What Makes a Great Endurance Athlete?

Key Terms:

• Robust Athlete
• Durable
• Metabolic Control

When you start. working with an endurance athlete the reasons they do it may vary, the goals may vary and the time they have to train will vary. However, there are things that stay the same;  things common to all great endurance athletes.

The priority as someone starting on an endurance journey is that you focus on the areas that get most gain long term, not short, quick hit, one-percenter gains.

My coach at the time pointed me in the direction of some podcasts by Stephen Seiler (links below). This was the first time I’d heard some of these key terms listed above, and it changed the way I trained forever.

Performance doesn’t come from a miracle interval set, or riding so hard you end up lying in a pool of sweat by your bike after a turbo trainer session. It comes from consistent, well structured, disciplined training over time.

The discipline most people struggle with isn’t actually to push hard, it’s to hold themselves back on the easy days. It’s this discipline that. forms the foundation of a great endurance athlete. Taking the easy. days easy enough means heart rate. below 78% of max (as a rough guide). This can be really hard at first, it takes discipline.

If you stay disciplined, keep your hard days hard (1-2 x per week) and your easy days easy you will get. consistent training over time and that is when you start getting sustainable, high-level gains.

It is this approach that will make you a robust, durable athlete with the metabolic control to go easy when it’s easy and hard when it’s required.

Stay Healthy

Meaning both not getting injured and not getting ill.

If your training is too hard or too frequently intense you will get little illnesses and injuries that break your consistency.

Keep. your easy sessions easy, for most athletes this means around 80-90% of your training is below 78% of your max heart rate.

Be Consistent

Once you are disciplined with your intensity, you will stay healthier and consistency will come.

Getting on your bike as much as you can, in balance with the rest of your busy life, will be the thing that impacts your fitness the most.

Sustainable rhythm

All this put together means that you can put together long stretches of sustained endurance training stimulus that creates greater adaptation and performance gains.

It’s important to remember to keep life in balance, fit the training in around everything else and don’t dig too deep into your energy or your partner or families ‘good will’. Find a balance.