---

Full Video Transcript

Introduction to Endurance Training

How in the world do we train? We can get really lost when it comes to endurance training or performance. So, today we’re going to break it down. We’re not going to get lost in all the details.

I’m going to give you my conceptualization of training that I’ve used for decades in coaching college and elite runners. At the highest level, I call it build, maintain, and connect. So at any period of time when we’re training, we’re either emphasizing or building a quality. We’re either maintaining that quality or we’re connecting it to something else.

Now, often when it comes to running and training, we get lost in these arguments over what zone should I train to? Should I do highintensity interval training or threshold work or double threshold or what have you? And here’s the truth. You need everything.

Okay, but in the right dose in the right time. So what I want to emphasize today is what we call periodization is meaning at any given time we’re going to build one or two qualities and everything else is in maintenance mode. Meaning we’re doing just enough so that doesn’t drain too much to where it’s like a loss quality when we come into having it. Okay, I’ll give some examples throughout.

And the last part is we

The Build Phase: Pushing Your Limits

connect it. So let’s dive into this really quickly and give you some insight that might help you. Building. What does that mean?

It means we’re trying to progress that physiological capacity or that speed or endurance capacity. We’re trying to improve the thing. What that means is we need to embarrass the body. That means we need to slightly go somewhere new or push the bounds of a workout or push the bounds of the long run or mileage or however you want to do it.

So our body goes like, “Oh crap, we need to adapt. Next time we need to be be a little bit stronger. The next time we need a little bit more mitochondria to deal with the things, the byproducts to get some more oxygen, all of that stuff. We’ve got to slightly embarrass it.

So when we’re in building mode, we’re progressing things. In the simplest way, this is increasing your base mileage. When you’re in that foundation or base phase where you’re going from 30 m a week to 35 to 40, what are you building? Your general aerobic ability and your like tolerance for the pounding that running gives us.

That’s what we’re building in workouts. What we’re looking at is we’re progressing the intervals or the threshold runs. Now, we can do this in a myriad of ways. I’ll outline this in another video because I think there’s 50 billion ways, but we can increase the volume of it, the total reps that we’re doing.

We can lengthen the interval itself going from 400s to 600s. We can do the classic just try and run the four by mile repeats faster. We can shorten the recovery, but generally over time, maybe not every time you do this workout, but every couple times is you’re progressing things to adapt. You’re challenging the system in some way.

Often this occurs naturally. You just run a little bit faster because you’ve done the mile repeats for three weeks in a row or whatever have you. But what we’re trying to get at is we’re pushing the bounds of the system. Now, the key is here is that for most people, you can only build essentially maybe two things at once.

Sometimes we can get to three, but most people are pretty safe on we need to build one or two things at a time. So that means either you’re holding the volume and intensity and number of workouts steady and you’re increasing maybe the length of the runs or vice versa where you’re saying, “Hey, I’m going to pre press my 5k pace intervals and keep our tempos or thresholds at the same level. Okay? So only building one or two.

This is where

The Maintenance Phase: Keeping Your Gains

we come into maintenance mode. When we’re not building something, we’re maintaining that quality.” Now the goal is depending on the time of the year we want to do enough to maintain that quality so it doesn’t drain. Now sometimes it’s naturally going to drain because we can’t maintain everything all the time at the same level at once. Example, think about this.

Your speed during a heavy base phase drains a little bit, right? You’re not as fast if I went and had you run a 100 or 200 or 400 as you were during peak track season. Okay. But what you do during the base phase is you just do just enough speed, some strides, some hill sprints, other things that maintain that capacity so that when we come time to emphasize it and to build it, it’s there.

We don’t have to go from scratch or from below scratch. Okay. The key is understanding what level of maintenance do you need these things to be at and when are you going to flip that switch and build again. So again, to use the example, we maintain speed during the base phase because we know when it comes time to sharpen up, if you’re racing the mile or 3K or 5K or something like that on the track, you got to do more of it to bring it all around.

When it comes to maintaining things, my general rule of thumb is that if when we’re building something, we want to hit it a workout every seven or 10 days to get that capacity. when we’re maintaining it’s probably once every 14 days to maybe three weeks but generally around every two weeks where we need to hit that individual capacity. The other part of it is it’s easier to maintain something that is already built and once we have this then we don’t need to do quite as much volume or intensity one or the other to maintain the thing. What do I mean by this?

This is the classic finding that Littyard found. Arthur Littyard, fame coach. What did he do? He discovered, “Oh man, if we spend a long time building our aerobic base with lots of 100 miles weeks and 20 mile long runs or what have you over mountains, we’re going to be in a good spot.” But what’s often forgotten, and the reason the weekly long run sticks around to this day, is that Lydiard found that when he switched And in Lyard’s original work, he switched from 100 miles a week of all easy steady work to hillphase, but then eventually originally it was 5 days a week of intense training, intense intervals.

He found that he kept that weekly long run, they would maintain their aerobic ability. Now, in modern times, we’re not going to do 5 days a week of interval training unless you’re crazy or doing some sort of iglooy adjusted program. So, the maintenance is a little bit different, but you’re always we often don’t need a weekly long run during the maintenance phase because we have other easy medium long runs and things like that in the training. So the balance shifts a little bit.

But think about it as it’s easier to maintain something once we’ve built it up. This applies not just to our base to sharpening. It also applies to our classic periodization when we look at especially for training for the track events where we’d often have a period of training where we go heavy into threshold or in the modern incarnation when you’re doing double threshold or Norwegian singles or what have you is what we know is once we transition to a sharpening phase or a more intense phase guess what we don’t need the double threshold to maintain that threshold really well. We need it maybe once every 10 days, sometimes once every two weeks depending on the event.

So again, building emphasizing, pushing the boundaries, maintaining maybe about 60 to 70% of volume will get you there. So if you’re used to doing a 6 miles worth of threshold work, you can do four miles and probably be okay. This is where I like to use combo work to maintain things. sometimes like four miles at threshold followed by six by short hill sprints.

What are we doing there? Maintaining threshold, maintaining pure speed. We’ve done it both in the same workout. Maintenance done for the next two weeks or so.

Okay, so building maintaining what’s the last thing

The Connect Phase: Linking Your Training

connecting. Connecting is this I’m trying to explain this in the simplest way possible. We have, if you think of training, we have almost like this kink in the pipe system that goes on. So, think of it like this.

If I know for my race that I need to do a workout like five by mile at 5:15 pace, okay, let’s say that’s the workout with 3 minutes rest. We’ll just throw it in there. And that’s gonna allow me to run, I don’t know, my 8K at 515 pace or 10K at 515 pace. Just go with it.

Pulling this out of my hip on the fly. If I know that’s the key workout that if I do that, I’m going to be in a good position to do that. And at the beginning of the year, I can only run those five by mile at 530 pace. somewhere along the way above or below on the speed or endurance we’re going to have kinks in the pipe meaning the water is not flowing through because we are not fast enough or do not have the endurance capacity to handle it.

Now I want you to start at that five mile at 515 pace at the top and then let’s go down the speed and endurance side. Let’s say hey I need to run 5 by mile 515 pace. Can I run six to eight 800s at 230? Maybe you can.

If you can, then that tells you your direct speed is not a problem. Okay? Because if you can run those 800s at 230, then 515 pace is 237 and change per 800. The problem is not the speed.

But maybe it is, maybe you can’t. Let’s go down a ladder. Maybe you can run those. Maybe you can’t run those 6 by800s at 230.

Why not? Maybe it’s the speed side. Can you run 400s, 10 x 400 and 68? Can you run 16×200 in 32?

Can you sprint a 26 second 200 or whatever it is? Again, I’m pulling numbers off, but you can see as we go down the numbers on the speed side, chances are there is a kink in the pipe. somewhere. And if it is, hey, I can’t do any of these things, maybe it is literally your base pure speed is not fast enough so that you don’t have a gap at every level going up.

Maybe it’s that you have really good base speed, but once you get around mile pace and you’re running those 400s, you don’t have that anorobic ability to tolerate everything that is building up. So, you can’t extend that a little bit. So your kink in the pipe is going from 400s at 68 to 800s at 230 or whatever have you. We can go the other direction as well.

Again 5 by mile 515 pace. Can you run seven or six or seven mile tempo at 530 to 540 pace? If you can’t, maybe your threshold level isn’t good enough. Can you do a long steady run, a 10 mile at six minute pace?

If you can’t, maybe your general economy plus fueling plus ability to cruise on a slow twitch muscle fibers isn’t good enough. Maybe you fall apart in that 10 mile run, not because of fatigue, but because 10 miles is a really freaking way and your own longest run is only 11 or 12 miles. And the king of the pipe is the actual physical endurance. The point is this.

is when we’re thinking about how we build decide what to build when part of it is where are the weak links where is the kink in the pipe what do you need to develop robustly so when it comes time you can progress through that as you add that training in this is why we often start with a very large base for high school or college kids who haven’t had a lot of aerobic training, right? And it’s almost all easy running. The reason we do that is because the kink in the pipe is often the aerobic side and it’s general endurance, especially for high school kids who are new. So, we spend a lot of time there because I can take that high school kid who’s young, fresh, and it’s got some nice fast twitch fibers and just throw them into intervals and they’ll handle it relatively well for fast stuff because they’re a young kid.

Now it reverses maybe as we age. When we have a lot of miles under us, our aerobic system, our base is so freaking big. We don’t need to spend months doing the traditional linear 100 miles a week. We jump straight into, okay, we need some hill sprints.

We need some reactive training, maybe even some strength work. We need some hills because we got to build this capacity up because we know the weak link is, hey, I got to build my ability to recruit those fast twitch fibers to have that speed. So when I start to do that threshold work or the specific 10k or half marathon or 5k work that you’re training for, like I’ve got enough speed gap that is there. Okay.

The other part of it is

Understanding Individual Needs and Time Horizons

this. Okay. So we talked about the individual where your weak link is. The other part is time horizon and interactions.

What do I mean by this? Again going back to Liard, his great breakthrough was realizing, holy crap, it takes a long time to develop all of the aerobic system both ensematically, structurally, all the things in between. Takes longer just does. On the flip side, Lyd and others realized, hey, I can get relatively sharp really quickly.

Give me six weeks, hammer it out, maybe we don’t get our full sharpness, but we can get pretty dang sharp. So, we realize the time horizons generally are quicker. Now, alternatively, the time horizons on, let’s say, we’re trying to make some biomechanical change that ties into muscle fiber recruitment and all of these things that tie into economy, that’s going to take a really long time, especially if our neural patterns are really freaking ingrained. Time horizons expand.

So, understanding the time horizons of different things, of general endurance, of threshold training, of that sharpening or quote anorobic work of specific endurance. Understanding those is important. And again, it comes down to the individual. What do I mean by this?

We have fast and slow responders to some things. Some people, you give them some threshold work and their threshold goes through the roof. You give them some sharpening work and all of a sudden they’re like cranking hundreds. Other people, it takes time.

Okay. How do you determine this? Through experience. trying things, seeing how they respond, and also tending to ask them what they like to do because we tend to respond well to the things that we like to do or we tend to like the things we respond well to, however you want to say it.

Okay, that’s how we look at it. And all we’re trying to do is work backwards from the event demands and our individual abilities and saying this is the goal. This is what I’m trying to accomplish. That’s the destination.

How do I create the map to get there? And the map is simply deciding when do I build the thing? When do I emphasize the thing? And then how much does it take to maintain it?

And again, the race distance will change, right? So, think of it like this. For a marathon, you want to build general endurance and some general speed capacity first. And then you’re going to use the threshold actually as not sharpening up or whatever have you.

It’s like I need to improve my half marathon time first. get that half marathon time before then focusing on extension or specificity towards the marathon during the last 6 to8 weeks of the training block that is different and it has a different in a different role than if I’m training for a 10k for example. So in the marathon example the threshold work served as like the speed support the kink in the pipe a level down from marathon pace. If I’m going to run 530 pace for my marathon, I better be able to run 510 to 15ish for my threshold work.

If not, good luck. You need the gap. And then we need to work on the fueling an extension to make sure that we can handle that 530 pace through the through the thing. If I’m running a 10k, guess what?

the model on building the thing up differs slightly because now that threshold work becomes like the aerobic support. Okay, we still do it before we go into sharpening but now it’s supporting us from the like endurance side of I don’t need necessarily the gap between my half marathon and marathon. Now I need to understand that like the threshold work supports the 10k paced work which is faster. Hopefully that makes sense.

But it gives us the ability to run at 10k pace without lactate going through the roof from the get-go. We have a steady gradual rise because our threshold is so high. The point is this is when you build things when you maintain things will switch. But if you keep this idea in mind of when am I building things that means progressing things in a direction that stimulates me to adapt means figuring out how much we need to maintain.

what is the dosage and then constantly evaluating where is the kink in the pipe and has it changed and does that mean I need to be responsive to change my periodization as we’re going along there you go build maintain

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

connectress however you want to say it that’s what we’re looking at hopefully that didn’t confuse you too much hopefully it gives you some insight on how to look at training through a different lens that is not purely physiological, not purely mathematical, but a theme for understanding of okay, how do I know when to emphasize different things? With that, I hope you enjoyed it. Please subscribe, like, share, comment. I want to hear from you.

Let me know what other videos you want. Until next time, everybody. Thanks and take care.