Racing Fastest Using The Principle of Bottom-Up Endurance


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

Human OS and Endurance Athletes


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.

Sunday Summary 20 November 2022

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

7 Questions to Accelerate Your Fitness


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 6 November 2022

Top Threads

  1. Ideas for the 4hr+ Marathoner
  2. Pulled resources into a Dynamic Loading Thread
  3. Remove friction between yourself and “better”
  4. Novices Always Want to Prove Progress, I’m not immune!
  5. Asked for help on resources for making desktop videos

Endurance Training Tips

High Performance Habits

Targeted Endurance For Self-Coached Athletes


Following on from the Lactate Testing Video, I made another helping you apply your data.

Just in case you prefer written content, I’m going to pull the key points out in this post.



#1 – We train ranges, not averages

To ride a 172w average, I sit in a 150 to 200w range.

If my range crosses into a higher zone/domain then I will be changing the nature of my workout.

With elite athletes, this is not a big deal. They have superior lactate clearance ability and handle micro surges, with ease.

With new and developing athletes, this is a source of underperformance in long workouts. The effective intensity is much higher than the average of the workout.

Learn to swim, bike and run… SMOOTH

It is a foundational skill



#2 – Anchors

Skew your errors left

Recognize that we exercise in ranges, not averages.

Keep your range in the domain you are seeking to train.

Setting an accurate anchor can help.

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Aerobic Threshold (AeT) (Border Between Zone 1 and Zone 2)

Easily found using the protocol in my lactate video. Anchor your endurance training here, exercise smoothly, and your range will straddle Zones 1 & 2.

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Threshold-Minus (T-) (2.5 to 3.0 mmol step on your lactate test)

For Heavy Domain training, start by anchoring here. This keeps your range away from the Severe Domain, where the recovery cost of your session rises much faster than the benefit from working a fraction higher.

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What you call the zones doesn’t matter.

What matters…

Figure out the correct anchor for the stimulus you are seeking


Key points:

  1. Know the effective range of your training
  2. Consider if your range overlaps a higher intensity domain
  3. Set endurance anchors bottom-up
  4. Consider checking in-workout lactates to confirm the above

When you have a fatigue mismatch, it is likely because you are training more intensely than you realize.

When you have upward drift in your heart rate, consider backing off.

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The most common “intensity” mistake is blowing right past T- into the Severe Domain (above FT/CP/LT2)

  • Floods the body with lactate
  • Recovery greatly extended
  • Painful
  • Time at intensity reduced, for small gain in work rate

We don’t graduate to crushing ourselves in the Severe Domain – we learn how to use the Heavy Domain wisely.


Additional Resources

Thresholds and Domains – explained very well in this Video by Dr Mark Burnley

I think of domains in terms of green, yellow, red

  • Green – Moderate Domain – Endurance
  • Yellow – Heavy Domain – Intensive Endurance
  • Red – Severe Domain – Use With Specific Intent – Costly

My Lactate Testing Video

The Lactate Thread

The Training Zones Thread

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Final Word : it’s easy to get wrapped up in zones & domains.

Given the experts struggle to reach agreement amongst themselves… better to find an effective anchor and get to work!

The Ambitious Athlete’s Guide to Allocating Intensity

Part One gave you a framework for allocating training load and structuring your week.

In this section, I’m going to offer you a framework for how to allocate training intensity.



Strength and stamina (above) are used in the colloquial sense.

Exercise physiologists have been debating the definition of each for as long as I’ve been alive.

Don’t debate do!


Strength is relative.

  • to you
  • to the requirements of your sport
  • to your future self
  • to what can screw up tomorrow (we don’t see injuries avoided)

There are many different types of strength, and training approaches.

Try them all

and include the following in your strength definition:

  • Traditional – compound lifts, pulls, pushes, twists (thread to get you started)
  • Plyometric exercises (stress your connective tissues)
  • Balance & agility exercises (prepare to avoid falling)
  • Different movement patterns

For a long time (25+ years), I had a very simple strength program. This period included some speedy race results and worked just fine.

In my late-40s, I started skiing and wanted new input to protect my joints and prepare for the demands of mogul skiing.

I started using MtnTactical.com programs.

The “programer” is not aware of my background load:

  • I scale the sessions (downwards) to fit into my strength allocation for the week
  • I spread the sessions out to avoid too much load in a week

The benefit of using someone else’s program is variety. For me, the only way to make that happen is someone else designing the program.

Your personal tolerance for strength will vary over time. The 10% guideline is a minimum. Many athletes will tolerate, and benefit from, a greater emphasis on strength (particularly in the winter).

I score traditional strength at 1 TSS point per minute and plyometric/work capacity sessions at 2 TSS points per minute. These scores include rest periods.

When resting between work sets, do mobility work!


So that leaves us with Endurance Training

  • 80% Stamina
  • 6% Tempo
  • 3% Threshold
  • 1% VO2 & VO2+

I titled this piece with intent.

The Ambitious Athlete’s Guide

I am assuming you truly want to see what’s possible with regard to endurance sport.

I’m assuming you want long term gains rather than whatever payoff you’re receiving from your current approach.

To see what’s possible, you’re going to have to overcome certain aspects of your Human Operating System and past habits.

One of these aspects is what I call “training like an age grouper” => instead of the 9% allocation to Tempo/Threshold we often have a burning desire to get that number closer to 90%!

Tempo/Threshold is what we expect exercise to feel like. Our breathing rate is up, we’re sweating, the work rate is high… we think it’s more beneficial.

Well, it is and it isn’t.

The ability to benefit from “work rate” training is linked to our capacity to do, and recover from, work.

Stamina is our endurance capacity over time and fully developing this capacity takes years.

My article on A Swedish Approach to Athletic Excellence says more, including when it makes sense to decrease the total Stamina allocation.


Stamina Allocations

Within the 80%, let recovery guide your allocation between Zones 1 & 2.

From Part One, when you’re having unplanned misses, assume…

  1. Your training zones are set too high
  2. Your loading days are too big
  3. You have too many loading days

If you can’t tolerate 80% of your week in Zone 1 and Zone 2 then:

  • Your zones are wrong – check LT1 via lactate (blog to come)
  • Your allocation to Zone 1 needs to increase – too much Zone 2
  • Your weekly hours need to decrease – load ramp too steep
  • You need to reduce total stress to accommodate training stress

It’s usually a mix of the above, with spontaneous intensity additions, that tip us over the edge.

Suck it up, slow down, and build some stamina.

This protocol was the foundation for taking myself:

  • from a 60-minute standalone 10K
  • to winning Ultraman Hawaii
  • to a 2:46 Ironman marathon

Bookmark this post, when injuries and setbacks get you down, come back to it.

This is the way.

The Serious Athlete’s Guide To Building A Training Week

This article started with a Twitter Thread last Friday.

In that thread I explained how to:

  1. Build a habit of doing
  2. Add balanced training
  3. Instead of adding training stress, focus on removing poor choices
  4. Start collecting data
  5. Stay the course – the first 1,000 days is the beginning of your journey

#1 puts you ahead of nearly everyone

#5 can lead you to the top


To build your week, you need to know what you’re trying to achieve.

What is the One Thing you are trying to achieve?

  1. Win Ironman Canada
  2. Go sub-9 in an Ironman
  3. Lose weight
  4. Qualify for World Champs
  5. Break 3-hours for an off-the-bike marathon
  6. Break 54-minutes for an Ironman swim
  7. Finish an Ironman before dark
  8. Regain my freedom action on long days in the mountains
  9. Support outstanding mogul skiing
  10. Prepare for an Alaskan mountaineering expedition

The above have all been goals.

Each goal, required a different approach to creating my week.

Do you know your goal?

Write it down!

By writing your goal, you are (even) further ahead of the pack.

Most people either have too many goals, or no goals at all.

One goal, done right, will be plenty!


You are going to be constantly tempted to deviate from your goal.

If you find you lack the ability to stay focused then use sport to train your ability to not-react.


Let’s pull it together:

  • Daily action towards One Thing
  • Written down
  • Removal of distractions
  • Removal of poor choices
  • Building a habit of not-reaction

No matter the results… daily action, via negativa, capacity to not react

You are on a winning path


Let’s dig into the training week, itself.

There are four types of days:

  • Recovery – off from exercise, focused on life
  • Easy – light activity to promote recovery
  • Maintenance – training at your normal level of activity
  • Loading – training above your normal level, designed to create a specific adaptation

Recovery – weekly, I use two recovery days (back-to-back) to re-establish my positive trend and maintain stability in my non-training life

  • Work calls
  • Interviews
  • Shopping
  • Cleaning
  • Long mobility session
  • Connection with my spouse
  • Connect with two friends
  • Help my spouse in a visible manner

The two recovery days are a mental reset, leaving me keen to get back to training.

These days have no training stress, but are important days in my life.

By keeping my non-training life in order, tending my relationships and obligations, I am able to lower the total stress in my life.

Lower Total Stress = Faster Training Adaptations


What makes a “loading day”?

Since the company was founded, I have been using a website called Training Peaks. What follows is a framework used on that site.

The framework isn’t perfect, but it’s very useful. The foundation of the framework is to derive a stress score for each session done by an athlete.

Training Stress Score – a way to quantify training load – called TSS

Easiest way to think about it

  • Best effort for an hour scores 100 points (5th gear)
  • Threshold effort 85 points per hour (4th gear)
  • Tempo effort 75 points per hour (3rd gear)
  • Steady effort 65 points per hour (2nd gear)
  • Easy effort 50 points per hour (1st gear)

If you think in Fahrenheit then you probably won’t be that far off.

Exercise scientists spend their lives debating the different gears, the transitions between the gears and the best gear to use for where you want to take yourself.

It matters, and it doesn’t matter.

Why?

Because most people never stay focused long enough for their protocol to limit their performance.

What you need is a simple way to keep yourself from over-doing-it.

TSS works for this task.

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Each day, I push my workouts up to TrainingPeaks and a TSS score is generated for the day.

My Chronic Training Load (CTL) is my average daily score for the last six weeks.

CTL is a proxy for fitness – it’s what you’ve actually managed to do for the last six weeks.

TIP: the speed your CTL increases is called your “load ramp” – a common error for athletes is too quick a load ramp.

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CTL should be fairly stable – if it is not then look deeper.

Do you have unplanned misses? injuries? illnesses?

Your mind will try to wrap a story around the misses.

Don’t worry about why.

Instead, assume:

  1. Your training zones are set too high
  2. Your loading days are too big
  3. You have too many loading days

Two loading days each week, a stable CTL, a life that’s under control…

Gives you plenty to work with.

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In the TP world, “fatigue” is measured by Acute Training Load, ATL. This is your average score for the last week (7 days).

If we take your CTL (fitness) and subtract your ATL (fatigue) then we can see how “fresh” you are. TP calls this your “form.”

Each athlete will have a personal tolerance for how negative they can take their form.

When you get “too tired” have a look at your “form” score and see how negative it was before you tipped over the edge.

We ALL make mistakes – the framework gives you a way to see if there is a pattern to your loading mistakes.


How it comes together – Blue Shaded is CTL, Red line is Acute Load and Yellow Line is Form – this table is called the Performance Management Chart
I’ve been working my CTL upwards so my form has been negative in the last 28 days

If it the above seems too much then you can simplify your approach!

Use HRV4Training and taking a morning HR measurement. Marco’s app will help you decide if it is a good day to load, recover, or rest.

Green light (load), Yellow light (maintenance or easy), Red light (recovery).

For now, I don’t recommend other company “readiness metrics” – they don’t work, yet.


To show how the week comes together, let’s dig into a case study – my current situation

My CTL is ~75 points.

  • Easy day – 25-50 points (below CTL)
  • Maintenance day – 75 points (around CTL)
  • Loading day – 150 points (2x CTL)

The key error here is one you’ve heard before…

Keep your easy days easy

In order to give yourself capacity to absorb your Loading Days, you need to recover from them!

This means you need to limit:

  • Number of loading days in a week
  • The size of the loading day, relative to CTL (your “average” day)

Many athletes load themselves into the ground, go stale, recover, then repeat the cycle, perhaps with injury/illness for variety!

This pattern will leave you undertrained because you are doing too much training.

More Tips:

  • When I was younger, I tolerated bigger Loading Days – start with two days a week at 2x CTL
  • The game with CTL is to gradually build sustainable load – that’s a superior game to seeing how hard you can smash yourself every single weekend.
  • CTL will seem like a long game to you. Six weeks is NOTHING – barely enough time to create an overuse injury.
  • 1,000 days is the shortest cycle you should be thinking about. Amateur athletes should be thinking on an Olympic Cycle – 2 years base building, 1 year performance-focused, 1 year health-focused – repeat forever!
  • The majority of your load should be Moderate Domain aerobic load (Zone 1 and Zone 2). This is very different to what you will think you need. You are going to be battling your urge to “go hard” and self-sabotage.

Training Peaks helps make mistakes visible – it’s up to you to address your mistakes.


Now we are ready to discuss the week, itself.

Similar to the Big Picture, write down what you are trying to achieve. From my week just past:

  • Elevation change run
  • Hill sprints
  • Bike long ride (2,000kj)

Those were specific workouts I wanted to include.

Why?

  • Something important I didn’t do last week
  • Something I want to add
  • Correcting an error from prior week (2,800kj was too much)

All the other sessions stay the same: (a) endurance training focus; and (b) strength sessions.

The Basic Week might look like:

  • D1 Bike, Run, Swim
  • D2 Bike, Strength
  • D3 Longer Day
  • D4 Bike, Swim
  • D5 Bike, Run

The size of the sessions (the load) depends on my metrics.

I know I am going to train each morning (other than my recovery mornings).

What I don’t know is “how much” load I am going to give myself.

  • I prioritize bike load because it’s the safest way to train my metabolic fitness (my One Thing).
  • Running is frequency based – “just run easy”
  • Swimming is short sessions when I have loading capacity
  • Strength is maintenance level, I’m strong relative to my stamina

As a coach, I have a loading hierarchy for each athlete.

TIP: write down your loading hierarchy – it will help you allocate your time.

Here’s my current hierarchy, it changes across the year:

  1. Ride every day, load when metrics are green
  2. Run as often as tolerated
  3. Get an elevation change run every 14 days
  4. Strength at least once a week
  5. Short swims for active recovery and to make it safer to ramp load, later

I do a ten minute HRV4Biofeedback session every evening before bed. It’s a 10 minute session that gives me a look into how much my day took out of me.

I have a 10 minute daily minimum for my mobility work – this has been transformative.


Take your time figuring everything out.

You win by staying in the game.

Sunday Summary 21 August 2022

Top Threads

  1. Developing Teen Running Talent
    1. Workout idea from Rich
  2. Fitness enabling a feeling of freedom
  3. Burning lactate strips in an attempt to prove I can go harder
  4. Johan’s advice to stay focused on what makes you better
  5. A benefit of developing low-end aerobic range

Workouts & Working Out

High-Performance Habits

Sunday Summary 10 July 2022

Top Threads

  1. Keeping Small Promises is my foundation for excellence
  2. Raising Young Olympians talking LTAD with Johan
  3. Training Through Fatigue can limit LT gains
  4. Book Review: Practice of Groundedness by Brad Stulberg
  5. Easy Days on the Swedish 5:2

Workouts & Working Out

High-Performance Habits