You might think that the top 1% of a sport is a very small pool to swim inside.

It’s not. I know hundreds of other runners inside that top 1%.

The really small pool is that top 0.3%. That’s the shallow end, where the true pros exist. The ones that don’t just have ambassadorships for big brands, but actually make money to do this as their career.

And the only thing that really separates that top 0.3% to the rest of the top 1% is this:

The ability to recover.

The best runners in this sport are not always the ones with the highest VO₂ max or even the highest top-end speed. Maybe not even the highest potential to be truly great at this. More often – they have the strongest ability to recover.

Because if you can recover from each effort quick enough, you can spend more time training, more time training intensely, and you can get away with less than sub-optimal recovery strategies in other areas of your day to day life.

For just about everyone, training has to be designed oh so meticulously to avoid injury, and recovery has to be planned out to the finest of details to avoid a myriad of other training errors.

And that’s even more unfortunate when you think that the real key to unlocking potential and punching above your weight, so to speak, is to be able to handle the demand of more days of running.

And not only more days of running. But more consecutive days of running. More “back to back” days.

Rather than running three to four days a week with a rest day in between each one, the better training stimulus would theoretically be to run three of those days in a row. I say theoretically, because that’s only *if* the body can properly recover from that string of days.

If you can do a big training day and then top it off with just one more effort before that rest, you have the potential to get even more out of the training stimulus from that first day. Mostly from building durability or “fatigue resistance”, but also from building both the mental and physical capacity to still run when things get tough.

In trail and ultra running, that’s one of the most important factors to success. Every single person will suffer at some point in an ultra. Sometimes it’s just about who can delay their suffering the longest.

In all of my best races, I’ve come from behind to finish strong by playing a smart, conservative game, where I was able to intentionally delay my suffering.

Big back to back training days are the best way to be able to prepare ourselves for that level of mental assuredness, backed by the physical capacity to play a longer game.

So eventually, you want to build up the capacity to handle back to back training runs. Again, this becomes difficult for those that are more injury prone, older athletes, and those with a myriad of other reasons (i.e. life stress, etc.) why they can’t always recover quickly from one run to the next.

But especially when it comes to those ultra distances, this is the best way to prepare the mind and body for that resilience. We really shouldn’t go out and do a 50K training run, preparing for a 50K mountain race.

A 50K training race used as a learning experience for a 50K ‘A Goal’ race is definitely the best stimulus you can get. Particularly if you can get on similar terrain, or slightly easier terrain. But a 30K, 35K, 42K can also do the trick really well, and allow you to recover faster in the process.

But there’s no need for that 50K training day in the midst of a normal training block for a 50K race. The muscle breakdown would simply be too grave, and other adaptations that can be acquired in that training block would subsequently suffer as you likely need more time off.

Instead, what we can do is back to back days that amount to that 50K distance, the number of hours you expect to be out, OR… MORE!

For example, backing up a 3 hour run with a 2 hour run. Or a 35K mountain adventure, with a 15K on park paths the next day. Very similar training stimulus, and same amount of time on feet, with a way better ability to recover.

Not only can you recover better, but you can get more out of each of those individual days. You can get into a better flow and run smoother and stronger, rather than suffering through the back half of that big long effort.

But for athletes that can be more limited within their recovery, it therefore becomes an equation of how to structure those days to ensure a back to back stimulus can still be acquired.

The traditional approach is to do the massive, race-specific day on the first day (say, a Saturday), and the shorter effort the next day.

When athletes have worked up to this state and can recover from it, this is the best approach. Even just from a perspective of helping that second run feel like something more than just an ordinary, everyday run.

But for athletes that have bigger injury histories and/or exist within a certain age bracket where recovery tends to be more difficult, I’ve flipped that switch.

I’ve been experimenting with placing the shorter run on the first day, followed by a bigger run on the second or third day in a row. It’s almost like the shakeout run the day before the big race. And we can treat it as such in training.

Rather than suffering through that final day and raising the risk of improper recovery or improper injury (not that any injury is proper), you can design training in a way where neither of those days feels like a sufferfest. You can then let the demand of that big day soak in (especially if concerned about any muscle tiredness/soreness that might come the next day), while getting more out of both days rather than just one.

It’s one thing to run on tired legs at the end of a three hour run. It’s another thing to go out the next day and run for another hour on those same tired legs. That’s putting an athlete at a way greater risk of injury.

But if you place that otherwise ordinary hour-long run first and don’t treat it as that tired leg recovery run, you can get more out of both days for that athlete.

The fear that some might have within this approach is in feeling fresh enough for that big day. You want that race-specific stimulus, and therefore you want to be at your best.

But I think there’s two things with that:

1. Any tiredness in the legs can still be used on that second day, just later in the process (thus allowing you to still get everything you want out of the big long run from a fatigue resistance and endurance perspective).
2. It’s not the big long run day that gets people injured. It’s the recovery from that day. So why not have more time to properly recover from it?

Don’t get me wrong – I think that first run, or even the first two days of a triple, have to be easy and short enough to properly allow for a good training run on that final day.

And it all comes down to how advanced an athlete might be. Again, the ideal stimulus is that you front-load the first day with the longer effort, and build more fatigue resistance on the second day.

But that is a big risk for a lot of athletes.

If an athlete can only handle the demands of a 3+1 at most, I’m finding that it benefits the athlete more to do it as a 1+3. You still get the long run closer to that race distance (i.e. why I wouldn’t choose 2+2), without suffering the next day through ANOTHER run.

_{ANOTHER RUN is definitely what DJ Khalid would say if he were a runner.}

AND if we’re talking about anything greater than three hours, I’d use the same theory. For example, I would rather see a recovery limited athlete do 1+1+4 in back to back days, than 4+2. The margin for error and risk is so much greater in that 4+2.

Athletes can then approach that first run like they’re “freshening up” or “checking-in” before that big day. Making sure the body has everything in order, but feeling fresh. This, as opposed to running through problems they felt from the moment they woke up.

For athletes racing shorter distances, I would love for them to just run more days of the week, and therefore a lot of their runs can be shorter.

But for athletes racing ultras, you really do need a couple of long runs in the mix, even if it’s just a few. And preferably, a few training days where you are able to build greater fatigue resistance and mental resilience by doing back to backs on some iteration of tired legs.

So like the theory on “delaying suffering” goes in races, why not delay that suffering for as long as possible in the string of days? Why not allow for enough time to properly recover from that tiredness?

Traditional approaches don’t always work for every athlete. Thinking about how you can get the most out of every athlete you work with is key, and this is exactly why I’ve adopted this approach so much this year, AND moved away from the common wisdom around back to back long runs.

Thanks for reading and see you soon!