Top 5 ultra running mistakes not to make (endurance coach Ian Sharman's training advice)

[Music] and you must see a lot of clients country MTV do 50 miles 100 miles and what are the biggest mistakes you see people making as a whole in training for these lung disease everything yeah I think it's not realizing what the specifics of the race are so UTMB some of it's obvious you know you got mountains you've got technical trails so if you live in London pretty difficult to train for a lot of that but you can maybe get out to the South Downs you can get out for peak district things like that so it's possible to get on similar terrain no matter where you live even if it's awkward and you can't do it as frequently so that would be a big part of it that people are doing something so unfamiliar to them that their body isn't used to it and they don't know how to deal with that terrain or they don't have the kind of mountain skills they'd need another one would be whether it's heat or altitude or whatever other specifics can be in there so level being a great example is only a couple of weeks ago so many people DNF they're basically cuz they turn up right before the race and they don't give their body a chance to adapt to the altitude so that the biggest advice for that one is make sure you can get out there a minimum seven days in advance so a lot of history just making sure that the training is as you get close to race going to involve the similar things your body will need to go through and it's not like every single variable you treat the same so whether it's speed work or Hill work or technical running or heat or altitude there are different ways to train them and the timing of when you do it is different too so it's good to try and get some knowledge about that and get some expert advice and there's a lot out there already so that that's one of the biggest things definitely not doing specific training the other one is probably people turning up to races injured so kind of like we discussed at the beginning there it's like what's the stage so hard rock where you can be where they've wanted to do it for so long and then they get a little injured and they turn up and common senses they're never going to finish and they're going to really hurt themselves and they get part the way through the race and then drop out so that there's another thing sometimes you've got to call it a day like I've done with this race it is easier for me cuz I know I can get in it's I don't have to worry about the loss tree side of things but even in that even if it is a lot of tree stuff then it's not worth risking your health I mean again it's a fine line because this is inherently kind of bad for you in many ways for 100 miles there's no way you're fitter after that you've damaged your body but it also you don't want to be putting yourself in hospital or if you have kids or a job that you need to be fairly physical in you don't want to be then harming that afterwards and again every will have a different line of what they're willing to go through but to not get too carried away with it especially if it isn't your job well this race is a great example of bad pacing if you look at even the top runners there's pieces they go through the first half I'm insane like eight hours to calm is almost halfway in eight hours for 106 mile race no one's running 16 or 17 hours here I mean the winning time which was insane was just over 20 so that shows you how much slowdown there is so the difficulty is good starts on roads and there's a big field and people don't want to be in the congestion so they go off way too hard and then 10k into the race they realize that I think that applies to every race every race distance every type of runner every type of event road trail short long but here it's particularly obvious when you look at the splits early on holy crap those are fast you know that are they running the occ or UTMB they're going at that pace so yeah that but that's a difficult one to do because people judge it by what the others around them are doing and if they're all passing you you might still be going too fast but again experience helps with that and seeing the good pacing pays off in a race and that some degree you can't go too slow in the early miles because you hardly lose any time while if you go too fast you could burn yourself out and lose hours later on so if you can get that to work once in a race it's so much easier to buy into it and get it right another time but it's still a fine margin particularly for the guys trying to be competitive if they can't afford to go too slow they can't be too far back but yeah it's it's a difficult thing to judge and I'd say the more you race the more you can get a sense of that but anyone who is following utmb if you saw the splits and you saw how many of the top runners were dropping back or DN f'ing you can see how many people get that wrong even amongst the top runners I'd say number one would be not eating enough in your training runs a lot of people have 20 mile training runs and they barely need to eat and then they get to race day and scientifically eat loads and their stomach hasn't been trained for it the gut bacteria are not used to it and just they're not used to the effort of having to force yourself to eat for a day two days to get through this race so just making sure your long runs include that is part of it another thing is make sure you have enough variation in there because one thing to say o gels work for me in a marathon but can you keep eating gels for that number of hours often the answer is no because you get kind of palette fatigue and everything just tastes horrible and probably well at the end no matter what you do but you've got to have different types of tastes in texture so I always say try and have some sweet stuff savory stuff salty stuff something's a little bit harder more like real food some that's more race food have different options with drinks that work for you and also know what the sponsors are of the race so what they're gonna have at the aid stations and tests that because you want to know if that works or most important if it doesn't work for you and then you can avoid it and if it doesn't work here that's fine you can just work around that with crews and drop bags and stuff but it's always good to practice all of that in advance and then you can get a sense of how much you need to eat but it always takes discipline near the end of a race like this to keep eating I find the last 20 miles 100 miler it is insanely hard to eat anything and I have finished hundred miles where a nothing in the last 20 and won them as well in that but it's just case holding on for dear life I'm hoping that I don't suddenly bonk really badly and so it gets very risky when it's like that but it's there's no easy answers and there's no one's kind of rule that works for everyone of certain number of calories per hour per kilogram or anything like that it's really trial and error I know run as you can get by an erase like this on a hundred calories an hour are the ones at the top end the scale on six hundred calories an hour so you've got to find out what your stomach can can deal with and ideally the more you can eat that and be able to digest it the better but practice again is the thing that will tell you that most obvious one that encompasses all of it is not testing it out in advance I've made silly mistakes such as having a headlamp where I checked it was charged in advance I start and there was two hours worth of darkness of beginning and it stopped after 45 minutes so then I had an hour and 15 minutes of just needing to put it on the lowest setting and just kind of squinting and I had to stay away from other runners because their headlamps were taking my night vision away so everyone again can make mistakes but testing the gear make sure it doesn't shave make sure it fits well if it's a backpack that you can get access to things as you want to and you're not going to have something around bottom the packing and never actually use it be I mean gear again is testing it everything really in 100 especially hundred miles is about practicing and testing everything out getting confidence that it all works that you know what you're doing and then on top of that increasing your skill set for problem solving so none of that is easy and I mean that's why it's such a big deal completing these races whether goes well or whether you just get the finish line holding on it's so difficult to do and everyone should put a lot of value on any finish at this type of race but yeah that practice you can still make mistakes even if you've nailed it and then suddenly you stop nailing it because you took it for granted so that's another thing that people often make a mistake with I mean at western states just a couple months ago I've never had really problems with eating and I stuck to too much sugary stuff then couldn't really eat much after 10 hours lower energy levels as a result it was part of the reason the race didn't go quite to plan but again you know it's something I just assumed that I had in the bag and didn't need to worry about it and so I got a little complacent and paid a price and then just finally recovery and what are the biggest mistakes that you see that with people trying to do too much too soon again so allow a lot of time off after a race and mainly allow your body to dictate how long but I would say usually a couple of weeks of no running is a good rule after a hundred mile a walk as much you can that's great fact of recovery or light cycling swimming things where you're not really pushing it but you're getting the blood flowing around for muscles and getting all the good nutrients in so you're probably going to treat yourself a bit with food but make sure you get some good fruit and veg and and good produce of different types in there but yeah I think it's mine just getting back to it too soon or having the next race be too soon it's like oh I've got to start training because the next one's three weeks away instead of allowing your body time to actually bounce back okay well that's the thing that's why people enter so many in a row is that how well the next one's so good and also a lot of these mountain races are all in the summer so if you want to do two or three of them that automatically can packs them quite a bit would you say to do it yeah yeah so my initial response was well zero was the sensible number but I would say I mean I like to do about three per year two or three I've done four in the past like when I did the Grand Slam that was four in one summer I would not recommend that that's insanely hard and has the risk of maybe like damaging you permanently but yes spread them out if you had like one of the beginning of the year one early summer one later in the year I think that's not unreasonable because it's not like a professional Mariner who would typically do two because firstly they're aiming to be at the absolute peak of human performance so they've got to have a perfect build up with hundred-mile is you can afford to even be a little bit tired or not quite in perfect shape because the tactics and the experience and the knowledge and everything else come and just the mental toughness comes into it so much more but I would say effort for most people especially it's your first hundred mile er don't do to that year but maybe to the next year if it would go as well and you've recovered well and your coach obviously with Charmin ultra endurance coaching and you gave out tons of advice all the time my mentor most to you insurance yeah I've seen there's one thing six in my mind it made such a difference to my own running when I was fairly new to the sport so I loved the car made ultra in South Africa like a double Mary from distance it's actually the biggest ultra 25,000 people at that race so it makes actual UTMB look small which is crazy but I was there and I was lucky enough to meet Bruce Fordyce who's won the race nine times and I he was like a 216 marathon I when he was winning it I at the time was about a three hour marathon uh and he was talking about how he made sure his easy recurrent recovery ones were super easy and that he and the other African guys who train with would purposefully go very relaxed kind of eight nine minute mile pace and this is for super far from I thought well that's like walking for you and I don't go that slow ever so when I realized that easy days need to be really easy and that allows you to do your hard training days harder because you're better recovered it was like a massive change to my mindset it also meant that I went from like it just under three our marathon to a 230 marathon in two years with no other changes just making the easy days easier so that one it stuck with me because it made such a difference and it does tend to be the biggest difference I'd say between like a pro level runner ultra or crack or anything and a more amateur one is that the pros have hard hard days and lots of easy easy days and it's a big difference in them for amateur runners their hard day's a thirty seconds a mile quicker than the medium and they're easy days at thirty Seconds miles slower and it's within a narrow band that is kind of all more medium so they don't get enough stimulus from the hard stuff to really improve and they don't recover enough before the next hard one because they're not going easy enough on those easy days it's crazy how it's such a simple piece of advice can make a world of difference [Music] that's how I felt and actually knew one runner who every work every run she did would be a hard workout and she wondered why she kept getting injured and she kept getting slower that's because her body can't adapt to that you have to have a stimulus and then an adaptation period as it rebuilds you're not fitter when you finish a speed workout you've created the stimulus and broken down the muscle and so what she wasn't realizing was that the next day she wasn't ready to go hard again and so once she started actually throwing in some slow runs she improved massively and also stopped getting injured weekly training how many slow runs in that there's always a slight kind of argument of exactly what different definition of a fast run is but generally something like the 8020 rule if people have heard of that so 20% of your running being harder and 80% being easy so that's a good way to look at it that long runs would often have relatively easy stuff but if you look at say an Olympian it doesn't mean they're just jogging for 80 miles a week and running super hard for 20 they're easy runs might still vary between that super easy stuff I was talking about with Bruce Fordyce and maybe you know six 37 minute mile pace or six minute pace which is easy for them but it's making sure they're not in the medium part of doing things so there is a clear difference between a workout where they may be going for minute pace and their intervals and easy stuff for them which might be from six minute pace onwards so it is always in context for the person but roughly about 20% of your running should be some hard stuff but that doesn't mean 20% of it is sprinting or 5k intensity but that's that's the bit that gives you the biggest benefit overall the biggest stimulus but if you don't have the easy stuff in there you'll just wear yourself down and get over trained or injured [Music] but when you do you easy runs very very easy and also even in hard session you might have a couple of miles of jogging at the beginning a couple of miles at the end so that's again a chunk of the weekly mileage that is in the EZ category it's not like that whole run is super hard yeah well I mean we're taking people on at the moment we have an awesome team of superstar athletes and coaches so people like Ellie Green words that better who just sent the world record 400 miles they're all such knowledgeable people who all have a slightly different skill set so it allows us to kind of learn from each other and learn from the people that we coach as well Charmin ultra calm so my last name ultra calm which in America has a more comedy meaning because Charmin ultra is a toilet paper so they kind of announced that Charmin so Charmin ultra to most people America the people at least they remember I did that on purpose thank you know it's great talking to [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Wild Ginger Trail & Ultra Running

Views: 162,869

Keywords: ultra running, ian sharman, ultra mistakes

Id: sJxkGCGfr0I

Length: 15min 41sec (941 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 16 2020