Top Endurance

The cultures of most endurance sports have deep traditions of focusing on completing as many miles and hours as possible, regardless of the quality of the workouts—and even at the expense of quality. This leads to a real challenge for modern-day endurance athletes. With the many outside demands on athletes’ time and energy, athletes need time-efficient ways to train effectively that allow them to recover from their workouts and grow stronger. High-quality workouts enable athletes to get the most from the time and energy put into workouts. The benefit of high-quality workouts far exceeds the benefit of completing as many workouts as possible. Athletes should eliminate workouts that do not focus on quality.

In addition to the “more is better” mind-set in society and in the cultural histories of endurance sports, athletes may also feel bombarded with a sea of information on training methods that have accompanied developments in technology. Multitudes of complex training approaches are now available as well as high-tech gadgets and software to dissect and analyze (and overanalyze) training. But at the end of the day, developing endurance still comes down to doing workouts that apply stresses that challenge athletes to cover ground for extended distances as rapidly as they can.

Athletes should focus on simple workouts with clear objectives. Doing so frees athletes to work hard and enjoy their sport. This is the most direct path to success and excellence. To achieve that success and excellence, athletes should use three main endurance-building tools:

Long workouts. These workouts are the most specific, and as the training year advances, the workouts can progress to distances similar to an athlete’s peak races; in addition, significant portions of the workouts are completed at race intensity. Athletes cannot do in a race what they have not done in a workout (with a few exceptions), and long workouts prepare athletes most specifically for peak races. Not only do these workouts develop the exact physical abilities that are needed for racing, but they also aid tremendously in developing optimal mental abilities. Long workouts are also the ideal chance to practice and experiment with race nutrition and equipment outside of a race.

 Interval workouts. These high-work and moderate-duration workouts (also known as anaerobic workouts and anaerobic endurance workouts) last less than 1 hour and 30 minutes, which is typically the amount of time that an endurance athlete has available for working out on most days of the week. Interval workouts are potentially the most potent, but they also present the most stress on an athlete. As discussed in chapter 3, athletes should use a planned, systematic, and progressive overload in order to avoid overtraining (sometimes referred to as underrecovery syndrome). Many experienced endurance coaches and athletes will tell you that being slightly undertrained on race day is better than being overtrained.

 Aerobic workouts. These moderate-work and moderate-duration workouts (also known as aerobic workouts or aerobic endurance workouts) are conservative sessions designed to enhance endurance. Aerobic workouts include a cap or ceiling on intensity that keeps the work almost exclusively aerobic in nature. As a result, these workouts are less effective at developing endurance than interval workouts, but they are also easier to recover from. Blending the right amount of these two types of workouts (used along with long workouts) is part of the art of training.

Interval workouts are made up of higher-intensity work broken up by rest intervals. Both interval workouts (high work, moderate duration) and aerobic workouts (moderate work, moderate duration) can be done as intervals or as steady, uninterrupted periods of work. However, the term interval workouts is more commonly used for anaerobic workouts. That’s why the terms intervals and interval workouts are typically used synonymously with high-work workouts, and the term aerobic workouts is typically used synonymously with moderate-work workouts.

Various subclasses of workouts can be categorized within the three types of endurance workouts. This is particularly true of interval workouts, which include hill workouts (cycling and running), fartlek workouts, and interval workouts done on an indoor trainer (cycling), track (running), or treadmill (running).