3 lessons from the world's best endurance athletes (without quitting your day job)

Hi everyone,

These past few weeks have been a showcase of what’s possible at the highest level. Everywhere you look the pros are putting on a show:

Jonas Vingegaard winning uphill sprints at La Vuelta.

Casper Stornes won the Ironman World Championships in Nice last Sunday.

Peres Jepchirchir won the World Marathon at Tokyo last Sunday.

Different sports, with different demands, yet these pros all have this in common: none of them wing it.

Their training is structured, progressive, and deliberate. They don’t “find time” for strength, recovery, or planning, they make time. They also face challenges and setbacks that test their true grit.

And while you’re not training 30+ hours a week with a support team behind you, the principles that keep them at the top of their game are the same ones that will help you keep improving in your 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond.

In today’s newsletter, we’re breaking down what you can learn from these three pros, and how to apply it to your own training week.

Jonas Vingegaard: The power of strength

Is this Vingegaard 2.0?

This season we’ve seen a different Jonas Vingegaard.

Likely the "best one-minute performance" of his career on the punchy final into Rouen on stage 4 at the Tour de France (1).

And notably, his attack up Bola del Mundo in Stage 20 of the Vuelta showed it all:

What changed?

Strength training.

After his horrific crash in the Tour of the Basque Country in 2024, Vingegaard lost a lot of muscle. Last winter, he committed properly to the strength training with the simple goal of rebuilding the strength he’d lost.

In the end he gained more muscle mass than planned, but it made him stronger than ever.

“It turns out I respond pretty quickly to strength training.” Vingegaard admitted with a smile in an interview.

The strength training didn’t just give him a more muscular and resilient body, it also gave him the ability to produce power explosively, to resist repeated accelerations, and to finish climbs with something left in the tank.

Strength training isn’t just about avoiding injuries. , it's like giving yourself an extra few gears and smoother shifting:

If Vingegaard can see these results with a winter of structured strength training, imagine what two 30-minute sessions a week could do for your riding or running!

Peres Jepchirchir: Discipline, recovery, and belief

Walk into Peres Jepchirchir’s house in Kapsabet, Kenya, and there are only a few subtle hints that a world record marathon holder lives there. In fact, even her gold medal from the Tokyo Olympics sits hidden away in a small black box.

This brilliant athlete, fresh off winning the Women’s World Marathon Title at the Tokyo World Athletics Championships last weekend, could easily surround herself with symbols of success. Instead, she remains grounded and leans on the same three principles every athlete needs: discipline, recovery, and belief.

Her life is a constant balancing act: logging 125 miles a week at altitude, following training programs written by her husband, caring for her 6-year-old daughter, and keeping her household running. Sports massage, strength training, rest, and downtime aren’t afterthoughts squeezed in; they’re built into her daily rhythm as deliberately as her long runs.

For you reading this, the circumstances will be different, your own struggles and commitments might be juggling work, family, or squeezing in training around a busy week. But the principles Jepchirchir lives by are universal:

Those habits are what keep you progressing week after week, season after season.

Casper Stornes: Overcoming setbacks

In December last year, Casper Stornes should have been lining up at the Ironman 70.3 World Championships in Taupō, New Zealand. 6 months before that race he had won Ironman 70.3 Warsaw in June… but just days before the start, disaster struck. He was hit by a car and left with cuts, bruises, and rib injuries so bad he couldn’t breathe properly. His championship dream was over before it even started.

As the race went ahead without him, Stornes took to his social media and said:

That was the end of a tough year, one where he also missed out on Olympic selection for Paris 2024.

But fast forward to last Sunday, and Stornes is the new Ironman World Champion in Nice!

Setbacks are inevitable.

Sometimes they’re no fault of our own: crashes, illness, injuries, timing. Sometimes they’re down to our bodies not being quite where we need them to be.

What defines you isn’t the setback itself. It’s how you respond to it.

For Stornes, that meant regrouping, rebuilding, and staying patient through frustration. And when his chance came again, he was ready and he took it!

For you, setbacks might look like a flare-up, a missed race, or simply a bad day. Like Stornes, your biggest breakthroughs might come not in spite of those setbacks, but because of how you handle them.

What matters is keeping perspective, staying consistent, and remembering that resilience is built over time.

Resilience is the ultimate endurance skill, and like Stornes, it’s something you build one setback at a time, the same way you build endurance to get through those final few miles of a run or the last kms of a ride.

Strength, recovery, resilience are not reserved only for world champions, they’re for you too. And you don’t have to figure it all out by yourself. Join my wonderful free community for runners and cyclists over 30 for ongoing support with your training.

Have a great Sunday!

Emma x

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