How To Endurance

Basic Fitness, Metabolics, Work and Time

The Role of Time is often overlooked in Endurance Sport

Our goal is to explain how you can become better than you ever thought possible.

We want you to “get there” and “stay there” for the rest of your life.

To help you, we’ve written four frameworks for viewing your endurance training:

1. Basic Fitness.

2. Metabolics.

3. Work Capacity.

4. Time.

Each framework builds on the capacities of the prior one.

The first framework is lifelong basic fitness. This is core training for health and functional performance. This type of fitness gives the ability to ramp up for longer events, or prepare specifically for shorter events. It supports ease of movement, generally, as well and ensuring capacity for activities of daily living.

The second framework is the foundational aspect of metabolic fitness. At its most simple, it’s the ability to turn food into speed. In the medical world, metabolic fitness relates to the absence of disease (in particular, chronic diseases like cardiovascular diseases and diabetes). This means that metabolic health is related to nutrition, exercise, mental health, cardiovascular, respiratory, hormonal and mitochondrial health. But metabolic health can also be seen as the ratio between substrate utilization and oxygen consumption at a cellular level. In a later chapter, we will show how to test this with lactate testing, which is a good way of looking at, and testing for, functional metabolic health in the athlete, even if it is a bit limited.

The third framework is work capacity, as Rocky Balboa says, “Going The Distance.”

Our final framework is the role of time. This is the ability to choose, change and sustain pace across our race duration. Our favorite time-based concept is training the ability to Always Finish Strong.

Together, the frameworks offer us a sustainable approach towards a lifetime enjoyment of endurance sport.

Along your endurance journey, you will wonder…

Am I doing the right thing?

When that question arises, refer back to what’s essential:

1. Do Work - Am I training consistently?

2. Enjoy The Process - Do I enjoy my life structure?

3. Endure - Is my workload sustainable?

4. Correct Errors - Do I have a system for better decision making?

We are going to start with what’s essential. An approach that will keep you in the game for many years to come.

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Doc Hellemans on Consistency

Are you prepared to do the work consistently?

• Consistently is the key….But it is o.k. to bring variety in the consistency….

• It is more likely you will do the work if you mostly enjoy it. If it feels like a chore sometimes that is fine. If it feels like a chore, most of the time, you need to change something.

• Sustainability is the key, although it is fine to adjust the workload over time, depending on other commitments, without feeling guilty.

• Use periodization across the year to bring variety in consistency.

• ‘Recognise and correct errors’, also relates to ‘What if’ scenarios. Being flexible is important. Some basic knowledge of training principles will help with decision-making.

• Being fixated on training and ‘getting it done, regardless’ will be detrimental over time.

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The First Framework: Basic Fitness

The first task is creating a life structure that enables 12 hours per week of movement.

We want you to remember:

• All Movement Is Good

• Everything Counts

• There Is No Minimum Intensity

We don’t need structure when we start out. We simply need to move, frequently.

As you’ll read later, Gordo likes to ensure two back-to-back easy days each week. So you might consider:

• Five Days A Week: Two hours of movement

• Two Days A Week: One hour of movement

Things to remember:

1. Health Supports Performance. Across your endurance journey, there will be times when you will be tempted to trade health for race performance. We hope to help you make better decisions.

2. Areas Of Risk. There are times when what’s required to race well diverges from health:

   1. The race itself,

   2. When we go deep, and

   3. When we get out of our comfort zone.

3. Short-Term Compromises. In preparing to race, we compromise our health to a degree, even if it is usually short-term. In return, we get an incredible amount of satisfaction by finding out how far we can push ourselves, rightly or wrongly. So, in pursuit of our goals, at times, we might well need to be prepared to compromise our health, but as long as it is not long-term and we recognize and manage it (this is where recovery comes in), we feel that is acceptable.