Last week the family & I escaped the rain & ensuing mud pit for the weekend at our usual spot by the beach. For dinner at the local, we ordered fish (whole), lamb, pasta, and two side dishes. The waiter looked at us. We looked at each other. There was a pause that contained, I think, about three years of dietary recalibration neither of us had quite completed. And it got us wondering how different life would have been without continuously living in an energy deficit.

The sports nutrition world has decided, collectively, that lots helps lots and more helps more as far as carbs are concerned. We’ve gone from the EnergyBar plus hope era, saving a flat Coke for the final 30 minutes so you don’t come crashing off the sugar high before the finish line, to athletes taking about new “insert personal best” grams per hour.

Oscar Wilde said the first thing you lose on a diet is your good mood.

He was being generous. What you actually lose is the buffer between a thought and a reaction. That half-second where a reasonable person considers whether something is worth the energy. I didn’t have that. What I had was a blood glucose level somewhere south of functional and very firm opinions about other people’s driving.

Emma and I used to joke about it even then, which was either emotionally intelligent or a survival strategy. Probably the latter. The beach dinner brought it all back - not heavily, more like watching old footage of yourself and shaking your head in disbelief. We sat there laughing. The reactions. The certainty. The absolute conviction that every minor inconvenience was genuinely, objectively wrong and required immediate comment.

It turns out a significant portion of my personality was just hunger with a strong sense of justice.

So while the sports world has moved to treating aid stations like an all-you-can-eat buffet, I’ll admit I watch the whole thing with a degree of wistfulness. Not because I miss the racing. More because I still can’t quite talk myself into eating like the current trends are suggesting gets the best performance. The deficit remained a habit long after the sport stopped requiring it, which is either discipline or a very specific kind of vanity. I lean toward the latter.

But if the current generation is going through a week’s worth of gels before lunch, I hope at least that they are slightly more pleasant to be around. Better for their relationships. More tolerant of strangers coming to sit on their wheel during an easy ride. The diabetes risk might be worth it.

Jan.

He could outsource all the chores and have all the comforts. He just doesn’t want to.

I remember buying the car. The house. Genuinely convinced each one would feel like an arrival of sorts. And they did, for a while. Then you’re just the person who owns those things, and the things need maintaining, and at some point you’re working to keep the stuff rather than the other way around.

Eliud never seemed to need to find this out for himself. I’m not sure if that’s either wisdom or a very particular kind of luck. Possibly both.

He’s also, for what it’s worth, exactly as you’d hope he would be. Maybe you should meet your heroes after all.

Eliud’s Episode’s

up.

Jan.

Sabastian Sawe. 1:59:30. The first official sub-two-hour marathon in history.

The second-place finisher, Yomif Kejelcha, ran 1:59:41. His marathon debut. Third place, Kiplimo, also went under the previous world record. The women’s top three were separated by fourteen seconds, all under 2:16, Assefa lowering her own record to 2:15:41. On the same morning. On the same course.

And let’s talk about Sawe’s second half for a sec. He ran 59:01. One European has run faster for a standalone half marathon, no American ever has. For him it was the second half. That’s not just a barrier falling. That’s a different kind of human performance than the one we were looking at a week ago.

Everyone will mention Bannister, and maybe Sawe has finally retired him from the corporate speaking circuit. Fifty years of keynote appearances. Finally done.

The map of what’s possible has been redrawn. Marathon running now has a number to aim the imagination at. Not 2:00:35 but 1:59:30 - and Kejelcha’s post-race interviews suggest there’s more in the tank. Seeing someone else break a barrier gives you permission to push past the limit you assumed was yours. The proof of possibility unlocks the next level.

I never broke a major round number in triathlon. The 8-hour Ironman mark, the kind of figure that lives in your head on hour five of a long ride, made other people’s careers. I know what it’s like to chase a ceiling someone else defines. And I know the particular shift that happens when it falls - not defeat, exactly, but recalibration. The question changes. It stops being whether and starts being how far.

In my opinion the women’s sub-8 Ironman is next. The progression is there, the conditions keep arriving, the field is there (and as I wrote last week, I think this is key!). What Sunday did was remind everyone paying attention that these things happen faster than the armchair experts allow for.

From now on, every major marathon result gets measured against two hours. Won? What was the time. Missed it? By how much. The number has become the standard the way eight hours was in Ironman - the thing every result sits above or below, whether the athlete cares about it or not. Sawe just handed the whole sport a new ruler.

The evidence of what round numbers do to our physiological performance is fascinating. They’re not just markers but often function as ceilings - psychological ones that operate below conscious thought. You train toward them, pace yourself relative to them, measure every effort against them. When they disappear, something that was constraining you disappears with them. Not just for the elites. For anyone who has ever had a time on a course they’ve raced before, a time in a pool, a personal mark that weirdly started organizing all the efforts that came after it.

Sawe’s comment after the finish: he thought he could go a minute faster.

You won’t know if you don’t go.

Jan.

Everyone wants things. To get fit, loose weight, get the next deal, better job or some version of that.

Simon Squibb left home at 15. No money, no job, social services told him there were more urgent cases and showed him the door. He started a gardening company. Not because he’d always dreamed of mowing lawns. Because he needed to eat.

He’s now the most followed business creator in the UK, ahead of Richard Branson. He grew up in a town where the ceiling they gave him was the local Nissan factory.

I often get asked how to keep going during setbacks and the short answer to close the gap between wanting something and needing it to happen. Wanting is free. You can want to qualify for Kona, want to start a business, want to get fit for years without it costing you a single uncomfortable morning, let alone years of consecutive ones.

Needing closes that gap.

For Simon it started as survival. But he’s honest that it shifted. At some point the need stopped being about money and became about the feeling of helping someone, the idea of his son watching what he does and drawing conclusions.

I’ve watched this in sport my whole career. The athletes who made it were seldom the most gifted. They were often just the ones who’d found something they genuinely couldn’t leave on the table. Sometimes that was circumstance. Sometimes it was just who they were.

Simon and I talked about whether you can find that before life forces it on you.

Jan.

In my spare time I still like to keep track of the sport, now probably more than I ever did as an athlete. Looking through the results of Ironman Texas it occurred to me how much the sport has developed in a relatively short time. My first world record from Roth in 2016 - 7:35:39- would have been a sprint finish for around 12th place in The Woodlands last Saturday.

Eight national records fell on that course. Norway, USA, Spain on the women’s side. Belgium, France, USA, Canada, Great Britain, Poland on the men’s. Blummenfelt finished in 7:21:24 - second fastest Ironman in history, his Cozumel mark now only arguable given that race had a current-assisted swim. With 16 kilometres of run remaining, he and Marten Van Riel were separated by 10 seconds. Ten seconds. In a race lasting more than seven hours. He won by 1:32.

Jelle Geens - reigning 70.3 World Champion, making his first full-distance start - ran with the best athletes in the world for 30 kilometres before his body decided the lesson would have to wait for another day. That’s long-course. You win or you learn.

Another way to look at records is that they don’t really belong to the people whose names are attached to them. They belong to the sport. A record is a snapshot of what’s possible at a specific moment in time. It says: this is where we are today. It says nothing about tomorrow. I held one once. It was the greatest honour. It was also always only borrowed.

The easy explanation for falling times is technology - and it’s not wrong. Bike engineering has moved considerably. Carbon shoes, aero equipment, swimskins that barely resemble what we raced in a decade ago. Nutrition science has shortened the gap between what athletes attempt and what their bodies can actually sustain across seven-plus hours. These things matter.

The depth of the field matters more. When Lovseth is chasing Knibb all day, or when Blummenfelt knows Van Riel is 10 seconds back with 16 kilometres left. And Van Riel knows Stornes is closing behind him, and Stornes knows half a dozen other athletes are running sub-2:35 marathons somewhere on the same course - everyone goes faster. Not because of equipment. Because of each other. The standard pulls people through thresholds they wouldn’t find alone.

Roger Bannister didn’t run 3:59 because of better shoes. He ran it because the idea that it was impossible had started to crack. Once a crack appears, it widens fast. Eight national records in a single morning in Texas is a crack widening in real time.

The sport is in a remarkable place. The women’s field winning in times that would have been overall winning times not that long ago. The depth behind the leaders, the age groupers posting times that would have been competitive at pro level fifteen years ago,. All of it moving, all at once.

I don’t know whose name will be on the record next year.

Neither do they.

Jan.

Dandapani reminded me of something I used to do without thinking about it. Early in my career, a long run was just a long run. No earphones, no podcast, nothing between me and the effort. Somewhere along the way that changed. Now nobody just runs. Nobody just rides. Every session comes with a playlist, a podcast, an audiobook - something to take the edge off the silence.

Which is fine. Both have their place. But Dandapani’s logic is hard to argue with: you become good at whatever you practice. If every training hour is spent with your attention somewhere else, that’s the skill you’re building. Being somewhere else. I get that it’s a fine line at times between having enough motivation to get the session done in the first place or extracting the absolute maximum you could, but I find it helpful to be aware of the difference.

There’s also a practical problem for anyone racing long course. Ironman doesn’t allow headphones. So if your entire preparation has been one long podcast binge, race day is the first time you’ve had to sit alone with yourself for eight, ten, twelve hours. That’s a bad moment to discover you can’t.

I’ve once again started going out for the occasional run or ride with nothing - no phone, no earphones - not as a discipline exercise, just to practice the thing Dandapani says actually matters. Keeping your attention where you put it.

A good skill to have.

Full conversation is this week’s episode. Worth a listen - preferably with your phone face down.

Jan.

Three athletes, three separate disasters, one collective response from the internet. Come back stronger.

I’ve seen that phrase so many times I started wondering where it actually came from. It was once literally accurate. American football in the 1960s didn’t include weight training. It wasn’t part of the programme. Then injured players, stuck on the sideline with nowhere to be, started wandering into weight rooms. They found something that worked. When they returned to the field, they were physically stronger than when they’d left. The phrase described an actual phenomenon. A broken bone had accidentally pointed someone towards a training method they’d never tried.

That’s not what people mean when they type it now. Now it’s reflex. The comment you leave so the athlete knows you care. Which is fine - people mean well. But as a plan, it’s not much.

I’ve had five covers of a German triathlon magazine under some version of the word “comeback.” I didn’t count them at the time. But it does mean I’ve had to actually think about what coming back looks like in practice, not just gesture towards it.

The first thing I noticed, every time: forced rest is often the recovery you’d been refusing yourself for months. Athletes are not good at rest. We treat it as something happening to us rather than something we’re doing. Two weeks off running because of a muscle strain is two weeks of adaptation you’d been putting off since November. The body doesn’t know the difference between planned rest and imposed rest- it just gets on with it.

The second thing: whatever the injury isn’t touching, you can train. A shoulder may not stop you running specific hill intervals. A knee may not stop you in the pool or on upper body work. Targeted sessions in an area you’d been neglecting anyway - because you were always too tired, always prioritising the key sessions - suddenly becomes the main session. Athletes who do this well come back with a strength imbalance corrected, a weakness quietly upgraded.

The third is stranger, and the science behind it still surprises me, despite having instinctively having practiced it so many years. When you visualise movement - properly, with focus, running the specific motor pattern in your head - the premotor cortex activates in nearly the same way as when you actually perform it. MRI studies on immobilised athletes show that regular visualisation measurably reduces strength loss during recovery. Your brain doesn’t fully distinguish between doing the thing and vividly imagining doing it. It’s a difficult concept to believe, because if it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t feel like training.

So stop watching other people’s highlight reels. Go make your own.

Until next week,

Jan.

That stopped me. Guilty.

She was trying to win a bike race. She went full gas into a corner, took a risk that didn’t pay off, and her first emotion was that she’d let people down. Her team, her sponsors, the riders who went down with her.

Her coach sent one line back: without risk, it’s not top sport. And apparently that was enough.

What I found fascinating wasn’t the crash. It was that someone at that level - Tour de France Femmes winner, one of the best in the world - still had to be reminded that the attempt was the right call. That going for it and failing is just what top sport looks like from the inside, even when it looks reckless from the outside.

The full conversation is this week’s episode. We get into the crash, the guilt, what she was actually thinking on that final climb in the Tour, and why she ripped her gloves off mid-race to win a stage.

Jan.

My dad called a few nights ago and as always, he’s reliably good for one thing: the observation you didn’t ask for but needed. This time it was short. “Jan,” he said, “you do realise you’re no longer the future.”

He was not wrong. I’m forty-four. I’ve won the races. I’ve done the thing. By the strict definition of a Future Leaders Summit, I am here as a cautionary tale with a nice title. But it made me think of who motivated me when I was just starting out.

My PE teacher was the first person who ever told me I had nothing going for me.

I was maybe fifteen. We were at the end of another session where I had finished reliably in the middle of the pack. Not last, which would at least have been memorable. He pulled me aside and told me, with the resigned sincerity of someone who actually believed they were helping, that apart from stubbornness, I really didn’t have much to work with.

He wasn’t wrong. He just wasn’t being kind about it either.

I’ve been given more generous compliments since. Better reviews, bigger stages. But I have never received a piece of information more useful than that one. Not only because it was almost completely correct, but because it made me want to prove him wrong.

Stubbornness isn't a backup trait. It isn't what's left when the talent runs out. It becomes the thing. There were people I've raced against who had more natural ability than me, and there were many. Stubbornness I would argue is driven by a need rather than a want. When a positive outcome really is your only option. Because giving up hurts so much more than whatever you have to endure to get past this moment. I needed to keep pushing if I wanted any chance of being able to bear looking at myself in the mirror.

The thing about PE teachers is that they’re never just PE teachers. Everyone has one: a coach, a boss, a relative at Christmas dinner who’s had one too many and decides to share their honest assessment of your prospects. Mine happened to wear a tracksuit and smell of stale coffee. Yours probably had a different costume.

What they all share is a spectacular lack of imagination about other people’s ceilings. They’re not malicious, mostly. They just can’t conceive of what they haven’t done themselves. The mistake is letting their limitations become yours. The better move, the only move worth making, is to file it away, say thank you, and let the doubt do what doubt does when you point it in the right direction.

It’s the best free fuel you’ll ever get.

Until next week,

Jan.

Lucy Charles-Barclay has never thought any of this through, because she’s never needed to. She told me she currently has a goal she’s 99% certain she’ll miss. Not 60%. Not probably won’t get there. Ninety-nine percent. She needs to swim faster than she’s ever swum in her life, fresh from surgery, while also training like an Ironman athlete.

She’s doing it anyway.

Not because she’s reckless and not because she’s delusional. Because she reframes it into something positive: the things you achieve just below the audacious goal are things you never would have reached at all if you’d aimed lower. The 99% failure carries 100% of the upside.

This is the same woman who DNF’d in Kona, basically when it was her race to loose and won 70.3 Worlds four weeks later. She went into her bubble, blocked out everything, and quietly did the work while the rest of the world wrote her off.

We talked about all of it. The Commonwealth Games, the Kona implosion, what she actually thinks about when it gets hard, and why public failure turned out to be the least frightening thing that could have happened to her.

It’s out now on Frodeno Going Mental.

What team are you on: “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” or “prepare until it’s perfect”?

After last week’s newsletter and showing a few of the 30 year evolutions, I thought I’d continue and share some more ideas from the coaching summit. Namely, what has not changed and I hope won’t be entirely replaced in the future either.

The Solo man had no coach. Conviction got him to the start line, and apparently across the finish. But somewhere between starting and becoming the best version of what you’re capable of, most of us need someone else to see us more clearly than we can see ourselves.

I’ve had five coaches. None of those relationships lasted forever. And I could not have made it, not in the same way, without every single one of them.

Karoly was my first. I arrived as a protected only child and he put me straight to the bottom of the pecking order. No special treatment, no shortcuts. But he rewarded effort before he rewarded times, which for a boy who had everything to learn was exactly the right order

.

Each coach after him gave me something different. A home in a new country. A national programme that taught me no single person builds a champion. An Olympic gold built on shared obsession. And eventually, someone who showed me that the outer results and the inner work are not separate projects.

Five coaches across thirty years. None of those relationships lasted forever, not because they failed, but because they worked. You outgrow a coaching relationship the same way you outgrow a version of yourself. The best coaches seem to understand this. They’re not trying to keep you. They’re trying to make themselves unnecessary.

Very little of that shows up in any data. Not because the data isn’t useful, it absolutely is, but because the best coaching moments I’ve experienced on either side of the relationship came from reading the human first and the training plan second. Knowing when to push. And knowing, just occasionally, when to put the oh so perfect plan down and ask how someone is actually doing.

Building a training programme has never been easier. A decent one is genuinely a few prompts away, and I say that without irony, the technology is impressive. But every algorithm is built to keep you engaged, which means it is also built to tell you what you want to hear. A good coach is not. A good coach has seen enough athletes to know the difference between an excuse and a reason, between a bad week and a pattern, between someone who needs pushing and someone who needs the opposite. That kind of knowledge doesn’t come from data. It comes from having lived through the process, or being willing to go through it with you.

That’s what hasn’t changed in thirty years. Not the science, not the plans, not the technology. The person standing next to you who refuses to let you be less than you’re capable of. That’s still worth more than any programme written for an athlete who isn’t you.

I’m off to enjoy some spring weather. Until next week,

Jan.

I never had a name for that. Just a feeling I recognised when it arrived. A race opening up, a moment to move, and something in me that was ready for it without quite knowing it would come.

Last week I sat down with Vali Höll. Four-time downhill mountain bike world champion, 23 years old, and someone who by her own admission needs plan A, plan B, and plan C before she feels comfortable. She asks her coach, her physio, and if the two disagree, a third person. Maximum preparation. Every variable considered.

But then she said this: she knows her life is already planned in advance. She just follows along. Even the decision to train, to risk, to push… She believes that was already written. We’re passengers, she said. We follow the plan, more or less.

What strikes me is that the obsessive preparation and the surrender aren’t opposites. One enables the other. You don’t get to be a passenger unless you’ve done the work to be ready for wherever the road goes. The planning isn’t about controlling the outcome. It’s about making sure that when the moment arrives, you’re not fighting it.

This is why I love the conversations a podcast allows me to have. Vali is 23 and she’s already figured it out and put it into words. Safe to say it took me quite a bit longer.

The full conversation is out now on Going Mental, wherever you find your podcasts.

I found it going down a YouTube rabbit hole late at night. A Solo lemonade ad from the 1980s, a man built like a wardrobe, moustache immaculate, sprinting what the caption assured me was a marathon. Laughter all around. Laughing at the realisation that I am the logical conclusion of whatever that man started.

He is the Marlboro man of our sport. I came after him.

Our sport has changed beyond recognition in thirty years, and that ad is the cleanest possible evidence. Not because he was wrong about fitness, but because nobody had told him yet to complicate it. He just went. No score to check, no algorithm to consult. Just an extraordinary amount of forward momentum and, well, excellent hair.

The nutrition tells the same story from both ends. I regularly rode four to five hours on what a nutritionist had decided was sufficient: some almonds. Fat burning was the umbrella term. Emotional misery was the result. By hour three you enter a state that I can only imagine resembles a slight hallucinogenic overdose, accompanied by a faint tingling from being so profoundly hungry. The Solo man would have found this insane. He was right.

The modern answer to this, naturally, is the opposite extreme. Athletes now attempt to consume 200 grams of carbohydrate per hour, testing the absolute limit of what the human gut can process before staging a full revolt. I have come home from a five hour bike and run session and not wanted to eat. I had spent the day living like a “Wiederkäuer”, a ruminant, endlessly processing, my body so saturated with engineered nutrition that an actual meal felt like it would tip me over the edge.

As far as training goes, volume was king. Lots helps lots, more helps more, that was the mantra. Nobody measured quality because nobody measured anything, and when you’re always tired, everything feels hard, which feels like enough. Now intensity is tracked to the second, recovery scored overnight, and no one can begin a run before their watch has negotiated with a satellite as to where in the world they precisely are. The Solo Man never asked anything for permission.

I once spent more time than I will admit applying tape to my shin in a specific direction for an aerodynamic advantage. Whether it would survive the swim, whether a partial peel on the bike would cost more than it saved, whether the wind tunnel data translated to the Queen K… These were real thoughts I had. The Solo man was already twelve kilometres into his sprint marathon by the time I’d finished the application.

And yet. He was crazy to do what he did. We are crazy to do what we do. Thirty years, what feels like two different species, one finish line.

That’s probably enough to unite us.

I’m off to find a good coffee. Until next week,

Jan.

Then I clip into my pedals and point my bike downhill, and it stops. Completely. Not because I’m particularly brave. Just because my brain finally has something real and physical to compute.

I’ve been thinking about why for a while and more since I sat down with big wave surfer Sebastian Steudtner last week. Sebastian holds the world record for the largest wave ever surfed. Twenty eight and a half meters. He also gets asked constantly why he chooses to risk his life.

His answer flips the question entirely.

The real risk, he says, is the other thing. Sitting at a desk for thirty years. Not knowing your body. Not knowing what you’re capable of. Ending up at the finish line of a life you never quite chose. To him, that’s not safety. That’s just slower damage.

I think he’s onto something most of us feel but struggle to say clearly. Not everyone needs to chase a fifty meter wave. The scale is different for all of us. But somewhere on that scale, genuine risk does something that nothing else quite replicates. It clears the frequency. Reminds you what’s actually real.

It lets you put the glass down for a while.

And when I get back to my desk, the noise has changed. Quieter. More ordered. I pick the glass back up, but somehow it weighs a little less than before. That’s the whole point of going out in the first place.

The full conversation with Sebastian is out now on Frodeno Going Mental. Worth an hour of your week, wherever you get your podcasts.

After spending quite a bit of time on Substack of late, I decided to move my newsletter here. I’ve found plenty of my favourite writers here but also like the comments and community. I hope you enjoy as I continue to aim to deliver a little more context in a world of content.

May 6th, 1954. Oxford. The day Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile and rewrote what humans believed was physically possible. He almost didn’t run.

The weather was terrible. Wind. That particular English spring wind must have been one of those that makes you want to go back to bed and try again next week. Bannister was wavering. Maybe today wasn’t the day. Maybe conditions needed to be right. Maybe next week

.

At Paddington he ran into Franz Stampfl. Not his coach. The coach of his training partners Chataway and Brasher, a dapper Austrian in a flat cap with no official business talking Bannister into anything.

Bannister shared his doubts and Stampfl replied flatly: “I think you can run it in 3:56.” Then landed the question that changed history: “If you forego this chance, would you ever forgive yourself for the rest of your life?”

Bannister ran. Somewhere in the second lap, exhausted, he heard a single word rise above the crowd: “Relax.” He obeyed. Only afterwards did he realise it was Stampfl. The man had followed him onto the infield although his job was done at Paddington. He showed up twice.

3:59.4. Because someone at Paddington refused to let him bail on himself.

Steve Magness pointed this story out last week and I felt a distant memory come to life as though it was yesterday. Not admiration for Bannister. More like recognition. That specific feeling of how close the whole thing came to not happening. And the quiet curiosity about how many athletes, at some point, needed exactly that. Not always. Not every day. But once. Just once, at the right moment, someone who had no business being there showed up anyway.

2005, Lausanne. My first senior European Championships and I had nothing to my name. Literally. I’d spent the last of my money on a shiny, fully automatic coffee machine for my shared apartment. I didn’t even drink coffee at the time. It just looked beautiful and made me feel like I was living the European dream.

The night before the race I was doubled over with stomach cramps. Nerves, obviously, though I’d have preferred a more dignified diagnosis. I genuinely didn’t know if I’d make it to the start line. It was my birthday.

Daniel Unger was there. A competitor, not a coach, not a manager, nobody whose job description included talking me off the bathroom floor. He’d just come through a long bout of illness himself and was simply glad to be racing again. And yet he sat with me, completely unbothered by the heap of self pity in front of him, and oozed the kind of quiet confidence that is either very annoying or exactly what you need. In his case it was the latter.

“Let’s go get em Frodissimo.” The nickname to this day only he calls me by.

That was it. No tactical analysis. No motivational speech. Just that.

The next day I rode off the front, guided by a veteran who knew exactly what he was doing, and held on for dear life. Fifth place. My first senior European Championships. The nerves that had floored me the night before turned out to be fuel. I just hadn’t known that yet.

Bannister’s 3:59.4 is remembered as inevitable. It wasn’t. It was a windy day in Oxford, a man at Paddington with no obligation to say anything, and an athlete who almost decided next week would do just fine.

Most breakthroughs look clean in hindsight. They are sometimes just a conversation away from never happening at all.

I think it was Jordan who coined the term: You miss every shot you don’t take. Which sounds simple until you’re doubled over in a hotel bathroom in Lausanne the night before the race that changes everything, wondering if today is really the day.

It usually is.

Jan.