Ben Rosario – 80/20 Endurance

Few reading experiences have been more intellectually validating for me than the one that’s being supplied to me currently through David Epstein’s Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. I chose it in the hope that it would inform my longstanding belief that generalists (i.e., creative problem solvers) make better coaches than specialists (i.e., people who have a lot of specialized knowledge), and in this regard it has exceeded my expectations.

With a veritable avalanche of science and real-world examples, Epstein demonstrates that “foxes,” who see the big picture, perform better in complex environments than “hedgehogs,” who focus on details. “Beneath complexity,” he writes, “hedgehogs tend to see simple, deterministic rules of cause and effect framed by their area of expertise, like repeating patterns on a chessboard. Foxes see complexity in what others mistake for simple cause and effect. They understand that most cause-and-effect relationships are probabilistic, not deterministic. There are unknowns, and luck, and even when history repeats, it does not do so precisely.”

Among the most compelling examples Epstein cites is a prediction tournament organized by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). Teams of forecasters were asked to bet on the likelihood of certain geopolitical events happening at particular future times. Most of the teams were made up of highly specialized intelligence experts, but all of them got their asses handed to them by a team of generalists called the Good Judgment Project.

To be clear, Epstein does not contend that foxes are better than hedgehogs at everything. They’re not. His reference to chess in the quote above isn’t arbitrary. Specialists, who through heavy repetition acquire vast stores of information that they use to identify patterns and select optimal responses, tend to perform better in so-called kind learning environments like chess, which are a lot simpler than most real-world situations, which present “wicked” learning environments. So, the crucial question for us is this: Does endurance training represent a kind learning environment, like chess, or a wicked learning environment, like geopolitics?

There are some coaches with specialized knowledge of exercise physiology who seem to believe that specialized knowledge in exercise physiology is necessary and sufficient for effective endurance coaching. In their view, endurance training is simple and straightforward. All you need is a thorough understanding of how the body adapts to various training stimuli and how these adaptations translate to competitive performance, plus a steady supply of relevant data from the athlete as they progress through the training process, and from there it’s paint by numbers.

I disagree. In my experience, endurance training isn’t nearly so predictable, even with the aforementioned knowledge and information. There are far more unknowns than knowns in real-world exercise physiology, and there’s far more to coaching than managing athlete physiology. Like psychology.

Recently, NAZ Elite coach Ben Rosario told me about a workout he designed for Aliphine Tuliamuk ahead of the U.S. 20K championships. It was a fairly complex hodgepodge of hill surges, tempo segments, and whatnot. “No physiology-type coach would ever give an athlete that workout,” Ben said. Why not? Because there was no clear physiological rationale for the format Ben had come up with. What mattered to him was that it was appropriately challenging and reasonably specific to the 20K race distance, and more importantly, its everything-but-the-kitchen-sink structure was sure to keep Aliphine on her toes, simulating the unpredictable dynamics of racing in a way that, assuming she performed well, would leave her feeling confident and prepared.

What Ben understands that hedgehogs don’t is that athletes are more than the sum of their blood lactate levels and heart rates. They are sentient beings who experience training, and how they experience it matters. By treating athletes as contextualized human beings rather than as tidy closed systems of physiological processes, fox-type coaches are able to deploy a broader range of tools to help them succeed.

It so happens that I’m writing this post on the day Emily Sisson set a new American record of 2:18:29 at the Chicago Marathon. In an interview conducted before the race, Emily’s coach, Ray Treacy, described how her training had evolved over time to become less “textbook” and more idiosyncratic as they learned from how she responded to standard methods like exposure to high altitude (which didn’t agree with her). Hedgehog coaches who adhere to a rote method of training athletes based on specialized knowledge and data have a hard time figuring out how to get the most out of athletes like Emily Sisson, and the fact of the matter is that all athletes are like her, which is to say that all athletes are unique individuals in unique situations. Indeed, of the six athletes I coach at this time, all six have at least one unconventional element in their training that was arrived at through experimentation and learning.

Foxes are much better than hedgehogs at adapting in the face of unexpected events. As Epstein puts it in reference to the aforementioned IARPA prediction tournament, “When an outcome took them by surprise . . . foxes were much more likely to adjust their ideas. Hedgehogs barely budged.” I’ve seen unfortunate examples of this rigidity in endurance sports. When Hedgehog coaches fail with an athlete, they blame the athlete instead of themselves. As they see it, the only reason their narrow, inflexible, one-size-fits-all methodology didn’t work was that the athlete brought messy complications that didn’t allow the methodology to demonstrate is infallibility. It never crosses their mind that messy complications are the norm, and because of this coaches must be flexible and creative in their approach, treating each athlete as a unique case.

You might be wondering why a coach can’t be part fox and part hedgehog, combining the virtues of big-picture thinking and specialized knowledge to coach more effectively than either pure foxes or pure hedgehogs. This makes sense in principle, but as a practical matter it’s next to impossible to be both a fox and a hedgehog. The reason is that the fundamental difference between foxes and hedgehogs is not that foxes know a little about a lot of things and hedgehogs know a lot about a few things. It’s that they have completely different ways of thinking.

Hedgehogs hate ambiguity and uncertainty. That’s why they try to absorb as much knowledge and information as possible—to eliminate ambiguity and uncertainty so that they always know immediately what to do in any situation. Foxes put reason ahead of information—process ahead of content. They accept that complexity and unpredictability are irreducible realities, so they don’t worry about always knowing immediately what to do in any situation. They draw confidence instead from knowing how to figure out what to do. And for this reason they make better coaches.

Interested in learning more about coaching? An 80/20 Endurance coach certification program is on the way. To be the first to know about updates regarding the course, sign up for our waitlist here. And just between us… we’d recommend signing up for the waitlist before Black Friday (November 25th, 2022) *wink*.

Recently I had a disturbing experience on social media. I know, I know. Join the club, right? But This one’s worth sharing, I believe.

Let me start by saying that I’m not naïve in these matters. I’ve been aware for some time that social media is a cesspool of idiocy and viciousness. That’s why I decided last year to drastically curtal my activity on the various platforms. But I held back from taking the even more drastic step of closing my accounts because I kind of need them for business reasons. This left the door open for the mindless savagery of the medium to seek me out, which is precisely what happened last week.

It began innocently enough. An athlete whose name I will withhold for his protection was reading my book The Endurance Diet when he came upon the following passage: “As with workouts, nutrition intake is not necessary during all races. Studies suggest that consuming fluid and carbohydrate enhances performance only in races lasting longer than about an hour. So don’t be that guy or gal wearing a fluid belt in a 5K run!”

Amused by these droll phrases, the athlete shared them on social media. Except he didn’t post the whole passage. Only the last sentence was made public, and let’s just say it was not well received. Minutes after my decontextualized words were broadcast behind my back, my phone started blowing up. After some initial confusion, I came to the alarming realization that I had become the subject of an unprovoked attack by a virtual mob of outraged athletes accusing me of elitism, judgmentalism, and snobbery.

In an odd sort of way, this gratuitous modern-day stoning reminded me of a scene in Megha Majumdar’s novel A Burning. It takes place in the fictional Indian Village of Kokilhat, where a visiting politician watches in horror as a Hindu mob brutally murders a Muslim man falsely accused of killing a cow and eating its beef. By no means am I equating the severity of this imagined incident with that of my online character assassination, but the underlying instinct is identical. The selfsame delirious, hive-minded lust to harm the outsider that drove a horde of bigoted villagers to drag an innocent religious minority down from the thatched roof of his family hut and crush his skull under their boots drove an internet posse of aggrieved fluid-belt wearers to collectively cancel me for . . . for what exactly?

Elitism, yes, but what flavor? It’s not entirely clear, but I have an idea. Had any of my verbal assailants taken the time to level a formal charge against me, I believe I would have been accused of trying to shame slower runners for being slow. This conjecture is based on a reasonable assumption that the practice of wearing a fluid belt in 5K races is perceived as a symbol of being a slower runner. It’s absurd, I know, but less absurd than the only alternative I can think of, which is that, in their eagerness to take offense, my hypersensitive would-be cancellers chose to interpret the orphaned sentence from my book as some form of body shaming, as if a certain fraction of the human population is born with fluid belts attached to their middles and how dare I try to make these poor folks feel “less than” for it!

So, let’s go ahead and suppose that my words were indeed interpreted as an expression of speed elitism, or looking down on slower athletes for being slower. By sheer coincidence, at the precise moment I discovered that I was being burned in effigy in cyberspace, I was working on a blog article titled “How to Impress Your Coach,” in which I explained that good coaches are impressed by two things only—smart decisions and grit—and are not impressed by strong workout numbers. “Currently I coach a half-dozen athletes,” I wrote, “ranging from twenty-something elites to fifty-something mid-packers, and all six of them impress me with approximately equal frequency in these two ways.”

This doesn’t sound like something a speed elitist would say, does it? Nor does anything else I’ve written in the nearly thirty years I’ve been writing about endurance sports. To the contrary, if you were to ask a random athlete who has read and understood all thirty of my published books to describe my shtick, they would probably say something along the lines of, “Matt is all about encouraging everyday athletes to give themselves permission to pursue the sport they love with the same dedication as the elites.” And they’d be right!

Heck, the title of my next book, coauthored with Ben Rosario, is Run Like a Pro (Even If You’re Slow)! Does that sound like a book that a pair of speed elitists would write? No! And if you’re still not convinced that I make no distinction whatsoever between faster and slower athletes, check out my Twitter page, where for the past two years the pinned tweet has read as follows: “Talent should not determine how far you take your athletic journey. Passion should.”

Perhaps the best summation of my professional mission comes not from me but from Knox Robinson, as quoted in my memoir, Life Is a Marathon. Here’s the relevant passage:

“When I talked to you in New York,” I began, my eyes on my phone to verify that it was recording, “you told me that you created Black Roses NYC because, in so many words, you wanted people in the urban running community to take running seriously—to take it all the way. Can I infer from this that you feel runners who don’ttest their limits are missing out on something?”

Knox sat with the question for a while before he answered. “Yeah, I do feel kind of bad for the folks who don’t take the whole trip,” he said eventually. “Running has unfathomable riches to share. Someone who endeavors to put together the full modern runner’s toolkit and really understand the marathon, beyond just completing it and getting a finisher’s medal, ends up learning more, I think, about himself or herself and what it means to be human. That’s what those tools are for.”

Which brings us back to the statement that I was recently pilloried for on social media. It is a simple scientific fact that carrying and consuming fluid during a 5K running event is completely unnecessary, and not only unnecessary but self-sabotaging, from a performance perspective. It’s fair to assume that most runners who wear fluid belts in short races aren’t aware of this fact. What’s not fair is accusing me of elitism for educating these runners and, more broadly, for encouraging runners of all abilities to pursue maximum performance and to take advantage of proven methods for doing so.

There is such a thing as reverse elitism. It manifests in a very of ways, one of which is a tendency to presume that people who have more of something desirable than you do (money, beauty, education, athletic ability, whatever) look down on those who have less of it. Elitism is real, and it is lame. I have zero respect for the pimple-faced trolls on letsrun.com who brand slower runners “hobby joggers” with such smarmy disdain. But reverse elitism is equally lame and pervasive, and I have no more respect for the passive-aggressive social media vigilantes who baselessly lumped me in with the letsrun trolls than I have for the trolls themselves. The point of this 1,200-word rant? Don’t be lame!

The first adult sports camp I participated in was a Multisport School of Champions event hosted in San Diego by Triathlete publisher John Duke and eight-time Ironman world champion Paula Newby-Fraser way back in 1996. Since then, I’ve been fortunate enough to take part in many more triathlon and running camps, and I remember each experience both vividly and fondly.

I’m hardly unique in this respect. No one ever regrets attending an endurance training camp. There’s a dreamlike quality about these athletic idylls, all-too-brief escapes from everyday reality centered on a passion shared equally by all partakers. That’s why I decided to get involved in the camp-hosting business myself. Do you want your 2022 to include an experience you will treasure for the rest of your days? Click here to learn more about the three 80/20 Endurance/Endeavorun camps we’ve lined up for next year.

If you need more persuading, read on. What follows is a “lost chapter” of my book Running the Dream: One Summer Living, Training, and Racing with a Team of World-Class Runners Half My Age. It describes events in my life on August 19, 2017, two days earlier I’d strained a hip abductor tendon during a workout with the Northern Arizona Elite professional running team in Flagstaff, Arizona. In the wake of this calamity, team member Stephanie Bruce invited me to participate in the adult running camp that she and her husband, Ben, were hosting that weekend, as a way to take my mind off my injury. Enjoy!

Cast of Characters

Nataki = My wife

Coach Ben = NAZ Elite coach Ben Rosario

AJ = AJ Gregg, strength coach and PT for NAZ Elite

Wes Gregg = AJ’s brother and colleague

Kellyn = NAZ Elite member Kellyn Taylor

50 Days to Chicago

I went for another long walk with Nataki this morning, my injured groin grabbing warningly a few times as we went.

“The Chicago Marathon is fifty days away and I can’t even walk without pain,” I pouted.

Nataki laughed, which wasn’t the reaction I expected or wanted. But her attention was not on me but on our dog, Queenie, who’d lunged at a bird.

When we got back to the house I emailed Coach Ben to request that we meet as soon as possible after his return from Malaysia to discuss the way forward in my training. I killed the next hour like the injured fake pro runner I was, sandwiching a round of rehab exercises between contrast-therapy treatments, and then drove to Hypo2 for yet another appointment with AJ.

“How was dinner?” he asked as he led us into his office.

Nataki and I raved about the previous evening’s meal at the Cottage: artisan greens salad with beets and fennel root, cold smoked salmon tartine, venison for Nataki, and flank steak for me. AJ was very pleased.

“So, what’s the report?” he asked, abruptly shifting the topic of conversation to my groin.

I told him about my less-than-encouraging my walk, realizing as I spoke that I sounded like a teenager confessing to a joyride in daddy’s Lexus.

“Well, then, you’re not running tomorrow,” AJ said flatly.

Swallowing the urge to protest, I dutifully ran the cold laser on my reddened inner thigh for 10 minutes. When this was done, AJ put me back on the treatment table and repeated the same tests he’d used to diagnose the injury two days ago. I bent my left leg sharply and swung it out to the side like a dog watering a fire hydrant. AJ then applied gentle hand pressure to the knee, his eyebrows raised inquisitively. I shook my head, so he applied a little more pressure. I shook my head again and AJ pressed down even harder.

“Huh,” he said. “Your range of motion is back to 100 percent.”

I pounced.

“What harm can it do me to run for a few minutes tomorrow, really slow,

just to see how it feels?” I asked.

“None, as long as you stop right away if there’s pain above a three out of ten. You might even find that running loosens it up a bit. But to be straight with you, I’ll be happy if you’re running again in eight days.”

In the afternoon, I returned to Hypo2 with Nataki for a classroom session with attendees of Steph and Ben’s running camp. The topic du jour was mental toughness.

“What I love about running is that it’s the only part of life where you get to choose how much you suffer,” Steph told the gathering. “And the more you are willing to suffer, the greater the reward.”

Ben Bruce chimed in from the wings: “It’s kind of a messed-up sport.”

“It is messed up,” Steph agreed soberly. A camper named Amanda raised her hand and asked Steph what she tells herself during difficult moments in a race.

“Well, I’m a huge Rocky fan,” Steph confessed, lightly blushing. “I think maybe it’s because Sylvester Stallone reminds me of my father. Anyway, I usually think of lines from Rocky movies. For example, in Rocky IV there’s the part where Rocky draws blood from Ivan Drago and his trainer tells him, ‘See? He’s a man just like you!’”

At four o’clock, we shuffled over to the strength and conditioning room for a group strength workout led by Wes Gregg. Ben explained that the exercises Wes was about to teach us would all be bodyweight movements we could do at home without equipment, or using household items for resistance.

“At home, I use my kids for some of this stuff,” he said. “I just have to decide if I want to lift the three-year-old or the two-year-old.” Pausing momentarily, he grinned with a sudden thought. “Wouldn’t it be funny if I did like Hercules and the bull and kept using them as weights as they got older? Imagine when Hudson is 18 and I’m like, ‘Come here, son. Daddy’s going to pick you up,’ and he’s like, ‘This is kind of weird.’”

I laughed like a man desperate for a laugh, much louder than anyone else in the room.

In the evening we gathered again, this time at Kellyn’s house, which sits alone at the end of a dirt road. I found my fellow campers in the backyard eating pizza and drinking beer and wine. After sunset we drifted over to an area where camp chairs had been arranged around a bonfire. Steph invited everyone to write down their A, B, and C goals on a notecard and then share them with the group.

When my turn came, I told my fellow campers I was training for the Chicago Marathon and that my C goal was to run my fastest marathon since my fastest marathon nine years ago, my B goal was to beat that nine-year-old personal best, and my A goal was to do something that made other runners believe they could achieve their own A goals. Next up was Donna, a 42-year-old Californian who started running just two years ago and has already completed six marathons. “I just love running so much,” she told me at the welcome dinner two nights back, “and I feel pressure to get as fast as I can before I’m too old.”

“I want to move to Flagstaff,” she said now. Everyone laughed. “No, I’m serious!” she protested.

One of the last to speak was Mary, who’d come all the way from eastern Canada despite being injured like me and unable to run. The instant she opened her mouth, her eyes filled and a soblike sound escaped her.

“I just want to run,” she said, “to be healthy. I’ve lost my passion and I want it back.”

I waited for the group’s attention to move on, then rose and walked over to where Mary was seated, crouching before her.

“It sounds like you’re feeling pretty hopeless,” I said. “I’ve been there before.”

“Can we take a little walk?” Mary asked.

“Sure, of course,” I said.

Mary stood and led me into the darkness away from the fire. When she was satisfied we were fully out of earshot, she opened up.

“I just turned 50,” she said, emotion overtaking her a second time. “I love Spanish culture and dance. I speak the language. That was my passion for a long time—Spanish dancing. But then I got away from it. That was okay, though, because I still had running. I’ve run most of my life. I love it. I’ve been pretty successful at it.”

“It’s a part of your identity,” I threw in.

“Right. But now I don’t even have that. I’m stuck in an endless cycle. I get injured. The winters are pretty brutal where I live, and by the time spring comes I’m way behind in my fitness. I spend the whole summer just catching up. Then I get hurt again. I’m getting older. I don’t have kids. I work from home, making competitive dance costumes. When I can’t run, things get pretty dark. I almost didn’t even come here. I thought, ‘What’s the point?’”

“I get it,” I said. “I haven’t been able to run for three days and I’m going nuts. Earlier today I was driving through town and I saw people out running and I thought—”

“—you don’t know how lucky you are,” Mary finished.

“Exactly,” I said. You know, I’m always a little annoyed when people give me advice based on the idea that whatever has been true for their lives will inevitably be true for mine as well. But I think it can’t hurt for you to know that there have been times when I was certain—absolutely convinced—that I would never be able to run another competitive marathon, or even jog ten miles without pain. And now here I am at 46, running almost as well as I ever have—until Wednesday, at least,” I laughed. There’s hope for you.”

“I know,” Mary said. “Thanks.”

I asked her if I could give her a hug, if only for my sake, and she said I could.

“Are you glad you came, though?” I said as I held her.

“Yeah,” she said. “I am.”

We returned to the circle, where Steph had the campers write down their greatest fear, share it with the group if they were comfortable doing so, and toss into the bonfire.

***

Ready to experience some camp magic of your own? Click here.

Anyone who has ever used a piece of cardio equipment at a public gym has some notion of exercise intensity zones. Here’s an example of a chart you might see stuck to an elliptical trainer at your local health club:

Training heart rate intensity zones example — Example of Exercise Intensity Zones

Athletes scoff at such simplistic, one-size-fits-all guidelines. For starters, they are based on the supposition that every human has a maximum heart rate equal to 220 beats per minute minus their age in years, which is very far from being true. My own maximum heart rate at age 49, for example, was 181 BPM, or 220 – 39. These charts also convey a misleading impression that individuals with any particular health or fitness goal should do all of their exercising in the zone associated with that goal, which is also untrue. I can assure you that doing 100 percent of one’s cardiovascular exercise at 60 to 70 percent of maximum heart rate is not the most efficient way to control one’s body weight. Those nice round numbers—50 to 60 percent, 60 to 70 percent, etc.—are a bit suspect as well.

A variety of more sophisticated zone scales—not all of them heart rate-based—have been developed for use by endurance athletes. Of these, Joe Friel’s is perhaps the best known and most widely used. David Warden and I created our own zone scale for athletes who wish to train by the 80/20 method. All of these intensity rating systems—or most of them, anyway—share certain characteristics that make them better than the ones you see at the gym. In particular, individual zones are linked to key physiological thresholds that vary with fitness and require testing to determine.

Athletes put a good deal of trust in the 80/20 zone scale and others, and rightly so—they work quite well. The funny thing is that very few elite endurance athletes use intensity zones of any kind. Take runners, for example. In any type of high-intensity workout, an elite runner is likely to try to hit a certain target rather than stay within a zone. For instance, a runner might do a set of 1-km repeats at critical velocity, which is the fastest pace that can be sustained for 30 minutes. Or a triathlete might do a long ride featuring alternating 10-minute blocks performed at Ironman power +10 watts and Ironman power -10 watts. Low-intensity sessions, which dominate the training schedules of all elite endurance athletes, are governed neither by zones nor targets but are done entirely by feel.

The core of my endurance training philosophy is that athletes of all experience and ability levels should train the same way the pros do, albeit scaled to their level. But if that’s the case, then why do I prescribe intensity zones to nonelite athletes when elite athletes don’t use them? The short answer is that, precisely because any person who has ever exercised in a public gym is familiar with the concept of zones, this tool is helpful in facilitating correct workout execution for less experienced athletes. The way the pros regulate intensity is difficult to do unless you really know yourself as an athlete.

When I trained with the NAZ Elite team in 2017, Coach Ben Rosario always gave each athlete a precise pace or time to hit in each workout, and he was able to do so because he knew his athletes thoroughly. For example, one day he had Kellyn Taylor complete a 4 x 300m cutdown at the end of a workout. He asked her to complete the reps in 52, 51, 50, and 49 seconds, basing these numbers on her known one-mile race pace of 50 seconds per 300. She hit these numbers dead-on.

Chances are, you don’t know yourself well enough as an athlete to train with such precision, which is why you need zones. No problem. Because I truly believe that all athletes should train like the elites as much as possible, I try to have it both ways in the new 80/20 run plans I created earlier this year. Yes, the workouts use zones, but in many of them the workout descriptions instruct athletes to aim for a particular target within a zone.

An example is lactate intervals. This workout type (there are nine separate levels) features sets of 30-second intervals that are meant to be run at the fastest pace a runner can sustain for 15 minutes. In zone terms, it’s a Zone 4 session, but the specific pace target falls smack in the middle of this zone for the majority of runners. Less experienced runners are free to just think of the session as a Zone 4 workout and trust they will get the desired benefit regardless of where they land inside this zone, while more experienced runners can try to nail their 15-minute pace with Kellyn Taylor-like exactness and benefit that much more. With time, of course, runners can graduate from the first approach to the second, and from there they can advance to signing a running footwear endorsement contract and going to the Olympics.

On May 5, 2019, Stephanie Bruce won the USATF Half Marathon Championship by 21 seconds with a time of 1:10:43. The following day, she asked her coach, Ben Rosario, for permission to compete in a 5000-meter track race on May 16^th. Ben gave her his blessing, and 10 days later Steph set a new personal best and an NAZ Elite team record (since broken) for 5000 meters, clocking 15:17.76. Afterward, she said to Ben, “When you’re fit, you’re fit!”

Ben likes to share this story as a way to make the point that optimal fitness for any given race distance isn’t so different from optimal fitness for any other distance, and that optimal training for any given race distance, therefore, isn’t very different from optimal training for any other distance. Running is running, after all, and, as Steph put it, when you’re fit you’re fit.

Not everyone agrees. There are those who believe that in order to perform optimally at a given race distance, a runner must tailor their training to the specific demands of that event. To the average runner, this approach probably seems more sophisticated than Ben Rosario’s approach of training more or less the same for all race distances. The logic goes something like this:

Short races and long races are different enough that one can imagine racing a pretty decent (if not quite optimal) 5K off a training program consisting of lots of speed and tempo work and not a single run longer than 7 miles. Likewise, one can imagine running a pretty decent marathon off a training program consisting of tons of easy running, including plenty of long runs, and no speed or tempo work whatsoever. And if one can imagine these things, then one can easily imagine that if Runner X moves toward optimal 5K training from the extreme I’ve described, and Runner Y moves toward optimal marathon training from the opposite extreme, the two runners will arrive at their respective optimal distance-specific training formulas well before they meet in the middle. In other words, Runner X will still be doing significantly more speed work and less volume/long running than Runner Y when each has completed the process of optimizing their training for their targeted race distance.

As sensible as this line of reasoning seems, I’m with Ben. Like him, I believe that runners should train in more or less the same way for all race distances, especially in the general preparation phase. Runners training for 5K’s should run almost as much and almost as far in individual runs as runners training for marathons because doing so will make them more fatigue resistant at their goal 5K pace, despite its relative brevity. Similarly, runners training for marathons should do almost as much speed and tempo work as runners training for 5K’s because doing so will increase their aerobic capacity and thereby increase the speed they can sustain for the full marathon distance, despite its relatively low intensity. Only in the specific preparation phase, encompassing the last eight weeks or so before competition, should the training formulas of runners aiming at different race distances diverge, and even then they shouldn’t diverge drastically.

Ben Rosario is hardly alone among elite running coaches in subscribing to the “when you’re fit, you’re fit” philosophy. Indeed, it has become the norm within the sport’s highest echelon. This was shown in a 2011 study published in the International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching. Norwegian researchers collected comprehensive training data from six elite runners, three of whom specialized in shorter events (3000 and 5000 meters) and the others of whom focused on longer events (half marathon and marathon). Members of both groups were found to have done about 80 percent of their training at low intensity and 20 percent at moderate to high intensity in all phases of the training cycle. Both groups also trained at high volume, with track runners logging between 92 and 104 miles per week in the various phases and the road racers logging between 107 and 116 miles per week. The main difference was that each group focused a little more on intensities close to their respective race pace, especially in the competition phase of training. But even then, the difference wasn’t extreme, with the track runners spending 19.4 percent of their weekly training time at marathon to half-marathon pace and 8.9 percent at 5000m to sprint speed during this period and the road racers spending 29.7 percent of their weekly training time at marathon to half-marathon pace and 5.2 percent at 5000m to sprint speed.

Also included in the study were sample training weeks from both the preparation phase and the competition phase for each of the six athletes. A close inspection of this material reveals that, for the most part, the short-race specialists and the long-race specialists were pulling their tools from the same toolkit. For example, in his preparation phase, Runner B, a track athlete, did a workout consisting of 12 x 1000 meters at altitude-adjusted marathon pace (3:13 per km), while Runner F, a marathoner, did a workout consisting of 16 x 1000 meters at sea-level marathon pace (3:25 per km) during her preparation phase.

In the concluding section of their paper, the researchers wrote, “The main finding in this study . . . was that a relatively high training volume at low intensity (62-82% of HRmax) combined with training just below and at the anaerobic threshold (82-92% of HRmax) was beneficial for the development of running performance in six Norwegian male and female track and marathon runners competing at top European level.” Notice that these statements apply to both the track runners and the road racers. The same training formula appeared to these scientists to be equally beneficial to all of the runners.

It so happens that I’m currently collaborating on a book with Ben Rosario. This post was inspired by two separate bits of this book: 1) Ben’s telling of the Stephanie Bruce anecdote I’ve retold here and 2) the training plans I’ve created for inclusion in the book. These plans cover every race distance from 5K to 100 miles, and I myself have been struck by how similar they are in terms of volume, intensity distribution, and workout types. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that you could prepare optimally for a 100-miler with one of the 5K plans or vice versa, but as a collective the plans really are consistent with the “when you’re fit, you’re fit” philosophy Ben and I share. Online versions will be available here soon.

(Yes, this entire article was nothing more than a buildup to a product tease.)

Leon Fleisher died recently. Man, what a life! Born in San Francisco in 1928 to Jewish immigrants, he started playing the piano at age four, and by nine he was proficient enough to become a student of renowned teacher Artur Schnabel. At 16, Fleisher made his Carnegie Hall debut, and by his mid-20s he was widely considered one of the greatest pianists in the world, if not the very best.

Then, at 36, Fleisher mysteriously lost the use of his right hand. That would be a lot for anyone to deal with, but for him it was cruelly devastating. Yet Fleisher persevered through the affliction with admirable resilience and adaptability. Predictably, he shifted some of his energies into teaching and conducting, but he also continued to play the piano, albeit one-handed. In interviews he often suggested that losing the use of his right hand expanded his creativity and forced him to think more deeply about music, saying in one interview, “Limitations are the food of the creator” (a line he attributed to the great German writer Johann von Goethe, though I’ve found no evidence he actually said it).

My refamiliarization with Fleisher’s story was timely. The day he died, I took part in a “Fireside Chat” on Zoom that was hosted by the online running club Endeavorun and featured elite miler Kyle Merber as guest speaker. Among the things Kyle talked about was how he’s adapted his training and overall approach to running in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. He told us he’s been experimenting with higher mileage, and the results have been so positive that he fully intends to continue running more than he used to even after things get back to normal. Kyle also said that training with less structure has given him the freedom to force things less than he used to do when he trained with teammates under a coach’s eye every day—for example, easing into hard intervals on the track rather than pushing to keep up with whoever had the best legs on a given day—and he hopes to be able to carry this adjustment forward as well.

In this analogy, the pandemic is the equivalent of Fleisher’s paralysis and Kyle’s training innovations are the equivalent of Fleisher’s becoming a brilliant left-handed pianist and learning to think more deeply about music. And Fleisher is hardly alone in his Fleisher-like response to the Coronavirus crisis. In fact, pretty much every elite endurance athlete and coach resilient and intelligent enough to meet the challenge has done so in similar fashion.

Take Ben Rosario, for example, my friend and coach of Hoka NAZ Elite. Ben has come up with a couple specific ways of adjusting to life without racing opportunities that he intends to continue using with his runners even after the races return. The one I find most interesting has to do with the fact that, for NAZ Elite, being stuck in place has mean being stuck at 7,000 feet of altitude, where it’s tough to do race simulation-type workouts because runners can’t run as fast up there. To make the best of the situation, Ben tested out what he calls “squeeze-down intervals,” where instead of trying to hold a steady, aggressive pace throughout an interval, runners start on the slow side and accelerate in increments. For example, instead of running a 1500-meter interval at 4:15 pace from start to finish, the male runners on the team might run the first 400 meters in 75 seconds, the next in 70, the next in 65, and the final 300 in 45 seconds. Ben tells me that these tests have gone well—so well that he plans to keep squeeze-down intervals in the mix, in part because they happen to do a good job of simulating championship-style racing and in part because they have him feeling less compelled to get out of Flagstaff for certain training stimuli.

When I discussed these matters the other day with my friend Mike, he mentioned the story of the London Underground strike of 2014. Highly disruptive to the millions of Londoners who relied on the tube for their daily commute and other routine activities, the strike turned out to be a blessing in disguise in the sense that it impelled many to find alternative ways to get around town that they ultimately deemed preferable, hence retained after the strike ended. In an academic paper on the phenomenon titled “The Benefits of Forced Experimentation,” a team of economists concluded that “individuals seem to under-experiment during normal times, as a result of which constraints can be welfare-improving.”

In other words, it is human nature to get comfortable with existing routines, even in high-stakes forums like elite running, where the potential competitive benefits of successful experimentation are great. Disruptive events like the current pandemic have a way of forcing the experimentation athletes are reticent to self-initiate. This reality puts us in the odd position of hoping for disruptive events—which, let’s be honest, tend to be more cloud than silver lining—to strike us every now and again.

Or does it? First off, I should note that not all athletes and coaches are equally able to turn crises into opportunities. Nor are all athletes and coaches who are able to turn crises into opportunities equally dependent on external events to trigger innovation. With the right mindset, it’s possible to seek out disruption by self-imposing constraints or placing oneself in an environment or circumstances that will all but necessitate adaptation. One random example is relocating to Kenya for a training stint, something that many pro runners and even some recreational runners have done with great success, a success that comes not despite but because of its necessitation of running on bad roads at high altitude, adopting a very limited (but very healthy) diet, doing without your $1,000 compression boots and a whole lot else, and adjusting to the Kenyan training approach.

If you were to actually do this (as I myself have done), I can guarantee you’d return home a changed runner and eagerly incorporate some of your “Kenyan ways” into your regular routine. And there are a million other ways to force experimentation as an athlete, any of which may yield an improved routine, and all of which will render you better prepared to make the best of the next unchosen disruption.

By the way, Leon Fleisher gradually regained the use of his right hand in the 1990s and died as he’d (virtually) been born: a two-handed pianist.

Lieutenant Commander Spock is one of the most iconic nonhuman (well, technically half-human) characters in television history. When I watched Star Trek as a child, my understanding was that Spock’s lack of emotion made him really smart. I’m not sure if this was Gene Roddenberry’s actual intent in creating the character, but regardless, my impressionable young mind’s exposure to him left me with the idea that emotion is the enemy of reason.

As an adult, I learned that the truth—at least for humans—is more complex. It was the work of neuroscientist and author Antonio Damasio in particular that cured me of the fallacy I’d absorbed from Spock. The reality is that a brilliant mathematician would be incapable of solving complex problems if he didn’t feel unsettled while the problem remained unsolved and didn’t experience a burst of euphoria (“Eureka!”) when at last he solved it. People who lose their capacity to emote as the result of brain damage also lose the ability to think logically, because it turns out human beings can’t think logically if they can’t feel sadness, joy, and all the rest.

Be that as it may, in everyday life emotion gets in the way of rational decision-making all the time. I see this particularly with athletes. Consider, for example, a runner in his 40s who refuses to do a certain kind of workout because he can’t hit the times he used to hit when he did it in his 30s. Doing the workout anyway would help him run to the best of his current ability nevertheless, and on some level he knows this, yet still he refuses to do it.

As an athlete myself, I try to be vigilant in my efforts to avoid making similar mistakes, but I don’t always succeed. Here’s a recent example: I was in Rhode Island, visiting my parents, and I had an 18-mile run on my schedule. My brother Josh was also in town and planned to run 10 miles on the same day. So I decided to start ahead of him and run eight miles alone, then finish up with him. At the time I was recovering from a groin injury that was more sensitive to pace than to distance, and during the first part of the run I got a little frisky, running a 7:17 mile that aggravated the injury.

I should have bailed out right there, but I don’t get many opportunities to run with my brother, so I forged ahead, rationalizing my emotional decision by telling myself that it wouldn’t be a problem because Josh runs a lot slower than I do. Trouble was, Josh had gotten a lot fitter since the last time I ran with him, and he was joining me with fresh legs and some excitement of his own about running with me. And so, those last 10 miles were only slightly slower than the first eight and my groin became more and more painful as we went. Six weeks later, I’m still recovering from this boneheaded misstep.

One group of athletes that does a really good job of putting reason ahead of emotion in the decision-making process is the professionals. If you haven’t spent a lot of time around elite endurance athletes, you might assume that the biggest difference between them and the rest of us, psychologically, is that they are more driven, perhaps also tougher. But I have spent a great deal of time with the pros, and based on this experience I believe that the biggest difference is that the pros have better judgment. You might say they are better able to channel their inner Spock.

Just the other day I saw an Instagram post from Northern Arizona Elite coach Ben Rosario that speaks to this point. The post shared a bit of the backstory behind NAZ Elite runner Stephanie Bruce’s decision to run the California International Marathon (which doubled as the 2018 U.S. Marathon Championship) just four weeks after racing the New York City Marathon, a gamble that paid off in the form of a second-place finish and a new PR of 2:29:21. Recalling the moment Steph proposed this gamble, Ben wrote, “My initial reaction was that she was thinking emotionally, rather than rationally. She assured me that was not the case, however, and laid out her reasoning in a very calm manner.”

Ben didn’t get into the details of the case Steph made, but I can make some educated guesses. She probably noted that, since the 2018 season was essentially over either way, it didn’t much matter if she thrashed herself a bit in Sacramento, as she had the whole winter to regenerate and build a fresh base. She may also have noted that it didn’t much matter either if she raced poorly in Sacramento, as she’d had a great season and wouldn’t weaken her professional stock by laying an egg in a situation where she would have every excuse for so doing.

After the decision to go forward was made, coach and athlete continued to make smart, rational decisions. “We took a week totally off after NYC,” Ben wrote, “followed by a week of very easy running. Then we did 4 workouts in the 2 weeks leading up to CIM.” In other words, the Ben and Steph did not compound their gamble by taking an aggressive approach to training.

Avoiding irrational, emotion-based decisions as an athlete is easier if, like Stephanie Bruce, you have a coach. If you’re self-coached, making good decisions will require that cultivate your inner Spock—an internal voice of reason that plays the same role that a coach would play on your behalf if you did have one. This works best if, when you step into this role, you regard the athlete-you as a different person, someone whose best interests you have at heart but who has more at stake than you do. When I perform this exercise, I sometimes pretend the athlete-me is a character in a book I’m reading, a protagonist I’m rooting for but with a degree of detachment.

Have you ever been in a bad relationship that everyone close to you knew was bad and yet it took you forever to see the truth for yourself? This happens to almost everyone, because it’s harder to see things as they are and to think and behave rationally with respect to your own life than with respect to other people’s. That’s why cultivating an internal Spock is an effective way to make decisions as an athlete.

It’s a long process, though. Achieving the same level of judgment the pros have will require that you train yourself to take a mental step back from your situation each and every time an impactful decision is to be made, such as “Do I rest this sore foot or go ahead with today’s scheduled run?” or “Do I race that half marathon three weeks before my marathon or bunker down and train instead?” You’ll have to do this again and again and again before it becomes instinctual and you consistently make decisions that subjugate emotion to reason. But you won’t regret the effort.

On October 3, 2018, runnerworld.com published an article titled, “Galen Rupp: American Record Could Go Down in Chicago.” In its ninth paragraph, after providing some background on the existing American record for the marathon and Rupp’s buildup to the 2018 Chicago Marathon, writer Sarah Lorge Butler hedged, “To be clear, Rupp says, he’d rather win in Chicago than run a record and lose.” When I read the article, I thought nothing of this remark, accepting Rupp’s attitude as a given in a top professional distance runner, not to mention the defending champion of the Chicago Marathon. But at the bottom of the page I discovered a reader comment that made my mouth fall open: “He would rather win in a slow time then [sic] get the American record and lose? Seems like he has his priorities backwards.”

Prior to October 3, 2018, I had wondered often whether professional running and amateur running were even the same sport. This comment, insofar as it is representative of amateur thinking, confirmed for me that, in fact, they are not.

Imagine a basketball star saying before an important game, “As long as I score the most points, I don’t care if the team loses.” You can’t, can you? And that’s because everyone knows that the fundamental point of a basketball game is to win! Why should running be any different?

What many amateur runners fail to consider is that before the advent of modern timekeeping, all running races were very small—limited to a handful of participants, and often just two (match races). Mass participation made no sense in the days before races were timed. If you did not have a legitimate chance of winning, there was absolutely no point in lining up. But timed mass-participation running events been around have long enough now that runners who are too slow to win and thus care only about their times have forgotten that nothing has changed for those runners who do have a legitimate chance to win competitions like the Chicago Marathon. The point of racing remains to win.

There’s nothing wrong with running for time. The pros care too, albeit secondarily, and as an amateur runner myself, racing for time is mainly what I do. But what isa problem is that, because professional runners and amateur runners operate in separate bubbles, the latter don’t learn much from the former and consequently rely on inferior methods in their pursuit of improvement. While the typical elite runner does 80 percent of her training at low intensity, eats a high-carb diet, and does functional strength training, the typical amateur runner does 50 percent of his training at moderate intensity, eats a low-carb diet, and either doesn’t strength train or does CrossFit.

As an endurance sports coach, nutritionist, and writer, I consider it my mission to bring elite practices to the masses, because they work better than the alternatives, whether you’re fast or slow, and whether you race to win or race for time. That’s my one and only shtick. This is why I’m so jazzed about Ben Rosario and Scott Fauble’s new book, Inside a Marathon. Ben is the coach of the Northern Arizona Elite professional running team, Scott one of its members, and their book offers a fascinating peek behind the veil that divides our sport’s elite and recreational chambers. It weaves together the journals that coach and athlete kept separately while Scott trained for the 2018 New York City Marathon, where Scott finished seventh (second American) in a PR time of 2:12:28. It also includes detailed training logs and superb color photos taken by Ben’s wife, Jen.

It works on every level. You can read it as a story, experiencing the highs and lows Ben and Scott experience as they work together toward the big climax. But you can also read it from your perspective as a self-interested runner who doesn’t give a crap how Scott fares in the Big Apple and cares only your own running. What you’ll see when you do is that preparing for and executing a successful marathon at the sport’s highest level is really one big exercise in problem solving, and the key to success is making good decisions all along the way.

One of my favorite chapters is Chapter 18, titled “Two Beaten Down, Exhausted Skeletons.” It deals with a point in Scott’s training when he is riding the fine line of overtraining. Halfway through a workout that is not going well, Ben pulls Scott aside and suggests he bail out. Scott protests, and after an honest and open exchange between the two men, they compromise. Scott does the next part of the workout and then calls it a day, skipping the last part. They both feel good about the decision and the ensuing days and weeks validate it as the right call.

This stuff is pure gold—a living example to all runners striving to “solve the problem” of getting faster. If you’re looking for a good running-related book to read, you can do no better than Inside a Marathon. It will not only entertain you but also influence you, so that a year from now you may find yourself doing the very same sport the pros do.

Order your copy of Inside a Marathon here and grab a copy of our 80/20 books on this page.

I’m currently coaching a runner, we’ll call in Dylan, who’s training for the Berlin Marathon. Recently he asked me why I’ve had him run his recent marathon-pace efforts at 6:51 per mile (2:59 marathon pace) when he hopes and (more or less) expects to run closer to 2:50 in Berlin. His concern was that I judged his goal to be out of reach.

I assured Dylan that I do believe his goal is realistic, but that, for the most part, workout pace targets should be based on a runner’s current fitness, not on his goal time. Aiming for pace targets that are based on your goal is a bit like doing your workouts with another runner who’s a little fitter than you and trying consistently to keep up. Assuming the workouts this other runner is doing are appropriately challenging for him or her, then they are almost by definition too challenging for you. Sure, you may survive a few of them by treating them as quasi-races, but in the long run you’ll overcook yourself.

I then told Dylan a story that Ben Rosario told me when I was training under him in Flagstaff last summer. It came from Ben’s time as a member of the Brooks-Hanson team. In the leadup to the 2004 Olympic Trials Marathon, Ben and his teammate Trent Briney were in a small group of athletes aiming for the Olympic B standard of 2:18 (both Ben and Trent had marathon PR’s of 2:21 at the time). Training went especially well for Trent, and a few weeks before the race he asked coaches Keith and Kevin Hanson if he could move up to the 2:15 group, which included Clint Verran and Brian Sell. Feeling that Trent had earned it, the brothers approved the request. Trent’s training continued to go well and in Birmingham he shocked the running world by blasting a 2:12:34, finishing fourth.

Ben told me he was convinced that Trent would not have run this fast if he had trained for a 2:12 all along, nor perhaps even if he’d trained for a 2:15 from the beginning. It was because he was always chasing targets that were appropriate to where he was at each step that he scored his breakthrough. The reason he told me this story was that Ben intended to take the same approach with me during the 13 weeks I trained under him in Flagstaff. I willingly submitted to the plan, felt terrific through the entire process, and ran my own breakthrough marathon at the end of it.

So, that’s the principle: Train as the athlete you are today, not as the athlete you hope to be on race day. The devil, of course, is in the details. Putting this principle into practice requires that you have an accurate knowledge of your current fitness level on which to base workout pace targets. There are three general ways to gain this knowledge: experience, testing, and on-the-fly. They are not mutually exclusive.

Experience: If you’ve been running competitively for a while, you have at least a pretty good sense of where you are fitness-wise at all times. You can use this self-knowledge to estimate your current performance capacity and select appropriate workout pace targets. For example, suppose you’ve just come off a training cycle that culminated in a PR 3:27:43 marathon, taken a week off, spent two more weeks slowly easing back into training, and are now ready to begin ramping up for another marathon PR attempt. In this case, based on your knowledge of how much fitness you’ve given up in past scenarios of this type, you might estimate your current marathon performance capacity to be in the 3:42 range and base your initial workout pace targets on this estimate (using either my 80/20 Zone calculator or Greg McMillan’s Running Calculator).

Testing: Alternatively (or additionally), you can measure your current fitness level more formally by performing a time trial, going in for a lactate threshold test, getting a lactate threshold or VO₂max estimate from a device such as a Garmin Forerunner, or racing. Bear in mind that it’s generally not a good idea to race too early in a new training cycle and that testing-based measurements become outdated as your fitness improves, so you will need a means of adjusting them that does not entail doing a race or time trial every weekend! To that end, keep reading.

On-the-fly: The on-the-fly method of setting workout pace targets consists of always doing workouts of a given time at the same effort level and allowing your numbers to slowly improve as you gain fitness. For example, early in a training cycle you might choose to target a pace of 6:56 per mile in a set of lactate threshold intervals based on either experience or testing. An appropriately designed and executed lactate threshold intervals session will feel “comfortably hard” and leave you tired but not exhausted. If you pay attention to your perception of workout and allow it to regulate your pace appropriately in all such workouts, you may automatically do the next workout of this kind in the cycle at 6:53 per mile, the next at 6:51, and so on.

Make sense?

Pacing is the art of getting to the finish line of a race in the least amount of time possible given the current state of your body (fitness and fatigue levels, etc.) and external conditions. Generally, this requires that you distribute your effort quite evenly throughout the race and that this evenly distributed effort leave you tired enough in the approach to the finish line that you are able to speed up a little but not much.

It has been my observation as a coach that most runners aren’t very good at pacing. Knowing a thing or two about the science of pacing, I am not surprised by the pervasiveness of this weakness. There is no test, calculator, or device that can tell a runner how to pace a race optimally. Pacing is and always will be a form of guessing based on subjective perceptions. Specifically, pacing entails using perception of effort, or your global sense of how hard you are working, to adjust your speed so that, at every moment throughout a race, you feel you are running at the highest speed you can sustain to the finish line. In other words, pacing is a skill that requires you to interpret a feeling (perception of effort) through the lens of external information (your conscious knowledge of how far away the finish line is) to make a prediction (whether you can sustain your current speed to the finish line) that could yield disastrous consequences if it is even slightly inaccurate. Not easy.

Try this Simple Pacing Games

Like all skills, though, pacing ability can be improved. As a coach, I try to help my athletes become better pacers by incorporating simple pacing games into their workouts. Each of these exercises offers an opportunity to practice linking perception of effort with external measures, which is the essence of the skill. Give them a try!

Human Autosplit

Turn on the autosplit function on your running watch so that you are notified when you’ve completed each mile (or kilometer) of a run and the time is captured. Throughout your low-intensity easy runs and long runs, when you hear your watch beep to signal a completed mile or kilometer, try to guess your split time to the exact second before you look at the display. If you do this consistently, making it a habitual component of every low-intensity run, you’ll get really good at it.

Metronomic Repeats

In workouts that feature intervals or repeats of a uniform distance, try to run precisely the same time (down to the tenth of a second in shorter intervals) in all of them. For example, suppose your workout comprises 6 x 1 mile at 10K race pace with 1:00 rests between repeats. If you happen to run the first mile in 6:22, do your best to run each subsequent mile in 6:22 also. Obviously, to get the desired training effect from such a workout, it’s enough to just be in the right ballpark with your interval times. But by raising your standard of consistency, you will get a second benefit from the workout, which is improved pacing ability.

Thin-Sliced Cutdowns

Cutdown intervals are intervals of a uniform distance or duration in which you try to run each one a little faster than the one before. Cutdown interval workouts that feature a large number of intervals offer an excellent opportunity to refine your control of effort.

One such workout, which I learned from HOKA One One Northern Arizona Elite coach Ben Rosario, consists of 10 x 1:00 uphill, where you are required to cover more distance in each rep than you did in the one before, finishing with an all-out effort. Obviously, you could cheat by walking the first rep, then speed-walking the second, and so forth. But the idea is to do the first rep at an honest effort that leaves just enough room to increase your effort nine notches more through the remainder of the session.

When I do this workout, I carry an extra pair of socks. At the instant I complete the first 1:00 hill repetition, I toss down a sock as a marker. In the next rep, I toss down the second sock, hoping to get about 10 feet beyond the first sock when a minute is up. Then I pick up the first sock while jogging back down the hill to my starting point, and so on.

Research suggests that all runners get better at pacing automatically through the process of accumulating training and racing experience. Indeed, there is no substitute for experience when it comes to mastering the skill of pacing. However, you will improve more quickly if your consciously and routinely practice your pacing through games like those I just described than you will if you just train without ever really thinking about pacing.

Try this Simple Pacing Games

Human Autosplit

Metronomic Repeats

Thin-Sliced Cutdowns

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