Chapter One: What is Endurance Mastery?
Your first step towards faster and more fulfilling endurance racing
Mastering Endurance is a publication of Campfire Endurance Coaching. We will publish a chapter-by-chapter guide to becoming a more masterful endurance athlete here on Medium. if you want to learn more about us and sign up for our newsletter, you can do so here.
What is this publication for? How is it different? What will you get out of it?
We want you to imagine your first language class, way back at the beginning of middle school. Or maybe the first tentative honks of saxophone lessons when you were ten. What information did your teachers impart to you? We’re guessing they aimed to communicate the basics: how to say your name in the new language, maybe, or how to coax any sound out of that recalcitrant woodwind. They certainly didn’t fold their arms and look at you expectantly, waiting for fluency or John Coltrane on day one, urging you to “simply go by feel.” On the other hand, they probably didn’t assault you with graphs about linguistic patterns, or the shape of the sound wave a saxophone produces when played by a master. Both your language teacher or band leader focused on some simple building blocks intended to introduce familiarity and safety, understanding that, eventually, those blocks could blossom into fluency or mastery, the student knowing the material so well that he or she could live inside of it, improvising as necessary.
In the endurance world today, two camps clamor for ascendancy, the “race by feel” army, who eschew devices or data of any kind, asserting the primacy of listening to your body. Across the battlefield, waving computers and wearables and lancets and lactate monitors, is the “race by data” army, who believe that by prostrating oneself at the altar of information, one can race by numbers on a readout, painting by numbers and never allowing the physical body or the emotional center have their say.
We believe endurance training and racing can become a spiritual practice. It can show you who you are.
As with any false dichotomy, we say “why do you have to choose?” Aligning oneself with a particular camp usually comes more from our inherent nature to be part of a tribe or a group rather than from any clear advantage either side boasts, and once someone has chosen a side they tend to lose the ability to see the benefits their rivals offer. What was at first an affinity becomes identity, and once that happens beliefs calcify into dogma, a stiffening that makes intellectual flexibility impossible. This publication will teach you how to understand what different levels of effort mean to you, both on a subjective basis (feelings, both physical and emotional) and on an objective one (data, information, the intellectual realm of thinking and analyzing). That understanding will blossom, on race day, into a flexibility that can open the doorway to performances you never thought possible. The best athletes in the world — the ones who are fluent in the languages of feeling and thinking — perform better than most not because they can generate the most watts or because they simply “feel” their way there. They perform better than most because they can assimilate large amounts of new information, both hard data and physical/emotional, and then make changes in their approach to accommodate the changing environment. Like a great musician or a master of a new language, their combination of technical prowess (scales, verbs, craft) and intuition (feeling, style, personal expressiveness) opens doors to performances they never could have imagined, back on that first day of class, tentatively honking that saxophone or pausing with the pen above the page.
We believe endurance training and racing can become a spiritual practice. It can show you who you are. For a certain group of people, sport is their creative impulse, and being active and moving your body, in the shared environment of a race, can be the art that you make in this world. Is this cheesy or new age-y or “too much?” We don’t think so. If going for a run or a ride or a row or a swim or a ski can connect you with that spring of creativity inside you, then we don’t think it’s too much at all. We think it’s just right. We want to teach you how to do the same. Please join us. Mastery feels great.
Mastering Endurance is a publication of Campfire Endurance Coaching. We will publish a chapter-by-chapter guide to becoming a more masterful endurance athlete here on Medium. if you want to learn more about us and sign up for our newsletter, you can do so here.
