“The Big Book of Endurance Training and Racing” by Dr. Philip Maffetone
This book is exactly what it says on the cover: It’s a big book (507 pages) on everything imaginable about endurance training and racing.
It is written by Dr. Philip Maffetone, the inventor of the famous “Maffetone method”, an approach on running that focused on low-intensity heart rate training to build a strong aerobic engine base (instead of high-intensity training). It is most popular with distance runners and endurance athletes, where the full method also integrates exercise, nutrition, and stress management to optimize our potential.
The book is exactly about these things. It is organized into 3 sections: Building endurance, diet and nutrition, self care and injury prevention; with the TL;DR version can be summarized into this short sentence: train with a heart rate monitor and stay at aerobic level. Don’t eat sugar, eat more salad.
The more elaborated core ideas are as follows:
- Aerobic first: Most training should be done at low heart rates. This is where the body burns mostly fat and builds aerobic capacity, efficiency, and resilience.
- The 180 formula. Our maximum aerobic heart rate (MAF) is 180 minus our age, with further adjustments (subtract if you’re recovering from injury or illness or on a regular medication. Subtract 5 if you’re returning to training after injury or illness. Add 5 if you’ve trained consistently or 2 years or more without problems).
- MAF test: Periodically run (or ride) a set distance at our MAF heart rate and track our pace or power. Aerobic progress will be seen when we can improve our speed at the same heart rate (conversely, a stagnation or even decline signals stress, poor diet, or overtraining).
- Base-building. Spend 3-6 months of exclusively aerobic work like this before adding anaerobic training.
- Avoid overtraining. Overtraining raises stress hormone (cortisol) and can lead to injury or plateau. Maffetone believes that overtraining is a whole-body stress issue and not just a training-load problem.
- Nutrition. Maffetone favors real, unprocessed foods, lower refined carb intake, and training the body to use fat efficiently.
- Whole-person approach. Outside factors such as sleep, stress, footwear, body posture, and biomechanics matters as much as the workouts.
- Self-assessment: Throughout all of this, pay attention to our heart rate, energy, and recovery rather than following a rigid schedule.
The book is not without its controversies, however, such as the choice of 180 instead of 220 as the base of calculation for aerobic base, or Maffetone’s argument against running hard, and his encouragement for using barefoot running shoes, among several others. But it could be seen as part of the greater debate between the multiple fascinating theories around the simple sports of running.
All in all, it is an ok book if you’re only starting to read up about running, although it can really use a bit more brevity and ditch the constant self-promotion. But from further research, it seems that people who implement the Maff methods eventually got sick of it and find a more practical approach from Matt Fitzgerald’s book 80/20 Running (which, coincidentally, is my favourite book on running).
