In endurance sports, there are 3 ways to evaluate your progress or lack thereof:
Racing
Testing
The workouts
Each one presents a different set of conditions.
Racing is something that is reserved for a few times per year for most.
Testing is a formal endeavor and may require controlling many variables to compare apples to apples.
The third option, the Training you do, is a hidden gem. It is done more frequently than Racing or Testing and can give a better picture of your development of yourself as an athlete.
This week we will dive into the indications for using Racing, Testing, and Training to establish proof of concept for your hard work.
Racing
Races can be the ultimate test of your fitness.
You have to perform on a single day, ready or not
You encounter “uncontrollables”
You have to combine the mental, physical, and emotional
Races are raw and can leave you exposed if you arrive unprepared for the demands. There is no better teacher than that.
But if you are like me, frequent racing is hard to come by. Travel, money, and time are all factors to consider. Therefore, this formative race day experience is reserved for certain points in the year and may not serve as the ideal barometer for how you are progressing if done infrequently.
In other words, you don’t want to have to wait around to find out what kind of shape you are in.
Testing
Pop science and social media culture have hyped up the ideas of lactate testing, VO2max testing, and other markers. These metrics are not to be ignored, but for the average athlete, these protocols can be confusing.
Many things can influence the results of such testing to the point where it may be most useful to rely on an age-old metric instead: “Did I go faster?”. In many cases that is the overarching goal anyway and can be replicated with plotting out a predetermined course and going for it to test for improvement.
Even so, with single-day testing, you must be aware that you are getting a snapshot in time. Numerous factors can affect the conditions and your test performance gives you a better indication of how you respond to those specific circumstances rather than an assessment of total fitness.
Did you create noise? Is there a clear signal from the test?
Sometimes it can be hard to tell.
Do not throw away your testing protocols. They are still useful, but using the test results to make large decisions on training may not always be the best choice.
Your training
Generating strong evidence for something requires a rich dataset. Unless you are Testing very frequently and under identical conditions, it can take a long time to develop many data points. This is where your regular training comes into play with visualizing the evolution of yourself as an athlete.
We are the sum of our best days and worst days. You will have some great sessions and sessions that are not so great, but on average, progress is defined as most of these trainings pushing you in the direction you want to go. Variability is inevitable which is why relying ONLY on your Testing may leave something on the table.
This data need not be purely quantitative either:
Are you walking away from training in a better mental head space than in the past?
Are you running more and without disruption due to injury?
Did you set aside more time for sleep this week/month?
Did you find more time to unplug from training?
These are worthy improvements in development that cannot be defined via a test.
Take a look at your day-to-day life for information rather than putting all of your eggs into the Racing and Testing basket. You may be able to pick up a greater signal for how you are progressing or not progressing. The things you do most frequently serve as the answer key so that you CAN show up to the big events and meet your expectations.