 14-year-old Grant Thompson was the first to find the bird pretty stung that week. So at 9.37 it's Colorado. Made it to Red Rocks. Made it to Red Rocks. All right. I was going to actually go do a 14er today, a 14,000-foot mountain, but I just ran out of time with work and with getting ready for the live stream tonight. And so I called an audible every now and then and running. You've got to call an audible. I'm here at Red Rocks. There you go. Red Rocks is a very famous music venue here in Colorado. And basically there's a mountain. Oh yeah, Johnny Cash played here. You know, Neil Young. Who else? Well, more recently, like a Mumford and Sons, and anyway, a lot of good music comes through Red Rocks every single year. But what I love about Red Rocks is that behind the music venue is a nice mountain called Mount Morrison, and it's very steep. It doesn't... There's no... It's not really switchbacks. It goes up the mountain, straight up the mountain. I don't know if you can see it there. So anyway, we're going to get some vertical gain, even though I'm not quite as high up as I would have liked to be for the day. And the big question is, do we go with the Speed Cross Fours or the Speed Cross Fies? Hmm, options options. About three quarters of the way up. Let's see. Let's see. I've been going for 30 minutes and it was like 49 degrees at the base. Up here, it's probably closer to 35, so time for a little jacket action. Oh man, Speed Cross Fours. Doing pretty well. Doing pretty well. All right. Let's see where we're at. Top of Mount Morrison in 36 minutes. Whoo! We'll take it. I... Let's see. Hold on. It's less than two miles of distance to get up here. But the vertical gain is just amazing. In fact, I think this is just a little higher than Mount Falcon, which all of you have seen me run at, which is just across the valley there. That's Mount Falcon over that way. So anyway, feeling good to do that in the snow. I think in the summertime, I can usually do that around 30 minutes. So we will take it, man. For January, we will take it. All right, back down, and we're going to get the Speed Cross Fives on. Whoo! Speed Cross Fours. I'm excited to talk about them in the second video publishing today, compare them to the Speed Cross Fives. All right, let's do this. This lap was three and a half miles, so a little over 5K. I don't know what the vert was exactly. I'll get that to you back at the house. Yes, switching in the Speed Cross Fives, and I'm going to change my socks as quick as possible. I don't want to be at the car too long. It's going to be four minute change. All right, come on. Am I putting sunscreen on in late January? Yes I am. Yes I am. It's a little... I'm telling you, man. That's sometimes the worst time to get a sunburn is when the sun is reflecting off the snow. I should have put it on an hour ago, but that's okay. We're putting it on now. Holy smokes. By the way, I'm going to put my hat forward for the second lap, so you will see footage. Basically, you'll know if I'm wearing the hat backward in the video, that means I'm in the Speed Cross Fours. If I'm wearing my hat forward, it means I was in the Speed Cross Fives. All right. This is... I didn't think I'd be doing this today. Holy smokes. Everyone in the Polar Vortex, stay strong. Gosh, you're always welcome in Colorado. Holy smokes. Stay safe. It's ridiculous out there. Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, everywhere over there, man. It's nice. Stay safe. Okay. Sunscreen in January. Oh, ladies and gentlemen. Okay. I'm almost to the top for the second round in the Speed Cross Fives. They're doing well, doing well. But tonight's back at the studio. I want to talk about volume of running, volume of training. So how many miles or kilometers are you running? Versus effort versus effort. I'll just say right now, I've been running for an hour and a half, an hour and a half. But my volume for the day is what? It's five miles, five miles. So it's insane. We're going to talk more about what the thought process is behind effort and volume, how they correlate, how they feed off of each other. All right. One last pitch of the mountain. Let's go. Seven miles. I've got a lot of thoughts, and I think you're going to enjoy the question of the day. I'm really interested to hear how you guys answer the question of the day. Oh, man. A little, yes, I know, a little afternoon coffee. I know. And I've got my Lunabar here, Lunabar here, little post recovery run snack. This is saving me right now because I was getting a little loopy up there. Oh, man. All right. We didn't quite nail it. We did not quite nail it tonight in the live stream. If you were there, thank you for your patience. We will overcome. We will defeat the live streaming technical difficulties. I don't know how long it's going to take, but it worked tonight, but we didn't quite get my brother in down from the mountains to all of you on YouTube. It's going to work. Stay with us. It's just going to work. That's all I can say. And if you haven't seen, if you haven't watched the replay and go watch it upper right hand corner, we covered a ton. We covered a ton effort versus volume, effort versus volume. And there's a lot. I'm not going to try and be as concise as possible, but I got, there's a lot to share. All right. Today I did seven miles, seven miles in like two hours. One of the slowest runs I've done in a long, long time. And I was running probably 90% of it, speed hiking 10% when it got really steep at the end. It was 3,900 feet of vertical gain and loss, 3,900 feet, which is basically 1,100 meters, 1,100 meters. And it felt at the end after seven miles of distance. It felt in my legs more like 14 miles or 15 miles, fighting the mud, fighting the snow, fighting the elevation gain on, yeah, and just fighting the, you know, the overall uphill battle of going up that mountain. So that was my run today. All right. Now I want to talk about Jason Schlarb and the East African runners. So Jason Schlarb is a hundred, he's an ultra runner. He in 2018, he won, I think 300 mile races outright. Just like he's the, he's the real deal. And he lives in Colorado. I just like, I really like his style of racing and he's just, he's the real deal. But he was running 100 to 140 miles a week up until last year. And basically he, he sought out a coach for some help and guidance. And basically it's from what I understand listening to him on podcasts. It sounds like they almost cut his mileage in half, not quite, but he went from a hundred to 140 miles a week depending on what, you know, the range was for that given section of his training block down to like 60 to 90 or 60 to 100. So really reduced the volume. Now the big question is how much of vertical gain is he doing in some of those miles because he lives up in the mountains. I'm guessing it's quite a bit. I'm guessing it's quite a bit. Okay. And then you have the East Africans, you know, Ethiopia and Kenya. Let's just hone in on those two countries from again, the research I've done, the watching YouTube videos, they, and I'm focusing more so on the marathon when I give these examples. It appears, and you know, you've got Kipchoge, who is the world record holder in the marathon. It appears that they're dialed into, and again, this is just rough research, but that 120 to let's say 145, 120 miles to 145 miles per week, and maybe even a little more for some of the guys that are really trying to make it. So what is that in kilometers? Oh my goodness. We're talking like 180 kilometers and to 220, roughly, roughly 180 to 220. So my question, okay, this is not the question of the day, but the question that I'm asking myself is as I prepare for my first marathon, and as I, you know, eventually pikes peak in August, how much mileage, so that volume, that kind of that generic volume term. Oh, and that's okay. Volume. If you're measuring volume in miles, in kilometers, in minutes, in vertical gain and loss, maybe you're not measuring your volume at all. And guess what? I have a lot of respect for you, and I'm just going to say it right now. Question of the day. How do you measure your volume of running? If you don't measure, that's okay. After college, I tell you what, I was not measuring my volume. I wasn't measuring, first of all, Strava wasn't around yet. I didn't have a GPS watch. I just went by feel, totally by feel, after college. In college, we had old, like, Timex watches. This is, I'm dating myself, but GPS watches were around, but they were pretty expensive. So nobody had them. And basically, we had, we just went, we went by miles that, like, that Mark Wetmore kind of marked off for us, and that we knew, okay, this is an eight mile run, and then we just looked at our watch, okay, and then we did the math on our heads afterward, okay, well, we must have been going 745 pace for that eight mile run because we ran, I don't know, 59 minutes. Just do, I don't know, off the top of my head. And so again, I am trying to discern how to measure the overall effort of my training, even though today was only seven miles. But again, I got back to the car and it felt like I had run 14 miles. Now it's a balance. And this is where I'm just going to come down and kind of wrap it up because I could talk all night about this. I think it's a balance. I love miles. I love running long distances. I did a 40 mile training run last spring, getting ready for a 50 mile race. Why did I do that? A, I love running. So do what you love, right? As I do what you love, like, let's not overthink it too much, but guess what? I DNF'd the 50 miler. And so why did I do the 40 mile training run? I was basically kind of doing a little bit of a mental game, trying to figure out it was my first 50 miler. Can I finish a 50 miler? Now I DNF'd a little bit because of an injury. And anyway, there's a lot of, a lot of issues happen, but I rolled my ankle and bottom line, it got ugly quick. You've got like, if there's two different runners, one is running 70 miles a week and the other is running 70 miles a week. This gentleman lives in Orlando, Florida, which is pancake flat at sea level. And this gentleman is or lady is lives in Leadville, Colorado. And they're both running 70 miles that week, but she is doing 5,000 feet of vertical gain and he did 100 feet because he lives in Florida. There's different efforts happening here. Obviously there's workouts to consider. And, and so I just want to point out that it's not just about volume. It's also about the overall effort that you're putting into each mile, whether it's hilly, whether it's at an altitude, whether it's a hard workout at sea level on a track and you're just, you're ripping mile repeats on a track. Like there's just differences in volume. And so as we begin, yes, the Strava group, it's live, it's live. I'm going to announce it tomorrow, though. I got to do a few tweaks. I got to do a few tweaks. Come back tomorrow for the Strava group. I will reveal it to you. This is more of a conversation starter down in the comments because I, I'm not sure I just made sense. I'm just trying to figure out volume effort. The East Africans, Jason Schlarb cutting his mileage almost in half. My vertical gain and how much I love running uphill. And we're just riffing here. We're riffing here, trying to figure it out. Again, the keyword is effort and I love you. And yes, that second video will be publishing at 3 p.m. Mountain Time, comparing the Speedcross five to the Speedcross four. Seek beauty, work hard and love each other. Thank you for being here.