Captain Kaufmann’s Playbook

OCR athlete Jeremy  Kaufmann has assembled 52 weeks of workouts to share with the world in his new book The Captain’s Playbook: More than a Beast as he journals his way through a year of training and races. The book is a collection of workouts and race reviews that chronicle his journey from November 2016 through November 2017. In that time, Jeremy passed many milestones, some OCR related, others personal, and it is clear that he put in a lot of hard work to get the results he achieved.

The format of the book is part diary and part workbook. Each set of workouts is accompanied by ruled pages for the reader to include his or her own results and notes. He includes the workouts he put together for himself, and he includes a few workouts from guest coaches as well. If you were ever curious about how much work the stronger athletes put in to achieve their results, you can now compare what you’re doing with what Kaufmann is doing. And then, if you want to keep yourself accountable, you can write in what you did during a particular week and see how it matches up.

That said, I would point out that these workouts are not for everyone. If you are trying to go from couch to Warrior Dash or your first Stadium Spartan Sprint, these workouts would knock you flat. However, if you are already young, fit and competitive, it could be useful to spy on what someone else is doing to keep up.

If you read between the lines, you can see that Kaufmann has a life beyond fitness and OCR. In his race recaps (some of them originally published here), he gives a first-person account of the races, but he also tells about getting injured and what is going through his head. His real life also “interferes” with his training: he gets married, he moves across the country, and he adopts a dog (a husky, so almost as cool as Ryan Atkins’ and Lindsay Webster’s malamute Suunto). Keep an eye out for Team Kaufmann and its captain in the years to come.

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Christopher Stephens

Christopher is an attorney, a middle-of-the-pack triathlete, a marathoner, an open water swimmer, and a recovering Jeopardy contestant. A native New Yorker, he trains in the rugged wilderness of Central Park and can sometimes be found swimming in the Hudson. He also bakes pies. Delicious pies.

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