Episode 37: Coaching The “Emotional” Athlete

About this episode

This episode explores the challenges faced by emotional athletes and the decisions that hinder their performance.

For well over the first half of my professional career, I was labeled an “emotional athlete.” That label seemed to mean, well, something else . In this case that “something else” appears to have been “undisciplined,” if the describer was being nice, or “riding like a stupid asshole,” if the describer wasn’t concerned with hurting my feelings. Faced with this description, which wasn’t ever really elucidated further until later in my career, I set about eradicating the problem. I had a problem with pacing, was the coaching feedback I probably should have received, but without clear guidance on how to pace better I found myself falling into the same pattern: starting too hard in the swim and having to slow down after 2-300m and losing the main pack, burbling self-recrimination to myself for the rest of the swim leg, before climbing out of the water alone and…repeating the exact same pattern on the bike: riding too hard to “catch up,” and then, successful or not at catching up, blowing to bits on the run. In this episode we explore why we make decisions that don’t serve us as athletes, on and off the race course. We look at how fear was the prevailing emotion behind my explosion at…

People in this episode

Host: Chris

Topics covered

• emotional athlete
• pacing
• fear in sports
• athlete behavior
• self-recrimination

Keywords

• emotional athlete
• pacing
• fear
• athlete behavior
• self-recrimination
• coaching feedback

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: The Mankind Project

More episodes of The Infirmary | Fixing Broken Endurance Athletes

• Episode 47: Justin Daerr on Intrinsic Motivation, Longevity vs. Performance, and Staying in the Game · June 4, 2026
• Episode 46: Fixing the Brick—Four Studies on Running Off the Bike · May 21, 2026 · 27 min
• Episode 45: Durability and Fatigue Resistance with Coaching Legend Joe Friel · May 7, 2026 · 1h 5m
• Episode 44: Triathlon Only Has Two Zones · April 23, 2026 · 50 min
• Episode 43: The Science of Sweat | How to Actually Fuel and Hydrate for Endurance with Tash Cooper-Smith · April 9, 2026 · 59 min
• Episode 42: Stress + Rest = Growth: A Guided Breathwork Session for Mental Toughness · March 27, 2026 · 30 min