Episode 317: How To Cut 30 Min off Your Marathon Time
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Welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast. Last week's episode focused on opening the door of opportunity for those who may have never thought it possible to finish a marathon, let alone be successful at one. We discussed strategies to motivate you towards taking on a challenge and strategies to help you thrive.
This week, we focus on those of you who have completed a marathon or even several. In this episode of the Purple Patch Podcast, IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon shares actionable steps and strategies to help you improve your performance and take your marathon to the next level.
Matt dissects marathon training and the unique challenges of marathon running to better understand what you face. He discusses common flaws in many marathon training plans to help runners avoid injury and progress. Matt highlights strategies you can leverage for a smarter training approach.
From the benefits of clustered and split runs to practicing good posture with subtle inclines, Matt shares tips that can help enhance your speed and boost your skill set for your next marathon.
Also, be sure to check out our free live webinar, Strategies to Nail Your Marathon & Half Marathon, where Matt offers a more in-depth analysis of these points.
Episode Timestamps
00:00 - 02:48 - Welcome and Episode Introduction
02:49 - 06:43 - Coach's Corner
06:44 - 19:21 - The Meat and Potatoes - Episode 317: How To Cut 30 Min off Your Marathon Time
19:24 - 21:22 - Purple Patch Program Information
21:24 - 36:31 - How To Cut 30 Min off Your Marathon Time Cont.
36:33 - 37:51 - Purple Patch Program Information
37:52 - 40:26 - How To Cut 30 Min off Your Marathon Time Cont.
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Full Transcript
Matt Dixon 00:00
Hi, I'm Matt Dixon and welcome to the Purple Patch podcast. The mission of Purple Patch is to empower and educate every human being to reach their athletic potential. Through the lens of athletic potential, you reach your human potential. The purpose of this podcast is to help time-starved people everywhere integrate sports into their lives.
Matt Dixon 00:22
If you want to go faster in sports, high performance is built on a robust platform of health. It's your foundation from which your commitment, your hard work, and, of course, your genetic talents can flourish. And that platform of health is developed by some really simple and important habits that can lay the foundation and promote a physiologically ready state every single day. One of the tools that we leverage at PurplePatch to hone our focus and develop this platform of health is InsideTracker because by taking a look inside and assessing your biometrics and then combining it with an action plan born out of the expertise of the scientists and experts at inside tracker as well as a wealth of peer-reviewed research, we get to filter out the distractions. We get to prioritize the elements that are going to drive the performance needle and ultimately help ourselves and all our athletes be more successful. I use it myself. And guess what? You can too. All you need to do is head to insidetracker.com/purplepatch, and we've got a nice code. Purplepatchpro20. That's purple patch Pro 2, zero. You get 20% off everything at the store. Alright, enjoy the show.
Matt Dixon 01:43
And welcome to the Purple Patch podcast as ever your host, Matt Dixon, and last week, well, the episode was all about opening up the door of opportunity for those folks who thought it might never be possible to even contemplate finishing a marathon, let alone be truly successful. And so I built out some strategies to help those people thrive. And maybe that was you as a listener, but perhaps you're one of those listeners who's already succeeded in that marvelous quest. You've already finished a marathon. But we thought, Why don't we evolve our thinking and our education a little bit? If you're already a marathon finisher, why don't we discuss how to make you faster, the next step on the journey of performance? And so today, what I thought I'd do is outline my key strategies. There are five of them to help you take your marathon from whatever level you're at now to the next level. Now, before we dive in, I've just got some associated education, insight, and something pretty inspirational. I'm going to tell you a story. It's Coach's Corner.
Matt Dixon 02:49
I just want to take this opportunity in Coach's Corner not to dive into more education but to tell you a little story. In 2014, I met a lovely young guy called Mohamed Lahna. And when Mohamed grew up, he was born without a femur, so he just had the lower part of his leg essentially coming out of his hip. And when he grew up in his village in Morocco, the local cobbler would simply try and keep his legs even by adding a little base, a platform, to the bottom of his shoes. And year by year, he would extend that platform, often in multicolor. After a few years, his hips were still stable, and he still had two legs at the same length, but he was leaning on literally a few ladders worth of platforms that were built. It was like a rainbow of colors. Well, Mohamed's life changed because, when he came to the US, he got in touch with the Challenged Athletes Foundation, and they provided him with a prosthetic. In 2014, I got the opportunity to coach Mohamed, and over the next two years, he developed as an athlete, which culminated in him securing the bronze medal at the Paralympic championships in Rio. It was one of my proudest coaching moments. It was fabulous. But Mohamed's story is not that unique amongst the Challenged Athletes Foundation; in fact, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of stories just like that. And it's not about kids or veterans becoming Paralympic champions or anything like that. It's about opening up access to sport and all of the rewards that come with it. And this is an amazing organization. And now, as we release this podcast tomorrow, we are going to host a huge event at the Purple Patch Performance Center here in San Francisco. We're going to be doing a live bike class with Jan Frodeno, in which you can participate from anywhere in the world. That's going to be incredible fun. It's via two-way video, and I'm going to be putting Jan through his paces, both in terms of asking him some difficult questions and also asking him to hit his very maximum power. Purple Patch is going to donate the same amount of dollars no matter what Jan can hit; whatever the watt challenge is, whatever his max output is, we will match it in dollars, and you can participate too. You can participate in the Watt Challenge if you like, but you can also just join us for the class. It's free. We have a suggested donation of $50, but it's free if you have less income to spare. We're also having a magical evening at the Purple Patch Center with Alistair Brownlee, a double Olympic gold medalist; Ashleigh Gentle, the number one track-ranked triathlete in the world; and Jan Frodeno, and we're going to be having a fireside chat. We're also going to have the legendary Bob Babbitt there, Mark Allen, a six-time world champion, and a host of other stars. It is going to be a magical night, and it is free to attend. Now, we've only got a handful of tickets left, but if you are in the Bay Area, you'll be welcome to join us. And if you can't participate at all, if you can't join the live bike class, which is accessible from anywhere in the world, at 4:30 p.m. Pacific time on Thursday, June 6th, if you can't, then please consider a donation. Our goal, our quest, is to try and raise $50,000 in a night and try and change the lives of four kids. Think about that: four kids that we can provide prosthetics for if we raise $50,000. All right, thanks for listening, and I appreciate your consideration. We are going to do the meat and potatoes.
Matt Dixon 06:44
So let's dive into the meat and potatoes. And I guess we should start with, Who is this education for? Who am I talking to today? Well, I'm talking to anyone who wants to get faster in either a half marathon or a marathon. In other words, build on your successes so far. If you've had a magical marathon or two and you just want to get faster, this is for you. Perhaps you're stuck in a rut. You've done a marathon, two marathons, three marathons, and 10 marathons, and you just can't unlock that next level of performance. This is for you. And if you feel like you just didn't give your best, well, you finished a marathon, but there was so much more to give. This is for you. This is about getting faster. And it doesn't matter whether you're trying to make the Olympic trial cut or if you're just simply looking to improve on your last performance. I want to help you unlock your performance. Now, as we go through this, I'm going to only focus my language on the marathon, but be aware that 99% of what I'm talking about absolutely applies to the half marathon as well. There are a couple of components that may be a little shaky on that, but for the most part, to keep my life easier, I'm just going to talk about this in terms of Marathon. So with that, let's first, in Part 1, frame the challenge of training for and competing in a marathon. Why is it such a difficult endeavor for anyone? Well, success in a marathon is demanding, and I think that's a part of the appeal. It requires preparation. No one succeeds in a marathon by accident, and you certainly can't rely on just genetic ability. You have to develop your cardiovascular conditioning. You have to also improve your muscular resilience and endurance. So those two systems combine to make you the runner that you're going to be and layered on that, you probably benefit from some specific training to get you ready for the demands of the event. It also presents a mental challenge, the absolute demand to be able to focus and to strategize as you go through, and the vast majority of marathons are going to include certain setbacks along the journey and preparation, as well as adversity on race day. It's uncommon for any race to just be that perfect race. There is also a pacing demand. How do you distribute your fitness and muscular endurance throughout the rest to give you the best return possible from it? And then finally, there's a fuel demand, because, for success, you're going to need the support of exogenous fuel. You're also going to need some additional hydration. In other words, it's long enough that we don't just naturally carry in our bodies enough energy to get us through the race and have our best performance. A whole suite of things can go wrong within any single event, and often a lot of things also go wrong before the event itself. In the lead-up to your journey, it's quite common. After all, let's consider it: running is weight-bearing, and so we all understand that there's a high risk of musculoskeletal injury. Ask anyone who's been on the journey; they've trained for a marathon, and most are going to report some form of niggler injury throughout the training journey. Also, I tend to observe a lot of athletes who arrive at their races incredibly fit, yet they're fatigued. Many athletes push their bodies beyond the capacity for them to positively adapt, especially in my observation, within the context of both the history, or lack thereof, and the sport itself. In other words, their body isn't equipped to respond positively to the training that they're asking for because they haven't done much running in their history. And secondly, within the context of their broader life stressors, which they are forced to manage every single day, those stresses can come from work, from life, and a host of other situations. And so I see so many athletes that show up working hard, wholly committed, and very fit, but then struggle on race day, whether it's down to fatigue or injury. So that's the body of challenges that we face, and we see some of the pitfalls: fit, fatigued, injured, struggling, bus, etc. It's no wonder so many athletes who decide to enter and compete in a marathon end up frustrated one way or another, and I believe that a big part of so many of the challenges and frustrations that athletes face is born out of the approach that they adopt to get ready for these races. Unfortunately, the most common practices to prepare for marathons are deeply flawed, and so I thought what we would do is go through some of the observations that I see, now, a broad brush here. I understand that I'm talking, and there are some fantastic coaches and some very good programs, but if you just pull one off the shelf, some of the flaws that I consistently see in athletes adopting their best training practices to get ready for their race lead to frustration.
Matt Dixon 12:22
So let's break down some of the most common issues that I see with typical marathon training plans. Number one, the program only focuses on running. Now this is hugely common, and so for 90% of participating runners, any program that focuses on core running training and only that to get them prepared is going to experience massive voids in preparation. They're going to amplify the risk of many of the challenges that I just outlined. There's no doubt that running is the bullseye. In other words, it is central for you to be successful in marathon preparation, and so let's not run away from the fact that to be great in a marathon, whatever your version of great is, you very much do have to run. So that's the bullseye. But true success for the vast majority—90% of athletes—plus, true success in a marathon experience goes well beyond just the running. You need to have a broader perspective on performance. I believe the only viable approach to establishing highly predictable and consistent training and preparation is to deploy that broader perspective to ensure that you're thinking in wider terms about what it takes for you to succeed. And so, issue number one is the run-only mindset.
Matt Dixon 13:55
The second challenge is, well, it's all about progression. Training programs have a rigid progression where the athlete lives at a height in a world that is anything but a spreadsheet. Let me give you a couple of examples of this. First, let's talk about total weekly mileage or the number of hours. This is very common. You see a training program that kicks off the journey to a marathon with a set number of miles or a total number of hours that it wants the athlete to accumulate. Let's just imagine it's 15 miles over the week, spread across three to four hours of training, and that's the starting point. Or, looking at the key run, because so many people focus on the longer run of the week, it perhaps starts with a set distance or a set duration in week one. Let's imagine it's 50 minutes or four miles. And then there is a very rigid progression of training loads. After all, that's what the coach or the program can manipulate. And so on a week-to-week basis, it might increase by five or 10%, and so it goes up from 15 miles to 20 miles to 25 miles to 30 miles to 35 miles, and so on and so on. And the long run of the week goes from 50 minutes to 60 minutes to 70 minutes, all the way up to three and a half hours. It's a progression. And of course, it's all very logical: you succeed at a certain training load, your body adapts, you progress to a training load, your body adapts, and so on. And so it all perfectly is designed to incrementally progress you until you are at or above the readiness to complete the distance. I absolutely understand the basic thinking here, but this ignores the ebb and flow of the demands of life, and it also doesn't consider the need to occasionally retreat from the progression of the training load to allow deeper rejuvenation and adaptations to occur. And so once again, this is a flawed fundamental premise on how to build a marathon training program.
Matt Dixon 16:12
The third challenge is too much intensity programmed into the running plan. Now, whether this is via athletes just simply executing their easy runs with too much effort, That's one issue, or the prescription is too much high-intensity training spread across the week in pursuit of improving an athlete's running speed. It's quite often that if you look at a training program, there's too much intensity, and I see so many athletes that face muscular and tissue injuries because they're challenged through too much high speed or harder running intervals, and their musculoskeletal system just cannot positively adapt, therefore niggles and injuries pop up.
Matt Dixon 16:57
The final challenge I can't tell you how many programs or coach-written programs are simply diluted or watered down from the solutions of programs and approaches leveraged by elite marathon runners. Look if Kipchoge runs 120 miles a week with two hard interval sessions. Well, you, as a time-starved amateur, just do a third of that or half of it; that same program just watered down. You're going to get some similar results, yeah? Not as fast, but if it works for Kipchoge, it's going to work for you. Unfortunately, this is madness, in my humble opinion. Elite runners are just that: elite. They have a certain suite of genetic gifts. They've typically benefited from a long, progressive journey over many, many years of running development. Their mechanics are superior, and in fact, they have incredible tensile strength, almost a spring-like ability, as their foot lands on the ground and rebounds. They have a great core and control. They have wonderful posture. And so the sport and activity that they are doing ends up being, and I hate to break this to you, vastly different than what 80% of the marathon competitors are competing in. It's probably better to think about elite runners as being closer to gazelles than they are to us. Essentially, they're doing a different sport with different equipment. So we shouldn't use them as a barometer to build our training programs. They absolutely can and should inspire us, and all we want is to close our eyes and imagine that we look just like that incredibly graceful, powerful gazelle, but it's more than likely that when we open our eyes, we look like a donkey dipped in cement, and that isn't bad news. It just means that we require some out-of-the-box thinking and an approach that can make that donkey go faster. That's the first rule. Don't treat ourselves like gazelles if we're donkeys. And by the way, I'm in that crowd as well.
Matt Dixon 19:24
Tri-squad. $129 a month. It's an incredible value. But what's in the box? When we take a look inside, it's so much more than a training program. It's a training program that works with the demands of life built from the ground up for athletes just like you. And in addition to that, you get time back. You get the confidence and the knowledge that your training is going to be so effective that you're going to get the best yield. But we also help you remove so much of the confusion, distraction, and cognitive load. We help you through our education. Focus on the things that are going to make you not just faster but have greater energy throughout the day. You also become a part of a team, a team of like-minded people who are there to help you with accountability, support, and course correction when you stray off course, and a whole team of coaches and performance experts, some of them world-class in their experience level, that have your back and are there to help you on the journey. To supercharge it all, you can be coached anywhere. Our video-based coaching encourages and ensures that you don't just follow a prescription; you do the workout as intended. This is why we have the best results of any program out there. Simply put: we have the best results, and we want you to be a part of them. There are three simple steps. All you need to do is reach out for a complimentary consultation at info@purplepatchfitness.com. We'll have a chat, we'll understand your goals, and we'll help you get on the right program. And then you can be on the program within minutes. It is a flip of a switch, and you will be right on the program. And we back it. We are going to give you a 30-day money-back guarantee, essentially a free month if you don't enjoy it because we know you will. All right, let's get on with the show.
Matt Dixon 21:24
So let's break down five key strategies to take our marathon performance to the next level. Now I'm going to deliberately avoid any specificity around running training programs or prescribing specific intervals or total training loads. I know that this will ensure that these five recommendations can fit into any training approach by any coach. And so this is something that should be able to be leveraged and molded into your approach to running. But in my experience, these strategies accomplish a few key elements of success. Number one, your greatest predictor of performance progression, namely consistency and, by extension, a radically reduced risk of injury or setbacks, is no time on the sidelines. In other words, number two, you're going to get a boost in the four elements that are critical to improving your marathon speed: race day, freshness and fitness, increased muscular resilience, a boost in cardiovascular capacity, and improved running economy. And then finally, number three, you're going to get the amplified potential of race day success and staying power. So those three things wrapped together—that's why we're building these recommendations.
Matt Dixon 22:37
So there are five of them. Let's dive in. Number one, ensure that you develop a running lifestyle first and then ramp up to a race. This is so important. So many athletes decide to enter a race and think, How many weeks do I need to do to get ready for this marathon? Or where can I pull off the shelf for my 16-week marathon program? If you want to take it to the next level, So many issues occur when you cram for a race. And make no mistake, if you start 16 weeks out, you are cramming for a race. Instead, aim to ramp into a race with a looming deadline off of many, many weeks of work so that you can avoid the risk of fatigue and the risk of injury, so build a massive platform of readiness. The ramp into a marathon can be much, much shorter than 16 weeks. It could be eight, nine, or ten weeks, but you want to start from a much higher starting point. If you want to break through to the next level, don't think about preparation lasting four months. Instead, embrace the journey. Fit running into your lifestyle. Build frequency. Have fun doing it. Maybe do some smaller events. And then, once you've developed the habit and are highly consistent, you can turn up the volume and get ready for a race.
Matt Dixon 24:11
The second strategy is to build all-high-intensity conditioning via other disciplines. That's a pretty bold statement. We understand that operating at a higher intensity, especially with specific interval-based training, is a catalyst and an important ingredient in any training program. And what I just said there is that you should do it, but you don't have to do it through running. I like athletes to go hard—very hard—at least once or twice every week. In other words, your heart rate is up, it's uncomfortable, and your breathing is labored. It's tough, but you don't have to do this via a running modality. I love to leverage. Safe modalities to develop that cardiovascular conditioning capacity. Now, there are a ton of options that you can leverage here, and many of these provide wonderful cross-pollination to improve your running. In other words, they have a positive impact on your running performance, whether you are rowing, cycling, swimming, stair climbing in a gym, elliptical to some degree, or cross-country skiing. All of these activities channel and fuel up your cardiovascular conditioning, so you can develop all of the cardiovascular conditioning at high intensity through low- or non-weight-bearing activities. It's incredibly safe, and it amplifies the running that you're doing.
Matt Dixon 25:44
Number three, you can develop muscular resilience through high frequency and mostly much easier running, and I'll add to that, including walk breaks. So many athletes just run twice a week, three times a week, or maybe four times a week, but it's a little bit like learning guitar. Don't just do two or three sessions a week. Do something every single day—just a little bit every day. And whilst these runs are seldom tough and don't tend to promote or produce any real deep fatigue or muscular damage, I love to develop athletes to run with very high frequency; many of them, often in their prior lives, were frequently injured. I have them running almost every day. Very few of these runs are hard. They're seldom long enough to create deep fatigue. There's a very low injury risk. But the benefit of this is that you get to strengthen and develop the robustness of your tendons, your ligaments, and your tissue; you improve your running economy; you get to promote and practice your form and technique on a day-to-day basis; and it's a wonderful route to develop both muscular and cardiovascular conditioning. You truly build resiliency, and by going on this journey, you reduce your injury risk. And your fitness over time, a little bit like sliding an envelope through a door, builds, almost comes behind you, and wacks you on the back of the head. Now, wrapped around this almost daily ritual, if you want to call it that of easy, short running, how long is it? Well, it might be 10 or 15 minutes. It might extend to 20 to 30 minutes. It might move up to 40, 50, or even 60 minutes on some of the runs, so it can be very short on some days and a little bit longer than others. But wrapped around this foundation of running frequency are a few other things. You've got your hard work, and we just talked about that. Coming through a multisport vehicle, you've got one or two key strength sessions a week that are central and critical to every athlete getting faster, and then you typically have two other runs that will transplant this frequent running that are more key focused, and they tend to be hill-based interval running or longer duration. And for longer durations, I love to do that on soft surfaces, such as trails. And so that's the fundamental building blocks of how we build a marathon programming high frequency, a lot of it easy, then you've got some high intensity through multisport, you've got one or two strength sessions, and you've got a couple of key runs that are going to give you the physiological demands and preparation to get you ready for the race. Those are your building blocks. But at the baseline build frequency, don't just rely on three or four runs a week.
Matt Dixon 28:59
Principle number four: we just talked about this a little bit, and that was hill-based running. Use Smart Hills to build and develop your strength, your speed, your technique, and your economy. Goodness me, that's a big ROI. Build smart Hill training to develop all of those assets. What do I mean by smart? It's at a grade of running or a grade of hill in which it will promote and improve your posture, your form, and your propulsion. That tends to be, depending on the athlete, somewhere between 4, 5, and 6% gradient, because what we don't want to do is have the hill be so steep that you end up hiking up the hill. In other words, lift the knee instead. We want propulsive development of the run, promoting activation of the muscles at the rear of the body, so your glutes, your hamstrings, your calf, and. Like the spring, the end of the foot pushes up the hill, and so once the grade goes above 6%, most athletes fall into letting their nose drop and lifting their knees a little bit, like hiking up a hill. That's not providing value. Some slightly shallower 4, 5, or 6% grades provide resistance, but they tend to promote great posture, great propulsive elements, and all of the fundamental elements that lead to improved form and economy. And so this not-too-steep grade promotes those elements you are going to get faster, and by the way, they are significantly less risky than you going to your local high school track and running very, very fast in circles. One little tool to this as well at the shallower grade, it's good to run down. You don't need to run down hard, but running down with good form and good leg speed can promote good, minimal ground contact time, as well as some muscular resilience in the quads, which in marathon running tend to be the ones that get beaten up a lot. So going uphill as the training stimulus and, where it's more demanding, downhill for added resilience and a little bit of leg speed is a good tool.
Matt Dixon 31:21
And then strategy number five is to develop a smart and what I would call modern fueling strategy. This becomes more important the longer your marathon will take. In other words, for an elite marathon runner who's running between two and two and a half hours, you're going to have slightly less demand because you're just not out there longer. You will need caloric support, but you're right on the thin edge of probably getting away with relatively minimal support and no performance decline. But as soon as you start moving up to 2:45, 3:00, 3:15, 3:30, 4:00, 4:30, 5 hours, and beyond, then you're going to have an increase in dependence on additional hydration to prevent performance decline and exogenous fuel, in other words, calories that you are consuming often via blocks or gels or that type of thing, to ensure your performance can improve. All of the latest research, as well as the observational application, have highlighted a radical shift in fueling for endurance events throughout the last few years, and what we started to see is a couple of things. Number one, athletes have a greater capacity to absorb calories taken in than we ever thought was possible, and that's because of some of the latest research that we've seen, as well as some training stimuli where you can train the gut to improve it, and the quality of the products has improved over the last four or five years. And so, in other words, you can absorb more than we thought you could, and that's good. But more than that, we're also seeing a positive performance impact from doing so. In other words, we are seeing athletes do better when they are consuming 60, 70, 80, or 90 grams of carbohydrates every hour. Now it needs to be the right carbohydrate, and you need to add to that hydration with electrolytes in it. When you have hydration with electrolytes and consistent fueling, it will yield faster performance throughout a marathon, period. And so these five strategies are critical: fueling as we talked about it, smart hills incredibly important and beneficial as we go through, developing muscular resilience through frequency running, getting a lot of your high-intensity training through other modalities from running, and making sure that you go the long term strategy on this. If you're getting ready for a marathon like a pinball, using 16, 20, or 12-week programs, whatever it is, you are going to be at high risk of frustration.
Matt Dixon 34:13
Now I'm going to give you one more coaching bonus here. So we're going to do bonus strategy number six, and that is to embrace clustered and split runs. Let me dig into this a little bit. Most athletes understandably fear being ready for the distance. It's no surprise that we started the show. It's daunting, and so they build their confidence and what they perceive as their readiness through big miles and a high number of hours of running in single sessions—the long run. Well, a really smart way for you to build confidence and muscular readiness without taking a risk is to broaden your perspective. Think about accumulating running miles that you feel are necessary throughout not just a single run but maybe two sessions in a day or a cluster of runs over two to three days—a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. If you run multiple days in a row and extend that one big run and spread it over three days, you can accumulate a marathon or more worth of running that's all done with your best form, a lower risk of injury, and probably a slightly faster pace, and you've got the reward of the same, if not better, conditioning, muscular resilience, and freshness. It's going to improve the quality of each run. And so the one bonus of taking this approach is that when you're on the bus on the way to your marathon and you sit down next to you and you meet some guy called Gary from Chicago who's got all of the T-shirts, and he starts talking about himself and finally says to you, by the way, what's your longest run you've done to get ready for this thing? You can have the joy and privilege of saying 12 miles, 14 miles, or 16 miles, and he's going to look at you in disgust and think, Well, you're not ready, but you can just smile inside because it's fine for Gary to think you're underprepared, but you'll show up with all of the prerequisites for you to go and have a terrific day.
Matt Dixon 36:33
Folks, we've spoken a lot about tri squads, but did you know we also have a run squad? A lot of what we talked about today infuses all of the ingredients and strategies around how you should fuel a high-frequency approach to running, key fundamental running sessions to get you ready, and supporting modalities with the whole array of options so that you can get a lot of your intensity through other vehicles rather than just running. It is a comprehensive running program that is supported by the same set of coaches and experts that we have in our tri-squad program. We also include our own Dylan Sorenson in there to help supercharge it. Dylan was the head coach of the University of North Carolina track and field, as well as cross country teams, one of the most successful coaching and collegiate running athletics programs, and this program is available to you. And so if you want to get ready for your next run and you want to have fun doing it, fit it into a time-starved life, but show up ready. Well, reach out to us. Info@purplepatchfitness.com, and we'll set up a call. We'll understand your challenging needs. We'll get you on the program within minutes. And if you don't love the program, just like Tri Squad, we will give you your money back within the first 30 days. We believe in it, and we also believe in you. Alright, back to the show.
Matt Dixon 37:52
Alright, folks, so that's it. Key takeaways of today: embrace the journey; embrace multisport. Make sure that you're developing a fueling strategy for it and that you hit high intensity with other modalities. It is a great vehicle for success, and don't think about getting ready for a marathon as just downloading a plan. It's only going to lead to frustration. Instead, broaden your perspective. You need to dial in sleep. You need to think about strategies for fueling and hydration on a day-to-day basis. You need to ensure your nutrition is good. You need a SMART program that integrates into your life. That is how you can be successful. I hope that helps if you need anything at all, info@purplepatchfitness.com, and I really hope to see some of you, either tomorrow in San Francisco, where I'll even have a beer with you, or, of course, from anywhere in the world on our live ride. It's all free, and of course, donations are graciously accepted. We'll see you next time.
Matt Dixon 38:55
Guys, thanks so much for joining, and thank you for listening. I hope that you enjoyed the new format. You can never miss an episode by simply subscribing. Head to the Purple Patch channel on YouTube, and you will find it there, and you can subscribe. Of course, I'd like to ask you if you will subscribe and share it with your friends. It's really helpful if you leave a nice, positive review in the comments. Now, if you have any questions, let me know. Feel free to add a comment, and I will try my best to respond and support you on your performance journey. And, as we commence this video podcast experience, if you have any feedback at all, as mentioned earlier in the show, we would love your help in helping us to improve. Simply email us at info@purplepatchfitness.com, or leave it in the comments of the show on the purple patch page, and we will get you dialed in. We'd love constructive feedback. We are in a growth mindset, as we like to call it, so feel free to share with your friends. But as I said, let's build this together. Let's make it something special. It's really fun. We're trying hard to make it a special experience, and we want to welcome you into the Purple Patch community. With that, I hope you have a great week. Stay healthy, have fun, keep smiling, and do whatever you do. Take care.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
marathon, running, athletes, performance, training, develop, build, program, improve, purple, race, demand, absolutely, week, patch, challenge, strategies, muscular, journey, resilience