Every piece starts with a number we went and checked — gear, pacing, travel, physiology, and the physics underneath.
Holding a third of your usual training preserves your aerobic fitness almost entirely. That one finding removes the rest-versus-fitness tradeoff — and frees up the only weeks of the year when you can afford to get temporarily worse.
Elite podiums cluster in a range, and the range means almost nothing — because the three disciplines pull your b…
The one- and two-week camps amateurs actually do sit at or below the noise floor of the test used to measure the…
The longer flight is often the easier one. Direction beats distance, and most athletes plan it backwards.
Often yes, and it has almost nothing to do with willpower. It is heat, and the fact that you never stop pedaling…
Ultra runners win on pickles, chips, and flat Coke. Triathletes pay ten times as much for the same three ingredi…
A swim skin saves a non-wetsuit racer maybe 20 seconds. Swimming the start too hard can cost you minutes — on th…
Racing at 5,400 feet costs an unacclimatized triathlete roughly 25 minutes over a half-distance race. The surpri…
The “flats bike plus climbing bike” answer costs about $11,000. Changing the cassette and chainrings costs about…
It sounds like a pro affectation. In the wind tunnel it is worth more than a new aero helmet, and that is the su…
One mounting spot quietly costs you watts. Another can make you faster than riding dry. Same bottle, opposite re…
A few watts, not a transformation. And the scariest numbers tend to come from the people selling chain wax.
Puncture-proof tires feel like the safe choice. The math says you are paying a guaranteed tax to avoid a rare, s…
Same engine, same effort. The right setup is worth the better part of half an hour, and almost all of it is aero…
The cheapest watts in cycling are on your body, not your bike. Aero socks are the meme; the hierarchy is the les…
A disc is real free speed. It's also the worst money you can spend on speed, and four cheaper upgrades each beat…
The famous 4% was measured at sub-3-hour marathon pace. At the pace most age-groupers actually race, the benefit…
Transfers cause 39% of all mishandled baggage — and a bike box is the bag you least want mishandled. Fewer legs…
Changing one variable — where the athlete flies from — moved the travel difficulty on 73 of 196 races. Not one c…
An audit of 330 race-travel routings found 38 that no longer existed. The failures weren't random — they cl…
The upgrade buys back something real. It just isn't the thing the marketing implies, and the cheap version captu…
Domestically the three options cost about the same. The real question is whether you can race someone else's fit…
Ask anyone who has done both: watching a long-course triathlon is harder than racing one. Here is how to prepare…
For years the smart qualifier picked a small, soft field. For 2026 Ironman rebuilt the system to kill exactly th…
The lost-momentum panic is mostly a myth. The re-acceleration is trivial, and the forced rest can hand some of i…
The scariest part of a first triathlon is the unknown. The calculator turns it into a number you can plan around…
Most blow-ups happen because athletes race the full like a long 70.3. The intensity drops, and the late-race fad…