TrainingPeaks

Call me strange, but I love building training plans. It’s one of my favorite activities, right up there with training itself. That’s why I got together with David Warden to create 80/20 Endurance, which, as you well know, exists for the primary purpose of creating training plans for endurance athletes of all types and abilities.

Nevertheless, I recognize that training plans aren’t perfect. They have a fixed duration, a fixed weekly workout schedule, a fixed volume progression — everything about them is fixed. We try to overcome this limitation by creating lots of different options so that any given athlete is able to select a plan that’s close to perfect. But close to perfect still isn’t perfect.

Some degree of post-selection customization is almost always required to take a readymade training plan from almost perfect to perfect. The most common issues are as follow: 

  • The weekly workout schedule doesn’t match up with the athlete’s life schedule (e.g., the athlete prefers to do long rides or runs on Saturdays, but the plan schedules them on Sundays). 
  • The plan is X weeks long, but the athlete’s “A” race is either fewer or more than X weeks away. In other words, the plan is either too short or too long. 
  • The athlete wishes to do one or more “B” races during the plan period, but these aren’t necessarily included in the plan. 
  • The athlete will be unable to complete some of the workouts in the plan due to expected travel or some other scheduling conflict. 

Let’s take a brief look at how to handle each of these scenarios.

Adjusting the Weekly Workout Structure

In most cases, this is the easiest type of adjustment to make. A couple of key principles will help you modify your training plan’s weekly workout structure to fit your routine. 

  1. Don’t schedule hard workouts back to back.
  2. Don’t schedule similar workouts back to back.

The first principle is the hard/easy rule, which stipulates that challenging workouts should not be scheduled on consecutive days. When shuffling workouts around, be sure to insert at least one lighter day of training between days containing long endurance sessions, high-intensity intervals, or any other workouts expected to result in a high level of fatigue.

The other key principle is balance, according to which the various workout types should be distributed as evenly as possible throughout the week. Suppose you’re a triathlete who swims, bikes, and runs three times each per week. In adjusting your training plan to fit your schedule, avoid setting up your week so that you swim on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, bike on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and run on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday! Obviously, this is an extreme example, but milder forms of workout “bunching” should be avoided as well.

Adjusting Plan Length

Suppose you’ve selected a training plan and aligned its end date with the date of your event, but there’s a gap between now and the plan’s start date. How should you fill the time? If you haven’t been training recently, or if you’ve been training at a lower level than will be required of you in Week 1, the answer is obvious: use the time to gradually ready yourself for a smooth transition to the plan. If you’re already fit enough to handle Week 1, use the time instead to focus on another priority that will help set you up for success. Examples of such alternative priorities are strength training, technique work, and dietary improvements.

In cases where you don’t have enough time to complete the entire training plan before your race, the simplest solution is just to skip the first part. If your plan is 17 weeks long, for example, and your race is 15 weeks away, go ahead and start at Week 3. But this solution only works if your recent training is similar to the weeks you’re skipping. If it’s not, you might be getting in over your head or setting yourself up for injury.

When you find yourself in this type of situation, your best move is to modify the first few weeks of the plan, beginning at the point where you pick it up, in such a way as to give yourself a chance to catch up to the training. Specifically, you’ll want to reduce the overall volume and the difficulty level of key workouts so that you’re not required to make big leaps in training load. Returning to the example I gave above, suppose Week 3 of the plan includes a high-intensity interval workout and a tempo workout, but your recent training has consisted entirely of low-intensity work. A sensible adjustment here would be to replace the interval workout with a fartlek-type session containing just a handful of brief surges and to replace the tempo workout with a “cruise intervals” workout containing a few short efforts at threshold intensity instead of one or two big blocks.

Adding “B” Races

Scheduling “B” races can be either simple or complicated, depending on when these events fall within your training plan and how many you wish to add. The ideal timing for such events is in recovery weeks, where they simply replace the workouts planned for that particular weekend. The two days preceding the race should also be replaced with lighter training, and the three days immediately following the race should be replaced with a combination of rest and lighter training. 

Things get more complicated, though, when a planned “B” race does not align with a designated recovery week. In these cases, dialing back the training that precedes and follows the event is likely to result in too much time away from harder training, especially when the week in question comes right before or right after a designated recovery week. To avoid this issue, make your adjustments more nuanced with half-recovery weeks (i.e., weeks in which the first few days are heavy and the last few are light or vice versa) and partial recovery weeks (i.e., weeks in which the training load is reduced, but only slightly). Consider both the logic of your plan’s training load variation and your own sense of what your body can handle in making these types of adjustments.

Things get even more complicated when you want to do more than one “B” race. But the same principles apply, with the basic idea being to preserve the plan’s intended balance of heavier training periods (typically two to three weeks of gradually increasing load) and lighter periods (typically one week of recovery every third or fourth week that’s about 20% lower in volume than the preceding week).

Planning for Anticipated Missed Training

When you know ahead of time that your training is going to be restricted during a certain period, your best strategy is to bookend this period with sensibly modified training. For example, suppose you are following a triathlon training plan and you are planning to take your family on vacation to Yosemite National Park during Week 9. In this seven-day period, you will be able to squeeze in a little running but your swim and bike training will be paused.

In this scenario, it would be wise to reduce your run training and increase your swim and bike training in the week that immediately precedes your vacation as well as in the week that immediately follows it. These adjustments will not only minimize any negative effect of the trip on your swim and bike fitness but should also help you worry less about it.

There’s a lot going on at 80/20 Endurance—so much, in fact, that you might be having trouble keeping up with all of it. Never fear! Within eight minutes (unless you’re a slow reader), you will be fully caught up on the major happenings here. Ready . . . Go!

A New Book

Earlier this year, we created our own publishing imprint, 80/20 Publishing. Fast forward a few months, and our very first title is about to be released! Written by Matt Fitzgerald (that’s me!), the book is called On Pace: Discover How to Run Every Race at Your Real Limit. As the title suggests, it’s about pacing, the quintessential running skill, which is even more important than most runners realize, and which most runners need a lot of help with. Through his trademark mix of science and storytelling, Matt will convince you of the importance of pacing and guide you toward pacing mastery.

On Pace also includes complete training plans for the 5K, 10K, half marathon, and marathon distances that develop pacing skill while also getting you race-ready. Online versions of these plans are available for individual purchase.

 

A New Adaptive Training App 

We’ve been teasing this one for a while, and at long last it’s here. Not to be confused with the book just described, PACE (which stands for Personal Adaptive Coaching Experience) is a smartphone app developed by TrainingPeaks that uses artificial intelligence to create personalized, adaptive training plans for runners. Among the five coaches that TrainingPeaks chose to launch with is our own Matt Fitzgerald. If you like the run plans Matt built for 80/20 Endurance, you will find the PACE training experience comfortably familiar, except with full customization and adaptation, so your plan evolves with your needs. Learn more here.

 

A New Director of Training

And then there were four. On November 1, Leyla Porteous joined 80/20 Endurance as our director of training. A native of Australia, Leyla now lives in North Carolina with her husband and 12-year-old son. Having swum competitively in her youth, she discovered triathlon in 2012. For the last several years, Leyla has coached fellow triathletes through Flow Multisport. As our director of training, Leyla will be involved in managing, improving, and expanding all of our training products and services. She’s only been on the job for two weeks, yet her impact has already been felt. As an 80/20 athlete, you will begin to benefit from Leyla’s addition to the team very soon.

 

New Swim Plans

We all know swimming is different from other endurance sports. Whereas cycling and running are all about fitness, swimming is mostly about technique. In recognition of this fact, we’ve partnered with swim coach Dan Daly to develop a set of technique-focused swim training plans to accelerate improvements in swim performance. Each plan will include dryland (strength training, mobility work) and pool workouts, and will build on the improvements you’ve made by completing earlier plans in the sequence. High-quality videos will guide you through every exercise and drill. Look for Dan’s plans to drop early in the New Year!

 

A New Charitable Foundation

In October, we launched a new charitable foundation, the 80/20 Endurance Foundation, whose flagship initiative, the Coaches of Color Initiative, aims to improve diversity in endurance sports by awarding apprenticeship grants to aspiring coaches of color. The first grant recipient will be announced on December 1st, and the apprenticeship will last the entire 2022 calendar year. Throughout this period, the grant recipient will receive a monthly stipend of $1,000, as well as one-on-one mentoring from successful endurance coaches, free certification as an 80/20 Endurance coach, and hand-son experience coaching experience on the 80/20 Endurance platform.

Donations are always welcome. To make a contribution, apply for an apprenticeship grant, or just learn more about COCI, visit 8020foundation.org.

 

A New Online Learning Event

What are you planning to do on Saturday, January 15, 2020? Unless you already have that date blacked out for space tourism, we suggest you spend it with us at The Endurance Event, an incredible online learning experience for athletes, coaches, and other hungry minds. Hosted by 80/20 Endurance and Accel Events, The Endurance Event is sponsored by InsideTracker and TrainingPeaks and features a stellar lineup of speakers that includes two-time world champion triathlete Siri Lindley and renowned exercise physiologists Stephen Seiler and Samuele Marcora.

The Endurance Event is the perfect way to start the coming race season. Fill your brain with cutting-edge information on training, diet and nutrition, mental fitness, and tech, and come away fired up to make 2022 your best year yet! Tickets to the first part of the half-day event are free, and the cost of attending the full event is way less than that of a new pair of running shoes.

We’re proud to bring this unparalleled learning experience to the worldwide endurance community. Help us make it a success so we can do it again every year! For complete information about The Endurance Event and to register, click here.

 

New In-Person Training Camps

Would you like to meet and spend time with some of your fellow 80/20 Endurance athletes? Or would you rather travel to a stunning endurance destination and immerse yourself in a pro-style training experience? Or would you prefer to learn from some of the leading minds in endurance training, nutrition, and psychology, including Matt Fitzgerald and Dr. Cory Nyamora? With 80/20 Endurance in-person run and triathlon camps, you don’t have to choose! We’ve partnered with Endeavorun to create a series of unique camp experiences that truly offer something for every athlete. Check out our lineup for the 2022 season:

 

Austin Winter Running Retreat

February 17-21

Kickstart the 2022 season with our five-day running retreat in beautiful Austin, Texas. Highlights will include group workouts, meals, and hangouts; a personal injury evaluation from physical therapist Asher Henry; one-on-one “office hours” with Matt Fitzgerald, Bertrand Newson, and other great coaches; and the opportunity to run the Austin Marathon with Hanna Hunstad (or try to beat her, or just cheer her on, or run the half marathon or 5K!).

Learn More

 

San Diego Spring Triathlon Retreat and Clinic

February 27-March 6

The sport of triathlon was born in San Diego, and for good reason. There’s simply no better place to swim, bike, run, and chill with your fellow triathletes than “America’s Finest City.” This two-part camp features a mix of epic training experiences and teaching sessions. Come for the first half of the week if you’re mainly interested in training or for the full week if you want it all. Highlights include an open-water swim clinic with Hanna Hunstad, bike threshold testing on Fiesta Island, and mental skills training with sports psychologist Cory Nyamora.

Learn More

 

Martha’s Vineyard Morning Run and Triathlon Camp

July 25-29

Would you rather enjoy a summer vacation with your family on Martha’s Vineyard or go there to train with fellow athletes and be coached by Matt Fitzgerald, sports dietitian Lydia Nader, and Endeavorun founder Jake Tuber? This special five-day camp for runners and triathletes allows you to do both! You’ll spend each morning working out with other campers and learning from our expert staff and the rest of the day enjoying family time in the summer paradise of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

 Learn More

 

New Cycling Plans

We are pleased to announce that a full selection of 80/20 Endurance training plans for cyclists is now available. There are 64 plans in all, covering three separate disciplines (Gran Fondo, gravel racing, and time trials), short and long distances, and two intensity metrics (heart rate and power). Designed by Coach Matt, the plans feature not only the 80/20 intensity balance you know and love but also recent innovations in workout design and periodization, as well as unique coaching tips in each and every workout. And like our training plans for runners, triathletes, and obstacle racers, these come in four levels, covering the full spectrums of experience and ability.

We think our new 80/20 cycling plans are terrific, but don’t take our word for it. You can sample any plan you choose for free, and if you’re an 80/20 Endurance subscriber, of course, you have access to all of them. And if you’re not a cyclist, you should become one just so can experience these plans.

 

A New Coaching Certification

Many 80/20 athletes are also coaches, or aspire to become coaches. And many of these athletes have let us know they want us to offer a proprietary 80/20 Endurance coaching certification. If you’re among these athletes, you’ll be happy to know that an 80/20 Endurance coach certification program is on the way. Our best guess at this moment is that it will be available on or around March 1, 2022. Elements of the program will be an official study guide written by Coach Matt, an online course, and a two-part exam (multiple choice and practical). We’re also exploring the possibility of offering in-person certification events. Stay tuned!

The term periodization refers to the practice of dividing the training process into distinct phases, each of which is defined by a specific purpose and made up of workouts that are intended to fulfill its purpose. Simply put, an athlete who practices periodization does different things at different points in the training cycle, whereas an athlete who does not periodize his training does the same thing week in and week out.

To put an analogy on it, an athlete who practices periodization is like a farmer, whereas an athlete who does not is like a factory worker. What sort of work does a farmer do? It depends entirely on when you visit the farm. In one season you may find him planting, in another administering pesticides, and in yet another harvesting. No matter when you visit the assembly line, however, you will find the factory worker putting screws in widgets.

Endurance athletes have not always practiced periodization in its current form. Like most modern training methods that we take for granted today, it had to be discovered. The idea that it is beneficial to train in different ways at different times is not terribly intuitive, which is why even now athletes who are not taught to periodize their training don’t.

While it hasn’t always existed, periodization was not discovered as a single event by a single individual—it’s too complex for that to have happened. Rather, it evolved piecemeal over time, with lots of different athletes and coaches representing a variety of endurance disciplines contributing to its development. In running, the most influential periodization model is the one that was created by the legendary New Zealand coach Arthur Lydiard. In this model, a phase of base-building that features increasing amounts of long, slow running is followed by a strength-building phase that features lots of hill running, then a speed phase dominated by short, fast intervals and finally a racing phase.

Since this model was developed in the 1950s, coaches and athletes have come to the conclusion that such a strict segregation of training types isn’t necessary. In his Hierarchy of Endurance Training Needs, noted exercise physiologist Stephen Seiler ranks “General Periodization Details” fourth in importance out of eight fundamental endurance training methods, remarking that there is a tendency to overrate the impact of sequencing different training stimuli in one way versus another. For example, some marathoners like to do a little bit of very high-intensity track work in the peak training weeks preceding a race, whereas others prefer to do almost all of their uptempo work at speeds closer to race pace. The evidence suggests that either can work.

Where there is less wiggle room is in how stress and rest are managed. Every runner, even those who don’t know the first thing about periodization, understand that their overall marathon training workload should tend to increase as they move closer to race day. But the best results seem to come not when athletes continuously do about as much as their present fitness level allows, as intuition dictates, but rather when they intentionally do significantly less training than they could handle at some times and intentionally overreach—that is, taking on a training load that would break them if they sustained it for very long—at other times—and this is less intuitive.

Most people exercise with a “get in shape, stay in shape” mentality. In a typical scenario, a sedentary person sees an alarming number of the bathroom scale or has a scary doctor’s appointment and starts working out. Initially, he can’t do very much, but as he builds some fitness he does a little more and a little more until he reaches a point where he’s doing about all the exercise he cares to do. From that point on, he follows the same exercise routine for the rest of his life (slight exaggeration to make a point).

Endurance training doesn’t work like that—or shouldn’t. If your goal is to achieve peak performance in a race, you need to train in a way that, to put it crudely, burns you out, so that after the race you need a break and after the break, having voluntarily give up some fitness, you must ease gently back into a new cycle of training.

Several years ago Stephen McGregor, an exercise physiologist at Eastern Michigan University, shared with me some interesting data he collected from professional cyclists. These were athletes who logged all of their training on TrainingPeaks, whose Performance Management Chart quantifies fitness through a variable called chronic training load (or CTL). In most circumstances, CTL is a very accurate predictor of performance. As a general rule, the higher your CTL is, the fitter you truly are and the better you perform in a races and other endurance tests. But in analyzing the data or professional cyclists, McGregor found that, over the course of a season, their CTL and performance decoupled. Early in the season, as the riders increased their CTL, their performance improved as expected. Then, as they maintained their peak CTL into the racing season, their performance level held steady—for a while. But after three months or so of this, their performance level began to decline even as their CTL was maintained.

In other words, the same training that made the cyclists fitter initially burned them out over time. On its face, this seems like an avoidable mistake, but training less in order to achieve a sustainable CTL is no alternative because in that case their peak performance level wouldn’t be as high. Peak fitness and sustainable training loads are simply incompatible, and this is the number-one reason it’s necessary to periodize.

Always remember, you’re a farmer not a factory worker.

If you’re like many other endurance athletes, you have probably followed a readymade training plan at one time or another. Perhaps you found it in a book, or maybe you purchased it online from a website such as Final Surge or TrainingPeaks. If so, then you know that readymade plans are generally classified by race distance and level. For example, if you’re a relatively new runner interested in training for your first marathon, you will likely choose a beginner-level marathon plan.

Choosing the right level is not always easy, though, especially when there are a lot of levels. I have online running and triathlon plans that come in as many as 10 levels at each major race distance. Not a week goes by without my receiving at leas one email from an athlete asking, “Which level should I choose?” These athletes always tell me a little about themselves so that I have something on which to base my recommendation. More often than not, the information these athletes choose to share with me is either their time goal for the distance at which they intend to race or their best or most recent time for the same distance. This has always seemed odd to me, because time goals are almost completely irrelevant to training plan selection.

To understand why, consider the hypothetical example of a runner who wants to run a marathon in 3:45. If this runner should come to me and ask which level of marathon plan I recommend for a runner who has this goal, and his name is Wilson Kipsang, I will tell him he does not need to train at all, because I know that Wilson Kipsang has run 2:03 for the marathon on four separate occasions, and a man who is capable of running a 2:03 marathon can run a 3:45 marathon on no formal training whatsoever.

Now suppose instead that the runner targeting a 3:45 marathon who comes to me for help with training plan selection is not Wilson Kipsang but a 44-year-old woman who has run six past marathons and has a current PR of 4:22. I would need a little more information to be sure, but it is likely that I would tell this athlete that no training plan could possibly deliver her to a 3:45 marathon. She could quit her job, send her children to live with their grandparents, and devote her life to pursuing this goal and never achieve it.

What this rather extreme hypothetical example demonstrates is that there is no single training plan that fits all athletes pursuing any given race performance goal. So if time goals are not the appropriate basis for training plan selection, what is? Simple: training history.

Numbers aside, the goal that every athlete shares is improvement, which tends to occur in modest increments and is made possible by modest increases in training load. Your next training plan should therefore be one that administers a training load that is slightly greater than the highest training load you handled successfully in preparing for a prior race of the same distance you’re targeting this time around. For example, if you built up to 45 miles per week in preparing for your last marathon, build up to 50 miles next time.

Note that increasing the training load is not the only way to improve, so you shouldn’t feel compelled to keep training more and more each time you set your sights on a PR. You can also improve by making better use of the volume of training you’re already doing, for example by doing less training at moderate intensity and more at low and high intensities.

Indeed, if your current training formula is already a good fit for you, you can improve without changing it at all. That’s because you are not the same athlete at the end of a training cycle as you were at the beginning. For example, if you complete an 18-week marathon build-up, then take it easy for three weeks, and then repeat the same 18-week cycle, you will start the second cycle fitter than you did the previous one, so the same training will develop your running ability even further.

I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent so I’ll just stop here.

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