If You Are Not Going Longer, You Are Not Training Endurance

I just finished the 12-week Endurance program on Heavy Meta. It is less a program than a prompt. It points you at better endurance by getting you to accept exactly one thing: if you are not going longer, you are not training endurance.

Last week I got asked a question I didn't have a good answer to. Not because I didn't know the answer. Because I didn't like it.

Derek is one of our best clients. We've been going back and forth on endurance for a while. We are both Zone 2 cronies, we both have over a decade in it, and we've both lived through the complicated business of building, maintaining, and actually using an aerobic system. Unlike most people having this conversation, neither of us gets to specialize. We have strength, speed, power, mobility, and sport skill to keep alive at the same time. If all I needed was endurance, the answer would be obvious and dumb.

We were comparing mistakes, two chronic over-workers trading notes, and Derek asked: knowing what you know now, what would you change about how you prepared for bike racing back then?

I'll get to the answer. First the definition, because the answer doesn't make sense without it.

Endurance is duration. Everything else is intensity.

Endurance is the effort toward duration. The longest lasting. It says nothing about pace. Pace is intensity.

Almost every construct we call an "endurance event" is a speed test. The winner is the fastest. So we build training backward from an arbitrary distance or time, pick the zone that optimizes for that limited window, and optimize for speed. The best endurance athletes in the world absolutely know how to go long. But the thing being tested is how fast, which makes most endurance events a question of capacity, not endurance.

In that way endurance is a lot like strength. There is a boundary you want to know. You want to get close to it in order to expand it. You want to get familiar with it, comfortable at it. You do not want to cross it. Crossing is a different thing than approaching, and the cost of crossing is what nobody budgets for.

Here's the story that taught me that. My friends Kegan and Roger are in it. Sorry, guys.

In 2020 Adam, who owns Movement Labs in central London, emailed me about a 24-hour assault bike challenge for teams of three. I don't remember if he'd done it or was thinking about it, but he sent it to me for obvious reasons. I looked at it, thought "that's disgusting," and forwarded it to Kegan so he would logically shoot it down. Kegan had worse sense than I did. He said we should do it.

We set it for New Year's Eve. That became the tradition we now call The Space Race.

We had four or five weeks. Roger became our third. We immediately started talking strategy, pacing, all that. We were especially concerned with snacks. There wasn't time to build a real base, so mostly we were getting used to sitting on that god-awful seat.

Ten years of triathlon and bike racing had taught me to think about contact points as the limiting factor, so I planned for shoes, shorts, sock changes. My real worry was cadence. The assault bike turns at almost half the RPM of an efficient bike to produce similar wattage. Anyone who has raced bikes and overdone SFR intervals, slow frequency repetitions, knows exactly what that does to your knees.

We didn't know how to split the work. First idea was 20 minutes on, 40 off. Then we talked to a few people who had set records at the Race Across America and they said: as short as possible.

Then Kegan started talking about sustaining over 450 watts.

Totally possible. But I heard that number and I wasn't weighing it against the event. I was weighing it against my entire life.

This is what people get wrong about the difference between an endurance event, which ends, and endurance as a trait, which is the ability to keep going. Plenty of people finish grueling events. The bill is bigger than they bargained for. I've watched the fallout of endurance junkies up close. They talk endlessly about how best to finish an objective, how to be the best in the world at that objective, and almost none of them save enough of themselves to keep doing the thing they're trying to win at. That, to me, is not endurance.

Kegan's pace did not account for the fact that I want to want to ride a bike again. I want to want to run, move, go further, next week and in twenty years.

My answer to Derek

I would not have made myself hate bike racing.

I went way too deep, for no reason. I wasn't trying to go further. I was trying to prove I could beat people, and in proving it I couldn't outlast myself and my own stupidity. I measured my endurance in speed, not in persistence.

I built the biggest Zone 2 engine I could and pointed all of it at events. 27 hours a week average, not counting gym work, which included plenty of pedaling. Upwards of 70 races a season. I rode a bike so far that I crossed the threshold. I still haven't come back.

Kegan, Roger, and I rode 575 miles in 24 hours. Team average just under 400 watts, dragged down by my 350. We tried varying splits but ended up doing 60 seconds on, 2 minutes off for 14 hours. I woke up the next day sore and still wanted to move. Within a few days I was back on the bike. Kegan took longer, weeks or months, I'm not sure, but it killed something in him. Roger, who brought his own assault bike, never came back. We still have his assault bike. I won't say it was all that one night, but it certainly contributed.

Roger, if you’re reading this, come get your bike.

The program is built on one premise: endurance is going further. Going further will build a threshold for going faster, as a byproduct. But if you're trying to build endurance by doing less of it, you are not training endurance. "Optimal" has nothing to do with a zone. It has to do with understanding that the day you quit enduring is the day you die. Optimal is whatever it takes to keep going.

What I'll keep adjusting in the program is any recommendation of a pace. I listed MAF as a method for tracking efficiency. I'm close to pulling it, because it designates a speed. You need to learn how to enjoy going longer. If that means slowing down, that's endurance. If it means speeding up to get it over with, that's not. When I say go further and don't worry about it, I mean it.

How to know if you're actually training it

People hear "go further and don't worry about the pace" and want a rule. Here it is.

Go out at whatever pace you think you can hold for a long time. At halfway, at three quarters, and as you get near the end, ask yourself one question: could I double this distance without changing the pace?

If the answer is yes, you are nowhere near the boundary. Go further.

If the answer is no, ask a second question: did I pick too hard a pace? If no, you're training endurance. If yes, slow down and go further.

That's it. The session is about time. There is nothing to chase except more of it.

After twelve weeks of building my endurance I have zero measurements proving the methodology. I feel better. I run and ride for significantly longer. I couldn't tell you the pace or whether it improved. But I enjoy it, and that means I'll keep going.