Chris is a lifelong endurance athlete with a diverse academic and professional background. He has degrees and experience in neuroscience, clinical psychology, art, documentary photography, and journalism, and has decades of professional experience in the cycling and travel industries. Most recently, he founded Alter Exploration, which crafts challenging, transformative cycling journeys in some of the world’s most stunning destinations.
Chris was born and raised in southeastern Connecticut. He took up running in elementary school, and it quickly became his sole competitive outlet. Ultimately, he won multiple state championships in cross-country and track.
Chris attended Colgate University and graduated with degrees in neuroscience and art. He spent the next three years at the National Institute of Mental Health conducting research on patients with schizophrenia. After another year researching a stem cell treatment for Parkinson’s disease, he decided to pursue his second passion. This led him to the graduate journalism program at the University of Texas at Austin, where he concentrated in documentary photography. This is where Chris rediscovered his love of cycling, joining the collegiate team before expanding into categorized racing.
In 2012, Chris became the managing editor of VeloNews magazine, a position he held for nearly eight years. It was during that time that he became co-host of Fast Talk.
His cycling pursuits took him around the world to race on the road, mountain, and in cyclocross, to places like Taiwan, Costa Rica, Israel, and throughout Europe. He has stood on the podium at several cyclocross national championships, and is a silver medalist at master’s cyclocross worlds.
Chris is the author of The Haywire Heart, a groundbreaking and critically important guide to heart care for athletes, and the first book to delve into the relationship between long-term endurance athletics and heart health.
He is a cofounder of Fast Talk Labs, with Trevor Connor, and was the COO of Fast Talk Labs and The Paleo Diet until January 2022.
Q&A on FTP testing, structuring recovery weeks, and the sustainability of base training, with guest coach Steve Neal
We explore how to use a training philosophy to design your program, then use metrics to guide how much, how often, and how difficult those workouts should be.
In this Q&A episode, guest Grant Holicky discusses sweat rate, polarized training for cyclocross, VLamax, and recovery tools.
We hit the art of cornering and descending from many sides with Emile Abraham, a 12-time national champion known for cornering and descending.
Rambleur Rising coach and elite gravel racer Kristen Legan answers your many insightful questions on the art of listening to your body, ketogenic diets, glucose transport, and much more.
Today, it’s all about performance off-road. Yes, we’re talking mountain bikes. And we’ve recruited some of the most talented folks in the sport to help us decipher this niche of cycling, from race craft, to technique, to training, and everything in between.
in Q&A episode, we cover a broad spectrum of topics including sugar consumption and its health effects, safe rates to increase volume, the pros and cons of group rides, the efficacy of topical bicarbonate products, and much more.
Why do we have rest periods at all? In this episode we dig into the details of this question, along with examining different interval types and the appropriate rest for each.
Listener Q&A on high intensity (HIIT vs. HIT), pyramid intervals vs. Tabata intervals, gut health, recovery, and CTL
We bust myths about exercising in the heat and in cold weather. We are joined by Dr. Stephen Cheung, one of the world’s preeminent environmental physiologists.
Whether for overall health, improving performance and fitness, or taking mental break, cross-training is a powerful tool with many benefits.
In this episode we have a classic Coach Connor special. We ask a question not many other physiologists are asking: Is an amateur’s zone 2 ride (in a five-zone model) as physiologically taxing as a pro’s zone 2 ride?
In this episode we do a listener Q&A on altitude training, TSS, and reference some great exercise physiology resources.
Today we’re discussing how to be aggressive, and when to be aggressive, in races. And we’re doing it with national road champion, Ruth Winder.
We bring in Dr. Stephen Seiler, one of the world’s preeminent exercise physiologists, to discuss how to adjust your training now that the world is in a chronic state of disruption.
We provide the psychological tools that will help both with uncertain circumstances in life (like a pandemic) and with addressing the emotional rollercoaster that is bike racing.
In episode 104, we wanted to give you something you’ve come to love about Fast Talk: a discussion on the science of training, and specifically answering your training questions about respiratory exchange rates, effectively using your bike commutes, and how to balance life with training.
A discussion of the origins of Fast Talk with editor-in-chief Fred Dreier and a special episode as we say goodbye to VeloNews.