Men's Journal

Chris Carmichael started out in the mid-1980s as a professional cyclist for the 7-Eleven team, the first American outfit on the European circuit. He made the 1984 U.S. Olympic team and rode with the first American team to compete in the Tour de France in 1986 (his team placed 63rd out of 132). Still, Carmichael is the first to admit that he was never the best rider. “I’m a better coach than I was an athlete,” he says.

He found his calling only after he quit racing and USA Cycling hired him to run its athlete-development camps. One day, a promising young rider named Lance Armstrong showed up at one of those camps and Carmichael began working with him. Soon Armstrong was demolishing the competition in major European bike races, and Carmichael was promoted to national coaching director for all of USA Cycling. After resigning from the post four years later, Carmichael retreated to the hills of Boone, North Carolina, to help his old prodigy, Lance, launch his comeback from testicular cancer. He would go on to coach Armstrong to seven Tour de France wins.

Carmichael wasn’t only focused on Armstrong, though. He saw the potential of the internet to scale up his data-driven business, taking it beyond direct relationships with individual athletes, so he began laying the foundation for a larger coaching business. He also saw the internet’s pitfalls: the sense of remoteness, of clients wondering if there’s a human out there or just a computer program. Carmichael understood more than anyone else that person-to-person contact — one human being motivating another — is as critical to successful coaching as crunching numbers.

He developed clear guidelines for coach-athlete interactions. He founded his own coaching college and taught every coach as much as he could about psychology, training language, and philosophy. CTS employs only full-time, salaried coaches: no subcontractors. Carmichael’s brick-and-mortar training centers allow CTS clients to meet their online coaches face to face, as do the Recon Camps, which are held nearly every weekend around the country. Carmichael plans to open more training centers in cycling destinations in New England; the Texas Hill Country; Majorca, Spain; and elsewhere.

Although Carmichael has never been the only player in this field, he is by far the biggest. Joe Friel started Trainingbible.com shortly after Carmichael started CTS, and while Friel considers his company one of the largest of its kind in the world, he admits that CTS dwarfs it. “In terms of numbers of coaches, athletes, world outreach, and financial backing, CTS is the thousand-pound gorilla in the room,” Friel says. CTS is also the most commercially successful of these coaching companies. “Everyone in the industry is envious of his business team and his business savviness,” says Dave Scott, six-time Ironman world champion and a widely respected coach to elite triathletes.

Carmichael confesses to his fair share of professional missteps. “We tried shit that didn’t work,” he says. “When Lance retired: ‘Oh, we’re going to broaden up and be sort of general fitness, health, and wellness.’ I even wrote a book called 5 Essentials for a Winning Life — health, fitness, relationships, career, and nutrition. But does somebody really want to hear from Chris Carmichael about improving your sex life?”

Now, Carmichael says, he’s just doubling down on what he’s always done best: helping athletes surprise themselves. Much of this, he admits, happens through the somewhat out-of-reach package deals targeted to the athletic rich — Carmichael aims to become the go-to source for bored millionaires with ambition to burn. “You want to do La Ruta de los Conquistadores in Costa Rica, the hardest mother­fucking mountain-biking stage race in the world?” Carmichael says. “You come to us, and we’re going to get you through, not only because we’re going to train you. We’re going to make sure you stay in the right hotels, you’re not waiting around four hours for a bus. Before you know it, after a stage, you’re back in that room getting a massage.”

—

Just as the midday sun was pounding against the Route 87 asphalt, the last of Carmichael’s riders — myself included — rolled into the Recon Camp’s host hotel, the Tempe Mission Palms, a few blocks from Arizona State University. After 75 miles of up-and-down riding along the shoulder of a Sunbelt freeway, the athletes could have been forgiven for crawling to their air-conditioned hotel rooms. Instead, everyone spreads out among the tables in the hotel’s shady courtyard while coaches walk around with laptops, showing each rider the numbers from the power meters and heart-rate monitors. Then the coaches herd everyone back into the white vans and drive us to a nearby pool for a swimming session, in which our strokes are captured by an underwater CoachCam. Then it’s off to dinner at a suitably healthy Tempe eatery owned by Mark Tarbell, Carmichael’s collaborator on Chris Carmichael’s Fitness Cookbook.

This kind of training regime, with progressively more difficult and intense sessions carefully planned over several months, is the key to expanding an athlete’s aerobic capacity and making him peak for a key event. Carmichael admits that digital devices and the internet make this considerably easier, given that a coach can now have an intimate understanding of your every workout, no matter where you are. But he insists technology is only part of the equation.

“I think I played a very important role in bringing science into endurance training,” Carmichael says, slouched in the restaurant’s banquette. “But when I hear people saying, ‘Well, we’re more scientific, so we’re better coaches,’ I say, ‘That’s bullshit. Science doesn’t win competitions; inspired athletes win competitions.’ And the foundation of coaching comes down to your ability to inspire.” Carmichael’s coaches are picking at the appetizers and listening closely as he brings up Armstrong again. “The greatest thing I learned from Lance is that he’s not afraid to fail,” Carmichael says. “People watch him attack and say, ‘He’s so confident; he knows he’s going to win.’ I’d say that he knows the only way he’s going to win is to attack.”

Carmichael also learned from Armstrong the value of forcing athletes to declare themselves 100 percent ready for competition. “Most athletes say, ‘Yeah, I’m prepared, but I missed a bit of training with this injury, or whatever,’ ” Carmichael says. “They’re laying the foundation of an excuse. If you say, ‘Yeah, I’m 100 percent ready, and if somebody’s going to beat me, they’re going to have to go through me’ — then if they do beat you, it means they’re better than you. Lance didn’t have a problem saying that.”

Then Carmichael cut dinner short — after a grand total of zero alcoholic beverages, among 12 guys. We needed our rest, he said. The following morning we would be up at 7 am, pulling on sneakers to preview the 26.2-mile running portion of the Ford Ironman Arizona. The more serious athletes, those with hopes of a podium finish, will crank out 18 miles before breakfast. They’ll all be getting stride tips from the coaches, and all that data will join the rest of it, informing their training plans for the weeks and months ahead. If they talk to Carmichael himself, they might get a final earful about what he says is the number one thing he tries to teach athletes: “You do not quit. If you lose a body part, you maybe contemplate quitting. Otherwise, you do not quit.”

That’s big talk for amateurs out to find a little satisfaction, or personal growth. But Carmichael believes we need the big talk if we want to pull off something huge. He just may be right.

Page: 1 2