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.

Wrapping Up My Iodine Year – Element 53

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53 was one of the best years of my life.

Here’s my year.

Brick by brick.

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Baseline Stress – Started November 2021

I was unaware of my baseline stress. Heart rate variability (HRV) gave me a look into both my stress, and my health.

HRV doesn’t care about my capacity to grind through fatigue.

Start gathering daily heart rate variability data and take a look

HRV is not “the answer”

The answer is removing the choices that screw up my HRV

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Connection – Started January 2022

When I returned to Twitter, my stretch goal was 10,000 connections by 2031 (empty nest for us).

Quickly, I realized I’d anchored on a meaningless number

What I needed was a handful of connections

A handful of my kind of people

  • Who are your people?
  • Where are they?
  • What do they like to do?

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Engagement – Started February 2022

In the Rich Roll podcast (recorded July 2022)

I wanted to see if there was a place for my voice

This goes beyond connection => positive action

We are wired to get a boost from helping other people

I love helping people figure things out

  • What’s your thing?
  • Who’s trying to learn about your thing?

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Narrative – Started May 2022

Humans run on narrative (book link)

Write a story you can:

  • embody
  • share
  • teach
  • be proud of

Let the story take you where you want to go

  • What’s your story?
  • Where do you want to go?

Links & Additional Resources

Sunday Summary 20 November 2022

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My YouTube Channel – https://www.youtube.com/@feelthebyrn

Top Threads

  1. Using sheet metal screws for a frozen XC course, worked well
  2. Accelerating Your Fitness
  3. Aerobic Threshold Resources
  4. Does Your Endurance Training Stabilize
  5. My Aging Athlete Hypothesis

Endurance Training Tips

High-Performance Habits

True Wealth – Building A Family System

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I gave my crypto post a retweet yesterday

The post isn’t about crypto.

The post is about deciding where not to focus.

The post contains a filter:

1/. Will “this” make a difference?

2/. Will “not-this” make a difference?

“Family” is a 20+ year project that made a difference.

Like any big project – it is daunting at the beginning.

Many people fail to take the first step because they lack confidence in their ability to complete the task.

The first step was “me”

One of my favorite filters has to do with selecting a home base.

Live Where You Don’t Need To Leave

Applies to more than our hometowns

It applies to our careers, our home lives, our relationships

Let’s go even deeper

Be someone I’m not trying to escape.

  • the way I act
  • what I say
  • what I write
  • what I think
  • how I want to be in the world

I started with with “say” and “write”.

  • Write about the person I want to be.
  • Stop talking about the things I didn’t want to be.

I was seeking to change patterns in my life

Patterns that led to my divorce – patterns that led to my current situation.

I wanted to be more like the person I wanted to attract into my life

  • Athletic
  • Kind
  • Calm

Maybe, your list is different.

Write it down.

Know where you’re trying to go.

From my Rich Roll podcast

I knew if I didn’t marry this woman then it would be greatest mistake of my life.

Getting married is the easy part.

We’re planting a seed, attending a party, everybody likes to get married.

Building a marriage, however, requires effort over time.

Effort at overcoming ourselves, our pasts and, sometimes, unhelpful family habits.

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One of the first lessons I learned in Private Equity, concession for concession.

Makes one an effective negotiator, screws up a family system.

Why?

Two main reasons

  1. Leaders do more than their share. To properly direct a team, we need to earn it.
  2. We never see all the work done by our teammates. If I think the work split is “fair” then, odds are, I’m not doing enough.

Fundamentally, I see marriage as an agreement to face the world, together.

It’s going to require both parties to put “together” first.

It can take a while to get used to this new way of thinking.

You have plenty of time.

Hopefully, a very long time.

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Embracing an “attitude of no escape” will help you make the changes required for success.

Create a family where you don’t need to leave.

Lean into your difficulties.

My biggest problems led to my most meaningful solutions.

Linked Articles

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:

Sunday Summary 13 November 2022

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Top Threads

Endurance Training Tips

High Performance Habits

Why You Are Overcomplicating Training Load

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Following on from Monday’s blog on How Much To Exercise…

With the hype around

You could be forgiven for feeling a little confused.

I’m going to make it simple for you.

What matters?

Well, that depends on your goals.

  • Longevity
  • Metabolic Health & Fat Loss
  • Mood Management

Lock in a Basic Week and repeat.

The Basic Week Approach is what I call low-standard deviation training.

It works for champion athletes

and

It works when I had a house filled with little ones

  • Something every morning
  • Mix our mornings between cardio and strength
  • Do a little more when our schedule permits

With a young family, exercise was for stress reduction, not performance.

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Health & Longevity – I am always amazed at how much health benefit we get from a bit of cardio and strength.

A bit of working out combined with frequent ‘moving around.’

If you want a deeper dive then read Howard’s book on Longevity, link is to Dr Luks’ site.

Metabolic Health & Fat Loss – don’t trap yourself on the hamster wheel of chasing volume so you can eat more. Even experienced athletes make this error, I did this summer.

It’s a game we NEVER win.

Keep stress down and focus on your core nutrition.

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Mood Management – My mood responds best when I stop before I’m tired.

As I wrote on Monday, we want a small disruption we can repeat over time.

If I feel “disrupted” during a workout… I blew it and recovery is going to take a while.

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Suppose you have ambitious athletic goals.

What then?

You will need to figure out how to manage larger “disruptions.”

Before you add training load, reduce life stress. I had to wait for the pandemic to end, and my kids to grow up.

There are seasons to what we can handle – these cycles are based on invisible rhythms and total life stress.

Three month view, below, to illustrate

  • The grey bars are daily disruptions
  • The calm blue “sea” is long term load – 7 weeks
  • The red “waves” are short term load – weekly peaks

Spring and Summer are a time for bigger waves of load.

Fall is a time for slowing down, and long-term projects.

***Keep it simple and persist***

If you are interested in how I’ve been managing my “waves” then I pulled together a thread of resources for you (below).

Where to start?

Heart Rate Variability – tracking my HRV showed me how much fatigue I was carrying around. Here’s an FAQ and here’s the app I use.

The graphic above is from hrv4t.com and is another representation of daily loading.

The color represents how my metrics looked that morning.

What I like about this chart: even when things are going well, there’s a lot of recovery required.

Depending on how you slice it, 2-4 recovery days per week.

Loading is the easy part, what’s your Recovery Strategy?

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Let’s end with a favorite quote about humility

When different protocols produce similar results, the mechanism isn’t the protocol

The process you enjoy is the one you’ll be able to sustain.

Consistency is the mechanism underlying all progress.

Linked In This Article

  1. How Much Should I Train?
  2. Optimized Training Protocols for Doctors, and other busy professionals
  3. Dead-Simple Nutrition
  4. Eliminating Weight-Gain While Exercising
  5. The Dynamic Loading Thread
  6. FAQ on Heart Rate Variability