We're back for another episode of answering YOUR questions! TriDot coaches John Mayfield, Elizabeth James, Jeff Raines, and Joanna Nami are in the hot seat on this round-robin, rapid-fire episode! Learn how to ease back into training after illness, train your gut for longer workouts, and plan for specific terrain in your upcoming race. Listen in as the coaches talk about mobility versus strength sessions, adjusting your training after a poor night (or several nights) of sleep, and how much time you should spend in aero on your indoor workouts. They also discuss overcoming swim panic and a hot new metric: VLaMax. Join the TriDot Crew at CLASH Miami in March! Use code TRIDOTMIAMI for 10% off any event! Register now at https://clashendurance.com/pages/miami. Also, be sure to check out the camping options so that you can join the TriDot party INSIDE of Homestead-Miami Speedway. Big thanks to Precision Fuel & Hydration for partnering with us on this episode! Head over to precisionfuelandhydration.com and check out the Fuel Planner to get your free personalized fuel and hydration strategy. If you didn't catch the discount code to get 10% off your first order of fueling and hydration products, drop Andy and the team an email at hello@pfandh.com and they'll be happy to help you. Participate in Triathlon Research! The Preseason Project® is a triathlon research initiative that helps us quantify and enhance the performance gains that TriDot's Optimized Training™ delivers over training alternatives. Qualified participants receive 2 free months of triathlon training. Learn more and apply at: https://psp.tridot.com/psp23pod/
TriDot Podcast .175
Your Questions Answered: Insomnia, Swim Panic, Mental Breaks, And More
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 show everybody! It is Episode .175. Every 25 episodes, we dedicate the show to asking a panel of our coaches questions from you, the athletes in our audience. I’ve got the Big Four with us today. Number one, TriDot Director of Coaching, John Mayfield; TriDot Pool School Director, Joanna Nami; pro triathlete and TriDot coach Elizabeth James; and TriDot coach and biomechanics expert Jeff Raines. The timing here is fun, because I feel like all five of us were just doing this for the Best of 2022 Episode that aired at the end of last year. Are y’all ready to hear what the people want to know this go‑around?
John Mayfield: Ready!
Joanna Nami: Ready!
Elizabeth James: Yep!
Jeff Raines: I am so ready to hear what they want to know, and know that they know that we want to say what we know, so that they know. Whew! Say that five times fast!
Andrew: I’m Andrew the Average Triathlete, Voice of the People and Captain of the Middle of the Pack. As always, we’ll roll through our warmup question, settle in for our main set conversation asking your questions, and then wind things down with our cooldown.
Quick reminder for everybody, TriDot is currently running the 2023 edition of our annual research project that we call the Preseason Project. We are looking for non‑TriDot athletes who want to jump into the research project this year. Qualifying athletes will get two free months of TriDot training. It’s literally two months of the best-quality training available, in exchange for TriDot getting to analyze the training data that comes in from those sessions. I started training with TriDot during the 2018 Preseason Project, and immediately took a liking to the structured training schedule, and saw huge improvements in my swim, bike, and run. My 70.3 PR before TriDot was a 5:57, and after training with TriDot, that PR is now a 5:02. For those of you doing the math, that is a 55‑minute improvement for me since continuing with TriDot after coming on board for the Preseason Project. If you already train with TriDot, now is the best time to invite your friends to participate in the Preseason Project, and if you’re a podcast listener and you have never given our training a try, head to TriDot.com/psp, join the preseason research project, and enjoy two free months of TriDot training. That’s TriDot.com/psp, the URL will be in the description for today’s show.
Warm up theme: Time to warm up! Let’s get moving.
Andrew: Today’s warmup question is also an audience question, and goodness gracious, it’s a very specific one. I’m not fully sure what we’re going to learn here. This is either going to be real eye‑opening, or just real matter-of-fact, but it came in from the audience, and I am willing to give it a go. Dara Harms asked this, she said this could be a nutrition-type warmup question: tell us all of the foods that you ate yesterday, at the point that we’re recording this podcast. I think part of the fun here is to give no context. We can’t give explanations for everything we ate and why or when we ate it. No context allowed, just hit us with your quick list. And once it’s out there, your “January 9th in food” is out there forever to be judged by the TriDot podcast audience. So, Jeff Raines, this was all chips and queso, right?
Jeff: Pretty much, man, that’s 90% of my diet! Mike drop done! No actually, I did have some pita and hummus and salsa, but no queso. Yesterday – eggs, English muffin for breakfast, I had that pita hummus wrap for lunch. I did have some of my daughter’s cereal, it was Froot Loops. Dinner we had leftover barbecue chicken, black beans, salad, rice. Sarah baked some homemade chocolate chip cookies as well. Yeah.
Andrew: Alright well done, a nice peek at the dinner table for the Raines family. Elizabeth, what is this list for you?
Elizabeth: Well I’ve been logging all my nutrition in Cronometer, so I’m just pulling it up so I can read it off. Here we go – we’ve got whole wheat toast with strawberry jam, pineapple chunks, UCAN Energy powder – the orange flavor, my favorite – then an orange UCAN Edge gel, then UCAN Energy + Protein as my recovery drink.
Andrew: I’m sensing a pattern here!
Elizabeth: Yeah, exactly! A little UCAN ad here. Then toast with natural peanut butter, banana, UCAN Energy with UCAN Hydrate, more UCAN stuff. Life Time Pre‑Workout, then tart cherry juice with UCAN Aminos, chicken and wild rice vegetable soup with some crackers, and some collagen mixed into that. Then a Superhero muffin, that’s my favorite go‑to snack, Shalane Flanagan’s cookbook for the recipe. Then chicken, broccoli, sweet potato, and a protein shake.
Andrew: Shalane Flanagan, a nice little shout-out to Shalane on the podcast.
Elizabeth: Yeah, I know you said no context.
Andrew: That’s just where it came from! That’s not like why you ate it or why you chose it or where you put it in your day. John Mayfield, what all did you eat? Did you have as many UCAN products as Elizabeth did?
John: I didn’t have near as much stuff as she did. I have three things. I had to actually think pretty hard, since this was almost 24 hours ago. Lunch was some homemade broccoli-cheese soup. My wife made it, it was quite delicious. Then I was by myself for dinner last night, so I just had some leftover chicken and green beans, nothing too exciting.
Andrew: What a simple man.
Elizabeth: What about breakfast??
Andrew: He skipped it. That’s the implication, right?
Elizabeth: No breakfast??
John: Uh, I had a shake for breakfast. And lots and lots of coffee.
Andrew: Aaaah. Joanna Nami, what on earth did you eat yesterday?
Joanna: This sounds so odd that I can’t stop giggling, after Elizabeth’s dissertation on nutrition. I eat the same thing almost every day. Oatmeal, chia seeds, egg whites, turkey sandwich – always on GF – leftover piece of lobster and beets for a snack, granola bar, steak and asparagus – holding my nose getting the steak down because I hate meat. The end.
Andrew: So far, my biggest insight into y’all’s eating habits is the fact that Joanna considers leftover lobster and beets paired together as a snack. That just kind of quietly works its way in there, that “I just casually had a piece of lobster and some beets as an afternoon snack.”
John: I missed my lobster snack yesterday, I just got busy and didn’t get to have my lobster that afternoon.
Andrew: For me, I had a Kodiak microwaveable breakfast muffin for breakfast. Lunch was a Star-Kist salmon packet, hickory barbecue-flavored. I had a biscuit and honey, a Cosmic Crisp apple, some baby carrots, and two York peppermint patties at lunchtime. Afternoon snack was a little square of gouda cheese and some sourdough crackers, and for dinner we hit up Chick-Fil-A. It was a Chick-Fil-A night for us, I got a grilled chicken sandwich, a kale crunch side salad, and a lemonade to polish it off. That was my day in food.
Hey, one of you asked this question, so hopefully this was insightful for you. We at least learned that Joanna has lobster as a snack in the afternoons, if nothing else. We’re going to throw this question out to you our audience and find out what did you eat yesterday? This podcast is coming out on a Monday, so it’ll be a Sunday that you’re reporting all the things that you ate. I can’t wait to hear, see, or read if there’s anything wild on your list.
Main set theme: On to the main set. Going in 3…2…1…
Andrew: We have spoken to sports scientist Andy Blow during several episodes of the podcast to help you nail your hydration and fueling strategy for training and racing. The big takeaway from those episodes is that there simply isn’t a one‑size-fits-all approach to race nutrition, and that’s why Andy and the team at Precision Fuel & Hydration have developed the Fuel Planner. Head over to precisionfuelandhydration.com to use the Fuel Planner, and you’ll get your free personalized fuel and hydration strategy. The plan provides guidelines for how much carbohydrate, sodium, and fluid you should be aiming to consume, so that you know your numbers for your next race. You can then hit those numbers by using the Precision Fuel & Hydration product range, which is designed to make it easier for you to keep track of your intake during racing, since the carbohydrate and sodium content per serving is smack-bang on the front of the packaging. As a TriDot listener, you can use the code TRI10 to get 10% off your first order of Precision Fuel & Hydration electrolytes and fueling products.
It always makes for a great show to simply be able to ask our coaches your questions. I always procure these questions from the I AM TriDot Facebook group, my email, Facebook messages, and our podcast voicemail system. If you have a question you would like to have answered on a future episode like this, you can always message me, you can go to tridot.com/podcast and click on “Send Voicemail”, or you can send me an email at andrew.harley@predictive.fit.
Let’s get into the questions! Athlete question #1, here on Episode .175, this comes from Tom Cassano. He says, “I plan on doing IRONMAN Lake Placid in 2024. I was wondering how much TriDot programming adjusts or changes for a race with that much elevation. Does it actually adjust my training, or does someone have to train outside on hills themselves just to get in that specific training?” A similar question came in from Boris Cortes. He asked for tips to train for a hilly race, living in a pancake-flat city. So TriDot coach Jeff Raines, talk to us about training for hills with TriDot.
Jeff: Yeah, great questions, guys! Tom, good luck at Lake Placid, what an iconic bucket-list race. So 2024, the good thing is you’ve got plenty of time to prepare and train to combat those hills. Let’s give a little insight there. First, I’ve got to refer to our RaceX, our race execution site. It knows you, it knows your thresholds, it knows so many awesome metrics about yourself, but it also knows the exact course that you’re going to be racing. TriDot doesn’t train you for 112 miles only. It trains you for the time that you’re going to spend on your exact race, in those exact conditions, on that exact course. It knows the elevation gain on Lake Placid, but it’s not just the number of feet of gain in the whole race, it knows how that elevation is distributed along the course. Is it one giant mountain hill, or is it fifty little hills? It knows the time that you’re going to spend in each discipline on that race day, and it knows the elevation of the city above sea level. It knows the historic and predicted weather aspect, and as you get closer it goes to actual weather. All of these things work together in knowing the time that you're going to spend in each discipline on that specific race day. Then you will train largely at percentages of that time, and work up the plan to be ready for it in that regard. As far as tips to train for a hilly race, in your training, your Zone 4 and Zone 5 are largely hills. The human body knows effort, but not necessarily that you’re on a hill. I do have to say there is a technical aspect of knowing how to ride on hills – how to body position, how to gear, getting out of the saddle – so you need to get out there and ride on hills. In your day‑to-day training, the Zone 4, Zone 5, there’s a different training response goal in each of those. What I like to do is know the route I’m going to ride on a given weekend – is there a lot of straightaway flats, are there hills in that – and I like to break my Zone 4 segments on different parts. We can soft-pedal up a hill, and we’ll be in Zone 4 or Zone 5 watts, the hill is creating that resistance for us. But if we’re on a flat straightaway, we have to create that Zone 4 or Zone 5 effort.
Andrew: You gotta put the power down.
Jeff: Yeah! So talk it over with your coach, or be very intentional with the routes that you’re going to ride. Maybe for the first part of your season, you want to do half of the Zone 4 on the flat where you’re creating it, and the other half of Zone 4 do it on a hill, so you can learn those technical aspects. Then as you get closer and closer to race day, do more and more of that on actual hills. Hopefully that helped a little bit. There’s a big “it depends” portion there, but hopefully that helped out, guys.
Elizabeth: Is it creepy if I say that I know where Boris lives?
Andrew: Yes. Yes it is.
Elizabeth: Well not like exact address, but the affiliate area. Still creepy?
Andrew: It’s not creepy. We here at TriDot are so invested in our athletes’ lives, “We know where you live!”
Elizabeth: There you go, we’ll reframe it in that way. But anyway I was just thinking, Boris, we should chat. I’ve got some routes for you. You’re in the DFW area, I’ve got like a 100‑mile route from McKinney that has 4,000 feet of elevation.
Andrew: Do you now! Wow!
Elizabeth: We’ve got options here. As I was training for Chattanooga and Des Moines last year I was like, “Okay, where can I find some hills?” So I’ve got some hills for you.
Andrew: Question #2 comes from TriDot Ambassador Shannon Rogers. He’s always good for a solid question on these episodes, we’ve asked a few Shannon Rogers questions before. Shannon is asking, around the normal three sports training – so we have to spend time training the swim, bike, and run – “If you have time to add something, should you add something like yoga, or would it be better to add something like strength work?” Elizabeth, what do you think? I know you do a lot of extra in your training, what would you recommend for your athletes if they have time to add one thing?
Elizabeth: I would definitely say strength over going to a yoga class, but the focus of your strength session is going to depend on how well you’re moving. This is one of the things that I truly believe Dr. Leeper just does an outstanding job of overviewing in some of the podcast episodes.
Andrew: He does, doesn’t he? Yeah.
Elizabeth: As he outlines, we need to be able to move properly first, and then once we can move, then we can load that particular pattern. So your strength session may be more mobility work than necessarily lifting heavy weights, if you haven’t addressed that foundation yet. You need mobility, then stability, then strength. All of that is in the form of strength work, so I would say that would still come before a particular yoga class. Your strength session may look more like mobility work if that’s where your need is at that time.
Andrew: Outstanding, wonderful input there, Elizabeth. That makes sense to me, and BJ, certainly on a number of episodes, has outlined the importance of mobility and stability and strength all as separate inputs. Your body’s got to move the way it needs to move in terms of mobility in order to stay healthy in the sport. That’s a great summation there. You need mobility first, then you need stability, then you need strength.
Question #3 comes from TriDot Ambassador Sarah Barr. Sarah was at Ambassador Camp in St. George, we had a good time getting to know her in person. She asks, “How often should you take a mental break from training? We hear about the pros doing it at the end of the season, and I’ve heard about adding a short break mid‑season as well. But TriDot takes us from a race to a couple weeks of recovery, then right back into the development phase. Is it on us to take a break when we feel like we need it, and just skip some workouts that are prescribed in the plan? Do we need a break?” John Mayfield, what do you think?
John: I think this is a great idea. It’s going to be very individualized based on each person’s season, what their training looked like, their history in the sport. Really it’s going to depend on a whole lot of things as to what that athlete needs, how frequently they need this, how long the duration of the break is. But really, as you mentioned, a mental break doesn’t necessarily have to be a physical break. There’s going to be seasons of recovery built into the training phase, especially after those larger races, those times of higher volume. There’s going to be a period of time built in that is going to provide for recovery to the body to rest up, relax, recover from all that work that it’s done over the last several months, as well as the strain of that race. I think that a mental break is a great idea, it’s something I really encourage athletes to do, but oftentimes it’s hard to get them to do it. Vacation time is a fantastic opportunity to pair this. Oftentimes I’ll get questions from athletes like, “Hey, I’m going on my family vacation, how can I best integrate my training into my family vacation?” A lot of times, you just shouldn’t. Enjoy your time there. One of my favorite things to do while on vacation is to just go for an unstructured run wherever I’m on vacation. Just set out and try not to get lost. Stick to the safe parts of town, but it’s a great way to do some sightseeing. Maybe it’s getting up before the family and doing something like that, or if you have the opportunity do something like a cool open-water swim. For something like a swim session, I think a lot of times the effort it’s going to take – to go find a pool, take time away from vacation, and go get in a swim session – is not really going to be that high-value. You’re probably better off just enjoying time with your family and taking things in. For me, that’s what those mental breaks look like. There’s going to be seasons of ebb and flow with work and that sort of thing where things get busy, so just use them as they come, and use them as needed. I would say keep them as short as possible, because as we know, detraining is a real thing, and we want to keep making progress, we want to build upon past successes. But as often as you need that, take it. We don’t want to push too far and get into burnout and that sort of thing, we want this to be enjoyable and fun and productive. So yeah, I’m a big advocate of those mental breaks. For me, they really look like unstructured training. It’s not necessarily a complete break from training, but do the sessions that you want to do. That’s my guide for the athletes I work with. If you wake up and you want to do the session, then do it. If you don’t feel like doing it, don’t. That’s different than the day‑to-day in‑season, where if you don’t feel like doing it, do it anyway unless there’s a reason not to. In these seasons we’ve identified as a mental break, if you don’t want to do the session, then don’t do it. Or if you want to change the session – if you want to go a little shorter, if you want to go a little lower intensity – that’s a good time to do those. Use those as momentum or consistency to take you into those regular phases once you’re back to really nail the sessions as prescribed.
Andrew: Yeah, and we had a podcast episode just a few weeks back – Elizabeth, you were on the episode – where we were talking about coming back to training from a break. One of the things Elizabeth specifically talked about on that episode was how long it takes for us to lose fitness on a break. And it’s not one week. If you have a week off because you were on a family vacation, and you’re just taking a mental break for that week or two, you're not losing any of the fitness gains that you picked up over the last year or so of training. I think that’s the fear for some people is, “Oh, I don’t want to lose the progress that I had.” You’re not going to lose that progress that quickly. It takes a pretty extended break to start seeing a deterioration in certain forms of fitness. Yeah, we’re all Type A, and if there’s a session on the calendar we want to do it. But like Coach John just said, if you want to take a week of a mental break or vacation, or maybe the holidays come around and you feel like you need a reset, then take a little reset. John, I love that approach that you just gave there. All good stuff.
Moving on to Question #4, this comes from Kurt Yannish. IRONMAN finisher Kurt Yannish was on our podcast episode talking about IRONMAN Texas where he got his IRONMAN done, so Kurt is a veteran here at the TriDot podcast. He is asking about open water swims at elevation. He said, “Every time I do an open water swim at elevations over 5,000 feet, I panic. It’s like my CO2 sensor thinks I am drowning. Is there some way to train my body and mind to overcome that sense of panic?” Now I know Kurt is an IRONMAN finisher, got the job done at IRONMAN Texas. He lives in the state of Wyoming, where I’m not sure if he’s at elevation there or not. But anytime he swims at elevation over 5,000 feet, he feels that sense of panic. Coach Jo, as one of our swim experts here at TriDot and our Director of Pool School, what would you say to Kurt on that sense of panic setting in swimming at elevation?
Joanna: That is a great question from Kurt, and it’s probably one of the most common questions we get as coaches. There are a number of techniques that I’ve talked about in previous podcasts in dealing with anxiety. Anxiety is not solely for beginner athletes. It affects even very experienced IRONMAN athletes across the board, and we often don’t know when it’s going to sneak up on us. It’s scary. But I’ve spent a lot of time drafting some tips for my own athletes to deal with anxiety as it creeps up. I can talk a little bit about those, but you can go on and on. In general – Andrew, you’ll love it because I’m going to refer back to the box breathing – box breathing is a technique that is a common technique to lower the heart rate and calm the nerves. I have a procedure for my athletes to start that about 15 minutes before they even get in the water to line up. But again, that has to be practiced. It is like any other swim or run drill. We can’t say, “Okay, here’s my open-water technique, this is what I’m going to do, I’m going to start box breathing.” It has to be practiced so that you know what you’re doing. In addition, I talk about a “go‑to plan”. This involves another type of practice in the water, whether you’re in the pool or open water. What are you going to do if you panic, if you start feeling anxious feelings? Are you going to turn on your back, do a little bit of backstroke? Are you going to take some deep breaths in doing that, or breast stroke? What makes you feel comfortable? What sets you at ease? I ask my athletes to practice that in the pool as well as in the open water. But for Kurt, the hard reality is, to prevent anxiety we need exposure. We need exposure to the situation that causes us anxious feelings. He’s talking about being at a high elevation, in open water, and he feels short of breath. When that happens, when any of us feel short of breath, it makes our heart rate skyrocket, it makes us anxious. So I would tell Kurt to get in that water more. You’ve got to get in, not once or twice or every six months, I’m talking about twice a week in that environment, in that specific environment where those conditions cause you anxiety. Then practice what your go‑to is. “Okay, now I feel short of breath. What am I going to do? Maybe I’m going to slow down my pace a little bit, that’s going to let my heart rate settle a bit. It’s going to let my anxious nerves go away.” That’s one way. Lastly, one technique that we can use to distract ourselves is a plan for mental focus when we’re doing open water. So Kurt may be focusing on, “Okay, I’m entering the water. Now I’m starting to feel anxious because I can’t catch my breath.” Whereas if we have laid out a plan of four areas we’re going to focus on as far as stroke form, “I’m going to think about my body position in the water, I’m going to think about a strong kick, I’m going to think about a strong pool or hand entry,” and spend about five minutes at a time going through all of those different parts of our swim form. We’re actually tricking our mind. We’re taking away the focus from “I can’t breathe” to “I’m going to slow down just a little bit and focus on these different aspects of my stroke,” and that’s going to allow me to remain calm and actually swim faster and more smoother in the water. That would be my advice for Kurt, but again, I could go and on for days on ways that we can deal with anxiety, both in open water and in racing.
Andrew: At the time this episode is being released, it is late January. Late February is the time frame we’ve targeted to launch the TriDot Triathlon Show on YouTube, so Coach Jo, we’ll have to have a segment where you demonstrate your box breathing protocol on video. I can’t wait for that already. This is the kind of stuff that we’re going to be doing on the show, is giving you guys the visual side of how to be a triathlete. And Kurt, on my list of topics to hit on the TriDot podcast is to do an episode on elevation, and how elevation affects our training and racing. TriDot does, when it’s prescribing your workouts, account for elevation in your prescribed zones and paces, which is great. But to your point, Kurt, this isn’t a pacing thing, it’s just a comfort thing, “Is my body doing something different at a certain elevation.” So we will have an episode that comes out later this year that addresses that a little more specifically with somebody who has scientific expertise in elevation and its effect on physiology. Be on the lookout for that, Kurt.
Question #5, this comes from enthusiastic TriDot Ambassador Craig Jimenez. He gave us a voicemail recording to actually ask his question on the podcast in his voice. I always love it when athletes do this, it just gives us a break from the five of us talking. So here’s Craig asking his question.
Craig Jimenez: Greetings TriDot family! Second-year ambassador Craig Jimenez, out of beautiful Winters, California, with a two‑part question. As a 57‑year-old athlete, I oftentimes suffer from insomnia. I’ll wake up in the middle of the night to use the restroom, and for some reason my brain will decide that’s a really good time to start thinking about things, and then I go down the rabbit hole of not being able to sleep because my brain is suddenly engaged. The first question is, do you have any tricks for turning the brain off and getting back to sleep? And the second question is, do you have a line in the sand that you draw, when you’re working with a sleep deficit, as far as skipping or postponing training sessions. My concern is that doing a vigorous training session on maybe four or five hours’ sleep may have negative results instead of positive results, although I will admit to having some pretty decent training sessions on some abbreviated sleep. Keep up the good work folks, and I look forward to the podcast weekly.
Andrew: Great question there from Craig, thanks so much for throwing it out there. I also, Craig, am somebody that doesn’t sleep well. I’ve always been that way, from a kid all the way up until now. My Kindle stays on my nightstand, and if I find myself just lying there, it’s midnight and my wife is sound asleep, I’ll crack open the Kindle and read for a while. Some nights that goes on for a while, some nights it doesn’t. But I’m curious to hear our coaches’ answer here as well, because a night of not sleeping great can certainly throw off the way you feel heading into your training sessions. Coach Elizabeth, what would you say here to folks like Craig and myself, folks that just aren’t that great at sleeping soundly through the night?
Elizabeth: Yeah, this is a good one for me to answer, because I am right there with you guys.
Andrew: Nice! Solidarity!
Elizabeth: Craig, I feel for you, sorry you’re dealing with the sleepless nights. Like I said, I’m right there with you, and it is incredibly challenging. What I’ve usually found is if it’s one poor night of sleep, you’ll likely be able to push to the full intensity the next day, and train as prescribed. But where I personally need to start backing off, and I’ve seen other athletes in that same situation, is where it’s more than one sleepless night in a row. At this point, going into a training session, I understand that my body isn’t at its full capabilities. If you’re run down, you have a greater risk of injury. Your body’s ability to recover and repair itself is already lowered. Being sleep deprived also raises cortisol levels, makes your immune system more vulnerable to any viruses around you. So we do want to take this seriously, and we want to make sure that by training, we’re not actually doing ourselves and our body a disservice. When coming off a few rough nights with a sleep deficit, using perceived effort has been very helpful for me. I know that the pace or the specific wattage might not be in the same range, but I can at least gauge the effort that I’m giving. I know those external factors such as the lack of sleep is influencing the workout, and I just go in knowing that I’m going to allow myself a little bit more grace with that. The other thing to really be aware of and be mindful of is how that effort is in relationship to where your heart rate and other metrics usually fall. If you’re supposed to be doing an easy ride on the bike and it feels just super hard, and your heart rate is sky high from the beginning of the session, use that hour to rest instead of bike. Even if it’s not sleeping, even if you’re not able to take a nap, just rest. Sit there with your eyes closed. Read a book. That can be a very productive use of that time as well. What we don’t want to do is just continue pushing, pushing, pushing so that we really dig ourselves into a bigger hole. Keep this in mind, recovery is training. Taking care of your body on those days where you’ve had a couple sleepless nights and you just feel run down, that’s going to allow for better training performance when you are able to be rested. The last thing that I’ll say is really just enlist the help of a medical professional. This is something that I sat in the doctor’s office and said to my primary physician, “All right, here’s the deal. I need to train, I want to train. There are so many great health benefits of me training, but my lack of sleep is keeping me from doing this.” I talked with her about some suggestions she had to improve the nights of sleep that I was able to get. They might have some great suggestions that allow you to get a more consistent night of good sleep, that will allow for good training going forward.
Andrew: I’m going to sound like a broken record here, but this is something that we plan on talking about on a full-length episode sometime this year. Dr. BJ Leeper and I have already been looking around the marketplace to identify the right subject area expert on sleep and how it affects triathletes to come on the show, so he and I are excited to target that with another expert later this year. While I’m saying this, we had several athletes ask questions about either doing aquabike or aquathon, which are versions of triathlon where you either swim and run or swim and bike, so it’s two disciplines instead of three. How does TriDot training handle that, and how does it account for the differences in those races? That is another full-length episode we are going to do, and with so many athletes asking about it, I’ve accelerated that one. We’re going to release that episode sometime in the spring as opposed to later this year. So for all of my aquabikers and aquathoners, be on the lookout for that full-length episode. I’m holding your questions until that. It’s funny, we’re 175 episodes into our triathlon podcasting journey, and there’s still so many topics we want to talk about on the podcast. Elevation, sleep, aquabike races are still on the list.
Question #6 for today’s podcast episode comes from Cari Craig saying, “I do a lot of extra sessions. I’m retired and love to train, so I train more for enjoyment than for performance outcomes. Extra sessions show up as N/A on the calendar, but do they influence my training plan optimization and workouts ahead on the schedule? As an example, I just participated in the Rapha Festive 500 Challenge, which was way in excess of the 3.5 hours of cycling on my TriDot schedule for the week. Did that affect what TriDot put on my schedule for the following week?” Coach John Mayfield, what does TriDot do with extra sessions that we put into the week and then show up on our training calendar?
John: Just to note, N/A is actually relating to the TrainX score. So if a session is done outside of what is prescribed, there’s really nothing to score. TrainX performs feedback as to how well a prescribed session was executed. So when there’s nothing prescribed, there’s nothing to score. That’s why those show with that N/A there. But a session is largely evaluated the same, so it’s not necessarily contingent upon that session being a prescribed session. It receives the data, analyzes the data, and adjusts training going forward accordingly. So whether that training session was part of the training or not, it can influence those future sessions. What the analytics are doing is looking at the data within that file to see what the body is doing and how it is responding to training –things like NTS, accumulated NTS, those types of things – then refining training going forward based on that. So yeah, if you have a session that is far in excess of what was prescribed, you could see a reduction in volume or intensity. It’s going to depend on what exactly was done within that session, and what you had coming up, and all that is going to be taken into consideration, just to ensure that you are training at a safe volume, safe intensity, safe training load.
Andrew: All right, Question #7 comes from Cath de Souza. Cath wants to know, “I was sick over Christmas with a sinus and respiratory tract infection, so some advice on how to come back after illness, especially with TriDot, would be great.” Now, my quick answer here would be to go back and listen to the TriDot podcast episode about how to return from training from a break. We do talk about illness a little bit on that episode. That was a fairly recent episode, so you don’t have to look too far back in the catalog to find it. But as quick as I would want to say that as the answer here, TriDot Ambassador Donna Tosh also chimed in with a similar question and said, “I have listened to the podcast about coming back, and while in theory we all know we need to take it easy, if you put a workout in front of us, a lot of us just can’t help ourselves.” So Cath and Donna both in their comments added some suggestions, saying that maybe TriDot could add a pause button to note that athletes are pausing for injury or illness, or maybe some form of way to tell TriDot how severe of an injury or illness you have, and maybe the training ramps back in. Of course when our athletes make suggestions like this, we always pass their ideas on to our performance scientists and our software developers. Some things are quantifiable, some things are not, but we always pass your ideas up. But for the question of easing back into training from illness, Coach Jo, what would you tell our athletes here?
Joanna: Oh, this is so hard, and this one was probably aimed at me, or maybe Elizabeth, because for us, when it’s on the schedule, it’s super-difficult to not want to get that session done. We are wired. Most of us triathletes are Type A personalities, so it is very difficult to not want to make sure we’ve done all our sessions. One thing I find is that TriDot athletes are very obsessed with the TrainX scores and their completion for the week. They struggle with that, so I often have to tell my athletes to stop freaking out over missed workouts. When you’re coming back from illness or injury, it really requires some daily self-evaluation. It’s important to look at your resting heart rate. Is it still high? Are you still symptomatic? Can you even take a deep breath? If you still have lots of congestion, you have to think about will this training even be effective? Is it going to serve the purpose that it was intended to, or is it going to be detrimental? Is it going to be a setback? Are you going to feel sicker, or is this going to delay your recovery? I liked when Elizabeth was talking earlier about how recovery is training. It’s equal part training, equal part recovery, equal part nutrition, all of these things. If you’re not allowing yourself recovery time from illness, it’s going to be detrimental overall to your performance in the long run. But there are a couple of things you can look at as far as, “Okay, I still want to do this session.” Number one, let’s reduce intensity. Most of the time with my athletes I say, “Let’s take it down to a Zone 1 or 2 effort. Let’s take it down and just monitor heart rate, versus pushing Zone 4 intervals.” Number two, let’s reduce duration. Let’s knock down a short session by 15 minutes, or let’s knock down a longer session by much more. In doing that, you’re still getting those endorphins, or that satisfaction of having the highlighted workout color-coded so that it is competed. We all know that we like to see that on our apps. The other thing I might do when I’m talking to an athlete who’s coming back from an illness is to give them other tasks. Let’s distract them. Let’s have them do strength work or yoga practice, or substitute a full session of drilling when it comes to swimming, instead of doing the prescribed swim workout. This way they’re very purposeful in what they’re doing. They may be working on a different purpose for their session, but they are still really working toward their goals. The athlete is still progressing, still working on goals that they need to be working on. I think it’s important to take the time you need to recover, but in all reality we’re not wired that way, so maybe using some of these techniques will help you to substitute other sessions that will be just as effective.
Andrew: Question #8 comes from Becky Phillips. Shout out to Becky, she’s one of our Waco-area athletes. She was a volunteer on course at IRONMAN Waco when I raced, and I got to say hey to her while I was on the run course. She was working one of the water aid stations, so Becky thanks for volunteering that day. She’s one of our wonderful TriDotters in the Waco area, and Becky’s asking about nutrition. “How do you train your gut for long activities, when most of our workouts are only about an hour?” She said, “I’m good for an hour, I can eat just about anything or nothing for that length of time. It’s activities over about 2½ hours where things start to get dicey.” So yeah, great point here from Becky. We talk about training your gut, we talk about practicing with the nutrition you’re going to use on race day, but when your race is longer than an hour, not very many of our training sessions are longer than an hour. We don’t get very many shots at practicing nutrition beyond an hour. Coach Elizabeth, I know you love going long, you frequently have long training sessions for your own race calendar. How do you coach your athletes in getting used to practicing your nutrition and figuring out what works for your gut, even if you don’t have a ton of long sessions on the books?
Elizabeth: Well I think one of the first things to point here out is just a great thing that Becky has already identified when, as she put it, “things get dicey”. She said, “I’m good for the hour,” and anything over 2½ is where she’s starting to struggle, and we’re needing to look at a little bit more detail what that nutrition looks like. Now if you are training for a long-course event, right now maybe your workouts are not much longer than an hour, but the long bike and long run sessions will begin to exceed that 2½ hours, and then every long workout is the perfect opportunity to work on your nutrition for that longer duration. Right now you might still be in that development phase where you’ve got an intense hour on the bike, but as you get closer and closer to your event and the duration of those workouts starts to increase, then every single one of those is an opportunity to work on your nutrition. That’s one of the things that I work very closely with my coached athletes on, is every one of those long sessions, part of what I want them to report to me in their notes is not only how the session went and how they felt, but what was their nutritional intake going into the session, what was nutrition and hydration like ahead of time, what did they do afterwards, how did they feel? All of those things are very important to not only experiment with, but also catalog and write down, so that you can go back to as part of your nutrition plan later. Now if you are training for a shorter-course event and you know that you’re going to need additional practice with nutrition, maybe even extending some of those sessions so that you have the opportunity to practice for that specific duration, then reaching out to a coach or a nutritionist like Dr. Austin might be very helpful. I know, thinking from my perspective as a coach, I would want my athletes to have opportunities to practice their nutrition. That might mean extending the duration of a few workouts to allow for those opportunities to practice, depending on what they’re leading up to, how many practice opportunities we need. But the main thing here is practice, and that might start to incorporate some of the nutrition even into those hour sessions. It might be a little more nutrition than you particularly need to get through that session, but starting to get used to taking in more nutrition for that hour, then extending it as you go into 90 minutes, 2 hours, 2½, and building from there.
Andrew: Question #9 comes from Annie Fox. She asked, “How much time should someone spend in aero position during workouts while on an indoor bike trainer workout?” This is a great question. I actually used to do a majority of my time in aero indoors. Doing some workouts indoors with my friends Jeff Raines, John Mayfield, Elizabeth James over the years, I’ve noticed that they did not spend as much time in aero as I did on indoor workouts, and we had some conversations, and now I kind of split it more 50/50. But a great question here, should we be in aero indoors, or should we not? Does it matter? Coach Jeff Raines, what are your thoughts here, what do you say to your athletes?
Jeff: Man, that’s a great question, Andy. There’s always that “it depends” aspect. Each coach will have their own unique philosophy or response to this question, and largely it depends on your story. There’s always a unique “it depends”, because what if you just got a brand-new bike? You can’t get outdoors much, and you have that big race coming up, and you’re doing that race on the bike. So obviously you’re going to want to mix in maybe a little bit more than you normally would. But in a perfect season with plenty of time on a bike that you’re pretty used to – we do largely sit different on a bike indoors than outdoors, so we need to be careful doing too much high-end quality in aero indoors, that quality being Zone 3 and above. Anything Zone 3 and above is considered quality, but largely that upper Zone 4 and a lot of Zone 5 in aero, you just need to be a little bit careful of. Indoors, we tend to sit further back on the seat, and what that does is it closes our hip angle off. As our bottom moves back on the seat, there’s more surface area to rub against the seat, because the seat largely gets wider as we move backwards. We’ve heard people say, and this is so true, “I can do an hour, hour and a half indoor ride, and I’ll have a little bit of chafing and discomfort, maybe a saddle sore.” We’ve all been there. But maybe a three or four-hour ride outdoors, we don’t have an issue at all because we tend to sit a little more forward on the seat outdoors. So moving the bottom back on the seat, closing off that hip angle, and doing a lot of high intensity can put a lot of strain on your lower back. Really what we need to do is know the intent of the workout. If it’s about threshold and hitting watts and really getting that fitness out of it, then sit up. The point is to tax the body. Also know that Zone 5 is more about an external response or low-cadence work. We’re really actually wanting to have a physical, external stressor, pushing a bigger gear, lower cadence, using bigger muscle groups, getting off the bike and doing squats, things like that, the point of that workout is to really get the legs working at that high end, so we don’t want to be in aero doing that. Maybe your coach wants you to get out of the saddle the last ten seconds, because you might be doing that on a few of the hills in your big race. Just know the intent of the workout. But I’ll say this, if you’re pushing Zone 4 or 5-plus in a race, especially half and full Iron distances, then you’re probably going up a huge hill, and in that scenario you’ll be sitting up. We tend to race in Zone 3 for the most part of a half or full Iron, so you don’t need to be doing too much quality indoors in aero. But we do need to train that, so if you’re in the race prep stamina phase, do some of those indoor Zone 2 sessions in aero if you’re super needing that extra time in aero. Just don’t do aero for too much of the quality inside of that.
Andrew: Yeah Jeff, I love the point you’re making about considering what your session is, what the intent of your session is, and even what is the intent of those intervals within that session? More often then not if they’re Zone 4 or 5 intervals, the point is to help you build power in your legs, and you can do that sitting up just fine. Just a few episodes ago, we had our Ten Next-Level Tri Training Tips episode, and Coach Jen Reinhart gave us a great nugget about how she doesn’t usually watch things on TV, she doesn’t usually listen to anything distracting, because she likes focusing on something within her intervals. Maybe for you that’s certain intervals where you focus on holding aero. For me, if TriDot puts me in Zone 3 indoors on a trainer, I try to be in aero for those Zone 3 sessions. Because more often than not, when I’m racing outside, I’m usually in Zone 3 at those race paces, so I try to do Zone 3 in aero. Maybe there’s certain days where you’re just going to be spinning easy in Zone 2 for an hour because it’s an easy ride, and maybe sometimes you let that be upright, maybe sometimes you take that 60 minutes and see how much of that you can hold aero. But to your point, Jeff, and to Coach Jen’s point a few weeks back, be intentional with what you’re doing in your intervals, and sometimes that intentionality can be practicing aero, and sometimes it can be sitting up and really pumping the legs in an upright position.
Our last big question that I want to talk on, this is Alexander Volkov, who asked this, “How does the TriDot platform consider the VLaMax development, whether that decreases or increases within an athlete. Is it important at all to know our VLaMax? Coach John Mayfield, what does TriDot do with VLaMax? I admittedly, if you’re listening to this and you’re like, “What the heck is VLaMax?” Alexander asked this, and I had to Google VLaMax. I’ve heard of VO2Max, I’ve heard of blood glucose, there are several metrics I’m familiar with, but I had not heard or read anybody talk about VLaMax before, so I did a little reading myself when Alexander asked this question. Coach John Mayfield, talk to us about this.
John: So as you mentioned, it is a hot new metric. It’s been around for a couple years, but it’s gained popularity really in the last year or two. It considers the lactate in the muscle, but it is one of those that is still very difficult to consistently and accurately measure. It requires a lot of hands-on and trial and error. I’d say the ones that are most successful in implementing these type of metrics are the elite athletes that really, all they do is train. They work with a staff of professionals that have access to lab-type equipment and can test on a regular basis. Like I said, a lot of this is trial and error. What they’re doing is testing these metrics, they’re doing what they hypothesize will be productive training, and they’re testing again to see what the impact is. It’s quite cumbersome, and really the intent of this is to really squeak out those last few drops of performance. This is not something that your average triathlete is really going to benefit from investing the time and resources into tracking and implementing into their training. This is for those that, like Olympic-level swimmers, where they’re chasing hundredths of a second. This would be something that is equivalent to that. This is a very high-level, elite athlete that really is already mastering training as a rule. They have those fundamentals of training, they have all those things down, and they’re looking for that last thing that is going to give them the edge. A lot of times, these things come at a high cost and have a low return. For those high-end professional elite athletes that’s fine, it’s worth it. They’re willing to do what is necessary to get every drop of performance out of their potential. But for the vast majority of athletes, there’s a lot more consistency, better execution of training, that should be the focus instead of getting hung up on some of these metrics that come into popularity at different times. I would say continue to focus on a high level of doing the right training right, as we say. There are opportunities out there, but there’s a lot of other things you can test for in the lab that can really provide some neat insights into your body, they provide a snapshot as to what is happening at that exact moment. But as training athletes, our bodies are constantly changing, so for this information to pertinent and relevant, it needs to be accurately and consistently measured on an ongoing basis, which is inconvenient and expensive. Then as far as integration with TriDot – TriDot is based on big data, so we need a very large data set of normalized data, which simply does not exist here yet. Things like heart rate and power and all the metrics that we track, we have tens of millions of training files from tens of thousands of athletes that allow the TriDot analytics to draw meaningful conclusions. But right now, these metrics like this just aren’t there, they don’t pass the sniff test yet, but we’ll see where it goes.
Cool down theme: Great set everyone! Let’s cool down.
Vanessa Ronksley: Well hello there everyone! I’m Vanessa, your Average Triathlete with Elite-Level Enthusiasm! I know you’ve all been anxiously awaiting the Coach Cooldown Tip, so let’s get to it with TriDot Coach Ken Presutti. By day, Ken transforms digital products as an Agile Product Coach at a large U.S. bank, and by night, he transforms athletes into triathlon champions. He has coached multiple IRONMAN World Championship qualifiers. He’s taken Olympic age‑groupers all the way to the podium, and has coached Junior World Elite triathletes as well. His coaching background also includes top high school runners in the state of Pennsylvania. He currently loves working with athletes at all levels, and as a master Chi Running instructor, he really specializes in helping athletes with their run form and staying injury-free. Ken was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and lives there with his wife and 10‑year-old son. Welcome to the cooldown Ken!
Ken Presutti: Thank you so much for having me, it’s awesome to be here!
Vanessa: Okay, so I have a quick question for you before we get to the tip. I noticed that you started in the sport ten years before you found TriDot. What made you try out this platform, and then soon become a TriDot coach?
Ken: Great question. I think this was probably back in 2019, when I was getting ready for my second run at IRONMAN Louisville. I don’t even know how it showed up on my feed, but John Mayfield was doing a race preview and I thought, “Wow, this looks really cool. Let me check it out.” At the time I also had several athletes that I was coaching that were doing Louisville with me too. I referred them and said, “Check this out with me, let’s get on this and hear what they have to say.” So we went through and listened to it, and being somewhat of a tech guy myself by day I was like, “This looks really cool. I could see some potential here.” So I signed up for a trial, and I think the rest is history. I can remember even vividly at the race – I signed up for the trial, it was probably after the race itself – so on race day, I’m running down the streets of Louisville, and the TriDot tent is up, and I see a bunch of people cheering them on and, “Wait, that’s the people that were on that race preview I listened to!” So I got home and I said, “It’s in off‑season, but let me see what this is all about.” And right as I had signed up, I heard Andrew on a podcast talking about, “Hey, if you’re a coach and you're interested in what we do, reach out.” As coaches, we like to think that we’ve got the secret sauce, and we all have this specialized thing that we do. And I think that’s true, I think we all have our own secret sauce that we bring, but it’s not just in the creation of the plan. And I quickly saw the benefits that, “Okay, I’ve got some artificial intelligence helping me along the way, this could really lead to some great results for my athletes.” And by the way, it has.
Vanessa: Awesome, that’s so cool. Well, what triathlon tip do you have for us today?
Ken: You had mentioned that I am a master Chi Running instructor, and for anybody that’s not familiar with that, that’s okay. It’s a way of approaching running that helps runners move more naturally, really the way our bodies were designed to run. The number one thing when I’m working with triathletes that I notice, is almost all of us – and I was certainly guilty of this when I ran my first IRONMAN – we overstride like crazy. My tip would be, if you find yourself overstriding, or maybe you don’t even know, try to get more in tune with your body. As you’re taking those strides, where is your foot landing? Is it landing out ahead of your knee? Is it landing below your knee, or do you find that it’s landing behind your center of gravity? Most of us are going to find that we’re striking way ahead of the knee. I would say be aware of that, and see if you can slow yourself down a little bit, and try to get that foot to land closer to underneath your knee versus ahead of the knee. It’s going to reduce the shock that comes into the body, and there are a whole bunch of other steps you can take to work on posture on all of those things. But I think the first step and first tip is really be aware of where that foot is striking. We can get into specifics, like are you heel striking, are you forefoot striking. I don’t even care about any of that just yet, just be aware of where that foot is coming down, and try to keep as close to landing below the knee as you can.
Vanessa: Okay, and for those of us that might not be as in tune with our bodies, and we think that we’re actually striking in the right place, how would we possibly know if maybe we’re not? How do we know that we’re doing it incorrectly?
Ken: That’s a great question as well. One, just have a friend take a video of you, and take a look. The other thing you can do, and this is what I really like to do and have my athletes try, is I call it the knee-bending drill. If you just jog in place, most people know what I mean when I say jog in place. When you jog in place, you’re simply lifting up your ankles behind you. You’re keeping your knees low, and your feet are always landing just below them. Just do a little bit of jogging in place. See if you can feel those knees, what that feels like when your feet land right below those knees by staying in place. Then when you’re ready, you can allow yourself to move forward just by letting your shoulders and core fall forward just a little bit, and you’ll start to move, and those feet will still fall right below those knees.
Vanessa: Ah ha, I’m just imagining myself picking up my knees right now, and I’m like, “Oh, I must be an overstrider.” Because when I pick my knees up, there’s a lot more bending of the knee, and when I run, the angle between the knee and my lower leg is much greater, I know it is. So I’m going to have to –
Ken: Yeah, and you always want to keep those knees a little bit soft. Never lock them out, but just be mindful of where the foot is landing, and try to keep it right below.
Vanessa: Cool, that’s an awesome tip. Thank you so much for sharing that with us today, and happy running to everyone out there!
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.