Small goals build the fitness you keep
Lena is on the last climb of her club's August sportive, the longest ride she has ever done, when her legs go empty. She has eaten two bars since breakfast. She stops at the top, eats everything left in her pockets and rides the last stretch slowly, with nothing in her legs. In the car park she is starving and cannot stop smiling.
Her big ride, 160 km over the hills, is in September. Today's was shorter, and it showed her something no training ride had. The last hours of a long day need food in you long before you feel hungry.
Two days later she is out again, for an hour on the lanes behind her house at base, the steady effort you could hold for hours.
Many people train for a big day the other way.
01
Near goals keep you going after you reach them.
Tom enters his first marathon a year ahead. For 12 months every run points at one Sunday in October. He gets round, collects his medal and puts his shoes in the cupboard. It was such a huge undertaking that he cannot face another. By Christmas he has not run once, and fitness you stop using starts to fade within weeks.
The psychologists Albert Bandura and Dale Schunk tested near and far goals with 40 children aged seven to ten, who were poor at arithmetic and disliked it. Each child worked alone through a booklet of subtraction. Some aimed for a few pages each session. Others aimed for the whole booklet by the last session. Afterwards each child was left alone with a pile of sums and a different kind of puzzle, free to do either or neither. Nine in ten of the children with near goals chose the sums. Of the children with the far goal, about four in ten did, no more than children who had been given no goal at all.
It was arithmetic, not training. But the children with near goals did what Tom did not. They kept going by choice.
So keep the big challenge you have set yourself, with its date. The big goal gives you the direction. The near goals on the way are what keep you going. Build towards it through smaller challenges in your sport, each within reach of the weeks you can train now, and do not plan as if the big day were the only goal.
02
A shorter challenge teaches you the long day.
Before the big day, take on a shorter challenge in the same sport, a little below the one you are aiming at. If the big day is longer than your longest session, nothing in your training comes near it. The shorter challenge is the first time you meet the late hours of a long day: how heavy they feel, how your effort holds, and what you need to eat and drink to get through them. Lena learnt on her sportive what would otherwise have cost her the big ride.
03
Build your weeks past the distance, one session at a time.
Aim at the training, not at the challenge's distance. Train in hours you can do and recover from, week after week, and add time only while you recover from it. It takes months of steady work to build your weeks this way. Skip the work and you never get there.
Build them until, across an ordinary week, you cover more than the challenge's distance with room to spare. Then the day is a long day on top of your fitness, not a leap.
The weeks have to be ones you can repeat. A week you recover from, you can do again the next week, and the one after. A single big week you squeezed out leaves you tired, not fitter.
Build for a triathlon sport by sport, because each sport trains its own movement. But all three train the same heart and lungs, so each leg needs less weekly distance than it would on its own. The full distance of all three, every week, would be more than anyone recovers from.
04
Each challenge is a deliberate exception.
On a challenge day you go far past anything in the last month, on the shorter challenge as on the big one. That is exactly the kind of jump that raises the risk of injury. So take each one on as the exception it is, recover from it, and leave weeks of ordinary training before the next.
05
After the day, build again.
For a week or two afterwards, keep every session at base and leave out the long session. After a marathon your legs can take days to recover fully. If you practise yoga, move gently through shapes you know well, and hold nothing deep. Then build your weeks again, towards the next challenge, a little beyond this one.
In September Lena eats from the first hour. On the last climb her legs are tired but not empty, and she passes riders who were ahead of her all morning. The week after, she is back on the lanes behind her house, at base. By October she has a longer ride written down for next summer.
Tom's shoes are still in the cupboard.