Endurance training is hard! Yet it’s also highly rewarding. This contradiction is why endurance athletes jokingly refer to training and racing as Type 2 fun; endurance sports are fun, but they are a different kind of fun. It turns out that having fun in training is one of the keys to staying motivated as an endurance athlete.
This story is an excerpt adapted from Chasing Mastery: 25 Lessons to Cultivate Your Full Potential in Endurance Sports by Matt Fitzgerald.
Endurance training is hard work. As such, it demands a high level of sustained motivation. For most athletes, the motivation to work hard derives partly from an expectation that the training they’re doing will yield results. Hope alone won’t motivate a person to keep working hard, however. Athletes want proof that their training is working, not just on race day but throughout the process. So where should they look for this proof?
The obvious answer is measurement—specifically, objective indicators of fitness. If an athlete’s VO2 max, or critical velocity, or lactate threshold, or some other scientifically validated measure of endurance fitness is improving, they know their training program is working. But it’s not always easy to obtain reliable measurements of these physiological indicators. Athletes must either rely on formal testing, which can’t (or at least shouldn’t) be done too often, or else trust the estimates generated by one of the many wearable devices available to them, and there’s good reason to doubt a lot of these estimates.
What’s more, even to the extent that quantitative indicators of fitness can be reliably measured every day, the numbers don’t improve every day. That’s not how training works. Like it or not, getting fitter is a relatively slow process, especially for more experienced athletes. Those hungry for proof that their training is working would find little satisfaction in a perfect-information scenario, where a space-age measurement device allowed them to know their precise VO2 max, lactate threshold, and whatever else at all times. Weeks might pass before this device (like the watched pot that never boils) showed any positive change.
Some athletes, not content to wait for the numbers to change, try to make them change. I call this the progress trap. An example of the phenomenon comes from Jessie, a former athlete of mine who trained by heart rate. When we first started working together, Jessie got fitter quickly, and the numbers proved it. It seemed that every time she ran, she was able to go a bit faster at the same target heart rate. But the trend couldn’t last forever, and when Jessie began to experience occasional runs in which, perhaps due to lingering fatigue from the harder workouts she was now doing, she actually needed to slow down to keep her heart rate where it was supposed to be, she refused to do so. The all-too-predictable result was that she stopped improving and began to slide backward.
Trust the Process
There are two pieces of advice I offer to athletes like Jessie who are caught in the progress trap. One is to relax and trust the process, shifting from the instant-gratification mindset of the average American consumer to the longer view that is universal among endurance masters—a point I’ll return to in future lessons.
Measure Subjectively
My other piece of advice is to focus less on objective measurements such as pace and heart rate and more on subjective indicators of how things are going. Sensations such as effort and tiredness might seem less scientific than biometrics to our 21st-century minds, yet science itself suggests they are quite reliable. If a 9-minute mile feels easier today than it did a few weeks ago, or if you feel less tired at the end of a 9-mile run than you did a few weeks ago, that’s all the proof you need that your training is working.
The Hard Fun Test
My favorite subjective measure of training status is one I came up with myself: the Hard Fun Test. If I had to pick one method of determining whether the athletes I coach are making progress, I would gladly pass over all of the aforementioned physiological tests in favor of this qualitative self-assessment.
The Hard Fun Test is simple. On a scale of 1 to 5, how accurate is the phrase “hard fun” in describing your current training experience?
- Totally inaccurate
- Not very accurate
- Somewhat accurate
- Very accurate
- Perfectly accurate
The correct answer—I mean, the ideal answer—is 5. The harder an athlete’s training feels while remaining fun, and the more fun their training seems while remaining hard, the more certain the athlete can be that the process is working. Simply put, your training program must be both hard and fun to be optimally effective, and if it is both hard and fun, no further evidence is needed to show it’s working.
Feelings are not arbitrary. When training feels hard, your body is telling you something. And when it’s fun, it’s fun for reasons that are relevant to the goals of getting fitter and performing better. In our technology-saturated modern existence, we tend to think of feelings as being less dependable or valid than objective measurements, but where endurance training is concerned, the opposite is true.
Just ask Anna Saw, an Australian sports scientist who, along with colleagues Luana Main and Paul Gastin, authored a 2020 review of prior research on objective and subjective measures of training responses in endurance athletes. A total of 56 studies were analyzed, all of which looked at how objective metrics such as salivary cortisol levels and subjective metrics such as mood state related to changes in training load. Saw’s team found that in nearly half of the studies, objective and subjective metrics disagreed on how the athlete was responding to the training load, and in 86 percent of these cases, subjective measures more closely tracked actual changes in how hard they were training. They concluded, “Subjective measures, particularly measures of mood disturbance, perceived stress and recovery and symptoms of stress, responded with superior sensitivity and consistency compared to objective measures.”
For endurance athletes, subjective measures are more sensitive and consistent than objective measures.
Anna Saw, sports scientist
The most fundamental principle of endurance training is the principle of progressive overload, which tells us that athletes must train harder to get fitter. And the surest way to know how hard you’re training, according to science, is how hard the training feels. This is why the Hard Fun Test is a more valid indicator of whether an athlete’s training is on track than objective fitness measures.
Don’t Forget the Type 2 Fun!
Correction: The reliability of perceived exertion is one reason the Hard Fun Test trumps other ways of determining whether the training process is working. A second reason is that, like perceived exertion, fun (or enjoyment, as our psychologist friends prefer to call it) is also a far more sensitive measure of how things are going than many athletes recognize.
When an athlete trains too hard, they enter a state known as overreaching, where the body is unable to absorb the work being done. And guess what? Decreased enjoyment of training is proven to be one of the best predictors of overreaching. The moment the process becomes so hard that it’s no longer fun, it ceases to benefit the athlete. And when training is not hard enough to be beneficial, that’s not fun either.
What you’re aiming for as a fun-focused athlete is a Goldilocks zone of perceived training hardness. The work of French exercise physiologist Bertrand Baron makes this point nicely. The term affective load, which Baron coined, refers to the emotional stress imposed by training. Research on affective load by Baron and others shows a clear relationship with performance. Specifically, athletes tend to improve the most when the affective load hovers within a sweet spot where they feel challenged but not overwhelmed by their training. Unlike the majority of exercisers, you—and other endurance athletes—actually enjoy challenging yourself in workouts; that’s a major reason you chose to become an endurance athlete in the first place. When you don’t feel sufficiently challenged by your training, you’re likely to become bored and restless. And this is why training must be hard and fun in equal measure.
Escape the Progress Trap
In my experience, competitive athletes are generally pretty good about making sure their training is hard enough but not too hard. They’re less good, however, at making their training as fun as possible at any given level of hardness. I think this is because, like Jessie, they’re caught in the progress trap, where they count on objective proof of progress to make training seem fun retroactively when what they ought to do instead is recognize enjoyment itself as proof that training is working, and then go out of their way to make training as fun as possible while ensuring it remains appropriately hard.
Adopt a Fun-First Approach
A real-world example from outside of endurance sports is bazball, the fun-first approach to cricket that coach Brendon McCullum and captain Ben Stokes instilled when they took over the English National Team. “The aim is just not to stymie talent,” McCullum said of his philosophy in a 2023 interview for the Daily Mail. “Let it come out. Create an environment where it’s enjoyable, where you want to turn up to work and have a good time and be the best version of yourself. Push the boundaries of what you’re capable of achieving as a cricketer and hopefully the results follow.” In McCullum’s case, the results did follow. England had lost sixteen of their last seventeen test matches before he took over as coach. After switching to bazball, they won nine of their next ten matches.
It’s fair to ask how prioritizing fun enhances training effectiveness and improves results. Ben Stokes’s view, which is supported by science, is that it allows athletes to perform fearlessly and thereby renders them less prone to choking. “I think just releasing that fear of failure is why we’ve produced the results,” the team captain told The Guardian in 2022. “When you take that burden off individuals and the team, you see players excelling and showing more within themselves. No one is worried about getting out. You don’t want to get out, but when that fear of failure isn’t there, you’re not tentative and you make better decisions.”
Type 2 Fun Does Not Making Training Easy!
There are lots of proven ways to make training more fun without making it easier, but in my opinion, the specific measures taken to make the training process more enjoyable are less important than simply thinking and talking about having fun in training. When you keep fun at the forefront of your mind, you’ll naturally look for ways to augment the fun factor, such that the means take care of themselves. Bazball is a mindset more than it is a set of techniques, and the same fun-first mindset will lead to enjoyment-enhancing choices for you, provided the attitude is genuine.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that training can or should be maximally fun or equally hard at all times. There are certain periods of training (the early base period, for example) that should not be very hard, and most athletes naturally find certain parts of the process more fun than others. It’s easy to account for these realities, however, when applying the Hard Fun Test.
Just ask yourself:
- Does my training feel as hard as it should at the present stage? and,
- Am I having as much fun as I could be at this point in my training?
If the answer to either question is “no,” you have an opportunity to tweak your training to make it hard enough but not too hard, or to make it more fun at any given level of hardness—an opportunity you might not have had if you’d focused exclusively on objective metrics.
Balancing Type 2 Fun Means Using Both Subjective and Objective Measures
To this last point, I would never advise a competitive endurance athlete to completely ignore their heart rate, power output, and other quantitative measures of fitness. These things are quite useful. But they’re not the key to endurance mastery, which is all about self-regulation—the near opposite of the data dependency that is so rampant in endurance sports today. Getting the most out of your training requires that you know when it’s not yielding optimal results and make smart adjustments quickly when it isn’t. Paying attention to your affective load—either through the Hard Fun Test or by some other means—is a more effective way to keep your training on track and, when necessary, get it back on track than any objective measurement. Using the Hard Fun Test takes this responsibility away from technology and places it squarely on the athlete’s shoulders. Like it or not, there is no other way to achieve endurance mastery.
CHASING MASTERY: FROM PRINCIPLE TO PRACTICE
Athletes make the greatest progress in their developmental journey when their training is hard and fun in equal measure.
Commit to tracking your enjoyment and subjective training load on a weekly basis using this chart.
Combine your enjoyment and subjective training load scores to generate a composite Hard Fun score for the week. For example, if your enjoyment rating for a given week is 6 and your load rating is also 6, then your Hard Fun score for the week is 12. As the weeks go by, look for trends and patterns. Is your Hard Fun score rising, falling, holding steady, or fluctuating, and what are the apparent causes of these trends and patterns?
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