Consistency - playing the long term game - secret weapon - availability - sacrifice - hyperrealism

There is no secret weapon in endurance, contrary to what most people say. No weapon but one. Could you guess what it is? It’s not an expensive bike or a fancy continuous blood test. It is plain and simple, long term consistency.

The problem with consistency is that we are programmed to find easy solutions, life-changing pills, instead of taking the long route. We end up losing sight from big gains only looking at those (very important indeed) marginal gains. And even worse, sometimes looking at them in the wrong place. Some of the most expensive marginal gains are not actual gains and are widely discussed because their promoters market them a lot.

As a coach, I believe the #1 job is keeping your athletes consistent, even if that means sacrificing a bit of the optimal training. Not everyone might agree with me, but I think its better to have a good plan that the athlete can perform consistently, than a fantastic plan full of missed trainings sessions.

Doing some simple math, if you train 20hrs per week for the 5 months leading to your race, you’ll be training 40% less hours annually than someone doing consistently 14hrs per week year-round. And that’s just seeing the volume and how the metabolical adaptations occur, nor including the antifragility and benefits of polarized training.

So, what can we do to be consistent in the long term?

First, understand where you are. You need to know where you are in terms of time availability. My athletes know how much I urge them to be realistic on their time commitment and availability to be able to play the long term game.

Second, you should also be mindful of yourself and how much sacrifice are you willing to make, again timewise and from social events, as you might be tired or just not able to go to every birthday in the build up for a race.

Third, you need to be mindful of where you are, and where you want to be. From there you need to work hard enough, but not so hard that an injury or getting sick might cost you days or weeks. And that might cost you even more weeks to recover. On a one on one conversation, this top level coach told me that 90% of his job was not screwing the athletes he took, and letting them stay consistent with what they already know.

To achieve consistency, we need to know that most of our effort will be unsexy, boring and not suitable for social media. We will have many days that we will want to give up, rest a bit more, cut the training in half or not go as hard as prescribed.

Contrary to social media, most of the days are not instagrammable. You might not feel like it, you might not use matching clothes. You just want to have the session done and move on to the next day. It is OK. For this you need to always remember your why, stay focused, and doing everything to keep the long term.

One last thought is on self sabotage. Going all in, checking all the boxes and committing your all exposes you to a hard fall if you fail. It’s easier to just have an excuse for not performing 100% than going all in and not achieving your goal. Have you ever heard people on the start line saying how little they trained? That is like the bandage before the wound. To avoid self sabotage, we need to let go, and focus on the process not the result of ONE race with all its unpredictable phases. Our goal should be to do the best preparation possible, the results might (and should) follow.

Book references:

Feel no fear, Béla Károlyi,

The Brave Athlete: Calm the F*ck Down and Rise to the Occasion, Simon Marshall PhD, Lesley Paterson

Coach Corner

Specificity in training for race conditions might make the difference between a great race, or one where you didn’t perform till the end. There are conditions like warm or cold weather. Either training in those conditions (like the pro’s travelling a month ahead to Hawaii to train) or simulate conditions with sauna, hot showers and baths, ice baths (here I have my favorite, Lumi Therapy).

Other things to consider is the course. River swim against the current, maybe you’ll need to train much more strength. Hilly runs are different than flat ones, same goes for bike flat and fast vs hilly with technical descents (as could be Nice).

As coaches, we need to be mindful of having our athletes get adaptations not only to be in the best physical shape, but on the best shape for their goal as possible.

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