Matt Carpenter Explains His Running Philosophy

0:00 It's only till recently some of Matt Carpenter's race records have been broken. Like his level 100-mile race record was broken recently. Same thing with his Pikes Peak ascent record. A trail runner whose records have stood for 30 years as the sport has progressed so far. So, what was his training philosophy? Well, he's actually been pretty silent over the past 24 years since 2002. Hasn't really said much at all in the public. He recently was on a podcast and there's a snippet of that I want to share with you today and break down Matt Carpenter's training philosophy. If you want the overall picture, I think it's you know, I always set up my training with a big C on the top of a pyramid and when that stood for consistency. And then down on the bottom, one side of the pyramid was a double-sided Q. One for quality and one for quantity. And then over here on the other side of the pyramid, you have the R for rest. So, you have to consistently go back and forth between rest and quality and quantity. And just like if you flip a coin, you can't get heads and tails. You can't mix quality and quantity. You know, if you do too much if you're trying to go too far, trying to do quality, yeah, it's not you're not going to go far enough to call it distance and you're not going to go fast enough to do speed. So, you have to be very specific, but the the key is consistency. If you're just always doing quality and quantity and not the rest, you're going to break down. You know, if you're only doing rest, of course you're not going to get better. This kind of stopped me in the tracks when I was listening to this cuz I'm like, okay.

1:30 Top of the pyramid is what's most important, right? Consistency. And then you only have three type of workouts or three things to do. You have a quality workout or you can have a quantity workout. You can run a lot of miles or you can do fast or you can do hills. And then on the other side, you got to rest. And so, you go back and before between resting, quality and quantity. And the rest, you know, the pendulum swinging could be 6 hours if you're doing two-a-days or it could be a 24-hour rest or it could be taking a week off. But, over a long period of time, by structuring everything through consistency, quantity, quality, rest, my goodness. The first thing I started to wonder is how much quality or quantity or rest should you do? Out of those three, how should it be ratioed? And it turns out he covers that later.

2:20 But, before covering that, here's a theory that gave me peace. I always had this theory that it doesn't matter if you do something wrong as long as you do it consistently, you're going to get better at it. Interesting. >> And I took it a step further and decided, well, if you do it right and consistently, you'll get better faster. How many people are too scared to start because they're scared of doing it wrong rather than realizing that being wrong first is kind of the only gateway to getting it right? But, how beneficial is it to know that if you do something consistently wrong, you're still going to get better? It doesn't matter if you do something wrong as long as you do it consistently, you're going to get better at it. Then, your goal, your metric, isn't to do the activity optimized, your goal is to do the activity, period. To be consistent in the activity becomes the greatest goal over optimizing the activity. And that becomes the the mover of progress. Matt Carpenter says the first goal should be consistency. This allows consistency to become the habit.

3:20 Once consistency's the habit, you don't have to put any more willpower towards it and now your willpower can go towards doing it right and the consistency's going to continue on because you've already habituated that. If you try to flip these and you try to do it right without the consistency, you will not make good progress. As we all know, most people fail their goals due to lack of consistency rather than lack of knowledge and I really like the way that Matt Carpenter explained it here.

3:44 Interesting. >> And I took it a step further and decided, well, if you do it right and consistently, you'll get better faster. Okay, now that we've nailed our consistency and that's a habit, what is the proper ratio of quantity, quality, and rest? What do you think Matt's going to say? Yeah, I think I said it already. Experiment, experiment, you keep what works, and you throw out what doesn't. You got it. It's literally experimenting and figuring it out for yourself because different distances you're running, different goals of running, the different type of workouts you enjoy, you might enjoy more quantity over quality, which helps you be more consistent, therefore doing more quantities probably going for you in the long run because it's going to improve your consistency. And Matt was world-class. He could run at high altitudes faster than anybody in the world. His VO2 max was so high that they threw out his results cuz they thought it was impossible. I think at the time he had the highest VO2 max in the entire world. So, when he speaks, he's going to be talking about the things that move the needle towards progress. Many people are too lazy to experiment. It's not even hard, and it doesn't even take that much time, but it takes personality, and it takes being purposeful. He put himself as the guinea pig, even going as far as eating gels as his diet for a few days in a row just to practice for ultramarathons, so that when the ultramarathon came, he's like, "My gut was fine because I I ate sugar through the gels 3 days in a row, so during the ultramarathon, that wasn't a change for me."

5:10 Crazy. Knowing something is much harder than doing it, and I would take advice from somebody like this over all of the studies because this is somebody who's went out and tested every individual thing for himself and figured out what works. It's really easy for us to watch 100 videos and do zero personal testing. If we just spend that time not learning anything about running and testing our own bodies, I guarantee we would all be better. Matt Carpenter's training philosophy is that triangle, as well as experiment, and then what does work, continue, and what doesn't work, don't continue. You don't have to get it right every experiment. That's why they're called experiments. Let's figure out what works best and then go with that. I'll link the podcast with Buzz and Matt in the description. 55miles.com for your anti-chafing blister prevention made right here in Colorado Springs. I will catch you in the next video.

6:02 Remember, be yourself cuz everyone else they're already taken.