Scientific Training for Endurance Athletes is back in stock!

For USA Orders: Please click the Amazon link.

USA / International Orders (E-Book): Apple Bookstore

International Orders (if you REALLY want a paper copy), there are additional steps:

1. Go to http://www.shipito.com and set up an account. They will give you a USA address.
2. Buy the book on the Amazon USA site.
3. Send the book to your shipito.com address and they will forward on to you using the method of your choice. They can offer better prices on shipping than I can.
4. For pricing the shipping, the package dimensions are as follows: Size is 12 inches x 9 inches x 1 inch. Weight is 1 lb 13 oz.
5. Please contact me for dimensions and weight for larger orders.

With the close of the Olympic quad and World Championships, I have openings on my roster. If you are interested in improving your performance, drop me a line at coachphil@physfarm.com. You don’t need to be elite or professional. Tell me about your background, your past results, your goals, and what you hope I can add to your program.

I also mentor coaches regarding the application / addition of the latest sports science and training techniques to their athlete’s programs. Please feel free to contact me at the above email address for details and pricing.

Although I continue to work in elite athlete performance, most of you know I am also the Director of Sports Medicine for Advocate Medical Group. Besides seeing patients from all over the world, it is my job to grow our department by recruiting the best and brightest sports physicians. I could not be more excited to report that we have been able to on-board Dr. Sara Brown and Dr. Kaleigh Suhs.

Annual Summer BBQ

Dr. Brown is a graduate of the Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine, and did both her residency and fellowship training in Chicago. Many in the Chicago running community already know her well, and she was in fact on the board of the Chicago Area Running Association for many years. She cares for weekend warriors and Olympians alike, and works out of our Ravenswood location starting July 17th. You can read more about her here.

Dr. Kaleigh Suhs is a graduate of the Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine, and also did her residency training in Chicago. I had the good fortune of recruiting Dr. Suhs as my sports medicine fellow for the 2016-2017 academic year, and can personally attest to her expertise. As a college (and current!) hockey player, Dr. Suhs has a special interest in the sport. However, she sees all athletes. In fact, Dr. Suhs is spending the first weeks of July 2017  traveling with USA Soccer in China, taking care of the junior squad. She will begin seeing patients at our Irving and Western and Park Ridge (Nesset) locations starting July 30. Dr. Suhs has also accepted an academic appointment as my associate program director for the Lutheran General Hospital Sports Medicine Fellowship Program.

You can make appointments with either Dr. Brown or Dr. Suhs by calling Advocate Sports Medicine at (847)-318-6020.

It has been a strong early season for the athletes of PhysFarm.

David and I have been hard at work engineering our athlete’s training programs to exacting standards, and the athletes have been on top of their sessions day in, day out, for months. Put these things together, and you get performances without equal from two Iowa Hawkeyes, Matt Hanson and Lesley Smith. (Well, Matt teaches at a different college, and Lesley now lives in Boulder, but they are both from Iowa. So there’s that.)

Matt Hanson crushes Ironman Texas

Saturday, May 16 saw Matt come out of the water at the Ironman North American Championships in Texas with a solid swim. He rode with the second pack on the bike, conserving his energy for what would be a blistering run. We would love to say that the run was filled with drama, but Matt simply set the pace we new he could run and he laid waste to the field. Matt banged out a 2:45 marathon to not only win the race, but claim a new course record.

Meanwhile, Sunday morning opened with Lesley Smith of Boulder, CO toeing the line at Challenge Knoxville. The Challenge Series recently began establishing footholds in the United States after many years of hugely popular races elsewhere in the world. Unsuprisingly, a field of heavy hitters turned up, including Rebekah Keat, the Wassners, and Rachel McBride.

Coming off the bike, Lesley was almost 10 minutes out of first place. It was time to unleash her secret weapon. Lesley ran 1:23 on a day when no one else broke 1:30. She was more than 4:30 out of first place with 3 miles to go. Catching McBride with 200 yards to go, she lit the afterburners and took the win. The race was so close that the Challenge twitter feed mistakenly named McBride the winner at first.

Lesley Smith triumphant in Knoxville

Other notable performances came from Heather Lendway. Knoxville was her first ever half-iron distance race. Despite this, she won the swim and finished the bike in 3rd place. She wound up finishing 8th, a strong showing for someone who has only run above 13 miles about 4 times in the past year. There are great things to come from Heather…watch this space. There was also PhysFarm amateur athlete James Haycraft, who netted an age-group win at the Xterra Southeast Championships, qualifying for Worlds.

Now, earlier in this article, we mentioned that PhysFarm engineers athlete performances. We mean that in the strictest sense of the word. Using advanced mathematical tools and algorithms, we are able to tweak the training programs of athletes with a precision others cannot. For example, we are able to use the GOVSS algorithm to understand runner power output and analyze course contours, so that we understand how our athletes will run on the flats, and on the hills. We use the Apollo system to adjust training in order to ensure an athlete is capable of a particular necessary power outputs and paces on race day.

As my British colleagues like to say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. With this in mind, it is worth taking a look at what our combination of training and technology does for our athletes. Lesley ran a 1:23 half-marathon (3:58 / kilometer pace) in Knoxville on a day when no one else could run under 1:30. What did our system predict? I’ll let a screen shot tell the story. Tasty, eh?

We predicted Lesley would run 3:58 / k. She ran exactly 3:58 / k. And won.

Game. Set. Match. PhysFarm.

Of course, we build these models for all of our athletes. (You can build them too! Download a free trial here). Sometimes, however, it’s fun to get under the hood. We did some lab testing on Matt last winter. Athletes are sometimes a bit nevous when they see all those toys for the first time. (Treadmills and carts and ergometers, oh my!) Matt was totally into it. He’s got a PhD in exercise physiology. Here’s a pic Ruth Brennan-Morrey took that day.  Matt’s incredible running has surprised a lot of people. It doesn’t surprise me at all.

People often ask me how we get these kinds of performances out of athletes. Yes, we know a lot about training. Yes, we use a lot of advanced technology to target specific performances through engineered workouts. However, the most important advice I can give you is this: You must only open up your “can of whoop-ass” during the race. If you are constantly shredding yourself in training, you will not have anything left to do something special during the race.

Matt, hauling buckets on the treadmill and collecting data.

As you train, you will improve, and as you improve you you will know you can go faster. You will feel it in your bones. You will be tempted to start crushing workouts. Resist this urge. Crush the race. Trust me on this. Or just ask Matt. Or Lesley. Or Joanna. Or Cat. Or…

Well, you get the idea. We could go on like that for quite some time around here.

We want to help you set your next personal best, whether that is on the podium of a world championship or a 10 second improvement at the local 5k. When you are ready to do something extraordinary, we’ll be ready for you. Get in touch with us at coachphil at physfarm.com.

See you at the races!

Today, Dr. David Clarke of the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT and I

A bit of page 1.

published a journal article that reviews the current state of the art in terms of the use of mathematical tools to inform the way we train. It also provides resources to help educators teach their students about these models. You can get a free .PDF of the paper at this link.

Any of you who have followed my work over the years know how much I like using these techniques to help athletes improve. Whether through my books, other articles on this website, or my grassroots or academic lecturing schedule, I think it is important to communicate these ideas and methods to the people who can best put them to use. Although triathletes tend to be early adopters of almost everything, those of us who actually work in both elite performance and academic exercise science can tell you that relatively few practitioners use these methods in other areas of sport and, importantly, in the health and fitness industries. Dr. Clarke and I decided that it was time to try to change that, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, academics have a responsibility to regularly and rigorously assess our collective knowledge, to find the strengths and the weaknesses, and to report them. Science advances because someone with a keen mind is inspired by one of the holes in our understanding, and subsequently attempts to fill it. We need to foster that process. Furthermore, we have a responsibility to expose our thoughts to scholarly criticism and suggestion. It is in this way that we improve our science. Finally, we each have a moral responsibility to try to make our own corner of the world better, and we in science and medicine can do that in particular by improving practice, and by providing helpful resources to those who teach that practice to the next generation.

Modern technology provides an immediate platform to anyone, and Dr. Clarke and I could have published our work in any number of places, including a simple blog post. With the above thoughts in mind, we chose an educational journal produced by one of the very best scientific organizations in the world. We also paid extra (out of our own pockets, not institutional funds) to ensure that the journal article would be available to anyone interested. In short, we believe you are deserving of science that has been rigorously reviewed by a panel of other scientists, even if (and especially if) you don’t work in a university or academic setting.

As the inimitable Professor Cornell West once wrote, “I am a jazz man in the life of the mind, and a blues man in a world of ideas.” Here, Dr. Clarke and I try to remix and communicate the threads of what we know and what we don’t know, and strategies for teachers to get these ideas across to students. It is our hope that this bit of ‘academic blues’ will move the field forward, and bring new people into the discussion who will have unique ideas and fresh perspectives to share.