SERIOUS TRAINING 13

Mark Allen’s Low-Intensity Training

The last few weeks I’ve been writing about the physiological benefits of low-intensity training (LIT), especially as it relates to aging. This week, I’d like to take a short detour and show you how LIT in zones 1 and 2 benefited a real athlete. We’ll stroll down memory lane and, hopefully, learn a useful lesson from history along the way.

I’ve always enjoyed history. As an undergraduate in the early 1960s, I double-majored in physical education and history. I even taught U.S. history at the high school level for nine years in what now seems like another lifetime. That was in the 1970s—after a brief interruption when Uncle Sam wanted me to fight a war in Vietnam.

Whenever I combine physical fitness and history (not teaching and war), I’m having a good time. Studying how the icons of endurance sport trained has always fascinated me. From time to time, I’ll write about some of them here.

This week I want to tell you about how Mark Allen, a remarkable triathlete, trained more than 35 years ago—and what we can still learn from it.

We often think of Allen as perhaps the greatest Ironman-distance triathlete in the sport’s relatively short history. One could even argue that he was the greatest male triathlete of all time at any distance, given his 21 consecutive victories in the late 1980s and early 1990s—including the first Olympic-distance World Championship in 1989.

But before 1989, he couldn’t win the biggest race of all: Ironman Hawaii. Six times he either failed to finish or came up short against athletes like Dave Scott, Scott Molina, and Scott Tinley.

Then something changed.

His training paid off. He went on to win six times in six starts in Kona.

What brought about that transformation?

Mark Allen on the way to his first Ironman Hawaii

win in 1989.