Artificial Intelligence – 80/20 Endurance

There’s a lot going on at 80/20 Endurance—so much, in fact, that you might be having trouble keeping up with all of it. Never fear! Within eight minutes (unless you’re a slow reader), you will be fully caught up on the major happenings here. Ready . . . Go!

A New Book

Earlier this year, we created our own publishing imprint, 80/20 Publishing. Fast forward a few months, and our very first title is about to be released! Written by Matt Fitzgerald (that’s me!), the book is called On Pace: Discover How to Run Every Race at Your Real Limit. As the title suggests, it’s about pacing, the quintessential running skill, which is even more important than most runners realize, and which most runners need a lot of help with. Through his trademark mix of science and storytelling, Matt will convince you of the importance of pacing and guide you toward pacing mastery.

On Pace also includes complete training plans for the 5K, 10K, half marathon, and marathon distances that develop pacing skill while also getting you race-ready. Online versions of these plans are available for individual purchase.

A New Adaptive Training App

We’ve been teasing this one for a while, and at long last it’s here. Not to be confused with the book just described, PACE (which stands for Personal Adaptive Coaching Experience) is a smartphone app developed by TrainingPeaks that uses artificial intelligence to create personalized, adaptive training plans for runners. Among the five coaches that TrainingPeaks chose to launch with is our own Matt Fitzgerald. If you like the run plans Matt built for 80/20 Endurance, you will find the PACE training experience comfortably familiar, except with full customization and adaptation, so your plan evolves with your needs. Learn more here.

A New Director of Training

And then there were four. On November 1, Leyla Porteous joined 80/20 Endurance as our director of training. A native of Australia, Leyla now lives in North Carolina with her husband and 12-year-old son. Having swum competitively in her youth, she discovered triathlon in 2012. For the last several years, Leyla has coached fellow triathletes through Flow Multisport. As our director of training, Leyla will be involved in managing, improving, and expanding all of our training products and services. She’s only been on the job for two weeks, yet her impact has already been felt. As an 80/20 athlete, you will begin to benefit from Leyla’s addition to the team very soon.

New Swim Plans

We all know swimming is different from other endurance sports. Whereas cycling and running are all about fitness, swimming is mostly about technique. In recognition of this fact, we’ve partnered with swim coach Dan Daly to develop a set of technique-focused swim training plans to accelerate improvements in swim performance. Each plan will include dryland (strength training, mobility work) and pool workouts, and will build on the improvements you’ve made by completing earlier plans in the sequence. High-quality videos will guide you through every exercise and drill. Look for Dan’s plans to drop early in the New Year!

A New Charitable Foundation

In October, we launched a new charitable foundation, the 80/20 Endurance Foundation, whose flagship initiative, the Coaches of Color Initiative, aims to improve diversity in endurance sports by awarding apprenticeship grants to aspiring coaches of color. The first grant recipient will be announced on December 1^st, and the apprenticeship will last the entire 2022 calendar year. Throughout this period, the grant recipient will receive a monthly stipend of $1,000, as well as one-on-one mentoring from successful endurance coaches, free certification as an 80/20 Endurance coach, and hand-son experience coaching experience on the 80/20 Endurance platform.

Donations are always welcome. To make a contribution, apply for an apprenticeship grant, or just learn more about COCI, visit 8020foundation.org.

A New Online Learning Event

What are you planning to do on Saturday, January 15, 2020? Unless you already have that date blacked out for space tourism, we suggest you spend it with us at The Endurance Event, an incredible online learning experience for athletes, coaches, and other hungry minds. Hosted by 80/20 Endurance and Accel Events, The Endurance Event is sponsored by InsideTracker and TrainingPeaks and features a stellar lineup of speakers that includes two-time world champion triathlete Siri Lindley and renowned exercise physiologists Stephen Seiler and Samuele Marcora.

The Endurance Event is the perfect way to start the coming race season. Fill your brain with cutting-edge information on training, diet and nutrition, mental fitness, and tech, and come away fired up to make 2022 your best year yet! Tickets to the first part of the half-day event are free, and the cost of attending the full event is way less than that of a new pair of running shoes.

We’re proud to bring this unparalleled learning experience to the worldwide endurance community. Help us make it a success so we can do it again every year! For complete information about The Endurance Event and to register, click here.

New In-Person Training Camps

Would you like to meet and spend time with some of your fellow 80/20 Endurance athletes? Or would you rather travel to a stunning endurance destination and immerse yourself in a pro-style training experience? Or would you prefer to learn from some of the leading minds in endurance training, nutrition, and psychology, including Matt Fitzgerald and Dr. Cory Nyamora? With 80/20 Endurance in-person run and triathlon camps, you don’t have to choose! We’ve partnered with Endeavorun to create a series of unique camp experiences that truly offer something for every athlete. Check out our lineup for the 2022 season:

Austin Winter Running Retreat

February 17-21

Kickstart the 2022 season with our five-day running retreat in beautiful Austin, Texas. Highlights will include group workouts, meals, and hangouts; a personal injury evaluation from physical therapist Asher Henry; one-on-one “office hours” with Matt Fitzgerald, Bertrand Newson, and other great coaches; and the opportunity to run the Austin Marathon with Hanna Hunstad (or try to beat her, or just cheer her on, or run the half marathon or 5K!).

Learn More

San Diego Spring Triathlon Retreat and Clinic

February 27-March 6

The sport of triathlon was born in San Diego, and for good reason. There’s simply no better place to swim, bike, run, and chill with your fellow triathletes than “America’s Finest City.” This two-part camp features a mix of epic training experiences and teaching sessions. Come for the first half of the week if you’re mainly interested in training or for the full week if you want it all. Highlights include an open-water swim clinic with Hanna Hunstad, bike threshold testing on Fiesta Island, and mental skills training with sports psychologist Cory Nyamora.

Learn More

Martha’s Vineyard Morning Run and Triathlon Camp

July 25-29

Would you rather enjoy a summer vacation with your family on Martha’s Vineyard or go there to train with fellow athletes and be coached by Matt Fitzgerald, sports dietitian Lydia Nader, and Endeavorun founder Jake Tuber? This special five-day camp for runners and triathletes allows you to do both! You’ll spend each morning working out with other campers and learning from our expert staff and the rest of the day enjoying family time in the summer paradise of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

Learn More

New Cycling Plans

We are pleased to announce that a full selection of 80/20 Endurance training plans for cyclists is now available. There are 64 plans in all, covering three separate disciplines (Gran Fondo, gravel racing, and time trials), short and long distances, and two intensity metrics (heart rate and power). Designed by Coach Matt, the plans feature not only the 80/20 intensity balance you know and love but also recent innovations in workout design and periodization, as well as unique coaching tips in each and every workout. And like our training plans for runners, triathletes, and obstacle racers, these come in four levels, covering the full spectrums of experience and ability.

We think our new 80/20 cycling plans are terrific, but don’t take our word for it. You can sample any plan you choose for free, and if you’re an 80/20 Endurance subscriber, of course, you have access to all of them. And if you’re not a cyclist, you should become one just so can experience these plans.

A New Coaching Certification

Many 80/20 athletes are also coaches, or aspire to become coaches. And many of these athletes have let us know they want us to offer a proprietary 80/20 Endurance coaching certification. If you’re among these athletes, you’ll be happy to know that an 80/20 Endurance coach certification program is on the way. Our best guess at this moment is that it will be available on or around March 1, 2022. Elements of the program will be an official study guide written by Coach Matt, an online course, and a two-part exam (multiple choice and practical). We’re also exploring the possibility of offering in-person certification events. Stay tuned!

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!

I’m working on a new project involving artificial intelligence and endurance training that I could tell you about, but I would have to kill you. Just kidding—it’s not that secret. In any case, the project has got me thinking about fundamental questions in endurance training. For example: What is training?

Don’t snicker. The answer is surprisingly nonobvious. If I were to ask ten coaches to define endurance training, I would probably get seven or eight different responses, and they would be telling. Ten coaches who have seven or eight different conceptions of what training is are likely to coach athletes in seven or eight (at least slightly) different ways. After much pondering (in truth, it came to me in the shower), I’ve settled on the following formulation: Training is goal-directed, principle-guided experimentation.

Goal direction is what distinguishes training from exercise. Most people who exercise have some kind of goal, but one can achieve the goal of, say, keeping one’s weight under control by running for 40 minutes at low intensity every other day year-round. Exercise, in other words, is a fixed routine, like dental hygiene, whereas training is an evolving process. Exercise becomes training when you set a goal to achieve peak performance in an upcoming race. Doing the same, easy to moderately challenging workout over and over will not suffice to deliver you from the Point A of your present fitness Level to the Point B of optimal race fitness. Unlike exercise, training aims toward a specific destination.

Principle guidance is a set of tools and rules that are deployed for the purpose of getting the athlete from Point A to Point B. As part of the project I’m working on, I’ve taken some time to create an exhaustive list of the tools and rules that I use (unconsciously, for the most part) to train the athletes I work with. There are surprisingly few of them. Here are some:

Start where you are: The initial training load must be equal to or slightly greater than the athlete’s recent training load.

Purpose-structured workouts: Endurance fitness has multiple components that (for the most part) must be developed individually by workouts of different types that are structured specifically to fulfill a given purpose.

The 80/20 rule: Except in the early base (90/10) and taper (70/30) periods of training, the athlete must spend about 80 percent of their weekly training time at low intensity and 20 percent at moderate to high intensity.

Step cycles: The training process should be broken into three-week step cycles, in which the Week 1 training load is slightly higher than that of any preceding week, the Week 2 training load is slightly higher than that of Week 1, and Week 3 is a recovery week, where the training load is 10-20 percent lower than in Week 1.

The hard/easy rule: The more challenging a workout is, the more time should be allowed before the next challenging workout.

The foregoing principles, plus a few others, are sufficient to generate a complete, customized training plan for a given athlete aiming toward a particular goal. But the plan won’t be perfect, because the athlete is sure to respond to it in unexpected ways and unexpected events are certain to occur. The athlete may experience a week of heavy fatigue and poor performance, or suffer an injury, or gain fitness faster than anticipated during a particular period, or encounter any of a number of other eventualities that require the plan to be adjusted in order to keep them on track toward their goal.

Indeed, such adjustments are so inevitable that it is arguably unnecessary to create a plan in the first place. Instead, the training process can be treated as an experiment in which the next step is always determined by the results of the last step, and by the goal, and the aforementioned principles. As a matter of fact, as I’ve mentioned in past posts, I gave up planning my own training in any detail long ago, and my competitive results have not suffered as a result. In fact, they’ve gotten better. And I take the same approach with the athletes I coach.

The defining error of inferior coaches, in my opinion, is putting too much faith in planning. Athletes, too, for that matter. Everybody wants to believe they can know ahead of time where they’re going to end up, but you can’t really control that. What you can ensure is that you make progress in the general direction of where you’d like to end up, and this is best done by conceiving of training as process of goal-directed, principle-guided experimentation.

Can artificial intelligence do this as well as, or better than, a human coach? Not yet. The AI experts I deem most credible tamp down expectations, suggesting that in this context it will never do more than help human coaches do their job better. In the meantime, anyway, I’m at least having fun trying to put myself out of a job.

Recently my brother Josh sent me a link to a fascinating article in Quanta Magazine about neuroevolution, a subdiscipline within the field of artificial intelligence. Like other approaches to AI, neuroevolution is all about creating mathematical algorithms, but whereas traditional approaches attempt to create algorithms that solve problems efficiently, neuroevolution seeks to create algorithms that maximize novelty and diversity and then tries to figure out what they might be good for.

This is exactly how evolution works in the natural world. Bioevolutionary processes don’t happen for the purpose of solving the survival problems that species encounter in their environments. They happen because they happen, and every once in a while they just so happen to solve a problem along the way.

A key concept in neuroevolution is the steppingstone principle. In natural evolution, morphological features arrived at through random genetic mutations may not only be useful in themselves but may also serve as steppingstones toward solutions to other problems. For example, biologists believe that feathers were first put to use as insulation before they were used for flight (although they did not evolve foreither purpose).

Neuroevolution uses the steppingstone principle in a similar way to solve problems by not trying to solve them. An example given in the aforementioned Quanta article concerns a maze that wheeled robots were tasked to find their way out of. Both traditional and neuroevolutionary approaches were used to evolve algorithms for this purpose. But whereas the traditional approach entailed trying a bunch of sensible strategies and then retaining and “breeding” the most effective ones for multiple generations, the neuroevolutionary approach simply went for maximum diversity of escape strategies, selecting for novelty rather than effectiveness.

Each approach was tried 40 times. Traditional AI succeeded in evolving a robot that escaped the maze three times. Neuroevolution succeeded 39 times. The reason? The traditional approach was too focused on early success, going all in for promising escape strategies that often led to dead ends. By casting a much wider net, neuroevolution traded early partial success for ultimate total success.

In reading about neuroevolution, I couldn’t help but wonder if the steppingstone principle might not also apply to running, and if so, how. My hunch is that it does. Artificial intelligence is really artificial learning. Biological evolution can be thought of as species learning—learning to adapt to the environment. And training for distance running can also be thought of as a form of learning—learning how to run better. It’s from this perspective that applying the steppingstone principle to running begins to make sense.

To suggest that the steppingstone principle does apply to running is to suggest that not trying to get better at running is an effective way to get better at running. Clearly, this can only be true to a certain extent. Running is without question the most effective way to get better at running. More than that, specific run training methods, such as the 80/20 rule, are known to work optimally to maximize running performance. These best practices are the products of a multigenerational, global process of trial and error that looks a lot like traditional AI, where different techniques have been tested and then either discarded if they proved ineffective or retained if they proved effective.

You need only compare the performance level of today’s top runners to the performance level of the top runners from 80 or 90 years ago to know that this approach to solving the problem of maximizing running performance has worked exceptionally well. But it is plausible that it has also resulted in a dead-end effect similar to the one I described in relation to the wheeled robots in the maze. A runner who relies entirely on proven best practices to seek improvement does not expose his or her body to a lot of novel challenges, and as neuroevolution has shown, novelty and diversity are rich sources of new learning.

How might a runner incorporate novelty in a sensible way into his or her efforts to become a better runner? Perhaps the least risky way to do so is to run in a variety of environments. Have you ever done a long run on a technical trail after an extended period of training only on the roads and/or on nontechnical trails and then woken up the next morning feeling sore in muscles you never knew you had? That’s novelty at work. When you run on different types of terrain and in different conditions, your neuromuscular system is forced to explore new ways of getting the job of running done, and the resulting discoveries might make you a better runner in any environment.

Non-running activities can take this effect even further. We know that activities such as strength training and dynamic stretching can improve running performance by enhancing some of the underlying physical qualities, such as muscular endurance, that contribute to running performance. But I suspect that such activities and others may also improve running performance by exposing the body to less familiar movement patterns that, in effect, add new tools to the toolbox the body draws from to push back performance limits in running.

Supposing my suspicion is correct, this way of incorporating the steppingstone principle into your running could be exploited by continuously mixing up the strength and mobility exercises you do and perhaps also by dabbling in stuff like snowboarding, surfing, and basketball. It’s not as crazy as it might sound. There’s quite a bit of research showing that early specialization in a single sport is bad for long-term development. Youth athletes who lock in on one sport before high school are more likely to get injured and burn out. I think there’s a little bit of the steppingstone principle at work in this phenomenon as well, and while adult runners who want to realize their full performance potential most certainly should specialize in the sport, there’s good reason not to go too far in the direction of specialization at any age.

Again, all of this is highly speculative. But I’m confident it can do no harm to your running and may do it some good to continuously run in a variety of environments, to constantly vary the strength and mobility exercises you do, and to dabble in activities like climbing or line dancing or horseback riding or yard work or kayaking or whatever floats your boat, because becoming the best runner you can be is not that different from escaping a maze designed for wheeled robots.

Training Plan Limitations

Long Term

Medium Term

Short Term

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