You may not believe this, but even elite athletes often settle for good enough. They are incentivized to win, not necessarily to set new records. Yet research shows that if we disrupt our training, we can earn marginal gains that drive continuous improvement and new levels of mastery.
This story is an excerpt adapted from Chasing Mastery: 25 Lessons to Cultivate Your Full Potential in Endurance Sports by Matt Fitzgerald.
Sergei Bubka knows a thing or two about breaking records. The legendary Ukrainian pole vaulter set an astonishing 35 world records in his storied athletic career, the last of which stood for more than a quarter of a century. But by his own admission, he probably could have gone even higher. “Often I jump only what I need to jump to win,” he told one journalist at the peak of his excellence. “If the world record were 6.2 [meters] right now, I’d jump 6.3. That is simply the way I am.”
We’re accustomed to thinking of performance standards as attractors, drawing athletes to new heights of performance with their psychic magnetism. World records help champion athletes set new world records by stimulating greater effort and innovation, and in the same way, personal bests help everyday athletes like us set new personal bests. But there’s another side to this phenomenon, which is hinted at by Bubka’s confession. I call it the good-enough principle—there’s a natural human tendency to do what’s required to achieve one’s goals and no more, resisting innovation and marginal gains when they are not necessary to goal attainment.
Why We Settle for Less
The good-enough principle originated in the work of Daniel Milo, a professor of natural philosophy, whose 2019 book Good Enough: The Tolerance for Mediocrity in Nature and Society challenges traditional interpretations of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, particularly the notion of “survival of the fittest.” In school we learned that certain genetic mutations are retained across generations in a given species because they produce characteristics that aid survival, while other mutations are weeded out because they reduce survival chances. While this is mostly true, Milo offers dozens of examples of species characteristics, including the giraffe’s long neck, that came about by pure chance, conferring no survival advantage whatsoever, and were retained simply because they didn’t harm survival chances—in other words, because they were good enough.
As you’ve probably gathered, I’m rather fond of analogies. Here’s one that will help you understand Milo’s concept of good enough, and how it applies not just to natural evolution but to other dynamic systems as well, including endurance training. The words you’re currently reading were typed on a standard QWERTY keyboard (named for the first five letters on the top row of keys). Have you ever wondered why the letters are arranged this way? It was done to extend the lifespan of mechanical typewriters by evenly distributing frequently used letters, such as E, with rarely used letters, such as Q, across the keyboard. Today, mechanical typewriters are obsolete, and there are alternative ways of organizing keyboards that would significantly increase productivity. One of them, known as Dvorak, has been shown to increase output by as much as 60 percent. Yet these alternatives will never garner mainstream adoption because QWERTY is considered good enough, or at least not sufficiently bad enough to justify the disruption of executing a wholesale shift to Dvorak or some other keyboard arrangement.
Oftentimes people need to be forced to innovate by events beyond their control that disrupt complacency. A famous example of so-called disruptive innovation is the 2014 London Underground strike, which forced local commuters to come up with new ways of getting to and from their jobs. When the strike ended, many of these commuters continued with their altered routines, finding them preferable to riding the underground. Three years after the underground strike, The Quarterly Journal of Economics published a case study about it titled “The Benefits of Forced Experimentation,” in which the authors concluded that “individuals seem to under-experiment during normal times, as a result of which constraints can be welfare-improving.” In other words, people innovate when circumstances change, and “good enough” is no longer good enough.
How Innovation Gets Overlooked
You might be wondering what all this has to do with endurance sports. The answer is that evolution is not exclusive to biology. Lots of things evolve, including endurance sports. The scientific term for the category of things that evolve is complex adaptive systems—a category that encompasses any and all phenomena that consist of heterogenous agents (organisms, athletes) capable of changing (mutating, trying new training methods) in pursuit of success (survival, winning) in a challenging environment (ecosystem, competitions) where success is far from guaranteed. Evolution of some form is certain to happen in a system that meets these criteria. In the natural realm, this process takes the form of amoebas becoming fish becoming lizards becoming dinosaurs becoming birds, and so forth. In endurance sports, it takes the form of improved methods of training, fueling, recovery, etcetera. Sometimes these improvements derive from big changes, like power meters in cycling or 80/20 training. Sometimes marginal gains come from small experiments that prove to be worthwhile yet often go ignored by mainstream endurance training.
Here’s the thing: If the principle of good enough applies to the natural realm, it must also apply to other complex adaptive systems, not excepting endurance sports. I used to believe that endurance training methods just kept getting better and better as successive generations of athletes and coaches innovated, relentlessly propelled toward methodological perfection by the pressure of competition. In fact, I still believe this is largely true. But after reading Milo’s book, I now recognize that the top athletes of a given generation are under no pressure to discover and practice the most effective training methods possible—they just have to train well enough to win. Sergei Bubka admitted as much, and others have too. John Walker of New Zealand was the first man to run a mile in under 3:50. Later in his career, he told an acquaintance of mine, “Back 1975, when I was 22 years old, if the world record had been 3:47, I would have run 3:46. But the world record was 3:51, so I just ran 3:49.”
There are many historical examples of endurance athletes not innovating until they had to. One of these examples is from the 1968 Olympics, which were held in Mexico City, 7,300 feet above sea level. Living at high elevation has always been beneficial to endurance performance. Yet elite athletes made no special effort to claim this advantage until after the Mexico City Games, where Kenya’s Kip Keino, who was born and raised at a similar elevation, defeated gold-medal favorite Jim Ryun of the United States in the 1500 meters. Altitude camps have been a staple of elite endurance training ever since.
Disrupt the “Good Enough” Mindset
A more recent example of disruptive innovation in endurance sports is the advent of carbon-plated super shoes, which were designed to make runners faster in races but have had the greatest impact in training after athletes discovered that running in them left their legs feeling less beat-up, prompting them to experiment with different ways of taking advantage of this unexpected benefit.
The problem with disruptors of this type is that athletes have no control over them. To fend against the inertia of “good enough,” athletes must seek out disruptors rather than waiting for them to fall from the sky. Fortunately, there is no shortage of potential disruptors available to athletes at any given time. The most obvious candidates are supplemental and ancillary methods and tools that have scientific backing but, for whatever reason, have not become universal practices among endurance athletes and therefore offer a potential competitive advantage to forward-thinking athletes who take them up.
Marginal Gains Worth the Disruption
A case in point is respiratory muscle training (RMT), which entails strengthening the breathing muscles outside the context of full-body exercise. Studies of RMT in athletes have consistently shown it to enhance endurance performance. Despite this, very few athletes—even at the elite level—bother with it, confident that (at least for now) they can win without the hassle of adopting the practice. It’s the sports equivalent of the Dvorak keyboard layout: a performance-enhancing alternative to the existing standard that just sits there unused because the existing standard is deemed good enough.
So there’s one example of a beneficial potential disruptor that even the pros—who have the most to gain from innovating—are currently passing over. Other supplemental methods are widely practiced by elite athletes but have little uptake among the rest of us. Here are three examples:
- glycogen-depleted workouts, which have been shown to increase aerobic capacity not just in elite athletes but in everyday athletes also.
- hopping exercises, which according to studies improve running economy in athletes of all abilities.
- heat training, which increases blood volume, hemoglobin mass, and time-trial performance in temperate environments.
Perhaps you’re thinking, Heck, if a little disruption is good, more must be better! Why pick one methodological innovation and improve a little when you can pick several and improve a lot? Nice idea, but to get the most benefit from each new practice, you should adopt them individually.
Always Try Something New
A good rule of thumb for athletes is to always be trying one new method or tool. To do any less is to allow the good-enough principle to limit your development more than necessary. Any more and you’re muting the potential benefit of each innovation by collapsing multiple potential disruptive events into one.
It’s also important to be highly selective in choosing new things to try. If elite athletes are often too complacent, innovating no more than necessary to win, others are just the opposite: willing victims of shiny-object syndrome, hopping aboard every new methodological bandwagon that passes by. Don’t be that athlete. Evaluate each method critically before adopting it. If science doesn’t support it, or if elite athletes don’t practice it, then you probably shouldn’t practice it either. Use your head. Double threshold workouts are practiced by elites and do have scientific support, but they have no place in the training regimen of the majority of athletes who aren’t already in the habit of training twice a day.
No athlete is fully impervious to complacency. Not Sergei Bubka, not John Walker, and not you. That’s the bad news. The good news is that you don’t need to be immune to the good-enough principle to gain a competitive advantage over other athletes with respect to our natural human complacency. You just need to seek out disruptors instead of waiting for them to fall from the sky.
CHASING MASTERY FROM PRINCIPLE TO PRACTICE
Natural complacency causes athletes at all levels, including the very best, to get a little too comfortable with habits that are good enough but could be better, and endurance mastery is achieved by those who actively disrupt their routine in ways calculated to keep them growing. Here is an idea for turning this principle into practice on your path to mastery:
- Take inventory of your current habits and patterns. Where do you see complacency in them?
- Is there something you keep telling yourself you should be doing that you’re still not doing? Perhaps you’ve been meaning to try the heat-training protocol you learned about a few months ago but you just haven’t gotten around to it.
- Figure out why you haven’t yet started and find a way to work around, over, under, or through the barrier Then do it.
Explore Chasing Mastery
Chasing Mastery shares five essential processes for runners, triathletes, and cyclists to cultivate their full potential in endurance sports.