Viking Muscle
The Wild West Relay – Viking Muscle Guide
The Wild West Relay is going to kick my ass…
That being said, I have a strategy and a training guide in place to help prepare, hopefully you can use this as a guide for your next big race as well!
The Wild West Relay is an annual relay style race that takes place in Colorado. The course is a daunting 198.9 miles starting in Fort Collins and ending in Steamboat. For those of you not familiar with Colorado, there are quite a few mountains in between the two amounting to a 16,500 ft elevation gain! The race is broken up into 36 ‘legs’ ranging from 2.3 miles to 10 miles each that you divide evenly across 12 team members. The race is run as a constant relay taking up to 38 hours from start to finish. This means for those 38 hours you must do everything possible in between legs to recover and prepare your mind and body for the next leg. This also means that a good 9-10 hours of the race will be in darkness after the sun goes down. The Wild West Relay is not your average race, and it will require some unique training to prepare accordingly.
To begin, I have broken the training down into 3 areas of focus:
- Endurance: In total, I will be responsible for 19.8 miles.
- As this is much longer (double) than any of the previous races I have run my conditioning for endurance will be priority number one.
- Strength: There a some pretty serious climbs and descents ahead
- Preparing my legs to withstand the impact of 10 miles straight downhill will be key to having enough strength to finish strong.
- Toughness: Pushing the body a bit past the comfort zone
- Testing my physical and mental endurance will help me push past some of the tougher spots on the course, keep pace, and finish on time.
- Weight: I will need to lean out about before the race
- At tall, … I am not what you would consider to be ‘ideal’ size for an endurance runner.
Let’s get started
Endurance Training:
The Wild West Relay is a distance / Endurance / Adventure race. I have stated before that I am by no means a distance runner. And for this reason, I will be using a series of ‘hacks’ to get my conditioning where it needs to be for this course. I will be using High Intensity Interval Training to minimize the stress to my body while fine tuning my cardiovascular recovery and endurance.
On the days that I don’t weight train I will do the following circuit:
| Dynamic Warm Up |
| 7 Minutes of Jump Rope |
| Jog 1 Mile Downhill (9 minute pace) |
| Sprint home up the hill: 30 second sprint / 60 second rest or walk |
Strength Training:
I will be doing a very focused strength routine that allows me to recover while training hard 6-7 days a week leading up to the Wild West Relay. This will split up my workouts into 4 days, each day dedicated to one basic movement and 2 supporting movements. This is going to be key to my race endurance, I want strong leg muscles that can withstand the torture that I will be putting them through. The split will be Military Press / Deadlifts / Bench Press / Squat – Heavy weight:
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Just take a Look at the elevation change for my 2nd leg of the Wild West Relay, Brutal!
The elevation map for my second Leg, all downhill!
During the Wild West Relay, It will be important to keep good form on these kinds of long negative grade stretches, running downhill can be exhausting! Downhill running is not as aerobically challenging as flats or uphills, however, the heavy pounding of your leg on concrete over and over is a tremendous toll on your body. Make sure to keep your foot at the same angle as the decline your running on, and take a faster cadence. Simply put, it’s falling with style! Shorten your stride and let gravity take over, your body will want to use a hard heel strike to control the pace. DO NOT LET IT! Keep the strike at your fore-foot and let yourself glide down the hill, using the momentum to your advantage without destroying your Quads!
Toughness:
This one will come naturally to some people. When you get to an event like the Wild West Relay, your adrenaline starts pumping and your body will begin to prepare for anything you throw in it’s path. However, a little training before hand could make all the difference. On Endurance training days, do one more sprint than you planned for, do one more mile, one more rep. When your brain tells you that its done and you want to quit… Do one more. This will help with your mental toughness so when your legs are burning on mile 15, your mouth is dry, you haven’t slept in 40 hours, and there is no one else in sight… you – keep – going.
Weight:
As with most things in life, I am an awkward and uncomfortable runner. I carry a large amount of upper-body weight, I am tall, I have bad knee’s, and a tear on my intervertebral disc in my back. So to combat some of the wear and tear that a 20 mile mountain race like the Wild West Relay will have on the body, I will be cutting weight for the 8 weeks leading up to the race with the goal of losing a half a pound each week at most to retain as much muscle as possible. The leaner and more efficient your body is on race day the better you will feel in the deeper miles. I will use a standard paleo diet, reducing carbs and calories by 15% on endurance training days. This will amount to a decent calorie deficit each week that will still let me make strength gains while leaning out.
So by following this guide you can prepare your body for a very taxing 48 hours. Make sure to refuel in between legs with fruit and as much water as you can drink, then a little more!
Good Luck, train hard!
Leave a Reply