The Albon Way

Pilot

In this pilot episode of The Albon Way, hosts Henriette and Jon Albon discuss their motivations for starting the podcast, their backgrounds in trail running, and the importance of balancing training with everyday life stresses. They share actionable strategies for optimizing training schedules, the significance of periodization, and the role of deload weeks in managing stress. The conversation emphasizes the need for flexibility in training plans and the use of data to enhance performance, while also inviting listeners to share their own experiences and tips.

Broadcast on:: 21 Sep 2024
Audio Format:: other

OK then I think we are recording the pilot podcast for the album way is it called the album way we're going for the album way that's fun album chat was not voted in by the one boy we considered from the external world. Wow in the three minutes it went from us not recording to a podcast to recording a podcast our ability to articulate words has reduced dramatically yeah yeah who are we and why do we want to start a podcast do we really want to start a podcast I'm not really a podcast person but I like to help people with training and I like to talk about training so you've decided to record how many podcasts have you listened to in your life me personally one actual episode no podcast I'm just not a podcast person but you're a podcast person and you digest all information and summarize it to me which for me time wise works absolutely brilliantly and that's one of our main talking points today is how to manage your time and better make training stress mesh with everyday stress yeah yeah who are we who are you John me I'm an English trail runner born and raised just outside of London in a town called Great Dumbo I'm now 35 years old that's right right yeah 35 living in Norway it's a professional mountain and trail runner and I'm John's wife no I'm more than that I used to be an orator and then I transitioned to being a professional trail runner sort of since Covid and together with John we have Albert app which is sort of a sidekick where we provide training plans and training advice and support to a community of trainers and yeah I still do the books and the accounts for the companies we have as well so I have a couple of different hats but I probably prefer to to be the trail runner in the mountains the majority of the time great and the album way what's what's this podcast going to be about John I guess it's just a way well we we spend a lot of time just talking to each other about training philosophies about how different athletes train or from what we know of how they train what we think is like an optimal way to train for different people and different lifestyles and we have so many of these conversations we've decided to try and record some of them and see if other people are interested in listening to them so we haven't really got a plan for where we're going to take this we're just going to record a pilot see where it's like see if we actually manage to articulate anything whilst being recorded because obviously it's a bit more difficult when you're talking and being recorded than the normal but yeah I'm quite excited about it like I said I really enjoy trying to help people and I've been on quite a training journey myself and learn a lot over the years made a lot of mistakes which you learn from and it's nice to try and then impart that knowledge over to other people so they don't have to make their own mistakes especially because trail running and mountain running it's a and a developing sport like really quickly and the level is increasing a lot so there's a lot of developments in how you can train and fuel and all those different pieces of the puzzle you need to execute a good race that's all developing super fast and we're trying to stay up to date with it so we can stay ahead of the curve and be at the pointy end of the racing and a lot of that knowledge can be imparted to other people which are operating on a sort of slightly lower level but still trying to get the best out of themselves which at the end of day is the most important thing trying to get the best shape you can at the time try and have fun and be happy with with your race hmm and I mean the topic of the day that we landed on was making training mesh with everyday life now at this point in time we're both sort of professional trail runners and we don't have a traditional nine to five job but what was your background john ten years ago yeah so it's actually really rich that we're starting with this topic because as professionals we have a lot less other life stresses and we have actually tried over the past years to remove as many of those other life stresses as possible so we can focus solely on training at the moment but this isn't what we've been doing all our lives and I actually started running whilst having a full time job in London and I was using my commute as part of my training and then entered into a few races and started to improve and then started to win some races and then gradually through some largely quite a few years I then turned professional and ended up having running as as my job so I have had to live through trying to make the training stress mesh with everyday life stress especially from from a job so I've got some experience there and it's not like I've been a professional my whole life and I think I can still remember what it's like and how I used to manage things and haemorrhacy you've been you've been there a little bit more recently than I have because it wasn't so long ago that you're working as a full time auditor yeah and then sometimes it was 50 plus hour weeks busy season as an auditor and I do have interesting memories of strapping my rucksack on in the dark at 5.30 in the morning having just had a spoonful of peanut butter and running off in the pouring rain in Bergen Norway which is one of Europe's rainiest towns I think so yeah we do have some experience we do have some fun stories to share so yeah let's dive into it how do we think you can make training mesh with your everyday life I think to begin with we need to try and explain what we mean with training stress and life stress because getting that balance right is super important because if you have too much stress in your life then things aren't going to be sustainable you're not going to improve you're not going to recover you're not going to just generally take steps up the up the ladder at some point things are going to start collapsing down and yeah you're not really going to be improving whatsoever so you need to get this life stress and training stress combination to the right level which is a continually moving target so obviously you can control your training stress and it's really important to sometimes train more and sometimes train less but you need to make that mesh with your life stress which can be quite out of your hands sometimes we're talking things like family like work other hobbies like all these other things which take up your time and produce a level of fatigue in addition to the the training you want to do for your next upcoming event or just to get out and have fun I mean life stress makes it sounds like a bit of a negative word I suppose but you know we need to acknowledge here that even just going out socializing on a Friday evening late night having a couple of drinks getting to bed late in the normal and then not having the best quality sleep that does impact how you soak up training and that's just where we want to get to the fact that you do need to sort of look at the whole package to see how you can sort of optimize your training rather than maximize it yes that might mean that you can adapt the type of training you're doing or the amount of training you're doing but then also make sacrifices in that training in that life stress area say for instance if you don't really want to go out for some drinks on a Friday night and then get poor sleep and then wake up hung over then you don't actually have to there's no one that's gonna make you do that just depends what you want to do with your life and what you want to prioritize so I guess it is all about prioritizing certain things but then also some life stresses you can't get away from say for instance work for many people a nine to five job is the only way and you're gonna have to make training work in and around that and then you need to start adapting how much training you're doing and yet make things have the right balance yeah so if we move on to more like actionable things that you perhaps can do to make training work for you I'd say it's super important just to have that plan in place when you hit Monday so I mean we always sort of sit down on a Sunday or sometimes early Monday morning and map out what's the next seven days gonna look like in terms of work commitments and how are we gonna train around that and then having okay so what are the key sessions in our weekly training plan and how can we really prioritize those eggs I think that you need to set a side time to train you can't just think up it's going to happen when I have the time so you need to have that intention there when you go into the week and have a plan in place and map it out I think that's quite powerful yes that's why in the app we came up with the prepare a week function so every Sunday you prepare the next week's training and you can choose your commitment level which is how much training you're gonna aim to get done during that week and you can change things around that way so it's gonna be a really busy life stress week you can drop the commitment level if it's gonna be more of a chill week or even a week with some more spare time then you can up your commitment level and do more more training to balance out the amount of stress you're gonna be you're gonna be under but definitely being organized and ready to go so you can optimize everything is super important we actually have our dream set up now how we're living for having clothes washed and gear ready to go and this is even us that have extra time more than normal people to go training so we have the washing machine in a washroom with a big clothes rack area where we're gonna hang either dirty clothes which we're gonna reuse and where again so they can dry and then also hang the clothes we've washed and then big baskets of different types of clothes ready to go so it's everything's prepared our bikes are racked up ready to go like everything is kind of like optimized so we have more time to train and less time looking for bike lights or headlamps or the jacket we want to wear etc now we do actually not sleep in our training clothes but yeah okay right so we have this weekly plan in place but how much flexibility should we allow within that plan do you think I I mean it's you can the best-made plans are always going to somehow fail so there needs to be a lot of flexibility throughout the week unless you have a super set structured work life and family life things are always gonna crop up and change so the ability to move workouts around has always been really key for me and I think like it doesn't matter especially the further you out from your race the more it doesn't matter with when you actually do the sessions the more important thing is you get them done and you get them done relatively well so that means if you're gonna do your intervals on a Tuesday great but you can also do them on a Wednesday if Tuesday is really busy it's not just because you have a set plan and Tuesday is interval day to do them on Tuesday like that's really not that important but the closer you get to your race the more important it does become because you want to manage like your fatigue and set training stimuluses and then try and make things a bit more specific for the race hmm and I mean I think we all know that feeling where you just really really do not feel like going out and doing that interval session it might be late in the day you might finish work you had a crappy day you just feel completely tired when do you sort of push that session to the next day versus just go out and do it and accept that it's not gonna be the best quality in the world I think like that's not the easiest of answers but I think the first thing is to make sure you're not using the word interval session in a negative way like oh I don't want to go and do these intervals or why don't you try and make that interval session a bit more fun so it seems like there's less of a psychological negative or around doing that so it might be that you can actually try and do those intervals as part of a more fun workout say doing them far like style instead of doing some laps they might seem like it's less daunting another one is I think you should never really be afraid of starting a workout and just seeing how you feel and normally doesn't really you can't really tell how you're going to feel in the workout until you actually get the shoes on and you get out and then if it does feel absolutely terrible you know the quality of the workout is gonna be nowhere near what you want it to be then just stop after the warm up head home get an extra night's sleep get some extra recovery in and then see if you want to move it to another day later in the week or just skip it completely because if that's what you have to do to keep the work life stress balance in check with your training stress and that's what you have to do one trick I learned in when I was training after work in London was sometimes after a heavy day's work I would feel completely crap like what you just mentioned but actually I found that this has more of a relationship with my fielding so I'd have this say for instance I finished work at five o'clock it gets to about three o'clock after lunch I'm a little bit peckish not really that hungry but I'm a bit bored so I eat like a snack maybe a chocolate bar or something like that and then come five o'clock I'm about to start training and I'm a little bit of a low after having this sugary snack sort of around three so I actually found a time that snack better with the training really helped a lot so I'd say it's much better to wait with the snack until say even 15 minutes before you're gonna go out training and then have the sugary snack and then when you head out training that's when you get the sugar high that's when you get a bit of a boost and things are gonna seem a lot easier and a lot better it might just seem like you feel like absolute crap before you start working out and then once you get that sugar in you and get out the door things are gonna seem a lot better and it's at that point then you can decide whether you're gonna bother getting the session done or whether actually no it's not just you on a sugar load things aren't good you need more recovery and it's probably better to save it for another day hmm yeah no that sugar trick is a good one because I've found as well that that can really change how you feel when you do start running if you don't have that sugar you feel super sluggish and just myth whereas that sugar high can keep you going through a decent interval session yeah no regions often talk about dogs fun which is day form so it's just how your form changes day to day and throughout the years we've realized more and more that no your shape doesn't drastically change from day to day your fueling does so it might not be that you've just got super heavy legs that day or you feel super crap it might just be that you missed time to sugar intake so when you started running you were on a bit of a low and things just felt awful but give a little bit of time have a bit of sugar fuel your session and it might be a thing swing right back around and if they don't then you know it's a clear sign you should try and skip the session or make it just a recovery session for example instead of trying to get those in towards done and saved in towards another day and just move things around during the week which is completely fine today yeah I also want to add that for me I find that actually just like listening to a good playlist can really change my mood when I'm out running and that can have a huge impact on just how I feel as well and also sometimes just going for a run with a friend that can really change how I feel about the aspect of running because once you get going and get chatting you just feel so much better and actually it feels pretty good to run so sugar music and making it social thing can be good sort of tricks to make the the late evening runs feel a bit better yeah a point I also want to touch on was the aspect of periodizing your training through the year because we talk about training being it has to be sustainable you have to have some consistency in there but also I think it's quite important to acknowledge that we're not going to be superheroes all the time we're not going to train you know X amount times per week every single week year in year out it's important to have those natural ebbs and flow in your sort of training year and yeah John do you want to just talk a little bit about how your training year has looked like this year and where you're at at the moment yeah I can try and tie that into the training the life stress thing as well because it might be that in certain times of the year especially we talk about the space building phase which is more general fitness gains when your race is quite far away you're normally going to be training more at this time of year and you want to dedicate more time to training so that means a little bit less time for family friends things like that if you are going to be super dedicated but then once you get to sharpening it can almost be better that you have got other things going on in your life to keep you entertained and keep you from over training because this is actually one of the problems we have as professional athletes we are relatively addicted to training we like to train a lot and at some points you're in the year we should actually train less so we can have a much higher quality in the workouts we are doing especially during sharpening so personally for me I actually need other projects and other things happening in my life to keep me from keep wanting to do too much training so that's actually one of the perks of having a full-time job is it's very hard to over train and if you are in that situation it means you can actually just enjoy time with the family enjoy time with friends as long as it's not negatively impacting the quality of your workouts then actually sort of like embracing a little bit busy in life and yeah try and enjoy it and then I have found it then makes you appreciate the training you can go and do a lot more actually like one of the best examples of this was over the past week we've been working on the house a lot so I've been working more of a say nine to five standard job actually with quite a lot of heavy lifting and manual labor so then when I have actually managed to get out and go for a run in the evening I've appreciated it so much more and the training stimulus has felt better and it's just been a very different type of type of workout so it's important to not get too down if your life is a bit crazy but see the the seal silver lining but for me at the moment it is a case of I'm in the middle of my racing season so I'm trying to actually train less and just absorb all the training I've done all the way throughout the winter and just enjoy the fact that I've done all that training and now I have relatively okay shape and it's okay to be a bit fresher and allow that load to go down and allow my fitness to gradually reduce and then enjoy being able to run good training workouts and run good races whilst being fresh and still having that residual fitness left over and then that's really important when I look at training for next year because once my fitness has gone down which it is at the moment especially when I take the good couple of weeks completely off as my off season my fitness will be back down quite low and then I can gradually build it up again through to next season which is going to allow me to peak my fitness higher next season than it was this season because I've allowed it to go down in the interim rather than trying to stay fit all year round which can raise injury risk it can not be that motivating and it can just sort of like make training a stimulus is stagnate and you just don't get that much better than you were before yeah I think the mental side of that is huge like just knowing as well that okay I'm training really hard now but I've gone easier a phase coming up in a couple of weeks where I will be prioritizing more time with friends and family and whatnot yeah I think that balance needs to be there and you need to acknowledge that stuff will sort of fluctuate throughout the year and some phases there will be more time to train and other phases there'll be less time to train and sort of embracing that and planning ahead is is quite key and even within those phases there will be set training blocks where you'll be doing slightly more training and slightly less as sort of deloads these you can plan in say every three to four weeks into your training plan like so okay every three to four weeks I'm going to do less training which in a sensible leave more room for other life stresses but you also want to be doing more recovering in that time and then have those every three to four weeks or you can just react to how your body feels and how to what life is throwing at you and say as soon as you start feel overly fatigued or life stresses pile up a bit much then you take a bit of a deload and you do less training and you just absorb the training you have done you let your hair down and then you know that if you take a bit of time off at that point in the future it will only allow you to train train more rather than stressing your way through having too much life stress and too much training stress and just getting more and more fatigued getting hit against the wall and at some point everything comes crashing down and you can't manage life stress or training stress yeah I mean we're talking about deload weeks and what's our take on that how do you john incorporate times of deload into your training year personally relatively poorly I'd say I think that's what something I can improve on a lot like I was saying I am definitely addicted to training I love to train I love to be out training I love the endorphins you get from training I like just I don't be being outside but at some point I would probably benefit from doing less training and considering where I live it's such a beautiful place to be outside it is really difficult to do that because even if it's not constructive training there's always going climbing or scrambling or doing some other activities outside which is stuff I want to do so I mean really my deload weeks are more day to driven than they are sort of like planned in really scheduled in like with set time periods in between the ultra plans we have when I'm planning for a training for an ultra race that is more set in because we operate on a three week rolling basis where every third week has a slightly less load to it because you're recovering from the race simulation but then that week does have a hard session as well so it does mean that you are doing sort of like you are training it's just a different training stimulus but really I keep an eye out on the training stress graph I make sure that when I'm trying to train well I'm in the green and when I'm trying to deload or get a bit fresher I drop down to the gray in between the green and the yellow or even into the yellow and definitely if I've gone up into the red then I think pretty soon I should take a deload and then try and drop it down or if I'm just feeling unmotivated I'm happy just like I'm not living my best life then that's a clear sign that things are getting a bit too much and I should take a deload and I'm talking a lot here about training stress because that's that's one of the only stresses I have in my life I don't have kids I don't have a four-time job I don't have many other life stresses but this counts for total stress really so if family commitments go up one week or job commitments go up one week well you travel not sometimes as well yeah yeah but it's still still related to training so it's it's all these life stresses which which do counts and sometimes it might not actually feel like you're training too much it might be that the numbers in the in the data and the training stress within the data analysis is completely fine but it might just be that you are super tired just because work has been absolutely hectic and that still means that you need to take a deload or you need to adjust things slightly so you can cope and manage and you can come back stronger rather than trying to grind your way through which to be honest really works out it's it's tough when life piles up on you because there's only something that you can cut back on and we're all driven none of us have enough time in the day really to to get what we want to get done during life so we do have to make sacrifices it's just about seeing the sacrifice you have to make before it all becomes a bit too much because when it all comes crashing down it can obviously it can sometimes be relatively drastic yeah off I think you you're quite good at just actually acknowledging you know what I'm not feeling too motivated I've got some niggles it's time to back off and drop the load whereas like me personally I find that quite hard and I do tend to sort of push it pretty far until I do take a step back and finding that balance and acknowledging reality I suppose is extremely hard especially for perhaps someone like me who's type a person who likes to tick all the boxes and they feel like I'm achieving things and not that you don't but I do feel it's really difficult for me because you like to train so much all the time and then if suddenly I'm realizing that I need to train less for me to be sat inside watching you go up training every day is really difficult but then I have seen how powerful it can be to listen to your body to trust in what your gut is telling you and what the numbers are telling you and that can normally always work out for the best like copying other people especially professional athletes isn't the way forwards I mean I spent enough time trying to train with Killian and overdoing it sometimes because he can just manage a lot more than me so I have learned the hard way and I do think it is very difficult for everyone to get this this balance right all the time but I do think it's especially difficult for females because what they've got going on in their bodies is far more complex than the males have and it's a lot easier to run into problems and it's just it's just not easy being a female athlete I think we do have a lot more hormone swings so stuff going on inside our bodies as best um but yes I mean to sum up our approach to deload weeks is not super systematic we do prefer to listen to our gut our motivation we also track our HRV our heart rate and whatnot using an ordering both me and John as we do use that data data side of stuff as well and we also analyze our sessions and look at where we're going from that at that point of view too but yeah we do have more of a reactive rather than a proactive approach and we don't systematically schedule deload weeks for example every three to four weeks sometimes it might be every eight weeks or five weeks and sometimes it might be you know a longer phase of two three weeks depending on just how fatigued and tiring might be feeling and with the deload week as well it's it's not always clear that it's a deload week for us if you look at the data it might be for example because we monitor the running impact separately to the the base fitness it might be that we're deloading our running legs from the impact because we went a bit a bit over over the previous few weeks but that still means we can cross train we can cycle we can ski and we can actually even do more hours training than we were previously in our deload week but we are deloading a certain type of fitness that we're trying to to build so it's not just sort of you can cut 80% or you can cut 20% of your training or 30% of your training for your deload week it can be a bit more complex than that trail running is a complex sport train for there's a lot of different pieces of the puzzle and we certainly are big fans of splitting up those two different types of fitness the the running impact mechanical stress type of fitness of your legs from from from running and then also the base fitness which is how much your heart is pumping your lungs are working the engine is is working and deloading those two separately sometimes can really work especially during the winter and there's so many cross training opportunities but it might be that your legs need a bit of a break from a long running season yeah and also just to back up a little bit there when we're talking about the stats and the graphs we're looking at we're referring to the Albert app graphs and the data driven side of that app we've tried to develop some tools there which makes it easier for us as trail runners to monitor the volume load impact whatnot of the training we are doing so yeah we found those to be super useful especially in the past year or so yeah so that means within the app now you can actually not even have a training plan and you can train very roughly from the data for example in early base building might not be that you want to follow a really set structure training plan because it's so far away from your race so then you can just look at the data analysis and for example that training stress graph try and get your line in the green zone which means you can be gradually increasing the quantity of training week on week and just hang out there go out and do fun workouts and that's going to make it a lot easier to plan life stresses around the training stress or the the other way around and as you get closer to your your race you can start building a training plan it does mean that now you can use the app you can use just the data analytics you can make just a training plan and not use the data analytics or you can combine the two like we do which we feel is the the most powerful where you build a week out of a training plan and then you can adapt certain workouts and add in workouts and move things around to make the data look good as well be be where we want it to be exactly all righty that was a good half hour of the album way i hope you enjoyed listening to our chat hopefully you came away with some useful advice as well and yeah that's not what you thought and we'll see maybe this will become a weekly or a bi-weekly thing it's up to you guys really it might might also be interesting to hear how other people are managing life stress and training stress like any tips and tricks they have to to save time or to make things mesh better obviously we have our own experiences but there's a lot of people out there which are training a hell of a lot with a lot of other things going on in their lives so if it's something like meal prep or i don't know a certain morning routine that you have that you think is super effective make sure you share it with us and then we can uh we can maybe learn something from you guys and then also maybe share some of your experiences so everyone else can learn from them as well yeah sounds good all right well we hope you guys have a good week of training and yeah let us know what you thought bye leave me to say goodbye i don't know goodbye i'm not sure we need we need to obviously work on our intros and outros a little bit uh uh well yeah we'll just leave it at the end i'll be still recording it was still recording i hope for these chat to you guys next week what do you want for dinner i don't know we need to do that paint job as i know we just [BLANK_AUDIO]