Triathletes know that temperature, humidity, and elevation have a significant impact on your training and racing metrics. But how do you know how much to adjust your pace or wattage in the summer heat and humidity or when training at a higher elevation? In this episode, TriDot founder and CEO, Jeff Booher, and exercise physiologist and TriDot coach, Jeff Raines, explain how TriDot’s EnviroNorm® (environment normalization) technology accounts for these variables to keep your training and racing spot on! Learn how TriDot localizes your prescribed training intensities to your anticipated environment to ensure that you are training at the intended intensity and producing the desired physiological adaptations from your training. And hear how TriDot normalizes your actual results to base values so that you can make real apples-to-apples comparisons of performances across different training environments. A big thanks to UCAN for being a long-time partner of the podcast! At TriDot, we are huge believers in using UCAN to fuel our training and racing. To experience UCAN’s LIVSTEADY products for yourself, head to their website UCAN.co! Use the code “TriDot” to save 20 percent on your entire order.
TriDot Podcast .186
Revisiting Consider The Conditions: Adjusting Intensities To Your Training Environment
Intro: This is the TriDot podcast. TriDot uses your training data and genetic profile, combined with predictive analytics and artificial intelligence to optimize your training, giving you better results in less time with fewer injuries. Our podcast is here to educate, inspire, and entertain. We’ll talk all things triathlon with expert coaches and special guests. Join the conversation and let’s improve together.
Andrew Harley: Hey everyone! Great show today, as we revisit Episode .47 of the TriDot podcast, which originally published on August 8, 2020. The episode was called, “Consider the Conditions: Adjusting Intensities to Your Training Environment”, which is basically just a fancy way of saying adjusting your paces according to how hot or not hot it is outside. We are inching closer to Episode .200 of the TriDot podcast, and as the list of episodes grows, we want to make sure that some of our core episodes don’t get lost in the shuffle. If you scan our list of episodes and you see the word “Revisited” in the episode name, let that stand as a beacon calling you to listen, as all of our revisiting episodes are hand-picked by our staff for their importance. As for Episode .47, knowing how hard to go or how much to back off your paces due to the weather in which you are doing your training is crucial to doing the right training right, and this episode goes hard on how to do just that. I can’t wait to hear all about it. Joining me for this revisiting is TriDot Media Contributor, Vanessa Ronksley. Vanessa is from Calgary, Canada, but is currently living in Sydney, Australia with her family. Vanessa has been a TriDot Ambassador since 2021, and a member of the TriDot media team since 2022. She is currently training for her very first Ironman, Ironman California 2023. Vanessa, thanks for hopping on and relistening with me to Episode .47 of the podcast!
Vanessa: Thanks Andrew! It’s great to be here with you and with all the listeners! This is a really important topic, and something that’s been very important to me as I’ve made this jump from a very cold and dry climate to a very hot and humid climate, so it’s perfect for where I’m at in my stage of life.
Andrew: Yes, very curious to hear your thoughts on it. You were hand-picked for this episode for all the reasons above. Vanessa, before we get too deep into the episode, I do have an unscheduled question for you. For anybody follows following TriDot System on Instagram or on Facebook, our social media team once a week has been pushing out a post highlighting a different member of the TriDot team. Jenna Gorham has been doing those posts and has been doing a fabulous job, they’re very engaging. One of the things that she’s doing is “Two Truths and a Lie”. She’s having all of our staff members for that post supply her with two things that are true, and one thing that is a lie, and then anybody following us on social media can take a guess as to which one of the things they think is the lie. All that to say, your post went up just this past week, at the time we’re recording this episode. I was looking at your list for the two truths and a lie, and there was one thing on there that turns out to be very true, and I’m glad that it’s true because I want to hear the story behind this. According to this post, it is a true thing that you broke your nose, as in the nose on your face, while you were playing the piano. Forget our listeners, I need to hear how you managed to break your nose on your face playing the piano. Please amuse us, what’s the backstory there?
Vanessa: Well for starters, I have red hair, which is correlated with being ambidextrous, which is correlated with having a very high rate of injury, and I’m also left-handed. I’m just setting the scene, because I’m injury-prone to say the least. So I was 13 years old and I was practicing piano, and I had just gotten a new puppy that I had been begging my parents for like a decade. I was playing the piano – no one else was home, I was all by myself – and he walked behind me on the piano bench, and I was still in that phase where I was like, “Oh my gosh, he’s just so cute!” So I leaned backwards to pet the dog, and somehow I tipped backwards off the piano bench, and the piano bench flipped on top of me. The piano bench, you know how they open and you store stuff in them? So this was a deep, dense, wood piano bench, and it landed on top of my lap, and it opened onto my nose. The opening part broke my nose. So I was scrambling on the floor, and my dog was terrified. I got up and my nose was bleeding everywhere, and I was all by myself was like, “What just happened?” Yeah, I had a broken nose, black eyes – and I have to say, I’ve broken many a bone in my body, but that was probably the most painful broken bone I’ve ever experienced. The pain lasted for a good six to eight years. It was a long recovery. Yeah, that’s the story.
Andrew: I mean, even besides the pain, just the moment sounds very traumatic, first of all for you, and the dog, frankly. And the piano, the piano was probably like, “What??” Thank you so much for telling me that. I had to ask, I had to know, and we have the extra time on this episode. So with that story out of the way, here’s how today’s episode will work. If you’ve heard one of our revisiting episodes, you’re familiar with the format. Vanessa and I will reshare the warmup question and we’ll chitchat about the warmup question that aired on this episode. Then we’ll get into the main set, and Vanessa and I will sit back and listen to the main set and just soak it in. It was myself interviewing Jeff Booher and Jeff Raines about this topic of considering the conditions in our training. So all of us will listen to that together. We recorded it years ago, it is fantastic information, it is definitely a core, hallmark episode for our podcast. Then when it’s over, Vanessa and I will stick around and do a fresh cooldown, where the two of us will reflect and share our thoughts on the episode, having heard it fresh right here in the moment. So without further ado, we will step out of the way and get into the warmup question so that we can get on with this revisiting of this episode. Lots of good stuff, let’s get to it!
Warm up theme: Time to warm up! Let’s get moving.
Andrew: When we revisit a podcast episode, we also like to revisit its warmup question. Our warmup question on Episode .47 was, “What was a time you used cycling or running to run an errand you would normally do with a car?” TriDot founder Jeff Booher shared a story about literally taking lunch up to his wife when she had accidentally left her work lunch at home, and instead of taking it up to her in the car, he ran her lunch up to her place of employment so she could have lunch. Jeff Raines talked about how he used to drive a school bus for the school system, and he would actually sneak a run in while he was waiting by the bus before his bus route would start. I told a story of running five miles from my job at the television studio to my local Midas car mechanic to pick up my newly-fixed car. It sounded like it’d be easy enough, but it was a 102° Dallas day, and I just about didn’t make it, that’s for sure. Vanessa, throwing this question over to you, what is an errand that you have run on your bike or on your feet that you usually, maybe probably should have, done with a car?
Vanessa: I’m going to the opposite end of the temperature spectrum from when you did your run to the car dealership. I was taking a university class at the hospital a couple years ago. I am super cheap – I do not like paying for parking, I avoid paying for parking at all costs. So this was a class that was happening during the fall, and we’d had a really cold fall that year, so it was like -40° with the wind chill, and I refused to drive to the hospital and pay their obscene parking rates. So I actually drove to my parents’ house, which was closer to the hospital, then I would hop on my bike and ride my bike in -40°. So if you can picture this person on a bike with a massive, giant sleeping-bag puffy coat, it literally looks like a sleeping bag with a face –
Andrew: With red hair and a broken nose.
Vanessa: Yeah, but my hair was totally concealed, because I had on a face mask, I had ski goggles on, and I had pants. I was fully decked out in all the layers, because ‑40° makes for a very cold commute by bike. But I refused to pay for parking, so I just looked like someone who was super hard-core. And you know what else, I was also wearing a boot. I had a boot on at that time, because I was healing a broken foot.
Andrew: We’re detecting a trend here. There’s a theme to Vanessa’s life. But that is very Canadian of you, much like trying to run to the car mechanic in 102° was very Texan of me. So we were just living very true to ourselves, that’s for sure.
Guys, we’re going to throw this question out to you, our audience. I know triathletes are creative, I know we can find a lot of good excuses to get out the door for a run or a bike ride, so I’m sure our audience has some good answers here on an errand you have run, either with your feet or your bike instead of a car. I will throw this question out to you on the I AM TriDot Facebook group. Let us know what you’ve done, we can’t wait to hear what you have to say!
Main set theme: On to the main set. Going in 3…2…1…
Andrew: Before we get too deep into the show today, I want to give a shout out to our good friends at UCAN. Here at TriDot we are huge believers in using UCAN to fuel our training and racing. In the crowded field of nutrition companies, what separates UCAN from the pack is the science behind LIVSTEADY, the key ingredient in UCAN products. While most energy powders are filled with sugar or stimulants that cause a spike and crash, UCAN energy powders, powered by LIVSTEADY, deliver a steady release of complex carbs to give you stable blood sugar and provide long-lasting energy. I personally fuel many of my workouts with the orange-flavored Edge gel, but between their energy mix, energy bars, almond butter, and more, there is definitely a LIVSTEADY product that you will love. So head to their website, ucan.co and use the code TRIDOT to save 20% on your entire order.
Us triathletes know that temperature, humidity, and elevation have a significant impact on our training and racing metrics. But how do we know how much to adjust our pace or our wattage in the summer heat or the humidity or when training at a higher elevation? Today Jeff Booher and Jeff Raines will explain how TriDot’s EnviroNorm technology accounts for these variables to keep our training and racing spot-on. So Jeff Raines, let’s start at the top today with just the why? Why are there training intensities? The paces and the powers that hold in a particular session, why are these so important to get right?
Jeff Raines: Well our intensities are prescribed and optimized in a way that’s catered to achieving specific results and outcomes to achieve a specific purpose. The goal, in general, of training is to be able to maintain a higher pace or speed over a set distance. There are certain types of these workouts that are set to achieve those specific purposes and to support different goals. It’s how we mix and match these different types of workouts and their underlying variables inside of them that we are able to maximize our own potentials in our performance levels. For example, you’ve got your intensity runs, long runs, tempos...what does it all mean? Long story short, there’s three main categories here.
Jeff Booher: The variables, too: duration, intensity, frequency, technique, and sequence. How you’re pulling those five different levers, making up the sets.
Andrew: Within an individual session, those matter.
Raines: Inside of these three types of workouts, yeah, all mean something.
Booher: And the rest in between the intervals, how long the rest is. Complete rest, partial rest –
Andrew: Whether it’s two minutes or three minutes, or those really, really hardcore run workouts that only give me one minute of rest in between.
Booher: That’s all very intentional and purposeful.
Raines: Just creating one plan for all those crazy variables for one person for one season just seems like a nightmare, you go cross-eyed, get a headache. Imagine doing that for every single individual person and optimizing their plan. And as hiccups or things come along the way, changing, monitoring that plan. So there’s just a lot that goes on. But anyways, we’ve got our interval training. Some people know it as HIIT training or High Intensity Interval Training. The concept here is alternating between high and low intensities. That’s trying to achieve a balance of utilizing different energy systems and building your aerobic capacity, let’s say. This, in turn, builds your speed and efficiency of the cardiovascular system. So that’s your speed. Long runs, the key purpose is to develop our aerobic endurance and tolerance from musculature, skeletal aspect as well. Unlike aerobic capacity from interval training, which is your max speed and max capacity of the cardiovascular system to exchange oxygen, aerobic endurance is kind of like different gears in your car, let’s say. You’ll use for long runs a moderate gear or a level over a longer distance, and that’s kind of known as your running economy.
Andrew: So you’re not working your engine as hard, you’re just working it for longer?
Raines: Exactly. Then you have somewhere in between intervals and long runs are your tempos. These are designed for distances typically shorter than a goal race distance at a pace that is at that kind of race effort and sometimes maybe a little bit faster. But they’re typically even paced and can be split into multiple segments inside of a workout as well. These help teach that grit factor we always talk about, and also just being comfortable at being uncomfortable at faster efforts and longer sets. So it builds a tolerance factor there. How far, how long, and how fast should these be? Long story short, with all of these variables: long runs build your endurance, short, hard intervals build your speed, and these fartleks, tempos or these targeted runs test your speed endurance at a target or projected race effort.
Andrew: So having those sets, those different types of training sessions is important, so we want to get the paces right. Those specific paces are designed to test those different parts of our running and cycling engines. So what temperature or environment those sessions are done in, we want to make sure we’re not – a Zone 2 run on a hot day might not work what it’s supposed to work if we’re not accounting for the environment.
Booher: Think about even the time and the paces, how critical that is, and that’s the whole principle behind intervals. If your objective is to get a certain amount of time duration in at your threshold pace, for example, you can go out and do that 30 minutes straight. Or you could break it up into three sets of 12 minutes with one minute rest. So you are able to partially recover and that allows you to get six more minutes in that session. So it’s very specific, but if you go too fast then you’re going to blow up and you’re not going to get it. You only get to 28 minutes and then you’re cooked. If you don’t work hard enough, you’re not taxing the right energy system and you’re not getting the benefit of it.
Raines: And then there can be an overflow into other workouts, so now that ruins other workouts. So the cascade, the overflow –
Andrew: So wanting to get the paces right and get these intervals right in our sessions, it’s important to know the temperature and the environment in which these sessions are being done. So the way TriDot accounts for the external environment for each workout session is just another example of how TriDot is helping athletes do the right training right, each and every day. So TriDot’s technology for adjusting to the environment is called EnviroNorm or ENorm for short. Jeff, how did ENorm come to be?
Booher: Well, the primary research for TriDot started 2004-2005 time frame. It took about maybe five or six years to get the foundational metrics and develop some of the standardization and normalization methodologies to look at the data, construct the data, to be able to do some of the analysis and optimization. So after that time we started shifting to look at some of the other ways where we could factor in outside factors. To isolate the training you have to isolate some of these other things –
Andrew: What’s affecting the body in training.
Booher: Correct. So there are things that are outside, external factors affecting the body, so you have to separate the performance variations that you’re seeing in the data and the response to that, from what is environmental versus what is a response to the training. What is performance improvement or lack of improvement or stagnation, or what is changes in the outside environmental conditions? We wanted to account for those, so over time we did all the literature out there, already done some work, and there were a bunch of different approaches so we figured out which one worked the best and validated it with our own data. So we created what became ENorm, EnviroNorm technology to block out the noise in the data and be able to assess and draw those cause-and-effect conclusions about what training is effective, how much, and what’s optimal.
Andrew: Yeah, because if you’re an athlete and you’re not considering environment normally or some of those other external factors, you would probably just go through the year thinking you’re getting faster and getting slower. I think back to, I had a 5K assessment back in March where I PR’ed my 5K. As Andrew the Average Athlete, the run is my best, so my 5K PR back in March was 18:16. Then just a few weeks ago, I 5K assessed again, and my 5K was 18:46. So you look at that and think, “Oh man, I’m getting worse! I’m not improving.” But ENorm tells me that the effort was around the same. So I’m not UNimproving. But for athletes who don’t consider that, you just go throughout the year thinking that, as the temperatures drop, “Oh, look at how much faster I’m getting!” But you’re not thinking about the fact that it’s getting cooler outside and vice versa. So talking through those external factors and the internal factors, I know TriDot uses both in optimizing an athlete’s training. Internally, looking at biological information, we have our genetics. Back on podcast Episode .07 was all about our Physiogenomix and how TriDot takes your genetic information to internally optimize your training, and externally we have ENorm.
Booher: It’s like a sandwich with the training in the middle. The outside being the environment and the wind and all of that stuff, and inside is your DNA. Both of those have influences, and if you don’t know how they’re influencing you and to what degree, then you can’t really optimize what’s in the middle, which is that training.
Andrew: So podcast Episode .07, if folks go back and listen to that, it talks about the internal factors on how our genetics affect how we train. But tell me how the external, how ENorm actually works in accounting for the differences in external environment.
Booher: Obviously it’s adjusting your paces and power, your FTP and all the paces derived from your FTP, which is your Functional Threshold Pace or Functional Threshold Power to accommodate or account for the environment. That’s a two-step process, or I guess it’s bidirectional rather than two steps. One is it takes performances – it could be an assessment, a race, or a just a workout – and your data file from XYZ location at certain altitudes, certain temperature, humidity, and then it normalizes that back to base value. So what would that individual athlete, what would you have done if it had been at the base values of sea level, 59°F, 30% humidity.
Andrew: Which is like the optimal –
Booher: Yeah, that’s the base. It’s the base reference point for normalization. So normalization goes from an actual, somewhere theoretical, or whatever environment that is anywhere in the world, and normalizes it back to a base value. Then going the other direction from base to any other location or environment is called localization. So now you’re localizing. You know the athletes base value for their FTP and other metrics so you’re able to push that out and environment normalize it in a localizing fashion. So you’re environment localizing it to Denver, Colorado at whatever, or Galveston, Texas, 90° and 80% humidity. Whatever that is, being able to account for that and to prescriptively give the appropriate paces on what you should do so that you’re in those right zones for the right amount of time.
Andrew: Because it makes a big difference. I remember vacationing in Colorado Springs. Just walking around Garden of the Gods on day one in Colorado Springs, I was winded. Versus I can run at sea level in Galveston and be more comfortable in a better heart rate place, lower heart rate running in Galveston, than walking in Colorado Springs.
Booher: It makes a big difference, and not only location, but time of day. So from morning to afternoon, some places have pretty static temperature, but some will have a 20° to 30° swing in temperature and humidity during the same day. We actually have some users that were in Sedona, and they were increasing 2 to 3, 4,000 feet from where they trained to where they lived. There was this big delta depending on where they did the workout that day. So they need to account for that. So you have two directions, bi-directional, you normalize it back to base values for a consistent reference point. From that reference point we can analyze tens of thousands of athletes and look at the data and know this is not environment-related, so we can look at the optimization algorithms there and then you can localize it and prescribe for any athlete anywhere in the world any time of the day in those environments. And there’s two layers, we call them impact layers, that we normalize for. One is their internal and external. Internal we’re not talking DNA here, we do that as a separate thing. This is still the environment, it affects you internally. What that means is it addresses all the factors that have a physiological impact on your ability to perform, your ability to do work. For example, elevation there’s less oxygen, so that has an impact that you can’t breathe as much. You have to breathe more.
Andrew: It’s impact on your body internally. The ability to breathe.
Booher: Internally. Physiologically. The same with temperature and humidity, combined to have a certain heat. So your body diverts blood from your muscles to your skin surface to cool yourself. When you don’t have to do that you have more blood –
Andrew: So your heart is working harder internally because of the temperature.
Booher: So that’s internal factors that inhibit your ability to produce work or to perform. Then there’s external variables, and those are things that have a physical impact on the results of your performance. So at whatever level you perform, you’re putting out the work, so it’s not that you can’t put out the work, but what results do they produce? So in that case it’s wind speed and direction, wind exposure – are you in a cavernous area with lots of buildings, or are you out on the plains, desert, grassland, beach, or coast? What’s the topography like, is it a lot of rolling hills, is it flat, is it uphill, surface conditions? How smooth is the road you’re riding or running on? If you’re in the water, is there a current? The water type, is it salt water, you have more buoyancy, are you in a wetsuit? Pool length, the format of the pool, how often are you pushing off? There’s all of these things you can normalize for to translate, whether it’s a race performance or a training set, back to a base value and assess. Factor out internal and external environmental factors, what were the results of that set? Then prescriptively prescribing that back out.
Andrew: Just to make it tangible for athletes, for me my first couple years in the sport, I had an Excel/Google sheet. After every single race I would sit down and log my splits, log what the temperature was that day, just hand notes about whether it was a hilly course, did the swim have current? That was my way of looking back, very amateurly, “Okay, at this race my time might have been a little bit slower, but look at the elevation.” Because you’re trying to compare for yourself, “How did I do on this race versus that other race? Am I improving? Am I getting faster? Was that a really good race for me or did I underachieve in that race?” So when you’re talking about, even on an individual training session, bringing it back to that baseline, it gives us a way of comparing how did that training session go? How did that race go? We’ve ENormed it, we’ve normalized the data, so we can know this is how it actually went. So there are some athletes out there, and most coaches out there, they don’t really take all this into account.
Booher: Some athletes don’t.
Andrew: Pretty much all. You take into account you know it’s hot outside so you temper your expectations, but that’s about all you do. You don’t know scientifically, data-wise, how to adjust your workout. So TriDot is the only one in the game doing this, and really on this level of detail, taking environment into consideration on every single training session.
Booher: Yep. We have patents pending on this, of course. We’ve done a lot of extensive research. This particular component of technology we’ve been working on for more than 10 years. So we have multiple patents filed in the U.S. and abroad.
Andrew: So tell me, for the athletes out there that aren’t currently leveraging this into their training, what are the consequences of not environment normalizing your training?
Raines: You’ve kind of alluded to it a little bit earlier, your 5K that you were talking about, Andrew. You ran one and a month or two later, and you slowed down. Mentally you may have thought, “Man, I lost fitness.”
Andrew: I’m de-training.
Raines: You’re de-training. Or now you even go your next month or two training at zones and paces based off of that slower 5K. But yet you’re a number of months into training, you’ve got to be fitter, you’ve got to be faster, but you did that 5K assessment in conditions that were hotter or whatever than that first test. So now you’re a little bit bummed out thinking, “Man, I slowed down.” So there’s the mental or morale aspect to it all. But, really, if you used the ENorm factor here, maybe physiologically or internally your body thinks you didn’t slow down 30 seconds. Let’s say maybe you did slow down 30 seconds, but physiologically your body may have thought it ran 45 seconds faster, so you actually had a 15-second personal record. That’s kind of what it does. So now we can establish much more accurate training and pace zones no matter what conditions you run in. We can normalize those down and generate going forward much more accurate training zones. But if you don’t use this technology, there can be training loss. You can overtrain, you can undertrain, maybe not being able to complete a session down the line.
Booher: One athlete I’m acquaintances with, doesn’t use TriDot, was just doing a run. He was only running, but he was complaining about the Texas heat. The training he was doing – I don’t know where he got it from – was 3 x 8 minute at threshold, was the set he was supposed to do. So he needed 24 minutes at threshold at a certain pace, but he said, “Halfway into the second effort I just blew up, I just couldn’t do anymore.” So he didn’t get hardly any of the benefit of that whole session.
Andrew: Because he was running too hard for that environment.
Booher: Yeah, he did the first one, halfway through the second one he blew up and didn’t get half of it. In that kind of workout you need the whole 24 minutes. The first 12 is not going to help you a lot. So he missed a whole session, the benefit of that session. You can’t go back and do it tomorrow.
Andrew: Just to quantify how much environment can affect what your threshold pace should be, using that example of 3 by 8 minutes. We’re recording this episode during summertime in Texas, so obviously there’s going to be different environment factors throughout the year, depending on where people live. But for me, my threshold pace in 98° at 8:30 p.m. in Texas at this present time will be around 7‑minute miles, whereas normally that’s closer to 6:10, 6:15, 6:20. So you’re talking not just a little bit, but I need to be slowing down anywhere from 40 to 45 seconds per minute per mile to be running in the right zone. So in this guy’s scenario, if he doesn’t know that, he’s running almost a minute per mile potentially too fast, and blowing up and not getting the workout in.
Raines: Yeah, we can be stubborn as athletes. We know it’s hot and we know we should slow down, but we still want to hit that goal pace.
Booher: Push harder…
Andrew: It’s gotta look good on Strava, Jeff.
Raines: Actually this athlete that Booher was just talking about, he got 50% of the quality in, but let’s say 90% of the gains you’re going to get out of that workout might occur in the last couple minutes of that workout.
Booher: Most interval sets or most workouts, the first half to two-thirds are priming you for that last portion of the workout. All the gain is at the last part.
Andrew: It’s like a Tour de France race stage, where the first 90% of the stage is just to wear the guys out for the last little bit.
Booher: The prologue is to get you conditioned and primed to accept the overload training at the end.
Raines: Let’s use a fun example here. If you’re not using this ENorm technology, you’re winging it, you’re guessing, “I should slow down a little bit because it’s hot,” let’s put this into perspective. Let’s just say you’re 16 weeks out to a marathon. “Four months, great. I’ve got plenty of time to get ready for that marathon, I’ve got 4 full months.” But, actually, if you’re going to do your assessments monthly, you’re going to update your fitness, your zones and all of that, four of those weeks there will be assessments.
Booher: Recovery weeks and periodized training.
Raines: Yeah, so the rest of that week you’ve got recovery and all sorts of stuff. So four weeks of the 16 are already out right there, so you have 12 more weeks to really train. But then you’ve got probably close to a two-week taper leading up to the last couple weeks there of the marathon, so really you only have ten weeks of the 16 to super capitalize on maybe a long run session, because we’re only doing one of those a week, maybe that one hard interval session per week. So we have ten more opportunities, ten more weeks essentially, to really capitalize, even though we’re 16 weeks out. If you don’t use this ENorm technology, and you’re overtraining or undertraining and you miss just one long run, or you have this scenario that this gentleman had, he only got –
Andrew: If you go too hard or too soft on a long run or an interval run.
Raines: You’ve wasted that entire week.
Booher: So it’s not one session, it’s the week, because you only get one of those workouts a week.
Raines: Until the next one comes. So let’s say you’re 16 weeks out, but I just mentioned really you only have ten of these quality weeks, let’s say, to capitalize on these things. But you’ve got one, two, or three not-perfect workouts because not every workout is perfect. Inside of that you are really, really losing 10-20% of your potential.
Andrew: I’m stressed out right now. I feel like I need to start getting ready for my next race like right now.
Raines: This isn’t to scare – I mean, it sort of should scare some people, essentially – but if you’re 16 weeks out from a marathon, really you only have ten weeks, ten opportunities to really capitalize on your potential, and if you have just one bad session, you get halfway through that long run and call it quits, that’s 10% right there. You’re 16 weeks out and one bad workout, you have just taken your race down potentially 10%.
Booher: Not 10% of your time, but 10% of your improvement potential. If it happens twice, that’s 20%, one-fifth of the amount that you could have improved. The thing is not to freak people out, like “Oh, it’s so hypersensitive,” but it’s to use the tools and the technologies available to make the most from every opportunity.
Andrew: There’s a reason we’ve gone through – I say we as in you – there’s a reason you’ve gone through all the effort to figure this out and get it right and dial it in to where athletes can leverage this in every single session.
Booher: It makes a huge difference, so much, and we’re not even touching on injury and some of these other things. It’s the consistency of your training week after week after week that matters. When you have these fluctuations in overtraining and undertraining, that’s when injuries happen. You don’t know you’re overloading yourself as much as you are. You bump up the volume, you bump something else, but if you also do it in hotter weather, there’s a number of things that can happen that lead to injury. That cumulative effect of all those is the big killer.
Raines: What a lot of people also don’t take into account, which we are, is how the weather changes during a race or during a workout.
Andrew: Which can be significant.
Raines: Yeah, if you’re out on that Ironman course for 12 hours, let’s say, the wind isn’t the exact same coming from the same direction or the same mile per hour the entire sustained 12 hours.
Andrew: Even a one-hour run outside, the wind can change.
Raines: Absolutely, and some of the hills are 8% for a mile, some are 3% for ten miles. So all of these factors are just, it’s really, really cool we are accommodating for those things.
Booher: That’s getting a little bit ahead on RaceX, so we can maybe cover that in a different podcast.
Andrew: That’s a whole different – we want to make sure people know how much goes into prepping you for race day, and getting the weather right, and the execution in that weather right on race day. That will be a part of a RaceX-specific podcast for sure.
Booher: I have another couple examples of how it affects people in scenarios where they don’t really realize the consequence.
Andrew: Do tell.
Booher: One is, early in the year a lot of people do an assessment, or come February they have their run paces, their bike power, whatever that is. Let’s just say run paces. As they continue training and it gets warmer, then the paces need to get slower, so they keep pushing at the faster paces, but it’s gradual. So they’re gradually effectively overtraining. They’re doing more than they should, so they’re not getting the benefit of the workout, and they’re causing too much stress more than they can recover from, but they’re not realizing it. So it builds this chronic overtraining, this cumulative training load, so they feel like they’re plateaued. They’re plateaued because they keep overtraining on these workouts, and they’re not recovering from the workouts, so their body’s not absorbing that training. So it’s gradual over time, and then they’re frustrated because they’re using non-normalized intensities. They’re perceiving it as a plateau, but they could have been getting faster if actually they slowed down a bit, did the workout they were supposed to, get their full time in the duration at the right intensity, then they would’ve been improving.
Andrew: Without looking at ENorm they wouldn’t know they’re supposed to be slowing down, and so you feel like, “Man, I’m not keeping the pace I should be keeping.”
Booher: The other one you alluded to before, with the getting cooler and people drawing connections and false conclusions. That happens a lot in marathon training. There’s a lot of people, it’s kind of a fallacy, when I do marathon training I really want to work on my run this year so I want to do marathon training. So they train long and they associate that good running they do because a lot of marathons are in the winter months. So it gets cooler –
Andrew: So they train in the winter, or they train in warmer climates and on race day –
Booher: So in the winter they train in cool climates and their run pacing is faster so they associate, “My running gets better!”
Andrew: “This run training is really working!”
Booher: But it’s the cooler weather. So they’re separate. They’re drawing a conclusion about the training, when the biggest factor of that is the environment, not the training itself. So then they do the wrong training, they don’t improve the threshold.
Raines: Oh, they think because they’re running longer, they’re getting faster, but it’s just cooler.
Andrew: They’re getting faster because it’s getting cooler.
Booher: Correct. So they’re not doing the right training that’s helping them increase their FTP, and overuse all those other dangers and harms that come from that from an injury standpoint, too.
Andrew: So just kind of getting into the nuts and bolts of how it really works, what it really does, tell me this--where does TriDot pull all this environmental data from?
Booher: Well the data comes from a number of different sources. One is the device itself. So after the fact –
Andrew: So either wearing your Garmin, your Polar?
Booher: Yeah, it’s going to pull in. So that will override it if you’re pulling in device data, that’s what happens. So that’s kind of after the fact, when it’s normalizing back from actual to the base normalization. But other than that we’ll use weather feeds. We have multiple weather feeds, so we’re checking those and prescribing it based on the time of day of the session, and then the location. In your TriDot settings for each session you can have defaults like, “I want all my indoor to be at this temperature.” This is the temperature and location, so you can set those indoor settings for each one. Then you can either set it to your current location, which is where you are – it looks at location services on your device, smart phone, or computer, laptop – or your home location. So it’s kind of this descending – if there’s information in the device, it uses that. If there’s not information in the device, it uses weather feeds. If it doesn’t have weather feeds, then it goes to predefined settings for inside workouts. Same thing if you say current location, it grabs that. If you don’t have a current location, then it uses your home location. And you can also go in and modify it and manually enter it. That’s an important thing.
Andrew: So after the fact if you look at it, and for whatever reason if your device says it was 83° and you know it was 93°, after the fact you can go in and tell it no, it was really 93°. So sometimes when we have podcasts like this where we’re really talking through a feature of TriDot that I know athletes ask about regularly, I’ll reach out to Cindy, who is our lead TriDot support team member and I’ll say, “Hey, we’re covering this, I know you get questions about this. What are the top things you want people to know about this feature of TriDot?” So Cindy very specifically – talking about the home address reminded me of this – she was like, “For the love of everything good and holy in this world, remind people on their account to have the correct home address.” Because if you move, if you don’t put that data in there, if you live at 6,000 feet and TriDot does not know that and it is not environment normalizing your workouts for 6,000 feet – so it’s gotta know where you’re at. So for me, it knows I live in Flower Mound, Texas. It’s 537 feet above sea level, and it knows that. So wherever you’re at, go check your settings and make sure that’s right because that is crucial.
Booher: Flower Mound is 5,000 feet?
Andrew: Five hundred! Flower Mound is five hundred thirty-something feet.
Raines: It’s a mile high city in Texas!
Booher: That’s just a few miles from here.
Andrew: It’s a long uphill drive to Flower Mound! But the other thing with that is, too, if you’re ever traveling, or like you gave the example earlier of the guy who lives in a place where –
Booher: Sedona. Flagstaff.
Andrew: Yeah, you could be at 6,000 feet or 2,000 feet depending on whether you’re at home or work. So before your workout, go in, tell TriDot, “I’m working out at 6:00 in the afternoon, this is where I’m going to be,” and make sure it knows it can get your workout and your environment normalization right.
Booher: Yeah. There’s two things there. One is your home address – you don’t have to put that into your account, but it’s good that we use it for that. It’s not required for any billing, or we’re not going to mail you anything or anything like that, but that’s what we use it for, the address there. The other thing is when you first log on, it says “share your location”. So that location sharing will just give permission to do that when you log on. Like Google Maps, all of that, they need to know where you are to be able to use the app. It’s the same way, so you’ll be able to hit “current location” wherever you’re at, it’ll update.
Andrew: Perfect. Do it, people! Do it, it helps a lot. It helps you get it right. Tell me this, guys – what impact can an athlete expect ENorm to have just on the day‑to-day training? Should we always check our workout in advance to see if the zones have changed, or does it really take extreme conditions – those hot summer days, those cold winter days, high elevation – before training intensities need to be adjusted?
Raines: You know, it’s quick, it’s simple. Just pull up the phone app, log in on your desktop, it’s not hard to do. So the answer is 100% yes. Log in before your workout. Right before or hopefully within –
Andrew: So just make sure it’s going to be right.
Raines: Yeah, within an hour. Booher mentioned earlier too, some people live in areas where like within a 10‑hour window, the temperature is not going to change more than a degree or two, so it may not be as relevant to do that. But for a lot of us, man, that weather swings a lot all day long, so it is very important that if you want to get the most out of this ENorm technology here, and the most out of your training, that you do log in before the session. I just recently moved from Central Texas to West Texas, and I went from 400 feet elevation to 3,000 feet elevation.
Andrew: Yeah. Not 5,000 feet.
Raines: I did a test, my 20 minute FTP bike test, my monthly TriDot assessment, and I got the exact same watts as I got from a month or two ago. And, you know, I was like, “Okay, well, I haven’t lost fitness. I moved or whatever.” I was a little bit bummed. I did both tests indoors, 70 degrees, about 30% humidity. I was within one beat of the same kind of average heart rate, max heart rate that I achieved. I was just thinking, “Man, what is going on here? I’ve been training hard, why didn’t I improve?” Well then I went back in there and I updated the city.
Andrew: Where you lived, yeah.
Raines: And 2,500 to 2,600 elevation change, actually the ENorm gave me an 8 watt improvement. So even though in person, in real time, I achieved the exact same score, the exact same average watts for that 20‑minute period, that ENorm then saw that, flagged it that I was at a little bit of an elevation –
Andrew: Because it knew it took more of an effort to match what you had done at a lower elevation.
Raines: Yeah, and now my zones are a little bit different going forward for the next month or two months.
Andrew: So Raines tell me this, because I’ve had athletes ask me this before. I know they’ve asked you guys, the coaches, this before, because our athletes do want to do the right training right and they want to get it right. So athletes that have heard us talk about putting your location in ahead of time, letting TriDot know the temperature of where your workout is going to be. They’ll do that, they do the run, they do the bike, they come back inside. Their Garmin watch, their unit uploads the data, and then all of a sudden the zones change just a little bit. It’s just a little bit, but it’s enough to affect their TrainX score just a pinch. Why do we see a difference between our zones going into the workout and coming out of the workout if we’ve updated where we’re at in advance?
Raines: Yeah, I know, you mean, weather is not a perfect science. Even the weather men have been perfecting these things for decades now. It says it’s going to rain and it doesn’t –
Andrew: Weather men can be fallible?
Raines: So yeah, you look at your training within an hour, it’s supposed to be 90°. You go out to a track and your watch reports 92°. It is what it is. So there are unique cases in there.
Andrew: So on the front end, TriDot is pulling the weather data from a weather service, correct? And then on the back end it’s the watch actually out in that environment reading and reporting what it’s seeing and that then –
Raines: Yeah, there’s a projected versus a historic weather pattern there, and the device also has a temperature gauge. Most devices out there have temperature gauges inside of them. And sometimes, actually, there are defaults in some of these things. Or sometimes body heat plays into the actual temperature, as well. So if it’s 30° out, but your device reports 40° – there are different manufacturers and recommendations on things to do there, depending on which device you’re using to collect that data. But TriDot will accommodate that actual weather as well, and then also, like you said, if there was a unique discrepancy there from a device, let’s say, you can go in and manually update or complete those.
Booher: You can manually update it after the fact for sure, adjust it, and then attach the file. But then before, if you go over to the training intensities page, you can go in and put in whatever you want, even if ahead of time. The best thing, all you can do, all TriDot can do, and all any person can do is make the most of the data you have available. So if the data’s there we can use it. If it’s not there we can’t use it. We don’t know what it is. So if it’s a little warmer than you thought it was, just adjust as best you can. You’re going to get a whole lot closer because it’s already pretty accurate to start with.
Andrew: For me, I’ve had this happen a few times myself. It’s never far off. It might change my zone 5, 10, 20 seconds tops, but you’re not losing the purpose of that workout.
Booher: Right, right.
Andrew: So, Jeff, you give the example of your bike assessment where one month you were at a lower elevation and then the next month you were at a higher elevation. I gave my 5K example of being in a cooler temperature in March versus having a slower 5K but still bumping the dot because I was testing in the summer. So when athletes go look at their assessment page, they’re going to see very clearly on the page that the time that they’re recording for that assessment and then the EN time for that assessment. So we’ve both given examples for some context, but what are other things that athletes need to know about how environment normalization affects their assessment?
Raines: What’s really cool, and it seems like there’s a lot going on here and there kind of is, but the beauty of it all is you don’t necessarily have to fully understand it. We have this podcast here to help in that aspect, but there’s basically three layers to what we’re doing here. TriDot knows the conditions at which you do your assessments, your tests. You do periodic tests to update your fitness and your zones going forward. We need to know how your fitness has changed so we can adjust your zones. So TriDot knows the conditions at which you do your test, so now we can establish much more accurate training zones. Then there’s a whole other layer to it all, in that each day when you do your training, TriDot knows the weather and how it changes basically every hour throughout the day. So every day when you do your training, TriDot knows the conditions at which you do your training, and it normalizes that data and localizes it, and gives you much more accurate power and paces. Your heart rate zones in TriDot always stay the same until you test again. But that power for cycling, and those pace zones for running, will change all day long as the weather changes in your city, to try to keep your heart rate the same, and you get those physiological more accurate effects from that. That would be the second layer. The third layer in all of this is what your future races are. We’re not just training you for 70.3 miles, 140.6 or whatever. You can customize all these distances in your races in TriDot, but we know that historic and projected weather of your race coming up as well. We know the temperature, humidity, the elevation gain within. Flat courses and hilly courses are different, right? So that third layer is we are training you for the conditions that you’re going to be racing in for your individual fitness levels on your specific conditions on your specific race course. So we can normalize your race-day strategy and how to race on your specific course inside of all that, which would be that third layer.
Booher: So another race, you might be biking 112 miles and that could be a six-hour effort or a five-hour effort, or 7½ or 6:45, so there could be a big difference in what you’re training for. So if you need to go for a certain amount of time on race day based on the terrain and all the environmental conditions, we know that your long ride needs to be x proportion of that. So we’re adjusting your long rides, how much are you going to build up in the long ride from week to week to week.
Andrew: It knows I’m going to take longer at Lake Placid than at Ironman Texas.
Raines: Yeah, exactly. And a lot of coaches use this, it’s on Google, but to establish or prescribe training zones, the old school way of coaching is, “Okay, go do a 5K. Great, you ran a 20 minute 5K? You should be able to run a 3:20 marathon.”
Andrew: Nope.
Raines: Okay, great. Now you’re going to go do Lake Placid full Ironman. Are you going to train for 3:20 all year long? You’re not going to be fit enough to do that until later on in the season. Or you’ve still got a long swim and a long bike, so do you add ten minutes to that? Twenty minutes to that?
Andrew: Or I might have done that 5K in February and Lake Placid isn’t in February.
Raines: There you go. There’s just so many things. So do you add 10 to 20 minutes to that 3:20 because you’re swimming and biking before? But what if there’s 5,000 feet of climbing on the bike and 1,000 feet of climbing on the run? Do you guess, and add another 10 or 20 minutes to the marathon time off the bike? So coaches have gotten decent at kind of guessing that. They may have raced that course, they have an idea of all that. But if you want to be exact, there’s just nothing out there.
Andrew: Use the data. Use the data that ENorm has, and get it right.
Raines: The data doesn’t lie.
Andrew: So whether we’re just getting to know a new training partner or just talking shop with another athlete, we often go through this comparison list. “What’s your FTP? What’s your 5K pace? What’s your base 100 in the pool?” etcetera. And when we talk about FTP, we’re used to talking about these like it’s an absolute number. It just gets ingrained in you, “My FTP is a 181, my FTP is this, my FTP is that.” When we talk about ENorm and we’re talking about assessments just now, Raines, it’s making me think – if we’re so used to talking about FTP like it’s an absolute, it feels like when you incorporate the environment FTP shouldn’t be absolute.
Booher: Yes and no. So, yes, absolute in the sense of your fitness at any one time is absolute. But the way that’s expressed depends on the conditions under which it’s expressed. So your fitness may be the same, but what that turns into on one day, one time of day, in one environment to another, could be different.
Raines: Yeah. It translates to a different outcome.
Booher: Yeah, it translates to a different outcome, exactly right. So you’re thinking FTP and how that’s expressed, and your paces are going to change in your workout. Also when you’re measuring stress, we’re talking about a lot prescriptively here on what your paces should be and what should your FTP – if you’re working at 75% or 90% of that, whatever your workout is – that FTP value is changing, so your prescription is changing. But also when you’re measuring training stress after the fact – so not only looking at performance improvement, but when you’re calculating how stressful was that – different types of day your FTP changes, so that percent of FTP change so the amount of stress from different types of workouts is also dynamic. So your FTP is dynamic, your results from performances and training is dynamic, as well as the assessment values and the stress values so that doesn’t stay the same day to day.
Andrew: So we need to be humble in knowing that, even if I know my FTP might be right now 180, that doesn’t mean I can hold 180 watts for an hour in 100 degree temperatures.
Booher: You can think of it back to the base values, “My ENorm FTP is...” and that number is the same until you retest. So that’s the environment normalized, what it would be at 59°, 30% humidity, at sea level.
Andrew: So the last question that I have when I think about environment normalization and its impact on our training – so let’s kind of land the plane in the main set with this – if my race coming up is – whether it’s hot, whether it’s humid, whether it’s at altitude – is there any value in trying to train in those conditions, or can I train where I’m at with the weather I’ve got and let ENorm guide me on race day?
Booher: I think ENormalization handles those different impacts of physiology, the physics of impeding your actual results due to those external factors of the environment. It doesn’t address the climatization, getting used to something, so there’s still that period when you get on site at altitude or getting used to the conditions. But it does transfer your performance abilities, that’s really the thing that it’s focused on. That’s about your physiological ability and the physical results produced from that ability. But there is tremendous value in training in the conditions that are going to be as close to race day as possible. From a psychological importance, getting used to it, being comfortable with that, what it feels like. It feels different, even though you’re working just as hard, it just feels different. Your hydration, your fueling, all of those things change. So especially race rehearsals, the more that you can do as near to race-day scenarios and environment the better.
Andrew: Just biologically, your body has to adapt to those conditions biologically.
Booher: Right. Regardless of how much work you’re doing, you’re doing stuff a little differently to do that. In different heat you’re going to digestively tolerate stuff different. It’s not a performance or fitness ability, but you’re going to digest differently. There’s less blood in your gut and your intestines. I think it’s additionally just the familiarity with the conditions fosters confidence. If you’re familiar with it, it’s not new. On race day there’s going to be enough new stuff to deal with, so the more familiar you are and comfortable you are in that environment, the better you’re going to perform.
Cool down theme: Great set everyone! Let’s cool down.
Andrew: Absolutely an excellent main set right there from Episode .47 of the podcast. TriDot’s ability to change your intensities based on your environment is, in my opinion, one of its best qualities. Literally, there’s no one else in the training game that does this like TriDot does this, and TriDot’s done this for a very long time. Vanessa, as you listened to that main set, what were two or three nuggets or main points that really jumped out to you?
Vanessa: I think the first one, something that I had completely forgotten about since I listened to this episode a long time ago, is that TriDot is going to take data from the training session, normalize it to sea level, and then from there it’s going to localize it to wherever the athlete is. It takes care of the pacing for different conditions. That was something that was really important to me to jog my memory. I thought that was cool.
The second thing that I think is really amazing, something that very much applied to me when I moved over here, is that the environmental normalization takes care of pacing in different conditions – cold or hot, high or low elevation – and it will make those pacing adjustments to suit that condition. But something that is also very important to consider is how you feel in those conditions, because I know training in a dry climate is very different from training in a humid climate. You’re going to feel different, your sweat rate is going to be different, and your hydration strategy needs to be different. I know for me coming to Australia, when it started to get really humid and hot I was like, “What are all these blisters on my feet? Why am I getting blisters in between my toes?”
Andrew: This is a new injury!
Vanessa: Yeah, right? I actually do remember I got my first blister during my first half-Ironman, that was the first time I ever got a blister. Now, in Australia, I am very, very sure to put 2Toms on my feet before I go out for a run, because I don’t want to get those blisters in between the toes, those are the worst. Yeah, I think it’s really important to know that the paces are adjusted for you, but you also have to be able to prepare yourself mentally for all of those extra things that are going to come about. Like chafing even, the sports bra line, oh my gosh, it can become so annoying when you’re training and running in humidity. Those are things to consider as well that are really important.
Andrew: Yeah, that’s a good reminder that TriDot takes care of all the pacing, the training session part, but you as the athlete still have to take care of going out and getting through the session, doing the best job you can in the session with the body and mindset that you have. I know exactly what you’re talking about. I grew up in Florida, and when I moved to Texas, I just thought Texas was so stinking dry. I would go for a run, and I felt like I just couldn’t get enough oxygen with my breaths. Now, being used to Texas, if I go back to Florida – they’re not dramatically different, but they’re different enough – I’m like, “How did I grow up playing sports here? The air is so heavy and thick! I can’t breathe, it’s suffocating me!” But growing up there, I didn’t think anything of it. It’s so interesting how you have to mentally get yourself ready for a different environment, even as TriDot tells you what paces you need to back off to. Super interesting stuff.
As we alluded to in the intro today, I wanted to revisit this episode with you because you, like me, are a very normal triathlete, and right now you have the circumstances of being very used to training in the cooler temps of Calgary, Canada, and all of a sudden you find yourself having to adjust to a much warmer climate in Sydney, Australia. What was that transition like for you, and what did you notice about your TriDot training once you made that move?
Vanessa: It was interesting, because we moved from summertime in Canada to wintertime in Australia. I mean, we have to put “winter in Australia” in very loose quotation marks, because it’s still pretty nice. But I do remember specifically, after I got my hands on a bike trainer and started back into getting on the bike, I put the bike trainer out on the deck for a couple of my first workouts. I was like, “Perfect, it's going to be so nice and cool out there.” But then the sun came up very quickly, and it became very, very intense heat, and I remember having to get off the bike and lay on the ground and collect myself, because I was so dehydrated, I was so overtaxed. Although my training zones were appropriate – I’m not sure if this is still a bike trainer problem or if I was so not prepared for how it was going to feel – but I was dying. My family was just looking at me like, “Are you okay?” I wasn’t okay. It was still quite a huge adjustment, and then as the temperature increased and the humidity became greater, I found that it was more of a gradual change from that point on, and I actually realized that I like running in higher humidity. This seems totally atypical of a red-headed, fair-skinned person, but man, I actually like that feeling of, “I’m sweaty, but I’m not getting any sweatier. I’m just as sweaty as I’m going to get right from the beginning.” It was kind of cool. But the bike, on the other hand, I do not like biking in humidity. Especially indoors, it’s just disgusting. That’s been an adjustment, but it’s been okay. I do like having the opportunity to train in an environment that is so different from what has been normal for me for my entire life. It’s been great, I really enjoy it.
Andrew: One thing I really liked from the episode, and from our conversations as staff, is that we’ll talk a lot about the obvious ones – our humidity or temperature, because we see an immediate impact on how we feel based on humidity and temperature – but elevation is also something that’s taken into account here. Because doing a session at 6,000 feet in Denver, Colorado is very different from doing a session at 400 feet above sea level in Dallas, Texas, in terms of how much oxygen you have in the air, and what elevation does to your body. Something super interesting that TriDot will do is, when you go visit a location like that and you tell TriDot, “Okay, I’m doing my workouts this weekend in Denver,” it’s going to adjust your paces quite a bit for that elevation. But if you were to MOVE to Denver, Colorado, and all of a sudden TriDot senses that you’ve been here for a week, two weeks, you’ve been here for a month, it’s going to start backing off how much it changes your paces, because it knows your body is actually acclimatizing to that new elevation. Super, super cool, how long you are in an environment will also play a role in what TriDot does to your training. So Vanessa, you have been in Sydney for a while now, you’re not brand-new to town anymore. Do you feel like your body has adjusted to the new climate, or do you still feel like a red‑headed Canadian dropped off for a run down Bondi Beach?
Vanessa: Yeah, I do definitely feel like I’ve adjusted. My Garmin watch tells me that I’m getting more and more heat acclimatized. That’s been kind of interesting.
Andrew: Oh, thanks Garmin!
Vanessa: Yeah, but I don’t know what it’s actually measuring or how accurate it is, but it’s kind of neat to see.
Andrew: We need a podcast episode for that!
Vanessa: It’s funny, because when I first arrived here – I’m thinking now that you’ve said this, because I had come from such a high elevation right down to sea level – it probably had adjusted my training zones to push the more difficult paces and power zones.
Andrew: What was your elevation in Calgary?
Vanessa: It’s 1,000 meters, so is that 3,000 feet I think?
Andrew: Yes? But you are like AT sea level now.
Vanessa: That’s quite significant. It’s funny too, because I ended up going back to Calgary for a work trip after we’d been here for several months, and I do remember I went up to about 1,500 meters and was doing some runs there, and I loved it so much. The air was so thin, it was so wonderful to breathe. I felt the elevation was going to impact me a lot more than it had, but because TriDot had changed my training zones to incorporate that elevation change, I think that’s why it felt so easy. That was really great.
Andrew: Vanessa, we’ll close down with this. One, it’s a public service announcement, but I’m also going to ask it of you. For our athletes listening, this is always a reminder: before you do a workout, if you are somewhere new – or if you are in your home town, you’re just workout out at a different time than you normally work out – make sure on the TriDot app you punch in, “I’m not doing that run at 7:00 a.m. when it’s cool and the sun isn’t up, I’m doing that run at noon, and it’s much warmer.” TriDot will adjust for you the intensities you should be doing for that workout. It’s going to make sure you don’t overcook or undercook the workout. So Vanessa, when you moved to Sydney for the year, and when you move back to Calgary, when your time in Sydney is over, did you properly, like you’re supposed to, go in your settings and tell TriDot, “I am now in Sydney moving forward”?
Vanessa: I did. It was probably the first thing that I did when I got off the plane, was change my address. What’s interesting is as soon as we got to Australia, one of the first things that I did was change my location. But then when we moved to the place where we were going to be renting for a long period of time, there’s no thermometer on the inside of the house, because there’s no centralized heating or cooling system. So I was using just the default indoor temperature setting, and again I was finding the bike workouts to be a massive struggle. So I went out and actually purchased a little thermometer that had a humidity meter on it as well, and it made the biggest difference, just knowing the temperature was about 4° warmer than I thought, and the humidity was about 40% greater than what was put as the default. So as soon as I changed that, everything became a little bit more manageable in terms of me hitting my paces.
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