What do you think the following Hard-Easy System truism means? The way you train will be the way you race. Sparing you the hunches others have offered; it refers to the harmonious way disciplined athletes handle training and racing effort.
You exert an effort whenever you do a race or workout; at the same time, your effort encounters whatever energy you have available, in the moment. The more energy you have, the harder you can run, harmoniously. It’s your duty to harmonize your effort with your energy. To do otherwise is to exert a dissonant effort that feels disagreeable.
Of course, there are times during a race when we must endure discomfort. Long-distance racing isn’t called an endurance sport for nothing. I’m talking here about the fundamental discordance between too much effort and too little energy. For, in this sport, you have a duty to your body to coordinate your effort in harmony with the energy it has made available, in the moment. You are in the driver’s seat regarding effort, but your body calls the shots regarding energy. So, how will you play the sport?
In an earlier article, I presented an effort-energy matrix, with 30 combinations, only 5 of which were harmonious. The rest were either too hard or too easy for adaptive training or racing. The harmonious combinations were on the diagonal, with the lowest four reserved for training, and the very-hard/eager combination reserved exclusively for racing. Notice that all-out/eager racing is not among the optimal combinations.
“I am saying that longevity in the sport requires you to find a racing sweet-spot at the very-hard/eager level.”
I’m not saying you should never run an all-out/eager race; sometimes a winning performance demands it. I am saying that longevity in the sport requires you to find a racing sweet-spot at the very-hard/eager level. So, let’s say you are about to race a 26.2-mile marathon. How will you exert yourself to achieve your best performance?
The graph below illustrates a way to understand a maximum sustainable marathon pace. Rather than showing pace in minutes per mile, however, the five red curves represent the exertion needed to generate an optimal start-to-finish pace on the following exertion scale: mild, light, steady state, threshold, ragged edge, maximum.
The graph shows that five different athletes produced five different marathon performances between 4 and 8 hours. I assume that each athlete’s performance is close to his or her fastest possible finish time. If this is true, the red curves each represent a gently rising, optimal range of exertion from start-to-finish of the marathon.
By running harder than optimal they risk impairing their finish performance with a crashing slowdown well before the finish. By running easier than optimal, they harm their performance by running slower than their true ability. Thus, the red exertion curves generate the maximum sustainable pace for each athlete’s marathon.
