 and away we go! Here we are! I'm back up at a 14er. That's why I backed to Gray's Peak and I came here today because the traffic going to Long's Peak was too crazy. It's too crazy. I'm not going to fight traffic to get to a mountain. You know what I mean? And a quick shout out. I forget her name, but a lady on Instagram I do believe asked if I could talk about downhill running technique and what I do for downhill running since I do it a lot. So that's today's focus. But I did make another vlog maybe two weeks ago about uphill running technique. If you want to watch that, if you're struggling a little bit with running up hills, which listen, it's hard to adapt your form and your muscle strength to uphill running. So upper right hand corner for that vlog and today I'm going to do my best not to film. I'm not going to do any filming. Okay, maybe not. I don't know. I'm going to try to resist not filming going up and focus all the filming going down just to stay nice and as concise as possible for all of you. So I love you. Thank you for being here. Oh man. I'm trying to think there was another update I was going to give you on the way up here. I was driving and thinking. Anyway, we'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. Hope you're having a great week. Okay, pulling out the Solomon super crosses. That's right. Not the speed crosses, the super crosses. Here we go. And before I bomb off a graze here and leave the goats, they're staring at me right now. Just chilling right there. I want to give a few just thoughts. What are the factors that go into what will determine how you are going to approach downhill running? The pitch or basically how steep the mountain is or how steep the hill is. The surface that you're running on, is it grass? Is it loose rock like this today? Is it a road marathon that's overall downhill? So the surface and then, well, obviously the shoes that you're wearing. So you want to make sure you have, especially if you're on loose rock, you want to make sure your lug depth, in my opinion, is at least five millimeters. Okay, five millimeters is spot on. It's not too much, not too little to make sure you're really biting the dirt on your descent. In fact, I would make the argument that the bite for the downhill for the lug depth is more important than for uphill. So the gradient, the surface and then like, is it a race? Is it a workout? Like there's, okay, shout out to the Europeans. Like I've heard stories and I haven't raced in Europe yet, it's coming. But as far as like mountain running in Europe, I've heard they are, they know how to run downhill. It's like, Colorado, we have mountains here, no doubt, you can see them around me. But the Alps, the Pyrenees, there's some serious, serious mountain, the Dolomites in Italy, there's serious mountains in Europe. So anyway, shout out to Europe. I know that there's some Europeans that really know how to run down technical mountains. All right, enough talking, let's bomb off of here. Here's those clouds. Running downhill technique, tip number one is, okay, your, your toes are your gas pedal, your heels are your brakes. So if you feel like you're going too fast, you can just lean back a little bit and start landing a little more on your heel. That'll help slow you down. And one other point, I approach downhill especially uphill as well, but downhill especially is definitely like dancing. Okay, so mountain running is dancing in disguise, meaning you're dancing through the rocks, you're light on your feet. It's like tap dancing where you're just barely touching the ground as you're going through rather than landing hard, landing hard, breaking too much. We're going to talk more about that down below. All right, come on, let's keep going. It's, it's Matt. Good work, sir. Good job, man. Matt and I met in the parking lot and Matt watches the vlog. Thanks for watching, man. Yeah. Yeah, good luck at the bear 100, right? Yeah, I would say more about it, but I can't breathe. Yeah, you're good, man. You're crushing it. You're almost there. Yeah. Yeah, good job. Yeah, right? Enjoy that downhill. So, all right, man, I'll let you keep going. Yeah. All right, we'll see you, see you at some races. Definitely. All right, cool. Have fun. All right, you too. Tip number two for downhill. Hold on, camera's a little dirty. For downhill running technique is I hold my arms a little lower, just a little lower on the body. It helps, I think, with balance because when you're bombing down the mountain, like, you don't want to be tripping and falling. So I just drop my elbows, drop my shoulders, and drop my arms down just, just a little bit. So instead of, instead of kind of being up, instead of being up here, which is where I would typically be in like a hard threshold workout, or probably a road marathon, a little higher arm swing, I drop the arms a little bit for balance on the downhills. Okay, just rolling with the goats. Here we go. Hold on, there we go. All right, we're meeting all kinds of folks today on the mountain. Where are you from? Arkansas. Arkansas. What's your name? Zach. Mary. Mary. Katie. Nice. And you watch the channel? Yeah, watch the channel, man. Awesome. Super inspirational. And I guess I talked them into the Wild Horse Fives, right? There they are. Looking good. Yeah. And you got your first 50k coming up? November. November. Awesome. Cool. Yeah. Well, shout out to Arkansas. Yeah. Go, Northwest Arkansas. Welcome to elevation. Yeah. Sweet, man. All right. Well, thanks for saying hi. Appreciate it, yeah. Number three, I'm going to be like your high school basketball or football coach right now. Commit or quit to great, not good, great footwork. So, you know, in basketball, when you do drills with your feet to make sure you're moving well on the court, you got to really commit, especially on downhill technical sections like you see right now on your screen. We're talking if you don't commit and you don't focus mentally. Remember we talked yesterday about good mental focus? You will trip and fall and you might hurt yourself. And I know plenty of mountain runners who have broken a collarbone or broken an ankle because they just were bombing down the mountain and maybe lost their focus a little bit. So again, commit or quit to good footwork. All right. Almost down. There we go. Back to the car, back down the mountain. Final tip here, and then I'll get you a couple more at the studio, is let's see, so 13.3 miles just so you know, better stop the watch. 13.3 miles, half of that was downhill. Be patient with your quads. It took me, so my brother invited me to start exploring the mountains about four or five years ago. So four years ago, I can never remember. We'll just call it four years ago. And I remember the first mountains that we were doing. I was pretty worried about my knees and my knee pain. And I didn't have sharp pain, but it was just general discomfort in the knee area. And that was my late 20s. And now I'm in my early 30s. And so I've actually improved. Like I have no knee pain now, no knee issues at all. And so anyway, be patient with your quads and developing your quad strength. And you might need to go to the gym. You might need to hit hills a lot in order to build up the muscles around your knee. And I think like, basically, I don't know, my quads are very strong at this point. And I think that helps alleviate some of the pounding and the downhill pounding on my knees. So patience with your knees in your, in the overall development of your running, your downhill running technique, it might take, I remember it took me two summers before I felt fully confident to run down a big 14,000 foot mountain with no issues with my knees. So all right, we're rolling back to the studio. Actually, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to do some form drills here in the parking lot and work on my footwork right now, some speed work. And now we're going to head back down. So I'll let the camera keep rolling for that. And as we wrap this vlog up about downhill running techniques, I got two more quick ideas for you, quick tips. So for uphill running, I like to keep my eyes up as much as possible. It gets really difficult when you're tired. And the reason I like to keep my eyes up is because when you start to look down, you start to slouch naturally your shoulders follow your eyes. So I like to look up for the uphill running, but downhill, you, if you look, if you look up, you're going to fall, you're going to twist an ankle, you're going to fall, you're going to crack your head. You don't want to do that. So I have the 90, 10 rule, meaning 90% of the time I'm looking 10 feet in front of me. So I can see what my next two or three steps are going to be. And then 10% of the time I'm looking down, let's say 30 to 40 feet down the trail. So I can see, okay, there's a boulder coming, there's a loose rock coming, there's random mountain goats up ahead, whatever the case may be. So that is my rule for eyesight on the downhill descending. And yes, while I'm thinking of it, descending is going to be the keyword. So the other last tip, and this is, you know, kind of goes without saying, but loosey goosey, I love, I don't know why I love that phrase, but you got to be your quads are going to thank you so, so much. If you can let the gravity pull you down the hill, don't fight the gravity, especially in a race. And especially if you've built up some confidence in downhill running, because it takes confidence and but I'm telling you, especially if it's a race that has downhill uphill, downhill uphill, undulating hills, your quads are going to thank you so, so much. If you can be loosey goosey, relax. Actually, here's a quick side story today at the massage, I was tensing up because it's a little painful, but it's a good pain to help loosen up the muscles, loosen up all the knots that are in my legs. So same with downhill running, you don't want to tense up. You want to be loosey goosey and work with the gravity. All right, so there you go. Question of the day. Those are the tips for you. Question of the day. Okay, let's hear it. I hate to even go here, but let's hear it. We've all fallen during a run, right? We've all fallen. And more than more chances than not, it was during a descent or during a downhill section of a race or maybe a workout. So what is your kind of crazy downhill descending stories? I know I've fallen. I've fallen so many times. It's hard to remember one specifically. Anyway, that is the question of the day. Let us know your stories about descending and maybe a tip you would give for descending downhills and especially fasts like in a race. Okay, and if you want to dive deeper into uphill running, click on the vlog on the right. If you want to click on the vlog on the left, that'll take you to my biggest mountain adventure of my life, Nolan's 14. Thank you for being here. Thanks for watching everyone. Love you, Zeke Beauty, work hard and love each other. See you tomorrow.