Training schedules are designed to try and prepare a person to achieve big things athletically. Developing fitness is one part of that, but these are some of the other things that go into a quality training schedule that goes beyond just developing fitness, and builds an athlete to perform their best in all regards.
What is Fitness?
The word fitness is used in a broad number of ways. A person might be considered fitter by improving their overall health or physical activity habits. In the context of running, however, fitness is a bit more specific. It is the physical preparedness of a person to handle the demands of the task they will be embarking upon, such as a 5K or 24 hour mountain running event.
In the context of endurance running, there are three pillars that make up fitness. These are metabolic fitness (ability to expend large amounts of energy quickly or continuously), muscular endurance (the strength and durability of the muscles that move us), and movement economy (the efficiency with which our body uses vital resources to fuel the other two pillars).
There are a lot of ways to move fitness forward whether training for a 5K or an ultramarathon, which is one reason no two training schedules will look exactly alike. Developing these physiological properties in the body will absolutely enhance performance capabilities, but there are other things we can do in our training to enhance performance that go beyond the pillars of running fitness. At the end of the day, fitness isn't sufficient for performance, and by developing these other skills in training alongside the physiology, we give ourselves the best chance of reaching our potential in our next event.
Pacing Skill
Pacing is a far more complicated and challenging skill set that most athletes give it credit for. The difference between our best pace for a 5K versus a 10K may only be 10 seconds per mile apart from one another, meaning we need to be really precise in pacing to get our best performance. At the same time, 10 seconds per mile too fast in a marathon can be the difference between perfect race execution and hitting the wall hard at Mile 21
To complicate things further, we know that our body is not exactly the same day after day. We have to be able to feel how are body is performing on the important days and respond, rather than trying to force some pre-determined goal when the body is ill-equipped to deliver it. It amazes me how things can turn around if an athlete is feeling slow early in a race and accepts it, only to be crushing negative splits later in the race that make up for the lost time.
We need to practice tuning pace by sense of effort, and dialing sense of effort to how long we can sustain that output for.
To develop a precise feel for pace and a keen sense of effort in training:
Incorporate training sessions specialized to goal pace where subtle pace/effort changes are practiced.
Example: In training for a marathon, include session like the Cutdown, where one long uptempo segment has three phases building from steady running at 10-15 seconds below marathon goal, then steady running at exactly marathon goal, followed by steady running 10-15 seconds faster than marathon goal pace
Resilience
Resilience is the ability to deal with pain and setbacks, and push on to see our goals through. On race day, we know we can at very least expect a decent amount of pain before the effort is over, but especially in races of the marathon distance and longer, it's possible we'll face mid-race setbacks we need to respond to.
Training resilience requires caution. By its nature, it is very taxing to practice persisting in demanding situations, and the risk is that we burn all of our mental matches in training with hard efforts and have less of ourselves left to give at the event itself (I wrote about burnout more in-depth here and here). What that means is that we need to be sparing with the major efforts, with probably no more than one of these 9 or 10-out-of-10 efforts per month.
Elite running coach Steve Magness has referred to these as "see God" workouts. In the context of road running races, what these workouts should look like is simply hitting near-race effort in a training session of very fast reps (such as 4x 1 mile at 5K pace) or very long distances and moderate pace (20 mile run with 16 miles at marathon pace).
Resilience training in ultra running has more to do with fighting back against challenging conditions during long-and-slow sessions. If you have a sick stomach 60 minutes into a 5-hour run, how do you respond? Can you correct the issue and get yourself moving again? Or perhaps you choose to suffer through a run in substantial heat since you know heat will be a factor on race day.
Fueling Skill
Honed fueling strategy is almost like free speed. The legs and lungs don't need to get fitter for us to realize a huge jump forward in performance due to strong nutrition practices. Runners training for distances up to the half marathon will primarily be focused on nailing their pre-workout and pre-race fueling, whereas half marathon and longer races require that we nail in-run fueling to perform our best.
Keeping a log of nutrition before and during key training sessions is essential to maximizing your fueling strategy. By recording what you ate and how many calories it was, and then how you felt during the session, over time clear trends will emerge. This is something I am constantly pushing my coaching clients to be as detailed and consistent with as possible.
Self-Preservation (for marathon or longer)
As the races get longer, peak performance becomes far less about the pillars of physiological fitness and far more about self-preservation. If an athlete can keep themselves, fueled, hydrated, mentally aware/positive, and injury-free over the first two thirds or three quarters of very long races, they're likely going to have a very strong performance. It is incredibly challenging to keep all those things near ideal in multi-hour events, which is where developing the resilience to fight back from those issues, comes in.
In training self-preservation is something to be practiced in the longest training sessions by identifying and treating problems EARLY. It takes practice to become attuned to the earliest warning signs of foot issues, dehydration, and other common limiters in very long events.
Incorporate strategies into your training that develop these skills, and you'll be a lot better prepared to give your best in your next event.
Comments