You and your body are two distinct entities. Increased fitness develops when you engage your body as a teammate. As team captain, your body sets the rules; as its teammate, you’re there to play by the rules, because disregarding them jeopardizes team results.
The book that started me on the path to understanding this principle is The Stress of Life, by Hans Selye. When it was published in 1956, the science of how the body operates was still in its infancy, so Selye’s idea was radical. He said that virtually everything we do in life (such as training for a marathon) produces a stress response. During the training process, that response is beyond our direct control. Yet, we must live with its results.
Of course, we want our results to be good. So, it’s important to understand that, according to Selye, the body operates in cycles. This cyclic process develops in three phases: shock, adaptation, and exhaustion. Shock and exhaustion decrease your capacity to withstand a stressor (such as training effort), while adaptation increases it. You may want every workout to increase your fitness capacity, but that’s not the way the body works. In the fitness training game, shock and exhaustion are unavoidable.
I’ve been into distance running a long time. I’ve seen guys who became incredibly fit, who also became ill and died earlier than they probably should have. My evidence is anecdotal, but it seems to me they trained and raced so hard that they exhausted their body of the hormonal energy needed to live a normal life. Fitness training, though stressful, can absorb and balance the stress generated by work and family life. But it can also generate more stress than the body can handle, which is where exhaustion comes in.
“You may have an idea of what it will take to run a marathon. But your body has alternate ways of racing preparation.”
Selye claimed, controversially, that the body’s adaptive capability is limited. Eventually, it gets old and dies. Meanwhile, it’s incumbent on us to choose our stressors judiciously, so we don’t waste our limited stores of hormonal energy—the stuff we use for adaptation. For example, your body will adapt to a certain amount of cold weather. But why would you force that sort of adaptation when you can cover up and conserve your body’s warmth, thereby saving hormonal energy for other purposes? Similarly, why would you over train when doing so greatly increases your risk of becoming sick, injured, or exhausted?
The Hard-Easy System that guides BC Endurance programs is aligned with Selye’s theory. The system offers a way to optimize training effort so workouts are never too hard nor too easy, but always just right. Remember, you may have an idea of what it will take to run a marathon. But your body has alternate ways of racing preparation. Disregarding those ways is perilous, which is why there are so many colds and injuries just before a goal race.
Ego-driven ambition is the bane of effective fitness training. You’re better off hearing and abiding by the sensations your body reveals in response to training effort. Learning to read your body with wisdom and understanding is what the Hard-Easy System teaches.