Shownotes

What makes Kona difficult

02:07 -

• Tomek says Kona is not the only race with its own character, but it stacks up several specific challenges: heat, humidity, a non-wetsuit swim, and for most athletes a long journey with jet lag.
• The race is in mid-October, so in much of the world athletes have already been training and racing in mild conditions for several weeks. Arriving in Hawaii is a shock to the system.
• There is a mental side too. Tomek remembers his first Kona, over a decade ago, as full of intimidating things. It is one of very few places where age-groupers see top athletes with top equipment up close, which can make them start questioning their own choices and chip away at their confidence.
• The expo and the media around the race add distractions, and time on feet in the heat, that can hurt performance.
• None of these risks is hard to manage, in Tomek's view, but they all need to be considered.
• Asked to narrow it down, Tomek names heat, and pacing that is not adjusted to the conditions, as the single most common reason a Kona race goes wrong. He thinks it accounts for around 70% of the races that don't go well.

When to fly out

04:41 -

• Tomek's first principle for Kona is to arrive fresh. The right arrival date depends on each athlete's lifestyle, constraints and duties as much as on the time zones.
• Based on time zones alone, the rule of thumb is to arrive one day early for every hour of time difference. From Central Europe that is 12 hours, which would mean arriving 12 to 13 days before the race.
• The more important point is that the last days before travelling need to be easy, not only in training but in lifestyle load. If flying two weeks out means cramming work in advance and boarding the plane exhausted, Tomek says it becomes very hard to recover in Hawaii, after around 30 hours of travel, changing planes and airports, worrying about luggage, and then landing in high heat and humidity.
• He prefers a balanced approach. From Central Europe, he sees about one week before the race as the minimum, for example flying on the weekend before, which only costs one week away from work and family.
• He has had athletes arrive nine or ten days out and win their age groups, or finish among the top age-groupers overall, although heat preparation and plenty of other things were also executed well on the way to Kona.
• Mikael suggests a middle option: if you have a set number of days off, spend the first one or two at home deloading rather than flying on your first day off.
• Tomek says he used to focus only on training load before the flight, for example not doing a very hard weekend and then flying on the Monday. He now looks at it more holistically and weighs work and life stress as well.
• On why a long flight isn't rest, Tomek says he has no scientific explanation, only common sense: if it were recovery, people would do it more often. Long-haul travel is stressful, particularly for Europeans who may queue for three or four hours at US immigration, and it disrupts chronobiology, probably with higher cortisol and lower testosterone and growth hormone, so few resources are left for recovery.
• In his experience athletes usually arrive "dead on arrival", and hoping to recover from training once in Hawaii did not work at all for many of them. He would rather have athletes keep training until a day or two before the flight than squeeze everything in, pack in a hurry and cut their sleep.
• His usual template for athletes flying midweek, 10 to 12 days before the race, is a last solid training weekend, then Monday to Wednesday very easy with at least one day off, plus the travel day as another day off training.

Jet lag and the European body clock

11:46 -

• Tomek doesn't work on adapting athletes to the time change before they leave. He might if someone were flying only three or four days before the race, but he has never had that situation.
• He doesn't think athletes need to adapt fully to Hawaiian time to race well. Coming from Europe, jet lag means getting sleepy around 5 or 6 pm and waking up fresh at 4 am.
• That suits race day, which requires a very early wake-up, an early breakfast and a commute to the race site. In race week, European athletes wake at 4 am naturally and can train in the morning before the heat builds, which mirrors race day.
• The job is to get rid of fatigue and adapt a little to the new time zone. For that reason Tomek doesn't think athletes need to arrive 12 days early for jet lag reasons alone.
• Mikael adds that, from memory, the body clock can shift by up to about an hour and a half per day when travelling west, but only about an hour per day when travelling east, so heading west to Hawaii is the easier direction.
• He also points out that early training is useful beyond race day. Most training on the island should avoid the most oppressive heat anyway, although athletes can still choose to train later when they want some heat exposure.
• Tomek agrees. He says that once you get into severe heat strain it takes weeks to recover performance in the heat, so even one session overdone in the middle of the day can ruin the race.
• He recommends his athletes leave the peak heat for race day and train in the morning or late afternoon. Midday errands, a stroll or sitting in a garden already give them some heat exposure, and heavy or long sessions in the middle of the day are a risk that isn't worth taking.

Training on the island

15:57 -

• Tomek's second principle is "adapt without destroying yourself". Athletes don't need to test their fitness in training sessions in Hawaii.
• It is easy to get carried away. The scenery is exciting, there are many very fast athletes around, and when another cyclist passes you only a couple of km/h faster, it is tempting to jump on the wheel. Tomek's advice is not to.
• The other side is that the same watts and paces create much higher internal strain in these conditions, especially in the first few days. Athletes need to pay close attention to perceived effort and go very easy on speed and power.
• To protect the taper, both volume and intensity usually come down slightly.
• As an example, an RPE of 8 that corresponds to 340 watts in a threshold session in Europe at this time of year might mean 10 to 15% lower power in Hawaii.
• Tomek's golden rule is to chase the feeling, not the numbers, and to stay on the conservative side for most sessions.

Taper volume and the last long sessions

18:14 -

• Tomek has never calculated weekly hours for the Kona taper.
• For races that don't involve long travel, he usually makes the period from 14 to 10 days before the race very easy to shed chronic fatigue, then returns to a close-to-regular schedule for the last nine or ten days, with volume trimmed slightly.
• He says many highly trained age-groupers need that rhythm and don't perform well with a big taper that takes their routine away, but they also don't perform well carrying high fatigue. His final ten days are probably closer to normal training than most coaches'.
• For Kona, athletes usually travel around that time, so the aim is to avoid boarding the plane fatigued and to keep the first three or four days on the island very easy. By the weekend before the race he wants them relatively fresh, more excited than tired, and then on a more or less regular schedule for the last few days.
• Most of his athletes do a long ride and a moderately long run in Hawaii, about five days to a week before the race, to keep the aerobic base ticking over and to test nutrition and pacing in the heat. Without a long session, you don't know what will happen after three or four hours.
• From the Saturday a week before the race, the long ride is 2h30 to 3h30 for age-groupers and the long run is 75 minutes to about 1h40.
• The long run usually includes walking breaks to keep the mechanical load down. Tomek sees them as a margin of safety, and as a chance for athletes to eat and drink properly.
• The two sessions are not on the same day, and sometimes not on consecutive days.

Race pace, expectations and threshold work

21:33 -

• On the run, Tomek says an upper easy aerobic run is effectively Kona marathon race pace, so even easy running touches race pace. On the bike he usually includes some race pace work as well.
• Mikael recalls that in their previous episode Tomek estimated an age-grouper's Ironman run pace at 10 to 15 seconds per km faster than normal easy pace, as a general rule rather than a Kona-specific one.
• Tomek says several factors feed into that, including shoes, since most of his athletes don't do their easy runs in carbon shoes. It is a common-sense estimate.
• It also helps calibrate expectations. Many athletes think they can run a three-hour Ironman marathon while running their zone 3 runs at around 4:15 per km, and Tomek says that isn't realistic for an age-grouper without very high training volume, above 20 hours a week, which most of his athletes don't do.
• Modest expectations matter particularly in Kona, because you can always pick up the pace later, for example after a conservative first 15 km. Once you overheat and store a lot of heat, Tomek says you probably won't cool down in Hawaii, so negative splits and conservative pacing are very important.
• It is easy to start too hard, because conditions early in the day feel mild. Tomek recalls 2018 as a pleasant year with many age-group records, but says that happens perhaps once a decade. On a typical Kona day it feels comfortable until about 9:30 am, then heats up, and if you are already overheated by then you are unlikely to recover.
• Mikael notes that the long-range forecast, ten days out, points to fairly moderate temperatures, although it will still be very humid.
• For race-specific work on the bike, Tomek uses two approaches for two types of athlete. Some do something like 3 x 20 minutes at Ironman race pace in Kona. Others do a threshold or sweet spot session to keep it safe.
• He doesn't want athletes going two and a half or three weeks without any threshold work. With a typical threshold session two and a half weeks out, followed by the easy days around travel, athletes can easily go that long without touching it. He has found that in many athletes three weeks without moderate to high intensities is very detrimental, so he adds something like 4 x 6 minutes at threshold on the weekend before the race, to maintain rather than build.
• Which athletes need that exposure is something he learns from working with them rather than from fixed labels. If an athlete performs poorly after ten days without threshold work before a half-distance race, and then performs well after a threshold session and a few controlled two-to-three-minute efforts in race week, he assumes they need it.

Swimming on the island: open water or pool

27:49 -

• Most of Tomek's athletes rely on open water swimming in Kona because it is more convenient. He doesn't want them spending hours commuting or worrying whether a pool will be open or taken over by a video shoot, and then stressing about missing a prescribed session.
• He does think many athletes, especially adult-onset swimmers, lose some of their technique if they swim a lot of open water instead of pool sessions. Their technique may be moderate at best, but it is still the best they have.
• In a normal race build, he often prefers a full pool session two days before the race over the common short swim at the race site the day before. He sees athletes swim with better technique on race day that way, either exiting in the same time with less fatigue or simply exiting faster.
• In Kona he tries not to overthink it. Most of his athletes stay around 20 miles from town, with good access to open water but not to pools, and Kona is a small town of around 20,000 to 24,000 people with few public pools.

Structuring open water swims, and the Hoʻala swim

30:43 -

• Without preset buoys or a familiar area, Tomek finds open water sessions hard to structure. His plans include a lot of continuous swimming, but usually not more than 10 minutes at a time.
• A typical first swim in Hawaii might be 4 x 8 minutes with one minute of recovery, easy, perhaps with 4 x 12 fast strokes in the second and fourth reps.
• He hasn't found a good way to run a threshold session without buoys and a known course. With athletes spread across different locations, including some in Maui dealing with hurricane weather, conditions are hard to predict.
• Instead his athletes do continuous swimming with progressions through two-to-three-minute reps by perceived effort. Pace will vary with currents, but they won't lose fitness in the last ten days, and the aim is simply to keep the momentum going.
• Tomek deliberately doesn't give these sessions much attention. He says athletes pick up emotions from their coach, and if a coach dwells on details, athletes assume those details matter. At Kona they already have enough on their minds, so he doesn't want to add stress over things they can't control.
• Mikael shares his own method for open water without buoys or landmarks: set a watch alert every minute, feel for the vibration and count them. Sessions can then be built around whole minutes, for example 8-minute reps at upper endurance or 3-to-4-minute threshold reps, each with a minute of rest. Tomek thinks it's a very good idea.
• Tomek recommends his athletes take part in the Hoʻala Training Swim, held on the race course a week before the race. It is a chance to get used to swimming in a crowd and to test non-wetsuit race equipment such as a swimskin in salt water over 4 km, including where it causes rashes, with enough time for those to heal before race day.
• He also sees it as a low-pressure adventure. In his view, most Kona athletes won't set a lifetime best there because it is a hard race, and perhaps 20% have fixed performance goals. The rest want a good race, to not suffer too long in the heat, and to enjoy the day.
• In the past it had a three-hour open slot, so family members could take turns swimming.
• Tomek has athletes swim it at Ironman race effort, upper aerobic.

Heat preparation before travelling

37:21 -

• Tomek doesn't add much specific heat training on the island. Around ten sessions across three sports, at different times of day, is enough. He focuses more on heat adaptation before leaving.
• He offers athletes three or four options, and some mix them. The most common is a hot bath after training in the two to three weeks before leaving, which needs a bath rather than a shower.
• Athletes should build up gradually. Tomek says the literature is fairly consistent that most of the adaptation happens within about two to three weeks. Continuing longer still helps, but the benefits get more marginal with each session, and all heat adaptation adds stress, so he prefers to concentrate it in the two and a half weeks before leaving.
• Other options include indoor sessions without a fan and occasional sauna use, with or without drinking. Some athletes run in sauna suits, though he doesn't recommend it.
• His basic recommendation is passive heat: exposure after training, without extra fluid, for around 30 minutes, eight times before leaving for Kona.
• The protocol starts at 20 minutes in water at around 40°C and builds towards 40 minutes.
• His unscientific suggestion, since many athletes are riding indoors by late September, is to turn the fan off for the last half hour of an indoor session and then get into the hot bath. What matters is the heat flux: with a fan, the air around the skin stays cool, and you want the gradient between the skin and the environment to be small.
• Mikael takes a very similar approach, focusing mostly on passive heat and hot baths where available. Some adaptation can't be simulated, even in a sauna suit, and a lot of it is psychological and perceptual. What home preparation can do is get the physiology ready, raising sweat rate and plasma volume quickly.
• The training athletes then do naturally in the heat across three sports in Kona provides the final perceptual and psychological piece, and they get more out of their training instead of struggling through the first few days.
• Tomek adds that this is not heat training in the sense of a multi-week intervention to increase haemoglobin mass. It is preparation for performing in warm weather.
• A benefit of passive exposure is that key sessions keep their quality, in intensity, perceived effort, nutrition and hydration. He doesn't want athletes underperforming in key sessions nine, five, four or three weeks out because they overheated.
• It is not cost-free, though. It is an additional stressor, so coaches and athletes should watch whether the athlete recovers by the next day, how they feel two days later, and whether they are getting ill.

Measuring heat adaptation, and too much data

44:10 -

• Tomek doesn't use core temperature sensors or sweat rate testing to track heat adaptation. His athletes do measure sweat rate, but not as a check on this kind of protocol, because it is tricky to do well and a large change within two weeks is hard to see.
• He compares it to testing FTP too often: it can show no progress even when the athlete is improving. He doesn't want athletes weighing themselves, seeing no change in sweat loss and jumping to conclusions about a process that is very short, and which also involves things like heat shock proteins that they aren't tracking.
• On core temperature sensors, Tomek says many validation studies suggest they are not really valid. He recalls that they tend to overestimate low temperatures and underestimate high ones, and don't account for things like drinking cold water, because they rely on an algorithm based on skin temperature. He adds that he hasn't read these papers for a while and doesn't want to mislead anyone.
• As far as he knows, ingestible pills and rectal measurement remain the only gold-standard methods, and none of his age-groupers use them before Kona.
• In Tomek's view, no measurement is better than a misleading one. Athletes already have plenty of variables from their phones, sleep, steps and heart rate, and don't need extra data that isn't solid.
• Mikael previews next week's research episode on heat. The most recent large meta-analysis on heat acclimation compared isothermal protocols, which clamp core temperature at 38.5°C by adjusting the workload or the ambient temperature, with self-regulated protocols, where athletes regulate their own effort. Self-regulated protocols showed the largest effect. The difference between the approaches did not reach statistical significance (P = 0.08), although it trended towards it.
• Mikael says this fits Tomek's point: more data points don't necessarily improve adaptation, and respecting your own perception can help optimise the protocol.
• Tomek says there are already many confounders in the data athletes have, and the priority is probably to integrate it better rather than add more. Data also doesn't help athletes learn to listen to their bodies, and what the body says is not always the same story as what the brain tells.
• As an aside, Mikael mentions a Finnish news story about universities offering psychological support for sleep problems, and how demand has grown in recent years. The people providing the support noted that more and more people track their sleep with devices, and the first advice they give is to stop tracking, which alone helps many of them sleep better.

Equipment for the heat

50:15 -

• Tomek generally wants athletes to keep the equipment and solutions that worked in the months before Kona, but the heat and humidity may call for some adjustments, and the days on the island are a good chance to check them.
• The hydration setup is one example. He has had several smaller female athletes who were afraid to ride with one arm off the bars in Kona's strong crosswinds, so they chose a safer, less aero setup. Otherwise they ended up drinking too rarely and too little.
• Training on the island is also the time to check the race suit, sunscreen, the swimskin, taping against rashes and Vaseline under the arms. Equipment should be settled weeks before, but there is room for adjustment in the last ten days.
• The two things he asks athletes to think about most are visor or no visor on the bike, and head cover for the run, where there are at least three options. How to carry fluids and nutrition, in a belt or in pockets, is another.
• He usually has athletes use the products provided on course, at any Ironman. If those products don't work for someone and they have had good experiences with a particular brand, carrying their own makes sense.
• Aid stations at big races can also run short, which particularly affects slower athletes and older age groups, so some spare supplies of their own can help.
• Tomek very rarely changes wheel choices for Kona. If an athlete can't handle 80 mm rims in other races, they won't ride them in Kona, and if they can, they can handle them here too. An athlete who has raced 15 times in two years has already been exposed to a wide range of conditions, so what they ride in other races should be good enough for Hawaii.
• About half of Tomek's athletes race in road helmets rather than aero helmets, and most of those riding aero helmets don't use a visor. They test it in summer training sessions rather than races, because race conditions vary too much to compare.
• The decision is based on heat, not aerodynamic testing, even though they have access to an indoor track in Warsaw. They try to use the most aerodynamic helmet possible, and accept that a road helmet might cost around three minutes on the bike, compared with the 20 minutes that falling apart on the run could cost.
• Tomek has no fixed approach here. He doesn't think comfort is always the right guide, because a solution can feel better without actually reducing heat storage. Some athletes prefer a road helmet for comfort, yet he hasn't seen them overheat in training or in warm races over the last five years, so he wonders whether it is the right call.

T2 change, headwear and shoes

57:55 -

• Tomek suggests considering whether to change into running kit in T2, such as a singlet with more airflow. It is individual, and there are enough sessions on the island to test it.
• Mikael thinks it can make a big difference to how cool you feel, which can affect performance, but it might also make you run a bit too fast. Many cooling strategies change thermal sensation rather than core temperature, which can be a good or a bad thing.
• Tomek says many athletes feel the change marks the start of a new race, leaving the fatigue of the bike behind with the cycling suit. In his experience, the athletes who moved up to the podium on the run in Kona all changed. They tend to be strong runners with a weaker swim or bike, and feel at home in running kit with a hat and singlet.
• The three headwear options Tomek considers are nothing, a white hat that also covers the neck, so cold water poured on the head also cools the neck and back, and a normal cap or visor.
• On ice bandanas and similar products, he tries not to micromanage. He tells athletes the options, has them test during the European summer or race week, and often only learns afterwards what they wore. The Omnius cooling headband is popular, and he expects most of his athletes to wear it because they use it in their regular races.
• For shoes, athletes wear what works for them in their other Ironman and half-distance races. In his early years in Kona, athletes tried things like drilling holes in the soles to drain water, especially in the Newton era.
• Modern shoes handle water well. His only reservation in the last five years was the Nike Flyknit upper, which soaked up so much water that a shoe could double its weight during the marathon.

Swim and bike pacing

01:02:57 -

• After almost 15 years of coaching, Tomek still isn't sure whether it pays to go very hard in the swim. In theory glycogen depletion in the arms is local and shouldn't affect the bike and run much, but that isn't entirely true.
• He usually suggests regular race pace, bearing in mind that the non-wetsuit swim will be longer for most. Start slightly faster than race pace, find some feet that hopefully swim straight, check navigation now and then, and settle in.
• It is easy to lose concentration in the second half and give away two or three minutes by coasting. For most athletes that probably does no harm, but those racing for a high placing need to stay focused all the way to T1.
• He thinks the swim is probably the most enjoyable part of the race for athletes who are comfortable in water. Fatigue isn't there yet, it's the first hour of a ten-hour day, RPE is low, and there are crowds at the start and finish.
• After T1, Tomek's mantra for most athletes is "pace, not race". Don't focus on placing or chase times and numbers. Pace wisely and ride to feel.
• Don't start the bike too hard. Conditions are pleasant early compared with what arrives three hours later, and even if it feels like your day, it usually isn't in Hawaii, so play it conservatively.
• Riding legally 10 metres behind other athletes can help with aerodynamics, pacing and mental fatigue, but it must not pull you 10 watts too high just because the rhythm feels easy.

How many watts to give up in Kona

01:06:48 -

• Compared with other hot races, Tomek says Kona doesn't have to mean much lower power. Coming from a cool race such as Kalmar or Copenhagen, it can be up to 10% lower.
• He describes the Kona bike course as moderate, neither very fast nor very slow in terms of road surface and elevation. It is usually a longer day, partly because of the swim, but he doesn't think it is very different from Frankfurt, which has a slightly longer bike and can be very hot.
• Pacing by RPE means a typical Ironman RPE, not a lower one. That RPE simply corresponds to lower wattage in Kona.
• Athletes should know how Ironman effort feels from dozens of race-pace sessions, such as 3 x 1 hour or 2 x 90 minutes, done indoors and outdoors, in the heat and in chilly weather. That range of experience helps them make good decisions, even unconsciously.
• Tomek credits his athletes' good Kona record to that exposure to different environments. He doesn't think being a champion of one setting is a good thing. He used to call athletes built this way "bulletproof", and would now call them "anti-fragile".

The bike course: special needs and the rollers

01:10:05 -

• Tomek doesn't plan for every possible scenario on the course. There might be 25 of them, and in the end athletes make their own decisions, some good and some bad, and sometimes bad decisions have good outcomes.
• One thing they do discuss is whether athletes who historically struggle in the heat should put cold drinks with ice in their special needs bag. They lose around a minute stopping, but come away cooled, rehydrated and refuelled. Perhaps 20% of his athletes do this.
• He divides athletes into two groups. Strong cyclists, for example those riding under five hours, carry high speed from each downhill into the rolling hills, so the course is not much of an interval session for them.
• Slower cyclists, including many in older age groups, have to work harder on every roller because they don't carry that speed. The slower the cyclist, the more the course behaves like an interval session, and he accommodates this in training since the course is known five or six months ahead.

Run pacing

01:12:53 -

• Tomek's run advice is simple: run easy, perhaps walking Palani to avoid building too much heat.
• Some athletes like walk breaks as mental breaks, while others know that if they stop, it's hard to start running again. He doesn't think one approach is better than the other.
• The target is easy run pace on a good day, or slower if it isn't a good day.
• The same applies to his faster runners. The fastest of his athletes who hold regular jobs run easy at around 5:00 per km, and he doesn't think they could run a 2:50 marathon in Kona anyway.

Fuelling, hydration and the 2% rule

01:14:04 -

• Heat and humidity can suppress appetite, but athletes still need to fuel, even if they don't feel hungry.
• Hydration needs to be tested in training. Drinking too little is detrimental, but so is drinking too much, which Tomek says can hurt power output.
• He likes athletes to weigh themselves before and after long sessions and learn from the weight loss, bearing in mind that the environment changes and the lesson may be different two weeks later.
• He thinks the Precision Fuel & Hydration online planner is good enough for most athletes to estimate sweat rate, fluid losses and sodium needs, and recommends checking it in summer training so similar numbers can be taken to Kona. It must be tested, though: he estimates that one in three athletes get stomach issues on some days when taking that amount of sodium.
• Tomek adds that the hotter the conditions, the bigger the penalty for too much caffeine, because it raises body temperature slightly. He sees many athletes take too much in long races, between gels, caffeinated drinks and a morning coffee, and in Kona you don't want to get hotter without a performance benefit.
• Asked how he uses the weigh-ins, Tomek stresses the advice is individual. As a general rule, losing more than 2% of body mass on the bike puts the run in a high-risk zone. If training rides show more than that, athletes should drink more.
• Fluid intake should be increased gradually over a few weeks. It isn't gut training as such, but you can't suddenly add two extra litres of water and expect to feel good, so a big change five days before the race is probably not a good idea, though a minor shift is warranted.
• The 2% figure isn't based on the old idea that performance starts to drop beyond it, which Tomek says we now know isn't true. It is based on the fact that athletes will inevitably lose at least as much again on the run, where they sweat more, and at around 4% total body mass loss from dehydration the race is usually over.
• Hydration is much easier to manage on the bike, with bottles, aid stations and more tolerance for fluid in the stomach, than on the run. So start the run in a good place, not with limited resources in T2.
• Mikael raises the famous example of Haile Gebrselassie losing around 10% of his body weight in a marathon. He points out that a two-hour event by a very light athlete is a different scale from being dehydrated for the last two or three hours of a three-to-five-hour Ironman marathon. Duration matters, not only the amount of fluid lost.
• Tomek agrees. Mouth rinses can trick the brain for a short time, but an Ironman run is long. Being lighter from dehydration may help in a standalone marathon, but he doesn't think that works in an Ironman marathon.

How much caffeine

01:21:47 -

• Tomek says there is a guideline figure for caffeine but he can't recall it. Mikael says the figure used in research is 6 mg per kg of body weight for a single event.
• For a 70 kg athlete that is 420 mg. With gels containing 100 mg, Tomek notes that an athlete taking 30 gels in a race should have no more than four caffeinated ones, which shows how easy it is to overdo it without any extra benefit. He checks on air that a typical caffeinated Maurten gel has 100 calories and 100 mg of caffeine.
• Mikael thinks the number is different in an Ironman. Heat does affect it, so you can take more caffeine in a cool Ironman than a hot one, but for athletes who respond to caffeine he tends to recommend a bit more than 6 mg/kg, because it is spread across a day of eight to 16 hours. He has found that more than 6 mg/kg works for many people, but has no specific upper limit and acknowledges this is based on anecdote. As an example, Solveig Løvseth took around 8.5 mg/kg when she won Kona last year.
• Tomek points out that athletes following the Norwegian approach are heavily gut-trained by their training load and high carbohydrate intake, so a higher intake is less remarkable for them. His general observation is that many athletes take far more caffeine than they need, and the penalty is higher in a very hot race.
• Mikael agrees that caffeine intake needs to be deliberate and based on what you have tolerated in training and previous races. Not every gel should be a caffeinated gel.
• Tomek says he is lucky to coach many athletes who analyse these things themselves. The episode covered chronobiology, heat, acclimatisation, nutrition and equipment, and a coach has to cover many areas well rather than any one extremely well. Where he didn't give exact answers, he hopes he has given listeners the direction and a sense of where to look.
• Precision Fuel & Hydration sponsors the show, and Mikael notes that Tomek's recommendation of the planner was unprompted.

Big mistakes on the island

01:26:12 -

• Tomek sees the expo as a big trap, along with meet-ups with athletes and influencers. Limit time on your feet in the last few days before the race.
• Don't buy discounted gear at the expo, such as a helmet at 50% off, with a plan to use it on Saturday. Keep new equipment for next season.
• Limit heat exposure in the middle of the day.
• Trust the work you have done over the whole preparation. There is no need to test your fitness on the island, so save it for race day.
• Mikael repeats the point from the start of the episode: pacing is what goes wrong for most people when a Kona race goes wrong.
• Tomek underlines that severe heat strain can impair performance in the heat, not general performance, for weeks or even months. That is why he is careful about hard sessions in the middle of the day. This year, with temperatures on the island currently under 30°C, it may be less of an issue, but in general he would not deliberately seek out the most challenging conditions.

Qualifying for Kona one day

01:28:42 -

• Tomek thinks things have changed since their previous conversation, because the qualification system has changed. It is now relatively easier for older age groups than for younger ones.
• His universal advice is to plan at least for the mid term. After two or three years of training things get much easier, including in terms of injuries, and if those first years are played smart, qualification should follow.
• Think in years, not months. Don't buy a six-month plan, because the last three years are what matter. You don't need 20 hours a week or to turn your life upside down, you need patience.
• Tomek mentions a book he enjoys, The Way of Aikido by George Leonard, an American book from the 1990s framed around the Eastern martial-arts fascination of that era. Its central idea is the plateau. Progress comes fast at the start, then you hit a plateau, which is where most people quit because they stop improving, get bored, or realise how much further improvement will take.
• Successful people in many fields embrace the plateau and enjoy the work, and over time it can bring results better than they hoped for.
• For triathletes, Tomek's version of this is to find a way to combine triathlon and an active life for many years, and to be smart about it. That way, most goals will probably be achieved.

LINKS, RESOURCES AND RELATED EPISODES

• Follow Tomek on Instagram  and find his coaching business Trinergy on his website
• That Triathlon Show community on ROUVY
• That Triathlon Show Group Ride on ROUVY - Monday 5 October, 18:00 CET, about 25 km of the Kona course
• Related episodes:
  • Tomasz Kowalski | EP#428
  • Swimskins, Power Duration Curves and Best Bike Sessions for Runner Turned Cyclist | Q&A
• Studies mentioned:
  • Effects of Heat Adaptation on Physiology, Perception, and Exercise Performance in the Heat: An Updated Meta-Analysis - Tyler et al. 2024
  • Reliability and Validity of the CORE Sensor to Assess Core Body Temperature during Cycling Exercise - Verdel et al. 2021
• Resources and tools mentioned:
  • Fuel & Hydration Planner - Precision Fuel & Hydration