You don’t get better by chasing results—you get better by executing the session in front of you.

Most athletes think they’re training for a result.

A time.
A placement.
A number they want to see on the clock.

And on the surface, that makes sense.

That’s how we measure progress.

But it’s also the fastest way to undermine it.

The Hourglass

A training partner of mine is a psychiatrist.

He told me something recently that he shares with his patients—a way of thinking about time and attention that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since.

Think of time as an hourglass.

The future sits in the top.
The past sits in the bottom.

And the narrow space in the middle—

That’s now.

That’s where everything actually happens.

Where Most Athletes Spend Their Time

Most athletes live in the top of the hourglass.

They’re focused on what’s coming—
the race, the PR, the outcome.

Or they drop into the bottom:
the last race, the missed split, the workout that didn’t go the way they wanted.

Both matter.

Goals give direction.
Results give feedback.

But neither is where training happens.

Where Training Actually Lives

Training lives in the middle.

In the session in front of you.

In the pace you’re supposed to hold today.
In the effort that’s actually required—not imagined.
In the decision to stay controlled when it would feel better to push.

That narrow space in the middle of the hourglass—

That’s the only place you have control.

What It Looks Like When This Gets Lost

You show up to a session with the future in your head.

“I need this to go well.”
“I’m behind.”
“I should be fitter than this.”

So things start to drift.

The easy run gets a little faster.
The recovery day turns into “kind of a workout.”
The session becomes a test instead of training.

You’re not executing the purpose of the day.

You’re trying to force something that doesn’t live there.

What Breaks Down

At first, it feels like effort.

You’re working.
You’re pushing.
You care.

But the structure starts to erode.

You stop recovering properly.
You stop hitting sessions the way they’re designed.
You start chasing feelings instead of building capacity.

Eventually, something gives.

You plateau.
You get hurt.
Or you burn out.

Not because you didn’t try.

Because you shifted your focus out of the one place that actually drives adaptation.

This is one of the reasons I don’t rely heavily on testing as a coach.

A bad day becomes a bad result.

And that result pulls the athlete out of the middle of the hourglass—
into the past, or into the future.

Now the focus isn’t on executing the next session.

It’s on fixing something, proving something, chasing something.

And the process starts to slip.

The Shift

The best athletes don’t ignore the top and bottom of the hourglass.

They just don’t live there.

They visit the top to set direction.
They visit the bottom to learn.

Then they come back to the middle.

And they ask a simple question:

What is this session trying to do?

And they do that.

What This Actually Feels Like

This isn’t passive.

It’s precise.

An easy run is for aerobic development → they run easy
A workout is for controlled stress → they stay within it
A recovery day is for recovery → they actually recover

Not impressively.
Not heroically.

Accurately.

Some days that feels too easy.
Some days it feels like you’re holding back.
Some days you finish knowing you could have done more.

Good.

That means you stayed in the middle.

The Part Most People Miss

You don’t get results by focusing on results.

You get them by staying where the work happens.

The easy runs you didn’t push.
The workouts you didn’t overcook.
The recovery you didn’t skip.

That’s what builds the athlete.

Not one session.
Not one race.

The accumulation of time spent in the middle.

A Simple Way to Think About It

Goals matter.
Results matter.

But they don’t belong in your hands during the session.

So instead of asking:

“Am I on track?”

Ask:

What is today’s job—and did I do it?

Stay there long enough—

And the results show up where they’re supposed to.

Race day doesn’t negotiate with the forecast.

The rain falls on everyone. The wind doesn’t check the start list. The cold doesn’t care what your training plan looked like. Conditions on race day are outside your control — and they always have been.

What isn’t outside your control is whether you’ve been there before.

Before race day, you should have run in the rain. Trained in the wind, the cold, and the heat. Not because you’ll enjoy it — but because you need to know what it feels like before it matters.

When conditions turn on race day, the athletes who’ve been there before have something the others don’t: a reference point.

Not a perfect memory of a perfect run — but the knowledge that they’ve handled it. That they got through it. That they came out the other side.

I’ve felt this before. I handled it then. I can handle it now.

That internal conversation happens in seconds on race day. And it only goes that way if you’ve earned it in training.

The Conditions Were the Race

Years ago, I ran a 10-mile trail race in mid-December in Massachusetts. Two nights before the race, a major snowstorm moved through. The trails weren’t cleared, but the race wasn’t cancelled.

At the start line, I could hear the concern from other runners. The trail conditions were unknown.

Some sections were hardpack snow. Others were deep powder. Footing changed constantly.

I wasn’t worried. Not because I was overconfident, but because I had run in those conditions before. I had made a habit of not letting bad weather keep me off the roads and trails.

I knew what running in snow felt like. I knew how to adjust my footing, manage my effort, stay composed when the surface changed beneath me.

We all ran the same race.

I won it.

The conditions weren’t an obstacle.

They were the race.

And I had already trained for them.

Don’t Survive It. Claim It.

Here’s where most athletes stop short. They train in bad weather enough to tolerate it.

But tolerance isn’t the edge.

The edge is ownership.

When conditions turn on race day, remind yourself of something: everyone is racing in the same weather. The rain falls on the runner next to you. The wind hits them too. The cold doesn’t give anyone a pass.

So while others are complaining about the wind, you can be the athlete who has decided they are built for this.

That’s not delusion.

That’s a competitive edge.

The mental gap between athletes in bad conditions is enormous. Some athletes tighten up, lose focus, spend energy resenting the weather. Others get sharper. They lean in. They run their race.

Which athlete you become is decided long before race day.

Say It Out Loud

When I’m coaching in person and the weather turns, I don’t commiserate. I don’t let athletes bond over the misery of the conditions. I reframe it immediately.

This is great. Because you are good at running in this.

It sounds simple. But say it enough times, through enough ugly sessions, and something shifts.

The athlete stops fighting the conditions and starts working with them.

The discomfort becomes familiar. Familiar becomes manageable. Manageable becomes an advantage.

Eventually, they believe it. Then it becomes true.

Build It Into the Plan

If you are training for an outdoor event, make this deliberate.

Before race day, get at least one session in the rain. One in heavy wind. One in the cold. One in the heat.

Don’t wait for bad weather to happen to you — seek it out.

The goal isn’t to suffer.

The goal is to build the reference point. To have been there before. To know — not just believe, but know — that you can handle it.

And when the weather rolls in on race day, don’t brace for it. Welcome it.

Because while everyone else is hoping the conditions improve, you already know you’re good at this.

The conditions aren’t the obstacle.

They’re the race.

And if you’ve done the work, you’ve already run it.

Of course, none of this matters if you don’t show up in the first place. If you haven’t read my piece on building the habit of consistency — The Decision Was Already Made — that’s the foundation everything else rests on.

The Open Question

It’s raining. You’re tired. Work was hard. You didn’t sleep well.

There’s always something — and your brain is very good at finding it.

The excuse is always available.

So is the workout.

But the excuse isn’t the problem.

The problem is treating the decision as open.

When you have to re-decide every day whether you’re going to train, eventually you’ll decide no. And no gets easier every time. Miss one session, and the next miss feels smaller. Miss a few weeks, and the habit starts to disappear. The gap between you and training grows — and so does the effort required to close it.

The daily negotiation is the enemy.

Not the weather.
Not the fatigue.
The open question.

When the Habit Starts to Slip

I’ve dealt with chronic fatigue since I was a teenager. It didn’t stop me from eventually running under 32 minutes for 10k, but it never fully went away either. It just became something I had to manage.

Some days, runs that should have felt smooth felt heavy from the first mile. Pace dropped. Motivation dropped with it. And because training no longer matched the version I thought it was supposed to feel like, I started skipping sessions.

A day off became a week. A week became two.

I was still making the decision every day — I just kept deciding no.

Removing the Negotiation

During one particularly rough stretch, I tried something different. I decided I would run every day until I got through it — even if it was only a mile, even if it was slow, even if it felt pointless.

Not as a permanent training philosophy. Just as a way to stop losing momentum.

And it worked.

Not because daily running is the answer for everyone — it isn’t, and I don’t coach that way — but because it removed the negotiation. The decision had already been made.

I stopped waiting to feel ready.

I just showed up.

That shift changed everything. Training stopped depending on motivation. Once I was no longer spending energy deciding whether to run, I could spend it actually running.

That experience shaped how I coach. It’s also why I wrote about the 10-minute run — the idea that a short run on a difficult day isn’t failure. It’s often the exact thing that keeps the habit intact.

Protect the Habit

The athletes who train consistently aren’t necessarily more disciplined than everyone else.

They’ve just stopped negotiating.

They made the commitment once – I train – and stopped reopening the question every time life got inconvenient.

The schedule may change. The volume may adjust. But the commitment stays intact.

Rain or cold doesn’t reopen the question.
Fatigue doesn’t reopen it.
A hard week at work doesn’t reopen it.

The decision was already made.

This isn’t an argument for training every day. Most athletes shouldn’t, and good training plans include recovery.

The point isn’t frequency.

The point is commitment.

The mistake many athletes make is setting the bar too high and then treating any deviation as failure. They picture the perfect session — full warm-up, complete workout, cool-down, everything clicking — and when life makes that unrealistic, they skip the session entirely.

A better approach is to lower the minimum.

Twenty minutes instead of an hour.
An easy run instead of intervals.
A short bike ride instead of nothing.

The goal isn’t the perfect workout.

The goal is to protect the habit.

Because habits are built through repetition, not perfection. Through showing up, especially when showing up is inconvenient.

The Decision Becomes the Default

Do that long enough and the decision stops feeling like a decision.

It just becomes what you do.

Build the habit first.

Then the excuses don’t need answers — because the question never gets asked.

Showing up is the foundation. But learning how to handle the conditions once you’re out there — the rain, the wind, the heat, the bad days — is its own skill.

I’ll get into that in my next piece.

One of the first things I tell every athlete I work with:

There are no bad workouts.

As long as you put in the effort, it’s a good workout.

Simple concept. But for driven, competitive athletes, it’s genuinely difficult to accept.

And I’ve seen versions of this moment play out with more athletes than I can count.

The Track Session

A few years ago, I was coaching an elite athlete through a track session.

She was struggling. The repetitions weren’t coming together. She was missing her targets — not by a little, but by enough that she knew it, and I could see it registering.

The emotions were right there at the surface.

I recognized the moment for what it was. An opportunity to coach the response, not the numbers.

I made sure she knew that I saw her. That I saw how hard she was working. That the effort she was putting in was making her stronger — regardless of what the watch said.

Then I asked her to do something hard: let go of the targets I had set and shift her focus entirely to effort.

That’s a big ask for an elite athlete. The targets are the point. The numbers are the feedback. Letting go of them in the middle of a session feels like giving up.

But she did it.

And once the pressure of the targets lifted, something opened up. We could work on how she was actually responding to the fatigue and discomfort — not just fighting through it, but managing it. Her breathing. Her internal dialogue. Her willingness to stay present instead of spiraling into what the split times meant.

She finished the session faster than she started it.

Not because she found some hidden reserve. Because she stopped fighting herself.

Effort Is What Gives the Session Value

A workout isn’t bad because the numbers are wrong.

Most hard sessions still have value if the athlete stays engaged and honest with the effort.

Mental state affects performance. So does stress — work, family, life. Weather matters. Sleep matters. What you ate, how you traveled, what you’ve been carrying that week.

These variables are real. They show up in your splits whether you want them to or not.

An athlete who shows up under load, in difficult conditions, running on less than ideal rest — and still gives genuine effort — had a good workout. Full stop.

The result doesn’t erase that.

After a hard session, there are really only two things worth asking. Did you give genuine effort? And was the session right for where you are right now? If the answer to the first is yes, move on. If the second is no, that’s a coaching conversation — not self-criticism.

Either way, don’t carry it forward.

One session doesn’t define your fitness. It doesn’t erase weeks of good work. It’s a data point — and data points only mean something in context.

The athletes I’ve seen spiral are the ones who treat a hard workout like a verdict. It’s not. It’s one session in a hundred.

When the Session Doesn’t Work — Look at the Coach

Here’s the part most coaches won’t say out loud.

Sometimes the workout was wrong.

Wrong timing in the training block. Wrong intensity for where the athlete was that week. Too much, too soon. A session designed on paper that didn’t account for what was actually happening with that athlete.

Athletes almost always blame themselves first.

But sometimes the problem isn’t the athlete. It’s the prescription.

That’s a coach error.

I’ve made this mistake. More than once.

An athlete fights through a session that was never going to go well and walks away feeling like they failed. They didn’t. The plan failed them.

Good coaches own that. They say it directly: that one’s on me. We’ll adjust.

It’s a simple thing. But it matters — because it removes the shame from a hard session and keeps the trust intact.

That trust matters. Athletes push furthest when they know the coach is paying attention to the athlete — not just the numbers. They’re more willing to fully commit in future sessions because they know they won’t be forced to chase numbers when the body or mind isn’t there.

That’s the relationship working the way it should.

The Athlete Who Shows Up Anyway

The athlete who comes in tired, runs the session on effort alone, and finishes it — even slower, even messier than planned — is doing something important.

They’re building durability.

Not just physical durability. Mental durability. The kind that shows up late in a race when everything hurts, the pace is slipping, and they still have to make good decisions. The ability to settle their breathing, decide not to panic, and keep holding form when fatigue is trying to pull everything apart.

That’s what a “bad” workout actually is, when you look at it clearly.

It’s practice for the hard parts.

There are no bad workouts.

There are hard days. Mistimed sessions. Variables outside your control.

But if you showed up and gave what you had, the session still mattered. More than one split. More than one workout. More than one day.

Most athletes think recovery happens on rest days.

In races, it happens in seconds.

Between surges.
After stations.
Coming off a hard effort before the next one starts.
At the top of a hill in a long race

The athletes who perform best aren’t always the fittest.
They’re often the ones who can reset the fastest.

That’s what this workout trains.

The Concept

Broken intervals aren’t new. Track athletes have used them for decades.

The idea is simple: take a longer effort, split it into pieces with very short rest, and use that structure to spend more time at race intensity without sacrificing movement quality.

A classic example is the broken 400 for 400-meter runners — 300 meters, a short pause, then the final 100. The brief rest isn’t there for recovery. It’s there to make quality possible.

We apply the same concept here to the 800 meters — with a structure that works equally well for runners and hybrid athletes.

The Workout

3 sets of:

400m — 15 sec rest — 400m

1 min rest

400m — 15 sec rest — 400m

2 min rest between sets

How to Think About It

Mentally, approach this as 3 sets of 2 × 800m with 1 minute between reps.

The 15-second break is not a recovery interval. It’s a reset window.

That reframing matters.

If you focus on how short the rest is, the workout feels intimidating before it starts. If you focus on the 800s, you settle into rhythm and pacing instead of reacting to the structure.

The real challenge isn’t the first 400.

It’s what happens during those 15 seconds before the second one.

Can you settle your breathing?
Can you relax your shoulders?
Can you reset without panicking?

What It’s Actually Training

The session works when you approach it this way:

• The first 400 is controlled

• The second 400 is committed

• Mechanics stay smooth under fatigue

• Pacing stays consistent across all three sets

If you go out too hard on the first 400, you miss the point. The goal is repeatable quality under incomplete recovery — not one good rep followed by survival.

This transfers directly to hybrid racing.

In HYROX, CrossFit, and other hybrid events, you rarely get complete recovery. You move from one demanding effort into the next. Heart rate spikes, breathing gets ragged, and you still need to run efficiently.

Broken intervals train that transition.

The Skill Nobody Talks About

Fitness matters. Everyone knows that.

But recovery is a skill too.

Recovery is not passive.
It’s something you practice.

The athletes who perform best under fatigue aren’t always the ones who are most fit. They’re the ones who can calm themselves down the fastest — physically and mentally — while continuing to move forward.

That’s true on the track and on the trails.

And it’s true in every hybrid race you’ll ever run.

This is a sample HYROX training session focused on aerobic durability and movement efficiency under fatigue.

It’s designed for athletes who want to improve how they run and move in the second half of a race, when fatigue is no longer avoidable.

I’ll be sharing more sessions like this going forward — each one built around a specific quality that shows up in HYROX racing: pacing, running economy, transitions, and fatigue resistance.

Warm-Up

500m row @ 20 s/m — feet out
500m row @ 22 s/m — feet out

Two things are happening here beyond simply getting warm.

Rowing feet out forces you to drive through the legs and stabilize through the core without relying on the foot straps. It exposes inefficient movement quickly and encourages cleaner mechanics — especially on the recovery.

The lower stroke rate matters too. At 20–22 strokes per minute, you cannot rely on spinning the flywheel to create speed. Each stroke has to produce force. Over time, this builds a more efficient rowing engine: more distance per stroke, less wasted energy, and better control under fatigue.

Together, these constraints turn the warm-up into a skill session. You’re not just preparing for the workout — you’re practicing movement quality before fatigue has any say in the matter.

The Workout

3 rounds, continuous — no rest between rounds

• 800m run

• 60m dual kettlebell farmer carry

  • 53#/35# per kettlebell (men/women)

• 800m run

• 30m sandbag walking lunges

  • 45#/22# sandbag (men/women)

• 800m run

• 750m row

Scaling & Loading Guidance

Choose loads that challenge posture and breathing without forcing long breaks or significantly altering your running mechanics afterward.

This session should feel continuous. If the carries or lunges completely derail your running pace, reduce the load or distance slightly and keep the overall flow intact.

Pacing Guidance

This session is designed to be continuous, and that only works if you pace it honestly from the start.

The first 800m run should feel controlled — maybe even a little too easy. That’s intentional. The goal is not to accumulate fatigue early. The goal is to still be moving well in round three.

A useful benchmark: if your running pace in round three is significantly slower than round one, you likely started too aggressively. Aim for splits that feel nearly identical across all three rounds. Controlled effort, not maximum effort.

The same principle applies to the row. Resist the urge to turn the rower into a test piece. It’s a transition station. Find a sustainable rhythm and protect what you have left for the next run.

If you finish the session feeling like you had a little more in the tank, you probably executed it correctly.

The Purpose

This session is designed to build aerobic durability and movement efficiency under fatigue.

The structure is simple on purpose: repeated running interrupted by loaded work that taxes the grip, trunk, and legs without fully stopping the aerobic demand. The challenge is not just completing the stations — it’s returning to controlled, efficient running afterward.

That transition matters in HYROX.

In the second half of the race, almost everyone is tired. The athletes who continue to move well are usually not the ones trying hardest in the moment. They’re the ones who spent months practicing composure under fatigue — controlling pace, posture, breathing, and rhythm when their body wanted to slow down.

That quality is trainable.

Sessions like this are one way to build it.

When people imagine elite athletes, they picture intensity. Confidence. Relentless drive.

What surprised me most about coaching Katrín Davíðsdóttir — two-time CrossFit Games champion — was something quieter.

Curiosity.

The Question That Changed Everything

Early in our training together, we were moving through a warmup: drills designed to build posture, rhythm, and body awareness. Some of them probably looked unusual from the outside.

She stopped in the middle of one and asked:

“Why do we do this?”

Not as a challenge. She genuinely wanted to understand it.

I smiled internally. In that moment, I knew the coach-athlete relationship was going to work.

That question became a pattern throughout our time together. She listened carefully. She absorbed details quickly. She applied new ideas almost immediately — usually within the same session.

The communication was never one-way.

Of course coaching requires clear instruction. But the best athletes also communicate back. They ask questions. They describe what they’re feeling. They expose uncertainty instead of hiding it.

That creates trust.

And trust accelerates improvement.

The Environment

Lisa Mikkelsen, a good friend and exceptional athlete, was the one who connected me with Katrín. She also trained with us as my co-coach.

What stood out most was the environment that developed.

Very little ego.

Lisa is a masters athlete, and she matched — or sometimes led — many of the repetitions. Nobody talked about it. Nobody needed to. The work itself set the standard.

That’s something I’ve seen consistently with truly elite performers. They recognize competence immediately. Age, status, résumé — none of it matters as much as doing the work well.

Doubt Doesn’t Disappear at the Top

People assume that once you reach the highest level of your sport, confidence becomes permanent. That doubt stops showing up.

That was never my experience.

Katrín had doubts like every athlete does. Bad sessions affected her. Uncertainty crept in. Questions surfaced.

What impressed me wasn’t the absence of struggle. It was her willingness to name it instead of conceal it.

That honesty made coaching easier. Problems become solvable once they’re spoken aloud. Athletes who hide uncertainty force coaches to guess. Athletes who communicate openly create the possibility for adjustment, reassurance, and real progress.

What This Means for You

The biggest lesson I took from coaching Katrín wasn’t about toughness or motivation.

It was about openness.

Ask why. Describe what you’re feeling. Say when something isn’t working.

That’s not weakness. That’s how improvement actually happens.

The best athletes aren’t always the loudest or the most outwardly confident. Often they’re the ones most willing to learn, communicate honestly, and stay engaged in the long process of getting better.

From the outside, elite performance looks almost superhuman.

Up close, it’s more human than most people expect.

One of the hardest moments in endurance sports is the moment when an athlete backs off.

Not because the body has completely failed.

Not because continuing is impossible.

But because the brain decides the effort has become too uncomfortable, too uncertain, or too risky to sustain.

I kept thinking about that while writing about pacing recently. Because pacing is not just physical.

It is psychological.

It is emotional.

It is shaped by perception.

And that idea is one of the reasons I keep coming back to Endure by Alex Hutchinson. The book helped me articulate something I had been observing for years as both an athlete and a coach:

Sometimes the challenge is not whether the body is physically capable.

Sometimes the challenge is whether the brain is willing to let us continue.

What the Book Actually Argues

One of my favorite things about Endure is the way Hutchinson takes ideas that athletes and coaches accept as obviously true and then digs into the actual research behind them.

In endurance sports, a lot of conventional wisdom gets repeated confidently — how fatigue works, what limits performance, whether mental toughness can be trained, how much of endurance is physical versus psychological.

Some of those ideas are supported by research. Some are incomplete. And some are not nearly as settled as many of us assume.

Hutchinson does not present scientific studies as isolated facts. He explores how our understanding of endurance has evolved over time, and where the science still leaves room for uncertainty.

One of the central ideas that emerges is this: endurance performance is not simply about the body failing. It is also about the brain regulating effort.

The body constantly sends signals about discomfort, fatigue, heat, pain, and rising effort. Those signals matter. But one of the key questions in endurance sports is whether a given sensation represents true physical limitation or protective regulation.

That distinction is not simple. And Hutchinson does not pretend it is.

What I appreciate most is that he does not turn any of this into a simplistic “mind over matter” argument. The book is more honest than that. And as a coach, I found that valuable.

What I See in Athletes

I see the consequences of that distinction constantly with runners and HYROX athletes.

An athlete backs off not because they are empty, but because the discomfort has reached a threshold their brain is not comfortable sustaining.

The reality is that endurance performance is supposed to feel difficult.

The skill is not eliminating discomfort. The skill is learning to stay composed inside it rather than reacting emotionally to it.

Experienced endurance athletes learn over time that many difficult sensations are manageable. Heavy breathing. Burning legs. Rising effort. The growing urge to back off. Those sensations are real, but they are not always signals that the effort needs to stop.

Part of what endurance training actually develops is a more accurate relationship with effort — learning which signals require adjustment and which signals are simply part of performing hard work.

That does not mean every session should be a suffer-fest. Most good training is controlled. But athletes also need experiences where they discover something important:

I can stay here longer than I thought.

That realization is powerful. And it is not something a training plan can hand to an athlete. It has to be earned through experience.

Dave Wottle and the Composed Brain

One of my earliest memories of track and field competition was watching Dave Wottle win the 800-meter final at the 1972 Olympics.

Wottle was dead last early in the race. As a young viewer, it looked impossible for him to come back. Everyone around him appeared to be moving faster. Even the announcers thought he might be out of it.

Most athletes in that position would panic. They would surge too early, burn energy trying to close the gap immediately, and completely change the rhythm of their race.

But Wottle stayed composed. He trusted his pace.

At the end of the first 400-meter lap he was still in last place. By 500 meters he had caught the pack, but remained well behind the leaders. He moved up gradually on the backstretch, and it was not until the final stretch that he caught pre-race favorite Evgeni Arzhanov right at the finish line.

At the time, it looked like Wottle must have run an extraordinary second lap. But what made the race remarkable was that he actually ran nearly perfect even splits across all four 200-meter segments. He did not panic. He did not abandon his plan because the race felt uncomfortable or because what he could see suggested he was in trouble.

I still think that race is one of the best examples of pacing and psychological discipline I have ever seen.

If you have never seen it, watch it here:

Perception is often misleading. In endurance sports, athletes are constantly interpreting sensations, positions, effort, and emotion in real time. The athletes who perform best are not always the ones capable of producing the highest intensity in a single moment. Often, they are the athletes who stay composed longest.

Good pacing requires tolerating uncertainty. Trusting effort instead of emotion. Resisting the impulse to react when discomfort rises. Continuing to work even when the brain is encouraging you to slow down.

Experience Over Perfect Physiology

Many recreational athletes spend enormous energy searching for perfect physiology — the ideal workout, the perfect heart rate zone, the optimal fueling strategy. Those things matter.

But a lot of endurance performance also comes down to something harder to measure: learning how to interpret effort accurately.

Experience pacing in real sessions. Experience staying calm when fatigue distorts judgment. Experience discovering that discomfort is not the same as failure.

That side of endurance training does not show up in a training plan. It accumulates over time, through races and hard sessions and moments where an athlete finds out they had more than they thought.

Why the Book Stays Relevant

What I appreciate most about Endure is that it respects both science and experience.

It looks at research, but it also recognizes that endurance performance is deeply human. People perform differently depending on context. Competition changes effort. Belief changes effort. Environment changes effort. Emotion changes effort.

There is no simple equation that fully explains performance.

And I think that is a good thing.

Endure did not give me secret workouts or a new training system. It gave me a better framework for thinking about fatigue, pacing, discomfort, and human performance.

It reinforced the idea that endurance is not simply physical. It is also perceptual. Psychological. Experiential. And trainable.

That is probably why I still think about this book years after reading it.

Not because it offered easy answers.

But because it asked better questions about what our limits really are.

A lot of athletes think pacing is something you either naturally have or you don’t.

You hear comments like:

• “I always go out too hard.”

• “I don’t know how to hold back.”

• “I just race on feel.”

But pacing is not a personality trait. It’s a skill.

And like any other skill, it can be practiced.

I see this all the time with HYROX athletes and newer runners. But it is not limited to inexperienced runners. Someone can be incredibly fit and still struggle to pace a session correctly. They can grind through hard workouts, handle uncomfortable efforts, and push themselves mentally — but the moment they have to distribute effort across a longer interval or sustained run, everything falls apart.

Usually the problem is not fitness.

It’s awareness.

The Early Sprint Trap

Most athletes start workouts too aggressively.

Part of that is excitement. Part of it is ego. And part of it is simply inexperience.

Early in a session, everything feels manageable. The pace feels smooth. Breathing feels under control. You convince yourself that you’ve somehow unlocked a new fitness level overnight.

Then the cost arrives.

The third interval becomes survival mode.
The final run falls apart.
The pace drops harder than expected.
And the workout becomes something you are merely trying to finish instead of execute.

This is especially common in HYROX and CrossFit training because athletes are used to working hard.

But effort tolerance and pacing are not the same thing.

A lot of people know how to suffer. Far fewer know how to regulate effort.

Good Pacing Should Feel Almost Too Easy at First

There is an idea in the book Endure by Alex Hutchinson that I think about often when coaching pacing.

One of the key ideas is that how we feel midway through an effort matters enormously. If we reach the halfway point feeling completely overwhelmed, the brain becomes more protective. But if we reach that same point feeling relatively controlled, even if we are working hard, the subconscious mind is often more willing to let us access deeper reserves of energy.

This is where concepts like perceived effort and the anterior cingulate cortex become interesting.

The body is rarely operating right at its true physical limit. The brain is constantly interpreting signals, evaluating risk, and deciding how much effort feels sustainable. In many cases, fatigue is not simply the muscles failing. It is the brain regulating output before true failure occurs.

That changes how you think about pacing.

Good pacing is not just about conserving energy mechanically. It is also about creating the psychological conditions that allow the brain to keep granting access to more effort later in the race or workout.

If the first half feels reckless and out of control, the brain starts preparing for survival.

If the first half feels difficult but manageable, the brain is often more willing to let you continue pushing deeper.

I have seen this play out many times in training and racing.

I once coached an 800-meter runner who developed an exceptional sense of pace. We discovered that if he simply slowed his first 400 meters by about one second, everything changed. He stayed more relaxed early, finished much stronger over the second lap, and consistently made up far more than the one second he had “lost” in the opening half.

The race looked smoother. But more importantly, the effort distribution was better.

Instead of fighting to survive the final stretch, he was still able to compete.

One of the hardest lessons for newer runners is that good pacing rarely feels impressive early on.

In fact, it often feels suspiciously easy.

When athletes pace correctly, they usually say things like:

• “Should I really be going this slow?”

• “I feel like I could do way more.”

• “Am I holding back too much?”

That uncertainty is often a sign they are pacing correctly.

The goal is not to win the first five minutes of the workout. The goal is to still be capable of your best effort later.

Anyone can run one interval too fast. The real skill is running repeat number six at nearly the same quality as repeat number one.

That requires discipline.

Pacing Builds Confidence

One reason I like controlled interval work is that it teaches pacing awareness.

Athletes begin to recognize:

• what threshold effort actually feels like

• when breathing starts to become unsustainable

• how quickly small pace changes affect fatigue

• how much smoother running feels when they stay controlled early

Over time, athletes stop guessing.

They become calmer during workouts. They stop panicking when discomfort appears. And they develop trust in their ability to manage effort.

That confidence carries into races too.

Athletes who pace well usually look composed longer. Not because the race is easy for them, but because they are spending energy deliberately instead of emotionally.

The Best Sessions Are Often the Most Controlled

Some of the best endurance sessions barely look dramatic from the outside.

No collapse.
No hero splits.
No crawling across the finish.

Just steady execution.

The athlete finishes tired but still in control.
The pace remains relatively consistent.
The mechanics stay smooth.
And the final rep is still strong.

That is usually a much better indicator of long-term progress than one spectacular interval followed by a complete fade.

This is something many athletes have to learn over time. There is a difference between training hard and training well.

How to Practice Pacing

One thing that surprises some athletes is that I rarely program ladder workouts where the distance changes multiple times.

There is nothing inherently wrong with ladders, but constantly changing the rep distance often changes the pacing rhythm too. Athletes start guessing instead of learning what a controlled sustainable effort actually feels like.

Most of the time, I prefer repeated intervals of the same distance because they teach consistency.

The athlete begins to recognize the difference between a pace that feels exciting and a pace that is actually sustainable.

They start noticing how tiny pacing errors accumulate over the course of a session. They learn how breathing changes when they cross the line from controlled discomfort into panic. And they begin developing the patience to stay slightly restrained early instead of chasing one impressive split.

Over time, this creates a much deeper awareness of effort.

The rare exception is a down ladder.

I actually like down ladders because they encourage patience at the beginning of the workout. When athletes know the shorter reps are coming later, they naturally settle into a more controlled rhythm during the longer intervals. The session unfolds progressively instead of becoming a survival exercise halfway through.

Over time, athletes stop relying entirely on watches and pace targets. They begin to recognize effort internally. Pacing stops being abstract.

It becomes something they can feel.

And once athletes develop that awareness, they usually become calmer competitors too.

This is one reason I like structured track sessions.

Athletes get immediate feedback. They learn what different effort levels actually feel like. And they start connecting pace with outcome.

A lot of pacing development comes from learning restraint early in a session. Leaving the first rep slightly conservative. Paying attention to how breathing and mechanics change across intervals. Finishing a workout tired, but with the sense that one more quality rep might still have been possible.

Those are usually signs that the athlete distributed effort well instead of simply exhausting themselves as quickly as possible.

Over time, pacing stops being guesswork.

Final Thoughts

Fitness matters.

But fitness without pacing often leads to wasted energy, inconsistent performances, and workouts that turn chaotic too early.

The athletes who improve the most over time are usually not the ones constantly smashing the opening interval.

They are the ones learning how to stay patient. How to stay controlled. And how to distribute effort with intention.

Because pacing is not just about running splits.

It is the skill of staying controlled when your instincts are telling you to panic.

And in endurance sports, that changes everything.

A while back, I was coaching an athlete who was preparing for an ultramarathon a few months down the road.

Training had been going well, but then life shifted.

His work became demanding. Not just busy, but physically exhausting. Long days. Early mornings. Constant fatigue. The kind of stretch where even motivated athletes start to feel like they’re falling behind.

He was stressed because his training no longer looked the way he thought it should.

The time wasn’t there.
The energy wasn’t there.
And every missed workout started to feel bigger than it really was.

Like many athletes, he had started to drift into an all-or-nothing mindset. If he couldn’t complete the planned workout, it felt like the session didn’t count. And when enough of those days pile up, momentum starts to disappear.

So instead of trying to force perfect training into an imperfect season of life, we changed the goal.

I told him:

Run every day, even if it’s only for 10 minutes.

More importantly, we shifted the focus away from perfect training and toward maintaining a small daily connection to movement.

Not as a streak.
Not as punishment.
Not because 10 minutes is somehow enough to prepare someone for an ultramarathon.

The goal was something different.

We wanted to protect the habit.

We wanted him to continue finding a small part of each day where he could reconnect with something he cared about. Even during a difficult stretch of life, we wanted running to remain present instead of disappearing entirely.

That shift changed his mindset almost immediately.

Some days, the run really was only 10 minutes. Other days, once he got out the door, it naturally became 30 or 40. He was still able to fit in a few higher-quality workouts each week, but more importantly, he stopped feeling like he was falling behind.

He still felt like an athlete.
He still felt connected to the process.
He still felt like he was moving forward.

A few months later, his work situation settled down. He returned to a more normal training rhythm and went on to perform very well in his ultramarathon.

But honestly, the most important part of that story wasn’t the race result.

It was the reminder that consistency does not always look impressive.

Sometimes consistency is just refusing to disappear.

There is another benefit too. Short runs have a way of breaking the cycle of stress and mental fatigue, even when they are brief.

During periods when I was working long hours and stress levels were high, I experienced this myself. It was always surprising how much better I felt after even a short bout of exercise. Sometimes 10 or 15 minutes was enough to clear my head, lower the stress level, and completely change the direction of the day.

Sometimes movement is less about improving fitness and more about creating space to breathe again.

To be clear, this is not an argument for streaking or feeling obligated to run every single day.

My point is that even when life feels overwhelming, we can often still find 10 minutes to move — and the benefits of that can be profound.

One of the biggest mistakes people make with training is believing that every workout needs to be big enough to matter.

We put so much pressure on workouts to be productive, optimized, or difficult that we forget the value of simply showing up.

But fitness is rarely built through isolated heroic efforts.

It is built through repeated exposure.
Through rhythm.
Through accumulated work over time.

A short run may not dramatically improve your fitness on its own, but it does something important:

• it reinforces the habit

• it reduces the mental resistance of starting again

• it preserves momentum

• it maintains your identity as someone who trains

And those things matter more than most people realize.

This is especially important during stressful periods of life.

When work gets busy.
When kids get sick.
When travel disrupts routines.
When motivation drops.
When mental fatigue starts to build.

Those are the moments where people often disappear from training entirely because they believe they need a perfect window of time to make a workout worthwhile.

But in many cases, the better approach is to lower the barrier.

Make the goal smaller.
Remove friction.
Give yourself permission to do less.

Because something is almost always better than nothing.

Ironically, those small sessions often lead to more consistency, better long-term fitness, and less guilt around training. A 10-minute run keeps the door open. It keeps the routine alive. And quite often, once you begin, the workout grows naturally anyway.

But even when it doesn’t, it still counts.

There is a tendency in endurance sports to glorify massive training sessions and extreme discipline. And while hard work absolutely matters, sustainability matters too.

Most athletes are not limited by one missed workout. They are limited by losing momentum for weeks at a time because the standard became too difficult to maintain.

The athletes who improve long term are often the ones who learn how to stay connected to training even when life becomes messy.

Not perfectly.
Just consistently.

But the goal is not perfect consistency. The goal is finding ways to stay connected to movement, even during difficult seasons of life.

Sometimes maintaining momentum means adjusting expectations instead of abandoning the habit completely.

When we have time for a long run or a full workout session, that’s great.

But sometimes all we have is 10 minutes.

And that still counts.

There is something unique about a good track session.

The simplicity of it.
The rhythm of repeated efforts.
The increased focus required as the workout unfolds.

At first glance, track workouts look like they are only about speed. But the real value goes much deeper than running fast laps.

A well-designed interval session teaches pacing, efficiency, and control. Athletes learn how to settle into discomfort without panicking. They learn how to recover while still moving forward. They learn how to repeat quality efforts instead of relying on one big effort followed by exhaustion.

There is also a mental side to track work that is difficult to replicate elsewhere.

The structure of intervals creates small challenges that feel manageable:
one more rep,
one more lap,
one more controlled effort.

Over time, those small moments build confidence.

Easy runs and long runs will always be important. They build aerobic capacity, durability, and consistency. But interval sessions add another layer. They help connect fitness with performance. They teach the body how to operate efficiently when effort increases.

This matters. The ability to recover and continue working under fatigue is a major part of the sport. Interval training develops that rhythm of working, recovering, and working again.

A good interval session is also highly adjustable.

As coaches, we can change the training effect in several ways:
the length of the intervals,
the number of repetitions,
and the amount of recovery between efforts.

Longer intervals tend to build sustained aerobic strength and pacing control. Shorter intervals can emphasize rhythm, speed, and efficiency. And adjusting the recovery period changes the feel of the workout entirely. Short recoveries teach athletes how to keep working under fatigue, while longer recoveries allow for higher-quality efforts.

One athlete I coached while preparing for a half marathon once looked at her workout and asked:

“Why are we running 100-meter intervals to prepare for a half marathon?”

On paper, it probably did look strange.

But the session was not designed as a sprint workout. It was a high volume of 100s with very short recovery between reps. The goal was not raw speed. The goal was to create sustained pressure through repetition and limited recovery.

By the end of the workout, she understood.

The session had become aerobic work.
It had become mental work.
It had become practice for staying composed while uncomfortable.

That is part of what makes interval training so effective. The workout written on paper is only part of the story. The way the session is structured — volume, pacing, and recovery — completely changes the training effect.

That flexibility is part of what makes interval training so effective. The same basic structure can be adapted for beginners, experienced runners, and hybrid athletes preparing for events like HYROX.

It also makes track sessions work surprisingly well in a group setting.

One of my favorite approaches is to run workouts on a fixed clock. Athletes might begin a new repetition every three or four minutes, depending on the session. Everyone starts each rep together, even though they finish at different times.

The faster runners simply earn more recovery before the next rep begins.

This creates a session where athletes of different abilities can train side by side while still getting an appropriate stimulus for their own level. The group stays connected, the energy stays high, and each athlete naturally finds the effort that matches their current fitness.

That shared rhythm is part of what makes track sessions special.

And despite their reputation, good track sessions are not about punishment.

They are about learning.
Learning pace.
Learning patience.
Learning how to stay composed and maintain form while fatigue builds.

Interval sessions also provide an opportunity to practice something I have written about before: accepting discomfort instead of resisting it.

Each repetition becomes a small opportunity to stay relaxed under effort, recover, and go again. Over time, those moments build physical adaptations, but they also build familiarity with discomfort itself.

Layer by layer, athletes learn they are capable of more than they first believed.

And on race day, that matters.

Some days the workout feels smooth. Some days it does not. But over time, the consistency of showing up and doing the work tends to leave a lasting impact.

There is a reason so many athletes keep coming back to the track.

In future articles, I’ll break down how to pace interval sessions correctly, common mistakes athletes make, and some of my favorite workouts for building endurance, aerobic capacity, running strength, and confidence under fatigue.

They’re working hard.
They’re doing workouts.
They’re showing up consistently.

But when race day comes, something breaks down:

• They slow down more on the runs than expected

• The stations feel heavier than they should

• The second half turns into survival instead of execution

That’s not a lack of effort. It’s usually a misunderstanding of what the sport actually demands.

And in my experience coaching hybrid athletes—HYROX, CrossFit, OCR, even mountain racing—the biggest missing piece is this:

The ability to run well on tired legs.

Some coaches call it “fatigue resistance.” Chris Hinshaw calls it “clearing fatigue.” Whatever you call it, it’s the same skill: the ability to keep running efficiently after your system is already under load.

Most athletes don’t train this well.

Here are the three biggest mistakes I see—and how to fix them.

1. Treating discomfort like a stop sign

At some point in every hard effort, there’s a moment where your body says:

“This is too much. Slow down.”

Most athletes listen. Not because they’re weak—but because they’ve never learned the difference between discomfort that signals danger and discomfort that signals adaptation.

HYROX lives almost entirely in that second category.

That heavy feeling in your legs during a run after a station? That’s not a breakdown. That’s fatigue you need to learn how to run through, not avoid.

And the good news is, this is trainable.

We can build those adaptations through properly structured workouts and repeated exposure to controlled discomfort.

Fix:

Start separating sensation from decision.

Instead of:

“I need to slow down.”

Try:

“This is where I practice holding pace under fatigue.”

You don’t need to go faster. You need to stay efficient while tired.

2. Training workouts instead of building structure

For many athletes, each training session might be good on its own. But there’s no connection between them.

No progression.
No layering.
No purpose beyond:

“That was hard.”

That approach builds fitness—but not specificity. And HYROX is extremely specific. Especially the ability to run repeatedly at controlled pace while fatigued.

Fix:

Start thinking in systems, not sessions.

Each week should develop a specific adaptation:

• aerobic control

• threshold tolerance

• and most importantly: running under fatigue

Those systems need to interact, not exist in isolation. Because race day is not isolated.

It’s stacked fatigue.

3. Not training repeatability—and not training fatigue clearance

This is the biggest one.

HYROX isn’t about how fast you can run one 1K. It’s about how well you can run each of the 1K segments at a controlled and repeatable effort.

But even more importantly, it’s about what happens between those runs.

Most athletes finish a station, start the next run, and carry residual fatigue:

• heavy legs

• elevated heart rate

• reduced efficiency

And they never learn how to clear it. That’s the missing skill: running well after stress, not just despite it.

This is what Hinshaw means by “clearing fatigue.” And it’s what separates athletes who fade from athletes who stabilize.

Fix:

Stop only training fresh running.

Start training:

• repeated efforts

• short recovery

• controlled pace

• maintaining form under accumulating fatigue

The goal isn’t to feel good on every rep. It’s to keep your mechanics and pace together when you don’t.

Because as fatigue builds, form naturally starts to break down. That’s normal. The problem is what happens next.

Most athletes fall into a loop:

Fatigue creeps in → mechanics degrade → inefficiency increases → energy cost rises → fatigue escalates → form breaks further.

It becomes a spiral. Not because the athlete suddenly gets “out of shape,” but because small mechanical leaks under fatigue compound into a larger systemic problem.

And once that spiral starts, it feels like everything is falling apart at once. That’s why this skill matters so much.

You’re not trying to avoid fatigue-induced breakdown completely—that’s unrealistic in HYROX and hybrid racing. You’re trying to delay the spiral, and more importantly, learn how to stabilize inside it.

So the real question becomes: Can you recognize when form starts to drift—and correct it without needing full recovery?

Because the athletes who can do that don’t just run faster. They stay in control longer.

Bringing it together

If your HYROX or hybrid training isn’t translating to performance, it usually comes down to three things:

• You treat discomfort like a stop sign instead of a signal

• You train hard, but without a connected structure

• You don’t train the ability to run on tired legs

That last one is the bridge. Because fitness alone doesn’t win HYROX. And strength alone doesn’t carry you through it.

What matters is the ability to stay efficient when everything in your body is telling you to fall apart.

That’s the skill:

• running under fatigue

• clearing fatigue

• staying composed when fatigue starts to distort mechanics and pacing

Not just producing effort once. But repeating it when it matters most.

This skill is trainable. With the right structure, the right progression, and enough exposure to controlled fatigue, athletes can learn not just to tolerate fatigue—but to move efficiently through it.

There’s a point in hybrid training where nothing feels fresh anymore—not your legs, not your breathing, not your ability to find pace on command.

This is a sample hybrid workout that is designed to build the ability to stay organized when fatigue starts to take over. I provide recommended weights; modify according to your ability. You can break the farmer carry. For the walking lunges, choose a load that allows unbroken carry for the prescribed distance, but forces post-lunge running to be controlled—not automatic.

Start with a 500-meter row for warm up.

3 continuous rounds (no rest):

• 800m run

• 200 ft dual kettlebell farmer carry (70# for men/56# for women)

• 800m run

• 100 ft sandbag walking lunges (50# for men/30# for women)

• 800m run

• 750m row

Jog 400 meters for cool down. Focus on easy, relaxed running form. The cool down is not junk time—it is an opportunity to practice proper running form under fatigue, without having to worry about how fast you are going. I will post some articles on building good running form soon.

The intent of this workout is not complexity. It’s accumulation.

Each round stacks the same problem: you are repeatedly asked to return to running after loaded movement has already taken something out of your system. Grip, trunk stability, breathing rhythm, and leg stiffness all start to interfere with what should be a simple task—running at a controlled pace.

Early in the session, the runs feel normal. You settle quickly. The carries and lunges are work, but manageable. Transitions are clean. Then the pattern starts to shift.

The farmer carries tighten your breathing more than expected. The lunges begin to slow your ability to reestablish rhythm. By the second round, the 800m runs test our ability to maintain pace and keep moving efficiently as fatigue builds. We call this learning to run on tired legs.

The final row becomes less about output and more about structure—staying composed when the system is clearly under stress.

What this session exposes is not fitness in a simple sense. It’s the ability to keep making good decisions when fatigue is already present. Because once fatigue arrives, everything gets harder—but not everything has to fall apart.

Coach’s Note

This session isn’t about fitness in isolation—it’s about what happens when fitness stops feeling clean.

Most athletes can run well when they’re fresh. Many can even handle strength stations in isolation. The challenge in HYROX is the transition between the two—especially when neither system has fully recovered before the next demand begins.

What tends to break first isn’t effort. It’s organization.

Pacing gets too aggressive early in the runs. Transitions become rushed. Breathing never fully resets after carries or lunges. By the third round, athletes are no longer executing a plan—they’re reacting to fatigue. The purpose of this session is to extend the window where control is still available.

We’re not trying to avoid breakdown. We’re trying to recognize it early, and keep running through it without losing structure.

In race terms, this shows up late in HYROX—when the body is still capable, but decision-making starts to erode. The athletes who perform best aren’t the ones who feel the least fatigue. They’re the ones who maintain clarity after fatigue arrives.

That’s what this session trains.

Many of the athletes I’ve coached are familiar with what I call “onion” workouts.

A while back, Lisa Mikkelsen, a good friend and very strong athlete, asked me after a difficult session:

“Is that because it makes you cry?”

Fair question—but no, that’s not the point. The point is this: difficult workouts give you the opportunity to accept another layer of discomfort.

The Opportunity

In almost every hard session, there’s a point where things start to shift. Your breathing changes. Your legs get heavy. Your brain gets louder.

That first wave of discomfort gets your attention fast. It feels sharp, urgent, and hard to ignore. What’s happening is your brain trying to protect you before it actually needs to.

It’s saying:

“This is getting risky.”

But “risky” doesn’t mean “over.” It’s a yellow light, not a stop sign.

If you stay just a little longer, instead of backing off, you start to notice something. The discomfort doesn’t go away—it becomes more manageable. And that’s another layer.

This Is the Skill

Peeling the onion isn’t about going all out. It’s about learning to:

• recognize when discomfort shows up
• acknowledge it without immediately reacting
• stay composed as you move deeper

Not forever. Not recklessly. Just longer than you’re used to.

Over Time, Everything Changes

The first time you do this, it feels overwhelming. Then it starts to feel familiar. Eventually, it just becomes part of the work.

That’s the shift: what used to feel like your limit becomes something you can handle. Not because you suddenly got fitter, but because you learned how to exist there.

Where People Get It Wrong

This isn’t about suffering for the sake of it.

It’s not:
• sprinting every rep
• ignoring your body
• pushing until everything falls apart

If you lose control, you’ve gone too far. The goal is controlled discomfort, not chaos.

The Takeaway

Training isn’t just about what you can do. It’s about what you can learn to stay with.

Over time, discomfort stops being a signal to escape and starts becoming something familiar—not because it gets easier, but because you get better at being there.

That’s the adaptation: a new tolerance for discomfort—and a new relationship with it.

Most athletes think fatigue is purely physical. Legs get heavy. Breathing gets hard. Pace drops. But that’s only part of the story.

There’s a part of your brain—called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) – that is constantly monitoring what you’re doing and asking a simple question:

“Is this effort worth it?”

The Brain’s Job Isn’t Performance—It’s Protection

The ACC sits in the front of the brain and plays a role in attention, decision-making, and emotional regulation.

But in training, its most important job is this:

It regulates effort.

As intensity rises, the ACC weighs:

• how hard you’re working

• how much discomfort you’re feeling

• how risky it might be to continue

And then it sends you signals. Those signals don’t feel like data. They feel like:

• “Slow down”

• “This is too much”

• “You don’t have it today”

Most athletes interpret those signals as truth. They’re not. They’re protection.

Fatigue Is a Negotiation

In Endure, Alex Hutchinson describes how the brain acts as a regulator, not just a passenger. You don’t simply run out of energy. Your brain decides how much of that energy you’re allowed to use. The ACC is a big part of that decision.

Which means:

The moment a workout starts to feel overwhelming…
you’re not at your limit.
You’re at your brain’s current setting.

This Is Where Training Actually Happens

When a rep or run starts to hurt, you have two options:

1. Back off immediately

2. Stay present and keep going just a little longer

That second option is where adaptation happens—not just physically, but neurologically.

You’re teaching your brain:

• this level of effort is safe

• this discomfort is tolerable

• this is not an emergency

Over time, the ACC recalibrates. What once felt like a red line becomes manageable.

The Onion

This is what I think of as peeling the onion. Most of the athletes I have coached know what’s coming when I tell them that this is an “onion” workout!

Each layer is a new level of discomfort.

• The first layer is easy to access

• The next one feels uncomfortable

• The next one starts to feel overwhelming

Most people stop at the first real signal.

Training is learning to:

• recognize the layer you’re in

• accept it

• stay there without panic

Then, over time, that layer becomes normal and you own it. And then a new one appears.

Pacing, Perception, and Control

This also shows up in how you pace. If you go out too hard, your brain senses threat early and tightens the brakes. If you stay controlled – especially early – you keep the ACC from overreacting.

This is why a race that feels slightly easier at halfway often finishes stronger. You didn’t magically gain fitness. You managed perception. This is a very important point and one that I include in my coaching.

You Can Train This

Just like strength or endurance, this system is trainable. Not through hacks – but through exposure and awareness.

Things that help:

• staying focused during discomfort instead of distracting yourself

• paying attention to effort instead of reacting to it

• repeating controlled exposures to hard efforts

You’re not trying to ignore the signal. You are changing your response to it!

The Takeaway

Fatigue isn’t just your body failing. It’s your brain trying to protect you. And in almost all cases, it’s conservative. And usually, very conservative.

Which means the real skill in training isn’t just getting fitter. It’s learning how to exist inside discomfort without immediately escaping it.

That’s where progress happens!

Some workouts show up often in my programming.

This is one of them. The athletes I have coached know this one well!

If you’re training for anything from the 5K to the marathon—or preparing for hybrid competitions like HYROX or CrossFit—this session is one of the most effective ways to build aerobic power, pacing control, and the ability to run well under fatigue.

The Workout

4 sets of:

• 4 x 400 meters

• 1 minute rest between reps

• 2 minutes rest between sets

What This Workout Is Actually For

A lot of athletes look at this and think it’s a speed workout.

It’s not.

This session is about control.

The pace should be challenging, but sustainable. The rest is short enough that fatigue builds, but not so short that you lose the ability to stay composed.

We’re not trying to run the fastest 400s possible.

We’re learning how to:

• hold a steady pace

• stay relaxed as discomfort builds

• maintain good form under fatigue

That’s what carries over to races—and to hybrid events where you have to run on tired legs.

Pacing: Where Most Athletes Get It Wrong

This is the most important part of the workout.

Most athletes go out too fast on the first few reps. It feels easy early, so they push the pace—then spend the rest of the session trying to hold on.

That’s not the goal.

These should feel:

• controlled early

• challenging in the middle

• focused and deliberate at the end

A good guideline for many athletes is around 5K pace, or slightly slower depending on experience.

The goal is consistency.

If your times are falling off significantly, you started too fast.

What It Should Feel Like

This is where discomfort starts to show up.

Not all at once—but gradually.

You’re not fighting the first rep.
You’re working by the middle.
And by the end, you need to stay focused to maintain pace and form.

This is where we practice staying composed.

Not speeding up. Not falling apart.

Just staying controlled.

Common Mistakes

Going out too fast

The biggest mistake. It turns the workout into survival instead of development.

Letting form break down

As fatigue builds, posture and rhythm start to slip.

This is where the real work is—maintaining movement quality when it gets hard.

Treating rest as “off time”

The short rest is intentional.

We recover just enough to go again—but not enough to fully reset.

Stay engaged between reps.

Scaling the Workout

Not everyone is ready for the full version—and that’s fine. We can build toward it.

Here are some scaling options:

Reduce volume

• 3 x (3 x 400m)

Increase rest

• Keep the structure, increase rest between reps to 90 seconds

Reduce distance

• 4 x (4 x 300m)

The goal is to keep the intent of the workout while adjusting the load.

Group Modification

For group settings, one simple way to run this is on a fixed clock:

Start a new 400 every 2:30 and take an extra 2:30 between sets.

Faster athletes get more rest.
Slower athletes get less.

Everyone starts each rep together, and the structure of the workout stays intact.

Why This Workout Matters

This session builds more than just fitness.

It develops:

• pacing awareness

• control under fatigue

• consistency across effort

It exposes the moment where most athletes lose control—and gives you a chance to handle it better.

Run With Purpose

Like everything we do, this workout has intent.

We’re not just running reps.

We’re practicing how to stay controlled, maintain form, and hold pace when it gets uncomfortable.

That’s how we improve.

That’s how we build real endurance.

That’s how we run with purpose.

Your lungs burn. Your legs start to tighten. Your mind tells you to slow down—but the rep isn’t over yet.

If you’ve ever run a hard interval session, you know this feeling. It shows up when the pace is right. Your breathing is controlled—but the discomfort is building. And in that moment, you have a choice: back off or stay with it. This is where improvement actually happens.

Discomfort Is Part of the Process

A few years ago, I was trying to explain the feeling of a 400-meter race to some friends. One of them asked:

“Why would anyone willingly put themselves through that?”

At the time, I didn’t have a great answer. But over years of coaching—working with athletes from CrossFit competitors to experienced runners—I’ve seen the same pattern again and again: The athletes who improve the most aren’t the ones who avoid discomfort; they’re the ones who learn how to work with it.

Learning to Handle Discomfort

This isn’t about “toughing it out” or pushing blindly through pain. It’s about understanding what you’re feeling—and responding the right way.

Be honest about where you are

Progress starts with awareness. I’ve coached athletes who hit plateaus not because they weren’t working hard, but because they weren’t being honest about what was actually limiting them—fatigue, stress, lack of recovery.

Once we addressed that, progress followed quickly. You can’t manage discomfort well if you’re not honest about what’s really going on.

Learn to read your body

One of the most important skills we develop is learning the difference between:

• discomfort that makes us better

• pain that sets us back

That line matters. Productive discomfort builds fitness and resilience. Ignoring warning signs leads to injury and inconsistency.

The goal isn’t to avoid discomfort. The goal is to understand it.

Respond instead of react

Discomfort often triggers an emotional reaction: panic, frustration, the urge to slow down immediately. Better athletes learn to pause and respond instead.

I saw this clearly while working with Katrín Davíðsdóttir during the 2020 CrossFit Games. In one event, athletes ran a brutal 5K trail under hot, dry conditions. When they reached what they thought was the finish, they were told to turn around and run the entire course again.

You could feel the energy shift immediately—frustration, disbelief, wasted energy. But not from Katrin. She had a brief moment of surprise, then quickly reset. She accepted the situation and focused on what she needed to do next.

That ability—to respond instead of react—gave her a real advantage. She conserved energy, stayed composed, and went on to win the event.

That’s what handling discomfort looks like at a high level.

Stay composed when it gets hard

Discomfort doesn’t mean something is wrong. In many cases, it means you’re exactly where you need to be.

The key is staying controlled:

• maintaining your form

• keeping your breathing steady

• not letting the moment dictate your effort

Elite athletes don’t avoid discomfort—they stay composed inside it.

Where This Shows Up in Training

You don’t need a race to experience this. It shows up every week.

• The last reps of an interval session

• The moment your legs start to fade but the pace needs to stay the same

• The point where your form wants to break down

That’s the work. That’s where we learn to stay relaxed, stay controlled, and keep moving well—even when it’s uncomfortable.

Discomfort Has a Purpose

We don’t seek discomfort for its own sake. We use it to:

• build fitness

• improve efficiency

• develop control under fatigue

And over time, something changes. What once felt overwhelming becomes manageable. What once forced you to slow down becomes something you can move through. That’s growth.

This Is Part of Running With Purpose

If you’re training with intent, discomfort isn’t something to avoid. It is something to understand. It is something to work through with control. And it is something we use to become better runners. Not by forcing it and not by ignoring it. But by learning how to handle it.

That’s part of what it means to run with purpose.

More workouts and coaching insights coming soon!

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Most athletes treat parts of their training like they don’t really matter.

The warmup is rushed.
The cooldown is skipped.
And the focus is almost entirely on the “main workout.”

But if we want to actually improve, we can’t train like that.

Everything we do has a purpose.

Every Part of Training Matters

When we talk about training, most people think about splits, intervals, and mileage. That’s important—but it’s only part of the picture.

If we’re serious about getting better, we have to zoom out.

It’s not just about what we do during the workout.
It’s how we prepare for it, how we execute it, and how we come out of it.

We’re not just logging miles.
We’re building a better runner.

The Warmup: Where We Build the Foundation

A lot of athletes treat the warmup as something to “get through” before the real work starts.

That’s a mistake.

The warmup is where we start to dial in movement:

• Dynamic mobility

• Posture and positioning

• Rhythm and coordination

This is where we begin to feel what good running actually looks like.

Before we ask the body to go fast, we teach it how to move well.

If we skip that step—or rush through it—we’re just reinforcing bad habits at higher speeds.

The Workout: Executing With Intention

The workout is where we apply structure.

This is where pacing matters.
This is where we manage effort.
This is where we learn to stay controlled when things start to get uncomfortable.

Every workout has a purpose.

Sometimes we’re building aerobic capacity.
Sometimes we’re working on speed.
Sometimes we’re learning how to hold pace when fatigue sets in.

If you don’t understand the purpose, it’s always okay to ask:

“Why this today?”

That question matters.

Because when you understand the intent, you execute better.
And when you execute better, you get more out of the work.

The Cooldown: The Most Overlooked Opportunity

This is the piece almost everyone gets wrong.

The cooldown isn’t just about “getting the miles in” or bringing your heart rate down.

It’s an opportunity.

You’re fatigued.
Your form wants to break down.
Your focus starts to fade.

And that’s exactly why it matters.

This is where we practice running well when it’s hard—but without the pressure of pace.

No splits to hit.
No clock to chase.

Just movement.
Just control.
Just reinforcing good habits when your body would rather fall apart.

That’s where real progress happens.

Training With Intent Builds Trust

One of the most important parts of coaching isn’t just what we do—it’s making sure it makes sense.

You should understand your training.
You should feel like there’s a reason behind what you’re doing.

And you should always feel comfortable asking:

“Why this today?”

I encourage that question.

A lot of coaches see it as a challenge to their authority. I don’t.

If anything, it’s the opposite.

That question creates a conversation. It builds understanding. And over time, it builds trust.

And trust isn’t something a coach should demand—it’s something we earn.

When an athlete understands the purpose behind the work, they buy in more fully. They execute better. They stay more engaged in the process.

And that trust becomes the foundation for everything else.

Because once it’s there, we can start to push the edge.

We can go to uncomfortable places.
We can ask for more.
We can move beyond perceived limits.

Not because the athlete is being told to—but because they understand why it matters.

We Don’t Train on Autopilot

If we want to improve, we can’t just go through the motions.

We have to be present.
We have to be intentional.
We have to understand what we’re trying to do.

Every rep has a purpose.
Every part of the session has value.

That’s how we train.

That’s how we improve.

That’s how we run with purpose.

More workouts and coaching insights coming soon!