CTS: Seven Steps Less Than AA

ADAPT: A 5-Step Plan for When Everything Goes Wrong
Jason Koop, CTS

If you do one single thing at a high enough intensity for long enough, every once in a while everything goes wrong. As much as you have trained and prepared, you will eventually get punched in the mouth, so to speak. Your legs will feel like lead, your effort will feel unreasonable, you will start tripping over roots and rocks, and your stomach will be in knots. If you are especially unlucky, these in infirmities will all happen at once. And for many miles. Maybe not in your next race, or the one after that, but if you remain in the ultramarathon game for a long enough time, lady luck’s evil doppelgänger will eventually find you...

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Outside: Being Injured...

How to Mentally Recover from an Injury
Brad Stulberg/Outside, May 17, 2017
For an athlete, being injured is often harder psychologically than it is physically. But the elites have developed a few key tools to help stay happy and sane while healing...
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From Our Sponsor: Level II Coaching Certification

RRCA has created an official tiered Coaching Certification program, adding on to the original (now officially designated) RRCA Level I Coaching Certification. The new curriculum enables RRCA Level I coaches to become officially designated as an RRCA Level II Certified Coach.

Level II will mark a sophisticated understanding of the scientific, psychological, competitive, and managerial aspects of community-based running and working with individual clients. This program is open to RRCA Certified Coaches, and anyone seeking to enhance their knowledge or reinforce concepts learned in Level I are encouraged to pursue the Level II program.

Minimum Prerequisites:
RRCA Certified Coach Level I (includes up-to-date CPR/First Aid certification)
18 years of age or older with no less than a high school diploma
12 months as a Level I RRCA Certified Coach.
     Coaches can start taking Level II modules but won't be fully certified until 12 full months
     following their Level I certification date
Proof of coaching experience - provide a 150-word essay outlining experience and/or URL of coaching business, etc.

Program Methodology:
The Level II course will be delivered in a combination of two formats: online self-study modules with online assessments and an in-person classroom requirement.

Go to RRCA.org for detailed descriptions of the program requirements, associated costs, and more.

Outside: How to Comeback

Getting Back into Running, According to the Pros 
Four of the sport's best on what they've learned from taking time off and coming back

Martin Fritz Huber/Outside Online, May 11, 2017

Every athlete knows that comebacks aren’t easy....Regardless of whether you’re returning from an injury or a voluntary hiatus, regaining your previous form can pose a challenge that’s as much mental as it is physical. Your body may be slow to relearn movements that once came with fluid ease, just as your mind wonders why the hell it’s taking so long...

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Active.com Thank You, Thing...

Is Barefoot Running Still a Thing?
Theresa Juva-Brown/Active.com May 10 2017

Once upon a time, you couldn't attend a race without seeing a slew of runners wearing Vibram Five Fingers, looking like they had lizard feet...

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Active.com: Juan Valdez, Patron Saint?

5 Ways Coffee Makes You a Better Runner
Kolby Paxton/Active.com May 10

Most of us make a beeline for our coffee makers immediately upon waking from our slumber. The hot, caffeine-filled beverage is a staple of the morning routine and often a prerequisite for human interaction. Coffee makes us better people—or, at the very least, better at performing the occupational processes that fill our mornings...

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CTS: Heart Rate? Good. Now Ignore It.

Why Heart Rate Is Not a Good Training Tool for Ultrarunning
Jason Koop/CTS, May 18 2017

If you are going to use interval training to accumulate time at intensity and target specific areas of your fitness, you need a way to figure out how hard you are working. In some sports this is simple. As mentioned earlier, a cyclist with a power meter can directly measure workload in watts, determine how many watts he or she can produce at lactate threshold, and then create intensity ranges based on percentages of lactate threshold power. Ultrarunners don’t have it so easy. For a long time, runners have tried to use heart rate to gauge intensity, intensity ranges based on percentages of lactate threshold heart rate or the average heart rate recorded during a 5K time trial. Others have used pace ranges based on time trials or goal race paces, or a combination of heart rate and pace ranges. Prescribing intensity based on either heart rate or pace is notoriously difficult in ultrarunning, and after trying all manner of methods, I found the greatest success in a remarkably simple, nontechnical, yet scientifically accurate method: rating of perceived exertion...

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