Team Tactic

10/29/2026

10/28/2026

The science of aerobic development, ventilatory threshold, double threshold training, field testing, critical power, etc. is super interesting AND it’s not super useful for most recreational athletes. And that’s assuming the science is correctly referenced, which it often isn’t. We still see a lot of talk about fat adaptation and training oxidation despite how many times that mechanism has been debunked.

The reason why I will argue semantics is because of how distracting the fat oxidation conversation can be. It can lead people to fasting, high fat diets, and really weird training / nutrition interventions that don’t help and may actually harm to a person’s health or enjoyment of the movement they choose.

Good coaching is a lot of things but fundamentally, we need to be putting out accurate information, regardless of how many UCI or Olympic athletes you’ve coached in your career.

10/26/2026

This concept of growing through challenge is such a natural one. Almost every organism on earth grows this way. Plants won’t grow deep roots when they have the comfort of consistent and frequent watering. Plants dig their roots down and branch them off only when they are starved of that comfort. Electrons don’t leave their atomic orbit without enough energy to overcome the attractive force of ionization.
 
When we decide to change the dance that we do with our environment and with the people in our lives, we often end up dancing on our own for a little while. You can’t bring your people with you everywhere you go. And it takes courage to step away from the comfort of what’s familiar even when you know that what’s familiar is holding you back. Where you are comfortable is very rarely the best place for you to grow and develop as a person.
 
But if you can deal with the discomfort of loneliness and learn how to be your own biggest advocate and cheerleader, you can achieve great things for yourself. You will get the gift of truly knowing yourself and that is not a gift that everyone gets. You will walk away with an unprecedented amount of clarity for your vision in life. And that clarity and honesty will ultimately allow you to show up as the very best version of yourself in the circle of family and friends that you do have. Which will probably be smaller than the one you started with, but again – that’s ok.

10/22/2026

People don’t believe what you tell them, they rarely believe what you show them. They will sometimes believe what their friends tell them but they will always, ALWAYS believe what they tell themselves.

So we want to encourage you to tell yourself better stories about yourself. Fight with your lizard 🦎

10/16/2026

The sad part is, someone at Saturday Night Live had to approve this monologue and then a studio full of people laughed.

We can’t make people be better but little by little we can make sure we are better and that we treat ourselves and other people in a better, more respectful way.

Signed,
A Not-Single Cat Lady

10/14/2026

Sometimes, a person slides into your DMs with a really good question 💡 and this was one of them:

Can hypertrophy 💪🏼 training be as effectively combined with endurance training 🏃🏼‍♀️as strength training can be 🏋🏼‍♀️?

Now in addition to everything in the slides, I also feel it’s important to speak to an athlete’s experience with resistance training. While heavy loads and small sets are the recipe for success with strength progression, it simply isn’t appropriate for a novice lifter to jump into heavy strength work. Anyone starting strength training, regardless of their goals, must spend time building good movement patterns, then consistency in those movement patterns, and then lastly – intensity/load with those movement patterns. This foundational work is vital for long term progress and patience really pays off here. This work can skew towards hypertrophy but it doesn’t always. Program design will vary per person.

If this type of training tickles your fancy, our Fast Twitch Endurance Programming application window opens TOMORROW. You can learn more about that program and hop on the waitlist by clicking the link in our bio.

If you enjoyed reading this information, you should also take a moment to join our email list so we can slide into your inbox with goodies like this and more.

kit: Velocio

Citations:

📕 Explosive training and heavy weight training are effective for improving running economy in endurance athletes: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

📗 Effects of strength training on running economy in highly trained runners: a systematic review with meta-analysis of controlled trials.

📘 The effect of strength training methods on middle-distance and long-distance runners’ athletic performance: a systematic review with meta-analysis.

📙 Strength training for middle- and long-distance performance: a meta-analysis. Int J Sports Physiol Perform.

📓 Optimizing strength training for running and cycling endurance performance: a review.

📒 Effects of increased muscle strength and muscle mass on endurance-cycling performance. Int J Sports Physio Perform.

10/12/2026

The best part of being half Canadian and half American is that we get to do Thanksgiving twice. Happy Thanksgiving to our Canuck community. We are thankful for you, and for this place we get to live.

Seems like a good moment to introduce ourselves for anyone who doesn’t know our story.

Alex (Alex Parker), the smoke show on the left, is from Calgary, Alberta. She grew up ski racing, competed on the Olympic development team, then took an NCAA scholarship to the University of Alaska Anchorage, where she became the program’s first five-time All American alpine skier, a four-time All-Academic athlete and will be inducted in 2027 into the UAA Hall of Fame. She went on to earn her juris doctor at the University of Alberta. She doesn’t practice law these days, but that attention to detail shows up everywhere in how she runs and coaches Tactic. She competed at the CrossFit Games as an individual in 2015, retired, and then found endurance sports. Several sub-3 hour marathons later, she’s still at it.

Meredith (Meredith Root), the cowgirl on the right, is from Greensboro, North Carolina. She’s a STEM kid who swam at a high level through club and NCHSAA in short course breaststroke and IM. She traded the swim cap for textbooks at NC State, starting in the Pre-Vet program but switching into engineering with a focus on industrial microbiology and genetics. She spent 6 years as a process engineer with Biogen in cell culture development, working on products to treat autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases. Meanwhile she was competing nationally in Olympic weightlifting and made the CrossFit Games as an individual in 2018. Now she puts her science and creative brain to work growing Tactic as a global leader in the online health and coaching space, and she’s back in the saddle racing gravel bikes and encouraging other women to join her!

We met through competitive CrossFit and Meredith moved to Canada full time in 2018. We live in Fernie, BC with a growing collection of dogs and cats, and we spend as much of our free time as possible outside on bikes and skis.

Grateful today, and most days.

Thanks for being along for the ride! 🚴🏼‍♀️🏃🏼⛷️🏋🏼‍♀️🏔️🍎

📸: Gretchen Powers

10/08/2026

Calling all Cyclists and Runners 📣 If want to join our Fast Twitch Athlete roster for the season, we will be accepting applications starting on October 15th. The application window will stay open until the 25th or until we are capped.

We are super super super excited about this coaching program and to finally be able to bring it to life. You can learn more about what’s included on the Fast Twitch Endurance website – the link to that is in our bio.

10/05/2026

Eat ice cream, lift weights, run, and be a good person.