LISTEN TO THE EPISODE HERE:
Listener Q&A, covering nine different questions/topics from building bike power as a runner and a collegiate swimmer moving back into triathlon, through what actually makes us fatigue during a threshold effort, to swimskins, power duration curves and lots more.
We do listener Q&As monthly, the last Thursday every month.
HIGHLIGHTS AND KEY TOPICS:
- Building the bike as a runner: why heart rate sits lower on the bike than on the run, whether that gap matters, and what it says about where the limiter is. Plus how to use a daily 20 km ride towing a 25 kg dog trailer.
- A 193 cm, 100 kg collegiate swimmer moving back into triathlon: the engine-stronger-than-the-chassis problem, a run progression specified down to the minute, and why Mikael gets more conservative every time he coaches this profile.
- Why the maximal lactate steady state is a steady state for lactate and not for the whole body, what keeps drifting while lactate holds flat, and what one study found when it looked for the system that fails at exhaustion.
- How long you can actually hold MLSS, against the 40 minutes the question assumed, how much that varies between athletes, and where critical power sits relative to it.
- Swimskins: whether they give you any of the buoyancy a wetsuit does, the performance, drag and energy cost numbers from the closest pool research, and the thing that matters more than the brand and price tag.
- Whether a swimskin does more for a fast swimmer or a slow one.
- Reading your own power duration curve with nobody to compare against: the TrainingPeaks chart to start from, why a flat profile means something different for a triathlete than a cyclist, and Strava as a stand-in database.
- Mikael's W’ bands for male and female age group triathletes, on record for the first time, plus the critical power ratio from close to a hundred of his own athletes' tests.
- Quickfire round on altitude, heat and the CORE sensor, run volume by intensity, and vegan nutrition.
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Shownotes
- 04:30 -
- A five to ten beat difference between running and cycling heart rate is normal and nothing to chase.
- The usual reason is that a running background delivers solid cardiovascular adaptation without the local muscular endurance that cycling asks for, and that side of things responds to volume.
- Prescribe intensity by RPE, or by power if a power meter is available, rather than trying to match run heart rates on the bike.
- The first thing to address is time on the bike. Build a base with the intensity kept easy, and once the body is conditioned and comfortable with that load, add one quality session a week.
- Threshold or sweet spot work is the right place to start, again executed by RPE, because the limitation sits on the local muscular side rather than the cardiovascular side.
- Torque training, covered in the previous episode, targets those peripheral adaptations well, and short sprints of ten to twenty seconds can be dropped into an endurance ride rather than made into a dedicated session.
- The trailer rides count. Ten kilometres each way with 25 kilograms behind you adds up, and if the load makes it genuinely hard then it needs treating as one of the harder sessions of the week, although done daily it presumably sits at an easier intensity.
- The one caution is fragmentation. Frequency matters, but training made up exclusively of short rides is broken up too much, so it is worth adding a couple of longer continuous blocks across the week.
- Nothing extreme is needed, just some rides that are not chopped into ten kilometre pieces.
- Cycling volume can also be built more aggressively than run volume, since the long ride does not carry the injury risk that the long run does.
LINKS & RESOURCES
- Related episodes:
- Related studies:
- Why does exercise terminate at the maximal lactate steady state intensity? - Baron et al. 2007
- Slow-Twitch Fiber Glycogen Depletion Elevates Moderate-Exercise Fast-Twitch Fiber Activity and O2 Uptake - Krustrup et al. 2004
- Time to Exhaustion at Traditional Physiological Indicators in Runners: Between-Subject and Between-Day Variability - Pallares et al. 2026
- Effect of Fastskin Suits on Performance, Drag, and Energy Cost of Swimming - Chatard and Wilson 2008
- Comparison of buoyancy, passive and net active drag forces between Fastskin and standard swimsuits - Benjanuvatra et al. 2002
- Reliability and Validity of the CORE Sensor to Assess Core Body Temperature during Cycling Exercise - Verdel et al. 2021
