NAZ Elite – 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*.

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.

If you read my book Running the Dream: One Summer Living, Training, and Racing with a Team of World-Class Runners Half My Age and found yourself wondering what happened on the days not included in the journal-style narrative, here’s your answer! Sort of. What follows is a chapter I wrote for inclusion in the book but eliminated in a late effort to reduce the book’s heft. Enjoy!

***

Like many people, I eat lunch every day. Most days, it’s just lunch. Today, though, it was an experience. The food itself had almost nothing to do with the meal’s specialness, the company and setting almost everything.

My companions in bread breaking were four members of the Sonoran Distance Project, a team of sub-elite female runners who share a goal of qualifying for the U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon, and their coach, John Reich, himself a former sub-elite runner; the location a remote cabin in the woods where John hosts the team’s annual summer training camp (a three-day affair, as most of the roster works full-time in jobs completely unrelated to running). The invitation to drop in on the group’s midday repast came about when John, having read one or two of my books, learned I was coming to Flagstaff and got my contact info from Coach Ben (everyone knowing everyone in the local running community).

Warned by John not to bother with Google maps, I drove to the cabin with printed directions resting on my lap, a highly descriptive set of cues (“At about 6.5 miles into the forest the good gravel will turn right but you will continue straight”) I received from him via email. It was slow going, and rather unkind to the Fun Mobile in certain sections, but eventually I did reach Elk Park meadows, an off-the-grid settlement of rough-hewn houses and glorified huts strewn across a gash-shaped clearing enclosed by pristine forest little changed since white men first laid eyes on it. The very last line of John’s document instructed me to look for the “Reich” sign on Raccoon Drive. Seeing it, I veered left onto a narrow drive, passing a pair of catatonic horses, heads hanging over a slatted fence, before parking beside three or four cars lined up against a second fence marking the perimeter of the front yard of a squat cabin. John met me at the gate.

“Any trouble finding us?” he asked, eyeing the mud-spattered Mazda.

“Not really,” I said. “Just one wrong turn.”

John ushered me into the yard and introduced me to the runners. Natalie Cuomo, a medical student in Phoenix with a marathon PR of 2:48:08, established herself as the group’s extrovert, stepping forward with a winsome smile and an extended hand. Autumn Ray, an emergency medical physician in Phoenix who competed in the 2016 Olympic Trials, said something nice about my most recent book. Tanaya Gallagher, a bespectacled massage therapist and yoga instructor from Sedona who’s into meditation and recycling, fended me off with a wave, as though she had a cold she didn’t want to pass on to me. And, lastly, Amy Cole, who lives in Tucson and has a PhD in psychology, greeted me with a look of incipient hilarity that made me wonder if my fly was open.

Sonoran Distance Project

John handed me a bottle of water and invited me to sit on a camp chair facing the house. The others arranged themselves in a loose circle around me, Autumn and John in low chairs to my left, Natalie on the porch (where she massaged her legs with a medieval-looking device made by Roll Recovery), Amy in a beach chair on my right side, and to her left, prostrate on a yoga mat, Tanaya, whose husband, Josh Esquivel, knelt on the grass beside her.

I sat back in my seat and exhaled hugely, soaking in the primordial serenity of my surroundings. The air was warm and dry, stirred by a gentle breeze out of the northeast that carried on it a hint of the sweet fragrance of ponderosa pines. A broad-winged bird of prey glided far overheard, perhaps interested in the deer femur currently being gnawed at by one of five dogs lazing about the lawn. A vast silence surrounded us.

“Shall we go inside and watch TV?” I joked.

“There is no TV,” John said. “No electricity, either.”

I remembered suddenly a famous quote from the great American miler Marty Liquori:

“You’ve got to be a little bored to be doing really good training.”

The runners proceeded to grill me about my fake pro runner experience, their curiosity—like my friend Teresa’s—tinged with envy. August asked me, half-serious, if I’d gotten any good dirt on the team. I told her they’d been on their best behavior so far, wondering even as I spoke if this might actually be true—if things weren’t as perfect as they seemed within NAZ Elite. Amy followed up with a question about whether I felt accepted by my new teammates, and I told her I did.

“Take today’s workout,” I said. “I had sixteen miles with an eight-mile cutdown from 7:10 to 6:20. Ben Bruce, who’s coming back from an abdominal strain, paced me through most of the cutdown, and it was his idea; I didn’t even ask.”

“Here’s something I’m curious about,” John said, and we all turned to him. “You intend to write about this experience, correct?”

“That’s correct.”

“What happens if you have a bad race in Chicago? That wouldn’t make a very good ending to your story.”

I reminded John that George Plimpton experienced a similar letdown in the process of creating Paper Lion. The climax of his story was supposed to have been the moment he came off the bench to play a full set of downs as quarterback of the Detroit Lions in a preseason matchup against the New York Giants, but at the last minute his coach decided against putting him in. Nevertheless, Plimpton’s book sold a million copies and became a hit movie, starring the author as himself.

“He couldn’t have known that at the time, though,” John countered. “He must have been shitting his pants when it happened.”

“And I will shit my pants if I run poorly in Chicago,” I conceded.

“Are you ready for some lunch?” Tanaya asked.

It was the custom of the runners of the Sonoran Distance Project to take turns preparing meals, and today’s chef was Tanaya. Having come to Elk Park Meadows with the expectation of feasting on something like grilled chicken breasts, a mixed greens salad, and couscous, I was instead given a choice between peanut butter and jelly and grilled cheese. I chose PB&J.

“Seriously, though,” I said while I chewed, “what the hell do you all do around here? Where’s the zip-line?”

“If you weren’t here we would be napping,” Natalie said frankly. “You should be napping too. You ran 16 miles this morning.”

“I don’t nap,” I said.

“What?” Tanaya said, incredulous. “Why not?”

“Whenever I nap, I feel sluggish the rest of the day. I never recover.”

“You told us you were going all-in on the professional running lifestyle,” Amy said. “Professional runners nap. You need to do it!”

Cowed by the vehemence of these objections, I promised I would nap. And then I turned the tables.

“What about you guys?” I asked. “You’re all busy professionals chasing the dream. It must be hard to give your running the attention and space you’d like to. Do you ever wish you could run full-time—to have this training camp lifestyle be your everyday lifestyle?”

“Yes, definitely,” Amy said. “The simple life of run, eat, sleep, repeat is very appealing to me. I’m not one who thrives on being busy.”

“I love my time at the cabin,” Autumn seconded. “When all there is to do is sleep and read, you actually get enough rest. Otherwise I find all sorts of useless chores to do. In my experience, both your brain and your body need the rest.”

Aware now that I was keeping the women from their hammocks, or whatever the hell they slept on in this odd Xanadu, I rose to leave. During the long drive back to Matt’s house I pictured my new friends packing up tomorrow to return to their normal lives. A quick bit of mental arithmetic revealed to me that in 78 days, I will do the same. From one perspective, this seems like a long time; from another, as brief as a pleasant dream in an afternoon nap.

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.

Most runners target a single intensity in all of their workouts. Either it’s an easy run or long run at a slow and steady pace or a tempo run with an effort at lactate threshold intensity sandwiched between a warm-up and a cool-down or an interval session featuring a set of a certain number of repetitions of uniform length or duration all done at the same high intensity or—you get the idea. But there is something to be said for doing the occasional workout that includes a range of different intensities.

First of all, multi-pace workouts are a literal change of pace, and as such they’re an effective way to keep your training fun and interesting. Multi-pace workouts are also a good way to get appropriate doses of different intensities. For example, if you’re at a point in your training where you can benefit from a little work at VO₂max intensity—but only a little—why set aside an entire workout for it when you can incorporate that work into a session focused on an intensity you need more of—say, lactate threshold intensity?

Yet another benefit of multi-pace workouts is that they help teach effective pacing. Can you shift accurately from half-marathon pace to 10K pace to 5K pace by feel? Most runners can’t, but runners who do workouts that include efforts at all three of these paces can. Finally, multi-pace workouts that put the fastest work at the end develop the capacity to dig deep and finish strong in races.

Here are three multi-pace workouts to try:

3 Multi-pace workouts to try

Intervals + Time Trial

This type of workout serves most of the purposes mentioned above. The interval segment provides the primary training stimulus and it should target a high aerobic intensity close to the lactate threshold. The closing time trial should be fairly short in order to serve the purpose of providing a modest exposure to VO₂max and to get you suffering a bit. As a whole, an Intervals + Time Trial workout is very taxing and you shouldn’t attempt them very often. The specific session described below is one I did with NAZ Elite during my time in Flagstaff.

1-3 miles of easy jogging

Drills and strides

7 x 1 km @ lactate threshold pace with 1:00 standing recoveries (2:00 after the last rep)

1500-meter time trial

1-3 miles of easy jogging

30-20-10 Run

A few years ago, a team of Danish researchers led by Jens Bangsbo set out to see if they could come up with a high-intensity interval workout that was more enjoyable than standard formats without being less effective. They tested a variety of designs before settling on one that fulfilled their hopes: the 30-20-10 Run. After learning about it, I gave it a try, made a couple of tweaks, and started incorporating the workout into the training plans I create for my clients. I like to schedule 30-20-10 runs during recovery weeks and during the final weeks of preparation for longer races as a way to expose athletes to a range of intensities without making them go to the well. This workout is also a great way to teach better pacing. Here’s the basic format:

1-3 miles of easy jogging

5 x 1:00 with the 30 seconds at marathon pace, the next 20 seconds at lactate threshold pace (i.e., the fastest pace you could hold for one hour), and the last 10 seconds at a relaxed sprint. No recovery—just cycle right into the next interval until you’ve completed all five.

Complete three cycles of five 30-20-10 intervals with 5 minutes of jogging after each.

1-3 miles of easy jogging

Tempo + Sprints

As a long-distance runner, you should sprint, but not a lot. Because any sprinting you do in a race is likely (one hopes) to occur at the very end of a race when you’re tired, it makes sense to sprint on tired legs in training. In the Tempo + Sprints workout, you will do just that.

1-3 miles of easy jogging

Drills and strides

20:00 at lactate threshold pace

2:00 standing recovery

8 x 200-meter relaxed sprints with recovery by feel (i.e., go again when you’re ready)

1-3 miles of easy jogging

During the 13 weeks I spent training with the NAZ Elite professional running team in Flagstaff last summer, I did a few workouts with Sarah Crouch, not a member of the team but an accomplished pro with a 2:32 marathon on her resume. During a couple of these sessions, it was apparent to both of us that Sarah was working harder (i.e., suffering more) than I was, which seemed odd to me because my goal was to run 2:39 at the Chicago Marathon, whereas Sarah hoped to run 10 minutes faster. Any knowledgeable observer of these workouts who knew nothing about Sarah’s and my respective backgrounds and ambitions would have predicted that I would beat her in Chicago, but in fact she beat me by 63 seconds, and would have finished even farther ahead of me if she hadn’t run the first half in 1:16:00 and then cratered.

Afterward, I couldn’t help but wonder: Is Sarah just plain tougher than I am? Is it possible that she is able to do more with similar physical capacity because she is able to run harder and push closer to her limit? Although I like to think of myself as one tough sonofabitch on the racecourse, I couldn’t dismiss this hypothesis, in part because I had no better explanation and in part because I’ve seen a good deal of evidence that elite endurance athletes are exceptionally tough mentally. Indeed, their next-level toughness is one of the reasons they’re elite.

Some of this evidence is scientific. In a fascinating 1981 paper published in the British Medical Journal, Stirling University psychologists Karel Gisbers and Vivien Scott reported finding that pain tolerance was higher in elite swimmers than in club swimmers and higher in club swimmers than in noncompetitive swimmers. More recently, a team of researchers that included my friend Samuele Marcora found that professional road cyclists scored significantly higher than recreational cyclists on a test of inhibitory control, or the ability to resist immediate temptations (such as the desire to slow down or stop to avoid the suffering of hard exercise) in favor of staying focused on a long-term goal (such as getting to the finish line in the least amount of time possible).

Other evidence of the superior mental toughness of elite endurance athletes is anecdotal. If you spend a lot of time interacting with both elite and nonelite endurance athletes, as I have done, you notice a clear difference in how the two groups (with some individual exceptions, of course) view the pain that their sport inflicts. Elite athletes tend to embrace the pain, or at least accept it. As NAZ Elite member Scott Fauble said in the documentary film 183.4, “I can put myself super deep into this well [of pain]. This is something I’ve known from a young age I was good at. As I’ve kept exploring deeper and deeper for longer and longer periods of time, I’ve just found more and more space there to be myself and live. That is a place where I am at home.”

By contrast, recreational endurance athletes tend to fear and resist pain. For them it is a problem to be avoided, wished away, and at most tolerated, but only up to a point, whereas for the elites it is information and an integral part of the racing (and training) experience. The title of this article is taken from a famous quote from Percy Cerutty, a legendary Australian running coach from the mid-20^th century, who often harangued his athletes with the phrase, “Faster, it’s only pain!” as he stood trackside watching them suffer.

If you want to be as mentally tough as the elites, your first step is to recognize the deep truth hidden in Cerutty’s directive. Pain is not proof that you can’t go faster, nor evidence that you’ve reached your physical limit. It’s an illusion. You can go faster. All you have to do is try, and accept the extra pain that comes with it.

These ideas are explored in depth in Alex Hutchinson’s new book Endure, which I haven’t read yet but is next on my list. Based on the extensive writing Alex has already done on this subject, though, I do not hesitate to encourage you to check it out. I’ll share some thoughts about it in this space after I’ve gone through it.

But if you want to read other books related to marathon, go here.

The strength-training methods I use today are different from those I practiced before I spent 13 weeks as a guest member of Hoka One One Northern Arizona Elite, a professional running team, in the summer of 2017. It’s not that I lacked commitment to strength training prior to this experience. As a self-coached athlete I hit the gym three times a week for 20-minute full-body strength sessions. But my Flagstaff experience resulted in changes that have enabled me to strength train more effectively.

The NAZ Elite team meets every Thursday for a one-hour strength workout designed and overseen by brothers AJ and Wes Gregg at Hypo2 Sport. Runners are expected to do a second, similar strength workout on their own, something I chose to do on Mondays. My very first team strength workout was embarrassing and eye-opening. I came into it thinking that strength was my strength, so to speak, but that first session just about killed me. I realized then that I had been coasting through my solo strength workouts—just checking the box by doing the same, familiar, comfortable exercise again and again in a half-assed sort of way.

Two separate factors made these professionally designed strength workouts tougher. One was exercise selection. Many of the exercises required balance and challenged important stabilizing muscles that are underdeveloped in most runners—including me, apparently. An example is the single-leg reverse deadlift, which entails standing on one foot and reaching a dumbbell toward the toe of that foot with the opposite hand by tilting the torso forward and kicking the non-supporting leg out behind. A muscle-bound bodybuilder might sneer at the puny size of the dumbbells we used to perform this exercise, but when he tried the exercise himself and couldn’t complete two reps without losing balance and touching the other foot down, he would cry like a little baby, and when he woke up the next morning feeling sore in muscles he never knew he had, he would cry all over again.

The other factor that made pro-style strength training tough for me was the intensity of the sessions. Virtually every exercise was done until it hurt. For example, when I saw side planks listed on the workout sheet I was given at the start of my first team strength workout, I celebrated, because I did this exercise at home—one 30-second hold per side, three times per week. I was forced to do three 75-second holds per side, and it was the single most painful thing I did in Flagstaff, including all of my run workouts.

It’s impossible to quantify the benefits I derived from this hard work, but I’m certain I benefitted. Within a few weeks of arriving in Flagstaff I felt like a different runner—tighter, lighter, more athletic, even younger. One of the main purposes of strength training as a runner is injury prevention. I did not escape Flagstaff without injury, but that’s what the second component of pro-style strength training is for: rehab.

The same guys who administer the strength workouts for NAZ Elite—the aforementioned Gregg brothers—are also chiropractors who function as full-service physiotherapists. I dealt with two minor injuries and one major one during my summer with the team, and each time I got dinged up, AJ gave me corrective exercises intended to restore function and prevent the problem from recurring. A typical exercise entailed lying face up on the floor with a resistance band looped around my feet and pulling my right knee toward my head while keeping the left leg straight. Collectively, these exercises made my body more balanced and functionally symmetric, and enabled me to overcome the breakdowns I experienced and race well at the Chicago Marathon.

I’ve incorporated much of what I learned about pro-style strength training into my new 80/20 Strength Training Plans, available here: https://8020endurance.com/strength-training-plans/.

3 Multi-pace workouts to try

Intervals + Time Trial

30-20-10 Run

Tempo + Sprints

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