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Endurance is essential in endurance sports to manage fatigue, prolong performance, and improve efficiency.
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A mix of physiological and psychological aspects, targeted training, and adequate recovery increase the athlete’s endurance.
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Monitoring progress through formal tests and tools such as sports apps helps assess and improve endurance.
We saysomething is resilient when it is able to last a long time.
Relative to endurance sports, telling someone that they have good endurance means that they have a good ability to handle and sustain an effort for a long time.
It is critical for an ultra runner to develop this ability in order to be able to cover miles and miles of racing without going downhill.
Being resilient means shifting the threshold of fatigue to last longer.
According to Nicolas Berger, a researcher and expert in endurance sports, endurance is related to resilience and includes both physiological and psychological aspects.
The mix of the different aspects is the key to being able to aspire to perform for extended periods of time.
To each his own
Endurance is crucial in ultrarunning.
It is on this that an athlete’s ability to withstand the physical stresses and challenges that will be faced the longer and more demanding the race.
A marathon runner is also a resilient athlete, but he or she is resilient in a different way than an ultramarathoner.
The difference between the two is that the marathoner at the end of the race will most likely have exhausted every ounce of energy in his body, because he has run faster than an ultramarathoner would have done, who, having reached the marathon distance, will be able to continue more or less comfortably for another x kilometers.
Work on fatigue
Fatigue is the number one enemy of the endurance athlete.
It creeps in and manifests itself in different facets that build up in the body and then presents you with the bill until you are forced to slow down or stop.
What you need to do is work to try to move the bar of fatigue higher and higher to delay the time when it will manifest.
Fatigue can be caused by muscle aches, dehydration, lack of sleep, and exposure to excessively high temperatures.
Recognizing the signs that are symptoms of fatigue is crucial.
Learning how to overcome it without, however, risking overdoing it and injuring yourself is a skill that develops with time and experience.
Change the race, change the parameters
VO2max and lactate threshold are some of the metrics taken as benchmarks to assess training level.
However, as the duration of the race increases, these metrics lose their importance in favor of a single metric: that of endurance.
A strong ultrarunner can use aerobic capacity and running efficiency more effectively to his or her advantage, being able to prolong performance over ultra distances.
The crucial role of recovery
It doesn’t matter how well structured or well-planned your workouts are if you don’t pay enough attention to recovery.
Your efforts will be in vain if you don’t give yourself enough time to recover between workouts.
Endurance is also trained through proper recovery.
The ability to recover more or less quickly is subjective and partly determined by genetics.
However, it is a partly coachable aspect on which you can improve, for example by taking care of the foundation, namely sleep and nutrition.
Sleep hours should never be less than 6, and nutrition should always be able to give you on the one hand the energy you need to cope with training and on the other hand allow you to recover in the correct way.
What is your level of resistance?
Knowing, monitoring, and checking your progress is an important aspect that should be done on a regular basis.
There are several methods for assessing your fitness level: from the more formal ones, to be performed with the support of professionals as in the case of metabolic tests that provide detailed information about an athlete’s physiological response to exercise, to the more informal ones that you can perform on your own on the field, in the field, or by monitoring your performance on apps such as Strava or Garmin Connect.
Monitoring certain data such as resting heart rate variability can also be indicative of how you are responding to training: when as training loads increase, this value remains constant, it means you have become resilient and are adapting well to the stress of training.
(Via trailrunner mag)