80/20 Running – 80/20 Endurance

You’ve probably heard of the book 80/20 Running, perhaps even read it. But did you know that the original working title of this book was A High-Mileage Manifesto? I started writing it in 2013, a time when HIIT mania was in full bloom, CrossFit Endurance was making waves, and Run Less, Run Faster was the top-selling training guide for runners. Dismayed by these and other influences, I decided to push back in the best way I knew. It was only when I realized that the average runner can’t benefit from running more until they’ve first balanced their training intensities correctly—shifting from the typical 50 percent moderate-intensity routine to the 80 percent low-intensity approach of the elite—did A High-Mileage Manifesto become 80/20 Running.

Despite this evolution, I remain convinced that exercising a lot is a proven best practice in endurance training that not enough athletes at the nonelite level actually practice. Scientific support for this position keeps coming. The latest evidence arrives in the form of a study published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology. Japanese researchers surveyed 587 runners (all male, unfortunately) about their training prior to their participation in the 2017 Hokkaido Marathon. Intensity data were not included in this particular study. The researchers were specifically interested in identifying links between various volume-related parameters and marathon performance—and they found them.

Among runners who trained with equal frequency, there were significant correlations between monthly training volume, average run distance, long run distance, and marathon time. In other words, given two runners who each trained five times per week, the one who packed more miles into these runs tended to perform better on race day. Interestingly, though, when the researchers compared runners at different levels of monthly volume, there were no correlations between training frequency, average run distance, long run distance, and marathon time. This suggests that monthly volume matters a lot, and how one achieves it matters less. But it does matter some, for when the researchers looked at runners who had the same average run distance or long run distance, strong correlations were found between these variables and monthly volume and marathon time.

On the basis of their findings, the researchers concluded, “These results indicate that monthly training volume is the most important factor in predicting marathon time and that the influence of monthly training volume is only significant if the running distance per workout exceeded a certain level.” The lesson I draw from this study as a coach is that, if you want to race a good marathon, you need to run high-mileage consistently. Get your volume up to a high but sustainable level and keep it there.

Perhaps I’ll get around to completing A High-Mileage Manifesto one day. For now, here’s the overview to a proposal I wrote for the book.

In 1945 Arthur Lydiard set out on a five-mile run that changed his life—and the sport of running—forever. The young track racer struggled to keep up with a much older man on that relatively short jaunt and came home humbled, realizing he was not nearly as fit as he’d thought he was. Sensing that the secret to running faster in races was to run farther in training, Lydiard gradually built his endurance to the point where he was able to easily run well over 100 miles every week, which was unheard of in those days. In 1953, Lydiard, now thirty-six years old, won the New Zealand Marathon Championship. Afterward he was inundated by requests for coaching from other runners.

At the 1960 Olympics in Rome, three athletes coached by Lydiard won medals (two of them gold). Suddenly the whole world was interested in Lydiard’s high-mileage training approach. Within a decade this approach had been adopted by virtually every elite runner on earth and was responsible for a drastic improvement in world records at all race distances between 800 meters and the marathon. Today the essence of Lydiard’s training system is still practiced almost universally by professional runners and by most collegiate runners and serious high school runners.

Curiously, however, the vast majority of runners who take up the sport as adults do not run high mileage and are not even aware that this training approach is regarded by every true expert as the necessary path to the full realization of any runner’s innate potential. Of course, the average recreational road racer with a full-time job and a family cannot be expected to run more than 100 miles per week as the professionals do. But it is bizarre that such runners are not even encouraged to run as much as they reasonably can. No other sport is bifurcated in this way, where competitive young athletes and recreational adult athletes are not even taught the same methods to improve.

The split occurred when the sport of running exploded in popularity in the 1990s and it has widened steadily since then. The rapid minting of new adult runners has created opportunities for new coaches to guide and train them. Almost without exception, the opportunists who specialize in mentoring adult recreational runners have little or no background in serious competitive running and were never indoctrinated into Lydiard’s high-mileage training approach. Knowing no better, these pseudo-experts base their own training systems not on high mileage but instead on “new” methods such as high-intensity intervals and technique fixing, which are not new at all but in fact were tried by past generations of elite runners and discarded as inferior.

This madness has to stop. Every runner deserves to know the best way to train. While high-mileage running may not be for everyone, the method that Lydiard perfected sixty years ago yields better results than any alternative even when scaled to fit the lifestyle of the average recreationally competitive adult runner. It’s a crime that this truth, known to all of the sport’s true experts, has been hidden from the masses by lesser authorities. A High-Mileage Manifesto is an overdue corrective that rediscovers the lost secret to running better and motivates runners who are not already enjoying its fruits to give it a try in the way that works best for them.

Written by Matt Fitzgerald, whose previous books include the bestselling Racing Weight and the award-winning Iron War, A High-Mileage Manifesto does not badger busy runners to run more than they really want to. Instead it makes Arthur Lydiard and his method the heroes of a story of triumph against long odds and of lasting survival in the face of wrongheaded challenges. In this way the book gently persuades readers to make their own choice to embrace high-mileage running, which truly can be tailored to work for any runner, as the meaning of “high mileage” is relative.

Like Fitzgerald’s past books, A High-Mileage Manifesto is intended above all to provide a captivating and satisfying reading experience for all runners who enjoy running enough to purchase a book on the subject. Readers will enjoy the author’s rich portrayal of Arthur Lydiard, history’s most iconic running coach, about whom far too little is known by most runners today. They will also gain a new perspective on the history of the sport as Fitzgerald traces the evolution of training methods from the nineteenth century to the Lydiard revolution to today. And they will have their minds blown by Fitzgerald’s limpid explanations of fascinating new science proving the superiority of high-mileage running in unexpected ways that almost no one yet knows about.

The book is organized as a linked set of narrative essays arranged in a loosely chronological order. Chapter 1 lays out the problem to be solved. The next several chapters take the reader on a journey of entertaining persuasion that follows the story of Lydiard’s great idea from its unlikely conception, through its astonishing world takeover and subsequent setbacks, to its ultimate vindication. The concluding chapter tells runners of all experience and ability levels everything they need to know to benefit from high-mileage running. By the time they get there readers will be keyed up beyond all expectations to do just that.

James Spragg is a young South African exercise physiologist who has carved out an interesting niche for his research. It is based on the idea that the fastest athlete on fresh legs is not necessarily the fastest athlete on fatigued legs, which is an important distinction, as in most endurance races, it is better to be the guy or gal who is fastest on fatigued legs. Yet conventional fitness testing protocols ignore this reality, which is a problem, because it has the potential to skew athletes’ training too far in the direction of improving fresh-legged performance.

In one of his early studies, Spragg teamed up with several other researchers, including Iñigo Mujika, whose name you might recognize from his work related to the 80/20 intensity balance, to compare power profiles in nine members of a U23 cycling team and five professional cyclists. Interestingly, they found that the U23 riders were able to generate as much power as the pros on fresh legs. Had this experiment been limited to non-fatigued performance testing, we would have been left to wonder why the U23 cyclists were not also on professional teams. But what Spragg and his collaborators also found was that, in U23 cyclists, achievable power outputs began to decline after 1,500 to 2,000 kilojoules (about 3,600 to 4,800 calories) of prior work was completed, whereas in professional cyclists, performance fell off only after 3,000 kJ of pedaling.

What’s more, a later study by Dutch and South African researchers found that, among top-tier professional cyclists, those able to do the most work before their power output capacity dropped off performed best in races. So, it appears that the ability to ride fast on tired legs is a key factor separating the best from the rest, both between and within echelons of cycling.

Spragg’s recent study is also his most ambitious to date. It involved collecting power data from every training ride and race completed by 30 U23 professional cyclists over three years. The aim was to determine how individual cyclists’ fresh and fatigued power profiles changed over the course of a competitive season and how these changes related to their training. The main findings were as follows:

Fresh power profiles remained relatively stable throughout the season.
Fatigued power profiles changed over the course of the season.
The difference between fresh and fatigued power profiles also varied as the season unfolded, indicating that the two phenomena are independent.
More time spent at low intensity in training predicted better 2-minute power on both fresh and fatigued legs.
A shift away from moderate intensity toward high intensity was associated with a stronger fatigued power profile (i.e., a smaller delta between fresh and fatigued power)

An important implication of these findings is that, depending on the type of event an athlete is training for, performing fitness testing in a fresh state may be of limited value. If you specialize in the 400m freestyle event or the 1500m track event, then perhaps testing in a fresh state has greater relevance. But if you’re training for a marathon or an Ironman 70.3, I would imagine that fatigued fitness testing would tell you more. In a narrative review published in October 2021, Spragg, Mujika, and three other colleagues provide detailed recommendations for incorporating fitness testing into training for road cycling events, one of which is to “avoid single effort prediction trials, such as functional threshold power.” As a running and triathlon coach, I personally lean toward using regular workouts to assess fitness. For example, tacking a fast finish onto the end of a long run serves as a good measure of fatigued performance capacity in a marathoner while also functioning as a relevant fitness-builder for the marathon.

Another interesting finding from Spragg’s 2022 study is that cyclists who maintained their peak training load through the late season also maintained their fatigue resistance, whereas those who reduced their training load during this period lost fatigue resistance. This finding is consistent with other studies reporting a correlation between training volume and fatigue resistance/endurance. One example is a 2020 study byThorsten Emig of Paris-Saclay University and Jussi Peltonen of the Polar Corporation, who collected and analyzed training and racing data from devices worn by more than 14,000 runners for a combined 1.6 million exercise sessions. For the purposes of this experiment, endurance was defined as the percentage of VO₂max running velocity that a runner could sustain for one hour, and the data showed a strong positive correlation between training volume and endurance thus defined.

I wish all of this science had been available when I wrote 80/20 Running back in 2014. It would have bolstered the argument I made therein about how the typical exercise science study design puts a thumb on the scale in favor of HIIT-focused training when compared against the type of training elite endurance athletes do. It’s less of a problem nowadays, but back then it was common to use fresh-legged VO₂max tests as the basis for such comparisons. But we now know that a VO₂max test performed after extensive prior exercise is likely to yield different results that are more relevant to real-world race performance, and that high-volume, mostly low-intensity yields better results in pre-fatigued fitness tests.

Oh, well. That’s what second editions are for, right? In the meantime, you can check out our cycling plans here – some are built to improve your FTP and can be used in your off season.

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.

It’s been nearly a decade since I coined the term “moderate-intensity rut” in reference to the widespread habit among recreational endurance athletes of doing a plurality of their training at moderate intensity. At that time, very few athletes were even aware of the existence of the problem. But much has changed since then. The books 80/20 Running and 80/20 Triathlon, through which I endeavor to save athletes from the rut, have sold a combined 90,000 copies, and online versions of the books’ training plans have sold close to 70,000 copies. And these numbers only hint at the ripple effect of broadening awareness of the moderate-intensity rut.

But one thing hasn’t changed, and it’s this: The vast majority of recreational endurance athletes are still doing a plurality of their training at moderate intensity. The latest bad-news report from this front comes in the form of a study led by João Henrique Falk Neto and published in the journal Sports. Nine recreational triathletes kept detailed training logs during the final six weeks before an Olympic-distance triathlon and for two weeks afterward. They also completed questionnaires intended to assess their health and well-being, including the Training Distress Questionnaire and the Training Stress Recovery questionnaire.

The main purpose of the study was not to identify the training intensity distribution of these athletes but rather, as the authors put it, to “assess how their preparation for a triathlon influences their health and their levels of fatigue.” I’m not sure what Neto’s team’s hypothesis was, or if they even had one, but if they hoped to find that the subjects’ health or well-being suffered during the eight-week observation period, he was disappointed. No significant changes were seen in any of the relevant measures.

Personally, I’m happy about that, but I’m less happy about the way these athletes trained. The most surprising finding was that their training loads fluctuated drastically from week to week. One would expect some variation in training stress, of course, but these folks took it to an extreme, with all nine subjects literally doubling their training load from one week to the next at least once. What’s more, Neto’s team was unable to identify any coherent logic or pattern to these fluctuations. They had every appearance of utter arbitrariness. My own best guess as to why training loads were so erratic in this group is that they trained too much in their “up” weeks and had to compensate by scaling way back in the weeks that followed.

As the 80/20 guy, I was most interested in how these athletes balanced their training intensities. If Neto and company’s findings regarding training loads were surprising and head-scratching, their findings on intensity balance were predictable and dismaying. Perhaps I was naïve to hope that the 80/20 message had achieved statistically meaningful penetration in this population, but it clearly hasn’t.

As most studies of this kind do these days, intensity was divided into three zones. Zone 1 is considered low intensity, and is bounded on the upper end by the first ventilatory threshold, which corresponds to 77-81 percent of maximum heart rate. Zone 2 is moderate intensity, and has an upper limit marked by the second ventilatory threshold, which corresponds to 91-93 percent of maximum heart rate. And Zone 3, high intensity, is everything above the second ventilatory threshold. On average, the subjects were found to have completed just 47 percent of their combined swimming, cycling, and running in Zone 1, and in only two weeks of the eight for which data were collected did they spend more than half of their training time at low intensity.

I should mention that these findings are skewed somewhat by the fact that they were based on session RPE ratings rather than on heart rate data. Subjects were asked to assign an intensity rating of 1 to 10 for each session as a whole, and so, for example, a 50-minute workout containing 25 minutes of work in Zone 3 would be considered a 50-minute session in Zone 3 if the athlete assigned it a session RPE of 7 or higher. Even accounting for this rather sloppy approach to measuring intensity distribution, though, we can be certain the athletes in this study were doing nowhere near 80 percent of their training at low intensity.

I feel two ways about this study. On the one hand, I’m sad that so many recreational endurance athletes are training in a self-sabotaging manner. On the other hand, as a cheerleader for athletes in the 80/20 Endurance community, I see this widespread self-sabotage as a competitive advantage for “my people.” Competition does not begin when the starting horn blares; it begins on the first day of training. If you exhibit the judgment to find and use the most effective training methods and your competition doesn’t, so be it. Exploit your advantage to the fullest possible extent, and in the meantime I’ll continue to work on trying to reach the lost sheep.

I’m not a total science geek, but I do take an interest in certain scientific fields, including evolutionary biology. My brother Josh, who is a total science geek, being aware of my more casual interest, suggested recently that I check out a book called Good Enough: The Tolerance for Mediocrity in Nature and Society. Written by natural philosopher Daniel Milo, the book is a critique of certain dominant interpretations of evolutionary theory.

Milo’s fellow philosopher (and fellow Daniel) Daniel Dennett has referred to this theory as “Darwin’s dangerous idea,” and with good reason. After all, it is a theory based on concepts that are inherently squishy, hence open to—indeed, requiring of—interpretation. What’s more, these concepts have deep relevance to our lives, and can influence or values, decisions, and policies for better or worse depending on our preferred interpretation. The great cautionary example of an unfortunate interpretation resulting in a damaging application of evolutionary concepts is eugenics, that equal parts vile and idiotic policy aiming to “improve” humanity by exterminating particular segments of it.

The particular interpretation of evolutionary theory that Milo goes after in his book is not nearly so vile and idiotic—merely wrong, in his view. He argues that our prevailing interpretation of evolutionary theory has placed too much emphasis on notions of fitness and function, an overemphasis that in turn is rooted in an inflated understanding of the importance of natural selection, which in turn is rooted in the excessive attention Darwin devoted to the phenomenon of domestication in developing his theory. What gets lost amid these biases, Milo contends, is the degree to which biological features that serve no useful function or confer no survival advantage are retained through sheer accident in the evolutionary process. In order to avoid getting weeded out, a given phenotype need not be better than others; it need only be good enough—and lucky.

The purpose of this article is not to provide a full description of, much less to defend, Milo’s critique of evolutionary theory. It is, rather, to hint at its relevance to endurance training. Because that’s exactly where my brain went as I started reading Good Enough. If you’ve read books of my own including 80/20 Running and The Endurance Diet, you know that I look at endurance sport as a self-organizing system, where competition operates as a ruthless selection mechanism causing training methods and other methods of improving fitness and performance to evolve toward optimum. The point I keep making over and again in my work is that the various major endurance sports have existed long enough, and the competitive stakes have become great enough, that training methods utilized at the elite level have evolved nearly to the point of full optimization, which is to say, to the point where there is very little room for further refinement.

But Milo’s book has shifted my perspective somewhat. Why have world records come down slowly and gradually, for the most part, over many decades? The current men’s world record for 10,000 meters, for example, set last year by Uganda’s Joseph Cheptegei, is 26:11.00. By definition, it is humanly possible to run 10,000 meters this quickly. Cheptegei proved it. Why, then, was Emil Zátopek’s 10,000m world record of 28:54.2 lowered by just 14 seconds in 1956 and not all the way down to where it currently stands? Part of the reason, of course, is that Sandor Iharos, the Hungarian runner who bested Zátopek’s mark, was himself not capable of running 26:11. But what Daniel Milo would point out is that it was surely also because elite endurance athletes are always, in ways they don’t entirely recognize or control, endeavoring not to achieve the limit of human possibility but to be good enough to win today. It can’t be any other way, because endurance sport is subject to the same natural laws that govern all self-organizing systems.

Which makes me think that perhaps there’s a little more room for innovation in training and other methods than I had previously assumed. In fact, this possibility had already been suggested to me by the manner in which the COVID-19 pandemic shook things up within the elite stratum of endurance sport. In a previous blog post, I wrote about how the constraints imposed by this crisis all but forced elite coaches to try different things, some of which led to breakthrough performances and are likely to be retained in the future, long after the limitations that gave rise to them have relaxed. These occurrences showed me just how much complacency and conformity exist in the methodologies used even at the highest level of sport at all times, lockdown or no lockdown.

Let’s not get carried away. Becoming aware of the fact that the Law of Good Enough governs progress in endurance sport does not empower us to operate outside that law and start making giant leaps forward. A law is a law. But for me, at least, I hope this shift in perspective allows me to become a bit more creative and experimental in my coaching. Indeed, I believe it already has.

Many of the posts I write for this blog are inspired by athlete FAQ’s. Well, this is another one. And, quite honestly, I’m note sure why it has taken me so long to write it, because it answers one of the top three most frequently asked questions I get from runners who either have read 80/20 Running or are following one of the 80/20 training plans available on this website. I’ve already let the cat out of the bag with my title, but I will go ahead and present the question anyway:

How do I choose an appropriate goal time for my upcoming race?

Race goal setting is as much an art as it is a science. There is no infallible oracle that runners can consult to obtain a time goal they can have 100 percent confidence in. But there is a way to approach goal setting that will maximize the likelihood of your coming away from the race satisfied with your performance. Here are my tips.

Forget zones.

I must confess that my 80/20 training system leads many runners astray with respect to race goal setting. That’s because this system is all about intensity zones, and as such it tacitly encourages runners to look at goal setting through the prism of my seven-zone 80/20 intensity scale. But as I tell every runner (and triathlete) who asks me which zone they should target for an upcoming race of a given distance, intensity zones are too coarse an instrument to be usefully applied to the precise objective of reaching the finish line of a race in the least time possible.

For example, marathon pace for me falls within Zone X (the gap between Zones 2 and 3), as it does for many runners. When I was training for the Chicago Marathon last summer, my Zone X range was 6:13-5:50 per mile. But based on my performance in training, my coach at the time, NAZ Elite’s Ben Rosario, believed my true marathon pace was precisely 6:05 per mile. It turned out he was right. I completed Chicago in 2:39:30, which averages out to 6:05.005 per mile. If instead of targeting 6:05 I had targeted Zone X, I might have run as slow as 6:13 per mile and finished the race in 2:42:59, disappointed in the knowledge that I could have gone faster, or I might have started the race at 5:50 per mile, blown up at mile 20, and failed to even finish.

Start with pace, not time

Another big mistake that runners make in setting race time goals is, well, setting race time goals. Too often runners become enamored by the idea of meeting or beating a round number or a Boston qualifying time. But these numbers are at least semi-arbitrary in the sense that, although our minds are attracted to them, or bodies do not operate by them.

There’s nothing wrong with aiming for round numbers and qualifying standards as ultimate goals, but your immediate goal for each race should be to cover the prescribed distance in the least time possible, and in approaching this goal it’s better to think in terms of pace rather than time. Ask yourself, “What is the fastest pace (either per mile or per kilometer) I can sustain over this distance?” The answer to this question should determine your time goal, not the other way around.

For example, if you believe that 6:36 per mile is the fastest pace you can sustain for 10 kilometers, then your goal time should be 41:00. The idea of “breaking 40:00” might be more attractive, but if 6:36 per mile truly is your current limit, it would be foolish to aim for that round number—yet.

Think in terms of incremental improvements.

Here’s the catch: The fastest pace that any given runner can sustain over a given distance on a particular day is fundamentally unknowable. It is not even possible after the factto determine whether a runner succeeded in complete a race in the least time possible. In light of this fact, the most useful way to aim toward completing a race in the least time possible through the goal-setting process is to try simply to improve on your own past performances at the same distance. There is no better source of information on which to base an estimate of your current capacity. The idea is to compare your current training to the training that preceded your last or best performance at the same distance to get a sense of how much faster (if at all) you’re prepared to go.

Rely on key workouts and “B” races.

Obviously, if you’re racing at an unfamiliar distance, or even if you’re racing at a distance you haven’t contested for a very long time, you can’t use the incremental-improvement approach to setting an appropriate race time goal. In this case you will need to rely instead on key workouts and on any races you do at other distances in the lead-up to your peak race. Online pace calculators can be used to generate an estimate of the time you will run at a new distance based on your performance at another distance. Be advised, though, that these calculators tend to overestimate performance at the marathon distance except in the cases of high-mileage runners (70-plus miles per week).

Any sensible training program will include workouts that target the specific intensity of your peak race. This thread of the training process should culminate in a single, peak race-pace workout that serves to dial in your goal for the upcoming race. Here are suggested formats for such workouts for the four most commonly contested race distances:

5K

Warm-up

5 x 1 km @ goal pace with 200m jog recoveries

Cool-down

10K

Warm-up

6 x 1 mile @ goal pace with 200m jog recoveries

Cool-down

Half Marathon

Warm-up

8 miles @ goal pace

Cool-down

Marathon

Warm-up

16 miles @ goal pace

Cool-down

Consider conditions.

It should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that your race goal should consider not only your fitness but the specific course you’ll be racing on and the conditions you anticipate racing in. For example, if you think you’re ready to run a half marathon in 1:21:30 in perfect conditions on a flat course, but you’ll be racing on a course with two big hills in 70-degree air, you’ll want to add a couple of minutes to your expected finish time.

Calculators can’t help you much here, though. What you really need to do is adjust by feel as you go. A half-marathon goal of 1:21:30 is (or should be) based on the belief that you can sustain a pace of 6:13 per mile for 13.1 miles. So what you’ll want to do in this hypothetical example is run at the perceived effort level that is associated with this pace in ideal conditions in the less-than-ideal conditions you’ll actually be racing in. In other words, slow down just enough so that your effort feels the same.

Don’t be afraid to make a mistake.

With pacing, as with so many other things, experience is the best teacher. No runner wants to blow his or her race with bad pacing, but there is really no better way to get your pacing right the next time. As Mark Twain famously put it, “Good judgment is the result of experience and experience the result of bad judgment.”