Many athletes get suckered into believing that physical potential is a genetic lottery. That’s only partially true.
Does more fatigue mean more fitness?
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 help? The order of events makes it […]
The best thing I learned from climbing
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.
To perform or protect? Which is better?
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 the grounds with 40g of […]
Genetic potential? Excuses matter more.
“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. I often sneer at discussions about genetics in sport. It’s not that I disbelieve that genes set our limits. They do in an absolute sense. What I despise […]
“When can I stop easy training?”
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,” I said with glee. “This […]