Sensible, world-class triathlon and endurance sport guidance arriving every Thursday. I deliver the results you want while helping you avoid training information overwhelm, bad coaching advice, and analysis paralysis. And I do it with a sense of humor, reminding ya'll to take your sport seriously...but hold it lightly.
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The Kite and The Pyramid 🪁
Published about 2 months ago • 3 min read
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.
1 MAY 2026
Chris' note—sometimes I find myself repeating the same ideas to my athletes, and when I notice that those ideas become longer posts such as the one that showed up on our Substack page yesterday (you should subscribe for free if you haven't already). This counter-intuitive error, that going hard more often than easy will make you fast, is a pervasive one in our sport, and I understand why: it seems that in order to go fast you have to train fast, but, weirdly, nothing could be further from the truth. So I wrote a children's book about it.
The Kite
A Child is wandering in the windy scrublands near their home, and they come upon a tall, unclimbable fir tree, the bottom fifty feet of the trunk branch-free. Fluttering above the tree, its string caught in the green canopy, is a beautiful kite that entrances the Child. I want that kite, they say to themselves, quietly. But the tree, they can already see, can’t be climbed, and they don’t have the resources for climbing equipment or crampons. Nor does his family own a saw that could handle the diameter of the trunk. This part of the world, though, is rocky; plenty of stones lie around that, if stacked together, just might be able to get the Child far up enough on the trunk to grasp a branch and climb the rest of the distance to where the kite string is tangled in the canopy. The kite shows no sign of crashing to the ground—this land is almost perpetually windy, and the Child knows that they would be in for a long, possibly totally fruitless wait for the kite to descend on its own.
The Tippy Tower
The Child sets about finding the most brick-shaped rocks they can find. They begin to drag the stones to the base of the tree and, spending their energy rapidly, begin to stack the stones one on top of the other. Soon, they fashion a column about ten feet high, but they have to select smaller and smaller stones just to get up to that height.
To make things more difficult, the stones are irregular, and although they can stand atop the ten-foot column, they can see that a fifty-foot tower with the materials on hand will be impossible. They know the story of Sisyphus, because this is a hard-working country, and they can see, plainly, that if they pursue this angle of attack they will suffer disappointment after disappointment, as they work too hard to build a tower too short to accomplish their goal. They go home, despondent and exhausted...[read more]
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Sensible, world-class triathlon and endurance sport guidance arriving every Thursday. I deliver the results you want while helping you avoid training information overwhelm, bad coaching advice, and analysis paralysis. And I do it with a sense of humor, reminding ya'll to take your sport seriously...but hold it lightly.
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