80/20 Blog
As an Athlete, Should You Care What Others Think? (Hint: All One-Word Answers to This Question Are Wrong)
In March 2017, I gave a talk at Run Flagstaff, a running specialty store located in the city whose name it carries. During the talk, I mentioned an occasion when I got to hang out with 2:19 marathoner Yoko Shibui and her teammates on the Mitsui-Sumitomo women’s professional running team in boulder, Colorado. “Are there […]
Are You a Chosen One?
This article is about endurance sports, I promise. It’s just going to take a minute to get there. Are you familiar with Calvinist doctrine? At its heart is the concept of predestination. Calvinists believe that, at the beginning of time, God selected a limited number of souls to grant salvation and there’s nothing any individual […]
The Most Interesting Runner in the World
Following is an unpublished chapter of my book Running the Dream: One Summer Living, Training, and Racing with a Team of World-Class Runners Half My Age. It features my friend Tommy Rivers Puzey, who a couple of weeks ago sent me a series of alarming voice messages from a hospital ICU in Flagstaff, where he […]
Creative Goal Setting
Recently I received a text message from Matt Chittim, host of the Rambling Runner podcast. In it, he informed me that he is several months away from turning 40 years old and he wants to mark the occasion by pursuing the goal of breaking 40 minutes for 10K. His purpose in texting me was to […]
Rediscovering a Process Focus
There’s a runner I coach, we’ll call him Jeremy, who’s concerned about his weight. It’s not that he’s overweight and worried about developing type 2 diabetes or heart disease. Rather, Jeremy is light and lean but just not quite as light and lean as the elite trail runners whose ranks he aspires to join—and it […]
Pressure Is a Double-Edge Sword
In 2015, economists Daniel Hickman and Neil Metz conducted an interesting study on the effect of pressure on performance in professional golfers. Data from the final hole of PGA tournaments taking place between 2004 and 2012 was analyzed to determine the effect of financial stakes—specifically how much money was riding on draining a putt—on performance. […]
Your Performance Management Chart Is Lying To You
…but you can make it tell the truth. The Performance Management Chart in TrainingPeaks is an extraordinary tool. As early as 1975, physiologists have been attempting to quantify, and ultimately predict, the relationship between training and endurance performance. Coaches and athletes wanted to know if you put in X units of training, could you predict […]
New Workout: Billat’s Analog Windup
Like many other endurance athletes, I’m adapting to the COVID-19 era by the seat of my pants, seeking ways to maintain my normal level of enthusiasm for training without races to look forward to and without a playbook. The pattern I seem to have fallen into—which has been working better than I would have imagined—is […]
Book Review: The Science of the Marathon
I first discovered the work of Veronique Billat in 2002, when I was working on my book The Cutting-Edge Runner. That’s a long time ago, but in retrospect I’m somewhat embarrassed that I hadn’t known about her even earlier, as she was then already well on her way toward titan status in the field of […]
Avoiding Dietary Self-Sabotage
I don’t really consider myself an expert on anything, but I do know a thing or two about endurance nutrition and training. Nevertheless, I choose to coach on the training side only. If an athlete approaches me with a request for nutrition coaching, I refer them elsewhere. The reason is that I have found nutrition […]