Black Cats Run

The case is afoot! Is it possible that the explanations we have for fatigue are not only limited but that they hide a greater truth? Performance competes with fatigue, they are, at the boundaries of performance, where we find failure and exhaustion, antithetics. Maybe, if we can find the trial, we can unearth something unexpected? The brain is our number one suspect. Tag along.

In high school Doug Ingersoll won the Massachusetts vs Connecticut Interstate Cross Country Championship. Fun Fact, the previous year's winner was Alberto Salazar. He then ran cross-country and track for four years at Bowdoin College in Brunswick Maine where he set school records in the 4x800m, 1500m, 1 mile, 3000m, 2 mile, and 3 mile. This is his story.

What do we do when nothing is doing what we want? We discuss three core issues of perspective that create the fog of war that's holding us back from seeing the results we hope to gain from all our time and effort. What limits us from seeing what's right in front of our nose?

If only we weren't as horribly weak and mentally deficient as we are. The neighbor's lawn is so much better than our own. If we just dig that little bit deeper and then a whole scale transformation will occur. Or maybe it won't. What makes it so tough for people to just train easy? Break on through.

Consensus is not proof of what can, or cannot be done. How can we determine the scale of improvement possible from training? Why does training lead to the adaptations that we see? How can we apply an understanding of why training can sometimes have a significant impact on fitness and sometimes no impact at all? Are the strategies most commonly used the most effective? Vox Populi, Vox Dei.

The three core questions for endurance sport training: how intense should my training be; how much volume of training should I do; how frequently should I train? We consider answers to these questions.

Fats and Carbs come up all the time when people talk about performance. These substrates are used to create ATP. ATP is, basically, energy used to move. The study of these two substrates relative to one another has been used to validated different training methods, particularly around higher intensity and multi-zone training. Here's why I disagree with this perspective and it's conclusions.

Lactate Threshold is lactate threshold. There is not a second lactate threshold. Critical power, which is questionable in it's own right, is confused as a second lactate threshold. Lactate threshold can't be identified by any prescribed 2 mmol or 4 mmol power. The conviction that there's this higher level limit or ceiling and training toward that intensity is the reason why there's so much injury, burnout, misery, unpredictable performance and tears in endurance sport. Turns out that when you train harder than is actually productive, it's overtraining, no matter what the group think leads you to believe.

60 minute fallacy. Maybe a better title - but let's call a spade a spade. FTP is stupid, any training system organized around FTP or a fractional value of FTP like sweet spot is stupid. You can't make lemonade

What do I know? More than I used to. In this episode we consider the importance of asking questions and being able to truly verify our practice in training. Why are we doing what we do? We also consider my crackpot (unappreciated genuis?) ideas about lactate and how we can leverage that paradigm to make better training strategies. Never too early, or too late, to set new goals for the New Year. What do I know? Not as much as I should

How long can we be fast? Existential crisis or reasonable training consideration? What does the long run do, what questions are not answered by lactate threshold. If we can identify the actual benefit from the long run, do we even need to do them anymore?

Overtraining isn't training too much. It's how most of us train. Our ceiling of performance is the product of our overtraining. Maybe spend a little more time looking at the floor. And stop listening to elite athletes making claims about lactate, they're a little confused.

More on fatigue. The Protestant Work Ethic meats Yoga. Are we there yet?

Fatigue limits preparation and performance. But we are also limited in our ability to resist its siren song. We measure our value as athletes by overcoming adversity, without fatigue there is no adversity. Are we motivated to destroy ourselves in the pursuit of success? We measure ourselves by overcoming fatigue. But it's probably ruining us on the starting line and on our day to day training practices. Shall we stop this bleeding?

Heart beats. It's a potent symbol is so many areas of culture both in the past and present. It's also taken on particularly unique and changeable meaning in endurance sports. Is training with heart rate actually stopping us from improving? We consider some of what we know about the heart as it relates to training and question if we should be using at all. So listen to your heart, or maybe don't. It might be leading you to a dead end.

The Blue Prints, number 1. In this sub-series we will explore specific design problems and paradigms with endurance sport training and try to see if they stand up to rigorous cross examination, or at least a barrage of google slides. In this episode we explore the idea of training to create a lactate curve for VLa Max and glycolytic power by asking the question: what if lactate is the preferred source of energy for the body? Paradigm shifted.

Here comes a sequel. We learn through the feedback we are given as we first become educated about what it means to exercise. Many of us are victims of a no pain, no gain ethos which is pushed by all the armchair athletes. Some people succeed with this approach, but we only see that outcome because we compare apples to apples. How to we interpret the different methods of cueing with lead us to focus on certain forms of engagement with training as productive? Can we change our cues and find better performance? Don't worry, this one's better than the prequel, it has oranges.

Lions and tigers, and glycolytic output oh my! We can't put out all the intellectual bags of dog poo burning on the mental porches of endurance athlete's around the world. But here's a forty-five minute fire extinguisher's worth. The specific nature of lactate as relates to what can be established through testing as well as the best strategy to test is the focus of this short(ish) episode. You can also check this one out on youtube complete with the visuals. Maybe if we dump a bucket of water on the Wicked Witch of Glycolysis then we can finally be free.

Speed merchant. Another episode inspired by a great question from a listener. What does speed mean for endurance athletes and how do you develop speed. We discuss strategies to develop speed, as well as how to assess if you have sufficient speed and then how that should influence your training strategy. We ruffle feathers by saying even Ironman Triathletes need to be able to run a great mile. Turns out, speed is easy - literally. But if you do it the wrong way, well, speed kills.

Don't blink, you might miss it. Revelatory training theory break through? First stages of a post modern dystopian rewrite of The Sting? Only one way to find out. Listen up. In this episode we outline the concept of the Aerobic Calculator. Good training should be a measured progression, not a repressed level of performance that suddenly and magically manifests in a mind blowing performance in the race. We explore the concept of proper threshold training, the history and context of the current conceptions of LT-2 and LT-1. Stamina achieve by the development of actual threshold is the backbone for training. Here it is, right in front of you. Also on youtube. Now you see me - now you don't.

The real and the really real. When we train we are engaged with a system of symbolic meaning. Training that was once innovative and original is reduced to ritual practice and we lose sight of it's meaning. Instead of looking at what the symbolic value of training practice is we should look for evidence to validate or replicate the supposed claims of efficacy. Otherwise we waste our time turning lead into gold.

The Wizard of Oz. The wizard can give you many things, maybe even everything. Master of mysteries, purveyor of promises. What's lactate? What's maximum lactate steady state? what's the best way to get faster? The less we understand the more we know. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Hard to know what it all means when everybody says the same things meaning different things. In this episode we introduce the problem of failing to teaching athletes the right cues, how most of us do not know how to identify the right training intensity benchmarks and how this relates to training design in the form of periodization. The most important factor of training is the athlete, not the workout.

"If recovery isn't real then how do I even train anymore?" You scream into the abyss of the night that surrounds you. The night as cold, dark, unfeeling, just like the eternal darkness of the universe as it expands into the unknown beyond the borders of our big bang bubble. Well. Here are some suggestions for how you can design your training.

Train Hard. Then what? Lie and wait for the gods of athletic achievement to bless you with the virtues of Milo of Crete? How is that we emerge from training, something that makes us tired, with the ability to get less tired from physical stress in the future? Recovery is often cast as the essential element that makes training possible. In this episode we consider whether or not recovery is an ingredient to training success. It turns out that if you need to recover from you training then you are training incorrectly. Buckle up.

Build it back up. There's a place for Intervals in our training. We just have to change their identity. Maybe we need to change the way we identify as athletes a little bit to make space for something new. Eventually the light will turn green.

Green means go. Intervals, the true path to Valhalla. Nothing is more universally accepted as the hallmark of glory in training culture as the interval session. To become one of the initiated you must destroy yourself eight times with a sixty second recovery. Yellow means go faster. We discuss the impact and the structure of intervals in our culture and suggest the best definition of intervals. How should intervals actually be used, and how do we make decisions about what constitutes good training? Red means floor it.

Entropy. Eventually it will mean the end of the universe. It also might tell us something about the body's response to training. How important is the mass of an athlete when we talk about athletic achievement. Is it better to be small? Or is it better to train effectively. Entropy doesn't mean your inevitable demise in this episode. It might actually be your first step toward transcendence and enlightenment. Failing that, maybe it will help you get in better shape.

Vox Populi, Vox Dei. Fears are motivating. How do we make decisions about how to train? Is there strength in consensus? We discuss a different strategies to reach conclusions about what our best practices for training should be. The voice of the people is always very close to madness.

Grandfathers, the ultimate proof of concept. We can't travel back in time and make up for the bad races, but can we use what we've learned over time to make the next ones better? We talk about paradoxes, pain, patrilineage, how to use LT, and how to lay an egg between the start an finish line of your local half marathon. Don't work, the Grandfathers are all safe in the end.

Charles Darwin had not idea the bomb he was letting off when he published On the Origin of Species. Are we are the mercy if natural selection when we fail to achieve athletic greatness? Or is Darwin's observation that species survive because they have remarkable capacity to adapt, and our issue is the cultural logic that we have latched around our own wrists like chains? In this episode we explore the explanations for why some people perform well while most of us are locked in the eternal internal struggle. Responsiveness to training load and training stimulus as well as the true nature of fatigue are all discussed. Iguanas swim in the ocean.

No Pain No Gain. Take you folding chair, a towel, sunscreen, a sandwich, and just chill out. Feel the sand between your toes. Nobody is rewarding your masochism more than you. We talk about how to find the equilibrium of training and how to design workouts from the perspective of where we are trying to get and not what we are trying to accomplish. Train, don't strain.

Into the shadows, where the self doubts grow. On this episode we get a little bit more introspective, a little bit more self-reflective. If something goes wrong one time, is it time to quit and run away? How can we take a step back and reassess? The more we know, the less we blame ourselves. Marathons, comparing training to races, and anticipating the pop culture surge of Lactate Threshold training. Here we go. Take a trip with me, into the dark.

Ghost Hunters. There's a specter here, your training log is haunted. How do we determine what is right when we are think about things we don't understand? We consider the implication of the relationship between audience and performance and the ways in which it constrains our capacity to create independent verifications. Raise a glass to Charles Darwin while we're here. Can evolutionary deduction help us reevaluate the structure of hierarchy? Rocks and sponges? Are the outliers the majority? Wait, what was that sound? There's some graphs for this one. Is that the attic? Just let me put on these special goggles.

In search of something. What does it mean to be an athlete? How do our ideas of what productive evolve over time? In this episode we discuss the difference between athleticism as an expression of fitness versus an act of inherent skill. How does the need to be an athlete and feel confident make it harder or easier to engage with the process of training and improvement over time? Let go to move forward.

Just tell me the workout. Ok, secrets wide open. Here's the sauce. Whoosh!

Plot, what an inconvenience. The struggle of others, also inconvenience. What do both of these have in common? A convenient solution. We can simply answer the disparity between the few who can and the few who can't by saying that's how it is. We explore the possibility that our structure of success as the exception as failure as the norm is simply a product of a willful cultural construct. Our love a tragety and a romanticization of the futile quest perhaps biases us to ask the wrong questions, or maybe no questions at all. That's just the way it is. Accept it. There's a big pitcher of kool aid on the picnic table, pour yourself a tall glass. As the great man himself once said, "OH YEAH!"

Fifteen years too late to name all the indie bands. Never too late to do the right thing. We talk about how to design a different training mindset. The path to the actionable goes straight through the conceptual. Can we shift away from energy systems and the overly complex view of training? We discuss how to think of training not as a series of stresses to recover from but an environment of adaptive response. We frame how Lactate Threshold is a window to making the differentiation between what's effective for entertaining an audience as a performative athlete versus what's effective as a performance athlete. Change we can believe in.

Peaking is overrated, just ask George Mallory. In this episode we discuss how to actually prepare for the women's pro cycling national road race championships once you have reached the target fitness level. It's more about feeling normal and being smart than seeking some sort of elusive and transcendent feeling of fitness. We also talk about how to approach the actual race itself and roll out the pearls of wisdom on how a team could both help or hinder individual success. Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary - that's more of the vibe we want to reach for here.

Lay down the path. Part two of our interview with Paige Kostanecki of ButcherBox Cycling. We go further in our discussion of the fabric of the spaces we seek to navigate. Do people with voice have an implicitly responsibility to think about the implications of that status? Can we see different ways to progress in developing our sense of self? How do we manage the various competing expectations that surround us? There's only one way to truly move forward. One step at a time.

Fool me once. Imagine a mountain, only it's invisible, but it's there. It must be there because everybody agrees it exists. In this episode we ask if something subtle but critical is being overlooked. Can high intensity training induce trauma response? What if we aren't the problem but the mountain we are trying to climb is a collective hallucination or fantasy? It's important to ask the question if we are ever going to find the answer. Fool me twice ...

Plant a garden. How much can we plan? The unknown needs to be discovered not uncovered. We discuss what are the tools by which we calibrate our training and explore the implications of the best, and worst way, to dial those in. What's the value of wild flowers? We also talk about example workouts and how workouts can really be whatever works out. You reap what you sow.

Everybody needs a compass. On this edition of Top Secret Guest we talk to Paige Kostanecki of ButcherBox Cycling. Paige is inspiringly authentic, open, and honest in engagement with the experience of being an athlete. She also is very much in tune with the struggle that we all feel sometimes as individuals as we seek to navigate the complex spaces of life. This episode is part one of a conversation that spans a variety of topics related to the experience of the self and the space around us. It's hard to sail by the stars alone, sometimes it's okay to accept a helping hand.

Primary sources, a historians best friend. And, maybe, just maybe, also best friend of the coach and athlete. Do we have an information problem or to do we have an interpretation problem? We present a specific explanation of the mechanism that's behind the concept of lactate threshold, we give historical evidence for it's application by it's most famous, and overwhelmingly misunderstood, proponent who probably never called it lactate threshold. Is there a moral to the story? Maybe it's that it knowing stuff, even if it's science, is pretty important. Strap on your aquatic lung, we submerge into the archives, diving for wisdom's lost pearls.

Pain. How do we build our understandings of what makes us better? Is it possible, that we do not have nearly as strong of a sense of awareness of what is making us better as we might think. We continue in our thankless task of drowning horses lest they die of thirst as we further explore what lactate threshold is and it's significance for training and performance. We don't want to train so damn hard, it's ruining us mind body and soul. Or maybe we don't even know what it means to train hard Less is more. Literally.

The Midas Touch. What is going to allow us to reach the level of fitness needed to take home the gold? There's no silver bullets. We need to be adaptable and we need to take it in phases as we progress towards our target. We talk about the strategies that allow different people at different points in their own training to all reach the same fitness target. The notion that there's a simple algorithmic solution to training is so seductive. Imagine, the power to have everything you ever wanted. Everything turns to gold. Think. It's not as good as it seems.

One stone, two birds, you know what to do. Part two of our conversation with Gillian Bennett about her 2023 season is also the first part of our Big Ring Bennett series. Sometimes when you think you have lift you realize you're suddenly up to your knees in mud. Picture a July day when the sun is high in the sky. There are no clouds, but a bronze heat haze sits on the horizon. You sweat even when you stand in the shade. Meanwhile, the lemons start to ripen in their trees. Picture tall glasses full of ice cubes; Adirondack chair optional.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. The champ is back. What does the champ do to be the champ? The champ invents a different paradigm. We set a different framework for conceptualizing targeted a performance. Can achieving a pattern of training by May unlock the shot at a title? If they can make penicillin out of moldy bread they can sure make something out of you.

Lactic Acid, dissolving our muscles and our souls from the inside out. Why don't parrots handout the Fields Medal? When endurance sports try to explain thresholds, they don't. Lactate Threshold and FTP are not the same thing. You're training harder then you need to, and we have proof. Your power meter is useless. There's a paradigm shift in her somewhere, if we can find it. Will we explain thresholds any better than anybody else? There's only one way to find out. Stop tipping cows in search of marginal gains and step into the light.

Clearance - top secret. We sit down for part one of a conversation with Gillian Bennett where we look back on her 2022 season as an elite multi-sport athlete. Gillian was 7th and the national criterium championship, 13th and the national road race championship, and mixed in a few marathons including a 2:59 at Boston along the way. She may also be a sleeper agent, we'll try to get to the bottom of that mystery as well as unravel the threads that weave together to form the fabric of her success.

Cold war, nukes, and Coltrane. Can your hear the key changes? We learn how to listen to ourselves. We learn what to do with what we hear Improvisation exists in all spaces of performance, including in endurance sport. How do we shift into that space where not following the plan is the best plan? Improvisation exists in the strange space between fixed pieces of discrete knowledge and the unconscious. If we can get into that space we can learn to fly.