About | Tri for Les

Runners, triathletes, endurance nerds with day jobs: welcome home.

Tri for Les has training plans, fitness tips and lessons learned from Adam and Cecily: relatively athletic siblings obsessed with finish lines, weird goals and fun states of discomfort.

We each have two Ironman triathlons under our belts, along with a decent number of marathons, half-marathons, trail races, open-water swims, bike rides, epic hikes, CrossFit workouts, kettlebell swings, dietary experiments and physical therapy sessions.

This site is where we document our various endurance adventures and share the cool and useful things we pick up along the way.

Tri for Les is here to help you:

Step up your swim-bike-run game.
Incorporate CrossFit Endurance into Ironman training.
Dial in your nutrition. How is carbo-loading still a thing?
Find new and uncomfortable ways to get healthy and strong.
Strengthen your feet, run barefoot and, specifically, learn how to overcome Posterior Tibial Tendonitis.
Build healthy habits around the few things that matter most, like sleep, nutrition, mobility, and having fun.
Get inspired. Set big goals, design training plans, go get it!
Balance those healthy habits and big goals with work, school, family, friends, travel, and all the other fun stuff in life.

Inspired by Leslie Whitfield

Tri for Les is inspired by our aunt Leslie Whitfield, who battled cancer for 19 years. She was always smiling and having fun, even in tough and uncomfortable conditions. Les taught us to Live every day and we want to help you do the same.

How we got here

It all started way back in 2011 when Cecily decided to raise the bar and sign up for her first triathlon, the Triathlon at Pacific Grove, with Team in Training. Then later that same year, Adam, inspired by his ambitious younger sister, followed suit, jumped on the Team in Training bandwagon, and went after his first triathlon, the Bluewater Triathlon, in Parker, AZ.

Seems like we’ve been training for something ever since!

Over the years Tri for Les has morphed to serve as a fundraising platform for charitable causes (e.g. Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, and the Arizona Humane Society); an Ironman training journal; a channel to share fitness strategies, race recaps and tips with other athletes; and a way to keep celebrating our aunt Leslie and practicing her motto, to Live every day.

To be sure, we’re not professional athletes, and we’re probably not about to break any records (other than personal records!) at the races we sign up for. But, from our years of training and experimenting in the endurance world, we know way more than when we started.

We read a ton, dive deep into our goals, pull from lots of great resources, and apply it all to our own experiences.

Since we’re not professional athletes, certified coaches or sponsored by third parties, we can offer a completely independent and brutally honest perspective on these topics.

Even though we may spaz-out on occasion from the excitement of a race, or the anxiety of a setback, we usually keep Tri for Les pretty balanced, thoughtful, light and fun.

Values or: Five things that we think are really important

The big goal here is to have fun with fitness and inspire people to Live every day. We want our articles to be useful, simple resources that help navigate the sometimes insane, intimidating and complex waters of endurance sports. Helpful, friendly, interesting – sometimes even somewhat funny – that’s what we’re going for here.
We run races, not ads. That means we won’t use this platform to promote sponsors, affiliate links or other kinds of advertising, aside from the occasional body ad. Also, we won’t promote Tri for Les with ads on other sites.
Email is sacred. If you subscribe to our newsletter (and we hope you do!) we will only email you with great content that we would want to be emailed. And if by some off-chance there’s nothing great going on, or we’re slacking, or the creative juices just aren’t flowing, we won’t email you! Also, we’ll only use your email to send you that newsletter, we won’t sell your data to third parties, and we won’t use your email to advertise to you on other sites, because, war on ads!
Transparency, just like Adam’s skin! We speak and write for ourselves, and will always include attributions and links to content we share from outside sources. We’ll be upfront about any conflicts of interest or otherwise potentially misaligned incentives if they arise. And if we make material edits to articles after they’ve been posted, we’ll note that at the bottom of the post.
Integrity, independence and free speech. Just to hammer it home, the beauty of not being tied to a sponsor or larger entities – other than keeping the blog free of ad pollution – is that we have lots of freedom to come up with fun ways to serve you, our dear readers, and deliver on the commitments outlined above. We’ll leverage this independence to take risks, have fun, get creative, avoid boring stuffy empty cliches and jargon, and communicate like actual human beings, with a heartbeat…and ‘tegrity!

Commenting guidelines

Odds are your comment is fine. But if it’s not fine, we’ll delete it. A comment would be considered not fine if it’s off-topic or disrespectful. Ads and blatant business promos are also not fine.

Contact

To get in touch, please feel free to email Adam. Alternatively, you can also find Adam on Twitter.

Updated December 2019