Junk Reps and Junk Miles

In deference to spring, I have been taking a half litre of water with me on my long runs these days. That probably does not seem much; and the over-prepared crowd who think you need the ten essentials every time you set foot in the woods would be horrified that I run up to 20 kilometres with half a litre of water, no food, and not having eaten since the night before. But, it works, and at least I know I have metabolic flexibility and am not a carbo crashing junkie.

Today my run did not go quite as planned but was, nevertheless, successful. What I often do is pick a spot on the map with some fire trails and just start running. Often times, I find some hidden single track, or a pretty creek, maybe some interesting boulders. It does not matter much to me if I am out alone in the woods.

But, this morning I kept running into signs that said "Danger, Shooting." That is actually pretty unequivocal, so every time I encountered one of these signs I turned back. Mostly, I found myself going up and down steep, loose, deeply eroded tracks under a power-line in the broiling sun. Not exactly what I was planning.

"This is good," I thought. For functional single leg strength training I am not sure there is much to beat going up steep hills, unless it is going up steep hills with a heavy pack on. The sun was good too. Summer is coming on, so training in the sun is good, because it is time to adapt to hotter weather.

So, I was thinking that some of the time, when training, doing more stuff that is harder is good, but not all the time. There are "junk reps," just as there are "junk miles." Coaches and athletes alike all too often focus on getting tired and sweaty and calling that a good workout than having a planned approach that improves performance. If you want to see a coach whose workouts are great for getting tired and sweaty but are really poor for skill or even strength development, go here.

Climbers, however, are a bit different to the average weekend athlete or endurance junkie. Climbing is not purely an endurance sport, nor solely a strength or power sport. It demands strength, flexibility, power, endurance, muscular endurance, and massive amounts of skill.

Training for climbing has really only been a big thing in the last decade or two and there are very few empirical studies comparing different training regimens. Therefore, climbers, being generally creative people, have taken techniques and principles from multiple different sports and tested them out as training for climbing. If they work, the ideas stick around, if not, they are rapidly binned.

Climbers are performance oriented: no-one, but no-one wants to climb a grade or two worse than they did the year before, and none of us needed a study to convince us that continuing to practice a skill sport when fatigue has caused a massive degradation in movement simply engrams poor movement skills.¹

So when should an athlete quit? I would say whenever movement has debased to the point where form is compromised. Unless, of course, the athlete has no interest in performance and simply wants to get tired, sweaty and crush it on Strava.

1Apparently such studies exist. Go here to listen to Steve Bechtel discuss this concept.