SPORT WALK

Fitness is a funny thing. We tend to think of fitness as a capability – what we’re able to do at a certain point in time, based on the training or exercising we’ve done beforehand. Being ‘race fit’ or ‘match fit’ means that you’re ready and prepared for that challenge. But understanding your true fitness can be a little tricky the further on you go, especially when you’ve attained a high level of fitness before.

Learning about my true fitness By Roger Burlinson

When you first start out, every new stage you reach reveals an improvement in your condition and capability. You know you still have limitations but you’re feeling that you’re on a path to get continually better, although this will only prove to be true, if you’re always progressing!

Where fitness can be a really devious adversary is when you’ve reached a peak and then, perhaps, taken a step back for a bit and this is when your fitness can deceive you.

You see, your level of fitness will always sit at the level of your activity – rather obviously – but this can be misleading. You feel the same as you did when you were more active, so you think you have the same capability…… until you push yourself further and then it gets really hard. Why? Because you’ve exceeded your true fitness capability.

This happened to me following the Covid period, when it was, at times, impossible to train to the level I’d held before and then, in the aftermath, with work and life commitments returning, it was again difficult to maintain the same work rate from pre-pandemic times.

But I felt the same and on my short weekday walks, I was still able to perform just as well and so, rather naively as I now realise, I assumed I had miraculously retained my previous capabilities. “What a unique specimen I must be” I thought, I’m still as fast and as strong as in 2019.

When I went out at the weekend, because my schedule was really hectic, I had much less time, so I didn’t go as far as I would normally but it was still a reasonable distance. Once again, my pace was on point and the distance felt just right.

This situation continued for well over a year and I happily skipped along (not literally you understand), a contented Sport Walker going out Sport Walking and still at the peak of his capabilities or so I thought!

After things calmed down a bit, I decided to go out for a nice 25km session one Saturday morning. It was just in the National Park where I live, which isn’t as challenging as some of the other locations I like to walk in, so I was feeling positive. The first 10k was fine but after about 12km, I really started to feel it and by the end it was hard work.

This completely confused me. My everyday pace was exactly where I’d want it to be, I was walking four times a week and always walking strongly. After a while it occurred to me that although I was walking to the same schedule as before, I wasn’t covering anywhere near the same distances overall.

Also, previously, I would go for 30-40km bike rides on my ‘off days’ and run many of my weekday sessions, adding both intensity and overall weekly distance. Now, I was only walking four times a week and going for much shorter distances. The clues were all there!

Quite simply, there was nothing wrong, my fitness had just settled at the level of my activity and so when I increased that activity, it was hard. I knew instantly that in order to perform at my old pace for longer distances, I needed to return my overall activity level to the same as it was before.

I did this, albeit with a different activity mix and, low and behold, I began to see improvements and now, I have a clear measure of where I’m at because I’m looking at things in the right way. And this is something that everyone can benefit from.

We talk a lot at Sport Walk about working with facts, dealing with things based on the reality of your situation because only then can you influence outcomes. My mistake was to blindly believe what I was feeling, without considering a danger lurking in plain sight – my reduced training volume. I wasn’t working with the facts about my training volume, I was liking how I was feeling when I trained and just took my data at face value – my pace was unchanged from 2019, therefore I’m as fit as I was then……. not even close!

But what I experienced isn’t just for those like me who’ve functioned at a high level in the past and who have reduced that volume, it can affect anyone at any point in their fitness journey. It would manifest itself differently but you can still mislead yourself about your true fitness just by reading how you feel. Your fitness always sits at the level of your activity. If you’re fast over 5k, it doesn’t mean you’ll be as fast over 10,15, 20k.

So how do you prevent this from happening to you? Well, firstly, try to ensure that you never ‘settle’ at a particular distance or on a particular type of terrain. Always be looking to test yourself a bit more, every time you go Sport Walking.

This doesn’t just have to be about the distance you go. You can vary the difficulty of the terrain, the type to ground you walk on, the number of climbs and the pace you hold.

The key thing, to avoid fitness complacency of the kind I experienced, is to always be looking to go a little bit faster, a little bit longer and to make sure you always walk strongly up climbs. In essence, it’s about always pushing yourself and always increasing your capability.

This doesn’t mean that you should add 5km to each walk you do every week, it means that if you’re training over the same distance and terrain as last week, that you’re trying to go a little faster or to work that little bit more, so that you’re making progress. If you think about what I experienced, it was stagnation but progression is the exact opposite of that, so to prevent yourself from what I experienced, always ensure that you’re progressing, continually.

This drive for continual progress doesn’t have to be overbearing, nor does it mean that you’ll turn into one of those over-driven obsessives who are flying headlong towards burnout. Progress is a good thing, becoming better at something, becoming stronger and, in this case, fitter is very positive but attaining anything in life requires continual steady progression. It also means that you’re managing your expectations of what you can achieve, which is also essential.

Starting out on a fitness path with an expectation of achieving your goal in months is optimistic, unless you’re just building back from a previous position of strong fitness. It’s important to view your trajectory as being a gradual one, where you’ll make continual progress over a number of years.

So when you start out with a new fitness or training routine, it’s vital not to think of your activity as fixed and that you simply keep repeating what you’re doing until you reach your goal. If you just do the same thing over and over, you’ll stay at the same point and what you do will gradually have less and less impact.

It’s not simply the totality of the work that gets you there, it’s how you continually progress your speed, your distance, your effort – always pushing a little bit further, a little bit harder that incrementally builds fitness.

If you stay static in what you do, even if you go out regularly and are dedicated, you’ll only achieve a level of fitness that fits that work. So, be sensible but be motivated to keep progressing and that’s what will bring you real fitness, whether it’s just for health and wellbeing or whether it’s to power you over an ultramarathon challenge.