Five Mistakes Self- and Uncoached Endurance Athletes Make

And How You Can Fix Them

The above is a real quote from a real Campfire athlete, but we would be lying if we told you this athlete’s experience was outside of the norm. In all of the hundreds of intake calls we have with athletes who are finally fed up with training on their own, we’ve collected the top five mistakes we see self- or uncoached athletes make. We’re also giving away our answers to these problems, so if you are one of those athletes who doesn’t have a coach you can…stop making them, we hope! All five of these errors will seriously set back your training, so we hope these strike a chord with you and inspire you to make a change.

Training Too Hard/Confusing “Hard” with “Fast”

Let’s return to our quoted athlete above. We understand why athletes train too hard: you want to improve, and the world sends you messages such as “no pain no gain” or “quitters never win” or some other totally toxic advice lifted from the fantasies of movie directors in the 1980s. Couple that with the fact that the athletes we see most often are professionals, who do seem to be going very fast indeed (they are). But pros are very rarely going hard in middle and long-distance events. They are going the correct pace for them, but when you have been training consistently for ten years, a moderate pace is very fast indeed. Believe us, when pros do go hard the results are even more impressive, but they don’t go hard very often at all, in training OR in racing.

The way you get faster at endurance sports that take longer than three minutes is to amass a very large volume of easy to moderate work. You have probably heard this by now, in the rise of “Zone 2” intensity, or the “80/20” style of training. Both of those concepts have been in the endurance world for well over half a century, since Arthur Lydiard discovered that both his marathoners and 800m athletes *both* thrived from running volumes over 100 miles a week (Lydiard, always the responsible scientist, discovered through personal trial and error that 200 miles a week was too much, yowza). But a *tiny* percentage of that large volume was fast or hard. So. Say it with us: “Most of my training should be conversational.” You should probably only have two sessions a week during which you are going hard. Oh, and triathletes? Remember that a “conversation” means that you say a sentence and then someone else gets to say a sentence. It takes a verbose triathlete to recognize a verbose triathlete.

Letting Perfect Be the Enemy of Good or “Mission TrainingPeaks Green”

Did you know that you can disable the colorized workouts inside of TrainingPeaks? You can and you should. When an athlete says that their goal for the week is “to make TrainingPeaks 100% green” that statement is a clear symptom of the tail wagging the dog. The colorized workouts suggest that the only thing important is compliance, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Smart athletes listen to their bodies in order to decide if they are going to train or not, rather than listening to a simple algorithm that calculates if you were within 25% of the planned workout time. Remember that holding onto something too tightly only strangles that thing, and in this case “that thing” is your body.

We polled our athletes for this article, and one of them said “I felt that having a coach would help optimize my training and keep me accountable. I also knew being a parent it would be hard to fit training around my schedule and a coach could help me come up with a training plan that would meet my schedule and needs vs a premade training schedule I found online.” Don’t get us wrong, there are plenty of good pre-made, inflexible training plans you can acquire online, for a price or for free. Heck, we sell them, too, although we don’t make too much noise about them. The problem with pre-built training plans, though, is that the person using them figures, sensibly, that the goal is to do ALL of the workouts, and to do them as close to perfectly as possible.

This approach is simply not how your body works. Many self- or uncoached athletes figure that the path to success is just…doing the whole plan. Being a robot, essentially. Even our coaches who work one-to-one with athletes don’t write perfect training plans—it’s literally impossible. A good training program is the mixture of a coach’s best educated guess (and the better or more experienced the coach, the better the guess, usually) and an athlete’s strengths, limiters, schedule, and good or bad luck. Even the best training plan is hopelessly opaque, because it lives in the future, which is unknowable. When athletes use training plans and think that 100% is the only way, they often end up injured, sick, burnt out, or worse.

A Short Term Mindset

Instead of “what have you done for me lately?” the endurance athlete version of this is “I want to peak for every event this year.” As soon as an athlete finishes a race, good or bad, they begin thinking of the next one, and how THAT race will finally be the one where they achieve all of their wildest dreams. The truth is that endurance development takes a long time, and we mean years, not months. The best athletes in the world have been doing what they have been doing single-mindedly for a long, long time. They carry a growth mindset into their sports, where they believe that they will develop over a long period of consistent work, and each event will build upon another.

Many athletes, excited as they come into the sport, think that a 16-to-20-week plan will do everything they need physiologically. But your body changes very slowly—our bodies are built to resist change, since change is usually energy intensive and our bodies are efficient (lazy, a doubter might assert). If you want to get faster year in and year out, you better be prepared to be conservative early in your career, hold back during races, and do less than you think you can, because most athletes believe they can do more than they actually can. That confidence is great, but make sure you approach each macrocycle (each season or year) from the perspective of allowing growth to happen, which often means accepting where you are right now. We do our best to avoid the big clichés, but Rome wasn’t built in a day. Adopt the mindset of those Renaissance cathedral-builders, who knew that even their lives wouldn’t be long enough to behold the edifice at completion.

The Security Blanket of Fatigue

Once you have done an endurance sport for a long time you become acquainted with fatigue. It’s a near-constant companion, seeing that the whole way we get faster is due to the principle of progressive overload, which states that something needs to be out of reach each microcycle, whether it’s volume or intensity. Your long ride was four-and-a-half hours last microcycle? Make it 4:45 this week, or 4:40, or 4:50. Intensity is different, but if we think about intensity as responding to duration as opposed to an ever-increasing number we’ll be doing it right: did 3x10’ at FTP last week? Try 4x8’ this week. Now, before you start progressing everything, please go back and read the first sub-heading: you can only do 2-3 “hard” workouts per week, so before you turn everything to 11 remember that maxim. You see, now, why triathlon can be so complicated: eventually all three sports need to improve, but you can’t progressively overload three sports all the time—you’ll literally explode like the Hindenberg.

But uncoached athletes often adopt a “use it or lose it” mindset, and as a result they never rest. An important part of progressive overload is rest. If you overload anything, whether an electrical circuit, a parent, or a body, it will need rest and repair at some point. But new endurance athletes begin to think that feeling tired all the time means they are working hard and as a result getting faster (again, reference subheading one, above). They cling to a “security blanket of fatigue” (thank you to Kolie Moore at the Empirical Cycling Podcast for this useful analogy), but we also know that “fatigue is the ultimate watt-blocker” (another Moore-ism). In triathlon, fatigue deeply affects swimming, and so athletes who don’t rest eventually see their swimming suffer. Frustrated, they train harder, and dig themselves deeper and deeper into a hole. Don’t be Linus—ditch that security blanket and get some rest. Rest is the only time you actually absorb the work you’ve been putting in.

Underfueling Workouts

Endurance sports have a body composition and body image problem. We believe that endurance training will make us skinny, since very often the successful athletes we admire seem to “look” a certain way. This is a real unfortunate thing, and very often it’s the other way around: athletes who already owned a certain body type gravitate towards endurance sports, and not enough attention is paid to the athletes who have success but look different, those that might carry more muscle or mass naturally. Due to this body composition problem, many athletes think that their workouts are a GREAT time to cut more calories, since that will make the workout more “valuable” from a weight loss perspective. Let’s call this the “MyFitnessPal” problem, where workouts of a certain duration give you a larger “budget” of calories for the rest of the day. This model is overly simplistic and not accurate. Joe Howdyshell, of the “Badasscoach” Instagram account, has a MARVELOUS post that you can read here about why it is impossible to over-fuel a workout, even if it is a very light workout. Say it with me, folks: underfueling will NOT help your body composition goals—underfueling will lead to all sorts of horrible hormonal problems, adrenal fatigue, and a body that is constantly looking for a way to rest. Usually that rest that your body forces upon you? It’s an injury like a stress fracture. Oh, and you’ll always be a jerk, too.

Conclusion

Although we are a coaching company, and we’d LOVE to work with you, we know that coaching isn’t for everyone. If you have questions about this piece, you can talk with us for FREE for 45 minutes about your training program so we can help you avoid these issues. Really, we would prefer that there are more healthy and happy athletes out there in the world than athletes who just work with us. Any one of these mistakes can land you on the disabled list, any many athletes, regardless of level, make several of them.