Endurance. The seemingly ultimate holy grail of fitness. Year after year the men and women who compete in IronMan distance triathlons are dubbed the fittest people on the planet. We seem to think that if we just had more endurance we could be fitter, skinnier, happier.
You couldn't be wronger.
Yeah. That's right. WRONGER. I used poor grammar on the internet. It's funny. And I'm right. I'm about to tell you why, but I'm also about to tell you how you can indeed pursue more endurance and achieve it, at least to a small degree.
First endurance can be had thru training, but like anything repetitive it must be periodized (ooooo fancy training words). What that means is you have to build or follow a program that builds, then rests then builds in cycles. Usually in 12 week chunks with 3, 4 week intervals where you build hard for 3 weeks and every 4th week taper the training a bit to allow for recovery but still training within the confines of specific gains in mind.
There in lies the reason why you haz none (see, more silly internet speak, aren't I cleaver). Most of us lack the focus and patience to actually stick thru a 12 week program. In our instant-gratification society 12 weeks is an eternity. We want it in 2 weeks, tops. Unfortunately that is paradoxically impossible. Endurance by definition entails long bouts of facing the same movement for long periods of time both in each session and over a long trining cycle. Be it running, swimming, rowing, climbing, education, a trying season in life, a bout with cancer...endurance is about the long haul and whether or not you have something that can get you through it.
That something is called tenacity.
Tenacity is the ability to see something thru in spite of hardships. Let's face it; running for long periods of time get boring, even if you enjoy it. Tenacity comes in when you continue even when you are bored, frustrated, and stuck. It's being persistent and determined thru an entire training program no matter how much you hate it or how ineffective you might think it is. The fact is you won't truly know its effectiveness until you make it thru the entire program.
That said, the whole truth about gaining long lasting endurance lies not in endurance training itself, but in a holistic training program that develops all of your body's energy systems so it can use all of it's metabolic pathways efficiently so that endurance doesn't come in until the end where your mind can push your body thru the hard part.
Doing long steady bouts help to be sure i.e. running a 10k. But now take that same 10k and break it into 10, 1k sprints with a 1:1 run to rest ratio or make it tough and go 2:1 or 3:1. But endurance goes beyond even that. You MUST be on a sound strength program. And I'm not talking about lifting 5lb. dumbbells 100 times. I'm talking real, measurable strength...as in lift heavy things. As heavy as your body, or more. Being strong is essential to having lasting endurance and that is the issue with most endurance training programs, they just plain ignore and even scoff at true strength. This is why most, not all, but most people who chase ultra distance events can't sustain them for years on end at a high level, they last a couple of years and their body begins to break down. Knees, hips, ankles, back, shoulders. "Runners" are the most injured training group in athletics and it's because their musculature lacks the ability to continue to hold them together. This is also why you can't call triathletes the fittest on the planet. Yeah they have endurance, but they have no other real fitness ability that would measured at even average for their age. The other reason for the heavy lifting is the real place where endurance lives, the mind.
The body can do just about anything the mind tells it. While a long run, marathon, 50 miler, 100 miler, etc. will test you mentally and in many cases you push through, attempting to back squat your body weight is an entirely different mental endeavor. One that can give you the push in a long run once you have flexed and trained that mental muscle and your "endurance" muscle is all flexed out because your body is breaking down. Running long distances can be nice and at times will make you fell accomplished, but world-renowned strength coach Mark Rippetoe once said "Strong people are harder to kill and more useful in general". Do you want to feel accomplished, or do want to be able to have endurance in the long haul and still be useful in other places in life?
There are many other things at play when talking about gaining endurance. Physiological limits in capacity, specific plateau breaking training methods, and even nutrition (I recommend a 50%-25%-25% balance of carbs-proteins-fats for endurance athletes). A great place to start is to check out a book by Brain McKenzie and T.J. Murphy called Unbreakable Runner (again, I'm not getting paid for that, I just like it) to get started on the right path. Or, you could do what you do when your car breaks down and hire a mechanic, a.k.a. a trainer (total shameless plug).
To put a nice little bow on all this pageantry; to gain more endurance, stop running so many miles! Have some long runs, work in long workouts based on a bunch of short bursts and for the love of life, lift some heavy freakin' weights! Deuces!
