Everything in moderation. Especially moderation.
Strava is an interesting thing.
I find it provides me with equal parts insight and entertainment. One thing that happens when you closely follow lots of peoples’ training is that you start to notice trends--and not all of them are good. A particularly unfortunate tendency I see a LOT of is for people to train too moderately. What I mean by that is this: as they attempt to train smartly and remain injury-free, they abandon the vision, ordering, and timing of what makes a training regimen truly effective. And it’s not that they’re training too easy, per se--you can be training moderately and still be doing some really hard workouts--it’s just that their whole approach, though striving to be sensible, just sortof misses the mark.
“...as they attempt to train smartly and remain injury-free, they abandon the vision, ordering, and timing of what makes a training regimen truly effective.”
And, look. I get it. Not everyone is trying to train at the highest level they possibly can. Plenty of folks get enjoyment from just being out there and putting in work and staying in shape and being part of a community. Totally fine. Nothing wrong with that. But the thing is, a lot of these runners are trying to get faster, and they’re training this way because they believe it’s the best way to do it. They’re genuinely striving to get better and better, and adhering to this “moderate” approach is simply a mistake. And honestly, regardless of your goal, if you’re gonna be out there, putting in work every day, wouldn’t you rather it be the type of work that will make you the best you can be? I know I would. But back to the focus of my tirade:
Training moderately.
Excessively moderate training is typified thusly:
A vacillation between total recovery and moderate fatigue
An aimless, somewhat random selection of workouts
An unending repetition of points 1 and 2
Here’s the typical week of the moderately training runner:
An easy run on Monday. A “tempo” type workout on Tuesday--usually a traditional steady pace tempo run, or a fartlek session of some kind. A couple more days of easy running, followed by a hard and/or fast track session later in the week. This will usually include any of your classic track gauntlets, ranging from 400m repeats to mile repeats, to ladder sessions, etc. Pretty much whatever you’re into that day, or whatever the group agrees on, or whatever feels right. Throw in an easy long run on the weekend, and maybe a day off, and you round out the tried-and-true moderate training week.
Now, understand this. There’s nothing inherently wrong about such a week. In fact, an actually good training program would likely include some weeks like this. The problem here is highlighted by point number 3. These weeks are repeated, over and over, with the assumption being that, because consistency is achieved, progress will follow. And I’m not saying that you’ll experience zero improvement or progress by training this way. You’ll just reach a (relatively speaking) mediocre level of fitness and will tread water there for months or years on end, all the while perplexed as to why you’re not actually getting any better.
So why do so many people do this?
Because, on its surface, it makes sense. All the necessary ingredients of “good training” are represented. You got a medium-effort tempo day, a high-effort track day, a long run, and plenty of easy runs mixed in for proper recovery. And the recovery runs keep you from being too extreme, by allowing for full recovery between hard sessions.
Why doesn’t it work?
“ If you’re doing the exact same run every day and you stop seeing improvements, it’s pretty obvious that you might need to change something up. It’s less obvious when it appears that you’re already doing all the right stuff.”
As we’ve discussed before, the body improves when exposure to certain stimuli triggers a physiological response that brings about adaptations that result in heightened performance. If this stimuli is not present, then the body doesn’t improve or get faster. Period. Most people know that, if you literally just did the exact same run every single day, you might improve a little bit for a short time, but eventually, a plateau in performance would occur, and if you wanted to keep getting better, you’d have to make some changes: adding more running, doing different types of runs, doing faster workouts, etc. This principle is fundamental to training. It doesn’t go away just because you get better at running. Even as you get faster and faster, plateaus will still form, and will do so in more crafty and conniving ways. That brings us to our moderate trainers. These moderators, if you will, are experiencing this same plateau phenomenon, but in a more highly evolved stage. Part of what makes it more highly evolved is that it’s being sneakily obscured by the appearance of proper training. Trojan Horse shit. If you’re doing the exact same run every day and you stop seeing improvements, it’s pretty obvious that you might need to change something up. It’s less obvious when it appears that you’re already doing all the right stuff. That said, once you get to a certain fitness level, your training must take on new dimensions. Sometimes you’ll need to train through a certain level of fatigue. Sometimes, merely doing a hard or high-effort workout is not enough--you might need a series of specific fast workouts done in a particular order. As you get in better shape, the roadmap of continued improvement grows more complicated and arcane, and demands a more creative, circumspect approach.
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