Many endurance athletes buy into suffer-as-achievement (sort of an exercise version of Catholic guilt/penance) where they
a) understand that stressing your physiological limits is necessary for improvement
b) do not understand, or ignore, that rest/recovery is also necessary for improvement
I’ve never leaned this way, personality-wise, and have only gotten into two fatigue holes in my life (fall 1998 as a collegiate distance runner, and fall 2023 when I got excited about doing a ton of elevation gain and didn’t back off soon enough), and have never ridden competitively. So I can’t really speak from experience here.
But some friends easily go this route, and then un-self-aware-ly complain to me about how they’re always tired. I suggest that they should dial back their intensity or volume, and they say “I’m just not getting enough sleep” and I point out that they should target their training intensity or volume based on the rest that they get, not the rest they would ideally get.
One friend is also very numbers-achievement motivated, and took two and a half months into this year before he recalibrated from his 10k-miles-for-2026 goal (he hasn’t even done 5k miles in a year in the past decade).
Of course I’m limited in ability to convince someone whose personality tends hard toward just-smash-your-head-against-the-wall-and-good-things-will-inevitably-follow. But I’m curious what people have found to be most effective practices/rhetorical approaches here.
The specific people I’m thinking of are mostly talking about parents in their 40s, but I suspect the rhetorical approaches that land here apply across ages and abilities, since the personality tendency toward penance-exercise is probably unrelated to age or ability.
One of my “Aha!” moments was reading an interview with John Tomac, who said that he could still do some of same workouts he did 30 years ago, but it took him three times as long to recover. I figured that if an endurance legend like that needed time to recover I probably did too.
Parents probably feel time-crunched, and that every minute on the bike not going hard is a minute wasted. That builds a lot of stress but they don’t realize it because it’s their normal. They also tend to ignore that life stress adds to training stress and that they are not completely separate buckets.
I think I finally heard enough about polarized training to start believing the old “Most people make their hard rides too easy and their easy rides too hard.” I now try to be focused about doing intensity – the trainer is great for that – and really enjoy the rest of my rides. It helps mentally because I only have to hurt in small planned doses. The rest can be…fun!
Not sure how to sell these ideas to other folks. The Fast Talk podcast has been a good source for me.
Don’t think that you could do much, honestly. I used to be of the ilk, up until I was consistently riding hard and far (both hard and far being relative to my abilities).
All it took was for me to throw out my back after one particularly gruelling ride, that necessitated some friends to physically lift me off the bike, because I could neither throw my legs over it to get off nor straighten my back.
One x-ray and one herniated disc was all it took to for lessons to be learnt. That and just so many I-told-you-sos from well meaning friends and family.
I suppose I’m pushing against the grain (whether of personality or ideology) here. Nobody sounds hopeful about getting this sort of message through, so I’ll probably just say moderate-to-gentle things every so often and not feel invested where I’d personally care if folks don’t have an “ah-ha” moment yet.
I think success in convincing someone of something depends on how receptive they are and whether it’s being delivered in a way that speaks to them. That’s entirely personality driven. Someone who doesn’t care about science won’t care about the literature. Maybe something from an influential podcaster or social media person would be more appealing. Maybe the person just doesn’t care and is all in on all hard all the time.
I’m a dad of two and very much understand the desire to maximize my minimal training time. But recovery is very much part of that equation.