The Early Season Is Everything

Right now, I'm eight weeks into a threshold block.

Ten-minute intervals at the edge of what I can hold. Next week, fifteen minutes. In four to six weeks, I'll be doing 25- to 30-minute intervals. That sounds insane even as I write it. But it's possible because of the work I'm putting in now.

The benefits won't show up for six to eight weeks. I won't know if this block worked until July. Until I'm deep in a race and can hold 30 minutes at threshold after 60 miles of riding (without cracking).

That's the whole game. And most people skip it.

What Early Season Actually Is

There are three phases to a training year in endurance sport. Most people only do two of them.

Winter is the engine build. Base mileage, volume, foundation. You're not trying to go fast. You're trying to build a bigger aerobic system — more mitochondria, more capillary density, more time in the zones that build durability rather than fitness you can feel in the moment. It's slow. It's long. It works.

Spring is the translation phase. This is where you take the engine you built in winter and turn it into something you can race with. Threshold work. FTP intervals. Sustained power at or just under what you can hold for an hour. You're not building the engine anymore. You're making it useful.

the Distance and high intensity simultaneously. This is when it shows up. Or doesn't.

The translation phase is the one that gets cut. People skip winter, so they show up to spring trying to get their legs back. Or they spend winter correctly but jump straight into race-specific work and skip the threshold bridge entirely. Either way, by the time they're actually fit, it's race season. No time to accelerate.

What I'm doing right now — this threshold block — is deliberately lifting my ceiling before I need it. Last year I was strong in zone 3. This year, I'm lifting my threshold so I have more room underneath it. More capacity. More ceiling to work under when the races get long.

You can't make that up mid-season. Once you're in race prep, you're focused on distance and intensity together. There's no time to go back and build the foundation. The ceiling gets set here. You either have it or you don't.

The Boring Middle Problem

Nobody posts about their 12-minute FTP intervals.

There's no race photo, no Strava segment, no external validation. You do the work, you hurt, you go home. Nobody knows. Nothing shows.

Chris Froome won the 2015 Tour de France in July. What made it possible was a decision he made in August of 2014, the moment he came home after crashing out of that year's Tour. He effectively started his 2015 build immediately, treating the rest of 2014 as the beginning of the next campaign rather than the end of the current one.

He was deliberate about early-season race selection, too. He chose Vuelta a Andalucía specifically because it offered multiple hard days, two summit finishes, and a time trial. A complete test of the foundation. He saw early races as steps in the build, not targets in themselves. Relaxed, but already deep in conditioning. By the time July came, he'd had more months of uninterrupted work than anyone else in the field. No surprise that he won.

Eliud Kipchoge operates the same way. After each marathon, he takes three to four weeks completely off. Then he starts with what his program calls a preparatory phase, alternating strength and core work with easy running, rebuilding the foundation before rebuilding the fitness.

Phase 1 is general prep: gym work, aerobics, light runs.

Phase 2 layers in multiple easier runs up to 25 kilometers, fartlek, continued strength work.

Only in Phase 3, many weeks later, does he add track intervals at or near race pace.

"Race pace is a late privilege. You earn it by doing everything else first."

By the time Kipchoge is doing race-pace work, he's already running 200 kilometers a week on strong legs, over a durable base, with a resilient body. The specific work doesn't break him because the general work prepared him. That structure is why he can string together seasons of world-class performances with remarkable consistency.

Here's the discipline trick I've learned: put it on the calendar. The first two weeks of a threshold block are the hardest. Your body is resisting the increase in intensity and your brain is reminding you there's no immediate reward. There's nothing worse that that first interval session (or that first interval of that session). After that, it becomes a habit. You trust the progression because you've seen it before.

I track everything during this phase specifically because the feedback loop is so delayed. Warm-up heart rate. Minutes in zone per week. Weight. Mood. Sleep. Not obsession, just calibration. Small progress signals keep you going when the big signal is six weeks out.

The Business Parallel

The most common mistake I see founders make after early success is skipping the translation phase.

They get traction. Some product-market fit, some revenue, some momentum. And then they jump straight into scaling. More customers, more features, more hires.

What they skip is the second tranche — the period between early success and scaled growth where you take what you learned and build it into something structural. You extract the lesson. You write down what you were trying to prove. You figure out what actually worked and why.

Instead, most founders experiment like crazy in early stage, move the goalpost constantly, and pivot before they've extracted the lesson. They never translate the early wins into a foundation for later.

Matt Fitzgerald, who's written extensively on periodization in running, is precise about the cost of this. When athletes skip base work and jump straight into race-pace training in early season, they have nowhere to go. They're using the specificity lever before they've built the engine. They arrive at key races flat, not sharp. The gains are gone before the race is even close.

I've seen the startup equivalent of this repeatedly: founders who hit early growth metrics and immediately enter race season — scaling sales, expanding markets, adding headcount. Six months later, the team doesn't know how decisions get made. They can't remember why they built that feature. They're repeating mistakes because they never wrote down what they learned.

Here's the harder truth: professional sports have built-in seasonality. Weather changes. Races are scheduled. The calendar forces structure. You know when you're building, when you're translating, when you're racing. You're not making that choice — the season makes it for you.

In most businesses, you don't have that unless you create it. Quarters help, but not enough. The pressure to always be "in season" means the foundation never gets built. You're perpetually in race mode on a body you never prepared.

The discipline is creating an artificial seasonality. Deliberate phases where you're building systems instead of scaling. Writing down what you're learning. Taking the off-season seriously, even when no one's making you.

My big goal race this year is the Oregon Trail Grinder, a five-day stage race in July. But more than any result, I was haunted by last year's late-season collapse. My hypothesis: I didn't do enough early-season work to stay strong all year. The solution is what I'm doing now. Volume platform in winter. Translation work in spring. Everything else follows from that.

Delayed Gratification as Competitive Advantage

Pretty much anything worth having has a delayed feedback loop.

New hires take months to ramp. Relationships take time to settle. Dietary changes don't show up for weeks. Strength takes time to build — you can't ramp it fast, and when you don't have enough of it, races get hard in ways you can't fix mid-season.

The work I didn't do six months ago? I'm feeling that cost right now. The work I'm doing now? I won't feel it until July.

The most important skill I've developed as an endurance athlete is a genuine fondness for delayed gratification. The ability to do the work others skip, because they don't see it as the path to success.

But it is. You just won't know it until later.

Froome started his 2015 Tour build in August 2014. Kipchoge starts every marathon campaign with weeks of gym work and easy running. The gains from that early investment are invisible for a long time. And then they're decisive.

Most people skip early season because the results are invisible. That invisibility is exactly what makes it valuable. Everyone is skipping it. The ones who don't show up to summer with a different ceiling.

What phase are you in right now? Building, translating, or racing?

And more importantly: did you skip the phase that would have made this one matter?

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PS - What are you building right now that won't show up for six months?