Endurance Athlete's Edge

by Marc Evans, Scott Tinley

Endurance and multisport athletes are a dedicated bunch. Whether they are running marathons, racing through ocean swims, pedaling over mountains, or competing in triathlons or duathlons, most of these athletes are not content just to finish. Their challenge is to cover the distance with maximum speed. In Endurance Athlete's Edge , author Marc Evans guides these serious competitors toward high-level fitness, flawless technique, and superior competitive performance. Selected as the USA National Triathlon Team coach and manager in 1989 and 1990, Evans has helped countless athletes move their performance standards ever higher. Through years of working with top athletes, such as Scott Tinley, he has developed a program that produces outstanding results in training and competition. Here, Evans teaches readers the most efficient swimming, cycling, and running techniques through numerous photographs and 50 performance drills. He includes prescriptions for strength training, flexibility, and nutrition, as well as advice for mental training and race preparation. Athletes and coaches alike will value the many effective training tables and charts carefully developed by Evans. He provides a series of templates that enable readers to customize training schedules. The result is a week-by-week training prescription for each sport, including what percentage of the training should be done in each of four intensity zones. Readers can simply refer to handy pace charts to match their effort to the prescribed intensity levels. The special, systematic table of periodization makes this difficult concept easy to apply, helping readers to reach peak fitness at just the right time for major competitions.

240 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1997

Reviews

[Trung Nguyen Dang · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this old book (1997) from Tanjong Pagar CC's book exchange corner.

The author is a triathlon's first professional coach. Thus, the book covers 3 sports: swimming, cycling and running. I only read the running part.

The book is very old, and the information has been repeated by all other resources and newer books. Thus, I find it too basic, and so I didn't learn much. It might as well be the best there was 2 decades ago but definitely not great by today's standards.

There's one part which I find useful was the downhill running advice. Other than that, I didn't learn much. Downhill running, the key is to minimise breaking force by:
- make sure the footstrike is mid to forefoot.
- land with your hips leaning slightly forward
- do not allow ankle to be in front of the knee. Ankle should be vertically aligned under the knee.