Why the 7-Day Training Week Fails Endurance Athletes (And What to Do Instead)

I didn’t arrive at this perspective through theory.

I arrived at it tired, curious, humbled—and still stubborn enough to keep going.

In 2022, I completed the Racing The Planet 4 Deserts Grand Slam: four multi-day ultramarathons, across four deserts, in a single calendar year. Each race covered roughly 155 miles, self-supported, across extreme terrain and conditions.

Looking back nearly four years now, that year changed how I think about endurance training—not because I did everything right, but because I didn’t.

At the time, my training looked like most endurance plans look: rigid 7-day weeks, weekly mileage targets, and a quiet belief that toughness would fill in whatever gaps the structure left behind. Sometimes it worked. Often it didn’t. What those races revealed—slowly and unmistakably—is that endurance performance isn’t built by stacking effort. It’s built by creating space for absorption.

Volume Is Not the Point—Time Is

If you want to understand endurance, it helps to look at the extremes.

In the Tour de France, professional cyclists cover more than 2,000 miles over three weeks. I once heard an anecdote about a rider who logged roughly 10,000 miles in the six months leading into the Tour. That detail stuck with me—not because it was impressive (it is), but because of what it implied.

Elite endurance athletes—and their coaches—understand something that recreational athletes are rarely taught:

Singular endurance performances require massive volume, but only when that volume is distributed intelligently across time.

No one prepares for the Tour by “winning the week.” No one prepares for a 100-mile ultra by squeezing hero mileage into a Saturday long run. And no one runs a strong multi-day stage race race because they nailed a few perfect weeks in isolation.

Volume is cumulative, not weekly. Recovery is structural, not optional. Fatigue must be managed across months and years, not just workouts.

The work is never compressed. It’s layered.

What I Got Wrong—And What It Taught Me

Finishing Racing The Planet races didn’t mean I had mastered the training process. It meant I had survived it.

That distinction became clear in the years that followed.

In 2023, I recorded a DNF at the Keys 100. In 2024, another DNF followed at the Heartland 50. These weren’t dramatic implosions. They were quiet reminders that accumulation without absorption eventually collects its debt.

At the same time, something else was happening. In 2024 and again in 2025, I ran marathon personal bests—not because I trained harder, but because I trained with more patience. Less compression. Better spacing. More respect for recovery.

The contrast mattered. Fitness expressed itself where the structure allowed it—and disappeared where it didn’t.

Why the 7-Day Training Week Breaks So Many Athletes

The 7-day training week isn’t physiological. It’s cultural.

It works beautifully for calendars and spreadsheets. It works poorly for:

• Tendons and connective tissue

• Sleep-deprived adults

• Athletes balancing work, family, and aging bodies

Only the fastest and most durable athletes can tolerate truly cap-touching volume inside a rigid weekly framework. For everyone else, the structure quietly encourages stress stacking:

• Hard days cluster because “that’s how the week lines up”

• Recovery becomes reactive instead of planned

• Missed sessions feel like failures instead of signals

This isn’t a discipline problem. It’s a time-scale problem.

The Parable of the Salt Water

When I try to explain durability and volume to athletes, I often use what I call the parable of the salt water.

Imagine your training capacity as a container of water.

Volume is the amount of water in the container. Stress—a workout, a race, a hard block—is a dose of salt.

The larger the container, the less salty any single dose becomes.

For an elite marathoner capable of running 120 miles in a week, a 26-mile marathon represents roughly 20–30% of their normal volume. Salty, yes—but manageable.

For a recreational runner averaging 40–50 miles per week, that same marathon can represent well over half of their weekly volume. The salinity spikes. Recovery slows. Risk rises.

The stress didn’t change. The container did.

Now apply that logic to a 100-mile race completed in 24–30 hours. That’s not just a longer race—it’s an extraordinary dose of stress. If your container is small, the system is overwhelmed. If it’s large, the stress dissolves rather than crystallizes.

This is why, for ultra-distance events, weekly mileage can be misleading. What matters more is consistent monthly and quarterly volume—the slow expansion of the container itself.

Endurance mastery isn’t about tolerating higher salt concentrations. It’s about building a system large enough to absorb them.

Endurance Adaptation Happens on Multiple Clocks

Most endurance athletes are taught to think in one direction:

Three build weeks, one unload week.

That model isn’t wrong—but it’s incomplete.

Adaptation happens simultaneously across multiple horizons:

• Day-to-day: sleep, nutrition, emotional load

• Within cycles: how stress is distributed over 10–14 days

• Across months: cumulative volume and durability

• Across years: resilience, injury history, aging

When we only manage training at the weekly level, we miss both the smaller signals and the bigger trends.

Longer training cycles don’t make training easier. They make it more honest. They allow effort to breathe and recovery to be intentional rather than accidental.

Aging Changes the Equation—But Not the Possibility

Here's a confession - I turn 50 this week! Yikes!

But what I’ve learned—personally and through coaching—is that aging doesn’t mean doing less. It means doing things with greater respect for recovery and timing. More space between hard efforts. More patience with adaptation. More honesty about what stress really costs.

That’s not a concession. It’s a strategy.

Executed well, it allows athletes to stay competitive, curious, and capable for decades—not just seasons.

A Long Horizon Changes Everything

In ultrarunning, my bucket-list race is the Badwater 135. The original plan was to apply for selection in 2026 (for my 50th birthday). But after racing the Tunnel Hill 100 in November 2025 (where I pulled out after setting a PR at 50 miles), I realized something important:

Despite my success I just wasn’t ready—yet.

Readiness isn’t something you force inside a calendar year. It’s something you earn by respecting time. That realization triggered a recent shift toward longer training cycles and a longer view—not away from ambition, but toward sustainability.

Badwater is still my goal race. A meaningful one. But the idea of true mastery, for me, is quieter - it’s running 100 miles in 20 hours—not because it’s flashy, but because it represents efficiency, restraint, durability, and patience. At my age, I’m fully confident this is achievable—but not by rushing. Twenty-four hours comes first. Then twenty-two. Then twenty. What will happen at Tunnel Hill in 2026? I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Accumulation Is Loud. Absorption Is Quiet.

Most training plans celebrate accumulation:

• Miles logged

• Weeks “won”

• Fatigue worn like a badge

Absorption is quieter. Harder to quantify. Easier to ignore.

But absorption is where fitness actually forms.

When athletes stop chasing perfect weeks and start building intelligent cycles, t

raining becomes more repeatable, more humane—and paradoxically, more effective.

Final Thought

If your training only works when life is calm, it isn’t robust.

Endurance doesn’t reward compression. It rewards patience, distribution, and respect for time. The strongest athletes—and the smartest coaches—understand that progress isn’t built by stacking stress faster, but by giving adaptation the space it needs to arrive.

That’s not a programming tweak.

It’s a different way of thinking—and it’s one that can keep you in the game for a very long time.