Black Cats Run

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 unconsciou...

Shhh, it's top secret. Our first ever top secret guest episode is here. Are our mindset and ethos about how we exist in spaces of adversity limiting our ability to develop as competitors and individuals? We welcome an expert in the field of learning and development with nearly twenty years of experience to share with us how developing as a learn is shockingly similar to what we need to develop as...

Achilles, call forth Hector onto the field. Once more we bid you engage in the mighty struggle. How do people win championships? Is it a wild melee? Or is championship performance something that can be controlled or engineered? To perform uniquely we need to do unique things. We talk about the demands of a championship and how to evaluate the process of reaching that level of performance. Take up...

Games of Pain. Gladiators called to the Area. We who are about to die salute you. We provide some evidence that suggests that the blood letting of pain based training is not only unpleasant and discourages us from pursing sport long term but it also maybe is not the most effective model. If there are zones for training how do we actually identify them? We offer an example of zones developed in pra...

Endurance sports are our most unrecognized Orwellian dystopia - weakness is strength, strength is weakness. Have athletes just reached a point where simplicity is truth? Or are we too willing except structures which see the few succeed and the many fail? Maybe those are two sides of the same coin. Taking a new view of the puzzle of individual endurance sport. Combing ideas from history, psychology...

Models everywhere. I am a person not a thing. I am more than my FTP, or my Vdot. Your PR's make me look fat. Was Strava ever really a safe space? Sometimes when we train we're not training because we're training to hard and too easy all at once. What do we do with the kind of variance that we all experience as athletes? It's going to be difficult to find a balance with our variance on the one hand...

Hyenas descend in the night to rip at the bodies of a thousand broken Icaruses. Specificity is not specific. What grounds the basic premise of all of our training ideas? We suggest a different definition of specificity, uncompromisingly insist that all athletes run and bike everyday, and break down the main tenants of Daniel’s Running Formula. Color coding your trading plans with sooth your soul....

Don Quixote joins our noble quest to restore the round table and unite the Britons. Do we actually know the value of our specific sessions in training? Have you ever exchanged gazes with the mentally weak stranger in the mirror after a failed session? Maybe we don’t need to sit on the couch hating ourselves when a workout does go according to plan. The next best option could actually be the better...

Whoop and Garmin are conspiring to get you to use only ten percent of your brain. Soon our dependence on their technology will turn us into mindless, drooling, drones. Then the corporations will unleash the hidden potential of the human body and sell us to replace the engines of formula one cars. Are the technologies of athletics solved core challenges of training? Has physiological methodologies...

A trip down memory lane chaperoned by Thomas Hobbes. We tour the first graphs of training principles. We quest for the Holy Grail of endurance athletics - the one true physiological model which will finally pull the personal best time or that six watts per kilo FTP from the stone. Have you ever felt something real and been told you were imagining something? What if I told you you aren’t crazy. Thi...

We can fly, but we have to be swimming. And we breathe water but it’s gold not water. Have conventional practices about training and athletics culture in general clipped the wings of athletes? Break free of the cage. Become the machine. Unleash the animal. It feels good to fly.

Running and Cycling, forever doomed to be as lost to each other as star crossed lovers? There’s synergy waiting to be found here. These are both, at the core, far more similar than they are different. They are power to weight sports. Can we see a difference in training and culture between them as a way to better understand training overall?

Is this an exit ticket? Let the adrenaline flow. Or maybe don’t.

What’s actionable? When we train we are engaging not only a physiological mechanism but also something that is functioning in a more complex socio-emotional level. We explore how these ideas can lead to a different way to interpret training that relying on physiological models of training. Are our concepts of how to train a result of a cultural screening process that removes practices that don’t m...

Madness or method? When we look at the things we do in practice with athletics how do we know it’s going to work? Much of what we do isn’t based on the competitive optimal model that we like to think would drive the ideas of training. There’s a better way.

Athletes are expected to follow systems of training and preparation. Are these systems designed based on the rigorous and absolute standard of competitive excellence? Are systems the logical filter for alphas and betas of the sporting world? We investigate and speculate as to the foundation of the systems of athletes approach to sport.

Hedonic nihilism, bacchanalias, and fireball whiskey at the aid station join forces to cast off the heavy yoke of of the path-of-discipline. The true anathema of discipline is its rejection; or is there a plot twist ahead? Why do we see the only alternative to discipline as total culture breaking of the norms of competitive sport? Here we try to unpack how the path-of-discipline view of sport isn’...

The path-of-discipline to the land of legends. Is the purpose of sport to become superior to all others? Is it even realistic to think go sport has having a purpose, many purposes, or any purposes at all? Here we begin to explore the path-of-discipline’s approach to sport which is the driving paradigm used to explain sporting successes and failure today. In doing so we question whether or not this...

What do we mean when we talk about sport? What core attitudes or beliefs about sport are allowed into, and kept out of, our views because of the way we talk about sport? In part A of episode one we try to frame the origin of modern sport as a part of the development of modern thinking and try to imagine how that process of societal change could also impact what we think is possible or right to do...