What is the goal of the training?
Performance
Whether you are an athlete training to complete your first 5 mile race, qualify for The Boston Marathon or run an Olympic time trial in the 5k the goal is the same, improve performance. The Webster dictionary defines Performance as: The execution of an action. In terms of improving running performance this boils down to being able to cover a target distance faster than you could previously. For the 5 mile race this might mean running without stopping to walk, for Boston it means hitting a specific marathon time based on age and gender and for the Olympic 5k it means 13:13:50 for a man and 15:10:00 for a woman. Whatever your specific goal is it all boils down to increasing the speed at which you cover a target distance.
What does it mean to train?
In order to improve performance it’s important to have an understanding of what it means to train. The body is constantly trying to maintain a state of balance, homeostasis. When your blood sugar rises you release insulin, when your core temperature goes up you shuttle blood to your skin in order to aid in cooling. There’s many examples of ways that your body regulates itself in order to keep it in a state of balance. When we incur stress our body reacts by trying to resist that stress. When the stress stops our body attempts to adapt to it so that the next time it encounters something similar it will be better able to handle it and ideally not get thrown out of homeostasis. This process (general adaptation syndrome) of stress, recovery and adaptation is the foundation for athletic training.
When we do a workout we are intentionally stressing the body in order to facilitate some type of adaptation. In other words we are training our body to perform better when it encounters a specific stress. What’s important to understand in this equation is that the adaptation happens during recovery not when the workout is executed. So what does this mean? It means that the recovery is of equal importance as the workout.
Workout + Recovery = Improvement
Workout + No Recovery = No (Less) Improvement
When does recovery happen? The rate at which recovery happens is not the same for everyone or the same for each workout. It could be 8 hours, 24 hours or longer. It depends how hard the workout was, your personal rate of recovery, external stress and sleep to name a few.
Training load
Training load boils down to how much stress is the right amount. Is it better to train to exhaustion, or have something left in the tank. Not everyone responds in the same way and not all stress is created equal. Too much load and your body may not be able to recover and adapt. Too little of a load and you improve less. It’s perhaps easiest to think of this represented as a bell curve.
Ideally we would always train with an optimal training load. However, this is not an exact science. The job of the coach or self-trained athlete is to continually re-evaluate an athletes progress in order to try and assess training load. The optimal amount of training is a moving target and not the same for everyone. That said it is my opinion that it’s is better to error on the side of too little than too much to avoid injury and over training.
Progression
The process of exposing stressors to an athlete in order to elicit physiological adaptations is the core of athletic training. To do this effectively requires what we call progression. Progression is simply the process of building up an athlete’s ability by adding more or different stressors as you move through your training. For example if you went to the gym and did sets of bicep curls with 25 lbs weights. Eventually it would get easier and you might up the amount of weight to 30 lbs. The idea here is that by progressing to a heavier weight the strength of the athlete would increase accordingly. The trick is knowing when to progress to the heavier weight. Progress too early and an injury might occur. Wait too long and the training is slower. There’s not a magic bullet and each person will respond differently. The key is to be sensible, listen your body and adjust in order to maximize effect. The same bell curve that we applied to training load applies to progression as well. Once again I would like to reinforce that most training errors occur when the athlete pushes to the right of the bell curve and that it is always better to error on the side of too little as opposed to too much.
What is trainable?
Speed is represented by the equation, force divided by mass. In order to increase your race time it is essential to increase the amount of force you can produce and the length of time you can sustain that force. Simple right? It is and it isn’t.
Understanding why we slow down
Before we look at what’s trainable it’s important to understand how effort fits into the problem. At some point when you run a race you will feel the urge to slow down. As the effort required to maintain your current pace starts to exceed your body’s ability maintain homeostasis you will start to experience fatigue. Once fatigue starts to set in, you will most likely slow down in order to minimize this feeling. There’s two things that can affect your perception of effort. The first is your fitness. The more you improve your fitness the easier it will be able to sustain a higher pace at a lower level of perceived effort. Next, is mental state. If you can resist, or push through fatigue you will be able to sustain race pace for a longer period of time. Below are the four top level categories I use to describe what is trainable.
Movement
In order to run we need to move. How we move dictates how well we convert the force/power we are generating into speed. Newton’s 2nd law: force / mass = speed, while descriptive, it does not account for the biomechanics of running. The object is to train the body to move in a way that optimizes our conversion of power into speed.
Energy
Chances are if you have perused the internet in search of articles related to endurance training you have no doubt found countless articles that address the topic of training your energy systems. Running requires muscle contractions. In turn muscle contractions require energy. Energy is produced at the cellular level in the form of ATP (Adenosine triphosphate). Energy requires fuel which comes from the food we eat in combination with the air we breathe (oxygen). In order to generate more force or sustain it longer we train to increase and improve our metabolic energy production. ATP fuels the force in this equation.
Durability
With every stride you take when you run you put 2.5 times your body weight of load on your legs. It is important to increase our structural durability in order to withstand the demands of your training load and race intensity. Our bodies adapt aerobically at a faster rate than structurally. A common training error is to add too much load too quickly. This is easily done as often times an athlete will start to feel aerobically fit after they have begun a training plan. When this happens the inclination is to feel they can add more volume or intensity to their training before their muscles, tendons and ligaments are ready to handle the extra work, resulting in injury. Effective training relies on consistency. You cannot hope to improve performance with an off and on approach. Improving endurance boils down to regular training. This means working out multiple days per week. In order to achieve this you need to remain injury free. This requires durability.
MENTAL PREPARATION
There are two main areas I consider when thinking about mental preparation. The first are the stories we tell our selves and the second is “inhibitory control”. The stories we tell ourselves matter. If you tell yourself you can’t do it, you probably won’t. Belief in possibility goes a long way towards achieving our goals. Reducing or eliminating negative “self-talk” is an important factor in performance. The ability to resist the urge to slow down or decrease intensity, “mental toughness”, is key to pushing your limits. This is the easier of the two concepts to quantify and is a focus of the F/M training regime.