Introduction
In today’s information age there are extensive fitness fads and trends all clamming to make you stronger, fitter, or thinner faster. This creates an information overload that can make it hard to find any meaningful information even when there is so much. Most of these trends are just that and are often unsustainable and impractical. While there is no substitute for hard work, practice, and day in day out commitment to improvement there may be ways to make the work feel easier. Caffeine has been shown to influence ratings of perceived exertion and perceived pain which can improve endurance performance. The following sections will argue that caffeine is a tool most endurance athletes should leverage to improve performance on race day and during training through anecdotal and objective evidence.

Personal Experience
My personal experience with caffeine started not too long ago. I was a committed caffeine abstainer for most of my life. My junior coach Josh Smullin had repeatedly conveyed the performance benefits of caffeine to me during my ski career. I abstained despite this knowledge because I was against the idea of caffeine addiction. I eventually committed to the caffeinated lifestyle during my junior year of college. I have since gone down a deep rabbit hole aided by other skiers on the University of Utah ski team that has led me to electronic scales, expensive burr grinders, and single origin light roast coffees.

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I believe my habitual use of caffeine has enabled me to perform at a higher level in training and racing the past few years. From my experience, coffee and caffeine have allowed me to have much more stable and focused training each day. This allows me to get the most out of each session leading to more quality training in general. During intensity training and racing an increase in dosage makes me feel more energetic and explosive even during periods of high fatigue. I have a low tolerance for caffeine and habitual use has allowed me to increase my tolerance up to the recommended performance enhancing doses. Not all caffeine use is good however, when used in excess it can and has ruined races and training sessions. This can come in the form of GI distress and overstimulation. I have never felt as bad as when I have had too much caffeine then done a sprint qualifier. The key is moderation and understanding your body. I am not the only athlete to use coffee and caffeine as a performance enhancer. Athletes from almost every sport can be seen having a morning coffee or taking caffeine pills, gels, and or sports drink during exercise. It is also one of the only proven performance enhancing drugs that is not banned in competition by WADA.

Objective Evidence
The objective evidence that caffeine helps performance is overwhelming. Presented are summarized results from particularly notable studies. Caffeine in doses of 3 to 6 mg/kg of body weight have been shown to decrease 1500m running times by an average of 4.2s. These results were presented from a double blinded and statistically significant study. Another study found that similar doses of 6 mg/kg around 60 minutes before exercise related to an increase in performance of 3.2% over a set distance. It is worth noting that one study used cross country skiing as a mode for testing caffeine’s performance enhancing effects and it was found that there was a mean improvement of 1.1%. While these margins may seem slim, improving by 3% over a 40 minute race is equivalent to getting 72 seconds faster.

Practical Applications
In practice, it is important to use caffeine before the day of the race to understand how it influences your body. 6 mg/kg is quite a big dose, and it is important to have experience with caffeine and exercise before jumping right to this amount. For reference a 300mL cup of pour over coffee has about 170 mg of caffeine in it. This means a 75kg person would need about 2.6 cups of coffee to hit that 6 mg/kg dose. That is a lot to drink before exercising. Caffeine pills can help meet this demand, but one should be cautious of contaminated pills. That is why habitual use of caffeine can be important to prepare for higher dosages. Overall, caffeine has been proven to be an important tool to improve endurance performance when used correctly and should not be overlooked.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments! If you want to follow along with me and my training you can follow me on Instagram or Strava

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Sources
https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/bjsports/26/2/116.full.pdf
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jennifer_Klau/publication/23658597_Effect_of_Caffeine_on_SportSpecific_Endurance_Performance_A_Systematic_Review/links/5a0f1fa1aca27287ce2732c7/Effect-of-Caffeine-on-Sport-Specific-Endurance-Performance-A-Systematic-Review.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etnMr8oUSDo&ab_channel=JamesHoffmann
Image by <a href="https://www.freepik.com/free-photo/cup-fresh-coffee-table_5903811.htm#query=coffee&position=33&from_view=keyword&track=sph">Freepik</a>

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