80/20 Endurance Blog
How to Avoid the Moderate-Intensity Rut as a Trail Runner
Trail running is becoming more and more popular—statistics say so. But I don’t need statistics to know that increasing numbers of runners are taking to the trails. I can tell by the emails I receive from advice-seeking athletes, a rising percentage of which are sent by trail runners. The question that is most frequently asked […]
“You Are Not a Watch” (A Lesson in Pacing)
In the context of endurance racing, pacing can be defined as the skill of distributing one’s effort across a defined distance in such a way that the distance is covered in the least amount of time possible. Although the body does the visible work in any kind of endurance race, the skill of pacing is […]
The Glycogen Threshold Hypothesis: What Is It and Why Should You Care?
There is a strong case to be made for making sure you consume plenty of carbohydrate before endurance training, and also during longer workouts. You will feel better and perform better, especially in harder sessions and in sessions that are begun in a prefatigued state during heavy training periods. But there is also a strong […]
3 Things That Work, But Not the Way Most Runners Think
There are lots of running-related techniques and methods that are widely known to be effective but that achieve their effects in different ways than most runners believe or assume. For example, drinking water and consuming carbohydrate during endurance exercise are known to enhance performance and are believed to achieve this effect by limiting dehydration and […]
Are Bounce Back Marathons a Bad Idea?
On April 24, eight days after American running star Galen Rupp dropped out of the Boston Marathon in the 20th mile with hypothermia and breathing problems, organizers of the Prague Marathon announced that Rupp had been added to the start list of their event, to be held May 6, a day shy of three weeks […]
Are Your Muscles Shrinking and Getting Tighter? Good! (If you’re a runner)
Recently one of the athletes I coach (we’ll call him Scott) came to me with some concerns about the results of his latest DEXA scan and weigh-in. Although he had lost both overall weight and body fat, he had also lost some muscle mass, and the body-fat percentage in his arms had increased slightly. Scott […]
Introducing the 80/20 Workout Library
Unless you’ve been hermetically siloed within the endurance space for as long as you’ve been exercising, you’ve probably heard of muscle confusion. Popular in the vanity-oriented fitness realm, muscle confusion is the idea that muscles undergo the greatest adaptation to training when they are subjected to constantly changing stimuli, and the corresponding practice of mixing […]
Hyperindividualism – Should You Train Your DNA or Train for Your Event?
We live in a highly individualistic society, a situation that has both pluses and minuses. On the plus side, our children tend to grow up with a sense of freedom to choose their own path in life. On the minus side, a growing percentage of us are burdened by feelings of loneliness and isolation that […]
Seiler’s Hierarchy of Endurance Training Needs
If I could clone myself a few times for the sake of taking different paths in life, I would definitely dedicate one of my clones to the pursuit of sports science. This being impossible with current technology, I choose instead to live vicariously through the individual sports scientists who are tackling the questions I would […]
