Anyone can go hard for a while. The real test is how well you keep moving when the kilometres stack up, the load gets heavy and fatigue starts making decisions for you.
There’s a difference between being fit and being physically capable.
You might run a quick 5K, lift impressive weights or smash yourself in a 30-minute conditioning session. All good things. But what happens when the work doesn’t stop after 30 minutes?
What happens when you’re three hours into a hike, carrying a pack up another hill, or trying to maintain your work rate late in a football match?
That’s where things get interesting.
Building an engine that works all day isn’t about becoming the person who can suffer the most during a workout. It’s about developing the physical capacity to sustain work, recover between efforts and keep performing when conditions aren’t ideal.
The good news is that you can train for it.
The other news? There’s no magic workout that will get you there. You need a plan, consistency and a way to determine whether what you’re doing is actually working.
Here’s how I’d approach it.
But first, who am I to give you advice?
I’m Jake. I’m no Olympic gold medallist or personal trainer. I’ve climbed, hiked, dog sledded and worked in environments where endurance mattered for hours, days and sometimes weeks.
Most of what I’ve learnt comes from experience, trial and error. We started writing these articles because our customers often aren’t sure where to start or what advice to trust.
We’re here to share practical experience, explore the research and cut through the fitness industry nonsense.
Take what helps. Question what doesn’t. It’s here if you need it.
Back to it.
If you want to work for hours rather than minutes, developing your aerobic fitness is a sensible place to start.
Your aerobic system helps supply the energy required for sustained exercise. It also contributes to recovery between harder efforts. Whether you’re running, hiking, playing football or carrying equipment, a better-developed aerobic system can help you sustain work at a given intensity.
But what does that actually mean when you lace up your shoes?
Before choosing a workout, decide what you want to improve.
Want to run a faster 5K? Build your capacity to hike for eight hours? Improve your ability to recover between repeated efforts on the football field?
These goals overlap, but they’re not identical.
A runner might need to improve their threshold pace. Someone preparing for a long hike may benefit more from building time on their feet and gradually increasing the demands of longer outings. A footballer needs an aerobic foundation alongside speed, power and repeated-effort conditioning.
The objective determines the training.
For general endurance development, start by accumulating regular aerobic exercise at an intensity you can sustain comfortably.
For a runner, that might mean two or three aerobic sessions a week, adjusted to suit their current fitness and training history.
Keep most of this work controlled. You should generally be able to speak in sentences, although breathing will become more noticeable as the effort increases.
Heart-rate zones can help, but understand what they represent.
On a common five-zone system, Zone 2 is typically a comfortable aerobic intensity, while Zone 3 is more moderate or steady. Zone definitions vary between devices and training systems, so don’t assume that everyone using the same zone number is doing the same workout.
If your goal is base building, don’t turn every run into a hard session simply because you feel good.
This is where training becomes more interesting.
You don’t need to guess whether you’re improving. You can collect information and look for trends over weeks and months.
VO₂ max estimate for example
VO₂ max describes the maximum rate at which your body can use oxygen during intense exercise. It’s an important indicator of cardiorespiratory fitness.
Compatible Garmin watches estimate VO₂ max from recorded running or cycling performance and physiological data. It’s an estimate, not a laboratory measurement, but it can be useful when you look at the trend rather than obsess over a single number.
For example, suppose your running VO₂ max estimate increases from 45 to 48 over several months while you’ve been training consistently. That’s encouraging evidence that your estimated aerobic fitness has improved.
But don’t treat it as proof on its own. Changes in body weight, environmental conditions, heart-rate accuracy and the watch’s estimation method can affect the result.
Age matters, too. Research commonly describes an age-related decline in VO₂ max of roughly 7–10% per decade, although the rate varies considerably with age, training status and the population being studied. It’s a broad population-level estimate, not a timetable your own fitness must follow.
The point is one way to measure your aerobic improvement over time is via this tool.
This makes long-term tracking particularly interesting.
Pace versus heart rate
This is one of the most practical measurements for a runner.
Choose a familiar route and compare runs completed under reasonably similar conditions.
Suppose you previously ran at 6:00 min/km with an average heart rate of 150 beats per minute on your favourite loop. A few months later, you’re running at 5:45 min/km with a similar average heart rate on the same loop (assuming it’s still your favourite).
That suggests your running efficiency and/or aerobic fitness may have improved.
Alternatively, you might maintain the same pace but see a lower average heart rate.
Again, that’s encouraging — provided the conditions are comparable.
Heat, wind, hills, fatigue and hydration all affect heart rate and pace. Don’t compare a cool morning run with a hot afternoon run and draw firm conclusions from the numbers. The conditions need to be comparable. A little like the weigh ins. You don’t weigh in one week in the morning and then another week after dinner 🤔
Garmin Training Status and Training Load
Compatible Garmin devices combine information such as estimated VO₂ max, recent training load and, on supported devices, heart-rate variability (HRV) to help interpret how your training is progressing.
These features can help answer useful questions:
HRV is particularly useful when interpreted against your own baseline. A change in HRV doesn’t automatically mean you’re overtrained, and a watch cannot diagnose illness or determine your readiness with certainty.
Don’t like sleeping with your watch (this is how HRV is measured) - no problem. I’ll discuss in a future article another way to measure this.
Use the information alongside sleep, fatigue, motivation and performance.
The point isn’t to obey your watch. It’s a tool to use it to make better decisions.
Garmin tip: Record your activities consistently, including relevant cross-training. Missing sessions can give your device an incomplete picture of your training load.
Garmin’s guide to Training Status explains how these measurements work and which features are available on compatible devices.
Let’s say my session today is an aerobic base-building run.
I’ve decided on the goal before I leave home. I want to accumulate useful aerobic work, not test my 5K fitness.
I start running. I’m comfortable, my breathing is controlled and my heart rate is where I expect it to be.
Then someone flies past me.
Immediately, there’s a temptation to speed up. I want to catch them. I want to see whether I can hold their pace. I start negotiating with myself.
Just for a kilometre. See how you feel.
Before long, the aerobic session has become a tempo run I never planned to do.
Sound familiar?
This is where discipline becomes part of training. I need to remind myself why I’m running today. If the session is supposed to build aerobic volume, chasing another runner doesn’t necessarily make it better.
If I’ve deliberately programmed a short, controlled faster section, that’s different. I can include it as part of the plan, provided it suits the training objective and my current workload.
But changing the session because someone overtook me isn’t a training strategy.
It’s ego. Yep I have one every now and again 🤣
The ability to stick to the intended effort, particularly when your competitive instincts want to do something else, helps you accumulate the right work over time.
And that’s the point: aerobic fitness is built through repeated sessions, not by winning an imaginary race against every stranger who passes you.
A big aerobic engine is valuable, but it doesn’t automatically make you strong.
Imagine two people with similar cardiovascular fitness. One is strong, accustomed to carrying equipment and comfortable moving over uneven terrain. The other has spent most of their training running on flat paths.
Put them on a long hike with a loaded pack and the differences may become obvious.
The task demands more than cardiovascular fitness. It also requires muscular strength, endurance, balance and the ability to tolerate repeated loading.
Military load-carriage research supports this broader approach. Reviews of the evidence have found that combining aerobic training, progressive resistance training and task-specific load-carriage practice can improve load-carriage performance more effectively than relying on aerobic or resistance training alone.
The lesson has applications well beyond the military.
If you want to walk or hike all day, you need an engine that can sustain the effort, but you also need legs, hips, back and trunk muscles capable of handling the demands.
If you play football, you need enough strength and power to accelerate, change direction, compete physically and repeat those efforts.
If you want to remain physically capable as you get older, strength and aerobic fitness are both worth maintaining.
What should you actually do?
Start with two strength sessions a week if that fits your current training capacity.
Build around movements that address your needs:
Progress gradually. The objective isn’t to make every gym session a test of your toughness.
If you’re preparing for hiking, introduce hills, longer outings and pack weight progressively. If you’re preparing for football, combine strength work with the running, sprinting and skills your sport demands.
And here’s an important distinction: being strong in the gym is not the same as being conditioned for a specific task. Yep we’ve all heard those words ‘gym strong’.
You still need to practise the task.
Arnold Schwarzenegger has spoken about the importance of being useful — contributing, helping others and putting your abilities to work rather than focusing entirely on yourself.
It’s a useful idea to apply to physical training.
Fitness is often treated as a collection of personal achievements. Faster times, bigger lifts, more followers and another medal.
There’s nothing wrong with any of those things. Goals help give training direction.
But physical capability has a wider application.
Can you carry your own equipment over a long distance? Help a mate move house without being completely useless afterwards? Keep up with your kids on a long walk? Assist someone who has run out of energy on a hike? Maintain your composure when you’re tired and things aren’t going to plan?
These aren’t laboratory measures of fitness. They’re practical examples of what a capable body allows you to do.
Military training provides a useful illustration because it often combines several demands: moving over distance, carrying loads, working as a team and performing tasks under pressure. Research into military occupational performance shows that these tasks require a combination of aerobic fitness, muscular strength and endurance, and task-specific preparation.
You don’t need to join the military to benefit from the principle.
You can build a broad physical foundation, then practise the activities that matter to you.
If you hike, hike. If you surf, develop the relevant paddling fitness and strength. If you play football, prepare for the demands of football. If your goal is general physical capability, combine aerobic training, strength work and activities that challenge you in different ways.
The aim isn’t to become mediocre at everything. It’s to build the capacity you need for your life and the activities you care about.
And if you can use that capacity to help someone else, all the better. David Goggins says it the best:
Pacing sounds simple: start at an appropriate intensity and manage your effort.
In practice, it’s difficult because we’re not particularly good at resisting the temptation to prove ourselves.
We start too fast because we feel good. We push harder because someone passes us. We turn an easy run into a race because the watch shows a pace slower than we’d like.
Then we wonder why we’re exhausted before the work is finished.
Pacing is a physical skill, but it’s also a lesson in discipline.
The decision to hold back today can be more valuable than the decision to push harder. Not because hard training is bad, but because the correct intensity depends on the objective.
If you’re building an aerobic base, your job is to build aerobic capacity. If you’re doing intervals, your job is to complete the intended efforts with appropriate recovery. If you’re preparing for a long hike, your job is to manage your energy across the entire outing.
The temptation to go harder doesn’t disappear simply because you understand the theory. You have to practise resisting it.
And this is where discipline compounds.
One controlled run doesn’t transform your fitness. One strength session doesn’t make you strong. One sensible decision doesn’t guarantee success.
But repeat those decisions consistently over months and years, and they begin to add up.
You accumulate training volume. You recover well enough to train again. You reduce the number of sessions wasted on unnecessary intensity. You become better at recognising when to push and when to hold back.
Eventually, the results become visible.
The challenge is that the reward often comes later than we’d like.
The run that feels too easy today may be part of the reason you run faster six months from now. The sensible decision to stop a session before it becomes counterproductive may help you train well again tomorrow.
Discipline isn’t always about doing more. Sometimes it’s about doing exactly what you said you would do, even when your ego wants something else.
There’s a danger in taking the message about pacing too far.
You don’t want every session to be comfortable. You don’t want to avoid difficult training because you’re afraid of fatigue. And you certainly don’t improve indefinitely by staying inside your comfort zone.
Confidence comes partly from doing difficult things and discovering that you can handle them.
A challenging hill session, a demanding strength workout or a ruck can give you evidence that you’re more capable than you thought.
But there’s a difference between deliberately challenging yourself and making every workout unnecessarily difficult.
The useful question is: what is this difficult session teaching or developing?
If you’re training for a faster 5K, appropriately programmed intervals can help improve the physiological qualities required for that performance.
If you’re preparing for a ruck adhering to an Army Rangers standard, a progressively longer outing can help you develop endurance and become familiar with the physical demands.
If you’re preparing for a team sport, practising relevant skills under fatigue may help you maintain execution when tired.
Each session has a purpose.
The discomfort should serve that purpose rather than become the purpose itself.
What does the research say about mental resilience?
Sports psychology research suggests that mental toughness can be developed, although the evidence is not as straightforward as some motivational slogans imply.
A 2020 systematic review and meta-analysis examined interventions designed to develop mental toughness in sport. The results were promising, but the researchers also highlighted methodological limitations and a high risk of bias in many of the included studies.
The science, or lack thereof, may suggest we should be cautious about claiming that any particular brutal workout will make you mentally tougher. But my real world experience is generally hard things make you tougher.
A practical approach is to combine progressive physical challenges with deliberate practice in managing attention, emotions, pacing and decisions.
For example, you might:
These experiences can help you build familiarity with difficult situations and learn how to respond to them. The result = a tougher athlete.
Confidence is not simply telling yourself you’re tough. It’s having evidence that you’ve prepared, that you’ve completed challenging work before, and that you know what to do when things become uncomfortable.
You can have an excellent aerobic base, strong legs and sensible pacing, then undermine the whole operation by failing to eat and drink enough. Yep it happens and I’ve seen it plenty of times. The obvious are not so obvious when you’re tired, hungry, cold and just had a gut full.
For prolonged exercise, fuelling matters.
Carbohydrate plays an important role in sustaining many endurance activities, particularly as intensity and duration increase. Forget this protein craze. When you’re working for long periods your stored carbohydrate is limited, and inadequate fuelling can contribute to declining performance.
For longer or more demanding sessions, practising an appropriate carbohydrate intake strategy can help you maintain performance.
And appropriate is not popping gels every 5km during your marathon!
Your needs depend on duration, intensity, individual tolerance and the activity you’re doing.
Hydration requires similar consideration. Sweat losses vary considerably with the person and conditions, and both inadequate fluid intake and excessive drinking can cause problems.
You don’t need to turn every walk into a nutrition experiment. A short, easy session may require little more than your normal meals and access to water.
But if you’re heading out for several hours, carrying a pack or completing a demanding endurance session, plan ahead.
Ask yourself:
Don’t wait until you’re depleted to start thinking about fuelling.
And don’t assume that completing a long session without food makes it more productive. Sometimes it just makes the session harder to complete well.
Here’s an unglamorous part of endurance that doesn’t get enough attention until something goes wrong.
Your feet.
You might have an excellent aerobic engine, strong legs and a sensible pacing strategy. But if your feet are blistered, your shoes are rubbing or your socks are saturated and uncomfortable, your ability to keep moving can take a serious hit.
Long-duration activities expose your feet to repeated loading and friction over thousands of steps. Small problems that seem irrelevant at the beginning can become major distractions several hours later.
The solution isn’t to assume one particular sock or shoe will eliminate every problem. Fit, footwear, heat, moisture, movement and individual skin tolerance all play a role.
Instead, prepare for the conditions you’ll face.
Wear footwear that fits properly. Test your socks before an important event. Pay attention to rubbing and hot spots rather than waiting until they become full-blown blisters. Practise with the equipment you’ll use on the day.
If you’re preparing for a ruck, don’t save all your equipment testing for the ruck itself.
The same goes for running shoes and socks. What feels comfortable for a 20-minute jog might not be the best choice for several hours on your feet.
Your equipment won’t build your aerobic capacity for you, but the wrong equipment can make it much harder to use the fitness you’ve worked to develop.
There’s another component to long-duration performance: what happens to your decisions and technique when fatigue accumulates?
Now I know some may disagree with me here. Training when tired can lead to injury and all that sort of stuff.
Valid for sure.
Realistic……..not so.
When you’re fresh, it’s relatively easy to concentrate, maintain good technique and make sensible decisions. As fatigue builds, the task can become more demanding physically and mentally.
You may start rushing, neglecting your fuelling, taking unnecessary risks or allowing your technique to deteriorate.
The answer isn’t to make every session miserable in the hope that suffering will automatically make you mentally tougher.
It’s to develop the physical capacity to handle your workload, practise the relevant skills under realistic conditions and learn how to manage yourself when things get uncomfortable.
What athletes and military training can teach us
Military training sometimes exposes people to demanding physical tasks and decision-making under pressure. The intention of a well-designed exercise is not simply to exhaust participants, but to assess or develop capabilities relevant to their role.
Professional sport uses a related principle: practise situations that resemble the demands of competition.
For example, Collingwood’s preparation for close finishes in AFL matches has included repeatedly rehearsing late-game scenarios during training. In 2023, Scott Pendlebury described how frequently the team practised those situations so players would understand their roles when the game was on the line.
And no I do not support Collingwood 🤣
Notice the important distinction. The team wasn’t simply trying to make players exhausted. It was rehearsing the decisions and behaviours they needed to execute under pressure.
That’s a much more useful lesson than telling people to train until they can’t think straight.
For an endurance athlete, practising performance under fatigue might mean completing the final part of a planned long run at a controlled pace, provided the session is appropriate for their training level.
For a footballer, it might mean practising skills or tactical decisions after repeated running efforts.
For a hiker, it might mean practising navigation, equipment management and fuelling during longer outings.
The activity should resemble the challenge you’re preparing for.
If you’re new to training, you don’t need to deliberately make yourself cold, hungry and exhausted to build resilience.
Start by developing the physical foundation. Then introduce manageable challenges that require you to stay composed and execute the task properly.
For an experienced athlete, that may mean carefully planned sessions with demanding efforts or sport-specific skills performed under fatigue.
For someone preparing for another activity, it could mean gradually extending the duration of outings and learning to manage food, water, pace and equipment.
The objective is to improve performance when conditions are difficult — not to accumulate suffering for its own sake.
And there are limits. Training through ordinary discomfort is different from ignoring injury, heat illness, severe dehydration or other warning signs. Fatigue should be managed, not treated as a reason to abandon good judgement.
This is where your Garmin and Strava can become genuinely useful.
There’s nothing wrong with sharing your workouts. But if all you’re doing is uploading another run and hoping someone notices, you’re missing an opportunity.
Your training history is a record of what you’ve done. Used properly, it can help you understand whether you’re becoming more capable.
The trick is to compare meaningful information over time.
Start with a few measurements rather than trying to monitor everything.
1. VO₂ max trend
Check whether your estimated VO₂ max is improving, stable or declining over several months.
Don’t panic over a one-point fluctuation. Look at the broader trend and compare it with your training consistency and actual performance.
2. Pace at a comparable heart rate
Pick a familiar route and repeat it periodically under reasonably similar conditions.
Record your pace, average heart rate and perceived effort.
If you’re gradually running faster at a similar effort, that’s a useful sign of progress. If your heart rate is lower at the same pace, that can be encouraging too.
3. Training Load and Training Status
Use Garmin’s training-load information to understand how your recent work is accumulating.
If you’ve added several hard sessions and your recovery indicators are deteriorating, consider whether you need to reduce the workload or improve recovery.
Don’t treat the watch’s status label as a verdict. It is one input into a decision, not a replacement for your judgement.
4. HRV and recovery trends
If your watch supports HRV status, establish your baseline by wearing it consistently overnight.
Look at changes alongside sleep, fatigue, mood and performance. A single unusual reading doesn’t necessarily mean anything is wrong, but a persistent change combined with poor recovery may be worth investigating.
Strava can help you examine how your training adds up across weeks and months.
Depending on your device, data and subscription, useful features include:
Strava’s Fitness score is based on accumulated training data, such as heart-rate-derived Relative Effort or power. It isn’t a direct measurement of aerobic fitness, and a rising score doesn’t automatically mean you’re getting fitter or recovering adequately.
Example: what a useful training review looks like
Imagine you want to improve your aerobic running over 12 weeks.
At the beginning, record a familiar route, the pace you can sustain comfortably, your average heart rate and how difficult the run feels.
Then train consistently, building volume gradually and including harder sessions only when appropriate.
Every few weeks, review your records.
Ask yourself:
You might find that your VO₂ max estimate barely changes, but you’re running faster at the same heart rate. That’s still useful information.
Or perhaps your pace improves, but you’re constantly tired, your hard sessions are deteriorating and your recovery indicators are trending poorly. That tells you to look beyond the pace and reconsider your workload.
The aim is to identify patterns and make better decisions.
Garmin and Strava are tools. Neither knows exactly how you feel, what your life demands this week or why a particular session went badly.
Your records are most useful when combined with context.
A poor run after a bad night’s sleep in hot weather doesn’t mean your fitness has disappeared. A personal best doesn’t automatically mean your training plan is perfect.
Track the numbers, but also record a short note about how the session felt and anything unusual that affected it.
Over time, you’ll build a much better understanding of your own training.
And remember: the point isn’t to collect impressive graphs. It’s to become more capable.
Building an engine that works all day isn’t about chasing exhaustion for exhaustion sake, collecting fitness gadgets or proving how tough you are.
It’s about developing the capacity to sustain work.
That’s toughness.
That’s different.
Start by identifying what you want to achieve. Build your aerobic foundation, get strong enough for the demands you face and practise the activity you’re preparing for.
Maybe to finish The Rock sums it up.
Challenge yourself, but make the challenge count.
Most importantly, stay consistent.
The benefits of training don’t arrive all at once. They accumulate through hundreds of sessions, sensible decisions and the discipline to keep doing the work when the immediate reward isn’t obvious.
You don’t need to be the fastest person in the room. You don’t need to lift the heaviest weight or carry the biggest pack.
But if you can keep moving efficiently, maintain your performance and make sensible decisions long after other people have started fading, you’ve built something valuable.
The real question isn’t how hard you can go when you’re fresh. It’s how much capability you’ve got left when the day gets long.
That’s the engine worth building.
Stay Moving,
Jake
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