Training for Endurance
Introduction
In this article I’m going to attempt to lay out all of the things you need to consider when training for a long-distance race - from half-marathon up, but mostly focused on ultramarathon objectives.
I’d like to start out by making a distinction that I don't often see talked about in articles about training for endurance running. The limiting factor in most people’s training regime is connective tissue - NOT aerobic fitness. While developing aerobic fitness is undoubtedly important for running races quickly, a huge limiting factor for people in both training and performance is the connective tissue in the feet, ankles, knees, hips and lower back. Connective tissue strength is the bottleneck for 99% of amateur athletes - if it weren’t, you could simply start running 50 miles per week, and this would build your fitness faster than any plan that builds volume gradually.
The whole point of the slow buildup of volume in a training cycle is to avoid connective tissue injuries such as patellar tendonitis, IT band syndrome, and shin splints.
With that being said, this article will focus on the need for connective tissue hypertrophy, and place less emphasis on the aerobic component of training which is well-covered elsewhere.
Needs Analysis
When training for anything, the first step is always a thorough analysis of the demands the sport places on the body. Without a clear picture of what we’re asking our body to do, it will be impossible to single out the training adaptations that are the most important.
Energy Systems
When you're engaged in any activity that lasts for more than three hours, your body will need to rely more on fat oxidation for energy, rather than carbohydrates, given the limited calories that can be stored as glycogen in the body. Therefore, a primary training goal will be to improve our running efficiency while remaining in the Zone 1-2 area because we will have to use this workrate if we want to finish.
To make significant improvements in your efficiency within Zone 1-2, you'll need to accumulate a substantial amount of training volume there. A critical challenge we see with distance athletes is that increasing your training volume will put additional stress on your connective tissues. To reduce injury risk while also accomplishing the training needed to reach our distance goals, it's essential to intentionally train and strengthen these connective tissues.
Energy from carbohydrate oxidation increases with exercise intensity
Tissue Resiliency, Common Injuries
Everything comes at a cost - every step. Repetitive muscle actions degrade our tendons and muscles over time. This damage to our connective tissue is unavoidable, and is the signal that tells our body to develop new connective tissue. If we provide the body with ample recovery resources between bouts of exercise, we’ll slowly get stronger - without that recovery we’ll only continue to degrade the tissue.
The most common injuries in any endurance running sport are overuse injuries of the connective tissue in the lower limbs - this includes patellar tendinopathy (runner’s knee), achilles tendinopathy, tendonitis in the dorsiflexors of the foot (ultrarunner’s ankle), plantar fasciitis, and medial tibial stress syndrome (shin splints). These issues are exceedingly common, and depending on the study you’re reading, one in three ultrarunners will experience an injury in their training season. During an average race there are more injuries than runners [sidebar: this is because of the coincidence of multiple connective tissue injuries in single runners - not because every single runner experiences a musculoskeletal injury].
Overuse injuries can come from an accumulation of volume over time, or from a specific bout that exceeds an athlete’s capacity. Connective tissue problems can be difficult to deal with, as excessive inflammation of connective tissue can be damaging, but entirely suppressing inflammation will impede long-term adaptation.
Connective tissue injury risk can be moderated by a smart training plan that slowly adds volume over time. Running volume for anyone who is not capable of regularly running their race distance without issues should be viewed as both connective tissue loading/strengthening AND cardiovascular fitness training. Another key point here is that aerobic training can be done without running - your heart is NOT aware of why it is being required to increase its output. So how do you add aerobic training volume without increasing connective tissue stress? Incorporate lower-impact cardio - biking, stairs, ellipticals, etc - the lack of impact and eccentric stress preserves connective tissue.
Mobility
The mobility requirements for running are relatively simple but commonly misunderstood, and the training information available to the average person does not not address all aspects of mobility for running.
Running requires significant ankle flexion and hip extension - easy right? Beyond these two requirements, the joint positions you need to access to run are available to almost everyone - you don’t need to lift your knees very high, do the splits, and your shoulders just need to hold your arms by your side.
In reality, you do need more than these two things - your ankles need to be able to move in every direction; inversion, eversion, extension and flexion. Your knees require rotational mobility to stay safe in a dynamic environment like a trail, and your hips require not just extension, but rotation and abduction.
Why? The answer is that you need to have a cushion of movement available to you to handle the fact that you probably won’t be running in a straight line on a flat surface the entire time. This cushion will help keep you moving efficiently through varied terrain, and help reduce the risk of injury should something unexpected happen - if you roll an ankle that has 0º of inversion, blowing out the connective tissue on that side is far more likely than if the ankle has 5º of inversion.
The other answer is that movement restrictions in one joint will cause you to compensate by moving other joints differently. This is not always a bad thing! The body will adapt to any stress we impose on it over time (so long as we can recover). This can cause issues in a few cases:
When there is a relatively sudden change to a joint’s movement capacity that causes a change in movement patterns, structures in the compensating joints will experience novel stresses that they don’t have adaptations for. This sudden change can over-stress these structures, causing overuse injuries to crop up.
When the change in a joint causes a person to use a movement pattern that moves stress from large structures in the body to smaller structures that did not evolve to handle the loads being imposed on them.
For example - your Achilles tendon is the biggest, baddest tendon in your body. If pain causes you to turn your leg in or out while running it will not be in a position to accept the amount of force it normally does. But if you keep running something has to transmit that force from your muscles to the ground.
When the joints involved in a movement pattern don’t have the range of motion to execute a sport-specific movement, the body will “find a way” and work around it - usually offloading that movement to other joints, essentially forcing them to do double-duty.
All this to say: the maintenance of joint ROM is crucial to maintaining the movement pattern you want during a race, and giving yourself movement options to keep you safe during a run.
Training
Training for an endurance event is all about developing a margin - you need more than you need, so that you don’t use it all.
Energy Systems Training
Training for an endurance event requires a ton of time put into Zone 2 cardio, as per Jesus’ instructions.
The volume of Zone 2 training, and running volume more broadly, will be almost entirely determined by an athlete’s training history and the rate of volume addition that they can tolerate. There is no magic bullet here in terms of the “correct” amount of running and aerobic training volume.
Most people’s running volume, in terms of mileage, will be determined by connective tissue capacities - and slowly expanding this volume will be one of the primary training goals until they can consistently run race pace for roughly their race length per week. At that point, and depending on an individual athlete’s goals, you can either continue to expand volume or work on improving pace.
Additional aerobic training can be done outside of running with lower impact to the joints - aerobic exercise modalities with little-to-no eccentric component can be employed to expand aerobic capacity with less volume on the joints, and is in my opinion an underutilized tool. The one thing I will say here is that it tends to be way more boring than running for runners - especially trail runners. This type of training is especially valuable if the event you’re running is significantly longer than anything you’ve done before.
Developing a training margin means being putting your race distance in the yellow - it shouldn’t be the absolute furthest you can run, even if you never run further in preparation.
Strategy
In strength and conditioning, training will always tend to go from less specific to more specific. In this case, that means that the training further away from competition will include less running, and more of, well, everything else: strength training, aerobic/anaerobic training in other modalities. The closer to competition an athlete is, the more they just run and less time should be spent on everything else - just enough to maintain the adaptations gained earlier in the training cycle.
This cyclic training idea is called periodization, and when it is applied correctly it leads to sustainable improvements in competition performance in the long run. Using this strategy we try to make gains in one cycle that potentiate further gains elsewhere. The reason we periodize training is that no one has an unlimited amount of recovery resources - we can only do so much useful work, and work done after that point will hamper our performance instead of help. This means that it won’t be possible to work on everything at once, we will have to prioritize; getting the order of priorities right in terms of training cycles is an art, and requires creating and adapting a plan based on where the athlete is, and how they respond to different training stimuli.
Just as there is no single “correct” volume, there isn’t a single “correct” way to periodize training - everyone has a different starting point, and responds to training differently.
Tissue & Resiliency
Outside of our running, the next biggest training focus will be improving tissue resiliency, to support our training and ultimately our actual performance.
Adaptation to repetitive, low-tension muscle contractions (like running) causes increases in tendon thickness - this is a good thing. However, this happens ONLY if recovery outpaces the stressors on a long term basis. The degradation of connective tissue during a single event can be the cause of an acute overuse injury, which, while not as serious as traumatic injuries like an ACL tear, can still end a race early. This is why the accumulation of connective tissue should be a primary training goal for most athletes - to build a margin that keeps us safe during a race.
We can train for more connective tissue outside of running by loading our tissue in lengthened positions, utilizing eccentric training, and using high-load training.
On top of developing the capacity of connective tissue to survive long bouts of repetitive motions, there are a few other important ways that we can improve the resiliency of our joints for long distance running:
Tendon Stiffness
First - tendon stiffness is different from the sensation of stiffness most people experience, which is a sensation. Tendon stiffness is more like a physical property of your tendons - the stiffer the tendon is the less it lengthens under load, which means better force transmission from muscles, and crucially, less tissue degradation with each movement.
Improving tendon stiffness can only be done with higher loads - training with lighter weights and higher repetitions does not create the same adaptation as higher loads and lower repetitions. When we refer to loading here, it is important to point out that the load a specific tendon can withstand does not necessarily equate to a “heavy” weight. The important thing is that we use a high load relative to what the tissue can handle.
The two ways that we can impart high loads on our connective tissue are generally with heavy, slow weight training (such as a leg press), or very fast contraction speeds (plyometrics). This training needs to be as minimal as possible, as it necessarily places a lot of stress on our connective tissues that we need for running.
Mobility
Mobility is defined here as the ability to actively control a joint into a position or range of positions, whereas flexibility refers to the ability of a joint to be moved into a position or range of positions.
We want to expand our joints’ range of motion because this gives them a margin of safety - when a joint is pushed past where you can actively control it, this can quickly lead to forces exceeding what the joint can handle, causing something to give. In a race, this could look like rolling an ankle - if you can invert your ankle to a fair degree, you might walk away fine. If your ankle doesn’t invert at all, you’re far more likely to sprain it.
Strength
Strength is not mentioned earlier in this article because the primary reason we want to be strong is to be resilient. You are very likely strong enough to run right now. Many people do “just run.” In fact right now you are probably strong enough to run a 4-minute mile pace, even if it’s not for long.
We cultivate strength to protect our joints and make us more efficient runners.
Heavy strength training is important because it not only improves the stiffness in our connective tissues, but it also gives us access to more of our muscle. Strength training improves neuromuscular recruitment, and in doing so allows us to generate more force. But if we’re strong enough to run a 4-minute mile already, why would this help us?
Improving our maximum force output will make a submaximal output a smaller fraction of our max. This functions for repetitions in a given lift, but also for pace in running. Strength, for the most part, can be developed independently of muscle size up to a certain point. Past that point increases in strength must be accompanied by increases in contractile proteins and connective tissue. This point is pretty high.
Adding muscle tissue can be beneficial, but there is a metabolic cost to fueling that tissue during a run - for example, despite their massive strength and power output, bodybuilders do not make excellent distance runners. You want to only add as much tissue as you need, and in the places you need it most.
At this point I would like to mention that in this article, we’re hyper focused on endurance training - many people would like to carry more muscle for any number of reasons. This is totally cool, and can definitely be done. Separating what helps us get better at running allows us to be mindful of our training and make sure we’re going to get the results we want out of our training. If you have conflicting training goals it is possible to improve in different areas at the same time, but the rate of improvement may be slower. Whether you accept the trade-off is a choice that can’t, or shouldn’t, be made for you.
TL;DR
We develop all of the capacities discussed above by slowly exposing the body to stresses at a greater intensity than those experienced during the sport - running.
Exercises outside of running should not really look like the sport - we want to target the adaptations as specifically, efficiently, and safely as possible. Oftentimes similar-looking training exercises lack stability, which makes them more dangerous and lowers the amount of effort you can put into them.
In order to train our connective tissues and muscles safely, we have to grade our exposure to these stresses and be intentional about how we increase them over time.
Putting Together a Training Plan
Balancing all of the demands of training we’ve covered in this article can be a daunting task. So where do you even start? Here at All Purpose Training Company, we have a three-part process: assessment, programming, and training protocol.
Assessment
You have to know where you are to know where you’re going. You can find an unlimited battery of assessments on the world wide web. Conducting the right assessments at the right times is crucial, and beyond the scope of this article. We cover the following topics with our athletes, although not all at once - a lot of training can begin with a thorough conversation with a coach.
Mobility - the passive and active ranges of motion of all involved joints needs to be assessed to ensure that the positions you expect to need are available to you.
Metabolic conditioning - many tests exist for the various types of “conditioning”, and a lot of the most popular ones can be run with minimal equipment. We try to run simple, less intense assessments for runners - you will never be asked to run to failure.
General health - things like resting HR, blood pressure, and oxygen saturation should all be in line, and likely are if you do a significant amount of running already.
Strength - we rarely assess strength directly as these tests can be risky and require learning technique, which takes time and energy away from training. Different limb lengths and individual mobility make comparing standardized lifts difficult anyway.
Programming should address the results of these assessments with the additional input of a thorough intake conversation. The importance of a good conversation at the start of any training relationship cannot be overstated.
Programming
The details of programming and periodization are the subject of many a heated debate behind keyboards in the Instagram comments section, but the truth is that no program is “right” or “wrong”, and most popular programs at this point will produce some level of results.
Training programs will go from less specific to more over the course of the entire preparation period with training around competitions being very minimal and almost entirely focused on running distance. Training further out will include more strength and mobility, as well as some metabolic training that is less specific (zone 3+) that can’t be included close to a competition.
The goal of any periodized programming is to carry the adaptations from prior cycles through to the competition, while doing as little as possible to maintain them so that more volume can be spent on running.
Our Training
Our philosophy centers around improving the capacity of the joints involved in the most efficient way possible - using low-volume, high-intensity training to accomplish training goals in the shortest period of time with as little stress placed on the body as possible.
We tend to use the safest exercises possible to accomplish training goals because safety and intensity are deeply related; you cannot train hard if you’re not safe. Safe training is hard training.
Our programming includes the aerobic training and distance running you would expect, programmed with and around specific strength work based on your body and how it responds to the training. We don’t do burpees.
Get Started
Core to our philosophy is keeping the human at the center of the training. Every training journey should start with a conversation, even if it’s just with yourself. What do you want, and why? We’re here to have that conversation with you and set you up with a plan to succeed in a way that fits in your life. We provide detailed training plans that are regularly updated and supplemented by in-person training or virtual coaching. Get started with an APTC coach today to help you reach your race-day goals safely, efficiently, and enjoyably.
