As the dust settles on the Marji Gesick a lot of us will already be asking ourselves “how can I do this better or faster next year”? The three basic pillars for endurance performance, that every athlete needs to have completely nailed before getting distracted by the nuances of training (and a forth that we really do need to consider if fast is our goal) have never changed from my perspective. Having completed the 50 myself this weekend I can say with absolute confidence that these are even more important at an event with this level of technicality. I have used the 50 as my example but elaborated on each point to consider the other distances as well.

1. Understanding what endurance is, and what governs our performance the most.

At the very baseline level endurance is going the distance. So let’s say it’s 62 miles we gotta cover, well we need the ability to cover 62 miles! Basic, but true. Now, Marji is a highly technical course so the distance is not so helpful as a marker for endurance; we make this more specific a criteria by changing the distance to time. We need a ballpark, so I think about it and I say “I think I can cover the distance on technical terrain in 10 hours” and so the endurance required is the ability to cover the 62 miles course in 10 hours.

When it comes to knowing if we have done the work to have the endurance required I find that working with some sort of duration ratio works quite well. From my experience a good comparison is the average hours of weekly training ON THE BIKE compared to the duration expected to cover the event. For an event like the Marji a minimum comparison period of 6 months works OK and 12 months is much better. I’ll use myself as the example: my past 6 months show an average weekly hours of bike training of nearly 11 hours, with a lot of 10 hour weeks in the lead up to the race, and my average for the past 12 months shows an average weekly hours of nearly 9 hours a week, lower due to an injury I had to recover from in the early part of the year. 

 

To make completion a real possibility, in any event that I think would take me less than 12 hours, a good rule of thumb tends to be matching or exceeding that figure as the average time per week in training. The longer the time period for comparison the better because consistency, rather than longest week, or longest ride, or how much we can cram in over a shorter period, tends to be a much more predictable driver for performance. For longer races I find that matching or exceeding is not necessarily as accurate but that there tend to be minimum amounts of accumulated training in order to give a good out come. 1:4 for anything <24 hours tends to be good minimum in my experience but for longer events it comes much more down to hitting a similar minimum and then getting accurate on the nuances of training: the ability of the athlete to train with great consistency and supreme accuracy. In bike packing for instance, athletes I coach race between 1000 and 5000km events, and many of them who can average 10 hours a week but train with great precision often outperform athletes who are haphazard, inconsistent but sometimes crack the 20, or even 30 hour a week threshold. 

For the majority of athletes at the Marji I would anticipate that the basics are much more important than the nuances. Finishing is the goal, and not finishing is often an outcome for a fair portion of the entry. Therefore focus on the basics is a key fundamental. 

At the top end of this ratio of time spent training compared to time needed to complete the race we have the pro riders, and this is a big reason they are so much faster than the rest of us. They have consistently accumulated a high average of weekly hours on the bike, often at a higher weekly average number or hours than the time they need to complete the course on the day. Despite what anyone might tell you, doing a lot of riding, every week, for many, many years, will get nearly anyone pretty close to their genetic potential when it comes to endurance - the ability to cover the distance at close to our highest genetic potential pace. Most of us however are not a pro and we don’t need to place high to keep employment, and do not have the time or energy to ride this amount of hours around family and work. 

Somewhere in the middle (or perhaps everyone who isn't a pro or intending to be one some time soon) are the regular folk who can get fit but might not yet be as fit as they would like to be. I have come to the conclusion due to all the data I have seen over the years, that if it’s a “one day” race and the athlete can accumulate the same amount of training over the space of a week, and recover and repeat week on week, then they will have more than enough endurance to complete the course (as long as they get the rest of the basics right) It’s a one day race, I was able to average 10+ hours of bike training over a 6-12 month period prior to the race, therefore I have a good confidence level that I can complete the distance. Do I need a lot of long rides leading up to the race? No. Do I need to do intervals or hard efforts? No. At a baseline level, as long as I have the essential box ticked, I have the ability (or potential) to complete the duration. It is my observation that getting this fundamental dialled is the most powerful, so I give consistency the highest value and weight in both my coaching practice and my own training. Here for clarity are my longest rides each week for the 6 months prior to Marji. The longest is 5.5 hours (a race) there are just 7 rides above 3.5 hours, and the average length of my longest rides is 2:40. In other words there's no direct correlation between my longest ride length in training and completion of the Marji Gesick. This is a commonality between every athlete I have ever coached, and/or seen their data prior to working with me. 

 

So I'm not doing a lot of long rides, or hard long rides but what you will see from the same data presented as a daily rather than weekly chart is that I am super consistent, and training almost daily. By giving myself a very managable training stimulus most days, recovery is easy and attainable, training again tomorrow is perfectly possible and a good overall volume is the result:

Action for you: check your training history in the months and weeks leading up to the event. Does the average weekly hours match or exceed your target time. Is it radically lower? Is your training sporadic and do you have lots of days with no on-the-bike training? All of these “holes” in your endurance are big-win areas to improve your time at the Marji if you fill them in, and improve them, over the next 12 months.