Training for Speed — Training for Fun — Training to Win
Strategies for long term training plans for Endurance Sport
This is the first in what will be a series I am writing while planning and executing my 2020 training year. Let me know what you think or if you have questions down in the comments!
It’s November. Events for next year are being announced. Your friends are saying let’s do this… let’s do that. How do you chart a successful path from now till then?
You look back and think about what went well and what didn’t. You start to think about setting goals for next year. How do you keep this year’s strength while improving on your weaknesses?
You go to write down a long term training plan but don’t know where to start. What is actually in a long term plan? How does it drive more detailed planning?
These questions and others might be in an endurance athlete’s mind when they are looking at an upcoming year and thinking about how to structure their training.
What do you want from and for yourself that you are driven toward?
First and foremost, you have to know what drives you. This is about what you care about and what makes you want to do the hard work. Don’t make it hard, don’t make it complicated. Identify the one part of your sport, or one event that you can get obsessed with and hold it in your mind as the reason you are going to train. Build everything around that thing but remember that it’s a commitment device and a goal. If things change and what you’ve been driving toward doesn’t pan out, at least you had the thing to drive at in the first place!
When looking out at the year to come, expect the unexpected, but use the chance that the expected pans out as a motivator.
How do you design a plan so you are at your best at the right time?
Classic wisdom would tell you to periodize your year in a progression focusing first on aerobic fitness, then on tempo and threshold, then on VO2Max and anaerobic. This is not on its face wrong, but there are a number of ways it can be seen as less than ideal.
- Linear periodization can take too long to be at your best at the right time. By mixing in small amounts of varied training, you can be closer to “all systems go” all the time while still achieving the goals of a focused linear periodization schedule.
- Linear periodization leads to major declines in higher intensity fitness (threshold and VO2Max), leaving you with a steep hill to climb in that part of the year. By mixing in small amounts of varied training, you can maintain a reasonable amount of the fitness you built last year and be able to build on it when the time comes.
- Linear periodization breaks the principle of specificity. e.g. If winning town line sprints at Wednesday Worlds is what you are after, why would you drop all your sprint workouts? Our bodies are complex and races require dynamic fitness, acting like different training zones are independent and can be focused on exclusively is just naive.
Ok, so what does this mean? There’s an idea of non-linear periodization that essentially says, it pays to mix things up a bit in the context of a well-thought-out long term plan.
For endurance sports like running and cycling, we benefit from both aerobic and anaerobic fitness. In a sweeping over-generalization, aerobic fitness builds slowly and anaerobic fitness builds quickly. Given this, we have to focus heavily on aerobic fitness a long time from our goals and progressively increase focus on anaerobic fitness as our goals approach.
Over the off season, slowly transition your focus from building aerobic fitness and maintenance of VO2/anaerobic to maintaining aerobic fitness and building VO2/anaerobic fitness.
What is actually described in an annual training plan?
An annual plan should be a brief ordered list that characterizes what you should be doing 1, 2, 3, 4, … months from today. If things go sideways, like if you get injured, get very sick, or have to move unexpectedly, this plan has to change so don’t get too invested in it.
The long term plan gives the top-level requirements for a monthly plan. What’s the focus for each month? What do you want to have achieved each month? What general training volume do you want to plan to make time for each month?
The talk…
I will always remember reading the Cyclists Training Bible and reckoning with the fact that I was going to have to talk about the impact my training would have on my family and my work. I also think that is one of the most useful things I took away from that book! Have the talk. You are going to be less available because you are going to be training X hours a week and this is the time to lower everyones expectations of you. This is the time to make sure your significant other is supportive of what you plan on jumping off into this year. This is the time to have that conversation with yourself a few times and make sure you are really committed to this.
Be straight with yourself, your loved ones, and your co-workers.
Is there any planning to do between annual and weekly? YES!!
The schedule you use is up to you, but doing some planning regarding the next month or two every month or two is worth doing. This is a time to look at a recent power test, revisit your annual plan, set your key breakthrough workout goals (not dates!), and identify (and remove) blockers that are going to hold you back day to day.
Consider putting an hour on your calendar to do this when developing your annual plan. Keep some notes every time you do it and let it be organic, but do it.
Intermediate planning between annual and weekly is time to think about executing the big-picture of your annual plan and freeing you up to think tactically about scheduling your week in detailed weekly planning.
What is weekly planning all about?
Every week, pick your goal workouts and figure out how to hit those as fresh and clear-headed as possible.
This is the time to line up a baby sitter when your significant other won’t be free to cover the kids, ask for the afternoon off work when the weather looks good, get group-rides on the calendar so your significant other knows you’ll be out, etc.
This is a time to put your favorite ride food on the grocery list, make sure you have all your maintenance done and equipment in hand, get your kits washed and ready for the week, etc.
This is NOT time to get stressed out about your annual goals or planning the specific kinds of workouts you should be doing this month. Since you should have done your annual plan and mid-range plan, those concerns should be squared away leaving you more or less on auto-pilot to execute the crazy plans you’ve already hatched.
Speed — Fun — Winning!
The title of this post is meant to convey that we train to be fast, we have fun doing things the training allows us to do, and at the end of the day, some kind of winning is largely what drives us to keep doing this crazy endurance sport game.
To be fast, we have to get our training act in order, not lose the fitness we built last year, and execute high quality workouts in the context of a well-designed annual plan.
To have fun, we have to keep an eye on what drives us, be real with ourselves and others about the trade offs we are making, and be ok and ready for it when the plan inevitably changes.
To win, we have to put the whole thing together and hit race day confident that we’ve done what we can — ready to focus on the task at hand. Ready to be a crafty racer who didn’t spend the whole winter on the trainer or trudging through the snow to race without focus and miss opportunities when they become available.
In closing, remember the infinite wisdom of LeVar Burton,
“But you don’t have to take my word for it.”
