Shownotes

The one change with the biggest upside 

01:21 -

• Get an extra half an hour of sleep a night.
• That is top of my list. I do not hold everyone to a particular number, but it is very well documented that south of seven hours is not good, so that is a hard rule, and aiming for eight is a good baseline.
• Second to that, and for many people this would be a complete luxury, is not setting an alarm. If you can live a lifestyle where you go to bed and wake up naturally, that is a huge positive for the quality of your sleep.

What professionalism means 

03:31 -

• Simplistically, professionalism is everything that performatively makes a difference and is not swim, bike, run or gym.
• Anything that is not physical exercise but has an impact on how you perform.
• Some of it is tangible, like what you eat. A lot of it is intangible: why you are doing the sport, understanding your own motivation, having the ability to be introspective. 
• There are 24 hours in a day, and most athletes train somewhere between one and five hours, which is still a very small percentage. 
• What you do with the rest of the day decides how well you adapt to the training and how much you get out of it.
• There is no magic training pill, no magic workout, no magic device, and no habit an influencer can hand you that makes you amazing in six weeks. It is consistency and professionalism.
• A young pro phoned me some months ago and said he had asked all of my peers the one thing he should do to take his performance to the next level.
• I think he expected me to say the Norwegian method, or threshold training, or polarised training, or Kenyan fartlek.
• What I said was: be the utmost professional you can be in your life. The irony is that when you ask world-class athletes, in triathlon and in many other sports, what they take away from their time in sport, it is an evolution in their character, and potentially their self-esteem.
• I think human beings subconsciously know that growth lies in suffering, which is why so many people do sport and seek fulfilment in that process.
• As they become more motivated and driven, they keep pursuing fulfilment through results and are never quite fully fulfilled.
• That is normal at the very tip of the spear, and none of it is swimming, biking or running. Professionalism is an attitude, behaviours, a mindset and practices that support your ability to swim, bike and run.

The professionalism checklist 

08:22 -

• It is a version of Matt Dixon's analogy of a table with four legs. What is your quality of sleep like?
• What is your quality of fuelling and nutrition like? Are you looking after your body? I
• In strength and conditioning, they say you cannot fire a cannon from a canoe, so are you structurally resilient and do you have good mechanics?
• Then there is stress. Human beings are very good at compartmentalising stress. An athlete says they were tired and struggling in a workout, so the training must be wrong.
• The training is not wrong. Right now they are between jobs, doing a bit of consulting, going to job interviews, doing the school runs because the kids are back at school, and moving house in three months.
• Emotional stress, financial stress, poor sleep, and people forget all of it.
• Mentally, you might feel like a rock in the middle of the ocean in a storm, immovable, but your body might be screaming. It could be thermal stress because you live in a hot environment.
• All of these things compound your ability to adapt to the training. So the list is stress management, looking after the chassis through technical competency and strength and conditioning, sleep, and nutrition.

Do your circumstances match your goal? 

10:49 -

• That congruence is exactly the point, but as a coach you also need to recognise that the person may be being very sincere.
• If it is a 40 minute drive to the pool, a one hour swim becomes two and a half hours of their day.
• So we do a gap analysis: we are here, we want to get there, or as Dan Bigham puts it, start at the end and work backwards.
• The idea has been around for decades. If the swim can only be a certain amount, where can we add value elsewhere: in the bike, in the run, in other aspects of life?
• There seems to be a growing pursuit of the perfect training session and the perfect training approach, and it is a myth.
• There are basic principles and practices, but look at any absolutely world-class performer in business, sport or music and what they have in common is that they comport themselves with the utmost professionalism.
• There may not be balance in their life. What they chase is complementarity. If you need a long ride at the weekend but you have to visit the in-laws, could you leave the house early, ride, meet your partner halfway and jump in the car?
• That is thinking outside the box rather than "I have to do this bike ride, and then we will go and do that thing."
• That is a very honest conversation about whether your habits, practices and demands align with your goal.
• If you tell me you can only train ten hours a week, you have lots of family and work commitments, you have done triathlon for two years, and you want to qualify for Kona next year, my next question is: what is the fastest 5K you have ever run?
• If you ran 15 and change in high school, maybe you were handed the genetics to wing it.
• If you have only ever run 19 minutes and you did not do sport when you were younger, we need to have a discussion, because your dreams do not align with your circumstances.
• Are you willing to compromise? That is professionalism too: being professional in your understanding of what your dreams demand, and whether you are willing to make those sacrifices.

Supportive or merely tolerant 

16:53 -

• A big issue is when people commit to racing and performing without making sure it aligns with their personal circumstances, and then end up constantly compromising in every part of their life.
• Sit down with the people who support you and say: I want to go on this journey of self-exploration, this is what it takes, are you cool with that? If you do not yet know what it takes, go and find out, then come back and ask.
• The worst thing in the world is to pursue a dream where the people around you are tolerant of it rather than supportive and uplifting of it.
• In that situation the athlete compromises on both fronts: too much training for the family to be happy, and not enough to reach an ambitious goal, so they end up with neither.
• Life factors like family, work and training environment, that pool 40 minutes away, have a huge impact on whether you reach your goals, outside of any magic session.
• I am not saying every triathlete is married with kids. But when you see the 4am club on social media, I want to understand that person's circumstances.
• If they are single, with no other responsibilities, no mortgage, maybe living with their parents, they can live that lifestyle.
• Some people in Australia do genuinely get up at 4am, but they are probably in bed by 8pm. When someone with a family and responsibilities bangs that drum, what I would love to see is an interview with their wife.
• How much childcare do you do? How much house cleaning, grocery shopping, cooking?
• Let me hear it from them, rather than from you telling me you are smashing the weights at 5 am and rucking up a mountain with rocks on your back.
• The question is always what the support structure around you looks like and whether it is aligned with your dreams or just tolerant of them.

Guardrails and turning pro 

21:26 -

• You can create it, 100 per cent.
• It comes down to really open and honest communication, and to the point that you do not know what you do not know.
• If you are on the journey to becoming a pro, or to being the best physical version of yourself, that information is fairly easy to find, or ask people who have already been on that journey, and then set guardrails.
• When I coached Corinne Abraham, who won multiple regional Ironman championships as a pro, she used to say to me: you can give me all the training in the world from 8am to 6pm, in essence a normal working day including the commute, but outside that it is a no-no, because I want to cook dinner and sit down with my partner in the evenings and have balance in my life.
• I repeat that as a lesson to younger pros. Procrastination through the day is something I see more and more in young pros.
• If you have committed to being a professional athlete, this is your job.
• You also have to manage other people's perception of what a job is, namely something that pays the bills, puts a roof over your head and food on the table.
• Triathlon is a very niche sport, and very few individuals are in a financial position to make it that.
• It is like being the best 110 metre hurdler in your country: absolute success is making the Olympic final, and that person is probably working two part-time jobs to fund the pursuit.
• On the face of it, there is more money in triathlon now, but it is a meritocracy; the top percentage get the rewards, and that is the same in investment banking, so I do not say it as a complaint.
• Make sure you understand what you are walking into. Have you got the savings or the infrastructure to support yourself for 12 months?
• Do you have health insurance? If you travel to a race and your bike gets broken, have you got the structure in place so that it is not your career over?
• Simple things like that take pressure and stress off the athlete's mental wellbeing.
• The same principles apply to an amateur targeting a local sprint or Olympic distance race, because you are making a commitment to be the best version of yourself, and the price is compromising in other parts of your life.
• Accept that a lot of people will not understand that. I have had female professional athletes tell me about parents asking when they are going to settle down, have kids and stop doing that triathlon thing.
• This is literally my job. We assume everybody shares the attitude of wanting to be the best version of themselves at work, at parenting, in athletics, but the truth is a lot of people are quite happy just being.
• So you need to walk people through what it is like to be in your shoes.

Fitting training around a job 

28:30 -

• Can you prepare your meals and snacks so that you can do 30 to 45 minutes of training on your lunch break? If the job does not allow that, could the commute become part of your training?
• Could some of the things you do at work improve your health and wellness?
• One individual told me about a high-pressure job, leaving home early, getting the train into central London and working long hours.
• I told him he was banned from using elevators. Stairs only, for any meeting, on any floor; I do not care if it is the 25th. It adds a few minutes, but it might be the only wellness change that person can make.
• A lot of this centres on not going after things you are not entitled to. Someone who has not done any aerobic sport for a long time, or ever, sees an Ironman and decides they want to do one.
• Can you swim 25 metres? Not really, but I am drown-proofed. Is that a wise decision? I would much rather have the discussion and say I do not think that is sensible.
• If you like triathlon as a concept, embrace a distance each year: sprints in the first year, Olympics in the second, a couple of halves in the third, and an Ironman in the fourth. Instead, a lot of people say:
• I have just started, I have a road bike, I have signed up for an Ironman in nine months and I cannot really swim, fix me.
• If you respect the decision they have made, it might be complete ignorance, and then you sit them down and lay out what it will take from a commitment perspective. Can you swim three times a week?
• Can you get coaching on deck? Can you ride regularly for a minimum number of hours?
• Can you run regularly, and are you willing to do harder runs to learn to push yourself and get uncomfortable, which conceptually they may never have experienced? 
• They need to learn how their body feels working hard versus easy. If after all of that they say yes, I can do those things, great. Sometimes it will not align, and that goes back to professionalism: know what you are walking into.

Devices, wisdom and time in your own head 

33:48 -

• This moves into the psychology of the human being. I listened to an interview with the philosopher Alain de Botton, who said that if you compare what we understand about the human mind with medicine, we are still at the stage of putting leeches on the body.
• We are at a very early stage of understanding the mind and how it shapes what we do day to day.
• Meanwhile what we know about physiology is off the charts, and we have more devices than hot dinners to measure and quantify it, to the point where people suffer from number-chasing anxiety. 
• That is why I always say that any training device is a compass. It gives you direction, it lets you ask better questions and understand more, but it is not GPS coordinates.
• All of these things are there to program the supercomputer that sits between the ears. They are not going to tell you what to do.
• From a coaching perspective, wisdom is knowing what to leave out, not knowing what specifically to do to be a game changer. The ability to simplify complexity is the black art of a good coach.
• Some of the really impressive endurance performances of the 70s, 80s and 90s still stand up despite everything that has developed since.
• My hypothesis is that there was a lot less to pay attention to. Not just simpler training, but simpler lives around the training: no social media, no endless sources of information to second-guess yourself with, simpler hobbies, probably bed at the same time every night.
• Inherent in that is the fact that athletes a few decades ago did not have real-time feedback on every metric and did not have social media, so there was a lot more time for reflective practice and introspection, which built their self-awareness of their body, their motivations, their drivers, their resilience and their mental toughness.
• With more devices and a cultural shift towards a dopamine culture, we have lost that.
• When a coach asked me what they should really focus on, I said make sure you have at least one hour a day just to sit and reflect on what you do and how you do it, on reading or research you have done, on feedback from an athlete, good or bad, and spend that time in your own head.
• Athletes simply had more time to be in their own head.
• As coaches we have a responsibility to help people create a bit of separation from how things are now and get that introspection back, so that their anxieties and worries about performing, amateur or pro, become things that make them reflect inwards and understand why they are on the journey, rather than consuming them until they struggle to train properly and let their professional habits slip.
• A couple of decades ago, a lot of that introspection happened in pen-and-paper training logs.
• Voice-typing a workout comment at a red light on the way to work is going through the motions; you do not get the same reflective benefit.

Self-doubt as fuel 

41:33 -

• In the pursuit of any performative excellence, in work, life or sport, we are led to believe there is a level of perfection involved.
• There was a clip doing the rounds of Sifan Hassan, who has smashed a whole load of track records, talking about standing on the start line legitimately asking herself why she was even there and why she thought she was capable of what she was trying to do.
• Masses of self-doubt. A strength in good athletes is taking all of that and channelling it into actions and behaviours that produce a positive outcome. You cannot control the mind with the mind.
• I am a firm believer that athletes cannot think themselves better.
• They need physical mechanisms for managing stress. If you struggle with the rough and tumble of the swim, there are things you can do to inoculate yourself so you do not have a stress response next time.
• Telling someone that if they just think about it differently they will cope is an approach I fundamentally disagree with.
• In my 30+ years of coaching, the level of imposter syndrome across the individuals I have worked with is extremely high. 
• Say you are the best long jumper in Portugal, the Olympic qualifying mark is five centimetres beyond your PR and you have three and a half years to get there.
• You do not motivate yourself for five centimetres, the length of your thumb, through "I just want to be the best version of myself."
• What drives you is the insecurity: am I doing enough, am I doing things the right way, am I looking after my body, am I focusing on the right technique, am I choosing the right equipment?
• There is a persistent anxiety and doubt. The very best athletes take those persistent doubts and imposter syndromes and use them as the fuel for the bonfire of their success.
• Athletes at a lesser level allow them to become the bonfire that consumes their ability to succeed.
• A lot of sports greats seem extremely confident from the outside, but confidence is not thinking you are better than everybody else.
• That is arrogance, and it is how some athletes come across.
• Confidence is understanding that you do not need to compare yourself to anybody else. Watch the interviews with Michael Jordan about his behaviours and practices and you cannot say those were not fuelled by a persistent underlying dissatisfaction with his own performance capabilities, which by definition is anxiety or self-doubt.
• If you have that concern, then: are you fuelling your workouts properly? Are you eating well between sessions and allowing enough time to do so?
• Are you off screens for half an hour to an hour before bed? Are you spending time with your partner and listening to their concerns about life, the universe and everything, so that your training is balanced?
• Are you having a regular date night, so that you do not train on a Friday evening or a Saturday afternoon? Are you going to church or the mosque at the weekend because religion is important to you?
• Or are you sat there stressing that you need to train? Maybe you do not. Maybe you need more balance and complementarity in your life so that consistency can happen over four weeks, 12 weeks, 12 months, three years.

Decision-making: present and engaged 

49:14 -

• The wrong bit is the easy bit to answer. Athletes come a cropper when they just execute, execute, execute, without staying present and engaged in the workout.
• A good coaching relationship is a partnership, not a dictatorship. In 30 years of coaching, jokes and mucking around aside, I have never once had to tell an athlete to suck it up because a performance was weak.
• They are all really hard on themselves and they all set the bar high, amateur or pro.
• So when I give people confidence, self-belief, autonomy and above all trust, they might come back and say: I understood the philosophical intent of that session, but I scaled the intensity back because that felt more appropriate today, or I did the intervals harder because I was feeling really confident.
• I trust that, because they are deciding based on being present and listening to their body, and that is what lets them recover and train tomorrow, next week and the week after.
• The best athletes are comfortable making those decisions.
• Where athletes go wrong is: coach wrote four hours at 150 to 200 watts, so I rode four hours at 199 to 203 watts in ERG mode on the trainer. 
• No gold star for you.
• An athlete who calls an audible and makes a workout an entire training zone harder is very different from one making a small adjustment that still keeps the intent of the session.
• If there is a pattern, it is an education piece. 
• Another part is expectations: the athlete understanding what the coach expects of them within a workout or a week, and the coach understanding what the athlete expects.
• An athlete might expect to finish a training week so wrecked that they want to lie on the lounge floor with the curtains closed in the foetal position. I would never want an athlete to feel like that.
• I want them to always feel they have one quality session in the bank, in the back pocket, that they could go and do if they had to.
• We often talk about leaving a couple of reps in the tank within a session; this is the same cue applied to the microcycle, and to training day after day after day.
• Social media leads us to believe that epic workouts make the difference, but three, four, six, nine months were building up to that workout, such that when the athlete did it, it was not really that epic.
• On social media, it just looks like one insane session six days before the world championships.

Attention as a resource 

55:50 -

• I am not naive. For many professional athletes there is now an inherent pressure, which did not exist online 15 years ago, to share an authentic journey, attract followers, and then go to a company and say: I have 20,000 people who love watching me, that is a captive audience you can market to, sponsor me.
• There is a responsibility for many athletes to pursue that.
• But some people do not like doing it, and if it does not come naturally, that is okay.
• The implication is that you can be attractive to a sponsor in a different way.
• Having dealt with sponsors, negotiated and written contracts, I would say most endemic sponsors in sport are actually interested in how you affect the bottom line and shift product. 
• A pro who is not great at social media might be a member of a 150-person triathlon club and able to influence that club to embrace the product.
• That has value. It is part and parcel of professionalism, but it is not as simple as everybody needing a social media channel and a YouTube channel like Lucy Charles-Barclay, who with Reece does an amazing job positioning her as a person of influence and a figurehead for the sport.
• That is not for everybody.
• Some people legitimately decompress by flicking through Instagram, which is fine, but put guardrails around when you do it and when you do not.
• I know many athletes who put their phone in air plane mode for the last three days before a championship race, turning it off only to phone their partner or family and then straight back on.
• As a coach, it is about saying: I feel this thing is detracting from your ability to be present, engaged or reflective; how can we manage that?
• And it comes back to procrastination and to structure and routine.
• In parenting, the one thing everybody agrees on is that children need structure to develop, and that a day of managed chaos affects their self-esteem, anxiety and attachment.
• Why would adults be any different? If we swim, bike, run and eat whenever it suits us, we end up with athletes doing a bike session at 9 pm, watching YouTube at 1 am, eating crisps, and wondering why they cannot perform.

Watches, splits and the intent of the session 

01:03:12 -

• It is also about the athlete learning what swimming 100s on 1:40 actually feels like.
• If you went for a bike ride with Sebastian Kienle tomorrow and he said: Let's spin for two hours at 200 watts, I guarantee he could put his Garmin in his back pocket and ride at 190 to 210 watts for two hours, knowing exactly how that feels, because he spent years and years programming the supercomputer between his ears. 
• The swim is the perfect example. If your threshold is 1:30 per 100, then 1:25 versus 1:30 versus 1:35 are small differences in seconds but pretty massive differences in lactate metabolism and energetics, and people need to learn that.
• If you want to swim with a watch, swim with an analog watch, especially if your eyesight is poor and you cannot read the clock on the wall, and learn to be present and engaged.
• When I write a main set, say six by 200 where the first 100 is practising the first 100 of a race before settling into an aerobic 100, with 300 aerobic recovery between, I want the athlete to look at the clock and tell me what the first 100 of each 200 was.
• Do not tell me after the workout, because that is the meat of the session. If those times change dramatically across the six reps, we need a discussion about perception of intensity.
• A common one in swimming is 20 by 50 at threshold: every pro I have dealt with swims those way faster than six by 400 at threshold, and it feels the same to them. Some coaches would say, why, I told you threshold.
• For the athlete, there is an education piece, and for the coach there is the question of what we are actually trying to get out of the workout, because the athlete is saying I can swim really fast 50s, but my 400s are a lot slower.
• There is a problem to solve there. It is fine to wear a watch; just use it in the right way.
• Sometimes that is down to the coach not having walked the athlete through the process, how this block fits the bigger picture and their goals, and what comes in the next block.
• Otherwise, you get the athlete who went to the pool on Tuesday, found a group doing 400s and did their 400s instead of the planned speed set, then joined a friend's long aerobic ride the next day instead of the strength work on the bike.
• Each of those workouts may have been done really well, but changing them every other day does not align with the process and the plan.
• That is an open and honest conversation about behaving professionally. As a coach, I help the athlete understand what we are doing and why.
• As an athlete, you buy into the process, with some flexibility because you want a social life and to swim with your friends, and a good coach says, fine, swim with your friends twice a week and do my sessions twice a week.

Communication in the coach-athlete relationship 

01:09:45 -

• Reflecting on every moment of a lack of professionalism in my coaching relationships, whether on the athlete's part or on mine, 100 per cent of them came down to open and honest communication, often around expectations.
• It is easy to say the athlete did that wrong, or for the athlete to say the training is wrong, so it is the coach's fault. Like any relationship, those blow-ups can be avoided by asking How are you feeling?
• How is this going? Am I communicating in a way that is effective and that you understand?
• Many of us coaches manage different cultures and language barriers. I am English; you are from the Åland Islands and English is not your first language, even though you speak it fluently.
• A miscommunication can get wrapped up in that and skipped over, when a conversation about what we are trying to achieve, why, and how it fits your dreams and goals would have avoided it. You were not happy with that workout, or with something I said?
• Tell me. Was I not happy with the workout you did? Let me help you understand why, so you can make a better decision in future.
• In my early years, I was more absolute in my views and more reductionist about what was appropriate and how to do it. Here is the workout; do the workout.
• I have studied and taught physiology and coached these athletes, so respect what I say at face value.
• A lot of athletes simply want to understand why they are doing something. It is not that they do not trust the process; if they understand, they buy in. 
• Now, being older, I am very conscious that if I am coaching a 25-year-old Brazilian woman, I am a white male in my 50s whose first language is English; I do not speak Portuguese, and there is a massive cultural and generational difference.
• I need to be incredibly respectful of that and work through the communication barriers as best I can, openly and honestly.
• Would I do anything differently if I could go back? Of course. But I would not be the coach I am now without the experiences I have had with athletes, good and bad. I have never felt I owned an athlete's success.
• I am babysitting somebody on a journey.
• Sometimes it has a beautiful ending: the athlete fulfils their dreams, retires to have a family, and 15 months later I get a message with a due date and later a picture of the baby. Sometimes it goes pear-shaped, and I step back.
• In the moment everyone is human and gets upset, but afterwards athlete and coach should reflect on why the relationship broke down.
• One of my questions when athletes approach me is: how many coaches have you had?
• If the answer is six coaches in six years, nine times out of ten there is an issue with that athlete, something they have not been taught or do not understand, or expectations that were not managed on one side or the other.
• In one rare instance, an athlete stepped away after about 18 months and told me a few weeks later not to read anything into it: every coaching relationship they had ever had, with lots of world-class coaches, had lasted about the same time.
• What that told me is that this athlete is a student of the sport, a sponge who just wants to learn, and I communicate differently to Dan Lorang, who is different to Björn Geesmann, to Matt Dixon, to Siri Lindley, to Erin Densham.
• We can all teach lessons in different ways. As a coach, understand that people arrive with preconceived ideas from their own experience and from previous coaches, listen to those, and contextualise them.
• The answer to the second part is the same thing: expectations of communication. What kind of communication do you want and need? These are my expectations as a coach, what are yours as an athlete?
• Some say they just want me to write a programme and sit behind a keyboard. If so, maybe I am not the best person for you, or maybe I am.
• Another needs me face to face regularly, looking them in the eye and giving them the confidence and self-belief to break through to the next level of performance.

Respect and trust 

01:18:33 -

• Beneath communication sit respect and trust. As an athlete, trusting that the coach has the best intentions in getting the best out of you, and if you do not feel that, or the training does not reflect it, communicating it.
• Athletes sometimes come to me while still working with another coach, and I ask what they are not happy with and whether they have actually had that conversation with the coach.
• Sometimes they feel they have outgrown that journey.
• Other times they say the coach does not communicate, keeps using science-y phrases they do not understand, and it really annoys them. Go and have that conversation, because the coach does not know what they do not know.
• Respect on the coach's side means respecting that the athlete feels the training while you only see it. Sometimes there is a disconnect. How did that session actually feel?
• I believed you were capable of that workout, and maybe I did not communicate that well, so you ended up in a really negative headspace. I should have said beforehand: this looks really scary, but I know you can do it, go for it.

When a session goes wrong

01:20:50 -

• It depends on the athlete's mindset, but how the coach manages it afterwards is what really matters. First, go through an ABC car-servicing type checklist. How was your sleep the night before? What was your fuelling during the day? Have you had enough protein in the last few days, because it was a really intense workout?
• For a female athlete, where are you in your cycle, did I as the coach fail to pay attention to that, and how might the follicular or luteal phase affect high intensity work, or maybe for this individual it does not.
• Tick those boxes. If they all come back fine, then: did you read the workout, decide it looked really scary and check out?
• Or did you stay present and engaged and just not hit the numbers? Sometimes you have to accept that maybe it was too aggressive, or that shit happens some days.
• Reductionism and absolutism are two words that sport and coaching sometimes treat as strengths.
• The reality is that the human being is a complex dynamic system and things do not always go as we expect.
• A simple one: an athlete who lives at sea level goes to a training camp at mild altitude, they happen to be someone who takes a long time to adapt to altitude, and there is an over-prescription of intensity relative to where they are environmentally.
• That creates a negative mindset in the athlete, when an understanding of how they respond to 1,500 metres versus 100 metres would have resolved it.
• Sometimes these lessons have to be learned. Twenty years ago I would have said if you are not measuring it, you are not managing it, and I still stand by that as a reasonable belief.
• But sometimes you cannot manage in the moment what you can measure, and sometimes you look back and realise you should have measured something, because you assumed the athlete would be fine going from one place to the other and they were not.
• That is not poor coaching. 80 per cent of coaching is pure knowledge, the basic facts of what you need to do.
• Another 15 per cent is pragmatism, based on the experience of the coach and the athlete, knowing their body, their goals and their dreams.
• The remaining 5 per cent is pure guesswork. Sometimes it bites you; other times it makes a massive difference. And that 5 per cent is not a gadget or a piece of equipment.
• When I worked with Lionel, and he finished second to Patrick Lange in Kona, one of the things we were managing was sufficient sodium intake.
• We decided to forget the idea of a Western diet and practise having Mr Noodles for breakfast, with their very high sodium powder, as the race morning breakfast.
• You could call that knowledge-based, but it was partly guesswork, because he might easily have said that is stupid.
• More often the pure guesswork is driven by the athlete: they say they respond really well to a certain type of run session, it is not a structure I have come across before, and it does not necessarily fit what we are trying to develop then, but I can break it down mechanically and physiologically, and we decide to just wing it and go with it.
• Whether the session is better or worse than any other, you still get the value of the athlete's buy-in.

The pizza-slice session

01:28:10 -

• A really good example as a training practice came when Professor Stephen Seiler's research on polarised training first came out, including the paper on maximising the response to VO2 max training that compared four by four minutes, four by eight and four by 16 minutes.
• A lot of cycling coaches said they had done four by four, five by four, four by five or five by five for years anyway.
• The point is that four by four at VO2 max with two minutes recovery is a really hard workout. Some people fail it for pure physiological reasons: with a very low anaerobic capacity they cannot recover in those two minutes, which is a different debate.
• But one athlete told me that mentally that workout was just crushing and they could not do it.
• We wanted that amount of mechanical work for the VO2 max stimulus, and as a triathlete with three sports to manage the cognitive load is big.
• So why not pizza-slice it? Sixteen minutes of work and eight minutes of recovery, sliced on a one-to-one basis. Start the workout feeling awesome and you can do an eight minute interval, then the rest as one minute intervals.
• Or be a metronome and do four by four, or eight by two. It does not matter. All I care about is the 16 minutes of work.
• That was pure intuition and gut instinct on my part: giving the athlete autonomy to control their cognitive load could still elicit a really good adaptive response.
• And it did. I wrote to Professor Seiler to tell him we were applying his principle with high performing triathletes this way, and he wrote back that it was really fascinating and asked whether I could give him exact compliance numbers. I said I needed to focus on the coaching, but if he gave me a master's student they could log into my TrainingPeaks, with everybody's consent, and look at the structures people chose.
• The upside was that athletes enjoyed the autonomy and executed the workouts better than they would have staring at five by four with two minutes recovery in TrainingPeaks.
• It lets the athlete self-select a version that is at least in the ballpark of their physiology, and it might have nothing to do with physiology at all; it might just be their emotional state or motivation that morning.
• Am I interested in lactate tolerance and clearance, or in the mechanical work?
• If four minute VO2 max intervals are 300 watts for you, am I interested in the torque your muscles have to overcome for four minutes, in which case we can accumulate a lot more of it by spreading the intervals out, or am I interested in your ability to tolerate the build-up of lactate and push into the next interval somewhat loaded?
• What are we physiologically focusing on: peripheral adaptation, central adaptation, mechanical adaptation, cognitive adaptation?
• The famous swim coach Bill Sweetenham, at UK Swimming, would have the assistant coaches write the workout on the board in the morning and then ask them afterwards to justify it biomechanically, physiologically and psychologically.
• I am known for a session of one minute on, 30 seconds off, to failure, which I give as a VO2 stimulus with a very singular physiological premise.
• The fun part is that I have no expectation of how many intervals you will do. Wake up feeling awesome and crush 27; wake up feeling like garbage and do 11. No judgement, you did the best you were capable of on the day.
• My rationale for spread-out intervals is central adaptation: increasing VO2 max by spending a lot of time near VO2 max.
• Longer intervals wash out the initial period of VO2 rising, but repeating them is very hard for people with a low anaerobic capacity, which describes a lot of triathletes.
• So for those athletes I have used something similar to your 60/30s, mostly 30/15s, the classic Rønnestad session, which is very effective and which science has shown to work, but it carries a high cognitive load and a built-in level of expectation.
• The other option is longer intervals with plenty of recovery, so you get up to a high VO2, stay there, and can do the next one as well.
• The nice thing with spreading them out is that you may also be working on neurological resilience, getting the athlete familiar with working at very high intensity when they are carbohydrate depleted and fatigued.
• One aspect of my coaching that is a little different is that with high performing athletes I try to get them to train for the strategy and tactics they are likely to race, based on their physiological strengths and weaknesses.
• I would never prepare a really good swimmer and biker who is an okay runner the same way as an okay swimmer, amazing biker and okay runner.
• You think through the course and the dynamics of the racing and prepare them physiologically for that, because training built purely on physiological adaptation does not necessarily set people up for a stochastic, variable racing environment.

You do not need to feel good to be good

01:39:39 -

• Joanna Zeiger, who went to several Olympics in several sports and was 70.3 world champion, always used to say you do not need to feel good to be good.
• People feel they need to get into a really good headspace.
• One of the top researchers on flow state is at Helsinki University, near where I live, and when I asked whether an endurance athlete could realistically stay in a flow state for four, eight, ten or twelve hours, the answer was no chance.
• They might go in and out of it, but they cannot sustain it.
• Turn that on its head, and as a coach you have to prepare athletes for low moments in a race and for how they perceive them psychologically.
• It goes back to expectations: what does the athlete expect racing to feel like, and how does that compare with what I, as the coach, think they should anticipate?
• Is it better to anticipate the race feeling harder than it does and be positively surprised?
• Yes, and you can do that through workouts.
• You do not need epic workouts all the time, but maybe you need to practise suffering. It aligns with the age grouper who says they need to ride 112 miles to know they can get through 112 miles, while another athlete does not need that ride to know they can race it and then run a marathon.
• Some people just need to tick that box, and communicating with the athlete to find out whether they are one of them is part of the coach's job.
• Is motivation something athletes have intrinsically, or something you work on through the training process?
• It is something you need to be self-aware of. Some people are intrinsically motivated; some extrinsically.
• Two decades ago I would have said extrinsic motivation was a bad thing. It is not; it is just different. Knowing whether you are doing this to be the best version of yourself or because you legitimately want recognition from your peers helps you execute workouts and races better.
• Extrinsic motivation can even make you more objective: for footballers whose way out of poverty is a professional contract, whether you performed is black and white: did you get the contract, did you move up to the next league.
• Triathlon is muddier because most athletes have a more comfortable fallback, but purely intrinsic motivation can make it harder to stay objective about how well you are doing.
• I have prepared UFC fighters physiologically, athletes with very different backgrounds to triathletes, and understanding motivation in the context of how bad do you want it matters there too.
• Some people legitimately are not wired that way; others are, and you tap into that as a coach.
• Does how bad you want it have the bigger impact on the race course, or in training, because it helps you do things better every hour of every day?
• In training. It goes back to professionalism.

Finding your next step

01:47:00 -

• Understand the end goal, really specifically. If you want to finish your local Olympic distance race: do you know the course, do you know the weather, do you have the right equipment to get round?
• If you want to win Kona: what will it take, how do you cope with heat and humidity, do you understand the nutritional demands of the strategy and tactics you will need to execute?
• As a coach, with that particular athlete, do you understand what it takes from a training perspective and what it takes to motivate and manage that person psychologically, what the genesis of their desire to win Kona is, and how you nurture it rather than crush it?
• You can get extremely analytical or keep it very simple, but it is about asking the right questions in the right circumstances.

LINKS & RESOURCES

• Related episodes:
  • David Tilbury-Davis | EP#416
  • The evolution of coaching principles and practices with David Tilbury-Davis | EP#283
  • Perspectives on coaching with David Tilbury-Davis | EP#227
  • Perspectives on training with David Tilbury-Davis | EP#226
  • Triathlon race planning with David Tilbury-Davis | EP#150
  • Kolie Moore – Overrated and Underrated Factors for Cycling Performance | EP#703
  • The Hour record and aerodynamics with Dan Bigham | EP#368
  • Dan Bigham – aerodynamic testing, equipment, and making your bike fast | EP#229
  • Polarised training with Stephen Seiler, PhD | EP#177
• Studies discussed:
  • Adaptations to aerobic interval training: interactive effects of exercise intensity and total work duration - Seiler et al. 2013
  • Superior performance improvements in elite cyclists following short-interval vs effort-matched long-interval training - Rønnestad et al. 2020