Learn How Pro-Ultra Runner Anna-Marie Watson Elevated Her Performance with Multisport Training
The Athlete:
Pro-ultra-runner Anna-Marie Watson, based in the UK, set her sights on Purple Patch 1:1 coaching to fix a plateau in ultra running performance. Little did she know she would be led to embody the multisport training approach that we so often utilize. Although she had years of great prior success, the last couple of years saw some performance stagnation that she knew she could improve upon. Anna-Marie arrived with a little multisport training experience, having competed in some Half IRONMAN racing, but never thought of aiming to leverage the full multisport approach for run performance. She began working with Purple Patch coach Mike Olizinski in November 2019. Mike encouraged her to integrate some different multisport training approaches to her training.
In January 2020, Anna Marie had a robust racing and training schedule with multiple day stage races, ultra-races on the books and even had planned some 70.3 triathlon races as a part of her training process. But not long into her new coaching journey, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Like dominos, the races (and thus the year of planning) started to fall. And along with the canceled races, her enthusiasm for ultra-running training began to diminish.
The Challenge:
Anna-Marie would easily be drawn into believing that the answer to the loss of racing was a huge focus in accumulation of running miles. This approach would have been a disaster, not only physically but emotionally. We needed to intelligently assess how stress was affecting Anna-Marie, and how we would balance her training around that.
Mike used the pandemic-forced break in the racing schedule to build the most robust and fastest runner he could. He achieved this through leveraging a multisport training approach to ultra-running training.
The Solution:
Even as an ultra-runner, one of the first things discussed when lockdown hit was to talk about the importance of running form, speed, strength work, and using the bike to cross-train. These concepts are nearly non-existent in the common ultra community. Mike and Anna-Marie collectively ignored the idea of running 100-milers or the 170km stage race in Nepal and said, “let’s build the strongest and fastest runner that we can”. That meant lots of strength work, short, hard intervals on the run, followed up with some fundamental easy runs or spins on the bike. After some heavy days of training, and after every Saturday workout, would be the “Bakery Spin'': an easy out-and-back ride to a bakery to pick up some pastries.
In fact, even though she is an ultra-runner, we can count the number of weeks that she ran more than 4x a week with all fingers. There were just a handful of 5x weeks prior to her race. She got excellent quality in her runs and loved leaning into the bike and strength work (swimming too when possible) to keep her consistent with training and healthy when running.
The Result:
Anna-Marie did get to do a 3-day stage race in 2020, the Ultra Coast Extreme (filmed running in this video), which was over 80 miles and 16,000 feet of elevation on wildly technical trails through the south of England. The result? Predictably powerful. She delivered a tremendous personal performance each day of the race and took 2nd female overall.
Purple Patch professional ultra runner Anna-Marie Watson has shown how to thrive and adapt in the face of adversity — even when it means finding a path forward as a pro athlete during a global pandemic. We learn by watching Ann-Marie’s trajectory over the year that there is incredible power in leveraging a multisport training approach, committing to a performance mindset, and following the Pillars of Performance.