Endurance Training as Problem Solving

Rules only take you so far.

When I told a colleague of mine that I was planning to start a Substack, he asked me how I’d differentiate Endurance Mastery from the 10 million other endurance-related Substacks. It was a fair question, but I couldn’t help but laugh.

“I am constitutionally incapable of creating things that already exist,” I told him. “I don’t have to try to differentiate myself. I’m just different.”

This has been true for as long as I can remember. An incident that occurred when I was in fourth grade exemplifies my deep-seated aversion to following the herd. One afternoon during a math lesson, snow began to fall outside the classroom windows, and all of my fellow students ran to the glass to marvel at the flakes (which weren’t exactly a rarity in New Hampshire). Only one kid stayed at his desk: me. Even at 10 years old, I couldn’t stand the idea of doing something just because everyone else was doing it.

As a writer, I’ve never worried about being scooped by other writers, and I have no fear whatsoever that artificial intelligence will replace me. My brain is wired for originality. While other people look for rules and patterns in things, my mind seeks the gaps in between—the things that no one else is noticing or expressing. I don’t even try to do it; I just do.

Run Like a Writer

When I became an athlete, and later a coach, I brought the same creative mindset to these seemingly noncreative disciplines. I learned the rules of training because I knew I had to, but from the very beginning I was most interested in the limitations of rule-following and the elements of the training process that rules couldn’t help with.

Fundamentally, I view endurance training as a problem-solving process. Almost by definition, problems occur when rote application of learned rules fails. An athlete is off track or stuck in some way, and the solution is not immediately obvious. A solution does exist, but it must be found, and the name for the process by which solutions are found is problem solving.

The obvious example is pain/injury. The rules-based approach to dealing with this type of problem entails 1) assuming that pain always equals injury, 2) diagnosing the injury, and 3) applying a cookie-cutter treatment protocol for that type of injury. The problem-solving approach to pain and injury dispenses with diagnosis and one-size-fits-all protocols in favor of an open-ended, experimental approach to working through the pain and back to full training. My friend Ryan Whited, who owns a gym here in Flagstaff that we visit once a week for a group strength workout, calls this method Training as Treatment, and you can learn more about it here and here.

Again, though, this is just an example. Even when athletes are pain-free and 100 percent healthy, there are still problems to address. Heck, even when things are going almost perfectly in an athlete’s training, there remains the problem of how to take advantage of the momentum they’ve got without getting too greedy and possibly overdoing it.

The Ultimate Problem

Having run competitively since 1983 and coached runners and triathletes since 2001, I have a high degree of confidence in my ability to solve any problem I encounter. Last year, I put this confidence to the test by signing up for a 100-kilometer ultramarathon despite being sick with long Covid and unable to run. I had 10 months to figure out how to get healthy and fit enough to survive a distance greater than any I had successfully completed when I was healthy (I attempted a 100K in 2020 but dropped out at 38 miles).

What I loved about this challenge was that there was no playbook for the process ahead of me. How does one prepare for an extreme endurance test while carrying a chronic illness whose major symptoms include chronic fatigue, exercise intolerance, and post-exertional malaise? Nobody knew, including me, but I did know the process I would use to answer this question, which was creative problem-solving 101:

1) Identify limiters

2) Brainstorm ways to address individual limiters

3) Select ideas worth trying

4) Test those ideas

5) Evaluate the results

6) Discard, retain, or refine each idea based on the results

One idea I decided to try early on was respiratory muscle training, which entails breathing against resistance to strengthen the diaphragm and has been shown to improve performance in elite endurance athletes. Knowing this, and also knowing that whole-body exercise was risky for me, I thought I might be able gain a meaningful benefit from this practice without undue risk. And it worked. My spirometry test numbers kept improving, and the 5 to 10 minutes I spent working out my breathing muscles every morning did not impede my ability to also walk and (later one) run.

A few weeks into my training, in the name of science, I underwent lactate threshold and VO₂max tests on a treadmill. It was the hardest run I’d done since before I got sick, and I performed surprisingly well, though I paid a heavy price for it. The experience taught me that my body could handle bigger individual efforts; it just couldn’t handle a lot of them. So what did I do? I started doing one big run per week and training at a maintenance level (mostly walking) in between. As a coach, I would never plan this way for a healthy athlete, but I wasn’t a healthy athlete, and despite its unorthodoxy, this approach enabled me to make more progress than I would have if I’d followed established rules.

In the final months of my training, I added midweek high-intensity interval sessions to my routine. Although not very specific to the demands of ultramarathoning, these workouts are known to boost overall aerobic fitness in small doses, and I believed they would give me the biggest bang for the buck as a second weekly running stimulus, and again I was right. I made astonishing progress during those few weeks of sharpening and ended up not just finishing my race but winning my age group and taking 17^th place overall, with long Covid.

Now You Try

A problem-solving approach to endurance training doesn’t come naturally to every athlete and coach. Some prefer the security of “painting by numbers.” But in my experience, it’s just not possible for an athlete to reach their full potential without becoming adept at creative problem solving. To learn more about this approach to endurance training, check out my new book, Chasing Mastery: 25 Lessons to Cultivate Your Full Potential in Endurance Sports.