Why do we train?
Endurance athletes are gluttons for pain. Restricted sleep, early mornings, inadequate food, hard manual labor, psychological stress, physical injuries—if this sounds like a litany of torture techniques, you’re not wrong! But triathletes, runners, and all endurance athletes go through most, if not all of these, and we pay for the privilege to do it! We truly are a weird bunch, aren’t we?
Despite all the pain and hardship we voluntarily put ourselves though, so many athletes don’t really know why we do it all. Ask yourself: do you know exactly how that next workout is going to make you better for your next race? Why are you doing those intervals and why are you supposed to rest 2:00 between instead of 2:15? If you can’t answer those questions with something better than “because coach told me to,” then read on!
It’s far too easy to get lost in the trees as you do workout after workout after workout without understanding what the forest looks like. And beyond merely wanting to know the general reason why you complete each workout, knowing how each session contributes to your fitness and race readiness is key for a few more reasons. Most importantly, if you know how each workout fits into the overall picture, you know when to push and when to hold back. Going from workout to workout and pushing as hard as you can in each might work if your goal is general health, but athletes have specific goals and purposes for each session. That means if you go as hard as you can on your easy day Monday, the track workout Tuesday morning won’t go as well as it could have!
So what is today’s workout supposed to do for you? It fits into one or more of three broad categories: energy system or other physiological training, psychological training, or skills training. We’ll explore each of these briefly here, and future posts will delve deeper into each training category.
Energy System and Other Physiological Training
In endurance sports, Jay Dicharry, author of Anatomy for Runners, explains that you can think of our bodies as formula one cars. Energy system training helps improve our engines, and other physiological training like weight lifting helps improve the chassis. It doesn’t matter if you have the best engine in the world if your wheels are crooked, or if the chassis is fine tuned and you have a lawn mower engine in the front.
Energy system training improves our abilities to push higher powers and hold faster paces. Traditional concepts of energy systems include the anaerobic system and the aerobic system in general terms. Research and experience with near-infrared spectroscopy shows that the muscle begins using oxygen immediately after you start work with it. This means that traditional concepts may need some revision, which we’ll visit in later posts.
Our other physiological training includes a number of things, like strength training, mobility, injury prevention, and recovery work. Even if you do hundreds of hours of easy spinning on the bike to increase your mitochondrial density, you won’t fare well in a sprint to the finish if you don’t have the muscle to support it! Plus, this category includes mobility and injury prevention, which are crucial to staying healthy and consistent with your workouts.
Psychological Training
If energy system and physiological training \comprise the engine and chassis of our race car, psychological training is the team of engineers and mechanics who work on the car. Psychological training helps you stay calm under pressure (think about those pit crews!) and unleash your body’s full potential. Psychological training is just as important as physiological training; if you don’t think you can race at a given pace, it doesn’t matter if your body is capable of it! That’s why I sometimes prescribe workouts that are more psychological than for the body. An example is a short race pace tune up the week of a race. Your body takes time to incorporate the physiological changes from a workout, and it’s not going to help much doing that effort the week of a race. But it will remind the athlete that the taper is helping her feel fresh and that race pace isn’t really that hard.
Skills Training
Skills are the driver in our race car analogy. In more skill dominant sports—think baseball and many team sports—this plays a much larger role than in most endurance sports, but there’s still a significant need for skills in triathlon and running. Skills include race tactics, how you hydrate and fuel at race pace, and swim/bike/run form. If the race car driver has the best car in the game but makes a tactical error, he’s not going to fare well. The same is true in endurance sports. If a marathoner misses a couple of bottles at aid stations, he’s not going to get all the fuel and fluid he needs. If a triathlete in a draft-legal race misses a chance to bridge to the next pack, she’ll be at a disadvantage for the run. At the 2020 ITU World Championship, a few seconds in transition cost Katie Zaferes, the 2019 reigning champion, a chance at another title. Skills play a significant role in our sports, even if it might seem small over the course of a 10+ hour Ironman.
Conclusion
In some way, every workout you do hits one or more of these categories. Good coaches maximize the quality of workouts by hitting as many of these areas as possible, not to mention carefully balancing and planning the physiological training at the heart of most workouts. So when you go out for that next workout, ask yourself (or your coach!) why am I doing this?