Written by Andy Mouncey - http://www.bigandscaryrunning.com

Many people gear up to start a new year full of good intentions. Add some reality with these top five tips so you can avoid coming to an abrupt halt in February.

Don’t Join A Gym

In January. Do it in December or wait until February – ‘cos if you’re still motivated and have control (mostly) over the calories in and calories out part of your life by then the chances are you’ll be on your way to making those new habits stick without the leverage of a new monthly direct debit. Use a gym membership or classes as a reward. By Feb-Mar the gym will be quieter anyway as the initial surge through the doors will have abated. How do I know this? I used to manage one…

Don’t Be Lonely

Especially when the days are short. It’s much harder to make some new habits stick trying to do it all on your ownsome when the sun doesn’t shine much. Contract with friends, share your intentions with your significant others – and give them permission to poke you with a stick to keep you on track. Make it sociable as well as effective and it’s more likely to stick because first and foremost we humans are social animals – even though we all know those who prefer a cave...

Don’t Start With The Big Stuff

Big scary sudden change is a real challenge whether it’s in life, business, sport or everyday life. Start where you can make the most difference for the least amount of effort in the shortest possible time. Once the boulder is moving you’ll be more motivated to tackle the biggies. Pace yourself – you don’t have to solve it all in January.

Don’t Do Stuff You Don’t Like

Swimming is a great full-body exercise – but that’s no good if you don’t like swimming. An exercise class can be a great way to workout at a higher level than you would on your own – but that’s no good if you don’t do classes.

Start with stuff you like to do; stuff that’s fun and has at least a bit of a challenge.

Upping the ante once you have momentum means you are more likely to persevere as the challenge ramps up.

Don’t Compare Yourself To Others

At least to start with. What you’re actually doing is comparing their outside to your inside: They may look fantastic – but you have no way of knowing what’s going on inside their head or the price they are paying for that look. Put your focus on stuff you can control - your choices, your progress, your thoughts, your behavior. While it can be helpful to use role models and targets, in the final analysis the only comparisons that matter are self to self – a mindset that puts you in a position of personal powerfulness as opposed to the horrible fretting other stuff.

Written by Andy Mouncey - http://www.bigandscaryrunning.com

At least, that’s what all the lead characters in the great movies/TV thrillers have. In fact, they go further than that because they give at least one entire wall of their house/office over to The Plan which is then peppered with pictures, photos, lines, notes and pins.

Claire Danes as the CIA operative in C4s USA TV series Homeland

Russell Crowe’s police officer in American Gangster

John Malcovich as the creepy assassin in Line Of Fire

Robert Downey Jnr as Sherlock Holmes in The Game Of Shadows

Heck, any police/crime/CSI drama worth it’s salt knows full well that you have to have at least a large wall-mounted pin board or three and periodic shots of people moving pins and paper around while stroking their chin thoughtfully under furrowed brows.

Even Tom Cruise in his Mission Impossible office knows you gotta have a plan – it’s just that he’s pimped his to be all virtual and whizzy so that it does really cool things as he waves his arms about.

A Big Wall Plan means you can:

Have an excuse for standing around looking as though you are daydreaming when in actual fact you are just ‘working your plan’

Move stuff around to create something different if you want to change the view

Physically rip stuff off/screw stuff up and throw it away which always feels very theraputic

Truly, in TV-land at least, The Plan is central to your storyline.

We (that’s me and friend Speedy Paul) were therefore very impressed when other running friend Andy B announced the other day as we were all halfway up an early morning ascent of our local mountain Ingleborough in the Yorkshire Dales that he had drawn up A Plan:

‘Ooooo! That means you’re all focused and structured and motivated and everything, then!’ we sneered, secretly jealous of his new-found dedication to The Search For (Sustained) Speed, and starting to remember the times when we too had A Plan and how that plan had actually really helped.

‘When I had A Plan before,’ said Andy, ‘It really helped…’ and he then proceeded to sell the benefits to an audience who were actually already converted – it’s just that we’d been doing the Spontaneity v Obligation bit for a while, and were actually quite comfortable with that, thankyou.

Too late: Andy had sprinkled and the Seeds Of Doubt had been sown.

Time to turn the tables and put the focus back on him.

‘Well it’s all well and good having A Plan,‘ we said, ‘That’s the easy bit. And now you’ve gone and Shared The Plan – which is a considerably more scary proposition especially for a repressed bloke, so well done – which means all that remains is the really hard bit: Working The Plan.’

We paused for dramatic effect – and to concentrate on our breathing as the slope kicked up viciously.

‘But don’t worry: now that you’ve told us we can be really helpful by asking you all about it every time we see you. We could ring you up and remind you. Send helpful and motivating messages. Give you an opportunity to report on how well you’ve been doing your homework - and belittle you and make you feel like a worthless worm if you miss a session.’

We grinned across at him with adoration shining in our eyes: ’We can be your special support team!’

And so it went on.

But however much we sought to have a little boyish fun at his expense the fact remained that Andy B had A Plan and was therefore clearly about to Go Places: We didn’t and by implication we weren’t. And that sucked.

By the time I got home the cogs were still churning: I wanted to Go Places – heck, I always want to go places - I had an office wall (which was blank) so what was I waiting for?

‘I know what the problem is’ I said to my wife Charlotte - we’d been worrying away at the business recently looking for ways to get to where we wanted to be faster – ‘I don’t have A Big Plan up on my wall. I used to have one, but…’

So that afternoon The Plan went up on the wall: business, family, running – it all went up there – and I spent many happy and smug minutes standing staring and stroking my chin thoughtfully.

Later that day I spoke to Andy B on the phone.

‘So that run this morning, then’ I asked. ‘Were we on or off Plan?’

‘Nah, don’t worry,’ came the reply ‘I haven’t started yet.’

Written by Andy Mouncey for http://www.runultra.co.uk

Andy Mouncey had thirty years of sport under his belt – thirteen of which were in ultra trail running. Then, disaster struck and he got an injury that just would not heal. Running is his business as well as his pleasure and his life is inextricably linked with the sport. So, what did he do to mend and how has he coped? He took the time out to talk Alice Morrison through it, and share his advice on what to do if you are unlucky enough to suffer a similar fate.

Q. Andy, tell us a little bit about yourself.

A. I am married, with two small boys, and live in the north of England. I have run my own business for the last 15 years: www.bigandscaryrunning.com. Triathlon was my sport for 17 years till 2003 since then it’s been trail ultras.

Q. How did your injury first manifest itself and what did you do about it?

A. I got a pain in the ball of my left foot after a run that I thought was just bruising. I’d bashed it on a rock or something. RICE didn’t fix it after a couple of weeks so it was off to X-ray.

Q. What happened after the realisation that this was going to take a long time? How did you cope mentally? What process did you go through with your doctors?

A. That first X-ray (May 2014) was inconclusive though the symptoms pointed towards a stress or partial fracture of the foot even though I wasn’t completely convinced. Not least because I’ve got about 30 years of training history in me, so this big running lark is hardly new. I’d not changed shoes or racked up my mileage and I’d not had a fall. Your typical NHS GP and consultant is a tad sketchy on runners and running and my first contacts didn’t exactly fill me with confidence. Waiting 10 weeks for results doesn’t exactly help either.

In the end, I went through two cycles of misdiagnosis and erroneous treatment. This added six months to the process. Worse, the knock-on effects from THIS – my foot was immobilized which in effect turned it into a block of wood – added about the same again. I had to both undo the cumulative dysfunction that had set in and start a treatment consistent with the actual problem, which had changed and become chronic. The first breakthrough came when I swallowed hard and went private for consultations and MRI and bone scans. The second breakthrough came when I ignored key parts of that advice, followed my intuition and effectively did the opposite, and worked with a local practitioner who knew me and my body.

What I eventually established was that the original problem was in one of the seasmoid bones in my foot. These are tiny pea-shaped bones under the ball of the foot. One of mine was in two parts – not a problem in itself apparently and likely to have been that way since birth – held together by strong fibres. In May last year, they decided to part company. Errors in diagnosis and delays in results meant that secondary and tertiary symptoms set in complicating and exacerbating the problem. What should have been fairly simple to treat, turned into a many-headed monstrous nightmare that I allowed to affect much of my personal, work and family life.

Q. What did you learn from this process, what tips can you pass on to other runners?

A. The scan is not the territory – just because it ain’t on the scan doesn’t mean it don’t exist. If you feel it, then it’s there alright.

    Consultants are not God. They are not the expert on you, and they can put too much faith in reports and scans.
    You are the expert on you. Especially so if you have a ton of self knowledge and emotional intelligence honed in part by decades of training.
    Pay attention to your intuition. If your little voice keeps pulling you back to something then odds are it’s worth being pulled back to.
    Be prepared to kiss a few frogs. Sorry!
    We are designed to move. So, unless something is physically broken, then immobilization should NOT be part of treatment.
    Keep a diary. I have done since I was a teenager and it’s a godsend for revealing patterns, trends and linking cause and effect over time.
    Unless you are very lucky, odds are you will have to look outside the NHS to get a breakthrough if you’re stuck. It won’t be cheap, but it will be fast and that may make a difference between sorting the original problem, or a whole set of new ones.
    If it’s complicated, then you need someone who knows the sport and has decades of experience working and treating healthy and broken people, and someone who will get their hands on your injury. Decades of experience mean they can piece together the ‘possible’ from the likely and unlikely patterns. The good ones are open minded enough to know what they don’t know and are honest enough to tell you so.
    Keep looking. There are people who care in this world and there IS a solution out there. If it’s soft tissue, it WILL heal.
    Change one thing at a time so you can monitor cause and effect.
    That change might have to be 180 degrees, but if you are going round in circles then being brave enough to do the opposite of well-meaning advice COULD be the pattern-breaker. It sure was for me.
    Of course it’s important and it is only running. Get perspective: No-one’s trying to shoot you for what you believe and odds are you know where your next meal is coming from.

Q. Where are you now. What is the prognosis going forward?

A. I recently completed a 50 minute jog pain free on road and have just started to include very short relaxed sprint uphill efforts as a way of putting more force through the structure while minimizing impact. The foot can be sore for a while afterwards, but so far it’s holding up. It’s taken two months to build to this and I started with 5 x 200 paces jog/100 paces walk. So this is monumental progress.

I started swimming again over the summer, after 12 years out of the water. I am also building my biking back up. While the prognosis is good, the timescale is uncertain. I’m pretty much working week by week, and I can see my future training being much more of a mix of running, cycling and swimming. Just to make sure that sticks, I’ve entered an Ironman race next July. As you do…

Andy Mouncey had thirty years of sport under his belt – thirteen of which were in ultra trail running. Then, disaster struck and he got an injury that just would not heal. Running is his business as well as his pleasure and his life is inextricably linked with the sport. So, what did he do to mend and how has he coped? He took the time out to talk Alice Morrison through it, and share his advice on what to do if you are unlucky enough to suffer a similar fate.

Q. Andy, tell us a little bit about yourself.

A. I am married, with two small boys, and live in the north of England. I have run my own business for the last 15 years: www.bigandscaryrunning.com. Triathlon was my sport for 17 years till 2003 since then it’s been trail ultras.

Q. How did your injury first manifest itself and what did you do about it?

A. I got a pain in the ball of my left foot after a run that I thought was just bruising. I’d bashed it on a rock or something. RICE didn’t fix it after a couple of weeks so it was off to X-ray.

Q. What happened after the realisation that this was going to take a long time? How did you cope mentally? What process did you go through with your doctors?

A. That first X-ray (May 2014) was inconclusive though the symptoms pointed towards a stress or partial fracture of the foot even though I wasn’t completely convinced. Not least because I’ve got about 30 years of training history in me, so this big running lark is hardly new. I’d not changed shoes or racked up my mileage and I’d not had a fall. Your typical NHS GP and consultant is a tad sketchy on runners and running and my first contacts didn’t exactly fill me with confidence. Waiting 10 weeks for results doesn’t exactly help either.

In the end, I went through two cycles of misdiagnosis and erroneous treatment. This added six months to the process. Worse, the knock-on effects from THIS – my foot was immobilized which in effect turned it into a block of wood – added about the same again. I had to both undo the cumulative dysfunction that had set in and start a treatment consistent with the actual problem, which had changed and become chronic. The first breakthrough came when I swallowed hard and went private for consultations and MRI and bone scans. The second breakthrough came when I ignored key parts of that advice, followed my intuition and effectively did the opposite, and worked with a local practitioner who knew me and my body.

What I eventually established was that the original problem was in one of the seasmoid bones in my foot. These are tiny pea-shaped bones under the ball of the foot. One of mine was in two parts – not a problem in itself apparently and likely to have been that way since birth – held together by strong fibres. In May last year, they decided to part company. Errors in diagnosis and delays in results meant that secondary and tertiary symptoms set in complicating and exacerbating the problem. What should have been fairly simple to treat, turned into a many-headed monstrous nightmare that I allowed to affect much of my personal, work and family life.

Q. What did you learn from this process, what tips can you pass on to other runners?

A. The scan is not the territory – just because it ain’t on the scan doesn’t mean it don’t exist. If you feel it, then it’s there alright.

  • Consultants are not God. They are not the expert on you, and they can put too much faith in reports and scans.
  • You are the expert on you. Especially so if you have a ton of self knowledge and emotional intelligence honed in part by decades of training.
  • Pay attention to your intuition. If your little voice keeps pulling you back to something then odds are it’s worth being pulled back to.
  • Be prepared to kiss a few frogs. Sorry!
  • We are designed to move. So, unless something is physically broken, then immobilization should NOT be part of treatment.
  • Keep a diary. I have done since I was a teenager and it’s a godsend for revealing patterns, trends and linking cause and effect over time.
  • Unless you are very lucky, odds are you will have to look outside the NHS to get a breakthrough if you’re stuck. It won’t be cheap, but it will be fast and that may make a difference between sorting the original problem, or a whole set of new ones.
  • If it’s complicated, then you need someone who knows the sport and has decades of experience working and treating healthy and broken people, and someone who will get their hands on your injury. Decades of experience mean they can piece together the ‘possible’ from the likely and unlikely patterns. The good ones are open minded enough to know what they don’t know and are honest enough to tell you so.
  • Keep looking. There are people who care in this world and there IS a solution out there. If it’s soft tissue, it WILL heal.
  • Change one thing at a time so you can monitor cause and effect.
  • That change might have to be 180 degrees, but if you are going round in circles then being brave enough to do the opposite of well-meaning advice COULD be the pattern-breaker. It sure was for me.
  • Of course it’s important and it is only running. Get perspective: No-one’s trying to shoot you for what you believe and odds are you know where your next meal is coming from.

Q. Where are you now. What is the prognosis going forward?

A. I recently completed a 50 minute jog pain free on road and have just started to include very short relaxed sprint uphill efforts as a way of putting more force through the structure while minimizing impact. The foot can be sore for a while afterwards, but so far it’s holding up. It’s taken two months to build to this and I started with 5 x 200 paces jog/100 paces walk. So this is monumental progress.

I started swimming again over the summer, after 12 years out of the water. I am also building my biking back up. While the prognosis is good, the timescale is uncertain. I’m pretty much working week by week, and I can see my future training being much more of a mix of running, cycling and swimming. Just to make sure that sticks, I’ve entered an Ironman race next July. As you do…

If you want to keep up with Andy’s progress, his blog is here. Or follow him on Twitter (@AndyMouncey).

- See more at: http://www.runultra.co.uk/Articles/November-2015/Recovering-from-injury-Q-A-with-Andy-Mouncey#sthash.WNoajGlB.dpuf

Andy Mouncey had thirty years of sport under his belt – thirteen of which were in ultra trail running. Then, disaster struck and he got an injury that just would not heal. Running is his business as well as his pleasure and his life is inextricably linked with the sport. So, what did he do to mend and how has he coped? He took the time out to talk Alice Morrison through it, and share his advice on what to do if you are unlucky enough to suffer a similar fate.

Q. Andy, tell us a little bit about yourself.

A. I am married, with two small boys, and live in the north of England. I have run my own business for the last 15 years: www.bigandscaryrunning.com. Triathlon was my sport for 17 years till 2003 since then it’s been trail ultras.

Q. How did your injury first manifest itself and what did you do about it?

A. I got a pain in the ball of my left foot after a run that I thought was just bruising. I’d bashed it on a rock or something. RICE didn’t fix it after a couple of weeks so it was off to X-ray.

Q. What happened after the realisation that this was going to take a long time? How did you cope mentally? What process did you go through with your doctors?

A. That first X-ray (May 2014) was inconclusive though the symptoms pointed towards a stress or partial fracture of the foot even though I wasn’t completely convinced. Not least because I’ve got about 30 years of training history in me, so this big running lark is hardly new. I’d not changed shoes or racked up my mileage and I’d not had a fall. Your typical NHS GP and consultant is a tad sketchy on runners and running and my first contacts didn’t exactly fill me with confidence. Waiting 10 weeks for results doesn’t exactly help either.

In the end, I went through two cycles of misdiagnosis and erroneous treatment. This added six months to the process. Worse, the knock-on effects from THIS – my foot was immobilized which in effect turned it into a block of wood – added about the same again. I had to both undo the cumulative dysfunction that had set in and start a treatment consistent with the actual problem, which had changed and become chronic. The first breakthrough came when I swallowed hard and went private for consultations and MRI and bone scans. The second breakthrough came when I ignored key parts of that advice, followed my intuition and effectively did the opposite, and worked with a local practitioner who knew me and my body.

What I eventually established was that the original problem was in one of the seasmoid bones in my foot. These are tiny pea-shaped bones under the ball of the foot. One of mine was in two parts – not a problem in itself apparently and likely to have been that way since birth – held together by strong fibres. In May last year, they decided to part company. Errors in diagnosis and delays in results meant that secondary and tertiary symptoms set in complicating and exacerbating the problem. What should have been fairly simple to treat, turned into a many-headed monstrous nightmare that I allowed to affect much of my personal, work and family life.

Q. What did you learn from this process, what tips can you pass on to other runners?

A. The scan is not the territory – just because it ain’t on the scan doesn’t mean it don’t exist. If you feel it, then it’s there alright.

  • Consultants are not God. They are not the expert on you, and they can put too much faith in reports and scans.
  • You are the expert on you. Especially so if you have a ton of self knowledge and emotional intelligence honed in part by decades of training.
  • Pay attention to your intuition. If your little voice keeps pulling you back to something then odds are it’s worth being pulled back to.
  • Be prepared to kiss a few frogs. Sorry!
  • We are designed to move. So, unless something is physically broken, then immobilization should NOT be part of treatment.
  • Keep a diary. I have done since I was a teenager and it’s a godsend for revealing patterns, trends and linking cause and effect over time.
  • Unless you are very lucky, odds are you will have to look outside the NHS to get a breakthrough if you’re stuck. It won’t be cheap, but it will be fast and that may make a difference between sorting the original problem, or a whole set of new ones.
  • If it’s complicated, then you need someone who knows the sport and has decades of experience working and treating healthy and broken people, and someone who will get their hands on your injury. Decades of experience mean they can piece together the ‘possible’ from the likely and unlikely patterns. The good ones are open minded enough to know what they don’t know and are honest enough to tell you so.
  • Keep looking. There are people who care in this world and there IS a solution out there. If it’s soft tissue, it WILL heal.
  • Change one thing at a time so you can monitor cause and effect.
  • That change might have to be 180 degrees, but if you are going round in circles then being brave enough to do the opposite of well-meaning advice COULD be the pattern-breaker. It sure was for me.
  • Of course it’s important and it is only running. Get perspective: No-one’s trying to shoot you for what you believe and odds are you know where your next meal is coming from.

Q. Where are you now. What is the prognosis going forward?

A. I recently completed a 50 minute jog pain free on road and have just started to include very short relaxed sprint uphill efforts as a way of putting more force through the structure while minimizing impact. The foot can be sore for a while afterwards, but so far it’s holding up. It’s taken two months to build to this and I started with 5 x 200 paces jog/100 paces walk. So this is monumental progress.

I started swimming again over the summer, after 12 years out of the water. I am also building my biking back up. While the prognosis is good, the timescale is uncertain. I’m pretty much working week by week, and I can see my future training being much more of a mix of running, cycling and swimming. Just to make sure that sticks, I’ve entered an Ironman race next July. As you do…

If you want to keep up with Andy’s progress, his blog is here. Or follow him on Twitter (@AndyMouncey).

- See more at: http://www.runultra.co.uk/Articles/November-2015/Recovering-from-injury-Q-A-with-Andy-Mouncey#sthash.WNoajGlB.dpuf

Andy Mouncey had thirty years of sport under his belt – thirteen of which were in ultra trail running. Then, disaster struck and he got an injury that just would not heal. Running is his business as well as his pleasure and his life is inextricably linked with the sport. So, what did he do to mend and how has he coped? He took the time out to talk Alice Morrison through it, and share his advice on what to do if you are unlucky enough to suffer a similar fate.

Q. Andy, tell us a little bit about yourself.

A. I am married, with two small boys, and live in the north of England. I have run my own business for the last 15 years: www.bigandscaryrunning.com. Triathlon was my sport for 17 years till 2003 since then it’s been trail ultras.

Q. How did your injury first manifest itself and what did you do about it?

A. I got a pain in the ball of my left foot after a run that I thought was just bruising. I’d bashed it on a rock or something. RICE didn’t fix it after a couple of weeks so it was off to X-ray.

Q. What happened after the realisation that this was going to take a long time? How did you cope mentally? What process did you go through with your doctors?

A. That first X-ray (May 2014) was inconclusive though the symptoms pointed towards a stress or partial fracture of the foot even though I wasn’t completely convinced. Not least because I’ve got about 30 years of training history in me, so this big running lark is hardly new. I’d not changed shoes or racked up my mileage and I’d not had a fall. Your typical NHS GP and consultant is a tad sketchy on runners and running and my first contacts didn’t exactly fill me with confidence. Waiting 10 weeks for results doesn’t exactly help either.

In the end, I went through two cycles of misdiagnosis and erroneous treatment. This added six months to the process. Worse, the knock-on effects from THIS – my foot was immobilized which in effect turned it into a block of wood – added about the same again. I had to both undo the cumulative dysfunction that had set in and start a treatment consistent with the actual problem, which had changed and become chronic. The first breakthrough came when I swallowed hard and went private for consultations and MRI and bone scans. The second breakthrough came when I ignored key parts of that advice, followed my intuition and effectively did the opposite, and worked with a local practitioner who knew me and my body.

What I eventually established was that the original problem was in one of the seasmoid bones in my foot. These are tiny pea-shaped bones under the ball of the foot. One of mine was in two parts – not a problem in itself apparently and likely to have been that way since birth – held together by strong fibres. In May last year, they decided to part company. Errors in diagnosis and delays in results meant that secondary and tertiary symptoms set in complicating and exacerbating the problem. What should have been fairly simple to treat, turned into a many-headed monstrous nightmare that I allowed to affect much of my personal, work and family life.

Q. What did you learn from this process, what tips can you pass on to other runners?

A. The scan is not the territory – just because it ain’t on the scan doesn’t mean it don’t exist. If you feel it, then it’s there alright.

  • Consultants are not God. They are not the expert on you, and they can put too much faith in reports and scans.
  • You are the expert on you. Especially so if you have a ton of self knowledge and emotional intelligence honed in part by decades of training.
  • Pay attention to your intuition. If your little voice keeps pulling you back to something then odds are it’s worth being pulled back to.
  • Be prepared to kiss a few frogs. Sorry!
  • We are designed to move. So, unless something is physically broken, then immobilization should NOT be part of treatment.
  • Keep a diary. I have done since I was a teenager and it’s a godsend for revealing patterns, trends and linking cause and effect over time.
  • Unless you are very lucky, odds are you will have to look outside the NHS to get a breakthrough if you’re stuck. It won’t be cheap, but it will be fast and that may make a difference between sorting the original problem, or a whole set of new ones.
  • If it’s complicated, then you need someone who knows the sport and has decades of experience working and treating healthy and broken people, and someone who will get their hands on your injury. Decades of experience mean they can piece together the ‘possible’ from the likely and unlikely patterns. The good ones are open minded enough to know what they don’t know and are honest enough to tell you so.
  • Keep looking. There are people who care in this world and there IS a solution out there. If it’s soft tissue, it WILL heal.
  • Change one thing at a time so you can monitor cause and effect.
  • That change might have to be 180 degrees, but if you are going round in circles then being brave enough to do the opposite of well-meaning advice COULD be the pattern-breaker. It sure was for me.
  • Of course it’s important and it is only running. Get perspective: No-one’s trying to shoot you for what you believe and odds are you know where your next meal is coming from.

Q. Where are you now. What is the prognosis going forward?

A. I recently completed a 50 minute jog pain free on road and have just started to include very short relaxed sprint uphill efforts as a way of putting more force through the structure while minimizing impact. The foot can be sore for a while afterwards, but so far it’s holding up. It’s taken two months to build to this and I started with 5 x 200 paces jog/100 paces walk. So this is monumental progress.

I started swimming again over the summer, after 12 years out of the water. I am also building my biking back up. While the prognosis is good, the timescale is uncertain. I’m pretty much working week by week, and I can see my future training being much more of a mix of running, cycling and swimming. Just to make sure that sticks, I’ve entered an Ironman race next July. As you do…

If you want to keep up with Andy’s progress, his blog is here. Or follow him on Twitter (@AndyMouncey).

- See more at: http://www.runultra.co.uk/Articles/November-2015/Recovering-from-injury-Q-A-with-Andy-Mouncey#sthash.WNoajGlB.dpuf

Andy Mouncey had thirty years of sport under his belt – thirteen of which were in ultra trail running. Then, disaster struck and he got an injury that just would not heal. Running is his business as well as his pleasure and his life is inextricably linked with the sport. So, what did he do to mend and how has he coped? He took the time out to talk Alice Morrison through it, and share his advice on what to do if you are unlucky enough to suffer a similar fate.

Q. Andy, tell us a little bit about yourself.

A. I am married, with two small boys, and live in the north of England. I have run my own business for the last 15 years: www.bigandscaryrunning.com. Triathlon was my sport for 17 years till 2003 since then it’s been trail ultras.

Q. How did your injury first manifest itself and what did you do about it?

A. I got a pain in the ball of my left foot after a run that I thought was just bruising. I’d bashed it on a rock or something. RICE didn’t fix it after a couple of weeks so it was off to X-ray.

Q. What happened after the realisation that this was going to take a long time? How did you cope mentally? What process did you go through with your doctors?

A. That first X-ray (May 2014) was inconclusive though the symptoms pointed towards a stress or partial fracture of the foot even though I wasn’t completely convinced. Not least because I’ve got about 30 years of training history in me, so this big running lark is hardly new. I’d not changed shoes or racked up my mileage and I’d not had a fall. Your typical NHS GP and consultant is a tad sketchy on runners and running and my first contacts didn’t exactly fill me with confidence. Waiting 10 weeks for results doesn’t exactly help either.

In the end, I went through two cycles of misdiagnosis and erroneous treatment. This added six months to the process. Worse, the knock-on effects from THIS – my foot was immobilized which in effect turned it into a block of wood – added about the same again. I had to both undo the cumulative dysfunction that had set in and start a treatment consistent with the actual problem, which had changed and become chronic. The first breakthrough came when I swallowed hard and went private for consultations and MRI and bone scans. The second breakthrough came when I ignored key parts of that advice, followed my intuition and effectively did the opposite, and worked with a local practitioner who knew me and my body.

What I eventually established was that the original problem was in one of the seasmoid bones in my foot. These are tiny pea-shaped bones under the ball of the foot. One of mine was in two parts – not a problem in itself apparently and likely to have been that way since birth – held together by strong fibres. In May last year, they decided to part company. Errors in diagnosis and delays in results meant that secondary and tertiary symptoms set in complicating and exacerbating the problem. What should have been fairly simple to treat, turned into a many-headed monstrous nightmare that I allowed to affect much of my personal, work and family life.

Q. What did you learn from this process, what tips can you pass on to other runners?

A. The scan is not the territory – just because it ain’t on the scan doesn’t mean it don’t exist. If you feel it, then it’s there alright.

  • Consultants are not God. They are not the expert on you, and they can put too much faith in reports and scans.
  • You are the expert on you. Especially so if you have a ton of self knowledge and emotional intelligence honed in part by decades of training.
  • Pay attention to your intuition. If your little voice keeps pulling you back to something then odds are it’s worth being pulled back to.
  • Be prepared to kiss a few frogs. Sorry!
  • We are designed to move. So, unless something is physically broken, then immobilization should NOT be part of treatment.
  • Keep a diary. I have done since I was a teenager and it’s a godsend for revealing patterns, trends and linking cause and effect over time.
  • Unless you are very lucky, odds are you will have to look outside the NHS to get a breakthrough if you’re stuck. It won’t be cheap, but it will be fast and that may make a difference between sorting the original problem, or a whole set of new ones.
  • If it’s complicated, then you need someone who knows the sport and has decades of experience working and treating healthy and broken people, and someone who will get their hands on your injury. Decades of experience mean they can piece together the ‘possible’ from the likely and unlikely patterns. The good ones are open minded enough to know what they don’t know and are honest enough to tell you so.
  • Keep looking. There are people who care in this world and there IS a solution out there. If it’s soft tissue, it WILL heal.
  • Change one thing at a time so you can monitor cause and effect.
  • That change might have to be 180 degrees, but if you are going round in circles then being brave enough to do the opposite of well-meaning advice COULD be the pattern-breaker. It sure was for me.
  • Of course it’s important and it is only running. Get perspective: No-one’s trying to shoot you for what you believe and odds are you know where your next meal is coming from.

Q. Where are you now. What is the prognosis going forward?

A. I recently completed a 50 minute jog pain free on road and have just started to include very short relaxed sprint uphill efforts as a way of putting more force through the structure while minimizing impact. The foot can be sore for a while afterwards, but so far it’s holding up. It’s taken two months to build to this and I started with 5 x 200 paces jog/100 paces walk. So this is monumental progress.

I started swimming again over the summer, after 12 years out of the water. I am also building my biking back up. While the prognosis is good, the timescale is uncertain. I’m pretty much working week by week, and I can see my future training being much more of a mix of running, cycling and swimming. Just to make sure that sticks, I’ve entered an Ironman race next July. As you do…

If you want to keep up with Andy’s progress, his blog is here. Or follow him on Twitter (@AndyMouncey).

- See more at: http://www.runultra.co.uk/Articles/November-2015/Recovering-from-injury-Q-A-with-Andy-Mouncey#sthash.WNoajGlB.dpuf

Written by Mark Woolley - http://markstevenwoolley.blogspot.com.es

Never has a topic, not just in ultramarathon running but in the nutritional world in general been subjected to a generalised pseudoscientific analysis as that of diet.
 
It is of course very natural for every athlete to contemplate and analyse every aspect of their training in order to improve performance and that includes diet. The chemicals that you put into your mouth ultimately translate into performance and it is natural to analyse what is the optimum combination of these chemicals that lead to a best performance in an event. But diet is not just about optimum performance; it is about generalised optimum health as well. The two are closely related as without optimised health there can of course not be optimised performance.
 
I will argue a case that a diet for optimised health is indeed a diet for optimised performance but that the diet during that optimised performance is actually radically different from the diet that lead to that optimised performance.

In the introductory sentence I mentioned that the subject of diet is one that has been subjected to more pseudoscientific (bad science) analysis than any other, not just in the world of ultra-running but in the dietary world in general. Body biochemistry is hideously complex with interplay of literally thousands of biochemical pathways, a symbiosis of which is a long way from being fully understood. It would be fair to say that at best we only partially understand these mechanisms and at worst completely misunderstanding them leading to practices that not only do not lead to optimum performance but that actually harm it and our general health in the process. I am not saying that these authors set out deliberately to mislead but when there is such a large interplay of a ridiculous number of parameters it is frighteningly easy to arrive at incorrect conclusions.
 
Bad Science
In writing this piece I will draw attention to the fact that I have a Ph. D. in science (Physical Chemistry). I do so, not to boast about my academic credentials but to draw attention to the fact that I am trained in the scientific method and more importantly I am trained in spotting bad science. Diet is certainly not my academic specialism but as an ultra-endurance athlete it is one that I have a great deal of interest in and one that I have studied extensively. Perhaps the most important thing I have discovered from my research on the topic is in spite of huge amounts of data that actually exist there is a huge lack of what I would describe as hard understanding on the topic and the subsequent substitution with what is otherwise known as bad science. And for those of you that prefer a bit of straight talking; that’s “Bullshit” in American English or “Bollocks” in British English by the way.
 
The term “Bad science” which has been popularised in Ben Goldacre’s excellent book with just that name “Bad Science”. (http://www.badscience.net) It does not mean for one minute that these conclusions are actually wrong. What it means is that the conclusions have been derived on incomplete data. But before analysing what we mean by bad science, let’s look at some “good, hard science” and then make a candid comparison. Newton’s laws on motion can be described as good, hard science. Newton, about 300 years ago formulated a set of very simple equations that were able to describe the whole of the then known physical word. These laws and his equations, whilst not only being very simple were extremely powerful. They had a predictive nature about them that is fundamental to the concept of good science.
 
Describing what we know about diet and ultra-running performance can indeed be described as bad science. This is not at all surprising as it is a hideously complex topic and isolating parameters that can be studied in order to determine their precise effect on performance to the degree of accuracy that Newton was able to describe the effect that mass has on acceleration and on the applied force when he formulated his second law is close to near impossible. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to describe a sports diet in such a way as to say that increasing your intake of x% of y ingredient will lead to a z% increase in performance; Alas it is not so. Not only does the diet effect performance but also a host of other environmental factors that over a prolonged period of time simply cannot be controlled. In studies of this nature there is a generalised absence of what would be the control group, for no other reason than nobody really knows what the control group should actually be. At best we have “best attempts” to isolate factors and study them but in spite of tremendous efforts on the part of the researchers they remain in the realm of bad science simply because of the impossible nature of isolating the parameter that is being studied or of simply establishing a valid control group, exempt from being corrupted by other factors. This doesn’t mean their findings are incorrect, only that they are flawed as a scientific endeavour. It also doesn’t mean that we haven’t discovered anything; on the contrary, there has been a major advancement in our knowledge on the topic. But wading our way through the myriad of scientific complexity is a daunting task, especially when so much research tends to be contradictory. Translating all of this science into a practical diet, that is easy to follow and that leads to a genuine optimum performance for a particular individual is near impossible, especially when we include the different genotypes of all of the athletes that may be interested in this material.
 
What we are left with is a philosophy, a set of general rules that certainly have a lot of valid use, but are by no means a detailed recipe for success. Many authors have tried to do just this and as would be very natural for a topic of this nature they have evoked the theory of evolution and justified diets on what our bodies had adapted over millions of years of evolution to eat. Whilst I believe that this approach can successfully lead to identifying the major trends in an optimum diet, I do not believe that it can lead to optimum performance in a race. Our ancestors generally had access to poor quality foods and developed highly efficient systems for extracting energy from these foods. By injecting high quality, energy rich foods into this system we can give it an extra boost leading to even greater performance.
 
So then, on to the bad science. It is unfortunate, especially after the introductory paragraphs but the nature of the topic is such that it is all we have. What I will express is of course is simply an opinion. I consider it to be a valid opinion though as it is at least coherent with what I know intellectually and what has worked well for me in running ultra-marathons. I will argue a case, based on evidence but much in the way that a lawyer would argue a case in court. I will be coherent in what I say and I will back up with as much data as I have available. However, it will remain an opinion albeit an informed one; based on my own academic research as well as my own experience in running ultramarathons. Ultimately it will be another piece of bad science, although I will argue there is a lot of truth in what I am offering.
 
This lack of hard data has been summarised in Mark Hine’s excellent book “Our natural diet” (http://www.markhines.org/Our-Natural-Diet(2857229).htm) where Hines draws attention to these very problems and offers an interesting synopsis of what may well indeed be our natural diet. But is our natural diet the same as an optimised diet for ultra-endurance running. It is an interesting question.
 
The diet for an ultra-endurance athlete has to allow the athlete to achieve the following goals. First and foremost has to be the ability to maintain a prolonged effort over a prolonged period of time. Following that the diet has to provide enough energy for adequate training, allowing the athlete to achieve his or her goals. Coupled in has to be the aspect of good health. A sudden burst of energy for training purposed does not necessarily constitute optimum diet if we are considering our long term health.
 
Back to the bad science then. In the void of any hard reliable data upon which to make any hard scientific conclusions the developed world in general came to the conclusion in the 1980s (http://understandnutrition.com/2013/05/08/the-low-fat-diet-why-it-was-so-popular-and-where-it-stands-today) that fat was bad. As athletes, weight is one of the most important aspects that have an effect on performance. Carrying a couple of extra kilos has a huge effect and slows you down so there is immense interest in keeping that weight off, or losing it if we carry too much of it. So when the general opinion in the field was that eating fat made you fat, we all diligently followed our low fat diets, convinced that this was the only way forwards to optimum performance. The problem is that this mind set has recently been shown to be complete nonsense. (http://realmealrevolution.com/) Noakes is in my opinion one of the very best sport’s scientist ever in the field. Not only because he has written a host of literature based on actual research but because he is willing to change his opinion and recognise that he was wrong with previous conclusions that he had made. His book “The Lore of running” is the staple reference point for any runner that is seriously considering a fuller understanding of the science behind the sport.
 
So then, back to the fat. Our bodies are tremendously adaptable and we are capable of adaptations in our diet that allows us to extract the necessary nutrients from our food so that we may go about our business. When we reduce or even eliminate fat in our diets, in an attempt to lose weight our bodies adapt to this regime. If the major source of calories is then carbohydrates our bodies become adapted to processing carbohydrates, and that includes converting the carbohydrate into fat to make up for the very lack of fat. The very biochemistry of our bodies changes in order to extract what is needed. And fat is needed. It is not only needed for fuel but also it plays an important role in cell protection and hence reduction in the risk for cancer. (http://www.thenaturalvet.net/Fats-and-Their-Relationship-to-Cell-Membrane-Function_ep_61.html)

A host of studies analysing glycogen (Carbohydrate) stores and performance arrived at the conclusion that at least up until the marathon distance that the primary fuel for performance was glycogen. In other words stored carbohydrate and athletes went to great ends to optimise these stores. These included the low fat high carb diets as well as the famed carbo loading regimes that athletes undertook the days previous to a race. Carbo stores in the body can typically last for 2-3 hours which is just the right amount for a marathon. When the carbs run out, the athletes experience the wall effect with the subsequent dramatic decrease in work rate.
 
Studies on triathletes, particularly for the Iron man distance (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4445872/) clearly demonstrated that the top athletes could not be burning carbohydrates as the major energy source for the duration of the event. They were winning races in about 8 hours, a supposed full 5 hours over the point when their bodies ran out of glycogen. Not only that, but at the work rates involved, whatever mechanism was producing the energy it was just as efficient as the carbohydrate burning mechanism of the marathon runners and lasted a lot, lot longer. It is this precisely this latter mechanism that we are interested in in ultra-running if we are to truly unleash our potential.
 
So, in the low fat, high carb diet the body is being constantly trained for precisely that combination and never really learns to burn fat. The body becomes adapted to carbs as the primary fuel source, so when the carbs run out, the body subsequently crashes. But it doesn’t crash because it has run out of fuel, it actually crashes because it doesn’t know how to burn the huge reserves of fat fuel that it still has. It is little wonder that whilst on this diet, study after study has demonstrated that it was the amount of stored glycogen that affected endurance performance and every possible trick was used to get more carbs into the body. (http://musclesound.com/glycogen-role-in-sports-performance)  Once the carbs ran out, the athlete hit the wall. The problem was though, that this still didn’t explain the top performances of the top triathletes as they were able to keep up work rates comparable to the top marathon runners but clearly they were not hitting the wall at 3 hours. They weren’t even hitting it 3 hours later. What was happening? And then came the revelation that shocked the sports science community: These athletes were not actually following a low fat diet after all and they were compensating with significant calories from fat. Not only that but the athletes actually confessed to “cheating” on their trainers prescribed diet and were eating considerable fat as well. The conclusion being of course that these athletes were fat adapted. They were not actually using carbs as their major energy supply but fats; stored body fats. Their bodies were so efficient at burning fats that they were capable of comparable work rates to the top marathoners of the day who were burning carbs. So instead of focusing on improving our ability to store glycogen we should be training our bodies to burn fats.
 
So the low fat diet recommended by so many sports nutritionists would not only appear to be highly mistaken for an ultra-runner but it would also appear to be a major hindrance in achieving optimum performance. By eating a low fat, high carb diet, the body becomes adapted to metabolising carbs, and more importantly it becomes very poor at metabolising fats. What we need to do is move to a high fat low carb diet in order to train our bodies to burn fat. When all we have is fat to burn, the body adapts to burning fat, and when the body is properly fat adapted it can run and run and run for a very long time. And this is precisely what we are trying to achieve in our ultra-running.
 
So the high fat diet has suddenly become fashionable and there is a growing trend in the sport towards it. With the same mistaken evangelism that promoted the low fat diet, we now seem to be becoming obsessed with the low carb diet. Carbs, at least to some extent have become demonised and a dietary backlash against carbs is now being observed. But going completely the other way isn’t the answer either. Those elite triathletes that were sneaking fats into their diets and doing the top times in Ironmans weren’t just only eating fats. They were eating considerable carbohydrates too. More specifically; carbohydrates were the official staple of their diets but, and it is an important but; they were eating considerable fat too. In other words, and this is where we come full circle; they were eating a balanced diet! This of course actually makes good common sense. Extremes in general are bad and often the best way is somewhere in the middle.

The “high fat - low carb” paradigm is equally misleading as the “low fat - high carb” one. Both terms are inherently mistaken and both lead to considerable imbalances for what can be considered as being optimum performance in ultra-endurance athletics. What we should be talking about is simple shifts in the percentages of these nutrients, and subtle shifts at that. Barry Spears “The zone diet” (https://en.wikipidia.org/wiki/Zone_diet) does just this and whilst anyone trying to follow this diet will require a degree in biochemistry to understand what he is going on about, the message can be neatly summarised as eating a bit more proteins and fats and a bit less carbs. Instead of eating 60% carbs, Spears recommends approximately 40% carbs with 30% fat and 30% protein. This can hardly be called a low carb diet as carbs still make up the greatest proportion of the macro nutrients but it is never the less an important shift from the more established traditional marathon runners diet. More to the point, the USA national swimming team that Spears coached whilst on his diet ran riot in the in 1980s and took pretty much all the medals that were worth having in the USA. Clearly he was on to something.
 
Training the fat metabolism.
The first stage in training our bodies to metabolise fat is clearly to increase the fat in our diet. (http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/how-eating-more-fat-helps-you-lose-more-weight.html) This doesn’t mean eating massive amounts of fat like the famed Atkins diet but simply shifting the emphasis of the diet towards fats. Remember, we are adjusting the percentages without making major jumps. 30% of total calories from fat, on a day to day basis can be considered as a healthy “high fat” diet. (http://www.mensjournal.com/health-fitness/nutrition/why-experts-now-think-you-should-eat-more-fat-20141020) But also an important aspect of training fat metabolism is to train when the body is depleted in carbs. This can best be achieved first thing in the morning and training before having anything to eat. Whilst the body will not be completely depleted as the glycogen reserves will not be empty, they will be significantly depleted and as all food from the previous evening will be digested it will at least force the body to access the reserves and this includes the fat reserves. It is important not to force the body too hard straight after waking up, especially as we get older and lose the elasticity in our arteries but by all accounts, a lower work rate leads to a higher percentage fat consumption, although total amount of fat burned increases with exercise intensity. (http://fitnesshealth.co/blogs/fitness/14112669-best-heart-rate-to-burn-fat). 

Personally I train religiously every day before work for about an hour. I take a coffee to get me going and then hit the road no matter what. Consistency and the formation of the habit are absolutely crucial in provoking the fat adaptation to take place. It is a slow process and not something that happens quickly. If you chose this route to ultramarathon success you have to be prepared to forsake short term gains for the long term ones. Training for ultra-marathons is even more arduous than the races themselves.
 
The major component of any ultra-distance athlete’s training programme has to be the weekly long run. Out of racing season this will typically be anything between 4 to 6 hours with the occasional 10 hour run for me. On these runs you have to eat whilst you run and although I have no scientific evidence or research to back up some of the following statements, I can say that my own personal experience more than justifies what I am recommending. We are interested in burning fats, but to burn fats we also need to burn carbohydrates (http://www.sport-fitness-advisor.com/energysystems.html). A useful analogy is that of the pilot light and the major flame in a furnace. Without the pilot light of the carb flame burning, it is impossible to ignite the major fat flame. To this end it is important to consume carbohydrate during the long runs as without them, the fat flame does not burn. But the trick and it is a difficult trick to master is to consume just enough to keep the pilot burning, thus forcing the major fat flame to keep burning. Too little carbs and the flame goes out, too much carbs and the body takes the easy way out and burns them, at the expense of the fat flame.
 
So just how much carbs should you eat on you long training runs? There really is only one answer to that as far as fat adaption goes and that is as little as possible. When you feel your energy beginning to dip then that is definitely NOT the moment to take the carbs. This of course flies directly in the face of traditional advice which recommends taking carbs on a regular basis precisely to avoid this dip. Only when you are starting to feel light headed and that there is a considerable loss in performance should you eat them. And they should be relatively difficult carbs to extract as well such as fruit. Personally I go for the dried fruit as it is energy dense relative to the weight you have to carry. Gels are absolute no no’s as far as training runs are concerned. You will take just enough to lift you out of the downer, and absolutely no more if you are genuinely interested in adapting your body for fat burning. I am a great fan of dried fruit and nuts. The dried fruit contains the carbs and the nuts contain lots of fat and proteins. At this point I need to point out that this is what seems to work for me. This is definitely not a statement based on a literature research.

In taking this strategy it is very easy to get it wrong. In a carbohydrate depleted environment you are essentially starving yourself. We have seen that carbs are important in the fat metabolising process and the complete absence of them in the body can be catastrophic. Indeed, the body will simply not allow a complete absence of them in the body and it has been show (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluconeogenesis) that in the absence of glucose in the blood, the body manufactures glucose by catabolising proteins. The brain mostly functions on glucose so the very survival of the organism depends on carbs being present in the system and will not allow zero point to be reached and starts to manufacture them internally. In lay terms that is tantamount to the body eating its own muscles and that is clearly counterproductive to any sports performance.

Clearly though, the purpose of all this is to promote fat adaptation and must not be confused with other aspects of training. This requires some considerable discipline and self-knowledge as this will almost certainly equate to slower times in the training runs compared to fuelling them with a carbohydrate rich foods. Indeed, on a typical 50 km training run that I often do, I will deliberately set out without eating breakfast. On a day with breakfast this will often take me 4:40 at a reasonable training pace. Without breakfast it always takes more than 5 hours, sometimes even longer. A casual observer will immediately point out that you can’t train properly without having eaten breakfast as you are clearly not working as hard and that the difference in times proves the point. However, the whole point of training whilst in a fasted state is not speed per se but is all about developing the fat adaption. Continuous races that take place over several days are not won on speed. They are won on endurance, and endurance is all about development of the fat metabolism mechanism in ultra events.
 
Other legitimate aims of any training session such as increasing your aerobic capacity and the development of speed clearly cannot be achieved by taking this strategy and more carbs should be consumed. Indeed, when I want to practice race pace, or develop speed I will always eat breakfast. For speed the body needs to be well fuelled. However, I would argue that the major purpose of the weekly long run for an ultra-distance athlete is to promote endurance and fat adaptation. Improvements in aerobic capacity and pace are the realm of shorter distance higher intensity workouts. The fact that the training run takes longer should not be the issue here, you are training for performance on race day and that will require shorter term sacrifices. But little by little, especially if you start to keep accurate records of your own training you will notice improvements in speed and endurance as the fat metabolism starts to become more efficient in your body.
 
Race day.
On race day we are all looking for a maximum performance. An ultra-marathon race for me can be easily divided into two sub categories as far as nutrition is concerned. The first are the 100 k races on tarmac or good trails. They are fast races and typically take less than 12 hours. My last 100 k clocked in at 8:49 which is not too shoddy a performance for a 51 year old. More importantly, my pace was extremely uniform and at no time during the race did I run out of energy or hit the wall. In this last race I didn’t eat breakfast. Not because it was part of the race plan but because I simply wasn’t hungry. Hunger is a good indicator to if we actually need food or not and for an ultra-run, I am not in favour of forcing the issue. I had a good fatty meal of sausages, ham and eggs the night before with just a few chips so I knew my reserves were full. I was also less worried about the absence of breakfast as I know that my fat burning metabolism is good. During the race, as soon as I noticed even a slight drop in speed I would drink an energy drink, or take a gel. The purpose of race day is to perform. Race day is when you get back what you put in and then, and only then is when you fuel your body for maximum performance and that means carbs. The train low, compete high strategy has indeed gainded popularity amongst many elite athletes. (http://awordonnutrition.com/sepost/train-low-compete-high-a-quick-summary/?type=article)
 
When you have trained properly in a carb depleted environment you have developed your fat metabolism to the full and when you finally inject considerable carbs into your body whilst running it is like igniting it with rocket fuel. The high consumption of carbs during the race not only keeps the pilot light burning brighter but also allows this very pilot light to ignite even more fats as though they were being burned in a blast furnace. What you are doing on race day by taking in high quantities of concentrated carbohydrate is actually providing an optimised environment for the burning of fats. And that leads to optimum performance. It is easy to understand the origins of the mistaken carbohydrate paradigm for optimum sports performance in ultra-distance athletics; the true function being that carbs facilitate fat burning. However, the underlying point, and it is one that cannot be stressed with sufficient force is that this only works in fat adapted athletes. During training it is a low carb diet; in a race it is high carbs still.
 
For any race that takes over 12 hours we require a different strategy. My own experience on relying on carbs and my internal fat store alone simply does not seem to cut it. Races over the 100k distance can take anything between 24 and 72 hours; at least for the kind of races that I like to do and the fuelling strategy returns to what could only be described as a typical balanced diet, at least in terms of the macronutrients. I will go for concentrated foods as in fibre depleted but certainly the combination of macronutrients resembles a typical food pyramid. After 12 hours I can only imagine that my fat reserves start to fail too. I clearly have much more fat to metabolise, I can see it; but after 12 hours it certainly appears that all of the readily available fat seems to have been burned and that accessing that second store of fat requires a bit more work.
 
The pace that the longer runs are run at is quite a bit slower than a typical 100k and that means that eating solid food is not only feasible but is actually quite pleasant as well. The intake of solid food early on in the race, and by that I mean a good combination of carbs, fats and proteins seems to keep me going for a very long time indeed.
 
A particular revelation in my own experience took place when I was running the Badwater ultra marathon in the States. About the half way point I switched to eating sandwiches that were soaked in olive oil and that seemed to pick me up and give me a massive boost of sustainable energy, far above the energy levels that I was experiencing by eating carbs alone. The combination of the carbs, and I strongly suspect the oil, provided a huge amount of fuel that went straight into the furnace. So, is it possible that we run out of available fat reserves too? And by replenishing these with readily digestible fats like olive oil we substitute the readily available fats in our bodies? The fat burning mechanisms in our body are already fully activated and all they need are the fats to burn. This would indeed be a great topic for a scientific study but in the absence of which I will simply try to perfect the method empirically on my own experience. Eating fats after 12 hours into the race it would certainly appear; equates to optimum endurance performance in the longer events.
 
Summary.
Summarising then, fat is the major energy provider during an ultra-endurance event and as such athletes should be training in such a way as to promote this biochemical pathway in the body and this means training in a carb depleted state, typically fasted and before breakfast.
 
As a general rule, an ultra-endurance athlete should be eating a balanced healthy diet but one that is subtly shifted towards fats, with no radical exclusion of carbs. Carbs are still very important.
 
During a race the athlete needs to consume more carbohydrates than in training in order to reach optimum performance and the longer the race, the more important are the fats and these have to be consumed to maintain performance.

And finally, before I get slated for the “bad science” this is just a synopsis of my experience and stuff I have read. I’ll leave it up to the actual sports scientists to collect the data and verify the hypothesis.

Written by James Adams - http://www.runningandstuff.com

If I had one bit of advice for this kind of thing, based on doing it a few times and failing sometimes; it would be this;

Prepare for your conversation with Hypnos.

Hypnos is the creature that will make himself known to you as night falls. He is the God of sleep. He makes himself known when you are at your most vulnerable. You'd have just run 50-70 miles, a pretty hard effort so far.
When your heart beats slower, your breathing shallower and your temperature falls he'll come along with clever arguments as to why you should stop what you are doing and join him in his cave. He's got me twice before, he is probably responsible for more 100 mile DNFs than anything else.

Its good to go into the race with something already prepared for this guy, like when Percius chained his men to the boat and waxed his ears to save him from the Sirens song. It might be worth rehearsing your answers now. The more answers you have the more committed you'll be, the better you'll be able to beat him.

Here are some that I just thought of. You might all have your own.

Q - You've done enough for today, 70 miles is more than most people will do ever. You are still in the top 0.1%!
A - I didn't come here to be a statistic. I came here for a life experience. Now fuck off and let me have it.

Q - If you quit now you can get a good night's rest and spend tomorrow relaxing with your family.
A - Yeah, I'm really going to enjoy sitting on the sofa and hearing my little girl ask "Daddy, where's your buckle?"

Q - Merville and Rupard are beating you and they are shit! You don't want to be beaten by shit runners do you?
A - Comparing yourself to others is the quickest path to unhappiness. I will not go there.

Q - Your leg is hurting 7.6/10. It's only a matter of time before you will collapse in TOTAL PAIN!
A - Well you make the mistake of assuming that my pain is linear in time. That 7.6 may well go down. Also you forget that just by wanting that buckle more I also have the power to increase that denominator.

Q - You told everyone and blogged that you are going to do XX time, you are way off! Quit now and save some face
A - Anyone who I gain "face" with for quitting is not worth knowing. I'll defriend them just as soon as I've finished this

Q - But what are you going to tell people about your terrible time?
A - I will have a tale less boring to tell, not about how I got exactly what I expected but how I went through a shitstorm but came out clean on the other side. These kinds of stories tend to get more pints purchased for me.

Q - You are going to miss the cut offs.
A - "Going to" miss the cut-offs is not a reason for dropping. Missing the cut offs is. Let's cross that bridge if we come to it

Q - You are clearly having a shit time, why prolong it? End the suffering now!
A - Well in my experience it is suffering like this that beings about the most joy. Those prolonged times when you feel like you can't even move, that the world is conspiring against you, that you are a pathetic and useless waste of human flesh that has no right being out here with such great people. However you hold it together just enough to get through it, just enough to stagger out a finish, it might not be pretty but it will be done, and then that finish is yours forever, it becomes a lasting point of reference on which you can and will draw on forever. Persevering through adversity and coming out the other side is the greatest of gifts, because it is yours, uniquely so and can not be taken away or damaged. Life is about collecting these experiences. I feel rich because my head is full of these memories.

Written by Andy DuBois - http://www.mile27.com.au

Feb 18 2014

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For many years we have been lead to believe that a dehydration level of more than 2% will negatively affect performance and therefore we should drink to limit dehydration to this level. This advice has even been given out by coaches and trainers for years and was the official recommendation of the American College of Sports Medicine in 2007.

Where this 2% rule came from no-one is really sure as there is no research to show that this is the case when applied to athletes in actual races. In fact there is an abundance of research to show the opposite.

A study(1) that looked at competitors in the South African Ironman showed there was a significant relationship between the degree of weight loss of competitors and performance time. The competitors that lost the most weight finished the fastest. The dehydration levels of the top athletes exceeded 7% .

Another study(2) looked at marathon finishing times and body weight loss and also concluded that the fastest finishers in a marathon were the most dehydrated.

If you look at what happens in longer races the same applies. Analysing results in 12 and 24 hour races researchers (3) found a linear relationship between weight loss and distance run. The more body weight lost the further the distance covered.

The same can be found in studies looking at the Rio Del Lago 100mile race (4) and the Marathon de Sables (5). Dehydration levels of up to 10% were reported in the fastest finishers.

In all of these studies the more dehydrated the faster the finish time. Clearly dehydration more than 2% isn’t detrimental to performance.

Dehydration and Core Temperature

It is also believed that hydration helps to prevent core temperature from rising yet several studies (6,7,8) have shown that running speed not percentage of dehydration was the determining factor in core body temperature

Is thirst a good indicator of fluid requirements?

We are often told that our sense of thirst is not sufficiently well tuned for us to rely on to determine our water intake. This may be true if we want to maintain zero to two percent dehydration but since performance isn’t hindered by dehydration levels this low, thirst can be used as the primary means of determining your water intake.

As Tim Noakes points out in his book Waterlogged every other living creature manages to use thirst as an indicator to regulate fluid balance so why would we be the only one incapable of doing this?

Should you replace all weight lost during a run?

The practice of weighing yourself before and after a workout to determine your fluid requirements is not only misleading it’s dangerous. A study (8) on the errors in estimating hydration status from changes in body mass concluded “body mass change is not always a reliable measure of changes in hydration status and substantial loss of mass may occur without an effective net negative fluid balance”

For example for every gram of glycogen in your muscles you need 3-4 grams of water to store it. As the glycogen is used for energy the water is released. This water wasn’t part of the water required for optimal function of tissues and cellular processes so doesn’t need to be replaced. If you burn up 400-500g of glyocgen thats 1.2-2 litres of weight loss you could suffer before even dehydrating even 1%.

Replacing 100% of your weight loss with water means you are effectively over-hydrating and the consequences of over-hydrating are far more severe than dehydration.

Thats not to say that you should deliberately try to dehydrate yourself just because the elite runners do. Elite runners have higher levels of dehydration because they are generating more heat since they are running faster and therefore have higher sweat rates. If you are working at a lower intensity you will sweat less and therefore wont be as dehydrated.

The point is that high levels of dehydration (5-10%) are NOT detrimental to performance or health and may even have a positive affect on performance due to reduction in body mass. It has been reported that Hallie Gebresallsie lost 10% of his body weight when he set his World Marathon Record. A weight loss of almost 5kg must have been advantageous in the later stages when fatigue set in.

Once again I’ll say that becoming that dehydrated isn’t the goal, its the consequence of drinking to thirst during a marathon, ironman or ultra-marathon and there are no side affects except becoming thirsty.

Of course if you ignore thirst or have no access to water when you are thirsty then dehydration can be a much bigger problem but in almost all endurance races around the world there is access to enough water to avoid becoming severely dehydrated.

Drink to thirst

The simple take home message is drink to thirst. Don’t impose a set amount of fluid to consume especially one based on replacing all lost weight with fluid.

If its hot drink more and if its cold drink less. Of course your thirst will tell you that very clearly. Listen to it.

Studies

1. Sharwood Collins, Goedecke, et al Weight changes, medical complications and performance in the South African Ironman Triathlon, Br.J Sport Med 2004

2.Cheuvront, Carter, Sawaka Fluid Balance and endurance exercise performance. Curr Sports Med Rep. 2003

3. Kao, Shyu, Yang et al. Athletic performance and serial weight changes during 12 and 24 hour ultra-marathons. Clin. J. Sports Med 2008

4. Lebus, Cassaza Hoffman et all. Can changes in body mass and total water accurately predict hyponatremia

5. Zouhal, Groussard Vincent et al. Athletic performance and weight changes during the ” marathon of Sands” in athletes well trained in endurance. Int J Sports Med 2009

6. Bryne, Lee et al. Continuous thermoregulatory responses to mass participation distance running in the heat Med. Sci. Sports Exer. 2006

7. Leo, Nio, Lim et al. Thermoregulation, pacing and fluid balance during mass participation dustance running in a warm humid environment Eur. J. APp. Physiol. 2010

8. Maughan, Shirreffs, Leiper. Errors in estimation of hydration status from changes in body mass. J Sports Sci 2008

Written by Andy DuBois - http://www.mile27.com.au

Many ultrarunners I know like to keep it simple; put shoes on, head out the door and run. There is nothing wrong with that approach but if you want to improve then the body has to have the right stimulus to force it to adapt and become stronger.

Elite athletes aim to leave no stone unturned in training. They do all they can to provide the body with the right stimulus and recovery to maximise their training. Whilst many of us don’t have the time to focus on training that some of the elites do most of us could improve in a number of ways with very little if any extra time involved.

I’ve listed below 27 ways you can improve your running that don’t need much if any extra time. See how many of these you can implement in your training program.

1. Know when to run hard and when to ease up. Many runners run their easy sessions too hard and that means their hard sessions aren’t hard enough.

2. Spend more time working on your weaknesses – whether its speed, uphills, downhills, stairs, trails – whatever it is spend more time doing it rather than avoiding it.

3. Build up the elevation of your training runs so it matches that of the race you are training for. If there is 400m per 10k in the race then that’s what you should aim for in training. Even it the only way you can do that is to run up and down the same hill for hours.

4. Stop static stretching – its a waste of time.

5. Introduce dynamic stretching and do it daily instead of just when you are injured.

6. Add a running specific strength training program to your weekly routine. Thirty minutes twice a week can make a big difference.

7. Focus on running during every hard run. Dwelling on work problems during a hard run isn’t going to help your running.

8. Practise staying positive in every run no matter how bad you feel.

9. Smile when the going gets tough, you’ll be amazed at the difference it makes.

10. Step outside your comfort zone and choose some races that will show up your weaknesses.

11. Make getting 7-8 hours sleep a priority.

12. Stop eating processed food and increase your fruit and vegetable intake.

13. Include walking in your training – you do it in a race so practise it in training. It’s a big component of ultra running so why not train it.

14. Next time you buy shoes try several different brands on, not just your favourites and see if there is a shoe better suited to you.

15. Stop doing the same runs you always do and try a different route.

16. Run with people a fraction faster than you for your hard runs and slower than you for your easy runs.

17. Seek professional advice and get a personally designed running program.

18. Listen to your body and be prepared to have a day off or two when it needs it.

19. Don’t try and run through an injury.

20. If you have a persistent injury seek professional advice sooner rather than later.

21. Do the least enjoyable sessions more often, you’ll probably benefit more from them.

22. Practise your race day nutrition plan in your long run.

23. Do some regular meditation to develop the ability of the mind to stay focused.

24. Decrease your alcohol intake.

25. Don’t be afraid to every now and then push yourself so hard in an interval session that you can’t finish the session at the specified pace.

26. Running on technical trails is a skill so practice it often until it’s a skill that you have some level of competence at.


27. Don’t be worried about taking a few days off if you are feeling run down. We improve through recovery and if you aren’t recovering then all you are doing is breaking down.

Written by Nick Jenkins - http://nearlyshoeless.com

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I love winter running, Its the only time of the year that I can actually justify wearing tights in public, in the daytime.  Early starts with the head torch, starting off cold under copious layers then warming up and regretting all of those layers.  The sound of crunchy snow underfoot, the fleeting glimpse of wildlife in the woods and the lure of snowy peaks… I love it.  This article is all about winter running and what you need to do to be able to do it, I’m going to start with the very basics in this post, then part two will be focused on what I think we’re all calling “Alpine running” – crampons and ice axe stuff… But for now we’ll start with the most important bit when running in wintery conditions.

The importance of warmth

It’s a balancing act, putting on the right amount of clothes in relation to the temperature outside – the fundamental requirement is not to freeze your bollocks or tits off.  In all seriousness hypothermia is a real thing and could happen if you aren’t suitably attired for the temperature.  Personally I can “get away” with shorts in temps as low as 2°C (35.6°F) but as I get older (and perhaps a bit slower) it seems that each year the Lycra is coming out of summer hibernation a bit earlier…

So lets have a look at a what to wear when the temperature creeps towards freezing.   The best approach is to combine 3-4 thin layers that you can remove and put back on as necessary.  I go for a technical t-shirt under a long sleeve thermal layer, these could be made out of a) Merino wool if you are rich, or b) Polyester if you are not so rich.  I go for poly as I found that the merino tops that I can afford often shrink a little in the wash.  A quick example of quality is my original long sleeve Helly Hansesn Lifa top which is still going strong after 11 years of use.  Bomb proof – and truly deserves the moniker of “Smelly Helly”.

On top of that you may want to add a lightweight fleece top or a sleeveless gillet type of thing.

Finnish off the layering party with either a windproof or waterproof top depending on the weather.  More info on “what waterproof in part 2.”

The body will pull heat away from the extremities to protect the core so make sure the hands and feet are toasty warm – I use a combination of proper ski glove mitten type things and normal runners glove – I’ve just purchased a new pair of Ronhill gloves with a tuck-in-able windproof over mitten which are quite frankly really bloody awesome.  Here’s a picture

On my feet in winter I always, without any exception wear proper wool hiking socks.  This really is my best beginner tip.  Wool will stay warm when wet – and you are going to get wet if you run in anything resembling snow.  The extra thickness will help with insulation from the ground too.  I use socks made by a company called Bridgedale, they are well made and seem to last for ever, one thing you might have to do is remove the insole of your running shoes to accommodate a thicker sock, you can also try sizing up.  Two shoes which work well in my arsenal are the Inov 8 roclite 295 and the Saucony Peregrine 4 (I take the insoles out in the Pery’s but not the 295’s).  A slightly less minimal shoe is my preference – the increased stack height and added foam will contribute to the insulation from the ground.

Winter isn’t really a time to start barefoot running either, unless you want to be a bit of an attention seeker.  You also hear about people who continue with shirtless running in winter… Look, I’ll never call anyone a moron for doing stuff like this, however, if the practices of winter barefooting and non-summer bare chestiness are combined with one of those knowing, smug looks that suggest that the secret of everything has been found…  Well… I will most likely refer to a person like that as sactominious twat.

In this case a beard will not be a saving grace.

Back to the advice.  On top of your bonce you need a hat, I usually start with a normal beanie, then as I warm up I take that off and pull up the buff (which was around my neck as a scarf) on to my head – clever, I know!  On my legs if temps are well below freezing I wear boxer type underpants, long johns and Lycra leggings – I’m a big fan of RonHill Tracksters, they’re not too tight, they have stirrups for keeping them from riding up, they are mega cheap, warm and really these days kinda cool in a retro ironic hipster type way.

ronhill

The next really important thing to discuss  (ladies this one is purely for the chaps) is how to “dress”… Lets face it, it’s difficult not to notice a poorly dressed man, there’s nothing worse than “positioning” yourself to either side when wearing Lycra… The best thing is to go for symmetry and dress down the middle and nothing says “I’m embarrassed about being a man” than wearing shorts over tights.  You end up looking like a grownup pretending to be a super hero, its 100% geeky – it just doesn’t look good.   I’ve heard it argued that “overshorts” are good if you run in the wind, or if temperatures are really low.  This is, quite frankly, a poor argument.

Nothing beats putting on a full windproof over-pant and thus covering the entire leg – if it’s really that cold, then that’s what you need to do.  Inov 8 make my favourite, the out of production Mistlite 130  (now updated to the Race Elite 85 windpant) which I’ve used to climb high peaks in raging weather.   You can pay a lot more and buy fully waterproof taped over pants… I dare say that they are worth the money but I still have yet to find conditions where my windproof inov-8’s were lacking.

All you need now is a bag to chuck in the discarded layers as you warm up, for long winter runs I need about 10-12 litres of space – I’m currently using the Ultimate Direction PB pack, it is very good.

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Buffs come in very handy…

Before you head out the door take heed of this advice – it’s okay to be wet and warm but not wet and cold, If the weather looks bad then either don’t go for a run, cut it short or wear a proper taped waterproof coat with a hood.  As I mentioned earlier, I’ll go a bit more in depth on waterproof shells in part two.   We also need to factor in wind chill – running will warm you up and you’ll be fine if you keep running, but if you need to stop for any reason you’ll get cold quickly. On big outings I always bring an extra windproof layer that I can bundle over or under my waterproof, takes hardly any space and can really make a difference.  In recent years we’ve seen the proliferation of micro down jackets, which I have yet to try but look like a nice lightweight alternative to a fleece used as a midlayer, the only down side (err…sorry) is that once wet, duck down will be really cold.  A waterproof outer layer is a must and even then in really bad weather its hard to avoid a soaking.  So, remembering that wet and warm is best, we’re probably better off using a fleece as a mid layer.

Traction.

Before I wrap up part one I will touch on traction and grip.  Snow is a bit slippery at the best of times, but honestly if there is a lot of it and its soft then a fall isn’t the end of the world – try out slushy snow or powder without any extra traction devices, I think shoe skiing should be recognised as a sport on its own…  You need more grip when you encounter ice – after a cycle of freeze/thaw the snow will get more and more consolidated and turn in to a sheet of neve or snow ice.

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Neve “snow ice” …very slippery

On a woodland trail a slip can be dangerous, on a mountain side a slip can be life threatening.  More about the high mountain stuff in the next article, but for now we’ll touch on traction options for general trail running outings.

Your traction options..

You can screw permanent spikes in to your shoes, there are official products available or you can use Tek screws

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If that doesn’t float your boat, perhaps you want something less permanent – you could purchase a product like Yaktrax which slip over the shoe. They have a number of different models to choose from – some use a metal ringed cord system similar in idea to snow chains for your car tires.  They also offer a product that has tiny spikes or dobs under the forefoot area.  Great for low level stuff and potentially the more comfy option for all day use.

Further up the hill I’d encourage the use of micro crampons such as Kahtoola Microspikes or Hill Sound Trail Crampon. Depending on your experience these could quite happily see you through sections of relatively technical stuff such as wide slopes of neve snow, iced up ridge running or single track and even short sections of more technical mountain – there certainly is a bit of a  debate about when a trail runner should put away the micro crampons in favour of real crampons with front points, micro’s are without a doubt the easier option to “run” in  however, you wouldn’t want to climb a frozen waterfall…But that’s not what we’re really contemplating is it?  We’re runners and we need to draw a distinction between true alpinism and “alpine running” which I will ponder over more in part two…

…Until then…Happy Winter Trails.

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Hey – if you’ve like this article, why not hit the share button on your favourite social media outlet or give me a little like button love.   All the links above are non-affiliated you won’t be helping me at all if you buy anything as a result of reading this, but a share, well a share is worth so much more than money…

A little disclaimer…Trail running is dangerous and mixing it with winter is surely a recipe for disaster.  I take no responsibility if you hurt yourself after reading my blog.  None at all.  The information provided is my personal opinion only – you follow it at your own risk.  Really, I think it’s best that you just stay indoors with a nice hot cup of tea until the spring time.

Written by Nick Jenkins - http://nearlyshoeless.com

Uphill Running – The best technique is the one that you already do.

It’s been close to 4 years now that I’ve lived in the Ariège Pyrenees, and if there’s one thing I do a lot of its up hill running. Now, when I first got here I was a touch over awed by the climbs, In the UK I lived close to a place called the Malvern Hills and in order to get a cumulative vertical gain of 1500 Metres I had to run the entire 9 mile chain twice. Now on my doorstep, I have close to the same amount of vert in one climb, about 1200 metres, from door to the top of the valley in about 4.5 miles. It’s been a somewhat steep learning curve (sorry).

About a year and a half ago I wrote this article At the time I found it pretty difficult to sustain up hill running for more than a few hundred metres of gain. Fast forward to the present day and I’m now able to run in access of 1000 metres in one go – running – no walking, no poles, no chairlifts. Just pure up hill running. I easily pass people on the hills in races now, when folk seem to start walking I’m still happily grinding out the climb at a reasonable running pace – it feels good!
In this post I’m going to share the secret of efficient up hill technique, and how you can get better at up hill running…

The Main Secret:

Put one foot in front of the other continuously and don’t stop until you get to the top.

Sounds easy enough. It is. There is no secret, no best technique and no special way to run up hill. Practice enough and your body will automatically work out its preferred and most economical way to climb.

But what about all the trainers and coaches who preach perfect form? Isn’t there “one best way” to run up hill?

It’s been very well studied that the pursuit of perfect form can be detrimental to our running economy.  And let’s be honest, if there is an area of running where economy is vital it’s in hill climbing.   In his book “80/20 Running: Run Stronger and Race Faster” Matt Fitzgerald goes in to depth on the subject of running economy and the”cost of correction” Fitzgerald provides solid evidence that runners who change their natural style or stride perform worse as a result.

Over the past few years I’ve come to see this personally. When I started down the minimal path, I like many others became obsessed with pursuing the idea of the “correct way to run.” In the process of transitioning to minimal shoes I looked at mimicking barefoot running form whilst shod. It took a lot of concentration but I gradually adapted. I stuck doggedly to it for the years that followed: the idea that there is a one true perfect form that fits all runners. I was convinced that a fore-foot or mid-foot landing was “optimal” and a cadence anything less than 180 would leave me sidelined with injury. In the past few years I’ve become less dogmatic, studies have now proved that there is no best foot strike or “best way to run” and according to Matt Fitzgerald book – Mo Farah’s cadence is just 160!

In my own experience, as I’ve naturally gravitated from a zero cushion, zero drop shoe to a more moderately cushioned lower drop shoe, I’ve seen my stride relax too. I’m no longer concerned about fitting in to the constraints of a branded running form. As a result of letting go and allowing my body to find its own stride again I’ve seen year on year race improvement, fitness gains and continual PB’s on my Strava Segments!

As Matt Fitzgerald writes, “Each runners stride automatically becomes more efficient over time so that conscious changes in technique are always counterproductive.”

An example of this “Self Optimization” in my own uphill running – I barely move my arms anymore. A form obsessed coach would seriously criticize this, but I’ve come to accept that my low relaxed carriage and almost non-existent arm swing is my body’s way of conserving energy as I run up hill in a steady aerobic state.

All of these changes are a result of letting go of an idea of “perfect form” but one thing I’m still careful about is posture. We can’t forget that the majority of workplace environments cause bad posture. Modern life generally sucks from a postural standpoint (I know another one.) One thing I do think about when running up hill is not to slouch too much, to pull my shoulders down a little, open my chest a bit, keep my abs flat… But In my case I really need to do this when I’m not running! I’m tall and as a result of growing up surrounded by short people I’ve developed a poor posture that I have to fight against daily! Cursed gravity!
In summary, the secret to uphill running is just to do it, don’t over think and in time (it took me three years) and with enough hills you’re body will self optimize its own perfect technique that’s tailor made for you.

Further TRT’s for uphill running…

Grinding out the vert.

This is where it gets fun, in hill running the greatest sense of achievement, I believe, is to grind out a climb without walking. There’s nothing better than reaching a col or a summit and thinking, “I didn’t walk any of that.” As my stride has developed over the years I’ve noticed my ability to keep on “running” up hill has too. In fact I prefer running up hill in a quiet meditative aerobic state than power walking. The later is undoubtedly more efficient on steep grades, and after a while energy levels can’t support continual run climbing, but I can slow it all down and pace myself up the sharper bits and as time goes by I find I can go longer uphill in “running” mode before I call it quits and revert to walking.

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Set your goals and the pace will adjust like magic.

Imagine running a half marathon the best you can do, you reach the finish line completely drained then the race director tells you that it was supposed to be a marathon! – you need to tack on an extra 13 miles. The chances are you’re NOT going to do it. You will more than likely crumple in to a deflated pile on the floor, the prospect of another 13 is ridiculous.   Even though you may have run a marathon before and know you can complete that distance – that wasn’t the task that was set for you, Your brain and your body say NO!

Humans are task orientated, we like to know how long something is going to take, when we have a specific goal, like the end of a race, we’re quite willing to suffer for that finish line. It’s accepted that there is a certain amount of psychology that underpins the physiology. Hill running fits nicely in to this paradigm – if we know how long the climb is going to be we can make it to the top!

If you set out that your goal is to reach the top of a mountain, on a known path, where you can perceive the finish you’ll easily be able to pace yourself to the top – over a period of time you will get quicker and quicker at this route – simple logic. Your stride will self optimize, you may walk less (if at all) and you will gradually find it easier.

A great pacing test is to run up hill as fast as you can to a given point. You should, without really trying too hard, manage to pace yourself to the finish  – as long as you are familiar with the trail.   Every month I do the same “Vertical Half Kilometer” time trial – a steep 500 metres of gain in less than 4 km which is now saved as a Strava segment. So far, apart from the odd occasion, I’ve made an improvement each time – got it down to just over 30 mins. At the beginning I took off dramatic chunks from my personal best but now I guess I’m close to the fastest I can go, I’m taking seconds off, no longer minutes.

It’s all about pace. And I’m sorry there’s no magic pill, you have to practice and repeat your routes, practice and repeat. You will get faster I promise.

But what if you don’t know the climb?

There’s usually a situation where you undertake a climb for the first time and you need to perform to your very best. Maybe a race or perhaps you are attempting to escape from prison.

The approach I’ve tried most often is to use a simple stopwatch timer – armed with the knowledge of how long it takes me to climb at a steady running pace and the amount of vertical gain in relation to the linear distance required to reach the top, I can usually get the pacing right – It’s even easier when you emerge from the tree line and can see the summit! But that’s not always possible – weather can obscure peaks and a climb can seem to take forever.

Another method is to use an altimeter, this is probably the best technique when you can’t see anything and its about as accurate an indication of how much more climb you have left to go than anything else.  You can relax and just see the vertical gain accumulating before your eyes. Perhaps the best approach.
The key thing is to be able to visualize the end goal and your pace will adjust like magic! Speed will come after practice.

What NOT to do:

Type “uphill running” in to YouTube and then copy someone else. Don’t Do that. Do not attempt to copy the rigid straight jacket techniques found in

. Leave the pseudoscience alone – walk away.  In fact it’s been shown that as an athlete gets fitter and more experienced they tend to have a more variable stride – looseness or fluidity develops. I’m not suggesting that professional athletes run around with their arms flaying all over the place, but they certainly don’t stick to the confines of a branded running style. If you take the time to look at a YouTube video of a top mountain runner like Killian Jornet, you’ll understand what I’m talking about; an individual, relaxed and fluid stride that is unique to Killian. Get out there and practice enough and you’ll be rewarded with your own best uphill running technique.  Enjoy the grind!