 All right, so today we're going to talk about the difference between racing and training because really they're two completely different things. All right, so the simplest way to define training and racing is as follows. Training is what we do in order to produce a training effect, okay? It's what we do to produce adaptations within the body. Racing is all about performance. It's just about, you know, running as fast as possible for the given distance. It's just producing the best performance. Now, during training, a workout is not going to be wiping you out, right? We don't want to go to the absolute limits because that would mean it would be too difficult to recover from it, right? Like if I do a crazy workout, like an absolutely insane workout, how many days will it take for me to recover from that workout until I can do another one, right? If that, if it takes a week or two weeks to recover from a workout before you can do another one, you end up not being able to train consistently enough to stimulate growth. There's a plateau at a certain point above which you're not really getting that much more training effect from the workout, but you are stressing yourself more and requiring more recovery. So your training is all about basically just trickling in little by little, chipping away at your fitness, slowly but surely building it with consistency over time, right? There's a saying that's something like one killer workout, you know, is nothing compared to 10 mediocre workouts over, you know, a month or something like that, right? So it's all about doing consistent work over time, cushioned with easy runs in between, recovery runs, all kinds of things like that. It's just about consistency, steadily building and giving the body a little bit of a stimulus, right? So giving it something that's slightly more challenging than what it's used to so that it elicits an adaptation response in the body. It's all about creating certain signaling pathways or not creating but stimulating certain pathways in the body that expresses certain genes and creates more mitochondria, more capillaries, certain enzymes, muscle size in your legs, your heart, all those different adaptations are a result of you just stimulating it through training, little by little, always going little bit over the top but not too much, right? So when you were doing an interval session, VO2max for example, a human being can stay at like VO2max for about eight, nine, 10 minutes maybe. So what we do in training is we just do like three or four minutes at VO2max and then we recover, right? Like, and then we do it again and then recover, do it again, recover, that's interval training. And that way we accumulate a lot of time at VO2max but we're never going to our absolute limits in terms of doing a full eight, nine or 10 minutes. And the reason for that is because if we went like nine minutes all out at VO2max, we are done. We need a loss of recovery and we only accumulated nine minutes. But if we do three minutes at a time and we do that five times, we can accumulate 15 minutes at VO2max but with much less recovery because it's less stressful to the system. So training is about stressing the system but not too much. Racing is about using your current fitness for what it's worth, right? It's like a test. It's actually, okay, here it goes. Let's see how fit we are, how fast we can cover this distance and you just go all out. That's racing, all out. And whatever fitness you currently then have on the day, that's what's going to produce your result. Of course, a race is also a workout. You will get a training stimulus from a race. But as I said, it plateaus. So if you compare a race, the stimulus like the actual biochemical response in your body, the physiological response of your body to a race and compare that to a workout, it turns out, you know, the race doesn't really give you that much more fitness stimuli. It doesn't really, the training effect from a race isn't really that much greater than a workout but the recovery afterwards is much greater because it was much more stressful to race all out. And of course, I do offer coaching if you're interested in customized training plans, consultations, anything like that. Check out my website. I'll put a link to it there, mgjcoaching.com, coaching for runners. So yeah, I'm just saying the same thing over and over again in different ways, I guess. Training is about stimulating adaptations without taxing the body excessively so that you can recover and continue to do it little by little consistently over time. Racing is something that you build up to, you taper down your mileage, you recover your rest, you get that sort of excess energy ready to spend and then you do the race and it's all out and you just put it all out there and then you have to recover afterwards. And if you include the two week taper and two weeks of recovery and an all out effort in the middle, which was the race, you have a whole month of just one really, really high quality workout. And that's, as I said, not as valuable as a month of, say, six or seven mediocre workouts where you're not going all out. So that's it. When you race, you race, when you train, you train. And if you want to grow, if you want to build your fitness, you should focus on training most of the time and realize that racing is something, it's like a cost. You are actually sacrificing a little bit of fitness gain, sacrificing a little bit of training progress every time you do a race because of the taper and because of the recovery afterwards and because of the tax it takes on your body. It's the toll it takes on your body. It's a really taxing experience to do a race. And I would argue that there's no middle ground. There's no gray area in the middle there. Sometimes people do like, yeah, I'll do a race kind of in the middle of training. I don't think that's a good idea because, you know, either you're racing and you're trying to get a certain performance or you're training and it's about doing a workout. And in a race setting, there's like, there's no in between there. If you, if you don't go all out because you're trying to do it as a training run, then it's not a race. You're not going to get the top performance. And if you're doing it as a workout and it's part of your training, then it shouldn't be too stressful because that would compromise the overall training progress. So I'm a fan of just doing a few races every year, really prioritizing them. If you're doing races in the middle of a training phase, perhaps just be strict about it, have discipline and keep it as a workout. Keep it controlled. Don't fall for the temptation of just racing it suddenly, unless you want to race it, but then you should know that beforehand anyway and just go for it, you know what I mean? But if you're going to go for it, you should recover afterwards and you should also taper beforehand to get a top performance. So it's really an interesting thing there. But you know, there are benefits from racing though, like mental benefits and you learn how to race. You learn how your body reacts at that very, very taxing top end sort of performance realm. So it is recommended of course that you do race if you want to be good at racing, but there's a cost so you can't do it too often. And so that's why we do paradise training plans. We have a period where we focus on building fitness and then we have a racing period. And then we go back to recovery and we build another base phase and then that's the way we go. Most people will have two or even possibly three macro cycles in a year where they're focusing on one race perhaps, but you know, there's a lot of different ways to do it. I do offer training plans as I've mentioned before and the link is in the description. So if you're interested in a paradise training plan, perhaps for one race or even a whole year, I do offer those. We can talk on Skype and we try and create a training plan that fits your history and your goals and build you up to a key race so that you're ready to perform your best on race day. That's it. Hope you're having an awesome day. Hope your running is going well. If you have any questions for me, you can send me a message at our Facebook page, the long trail or MGJ coaching. And you can also go on MGJcoaching.com and send me a message there. Thanks for watching. Bye.