It is impossible to continue to progress and improve our performance indefinitely. The bottom line is that assuming you are consistent in your efforts--even if you mix things up to keep offering your body new and varied training loads (you know, muscle confusion! That's a real thing, right?!)--you will eventually reach a plateau. Sure, you might still see week to week variability (including improvements) but overall you will stop making substantial gains.

The good news is that it takes at least a year of consistent effort (more if your fitness is lower going in) to reach this sort of plateau. And of course the plateau isn't completely flat. But in general, any fitness gains or losses that you experience once you are on your plateau, once you are maintaining this level of fitness, will be smaller.

The other bit of good news is that once you do reach this plateau, you've made it! At least in my experience, the fitness platform attainable via One Hour Series type training is sufficient to tackle pretty much any effort out there, so long as your mind is on-board.

The only bad news is that, well, you're on a plateau! If you want that plateau to be as high as possible (most fitness), then you've got to keep training hard, albeit for very short time periods. If you're really near your potential, eventually you'll be more likely to fail at a given workout than match or improve on it. And that sucks.

The solution, however, is simple and effective, particularly given that you need/want a steady diet of bigger efforts anyway for the reasons listed on the previous page. These bigger efforts require greater recovery and actually reduce your fitness for a period following them. But since bigger efforts are the point to begin with, this is perfect. These efforts are effectively a 'training reset button'.

After a big effort, you'll need to rest for a while to let your body take care of itself. When you're able to match or nearly match earlier Baseline Workouts from your previous training period, then you're ready go get after it again. Recovery? Check. Not only that, but you'll find you're not quite as fit as you were after the last few cycles leading up to that big effort, which means you now have a bit of room for improvement. Sure, it's improving back to where you already were, but still...it's motivating to see those times drop a bit each week!

Sandwiching training periods that include 3-6 training cycles between big efforts keeps the plateau from being flat. Instead it is a bit like a saw blade: gently sloped performance increases that give just a bit of 'bite' to your fitness, coupled with short sharp decreases in performance following a big effort that let you do it all over again. And this is, at least in my experience, waaaay easier to deal with than true stagnation. After all, if I'm regularly able to do what I want (ambitious races) with an always-going-to-be-manageable time investment, then that's pretty cool, plateau or not.