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# EP 6 - RUNNINNG SESSIONS EXPLAINED
- URL: https://www.inthebeginningpodcast.com/ep-6-runninng-sessions-explained/
- Published: 2024-10-25T06:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-20T03:37:22.000Z
- Description: Courtney Atkinson and Liam Flanagan on heart rate training, parkrun, marathon integrity — recorded on the Gold Coast.
- Author: Courtney Atkinson
- Tags: Episodes, Main Feed, Sports Science, Running Training, Marathon Training, Olympics, #Import 2026-07-28 20:58

*Courtney Atkinson and Liam Flanagan on heart rate training, parkrun, marathon integrity — recorded on the Gold Coast.*

## Listen

Listen on [Spotify](https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/inthebeginningpodcast/episodes/EP-6---RUNNINNG-SESSIONS-EXPLAINED-e2q2pta?ref=inthebeginningpodcast.com) or [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/REPLACE?ref=inthebeginningpodcast.com).

## Full transcript

Auto-generated transcript. Timestamps approximate. Hosts: Courtney Atkinson & Liam Flanagan.

**Read the full transcript** 

\[00:00\] In the beginning episode 6, Courtney Atkinson, we are back and it's nice to be back face to face with you once more. It's always good to be back on the Gold Coast. You're looking a bit tight though Liam — big weekend with your big 40th that I missed, it was a massive weekend. To sum it up, The Hangover meets schoolies is probably the best way I can sum it up. It's done nothing for my physical wellbeing, but it was — we talked a bit about it last week after I'd had a wedding down in Sydney. I'm really enjoying the balance

\[00:32\] that's in my life at the moment, although I'll be tilting that balance away from alcohol for a little while now because — it was a lot of fun, it was a long day, a late finish, and I went for a run Monday morning, and that's a hard run. What were you sweating out? It was a mix, and that was part of the problem too — they say don't mix your drinks, or pick your poison.

\[01:02\] I tried all the poisons — I was going from seltzers to beers to some champagne, and then a friend of mine who works for a tequila company. Have you ever had coffee tequila? I have one rule when it comes to drinking, and that's to avoid shots at all costs. Coffee tequila, Courtney — let me tell you, it's delicious, terrible for the day after, but it is delicious. Well, on the socials mate, you look like you guys were having an absolute ball and dancing

\[01:34\] away into the wee hours. And there were some residents down in Currumbin who probably weren't too impressed. No, what? I've gotta give a big shout out to my Currumbin family, they were outstanding. My wife put up a message on the Facebook group and the support was there — like, "have a great night." Some smart-asses saying "thanks, where was my invite?" but it was widely supported. The key thing was to invite your neighbours — yep, invite your neighbours — so we had neighbours from across the road and next door, but it was great. Quickly, can I just give a quick shout out — speaking of socials, I want to give a shout

\[02:07\] out, firstly, to James Hopper, who's a big fan of the podcast early on — he's been going for his long runs up in the range, 100% seen him, big supporter of the podcast. He passed the podcast on to a fellow by the name of Nick Snow, and this is what I wanted to share with you — he sent me a message saying he's absolutely loving the podcast, best podcast for years, keeps telling everyone he knows to subscribe. And I wrote back and said, awesome to hear Nick — I've never met Nick — I said, awesome to hear, how's your running going? I assumed he was a runner.

\[02:38\] This is the message I want to share with you — he said, going well, thanks, I'm totally hooked, exactly how you guys talk about it. Dropped 40 kilos with plenty to go, but will crack 600 Ks this year, on Saturday — presumably the week just gone. And before this year I couldn't do 600 metres around the block of the gym. How good is that? And that's what it's about — we talk about people getting hooked on running, and that's someone who's hooked on running. His health has probably benefited untold —

\[03:09\] he's probably added years back to his life. How good is that? We love getting love, but when it's something like that and it's a positive story, even better. Talking about positive stories — a new marathon world record in the women's division over in Chicago, 2:09:56\. Well, what do you think? Do you believe it? We're jumping straight in — we're not, we're not, we're not

\[03:39\] dancing around it. Do you know what — from when I was competing, at the Olympic Games and World Championships, at that level, you could never even consider someone else was doping, because as soon as that got into your head, you're beaten. Have you ever thought about it — you turn up on the line and you believe someone next to you is doping, how can you race them? So it's really hard to get rid of that. But since I've been out of that, I'm a sceptic on a lot of things.

\[04:09\] And also, of course, what's happened over the past decade with cycling and running — at the moment I think I read the other day there's 120 Kenyans currently on doping bans. Yes. So it begs the question. But for the moment, let's leave the doping out of it, because we don't know — that's the thing, you don't know. I just want to focus on how bloody quick that is — we had a big

\[04:39\] discussion about who was Australia's best-known runner — Steve Moneghetti, Brett Robinson came into that conversation, and we were talking like 2:07s. In this race, only two American males beat the top female. First-ever woman under 2 hours 10 minutes — do you believe it? Until someone tells me otherwise — in the same way you say you're now a sceptic — I am now an

\[05:09\] optimist. I want to believe that the best of the best in all sports are clean. Now, I know that means I'm going to have my heart broken on occasion — I remember being in high school and seeing Marion Jones, the US sprinter. I loved Marion Jones, she was the poster woman for athletics then, and when it came out that she'd been doping, it sucked. I hated it — I don't think it ruined my love of sport, but it sucked, right?

\[05:40\] I now look at what's being done and I want to believe it, because I want to believe that we as a species can keep getting faster. I love seeing that we've got men who've run under 2 hours now — whether assisted, in specific environments, designed, not in a race format necessarily — but in Moneghetti's era we would never have thought anyone was capable of running under 2 hours. It was insane. And now you've got a female athlete breaking 2 hours 10

\[06:11\] minutes for the marathon, almost lopping 2 minutes off the previous record. Yeah, and I think that's the key, and that's what a lot of the discussion is about — the percentage women have dropped since Paula Radcliffe held the record at around 2:15, give or take, compared to how much the men have been able to drop. And I even read today — went down the rabbit hole a little bit — that there are even people saying maybe super shoes suit women more than men. Really? Because it's not just on the marathon.

\[06:44\] This has happened in the 10K and 5K too, similar percentage breakdowns. I don't know — I have half a thought-out theory, which is a lot of my theories, we're all about theories. It makes more sense that women have greater scope for improvement in all sports, because historically men have been prioritised in sport funding and everything. And now, as we talk about AFLW and NRLW and the women's

\[07:15\] cricket — we see it particularly in NRLW — as you pay these women as professional athletes, you're seeing the physical changes in them. Now athletics is probably a bit different, because I think women's athletics has probably been on parity for a long time — it's only half a floor anyway. Anyway, look, I want to believe, and I'm going to believe until someone proves us wrong. Either way, no matter which way you look at it, it's just absolutely crazy. We're just talking —

\[07:45\] it's just 2:09 — what does that break down to per-K pace? Oh God, is it sub-3? Not quite, not quite, probably 3:11 or thereabouts — I've never really worked that out for my own times. What's the fastest marathon you've ever run in a race? In an Ironman I think we went low 2:40s. OK, yeah. Look, I'm never gonna predict times here, but the more we're

\[08:15\] talking about running, the more we're doing this podcast, the more excited I'm getting about what it's gonna be. I've been talking about marathons since coming back from America last week — I've been looking at some things and getting excited. I don't know what it will be yet, I'm not going to commit to anything just yet, but next year we're committing to something. And the other significant thing I'll say before we move on from this marathon world record — Nike takes the crown back, because the previous record was held by — I'm not going to try and pronounce her name —

\[08:48\] let's say Assefa — I don't want to get her name wrong — but she was running in those one-use-type Adidas shoes, branded the Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo. This most recent record, Nike takes it back. And I also love that idea — there's an athlete running them, but from a branding perspective, the shoe manufacturers must want that record held by someone in their shoes. So Nike takes back the women's title. Here's a question — does that sway your

\[09:18\] judgement on what shoe you'd go and pick? Were you looking at some Adidas shoes? Yeah, no, but now I'm back — now you're back on Nike? I'd be more inclined to buy the Alphaflys, put it that way. Talking about not really knowing what we're talking about, and a bit of rumours — I'll jump straight into a bit of equipment. So there are rumours about a codenamed shoe called the Alter G, and Nike is actually going for an

\[09:49\] illegal shoe — you know this, 40 millimetres stack height is the rule for international running competitions, you can't — pretend I don't know — because stack height, the height of the rubber under the shoe, the base of the shoe, cannot be more than 40 millimetres. So — 4 centimetres? Is that 4 centimetres? Yeah, 4 centimetres. That's not a strong point. Yeah, that's why we have calculators, so you can't have more than 40 mil stack height to break a world record in competition.

\[10:21\] I'm sure they're not checking the back of the marathon here at the Gold Coast, but that's the rule. But in training shoes, some of the companies are doing — like Hoka, however you want to pronounce it — they have a 48-millimetre shoe you can train in. What does the increased stack height do? More rubber, softer — it's probably personal preference whether it's better or not. But this shoe in particular — the images that have been leaked are from the secret

\[10:54\] shoe — that's the IG, the secret shoes, I'm now following them so we can get all the gossip — that's the Instagram account, The Secret Shoe. I think people send in prototypes and things like that to kind of get it out to the public, so we don't know for sure this is real. But the interesting thing for me was they've got their ZoomX foam — really nice foam in there — but there's an air pocket, you know, like the old Air Jordans, from the toe

\[11:24\] to the heel. You can see on the side of the shoe, air right from the toe to the heel. So you've got that thickness of rubber plus an air pocket going right through the whole shoe. Is there a carbon plate? I don't think — we don't know, it's a secret shoe, no one knows. But obviously some of their pro athletes may have been testing them, and they've got a few photos — or this could be complete crap. Oh geez, I hope it's not — interesting, I'd want to try that shoe, I want to try that shoe. I'm already — the air

\[11:56\] bubble was so — yeah, it's iconic. Imagine that at the Gold Coast Marathon in 2025 — if that shoe was available to purchase it'd be unbelievable, you'd have thousands of 4-hour-plus runners rolling over the line in air bubble shoes. Well, possibly rolling their ankles — they're like high heels nearly these days. 48 mil, geez that's enormous, you think about 5 centimetres.

\[12:27\] Well that one — that one's the Hoka, however you pronounce it — I think this adds up. Yeah exactly, the point is we know what we're talking about here, I like that — The Secret Shoe, true, I'm gonna have to jump on that Instagram account for sure, oh I like it, sure I like it. Hey, how's your week been? 'Cause you've been travelling, you've been busy since we last spoke — last time we spoke you were in the US, at the Red Bull High Performance Centre in Santa Monica. You're back — what can you tell me, what happened after we last spoke? Yeah, we can get into that.

\[12:58\] We were just saying how quickly a week goes, right — it feels like last night I was sitting in the hotel there doing this. You know, committing to doing this podcast each week has made me feel like I'm going to school — you're kind of suddenly, holy hell, gotta do my homework, gotta do my homework again, which we did have homework for this week, yes. So I had another few days after we chatted last week at the Red Bull High Performance Centre, or the Athlete Performance Centre, over there. The interesting thing was I showed the next day a picture of myself on a treadmill with the full apparatus and the VO2 mask

\[13:29\] on, and I had so many people asking me about VO2 — "what's your VO2?" I don't know, it wasn't a VO2 test, I put the oxygen mask on, and that was the joke of it all, it was just for show. Because my watch says mine's 57, so — well, the watch has got to be right. So what I did do was go in the next day after we spoke — I did a step test, so I was more around looking at where my lactate lies, trying to get myself to exhaustion

\[13:59\] running, and then look at how my biomechanics were reacting — the problems I was having in that space. So around the room they have, let's say, 1,000-frames-per-second cameras, a heap of them, just looking at you in a 360 model, looking at what's working at different speeds. What's interesting is we used a very similar step test to what I used to do at the Queensland Academy of Sport, probably about a decade ago when I was training to race. We'd get our lactate

\[14:29\] levels off that, and that would dictate what I'd go and train at. So that hasn't changed that much — well, it's changed a lot, that's the problem, it has changed a lot. But interestingly, it was very similar to what I'd do at the start of a pre-season — we'd go in and test pre-season, like when I'd come back after maybe 3 weeks off for holiday. We'd do our first test, that's the baseline, and then as we went through the season we'd do a number of these tests. What you're trying to work out is, if you think about it like a curve where you start off at a very slow speed —

\[14:59\] and work out what lactate you're producing. If anything, your lactate to begin with might even be higher when you first start, and then it might decrease a bit. But there's a point at a speed where there's a slight inflection where your lactate starts increasing — that's kind of what they call L1, that first point, and that's what I'm interested in. And then the second point, once you're running up into higher speeds, is where does the lactate curve suddenly go exponential —

\[15:32\] and that's the lactate threshold. And that's the only thing we're interested in, right? And that's the lactate threshold — the VO2, from my understanding — I could be wrong, I'm not a sports scientist — it's a great guide when you're testing kids for what sport they're going to play, but it doesn't really tell you anything about what's going on. I've known plenty of endurance athletes with not great VO2s but great efficiency who've gone on to great things.

\[16:05\] OK, alright, so overall it was a good experience — you're glad you did it. Great experience, I'm motivated, I've got some data to work off, some strength and conditioning now — not rocket science, but I can work off the back of it — and had another few great runs around LA, mate. Yeah, some of those videos you were putting up, the running around there looked fun, looked cool. It wasn't all work — I guess this is an appropriate forum for me to share my news that I think I'm basically a run

\[16:36\] influencer. You're right, because I've got to buy you a boom box — no, although — I did find it, I had plenty of people messaging me about that stupid run boom box, I do not want one, no. So I'm part of a run group back in Sydney — I guess I'm kind of an ex-member of this run group, I don't run with them regularly anymore. But the run group has become a sponsored run group now — AG1, Athletic Greens, yeah right, have partnered with this running group, and what's —

\[17:08\] the running group — Runners in the Dark. Runners in the Dark, and they're a bunch of — I'm the snail, I'm the snail mascot, that's how I refer to myself within this running group because I'm slow, right? But you've got some marathon runners who run somewhere around 2:30 — you've got some quick ones, they move. There's the fastest fella, he's quick — they're putting together an A-team for the Bondi to Manly Ultra this weekend, yes, which they'll win, I reckon — their A-team had a qualifying race for

\[17:38\] it the other week, or a training run the other week, and their A-team will probably win it. There are some really high-end runners and a few plodders as well, like me, but for the most part they're pretty good runners. And yeah, the other day the big boss at AG1 apparently saw them coming back from one of their runs, reached out, and now they're partnering — professional, we can call them professional, we're getting some kit made up. Now when I say they're getting some kit, I'm — I say I'm a run influencer now because I'm still

\[18:09\] on the WhatsApp group, and so when the message gets sent around — "hey guys, what do we all think of this?" — I just say yes. And then when they say "right, oh well, we need your shirt size," I just give them my size. You're just going to get some freebies out of this — this is brilliant. So Runners in the Dark — why Runners in the Dark? Run in the Dark, we started in the dark, so we'd usually meet three times a week in Sydney, in Bondi, starting at 5:00 AM, and in Sydney that's — dark. It's not like — I know, I know.

\[18:40\] Right, and so it started much more socially, and then it's kind of developed — I don't want to say elite, because it's not elite, but most runs Monday and Wednesday are probably sort of 10-15 Ks, usually run around 4:45 pace. But then they also have what's called Fanging Friday — that's the run session that the AG1 boss saw. And that's when some of these

\[19:11\] fellas put their foot down — you're talking 12-13K down at sub-4-minute pace, hills in it, they really put their foot down. There's a lot of running of the City2Surf track, and when these boys put their foot down, is it shirts off? Well, it probably depends on the time of year — the cold weather allergies would be coming out around this time of year — yeah, I thought that might have just — shirts off might have the AG on it, yeah, go ahead. I mean, if you take the

\[19:41\] shirts off there's less area to advertise on, that's true. So the shirts are going to start, but — that may have been the opportunity. By proxy I'm now a sponsored runner. OK, so you're now the professional in this duo, I guess, and I'd like to be treated as if — if that's OK we can go forward, that'd be great. What else — are we going to talk about this week's poll, this week's running poll? We are going to talk about this week's running poll — you put this one up on the Instagram, and —

\[20:13\] well, it's a — it's a question, it's a poll, it's not exactly a poll — and interesting answers too, not exactly what I was expecting. I was kind of expecting the marathons we've been talking about, but we've got everything under the sun here — we've got the Rottnest swim. The question was: if you could choose only one event in Australia to do, which would it be? And because we didn't really specify, it could be any event — it was just the one endurance

\[20:44\] event in Australia you want to do — if you had one event you could do for the year. Most of them are running, I can see, but a few people are actually now spruiking their own events, which is fine. So we've got the Burley Swim Run Day — great event, on Australia Day. What else have we got here? Plenty of people spruiking their own events as well. One of the ones that came up a fair bit was Red Bull Trailheads. What's Red Bull Trailheads? I don't know, this one hasn't —

\[21:16\] it was a one-off during COVID, when obviously the borders were shut. I had an idea where we took the idea of mountain bike enduro — you pretty much race the downhill trails and then cruise back up, only timing the downhills — very similar to a rally car stage race. We thought let's do that for running, but we're going to run up the black trails and race down the nice flowy green and blue trails.

\[21:47\] So it was only a 5K race — most of it — and we did it out here in Numinbah Valley, at a private mountain bike track. And we had some of the best 10K runners in Australia, who were Queenslanders at the time, come out — remember this now — and they said literally, they didn't think it'd be quite that hard, but most of them said it was one of the hardest things they've actually done, and it was only a 5K rep. We had some of the footy players come out too — yes, we had the Suns out — I remember this now, I remember seeing it. It was before I moved to the Gold Coast, and I reckon I knew

\[22:19\] I was moving here, and I remember seeing some of the footy players posting about this event and thinking it looked awesome. It was great. We had a bit of a problem because it rained the week before — mountain bike trails, slippery mud and rain — but we put a few ropes in on the uphills and worked it out. But it was just a completely different way of looking at running, and that's come in strong — the Red Bull Trailheads — I'd say that's the number one. Really? Doesn't surprise me, OK. And so —

\[22:49\] what — obviously my audience — do you read anything into that? Do you read anything into it? I do, yeah — what do you read into it? Crew love to do things differently. They also love to run marathons and try to beat a personal best, but I think that's where you're seeing trail running and different kinds of outdoor events really having their time, because people just want to get outdoors and do different stuff. And I always liked this event particularly because —

\[23:24\] we know who the quickest runner is — if I went down and ran them over a 5K along the beach, we know he's going to win — the quickest guy wins. This one kind of brought the trail runners and the road runners together, and gave the trail runners, with the downhill sections and a bit of technical aspect to it, a chance against the really fast runners, and they loved it. I also think — and this says to me a little bit as well, and we've talked about it on previous episodes — about the experience

\[23:57\] mattering as well. We talked about the atmosphere at the start line for something like City2Surf, or Noosa Triathlon — the experience and environment you get up there. But it also says to me, and I guess you look at things like Tough Mudder, and Spartan Race, and those sort of things — well, that's Hyrox now, right — and that's what Hyrox is now. I think as part of this running movement we're all experiencing, people want to get out to an area or an

\[24:28\] environment they wouldn't normally get out to — most people would never take themselves out running there. No, but when there's an organised event — Tough Mudder is an example — most people who've done Tough Mudder over the years, and I've done one, I would never have gone out and done it when I was in Sydney. I would never have gone out to that section of Sydney in the hills where we did it. But because there was an organised event and I was doing it with other people and I was being held accountable, it gave me an excuse to go and explore a part of Sydney that I would

\[24:58\] never have previously. And you talk about Trailheads the same way — those road runners would never have taken themselves off to this mountain bike track, it was private property anyway so they couldn't get there. But you look at people saying they want to do stuff like that, or even some of those other surprising events — it's like people want a reason to go somewhere they haven't, or wouldn't. And I think COVID had a lot to do with that — in a positive way, as much as it was — let's not even talk about COVID — but it had a real positive effect on people

\[25:30\] getting outdoors. Once you could get outdoors, it had a real positive effect. So what we've seen since then, I think, is people showing what they do on social media as well — once you see someone — it's a bit different seeing a professional athlete up on the side of a mountain, which you can trip and fall off the side of, I'm not talking about that — but you're just seeing everyday people get out and hike, creating videos of themselves in places where generally people may have thought "I can't go there myself,"

\[26:01\] "I don't feel safe" — but I've seen my mate go there, no stress, let's go in. Like, I've seen you take your kids up to Springbrook — Twin Falls — so good, so good. And prior to COVID — because I know the tracks pretty well — prior to COVID you'd be lucky to get, I reckon, 10 people go in there in a day, especially down into the Warrie Track, which is the 14K loop that takes you around. Like, one, people didn't know about it, and two, I wouldn't

\[26:36\] even think about it. Now that place, you go up there and by 8:00 AM in the morning you can't get a park. And to think now — this is the exact sort of conversation, if people are listening to this and thinking "what are these two talking about" — this is why we started this podcast in the first place, because we start somewhere and then we end up here. I'm now thinking about Mount Coot-tha up in Brisbane, right — I don't know if there's a race through Mount Coot-tha — yeah, there is, Brisbane Trail Ultra — but there would be so many

\[27:06\] people who would have walked up Mount Coot-tha at one time or another, but would never think to run around it or through the trails, just because they wouldn't know where to go, right — which is perfectly normal. But if they can find out about these events, they'll do it, and they'll commit to it with a friend. Like, for example, coming up — I think it might even be this weekend — The Cut, yes, which is a unique event, it's worth talking about. So, and correct me if

\[27:37\] I'm wrong, because I might get it wrong, but basically The Cut is a kind of ultra enduro race where you run a lap of a course around the velodrome — or, well, it's the criterium track around the velodrome — and I think it's about 5 or 6K long. No — again, I'm not 100% across it, but I think it's about 1.5K loops — I reckon it's longer than that — well, you'd better do a quick Google on it for me, but I'm gonna go with, it's about a 1.5K loop. And what they do is they'll

\[28:09\] let everyone run that 1.5K, and when the last person comes across the line, they give you a little bit of time and then you go again. And at a certain point — I've got a feeling maybe around the 7 or 10K mark — they start cutting people as they come across the line, and they just keep whittling it down until they get to close to 50K, then they have a sprint with the last four people. You nailed it — so basically that's it. The way it's pitched is anyone with a heartbeat and a

\[28:42\] pair of running shoes should read on. The minimum distance is 10.5K and the maximum is 50K. As long as you can run 1.5K in under 15 minutes you'll be fine — if you can't, you'll get cut. So, as you say, they start as a massive group, the event takes place over a 1.5-kilometre course, the race stops at the end of every lap and they wait for everyone to cross the finish line. There's a maximum time of 15 minutes for a lap — once everyone's across the finish, they make any cuts, wait 20 seconds, line up again and restart the race.

\[29:12\] And so I love this race — I haven't done it, but I want to do it badly. I want to do it too. It would be such an exciting thing to be a part of. It's a long day — doing it that way takes a long time to get through, if you're getting up towards the back end of it, the 30-to-50K mark — because of the way it's structured — but I suppose there are people around, there's tents, you get to recover, I think they even give a 10-minute break to go to the toilet. It's a vibe, there's an atmosphere, and again, we talk about

\[29:43\] these events, and it's not always about the distance or the location — it's about the environment. The best events are the ones that create the best environment around it all, which is why we see events like City2Surf sell out like it does, Noosa sells out, and why Gold Coast Marathon is now selling out — because the vibe around it is, I'd argue, unmatched. 100%, and this one reminds me a little bit of the real ultra stuff at the moment — they've got these backyard ultras, where they run

\[30:15\] — I think that's the 6K or 6.5K loop — and they do it on the hour, so you run around and just keep going till you can't stop, right? That's for a certain type of person, not for me — but this Cut, this interests me. I'm not going to be able to get there and do it this weekend, but one year — that's something. 1,500 metres, is it — yeah — I'd just like to spectate at it. I'd always like to go up and just watch it, particularly as you get to the

\[30:46\] pointy end. You've gotta run it — why wouldn't you? Don't spectate, get out there and run it. I'll try. Can I ask you some technical questions? Sure, we brought this up before — sure. This was put to me by a friend who's a very good runner, but he's naturally a good runner — a little bit naive when it comes to the technical aspects of things. And we talked a bit — I've asked you previously about what "floating" means within a session, because I've always seen it written on people's trackers, like 2K or two-minute efforts, floating in

\[31:19\] between. I don't understand what float means. If you understand that, I want you to explain — in the dumbest language possible, for someone like me — what the value of specific running sessions are. OK, alright, the language will be the easy part for me — the dumbest language possible. So, unless you've got a running coach preparing these things for you, you'd have heard these types of runs or sessions laid out, or you might read them online, but you won't

\[31:51\] understand the value behind the sessions, because I don't understand the value behind all these sessions, and I run a bit. Can we start with a long run? Because we all hear about the idea of a long run, a Sunday long run — what is the value of a long run, and how should we be doing it? So this is just my experience, sure, because everyone's going to look at it a different way. And when we talked about periodisation, I think you start

\[32:22\] thinking each week's got to look different, so there's no one long run that works necessarily — before I take that question around the long run — he says, sitting up on the stage — before I take that question, I do feel like I'm being interviewed now. I think before we get into that, it's worth explaining what I think a balanced week should look like for the everyday runner.

\[32:52\] And veg — let's go, exactly, the five food groups and veg. So what do you need within your week? We're not talking about an Olympic runner doing 20 sessions here — but what would I put into my week that would give me a rounded approach and give me the best chance of actually improving week on week — and the first basis of that would be the long run. Right, so that's first and foremost — that's the most important thing in the week. If we're building the run pyramid, the old-school run pyramid, it's your —

\[33:23\] it's your — think about the base, right, the big base, and there are rules of thumb around how long that should be — some percentage of distance, whatever that is technically. The reason for the long run is endurance — not rocket science, OK, it's endurance. What it's doing, in a more simplified version, is building the capillaries within the muscles to be able to carry the blood, oxygenate it, and do all that, which then helps you run longer, more efficiently, and

\[33:55\] for longer. But the big thing for me with the long run is it gives you the confidence, when you go to the race, to be able to finish it — the confidence when you go to the race to get through it. It's like putting money in the bank — that's the dumbed-down version of it, you're putting money in the bank so you can get through the race. I love that —

\[34:29\] the best way possible to put it. Because that tells me the biggest advantage of a long run is the mental benefit. It does stuff for your legs, it does stuff for your lungs, but ultimately it's the mental strength you gain from a long run — going, "oh, I can do a half marathon because I've run a half marathon, I've done it, and I can," or "I can do a 10K run because I did a 10K run the other weekend." That's the most basic way to look at it — time on legs, can I stay on my legs as long as I need to for that race? Then look, there are progressions of how you can do a long run — you can do an actual progressive long run where you

\[35:01\] start off at a set pace and then build to, say, marathon pace by the end — so it's like a build through the long run. There's no reason — we're talking about these particular ways of running, but there's nothing to say you can't mix up these types of runs. Do a long run and at the back of it throw in some fartlek-style intervals, which is very specific — but again, we're keeping it simple, OK, we're doing this for the dumb people. So I talked about the week and what I'd put in it — the base is the long run, right — you'd hear a lot in a

\[35:34\] late-training kind of talk about 3 intense sessions a week within a run week. I think that's probably too much for someone who's just running 4 or 5 days a week. The reason being, you've got to allow for recovery — and if you put a long run in there, which is going to tax you, and then try to fit three other intense runs into that week without the volume to support it — yeah, you're going to get injured, and you're just going to be feeling like crap the whole time. So the two runs I like are some type of

\[36:08\] speed run — now you could do reps for that, or you could do some type of fartlek. I like fartlek. Explain fartlek and explain why it's good. So fartlek — I think it's Swedish for "speed play," that's the actual proper definition. So speed play — the best way I'd suggest someone approach fartlek is it's over your race pace for a set period of time, and

\[36:39\] then coming back just under your own race pace for a set period of time. And what that's doing is teaching your body to accumulate lactic acid — more than you'd be capable of continuing for a long time — and then bringing it back and recovering, clearing it, to be able to go again and again. For those playing along at home, Courtney was bang on — fartlek is a Swedish term for speed play, you nailed it. So it's like you're teaching your body to be able to buffer — go above, then come back — and then the traditional form of

\[37:12\] fartlek, the real one, if you were to go out and do it properly — there's no set — you don't do it in reps, there's no set time. You could be running around the streets with a group and just say "alright, we're going to go hard until the 3rd lamppost" — I don't know how far that is, could be 800, could be 1,200, doesn't matter — and then we're going to back off until the next one. It's great doing it with groups this way if you want to have a bit of fun, where it's nearly like one person decides the next thing they're going to do.

\[37:43\] So if you're in a park or around the street or whatever — it's like, OK, we're onto #5 — sometimes you see running groups do it, and I've done it in football pre-seasons before, where it's like doing a running session, the old "back person runs to the front" — it's a similar concept. Yeah, similar concept. So what fartlek is, is going above your race pace and then below it. Why is it good for your running?

\[38:13\] Like we said, it's teaching you to run — it's giving you, it's buffering, it's helping you learn to buffer. So if you go a bit over your red line, it's teaching you to know your paces, to be able to come back and get a bit of recovery without completely blowing up. The other thing I really like about fartlek, from a pure race point of view, is if you go out and run — you kind of look at your watch and go, "I'm going to go out and run 10K, my goal pace is this, and I'm going to try and keep it consistent."

\[38:44\] "I'm going to run a marathon, and I need to run, say, 4 minutes per K to do this time" — but the reality when you're in a race is that doesn't happen, because you've got wind, you've got hills, you've got downhills, you've got people around you, and you might get a bit competitive with the guy next to you and run a bit hard. So fartlek's great in teaching you just to know your body by feel a lot better — and that's why I personally like doing it a lot more than, say, specific speed sessions.

\[39:14\] So the two options — you'd want to do some type of speed tolerance during the week, it could be fartlek, it could be hill repeats, which also gives you a bit more strength-building, and then when you come back to the flats — pay the bills, you always pay the bills — but you could do that as intervals as well, or you could literally get on the track and do hard intervals, which, to me, just teaches you to have balls. You're going hard — we're talking real dumbed-down language here.

\[39:45\] So fartlek teaches you how to race, because it teaches you to be at that speed and come up and over. Whereas I think the track work, the real high-intensity speed work — it hurts, because you're going as hard as you can, and it gives you that real feeling of, "I'm in a race and I've got to dig deep, I know that pain." I know the pain, because you're building that lactate, but then you're completely recovering so you can attack it again at the highest intensity you can. So it's got a similar effect, but a

\[40:17\] little bit different. I love hearing you describe interval training as teaching you to have balls, or teaching you to get a bit of fire in your belly about running. Because I think for a lot of people at my level and below, there's a real fear about running faster, because it's unknown. And I think that's part of it — and if you're at the point where

\[40:47\] you're ready to take on a 5K, a 10K, a half marathon, or even a marathon — I know for me, with the half marathon a couple of weeks back, when I set my PB, I wasn't scared in the sense of fearing it, but nervous about how my body was going to handle running at that pace. And that idea of interval training being the proving ground — it's mental again, a bit like the long run really — it's about fortifying your brain and

\[41:21\] your mind, and the inner dialogue that happens when you're exercising, if you don't have the music drowning it out — because your brain tells you to quit when your legs tie up, the lactic builds up, and the brain just goes, "you can just start walking now if you want, you can stop now." There's nothing — but those interval sessions, it sounds like, as you're dumbing it down, is where you tune that noise in your head down, get it quiet. Well, it gives you the break to

\[41:52\] be able to reset, to get in the pain again — you know what I mean? So with fartlek, or a long run, or where you're just running continuously, you get the pain and then you've kind of got to fight it, right, you've got to keep fighting it and manage your pace. Whereas with speed work, you're getting either a complete stop or a slow jog, and that's your reset, to be able to put yourself back in the hurt box again. But there's also, with the speed stuff, it's about efficiency, because you're going over speed —

\[42:23\] you're teaching, through the running motion at that higher pace, it's also just teaching you to run a bit more efficiently than when you're shuffling along out there. So there are a few different purposes to it — and that's not even touching on the science behind it. But I don't want to touch on the science, I'm not going to understand the science, you're going to keep cutting me down on the science, I don't want to hear the science. Well, look, you can explain the science if you want, but hearing you talk about the intervals and stuff like that — genuinely, I want to go out and do one tomorrow, like I'm genuinely, it's got me

\[42:55\] excited — I'm not, I've got a slower run planned with a mate, but the runner in me, the competitor in me, gets excited at that feeling, because I know what that feeling's like after an interval session, and it's awesome, it's great. I think you love running fast — I think it's a better feeling, I feel better after an interval session than I do after a long run — that's the "runner's high" everyone talks about, the endorphins and everything coming up. Yeah, because you're at a higher intensity, the heart rate's higher —

\[43:25\] and again, you're getting rest, so it's like you're hurting, then coming back to the rest. The reason though — you'll hear me — you can see what my favourite is, and it's fartlek. Especially as you get a bit older, fartlek protects you a little bit as well — you're still getting the speed, speed play, with fartlek, but because you're not completely stopping, it moderates the amount of speed you can go. Whereas I think as you get a bit older, if you haven't got a good background or haven't

\[43:55\] been at speed a lot, there's a chance you can go to the track, having been doing all this endurance stuff, and suddenly you're banging out a flat-out 400 metres, and you do yourself an injury — right, and if you don't do it on the first rep, because you get to rest again, you get to go, and you're actually running — there's more chance you're running above what you should be, right? Whereas fartlek, to me, because it's continuous, it just helps bring that pace back to a level where you know you can only go so hard, because you've got to

\[44:26\] recover again while you're moving quick — especially in a group. Yeah, OK, I like it. So those are the two — that's the basis, we've got the long run, we've got the fartlek or some type of repetition session. And then the third, more intense session I'd look at is some type of tempo run. Tempo runs, you might hear them called threshold runs — there are so many different terms out there for different types of runs. But this one's all about building tolerance — building your tolerance

\[44:56\] to be able to run at a pace that's uncomfortable but not flat out. OK, so this one's teaching your body to build tolerance — it's probably not even speed endurance, it's at the point just under your anaerobic threshold, right before you go into that anaerobic zone where you're literally gasping for air. So — should you be able to talk, like, by definition —

\[45:26\] it should be difficult to talk, OK. It should — you should be able to say a few words, but you're not just yapping away here. OK, and I've often heard tempo runs talked about as like 10 seconds slower than your race pace — like, if you're training up for a race and setting yourself a goal, let's say four-thirties for a 10K race, your tempo run — no, sorry, tempo run should be 10 seconds quicker

\[45:57\] than your race pace — does that sound about right? Or have we gone off into the deep end here? Well, this is the issue when you say to someone, what's my tempo run, what's a run session — my tempo run is exactly — I'd go on feel and heart rate. So my tempo run, we just talked about the test I did over there, and I've done for years and years, that L2, where the exponential lactate kicks in — yeah, it'll pick up like a pinpoint of lactate.

\[46:31\] You could do that with a lactate monitor if you wanted to, but you also have a corresponding heart rate — OK, and that heart rate's a good guide, it doesn't have to be exactly at that point, but it's a good guide as to where you should be. I use the breathing thing — you want to be at the point where you can continue. Some people will look at it like, what's the pace you can hold for one hour, right, and then you go out and run that — if you're just starting, it might be more 15 to 20 minutes, or you might break that down into longer reps, so you might do 3 x 8-minute reps, or 3 x 6-minute reps, whatever

\[47:04\] level you're at. History-wise for me, I'd always go around that 40-minute mark — if I ran 38 to 40 minutes I'd be aiming for about 12K. The reason for me was the distance I did was my bread and butter — my money came from running 10K off a bike, right, so I wanted a little bit of buffer, so I'd go 12K. OK, look, the tempo run is a funny one, because I think that's probably a

\[47:37\] type of training session a lot of amateur athletes have heard about or read about, and if they don't have a coach they probably don't understand what it's for. So I like that — you're buffering that lactate so you can run at a higher pace for longer, that's probably the simplest way to put it. You want to feel — if I put it into words of how you feel doing that — you'll be uncomfortable, but it's manageable, and you should be

\[48:09\] able to say at least a couple of words to someone, but you can't be yapping away. This has been genuinely helpful — for me, again, as someone who runs quite a bit, understanding the basis and the benefits of these different types of running sessions — I've kind of always gone with, my general approach is that any run is good for you, any run's better than no run at all. But actually getting an understanding of this is what you —

\[48:39\] this is why — this is what you can get out of a fartlek, this is what you can get out of intervals. Genuinely helpful. But that's a rounded guide — if you want, instead of going out and running every day just an hour along the beach, if you want to get some improvement, it's a way of throwing in a longer run one day than what you'd normally do, then on the next day recover, do a shorter run, a recovery run, padded with a bit of mileage, whatever. And then the next day go out, warm up, throw in some fartlek

\[49:13\] and you're just mixing it up, which is giving your body different stimulus. As long as you recover from that properly, you won't know yourself. Because it's interesting — I've noticed that run influencers out there are now starting to bring more than just them running with their shirts off, they're actually starting to say "here's how I achieve my goals," and there's interval sessions being referenced, fartlek sessions being referenced — and we talked about run coaching the other week.

\[49:44\] But I just wonder, as this movement of running and fitness continues to grow and gather momentum in Australia, and these run influencers become more and more — not relevant, because they're already relevant — but more and more influential, I wonder if that level of expertise you've just dropped, that level of information, is going to get into the everyday runner. I wonder if we're going to hear more people understanding what fartlek does for them, and

\[50:17\] understanding what the benefit of the long run is, as opposed to just going for one. Yeah, I mean, I love that you've kept it really simple, because you'll hear things like Zone 2 and zones, and there's so much information out there. I think the key takeaway of what we just talked about is: if you don't have a run group, if you don't have a coach, and you're just running on your own — mix up your runs, you will improve if you mix up your runs. It's not to say that if you go out and run every day for an hour you won't —

\[50:47\] if you can do that consistently over time, you will improve as well. But this way, I'd suggest, is even more fun — you're not doing the same thing every day, mix it up, find a hill, run the hill a bunch of times, down it — there's a few other things I thought about when we were doing the homework that you could throw in there. There's a thing called strides — why do you do strides? So, after a session, or maybe after a longer run or an easy run, at the back end of it you do some really fast 50

\[51:18\] to 100 metre run-throughs. Is that like — when you say strides, does that mean lengthening your stride? No, it just means going faster and holding really good form, and then walking back to recover. It might even be to help really open your body up before a race — you go out, warm up, get the blood flowing, and then you might run through, say, 3 x 100 metres — not flat-out sprints, but just quicker pace — and what you're

\[51:48\] going to do — I've been told that's good for your heart rate too, don't know how true this is. Well, if you've warmed up slowly, you're moving the blood around the body and slowly building up your heart rate — that might just perk your heart rate up, so when you start the race and get the adrenaline, you've already shown your heart, hey, we've just increased the beats before we go to run. What it also does — and I'd suggest, well, the way I feel anyway — it's more neurally, it's more a

\[52:18\] neural kind of activation. What do you mean by that? It switches your brain on to running, switches your body on, switches your legs on to a pace. OK, alright, so you're jogging around to warm up and then you go — but you can also do that at the back end of runs. So when you've been running a threshold, or a longer fartlek or something, and you just want to, at the end, make sure you really activate and get your speed — yeah, you can. In more elite terms, it helps the back end of your race if you're in for a sprint finish. It's just teaching your body to do that.

\[52:50\] But — I think so, what's interesting listening to all this — in my head I'm thinking about me when I swim, and I know that — Noosa, at the time of recording this, is about a week and a half away for me, and I've discussed it already, I'm not setting the world on fire at Noosa this year, but I'm really looking forward to doing the race anyway because it's a great morning out. But what happens when I swim is I find about 200 or 400 metres in, I find that my

\[53:20\] heart rate gets up to a level where — I don't have a panic attack, but I genuinely get short of breath and have to mentally tell myself to calm down. And I sometimes wonder whether it's because I'm not warming up well enough when I swim, whether I'm not actually doing the swim equivalent of what you're talking about there — strides, getting my body switched on neurally to swim, I

\[53:51\] don't know if that's true, it's just how I feel. Processing it — there are two things I think it'd be to do with the warm-up — if you warm up, it's probably going to help you, especially when you rush off at the beginning of a race. The fact it's happening 400 metres into the race, there could also be a bit of anxiety in the swim, mate, around the boys — I think it's quite prevalent in triathlon swims, competitors who don't train in an open-water environment or don't train with people around them. The only time they really get

\[54:23\] exposed to people bashing them and being on top of them is in a race, and that does get the heart rate up, no matter if you're used to it or not. But you definitely get better at it over time if you train for it. If you looked at, say, the Paris Olympics as an example, in the triathlon, they'd jump in the water — there's probably a time limit they have to get out before the race — but let's say 30 to 40 minutes before the race they jump in the water and might swim, could even be 10 to

\[54:54\] 15 minutes for some of those athletes, really easy. And then they'll come back to the start and dive in and do 3 to 4 flat-out sprints, as hard as they can go. Two reasons — one is what we talked about, getting the heart rate right up, and the second is that they're practising what they've got to do when they go off the start, so their arms are exposed to that level of pressure. And then you'll even see some come out of the water and use rubber bands to do some activation exercises on top

\[55:25\] of that. So even though they're going into a 2-hour event, or an hour-45 event, or whatever it is, they'll be warming up for over an hour before that race across the run, the bike, and eventually the swim. What I will say is I want to thank the organisers of the Noosa Triathlon for the new swim start procedure they have. What was that? Because in years gone by — even before it was moved out of the canals into the ocean — it used

\[55:56\] to be a wave start, right, get in your wave, which is an age-group thing, and go. And then they introduced the concept of time — like, if you think you're going to swim under 20 minutes, if you think you're going to swim under 25, 30 minutes, whatever it is, you seed yourself based on time, which improved things, but it was still a packed start. And again, for someone like me, the anxiety of that is intense, because I don't do enough training in a group.

\[56:26\] I'll swim open water, but I don't do it in a pack, so I'm not used to it. What they did last year for the first time was you seeded yourself based on the time you thought you'd swim, and then they sent off four at a time on five-second intervals. So you'd be in the gate, in a row of four, and it'd beep and you'd run off, then they'd wait five, four — another four would go out.

\[56:57\] So it's a constant rolling start of racers and competitors. But what it does for someone like me is it means I'm heading out with four people and I can control that — I can pick a spot, I can go wide, I can swim to the edge. And if I swim past some people, fine, if some people swim past me, fine. But for the most part, because we've seeded based on time, I know I'm not going to have Courtney Atkinson and his mates swimming over the top of me, or even the age group behind me — because that's what would happen, I'd start off in the 35-to-40

\[57:28\] year-old age group and then they'd put the 24-to-30-year-old age group behind me, and they'd come straight over — 150 metres into the race, all of a sudden a wave of people swim over me anyway. So — but the point is, I need to do more work on my swimming, because I still get anxiety at about 400 metres. But we're not going to fix that in one week, we can't fix that before this year — that might be on the cards for next year. Yeah, it's the same — bringing that back to running, it's the same on any start line in a running

\[57:59\] event — you have to get there early if you want to get to the front. And then it's a case of, well, if I'm gonna run a three-hour marathon, should I have more right to be near the front of the line, so I'm not getting impeded by traffic, than someone who's trying to run a five-and-a-half-hour marathon? Everyone's got the same right to run and get a clean run and enjoy the event. But I've seen it — there's a lot of — no, you should go and run where you think you're going to finish. It's the same

\[58:29\] part — so you think you should self-seed? Absolutely, it's like — I think we should self-seed in life, I think we should — let's go one step where — where are you self-seeding in life? I don't know, but I just think — well, actually I do, let me give you an example, please — tall people, self-seed yourself down the back of music gigs, that's — you're onto something — get yourself down the back so us short-asses can see the gig.

\[59:00\] Or whatever it is, anyway — seriously, you just sit on your knees as well — say, we were talking, you're just talking about self-seeding, and — I'm just quickly racing through our run sheet because there was something I'd completely forgotten. Now, tie up your run sessions in a bow — it'll come back to me — run sessions in a bow, so can we cover that — I mean, the crux of it is, do some different things. I'll tell you what my favourite run of the week is —

\[59:30\] there you go. So when I'm fit, what's my favourite session? Because I talked about how you don't have to just put these into a box, it doesn't just have to be an interval session, it doesn't have to be just this. So my favourite run, I do it out in Numinbah — it's a 79K loop — and when I get fit, I use it as a bit of a test loop for me, and I call it hilly fartlek. It's literally run up the first hill first — and when I say hill, it's probably three hills that go up about 2K, and I use that as a bit of a warm-up into it.

\[01:00:02\] And then I just start running the downhills relaxed or floating, and then I push the uphills at what I'd consider, at the time, my threshold or tempo pace, over 17K — that gets really, really taxing. And, like I'm saying, it's fartlek, but not really fartlek in the traditional sense, because I'm using hills, and it's not really hills either because it's a long run. But I find when I can run that really well, I can go off and race a half marathon

\[01:00:33\] style — what would you say, half marathon style, trail race — and I can be confident I'm going to go well. Or I could go back to doing some type of 10K race, or some type of shorter multi-distance — multi-discipline race, sorry — and go really well, because I know my time around there is my benchmark. Mix it all up, that's the other thing I'll say — I reckon "mix it up" is a great takeaway, a nice way to finish it. The other thing I'd say, if you're starting out, wherever you are on your running or exercise journey, is: find yourself a benchmark, go and get

\[01:01:05\] yourself a benchmark, and whatever it is — if it's a 5K, a 1K, a 10K — find yourself something you benchmark. Parkrun is a perfect — Parkrun is the ultimate benchmark, especially for beginner runners, because 5K is a perfect distance, you can run the same course every week, you've got competition to push you, they even time it for you for free. Exactly — Parkrun, go and do a Parkrun and figure it out, because it's a great way to keep yourself honest — and we talked about PBs previously.

\[01:01:37\] It's the best way — not competing against other people, competing against yourself. Go on, get yourself a Parkrun benchmark, and then if you're interested in how you're travelling, go back and do it again. Don't we have to do it every week? We do sound by now like people are paying us to promote Parkrun, but honestly, it's just too good. I maintain — I've thought more about my bold statement from a couple of weeks back — I genuinely believe it's one of the greatest inventions of the last 20 years, and I'd like you to prove me wrong, and you haven't yet. Funny enough, you talked about going to Yamba Parkrun because of the alphabet —

\[01:02:09\] the Parkrun alphabet. I'm heading to Yamba this weekend, so I might even tick off the Y. Are you gonna do it? Maybe — go on, get amongst it. I reckon you could take it out — actually, I think the winners when I was down there were running somewhere in the eighteens. Eighteens? Should be able to take that out. I even clicked under 3-minute-K pace on the treadmill last week for two minutes — not too long — but yeah, the alphabet, the Parkrun alphabet. Yeah, so we talked about this after we chatted about it, because there's an X — I'm not sure —

\[01:02:40\] I think there's no X, because officially they said there's no X. But Liam, with his quick radio Google search — where do we go for X? Zanthus, we're going to Zanthus — I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly. Zanthus is a rural locality in WA, approximately 220 kilometres north-east of Perth. It's the only place in Australia whose name starts with

\[01:03:11\] an X. So they don't have a Parkrun — but I think, after the alphabet, people should be petitioning them to have one. This is probably the reason they might not have a Parkrun — in the 2016 census, the population was recorded as 20\. That's 20 people who could run it. There are nine families that live in Zanthus. That explains it. Anyway, well, that's us done — In The Beginning, episode 6.

\[01:03:43\] And thank you everybody — the Spotify follower numbers are growing, which is great to see. We want to keep sharing the love and growing the audience, and the best way you can support us, if you're listening, is to leave a rating and share it with a mate. If you've got someone who's just beginning their running or fitness journey — I think today's episode is by far the most informative we've delivered. Courtney, you brought your expertise to the table, and there's genuine value in it today, so thank you. And let us know what you want us

\[01:04:14\] — what you'd like to hear us talk about, let us know what you want to hear us talk about. I do know some of the shoe chat has been well received, so we might need to bring some more shoe chat to the table. I like the idea, we'll keep our eyes peeled for this — what was this secret shoe, the secret shoe, 48-mil stack, what's it — is this a nickname, the whole "Alter G"? This could be complete — it could be a sham, it's a rumour — but what I do have coming for you is a shoe that's targeted at a 3-hour marathon. So we talk a lot about super

\[01:04:44\] shoes, but I've got a specific shoe I'm going to bring you, Liam, and we'll talk more about that one — there's a hook, I can't wait for next week, we'll see you then.