#1: What does it take to (run, ride, swim, climb ski, hike….) fast?
Whatever your event, if you’re an endurance athlete, you likely want to do it fast on race day. Everyone has their own fast, but that’s generally our goal. Before we start our deep dive into the mechanics of going fast, I think it’s important to start with the basics of what it takes to have that peak performance, and to stress how important timing is in the equation of going fast.
1. Fitness
Ok that seems like an obvious one. But fitness isn’t a one-dimensional concept. In essence, our fitness is what our maximum potential performance is at any given time, but there’s more to fitness than just “fit” and unfit. Your fitness needs to be specific to the demands of your event. Do you have enough general strength? Muscular endurance? Aerobic fitness? Anerobic capacity? Can your musculoskeletal system go the distance? How’s your economy of movement? Can you handle the fueling aspects of your event? Do you have adequate technical skills? For success, we need the right mix of each of these factors, determined by the demands of our events. While by no means easy, fitness can be one of the most straightforward of these factors to obtain. Stress the body, and recover right, and your body will super-compensate and you’ll get fast. It’s the below factors that make the equation for a successful performance a bit more difficult.
2. Motivation.
I’ll define motivation as “mental fitness”. You’ll likely have to push yourself pretty hard, and deal with some significant discomfort as an event progresses. It takes motivation to remain positive and to continue to push through the inevitable tough patches through a race and get the most out of our physical fitness. Motivation comes from any number of sources, but knowing what drives us, knowing the reason behind the discomfort, and knowing the benefits of getting through it, helps us cope with and ultimately triumph over the obstacles we encounter. Motivation can be fickle however, and it is rooted in just as many physical sources as mental ones. Chronic fatigue or overtraining can erode even the most dedicated athlete’s motivation. To be able to access our motivation and turn it into a great performance, we’ll also need our next factor.
3. Freshness.
If fitness is our maximum potential performance, freshness is what percentage of our total potential performance we can produce at any given time. Freshness (or lack thereof) is the reason why we can’t PR in every race and workout all season, and why we must modulate our total training load over the course of a training cycle. The training we need to undertake to improve our fitness will fatigue us, and thus lower our freshness temporarily. Until our body fully recovers and reaps the benefits from each training bout, we cannot perform to our full potential due to this fatigue. If you’ve ever had a disappointing performance despite training well, it’s likely that a lack of freshness, rather than lack of fitness, was the cause.
4. Health.
I’m sure more than a few readers will have had a health issue impact their ability to perform optimally, or even just complete an event. Whether it comes from an injury or sickness, these issues can hamper performance, or even cause an athlete to miss an event entirely. So needless to say, health is a critical part of going fast!
5. Timing.
While being fit, motivated, healthy and fresh all feel great, no one gets a PR or a trophy just for feeling good. We need to make sure we have all these factors at the right time: when the gun, bell, whistle or cannon goes off and our targeted race begins. Only then can we can turn these somewhat intangible factors into a concrete result. None of the above factors matter much without having them at the proper time. We can be in the shape of our lives, but if we aren’t fresh enough, we won’t be able to show it. We can be healthy all season, but have an injury crop up the a week before our event, and we can’t go as fast as our potential allows. Timing is the reason why we make periodized training plans, and often what makes creating and executing one challenging. As I mentioned earlier, building fitness is rather straightforward. Stress the body enough, and it will (given adequate recovery and nutrition) super-compensate and we become fitter. But achieving the right kind of fitness we need, at the right time, while also balancing our freshness is where the art of coaching comes into play.
Let’s dive even deeper into the timing aspect of all this and consider timing in a larger scope than a typical yearly cycle where we have a day, or at most a few weeks, when we want to be at our fastest. Let’s zoom out a bit, and consider timing in a larger scope: that of multiple years or even an entire athletic career. Depending on your individual circumstance, there may be events years from now that you want to excel at, in addition to those on this year’s calendar. For example, let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a freshman trying to maximize performance at nationals their senior year. The training that maximizes short term performance, such as at our freshman’s next XC race, isn’t the same as the training that best supports his long term goal of making All-American his senior year. Thus, when we consider our next block of training we need to weigh the importance of immediate success versus long term development, in addition to monitoring our fitness, motivation, health and freshness.
In summary, I want to stress that fitness is only part of the equation of going fast. We also need freshness, motivation, health, and most importantly, we need all these factors at the right time. Setting PR’s is fantastic, and absolutely an accomplish worth celebrating. However, I’d like to challenge you to think bigger with your training. Don’t simply train to be fit as you possibly can. Train to be as fit as you possibly can, as fresh as you possibly can, as motivated as you possibly can, and as healthy as you can, all at the right time.
And don’t forget to have some fun along the way.