How To Train - Chapter Ten
Building World Class Fitness
What does it take to be the best you can be?
Time, patience and consistency.
At this point of our story, we are a little more than halfway through my first 1,000-day block. Excited by seeing gains and eager to prove my run fitness, I’d been distracted. Fortunately, I learned my lesson and returned to what is required to improve.
My goal for 2024 was to attend Epic Camp France with my friends. Epic Camp is a business I founded with Scott Molina. When we started the business, the idea was to do monster training camps in fun locations. Inside the camps, we’d have daily competitions, climb & sprint bonuses, and incentives to do a ton of volume.
The camps would last from 8 to 12 days and were held in New Zealand, Colorado, Australia, Italy, France and Canada. To give you an idea on volume, the most I ever did was 84 hours across the 12 days of Epic Camp Australia. In hindsight, that was 24 hours too much. Binge training is what I call it now.
Years ago, after a 15-day tour from the top to the bottom of New Zealand, Scott and I handed the business off to John Newsom. John and his team have kept the business going. John organized Epic Camp France for the summer of 2024. I signed myself up knowing that the camp would motivate me to ride lots.
Epic Camp France included several mountain stages that were expected to add up to 40,000 vertical feet of climbing. The camp ended with the Alpe d’Huez triathlon (Alpe Tri) that was rumored to contain 10,000 feet of climbing and a bike course that ended by riding up to the village of Alpe d’Huez.
John offered a Mount Ventoux prologue and about half the campers signed up. So, before the official camp started, a bunch of us would drive south and ride up the Giant of Provence, a 21-km/13-mile climb with an average gradient of 7.7%. A 7%-grade doesn’t sound bad on paper but seems to wreck many excellent cyclists.
Big picture, I needed to prepare my body to handle six massive days, which would happen across 11 total days. To make the challenge bigger, the 11th day would be the Alpe Tri. When I was younger, this type of block was my favorite thing to do in the world.
How would I handle the preparation, execution and racing in my 50s?
We were about to find out.
Getting ready for a series of big days is different than seeking to peak on a single day. I knew that if I arrived in France with the necessary general fitness, then the camp would improve my specific fitness. General fitness is the ability to get through the camp, itself. Specific fitness is the ability to perform on the final race day. The tricky part would be managing total fatigue, so I didn’t fall apart during the camp, or the Alpe Tri race on the final day.
ÖtillÖ and Epic Camp France were events at the limit of my endurance. By choosing them, I was giving myself an incentive to focus on two more of the foundational concepts of fitness:
Maintain base training if it continues to shift the curve.
The bike is the safest place to ramp endurance volume.
I explained shifting the curve in Chapter Eight. The tests I showed you were done fresh. There is another important dimension to fitness: time. Endurance performance changes, sometimes dramatically, as we move through time. At Epic Camp France, I’d need to maintain my form across 11 days, culminating in race that was expected to last ~80% of an Ironman duration. I would need all-day, and multi-day, fitness.
My plan was simple, and one you should use on yourself:
Get Gym Strong
Get Sport-Specific Strong
Get Fit
Strength goals are compared at the individual level. Focus on you vs. you. Unless you have been focusing on strength training for the last three years, you can be far stronger than you are right now. Stronger is faster, period.
Fitness is defined based on the requirements of your goal event. For example, fit for a 10 km run is different than fit for a 100-mile Grand Fondo. Similarly, running a marathon (or half-marathon) has very different requirements when placed at the end of a triathlon.
Regardless of the specific capacity you ultimately require, I recommend you follow a seasonal approach:
Gym strong by the end of Winter
Sport-specific strong by the end of Spring
General preparation in place by mid-Summer
Then, a short-specific preparation block completes the process before your main event.
In 2023, I didn’t have the general capacity to tolerate any specific training for ÖtillÖ. Due to a lack of fitness, my training was general right up to race week. If you are stepping up to ultradistance racing, then this should be your default approach.
In 2024, I was able to tolerate a few specific sessions that I’ll share with you. However, training specific to Epic Camp is likely to be different than you expect.
