You're at Evoke Endurance now, but what came before that and how did you get there?

I'll start with I've been a lifelong athlete myself, and then later in life transitioned to coaching.

And started off my career coaching because I had, I had been cross-country ski racing at the World Cup level for a number of years.

I retired from that and moved to a small community that had a pretty active junior, um, cross-country program.

I took over this program because they were looking for a coach.

And I had a hundred and twenty kids to deal with, and I had a lot of volunteer assistant coaches and things, so I was, I was mainly just coaching the older kind of competitive group.

And I realized I really didn't know that much about coaching.

Yeah.

And do you see differences between the pros and the athletes? If you were to look at them on the start line and their mental state, are you treating both the same approaching the start line? And are there differences as they start, uh, you know, in terms of their confidence levels?

That's a great question, and I, I think it-- I wanna take a s- a slight step back to lay a little groundwork and context for that, this discussion.

But first of all, I think of coaching, y-you know, as you probably know, my background really at, at high-- at elite coaching started with coaching cross-country skiers at the World Cup level.

Well, it didn't start at the World Cup level, but it terminated.

I spent about almost 15 years working with athletes at the World Cup level.

And, um, and in those days, I was with the athletes personally, physically with them during most of their training.

And that's a huge advantage when you can watch body language, you can hear the gripes and the complaints and, you know, you get the feedback instantly from people.

How do you continue to develop year over year, create either continuity or sort of freshness in the training to keep them engaged and all those kinds of things? Like, what is your philosophy on building year over year?

What do you mean, or what does evoke mean when you have to earn the right to do uphill pack work? Where does the story start, actually? What are people missing?

That is a great question.

And it comes down to the concept of specificity.

So, you know, I think people even that don't have a great grasp of the formal definition of specificity in sport can understand that, you know, the training you do for your sport needs to look something like your sport.

In other words, ultra runners, yeah, swimming is a great exercise and it's a wonderful sport, but it's not very specific to trail running.

And as a consequence, it's not going to do very much to help you in your trail running.

And I mean, that's a fairly extreme case, but I'm using it to make this example about specificity.

anecdotally over your 30 plus years of coaching and all these athletes do you find that anecdotal evidence to be true or is it maybe more not as clear-cut so to speak

So tell us, Scott, how did you do it? How do you do it? What do they mean? And in particular, let's talk about the Sanderson's Fail Manhattan.

Sure.

I never set out to be a novelist.

It never occurred to me that I could be or would be.

Uh, and campus land, you know, originally came about because I had a couple of sort of insane encounters on, uh, my old campus at Yale and, uh, just finally had enough.

And like someone, why is no one using this as fodder for a satire? So if no one else is going to do it, I'm going to do it.

So that, that campus lane came about and, um, it did quite well.

I'm curious about the creative process as we age.

Mm-hmm.

And so I just want people to understand that VO2 max is not the be-all and end-all of endurance performance.

There are so many other components to it.

And one of the things that the coach and an athlete, it's great if you're a scientist and you're going to do this experiment in a lab with, we're going to take these 12 people and we're going to put them in a couple of different groups and they're going to do these different kinds of workouts and we're going to measure the VO2 max performance.

improvement over the course of eight or 10 weeks.

And that's pretty typical for these kinds of studies.

And we'll say, oh, look at this group improved their VO2 max this much in these weeks using this protocol.

Can you explain a little bit more of what are some of these symptoms and what can people do to turn things around when they might recognize some of these symptoms?

How would you go about measuring that? Or for anyone listening here, if they want to measure that on their own, how would they go about that?

So, well, the classic way of doing this in the past has been to go spend hundreds of dollars in a laboratory.

And that does work.

You can do that.

There's two problems with that.

And I'll send you a link on our website that people can go to.

I have a whole article that explains these tests, that they're self-administered and they're free.

What advice would you give to your younger self or to other athletes in the earlier stage of their running career to improve their running?

I had just too many back issues.

It's not necessary.

Again, we're training these soldiers to carry 100 plus pounds frequently.

Right.

And they only do a heavy carry maximum once a week.

So there's a concept in sports training that's called specificity.

Okay.

So go ahead and explain