The Hard-Easy System (HES) is especially useful in addressing how to exert optimal workout efforts. The solution is the Holy Grail of endurance training. When I began writing How to Read Your Body in 1985, I knew that a workout was essentially effort and energy. Thus, training optimally meant matching a hard workout with being ready-to-train hard. But I hadn’t yet realized the scope or implications of my knowledge.
At the time, I had written enough to put my hand-written, much-edited book into digital format. My associate, David Lally, shared time with me on his computer in the University of Hawaii’s physiology lab. It was Dave who enabled my first breakthrough understanding of the HES. He saw my effort and energy scales as a matrix (see below), with five optimal combinations on the diagonal. The book gained heft with that insight.
A discerning reader will see six workout effort levels (from very easy to all-out) juxtaposed with five workout energy patterns: sluggish, tired, lazy, ready, eager. One of these patterns develops during every workout, as running energy fluctuates on this scale: no energy, little energy, some energy, ample energy, abundant energy.
Workout effort is even more difficult to understand. It shouldn’t be confused with the exertion necessary to hold a pace. As I mentioned in the first article, this was Arthur Lydiard’s mistake in conceptualizing effort: he used the same effort scale to measure workout effort and pace exertion, which are two different concepts, deserving of separate descriptive terms and ways of measuring running experience.
“Once you see that a workout can be too easy, too hard, or just right for your energy on the day, you can aim to build ability with a particular exertion structure by optimizing the overall workout effort.”
Remember, experience is not the same as the concepts we use to describe it. Our ideas point us in the right direction, but we still must reflect on our experience to garner further insight and direction in our training endeavor. Nonetheless, once you see that a workout can be too easy, too hard, or just right for your energy on the day, you can aim to build ability with a particular exertion structure by optimizing the overall workout effort. There is no other way to garner the adaptive value necessary to build the five racing abilities.
With this as our basic understanding, it’s possible to conceive of a training schedule as a set of times during a training week when optimal training efforts will be run. They are optimal because the schedule provides just enough time between workouts for regular and adequate recovery. Although we have our foot on the exertion gas pedal, we cannot disregard the human body as the determinative entity. The next article focuses on the crucial problem of establishing new ability-building workouts.