Matty Abel Running Academy

Feeling very grateful.

Not just after a huge week of running, but for what’s been a pretty big year so far.

It’s been over a decade of putting in the reps to now work with brands I’ve always dreamed of working with, take on projects that challenge me daily, and coach runners I genuinely love working with.

None of it happened overnight. Just a lot of years of showing up, learning, making mistakes and continuing to put the work in.

Plenty still to do.

One final push for 2026. Let’s go 🚀

You've done it a hundred times. Session gets hard, race gets hard, and something in you looks for the exit. You back off, cut it short, tell yourself today's not the day. You've decided that means you're not tough enough. It doesn't. It means you've never practised staying in that feeling long enough to find out what happens next.

Here's the physiology. The moment you push the pace, your energy demand spikes in seconds, but your heart, lungs and blood vessels take one to three minutes to catch up. That gap is called the oxygen deficit. While your aerobic system ramps up, your body plugs it with anaerobic metabolism, and the byproduct is the brutal, disproportionate effort you feel in that opening stretch. Once oxygen uptake reaches steady state, that burden lifts, and the pace that felt unbearable at minute one is often manageable by minute four.

You don't get to practise sitting with this on race day very often. But you rehearse it every time you do intervals, rep one recreates it precisely. Use it on purpose. Notice the discomfort, notice the shift once your system catches up. That's the actual skill, sitting through the worst-feeling part without reacting to it.

Build a mental cue before you start. Give the first few minutes before you judge anything. Use your intervals as rehearsal. If you need to adjust early, adjust effort slightly, not the whole plan.

You're not bad at running hard. You've just never sat in the part that's supposed to pass.

Follow for the physiology most coaches won't explain.

Goal achieved ⚡️

Three sub-3’s in 2026.

A solid hit out on home turf today with a 2:56:59.

One thing I’ve learnt about the marathon is that so much of it comes down to being able to sit with the discomfort when things start to hurt.

Super stoked with the outcome, but even more proud of everyone across the Academy today. 33 runners on the start line and some incredible performances across the board.

What a day Sydney turned on.

Stoked to get another marathon in the bag with Team YoPRO

WHOOP x Beforeyouspeak Coffee x 247

Dreamy collab 🥰 thanks to everyone who showed up this morning. Sorry for the hills 🫣

You cramp late in a race, so you drink more, add electrolytes, load salt tablets. And you still cramp. Here's what the research actually shows.

The leading explanation for exercise-associated cramps is neuromuscular, not nutritional. When a muscle fatigues beyond what it's conditioned for, the nerves controlling it misfire, the contract signal ramps up, the relax signal drops, and the muscle locks. That's why cramps hit late in races, when fatigue peaks, and why calves and hamstrings, muscles working in a shortened position, are the usual suspects.

Studies comparing crampers to non-crampers repeatedly find no meaningful difference in hydration or electrolytes. Cramps have even been induced in a lab with no dehydration at all. When researchers followed 210 Ironman triathletes, what predicted cramping wasn't dehydration or falling sodium. It was running faster than their own normal, and having cramped before.

One honest caveat. Electrolytes aren't useless, rehydrating with plain water alone after heavy sweating dilutes your sodium and raises cramp risk, electrolytes prevent that. So hydrate properly. Just don't expect a sachet to fix a fatigue problem.

Train for the demand. Build strength and durability. Pace realistically. Rehearse race pace so race day isn't a shock to the muscle. And if cramping is severe or unusual, see a doctor.

Follow for the physiology most coaches won't explain.

You check your VO2 max obsessively. Compare it to your mates. Watch it tick up like it's the scoreboard for how good a runner you are.

Here's the problem. A classic study on elite distance runners of comparable ability found VO2 max barely predicted who'd win a 10km race. Running economy did. Same fitness level, wildly different predictive power.

VO2 max is your aerobic ceiling, the most oxygen your body can use flat out. It matters, but you never run near that ceiling in a race, a marathon sits at 70 to 80% of it. What actually separates runners at the same fitness level is running economy, how much oxygen you burn to hold a given pace. Combine economy with your ceiling and it explains around 94% of the performance difference between trained runners. VO2 max alone explains about two thirds.

Here's why this should change your training, not just your thinking. VO2 max responds fast early in a training career, then improvements slow right down once you're well trained. Most of you have already captured much of what your ceiling has to give. Economy keeps developing for years past that point, built through strength work, plyometrics and consistent mileage, not more hard intervals chasing a bigger number.

To be clear, VO2 max still matters a lot between very different fitness levels. But between two well-trained runners with the same score, the answer to who's faster is almost never in that number.

Stop chasing the ceiling. Build what's underneath it.

Follow for the physiology most coaches won't explain.

You used to just run. Now every session ends in a verdict, green ring or red, PB or not, splits hit or splits missed. Running stopped being something you do and became something you're graded on, and you probably didn't notice it happen.

There's real psychology behind this. It's called the overjustification effect, and it's been studied for fifty years. When something you do for pure enjoyment gets wrapped in constant measurement, rewards, streaks, scores, your brain starts attributing the activity to the metric instead of the enjoyment. The joy doesn't vanish overnight, it gets crowded out, run by run. Research specifically on running-tracking apps has flagged this exact risk, that the tools built to keep you motivated can end up replacing the motivation that got you started.

Watch for the signs. Dread before you check your splits. A bad data day ruining your mood. Cutting a run short, or stretching one out, to protect a stat. Forgetting your watch feeling like anxiety instead of freedom.

Here's what's actually at stake. Motivation that comes from loving the activity lasts decades. Motivation that comes from a number is fragile, it only holds up while the reward shows up. The runners who last thirty years in this sport aren't the ones who tracked hardest. They're the ones who never let the tracking replace the reason they started.

This is actually something I build into every program I coach. Deliberate runs with no watch, no target, nothing to analyse afterwards. Not a nice-to-have. A scheduled part of the plan, because enjoyment isn't the reward for training hard, it's what makes training hard sustainable for years instead of a few seasons.

The watch was supposed to serve the run. Somewhere along the way, it started grading it. Take the run back.

Follow for the physiology, and the psychology, most coaches won't explain.

Your drive's dropped. Mornings feel different. You blame stress, work, getting older, a long relationship, anything but your training.

Here's what almost nobody tells male runners. A woman's body has an unmistakable alarm for this problem, her period stops, and everyone knows to get that checked. Men have a version of the same alarm, it's just quieter, and nobody ever taught you to read it.

When your body isn't getting enough fuel for the training and life you're asking of it, it starts shutting down non-essential systems. In women that shows up as a missed period. In men, it shows up as suppressed testosterone, low libido and quieter mornings among the earliest, clearest signs. Sports medicine has a name for the chronic version, the Exercise Hypogonadal Male Condition, and it sits inside the same broader picture as RED-S. Same root cause as the female version, a much quieter warning light.

A missed period is impossible to ignore. Low libido is easy to explain away, so the signal sits there unread. Alongside it, watch for irritability, brain fog, poor recovery, increased body fat despite training hard, and performance that's plateaued or slipped for no obvious reason.

Stop assuming it's just stress or just age. Get bloods done, total and free testosterone, ideally with a doctor who understands athletes. Look honestly at your fuelling and your training load, both are common drivers, and both are fixable. In many men this reverses once those are corrected.

Your body sends an alarm too. You've just never been taught to hear it.

🚨 This isn't medical advice, it's a reason to get checked instead of guessing.

Follow for the physiology, and the honesty, most coaches won't give you.

"I don't get my period anymore." You've heard a female runner say it, maybe almost proudly, like it's proof of training hard. It isn't a badge. It's her body sending the clearest signal it has.

To be clear, every woman's cycle is different, and this isn't about panicking over one irregular month or comparing yourself to anyone else. But your period disappearing for three months or more isn't a version of normal. It's a specific signal. When your body isn't getting enough fuel for the training and life you're asking of it, it starts shutting down systems it can most afford to pause, and reproduction is one of the first. It's common in runners, estimates put it as high as two in three long-distance runners, but common doesn't mean normal.

The cost is real. For every year without a period, bone density can drop by more than 2%, sometimes permanently, and that's directly linked to the stress fractures that sideline runners for months.

Here's the part that made me want to post this. Research into why female athletes don't report a missing period found the main reason wasn't confusion. It was that they'd normalised it and didn't see it as a problem. That's the actual danger, a culture that's taught women it's fine, even admirable, to ignore this.

If it's been three months or more, that's worth acting on. See a GP or sports physician who understands athletes, this needs a proper workup, not a DIY fix. If it's been six months or more, ask about a bone density scan.

Your cycle is allowed to look different to everyone else's. It's not allowed to disappear and be called nothing.

🚨 This isn't medical advice, it's a reason to take this seriously and get the right support from a GP or sports physician who understands athletes.

Follow for the physiology, and the honesty, most coaches won't give you.