Failed Intensity

Is more really more? Or is it just more noise? How do we decipher?

It seems we are increasingly treating intensity as a virtue you can apply indefinitely, in every direction, without cost. Push harder at work. Push harder in training. Push harder with the kids on the weekend. As if the human system were a light switch rather than a battery.

Sorry to be the courier of bad news. It isn’t a light switch at all. Every high output state you enter is withdrawn from somewhere. There is one nervous system underneath your job, your training and your family, and despite us believing otherwise, it does not separate the ledger by category. It just knows what has been spent and what is left.

This is the part we resist, because resisting it flatters us. We would rather believe our will is the constraint, that if we just wanted it enough we could go hard everywhere at once. In what I have had the privilege in seeing, wanting has never been the limiting factor. Capacity is. And capacity, unlike willpower, does not respond to a pep talk.

So the real question is never how do I get more intensity. It is where does this intensity come from, and what am I quietly no longer able to give somewhere else because I took it.

I learned this beautifully after I completed my 30 marathons in 2018. I was playing two things at once that both deserved their own playground. Ultra running and a fast marathon. I knew in my heart that for the two to co-inhabit my life I would have to strike on something very special. But more is more and the more I ran the more I wanted to run more. Ultras, multi-stage ultras, adventure, anywhere, anytime, the best. Intensity on a different level.

By the same token 4 minute 15 second kilometres for 42.195 kilometres also needed something special. Intensity. Hard track sessions. Tempo runs that tested the legs and the mind in strangely disturbing doses. And my long runs which of course were a nice crossover to my ultra running. I was trying to fill two cars with one tank. A short-lived endeavour.

I told myself I was building an aerobic base for the marathon. Really I was stealing from what I had built in my endurance life. You cannot run 100 kilometres on a Saturday and expect Tuesday’s intervals to have anything left in them. The legs might show up, highly unlikely. Intensity needs a fresh system to spend itself on, and mine was always in debt. I knew it, the more I knew it the more I wanted to prove it wrong. I saw it as a game. One deep down I knew I would never win.

Insanity. The definition of doing the same thing and expecting a different result!

My good friend Jani spotted the same pattern in my cycling. He watched my numbers and of course came with the news I had heard but not actioned before. My easy rides weren’t easy enough, and because of that, my hard rides weren’t hard enough. I was riding a lot. I just wasn’t riding well.  Too much sat in the middle, moderately tired all the time, never truly recovered, never truly sharp.

I flicked the switch. Properly easy on the easy days, conversational pace, if you cared you could say embarrassingly slow at times. Then genuinely hard on the hard days. The watts went up almost immediately. Not because I was fitter. Because I finally had something left to spend when it mattered.

Of course it’s a simple principle but not exclusive to a sport. It applies to life. A big training week borrows from your work week. A big work week borrows from your family week. A big family week, the kind with early starts and late nights and everyone needing something, borrows from your training and your work both. The tank is one tank, exactly as I said it was. It does not know which category you are drawing from, it only knows what is left.

You can be fully committed to your business, your marathon and your marriage and still fail at all three in the same month. Not from lack of effort. From lack of distribution. The ambitious answer is always to add. Add another session, another client, another commitment.

Addition rarely works. Subtraction does. Decide which area gets the intensity this week, and let the others run easy on purpose. Not neglected, just easy. Genuinely easy. Contrary to the feeling that you are compromising, you are not. You are simply following the method, the method that works.

Where in your life this week are you demanding intensity everywhere at once? Your training, your work, your family, all dialled to the same number? And which one of those is actually paying for the others without you noticing?

Find the place you need to be sharp. Then go properly, unapologetically easy everywhere else, so you have something to give when it counts.

Remember, it’s the same tank underneath all of it.

No Weakness,
Marcus