The Infirmary | Fixing Broken Endurance Athletes (Campfire Endurance Coaching)

Chris talks through just WHY it takes so long to prepare correctly for an Iron-distance triathlon. We also talk about the great Gordo Byrn and his influence on proper conditioning within endurance sports.

Gordo's substack, Endurance Essentials

Gordo on Rich Roll's podcast

It’s a tale as old as…well, it’s probably around 40 years old, but for a sport as young as ours, that’s fairly venerable: a hard-working triathlete puts in their time over the course of a season, qualifies for Kona (or Nice, which is a really great site for a world championships, go ahead and @ us), and then, through a combination of poorly timed heat acclimation, arduous travel, wide-eyed enthusiasm, panic training, expo smorgasbord, and terror ends up performing far below their potential. Today we’ll be talking about how to navigate the veritable gauntlet of triathlon’s big show and perform to the best of your ability.

Want to read a text version of this article? You can find it here.

Endurance Spin signups: https://www.campfireendurance.com/endurance-spin-202324

Now that Ironman World Championship season is over for the year, after the women raced in Nice last month and the men just raced in Kona, we thought it would be helpful for those of you excited about those races to hear what it takes to qualify for them.

Too many athletes believe that qualifying for races such as Kona, Nice, and Roth (all long distance triathlon) requires speed. It doesn’t. Qualifying for these races (which is another way of saying “executing this difficult distance effectively”) requires a physiology that doesn’t slow down.

In this episode, which is the audio from a webinar our owner, Chris, gave a few times in October, we walk you through a common misconception about long course triathlon racing and how to change your training so you can give yourself the best possible chance of qualifying.

If you would like this content as a video, you can watch the presentation over on our YouTube channel.

And, finally, if you would like the presentation from this webinar, there's a link in the show notes.

https://campfireendurance408.lpages.co/how-to-qualify-presentation-and-pdf-lead-magnets/

https://youtu.be/yp7IaROWkiQ

Linsey Corbin has been one of the most consistent professional triathletes of all time, qualifying for Kona 14 times, winning eight Ironman events, and managing to show up year after year even while dealing with Injury. Linsey walks us through her process for reviewing the past season and looking forward to the next year, and she shows us how she bridged that sport-specific process to her life outside of sport.

After we chat about year-in-review processes, we answer two questions from our Campfire Endurance athletes, one about knowing WHEN you should train again after a difficult session, and also if using a little barefoot running can help your run form.

If you are interested in becoming a Campfire athlete and being able to ask us anything you want (and maybe hear your question on the air), you can chat with us about one-to-one coaching, Team Campfire, or attending one of our camps. Book a free call here.

You can find Alex at Alex Larson Nutrition and on Instagram and Facebook @alexlarsonnutrition, playing with three kids, or watching all the Star Wars intellectual property she can get her eyes on.

What is “mastery,” and how can we develop mastery in endurance sports? What even IS mastery? What does it look, sound, or feel like? In this episode, Chris walks through what mastery is and how you can begin to build mastery in your own sports.

If you’d like to learn this process through reading, check out our series on Mastery over on Medium. The link here is a friend link, so you’ll be able to read for free. Want the free PDF that helps you out with this? You can grab that here.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five

And, finally, if you’d like to talk to us about coaching, we’d love to chat! You can book a free training analysis here, getting some outside eyes on what it is you are doing.

Chris sits down with Joe Howdyshell of Summit Endurance Academy, a mountain sport coaching company based in Breckenridge, CO. What is a “mountain sport coaching company?” Joe (also known as @badasscoach on Instagram, although these days you can find him over on Substack talking to athletes) primarily coaches sports such as Ski Mountaineering (SkiMo for short), mountain biking, and mountain running.

“I work with athletes who want to play in mountains that look like the ones around me,” he says, although he’s also totally comfortable coaching road cyclists, triathletes, and more traditional endurance endeavors.

As with many coaches, Joe’s path to where he is today would be best described as “meandering.” No shade, there—most of us who work in the endurance world took a…circuitous path to our current situations. Joe came up as a runner, and then a cross-country skier, and finally a SkiMo athlete. He has bachelor and masters degrees in exercise physiology, so he knows his stuff, but as with the coaches at Campfire, he tends to keep the athlete first and the training minutiae second.

Instagram
Summit Endurance Academy
Substack

Work with us! If you heard something you liked today, join us! We’re always taking on new athletes, and you can book a free call to chat about your training here.

In this episode we talk about the importance of annual training plans for athletes and coaches, focusing on the need for clear goals and structured training blocks. We break down the types of goals you should use in your annual plans—outcome, performance, and process—and explain how to effectively build and manage a plan based on those goals. We give you three different examples of annual plans and offer hints and tips about how to use them to best effect: your performance and your happiness.

We also answer a great listener question about the significance of accountability in coaching, contrasting it with feelings of shame that can arise from missed workouts or unmet expectations.

Show Notes:

The Performance Psychological Effects of Goal Setting in Sport: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1750984X.2022.2116723

Three different annual training plan templates

Link to YouTube video (so you can watch Chris manipulate the actual training plan templates)

Chris sits down with Phil Batterson, Ph.D., host of the CriticalO2 podcast and physiologist for Moxy Monitor. They have a discussion about the oft-discussed “Art and Science of Coaching,” focusing on what coaches can learn from physiologists and vice versa. It’s a fascinating conversation that ranges from debunking long-observed tenets of the coaching world (FTP = 95% of 20-minute power, for one, and why 2mmol/l and 4mmol/l aren’t gospel) to best practices for improving your ability to make decisions in your training.

The Critical Oxygen Podcast

Remember what it was like when you had just set out upon your endurance journey? At first everything felt incredibly hard, but after a short amount of consistent training things started to feel easier. Those, our friends, were your “Noob Gains,” or the improvements that happened in the first months (or years) of this new habit.

Today on The Infirmary we explain how and why Noob Gains happen and offer some guidance for those who are in this very fun and satisfying period of training. We also talk about ways to avoid the pitfalls of this leg on the path to faster, happier, and healthier athletics. We close the episode with a warning around the ways unscrupulous companies try to take advantage of you while you’re living your Noob Gains life.

If you’re already an experienced athlete, please think about passing this episode along to someone who has just begun, since doing so might save them from injury, burnout, or worse.

Chris sits down with Brad Culp, author of the 2024 Book The Norwegian Method: The Culture, Science, and Humans Behind the Groundbreaking Approach to Elite Endurance Performance. After some book-nerd talk about the structure Brad and his publisher chose for the book (the first few chapters provide a brisk but necessary and engrossing history of Scandinavia’s Viking culture and boatbuilding technology), Culp explains what he sees as encompassing “The Norwegian Method.” He talks about Kristian Blummenfelt, Gustav Iten, Olav Aleksander Bu, Jakob Ingebrigtsen, and the other less well-known forebears of The Norwegian Method. Culp recounts what he saw while reporting on and then writing about some of the greatest endurance athletes of our moment, and talks about how amateur endurance athletes can incorporate some of these training strategies without hurting themselves.

You can pick up Brad’s book on Amazon, and find him over on X.