Is race day coming up? Whether this is your first big race or you're a seasoned vet, this episode will help you be sure that you don’t miss a critical step of your race day prep!
In this episode, you’ll learn:
Plus, get our free race day guide checklist here so you can have the peace of mind you have everything you need!
If this is your first big race you don’t really know what to expect. Hopefully, your taper has been going well and you are starting to dream about all the possibilities of how the race will go.
But your actual race day is uncharted territory.
So today, we’re going to go over all the things that you need to pay attention to and plan for on race day.
Because when you prepare for as many details as possible, you are setting yourself for the best race you can run.
Now, if this is not your first marathon, this is a perfect refresher course to make sure that you don’t forget anything.
Your goal is to take away as many decisions as possible on the day itself, so you are ready to run with a calm mind, knowing that you’ve done everything right. You want to control the things that are within your control and let everything else go.
To help me out with this race day prep episode, I invited Coach Elisabeth Scott to the show.
Elisabeth is a marathoner, coach and podcast host at runningexplained.co. What I love about Elisabeth is that she takes complicated running topics and breaks them down into really easy explanations.
Elisabeth found running like many of us do, by just wanting to get in shape and change her outlook on life. And she made a lot of mistakes along the way. I’ll let her explain more about that, but I think that’s what makes her so relatable and interesting.
We go into all the details about what you should eat and wear and how to plan every little thing you can to ensure that your big day is as stress free as possible.
Also at the end of the show, I’ll share a little story about a race day that I didn’t plan so well and how that went. Here’s a hint–it didn’t go great.
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The three weeks before your marathon are critical to your success on race day. If you do too much, you’ll leave your speed in training. But if you do too little, you can start losing fitness.
In this episode you’ll learn…
Grab your free download of our exclusive Marathon Taper Nutrition Plan!
Full transcript and show notes here.
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Improving your mitochondria is one of the best things you can do for your health, with Mitopure from Timeline Nutrition, it has never been easier.
Mitopure restores mitochondrial function, so every cell in your body has the energy to do its job and keep you healthy and functioning right. Mitopure comes in powder form to mix into your favorite smoothie, Protein Powder if you are looking for a great 1,2 punch of muscle support, or softgels.
Go to timelinenutrition.com and use my promo code CONNECT for 10% off the plan of your choice.
Athletic Greens has released a big update to the name of their flagship product. The Athletic Greens we love is now called AG1.
If you’re someone who struggles to get in all the fruit and veggies you need, or who wants to get more consistent but always falls off, or you end up finding tons of fruits and veggies gone bad in the fridge, AG1 will make it simple and delicious.
If you want to try them out and get a special bonus of 5 travel packs and a year’s supply of vitamin D, head to athleticgreens.com/rttt.
I know you’ll love how easy it will be to finally be consistent with your fruit and veggie intake. Give it a try at athleticgreens.com/rttt
There is a deep divide among runners about which is the best running shoe and the big super shoes seem to be winning. Is this because they are better, or is it just clever marketing with a big budget?
Steven Sashen thinks it’s the latter.
In this episode you’ll learn:
The beauty of running is that you really don’t need much more than a pair of shoes to get started.
But does the kind of shoe really matter? Absolutely.
Hundreds of millions of dollars has been spent on the development of running shoes that promise to propel you farther and faster than you’ve gone before, while also delivering a smooth ride and making your feet look good.
Steven Sashen is the co-founder, along with his wife Lena Phoenix, of the minimalist footwear company Xero Shoes and he is also a master’s level sprinter. He claims not only that true minimalist shoes are better for your feet, but they are better for your running.
He takes issue that you need super shoes to run your best and in fact you might be causing more harm than good if your goal is to run for life.
And a fun fact, when Xero Shoes was just getting started, Steven and Lena appeared on the hit show Shark Tank, where they turned down a $400,000 offer from Kevin O'Leary.
I ask Steven about that experience, the pros and cons of each type of footwear, and where we go from here. It’s a lively and controversial conversation that just might have you rethinking what you put on your feet.
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This episode is sponsored by LMNT
When coaching endurance runners of all levels to be their best, I always emphasize the need for proper hydration with the right balance of electrolytes. Most athletes I've coached are surprised to learn that their sodium needs are actually much higher than they expected and it's been hurting their performance.
Part of the reason athletes need much more sodium than they think is not just because they lose electrolytes through their sweat, but also because athletes tend to eat very healthy diets. They've been told that salt is a bad thing in food and frequently don't get enough for their lifestyle.
Much of the science of sodium is based on people who eat highly processed diets which also are very low in potassium. It could actually be the low potassium levels causing the issues that sodium has been blamed for!
What is clear is that both sodium and potassium at the proper levels are essential for high performance (and for life in general!).
When I race, I don't crave sweet, I crave salt and LMNT is the perfect way to hydrate and replenish the electrolytes I need to perform and feel my best.
Head over to DrinkLMNT.com/RUNNERSCONNECT for your salty samples.
How do you KNOW that you are ready to race a marathon? And not just run it, but race it in your dream goal finishing time?
In this episode you’ll learn…
If you are training for a marathon, now is the time that you are really starting to feel it. The miles have been piling up, the long runs are getting longer, and race day is getting closer and closer.
You’ve been keeping your head down and getting the work done and trying not to worry too much about the 26.2 miles or 42 kilometers that you will be racing soon.
But no matter how confident you are in yourself and in your training, there’s a little voice inside your head that is always asking, am I ready? Have I done enough?
Okay, for some of us, that voice isn’t so little! So how can you tell if you're ready for the marathon in a few weeks? And how do you know if the finishing goal that you’ve been dreaming about is realistic or not?
I mean, we all dream of running faster or farther than we ever have before. But we can’t truly know that we’re capable until we do it. Or can we?
In today’s bonus episode Run to the Top, I’m going to reveal the 7 signs that say you're finally ready to crush your marathon goal. This is exactly what you’ll need to know if you are a first-time marathoner, or if you’re running your hundredth. But, I’m also talking to those of you out there who keep trying and trying and just missing that elusive dream goal time. Have you finally done enough this time?
Most first-time marathoners are just happy to be able to finish a marathon, but once you have that first one behind you, almost everyone wants to know if it can be done faster.
The quick answer to the question is no one knows! You can be the most highly trained elite marathoner in the world and if you get a terrible day, you might not make it to the finish line. That's just the harsh reality and sometimes heartbreak of the marathon. You train for months on end and it ends up being a crap shoot on just one single day.
But let's assume that weather is not a major factor (and that’s a BIG IF). How do you know that you've done enough to prepare yourself for what you think you can accomplish?
For anything but your very first marathon where you are simply trying to finish, goal marathon pace should feel a step harder than easy. The more experienced you are at the marathon, the more you can push the effort level. If you've had a good build-up, the goal pace should be something that felt pretty hard the first few weeks, more manageable in the middle, and good (but still a little scary) toward the end of your cycle.
But there’s more to it than that.
There are actually seven major signs that you are ready to race the marathon.
The first thing to do is look back at your training log. How consistent were you with your mileage and fitting in your runs? Consistency is hands down, without a question, the single most important aspect of good training. Running stable mileage without big gaps in training or big swings in mileage is key to being well prepared. Your runs don't all have to be Instagram-worthy, but just showing up day after day is what matters most.
If you were grading your runs like you were in school, I’d like to see the vast majority of them in the B range. If you are always turning in A+ performances, your training is either far too easy for your fitness, or--and this one happens far more often--you are working way too hard and are risking injury or leaving your best work in training.
When training for a marathon, good enough really is good enough.
The second thing I look at as a coach is your long runs. Did you get all or most of them in? Did the majority of them go well or were you strapped to the struggle bus the whole time?
Simply running long at a slow pace does tremendous things for your aerobic system, but adding the extra challenge of some speed to a long run can really test your legs for the big day. Fast finish long runs are great at signaling how you might hold up in the marathon, especially if you paired the run with a moderately paced steady run the day before and still survived. Teaching yourself to keep running hard when tired is exactly the skill you will need on race day so if you have a time goal in mind, you definitely should have been practicing this.
If you’ve had a few terrible long runs, guess what? So have most of us. One or two bad runs are a small part of the bigger picture, so they are unlikely to change your fitness. And the best thing about a bad run is that it’s still a run and it’s still making you a better runner.
The next thing I want to know is how well you are recovering from those hard days and those long, hard runs. Are you able to run easy the next day with minimal to no soreness in the last few weeks before the race? Or do you have to take extra recovery time to get to feeling yourself again?
At the beginning of your training cycle, it's very normal to have leg soreness after hard workouts, but the goal is to build strong legs that can handle what the marathon has to throw at you. A well-designed training plan will build tough, durable legs that can go the distance without being completely trashed the next day.
That’s because soreness is not always a good indicator of a good workout. Soreness happens when you go beyond what you are used to, but lack of soreness doesn’t mean that you are not building and growing. Often, lack of soreness shows healthy adaptation, which means you are absorbing the training well.
If you’ve been consistent, gotten most of your long runs done well, and have made sure that you are recovering right, you are almost halfway there to nailing that goal marathon time. There are four more ways to tell if you are ready.
Number four might be a little obvious, and it's how does goal pace feel? At the beginning of the cycle, a few miles at race pace typically feels on the harder side, but as you get closer to the race, goal pace should start feeling pretty good. It's certainly still significantly harder than easy pace, but it should not be a struggle to maintain it for several miles. After all, you are going to be running at that pace for hours! If you are sucking wind after 30 minutes and it's three weeks before your race, it's highly likely your goal is far too aggressive.
Now there is one caveat to this. If you are training in harder conditions than you predict your race to be, race pace is going to feel much harder at home. For example, I’m coaching an athlete named Katy who lives and trains in hot, sweaty Florida. But her race is in cool and dry North Dakota. So when she is running marathon pace, her effort level is much higher than we hope it will be on race day. Well, at least at the beginning.
That also means that the opposite is true. If you are cruising along down your cool and perfect home roads and your marathon is predicted to be any of the 4Hs hot, hilly, humid, or at a higher elevation, what is easy for you at home is not going to feel easy on race day, so adjust your expectations accordingly.
The next factor in the equation is fueling and hydration. Have you found what works for you and practiced it until it's second nature? Nearly all of your long runs and many of your later-stage fast workouts should be done fully fueled, practicing your race day nutrition, including what you will eat the night before the race. Nutrition is what makes marathons more than twice as hard as halves. If you skimp on this section and don't have a well-practiced plan for the race, you could be in big trouble.
As a coach, I also want to determine how healthy you are. Are there any lingering injuries that you've been pushing through that haven't properly healed? Have you been truly honest with me and with yourself about how severe an injury is? Athletes are strong, stubborn people and we don't want anything, especially a little injury, to get in the way of running. But if you neglected to take care of a tweak, a niggle, or an ouch with proper recovery, then pushing harder than you've ever gone before on race day is a huge risk that might not be worth the potential reward.
I know that you’ve been working so hard and for so long for this one day to arrive. But if you are injured before you start, you are risking couching your running for a very long time.
The last factor is arguably the most important of all. How well have you trained your brain?
If you want to reach your potential in the marathon, or really at anything hard, you've got to dig down into a part of yourself that is a little dark and a little uncomfortable. Running hard for hours on end is hard. And if you don't want it bad enough, all the safety features that your brain has at its disposal to keep you from dying will come out in full force.
This is why you run hard in workouts. It’s not only to build your physical strength, but also to see if you've got what it takes to push past the point where reasonable people slow down or stop.
Now to do that on race day takes discipline that is 100% mental and which can be trained.. Your brain has to override the feelings of excitement and adrenaline at the beginning of the race to keep your pace under control. You've got to learn to stay calm when you see a split that you don't like on your watch and remember that the first 20 miles is just a warm up for the real 10K race.
You've got to let go of fears of failure and follow your plan. You've got to prepare yourself ahead of time that the last 5-10k of the race will be very, very, very hard if you are doing it right.
But you will keep running anyway.
So if all seven signs are resonating with you, then congratulations, you probably have a realistic goal in mind and are ready to race.
If none or only a few of the points I've mentioned are true, then it's time to take a step back and rethink your goals. After all, would you rather cross the finish line with a smile on your face knowing you ran the best race you could or skeleton walk the last 10 miles in pure agony because you overshot your goal?
Making a realistic plan for your race is essential to finishing the marathon with a performance you can be proud of.
Of course, even if you are perfectly prepared, in the best shape of your life, anything can happen on race day that will be completely out of your control. You will have to roll with the unexpected with a calm mind and adjust as you go.
And remember, there’s really no such thing as a good race or a bad race because they both make you a better racer. Most people actually say they learn more from a bad race, but of course no one wants them to happen!
But if you’ve been consistent, with solid long runs, good recovery, goal pace feels good, fueling and hydration is dialed, you’re healthy and mentally strong, you are as prepared as you can be.
Now as long as you don’t overdo during your taper, there’s nothing that can stop you from running your best race.
So I’ll go over that next week on the next bonus Run to the Top.
Are you ready to race? Let me know and I just might feature your story on a future episode.
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What if you could get faster, stronger, and more mentally sharp despite turning the corner beyond age 40? It is actually possible.
Now, if you started running in your teens or in your twenties, you are not going to be able to race or train at the same intensity or paces as you did back then. But just because your times aren’t going to be the same doesn’t mean that you can’t run your very best and have the same sense of pride and accomplishment as you did when you were younger.
In fact, you might even find more satisfaction in your running as a master.
Coach Claire's guest will tell you how.
Cathy Utzshcneider is an accomplished athlete and coach who did not even start her running journey until age 40. In the years since, Cathy has won nine USA Track and Field national age group championships, a silver medal at the Nike World Masters Games, and a gold medal at the North American World Regional Championships. She was ranked No. 5 in the world in her age-group in the mile in 2005.
She is a lead faculty member of coaching and high performance at Boston College and is the author of three books on master’s running. Her coaching practice has produced eight Olympic trial marathon qualifiers, six world age-group records, 10 American age-group records, and 67 USA Track & Field (USATF) age-group champions.
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Running strides will get you fast, fast!
What if we told you that there was a way to get faster, to improve your running form, quicken your feet, better prepare for a race, and have some fun, all in less than 90 seconds of work?
The good news that such a thing actually exists. This simple speed development drill is a staple of track and field and cross country teams all over the world, but many recreational runners are missing out on a classic tool that can massively improve their running.
It’s called the stride. Or striders, or accelerations, or stride-outs. Lots of names for the same awesome skill. But what it’s not is a sprint or a surge. Coach Claire Bartholic will explain.
In this episode, she investigates why strides are so amazing, what they do for you, and tells you exactly when and how to do them.
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Sha'Carri Richardson thought she was going to the Olympic this summer after winning the 100m sprint. But when she tested positive for THC after the race, she was disqualified.
Like Richardson, several elite athletes have made headlines recently, while the use of marajuana has pretty much been an open secret among the best of the best.
But why? What is the science behind this controversial plant? What researchers are starting to learn is that the natural runner’s high that we feel when we go for a run is directly related to the one you get from THC and NOT from endorphins like so many believe.
Now there’s a whole lot more to this topic than getting stoned and going for a run, I promise you, and today I’m going to talk to the investigative journalist who literally wrote the book on it.
Josiah Hesse’s work has been featured in publications including Vice, The Guardian, Politico, and Esquire. In his new book, RUNNER’S HIGH, Josiah takes us on a journey through the secret world of athletes who experience astounding, cannabis-inspired physical and mental transformations. He explores the groundbreaking science of the runner’s high, the economics of the $20 billion CBD market, and the fundamental racism and inequalities in the enforcement of marijuana prohibition.
Regardless of what you feel personally or politically about marijuana, and how it relates to running, this is a stereotype-busting deep dive into a fascinating topic and I hope you’ll join me for the trip.
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Is a cool down after running really important? Do you tend to skip your cool down when time is crunched?
Coach Claire Bartholic reveals the the four biggest myths about cool downs, because even if you do one religiously, it might not be doing what you think it’s doing. Despite what they don't do for you, there are still some great reasons for incorporating a cool down into your routine after each and every run. Claire explores how you can maximize the time at the end of your runs most effectively.
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Will running a marathon in high-tech super shoes help you run faster?
Nike made huge headlines when they came out with the Vaporfly series in 2017. Featuring a new kind of foam and a flexible carbon plate, Nike promised that their expensive new shoes would improve a marathoner’s running economy by 4%.
With elites and recreational runners doing everything they could to improve by just one percent, these magic new shoes were pretty tantalizing.
But with all new technology comes controversy. Nike had already been supplying its best runners with Vaporflies as early as 2016, which was an Olympic year. Other athletes sponsored by other companies would be at a clear disadvantage if the 4% improvement numbers were really true and they complained to the governing bodies of the sport.
Rules changed and the copycats followed Nikes lead. Now in 2021, most of the major running shoe companies have some version of high-tech foam and carbon plate shoes and all of them need to be available to the public before they can be used in competition.
So what does this all mean for you? How much do high-tech shoes matter in your running and racing? I wanted to find out so I invited Michael Haischer on the Run to the Top to tell us what he found.
Mike is a doctoral student and lab manager at the Athletic and Human Performance Research Center at Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI, which just so happens to be my alma mater.
Mike and his team wanted to better understand the potential performance-enhancing effects of technological advancements in marathon racing shoes. So they examined the finishing times of the top 50 male and 50 female runners from all the World Marathon Major series in the past decade, both before and after the introduction of new Nike shoe models.
Did the Nikes make a difference? And if so, what implications does that have on the rest of us, who are not in the top 50?
We are about to find out.
Marquette University's Athletic and Human Performance Lab
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