Ironman World Championship – 80/20 Endurance

If you could choose one athletic superpower to exploit in your future training and racing, what would it be? Here’s the rule: Your superpower has to be a natural human trait that actually exists in some athletes, not a magical attribute like Pogo Feet or Turbo Mode. Potent, yet real.

If I were I to collect a hundred answers to this question from everyday athletes like you, I would be surprised if a plurality didn’t choose toughness (or resilience or grit) as their superpower. That’s not a bad pick. Toughness is very useful in endurance sports. But as a coach, I believe there’s another trait that is even more useful as an athletic superpower: restraint.

Surprised? That’s understandable. But give me a chance to explain what restraint can do for an endurance athlete, after which, I’m confident, you’ll agree that it is the best superpower one could possibly have. First, though, let’s talk about two other traits that are highly useful to endurance athletes: motivation and judgment.

Motivation is critically important in both training and racing. To achieve maximal performance in competition, athletes must attain maximal fitness in training, which requires that they put in large volumes of work with great consistency, which in turn demands a very high level of motivation. In a 1987 interview, six-time Ironman world champion Dave Scott said, “I had this idea that if I trained more than anyone else, I was bound to succeed.” It’s one thing to have this idea, quite another to execute on it. Dave was able to because he had an unmatched desire to train.

In races, motivation contributes directly to performance. According to Samuele Marcora’s psychobiological model of endurance performance, endurance performance is limited not by physiological factors such as lactate buildup, which merely constrain performance, but by psychology. A 2010 overview of the theory describes it as follows:
The Psychobiological model is based on the Brehm’s Motivational Intensity Theory, which consists of two main constructs: potential motivation and motivation intensity. Potential motivation refers to the maximum effort a person is willing to exert to satisfy a motive (e.g., to succeed in the exercise task), while motivation intensity is the amount of effort that people actually expend. The Brehm’s Motivational Intensity Theory postulates that individuals will engage in a task (i.e., exert effort) as long as: a) the level of potential motivation is not reached; or b) the task is still viewed as possible. If the former is reached or the task is perceived as impossible, individuals should disengage from the task. In the light of the Psychobiological model, the point of exhaustion during exercise is a form of task disengagement, in which individuals will exercise until a) the perception of effort raises to the critical level set by the potential motivation; or b) believe to be physically unable to maintain the task. In the latter case, they believed to have exerted a true maximal effort, and the continuation of exercise is perceived as impossible.

As you see, motivation is the lynchpin of this particular model of endurance performance, which has received a lot of experimental validation since it was introduced. For example, a 2020 study led by Ian Taylor of Loughborough University found that, within a group of forty athletes, those who scored higher on a measure of autonomous motivation reported “lower temptation to reduce effort and higher value of goal pursuit” in a 10-minute cycling task and also performed better in that task. When the limit is psychological, psychology moves the limit.

There’s less research on the influence of judgment on outcomes in endurance sports, but do we really need it? I see it every day in my work as a coach. The majority of recreational endurance athletes self-limit in various ways as a consequence of imperfect judgment. They spend too much time training at moderate intensity, don’t vary their workouts adequately, race too often, put little thought into their training plan selection, blow their pacing in workouts, fail to modify their training appropriately based on how their body has responded to completed training, follow fad diets instead of eating like the elites, the list goes on. True, some of these bad decisions can be attributed to naivete, but others continue to be made even when athletes know better and therefore must be attributed to poor judgment. Athletes who possess or develop good judgment learn to avoid such mistakes, and they benefit tremendously as a result. It really pays to have good judgment as an endurance athlete.

The reason restraint trumps both judgment and motivation as an athletic superpower is that it essentially combines these two things. By definition, restraint is a conscious act of resisting an impulse, and an impulse, by definition, is a motivated desire to perform a specific action. Without motivation, therefore, there is no need to exercise restraint. Nor is there a need to exercise restraint when a particular impulse is judged to be consistent with a person’s larger objectives. Only when an impulse contradicts such objectives—as when a person who’s sworn off alcohol feels an impulse to have a glass of wine—is restraint called for.

So you see, an athlete must be both motivated and capable of making good decisions to exercise restraint. This makes restraint a superior virtue to motivation alone, which often results in foolish risks, and judgment alone, which is of as little use as a steering while without an engine.

I will illustrate the rewards of exercising restraint and the consequences of failing to do so with a pair of excerpts from my book On Pace: Discover How to Run Every Race At Your Real Limit. First the consequences:

Professional triathlete Jesse Thomas came into the 2016 Ironman World Championship with a solid plan. On the basis of prior experience at the Ironman distance as well as recent training performance, he had identified a power target that he intended to sustain throughout the bike leg. A strong runner (he’d won state championships in track and cross country in high school and earned All-American status in the same sports at Stanford University), Thomas needed to ride hard enough to avoid giving up too much ground to the competition but not so hard that his legs had nothing left for the marathon, and his power target struck this balance.

It was a sound plan. But when he got out onto the bike course and found himself being left behind by uber-cyclists Sebastian Kienle and Michael Weiss, Thomas cast aside his pre-race strategy and gave chase. Upon reaching the 60-mile mark in the hilltop village of Hawaii, Thomas discovered that his average power output up to that point exceeded not just the target he’d set but also his average power in a recent race of half the distance, Ironman 70.3 Santa Cruz.

“And then I just completely crumbled,” Thomas told a reporter for Triathlete after his disappointing 16^th-place finish. “It was a long, long, long day.”

Now the rewards:

An historical counterpoint to Jesse Thomas’s long, long, long day at the 2016 Ironman World Championship was Mark Allen’s performance at the same event nineteen years earlier. It was Allen’s swan song as a professional triathlete, a do-or-die attempt to match his former rival Dave Scott’s record six world titles at age thirty-seven. Cycling power meters did exist back then, so Allen’s plan for the bike leg was to keep his heart rate at or below 150 beats per minute, a number that, like Thomas’s wattage target, he’d arrived at through experience. In the early miles, Allen lost his lead to a pair of younger Germans, the strongest of whom, Thomas “Hell on Wheels” Hellriegel, eventually built a seemingly insurmountable advantage of 13:31 over the five-time champion. But Allen didn’t fall so far behind because he couldn’t go faster. Rather, he lost ground because he chose not to go faster, knowing that sticking to his plan gave him the best chance of winning, regardless of what anyone else did. Resisting the temptation to push harder wasn’t easy, but Allen’s Ulysses-like discipline was rewarded when an overcooked Hellriegel cracked during the marathon and Allen slid past him and into history.

I love seeing the athletes I coach exercise restraint, and love it even more when they do so in situations where they previously wouldn’t have, demonstrating growth in this area. Recently a runner I coach sent me a message through TrainingPeaks letting me know he was feeling tempted to turn the easy 2-hour run on the calendar that day into a long tempo run and seeking my input—thumbs up or thumbs down. I replied with an emphatic thumbs down, but by then my athlete had already set out on the run. Afterward, he reported to me that he had made his own decision to restrain himself, completing the session as planned instead of running hard. I praised him fulsomely for his restraint, for I have found that rewarding restraint encourages it. If you’re self-coached, be sure to give yourself a pat on the back when you exercise restraint. Over time, such positive reinforcement will make restraint your athletic superpower.

On January, 22, 2020, five days after thirty-eight year old Sara Hall set a new American record of 1:07:15 for the half marathon, Women’s Running magazine published an article titled “Sara Hall Shares 7 Keys to Her Longevity of Excellence.” For your convenience, I have copied the article’s section headings, which neatly summarize Hall’s secrets, and pasted them here:

“Immersing herself in the love of running”
“Being relentlessly resilient”
“Embracing imperfection”
“Trusting and adapting in training”
“Keeping the faith”
“Focusing on a full life”
“Turning disappointment into teaching moments”

There’s a lot of wisdom packed in these few phrases, but do they constitute a complete recipe for “longevity of excellence”? Of course not, as I’m sure Hall herself would agree. One additional nugget of advice I would offer to aging endurance athletes is this: Assume nothing. By this I mean that you must not assume you will slow down, or your training capacity will decrease, as you get older. Just keep chugging along as though you are immune to the laws of nature that affect other aging athletes and see what happens.

I first heard this advice many years ago from Dave Scott, the legendary six-time Ironman world champion. When Scott was twenty-eight he told his girlfriend Linda Buchanan that he wanted to be even fitter at forty than he was then. Well, he got his wish. In 1994, three months shy of his forty-first birthday, Scott narrowly missed winning a seventh Ironman title, finishing a close second to thirty-year-old Greg Welch. “I didn’t feel like there were any boundaries,” Scott told me years later. “I was constantly reminded of how old I was, but those comments went in one ear and out the other.”

Psychologists have demonstrated that expectations of all kinds tend to be self-fulfilling. It’s not surprising, then, that athletes like Dave Scott, who perform as well after forty as they did before, tend to share a defiant attitude toward the aging process. Some even talk about aging as an advantage. “The more you age, the more you’re getting stronger,” said twenty-seven-time world record-breaker Haile Gebrselassie at a press conference before the 2010 New York City Marathon, when he was officially thirty-seven years old but probably closer to forty-one. “I still feel like age of twenty.” Alas, Gebrselassie wound up DNF’ing the next day, but three years later he was still winning major races, including the Vienna Half Marathon.

Let’s be clear: Age is more than just a number. It is an inexorable biological process ending in death. Athletes who extend their peak performance years into their forties by virtue of high expectations are not defying the laws of nature. If it were not physically possible to set an American record at thirty-eight, Sara Hall would not have done so. In continuing to improve as they approach middle age, the Sara Halls of the world are merely exploiting a possibility that exists in all of us.

This was shown in a recent study by researchers at Germany’s Martin Luther University. The purpose of the study was to identify differences in how older and younger athletes tolerate and recover from high-intensity interval training. Two groups of twelve well-trained cyclists and triathletes, one with an average age of twenty-four and the other with an average age of forty-seven, completed a series of HIIT sessions. During and after each workout, a variety of physiological measurements were taken in an effort to assess how stressful the interval set was for the individual and how quickly the athlete recovered. For example, the researchers looked at the rate at which lactate was cleared from the bloodstream during recovery intervals. They found no differences between the two groups in any of these measurements, leading them to conclude (in language so bloodlessly scientific it’s almost self-parodying), “[I]t seems that the trainability of the organism is maintained.”

Findings like this one suggest that, for athletes over forty who experience a marked decline in performance, the flesh is willing but the spirit is weak. This was certainly Dave Scott’s take, as he explained in the above-referenced conversation: “I think it comes back to how hungry you are in your workouts and how intense you are in your workouts. I coach regular folks. I have thirty-year-old’s, forty-year-old’s, fifty-year-old’s, sixty-year-old’s. . . The intensity of the workouts drops off as people age. They allow it to.”

I’m no Dave Scott or Haile Gebrselassie or Sara Hall, but I am living proof that mere mortals too can extend their peak performance years into their forties if they let the chatter about age go in one ear and out the other. Having raced my first Ironman at thirty-one, I completed my fastest Ironman at forty-eight. Having raced my first marathon at twenty-eight, I completed my fastest marathon at forty-six. And having raced my first 10K at twelve, I completed my fastest one at forty-nine. I repeat: Assume nothing!

Last year I was contacted by a very interesting person, we’ll call him Brad, who became a professional skateboarder in his teens, then transitioned to professional snowboarding, and then made a go of qualifying for the PGA Tour (making is as far as the Nationwide Tour), and subsequently started getting into triathlon. Now in his 50s, Brad told me he aspired to reach the elite level of Ironman racing despite his age and despite a total lack of endurance training experience. He further explained that he had no interest in short-term competitive goals except inasmuch as they might helped him get to the elite level.

After taking all of this in (and you must admit it was quite a lot to take in), I told Brad that my advice for him was to proceed as if his actual motivations were flipped on their head, which is to say, as if all he cared about was training for and completing races and wasn’t at all concerned about where it all led. Before I explain why I said this, let me tell you about another triathlete, “Mark,” to whom I recently gave similar advice.

Mark is a 40-something triathlete who is chasing the goal of qualifying for the Ironman World Championship and has been held back by a comparatively weak run leg. When I started coaching Mark this summer, we decided to address his Achilles heel by completing a run focus phase culminating in an attempt to break three hours in a solo marathon time trial. A few of weeks ago, after a mildly disappointing marathon-pace training run, Mark realized he wasn’t on track to clock 2:59 on the scheduled time-trial date and asked me what I thought about delaying the attempt several weeks to give him more time to get fitter. I told him I thought this was a bad idea and urged him to stay the course, arguing that doing so would better serve the greater goal of becoming a better runner.

Fitness Building and Athletic Development

Now to explain. Both Brad and Mark were struggling to conceptualize the difference between fitness building and athletic development. We all know what building fitness is—it’s a process by which progressive training is used to stimulate physiological adaptations that increase an athlete’s performance capacity. This process is distinct from the process of becoming a better athlete, which is what athletic development is all about. It goes without saying that you can’t become a better athlete without getting fitter, but the two phenomena operate on different timescales. An athlete cannot build fitness uninterruptedly for more than 24 weeks, give or take. Athletic development, by contrast, can continue for years and indeed requires years to complete.

It’s not a perfect analogy, but the relationship between building fitness and athletic development is similar to the relationship between recovery and building fitness. The physiological adaptations that serve to increase fitness are largely extensions of acute post-exercise recovery processes. Similarly, athletic development is, to a large degree, an extension of fitness-building processes. But here’s the key: You can’t just keep getting fitter and fitter by imposing ever greater recovery needs through larger and larger training stresses. The body needs a reset every now again, during which period some hard-earned fitness is voluntarily given away so the body can achieve a deeper level of recovery than it can during times when fitness gains are actively pursued.

Imagine a runner who completes a well-designed, progressive, 14-week half-marathon training program, races a half marathon, and then takes it easy for two weeks before repeating the same 14-week half-marathon program and racing a second half marathon. I can all but guarantee this runner will perform better in the second half marathon than in the first. Why? Because although the training is the same, the runner is different. By virtue of having gained a lot of fitness in the first training cycle, and having given up only some of it in the following rest period in exchange for deep recovery, the runner will start the second training cycle at a higher performance level than they did the first and will therefore complete it at a higher level than they were at when they completed the first.

Exercise scientists typically measure fitness through inputs. Commonly used measures of endurance fitness such as Training Impulse (TRIMP) and Chronic Training Load (CTL) are calculated as rolling averages of recent training volume and intensity. By such measures, therefore, a runner who completes the same 14-week training plan twice will attain the same level of fitness at the end of each. Yet we know the hypothetical runner in the example I gave above will be a better runner at the end of the second cycle, and that, in a nutshell, is the difference between building fitness and athletic development.

It’s also why even the athlete who only cares out long-term development should focus on short-term fitness just as much as the athlete who can’t wait for the next racing opportunity. And it’s why our hypothetical runner is better off completing two separate training cycles separated by a rest period over the next 30 weeks than trying to develop at a sustainable rate over that same period, and why I told Brad to train for and compete in two to three Ironmans a year even though he had no chance of achieving the sort of results he dreamed of in the first several, and why I told Mark to finish what he’d started with his run focus phase and move on.

QED.

The 2020 Antrim Coast Half Marathon was exceptional simply by virtue of happening. It was one of the first sizeable road running events to take place after the COVID-19 pandemic swept the planet. But the race became even more exceptional when 60-year-old Irishman Tommy Hughes crossed the finish line in 1:11:09, smashing the age-group world record for the half-marathon distance.

You’re seeing this type of thing more and more these days—men and women redefining what’s possible for older endurance athletes. And it’s not just athletes like Tommy Hughes, who competed in the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, who are getting in on the action. At 49, I myself am doing things at a lower rung on the talent ladder that I wouldn’t have believed possible for me. This year alone I have finished second overall in the Orange County Half Marathon in 1:15:30, finished 14^th overall in the Los Angeles Marathon in 2:46:59 (on a course with more than 1,800 of elevation gain), run my fastest mile since high school (4:55), and run a 10K time trial in 33:25 (beating my official PR by nine seconds). None of these performances is anywhere near as impressive as Tommy Hughes’s world record, but that’s not the point. The point is that, as seems to be the case with so many older endurance athletes these days, age is not slowing me down nearly as much as it is supposed to be doing based on historical standards.

Fifty is the new forty?

We’ve all heard the expression “Fifty is the new forty,” and variations thereof. It makes a cliché of the observation that older people—or subgroups of older people, anyway—are behaving or performing or presenting themselves in ways we are accustomed to seeing only younger people do. The phrase makes no effort to explain the cause or causes of the phenomenon. So, let’s ask now: Why are lots of older endurance athletes these days performing at levels heretofore unseen in athletes their age?

I see three reasons:

1) more talent competing in the older ranks of endurance sports,

2) better methods and practices, and

3) the reinforcing psychosocial effect of raising the proverbial bar.

Let’s take a quick look at each.

Reasons why older endurance athletes perform at levels unseen in athletes their age

1. More talent

When I say there is more talent in the older ranks of endurance sports, I mean this in two ways. First, surveys like this one are reporting that there are simply more men and women over 40 participating in running events and triathlons, in particular. Additionally, a greater number of the most talented young endurance athletes are choosing to continue competing past 40. In the old days, most of the top endurance athletes in the older age groups were late starters—folks who in their 20s were working in offices rather than racing in the Olympics like Tommy Hughes.

Case in point: When I raced the 2017 Chicago Marathon at 46, one of my goals was to not get beaten by anyone older than me. That goal was made a mockery of Martin Fiz, 54, who clocked 2:28:09 to my 2:39:30. Fiz was the 1995 marathon world champion and set a PB of 2:08:05 in winning the 1997 Lake Biwa Marathon–a top professional run in his prime still at it well into middle age.

2. Better methods

It’s not just over-40 endurance athletes who are performing at historically high levels. So are active professional athletes over 35. Last year’s male winner of the Ironman World Championship (Jan Frodeno) was 38 years old. This year’s winner of the U.S. Olympic Trials Men’s Marathon (Abdi Abdirahman) was 43.

Professional endurance sports careers are getting longer, and they’re doing so largely because athletes are doing more to take care of their bodies. In past generations, a lot of elite athletes ate whatever, overtrained, and eschewed ancillary practices like mobility work. Nowadays, the typical pro place as high a priority on this stuff as they do on workouts, and the rewards are plain to see. The good news for recreational athletes is that they can reap the same rewards by prioritizing these same practices. Indeed, I believe that my longtime habit of mimicking elite methods of taking care of the body is the number-two reason I’m aging more successfully as an athlete than I expected to.

3. The Bannister effect

Athletic performance is psychologically limited by current standards. A higher level of performance that is possible physically doesn’t seem possible to an athlete if nobody around them is actually performing at that level. But when, for whatever reason, one or more athletes break through to attain that higher level, the proverbial floodgates open. This happened famously with the quest to break the four-minute mile barrier in the one-mile run. It took nine years for Roger Bannister to lower the world record from 4:01.3 to 3:59.4. In the next 18 months, 12 other men ran sub-four-miles. I think something similar is happening now among older endurance athletes generally.

The best part about this phenomenon is that you don’t have to be a record-setter to get in on the fun. I’m no record setter, but to no lesser degree than the likes of Tommy Hughes, I’m taking advantage of the 50-is-the-new-whatever phenomenon to achieve things I never dreamed I would be able to achieve at my age. And you can too, if you’re interested (and old).

Lastly, I mentioned above that better methods are the second-biggest factor in my successful aging as an athlete. Perhaps you’re wondering what the biggest factor is. I’ll tell you: Passion! My insatiable hunger to test my limits, more than anything else, I believe, has kept me from slowing down as much as I thought I would. But the very potency of this passion has a recursive effect. By this I mean that doing better than expected for my age fires me up to keep doing better. If I could speak only two words of advice to any athlete who wishes to age successfully fitness-wise, they would be these: Stay hungry!

I ran my first Boston Marathon in 2009. Although I came into the race super fit, having just lowered my half-marathon PB, I knew within 12 miles that I was in for yet another long and disappointing day at the 26-mile, 385-yard distance. At 16 miles, I saw my family, who, at great inconvenience to themselves, had come out to stand in the rain for a glimpse of me. My brother Josh broke form the curb and ran alongside me for a few seconds, checking in.

“How’s it going?” He asked.

“Terrible,” I said disgustedly.

“Really? Why?”

“Because I suck at running marathons!” I barked.

This was not mere tantruming on my part. I really did suck at running marathons. I’d run my first one ten years earlier, starting out at 2:45 pace, hitting the wall at 18 miles, walking for a while, and ultimately finishing in 3:38. My next marathon followed the same pattern, though I was able to improve my time to 3:11. When the 2009 Boston Marathon took place, my PR was down to 2:41, but my times at shorter distances suggested it should have been closer to 2:35. True marathon mastery still eluded me, a fact that was underscored by my performance in Boston, where I finished in 3:18, having been reduced to walking yet again.

Things didn’t change until 2017, when I ran eight marathons in eight weeks as part of an adventure that I documented in my memoir, Life Is a Marathon. Only the last of these events—the Eugene Marathon—was run as an all-out effort, but by the time I got to Oregon I was no longer the same runner who had fallen short of his potential in every previous all-out marathon. I finished that race in 2:49, well shy of my PR, but I was 46 years old then and exhausted from eight weeks on the road, and my training had been far from optimal during that time (featuring no speed work whatsoever, for example). What mattered to me was not my time but how I had executed the race. When I reviewed my performance afterward in my mind, I realized I hadn’t made a single mistake in my pacing, nutrition, self-talk, or any other dimension of race execution, and that I had therefore, for once, done the very best I was capable of that day.

Five months later, at the Chicago Marathon, I set a new PR of 2:39, confirming that, at long last, I had mastered the marathon distance.

Fast forward to this year. Two months shy of my 49^th birthday, I completed the brutally hilly Atlanta Marathon in 2:46:59, feeling very much on top of my game still. But then the bottom dropped out. I returned home from Atlanta carrying a virus that would lay me low for an entire month, decimating my fitness. When I was finally healthy enough to contemplate an athletic comeback, I quickly decided to race a virtual marathon that was then 5.5 weeks away.

It was a crazy idea, but somehow it just felt right. Only after it was behind me did I fully understand why. It’s no fun to suck at something, of course, but being so good at something that it’s no longer challenging and/or you’re no longer improving isn’t much fun either. I think I looked at the challenge of seeing how well I could prepare for a marathon in 5.5 weeks, and how well I could execute a marathon with questionable fitness, as an opportunity to test and stretch my marathon mastery. And it proved to be just that.

About halfway through the condensed training process, I got myself into a bit of a hole. A planned 23-mile run turned into a 12-miler, and my next two runs weren’t much better. I felt like a zombie. Having planned the most aggressive training ramp-up I thought I could handle, I knew it was highly likely that I would have to make some adjustments along the way to avoid burnout and injury. So that’s what I did, and eventually I got out of the hole.

When race day rolled around, I had only the vaguest sense of what sort of marathon performance I was capable of, hence how to pace myself. Different components of fitness are gained and lost on different timescales, and I was aware that I’d regained a lot more speed and aerobic capacity than I had raw endurance. Frankly, I would have been much better off racing a virtual 5K than a virtual marathon. The best plan I could come up with was to run the first 10K at 6:49 per mile (setting myself up for a sub-three-hour finish, barring disaster), then assess.

I started a little hot, completing the first mile in 6:44. The textbook move at that point would have been to forget about those five seconds and make sure to run the next mile in 6:49. But my body was telling me something else. Based on the nearly 50 previous marathons it had absorbed, my body knew what to do, and I knew to trust it. Long story short, I went on to complete the marathon in 2:54:42, averaging 6:40 per mile for the full distance. My half-marathon splits were 1:27:51 and 1:26:41. My last two full miles were my fastest, but not by much—6:29 and 6:31—indicating flawless pacing. I neither ran out of gas before I finished nor finished with gas in the tank but ran out of gas as I finished.

If it sounds like I’m bragging, it’s because I am. I was on Cloud 9 for the rest of the day, as high as I’ve been after any race, not because I’d lit the world on fire with my performance but because I’d been literally coughing up blood just eight weeks earlier. Later in the day, after my third or fourth beer, I recalled something Dave Scott said to me during a weekend I spent shadowing him in Boulder, Colorado, while working on a profile for Inside Triathlon. Dave had won the Ironman World Championship six times, yet he told me that the two races he was most proud of were both losses—his second-place finish in 1994 at age 40 after a five-year retirement and his final Ironman two years later, in which he overcame a disastrous bike leg to move up from 26^th place to 5^th during the marathon. After my virtual marathon experience, I understood more deeply why Dave looked back on these achievements so fondly. More than any of his victories, they tested and validated his mastery of Ironman.

Mastery is a mindset. When you possess this mindset, you aren’t really focused on outcomes; you’re focused on the process. Outcome goals are merely a facilitator of the true goal, which is to get better and better at the skill of racing (or playing the violin, or brain surgery, or whatever it is you’re trying to master). Mastery-minded athletes would rather be stretched in the process of losing than win easily, and they get more satisfaction out of making the best of bad circumstances than achieving a goal only because everything went their way. They’re also more likely to regard sucking initially at some skill—like racing marathons—as a reason to keep trying, not a reason to try something else.

Which is why I now want to master ultramarathons, which I suck at as much as I once sucked at marathons.

As part of my ongoing quest to qualify for the Ironman World Championship, I am working with a company called INSCYD (pronounced “inside”), creators of a physiological performance software tool that helps endurance athletes like me identify specific ways to improve their fitness.

A few weeks ago I performed a sequence of bike tests that are used to generate the data that the program uses to assess cycling fitness/performance. They were pretty tough, comprising a 20-minute time trial that I had to start with a 60- to 90-second all-out effort, a four-minute time trial starting the same way, and a handful of seated 15-second sprints in a high gear ratio. What’s special about INSCYD is that it uses performance data not only to measure performance variables such as anaerobic threshold power but also to estimate physiological variables such as VO₂max with an impressive degree of accuracy.

My results seemed spot-on to me. According to INSCYD, my VO₂max, or aerobic capacity, is 62 ml/min/kg (about average for an athlete of my performance level and age), my VLamax, or anaerobic capacity, is 0.23 mmol/l/s (extremely low, which is actually good for an athlete in Ironman training), and my weight-adjusted anaerobic threshold power is 4.5 watts/kg (extremely high). All of this was explained to me by INSCYD’s Greg Hillson when we went over the results over the phone. Greg further explained to me that, based on these results, my best opportunity to increase my cycling performance ahead of Ironman Santa Rosa is to increase my VO₂max.

Sounds great in theory, but the best most effective ways to increase aerobic capacity are to train a lot and to perform brutally hard high-intensity interval workouts on a regular basis, both of which things I was already doing before I was tested. Referring to these methods as low-hanging fruit, Greg suggested I look to some next-level ways of boosting aerobic capacity a bit, including a particular carbohydrate-restricted workout protocol that was shown to increase cycling efficiency, cycling time to exhaustion at peak aerobic power, and 10K run performance among triathletes in a 2017 study.

I gave it—or a version of it—a try recently. Normally I start my afternoon workout between one and two o’clock, but on this occasion I waited until four o’clock to do an indoor cycling workout containing four, eight-minute efforts at threshold power and lasting 80 minutes in total. After showering and changing, I ate a low-carb dinner of salmon, eggs, and a green salad with oil-based dressing. This ensured that I went to bed with reduced glycogen stores and woke up the next morning even more depleted.

On any other day I would have made breakfast my first order of business, but in obedience to the protocol I instead hopped on the treadmill and ran for one hour at an easy pace. Done by 6:30 am, I then enjoyed a high-carb breakfast (whole-grain, low-sugar cereal with whole milk and fresh raspberries, orange juice, and black coffee).

I now have super powers. Just kidding. I won’t know what effect these sessions have had (and I plan to do one per week from here on) until I repeat the INSCYD tests between two and a half and three weeks before race day. But I trust the science and there’s really no risk. While you might expect a fasted morning workout to be rather miserable after a one-two punch of hard intervals and carbohydrate restriction the evening before, I felt completely normal.

Another next-level method of nudging aerobic capacity upward that Greg Hillson recommend I try is sauna training. And I’m totally game, but that’s a topic for another time. . .

The other day I had an interesting conversation with an athlete I coach who is training for an Ironman 70.3 event that will take place on the same weekend as the Ironman race I’m training for (specifically the weekend of May 10-11, 2019). In explaining to me why he had done the bare minimum of swimming within a range of options I gave him during a holiday trip, he said that the hassle of doing more didn’t seem worth the extra second or two per 100 meters he might gain thereby.

Although I found no fault with this reasoning as it applied to my client, when I turned it around and applied it to myself, it struck me that my attitude is rather different. Simply put, I am fighting for every possible second in my preparations for Ironman Santa Rosa. Whether it’s through training, nutrition, equipment, psychology, logistics, or you-name-it, if there’s something I can do (safely and legally) to shave even one second off my finish time, I’m doing it.

Why the no-stone-unturned approach? Several reasons. One is that I feel I must take this approach to achieve my goal of earning an Ironman World Championship qualifying slot. I am not talented enough, nor is the competition weak enough, for me to be able to coast to Kona. Indeed, in my first Ironman I missed out on the last qualifying slot in my age group by 23 seconds! Another reason is that I enjoy the challenge of trying to identify and execute all possible means of improving my performance. For me it makes the preparatory process a more stimulating game than it would be if I were to set a lower bar. And, unlike my client, who travels a lot for work and has a new child, I have the time and opportunity to fight for every second. I’m not a parent and I don’t hold a real job, and indeed it’s sort of my job to train and compete, so, why not?

In this post, I thought I would share a few examples of what I’m doing in the effort to shave every shavable second off my Ironman Santa Rosa finish time.

My Ironman Training

Swimming

Swimming is my weakness as a triathlete. But nor am I a beginner, and the experience I do have gives me advantage of knowing that the most effective way to become a better swimmer is to focus intensively on technique improvement by working one-on-one with a good coach. I’ve been fortunate to find a very good coach in Mandy McDougal of Mind Body and Swim. Her pragmatic methodology suits me well and reminds me a lot of my own coaching style. She’s big on evolving the stroke you have rather than imposing some one-size-fits-all notion of perfect technique, prioritizing the most impactful changes and making them stick through basic drill sequences.

Here are a couple of her videos that concern technique elements I have benefitted from especially:

I make a four-hour round-trip drive every two weeks or so to benefit from Mandy’s instruction. Whatever it takes!

Cycling

The primary application of my no-stone-unturned approach to cycling has been spending lots of money. My main expenses so far have been a high-end indoor power trainer (Wahoo Kickr Core) and a high-end time-trial bike (Felt IA2). Past experience has taught me that I get a lot more fitness per training hour when I do most of my cycling indoors, where I can perform very precisely controlled workouts. Already I’ve seen benefits from using the Kickr two to three times per week.

As for the time-trial bike, as much as runners like me like to think it’s all about the engine, it’s really not. Outdoors I travel 3-4 mph faster at the same power output on the Felt IA2 than I do on my road bike. I’ll likely gain a few more tenths when I shell out another couple of grand on race wheels. And, to further ensure I get the most out of my new machine, I’ve had not one but two professional fittings done at Revolutions in Fitness in Palo Alto.

Running

Running is supposed to be my strength, but a nagging groin injury has made it anything but that lately. Fortunately, the injury does not stop me from running; it just prevents me from running fast (for now). Fortunately as well, I won’t need to run particularly fast in my race to achieve my goal. If I swim and cycle as I hope to in Santa Rosa, a marathon split of 3:20 should get the job done. That’s 7:37 per mile. In the next-to-worst case scenario (the worst case being that the groin degenrates over the next four months), I will run no faster than this in training and enter the race with one-dimensional running fitness—plenty of endurance but no speed.

I take some comfort from having been in this position before. When I trained for my first 50-miler in 2016, a bothersome Achilles prevented me from doing any faster training until within a few weeks of race day, and I still did okay. In a nutshell, leaving no stone unturned in the running dimension of my preparation for Ironman Santa Rosa will entail doing very large amount of very slow running.

One of my major training goals in general is to make the Ironman distances seem completely unintimidating. In 2017, I ran eight marathons in eight weeks, and by the end of this experience 26.2 miles was ho-hum—a major reason I was able to set a marathon PR later in the year. I’m now attempting to do the same thing with all three triathlon disciplines in my current Ironman preparation, for example by doing 100-mile-plus bike rides two to three times per month.

Other trainings

Obviously, nutrition and weight management are hugely important in Ironman training and racing. But I’m not doing anything extreme in these areas for the purpose of shaving seconds off my finish time at Ironman Santa Rosa. To the contrary, I am studiously avoiding doing anything extreme. In my experience, triathletes who otherthink nutrition, become weight-obsessed, and/or go in for unbalanced diets such as the high-fat low-carb fad more often get slower instead of faster. So, for the most part, my approach to nutrition and weight management will consist in simply continuing to eat like the pros, as described in my book The Endurance Diet.

Course familiarization is another element of my strategy of fighting for every second. I plan to make two trips to Santa Rosa ahead of race weekend to ride and run the course, and I’m even considering renting a small boat and paddling the swim course as soon as the buoys go up a couple of days before the event so I can capture a clear picture of what I will see from the surface during the swim.

From my inspection of the online course maps, it appears there’s a fairly lengthy run—likely on concrete—from the swim exit to the transition area. If I’m able to confirm this, I’m going to practice a little barefoot running on concrete to callous the bottoms of my feet, enabling me to shave a few seconds there. And, of course, I will practice mounting my bike with my shoes already clipped in the pedals and dismounting barefoot, as the pros do.

Not for Everyone

By no means am I recommending my no-stone-unturned approach to Ironman preparation to everyone. But I am having a blast with it and I wouldn’t want to see any other likeminded age-group triathlete shy away from it just because he or she is not paid to race. I mean, so what?

Recently my brother Josh sent me a link to an article on the John Templeton Foundation website that I found quite interesting. Titled “Sanctifying Everyday Difficulties: Motivational Consequences of Sanctifying Difficult Experiences,” it concerned the work of Daphna Oyserman, a professor of psychology at USC.

Oyserman has spent a number of years studying ways in which concepts of identity can be harnessed to supply the motivation needed to do hard things. Quite unexpectedly, these inquiries led her to observe that some of the most successful overcomes of difficult experiences regard them as ennobling—which is to say, as something that helps them become better versions of themselves or makes their lives more meaningful or brings them closer to God.

As unscientific as this idea may sound, we all know people who function in this way. Indeed, it has been my own observation that great endurance athletes tend to bring identity-based motivations to their sport. A quote from six-time Ironman world champion Mark Allen comes to mind: “The shorter races are a little more physical. Once you get into the longer races, it become more a test of you as a person on top of a test of you as an athlete.”

This is how many if not most (maybe all) great endurance athletes see their sport: as a means of testing and refining what they’re made of. They raise the personal stakes of competition far above the level of just trying to achieve goals and get better. For them, the ultimate failure is not falling short of particular outcome goals but falling short of their personal character standards in the pursuit of such goals.

Of course, everyone who takes up endurance sports is looking for a challenge. Relatively few athletes, however, consciously frame their chosen challenge the way the great ones do: namely, as the whole point of the undertaking. “To win is not important,” marathon world record holder Eliud Kipchoge said in a 2018 address to the Oxford Union Society. “To be successful is not even important. How to plan and prepare is crucial. When you plan very well and prepare very well, then success can come on the way. Then winning can come on your way.”

Kipchoge and his ilk see no separation between sport and life, between athlete and human. How they handle themselves in the heat of competition matters to them every bit as much as how they handle themselves in the difficult situations they face in everyday life because both types of challenge reveal who they really are. “Only the disciplined ones are free in life,” Kipchoge said in the same address. “If you are undisciplined, you are a slave to your moods. You are a slave to your passions.” As an athlete, Kipchoge does nothing less than strive to perfect himself. Monks talk the same way about their own efforts at self-mastery, for they’re doing the same thing.

To some athletes, Oyserman’s difficulty-as-sanctification approach to sport may seem like taking a mere game too seriously. I get it. Some of us prefer a moderate challenge—something less than a quest for ennoblement. If you’re in it mainly to enjoy being outside or doing something positive with friends, Kipchoge’s talk of discipline and slavery may come off as rather intimidating.

Having said this, though, let me just add one caveat, which is this: It’s a mistake to think that athletes who put everything on the line when they race are bleeding all the fun out of endurance sports. To the contrary, it’s the athletes who pin all their hopes on achieving goals such as breaking 3:30 in the marathon who more often end up disappointed. Whereas athletes who instead use endurance sports as a vehicle to become a better version of themselves are all but destined to succeed because seriously trying to evolve as a human being is pretty much all it takes to succeed in doing so.

Make that two caveats. The second is this: It’s a mistake also to think you have to be a great athlete to pursue sanctification through endurance sports. I know this because I’ve done it myself. As a young runner I failed to measure up to my personal character standards in a way that has haunted me ever since. When I got back into running (and branched out to triathlon) in my late 20s, I came to regard endurance sports as a means to transform myself into the man I want to be. Not long afterward, a personal challenge far more difficult than any marathon entered my life. Only then did I begin to appreciate that the value of the self-work I did as an athlete extended beyond the racecourse.

If you’re interested in my full story, check out my forthcoming memoir, Life Is a Marathon. It makes the best case I know how to for approaching endurance sports with the difficulty-as-sanctification mindset.

I came home from my time with the Northern Arizona Elite professional running team last summer convinced that every serious athlete should carve out a little time each day for what I will loosely classify as physical therapy. I’m talking about foam rolling, mobility exercises, and other activities that help put the musculoskeletal system in balance, keep it healthy, and improve functional movement capacity. Very few athletes do this stuff with any consistently, nor did I before my fake pro runner experience. But my whole purpose in going there was to do everything the real pros do, including daily physical therapy, and I believe it made a significant contribution to the improvement I experienced in those 13 weeks.

I get it: We’re all busy. None of us has enough time for everything. Physical therapy seems like more of a luxury than a necessity. Plus, it’s not the sort of thing you can manage entirely on your own. You need to be taught what to do, as each body has distinct needs. The temptation to skip PT in favor of flossing your teeth is great, but I think it’s a mistake.

I speak as someone who has made this mistake even after he knew better. After returning home to California last October, I started slacking on the PT work I’d done so religiously in Flagstaff. Then I transitioned back into triathlon training, and soon afterward my body fell apart. Realizing my dream of qualifying for the Ironman World Championship at Ironman Santa Rosa next May might depend on it, I visited Revolutions in Fitness, an athlete-oriented physical therapy outfit and Palo Alto, and put myself in the hands of PT Meghan Taff, who gave me some new exercises to mix in with the old.

The total time commitment required by these exercises is small. Some of them have been inserted into the twice-weekly strength workouts I was doing. These include some unloaded movements intended to reconnect my brain with my lower trapezius and rhomboid muscles, whose dormancy, according to Meghan, is negatively affecting my swim stroke. Others I do as mobilizers before workouts. Specifically, I do some foaming rolling to open up my chest and mobilize my thoracic spine and ankles before I swim and some band work to open up my hips before rides and runs. The rest I bang out at night while winding down before bed. This takes about six or seven minutes.

I’ve been on this new regimen for less than three weeks and already I am noticing a difference. For example, my calf muscles no longer cramp when I swim, as they used to nearly every time I got in the pool. I credit the ankle mobilizations Meghan taught me for this improvement. I’m telling you, folks, this stuff is worth the commitment!

The hardest part is getting started. That’s because, as mentioned, the specific exercises you do need to match your needs, and also because many of these exercises are rather esoteric and/or require special equipment. For example, I do a couple of foot-strengthening exercises that require the use of toe separators. So it’s best that you begin by making an appointment for a functional movement assessment with a good local PT like Meghan who really knows athletes. There are some decent quasi-do-it-yourself alternatives to this, however. One example is the Saucony Stride Lap app.

As chance would have it, a writer friend of mine contacted me the other day asking if I could contribute a good runner-specific New Year’s Resolution idea for an article she’s working on. Guess what I told her.