The Terrible News That Training Smarter Might Make You Faster

For most of my rowing life, training was treated like olive oil in a Mediterranean cookbook. If some was good, more was obviously better. More metres, more intervals, more threshold, more suffering. Especially more suffering, because suffering has always had a suspiciously good reputation in rowing.

This suited me perfectly, because I am exactly the sort of person who can finish a hard threshold session, upload it to Garmin, and admire the evidence as though I’ve just submitted a doctoral thesis. There it is: heart rate, power, duration, 500m splits, all beautifully arranged on a screen. Proof, surely, that I am becoming faster. Or possibly just proof that I own a watch and enjoy making myself tired.

Then two episodes of AFib came along and ruined the arrangement. Not because they removed my ambition. Annoyingly, that remained intact. I still want to race. I still want to go fast. I still want to beat people who, in my private and not especially generous opinion, should not be beating me.

But AFib changed the question. It was no longer, “How much training can I do?” It became, “What actually makes me faster and stay healthy?”

This was deeply inconvenient, because the answer was not simply “more cardio”. For years, like many rowers, I had treated the cardiovascular system as though it were the whole show. Bigger engine, better performance. Easy. Unfortunately, rowing is not moved by lungs alone. It is moved by strength, strength endurance, technique, timing, durability, nutrition, recovery, and a brain that occasionally intervenes before the ego drives the entire enterprise into the riverbank.

After the AFib episodes, I went looking for a way to keep racing without simply flogging the same system harder. The rower AFib data was sobering enough. But the more useful discovery was not medical. It was practical. I had spent far too much time going hard in the heroic middle ground.

Threshold.

Threshold is not bad. Let’s be clear about that before someone throws a lactate analyser through a window. But treating threshold as a religion is daft.

Seiler is awkward because he makes the middle ground look suspicious. His work around endurance training points towards a pattern many athletes hate: lots genuinely easy, some genuinely hard, and less of the grey-zone heroics where masters rowers go to feel important.

This is annoying because the middle ground feels serious. It feels as though you are doing something important. It feels like training. But for many of us, too much of it becomes a fatigue subscription service. You pay every month, it takes your money, and somehow you are no better off.

Then there is Dan Plews, who is difficult to ignore because he knows rowing as well as endurance science. Plews also brings in the idea of durability, which is a horrible concept because it asks a better question than most athletes want to answer. Not: what can you do fresh? But: what can you still do when fatigue arrives?

For rowers, durability is not an academic concept. It is the second half of the race. It is whether you can preserve boat speed through the middle of the race. It is whether your technique survives when the legs begin posting resignation letters. It is whether you can sprint when every sensible part of your body is voting to stop. And at a regatta, it is whether you can come back later the same day, or the next morning, and still look like an athlete rather than a man negotiating with a sun lounger.

Joe Friel makes the whole thing worse by reminding older athletes that getting older does not mean giving up speed, but it does mean changing the way you train. His Fast After 50 is aimed at endurance athletes who want to stay fast, race strong and stay healthy beyond 50, and it covers adapting training with age, avoiding overtraining, high-intensity work, focused strength training, recovery, cross-training and nutrition.  

This is not what many masters athletes want to hear. We want to be told we can train like 25-year-olds, only with better equipment and more expensive sunglasses. Sadly, the body has access to the calendar.

So the lesson I have taken from Seiler, Plews and Friel is not that I should train less. That is too crude. The lesson is that I need to train smarter, and train the entire athlete, not just keep flogging the engine until smoke comes out.

That means easy aerobic work that is genuinely easy, not “easy” in the way rowers use the word, which usually means slightly too hard but accompanied by a virtuous facial expression. It means hard sessions that have a purpose, rather than random acts of violence performed to impress a spreadsheet. It means threshold work used carefully, not sprinkled over the programme like parmesan. It means strength, because older athletes cannot afford to treat muscle as optional. It means strength endurance, because rowing rewards the person who can keep applying force when fatigue has moved in and started opening the post and started rearranging the furniture. It means technique, because wasting power is not noble. It is just expensive incompetence.

Most of all, it means recovery is no longer the bit between training sessions. Recovery is where the adaptation happens. This is annoying because there is no trophy for sleeping properly. You cannot upload “excellent restraint today” and expect applause from people who believe a rest day is a moral failing.

But if the goal is to go faster and win, then the question changes. It is no longer, “Did I train hard enough?” It is, “Did this session make me better?” If the answer is no, then all you have done is collect fatigue, and fatigue is not fitness. It is just fitness’s overweight cousin wearing a tracksuit.

That is now the filter I use when thinking about training plans. Not: can this session hurt, will this push me, is this as hard as last year? Any fool can design a painful session. The question is whether it earns its place. Does it build the engine? Does it improve rowing economy? Does it create durability? Does it leave enough in the system to absorb the work, stay healthy and come back better?

The new plan is not softer. It is harder in a more grown-up and irritating way. It requires discipline not to turn every outing into a test. It requires humility to admit that technique matters. It requires patience to build strength. It requires enough intelligence to understand that the session you do today has to leave you capable of doing the next one properly.

This is what I have learnt from two episodes of AFib: ambition is still allowed. Winning is still allowed. Racing is still fun. But the old model — more volume, more threshold, more suffering, more heroic nonsense — is no longer good enough.

I am not trying to become careful. Careful is cancelling a bike ride because the sky has gone a bit grey. I am trying to become harder to beat.

That means training with more purpose, not less ambition. The easy work has to build the base and leave me fresh enough for the hard work to matter. The strength work has to keep the body together and strong. The technique work has to move the boat and stop me wasting watts like an idiot. And the recovery has to make sure I can do it again.

This is what now sits underneath my training plans. Not fear. Not caution. Not retreat. Just the irritating discovery that smarter training might be faster training.

Which is annoying, because I was rather enjoying pretending that smashing it every day was the same as being fit.