Beyond the Numbers: The 3 Durability Benchmarks That Build Real Performance
We have more sensors than sense. Look at the gear available to the modern triathlete: power meters, continuous glucose monitors, aerodynamic sensors, and heart rate variability trackers. The data file from a single Sunday ride is thicker than a master’s thesis.
Yet, despite this flood of information, athletes are becoming more fragile. I see it constantly. An athlete uploads a workout showing a new 20-minute peak power and they are ecstatic. The software—designed to market anxiety rather than performance—tells them their fitness has improved. But put that same athlete in a race, or a long brick session, and the reality is different. They crumble.
We are optimising for spreadsheet metrics, not Durability.
The problem lies in how the industry defines "fitness." In the traditional model, fitness is defined by your ceiling. It looks at your Functional Threshold Power (FTP) or your VO2 Max. These are vanity metrics. They represent what you can do when you are fresh, well-fed, caffeinated, and motivated.
That number is a lie.
In long-course racing, your fresh numbers are irrelevant. The race does not happen in the first hour; it happens in the fourth hour of the bike and the second half of the run. I see athletes who can hold 370 watts for 20 minutes after a warm-up, but ask them to hold 260 watts after riding 100 kilometres, and they cannot. Their heart rate drifts upward (cardiac decoupling), their power fades, and their form collapses.
You have built a high peak, but you have no foundation to support it. You are training the engine to rev high, but you haven't built the resilience to keep it running.
The Philosophy: Raising the Floor, Not the Ceiling
At Sense Endurance Coaching, I view physiology through a lens of pragmatism. I am not interested in laboratory values unless they translate to speed on the road. Why lab testing is a waste of money for the majority of age-groupers is a hill I am willing to die on. Raising your VO2 Max by 2% is scientifically interesting, but practically useless if you cannot access that fitness when you are tired.
Durability is the metric that wins races. It is not about how fast you can go; it is about how little you slow down. The goal is to compress the gap between your "fresh" performance and your "fatigued" performance.
Consider two athletes:
Athlete A (The Fragile Hero): Fresh threshold is 300 watts. Fatigued threshold is 220 watts. This is an 80-watt vulnerability gap.
Athlete B (The Diesel): Fresh threshold is 280 watts. Fatigued threshold is 260 watts.
Athlete A will win the Zwift race. Athlete B will win the Ironman. Most athletes try to fix their vulnerability by raising the 300 to 310. That is the wrong approach. You need to raise the 220 to 260.
The Solution: Benchmarks, Not Tests
How do we measure this? We stop "testing." I generally don’t use the word "test" with my athletes because a test implies anxiety and a taper. You rest for two days, you psych yourself up, and you bury yourself for 20 minutes in a false environment. This gives us a number inflated by freshness and adrenaline.
You cannot taper for every training session, and you certainly won't feel fresh at the 90km mark of a bike leg. Instead, we use Benchmarks. Benchmarks are standard sessions. They are routine. You do them on a Tuesday morning before work, with no fanfare and no taper. We repeat them over and over again.
We are not looking for a higher max number; we are looking for efficiency. Can you hit the same power with a lower heart rate? Can you execute the session with better perceived exertion? This shifts the focus from chasing vanity metrics to building true physiology.
Benchmark 1: The Swim
The first benchmark addresses the discipline most triathletes misunderstand. You are not a swimmer. You are a triathlete who swims. There is a fundamental difference in the mechanics required to survive a rough ocean start versus a pristine pool lane.
The Protocol: The Continuous 100s
This session is simple to write, difficult to execute.
Standard: 20 x 100m
Ironman Prep: 40 x 100m
Rest: 5 to 10 seconds. No more.
Intensity: Moderate to Medium.
Equipment: Pull Buoy and Paddles (PB&P). Mandatory.
You will use the equipment for the entire duration. Do not view the pull buoy as a crutch. On race day, the wetsuit lifts your hips. Your legs will not be driving you forward; in a long-course race, the legs are for balance and stability, not propulsion. If you are kicking hard for 3.8 kilometres, you are ruining your bike leg before you even touch the aerobars.
The pull buoy replicates this wetsuit buoyancy and neutralises the legs, removing the massive oxygen demand of the lower body. We eliminate the cardio spike from heavy kicking to isolate muscular endurance. The paddles increase the surface area of the hand, demanding a clean entry and a solid press and push. If you drop your elbow with paddles on, the resistance disappears. You feel the slip immediately. The equipment enforces honesty.
The "Deep Water" Effect
Pool swimming creates a false sense of efficiency. You push off a wall every 25 or 50 metres. You glide. The water is still. Open water is "heavy." In a lake or ocean, there are no walls. There is chop, current, and the turbulence of 2,000 other bodies.
A delicate, high-turnover stroke often fails here. You need torque. You need the strength to grab a hold of the water and pull your body past your hand. The 20x, or 30x, or even 40x100m session builds this specific type of torque, creating a stroke robust enough to handle rough water. We are not training you to glide; we are training you to haul yourself through a medium that is fighting back. This is critical for maintaining form under fatigue when the water gets rough.
The Mental Grind
This session is boring. Staring at a black line for endless repetitions is monotonous. Athletes often complain they lose count or get distracted. That is precisely the point. Ironman racing is not excitement; it is sustained focus over a long duration. When the mind gets bored, the form slips. You start to daydream, and suddenly your pace drops by two seconds per 100m.
You must train the mind to stay engaged when the stimulus is repetitive. You must treat the 35th interval with the same technical precision as the first. If you cannot handle the boredom of the pool, you will not handle the solitude of a 180k bike ride.
The Assessment
We measure Durability by monitoring the relationship between Pace and Perceived Exertion (RPE). This session assesses your ability to pace yourself without a digital babysitter.
The Fragile Athlete: Starts with ego. Holds 1:30/100m for the first twenty reps feeling like a hero (RPE 7/10). By rep thirty, they are fighting to hold 1:30, but the internal cost has skyrocketed to an RPE of 9/10. In a race, this is the moment you blow up.
The Durable Athlete: Pace stability is within 1-2 seconds between the first and last 10 reps. RPE remains consistent.
You must know what a sustainable effort feels like. If you go out too hard and fade, you failed the pacing test. If you finish with too much left in the tank, you failed the intensity test. Find the line and hold it.
Benchmark 2: The Bike
This benchmark is structurally simple but psychologically demanding. It is designed to recalibrate your internal sensors and break your addiction to the numbers that are holding you back.
The Protocol: The 20/20/20
It requires a 60-minute continuous block of work, ideally on a trainer.
0-20 mins: Moderate
20-40 mins: Medium
40-60 mins: Mad
There is no rest between the blocks. The pressure must be continuous. Before you start, take a piece of electrical tape. Cover your power, heart rate, and speed fields. You can record the data, but you are not allowed to see it.
The "Blind" Logic
When you ride to a number, you are limiting yourself. On a good day, the number holds you back; you might be capable of 280 watts, but because your plan says 260, you coast. On a bad day, the number destroys you. You force 260 when the body can only give 240, digging a recovery hole that takes days to fill.
You must learn to auto-regulate. You must recalibrate your internal sensors. By removing the feedback loop, I force you to listen to the signals your body is screaming at you: leg tension, breathing rate, focus.
Defining the Effort
Without a number to guide you, how do you pace this? When still learning to pace yourself, you can use the "Talk Test". It is crude, but it is accurate.
Moderate (0-20 mins): You can speak in paragraphs. You could explain a complex concept to a riding partner without gasping. This is aerobic maintenance. It feels easy.
Medium (20-40 mins): You can speak in sentences. You can communicate necessary info—"Pot hole on the left"—but you don't want to chat about the weather. The breathing is rhythmic and audible.
Mad (40-60 mins): You can only grunt. Yes. No. Up. Down. This is the edge of your sustainable limit.
The Diagnostics
The real work happens after the shower when you remove the tape and download the file.
The Successful Session: The graph looks like a staircase. Moderate: 200w / Medium: 230w / Mad: 260w. The power rose as the RPE rose. You have a connection between your brain and your legs.
The Fragile Session: The graph looks flat, or worse, declines. In the final 20 minutes, you felt like you were going "Mad." You were grunting. You were hurting. Your RPE was a 9/10. But the power did not follow. You have high fatigue perception and low mechanical output.
Your governor shut you down.
When you can see the numbers, you can fake it. You can surge to hit the average. You can bargain with yourself. When the screen is blank, there is nowhere to hide. You either know your body, or you don't. If you failed the diagnostic, do not change your FTP setting. Repeat the session until you learn what 230 watts actually feels like.
Benchmark 3: The Run
Most age-group athletes spend their training runs practising how to run slowly with bad form. They go out for a "long run." The first part looks acceptable; the hips are high, the cadence is snappy. But as fatigue sets in, the chassis collapses. The hips drop. The ground contact time increases. They enter the "survival shuffle".
They are reinforcing inefficiency. This is why the run off the bike is usually a disaster. You are practising collapse, not resilience.
The Protocol: The Run/Walk
We strip the ego out of the long run.
Standard: 15 x (3 mins Moderate Run / 1 min Walk).
Total Duration: 60 minutes.
Pace: Moderate. This is not 5k race pace; this is your projected 70.3 or Ironman pace.
Advanced: For the full distance athlete, we extend this to a whopping 40 repetitions or more (2 hours 40 minutes).
The Strategic Reset
You will likely resist the walk. You will feel it interrupts your rhythm. You will worry what people on Strava will think. Ignore those impulses.
Walking acts as a structural reset for the musculoskeletal system. In a continuous run, your structural integrity degrades linearly. By minute 90, your core is tired, and your impact absorption fails. You begin to crush your joints.
The 1-minute walk breaks this cycle.
Heart Rate Reset: It allows the cardiovascular system to micro-recover.
Posture Reset: It allows you to consciously realign the spine and hips before starting the next run segment.
Killing the Shuffle
The goal is quality volume. By breaking the run into 3-minute segments, we ensure that every single minute of running is executed with high mechanical integrity. You run for 3 minutes with perfect form. You walk. You run for 3 minutes with perfect form. You walk.
Compare this to a continuous 2-hour run where the final 45 minutes are performed with a collapsing chassis. If you cannot hold your form for the 3-minute segments late in the session, you stop. You have reached your durability limit. Pushing past this point only trains you to run poorly when tired.
Reliability Beats Volatility
I am not impressed by a high VO2 Max test. I am impressed by the athlete who can hold their pace, their power, and their form in the fourth hour of a ride and the second half of a marathon.
The athlete who slows down the least wins the race. It is that simple.
You do not need a miracle performance. You need a chassis that does not crumble under the load. You need Durability. Stop chasing the ceiling. Build the floor.
If you are ready to stop chasng vanity metrics and start building race-day performance, my training plans offer a structured path to durability.
For athletes seeking a more personalised approach to their physiology and season planning, I offer comprehensive coaching services.
