The Infirmary | Fixing Broken Endurance Athletes

Sports scientist and triathlete Tash Cooper-Smith from Precision Fuel & Hydration joins The Infirmary to demystify one of endurance sport's most confusing topics: fueling and hydration. Tash breaks down sweat testing, sodium concentration, carbohydrate intake, gut training, and the actual science behind cramping — and why the answer to most athletes' fueling problems is rarely as complicated as they make it. She also shares the story of her own athletic journey, from competitive gymnastics to Kona qualifier in four years, and what that experience taught her about personalizing nutrition for performance. Links mentioned in this episode:Jesse Dukes' one-day "How to Get Good Tape" Los Angeles Workshop: https://jessedukes.com/good-tape-how-to-get-it-2/Precision Fuel & Hydration: https://www.precisionhydration.comPrecision F&H free sweat rate calculator and spreadsheet: precisionhydration.comFollow Tash on Instagram: @tash.csFollow Precision F&H on Instagram: @precisionfandhBook a free 20-minute video call with a Precision F&H sports scientist: precisionhydration.com

Most athletes swing between two bad options when things get hard: they back off because something in their brain, body, or heart says “too much,” or they panic, push too hard, and blow up. In this episode of The Infirmary we name the productive space between those two poles — the growth zone — and give you a practical tool to train your ability to stay there. Chris draws on his own racing career, including a painful lesson from Ironman Canada 2012, to explain why learning to sit with discomfort is a crucial and trainable skill, not a personality trait. The episode ends with a three-round guided breathwork session designed to put you face-to-face with that exact discomfort, so you can practice handling it before you're in a race or in a tough workout. Links mentioned in this episode:Campfire Endurance Substack: campfireendurance.substack.comBend Camp1:1 Coaching with Chris: campfireendurance.com

Ryan Bolton is an Olympian, competing at the first Olympic Triathlon in 2000, and he is also a long course champ, winning Ironman Lake Placid in 2002. He coaches America’s top-ranked short-course triathlete, John Reed, and coaches or has coached Olympic Morgan Pearson, triathlon legend Ben Hoffman, recent star Sam Long, and many, many others. Ryan and I talk about a huge range of topics, including artificial intelligence (AI) in the coaching space, why “metabolic efficiency” isn’t anything you need to really pay attention to because it will happen as you get fit, and what it means to focus on “$100,000 wins” instead of “$500 wins.”You can find Ryan at https://boltonendurance.com/ and on his social media accounts: @coachryanbolton and @boltonendurance. You can (and should!) listen to my interview with Ben Hoffman, whom Ryan Coached for most of Ben’s career.

Coaches and athletes talk about the semi-mythical “flow state” a lot, but there is precious little information about how to achieve flow state. Those same coaches and athletes seem to leave it up to chance, but as you all (I hope) know, hope is not a strategy!In today’s episode, which is the companion piece to the guided meditation just below this one in the feed, we talk about ways to practice presence in your training and racing, since all that flow state is is a state of heightened presence in the moment, when distractions and obstacles seem to fall away. If you read last week’s Substack post, you’ll see the connection here to getting away from thinking, because when we think we tend to make judgments, and if you are judging you are reflecting or ruminating, not present in the moment.The episode opens with a real athlete meltdown (the kind most of us have had at some point) to explore how perception and self-judgment are the first things standing between you and your best performance. From there, we make a connection between traditional meditation and the way you approach a hard interval — and explains why those two things are basically the same skill. You don't need an app, a cushion, or a monastery. You need your next workout and a willingness to notice where your brain actually goes when things get hard.Resources and links mentioned:The companion guided meditation episode CAMPHow to Change Your Mind by Michael PollanChris's Substack post: "Getting Away from Bad"Book a consultation with Campfire Endurance

The companion piece to Episode 40, this is is a guided meditation that will help you discover what your brain and body wants to do during a difficult interval or during a race. Practice this meditation to improve your ability to maintain a wide, soft, presence that improves your chances of accessing flow state in your training, racing, and life.Book a free training consult with Chris here: https://tinyurl.com/3b8shdav

Endurance coaching legend Gordo Byrn joins us to discuss his return to racing after a 10-year break. The 2002 Ultraman World Champion and author of From Lemon to Legend breaks down his training philosophy that led to a 9:03 at Challenge Roth. We explore why consistency matters more than any specific workout protocol, how he rebuilt his aerobic base starting with workouts so easy he didn't believe they'd work, and why most athletes overcomplicate their training. Gordo shares his "10, 20, 50" protocol and explains how patient application of ridiculously easy training builds the efficiency required for world-class endurance performance. Whether you're returning to the sport after time away or struggling to maintain consistency, Gordo offers a masterclass in sustainable high-performance training from someone who's mentored a generation of endurance coaches.Gordo’s book: https://tinyurl.com/2376uex4Gordo’s Substack: https://feelthebyrn.substack.com/

For well over the first half of my professional career, I was labeled an “emotional athlete.” That label seemed to mean, well, something else. In this case that “something else” appears to have been “undisciplined,” if the describer was being nice, or “riding like a stupid asshole,” if the describer wasn’t concerned with hurting my feelings. Faced with this description, which wasn’t ever really elucidated further until later in my career, I set about eradicating the problem. I had a problem with pacing, was the coaching feedback I probably should have received, but without clear guidance on how to pace better I found myself falling into the same pattern: starting too hard in the swim and having to slow down after 2-300m and losing the main pack, burbling self-recrimination to myself for the rest of the swim leg, before climbing out of the water alone and…repeating the exact same pattern on the bike: riding too hard to “catch up,” and then, successful or not at catching up, blowing to bits on the run.In this episode we explore why we make decisions that don’t serve us as athletes, on and off the race course. We look at how fear was the prevailing emotion behind my explosion at Canada in 2012, and how I would have handled it differently, had I the tools. I hope this episode helps someone determine the shadows they have that are driving behaviors that they don’t like.The Mankind Project accountability exerciseChat with Chris about your emotional game, whatever your sport.Learn about CAMP May 29-June 2