New York Double Enduro: Brooklyn Half Marathon & Gran Fondo New York (5/18 – 5/19/2024)

 

Double Medal Monday - 
Enjoying a Stone IPA on the train with medals form Brooklyn and Ft Lee

Brooklyn Half Marathon
Date: May 18, 2024
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Distance: 13.1 Miles
Goal Time: 2:00:00
Actual Time:  1:58:04

Gran Fondo New York
Date: May 19, 2024
Location: New York and New Jersey
Distance: 85 Miles
Goal Time: 6:30:00
Actual Time:  6:45:52

I looked up at the last stretch.  85 miles in and there was one last climb.  A sign at the bottom said: “100 M to finish.”  While it was probably only about 5-7% up the final climb, with 98 miles in my legs over the previous two days, it felt like 20%.  Two things came to mind.  First, I will never complain about a pro unable to sprint away with this much left on a mountain stage again.  But second, I had completed an endurance challenge that I could be proud of: Brooklyn Half on Saturday: Gran Fondo New York on Sunday.  (And thirdly, why is this hill here at the end?) 

On the second one, it was a victory of perspective and perseverance rather than preparation and pedagogy.  While there was surely a path to properly train for both events, I both did not and did not want to.  I have found a current path to half ass train for both to be the best plan for me now. This path walks away from both the specificity of running or triathlon training, or the multi-stimulus conjugate system of Westside and even the challenges of Crossfit.  It is something different and something I want to explore. 

In the 1980s Joseph Campbell – author of The Hero with A Thousand Faces and creator of the monomyth hypothesis – sat down with Bill Moyers for a series of interviews called The Power of Myth.  During the interviews he refers to himself as a popularizer and a generalist.  He isn’t the traditional folklorist with roots in literary criticism or a psychologist coming from longitudinal research.  Instead, Campbell was trying to connect the strands of human experience through a general understanding of multiple disciplines at once.

My training leading to this has failed because I was trying to get too deep into training of too many things.  I kept looking at this as my path back to whomever I was as an athlete before Covid and before my little minor injuries that kept me from running well at Chicago, New York and Malta.  This has been show by the number of blog posts since 2022 – zero. 

I should have looked at my training as what it was – generalist.

Going forward – for the unforeseeable future – I will be adhering to a generalist endurance training.  While not specializing in one sport or training modality, I will attempt to fit what I need.  Why does that look like long term?  I don’t know.  Is that a plan that can build to another thing in the future? I don’t know.

Generalist training is going to be general and non-specific long term.  There will be no macrocycles; no mesocycles.  Maybe a few microcycles?  I don’t know. 

I know many people in the fitness world will reject this. Many old school strength coaches see RPE training as a copout.  Many specific endurance athletes see easy runs or easy bikes as an excuse to not try hard.  And I'm sure some people I know will just laugh at me and under my breath tell me it's just an excuse to train lazy.  

My next two events are: Boston Dragon Boat Festival and B2VT over the next 3 weeks.  So my generalist training will be specific to dragon boat and cycling for the next 3 weeks.  I guess that’s a microcycle. Overall effort will be the goals for the next while. Welcome to the Generalist Endurance Athlete.