Effective Distribution of Resources
With Ironman 70.3 South Africa having taken place in East London recently, many participants will no doubt have set personal best performances on the roads in and around Buffalo City. All those hours of sacrifice over November and December would have hopefully paid dividends on the race course.
Yet I do know of at least a few athletes who have fallen well short of their performance expectations, two of which failed to complete the event owing to serious illnesses contracted during race week. Given that both of the athletes in question are usually at the sharp end of the elite podium here in South Africa, their respective ailments do beg the question: just how can supremely fit individuals get so horrendously ill in the lead up to an important event?
When I was in my teens (and pre-teens), illnesses such as the common cold and influenza were deemed as things that occurred almost exclusively in winter. I mean, who was in bed with 'flu during summer? Yet incidences of summertime illnesses seem to be on the increase these days, particularly among endurance athletes. While the answers to the above rhetoric are quite simple (hint: too much of a seemingly good thing), what about the reverse notion of erring on the lesser side as a way to improve performance?
Mark Sisson is one of the world's foremost experts on health and fitness. His comprehensive website is a veritable archive of all things healthy and fit. A great addition to his online presence is a weekly podcast, co-hosted with former professional triathlete and fellow wellness entrepreneur, Brad Kearns. In terms of endurance training, both Sisson and Kearns have always had a somewhat non-conformist approach to attaining peak performance, dating back to the "go-go" 1980s when they were both competing at an elite level. They have consistently erred towards a more balanced and seemingly minimanlist approach to training practices, where an individual's health is placed above the more fashionable peak fitness on the totem pole of importance.
Their latest installment provides some great insight, particularly in the sense of a person doing the best they possibly can with the resources available to them. Roughly translated, Sisson and Kearns effectively endorse performing to the best of your ability with the least possible amount of training, a statement which needs to be put in a proper context. That said, can you imagine this message adorning the pages of Lava magazine? In the unlikely event of that actually happening, there may well be a veritable influx of dismissive comments and vicious debate on internet chat forums that would span months. But Sisson and Kearns do have a very viable point, however unpopular and hard-to-digest that point might be.
Midway through last year, a friend of mine and fellow athlete forwarded me a training program that he followed almost to the letter in 2011. The schedule in question was specific preparation tailored for an ultra-distance running event here in Cape Town, where he achieved a longstanding goal of attaining a much vaunted silver medal performance. Given that I share the same aspiration in 2014, I'm naturally curious as to how others go about attaining this level of performance. The program itself wasn't exactly rocket science; lots of basic running on a daily basis interspersed with weekly track-work and long runs. But it was its sheer volume that resonated with me, which had my friend running well over 120km/week for almost four months.
Needless to say I was reeling after dissecting the information on the aforementioned spreadsheet, although I wasn't exactly surprised. I do actually know of many fellow athletes who match and often exceed this sort of mileage almost year round. My "reeling" was more a case of my thinking to myself that there would be absolutely no way that I could even contemplate trying to follow my friend's schedule for longer than two weeks. It would be just too rigid, too much and squeeze the enjoyment out of my running, especially seeing that my training philosophy is more aligned with daily aspiration as opposed to weekly targets. But that is just my approach and is not necessarily compatible for others.
This is not to say that we should all just stop exercising and compete in athletic events on no training. Far from it. Most athletes of any level are in their respective sports for the sheer love of the activity, at least they should be. When that love is lost, it perhaps time to examine the reasons for this attitude shift and what steps can be taken to "right the ship."
Something that I often contemplate is why we as athletes even get to the point of declining passion in the first place. Surely there is a way of preventing the "training blues" that is so prevalent in the endurance sport community. Keeping things fun is one way to achieve this although the term "fun" means different things to different people. In a similar vein, a six hour bike ride might be fun one Saturday but not the next. One of the dangers of an overly-rigid training plan is ensuing boredom after a certain length of time. Many of these programs call for athletes to incorporate as much training as possible into their daily lives, effectively leaving little or no time for much else.
The converse of the above is perhaps a more practical way of "fitting it all in." If one considers that the majority of athletes work on a seven day cycle (i.e. the week), spreading things out over a longer time-period can have incalculable benefits, one of which is the avoidance of over-scheduling. My interpretation of this sort of approach in the quest to race as fast as possible could be summarised as follows:
- train as slowly as possible on a daily basis.
- avoidance of trying to stay with people who pass me in training.
- abstinence from any form of quantitative device (stopwatch; HRM; yo-yo etc).
- perform some crazily intense or long sessions only a handful of times annually.
- vary duration of daily exercise according to mood, weather, favourite TV programs etc.
- find at least one new dog-leg/variation to my usual routes per month.
Don't get pasted by copying others.
Rather observe, listen and learn from from the broader athletic spectrum using these various pieces of information from many different sources to work out what works best for you.
Friend's program - Wednesday 19 January 2011:
My program - Wednesday 22 January 2014:
