The Infirmary | Fixing Broken Endurance Athletes: Daily Summaries Delivered

Episode 51: Three Endurance Skills that Lead to Mastery

I see the following situation far too often: an athlete who is completely reliant on their devices, doesn’t practice their fueling, and cannot change a flat tire. This kind of reliance is deeply fragile: it doesn’t take much to break it on race day. In this show, I walk through the three most important skills to an endurance athlete’s success, and there are far more qualitative measures than quantitative. We cover pacing, fueling, and equipment proficiency, ending with practical directions to improve at all three.

Episode 50 Live from Bend Camp: David Tilbury-Davis on the Mindset and Habits Behind Long-Term Athletic Success

This episode is a live recording from Campfire's annual Bend Triathlon Training Camp, where co-coach and longtime collaborator David Tilbury-Davis sat down with campers for an open Q&A. David has coached over 30 years and worked with some of the most recognized names in the sport — Lionel Sanders, Ashley Gentle, Cody Beals, Sky Munch, Kaisa Sali, and many others — but what runs through every answer in this conversation is a conviction that coaching, at its core, is about human connection and behavioral engineering, not data dashboards. Links:Campfire Endurance 2027 Bend Training Camp: https://www.campfireendurance.com/training-campsFuelin app: fuelin.comTrimapper: trimapper.comDavid Tilbury-Davis Coaching: https://www.tilburydavis.com/Campfire Endurance coaching: campfireendurance.com

Episode 49: How to Face Your Fear w/Sports Psychologist Simon Marshall

Simon Marshall trained the brains of endurance athletes for a living, and in this conversation he makes the case that the mental side of sport is the part most of us skip — right up until it costs us a race. Recorded during the pandemic and shared again in Simon's memory, the episode digs into what actually decides how race day goes: why everyone walks to the start line a little terrified, why your brain treats one bad comment like Velcro and ten good ones like Teflon, and why "just find your passion" is mostly a myth. Simon, who wrote The Brave Athlete with his wife, five-time world champion Lesley Paterson, also hands over tools you can use this week — the alter-ego trick, microdosing dopamine, and the quiet skill of embracing the suck. It's funny, honest, and a little subversive, which is to say it sounds just like Simon. Come for the start-line nerves, stay for the reminder that getting fitter and getting to know yourself are supposed to be the same project — the whole point of sitting around the Campfire.Links to drop in (mentioned on-air)The Brave Athlete: Calm the Fck Down and Rise to the Occasion* — Simon Marshall & Lesley PatersonThe Passion Paradox — Brad StulbergPaula Reed, adventure psychologist (the "fun scale" and the 150-item adventure list)Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

Episode 48: Deliberate Practice in the Pool Leads to a TEN-MINUTE Olympic-distance Improvement

Swim improvement is slow, frustrating, and worth every minute — and this episode is proof of that. Chris walks you through Alex W.’s amazing 2:35 to 1:52/100 threshold pace improvement in today’s episode: what wasn’t working, what Chris prescribed, and how Alex took the reins and put in the hard work. We track her development step by step: the front quadrant breakdown that was costing her propulsion, the drift toward her breathing side that threatened her open water navigation, the elbow angle problem that was limiting her pull power — and the specific drills that addressed each one. Along the way, Chris explains why triathlon is an energy cascade, what deliberate practice actually requires, and why more yardage without technique work has a ceiling that most swimmers hit much sooner than they expect. If your swim has been stuck at the same pace for longer than you'd like to admit, this is the episode to listen to twice. Links mentioned in this episode:Book a swim analysis with Chris: campfireendurance.com/swim-analysisSwim Smooth (methodology and drill references): swimsmooth.comCampfire Endurance coaching (spots opening July 2026): campfireendurance.com or email chris@campfireendurance.com

Episode 47: Justin Daerr on Intrinsic Motivation, Longevity vs. Performance, and Staying in the Game

Episode 46: Fixing the Brick—Four Studies on Running Off the Bike

The difference between a well-trained bike-to-run transition and a poorly trained one is up to 10% of your run performance — and most athletes have no idea why it happens or what to do about it. In this episode, we look at four peer-reviewed studies on the physiology of brick runs, covering the nervous system disruption that starts before you even dismount, the fueling and breathing problems that peak in the first seven minutes of the run, and the biomechanical breakdown that results in the dreaded “Ironman hunchback.” You know you’ve seen that out there in the wild. You'll learn why long brick runs are a waste of training time, how riding with high variability hurts your transition runs, and exactly what a productive brick workout looks like. Practical, research-backed, and we got it in under 30 minutes!Links mentioned in this episode:Millet & Vleck (2000), British Journal of Sports Medicine — cycling-to-run transition adaptationsBonacci (2011), Sports Biomechanics — neuromuscular control in elite triathletesWalsh (2019), Sports — elite short course triathlon and transition efficiencyZwetsloot et al. (2022), BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation — prolonged cycling and running mechanical efficiencyCampfire Endurance Coaching: campfireendurance.com

Episode 45: Durability and Fatigue Resistance with Coaching Legend Joe Friel

Joe Friel — author of the Triathlete's Training Bible, co-founder of TrainingPeaks, and one of the most influential coaches in endurance sport — joins Chris Bagg for a conversation centered on durability: what it is, how it is built, and why it matters more than most athletes realize. Joe explains how he developed the concepts of heart rate decoupling and efficiency factor in the early 2000s — more than fifteen years before sports scientists gave durability a name — and walks through the three-phase training structure he uses to build durable athletes from the ground up. The conversation covers zone one and zone two training, the discipline of race-specific pacing, AI's role in coaching, and Joe's revised edition of Fast After 50, due out in June. If you work with long-course athletes, or if you are one, this episode covers the ground that determines who holds on late in a race and who doesn't. Links mentioned in this episode:Joe Friel's website: joefrieltraining.comTrainingPeaks (decoupling and efficiency factor tools): trainingpeaks.comFast After 50, revised edition — coming June 2026 (available wherever books are sold)Kolie Moore / Empirical Cycling: empiricalcycling.comSerious Training for Endurance Athletes by Rob Sleamaker and Ray BrowningCampfire Endurance coaching: campfireendurance.com

Episode 44: Triathlon Only Has Two Zones

One of the issues with the established training zone systems out there is that, very often, there are more zones than we need, particularly for multisport training and racing. When zones were first established, most of the data came from road cyclists, who have more dynamic events and different demands placed upon them while competing.In a triathlon—even a short course triathlon—the goal is a steady, moderately-hard effort that you can hold for a long time. In this monologue episode of The Infirmary, I make the case that triathletes need just two training ranges: endurance and speed. I talk about how training actually works — oxygen delivery, blood volume, capillary density, mitochondrial function, muscle fiber recruitment, metabolic efficiency — and show why the moderate and heavy exercise domains can and should be collapsed into a single endurance range for multisport athletes. I also address why a seven-zone system can actually hurt your training as a triathlete, why "anaerobic threshold" is a misleading term, and why your threshold intervals shouldn't be killing you—they are part of the endurance side of things, NOT intensity. We wrap things up with a practical breakdown of how to apply perceived exertion and training intensity distribution across a season.Links mentioned in this episode:Jesse Dukes' one-day "How to Get Good Tape" Los Angeles Workshop: https://jessedukes.com/good-tape-how-to-get-it-2/Kolie Moore FTP test and threshold discussionRyan Bolton metabolic efficiency episodeBook a free training consultation: https://tinyurl.com/mu8d8tuxJoin the Campfire Discord community: https://discord.gg/3Uq989QFX42026 Bend Camp waitlist