What are your favorite books related to cycling, triathlon, or just endurance sports in general, and why?
I am looking for one for adventure racing - so if anyone has recommendations I’d love to hear them
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How bad do you want it? by Matt Fitzgerald is an awesome book about the mental aspects of endurance sports.
The brave athlete by Leslie Patterson and Simon Marshall was ok I thought. It has lots of practical exercises in it. It covers a lot of issues so it ends up being a pick and choose sort of book.
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Lise you might like This Road I Ride by Juliana Buhring. It’s not about a race but it is about her riding her bike around the world - first woman to do it. Buhring became an ultra-distance racer after that and has had some great success.
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Thank you Stephanie
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For endurance (although rowing endurance) - I enjoyed listening to The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics this summer. It made for a great listen on a long drive down to Oregon and back.
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“Rusch to Glory” by Rebecca Rusch. She goes over how she got into adventure racing through her getting into endurance mountain biking and winning leadville. Very inspiring.
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Thanks. I’ll look at that.
I am reading Roar right now. Thanks for more reading ideas.
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Just finished reading an interesting book called Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance by Alex Hutchinson. He’s a sports science journalist and the book looks at different aspects of physical limitations and includes to great historical research/science. Lots of stuff about VO2 as well as heat, fuel, mental toughness, pain, lactate threshold and hydration. What’s really interesting is that in spite of all we know, we still don’t know much of anything!
Some interesting takeaways:
Pacing is complex but it seems we judge what is sustainable by how we feel but also by how we feel in comparison to how we expected to feel at that point during the race.
Pain tolerance is both a trainable trait and a limiting factor of performance.
VO2 max is a pretty good predictor of performance.
A high fat low carb diet works just fine for endurance but if you want a good sprint you absolutely need carbs.
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Additional books:
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I just finished listening to the audiobook version of this book and found it really insightful - it isn’t fitness specific but more about building up structures to help you improve the areas you want to improve in life.
I’m also in the middle of reading this book, which has a lot of great advice for mobility and running - the same author as the Supple Leopard book
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