The Infirmary | Fixing Broken Endurance Athletes

This comprehensive swim technique presentation reveals what really holds swimmers back and why swimming improvement is so different from cycling or running progress. As a Swim Smooth certified coach, Chris breaks down the five major swimming technique faults that prevent triathletes from swimming faster, demonstrating why swimming drills for adults require a completely different approach than other endurance sports.

Learn about the six Swim Smooth swim types and discover which category fits your current stroke patterns, from Bambinos struggling with anxiety, to Arnies trying to overpower the water, to Overgliders who want to TALK about swimming, rather...

In this candid conversation with former Campfire athlete Annie Solonika, we dive into what really matters in the coach-athlete relationship from both perspectives. Annie shares how a strong coach-athlete relationship requires clear communication and expectations from the start. As both a successful triathlete and business owner of Full Circle Stretching, Annie offers unique insights on balancing triathlon training with work and family life, showing how proper coaching can help busy athletes maintain consistency.

We explore the differences between self-coaching and working with a coach, discussing how training structure and accountability contribute to athletic development. Annie explains that...

Chris sits down with professional triathlete Ben Hoffman, who has won eight Ironmans, seven 70.3 races, and landed on the podium an unreal 28 times, one of which was the 2014 Ironman World Championships in Kona, where he finished 2nd.

The biggest takeaway from this episode, I believe, is a concept that Ben returns to several times: you simply let your body express what it has been trained to do on race day, with a slight aim for "a higher level" because you are rested.

You can follow Ben on instagram @benhoffmanracing, and watch him race at Ironman...

I have heard it a million times: a triathlete tells me “I swam and swam but it never changed my time, so I just stopped swimming.” I really feel for this athlete, since they are clearly frustrated, but there’s a better way to train for triathlon. In this show we walk through:

What goes into effective endurance training in the first place

How neglecting your swim hurts your overall triathlon performance

How you should actually train to improve your swim performances

Swim Smooth Coaches Directory for Video Swim Analysis: https://www.sw...

One of the hardest skills for any endurance athlete to master is pacing, and when you’re running a hilly event or participating in a bike race with a lot of elevation changes, pacing gets more difficult.

In this episode, Chris walks through the pitfalls athletes often fall into, the biggest of which is the “fly and die” approach where the athlete hopes to “bank” time by running harder or faster early in the race, hoping that when they inevitably slow down (because they went harder than they trained to run) that the time they banked will still keep...

“Progressive Overload” is a topic that gets tossed around a lot in endurance circles, but, just as with other topics like “FTP” or “core strength” or “recovery,” progressive overload is more nuanced and complex than it first appears.

At it’s most basic application, progressive overload is “the steady and systematic increase in training load in order to continually force an athlete’s body to adapt and develop in the ways we want it to develop,” but how we apply that concept can get hairy pretty quickly.

In this episode, Chris defines the term, walks through different method...

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 report...

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 t...

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

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 acco...

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 ma...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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

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 a...

Fatigue resistance is an idea that has been around for a long time, but it’s having a bit of a moment recently. A few companies are trying to develop fancy metrics like “durability” to measure (or, um, monetize) this concept. We don’t need to monetize it. Fatigue resistance is a simple concept, one that it is easy to track and train. This episode defines: What fatigue resistance is and isn’t Why it’s important How to evaluate it How to develop it (which is what we imagine you’re here for) We hope you enjoy this episode! Whether you do...

Chris sits down with elite amateur and Campfire Coach Emily Arcuri to talk about training and racing all the way through 32 weeks of pregnancy. Emily offers three different periods of her journey and thoughts about what you should expect if you decide to follow her example.

Chris chats with Campfire coach and professional triathlete Adam Goulet about why strength training is crucial for endurance athletes and how they can incorporate it safely and effectively in their training.

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