The Tortoise and the Hare: On Training Focus.

You know what really chaps my ass? “Hours.”

For those of you not in the know of endurance sports terminology, and bored enough to keep reading after that first sentence, “hours” means accumulated hours of training, i.e. “I’ve trained 3,472 hours this week!”

But seriously, this is a good exercise for the difference between non-endurance nerds and those of us trapped in the quicksand of convention.

If I were to ask you what was more important to becoming a fast racer, how hard you train, or how much you train, what would you say? This is fundamentally a quantity vs quality question.

How did you answer? I bet the non-enduranerds said how hard you train is more important, and vice versa.  Am I right?

Let’s look at a scenario. Athlete A (let’s call him the Hare), focuses on the quality of his training, focusing on technique, race pace intensity, and good “sensations.” Athlete B (let’s call him the Tortoise. See what I did there?) focuses on how many hours he can accumulate in a week.

In reality, there is very little different about how these athletes train. The Hare probably trains 5% less volume than the Tortoise. I don’t believe at all that the TRAINING IMPULSE of these athletes is different. Some would argue that high volume programs do something fundamentally different from high intensity programs (to see a refutation of this, please read my Masters thesis) but I don't.

However, it is the FOCUS of these programs that will decide the outcome. Why? Recovery.

As Joe Friel says “Hard training days only create the POTENTIAL for fitness.” Without the proper recovery from a training stimulus, you won’t actually get any better. I like to think about it as “absorption.” If you’re trying to clean up a spilled beer with a sponge (how dare you waste that which the God of hops gave us!), you can only soak up so much before it is saturated, it just won’t soak up any more beer right? You have to wring it out into the sink to be able to soak up more beer. Recovery is wringing the sponge. Without recovering, YOU CANNOT SOAK UP MORE TRAINING. In fact, unlike the sponge, without “wringing it out,” you are going to become SLOWER by breaking your body down more than you rebuild it.

What does this have to do with the Tortoise and the Hare? The focus on "how much" turns an already focused person into an obsessive person. If you tell the Tortoise he needs to train 20 hours in a week, he will do everything he can to train 20 hours. It doesn’t matter if he should rest after 17. He WILL train 20 hours. What do you think that does to his sponge? What does that do to the quality of his training? If he’s gotten to the point after 17 hours where his workouts are no longer good quality, what is he doing in those last 3 hours?

However, the Hare focuses on good technique, training hard, and feeling snappy. This way he does not have the “need” (and I do not use that word flippantly) to get “hours,” and has a real signal that it is time to rest.

And, just like that, the Hare beats the Tortoise.

“What the hell, since when does the Hare beat the Tortoise?” SINCE FOREVER! The moral of that story isn’t that “slow and steady wins the race.” It’s that “people are sheep and will believe dumb shit.” In what world could a Hare EVER be beaten by a Tortoise in a race? That's like believing that “endurance” (I’m talking about races less than 2 hours here, not ultras) athletes who train the MOST win. IT'S NOT GONNA HAPPEN. 

YES this is an oversimplification, and YES you can be a smart Tortoise and a dumb Hare, but I honestly believe that you get good at what you FOCUS on. 

Focus on the FAST my friends.