that, right?

It’s like, oh, my god, I can’t do that kind of math. So having that band on your wrist is so awesome, because all you have to do is look down and go. Okay, my time is this, this is where I should be, I’m a minute faster than I need to be, perfect. I’m just gonna keep doing what I’m doing. So very, very effective pacings tool to use, it’s an assessment tool, you know. So go by time over pace, I think this is going to be very helpful for most people.

And then there’s the RPE scale. So that’s your rate of perceived exertion, just understand that you have to understand how it feels for you to run at 9 minute pace or a 10 minute pace or whatever. Like you have to be practicing this and you have to have gotten in touch with your own rate of perceived exertion so that you understand what that feels like for you.

When you get good at this though, this is awesome. Because you just know, Oh, this feels like a six on the RPE scale, this feels like a seven. Oh, maybe I need to slow down I’m getting into the eights. Or you can say this is a four, I can write this pace all day. So when you get good at that this is really an awesome strategy to use for pacing.

So most people make mistakes when they are running a race and some of the most common ones, especially for the longer distance races. You know, if you’re if you run a 5k, you’re going to be running pretty hard from the gun, you’re just going to run hard from the beginning.

And you’re going to, you know, put it all out there and you can kind of maintain a pretty high intensity for the duration of that. But then when we started getting into the longer distances, 10 K’s half marathons, marathons. One of the most common mistakes people make around pacing is just starting off too fast.

Probably the most common pacing mistake is getting caught up in the excitement of the of the event. I mean, it is super exciting. You’re down with thousands of people that got the music blasting or shooting off fireworks or whatever they’re playing, you know, Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run as you cross the start line. It’s amazing, right? Probably the most overplayed song at the start of a marathon by the way, but just a little side note there.

So the most common mistake is going to be starting off too fast. And so one thing you want to do is not do this, right? Don’t try to keep up with people around you. Another common pacing mistake is running someone else’s pace, we talked about that already.

Don’t run a pace that somebody else has set, you have to set your own pace, you have to have been practicing this. And then the third common mistake that people make is running at varying intensities, you really don’t want to do this.

Most runners try to maintain the same speed. So they’re trying to maintain a certain pace, even when they’re running uphill. So what they will do is they will run hard and fast uphill, and then they will slow down a little bit on the downhills. And this is actually not a very efficient way of running. You don’t want to be varying your intensities. It’s not as efficient as just a smooth and steady approach. Okay.

And that really is the best racing or pacing strategy for a race is a smooth and steady approach. You don’t want to be bouncing all over the place. You don’t want to be all erratic with your pacing. You want to get into a pace pretty quickly. You know, for some races, you want a little bit of a warmup period and honestly the start of most races is going to give you that opportunity. If you’re running a crowded race, then the start is usually going to be pretty slow so you may be 30 seconds to a minute slower for your first mile or two. Whatever, that is completely fine.

And to do that, get into your, your effort level that you want to maintain for the duration of that race, a consistent effort level is the most effective pacing strategy. Okay? Please understand that that is different from your pace or your time. Now we want to pay attention to that stuff, especially the time if you’re trying to get you know a PR.

But the most effective pacing strategy is going to be to maintain a consistent effort throughout the duration of your race, that means that there will be times when you’re running uphill, and you might have to slow down a little bit or you’re running downhill, and you might be able to speed up a little bit, try to maintain that consistent effort level, I have used this pacing strategy to hit all my PRs, my 5k 10k, half marathon, a marathon is all all of those.

I applied this strategy right here consistent effort throughout the majority of the race, with a strong finish at the end. That’s it, that’s the that’s the most effective pacing strategy right there.

Think about it like this. If you have two cars, and they’re both driving the same distance, one’s driving steadily at 65 miles an hour. And the other one is constantly braking and accelerating, braking and accelerating, they’re going 40, they’re going at, both cars are going to arrive at the finish in the exact same time. One hour, let’s say, okay, but which one was more efficient, you know, which one had more gas in the tank at the end, you know, it’s going to be the one that just maintain a steady, smooth pace the whole time.

So this is a really good analogy for what your pacing strategy should look like. Okay, this does not mean that you don’t push hard in some areas of a race, it does not mean that you don’t finish strong, that is very important. You always want to have a race where you finish it strong.

And this is, again, something you have to practice in your training, you cannot just show up on race day and think that all this stuff is going to come together for you have to be practicing this stuff. Now, you’re not going to practice a whole half marathon like this, but you might do a nine mile or you know, or 10 miles at your race pace with a strong finish just to see like, where are you from a fitness standpoint, is this doable for you? Are you able to do 9 or 10 miles at race pace? And if you are, then your half marathon is going to be definitely doable. Okay.

So that would be my suggestion for the most effective about pacing strategy. And just keep in mind that, you know, we’ve got things to consider, we’ve got the excitement of the race, you gotta like make sure you’re calming yourself down, and you’re not getting caught up in the excitement or running somebody else’s race. We’ve got pacing versus time versus heart rate, all those things you have to consider.

I suggest if you can for longer races to get that pace band, so that you know where you’re supposed to be at each mile. And then settle into your your pace early or settle into your effort level that matches the pace that you want to that you want to hit early. And then maintain that just hold that smooth and steady pace for as long as you can.

Yeah, you might be able to run faster on some down hills, you might run a little bit slower on some of the uphill, it’s perfectly fine to do that. That’s going to give you the most energy efficient race, you got to conserve energy for the end. That’s why we like that strong finish because you have to conserve energy for the end. And if you’re running out of gas throughout the middle of the race, that end of that race is going to be terrible for you. I’ve done that so many times.

So I know exactly what it feels like where you get to mile you know 20 of the marathon, you’re like I am just done like this is like so hard because you went out too fast your effort level was all over the place. And you’ve just been wasting gas the whole time essentially. Okay.

So instead of going for some crazy erratic thing or starting slow or starting fast or anything like that, just try for smooth and steady for the majority. Okay, push it a little bit here and there but really smooth and steady and then aim for that strong finish at the end. Cool. And I hope you have an amazing race this season. I’ll let you know how mine goes here in a couple of weeks. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean and I will talk to you soon.

220. Should You Lose Weight While Training for a Race?

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A lot of runners are told not to lose weight while training for a race. There are many reasons why they are given this advice (which I cover in today’s episode), but I don’t necessarily agree with …

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Podcast Transcript

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Hey there, and welcome to episode 220 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners, and today, Should You Lose Weight While Training For A Race.

So a lot of runners are told not to lose weight while training for an event. And there are many reasons why they are given this advice, which I’m going to cover in today’s episode, rest assured, but I don’t necessarily agree with all of it.

I believe that there’s a right way and a wrong way to lose weight as a runner, even when you’re training for an event like a half or a full marathon. So in this episode, can you and should you lose weight while training for a race?

But first, I know I share a lot of information here about nutrition, weight loss, improving your running, and building strength. And if you’re new to the podcast, welcome. But all this stuff might seem a little overwhelming to you and might be a little confusing, and you may not know where to even begin with all of this stuff.

So if that sounds like you, no worries, I’ve got you covered, I created a free training to help you get started with all this stuff. It’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronger Runner.

You’re going to learn the basics of nutrition, strength, endurance and mindset, all geared towards you the long-distance runner. So if you’re ready to get leaner and stronger and become the most badass version of yourself yet, this free training is exactly what you need. Just go to runningleancoaching.com click on Free Training and get started on your weight loss journey today.

Okay, so why I’m talking about this today, should you lose weight while training for a race? I have heard from a lot of people that I talk to out there in the running community that they’ve been told that they should not try to lose weight while they are training for some event, like a marathon half marathon, even for a 5k.

Like you don’t want to, to you know, try to lose weight, just focus on running. Don’t worry about the weight loss. And it could even be bad for you, it could hurt your running. And there are a few things that I want you guys to consider when we talk about this subject today.

So, the first thing before I get into some of the reasons why we’re told not to try to lose weight while training for some event, the first thing to think about is what most runners think the answer is to weight loss.

So most runners believe, and even most coaches that I talk to, that the way you’re going to lose weight is to run more. So pick a race, pick a marathon, and start training for the marathon up to your weekly mileage, you’re going to be running more than ever, and you’re going to lose weight like crazy.

And I don’t know about you guys, but that was not always the case for me. In fact, I went through periods where I was running a lot and gaining weight. And I talked to people all the time who told me the same thing.

They’re like, yeah, you’re the first person that’s ever actually said out loud. What happened to me, was I was training for a marathon and I was gaining weight. And I don’t understand what’s going on there. All the experts tell me I should be losing weight, because I’m doing all this running. But this is the exact opposite of what’s happening to me.

And so I had that same experience, you know, I think there was a period there over the length of two or three years where I was running a couple of marathons a year, I was training for a bunch of ultra marathons.

And in that process, and it was just a couple of years, I gained like 40 pounds, that’s a lot of weight gain over the course of a few years. So for me, I had that experience of trying to, you know, run more and trying to lose weight, but it wasn’t working.

I was actually gaining weight in the process. Okay. So let’s start with why most runners gain weight while they’re training for a marathon. So one of the reasons why is that increased activity levels can lead to increased appetite. This happens for most people.

So you start training more, you’re running a lot more miles and you’re exerting a lot more energy, you’re using a lot more energy. And so your body’s natural response is to want to replace that energy that you’re expending. So you are going to be more hungry and so you end up eating more.

And especially if you’re eating the wrong kinds of foods, you end up overeating. And that’s a really hard way to lose weight. If you’re constantly overeating, then you know, your weight loss is going to be very challenging for you. Okay?

Another reason why a lot of runners gain weight while training for some events is they’re eating the typical runner’s diet. So they’re eating not only more food, but they’re eating that typical runner’s diet of all the carbs all the time.

And so when you increase your carb and your sugar intake, you are going to be holding on to body fat, you won’t be able to burn that body fat, it’s very hard to burn fat when you’re consuming a high, high carb diet, you know, the more carbs you eat, the more you crave carbs, and that makes it very hard to moderate.

And people are like, well just eat sugar. It’s fine, everything’s fine in moderation, you know, but I gotta tell you, I don’t know about you guys. But for me, eating sugar in moderation is very hard for me. Because the more you eat that stuff, the more you crave that stuff, and then you can’t get enough.

Your brain, and your body just want more and more and more. And it’s really difficult to moderate that stuff. And if you are a runner who is eating that typical carbohydrate-laden diet, so I call this being a carb-adapted runner, you’re you’ve adapted to using carbs as fuel, you will naturally need to consume more carbs to maintain high mileage, which leads to even more intense cravings, and an even harder time burning fat.

So your weight is mostly affected by your diet, not by the amount of exercise you’re doing. And nutrition has a much bigger impact on your body composition, the amount of fat that you’re carrying the amount of muscle that you’re carrying, versus exercise, exercise can help you to put on muscle, obviously, it can help you to lose some fat, but nutrition is a much bigger driver of body composition.

Okay, so we just have to understand that these are some of the reasons why you know, it’s why a lot of runners gain weight, even though they’re training for a marathon, okay? It’s not as simple as just calories in calories out. If it was that simple.

You know, you would always lose a ton of weight when you’re training for a marathon. But that is definitely not the case. And I talk to people every single day who tell me this, okay, so it’s not as simple as calories in calories out, increased activity levels lead to increased appetite.

Increased carb and sugar intake means your body’s going to be storing more body fat, it’s really hard to burn the fat. When you’re eating that high-carb diet, the more of that stuff you eat, the more you crave that stuff, the more you rely on that stuff for fuel for running, the more you want that stuff. So all of these things lead to it being very challenging to lose weight as a runner.

Another reason why runners are told not to attempt to lose weight while they’re training for an event is because just about every diet out there is going by this principle of calories in calories out, right?

So they want you to get into a calorie deficit and maintain it. And that’s how you lose weight. And that’s the principle that most diets follow when it comes to weight loss. And it works until it doesn’t work. So if you spend enough time in a calorie deficit, this is going to lead to a dramatically slowed metabolism.

So for example, if you’re eating 800 calories a day, you’re gonna lose weight doing that, okay, but eventually, your metabolism will slow down to match that 800-calorie energy intake that you’re getting.

Because your body’s like, listen, we’re only getting 800 calories a day, our energy output is, you know, at resting metabolic rate is 2000 calories a day, we need to lower that we need to keep lowering this until we can match the energy that’s coming in and over time, people that are in a calorie deficit for a long period of time, they find that their weight loss stalls for a long time and then they start to gain weight, because now their metabolism has slowed down to match the energy that’s coming in.

And it’s even worse if you’re training for something because then you’re exerting more energy and you’re not giving yourself the food that you need and the fuel that you need to repair and recover from all the training that you’re doing. You know, a lot of runners go into a calorie deficit while they’re training. And that’s a problem because your body needs the fuel.

You know most diets that are going by the calories in calories out principle is not recommended because you’re going to be lowering your calorie intake while you’re training. And your body can’t deal with that, like you need the fuel for running, you need the fuel for your running performance, you need the fuel for repair and recovery.

So being in a calorie deficit, while you’re training for a half marathon marathon is not recommended. And so that’s the main reason why most people are like, you know, don’t try to lose weight while you’re training for something, it’s really hard. And your running is going to suffer and it’s not good for you.

So this is why a lot of runners are told not to try to lose weight, while they are training for something, okay? The reason why a lot of runners gain weight, while training is you know, they are eating a diet that literally locks fat in their fat cells.

So when you’re eating a diet that’s high in sugar, and high in carbs, you are literally going to be holding on to fat and those fat cells. So their energy output goes up, right, because they’re training more, their energy intake goes up, because they’re eating more than ever. And they’re locking all the fat in their fat cells. This makes for a very tough combination if you’re trying to lose weight, right?

So runners who are trying to lose weight, and they’re training for an event, you know, they’re making a lot of these mistakes. So there is a better way to do things, okay? And this all focuses around this idea of burning fat, right?

If you want to lose weight, you have to burn fat, I think we can all agree on that, right? And if you’re eating the all-carb all the time typical runner’s diet, burning fat is going to be very difficult for you.

So imagine your body has a fuel tank, and there’s fat in that fuel tank, and then there’s carbs in that fuel tank, sugar, whatever you want to call it, it’s all the same thing. It’s all carbohydrates, essentially, the very top of that fuel tank, the most easily accessible fuel is the carbs as fuel. And your body has a very limited supply of that, but it is available pretty easily.

Okay, once that’s gone, you can start tapping into that larger amount of fuel that you have, which is your stored body fat, you can use stored body fat as fuel, which is amazing. But when you’re eating carbs all the time, you’re eating sugar all the time, you’re you know, training with all the carbs and the sugar and stuff like that, it’s very hard to get into that fat-burning zone, it’s very hard to get into that fat burning state, you’re not going to dip into the fat as fuel.

So when you’re eating that high-carb diet, this is what locks your fat in the fat cells. Insulin is the driver of this. So high-carb diet means high blood sugar means high insulin, high insulin, it locks fat into fat cells.

When you do the opposite, when you do kind of a lower carb diet, that means fat is available to be burned. So the low-carb diet means that your blood sugar is low, or you know normal, your insulin levels are normal and then fat burning can take place.

Okay, so high-carb diet equals storing fat, low-carb diet equals burning fat. Just keep that in mind. That’s a good principle to follow right there. So, if fat burning is the goal, which it should be, then everything you do should be to optimize fat burning.

So that means keeping the carbs low, getting into that fat-burning state and then maintaining it, you know, so switching from being a carb-adapted runner to a fat-adapted runner. So you’ve adapted your body to using your own stored body fat as a fuel source.

If you want to lose weight, you have to burn fat. And eating the typical runner’s diet of all carbs all the times means that you have effectively shut down fat burning and losing weight will be extremely difficult for you.

Okay, but what about running? Aren’t you going to crash and burn without all the carbs? Don’t you need carbs to run? And I think you know the answer to this already if you’ve been listening to this podcast at all, but I’m going to break this down a little bit for you.

So carbs, yes, they’re a great source of fuel for running. This has been pretty well established since the 1980s. You know runners have been using this all-carb approach to running since then. The problem with this is you’re relying on one fuel source, you’re relying on carbs for fuel and that’s it.

And it’s a finite amount of energy that you can store as you know blood glucose and glycogen that’s stored in your liver and your muscles. It’s like around 1800 to 2000 calories of fuel essentially. And this is going to run out in it’s different for each person. But let’s say around 90 minutes or so, and you’re gonna hit the wall and you’re gonna crash and burn.

This is like so many runners hit the wall in the later stages of a marathon, they literally run out of gas in the tank, you know. And for most people, that means that even if you’re running half marathon, you’re gonna be probably hitting the wall, three-quarters of the way into the race.

All right, you know, unless you’re super fast, and you get it done in less than 90 minutes. But for most of us, I think, you know, two hour-ish, you know, half, you know, somewhere around that range is pretty normal.

But if you’re relying on carbs for that, then it’s going to be tough for you. Okay. Another issue with relying solely on carbs as fuel, is that you have to keep ingesting carbs in order to sustain the running. And this can cause a lot of stomach distress with people, it can cause disaster pants, which is something you definitely don’t want to happen while you’re out there running a race.

Have you ever seen somebody sprint off to the Porta Potty, they’re like, oh, maybe a little too much sugar, I don’t know. But the other source of fuel that your body produces naturally is fat, stored body fat. This is an incredible fuel for endurance athletes.

And listen, the whole reason we store fat is to use it later for fuel, you know, eat some food, some of that energy gets used right away from the food that we eat. And some of that gets stored as fat. This is the natural order of things.

This goes back to our ancient ancestors, who went through periods of feasting and fasting, they were very well adapted to use their own stored body fat as fuel, you know, they would find food, meat, berries, honey, whatever some of that energy would be used right away, some would be stored as body fat, then they would have periods were fasting, where they were fasting. And food was kind of scarce, you know.

But it wasn’t a problem because they had all the fuel they needed on board. And they tapped into that stored body fat they were they were fat-adapted, essentially. And I think this is our natural state as human beings to be fat adapted. In order, it’s during these times of limited food availability, that we develop the ability to use our own stored body fat as fuel, and it’s very effective. And we use it very, very well.

Humans do it, animals do it. Think about a bear fattening up for the winter. And then they can live all winter long, hibernating, essentially using their own stored body fat as fuel. And you see those bears coming out of hibernation, they’re all skinny. It’s pretty funny looking, actually.

But they’ve essentially been using that stored body fat as fuel. And so we have that same mechanism built in basically, you know, I kind of feel like hibernating all winter, that would be amazing.

The problem with us as humans, though, is that we never stopped storing the fat we’re just constantly eating the kinds of foods and overeating and just always adding fat to the equation and never burning the fat, right?

So if you want to lose the weight, you have to burn the fat you have to get your body into that fat-burning state and maintain that fat-burning state. So you need to get fat-adapted, you need to adapt to using your own stored body fat as fuel.

So using your own body fat as fuel against the natural state of is humans, we’ve been doing it for millennia. It’s a very effective fuel for endurance activities like persistent hunting or running a marathon. You know, if you can only store 1800 to 2000 calories of glucose or glycogen, as you know for sugar.

Basically, as a carb-adapted athlete, you can easily store more than 100,000 calories as fat. Even the leanest runners have enough body fat to run for days and days nonstop without the need to refuel. That fat is an amazing source of fuel for endurance athletes, okay?

And again, this isn’t some weird fad. Using fat as fuel is something we’ve always done as human beings. Lots of endurance athletes, lots of the top endurance athletes in the world are actually using this approach this fat adaptation approach as a tool to improve their endurance and their racing performance.

So it’s not something they’re doing because it’s detrimental to running, they’re doing it because it’s really beneficial. And it actually gives them an edge it gives them a tool that most runners are not using. When you can get really good at burning fat you have a tool that most other people are not using.

And then fat-adapted doesn’t mean that you never use carbs for fuel. It means improving fat burning immensely. And also using some carbs as fuel so you can get the best of both worlds. So you can use both of these fuel sources very effectively. And you can kind of go back and forth between the two and use two at the same time.

And most runners don’t do this. They’re just using the one form of fuel they’re using the sugar as fuel and they’re trying to I just rely on that as the only source of fuel. So they’re leaving this whole other thing on the table. So don’t do that.

But when you’re using fat as fuel, what happens? You burn the fat, your you lose the weight, like this is an amazing way of not only improving your running performance but also losing weight. And yes, you can do this while you’re training for an event or a race. Okay.

So I think you know, the answer here is pretty clear, you can do both, you can train for a race without inhibiting your performance. And you can lose weight in the process. But you have to take a different approach, you can’t do the all-carb approach because for most people, that just doesn’t work.

For some people that works great, and that’s fine. If you don’t have a problem getting you know, gaining weight while you’re training and stuff like that, then you keep doing your thing. That’s awesome. But if you’re somebody who gains weight, well, whenever you even look at carbs, or when you’re training for something, and you’re like, why am I gaining weight while I’m training for this marathon?

If that sounds like you, then cutting down the carbs might be a way to get your body burning fat. And that might work really well for you. You know, don’t cut your calories. That approach probably isn’t going to work either. You know, you got to give your body the fuel that it needs, but cut out the carbs and the sugar and see if that helps.

Okay, get your body into the fat-burning state. It’ll help improve your weight loss. It’ll help improve your running performance. And I think it’s definitely something you should try. Cool. All right, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean and I will talk to you soon.

217. 5 Ways to Improve Your Endurance

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Whether you are just getting into running or have been at it a while, you should be actively working on improving your endurance. While there are many methods out there that are designed to help …

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Podcast Transcript

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Hey there, and welcome to episode 217 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners. Today, I’m talking about five ways to improve your endurance. So whether you are just getting into running, or maybe you’ve been at it for a while, you should be actively working on improving your endurance.

And there are many, many methods out there that are designed to help you improve your endurance. But there are a few key principles I think most runners overlook. So today, I’ve got five ways to improve your endurance to help you run longer, and make running easier in general, who doesn’t want that? I know I do.

But first, I know I share a lot of information here on the podcast about running and nutrition and weight loss and building strength and all these topics. And if you’re new to the podcast, this might all feel a little bit overwhelming and confusing to you. And you just don’t know where to start.

You’re like Patrick, where should I start? Well, funny, you should ask because I created a free hour-long training video that can get you started. It’s called 5 Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronger Runner.

You’re going to learn all the basics of nutrition and endurance and mindset and building strength. All for you the runner who is maybe interested in improving your body composition, losing some weight.

So if you’re ready to get leaner and stronger, and you’re ready to become the most badass version of yourself yet, which you are, I know you are, then this free training is exactly what you need.

Just go to runningleancoaching.com click on Free Training. I know it’s so logical, right? And get started on your weight loss journey today. Okay, so five ways to improve your endurance. Why am I talking about this today?

Well, lots of runners that I talked to don’t know where to begin with this, or they are not really working to improve their endurance, and they don’t understand why they’re not improving their endurance.

So if you’re a new runner, you might have no idea how to build your endurance, you might be just thinking that you’re just going to run and just keep running and just see if it pans out, you know, see if it works.

Somehow see if some magic happens, where you’re going to be, have more endurance, be able to run longer, and maybe run easier. Seasoned runners that I know, might not be feeling very good when they run and they’re like, I don’t understand what’s happening here. I’m running all the time, but I can’t seem to get faster, I can’t seem to run longer, running still feels really hard all the time.

So you know, whether you are a new runner, and just getting started with all this or you’re a more advanced runner or a seasoned runner, and you want to improve your endurance, then you should be actively doing a few things to help you improve that endurance.

Okay, so, and like I said at the beginning here, there’s a lot a lot of principles, if you just start Googling, you know how to improve your endurance as a runner, you’re going to find 20, 30, 40 different ways of doing that. I’m going to narrow it down to a few that I found, or that I that I tend to help people with more than others.

Because these are the things that kind of get overlooked a lot. Okay, so I’m going to talk about some things that may be overlooked. Okay. So why would you want to be actively improving your endurance as a runner?

Well, you might want to run longer distances. So maybe you’ve got a certain race distance that you’re training for, or that you would like to do someday. So maybe you’re a 5k runner, and you want to be able to run a 10k.

Or maybe you’re doing half marathons and you want to run a full marathon, or maybe you run full marathons and you’re ready to take on an ultra marathon. You know, so whether you want to run, you know, five miles or fifty miles, I think that building your endurance as a runner, or improving your endurance as a runner is key, it’s just going to make running feel easier. Okay?

So you might run a longer race, you might just want to run more miles every week. So you might love running, and you just want to be able to run more. So you just want to instead of running, you know, 10 or 15 miles a week you want to bump that up to like 15 or 30 miles a week.

So you don’t necessarily want to train for some ultra marathon, but you just want to be able to run more days or, you know, longer distances. For each typical training run that you do, you might want to run a faster race. So you might want to get faster for a particular distance.

So that could be whatever, whatever distance your jam is, but you may want to get faster and improve your endurance. Sounds kind of counterintuitive, but it can actually help you to get faster, I’m gonna talk about that here in just a minute.

And you might just want to improve your endurance for your heart health because improving your cardiovascular system is so good for your heart, right? The bottom line here is that you probably just want running to feel easier.

And I think most of us would agree that yeah, I want running to feel easier. Now I have to say this running is never going to feel easy, but it can feel easier. Running is hard. You know what I mean? Like, you get out there and you run. And it’s kind of hard, you know, but have you ever had one of those runs where you’re like, that just felt it felt easier, like that felt really good, you know, for a change?

That’s what we want, we want running to feel easier, it’s still going to be a workout, you know, just like swimming is a workout, cycling is a workout, but we want it to feel a little bit easier. Because when it feels easier, you’re going to want to do it more, and you can go longer if it’s feeling easier, right?

So I’m going to give you guys a couple of keys, here, I have five different ways that we can improve our endurance. And the first one is this, and this is going to come as no surprise to you, but it is to just run more so increase your volume.

So increasing your volume is the easiest way that you can build your endurance and build that aerobic system. So the aerobic system, you know, is the slow running system that you use, for most of your running, hopefully, something around like 80% of your running should be done in that aerobic zone.

Which means you’re not pushing it too hard, you’re going pretty easy. So the simplest way to run to increase your endurance is to run more, you know, it’s just like anything else, when you practice doing it more, it becomes easier.

You know, like, if you want to play the guitar, you got to practice playing the guitar and you’re gonna suck at it for a while, it’s gonna be hard, but the more you do it, the easier, it’s gonna get the same with running, you want to run longer than you have to practice running longer. If you want to run more, you gotta practice running more. Okay.

So why this works is because you are building an aerobic engine here, right? This is your endurance engine, this is probably the most important factor in long-distance running is building that strong aerobic engine.

Okay, so most training programs, they feature a lot of aerobic running, and some of them have some speed work built into them. But that that aerobic engine, your ability to run longer, at a slower pace is slower, you know.

Pace is the number one thing you can do to improve your endurance, okay? So if you want to improve your aerobic engine, increase the volume that you are running, and that will help you to build a stronger aerobic engine, it also helps to increase your running efficiency.

So when you can run more efficiently, you’re going to be able to run further, this is going to improve your endurance as well. And running, you know won’t use as much energy. You know, a lot of running, especially when you get into longer distance stuff is about energy conservation, right? We don’t want to be spending energy, flailing your arms around, or running all weird.

I’ve seen some people that run pretty weird. And I’m like, man, how do they do that? Like they, they can run long distances, and they have some strange gaits, you know. But when you run more, you can typically improve your gait. And one thing I’ll just say, a little sidebar about improving your gait or changing your gait as a runner.

As a running coach, we’re sort of taught that we shouldn’t really mess with people’s gaits too much like you should just run the way that you run because that is going to be the most natural way for you to run.

So don’t think that you’re running wrong. Just because you’re going to gradually when you increase your volume, your running volume, you are going to get more efficient running the way that you run naturally.

So I know it sounds kind of weird, but like don’t worry about if you have a weird gait or something like that or if you don’t think your running form is very good. Don’t worry about it seriously. Just run the way you run and over time, you’re going to be very efficient running that way.

Okay, for the most part now, there are some rare exceptions of people that have really weird flailing legs or arms or something like that, which we probably want to check out a little bit. But for the most part, your running gait is fine. So don’t don’t stress out about that too much.

Okay, so we want to improve our running efficiency, we want to be more efficient as a runner, and we want to use less energy as a runner, and increasing your volume will help with this. When you increase your volume, you also are preparing yourself for fatigue in races especially the longer runs right, when you increase your mileage, you’re going to be dealing with fatigue pretty often, and you’re going to get better at dealing with fatigue, fatigue is something that will happen.

It just happens, you know, it’s part of running. And so consistently dealing with fatigue and pushing yourself to that point of like, oh, I’m feeling pretty tight, this is really hard. That’s a good thing.

And that leads me to the last reason why increasing volume will help you improve your endurance is it helps you to build resilience and helps you to build mental toughness, you know, you’ve done all this hard work, you’ve you know, hit fatigue a bunch of times in your training, you’ve run longer distances, you’ve improved your volume immensely.

Now you have some resilience and mental toughness, some grit, okay, so when it’s time to dig deep in a race when you got to like really push it towards the end of a race in order to hit that PR or something like that, you’re going to have that mental toughness that’s going to be there. Okay?

Now, a little pro tip about increasing your mileage. Don’t feel like you can just do a huge increases in your mileage, you know, week to week, you don’t want to do too much too soon. This is what most new runners do. They’re like, oh, I can run. You know, I ran five miles last week, I’m gonna run 10 miles next week, don’t do that.

Try to stick to the 10% rule. That means that we never increase our mileage more than 10%. So for new runners, I would stick to this pretty hardcore. If you’re a pretty experienced runner, and you have been running for years and you’re not injured or anything like that you can be a little looser with the 10% rule. You can do 15%, you know, sometimes 20%, but don’t want to go too much too soon. This is a recipe for disaster, especially for most new runners.

Most new runners, they get injured because they do too much too soon. So increase your volume slowly. That means if you run 10 miles this week, next week, you’re gonna run 11 miles, and then you’re gonna just keep using that 10% rule. Okay, it takes time. So just give it the time that it needs, but increase your volume. That’s number one.

Number two, and this is one where I don’t see a lot of people talking about this, but you probably want to change your diet, you probably want to start training your body to use a fuel source that you have onboard already. That will help improve your endurance immensely. That is your own stored body fat.

And this is called getting fat-adapted, it means that you are basically switching your main fuel source from sugar to fat, from carbohydrates to your own stored body fat. If you want to take a deep dive into this, I talked about getting fat-adapted and using fat as fuel in the last episode of the podcast, number 216: An Alternatieve Way To Fuel Long Distance Running.

So definitely check that out. But here’s some little key takeaways here. Number one, think of your energy stores as a fuel tank. And at the very top of the fuel tank you have this tiny little sliver of sugar or carbohydrate that’s available as fuel.

And then below that sugar, you’ve got this massive storage tank of stored body fat as fuel. So most runners what they’re doing is they’re using the sugar at the top a little tiny bit of the fat. Yeah, we always are burning a little bit of both.

But most runners are burning primarily sugar and when that is available, that’s all they’re going to burn so they have to continually feed with carbohydrates in order to keep that sugar fuel tank that sugar part of the fuel tank topped off.

When you’re doing that you are just relying on sugar as a fuel source and it is a good fuel source for running it does work, but there are problems with that. Eating a lot of sugar causes a lot of people to gain weight and I’m one of those people.

Eating a lot of sugar, especially during running can really upset a lot of runners’ stomachs. And that is not something you want. You don’t want to have disaster pants while you’re out there running. I hear too many stories about that actually, and I don’t really need to know about what’s going on during the run when you’re eating too much sugar.

But people have really upset stomachs with trying to consume all that sugar. And most runners are not really fat-adapted, so they’re not using that stored body fat as fuel. So they hit the wall pretty often, like they just run out of fuel, because that that small little bit of fuel once it’s gone, they haven’t trained themselves to tap into that stored body fat.

So getting fat-adapted just means you’re primarily burning fat as fuel, and you’re not really relying on all the sugar, which is such a good way to go. Because then you don’t need to feel as much during these longer runs, you won’t get the stomach upset.

And you can basically, you’re going to feel like you can run forever like you’re going to feel like you can run long distances much longer. So this is a great way to improve your endurance that just not a lot of people are talking about out there. Okay.

That’s one principle that most runners overlook. But it is key if you want to improve your endurance as a runner, change your diet, get fat-adapted, ditch the sugar, and start you know, relying on your own stored body fat as a fuel source and your endurance is going to go through the roof. Again, check out the last episode number 216 on a deep dive into getting fat-adapted.

Okay, the third way to improve your endurance is to get stronger. So you want to be intentionally building strength as a runner. And this means like head to toe, actively building strength every single week, this has to be part of your training regimen.

You can’t just go well you know, I do strength training a couple of times a month or whatever, once a week, that’s just not enough. And again, I did a whole episode talking about how to build strength and the benefits of building strength in episode number 199. So check out that episode for sure I take a deep dive into how to do it and, and how to actively build strength.

But when we’re talking about building strength, we’re talking about building stronger muscles, you go to the gym, you lift something heavy, you overload the muscle group that you’re working, and then you have a positive adaptation, you build stronger muscles, okay?

Stronger muscles take longer to fatigue, this is a good thing as a runner, that means you can run much longer before you hit the wall because you have stronger muscles and you can go longer before your muscles are going to give out on you. Okay?

Building strength does not just mean stronger muscles, it also means you build stronger connective tissues like tendons and ligaments, and stronger bones as well, which is really important. But that tendons and ligaments, this is where most runners get injured.

Most running injuries are tendon injuries, like a tendinitis type of thing, which basically just means like you have a pulled or strained tendon of some sort, you know. And if you are a runner, and you’re ramping up your mileage and you want to build your endurance, you do not want to get injured through this process, right?

So actively building strength on a regular basis will help you to stave off injury, and help you to improve your endurance at the same time. So win-win.

Now running will help you develop stronger muscles, especially stronger leg muscles. And runners are like, well, I’m running and so that’s enough. That’s all I need to do. But it’s really not enough, okay, it’s not enough to just run.

First of all, you have to understand that running is a catabolic activity, meaning it breaks down muscle tissue, especially if you’re running a ton of mileage. So if you’re not actively doing some strength training to offset that and getting enough protein, you’re probably going to be losing muscle in the process.

Now it doesn’t mean you’re going to you know, waste away to nothing because running does help to develop muscle. But there’s a little bit of a breakdown that’s happening as well. So what you want to do is you want to hit the gym, and you want to be actively building stronger muscles, especially the stronger leg muscles in the gym.

Because when you do that, that’s going to help improve your running endurance, it’s going to help improve your speed as a runner, it’s going to help you become a more powerful runner. Strong runners are fast runners, strong runners are more powerful runners and strong runners can go longer.

So the third key really to improving your endurance is to get stronger because you’ll be able to go longer, you’ll stave off injury, and you’re going to be running is just going to feel easier for you.

Okay, number four is to run faster. I know this sounds counterintuitive if you want to improve your endurance you have to run faster. But speed work is one area that gets overlooked by runners who want to improve their endurance.

Most people have a love-hate relationship with speed work, they hate doing it. Maybe it’s a hate-hate relationship. They hate doing it. And it feels terrible. But the love part of it would be this: when you do speed work consistently, running will get easier.

You know, if you want to be a faster runner, you probably understand that you need to do your speed work, right? But doing the speed work. And doing it consistently will also help to improve your endurance as well. And most runners don’t realize this.

And when I talk about doing speed work, we’re talking about anything where you’re running and you’re pushing it, you start to feel like you’re pushing it a little or pushing it moderately hard, too hard.

So if you’re not pushing it, then that’s what we call the aerobic zone or easy running, this is a good thing. Just think of the cutoff as just being like, I don’t really feel like I’m pushing it at all. That’s when you’re in the aerobic zone.

But if you’re like, oh, I’m pushing it a little bit or I’m pushing a priority right now, that’s then you’re into the doing the speed work type of zones, okay. So really, I love HIIT training and I love tempo runs.

Tempo runs are where you’re running consistently, at a faster pace than your goal, half marathon or marathon pace, whatever your race pace is, let’s say your race pace is a 10-minute mile, then tempo runs need to be done 30 to 60 seconds faster.

So you might do a mile warm-up. And then you’re going to run 2, 3, 4 miles at that tempo pace. So that is like 30 to 60 seconds faster than your race pace. And then you’re going to do like a mile cooldown, okay, that’s a tempo run.

HIIT training is high-intensity interval training, this can be any kind of interval, it could be four hundred repeats, it can be thirty-second sprints, it can be hill repeats, it can be, I like to do longer repeats like 1/3 mile repeats, that you could do eight hundreds, like there are so many different ways of doing HIIT training, but it is so good for you.

So doing the speed work is key. If you want to run longer, then you need to improve your speed. So you want to do the speed work. Here’s why. When you do speed work, this will help to improve your VO2 max. This is the maximum amount of oxygen that you utilize while you’re running.

Higher VO2 max levels will indicate better aerobic capacity and improved endurance. Also, the speed work helps to improve your lactate threshold. So it can raise your lactate threshold doing the speed work will cause your body to produce lactate while you’re training.

Your body will then adapt and burn the lactate more efficiently the next time, so you have a positive adaptation from doing this kind of HIIT training especially. So this means that at higher intensities, you can go longer before fatigue or pain slows you down. So you got to improve that lactate threshold in you know, raise the lactate threshold speed work is how you do it.

The other reason why speed work will help you build endurance is because it helps to improve your body’s ability to deliver oxygen to working muscles. Oxygen delivery is key in endurance. And one really good way to improve your endurance is to do the speed work.

It also helps you with energy production. So your body has this ability to produce energy with oxygen and without oxygen. So when you’re without oxygen is like what we call the anaerobic zone, that’s when you’re doing like sprinting, you’re gonna just run out of gas at some point, you can only sprint for 10 seconds, 20 seconds, something like that.

And then you’re going to absolutely hit the wall. So when we practice that kind of interval training, you’re training your body to use oxygen more effectively. Another key to doing this speed work is that it helps to improve your ability to use both fat and carbohydrates as fuel sources, which is really a key right there, okay.

Because when you’re doing the speed work, you can bump up your body’s ability to burn fat. And a lot of people say well, you know I’m running faster, so I have to have the sugar. I need gels I need to fuel up I need to use sugar. You really don’t.

There have been a lot of athletes. One that comes to mind is Jeff Browning. He’s an ultra runner. And this guy’s been fat-adapted for years. He’s an elite ultra runner, he wins all kinds of stuff. Amazing guy. But he has been proven.

They’ve done some testing on him. And they’ve shown that he has the ability to burn fat, like more than just about anybody else out there. So most runners who are carb-adapted, they hit this switchover point around 65% of their VO2 max where they’re going from burning mostly sugar, or I’m sorry, burning mostly fat to burning mostly sugar.

So 65% is the traditional cutoff point or changeover point for most carb-adapted runners. But guys like Jeff Browning, he’s trained his body to use fat, mainly fat as fuel up to 90-95% of his VO2 max.

Even some people can go up to 100% of their VO2 max using just fat as fuel, it’s pretty awesome. You know, because that means that you can go much faster than previously thought possible. Right.

And then lastly, running faster helps to improve your cardiovascular fitness, it helps to improve your muscular endurance, and just helps you to improve as an athlete overall. So the speed work is key to improving your endurance for all these reasons.

And then lastly, number five. The fifth way to improve your endurance as a runner, and this is probably the biggest key to all of this is you have to be consistent, it takes time to build endurance as a runner. And consistency is going to be the key to doing this.

If you only do these things here and there, so if you do the speed work, you know, once a month or something like that, because you hate it. I talk to so many people are like I hate doing speed work. But I want to get faster, oh, I want to run longer. Okay, well, then you got to do the speed work.

But if you do these things inconsistently, you’re gonna get inconsistent results, right? You’re just not going to get there. You need to be consistent with your training volume, with your diet, with your strength training, and with your speed work. Consistency is key.

The way you accomplish anything in this world really is to take consistent aligned action, what are the actions that you need to take that are going to get you to this goal? Okay, make sure you know what to do. That’s key, right? But then practice doing those things consistently. That’s it. That is the key right there. Okay.

I mentioned like learning how to play the guitar earlier. If you want to learn how to play the guitar, you have to practice it and you have to be consistent with it. And it’s going to suck at the beginning and you’re going to be terrible. And everybody’s going to tell you to stop playing because it sounds awful. But you have to stick with it. And you got to keep doing it.

You have to take consistent aligned action if you want to accomplish anything in this world. Okay. Practice consistently improving your endurance and you’ll be running longer and easier before you know it. Cool. All right, that’s all I got for you today. I love you all, keep on Running Lean, and I will talk to you soon.

216. An Alternative Way To Fuel Long-Distance Running

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As runners, we’ve been told over the last 40 years or so that the only way to fuel for running is with carbohydrates. Loads and loads of carbs. Eat lots of carbs every day, carb load the day …

Continue Reading about 216. An Alternative Way To Fuel Long-Distance Running →

Podcast Transcript

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Hey there, and welcome to episode 216 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today, an alternative way to fuel long-distance running. So as runners, we’ve been told over the last 40 years or so that the only way to fuel for running is with carbohydrates, carbs, loads and loads of carbs.

Eat lots of carbs every day, carbo-load the day before you run, carb up in the morning pre-run, consume ample carbs during your run. And then of course, you’re gonna want some carbs for recovery after your run.

This has been the standard approach since the 1980s. But it’s definitely not the only way to do things. The thing is, this approach just doesn’t work for everyone. Some people like me gain a lot of weight eating all those carbs regardless of how much we run. So in this episode, I offer an alternative way to fuel long-distance running one that doesn’t cause you to gain all that weight in the process.

But first, I know I share a lot of information here on the podcast about nutrition, weight loss, and improving your running. If you’re new to the podcast, it can probably feel a little overwhelming. And you’re like I don’t even know where to start with all this.

And if that sounds like you, totally cool, I got you covered. I created a free training. It’s about an hour long. It’s a video that you can watch, you can check it out anytime it’s called 5 Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronge Runner.

In this video, you’re gonna learn the basics of nutrition, strength, endurance, and mindset, all these things that are geared towards you the long-distance runner. So if you’re ready to get leaner, and if you’re ready to get stronger, if you’re ready to become the most badass version of yourself that I know you are, then this free training is exactly what you need to get started. Just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on Free Training.

Okay, so let’s talk about an alternative way to fuel long-distance running. Why do I want to talk about this today? Because I keep hearing from runners and I keep reading articles online and social media posts for runners that talk about eating all the carbs.

And I’m like, gosh, are we still talking about this? Since the 1980s, the carb-loading approach has been the gold standard, so to speak for runners just eat all the carbs, and you’re going to find that most coaches teach this approach.

Most experts, quote-unquote experts, teach this approach. When I got my running, coaching certification, when I went through my coaching certification program, I was taught this approach. And this approach is fine. And it does work for some people. But it doesn’t work for everybody.

For some of us, like me, eating all those carbs caused us to gain a lot of weight in the process. You know, and I’m not against having carbohydrates. In fact, I think using carbohydrates strategically for running is a great tool.

It’s a really good tool that you have in your tool belt, why not use the carbohydrates as fuel, especially for the higher intensity stuff or races? But eating all the carbs all the time, is what we’ve been taught and it just doesn’t work for everybody.

You know, I’m one of those people that is very sensitive to carbohydrates. You know, I eat carbs and I gain weight. And so if I just take this standard approach to fueling for long-distance running, I ballooned up 40 more pounds, 50 more pounds, whatever.

You know, I’ve shared this before where I was training for ultra marathons, I was running all the time, I was doing a ton of mileage and gaining weight in the process. You can’t outrun the wrong diet, right?

So for me the all carbs all the time approach while I loved it. Who doesn’t love eating carbs all the time? Oh, pizza, sure. Ice cream. Yep, that’s going to, I mean, I’m a runner, so I gotta eat this stuff. Right? Spaghetti all the time. Like I was just I was eating tons of bread and pasta. And sugar, like this was my diet. You know, it was like a 90% carbohydrates, you know?

And I just kept gaining weight and gaining weight and I was like wow, even though I was running a ton, you know, I was training for ultra marathons and running ultra marathons regularly and then gaining weight in the process does not make sense, right?

You are supposed to lose weight when you start training. Well, the wrong diet won’t allow that to happen, right, so the wrong diet will cause the weight to continually stack up. So for me, this this all carbs all the time approach is one that I tried, and it just didn’t work for me.

You know, I also found that I would crash and burn during long-distance events. And I’m like, what’s going on here, because I’m using all the fuel. You know, I’m taking all the gels and I’m eating, I’m pre-loading with carbs and do all this stuff. But I keep crashing and burning and mile 18 to 22 of a marathon, you know.

And I was like this, this isn’t working, like there’s got to be a different approach here. Okay. And there is, there are, there is an alternative approach, there are probably multiple other approaches that you can take.

But there’s one specific that I want to talk about today, one that doesn’t require eating all the carbs all the time, and one that doesn’t require you to gain a bunch of weight in the process, if that’s you.

And listen, if you’re the kind of person that can eat all those carbs, and not gain any weight, and it works really well for you, then keep doing your thing. Keep doing that. My hat’s off to you. But if you’re somebody that’s like Patrick, that really doesn’t work for me, then listen up, because here’s the different approach you want to take.

You want to get yourself fat-adapted. So we’re talking about this concept of fat adaptation. Fat adaptation means that you train your body to burn your stored body fat as fuel for long-distance running.

When you stop eating all the sugar and all the carbs constantly, you give your body a chance to tap into your stored body fat as fuel. So the way this works, essentially, is think about your different fuel sources in your body as like a fuel tank, and the top layer of that fuel tank is what’s gets burned first.

And that top layer is going to be sugar, essentially glucose, glycogen, that kind of stuff. So that is going to be burned first. And as long as that’s available, that is what’s going to be constantly burned. Okay.

And so the concept, but behind all carbs all the time thing is like you want to keep that top layer of the tank filled at all times so that you’re constantly always burning that. The problem is that when you run out of that, maybe you get to mile 20 of the marathon and you just haven’t done a good job of keeping up with the amount of carbs that you need for that event, or you haven’t trained yourself to metabolize carbs that to that extent.

That top layer of the tank is going to run out and then you’re going to crash because you don’t, you don’t have access to that lower portion of the gas tank, which is the biggest portion, I’m going to say it’s probably like 90% of that gas tank is going to be your fat stores.

But you don’t have access to that because you haven’t trained your body to use that fat as fuel, like the pathways are not there. So what happens is that when you stop eating the sugar and the carbs all the time?

You start to train your body to use the alternative fuel source, the fat stores the stored body fat, you know, we all eat some, you know, we all eat food and some of that energy that we consume gets used towards working muscles, some of that energy gets stored as fat to be used later as fuel.

The problem is we’ve just gotten so far away from using our stored body fat as fuel, it’s kind of like we just constantly put wood on the woodpile, but we’re never burning the wood it just keeps stacking up that’s our fat stores just getting bigger and bigger.

So when you train yourself to tap into those stored to your stored body fat as a fuel, now you have this like almost unlimited fuel source for running. So that’s the concept of fat-adaptation, you’re removing the sugar and the carbs that that initial, like, let’s say 10%.

And I’m kind of making these numbers up but just think of it like you know, we only have the capacity to store like 2000 calories as of energy as glucose but we have our body fat can can store hundreds of thousands of calories of energy as stored body fat, so just know that yeah, it’s probably like 10% and 90%, something like that. It’s probably more like 99 and 1% or something okay.

Anyway, so we want to get ourselves fat-adapted we want to be able to adapt to using that stored body fat as fuel. Okay, now, people hear this and they’re like, oh, that’s crazy. That’s just some weird fringe thing, it’s probably a fad, and it’s gonna go away.

Listen, we’ve been doing this for millennia, as human beings, we’ve been doing it for more than millennia, for like millions of years. Fat Burning is our natural state as human beings. You know, we store some of that energy we consume as body fat, and we use it when we’re not eating.

This is the way the human body is designed, you know, there’s periods of feasting, and there’s periods of fasting during those periods of fasting, we should be tapping into our stored body fat as fuel. Humans are really good at this, we are naturally really good at using fat as fuel.

And we’re naturally good distance runners like we used to be hunter-gatherers, we used to be a persistence Hunter, so we would, we would chase down prey, and we would outrun them not from a speed perspective, but from a time perspective like we would, you know, cut an antelope out of the herd or whatever.

And they might be able to outrun us in the short distance, but over time, like over hours and days, we would run them down to where they just would die of exhaustion. You know, poor antelope. I know, but good for us, because now we have this nutrient-dense meal that would that would sustain us, you know.

So the human body is designed to use that stored body fat as fuel during those times when we didn’t have the other food coming in. Okay. So to say that, oh, you have to consume all the carbs, all the pasta, all the bread all the time, just to be able to run?

That’s actually the new thing. That’s actually the weird fad thing that we’ve only been doing for the last 40 years or so. Right? I mean, isn’t that interesting that people look at this fat-burning thing. And they’re like, oh, you know, that’s not the way you should do it.

And I’m like, well, listen, we’ve been amazing runners for millions of years as humans and we never had to eat all the pasta and bread and gels and stuff like that. Why now? Should we have to do that? Okay.

So not only is it not a fad thing, or some weird approach, like there are elite runners that have adopted this approach for years and years and years, and they’re at the top of their game, you know, I’m gonna mention a couple of them here.

And I’ve talked about these guys before on the podcast here. And there are countless others too, but these guys just are kind of like the top, you know, the top 1% or whatever. Jeff Browning. He’s an ultra runner. He’s finished nearly 200 ultra marathons in his career. He’s had over 40 career ultra marathon wins 29 of those at the 100 mile plus distance, making him second in the world for the most 100 mile wins in history.

Ranked seven times in the top 10 of ultra running magazines, North American Ultra Runner of the year, ranked third in Ultra running magazines, North American Ultra Runner of the decade. He builds multiple, multiple course records, including the Moab 240 course record, and he is a low carb, low carb, high-fat kind of he takes that approach to his training.

You know, he’s very vocal about his fat-burning approach, his fat-adapted approach to ultra running, you know, he doesn’t consume all the sugars and all the gels and all the pasta and all the carbs. All right.

And another one that comes to mind is Mike McKnight. He’s an ultra runner. He specializes in the 200 mile distance. And he posed several wins every year for different events. He’s kind of known because he ran 118 Miles while consuming zero calories, zero calories. He ran 118 miles. He was just relying on his own stored body fat for fuel and he’s a pretty, pretty lean guy. You know? He’s amazing.

And I actually tried this, I was like, hey, you know, I’m gonna I’m gonna give this a shot. I didn’t do 180 miles but I did two marathons and a 50k ultra marathon on zero calories just to say like, Oh, can I even do this? Yeah, I could do it and I was fine. Really no problems whatsoever.

And then of course, there’s Zach Bitter. He’s an American ultramarathon runner. He specializes in the 100 miler distance and he’s done like over 60 ultras. He’s known for his low-carb diet, which he uses for training and racing nutrition. He had the record for the 100 miler. One point of 11 hours, 19 minutes and 13 seconds. I’m gonna say that one more time because that is a crazy number, he ran 100 miles and 11 hours in 90 minutes. That’s insane.

He’s the holder of the 12-hour American record at 104.88 miles. He claims the 100-mile and 12-hour world records at the Six Days in the Dome event in Milwaukee in 2019. Competed for team USA world 100 Kilometer team three times.

So these are guys, these are just some of the guys who are benefiting and their, their elite athletes who are at the top of their game. And they’re taking this low-carb approach to distance running. They’re not consuming all the carbs all the time. Yeah, they do use some carbs for their events.

And they’ll tell you, you know, you can check them out, or their websites, check them out on social media, they have podcasts and stuff like that, you can totally listen to what these guys say. And they’ll tell you they do like maybe, you know, 30 to 50 grams of carbs per hour for these events, which is not a lot. But they’re not eating all the carbs all the time. They’re taking this fat adaptation approach to running and it’s working really, really well for them. Okay.

Another thing to consider here is that if your goal is to lose weight, then this is a great way to lose weight. Because listen, if you want to lose weight, what do you got to do? You have to burn a fat, right?

We’re not talking about weight loss, we’re talking about fat loss. So you have to burn the fat. If you are burning the fat, you are losing weight. And it’s really hard to burn the fat when you’re on that super high-carb runner’s type of diet, right?

Because of the whole fuel source prioritization, you know, you’re going to burn through the glucose first, then you’re going to tap into the fat but you gotta like, You got to eliminate that top 1% or whatever of your fuel tank.

So if fat burning is the key to weight loss, which it is, wouldn’t you want to do it? It that makes fat burning the priority? Yes, you would. When you eat for fat-burning, you’re running improves your endurance and improves and you lose weight in the process. Right?

So if you’re somebody who is interested in losing weight, this approach might work for you, it may be something you want to consider. Okay, and and listen, when we talk about a low-carb approach to fueling a low-carb diet, a low-carb, you know, nutrition approach; a lot of people think, you know, you’re talking about keto, or doing no carbs or carnivore or something like that.

No, it’s not about that. It’s about finding the right amount of carbs that keeps you burning fat, while also helping you’re running because carbs are helpful for running, right? You don’t have to be Mike McKnight and do the zero-calorie thing. But it’s cool that the human body can do that, you know.

That’s fat-adaptation. And it’s most impressive, like what that guy does, right? And by the way, this guy is not fat, right? You don’t need a ton of body fat, to be able to use your own stored body fat as fuel.

Even the leanest of athletes can benefit from fat adaptation as an approach. Okay, so this doesn’t mean that you’re never eating any carbs, you can still eat some carbs. I use carbs for fuel, and I encourage my clients to use carbs for fuel, but we prefer like whole food sources of carbs, you know, we might be talking about bananas or sweet potatoes or rice or something like that, right?

And obviously, everybody’s a little bit different. And you have to kind of experiment with what works for you. But there’s, there’s tons of great options just from the natural world like and sticking with whole food sources of carbohydrates is great.

Now I get it that when you’re in any event, like you can’t carry a bunch of sweet potatoes or bananas with you. I mean, it’s just really not that convenient. But what’s cool is that there are a bunch of brands out there that cater to the low-carb endurance athlete, and they have entire product lines that are geared towards helping you fuel for running while maintaining that fat-burning state.

So like Hammer Nutrition is one you can use. S-Fuels, Muir energy, and there are a bunch of other brands out there and new ones coming out all the time. So that’s a very encouraging thing that there are companies out there that are that are gearing their product lines towards the low carb endurance athlete. Okay.

Now, just like I said, at the beginning of this podcast that the high-carb approach isn’t for everyone, just like that, like the fat-adapted approach probably isn’t for everyone. So I’m not going to come out here and say that everybody should do this. And everybody will benefit from this.

Some people do really fine eating all the carbs and the sugar and the gels, and they never have to worry about gaining weight. And if that’s you, that is amazing. That’s definitely not me. But if you struggle with losing weight, and you love running, then this might be the approach that you want to try.

You know, the only way you can tell if it works through you, or if you enjoy it, or if you can do this as a lifestyle as to give it a shot, you might see the weight start to come off, you might experience running feeling easier than ever before.

You might see your energy levels are better all day long, no more afternoon crashes, you might begin to think more clearly be able to focus and concentrate better. And as always, if you want help with any of this, you can always reach out to me you can go to my website runningleancoaching.com.

Every day I help runners get fat-adapted, lose weight, improve their running performance and make all this a lifestyle. So whatever approach you take cool, but it has to be something that is sustainable for you. Because if it’s not sustainable for you, it’s not going to work because this stuff takes time.

You know, if you want to lose weight, and you want to improve your diet, improve your nutrition, improve your running and your nutrition for running specifically, then you’re gonna have to take a little bit of time to figure out what works for you. And it has to be something that you can do sustainably long term, right?

So I work with my clients, we work together to make sure whatever they’re doing is something that they can do on their own like for good, or it’s not about quick fixes, but lifestyle changes, right being fit and healthy isn’t a destination we’re trying to get to. It’s how we live our life. Okay. Consider the fat-adapted approach. I think it’s amazing. It works really well for me and countless people that I work with. Give it a shot. You never know. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean and I will talk to you soon.

181. Ultramarathon Redemption with Pete Caigan

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Today I have a special treat for you, I’m sharing a candid conversation I recently had with Pete Caigan. Pete is one of my clients who has had a pretty remarkable transformation over the last 6 …

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Podcast Transcript

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Hey there and welcome to episode 181 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today: Ultramarathon Redemption with Pete Caigan. So today I have a special treat for you.

I’m sharing a candid conversation I recently had with Pete Caigan, Pete is one of my clients who’s had a pretty remarkable transformation over the last six months or so. Before finding me Pete was training for an ultra marathon and found himself gaining quite a bit of weight, and ended up getting a DNF.

So he did not finish his first 50k attempt and was determined to try again and succeed. So he’s going to share his story of changing his diet, getting fat adapted, and the things he struggled with along the way, losing weight and then attempting that same 50k again.

I hope you enjoy this episode of Ultramarathon Redemption with Pete Caigan. His story is truly inspiring. But first, if you’re ready to learn what it takes to get leaner and stronger, run faster and longer than you ever imagined, then I have just the thing for you.

Check out my all new free training called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner, Stronger Runner. This comprehensive training will teach you how to lose weight and keep it off for good without running an extra million miles per week.

It takes everything I’ve been teaching on this podcast for the last three years or so and distills it down into an hour long training program to teach you everything you need to know to get started on your weight loss journey the right way, and it’s all designed with you the runner in mind, just go to runningleancoaching.com click on free training to get started.

Okay, let’s just get into it. Without further ado, please enjoy my recent conversation with Pete Caigan.

Patrick McGilvray
Okay, so today we’re having a conversation. Me and Pete. Pete Caigan has been working with me for a period of time now, and has experienced some pretty amazing stuff, some pretty amazing transformations. And I want to talk about that. So welcome, Pete.

Pete Caigan
Thank you. Good to be here, Patrick. Thank you for having me.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. So give me an idea of, you know, what things were like for you before we started working together. So think back to that time. It’s been a while now. I guess it was back in probably October, September, October of last year. And you needed some help with some things and you had some goals. So just give me an idea, kind of a little bit of a snapshot of where you were at that time and what you were looking for some help with what your goals were at that time.

Pete Caigan
Sure. It was September of 2022. And I was feeling frustrated. I was 30 pounds more than I am now by running and slowing down to crawl. I had done a half marathon trail run in the fall of ‘21 and it went great. Started training the spring of ‘22 for 50k.

I took the advice of my cousin to eat a lot of carbs and load and just eat whatever you want and run a lot. And I did that and I gained about 20 pounds and attempted my 50k in the spring of 2022 got taken off the course at mile 10 by the sweepers. Mumbled and grumbled for a few months and then heard your podcast a bunch of times and decided to get in touch.

Patrick McGilvray
So that that experience of training for that first ultra marathon and eating all the what I’ll just call like “carbage”, right, all the junk food or whatever, will lead to 20 pounds of weight gain.

Pete Caigan
Yeah, I gained 20 pounds and slowed down. My endurance was really good. I was so slow and it was brutal. Everything was difficult.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and it’s crazy because we’re told, at least by traditional coaches and you know, this is you know, long standing principles, I guess, of running that you need all these carbs, but some of us are a little more sensitive than others to them and they have an adverse effect and even training for an ultra marathon isn’t going to undo kind of what your experience was of loading up on all those carbs and and you can’t outrun that bad diet.

Pete Caigan
As I said before, I was doing long runs over 20 miles. And so gaining weight, and you’re probably running 40 miles a week or that entire time gave me wings. It was very strange. I was going on and I was legitimately hungry. It wasn’t like, I felt hungry. It was signals, and I was listening.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. And then you tempted this 50k. And you said around mile 10, you got taken off the course because you didn’t make a cut off?

Pete Caigan
Yeah, there was a cut off. And the sweepers came and the race director said, come on, get the bus. And I was like, no way. He’s like, well, you can keep going, but you’re not part of the race anymore if you want to keep going. And this is very bad country, Vermont. So I was, I think, wise and got on the bus. And I was really mad at the guy for like months. Like I was like telling all my friends and took me when whining finally hit me like maybe he was right. Like maybe I already got hurt, not made it. So that’s what I recommitted and called you.

Patrick McGilvray
Okay, so you were 30 pounds overweight at the time, or 30 pounds heavier than you are now. You were frustrated. Sounds like from not being able to finish this event that you train for, you’re probably frustrated that you gain all that weight in the process.

So give me an idea of what some of the goals were when you wanted to, you know, start working with me and like why you came to me and like what is it that you wanted out of that coaching experience? What did you need help with?

Pete Caigan
Well, I needed to get help, because I couldn’t figure it out. I was eating, I thought well, and I was working out a lot. So I wanted to initially lose 20 pounds and try to do the same race again. And finish. Be successful was my initial goal when I joined up with you.

Patrick McGilvray
So those are the big goals. To lose 20 pounds and then do this race and redeem yourself, you know, not be taken off the course or suggested to be taken off the course.

Pete Caigan
Yeah. Exactly.

Patrick McGilvray
Okay, good. So you committed to those goals, we started kind of changing something. So what was that process like for you at the beginning? Like, what were some of the changes that that seemed to help you the most at the beginning, especially.

Pete Caigan
I think getting off grains, sugar, and seed oils was really the beginning. And start to be more conscious of what I was eating. So I started to journal food. And I started to eat in a window. You know, like I was doing 16 hours a day not eating, eight hours a day eating.

That is really the biggest change and really not easy. It was extremely difficult. For me it was about two weeks of discomfort, but it wasn’t miserable. I was just a little cranky, little hungry. I was very slow as a runner. I felt like I was carrying a bag of rocks. And

Patrick McGilvray
How many times a day were you eating before? Like how often during the day were you eating prior to this?

Pete Caigan
Oh, seven.

Pete Caigan
Yeah, just like constantly eating all the time.

Pete Caigan
Well, I usually would like wake up, have some coffee, hang out and have a bowl of oatmeal. Maybe wait an hour, go for a run, get back. You know, have a protein bar. Work a couple hours more.

Have lunch, pretty good lunch, maybe a salad, chicken, maybe some rice. Mid afternoon I’d be back at it with some more food, whatever nuts, bag of nuts, maybe more bars or something. And then before dinner I was snacking a bit on whatever, chips. It’s pretty healthy.

Like I was shopping at the health food store. I was eating good foods, but then dinner, it could be like anything. I mean, could be anything. It could be a bowl of pasta with, you know, fish or whatever. It was a lot of carbs. No window, you know, I was eating like 14 hours a day.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, so you’re describing what I’ve talked about in the past, which is that typical runner’s diet. Which is just eating all the time, because you’re hungry all the time, and you’re eating all the carbs all the time.

And when you’re eating all the carbs all the time, that makes you more hungry. So you just got to keep eating the carbs so you can keep satisfying that hunger but the satisfaction never comes. And you end up doing a couple things.

Number one, a lot of that energy that you’re taking in, a lot of the food that you’re taking in, gets converted to fat stores and you, you recognize that from gaining 20 pounds during this process.

The other thing is that you’re never feeling really satisfied, you’re always hungry, you know, and the only thing that you’re your body, you’ve you’ve trained your body essentially to crave more carbs.

You know, the body will crave what you continue to give it, what you repeatedly do. And so when you repeatedly eat carbs, you’re just going to be craving more and more and more carbs. And that is a really kind of a downward spiral. It’s a cycle that you can’t get out of.

Pete Caigan
There for a little bit like when I was working out and I was working a lot. I was doing CrossFit three or four times a week, I was running four days a week, and I was stretching every day and my work is active.

So I was working out and feeling like when I did eat the carbs, I was like, okay, good. I’m good to go. And I’d have like an hour. I don’t know what it is, a sugar rush? But then the hunger would come quickly, you know, and I realized now, it wasn’t real hunger when it felt like hunger.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, well, it feels great eating that stuff. It feels amazing because it lights you up. You know it hits those dopamine receptors in your brain and produces serotonin and you know, all the good feeling hormones and things like that.

It’s very similar to the way drugs and alcohol light up our brains. You know, they’ve done all these studies on the poor little rats who you know, they make them take all this cocaine and sugar and things like that. And the rats kind of prefer the sugar to the cocaine because it just feels so amazing.

So even the rats will choose carbs over cocaine. It’s kind of funny. But yeah, so that that whole process is maybe, okay, for some people like what you just described there is the way a lot of people approach running, especially when doing ultras.

Pete Caigan
Yeah, my cousin who recommended it, he eats like that, and he came in third on the 50 miler on the same event. That he was like, wasn’t that great? I don’t know.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. And I followed a bunch of ultra runners early in my running career. And, and they were doing the same thing. And I was like, well, I guess this is what I need to do. And I had the same experience you did Pete, where I just kept gaining weight until I was like 40 pounds overweight, and like what is happening here, you know, so that doesn’t work for everybody.

And if you’re somebody listening to this, and you’re like, yeah, that’s my experience too. Just know that you can change like, you don’t have to keep doing that. And being in that cycle, that frustrating cycle of like, eating all the carbs, being hungry all the time, getting fatter and fatter as you go, like, that’s not a good place to be. It’s not healthy.

It’s just not, you know. And so, you know, the solution is not to just, you know, never eat another grain or carb again in your life. That’s not what we’re talking about here. So, what did that sort of diet look like for you, you know, at the beginning at least, Pete?

Pete Caigan
Well, I would drink coffee. I started to use heavy cream in my coffee, which I always avoided because that was taboo. And I love the taste. So I could put a couple of tablespoons of heavy cream in my coffee in the morning and feel like good.

So that would usually be the morning combined with a fasted workout. And I was at first struggling with that, the fasted workouts, but within a couple of weeks, it was better, actually. Surprisingly even the lifting and Crossfit was better.

And then I would wait till noon generally to eat and what it would look like was a nice serving a protein could be like 12 ounces of fish, or chicken, usually fish or chicken with the big salad, no starchy vegetables, but a big salad with olive oil, salt and pepper. Very satisfying.

So I would do that and then at first I was really struggling getting from lunch to dinner, like to get from noon to six for me because I’m pretty active was hard. And I did that for a while but I was constantly like kind of freaking out.

So I added a protein shake mid afternoon, like a whey protein. And if I’m really hungry, I might eat some nuts but not a lot. And then dinner would generally be another big serving of protein and not salad more like cauliflower or broccoli.

I could use cheese. I was using a lot of coconut oil. I mean it’s still scary but not crazy amounts, a lot of coconut oil, a lot of olive oil, a lot of avocado oil. And, you know, it could even be a big serving of protein like I can eat a 16 ounce steak, which I love.

And I got into blue cheese which I have to be careful about but it’s, I love it so much. And it’s so satisfying. I kind of can’t eat anything after a blue cheese, it’s overwhelming. I’ll eat that. And then if I was really craving dessert type food, you know, I’d have some berries like blueberries on Greek yogurt, maybe with some stevia and cocoa powder, had the feeling of like ice cream, a very satisfying and good amount of protein. But often nothing like I don’t, the no sugar thing is much better. If I hit any fruit, it’ll be like berries, maybe an apple? Well, you really just got a big part of my diet.

Patrick McGilvray
Yes, so for you a couple of the changes. Just to kind of recap here, you went from eating seven times a day to eating, you know, two or three times a day, which is normal. That’s kind of what normal human eating patterns should look like. You know what I mean, we shouldn’t be eating seven times a day.

Because when you do that, you just train yourself that you are going to be hungry all the time, you know, especially if you’re eating a lot of carbs in those meals. So when you switch to eating a couple times a day, two, three times a day, your body will naturally switch to being hungry those two or three times a day, which becomes normal, and then it becomes very easy to only eat a couple times a day. So you made that change, which is great. It was a little bit of a struggle at the beginning, but you got used to it. You know? Do you enjoy eating that way today still?

Pete Caigan
The thing I love is the high fat high protein because I avoided fats like the plague for so many years. And it’s really some of my favorite foods. So I love that aspect of it. You know, now that I’m fat adapted, I do eat carbs sometimes and it’s not a big deal. I mean, I do notice like the day after. I have to clean up a little bit but I don’t if I eat carbs once a week if I have sweet potatoes or something. I’m generally I don’t want it the next day, like maybe I’m loaded up or something. So it’s not even that big a deal.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, we’re not talking about like, birthday cake every week or something like that. It’s just some sweet potatoes like it’s fine.

Pete Caigan
Honestly, the sweet sweet stuff, I have a bite sometimes it’s so overwhelming. I don’t really enjoy it at all. Like I used to get it really barely once in a blue moon, I ate a marshmallow recently, and I was like woah. I’m so sensitive now to the sugar. I didn’t realize how strong it is.

Patrick McGilvray
So you’ve shifted. That’s good. That’s a good time.

Pete Caigan
Yeah, I really enjoyed it. It’s like, it’s almost a relief.

Patrick McGilvray
Another big change was focusing on more protein.

Pete Caigan
Right? Well, yeah, I’ve been keeping track, I use an app on my phone, right? I don’t do it all the time. But entering my food during a journal shows me the protein I’m getting. And I’m trying to get almost a gram per pound of body weight. Because I’m so active. I’m training for another 50k.

Patrick McGilvray
I think that’s a good place to be.

Pete Caigan
The macros are significantly different. It’s like 60/30/10 usually fat to protein to carbs.

Patrick McGilvray
Okay. Yeah, like 60% fat, 30% protein, 10% carbs. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And that’s different for everybody. But you know if that works for you, awesome. Yeah, so you focused on more protein, not eating all the time. And, you know, what were some of the results of that? Or like, how did you feel through the day? Did your hunger start to like, go down?

Pete Caigan
Yeah, after two weeks, it was way better. And then the hunger went down. But it wasn’t gone. I also learned a lot working with you and the group about hunger and like, whatever. It’s not the end of the world, you’re hungry. And usually it goes away in like 10 minutes. It’s not that big a deal.

So one of the things for me is my life really shifted in a lot of ways away from other than food and running, which is I got way more motivated on what I do. And I started working harder and sleeping less, which was a very unexpected side effect of all this, like I was sleeping a solid hour to two hours more than a night than I do now.

Patrick McGilvray
Okay, so you’re sleeping less but how’s the quality of sleep?

Pete Caigan
Yeah, I’m sleeping a lot less and my quality of sleep is better. So that was an interesting thing that I didn’t, uh, I wasn’t planning on which is great. I feel way more energy.

Patrick McGilvray
Okay, good. Yeah, typically, people would say that they need more sleep or they sleep longer when they get off of the crazy foods, but you’re saying you’re sleeping less, but it’s a positive change. Right?

Pete Caigan
Well, I would say maybe at the beginning I was sleeping more but after I feel like I cleaned up and lost the weight and got off that food, I just I was sleeping eight to nine hours a night and now it’s been seven.

Patrick McGilvray
Okay, gotcha. So probably more in line with the way you should be then. Okay. Yeah, that’s cool. That’s good. So what else was your experience during this process of like shifting your diet and what you’re eating, how often you’re eating, upping in the protein, all those things. What was, or was there anything that you really struggled with, you know, during that transition?

Pete Caigan
Yeah, there were some things I struggled with me, I was very moody. I had to not be a jerk to my mate, my wife. I definitely was cranky for a while. So that was hard. And then, like, I just had to deal with myself more, my emotions, and reality.

And the accountability with you and with the group just made me be like, no, I really want to lose a pound this week, like, I don’t want to gain this week. And I would have moments, usually at night in front of the fridge, where I’d have to be like, don’t do it! But there were moments, so the struggle was really like dealing with my emotions, like if I had a really stressful day, and like figuring out other ways to deal with it.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and for how long did that like cranky pants last?

Pete Caigan
Probably a month. I mean, it still happens occasionally. Like in the morning, if I’m waiting till noon to eat. But I’ve learned how to do it. Usually if I’m not, if I haven’t worked out, really, I find I could do a fasted workout and then feel great, it doesn’t happen. But if I end up like waking up, having some coffee and ending up at a desk for two or three hours, I’ll get like, like, edgy.

Patrick McGilvray
So yeah, that sounds like it’s probably from lack of exercise, because you didn’t get your endorphin rush that you’re used to in the morning.

Pete Caigan
Exactly.

Patrick McGilvray
But that crankiness at the beginning, whenever we get off of a really high carbohydrate diet. It is basically like withdrawal symptoms. It’s one of the symptoms of withdrawal from like a sugar addiction, you know. And it’s the same, you know, kind of shows up the same way that when you stop drinking alcohol or doing drugs or something like that. It can have the same sort of withdrawal effects, which is crazy to think about. That sugar has that kind of an effect on us.

Pete Caigan
Right? It’s so accepted that we eat tons of carbs all the time. Maybe that’s not how our bodies function best, but that’s how we were brought up. So you think you’re supposed to eat breakfast or you’re bad. Maybe you’re fine.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, well, that whole idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. That’s just a marketing tactic. You know, that was made up by the cereal companies like Kellogg’s or someone made that up.

Pete Caigan
You can still have breakfast, but have breakfast at 11. Like it’s okay. Your first meal can be your bacon and eggs.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, eat some protein at that first meal for sure. Okay, so you went through this process, you got fat adapted, which just means that you, you know, we’re running without the need for all the carbs without the need for a bunch of fuel. And you trained yourself to use your stored body fat as fuel. And I’m guessing through this process, you started losing weight as well. Right?

Pete Caigan
Yeah, started to come off by two pounds a week at the beginning.

Patrick McGilvray
Nice.

Pete Caigain
A lot at the beginning. Yeah, I started to lose significant weight. And that’s always really great to see what the first person notices and your clothes fit. That’s a big moment.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. That’s motivating and it keeps you going because you’re seeing progress. I mean, you can literally see the progress happening. And it keeps you in the game.

Pete Caigan
In like 5 weeks I lost like 10 pounds or something. And the first person was like wow Pete, and I was like thank you. And then yeah, I’d like to think I don’t have a big ego, but at first it really feels good. Clothes fit better, it’s starts to be like actually fun. Because once I got fat adapted it was not difficult.

For me, it was many ways a pleasure because I was eating the fat switch I stayed with the running and I started to get better quickly too. So you think now put on a 10 pound pack and go for a run. That’s enough to make a big difference.

That first 10 pounds and as I say now I feel like free back to running like bouncing. I run in the woods and just fly around. I’d forgotten that a little bit. Like I kind of had it in my memory. But it wasn’t. It’s been a few years since I felt that so now it’s back and it’s just it’s incredible.

Patrick McGilvray
Well you get used to it. You know you get used to being overweight, you get used to carrying around an extra 30 pounds or whatever. And until you lose the weight again, it’s like oh, now I see what I was carrying around and you know, I had that experience too some years ago, lost 40 pounds and it was literally like running just became so easy.

It was so much more enjoyable. Yeah.

Patrick McGilvray
And then you started training. So let’s talk about that a little bit. So you decided you’re going to conquer this 50k, the same one, same race. And but this time, there’s no way you’re gonna DNF. So talk about the training a little bit with that, like, what, what was that like for you?

Pete Caigan
Sure. All Fall, I was doing three runs a week, kind of short, medium long, but not as a structured plan, which is keeping my fitness up and losing weight. And then I started, I think an 18 week training cycle in maybe the beginning of February, that you helped me design. That was four to five days a week of running, and I was doing strength training two days a week, which often ended up once a week. But I was hitting it hard, like I was getting a lot of miles on the trail.

And where I live is in the mountains in upstate New York. So I was dealing with running snow and the ice and very cold temperatures. And I was getting up in the mountains, which means carrying a 15 pound pack and wearing spikes. So it was very challenging in February March, but I got the miles in and I didn’t miss many runs.

And I was losing weight. I wasn’t as late as I am now. But I was probably down 20 pounds at that point, and feeling good, you know, struggles. I had definitely had a lot of struggles through the 18 week training cycle, I had two injuries that weren’t really injuries, they were just pain, which was a good thing for me to understand, and notice that just because you’re hurt, doesn’t mean you’re injured. That’s a big difference that I didn’t quite understand fully until this training cycle.

One day I finished a 20 mile run, which included a lot of concrete running and running shoes, which I don’t do I mostly do trails. I woke up the next day and there was like a peak on the top of my first metatarsal. Like it looked like I broken my metatarsal. It hurt, couldn’t walk. So I was just like, oh, I’m so screwed. So I just did and I hobbled around for a few days. And then like after like five days, I got back to like jogging lightly, like it didn’t really hurt. And then by the next week I was back out.

Patrick McGilvray just the joys of running, you know.

Pete Caigan
So that was a good lesson. And then I played golf, like four weeks out from my event, and I hurt my neck. And I couldn’t move. And I was like, I’m so dumb. So that put me down for like, over a week of no running, when I was in my peak phase. And I was really scared at that point.

Like I blew it like I can’t believe I hurt myself at the end. But again, you helped me to see like, you know, you’ve banked a lot of fitness here. Like don’t sweat it like it’ll be okay. And then I got back they did one more long run after that I did. My race was 32 miles, I went out and did like a 25 mile run with maybe 4700 feet a gain, in the mountains, it was big deal. And I did and I was like alright, I got this.

So yeah, then the last few weeks just took it easy as I was supposed to which was a challenge into unto itself to taper. But yeah, that was the training cycle. It was challenging in many ways. It was hard to make the time on my long runs because I’m in the mountains. It could be like an eight hour day. So it was challenging to just be like alright, family I’m leaving. I’ll see you tonight.

Patrick McGilvray
How was this training different from your approach last year when you were going for the same event?

Pete Caigan
I didn’t do nearly as many miles or as many runs last year, I was doing three days a week, I would do like a short run or medium run and a long run. But my longest run last year was 21 before the race, before the 32 mile race. And my you know I had done a few like 15-18 days as well. But like really slow, like way more walking than I did this time.

Patrick McGilvray
So more volume and a few longer runs. Yes, more work overall for sure.

Pete Caigan
More miles for sure. And more frequency. Yeah.

Patrick McGilvray
That’s one of the biggest things for an event like that because you are going to be on your feet for so long. You gotta you got to make sure you are putting in the time like time on your feet, you know, and increasing the amount of running that you’re doing per week has to go up pretty high to get you there. So good. Good job with all that.

So the race comes and where were you at? Give us a snapshot of where you were like for the race itself, like from what was your kind of weight loss at that point? How much had you lost? You know, come race day.

Pete Caigan
I got to 30 pounds down.

Patrick McGilvray
Okay. Beautiful.

Pete Caigan
And, you know, for whatever it’s worth, if you care about body composition was like I was at 18% fat.

Patrick McGilvray
Awesome. Yeah, no, that’s great.

Pete Caigan
Do you want me to tell you about the event?

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, just like, how was it for you?

Pete Caigan
It was brutal and it was the most amazing thing I’ve ever done. I totally had many, many times the week leading up to it where I thought maybe I was gonna chicken out.

Patrick McGilvray
Really? Okay.

Pete Caigan
I just had like weird thoughts. Like, maybe this isn’t for you, you’re gonna hurt yourself. Every ghost came up into my mind trying to get me to not do it. It was like the one side’s the angel the other side’s evil and like telling me not to do it.

But I was like, just go, keep going. I made the hotel reservation, the race is about three hours for me. So I got a hotel the night before, and the night of the race. So Friday, Saturday. I went and I did some research on the race director Luis Escobar? You could look him up. He’s one of the guys in Born to Run. The guy had been personally before.

Patrick McGilvray
Oh, yeah. Cool.

Pete Caigan
So I was like, oh, this guy’s like legitimate. Like come on. Pete like get over yourself. So I went the day before Friday to get my race bed and I hung out at the starting line was 100 mile distance was starting that night.

So I like spent like an hour there with him and all the other race directors and CO race directors are also well known. ultra runners so I like really spend time with them chatted Luis was like, man, it’s so great. You came back you have good, you’re gonna do great. So that was cool, because it gave me like a vibe of the race and it’s a Spartan Race, and it’s really friendly environment.

There were 300 participants. So I spent some time with the people picking up their badges and just trying to get into like the vibe of what was going on in its a gorgeous place. It’s the guy who started Spartan, I don’t know his name. It was his home, of course, and beautiful Vermont. So I really enjoyed that.

And I went home, I had packed all my food which was smart. Last year I’d gone out to a restaurant and gotten like, I don’t even know like a bowl of cheesy fries for dinner. It was horrible.

So I had like my two purple sweet potatoes and like a little chicken salad. At my dinner I had my race vest pack like before, which I highly recommend for anybody. So you’re not nervous in the morning packing. I woke up super early, race time was seven. I got up before, just like took my time, got my stuff together, got to the starting line by 6:00.

Everybody like it’s a really good camaraderie of these things. Spend time people are nervous talking, you know, people doing the 50 mile the 100 miler have been going down for 14 hours. So they’re still going and then went out. It was like in the front of the pack. Like I went too hot like but too hot. Really? Maybe in retrospect. So I kind of crushed the first 10 miles I did. I was really fast for me, which was also the reason is 6500 feet a gain 32 miles. So you know it’s a lot.

And a lot of it was bushwhacking, like difficult terrain where there’s puddles and mud and very little trail. But the first 10 miles was generally really nice, trails up and down, a couple more, got to the first checkpoint where I had been pulled off the year before. And the guys were like Pete, you’re doing great. You’re like, you know, you’re not at the back of the pack, so that was cool.

Miles 10 to mile 15 was up and over a huge mountain. Very difficult. Extremely difficult. But I did all this generally fasted. I only had about 200 calories an hour. You know, it was I had electrolytes. But I felt great. I felt fine. Up and down this big mountain who was cool. I was okay, but I was definitely not as fast.

And then there was a checkpoint it was like a party, like they had like barbecue and beer like music cranking, and I maybe made a mistake, and I had like two sips of beer. And I was like, This is bad. Don’t do it. And then they had it cut off. You had to get to mile 22 by 3pm, which was eight hours.

And at the beginning of the race. He stood up on a table he said does anyone disagree that if you’re not at mile 22 I’m taking you off the course? Nobody said anything, he shouted it so everyone understood. So now miles like 15 to 22 up and down many mountains.

At this point, it was little mountains, but up and down a few if something happened, I started to slow down significantly. But I did not stop. Like I didn’t stop and I sit down, I sat down once the whole race just to change my socks, like I was relentless for me.

Relentless forward progress zone for the majority of the time, which sounds crazy, but somehow my body held up. So anyway 15 to 22 miles I was slow, like things were falling apart a little bit, kept going, I got to 22 to seven and a half hours. And I’m like, pumping my chest. And now there’s a bus already filled with people who are calling it a day, even though they made the cut off the next.

The 22 or 32 is extremely difficult. 22 to 28 is extremely difficult. So a bunch of people quit and then like RIP, you’re done. Right? And you want to get on the bus. We’ll take you back. And I was like, no way, there’s zero chance of getting on your bus goodbye, and they were like alright.

So I took off. And now I’m going up and down three mountains, mile 22 to mile 29. Alone in the woods. The sweepers are behind me, but they’re not in sight. They’re back. And I just started to lose my mind. Like I was having a very, very hard time functioning.

My body was like leaning left, I kept on drifting left. I didn’t know what was going on. I was like, I’m gonna have a stroke, am I dying? Like, I didn’t really think that but I was hurting. And I didn’t know what was going on. But I just kept trudging forward going as fast as I could. And I got out into back to civilization, which is at mile 29 is the top of this mountain but there’s houses.

The last three miles is downhill. Three miles back to the starting line through country roads. And the checkpoint there. It was 6pm. And they say alright, well, Whoever didn’t get here by six, we’d have to take you down the hill. You got to get in the bus.

And I was like, I’m not getting in your bus. I don’t care what you do. I’m leaving goodbye. And they were like, really? I was like, really, goodbye. And I took off and I was holding myself up on my ribs because I couldn’t stand up straight. But I was okay. I was okay. And then I passed the guy’s house. He comes out of his house. He’s like, are you okay? Like you’re leaning all the way over?

I was like, I don’t know if I’m okay. I think I’m okay. And I sat down hung out with him. He was really cool. And older Vermont guy. And then the sweepers came by in a car and they’re like, go Pete. Okay, we’ll see you at the finish line. Right? I was like, yeah, I’m good. Like, yeah, go man go.

So I got down to the finish line. I was like, within 200 meters, I could see the finish line and straighten up and pull my head I’m talking my shirt like, act like I got my act together, went as fast as I could to the finish line got through and all those sweepers who were trying to get me off the course were cheering me on.

Good job, you made it. You made it, we love you! Giving me hugs, you’re the reason we do this. You’re so great. And I finished in 12 hours, and I got a DFL, I did not finish last. So there was a girl behind me, which was great. And so I accomplished my goal. I was so happy. It was like one of the great moments in my life. It was really, really cool.

Patrick McGilvray
That’s so awesome. And I love your determination of like, you know, nope, nothing you can do or say is gonna get me into that van at this point. Like I’ve trained for this. I’m ready for this. I’m doing it. What was the deal with you, like leaning to the left? What was that all about?

Pete Caigan
So Luis at the finish line personally came up to me, he’s like, I’m so happy you did this. I’m so happy you came back. You just show that like perseverance is I can work and use it was cool. And he said you got the leans, man. You got the leans, you gotta go take care of that. And I was like, what?

And I realized what had happened is that and I looked it up. And it’s a thing that can happen where your core fails. And you can’t keep your spine up, right. And it’s not entirely uncommon. So I realized it was going on and I just kind of took it easy. And I went to bed and I woke up I was fine, the next day, it was Mother’s Day. It was gone. I was totally fine. I was able to walk. it I wasn’t even that sore. But it’s called the leans I guess, in that community.

Patrick McGilvray
Shows you the power of like or the importance of strength training and core strengthening probably would help with that.

Pete Caigan
Yeah, I think so. It was definitely a weakness, maybe doing more that type of work would be helpful.

Patrick McGilvray
So what an amazing experience. I mean, super. I mean, it’s kind of life changing, right?

Pete Caigan
You know, it is and it completely translates to everything else. Because everything else that feels hard. I’m like, this isn’t that hard? It isn’t just running things, but things I’m talking about, like emotional things or work? You know, struggling to do the stuff I don’t want to do is not as big a struggle, because it’s like, oh, I freaking ran 32 miles.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, you’ve proven to yourself that not only can you do hard things, but you can accomplish things that maybe you’re not even. Maybe you don’t even believe in yourself or you’re not even sure you can do it. But you can do it anyway.

Like, you can push yourself out of that comfort zone. And because you’re, you know, remember you were talking about how you were having some doubts in those weeks leading up to it and thinking about, you know, pulling out and things like that, but you didn’t do any of that you just kept moving forward, and you just stayed with the plan, and you trusted your training, and look what you did. It’s amazing.

Pete Caigan
Yeah, thank you. I mean, I do have such a long term goal to be so persistent and consistent with something and then see the results was a big lesson for me. Or, you know, sometimes it’s persistence over a long period of time that gets you somewhere, it’s not the two week effort could be the year of doing something, a lot of things, you know.

I will say thank you, Patrick, for your guidance. And you know, what you do is so valuable and like, I feel like I went to school, honestly, nutrition and fitness and in many ways, life. I had no idea you can eat like this or train like this, it’s gonna be like, it wasn’t something that I thought could be for me, people used to talk about being keto or low carb. Never seemed possible or appealing, just seemed like not normal. Now that I’ve been doing it. I see how, for me at least, it’s it’s a really good way to be.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, yeah. And just for clarification, like everybody does this a little bit differently, you know, the way that Pete approached his nutrition and training was probably different from everybody else I work with.

So there’s no two people really doing this exactly the same, which is the way it should be, you know, there isn’t one plan, one diet, that’s going to work perfectly for everybody. I know, that’s what everybody wants you to believe out there. But it’s just not true.

So we got to figure out what works for us as individuals. And that’s a big part of what Pete and I did is kind of that figuring out process, you know, figuring out the right combination of foods and training and strength training and in the running to make these positive changes for you as an individual.

Pete Caigan
With me in terms of like, I’d be like, oh, I’m eating too many nuts, I’m going to again, and I’m going again, not losing weight. I mean, he’s not saying I can’t eat nuts, and you would often just be like, oh, you just eat less nuts. And that was so helpful for me. That was like one of those little tidbits to help me to realize that, you know, to do in my, what works for me, but maybe I don’t need to be so extreme.

Patrick McGilvray
So tell me where you are today with things. How’s everything going for you? How are you from like a nutrition standpoint? And from like a training standpoint?

Pete Caigan
Yeah, took the past month, I’ve been very light training. But I took a week off pretty much but not even off just not running a lot, or lifting a lot. And then the past three weeks, I’ve been running three times a week and lifting two to three times a week.

And actually, today was day one of the 13 week training cycle of doing another 50k.

Patrick McGilvray
Oh, heck yeah!

Pete Caigan
So I’m back in the game. I’m way ahead of where I was 13 weeks out from the last run. Now, that being said, I’m humble about this experience, I don’t expect this to be easy. And I have to do 20 mile uphill run on Sunday. So that’s no joke. So that’s good.

And the nutrition, I was a little lax after the race on the food for a couple of weeks. But I didn’t really gain weight. But now I’ve been eating really clean and on program for about 10 days, and I’m getting down to my lowest ever. Lowest weight ever for many, many years. And I’d like to get lower for this race I see, you know, even just five or 10 pounds less, thatwill make a big difference to be no faster. And I want to know I don’t expect to compete, but I’d like to be able to faster at this point. So that’s one of my goals for this.

Patrick McGilvray
Cool and how are you feeling about this next 50k having just completed this last one? Feeling a little bit different about this one?

Pete Caigan
You know, in my mind, I’m like, oh, this will be easier but it’s not easy. There’s nothing easy about this. So I do feel a little differently, but I’m also slightly reserved. Uh, in terms of letting myself feel like this is like a big deal, because it is a really big deal to do something like this again. Yeah, out there, in the woods all day.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, you probably have more confidence. But you also know it’s still gonna be at some point you’re going to enter the pain cave out there, right? Because we all do.

Pete Caigan
This one has no time cut off, which is interesting. Oh yeah,

Pete Caigan
Oh yeah, interesting.

Pete Caigan
I’m excited. And it’s a lot different to train where I live in summer than in the winter. So I enjoy the heat. So I’m really actually, it’s good to be out there this summer where we live, which is blueberry, wild blueberries and you know, streams, you can drink water on them. It’s gorgeous.

Patrick McGilvray
Heck, yeah. That’s amazing. And then maintenance, like, how’s that for you feeling like, that’s pretty easy for you to do going forward? Like, this has become something that is more natural for you now?

Because I know, we talked about at the beginning of the process, especially with the change in diet, it was a little bit of a struggle, you know, there was a little bit of a transition period there where you’re like, you know, this is kind of hard. I’m a little hungry. I’m a little cranky, you know, um, uh, but now, like, how does all that feel for you?

Pete Caigan
I mean, it feels easy. Maintenance is a non-issue to get leaders challenging, because I’m kind of like anyone wants to be so, you know, when I get into like, eating, try to get leaner. It’s a little challenging. It’s okay, maintenance, though. Not hard, because I’m eating foods that I like. Intermittent fasting has gotten so easy.

Patrick McGilvray
That just feels normal to you now?

Pete Caigan
Yeah, I don’t want to eat after dinner or in the morning. I don’t want to be. So. Yeah. Okay. Make the window 14 hours just set to 16.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, one of the goals is that by this point of the process, this should all feel easy and effortless. It just should feel normal for you. Yeah.

Pete Caigan
I don’t have to talk about it with people anymore. I don’t have to make a big deal. And what to do. If I go to a restaurant, I can like whisper to waiters like keto. They know exactly what to do. You know, no low carb, no carbs. No problem. I don’t even talk about it with people anymore. I used to talk about whatever. You really care what I eat. Anyways, that was a big hard thing at first, which it isn’t now.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, yeah. And then you mentioned something which is like, the maintenance is easy, once you get used to this, but then if you’re like, Okay, I want to, I want to lose a few pounds here, you know, I want to get down to a little bit lower weight, that’s easy to do, too. It just takes a little bit more discipline a little bit more, you got to be a little stricter about what you’re doing.

So sometimes I recommend to journal food again, you know, or track your macros again for a couple of weeks, you know, just to get you to the place where you’re like, okay, now I’m, you know, kind of recommitted. I know what I’m doing. And I can start to make some incremental changes here. Because it doesn’t take much to dial the weight down. You know, sometimes it’s just cutting back on the amount of food you’re eating, you know, and, you know, something as simple as that.

Pete Caigan
Yeah, it is a small margin between gaining and maintaining, small margin’s maintaining.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and it’s possible while you’re training, for an event like this, especially at the beginning of the training cycle, it’s a little bit easier to do. To lose weight, like you can, you can lose weight while you’re training for sure. I don’t recommend it as you’re getting into that last half of the training cycle, like the you know, as your race is approaching, you don’t want to be focused on losing weight, you just want to be like maintaining and focused on running and improving your performance and doing all the things you know and not be stressed out about trying to lose. But it’s possible, it’s possible to do that.

Pete Caigan
One other thing I want to say before we wrap up is it was a big step for me to take to decide to get in touch with Patrick to do the one on one initial consultation. You know, I somehow found the podcast I don’t know how. But I started listening to it a lot. I was like, I like this guy’s like my buddy like I felt simpatico with you.

But to like call somebody you don’t know to like do something over the internet was a big stretch for me and to think about spending money on it was a stretch and then I realized like investing in myself.

First of all, you eat less food so you’re gonna save money. But it was a big stretch to do it on this like kind of anonymous internet thing, but I can’t say like, how great it was of a decision for me to do it in the community is incredible.

I mean twice a week to have these group calls, which I still get on, at least one of them a week is very big, because these people who I’ve never met, are like my buddies, and we’re like working together on the same goals. And it seems a little weird that you’ve never met these people in person, but it really works. It works for me. So I highly recommend if you’re thinking about it, to have the faith that it can be real.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, it is a great group of people. And you’re right, I feel like you guys are kind of my family in a way, you know, because we do spend a lot of time together. And not only do I do all these one on one calls, where you and I spent a lot of time together over the last six months or so. But then we do the group calls where we all come together and, and can kind of share what’s going on share wins, you know, ask questions, and kind of…

Pete Caigan
They go through almost the same thing you go through. It’s like, we’re not all that different. Most of us and we each have our own issues, but there’s a lot of similarities. So to hear that someone else is struggling with something similar helps a lot, because then a lot of people have strategies that work out.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and I remember cracking up last week because somebody else shared a story of injuring themselves golfing right before their race, right. And I was like, and Pete, you were just like cracking up because you’re like, I did the same thing. And lesson here is like to stay away from golfing, you guys, okay? It’s a dangerous sport. It’s apparently very dangerous.

Pete Caigan
That’s serious.

Patrick McGilvray
Good stuff. Anything else you want to share? Pete, this has been awesome. Thank you for being here and sharing all this stuff with us.

Pete Caigan
Thank you for your work, Patrick, I know you’ve been working on this a long time. And you’re very thoughtful. And you put a lot of time into this. And, you know, just grateful for what you do. And it’s really what. So that’s all just gratitude towards you, and acknowledgement of all your hard work goes into this, as well.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, well, I’m just over here yammering on about stuff, you’re the one actually doing the work, you know, you showed up, you made a decision that you were going to conquer this 50k, you are going to lose the 30 pounds, you made that decision, which is really important.

And you said it was a little bit scary, because who is this guy, this random guy from the internet or whatever. But you made that decision. You committed to the process, you know, which was I’m going to change the way I’m doing things. Because what you were doing wasn’t working for you. It was, you were having the opposite effect. You were getting slower, you were gaining weight, you were feeling terrible. Like you needed to shift that you know, and that takes a commitment.

And that is scary. Because you’re getting into uncharted territory. When you do that, you know, you’re like, I don’t know if it was gonna work or not, you know, I don’t know what’s gonna happen here. But you committed to the process.

And anybody listening to this, if you just do that part right there, if you commit to the process, like I know, this is what I want for myself, here’s the goals that I have for myself. They’re very clear, very measurable goals. And then you commit to that process of change, I guarantee you can get there. As long as you don’t quit. The only way you can really fail kind of like with the 50k is if you just quit, you get on the van. But if you keep going, you’ll finish. Right.

Pete Caigan
So let’s keep going back every time you fall off, it’s like okay, well, I fell off. Well, we’re back on.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. So you did the work. And I’m proud of you for showing up for yourself for making that commitment to yourself for making that decision that this is what you wanted for yourself. And then just doing it and like continually sticking with it.

Even though it was hard sometimes, even though it was a struggle sometimes. You didn’t give up. You kept going. And I can’t wait to hear about your next 50k. I want to I want to hear about how you crush your last time on that.

Pete Caigan
You know, yeah, I’ll keep you posted for sure.

Patrick McGilvray
All right. Well, thanks again, Pete for everything. Thanks for being here. I really appreciate it.

Pete Caigan
Thank you, Patrick.

Patrick McGilvray
So a lot of runners who struggle to lose weight, wonder if coaching is a good fit for them. I’m going to be very honest about this. Coaching is a good fit for you. If you are willing to go all in on yourself.

You have to be willing to commit to the process of change. You have to be willing to get uncomfortable. You have to be willing to give it everything you’ve got.

The people in my program who do amazingly well are the ones who go all in on themselves. There are a few people who don’t do so well. And those are the people who kind of half ass it, right?

You cannot expect to accomplish anything of value in your life by half assing it, you just can’t. You have to full ass everything you do. So if you’re ready to commit to becoming the most badass version of yourself, then you’re ready for The Coaching Project.

That’s my lifetime access weight loss coaching program for runners. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/join to learn more. That’s all I got for you today, love you all, keep on Running Lean and I’ll talk to you soon.

180. What I Learned Running Solo for 12 Hours

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Recently, I completed a self-supported, solo 12-hour run. I’ve always wanted to do a 12-hour event, but I could never really find a race that spoke to me. So, I decided to take things into my …

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Podcast Transcript

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Hey there, and welcome to episode 180 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today what I learned running solo for 12 hours. So recently, I completed a self supported solo 12 hour run.

I’ve always wanted to do a 12 hour event, but I could never really find a race that I got excited about and nothing really spoke to me. So I decided to take things into my own hands and just do it myself.

So in this episode, I’m going to share what I learned running solo for 12 hours. What prompted me to want to run alone for so long, how I approached my training, how I fueled during the event and some interesting lessons I learned along the way.

And if you’ve ever considered doing an ultra marathon, this episode is for you, I think you’ll learn a lot. Also, if you have no desire to ever do an ultra marathon, I think you’ll still get a lot out of this episode, because a lot of the training, and the fueling principles especially, apply to races that have many different distances. Cool.

But first, if you’re ready to begin your weight loss journey, then I have just the thing that gets you started on the right track, I put together a brand new hour long training just for you. It’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronger Runner.

I will teach you how to lose weight the right way and how to keep it off for good without running a million miles a week. Okay, some of the things that you’ll learn in this comprehensive training is why running more and eating less is not an effective way to lose weight and what to do instead.

One thing most runners don’t do or do wrong when they’re trying to lose weight, the best fuel to use to improve your endurance and lose weight, how to create the mindset shifts necessary to develop new habits that actually make all this last for life.

And then one thing that I did that was really the key for me being able to keep the weight off for good. And it’s something you should probably do too. And there’s a lot more in there. But those are some of the key points that you’ll learn.

So if you’re ready to get started, if you’re ready to get leaner and stronger, run faster, longer become the healthiest and most badass version of yourself, check out this free training, just go to my website runningleancoaching.com and click on Free Training. There’s never going to be a better time than right now to get started. So just go to my website runningleancoaching.com and click on Free Training. Alright, cool.

So let’s talk about this: what prompted me to want to run solo for 12 hours? So I came across a podcast where some people were talking about the 12 hour walk. And ‘The 12 Hour Walk’, if you’re not familiar, is a book that Colin O’Brady wrote.

Colin O’Brady is a pretty badass adventure guy. Like he’s done all kinds of endurance events like walking solo across Antarctica, and actually breaking the record for doing it faster than anybody else.

So he walked across Antarctica, pulling a sled with all of his, you know, food and equipment and everything that he needed for this track. And he ended up walking something like 12 hours a day, because I guess that’s how much daylight they had.

And he covered I don’t know, 50 miles a day or something close to that, 48 miles a day. But he ended up doing this for like 53, I believe, straight days. So that is pretty insane to do something like that.

So during the pandemic, he, you know, was back home and, you know, was itching to get outside and do something. And of course, you know, all this stuff is shut down. He couldn’t travel.

And so he decided to just take a walk and he left his house and he ended up walking for like 12 hours by himself without his phone. And he was just like, this is really fascinating. And he learned some interesting lessons along the way by doing this.

It’s a very personal sort of inward journey. It was for him anyway. And he thought, wow, I think a lot of people could benefit from doing something like this. So he wrote the book, the 12 Hour Walk.

And it’s a great book, if you want to check it out. It really goes into a lot of detail about all the things that he’s accomplished, and he’s accomplished some crazy events, some crazy endurance events.

But in the book, he talks about this 12 hour walk and encourages people to just do this. Leave your house, go walk for 12 hours by yourself unplugged. And some of the rules that he puts down are this, so it’s supposed to be done solo. So you do it by yourself, no friends, no dogs, no turtles, cats, anything, any other animal, it’s just supposed to be you. So it’s a solo journey.

And the length of time needs to be 12 hours. You know, it can be longer if you want, but that’s like the minimum right? So 12 hours is the length of time we’re talking about. And you need to be by yourself and there’s no, no phones involved.

So no headphones, no texting, no talking to anybody on the phone, no listening to podcasts, no listening to audiobooks, no listening to music. No, you know, FaceTiming people while you’re out there, it’s supposed to be a solo journey. Now you can take your phone with you, which I did. And I recorded a few short videos or a few voice memos or typed in some notes. I especially took some notes about my fueling during the event, just so I could keep track of when I was, you know, fueling.

So I could, you know, know how much time had elapsed between the last time I fueled. But it’s supposed to be done in silence, like you’re supposed to be just quiet, you know, and really not talk to people. And so that’s what the 12 hour walk is.

Okay, so I heard about this. And I heard some people talking about this on a podcast. And it really started, the wheels in my brain started turning because I was like, oh, man, I’ve always wanted to do a 12 hour event. And a lot of the 12 hour events or 24 hour endurance events, if you’re familiar with these things, a lot of times they do them on a short, one mile or two mile loop.

A lot of times they’ll do it at a track. So you’re running around a track for like 12 hours. And to me, that sounds terrible. The few miles like loop through the woods would be doable, but also you get sort of, you know, just used to the same things over and over again. So that really never spoke to me.

Like I just never was really interested in doing an event where I’m going to be running for 12 straight hours or 24 hours around a track or something like that. So I thought wow, this is pretty interesting. Because I get to do this anywhere that I want, I can go and run around my neighborhood, I can go down, you know, I live close to the Ohio River, I can go down to the river and run along the river.

And I’ll tell you about what I ended up doing and where I ended up going in a minute. But it was just sort of like this free form event like you can do it any way you want. So that really appealed to me. The solo adventure part of it appealed to me because I’ve you know, I’ve done a lot of running by myself for sure, I’ve done a lot of long distance running where I’m by myself for long stretches of time, but never more than an hour or two, something like that.

And then you’re like you hit an aid station or you’re running with other people or maybe you’re listening to something on the phone or talking to somebody. And then that aspect of not having your phone on and not having that distraction and, and listening to a podcast or an audiobook or something like that.

I love listening to podcasts and audiobooks when I run. It’s like I get to learn while I’m running. You know, I get to learn about you know, some badass, you know, adventurer guy, or whatever it is. And I really enjoy that. I don’t do that all the time, but I do enjoy that.

And so that appealed to me, like unplugging basically for 12 hours. So that part appealed to me. So this is kind of my, what prompted me, you know, and why I decided I wanted to do this. And then, of course, being a runner, I was like, well, I’m not going to walk this thing, I’m going to run it.

And I ended up doing a run-walk approach. And I’ll talk about that next and I want to talk about the training but just understand that this is something that you can do anytime you want. And if there really aren’t any rules other than what I just mentioned there, like if you need to take breaks, take breaks.

If you need to use a bathroom somewhere, use a bathroom, if you need to get some food, get some food, but the idea is that you kind of carry the food that you need, take a backpack or a Camelback or something like that. And then it should be self supported. There should be no distractions, it should be an internal journey, as well as an external physical journey. Okay.

So how did I approach my training? What did I do there? So, my idea was, my focus was always going to be on 12 hours. I wasn’t concerned about distance or time or pace or anything like that. I just wanted to be out there running for 12 hours.

And so I was going to I made a decision early on, that I was just going to do this slow and easy, that I wasn’t going to try to break any records here. And that if I could get to 50 miles, I would consider that to be a huge success. So that was kind of my goal, really, my big goal was like, you know, just to finish it, and just to keep, you know, running for 12 hours.

So, the way I approached my training, I started training for this thing back in like December, January. And the event was on May 27, that’s the day that I picked, so that was Memorial Day weekend, which was about three weeks after the Flying Pig Marathon, which I did, which was the Floating Pig Marathon since we had so much rain that day, it was crazy.

But I knew I wanted a little bit of time to recover from that race until before I did this other Ultra event. So 50 miles was the goal, May 27, was the date I picked. And I started training in December, basically January, and I was just building my base at the beginning.

I divided my training into three main sections. So the and as we get closer to the race, the running becomes more specific to the race. So at the beginning of my training cycle, I was doing more speed work, doing shorter, faster runs doing hill repeats and, and sprint intervals, and tempo runs and things like that.

As I got closer to the race, I stopped doing a lot of the speed work. And I just focused on, like dialing in sort of that race pace that I was going to use during the event itself, which was very slow. It’s like 13 minute miles, which is what I ended up averaging for the event itself, which I thought was fine, you know, it’s fine for me.

And that’s the way that I kind of approached the training. So, you know, I did a lot of miles, especially in that second and third phase of my training cycle, a lot of miles at a slow pace, and kept my heart rate down. And really the whole point of this was just to be out there for 12 hours, and enjoy it. I guess as much as you can enjoy running for 12 hours or being out there running and walking for 12 hours. And really just to finish.

And so I didn’t I didn’t put a lot of pressure on myself. I did have that goal of 50 miles. And so that was one thing where I was like, I do want to hit 50 miles. And that was totally doable. I knew that if I could get to about a 14 minute pace 14 something I knew that I would get to 50 miles.

So that was kind of the goal from a pace standpoint. So a lot of my training was just done by myself without my phone. So I just leave my phone at home and start getting used to running without any sort of distraction. Okay.

That was interesting, because think about this, how much time do you spend completely unplugged. Not looking at a screen, not watching TV, not listening to music, or podcasts, or books, or the radio in your car. Not talking to other people. Not calling someone or texting someone.

Think about this. This is one of the big lessons I learned because I was like, I do not spend much time during any given day completely unplugged. And that’s what was really interesting to me, that it made me hyper aware of how much time I actually spend distracting myself from whatever’s happening in the moment.

Think about it, like I was at the gym this morning. And I usually have my headphones when I’m at the gym and I’m listening to a book or something like that. And I forgot them right. I left them at home. So I’m just like, whatever. I’m just going to sit here in between sets and just look around, I guess I don’t know, what do you do? It’s kind of weird.

I was like, what did we used to do back in the day when we didn’t have cell phones? I guess we would just sit there and look at each other. Right? So I was just sitting there and I looked around and I started to see every single person in the gym staring at their phone.

Every single person that wasn’t actively lifting was like staring at their phone. Every person. It was wild. And I was just thinking wow, that’s so interesting. We are so connected to our phones that even two minutes in between sets we can’t not be sitting there staring at our phones, you know.

So for me, one of the biggest lessons that I learned really is that I can spend time away from screens and I can spend time away from distracting myself from the moment and that I want to be more mindful, I want to have more mindfulness in my life, I want to be more present in the moment, not just for myself, but for other people as well.

And so that was a huge lesson that I learned. And it took training for this event, and then actually doing the event to sort of bring that really into my focus and into my attention. So during the event, there were so many times where I was wanting to whip out my phone and call somebody, or text somebody, oh, I just thought of something I need to tell my kids. I better just text him.

And I was like, nope, I had my phone with me, but it was just for taking a couple of quick videos and some voice memos that I was recording, and a couple of notes that I was writing just because I wanted to keep track of my fueling, right.

So I did have my phone with me, but it was in airplane mode. So it was basically all I could do it use it for was recording messages, taking pictures, that kind of stuff. And I didn’t pull it out that often I was really just focused on being in the moment.

And that was one of the biggest lessons I learned is that I distract myself a lot. And we all do. We are constantly distracting ourselves. Aside from sleeping. We either have, we’re talking to someone, we’re listening to something, we’re watching something, we’re reading something, we are constantly bombarded with information, and constantly connected and constantly distracted from the moment. So just think about that.

How can you maybe change that? What does that look like for you? Can you spend some more time just in silence, maybe mindfulness meditation, maybe just leave your phone at home, when you go for a run, leave those headphones at home, take your phone if you want to, if you need it for emergency or something like that, but just take leave the headphones at home. Interesting, right? It may be an interesting experiment to do.

Okay, so the training I did was pretty standard, nothing really fancy there. Other than, you know, I shut down the speed work during that last six weeks or so and really just focused on really hammering the long distance getting used to running with a backpack because I did carry a backpack with water and fuel and things like that.

And that was it, like the training was pretty, you know, standard and really not a whole lot to discuss there. Other than, you know, just those last six weeks or so I just really ramped up the mileage. You know, I was doing you know, my weekly mileage ended up being I think at the peak was something like 60-65 miles a week.

But the long runs on the weekends were, you know, 25 and 12 was like the longest I did. 26 and 10, something like that. So that was the training. And then so my approach for the race itself, I decided I was going to bring the minimal amount of fuel that I needed.

And I was thinking because I’m fat-adapted, I don’t really need a whole lot in the way of fuel for something like this, but I wanted to maintain some semblance of energy. So I did use some fuel. And the idea was that I was going to start to run fasted and have some coffee before I left the door or headed out the door. I had some coffee about 6am and was out the door by 6:22 is when I started on a Saturday morning.

So I started fasted, just had some saltwater before I started and some coffee and that was it. The saltwater was actually an LMNT that’s an electrolyte drink. So I did my electrolyte drink, no calories, really no sugar or anything like that. And just some coffee, headed out the door.

And then my goal was to fuel every hour, and to get about 150 calories per hour 150 to 200 calories per hour. That’s all I wanted. I didn’t want more than that, because I don’t really need more than that. So, and I practiced during my training with this and this is something important for you.

If you’re doing a half or full or any kind of long distance event, you’ve got to practice your fueling during training, like all your long training runs should be dress rehearsals for your event. Okay, so just make sure you’re training the way that you’re going to be racing, right so I did this regularly.

And I’ve tried a few different types of fuels and things like that, I ended up going mostly with the Muir energy gels and those things, they have like four ingredients. It’s like almond butter, cacao, some blackstrap molasses, that’s the carbohydrate that they use in there. And then some salt, something, maybe there’s five ingredients, some other kind of flavoring in there, but they’re very clean.

Some people don’t like the way they taste, I think they taste fine. They’re kind of good, actually, I think they have almond butter as another ingredient depending on which one you get: cashew butter, almond butter. But they’re pretty good and have good, clean ingredients.

There are a little bit of carbs, like 12 carbs per packet. And they’re 150 calories. So one of those per hour was kind of my goal. And I had a couple other things that I had just had in my closet that I just pulled out a couple other types of fuel. But they were all very similar and all about 150 calories each. So that was what I planned on doing. And I stuck to that plan pretty well.

So after about an hour of running, I did my first Muir, and then kind of kept doing that every hour or so there was a couple of times where I lost track of time, and I looked down, I’m like, oh, it’s been like an hour and a half and I haven’t fueled at all, better do something. And then the next one I did a little bit shorter, like, you know, I just had to kind of tweak it a little bit.

But at the end of the day, I think I only used eight or nine of those. So it should have been 11. And I think I brought 11 with me, and there were a couple left when I got home. So maybe I used eight or nine of them in total. So it didn’t even need as much as I brought with me, you know, and I was really trying not to weigh myself down the pack that I had fully loaded with water, two liters of water plus all the, you know, goos and the phone and stuff like that, we’d like eight and a half pounds, so it wasn’t super heavy.

But eight and a half pounds is eight and a half pounds added to, you know, your body weight as you’re running for 12 hours, right. So I wanted to keep things as light as possible. So I just brought the bare minimum and I didn’t even use all of it. And I felt fine.

The race itself was pretty uneventful other than so I headed out of my house. And it was cool in the morning. You know, it’s very cool, probably in the high 50s, right. And I was like, oh my god, this is perfect, you know, but it got hot that day, it ended up being in the high 70s.

And two things that really helped. Number one is that I chose a rail to trail, also the little Miami Recreation Trail, that was kind of the majority of the run for me was on that trail. And I hit that during the peak of the day. And it’s very shaded because there’s trees on both sides.

And most of it, there’s some sections that are totally exposed, and it was getting hot. So that helped. So the location that I picked for this thing really did help. Also, it ended up getting cloudy in the afternoon, which was amazing because when the clouds came over it dropped the temperature down and kept me from like, I was getting hot with the sun out I was really getting hot.

And so the clouds really helped a lot. And so for that second half of the day, you know, I finished at 6:20pm. The second half of the day was warmer, but it could have been a lot worse. So I was thankful for the clouds. So I took off from my house. I ran out to this trail, which is about 12 miles from my house. So I took another path called the Watson Way, it’s another rail to trail that sort of connects to this other one.

And I ended up running from my house 26.2 miles to a little town called Loveland. And, you know, that is the farthest I’ve ever run by myself. The farthest I’ve ever run in one direction, that’s for sure. And so when I was in Loveland, I was like, 5 hours and 36 minutes into this thing. So I wasn’t quite halfway but close to it. And I decided that was a good point to turn around. And my goal was to make it a double marathon.

So if I got to, like 52 miles, that was the goal. At that point, I was like, I think I can do this. You know, I’m padding my time a little bit because I might slow down towards the last half of this thing. And I did slow down a little bit towards the end just because I did have a little bit of extra time and so I did a little bit more walking during the last hour or so, a little more walking, and a little less running and it felt fine.

You know, all in all, the event was great. I did stop to refill water a couple of times, because the two liters of water that I had wasn’t going to be enough. I ended up stopping at a Starbucks on the way out towards Loveland.

So during the first half, I stopped at Starbucks and got some ice water, took that with me, that felt great. Stopped at a little bike shop that had cold waters and filled up my backpack with cold waters on the way out. I did that again on the way back, stopped at that Starbucks again, on the way back in, I ended up getting an iced coffee, which was amazing. So delicious.

And then that gave me a little bit of an extra boost there for the last few hours that I have out there. And then you know, I ended up just finishing feeling pretty good. The only problem I had during this thing was that my knees are kind of messed up, like I’ve fallen down on the trail so many times that my knees occasionally will kind of start talking to me and my right knee was kind of talking to me towards the end of this thing.

And I was like, yeah, I think I’m ready to be done. And then as soon as I finished and I stopped, and I sat down, and I took a shower and stuff like that my knee just swelled up, it was huge. And just bending, it was very painful. And walking was hard.

Like, I messed myself up pretty bad, like, not even knowing that I was in, you know, doing any kind of damage to the knee. That knee is fine now like it just took a couple of days for the inflammation to go down. I don’t know what the issue is with that knee. But it does do this every now and then.

And I’m just going to take it easy and not overdo it here during the next few weeks. But it’s been fine since then. It took a couple of days for that swelling to go down, but it’s been fine. So the event itself was great. I did it solo, I did it without talking to people.

For the most part, when I did stop, I had to like, you know, talk to the people that sold me the water or the coffee or whatever. But other than that, and one guy that ran past me, there were some running groups running on Saturday morning. And one guy in a running group said, Hey, I love your podcast.

And I kind of just looked and waved because I didn’t want to say anything because I’m like I’m trying to be quiet and not say anything. So for the guy that ran past me and said, hey, I love your podcast, on the Murray trail, I think you’re with the tri-state group, then hey, I’m gonna say, hey, thank you for listening. I appreciate that. And I appreciate that you gave me the shout out during the run, but I was being quiet at the time.

So I wasn’t talking to anybody. And I did run into my son. I’m like, you know, he was running towards me on one section of the trail. And I’m like, what are you doing out here and he’s like, I just went out for a run today. And he didn’t know where I was running. And so he didn’t know he was going to run into me. I’m like, hey, I’m not supposed to be talking to people. He’s like, cool, I’m gonna leave. And I’m like, cool. Alright.

So that was kind of fun. And by the way, I ended up running almost 53 miles total. So it was a double marathon and a little bit more. So that was cool. So a couple of lessons that I learned through this whole thing, number one, that you have to get out of your comfort zone if you want to grow.

And I’ve talked about this before, but this brought it all home to me in a big way that this was an uncomfortable event fFor me. It was uncomfortable for a lot of reasons: because of the silence because of no distractions, because I had to be in the moment. And because it’s 12 hours of running, come on.

It was hard, you know, something that was very challenging to do the training was hard. For this event, the event itself was hard. But coming out of this, I feel like a little bit of a different person. You know, I feel like I have learned some things and I’ve grown and I’ve like, every time I challenge myself and I try to do something like this, like, once a year.

Every year, I try to pick some event, something that I’ve never done before and do it. So anytime I do something like this, it causes me to level up, causes me to grow and it causes me to become more and become closer to that ultimate version of myself that I’m always working towards. It’s a work in progress. It always is.

But doing things like this. I want to encourage you to do something like this because things like this cause you to level up, they cause you to grow and they cause you to evolve as a human being, okay.

The other lesson that I learned is that being alone in silence without the distractions for 12 hours is really hard. We are so used to using our devices and distracting ourselves that to do this was a challenge but it was great. I loved it. At the end of the day. I was like, wow, I’m like I didn’t need it. You know, I don’t need to distract myself, I could just be in the moment.

And it got me thinking about when I was younger. You know, we grew up without the internet without cell phones. Well, we did have like a Sony Walkman you could wear you know, and listen to tapes, you know, that was awesome. But even so, like, we didn’t take those everywhere we went, you know, and so there was so much more in the moment.

Mindfulness, I guess you would call it, we didn’t know, it was called that at the time. Now we have to call it a certain thing, because it’s so different from what we’re used to doing. But that’s just how we were back in the day, you know. And so it just really made me realize how distracted we are all the time.

And how much I am craving, and I think we all kind of crave a little bit of like silence and internal, an internal journey, so to speak. Okay. Another lesson I learned was this, that we all have an inner dialogue, we all have an internal voice that’s kind of talking all the time.

And I realized that that voice never really stops, it’s there’s always going and even being out there, I thought, this voice has got to stop at some point here. And it sort of did at least it got quieter after about four or five hours, but it took four or five hours out there running by myself for this to even like calm down at all. Okay.

And then I noticed that there were times where I started just talking to myself out loud. So that into your internal voice that I had, maybe I was missing it, I don’t know, but I would just start talking to myself out loud. And it wasn’t like seeing anything, you know, mind bending or anything like that.

I would just be like, oh, hey, I wonder if it’s time to drink some water. Maybe I need to grab a gel. Maybe it’s time to feel? Gosh, that tree is cool. Oh, man, I’ve been on here for a long time, those clouds look interesting. Like just whatever. I was sort of, like narrating things, and I had to like, stop myself and be like, dude, what are you doing? I was craving some sort of, I don’t know if it’s a distraction, but some sort of a dialogue.

And so I started just creating a dialogue to myself, Okay. But all in all, I would suggest that if you want to challenge yourself, and if you want to level up and if you want to see what you’re capable of, and if you want to learn some lessons that you know are going to be personal to you, then I would suggest doing something like this, you don’t have to run it, you could walk it. It can be something that you do once a year, twice a year, I’m considering doing this again in the fall as a walk.

And I might invite you to join me, not in person, but virtually and we can all do this, maybe we pick a date. And we all do this together, so to speak. You know, we all do it on the same day in our separate towns in our separate cities, separate countries, whatever. And it could be something where we all learn some lessons together, we kind of come back and commiserate on what we’ve learned together. Sounds cool.

So all in all, this was a successful event. For me. It’s my first 12 hour timed event. And I enjoyed it. I really did. I enjoyed the the aspect of doing it however, I wanted to do it, you know, picking my own route, picking how I wanted to approach the fueling and, and hydration and all those things myself.

Making all those decisions myself and not having to, you know, have it be dictated by a race director and a certain location and a certain day in a certain time and certain types of fuel they have out there. Like I just did it myself. And it was awesome.

And actually, it was one of those things that like wasn’t that big of a deal. It really wasn’t. I devoted one day, one day to bettering myself to being mindful with myself being alone with myself. And I would suggest that you kind of do the same thing. Cool. All right.

So that’s all I got for you here. And listen, if you’ve ever struggled with losing weight, if you want to lose weight and keep it off and you want some help doing that, I want you to know that I have a great coaching program, and it was created with you in mind.

The Coaching Project is my lifetime access weight loss coaching program for runners. You and I will work closely together to put together a custom nutrition plan for you to get you to your goals. And we also talk about building strength and we talk about endurance and we talk about mindset, okay, and then we meet regularly to see what’s working and what’s not and then course correct as needed.

And one thing you have to understand about coaching is it’s not like some other diet or something like that. It’s not like a one size It’s all cookie cutter approach, right? You’re an individual, you have your own sets of goals and lifestyle and food preferences and the way you want to work out and things like that. And I’m going to meet you where you are.

And we’ll put together a plan that you feel good about because you have to enjoy what you’re doing. You have to enjoy the food, you got to enjoy the way you work out. Because if you don’t, you’re not gonna stick with it.

So if you want to just stop struggling, you want to start getting results, check out The Coaching Project. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/join to learn more, I’d love to see you in The Coaching Project. All right, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all. Keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.