Endurance and Love
Module 3 | Endurance - To learn to endure is to learn to suffer. To learn to suffer is to learn to love.
There is no shortcut to learning to endure and no substitute for volume. I fought tooth and nail against this for years on top of years.
“Evidence based” literature will tell you all kinds of manipulated lies about high-intensity interval training (HIIT) achieving dramatic improvements in VO2max (oxygen uptake). What they won’t tell you is that it’s a lot more fun and engaging, not only to do HIIT, but to observe and measure it in a laboratory. If you can’t get funding for a group of 12 people to do 3-minute bike sprints, how are you going to get it to watch the same group run 5-hour marathons?
Further, if the “science was settled”, why do Olympic triathletes not then spend the majority of their training time in higher heart rate zones? Don’t they or their coaches read?! That’s not to say that they don’t do some “short” runs or even occasional sprints or aerobic capacity work, but the bulk of their training is in a low intensity steady state (LISS).
How could I (or anyone else) be so naive as to think that 2, 5, or even 10 minute intervals would in any way prepare someone for a 5 or 6 hour effort? You simply cannot comprehend how little you know if you haven’t been willing to reach out over the abyss.
In a more practical sense, a warm-up designation that I often use is “a 1-hour pace” (e.g. biking, running, rowing, skiing). If you’ve never seen more than 20 minutes in a single sitting, can you even grasp what will be required?
This is the essence of endurance. It’s not that we have to grind ourselves into oblivion every session, but we do need a reality check. I certainly will not posit myself as an endurance guru, but I believe I have ventured far enough.
That is the paramount question. How far is far enough? What is the criteria?
What Couch-to-5K Programs Miss:
I have never been and will never identify as “a runner.” When I was in graduate school I specifically wanted to try, explicitly because it was hard for me, because I wasn’t good at it, and I hated it.
Discipline wasn’t the issue. I drudged the miles as best as I could on pavement with poor shoe selection. The program design itself wasn’t terrible, but the emphasis was misplaced. The title of the program identified an arbitrary endpoint of 5 kilometers (or about 3 miles).
A decade or more earlier Greg Glassman infamously declared that a 5K wasn’t “endurance”, it was “capacity.” The motive, for me, and many others, became “how fast can I finish this horrible thing?” That inevitably lead to burn out, back pain, and shin splints that you can’t simply “rest away.”
Why? From a technical perspective my running technique was terrible – running is, after all, it’s own sport. Moreover though, the reason it was terrible was because I was trying to move quickly rather than learning to endure.
Questions of “how far” and “how fast” are matters of capacity that we’ll cover in later modules. The matter of enduring is really a question of “how long?”
For many people, the mention of “cardio” or "endurance” is synonymous with monostructural LISS. This is problematic. As I mentioned above, running, rowing, cycling, skiing, etc. are all their own distinct sports with technical specifics.
So, by “cardio” what I mean is challenging, training, and adapting the cardio-respiratory system – your heart and lungs. There are myriads of combinations of movements (like running, calisthenics, machines, etc.) that we can use to accomplish this.
If we’re a little creative, structures like those below help keep use from bashing our head against the wall out of sheer monotony:
Ascending Ladders (e.g. 10-20-30-40-50 reps): which tend to teach us to temper our pace and expectations.
Descending ladders (e.g. 50-40-30-20-10 reps): which can bolster confidence.
Intervals (e.g. every minute on the minute / EMOM, or 5 minutes of this then 5 minutes of that) which help break up and build up to longer monostructural efforts.
What we need is enough creativity to keep us engaged (and hopefully avoid overuse injuries); though I’ll admit to having baked in the summer sun on a stationary bike many times. We also need enough volume to teach us the unavoidable truth that we must “slow down, relax, and settle in because this will not be over soon.”