Siri Lindley – 80/20 Endurance

There’s a lot going on at 80/20 Endurance—so much, in fact, that you might be having trouble keeping up with all of it. Never fear! Within eight minutes (unless you’re a slow reader), you will be fully caught up on the major happenings here. Ready . . . Go!

A New Book

Earlier this year, we created our own publishing imprint, 80/20 Publishing. Fast forward a few months, and our very first title is about to be released! Written by Matt Fitzgerald (that’s me!), the book is called On Pace: Discover How to Run Every Race at Your Real Limit. As the title suggests, it’s about pacing, the quintessential running skill, which is even more important than most runners realize, and which most runners need a lot of help with. Through his trademark mix of science and storytelling, Matt will convince you of the importance of pacing and guide you toward pacing mastery.

On Pace also includes complete training plans for the 5K, 10K, half marathon, and marathon distances that develop pacing skill while also getting you race-ready. Online versions of these plans are available for individual purchase.

A New Adaptive Training App

We’ve been teasing this one for a while, and at long last it’s here. Not to be confused with the book just described, PACE (which stands for Personal Adaptive Coaching Experience) is a smartphone app developed by TrainingPeaks that uses artificial intelligence to create personalized, adaptive training plans for runners. Among the five coaches that TrainingPeaks chose to launch with is our own Matt Fitzgerald. If you like the run plans Matt built for 80/20 Endurance, you will find the PACE training experience comfortably familiar, except with full customization and adaptation, so your plan evolves with your needs. Learn more here.

A New Director of Training

And then there were four. On November 1, Leyla Porteous joined 80/20 Endurance as our director of training. A native of Australia, Leyla now lives in North Carolina with her husband and 12-year-old son. Having swum competitively in her youth, she discovered triathlon in 2012. For the last several years, Leyla has coached fellow triathletes through Flow Multisport. As our director of training, Leyla will be involved in managing, improving, and expanding all of our training products and services. She’s only been on the job for two weeks, yet her impact has already been felt. As an 80/20 athlete, you will begin to benefit from Leyla’s addition to the team very soon.

New Swim Plans

We all know swimming is different from other endurance sports. Whereas cycling and running are all about fitness, swimming is mostly about technique. In recognition of this fact, we’ve partnered with swim coach Dan Daly to develop a set of technique-focused swim training plans to accelerate improvements in swim performance. Each plan will include dryland (strength training, mobility work) and pool workouts, and will build on the improvements you’ve made by completing earlier plans in the sequence. High-quality videos will guide you through every exercise and drill. Look for Dan’s plans to drop early in the New Year!

A New Charitable Foundation

In October, we launched a new charitable foundation, the 80/20 Endurance Foundation, whose flagship initiative, the Coaches of Color Initiative, aims to improve diversity in endurance sports by awarding apprenticeship grants to aspiring coaches of color. The first grant recipient will be announced on December 1^st, and the apprenticeship will last the entire 2022 calendar year. Throughout this period, the grant recipient will receive a monthly stipend of $1,000, as well as one-on-one mentoring from successful endurance coaches, free certification as an 80/20 Endurance coach, and hand-son experience coaching experience on the 80/20 Endurance platform.

Donations are always welcome. To make a contribution, apply for an apprenticeship grant, or just learn more about COCI, visit 8020foundation.org.

A New Online Learning Event

What are you planning to do on Saturday, January 15, 2020? Unless you already have that date blacked out for space tourism, we suggest you spend it with us at The Endurance Event, an incredible online learning experience for athletes, coaches, and other hungry minds. Hosted by 80/20 Endurance and Accel Events, The Endurance Event is sponsored by InsideTracker and TrainingPeaks and features a stellar lineup of speakers that includes two-time world champion triathlete Siri Lindley and renowned exercise physiologists Stephen Seiler and Samuele Marcora.

The Endurance Event is the perfect way to start the coming race season. Fill your brain with cutting-edge information on training, diet and nutrition, mental fitness, and tech, and come away fired up to make 2022 your best year yet! Tickets to the first part of the half-day event are free, and the cost of attending the full event is way less than that of a new pair of running shoes.

We’re proud to bring this unparalleled learning experience to the worldwide endurance community. Help us make it a success so we can do it again every year! For complete information about The Endurance Event and to register, click here.

New In-Person Training Camps

Would you like to meet and spend time with some of your fellow 80/20 Endurance athletes? Or would you rather travel to a stunning endurance destination and immerse yourself in a pro-style training experience? Or would you prefer to learn from some of the leading minds in endurance training, nutrition, and psychology, including Matt Fitzgerald and Dr. Cory Nyamora? With 80/20 Endurance in-person run and triathlon camps, you don’t have to choose! We’ve partnered with Endeavorun to create a series of unique camp experiences that truly offer something for every athlete. Check out our lineup for the 2022 season:

Austin Winter Running Retreat

February 17-21

Kickstart the 2022 season with our five-day running retreat in beautiful Austin, Texas. Highlights will include group workouts, meals, and hangouts; a personal injury evaluation from physical therapist Asher Henry; one-on-one “office hours” with Matt Fitzgerald, Bertrand Newson, and other great coaches; and the opportunity to run the Austin Marathon with Hanna Hunstad (or try to beat her, or just cheer her on, or run the half marathon or 5K!).

Learn More

San Diego Spring Triathlon Retreat and Clinic

February 27-March 6

The sport of triathlon was born in San Diego, and for good reason. There’s simply no better place to swim, bike, run, and chill with your fellow triathletes than “America’s Finest City.” This two-part camp features a mix of epic training experiences and teaching sessions. Come for the first half of the week if you’re mainly interested in training or for the full week if you want it all. Highlights include an open-water swim clinic with Hanna Hunstad, bike threshold testing on Fiesta Island, and mental skills training with sports psychologist Cory Nyamora.

Learn More

Martha’s Vineyard Morning Run and Triathlon Camp

July 25-29

Would you rather enjoy a summer vacation with your family on Martha’s Vineyard or go there to train with fellow athletes and be coached by Matt Fitzgerald, sports dietitian Lydia Nader, and Endeavorun founder Jake Tuber? This special five-day camp for runners and triathletes allows you to do both! You’ll spend each morning working out with other campers and learning from our expert staff and the rest of the day enjoying family time in the summer paradise of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

Learn More

New Cycling Plans

We are pleased to announce that a full selection of 80/20 Endurance training plans for cyclists is now available. There are 64 plans in all, covering three separate disciplines (Gran Fondo, gravel racing, and time trials), short and long distances, and two intensity metrics (heart rate and power). Designed by Coach Matt, the plans feature not only the 80/20 intensity balance you know and love but also recent innovations in workout design and periodization, as well as unique coaching tips in each and every workout. And like our training plans for runners, triathletes, and obstacle racers, these come in four levels, covering the full spectrums of experience and ability.

We think our new 80/20 cycling plans are terrific, but don’t take our word for it. You can sample any plan you choose for free, and if you’re an 80/20 Endurance subscriber, of course, you have access to all of them. And if you’re not a cyclist, you should become one just so can experience these plans.

A New Coaching Certification

Many 80/20 athletes are also coaches, or aspire to become coaches. And many of these athletes have let us know they want us to offer a proprietary 80/20 Endurance coaching certification. If you’re among these athletes, you’ll be happy to know that an 80/20 Endurance coach certification program is on the way. Our best guess at this moment is that it will be available on or around March 1, 2022. Elements of the program will be an official study guide written by Coach Matt, an online course, and a two-part exam (multiple choice and practical). We’re also exploring the possibility of offering in-person certification events. Stay tuned!

Let me start with an apology. This post is not about sex. It’s actually about hermeneutics, or the discipline of textual interpretation, as it applies to endurance training. I knew that if I promoted a post about hermeneutics on social media, no one would read it, so I deliberately mislead you. Dastardly, I know, and I won’t hold it against you if you stop reading right here and move on with your day. If, however, you are open to learning more about hermeneutics as it applies to endurance training (or if you are embarrassed at having fallen for such shallow clickbait and now feel obliged to redeem yourself by suffering through this boring, sexless post), I welcome you to stay with me.

Interpretation is an integral component of all communication. Every spoken message is interpreted by its hearers and every written message is interpreted by its readers. If human language (including nonverbal communication) were not inherently ambiguous, there would be no need for interpretation—each message would have only one possible meaning that every hearer or reader understood. But language is messy, and therefore everything is open to interpretation. For example, I might say to a pair of twins, “You two look like you could be twins,” and whereas one of them might interpret the remark as a silly sarcastic joke, the other might interpret it as evidence of my stupidity.

Hermeneutics comes into play when the need arises to determine whether one interpretation is better than another. It is self-evident that, like anything else, interpretation can be done either poorly or well. What does it mean to be good at interpreting? Philosophers, religious scholars, and others have been discussing this question at least since Aristotle penned On Interpretation in 360 BC.

You might be wondering what the heck any of this has to do with endurance training. A lot! Human beings are meaning-making machines. We find meaning in absolutely everything we experience, and this includes our experiences as athletes. We find meaning in every workout and in every race. But we don’t all do it in the same way. Like those hypothetical twins I mentioned earlier, any two athletes may interpret the same experience in highly disparate ways. The most successful athletes are adept at finding helpful ways to interpret what they perceive and feel, less successful athletes not so much.

Take choking, for example. Athletes who tend to choke in competition do so because they give the race a meaning that place them under undo pressure not to fail. In How Bad Do You Want It? I share the example of Siri Lindley, a professional triathlete who choked in a pair of qualifiers for the 2000 Olympics because she suffered from low self-worth and chose to believe that she had to succeed as a triathlete in order to see herself as a person of valuable. Only after she realized this and relaxed, choosing to strive for success in triathlon purely because she enjoyed it, did she rebound to become world champion.

The importance of athletic hermeneutics is not limited to big moments. It extends to every moment of every training session, and indeed to every moment in which you are operating in an athletic mode. Here’s a recent personal example: A couple of weeks back I performed a bread-and-butter moderate-intensity run that I revisit a few times each year: 2 miles easy, 6 miles at lactate threshold effort, 2 miles easy. Having suffered a foot injury eight weeks before this particular revisitation, and having returned to full and unfettered run training only two weeks earlier, I knew that I would not feel as good or perform as well in the session as I had when I last did it. This tamping of expectations was a way of contextualizing the workout to ensure I interpreted my subsequent experience of it in the most helpful possible way.

Sure enough, I felt meh throughout the threshold portion of the run and my average pace was a good 10 seconds per mile slower than it had been the last time. As a coach, I can tell you that most runners in my place would have let the situation get to them. They would have pouted internally about how meh they felt and repined over how much fitness they had lost in the past two months. I did not. The temptation was certainly there, but I made a conscious effort to resist it by reminding myself of the context; by drawing encouragement from the fact that, thanks to aggressive crossing-training during my injury recovery, I hadn’t lost even more fitness than I had; and by telling myself that the next time I did this workout I would surely reap the rewards of having muddled through it this time. “This is a steppingstone,” I said to myself, over and over.

It worked. I didn’t enjoy the run as much as I enjoy most runs, but I enjoyed it more than I would have done otherwise, and I finished it feeling good about how I had hadn’t it mentally. This is hermeneutics at work in the endurance training context. Now it’s your turn. As you move forward with your training, don’t allow yourself to lose sight of the fact that you always have the power and freedom to interpret what you’re experiencing in manner of your choosing, and your choices have consequences. Your goal is to become a better athlete. Becoming a better interpreter will help you become a better athlete.

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