Shownotes

Racing Norseman on almost no training 

01:05 -

• I have spent my whole career telling everyone that endurance performance is all about preparation, so I am not taking my own advice too seriously these days. What I am relying on is 30 years of background.
• I do zero structured training, no sessions at all, but I do a lot of exercise, perhaps 12 to 15 hours a week on average. Norseman is one of the toughest long distance races there is.
• I do very little swimming now and I have learned that I have to be extremely careful with pacing in the water.
• Going into the red in the first few minutes of a swim is something I cannot recover from, so I set off at my own pace, let the group go and swam the whole thing alone. 
• On the bike I got carried away in the first hour and a half and spent time in the middle recovering from that.
• The course climbs almost 1200 metres straight out of the fjord onto a plateau, then over four or five mountains before descending to the run. 
• The run is 25 kilometres on the flat, which I was enjoying, and then 17 kilometres uphill. The first 12 of those are on the road, 800 metres or more of ascent at seven or eight percent, in long straight lines, and the last five are the rocky section, a mix of running and walking.
• The lessons were pacing, which I got right in some places and wrong in others, good equipment I could rely on, support crew who knew what to give me and when, and a huge emphasis on nutrition.
• Everything I have done in the last 12 months while underprepared has taught me that if you keep well fuelled, well hydrated and with plenty of electrolytes on board, you can get away with a bit more.

What is lost and what is retained 

04:56 -

• Swimming is a special case because I have done almost none of it.
• I did Patagonman last year without having swum a single stroke in a pool since retiring, and I have done maybe four or five sessions since, perhaps 4 or 5 kilometres in total.
• There I am relying purely on technique and general fitness. I never had a great 100 metre punch anyway.
• On the bike, which is a fairer comparison, I have probably lost only 5 to 10 percent in the mid zone of the curve, around LT1, and I am also 5 to 10 percent heavier, which compounds it.
• I have lost similar or a bit more in the VO2 zone, the three to five minute efforts, because I do literally nothing for that. 
• Considering how little I do, that is not much, and it has confirmed my general theory that the bedrock of all endurance performance is steady state volume. You can get a very long way on consistent steady state volume alone.

Dose, response and maximising volume 

07:32 -

• The human body is evidently complicated, and the peer-reviewed evidence on endurance training is weak and inconsistent.
• People differ, athletes at different levels train differently, and training itself is hard to quantify, especially in triathlon.
• The way past that is to take a simple high level view. Everything we know about the body is a dose response relationship: dose is exercise, response is getting fitter, faster and stronger.
• The dose is not just what you can do this week. Genuine endurance adaptation, from cardiac remodelling to capillarisation to metabolic efficiency and mitochondrial density, takes months or years to show up.
• So the question becomes how to maximise the dose over that period, which means training at a level you can sustain within that volume envelope for months at a time.
• That raises questions of habit, of making it fun and making it as easy as possible for yourself.
• Both psychologically and physiologically, the answer that falls out is to do as much training as you possibly can at low intensity. 
• From a habit point of view, easy stuff is easy to get out the door for. Physiologically, I have only become more convinced that it is very easy to do easy training slightly too hard.
• There is a lot of work on whether the region up towards LT1, high zone 2, is more effective per minute, though most of the time in sport science we do not even know what the determining factor for winning a triathlon is.
• Even if it is more effective, it is far more fatiguing and metabolically very different.
• Accumulate the vast majority of your volume at low intensity, do some high intensity around it, and then debate what that high intensity should be. 
• The high intensity work is the icing on the cake. You are better off icing a massive cake than a small one, and the icing contributes less to the whole performance package than most of us think.

How this played out in my own training 

11:58 -

• My training was a constant exploration of how to maximise what I was doing.
• I started off with more high intensity work and probably too much middle zone.
• I then realised that if I wanted to do the maximum volume possible and protect the really hard sessions, the vast majority of that volume had to be as easy as possible. 
• At my best, my bike rides averaged around 200 watts, for someone with an FTP of 400 watts or more, and a lot of my running was at five minutes per kilometre when I could run a sub 29 minute 10k.
• Everyone who came to train with me was surprised by how slowly I was going most of the time. I learned this in my late teens and early twenties, a lot of it from training with Jonny.
• We would get competitive on easy runs and then find we could not do the hard sessions when we needed to.
• There were points later in my career where things edged outside that, riding a bit harder for a reason or adding middle zone work as I experimented with different distances, and something would prompt me to refocus on keeping the rest really steady.
• In the last few years of proper training I was riding on my own at 200 watts and being strict about it.

Weekly volume and the share of intensity 

14:52 -

• At most I trained about 35 hours a week on average, with big weeks going up to 40.
• In the Olympic distance days that was swimming five days a week for seven to seven and a half hours, cycling six or seven days for 15 to 18 hours or more, and running up to 12 times a week, around 12 hours, when I was trying to run well.
• Swimming had the highest share of intensity, though even metre for metre I reckon it was 10 to 20 percent. Running 120 to 140 kilometres a week, about 15 of those had any intensity.
• A 15 to 18 hour cycling week would contain one or two hours of intensity. Very small percentages.
• In the swim there was one session we called a VO2 session, 15 to 20 reps of 100 metres, and one longer threshold style session with reps from one to five minutes and around 3 kilometres of volume.
• Running was one track session, five by 1k or 800s, and one longer rep session that was more threshold determined.
• Cycling was a one hour chain gang, which is a good race simulation with a mix of all intensities and something I was always a fan of, and sometimes some hill reps.

Injuries and the cost of pushing the envelope 

17:48 -

• It is multifactorial, but the number one thing with injuries is Occam's razor: look for the obvious explanation first, and if you get injured it is probably because you are doing too much.
• I was doing a lot, and that was a conscious decision. I wanted to stand on the Olympic start line knowing I had done everything I could, and I was deliberately testing where the limit was all the time. 
• Could I have handled a similar load with a different physiology, a different gait or better recovery? Probably yes, but those are edges.
• The real question is how much load you can do given your recovery and your biomechanics on any given day, and when you get injured it is usually because you did a bit too much.
• The whole point of endurance training is to maximise the dose over a long period, and you do that by being consistent, which means training at 80 or 90 percent the whole time to reduce injury risk.
• If you miss 100 hours through injury, catching that up over 50 weeks is two extra hours a week, or five a week over 10 weeks.
• So in theory most of the benefit comes from consistency. Can most people push higher? Yes.
• What is too high? You do not know until you get there. Many athletes and coaches would rather arrive at the Games at 95 percent and healthy, which is fine.
• Others are prepared to risk everything to arrive at 100 percent knowing that if it goes wrong they fall off the cliff. That is a psychological choice.

Recovery, nutrition and staying mentally fresh 

23:48 -

• This changed enormously. At 21 or 22 I would have said recovery did not matter much, eight hours of sleep was enough, and food all broke down into carbohydrate, fat and protein anyway, so a pie from the local shop or a curry was all the same.
• That changed drastically as I got older. 
• The natural ability to recover declines, so you focus on it more: sleep, everyday nutrition as good as it could be, being mentally fresh and ready to train hard, and being happy in the training environment.
• I never used any formal psychological intervention, but being mentally relaxed mattered to me.
• Having other interests away from sport, switching off, staying off social media, not reading too much about triathlon, reading books, and sleeping during the day.
• Sleeping during the day is amazing if you can do it. I easily averaged over eight hours a night, probably nine, and at my peak I slept an hour during the day most days.
• A typical day was a swim and run in the morning, a break to relax and sleep, then a ride and a run in the afternoon. The easy sessions became part of active recovery.
• Any session that was not an intense session or a very long ride, I felt I should come back from feeling better than I started.
• I did that by keeping the intensity very low, and increasingly by riding off road on a gravel or mountain bike because I found it mentally more refreshing.

Sleep habits and tools 

27:50 -

• Sleep is something we all know how to do well in theory but find hard in practice. I have since done a lot of work with big data in sleep science and the number one signal that keeps coming out is consistency.
• People who go to bed at the same time have the best sleep and recovery. Beyond that: dark, cool, quiet rooms, not eating too close to bed, and I found sugary high carbohydrate food at night affected my sleep.
• No screens, reading before bed, getting up at the same time and not too early. Early morning training is probably bad for you most of the time if you can avoid it.
• I did not have one during my career but I have recently got an Eight Sleep, and I mention it because it is a game changer rather than as a sponsorship. 
• Getting into a cold, temperature-controlled bed during a UK heat wave has been remarkable.
• I spent a lot of my career sleeping in an altitude tent, which is not good for sleep because it is hot and noisy.
• Yes, it sits over the mattress and does not make it much bigger, so the tent would go over the top as normal.
• I tried everything over the years to keep the tent cool, including having the generator outside, having the tent and generator in separate tents outdoors, and building a refrigeration system around the air inlet. 
• An Eight Sleep inside an altitude tent would be very effective.

Altitude strategy 

30:51 -

• I used altitude in specific strategic periods and found it very effective, both the tent and living and training at altitude. I did not use it all year.
• Most physiological responses follow a curve that is steep at first and levels off quickly, unlike long term endurance training, which takes far longer to plateau.
• I got most of the benefit in three or four weeks and after that it was diminishing returns.
• So I used it in the lead up to big races, in between altitude camps, and in the lead up to going to camp.
• I also found sleeping in the tent all the time too stressful and wanted periods where I just slept normally and relaxed.

Hindsight and advice to my younger self 

32:20 -

• I could talk for weeks about things I could have done differently, but what I did led to two Olympic gold medals and I would not change that for anything.
• That is not to say there were not many things I could have done better, from the simple, not going for that extra run on that day and getting injured, to the more complicated matters of recovery, fuelling and strategy.
• I would be careful, because interventions in coaching have so many unintended consequences.
• But I would say keep going, have faith in what you are doing, and step back every so often to look at the bigger picture. 
• There were times when I did not want to miss a session or a race because of injury, and a bit more perspective would have been valuable without, I think, any negative consequences.

The long distance years

34:45 -

• I have regrets about all of my career. You do not become a successful athlete by being easily content, and I imagine even the most successful athletes of all time have things they regret.
• Roger Federer, at the time the most successful tennis player ever, won just over 50 percent of the points he played. I would have loved to win the Ironman World Championships, and there are many ways I could have prepared better.
• The main thing is I could have been more successful if I had started earlier, but that would have meant not going to Rio and winning there. You cannot have everything, and I can sit here relatively content.
• I did pretty much stop. 2017 was largely long distance, and I probably should have fully committed at that point. The mistake was half-heartedly thinking about Tokyo. Would it have made a difference? Probably, but who knows.

The highest level races I was part of 

37:40 -

• For short distance, the London Olympic Games. Super fast swim, bike and run. The first 2.5 kilometres of the run went through in seven minutes flat, 28 minute 10k pace, and I ran a 29 minute 10k on that course in those conditions.
• For long distance, the 70.3 in South Africa where Jan Frodeno won, I was second and Javier Gomez third. The swim was on, the bike was hard for most of it and the run was very quick, with a close race on the run.
• Those were the two I would have picked from the outside too.
• I entertained myself calculating that a 3 percent running economy gain from super shoes, roughly 2 percent in performance, would take that London 29:07 to around 28:30, about a second faster than Alex Yee's current fastest 10k in an Olympic distance triathlon, and that was with some slowing on the blue carpet to take it all in.
• For anyone who has not watched that race, the run especially is worth watching as a piece of triathlon history.

Training trends today 

40:10 -

• I am a bit disconnected, and one challenge with calling training trends is that without a detailed breakdown of what someone has done for six months you do not really know.
• Consistent training over a long period still has to be the bedrock. Short distance is interesting tactically and physiologically because very few athletes have full control of the outcome.
• Races cycle between being run dominated and swim bike dominated, and that comes from the combination of dynamics rather than one athlete.
• In a sprint race during a swim bike dominated era, which we are seeing in the men's racing now, your result can be decided entirely by the first two minutes of the swim or the last minute of the swim and the first two minutes of the bike, which is a pure VO2 max effort to make the front group.
• That is different from training to be the fastest 5k runner.
• Matt Hauser has worked out that a particular tactic increases his chances and I imagine he trains for it.
• Long distance allows more latitude because it sits at a metabolically challenging intensity in the middle, and you see a lot more variation in how people train for it.

Why I have not moved into coaching

43:16 -

• I am enjoying a break from triathlon while doing my own sport.
• I did coach Beth Potter for two or three years. She came to me in 2021 wanting help getting to the front of races and becoming someone who could win in Paris, and I put together a strategy and helped her on the way to that medal.
• I believe coaching high level athletes requires being very involved, day in, day out.
• The value is being the person who runs and rides with them, who is at the swim sessions, who understands how training is going and can help technically and tactically. 
• Writing the programme is the easy bit. What you owe a top level athlete is that involvement, because it is their health, their dreams, everything. I do not feel ready to be that involved right now, but I would like to do it at some point.

The wider support team 

45:20 -

• I had a wide team: coaches, mostly Malcolm and Jack, doctors, physios, strength and conditioning coaches, a masseuse, a nutritionist and training partners.
• Training partners were probably the most important because they were the people I spent every day with, trained hard with, and who cheered me up on a rainy Monday.
• Jonny too. I would turn up to a morning swim and the coach would have a session on the board and I would do it, controlling the intensity myself.
• Running sessions were set by Malcolm at the track. Everything outside those was my own.
• Great coaches in my experience are there all the time, consistently, they are clever and good at communicating, and they tell you not only what to do but what you are not doing. 
• The people I worked with guided and prompted me rather than dictating.
• I had a week structure I came up with that was the same every week, so on a Monday I knew exactly what I was doing.
• Within that I would experiment, adding 10 minutes to a session and seeing what happened, keeping it if it worked and removing it if not.

Advice for age group athletes 

48:26 -

• It is the most boring advice in the world, but consistency. That leads to accumulating volume over time, and almost all of human physiology comes down to the fact that the more of something you do, the better your body adapts to it.
• I think it is important to keep the easy volume easy, for two reasons.
• Physiologically it is the intensity that gives you the most improvement for the fatigue it causes, and it lets you get on with the rest of your life. 
• From a health perspective, I view it as a decent chunk below LT1, and it has to feel fairly easy, with the same test of returning feeling better than you started.
• To maximise metabolic benefits you want to be predominantly aerobic and fat burning, and to maximise cardiovascular benefits the science suggests being around the point where maximum stroke volume occurs and not beyond it, which is a low intensity.
• The change I would make is in the proportion. Where mine was 10 or 15 percent intensity, at 10 hours a week you could make that 30. But the majority should still be slow.
• The trap most people fall into is doing their low intensity work too hard, which is neither healthy nor good for performance.
• The other reason, which came up earlier, is that keeping the easy work easy lets you perform in the hard sessions, and if you have a lot of stress outside training that matters even more.
• Low intensity training is also a good buffer for physiological and psychological stress.
• I notice now that if I go easy enough I come back mentally and physically fresher, and the less you train the more benefit that probably has.
• It is all relative. My easy is different from someone else's easy, and where people's thresholds sit on the continuum differs too, so people get away with very different paces.
• The interesting question is how you judge where easy is, which is why I like the fuzzy definition of coming back feeling better than you started.
• If you have done that you have probably not caused much neuromuscular damage, so you have been running slowly. 
• If you feel fatigued, and this is debated, you may have had some hypoglycaemia, which suggests you were not fuelling right but also that the intensity was slightly too high for an easy session, because you should be able to manage that metabolically.
• You have not got too hot, you have not had to push your metabolism too high. Defining it that way controls for a lot of things and gives people a window rather than an exact wattage or lactate.
• The window is quite big, but we all know when we have gone over it: you come back, sit on the floor and want all the sugar in the cupboard.
• Duration plays into this as well. The fitter you are, the longer you can hold a pace and still have it feel restorative.
• Beginners often go wrong because what feels very easy in the first part of a run becomes too much after 20 or 30 minutes, and they would have needed to go even easier, but there is not yet the endurance base for that to be obvious to them.

TrueFuels and the case for sodium 

56:58 -

• TrueFuels came from two things. The number one thing that goes wrong in endurance sport, from my own experience and from talking to people, is nutrition.
• If something goes wrong on race day in an ultra, a cycling event, an Ironman or a shorter triathlon, it is probably nutrition.
• It should not be so complicated, and for the vast majority of people within the normal distribution of carbohydrate and sodium needs you should be able to say, take this and you will be fine.
• The second was my own wish to simplify: one thing to sip every 10 to 15 minutes for the whole race. And my interest in the science, which has changed a lot in the last decade but still has thin literature on some topics.
• The aim is to turn that into a product and communicate it in a way that helps people fuel well.
• A sport scientist would say there is little evidence sodium contributes to cramping or performance, and yet nobody on this show would say they would do a long hot race without sodium.
• There is a huge gap there and something must be going on. In a long hard hot race with enormous neuromuscular fatigue and dehydration, anecdotally everyone will tell you that you are much less likely to cramp with plenty of sodium on board.
• In my experience sodium is not what causes GI distress, and I have tested that aggressively. Sodium bicarbonate products now deliver very large sodium doses and people are fine with them.
• Chronically, sodium is bad for us, but acutely it does not seem to be, so if it is not a GI problem for you, you might as well take as much as you can sensibly take.
• I do not agree with testing sweat sodium concentration and building a strategy off it, because mine changed a lot from day to day.
• A salty pizza today meant a high reading tomorrow, and a few good days brought it down, which makes homeostatic sense.
• With heat training mine would come down from nearly 2000 milligrams per litre to more like 500 or 600.
• If you do the maths on three litres an hour at 1000 milligrams per litre, that is 2.5 grams of sodium, 7.5 grams of salt, in a single hour. 
• Over eight hours of an Ironman that is an enormous amount, and while interstitial fluid holds plenty of sodium, the amount in circulation is nowhere near that, so it makes sense to replace some.
• That reasoning led to putting sodium in the gel. I cannot think of a scenario where you are taking concentrated carbohydrate as a gel and there is no sweat involved.
• There is also the debate about whether it helps carbohydrate absorption. In the spirit of simplifying, the two TrueFuels gels are a high sodium version and a low sodium version.
• Higher sodium sweaters and hot conditions use the high one, lower sodium sweaters and cool conditions use the low one.
• Each is 40 grams of carbohydrate in a one to one ratio, and two an hour will give most people within the normal distribution what they need.
• My own theory on why the research struggles to show benefits, which I covered with Jack in a recent episode on this topic, is the huge variance in sweat rate and sweat sodium concentration.
• Someone at three litres an hour and 2000 milligrams per litre versus an athlete I have tested repeatedly who never passes 400 millilitres an hour are losing wildly different absolute amounts, and for the latter sodium is probably insignificant outside an Ironman.
• Putting both in the same randomised group is like comparing VO2 max values of 80 and 20 in the same training study.
• On top of that, lab protocols cannot reproduce the intensity or duration people reach outdoors, so studies are unlikely to measure the extremes of an Ironman.
• We also do not know whether cramp risk is linear or has a cliff edge, and people who struggle with cramp will tell you there is a point beyond which nothing helps.
• One anecdote: eight hours into a bikepacking race in southern Spain, after many punctures, I could no longer change a tyre because my hands and forearms were cramping. I had to get a salt packet out of my bag with my teeth. Two salt packets and five minutes later I was cured.

CoreControl, a taurine supplement for the heat 

01:08:00 -

• CoreControl is a supplement taken for eight days, mixed with 500 millilitres of water and taken either during exercise or in the morning.
• I am taking it now ahead of a very hot race in Costa Rica on Saturday. 
• The active ingredient is taurine, combined with piperine for bioavailability, some electrolytes because you sweat more in the heat, and mint flavour and cooling for sensation.
• It is based on work by Jennifer Peel, who found that taurine over this kind of period at around 50 milligrams per kilogram of body weight, three to four grams per serve for most people, boosted the body's ability to increase evaporative heat loss.
• The mechanisms are hypothesised rather than confirmed, and there is also acute work by Page and Jeffries showing benefit from acute supplementation.
• Think of it as helping the body shed more heat, probably by increasing blood flow and heat transfer from core to periphery and then to the environment, mostly through increased sweat gland activation and sweat rate.
• It comes in packets of eight. Take one a day for the eight days before the event, with the last dose on the morning of the event about two hours before, because there is acute evidence too.
• No negative side effects have been found so far, but never try anything for the first time on race day; do a course before a training session first.
• Over about 60 kilograms take one a day. Under 60 kilograms take it two days on, one day off, over 12 days, to balance the dosage.
• You can take it for longer runs of days if you want, and it is under the daily recommended taurine limit, but I would not recommend taking it every day forever simply because we do not know the impact. 
• For multi-day events, take it for eight days before day one and then every morning before racing.
• I am currently running a randomised crossover trial with a local university and have done my own placebo and active tests in a study I designed. 
• It definitely increases sweat rate, by how much depends on the person and how close to maximum their sweat rate already is, so be prepared to drink more. That mirrors heat training in general: it helps you tolerate and perform in the heat, but you have to hydrate more or you shoot yourself in the foot.

Overrated and underrated

01:14:03 -

• Underrated: consistent volume, consistent performance nutrition, and sleep, which is recovery 101. Overrated: worrying too much about exactly what intensity you have to do.
• You have to do intensity, but if the choice is between getting out the door for easy work or doing nothing, get out the door.
• If you would miss a group session because it is not the exact intensity you planned, just do the group session. Most supplements are overrated for most people.
• Some vitamins and minerals are good, but combining lots of things means we do not know what is going on, and less is often better.
• And swimming, at least for me. I do one thing every day, always cycling or running, and I think I have swum about five times since retiring.
• Volume matters, but in the context of what most people are doing the point is consistency. Whether you do 30 or 35 hours this week does not make the difference.
• What matters is whether you can average that over the next 50 weeks.
• The main endurance response, as I understand it, is stroke volume and cardiac output, driven by the shear force of blood across the heart per beat at maximum stroke volume, and it is the number of beats you accumulate at that shear that counts. 
• You cannot do that in a week. It happens over years, so total volume matters, but for most people the message is make sure you can do it week in, week out.

LINKS & RESOURCES

• Related episodes:
  • Polarised training with Stephen Seiler, PhD | EP#177
  • World Champions keep things simple: training masterclass with Joel Filliol | EP#172
  • The “Best Practices” We Stand By That the Research Does Not Support
  • Nutrition and hydration data from Kona and 70.3 Worlds with Andy Blow | EP#365
  • Running, Peaking, and Suffering with Olympic gold-medal coach Malcolm Brown | EP#96
• Studies discussed:
  • The effect of 8-day oral taurine supplementation on thermoregulation during low-intensity exercise at fixed heat production in hot conditions of incremental humidity - Peel et al. 2024
  • Acute taurine supplementation enhances thermoregulation and endurance cycling performance in the heat - Page et al. 2019