Endurance Is a Long Game

Alan Couzens Interview Part 1

Why can the same workout feel easier after a few days?

That’s where my conversation with Alan Couzens began.

I wanted to understand what’s actually happening in the body when we get better at endurance sports—what physiological changes are at play in both the short term and over months, years, even decades.

Alan’s a coach with deep experience in endurance training, and in this first part of our interview, he breaks down the difference between quick, short-term gains and the slower, foundational adaptations that really move the needle—like growing a bigger heart or improving muscle efficiency.

We also talk about the trade-offs athletes face between racing now and building for the long term, the massive training volumes top performers take on, and how Alan’s experience as a young swimmer helped shape his coaching philosophy.

This is part one of my interview with Alan. More to come...

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

John: A lot of people will have had this experience of doing a workout and it feels very difficult. And then they come back a couple of days later, and somewhat miraculously, the workout feels easier.

From a physiological perspective, what is happening there? What is enabling somebody to get better when it comes to an endurance activity?

Alan: That's a big question because there's quite a lot of components to getting better at an endurance activity. And some of them are short-term components and some of them are very long-term components. The short-term components, I think, sometimes push an athlete in one direction with their training –

When you do higher intensity work you tend to see quicker improvement, and that can come from a number of different things that happen over the short term. Basic things like neuromuscular things – you run fast, you become better at running fast relatively quickly.

Anaerobic capacity adaptations also happen. You have improved ability to buffer lactate and things like that. Those are fairly short-term adaptations.

And then you have longer-term adaptations like growing a bigger heart so that it can deliver more oxygen to the muscles, which is a really important adaptation to have for an aspiring endurance athlete.

So you've got all of these layers to getting better as an athlete. And it's very tempting when you see the short-term things improve very quickly to think that that's the right thing to be focusing on. But the things that really matter do take a very long time to maximize.

That's the downside of those adaptations and also the good side of those adaptations – there's a lot of room for improvement for most of us!

So if we're patient and we have the willingness to stick with the slower adaptations, we ultimately can see some pretty impressive changes in our physiology.

John: You mentioned these adaptations can take a very long time, especially with ones around the heart and maybe a couple of others as well. Just how long are we looking at? Just how long a game are we playing with endurance sports?

Alan: It's a very long game. It's a very, very long game!

I've tracked these things in developing athletes over years and we are talking about multiple years, even decades, for some of these adaptations.

So things like maximizing the stroke volume of the athlete, you can see improvements in those things over 10 years or more with progressive increases in training volume.

And then you have things within the muscle, like the efficiency with which the muscle is able to produce power given a certain amount of oxygen. And those take longer still. You can have athletes over multiple decades moving through from being a short-distance athlete focusing on maybe 800-meter track events and gradually working their way up to 3K, 5K, all the way up to the marathon. And over that entire lifespan, you'll see improvements in the economy of the athlete.

It’s good news because most of us aren't at our peak. We can continue to improve for many years to come.

John: Which is super encouraging!

So if you look at these adaptations, one question a lot of people have is: which ones are most important? Which ones really count? We've heard about economy, we've heard about the size of the heart, we've heard about some of these metabolic changes.

How do you rank and prioritize them? Which ones really make the difference when it ultimately comes to increased fitness?

Alan: I think that's sort of the million-dollar question because the short-term adaptations are really tempting when you want to race in the next two months or three months or four months. You have this potential where you could throw in X amount of weeks of interval work and really sharpen up what you have.

But when you do that, the trade-off is you're not improving that base that you want to improve over years and decades. So I think that's a really important question for the athlete to answer themselves. How much of this potential base improvement do I want to give up just so that I can race this 10K in 39 minutes instead of 41 minutes?

That's a really important question for the athlete and the coach to answer because we get pressure as well. An athlete has a particular goal, usually for that year or for that season. They're not saying, "I want to be as fast as I can in 20 years." It's one of our jobs as coaches, I think, to try to push them gradually more and more in that direction.

John: That definitely does seem to be one of the themes of your work, which is encouraging people to hold off a little bit on racing—or at least be somewhat cautious—because of exactly that trade-off. It's that sharpening versus base-building trade-off.

Let’s talk more about your story as an athlete.

Growing up, I know you were a very good swimmer, but in your book, you say you came to this realization that maybe some of the very top athletes, the ones who would go on to become future Olympians, were training slightly differently from you, especially during the peak and off-seasons. Tell us a little more about that story.

Alan: So I started swimming fairly late—for swimmers in Australia at least. I was 12 when I started swimming competitively. And I was pretty well suited to it. I'm 6'5 and I've got size 15 feet. So it was the right sport for me and I progressed fairly quickly. I started out in the junior squads and pretty quickly made my way to the senior squad. And I was fortunate that, just through sheer luck, the squads that we had in the little country town that I had moved to were quite competitive. I had a very good coach there.

And we had a lot of national-level swimmers and we were very good for the size. The town was less than 30,000 people. It was a pretty small town. And so I worked my way up and I got thrown in with these kids who had been swimming since they could walk. And that was another level from where I was as I was just starting out. So I spent a lot of my time trying to keep up with these kids. And I was good, but I wasn't at that level. So what that meant was that a lot of my training was probably a zone above where it should have been. And it was quite different, the way that I trained compared to how they were training. My attitude at the time was, "If I want to be as good as them, I've just got to keep up with them." That's not the right attitude at all. The right attitude is: I should have been training where I was, at the fitness level I was at, and continuing to show up and develop organically.

But I didn't do that and, as a result, my training was less consistent than theirs. I was sick a lot, I was injured. And when you have these breaks in your training, the gap only widens, right? Because they're showing up and they're getting fitter and fitter and fitter. So it was kind of this fork in the road where I just got a front-row seat to see how these future Olympians were actually training—and how it was a little bit different from what I was doing.

And the main thing that they were doing was being consistent with their training. Through that, we had swimmers going on to the national team. We had Olympic medalists. We had an Australian record holder coming from my squad.

It was interesting, and frustrating, and I guess educational. It was a big part of what led me in the direction of becoming a coach and trying to help people take the right path.

John: Let's try and drill down into some of the specifics in terms of volume, because I don't feel like a lot of people truly appreciate the volume needed to succeed at a sport like swimming—or at any endurance sport, really.

How much endurance volume does somebody need to be doing on a yearly basis if they want to get to a truly competitive level? And what's the typical buildup in that volume from, say, year one or two when they start training as an early teenager or even younger, to when they're fully maturing into some of their peak performance?

Alan: I think to be at the top of any endurance sport—certainly if we're talking about distance swimming and those sorts of events where they're eight minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes in duration—training volume is a central element. There's no way around that, really.

When I started working at the Australian Institute of Sport, that was one of the first things that blew me away. We had this guy Alexander Popov, who was the world record holder at the time in the 100 freestyle, and he was a sprint swimmer. He was training for events that lasted 21 seconds to 48 seconds at the time.

And when I arrived there, I see Popov training and it's—you know—eight in the morning and okay, he's in for his morning session. Then I go off and I do some things with the coaches, and I come back at midday to have lunch with the coaches and Popov's back there and he's doing another session. And then I come back in the afternoon and he's doing another session.

So here's a guy whose event lasted less than a minute, and he's training 100K a week, some of these weeks—which is just a phenomenal amount of volume in the pool. That was a big wake-up call on just what that next level of training volume is about.

And certainly, as I got more into triathlon and started dealing with Ironman triathletes, that lesson was pushed home even more.

So I would say: 1,000 hours—that's what I have in my head for a serious endurance athlete.

For the most part, I haven't seen too many top endurance athletes who are really at the top of their game training much less than 1,000 hours a year.

I’m currently recording the first season of my podcast, and I’ll be posting transcripts here as I go—starting with this conversation with Alan.

The full podcast episodes will be released in a couple of months, but if you’d like to watch the full video of this episode ahead of time, you can watch it now on YouTube.

More to come soon. Stay tuned.