The Golden Rule of Endurance Training
To go really fast, you have to spend a lot of time going slow.
Over the last 10 years I have spent a good portion of my professional career as a sport scientist trying to answer the question “How do the best endurance athletes organize their daily training?” You just cannot reproduce in a laboratory the Darwinian caldron that elite sport represents. Top athletes are constantly adjusting and tuning their training to optimize the effect. And their performances determine their “survival.” Understanding what training patterns have emerged, and survived, at the highest levels can tell us a lot about how we mortals should train as well.
So, do the elite train at their physiological redline every day (lots of “anaerobic threshold training)? Are they doing intense interval workouts 3-5 days a week (like the short interval sessions personal trainers have gone nuts with)? Is every workout “NO PAIN, NO GAIN?” I have performed research studies, integrated the research of other scientists studying elite athletes, and worked “in the field” consulting national and international class endurance athletes, including Olympic gold medal winners. And, for what it’s worth, I have also shed many buckets of sweat myself. If I had to sum up all of the data and all of the experience in one sentence (albeit lengthy), this is what I would say: “across sports, great endurance athletes are disciplined enough to spend a lot of time training at low intensities, and committed enough to use the resulting physiological foundation to extend their mental and physical barriers with careful doses of high intensity, very hard training sessions.”
Training long and slow, and training hard and fast are both critical ingredients for success. But, whether it is distance running, cycling, rowing, or cross-country skiing, we see that successful performers perform 75% or more of their training sessions at what, for them, is a low intensity. Two hour easy runs, 4-5 hour cycling rides at talking tempo, 90 minute rows with a heart watch on to make sure the heart rate stays below their “threshold”, these are the bread and butter workouts we see through the years and across the season. Endurance athletes can train for 2-3 hours and finish feeling better than when they started. But, when the goal is to push the training intensity up to scary levels and hold it for brutal amounts of time, their workouts are often the stuff that legend is made of.
Now I was raised in the U.S. South, but I live in Norway now. Besides the climate and political differences, there is also a different menu of sports to observe and embrace. Norwegians love their endurance athletes and seem to appreciate the intrigue of a battle stretched over time, like the 2 hours+ of a marathon or 50 km XC ski race. In this home of endurance legends like female marathoner Grete Waitz and 8-time Olympic gold medal winner Bjorn Daehlie, it is said that long, low intensity training sessions are “making the cake”. The hard, high intensity training sessions and the races are “eating the cake”. Baking a cake takes time, eating a cake goes fast. Eat too much too fast and you get a stomach ache. So it is with endurance training as well.
What can we weekend warriors, recreational competitors, and masters athletes learn from these professionals who train twice a day and get paid to race? With jobs, families, and other time squeezing commitments, we tend to want to make our more limited training time “really count.” Consequently, our hurried workouts tend to all slide towards what I call the training intensity black hole. This is a moderately hard intensity right at or slightly above the lactate threshold, our physiological redline. Forty five minutes of frantic training 3-5 days a week. It works for a while, we get in shape………but then we stagnate. What can we learn from the pros when we don’t have the time to train as much as they do? Well, surprisingly, we can learn that less is more. Ninety minutes at 65% of max is more valuable than 45 minutes at 75% sometimes. Then, another day, we will have the mental energy and physiological platform to aggressively run, cycle, or row those hard intervals at 90% or more of max. Instead of falling into that rut of doing all the workouts “pretty hard”, we polarize our training and learn that there is a time to go long and slow and a time to go hard and fast. How will you know when you are getting there? You will know when you can let someone pass you during a long, slow workout, smile, and not speed up…… not today, today I am making the cake.
