Most athletes think the OutSeason is just a training program. It’s not. It’s a permission slip to stop doing the thing that’s been breaking you.
I’ve been watching this pattern for years. People come into the winter exhausted. Like an iPhone on 5% battery trying to run everything at once. They’ve spent months, sometimes years, treating volume as the solution. More miles. More hours. More suffering. And by the time they reach me, they’re running on fumes.
Then something shifts at the end of those 14 weeks.
It’s not that they suddenly get faster. It’s that they get smarter about what fast actually means.
- Your iPhone Battery Problem – Most athletes confuse three hours of easy riding with hard work. There’s nothing hard about it. It’s just hard to be out there that long. But real hard work is staring at a number and improving it 1%. Real hard work is lifting heavy. Real hard work is recovering so well that your body actually adapts. When people experience what full rest looks like—real sleep, real recovery between workouts—they’re shocked. “It’s impossible that I feel this good.” But that’s what happens when you stop running your battery to zero.
- Your Mental Six Pack: Adopting a Winter Menu – People come in thinking they need five hours of running a week. But what they actually need is consistency. One athlete realized she could run 20 minutes, seven days a week, instead of running an hour five times a week. Same results. Half the time. She cut her training time in half and got stronger. That’s not a bug in the system. That’s the point.
- Sampling Serious Rest – The OutSeason is like a weightlifting program your physical therapist would give you for recovery. Super structured. Super tactical. Everything dialed. And because it is, you have time for the stuff endurance athletes usually skip. The core work. The glute activation. The functional strength exercises. In season, athletes are scrambling—lifting at 3 a.m. or in work clothes on the way home. In the OutSeason, you do the hard workout, change your shirt, do the core session. Two quality components. One shower. Then you’re done.
- The Power of Time Spent Not Training – There’s this weird moment in the OutSeason where people realize they have time for their family again. Time for things that aren’t training. And the strange part? Their workouts get better. Higher quality outcomes happen when there’s homeostasis with the people you love. Most endurance athletes live in a constant zero-sum game between training and life. For half your season, it doesn’t have to be that way. People get into this rhythm and suddenly they see what’s possible.
- Learning the Consistency Equation – Fourteen weeks of focused core and functional strength work doesn’t just disappear when season starts. It gives you a break from the breakdown. The overtraining. The poor form. That stuff gets pushed off a couple months because you’ve built resilience. You get training in at the beginning of season off this strength. Then you maintain. And if you build the maintenance habit—just 20 minutes of upkeep a few times a week—you stay in a phenomenal place all season. It’s not about never breaking down. It’s about slowing down when things fall apart.
- Training Like You’re Injured, But You’re Not – Most athletes only get this type of work when they’re injured and have to stop. The glute work. The core activation. The functional strength. In the OutSeason, you get it on purpose. You build 14 weeks of intentional strength work. Then when season starts, you maintain it in small doses. You don’t have to do it 365 days a year. But put in three and a half months of quality work in the winter, come out super strong, and that resilience buys you a couple months before things start to fall apart. That’s not a small thing.
The mental shift is the real transformation. People realize they’ve been thinking about this all wrong. Volume was never the weapon. Consistency was. Strength was. Rest was. They stop treating the OutSeason like a gap and start treating it like the foundation everything else is built on.
Here’s the assignment: The next time you hit your race season, notice the difference. Notice how much longer it takes for things to fall apart. Notice how much better you feel. Notice the strength that’s still there. Then come back and do it again next winter.
PS: This isn’t just about getting faster. You get your marriage back. Your sleep back. Your body back. And when you build this habit—when you realize that 14 weeks of intentional work at the right time beats 52 weeks of grinding—you stop treating the OutSeason like a program. It becomes a lifestyle.
