Dan, Dan, The METCON Man
The importance of developing an Aerobic Engine for Military Schools
In the Fall of 2023, I started training an athlete for Ranger School. We’ll call him Dan. Dan was a sub 40:00 minute 5-mile guy who was doing mostly CrossFit and strength training, could pass the ruck, and was looking to go to PRC in the next two months with Ranger School a month later in January.
His problem was simple: he could pass the standards in training, but he was worried about putting it all together at the event. When I say sub 40 guy, I really mean it; I think he was in that 38:00-39:00 range when he was fresh, and although he had the strength to do well on rucks, he wasn’t confident he could pass any of those times when the inevitable smokings of the school piled on.
In a lot of ways, I think Dan read the situation correctly. He was worried high-intensity volume would cook him by the time he got to the run, and he trained to his best understanding of this. Here’s a week I pulled from Dan’s training logs from September, the week before he came to me:
Figure 1: Dan’s Training Log from 1 week in late September
As you can see, Dan was preparing logically. He’s a disciplined guy; he showed up before PT, usually at 5:45 to get his strength work in, then hit his METCONs with his soldiers. As exemplified by Monday, he tried to get some muscular fatigue with a lift, then a METCON of bodyweight and lightly weighted work before hitting his runs, almost always at his max 5-mile pace. The next Monday, he went out for a 4-mile run as a test of fitness at his max 5-mile pace for four miles.
If you’ve ever trained for a school or selection, you might have had a similar training regimen. You’re the kind of person who can run the standard, in this case a 40-minute 5-mile, but just barely. You do a lot of strength, and since you know you’ll be smoked when you run, you decide to replicate that in your training. Plus, since you have to run below an 8-minute mile for five miles, you train that way too.
So why doesn’t it work?
Aerobic Capacity and Why it Matters
Put plainly, Dan didn’t understand the value or the demands of aerobic capacity for his training. But what is the mysterious ‘aerobic’ capacity, and why is it important?
If we’re taking it from a physiological perspective and talking about aerobic capacity, we should probably define aerobic capacity.
Let’s start with aerobic.
We shorten things to just say aerobic, but what we’re really talking about is ‘aerobic respiration,’ which is one of three ways we make energy during exercise. Aerobic respiration is the main way of making energy for efforts over about 1:00 minute. Somewhere between 1:00 and 1:30, our body starts to produce over 50% of its energy aerobically. At about 4:00 minutes, even in all-out running, males are between 77% and 84% ‘aerobic’ (shorthand for ‘producing energy aerobically’) and females as high as 86%. The longer you run continuously, the higher the percentage goes.[1]
Why do we care about these numbers? What it shows us is that even when running for only 4:00 minutes, the best-trained athletes in the world are using the aerobic respiration mechanism to create between 77% and 84% of their energy. Anything beyond that time horizon is only going to place more and more weight on the aerobic system.
Let’s apply to this to Dan’s training week:
Figure 2: Dan’s Training Log from Figure 1, translated into time in Aerobic Respiration
On Monday, when Dan lifts, METCONs, and 1.5-mile runs, he’s practicing a lot of anaerobic respiration for those first two activities. It’s only the 1.5-mile run that activates his aerobic system, which he does for about 11 minutes. Since he’s well past that 7:30 time horizon, most of this activity is going to be aerobic.
The same is true for Tuesday and Wednesday with no aerobic activity Tuesday and about 27:00 minutes on Wednesday. On Thursday his 90-minute ruck nets him about 90 minutes of aerobic activity. If you’re protesting some of these percentages, keep in mind that Dan started all of his runs with at least a METCON, if not a 90-minute lift, so his anaerobic ratio is probably lower than it normally would be given the athletes from studies where these percentages were pulled from were fresh in their runs; their anaerobic systems were primed, and they were still primarily aerobic.
The real kicker is that on Saturday and Sunday, Dan is so physically depleted from his intense workouts, which despite being 99% aerobic have been at his 5-mile max pace, that he has to take two rest days before he rolls into the next week.
In all, he’s working out for well over 400 minutes (since I failed to factor most of his METCONs and lifts in), but only 127 minutes of that is in aerobic respiration, and he totals just over 15 miles in the week.
Now, let’s look at Ranger School:
Figure 3: A conservative estimate of time in aerobic respiration based on each day of Ranger School
Ranger Assessment Phase (RAP Week) alone is just 4 days long. On Day 1, candidates perform a 5-mile run as part of the PT test, which for Dan we know will take him 39 minutes.
Land Nav on Day 2 will be much less intense but much longer than any other event, giving him at least 3 hours of aerobic activity. If he passes the first time, he’ll get a day of rest before his 12-mile ruck, which we know will take him just short of 180 minutes. I’ve factored in an additional 80 minutes of aerobic activity to cover movement because at Ranger, you aren’t allowed to walk to the bathroom or to get food. You run to the starting location for each of these events, but I think anyone who’s experienced it can tell you my 80 minutes is extremely conservative.
That’s at least 474 minutes of aerobic activity and at least 30 miles of running/ rucking alone. And that’s just four days.
So why doesn’t it work? If we look again at Dan’s training, he’s severely underprepared his aerobic system to handle the day-to-day stress of Ranger. On an average week, he’s putting in 127 minutes of work to prepare for 474 minutes, more than three times the strain in just over half the time.
Applying the Aerobic Solution
The main problem was that Dan wasn’t getting enough time doing aerobic respiration. We knew he was fast enough to make the 5-mile run and 12-mile ruck times fresh, but we needed him fast enough on Day 4.
The first thing we did was to slow down. Dan was running all his mileage at what we call “race-pace;” the problem with race pace is it’s very intense. A common saying is that even marathon runners only run 20% of their mileage at marathon pace, and although it might be as high as 50% when we factor in mileage faster than race pace, that’s still much lower than 100%. Dan needed to slow down so he could run more.
The second thing we did was to increase his mileage. We increased by a safe 5 miles a week. In September, the month I pulled Figure 1 from, Dan totaled 15 miles; by November, he was at 100 miles in the month.
The last thing we did was to reduce the METCONs. The METCONs were good at preparing him for the bodyweight work in the volume he’d see (i.e. push-ups, sit-ups, body squats), but Dan could already handle that. All those METCONs were doing when paired with running was making him miserable and increasing the fatigue of running. You won’t run more if you hate running.
Here’s how it came out on a week in mid-November, two weeks before his pre-Ranger date:
Figure 4: Dan’s training Log from mid-November after 2 months of Aerobically focused training
As you can see, Dan put up 38 miles in the week for a whopping 395 minutes of 99% aerobic activity. His average mile for running was above 10:00/mi, and despite the mileage increase, he was able to run one more day of the week than two months prior.
It was one of my proudest moments when Dan texted me to say he’d graduated Ranger School. It didn’t take a crazy amount of workout planning, and it didn’t take cutting out his lifting. It just took reorienting the mindset to view running in terms of aerobic fitness.
References
[1] Spencer MR, Gastin PB. Energy system contribution during 200- to 1500-m running in highly trained athletes. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2001 Jan;33(1):157-62. doi: 10.1097/00005768-200101000-00024. PMID: 11194103.
Duffield R, Dawson B, Goodman C. Energy system contribution to 1500- and 3000-metre track running. J Sports Sci. 2005 Oct;23(10):993-1002. doi: 10.1080/02640410400021963. PMID: 16194976.
Buga, A., Crabtree, C. D., Stoner, J. T., Decker, D. D., Robinson, B. T., Kackley, M. L., Sapper, T. N., Buxton, J. D., D'Agostino, D. P., McClure, T. S., Berardi, A., Cline, S., Fleck, T., Krout, J., Newby, D., Koutnik, A. P., Volek, J. S., & Prins, P. J. (2023). Metabolic and ruck performance effects of a novel, light-weight, energy-dense ketogenic bar. Experimental Physiology, 108, 715–727. https://doi.org/10.1113/EP091029