Building an Appetite for Consistency

Five steps to make 2024 your best endurance year yet

We can’t think of an interview with a professional endurance athlete or coach in which they don’t cite “consistency” as the crucial ingredient of their success. That fact isn’t surprising: endurance sports are about amassing the highest volume of training possible without getting injured, and a consistently training athlete will always train more than an inconsistent one. Despite the cliché, the tortoise and the hare give us our central metaphor for today. If you can simply keep amassing workout after workout, not giving into “hacks” or “time-crunched tactics” or whatever latest gadget will deliver “marginal gains” you will be amazed at how much you improve this year. Training consistently, however, is easier aimed at than achieved, as anyone who has tried to begin or halt a habit will tell you. Today we’ll give you five behaviors to help you develop an appetite for consistency, because, as the old saying goes, you can lead an endurance athlete to a consistent training plan, but you can’t make him drink—that has to come from him.

Why Fads are Bads

Before we get to the goods, though, we need to answer those hands we see shooting up in the back. “But the Norwegians use all of these devices!” “Shouldn’t we be lactate testing for better efficiency?” “Can’t I just sub intensity for volume?” First of all, remember to consider the source and the intent of a lot of the devices or hacks or technologies from which these questions spring. Often there is a sales strategy behind all of them. Magazine and website editors need new content to put in front of their readers. The companies that sponsor your favorite Scandinavian athletes want you to purchase the devices upon which they’ve wagered their careers. Coaches want to tout whatever will get you to your desired level of fitness faster, which often means purchasing something from them. Heck, this article, for all its lack of sexiness, is trying to sell something: the idea that simple and consistent training, although it takes longer, will eventually make you the fastest, happiest, and healthiest athlete in your community. So take our words with a grain of salt, but…we think you need less salt for what we have to say.

Start Small and Be Realistic

We issue a long questionnaire to every athlete at Campfire, and one of the most important questions we ask is “how many hours—REALISTICALLY—do you have to train?” And then (spoilers!) we mentally multiply whatever the athlete says by about 75%. Athlete says twelve hours? It’s probably more like nine. No, we’re not cynical jerks (well, maybe not), but we know by now the way a training week really works. When you factor in travels, showers, changing, pumping tires, filling water bottles, realizing at the last second you need to charge your GPS watch, finding your sunglasses, and where the #*&@ the dog leash is, workouts take longer than whatever is listed in your workout journal of choice. When you start training (or start back training), you need to start small and start slowly. Assembling a lot of hours quickly might feel good for a week or two, but soon you’ll discover you’re trying to stuff more training into your life than it can accommodate (and you’re likely to get injured, too). When you’re trying to build consistency, the goal is consistency, not volume. That will come later. If you’re just getting going, aim for 5-6 workouts a week with 1-2 full days off. Six is nice, because each discipline gets equal shrift. Volume? Probably doesn’t matter too much at this point, but remember the following:

• Swim workouts will occupy twice as much time in your life as the workout (a 45-minute swim will be AT LEAST a 90’ commitment with travel and changing and showering)

• The bike is the biggest driver of aerobic fitness for triathlon, puts you at little risk for injury, and usually can be done at home with minimal additional equipment

• The run is the sport that will hurt you, so if you begin with two 15-to-20-minute runs a week, that’s GREAT. Be patient, not A patient.

Scan For (and then Remove) Obstacles in your Week

One mistake new athletes make is they don’t realize all of the obstacles they face when considering a training week. It’s easy in the abstract to say you’ll get to the pool every Tuesday and Thursday after working a full day of work or chasing the kids all day, but what you’ll probably find happening is your strike rate is far less than the 90-95% workout compliance everybody is talking about when they talk about consistency. What are the things that stand in your way to being at the pool twice (or five to six times) a week? Once you’ve identified those obstacles, remove them, OR realize that you’re trying to put a square peg in a round hole and start looking for another time of day to train.

Make it Easy to Get Out the Door (or onto the Trainer/Treadmill)

If the above tactic is about the week, this one is about the day. Got a bike ride tomorrow? Fill your bottles today and put them on the bike now. Pump your tires now, before you go to bed. Everyone has little pockets of time spread throughout the day that often they fill with Insta-scrolling, Netflix, or whatever your evening substance of choice might be. Lay out your running clothes, set out your nutrition, charge your bike computer, pack the swim bag, mix your recovery drinks ahead of time. Next time instead of spending the time to tell someone you have no time, use that time to buy yourself back some time tomorrow. There, our high school English teachers are facepalming about the repetitive use of the word “time” in that previous sentence.

This is a fun one! OK, reward schemes are as old as human behavior, which means they’re quite old. Thing is, it turns out that if a reward scheme is consistent, it loses its mental appeal. If you know you’re gonna get a treat at the end of each run, eventually your brain just assumes it gets a treat when you run, and…that’s not what we’re trying to do. We want to create the anticipation of a reward, which is actually more important than the reward itself. So here’s our suggestion. Go steal a six-sided die from your Monopoly! set (it’s a bad game anyway, don’t worry about it) and pick two numbers you like out of six. Every time you do a workout on your schedule, roll that die. If it comes up on one of the two numbers you’ve picked, you get something! Make sure to articulate what the “something” is ahead of time, otherwise this will slide into insanity quickly. One athlete we worked with who enjoys target shooting put $10 in a “new scope” budget when starting a new walking habit. By the end of that particular summer, he happily had a new toy by following this rule. Second part of this one—make some kind of visual (you have to be able to SEE it) representation of your progress. Remember those donation thermometers at the public library? Those work because they show to people that progress is being made, so if they want to be part of making their town a better place, they better get on board and join this wholesome library movement! James Clear points out that every time you complete the behavior associated with the habit you’re trying to create you’re entering a vote that you ARE the kind of person who habitually performs that behavior. If you generate some kind of visual representation of your progress (fill a goldfish bowl with pennies, or jelly beans, or whatever), you’re more likely to keep making that progress happen.

Get Better at Saying “No”

We saved the hardest for last. We can’t tell you the number of athletes we talk to each week who give us long descriptions of the obligations they have that keep them from being consistent. First of all, if the athlete really can’t fit their training into their life, then the coach needs to go back to the drawing board and pull back on the hours, and the athlete might need to constrain or revisit their goals. But very often usually what’s happening is that the athlete is struggling to say “no” to someone or something: extra obligations at their job, the requests of friends and family, community engagements. This is a hard one, but once you do it, we think you’ll be amazed at not only the time you get back, but also the sense of importance that comes from prioritizing YOUR needs.

CONCLUSION

Consistency is hard to achieve. Professional athletes make it seem simple, but you have to remember that A) they have been doing this for a LONG time, so they have practice and B) they have set up their entire lives to be consistent with training, much in the same way that you probably have set up your life to be consistent with being at your desk each day or being there for your family. Remember we’re all professionals at something (for working parents, usually TWO things!), so you can look at your own experience as to how you’ve created consistency in your own life around work and family (or maybe another hobby, or a friendship) and then copy what worked for those parts of your life to your endurance training.