Brain Training for Runners

Among the first books I read after graduating from college (and thereby gaining the freedom to create my own syllabus) was Richard Rorty’s Truth and Progress. It served as my introduction to pragmatic philosophy, and I liked it. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that—very broadly—understands knowing the world as inseparable from agency within it.” To the pragmatist, truth is not an abstraction. When a belief solves a problem or is otherwise useful, it is true. There is, from the pragmatic perspective, no other viable standard by which to judge the veracity of an idea.

When I discovered pragmatism at age 22, I couldn’t have imagined how profoundly this way of thinking would influence my future work as an endurance coach, but it has—and for the better, I believe. There is a ruthlessness about pragmatism that I find comforting. Every move I make, or even consider making, as a coach is judged by the sole criterion of how well it works (within the parameters of legality and ethics). I don’t care what it is, where it came from, or how disruptive it might be to my existing beliefs—if it works better than any practical alternative, I apply it.

But doesn’t every coach do this? Hell, no! A lot of coaches spend zero time reflecting on their criteria for selecting methods to apply. If you ask a randomly selected coach to explain the standards they use to determine which methods to employ and which to disregard, there’s a good chance they will struggle to answer, because they’re never asked themselves this simple question. And when you lack a clear, conscious understanding of your selection criterion, all kinds of other standards besides practical utility sneak in.

One example is the credit criterion. Many coaches—often without conscious awareness—want to take all of the credit for any success their athletes achieve. This makes them territorial, unreceptive to ideas and expertise that come from outside themselves. Suppose a runner who has a history of hitting the wall in marathons mentions to her coach that she has a friend who overcame the same problem through the use of back-to-back long runs, and asks him (her coach) if he thinks the same method might also help her. The territorial type of coach who needs all of the credit is likely to reflexively dismiss this idea, not on its merits but simply because it wasn’t his idea.

Another common mistake of this general sort that some coaches make is refusing to change their mind in response to evidence that they were wrong about something. When Emerson wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” he was referring to this form of prideful stubbornness, which can be quite damaging when exercised by people in positions of authority. As a person in a position of authority myself, I understand the temptation to keep giving athletes the same bad advice even after it has been revealed to me that a particular piece of advice I’ve been giving, thinking it good, is in fact bad. It’s embarrassing to admit you were wrong. Still, though, I’d rather live with some embarrassment and give athletes good advice going forward than continue giving them bad advice for the sake of sparing myself a little embarrassment.

The most embarrassingly bad advice I’ve ever given to athletes is Chapter 5 of Brain Training for Runners, where I essentially argue that there is only one correct way to run and I provide detailed guidance on how to run that way. I don’t know what drug I was on when I wrote that chapter, but the spell broke soon afterward and I awoke to the truth that each runner has their own optimal stride and that the best way to achieve it is to simply run without thinking about your form. I wish I could track down and burn every copy of Brain Training for Runners, but that’s impractical, so I’m doing the next best thing, which is admitting my error.

I realize that most of the folks reading this article are not coaches, but single-minded pragmatism is every bit as useful for the self-coached athlete as it is for coaches. The best way to get started with it is by considering why you do what you do as an athlete. For example, do you do CrossFit workouts because elite endurance athletes strength train that way (they don’t) or because it’s there? Do you put more time and energy into your strongest triathlon discipline than your weakest one because that’s the most effective way to elevate your overall triathlon training performance (it’s not) or because you least enjoy training in your weakest discipline?

I’m not suggesting that every recreational endurance athlete should feel 100 percent obligated to always do what works best. If you want to race so often that you never race at your best because you enjoy racing frequently, go for it. All I’m saying is that you should make all of your training decisions with completely open eyes and that, to the extent that you do care about performance, pragmatism should be your sole selection criterion in your athletic decision making. Give it a try. I’m confident you will find that, at the very least, coaching yourself the Richard Rorty way brings a comforting level of clarity to the process of choosing what to do and what not to do as an athlete.

Every once in a while an athlete asks me if the training plans offered in one of my older books such as Braining Training for Runners or Triathlete Magazine’s Essential Week-by-Week Training Guide are still relevant or have been rendered obsolete by the 80/20 training plans I peddle today. My stock answer to this question is that my overall training philosophy has never changed; it just has a name now. In other words, my older training plans are 80/20 plans in all but name.

Let’s not forget how the whole thing came about. In the early 2000’s, exercise physiologist Stephen Seiler set out to quantify the training practices of elite endurance athletes in various disciplines and geographical locations. His main finding was that, across the board, these athletes do about 80 percent of their training at low intensity and 20 percent at moderate to high intensity. But it’s not as if they only started training this way the day before Seiler showed up with his calculator. As I point out in 80/20 Running, four-time Boston Marathon and New York City Marathon winner Bill Rodgers did about 80 percent of his training at low intensity in the 1970s, as did 800m and 1500m Olympic gold medalist Peter Snell in the 1960s. As a high school runner in the 1980s, I was trained by coaches influenced by Snell’s coach, the legendary Arthur Lydiard, who pioneered the high-volume, mostly low-intensity approach to endurance training we call 80/20 today. I’ve never known any other way.

So, the only thing that’s really new is the phenomenon of nonelite endurance athletes consciously trying to adhere to an 80/20 intensity balance in training. Predictably, some of these athletes have become somewhat obsessive about the 80/20 Rule, going to great lengths to make sure they don’t deviate from it and fretting about the potential consequences of straying accidentally. Online 80/20 forums are rife with questions from athletes who seem to invest these numbers with an almost totemic authority. “Just tell me what to do, oh mighty 80/20 Rule!”

Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit, but I do see a fair number of athletes overthinking the whole 80/20 thing, and it concerns me. Here’s something I would like these athletes to know: Today’s elite athletes still don’t consciously adhere to an 80/20 intensity balance. Just as Bill Rodgers and company did 40-plus years ago, the champions of our time practice the 80/20 method by default, using other rules of intensity balance that, in practice, result in 80 percent of training being done at low intensity. As a nonelite athlete, you can employ the same rules to make 80/20 training easier, or to rescue yourself from the rabbit hole of overthinking intensity balancing.

First Rule

The first rule is this: Be sure you’re actually at low intensity when you intend to be. Elite athletes never fail in this regard. Their easy swims, rides, and runs are truly easy, by which I mean that they are performed entirely below the first ventilatory threshold, which falls between 77 and 81 percent of maximum heart rate in most athletes. In contrast to this, most recreational endurance athletes do most of their easy training slightly above the VT1, which is technically moderate intensity, and creates a significantly greater fatigue burden.

Second Rule

Rule number two is this: Devote roughly one out of every three training sessions you do to moderate or high intensity. Again, this is how elite endurance athletes and their coaches balance training intensities. The typical elite runner, for example, runs 13 times per week and three of those runs are set aside for focused work at moderate to high intensity. By planning at the level of session types in this manner, elite endurance athletes end up spending very close to 80 percent of their training time at low intensity without ever actually thinking about time-based intensity distribution. If you train less frequently—say, six or seven times per week, as a plurality of recreational endurance athletes do—applying the same rule yields two moderate/high-intensity sessions per week. Pretty basic.

You can fine-tune intensity balance within this framework by adjusting the duration of individual sessions. Bigger tempo and interval workouts will make a bigger contribution to the moderate/high-intensity side of the ledger, while smaller ones will make a smaller contribution. There’s no need to get overly fussy in adjusting the size of your “quality” sessions for the explicit sake of nailing an 80/20 intensity balance for the week. Instead you can simply plan workouts that make sense in the overall context of your training, trusting that by doing so you’ll end up close to 80/20.

If you are the type of athlete who tends to lose the forest of training principles for the trees of quantitative minutiae, consider zooming out in the manner I’ve just suggested. Forget about 80/20 per se and concentrate instead on planning out your weeks by session type and on ensuring that you remain consistently at low intensity when you intend to be. If this approach seems rather inexact to you, well, this just means that exactitude is overrated!

$ubscribe and $ave!

  • Access to over 600 plans
  • Library of 5,000+ workouts
  • TrainingPeaks Premium
  • An 80/20 Endurance Book

 

30 day money back guarentee

For as little as $2.32 USD per week, 80/20 Endurance Subscribers receive:

  • 30-day Money Back Guarantee