Men's Journal

Chris Carmichael coached Lance Armstrong to the best performance of his life. Check out what he can do for you.

by Daniel Duane

Chris Carmichael swerves his bike between a dead coyote and a shredded truck tire on Route 87, outside Tempe, Arizona. Behind and in front of him, 28 Ironman Recon Camp participants — each paying $1,800 for three days of coaching — pedal hard in the desert sun.

“I sometimes get approached by celebrities!” Carmichael shouts over the din from the 18-wheelers blowing past on the crowded roadway. “But you won’t see me trying to be Trainer to the Stars. They’re idiots! We had this one lady. She was like, ‘I want my biceps to have that little cut look.’ ” He shakes his head with disgust. “Rock stars aren’t so bad. But celebrities are douche bags! I don’t train appearance. I train performance.”

With the faintest hint of a paunch bulging beneath his Lycra cycling jersey, Carmichael, 51, doesn’t fit the picture of a serious coach. He has a remarkably laid-back demeanor, slack-mouthed and a little distant, like a guy who’s been to one too many Grateful Dead shows. Yet Carmichael has successfully trained athletes at the highest level, most notably Lance Armstrong during each of his seven Tour de France victories. He’s also trained professional hockey players, elite swimmers, the entire U.S. cycling team, three Ironman world champions, and a series of athletes who have collected, altogether, 33 medals from Olympic, Pan American, and World Championship games. Carmichael began offering his coaching services to the masses in the late 1990s; today he runs the largest elite-level endurance-sports coaching business in the world.

Carmichael Training Systems (CTS), employs 30 full-time coaches who work with nearly 2,000 athletes at training camps like this one in Arizona, as well as online. The secret to Carmichael’s success is his company’s ability to take complicated technical data — like a nearly imperceptible change in your VO2 max, or the maximum volume of oxygen you can process during all-out effort — and make finely calibrated micro-adjustments to your training regimen that yield macro results. Take Matt Allaire, a 41-year-old recreational mountain biker from Orange County, California. Just one and a half years after signing up with CTS, he had finished three Ironman triathlons. “CTS helped me ramp up my volume, intensity, and stamina. They teach you the different phases of training and take the math out of it, so you know what you need to do to get to an event,” says Allaire, who has five triathlon races on his 2012 calendar already.

Half a dozen CTS coaches follow the riders down the Arizona highway in shiny white vans, keeping the cyclists stocked with energy gels. The coaches offer encouragement, tips, and even some on-the-fly bike maintenance. Each bike has been equipped with a $2,000 rear wheel, which houses in-hub power meters to measure the wattage generated by every pedal stroke. The riders also wear GPS watches, heart-rate monitors, and pedaling-cadence sensors, all beaming a vast array of data to wireless computers mounted on each bicycle’s handlebars.

Meanwhile, at a nearby hotel, another team of coaches armed with laptops waits to crunch the data as soon as the ride is over. Still more coaches at training centers in Colorado Springs; Tucson, Arizona; Santa Ynez, California; and Brevard, North Carolina, stand ready to plug the information into customized CTS training-and-nutrition plans, which are delivered to the campers via the internet.

CTS clients come from practically every walk of life and level of athletic ability. They range from potbellied bankers to former ­Division I jocks wanting, as Carmichael puts it, “to take their performance to the next level.” Some stick to online coaching, but many others sign up for what Carmichael calls “big-ticket items: high-touch, high-dollar, high-value athletic experiences,” such as the Recon Camps and race-support packages for extreme endurance competitions.

Participation in endurance sports happens to be booming. Last year’s Boston Marathon sold out all 21,000 slots in a record eight hours, crushing the previous high mark of 62 days, which had been set just the year before. Eighty-two Ironman-branded events will take place worldwide this year, and all 178,000 slots available — up from 165,000 last year — will sell out online, just as this year’s inaugural New York Ironman did, in 11 minutes flat.

“If you’re going to sign up for stuff this hard, you can’t fake your way through,” Carmichael says. “From a business standpoint, that’s our sweet spot. ‘You want to do something grand, superbold?’ We love that. Hey, excuse me here, OK?”

Carmichael stops talking suddenly, then — to quote the vernacular — drops me like a bad habit. There is no visible increase in effort, no strained standing in the saddle, no labored change in breathing. He is just gone, covering the 200-yard gap between him and one of his clients in seconds. He rides with the man for a while after that, chatting amiably, until the two of them, seemingly inspired by the pleasure of their conversation, speed off, vanishing into the hot distance.

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Anyone can buy a power meter, heart-rate monitor, and GPS watch, and generate mountains of data about every workout. You can even crunch those numbers, for free, at sites like Trainingpeaks.com, or upgrade for a small fee and receive cookie-cutter training plans. But knowing enough exercise science to interpret it and make changes to your training over time is both complicated and time-consuming. Few coaches can analyze and individualize data like Carmichael can, especially for a mass audience.

CTS client Craig “Crowie” Alexander was already one of the fastest triathletes on the planet when he signed up in 2007. He’d successfully coached himself to a World Championship title in the Ironman 70.3 triathlon, which is half the length of a full Ironman. But for his 2008 debut in the full Ironman World Championship, a 140.6-mile race held annually in Kona, Hawaii, he sought out Carmichael.

CTS coach Nick White put Alexander through a barrage of physiological tests to establish his V02 max and his so-called lactate threshold, or upper limit for sustained effort. White noticed that Alexander’s lactate threshold was already a quite high percentage of his V02 max, so he prescribed the counter-intuitive training solution of hard sprint intervals. “We figured the improvement in his V02 max would create some wiggle room for his lactate threshold to move up,” White says. It seems to have worked: ­Alexander won that year’s Ironman World Championship.

CTS can determine if a client’s footfalls-per-minute while running are below peak performance and recommend cadence drills to increase it. They can calculate your optimal stroke rate in swimming — down to the hundredth of a second — and develop training sessions to help you achieve it. And it’s more than just using these tests to push you harder. In fact, less is often more. Because many athletes tend to train too much rather than too little, CTS coaches are always looking for signs of fatigue. A disconnect between heart rate and running pace, for example, will show up in the uploaded data. If your pulse is running too high at a pace you typically find easy, CTS coaches know it’s time to scale back your next few workouts.

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