Iliad Athletics

09/02/2026

Iliad founder and CEO on the Furrows Podcast: Patrick Whalen spent a decade in the Marine Corps, founded a boys' boarding school on a Kansas farm, and now builds physical education curriculum for classical schools through Iliad Athletics.

He tells Ryan Klopak and Alex Julian how a candlelit reading of Ecclesiastes, a wagon crash into a chain-link fence post, and The Song of Roland read over ci**rs all point at one conviction: that formation runs through the body, and abstraction is what happens when it doesn't.

What's in This Episode:

Why Patrick credits the dinner table over any classroom he sat in, and what his educator parents told him about report cards
Saint Gregory's Academy: sixty boys, no electronics, and a folk-music culture that turned a self-declared non-singer into a musician
Busking through Rome as a juggling troupe, and the old puppeteer who kept twelve boarding-school boys from getting jumped in an alley
Reading The Song of Roland with Marines before a deployment, and why "do you blow the horn" was the only question worth pressing
The chess-and-burpees day camp where the least athletic kid on the team won the game in three moves.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3LoFluzlyAf8lh99PxVPPy

09/02/2026

Students need hard, physical work that teaches patience and responsibility and impresses upon them the limits of human will.

08/28/2026

We're transmitting a physical culture to the next generation whether we like it or not. The two pictures offer two different paths. The question is which way are we going?

The physical practices of a people create its physical culture and establish the norms or standards which imprint or engrave their characteristics even on the young who have yet to contribute their part.

I think we're at a critical point in the development of our physical culture in America. There is a tendency away from the fresh, real, and raw, and toward the inert, apathetic, sterile, and stifled. Do our kids have the opportunity for unstructured free play with their peers after school, or during recess? Do they come home to play outside or do they vegetate in front of a screen? What do they see us, the adults, doing? Do they cook and eat and complete chores alongside family members, or do they withdraw from one another into headphones and much easier "virtual relationships?"

I think the good news is that a robust physical culture is not just healthier, it's also more enjoyable and more attractive.

We're for vigor, sunshine, fresh air, real food, sweat, and the civic responsibility to pass along a wholesome physical culture to the generations to come.
www.iliadathletics.com

08/26/2026

It's not about you! It's about you too.
This is physical culture for building a nation of willing and able citizens.
www.iliadathletics.com

08/25/2026

We're committed to Iliad Athletics serving as America's Physical Culture Department.
We are at work building a sorely needed physical culture among the young. The seeds of learning fall on the soil of physical culture. No ideal for personal conduct or civilizational achievement can germinate in impoverished soil. The physical culture will determine which ideals are realized, and which will fail. Ultimately, the physical culture will determine what we take to be ideals at all.

08/21/2026

08/21/2026

Virtue has to be lived.

Former Marine Patrick Whalen joins me to talk about rites of passage, real challenges, and why growth requires action: https://relevantradio.com/2026/08/thinking-acting/

08/20/2026

Here are a few Iliad Athletics Coaches in action to get you fired up for the year ahead. Set the example. Hold the line. Lead from the front!

08/19/2026

Two students are failed by the same PE class for opposite reasons. One is bored because nothing in the period asks anything of him. The other has been quietly written off, and knows it.

Neither problem is about effort or attitude. Both come from a program with no standard in it. When performance is measured against Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Black rather than against the kid in the next lane, the fast student has somewhere to go and the slow student has a next step specific enough to train for.

Schools are stretched thin, and PE is rarely first on the list. That is why the Educator Course is one day and virtual — September 5, no travel, nobody leaves campus.

Send a teacher. Sponsor a seat. Put a real standard in front of both of those students.

Details at iliadathletics.com under Train With Us.

08/12/2026

Dear Parents,
Your school is partnering with Iliad Athletics for its physical education curriculum this year. I'm glad to introduce our approach and to tell you what to expect in the year ahead.