 Beacons or Torrens. Beacons or Torrens. Believe it or not, I'm going to go with the Torrens today. You know, I've had two big days back to back and yeah, my legs are feeling it today, so I want to test out. In fact, my left calf is just like a little sore, a little tight, so I need to work on that today. And so I'm fascinated to see, as usual, will the zero drop help stretch out everything in my left calf specifically today. And I love them both. You know I love them both, but we're going to go with the Torrens on this first run. All right, legs are feeling pretty good. Took about three miles to warm up and then my left calf is feeling great. It's just nice and, I don't know, like the pain, the soreness, it's totally gone. I can't feel it at all. So that, that was the goal of this run about eight minute pace. You know, nice and easy. In fact, I probably should have gone a little slower, but I actually got, I got places to be, things to do. All right, and got to get ready for the live stream tonight. Oh baby. And I believe we're going to be opening up a new pair of shoes today, which I hope to put into another, another video later today. So it's a, another marathon shoe option. Oh, it's cold again. I almost didn't check the PO box today. I'm glad I did. It's time. It's time to talk about plyometrics. Oh my goodness. Thank you for your patience. If you've been waiting for this blog for a long time. And the reason you've been waiting is because I do not believe in jumping right into plyometrics at the beginning of a training block, which my training block started in January. And so over the last month, you've seen me building up my ankle strength and my foot strength in my house, just in my living room before coming to this field out here to begin the plyometric exercises, because listen, you can injure yourself with plyometrics and they will beat your legs up if you're not careful and if you're not used to them, especially if you're doing them incorrectly. And they're just, they're, they're intense. They make you hurt. They should make you soar, especially when you're just getting into them. And if you're, if you're getting ready for a race, don't add plyometrics like too close to a race. I would recommend at least six weeks out from a race, preferably two months out, because again, you just need to build up that suppleness, that explosiveness, and the elasticity in your lower legs, especially like your ankle, your calves, your soleus. So anyway, that's my approach. That's how I do plyometrics. And again, we're going to do, so we're going to do four exercises out here in the field. And then we'll add more as the weeks go along, getting closer to the marathon. And one last point, plyometrics helps with your power coming from your leg, which therefore will help with your, your push off power, like through your foot strike. And therefore you should be able to run faster when you are stronger in your lower limbs. But what I am frankly, almost even more interested in than power is cadence and turnover. And how quickly can you move your feet through the, through the foot strike on the ground, uh, with less ground contact and lighter ground contact. And you hear me talking about dancing on the trails up in the mountains. It's like that nimbleness, just that light on your feet feel that I think can really help with your speed as well. So plyometrics will help with that as well. All right, enough talking. Let's get to business. The first one we're going to do is hurdle jumps, all the hurdle jumps. All right, let's go. Gotta take sunglasses off. There's the hurdle jumps. It's pretty straightforward. You're just jumping in place. But in college and high school, we used to jump over hurdles. That's why I call them the hurdle jumps, but I don't have any hurdles out here. So, and again, I just did three sets of five. Eventually I will add, I will get up to three sets of 10, sometimes even three sets of 12, depending on the timing of the training block. And okay, next, one of my favorites actually, it might be my favorite, not quite, but quick feet. Just like it sounds, quick feet right on the ground, moving your feet as fast as possible. I'm going to start with three sets of 20 seconds and eventually again work up to three sets of 30 seconds. Eventually three sets of maybe 45 seconds. All right, let's go. Eyes up, eyes up when you're doing this one. You don't, it's really tempting to look down, okay? So eyes up. See, I was looking down. Eyes up, eyes up, eyes up, eyes up. Oh, my poor baby blues are getting all muddy, but that's okay. That's what running shoes are made for. All right, it's got to keep those eyes up. It's really tempting to look down, but you want to keep your eyes up, looking at the competition ahead of you. And that, my friends, is talk about foot strike, light on your feet, quick off the ground, RPM, increasing that turnover, that RPM. Oh, baby. I love that one. And so anyway, I just did three sets of 20. And again, I'll increase the time the next time I do them, which will be next week. And now we're doing a non-traditional plyometrics exercise and get, in fact, you almost can't even put this in the plyometrics category, but I love it. I love it. It's called, I call it Mr. Roboto. Mr. Roboto. It's not explosive. It is not jumping oriented. It is not, it's very, I actually have never really seen any other runner on YouTube do this, okay? So it's called Mr. Roboto. It's a little difficult to explain, so I'm just going to do it first, and then I'll try and explain in words after I do it. All right. Nice and easy, not slower, the better. There you have it, Mr. Roboto. It might be the most, it's probably not the most difficult for me, but I'm telling you, the slower you go, the better. What you're doing is you're doing, you're doing your running stride, and you are, you're going like a robot as slow, like you're going through molasses, like you're cutting through molasses, and the whole idea is to go through your entire running motion, your entire running stride, and then right, the most important is like right through that lift off, right through the toe off, and it's a balancing act, and you're firing, you're firing all these different muscles in your lower legs, especially, but all over, but especially your lower legs, which is going to build strength there, flexibility, all of that good stuff. So, and it just, it forces you to really, like for me, I tend to, I sometimes I slouch, and so it forces me to really focus on putting those shoulders back, and just making sure I'm just nice and taut. All right. I know that's a strange word, but like nice and kind of, there's a little bit of tension there, so I can use that tension as a kind of like a rubber band to help just push, push me down, push me down the track, push me down the road. All right. So, that's Mr. Roboto. I love it. I love it. Okay. One more for today. Just one more. Oh yeah. Bounding up. Oh yeah. I forgot to mention, Mr. Roboto, you do it three by, start with three by 10 meters. That's all. So, you'll go 10 meters down the, down the football field or 10 meters down the track, wherever you're at, and eventually again, I like to work up to 20 meters and even 25 meters. So, three by 25 meters sets, and by the end, you're like, you're burning. You are, you want to be done, and you want to be done, and you want to be done. All right. Bounding up the hill over here. Let's see. Yeah. I think there's enough cleared area. There's not too much snow. So, the next one is bounding, and just like it sounds, I'm sure you've seen it done before, but I like to do it on a hill for a little more resistance, and I prefer, this hill is not quite big enough, but it's okay. It'll do the trick. I prefer about a 50 meter hill. This is probably 30 meter hill. So, and again, I'll do three sets by 50 meters or four sets by 30 meters, and you're just bounding up the hill, and I'll show you here in a minute. And again, you're working on this one. You're really working on that explosion. And if you don't have a hill, that's okay. You can do these on flat as well, for sure. But I prefer to do them on a hill, because I like hills. All right. Let's go. Little mud on the camera lens. Hold on one second. All right. That's better. Okay. I can tell that I'm a little out of practice with the bounding. I felt like the power was okay. My legs are a little tired today, but it was more of the, like, the hand-eye coordination. And with these plyo exercises, you will improve your hand-eye coordination as well, because some of them will get more complex over time, and you will have to really think about the movements that you're doing and the explosive jumping that you're doing so that you don't fall on your face. So you don't fall on your face. But I felt pretty good about that today. So that was the four exercises. We'll talk more about them back in the studio. We're gonna need a warehouse. We're gonna need a warehouse YouTube family. I'm calling it now. Thank you. Oh my goodness. Amazing. In case you missed the live stream, you can go watch it upper right hand corner. We usually go about an hour. Tonight we covered culture, running culture, a little bit of nutrition, keeping in mind I'm definitely not a trained dietician, and then open Q&A. I'm sure we're gonna dive into a lot of running shoe topics. So make sure you go check it out upper right hand corner. All right. See you in an hour. And there you have it. Livestream in the books. Oh, it was a good one. It's always a good one, right? But no technical difficulties. I think that might be the first time that's ever happened where the audio was perfect. No echo. My lips were synced up with the audio. It was amazing. Thank you for being there. If you made it live, lots of good chatter in the chat. We do it every Wednesday night every week on Wednesdays at 7 p.m. mountain time. All right. Okay. Two runs today. Whenever I get over 80 miles a week, I usually start introducing doubles. All right. So that is this week. Started in the Ultra Torrens. They just, they felt good. They felt by the, and listen, I don't, I took them six miles today. I don't know if I'd want to go much further. I'm just gonna put it out there. But they did feel good those first six miles. And then the second run of the day was in the beacons. And I completely destroyed the beacons out in the mud doing the plyometrics. But again, they felt great as well as usual. So no updates there. No major updates. Somebody did ask me though, and I'm just gonna adjust this light a little bit as we're talking. Somebody asked me in the live stream, when is the beacon two coming out? And I believe I've heard July first. So I'm hoping it's sooner, but we'll see. I heard July first. So stay tuned for that. Of course, I will be getting the beacon two. All right. Plyometrics. That was fun. That was hard. And I've reviewed some of the footage. And I'm realizing that, like for example, the first one, the hurdle jumps, I can tell I'm a little sore. I'm a little out of practice. They didn't look amazing, just so you know. And so the idea is you want to lift your knees higher, and you want to make sure you're, you want to make sure you're not crouching over. You want to make sure you're back and that you're really good in good elevation. And then eventually, I will do the the hurdle jumps, but I will be propelling forward. So that'll be kind of the next step. Once I get these baby Plyometrics under my belt, just to reintroduce them to the legs. What else? The quick feet. Amazing. I love them. I love them. And again, in the Skechers Razor Threes, two days ago for the 22 mile run, I hit 185 for the RPM for my cadence. That's what I'm talking about. I would love to bump that up even to like 188, 189 this year. So I don't know how high I can go, but that quick feet exercise, that is part of the game plan. And then what else was there? Oh yeah, Mr. Roboto. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. It's like, you just, it's one of the, it's, it's one of the hardest things you'll ever do. More from the sense of focus, because it forces you to become a mental game runner, because you have to focus on your form in slow motion. It's beautiful. It's beautiful. Okay. And then lastly, bounding up the hill. Once that hill has a little less snow, it'll be, it'll be a little easier to negotiate and get a better, um, anyway, it was good. But again, I could just tell that I'm a little out of practice. Maybe my hand-eye coordination is not quite where I want it to be. Did I give you a keyword? It's been a long day. Was it power? Anyway, you probably already know. So I'm not going to say another one, but if not power, power. And the question of the day has to be this, what questions do you have for me about plyometrics? And I will dig into the, like just be patient with my answer. It might take me a day or two to get caught up on the comments, but really, really think about, like, is it, is it technique? Is it the science? Is it the, the, uh, the, uh, performance? Like, how does it help your performance? Anyway, anything like that. Or you could also comment on how could I, uh, basically better film? And I'm hoping to, uh, recruit the secret sauce. You know who you are. Uh, a gentleman out there in Denver who helps me film sometimes these daily vlogs. So I want to get him involved to help film these plyometric exercises better. So it's easier to see for you. So anyway, if you have any comments on how to make the videos better about plyometrics, I'm all ears. I'm all ears. This is the first video publishing today, publishing two. Yes. We opened up a brand new pair of shoes at the live stream. If you weren't there, you can either go dig through that video or you can wait for 3pm mountain time to watch the second video about that shoe. It's a, uh, it's an exciting one. It's an exciting one. See beauty. We're, uh, it'll publish at 3pm, 3pm. See beauty, the work card.