 The only easy day was yesterday. Hedgehog! Get your heads up and get your eyes open. Stop trying to hide from the pain. Hedgehog, eyes open. Welcome to The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday, the official Navy Seal podcast. I'm Daniel Fletcher. Today we bring back the Director of Fitness for Naval Special Warfare, Mike Caviston, to cover a very important aspect of NSW, running. His advice on training, form, and commonly held misconceptions is crucial if you're planning for a career in naval special warfare, but also helpful for anyone who strives to be a more efficient and effective runner. Let's get started. Hedgehog, get your eyes open. Stop trying to hide from the pain. Hedgehog, eyes open. Thanks for coming back and speaking with us. We're going to do a deeper dive about running in general. You know, we all do it as civilians. We do it as kids. It's got some universal appeal to say the least. So thanks for sitting down with us again. My pleasure. Looking forward to it. We'll start off by having you just give a brief history of your employment before coming to work where you do now. Well, before I came to the center, I was a coach and a teacher. I was at the University of Michigan, and I worked with a number of athletes in different sports, but primarily I was a rowing coach. I was a competitive rower myself, and I got into coaching. And while that was unfolding, I went and got my graduate degree at U of M in kinesiology, and I began teaching. And so I spent about 22 years as a rowing coach and 14 of those years as a lecturer in kinesiology. So you have an extensive background, obviously. It's awesome to be able to talk to you about this, because I think this is something that's personally interesting to me. I'm a runner, and my father's a marathon runner, and so he kind of got me into running pretty early. We all think we know how to run, but in your view, what percentage of active runners are actually doing it correctly? That's a hard question to answer. It's hard to definitively say what correct running is, and I try not to get too caught up in that when I'm talking to people. I was just working with a group earlier today, the recent classic, Completed Hell Week, and they're going through what we call Walk Week, and I'm trying to help them get back literally on their feet so that by next week, a couple of days from now, they can get back into regular training and pass their time four mile runs. And so we review a lot of running technique and give them some running drills and help them get through the aches and pains that accumulated during Hell Week so that they're feeling a little bit better about themselves. And that's one of the things I stress to them is that there's no absolute right or wrong way to run. But I can give them some guidelines and some things to think about, and especially for people that are sort of on the borderline. You know, they're not the greatest runners, or maybe they've been running and they keep getting injured and they're trying to figure out why, then I'll give them some technical things to think about. But everybody's built different. Everybody has a different body type. So I'm a little hesitant to say, oh, this is the correct way to run. Right. And that's because you're saying physiologically people's differences, although we may look very similar. Or we don't all look that similar. So we get a wide variety of people here, you know, some football linebacker types that if they didn't have to go through buds, I wouldn't have them run more than two or three miles a week. We also get people that were actually very competitive cross-country runners. And so, yeah, they've got a runner's body and they'll do very well running. They're primarily swimmers or water polo players that may be the good athletes, but they haven't really spent the years building up the bone density that would help them be good runners and, you know, maybe they're going to run into some problems here, too. So, yeah, physiologically, anatomically, biomechanically, there's all kinds of differences. And as I said, it's hard to just say, categorically, here's the right way to run. So, well, then I guess we'll look at that from a different perspective. Where do you see a lot of people misstepping I think having the necessary background in aerobic training is something that I would encourage people to really consider. And some people that are transitioning to running, they don't like to run, they wouldn't run, but you have to be able to pass running standards to be able to get through the program. So, okay, they're going to do some running. They'd better do a certain amount of aerobic preconditioning before they really start to seriously run. Do you say that because people develop an innate sense of being in tune with themselves when they're developing aerobic capacity or because you mean more from like a clinical standpoint than being able to actually run and maintain a distance? Well, that's the key thing, is to be able to run and maintain the distance. I mean, one of the things I try to emphasize when I talk about running, and I say it over and over again, I encourage people to look at the statistics that if you want to have a good chance of getting through the program, you'd better be able to run well. The better runners make it much, much more frequently than you would in a certain standard. They pass at a rate of like three or four percent. So, it's not good enough to just barely meet the standard. You have to be the best that you can be. So, when I say that, people say, well, why is running so important? And I don't know for sure, but what I think is the real reason is that overall endurance is better. And to be able to get through the tough selection portion of the pipeline, you need to do multiple hard things on a daily basis several days and several weeks in a row. And we happen to capture that because running is a fairly easy thing to measure. So, people have to do run tests and the better runners will tend to perform better. But when it comes down to it, I think the reason that those better runners succeed is because they have a general overall endurance that benefits them in a number of different ways in addition to just being able to run fast. Yeah, you're kind of looking at it from more of a whole person approach to understanding more aspects of running in foot strike and shoes. Correct. I think that's important because if you're overweight and you want to just start, I'm going to go lose weight, I heard you should run. That is not a good idea. No, it's not a good idea. I guess depending on how overweight you are, but has your own personal kind of philosophy on analyzing people's running, has it changed over time? Well, what I've noticed over the years, a lot of people have participated in or been interested in a number of what I'll just have to call fads, running fads. This technique is good or this running shoe is good or not wearing shoes at all is good, going barefoot is good, trying to run like our caveman ancestors, that's good. I don't know, I take all of that with a bit of skepticism and try to look at what really works for the people that we're dealing with today. But things like mechanics and foot strike definitely have an impact. I mean, I guess that's a pun, but didn't mean that to me. It has an effect on outcome, it has an effect on injury rate and so I want people to be aware of how they run. On the other hand, I don't personally want people to overthink it. One of the things I tell people that have a certain amount of athletic experience is that if it's not broke, don't fix it. And so if somebody is meeting their standards and they're comfortable running and they're confident in their running and they're not getting injured, even if they look a little quirky to somebody like me, I'm not going to try to turn them into something else. They're in tune with their bodies. Yeah, exactly right. And so it's the people that are struggling. They're not quite making the standards or they're not confident they can make the standards all the time or they run but they keep getting set back because they get injured and then take a closer look at the way they run and say, well, maybe if we try modifying this, you might have better success. I think that's one of the most fascinating parts of the human body. And you kind of touched on it there with the philosophy or the way you look at running is that if one thing hurts, it doesn't fix this thing but it's almost never the cause of the problem and how the body is kind of all interconnected and how it's usually way, way, way different of a problem than most people would ever know. Is running kind of like that in terms of people having joint pain or anything like that? Well, there's so many interconnected things that it's hard to untangle what the original cause might be and so we work on a few different things and hopefully we can get to what the root cause is. Sometimes we have to treat the symptoms before we know what the underlying cause is. But I think one of the things you're trying to get at when you're just asking about technical things like what's something that we focus on and something that over the years that I've looked at, the foot strike pattern. And so most people I think are aware of there are heel strikers, there are midfoot strikers, there are forefoot strikers and what will probably work best for most people most of the time is midfoot striking and I think over the years I've modified my view on that a little bit. It was always clear, like the literature was always clear that midfoot striking produced the lowest injury rate. What wasn't clear is can you take somebody that was historically a rear foot striker and turn them into a midfoot striker? Again, I'm kind of hesitant to try to change people and say, oh, you should run this way because we might cause more problems than we fix. But it seems that, yeah, you're probably going to be doing okay if you're a midfoot striker and so that's probably the first thing we'll work on. Again, somebody that's injury prone, somebody that's not particularly confident in their running ability, okay, let's look at your foot strike and if you're heel striking, let's get away from that and let's get more into midfoot striking. Yeah, I think that kind of in summary you're saying that there's a lot of variation and there isn't a magic formula. Well, and I'm not 100% sure that we can turn somebody into a midfoot striker. I think it's worth trying to do and the more I look at it we're probably not going to screw them up if we do that. So, you know, it's not going to make them worse. It might make them better. My question is, you know, an exercise scientist as a researcher as a devotee of running is, well, can we really take these people and turn them into midfoot strikers permanently or in a meaningful way? I'm not 100% sure we can, but I think it's worth trying. Yeah, or at least exposing them to see if they could because not everybody but some people can. Can we talk a little bit about some of the injuries that are caused from running? Yeah, well, cause of injury is kind of a sensitive terminology. I don't really like to phrase it that way, correlation with injury. We see certain injuries pretty regularly and it probably is correlated with the running that they're doing, but one of the things I try to get away from saying is that running causes injury. Right, right, right. Well, it might. What does that mean? That you shouldn't run? Well, if you don't run, you're not going to be in good enough shape to be able to pass the selection process so you have to do some running. When it comes to injury, we look at things like, well, how much mileage are you doing and generally more mileage is a good thing, but you have to build up to it gradually. So one of the things that I've heard bandied about for years is, well, you got to run 40 miles a week. Like that was kind of the gold standard. Well, it is the gold standard. That's what a lot of people, some people in NSW still say that. They still believe that because they think that, well, when you're in budge, you're going to be running 40 miles a week and that's actually questionable. You don't run that much at all. You shuffle along at varying paces, but you don't actually run all that much. I think that 40 miles a week is a realistic goal for some people. If they take the time to build up to it, certainly a competitive cross-country runner is going to be running more than twice that a week. So 40 miles a week isn't unreasonable, but for some people, it probably is unreasonable. Again, the people with the body types that aren't really conducive to running, the people that aren't natural runners, I wouldn't push them to 40 miles in any week. Other people, I would say, yeah, you can get to 40 miles, but you got to take not just a couple of weeks to get there, you got to take several months, maybe a year or more to get there. Other than the gradual, I guess, onset of mileage, what other things do you do or do people do to prepare their joints for that amount of impact? Well, so one thing I would say is maintain a desirable body weight. One of the things that people have an image of coming to, say, Buds, is that, well, I got to be big and buff and strong and have lots of muscles to be able to pick those logs up and carry those boats around. And yes, a certain amount of strength is required for that, but it's actually more about endurance. And if you have to run up and down the beach, carrying logs and boats, and you're carrying an extra 30 pounds of muscle that you're not using other times, that's probably not going to go well for you. So when I encourage people to prepare, I want them to prepare in many different ways, not just as a runner, but I want their strength training to reflect that they're going to be mostly an endurance athlete, not a lifter of heavy objects. Yeah, I think that's maybe pretty obvious to someone who is overweight that they're like, yeah, my joints are in pain. Anything else? Yeah, well, there are lots of things that people can do to prepare the joints and the different muscles and the tissues. And, you know, I'm asked, well, what about weightlifting? Oh, that's a good thing. You should weightlift. You should definitely strength train. That's an important part of preparing for Buds. Okay, well, how much should I squat? How much should I bench press? And I'm like, well... Not that simple. It's not that simple. That's not the things I want you to be focusing on. And, you know, unfortunately, most people are focused on being able to lift heavy weights. And we here contribute to that problem a little bit because we test that. And so, you know, in some sense, we reward people for being able to lift heavy weights. But we'll have a bigger impact on their overall chances of making it through the program and certainly being able to run great distances without getting an injury is working on some of the smaller muscles that contribute to the running propulsion. So everybody does squats. They do lunges. They do deadlifts. They build up enormous quads. I've got nothing against having strong quads, but there are a lot of other muscles that need to be strengthened proportionally. So for most people, they have ginormous quads, but very weak hamstrings, and their glutes are weak. And so I say, well, balance your training out. You know, do some lunges, do some squats, but do some hamstring curls as well. Get some glute bridges in there as well. Make sure you work in the backside as much as you are the front side. And for a lot of people that have, for example, knee problems, a lot of the problem is that when they are on unstable surfaces, they can't maintain proper posture and they wobble from side to side. And so they need to work on the lateral part of the hip, hip abduction and some abduction. Yeah, you're talking to me right there. Yeah, well, it's a very common problem. And so a lot of people that have done a lot of running on firmer surfaces, now I'm fine, I'm okay, but then they get out here and they're on the beach or they're on the obstacle course, where it's very soft and loose surfaces, then stability is much harder. And below the knee, working on all the muscles around the ankle. So making sure people work on the calves. The calves are usually pretty strong, but trying to get them to work in a good range of motion and emphasizing the negative portion, the eccentric portion a little bit more. Working on not only the calf, which is plantar flexion, but working on lifting the toes up, dorsiflexion. People that have problems with shin splints, they probably have weak dorsiflexors. And so they're exercises you can do to create resistance when you're lifting the toes up. And then lateral, side to side. What goes through inversion and eversion and pronation and supination, the muscles that control that motion need to be strengthened. And for a lot of people they're saying, what, there are muscles down there? How do I do that? So try to give them guidance on how to strengthen those muscles so that everything is able to bear the impact. And then just proper body positions. One of the very basic things that I would encourage somebody to improve their running is to work on their core strength, and specifically the plank. Very simple exercise that I try to get people to do for a lot of different reasons, but one of the reasons is that it will improve their running posture. It's interesting because the initial thought is like, what are people doing wrong? And the answer really is, what aren't they doing? That's more the issue. And so I've taken issue with a number of people that promote weightlifting, and it's like, well, heavy weightlifting. Like I said, doing the squat, doing the deadlift. It's not that those things are necessarily bad, but if people focus on them exclusively and as a result they don't do the other things that are actually more important, then it's bad. Yeah, that's absolutely true. So I agree with what you said. It's not so much what they're doing, it's what they're not doing. So just to kind of clarify that for people, I think the misconception with big powerlifting movements is I want to get stronger, I want to lift this heavy weight, but they don't realize how weak, comparatively, muscles that are involved and that can prevent worse injury are in that process. So humbling yourself to realize, hey, there's other parts of my body that are involved in this process of the concept of strength. Well, unfortunately those aren't the glamorous, sexy muscles that most people, either because of their own vanity or because they're trying to repress other people who want to develop, but it's actually important to do that to be able to increase your chances of succeeding. You're moving your body when you're running, you're not pushing a car down the street. How do you recommend people becoming in better tune with their bodies in order to even gauge the types of things that they will need to when they run? I'm not sure how to tackle that question. One of the things I think you're asking, if you're not, I apologize, I've heard variations asked many times is, well, listen to your body. That's important, right? Listen to your body. Yeah, but it's hard to understand exactly how to interpret that. Yeah, yeah, because myself, it's like if I listened to my body literally, I wouldn't get out of bed most mornings. I just don't feel like it certainly wouldn't go for a long run. So my body's saying, I'm kind of sore, I don't really know if I want to do this and then you have to say, well, suck it up because we need to get in better shape. On the other hand, your body will sometimes give you signals that, wow, here's a pain that I haven't experienced before. I don't know where that came from. I'd better not ignore that. So you have to listen to that sort of thing. You have to be able to listen to or learn being tuned with the sensation of effort. Like how hard am I working? I'm asked all the time, how hard do I work? Well, work hard enough. Work harder than you were working before. I don't want to work too hard. I don't want to over train. I want to work hard enough so I'm getting some benefit. How do you learn that? But one of the things that I, if somebody is going for a conditioning run, how do I measure intensity? Should I use heart rate? You can do that. People have done that successfully. I'm not a big fan. I think the simplest way requires no gadgets, no technology. Pretty straightforward, simple way to do it is just pay attention to your breathing. So one of the things I'd encourage people to get in tune with when they're exercising any activity, but certainly running, is their breathing. And if you're out for a conditioning run, you want to be going at a pace or an effort that's hard enough to get your breathing up, but not gasping for air. So one way we describe it is the talk test. You should be able to talk to somebody that was running with you, not non-stop like the annoying people that I see in the gym that are on their cell phones that their voice carries across the gym. They never draw breath, even though they're supposedly exercising. That's not what I'm talking about. But you should be able to carry on a conversation in choppy sentences. Get out a phrase, take a breath, get out another phrase. And so you're working hard enough to breathe harder, but not so hard that you're gasping for air. Yeah, and kind of defining that as a comfort space. Yeah. Just exposing yourself to more endurance, I guess, experiences. Different activities. Well, another aspect, I don't know if this is the best place to introduce it, but it's on my mind here. Running is important. I encourage people to run. I was talking a little bit about some people that aren't necessarily built for running, and so I wouldn't have them do 40 miles a week. What would I have them do while they want to get more cardiovascular training so find some low-impact cross-training. And so I'm a big proponent of cross-training, supplementing running with other activities. In this community, swimming is a great activity. You've got to be a competent swimmer as well, so you've got to devote a certain amount of your training time to get in the water, get better at swimming, and that will also complement your running. But in addition to those two activities, not everybody has access to a pool. Some people have swum their maximum mileage for the week and they still want to do more. So do something. Cycling is a great activity. There are different cardio machines in the gym that you can do. Your heart doesn't really care, as long as you're doing something that gets major muscles contracting in a rhythmic manner. So you can choose an activity that you enjoy that breaks up the monotony, the routine of only running and swimming, something you have access to, and something that will supplement your aerobic conditioning. Yeah, I think a lot of people look for the magic pill for everything, and there's such variation in body type and surface and what equipment you have. It's not either, am I going to run the treadmill or do I have to run this distance outside? It really isn't that simple. I guess speaking of treadmills, short of maybe rehabilitation, where do you feel that fits in for you in your prescribed fitness regimen for people that are trying to train? I certainly wouldn't tell people to never get on a treadmill. I personally question, this is a personal opinion, not gospel for everybody, but I personally question why some people spend so much time on treadmills. It's kind of funny. I mentioned I was a competitive rower. I spent time on the rowing machine, and people say, well, don't you get bored on that machine? Why don't you go get in a boat and go out on the water and do some rowing? And well, the answer is, boats are really expensive, and storing them is expensive, and bodies of water that are rollable aren't immediately accessible, so I can't really do that, but you can run. You can go out the door and run anytime. So why would you get on a treadmill? But having said that, there are some good reasons to be on a treadmill. You can really, some people that really want to get a better sense of their pace, they've got the monitor right there. They don't know how fast am I going, or you can control the grade. One thing that I appreciate is being able to go uphill for a long period of time. So that's a good thing. So there's no reason not to use a treadmill. I personally wouldn't make it the only means of training, but incorporating that into your training for a workout or two every once in a while is fine. I personally have found success in, instead of listening to the distance or programming a distance for myself, programming a time for myself, and I kind of came to that realization later in my life. I mean, I'm not an older person, but that's something you don't really hear very often. Can you talk about that a little bit and how you think that fits into running programming, focusing on time spent running versus distance? Personally, for my training, I do it almost all by time, and that's partly because I do, as I said, a number of different activities, and so minutes are minutes, whatever I'm doing, and it's one way I can equate my training. I do like to be a little bit more sensitive to pace, and when I'm doing interval training, I want to know the measured distance and I want to time that and I want to have a little bit more accurate accounting of the distance and the time and the relation, but if I'm just going out for a conditioning run, I don't worry that much about distance, I worry more about time, and I will do, okay, now I'm going for a 40-minute run or a 60-minute run or a 35-minute run or whatever it might be and try to go, as I was talking before, about the breathing and maintain the proper breathing to get the conditioning effect that I'm looking for, and beyond that, I won't worry about it because sometimes the terrain's flat, sometimes the terrain's hilly, sometimes the ground's firm, sometimes the ground's soft. I can keep adjusting my intensity based on those conditions and then just go for the time that I want to go. Yeah, no, I think that does kind of, first, it validates my idea to do that instead. Well, I don't want, I mean, that's as good as I do it the same way. I don't want to necessarily tell all my listeners here that, oh, you have to train that way because that's what I do and I think that, no, if you like to measure things out exactly, and as I said, there's technology that makes it very easy to measure your course and you can map your course and there's no reason not to do that, but I don't think that that's the essential part of training. That's not the most important thing that you need. You just need to be active for a period of time. Right, and my thought is also, as your fitness increases, the five mile run is not the same as a five mile run three months ago and I think as you gauge your distance in whether it's 20, 30 minutes, whatever your run is, that is a little bit more consistent way to maintain intensity in my life, at least. Let's talk a little bit about recovery or kind of maybe say self-care. Yeah, it's an important topic. As I mentioned earlier, we just finished up a hell week ago and so this week has been the recovery week and so we've been working with all the students that completed the process and going through all these things that you're talking about and it makes me think of it in a little bit more detail. The most important thing, we tell the students and I would tell anybody listening and certainly something that I practice myself and all the different activities that I do, I'm an active racer. I do almost 40 different races a year and whether it's a half marathon or a marathon, the first thing I do when I'm done is recover, like do some more activity. So if I finish a run, a race even, I'll get on my bike and pedal for a little bit and just do some moderate cool down activity and the first thing we had the hell week kids doing on Monday, they secured hell week on Friday and they come over, they're wobbling over, they're stiff, they're sore, it's like get them moving, very controlled, very moderate, not doing an excessive amount of work but just getting moving. The tendency is they're sore, they're stiff, they don't want to move, get them moving because getting the muscles contracting, getting the blood flowing, that's the best recovery and I'll ask questions, well what about massage, what about ice baths, what about hot whirlpools and it's like, well in their condition they want to stay away from massages and hot whirlpools for a little while, they got wounds that need to heal and they got inflammation that needs to recede a little bit but stretching is important, we go through stretching, over stretching with them and I would encourage everybody to utilize a little bit of stretching but you don't have to spend all day doing it either and the best time to stretch is when you're warm, so after a conditioning activity if you feel like you're tight and want to stretch a little bit before you go for a run you can do that too but warm up a little bit first and stretch, stretch what's tight. One of the things that I talk about in terms of promoting flexibility rather than creating the need to stretch all the time is like during your conditioning including your aerobic activities but also certainly during your strength training is maintain balance and proportion so a lot of inflexibility comes from people overworking some muscles and not working the others and I was talking before about strength training and tight quads big strong tight quads and weak hamstrings would be a common example or people in the upper body they do push ups all the time but they don't do any complimentary rowing motions and so their chests and the front part of their shoulders are tight. If something's tight but you can limit the need to do excessive stretching if you maintain an overall balanced training profile. Yeah that goes back to what you're saying earlier about not that you think that there's no benefits to deadlift or big muscle group exercises but that in fact could also lead to a potential injury if you're not strong in the other areas of your body holding yourself together it's specifically beneficial not in an injury state but in a recovery state and then the idea of being active as a form of stretch or recovery I think are the two key areas. So the thing I would summarize most is the best recovery is active recovery and so doing a little bit of low impact light activity again keeping the blood circulating so you've just done a hard workout you want to maintain blood flow you don't want to just stop dead and let all those capillaries and blood vessels close and let the heart slow down too fast keep the heart pumping keep blood circulating getting oxygen and nutrients in getting waste products out other things might make you feel good you asked about cold and certainly if there's an acute problem where there's some swelling and you want to apply some ice cold right away to reduce swelling that's a good thing but just in general people say oh ice baths make me feel great I mean well okay if it makes you feel great go ahead and do it I don't think it's going to accelerate your recovery process but you don't have to believe me it's not going to you know go ahead and do it if you want to what will really accelerate the recovery process is some active recovery some physical activity that will as I said maintain the blood flow and keep those muscles that were worked hard working lightly so that they can recover more quickly are there key areas that we haven't talked about that you think are ignored not even not clinically or professionally but by runners and specific people coming into this pipeline people coming into the pipeline a few things that I would address is I would encourage them to try to run on a variety of different terrains try to get a mix of different things like for example do a lot of running on pavement that's fine most people have the conception that oh that's bad for you that creates pounding and it's like well unless your technique is horrible it doesn't it's more stable it's actually less stressful to run on pavement safer yeah as opposed to going out and running in say soft sand which is actually more stressful because there's lack of support and the amount of muscular activity required to allow you to remain upright and keep running is dramatically greater so I would say yeah run on sand but not all the time because it's actually pretty stressful try to find some hills you can it's a good strength builder to be able to run uphill it can be actually kind of challenging to run downhill but get some elevation changes in your running running on trails is good but be careful the surface changes all the time I think that's part of developing I think that's part of developing your running acumen is jumping over roots and being able to navigate jumping off of a curb jumping but with your stride well one of the one of the things I hear from potential candidates is oh you have to run on the beach run on sand no don't do that that's actually not a good way to train all the time you're not going to get very fast because when you're running on sand you're actually going pretty slow you've got to meet time standards we have to run fast sometimes you have to find a good surface and run fast but sometimes get in sand and run get comfortable with sand it's actually a good strengthening medium if you don't overdo it so yeah run on sand once in a while but it's fine to run on a track go into your do your intervals find a good rubberized track if you can at a high school drive as nearby and do some timed intervals there any other areas you feel that people generally are not as aware as they should be I think the running on different train is huge and that's really easy to overlook because it's not hard to implement and it's not very different from what you're already doing but it has a huge impact well one of the the general training format and I would as an aside just encourage people to explore further our website seeleswick.com and look at their detail and gives a schedule of how to incorporate them into a weekly session the online training forum has some sections that deal with this in a little bit more detail so it will talk about some of these things in much more detail but just recognizing the different formats that you want to use for workouts so it's not all long slow distance all the time that should be a portion of it but then get some good speed work some quality interval training in there as well when they come here so they think they should be doing all their running and boots to get ready and I think that's not a good idea you'd be fine if you never wore a pair of boots until you joined the Navy and they issued them to you and you get a chance to break them in a little bit before you actually show up to buds and start running in them for real for somebody that doesn't believe me and puts on a pair of boots once in a while and goes out and we've hit on that a lot over multiple episodes but there's clearly a need for explosive strength and interestingly I think running has the capacity to build both of those areas I know it's not as clear-cut as I'd like it to be so the answer is a little bit more difficult but talk a little bit about how people can either expect to work on that while they're here or if they could work on their own that difference between slow distance and explosive strength and they're running so the right terminology I say weight lifting and people think well you're talking about the clean injuric you're talking about the squat and no, no like resistance training all kinds of different mediums it might be dumbbells it might be an Olympic bar or it could be a rubber band rubber band exactly right it could be manual resistance like you using your own muscles against other muscles in your own body there's all kinds of different ways that you can create resistance and so among the many different things I encourage people to do that would address what you're talking about is just do some plyometric exercises do some leaping and bounding do some hurdles do some agility ladders get out on a surface and do some agility run change of direction COD in the training jargon change of direction so short sprints with you know down and back that type of thing cut right cut left but that will work on the lateral muscles in both the ankle and the hip that are required and do as I said some explosive running some jumping some leaping that type of thing a little bit of jumping rope be it a type of plyometric type thing for the ankles that you could work on there are all sorts of things that would include as part of your conditioning that would aid your running in particular and your overall athletic profile as well like in buds explosiveness isn't used all that often but once in a while it is and so if you develop a little bit and you can call on it when you need to that's great touching back on one of the areas we spoke about little bit with the boots or trying to prepare yourself for what you're going to be exposed to active duty seals and special operations people are carrying a tremendous amount with them and it's potentially very heavy so at what point in preparation for their deployments or even in their buds training should they be exposed to that type of training great question I'm asked it frequently or at least variations that question is frequently I don't think there's a definitive answer but I'm going to give you a well thought out answer I've had a lot of time to think about that for the 11 years that I've been you've been talking to operators who've been in all sorts of different deployment situations to ask them about and their personal opinions are about rucking and depends on who you are where you've gone what missions you performed what the requirements are but there are clearly cases where people have had to carry some pretty heavy weights for some pretty long distances and that's not easy to do so you want to physically prepare for that but let's not get ahead of ourselves for any potential candidate they're not going to be doing that for a long time in buds they'll probably do some ruck running it'll probably be relatively modest loads and modest distances so nothing that requires a tremendous amount of specific preparation now it's fine to do it occasionally but again this is the sort of thing that a lot of eager beaver type candidates want to take all out of proportion and just like I said with running in boots or running in soft sand they think they should do it all the time and so some people want to do all their conditioning with a ruck on their back and I know don't do that you know once in a while go out for a hike like go out for a walk carrying 50-60 pounds on your back and so one of my recommendations just to make it pretty clear is that if you go out with weight on your back don't try to run at the same time you might have to occasionally do that although actually most people don't run with a ruck they walk fast so a little bit of a difference there so if you march with a ruck that's okay that's not going to break you down too much as long as you don't overdo it and so it's actually probably a good thing to do occasionally just don't do too much weight don't try to go too fast don't try to go too far to perform best at least on the data that I've seen at the students here is the best runners do best on the ruck marches even though they're carrying weight their endurance has helped them perform better with the ruck and the people that have lifted the most in training don't actually do that well on the ruck marches yeah that's an interesting correlation but it does make sense when you unpack the needs of running as an individual being sensitive to the weights and bearings and kind of balance I want to talk a little bit about the mental aspect to running in your personal experiences when you're challenging yourself what do you fall back on is it your training is it your confidence in previous races when you're really kind of pushing that envelope for yourself well at this point I guess in my career I can fall back on the fact that I've completed a lot of races successfully and as nervous as I am and I'm always nervous before a race and I always doubt whether I can complete it or at least according to the standard that I set for myself at some point some voice will say yeah you've done it before you felt like this before you'll get through it somehow and I usually do so training even if you're not an experienced racer even if you're relatively younger training successfully having training goals and achieving the training goals gives you confidence that when the time comes you'll be more prepared to perform so that's certainly something that I like to fall back on I think you said something real key there you really walk through it pretty quickly saying completing a race to the standards you've set for yourself and I do think that is key because if you haven't had that measured approach then you don't have that experience to fall back on or that knowledge and confidence is racing something that you encourage people trained to come in the pipeline to do? With a certain amount of hesitation yes I do again I don't want to get people to go overboard and race all the time I race a lot I enjoy it I prepare for it that's fine but you've got to make training and race occasionally just to sort of test your abilities but the experience of racing is a good thing and it gives you a chance to work on a number of different things like getting your pre-race strategy right because that will translate to a lot of the different evolutions that they do in butts make sure they're physically and mentally and nutritionally and always prepared to do the activity so that's a good thing being in a crowd of people is very energizing and so one of the things I've found is that when I race more I race better and racing is good training I don't approach any single race as a do or die where I'm going to run myself into the ground but you push yourself basically just a glorified workout with a t-shirt and a finisher medal at the end but by doing that I actually train better so yeah I would definitely encourage people to train but again I don't want to go out and do oh I'm going to run a marathon now because Mike said that I should now well are you trained for a marathon 5k, 10k maybe and once in a while to do that and maybe a half marathon I think racing would be a positive aspect of being able to tie it all together so we've covered a lot of different areas and we've talked about some of the high points of where people often have misconceptions I'd like you to try to summarize quickly the areas where people like someone's listening I'm sure they're still waiting to hear what shoes they should go out and buy and I didn't ask that question for good reason and I really don't want to go into that exactly and so I think that there's a real common misunderstanding of running that's exposed to it for a certain amount of time if you can just kind of quickly knock off some of the things not to worry about and some of the things that you should be aligning your focus to I think that would be a really nice way to wrap things up Well as I said earlier on the most important aspect of being able to run well is to demonstrate good endurance and so whatever you do make sure that your endurance improves and possibly if you're not the greatest runner but you still have overall great endurance your chances are going to be a little bit higher so you have to organize a training program to advance your running one of the things I assume with candidates that are trying to get ready for Buds is that they are trying to prepare among a number of different ways swimming and running and lifting and being able to do calisthenics and being able to stretch and all sorts of things that place demands in their time so they've got to budget their time wisely and so you don't have to run 40 miles a week most people shouldn't run 40 miles a week if you followed the guide for 26 weeks you'd probably build up to about 22 miles a week with an additional few miles of warming up and cooling down but the actual core of the workout would be about 22 miles so that's not an excessive amount of training it doesn't take 80 miles a week of training to be able to make you a decent runner so be able to bear that in mind being able to incorporate other activities in addition to running have a sense of building gradually over time again one of the things I encounter people that's too quickly or their intensity too quickly so if they're following the schedule that I've laid out for interval training they'll try to get their paces too fast too soon and I said give it time let it develop naturally don't go too hard too soon go hard consistently a little bit faster each week thank you so much for giving us a lot of your wisdom and time today appreciate it it was my pleasure I hope it'll be helpful to somebody find out more at Sealswick.com and the NSW podcast