Reflections on a summer in Chamonix

Spending time in Chamonix in the heart of the French Alps — arguably also the centre of the trail and mountain running universe — provides many opportunities to learn and reflect. The summer trail running season reaches a crescendo as we approach what many will consider the marquee event of the year, the Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc and its sister events. Whether or not I agree with the emphasis placed on the longer forms of the sport is for another post. Either way it’s difficult to spend time in the Chamonix valley in July and August and not walk away feeling at least a little overwhelmed. Both by the sheer number of athletes training for one of the UTMB races or at least using the endless network of trails as a training base for other high profile European races. While incredibly passionate about the sport I can openly admit to being more flabbergasted and exasperated most days than inspired.

On the one hand, you are exposed to athletes of the highest calibre with resumes and the physiology to make the absurd seem marginally possible. On the other you get to witness the crazier side of a sport where a poor understanding of physiology, psychology, fuelling and perhaps more importantly, it’s application leads to a training culture based on hearsay and social media. There is also a blending of athletes from many different endurance sporting backgrounds. The latter becomes problematic for those without the context to appreciate that volume and intensity are widely varied in non-impact sports relative to more traditional running training. This creates both opportunities and of course risk.

Let’s be clear, trail running, at least as far as ultra-running and skyrunning disciplines are concerned, is quite different to running on the track or the road — at least insofar as there are multiple ways to train for these disciplines. There are examples of athletes who have succeeded from a more traditional running approach. The likes of Jim Walmsley or more recently Nienke Brinkman stand out as athletes capable of running fast times on the road, at least in the marathon. While Jim may not be knocking on the magical 2-hour barrier, I suspect given the specific time and focus may well be capable of running under 2:10 whereas Nienke recently ran a 2:22 marathon after only a couple of years of competitive road and trail running. While in percentage terms these are still a long way off world record times, both athletes would likely have legitimate chances of being professional athletes on the road. On the other side of the spectrum, we have athletes like Francois d’Haene, Killian Jornet and Maude Mathys who have had success coming from a background of higher volume sports such as ski mountaineering. The volume, intensity and distribution of that intensity across these sports are hugely varied. For some context: 20-30-hour weeks of training are not uncommon in ski mountaineering (or cycling, rowing, cross-country skiing etc), of which often sighted sports scientist Dr Stephen Seiler has showed the vast majority of which will be at easy intensities (> 80%). Athletes from these non-impact endurance sports can accumulate close to 1,000 hours of training every year. The hours spent training by elite runners in the marathon and under in comparison are likely to be closer to 10-16 hours per week and will also likely have a different intensity distribution based on the specific event they are training for. Perhaps a more periodised approach for the middle-distance events and more pyramidal for events from the 10k through to the marathon as advocated for by British sports scientist and long-time advisor to Paula Radcliffe, Prof Andrew Jones. Part of the challenge in studying this intensity distribution is in delineating an exact method for appreciating the inter-relationship of intensity, speed and duration throughout the course of a training block. For now, I digress.

As trail running grows, becomes more professional and attracts an even higher calibre of athlete and sponsorship money, the training methods will undergo a similar refining process. Not too dissimilar to what we have seen in road and track or road cycling where the combination of highly talented athletes will merge with great coaching, sports science and psychology. The range of potential training approaches will narrow, albeit given the varied tools required to perform in trail running, will remain wider than that in professional road and track. Training progressions for the latter can ultimately always be reduced down to time; be it per mile, kilometre, one lap on the track or even per 100m increment. Thankfully, the role of art and not just science will always have a place in both, but likely more so in trail running where the sheer number of variables to consider will limit the role that external tools for monitoring performance and dictating changes in training can have.

The purpose of this post is not to take a side or to say that one is better than the other. As my time in the sport and ultimately life has shown, it is often best to sit on the fence and observe both sides. Picking the attributes that resonate and at least sitting, often uncomfortably, with the ones that don’t. Allowing them to penetrate just deep enough for one to question one’s own truth, but not so long that we end up jumping at our own shadow each time new information or ideas emerge. It’s an uncomfortable place for sure. Ultimately the athletes in your care can succeed or fail based on these reflections and the subsequent iterations or reinforcement of your existing knowledge and experiences. Everywhere you look we see differences in volume, intensity, frequency, nutrition, strength and conditioning, cross training modalities, you name it and each attribute of ‘training’ can be argued in a myriad of ways. When one starts out it is common to gain a limited amount of knowledge about the subject and vastly overestimate the relevance and applicability of that knowledge. It’s only as time progresses and your experience grows that you are provided with the context to see where and when that knowledge is actually applicable – some might call this wisdom.

Coaching an athlete with a background of running the mile can look very different to coaching one with a background of ski-mountaineering. Not only can their underlying physiology be wildly varied but the training they have done will have pushed their physiology and psychology to very different places. The metabolic profile of the miler may be steep which serves them well in an event where the ability to produce and utilise lactate is important whereas the metabolic profile of the skier may be flatter given higher global training volume and a more pyramidal approach to intensity distribution. We can’t train these athletes with the same approach. We have to ask ourselves: what are the qualities required for the event we are training for relative to the qualities of the athlete in front of us? How many athletes and coaches are asking themselves this question?

For me coaching has become less about having a specific philosophy and more about ensuring I am constantly challenging my knowledge to ensure that I have a big enough toolbox to apply to the specific athlete I am working with. The challenge is only heightened by the role of perception and psychology of the athlete. Irish sports scientist, John Kiely makes the argument that we cannot separate the perception of training, the expectation of what adaptation that training will elicit and the actual physiology of training adaptation as we might try to understand it in a lab setting. To me this is both amazing and at times frustrating. I watch to see what training people are doing and then I try to listen to their rationale. Many times, I cannot understand the link, yet paradoxically some of them continue to perform.

There is a quote from economist, John Maynard Keynes saying that “the market will stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”. In essence implying that even if the market price of assets is wrong (irrationally priced), the timeline for those prices to correct are often longer than the investor can stay solvent for. Sometimes I feel the same in coaching. You can often see what is wildly wrong, but in many cases the athlete can perform for just long enough that you look wrong for saying their training / racing was unsustainable or the next person comes along doing the same thing just reinforcing the message. The bottom line is that our memories are short. I often like to go back 5 years and look at race results and see who is still in the sport and who has since drifted into the proverbial abyss of burnt-out and injured. Outside Online published an article a number of years ago on burnout in ultra-runners. The evidence was all too clear and yet sitting in Chamonix right now I feel that we have not moved any further forward. Remember the likes of Geoff Roes, Kyle Skaggs, Mike Wolfe, Timothy Olson the list goes on. If we look at the female side of the sport, the combination of overtraining and racing combined with underfuelling means we are sitting on a dangerous precipice of athletes that are on the verge of breaking down. The consequences range from stress fractures to failing to have a natural menstrual cycle and the long-term health consequences of what is now termed relative energy deficiency in sport (REDs). Norwegian sports scientist, Olav Aleksander Bu is someone that is passionate about endurance sport and lives at the coal face through his involvement with two of the world’s best triathletes, Kristian Blummenfelt and Gustav Iden. He has been vocal in his criticism of underfuelling for endurance sports athletes. Based on their research, current Olympic gold medallist and ironman world champion Blummenfelt has a higher absolute V02 max when he is carrying more weight (including fat). He now races at 80kg despite having been as low as 72kg because he performs better at a higher weight. This is for race distances lasting as short as 2 hours and as long as 8. We need to move away from a world where an overly reductionist view on weight is taken and tolerated. Irrespective of how aerobically efficient you are, if you limit exogenous glycogen intake the quality of your training will suffer. The body needs fuel to train and race and I would hazard a guess that most female trail runners are chronically underfuelling.

It is no surprise that we also get sucked into the mileage and vert Jim is running or how quickly Killian gets back into training after a 100-mile race. It is easy to fall into the trap of “if they can do it and be successful then so can I”. The problem is multifactorial, but my guess is that we will not see what is optimal until there are a large number of athletes of equal physiology and training history as Jim, Killian, Maude, Courtney etc. Until such time as making training mistakes is costly to performance and therefore to the sponsorship and salaries of the athletes at the top, we will not see what is wise and what is folly.

Let’s also not underestimate the understanding that Killian has of physiology and performance. I have spent hours looking through his published training (partly because some of it is in Spanish) and read every English blog I can find. He is a keen student of the sport and has been training methodically since he was a teenager. He is also no stranger to the psychology of performance and racing — he wins most races before they even start. Stories of him running up Mont Blanc with Dakota Jones or jumping out a taxi in Nepal and running with Davide Magnini in the week of races are shrewd ways to knock your competitors off their game when you know you have superior abilities to recover from training than they do. Let me get back to my earlier point though. If there were more competition, then the likelihood of such strategies being successful are reduced. When that happens, we can start looking at a narrower range of ways to taper as a simple example. Athletes will no longer be able to use Killian as justification for doing too much in the week of a race and ultimately shooting themselves in the foot. When there is an actual performance and financial cost to this sort of behaviour it will undoubtedly change. Of course, whether professionalism is good or bad for the sport as a whole is an entirely different debate.

Similarly, when it comes to mileage or vertical gain, we are all still far too easily sucked into comparing these numbers on a weekly basis. Italian running coach Renato Canova has made the observation that with elite level East African runners, basic aerobic capacity is built within about 5-7 years of structured training. After this time, any training done at an intensity lower than 20% of their race intensity is simply there for regeneration purposes. And for clarity, regeneration is not a 20km trail run with 1,000m of vert. It’s probably 30-60 minutes of easy jogging. In the context of trail running this might mean that doing 3,000m of climbing in a week at an intensity within 10% of race intensity (distributed with some a bit harder, some easier and some at race intensity) might be far more valuable when training for most marathon distance trail races rather than trying to do 8,000m of climbing where, given the total fatigue accumulated, the athlete can only do 1,000m of that with any ‘quality’. For another athlete training for an ultra, I accept that this might look somewhat different. Naturally the intensity of UTMB is probably steady (5-10% harder than easy) given the duration of the event, so climbing at an easy intensity might well sit within 5-10% of race intensity and therefore have actual training value. My guess is that most athletes in our sport try to compress too much into too short a time and subsequently are not able to produce the quality of training that would ultimately lead to even high levels of performance in racing. To make this point clear, I am not saying we should not train hard. What I am saying is that the quantity of training should not be at the expense of the quality of that training. Race results are what should make the headlines, not data on Strava. Simply creating space in the form of true regeneration running, between harder days or even harder blocks and moving away from looking at training through the lens of a week will go a long way in improving the structure of most athletes’ training.

While the sport is growing remarkably fast and the current generation of talent is incredibly exciting, I think we are still some way off seeing the sport reach a level similar to that in road / track or even professional road cycling. Remember the days when cycling was more about romantic breakaways and maverick riders throwing caution to the wind than it was about power meters, exogenous glycogen intake and team tactics? The sport has changed and the level of professionalism has increased. Teams have sports scientists, coaches, psychologists and chefs. The understanding of training, aerodynamics and equipment has reached incredible levels. The likes of Pogačar, Van Aert, Pidcock and Van der Poel are not only redefining what we thought was possible within modern road cycling, but also crossing over into other disciplines such as cyclo-cross and mountain biking with great success (and vice versa). Not only are these guys talented, but they also work with world class coaches and support staff. This forces the other riders to up their game and ultimately takes the sport to a higher level. Don’t get me wrong, both cycling and running on the track and road face their own challenges, but they are also unquestionably further along in this process than trail running is. Until trail running reaches a similar place, athletes will continue to feel their way blindly through a sport that asks a lot of the body and perhaps even more of the mind. They will train too hard, race too often and remain in the dark ages with regards to fuelling and nutrition and not connect the dots until it’s too late. It’s a vicious cycle and one that sponsors and certain race series organisers would do well to appreciate and assist through athlete education and support instead of encouraging unrealistic race programs and poorly thought through race incentives. Potentially the greatest marathoner of all time, Eliud Kipchoge, races a couple of times per year and is known to take 3 weeks of complete rest after a marathon. The lesson is clear, to produce great quality of performance we need to respect the combination of training and recovery. It is seldom the athlete that can handle the most in training that wins. Instead it is the athlete that handles, absorbs, improves and ultimately expresses that training in a race that comes out on top. The human body is incredible; its resilience and potential to achieve great feats of endurance is something to celebrate and of course challenge. But let’s not bury our heads in the sand when it comes to the challenges we face as a sport. There is no reason that athletes can’t succeed in races while also living a healthy life. There are times to take risks for sure, but these should never be at the expense of long-term health.