Topo Blog
My father used to tell a joke about baseball umpires. Three umpires are sitting around talking about their job. The first umpire says, “There are balls and there are strikes, and I call them as they are.” The second umpires nods and says, “I hear you, but I don’t quite share your confidence. There are… [view more]
1. Ditch the watch The first rule for the runner moving from the road or track to the trail is simple: Lose your watch. The best way to ruin a trail run is to try to quantify it the same way you would a road run. If you want to record your totals, at least… [view more]
The biggest race of my career – the Ironman World Championships in Kona – is just a few days away. It has taken 3 Ironman races, 3 Ironman 70.3 races and almost a year and a half of injury-free training consistently to get to this point. I have to admit: once I qualified in July,… [view more]
As a cross country coach for more than a decade, I continue to learn lessons that help my own running. High school runners may be less than half my age, but they face similar challenges, and the controlled setting lets me try out new tactics and observe trends over the course of a season and… [view more]
As a professional triathlete, Angela Naeth understands the anxiety and frustration experienced when faced with injury or illness. How do you stay focused and positive when your body seems to be failing you? Learn more in our new video featuring Topo Athletic Elite Athlete, Angela Naeth. Naeth is a 17-time Ironman 70.3 champion and… [view more]
Our youngest Topo ambassador, Chase Visser, is a competitive youth triathlete navigating the race circuit while juggling the academic rigors that come with being a high school senior (remember those days of AP classes, college applications and SATs?). During his budding career, Chase has already raced for Team USA at the Rotterdam Tri / 2017… [view more]
If you visit the Rift Valley of Kenya and spend some time among the world’s greatest distance runners, you’ll quickly notice that everywhere you look everyone is walking. They also run, of course, long miles on red dirt roads and mind-blowing speed sessions on the track. But walking is how they get around. They walk… [view more]
Hello from the PCT! You may remember me from my last blog post about 7 days before I left for my trip. I am now just over halfway done with this crazy trek. I’ve successfully completed the desert and Sierra sections of the Pacific Crest Trail. Due to fires in Northern California, my boyfriend and… [view more]
“We are each an experiment of one,” George Sheehan famously wrote regarding the need to individualize our running. While oft-quoted, Sheehan’s maxim is, however, too rarely applied. A quick google search reveals a wealth of research proving the maxim’s truth. A 2009 Swedish study on aerobic capacity, for example, found “substantial interindividual variability in training-induced… [view more]
There are times I can’t help but feel like one of my Middle School students. Usually it’s around mid-April when we are in the midst of state testing and I find myself daydreaming about the upcoming summer break. As my wife Sarah and I are both science teachers, and our dog Barley is a dog,… [view more]