80/20 Endurance Blog
I Ran Today. Pray for Me.
The last time I tried to run it did not go well. It was May 2021, four months after I stopped running in the hope that doing so would heal me from long covid. Alas, my symptoms showed no improvement in that time, but neither did they worsen, so I decided to try to ease […]
If It’s Not Hard, It’s Not Hard Enough
Every time a television advertisement talks about “making life easier”—and there are many, many such advs—I feel a pitch of annoyance. Of course, I understand why the phrase is used so liberally in messages intended to make people buy things. Commercial products and services often do make certain parts of life (fixing dinner, getting stains […]
A Power Meter Is Like a Thesaurus
Regular readers of this blog will know that I recently read and greatly enjoyed David Epstein’s book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. It inspired my post about why foxes make better coaches than hedgehogs, and it inspires the present post about why a power meter is like a thesaurus. There’s an interesting […]
Why I’m Not Afraid of Losing My Coaching or Writing Jobs to a Robot
I’m not one for hot takes. It’s not that I don’t pay attention to ,or have opinions on, current events. It’s just I prefer to keep silent except when I have something to say that hasn’t already been said. So, I wait until others have shared their takes, and when I find that my own […]
A Different Way to Determine Your Training Intensity Zones
There are lots of different tests that endurance athletes can use to gauge their fitness and determine appropriate training intensity zones: VO2max tests, lactate threshold tests, time trials of various lengths, perceived effort calibration tests, the list goes on. Today I’m going to tell you about another protocol, one that has been around for a […]
The Ultimate Athlete Superpower
If you could choose one athletic superpower to exploit in your future training and racing, what would it be? Here’s the rule: Your superpower has to be a natural human trait that actually exists in some athletes, not a magical attribute like Pogo Feet or Turbo Mode. Potent, yet real. If I were I to […]
The Problem with Intensity
In endurance sports we toss around the word “intensity” as if this word had a clear, singular, and consensual definition. In fact, it is not, and I doubt it ever will. “Why not?” you ask. Because exercise intensity is not a unitary phenomenon. Our problem is not that we have so far failed to discover […]
How to Build Self-Trust As an Athlete (and Why It’s Important)
I coach a runner who wants to break 1:30:00 in the half marathon. We’d been working together for about two and a half months when she took her first crack at it. I was 95 percent confident that Jody (not her real name) was fit enough to run under 1:31:00, but only 10 percent confident […]
Disordered Eating Will NOT Make You a Better Runner!
I finally got around to reading Chrissie Wellington’s autobiography, A Life Without Limits. Of particular interest to me was how Chrissie wrote about her struggles with eating disorders as an adolescent and young adult. Here’s a passage concerning her first bout with bulimia: “Soon you lose sight of the original object of the exercise—to achieve […]
The Tyranny of Talent
For the past several months I’ve been working on a book called Screw Loose, Shit Together: A Theory of Athletic Greatness. In it, I propose that there are two kinds of talent, physical and mental. Physical talent, loosely speaking, is what makes some athletes better than others at a given sport as untrained beginners. Mental […]
