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By Grass Roots Racing

By Mike Shultz CSCS-Highland Training

Endurance Training for Adventure Racing

An article by Grass Roots Racing

There are many facets to endurance. Ultimately endurance can be defined as your ability to persist while you continue your effort. Another way of saying it is endurance is your ability to resist fatigue. This is a clear and concise definition, but the issue becomes—what is causing the fatigue? If your goal is to run a five hour marathon, then the fatigue you face is contracting your muscles at a relatively slow rate for a long period of time. This could be defined as muscular endurance. If your goal is to run a two hour marathon, then the fatigue you face is maintaining a high rate of speed for an extended period of time while anaerobic.

This sounds very simple until you realize that most of us are somewhere in between these two. This means that training for endurance is not as simple as running or biking for extended periods of time. It also means that training for endurance is not accomplished by doing countless sprints. Both of these training techniques have a place in an endurance athletes quiver, the art is finding the proper balance and timing of the workouts. Adding the element of adventure racing makes all of this a bit more complicated in that an adventure race is not simply a matter of moving forward as fast as possible. There are many obstacles and hurdles that one confronts while adventure racing, and that means that your training needs to be as varied as the terrain you race on.