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.
+
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…
Found this in the archives – memories of a very good day 5th Ironman in 14 months, October 2000
With Ironman Hawaii last weekend, there is a treasure trove of data waiting to be mined.
I took a look through my speedy friends’ activities to see what I could learn.
I started with a summary of January to October weekly averages.
16.25 hours a week, every week, for decades
The first thing I noticed is they do a lot of exercise!
That said, it’s not as much as I expected. The implied range is 12-22 hours a week. When I was a speedy 40-something, my range was 18-28 hours per week.
So perhaps this is a “stay good” level of training – these guys are already at the top.
What can you, and I, learn from these athletes?
Think about a Basic Week and forget about the pace that you’re going.
Three swims
Three runs
Bike leads metabolic fitness improvement
Strength work to address personal limiters and injury risks
Mobility – 10′ minimum every single day
My Rx for you, and me, would be 5 months of that program (November to March).
That might seem like a lot but ~300 aerobic hours is a drop in the bucket compared to the lifetime mileage of top endurance athletes.
What a best-case scenario looks like in Kona. Showing the vibe I want to the bring to my training, and racing, going forward.
How fast are these guys?
I started by pulling up the marathon splits of the Best-of-the-Vets in Kona.
Mens 50-54 ran 3:15 to 3:40
Mens 55-59 ran 3:25 to 4:00
Not as fast as expected, except for the handful of sub-3:20 tropical marathons.
I headed over to the Boston Marathon site to have a look.
Mens 50-54 was 2:30-2:45
Mens 55-59 was 2:40-2:55
Still really quick, and my pals remain quick over shorter durations
Implications for me, and you.
Best in class race pace is ~8 minutes per mile, ~5 minutes per km
Right now, fresh, I can run that 30 bpm under max, 15 bpm under threshold – I’ve been running for five months, it’s reasonable to expect some improvement.
The best Ironman athletes (50+) in the world aren’t running much faster than 8 min mile pace – takes a lot of pace pressure off my run sessions.
Might do the same for you…
…and that would give you energy to place elsewhere in your program
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.
Nine months along with HRV, and 15 weeks along with proper training… I wanted to update you on how I’m applying load.
Dealing with Noise
To avoid chasing my tail on a daily basis…
Respect the trend
Ensure a positive trend before starting each microcycle
Chart from HRV4T.com
Respecting The Trend
Top half of the chart:
Blue line – 7 day HRV average
Shaded range – 60 day HRV average
Colored Bars – how I’m trending
When my “line” gets to the bottom of my shaded range…
When my bar turns orange…
…it is a sign I have disregarded the trend and gone too far.
Because my primary source of overload is Moderate Domain aerobic volume, the fatigue clears in a few days.
In July (lower chart) I made an error that required a week of backing off.
My error was stacking bikes on top of hikes, same day => my muscles are learning to reload themselves and I need to metabolically challenging sessions.
Where I went wrong was pushing duration AND load on multiple days.
Too much stress, too quickly (TSS was 3-5x CTL for the technically minded).
Related, being human… I share the urge…
to progress every session
to increase intensity when my heart rate is up
to set personal bests
Three things have helped me have fun, while not blowing myself up…
Set a HR cap for each of Stamina (135 bpm) and Threshold (150 bpm)
Set a time-at-intensity cap for efforts above Stamina (10% of total load)
Publish what I did, weekly
Reduce the scale of self-inflicted wounds.
The last week of July saw encouraging #s on the bike – the approach is working
Variation
I bought myself a Kickr-Bike.
Love it and realized that my previous riding had been very low variation, possibly too low.
The Kickr, combined with the Zwift platform, gives me natural variation based on the course I select. I’ve been mixing flat, rolling and climbing courses.
I’m going to extend stamina by adding more flat/rolling riding.
I am always tempted to add climbing but that tends to be higher torque & intensity – could lead to repeating my error of stacking load & duration.
What’s next?
Extend my comfortable stamina durations
Add a bit more Severe Domain work (VO2, bounding, sprints)
Feel The Byrn 
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