Endurance is the foundation of everything in Sport Walking, just as it is in running, cycling or any other physical activity. It’s the great enabler, it allows you to move strongly for a good period of time and to feel relatively comfortable while you do so.
Without good endurance, your scope is limited. You can only walk strongly for a while before you run out of steam and need to stop. Endurance extends your potential and enables you to go for longer or, in the case of shorter athletic disciplines, it allows you to sustain the fastest speed you can for that distance.
In athletics for instance, the 400m is considered one of the hardest disciplines on track and that’s because, while we at home watching it on TV think it’s a sprint and so assume it’s all just about running as fast as possible, in reality 400m of sprinting is a long, long way.
You have to sustain your fastest possible speed for another 300m beyond the 100m sprint, which really is just about eyeballs out laying it all down on the track. So the 400m ‘sprint’ is an endurance based discipline, not in the sense of it being an endurance sport but in the sense that without endurance you won’t get anywhere.
In the 400m, the endurance you need is obviously different to the endurance you need for a marathon but it’s still necessary and just as influential. So 400m sprinters train their endurance, just as marathon runners do, it’s just that they do it differently and over shorter distances.
So there’s no escaping the role endurance plays in Sport Walking or anything else for that matter and it’s something that we need to prioritise but a mistake some people make is to assume that you can acquire endurance as a natural offshoot of building fitness or that fitness and endurance are one and the same. They’re not.
The simplest definition is that endurance determines how long you can sustain applying your fitness for. Fitness gives you a capability to function at a high level, endurance determines how long you can sustain that activity for. So they each serve a different purpose but, more importantly, they’re each achieved through different means.
Gaining fitness vs building endurance
Fitness is gained by working at a level where your heart rate is raised and the higher the level of intensity of that effort, the greater (generally speaking) the benefit. However, and this is an important point, the duration of that activity also determines your fitness, so if you only travel a short distance, the fitness you build will only support activity over that distance.
If you can move fast and sustain that activity over longer distances, then you’re really mounting up the benefits. You’re not simply developing a ‘sprinter’s level of fitness’, which is all about short intense efforts, you’re building a much more useful and functionally beneficial type of fitness. Fitness to sustain whatever you might wish or need to do and for the majority of people seeking to get fit or to build their fitness, it’s this type of benefit they’re seeking.
Being able to play football with the kids or grandkids for an hour without having to sit down every ten minutes. Being able to take a long walk in the hills and feeling alive, not like you’re going to explode any minute. It’s this type of capability which the majority of people seeking fitness aspire to and, as you might expect, to achieve longer form fitness potential by increasing your endurance, you need to be working out, training, or just walking strongly at a reasonable pace for longer. This is not about increasing the intensity of your effort.
So, being able to hold your pace for an hour or more, being able to travel 10km or further and feeling relatively comfortable doing so, as a starting point, is all determined by your endurance. With good endurance you can go on to build great fitness but the things you might do which will improve your fitness aren’t necessarily going to build good endurance, so you need to target your efforts in that direction specifically and you want to work on your endurance first.
Why? Because you wouldn’t build a house first and then try to insert a foundation under it. Likewise, you don’t want to work on building fitness without that underlying base – your endurance.
The autumn and winter is the best time to work on increasing your endurance or, as it’s called in sport, ‘building your base’ but it’s not because of anything to do with the seasonality, like temperature, daylight hours or weather conditions.
It’s more about doing this work at the opposite end of the year to the time you’re most likely to want to put all your training into practice – the summer – either by taking on Sport Walking challenges or by having long fulfilling days on the trail. So that means doing all your endurance work – building your base – through the autumn and winter.
For those solely focused on Sport Walking for fitness, or where there isn’t a challenge motivation and a seasonal imperative, there’s a more emotive reason. The spring and summer are seasons when we naturally want to be out enjoying the good weather and making the best of the longer days. It’s a time for enjoying your trail time and it’s a time when we want to be sharp, fast and capable. So, again, we need to work on the support structure for that fitness capability during autumn and winter.
So that’s one reason – we build our base during the autumn and winter because that means we’ll have that endurance ready to apply in spring and summer. But there’s another reason why this seasonal priority works.
Autumn and winter, while they can both be stunning on good days, can also be really quite challenging if the weather’s not that great and if you’re having to contend with difficult conditions, you really don’t want to also be having specific structured work that you need to do at a certain intensity in order to make progress. That’s far easier to achieve when the days are long and the conditions are, generally, better.
Focusing on building endurance during autumn and winter fits really well with a relatively freestyle approach to training or walking workouts. You don’t have to focus on anything too technical, you can just go out and walk reasonably strongly, knowing that as long as you cover a certain distance, you’ll be contributing to the development of your endurance. K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid)!
It’s not a one time action
You might think that because your endurance is your foundation you only need to develop it once. Nice try!
Yes your endurance supports everything but it’s fluid. You can lose it just as you gain it, although it takes longer for your endurance to fade away during a period of inactivity than your fitness. It’s why we keep going back to focusing on building our base at certain times because we need to keep working on it and just as continued work can deliver continued improvement, you can make improvements to your baseline endurance even after a summer filled with high level activity.
You see the base you build during the autumn and winter carries you through spring and summer and if you focus more on speed during the summer, your endurance will still remain fairly constant. So you can work on your base one winter, enjoy a great summer of Sport Walking, then return to building your base the next winter and continue to improve from that point.
You’re not having to start from scratch each time, every autumn if you switch to an endurance focus, you’ll be building your base further, growing the capability you already have. So the work is never done but that’s a good thing because it means you’re continually improving, which is great for your sense of self belief.