01 Jun Why Some Athletes Finish Strong

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Ed Kornoelje DO
Sports Medicine|University of Michigan Health-West

To be honest with you, I’m always a little nervous around triathletes. I’m in charge of medical coverage for many of the triathlons in the area, so I see a lot of you several times a year.  It’s not that triathletes are not nice—pretty much every triathlete I know is a great person.  I think it’s more an envy of your ability to swim, then bike then run, and do it well.  It’s not like I haven’t done a few duathlons and run more than a few marathons myself but seeing all the wetsuits moving from land to water and knowing after a couple transitions you will all be back is pretty cool!  And to do this well you need to train your body to be durable.  While durability (also known as fatigue resistance, resilience, or physiological resistance) is not a new concept, it may as important VO2max, lactate threshold and running economy when it comes to performing well.

A Runner’s World article from Feb 2026 titled “The Key to Beating Fatigue in Long-Distance Races Is Durability. Here’s Everything You Need to Know” says this: “Basically, building durability means maintaining your energy, mind-body connection and form after hours of running.”  While it is very important to maximize parameters such as VO2max and lactate threshold, when it comes to race day it’s where the rubber meets the road (or neoprene meets the water) that counts.  Literally.  All the training you do to get you ready to race is done—it’s how it all comes together that gets you to the finish line.  As the article notes energy (fuel), the mind and the body all need to work together to keep us looking like the swimmers, cyclists and runners we all want to be!

So how is durability best achieved?  Good news—there are several ways to get it done.  This list is not complete, but here are a few of my favorites:

  1. High-volume zone 2 training.  The article says running instead of training, and if your focus is running, then running is best.  But for triathletes or runners prone to injury with higher volume running programs (or boredom) cycling can also serve this purpose.  There is no direct running/cycling conversion that I am aware of, but the one that I like to use is cut the cycling time in half to get the running equivalent (60 minutes of cycling is like 30 of running).  There are other distance conversion methods—the faster you cycle the closer the time gets—but this one works pretty well for zone 2.
  2. Zone 3 running—the dreaded grey area!  As many of you know I am a big fan of polarized training—keep the fast stuff fast and the slow stuff slow.  In a 5 zone system zone 3 is in the middle (keep the no s*** Sherlock comments to yourself please) and in general we want to stay out of there.  But what happens during a race—we end up in zone 3 (often on our way to zone 4 or 5).  So why not stick some zone 3 efforts into zone 2 workouts—add two 15-minute zone 3 intervals separated by five minutes in zone 2 to your long runs (or rides for that matter—for rides use 25–30-minute intervals).  A faster (zone 4/5) variation of this utilizes more of a bookend concept: warm-up, run a 5K time trial, run 5-10K (or more in zone 2), then finish with another 5K time trial.  Try to run you second 5K as fast as your first one!
  3. Fast finish long runs.  Similar to #2, every 2-3 weeks I tag on 2-8 miles of race pace at the end of my long runs.  I increase the frequency and distance the closer I get to race day.
  4. Downhill running.  We know uphill running is like strength training in disguise—downhill running is strength (fatigue resistance) training as well. The hard downhill portions will allow your leg muscles (particularly quads) to be eccentrically (getting longer not shorter) strengthened.  Several ways to do this:  if you have an uphill/cross/downhill course with similar length segments, you can run hard (not necessarily fast) uphill, easy across, and hard/fast downhill, easy to the start, then repeat for a total of 2-4 reps.  I use the Lyon, Layfayette, Fountian, Division loop in downtown GR for this purpose.  The cross pieces are a little shorter than the ups and downs—more bang for your buck!  Another way: when running some of your long runs in a hillier area, run in zone 2 most of the time, and run hard on every downhill (not uphill).  Make sure you are doing these workouts close to race day (with the appropriate taper).
  5. Bricks!  They can be done in multiple combos, but a medium to hard ride followed by a medium to hard run works well.  Most of you do these already.
  6. Strength train.  Fewer reps (6-8) and higher weight.

A couple of keys—when utilizing any of these methods make sure your form does not breakdown—that’s the point after all.  And practice fueling both pre-workout and in-workout.  We talked about this a little bit last month—we’ll look at this a bit more next month!

Thanks for reading!  UMHWest Sports Medicine is here to help—please reach out if needed.