Endurance

Episode 9 - with Chrissie Wellington OBE and Dr Andy Kirkland

Christine Wellington OBE needs little introduction to most, a legend in the Ironman world, having won every iron-distance event that she entered as well as being a four-time Ironman Triathlon World Champion. She held all three world and championship records relating to iron-distance triathlon races: firstly, the overall world record, secondly, the Ironman World Championship course record, and thirdly, the official world record for all Ironman-branded triathlon races over the full Ironman distance. Dr Andrew Kirkland worked with Chrissie on her training book. Andy is a lecturer in Sports Coaching at Stirling University here in Scotland and passionate cyclist. In Performance Coaching he works with grass-roots sport through to Olympic level. Book – To the Finish Line &amp; A Life Without Limits Twitter: @chrissiesmiles and @andykirkland71

Welcome to the first series of the Endurance podcast with myself Mark Beaumont. I’m joined on many of the episodes by my friend and performance manager Laura Penhaul. We started recording these conversations as a research project for my new book, also called ‘Endurance’ &amp; published by Global Cycling Network – so you can find many of these conversations written up in the ‘Wise Words’ sections of the book. The Endurance podcast is focussed on meeting the sports scientists, the support staff, the researchers, the entrepreneurs – the people you will rarely have heard of - but who are the experts at supporting endurance athletes and are at the forefront of endurance sports. I started my endurance journey 25 years ago as a 12-year-old boy cycling across Scotland, and I recently pedalled around the planet at the pace of 240 mile a day. Laura has been a physiotherapist at 4 Paralympic &amp; Olympic Games, led the first female crew to row the Pacific Ocean and lead my Performance team for the ‘Around the World in 80 Days’ race. Young or old, female or male – I believe that endurance is the greater leveller in sport. I’m fascinated by the mental, physical and logistics skills that it takes to push endurance. We are all endurance athletes at heart – we can all go further.