I Forgot My Watch. You Should Too.
The less dependent you are on technology, the closer you’ll get to reaching your full potential as an endurance athlete.
On the way to Buffalo Park the other day I realized I’d forgotten my watch. I was less than a mile from home when I made the discovery, and I briefly considered turning around to fetch the device before deciding against it. Having made my decision, I found myself quite looking forward to running around the park unshackled by technology. Garmin and TrainingPeaks and Strava would never know I jogged 5 miles, and I didn’t give a shit.
What would you have done in this situation? I know a lot of runners who would have turned around and retrieved the watch. Which is fine—I’m not here to tell anyone what they should do in such a moment. I’m just here to remind you that the less dependent you are on technology, the closer you’ll get to reaching your full potential as an endurance athlete.
Watches Don’t Have Feelings
The reason, quite simply, is that endurance performance is limited by subjective perceptions, not by physiology, and there isn’t a device in the world that can experience, interpret, and regulate an athlete’s subjective perceptions. To find your limit in competition you must feel your way toward it, and to do this you must be exceptionally good at reading your body’s signals, interpreting and acting upon them with the same degree of precision a world-class soccer player shows in directing a free kick over a wall of leaping defenders and into the top left corner of the net, just beyond the goalkeeper’s outstretched hand.
Evidence that endurance masters are more sensitive to their body’s signals and better able to feel their way to their performance limit comes from a 2011 study involving 25 cyclists representing three levels of competitiveness: local, regional, and national. In the first part of the experiment, subjects were exposed to small doses of different exercise intensities and asked to estimate how long they could last at each. In the second part, the cyclists rode as long as they could at one of these intensities. All four of the locally competitive cyclists gave highly inaccurate predictions of their time to exhaustion, whereas four of the six national-caliber cyclists were spot-on in their estimates.
“High-level athletes may be more consciously attuned to their bodies and their own effort sense as a result of greater exercise experience,” wrote the authors of the study. “They are more familiar with the signals of exertion emanating from acute cardiorespiratory, thermal and metabolic changes associated with an increase in exercise intensity than low-level athletes. Consequently, the task of interpreting these cues and using them to estimate their exhaustion time may be less prone to error and therefore may be less variable in this group.”
The problem with devices that offer real-time physiological and performance feedback is that they distract athletes from their internal perceptions of effort. It’s hard to develop the level of body attunement seen in high-level athletes if you’re not really paying attention to what’s going on inside you.
A Thought Experiment
Suppose you had to train for your next race without a watch, doing absolutely everything by feel: guessing distances, estimating times, hitting intensity targets, etcetera. Would the quality of your training suffer in this scenario? If you answered yes, you’re not reaching your full potential even with your watch and must work at becoming less device-dependent to discover your true performance limit.
Among the most device-dependent runners I’ve hosted at Dream Run Camp was a guy from Seattle called Saeed. He was the type of athlete who might actually skip a workout if he forgot his watch. But Saeed relished a challenge, and when I challenged him to train for his next marathon without data, he bought in. For 14 weeks, he ran without ever consulting his watch (though he did wear a watch, screen locked on heart-rate display, so I could review the data afterward and offer feedback). If I asked him to run 45 minutes easy, Saeed would go out and run by feel for what seemed like 22 minutes and 30 seconds and then turn around. For quality sessions, I prescribed the following intensities, all of which Saeed tried to hit by feel:
· Steady state pace: 2-hour TT pace (between half-marathon and marathon pace)
· Threshold pace: 1-hour TT pace (between 10K and half-marathon pace)
· Critical velocity: 30-minute TT pace (between 5K and 10K pace)
· vVO2max: 6-minute TT pace
· MAS: Max Aerobic Speed, same as vVO2max
By the end of those 14 weeks, Saeed was fitter than he’d ever been, but more importantly, he’d gotten much better at feeling, trusting, and controlling his running body. One time I half-jokingly told him to run for 2 hours, 51 minutes, and 36 seconds and he went out and ran for 2 hours, 51 minutes, and 51 seconds without ever seeing his elapsed time.
Alas, wildfire smoke forced Saeed (who’s asthmatic) to abandon his chosen marathon at 15 miles, when he was on pace for a huge personal best and feeling great, but these things happen, and we both agreed the experiment was an unqualified success despite the unhappy ending. Afterward, Saeed did go back to using real-time data in his training, but he never went back to depending on it, and when I last spoke to him, he was the proud owner of shiny new PB’s at the 5K and half-marathon distances.
Another Thought Experiment
Now imagine you’re standing at the start line of a marathon and you have no memory of your training. Some kind of weird amnesia has wiped out everything you experienced in preparing for the race you’re about to start, leaving you clueless as to how fit you are and what sort of time you’re ready to run. Your watch is on your wrist and working just fine, but it can’t help you much in this scenario. To run the best possible marathon, you’ll have to figure out how fit you are and what sort of time you’re able to run by feel as you go. Could you pull it off?
Some runners could, and in all modesty I think I could. Unlike the previous thought experiment, this one can’t be tested in real life, but I’ve come pretty close on a couple of occasions. Of these, the more recent was the 2018 Boston Marathon, which I ran as a “B” race two weeks before Ironman Santa Rosa. A hip injury had decimated my running until shortly before Boston, and although I’d built a ton of fitness on the bike, it was impossible to know how this would translate to the marathon. Like an amnesiac who remembered nothing of his preparation, I’d have to figure out how fast I could go as I went.
I started the race cautiously, my attention focused internally in an effort to gather information, and completed the steeply downhill first mile in 6:53. Having experienced four dozen prior marathons, my body told me I could run the next 25 miles a little faster, so I ran the next mile in 6:37 and finished with an average pace of 6:36 per mile and the satisfaction of knowing I couldn’t have gone any faster. While hardly scientific, to me this result strongly validated my belief that reaching your full potential as an endurance athlete is all about self-regulation and not at all about obeying numbers.
Don’t Straw-Man Me!
I’m always concerned about getting straw-manned when I make the argument I’ve just made. For the record, I’m not against using real-time data as a training guide. But as a coach, I am against anything that stymies a motivated athlete’s progress toward mastery, and in my experience, the vast majority of endurance athletes are too dependent on their training devices and unable to find their performance limit by feel, which is the only way it can ever be found.