#3: What Harvey Dent Can Teach Us About Training

“You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

-Harvey Dent, The Dark Knight

Unless you are running for the Gotham Track Club, or a certain clown is stealing your crowns on Strava, what can Mr. Dent’s words teach us about training? With just a bit of artistic license, let’s rewrite this quote just a bit…

“You either train smart, or train hard enough to see yourself become the villain.”

That’s better. Let’s talk about an all too common trajectory that I see athletes (particularly those who are self-coached) take with their careers in endurance sports. You first start out training modestly, with your overall training stress mostly limited by your body’s musculoskeletal system. You are sore from most training sessions, but find yourself usually wanting more. You might even look at how other, more advanced athletes train with an envious eye. But you love the sport and keep plugging away. Eventually, your musculoskeletal system adapts and your training capacity for both volume and intensity increases rapidly. Finally, you find yourself able to really train hard. Fitness gains come quickly and rapidly, which further eggs you on to do more and get even fitter. You quite rapidly rise through the ranks, but then at some point, you hit a plateau. Either injury issues start to crop up that were not an issue before, or your performances in races start to stagnate, despite training harder than you ever have. Sound familiar? A good number of the coaching clients I work with have come to me and my colleagues looking for answers to their frustration. 

So what happened? The athlete in question has crossed a distinct point in their athletic development, a point which I feel is one of the most critical changes in an athlete’s development. We’ll call this point the Harvey Dent Point (Figure 1). Our athlete’s fitness and motivation have reached a point where they are able to train enough to put themselves into a state of overtraining on a consistent basis, or in other words, they can train hard enough to become the villain to their fitness gains! Before this point, the athlete’s training was limited by their overall capacity to train, and/or overuse injuries. But now, their training capacity and durability are so great that they are able to consistently hit a training stress that is beyond their ability to recover from. This is not to say that only more experienced/developed athletes are able to overtrain.  Beginners certainly can, but typically only for shorter periods due to their lower training capacity and durability. At the Harvey Dent Point, the athlete is able to consistently train above their recovery capacity, which allows for a more chronic state of overtraining to be reached: the Villain Zone (see figure 2). 

Figure 1: The Harvey Dent Point Visualized

So why do I consider this Harvey Dent Point so important? Because it requires a paradigm shift in how the athlete approaches training. Before this threshold, the idea that “more is better” holds true for the most part. More training will yield results since you can still recover from it. After this threshold has been crossed, however, the idea that “more is better” no longer holds true, and the athlete must adjust their mindset to be more restrained and their overall training stress to be more conservative. What I think makes this so difficult is that the “more is better” ideal is such a tempting mindset, and is echoed so much in our society’s views on success. What’s more, in the athlete’s eyes, it has worked thus far! So why change it? Further compounding the problem, well-meaning athletes often train even harder in response to an early setback caused by this overreach. This can be a tricky hole to escape from, but I think it is critical to remember that just as we wouldn’t take the same physical approach to training as an advanced athlete compared to when we were a newbie, our mental approach to training must also evolve as our fitness does.

Figure 2: Which side of Two Face are you?

While a big light in the sky notifying us we’ve reached the Harvey Dent Point would be great, it can be hard to tell when an athlete crosses this threshold. To me, the clearest sign indicating that this point has been reached is when performance improvement starts to level off despite increases in training stress, and the training starts to create longer-term fatigue for the athlete, i.e. fatigue that can linger for multiple days or weeks during training, despite (seemingly) adequate recovery in the short term. A sure signal that you have passed this point are those disappointing race performances that come in spite of the athlete having their strongest workout performances in the buildup (or when your local billionaire/vigilante starts taking down your KOMs). 

Luckily, like Batman, we have a plethora of gadgets available to help us in our fight, albeit less cool ones. We can track how hard we are working and how well we are recovering from our workouts with tools such as Training Stress Score, morning heart rate, heart rate variability, and daily qualitative training journals, just to name a few. But we must also be proactive: deliberately modulating our training stress in both the short and long term, and taking a more holistic look at our training loads and how they further our goals as athletes. Ultimately, we must understand and accept that the approaches and mindsets that may have worked before might not always continue to work as we progress in our athletic careers.