Endurance athletes typically adopt a driven and methodical approach to training that fails to properly balance stress and rest. An intuitive approach that respects an assortment of other life variables and stress factors will deliver more favorable results. Workout difficulty should be aligned with daily level of energy, motivation, and health.
Periodization entails focusing on different types of training during specific blocks of time over a calendar year. The big picture annual periodization strategy involves an aerobic-base-building period to start the year; sequences of mini-periods where you introduce intensity, followed by rest and aerobic periods—repeated over the course of the year in alignment with your progress and your competitive goals; and finally a lengthy rest period to end the competitive season.
It is essential to be highly intuitive and flexible with your training patterns, while adhering to the foundational principles of periodization. The importance of “consistency” in the context of endurance training is a flawed notion that can easily lead to mediocrity, chronic patterns, and burnout. The ideal training pattern is fractal, flexible, subject to change on the fly, and ultimately your responsibility.
PERHAPS YOU HAVE HAD SOME exposure to the musclehead crowd and the hilarious “bro-science” that pervades that scene? Their ethos is always worth a laugh or two amidst a group of high-minded endurance folks, once they leave the gym parking lot, reach the trails, and are out of earshot. Time to sober you up a bit and realize that these dudes have us beat in the balancing stress and rest department. That’s right, the readership of triathlon magazines, who have an average college education of 4.3 years (!), are put to shame on the simplest of training concepts by the average shaved-down, yoked-up muscle-head from the nearest gold (or even silver…) gym. You see, anyone who has been able to achieve muscle hypertrophy, to inflate their body to cartoon-level (or at least NFL-level) proportions, has successfully optimized the delicate balance between stress and rest. There is simply no other way to get huge guns. If a bro were overzealous in his quest to blow up and drifted into a chronic training pattern, muscle catabolism would result and his T-shirt would not stretch till the words “Sun’s Out, Guns Out” became illegible.
Bodybuilders honor the simple, common-sense principle of challenging muscles to their maximum capability, then affording generous time periods for rest, nourishment, and repair (okay, and the injection of foreign substances, but that doesn’t weaken the argument here at all!) so that the muscles come back stronger and larger. Meanwhile, endurance athletes challenge their muscles, cardiovascular systems, hormonal systems, and immune systems to maximum capability, then drag their butts out the next day to perform more work at the expense of rest. “Dude, what’s your problem?!” the bros say in response.
We’re having a little fun here at the expense of the proud endurance community, but we want you to take this revelation seriously. The cerebral, analytical, regimented, methodically driven approach to getting fit simply doesn’t work as well as a simple, intuitive, spontaneous, sporadic approach. It’s a tough pill to swallow, because our Type-A personalities and keen intellects crave a methodical approach. Furthermore, modern life rewards and reinforces the “to-do list” approach as the path to success. Write down specific measurable goals, establish checkpoints along the way, make yourself accountable, apply your exceptional discipline and willpower to stay the course no matter what, and you shall [fill in the blank: graduate college, pass the bar exam, reach your quarterly sales quota, get your startup ready for an IPO, and, uh, win your age group in a triathlon].
Unfortunately, the human body doesn’t get fit in a linear manner. The process of fitness is dynamic—subject to dozens of important variables far beyond your workout choices. Sleep patterns, eating habits, other forms of life stress, your emotional state, and your physical environment are just a few factors that influence your fitness progress and whether or not it syncs with your health. You can try your best to create a scientifically sound, methodical training schedule designed to get you onto the podium, but it must always be subject to revision at a moment’s notice if your workout choices are not in alignment with your general state of health and your subjective level of energy and motivation at the time of your training session.
If you feel intimidated at the daunting task of balancing stress and rest in an intuitive manner instead of relying on regimented patterns like “hard day–easy day,” or lengthy schedules created by an expert coach, rest assured that you are already an expert in this department. Deep down, you know the correct workout decision to make each day to optimally balance stress and rest. Unfortunately, what typically happens is your intuitive voice gets snuffed out by the demands of your ego, your insecurities, and your obsessive/compulsive behavior tendencies.
Balancing stress and rest can be a complex topic to fill an entire book on its own, so let’s make things simple here: align the difficulty of your workouts with your daily level of energy, motivation, and health. Make a quick assessment each day and give yourself a 1–10 score in each of these three categories. The Primal Blueprint 90-Day Journal has daily journal pages designed for this purpose if you want to really get focused. Or, just jot your daily scores into a ninety-nine-cent spiral notebook or digital device.
Journaling can help you get into the rhythm of aligning workout difficulty with subjective levels of energy, motivation, and health.
If you wake up feeling refreshed and energized, with perfect immune function and a strong desire to get out and hit the road, you might give yourself a score of 8, 9, or 10. If you are amidst a stressful work deadline, experiencing family or relationship struggles, feeling fatigued upon waking up, have stiff or sore muscles, have a scratchy throat, feel a bit hot, or simply don’t feel like working out on a certain day, you might give yourself scores of 2 or 3 in energy, motivation, and health.
The trick is to conduct a workout with a similar 1–10 score in degree of difficulty—the degree that the workout stresses your body. A score of one or two would be an easy recovery session, while a ten would be a competitive race or other maximum effort performance. When you establish a pattern of aligning your subjective scores with the difficulty of your workouts, you are on your way to huge guns…or rather, on your way to an endurance career that is rewarding and successful, and supports your health instead of compromising it.
You may not be totally comfortable with a suggestion to be 100 percent airy-fairy with your workout decisions and just train how you feel each day. Please appreciate the opening comments of this chapter as an attempt to get your mind right and to break free once and for all from any sort of obsessive/compulsive influences in your training decisions.
With a healthy respect established for the importance of an intuitive approach to training, we’ll proceed to add some broad general guidelines in the form of an annual periodization template. Periodization is simply periods of time—over the course of a calendar year, for example—characterized by different types of training emphasis. These are not rigidly prescribed periods of a specific duration leading to a single date where you peak in an important competition. That approach might be relevant for an Olympic athlete with tremendous control over life variables and all the marbles riding on a single day when they give out the gold medal. For our purposes, we are going to adhere to the philosophical guidelines of periodized training, but allow for plenty of flexibility and adjustment along the way based on real-life variables.
There seems to be a huge percentage of endurance athletes whose behaviors suggest they are opposed to periodization. Instead, they try to train an assortment of energy systems and sport-specific skills every single week, are reluctant to complete a strict aerobic period and create a proper base, and seem to skimp on a proper off-season of drastically reduced training. Consequently, they aspire to be at or very near peak racing shape virtually year-round—including winter endurance events in many cases.
As with the other admonitions and spicy talk in this book, we’re not trying to tell you how to live your life; we’re just strongly suggesting an approach that will deliver the most competitive success, the most enjoyment, and the least offense to your general health. If you want to realize your peak performance potential, it is imperative you engage in precisely defined and focused periods of training. We don’t know why this is so difficult to embrace—we get amped up just talking about it, like Pete Snell in Chapter 1. We have decades of time-tested success from elite athletes practicing periodization, but if you flip open a random magazine or download a random podcast, you are likely to hear about “balanced” training programs where you have overdistance, tempo, intervals, and resistance training on the docket week in and week out. This is not balanced; this is imbalanced, with too much stress and not enough specificity!
The most important and probably least respected aspect of periodization is the rest component. It’s indisputable that every serious athlete can benefit from an extended rest period annually. Usually this coincides with the end of a long season and the onset of winter, where less daylight and colder temperatures offer great excuses to back off. Giving your body a physical break from devoted fitness pursuits and giving your mind a break from the struggle of balancing workouts with other life responsibilities, as well as the mental energy expended worrying about compelling athletic goals, is tremendously refreshing and restorative.
Similarly, every endurance athlete, from world-class racer to novice, can benefit from a lengthy period of exclusively aerobic base building prior to the start of the competitive season. Here, you can develop your fat-burning systems without the metabolic interference and increased risk of breakdown associated with high-intensity workouts. Finally, virtually everyone will experience best results with intensity when it is performed in short-duration time blocks, with dramatically reduced overall training volume or concern with aerobic development. Intensity periods are always followed by a rest period of an appropriate duration and a mini aerobic base-rebuilding period before introducing another intensity block.
These guidelines are purposely generalized, because the periodization philosophy does not warrant a cookie-cutter approach, but rather an adherence to philosophical guidelines with plenty of flexibility and customization. Unfortunately, with today’s popular internet-based coach/athlete model, intricate and lengthy programs are designed to culminate with a peak performance at a distant goal event. One elite reportedly engaged in a thirty-eight-week build to the big event of the season (which did not go well, by the way). This is periodization at its worst—or at least we can call it high-risk periodization. Catch a little cold or a minor injury, perform poorly at some workouts somewhere along the way, and the whole algorithm is blown. What a joke, and what a heart-break for an athlete putting his or her heart and soul into following an expert-designed program to the letter.
What’s cool with the Primal Endurance approach to periodization is that the duration of all of your periods and mini-periods is flexible and subject to your intuitive evaluation of what works best for you. When you suffer a setback like an illness or injury, you just shuffle the deck instead of completely invalidating your previous hard work. When you experience declines in energy, motivation, or immune function, you adjust your ambitions and embark upon a short or lengthy rest period. When you find yourself in peak condition and succeeding on the racecourse, you can keep the magic going for perhaps a little longer than planned, and build in a longer rest period accordingly. Why not capitalize on your hard work? Everything you do is aligned with your intuition, while still respecting the fundamental principles of periodized training.
In essence, what we want to strongly argue against here is the misguided notion of “consistency” when it comes to your training schedule. Consistency in this context is simply a consistent application of a similar type of stress to the body week after week, month after month. This diminishes your potential to excel during peak competitive periods and comes with an extreme risk of burnout. Worst of all is trying to continually train all of your energy pathways, with a weekly schedule that includes overdistance aerobic sessions, high-intensity workouts, strength-training sessions (especially “blended” sessions that have both strength and endurance components—more on this in Chapter 5), and pre-programmed rest days. This type of approach will make you consistently mediocre at very best, and more likely consistently burnt out.
Unfortunately, this is exactly what many misguided endurance athletes are doing in the name of consistency, and with a nagging fear in the back of their minds that they might get out of shape (or at least lose their endurance, lose their speed, or lose their feel for the water) or fat (not knowing that 80 percent of body composition results are dictated by diet, specifically carb intake) if they deliver a week with any deficiencies from their normal pattern.
We’re assuming that you are a serious athlete with distinct performance goals, along with a desire to protect your health, delay aging, be a positive role model for your kids, and all that other good stuff. If you absolutely must get out of the house or the office and push yourself to reach a sweaty, depleted state to cope with the stress of hectic daily life, this is the wrong book for you. Granted, getting out there and working hard with the “jack of all trades, all the time” approach is still a huge step up from being a couch potato. But the more time and energy you devote to training, and the deeper your commitment to peak performance, the more you must respect the principles of periodization. After all, the average weekend warrior who plays hoops at lunch on Tuesday, does a gym session with his trainer on Thursday, and runs a 5K on the weekend is not dealing with the hormonal irregularities, overstretched right ventricles, and overtraining issues that serious endurance athletes traffic in.
Honoring the KISS mission stated at the beginning of the book, this chapter presents a simplified view of an annual training and competitive season filled with both major periods and mini-periods that respect the three fundamental training elements required for success in endurance sports: aerobic development, high-intensity workouts, and rest and recovery.
Here’s what an optimal annual training pattern will look like: A strict aerobic base building period to begin an annual training cycle; brief periods of high-intensity workouts (including competitions) with greatly reduced aerobic work and overall training volume; mini-cycles where you rest after an intensity period, rebuild base briefly, and reintroduce an intensity period; and finally an extended rest period/off-season of minimal exercise and zero high-intensity sessions. This completes an annual training cycle, and you would resume a new season with an extended aerobic base building period.
This approach allows you to achieve and maintain peak condition at numerous times during the season, and to be super-flexible throughout the season to both balance other forms of stress in your life and strike when the iron is hot. Following are more details about the composition of the major training periods.
The remarkable success Mike Pigg experienced working with Dr. Maffetone that we glimpsed in the sidebar in the Introduction deserves a second look. While Pigg made headlines blowing up bike courses and opponents all over the globe throughout the late 1980s, his success was coming at a cost, and he was hanging on by a thread. “By the end of 1989, I was completely burnt out,” remembers Pigg. “I’d raced like crazy for several years all over the globe. I had pushed myself extremely hard with high-mileage, high-intensity workouts, often alone in Arcata, CA [his hometown]. I had contracted the stomach ailment Giardia swimming in dirty water somewhere on the planet, and couldn’t shake it. It really affected me at long-distance races, where I could no longer compete with the best. I really thought my career was nearing an end because I simply could not push anymore.”
Dr. Maffetone gave Pigg some “doctor’s orders” to start the new decade training indefinitely at strictly aerobic heart rates. Despite the pressures and expectations that come with being an elite performer, Pigg mustered the courage to blow off speed workouts for months on end, building his aerobic engine at 155 beats per minute or less. After several months of strictly aerobic workouts, Pigg started to feel his health and energy normalize, as it was finally liberated from the unrelenting stress of high-intensity workouts.
Pigg remained aerobic all the way up to the starting line of the first big event on the calendar, the America’s Paradise Triathlon in St. Croix in April. Wanna guess what happened? Typically behind after the swim and known for catching and passing the field on the bike, Pigg was so far ahead of the pack after the swim that he rode off unseen by the pack. They waited all day for him to catch up and when he never appeared, they assumed he had crashed out…until they saw him heading home while they were still outbound toward the run turnaround—leading the race by a mile, literally!
With no preparatory speed workouts at all, Pigg delivered a world-class performance in St. Croix, and at the next race, and the next, and the next, and so on through two full triathlon seasons where he won almost every race and every award in sight. During this period of time in the early 90s, Pigg’s races were his speed workouts, while his training focused on aerobic development and stress management. Granted, Pigg had lots of high intensity races and workouts in his legs prior to 1990, but there is no discounting the fact that even the fastest guy in the world improved significantly when he slowed down and emphasized aerobic training—not just for the minimum of eight weeks, but for virtually two full calendar years, followed by many more years at the top of the sport with a drastically less intense, less stressful training program.
When Pigg did go hard in training, it was typically on a whim. “I would naturally decide to go hard about two to three times per month,” explains Pigg. “Once in a while I just needed to see what I had, but it was hard to predict when those days would be. It was all based on intuition. I wish I had discovered these methods earlier in my career. Switching to aerobic emphasis literally added seven years to the length of my career.”
Aerobic Base Period: Train at strictly aerobic heart rates for a minimum of eight weeks to begin your annual season. While there is some difference of opinion on the matter, we favor Dr. Phil Maffetone’s admonition to complete a strict base-building period of aerobic activity only. That means taking a break from any kind of strength training (which is anaerobic by nature), Sunday night adult pickup basketball, and any other activities requiring anaerobic efforts. If you do rehabilitative/preventative strength routines for joint or imbalance issues, that’s fine. But don’t take the base period to go crazy with the weights or extracurriculars—something that, shockingly, is advocated by several leading endurance coaches.
The group of professional triathletes Mark used to coach in Los Angeles, including Brad, welcomed the winter months as a chance to get off the roads and have some fun in the mud with loosely structured mountain bike rides. Mountain biking in the wintertime offered a great mental break from the routine routes, timed climbs, and heart rate constraints of road riding, but when Mark joined them once for a mud fest, he realized a huge problem: mountain bike riding is tough! With everyone leaving their chest straps at home, there was no alerting the group that heart rates were going through the roof on steep hills or dismount/remount areas over challenging terrain. This was especially so when ringers joined the group—mountain bike specialists champing at the bit to put the hammer down on the season-weary triathletes.
A proper base period entails comfortably paced workouts that are relaxing, easy to recover from, don’t make you want to ransack the nearest convenience store for a Hostess pie at the end, and don’t leave you feeling stiff and sore the next day. However, a weekly overdistance breakthrough workout and the general accumulation of substantial hourly volume can still be taxing, so rest days, easy days, and easy weeks are still important during the base-building period. It’s also imperative to be strict and disciplined about never exceeding your maximum aerobic heart rate—no excuses!
A friendly sprint to the city limit sign to break the monotony of a long aerobic bike ride may seem inconsequential, but it’s not. Drifting out of the aerobic zone even briefly can cause a bit of lactate to accumulate in the bloodstream, a bit of fight-or-flight hormonal response, and a bit of acceleration in glucose metabolism to the detriment of fat metabolism. When you slow back down, these anaerobic processes obviously normalize a bit, but not completely. A few ill-advised or inattentive pace escalations lasting only minutes in total can significantly compromise the intended benefits of a fully aerobic two-hour run or four-hour ride.
Granted, this is really hard to believe, hard to accept, and not as much fun as unleashing your competitive intensity at a moment’s notice. But the base period is a great time to reflect on your priorities, how well you behave in congruence with your stated goals, and how ego demands might get in the way of the fitness benefits (not to mention the positive character attributes) that accrue in an athlete who exhibits discipline and restraint when it’s called for. Dr. Phil Maffetone does an exceptional job detailing the negative metabolic consequences of being undisciplined with your aerobic limits, so read The Big Book of Endurance Training and Racing if you are particularly vulnerable or need more support here.
It’s important to respect that eight weeks is the minimum time required for a base period. Reflecting on the list of ambitious goals to achieve during the base period (no setbacks, numerous breakthrough overdistance sessions, improvement in Maximum Aerobic Function test results), it’s a lot to accomplish in a short time. In many cases, spending more time in base-building mode results in further aerobic development, as evidence by a continued improvement in MAF test results. This means you are building a bigger and bigger engine, and that aerobic sessions continue to be the best return on investment of any kind of training.
Intensity/Competition Period: Enter this period if and only if you have completed a successful aerobic period of at least eight weeks, quite possibly more, and are fully rested and energized to start going fast and doing explosive strength-training sessions. We’re talking about eight weeks or more of actual aerobic training, so unfortunately you can’t start the clock with your winter snowboarding trip or the two weeks you were laid up with a cold. That’s part of the Rest period!
The intensity/competition period lasts for a maximum of four weeks. Dr. Maffetone suggests that best results come from anaerobic periods lasting just two to three weeks, and that only the fittest, most experienced athletes can benefit from going as long as four weeks. A maximum edict on the intensity period bookends nicely with the eight-week minimum requirement of the aerobic base period. When you’ve hit four weeks of intensity, a couple or a few weeks of rest are due, followed by a couple or a few weeks of rebuilding your aerobic base. After you rest and rebuild, you can introduce another intensity/competition period. We discuss these micro-cycles of the major season periods below.
When it’s time for the intensity/competition period, you have to make a concerted effort to put your obsession with volume, mileage, and consistency aside and focus on delivering high-end peak performance efforts, and successfully resting and recovering from these sessions. While any endurance athlete can recite the gospel of the importance of a rest day every week, Primal Endurance ups the ante here big time and suggests that three or four days of your week will involve either total rest or short, easy recovery sessions. Spend your free time off the roads and on family time, catching up on your reading and digital entertainment, yoga classes, foam-rolling sessions, and massage therapy appointments.
Science suggests very strongly that you will not lose any fitness when you cut your volume significantly during an intensity period. Dr. David Costill of the highly regarded Human Performance Laboratory at Ball State University in Indiana is one of the pioneers in studying and promoting the benefits of tapering for peak performance. In one study, collegiate swimmers reduced their training volume by 66 percent (dropping from 10,000 yards per day down to 3,200 yards per day) for fifteen days before a performance test. They delivered an outstanding 4 percent improvement in performance (ask any swimmer about dropping from 1m:00 in the 100 meters to a 57s:6!) and a 25 percent increase in muscular power. Another Japanese study with runners revealed that cutting back mileage by 90 percent and doing only race-pace intervals for a week produced substantial improvements in 5K race times.
Numerous other studies suggest that just maintaining a small fraction of your normal training routine for weeks on end will not compromise fitness or peak performance. One study summarized that tapering between 60 to 90 percent of normal volume for anywhere from four to twenty-eight days will deliver excellent results. That said, it must be respected that an optimal taper entails conducting regular high-intensity workouts while reducing volume. De-training is another matter entirely. If you get sick or otherwise completely cease exercising, you will lose heaps of your fitness very quickly. But fear not, you can also get your fitness back quickly when you return to normal training.
DETRAINING AND RETRAINING: A ONE-TO-ONE CURRENCY EXCHANGE RATE
While this is very hard to quantify, there seems to be plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that a detraining period of a certain duration requires around an equal duration of retraining to get back to the fitness level you were at when you stopped or cut back dramatically. If you get the flu and can’t do much of anything for three weeks, it will likely take you three weeks of steadily rebuilding your fitness when healthy to get back to where you were before the flu hit. If you take six months off to have a kid or work crazy hours to ascend to partner in the firm, you may require six months of buildup to return to your previous form.
The only known photograph in existence of Mike Pigg sitting still.
Doesn’t this one-to-one concept feel incredibly reassuring and empowering?! It seems many athletes harbor an assortment of dark fears and anxieties about the mysterious and sinister issue of detraining, despite repeated personal experiences of getting back into form quickly after a cold or a bout of heavy travel. When real life throws a curve into your normal training routine, you can relax and let the process play out, knowing your body will respond magnificently when you build back to your typical workload.
Furthermore, as the tapering studies assert, even maintaining a fraction of your normal production will greatly minimize the detraining effect. If you go from an aggressive ten- to fifteen-hour-per-week triathlon training schedule to jogging a few days per week and pedaling casually for a couple hours on the weekend, even for as long as two or three months, you will lose very little fitness.
It may be hard to believe, but countless anecdotes support this. Recall Peter Snell coming right out of jogging the sand dunes to step on the track and set an 800-meter world record. Similarly, many endurance enthusiasts report coming right out of base training and setting PRs in the swimming pool or on a time trial hill climb. Yes indeed, your first anaerobic effort in months can turn out to be your best ever. And if you carry on with an intensity/competition period lasting longer than four weeks, as is routine in the endurance community, you will often see a gradual decline in performance ending in burnout, illness, or injury—your body’s emphatic way of telling your stubborn ego to take a break.
While moderate training can preserve fitness for a long time, and base training can deliver competitive PRs right out of the gate, a true detraining period—where you fail to provide any stimulation to your muscles or cardiovascular system—will lead to a quick nosedive in your fitness capacity by any measure. Most serious old-time runners can relate with horror those first couple runs after returning from a four-week or six-week injury break back in the days before the advent of cross training. It felt like you’d never run a step before in your life! Those previously lean, ripped thighs would get chafed after a mile of shuffling, and you’d wake up stiff and sore from arches up to traps the following day—from an effort that amounted to a simple cooldown during normal training periods. Fortunately, a careful review of the big-picture calendar usually revealed that after four weeks, or six weeks, one was almost always back running at peak form.
These days, there is really no excuse to be deliberately sedentary for extended periods, so you should have minimal concern about lengthy detraining periods. If your worst case arises, where you can’t exercise for a month or two due to illness, injury, or unique life circumstances, rest assured that you will get everything back and more in due time—one-to-one with your downtime—as you patiently progress back to your normal workload.
Rest Period: At the conclusion of the season, you will turn off your brain and body for a minimum of four weeks and focus on the neglected other areas of your life and your personality. It’s essential to take time away from exercise as well as thinking about exercise to properly refresh and restore your batteries. In the example of the previously mentioned mountain-biking triathletes in Los Angeles, they enjoyed a bit of a mental break with the different dynamics of unstructured mountain biking, but they failed to achieve a proper physical or mental break from high-caliber endurance training.
As much as you love to train, to balance the sedentary elements of daily life with exercise, to linger with the boys at the pool or the gals at the trailhead, unplugging for a while will inject some critical balance and expanded perspective into your life each year. It’s no secret that endurance sports, especially the time-consuming, all-consuming ultradistance variety, can easily place a strain on romantic, family, and personal relationships. Don’t be one of those endurance athletes with blinders on, running away from a balanced lifestyle, from little faces calling out for more quality time, from gentle, well-intended reminders from a partner or other loved ones to slow down, reflect, and regain some balance and perspective.
When you make the commitment to observe a proper rest period, what often happens is that you gain a greater appreciation for living a stress-balanced life, for cutting loose and having a little fun once in a while, for consuming food and drink that’s off your usual training table (and not stressing about it!), for hanging with interesting people who may not live and breathe your sport, and for a taking a leisurely hike on your favorite running trail, instead of a run! Don’t worry, odds are that you won’t drift into a life of slothfulness and decadence if you take a month away from early-alarm swims or headlamp-running sessions after a long day at the office.
When you give yourself true mental and physical restoration, you might even feel more sleepy, sluggish, and stiff for a while when you stop training. What’s happening here is you are finally giving your stress hormone production a break and allowing yourself to actually process fatigue in an authentic manner. Yes, this sounds weird, but certainly you can relate to going into vacation mode. You know, when you escape your normal hectic routine and spend a week sleeping in and lying on the beach all day, and only then gain the epiphany that you really needed a week of sleeping in and lying on the beach all day.
Similarly, even if your go-getter brain has no problem rising for that morning swim workout or that rainy, snowy evening run, taking time off from these schedule fixtures will demonstrate to you how badass you really are in real life, and how pleasant it can be to grab an extra ninety minutes of sleep in the morning or leisure time in the evening.
True restoration entails not just fewer weekly heartbeats, but a relief from the constant time pressures endurance athletes face—not just from measuring workouts, but from squeezing those workouts into a time-stressed society. You have to give yourself permission to feel comfortable being lazy for however long your mind and body need to be lazy for, and allow for a steady building of inspiration and excitement about your eventual return to training, your future goals, and getting back into an enjoyable routine.
In fact, that’s a good benchmark for how long your break should last: when you feel the bubbling of an underground geyser that’s about to burst if you don’t get out there and start training again. As with the aerobic base period, this means that you might tremendously benefit from a rest period lasting longer than the minimum four weeks.
We already discussed the folly of comparing your training approach to that of the world’s elite athletes, and it’s worth emphasizing here that professionals have a virtual absence of a working or family person’s time pressures and responsibility-juggling pressures. Picture for a moment, instead of having your actual job, you have a job as a professional athlete in your chosen sport. You always have time for your job no matter what, right? Ah, the luxury of knowing without question that you can exercise for as long as you want every single day, that you can sleep for as long as you want every single day, and that once you get your sleep and do your workout, there are minimal other pressures on your free time or demands on your cognitive function. Of course you will recover faster and perform better!
While it’s true that exercise is a great “stress release” from the pressures of work and a great balance to the many sedentary forces of modern life, you must also recognize that exercise is merely another form of stress to the body—it lands on the same side of the balance scale as a daily commute in traffic, arguing with your teenager, or facing deadline pressures at work. The term “stress” might more accurately be described as “stimulation.” Your fight-or-flight hormones make no distinction, no matter whether you consider the stimulation enjoyable (a workout) or unpleasant (your commute).
That’s why even the psychic energy you spend on your endurance passion must be earmarked for a rest period. That’s right, you aren’t even allowed to surf the internet and look at race splits or workout ideas during your rest period. Put everything aside for at least a month so you will really get pumped when you return to action.
DON’T SWEAT THE DETAILS, OR THE WEATHER…
Maybe you’ve seen books or articles with fancier and more descriptive periodization terms like the “pre-competitive tiered sub-threshold buildup phase” or whatever. We have to scoff a bit at the complexity and regimentation often applied to the simple concept of periodization. While today’s coaches are, for the most part, presenting concepts that are steeped in science and common sense, this hairsplitting with a sub-elite athlete might be akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic if the big-picture, stress-balanced lifestyle elements are deficient.
Triathlon legend Andrew MacNaughton, the best pure climber ever in triathlon, let his moods dictate his workout decisions—a sage approach that took him to the top of the sport.
Even if an athlete has his or her act together and is primed to conduct highly specific and scientific workouts, it’s worth reflecting on the profound statement from Dr. Phil Maffetone that all forms of anaerobic workouts have a similar training effect on the body. You can do descending sets in the pool, ascending sets on the track, alternate gearing hill repeats on the bike, or alternate gradient treadmill workouts indoors. If you are looking for an edge over the competition in this area, rest assured that the specifics of your high intensity workouts really don’t matter. You are better off closing whatever magazine, book, or email you are reading about this stuff and getting more sleep. Go hard when it’s time to go hard, doing whatever kind of workouts seem the most fun and interesting. You can mix things up with a different session each time, or you can do the exact same speed workout for years and years (like several world champions we know) and fare just fine.
Just as there are many roads to burnout, there are many different routes you can take to the podium. What top athletes seem to have in common are not the mechanical elements of their training schedules, but a deep conviction that what they are doing works for them and a great enjoyment of their particular workout patterns and training environment. During the days that Mark traveled the pro triathlon circuit with Brad and his teammates that he coached, top performers came in all shapes and sizes (okay, they were all lean, but a muscular 5’8”, 175-lb swim specialist could often be seen competing side-by-side with a 6’4”, 175-lb run specialist), from all corners of the globe, and with tremendously disparate training approaches. Guys who lived in Florida or the Midwest would often be seen going off the front on hilly rides. Guys from cold climates would often thrive in hot-weather races, not because they were genetic freaks but more likely because they were well-trained, rested, and happy with their training circumstances.
At one early season event in steamy St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, the top finishing spots were dominated by athletes from the Foxcatcher training enclave in Pennsylvania (yep, that Foxcatcher, sponsored by the infamous late John E. DuPont). These guys had just endured an extremely snowy winter with zero outdoor bike riding, but they disposed of the more numerous and similarly highly ranked warm weather athletes—likely because they weren’t overtrained from a winter of festive daily hammer sessions in sunny San Diego.
During the buildup to the 1984 Olympic marathon in Los Angeles, athletes from around the world were deeply concerned about the predictable heat and smog forecast for the race’s August afternoon start time. American Alberto Salazar, the world’s top-ranked marathoner at the time, was concerned enough to uproot from his Oregon training base and relocate to the oppressive humidity of Atlanta—the better to prepare for the Olympic run. He even underwent extensive testing in a human performance lab to analyze his sweat rate and dial in the best hydration strategies. Salazar showed up on the starting line in LA with his beautiful USA uniform cut to shreds—the better to dissipate heat. In summary, he spent a lot of time and energy and logistics preparing for and likely stressing about the heat.
Ever run in Atlanta in the summer? Right, not many people have! It’s plausible that Salazar experienced an extreme and highly stressful disruption of the routine that made him the fittest runner in the world, and that his warm weather acclimation efforts actually compromised his readiness for the Olympics—likely chipping away at his reserve as well as his resolve. In going human guinea pig with the lab testing, he discovered that he had a super-high sweat rate that put him at a decided disadvantage in hot-weather races. So he had that weighing on his mind, while training in the highest sweat-producing environment he could find. Ouch!
On race day in Los Angeles, which we were both lucky enough to witness up close with NBC-TV credentials as official “spotters,” we “spotted” Salazar all right—looking exhausted as he finished in a dismal fifteenth place. It actually turned out to be an unseasonably pleasant day in Los Angeles, free from the predicted brown haze, with temperatures at the 5:00 p.m. start by the beach in the 70s, and topping out in the mid-80s at the inland downtown Los Angeles finish line. Still far less than ideal conditions for a marathon, but no one was dropping like flies from the heat.
As Salazar plugged along behind the leaders, a lightly regarded thirty-seven-year-old, Carlos Lopes of Portugal, floated along, quietly tucked into the lead pack and obscured from clear television view. At around mile 20, Lopes rocketed to the front and won the gold easily. His time of 2h:09:24 was astonishing for the warm conditions, and stood as the Olympic record for twenty-four years. The most unlikely winner had attempted only three marathons prior to the Games, and finished only one of those. Furthermore, Lopes was still nursing minor injuries from being hit by a car (rolling over the hood and crashing his elbow through the windshield) fifteen days before the marathon.
After the race, the oldest Olympic marathon gold medalist in history was asked in an interview how he was able to outlast both the weather and the competition. He explained that he did not concern himself with the heat; he preferred to train in his temperate seaside home in Portugal and build his fitness to the highest level possible.
While you can dig up science that suggests physiological benefits conferred by acclimating to warm weather, high altitude, hilly terrain, or even the time of day that you race, the science fails to account for stress caused by disruptions to familiar routine and environment. If your efforts to acclimate to competitive conditions are more stressful (physically and/or emotionally) and less enjoyable, you may be better off sticking to your familiar routine, like Carlos Lopes. Furthermore, no matter how well acclimated you are to extreme conditions like heat or altitude, the fact is you still have to slow down when conditions are tough.
Mini-Periods: So you know to start every season with an extended aerobic base period, followed by your first intensity/competition period. After that first bout of competition or high-intensity training, you will take a short rest period, and cycle into an assortment of mini-periods to carry you through the season, and eventually observe a season-ending rest period. The pattern and duration of these mini-periods is highly individual and customizable, but you must adhere to the general principles presented here: start your season with a minimum of eight weeks of base, never exceed four weeks of intensity without a break, and always take a hearty off-season break of four weeks minimum.
Here are some more rules and guidelines for the mini-periods. First, each intensity/competition period must be followed by a period of nearly equal duration that involves rest and then strictly aerobic exercise. If you indeed complete a maximum duration four-week intensity/competition period, take at least four weeks (maybe more) that are composed of rest and aerobic rebuilding before introducing another intensity period.
If you complete a three-week block of racing and/or high-intensity workouts, you can follow that with three weeks of a mix of rest and aerobic. Again, an even trade for mini-intensity periods and mini-rest/aerobic periods presents a minimum rest/aerobic period. It’s likely that you might have a four-week intensity period that leaves you pretty fatigued, or unlucky with an illness or injury to deal with. You may need to rest for two, three, or four weeks until you feel healthy and energetic enough during everyday life to even consider returning to aerobic base training. Then, you might need to train aerobically for another two, three, or four weeks until you experience a progression in MAF test results and are full of energy and enthusiasm to return to the race course or high-intensity workouts.
While your periodization details are flexible and customizable, it’s not a good idea to ignore the minimum rules or disregard the spirit of the rules. The odds are that you will crash and burn if you do. For example, if you take a lengthy mid-season rest period of several weeks, spend a few more weeks going at low heart rates, and still feel stiff, sore, tired, burnt out, or sport a lingering cough or crusty iliotibial band, you are not going to benefit from introducing high-intensity workouts. You can proclaim that it’s “time” by manipulating or misinterpreting these rules, but it simply won’t work.
The training patterns of the world’s elite athletes all feature a strong intuitive component and tons of flexibility. This is so even though they take great pains to control all other life variables and mitigate all other potential life stressors. If a top athlete doesn’t feel right, he or she will not open up the throttle. Yet droves of amateur athletes are obsessed with opening the throttle as often as possible in a dogged quest for competitive success. Take a step back and realize the folly of this approach, embrace the simple rules presented here, and accept the friendly edict to take what your body gives you each day and nothing more.
Something wonderful will happen when you relax, harness your dogged competitive intensity and work ethic, honor your inner voice, and respect the scientifically validated principles of successful endurance training: You will get faster! It’s hard to say it any more plainly than that. The path to going faster requires that you balance out and chill out.
With a solid understanding of the annual periodization plan and mini-period strategies, the next question many endurance athletes have is, “what should my week look like?” Here, our hackles get raised a bit at the mere mention of the word “week.” A week is an arbitrary block of time (okay, not totally arbitrary; the Babylonian astrologers took a bit of inspiration from lunar cycles to start the tradition of seven-day weeks) that has no relevance to the dynamic process of getting fit or balancing stress and rest. Weekdays and weekends have tons of relevance to our orderly modern society, but it’s better, safer, and more fun for you to reject the conventional approach of orchestrating a perfect training week on paper and then trying to duplicate it over and over on cue. Your analytical brain may be balking right now, but we cannot stress enough the importance of freewheeling when it comes to your workout patterns.
Even a seemingly sensible concept like following a hard day–easy day pattern is guilty of being regimented and disconnected from the dynamic process of getting fit and balancing your health while doing so. Consequently, magazine articles and books on workout scheduling may very well be scientifically sound, eminently sensible, highly strategic, extremely well thought out, and likely of minimal help to you personally.
Next we were about to say, “scheduling is not that simple,” but we really mean to say, “it’s not that complex!” There is no justification for adhering to any predetermined workout schedule or guidelines like “take a day off every week” (that could be too few!), “never increase mileage by more than 10 percent a week” (why not? A healthy, stress-balanced, aerobically strong body can certainly handle, and benefit from, an occasional temporary spike in volume), and so on. These and other maxims are merely ancient stopgap measures designed to guard against unbridled obsessive work and insufficient rest. Remember, endurance sports originated from the rudimentary ethos of “that which does not kill you makes you stronger.” Today, with all that we in the endurance community know and have learned, your intuition should be your ultimate guide. This means that your ideal training pattern will be fractal, flexible, subject to change on the fly at any time (including revising a planned workout in the middle of it), and—no matter how many highly paid training experts are in your entourage—ultimately your responsibility.
Unless you are living in a vacuum (or an altitude tent) at the Olympic training center, with your entire life totally dedicated to being present and perky for every single intended workout in your carefully designed schedule, you are going to have to accept that fractal workout patterns align much better with your other life responsibilities. As mentioned at the outset, taking the simple step of aligning your workout difficulty with your level of energy, motivation, and health each day is a great way to recalibrate your approach away from robot and toward healthy and balanced. Remember, in Rocky IV, the robotic, laboratory-trained Soviet boxer Drago lost to Rocky and his free-spirited methods anyway.
THE STRESS-FREE APPROACH OF OLYMPIAN NICK WILLIS
If some part of you deep down bristles at the suggestion that being loosey-goosey and carefree can actually be more effective than being grim and regimented, you might be interested in some perspective offered by one of the fastest runners on the planet, New Zealander Nick Willis. Nick was the Olympic silver medalist in the 1500 meters at the 2008 Beijing Games, and the New Zealand record holder at 3m:29. He has had a long and consistent career at the top level of the extremely competitive middle-distance track circuit.
Nick Willis representing nicely in Kiwi colors at the World Speedgolf Championships. Nick’s offbeat competitive interest is a testament to his balanced approach to elite middle distance running.
Nick calls his approach Simply Running, and delivers some memorable insights on a couple of blog posts at theteamwillis.wordpress.com. “The point of my Simply Running approach is not to find the ultimate schedule that maximizes all energy systems in my body, but to find a schedule that frees me of any stress, and allows me to enjoy what I do, which seems to produce better, more sustainable performances anyway,” Nick says.
As Nick describes his simple, minimalist training week, it’s hard to comprehend that we are talking about an Olympic silver medalist! But here’s his description, time-tested under the most competitive circumstances imaginable: “I run once a day, and take one day off a week. I have removed the two to three thirty-minute secondary runs I used to do in order to top up my weekly mileage, and this has greatly opened my days to enjoying family, balancing other interests, studying full-time for a Master’s degree, competing in professional Speedgolf tournaments, and enjoying an overall higher quality of life.”
—Nick Willis
Nick continues, “I have also removed gym work (my least enjoyable aspect of training). To offset this, I run hill sprints once a week, and do five minutes of plyometric drills three to five times a week. I do believe weight training is an important part of many training programs, but for me, the benefits [of replacing weight training with shorter, more enjoyable workouts] are far outweighed by the negatives [of eliminating weight workouts]. Five minutes of plyos is a far less invasive time commitment than a sixty- to ninety- minute trip to the gym.” For you aficionados, here is a typical weekly Nick Willis schedule:
Monday – Day off
Tuesday – Run 2h:00, 10–12 miles.
Wednesday – 1h:00 easy jogging (7 min/mile pace)
Thursday – Run 1h:15 (6 min/mile pace) + drills and 4 x 70-meter hill sprints.
Friday – Run 2h:00, 10–12 miles.
Saturday – Run 2h:00 (17–18 miles at 6m:30/mile pace)
Sunday – Run 0h:45 + plyo drills and 5 x 100-meter sprints
Nick’s rationale for his simple, shall we say casual, approach to elite running is high-minded, but it is also incredibly practical: “When you place sport as an important but not all-encompassing component of your life, it allows you to cope with success and failure with much more stable emotional maturity. This takes a lot of pressure off of performances, and so when you toe the line in races, there is much greater opportunity to maximize your ability, as you are not weighed down by pressure or expectation.”
Furthering this theme of fractal and intuitive training patterns, it’s not out of the question to stack hard days together to enable longer rest periods. When Mark coached Brad in the early 90s, they implemented a bold adjustment to the typical approach of spacing out hard workouts over a week. Instead, Brad experimented with stacking his long, hard Tuesday run next to a long, hard ride on Wednesday. This was followed by four days of minimal training, including two days of total rest.
We decided to try this approach because Brad was struggling with inadequate recovery. Trying to repeat the seemingly sensible “Before” weekly pattern detailed shortly (you’ll notice the strategic interspersing of hard days and easy days, the obligatory one rest day a week, all the usual recommended behaviors) was catching up to him. Race results started to suffer and he was far too inconsistent. He was still a world-ranked athlete, but we knew that more potential was possible with some tweaks to his approach. We realized that if Brad could deliver two elite-level efforts on his two big days, the rest of the week was basically just fill-in—do what he could comfortably do while ensuring a full recovery for the next cycle of back-to-back hard sessions.
Let’s compare the following before/after presentation of Brad’s late 1980s typical weekly training pattern versus his 1990–1991 training pattern. See which one you think involves less risk of drifting into chronic pattern/overtraining and more potential for peak performance on race day:
Long-lost photo of the surprise winner of the 1986 Desert Princess World Championship Series Duathlon race #1. No clothes, no sponsors, no competition—at least on this day in the desert.
BEFORE (1987–1989)
Monday – Swim 3,500 yards, bike 1h:30 aerobic, run 0h:30 easy
Tuesday – Bike 5h:00 in mountains (5,000–7,000’ of vertical gain), run 0h:20 easy, swim 1,000 easy
Wednesday – Run 0h:40 easy, swim 2,000 easy
Thursday – Run hard 1h:20 (12-mile AT session in mountains, including 6 x 3 min @ AT with thirty-second rest intervals), bike 2h:30 aerobic (to trailhead and back)
Friday – Bike 1h:30 aerobic, run 1h:10 aerobic, swim 3,500
Saturday – Bike 3h:00 aerobic, swim 1,500 easy
Sunday – Rest day
Weekly Totals
Swim (5): 11,500 yards
Bike (5): 13h:30
Run (5): 4h:00
Sessions: 15
Hours: 21:30
Behold the chrome dome, and the eighth habit of highly effective endurance athletes: call attention to yourself with flashy equipment...
Monday – Swim 2,500, bike 1h:00 easy
Tuesday – Run hard 1h:20 (12-mile AT session in mountains, including 6 x 3 min @ AT with thirty-second rest intervals), swim 1,000 easy
Wednesday – Bike 7h:00 in the mountains with 7,000–12,000'of vertical gain
Thursday – Sleep in until 10:30 a.m., massage, swim 1,000 easy, watch movies all afternoon and evening
Friday – Run 0h:40 easy, swim 1,500
Saturday – Run 1h:00 aerobic, bike 2h:00 aerobic, swim 3,000
Sunday – Rest day
Weekly Totals
Swim (5): 9,000 yards
Bike (3): 10h:00
Run (3): 3h:00
Sessions: 11
Hours: 16
The “Before” strategy looks suspiciously like an attempt to max out weekly mileage and deliver the requisite number of workouts in each sport, so as not to lose any fitness if a couple of days go by without getting wet or clipping into the pedals—the typical endurance athlete’s “volume and consistency” approach.
There are a couple of important takeaways from the “After” strategy. First, you’ll notice higher highs (the difficulty of the already long, mountainous weekly bike ride increased from five to seven hours, and on harder climbs) and lower lows (two days of near total rest each week, two other days considered “easy”). Essentially, what Brad did was deliver a Tuesday run and a Wednesday bike that were comparable to the big workouts his competitors did. However, due to Brad’s increased sensitivity to overtraining, he produced significantly lower total training volumes than the other top pros on the circuit, many of whom routinely delivered superhuman mileage totals such as 25,000 yards swimming, 300 miles cycling, and 50 miles running (probably taking about thirty-five hours to complete) in a typical week.
Brad’s schedule modification worked quite well, as he won six races in 1990 and delivered numerous other top-three finishes in big races. However, he still had some spotty performances, including a handful of DNFs to go with his wins. Realizing that tweaking of conventional wisdom’s volume and consistency approach delivered results, we took things a few giant leaps further away from triathlon norms leading into 1991, his best season on the circuit.
In discussing 1991 and beyond, it’s hard to even offer up a weekly training pattern like the “Before” and “After” examples presented. Instead, we totally rejected the idea of delivering a nice, tidy weekly training package and stopped even discussing the concept of weekly schedules. We looked at the big picture of Brad’s season goals, his strengths and weaknesses, and the training methods that had worked, and those that didn’t work. Packing his stress into two consecutive days was much better than continually having a hard workout looming around the corner, and the success of this strategy helped us realize that, at least in Brad’s case, everything was negotiable when it came to scheduling. By this time in his career, Brad had already built a high level of fitness, so we just extended our training time frames out to a big-picture season view, instead of the “what’s the best weekly schedule?” view.
Brad describes the continued modification of his approach:
The first major change in 1991 was to train alone, coinciding with a move from Los Angeles to Northern California. This enabled me to pace myself according to my daily energy levels, and avoid the large pack rides and swims in Los Angeles that were fun and fitness-building, but could easily wear me down. Secondly, I relied almost entirely on intuition every single day to choose my workouts. Mark and I would plan and plot strategy as usual, but it was outside the crucible of weekly scheduling.
Third, I didn’t even purchase a new training log for 1991. We all know how training logs can develop a sinister little voice of their own, luring you into overtraining patterns. Instead, I picked up a ninety-nine-cent spiral notebook and filled it with free-form thoughts about my daily training and general life. I learned this from Mike Pigg, as he offered me a glimpse of his “training log” one night in a shared hotel room. I opened up the spiral binder expecting to see badass split times and other juicy workout particulars, but instead it read like a free-form personal diary. All his workouts were faithfully logged, but the details were sparse. You’d see entries like, “Did Bridgeville-Kneeland loop—chilly. Then swam 3,000 with 15 x 100 yards on 1m:10. Still stressed about that clothing deal coming through. Right shoulder a bit looser, but better take it easy for one more week and do the stretching exercises every night.”
“Did the Bridgeville-Kneeland loop—chilly.” Ho-hum, sounds like one lap around Central Park. Actually, this is an absolutely epic hundred-mile ride deep into the Shasta-Trinity National Forest in extreme Northern California. First, you head south for fifty miles on flat roads, then start climbing and descending on crazy dirt logging roads for thirty-three miles before rejoining pavement near your starting point. Magnificent views of the Pacific coast are afforded en route, but my favorite view when I did the route with Pigg was a huge cloud of dust at the bottom of one of the dirt descents. It was Pigg sailing off the road after trying to take a corner too hard. No wonder he was perhaps the best descender ever in the sport; he practiced on dirt roads!
Swimming: Knowing this was Brad’s weakest event and that it is less stressful physically than running or cycling, Brad did his best to get to the pool as often as he could—usually four days a week. Instead of hammering intervals in group workouts, he swam alone at a comfortable pace, focusing on improving stroke mechanics and aerobic conditioning.
Typical swimming week:
• 1–3 days of recovery swims of 1,000–1,500 yards. Focus on stretching and rejuvenating after races, travel, or hard days.
• 1–3 proper training sessions of 3,000–5,000 yards. Emphasis on stroke mechanics, often in a small nearby lake.
Cycling: The centerpiece of Brad’s entire training program was an incredibly challenging “Death Ride” that he attempted once a week, a 107-mile loop into the High Sierra with 12,700 feet of climbing out of very steep river canyons—some steeper than anything seen in the Tour de France. After so many years on the circuit, we realized that Brad’s success came down to being fresh and fast on the run. Running more mileage or more speed workouts in training is very risky, so we figured that building his strength with extreme overdistance cycling on unbelievably challenging terrain, while always maintaining an aerobic heart rate, would not only help his cycling but also his ability to run off the bike.
Brad fondly remembers his Death Ride days:
After I moved out of LA, I didn’t do intervals, time trials, hill repeats, or pack rides. I could always rally for the crazy pack rides in Los Angeles, but they made me feel hot and tired in the days following. The tour through the Sierras at a comfortable pace was no easy feat, but it was fun, social, and scenic. I also discovered that I could recover from it easier than fast riding.
I did my best to be sure I was fresh and rested for the Tuesday Death Ride, but I would routinely abort the mission when I wasn’t feeling my best. In these cases, I would ride the first ninety minutes, all uphill, to a gas station—the final refreshment opportunity for the next four hours of travel on old logging and mining roads deep in the Sierra. If my legs didn’t feel good-to-great on that initial climb, I would turn around and pedal back down the mountain, using the free time that I’d allotted for the ride to watch videos and sleep. I’d hand the map to training partners I’d invited along (and were counting on me to lead the route!) and wish them luck. That’s not a friendly tour guide, but our group dynamics were to prioritize what was best for the individual athlete, every day and in every workout. We commonly flaked on each other with no repercussions or bad feelings.
Even with all my instrument dials pointing in the direction of succeeding on that one ride—sleeping like a champ and carefully moderating exercise stress during the lead-in days—it was still aborted 25 to 33 percent of the time! All the strategic planning and periodization is great, but things don’t always go according to plan, even for a dedicated professional athlete. With my competitive nature, I was willing to work as hard as possible to succeed as a pro, but I finally learned to take what my body gave me each day and nothing more. By only completing the Death Ride when I felt “strong, to quite strong” (as Ben Stiller would say in Meet The Parents), the body of work I accumulated was a bunch of epic all-day aerobic rides where my legs and body felt great and I became stronger and stronger over time—on the bike and on the run.
Behold the notorious Corkscrew Wall in California’s High Sierra. The climb ascends 2,200’ in 3.5 miles out of the Rubicon River, and comes midway through Brad’s “Death Ride” loop.
Typical cycling week:
• 1–3 aerobic/recovery rides of 1h:00–2h:30. Hilly terrain but heart rate typically only 100–120 bpm (aerobic max was 155 bpm).
• 1 Death Ride of 7h:00. 107 miles in high Sierra, 12,700’ climbing. All aerobic except climbing the Corkscrew Wall (2,200’ in 3.5 miles), where it was impossible to stay aerobic. Doing this made his 40K time trial + 10K run feel like a breeze.
Running: Brad was racing and traveling a ton during his peak years on the circuit, so instead of trying to make big fitness gains in training, Brad focused on feeling comfortable at all workouts. Sometimes this meant going very slowly and other times it meant flying along the Auburn State Park trails at an impressive speed while remaining aerobic. We avoided the high-risk track workouts he had done in the early years of his career (alert: sore throats and sore calves ahead!). When he went hard, it was on long-duration hill climbs where he’d go 6 x 3 minutes at 10K race pace with thirty-second rest intervals. Triathletes are primarily training to run well with fatigued legs, so this session emphasized strength more than building raw speed on the track.
Average over an entire year:
• 1–3 recovery jogs of 0h:20–0h:45 (He had a calf problem and was sore for three days after every race where he couldn’t run a step, so his weekly mileage was in the teens or twenties).
• 1 run of 10–12 miles (1h:30), including 6 x 3 min with thirty-second rest (when not racing)
Summary:
• One day of no exercise each week
• 1–2 other days of one hour or less of total exercise
• 2–4 days of entirely aerobic workouts, 3–4 hours total exercise
• 1–2 days of long duration/multiple workouts (e.g., Death Ride)
• Sleep 10 hours per night and 1–2 hour nap every afternoon (i.e., during his nine years on the circuit, half of his life was spent asleep!)
As you can discern from this trip down memory lane, and all the science and real-life experience that’s happened in the endurance scene in the ensuing twenty-five years, we grew to despise the concept of schedules in general, and in particular using the completely arbitrary time period of a week on which to base one’s schedule. The periodization guidelines in this chapter should be adhered to for best results, but there is plenty of opportunity for renegotiation along the way.
All this talk about adopting an intuitive and unstructured approach might have your analytical mind feeling a little frazzled right now. Understand there is nothing inherently damaging about having a techie bent or preferring a methodical, data-driven decision-making style, but you will very likely be better served by always blending subjective factors with whatever objective, precise, high-tech tools you enjoy training with.
Departing from the structured weekly schedule approach paid big dividends for Brad (pictured here, winning in Eilat, Israel, in 1991) on the racecourse. He had fifteen victories over the 1990–1991 seasons, including a national sprint championship, national series/Coke Grand Prix championship and No. 3 world-ranking in 1991, with a seven-race win streak to end that season.