Black Cats Run

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 le...

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 wor...

"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 ingr...

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. Ho...

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 enl...

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 explor...

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 trainin...

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 h...

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 lov...

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 adapti...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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 ha...

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 algorith...

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 thresho...