Training lessons from the 'Lover of Mountains'
An interview with Kilian Jornet
Probably one of the greatest endurance athletes out there, Kilian Jornet has done it all. He recently sat down with Dr Stephen Seiler to chat about his training methodology after he wrote a blog about his training. You can watch the interview on Stephen Seiler's YouTube channel.
Whilst Kilian is a little way off a mid life athlete, there are some great takeaways for us.
Aerobic capacity - endurance athletes need to create long term adaptations. Kilian spends a long time building aerobic capacity and its only nearer race days that he starts adding in intense sessions. Even then he only does 2 intense sessions a week. Doing more intensity and he gets injured or overtrained.
A lot of mid life athletes will probably relate to this, probably finding that their training keeps getting interrupted with injuries or simply finding that they aren’t improving.
Not the epic workouts that leads to great performance - the keys to improving performance is the repetition of stimuli that then makes the adaptations to allow improvement and performance. It’s doing things over and over again. You can’t go out day after day if you are trying to smash it every time. Athletes get a VO2 benefit from the volume of low intensity training not some magic workout. Think sustainability.
Train with intention - when Kilian does his easy running on the trails he uses these easy days to train technical. Lowering intensity allows him to focus on foot placement, etc necessary for running on gnarly trails. Effectively he gets a double hit from these sessions - aerobic & technical training.
What do I want to feel today - each time Kilian goes out he asks himself what does he want to feel today. We discovered when chatting to David Robson how important mindset is not just to performance but life in general.
You can read in Kilian’s own words his take on his 2022 season
If you want to delve into Dr Stephen Seiler’s research and how to apply it to your training, you can listen to the interview we did with him way back in Season 1.