The Resurrection of Crucible Fitness -- A Trip Down Memory Lane!
Many of you know that back in the day I was "Crucible Fitness" before we started EN. From 2001 to about 2007 you could find me at CrucibleFitness.com. I offered a very active forum for my athletes, training plan customers, and the general public.
When we started EN I basically jumped all in and turned the lights out on CF.
Mike Graffeo sent me this link the other day and I've had some fun wandering through my old forum. It's like re-finding a dusty old room in your house that you haven't been in for years! Very cool to see old names, personalities, relive discussions, etc.
Here is the text from one of the last posts in the forum, from this thread, Introduction to Endurance Nation. Very, very interesting to see what we though EN was going to be and what it is now!
As many of you may know, Patrick McCrann, www.performancetrainingsystems.com, and I have worked together to form IronCamp.com. While Patrick and I have very different professional backgrounds (R = Marine Corps, P = Peace Corps) we do share complimentary coaching and business philosophies. While rooming together at IMCDA, we spent many hours brainstorming how we could create something valuable for you, our clients. In our discussions we recognized there are two missed opportunities in the triathlon world: Coaching and Community.
Coaching
We've each been in the business a long time and we've seen MANY coaches, with a wide range of experience and knowledge, put out a coaching sign. The result is there are many low end and high end options but few quality options for that middle budget tier. In short, your choices have been to either use a generic training plan or hire an expensive coach. Patrick and I have serviced both ends of the market for years and have tried to raise the bar, especially on the low end, by offering high quality, proven training plans augmented with extensive documentation, message board support, etc.
Community
There are several triathlon communities (internet-based, tri clubs, etc) who do a pretty good job of creating a neat group/team vibe. Their members naturally have training questions which are primarily answered by the athletes themselves or by random coaches who write training articles. The result is often a hodgepodge of conflicting training ideas that are not unified under a coherent coaching philosophy or quality standard. We feel that many of these communities also miss networking opportunities between members at races, training camps, clinics, etc.
Endurance Nation
With these thoughts in mind, Patrick and I have decided to create Endurance Nation (note: this is a very basic initial site while the real deal is under construction). The elements of Endurance Nation will be:
TeamEN: the citizens of Endurance Nation (more below).
ENUniversity: an archive of webinars, podcasts, ebooks and other knowledge-intensive training aids available for purchase.
ENForum: the current and very active Crucible Fitness forum will be significantly upgraded to provide a much improved community for us to all connect and share information.
ENLibrary: current CF and PTS training articles will be moved to this location.
IronCamp:Tour of California, Tour of Georia, IMCDA, KY, LP, WI, FL, Kona
ENStore: where athletes can buy EN gear, equipment, etc.
The Endurance Nation Experience
A community of athletes educating and inspiring each other, managed within the framework of a consistent coaching and training philosophy. Members can receive high quality yet affordable coaching augmented by state of the art internet tools, bringing experienced teachers to the desktop of every athlete. Finally, Endurance Nation will provide opportunities for the members to meet, learn from and train with the coaches and other members, through camp opportunities, an organized EN presence at national races, and other cool events.
Nationwide Virtual Tri Club
So, think of TeamEN as a virtual, nation-wide triathlon club with an annual membership free. If you're in, you get this stuff (see the short list of our ideas below), if you're out, you're out. Done. Very simple for us both to understand. You know what you're going to get, we know exactly who is paying us and what we are responsible for providing to you.
Our website is about 80% completed. We are looking for 100 beta-testers to help us brainstorm, build and evaluate the site, our ideas, the products, and the relationship. This beta test period will be from August 1 to October 1, at which point we go 100% live and membership is $x/yr. In appreciation for your help, your free membership will extended for 6 months, and then $x/yr thereafter. If you are interested in participating, please email kris@performancetrainingsystems.com and she will outline the program, expectations, and instructions for you.
How will EN be different from all of the other communities and coaching services out there?
Our bottom line is this: we want the content, features and enhancements of your EN experience to be driven by you, the members, and we want to be financially incentivized to make that happen for you. We don't want to be another free site offering a mish-mash of content presented via the typical model: build it and hope they come. Everything offered within EN will be driven by the members. On the coaching end, we will offer a new service, ENCoach: your own customized training plan created by an EN Coach and adjusted monthly. Your customized experience will be augmented with exclusive EN webcasts, conference calls, webinars, podcasts, etc. In short, we will use technology to bring high quality, premium instruction within the reach of every endurance athlete.
How will we bring people into Endurance Nation?
We want to work with you to create a unique community and encourage you to bring in your friends, training partners, etc, establishing little EN sleeper-cells in triathlete communities all over the country, and then work to figure out cool stuff to do together. One example is that we will make the American Triple-T the official EN national race and training weekend for '08.
What will drive the innovation within EN?
But the good stuff, the things we know we can do with the technology, will happen on the inside of EN. From the outside, it will be apparent that some very cool things are going on inside. In that house, we want you to tell us what you want to see and we WILL build it. One example is the IMLP webcast we did for you last week. We had the idea at about noon on Tuesday and by 7pm Thursday we had 60 people in a virtual conference room listening to us do our thing, complete with a PowerPoint presentation, chalk-talk of the course via GoogleEarth, and QnA via webchat. We received outstanding feedback from the participants. There are LOTS of cool things like this we can do for you. However, based on our experience, we know that working for 200 people is about the same as working for 2000 people. So rather than generate a lot of value and hope people pay us for some of it, we would like to create a relationship where we are paid up front and are then free to teach, create products, and deliver the services that you have requested, without having to figure out how to nickel and dime you weekly. :-)
Short List of Endurance Nation Ideas
EN Nationals, at DeSoto American Triple-T in Ohio, Memorial Day Weekend 2008. Rich and Patrick vs. All-Takers in the relay division? Bring it!
Kick-ass forum, leveraging a relationship with SmugMug. This is the best example we can find: AdvRider.com
Weekly podcasts from Rich and Patrick. On Monday, tell us what you are interested in, it's done by Wednesday.
EN$: earn EN bucks for posting a race report (with pictures), opening up a SmugMug account (we want PICTURES on the site!), contributing to the powerfiles library, linking your blog to EN, hosting our blog on EN, achieving x# posts in the forum, participating in an EN virtual training camp, etc. EN$ can be redeemed for...stuff we haven't figured out yet, that's where you come in! Again, we want to give you concrete incentives to help us build this community.
EN Virtual Training Camps: we pick a weekend every 8 weeks for some serious high volume training. We publish the schedule, fire up a points competition, collect powerfiles, training data and reports, give out schwag and EN$ to the participants.
The EN Race Day Experience: bringing the CEO Challenge to the Everyman - team dinner, pre-race talk, t-shirts, ez-up at the swim start, team bike mechanic on hand, anything else we think of to create a VIP experience for you.
Any other cool stuff you can think of doing when you have a great group of folks.
Thanks for your attention. We realize that YOU, our current clients and customers, are our best marketing resource. We hope you are as excited about this new direction as we are and choose to become an Endurance Nation beta-tester (remember to email kris@performancetrainingsystems.com).
Comments
I agree with Mike, looks like the evolution has been on target, and no "jumping the shark" Netflix-like moves. With all of us around, and especially the quality of RnP, I'm sure that won't happen!
Yep...it's been a long time!
It would be fun to sit around with everyone and talk about the evolution of EN from our perspective: what we've seen back here behind the curtain, the why of the decisions we've made, etc.
I pretty much do all of my runs in the few CF technical t's I have remaining. They are my exclusive baselayer for cold cycling and all dirtbiking.
The Pasadena Tri Club was originally Team Crucible and there are still some TC jerseys floating around locally that I'll see from time to time on the bike.
Connect - Learn - Achieve!!! While it seems a liitle lame now I for sure liked it back then. FWIW Kyle Welch [kdw on ST] can still be found kicking some AG ass on the east coast in his crucible fitness singlet.
Oh and I have posted hundreds of pictures and never figured out how to redeem my EN$'s for beer?
Says "Mission, Goal, Nooky"....or something like that.
Call this nostalgia all you want ... after lots of to-ing and fro-ing, I'm actually following the Crucible Fitness OS run progression until mid-December! The plan and WOs still reside in my TP account. Did I happen to mention I like to get my money's worth out of a purchase??