This article is not only for mature and young athletes but for their parents as well.
Without a doubt, Kilian Jornet has been the most influential figure in endurance mountain sports over the past decade. I don’t know anyone that hasn’t been inspired by him at least a bit.
There are videos, and stories, showing Kilian winning a stacked World Cup ski mountaineering race and smashing a field of well-known ultra-runners only few weeks later, despite a five-month long break from running. In between, he is skiing up and down Mont Blanc for breakfast. I mean, how can you not be inspired?
I am a fan but I want to bring attention to couple of points that I think the general athletic public is perhaps not aware. In recent years, I observe many mountain/endurance athletes mimic Kilian’s training and I think, such copying, can likely do more harm than good to us in terms of long-term performance and more importantly health.
Kilian versus Us: Physiology, Training, Recovery, Resources
I am not trying to pick on Kilian here, I am simply using him as an example because he is arguably the most decorated endurance athlete right now and he is a man of extremes. If you are getting inspired by him then that’s all great, and know I am as well, but perhaps keep the following points in mind when increasing your training loads.
Physiology
There is no doubt in my mind that Kilian Jornet is a freak of nature. He regularly dominates elite fields in two different mountain sports – ski mountaineering and running – in events ranging from 20 minutes to 40 hours! He seems to recover crazy fast and is never injured.
This could be due to the fact that the two sports still have long ways to go in terms of competition evolution, or that his physiology is that much better that he might not need to be racing at 100% to achieve many of his wins. Most likely, it is a combination of both.
Whatever the case, I am fairly certain that if Kilian was a road marathon runner, or a professional cyclist, he would be top 10 in New York Marathon, or Tour de France, perhaps even win.
Training
As athletes, we respond differently to different types of training programs but there are some general principles that work quite well universally. We should shape our programs based on the demands of our goal competitions as the best performance gains are made when a training program promotes the desired adaptation effects in a long-term sustainable manner.
The above means that if you want to run ultras then you will need to spend lots of time running long miles, but if your goal are 1-3 hour races then your training needs be quite different – less overall volume, frequent high(er) intensity sessions, etc – to provide you with the most benefits for the time spend.
Kilian Jornet seems to be somewhat spared of these training specificity rules. No matter how many hours of training, combined with unprecedented vertical climbing he does, he is still arguably the fastest when the race is longer than 20 minutes. According to his website, Kilian trains 20-35 hours over 7 days a week, pretty much year round. He averages around 1000 hours and 550,000 vertical metres annually.
For you and me, raising our training volume anywhere close to his levels, even for few weeks, it is very likely to set us on a path of over-training and health issues such as joint problems, muscle imbalances, hormonal and immunity imbalances, and others.
Recovery
Ability to recover well and fast is crucial to successfully improve your performance. Quality and speed of your recovery allows you to do more in training and to have an edge in competition.
Given all of the above, it’s clear that Kilian Jornet’s body must have an exceptional recovery ability. This allows him to train and race more than almost anyone in the world, and all without getting injured! I am not aware of any other athletes that push(ed) their bodies so much, for so many years, and haven’t been sidelined with an overuse injury even for couple of weeks. Will he pay the price later or he is physiologically just so superior?
Resources
With physiology, training, and recovery building on each other, we need to also consider resources when comparing ourselves to Kilian.
If you ever seriously focused on improving your performance, even for a short period of time, then you likely discovered that not enough recovery time and quality easily erodes your efforts. I believe, for most mountain athletes, this ultimately comes down to resources expressed as money and time. Between work, training, and other commitments there simply is not enough time for proper recovery on regular basis, and no money for some quality methods such as massages, physio, etc.
I don’t think Kilian is rich but he certainly has more time – to listen to his body, to take care of it, to relax his mind. He has worked hard to arrange things this way but for most of us this is not possible so it should be taken into consideration when setting up our training plan.
Killian is a full time professional athlete and at any time he isn’t training he is recovering. He also has a great support network – this also fits under the resources umbrella.
Kilian versus Us: Long-term health
Professional athletes get paid with an understanding that they are trading their bodies for money but even they still hope the trade-off won’t have serious consequences.
As amateur athletes, junior racers, or parents, we should consider future consequences a little bit more, especially, given the fact that we don’t have the same recovery resources available to us.
Bottom line
With everything said throughout the article, I don’t want to discourage you from challenging yourself, but I hope I was able to illustrate why you should be thinking of the size and the kind of the impact your training and activities will have on your performances and health. Kilian is using his talent to its full potential, and that is very inspiring, just don’t forget he is a bit special 😉
Stano Faban says
@Adam Agree with everything u said. One distinction – that I comparing him with amature athletes with jobs, juniors, and also trying to talk sense into some parents that think the only way to be good is to copy Kilian. But I think we agree even on that 😉
Adam St.Pierre says
I agree fully that Killian is an incredible athlete, but I still suggest that part of what makes him incredible is the early age at which he started doing long “explorations” in the mountains. Running lots of miles as a child is hypothesized as why Kenyan marathoners are dominant on the world stage (among other factors). I think if more children were raised with high levels of unstructured activity, we may see more incredible athletes like Killian. His biomechanics and pension for remaining uninjured are certainly related to his body type and genetics, but he also learned how to move in the mountains while young, when the body is more adept at creating neuro-motor connections, and also related to the fact that his body has benefitted from his years of endurance “training.” I love this discussion, I just think it’s harmful to put limits on anything. To think that no one should train like Killian is to say that Killian is the best there ever was and the best there ever will be. We must learn from what Killian does and can do, adapt that to our own backgrounds and situations and use that to try to better ourselves as athletes. For most, we can’t train Killian’s volume, but the message I see is that we must gradually build up volume in training, whether measured as hours or vert, in order to compete. It says to me, that long tours in the mountains serve as effective training once in a while and that some high intensity training (and racing) is beneficial to the ski-mo racer. Copying Killian’s numbers is probably not a good plan for most athletes, but copying some elements from successful athletes can be a good way to improve.
Stano Faban says
@Adam Thank you for commenting!
While I agree that 1000h per year is not that unusual for elite endurance athletes I have to point out that no xc skier, even the very best, (or pretty much anyone) ever did 100-200km races or FKT runs so frequently as Kilian did in couple of cases… and not suffer from injuries or over-training.
Pro cyclists must do perhaps even more hours but then the sport is very low impact and lots of that time is cruising in the bunch, running downhill is quite different. Then pro teams also have top class support networks to aid recovery, plus a lot of them get “extra help” as we all know.
But I suspect that Kilian is accumulating more than the claimed 1000h, because if you just add up all of his racing time + FKT efforts then only that must be around 80-100h per year, all accumulated perhaps in less than 40 days. He travels a lot but still this probably leaves him with about 250 days to do things, which we all know he takes advantage of.
Anyways, back to the rest of us 🙂
Small increases in training time over many years are the sustainable way and that is the crux, as you point out. But even then many many athletes with such training base suffer from overuse injuries or health issues at some point.
Stano says
@jcoates Funny comment 🙂 but our mental state is still one of the things under our control 😉
Adam St.Pierre says
Interesting thoughts, thanks for sharing. I agree that copying Kilian’s training is likely inappropriate for most athletes, I don’t think Kilian’s training is that extreme. Elite XC skiers are known to train 1000 or more hours per year, including a variety of activities- running and skiing among them. In order to train 1000 hours per year without getting sick or injured, an athlete must have a base of training to support that load. Kilian started “training” very early with a very active childhood and early adolescence, spending hours running, hiking, climbing, and skiing in the mountains (compare this to an “active” kid in the US who plays soccer 3 times per week for 1 hour). This enabled Kilian to start racing at a high level in ski-mo and ultras at a relatively young age, an age when most people are just “discovering” the sports. But he had already accumulated a huge training base before he started. If you start training for ski-mo/ultra at 20 years old, it’ll take years to gradually build up the base required to tolerate and sustain volume like Kilian. Maybe by the time you are 30 you’ll be able to regularly train 1000 hours per year, with the vert and mileage that Kilian does. Maybe then you’ll see levels of success close to his. But most athletes do not take a gradual approach and instead will jump in and try to copy Kilian’s current training without anything remotely close to his base. This leads to overtraining, burn out, injury, etc.
Pablo Nogue says
this is Word!
Kilian is a very special one and only.
A one in a millino guy and we need to understand this.
I also agree with JCoates comment.
Nice article
JCoates says
Don’t forget that trying to mimic Kilian will likely lead to poor MENTAL health as well. When you realize that no matter how hard you train it will still take you 2-3 days to do the same ski traverse in the alps that he does in 5-6 hrs you will have your self-esteem crushed and you will likely fall into a deep, dark well of insecurity and depression that only beer and TGR videos can pull you out of. I believe that all Kilian videos should have a warning from the surgeon general.