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

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.

“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

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

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

In 2005, I went with three friends to get our first VO2 max tests. I didn’t know what the results meant. But fourteen years later, that first test is a good benchmark, and I can make some unfortunate conclusions. When compared to two more tests that bracket six years