Category Archives: supervet fitness

Durability Is Speed You Can Use, Here Is How You Can Start Building It Today

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Every new cyclist knows the feeling of being completely blown after a hard effort.

In my first bike race, I decided to attack the bunch, downhill. Don’t ask me why. Back then, I’d lose my mind when my HR was up.

The attack left my legs shattered and saw me quickly spat out the back when the bunch rolled me up.

In swimming, as I challenged my ability to swim long via 4000, 5000, 6500 and, eventually, 10000 meter workouts, there would be days when a switch-flipped and, instantly, my pace dropped by 10s per 100.

Like my first bike race, there was no coming back.

In running, particularly long races, my experience was different yet again.

Here, pain would slowly build in in my legs and my pace would gradually slow.

Eventually, my legs would be so beat up, I was unable to place a meaningful load on my cardiovascular system.

Fueled up, and hydrated, with no ability to raise my heart rate.

  • What’s happening?
  • What can we do about it?

Exercise physiologists refer to the above as Durability

…the time of onset and magnitude of deterioration of physiological performance parameters over time during prolonged exercise.

– TTS Podcast with ed maunder & stephen Seiler

Quite a mouthful.

I prefer to think in terms of DEPTH.

Think Deep.

Deep Fitness

  • goes from our skin into our bones
  • permeates every cell of our bodies
  • can’t be disturbed by shocks
    • in pace
    • from heat
    • via altitude
    • over time

Fitness, that goes the distance.

Fitness, nurtured with sleep and nutrition.

How might we build this fitness?

Last Monday, I shared an Endurance Hierarchy

  1. Ability to Move
  2. Ability To Do Work
  3. Work Rate Training
  4. Specific Preparation for Competition

Before you try to get faster, DEEPEN the fitness you already have.

You are going to be surprised by this process.

It will make you faster AND give you the capability to hold your speed.

Dead-simple approach

  1. Time at Aerobic Threshold
  2. Heavy Domain Sets, where you ‘recover’ at Aerobic Threshold

Make sure you’ve developed the Ability To Do Work before starting this training.

How much should you do? Start with a 90:10 split.

If you incorporate hills then you might already be doing this training without realizing it.

That said, if you are ‘trying’ on your hills then you are likely to be training more intensely than required.

This tip, to slow down, will be a recurring form of my advice to you.

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Skew Errors Left

You’re almost certainly training more intensely than you realize.

It’s not your fault. It’s the way we’re wired.

The solution is simple, aim your mistakes towards “low & less.”

In the unlikely event you’re aiming too low, you get more volume around aerobic threshold.

This is not a problem, it’s a benefit from my approach.

You’ll benefit in avoiding the common pitfall of nuking yourself as soon as you add a bit of “proper” training.

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What is a Heavy Domain set?

I’ve written out examples for you.

  • Swim – Pace Change Workouts
  • Bike – Big Gear and Favorite Endurance Patterns
  • Run – Favorite Endurance Patterns

Tips for all sports:

  1. Start with 10-15 minutes of work, broken.
  2. Be patient with getting your heart rate up, there’s a lag.
  3. Learn to recover while moving at aerobic threshold pace

Advanced athletes, build up to 40-60 minutes worth of work, broken.

Remember: this is not more than 10% of your total volume

Resist: the urge to go bananas when heart rate rises

Know: The big gains come from:

  • The 90% => time around Aerobic Threshold
  • Sleep
  • Nutrition
  • Stacking continuous work (1000 Day Pacing)
  • Workout by workout
  • Week by week
  • Month by month
  • Season by season

Build fitness that permeates every cell of your body.

Think DEEP

Linked Resources

In January, I am migrating to Substack and splitting my blog.

WordPress won’t let me migrate my existing subscribers.

Subscription is free – there’s an option to financially contribute if you wish.

Come along for the ride. It’s going to be great.

Racing Fastest Using The Principle of Bottom-Up Endurance

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Today, I am going to touch on a favorite topic.

Getting Tired The Right Way

“Right” meaning the way that directly benefits race performance, or builds the capacity to do the training required for race performance

Let’s start at the beginning.

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Ability To Move

You’ve signed up for a race. How long is it going to take you?

  1. Have ever stood for the duration of your goal event?
  2. Have you ever moved for the duration?
  3. Based on last month, how many days does it take you to train the equivalent of your goal event?
  • Take your training time from last month
  • Convert to HH:MM per day
  • Compare it to race day

Consider The Gap between Average Daily Load and Likely Race Duration

The wider the gap, the lower your training intensity will need to be.

The initial focus: skills, strength and building the capacity to move.

Above is a long weekend from in November, ~10.5 hours of volume across three days.

  • If my race was 1-4 hours long then I’d be ticking the box on “ability to move”.
  • If my race was 10+ hours long then I’d want to avoid all choices that result in less volume being done in my week.

When you are pushing duration, you will need to back off the pace.

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How You Can Address The Gap

Extend by Compressing => patiently build the capacity to fit your event into fewer days.

Triathletes, look at total time (& distance) by sport. The multiple, or fraction, of race distance completed each week gives valuable insight into the humility you must display with race pacing.

Runners, your job is easier, look at weekly mileage and remember ALL mileage counts (walk, hike, run, you name it).

Everyone, judge your fitness by what happens after you load.

When you push duration, how long does it take you to return to normal training?

The depth of your fitness will be determined by your ability to back-it-up following your key endurance days.

Ability To Do Work

The weekend after the block (above), I did the equivalent of a Half Ironman (below)

These two days were not done at race pace.

Race Simulation workouts would have been too costly to my overall week. I would have needed too much recovery.

Step Two: after you have proven “Ability to Move” move on to “Ability to Do Work”.

What I was seeking was placing the work-equivalent of my goal event into a single day, or 24-hour period.

My long “workout” is actually a series of workouts, intervals, meals… spread across a period of time.

Then I rest, do easy training, absorb and return to my normal training week.

Over time, my ability to do work will improve.

If it doesn’t then I need to see what is preventing improvement (below).

How can we train the ability to do work?

  1. Time at Aerobic Threshold / Baseline Lactate
  2. Get your nutrition sorted
  • No Hacks
  • No Short Cuts
  • No Easy Way

You gotta put in the hours.

Work Rate Training

Years later, it’s time to think about the specific demands of your event.

Step Three is training to perform and that’s a topic for another day.

The more time you give yourself to prepare, the faster you will be in your racing.

Linked Resources

4 Tactics To Prepare for Half Marathon and Half Ironman Racing, While Staying Healthy and Enjoying Pain Free Running

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It’s been 22 weeks since my return to running (chart above)

I’ll walk you through my data and give you some benchmarks to consider with regard to your own training.

My 7-week average is 23km per week (chart below)

I’m tolerating 3 hours per day on my loading days and managed a broken Half Ironman over a weekend in November.

The two areas where I have been most conservative:

  1. Intensity – nearly everything is easy/steady (30-60 beats below max heart rate). I wasn’t tolerating my sprints/bounding so dropped them.
  2. Duration – my longest main set is 12km/7.5M

Right now, the longest I could see myself racing is ~5 miles / ~8 km

I’m not going to race => why take a risk of screwing up my progression.

The “just stay healthy” plan has been working.

Four things have kept me healthy

1// No back-to-back runs

  • With the exception of my Broken Half Ironman Workout (Sat AM / Sun PM runs), I have avoided running on back to back days
  • I let soreness be my guide, if I need more recovery then I take it

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2// Eccentric (Pre)Hab

The program I put together for my posterior chain was fun to do.

Unfortunately, it didn’t deliver the results I wanted – a pain free increase in run load.

So I changed the plan.

Simple plan – get eccentric load into the areas troubling me

  • Two Exercises (Prone Leg Curl, Seated Calf Raise)
  • Two Sets of 10 reps per side, each exercise
  • The moment pattern is “Up with Two, Down with One”
  • Full range of motion
  • When I go to the pool (non-running day) I do the exercises.
  • It takes 12 minutes, done 2-3x per week.
  • Relief happened from the FIRST session.
  • It’s not necessary to progress the weight.

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3// Habit of Daily Mobility

Since my first run, I have scored 150/154 (days) with my mobility habit.

It works.

It is simple.

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4// Build Stamina on the Bike

Since July, I’ve been riding ~8 hours per week

With my 5:2 loading, the 8 hours breaks down as 4 rides a week of 3/2/2/1 hours duration.

Cycling has benefits for runners:

  • I can train duration without impact stress – faster recovery from ‘long’ sessions
  • I have an “easy” zone on the bike – I’m only starting to develop this ability with my running
  • I can keep training when I’m recovering from a run session

Extend duration, low-end intensity control and greater total endurance load

What does this mean in practice?

  • Since July, I have completed more than 50 bike workouts >=2 hours
  • Compared to my longest running main set => 60 minutes, done once

I can prepare myself for a race that’s much longer than my current run workouts.

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Linked Resources

  1. A Return to Pain-Free Running
  2. The Serious Athlete’s Guide To Building A Training Week
  3. Bomber Calves & Hamstring Protocol
  4. A Swedish Approach to Athletic Excellence
  5. Supplemental Videos on My YouTube Channel
  6. I create my charts and track load over at Training Peaks

Sunday Summary 27 November 2022

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Top Five Threads

  1. How to write a book – rough draft is toughest part
  2. Best Starter Bike Thread
  3. Video on Intensity Zones & Domains
  4. When metrics decline, Trust The Process
  5. Active Readiness (with Brad & original thread & metrics video)

Endurance Training Tips

High Performance Habits

Human OS and Endurance Athletes

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Jim O’Shaughnessy is a favorite follow and introduced me to Human OS.

Human OS is our default operating system. After birth, our OS is reinforced by our parents, communities and environment.

It wasn’t until I started training _very_ seriously that I became aware of my default programming.

Athletic stress is a low-stakes method to surface our default settings.

Amateur sport has lower emotional, and financial, stakes than our families, and careers. It is an effective venue for self-improvement.

Awareness is the first step… I’ll share certain traits you might want to notice.

Once you see these in your sport, look for them in your driving (another training ground for elite emotional control), at the office or around the Thanksgiving table.

There is no “right” answer.

What’s useful is understanding our tendencies then allocating time to train against preference.

The goal being to remain emotionally stable as stress ramps up.

The benefit being the capacity to think clearly under duress.

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Hills

A hill pushes against you.

What do you do?

Do you have the capacity to anticipate the hill? Shift to an easier great, or shorten your stride, in advance of your heart rate spiking?

Step outside your sport.

Life pushes you.

What do you do?

Start with hills, it’s easier.

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Where do you place most of your energy?

At the bottom, middle, or top of the hill?

I’m a “top of the hill” rider – I want my power to be highest when air speed is lowest.

I want to optimize overall time and avoid the pain of regret.

My son is a “bottom of the hill” rider – he likes the challenge of hanging on.

My son wants to win. He is likely to regret not giving maximum early effort.

We can learn from each other.

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Weather

My kids love bad weather racing.

Why?

Because they’ve learned it hurts the competition more.

How do you deal with weather?

Surprisingly simple to retrain our attitudes here.

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Pacing

  • What’s the fastest part of your interval, set and workout?
  • What’s the slowest?
  • How does your profile compare to other people?
  • How often do you train against your preference?

Understanding the slowest part of an event, then training to be fast in that segment, will give you an edge in your racing.

Understanding our own tendencies makes it more challenging for others to exploit them.

Some mantras that have helped

  • Stay in the game
  • Always finish strong
  • Speed up, before slowing down
  • Quit later
  • Never get in the van
  • Be the brand

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Feel

Do you have the capacity to feel speed?

  • The air against your body, the water against your skin, the pressure of the pedals…
  • Breathing rate, muscular tension, heart beats, lactate…

There’s a feeling to all of the above.

How about seeing speed? How fast you’re moving.

With the gizmos available to us, it’s easy to lose the ability to choose how we’re feeling.

Feelings, our response to stimulus and stress, are highly trainable.

Take charge of your ability to decide how you’re doing.

Being excessively data-focused can drain mojo, without benefit.

Be more than your data.

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Setbacks

How often do you get sick, injured or have a setback?

A pattern of setbacks will have more to do with your approach than fate.

A simple ‘trick’ here.

Build your circle with coaches, partners and mentors with different blind spots than you.

Consider looking outside your agegroup, gender and sport.

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  • What do you ‘talk” about when you get home?
  • Ever re-read your training diaries?
  • Your journal?
  • Where’s your mind focused when you’re not exercising?

Relentless positivity is not common.

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Personal Narrative

This one’s important

What’s the story you tell yourself about exercise?

  1. Born to train
  2. It’s work
  3. So I can eat more
  4. Just get through it
  5. Because I need to lose weight
  6. I’m an Olympic champion
  7. Because I will gain weight if I do less
  8. Because…
  9. Because…

Really listen to yourself here.

Why?

No matter your story, you will act to prove yourself right.

All my stories have proven false.

Most of my stories were useful.

Know your story.

7 Questions to Accelerate Your Fitness

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Got the Qs from Dickie

What is something most people think is important that I can skip entirely?

Most of the debate between exercise experts occurs with respect to the Severe Domain, high intensity exercise.

Energy spent entering this debate is WASTED.

Why?

As a new athlete, it’s 1% of your training load.

Focus on:

If you need some Pep in Your Program then do a race, ideally a short one.

What is something important to your daily routine you wish you started earlier?

  1. Heart Rate Variability – we are CLUELESS with respect to our baseline stress
  2. Early to rise – the last two hours of the day are the least productive
  3. Always sober – reality is enough for me
  4. Train first thing – one positive step, daily

What channels led to the building of your highest quality relationships?

I’ve lived an open life and shared my experience online. This attracted a wide range of interesting people, and opportunities.

One aspect of my coaching business was training camps. These camps were not vacations. They were created to put athletes in high stress situations.

The shared suffering of the camps generated enduring, high quality friendships.

Here’s the filter… shared philosophy on life, willing to travel to learn, not an asshole under duress.

What is something you did differently from your peers but served you in the long run?

I defined “enough.” When I hit my number at 30 yo, I left Private Equity.

At 42 yo, I was at the top of AG racing. I made a decision to shift from fame to family.

What can I expect to struggle with along the way?

Setbacks are salient. Gains are slow.

Write your wins down, daily.

Before we had Strava, I used to post my weekly training summary on my website.

We build our lives brick-by-brick.

Persist.

What is something you had to unlearn to take the next step?

Soft Skills – harmony enhances every aspect of performance

Recovery – loading is the easy part

What is something you had to learn the hard way?

There is more grey in the world than I realized.

  • Do your work, and stand back
  • Let other people:
    • be wrong
    • have the last word
    • live their lives as they see fit
  • Yield – we’ve already won

Linked In This Article:

Three Tips For How Much Exercise You Should Target

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I got a lot of things right during my elite career.

Optimized loading was not one of them!

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Let’s start with the purpose of load, paraphrased from Øyvind Sandbakk,

A good enough disruption in physiology that can be repeated over long time horizons

As a returning athlete, most my errors come from targeting too large a disruption…

…that delays my ability to repeat (and hopefully progress) the disruption.

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How do we tip the scales in our favor?

One: Know YOUR Sustainable Average

  • Not where you want to be.
  • Not what a friend is doing.
  • Not what was suggested on the internet
  • Not the biggest week you ever survived

On my first call with an athlete:

  1. What did you get done last month?
  2. What was your average volume last winter?

That’s your HIGH and LOW range for sustainable volume.

It’s much easier to move up the bottom of the range.

Remove the causes of “missing tomorrow.”

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Two: Know What Tips YOU Over The Edge

We each have a level of load that causes our lives to gradually fall apart.

Make errors visible and pay attention to what tips you over.

10% less can have you feeling 100% better.

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Three: Know Your Minimum Effective Dose

My current minimums:

  • Swim 2000 meters
  • Bike 60 minutes
  • Run 5 km

Not in a row, by the way.

Get those done 3x a week, add a strength session.

I’ll be just fine until life settles down.

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Bottom-Up Fitness

  1. Use minimums to bring average load up
  2. Avoid long gaps in your favorite sports
  3. Focus on removing the choices that screw up tomorrow

Compounding Drives Returns

Sunday Summary 23 October 2022

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Top Threads

Endurance Training Tips

High-Performance Habits

The Psychology of Training After 45

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Dan & Ron – a couple of my favorite veteran athletes

I’m more than halfway along my journey from 45 to 60.

The biggest change is the reduction in my total pool of energy.

To cope, I’ve been open to changing my approach:

  • Adding: mobility work, heart rate variability metrics, additional easy days
  • Removing: alcohol, caffeine, travel, driving

Have the changes worked?

Honestly, tough to say!

It’s a paradox… less overall energy provides motivation to make changes in the hope of getting some energy back!

The other big motivator is fear.

Fear of:

  • Decline in sexual function
  • Decline in muscle mass
  • Increase in body fat
  • Getting “slow”

Let’s dig in a little.

Somewhere between 2000 and 2022, I convinced myself that coffee was giving me energy. When I tested that assumption, it proved false.

I continue to have false beliefs – I’m on the hunt for them.

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Sex Drive

One of the best ways to measure if we are coping with our total stress load.

Not just training load.

Sex drive captures the total package of stress in our life as well as health status.

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Muscle Mass

One way to resist “looking old” is to get jacked.

One way to resist “feeling old” is to get strong.

Strength training works.

Thing is, doing it well, requires quite a bit of energy.

How best to optimize?

My choice has been to use multi-year cycles.

Get strong once a year and get _really_ strong every 5 years.

When I swing too far towards strength training, my endurance suffers and that has a negative impact on my quality of life.

My approach ends up being a pendulum, between strength and endurance.

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Fat

Here’s the hazard – a fear of fat, can turn into an obsession with body weight.

As we drive body weight downwards, we can create a negative spiral of losing muscle mass and, eventually, strength.

It takes years for this process to play out.

Personally, I was to be strong for as long as possible.

Strong like Ron!

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Few years back. Ron broke the course record in the 65-69. Finished 2nd

Slowing Down

The reality => less overall energy, means less training load, means less training response

We’re going to slow down.

When we let our fear drive our training selection, we can make matters worse.

  • Too much high intensity (Zn 5, Severe & Extreme Domains)
  • Too much sustained intensity (Zn 3 & 4, Heavy Domain)

Use expensive training with intent.

Specifically, as we age, avoid strategies with a high risk of injury.

Why?

Injury, and the associated gap in training, results in a step-down in function.

Not gradual and, increasingly, challenging to build back.

Ron stuck with it, took an hour (!) out of 70-74 AG record and won in 2007

What’s the prescription?

Keep fear out of the driver’s seat.

Pay attention to natural signals – mood and sex drive are important metrics.

Balance working towards a “fit future” with enjoying the present.

Feel superb, frequently.

Enjoy the ride.

Sunday Summary 16 October 2022

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Top Threads

  1. Fast After 50 – Ironman
  2. Team “Feel The Byrn” in Sweden next June
  3. How to review an Ironman Bike File
  4. How to Qualify for Kona
  5. How to review an Ironman – more next Tuesday on Twitter

Endurance Sport Tips

High Performance Habits