Katie Schide & Germain Grangier | 2023 OCC & UTMB Pre-Race Interview

Katie shine German Grange how's my pronunciation that's pretty good yeah that's not that far from you usually say like Jermaine Granger yeah Jermaine is is the the main thing yeah German Katie shine of course 2022 UTMB champ how's it feel to be back in the valley you two after many years being back and forth yeah it's been fun we've been in the valley for six weeks now we normally live a bit south of here um and it's been it's always fun to like change up the training grounds and just see a different place and yeah just some new trails yeah yeah I guess it's the first time uh we come earlier before UTMB week so yeah yeah six weeks I mean that's a long time that is that a reflection of like a a deep commitment towards uh the performances this coming week or was it just simply new training grounds an opportunity to just be somewhere else for the summer no yeah it's clearly to to be used to the UTMB race route I think for me I think it is just doing OCC so she doesn't need that much we can yeah so yeah every time I would start hmb I would just show up on Monday Tuesday and do the race so it's actually the first time I am doing the Reiki yeah as you say Ricky So Jammer has done UTM you started UTMB three times and he's never seen Cole de lessen in the daylight so I'm just putting that up there because this is his first time seeing it in the daylight that's a great part of the course and I've noticed that you've been doing a lot of training on the course maybe we'll come back and talk about that in a sec but first just introduce yourself a little bit because Katie's been on the podcast a few times and obviously they'll be the majority of the viewers and listeners of this are going to be American so maybe just give us a quick introduction to you your background in sport because I think didn't you come from like a cycling background or something yeah I kind of I would say my first spot was Alpine skiing because I grew up in a French ski resort so that was really the the first book I did and then my family moved to the the French Riviera like close to nice obviously less mountains so that's when I started mountain biking then Road biking then I was doing my studio in parallels and uh I got injured and I decided to push more on the studio side and that's when I found out about driving because I had less time to train and I would be dead after just one hour of running so that's how I went I came to try running awesome well thanks so much for coming guys it's great to have you here and it'll be fun to chat briefly but maybe let's start with two months ago when Katie finished spectacular second place one of the great 100 mile performances ever and just maybe 12 hours before that race started you one here in Germany at the 90k Montblanc so maybe tell us a bit about like what the conversation was like after you finally had a chance to catch up because I'm sure you guys were both you know pretty proud of one another and had a lot of fun things to talk about yeah I mean I was following Jamil's race it's not what you're supposed to do two nights before you race right it's like the night before the night before is the best it's the most important sleep or something I don't know if someone told me that once but I was up all night like trying to sleep but then you know you kind of wake up and you're like oh I have to check the timing and uh genre didn't make it easy for us because he held like a two-minute lead for like 40K or something so it was quite stressful to just follow on the timing updates um but yeah it was super it was just um a big relief for me to like see that he won because I knew I knew how obviously we know how much goes into each other's training and preparation so that was a great thing to kind of wake up to and then get his whole like you know race report the next day on the phone while I was still preparing myself okay so he had finished before you started yeah yeah because of the time difference he it was the night before the night before yeah so German tell us about watching Katie's performance at Western States yeah so yeah I basically finished my my race then it was like the start was like a few hours later so yeah I didn't sleep at all I just like tried to to sleep but then every like 30 and one one hour I would work up then like watch a different life like listen to you obviously and um and then yeah I was following the the race uh from shamani and uh yeah that there was less like way to really follow the race and with like really live footage but but you can really follow the split and you guys doing their life so yeah it was like a pretty intense night actually it was more tired from like sleep deprivation than for like like real running so oh what a great memory you guys will probably cherish for years and decades to come Katy have you been feeling since Western States obviously it's like you've done what have you done any hundreds aside from you tmb you did the race in your near where you guys live right um yeah UTMB and western states are the only Hundred Mile races I've done but utcam which is close to where we live is um yeah where we live it's really Technical and the trails are much slower than here which is why we have to come here to prepare for the race because it's so much faster to run around here and so that race actually is 120k but my finishing time was like just squeaked under 20 hours so actually it's longer than yesterday the reason I ask is because you know somebody who's done Western States a number of times like it can really shred you like for how fast of a course it is it often takes people a long time to recover from it have you felt in the last couple of months I mean you did get it on a year where it was a little bit cooler and obviously you were fit in good condition for it how's the recovery been yeah I think maybe I got like um a different circumstance because of the temperature I didn't or maybe because I'm so used to races being like time wise really long and maybe go actually all of those races go through the night and I think that completely changes the race and the recovery when you are also missing a night of sleep on top of running for that long so honestly when I got to the finish of Western States I was like that went by so fast and I think I had pretty good recovery like the biggest thing was just the time zone difference because I came back home to France like directly after and I had a lot of trouble sleeping for like a week and a half but I I attribute that more to the time change than the race itself so do you feel like you bounced back more quickly than UTMB for example the only other 100 that you've done because this is when Korean was just here and we were sort of talking about some of the story lines of the race for the season and one of them is like the people who are doing the western states UTMB double of course you're doing OCC we'll talk about in a second but you know there's some conversation about like because Western States was a little bit cooler this year it seems like a lot of people have recovered more quickly and there's an extra week separating the two races now and so you know sort of the speculation of maybe it'll be easier to do the Western States UTMB double did you feel like you bounced back pretty quickly I think there's two things one is that I've like done more races now so I think that just helps you recover faster and it's also really different when you finish on a positive note than when you finish on a negative note and I've finished UTMB twice on really negative notes and it's kind of destroyed me and I've had a really hard time coming back after that mentally and I that definitely affects your physical body too that's just fast yeah like last year after UTMB I felt great like I didn't feel like there was any time I was like wow I'm so so dead because you won yes like I won okay great everything's wonderful in the world but the same with Western States like I was super happy with how everything went went so I wasn't you know I think it really changes awesome germa you've had a super solid year in addition to the montblog now DK you were solid fifth at translocania I have those two races set you up for UTMB this is your fourth start at UTMB right and we'll we'll get to what happened last year but maybe just talk about your season how it set you up for this this weekend's race yeah so I actually didn't run from December 1st to April 1st I only ski so I was a bit scary but that's what we did and then I had like four or five weeks of running to go to transport Kenya and uh Indiana he worked pretty well and um and Ben yeah I had like another five or six weeks to go to the 90k and it's when I run more and yeah this season I didn't have any any injury or was sick or whatever so I have like a better consistent training behind me So speaking of illness sickness let's talk about last year that was your third year running in a row you'd finish ninth and fifth in 2019 and 2021 and then I think I recall you caught covid during race week last year ended up pulling out at core my air remind the audience about that story yeah actually uh yeah we we rented like we went a chalet with like our coach and and other people for the crew and then one of the member of the the shed came with kovid but we didn't know it at the time and then you tested early in the week positive it's when we begin to split everybody in a different location to make sure and optimize like the spread and yeah I felt like sick at the big pickup but I didn't want to to do testing yeah keep giving it a shot just declare that we didn't he didn't test part of it until the day before so you didn't go we didn't go anywhere knowing that we had something yeah just to really clarify yeah yeah this was like the afternoon before the start of the race yeah yeah so yeah I studied that okay then like worse and worse and worse so I decided to stop because I knew that something was going on what was it like to see Katie win last year after you know having that disappointment I mean obviously it makes perfect sense you shouldn't have continued on and I'm sure you know everybody comes to UTMB it's their biggest goal of the season so there was Major disappointment but obviously Katie was able to make the yeah that was like hard because uh because not only about like the fact that I I dropped the race it was just that okay my rest got stopped but then I can even celebrate so I can't like I had I stayed moles at the Airbnb because I couldn't go to the party after party or whatever because I was sick and I didn't want to spread my virus to anyone else so yeah that was the the hard part not being able to really like celebrate 100 with Katie but as soon as as I as I saw that she was very wrong okay still went on the race route like in places to to see her finished but yeah for sure I was really happy for it's just like such a bad timing but yeah she well it's your turn this year yeah I will do my best but I don't know yet Katie back to you obviously like going from a super fast 100 Miler to a slower amount this 55k it's kind of an Abrupt transition to make give us a sense of sort of like how you've made that transition in terms of training mix of volume and intensity vertical how's that been um yeah I mean I decided in I think January to do OCC so it wasn't like a last minute thing at all it was very much on the calendar um we kind of made a decision after what happened last year not just because of that but just our experience with racing the same we had basically always done the same races um 100 of the time and so coming into this year we we said okay we're not going to do that anymore it's very like you know ruining each other's Races by needing each other when the other person is very much not available you know those who follow you more closely know that you jump into cross-country races you do a lot of like faster harder schemo type stuff to is where is your head at in terms of like this change in distance yeah I think I've gotten more media coverage on longer things but I've done I think I've I mean I've definitely done more but like 50k ish length races then I have 100 milers um and I'm just not you know like winning sagama or the marathon to Montblanc because that's not where like my best skill set is but I love those races and I think it would be yeah I think it would be sad to just like cross them all off the list because I quote unquote like do better at long races um so yeah my like my training has uh following Western States I like brought down the volume quite a bit but like way more intensity sessions which yeah are you feeling confident or are you feeling like it was an Abrupt change in stimulus um I at the beginning I was a little nervous because I had focused so hard on like flat running since this week last year and then I immediately switched when I got home after western states to like okay I mean I just went back to running like normal basically which is included and down instead of like um like trying to avoid that yeah um but I feel like my legs have come back around but you never know I mean 55k 3 500 meters is long it's not short so we'll we'll see how it goes and there's tons of other super strong women so any weakness will be shown for sure yeah well it's gonna be fun to follow jeremon back to you maybe similar question about your training I've noticed that you've been on the course quite a bit you've done a couple like big runs from here to core my air give us a sense of you know how you've structured things just like Again mix of volume and intensity anything so you've done differently this year this year I definitely run more than I used to run because I don't bike anymore this year and yeah I have way more kilometer in my legs my more time on feet and yeah that's the main difference with my training of the previous year I would always build up with like long biking Loops like sneaking between like big running days and I have only done like running days yeah so you know as somebody who's been here three times in the past like have you approached the training on the course part of it because I think there's like Katie said you've never seen the cold Ascend in the daylight before so there's some advantage to knowing what you're doing but there's also I don't know sometimes it's nice to not be doing so much on the course so it feels a little bit more fresh on race day have you balanced that yeah exactly that was my always my previous approach to UTMB and then I wanted to change things that Euro and give me like more chance and opportunity to to get the race route like better like the those little things you know and yeah definitely at some point you're like okay that's a lot of time on the race route uh maybe I want to do less so some some days I would just like not go on the race route but I always try to stay committed to my choice to come here earlier is to get on the race route yeah so that was my main line to follow like I'm here for that have you felt like it's there's been things that you've learned that you didn't pick up in your three previous Runnings yeah definitely I would I was just first thinking that was really stupid to didn't go here like under like first part of the race during like daylight yeah yeah there is definitely things that that shows up quickly like the fact that Katie said that yeah we can not really prepare that you can be at home because the trays are already different when I did my first like Loop Ricky loop I was like okay it's really great that I'm here because I'm not used to this great going down easy grade that totally destroy your legs I'm more used to jump around like rocks stuff like that so yeah there is ton of things so we're calling back to your fifth place finish in 2021 didn't you share a lot of miles with irelian that year yeah exactly and he ended up finishing second yeah what happened I mean fifth place at UTMB is a spectacular performance it would be a highlight of anybody's career but do you look back at that race and feel like there was something you should have done differently no because the year before um I was like discovering the 100 miles uh thing so I started Eugene B super concert in the conservative conservative way and ended at Ninth so I wanted to take it a bit more risk but maybe too much so that's why I was like yeah I was with our young and we are second and third in Champaign then it's really the place where like my speed really like slowed down and I really eat a low and uh yeah that was interesting to to to manage but for sure it it's something I can look back and like improve a lot of things uh I was still like really like I feel like I was still not really into like the details of the preparation or whatever I was more like okay cool I want to give a shout awesome so yeah it always gets hard after champ yeah I think I think it can be easy after something like Anyway uh well thank you guys so much maybe quickly just share what you guys are going to be doing this week for people who are listening who are in town I know you have at least a couple of things that you're doing like is there a movie on Wednesday or Thursday uh yeah I'll be at the premiere of my film it's a 10 minute film it won't take two hours um that'll be at outside at the North Face store Wednesday starting at 4 30 followed by a q a um and then I'll other than that I would pick up my bib I just want to warm the volunteers then I'm gonna pick it no but otherwise you guys will be inside now hopefully for the rest of the week so just quick closing question I was sort of thinking about something I could ask everybody who comes in here and do they not allow crew in OCC okay this is the thing that I was thinking about is like asking everybody who's your crew why and what is that person meant to you so maybe you can answer the question who's crewing for you at UTMB why is that the person that you've chosen and what is that person meant to you over time so I would say the there will be two persons so Katie is more like in the assistant role and yeah the my crew person is Ronnie McGregor I don't know if you know I don't know it's like uh if she's a dietitian sport nutrition list and I've been working this year with her and uh yeah we really like to work together and I think she she would be really helpful so that's did you choose her because of her nutrition background like she can help you navigate any potential issues that happen along the way are she just a friend yeah first for like a nutrition background and I think she she can find also the good words for me so that's the buff side I would say awesome well good luck to you both okay do you know CC chairman and UTMB it's great to have you both in here together and good luck this week thanks thanks