The Albon Way

Episode 2 - Open & Closed Body

In this episode, Henriette and Jon Albon discuss their training experiences, focusing on the concepts of 'open body' and 'closed body.' They share personal anecdotes about their training cycles, injuries, and recovery strategies. The conversation delves into the importance of mental health in training, recognizing signs of overtraining, and the significance of enjoying the process of being an athlete. They conclude with strategies for maintaining an open body state and the importance of recovery.

Broadcast on:: 05 Oct 2024
Audio Format:: other

Welcome to the album way, a podcast dedicated to providing practical and actionable advice to trail runners of all levels. This podcast is hosted by myself, Henrietta Alban and my partner, John Alban, and today we're going to talk about self-awareness as a trail runner and how the concept of open versus close body can help you better adapt your training approach in the long run. But first, training update, how are you getting on John? You've got niece coming up right around the corner. I have and I was actually feeling pretty good about 10 days ago. I'd recovered from a wild swivel and life is pretty good, felt pretty powerful in my sessions but then that was also a product of coming down to sea level, having been altitude for a while, done a really big training run which every race is if you can recover from it and getting home and just feeling happy and healthy. I still feel like I'm not in the worst place now but certainly feel like my my fitness is running out and I think that's like often something that happens in the autumn for me because I train a lot in the winter, in the spring, in the summer, I'm living off that built up fitness and then come autumn. You see the numbers are all dropping and you are just kind of like on borrowed time before you need to hit another big training block as well. So I kind of feel like I am still in relatively good shape but I'm definitely unsure as to how the race will go and it's kind of a 50/50 as to whether I'm going to be able to hold it strong all the way through. Yeah that's interesting what you say about sort of holding on to your old fitness there. In the spring we were super psyched about these new steps we had in the album app and how we were growing them and we could really feel our fitness as well getting better week on week. Whereas now we almost got the opposite effect where we can see the numbers declining further and further down the woods and the fitness is also dissipating gradually and yeah so when it comes to me for example I look at those numbers and I think this is not going in the direction I wanted to be going considering I still have a race around the corner as well and then on top of that I'm very much managing a couple of niggles. I had a knee niggle sort of after keema throughout September which resulted in a lot of uphill sessions and then when I came out of that I've sprained my ankle a pretty soon after so I'm still very much managing training around these niggles which is not ideal and I find that it just takes a lot of mental capacity as well to accept that this is where you're at and this is what you have to deal with and you can't necessarily do these in these sessions or go in that terrain that you were hoping to you know do a cool long run-in and then on top of that I'm a very weather dependent female I suppose so person whether dependent person so now at home we've got really crappy weather and it does impact my mood and my sort of yeah general mental state I think we have this word in Norwegian which translates to weather sickness and at the moment I'm a weather sick. I don't know I think it could be worse but yeah you are certainly reminding me how bad the weather is every 10 minutes mostly sometimes every 30 seconds when it does start half snowing half raining which actually can drag me down and that is like an interesting dynamic between us that we seem to be able to either bring each other up or drag each other down so it can be quite difficult to try and maintain your own mood and not be influenced so much by the other person but I certainly do feel that we have a big difference in our approach to the numbers at the moment whereas I've just embraced the fact that my accumulated load numbers are going down and that's just what's happening at this time of year and that almost has to happen so I can get them to go up and be higher and bigger and better next year whereas you are still in the camp of oh my god my numbers are going down I need to have them up I need to train more what the hell is going on train doesn't feel that good so you are on a little bit of a slippery slope which is what we're going to be talking about today. Yeah yeah so this topic that we've chosen to try to do justice on today's podcast is the concept of open versus closed body so before we dive into the what wine how let's just like briefly touch on what is this concept of a closed versus an open body John? I mean it's really tough for me to like describe exactly what it is because everyone experiences very differently but I suddenly think that like the the key thing is that when you do have a closed body training just feels like it is no longer working and I think the best way I can describe it is it just feels like you're hitting your head against the wall you are trying to train more and more but it's just not doing anything and if anything you're getting less fit and it's a super frustrating place to be but it does happen especially I think sometimes motivation can be the biggest enemy and if you are super motivated and you want to get much much better then this is one of those booby traps which can get you if you're if you're not aware it's a bit like a sponge isn't it in the sense that if the athlete is the sponge your sponge is like fully saturated with training and you just can't soak up any more training no matter what you chuck at it yeah I think that's one course definitely is like lowered management and you've just sort of like you can't manage any more than what you're what you're doing and you just keep trying to do more but it's it's not really working but there are loads and loads of different pauses but really it's normally a combination of all of them but I think the the one way I I've really like sort of like been able to judge as to whether I am getting closed body is my pain threshold so the idea of a cold shower when I'm getting closed body is like absolutely hell it's like no I'm never going to be going in that cold shower or like if you like yeah any small pain it's just kind of like super irritating so I think that's like one thing but then yeah so that's one end of the spectrum right yeah closed body so let's jump to the completely other end of the spectrum where you maybe feel like cold showers I guess this is the idea of a cold shower isn't complete hell and that's open body and that's like the main goal of all training is to have open body for as long as possible because when you have open body life is good training is working you're doing more and more and everything's moving in the right direction you're absorbing everything you're doing and yeah I mean it's just you're getting fitter and it feels it feels good so let's rewind like where do we first hear about the concept of open versus closed body job yeah I think probably from pething that was the first time I heard it and we've often tried to describe how we're feeling with training and like using terms like over trained or under rested or stuff like this but it's never really sort of really encapsulated it as well as open body closed body so Peter started talking about it and I really resonated with it and then we started doing a bit of research and trying to find out a little bit more about it and which other coaches or which other athletes also operate with this kind of system. Yes I mean I could trace it back to this Finnish cross country skier called Niskaman who talks about this mindset of open versus closed body with the idea being that if the body is closed there's no point in even training hard or increasing your volume as yeah going back to the sponge the sponge is like fully saturated and you just need to back off and sort of wait until it opens up again before you start hammering but as very much a sort of lowered management thing so physically how much training can you manage and if you try and do more training than you can manage then things are going to go well and you won't be absorbing that training either sponge you can't fit it with any more water than it can it can hold so then if you're trying to fill the sponge with too much water you're going to end up getting closed body and for us normally closed body means life is not good and training isn't working so you keep training it doesn't you're not really improving it's not really fun and weeks go by and if anything you get worse open body the complete opposite every session seems to sort of you know improves you seems to work and life is good you wake up every day and you've got a bounce in your step and the body is open and willing to cooperate with everything you're throwing at it now it's not as easy as trying to have open body enclosed body because obviously you can have open body if you just stop trading but no we need to train we need to push the body we need to challenge the body and try and improve our fitness so we need to we need to train it's just you need to do challenge it enough to get those improvements but not too much that you cause the body to lock up and then not stop responding yeah i mean training is such a balancing act and we just have this concept of open closed body as a way of sort of identifying where are we on the scale of being able to absorb training really that well versus perhaps having to put the brakes on a little bit step back cut down on the harder sessions yeah so it's sort of a tool we use to manage and describe to each other as well like how well can we actually absorb the training that we've got coming up and have done in the past yeah so then using those words we can really quickly tell each other about sort of where we are physically and mentally and whether we are ready to sort of really push the balance of the training or whether we need to take a step back and adapt the plan or adapt other things in our life because it really isn't just a case of how much training will cause the body to to lock up or or close it's sort of like a full package deal and there's just so many different things which can affect whether you have open body or closed body yeah so i think i mean this is quite a complex concept i think and the best way to perhaps describe it to others and this is to come with a couple of examples of when we have had close body versus open body yeah um when was the last time i had fully closed body and life sucked i think um no life didn't suck yeah life did suck but this is is it is it's all relative and i've got very high expectations of myself and of how i should be training and and performing but i think it was probably last spring so that was 2023 after zagama i didn't take the recovery i needed to afterwards i went straight to elevation um i started training again too soon um yeah lots of things just stacked up and weren't quite right and the body closed up and then it continued like that for the entire spring through trail world championships i ended up DNFing marathon month bronc um got home after that long travel and was just in a rut in a hole so the body had been closed for say two months long story short it wasn't a good place to be halfway through the season because normally the best thing to do with a closed body is then take off season have a nice big long build up again and train through to a new season but when you're midway in a season what what are you going to do and i had to do a full full full i do i do a full reset like i had to quit being a runner for a week well i mean you i mean the first step was just acknowledging this is where you're at this is the reality of it you need a break yeah i think being brutally honest with yourself is uh a key thing to being a good athlete and i had to sit down and say well you sat me down and said you're not in a good place right now and you can't do the races you did have plans that's the first thing we had to fix which was to drop some of the races that were planned so i could give myself the time and the space to fix myself up again and get the body open so that's the first thing we did was to say no i'm not going to do CS and now i think just i mean taking that pressure off yourself to sort of rush back to a race for you that that made a huge impact immediately yeah you need you need time like uh with training everything takes time you can't rush things and for me i put a lot of pressure on myself so automatically relieving pressure is always going to help but i needed i needed time and most of all not just sort of like needing the physical rest i needed a bit of a psychological rest i needed to do something new and different with my life my life revolves around exercise it revolves around sport and my hobby is my job and my job is my hobby so it can get really sort of like yeah heavy a heavy load to bear sometimes so i just needed to get some fresh air blow off some steam and i chose to go to Sweden and do a paragliding course for five days and that was my way of doing something else and trying to have a hard hard reset so technically i retired as an athlete for one week to try and get myself in a better physical and mental headspace it was a lot of fun i learned a lot of new skills learned to fly which was really cool came home started training again building up really gradually from where i was at with the training load turned up at ccc less fit than i was the year before but a lot happier and healthier and ready to try and leave leave it all out there and that's exactly what i did so i managed to race a smart race playing my strengths well not overdo it at the beginning and i still came through and managed to to win so i mean i i in my mind i was at rock bottom in the spring even i was the third yeah that it's a karma fifth that world champs isn't so bad but for me that was still felt like rock bottom so then to put it back and be able to get something out of the end of the season was was very fun yeah and i mean i think the reason it felt like rock bottom for you was because you were buying your head up against the wall you were training but you didn't feel like you were absorbing the training you were doing and you weren't enjoying the process whatsoever so then it just felt a bit pointless whereas actually in the weeks leading into ccc you were healthy you were happy you were enjoying the sessions you were doing i think a lot more and that just made a huge difference to you and it showed in the results yeah i think i'd also just accepted the fact that i didn't have crazy good shape and that i would have to rely on some other strengths in order to do well and that actually took even more pressure off uh that i didn't see myself having a possibility of winning which actually enabled me to then go through and and win so um giving myself the underdog status is maybe what i needed to um to really get over the line first hmm yeah but what were you i mean um i can think of quite a few instances when i've had the body closing up uh another few where i felt like i've had fully closed body like last spring um the view that felt like the body was fully closed uh yeah interestingly it was two years ago that i did zagama uh and i i just i'd come out of a ski mountaineering season or a schema season and then roll straight into a trail season i was pretty i was pretty tired really i did need a break but instead of having a break at that point uh i had my eyes set on a full trail season and i just remember doing this half marathon it was actually a local uphill half marathon and i was racing emily and we we ran together for a lot of it but then i just didn't have that finishing kick and she ran away in the final like five minutes and i just remember finishing that race thinking to myself i i didn't want it i didn't have that kick in there what what's going on what's wrong um and you know a couple of weeks later i actually ended up DNFing marathoned and went wrong and i had decided not to start the night okay i felt really off i did start the 40k um and this was the year before john DNFed but yeah i did start the 40k but i ended up DNFing because i i was just like there was nothing in the tank the tank was just empty i was just fatigued tired i i'd been tired for many many weeks and again that that's definitely a scenario of closed body which has just prevailed for a long time although at the time i didn't really think of it as closed body in any way i didn't really know what was going on um and and yeah so that's definitely a point in time which for me stands out as a closed body situation where i perhaps sooner could have taken a bit of a reset uh in that case as well and sort of built up a bit more from scratch and perhaps also reduced the number of races i was doing yeah i think quite often we're quite prone to it during the spring because we're used to training so much in the winter and feeling quite strong to then suddenly being exposed to so many other stresses which aren't really training related uh which then caused like a bit of an overload and yet we still psychologically want to train as much as we have been in the winter so we just we double up on everything i mean as soon as we hit the spring we start traveling more and we're surrounded by more people and busy airports and things it's louder um we end up yeah we we love being at home we end up going to elevation to try and acclimatize which is a whole nother stress on the body running in or training in more heat it's like all these extra stresses which really sort of like yeah build up and then it's just it's obvious uh after when you look back you just couldn't handle the same amount of training as when you were at home in the perfect training recovery conditions um but the time psychologically you just want to keep training as much as as you were and then um immediately there's no problem you can handle it you're resilient and then slowly you get ground down and then after a few weeks maybe it we've got this sort of idea over three weeks like after three weeks usually the butter has been spread over too much bread and the body starts to to close and then it's it's what you do then which is really important it's it's like really key to try and catch this as early as possible and that's something that we've learned the hard way over the previous years and something we're trying to get better at and then improve on um in the future and I actually felt like uh before western states I handled the situation a lot better than I would have done the year before so as soon as I arrived in America got jet lag got corona was suddenly at two thousand meters above sea level and training in a lot more heat than I was used to and the body definitely closed up it wasn't fully closed it wasn't good but then I was also taking a lot of cautions to try and keep the body as open as possible so it wasn't it wasn't a perfect scenario I didn't do that good of a job but I certainly did much better than I would have done having not had the experience from the year before yeah for sure I mean previously you were almost not panicked but it has been yeah sort of little with panicky whereas now you did try and sort of think about it more rationally take the pressure off and just do what you could to control the situation yeah and I think one of the things that really helped with that was actually after the previous spring getting the lowering and then being able to measure the resting heart rate and HIV was to sleep which was the main reason I I got the thing and that was so I could try and see some data to back up how I was feeling and sort of like try and link that through to whether the body is open or opening or closed or or closing and really you can definitely see trends in the data that the HIV does start getting worse and the resting heart rate does start going up when your body is under more stress and prolonged periods like that is going to lead to the body closing up and then training to to stop working unless you try and change what's happening and adjust something to make open up again yeah so just to sum it up a little bit what would you say are the main sort of red flags when you're going more towards the closed body end of the spectrum I think normally it's to assess what you might have changed and then see whether it's having a negative impact for example like obviously training load is one of the easiest examples to use if you're suddenly doing a lot more training than you have been the body might end up closing up because you've suddenly increased or normally always gradual progressions are the best but then this is also going to have an effect on lots of other things like if you train more you need to fuel more so are you fueling your your workouts with enough carbs for example that's going to really help performance during the workout but also help speed up recovery like a lot and with that recovery are you getting enough protein with more training you should be having more protein how about your vitamins and nutrient uptake like is it suddenly winter and there's less sunlight she should be taking vitamin D have you been out to you to you should be taking more iron for example like all these things are all interlinked and it can be any one of them or really a combination of all of them which is going to cause you to sort of like just stumble a little bit and then start losing that sort of like full momentum with your training when things aren't quite as easy things don't feel like they're working quite as they should and as you stutter and lose that momentum then things can start to close up so like a lack of consistency I suppose in training could be a red flag then yeah sure like normally the lack of consistency would be caused by something else I guess interrupting training but I mean there's so much that cause close body thinking trying to think of some others like that I mean maybe losing too much weight too quickly immediately it's probably actually going to feel much better in training because you're a bit lighter but over a few weeks you're probably gonna start experiencing the negative effects and then the body could start to close up and then once you get into that negative cycle that downward spiral it can just get worse and worse and worse if you don't see what the the problem might have been and then gradually try and rectify it yeah yeah so um talking about open body then have you got some examples of when you when you've had open body oh I'd say spring of 2022 I had really open body and no matter what I was doing training wise I managed to recover and I was improving no end and I was fulfilling or surpassing my expectations and I think that was one of the keys looking back to it that's why I had such open body because I didn't expect myself to be getting that much fitter and as soon as you're surpassing your expectations you get into flow state and flow state is not just with the running individual sessions you also get in flow state in life and if you're surpassing your expectations you get into that flow state and things are good and things keep being good so you're on that wave and you have fully open body the problem is now I've been that fit it's a lot harder to get back to being that fit again or surpass that fitness because my expectations are that much higher so it's about managing those expectations and trying not to think back too much to how fit I have been before and just concentrate being in the moment now enjoying the journey and then not really having two high expectations just going through the process. Yeah I think for me as well something that helps me get open body is if I'm really excited about a goal I've set myself like it can be like the Bob Gray around which I did I was so excited about that it wasn't a race I like wouldn't necessarily get the fastest known time but just just the idea of moving this terrain which I'd really sort of watched and watched loads of films about read loads of books about I was just super excited about the whole Bob Gray project and it was a personal project something I wanted to do and that just put me on this wave which propelled me into that FKT. Yeah because for me having a race coming up is normally the best way for me to have the body start closing up having this expectation myself having extra pressure of what fitness I should have or need to have in order to do well in the race then traveling to the race maybe like not being at home not sleeping in my normal bed being a different climate maybe elevation all these things normally it comes together to to mean that I just do not feel good before the race and the body has closed up and is reacting like a lot differently to what it would have done when I was at home so it's funny how then a project on FKT or an adventure for you could have the exact opposite of effect of what a race can have for me these days but then I guess maybe you do loads of races so how do you avoid getting closed body every time you start on the start line you got niece coming up in like a week how much that well I think over the years I've raced less I guess no I think uh no I think it's uh it's really tough and it's one of the things that I've been trying to deal with the the most um the psychological approach to racing because that is something I struggle with a lot so with wild struggle and niece has definitely been trying to train less towards them because sometimes less is more and I do have a tendency to over-prepare so I kind of peak training about three weeks before the race and then can't really manage that much more so obviously then the body starts to lock up into the race as well so trying to train a bit less train through the race is a bit more that's really helped actually with the training stress go off within the app because when you're in the green zone it means you're gradually doing more load than you have done in the previous weeks when in the yellow zone slightly less but not too much less so that means you're not sort of like doing loads more load and then loads less load you're a lot more gradual um you're managing your load a lot more gradually into the race and that has really helped so I can sort of like see through the numbers how much load I am doing um but I think I've just tried to relax a little bit about racing and see the the fun in it and I think wild struggle really helped for that because it was like a ridiculous scenario with the race I mean the course changed twice in the in the two days before even the course got changed again like 20 minutes before the start it snowed like uh up to my knees I was waiting in snow making the track following the GPX on my on my watch it was up to my waist sometimes when I started trying to roll over the snow rather than plow my way through it it was just a very fun experience and I think that's what I need to get back to it it's just trying to sort of actually enjoy racing not put this weight on my shoulders I have to win every single race and I always have to do really well and even if I do win I should have run faster because there's a course record you could set or there's there's this or that and uh just try and actually just enjoy being relatively young relatively fit and sort of like able to go and visit these nice places and run in these beautiful mountains yeah I mean before I race nowadays you'll often say you know you're just going to go out there and follow the flags it's and this is simple as well that is what racing is we are just following little flags in the woods so I mean it's kind of I enjoy it exactly so um yeah I mean that's that's all like sort of contributing to whether you have open or or closed body and it's very frustrating to feel that you have open body all through the winter and be happy and healthy and when you get to race season you can't train how you want to but that's also why we continue try and remind ourselves that in the winter with the off season when you're not racing you are only training so you can train in the summer specifically for the races so if we try and take training not too seriously during the winter try and let our hair down a little bit and not get too bogged down and wear ourselves out psychologically so we've got that extra push and that extra gear um come sort of sharpening season yeah I mean it all comes back to the fact that we do this because we enjoy it it's supposed to be fun it's supposed to add a dimension to our lives that we uh we can enjoy and have fun with so without that it all gets a bit pointless and ideally you want to avoid that closed body situation where it all spirals downhill uh you want to aim for the open body and try and stay in that open body state for as long as possible without overdoing it uh which is a super hard balancing act but the I mean the balancing act isn't actually even the hardest thing question of the day is if you have closed body you feel like you are in that rut what can you do in order to try and claw yourself out of it yeah like I've I've said what I did but what do you think um yeah I mean what like as I mentioned before what did really help me was just to find find a goal that really motivated me and that I was passionate about um I like last season I just felt like races didn't give me much and I did have a couple of days where I was just in limbo and thinking you know what's the point with this why am I doing this and then I found something which set my motivation on fire luckily uh but um moving away from that example thinking back how do you sort of dig yourself out of that rut that you're stuck in I think it is actually quite useful just to take a break whether it's two days or a week or a month uh to take that break can be quite powerful and just remove yourself from this sort of tunnel vision that you're stuck in because I do think you can tend to get a bit of a tunnel vision if you are stuck in the closed body state because your mood and your um mental state is perhaps just a bit unbalanced and off as well I think it's also really important not to try and assess the situation as a whole and see where you need to be in X amount of time because you are kind of you're at the bottom of a big cliff and looking up at the top isn't really going to help you just need to look up at the next hand hold which is probably just the next session try and execute that well try and do it in a manner that is uh okay for how your body is responding to training at the time and then hopefully that sets you on a road to gradually opening up the body again and then hopefully that just speeds up the process that by the time you get to the uh uh the end of the road you are you are open body again but it's not like a light switch you can't just flick it you need to take it like one little step at a time so that's that's all you can do just uh break it down run to the next flag of the race course and then try and get the next one after that yeah I think that's a really good note to end on um yeah so I mean hopefully it's like we said initially this is this isn't an easy concept to try and uh get across in the podcast but hopefully we have uh done an okay job I'm actually really interested to hear where the other people have a similar way of thinking and whether they can actually assess whether their body is open or closed so I think it's actually really easy for us to tell because training is our main focus we don't have that many other life stresses which can muddy the water so we can very quickly see okay my body feels like this because I did this in training or I've been doing this lately whereas if you've got a lot of unknowns or a lot of other stresses like family school stuff job stuff all this sort of thing which can affect how you're feeling it's going to be a lot harder to tell whether you have open body or closed body or whether you've even ever had open body for example maybe someone's just never really felt like training has really worked that much or maybe people don't get closed body because they're just so used to these continual struggles all the time they're just kind of in a state in between maybe but I'll be interested to hear from people as to what their experience is and whether they have a similar concept hmm all right and that wraps up our conversation about open and closed body thanks john thank you thanks to everyone attuning into this episode of the album way if you enjoyed this conversation be sure to share it with your friends you can also check out album apps and more trail specific training advice and tips and yeah we'll talk to you all next time