Trevor Connor and Chris Case break down the concept of durability—the ability to maintain performance deep into a race or training session, even after hours of fatigue.
Video Transcript
Chris Case: There’s a topic that so many people have been talking about for years in. Ways that make it sound like it’s something new. And in some ways, in the science world, durability is new, but it’s something that athletes have been training for without maybe putting a word on it, or at least that word for a really long time.
Can you help us understand durability? What’s this definition of durability?
[00:00:39] Trevor Connor: Yeah, I love that. It’s kind of a new thing in science because it was defined by Dr. Seiler and Dr. Moner in 2018. But we were actually having conversations with them before that saying, you know, there’s this thing that you see in cyclists, there’s this expression.
Um, and, and this is how I always define it, uh, which I got from a bunch of pros, which is. It’s not how hard you can go for five minutes. It’s how hard you can go for five minutes after four hours of racing. And that is the essence of durability. And Dr. Seiler kind of took that from all these athletes and said.
There’s something to this.
[00:01:16] Chris Case: Mm-hmm.
[00:01:16] Trevor Connor: So, of course they put a big science definition around it. What they put in that paper was time of onset and magnitude of deterioration and physiological profiling characteristics. And Yeah. I’m reading that ’cause I don’t think I could memorize that. Right.
[00:01:32] Chris Case: Yeah. But it’s, but it’s like you said, you can, you can go for five minutes when you’re completely fresh.
[00:01:41] Trevor Connor: Right.
[00:01:41] Chris Case: If you did a four hour ride. And then did another five minutes. How much is there going to be a decline there? Right. If there’s not a decline, then you’ve got good durability. If there’s a gigantic decline, then you’ve got bad durability.
[00:01:54] Trevor Connor: Right? And it’s really important to understand how big a change or a revolution this has been in endurance sports science.
Because back in the nineties we had Dr. Joyner define the three pillars. Um, basically three attributes. Mm-hmm. You look at endurance athletes and Dr. Joyner created these formulas, basically saying these three attributes define how good an endurance athletes are. Yes. So it’s VO two max.
[00:02:21] Chris Case: Right?
[00:02:22] Trevor Connor: It’s threshold power and its economy.
[00:02:26] Chris Case: Mm-hmm.
[00:02:27] Trevor Connor: Um, there was an issue though with his formulas was they always overestimated. Yeah. How well an athlete was gonna perform. And that’s because they weren’t accounting for, this might be your VO to max when you’re fresh.
[00:02:42] Chris Case: Right.
[00:02:42] Trevor Connor: This might be your threshold power when you’re fresh.
[00:02:44] Chris Case: Mm-hmm.
[00:02:45] Trevor Connor: But if you go really hard for a while, those are actually gonna decline.
[00:02:50] Chris Case: Yeah.
[00:02:51] Trevor Connor: There was only ever one athlete that joiner got spot on. It was a marathon runner, and what they showed was he saw no decline. Yeah. Over the course of a marathon. So he was somebody that just had amazing durability. So think of durability as either a fourth pillar or I like to think of it as the wrapper around the three pillars.
[00:03:11] Chris Case: Mm-hmm. It’s a bit of, a bit, a bit of a missing link in that. Right? If you were to take those three pillars to estimate somebody’s finishing time or to try to understand their potential as an athlete, it doesn’t account for the the rate at which they fatigue, but. This durability pillar does. And so that’s the missing link or the wrapper that in incorporates all of those three.
And also accounts for fatigue.
[00:03:40] Trevor Connor: Right. So yeah, it is the thing that shows when VO two max, when threshold, when economies start to fall apart.
[00:03:49] Chris Case: Mm-hmm.
[00:03:50] Trevor Connor: And it’s also really important because you see all these endurance athletes that are spending tons and tons of time doing big volume training. And they, when they look at how you improve these three things like VO two max, VO two max high intensity.
[00:04:03] Chris Case: Mm-hmm.
[00:04:03] Trevor Connor: And you max out very early on in your career. Right. Threshold power, again, that’s about going and doing harder. High intensity intervals economy, there’s even a question of whether you can improve that, but certainly it’s not going out and doing long, slow distance. So there’s always this. Why are athletes going out and doing long, slow distance?
Because it doesn’t really affect the three pillars.
[00:04:28] Chris Case: Yeah.
[00:04:28] Trevor Connor: This is what it affects. Mm-hmm. It impacts that durability. It allows you to sustain these things much, much longer. And I’ve seen this, I remember going on a group ride where we had a Tour de France Pro show up, and this was just a group ride with a bunch of masters athletes.
And we just did this loop with a one minute hill in it.
[00:04:48] Chris Case: Mm-hmm.
[00:04:48] Trevor Connor: And just four loops. So it wasn’t very long. It was like a 25 minute race. And the Tour de France athlete was not dropping anybody on the one minute climb. And they’re all like, oh, he’s holding back. I’m like, no, he’s not you guys for a couple rounds up this hill can be just as strong as him.
[00:05:04] Chris Case: Yeah.
[00:05:05] Trevor Connor: But if we did 20 laps, he’s gonna be hitting that one minute hill just as hard as he did on the first time. Well, we’re gonna be. Struggling up it,
[00:05:15] Chris Case: it’s,
[00:05:15] Trevor Connor: and that’s when he is gonna kill us.
[00:05:17] Chris Case: It’s kind of why you can see Strava kms held by non pros, right? Because they can go out, I mean, there’s a lot of factors here, but they could go out and they can match a pro right when they’re fresh.
They might not be able to do that at the end of a race. Whereas a pro, they’re, they might be very close to that same exact time in a race. After a huge fatiguing effort,
[00:05:43] Trevor Connor: and this is why world tour team managers, when they see a amateur, take one of those extra homes, they go, that’s nice. We’ll keep an eye on you, but can you do that two weeks into a stage race, five hours into a really hard stage?
[00:05:58] Chris Case: Exactly.
[00:05:59] Trevor Connor: That’s the key question.
[00:06:00] Chris Case: Yeah. I think that it’s interesting. When we were preparing for this, you said. So question you actually get asked the most once this conversation around durability comes up is, how the heck do you measure this?
[00:06:16] Trevor Connor: They’re still trying to figure out how to measure it. And there was a recent paper that was published where they have three ways of measuring it.
I’ll tell you, if you ask any pro, they’re gonna go, yeah, that’s easy to measure five hours into a race who’s still there?
[00:06:28] Chris Case: Mm-hmm. Sure.
[00:06:29] Trevor Connor: That’s, that’s durability. Uh, but apart from that, they’re, they’re looking at different methods. One of them is. Have somebody do a five minute all out effort.
[00:06:39] Chris Case: Mm-hmm.
[00:06:40] Trevor Connor: Then have them go do a fatiguing ride for four hours.
[00:06:43] Chris Case: Right.
[00:06:43] Trevor Connor: And then do another five minute effort. And is, you know, how close are those two, five minute efforts? That’s one way to measure durability.
[00:06:50] Chris Case: Mm-hmm.
[00:06:50] Trevor Connor: It’s not a very fun way to do it.
[00:06:52] Chris Case: Mm-hmm.
[00:06:52] Trevor Connor: The way that I like, which they seem to be gravitating towards is cardiac drift.
[00:06:57] Chris Case: Mm-hmm.
[00:06:58] Trevor Connor: So that’s gonna be harder for other athletes like swimmers to measure.
[00:07:03] Chris Case: Yeah.
[00:07:03] Trevor Connor: But for cyclists, even runners who use pace. Um, it is easier to measure that cardiac drift. What you need to use is both a heart rate monitor and a power monitor, and the idea is when you are fresh, you’re gonna see your heart rate be very consistent at a given wattage. So if you went out and did a ride at 200 watts, heart rate’s gonna stay very steady as well.
When you hit that point where your durability starts to fade, you’re gonna see that heart rate go up. ’cause heart rate is measuring. How much effort is your body putting out? How hard is this on your body? Power is just a measure of what sort of kilojoules you’re putting into the bike.
[00:07:44] Chris Case: Mm-hmm.
[00:07:44] Trevor Connor: It doesn’t factor in fatigue at all.
[00:07:47] Chris Case: Yeah.
[00:07:47] Trevor Connor: So if you stay at that 200 watts, eventually you’re gonna start to see heart rate kick up. That’s called cardiac drift or decoupling. Yeah. Right. And that’s an indicator of your durability. So if you take somebody who’s. More amateur rider, you’re gonna start to see that decoupling an hour and a half, two hours into a ride.
You take a world tour pro, they can go out and ride at 250, 300 watts
[00:08:10] Chris Case: mm-hmm.
[00:08:10] Trevor Connor: For six hours and you’ll see almost no decoupling.
[00:08:13] Chris Case: Yeah. ‘
[00:08:13] Trevor Connor: cause they have amazing durability.
[00:08:16] Chris Case: The science on this, they’re, they’re, you know, it. Again, the science is sort of coming to this now. Mm-hmm. It’s something that athletes have been sort of innately doing and gaining just through the, the traditional methods of training.
Right. So with all of this new science, there must be new ways of people saying this is what you need to do in order to gain greater durability. Right.
[00:08:46] Trevor Connor: Durability is this huge, exciting thing that’s revolutionizing the science and everybody’s kind of getting excited about this.
But then when you get into how to improve it, it is the most boring thing in the world. This is why top endurance athletes do lots of slow volume. There is no way around it. There is no short interval,
[00:09:08] Chris Case: no shortcuts.
[00:09:09] Trevor Connor: That’s going to give you a lot of durability. It takes years and it just takes lots and lots of time.
I mean, the, the closest thing to a trick is to go out and do a long ride or a long run. And do efforts at the end, train the body to deal with, Hey, I’m fatigued now, I gotta go really hard. What’s going on? Mm-hmm.
[00:09:34] Chris Case: But that’s about it. Hmm.
[00:09:35] Trevor Connor: You gotta do the time.
[00:09:36] Chris Case: Yep. No shortcuts, like a lot of things.
[00:09:39] Trevor Connor: Yep.
[00:09:41] Chris Case: If you’ve liked what you’ve seen here, give us a like, subscribe to our channel.
Thanks for watching.
