SERIOUS TRAINING 28

Time Crunched—Train Harder? (Part 1 of 2)

A friend recently told me that he’s been unable to train much lately. Life got in the way. His solution for the rapidly approaching summer race season was to do lots of high-intensity workouts each week.

“Do you think that would get me ready?” he asked.

This is a common problem for time-crunched athletes. There are periods when we simply can’t fit workouts in around the demands of family, career, and life in general. I understand. I’ve been there.

And it certainly seems to make sense to increase the number of high-intensity sessions to speed up the process. After all, races challenge our upper limits. They’re hard efforts. It seems logical that the best way to get race-ready is by training hard most of the time so that, when race day arrives, the body is ready for the challenge.

His conclusion was simple and straightforward:

“I’ll just do hard sessions and get fit fast.”

But on closer examination, that strategy raises several problems. What are they? And how can a time-crunched athlete solve this problem?