Understand the Balance of Training (Hard/Easy, Speed/Endurance)
7 Principles of Training:
#3) Understand the Balance of Training (Hard/Easy, Speed/Endurance)
Bill Bowerman and Bill Dellinger are credited with being the first to teach that training of runners should not always be the same intensity and duration every day.
They observed their runners progressed best when they had restitution periods of light-to-little work following intensive periods of heavy or difficult work.
Here’s Dellinger explaining the Hard/Easy philosophy of the Oregon System:
“Strictly speaking, it’s misleading to say that we followed a hard-day/easy-day pattern. Our kids run 2 workouts a weekly which I consider fairly hard, those happen on Tuesday and Saturday. On Thursday they do a little quality work, but it’s short and fast, and not very long or intense.”
Their observations have withstood the test of time as sports science has proved their approach correct.
Today, we know that a difficult workout damages the body by subjecting it to stressors beyond its current coping capacity. This triggers an alarm state. The body then responds in the recovery period by working to rebuild itself to handle further exposures to higher stressors. This is adaptivity and super-compensation.
Hard training when our bodies are not fully recovered simply compounds damage already done. This principle holds true on the micro scale (day-to-day), meso scale (week-to-week, month-to-month), and macro scale (year-to-year).
However, it’s a tough concept to grasp for many because there are no exact formulas or tables which correspond to how much restitution is needed after a heavy period of training. It all depends on context of the individual and training performed. Effective training is still more art than science, even though we now have more science than ever to inform how coaches and runners can best go about our craft.
Understanding the balance between endurance/speed isn’t any easier.
Many coaches and athletes have what I call a “Hardest-Worker-Wins” bias.
Like all bias, there is a degree of truth in it, namely, someone who works harder will usually outperform a competitor who works less hard. However, so many erroneously think the hardest working runner is the runner who runs the most. Not so. Working harder rarely means working more.
Here’s Bowerman’s take:
“The idea that the harder you work, the better you get is just garbage. The greatest improvement is made by the man who works most intelligently.”
Intelligent training is directing your training to improve specific qualities which will improve your ability to better meet the demands of your event on race day.
In running, there are only a handful of basic physical qualities that can be improved: Speed, Endurance, Mobility, and Strength. Other qualities like Stamina, Power, and Speed-Endurance are a blend of these basic qualities. I don’t think there is a lot of confusion in this area. Where confusion starts to arise is how to advance these basic, or general qualities, into more specific qualities.
The most simplistic approach is to work on “building a base of endurance” first because it is assumed a lack of endurance is the most limiting factor to improved performance in running. Lydiard propagated this belief with his 100-mile weeks of so called “marathon style” based training phase and his assertions there was “no loss of speed” with this approach. Bowerman, who knew and respected Lydiard, called bullshit on this.
Why? It’s too reductionist. Whenever you completely ignore a physical quality you lose efficacy in it. This goes for any quality: speed, endurance, mobility, strength.
People like Lydiard’s method because it’s simple and straightforward. Focus on running as much as you can for a long period. Then shift your focus to running faster.
However, there is a balance of speed and endurance which is wise to maintain year round.
A more intelligent approach is to work on improving both your basic endurance and speed abilities, concurrently, during the base period, and then shift your focus to blending your upgraded endurance and speed abilities during specific periods of training.
For example, this is what Canova does with his marathoner runners. In the General (or base) period of training they do some runs for basic endurance (longer runs of 2-3 hours, at low intensity paces) and other days they perform repeat “Power Hill” sprints lasting 10” - 20” at max speed, with full recovery. Then in the Specific phase his runners focus shifts exclusively to workouts which extend race-specific speeds, like 2 x 10,000m + 10 x 1,000m at goal marathon to 15K race speeds, and very easy recovery runs under 1 hour at 5:00/km pace. In the specific phase, no more general workouts, like longer easy runs or Power Hills, happen.
Coaching is a complex profession and the interactions between hard/easy, endurance/speed are also complex. There are universal truths in training, but everyone comes to different conclusions about how they want to apply these truths to their own training.
The balance of hard/easy and speed/endurance is a critical principle of training. Better understanding of this principle is what separates hard workers who sees modest returns on race day from intelligent workers who enjoy big PRs and victories on race day.