401 - Fewer Miles, Faster Finish: Racing a Marathon on 35mi/week
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Welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast!
On this episode, IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon and Purple Patch Coach Max Gering discuss innovative marathon training strategies in a webinar. They emphasize a multi-sport approach, integrating running with cycling, swimming, and strength training to enhance cardiovascular conditioning and muscular endurance without high impact. They advocate for frequent, low-intensity running and strategic walk breaks to maintain form and avoid fatigue. The conversation highlights the importance of tissue durability, economy, and biomechanics. They also stress the value of a dynamic training mindset, avoiding rigid schedules, and leveraging community support to enjoy the journey and achieve better performance.
If you have any questions about the Purple Patch program, feel free to reach out at info@purplepatchfitness.com.
Episode Timecodes:
00-1:19 Episode Promo
1:48-4:42 Intro
4:51-end - Meet & Potatoes
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Transcription
Matt Dixon 00:00
Folks, today's episode is an absolute cracker, especially if you want to break through to the next level or attempt your very first marathon. It's going to change the way that you think about training for the most pure endurance sport. I'm going to tell you more in the introduction, but over the course of this episode, which is a conversation between myself and Purple Patch Coach Max Gering, we're going to talk about how on the live webinar 30 people have a special opportunity to have an individual complimentary consultation with Coach Max. We wanted to extend the offer to you, a listener of the Purple Patch Podcast, and so if you want to reach out after listening to this episode, feel free to reach out to us, info@purplepatchfitness.com You can also click on the link in the show notes and set up your time with Coach Mats right there. It is a complimentary consultation to help you unlock your running performance, and in the pursuit of that conversation, if it ends up that Purple Patch is a great fit for you, well, we can cross that bridge, but most importantly, we want to set you up for success, and so I hope you enjoy the show. It's a special one. Enjoy, and please share it with anyone that you think might find benefit in it. Cheers, I'm Matt Dixon, and welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast. The mission of Purple Patch is to empower and educate every human being to reach their athletic potential through the lens of athletic potential. You reach your human potential. The purpose of this podcast is to help time-starved people everywhere integrate sport into life. And welcome to the Purplepatch podcast, as ever. Your host, Matt Dixon, and folks, we've got a little bit of unique one today. You see, recently we hosted a performance webinar all about marathon training, and it ended up being really quite good. It was a conversation that was hosted by myself and Purple Patch Coats Mach Garren, and we had a bunch of people join us.
Matt Dixon 02:15
It was one of two webinars that we hosted last week. We did one on Ironman performance, if you would like to actually grab that episode from us, if you're listening, fantastic. Just email at info@PurplepatchFitness.com, we'd be happy to show you the recording of that. But the running one, we enjoyed so much and realized it was so powerful. In fact, we got so much great feedback that we thought, you know what, we want to share it with our broad audience. We want to enable you to have a listen. What you're going to hear is an episode and a webinar, a recording of it that is packed full of actionable takeaways to help you train more effectively for your next marathon. And, of course, you can apply most of these lessons if you're chasing half marathon performance as well, and so, whether you're listening and you're thinking, maybe I'll think about tackling my first marathon, or even could I even do such a thing, or you want to overcome a plateau, or you want to go to the next level, have a breakthrough race, perhaps you're even chasing down Boston qualification. This is an absolute must listen, and I tell you, what, if you could do me a favor, have a listen, enjoy it, but then also send it to a few friends that you think might benefit, that may be a training for one too, even if they are your competition. Come on, we're all trying to win together here.
Matt Dixon 03:36
One suggestion I would make, listening to this podcast your very first step in your marathon breakthrough, before you put your shoes on and get training. Do this second step in the show notes: book a strategy call with Coach Max. As we talk about in the episode, it's absolutely complimentary. He's there to help you troubleshoot on some of the individual challenges that you might face, and set a path for yourself. We only have 30 spots. You are welcome to dial in and listen. Of course, you can just email the word marathon to info at Purplepatch Fitness, and we will send you all of the resources you need.
Matt Dixon 04:15
And, as I mentioned in the promo before the episode started, we also did a webinar last week on Iron Man, so if you're interested in that webinar, just email info at Purplepatch from this and put Iron Man in the episode. Anyhow, without further ado, we're going to dive right in. We've trimmed it up, so you don't need to worry about the introductions. We're getting right into this episode, and it is the meat and potatoes, it's everything marathon. I hope you enjoy. Take care. Fantastic. Well, welcome, Max. I think we're going to, I think we're going to be doing something pretty fun today, and for you. Eyes that are listening, this is going to be a little different. We're going to challenge, I think, in many ways almost everything you know about classic marathon training, and, and helpful, hopefully help shift the perspective in a positive way. And we want you to leave today with some really actionable insights that you can go and apply to your own training and your own racing. And so I'll let you kick us off, Max, with wherever we're going to go.
Max Gering 05:23
Yeah, let's do it. We're definitely going to challenge a lot of pre-consisting notions about that marathon training, but I think before we do that, it's really important that we give everybody context of how we got here, because we could sit here and say, okay, Matt, you've coached Olympic trial qualifiers, you've coached over 350 people to Boston qualify hundreds of sub three hour marathons. Those numbers are really impressive, but they don't exist in a nutshell. So, if we go back 20 years, I think there's a really good story to give everybody context, which is the famous napkin story about how people out started. So, I'll cue that over to you to let you share how we got here.
Matt Dixon 06:01
Yeah, I think it's smart. I think it's good grounding. Look, I had struggled as an athlete myself. I was an elite swimmer originally. I became a professional triathlon. My career ended in ashes with chronic fatigue, and I had really high work ethic. I was pretty tough, but my system collapsed. And when I turned my focus to coaching, I just saw so much underperformance in the world of endurance sports, and my focus at the time was very much triathlon, but I really saw people that were committed, that were working hard and not yielding results, and so I, when I started to coach, I was, I was flying back from San Diego, where your base Max to San Francisco with my wife, and she said, 'Tell me what you want to do with this business that you're starting. And I said, 'I wrote it on a United napkin. I want to change the way that endurance sports were coached. And ostensibly, what that was was I felt like there was a smarter way, things like nutrition recovery, integrating strength training, getting the most out of the hard work, these elements were being underserved, and so I said I'm going to try, and every athlete I coach, I'm going to help them build performance over the long term on a platform of health, and so things like recovery and nutrition will give an equal value, and it's not revolutionary anymore, but at the time this really was very much against the grain, very much against the culture of endurance sports, and and we put them on the same pedestal as my sport was triathlon, swim, bike, and run training, the grueling stuff that they were doing, and it ended up that we had great results, we had great results with our professional triathletes and Iron Man athletes, and went on to build an incredibly successful group of professional triathletes, including multiple world champions, but
Matt Dixon 07:48
I also, and ostensibly, I was not a marathon or running coach, I never identified as that, but I did get to work with Ryan Hall, who some people might know when he came to us in deep fatigue and helped him turn around via this methodology to facilitate going on and running 204 at Boston, and that was that was a great experience, and that really opened my eyes at looking at someone in a single sport that was basically making the same mistakes that I saw many triathletes making, which was work, work, work, and continually getting stuck in cycles of injury, plateaus, and frustration. And my passion wasn't at the elite end of running. I never wanted to be an elite running coach, despite working with him, but I did want to help age group triathletes that tended to be busy really create a recipe that could help them number one fall in love with their sports, number two improve, and number three predictably build up consistency to unlock whatever performance level was necessary to achieve their goals across the great gamut, and I think most of the results, not just at the professional triathlon level, but as we talk about all the way through our age group level, of how it had so much success was really born out of that first mindset of let's be brave enough to challenge the status quo, to challenge the norm, and that's that's where we got to,
Max Gering 09:17
that's that's awesome, and it's really helpful for people, because it's really going to set the lens for what we're going to talk about today, and Pearl Patch has evolved, and today we don't just coach triathletes, for everybody listening, we have our triathlon program, we also have our run program, which is our unique multi-sport approach to running, which is what we're going to dive into today. So, on that note, is there an athlete or two that you coached back then that is a relevant story to really explain beyond what you did with Ryan that opened your eyes to the power of multi sport training and the birth of Rome Squad in 2026
Matt Dixon 09:51
Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I could unpack Ryan, but, um, but he was a pure runner, and I think a lot of what we're going to talk about today was born out of on. Most necessity for me, and that was there was one particular I could choose a couple, but there was a fantastic thing, I mean, just an incredible human being, Cecilia Davis Hayes, and this was one of our professional triathletes, but a number of people listening here to realize this, she was competing in half Ironman and Iron Man distance triathlon while going through residency as a doctor at Columbia, and so this was a huge optimization challenge, and she decided that she wanted to shift her emphasis from triathlon to running, and said, "Look, I'd really love to give a crack at this running, and yet she had incredibly limited time, as you can imagine, you know she's training to be a doctor, and a lot of her training we had to embed it into things like her commuting, she would commute on her bike, she would extend out, she would go and ride around Central Park, and we had very limited opportunity to just go out and accumulate what you would think was the prerequisite mileage to get ready for running, and so we had an incredible optimization challenge, and I said, "Look, we need to train the heart, the pump via the bike, we need to actually train some of the high intensity on the bike as well, because you can do that during the commute, and on top of it, she was a very tall, long-limbed athlete that was pretty, pretty high risk for injury, and she wasn't a natural runner. So I said, let's keep much of the running pretty calm, let's do just enough speed and just enough endurance, but let's try and leverage your strength training that you can do it in your lunch breaks over 10 or 15 minutes, and this commute to try and get ready, and what emerged on this really low running recipe, if you want to call it that, was incredible consistency, and she showed up and ended
Matt Dixon 11:52
up having a couple of really great running performances. She ultimately qualified for the Olympic trials in the marathon, and in that race her fastest 10k was the last 10k of the race, and you know when you're running 244 in a marathon as an elite athlete, and you're you're operating on less than 20 out 20 miles a week of running, it's worth as a coach looking back and going, what's happening here? So I think it was a stimulus, and I'm not suggesting that's the right recipe for every runner, you know, the more running mileage we can do, as long as your body can absorb it and you stay healthy, but it was a real first catalyst 15 years ago to say, hang on, if you strip away logic and you're not bound by history and you look at what you're trying to do, and I think we'll break this down a little bit. Of training cardiovascular conditionings and muscular endurance, there's no rule that you have to do it only through the very sport-specific demand of running, and so we took a multi-sport approach, and we applied that across multiple athletes, and lo and behold, it unlocked so much, and we, we see it time and time again, and I will say just as we go into this, there is at the elite end of the sport now much more acceptance and leveraging of multi sport to fuel it. I think the difference is that people are still stuck in multi sport for recovery, not for multi sport for performance evolution, and I prefer the latter, of using it as a tool to actually get faster, to stay healthy, but go faster, and that's what we want to unpack today.
Max Gering 13:30
Fantastic. Yeah, it's a really.. I mean, it was a game-changing story. It reminds me of, you know, if no one told you how to do your job, how would you do it? So, like, stripping, as you said, stripping away all the logic,
Matt Dixon 13:41
Yeah.
Max Gering 13:42
Um, so let's, let's dive in, let's get into it,
Matt Dixon 13:44
yeah. The
Max Gering 13:45
question to kick things off, I think, is this: Why are marathons so hard? What are we really trying to achieve in a marathon, and not just the race itself? If we go back, you know, the training, the build up, and the race day, what are what makes up a great marathon performance, and what makes it so hard?
Matt Dixon 14:06
Well, I think anyone that's done one realizes something pretty simple, and, and you know, in many ways it's the most pure endurance challenge, and and it obviously has a lot of history going back many, many, many years. But let's start really simple. It's a really long way, you know. My commute is about 20 miles, and sometimes I drive that commute and think, okay, I finished that commute, and if I was running that, I'm just at the place where things start to get hard. Yeah, 26 miles, 42 kilometers is a really long way to run by anyone's measure, and and so that that's sort of the most basic thing, but also I think it has, in many ways, the beauty of it and the beast of it is it's an incredibly complex and brutal challenge, because you need cardiovascular conditioning to carry your body that way, it has. Huge muscular demands, in fact, much of the breakdown that we see is mechanical fatigue. As I like to see it, the breakdown of the running muscles waist down become really challenging, and on top of it, you've got the mental strain, like there's an incredible amount of focus that is necessary, cognitive load that's there, and beyond the pure effort, it also takes enough time in which exogenous fuel taking in calories isn't optional. It's critical if you want to maximize your performance, and most athletes get that wrong. They don't fuel enough, they don't practice enough with their fueling, and so you have these huge demands, and so in order to get ready for this event, there was also a reality that so many runners, in fear of the distance, in pursuit of breaking through barriers, in this thought that's weight bearing the high impact every time your foot lands on the ground, of the 1000s of steps that you take, it's multiple times your body weight that is going into the ground and rebounding through the musculoskeletal system. It's no wonder that north of a third of people that decide to take on a marathon challenge get injured in the leader, up to half the stats show us this, and so it's a really, really tough event, and it's a tough event to get ready for. That's the challenge of it, in many ways.
Max Gering 16:30
There's another component that we talk about a lot, that going back to the pro athletes, you had an expression where you talked about the athletes about showing up to your race day fit and fresh, and I think one of the things we'll unpack today is there's training for a marathon as an elite athlete, where that's your whole full-time job, and then there's training for a marathon and a breakthrough performance when you have a very busy life with competing demands, and I think it'd be great if you touch briefly on this game of stress and understanding that training is stress on your body, but there's also life stress, and how does that come into play when training for a marathon?
Matt Dixon 17:04
Yeah, I think one of the biggest challenges of age group athletes of any endurance sport is to look at what the pros do and say, okay, I'm just going to do a sort of shrunk version of that, and just if I follow that in a vacuum, I'm going to be great. The difference with most of us, if you want to call us that, that us is that we are training, we are applying a training stressor on the body in the realm of a whole bunch of other life stress, so work demands, financial stresses for some people, traveling for work, family life, and life commitments, all of these other stresses that we have. The body is very smart, but one thing it's not good at is differentiating sources of stress, and so you know, my stats of more than a third of runners showing up injured, they also showcase, and these have been studies that have been done taking blood work for athletes in the day before the race, and there's a really interesting study to do that, and by some estimates, more than a third, about 40% of marathon runners show up systemically fatigued. Now, part of that might be their training loads, but I think a lot of it is that the fitness is not really absorbed, and I think it becomes in the realm of all of the other stresses that accumulate, and so we need to be really, really sensible. We always say you don't want to show up to the start line fit but fatigued, you want to show up fit and fresh, and it's so, so critical.
Matt Dixon 18:36
And I think that this leads us to one of the challenges of the vast majority of, and I hate to say it, marathon plans, especially ones that you get off a shelf, or marathon coaches, which is predetermined number of mileage or hours per week as the barometer, and so if you build a plan, proverbically as a spreadsheet, I'm going to run, make it up 20, then 25 then 30, then 35 miles a week. Yes, that looks very pretty on a spreadsheet, but life is not a spreadsheet. It's chaotic, it ebbs and it flows, your stresses and demands, and so a rigid outcome goal of I need to just hit this number of miles or hours in a week of running is always going to compete with everything that happens in life. You've got a sick kid, you've got a brutal work deadline, you've got a string of bad nights of sleep, and this is where things get really challenging. And so I like to apply, we like to think about a dynamic mindset where you're building the magic word in any endurance athlete, consistency. If you can weave weeks and weeks and weeks, if not months and months and months of high value training that's not predetermined of a good chasing outcome of number of hours, but whatever it is for this week. Then I can take advantage of that of which the body can absorb and adapt to, then we're on a raining run, that's when we start to see progression, and when we see progression, we build confidence, we build trust in ourselves, the body physiologically adapts, and guess what, we show up fit and fresh, and that's really the key,
Max Gering 20:18
fantastic, and oftentimes athletes in the end end up training more when they had that dynamic approach, which is something we talk about a lot, because they don't get sidelined for a whole week or three, four days from overdoing it, and needing to take some time off. So, in the end, you actually do train longer and better over the long course of the journey.
Matt Dixon 20:36
Yeah, I think that's really.. I always tell a story, and this is going to be about a triathlete, and I'll tell it very, very quickly, but one of our world-class athletes, that was an Ironman athlete, that always did 30 hours a week, and when I took him on as an athlete, I reduced his total training hours by a third on average on the week, but over the course of the whole season he accumulated more training hours, because he was never injured, he never had forced breaks. He stayed healthy, and so whenever the media asked me, How many hours a week do your pro athletes train, I always used to look around and say, I don't know, that's not something I'm looking at. What I'm looking at is how many hours can they accumulate over six months, and are those hours hours of training in which the body can positively adapt, and when you have that shift of mindset, it enables courage to make smart decisions to fit your training into life, and that's what we try and inject into every athlete cycle, psyche, not just the pro athletes, but people that are doing it for the first time
Max Gering 21:42
fantastic, so with all of that in mind, in those training hours, what are we looking to accomplish when building up a marathon runner? You often touch on five components of marathon performance, these five big things that we're trying to build, and just a disclaimer, we're going to put mindset and we're going to put fueling on the side right now, because, as we know, those are two, and pacing, those are three things that can make or break a marathon performance, but from a physiological standpoint, training the body, what are we looking to accomplish?
Matt Dixon 22:14
Yeah, I think Swain, I think I want to double down on that, because those are key components, you can be as fit and primed as you can, but if you, if you, if you mess up the pacing side relative to your readiness, or you fail to fuel, then everything to come back, and obviously the mind is a key driver of performance, that's the thing that really can make or break. So we are going to package those up in a bow and put into the side, and we'll just think about these are the nice building blocks of training in a way of preparation. This is what we're going to do, and, and I think this is this is always valuable. When I talk to an individual athlete, I always break it down in these, because it, it defines our mindset as it comes to training, and I think it starts to unpack how we can be successful to think about things in a different way, so the first is the most obvious, the thing that everybody thinks about, which is cardiovascular conditioning, and let's just remember what that is, your heart, which is a pump, which is uploading oxygen and pumped out through carried by the blood to our muscles that we are then using to generate energy and then transferring back and offloading the byproducts, carbon dioxide, hydrogen, etc. and circulating on a closed system, so that is a critical core component we need to be fit and we need to be fit enough to carry whatever effort we can over the course of 42 kilometers 26.2 miles I think the big mistake the runners make pure runners make when they think about cardiovascular fitness is that the only way that I'm allowed to build cardiovascular conditioning is through running, because I am a runner. But hang on, if you strip it down into really simple terms, you're kind of training a pump, that's what you're doing with a whole bunch of plumbing, and we need to be really good at circulating it, and so it's allowed under the rule book. The last time I read that we can train that in any arena, and that's where the multi sport comes back to it. So that's a key component. We'll talk about multi sport a little bit later, but I just want people to remember you're not restricted to running to train the pump. That's a nice way to think about it. The second component, and it's always this happy marriage that occur between these two partners is muscular endurance.
Matt Dixon 24:47
So, what we're talking about here, mostly your legs, because it's a running discipline. If you're training the muscles to handle the load of longer efforts, hopefully at the highest operating level that you can. In and especially when you start to experience fatigue, so can you maintain good spring and rebound off the ground, good leg speed over the course of 42 kilometers, and interestingly, this is often the part where marathons are on an individual level won or lost, whether you meet your goals, you don't meet your goals. So I always say fitness is not the limiter, and when I talk about that, I mean cardiovascular conditioning, that's that's the easier one to actually train, but it's whether your legs are actually holding up, and people that have done marathons before probably hear about this, of deliver yourself to the last 10k or so, where we can have the durability and maintain and prevent too much mechanical fatigue, where, and I'm sure some people on the call have felt this, I feel fine, I can talk, I look down and my legs won't behave, and therefore I start to lose that little bit of rebound, the foot spending more time on the ground. I've got muscular fatigue, or I like to call it mechanical fatigue. That's the biggest limiter for so many people. The body's full of energy, the heart is not slowing down, and yet you can't express it. That's mechanical fatigue. So that's a big limit. That's number two. Number three kind of partnered with it is tissue durability. What I mean by that is this is your tendons, your ligaments, your muscles that are effectively holding together our chassis, the bones.
Matt Dixon 26:32
Can we actually train the cardiovascular condition and the muscular endurance without breaking, and if we can have a really robust chassis, and therefore, and we don't break it, we increase our training capacity, and this is under appreciated. Okay, because without it, your risk of injury goes up. So that's number one. Number two is when you do experience fatigue, because fatigue is a part of doing anything great as a breakthrough, whatever you're doing, can you actually retain form, and if your posture drops, if you lose this integrity, and then not only do you increase risk of injury, you decrease your economy, something will come to, and cost goes up, and so this is an another big failure point for people that are training for marathons. They build cardinal vascular conditioning very quickly, they get fit, and then the tissue durability declines. They get injured, their achilles starts to hurt, they start to have their lower butt hurting because of the upper hamstring. This is around tissue durability. Can you keep it healthy and increase the capacity of your training to be as high as it can in the context of your life to develop, and so that's a huge thing. I want to build the tissues, muscles, and ligaments to be robust. The fourth, which we're really going to dig into is something that is massively under appreciated economy. If you're a car, an automobile, it's your miles per gallon, that's the way you think about it. How do we drive up our running efficiency? And the recipe for this is often neurological and neuromuscular conditioning, getting the brain to fire to all of the muscle fibers, so that a little bit like a an orchestra and a concert, everybody's in tune, all the muscles are working together rather than competing against each other, having great technique and building up your miles per gallon, so at any operating level you lower the physiological cost, and so this is this is really interesting, because if one athlete has the same physiological profile, the same weight, and the same conditioning as another athlete, but one of them is less economical, well, we know who's going to win the race, and it's going to occur in the latter stages of the race economy is the catalyst. Economy is the predictor of mile 22 to 26 and that gap is trainable for every single athlete.
Matt Dixon 29:11
And then the final one is pretty simple: biomechanics and form starts with good posture and optimizing what my stride is like, what your stride is, like it's not for everyone to try and prevent breakdown over the distance, and I would say, and I think that there's an important thing about biomechanics and form. The last thing that you should do, Max, particularly with your heavily muscled legs, the last thing that I should do that looks more like a donkey dipped in cement. When I'm running, red is not look at the elite runners and try and replicate what they're trying to do. Biomechanics and form is very individual for this. There are some themes that continue to come up. You must stand tall, you must have good posture, you must stay. Pull on your upper body, you must try and get the foot to land as close to under the knee and towards the hip as possible. This is really, really important, but to be better, it's the best version of our technique possible. But biomechanics and form is really critical on this. Those are five components I would say
Max Gering 30:20
that's that's great. And now, what we'll do for everybody listening is, we're going to break down how do we train these five components, and we have to start to broaden our perspective about everything we're going to talk about now with multi sport. So, the Purplepatch multi sport approach, what is what does it mean for somebody to broaden their perspective about using multi sport to train not just cardiovascular fitness, but also the other things you mentioned.
Matt Dixon 30:44
Yeah, I think that the multi-sport approach, if we go back to our story with Cecilia Davis Hayes, it was almost something that caught us a little bit surprised. I was not on a passion 15 years ago to try and train runners too much, and the fact that I had a couple of my professional athletes that really got into running, and they had to continue to do multi sport. We started to reveal the truth. I think it is a truth now, and I think it's more commonly accepted. I think it's only going to become more of a part of running training, as you say. We've got to broaden the perspective a little bit. I think it's important to first say running is the bullseye. Okay, if you want to be great at marathons, you better be good, you better be focusing and building your training around running. So, this is absolutely central, and, and so what we're not saying here is, go be a triathlete, you can be a better runner, that's not what we're talking about. Running is the central sport, and when we think about running as it relates to the cardiovascular conditioning, I really like something that's a little bit different for many athletes. When I look at many marathon plans, they'll often say you start running three days a week, only run every other day, like have a week off between, and, and I think for a host of reasons I like a lot of the bedrock of running to be really quite easy for athletes, so lower conversational would be, and incredibly high consistency. Now, there's other benefits to this, but what we like to see is athletes running quote almost every day, that doesn't mean you're running seven days a week, you know, for every every week of the month, but very, very frequent running with a lot of it pretty easy.
Matt Dixon 32:31
There's host of benefits that I'm going to explain a little bit later on that, and we are very, very cautious on the running side of doing, particularly early, too much very high intensity running, it comes with huge, huge risk, as well as every single week doing big over distance running, and the reason for that is those are the individual training sessions that carry consequence fatigue lag for multiple days following, as well as risk of injury, and so, and I say this over distance running is important. You have to do it some speed training in running is important. We do it, but we tend to throttle it down, particularly early, and so the spirit of everyone's marathon training being anchored around the long run, we take a sledgehammer to it. Okay, we just absolutely stand that away. That's not that's a training session, that's not the training session. I think that's it. That's a different thing. Then what we do with cardiovascular conditioning is say, look, as I mentioned before, there's no rules around how you train the pump, and so in support and in partnership, not for recovery, but for performance gains, we leverage other disciplines that tend to be lower weight bearing or non weight bearing, and what that is, is really up to the athlete in charge. We have various modalities that can do it, but the reason for this is we are training cardiovascular conditioning through arenas that carry lower risk. We introduce greater variant stimulus to the body, and actually it gets you - it's a route to get greater total training volume. You can do more, and it is much, much easier to do very, very high intensity work, which is really productive to get ready for a marathon, really hard stuff, but you can do it with less impact on subsequent training, and I'll give you an example. If I'm on a rowing ergometer and I say, let's just make it up, I'm going to go eight by one minute, very, very strong. That can be really demanding, but the next day, outside of a little bit of systemic fatigue, my muscles are fine.
Matt Dixon 34:50
If I send you to the track and say you're going to go eight four hundreds, absolute best effort, it's two or three days of compromised muscular. Skeletal readiness to absorb training, and so it's a route to do high, high intensity from a cardiovascular standpoint. So we use the Stairmaster, the bike, swimming for some people if they like it, the rowing ergometer. There's lots of different arenas that you can deliver, develop cardiovascular conditioning that's safer, and that's really, really high-value stuff.
Max Gering 35:25
Yeah, and to put it more into context, for athletes, about what it looks like day to day, it's instead of a traditional plan, having you run Tuesday through Sunday, you're going to have a run Tuesday and Wednesday, but then on the Thursday we can actually get in some greater work by leveraging a multi sport workout that doesn't have such high high impact recovery time, so then on Friday and Saturday you can do back to back cluster running, as we'll talk about shortly, and so that's what it looks like in the context of your week running, as you said, is still the bullseye, but we're strategically placing multi sport workouts within the week to enhance the rest of your training, not just using them as easy recovery workouts on a Sunday to sneak in extra cardiovascular conditioning, that's one of the big shifts
Matt Dixon 36:11
I think it's key, and you know it's things like depending on if we're, if let's just use the bicycle, and you can be a spin bike, a Peloton, or a bike on a train, or whatever it might be, the type of thing you might do, there's sort of two ins where there's very, very short, high intensity stuff, there's kind of classic, more like zone four threshold work, where you might be going four or five, six minutes at a very strong effort, that might be for other people somewhere around one mile intervals, then we also do a lot of low cadence, what we call strength endurance, so where the legs are moving slower, but you're building very demanding stuff, and as you say, Max, that's a really high value session, but then you're free the next day or the day after to go and do some really high value running stuff in which you can show up better for it.
Max Gering 37:01
Fantastic, just on that. that note, a brief tangent. I'm curious, if you could touch on, so you mentioned the low cadence, but purplepatch, we also, for our bike workouts, we also have athletes do bouts of higher RPM work on the bike. Is there a transfer between that and some running performance in terms of your foot speed and how fresh you may feel the next day on a run,
Matt Dixon 37:22
yeah, there's, we, you know, the label that we call that is neurological conditioning, and so it's sparking up the dialog between brain and muscle, so typically you're doing it pretty high power, and and so you think about it, high high effort, fast leg speed, so you imagine over speed, then you look a little silly, almost doing it, but what's happening there is it's firing every available muscle fiber that you have. When we do any modality, we're only recruiting a certain percentage of those available fibers, but when you actually go high effort and high speed, it tends to recruit those more dormant fibers, and the reason that's important, it's a little bit like lighting up all of the lights on a Christmas tree, rather than some of them. Then what can be available is when you go into running, those fibers are available in the usable mix, so they're available when you start to get fatigued, of like, oh, I can bring them in, but if you've never established that spark that dialog, they're just going to become lead weight, no different than fat, and so we do. It's very, very important to do some high, high intensity type running, but the challenge with it is that it's risky. So, if you do it on a bike, it's zero risk. It also is, we say, a much lower lag of fatigue, so I think this is one of the great catalysts of power, so successful in many ways,
Max Gering 38:46
fantastic. So, for all of you athletes listening, remember, reframe that you can train your VO two max on a bike on a rowing ogrometer. The next part of building a great marathon runner, as we talked about, is muscular resilience, muscular endurance. So, to kick things off, obviously, let's talk about the running side of that, and that's important to train. We need to do it with some over distance running, a fair amount of run frequency. But how do we do it differently? How can athletes do it differently without increasing injury risk?
Matt Dixon 39:17
Yeah, I think there's two things here. So, we let's hold hands and say, what are we trying to do here? We're trying to get incredible durability. We don't want to fail from a muscular standpoint in the back half of it. So, how do you get there? Well, most people get there by saying I'm worried about the distance, so I've got to build confidence that I can go the distance, so if I'm going to run 26 I've got to run 18, then 20, then 22 then 24 then I can quote no, I can do it, but it comes with huge risk, because when you actually run 20 miles, and particularly if you just run straight, what occurs over the course of let's just make it up three hours or. So, of running is that your form builds up and it feels really good, and then it starts to decline on the back side of it, and now you're running with less and less great form of biomechanics, greater and greater risk of injury, and magnified muscular damage, and so then it's like, well, I've got to get ready, so you've done that on a Sunday. On a Tuesday, I go to the track and do some intervals. That's when you get injured. You didn't get injured because of the track, you got injured because of the muscular damage, the similar to the cardiovascular condition. If we want to build incredible muscular resilience, it's way safer to build it through frequency than it is through just single bouts, so if I want to learn to play guitar, don't just play for two hours once a weekend and say that's great, play every single day. So even on the multi sport days, we might have athletes go and run really easy for 10 or 15 minutes following, and what we're building there is a little bit of muscular endurance, so building that frequency, it's almost like gradually building fitness under the radar, and then it pops up, and you say, "Wow, it's incredible. The other part of it, and I think we'll get into this a little bit later, but we also, on any longer running we do, we're looking to develop cardiovascular conditioning, we're looking to develop muscular endurance, but we have a rule: never take a bad step.
Matt Dixon 41:24
And so, by never taking a bad step, we introduce walk breaks as a strategic tool, and that's so that before your form declines, reset cognitively, reset your form, and run well. And so, you should finish every single time the last third of your race, rather than form of your training event, rather than form declining, you're running your best at that point, and then the body is programming good form, the body is establishing the adaptations without all of the consequence, so we do that really well, we also, as I mentioned before, for muscular endurance that low cadence biking, or big overpowered rowing, really, really valuable, almost as well. By the way, the other things we use is people hiking, or rocking, or stair climbers, where it's a really safe upward challenge against a grade, where you're walking on a treadmill, walking on a stair climb, it's a great way to build muscular endurance. So, this is not just recovery, it's using it to build that muscular endurance, is what I would say.
Max Gering 42:31
Fantastic. Going back to that, never take a bad step, which I think is a really important reframe for athletes, because it allows them to really focus on winning their training and accumulating great training over the course of months, not just weeks, leading into a marathon. How do cluster runs and breaking up that super over distance long run come into play in helping athletes never take a bad step? How can athletes think about breaking up one long run over two days, maybe three days, depending on the athlete, over the course of a weekend,
Matt Dixon 43:02
yeah. The athletes are senior Davis Hayes. I'll never forget her longest run that she did was 13 miles to get ready for the marathon, 244 in the marathon, but there's a little, you know, they sound that it's like that's bonkers. But by the way, we have athletes that run longer to get ready for marathons, make no mistake, but there's a dirty secret when you say that, that's almost like the headline news or social media type blitz, because the truth is, what we did repeatedly is something that everyone listening can learn from, is rather than just building muscular readiness and marathon readiness around single bout single days, how long is my long run over the course of typically three days, so let's just take it a Friday, a Saturday, Sunday. We can cluster three runs in a row, sometimes more than three runs in a row over three days. That over the course of it, you might actually run a marathon. So, what it looks like is, okay, I'm going to do an easier run on Friday. Sometimes we might do a double run on Saturday, so imagine 100 minute run in the morning and a 50 minute run at night, and then, and then on Sunday, another run of let's make
Matt Dixon 44:11
it 75 minutes, and over the course of that time, for over three days, you might run a marathon, but the key is every single step is good, every single step is under control, and that Sunday run, you're running it at race pace for the most part, so that the body and the back end of it is getting used to the last mileage being great, and so we do this consistently over two days, back to back, three day clusters, but building that cluster of marathon readiness, and guess what, you just said something really, really good there, Matt, which is winging training, something that we love to say at Coaches at Purple Patch. It builds confidence, because you're like, yeah, okay, I've just run the distance over a couple of days, but I've run it feeling great, doing great, the body is adapting to it. And I can actually start to see evidence that I can run at this pace, and when I see evidence, you know what comes confidence, trust in yourself, and so we're looking to win training rather than surviving 20 miles and then going, "shit, now I've got to do 26, and that's what happens so often, so it's just a more pragmatic way to go about it. I would say
Max Gering 45:24
fantastic. And for everyone listening, again, these numbers, right, we're throwing a blanket over general marathon training. The way we do it at Purplepatch is to give context, is you have our run squad program, but you also have access to myself and the whole team of coaches, so there's nuance here. For one athlete, it may be 213 mile back to back runs for another advanced athlete. It may be doing a 20 mile run because they've been running for years and their body can absorb it. Yeah, the idea is being creative and not forcing your body and your life to train a certain way, because that's the way you're quote unquote supposed to train. So
Matt Dixon 45:57
I think that's a really key point, because if you can do it really, really well, as some advanced runners can do some 1820 mile runs, do it at pace like I prescribe that, but it's not the right for everyone. So we are talking under that big umbrella, and obviously the influence, and that's the thing. We
Max Gering 46:14
just had an athlete, Kyle was on the podcast, who ran 234 at Boston, right, and he worked with Coach Brad via Coach consults and increased his run volume on certain weekends because his body could absorb it. One more thing about this topic of muscular endurance is strength training. We can't move on until we talk about strength training. So, how does that play a role in building this for marathon runners? The classic lens on strength training is I should do some strength training, because it's good injury prevention. Throw that in the bin. Okay, that's a little part of it. Yeah, yeah, that's good for tissue resilience. It's a performance catalyst. If you want to do great in your marathon, whatever it is that great is good for you personally.
Matt Dixon 47:00
You just mentioned Kyle going to 34 but someone else, massive smile on the face, finishing a marathon and taking going under six hours, whatever it is. If you want to do great for you, your program should include strength training throughout your journey. Number one, and it's a performance catalyst, it's not to prevent a negative injury, that's a nice little bonus. It is a performance catalyst, and it has two prime roles. The first is what we talked about with tissue durability, so strengthening tendons, muscles, and ligaments, and that's really, really important. It also improves your connection and athleticism globally, if you want to be a great marathoner, be a great athlete. That's the first part of it, but I think the key part of it is economy. There is a direct - it's not secondary - it is a direct link of integrating strength training to improving an athlete's economy. So, in other words, let's just simplify. Reducing cost, strength training reduces cost. Everybody is in the pursuit of, can I get ready from a cardiovascular conditioning and muscular endurance, but if you can reduce the cost, that'd been, you're going to be better, or whatever it looks like, so you, you cannot bypass it. When I first started coaching professional endurance athletes, and I'll say this broadly, this was early 2000 zero. We're doing strength training year round, and a big part of the Purple Patch approach, we are real experts at integrating strength training at thought the right thing at the right time, delivering to races year round, because to be coached by me is a non-negotiable. All of our professional Ironman athletes, now there isn't an elite endurance athlete alive, at least a successful one that doesn't integrate it, and that means that we should too. So it's absolutely key,
Max Gering 49:01
fantastic. So that brought us all the way up to economy of movement. If we take a step back in the list of five, and we have tissue durability - we hinted at this earlier - when it comes to frequency, but just again, How should athletes be thinking about training tissue durability? And beyond the 12 weeks before the marathon, how does that come into play?
Matt Dixon 49:18
Yeah, it starts, you know, the thing, the big thing, if you, if you really want to develop tissue durability, it's very, very difficult to say, "Oh, I've got Chicago in 12 weeks, I'm going to build tissue durability, because you're getting ready for the demands of the race. So, we love athletes, we love athletes to fall in love with the journey of running as a part of life, you should always be running. It's really good. It's a great, healthy thing. And there's, we can smash apart. It's bad for your knees. It's not people that run appropriately and don't over train have stronger knees. So, this is done right. Running is a great thing if you want to build tissue resilience. And durability, you need to start way before you put your marathon hat on, and so I always talk about off season and preseason, we kind of kind of treat them both, what we call preparation, as being the most important catalyst for athletes that have breakthroughs, if you do that well, and that's a time that a whole bunch of your running is really easy, really soul filling, really short, and you just build it up gradually. That's how you build it. As that permeates through, we talked about it before, frequency over single belts running most days, it's a huge fed rock. So you want to bring the sea level up, you don't want to have tsunamis, that's the way, that's a nice way to think about it, and so, and
Matt Dixon 50:46
I guess I should go into biomechanics and form as well, just to calories, so that's the catalyst, and then with biomechanics, it's a very similar thing, when you do something frequently, the brain and body starts to work it out, because you're just doing it every day, in parentheses, you obviously integrate some days off, we don't train running every single day, but you know, I say in that parentheses, in the spirit of it, and you're running it, and it's that back to that guitar analogy, it really, really helps, but the other part of it is not trying to turn yourself into a robot with mechanics, but actually do the right things for you. So, there are some things that are universal. You got to have good posture, you got to have good arm carriage. We're not going to break down biomechanics in this webinar, but, but then refusing as an athlete to take bad steps, toughness and just grinding through workouts with big form because you're worried about your cardiovascular conditioning is a recipe for disaster and so that's why when we think about the no bad steps it's so important whatever good running form is for you, for me, for Sally, for John, it might all be different. Some of us are more natural runners, some of us have greatest tensile strength, but whatever it is, don't take a bad step. And that's why one of the reasons that we really love walk breaks as we think about training and racing, ultimately
Max Gering 52:16
fantastic. We will dive into walk breaks in a minute. One thing that we didn't didn't cover yet, which I think is important for runners listening, is I want to talk about wanting to connect the dots between some over speed running hills and then also some longer intervals, and that's the final missing piece here. But how should athletes be thinking about integrating those three different things into their marathon and running training overall and differentiating between the stimulus, there.
Matt Dixon 52:43
Yeah, I think hill training is so valuable. Hill training for me is a safer way to develop the prerequisite sort of harder work that you want to do in running. When you're running on a track and you're running really fast, eight hundreds and 1000s and 1200s there's an amplified risk when you're running up a hill. There's less risk. So I like hill training, and it's a great venue because you're going against gravity. Hill running globally, though, you want to ensure that it's not too, too steep. Anytime you're running hills above about 6% grade, it starts to shift our biomechanics, where we start to lift the knee rather than pushing back the ground behind us, so I like a lot of steady grade stuff, unless you're doing very short sprints, that's number one, over speed running is really high value in which you're doing strides where they're 10 to 15 seconds, and that's similar to that sort of neural connection that we talked about on the bike, and just getting the body. Our biomechanics are best when we're running fast, we're spending the lowest ground contact time, so we're springing, and we're getting used to running form. The important thing when you're running fast is you're not running hard, so it should be flow, ballerina, supple, not like a dormant on an Eastern European disco, where you're just running as hard as you can and trying to break someone's thought, so that's that. It should be poetic on that. And then the last thing that you mentioned, what I think is important that we're not against, and in fact is important, is doing some stronger running intervals at the right time, just not too much of them to get used to running harder, to get used to retaining form under fatigue, to drive cardiovascular conditioning, and running with good form at higher heart rate. So those are all part of the recipe. It's just how you blend them in the program while also leveraging the multi sport, that's the real code that you're looking to crack as an individual.
Max Gering 54:47
Yes, and the want to hover on the word recipe there, when we tie it all together, because that, that's exactly that right. So, if you're training, let's just take, remember, listening 12 weeks, go, the 12 weeks going into into your marathon. It's when you combine all these things, you get a smarter approach. So, you're still doing intervals, you're still doing your everyone loves their Yaso 800 workout and loves to go to the track and do some hard track second sessions. That's important, but you don't need to do it every single week for the 12 weeks leading up to your marathon. That's how you show up fit and fatigued. But if one week you do intervals and then the next week you're doing hills and you leverage a little more multi sport, and then the third, fourth week again, you do intervals, you may do eight hundreds or kilometer repeats, whatever it may be, three, four times leading up to your marathon, but you're not doing it every single week, and so that I think is a really important lens to shift to understanding what it means to train smarter. It's not
Matt Dixon 55:38
just doing, we're sort of looking to avoid the cliff erosion, where it gets good, you get better, and then the body starts to grind, and then you show up, fit, and fatigue. So, rather than thinking about trying to put everything in every single week, we build it over three week cycles that you layer on, and hopefully more than 12 weeks, yeah, hopefully 2024, but you know, 36 weeks that you're building these three week cycles, and then, as you say, narrowing in the last 12 to 16 weeks of marathon prep, you're keeping that cycle going, and the body is like, okay, it's great, because when you look across three weeks, you see everything, everything that you would expect with more, and you actually get to train more of the effective stuff, and that's that's the unlock, and that's how it really is a shift of approach in many ways,
Max Gering 56:26
and it's a good place to stop there with training and what we're trying to build. The last thing I want to touch on before we get to the Q and A is walk breaks. Now
Matt Dixon 56:35
bang them out,
Max Gering 56:37
a popular topic on social media, I mean, you've had multiple athletes go sub three in a marathon, leveraging walk breaks. I recently had a young female athlete, she hit a PR of 307 at Boston, which is a fantastic time on a tough course, walking every single aid station. From a coaching lens, one thing we talk a lot about to athletes about is shifting their mindset from this is not, you know, being lazy. It's not a sign of weakness. It can be a performance enhancer. Walk us through how to actually implement that. How can you make walk breaks a performance advantage and not see it in a way of being a weakness?
Matt Dixon 57:15
Yeah, I think what you mentioned there is the most important thing. By the way, I love, I love, I love it on social media. You get battered by people like it's fantastic. I get to sit back and enjoy my popcorn, but integrating walk breaks in training and in racing is not a sign of weakness. It's not a failure if done right. In fact, it is a tool to go faster, and that that is a really important shift. I want you to go faster, and in order to get from A to B, start to finish line, we integrate walk breaks to go faster. The key thing about it is in that lens you can't wait until you're forced to start walking to integrate walk breaks, so it's not something that you do when everything is collapsing. You get a mile 22 and you go, "Oh my god, I can't do anything but walk, because as soon as you're doing that, the clock starts to accelerate, you start to go slower and slower. You do it in front of the wave, you know, there's that saying that we have, which is run as well as you can, for as long as you can, as often as you can, and we do that across every athlete, and it is mind blowing that you see, and I'm going to give people a running training session, two running training sessions, in which you can experiment on yourself with this, but all of the stories that we have, you know, these, and these are not great runners, these are quite often middle-aged people that sub three hours, never thought they would do it, have tried 315 312 322 suddenly 257 256 walking every single aid station, so getting to mile one and walking now, that's not carrying the shopping from Whole Foods. This is a strategic walk break in an aid station to get fuel and hydration to reset your form way before you need it, and it takes a lot of courage.
Matt Dixon 59:15
The key thing is that your net pace over the course of 26 of the one miles is going to be faster, even though you're walking for 10 seconds or 15 seconds, and what happens is when you get to halfway, you get to three quarters of the way through, you have better muscular resilience, all of the energy reserves, and you're still running with great form, great spring, and you don't have that decline, so every one of these athletes has negative split. Every one of these athletes' fastest 10k is the last 10k So people are not doing it in two hour marathons, but that's a different game, that's a completely. Different game, but when you are approaching this, the key is that you do very short walk breaks earlier than you need. You do it consistently, and it's not the same for everyone. It's not that everyone walks every aid station. I had an athlete run 228 at the New York Marathon.
Matt Dixon 1:00:18
He walked five times, 10 seconds, fastest 10k the last 10k So, most of these athletes that are breaking through, it's finding your recipe, so that you'd never get to that point of high effort with bad form, because when you got high effort and high form, cost goes up, form goes down, and of course, pace and explosions occur, so that's really the strategy here, and if this is something that we learn out of Ironman training and Ironman racing at the professional level, applied it to our marathon runners, particularly age group marathon runners, and of the every participant's doing a marathon, I would say that, yeah, there are 1015, 20% of the faster runners that are more pure runners that might not need them, but there's probably a good 70 to 80% that would go faster by bravely integrating it, and this is something that we see time and time again, so very quickly, I know we're bartering up on time, and we do want to stay on for five or 10 minutes for questions, but very quickly, if you want to experiment with this, go out on a Wednesday, choose a loop near your house with very few stop signs or traffic lights or anything like that, and run at like a six or seven out of 10 effort, and you can have your Garmin, you can have your heart rate strapped, just don't look at any data, and just run around at a moderate effort. Okay, and just run around, just no stops. Next Wednesday, similar thing, go and do exactly the same thing, but about every 10 minutes, just walk 10 or 15 seconds. Don't try and beat it, don't try and go faster. It's not a time trial. Don't run harder, don't run easier. Just go by feel and see what happens, and it's not that, oh, you have to go faster, but see how much speed penalty you have, and see how you feel on the back half of the run. We do that, and consistently we see people that report back and go, well, that felt really good, but you can't wait until you're 30 minutes in, you got to start straight away. It's a really nice way to put it into action a little bit.
Max Gering 1:02:28
Fantastic, exciting to see if people try and let us know how it goes. All of you on this call, whether you're live or watching the recording, you have a chance to chat with me. We can have a 30 minute call to talk through your training and your goals and answer anything further in depth that you, that we talked about, here we had about over 300 people, just over 300 people sign up for this webinar. I have 30 spots over the next two weeks to talk with you guys. So, Tiger's gonna drop a link in the chat, which she just did, to book that call, and you can also email info purplepatchfitness.com to get a link and schedule a call with me. Fantastic. And then the last thing, which is something we talk about a lot, which is, remember that this should be fun. Matt, you talk about that a lot, and this is, we're all ambitious people, and we want to go faster, and want to be fitter, and get stronger, and that's really important, and set big goals. But majority of the journey should be fun. You shouldn't be dreading your workouts, you shouldn't be dreading your marathon build, and you don't want to get to the end again, whether it's a half marathon, 5k 10k ultra, whatever it is that you're training for, whatever your big goal is, you don't want to get to the end of that training block being, wow, goodness me, thank God I don't need to train anymore for the next two, three weeks, and I could just turn my back on the sport. Yes, we won some post-race recovery, but we're looking to make running a lifestyle and something that, as you said, Matt, earlier, that you really fall in love with that's
Matt Dixon 1:03:42
it, and I'll finish with just a vignette of, you know, it is unbelievably important that we allow ourselves to love the journey, and it's fun, and a big part of this, you mentioned Carl, who went 234 we also had in that race another athlete that raced a marathon on the same weekend that broke five hours and was just as excited and happy, and they both happened to come to my bike classes, and so you know the race was Boston was on the Monday, the her marathon was, I think, on the Saturday, and by that Thursday they came back to the bike class, and they came in not just big smiles, but there were smiles with everyone in the room, and I think being a part of a community where it's like everyone just trying to improve and do their best, and they're just excited to carry on, you know. Kyle just decided to go and race a triathlon a few weeks later, and when he did Alcatraz and did great there, and it's, it's like it's a big part of the fabric to make your big life even bigger, and one thing we didn't touch on today is this is a journey for you to get faster, but I tell you one thing that's going to help you get faster is if you do it in company of others, and you leverage people around like-minded, not just the team of coaches, if you're a part of Purplepatch. But the big broad community that are going to help you stay on track, feel accountable, get support, insight, and guidance of people that have done stuff just like you want to do, and so, um, so I think that's a great way to end, guys.
Matt Dixon 1:05:15
Thanks so much for joining, and thank you for listening. I hope that you enjoyed the new format. You can never miss an episode by simply subscribing. Head to the Purple Patch channel of YouTube, and you will find it there, and you could subscribe. Of course, I'd like to ask you if you will subscribe. Also, share it with your friends, and it's really helpful if you leave a nice positive review in the comments. Now, any questions that you have, let me know, feel free to add a comment, and I will try my best to respond and support you on your performance journey. And in fact, as we commence this video podcast experience, if you have any feedback at all, as mentioned earlier in the show, we would love your help in helping us to improve. Simply email us at info@purplepatchfitness.com or leave it in the comments of the show at the Purplepatch page, and we will get you dialed in. We'd love constructive feedback. We are in a growth mindset, as we like to call it, and so feel free to share with your friends, but as I said, let's build this together. Let's make it something special. It's really fun. We're really trying hard to make it a special experience, and we want to welcome you into the Purple Patch community. With that, I hope you have a great week, stay healthy, have fun, keep smiling, doing whatever you do. Take care.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
marathon training, cardiovascular conditioning, muscular endurance, tissue durability, economy of movement, biomechanics, walk breaks, multi-sport training, strength training, performance enhancement, injury prevention, training consistency, fueling strategy, mental preparation, dynamic training.