Not a lot of love from the FB comments. Obviously he’s got a good engine with marathon time. Not sure why people are so salty about the trip to A2, etc... that stuff is great, but without that engine and training it back up he wouldn’t be sniffing those times no matter how fat his wallet is.

I like the story and am fascinated by the swim improvement. Is there any way to get an idea about weekly volume, go to set, any epiphany on technique?

The whining is so nauseating. The reason there isn't more love is that too many people here are unwilling to acknowledge that they just don't have the talent/work ethic/discipline and need to blame their lack of success on something outside their control
-I'm not rich enough to be fast
-I'm not flexible enough to swim fast
-I love my family or I would be much faster
-If they are better than me, they must be doping

Blah, blah, blah, whine, whine, whine

The key thing here is that he was a collegiate runner (engine and potential), and as judging from his initial swim videos, clearly has some significant talent at swimming, as his 'before' video looks nothing like the typical flailing beginner swimmer who has no power in their stroke and serious stroke errors.

Still, he did a nice job cleaning up the stroke and adding good power to it - that's some good progress there for sure, even if he literally started out faster than probably well over 50% of experienced AG triathletes on day 1.

i think there's something more, and he and i got into this a little. i cut it from the interview, because the interview was long. he's 6'1" and 165lb. he's way too big to be a 1:05 half-marathoner. he's got to have a HUGE engine to run THAT fast at that weight. this is not the prototypical runner body, but it IS the prototypical triathlete body (that is, long course triathlete body). dave scott, scott molina, mark allen, scott tinley, and a lot of others were all in that 6'1" and 163lb (+/-) morphological window. pigg, huddle, peter reid, zach, kiuru, dittrich, luc, macca, normann, they were all this size or close to it, and i could list you 3 dozen others. i fitted most of them in our wetsuits and altho we made 14 sizes they all fit into the same size.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

bear in mind that "before" video was 6wk after joining purple patch, and that was (i believe) a couple of months after joining palo alto masters. so, some progress had already been made.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

Was gonna say...if only I looked like the first video...

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Washed up footy player turned Triathlete.

I think the whining is more a symptom of not being able to identify with this guy. He's a guy who's been at the top of two major companies and had the means to quit his job and just train. The average AG'er doesn't have the ability to do that, and I think it's hard to look at this as "inspiration," which I think is where people just can't identify with the life this guy is currently living.

That said, it's inherently short-sighted to act like he didn't work his ass off to earn those two years and the money he's made. I have to imagine a bit more context behind how he got to where he is might have helped. You don't get to leading Fb/Uber's global growth without an impressive work ethic/backstory, which might have been interesting to get a bit more of a flavor for. Super interesting profile though on a guy who's clearly one of those born with the engine to do this stuff.

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Chasing PB Podcast Latest interview with Eli Hemming on Targeting a US MTR spot in Tokyo

So true. Show me a high-level collegiate runner, I'll show you a future monster on the bike, when they inevitably give up running for cycling or go into triathlon.

He did look good in the before video. One big takeaway in the after video is his turnover is much higher while maintaining better form and a more powerful pull.

Kudos to this guy for tapping into his existing potential and making something of it. As far as the poo-poo'ers .. triathlon isn't the only sport where it helps to have money and time. Life isn't fair.. deal with it.

He's a guy who's been at the top of two major companies and had the means to quit his job and just train. //

And here is the other thing that everyone seems to leave out, or just pass over like it is nothing. This guy ran faster than virtually every pro in the sport right now, ITU included, and it was the marathon. So before he swam a stroke or turned a crank, he had built the endurance physiology of a very top level pro athlete, so that was his starting point.


So in that regard it is no huge surprise that he has some talent in other endurance sports, certainly we would expect top runners to become top cyclists. The only real question is will he ever be able to swim, some runners just are rocks, and stay pretty much that way. But he has attacked swimming a lot like Lionel, and surprise, surprise, hard work, lots of yardage, and a coached masters team actually works and is the fastest way to faster times..


The rest of the story is interesting but just noise to his success, it was born out of his prior career as a world class runner, not the accolades he earned in business...

How relatable are pros who do this full time, and everyone seems to fawn over and identify with them? I think the comment hate or "whining" is because the subject comes across as very irritating to many people, including me, by virtue of how he talks about himself -- especially on this podcast, if you can even get through that, which I couldn't -- and how highly he seems to think of himself in general. You can tell a lot about a person whose instagram header says "Triathlete (previously at Harvard, Stanford, Facebook, Uber)". For me, that irritation simply drowns out anything I could hear about and learn from his training and it is even more irritating because I don't think he has any sense that he is being irritating -- when I irritate you and make you feel an inch high, it's because I meant to, but Ed Baker seems like a hapless natural.


With all this initiative and smarts and how much he seems to know already with the endurance background, why does Ed Baker need a Purplepatch / Matt Dixon to win the amateur race at an IRONMAN/70.3 event anyways, and why is the fact that he did surprising? After all, I won the amateur race at my first MDot event (beating more than half of the male pros) by coaching myself. A lot of that was based on what I learned about work ethic and discipline as a successful junior executive at Fortune 500 companies, but also because of my running background as a distance runner, first at Blair Academy and then at Penn -- a school I of course chose for academics even though I was a recruited athlete. Now I have a lot more flexibility with my training because I run my own business (part time) making private real estate investments and advising other firms in my space.


See what I did there? How you talk about yourself matters in terms of how people respond to you -- he's getting shit because he is irritating and seems not to know it. This is my complaint about Ed, Dan, though I appreciate the profile.


Also, note: if you can only go 4:29 with an FT of 400 watts, you wasted your money tinkering with helmets and trinkets at A2, because the way your body is fit to that bike makes you efficient as a barn door in the wind. You can see what I mean in his A2 before and after photos. I guess they didn't teach aero at Harvard.

Exactly. So be quiet about the rest of it -- it's just a mechanism for talking about how successful you are and it's irritating as shit.