How Doing Something New Can Help You Achieve Your Endurance Sports Goals - Coach Tip Tuesday

As an endurance coach, I have long advocated for athletes to introduce discomfort into their training and daily workouts.  In fact, it’s not uncommon for me to plan a particular workout for an athlete or for me to recommend that an athlete do a particular thing precisely because I know it will be uncomfortable for them.  One of the most common ways I do this is by recommending that athletes do something different from their normal training and racing routine.  In other words, I recommend that they do something new.

Reading Michael Easter’s book The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self only confirmed what I had long observed in my work as a coach: That comfort is great in moderation and disastrous in the amounts most of us currently have in our lives.  We get so comfortable in our normal routines that we forget the power of a new experience.  In order to counter this overabundance of comfort, we need to intentionally introduce discomfort and novel experiences into our lives; doing so helps us grow and to live higher quality and happier lives.  

Humans Actually Thrive with Discomfort

I’ve talked about how the hard is what makes endurance sports great; sports like running, cycling, swimming, and triathlon are attractive to athletes precisely because they are challenging and uncomfortable.  Whether we are conscious of it or not, we derive immense satisfaction from learning new skills and seeing what we’re capable of.  The only way to learn something new (either in general or about ourselves) is to do something different from what we’ve done before.  Doing something new - which often means doing something uncomfortable - is what gives us this opportunity and yields that satisfaction.  While it definitely can feel uncomfortable, doing something new can also be exceptionally liberating, and that is why it is one of the ways I encourage athletes to introduce discomfort into their endurance training and racing.

Doing Something New Forces Presence

Our brains default to going on autopilot when we do something that we are familiar with.  This autopilot process can feel very comfortable to us because we don’t have to think that much.  (In fact, going into this autopilot mode when doing familiar things is often so comfortable that we don’t even realize that it is what is happening.)  We can engage in one thing while maintaining a decent level of distraction (where we are either thinking about or doing another thing simultaneously).  

This distraction is often referred to as “multitasking”, but distraction is the accurate descriptive term for what is happening.  The truth of the matter is that we are never giving something our full attention if we are dividing our focus between multiple things.  Thus, we can’t - and shouldn’t - ever expect the same results as if we had given a particular thing or process our full attention.  While many people think that they are giving 100% to each process, activity, or task when they “multitask” (and therefore accomplishing 200% of what they could have been by only doing one thing at a time), the reality is that multitasking costs us about 40% of our productive time.  As such, we end up getting closer to 50% of something done (not even 100% and certainly not the fabled 200%).

By contrast, we cannot go on autopilot when we are doing something new.  This is because doing something new forces presence.  When we are doing something new and/or different from our “normal”, our brains need to give what we’re doing much more care and attention than we are used to.  The brain notices more details, evaluates our environment and situation more acutely, and stores memories differently.  We need to engage in the novel experience with curiosity and rely on our instincts and judgment to navigate what we are experiencing.  All of this means that we don’t have the cognitive energy or space for repetitive or familiar thoughts when we are engaging in a new experience; we must give our attention to what we are currently experiencing without distraction.  As a result of all of this, time actually can feel like it’s slowing down when we are doing something new.

Time & The Theory of Relativity

We’ve all experienced the phenomenon when Time’s “speed” changes.  Hard workout intervals of 30 seconds can feel like they take forever and easy workout intervals of three minutes can feel like they pass in the blink of an eye.  Some days, weeks, and months fly by so fast that we can barely remember the details of what took place.  And other days, weeks, and months pass more slowly and are much more memorable.  

One example is time spent at home going to work, school, and sports contrasted with time spent in a foreign city.  The time spent at home will fly by while the time spent in a new place where we don’t know how to get around, where we don’t speak the language, and where each day is different from each other (aka not routine) will seem longer - relatively - to that same amount of time spent at home where we know how to get places, how to speak the language, and have a daily routine.

Why Doing Something New in Endurance Sports is So Beneficial

In the world of endurance sports, doing something new can take many shapes.  The most common are:

• Doing a new-to-you sport discipline (such as a runner trying cycling or a swimmer trying strength training)
• Doing a workout in a new-to-you place
• Doing a race that you haven’t ever done before
• Doing a new-to-you workout

I firmly believe that doing something new can not only help us challenge the comfort crisis that we’re collectively facing as a society, but that it can help us enjoy our life experiences more.  I’ve seen time and time again in my own endurance sports training that constantly introducing something new significantly increases the enjoyment I get from training.  It also helps me continue to enjoy a hobby that identically resembles what I do full-time for work, which is really important.

One of the biggest ways I personally introduce something new into my training on a regular basis is that I never, ever use the same route for consecutive workouts.  In fact, I almost never repeat the same route for workouts that take place within a few months of each other.  By doing this, I find that I am able to focus better on the intention of the workout itself; I cannot go on autopilot and thus my mind cannot wander to other thoughts.  I am able to really hone in on what I’m supposed to be doing in the workout, which helps me yield better adaptations from my training over time.  Additionally, I find that the experience of the workout itself is much more enjoyable and doesn’t feel like a chore.  Instead, it feels like a bit of an adventure.  

I take a similar approach when it comes to racing; I generally never repeat a race.  Out of the 105+ individual races I have completed, I’ve only raced ten individual races more than once.  Most of those ten I only raced twice; the most notable exception to this is my all-time favorite race - the Mountain Goat Run - which I have run 13 times as of the time of my writing this article.

I’m not the only athlete who has experienced these positive benefits; I’ve seen the same thing happen for the athletes I coach.  If athletes either take the initiative to introduce novelty into their training (or finally do engage in novel experiences after some very persistent nudging from their coach), they often discover that they enjoyed and got more out of those experiences than they originally imagined they could.  They also see that this novelty helps them make progress and achieve their goals over time.

New Training Stimuli Yields New Performance Results

From a very practical standpoint, we need to introduce new and varied stimuli in training in order to elicit desired physiological adaptations in the body.  Training stimulus is imposed by managing variables such as volume, intensity, frequency, and workout modality.  Manipulating these different variables over the course of an annual training plan is what helps athletes get stronger, faster, achieve better performances, and reach their goals.

Just like the brain and mind, the body knows when it’s doing something it has done before.  When it knows what to expect stimulus-wise, it stops adapting as much or as quickly.   As a result, if we want to see continued gains and increases in performance over time, we need to constantly vary what we’re doing in training.  Practically speaking, this means that we need to do things like cross-train, interval workouts of varying intensities, workouts of varying durations and different movements or exercises.  By keeping the body guessing about what is coming next, it won’t get used to a given stimulus and it will respond to the variability by making the various systems in the body (such as the cardiac, respiratory, muscular, and skeletal systems) more durable, resilient, and stronger.  With consistency, all of this can lead to increased speed and performance gains over time.

The Bottom Line

In a world that is already very comfortable and is becoming increasingly too comfortable, we need to intentionally do new things to combat this comfort crisis and to help us thrive.  This is true both in our lives as endurance athletes and in our existence as humans.

This week, I challenge you to do something new in your training and/or racing.  Try a brand-new route.  Do a completely different type of workout.  Give a new discipline or movement practice a try.  Sign up for a race you’ve never done before.  Embark on the new experience with curiosity and immerse yourself in it.  It might just be the thing you need to break through a training rut or plateau and to achieve greater enjoyment and success than you could previously envision for yourself.