In January, I started using Anki [https://apps.ankiweb.net/], spaced repetition software, to study for an exam. My first impression was negative. "This is too easy," I thought. "This can't be helpful." But as I read more about spaced repetition [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition], my initial

If you run all out for 10 kilometers in 30 minutes, does that mean that you can run all out for 20 kilometers in 60 minutes? No, but there is a way to make a decent estimate of a goal time.

"More is better" is almost never the case. Like nutrients, the body can only absorb what it can absorb. Anything more than that dose is wasted or, worse, counterproductive.

To maximize performance, an athlete needs to do some anaerobic training. But to optimize the anaerobic benefits, an athlete needs to have an aerobic foundation. The bigger the base, the bigger the benefit. The bigger the benefit, the better the performance.

Many athletes get suckered into believing that physical potential is a genetic lottery. That's only partially true.

Training causes fatigue and fitness to appear in sequence. Then athletes confuse the degree of fatigue with future fitness. Sometimes, it’s the opposite. I’ve had a sinus infection for three weeks. On day 17, I started taking antibiotics. The next day, I felt much better. Did the antibiotics

Climbers feel fear but cannot act on it. Practicing forced restraint widens the gap between stimulus and response. What was a tunnel becomes a decision tree. — “If I fall here,” I thought. “I could die.” I was way above my last piece of gear on a delicate mixed pitch. The

Most mornings, I make pour-over coffee. I weigh and hand-grind 20 grams of whole beans. I pre-rinse a filtered V60 cone. Then I put the grounds in the cone on a mug on a digital scale. When the water reaches ~93 degrees Celsius, I start to pour. First, I saturate

“Uh oh, you’re not going to like that,” my wife said. We were in a bookstore, and I had picked up a copy of The Sports Gene [https://www.amazon.com/Sports-Gene-Extraordinary-Athletic-Performance/dp/161723012X/] . I often sneer at discussions about genetics in sport. It’s not that I disbelieve

When I introduced an allowance to our oldest son, I used three jars: Spend, Give, and Save. The three jars represented three big-picture elements of managing money. After describing the first two, I got to the one that I was most excited about, the Save jar. “And with this jar,

Performance in an endurance event comes from the highest average speed. Training determines what the highest average speed–“race pace”–will be. The higher the race pace, the faster the time. The faster the time, the better the performance. So the more race pace training an athlete can tolerate, the

The 2018/2019 skimo season was my best ever. I finished the season sixth in Canada and went to the World Championships in Switzerland. A lot of factors contributed to that outcome, luck included. My 2018 training cycle was a big factor. It was much different than in previous years