PODCAST · health
Black Cats Run
by Tristan Black-Ingersoll
Endurance sports are our most unrecognized Orwellian dystopia - weakness is strength, strength is weakness. Have athletes just reached a point where simplicity is truth? Or are we too willing except structures which see the few succeed and the many fail? Maybe those are two sides of the same coin. Black Cats Run takes a new view of the puzzle of individual endurance sport. It combines ideas from history, psychology, physiology, cultural anthropology, training methodology understand the experience of the athlete and search for new ideas to help us grow and develop into the best possible version of our competitive selves. Black Cats Run strips it all back to the studs and offers a new, better way to feel good in training, racing, and, just maybe, in life.
Episodes
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Chapter I. Herodotus's Ants
Chapter 1 - The Blood and the Rain - Herodotus's Ants: What Belief Looks Like. Chapter 1 in the serialization of The Blood and the Rain
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Apples and Oranges
Intensity is the critical determinant of all training outcomes. What is the purpose of the time we spend training? How does it interact with the bigger picture of training? We talk about the difference between intensity of perception versus work and whether the apples and oranges of fractionalism...
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The Blood and the Rain Chapter Nine "The River"
Chapter 9, "The River" explores the relationship between imperialism, post-colonialism, the regulation of voice, and the construction of modern endurance sports science and theory. Rather than treating physiology as a neutral body of knowledge, this chapter examines how authority in endurance...
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On The Rails
You cannot draw a picture of your cat. That's the reason you cannot train properly. Application is the hardest part of training. How do we measure training when we cannot use emulsification of the soul as the benchmark that we've put another drop in the drum? We learn to avoid fatigue at all…
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The Fulcrum Effect
Don't stay hard. Training isn't supposed to be a cage match with a polar bear. It's practice with proficiency leading to improvement in what we can do with ease. The best way to train is to feel easy everyday. Easy doesn't mean slow or fast. Easy means with ease. We just have to cut bait on the...
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The Blood and the Rain - Chapter 3 - The System Defends Itself
This is the audiobook sample for The Blood and the Rain Chapter 3 - The System Defends itself. The Blood and the Rain will be released as an ebook and paperback in July 2025. The Audiobook is scheduled to be released by the end of the summer. Enjoy.
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The Blood and the Rain - Preface
July 2025, Black Cats Run Founder and Host, Tristan Black-Ingersoll will be releasing his book The Blood and the Rain. This is the audiobook preface to The Blood and the Rain. It introduces the core argument of the book: that endurance performance isn’t limited by physiology alone, but by the...
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A Mechanical Mystery
The case is afoot! Is it possible that the explanations we have for fatigue are not only limited but that they hide a greater truth? Performance competes with fatigue, they are, at the boundaries of performance, where we find failure and exhaustion, antithetics. Maybe, if we can find the trial…
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The Old Man
In high school Doug Ingersoll won the Massachusetts vs Connecticut Interstate Cross Country Championship. Fun Fact, the previous year's winner was Alberto Salazar. He then ran cross-country and track for four years at Bowdoin College in Brunswick Maine where he set school records in the 4x800m,...
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It's Not Working
What do we do when nothing is doing what we want? We discuss three core issues of perspective that create the fog of war that's holding us back from seeing the results we hope to gain from all our time and effort. What limits us from seeing what's right in front of our nose?
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The Other Side
If only we weren't as horribly weak and mentally deficient as we are. The neighbor's lawn is so much better than our own. If we just dig that little bit deeper and then a whole scale transformation will occur. Or maybe it won't. What makes it so tough for people to just train easy? Break on through.
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Why Training Works
Consensus is not proof of what can, or cannot be done. How can we determine the scale of improvement possible from training? Why does training lead to the adaptations that we see? How can we apply an understanding of why training can sometimes have a significant impact on fitness and sometimes no...
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The Three Questions
The three core questions for endurance sport training: how intense should my training be; how much volume of training should I do; how frequently should I train? We consider answers to these questions.
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Fats Vs Carbs
Fats and Carbs come up all the time when people talk about performance. These substrates are used to create ATP. ATP is, basically, energy used to move. The study of these two substrates relative to one another has been used to validated different training methods, particularly around higher...
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LT2 Brain Drain
Lactate Threshold is lactate threshold. There is not a second lactate threshold. Critical power, which is questionable in it's own right, is confused as a second lactate threshold. Lactate threshold can't be identified by any prescribed 2 mmol or 4 mmol power. The conviction that there's this...
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FTP Is Stupid
60 minute fallacy. Maybe a better title - but let's call a spade a spade. FTP is stupid, any training system organized around FTP or a fractional value of FTP like sweet spot is stupid. You can't make lemonade 🍋 without shaking the lemon tree. Try something different for your new year's...
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What I Know
What do I know? More than I used to. In this episode we consider the importance of asking questions and being able to truly verify our practice in training. Why are we doing what we do? We also consider my crackpot (unappreciated genuis?) ideas about lactate and how we can leverage that paradigm…
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The Long Run
How long can we be fast? Existential crisis or reasonable training consideration? What does the long run do, what questions are not answered by lactate threshold. If we can identify the actual benefit from the long run, do we even need to do them anymore?
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Run Me Down - Part III
Overtraining isn't training too much. It's how most of us train. Our ceiling of performance is the product of our overtraining. Maybe spend a little more time looking at the floor. And stop listening to elite athletes making claims about lactate, they're a little confused.
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Run Me Down - Part II
More on fatigue. The Protestant Work Ethic meats Yoga. Are we there yet?
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Run Me Down
Fatigue limits preparation and performance. But we are also limited in our ability to resist its siren song. We measure our value as athletes by overcoming adversity, without fatigue there is no adversity. Are we motivated to destroy ourselves in the pursuit of success? We measure ourselves by...
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The Heart Knows
Heart beats. It's a potent symbol is so many areas of culture both in the past and present. It's also taken on particularly unique and changeable meaning in endurance sports. Is training with heart rate actually stopping us from improving? We consider some of what we know about the heart as it...
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The Blue Prints - No. 1
The Blue Prints, number 1. In this sub-series we will explore specific design problems and paradigms with endurance sport training and try to see if they stand up to rigorous cross examination, or at least a barrage of google slides. In this episode we explore the idea of training to create a...
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Who's On First - Ep. 2
Here comes a sequel. We learn through the feedback we are given as we first become educated about what it means to exercise. Many of us are victims of a no pain, no gain ethos which is pushed by all the armchair athletes. Some people succeed with this approach, but we only see that outcome…
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Let's Test Lactate
Lions and tigers, and glycolytic output oh my! We can't put out all the intellectual bags of dog poo burning on the mental porches of endurance athlete's around the world. But here's a forty-five minute fire extinguisher's worth. The specific nature of lactate as relates to what can be…
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The Speed Merchant
Speed merchant. Another episode inspired by a great question from a listener. What does speed mean for endurance athletes and how do you develop speed. We discuss strategies to develop speed, as well as how to assess if you have sufficient speed and then how that should influence your training...
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Seeing Is Believing
Don't blink, you might miss it. Revelatory training theory break through? First stages of a post modern dystopian rewrite of The Sting? Only one way to find out. Listen up. In this episode we outline the concept of the Aerobic Calculator. Good training should be a measured progression, not a...
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Lead Into Gold
The real and the really real. When we train we are engaged with a system of symbolic meaning. Training that was once innovative and original is reduced to ritual practice and we lose sight of it's meaning. Instead of looking at what the symbolic value of training practice is we should look for...
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Behind the Curtain
The Wizard of Oz. The wizard can give you many things, maybe even everything. Master of mysteries, purveyor of promises. What's lactate? What's maximum lactate steady state? what's the best way to get faster? The less we understand the more we know. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
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Who's On First - Ep. 1
Hard to know what it all means when everybody says the same things meaning different things. In this episode we introduce the problem of failing to teaching athletes the right cues, how most of us do not know how to identify the right training intensity benchmarks and how this relates to training...
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Make A Map
"If recovery isn't real then how do I even train anymore?" You scream into the abyss of the night that surrounds you. The night as cold, dark, unfeeling, just like the eternal darkness of the universe as it expands into the unknown beyond the borders of our big bang bubble. Well. Here are some...
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Recovery Isn't Real
Train Hard. Then what? Lie and wait for the gods of athletic achievement to bless you with the virtues of Milo of Crete? How is that we emerge from training, something that makes us tired, with the ability to get less tired from physical stress in the future? Recovery is often cast as the…
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Red, Yellow, Green - Part II
Build it back up. There's a place for Intervals in our training. We just have to change their identity. Maybe we need to change the way we identify as athletes a little bit to make space for something new. Eventually the light will turn green.
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Red, Yellow, Green
Green means go. Intervals, the true path to Valhalla. Nothing is more universally accepted as the hallmark of glory in training culture as the interval session. To become one of the initiated you must destroy yourself eight times with a sixty second recovery. Yellow means go faster. We discuss…
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The Bee's Knees
Entropy. Eventually it will mean the end of the universe. It also might tell us something about the body's response to training. How important is the mass of an athlete when we talk about athletic achievement. Is it better to be small? Or is it better to train effectively. Entropy doesn't mean…
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The Immersion Complex
Vox Populi, Vox Dei. Fears are motivating. How do we make decisions about how to train? Is there strength in consensus? We discuss a different strategies to reach conclusions about what our best practices for training should be. The voice of the people is always very close to madness.
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Paradox of Intensity
Grandfathers, the ultimate proof of concept. We can't travel back in time and make up for the bad races, but can we use what we've learned over time to make the next ones better? We talk about paradoxes, pain, patrilineage, how to use LT, and how to lay an egg between the start an finish line of...
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Deus Ex Machina - Ep. 3
Charles Darwin had not idea the bomb he was letting off when he published On the Origin of Species. Are we are the mercy if natural selection when we fail to achieve athletic greatness? Or is Darwin's observation that species survive because they have remarkable capacity to adapt, and our issue…
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At The Beach
No Pain No Gain. Take you folding chair, a towel, sunscreen, a sandwich, and just chill out. Feel the sand between your toes. Nobody is rewarding your masochism more than you. We talk about how to find the equilibrium of training and how to design workouts from the perspective of where we are...
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Into the Dark
Into the shadows, where the self doubts grow. On this episode we get a little bit more introspective, a little bit more self-reflective. If something goes wrong one time, is it time to quit and run away? How can we take a step back and reassess? The more we know, the less we blame ourselves....
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Deus Ex Machina - Ep. 2
Ghost Hunters. There's a specter here, your training log is haunted. How do we determine what is right when we are think about things we don't understand? We consider the implication of the relationship between audience and performance and the ways in which it constrains our capacity to create...
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Make Me Fast
Just tell me the workout. Ok, secrets wide open. Here's the sauce. Whoosh!
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Deus Ex Machina - Ep. 1
Plot, what an inconvenience. The struggle of others, also inconvenience. What do both of these have in common? A convenient solution. We can simply answer the disparity between the few who can and the few who can't by saying that's how it is. We explore the possibility that our structure of…
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Faith In Poison
Fifteen years too late to name all the indie bands. Never too late to do the right thing. We talk about how to design a different training mindset. The path to the actionable goes straight through the conceptual. Can we shift away from energy systems and the overly complex view of training? We...
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Win Pro Nats - Ep. 4-Finale
Peaking is overrated, just ask George Mallory. In this episode we discuss how to actually prepare for the women's pro cycling national road race championships once you have reached the target fitness level. It's more about feeling normal and being smart than seeking some sort of elusive and...
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High Intensity Trauma
Fool me once. Imagine a mountain, only it's invisible, but it's there. It must be there because everybody agrees it exists. In this episode we ask if something subtle but critical is being overlooked. Can high intensity training induce trauma response? What if we aren't the problem but the…
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Win Pro Nats - Ep. 4-D
Plant a garden. How much can we plan? The unknown needs to be discovered not uncovered. We discuss what are the tools by which we calibrate our training and explore the implications of the best, and worst way, to dial those in. What's the value of wild flowers? We also talk about example workouts...
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Black Cats Run - Light Bulb Burst - C
Primary sources, a historians best friend. And, maybe, just maybe, also best friend of the coach and athlete. Do we have an information problem or to do we have an interpretation problem? We present a specific explanation of the mechanism that's behind the concept of lactate threshold, we give...
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Black Cats Run - Light Bulb Burst - B
Pain. How do we build our understandings of what makes us better? Is it possible, that we do not have nearly as strong of a sense of awareness of what is making us better as we might think. We continue in our thankless task of drowning horses lest they die of thirst as we further explore what...
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Win Pro Nats - Ep. - 4C
The Midas Touch. What is going to allow us to reach the level of fitness needed to take home the gold? There's no silver bullets. We need to be adaptable and we need to take it in phases as we progress towards our target. We talk about the strategies that allow different people at different…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Endurance sports are our most unrecognized Orwellian dystopia - weakness is strength, strength is weakness. Have athletes just reached a point where simplicity is truth? Or are we too willing except structures which see the few succeed and the many fail? Maybe those are two sides of the same coin.
Black Cats Run takes a new view of the puzzle of individual endurance sport. It combines ideas from history, psychology, physiology, cultural anthropology, training methodology understand the experience of the athlete and search for new ideas to help us grow and develop into the best possible version of our competitive selves.
Black Cats Run strips it all back to the studs and offers a new, better way to feel good in training, racing, and, just maybe, in life.
HOSTED BY
Tristan Black-Ingersoll
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Black Cats Run have?
Black Cats Run currently has 71 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Black Cats Run about?
Endurance sports are our most unrecognized Orwellian dystopia - weakness is strength, strength is weakness. Have athletes just reached a point where simplicity is truth? Or are we too willing except structures which see the few succeed and the many fail? Maybe those are two sides of the same coin....
How often does Black Cats Run release new episodes?
Black Cats Run has 71 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Black Cats Run?
You can listen to Black Cats Run on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Black Cats Run?
Black Cats Run is created and hosted by Tristan Black-Ingersoll.
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