You should be able to answer these questions at any time as you progress through your training year. If you can't - ask! Understanding why a given workout is on your plan can help improve your motivation to follow through with the training set as it's written, and it can also be motivational to track fitness improvements throughout the year. Not every workout serves as a fitness marker, but generally each workout serves one of these three following purposes:
- To recover from previous workouts
- To improve your level of fitness
- To maintain your level of fitness
Recovery is as important as the level of training stress that you place on your body. Without adequate recovery, you are constantly breaking the body down and not allowing it to build itself back up (also known as "supercompensation"). Eventually, you will have over-reached your body's limits to build itself back up adequately and may become demotivated, slower, or sick. This is a great article on overreaching: Overreaching in Training.
Each individual requires a different amount of recovery. Your individual amount of recovery needed may be influenced by the amount of sleep you get, hydration and nutritional habits, genetic ability to recover, etc. Each week we will place a measured training load on our bodies, and we always want to perform a given run or bike a little faster than the week before, but is this reasonable? Let's look at the second purpose of a workout - To improve our fitness.
The purpose of a group of workouts (also known as "Training Stress") is to break the body down slightly, allow it to recover, and to build itself up stronger than it was when we started. As we mentioned previously, this is known as "supercompensation". However, if we're in the middle of a build cycle with a high level of training stress (or even a base cycle for that matter), should we expect to see levels of supercompensation? If so, when? How much? At what distance, time or intensity level?
As is the case with many issues in exercise physiology - it depends!
It is possible that if we're building up an athlete's aerobic capacity, that they can expect to see a decrease in their anaerobic capacity. In other words, an athlete might be faster at longer rides or runs than they were 6 months ago, but are actually slower at shorter rides and runs. This is to be expected and is precisely why we talk about goal races and distances. You won't find an athlete that's a gifted marathon runner and also a gifted 400 meter sprinter. In the Olympics, you won't see an athlete run a world record marathon and also run a world record sprint race. It just doesn't happen! Pick your distance, train that distance, and expect to see improvement at that distance. However, you should also expect to see performance levels drop at other distances. This is all part of tailoring the anaerobic capacity to the athlete for the distance at which they hope to succeed.
For example, you might find that after a 12 week block of aerobic capacity training (2-3 hour rides in your aerobic zone) that your CP20 (Critical Power for 20 minutes) has actually decreased. Does this mean that you're slower on the bike now? If your races are 20 minutes long, the answer is yes! However, the reason that you were prescribed a block of 2-3 hour aerobic capacity rides is probably because your goal race is longer than 20 minutes. This is one example of a fitness test not being a good representation of race fitness. Another example would be doing 200 and 400 meter sprint workouts as a measure of your Ironman marathon fitness. Reality check - not many Ironman athletes need to improve their 400 meter kick at the finish line!
In other words, the "test" that you're using should measure the goal of the training.
During the training block, we do have days that are considered "performance markers". Sometimes these markers are physiological tests (such as lactate tests), but they may also be individual races. It is important that if we are looking at a performance marker mid-build that we don't compare that marker with one that we'd see after a recovery week or taper. Our number one goal is to race as fast as possible, not to train as fast as possible. I don't care how fast you did your "10 x 800 meter repeats at Ludicrous Pace" mid-build if you can't hold pace at the half marathon on race day. Workout stats are usually for impressing your friends on Facebook, but remember that there's a difference between training and racing. A workout is not a race. A race is a race!
I recommend physiological testing every 6-8 weeks for my athletes. This is the ONLY way to measure adaptations within the body. The tests are not subjective and the blood does not lie. You're either improving, staying the same, or regressing.
It is also possible to prescribe a series of workouts to maintain one's level of fitness. For example, if an athlete needs to improve their swim, they may elect to go into a maintenance protocol on the bike or run. Don't believe me? Look at TJ Tollakson's training logs and see how much cycling and running he did during the months of November and December. He was swimming about 45,000 yards per week, and cycling and running just enough to minimize his fitness loss during this period.
There you have it! When you're working out, you're either recovering, improving or maintaining your fitness. If you don't know which of these goals an individual workout serves, ask your coach to tell you. After all, that's why we're here! Finally, the true measure of your fitness is on race day. Learn to look at each workout as another building block in your foundation to faster finishing times on race day, and this will help you stay within the prescribed intent of your workout session.
