Endurance Nation | Triathlon Coaching, Ironman Training, Half Ironman, Beginner Triathlon

We hope that Chapter One gave you a broader perspective of the sport. Let’s now begin to dive into the nuts and bolts of the Endurance Nation Long Course Training Method.

In this chapter, we will:

• Present our Five Keys of Long Course Training
• Explain each of these keys in detail
• Compare our model side by side against the more traditional model currently in the tri-culture.

The fitter our athletes become, the more other athletes want to know about our endurance training protocols. Some of these emails come from athletes outside the EN system, looking for a magical way to get faster. Others are from folks inside the system, usually commenting on their fitness gains and better overall results on fewer hours of training. The best part? Our approach is simple to understand, even easier to implement and backed up by science.

The way we think of training isn’t that different from the “regular” version of periodization that has permeated multisport. We do, however, have a real problem with the visual representation of periodization as a pyramid — and the misconception that one needs to “graduate up” from stage to stage to have optimal performance. There are many coaching practices that uphold the idea that there is an aerobic debt that needs to be paid before one can be successful at long-course triathlon. This is simply not true, and our athletes are living proof that there is another way.

The Five Keys are entirely a function and the need to both maximize and reserve your training time investment for as long as possible to meet real world constraints.

Everything we do, the workouts, the structure, everything, flows backwards from the fact that you are a real world age group athlete. Period. The fact that it also happens to follow the science is an added bonus. However, we feel very strongly that any discussion of how to train that does not begin, in the first sentence, with defining how much time you have to train, is largely invalid. We can’t talk about what goes in your training box without first talking about how big your box is. LIFE — not a spreadsheet, not a coach, not a book — dictates the size of that box. This is an absolute, do not pass go, thing you gotta get through your head. This is all just a game and it MUST fit within your life.

Use the Five Keys to put together a plan you can do week after week, holding off on cashing in your SAU credits (Spousal Approval Units) for as long as possible.

That’s it. You could close your browser right now and have 90% of what you need to be a successful Long Course athlete. Success in this game, in the long term, is about getting your head screwed on straight regarding where you should be spending most of your time (not training) and how to maximize your ROI when you are training.

Let’s now discuss each of the Five Keys in more detail:

I. Real-World Volume
Any discussion of training protocol MUST begin by defining the time available to train. Period, do not pass go. 95% of triathletes have jobs, families + commitments that limit training time; our approach reflects this reality. Any attempt to define what to put into a training week without first quantifying the size of that training week is inherently flawed. We discount or ignore any coaching protocol that is either not framed in this perspective from the start, or is framed from the perspective of 18+ hours per week. That is not the real world.

II. Maximize Return on Time Invested
What activities will yield the greatest fitness and performance returns for the time you invest in training? If you can achieve the same results with a 1:30 ride as you can with a 2:30 ride, why waste an hour of your day? More importantly, why would you want to compromise the more important parts of your life (work, family, etc) when you don’t need to in order to reach your race day goals?

III. Fitness = Ability to Perform More Work
The measure of your current fitness is the ability to do work: to move the mass of your body through space, via wheels, water, or shoes, at pace/speed/watts X for distance/time Y. “Fitness”, as you know it, is simply your body’s ability to perform work at a specific work rate. Your body is very efficient and will only adapt itself to the stresses that you place upon it. Any training session is nothing more than an opportunity to load the body with a “training stress/” The cumulative effect of this stress applied over a week, a month, a training period, etc, is that your body is forced to adapt to this ever increased stress. The expression of this increased adaptation is the ability to do more work. You call it becoming more fit. However, in the current endurance training world this loose definition, “fitness,” opens the door to a variety of interpretations. Namely, that there are different flavors of often mutually exclusively fitness: aerobic fitness, “go fast” fitness, etc. This is a myth. The fact is that all exercise longer than about two minutes (?) is almost 100% aerobic and there really are no different flavors of aerobic fitness, other than “fast” or “slow,” we suppose!

In our world, it’s very simple:

• Fitness is the ability to perform more work.
• My body is currently adapted to perform work at a specific work rate.
• I introduce my body to increasing levels of stress and it adapts.
• The expression of this adaptation is the ability to perform work at a higher work rate, ie, I go faster for longer

In other words, WORK WORKS!!

“Race specific fitness,” the ability to exercise and maintain your body at effort level x for time y…yes, we will address these issues later, not now.

IV. Intensity = Most Flexible Tool to Manipulate Training Load:
The vehicle in which you do this work and apply training stress to your body is your training week.

Weekly Training Stress = Frequency x Volume x Relative Intensity

• Frequency: number of swims, bikes and runs per week. Largely dictated by your real life and is relatively static. You can ride three times, run four times and swim four times in a week because life SAYS you can! Once you reach the frequency that life lets you have, you’re done.

• Volume: the length of these sessions, measured by time. Total volume becomes relatively fixed, as determined by real world commitments, climate, need to preserve your head across a long season, etc.
• Relative Intensity: my hard is my hard, yours is yours and to each his own. Intensity is infinitely more flexible and therefore becomes our primary tool for manipulating the training load of each workout, of your entire week, of your training program.

You may hear that our program is an “intensity-focused” program, that we have our athletes doing a lot of intensity. It is and we do. We are focused on intensity in that it is, again, the primary tool we use to force an adaptation. Why? Because it’s the best tool for the job for the age group athlete!

V. The Best Predictor of Performance is Pace/Watts at Functional/Lactate Threshold
You’ve probably heard the term Lactate Threshold. As exercise intensity increases, lots of things start to happen. At some point our blood chemistry changes. With testing we can identify this point as a marker, from which we can infer other, more difficult to measure, things are happening.

At Endurance Nation we prefer to use “functional” metrics. We are interested in how much work you can DO, not what happens to your body while you’re doing it. How fast can you run a 10k? How fast can you swim 1000m? How fast can you ride up that hill? What are your average watts for a 60 minute time trial? Remember, in our world fitness is work and “how fast can you go/how much work can you do” is a direct and functional definition of your fitness.

Training to lift your Functional Threshold – or your ability to work at Lactate Threshold - also lifts all paces and intensities below that threshold. Imagine, for a very brief moment, that you’re weight lifter and your current bench press is 200 pounds. You want to get stronger and eventually lift 250lb. You go to the gym, put weight on the bar that is some percentage of your current strength of 200 pounds, and then you LIFT IT. You don’t take your heart rate, you don’t “think” it’s 150 pounds. You put 150 pounds on the bar and you LIFT IT. You progressively add weight, your body adapts and before long you can now bench 250lb. Two things here:

1. At 200lb, 170lb was still a pretty big deal.
2. At 250lb, 170lb is cake and you now “idle” at your old 200lb.

In our world, whenever possible, we use the same tools: put a measurable amount of work on the bar and LIFT IT. Currently run a 10k at 9′ pace? Structure your training in relation to that 9′ and you will get faster. Currently ride 20mph/200 watts for one hour? Measure your training relative to those objective data points and you will get faster. Very simply, if you want to swim/bike/run fast, you need to swim/bike/run fast.

The critical point here is that fitness itself can be quantified, measured, and tested over time. Traditional endurance training places a significant emphasis on building “endurance” by spending lots of time swimming, biking, and running at low intensities for long periods of time. Fitness in this case is merely a bystander; it may or may not improve based on the workouts being completed. Without a diverse and challenging program, complete with benchmarking and repeated testing, athletes (and their bodies) training under the traditional paradigm learn to swim, bike and run at an endurance pace. These folks are essentially exercising themselves into a rut.

It may be helpful if we put the two side by side and compare:

Endurance Nation vs the Traditional Training Model

Problems with the Commonly Accepted Endurance Training Paradigm

Our issue with the mainstream isn’t that it doesn’t work. It’s that much of it is has been sunk into the concrete of an endurance culture that confuses anecdotes and voices from the mountain top with science. Mainstream training methodologies for long course triathlon are founded upon a murky combination of heroes, hype, and history. When you really take a hard look at it, when you dig deeper into the 7th article on base training you’ve seen since November, much of what is written is by a guy who read a book by a guy who read a book, who…and when you find the “source” of this training model, it turns out to have no basis in what has been proven to work in the lab. We know because we used to be “that” guy until we scratched our heads, began to look around us and dig a little deeper. This opus is largely us sharing with you lessons we’ve learned training real people in the real world and actually questioning the way it’s supposed to be done.

As a grassroots sport that’s suddenly all grown up, our sport is rife with stories of epic training and racing that still hold relevance years later. To this day, you can find elites and age group athletes alike putting in mega-hours and performing special brick workouts that are reputed to hold the key to getting faster. Common themes among these approaches include the assumption that more is better (more time, more miles, etc.), the assumption that speed will come from working at predominantly aerobic or steady levels of intensity, the assumption that a massive personal sacrifice must be made in order to achieve one’s utmost athletic potential.

Our biggest “beef” is with the pro-turned guru. The mega-volume and long hours worked for him, right? What you don’t realize is this guy was able to put up that volume because he so tightly control all the variables in his life that all he had to do is eat, train and sleep. If you sit on a bike for 15hrs, run 60 miles and swim 20k per week guess what? You’re gonna get faster! But to apply those training ideas to the life of an age group athlete, averaging 8-14hrs per week, is just ludicrous. To sentence that same athlete to 3-5hr trainer rides in the winter so they can “build their engines” is simply negligent.

• On Mileage: From our perspective, longer isn’t better, it’s just…longer. More time on the bike, on the road or in the pool just means you are spending more time training. It doesn’t mean you will be faster. Consider this: if you only ride at 18mph, even for hours and hours, what makes you think you will ever be able to ride 21mph comfortably? To return to our weight room analogy, you KNOW that no amount of lifting 100lb will make it any easier to lift 250lb. Or rather, the amount of time you’d need to spend lifting 100lb is so huge that it makes no sense. Why should endurance training be any different from your experience with any other physical activity?
• On Duration: Via the commonly accepted endurance training paradigm, shorter workouts are considered short cuts. Give me 45′ on a trainer, I’ll show you how “easy” going shorter can be.

• On Base Training: Base Training doesn’t have to be focused on in huge blocks of training every year in order for Aerobic Fitness to exist, to grow, to improve.
  • It is developed annually w/ each year of training / racing
  • Its development is a lifetime in the making, starting in childhood w/ youth sports
  • Huge chunks of aerobic training time are not a prerequisite for racing success
  • Aerobic Base is the last element of your fitness to disappear

• On Sacrifice: Quality training takes focus and discipline, but true sacrifice should never have to enter the equation. No athlete exists in a vacuum; our balanced approach included room for spending time with your friends, family, etc. Excellence is not an all or nothing proposition.

Finally, consider this: if your primary means of increasing training load and forcing your body to adapt is training volume…where does it end? 15hrs/wk the first year, 18hrs the second, 22hr the third…? Seriously, think about that. Just how much volume can do before you’re living in a cardboard box under the freeway?

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