Rethinking Your Obsession and Compulsion For Extreme Endurance Training

As I detailed in my book, Born To Walk, many of our fundamental beliefs about steady-state cardiovascular exercise are flawed. Endurance training doesn’t really help you lose excess body fat, and can actually send the hormonal signals for fat storage. General everyday movement and low-level cardiovascular exercise is supremely healthy, but most joggers and hard-core cardio freaks exceed the healthy heart rate zones and invite breakdown, burnout, illness, and recurring injury. 

As you may know, in my youth I was an elite endurance athlete in marathon and ironman triathlon, so I’m allowed to sound off on the broken promises and unintended consequences of getting deep into the endurance scene. Granted, living an exciting life full of adventures, personal challenges, and valiant struggles against your physical and mental limits is valuable and fulfilling, but it’s important to do things correctly. I’m all in favor of bucket list goals like completing a marathon or preparing all summer for a serious backpacking trip. The problem happens when your steady-state cardiovascular training patterns become chronic. 

I’ve written about this extensively for decades. Today, I’m happy to report that the long-sidelined MarksDailyApple.com is coming back to life. You’ll find hundreds of archived blog posts and fresh new content going forward, so head over there and subscribe. Alas, the question begs: if you’ve heard about the detrimental aspects of extreme endurance exercise, and still insist on mistreating your body with an overly stressful training regimen, what gives? (and by the way, “extreme” encompasses millions of everyday marathoners, triathletes, and heavy gymgoers).

Why does the “struggle and suffer” endurance culture persist when we know it’s not serving us, when we’ve been bombarded by the scientific validation that resistance training and sprinting are more beneficial for health, vitality, and longevity, and we’ve learned the hard way about fatigue and injuries from chronic cardio?

It comes down to numerous complex and nuanced variables that might be difficult to talk about, but the time has come. First, let’s acknowledge that the highly motivated, goal-oriented, type-A personality typically drawn to extreme endurance training achieves a wonderful payoff from pushing the body: a reliable and repeatable burst of endorphins into the bloodstream, and the psychological satisfaction of a job well done. When you become immersed in the culture and share the experience with like-minded athletes, you enjoy group camaraderie and peer recognition. Indeed, you also nurture important skills like focus, discipline and competitive intensity that can be leveraged in other areas of life. 

That’s great, and I feel ya since I was a competitive type for a long time. Alas, with an expanded perspective, we can reflect on the idea that the body responds and adapts extremely well to intermittent stress such that you can do vastly less steady state cardio and still be highly proficient in endurance performance. I learned this the easy way after I retired from elite racing and hung around the front of the pack on embarrassingly little training.

When I say, “embarrassing,” I really mean it. I remember getting called up to the podium to receive awards and feeling a tad uncomfortable, even ashamed, that I kicked ass without having to suffer in training. This gives you a glimpse of how perverse the prevailing mindset is amongst highly competitive endurance athletes. Of course, after I stood on a few podiums, my embarrassment and shame quickly wore off, and one of the great epiphanies of my life took shape: humans can become fit, and even super fit, with far less pain, suffering, and sacrifice than we think. 

This epiphany was a catalyst for my deep research, immersion, and creation of a “Primal Blueprint” lifeway that is informed by our hunter-gatherer ancestors and two million years of human evolution. Notably on our timeline, there was a complete absence of extreme endurance training or events like the marathon or the ironman that have zero connection to our human genetic expectations for health, and lots of connection to corporate interests luring us into their lair in a manner similar to the providers of alcohol, tobacco, and processed food. I know that’s plenty harsh, and that catching the marathon bug is better for you than other indulgences, but please don’t fool yourself that extreme endurance training and racing is “healthy” any longer. 

I know many of you will remain enamored with endurance goals despite my gentle and not-so-gentle counter-arguments, so I propose you vary your approach to emphasize breakthrough workouts relating to your area of competitive interest, and de-emphasize your fixations on chronic cardio weekly mileage. For example, if you enjoy racing 10k’s, how about heading out 2-3 days per month for a brisk 10k run? Exhibit good technique and practice holding a steady pace (the 10k distance will be completed at near anaerobic threshold for most people.) Only conduct these and other breakthrough workouts when you feel 100 percent rested and energized to deliver a peak performance. If you don’t feel springy and energetic during warmups and during the first mile, back off and attempt the workout another day. Emphasize recovery workouts before and after breakthrough workouts to ensure that you can “nail” them when the desired day arrives. 

You can package these goal-specific workouts with a more effective and focused commitment to the big picture of health and broad-based functional fitness. For example, a walking-oriented lifestyle is great for aerobic conditioning. And when you walk in Peluvas, you naturally strengthen your feet to form a better foundation for more ambitious fitness endeavors like endurance running. You also have the necessary time and energy for things like flexibility/mobility/rehab/prehab exercises (which will help improve your running form and reduce injury risk), and engage in the incredibly important but often neglected modalities of strength training and sprinting. With this revised approach, I virtually guarantee you that you will perform as good or better than your previous chronic-cardio fueled performances, that you’ll have more fun and less drudgery, and that you’ll avoid being part of the “50 percent” stat on annual running overuse injuries. 

I cover these concepts in more detail in Born To Walk (BornToWalkBook.com) and you can also enjoy many topical posts over the years at MarksDailyApple.com, including the one that started the whole chronic cardio rethinking a couple decades ago: A Case Against Cardio.