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).
I'd add…
Are you certain you are doing what you think you are?
Smart training works, guaranteed, if it's not working then dig deeper
Consistency? Sleep? Spontaneous tempo? Energy deficits? Zones too high? Excessive load? Undiagnosed illness? Blood work check?
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…
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.
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:
Know the effective range of your training
Consider if your range overlaps a higher intensity domain
Set endurance anchors bottom-up
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.
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.
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.
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:
Your training zones are set too high
Your loading days are too big
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.
Feel The Byrn 
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