Today’s endurance training methods offer athletes an excellent starting point. But to find the best endurance training formula for your unique physiology will take some trial and error.
This story is an excerpt adapted from Chasing Mastery: 25 Lessons to Cultivate Your Full Potential in Endurance Sports by Matt Fitzgerald.
Athletes living today are fortunate beneficiaries of the many useful discoveries made by clever and creative endurance seekers of the past. From them we have inherited a set of training methods that work better than all known alternatives, whether you’re a 25-year-old Olympian with a VO2max of 74 ml/kg/min or a 55-year-old beginner with a VO2max of 37. These universal best practices provide a reliable starting point for all athletes—regardless of age, sex, ability, or experience—in the journey toward fulfillment of potential.
This is a starting point, mind you, not an end point. After all, each athlete is unique, genetically and otherwise. Therefore, no two athletes can reach their full potential with precisely the same training formula. Universal best practices such as training at high volume and maintaining an approximate 80/20 intensity balance will take us perhaps 90 percent of the way to our ultimate potential, but to get the rest of the way, we must carry forward individually the same evolutionary process that produced our current best practices, and we must do so blindly, without foresight into which deviations from generic endurance training methodologies will work best for us.
How to Search Out What Is Most Effective for You
Did you ever play the childhood game Hot and Cold? An object is hidden by one child, and a second child must locate it. The seeker moves about randomly in search of the hidden object, and as they do, the hider says “warmer” if the seeker happens to move closer to the object and “colder” if they move away from it. In this manner, the object is inevitably found despite the seeker’s “blindness.”
The search for optimal training is similar. As mentioned, it began in the 19th century, when elite athletes and their coaches embarked on the process of seeking the most effective ways to train for endurance performance. The results these endurance seekers got from putting new methods to the test in competition let them know if they were getting closer to or further from the thing they sought. When they tried something different and won, they heard “warmer” and continued in that direction. When they got beaten by someone who trained differently, they heard “colder” and moved away from their losing practices. The flaw in this analogy is that optimal training is not the same for every athlete. There is no hidden object that, once discovered, ends the game for everyone. The version of Hot and Cold that we play today has two parts. The first part is easy, consisting of nothing more than receiving best practices passed on to us by athletes of yore. The second part is much harder, requiring us to search within collective best practices to find our own individual best practices.
Imagine a grassy park with objects hidden throughout it. The space inside the park’s fenced borders represents current best practices in endurance sports. Thanks to the efforts of past generations of endurance athletes, who gradually “warmed” their way to this park in the historical part of the Hot and Cold game, we today are privileged to begin the search for our own optimal training formula at the front entrance. To gain entry, we need only learn and heed the universal best practices bequeathed to us by our athletic predecessors. But somewhere within the park lies a single object that represents our own personal optimal training formula—a formula that is consistent with universal best practices but different in certain details from any other athlete’s optimum. Here, the game of Hot and Cold continues. To find your hidden object, you must try things, pay attention to the results, and retain practices that seem to work (“warmer”) while discarding those that don’t (“colder”).
Finding Your Personal Endurance Training Formula Is a Process of Trial and Error
There are innumerable ways in which one athlete’s optimal training formula might differ from another’s. I’ve coached some athletes who could handle a lot of volume but had a limited tolerance for hard workouts, and I’ve worked with others who exhibited the opposite pattern. I’ve coached some athletes who thrived on long endurance sessions and others who crumbled under them. I’ve coached some athletes who benefited from a heavy emphasis on strength training and others whose endurance training was negatively affected if they did more than a minimal amount of gym work. I’ll stop there, but I could easily continue.
All of this might seem rather intimidating. As an athlete, how are you supposed to identify your personal optimal training formula when there are so many possibilities? Relax. Remember that using universal best practices as a starting point takes any given athlete— including you—90 percent of the way to their full potential. And though it isn’t easy to figure out the remaining 10 percent of your formula, if you go about it sensibly, you can make continual progress.
The Four Fitnesses of Endurance Training
Everyone has a unique blend of the four fitnesses. Discovering your profile among these four endurance attributes is the key to finding your optimal training formula.
There are four main components of endurance fitness in which individual differences show up:
- Speed (measurable as performance in a 10-second sprint)
- VO2max (measurable as performance in a 6-minute time trial)
- Threshold fitness (measurable as performance in a 20-minute time trial)
- Endurance (measurable as the rate at which speed or power degrades between a 6-minute time trial and a 60-minute time trial)
Four Workouts to Develop Speed, VO2max, Threshold Fitness, and Endurance
Use these four workouts to gauge your current fitness in each attribute of endurance fitness.
Endurance Fitness Test
The Zone X efforts should be at a pace you could sustain for 2 hours, which is between half-marathon and marathon pace for most runners.
Beginner Endurance Fitness Test Workout
5 min. in Zone 1
5 min. in Zone 2
30 min. in Zone X
10 min. in Zone 1
Total: 50 min.
Advanced Endurance Fitness Test Workout
5 min. in Zone 1
15 min. in Zone 2
50 min. in Zone X
20 min. in Zone 1
Total: 1.5 hr.
VO2max Fitness Test
These lactate intervals boost aerobic capacity (VO2 max), which is critical to running performance, to increase the time you can spend near VO2 max intensity within a single session without becoming exhausted.
Aim for a pace you could sustain for 15 min. in race conditions, putting you close to the middle of Zone 4.
Beginner VO2max Fitness Test Workout
5 min. in Zone 1
5 min. in Zone 2
8 x 30 sec. in Zone 4, 15 sec. in Zone 1
3 min. in Zone 1
8 x 30 sec. in Zone 4, 15 sec. in Zone 1
3 min. in Zone 1
8 x 30 sec. in Zone 4, 15 sec. in Zone 1
10 min. in Zone 1
Total: 44 min.
Advanced VO2max Fitness Test Workout
5 min. in Zone 1
15 min. in Zone 2
12 x 30 sec. in Zone 4, 15 sec. in Zone 1
3 min. in Zone 1
12 x 30 sec. in Zone 4, 15 sec. in Zone 1
3 min. in Zone 1
12 x 30 sec. in Zone 4, 15 sec. in Zone 1
20 min. in Zone 1
Total: 1 hr. 13 min.
Threshold Fitness Test
Over/Under Intervals fluctuate between an effort that Is slightly above and slightly below lactate threshold (LT). The Zone Y efforts target the small space between Zone 3 and Zone 4. The upper limit of the easier Zone 3 efforts align with LT.
This type of workout develops your ability to run relaxed and efficiently at moderate speeds, with the additional benefit of teaching your body to recover from a harder effort while still running somewhat aggressively.
Beginner Threshold Fitness Test Workout
5 min. in Zone 1
5 min. in Zone 2
3 x 3 min. in Zone 3, 3 min. in Zone Y, 3 min. in Zone 1
10 min. in Zone 1
Total: 47 min.
Advanced Threshold Fitness Test Workout
5 min. in Zone 1
15 min. in Zone 2
4 x 3 min. in Zone 3, 3 min. in Zone Y, 3 min. in Zone 1
20 min. in Zone 1
Total: 1 hr. 16 min.
Sprint Fitness Test
Short, all-out sprints done on an incline. Choose a steeper incline to reduce the risk of muscle and tendon strain. These efforts increase strength, power, speed, efficiency, and durability. Use the recovery time to walk back to your starting point.
Beginner Sprint Fitness Test Workout
5 min. in Zone 1
5 min. in Zone 2
10 x 10 sec. uphill in Zone 5, 80 sec. in Zone 1
5 min. in Zone 1
5 min. in Zone 2
Total: 35 min.
Advanced Sprint Fitness Test Workouts
5 min. in Zone 1
15 min. in Zone 2
10 x 10 sec. uphill in Zone 5, 80 sec. in Zone 1
5 min. in Zone 1
15 min. in Zone 2
Total: 55 min.
Adaptation After Workouts Is Highly Individual
Your optimal way of training to develop each of the four fitnesses will be different from mine. Figuring this out requires some self-awareness.
Consider a few ways in which individual differences can manifest:
- Strengths and weakness. Are you stronger or weaker than other runners of similar overall ability in terms of speed, VO2max, threshold fitness, and endurance?
- Responsiveness. Does a little bit of speed, VO2max, threshold, or endurance training go a long way for you, or not so far?
- Tolerance. Does more than a little bit of speed, VO2max, threshold, or endurance training tend to put you in a hole, or not so much?
Consider what you learn in these four key areas against the backdrop of the specific demands of the races you do and the specific type of fitness demanded by these events.
With this approach, you’re never simply doing things but rather always trying things. You’re unsure about where it’s all going, but that’s okay. There’s no need to know what will work before you try it because you can easily identify what is working once you’ve tried it. And from there, all you have to do is retain what works, discard what doesn’t, and continue to try stuff.
CHASING MASTERY FROM PRINCIPLE TO PRACTICE
It is impossible to guess the most effective way to train for you—it can only be discovered through personal experimentation and learning.
Identify your primary limiter—the one problem or challenge that stymies your progress more than any other. Ask yourself, When I fail, why do I fail? Then ask yourself, What am I currently doing to overcome this limiter, and what might I be doing that I haven’t done already? Don’t be afraid to think outside the box. Say your primary limiter is a feeling of weakness in your legs in the later stages of races, and you wonder if running with a weighted backpack or doing squats and lunges between high-intensity run intervals might make a difference. Neither method is widely practiced in the higher echelons of the sport, but they’re not crazy ideas, and there’s no harm in testing them out. If you’re stuck for ideas, consult a coach or experienced fellow athlete.
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Chasing Mastery shares five essential processes for runners, triathletes, and cyclists to cultivate their full potential in endurance sports.