Hey Athletes! Want to know how to pace, prepare, and tackle endurance events? Make sure to catch the newest episode of Ask Me Anything!
Episode 22 of Ask me Anything is up!
Pacing, Preparing and Tackling Endurance Events
In this week’s episode of Ask Me Anything, Jerred and Joe answer’s Tom question on how to pace, prepare, and tackle endurance events. Each of the coaches gives their tips and examples from their own experience!
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Jerred
Transcript:
AMA: Pacing, Preparing and Tackling Endurance Events
[00:00:00] Jerred Moon: Welcome to garage gym athlete asked me anything. It’s pretty simple. I’ll be answering questions from the thousands of athletes that follow our daily programming. If you have a question or topic you want submitted, go to dot com slash AMA. Let’s get started.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the garage gym athlete podcast. Jared moon here with Joe Courtney. It’s up, Joe? Hi,
Joe Courtney: beard is back.
Jerred Moon: The beard is back. Hopefully more people have seen it cause it’s awesome. so we have a question from Tom today. we are doing an ask me anything if you didn’t know.
And Tom, he adds some specific questions about endurance events and we like to kind of generalize some of these. The the question so we can help more people, but also respond to Tom’s question. And Tom is he started, what was it? A half marathon, Joe? Yep. Yeah, he said he’s tackling a half [00:01:00] marathon and he has just asked some questions about preparation for something like that.
Especially if it’s maybe not in your normal training, you’re not like specifically training for a half marathon. So how do you prepare, how do you pace for something like that? and we, you know, we’ll, we will talk in general terms. because Joe’s done endurance events, I’ve done endurance events and we can just, you know, maybe shed some light on these things, things that we’ve probably mentioned throughout different podcasts, but it’d be nice to have like an, a consolidated resource here, man.
So I’ll throw it to you first. Like how do you, how do you approach these things,
Joe Courtney: prepared or during
Jerred Moon: yeah. What is your preparation? And again, this is, if you’re not going to specifically train for it, but you’re still going to prepare for it. How would you prepare?
Joe Courtney: So you got to do whatever you’re doing.
For the events. So if you’re just running a regular race, then just run on dirt or just run on, you know, gravel or nothing like, dang, we’re having a gravel pave pavement. There we go. There’s the thing. Yeah. Floor type stuff. Yeah. [00:02:00] If you’re doing like a Spartan or a trail race and run trails, biking, you bike, but.
I would just add some more on Saturdays and even some, you know, do zone two in that element. So if you’re doing a bike race, then do zone two biking versus versus the zone to run don’t do in general is good, but you’re still just getting your body used to that same movement for over and over. so you just feel like you feel like you’re home doing it, and have your, Extra and extra training day.
So far like of our program, we do four days a week. So have your fifth day be a workout centered toward preparing you for that. So do some, a little bit of longer distance, runnings, or longer intervals for the, on those Saturdays or whatever else are you extra training day, but for, well, actually I’ll just the past you for anything for preparing for it up to leading up to the race.
Jerred Moon: I think what you said there is very important and people need to realize. And most people do, but some people don’t, you can’t, if you’re preparing for a run and you want to do a lot of biking, it will not [00:03:00] translate. And I’ve had a lot of people try things like this, or talk to me about it. I’ve even tried it, you know, many, many years ago.
I remember, I wanted to try and increase my rogue endurance for the air force PT test. And I read some articles about how swimming can like drastically increase your VO two max. And so I was like, okay, I’m going to swim and not run to prepare for my mile and a half run in the air force PT test. There was no improvement in my mile and a half run at all, even though I swam like literally every day.
And so there’s just, it sounds dumb, but I thought if you’ve tackled VO, two, max has a whole, you know what you’re missing out on the actual. Muscles and the ligaments and the tendons and getting those things and that’s, what’s going to get painful or they’re not going to be ready to execute. So what Joe said is, is very, it seems very like, you know, logical, but it’s very important to not skip that step.
If you want to train zone two. For a lot of the other reasons we talk about is not going to matter as much, but if [00:04:00] you’re going into an event, then you definitely want to make sure training for that event. So other preparation, most of the time when I do these events, I just do normal training. I don’t do a lot of, Additional preparation other than what you said, Joe, like Fike race.
I, you know, I’ll do a long ride on Sunday. So I try to throw that modality and a little bit more also in the, in the programming, we always have a lot of conditioning and I’m always doing that modality and I won’t, I won’t, I won’t row, I won’t do anything else. I’ll only make sure I’m doing that one thing.
And then nutrition is the biggest preparation thing that I think you can do start experimenting with different fuels, and just getting ready for. For game day and cause you don’t want to change anything on game day, your add new supplements. Like if you’re gonna, if you’re gonna try something, then just make sure you’ve tested it, tried it before ahead of time.
and you know, your fueling strategy going in and especially if it’s a longer event and don’t, don’t try and make it up on, on that day. Cause it’s, it won’t go well for you.
Joe Courtney: Great segue for preparing during a, I would also, [00:05:00] as you’re getting close to the race for preparing, so say it’s a half marathon or a marathon, you’re going to have to figure out how to.
Like for me, if I was tackling one to just personally, I would try and figure out how to break it up to have at least a little bit of rest and recovery during, cause I’m not, I’m not going to be one to just run straight through and break any records or go for any, any time, any
Jerred Moon: time you’ve done a half marathon.
So did what’d you do when you actually ran a half marathon during the half months you did?
Joe Courtney: Well, the second one was the second one was just the battle purpose is there’s more than a half marathon for the Spartan. The first. half marathon where he’s actually just running a half marathon. I think we ran, we were kind of running it in spurts of like five Ks,
Jerred Moon: like
Joe Courtney: three or so miles, which seemed to work out well.
So like, like we didn’t rest at first until the, after the first five games, like, okay, we’ll go to this. And this is probably how I approach it now too, is break it up into five Ks and like get some water. You walk for a little while, rest your heart rate a little bit and then go back on it. And break it up like that throughout, toward the end we were, we were stopping about [00:06:00] every part of the last three miles and stop every mile because just like my knee or something else was hurting.
Cause I actually didn’t prepare for it at all, but it’s still like, that’s kinda how we, how we tackled it. And it’s probably how I do it now. Cause maybe one day I’ll run a full marathon. If I find a fun one to do, especially because you know, 15 miles in a Spartan like you do,
Jerred Moon: what’s a fun marathon.
Joe Courtney: Oh man.
So they have a star Wars ones at Disney, which are just look awesome.
Jerred Moon: So you like running costume or
Joe Courtney: something? Well, you can, there’s a bunch of people that do, but do you like actually run through the barks and then you end at a park? and it’s just Disney,
Jerred Moon: Disney quarter mile track?
Joe Courtney: No, not a quarter mile track at all.
So that would be good for you because it was just, you just pass everything once they also have a princess one, if you like, princess is better.
Jerred Moon: Great. I’ll.
Joe Courtney: Yeah, because Disney owns everything. So you can just any type of thing. Yeah. So break it up like that. I think if I were to do your a hundred mile bike race, which it’s still a, [00:07:00] we’ll see how it goes.
I would have to do it on a stationary bike. I’d probably break those up into twenties, 20 mile intervals, but rest a good five, 10 minutes, like with my eight feet elevated feet. Yeah. Feet elevated. so that’s how I would tackle it, break up your animals. And when you’re training trained for those intervals to see, okay, I can do this interval repeated times and not maxed out each time, because the first time you do that, that segment, it should feel fairly easy.
You should feel repeatable and then try and repeat those sections throughout versus just going, like, I’m just going to go fast and then you don’t want to slow down. I expect to slow down and that’s fine. If anything leaves something in the tank for the last like 20%, and then you can dial it
Jerred Moon: up. Yeah. So I think, event duration is, is a major factor there.
So for a half marathon, you know, I I’m, the only time I’ve done a half marathon was inside of a full marathon. And I remember, cause I looked at my time and stuff. I was like, okay, cool. That’s a half. but I didn’t, I didn’t take any breaks [00:08:00] or anything like that. I think that that’s good advice again.
I’m like, I think Joe has good advice that I just don’t listen to or don’t even think about. So when I ran a marathon, it was on a quarter mile track and I did not, we just didn’t stop when it stopped the whole time. and I mean, maybe we stopped for like a banana or something. And I didn’t know, because I’d never run a race like that before.
I didn’t know that they did that. I didn’t know they had like stations and stuff. So like when I did a a hundred mile bike race, they start off with stations, I think like every 10 miles. And then after. After like 30 or 40 miles, maybe even halfway, it spreads out real far. It’s like every 15 to 20 miles.
and again, yeah, I would always keep those to a minimum, like go in fuel. If I need to get some water bathroom, if it happens, if it’s necessary and then, get back on. But you know, Tom’s specifically asked like about pacing, like, okay, can I go fast for two miles, slow for one mile? I think that that’s fine.
Like. Because no, you’re not going for a time. Right? If you’re going for [00:09:00] time, you would just run as fast as you could the whole time, you know, for that, for that duration. But I think mentally that’s a good strategy. I think mentally that’s a really good way to break things up that way. If you don’t plan on stopping, you do want to move the whole time.
You have this, like, okay, for the next two miles, I’m going to keep this pace. And then I’m going to drop to 50% of that pace. After these two miles, I think mentally that’ll keep you going. and you just, you don’t want to quit. You don’t want to sign up for one of these things. They’re not. Not finish it.
So whatever you have to do mentally to get through
Joe Courtney: it. Yeah. Basically.
Jerred Moon: Yeah. I think that’s about it. And then if you are doing one of the long ones, that again, the fueling strategy is really important and then recovery, make sure you don’t just like do something the next day for recovery, like move your body.
If even if it’s just a walk, just do something for recovery and don’t skip that step or you’ll be way more sore than. You should have been FedEx. Got anything else?
Joe Courtney: I don’t think so. I think [00:10:00] that we pretty much hit on all those things.
Jerred Moon: Alright, cool. All right, Tom. Thanks for the question. If anybody else wants to ask a question, go to garage, gym, athlete.com/ama submit your question and we will get answered here on the podcast.
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