How to rebuild your endurance when you can't run like you used to

Q: I (F46) used to do stupid distances with running and now struggle to do 5k. What is the best way to build my endurance again?

This is a brilliantly leading question because there are so many answers to this. A coach always loves to start an answer with “It depends…” so here are some classic examples of things that could have caused this to happen with some suggestions and resources to help break through those barriers.

But be warned, sometimes there is no fix and you have to find a way to reconcile yourself to your current ability.

1. Physically not able to go further

There are a number of sub-categories here, but they all boil down to your body is not capable of going further. The reasons are not a reflection on laziness, inability to train or a lack of willingness to train. Your body, for some reason, just can’t. You will have to do something radically different in your training to break this barrier or you may never be able to go further.

1a. Robustness

Physical degradation of the little muscles in your hips, knees and ankles as we get older can mean our joints give up or hurt before our big propulsion muscles (quads, hamstrings, glutes etc) have had a chance to get tired. Or your posterior chain is tight (tight lower back, hamstrings, calves, achilles etc.)

These slight degradations in strength or increased tightness in the muscles might only manifest themselves after 20-30 minutes of exercise causing you to need to stop running as it is too hard or hurts.

Cure: Yoga, Pilates, Strength Training. Prioritise these over all other types of training. Your 80-year-old self will thank you for taking this up as the real-life longevity benefits are an added bonus to pain-free running.

1b. Injury/arthritis

As we get older, the joints themselves degrade manifesting as small injuries like sub-patella tendonitis (runner’s knee), Achilles tendonitis and plantar fasciitis. These usually decrease the frequency we can run. Where we used to be able to do 30, 40, 50+ miles a week, we start to realise that we see these niggles manifesting themselves at 20 or 15 miles a week.

Cure: Yoga, Pilates, Stretching, Foam Rolling. Consider nutritional changes that will reduce inflammation in your body and promote recovery and repair.

2. Hormonal Imbalance

2a. Chronic Overtraining

An athlete has to over-reach to be able to get stronger. The athlete trains hard and then has a period of rest and recovery and the muscles repair stronger than they were before.

The recovery and repair can take 24-48hrs so this is why you go through blocks of training interspersed with testing (FTP test on the bike, CSS test in the pool, 5k in running) as it checks you are making those slow adaptations on a regular basis that leads to an increase in fitness.

As triathletes, we are serial over-achievers. We don’t like taking rest, we train more than once a day to be able to get the sessions in we need to do, and we all think “more is more”. But if you are training hard every day or training more than once a day, you break the muscles in the recovery phase so you never get that over-compensation where the muscles come back stronger. No matter what we do, we plateau or get slower.

This can be useful in Ironman training where that last big block of training puts us heavily in to over-reaching, but the taper quickly brings back huge benefits in form. However, if you keep over-reaching, you will get chronically fatigued and eventually your body’s systems are maxed out and start to shut down. Your hormone system is shot, and you need to take a complete rest (sometimes for up to 5 years) to allow your body to get back in to balance.

Cure:

Take regular rest days
Do your hard sessions on the same day or on back-to-back days with multiple easier days between to allow recovery
Have some days where you only train once
Build recovery training (Yoga, walking etc.) into your plan

2b. Menopause/Perimenopause

Generally, from early to mid-40’s, but for some this is much younger, perimenopause causes a change in the balance of your sex hormones (oestrogen, progesterone, testosterone) that cause you to be more tired and less able to train. Your bone density and muscle mass decreases and you store more fat in places you don’t want.

It is a fact of life that this process will take place, but it does not affect everyone in the same way. You could be doing all your normal training and results are getting worse, or you find you need more recovery time after a race, or even your top end speed has just gone. This can be mentally challenging as well as physically frustrating so do not under-estimate how detrimental this can be to performance.

Cure:

Knowledge is your friend. Know your cycle (even if you are not having periods anymore)
Get your hormones tested before you go into perimenopause, so you have a baseline to know when they are off. So many athletes get told by their doctors that they are “normal” when their hormone levels have dropped in a personally noticeable way but that has only brought levels in to a “normal range” — a doctor may be reluctant to prescribe hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and you end up suffering unnecessarily
If you are suffering with perimenopause symptoms, you no longer have to just put up with it — there are lots of treatments and nutritional supplements that can help
Stacy Sims is a good place to start for information on perimenopause and performance

3. Mental Block

A mental block sounds terrible but can happen due to a number of the physical issues as previously mentioned but also things like boredom with the same route, general lack of endurance leading to poorer performance and a disengagement in the process. If you have been training for a while and do the same route, the same type of training or have the same routine, you can get bored and lose enthusiasm to improve. Just because it seems so simple doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen to lots and lots of people.

Cure: Mix it up.

Go to a running club
Change or start using music
Do running drills or run at different speeds to normal
Go somewhere exciting
Go with friends
Find any way to introduce fun to your activity so it doesn’t feel like training

A firm plan will mean you are less likely to avoid the session and an exciting or new session will leave you full of enthusiasm for the next one.

4. Heart Problems after Covid

Do not under-estimate this one. If you look at how the death rate in childbirth has increased since Covid due to heart issues, you will realise there are a LOT of people who developed heart issues after a bout or a series of bouts of Covid. These have gone largely undetected and there has not been enough research to know the scale of the problem.

There are two ways your heart could be affected during sport:

You are unable to get your heart rate up, so you are extremely slow, or you have to walk more
Your heart rate goes up quickly and you exercise at a much greater heart rate than you used to

Either way it is going to be hard work to exercise. If you suspect this might be the case, you can check your Garmin (or similar) stats and see how your resting and max heart rate has changed before and after Covid.

Cure: Go straight to your GP. Do not pass go. Do not collect £200. Do not enter that big race you wanted to do or try to do any max efforts before getting checked out. It can take a long time for cardiac abnormalities to settle down and it is not worth the risk.

5. Lack of Fitness

I have left this one until last because it implies a certain level of inherent laziness on the athlete’s part (and it’s hardly ever true), but a change in habits or priorities could mean you don’t have the fitness or capabilities you once had. Checking your Garmin or Strava stats will tell you if your activities have significantly changed.

If you are doing half the miles or missing the top end workouts, you will not be as fast or as fit but you could be blissfully unaware of these changes to your habits.

Cure: Build up slowly and introduce sessions that are missing so you train through all the zones. Make sure you do enough really easy and really hard sessions. This is also called polarised training.

General advice on increasing

No matter where the issue stems from, there are a few golden rules that will help you improve:

Address the root cause. If you don’t fix the problem, it will just get worse.
Own your reality. Be realistic about where you are and what you can do. Also be realistic about whether it is a temporary or permanent change. You can only move on to the next stage once you have the self-awareness of the position you are in.
Control the controllables. This is part of owning your reality. If you have a ruptured achilles, you can’t ignore it and carry on. You can’t control that you have the issue, but you can control how seriously you take it, how often you do your rehab and how you get to know the limits of your training without hurting yourself more.
Let it go. Once you have controlled the controllables, there is no use worrying about the stuff you can’t control. You can’t run a marathon anymore? This is your new reality. You can’t control that you may never run a marathon again but you can run 5k so you can focus on doing that to the best of your ability. You can have fun doing this. It can open new doors to possibilities you’ve never thought of before.
Make small goals. Don’t be ambitious. Aim for a 5-10 sec PB or a post-operation PB or a comeback PB. SMART goals: By Easter I will run the last kilometre of my 5k 4 seconds quicker than I can do today.
Consistency is King. Don’t do loads one week and nothing the next because you are too tired or injured. You will get fitter faster by consistently doing the average weekly amount you’ve done in the last 90 days. If you have proven you can do that consistently for 4-6 weeks, then start increasing the training load of one sport by 10% every 2 weeks.
Mix it up. If you normally train for endurance, train for speed or strength.
Have fun. There is no better training session than the one you finish with a big grin. It keeps you keen to go back out there.
Balance your training. Endurance, Strength and Speed in all sports and in the Gym.
Lift some heavy sh*t. Get strong.
Do today’s session so you are in shape to do tomorrow’s session. Don’t go too hard, too often or you won’t be able to do your next session as was intended.

Conclusion

A change in the output of the training can be caused by a change in the input or a block in the body or mind. Fixing these issues is the highest priority but identifying the issue can be very hard. The second hardest thing is to be realistic about what your capability is, IF those issues cannot be fixed.

You may have to go through a grieving process to own your reality but once you are there, you can start making good decisions about your future training. Following the general advice will have you back up to your current potential at your best pace — note: not THE best pace — and you can have fun within the limits of what you can do.

We are not professionals so just being out there having fun is the baseline. Everything else is the icing on the cake followed by the cherry on the top and then the dusting of icing sugar to make it look good.

I’ve twice been told I will never get back on a bike again and I’ve since been to 13 World and European Championships involving a bike, so don’t give up, find a way to do what you can, and you never know where it will lead.

I hope these thoughts help you find your fix or get you to your reality and that grin will return soon.

Coach T xxx