It's time to "negative split" the year and finish stronger than you started! Whatever has happened in the first half of your season, this episode is going to help you nail the next part! Joining us today is triathlon legend and Coach Mark Allen and Coach Joanna Nami. Mark and Joanna discuss how to stay healthy, injury free, and motivated in the back half of the year. They also talk about setting a race schedule that enables you to peak at the right time. There's plenty of time left this year for a great performance. Listen in to get all the tips for smashing the second half of your triathlon season! At TriDot, we trust 2Toms to keep us moving! 2Toms provides revolutionary products to prevent issues from chafing, blisters, odors and sweat. To make the switch to 2Toms, head to Medi-Dyne.com and use the code “TRIDOT” to save 20 percent on your entire order. A big thanks to UCAN for being a long-time partner of the podcast! 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 .197
Smash The Second Half Of Your Tri Season
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: Welcome to the TriDot podcast! Our good friend, triathlon legend, and TriDot Coach Mark Allen has been doing a really great series on YouTube called “The Second Season”, focusing on how to stay strong deep into the triathlon season. It’s really great content from Mark on YouTube as always, and we decided to bring this topic over to our podcast audience. So naturally, our first coach joining us for this conversation is Mark Allen. Mark is the most successful triathlete of all time, having won the Ironman Triathlon World Championships six times, the Nice International Triathlon ten times, and the first recognized Olympic-Distance Triathlon Championship. He went undefeated in 21 straight races for an astounding two-year winning streak from late 1988 to 1990 season. He has been inducted into the Halls of Fame for Ironman, USA Triathlon, and the International Triathlon Union. ESPN named Mark as the Greatest Endurance Athlete of All Time, and you’ll hear no argument from me on that. Mark, thanks for inspiring such a great topic today!
Mark Allen: Yeah, it’s one that people don’t actually address with enough thought or enough focus, really. That whole second half of the season, which I really call the “second season”. A lot of people start training after the first of the year, and they hit some early races in May and June. Then after that – July, August, September, October, November, maybe even into December – there’s usually that one huge thing, the nugget that’s out there that you want to target and hit really well. So for those who have trained since January, that can be tough, because that’s a long haul to be considered training all that time. Then there’s the whole other crew who don’t get their momentum going until May or June because of weather, or school commitments for their kids, and that kind of stuff, so they’re sort of trying to play catch up. How do you play catchup and get there at that last race, also healthy, fresh, vital, ready to go? I think it’s a great topic. It’s one that not many people talk about actually, the second season.
Andrew: Yep, and we’re going to discuss all of that today with you and Coach Joanna Nami. Joanna is better known as Coach JoJo, and has been coaching athletes with TriDot since 2012. She is a cofounder of Hissy Fit Racing, a member of the Betty Design Elite Squad, and has double-digit Ironman finishes on her accomplished triathlon résumé. She is a two-time Kona qualifier, and is racing on the Big Island for the second time this year. As our Director of TriDot Pool School, her passion is getting athletes faster and more comfortable in the water. Jo, welcome back to the show!
Joanna Nami: Thanks for having me, Andrew! I love being out here with Mark. We have gotten to be friends, so I WON’T remind him twelve times during this podcast that I have more Ironman finishes than he does.
Mark: Oh dang! Let’s throw down, ladies and gentlemen!
Andrew: I think Mark will let you have that. I think he will happily take his six championships and let you have the higher finish line number.
Joanna: Yeah, he’ll always say, “Well, how many did you win?” I said, “I’ve won them all in the hearts of my children, okay?”
Mark Allen: Aww.
Andrew the Average Triathlete, Voice of the People and Captain of the Middle of the Pack. As always, we will roll through our warmup question, settle in for our main set conversation, and then wind things down with Vanessa interviewing a TriDot coach for the cooldown.
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Warm up theme: Time to warm up! Let’s get moving.
Andrew: Most folks exist on some form on social media these days, and as triathletes, it’s usually a balance between posting about your athletic endeavors, maybe your career or any other hobbies, and your personal or family life. So for our warmup question today, I’m just curious, what social media post of yours received the most engagement that you have ever gotten? This can be a Facebook post, an Instagram post, a YouTube video, a TikTok – wherever the heck you are on social media, what post of yours just got the most attention, the most likes, clicks, comments, whatever? Coach Jo, let’s send this over to you first!
Joanna: Well, it was a little surprising to me, I am not one that posts a lot about my private life or my family and kids. I do use social media more for my coaching, my career, for Pool School, for my racing. It was actually dead-center in the middle of the pandemic, and I was having a lot of thoughts about how frustrating and difficult – there was a lot of complaining from everyone about quarantine, and not being able to do the things we want to do, and how life was hard. I started to witness some blessings in my own life with my own kids, so I wrote a blog – I think it was on Instagram and Facebook – about some of the things that were super special that were happening when you have three teenage sons that really don’t want to have as much to do with you as they get older. People will say it’s a slow breakup between a mom and son over about fifteen years, because they don’t want to hug anymore, and – see, I’m getting choked up about it. But because we were quarantined – they didn’t have places to go, we couldn’t’ socialize with friends, and I think they had a lot more anxiety and fear during that time –there was a lot more hugs, and a lot more I-love-you-Mom’s, and a lot more holding my hand. Those were things that never would have occurred had I not gone through the pandemic. So that post kind of blew up, and I got a lot of comments and messages back about the blessings in disguise. That was probably the most popular post that I had.
Andrew: I can see why. I mean, people like seeing other people be real on social media. So often, people just post their life highlights, and they don’t take a second to get real with emotions, and the ebbs and flows of life. Yeah, I can see why people would respond to that post so vigorously. Mark Allen, you are on several different social media formats, including the aforementioned YouTube platform. Where have you gotten the most engagement with a singular post?
Mark: I’m going to actually give you my top three. In third place is pretty much anything that I post where it’s about Lionel Sanders. All you gotta do is hashtag Lionel in there, or talk about him or something that’s going on with him, and it gets a lot of people viewing it. And I understand why, he’s a great and interesting character –
Andrew: People love Lionel, yeah!
Mark: – continually evolving, and he’s always surprising you with something that either comes out of his mouth, or that he does in a race. That’s my go-to when I kind of need to bump things up a little bit.
Andrew: You just mention Lionel!
Mark: Past that though, was a photo that I took of myself. It was a selfie, I have to say, with me and Christian Blummenfelt in St. George last year after he won. It was after the finish, and it was just such a cool, natural moment to have when we were together. That really, really got a lot of engagement, like three times as much as anything I did with Lionel, I hate to say. However, numero uno – this also has Christian Blummenfelt in it – was in St. George, a photo of Daniela Ryf and Christian Blummenfelt at the finish line together. They both had their champion’s leis on, and they were doing like they were doing the hula. That got over a quarter-million views, it was like that thing blew up. It was such a cool, spontaneous moment. I don’t’ know if anybody else got that photo, because it happened so quickly and I just happened to be there, and they were doing this thing. Social media – there’s a part of it that’s predictable and a part of it that you have no idea what’s going to just blow up.
Andrew: That’s so true. Mark, I do wonder, if social media had been a thing when you were in your prime, racing and winning championships – would you have been like Lionel Sanders, who wore your heart on your sleeve and vlogged your training? Or would you have played it more close to the vest? What do you think, have you ever thought about that?
Mark: I’m sure I would have played it close to my chest. I was never one to say, “Watch out, everybody! I’m coming to get you all!” like his most recent thing is like, he is coming to get everybody. That would not be me. I don’t know who that would be, but not me. Even in the day when we did a lot of TV interviews, radio interviews, print interviews, I always just tried to really tell my story of what was going on, but at the same time, let my racing be the ultimate voice for what I was doing.
Andrew: Well, you certainly did well there, that’s for sure. This answer for me – now, I do not pretend to be a social media influencer, I am horrendous at posting regularly on social media. My number one post anywhere, I posted when our daughter Ellie was born fairly recently. That one got a whopping 438 likes and 213 comments on Facebook, which is a ton for me, being a non-influencer. Nothing like a quarter of a million like Mark Allen, but that was the biggest one for me. My biggest triathlon one was also this year, when I got my new TriDot custom paint job Dimond bike. I took a picture of it in the driveway and posted it, and that was my triathlon-themed post that has gotten the most likes. So “New Baby Day” and “New Bike Day” did very, very well for me here this year.
Guys, we’re going to throw this question out to you, our audience, and see what you have to say. From all of the posting you’ve done on all of the different social media platforms, what is that picture, that post, or that video that you sent out there that just got the most attention? I’m curious to see what you have to say! Make sure you’re a member of the I AM TriDot Facebook group, we’re going to throw this question out and see what post got you some extra attention.
Main set theme: On to the main set. Going in 3…2…1…
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There are twelve months in a year, and depending on how triathlon-obsessed you are, you may be training and racing your way through all twelve of them, most of them, half of them, or the bare minimum of them. Either way, no matter how you play it, staying strong deep into the tri season can be a challenge for every triathlete. No matter what is on your schedule for the year, Coach Mark and Coach Jo are here to help us crush the back half of our season, something that Mark calls the “second season”. So Mark, as we get into the topic today – on your Mondays with Mark Allen YouTube series, following you there, it seems like the topics are either inspired by what you’re seeing in the pro field, or what you’re hearing from your own athletes as you coach with TriDot. What specifically prompted you to discuss the idea of the second season?
Mark: Well, it was actually Scott Zagarino, my business partner, who brought this idea up. He said, “You know, you were really good in the second half of the year in that second season.” So we talked about it, and we realized there was really not a focus on how to hone your fitness in that sort of meaty part of the year. I personally kind of had two seasons. I would start training in January – fortunately I lived in San Diego and the weather was usually pretty cooperative – and I had big races in May and June, culminating with the Nice International Triathlon early June. Then it was like a real shift. I was in very good shape, I would back down on the volume, increase the speed work, do a lot of short-distance events like ITU World Championship in ’89, then rebuild that endurance at the very end of the year. I realized I had these big cycles of how I was varying my training throughout the season to get ready. Then also Scott and I were talking about this – there were a lot of athletes who kind of did the same thing all year, and they were on fire in the first part of the season, but in that second-season time, they were barely hanging on. Or they got injured, or they got burned out, or they would get to Kona and just have lousy races that were not reflective of their potential. So I thought this was something that I’d really like to highlight for all the athletes that I coach here at TriDot, and others who are listening, to just give you folks out there some ideas on how you can optimize this part of the year. If you come into it already pretty fit, a lot of people think, “I’ve got to really maintain that fitness.” But there’s this saying that says, “The more fit you are, the closer you are to being overtrained, burned out, or injured.” So when you really are right at the very top of your peak potential, that’s when you actually have to be careful with your training. Don’t keep loading more and more, and keep adding in more and more speedwork, but really pay attention to recovery. Pay attention to how your body is responding. If you feel like you’re training hard but you're getting out of shape, that’s for sure the first sign that it’s actually to take off and rest a bit.
Andrew: If your Garmin tells you your training is unproductive, maybe your training is unproductive. Or it might be nothing. But Mark, it’s interesting to me to hear that even back then, before we had as much of the data and numbers to back it up – because with TriDot training, certainly we tell people on the podcast all the time, if you are constantly stacking your schedule with A races, TriDot can never bring you out of that building stamina phase. It has to keep you doing that, and it can never back you down to the developmental phase where you can work on your power and your speed, and let the body rest a little bit. It’s just constantly having to keep you ready for race day, race day, race day. It’s so interesting to hear that back in your day, you and so many other pros who were good deep into the season, took that time to let a lull exist, get back to the speedwork, get back to the shorter stuff. I’m curious, Mark, do you think that burning out before the end of the year is a problem that’s more exclusive to middle- and long-distance athletes and not short-course athletes? Or is that potentially a problem for anybody?
Mark: It can be a problem for anyone. But for sure, if your focus is 70.3 or Ironman-distance events, and especially if you’ve done a lot of them throughout the year, you are a prime candidate to end up at that last event kind of just barely hanging on. The other side of it is, for those who are just really starting to get back in their training – here it is summertime, the days are long, and you can almost overextend too early. If you’re just starting to build your base, build your fitness, build your speed, and you have these long days, and these group workouts because everybody’s off their trainer and they’re outside riding and running together – super-motivating, but at the same time it can be hard to stick to what you know is the smart schedule for you, and build gradually. Because big fitness gains happen a little bit each day, they don’t happen in dramatic chunks. Coming into this June, July, August window, maybe actually starting to build your fitness toward the end of the year, the end of the second season. Take those group workouts on the days you need that motivation, but try to also stick with what your coach is telling you, what you know has worked in the past. Just look at it like, “Okay, this is June. Those ten athletes have been training since January, there’s no way I should be training with them yet.” Build up to that point where your training community, your training groups, are going to enhance everybody’s experience in fitness.
Andrew: Great point there, Mark. There’s certainly some group rides in my area that I enjoy joining. But I know on a Saturday morning, they’re going to do two or three hours in the saddle. If I’m at a spot in the season where I shouldn’t be doing two or three hours in the saddle, then I’m going to avoid that group ride for a little bit. But once my season hits that point, where that’s how long I’m supposed to be in the saddle, then yeah, it might be a decent idea to go pick up that ride and chat with some folks and do a ride with some friends. Jo, you might race more than anybody that I know. I think the two people that come to mind that might race more than you are TriDot Pool School coaches Kyle and Terri Stone. I know you know them very well, you’re good friends with them. I think they’re the only ones I see on social media racing more often than my good friend, TriDot Coach Joanna Nami. You race early in the season, you race in the middle of the season, and you race deep into the season, often full-distance stuff. Before we get into our specific how-to questions here, how would you say that your triathloning, your swim, bike, and running, how does it feel at the beginning of the season versus towards the end of the year?
Joanna: I had to think about this for a minute, because in all honesty, when people talk about their tri season, I have no idea what they’re talking about. I have lived for 20 years training. There’s no “season”. When I say this, I tell my athletes, “Do what I say, don’t do what I do,” because I don’t follow my own advice. But I think what led up to this type of training for all of these years was that, in my first Ironman, doing Coeur D’Alene in June 2010 with Cindy Reeves and Suzette Schutze, two days before it they announced the inaugural Ironman Texas in May 2011. Now they have it in April. So when everybody else is having their off-season, nobody’s training through the holidays, we are. We’re training. That was years and years of doing Ironman Texas, so I got accustomed to training during that time. Then it led to wanting to do an Ironman in the fall, and in doing that, it just sets you up to be training for most of the year. So for your question then, on how do I feel toward the beginning and then toward the end – I think I’ve learned a lot over the last 15 years, in how to build in some short-term recovery for myself. There is no way, like Mark said, to go full-throttle for eleven months out of the year, so I have to have some lulls in there. I have some athletes that are built like that, that want to train the entire year, then I have some that definitely need an off-season. So in doing that, I think the only way to be successful in those late-season Ironman races is to have some lulls, some recovery, throughout the entire year.
Andrew: Mark, how does the approach to the back half of the year change whether you are a year-round triathlete or a seasonal triathlete?
Mark: That question is probably the main reason that we decided to do something with this concept of a second season, because it is very different. If you are sort of a year-round athlete, like Coach Jo, it’s really important to build in some periods where you back things down. You let your fitness actually drop down a little bit. You don’t have to stop training, but let your fitness drop down a little bit. Do something completely different than what you normally do. Let’s say you’re mostly an Ironman triathlete, a long-distance triathlete. In that sort of “let it go” period, cut your volume way down, maybe actually focus a little bit more on some very short speedwork sessions, or maybe do a sprint race or a 5K or something like that, so that the physiology and the muscles you’re working are very different than what you do on your standard day-to-day stuff. If you’re that seasonal athlete that just has a couple of months, and you really want to focus, for sure use some of those groups to motivate you, those training partners who have been training all season. Maybe they’re a little bit above you, but that’ll help boost you on those tougher workouts when you need that motivation, that support. But also really stick to your overall training plan and your overall guidance from your coach, because again, it can be really easy to overdo it. You’re going to see these big results really quick when you’re pushing hard, and you’re overreaching all the time, but there has to be that recovery from it. It’s sort of like, think of everything as an inhale and an exhale. We inhale, that’s the overreach. Then we exhale, that’s the rest. So metaphorically, there has to be that exhale in your training, to then take that next inhale. If you’re trying to inhale all the time, you’re never going to get the recovery. Again, recovery seems to be a theme that keeps coming up in my conversations. It’s a super-important part of this second season. As a seasonal athlete, for sure you’re going to get fit quickly as everybody’s training and there’s lots of sunlight, and there’s group workouts. But tune in to your recovery, make sure you’re getting that recovery. If you’re a year-round athlete, make sure you get that exhale too, that recovery in between these extended blocks of training that you’re doing over ten, eleven, twelve months. If you do that, incorporate that recovery with that smart training, you’re going to have the best race of your life when you get to the end of the season, the end of that second season.
Andrew: In our audience, we definitely have athletes that train with TriDot training, and with TriDot coaches like Jo and Mark Allen. We definitely have athletes on the TriDot Mark Allen Edition, which is always very cool. I’m on the Mark Allen Edition, I’ve got my little Monday Motivation video from Mark every single Monday when I fire up my app. We also have plenty of athletes in our audience who listen to our podcast, like our podcast, like learning from the coaches, but do not use TriDot to train. That is well and good. We welcome you, we love that. So when we talk about topics like this, we try to answer really for both parties. So Jo, I’m really curious to have you talk about how TriDot handles our training schedule as our race season ebbs and flows. Because a lot of the principles we’re talking about – giving yourself time to have your fitness come down in between A races, giving yourself ebbs and flow and different types of training that work different energy systems throughout the season – TriDot optimizes all that for you as your season goes along. Unless you just stack your schedule so full of races that it can’t really back you off, TriDot will help do this for you. So Jo, as we start putting races on the calendar, what does TriDot do, going from race to race to race, to optimize our training?
Joanna: Yeah, super smart, letting TriDot do the work. It’s always inevitable that I’ll have athletes that have A races, half-Ironmans, full Ironmans, that are fairly close together, then they’ll come at me and say, “Why aren’t I riding six hours next Saturday?” As TriDot optimizes your training, coming off of a big race, it’s going to be building in that recovery. You’re going to have a week or two where you have shorter sessions, or less intensity in those sessions, leading up a couple weeks later to another race, or a month or so later to another race. In doing that, you may not see what you think are going to be your long rides or your long runs. You may see that that backs off, you may see that you get pushed back into a developmental phase, if you’ve got enough time in there. Athletes sometimes aren’t happy with that. They think, “Oh, I’ve got another Ironman coming up in seven weeks, I need to be riding six hours.” I’m like, “No, you don’t!” So listen to the program, follow the program, be smart about the fitness you’ve accumulated by that point. You’ve already raced, so it’s a lot about what Mark was saying, it’s having that time to back off a little bit. It’s not necessarily losing a little bit of fitness, but having enough of that recovery that you can build on it, and still make gains and be successful in your next A race.
Andrew: All three of us on this podcast are dear friends with TriDot Coach John Mayfield, a podcast regular, and when we talk about putting races on the calendar, John has two tricks that he just uses for himself, that he recommends to his athletes. One of them, I call it the “Mayfield Double”, is he will stack two Ironman races within six to eight weeks apart. So you do your big training block – TriDot takes you through your training block, it gets you ready for the race, it builds your stamina up, and then you do Ironman Arizona – and then six weeks later you race Ironman Florida. And in between, you’re basically just maintaining that fitness you already gained for the first Ironman, and you get two Ironman finish lines out of it. As opposed to, if you sign up for Ironman Texas in April, and Ironman Coeur D’Alene in June, that’s two to three months where you have to keep that fitness up. When you space them out, it doesn’t let TriDot back you off in other parts of the season. For our short-course athletes, which John likes doing is stacking two or three sprints and Olympics within the same couple weeks. So go two, three, more months without racing, letting the program really train you, really work your fitness, really do whatever it needs to do to optimize your training, and then blitz out two, three, four short-course races before backing off again. He recommends those two tricks frequently on the podcast, so I wanted to mention those. But I’m curious from you, Mark, because obviously to peak the way you did in the second season in your pro career, and the way you help your own athletes do that, you obviously have some tricks of the trade for how to stack your race schedule to really get the most out of it .What recommendations do you have, Mark, for setting a race schedule that really enables you to peak at the right times, and then back off the training at others?
Mark: That’s a great question. As I said earlier, I kind of had two real seasons. I would focus on longer, more endurance races in the early part of the year, and then in the middle of the year, in my backing-off period, that’s when I would throw in Olympic-distance races, and I wouldn’t do any Ironman training for a couple months, like in that June, July window. Then sometime mid- to late-August, I would shift back to more Ironman-focused training with the longer distances, and rebuild that endurance. So the stimulation on my body was very different throughout the year. I’d start training in January, and like a lot of people it would take me a month to get in the rhythm, so it really wasn’t until February when I’d start to really lock in on my workouts. Then in April I’d race in Australia, maybe another Australia race in May, and then Nice in early June. So I had this sort of longer build in the first half of the year. Then the second half of the year, when I was getting ready for Kona, even though it was obviously a long race, my Kona block was only about two months. When you’re more fit – and this sort of goes to what John was talking about in his “Mayfield Double” – once you’re fit, you don’t have to go through the whole big, long cycle of building up and getting your speed. You have it already. It just takes a short little bit of fine-tuning each one of the different physiologies – your speed, your endurance, your strength – to then take up to that final level at the end of the second season. That’s how I would structure it. The message here is to sort of mix it up throughout the year. Doing the exact same thing all year long might feel good, it might be satisfying, but it will probably not lead you to your ultimate performance. However, if you mix up the kinds of workouts that you do, the distance of races that you do, and you kind of segment them, and put them in different blocks, then your body is like, “Oh, okay, now I get to do my long stuff." Then when you’re starting to get that feeling like, “Oh gosh, another long ride,” you do the race, you come back, and it’s like, “Oh, I get to do short stuff! This is cool!” So the message there is to mix it up. It’s not necessarily to entertain you, but it’s to work your physiology differently throughout the different parts of the year.
Andrew: Very actionable item. I really like that mindset, Mark, just to mix it up throughout the season. The next thing I want to ask about, and I might be asking this selfishly because Joanna and I both live in Texas. We definitely feel this, but I know wherever an athlete lives, wherever their training, I’m sure they encounter this in some form or another. In Texas, when you’re training in mid- to late-summer for an important fall second-season A race, the summer training conditions in Texas are nothing like the race weather you’re going to encounter a few months later, deep into the second season. It’s a pretty dramatic difference for us, depending on where you’re training and racing, but I know other athletes in other locations feel that in some form. So if you’re training wherever you live for a second season race, and the weather just does not match where you live and where you train, how can athletes nail their mid-season training for a second-season race that will likely have different weather? What do you think, Mark?
Mark: The more important question to ask yourself, during these pretty intense heat months, is “How do I optimize my training?” One answer is to do some of it in an air-conditioned environment, so that you can actually train hard. The opposite side of that is going to be people who are, let’s say they are doing Ironman Florida, and they’re training up north somewhere. It’s the end of the year, and they’ve already seen snow, and they’re going down into the humidity and heat to do that big race. You can train for that by simply, any workout that you do, put on one extra layer of clothing beyond what you would normally wear for whatever temperature it is. What that does is it actually creates this little microclimate next to your skin that’s hot and humid. I used to do this getting ready for Kona, because Ironman was at the very end of October, and I was training in Boulder, Colorado. By the end of October, for sure we’d had one or two snows already. So I would just put on that extra layer when I went outside, and my skin was Kona hot, I was ready to go.
Andrew: I really like that, Mark. Jo, do you have anything to add there to what Mark said?
Joanna: I had the funniest thought, because as I was racing Kona last year, I was all confident in myself. “Oh, I’m from south of Houston, you all have no idea how hot it is there. I mean, we have perfect conditions, I am so ready for this.” I get halfway through the bike course in Kona, and I literally pull over at an aid station, take my helmet off, and dip it in ice water. And I am screaming, “I am from Houston, Texas, and I can’t believe how freaking hot it is here!” It was a different kind of heat, it was different. What Mark is talking about is, I’m in the middle of training right now for Kona, and it’s a balancing act. I mentally do some of the training outside – the long bikes, I need to know how it feels to be out there for long periods of time – but I wouldn’t have effective training if I tried to do every session outside. So I aim for a balance, half indoors, half outside, for that mental factor. You mention the heater, I have a new athlete that just came on. She is in Seattle, and she is training for Kona, and I suggested it. She said, “Don’t worry, I have a sauna.” Even just sitting in there, getting used to temperatures that she’s not used to, it’s still chilly there. I’m like, “Chilly?? It’s 100° here!” Opposite problems, opposite places, but my rule of thumb is, you have to get accustomed to what you’re going to be racing in.
Mark: If I could just add something in there, if you’re racing really deep into that second season, late November, early December, often the races can be very cold, even if they’re historically warm places. There may not actually be a way for you to fully be adapted for that, in that sort of swing weather period. It could be warm where you’re at, and all of a sudden, two days later, it’s freezing. Well, it can be like that at the race, too. Also, prepare with clothing that you might want to put on during the race. The very first Nice International Triathlon in 1982, it was on November 20 in Nice, France, and it was cold. Like, the Maritime Alps, where the bike course was, had snow on them. The Mediterranean, they were saying, was 57°, but I’m a surfer, and I know that it was maybe 54° at best, and this was before wetsuits. So the swim was supposed to be 1,500 meters, but they shortened it to 500 meters, thank god, because I wouldn’t have made it 1,500 meters in that water.
Andrew: That says a lot, yeah.
Mark: Then when we were in the changing room out of the water, I was shaking, I couldn’t talk, but I saw Scott Molina, and I realized we’d both made it out, and we’re both semi-clear, and I gave him a thumbs up. I couldn’t articulate a word. I threw on cycling tights, a cycling jersey, and wore that for about three-quarters of the bike ride, until I started to actually warm up, then I stopped and took the tights off. So there’s many ways to be prepared for a weather situation like that.
Andrew: The next second-season topic I want to talk about is staying healthy all the way to that second-season race. Maybe this is an issue for folks that train more year-round, but Mark, to your point, people that train seasonally often jump into the training really hot-and-heavy, because they only have a short amount of time to get ready for that race. Either way, the deeper you get into the season, it’s just simple math – your body has more miles on it at that point in the year. What should we be doing in terms of recovery, nutrition, sleep, etc., to help our bodies stay strong all the way through the end of the year for those second-season races?
Mark: No matter where you are, if you’re starting to see injuries come up, something that’s bugging you that you know isn’t right. An injury starting to take place is something where you can identify the location of it – it’s a shoulder, it’s a knee, it’s an ankle, it’s a hip, it’s a back, it’s a neck, whatever it is. The pain from training is a global thing, it’s everywhere, it’s like the universe hurts. That’s okay, that’s just a byproduct of pushing your body. But the second thing, I call it the “unseen injury”, it’s just being overly fatigued. There’s no one thing that’s going on that will get your attention, like a sore knee or a sore ankle or something. So as you’re moving through the second season, tune in to that recovery. I keep emphasizing this, but some of the signs of an “unseen injury” are one, you have problems sleeping. Let’s say you normally don’t have problems, and all of a sudden you have problems sleeping. You can’t get to sleep, or you get to sleep, but when you wake up in the morning, you feel like you were hit over the head with a stick or something. Another sign is that it’s getting harder and harder for you to motivate yourself for your workouts. You get up, and it’s becoming like this supreme effort. Maybe it’s time to skip a workout or cut it back. Another clear sign is if you wake up in the morning and your heart rate is really elevated, that’s a very physical sign that something’s out of whack in your body. Maybe you’re dehydrated, or maybe you are getting overtrained. Another sign, let’s say on the bike you’re starting to move along, and it feels like you’re pushing really hard, but your watts are really low. That’s a sign that you need some more recovery. On the run, if you go out the door and you’re just barely getting warmed up, but you feel like your body is completely filled with lactic acid at a slow pace, that’s another sign that you are getting overtrained and need some more recovery. Back it down, back off the intensity, back off the volume. The classic sign, in any sport, is it just takes longer and longer in your workout to actually get warmed up. At some point you start to feel good, right? In the beginning, when you’re fresh, you’re warmed up in five minutes. But as you go through the season, if you’re starting to wear those batteries down, you could be an hour into a run, or an hour and a half into a bike ride, where you’re starting to feel like, “Okay, now I got this thing.” That could be a sign that maybe there should be some added recovery put in here.
Joanna: I’d add that if your husband asks you what you want for dinner, and you give him a death stare from across the room, if your irritability is at an all-time high –
Andrew: He’s just trying to feed you, Jo!
Joanna: If you can’t stand your children or your dogs or your husband, you may need to recover. I will add to what Mark said, because I think it’s super important – I do coach a lot of women that are perimenopausal, or have been through menopause, and we’re talking more and more about reading the signs of overtraining. These athletes require more recovery, they recover more rest. It’s very clear a lot of times when you’re just doing more harm to yourself, so they need to be building in more recovery into their plans. I’ve said it on my post before, “Your training has to be strong, but your recovery game has to be stronger.” It becomes like a second full-time job. What can you do daily to recover? If you can train hard, that’s fantastic. But if you’re dead on your feet and you’ve got to go to the grocery store and you’ve got to do this and that, and you’re just running yourself ragged, you’re not going to reap the benefits of that training. That’s what’s hard. It’s hard for you, Andrew, when you have little ones. It’s very tricky to figure out. You may squeeze in the training, but are you going to get enough sleep to really recover? So often with athletes, they may have had some super-successful training – they’re doing great, they’re producing these great sessions – then they’ve got some life events that happen. Something’s happened that’s really stressful at work, really stressful with family, and they’ll come to me with those things, and I’m like, “My call – three days off.” “No, no! I need this for stress!” I said, “No, you need to sleep.” There’s definitely times when you really have to be smart about, “Is this added easy bike going to produce a better result on race day?” No. “Is me sleeping 14 hours going to make me feel better and train better next week?" Yes. That is just some coaching advice on how sometimes the recovery is far more important than an extra training session.
Andrew: One thing I pay a lot more attention to in the first season is the triathlon skills, so to speak. Transitioning smoothly, sighting in the water, making sure my gear is packed and ready to go, making sure I know the course leading into race day before I’m actually there to do the race. Later in the season, I can get a little bit lazy with those things. Because you kind of get in your head, “I’m a seasoned triathlete, I’ve done this for eight or nine years, I know how to race, I’ve already raced three or four times this year.” Then all of a sudden, you show up to your Olympic-distance triathlon, and you’ve forgotten a key piece of gear, or you didn’t know the race course enough, and you’ve just botched something. Or you hadn’t practiced a transition in forever, so you flub getting your wetsuit off. What do you like to see your athletes do to keep those skills topped off, and keep our t’s crossed and our i’s dotted deep into the year?
Mark: I try to tell people, “Experience is great, but always think of yourself as a beginner.” If you do that, then you’ll always make sure that you’re checking those real basic things. It is very easy to get into that mindset like, “Oh, I’ve got this wired, I’ve got this covered, I’ve raced six times this year, I don’t have time to practice my transition. I’ve got my pile of race stuff over here, I’m sure everything’s there. "Here’s a great example. In 1989, that was the first year that we were starting to see some people had lightning-fast transitions by putting their bike shoes clipped into their pedals. You get on the bike, pedal a little bit, and while you’re coasting, you put your feet into the pedals. Dave Scott and I – here we are, this is my seventh Ironman, it was his eighth or ninth –we’re obviously good triathletes, we have a lot of experience at that point. Both of us had our shoes on our bike pedals, but neither of us had actually really practiced it, because we were professionals, and we knew how to do everything.
Andrew: Oh, I love this.
Joanna: This is amazing!
Mark: I’m like, “This is going to work great! I’m going to save 3.78 seconds in transition, and I’m going to win the Ironman because of this transition!” So I was on Dave’s feet the whole swim, we both came out of transition together, we both take two or three pedals, we are both reaching down to put our feet in our cycling shoes, and we smashed into each other, and we both almost went down. I mean, the classic Iron War race was almost finished in transition before we even actually got out on the bike course. So just go back, take all of that experience you’ve gained throughout this year training and racing, all the experience your coach has given you, all the experience your athletes have given you, all the experience you’ve gained through many years of doing this sport. But at the same time, think of yourself as a beginner. “What are the things I need to look at? What do I need to do? How do I need to get prepared?" Then ultimately, that last race of the year for that second season, it has a different complexion, because there’s no more tomorrows. This is it. A lot of other races throughout the year, there’s actually less pressure on them, because if you have a great race, great. If you don’t have quite a great race, well there’s another one coming up in a month or two months or three weeks. That last one of the year –
Andrew: That’s it!
Mark: – it’s kind of like, “This is all on the line. This is my final exam.”
Andrew: Then you’ve got to think about it for months.
Mark: “I’m either going to get my Ph.D., or they’re going to send me back to the lab.” You know what I mean? So that also is sort of like, take it all back to the very beginning, “What are you ultimately trying to get out of this race?” You’re trying to get the best that you have on that day, so as best as you can, go into that race with that mindset, like, “Yeah, this is a big deal for me, and I am excited to be here. I’m nervous, but ultimately I am just going to try and stay fully engaged, and get the best out of myself each moment I can in this race. Maybe I’ll have a great time, a great placing, maybe I’ll qualify for something for next year. Maybe I’ll have a terrible race. But at the end of the day, when I cross that line, I want to be able to look back and go, ‘You know what? That was the best I could do on this day, and I am proud of that.’" That’s an honor you’re going to hold high inside of yourself, if nowhere else.
Andrew: Jo, I’m curious for you, with all the day-to-day age-groupers that you’re working with, what do you tell them in terms of keeping the tri skills sharp and not colliding into a competitor like Mark did in Kona in 1989?
Joanna: I write that specifically, “Do not NOT practice like Mark Allen did in 1989.”But what you talked about before, Andrew, about being extremely organized – for my athletes we do a ten-week-out to-do list, a five-week-out to-do list, and a two-week-out to-do list for every race. Never fail, this is what we have to do. That’s prepping, that’s planning, that’s nutrition. I have them write a race plan before, and they have to submit it to me, because what happens in the second season is you are less engaged mentally. You’ve raced a bunch, you’re tired, you’re more burned out. But when you’ve got to write the race plan down and submit it to somebody else, you’re far more engaged. “Oh, I can’t forget this, I need to do this, this, and this.” Write those goals down. Like Mark was talking about, “Was that in this race plan? If I hit this, then I’ve done the best I can. Or if it’s crossing the finish line, that’s my goal, then that’s fantastic”. But you stay engaged, and you’re recognizing those goals right before you do the race. Then also everybody writes a race report after the race, “This is how it went, this is what I did.”
Andrew: How can we keep our motivation topped up deep into the year?
Joanna: This sounds token, but we all have our “why”. We talk about, “Why did I endure all these years? Why did I do all these Ironmans?” Most of the athletes I coach, most of the parents that I coach, talk about that they really lost themselves, they don’t have something for themselves. So this gets to the athlete that’s inside of them, and they need this little part of their life so they can be happy in all other aspects of their life. That’s kind of the overreaching feeling of “why”, why we get involved in this in the first place. But the daily motivation, it is a huge struggle. I hear this from age-group athletes all the time, “I just don’t have motivation this week." I’m not too proud to say that bribery is very good. Bribing yourself –
Andrew: I’ve done it!
Joanna: With some of my athletes, I said, “You’ll get a new kit! You’re going to get a new Betty kit if you do all these workouts over the next two weeks.” For me, because I eat pristine, my kids just have to look at me and go, “Peanut Buster Parfait, Mom. Dairy Queen. You can do it, knock it out. Knock out that long run, and we’re going to DQ.” Sometimes you gotta get as simple as that, and the fact is, you’re always going to feel so good about yourself once you’ve gotten it done. Sometimes it’s just getting over that hump of, “I’m going to get the Peanut Buster Parfait on Friday if I do all this training.”
Mark: I tell my athletes who ask me that same question, “Motivation is what gets you started on a journey, but it’s the habits that you have that keep you going on it.” So what habits will enable you to train day-in and day-out without burning out? You don’t need to be motivated to get yourself out the door to do the workouts, because it’s a habit of something that’s part of your life. If you have that, then you’re not constantly having to search for motivation. But the other thing is sometimes just sit back and reflect, and ask yourself, “Is this something that’s important to me?” Sometimes that lack of motivation means that you need to maybe shift directions a little bit, but it could also just mean that it’s time to remind yourself of what that initial dream was. Why did that spark you to get going? What was it that you saw or experienced that was like, “I want to do that!” Or, “This is what I’m setting out to do this year.” For me, a lot of that sort of underlying low-grade, very steady motivation really comes from being part of a triathlon community. We have our training partners, our coaches, we have our family and friends who are supporting us in this. If I’m out there and I’m going, “Ugh, I don’t really want to give it much today,” I think about all the sacrifices and support and help that everybody else has given me to get to today, and I’m like, “Wait a minute, uh-uh, you just get yourself back in a good mindset here.” There’s a lot of ways that you can keep that mindset. Ultimately, this goes back to the planning thing. Plan your season out, plan your races out, plan your training out. Ask yourself, as you look at the big picture of things, “Is what I’m doing this week going to be something that will propel me forward a little bit, that I can then continue on next week, and keep going and keep going?” If this week is like this massive, “I hit PR’s and everything,” and next week you’re flat on your back, that’s not sustainable. Sustainability is something that’s super-important when it comes to motivation. If you’re feeling like you always maybe had a little bit left in the tank, you’re going to have motivation, because you want to empty that tank, and hopefully you empty the tank on race day, the last race of the second season.
Cool down theme: Great set everyone! Let’s cool down.
Vanessa Ronksley: It is Coach Cooldown Tip Time, and I’m Vanessa, your Average Triathlete with Elite-Level Enthusiasm! Our featured TriDot coach today is Greg McAuley. Greg has an abundance of triathlon experience, both in racing and in coaching. He has stepped on the podium twenty times, and has completed over 80 tris within the last decade. Now, if you had asked him in 2007 if this was what he could expect of his future, he would have been in complete disbelief, because at that time, he was living a pretty unhealthy lifestyle. Well, triathlon changed everything for Greg. The support and camaraderie of the community got him absolutely hooked, and now he loves sharing everything he has learned with his athletes. His coaching specialties include helping his athletes’ developmental strength, everything to do with cycling, and also simplifying the process. Greg currently lives in Texas with his wife of 35 years. He has three adult children, and three grandchildren. Welcome to the show, Greg!
Greg McAuley: Thank you, and thank you for having me!. I’m humbled and very excited to be able to share a coaching tip, or just being able to share a little bit about my experience.
Vanessa: I am very excited about hearing about this next tip, because you are a very avid cyclist, and I’m looking forward to learning a little bit about cycling. What can you share with us?
Greg: My tip is to know your bike as well as you can physically know your bike. It goes without saying that we need to know how to change a flat, we need to know how to make sure our bicycle is safe to ride, we need to know the basics. But when you’re out there, and especially in the heat of competition and you have something new, or you hear a different sound, or just something is happening that hasn’t happened before, the better you know your bicycle, the better you’re going to be able to do one of two things. One is to stop and decide how or if you need to repair something, and the other is if that sound is not good, but it’s not going to be a show-stopper either. One of my latest near-misses, and one of the reasons I’m glad that I know my equipment as well as possible, was at Ironman Cozumel last year. I flew with my bike, and I was in the process of reassembling it. I just have this habit, when I’m reassembling the bike, of looking at every square inch. You never know what’s going to happen when your bike is shipped. It wasn’t brand new, I wrecked it at 70.3 Ohio last year, so it behooved me to look at every square inch of the bicycle. Before I tell the rest of the Cozumel story, becoming intimately familiar with your bicycle helps when the only affordable bike transportation method is to borrow a bike bag, or to use a bike bag that you already have. Most bicycles, especially with the aerobar or your cockpit, there is some disassembly required. If you’re not really familiar with how to take it apart, there’s a strong possibility you’re not going to be familiar as you should be when you’re reassembling your bicycle, which can lead to safety problems when you’re racing. But back to Cozumel again, I like to be intimately familiar with my equipment, and in the process of inspecting my bicycle, I found my left front fork cracked. With the money I had already invested – and not that I recommend this, and anybody that owns a bike shop, put your hands over your ears – but I taped an Allen key across the crack, and raced with a damaged bike. But it got me through, and what was most important was, I was confident that it was going to work, and I wasn’t going to crash during the race. So familiarity with your equipment brings the peace of knowing how your bike is operating, and when things happen, the more familiar you are, the better able you are to potentially fix the problem rather than having to either stop the race, or potentially send it to somebody else for a more costly repair.
Vanessa: Do you have any suggestions as to where people can get information, or how to go about learning the small little details about their bike?
Greg: Local bike shops are a good resource. I know the one that is closest to us here in Pearland, the owner and the bike mechanics that work there are almost always willing to give up their time to explain, “What about this, what about that?” He’d teach me things that I thought I knew, but I really didn’t. Tri clubs are a good resource, too. There are a lot of tri clubs that have intros to bike mechanics, and fellow triathletes are a great, highly underutilized resource, too. It’s not something we often talk about unless there’s an issue.
Vanessa: Instead of getting together with your triathlon friends to do a training session, wouldn’t it be fun to have a “let’s learn about your bike” session, where you just bring your bikes in, talk to everyone, and everyone does a show-and-tell, and then you would just share your knowledge about your bike? I would find that so fascinating!
Greg: To most, a bike, especially a modern one, is a very complicated piece of equipment. The derailleur systems, how your chains move from gear to gear, that’s the most complicated part of a bicycle. Most modern bikes, especially time-trial bikes, are very elegant, but they’re very simply assembled, or very simple to assemble. We don’t know until you start messing around, start playing with it. We don’t want to try to do something new right before a race or during a race, or try to think we know more than we do. But yeah, there’s plenty of time when we’re not racing to try to overcome that phobia that people have, or the mystery behind their bicycle. At the end of the day, they’re really not that complicated.
Outro: Thanks for joining us. Make sure to subscribe and share the TriDot podcast with your triathlon crew. For more great tri content and community, connect with us on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Ready to optimize your training? Head to TriDot.com and start your free trial today! TriDot – the obvious and automatic choice for triathlon training.