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.
I was giving this a little more thought today, and I realised/wondered whether this came from an invested, but professional capacity as a physician.
If it’s the case where clients are coming through the door with sports/activity-related issues, I do think it’s a pragmatic approach to outline the documented effects of overtraining. In so doing, you’d also have ensured that the client is made aware of the downsides of ignoring rest/recovery; the onus is still, ultimately, on the client to realise the safest route forward.
Incidentally, one of the I-told-you-sos was from a well-regarded sports physician, did the exact same thing, and broke down everything that would happen if I had persisted on the route of no pain no gain. I’d say he was pretty close to being wholly accurate - he was only off by a measure of being blatantly honest.
Good question. I’m speaking only as a friend who has some endurance athlete friends who tend in this direction. Talking to them about the importance of recovery to performance has never seemed effective.
And I figured this is likely a common problem, from what I understand about endurance sports personality distributions, but I’d never seen discussion of it anywhere.
There also may be multiple personality and ideological factors that predispose people in this direction. I thought about seeing workout akin to Catholic guilt penance, but maybe there’s another piece of “grind” that leans people toward the effort part (bc it feels like you’re “doing something”) but not the recovery part. I know psychometric methods but not psychology.
The thing is that from a physiology standpoint, doing the work does not make you stronger. Doing the work does damage that your body has to repair and rebuild. Recovery is when you get stronger.
Effective training is working hard enough to drive adaptations but not accumulating excess damage and fatigue.
I think the general idea of leaving breadcrumbs is a good one. Especially training based on your actual ability to recover, not your perceived one, is really important.
It’s been a tough adjustment for me as a dad with a toddler. I have to be so careful not to overtrain, because I can’t always count on a good night’s sleep, and my kid expects (and should get me) at my best. It’s mentally really difficult, but in a different way than just making yourself physically suffer. Hopefully your friends are able to sort it out for themselves, maybe with a bit of your help.
The original post resonated with me and what I have seen in so many of the people I have run with over the years. In my experience the people you describe don’t necessarily want what others want out of sport. For me, the performance in competition is the end goal and the training a means to that end; for others the sense of working harder than everyone else is what drives them, even if this mentality means underperforming in competition. Trying to change these people is generally futile!
I got sick so many times from kid viruses early on (thanks daycare) before I tried training with less intensity to see if the better fatigue management would help my immune system. I did get sick noticeably less often but it also could have been my kids immune systems getting better too.
Who knows, but I’d like to think I was onto something
A bit more than 20 yrs ago, I was a 40-something hammerhead. I was working a ton and used my commutes as ‘training’. After I hit my 50’s it was clear that was not working since I was tired constantly. Thats when I sought the knowledge that guides me now: Training gains happens in the recovery.
My son is now where I was then. Time-crunched, yet still able to hammer it out. I love riding with him, in part because he can push me when he hits it hard and I need to really work it to keep his wheel. There’s been a couple moment when I tried to pass along what I’ve learned over the years but I get the same look I must have given to others when i was his age.
My point is, like the old saying, that you cannot lead a horse to water. Just let it go. And when the hammer comes out on your easy day, have the audacity to smile and wave as they ride off. If they want to ride WITH you they will.
Convince them to get a coach. A huge part of coaching is making sure athletes can improve sustainably and not overcook themselves, but it can be framed as an investment in their performance.
I think some people get out once a week and they like to hammer with their buddies. They don’t really care about improving. Its just a way to let off steam and get out of the house. If you don’t race you may not really care about improving. I think a lot of people are like this.
I understand the desire for “sweat therapy”, or the fun of a mutual hammerfest, or going hard just because it feels good to feel your engine working. We don’t have to train for something, or worry about optimal training. We can just ride our bikes.
I do think you should know what you’re doing. If you want to do a big hard ride because you want to, great! If someone does a big hard ride every day because they think they have to do that to get stronger, they’re going to end up frustrated by the fatigue and lack of progress.
We don’t have to be rational, but we should know that we’re choosing to be irrational.
Sometimes people just have to figure things out for themselves. I know someone a little like this, they made themself very ill through overtraining. Plenty of people suggested they knock it back a bit, and gave them some very good reasons, but they didn’t take any of it on board until they had no other choice. They have a much happier and healthier relationship with sport now.
If it’s to back off from you, in that their behavior is making it difficult to have the riding relationship/friendship you want with them… then tell them. If it’s your concern for their welfare doing what they are doing, then I’d leave them to it. A lot of people learn a lot about themselves with that kind of personal challenge. They won’t be able to do it forever, and once they cannot, they’ll likely wish they could. Let them find their own limits. What’s truly the worst that could happen? And if it does?
