Ep. 27 Vertical Kilometre Challenge. With James Stewart and Brian Clements

The opportunity to listen to a coach and one of their runners talk about a common subject is something I’m enjoying immensely so far. It’s fun to hear from both sides and this week’s podcast features this dynamic as Couch to Summit coach James Stewart joins us along with one of his runners, Brian Clements. James and Brian are chatting all about their Bremners Winter Vancouver Vertical Kilometre Series taking place on the North Shore of Vancouver, BC. The winter series is virtual (though the pair chat about some exciting news for the next summer series) and they have 5 courses (with 15 segments) ready to go. Runners competing on those 5 courses aren’t just competing for the fastest climb either as they made sure the series was more interesting than that. As a coach, James wanted to make sure all of his runners felt as though they were a part of the series:

“Brian's an incredible athlete, but he's not ever going to be setting the fastest times. But he's more than capable of doing like 50 or more VK's over a four month stretch, no problem. So I guess I was thinking about how do I reward someone like Brian and keep them interested in the series. So with the power ranking format we have, it's just the way that we reward people who put the most effort into the series and we give them rewards and challenges to aim for and that has actually spurned forward some really epic feats of endurance…”

Learn more about the series and register

Check out James and his coaching

Follow Brian on Strava

It was awesome to get to hear a bit about both of these passionate trail runners and how excited they are for this winter challenge. Are you going to sign up? Are there VK challenges where you run? Let us know!

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With Twitter doing it’s thing I’ve started a Discord channel. I’m hoping to maybe get some live chats and such going when a few more people sign up. You know, actually use it the way people do! So if that’s something you’re interested in, head on over and check it out. It’s also got a chat feature so that we can type to each other just like any other old school chat :)

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Music by REDproductions from Pixabay.

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