My 5 Favorite Pieces of Gear Right Now: July 2026

Like many of us triathletes here in the Northern Hemisphere, I’m into the weeds of a race season build. Though I had originally planned at being at IRONMAN 70.3 Boise in a couple of weeks, life intervened (as it generally does). So instead, I’ll be pulling my trademark scheduling move of cramming a bunch of racing in all at around the same points in time. You’ll be finding me up and down the West Coast in September and October in an attempt to improve upon my below Mendoza line batting average for, you know, finishing a full distance race.

And maybe, just maybe, not do something silly in the process. (We can revisit this article in October when I have, in fact, done something silly.)

What that means is that my workout stuff is getting a lot of use these days. Case in point: on my family’s recent trip through Europe, we did laundry on four separate occasions, including three while on board our floating hotel room through the European Heat Dome, the Disney Dream. A good three quarters of that laundry was just workout clothing or swim gear. Thank God the laundry wasn’t too terribly priced (unlike the $37 old fashioned I had on board).

With that in mind, as we go through the process of training and racing here, I wanted to point out some of my favorite items I’m using in training over the next few months. As you can probably guess, this list will evolve over time as I fall in and out of love of certain things, whether that’s a particular shoe or flavor of sports nutrition or some other element. But for now, these are my top, go-to, pieces of gear when I spot what workout(s) I’ll be doing that day.

Mount to Coast C1

Running is the pathway into my multisport journey, having started working shoe floors twenty years ago. My default choice whenever it comes to a workout almost always turns to running, as it’s the easiest to quickly fit in between meetings or first thing in the morning.

No matter what type of run I wind up deciding to go ahead and do, I almost always am reaching for this pair of Mount to Coast C1s out of the three dozen or so pairs I currently could choose from. As I wrote back in May during my initial review, “It’s soft, not spongy. It’s bouncy, but not propulsive. It’s flexible without being flimsy. And it’s simply comfortable. It’s a shoe that tackles a mix of surfaces and terrain extremely well.”

And now that we’ve entered into the dry season here in the Pacific Northwest, my primary complaint on the C1 is eliminated — traction is never an issue now. This is a shoe that’s versatile enough to handle just about anything I throw at it. Depending on how training goes, this might turn out to be my choice for a 26.2 mile long survival shuffle in October.

Vuori Kore Short 5″

As mentioned in the opening — we did a lot of laundry while on board the ship. And part of that was so that way I could get my two pair of Vuori shorts clean again. Of the two pair I own, the Kore Short in 5″ inseam is my preference.

If you look at the materials list on the Kore short, you wouldn’t think much special of it (especially at the nearly $80 price point for a pair). There’s a combination of recycled polyester, polyester, and elastane. That’s it. But somehow there’s magic out of these shorts. The Kore short is quick drying and features four way stretch. They fit extremely well. And they simply held up to the heat and humidity while running on board the ship in the Mediterranean Sea. I’d be sweating buckets and these somehow stayed dry enough to not cling and result in chafing. I’ll take as many pairs as I can get my paws on.

Apple Watch Ultra

For as much as I enjoy the pure GPS smartwatches within our space — with Garmin and COROS in my opinion leading the way in that arena — they aren’t great for wearing everyday. And they certainly aren’t great when you’re trying to navigate through new cities, map routes on the fly, and also serving in that sport watch role.

Enter my trusty, well-loved Apple Watch Ultra. I’ve had this watch for a couple of years now. It is serviceable enough as a sport watch; it’s not going to be great for intervals outside of certain mile markers, and it’s not a terribly good swim or bike companion. But it still has, for my money, the best optical heart-rate monitor in the game. More importantly, I can quickly build out a navigation route in Apple Maps, have it display on the watch, and get to places in new cities. We relied on this heavily on our recent trip when we were in Rome, Athens, and Barcelona. It just works. Depending on your cell provider, you might still be able to pick up one for free when you upgrade your phone (which is how I got mine). It’s the watch I keep using most often.

Wahoo KICKR CORE

I have not hidden the fact that I do almost all of my bike training indoors. Especially given my role as primary parent in our household, it’s just far easier to find time to ride inside than it is outside. Take yesterday, for instance. My daughter is home this week without summer camp, as we only flew home from Barcelona on Wednesday. I had a couple of meetings in the morning, then found myself wanting to hop on the bike. Within ten minutes, I was riding in an event in my basement, and an hour later had churned out a solid workout.

Regardless of what bike is hooked up to the trainer, or what software I’ve opted to control that trainer, the mileage is done on a Wahoo KICKR CORE. It is a trainer that I can legitimately call bulletproof. It always connects. It’s damned reliable. And it’s accurate against itself. It’s survived a cross country move, the tens of thousands of miles worth of riding I’ve done on it, and the gallons upon gallons of sweat that I’ve dumped on it. I can’t ask for much more than that.

TrainingPeaks Premium

OK, this one is cheating a little bit, as it’s not really “gear,” per se. But look. I’ve been a member of TrainingPeaks for fifteen years now. This is the longest running piece of my multisport career besides, well, myself. It’s the only analysis and scheduling tool I’ve relied upon. If I want to see how my prior long-distance race builds went, I can pull that up. If I want to copy and pull things forward, I can. And then if I want to move things around, because life happens or because I can’t do something a certain way now, that’s easy enough too.

But, of course, TrainingPeaks is a lot more than that these days. It also has all of that indoor training capability with TrainingPeaks Virtual included in a Premium membership. Arguably, the game physics and road feel are more complete than those of Zwift. And it doesn’t cost you anything additional on top of an existing Premium membership. I’m hopeful that I can learn some valuable lessons from my prior builds and new tools to get me to my goals this fall.

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