80/20 Endurance – 80/20 Endurance

I learned recently that only 9 percent of triathletes have a coach. This struck me as a very small number—until I learned that just 5 percent of runners have a coach. Now, I’m no mathematician, but I think this means that 91 percent of triathletes and 95 percent of runners are self-coached.

Or does it?

To some extent this question is one of semantics. But to the extent it’s not, I would argue that in fact there is no such thing as a self-coached athlete. And if I’m right, then 91 percent of triathletes and 95 percent of runners have no coach.

There are some things coaches do for athletes that athletes can do for themselves. These things include creating training plans, analyzing workouts, and learning about the sport. But there are others things coaches do for athletes that athletes cannot do for themselves—at least not as effectively. These include having the athlete’s back during difficulties, calling out the athlete’s self-deceptions, and inspiring trust.

You might have noticed that the list of coaching responsibilities that athletes can handle for themselves (though not always very well) are all technical in nature, whereas the areas in which the coach is irreplaceable are relational. Any great coach will tell you that the technical part of coaching is the least important part. Golden State Warriors Coach Steve Kerr, for example, has stated that “coaching is 90 percent creating an environment and 10 percent strategy.”

I myself am not a great coach, but for what it’s worth I agree with Kerr, and I coach in a manner that is consistent with this belief. Within just the past week I had three separate athlete interactions that illustrate my “90/10” approach to my craft. Each of these three athletes was engaging in a different form of self-sabotage. Namely: overtraining, poor adherence to pace and intensity targets, and choking. In all three cases, I concluded, the problem was rooted in a psychological blind spot within the individual. Hence, even though the problems were superficially training-specific, I focused on the underlying psychology in my efforts to help the athletes work through them.

This sort of thing is exceedingly difficult for an athlete to do on their own. And that is why I say there is no such thing as a self-coached athlete. Either you have a coach who inhabits a separate body and helps you in ways you can’t help yourself or you go it alone and miss out on the most important services that a good coach provides.

It might sound self-serving of me to state the opinion that more athletes should have coaches, but understand that I have a full client roster plus a waiting list. I’m not looking for clients. The reason I hold the opinion that more athletes should have coaches is simply that I want athletes I will never coach to enjoy the rewards and benefits of coaching. But how? What can be done to improve the statistics cited at the top of this post, doubling 9 percent to 18 percent (at least) and tripling 5 percent to 15 percent (for starters)?

80/20 Endurance is in a good position to function as the driving force of the growth I envision. We are the hub of a global community of athletes that numbers in the tens of thousands, and our reach continues to expand every day. The vast majority of these athletes have no coach, which is precisely why they’ve come to us; we are their coach, effectively. But there’s a big difference between a readymade training plan and an actual coach. Our plans are great, don’t get me wrong, but even with the supplemental resources attached to them, they can’t do most of the nontechnical 90 percent of coaching.

This is why we’ve launched our new Platinum Subscription service. It’s a natural evolution of our existing offerings, hence an easy way to level up athletes who perhaps have never worked with a coach to a light version of coaching. One of the major barriers to hiring a coach is cost, a barrier that Platinum removes with its $99/month pricing, for which athletes get access to our entire libraries of training plans and workouts, a free TrainingPeaks premium subscription, and a coach, who provides help with onboarding, plan selection, and plan customization, as well as weekly monitoring of training and as-needed check-ins. Perhaps only a handful of existing 80/20 athletes will make the leap to Platinum initially, but when athletes value something they talk, so it’s only a matter of time before Platinum subscribers represent 30 percent or more of our ever-expanding subscriber base.

We’re also working from the top down to make coaching available to more athletes. Late last year we rolled out the 80/20 Endurance Coaching Certification Course, and as I was beginning to write this piece the first students to have completed the course received their certificates. Nearly 200 students are currently enrolled in the course, but this is only the beginning. We intend to use our platform to create opportunities for 80/20 Endurance-certified coaches, going beyond educating them to provide meaningful support throughout their coaching journeys. Proof that we mean it can be found in the fact that we hired one newly certified coach, Steph Christiansen, to manage our Platinum Subscription service. Our hope is that exposing our athletes to lots of coaching options will help many of them overcome whatever resistance they might have to working with a coach and begin to enjoy the rewards and benefits of this unique type of relationship.

More to come!

Think about the last race you completed. Could you have gone any faster than you did? It’s a very simple question, yet a difficult one to answer in many cases. If you committed a major error in execution, such as running an entire track race in lane three, then it’s easy to answer in the affirmative. But if you did manage to avoid obvious mistakes, it’s hard to know whether or not you might have been able to squeeze out a few more seconds. In fact, it’s impossible to know.

Why? Because an unimprovable race performance requires perfect pacing, and perfect pacing is impossible to define or measure. Pacing entails purposely holding oneself back from one’s physical limit, and it’s this gap between self-imposed limit and physical limit that makes perfect pacing undefinable and unquantifiable. A true maximal effort cannot be sustained longer than 30 seconds, give or take, so athletes aim to sustain a level of effort that will put them at their physical limit when they’re within 30 seconds of the finish line and fatigue has reduced their capacity to match the level of their chosen effort. But no athlete ever sustains a perfectly steady output in a race and it’s doubtful that a perfectly steady output is even optimal. In long races, it’s not uncommon for an athlete to go through one or more rough patches, when their perceived effort level spikes, and most experts would agree that reducing one’s effort level slightly at these times leads to a better final outcome. Furthermore, research on pacing in real-world environments suggests that the best outcomes occur when athletes are able to kick (i.e., accelerate) at the very end of the race, which indicates they could have gone faster prior to that point—a paradoxical phenomenon, as it essentially means that athletes go fastest overall when they could have gone faster prior to the homestretch. Further muddying the waters is the fact that athletes’ performance limits are mutable, varying from one circumstance to the next based on a myriad of factors affecting perception of effort. For example, athletes almost always go faster in a group than they do alone.

Despite all this complexity, we have a pretty good idea what a perfectly paced race looks like as a platonic abstraction. A graph of such a performance would consist of two lines, one flat and the other upward-sloping. The flat line represents the athlete’s output (power, rate of energy expenditure), which remains quite steady between the start and finish. The upward-sloping vector represents the athletes’ perceived effort, which rises with perfect linearity over time and peaks just as the athlete finishes. These two lines indicate that the athlete has parceled their energy efficiently throughout the race and finished with nothing left in reserve. But again, this is an abstraction, and in any given real-world case it’s impossible to know if the athlete truly paced their race perfectly.

Putting aside the unknowable nature of perfect pacing, most runners fall far short of perfection in their race pacing. This isn’t just my opinion—studies prove it. That’s why I wrote On Pace: Discover How to Run Every Race At Your Real Limit. Do you need this book? Let’s find out. To test your current pacing ability, try the following test: First, determine your average pace per mile or per kilometer in your last half marathon. Next, go for a run. After warming up, run one mile or one kilometer at half-marathon effort, aiming to nail your exact average pace from your last half-marathon without looking at your watch. Note your actual time, then send your results to me here: matt@8020endurance.com by September 10th, 2022.

The 80/20 Endurance Pacing Challenge will operate on the honor system, so I’m trusting you not to lie or cheat. But you have little incentive do so, as no prizes will be awarded. Instead I will compile the results and share them in a future blog post, in which I will also provide tips on getting better at pacing.

Note that being able to hit a target pace accurately is not quite the same skill as being able to complete a race in the least time possible. But they’re similar enough that runners who are good at either one are almost always good at the other. Hence, if you run test mile or kilometer more than a few seconds too fast or slow, you have cause to believe you’re not pacing your races optimally and will benefit from reading and applying the methods taught in On Pace. If you prefer to skip the test and go straight to the book, you can purchase it here. And if you’re on the fence, you can read a free sample chapter here.

Billy Sperlich is one of the world’s leading experts in the area of training intensity distribution (TID) in endurance sports. I’ve often cited his research, which he conducts out of the University of Würzburg, in my books, articles, and blog posts. Recently, Sperlich released a series of eleven tweets summarizing the “experiences and takeaways” he’s accumulated in studying TID over the past few years, with links to the studies he’s been involved in. It’s a tidy little resource for endurance athletes and coaches, so I’ve taken the liberty of repackaging it here, with supplemental commentary.

1. “TID between endurance sport and time of season vary considerably”

This tweet includes a link to a comprehensive 2015 review of existing research on training intensity balance in endurance athletes that Sperlich collaborated on with colleague Thomas Stöggl. Although the text of the tweet conveys the impression that the findings are all over the map, honestly, if I knew nothing about endurance training and I read this review I would come away feeling quite confident that I would get good results from a high-volume, mostly low-intensity training approach, regardless of my specific sport or current phase of training.

2. “The TID quantification method substantially influences the proportion of low/medium/high intensity training”

This tweet includes a link to a new study involving endurance kayakers that Sperlich conducted with three other researchers. It showed that individual athletes’ training intensity balance varied significantly depending on whether it was measured with performance metrics or physiological metrics. My takeaway as a coach is to avoid mixing and matching intensity metrics in measuring TID.

3. “Maybe different TID quantification methods are necessary depending on the time of season”

This tweet links to the same study as the previous one. On the basis of their findings, Sperlich et al. speculated that each of three methods of measuring intensity—velocity, heart rate, and blood lactate—has advantages and disadvantages, and that it may be sensible for coaches to prioritize different ones at different times in a training cycle.

I’ve actually found it useful to prescribe individual workouts with different intensity metrics from day to day, based on each metric’s strengths and weaknesses and the type of workout. For example, I might give a runner a power-based hill repetitions run on Tuesday, a heart-rate based easy run on Wednesday, and a pace-based tempo run on Thursday. This is somewhat different from using different intensity metrics to monitor and regular intensity balance, though.

4. “The seasonal analysis of TID reveals extensive inter-individual variability”

This tweet includes a link to another study involving elite paddle sports competitors. Sperlich and his collaborators found a high degree of variability in individual athletes’ training intensity balance at different periods of training. But again, all of the athletes spent the bulk of their time at low intensity in all phases.

5. “Published ‘Polarized’ TID observations are not necessarily ‘polarized’”

A polarized TID is one in which little time is spent at moderate intensity. This tweet links to a study coauthored by Sperlich that describes and validates a tool called the polarization index, which quantifies the degree of polarization in a given period of training. This tool is useful in determining how effective a polarized approach to TID is compared to other approaches.

6. “Athletes with pyramidal TID during preparation may (automatically) shift to polarized TID when entering competition period”

The primary alternative to a polarized approach to TID is a pyramidal approach, wherein more time is spent at moderate intensity than at high intensity. This tweet links to a prospective, controlled study, again coauthored by Sperlich, in which elite rowers were separated into two groups, one of which trained with a polarized intensity balance while the other trained with a pyramidal intensity balance for eleven weeks. Neither group improved more than the other, which isn’t shocking because the two programs were the same in most respects, containing equal volume and similar amounts of training at low intensity. At the elite level, both polarized and pyramidal training are dominated by low-intensity training. (There seems to be a theme emerging here . . .)

7. “The analysis of waking hour TID (training & off-training TID) shows a broader more holistic perspective to understand the TID-dose-response”

This tweet links to an interesting study published last year that explored the influence of non-scheduled activity on training intensity balance, training volume, and performance in elite male rowers. In essence, Sperlich and his collaborators sought to find out what difference it makes, if any, if daily activities outside of formal workouts are measured the same way formal workouts are. What they found was that such activities had a small but statistically significant impact on training volume and TID but no impact on performance.

8. “Not much TID analysis exist in female endurance athletes.”

This point is underscored by the fact that there is no study linked to from the tweet! Kudos to Sperlich for drawing attention to the problem.

9. “Too much ‘black and white’ in the ‘80:20 TID story’. This specific low:high-intensity TID may work in one sport or for one athlete or during a certain period of the season but is far from the obtained data of the last years and surely no universal best-practice TID.”

Am I wrong to feel personally targeted by this one? Arguably, I’ve done more than anyone to promote the “80:20 TID story”. Yet my own thinking about the 80/20 intensity balance is far from black-and-white, and I’ve taken pains to express this nuance. Exhibit A is the following excerpt from my 2014 book 80/20 Running:

There’s no reason to tie yourself in knots trying to aim for perfectly round numbers. What is important is that you avoid ratios that are way off the mark, such as 100/0, 30/70, and the 50/50 ratio that is the norm for recreational runners.

In short, the ideal balance of training intensities is a narrow range rather than a precise ratio. But that range may be slightly different for individual runners. The 80/20 Rule is what Seiler has referred to as a population optimum. This means that a training intensity distribution that is very close to 80/20 is best for most, but not all, runners. A few runners respond better if they do a little less or a little more of their training at low intensity. There is no evidence, however, of extreme “outliers” who respond poorly to 80/20 training and much better to either a heavily speed-based program or to an always-slow regimen that lacks any work at higher intensities. So you can’t go wrong by following the 80/20 Rule. It’s certainly the place to start. As you gain experience, though, you may find that you respond better to a 70/30 ratio or a 90/10 ratio, in which case you’ll want to make that your personal rule. But it’s more likely that you will find your sweet spot closer to 80/20.

The sweet spot shifts, however, as the training process moves along…

Exhibit B (and I could easily adduce exhibits C through Z if I weren’t fearful of boring you) is a blog post I wrote last year, titled “How to Practice 80/20 Training Without Really Trying,” where I lament, “I do see a fair number of athletes overthinking the whole 80/20 thing, and it concerns me,” before going on to advocate a nonliteral interpretation of 80/20 defined by two rules: 1) Be sure you’re actually at low intensity when you intend to be, and 2) Devote roughly one out of every three training sessions you do to moderate or high intensity.

To the extent that I am guilty of overselling 80/20, I’m not sorry. I’m a coach, not a scientist, and like any good coach I love truth, but I love results even more. As the legendary basketball coach Billy Donovan said, “Believe it your system, and then sell it to your players.” Buy-in is critical to athletic success. A good system that an athlete believes in will always yield stronger results than a better system an athlete hasn’t fully bought into. Scientists are understandably uncomfortable with this reality, but it is the reality. “You lied!” says the scientist to the coach. “I exaggerated,” answers the coach, “and I won because of it.”

10. “Single case TID observation of elite athletes are interesting for the examined athlete but not a blueprint for all other athletes => My experience: The day-by-day decision-making forms a TID signature which depends on several internal and external factors.”

I agree. But who is actually suggesting that single-case observational studies of training intensity balance in elite athletes are a blueprint for all athletes?

11. “Seeking for a best practice (a priori) universal TID pattern most likely will not assist personalized training prescription… (and probably does not exist…)”

This statement seems to suggest that coaches need to start completely from scratch with each new athlete, behaving as if nothing that any athlete has ever done before has any relevance whatsoever to the next athlete to come along. While I certainly agree that the optimal training recipe for each athlete is unique in the fine details, the last time I checked, all endurance athletes were human, and certain things are generally true for all humans, and for Pete’s sake, a coach has to start somewhere with a new athlete! And yes, I do believe that elite best practices are the best starting point.

What’s missing from Sperlich’s tweets is any acknowledgement of just how poorly the vast majority of endurance athletes manage their training intensity balance. The typical recreational endurance athlete is so far away from optimal TID it’s not even funny. Also missing from the thread is any kind of nod to the reality that the vast majority of recreational endurance athletes do not have one-on-one coaches.

To be more specific, the typical recreational endurance athlete is caught in the moderate-intensity, doing far too little training at low intensity. When such an athlete goes from muddling along on their own to following one of the readymade 80/20 plans available in my books or on this website, they almost invariably experience breakthroughs in fitness and performance. Most of them also feel better in training and enjoy the process more, and many report a reduction in injury frequency.

Does this mean that athletes can do no better than follow a readymade 80/20 plan? Of course not. There is another level, and it is the personalized approach Sperlich advocates. I love to see athletes take this last step in the process of true training optimization, but it’s not a realistic step for many.

For the past several months I’ve been writing a book that will serve as the official study guide for the 80/20 Endurance coach certification program. As you might expect, working on this project has afforded me the opportunity to reflect deeply on my philosophy of coaching. It’s impossible to summarize this philosophy in a pithy epigram, but I can’t resist trying. Are you ready? Here it is:

The job of the coach is to never let an athlete take two steps in the wrong direction.

Now, if these eighteen words truly encapsulated the essence of good coaching, I wouldn’t have to devote another 800 words to explaining them, but they don’t, so I will.

From a remote perspective, the entire history of endurance sports training can be seen as one big trial-and-error learning experiment. In the early days of running, swimming, cycling, and other endurance disciplines, nobody knew what the hell they were doing as far as training was concerned. Athletes tried all kinds of things in search of better performance, learning as they went.

One such athlete was Walter George, an Englishman who is remembered as the greatest amateur runner of the late 1880s and early 1890s. Early in George’s running career, his training regimen consisted almost entirely of 100 daily repetitions of a modified form of running in place that he called 100-Up. On the strength of this goofily minimalist program, George set amateur world records of 4:19.4 for the mile and 14:42.8 for three miles. His success led to widespread adoption of the 100-Up exercise, whose propagation was aided by the enthusiastic evangelism of its inventor. In an article he wrote in 1908, George expressed his “supreme faith” in the exercise, which he labeled “the century’s best.”

As the years went by and improvements became harder to come by, George added more and more actual running to his routine. Here is an example of George’s training in 1882, when he was twenty-six, as originally printed in the 1902 book Training.

Date Morning Afternoon

18 Oct. 1,000 yds and 1 mile slow 880 yds at ¾ speed

19 Oct. 1½ miles slow Very wet. Did not run.

20 Oct. 1,000 yds at ¾ speed 800 yds and 350 yds fast

21 Oct. 1,000 yds and 700 yds —–

22 Oct. 800 yds at ¾ speed 1,000 yds slow

23 Oct. 1,000 yds and 700 yds slow —–

24 Oct. 1¼ miles and 1,000 yds slow —–

The reason today’s elite runners no longer train this way is that the trial-and-error process continued. Athletes kept trying different things, and when a new thing seemed to work better than an old thing, the latter was discarded in favor of the former. In many cases, athletes made their own training methods obsolete through n=1 testing. As I write this article on New Year’s Day 2022, endurance training methods have become highly optimized at a population level. Yet endurance training remains a never-ending experiment for each individual athlete. While today’s proven best practices are broadly optimal for everyone, each moment in each athlete’s journey toward full realization of potential is sufficiently unique that the best way forward is seldom obvious. There’s always a degree of creative problem solving involved.

In endurance training, in other words, you’re not doing things so much as trying things. When you try something that doesn’t work out, that’s like taking a step in the wrong direction, away from full realization of potential. That’s okay. A coach shouldn’t beat himself up for sending an athlete one step in the wrong direction. But if the coach fails to recognize that the athlete has gone off course and to take immediate corrective action, that’s on him. If one step in the wrong direction is only human, two steps is unforgivable. It’s kind of like that old saying, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

For example, suppose a coach is working with an athlete who keeps hitting the wall in marathons, and she’s trying to figure out what to do differently in the athlete’s training to break the pattern. Her intuition tells her that overdistance long runs (i.e., runs longer than 26.2 miles) might be the answer, but it turns out this method leaves the runner completely wrecked even when the overdistance runs are planned and executed carefully. That’s one step in the wrong direction. If the coach then insists on continuing with the method, perhaps out some Trumpian inability to acknowledge error, that’s too steps in the wrong direction. A better coach in this situation will acknowledge the error and try something else—perhaps back-to-back long runs, or depletion runs, or extra mileage spread evenly across the week. Any one of these alternative methods might also turn out to be a step in the wrong direction, and that’s okay too. As long as the coach never stops trying and never allows the athlete to take two steps in the wrong direction, it is inevitable that the athlete’s full athletic potential will be realized eventually.

Did you ever play the Hot and Cold game as a kid? As a refresher, one player hides an object and the other player wanders around with their eyes closed, trying to find it. When the second player moves toward the hidden object, the first player lets them know by says “Warmer,” and when the second player moves away from it, the first player says, “Colder.” In this way, despite being blinded, the second player inevitably lays hands on the hidden object.

Endurance training is like that. In this analogy, the second player’s closed eyes represent the coach’s blindness to the best way forward, the hidden object represents full realization of athletic potential, and the first player’s verbal cues represent the results, positive and negative, of the things coaches try with athletes in search of maximum performance. It doesn’t take a genius to guide athletes to the hidden object that is optimal performance in this matter. In fact, it takes a moron to fail!

Call me strange, but I love building training plans. It’s one of my favorite activities, right up there with training itself. That’s why I got together with David Warden to create 80/20 Endurance, which, as you well know, exists for the primary purpose of creating training plans for endurance athletes of all types and abilities.

Nevertheless, I recognize that training plans aren’t perfect. They have a fixed duration, a fixed weekly workout schedule, a fixed volume progression — everything about them is fixed. We try to overcome this limitation by creating lots of different options so that any given athlete is able to select a plan that’s close to perfect. But close to perfect still isn’t perfect.

Some degree of post-selection customization is almost always required to take a readymade training plan from almost perfect to perfect. The most common issues are as follow:

The weekly workout schedule doesn’t match up with the athlete’s life schedule (e.g., the athlete prefers to do long rides or runs on Saturdays, but the plan schedules them on Sundays).
The plan is X weeks long, but the athlete’s “A” race is either fewer or more than X weeks away. In other words, the plan is either too short or too long.
The athlete wishes to do one or more “B” races during the plan period, but these aren’t necessarily included in the plan.
The athlete will be unable to complete some of the workouts in the plan due to expected travel or some other scheduling conflict.

Let’s take a brief look at how to handle each of these scenarios.

Adjusting the Weekly Workout Structure

In most cases, this is the easiest type of adjustment to make. A couple of key principles will help you modify your training plan’s weekly workout structure to fit your routine.

Don’t schedule hard workouts back to back.
Don’t schedule similar workouts back to back.

The first principle is the hard/easy rule, which stipulates that challenging workouts should not be scheduled on consecutive days. When shuffling workouts around, be sure to insert at least one lighter day of training between days containing long endurance sessions, high-intensity intervals, or any other workouts expected to result in a high level of fatigue.

The other key principle is balance, according to which the various workout types should be distributed as evenly as possible throughout the week. Suppose you’re a triathlete who swims, bikes, and runs three times each per week. In adjusting your training plan to fit your schedule, avoid setting up your week so that you swim on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, bike on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and run on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday! Obviously, this is an extreme example, but milder forms of workout “bunching” should be avoided as well.

Adjusting Plan Length

Suppose you’ve selected a training plan and aligned its end date with the date of your event, but there’s a gap between now and the plan’s start date. How should you fill the time? If you haven’t been training recently, or if you’ve been training at a lower level than will be required of you in Week 1, the answer is obvious: use the time to gradually ready yourself for a smooth transition to the plan. If you’re already fit enough to handle Week 1, use the time instead to focus on another priority that will help set you up for success. Examples of such alternative priorities are strength training, technique work, and dietary improvements.

In cases where you don’t have enough time to complete the entire training plan before your race, the simplest solution is just to skip the first part. If your plan is 17 weeks long, for example, and your race is 15 weeks away, go ahead and start at Week 3. But this solution only works if your recent training is similar to the weeks you’re skipping. If it’s not, you might be getting in over your head or setting yourself up for injury.

When you find yourself in this type of situation, your best move is to modify the first few weeks of the plan, beginning at the point where you pick it up, in such a way as to give yourself a chance to catch up to the training. Specifically, you’ll want to reduce the overall volume and the difficulty level of key workouts so that you’re not required to make big leaps in training load. Returning to the example I gave above, suppose Week 3 of the plan includes a high-intensity interval workout and a tempo workout, but your recent training has consisted entirely of low-intensity work. A sensible adjustment here would be to replace the interval workout with a fartlek-type session containing just a handful of brief surges and to replace the tempo workout with a “cruise intervals” workout containing a few short efforts at threshold intensity instead of one or two big blocks.

Adding “B” Races

Scheduling “B” races can be either simple or complicated, depending on when these events fall within your training plan and how many you wish to add. The ideal timing for such events is in recovery weeks, where they simply replace the workouts planned for that particular weekend. The two days preceding the race should also be replaced with lighter training, and the three days immediately following the race should be replaced with a combination of rest and lighter training.

Things get more complicated, though, when a planned “B” race does not align with a designated recovery week. In these cases, dialing back the training that precedes and follows the event is likely to result in too much time away from harder training, especially when the week in question comes right before or right after a designated recovery week. To avoid this issue, make your adjustments more nuanced with half-recovery weeks (i.e., weeks in which the first few days are heavy and the last few are light or vice versa) and partial recovery weeks (i.e., weeks in which the training load is reduced, but only slightly). Consider both the logic of your plan’s training load variation and your own sense of what your body can handle in making these types of adjustments.

Things get even more complicated when you want to do more than one “B” race. But the same principles apply, with the basic idea being to preserve the plan’s intended balance of heavier training periods (typically two to three weeks of gradually increasing load) and lighter periods (typically one week of recovery every third or fourth week that’s about 20% lower in volume than the preceding week).

Planning for Anticipated Missed Training

When you know ahead of time that your training is going to be restricted during a certain period, your best strategy is to bookend this period with sensibly modified training. For example, suppose you are following a triathlon training plan and you are planning to take your family on vacation to Yosemite National Park during Week 9. In this seven-day period, you will be able to squeeze in a little running but your swim and bike training will be paused.

In this scenario, it would be wise to reduce your run training and increase your swim and bike training in the week that immediately precedes your vacation as well as in the week that immediately follows it. These adjustments will not only minimize any negative effect of the trip on your swim and bike fitness but should also help you worry less about it.

In 2018, Bernadette Brady of Western Sydney University got together with a few colleagues and designed a study to determine to what degree, if any, implicit ethnic bias negatively impacted physiotherapy care among Australian ethnic minorities. Forty-eight patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain who identified as Mandaean, Assyrian, or Vietnamese participated in the trial. Half of the subjects were assigned to a standard physiotherapy treatment program while the other half were assigned to a culturally adapted treatment program that was identical in substance but was delivered in a culturally sensitive manner.

The results were striking. Only 58 percent of subjects in the standard treatment program completed it, compared to 96 percent in the culturally adapted program. Attendance and adherence were also significantly greater among patients in the culturally adapted program, who reported less pain-related suffering. Again, the actual treatments administered were the same; only their presentation differed.

This study highlights a fundamental truth, which is that people tend to get better outcomes from helping professionals when they are able to connect with those professionals on a cultural level. Students are more likely to excel under teachers they can relate to culturally, soldiers are more likely to reup and climb the ranks when they can relate to their commanding officer culturally, and yes, athletes tend to improve more when they share a cultural connection with their coach.

Not only that, but athletes are more likely to choose a particular sport in the first place if they see people who look and talk like them participating in and coaching that sport. As I write this, five of the ten highest-ranked American women professional tennis players are Black. This wouldn’t be the case if not for the influence of the Williams sisters. Nothing like the “Williams Effect” has yet happened in endurance coaching, but I would like to see it.

Why? Two main reasons. The first is that I know what endurance sports can do for people. Being an endurance athlete has changed my life for the better. It has helped me learn more about myself and grow as a person, it has given me some of the most intense experiences of my life, and it has taken me all over the world and brought great friends into my life. I want these types of experiences to be accessible to everyone, and right now they’re not. In theory they might be, but the numbers tell the true story. My wife, Nataki, who is Black, grew up in East Oakland, where she still has family and where I’ve spent a lot of time over the past 26 years. It’s difficult to envision a viable path from that neighborhood to a triathlon start line. The existence of more nonwhite endurance coaches would help change that.

The second reason I would like to see more people of color working as endurance coaches is that diversity enriches the endurance sports experience for everyone, including white guys like me. I remember traveling to Boston in April 1983 to watch the world’s oldest and greatest marathon, 98 percent of whose participants were male. It was a really cool event despite the extreme gender imbalance, but there’s no denying that the Boston Marathon is infinitely cooler today with a 50/50 gender split. Studies have shown that diverse work teams are more productive than homogenous work teams. But that’s not quite what I’m talking about here. The benefits of diversity in sport are less tangible than increased work productivity but no less real, more akin to how diverse parties are more fun and memorable than parties where everyone looks the same.

Instead of passively hoping endurance sports become more diverse, I’ve decided to do something about it. That something is the Coaches of Color Initiative, a program that operates under the aegis of the 80/20 Endurance Foundation, which is the philanthropic arm of 80/20 Endurance. COCI will award apprenticeship grants to people of color who aspire to successful careers are endurance coaches. The first grant will be awarded through a selection process hosted on the 80/20 Endurance Foundation website (www.8020foundation.org), where candidates will complete a brief application and submit a personal statement in either written or video format. The application window is from October 21 to November 18 and a winner will be named December 1.

The apprenticeship itself will last for one year. During this period, the grant recipient will receive a monthly stipend of $1,000 and will undergo a comprehensive apprenticeship experience with 80/20 Endurance. The program will include free training and certification as an 80/20 Endurance coach, one-on-one mentoring sessions with experienced coaches of color, and opportunities to create training content and gain valuable coaching experience through the 80/20 Endurance platform.

Funding for the Coaches of Color Initiative comes primarily from our company, which automatically donates 1 percent of gross monthly revenues to the Foundation. Future apprenticeship grant opportunities will become available as funding permits, so the more support we get from the endurance community and potential corporate backers, the more coaches we can help lift up.

COCI is not a one-man show, thank goodness. My colleagues at 80/20 Endurance, David Warden and Hanna Hunstad, have worked their butts off alongside me to make this dream a reality. Additionally, we’ve brought on running community leader and 80/20 Endurance ambassador Bertrand Newson to codirect the program, and we’ve put together a diverse advisory board to offer perspective and guidance on all of our important decisions. Its members are RaceMob founder Kevin Chang; running coach, podcaster, and online influencer India Cook; and Ball State University Women’s Cross Country and Track Coach Angelina Ramos.

I know the above sounds rather press release-y, and I will go ahead and admit that the last few paragraphs of this post were lifted from the press release I wrote to announce the launch of COCI. But we’re talking about real human beings here, not some bandwagon PR move. It won’t be long before an actual person with a name and a face and a voice is awarded the first apprenticeship grant, and you will get to watch this person grow and flourish within the program. Then a second real person will get the same opportunity, and so on.

I can’t wait to get started on this journey, and I hope you’ll make it with me in some capacity.

Training plans are great. If I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t have built a company that sells them! Not a day goes by that I don’t see the proof of the usefulness of training plans in the feedback I see and hear from athletes who have gone from training without a plan or with a dodgy sort of plan to training with an 80/20 running plan or triathlon plan and experienced significant improvement.

Prebuilt training plans have obvious limitations, however. They have a fixed duration, a fixed weekly workout schedule, a fixed volume progression—everything about them is fixed. If it were possible to build an infinite number of such plans, then in principle there would be a training plan that fit the needs of each athlete. Alas, this is not possible.

Well, actually, it is. Training plan generators powered by computer algorithms or artificial intelligence can indeed create training plans for every athlete. Technically, though, these plans aren’t prebuilt, and we’re talking here about prebuilt plans, which for the moment remain more widely used that plan generators. So, back to the topic at hand . . .

Training Plan Limitations

If you spend time on this website’s forums, you will quickly learn the specific limitations of prebuilt plans that athletes encounter most commonly. Issue number one is that the plan is X weeks long, but the race the athlete is preparing for is either more or less than X weeks away. In other words, the plan is of the “wrong” length. Perhaps the second most common issue is that the athlete wants to do more than one race, whereas our prebuilt plans necessarily lead up to a single race at the end. The question in these cases is either “When is a good time within the plan to do a ‘B’ race?” or “How do I adjust the plan to accommodate my other race(s)?”

A third type of limitation has to do with how to string plans together over time for the sake of long-term progress. Most athletes want to not just do their best in their next race but get better year by year, and individual prebuilt training plans have nothing to say about that. In order to be as inclusive as possible, all of the plans we build for general use assume the athlete is starting at a fairly low level of fitness relative to their personal peak. This makes the early weeks of training “too easy” for some athletes in certain instances.

When I sat down to write this article I intended to provide specific guidelines for working through these various limitations. I realize now, however, that to do the job properly I would have to write the longest blog post ever written. After all, the whole issue is that you’re trying to individualize something that was not created for any single individual. Each case is unique. Whenever an athlete asks me for advice on how to modify a plan or a sequence of plans to make it better fit their unique circumstances, the answer I want to give is to go inside the plan, perform surgery on it, and then point at the result and say, “Here’s what I recommend.”

I suppose there are some broad guidelines that can be applied to these issues. Scheduling “B” races is relatively straightforward. The ideal timing for them is in recovery weeks, where they simply replace the workouts planned for that particular weekend. The two days preceding the race should also be replaced, specifically with lighter training, and the three days immediately following the race should be replaced with a combination of rest and lighter training. Things get more complicated, though, when a planned “B” race does not align with a designated recovery week in the plan, and when the athlete wishes to do more than one “B” race, and when a “B” race falls earlier within a plan than is ideal. . .

Scheduling "B" races into your training plan

The coach in me can’t help but want every user of the training plans offered on this website to get as much out of it as my individual clients get out of the plans I create for them. To this end, I’ve lately been thinking a lot about how to create a more customized experience for users of our prebuilt 80/20 endurance training plans. Here’s what we’ve got in the works:

Long Term

We’re in the early stages of developing a proprietary 80/20 Endurance coaching certification for in-person and online run and triathlon coaching. Once we have a critical mass of trained and certified coaches, we will begin to offer a new level of our subscription service that includes coach monitoring of training and run and triathlon training coaching. Whenever you need a plan adjusted, just let us know and one of our certified coaches will assist you. An expansion of our custom training place service is also likely.

Medium Term

If you liked the sound of an AI-driven training plan generator when I brought it up earlier, I’ve got good news for you. Well, not really. What I meant to say is that I will soon have good news for you on this front. That’s all I’m allowed to say at the moment, but stay tuned.

Short Term

In the meantime, keep doing what you’ve been doing, which is using our forums to ask questions about plan adjustments whenever necessary. My goal is to collect a few specific case studies over the next few weeks and mold them into a standing resource document that actually delivers on the promise hinted at in the title of this post!

Adjusting the Weekly Workout Structure

Adjusting Plan Length

Adding “B” Races

Planning for Anticipated Missed Training

Training Plan Limitations

Long Term

Medium Term

Short Term

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