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Malindi Elmore joined Gary only 2 weeks after finishing 9th in the women's marathon in the Tokyo games. Malindi shares about her preperation for the race, her thought process through the challenging day, and answers the burning question, what happened to her hat at the end of the race?
Transcript:
Gary McCoy: [00:00:02] Watching the women's Marathon in Tokyo, the announcers couldn't help but to label and try to put Malindi Elmore into the box, that she is a 41 year old athlete and a mother of two. They're saying it because it's not the norm. It's incredibly impressive. But put simply, Malindi is so much more than the simple two dimensional definitions. She competed in Athens in 2004 in the 1500, only to return to the games 17 years later as a marathoner to finish ninth. By anyone's standards, this is an incredible effort. But what I've learnt in a short time with Malindi is this: that that outcome wasn't something she was really focused on. She focuses heavily on her process. She has a physical wisdom that embodies the term athlete. Her mindset enables her to overcome the pain of an event like the Marathon, and her mantras enable her to tune in to her own performance. World-Class athletes are not only resourceful, but also operate at a frequency that many listening to this would consider rare. Malindi Elmore is a national treasure. And we're thrilled at Kinetyx to welcome her as one of our first athlete ambassadors. Malindi, welcome to The Human Kinesome Project podcast. Firstly, thank you so much for doing this. I can only imagine the demands on your time right now after the Olympics. It must be incredible, right?
Malindi Elmore: [00:01:50] It actually hasn't been as bad as I had anticipated. I think everyone thinks that I'm really busy so they can leave me alone, which is kind of nice, actually. But I do work. So I work at UBC and I've got some online clients and I've got my kids. So it's been nice to focus on that stuff.
Gary McCoy: [00:02:09] Tell you what, the highest use of slack in our company, I think, was the messages floating around when you were in race. We were just glued. Everybody was glued. And there's this one question. Our president said something to the effect of: "What happened to your red hat?" You lost... Like we saw you in one frame, had the hat on, you were easy to find, and then all of a sudden she's gone. Where's the hat? What happened?
Malindi Elmore: [00:02:36] You know what? I didn't realise how many people were counting on that red hat. I've had so many people say: "Thank you for wearing that red hat! We were able to spot you because of it." And it wasn't... I never thought of that. It was just our team issued hat that came with our uniforms. So I swapped hats four times in the race, it was at one of the personal aid stations in a cooler. So about every... I don't even remember, it was at the 26, the 16, 26, 36 K station, Chris would hand me a new cap with ice in it and ice water. Anyways with about a mile to go, I just suddenly decided that hat was annoying me and I just threw it to the side of the road. And I had this this immediate image of Simon Whitfield, if you recall, in I think it was 2008 in Beijing. So he had won the gold medal in 2000 in Sydney, and then Athens wasn't best year, and then he came back in 2008 and won a silver medal. And he was coming down to the final sprint with about 500 metres to go in a one two three race for the medals. And he threw off his hat and then just took off to catch the guy for second. And I thought of him in that, I was like: I'm throwing my hat and I'm going to go for it. But there was no one to catch, I was just hanging on. But I also had tossed my sunglasses a couple of kilometres before that . You get to a point where you're just like: "This is so hard, I need to change something about the way I'm doing. I'm going to get rid of my hat and get rid of my glasses."
Gary McCoy: [00:04:06] Oh, I love it. And so I'll give you... My connexion to the Marathon is is twofold. One, I wrote a paper about it in the first year of my undergrad. That was the topic I selected because I was such an Australian rules football, cricket guy, that, no you've got to pick another sport. So the history of the Marathon was what I wrote a paper on, then I finally ran one. In 2000, I ran Paris. A buddy of mine said, hey, let's stretch you a little bit. And so my buddy was, you know, he's a bigwig in corporate circles, and he said, I'll get a coach. And so he gets ahold of Jeff Galloway. And I remember being on this speakerphone, you know, to talk about how, you know, how we going to plan for the race that six of us are running this race. And Jeff says to me, "Gary, give me your running history." And I said, "Well, Mate, I said, I played baseball at a pretty high level. So I run 90 feet and I turn left. If I'm lucky, I get to turn left again, run another 90 feet. Now, how long is this race?" You know, it's was one of those discussions, right? So 12 weeks. And then go and run Paris and just not understand... The Lucozade, I think it was the drink, and their Cobblestone roads, it was insane, the amount of people that were just wiping out at all these breaks, right? So I loved it so much. I loved the training, loved the discipline, loved the planning. I ran this in 2000. That's 21 years ago, right. So I said, when I forget the pain, I'll run another one. Yeah, I still remember the pain. So I haven't started down that path. But Mate, diving in here, I'm really curious. And this is kind of a couple of questions in one, but, you know, it's been 17 years between the Olympic Games for you. Take us to those minutes before the race start. Was there fear? Were you looking at this going, you know what, the time kind of evaporates between that run in 2004 versus the run in in 2021 now? What was in your head a few minutes before the starter's gun?
Malindi Elmore: [00:06:07] You know, I didn't expect to be back at this level in sport again until only the last year or two. And so I had really moved on in life from being a high-performance athlete, just being a lifelong athlete, like I did triathlon in the mean time. I got back into running because I love to run, I love to move. I want to compete. But it wasn't that I had I was harbouring this. Oh, my gosh, I need to get back to the Olympics and finish, you know, and take care of undone business. So I was definitely really nervous leading into this race. There was a lot of build up over the last year and a half. Are there going to be an Olympics? Is COVID going to shut things down? Right? And as we got closer and closer, okay, They're not going to cancel the Olympics. It's a go. Managing my own health. Just, you know, you have to show up not injured on the day. Then, as nervous as I was in the final two weeks leading into the race, as my coach on on site said, he said I had my game face on a lot. I just tried again to focus on being really grateful for this opportunity to be back. And as nervous as I was about expectations around my own performance, oh, my gosh, there's an Olympics happening. I'm fit, I'm healthy, and I get a chance to do this again after 17 years. So whatever comes of it, it's going to be a good thing.
Gary McCoy: [00:07:23] It's amazing, that notion of gratefulness. It's amazing, the constructive energy that comes from that. I've seen that with so many athletes, experienced that personally. You've retired at one point. How do you make a decision to un-retire? Or was it that how you shifted into this lifelong athlete? Kind of - I'm going to continue to run and don't label me as retired. Or was it no, I'm definitely retired from competition, I'm coming back out. Tell us about that a little bit, if you can, Malindi. What was the... Was there an impetus? Was there something that just hit you one day that you said, hey, my identity is tied to this? I need to I need to express that.
Malindi Elmore: [00:08:06] I actually don't really feel like my identity is tied per se to having to do sport and compete and perform. It's more... It's deeper than that. It's just who I am. But I guess you could say that's identity, but I feel like identity is more an external factor of how people view you versus how you view yourself. So I need to exercise and move to feel good and by extension to that I love to compete and see how good I can be. But they're not always the same thing. So in my retirement, I continued to be active because I like to move. So I would ride a bike. I would go for a long bike rides and explore the Okanagan Valley, do some open water swims in the lake. You know, just that's part of what's fun for me on a daily basis. But I also do love to also join events and be part of that energy of doing a triathlon or doing a mass road race, that sort of thing. And I'm good at them. That's part of the way my body is built, is I can push myself pretty hard and I can get good results. And then that fuels a desire to see how good I can be and if I can be better and the next thing you know, I'm in the Olympics.
Gary McCoy: [00:09:16] It's amazing. There's been a transition for you. Not only that, you know, to kind of un-retire, come back, come back and run at such an elite level. But there was another moment that I learnt about you, that Endurance was never really on your radar, right? It was, you were doing other events. Was there an attraction to doing something in the Endurance sector or was that just that natural flow on like, I like to go for a run. I like this distance. I can survive this distance. How did that how did that come about?
Malindi Elmore: [00:09:45] Yeah, if I think back 20 years when I was in university, I was probably the least likely person to turn into an Ironman Marathon competitor. I thought people, one, who did them were a bit crazy. And I see that certain tongue in cheek now that I am one of them and my friends are. But two, to actually race them at a high level was just mind boggling to me. You know, when I thought about like even 10 years ago, what Shalane Flanagan, who was a kind of a contemporary of mine on the track, who ran and ran into winning the New York Marathon and 6th in Rio at the Olympics. And I remember saying to a friend one day, I can't believe she can run 3:30 or faster per kilometre pace for 42 kilometres. That's crazy. And it wasn't that I had set out with this lofty goal of running these times. It just evolved naturally. And I wanted to do a Marathon for the sake of a bucket list, like, oh, that's my friends are doing it for fun, let me sign up and do one to say, I've done it, kind of. And then I did find the training really addictive and it came to me quite naturally. And then the race itself, my first Marathon, Houston 2019, so that this Olympics is only my third. But each time I've learnt so much and I've there's so much opportunity for growth still. And I don't think that it's something that you ever feel like you completely master. So it just keeps you coming back for more.
Gary McCoy: [00:11:11] Right. There's things like in the distance work that I've done, and when I talk to Endurance athletes, I mean, you find this kind of frequency to operate on both mentally and physically. Tell me a little bit about that. Like your mindset during the course of a race. How does that.. like, are there different moments that you're recalibrating mind, body at different markers? Are there like... And when you're building in like the strategy of the race, how does that mindset from the gun has gone off to crossing that finish line? How does that work during the course of this? Is there a lot of alteration?
Malindi Elmore: [00:11:49] Well, it ebbs and flows as you go. But I think the important thing is that your mind and your body are always working together. And well, when I say together, maybe they're working against each other, but you're trying to get them to work together, right? So there's lots to think about. And it's just a constant check in: How am I doing? Is this right? How am I feeling? And I think what some of the cool things are, you know, when people talk about finding flow or mindfulness and you're just completely absorbed in the task in the moment. That's what it's like in a Marathon. And as you go through rough patches, you're still very much in the moment and you're trying to figure out how with with your mind you can make your body feel better. So it might be taking in some fuel or some hydration or cooling yourself or adjusting your pace. Or in the case of this last Marathon, I really had worked on some sort of mantras and some mental strategies leading in. So it's funny. Obviously, podcast people can't see. But I've got a list of words here in front of me that I had written leading into the race that I felt like I was cramming for an exam. I brought them to the warm up and I was just kind of reviewing them and mantras like: patience is power, be a fighter, even even just thinking about my children. So when it got challenging for me, it was like my mind went to where I wanted it to be. And I started automatically thinking these things that I had sort of practiced. And that really, really helped, especially the last five, seven kilometres when it was really hot. I was really tired. I was really ready to be done. And it gave me something to mull on and to keep me moving forward positively.
Gary McCoy: [00:13:28] Tough environment in Tokyo, too, right? I mean, I spent a fair bit of time there working in baseball. And it's not even the degree of Humidity. What I've experienced, and it might have been different on the day, but I just always experienced this thick air kind of feeling like there's nothing... the air is not moving around me. It's hard, like it's hard to breathe when you're walking down the street. So knowing what you're going into with the heat and everything, were there acclimation strategies prior to the race?
Malindi Elmore: [00:13:55] We were actually in Sapporo, three or four thousand kilometres north of Tokyo, but it didn't really make any difference to the heat and humidity. They had hoped that it would, but we were in a bit of a heat wave up in the north. So we arrived 15 days before the race to do some acclimating. And we practise a lot our cooling plan with ice leading, you know, in the days leading in and what I was going to take at what station. So as I mentioned earlier, changing out my hat multiple times, so I had an ice hat. Taking towels, ice, all sorts of things that that helped. But the biggest thing is just being there and enough time to try to get your body used to it. And it was really hard. Even a 20, 30 minute run, especially initially, you finish and you're drenched and you're thinking, well, how am I supposed to run way faster for, you know, two and a half hours? And it was very hot. I heard a podcast this morning and they mentioned they referred to the race as being decently warm or something. I thought, no, no, no, no, no, no. It wasn't decently warm. At 5:00 AM it was 28 degrees and 80 percent humidity. You go run a marathon and see if that's decently warm.
Gary McCoy: [00:15:11] That's not decent, mate, that's miserable. Yeah, that's probably a better, better word to use.
Malindi Elmore: [00:15:17] When we had it, we didn't have any cloud cover that day. It was a sunny day. So you can see if you watch the race, in the early parts of the race, there was a fair amount of shade coverage. So we're all trying to stick to the side of the road where there's shade, and that gradually disappears, especially where there are buildings. And that you really felt it on that exposed part of this course.
Gary McCoy: [00:15:38] Yeah, incredible. So you currently hold the women's record for the Marathon, Canadian women's record. Tell me about physical systems, like when you're looking ahead, if you will, looking to, in your planning up to Tokyo and looking forward. One of the things is, like our practitioners, I always have discussions with them around our trying to understand what we'll call rate limiting factors for performance. Do you kind of dive into those and say, you know what? Like you just said, I've got my head in my body kind of lined up. Those things are working really well. But you know what? Boy, I've got a musculoskeletal imbalance, that I feel like I've got to work on to get that time down. Or is it that I've got to get some more peak interval kind of stuff to really shunt that VO2 part of the equation, so I've got a got a sprint kind of capacity in there? When you analyze yourself physically, what's the thing that you would look at and go, you know what, I'm going to work on, this is this is what I want to change? Is there anything?
Malindi Elmore: [00:16:41] Well, the biggest limiter to me over all my years has been injury prevention. And I've had plenty of injuries. When I was in my 20s, I would get bone injuries and that really significantly negatively impacted my career in my twenties. You know, I missed the Olympics in 2008 because of a navicular stress fracture. And that changed over the years. Where now that what I've been battling with in the last year and a half, is hamstring tendinopathy. High hamstring, which is really common, especially for women in their thirties, forties, more mature runners. So in the last year, I have worked a lot and really hard with a one on one with the strength and conditioning coach in Kelowna, Chris Collins. And that's helped a ton. So doing doing real weights, deadlifts, heavy weights, eccentric loading, that sort of thing. And some plyometrics for generating good force. And we think that we don't need that in the Marathon per se, that, you know, that force and that power. But you do to stay healthy and to keep your tendons and everything working to their full potential. So I was saying to him yesterday when I was in, my hamstring is no longer a limiter or concern to me. There was about a year where I could feel it. It would tweak if I did anything too fast or did hills or if I changed my load too much, I would immediately get that feedback, and my hamstring would tighten up. That right now is really well managed. I think that's, you know, managing injuries is probably the hardest, but the best way to become a better athlete, because then you're able to have consistent training over a long period of time. And that's ultimately what's going to lead to improvement.
Gary McCoy: [00:18:31] Yeah, we often use the term in team sports, in elite team sports, that the best ability is availability, right? Make sure you're ready to go out and perform. So, yeah, the injury reduction side of the equation is something I've focused heavily on, and as even our team at Kinetyx, you know, we're looking forward and looking at data projection. You know, I don't like the term prediction of injury, because I really think that's it's always multifactorial. There's so many things we can't predict. But, boy, if we can identify risk due to change the centre of pressure in one foot versus the other and even see, you know, potentially when you have like a loop of, like pain, you know, say the pain re-emerges in the hamstring as your foot identification of the ground, has that changed any? So those are the things that we look at a lot. But yeah, like I, I hear you on the injury side, but I want to go back, like you said, women who are lifelong athletes, I mean, you've got kinematic, I think variability and also even hormonal variability that goes into kind of athlete planning, right? And so one of the things I remember working with Duke women's basketball team, and they had a lot of ACL injuries and a lot of it came down to Q-angle coming out of the hips these were collegiate athletes, you know, 18 to 22. There's so many things you have to manage differently as a female in a race and even things like, you know, your like hormonal challenges that you that you may face either through, you know, a menstrual period or anything like that. Do you do have it like in in that planning? Do you like look hormonally first and go, OK, here's the pattern, here's what I've got to regulate or or change in alter prior to competition? Are there variability... I'm trying to look at the variability in your training from a standard, you know, from say, if I was to go out and start running and planning, you've got, I think, more to deal with than I do. How do you approach that side of the equation? How do you put it all together? To me, it's a mosaic of information.
Malindi Elmore: [00:20:30] Yeah, well, I think there's a lot of emerging talk about how women are not small men, to coin the term from Dr. Stacey Sims. And a lot of people are becoming more aware that that there are nuances of female athletes and all those those ways you describe. And that for the majority of studies, scientific, peer reviewed studies are done on male control groups, right? So how do women... In anything, high performance data is derived for men and applied to women. So for for starters, being aware that there is a difference, I think is a good starting point. Secondly, the biggest and most important factors, aside from like the micro details of managing hormonal fluctuations and getting really detail oriented, is that a healthy female athlete regularly has a period. And that is the most important factor to look at. And there used to be sort of a myth, perhaps, that you were really if you really fit, then it would disappear. And that's OK, because that meant you were fit. That's that's not OK, and lots of science has shown that that's not a healthy body that we're dealing with. So a healthy body is one that is regular and a healthy body is one that is getting enough fuelling and nutrition to support both their training and their normal cycles or normal hormonal influences. So if there's one message that I would want to share with any audience of coaches or athletes is that if women are not getting their periods, they need to reduce their their load and increase their fuelling, their food. Look at that sort of thing. Work with a doctor, that's key. And otherwise it leads to injury. It leads to bone injury, underperforming, et cetera, et cetera.
Gary McCoy: [00:22:28] Look, I couldn't agree more. My wife's a sports nutritionist and she's a lecturer at Arizona State University. And we have these discussions around, you know, and you coined it perfectly: it's like we take we take all these studies on men and try to downstream, you know, for the female athlete. And it's so different. I mean, biomechanically, kinematically, physiologically, hormonally. And a loss of period. She was one of the first ones to explain this to me. Loss of period is not a good thing, especially especially for the potential of bone injury, right? And managing that, especially that long term stress. So I think it's a super important point to underline. And I think overall, it's almost like there's not enough studies being done, because even the format of the studies, we have a govern for some sense of, you know, like we did a nine week study of athletes, you know, 18 to 22. Well, that's fantastic, great. But now, like, what about our older athletes? How do we how do we apply really good research and even do more research into, you know, an athlete whose 30 and older? You know, what does that look like? So I think, you know, I think I think we underserve our community dramatically and a lot more studies need to be done.
Malindi Elmore: [00:23:46] Yeah. And I think things are changing. I think there's a response in the in the research community and in the application of it, at least maybe because I'm tuned in as a coach and an athlete, but I'm seeing really good work coming out of Canadian universities and labs and some leaders like Dr. Trent Stellingwerff, Louise Burke of Australia, Katie Ackerman, I think in Boston, at Harvard. They are putting on conferences, they're publishing, they're sharing. There's some, you know, some open access work being done in the area of RED-S, relative energy deficit syndrome for people. And it's not just siloed to research. It's really trying to get out there into the community. And I personally have been requested to participate in more research projects in the last year or two on all areas of RED-S and pregnancy, and postpartum recovery and all those all those areas that absolutely were lacking. You know, when I had my first son, he's seven and a half, and I spent a day at university lab or the university library trying to look up research on how to how to try, what's the appropriate amount of training to do while pregnant that's safe? There's nothing. And no, now, I've been contacted multiple times to engage in this kind of research. So that's really exciting.
Gary McCoy: [00:25:08] That is exciting. And yeah, it's so underserved. I had a friend who was looking into... to try and find the exact same data a long time ago. And she said, you know, there's nothing out here about, you know, even postpartum training or, you know, training during pregnancy. You know, what's right, what's wrong? And it's this I think archaic, kind of - let's put you in cotton wool, let's sit you down, you know, let's put your feet up. I think there's an archaic kind of association that comes with pregnancy, post pregnancy and oh, look, a whole lot of probably societally governed or driven, you know, labels that are put on you around that period in time too, right, that could alter training progression. So, yeah, look, it will be great to see you unpack that. But Malindi, something you said to me there, too. I want to bring in, too, your coaching. So as a coach, I mean, what did you learn about yourself as an athlete, that you know as an athlete that you bring into your coaching? If you have to say, hey, this makes me different as a coach? Is there one thing or there are a couple of things that you brought in?
Malindi Elmore: [00:26:14] Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Being a coach, being an athlete helps me be a better coach, and being coach helps me be a better athlete. It's two ways. And I think one of the biggest things is really truly trusting the process and trusting if you've done the work that you should be prepared to to bring it on race day. And I used to, as an athlete, have a lot more doubts, I'd say, in my ability to execute and whether the training would actually bring the outcomes that I desired. And now I know if I do the training, I should be able to count on myself to bring the performance. And I expect that of my athletes and I see that in my athletes. If I've done a good job preparing them, then for the most part, they should be able to have great races barring any unusual circumstances. So now, you know, when I see certain workouts that I can perform. I know that's an indicator of what I should be able to do. And I think that really helps and it also really helps me coaching. It just I guess it feels like a maybe integrity is is the word I'm looking for, but I expect a high level of performance from my athlete, and I want them to be able to do that on race day because it's a character trait, it's also the training, right? And so if I expect out of them, I have to be willing to to show the same on in my own live performances.
Gary McCoy: [00:27:49] Yeah. Now 100 percent. And look at a lot of what you said was similar for me to transition from an athlete into a coaching role. So I kind of feel that and I always look to it like empathy is the very first thing you have. I mean, it's that you understand where they are on their journey and what that process is going to be. But something you said in that statement too: Doubt. Let's talk about that a little bit. One of the moments for me and was ironic that it was just brought up in Alex Hutchinson's book Endure, which I'm guessing you may have that somewhere. One of the things that he tried to unpack was from a 1999 ACSM conference. And I'm old enough to remember this. And I was actually there. It's not like, you know, like Woodstock if you say you were there. You know, it's probably a lie because you wouldn't have remembered, right? But 1999 ACSM convention, I'm there and I forget the presenter's name. But he talked about the central governor theory and it was really interesting to me. There you go! There's the book, Malindi just showed the book. So central governor theory. This thing was like kind of game changing for me because it helped, I took that and made applications to that into professional baseball. I thought immediately that if I want a guy to throw harder, what are the innate restrictions on him throwing that ball faster and harder? And it was really it came down to, okay, well, let's hack the system here. Let's go in and build the brakes better so that we can get above what's preventing that velocity and acceleration. Do you, like, your understanding of that, and a lot of a lot of athletes I talk to, a lot of coaches I talk to, sometimes that would doubt is the initial, it's a mental kind of layer that you've got to get beyond to have the physical expression beyond that. Tell me a little... Firstly, recognition of that. Secondly, how do you deal with it?
Malindi Elmore: [00:29:51] Well, boy, that's a complex question.
Gary McCoy: [00:29:54] It is.
Malindi Elmore: [00:29:55] Yeah. Well, because we're, to our detriment at times, such intelligent, complex beings, right? And to unravel all the psychology to get to best performances at times can absolutely be be the hardest task. And you'll see lots of genetically gifted athletes who underperform. And you wonder why. They can do it in training and they can't do it in competition. So what's going on? And so really, the true athlete is one that can maximize themselves physically and emotionally, mentally, psychologically, right? So how do you how do you deal with getting past doubt? For me, it was just, probably came as a function of being in the sport long enough to see the feedback loop that if I put in this kind of training or I am at this level and also having confidence in myself like I did leading into Tokyo, that, you know, generally speaking, I'm a good performer when the stakes are high. I can think back to lots of examples where I met or exceeded my expectations at championship races, at high stakes races. I'm not actually someone who's good year round or who can run an amazing time trials on their own or does kind of weird one off spectacular things that people think like how the heck did she run the 10K in February that fast on her own? If you look back, I ran pretty mediocre road races through the winter. And then I listen to some podcast of people analysing, you know, who's going to do what for performance. And I mean, based on my training, I, I guess I would agree with people saying that I wasn't looking like I was going to do anything spectacular in Tokyo. But it's all part of the big macro picture. You don't want to be peak fitness fitness year round anyways. Anyways, so, again, like getting back to the doubt pieces, just I think incrementally building confidence over a long period of time through races, through performance, through training. And working with younger athletes is a little bit more challenging because they maybe don't have that huge body of experience to draw on. And so we need to maybe work more conscious sports psych tools, visualizing. But I mean, as you saw it earlier, as I mentioned, I did write some mantras. I relied on that in my race. So it's teaching probably these skills to younger athletes so that they can start to to kind of move together with their physical development. They're working on their emotional resilience toolbox at the same time.
Gary McCoy: [00:32:40] Right. And it's this is an element of kind of risk that's part of the equation, I think, in any kind of training, right. It's like if you're working with an athlete, you want them to explore the next, kind of, everyone says, the next level. Well, what is that level, right? If someone's doing something repeatedly, consistently, so, like, how do I shunt them? How do I break that ceiling and move them forward? And sometimes that is an element of risk quotient, really, really calculated risk. For me, it was massively calculated risk because I'm dealing with athletes that are worth a hundred million dollars to an organization. So I had to be really, you know, I was conscious of this the whole time, that I can take more risks in the off season than I can in season, you know, to keep them healthy and available. But risk and applying that risk to training, like having an overspeed day or a greater distance day or things like that, and to get that feedback and have it positively check the box so that they can build that as part of the foundation. Is that something you plan in for your athletes? Do you plan in any sense of, okay, I'm going to, like you say, one athlete that you think of that you've known that even like let's use risk to break capacity here.
Malindi Elmore: [00:33:56] You know what? I probably err more on the side of caution still than that point because I think there's still a lot of low hanging fruit with younger athletes just in managing, like you talked about earlier, injuries, being consistent. I think the biggest breakthrough for younger athletes is just consistent training over a period of time is going to bring them breakthrough results without doing anything crazy. And even myself leading into Tokyo, we erred on the side of being conservative in a lot of our, in the execution of the plan. So we went with sort of the tried and true formula that had worked for me in my past two marathons. We bumped up the mileage a little bit, maybe five percent. The most important thing was arriving to the start line fit and healthy and ready to execute the plan without taking the next little risk. So thinking of Molly Siedel, I was just listening to a podcast today about the training she did leading into Tokyo, and she had a spectacular day and won a bronze medal, which is a total dream come true and something, you know, I dreamed about as well. But she was taking more risk in her training and that paid off. But my flip side of being 41 versus she's 27 is it could have just blown up and I couldn't maybe make it to the start line. So going forward, now that the Olympics are done and dusted and I had a top ten performance that I'm that I'm proud of, I think we can start to play around with a little bit more risk, because if something goes wrong in a build to a Marathon in the next year, it's it's not the Olympics, right? I can pull the plug and reset and pick another date down the line. But the olympics come along every, in theory, every four years or so, you just don't want to screw that up too badly.
Gary McCoy: [00:35:41] Malindi, are you at your limit? Do you think are you looking ahead and going, yeah, you know what? I can get this time down. I can do this. I can do that. Do you, are you looking at yourself now as a 41 year old athlete and saying, yeah, this is it. This is kind of peak for me? And what are you looking at relative to your current position as an athlete?
Malindi Elmore: [00:36:07] Yeah, well, absolutely not. And I don't know that anyone ever thinks they're at their best or at their peak until it's hindsight. But like I said, we were relatively cautious still going into this build. There's still tons of areas that I can explore through different application of stress, both in terms of volume and intensity and frequency. And I think that that's what's exciting now is to start to explore. Okay. Can I can I chop that, my personal best off by two minutes. What is my, and that, I think is what's driving me now, is that how can I be my best and what is my best? Versus necessarily chasing records or times or places which are very meaningful. But they're more, that's product that comes from seeing how good you can be.
Gary McCoy: [00:36:57] Yeah, I was going to say it's like the qualitative process that... Don't look at the outcome, because that will happen if you if you got quality process.
Malindi Elmore: [00:37:07] Yeah, 100 percent. So yeah, do some analysis on what worked last time and then, you know, where in your risk equation, where are you willing to take some risk and what is the potential, you know, potential upside of playing around with that?
Gary McCoy: [00:37:24] Yeah. And when and in what part of this next cycle. right? So yeah, that's really interesting. But age is really it's interesting to me. It's when when you throw that term out there, everybody immediately goes to chronological, you know, this linearity of age. I always look at an athlete and say it's biological. You know, it's it's not, you know, let's not look at this chronologically. Let's look at this biologically. Kind of like buying a car, right? How many miles are on the clock? What has this car done? You know, how does how does that work? And the interesting thing is, I think there's a there's a societal kind of tag that comes with age as well. So how do you look at it? How do you look at age now?
Malindi Elmore: [00:38:10] It's funny, because I ran into my neighbour the other day and, big fan, watching my race, super keen, she's like, but if they said one more time, 41 year old mother of two, I was going to break my my television. She's like, you're more than a 41 year old mother of two. And if you look at the results, the woman from Australia just behind me is Sinead Diver, is 44. The gal behind her is the world masters record holder from Uganda. She's run 2:19 in the last year and she is 41. The Canadian behind her in 13th place is turning 40 this year. So there were four of us in a row who are masters runners. And I absolutely think that it is a social construct that we have decided that at a certain age, you're officially old and you're you're on the flip side. I mean, there there might be some studies that show some relative declines in aerobic capacity and VO2 max, but it's all very relative. It's, and it can be overcome with training and consistency and health and all those other factors. And what I say to people is, well, the fact that I'm 41 means I have 20 more years of aerobic training under my belt than a 21 year old, so.
Gary McCoy: [00:39:28] Exactly. Yeah.
Malindi Elmore: [00:39:30] And 21 years more experience of working on my mental skills and my, and all those other sort of, like we talked about, doubt or believing, you know, all those things that you stop having to work on. So that are just become ingrained in who you are in a race and that, you know, sense of gratitude. You have more perspective, perhaps 20 years later, of how cool it is to be out there, that sort of thing. So we need to stop thinking that we're past our prime in a certain certain point and then just just kind of live in the moment. And as you said, to, you know, chronological versus biological age is another important factor. Like I've taken a good number of breaks through my career and reinvented myself as a triathlete for a period of time, had two children. So I think that when you talk about wear and tear on the body, if you can if you can plan in some periods of rest and recovery, then then you get a lot more out of your your body over a longer period of time, too. Yeah.
Gary McCoy: [00:40:37] A lot of the time when I talk to biomechanists, different professionals that are approaching sport or even coming out of school, going into sport. And, you know, it's it's amazing. Everybody wants to win most. I want to be a major league strength and conditioning coach. I want to work in the major leagues as biomechanicanist. And I say yeah, a lot of people want to enroll in the Army as generals, too. But hang on, you've got to get that, got to get that grounding. You know, you've got to get in the trenches and get your repetitions in. I will take wisdom over intelligence any day. And I think that's what the Marathon is. It's wisdom. Not so much relative to strategy, which plays a part in it, you know, with the more these events that you run. But it's wisdom relative to physical systems and how you can manage your body, control your body at the times where it's necessary. Would you say that's an accurate statement?
Malindi Elmore: [00:41:29] 100 percent. Yeah. I mean, looking at my race, about 18 kilometres, I realized that that case was just going to be a little bit too rich for me and that, you know, I did the math. I said, I've got to double this and add five before I'm finished. I got to back this off and it started to splinter and I watched the front pack go. And that was kind of a key decision point for me, was that check back with myself going, do I think this is actually sustainable? No, I got to back off instead of... Maybe when I was younger, I might have been inclined to, I need to stick to them and go with it and not let them go. And I don't think I would have done that as a younger athlete, let them go, because I was I always wanted to be in contention and up at the front. The the last 10k of the race, I, I slowed down. Everybody slowed down. But I still passed 10 people. So there were 10 people who went off on that initial pace and who ended up blowing up or dropping out. And there were eight people who managed to hold it. So if I had gone out with that, if I had stayed on that pace, I could have had a spectacular run, perhaps, but most likely I would have had a much worse run than I had in the end.
Gary McCoy: [00:42:49] Right, so great example.
Malindi Elmore: [00:42:51] The last part of that race, I was was just holding on. So if I had to burn those matches too early, it could have been very ugly.
Gary McCoy: [00:42:57] You made that decision tactically within the race to pull back. Was it simply time splits you were looking at? Was the other data that you were looking at, did data or did feeling primarily influence that decision?
Malindi Elmore: [00:43:15] Primarily feeling backed up by data. So I knew actually a bit earlier on, maybe about, 14k, the pack surged a little bit, and I, I fell off and I thought, oh, this feels a little bit rich, I'm going to just back off. And then I got my next kilometre split and we had dropped about six seconds per kilometre from the previous kilometre. So it was like, oh, yeah, no, this is legitimately the surge that I'm feeling is is happening. And then the pack slowed down again. And I got back on the back of it. It slowed down a little bit to where we had been running the first 10, 12k of the race. At about 18k, I think it surged a little bit again. And I got that same feeling, so I can feel it before before I see the data. And I just have learnt over the years that you really have to trust your instincts. So I use the data as more like confirmation than as prescription. But I think that's where people run into a lot of problems with Marathon, and maybe other sports but let's talk about the Marathon, is that they have this idea that I want to run whatever time it is, let's say three hour marathon and a have to all these splits for it to happen. And if you're just on slightly the wrong side of that red, even if it's only two or three seconds too fast, you're going to blow up and it's going to be really ugly and you're going to lose ten minutes on the back end. But if you just if you just are one or two or three seconds on the plus side where it's feeling still really comfortable, and you feel you're thinking to yourself, I could do this forever, in theory, you can make up like 20 minutes on the backside. I mean, 20 minutes is maybe a little bit of an exaggeration, but you can make up so much in the last 10K by erring on the side of caution in the first 30, 30K. The Then by going a little bit rich on the first half, the blow up is just detrimental. So it's just respecting the Marathon, really. And these Endurance events and knowing that it really is the last portion of the race that really makes or breaks your race. And so many people want to be aggressive and they want to you want to stick to these pieces that are, that could be arbitrary. They could just be a number that you've decided you want to go after. And that's not the right (unintelligible).
Gary McCoy: [00:45:38] Technology that you use. Technology that you trust. Is there something that you're using, like I can't live without in my training process?
Malindi Elmore: [00:45:46] Well, I was a fairly late subscriber to a GPS watch anyways. I only started using GPS watch in 2019 leading into my first Marathon. And that was more because my husband, who coaches me, brought me one and said, you need to you need to use this so I know what you're doing. And it was actually really surprising to me because I didn't run as fast as I thought I did, and I didn't run as far as I thought I did on a daily basis, because I was really used to just kind of doing going for 60 minute run and calling that eight miles or whatever. And then I realised, oh, when I'm really tired, I go five minute kilometres. I thought I was running four and a half minute kilometres, but I don't. And so I try not to adjust things or to, again, to be chasing these times and distances and just use my GPS as feedback to analyze afterwards. And it's super, super effective when doing workouts to know what my paces are, and that helps you figure out what pace I can do a Marathon at. By using that information to analyze how I what pace I did a workout and heart rate. This is my heart rate zones, that sort of thing. So I think there is huge value in that in that data feedback. I just think that you need to you need to kind of always be weighing the art and science side of of training and of competing.
Gary McCoy: [00:47:07] Yeah, and it's interesting, too, because there's so many technologies out there. And that's why I always ask the question, did you feel this or was it data driven? Because that data, you know, sometimes that, you know, like the like I had a recovery device at one point that told me I was only 57 percent recovered. So I acted like I was 57 percent recovered, right? So, I mean, you can have that, you know, that almost placebo effect from the data. That's that's that's not correct. Did you use anything for recovery right now, Malindi? Are you looking at anything?
Malindi Elmore: [00:47:38] No, I mean, that's funny, because when we were in in Tokyo or in Japan, I asked an athlete, oh, how did you sleep last night? And she said, oh, I think pretty well, let me check. And then she went to her watch and she still scrolled through a few, she's like, oh, actually, not that great. I only hit deep sleep for this many hours. And I was like, oh, my goodness. So right now we're relying on a watch to tell us if we had good sleep when you didn't like when your initial reaction is that you feel rested. So, so what what's the point of this? Why are we using this device, to make us feel bad about what we've done? You can't really change the fact that you had a bad night's sleep. And I trained my first two marathons with an infant and I wasn't sleeping well, I was up three times a night nursing this baby. And if I didn't ever, if I never felt rested and had a full night's sleep, I would never have trained. If I ever woke up... you know, there was never a day when he was in the first year and a half of my second son's life that I ever felt like I had a full night's sleep. But it wasn't going to stop me from going and doing what I wanted to do with my day.
Gary McCoy: [00:48:47] Yeah, man, I'll ask this question. We don't we don't often talk in our podcast around, like, our product. We don't try to sell product on this. We want to talk and understand our athletes, understand how practitioners use data, tech, etc. So but what was it about Kinetyx that really made you think, hey, I want to have a conversation with these guys? Was there something you just said, oh, that could be valuable data? I just like to look of the company. What what was it that really drove you here?
Malindi Elmore: [00:49:16] Well, as as you can probably pick up from my response to the earlier questions, is I'm not a hugely data driven person, I'm definitely a go by feel. And I think that the art side of training and perceived effort are really key indicators for for maximizing our potential and that our brains are... You can't you shouldn't try to replace our brains, which are massive computers. But at the same time, being able to have data that helps us become the best athlete that we can is also super exciting. So the number of data points that you take and then you have to actually figure out how to apply it and how to make yourself a better athlete is the stuff I'm interested in. I don't need to know everything about my body that's not relevant. But what are the relevant things? So, you know, even as a as a slight example, we were running on the same course the whole time in Sapporo leading into a race which had quite a camber, it was on a corner. It was a short loop, my post tib started to flare up. I would have loved to have been able to see that and see how I was loading differently in that environment. And that would be really interesting. And are there other ways that you realize, that you're there's missed opportunities that that are changeable within your training?
Gary McCoy: [00:50:36] Hmm, right, right. Yeah. And that's it. And it's one of those things, I think, like we're not here to answer questions. We're here to ask the next level of questions. That's kind of how, you know, like kind of this terminal evolutionary gene that sits in us at Kinetyx where we're so interested on what's next. And to get to what's next, though, we know we've got to collect a lot of data. We've got to run even machine learning and AI through that, those data sets so we can look at say, look at your data, Malindi, and say, you know what? Like any time you look at data can go in with this kind of confirmation bias of looking for something and you will find it. You'll say, yeah, look, I think I was lateral on this foot. You know, my foot pressure felt more lateral on my right side during this run, da da da. And sure enough, you'll go there is there it is. You go in and confirm, right? Go in and find it. The thing that's really interesting, interesting to me is, is us getting down into the granularity of the data that could potentially come from your foot, hitting that ground so many times over the course of that race. And even in your training, you go, OK, let's run some AI through this. What patterns are there that we're not even looking at? You know, what's an unbiased kind of line and pattern of information that is kind of also correlating with how you feel? That feedback loop, as you indicate, is so critical. And to that point, if you're experiencing, say, interior knee pain, will, does that correlate with a lateral shift of centre of pressure in your foot? Or if you change shoes or change type a shoe or you're running on a different surface, you know, how does that all fit? I think that's the next level for us internally, is to be able to look at runners, understand the injury mechanisms that we do chronically, and try to find patterns of de-risking not only your training, but also finding those data sets to really express and accelerate, you know, what you think is missing.
Malindi Elmore: [00:52:34] That's where we get the next level of performance. And that's where, OK, how am I going to be the best version of myself for kind of, The low hanging fruit? Kind of, I've mastered all of that now at 20 years into the sport. So let's let's go for as good as we can be.
Gary McCoy: [00:52:51] Yeah, it's amazing. Let me ask this, Mate. If there's a 35 year old female runner, who's about to say, you know what, I want to start on this endurance journey, because you've inspired so many people, not only in Canada, but in North America, I think. What advice would you give her?
Malindi Elmore: [00:53:12] Well, there's been some really amazing examples of women taking up running in their mid thirties with children and careers to go on to run really well. And actually, Sinead Diver, who was 10th, started in her mid thirties as well. She's an example. And in triathlon, there's tons of people who came from all disparate backgrounds who then become really top tier athletes. So I think, you know, letting go of some of that fear of not having grown up doing the sport and just opening yourself up to the process and be willing to learn and to work hard, but be smart about it. You don't want to get injured in your first few months of starting. So like seeing it as a long term project, that takes consistency, and that takes, that that balance of hard work, but being smart about it. I mean, I hear a lot of the success stories for sure, but I know how rewarding and how exhilarating it is to be a runner and to do these races and to join the community of runners and the network in and how positively it impacts so many people's lives once they take up the sport of running and start seeing what they can do with it.
Gary McCoy: [00:54:28] Mm hmm. Exactly. It's amazing, like I'll remember in Paris standing under the starting point for that race in 2000, like it's right under the Arc de Triomphe right there. And I went in like, I played some professional baseball and I was a swimmer. And I went into this like looking like I've got game face on. I'm looking at everybody left and right, I'm ready to run. And there was this overwhelming sense of community is like, just cool your jets, pal. Right. Yeah. We're all in this together. We're all going to make you know, our goal is just to get through and pull this off. And that was one thing that I really noticed is that sense of community with with runners. I want to wrap up here. Is there anything you want to to say into our space at this point?
Malindi Elmore: [00:55:15] I'm trying to trying to share my journey as as openly as I can. And I think part of what has inspired me in the last few years is building this connexion and community, amongst other runners, and feeling like my performance matters beyond just myself and vice versa. People's performances inspire me as well and what they're doing. And so as part of that and also the feeling of being really grateful that I've had an opportunity to work with some of the top resources in the world: coaches, sports scientists, had access to really great information. So I've started to put together a series on YouTube called Win or Learn. So the idea that you're, you know, you're striving to be your best, but you're always learning along the way. So that's one way that I'm trying to help other people have access to some of the great resources that I've had access to. So I interview people in a short format, 10 minutes long. So my physiotherapist, my strength and conditioning coach, and then I also just recently started a newsletter that people can sign up for that is maybe a little bit more detail than just your typical Instagram like one paragraph. So people really want to read into, you know, my debrief of my race. I put it up on my on my newsletter. So both those things are accessed through my website, which is just my first name last name, Malindielmore.com.
Gary McCoy: [00:56:46] That's beautiful. Win or Learn is a phenomenal title, because I think I always kind of lay this out. I've done this diagram, I think probably 20 times in the last month looking at an athlete. I always say emotion, the emotional foundation, and then we've got the cognitive side. Yeah, but it all stems from emotion, how we think. And then we go into physical systems, your technical ability, your tactical use of of those skills and in strategic use over a season, a game, what that looks like and how that outcome feeds back into the emotional, kind of, model, right? And and it all comes to fruition and win or you know, it's like I used to use the term, there's no such thing as failure. There's only feedback. Failure is the emotional negative that you wrap that in. Let's make sure that it's feedback. You didn't, there wasn't a loss. This was feedback. And we're going to use that feedback to construct. And quite often I think we do a better job of dissecting failure to understand why than we do of dissecting winning half the time., right? It's like you just end up in that head space that enables that dissection. But I think emotionally wrapping this correctly is something that I think is, that's that's significant and should not be, you can't underline that any any more. And I think that title is just absolutely perfect.
Malindi Elmore: [00:58:08] Awesome, thanks!
Gary McCoy: [00:58:09] Beautiful. Well, Malindi, thank you so much for this time. I know we're at time and like I could talk to you all day about this just to you know, it's like it's just getting inside of the, we have to, right? And it's like trying to understand the operating system on our computers, right? I like to understand your operating system, because I think you're operating outside of what would be considered traditional framework or outside of traditional expectation as a 41 year old mother of two and an athlete that has inspired so many people. I mean, I can't tell you, the announcement that you were going to be involved with us at Kinetyx Mate. Yeah, we had to get massage therapists into, you know, work on the cheeks from everybody. Smile was incredible. So I'm like, oh, you you got a lot of fans inside of our company, that's for sure.
Malindi Elmore: [00:59:02] Awesome, thanks. Yeah, no, I'm really excited, too, about seeing what's what's what's going to happen over the next two years. I mean, it's a really it's an amazing idea with so many applications. And absolutely the team already, I can tell, has has so many strengths. And yeah, I'm looking forward to get my hands right into things and helping out as best I can.
Gary McCoy: [00:59:28] Well, I can't wait till we've got this product that we can ship over to you and that you'll have some in your hands and play with and give it a feel. I mean, the things that we've got some we're our own worst enemy because we like we don't want the perfect product out in the market, because that's impossible, because we'll keep chasing it down, right. But we want something that is scientifically accurate and credible relative to the data that's coming off it because someone like you has to transact on that data and make decisions around it that, ah, that could be game changing decisions. So we're really holding that bar. Durability is the other thing, right, when you're putting anything in a shoe it's like running on a laptop, right? All of a sudden, we've got this we've got this kind of rigid flex kind of oxymoron kind of thing going on relative to hardware. And I, I look around the room sometimes and I go: Someone once said to me, if you look around the room and you're the smartest person in the room, get out of the room. I look around this room, I'm going to be here for years because the intelligence that's in the room somewhere, it is stunning, is just absolutely stunning. So we think we've got the right people in the right seats to solve a problem that has been unsolvable for many companies. But you're, like not doing this in an ivory tower is also part of that culture. And I think that's something we're going to lean into you for as well, is your insight and your feeling. And don't hold back. We will take, we'll take every criticism under the sun. But we want this to be a tool that you can use to, to level up your next run and for you, you know, who you're coaching as well. And we also think that there's a massive part of community that could digitally be enmeshed with and through this product. So Mate, I think it's an exciting time to be here. And I look, you are an absolutely bullseye for this company relative to being engaged with us. So I can't thank you enough. And I'm just looking forward to talking to you more Mate.
Malindi Elmore: [01:01:25] Likewise. Awesome. Well, yeah, let's get it going.
Gary McCoy: [01:01:29] Awesome. Thank you for joining us on the Human Kinesomic Project podcast. Hey, find out more about Malindi Elmore at malindielmore.com and look for her series of spectacular videos on Win or Learn. Team, the game is just beginning.
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