About this episode

Steve House interviews Hunter Allen about the evolution of training technology and its implications for athletes.

Steve House sits down with Hunter Allen — cycling coach, co-creator of TrainingPeaks, and co-author of Training and Racing with a Power Meter — for a wide-ranging conversation on training technology through the lens of the hype-adoption-disillusionment cycle. They trace the power meter's unusual "trickle-up" adoption (from data-driven amateurs to pros around 2008-2009) before working through today's landscape: HRV as a life-stress signal, the limits of wrist-based sleep tracking, the untapped promise of respiration and minute ventilation monitoring for mountain athletes, pulse oximetry's highly individual response to altitude exposure, heat/core-temperature training for hot events, skepticism around substrate utilization metrics, and the current bottlenecks holding back continuous lactate monitoring. The back half is a deep dive into continuous glucose monitors (CGMs), where Allen unpacks why endurance athletes run naturally higher glucose than the general population, why CGMs are both a performance and behavior-change tool, practical strategies like "food stacking" at meals, and why he recommends six months of wear time before drawing conclusions — closing with his take on where…

People in this episode

Host: Steve House

Guest: Hunter Allen

Topics covered

• training technology
• power meters
• continuous glucose monitors
• endurance sports
• performance metrics
• health monitoring

Keywords

• training technology
• power meter
• HRV
• CGM
• endurance athletes
• sleep tracking
• respiration monitoring
• lactate monitoring

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: TrainingPeaks

Books & works: Training and Racing with a Power Meter

More episodes of Uphill Athlete Podcast

• Who Says Yes? · September 8, 2026 · 1h 51m
• Endurance and Enlightenment on Everest · August 25, 2026 · 1h 24m
• Voice of the Mountains: Legacy is Not the Measure with Max King · August 4, 2026 · 1h 40m
• Training Considerations for Master Athletes with Joe Friel · July 28, 2026 · 1h 7m

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