Welcome to our weekly gathering around the campfire. This free communique will level up your endurance skills in ten minutes, twice a month. Forwarded this message? You can sign up for these emails by clicking here.

8 JAN 2026

It's that time of year when everyone is talking about goals: how to set them, how to achieve them, and by this point you can probably rattle off the S.M.A.R.T. acronym by rote memory (except can someone clear up whether "A" is for "adjustable" or "achievable?" And if it's achievable then why is "R" "realistic? Asking for a friend...)

But there's a problem with setting your goals this way.

This process leaves out a crucial ingredient. You.

We tend to set goals thinking we know that we want something: a certain level of income, a certain race result, a certain relationship, a certain pair of socks.

But do you actually know if those goals come from your own values, or ones the world holds and you're simply borrowing, because you think that's what you're supposed to do? This is rampant in the endurance sports world and particularly triathlon, where most athletes seem to think that longer is more worthwhile, more valuable, more admirable. You only have to bear witness to the thousands of memes out there with robotic athletes repeating over and over "Did you know I'm training for an Ironman?" to see that the rest of the endurance world recognizes that triathletes have a problem with distance = status.

But what if distance isn't part of what you value as an athlete or a person? If you simply fall into what the rest of the endurance world thinks is valuable, you're going to spend a lot of time training for something that, when you arrive at race day, will feel...empty.

There's another way.

Values -> Process -> Outcome -> Emotions

This is an exercise I learned in another part of my life and I adjusted for our world. I was taking a class on emotional connection, and the instructor asked us to visualize our perfect partner, someone that felt ideal to us, and had us feel the feelings that being connected with that person would bring us.

Then he pulled the rug out from under us.

"If you spend your life trying to locate those emotions in another person, you will never find the emotional connection you're looking for. YOU need to find a way to give YOURSELF those emotions, first."

Ouch. And accurate.

So here's what I want you to do, minus the rug pull

1. Think of your BIG outcome goal for 2026. And even though we're taught to ignore/avoid outcome goals, we need them in order to actually know what we're aiming at when we spend hundreds of hours training. So don't worry about it. Write it down: sub-2:45 Olympic distance, sub-5 70.3, 9:30 Ironman, 16' 5k, make the winning move at that stage race in May, top-200 at the American Birkebeiner.
2. Close your eyes. Visualize coming into the finishing chute and seeing your goal time on the finish line, or realizing you've made that winning break, or that you're well within those top 200 other athletes. Hear the crowd. Feel the sweat or the cold on your body. What does the air taste like and smell like? What do YOU taste like and smell like? Really really put yourself in the world of that situation. Even if you get nothing else out of this experience, visualizing success will already move you on the path towards your goal.
3. Now feel the emotions you imagine feeling in that moment. Pride? Gratitude? Satisfaction? Elation? Bravery? If you don't own or use an emotion wheel. Now's the time to download one so you can get familiar with emotions beyond Mad/Sad/Glad/Afraid/Ashamed/Proud (the thumb piano of male emotional range). If you need one here's a good one.
4. Now we're gonna take a sharp turn. When in your life have you felt those EXACT emotions before? Birth of your children? Graduation from an institution? Success at a job? Success in your family? After helping a friend? Volunteering on a worthy project? Put yourself in THOSE shoes again for a few minutes and feel your emotional history course through you.
5. Let's keep following that thread: what led to that success in your life? What values do you hold that got you that success? Good communication and listening skills? Problem-solving? Compassion? Empathy? Positivity? Humility? Support? Progress over perfection? Deliberation? Honesty? Transparency? If you're not familiar with the range of human values, you can find a good list here. Write them down.
6. Believe it or not, following the same values you already have will help you in your quest for your outcome goal. Here's why. You have already done amazing things with the values that you carry. Maybe you still have work to do making those values real in your life, but if you approach your training valuing problem-solving, humility, progress over perfection, honesty with yourself and your coach, empathy, discipline, compassion for yourself and others, or anything else you've written down, you can be 100% sure that your outcome goal is for you, not for the rest of the world. Your values lead you to a certain process in your training, and as we already know from many other goal-setting exercises out there, focusing on process leads to the outcome we want, but ignoring process and simply focusing on outcome tends to hollow us out and leave us enervated and confused. And if you let your values -> process, process -> outcome, that outcome will deliver those same emotions you imagined at the beginning of this exercise.
7. Finally, let's make it real by doing some arts and crafts! You can see that above I crafted a coat of arms with my values on it and a few other pieces of iconography that are important to me. If you want to know more about mine, just drop me a reply here and I'll let you know about my Two Wolves. You can use an online illustrator such as Canva, or you can grab a piece of paper and some markers and have a blast that way. If you need some inspiration about what goes into a coat of arms, you can learn more here.​
8. Finally, post it on social media and tag @campfire_endurance with the hashtag #endurancecoatofarms. I will pick one random post to get a brand bundle of Campfire swag mailed directly to you.

Let me know if you performed this exercise and what you learned!

Kit Store is Open!

As you learned Monday, 2026 kits are available now! You don't have to be a Campfire athlete to rock our kits, and gosh they are BEAUTIFUL, so why not add one to your collection? We've shifted to Castelli for our 2026 kits, and I couldn't be happier about the change.

But don't delay—once the store closes 1/31/26, they are gone forever.

As always, thanks for reading.

If you found today's newsletter helpful, consider SHARING IT.

Forward this email to a friend, roll it up and put it in a bottle, send it via semaphore…we’re grateful any which way.

—The Counselors at Campfire Endurance

Presented by Campfire Endurance Coaching

Today's newsletter is presented by Campfire Endurance Coaching.

We help endurance athletes improve their results (get FASTER), find more joy in the process of getting faster (get HAPPIER), and achieve lifelong wellbeing through sport (get HEALTHIER).

Our company has two major services:

• ​One-to-One Coaching: fully customizable, high-touch coaching built for your life and your goals. Our coaches carry a maximum of 15 athletes so you know you and your goals are always a prioity.
• ​Training Camps and Clinics: immersive multi-day and single-day events aimed at getting you the most improvement in the shortest amount of time.

If any of those sound like something you would like to take advantage of, you should consider booking a 45-minute FREE coaching and training consultation with us​