Hi, everyone. Kate Edwards here and the question that I'm answering is, do you think stress ruins your performance? If yes. How so. And I absolutely think that it does, we use this term called stresses stress in our practice and that means that no matter what it is, physical, mental or emotional stress, it all. Looks the same to your body, your body cannot differentiate between a emotional issue and a physiological issue, unfortunately. And so it It all looks the same in. Once we reach that threshold of what our body can handle. We start to break down and we can break down in performance, and we can also break down in our body, and become injured. So, absolutely stress is stress, and you just need to figure out a way to manage the mental, emotional and physical stress. And if one thing in your life is over, it's too much. So say you're at a point where you are changing jobs, you're under Financial stress, you're getting married, you're going to graduate school. I am something like that. If you have all that mental, emotional stress, that might not be the time to put your target race. You might move your target race later in the year when you have less stress. So it doesn't impact you as much.

See how humans are made for running because we have the ability to cool ourselves down through sweat. If you compare us to dogs, for example, who when they get hot, they pant and obviously that's pretty difficult to disperse the heat that you just threw their tongue words for us, humans were able to sweat which means we're able to call ourselves down far more efficiently to go to keep us going for longer and longer.

With this the same principles apply. But operating it out to do requires higher calorific output and you'll use more energy to do the same amount of work so you're using more carbohydrates when you're at altitude. So recovery wise you probably need to look at consuming slightly more carbohydrate in and around training because you're going to be burning more. But apart from that the yeah, it's fairly similar. Some people is really different between some people. Some people find it hard to recover it out, Stood other people find a little bit easier but yeah, the principles of how you would recover at sea level, stay the same for when you're at altitude. But for me personally, I find that I recover a little bit slower in my first couple of weeks coming from altitude but then yeah after that it seems to be sort of Fairly standard to at sea level, but you just really gotta listen to your body and using tools like your Garmin watch or heart rate. Variability in the mornings is really useful but also you've just got to be able to use your feel and exactly how you're feeling only, you will know. So yeah, just go test some things out and I'm good luck.

That actually is a great question and it definitely applies to me because I am still recovering from my New York City marathon from three weeks ago. So, for us, we usually take two weeks off completely no running. And I took two weeks off this time round. And then I started running, I ran the first time, two days in a row, and then took a day off then actually run every other day. So right now, we are at the in the middle of week 4, since I run New York, City marathon, and I've only ran five times. Now, I will say the typically, it's just a two weeks off and then, you know, start running, maybe like, you know the whole week, you know, everyday running for miles or two every other day. And also, you know, I try to just like do things that are not running related, you know, like take a vacation, go visit family and friends and, you know, get, you know, massages and try to rest as much as I can. And I mean, resting from America Marathon or recovering from American is not just physical. It's also mental child. Try to do things that doesn't text. Mentally. And I mean, that's a little challenging these days as a mom just because like, you know, my daughter is always needing me and so I try my best to recover but yeah, like I think the first couple days actually when I get home, I literally didn't even get out of the house. Now, I'm not saying that that's normal, but that's what, you know, I decided to do just because I was super tired and it been like a very intense. Five weeks of training leading up to New York City marathon. I also tend to watch a lot of movies, you know, during my recovery and a couple of years ago, I started crocheting and I didn't really have a lot of time when I was training for my Marathon. So I started getting back to crochet and so I made a few beings during my recovery watched a lot of movies, you know. And so it's been just fun to just have a downtime. And I'm actually still having downtime, you know, for the rest of this month, I mean, until four weeks just because American takes a lot out of you and I I want to make sure that when I get back to my next marathon, I'm motivated. You know, physically, I'm ready to go and because I mean it's gonna be a long build.

So the question is, how do I make my steps lighter? One of the easiest things that I have people start with is measuring their Cadence, sometimes the Cadence of your runs are a little bit too slow, which means that you're spending a bit more time on the ground than you need to. And it really easy way to get your steps to be. Lighter is just to increase your Cadence, which is your step rate per minute. So you can measure this by counting how many steps you take in a minute on one side and multiplying that by two. And that's your Cadence. And then when you're trying to increase your Cadence, if it is a little bit on the low end, you can start with just a five to ten percent increase in Cadence practice see what that feels like. And over time just slowly try to gradually increase in small increments Cadence's. That would be considered a little bit too slow would be in the 150s. 160s you know in the low one, 70s to Mid 1880s is a great goal to shoot for but again there's been like a lot of research to show that just a slight Improvement in what your own normal kid and Is can have big Improvement in lighter steps, injury rates, Etc. An easy way to do this is to use a metronome. You can do an app on your phone, you can set it to the Cadence and just try to match your your foot falls to the Cadence also Spotify. Different music apps have cadence songs that you can pick an average Cadence and then run to that music. And just try to get the feet to land with beat when you're first starting this. I recommend, just trying to do five minutes at a time. Then go back to your room will run and then check in. For another 5 minutes and see if that if you're on. And then again, towards the end of a run, when you start to feel fatigued, try to match that Cadence, again. Hopefully, this helps

As a beginner. Should you get to the front of the starting line? Short answer is no, not a good idea. Number one, just for Courtesy sake. You'll probably have faster faster, Runners behind you that are going to want to get by and you're impeding them. But for safety's sake, same reason, I mean they can they can push by in your a danger getting knocked over or trampled but also just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I mean, most of the races we have. Now, our chip timed where it's called a chip, because it used to be a little, like, actual little disc that used to lace into your shoe, But now usually it's on the back of your race, number your race bib, and it's a telemetric telemetric ship our timer, what it does is once you cross that starting line it turns on and then when you cross the finish line it turns off. It gives you your net time from start to finish. So if you're, you know, five rows back or ten rows back or 10 minutes back, it doesn't matter. It's going to deduct the time from when the gun goes off until you cross it that starting line. So it doesn't really pay. It's not going to give you any any real Advantage when you get that net time. The other thing is just for your own pacing. I mean, usually you want to do a nice steady Pace trace or maybe go a little faster. You know, each mile or have a negative split with a second. Second part of the race is faster than the first. If you're right out there with the leaders, you're at risk of going out way too fast at the outset and blowing yourself out in the first, you know, two minutes of the race. So start where you should be. They usually have signs with predicted Pace line up there and you can have a great race.