Marius Bakken is a physician, a former professional runner and two-time Olympian with a 13:06 personal best for 5000 m, and the person who developed the training approach that later became known as the Norwegian method, since used by Jakob Ingebrigtsen, Andreas Almgren and many others. We cover why he sees the muscles rather than the heart and lungs as the real limiter, how double threshold works, how to find and control your threshold with or without a lactate meter, and how much of it carries over to triathlon.
Oct 15
1 hr 16 min
With the Ironman World Championship in Kona this Saturday, this Research Roundup is a heat and humidity special for triathletes and other endurance athletes, built around four big topics instead of four single studies. How much heat and humidity each slow you down when you separate the two, what the largest reviews say about heat acclimation and whether sauna and hot baths work as well as active methods, how fast heat adaptations arrive and how fast they fade, and which in-race cooling strategies work, while also being practically feasible.
Oct 8
1 hr 26 min
Tomasz (Tomek) Kowalski is a triathlon coach with a great track record of athletes racing Kona, among them age-group world champions and podium finishers. With the IRONMAN World Championship coming up again in Kona we cover everything age-group triathletes need to know to have a successful race there, including when to fly out, training and tapering on the island, heat preparation at home, equipment choices, and pacing, fuelling and hydration on race day.
Oct 1
1 hr 33 min
Mikael Eriksson and Jack Hutchens answer listener questions, starting with a long look at how to fit a marathon into a triathlon year: when to do it, how much running it takes, what happens to the swim and the bike, and how far the long run really should be. Then questions on racing a 70.3 inside a base phase, coming back from overtraining syndrome, and whether you have to dig a hole to get supercompensation.
We do listener Q&As monthly, the last Thursday every month.
Sep 24
1 hr 26 min
David Tilbury-Davis has coached world class triathletes since 1995, among them Lionel Sanders, Ashleigh Gentle, Skye Moench, Cody Beals and Matt Hanson. In this episode we cover everything that decides whether an athlete reaches their potential except the training itself: professionalism, how you design your life around the sport, the decisions you make week to week, psychology and mindset, and the coach-athlete relationship.
Sep 17
1 hr 49 min
In today's Research Roundup we bring you four recent studies. How world-class Norwegian endurance coaches programme strength and speed, the factors determining how a runner's physiology holds up over two and a half hours of running, a defence of the critical power model written by the people who built it, and a polarised versus high-intensity trial in cyclists with a result neither of us expected.
Sep 10
1 hr 36 min
Alistair Brownlee is the only triathlete to win two individual Olympic golds, winning at home in London in 2012 and in Rio in 2016. He retired at the end of 2024 after an 18-year career, in which he also won two World Titles, four European Titles and the Commonwealth Games. He also has two second-place finishes from Ironman 70.3 World Championships. This is a conversation about how he actually trained across two decades, in particular when he was at his most dominant and changed the sport: the volume, the intensity, what he would do differently, and lots more.
Sep 3
1 hr 18 min
Listener Q&A, covering nine different questions/topics from building bike power as a runner and a collegiate swimmer moving back into triathlon, through what actually makes us fatigue during a threshold effort, to swimskins, power duration curves and lots more.
We do listener Q&As monthly, the last Thursday every month.
Aug 27
1 hr 13 min
Mikael and Jack Hutchens each bring up four things they do in their coaching practice that the research does not support, or does not support in the form they use it. Tapering, torque work, electrolytes, grey zone intervals, heat training, strength training, sprint interval training and psychology. For each one: what the evidence actually says, what the two of them do instead, and the reasoning they would defend it with.
Aug 20
1 hr 19 min
Marc Graveline is an aerodynamics consultant who works with WorldTour cycling teams as well as professional (e.g. Chelsea Sodaro, Lionel Sanders) and amateur triathletes, and road and gravel cyclists. He co-developed the Notio Konect, the first consumer on-bike aero sensor, and now develops his own device, the Gizmo. He also led the testing programme behind IRONMAN's decision to move the professional draft zone from 12 to 20 metres.
We cover how to run an aero test you can actually trust, what to test and in what order, tyres and tyre pressure, and what IRONMAN's draft-zone testing actually found.
Aug 13
1 hr 45 min
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