Training science, coaching, and the 80/20 method — from Matt Fitzgerald and the 80/20 Endurance coaching team.
Endurance athletes understand fatigue. Why wouldn’t they? Fatigue is the primary limiter of endurance performance. Athletes get better at marathons and triathlons and gravel races and so forth by getting better at resisting and delaying fatigue. Training is therefore focused on building fatigue resistance, which requires regular exposure to fatigue in workouts. Understanding this, athletes…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
The short version. Parker Valby won the 2023 NCAA cross country title on about three runs and 30 miles a week, with six to eight hard cross-training sessions on the arc trainer and in the pool filling the rest. Injuries pushed her there. Her result is the best case study we have that a runner…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
You’re standing before a pedestal table with two small bowls resting upon it. In the bowl on the left is a capsule-shaped blue pill, and in the bowl on the right is a red pill. An elderly woman with snow-white hair invites you to choose one of the two pills, explaining that swallowing the blue…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
How a Chance Encounter Blew My Mind and Transformed My Relationship with Pain and Injury Have you ever learned something that instantly validated a whole chunk of your experience, making sense of life events that had defied all previous efforts to explain and assuring you that you weren’t crazy after all? That’s what meeting Ryan…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
About a year ago, David Warden persuaded me to create an online course that would serve as an athlete-focused companion to the 80/20 Endurance coach certification program. It would teach athletes everything they need to know about how to train effectively for endurance performance, starting, of course, with the 80/20 intensity balance. I say “persuaded”…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
A note from Jim Vance: As the sun sets on another summer, athletes find themselves nearing the end of their endurance sports season, signaling the impending arrival of the off-season. However, in the world of endurance sports, the concept of a complete “off-season” is something of a misnomer. Even during this supposed downtime, there remains…
David Warden ·
There’s a phenomenon that armchair psychologists refer to as shiny object syndrome. You won’t find it mentioned in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (at least I hope you won’t), but its existence is widely acknowledged among lay observers of human nature. According to a Wikipedia writeup, “Shiny object syndrome is the situation…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
Every once in a while, an athlete I’m coaching will confront me with information that they’ve obtained from another source and that (at least in their perception) challenges what I’ve told them or what I’m doing with them. For example, an athlete might say to me, “You always have me do some work at higher…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
I have a vivid memory of sitting in trigonometry class on a Thursday afternoon in the fall of my junior year of high school, sick with fear. I mean this literally. The fear was centered in my stomach, agitating my recently eaten lunch with such violence that I felt queasy. It wasn’t, I should say,…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
You want perfect weather conditions for your half-marathon PR attempt on Sunday. But do you actually need perfect weather conditions? You want to beat your average pace from your last tempo run in today’s tempo run. But do you really need to beat it? You want to avoid niggles and minor illnesses in the remaining…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
