How Coach James McKirdy is Bringing the Pro Treatment to Everyday Runners

Guest [00:00:01]: But the idea is to how do we provide this concept to everybody so they get a chance to experience what it means to have personal support, to be able to be on course, to have cheering sections where their family can be around or the coaches can be there to support them, where it can be a safe environment where if they don't feel well, they can step off course and they're never more than a mile and a half or so away from the finish.

Cory Nagler [00:00:26]: We know most of you listening aren't elite athletes, but you work really hard and you deserve to get the best shot possible at your running goals. My guest today, James McCurdy, really believes in helping athletes achieve their personal best. And that's why he started the McCurdy Micro Race Series. These are small races of no more than 300 people that offer elite style treatment with personal bottle service and pacing. These might sound like small things, but it gives a pretty rare opportunity to make your fueling easier. No need for carrying around tons of jowls or worrying about when the next aid station will be. It's about helping everyday runners to chase their potential. I think that it's such a cool concept and I really hope that you enjoy my conversation with James on today's show.

Cory Nagler [00:01:17]: Hello, runners, and welcome to the Run to the Top podcast where our goal is making you a better runner with each and every episode. I'm your showrunner, Courtney Nagler, and I'm not an elite runner, but together we'll explore new strategies and topics to take your running to the next level. This podcast is created and produced by the expert team ofcoaches@runnersconnect.net where you can find the best running information on the Internet as well as training plans to fit every runner and every budget. All right, I'm super excited to have with me James McCurdy, who's put together what I think is a super exciting race series bringing together the elite treatment to everyday runners. James, thanks so much for joining me on Run to the Top.

Guest [00:01:56]: Yeah, no, I really appreciate the time, Corey. It's. It's an honor to be here and I'm excited to talk about what we've been working on.

Cory Nagler [00:02:04]: Yeah, so I know. Take me back a little bit to the genesis of McCurdy Train, because I think this race series is a little bit newer, but you've been coaching for quite a while.

Guest [00:02:13]: Yeah, gosh, we. We've been around now as a service for nine and a half years, actually. I started the business really small when I lived back in Connecticut. I had about 10 athletes back in January of 2016, and it just kind of grew naturally. A friend of mine was looking to get into coaching, and we lived in the same town. So rather than having competing coaching services, I said, well, why don't we work together? And so I brought on Michelle as a coach that worked for the McCurdy Training Service. And then another coach came on board, and then another. And by the end of the first year, we had nine coaches and about 150 athletes kind of in that northeastern U.S.

Guest [00:03:03]: region. But those branches just grew naturally. And now we have 25, 26 coaches around the country, and we service about 750 or so athletes around the world.

Cory Nagler [00:03:17]: We were just talking about this before the show, how you used to live.

Cory Nagler [00:03:19]: Up in Connecticut, but now you moved to Flagstaff.

Cory Nagler [00:03:21]: So at what point in all of this did you decide to ditch the.

Cory Nagler [00:03:24]: Connecticut winters and come someplace at altitude and much warmer?

Guest [00:03:28]: So I visited Flagstaff for the first time in July of 2015. It was for a running vacation. It was kind of a running camp, so to speak, through a company called the Run Smart Project. And I was actually a paying client. I had a coach, and through a service that was similar to McCurdy, trained well before that, we started the service. And I just. I fell in love with the forest and the trees, the weather. Maybe a little bit idealistic.

Guest [00:03:55]: Like you go away on vacation, right, and you're three days in, and all of a sudden you find yourself looking on Zillow or whatever housing application. Oh, I wonder what it's like to live out here. And I really did truly enjoy my time in Flagstaff. And I wanted to. I wanted to go back. And then I got to a point where about a year and a half into the business, my girlfriend, who's now my wife, we decided that we were going to take a two week vacation in Flagstaff and just spend some time in a place that I really loved. And I wanted to show her the trails and the atmosphere. And towards the end of that trip, I caught her doing the same thing where she was looking on her phone and looking at the housing costs and all of that.

Guest [00:04:41]: And she worked from home as an engineer. I worked from home coaching. And so we decided that we were going to not tell anybody, but go back to Flagstaff for about three more weeks and see if we liked the environment. And so we essentially spent five out of eight weeks in Flagstaff in an eight week period. And we loved it. And we said, you know what? We're renting right now. Let's finish our lease and come January, we're going to move in Flagstaff and live in Flagstaff. And we tested the waters for about a year and a half before we decided that we were going to buy our home.

Cory Nagler [00:05:20]: Alright, so as somebody who's Canadian and has zero idea about real estate up in Flagstaff, is it actually affordable, More.

Cory Nagler [00:05:27]: Expensive, less expensive than Connecticut?

Guest [00:05:30]: It was very affordable. I actually talk about this on my Facebook, my personal Facebook all the time. Flagstaff was very affordable. I shouldn't say very. It was relatively affordable in 2016, 2017, all the way through 2019 into 2020. Then when Covid hit, we saw like, the interest rates come down a little bit, but the housing market started to rise quite a bit. And all of a sudden, especially in my neighborhood where I live in town, like the big businesses were buying up the homes for Airbnb and for rentals, and so they just come in and, and buy the houses cash. And then all of a sudden there's limited housing available because there's so much rental going on.

Guest [00:06:18]: So now all of a sudden that's raising the rates and raising the prices of all the homes because they're being bought for cash. And there was a bidding war. So housing costs have gone up by about 75% in value from 2019 to current six years later. 2025. Yeah.

Cory Nagler [00:06:42]: Yeah. That's a steep price.

Cory Nagler [00:06:43]: And I'm assuming that a lot of the people who are occupying these Airbnb, there's probably a lot of rudders coming.

Cory Nagler [00:06:49]: Up for training camps, I would imagine.

Guest [00:06:50]: Oh, I mean, all types. This is a tourist town. We're 90 minutes away from the Grand Canyon. We're 20 minutes away from what I call mini Grand Canyon, which is Walnut Canyon national park, which is a fantastic place to visit. You know, we're 45 minutes away from Sedona. There's a lot of trails to run on, to hike on, to cycle on. There's a lot of camping here. We're surrounded by national forests.

Guest [00:07:16]: Ponderosa Pines is. The Coconino National Forest is the largest ponderosa pine forest in the world. And so we're kind of an isolated community. We're about 85, 90,000 strong, but there is a lot of tourism that comes through.

Cory Nagler [00:07:31]: Very cool. All right.

Cory Nagler [00:07:32]: I realize we've gone on a long.

Cory Nagler [00:07:33]: Tangent about Flagstaff real estate, so I'll.

Cory Nagler [00:07:35]: Bring it back a little bit.

Cory Nagler [00:07:37]: Uh, we're talking about how you, you.

Cory Nagler [00:07:39]: Grew your coaching business, you moved to.

Cory Nagler [00:07:41]: Flagstaff at one point, did you start getting into to races and actually organizing them yourself.

Guest [00:07:47]: So it actually came because of COVID there was nothing happening. So all of the, the races from 5K to marathon ultras, everything was shut down. And we were trying to come up with reasonable concepts for athletes to participate in to give them some hope, some, some vision of success. We didn't necessarily want everybody to be training for a marathon unsupported because nothing was really existing. Everything was shut down, even for professionals. So we came up with the McCurdy Miles series. And this was a virtual eight week four event series where everybody would just run a mile as fast as they could and they'd be, oh, it was a free series and they'd be eligible to win some prizes with some partners that we brought in. I thought it was actually pretty successful and it was global.

Guest [00:08:37]: We had athletes from all over the world that were participating and that struck and it hit well, and then we made it a 5k 10k series over the next fall or that following fall of 2020. But then one of my athletes, actually two of my athletes participated in the marathon project, which was at a fantastic event by Ben Rosario and Josh Cox. They hosted this professional level race. There was another one of my athletes that participated in a half marathon that the Hanson's Brooks team put together in Michigan. And they put a few professional level events. But nothing was really existing for anybody outside of these small professional events. And nobody knew what the pandemic was going to do. Nobody really understood because how could you, right? Like, you know the decisions that people were making and whether you agree or disagree, like we were all just trying to do the best we could.

Guest [00:09:37]: And once we knew that races weren't coming back yet in early of 2021, we decided that we were going to host these small micro marathons from 1520 people all the way up to 125 around the country. So we came up with the McCurdy micro marathons. In the spring of 2021, we hosted two at Rockland Lake State park, which is just north of New York City. We hosted one in Onondaga Lake park in upstate New York, like way upstate New York. We hosted one in South Carolina and one in Texas. And then we had the bigger one in Grand Rapids, Michigan where we were allowed to bring in 125 people. That was within the COVID protocols of Michigan at the time. And the idea behind these races was we knew races were going to come back, but we didn't know what the BQ standard was going to be or what they were going to accept and not accept.

Guest [00:10:38]: So let's put on Some marathons that would allow people to qualify for Boston. You know, we, yeah, we wanted to make some money, but the reality is once you put all that time in and the race fees and the expenses and the license, all this stuff especially then the insurances then were kind of insane. It wasn't about making money. It was more just how can we provide something and also give us something to look forward to. And they were wildly successful for what they were. And even though they were incredibly small, not incredibly profitable, but they were, they were good events and it helped people. And one of those races put forth an athlete that was a 223 marathoner not associated with us, who lowered his personal best from 223 down to 2:16:51. And that was at the Rockland Lake State park course.

Guest [00:11:36]: The second race we did. And we're like, whoa, wait a minute, I didn't realize this course could be that fast, you know, so we had this idea, okay, you know, this is, this is something that maybe could exist in the future. We proved that we could host these events. But in 2023, when the US Olympic trials was, was coming around or the finality of qualifying for the trials was coming around, I was actively reaching out to races in existence to see if they could provide more support for more, more people in terms of bottle support. But the reality is that these races are limited. They can't supply that one on one care because they have a limited budget. It's not the design of the race. Especially a race like grandma's who does a fantastic job.

Guest [00:12:25]: It's not like they can put 40 tables out every 5k. That's not going to happen. It's a point to point race. They'd have 320 tables. It just doesn't make sense. Once we realized that some races just structurally could not do what we were hoping that they might try to do or just didn't want to, we said, you know what, F it, sorry, I'm Irish. It's going to happen. We're just going to do it ourselves.

Guest [00:12:53]: So we came up with the OTQ race, the on the cusp marathon in 2023 as an extension of what we already knew was successful from 2021. And that was great. That was an international race. We had Callie hogarth thackeray run 220, 211 on our course there. We had a national record set with the U.S. virgin Islands. We had I think 44 athletes run under the U.S. olympic trial standard.

Guest [00:13:23]: So it was, it was a really really successful environment, even though it still had this small feel to it.

Cory Nagler [00:13:31]: And one of the things I noticed that your races seem to do very differently from other races offering similar services, as limited as they are, is you seem to really offer something for a wide variety of athletes. Like the marathon project was such a cool idea, especially in Covid, to try to get together a bunch of people and run fast times. But it was really geared to those faster athletes, those OTQs where you seem to be doing something for those high level lead athletes, but then also for your everyday runners and those trying to break four hours or we're more middle of the pack. So did you come out wanting to appeal to everyone or did you initially think you were going to go after one end of the spectrum or the other?

Guest [00:14:11]: It's a really good question. You know, the entire purpose of our service is professional level care, regardless of the ability. I've got some wonderful athletes in terms of professional level. Our top athletes athlete currently is Tebelo Ramagona from Lesotho who is seventh at the Olympics and that's an amazing accomplishment. He's set multiple national records over the last few years and I'm incredibly proud of him. He's a close friend of mine and I'm honored to be working with him. But I've also got Tom Zukowski, who I've been coaching for many years, who lives in Connecticut. He's a newsman, a cameraman for a news station, a local station.

Guest [00:14:50]: And one of the ideas was for him to. He actually ran the New York City Marathon last year for the first time ever. He finished without having to walk. And like that was, that was really cool. Like he was crying. He was. I mean, I'm putting him on the spot here. I hope, I hope he listens.

Guest [00:15:09]: I'm calling you out, Tom. He was just so happy for his experience. I've got Leslie Piercey, who is 67 years old. You know, she just ran almost a 21 minute progression from a marathon she ran when she was 65. You know, actually, no, now she's 68, so. And she just ran 337. You know, Federico, who lives in Puerto Rico, he's coming out of cancer and he finished the Boston Marathon in 5 hours and 47 minutes. And I was there at the finish line and I got to hang his medal on him for his six star.

Guest [00:15:46]: You know, like the idea behind coaching, you know, there are, there are some visions of this concept where there are some coaches and this is what they want to do. They want to serve X And that's. And they just want to stay inside of that. Our vision, our concept of service is how can we provide the same level of care to the best we can to all levels of ability? And that has bled into the marathon. The hard part about the marathon when we're hosting these events is we can't serve everybody at the same event. The nature of these events, it becomes a safety issue. You know, we can't have somebody running 209 on a three mile looped course, which we did, who's also running alongside four and a half hour marathoners because they're going to be lapping them. It can be very unsafe.

Guest [00:16:38]: So these events, even though we've hosted some professional level, we just hosted a breaking three as well, which is wildly successful, and we're hosting a breaking four. We're trying to keep these events themselves contained to the level of athlete that it's meant for. But the idea is to, how do we, how do we provide this concept to everybody so they get a chance to experience what it means to have personal support, to be able to be on course, to have cheering sections where their family can, can be around, other coaches can be there to support them, where it can be a safe environment where if they don't feel well, they can step off course and they're never more than a mile and a half or so away from the finish. You know, they don't need to be 20 miles away and find out like, oh gosh, this isn't my day. Oh, it's okay. You can come off course, you can save your energy, you can make another attempt six weeks from now or whatever it might be. You know, professionals get that care and we want to provide that idea of service to any level. We just have to keep it contained.

Guest [00:17:43]: So our next event is breaking four and we're getting, oh, like, I want to try to run 3:10, like yeah, you're absolutely welcome. But we're going to focus on the four hour, folks. We're going to focus on just these athletes because this is who we want to highlight in this event.

Cory Nagler [00:17:58]: Yeah, and I think super exciting to see that kind of treatment make its way into, you know, runners trying to run sub four hours. I think we've kind of danced around this a little bit in terms of what it means to give all these special services to athletes to help them PR and get some of that elite treatment. But can we go a little bit more into what it is you're actually doing? Because I think it's pretty unique compared to what you would usually experience in a maybe big city race or even more of a small local one.

Guest [00:18:25]: Yeah. So having the experience of working with many top level runners, One of the things that marathons will provide for all the world majors, championship events, Olympic trial events, global championship events, is that these runners, these athletes will get personalized bottle service essentially every 5K. And at their speeds, this is going to be anywhere from 14 to 17 minutes, male to female, right? That's what they're getting. They're getting a chance to take in their own personal fluids, their own hydration, their own caloric needs every 14 to 7, 17 minutes or so. That's not something that a race can provide for every single runner out there, but it is absolutely pivotal to performance in a marathon. If you're running as hard as you can over 26.2 miles, you're going to be depleted. You need more than just the 2 ounces of liquid that, that a race will provide off the side of the street, right? You need more than just the three gels that they're hopefully being able to provide to the 40,000 people that are running in Chicago. Right? Like, I mean, think about that, right? Like three gel stations, maybe four, each person grabs one, that's 120,000 to 160,000 gels that they have to prepare.

Guest [00:19:52]: That's they can't provide eight opportunities for you to grab your calories. These events that we're hosting are focused on the performance side of things, Giving the athletes the opportunity to drink as much fluid as they decide that they want to drink by providing personalized bottles every three miles or so, to have the opportunity to have the appropriate amount of calories. I mean, doing this for as long as we've been doing it, the amount of conversations that we've had to talk people into, the concept of just taking more calories, taking more fuel per hour than just one gel. It's like, oh, wait, you want me to do what? Like one of the calls when we had breaking three, I was hosting zoom calls for the athletes so they can, they can have an understanding, a real feel of what it means to be a professional. But they've never experienced this before. So we had to walk them through what it meant to practice with their nutrition, what we wanted them to be doing and why we wanted them to be doing this. So when it came to race day, they had been practicing this, these concepts for eight to 10 weeks. It wasn't foreign to them.

Guest [00:21:15]: All right? So they knew what it meant to take fuel along the way, you know, so we're we're, we're trying to teach them along the way what it means to really go through this experience so they, when it does come to race day, they have the best experience. Experience.

Cory Nagler [00:21:29]: Yeah. Be curious on these races. Are, are most of the participants your own athletes or do you get a lot of external ones?

Guest [00:21:36]: No, no, no. It's, it's mostly not our own people. Right. It's mostly global. We have neighboring coaching services from across the country, across North America that are, that are sending their people into, into the races. This isn't, it's not just, I mean, of course, are we going to get some, some athletes that, that are interested in our coaching services because of, of the treatment from the race? Absolutely. You know, if they're not led and they, they have an interest, of course we're going to have that conversation if they want. But now this is about helping as many people as we can.

Guest [00:22:10]: So our friends over at Bat City Track Club. Jeff Cunningham is the head coach of Bat City Track Club. He has sent multitudes of his athletes to our races because he knows that we're going to take care of them. Railroad athletics, same concept. Even Molly Huddle and her husband Kurt, they sent a few of their athletes into our Road to Tokyo event so they can have the best treatment possible. Now the idea is, of course we want to grow, but we want to help as many people as possible. That's how these athletes find the best, have the best chance of success.

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Cory Nagler [00:25:51]: Yeah, and it must be tough. I would imagine that balance between wanting to help more athletes but also keep it personalized. And as you said, it's difficult to serve a really broad audience. So how do you try to walk that line as you're organizing these events?

Guest [00:26:07]: So this coming event Breaking four, it's going to be in October and we're going to go back to where we had our largest event in 2021 and so we can manage a few more people. So we have a maximum capacity of 300. Sami McClintock is going to be one of the co race directors. My wife is the other and I'm kind of on the back end helping and making sure everything's organized and for the things that because I've had a little bit more hands on experience at some of the races. But the focus is we know what we can't do. We cannot serve a thousand people. Right. That.

Guest [00:26:43]: We know that, but we know that we can serve more than 50. Right. So there's got to be somewhere in between that we can. We can have this maximum capacity of athletes, of athlete load and still provide the highest level of service. And depending on the location of where we're going to be, that's going to be somewhere between 200 and 300 athletes. And we feel really comfortable at that level knowing that if we were to go to four or five hundred people, it just wouldn't work. It doesn't make any sense. It honestly just becomes a money grab.

Guest [00:27:15]: And that's. We're not trying to do that. We're trying to. I mean, that's why our price point is the way it is and has been steady and structured that way. But in order to serve, to have the most chance of success, we need to make sure that we're keeping things contained.

Cory Nagler [00:27:33]: And if you don't mind my asking, what is the price point? Because I know with the marathon project, one of the things that jumped out was the price point. 750 US, I believe, for their latest.

Guest [00:27:42]: Edition, which since given the service, I think it's 500.

Cory Nagler [00:27:46]: Was it 500? Okay.

Guest [00:27:47]: Yeah, 500 for the gold Wave. Now their event is a different location, and it's a little bit more spread out, so they have a little bit more range of service. They have more people involved in their concept. We are a small organization where we have, you know, four or five people managing this. This concept. So marathon project, they have more concepts around and they. They're partnering with a specific location, a casino where they have services available to them that we just don't have. But we're.

Guest [00:28:26]: We found success in the way that we're managing it, and it's in its being done in a way that we feel the most comfortable. So our price point in the past it's been $150. And so I think what we're doing with the upcoming price point is 150 in the opening and then 175 for a period of time, and then one, I think it's 199 for like the final six weeks or so.

Cory Nagler [00:28:54]: And I'll say my first reaction is that that's shockingly low to me. It's pretty hard to find many marathons below 100, $120 even locally without those kind of treatments.

Guest [00:29:05]: Yeah. And that's okay, right? Like, you can't run a business like, you know, race directing is a business. Right. And people have a livelihood doing this. So they're not doing it for charity. I mean, they're doing it because of the love of it. But they still have to live, they still have people to pay. They have responsibilities.

Guest [00:29:26]: So they have to charge whatever they need to charge based off of needs and expenses and things like that. We are choosing locations where we don't have to shut down roads, where we don't have to have a police presence, where things are a little bit more contained. And that automatically that, that keeps things a lot lower.

Cory Nagler [00:29:45]: Is that part of the reason you choose looped courses or is that more to do with the structure of how you spread out the bottles?

Guest [00:29:52]: It's definitely a part of the discussion of why we choose where we choose. Like we're not doing this in an inner city of a three loop. We'd have to shut down streets. We can't afford that. We would have to charge 4, 5, $600 and bring in a thousand people. We just can't afford that. It doesn't make sense for the nature of what it is we're doing. So this concept really only works in a three to four, maybe up to five mile enclosed area, maybe up to five.

Guest [00:30:27]: But I really think three to four miles makes the most sense because that's where things are contained. They're a little safer, they're protected, the athletes have protection. And we're not worried about oncoming cars and things like that either.

Cory Nagler [00:30:42]: Yeah. And as you're organizing these events, is your goal to try to get any of these types of features distilled into the mainstream or do you think that they'll always stay a little bit more niche? And one example of that is something like tangent lines, for example, that you're doing is maybe a little bit more, a little bit easier to accommodate in a bigger race than say, personalized bottle service?

Guest [00:31:04]: Actually, I would disagree with that. Okay. I imagine. Have you run any major city marathons?

Cory Nagler [00:31:13]: Yeah, I mean, probably the biggest marathon I've done would be Boston is the only, the only major I've done. But yeah, I can start to envision tangent lines. How? It could be difficult.

Guest [00:31:22]: It would be very difficult. Right. Because you're not just in a, in a confined area. In Boston specifically, you're going through many different towns and cities. Right. Or different streets, different codes, different insurances, things like that. Now you have this line that's cutting through the streets. That's, that's, that's, that's on one way traffic.

Guest [00:31:43]: That's on opposite sides of the road, all of these things. Right. So a race like Boston or Grandma's, London, Chicago, they're never going to have a true tangent line because it's going to, especially right after the race is done. All of a sudden you have all these conflicting lines for what the road actually is. Right. So it's going to mess up drivers. I think it might actually be pretty unsafe and risky for the population that comes to that follows. In a race like ours, I'm actually the person that is physically drawing the line.

Guest [00:32:26]: So I'm the one who, I'm not hiring somebody else for it. I'm the one who's literally walking the course and physically doing the line to make sure it is what we say it's going to be. So I don't think races can really. They might have a blue line that will mark the course, but is it truly tangent line? Are they being obsessive over that small of a detail? I don't know. You know, I just don't see that happening too often. And some people say, well, what difference does it make for a four hour marathon if you're running an extra 400 meters because you're weaving in and out, that's 2 minutes and 17 seconds. That's the. If you run 401 but run 26.45 miles versus 26.2, you didn't break four because of tangents.

Guest [00:33:15]: And some of that might be GPS error and all that kind of stuff, but the reality is when you're in a big city race and you have to weave around all these people, you're not going to be able to run the shortest distance possible. When we're talking about breaking barriers and finding the best way to have the absolute shortest distance you can, a race like this is one of the only opportunities you're going to have.

Cory Nagler [00:33:39]: Yeah. And I think a lot of runners tend to just focus on getting in your speed workouts, focusing on mileage and maybe not paying so much attention to, you know, you're fueling, you're running the tangents, you're even pacing. But those things make a big difference. Are those something that you distill a lot in your own athletes?

Guest [00:33:55]: I try, I think we try. I think any coach tries nutrition. Absolutely. You know, pre run, during the run, post run, making sure that those healthy concepts are in play. Tangents can be a little bit more of a challenge because especially when you're training early morning, you're not always on the able to cross the streets that way. So maybe you're at a park where that's going to be something that you can focus on. But definitely nutrition. That's a big piece of what I believe is a successful part of performance, especially in the marathon, but certainly all the way down to a mile.

Guest [00:34:36]: You know, eating well, understanding what you need to do to be well fed, to do the work that you're, you're trying to do.

Cory Nagler [00:34:44]: And is there anything else beyond just getting faster that you think athletes can do in their training to, to try to achieve that personal best they might have been chasing for a while?

Guest [00:34:53]: Yeah, I mean, I talk about the, what I, what I would consider the most important aspects of training that isn't training is sleep, hydration and nutrition. What I found, especially over the past few years, my wife really put me onto the concept of electrolyte consumption because we, I used to not truly understand this. And we're always trying to grow, we're always trying to learn. And one of the things that she taught me was not everybody. Just because you're sweating a lot doesn't mean you're losing the same amount of electrolytes. You can be a low volume loss of sweat, but your electrolyte loss can be really high. But just because you sweat a lot of volume of liquid doesn't mean you're losing that much electrolyte. Everybody's body is different.

Guest [00:35:37]: Their, their concentration of sweat loss is different. So in these events that we're doing, we're talking to them about their own electrolyte needs. They have the capacity to be able to put in what they want in their bottles. Not just a little bit of Gatorade, but what, you know, let's learn what it is you need. Are you a really sweaty and salty runner? What can you put in your bottles? For my professional team and a lot of my athletes, I'm prescribing precision fuel and hydration. They have quality electrolytes and different levels of electrolytes along with the, the gels that I haven't had any issues with at any level of runner. So we're working with our athletes on that aspect. And then the concept of daily nutrition, you know, like, so we have sleep, we have hydration, we have daily nutrition.

Guest [00:36:34]: Are you eating every three to four hours? Are you putting something in your body? I'd rather see a Snickers bar come in rather than nothing at all, you know. So, like, let's make sure that we're making good choices. Let's get the food in, then we can work on the quality of food as we go. And I think if we can focus on those aspects of living, then let's. Then that will parlay into development of training as well.

Cory Nagler [00:36:59]: Yeah. And, you know, I think a lot of these things are easy to totally lose track of because they feel like those 1 percenters, but they really add up. If you had an athlete just to play devil's advocate, you said, you know, what does it matter at the end of the day? You know, if you, if you put in the workouts, you're probably going to run faster. What, what would you say is why it's so important to focus on these other things?

Guest [00:37:22]: Depends on the vision of the person. You know, if we break it down to these events, breaking four, for example, there might be some athletes who have a vision of just completion, and that's what they want. They want to complete. Their. Their talent level is pretty high. Maybe they are talented enough to run 3 hours and 15 minutes, but their vision is, is to finish the race. And when you have a vision of completion, your window of tolerance might be pretty big. But as you focus on your personal performance capacity, that window of tolerance of being outside of the scope, I believe, can start to shrink.

Guest [00:38:04]: And so as you want to become faster or stronger or more capable, I think some of those aspects start to play a bigger role. So it might be a 1%er for some people, but it might be a 50 percenter for others. You absolutely can't mess this up. You have to make sure that you're eating every three to four hours. You have to make sure you're sleeping well. You have to make sure you're hydrating. It's not a 1 percenter anymore. That's imperative.

Guest [00:38:33]: That's just as important as the training versus somebody else, where their window of tolerance might be bigger because their vision of what it is they're trying to accomplish is very different, and that's okay.

Cory Nagler [00:38:45]: And who are those types of athletes that you're trying to get after in these events? If there's kind of a very specific athlete where this matters most to, who is that athlete?

Guest [00:38:55]: Honestly, I don't know. Like, that's a really good question, because for my athlete, Leslie, who's 68, who just ran 337, man, she's focused on every aspect that she can be. She runs four days a week, five days a week, she walks and she swims on the other days. But she is so dialed in, and she did everything possible to run a 337. My athlete, Mike Wardian, who lives out in England, he did everything possible. He's 75 years old. He ran 324. He's fantastic.

Guest [00:39:24]: I've got a few other athletes that can run three or four days a week and they're maybe even in the same age bracket. And their focus is something completely different, regardless of how fast they are. So it's not what type of athlete, how, how quick are they, it's where are they relative, you know, what are they running relative to their ceiling? And I don't know, you know, like, I don't know what, what people's full potential is. I'd like to find out individually. I'd like to really find out what people can accomplish as an individual. And let's find, let's, let's understand where we are right now. What is the current reality? And let's see what we can do in the next five, six, seven months. Let's see where we can go over the next two years.

Guest [00:40:12]: I don't know, like, I've worked with some athletes on a professional level that don't take it nearly as seriously as Leslie, who's 60 years old, who just ran 337.

Cory Nagler [00:40:24]: Yeah, I find it really fascinating, the whole curve of both, like, what is your absolute speed, you know, how quick do you run the marathon, but also how close are you to your own potential? And I think there's some parallels in terms of what you're trying to do and these extra services that are ultimately going to make you faster. Between the super shoes, I think, you know, we know at this point they make you faster. But there was a lot of debate at first of is it only making the pros faster or is it for everyone? And I think there's some pretty good evidence now, but I think I could see it too, where it'd be interesting to see how much that bottle service, we know it benefits the elites. How much does that translate into the everyday runners? And based on what you're saying, I suspect a lot.

Guest [00:41:02]: Yeah, I think it's massive. Think about a four hour marathoner. They're out there for four hours. Their time at exposure is huge. Their opportunity to lose that much more fluid over a period of time is huge. A warm weather day breaking 3 increased by 17 degrees from the start of the race to when it finished another 45 minutes later. I think the temperature increase would have been a total of 25 degrees. So their exposure to the elements is far longer.

Guest [00:41:36]: So I think it's actually that much more important. Right. Like the wiggle room might not be as great as maybe we first thought to make sure that they're hydrating enough and taking in the caloric needs to make sure they're getting in the right amount of electrolytes. I think it's really important. We saw 83 athletes break three in our most recent race. The guy that won was a 304 marathoner who ran 2:27. That's a 37 minute PR. Now of course he's talented.

Guest [00:42:14]: He didn't just go from 304 to 227 overnight. He worked really hard to be able to accomplish that. But his legitimate prior personal best, I remember texting him, asking him like, did you run anything before this? He's like, no. My old PR was 304. Okay. Like the bottle service absolutely played a role because he was able to get the things he needed to be able to run at the level he was able to run at.

Cory Nagler [00:42:45]: Do you, do you take pride as.

Cory Nagler [00:42:47]: If they're your own accomplishments, these runners, when they finish, even if they're not your own athletes, does it kind of feel like they are?

Guest [00:42:53]: No, I mean I take pride in providing the opportunity. I take pride in providing something. For people. To claim it as my own would be incredibly disingenuous. You know, Jeff Cunningham had had an athlete have to who ran our Road to Tokyo event and HAFTU as an American citizen. He, he went from 217 to 209. And like, yeah, we helped, right? Like we provided a great race, a great environment. But that was between Jeff and have to, you know, like Justin Kent, who's from Canada, who won our event, is now going to the world championships in Tokyo because in part of our event.

Guest [00:43:40]: But that's between him and his coach. You know, it's. I took pride in my own athlete, Andrew, who was in, who was in breaking three and his first marathon and he broke three for the first time. My athlete, Mark, who ran a lifetime personal best of 249, Taran, who was third and 246 in the road to Tokyo event. Like that. I take pride in that. I take pride in the idea of what it is we're doing. But I'm not going to say I don't get excited.

Guest [00:44:09]: Like you should see me at the finish line, man, it's fun. I lose my voice in an instant. It's cheering people on and helping them along the way. Like it's fun to be there. It really is. Like, it's fun to be on a race course. It's fun to be, to be, to be yelling in support of folks. I like that you Know, that's a fun time.

Cory Nagler [00:44:33]: Have you thought about hopping in as a pacer for any of your own races?

Guest [00:44:38]: I can't physically, unfortunately, my. My running days are done. I've had some serious health concerns over the past few years that have just. It's taken it out. Yeah. So I really. In my last. My last focus to pace was my athlete Kara, who's got Ms.

Guest [00:45:04]: I was meant to pace her in the Boston Marathon a few years ago, and I was training to be able to get to a point where I can do that, and I was trying to get healthy enough to do it, and unfortunately, I had some. Some. Some. Some internal health stuff go on that, like, just. It's done. So about the best I can do right now is a run walk, and I'm just slowly getting back into that. I was able to run two miles nonstop over the Boston Marathon weekend, and that was like. I felt really good about myself because that's.

Guest [00:45:37]: That's the most I'd run in almost two years. And I felt really. You know, I felt really proud to be able to do that. I mean, I wish I could get back out there. I wish. I wish I knew now, like, I think we all do, right? Like, man, if I. If I knew all of this stuff 10, 12, 15 years ago, what could have been different? But that's just not my reality. And I wish.

Guest [00:46:04]: I wish things were a little bit different on that end, but I'm a far better coach, I hope so. Than I ever was as an athlete. And I certainly made my mistakes along the way, but I love what I'm doing right now.

Cory Nagler [00:46:20]: Yeah. And it really shows. Yeah. I guess in terms of those items, maybe you wish that you knew in the past. Is there any one or two that really stand out?

Guest [00:46:30]: Yeah. I wish someone told me not to drink coffee right before my debut marathon in Philadelphia in 2013. I wish somebody told me to take more than one gel. I wish somebody told me not to. Not to rely on the clocks on a course because they could be wrong. I wish somebody told me to pack toilet paper because I was on the side of the road. That was a very interesting experience.

Cory Nagler [00:46:59]: Is this all Philly?

Guest [00:47:01]: That was all the same day, man. That was all the same day. I still ran a 238 that day, but it was. It was a very difficult way of running a 238. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I wish. I wish I listened to.

Guest [00:47:22]: To what it really meant to. To run easy, you know, I had no business running in the low sixes for my Easy days per mile, per hour, you know, like, you know, basically 354, four minutes per kilometer. I had no business doing that. You know, I wish I paid attention more to calming, you know, having fun and calming down in my own training and just letting that development happen a little bit more naturally because I used to force things quite a bit. But I'm very thankful for the coaches that I had because I think they were. They were. They too were also learning about the process and how. How they can serve better.

Guest [00:48:08]: I think a lot of the mistakes I made was mistakes as an athlete out of. Out of anxiety and pushing and pressing. And so now I try to try to. There are elements of risk with certain athletes. Like you have, like, hey, we're going to try something different and we're going to own it. If this ends up great, fantastic. But if this doesn't, we're going to learn from this either way. And so having proactive communication and not reactive communication in those respects, I think is something that I'm always working on because it's, you know, we're human.

Guest [00:48:42]: We're not always going to. We're not always going to have the right answers and the right solutions to problems or issues that come up. So, you know, I'm just. There's an old friend of mine, he's in his late 80s now. His name is Barry Allman, and this guy's a legend. And I've talked about him in the past on my social media before, and he's. He didn't break four in the mile, but he was really close. Back in the early 60s and the late 50s, he was really.

Guest [00:49:12]: I think he ran like a 407 mile on gravel. Like, he reached out when I first started my business in basically in March or April of 2016, and he happened to live locally to me, but he was born and raised in Australia. And he said, you know, coaching's an art, and not everybody can be an artist. And I really took that to heart. Like, if I'm going to invest my life into this, I have to be okay. Like, the art is not perfect. There's imperfection between painting and sculpting. There's imperfection in creating training, too.

Guest [00:49:51]: Like, there's no. There's no blueprint. We are not robots with this stuff, and we can provide the best environment possible. But what happens at breaking 4 if it's, you know, 85 degrees and hot and humid? I hope it's not like it's October. It shouldn't be. But, like, life happens and all we can really do is provide the best environment possible and hope for the best that day. Even with training, it's, you know, we try to provide and scope the training that we feel is the safest environment that's going to allow for the most development. I wish, I wish I learned that as an athlete a little bit earlier on, but I'm really glad I was able to learn that as a coach and I'm continuing to learn that as a coach.

Cory Nagler [00:50:35]: Yeah.

Cory Nagler [00:50:36]: And as much as that must have been a really tough race at Philly, at least it's kind of nice, I guess, to pull off the band aid and learn them all at once.

Guest [00:50:42]: Man, it was interesting. Like, I didn't know what I was learning. I didn't know that they were mistakes. I look back now and it's like, wow, 12 years later, holy Lord. Like, I wish I knew, you know, so I didn't realize that there were mistakes. I didn't, you know, like I had to stop to use the bathroom. And then I, when I tried to catch up to the group that I was in, I tried to catch up over the course of three miles versus trying to take my time over the next 10, you know, so I crammed all that missing speed into the first, like, oh man, like I didn't realize I was making, making a mistake until I look back on it. I think that's what mistakes are.

Guest [00:51:21]: Right? Like you don't realize you're doing something until you look back in the hindsight being 20 20. So yeah, it's interesting, you know, I didn't realize how much I was pushing in, in the, in the summer of 2015, which caused me to miss most of my fall of 2015 with Achilles tendonitis. You know, I didn't realize how much damage I was causing. So you look back and say, oh, well, that was stupid. I shouldn't have done that. Like I, I could have, I could have given myself two weeks of rest and I could have had a season. Instead, I missed everything. So those mistakes that I've learned from have allowed me, hopefully they continue to allow me to try to do my best to keep ahead of, of some athlete issues that, that might transpire.

Cory Nagler [00:52:10]: Yeah. And having made that transition from athlete now to full time coach and even race organizer, how does the barometric or the bar for success change? How, how do you evaluate success when it comes to racing in particular? What, what is your future vision for the races and what do you hope they become?

Guest [00:52:30]: The races? We want to be a branch of service for McCurdy. Trained. We want, we want this to be something that is annual. We want this to be something that develops to be something that's positive, to be an opportunity to give to those who wouldn't get this opportunity otherwise. I maybe down the road, like it becomes a big name event and it becomes a, maybe a national championship, I don't know, like that'd be fantastic. But right now we want to live in the space of providing the opportunity for the events focus, whether that's breaking four, breaking three, or potentially going back to the Olympic trials qualifier or the Olympic standard. So we want to continue to have that to be a branch of service and whether that's our own athletes that are, that are signing up, that are registering, registering for it or keeping it global, like breaking three. We had athletes from Scotland, England, Mexico, Canada, obviously the us, Germany.

Guest [00:53:28]: We had athletes from all over the world coming in to run a professional, non professional event. It was awesome. You know, like I'm really proud of the work that we've done. So I want to continue to provide that level of service and just continue to provide this concept of professional level care regardless of the athlete's ability, speed, you know, and I don't want to lose that. I think that's really important. I think, I don't know, like to me, if we can do that, if we can continue to keep that focus, that's a level of success for these events that will permeate and maybe that inspires others to start to do the same, you know, from an individual standpoint, from a coaching standpoint, One of my athletes who I just recently started working with, I had to break her down, start her with rest, like, yeah, you need two, three weeks off, you can't run. And then we're going to start with run walking. And this was a conversation I had with her today.

Guest [00:54:33]: Just an hour and a half, two hours ago, I texted her, I said, you know what? I'm seeing a lot of that felt great. I'm not in pain. I felt like I could continue. That's success for her right now, focusing on the good of what that is. She might not be as fit as she wants to be, but she's not running in pain because what she was doing before was causing a lot of pain. And now we're breaking it down to the most simplest of things to give her a foundation and whether it's run walking, to non stop running, to development of completion of an event, to performance or to the highest level, that, that development I think is for me is how I'm Trying to define my individual coaching success.

Cory Nagler [00:55:20]: Yeah, I think it kind of inspires, honestly, you should copyright that the professional, non professional event because it does kind of capture. It's this idea of, hey, you can really shoot for the stars even if you're not running a two hour marathon or I guess, you know, 2:09,210 for women.

Guest [00:55:34]: Yeah, it's, it's. I hope it's something that catches on. I really do. Because there's a need for it. There's a need for people to feel like the hero of their own story. You know, like imagine being someone who breaks four for the first time and you win the marathon. Like that's remarkable. Maybe they never get a shot to win another marathon ever again.

Guest [00:56:02]: Maybe that's the first race they've ever won in their life. But man, like, I don't know, I feel like that's impactful, that's something that's meaningful for that person for the rest of their life, you know, And I think it's really important. We've had athletes at five and a half, six hours get all the way down to 4:30. We've had athletes at 5:12 get down to 3:05. You know, athletes that are 4:30 come down to breaking three. Like we want to give them the chance to be the hero of their own life.

Cory Nagler [00:56:39]: James, I think you're doing something really cool here and I was glad to have you on after reading about these races. If anyone listening wants to learn more and maybe even sign up for themselves, I guess A is it too late for October? But just in general, where can you sign up?

Guest [00:56:51]: You can go right to McCurdytrain.com and there's a little tab that says McCurdy Micro Races. And there should be a link that puts you right to the run sign up page. So that's right there. You can go to the link in our profile and that will take in our Instagram profile and that will take you right to it as well. Right. So there's, there's plenty of spots available. We're hopeful that it becomes an event that's between 2 and 300. We would love to sell out, but we're not sold out yet.

Guest [00:57:15]: So there's plenty of space and yeah, you can go right there. One of the things that we didn't talk about was we're done. We're going to do a shared prize pool for 10,000American dollars. Anybody who runs under four hours, regardless if you've done it before or not, as many people that break four hours will share the prize pool of $10,000. So there's only five people that do it. They're getting $2,000 each. But if there's a hundred, well, you know, you do the math. And what a $200 each, whatever that is.

Guest [00:57:48]: Right. So I can't do them. I can't do my. The math. Right. I know that's not $200 each, but whatever it might be, yeah, it's close.

Cory Nagler [00:57:56]: To 200 Canadian or in some currency.

Guest [00:57:58]: There we go. Yeah, but we want to treat everybody as equal. And that's the whole vision of this. Like, so it's a small perk, but it's something that's important too, to recognize what this accomplishment really is. The global average, I think for a marathon right now is 4 hours and 32 minutes, the global average. So we want to help people raise their standard of what that average is, you know, and to be able to share that. And the spoils of that, I think is a really cool thing too.

Cory Nagler [00:58:33]: Awesome. And aside from the October one, I read there were some in March. Did those already happen or is that looking ahead to 2026?

Guest [00:58:40]: So March already took place. Yeah, the road to Tokyo and Breaking3 took place. However, we have big plans for the March of 2026, so those are not announced yet. This is the first time we're publicly acknowledging that concept, but we have some, some really big plans for March of 2026. And yeah, I think. I really think that we've got something special and something that might be small, but man, they're impactful.

Cory Nagler [00:59:11]: All right, consider me intrigued.

Guest [00:59:13]: Yeah, thanks for the time, Corey. I really appreciate it.

Cory Nagler [00:59:30]: Thanks for listening to the Run to the Top podcast. I'm the showrunner at Runners Connect, where, as always, our mission is to help you become a better runner with every episode. You can connect with me on Instagram Orinagler or through Strava by searching Corinagler. And please consider connecting with the rest of our team@runnersconnect.net if you're loving the show, you can help us reach more runners by leaving a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcast. Lastly, if you want bonus content, behind the scenes experiences with guests, and premier access to contests and considerations, consider subscribing to our newsletter by going to runnersconnect.net podcast. I'll see you on the next show, but until then, happy running, everyone.