Black Cats Run

Chapter 9, "The River" explores the relationship between imperialism, post-colonialism, the regulation of voice, and the construction of modern endurance sports science and theory. Rather than treating physiology as a neutral body of knowledge, this chapter examines how authority in endurance culture is produced, protected, and enforced. It traces how certain ways of speaking about the body came t...

You cannot draw a picture of your cat. That's the reason you cannot train properly. Application is the hardest part of training. How do we measure training when we cannot use emulsification of the soul as the benchmark that we've put another drop in the drum? We learn to avoid fatigue at all costs, and we learn how much some people seem to love to be tired.

Don't stay hard. Training isn't supposed to be a cage match with a polar bear. It's practice with proficiency leading to improvement in what we can do with ease. The best way to train is to feel easy everyday. Easy doesn't mean slow or fast. Easy means with ease. We just have to cut bait on the romanticism to get there. It's hard to stay easy.

This is the audiobook sample for The Blood and the Rain Chapter 3 - The System Defends itself. The Blood and the Rain will be released as an ebook and paperback in July 2025. The Audiobook is scheduled to be released by the end of the summer. Enjoy.

July 2025, Black Cats Run Founder and Host, Tristan Black-Ingersoll will be releasing his book The Blood and the Rain . This is the audiobook preface to The Blood and the Rain. It introduces the core argument of the book: that endurance performance isn’t limited by physiology alone, but by the brain’s regulation of effort, fatigue, and threat. The book builds on ideas explored in 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,...

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 🍋 without shaking the lemon tree. Try something different for your new year's resolution. Dump your FTP based training and work on training based on lactate threshold. Or, keep on keepin' o...

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. Wh...

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 prac...

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. I...

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 so...

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 focu...

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...

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. Turn...

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 r...