Endurance athletes don't suffer enough, says Matt Fitzgerald

To prepare yourself for the pain of race day, competitive
triathletes have to learn to suffer.
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"Very few endurance athletes think of themselves as avoiding suffering in their training, but in my experience most do," says Matt Fitzgerald, author of eight books about endurance training, including Brain Training for Runners and Triathlete Magazine's Essential Week-by-Week Training Guide. Fitzgerald explains that endurance athletes are willing to push the discomfort envelope when it comes to high-volume training, but they rarely simulate race-specific intensity in training.

Fitzgerald is co-authoring a book with Stephen McGregor, PhD, an exercise physiologist who trains elite British endurance athletes with the English Institute of Sport. An integral part of McGregor's programs for endurance athletes is to break them of the habit of always staying in their comfort zones. According to Fitzgerald and McGregor, even elite athletes are reluctant to do gut-busting efforts intense enough to push their discomfort level. The reason athletes need to train until they feel like they're going to puke, according to a study by Bertrand Baron at the Université de la Reunion in France cited by Fitzgerald, is that that pain threshold is trainable just like a lactate threshold. If athletes rarely mimic the intesity race pace in training, then they will have trouble pacing themselves in races. Perhaps they push too hard and blow up, or perhaps they don't push themselves as hard as they could have.

According to McGregor, athletes tend to make great gains in the first few weeks of training, but then their gains level off as they develop a comfort zone. They find an intensity or rate of perceived exertion that works for them and they stay there, freezing gains. McGregor includes high-intensity workouts in elite athletes' training programs to push them out of that rut. Many non-elite endurance athletes avoid high-intensity training because they fear that it increases the risk of injury (or that it will develop too many fast-twitch muscle fibers, there are a million excuses), but Fitzgerald says that this is all a bunch of hogwash. "Yeah, right," he says. "Having been an endurance athlete since 1983... I have simply been around the block too many times to live in denial of its effectiveness." Fitzgerald suggests incorporating race-intensity suffering into your training about two times per week through track repeats, hill repetitions, tempo runs, or anything that hurts like mad.