You're training to be able to train more

I had a conversation with an old mate recently. He's done a couple of Ironmans, so he's trained hard before. Somewhere in the middle of it he asked me a question I've been thinking about ever since.

"How often do you get an athlete who trains for a race and just doesn't make it?"

My first thought was... Eh? Then I worked out why he'd think that. He was picturing a runner who signs up for something, trains hard for a few months, does the race, and then stops. A block with a start and a finish and nothing either side of it. That's how he's done his own racing, and he was honest that he found the training miserable.

That's not how the runners I work with train, and it's not how I coach them.

The pattern he was describing is a common one. Train for a race, run it, stop, do very little for months, then enter something the following year and start the whole thing again.

The runners I coach still work in blocks, because that's how you prepare for a specific race. The difference is what happens either side of them. The build ends, the recovery happens, and the next build starts from a higher floor than the last one did. Over a few years that floor climbs a long way. That's the whole game. Any individual race is just a test of where the floor is right now.

Train, stop, repeat, and the floor never moves. You spend every build getting back to where you already were.

The other thing he said was that races beyond marathon distance aren't really about physical limits. That it's all mental.

That one is worth picking apart, because he's half right.

Ben Dhiman has just run the fastest UTMB in history, 18:16:29, the first man under nineteen hours. And he did go into that race with a different head on him to everyone else. He said beforehand that he expected to win, that it felt inevitable. In the pre-race interviews he was shockingly calm about it. Not loud, not hyped, just completely convinced. He decided not to be frightened of the distance and to race it almost like a 100k, which is close to the opposite of the advice everybody gives, which is respect the distance.

So yes, his mental approach was genuinely different from the rest of the field. But look at where it came from.

2023, DNF. 2024, DNF. 2025, second in 19:51. 2026, first in 18:16. Four years at the same race.

Two of those years he didn't finish. He hadn't got it right yet, and each time he came away knowing more about the course and about himself. In 2025 he got close. Then came the training block everyone is talking about now.

That block is the part people see, and it's the part that gets the credit. But it wasn't standing on its own. It was standing on every block that came before it, year after year of work, and on three previous attempts at that course. A wide base of training, racing and experience, with this season's block sitting on top of it.

That's where the calm came from. He wasn't talking himself into anything. He knew exactly what he was holding. The belief came out of the work. It wasn't standing in for it.

Which is a different thing from being able to hurt more than the next person. Look around the start line of any hundred miler and everyone there can hurt. Nobody gets to the start of a race like that without being able to put themselves through something. It's mostly not what separates people, because almost everyone has it.

And the bit that gets missed is this. That same stubbornness is what lets someone train consistently for years. It doesn't mostly show up in the last ten kilometres of a race. It shows up on a wet Tuesday in February.

That's the very top of the sport. It works the same way everywhere else.

One of my athletes has been building towards a sub three hour marathon at the end of October. He came to me already recovered from a foot injury, nothing to do with running, but recovered isn't the same as ready. His volume was still very low and he was nowhere near being able to train five or six days a week, so the first job was just getting him back up there.

I already had the feeling the block was tight. He probably has the base to go out and run a decent time off the back of it, but it wouldn't have been a proper marathon build. Then, just as we were getting into the marathon specific work, something small came up and he had to drop the hard sessions and cut the volume for a week.

It's not a disaster. It's load management. But it's the kind of thing that happens again and again when an athlete is still fairly new, because the body hasn't yet learned to take the work.

So we changed the goal. He can still run the race. We'll see how it goes on the day. But the sub three is now a longer term target rather than something we chase in the next few weeks, because the alternative was cramming for the exam.

What I said to him was this. Think of it like this: you're training to be able to train more.

It landed with him. It landed with me too, because it's exactly how it works at the start.

In the beginning you have to be gentle. Your body can't handle much. It's easy to get it wrong, and when you get it wrong you pick up the small niggles that cost you weeks. You'll still gain fitness fast, because everything is new and almost anything works. But the first couple of years aren't really about results. They're about getting to the point where you can absorb real training.

The longer you train, the more your body can take. And when you can take more, you can finally start aiming at the big things.

Now, I'm aware that the easiest gains go to the people who are least fit. That's true. The better trained you are, the harder every extra percent becomes.

That's not an argument against any of this. It's the reason for it. Once the easy gains are gone, the only thing left is more work: more volume, the right intensity in the right places, and training that actually looks like the race you're going to run. And you can only handle more work if you've spent years building up to handling it. That capacity is the part nobody can rush, and there's no twelve week block that hands it to you.

So if you have big ambitions, and some of the people I coach very much do, then the honest answer is that most of what you're doing right now isn't about this season at all.

You're training to be able to train more.