Alright, I've saved the best for last. It's the big efforts, the suffer-filled races or missions that truly test my mettle that inspire me the most. They are what keep me training--pushing as close as I can get to those gun to the head moments as I can on a consistent basis. It is the big efforts that provide those rare opportunities to test my mettle and explore, first hand, the epic mysteries of agency and consciousness.

Don't worry if you think I've gone off the deep end--keep pursuing bigger and bigger goals and eventually you'll understand what I mean (hopefully!). What we believe to be true about ourselves--what we want to be true about ourselves, well, these are usually the first things that are stripped away when we're confronted with real mental and physical difficulty of any significant duration.

But even if you're not there yet--even if your aspirations don't extend to multi-day adventure races and 100 mile runs or cross country cycle races, you'll want to get up to something significant at the end of every training block. This is not only a way to 'try out' your endurance, but is also important in that it provides an opportunity to hit a 'reset' button. The reset button, which we mentioned earlier, is key in that without it it gets very difficult to keep repeating Baseline Workouts and seeing improvement. Most importantly though, consistent big efforts provide the mechanism by which you develop a 'feel' for protracted effort, develop confidence that your training produces fitness that extends beyond high intensity work, and start confronting the mental challenges of longer duration work.

If you're at one end of the extreme--reading this despite not having any endurance background, simply start small. Maybe your first effort will be a half marathon. Then an Olympic triathlon. Then a marathon. Even starting from scratch and being conservative with your efforts--if you don't mind suffering a bit then within a year of hard (but short) work and a steady dose of progressively bigger 'big efforts', you should find yourself poised to jump from the world of endurance into ultra-endurance. Not a bad year, eh?

The bottom line is that I firmly believe that someone who can stick with the fitness program provided in this guide, and who charges their way through 4-6 epic adventures/races/missions every year, will be pleasantly surprised by what they are able to accomplish. Furthermore, they will hopefully realize the amazing extent to which training volume can be supplanted by training intensity, even when the goal is extreme endurance. It is just a matter of making every second count.

Just in case you need some help thinking of how to go big without signing up for a race, I've taken the liberty of tacking on a few videos to get your mind cranking with ways to see just what you're made of. Ah, the good old days!