The field of endurance athletics has quite a wide variety of views on the value of resistance training — Viada's polite way of saying that many endurance athletes think lifting weights is at best a mild convenience and at worst a waste of time that adds mass and slows them down. This view is wrong. And understanding why requires separating what actually happens in the body from what endurance athletes typically see in poorly designed lifting programs.
The strength training found in most triathlon or running magazines, Viada observes, is "abysmally awful, if not totally useless." High-rep, low-weight circuits. Quarter squats. Bodyweight routines. The kind of training that would do very little to improve a runner's performance any more than a few miles of walking per week would markedly improve conditioning. These programs fail because they don't produce the adaptations that actually benefit endurance performance: meaningful force production, connective tissue robustness, bone density, correction of postural imbalances. Real strength training — with real loads, through full ranges of motion, with progressive overload — does all of these things.
The deadlift, done correctly, trains: hamstrings and glutes (the hip extension chain that powers the running stride), upper back and lats (postural muscles that keep form from collapsing in late-race miles), core stabilizers (the trunk that transfers power from legs to upper body), and grip (a limiting factor in Event 6). It also does something less obvious: it loads the skeletal system in a way that running cannot. The compressive and bending forces on the long bones during heavy deadlifts trigger osteoblastic activity — new bone formation at the attachment points where tendons pull on bone. Stronger bone attachment points mean lower stress fracture risk in athletes who train high volumes of running.
The back squat drives similar adaptations across a different movement pattern — knee flexion-extension under load, significant quad development that running cannot produce. For Event 5 (2-mile run), well-developed quads absorb impact force during each stride and provide a reserve of strength that can be tapped in the final push when hip extensors are failing. For Event 6 (50 front squats at the end of a loaded carry complex), the squat is even more direct: the 50 front squats are a strength-endurance test, and the athlete who arrives at them with a stronger squat will complete them significantly faster than one who arrives at 90% of their front squat max.
Viada makes the case that the biggest return on strength training for endurance athletes may not be performance — it's durability. Every stress fracture, every patellar tendinopathy, every IT band syndrome that ends a training cycle early is a training stimulus that never happened. An athlete who can train consistently for 52 weeks produces more adaptation than one who trains brilliantly for 40 weeks and gets hurt for 12.
The same mechanisms that make deadlifts and squats effective for performance — increased bone density, improved tendon robustness, stronger joint stabilizers — are the mechanisms that make endurance athletes harder to break. Strength training isn't something endurance athletes do instead of running. It's what they do to run better, longer, and with less injury, for more years.
Both qualities are trained concurrently in ETR. See the full structure.
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