Training science, coaching, and the 80/20 method — from Matt Fitzgerald and the 80/20 Endurance coaching team.
Let me be clear: Many if not most endurance athletes race too often. I consider over-racing to be one of the most common and costly forms of self-sabotage in endurance sports. Check out this past post of mine for a full rant on the topic. But in this post I’m going to toss a curveball at…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
Exercise scientists have two basic ways of measuring performance in their studies. One is a time trial, where subjects are asked to cover a specified distance in as little time as possible (or cover as much distance as possible in a specified amount of time). The other is a time to exhaustion test, where subjects…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
At some point during the three-hour drive I undertook with my wife, Nataki, from our home in Oakdale, California, to Santa Rosa last Thursday I came up with a motto for the Ironman I would race two days later: Don’t panic. The phrase arrived out of the blue, as they say, but it did not…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
This week, Matt writes for the TrainingPeaks Coach blog and his article can be found here.
Matt Fitzgerald ·
As a youth runner I never got injured. But then, what young runner does? Kids are made of rubber. Act Two of my life as an endurance athlete has been a different story. Since I got back into racing in my late 20’s (I’m now 47), I have experienced four separate multiyear overuse injuries (in…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
Forget everything I’ve ever written about diet and nutrition. It’s utter garbage—all of it! Racing Weight? Garbage. Diet Cults? Rubbish. The Endurance Diet? Pure crap. I’m a new man with a new message, one that is powerfully encapsulated in my astonishing new book, Celebrity Miracle Breakthrough Keto Revolution! That’s right: I’ve gone full keto, betting all…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
As part of my ongoing quest to qualify for the Ironman World Championship, I am working with a company called INSCYD (pronounced “inside”), creators of a physiological performance software tool that helps endurance athletes like me identify specific ways to improve their fitness. A few weeks ago I performed a sequence of bike tests that…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
3 Benefits of Narrativizing Your Athletic Journey On March 26, my latest book, Life Is a Marathon: A Memoir of Love and Endurance, will be published. It explores what running does for the people for whom running does the most—those men and women who are able to say, “Running changed me,” or even, “Running saved my…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
One of the more common forms of self-sabotage perpetrated by endurance athletes is racing too often. Now, before I go any further, let me state quite clearly that racing often is not necessarily a mistake . . . if you don’t particularly care about achieving peak performances in competition. For many people, athletics is more…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
One of my all-time favorite short stories is “Fantastic Night,” written by the great Austrian fiction master Stefan Zweig in the early 1920’s and set in late Bell Époque Vienna. It concerns a wealthy 35-year-old baron, an orphaned inheritor of a large fortune and dedicated gentleman of leisure who leads a pleasant but unfulfilling life…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
