Easy Miles, Honest Advice: Julian ‘Moose’ Spence on Coaching and Shoes
Few guests arrive with a longer introduction. On episode 320 of the Better With Running podcast, hosts Chris Armstrong and Zac sat down with Julian "Moose" Spence: a 2:14 marathoner, Australia's marathon representative at the 2019 World Championships in Doha, coach to Olympian Ellie Pashley, co-host of the Inside Running Podcast and owner of three Running Company stores.
The conversation runs from a footy-mad kid who never trained to the lessons that shaped his coaching, what most coaches get wrong, and what a good running store really does when you walk through the door. Here are the highlights.
From Footy and Surfing to a Marathon Start Line
Moose says he never trained as a kid. He was good at cross-country, surfed and played every team sport going, but couldn't see why anyone would choose running over footy with their mates. His first taste of competitive running came at about eight years old, when he ran the whole primary school walkathon for a dollar a lap, and he reckons he may still hold the record.
After a stretch of local footy, plenty of drinking and no real direction, he joined the Navy, which wasn't for him either, although he did join a running club there. Back home, he and two mates entered the half marathon at the 2008 Melbourne Marathon as a bit of fun. One of them had quietly entered the full, so Moose ended up sitting in the MCG for hours, watching marathoners finish.
"What we did in the half is nothing... This looks like where the real action's at."
The emotion of those finishes got him. He entered the next marathon he could find, Portland 3 Bays, three weeks later, and ran 3:04. He was beaten by a couple of older runners and went home with a George Foreman grill that the third-placed finisher passed down to fourth. Footy was done. By the end of 2009 he'd run 2:27 at Melbourne.
The next stretch wasn't smooth. Moose fell into the trap of believing the quickest way to be great tomorrow was to do as much training as possible today. The injuries that followed took five or six years to shake and, in his words, ruined his twenties, until consistency finally took over.
Where the Drive Comes From
Asked where his drive comes from, Moose says he's still working it out, but he points to a childhood with no adversity. School was easy, he was decent at every sport without committing to any, and by his mid-20s he'd quit a uni degree, several sports and the Navy, then returned to a small town embarrassed. Running looked like the simplest way to prove he could do something hard. It needed no skills and no teammates, which mattered to a guy who'd lost sleep as a 20-year-old senior footy captain whenever he felt he'd let people down.
"I wanted to prove to myself that I could do hard things. I'd never done anything hard."
That mindset became his edge. Chris noted that rivals on the start line couldn't out-hurt him. Moose says it wasn't about being tougher so much as getting smarter about pacing, then looking forward to the part of the marathon that other runners dread.
"I wish I was allowed to hurt now. When do I get a chance to see how tough I am?"
Doha 2019: The Race That Meant the Most
His 2:14 PB got Moose to Doha, where he was Australia's only marathon representative at the World Championships. Of every start line, it's the one that means the most. From 2009 through to 2018 there was no real sign it could happen, just a dream of being as good as he could be. He remembers jogging out of the athlete marquees thinking how crazy it all was, and knowing it might never happen again.
"I knew at the time, this is it. Everything came together for this moment."
Zacca pointed out how much that run meant to Victorian runners who'd turned up every year, battled injuries and improved a little at a time. Moose's take was typically modest: there's nothing special about him, so if he could get there, why couldn't others?
Mentor Scott Nicholas and a New Language of Training
Moose credits his biggest coaching influence to Scott Nicholas, owner of The Running Company Geelong, who worked alongside him in the early days of the store. Scott had been coached by Alberto Salazar and had been around high-level US running, and he spoke a different language from the one Moose knew: Renato Canova, specific sessions, fundamental and special phases. This was before Strava took off, when most local groups just did the same things as each other.
Scott wrote him programs built on exact paces, with key sessions on Wednesdays and Sundays and efforts set as percentages of marathon pace, such as 95 per cent and 105 per cent. Moose's first marathon on the program went badly because he got greedy and ran the sessions too fast, but it sent him reading. He went on to run 2:18 at Berlin using those methods, while the Athletics Victoria crowd he raced against were running around 2:25.
People saw his training on Strava and asked to be coached. He's honest that early on he gave everyone much the same program and told them to go and do it.
"I was more a programmer than I was a coach."
These days, he says, he's grown into long-term, multi-year relationships with the athletes he works with.
What Most Coaches Get Wrong
Zac asked what's widely accepted in coaching that Moose rejects. His answer: coaches charging money feel they have to justify it, so they get complicated, handing out intricate sessions several times a week to runners who aren't ready for them. Methods that worked for elite runners have filtered through to recreational runners, where they're too advanced.
"People overcomplicate it. Easy mileage can get you so much further than sessions will."
He also thinks coaches zoom in too far. He recently spoke with an athlete who had a brilliant 10-week marathon block and a disappointing race, but the weeks before that block were average and the stretch before that barely involved any running at all.
"We look at things on too much of a micro level. It's so much bigger picture than a 10-week block."
There's a power imbalance when money changes hands, too. If an athlete wants to run Valencia in eight weeks, many coaches will say yes even when it isn't right. Deep down, Moose says, the honest answer is Valencia next year, built on a proper foundation so you can progress through your training rather than just survive it. Chris and Zac agreed that preaching the long game to an instant-gratification world is one of coaching's biggest challenges.
Coaching Ellie Pashley
Ellie worked at the Geelong store before Moose did, and he describes a hugely talented runner who wasn't always hardworking. She'd turn up to shifts hungover, nap on the store couches, and train brilliantly for eight weeks before disappearing for six. He had no interest in coaching anyone who wouldn't listen, so when she asked him in 2016 to help her run Melbourne, his condition was that she do everything he wrote.
She ran around 2:48 on debut in warm conditions, then, by his recollection, 2:34 at Berlin and 2:31 at Cape Town. By then she was all in. She made a world half marathon team, ran 2:26 at Nagoya and was selected for Doha. Moose notes the pair were potentially the first coach and athlete to compete at the same major championships, and a World Athletics article said as much.
Their one proper fight came in Noosa, in the lead-up to the Olympics, when Ellie wanted to squeeze in a second run of about 6K and Moose didn't want her to. It wasn't the 6K, it was that she couldn't not run it. During that second run she got the call that she'd been selected for the Olympic team, and Moose turned up with a bottle of whisky. She went on to finish 23rd in the Olympic marathon, executing it perfectly.
"Now she's smarter than me at everything. It's annoying."
Ellie now has her heat training, nutrition and strength work dialled in, and Moose has taken a big back seat, still offering guidance on workouts and blocks.
Starting From Scratch in Ballarat
After spending years managing the Geelong store, Moose and his wife Bree decided to open their own Running Company in Ballarat, a city they'd barely visited. They painted the shop themselves and started with the tiniest amount of stock. Nobody there knew the brand, and Ballarat is wary of outsiders, so every customer who walked in was sceptical.
There were days they didn't sell a single thing, and he'd drive home wondering what he was missing. Slowly, one customer became two, then three, and it was about three years before it felt like a long-term proposition. Moose says he's not sure he could start from scratch like that again because it was so draining emotionally.
What a Specialty Store Really Does When You Try On a Shoe
With the running boom bringing in plenty of new runners, Chris and Zac wanted to know what actually happens in store. Moose says it starts with questions: what are you wearing now, where do you run, what's your training, any injuries? If you like your current shoe he wants to know which feature works, and if you don't, why not. Then he'll watch you run on the treadmill to see where the foot strikes and where load goes through the shoe, because some shoes have integrity in those areas and others don't.
Behind the scenes, staff might fit the same shoe on 40 people a week, which teaches them how it behaves with different foot shapes and gait patterns, and senior staff coach junior staff out the back so what comes out of the stockroom is a carefully chosen selection, not a random grab. Comfort is personal, too: some people use stability as their comfort filter and others softness, and a strong rocker might aggravate someone's Achilles.
He adds that customers now arrive loaded with questions from their phones, so staff often start by talking through misconceptions. And even he doesn't always get it right.
"If I can't buy a shoe online and get it right, how are you supposed to?"
Red Flags When Buying Running Shoes
Moose rattled off a handful of warning signs, noting they apply to the wider market and not just his stores. A big window campaign for one model often means staff get an incentive for selling it. Don't trust a treadmill walkover or an app that tells you which three shoes will suit you without anyone asking proper questions. And don't expect a shoe to loosen up later.
"Shoes will not break in these days. They have to fit comfortably on the shop floor."
He also thinks trail shoes are overused, since road shoes cover most dirt-road running, and that race shoes are drifting further from what the average runner should use because the lighter a shoe gets, the less practical it tends to be. The trade-off is durability.
"Don't be surprised if $500 shoes are only lasting 100 kilometres."
That's why he expects the super trainer category to get bigger and runners to go back to two shoes: a lightweight trainer for sessions and a race shoe for race day. One last tip: don't turn a pair you've smashed over 1000 kilometres into your walking or work shoes. Get rid of them.
Moose's Shoe Rotation and the Next Frontier
Moose recently started tracking his shoes on Strava again and says he's used 13 different pairs across 21 runs, so he couldn't run through his rotation. Asked to build one, he went with the Mount to Coast C1 for easy running (generous toe box, stable heel, durable, and not yet stocked in his stores), the New Balance SuperComp Rebel for tempo (he ran the Sydney Marathon in it at about 4:00 per kilometre with a mate), and the shoe he calls the Apex as his race shoe.
He's 40K into the Nike Apex and says he's only just started to learn it, comparing it to driving a car with its pods, cavities and plates. It's due out in January. As for the next frontier, he reckons the true next step is already in labs and on elite runners' feet in Kenya, and that there's only so far foam can go, so expect more tech like double-stacked airbags rather than just foam.
Quick-Fire Round and Australia's Next Household Name
The quick questions turned up a few surprises. Moose holds a degree in Indonesian, and says he got through it by running entire papers through Google Translate. His guilty pleasure is listening to dog training podcasts and former special forces interviews. And when asked to give up either super shoes or watches forever, there was no hesitation.
"The watch brings anxiety and insecurity, whereas the super shoe brings fun and joy."
His one-word verdicts were just as direct: Ellie Pashley, "humble", and run influencers on Instagram, "cringy". Looking ahead, he thinks Cameron Myers has the personality to become a national hero like Cathy Freeman, and that Jess Hull could too, with the Brisbane Olympic Games a big opportunity for someone to step out.
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