Mark Allen – 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.

I have a theory about athletic greatness, or more specifically, about what it takes to achieve greatness as an athlete. It’s quite simple. There are two mental traits that I see again and again in athletes of the highest caliber. One is a drive toward greatness that has the untamable ferocity of a full-blown disorder. In other words, great athletes have a screw loose—not in the sense of being certifiably insane, mind you, but rather in the sense of being unbalanced in a way that serves them well on the racecourse but not always so well away from it. The other mental trait I see again and again in the greatest athletes is a kind of self-mastery that blends together good judgment, strong discipline, and self-control. In other words, great athletes have their shit together.

There are exceptions—great athletes who have a screw loose but don’t have their shit together and athletes who have their shit together but don’t have a screw loose—but I see these rare exceptions as proving the rule. It is only a mild exaggeration, therefore, to state that if you want to achieve greatness as an athlete, you’d better have a screw loose and your shit together.

I am by no means the first person to propose that great athletes tend to have a screw loose, nor am I the first to note that, by and large, they have their shit together, but whereas others observers always focus on either the one or the other, I stand apart in pointing out that, more often than not, these two traits are combined in the greatest athletes.

When I think about the screw-loose part of the mental formula for athletic greatness, I think of something that six-time Ironman world champion Mark Allen said in an interview for LAVA magazine back in 2011: “If you dig deep enough into the life of any of the top athletes who are pushing their bodies to the absolute limits, you’re going to find a story. You’re going to find something that those athletes are trying to make up for that they didn’t get when they were younger. Something that hurt them.”

The limited scientific research in this area backs up Allen’s claim. At the 2012 Olympics, psychologist Mustafa Sarkar and colleagues at the University of Gloucestershire conducted interviews with eight gold medalists and then looked for themes in their remarks. In a paper titled, “What Doesn’t Kill Me: Adversity-Related Experiences Are Vital in the Development of Superior Olympic Performance,” Sarkar reported that “the participants encountered a range of sport- and non-sport adversities that they considered were essential for winning their gold medals, including repeated non-selection, significant sporting failure, serious injury, political unrest, and the death of a family member. The participants described the role that these experiences played in their psychological and performance development, specifically focusing on their resultant trauma, motivation, and learning.”

Having a screw loose isn’t always the result of life experience, though. Some people are born with a screw that is not fully tightened, and many such individuals go on to become great athletes. We need look no further for an example of this type than Mark Allen’s archrival, Dave Scott, who seems to have emerged from the womb with an insatiable drive to keep moving and to test his body’s limits. A self-described “endorphin lunatic,” Scott once said of his superhuman appetite for physical exercise, “If I don’t get it, it just makes me go haywire. It rules my life. It’s a powerful drug for me. It’s huge. It’s gigantic.”

Yet Dave Scott, like all great athletes, had his shit together in most ways. Smart enough to earn a master’s degree in exercise physiology, he almost singlehandedly invented modern triathlon training methodology and was a brilliant tactician on the racecourse. In this respect, Scott was utterly typical of his ilk. Research involving elite athletes has demonstrated that, as a group, these performance outliers are way above average in certain mental traits, especially those having to do with self-regulation, or the ability to regulate one’s thoughts, emotions, and behavior in pursuit of goals.

Study after study has found that elite athletes are better at self-regulating than lower-level athletes, and that lower-level athletes are better at self-regulating than nonathletes. What’s more, longitudinal studies have shown that self-regulatory capacity in youth athletes predicts subsequent rates of improvement. If you’re interested in learning more about this research, check out the new book The Genius of Athletes, coauthored by Noel Brick, a sport psychologist and leading expert on how elite endurance athletes think, and veteran running journalist Scott Douglas.

While the two mental traits I’ve identified as definitive of athletic greatness—having a screw loose and having one’s shit together—might seem to pull in opposite directions, an intriguing 2020 study led by Gro Jordalen of the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences indicates that they are actually complementary. Jordalen’s team conducted in-depth interviews with five female Olympic and world championship medalists in which these athletes were invited to reflect on their evolving motivations and self-regulatory practices over the course of their careers. What emerged from these interviews was evidence of intensive interaction between these factors, with shifts in motivation triggering changes in self-regulatory practices and vice versa. It’s no wonder, then, that a loose screw (which manifests athletically as an insatiable motivation to achieve) and having their shit together (which manifest as an extraordinary self-regulatory capacity) are the two hallmark mental traits of the greatest athletes.

This is one of my blog posts that have no practical value whatsoever. Even in the unlikely event that you accept my theory of athletic greatness, there’s nothing you can do with it to benefit your own sporting pursuits. Informing you that the greatest athletes have a screw loose and their shit together is about as useful as informing you that they all possess a certain gene you lack. Be that as it may, I believe that truth has inherent value, and you never know where a truth revealed might lead. . .

A few years ago, New York Times writer Gretchen Reynolds penned an interesting article titled “Running as the Thinking Person’s Sport.” It focused on a then-recent study by neuroscientists at the University of Arizona in which it was shown that high-level distance runners had significantly higher levels of connectivity in certain parts of the brain compared to nonrunners.

In interpreting these findings, Reynolds wrote that “running seems to be a kind of mobile math puzzle,” an idea that the study’s lead author, Gene Alexander, expanded upon, saying, “It requires complex navigational skills plus an ability to plan, monitor and respond to the environment, juggle memories of past runs and current conditions, and also continue with all of the sequential motor activities of running, which are, themselves, very complicated.”

If it’s true that, as this study indicates, running makes people smarter, then it must also be true that smarter people make better runners. There is no consensus definition of “intelligence” among scientists, but I like the one proposed by David Krakauer, an evolutionary biologist and president of the Santa Fe Institute, who has said, “Intelligence is making hard problems easy.” The reason this way of looking at the phenomenon appeals to me is that it’s inclusive and pragmatic. It recognizes that intelligence is not some global aptitude that one either has or doesn’t have but is rather a diverse collection of mental skills, which different people have in different degrees. No person is capable of making all types of hard problems easy, and very few people are incapable of making at least one type of hard problem easy.

Top athletes are among those who count as highly intelligent by Krakauer’s definition. As he explained in a 2015 interview for Nautilus, “Something that we’d find tremendously difficult—skiing downhill at a very high velocity or getting a small ball into a basket or getting a ball over a net at over 70 miles an hour, things that we struggle with . . . they make look effortless. And that’s not really that different from a mathematician effortlessly solving a theorem, or a musician remembering a symphony. The difference [exists in] the part of the brain that stores the relevant information, and for some reason when we’re talking about the motor system, it’s not intelligence. I think part of the reason for that is because it’s not exclusively human, because marine mammals make swimming look effortless. Birds make flying look effortless—we can’t do that. And surely that can’t be intelligence because we can’t do it.”

Krakauer continues, “If you reduce the theory to intelligence to, on the one hand, this notion of efficient solutions to hard problems, and simultaneously think about it in terms of the energy and resources that neurons require to solve the problem, then in fact, the motor system is arguably more intelligent than the frontal cortex.”

Long before I met David Krakauer at the 2015 Goldlab Symposium and learned about his take on intelligence, I had already become convinced that certain types of intelligence are vital to success in endurance sports. Pacing is arguably the defining mental skill in endurance racing. It is not easy to get from the start line to the finish line of a 10K or a marathon in the least time possible. While physical fitness determines the highest velocity you can sustain over a given distance on a given course on a given day, this number is fundamentally unknowable. Discovering it as you go is the job of your brain, and it is a job that most athletes suck at. Effective pacing requires intentional practice, but it’s also a matter of natural aptitude, as is the case with all mental skills. My advice to athletes is that you exploit the advantage of natural pacing ability if you have it and that you take pacing skill development more seriously than most athletes do regardless of your innate aptitude.

Pacing is one form of self-regulation. Another form of self-regulation that impacts endurance performance is restraint. All athletes understand the value of hard work, and a majority of serious racers are willing to work hard, but in my experience, relatively few of those who are willing to work hard have the restraint to consistently resist working hard when doing so is unwise. Forcing it in workouts where the target splits are out of reach, sticking to the training plan instead of dialing back in the face of excessive fatigue, grinding out the last mile of a 20-miler despite red-flag pain in your knee—such behaviors are the norm among competitive runners, not the exception.

As the saying goes, “It’s easy to train hard, but hard to train smart.” Hard trainers are a dime a dozen, but where smart training is concerned, the bar is low. This state of affairs represents a golden opportunity to gain an advantage over other athletes by taking pride in exercising restraint throughout the training process. It can be hard at first, but if you persist in the effort it can become your special thing. Instead of rushing to reclaim a Strava segment from a local rival who makes a point of taking it from you, laugh privately and take your revenge in the next race.

A third form of intelligence that aids the athlete is the ability to learn and adapt through trial and error. Athletes who are smart in this way pay attention to cause and effect in their training, figure out what works for them and what doesn’t, and adjust accordingly. I can think of a number of noteworthy examples of athletes whose training evolved over the course of their careers and who performed better because of the changes they made. One example is the legendary triathlete Mark Allen, who overcame a propensity toward injury early in his career by swapping his favored low-volume, high-intensity training approach for a high-volume, low-intensity approach under the guidance of coach Phil Maffetone.

Conclusion

In summary, if you’re smart, take full advantage of this gift in your training and racing. And if you’re not so smart (and let’s face it, most of us aren’t so smart), emulate those who are and you’ll at least have an advantage over other not-so-smart runners who make no effort to get smarter.

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.

Conclusion

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