- Home
- Athletic Training and Therapy
- Triathlon
- Sports and Activities
- Triathlon 2.0
Serious triathletes may be the most tech-savvy of all athletes. You have the latest devices and know that data to improve your performance are at hand, but putting it all together can be a daunting, confusing task.
Triathlete, coach, researcher, and author Jim Vance maintains that, despite access to the relevant information, most triathletes start a race undertrained or overtrained. That’s why he’s developed Triathlon 2.0: Data-Driven Performance Training, the first program to take advantage of the latest science and technology.
Triathlon 2.0 examines the sport’s most popular devices, including cycling power meters, GPS trackers, and heart rate monitors. Capture the most accurate readings, learn what they mean, and, just as important, what they don’t. Then, put the numbers to work for you, translating your data into a comprehensive program based on your performance needs and triathlon goals.
With Triathlon 2.0, you will learn these skills:
• Establish and identify optimal aerobic fitness base.
• Determine the exact number of intervals for the most effective training and quickest recovery.
• Identify performance markers to track training results.
• Develop a tapering plan for peak performance.
• Monitor pace and progress in real time.
If you’re serious about maximizing performance, then turn to the only program built around your personal performance data. With Triathlon 2.0, the power and plan are in your hands.
Chapter 1. Cycling Technology
Chapter 2. Running Technology
Chapter 3. Swimming Technology
Chapter 4. Assessing Triathlon Fitness
Chapter 5. Planning the Training Year
Chapter 6. Training Analysis Software
Chapter 7. Stress-Based Periodization
Chapter 8. Transition and Preparation Phases
Chapter 9. Approach to Base Phase Training
Chapter 10. Approach to Build Phase Training
Chapter 11. Tapering and Peaking
Chapter 12. Prerace Preparations
Chapter 13. In-Race Monitoring
Chapter 14. Postrace Analysis
Chapter 15. Postseason Analysis
Jim Vance is a former elite triathlete and currently an international triathlon, running, and cycling elite coach with TrainingBible Coaching. After a college career as a cross country and track athlete at the University of Nebraska, where he earned his degree in physical and health education, Vance turned to triathlon and trained at the Olympic Training Center. Later he moved to Ironman racing where he had many top finishes, including a third-place finish at Ironman Florida with a personal best time of 8:37:09.
Vance is the founder and head coach of the nonprofit organization Formula Endurance, the nation’s first USA Swimming and USA Triathlon high-performance team that develops elite youth and junior triathletes for Olympic-style racing, based in San Diego, California. Formula Endurance is annually named one of the top development programs in the United States.
With Joe Friel, Vance coedited and contributed to Triathlon Science (Human Kinetics, 2013), a book that focuses on science and research in the sport.
“Jim Vance is the best not only at creating a training program but in explaining the program in a way that anyone can understand.”
Bob Babbitt-- Ironman Triathlon Hall of Fame Inductee, USA Triathlon Hall of Fame Inductee, Cofounder, Competitor Magazine, Host, Babbittville Radio and The Endurance Sports Network
“Knowing how to use the latest technology to improve training also means faster racing. Put them together and you have a winning combination. Jim Vance is among the smartest coaches in the United States. I highly recommend this book.”
Joe Friel-- Cofounder, TrainingPeaks
“While many people know how to collect data, Jim is an expert in understanding it and teaching others how to make decisions with it.”
Adam Zucco-- Training Bible Coaching
Benefits of Technology in Training
In all my days of racing as an elite triathlete, there was never a single piece of equipment I could use that would allow me to train poorly, or dumb, and make up for it on race day.
In all my days of racing as an elite triathlete, there was never a single piece of equipment I could use that would allow me to train poorly, or dumb, and make up for it on race day. There was no magical wheel set, aerodynamic frameset or helmet, pair of race shoes, or innovative wetsuit that changed the fact that how well I trained on a daily basis made all the difference on race day.
Look in most transition areas and you'll find the latest and greatest of these items, but probably few items devoted to executing daily training better. Most of the athletes who come into these races are undertrained or overtrained, and no bike or other piece of equipment will change that fact to any significant degree.
A small segment of athletes in the race are poised to do well. They have figured out how to balance training stress, recovery, life and job demands, and family commitments. They were able to see the signals that their training was going well and were able to keep it that way. They are likely the athletes you train with and are beating in the sessions but somehow lose to each race. Or they are the athletes who never seem to have a bad race. Or they're the athletes who always seem to peak perfectly at the biggest races. To many, these athletes are either very lucky or they know some magical formula we're all dying to know.
Many athletes scour articles and blogs, reading all they can, trying to process all the information out there, convinced it will make clear how to train. What tends to happen though is the exact opposite. Athletes read and try to put into practice everything they read about the latest interval set, or strength equipment, or long ride with big gear climbs, and so on. With so much information bombarding athletes, they get more confused and never stick to one plan, trying to do every plan out there, much of it not addressing their own needs, just what is popular.
Athletes get power meters, heart rate monitors, and GPS systems and look at screen after screen of data from their training, trying to figure out what it all means and where the secret information within it shows what to do next.
There is an infinite amount of information available on training for a triathlon, but in the end it is all about filtering that information so it makes sense for the individual athlete. This is the purpose of this book. We can't all be Ironman world champions, so training like one isn't going to work for the majority of athletes. Athletes simply need to understand their own goals and then decipher the information from their training that matches their goals, according to the time of year and amount of time until race day.
Athletes who have purchased generic training plans or taken a free one out of a recent magazine inevitably find some challenge with it, because it can't account for their whole race schedule, their past training history, their strengths and weaknesses, and what training groups and resources are available in their area.
A frustration I've had with most training plans, and many traditional coaches, is the belief that there is a set number of weeks to devote to a specific type of training. For example, many coaches say that athletes need 12 weeks of aerobic base-building work and then 12 weeks of race-specific work to be ready to perform well. That might work for some, but what if they really need 16 to 20 weeks of aerobic base work? What if their basic aerobic fitness is lacking so much that it should be almost all they focus on for many months? Otherwise, the athlete is coming to the start line with not enough aerobic fitness to make any race-specific work worthwhile. If an athlete hasn't shown he or she can last at an aerobic intensity for 12 hours, how is he or she going to break 12 hours in an Ironman? These things can't be rushed, and setting some arbitrary number because of historical norms doesn't help the individual athlete meet his or her specific needs.
What if the athlete has been doing multiple long-course races each year, for many years? Do you think that athlete needs to still do 12 weeks of aerobic base-building work? No, of course not. The athlete's aerobic fitness isn't lacking; it's the ability to hold a higher intensity during the race that needs to be addressed. This athlete would waste 12 weeks of opportunities to address his or her weakness and miss the potential for a huge breakthrough!
The Power of Data
I run into many athletes who think power meters and other technological tools are a waste of money. It's ironic that usually these athletes own some sort of smartphone, use complex software at their day jobs, or use computers in just about every aspect of their daily lives, and yet there is a disconnect that prevents them from realizing that technology could be as much of a benefit to their training as it is for their daily life.
If you're still wondering if using technology is best for you, let me ask you a few questions. What if I told you there was a way to determine exactly when you had enough aerobic fitness, so you could maximize training time by focusing more time on weaknesses, instead of aerobic work?
What if you could see your exact weaknesses and get direct, measurable feedback on how well your training is addressing them?
What if you could see exactly how many intervals you should do in a workout to get just the right amount of training stress, so you can recover quicker and pack in a better week of training?
What if you found the perfect tapering strategy and wanted to replicate it perfectly for each major race? What if you could actually see into the future to where your fitness will be down the road and how well your taper will be executed?
What if I told you that once you hit a certain performance marker in your training, the chances of achieving your goal or exceeding it just increased dramatically?
What if I told you we could look back at your training from the past season or longer and see where you made training mistakes or errors in judgment for your training load, what training load got you sick or injured, or where you plateaued, all in a matter of minutes?
What if you could be shown your training tendencies so you could come up with a new and better stimulus to get the fitness and performance jump you're looking for?
Believe it or not, all this can be done, and it really isn't that hard. You just have to know what data to collect, the elements of the data to look at, and when to look at them, according to your goals and timeline to race day.
What data should you collect? Depending on how many variables of your training you want to control, you should consider a power meter for your bike, a speed-distance device for your running (GPS or accelerometer-based watch), a heart rate monitor that will work for both devices, and something that can measure your swim pace and distance. If you have and regularly use all of these, you will be able to do all the things I've mentioned.
If you've been training old-school style, without any of these tools, this book will show you how to begin training by the numbers and open up a whole new world of training performance and efficiency. With so much data collection it appears difficult to isolate what is important, but that is exactly what you will learn to do in this book, making training with these tools simple and rewarding.
Everyone knows there's more than one way to train, and that's the fun of training in general, to find your own way. It's why I enjoy coaching athletes so much, helping them find the way that works for them. What way best helps athletes to reach their potential, given the resources available, strengths and weaknesses, and race goals, can be calculated and measured, giving you the freedom and power to create your best way of training.
Going by Feel
I once had a very famous and successful triathlete tell me he liked "to go by feel" in his training and therefore didn't want to use data. It is perfectly fine to go by feel; no one is saying athletes should be robots and simply follow a set program of numbers. At the highest levels of the sport, athletes must use their feel and sense of their bodies to get that extra percentage point of improvement and performance. But collection and analysis of the data are what helps an athlete better understand and improve his or her sense of feel. In the end, the data are simply numbers, representing what has been done in training and helping us project what still needs to be done. The real art of coaching and training comes from the decisions made from what the data tell us. Those decisions become easier with a clearer picture, as we begin to know more and more about the athlete.
Data and the Mind
In all my days of racing, the differences between my best races and my worst races usually only came down to one thing, and it wasn't health, injury, or equipment. It was what I was thinking on that start line. When I was timid and unsure of myself, I raced poorly. When I knew I was ready, I was eager to prove myself against the best. It wasn't really my training as much as my confidence in how the training had prepared me. When you've been tracking and seeing the improvement in your training, it is hard not to be confident in the preparation, which keeps you motivated to train and step to the start line ready to race.
About This Book
Part I, Triathlon Training Technology, will introduce you to the key training devices for cycling, running, and swimming. These chapters will help you make intelligent choices if you decide to purchase a new training device. Before using these devices in your training, you will need to assess your current fitness level and then set some training goals. That's where Part II, Planning Your Training, comes in.
Every training and racing decision you make, including equipment, nutrition, volume, and intensity, along with timing, depends on your goals. Determining the training to meet your goals in different times of the year, is where individuality is most important. The training decisions you make should support those goals and your needs as an athlete. In Part II we dive into better assessing your needs as an athlete, using the data from these tools, and then planning on how to meet those needs through the season, according to the goals you have set.
In Part III, High-Tech Periodization, we go step by step through the season, understanding how to prioritize training needs and analyzing how effective the current training decisions are, according to the goals you have set and the timeline available until race day. This allows you to make sure you are on a consistent improvement track and preparing to meet your goals.
In Part IV, Race Analysis for Winning Results, we use the data from prerace, during the race, and postrace, as well as from the entire season, to better examine athlete tendencies (both positive and negative), what types of race strategies and training the athlete responds best to, and how effective the overall training decisions for the season were. We can also use this to better plan paces and even nutrition strategies.
As an added benefit, many of the figures provided throughout this book are screenshots from actual races or training sessions with the coach's notes and comments left exactly as they were in real time, giving you an inside look at the coach/athlete relationship.
This book is a guide on this journey to help you find your best way of training, so you can be on the start line confident and ready to maximize your fitness and training. Let's get started.
Popular and Useful Technology Used to Train During Runs
As popular as power meters are in the cycling world, GPS (global positioning system) units are even more popular in the running world. Just about every serious heart rate monitor brand on the market offers a GPS or some type of speed-distance device with it.
As popular as power meters are in the cycling world, GPS (global positioning system) units are even more popular in the running world. Just about every serious heart rate monitor brand on the market offers a GPS or some type of speed-distance device with it. And just about every GPS unit on the market now offers a heart rate monitor with it as well. If it doesn't use GPS satellites, it likely uses an accelerometer to measure speed and distance, usually a foot pod placed in the shoe that measures the accelerations and decelerations of the foot, to determine stride length and stride rate. In running, stride rate is the revolutions per minute (rpm) based on how many times the foot strikes the ground in a single minute. Running rpm are also referred to as cadence.
This chapter covers popular and useful technology used to train during runs, along with some useful terminology that will help you interpret and understand the data the technology provides.
Global Positioning System (GPS)
Most athletes understand GPS units a lot more than power meters and power data because the information they provide is easier to conceptualize, for example, how fast one is running. If you produce more watts on the bike, you're not necessarily going faster (such as when going uphill), but if you push the pace on a run, you are definitely going faster. If you produce less watts on the bike, you're not necessarily going slower either (such as when coasting downhill or with a strong tailwind). If you run easier, you are almost always running slower than if you run hard.
A GPS device uses a network of 24 satellites that have been placed into orbit by the U.S. Department of Defense. GPS works in any weather, anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day without subscription or fee (Garmin 2015). These GPS satellites circle the earth transmitting information back to earth where GPS devices use triangulation to calculate the user's exact location.
The GPS receivers are very accurate due to their multichannel design. Some of the top GPS watches use 12 parallel channel receivers to initially lock onto the satellites and maintain a strong lock in settings such as dense foliage or among tall buildings. In general, the common GPS watches today are accurate to within an average of 15 meters.
Most GPS watches generate data files that can be uploaded to a third-party software suite for postworkout analysis, through external sensors like wireless ANT+ protocol, usually by using a USB cable or Bluetooth technology.
Speed-Distance Devices (Accelerometers)
These devices are similar to GPS watches, but instead of using satellites to determine speed and distance, they use a motion sensor (accelerometer). Most commonly this is a foot pod attached to your shoe.
Because accelerometers do not rely on GPS signals, they are popular for their use indoors, usually on treadmills.
Foot Pods
A foot pod uses an accelerometer, which measures the time the foot is in contact with the ground and counts the number of strides. With this, the foot pod calculates running pace, which gets transmitted to the watch.
The foot pod should be calibrated to each user, which accounts for individual running biomechanics and running shoes. Some athletes have reported as much as a 12 percent or more difference in calibration factors between racing in flats versus trainers.
GPS units or other speed-distance devices help to show the changes in grade (terrain) and the intensity of the effort athletes are putting forth. Both of these variables (grade and intensity) contribute to the physiological demands of running on terrain that is not flat.
In chapter 1, we discussed training with heart rate, showing the pros and cons while on the bike. The same basic principles apply with running, as heart rate is not an output-based metric. Remember, HR has a linear response to an increase in intensity, but it will only increase up to 
O2max, which is the maximal volume of oxygen the body can utilize. This is due to an athlete's 
O2max being limited to a large extent by the cardiovascular system's ability to pump blood. Once we reach that limit, HR can no longer increase to match an increase in intensity.
Long before GPS watches, most runners used the distance covered and the time it took to determine pace, which was the primary method for tracking training load and training intensity. This basic approach works really well on flat terrain, but when examining the intensity and training load generated by varied-pace running on rolling or hilly terrain, there is a lot that can be missed.
Simply using distance and time to measure the quality of intense running works really well on a track, but what if you are not doing all of your intervals on a track? What if the other runs in your training are on hilly courses?
Some of the most important runs in your training are recovery runs. Using distance and time to accurately measure intensity and training load while on open or uneven terrain is simply not as accurate as we would like it to be, which can lead to overdoing a recovery run without knowing it.
Stress-Based Periodization
Training for triathlon can be one of the most complicated things to master in perhaps all of sport, especially as the goals and competitive levels get higher and higher. Think about all the variables that can affect it, from those in our control to the randomness of sicknesses, non-sport-related injuries, stress, crashes, race mechanicals, and more.
In God we trust. All others bring data.
William Edwards Demming
Training for triathlon can be one of the most complicated things to master in perhaps all of sport, especially as the goals and competitive levels get higher and higher. Think about all the variables that can affect it, from those in our control to the randomness of sicknesses, non-sport-related injuries, stress, crashes, race mechanicals, and more.
It's no wonder the chapter-opening quote discusses God and faith; I have seen plenty of athletes who use prayer to try to help their performance. It makes sense that with so many things seemingly out of our control, we have to use our faith that the things we can control are good enough to help us achieve our goals.
If you look at the top professional triathletes in the world, especially those chasing the Olympics, many of them train with a coach and some training partners on a daily basis. They travel to remote places in the world to train without distraction, with a group of similarly minded and skilled athletes who can push them. They have a coach watch all their moves to help keep them doing things technically excellent and also for telling them when to slow down and not push too hard.
In the world of elite endurance sports, we call this a daily training environment, or DTE for short. Not many athletes in the world can commit to a DTE that involves travel around the world, with everything devoted to training and racing, and eliminating almost everything else to be the best at the sport. Not many athletes want to give that level of commitment, since the sport is their escape and an outlet to be competitive and healthy. They have families, responsibilities, careers, and more.
But that doesn't mean athletes don't want to work hard or try their best to maximize their training time and commitment to the sport. They are fascinated with the challenge of long-course triathlon and want to compete at a high level, while still trying to balance all of life's demands, stressors, distractions, and more.
Ask many triathletes what their biggest challenge is with doing triathlon, and they will likely tell you time for training. The time commitment to compete in a 70.3, or even just complete one, is enormous. The time commitment for a full Ironman is no less than 10 hours per week, just to finish. If your goals are well beyond finishing, you definitely need more time than that.
This time challenge only adds to the burden of getting training right, because there can't be mistakes in training. And with limited training time, but a lot of time spent away from training involved with other variables in daily life, it becomes even harder to get the training right. Overreach in a workout, and you might lose a few following quality sessions because you're too tired or possibly injured or sick.
But with applying numbers to efforts and intensities, you eliminate a lot of the guesswork. You don't have to take the big risks in your training. In fact, you can dial in the perfect training stress nearly every time, whenever you need, based on your goals and history.
You can also track the numbers and prescribe fitness based on the numbers, instead of postscribing workouts to determine what happened. Once you know what event you're training for, much like you can do with an annual training plan and breaking the year into cycles, with stress-based periodization you can begin to plot the road map to where you want to go. The road map and periodization cycle is written out by numbers, to define the load.
Traditionally, athletes set up their annual training plan (ATP) with the load distinguished by volume of hours trained. This is not a good gauge of training load because intensity, and the amount of training at specific intensities, is the biggest determinant of training success and stress load.
As mentioned in previous chapters, volume is a very overrated metric, and the more you use TSS to track your fitness, the more you will find that to be true. What you are training for in long-course triathlon is not the Tour de France. It's not multiple long days of four to six hours in the saddle, going very hard for 21 of 23 days. That test requires a large amount of volume on a daily basis.
Long-course triathlon is a single-day event. Your ability to peak for that one day, making sure everything comes together, is the key to success. Come race day, you are all in. You have to get it right, and the numbers of stress-based periodization, using TSS to help plan and execute training, are what help you maximize training on that day.
Benefits of Technology in Training
In all my days of racing as an elite triathlete, there was never a single piece of equipment I could use that would allow me to train poorly, or dumb, and make up for it on race day.
In all my days of racing as an elite triathlete, there was never a single piece of equipment I could use that would allow me to train poorly, or dumb, and make up for it on race day. There was no magical wheel set, aerodynamic frameset or helmet, pair of race shoes, or innovative wetsuit that changed the fact that how well I trained on a daily basis made all the difference on race day.
Look in most transition areas and you'll find the latest and greatest of these items, but probably few items devoted to executing daily training better. Most of the athletes who come into these races are undertrained or overtrained, and no bike or other piece of equipment will change that fact to any significant degree.
A small segment of athletes in the race are poised to do well. They have figured out how to balance training stress, recovery, life and job demands, and family commitments. They were able to see the signals that their training was going well and were able to keep it that way. They are likely the athletes you train with and are beating in the sessions but somehow lose to each race. Or they are the athletes who never seem to have a bad race. Or they're the athletes who always seem to peak perfectly at the biggest races. To many, these athletes are either very lucky or they know some magical formula we're all dying to know.
Many athletes scour articles and blogs, reading all they can, trying to process all the information out there, convinced it will make clear how to train. What tends to happen though is the exact opposite. Athletes read and try to put into practice everything they read about the latest interval set, or strength equipment, or long ride with big gear climbs, and so on. With so much information bombarding athletes, they get more confused and never stick to one plan, trying to do every plan out there, much of it not addressing their own needs, just what is popular.
Athletes get power meters, heart rate monitors, and GPS systems and look at screen after screen of data from their training, trying to figure out what it all means and where the secret information within it shows what to do next.
There is an infinite amount of information available on training for a triathlon, but in the end it is all about filtering that information so it makes sense for the individual athlete. This is the purpose of this book. We can't all be Ironman world champions, so training like one isn't going to work for the majority of athletes. Athletes simply need to understand their own goals and then decipher the information from their training that matches their goals, according to the time of year and amount of time until race day.
Athletes who have purchased generic training plans or taken a free one out of a recent magazine inevitably find some challenge with it, because it can't account for their whole race schedule, their past training history, their strengths and weaknesses, and what training groups and resources are available in their area.
A frustration I've had with most training plans, and many traditional coaches, is the belief that there is a set number of weeks to devote to a specific type of training. For example, many coaches say that athletes need 12 weeks of aerobic base-building work and then 12 weeks of race-specific work to be ready to perform well. That might work for some, but what if they really need 16 to 20 weeks of aerobic base work? What if their basic aerobic fitness is lacking so much that it should be almost all they focus on for many months? Otherwise, the athlete is coming to the start line with not enough aerobic fitness to make any race-specific work worthwhile. If an athlete hasn't shown he or she can last at an aerobic intensity for 12 hours, how is he or she going to break 12 hours in an Ironman? These things can't be rushed, and setting some arbitrary number because of historical norms doesn't help the individual athlete meet his or her specific needs.
What if the athlete has been doing multiple long-course races each year, for many years? Do you think that athlete needs to still do 12 weeks of aerobic base-building work? No, of course not. The athlete's aerobic fitness isn't lacking; it's the ability to hold a higher intensity during the race that needs to be addressed. This athlete would waste 12 weeks of opportunities to address his or her weakness and miss the potential for a huge breakthrough!
The Power of Data
I run into many athletes who think power meters and other technological tools are a waste of money. It's ironic that usually these athletes own some sort of smartphone, use complex software at their day jobs, or use computers in just about every aspect of their daily lives, and yet there is a disconnect that prevents them from realizing that technology could be as much of a benefit to their training as it is for their daily life.
If you're still wondering if using technology is best for you, let me ask you a few questions. What if I told you there was a way to determine exactly when you had enough aerobic fitness, so you could maximize training time by focusing more time on weaknesses, instead of aerobic work?
What if you could see your exact weaknesses and get direct, measurable feedback on how well your training is addressing them?
What if you could see exactly how many intervals you should do in a workout to get just the right amount of training stress, so you can recover quicker and pack in a better week of training?
What if you found the perfect tapering strategy and wanted to replicate it perfectly for each major race? What if you could actually see into the future to where your fitness will be down the road and how well your taper will be executed?
What if I told you that once you hit a certain performance marker in your training, the chances of achieving your goal or exceeding it just increased dramatically?
What if I told you we could look back at your training from the past season or longer and see where you made training mistakes or errors in judgment for your training load, what training load got you sick or injured, or where you plateaued, all in a matter of minutes?
What if you could be shown your training tendencies so you could come up with a new and better stimulus to get the fitness and performance jump you're looking for?
Believe it or not, all this can be done, and it really isn't that hard. You just have to know what data to collect, the elements of the data to look at, and when to look at them, according to your goals and timeline to race day.
What data should you collect? Depending on how many variables of your training you want to control, you should consider a power meter for your bike, a speed-distance device for your running (GPS or accelerometer-based watch), a heart rate monitor that will work for both devices, and something that can measure your swim pace and distance. If you have and regularly use all of these, you will be able to do all the things I've mentioned.
If you've been training old-school style, without any of these tools, this book will show you how to begin training by the numbers and open up a whole new world of training performance and efficiency. With so much data collection it appears difficult to isolate what is important, but that is exactly what you will learn to do in this book, making training with these tools simple and rewarding.
Everyone knows there's more than one way to train, and that's the fun of training in general, to find your own way. It's why I enjoy coaching athletes so much, helping them find the way that works for them. What way best helps athletes to reach their potential, given the resources available, strengths and weaknesses, and race goals, can be calculated and measured, giving you the freedom and power to create your best way of training.
Going by Feel
I once had a very famous and successful triathlete tell me he liked "to go by feel" in his training and therefore didn't want to use data. It is perfectly fine to go by feel; no one is saying athletes should be robots and simply follow a set program of numbers. At the highest levels of the sport, athletes must use their feel and sense of their bodies to get that extra percentage point of improvement and performance. But collection and analysis of the data are what helps an athlete better understand and improve his or her sense of feel. In the end, the data are simply numbers, representing what has been done in training and helping us project what still needs to be done. The real art of coaching and training comes from the decisions made from what the data tell us. Those decisions become easier with a clearer picture, as we begin to know more and more about the athlete.
Data and the Mind
In all my days of racing, the differences between my best races and my worst races usually only came down to one thing, and it wasn't health, injury, or equipment. It was what I was thinking on that start line. When I was timid and unsure of myself, I raced poorly. When I knew I was ready, I was eager to prove myself against the best. It wasn't really my training as much as my confidence in how the training had prepared me. When you've been tracking and seeing the improvement in your training, it is hard not to be confident in the preparation, which keeps you motivated to train and step to the start line ready to race.
About This Book
Part I, Triathlon Training Technology, will introduce you to the key training devices for cycling, running, and swimming. These chapters will help you make intelligent choices if you decide to purchase a new training device. Before using these devices in your training, you will need to assess your current fitness level and then set some training goals. That's where Part II, Planning Your Training, comes in.
Every training and racing decision you make, including equipment, nutrition, volume, and intensity, along with timing, depends on your goals. Determining the training to meet your goals in different times of the year, is where individuality is most important. The training decisions you make should support those goals and your needs as an athlete. In Part II we dive into better assessing your needs as an athlete, using the data from these tools, and then planning on how to meet those needs through the season, according to the goals you have set.
In Part III, High-Tech Periodization, we go step by step through the season, understanding how to prioritize training needs and analyzing how effective the current training decisions are, according to the goals you have set and the timeline available until race day. This allows you to make sure you are on a consistent improvement track and preparing to meet your goals.
In Part IV, Race Analysis for Winning Results, we use the data from prerace, during the race, and postrace, as well as from the entire season, to better examine athlete tendencies (both positive and negative), what types of race strategies and training the athlete responds best to, and how effective the overall training decisions for the season were. We can also use this to better plan paces and even nutrition strategies.
As an added benefit, many of the figures provided throughout this book are screenshots from actual races or training sessions with the coach's notes and comments left exactly as they were in real time, giving you an inside look at the coach/athlete relationship.
This book is a guide on this journey to help you find your best way of training, so you can be on the start line confident and ready to maximize your fitness and training. Let's get started.
Popular and Useful Technology Used to Train During Runs
As popular as power meters are in the cycling world, GPS (global positioning system) units are even more popular in the running world. Just about every serious heart rate monitor brand on the market offers a GPS or some type of speed-distance device with it.
As popular as power meters are in the cycling world, GPS (global positioning system) units are even more popular in the running world. Just about every serious heart rate monitor brand on the market offers a GPS or some type of speed-distance device with it. And just about every GPS unit on the market now offers a heart rate monitor with it as well. If it doesn't use GPS satellites, it likely uses an accelerometer to measure speed and distance, usually a foot pod placed in the shoe that measures the accelerations and decelerations of the foot, to determine stride length and stride rate. In running, stride rate is the revolutions per minute (rpm) based on how many times the foot strikes the ground in a single minute. Running rpm are also referred to as cadence.
This chapter covers popular and useful technology used to train during runs, along with some useful terminology that will help you interpret and understand the data the technology provides.
Global Positioning System (GPS)
Most athletes understand GPS units a lot more than power meters and power data because the information they provide is easier to conceptualize, for example, how fast one is running. If you produce more watts on the bike, you're not necessarily going faster (such as when going uphill), but if you push the pace on a run, you are definitely going faster. If you produce less watts on the bike, you're not necessarily going slower either (such as when coasting downhill or with a strong tailwind). If you run easier, you are almost always running slower than if you run hard.
A GPS device uses a network of 24 satellites that have been placed into orbit by the U.S. Department of Defense. GPS works in any weather, anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day without subscription or fee (Garmin 2015). These GPS satellites circle the earth transmitting information back to earth where GPS devices use triangulation to calculate the user's exact location.
The GPS receivers are very accurate due to their multichannel design. Some of the top GPS watches use 12 parallel channel receivers to initially lock onto the satellites and maintain a strong lock in settings such as dense foliage or among tall buildings. In general, the common GPS watches today are accurate to within an average of 15 meters.
Most GPS watches generate data files that can be uploaded to a third-party software suite for postworkout analysis, through external sensors like wireless ANT+ protocol, usually by using a USB cable or Bluetooth technology.
Speed-Distance Devices (Accelerometers)
These devices are similar to GPS watches, but instead of using satellites to determine speed and distance, they use a motion sensor (accelerometer). Most commonly this is a foot pod attached to your shoe.
Because accelerometers do not rely on GPS signals, they are popular for their use indoors, usually on treadmills.
Foot Pods
A foot pod uses an accelerometer, which measures the time the foot is in contact with the ground and counts the number of strides. With this, the foot pod calculates running pace, which gets transmitted to the watch.
The foot pod should be calibrated to each user, which accounts for individual running biomechanics and running shoes. Some athletes have reported as much as a 12 percent or more difference in calibration factors between racing in flats versus trainers.
GPS units or other speed-distance devices help to show the changes in grade (terrain) and the intensity of the effort athletes are putting forth. Both of these variables (grade and intensity) contribute to the physiological demands of running on terrain that is not flat.
In chapter 1, we discussed training with heart rate, showing the pros and cons while on the bike. The same basic principles apply with running, as heart rate is not an output-based metric. Remember, HR has a linear response to an increase in intensity, but it will only increase up to O2max, which is the maximal volume of oxygen the body can utilize. This is due to an athlete's O2max being limited to a large extent by the cardiovascular system's ability to pump blood. Once we reach that limit, HR can no longer increase to match an increase in intensity.
Long before GPS watches, most runners used the distance covered and the time it took to determine pace, which was the primary method for tracking training load and training intensity. This basic approach works really well on flat terrain, but when examining the intensity and training load generated by varied-pace running on rolling or hilly terrain, there is a lot that can be missed.
Simply using distance and time to measure the quality of intense running works really well on a track, but what if you are not doing all of your intervals on a track? What if the other runs in your training are on hilly courses?
Some of the most important runs in your training are recovery runs. Using distance and time to accurately measure intensity and training load while on open or uneven terrain is simply not as accurate as we would like it to be, which can lead to overdoing a recovery run without knowing it.
Stress-Based Periodization
Training for triathlon can be one of the most complicated things to master in perhaps all of sport, especially as the goals and competitive levels get higher and higher. Think about all the variables that can affect it, from those in our control to the randomness of sicknesses, non-sport-related injuries, stress, crashes, race mechanicals, and more.
In God we trust. All others bring data.
William Edwards Demming
Training for triathlon can be one of the most complicated things to master in perhaps all of sport, especially as the goals and competitive levels get higher and higher. Think about all the variables that can affect it, from those in our control to the randomness of sicknesses, non-sport-related injuries, stress, crashes, race mechanicals, and more.
It's no wonder the chapter-opening quote discusses God and faith; I have seen plenty of athletes who use prayer to try to help their performance. It makes sense that with so many things seemingly out of our control, we have to use our faith that the things we can control are good enough to help us achieve our goals.
If you look at the top professional triathletes in the world, especially those chasing the Olympics, many of them train with a coach and some training partners on a daily basis. They travel to remote places in the world to train without distraction, with a group of similarly minded and skilled athletes who can push them. They have a coach watch all their moves to help keep them doing things technically excellent and also for telling them when to slow down and not push too hard.
In the world of elite endurance sports, we call this a daily training environment, or DTE for short. Not many athletes in the world can commit to a DTE that involves travel around the world, with everything devoted to training and racing, and eliminating almost everything else to be the best at the sport. Not many athletes want to give that level of commitment, since the sport is their escape and an outlet to be competitive and healthy. They have families, responsibilities, careers, and more.
But that doesn't mean athletes don't want to work hard or try their best to maximize their training time and commitment to the sport. They are fascinated with the challenge of long-course triathlon and want to compete at a high level, while still trying to balance all of life's demands, stressors, distractions, and more.
Ask many triathletes what their biggest challenge is with doing triathlon, and they will likely tell you time for training. The time commitment to compete in a 70.3, or even just complete one, is enormous. The time commitment for a full Ironman is no less than 10 hours per week, just to finish. If your goals are well beyond finishing, you definitely need more time than that.
This time challenge only adds to the burden of getting training right, because there can't be mistakes in training. And with limited training time, but a lot of time spent away from training involved with other variables in daily life, it becomes even harder to get the training right. Overreach in a workout, and you might lose a few following quality sessions because you're too tired or possibly injured or sick.
But with applying numbers to efforts and intensities, you eliminate a lot of the guesswork. You don't have to take the big risks in your training. In fact, you can dial in the perfect training stress nearly every time, whenever you need, based on your goals and history.
You can also track the numbers and prescribe fitness based on the numbers, instead of postscribing workouts to determine what happened. Once you know what event you're training for, much like you can do with an annual training plan and breaking the year into cycles, with stress-based periodization you can begin to plot the road map to where you want to go. The road map and periodization cycle is written out by numbers, to define the load.
Traditionally, athletes set up their annual training plan (ATP) with the load distinguished by volume of hours trained. This is not a good gauge of training load because intensity, and the amount of training at specific intensities, is the biggest determinant of training success and stress load.
As mentioned in previous chapters, volume is a very overrated metric, and the more you use TSS to track your fitness, the more you will find that to be true. What you are training for in long-course triathlon is not the Tour de France. It's not multiple long days of four to six hours in the saddle, going very hard for 21 of 23 days. That test requires a large amount of volume on a daily basis.
Long-course triathlon is a single-day event. Your ability to peak for that one day, making sure everything comes together, is the key to success. Come race day, you are all in. You have to get it right, and the numbers of stress-based periodization, using TSS to help plan and execute training, are what help you maximize training on that day.
Benefits of Technology in Training
In all my days of racing as an elite triathlete, there was never a single piece of equipment I could use that would allow me to train poorly, or dumb, and make up for it on race day.
In all my days of racing as an elite triathlete, there was never a single piece of equipment I could use that would allow me to train poorly, or dumb, and make up for it on race day. There was no magical wheel set, aerodynamic frameset or helmet, pair of race shoes, or innovative wetsuit that changed the fact that how well I trained on a daily basis made all the difference on race day.
Look in most transition areas and you'll find the latest and greatest of these items, but probably few items devoted to executing daily training better. Most of the athletes who come into these races are undertrained or overtrained, and no bike or other piece of equipment will change that fact to any significant degree.
A small segment of athletes in the race are poised to do well. They have figured out how to balance training stress, recovery, life and job demands, and family commitments. They were able to see the signals that their training was going well and were able to keep it that way. They are likely the athletes you train with and are beating in the sessions but somehow lose to each race. Or they are the athletes who never seem to have a bad race. Or they're the athletes who always seem to peak perfectly at the biggest races. To many, these athletes are either very lucky or they know some magical formula we're all dying to know.
Many athletes scour articles and blogs, reading all they can, trying to process all the information out there, convinced it will make clear how to train. What tends to happen though is the exact opposite. Athletes read and try to put into practice everything they read about the latest interval set, or strength equipment, or long ride with big gear climbs, and so on. With so much information bombarding athletes, they get more confused and never stick to one plan, trying to do every plan out there, much of it not addressing their own needs, just what is popular.
Athletes get power meters, heart rate monitors, and GPS systems and look at screen after screen of data from their training, trying to figure out what it all means and where the secret information within it shows what to do next.
There is an infinite amount of information available on training for a triathlon, but in the end it is all about filtering that information so it makes sense for the individual athlete. This is the purpose of this book. We can't all be Ironman world champions, so training like one isn't going to work for the majority of athletes. Athletes simply need to understand their own goals and then decipher the information from their training that matches their goals, according to the time of year and amount of time until race day.
Athletes who have purchased generic training plans or taken a free one out of a recent magazine inevitably find some challenge with it, because it can't account for their whole race schedule, their past training history, their strengths and weaknesses, and what training groups and resources are available in their area.
A frustration I've had with most training plans, and many traditional coaches, is the belief that there is a set number of weeks to devote to a specific type of training. For example, many coaches say that athletes need 12 weeks of aerobic base-building work and then 12 weeks of race-specific work to be ready to perform well. That might work for some, but what if they really need 16 to 20 weeks of aerobic base work? What if their basic aerobic fitness is lacking so much that it should be almost all they focus on for many months? Otherwise, the athlete is coming to the start line with not enough aerobic fitness to make any race-specific work worthwhile. If an athlete hasn't shown he or she can last at an aerobic intensity for 12 hours, how is he or she going to break 12 hours in an Ironman? These things can't be rushed, and setting some arbitrary number because of historical norms doesn't help the individual athlete meet his or her specific needs.
What if the athlete has been doing multiple long-course races each year, for many years? Do you think that athlete needs to still do 12 weeks of aerobic base-building work? No, of course not. The athlete's aerobic fitness isn't lacking; it's the ability to hold a higher intensity during the race that needs to be addressed. This athlete would waste 12 weeks of opportunities to address his or her weakness and miss the potential for a huge breakthrough!
The Power of Data
I run into many athletes who think power meters and other technological tools are a waste of money. It's ironic that usually these athletes own some sort of smartphone, use complex software at their day jobs, or use computers in just about every aspect of their daily lives, and yet there is a disconnect that prevents them from realizing that technology could be as much of a benefit to their training as it is for their daily life.
If you're still wondering if using technology is best for you, let me ask you a few questions. What if I told you there was a way to determine exactly when you had enough aerobic fitness, so you could maximize training time by focusing more time on weaknesses, instead of aerobic work?
What if you could see your exact weaknesses and get direct, measurable feedback on how well your training is addressing them?
What if you could see exactly how many intervals you should do in a workout to get just the right amount of training stress, so you can recover quicker and pack in a better week of training?
What if you found the perfect tapering strategy and wanted to replicate it perfectly for each major race? What if you could actually see into the future to where your fitness will be down the road and how well your taper will be executed?
What if I told you that once you hit a certain performance marker in your training, the chances of achieving your goal or exceeding it just increased dramatically?
What if I told you we could look back at your training from the past season or longer and see where you made training mistakes or errors in judgment for your training load, what training load got you sick or injured, or where you plateaued, all in a matter of minutes?
What if you could be shown your training tendencies so you could come up with a new and better stimulus to get the fitness and performance jump you're looking for?
Believe it or not, all this can be done, and it really isn't that hard. You just have to know what data to collect, the elements of the data to look at, and when to look at them, according to your goals and timeline to race day.
What data should you collect? Depending on how many variables of your training you want to control, you should consider a power meter for your bike, a speed-distance device for your running (GPS or accelerometer-based watch), a heart rate monitor that will work for both devices, and something that can measure your swim pace and distance. If you have and regularly use all of these, you will be able to do all the things I've mentioned.
If you've been training old-school style, without any of these tools, this book will show you how to begin training by the numbers and open up a whole new world of training performance and efficiency. With so much data collection it appears difficult to isolate what is important, but that is exactly what you will learn to do in this book, making training with these tools simple and rewarding.
Everyone knows there's more than one way to train, and that's the fun of training in general, to find your own way. It's why I enjoy coaching athletes so much, helping them find the way that works for them. What way best helps athletes to reach their potential, given the resources available, strengths and weaknesses, and race goals, can be calculated and measured, giving you the freedom and power to create your best way of training.
Going by Feel
I once had a very famous and successful triathlete tell me he liked "to go by feel" in his training and therefore didn't want to use data. It is perfectly fine to go by feel; no one is saying athletes should be robots and simply follow a set program of numbers. At the highest levels of the sport, athletes must use their feel and sense of their bodies to get that extra percentage point of improvement and performance. But collection and analysis of the data are what helps an athlete better understand and improve his or her sense of feel. In the end, the data are simply numbers, representing what has been done in training and helping us project what still needs to be done. The real art of coaching and training comes from the decisions made from what the data tell us. Those decisions become easier with a clearer picture, as we begin to know more and more about the athlete.
Data and the Mind
In all my days of racing, the differences between my best races and my worst races usually only came down to one thing, and it wasn't health, injury, or equipment. It was what I was thinking on that start line. When I was timid and unsure of myself, I raced poorly. When I knew I was ready, I was eager to prove myself against the best. It wasn't really my training as much as my confidence in how the training had prepared me. When you've been tracking and seeing the improvement in your training, it is hard not to be confident in the preparation, which keeps you motivated to train and step to the start line ready to race.
About This Book
Part I, Triathlon Training Technology, will introduce you to the key training devices for cycling, running, and swimming. These chapters will help you make intelligent choices if you decide to purchase a new training device. Before using these devices in your training, you will need to assess your current fitness level and then set some training goals. That's where Part II, Planning Your Training, comes in.
Every training and racing decision you make, including equipment, nutrition, volume, and intensity, along with timing, depends on your goals. Determining the training to meet your goals in different times of the year, is where individuality is most important. The training decisions you make should support those goals and your needs as an athlete. In Part II we dive into better assessing your needs as an athlete, using the data from these tools, and then planning on how to meet those needs through the season, according to the goals you have set.
In Part III, High-Tech Periodization, we go step by step through the season, understanding how to prioritize training needs and analyzing how effective the current training decisions are, according to the goals you have set and the timeline available until race day. This allows you to make sure you are on a consistent improvement track and preparing to meet your goals.
In Part IV, Race Analysis for Winning Results, we use the data from prerace, during the race, and postrace, as well as from the entire season, to better examine athlete tendencies (both positive and negative), what types of race strategies and training the athlete responds best to, and how effective the overall training decisions for the season were. We can also use this to better plan paces and even nutrition strategies.
As an added benefit, many of the figures provided throughout this book are screenshots from actual races or training sessions with the coach's notes and comments left exactly as they were in real time, giving you an inside look at the coach/athlete relationship.
This book is a guide on this journey to help you find your best way of training, so you can be on the start line confident and ready to maximize your fitness and training. Let's get started.
Popular and Useful Technology Used to Train During Runs
As popular as power meters are in the cycling world, GPS (global positioning system) units are even more popular in the running world. Just about every serious heart rate monitor brand on the market offers a GPS or some type of speed-distance device with it.
As popular as power meters are in the cycling world, GPS (global positioning system) units are even more popular in the running world. Just about every serious heart rate monitor brand on the market offers a GPS or some type of speed-distance device with it. And just about every GPS unit on the market now offers a heart rate monitor with it as well. If it doesn't use GPS satellites, it likely uses an accelerometer to measure speed and distance, usually a foot pod placed in the shoe that measures the accelerations and decelerations of the foot, to determine stride length and stride rate. In running, stride rate is the revolutions per minute (rpm) based on how many times the foot strikes the ground in a single minute. Running rpm are also referred to as cadence.
This chapter covers popular and useful technology used to train during runs, along with some useful terminology that will help you interpret and understand the data the technology provides.
Global Positioning System (GPS)
Most athletes understand GPS units a lot more than power meters and power data because the information they provide is easier to conceptualize, for example, how fast one is running. If you produce more watts on the bike, you're not necessarily going faster (such as when going uphill), but if you push the pace on a run, you are definitely going faster. If you produce less watts on the bike, you're not necessarily going slower either (such as when coasting downhill or with a strong tailwind). If you run easier, you are almost always running slower than if you run hard.
A GPS device uses a network of 24 satellites that have been placed into orbit by the U.S. Department of Defense. GPS works in any weather, anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day without subscription or fee (Garmin 2015). These GPS satellites circle the earth transmitting information back to earth where GPS devices use triangulation to calculate the user's exact location.
The GPS receivers are very accurate due to their multichannel design. Some of the top GPS watches use 12 parallel channel receivers to initially lock onto the satellites and maintain a strong lock in settings such as dense foliage or among tall buildings. In general, the common GPS watches today are accurate to within an average of 15 meters.
Most GPS watches generate data files that can be uploaded to a third-party software suite for postworkout analysis, through external sensors like wireless ANT+ protocol, usually by using a USB cable or Bluetooth technology.
Speed-Distance Devices (Accelerometers)
These devices are similar to GPS watches, but instead of using satellites to determine speed and distance, they use a motion sensor (accelerometer). Most commonly this is a foot pod attached to your shoe.
Because accelerometers do not rely on GPS signals, they are popular for their use indoors, usually on treadmills.
Foot Pods
A foot pod uses an accelerometer, which measures the time the foot is in contact with the ground and counts the number of strides. With this, the foot pod calculates running pace, which gets transmitted to the watch.
The foot pod should be calibrated to each user, which accounts for individual running biomechanics and running shoes. Some athletes have reported as much as a 12 percent or more difference in calibration factors between racing in flats versus trainers.
GPS units or other speed-distance devices help to show the changes in grade (terrain) and the intensity of the effort athletes are putting forth. Both of these variables (grade and intensity) contribute to the physiological demands of running on terrain that is not flat.
In chapter 1, we discussed training with heart rate, showing the pros and cons while on the bike. The same basic principles apply with running, as heart rate is not an output-based metric. Remember, HR has a linear response to an increase in intensity, but it will only increase up to O2max, which is the maximal volume of oxygen the body can utilize. This is due to an athlete's O2max being limited to a large extent by the cardiovascular system's ability to pump blood. Once we reach that limit, HR can no longer increase to match an increase in intensity.
Long before GPS watches, most runners used the distance covered and the time it took to determine pace, which was the primary method for tracking training load and training intensity. This basic approach works really well on flat terrain, but when examining the intensity and training load generated by varied-pace running on rolling or hilly terrain, there is a lot that can be missed.
Simply using distance and time to measure the quality of intense running works really well on a track, but what if you are not doing all of your intervals on a track? What if the other runs in your training are on hilly courses?
Some of the most important runs in your training are recovery runs. Using distance and time to accurately measure intensity and training load while on open or uneven terrain is simply not as accurate as we would like it to be, which can lead to overdoing a recovery run without knowing it.
Stress-Based Periodization
Training for triathlon can be one of the most complicated things to master in perhaps all of sport, especially as the goals and competitive levels get higher and higher. Think about all the variables that can affect it, from those in our control to the randomness of sicknesses, non-sport-related injuries, stress, crashes, race mechanicals, and more.
In God we trust. All others bring data.
William Edwards Demming
Training for triathlon can be one of the most complicated things to master in perhaps all of sport, especially as the goals and competitive levels get higher and higher. Think about all the variables that can affect it, from those in our control to the randomness of sicknesses, non-sport-related injuries, stress, crashes, race mechanicals, and more.
It's no wonder the chapter-opening quote discusses God and faith; I have seen plenty of athletes who use prayer to try to help their performance. It makes sense that with so many things seemingly out of our control, we have to use our faith that the things we can control are good enough to help us achieve our goals.
If you look at the top professional triathletes in the world, especially those chasing the Olympics, many of them train with a coach and some training partners on a daily basis. They travel to remote places in the world to train without distraction, with a group of similarly minded and skilled athletes who can push them. They have a coach watch all their moves to help keep them doing things technically excellent and also for telling them when to slow down and not push too hard.
In the world of elite endurance sports, we call this a daily training environment, or DTE for short. Not many athletes in the world can commit to a DTE that involves travel around the world, with everything devoted to training and racing, and eliminating almost everything else to be the best at the sport. Not many athletes want to give that level of commitment, since the sport is their escape and an outlet to be competitive and healthy. They have families, responsibilities, careers, and more.
But that doesn't mean athletes don't want to work hard or try their best to maximize their training time and commitment to the sport. They are fascinated with the challenge of long-course triathlon and want to compete at a high level, while still trying to balance all of life's demands, stressors, distractions, and more.
Ask many triathletes what their biggest challenge is with doing triathlon, and they will likely tell you time for training. The time commitment to compete in a 70.3, or even just complete one, is enormous. The time commitment for a full Ironman is no less than 10 hours per week, just to finish. If your goals are well beyond finishing, you definitely need more time than that.
This time challenge only adds to the burden of getting training right, because there can't be mistakes in training. And with limited training time, but a lot of time spent away from training involved with other variables in daily life, it becomes even harder to get the training right. Overreach in a workout, and you might lose a few following quality sessions because you're too tired or possibly injured or sick.
But with applying numbers to efforts and intensities, you eliminate a lot of the guesswork. You don't have to take the big risks in your training. In fact, you can dial in the perfect training stress nearly every time, whenever you need, based on your goals and history.
You can also track the numbers and prescribe fitness based on the numbers, instead of postscribing workouts to determine what happened. Once you know what event you're training for, much like you can do with an annual training plan and breaking the year into cycles, with stress-based periodization you can begin to plot the road map to where you want to go. The road map and periodization cycle is written out by numbers, to define the load.
Traditionally, athletes set up their annual training plan (ATP) with the load distinguished by volume of hours trained. This is not a good gauge of training load because intensity, and the amount of training at specific intensities, is the biggest determinant of training success and stress load.
As mentioned in previous chapters, volume is a very overrated metric, and the more you use TSS to track your fitness, the more you will find that to be true. What you are training for in long-course triathlon is not the Tour de France. It's not multiple long days of four to six hours in the saddle, going very hard for 21 of 23 days. That test requires a large amount of volume on a daily basis.
Long-course triathlon is a single-day event. Your ability to peak for that one day, making sure everything comes together, is the key to success. Come race day, you are all in. You have to get it right, and the numbers of stress-based periodization, using TSS to help plan and execute training, are what help you maximize training on that day.
Benefits of Technology in Training
In all my days of racing as an elite triathlete, there was never a single piece of equipment I could use that would allow me to train poorly, or dumb, and make up for it on race day.
In all my days of racing as an elite triathlete, there was never a single piece of equipment I could use that would allow me to train poorly, or dumb, and make up for it on race day. There was no magical wheel set, aerodynamic frameset or helmet, pair of race shoes, or innovative wetsuit that changed the fact that how well I trained on a daily basis made all the difference on race day.
Look in most transition areas and you'll find the latest and greatest of these items, but probably few items devoted to executing daily training better. Most of the athletes who come into these races are undertrained or overtrained, and no bike or other piece of equipment will change that fact to any significant degree.
A small segment of athletes in the race are poised to do well. They have figured out how to balance training stress, recovery, life and job demands, and family commitments. They were able to see the signals that their training was going well and were able to keep it that way. They are likely the athletes you train with and are beating in the sessions but somehow lose to each race. Or they are the athletes who never seem to have a bad race. Or they're the athletes who always seem to peak perfectly at the biggest races. To many, these athletes are either very lucky or they know some magical formula we're all dying to know.
Many athletes scour articles and blogs, reading all they can, trying to process all the information out there, convinced it will make clear how to train. What tends to happen though is the exact opposite. Athletes read and try to put into practice everything they read about the latest interval set, or strength equipment, or long ride with big gear climbs, and so on. With so much information bombarding athletes, they get more confused and never stick to one plan, trying to do every plan out there, much of it not addressing their own needs, just what is popular.
Athletes get power meters, heart rate monitors, and GPS systems and look at screen after screen of data from their training, trying to figure out what it all means and where the secret information within it shows what to do next.
There is an infinite amount of information available on training for a triathlon, but in the end it is all about filtering that information so it makes sense for the individual athlete. This is the purpose of this book. We can't all be Ironman world champions, so training like one isn't going to work for the majority of athletes. Athletes simply need to understand their own goals and then decipher the information from their training that matches their goals, according to the time of year and amount of time until race day.
Athletes who have purchased generic training plans or taken a free one out of a recent magazine inevitably find some challenge with it, because it can't account for their whole race schedule, their past training history, their strengths and weaknesses, and what training groups and resources are available in their area.
A frustration I've had with most training plans, and many traditional coaches, is the belief that there is a set number of weeks to devote to a specific type of training. For example, many coaches say that athletes need 12 weeks of aerobic base-building work and then 12 weeks of race-specific work to be ready to perform well. That might work for some, but what if they really need 16 to 20 weeks of aerobic base work? What if their basic aerobic fitness is lacking so much that it should be almost all they focus on for many months? Otherwise, the athlete is coming to the start line with not enough aerobic fitness to make any race-specific work worthwhile. If an athlete hasn't shown he or she can last at an aerobic intensity for 12 hours, how is he or she going to break 12 hours in an Ironman? These things can't be rushed, and setting some arbitrary number because of historical norms doesn't help the individual athlete meet his or her specific needs.
What if the athlete has been doing multiple long-course races each year, for many years? Do you think that athlete needs to still do 12 weeks of aerobic base-building work? No, of course not. The athlete's aerobic fitness isn't lacking; it's the ability to hold a higher intensity during the race that needs to be addressed. This athlete would waste 12 weeks of opportunities to address his or her weakness and miss the potential for a huge breakthrough!
The Power of Data
I run into many athletes who think power meters and other technological tools are a waste of money. It's ironic that usually these athletes own some sort of smartphone, use complex software at their day jobs, or use computers in just about every aspect of their daily lives, and yet there is a disconnect that prevents them from realizing that technology could be as much of a benefit to their training as it is for their daily life.
If you're still wondering if using technology is best for you, let me ask you a few questions. What if I told you there was a way to determine exactly when you had enough aerobic fitness, so you could maximize training time by focusing more time on weaknesses, instead of aerobic work?
What if you could see your exact weaknesses and get direct, measurable feedback on how well your training is addressing them?
What if you could see exactly how many intervals you should do in a workout to get just the right amount of training stress, so you can recover quicker and pack in a better week of training?
What if you found the perfect tapering strategy and wanted to replicate it perfectly for each major race? What if you could actually see into the future to where your fitness will be down the road and how well your taper will be executed?
What if I told you that once you hit a certain performance marker in your training, the chances of achieving your goal or exceeding it just increased dramatically?
What if I told you we could look back at your training from the past season or longer and see where you made training mistakes or errors in judgment for your training load, what training load got you sick or injured, or where you plateaued, all in a matter of minutes?
What if you could be shown your training tendencies so you could come up with a new and better stimulus to get the fitness and performance jump you're looking for?
Believe it or not, all this can be done, and it really isn't that hard. You just have to know what data to collect, the elements of the data to look at, and when to look at them, according to your goals and timeline to race day.
What data should you collect? Depending on how many variables of your training you want to control, you should consider a power meter for your bike, a speed-distance device for your running (GPS or accelerometer-based watch), a heart rate monitor that will work for both devices, and something that can measure your swim pace and distance. If you have and regularly use all of these, you will be able to do all the things I've mentioned.
If you've been training old-school style, without any of these tools, this book will show you how to begin training by the numbers and open up a whole new world of training performance and efficiency. With so much data collection it appears difficult to isolate what is important, but that is exactly what you will learn to do in this book, making training with these tools simple and rewarding.
Everyone knows there's more than one way to train, and that's the fun of training in general, to find your own way. It's why I enjoy coaching athletes so much, helping them find the way that works for them. What way best helps athletes to reach their potential, given the resources available, strengths and weaknesses, and race goals, can be calculated and measured, giving you the freedom and power to create your best way of training.
Going by Feel
I once had a very famous and successful triathlete tell me he liked "to go by feel" in his training and therefore didn't want to use data. It is perfectly fine to go by feel; no one is saying athletes should be robots and simply follow a set program of numbers. At the highest levels of the sport, athletes must use their feel and sense of their bodies to get that extra percentage point of improvement and performance. But collection and analysis of the data are what helps an athlete better understand and improve his or her sense of feel. In the end, the data are simply numbers, representing what has been done in training and helping us project what still needs to be done. The real art of coaching and training comes from the decisions made from what the data tell us. Those decisions become easier with a clearer picture, as we begin to know more and more about the athlete.
Data and the Mind
In all my days of racing, the differences between my best races and my worst races usually only came down to one thing, and it wasn't health, injury, or equipment. It was what I was thinking on that start line. When I was timid and unsure of myself, I raced poorly. When I knew I was ready, I was eager to prove myself against the best. It wasn't really my training as much as my confidence in how the training had prepared me. When you've been tracking and seeing the improvement in your training, it is hard not to be confident in the preparation, which keeps you motivated to train and step to the start line ready to race.
About This Book
Part I, Triathlon Training Technology, will introduce you to the key training devices for cycling, running, and swimming. These chapters will help you make intelligent choices if you decide to purchase a new training device. Before using these devices in your training, you will need to assess your current fitness level and then set some training goals. That's where Part II, Planning Your Training, comes in.
Every training and racing decision you make, including equipment, nutrition, volume, and intensity, along with timing, depends on your goals. Determining the training to meet your goals in different times of the year, is where individuality is most important. The training decisions you make should support those goals and your needs as an athlete. In Part II we dive into better assessing your needs as an athlete, using the data from these tools, and then planning on how to meet those needs through the season, according to the goals you have set.
In Part III, High-Tech Periodization, we go step by step through the season, understanding how to prioritize training needs and analyzing how effective the current training decisions are, according to the goals you have set and the timeline available until race day. This allows you to make sure you are on a consistent improvement track and preparing to meet your goals.
In Part IV, Race Analysis for Winning Results, we use the data from prerace, during the race, and postrace, as well as from the entire season, to better examine athlete tendencies (both positive and negative), what types of race strategies and training the athlete responds best to, and how effective the overall training decisions for the season were. We can also use this to better plan paces and even nutrition strategies.
As an added benefit, many of the figures provided throughout this book are screenshots from actual races or training sessions with the coach's notes and comments left exactly as they were in real time, giving you an inside look at the coach/athlete relationship.
This book is a guide on this journey to help you find your best way of training, so you can be on the start line confident and ready to maximize your fitness and training. Let's get started.
Popular and Useful Technology Used to Train During Runs
As popular as power meters are in the cycling world, GPS (global positioning system) units are even more popular in the running world. Just about every serious heart rate monitor brand on the market offers a GPS or some type of speed-distance device with it.
As popular as power meters are in the cycling world, GPS (global positioning system) units are even more popular in the running world. Just about every serious heart rate monitor brand on the market offers a GPS or some type of speed-distance device with it. And just about every GPS unit on the market now offers a heart rate monitor with it as well. If it doesn't use GPS satellites, it likely uses an accelerometer to measure speed and distance, usually a foot pod placed in the shoe that measures the accelerations and decelerations of the foot, to determine stride length and stride rate. In running, stride rate is the revolutions per minute (rpm) based on how many times the foot strikes the ground in a single minute. Running rpm are also referred to as cadence.
This chapter covers popular and useful technology used to train during runs, along with some useful terminology that will help you interpret and understand the data the technology provides.
Global Positioning System (GPS)
Most athletes understand GPS units a lot more than power meters and power data because the information they provide is easier to conceptualize, for example, how fast one is running. If you produce more watts on the bike, you're not necessarily going faster (such as when going uphill), but if you push the pace on a run, you are definitely going faster. If you produce less watts on the bike, you're not necessarily going slower either (such as when coasting downhill or with a strong tailwind). If you run easier, you are almost always running slower than if you run hard.
A GPS device uses a network of 24 satellites that have been placed into orbit by the U.S. Department of Defense. GPS works in any weather, anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day without subscription or fee (Garmin 2015). These GPS satellites circle the earth transmitting information back to earth where GPS devices use triangulation to calculate the user's exact location.
The GPS receivers are very accurate due to their multichannel design. Some of the top GPS watches use 12 parallel channel receivers to initially lock onto the satellites and maintain a strong lock in settings such as dense foliage or among tall buildings. In general, the common GPS watches today are accurate to within an average of 15 meters.
Most GPS watches generate data files that can be uploaded to a third-party software suite for postworkout analysis, through external sensors like wireless ANT+ protocol, usually by using a USB cable or Bluetooth technology.
Speed-Distance Devices (Accelerometers)
These devices are similar to GPS watches, but instead of using satellites to determine speed and distance, they use a motion sensor (accelerometer). Most commonly this is a foot pod attached to your shoe.
Because accelerometers do not rely on GPS signals, they are popular for their use indoors, usually on treadmills.
Foot Pods
A foot pod uses an accelerometer, which measures the time the foot is in contact with the ground and counts the number of strides. With this, the foot pod calculates running pace, which gets transmitted to the watch.
The foot pod should be calibrated to each user, which accounts for individual running biomechanics and running shoes. Some athletes have reported as much as a 12 percent or more difference in calibration factors between racing in flats versus trainers.
GPS units or other speed-distance devices help to show the changes in grade (terrain) and the intensity of the effort athletes are putting forth. Both of these variables (grade and intensity) contribute to the physiological demands of running on terrain that is not flat.
In chapter 1, we discussed training with heart rate, showing the pros and cons while on the bike. The same basic principles apply with running, as heart rate is not an output-based metric. Remember, HR has a linear response to an increase in intensity, but it will only increase up to O2max, which is the maximal volume of oxygen the body can utilize. This is due to an athlete's O2max being limited to a large extent by the cardiovascular system's ability to pump blood. Once we reach that limit, HR can no longer increase to match an increase in intensity.
Long before GPS watches, most runners used the distance covered and the time it took to determine pace, which was the primary method for tracking training load and training intensity. This basic approach works really well on flat terrain, but when examining the intensity and training load generated by varied-pace running on rolling or hilly terrain, there is a lot that can be missed.
Simply using distance and time to measure the quality of intense running works really well on a track, but what if you are not doing all of your intervals on a track? What if the other runs in your training are on hilly courses?
Some of the most important runs in your training are recovery runs. Using distance and time to accurately measure intensity and training load while on open or uneven terrain is simply not as accurate as we would like it to be, which can lead to overdoing a recovery run without knowing it.
Stress-Based Periodization
Training for triathlon can be one of the most complicated things to master in perhaps all of sport, especially as the goals and competitive levels get higher and higher. Think about all the variables that can affect it, from those in our control to the randomness of sicknesses, non-sport-related injuries, stress, crashes, race mechanicals, and more.
In God we trust. All others bring data.
William Edwards Demming
Training for triathlon can be one of the most complicated things to master in perhaps all of sport, especially as the goals and competitive levels get higher and higher. Think about all the variables that can affect it, from those in our control to the randomness of sicknesses, non-sport-related injuries, stress, crashes, race mechanicals, and more.
It's no wonder the chapter-opening quote discusses God and faith; I have seen plenty of athletes who use prayer to try to help their performance. It makes sense that with so many things seemingly out of our control, we have to use our faith that the things we can control are good enough to help us achieve our goals.
If you look at the top professional triathletes in the world, especially those chasing the Olympics, many of them train with a coach and some training partners on a daily basis. They travel to remote places in the world to train without distraction, with a group of similarly minded and skilled athletes who can push them. They have a coach watch all their moves to help keep them doing things technically excellent and also for telling them when to slow down and not push too hard.
In the world of elite endurance sports, we call this a daily training environment, or DTE for short. Not many athletes in the world can commit to a DTE that involves travel around the world, with everything devoted to training and racing, and eliminating almost everything else to be the best at the sport. Not many athletes want to give that level of commitment, since the sport is their escape and an outlet to be competitive and healthy. They have families, responsibilities, careers, and more.
But that doesn't mean athletes don't want to work hard or try their best to maximize their training time and commitment to the sport. They are fascinated with the challenge of long-course triathlon and want to compete at a high level, while still trying to balance all of life's demands, stressors, distractions, and more.
Ask many triathletes what their biggest challenge is with doing triathlon, and they will likely tell you time for training. The time commitment to compete in a 70.3, or even just complete one, is enormous. The time commitment for a full Ironman is no less than 10 hours per week, just to finish. If your goals are well beyond finishing, you definitely need more time than that.
This time challenge only adds to the burden of getting training right, because there can't be mistakes in training. And with limited training time, but a lot of time spent away from training involved with other variables in daily life, it becomes even harder to get the training right. Overreach in a workout, and you might lose a few following quality sessions because you're too tired or possibly injured or sick.
But with applying numbers to efforts and intensities, you eliminate a lot of the guesswork. You don't have to take the big risks in your training. In fact, you can dial in the perfect training stress nearly every time, whenever you need, based on your goals and history.
You can also track the numbers and prescribe fitness based on the numbers, instead of postscribing workouts to determine what happened. Once you know what event you're training for, much like you can do with an annual training plan and breaking the year into cycles, with stress-based periodization you can begin to plot the road map to where you want to go. The road map and periodization cycle is written out by numbers, to define the load.
Traditionally, athletes set up their annual training plan (ATP) with the load distinguished by volume of hours trained. This is not a good gauge of training load because intensity, and the amount of training at specific intensities, is the biggest determinant of training success and stress load.
As mentioned in previous chapters, volume is a very overrated metric, and the more you use TSS to track your fitness, the more you will find that to be true. What you are training for in long-course triathlon is not the Tour de France. It's not multiple long days of four to six hours in the saddle, going very hard for 21 of 23 days. That test requires a large amount of volume on a daily basis.
Long-course triathlon is a single-day event. Your ability to peak for that one day, making sure everything comes together, is the key to success. Come race day, you are all in. You have to get it right, and the numbers of stress-based periodization, using TSS to help plan and execute training, are what help you maximize training on that day.
Benefits of Technology in Training
In all my days of racing as an elite triathlete, there was never a single piece of equipment I could use that would allow me to train poorly, or dumb, and make up for it on race day.
In all my days of racing as an elite triathlete, there was never a single piece of equipment I could use that would allow me to train poorly, or dumb, and make up for it on race day. There was no magical wheel set, aerodynamic frameset or helmet, pair of race shoes, or innovative wetsuit that changed the fact that how well I trained on a daily basis made all the difference on race day.
Look in most transition areas and you'll find the latest and greatest of these items, but probably few items devoted to executing daily training better. Most of the athletes who come into these races are undertrained or overtrained, and no bike or other piece of equipment will change that fact to any significant degree.
A small segment of athletes in the race are poised to do well. They have figured out how to balance training stress, recovery, life and job demands, and family commitments. They were able to see the signals that their training was going well and were able to keep it that way. They are likely the athletes you train with and are beating in the sessions but somehow lose to each race. Or they are the athletes who never seem to have a bad race. Or they're the athletes who always seem to peak perfectly at the biggest races. To many, these athletes are either very lucky or they know some magical formula we're all dying to know.
Many athletes scour articles and blogs, reading all they can, trying to process all the information out there, convinced it will make clear how to train. What tends to happen though is the exact opposite. Athletes read and try to put into practice everything they read about the latest interval set, or strength equipment, or long ride with big gear climbs, and so on. With so much information bombarding athletes, they get more confused and never stick to one plan, trying to do every plan out there, much of it not addressing their own needs, just what is popular.
Athletes get power meters, heart rate monitors, and GPS systems and look at screen after screen of data from their training, trying to figure out what it all means and where the secret information within it shows what to do next.
There is an infinite amount of information available on training for a triathlon, but in the end it is all about filtering that information so it makes sense for the individual athlete. This is the purpose of this book. We can't all be Ironman world champions, so training like one isn't going to work for the majority of athletes. Athletes simply need to understand their own goals and then decipher the information from their training that matches their goals, according to the time of year and amount of time until race day.
Athletes who have purchased generic training plans or taken a free one out of a recent magazine inevitably find some challenge with it, because it can't account for their whole race schedule, their past training history, their strengths and weaknesses, and what training groups and resources are available in their area.
A frustration I've had with most training plans, and many traditional coaches, is the belief that there is a set number of weeks to devote to a specific type of training. For example, many coaches say that athletes need 12 weeks of aerobic base-building work and then 12 weeks of race-specific work to be ready to perform well. That might work for some, but what if they really need 16 to 20 weeks of aerobic base work? What if their basic aerobic fitness is lacking so much that it should be almost all they focus on for many months? Otherwise, the athlete is coming to the start line with not enough aerobic fitness to make any race-specific work worthwhile. If an athlete hasn't shown he or she can last at an aerobic intensity for 12 hours, how is he or she going to break 12 hours in an Ironman? These things can't be rushed, and setting some arbitrary number because of historical norms doesn't help the individual athlete meet his or her specific needs.
What if the athlete has been doing multiple long-course races each year, for many years? Do you think that athlete needs to still do 12 weeks of aerobic base-building work? No, of course not. The athlete's aerobic fitness isn't lacking; it's the ability to hold a higher intensity during the race that needs to be addressed. This athlete would waste 12 weeks of opportunities to address his or her weakness and miss the potential for a huge breakthrough!
The Power of Data
I run into many athletes who think power meters and other technological tools are a waste of money. It's ironic that usually these athletes own some sort of smartphone, use complex software at their day jobs, or use computers in just about every aspect of their daily lives, and yet there is a disconnect that prevents them from realizing that technology could be as much of a benefit to their training as it is for their daily life.
If you're still wondering if using technology is best for you, let me ask you a few questions. What if I told you there was a way to determine exactly when you had enough aerobic fitness, so you could maximize training time by focusing more time on weaknesses, instead of aerobic work?
What if you could see your exact weaknesses and get direct, measurable feedback on how well your training is addressing them?
What if you could see exactly how many intervals you should do in a workout to get just the right amount of training stress, so you can recover quicker and pack in a better week of training?
What if you found the perfect tapering strategy and wanted to replicate it perfectly for each major race? What if you could actually see into the future to where your fitness will be down the road and how well your taper will be executed?
What if I told you that once you hit a certain performance marker in your training, the chances of achieving your goal or exceeding it just increased dramatically?
What if I told you we could look back at your training from the past season or longer and see where you made training mistakes or errors in judgment for your training load, what training load got you sick or injured, or where you plateaued, all in a matter of minutes?
What if you could be shown your training tendencies so you could come up with a new and better stimulus to get the fitness and performance jump you're looking for?
Believe it or not, all this can be done, and it really isn't that hard. You just have to know what data to collect, the elements of the data to look at, and when to look at them, according to your goals and timeline to race day.
What data should you collect? Depending on how many variables of your training you want to control, you should consider a power meter for your bike, a speed-distance device for your running (GPS or accelerometer-based watch), a heart rate monitor that will work for both devices, and something that can measure your swim pace and distance. If you have and regularly use all of these, you will be able to do all the things I've mentioned.
If you've been training old-school style, without any of these tools, this book will show you how to begin training by the numbers and open up a whole new world of training performance and efficiency. With so much data collection it appears difficult to isolate what is important, but that is exactly what you will learn to do in this book, making training with these tools simple and rewarding.
Everyone knows there's more than one way to train, and that's the fun of training in general, to find your own way. It's why I enjoy coaching athletes so much, helping them find the way that works for them. What way best helps athletes to reach their potential, given the resources available, strengths and weaknesses, and race goals, can be calculated and measured, giving you the freedom and power to create your best way of training.
Going by Feel
I once had a very famous and successful triathlete tell me he liked "to go by feel" in his training and therefore didn't want to use data. It is perfectly fine to go by feel; no one is saying athletes should be robots and simply follow a set program of numbers. At the highest levels of the sport, athletes must use their feel and sense of their bodies to get that extra percentage point of improvement and performance. But collection and analysis of the data are what helps an athlete better understand and improve his or her sense of feel. In the end, the data are simply numbers, representing what has been done in training and helping us project what still needs to be done. The real art of coaching and training comes from the decisions made from what the data tell us. Those decisions become easier with a clearer picture, as we begin to know more and more about the athlete.
Data and the Mind
In all my days of racing, the differences between my best races and my worst races usually only came down to one thing, and it wasn't health, injury, or equipment. It was what I was thinking on that start line. When I was timid and unsure of myself, I raced poorly. When I knew I was ready, I was eager to prove myself against the best. It wasn't really my training as much as my confidence in how the training had prepared me. When you've been tracking and seeing the improvement in your training, it is hard not to be confident in the preparation, which keeps you motivated to train and step to the start line ready to race.
About This Book
Part I, Triathlon Training Technology, will introduce you to the key training devices for cycling, running, and swimming. These chapters will help you make intelligent choices if you decide to purchase a new training device. Before using these devices in your training, you will need to assess your current fitness level and then set some training goals. That's where Part II, Planning Your Training, comes in.
Every training and racing decision you make, including equipment, nutrition, volume, and intensity, along with timing, depends on your goals. Determining the training to meet your goals in different times of the year, is where individuality is most important. The training decisions you make should support those goals and your needs as an athlete. In Part II we dive into better assessing your needs as an athlete, using the data from these tools, and then planning on how to meet those needs through the season, according to the goals you have set.
In Part III, High-Tech Periodization, we go step by step through the season, understanding how to prioritize training needs and analyzing how effective the current training decisions are, according to the goals you have set and the timeline available until race day. This allows you to make sure you are on a consistent improvement track and preparing to meet your goals.
In Part IV, Race Analysis for Winning Results, we use the data from prerace, during the race, and postrace, as well as from the entire season, to better examine athlete tendencies (both positive and negative), what types of race strategies and training the athlete responds best to, and how effective the overall training decisions for the season were. We can also use this to better plan paces and even nutrition strategies.
As an added benefit, many of the figures provided throughout this book are screenshots from actual races or training sessions with the coach's notes and comments left exactly as they were in real time, giving you an inside look at the coach/athlete relationship.
This book is a guide on this journey to help you find your best way of training, so you can be on the start line confident and ready to maximize your fitness and training. Let's get started.
Popular and Useful Technology Used to Train During Runs
As popular as power meters are in the cycling world, GPS (global positioning system) units are even more popular in the running world. Just about every serious heart rate monitor brand on the market offers a GPS or some type of speed-distance device with it.
As popular as power meters are in the cycling world, GPS (global positioning system) units are even more popular in the running world. Just about every serious heart rate monitor brand on the market offers a GPS or some type of speed-distance device with it. And just about every GPS unit on the market now offers a heart rate monitor with it as well. If it doesn't use GPS satellites, it likely uses an accelerometer to measure speed and distance, usually a foot pod placed in the shoe that measures the accelerations and decelerations of the foot, to determine stride length and stride rate. In running, stride rate is the revolutions per minute (rpm) based on how many times the foot strikes the ground in a single minute. Running rpm are also referred to as cadence.
This chapter covers popular and useful technology used to train during runs, along with some useful terminology that will help you interpret and understand the data the technology provides.
Global Positioning System (GPS)
Most athletes understand GPS units a lot more than power meters and power data because the information they provide is easier to conceptualize, for example, how fast one is running. If you produce more watts on the bike, you're not necessarily going faster (such as when going uphill), but if you push the pace on a run, you are definitely going faster. If you produce less watts on the bike, you're not necessarily going slower either (such as when coasting downhill or with a strong tailwind). If you run easier, you are almost always running slower than if you run hard.
A GPS device uses a network of 24 satellites that have been placed into orbit by the U.S. Department of Defense. GPS works in any weather, anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day without subscription or fee (Garmin 2015). These GPS satellites circle the earth transmitting information back to earth where GPS devices use triangulation to calculate the user's exact location.
The GPS receivers are very accurate due to their multichannel design. Some of the top GPS watches use 12 parallel channel receivers to initially lock onto the satellites and maintain a strong lock in settings such as dense foliage or among tall buildings. In general, the common GPS watches today are accurate to within an average of 15 meters.
Most GPS watches generate data files that can be uploaded to a third-party software suite for postworkout analysis, through external sensors like wireless ANT+ protocol, usually by using a USB cable or Bluetooth technology.
Speed-Distance Devices (Accelerometers)
These devices are similar to GPS watches, but instead of using satellites to determine speed and distance, they use a motion sensor (accelerometer). Most commonly this is a foot pod attached to your shoe.
Because accelerometers do not rely on GPS signals, they are popular for their use indoors, usually on treadmills.
Foot Pods
A foot pod uses an accelerometer, which measures the time the foot is in contact with the ground and counts the number of strides. With this, the foot pod calculates running pace, which gets transmitted to the watch.
The foot pod should be calibrated to each user, which accounts for individual running biomechanics and running shoes. Some athletes have reported as much as a 12 percent or more difference in calibration factors between racing in flats versus trainers.
GPS units or other speed-distance devices help to show the changes in grade (terrain) and the intensity of the effort athletes are putting forth. Both of these variables (grade and intensity) contribute to the physiological demands of running on terrain that is not flat.
In chapter 1, we discussed training with heart rate, showing the pros and cons while on the bike. The same basic principles apply with running, as heart rate is not an output-based metric. Remember, HR has a linear response to an increase in intensity, but it will only increase up to O2max, which is the maximal volume of oxygen the body can utilize. This is due to an athlete's O2max being limited to a large extent by the cardiovascular system's ability to pump blood. Once we reach that limit, HR can no longer increase to match an increase in intensity.
Long before GPS watches, most runners used the distance covered and the time it took to determine pace, which was the primary method for tracking training load and training intensity. This basic approach works really well on flat terrain, but when examining the intensity and training load generated by varied-pace running on rolling or hilly terrain, there is a lot that can be missed.
Simply using distance and time to measure the quality of intense running works really well on a track, but what if you are not doing all of your intervals on a track? What if the other runs in your training are on hilly courses?
Some of the most important runs in your training are recovery runs. Using distance and time to accurately measure intensity and training load while on open or uneven terrain is simply not as accurate as we would like it to be, which can lead to overdoing a recovery run without knowing it.
Stress-Based Periodization
Training for triathlon can be one of the most complicated things to master in perhaps all of sport, especially as the goals and competitive levels get higher and higher. Think about all the variables that can affect it, from those in our control to the randomness of sicknesses, non-sport-related injuries, stress, crashes, race mechanicals, and more.
In God we trust. All others bring data.
William Edwards Demming
Training for triathlon can be one of the most complicated things to master in perhaps all of sport, especially as the goals and competitive levels get higher and higher. Think about all the variables that can affect it, from those in our control to the randomness of sicknesses, non-sport-related injuries, stress, crashes, race mechanicals, and more.
It's no wonder the chapter-opening quote discusses God and faith; I have seen plenty of athletes who use prayer to try to help their performance. It makes sense that with so many things seemingly out of our control, we have to use our faith that the things we can control are good enough to help us achieve our goals.
If you look at the top professional triathletes in the world, especially those chasing the Olympics, many of them train with a coach and some training partners on a daily basis. They travel to remote places in the world to train without distraction, with a group of similarly minded and skilled athletes who can push them. They have a coach watch all their moves to help keep them doing things technically excellent and also for telling them when to slow down and not push too hard.
In the world of elite endurance sports, we call this a daily training environment, or DTE for short. Not many athletes in the world can commit to a DTE that involves travel around the world, with everything devoted to training and racing, and eliminating almost everything else to be the best at the sport. Not many athletes want to give that level of commitment, since the sport is their escape and an outlet to be competitive and healthy. They have families, responsibilities, careers, and more.
But that doesn't mean athletes don't want to work hard or try their best to maximize their training time and commitment to the sport. They are fascinated with the challenge of long-course triathlon and want to compete at a high level, while still trying to balance all of life's demands, stressors, distractions, and more.
Ask many triathletes what their biggest challenge is with doing triathlon, and they will likely tell you time for training. The time commitment to compete in a 70.3, or even just complete one, is enormous. The time commitment for a full Ironman is no less than 10 hours per week, just to finish. If your goals are well beyond finishing, you definitely need more time than that.
This time challenge only adds to the burden of getting training right, because there can't be mistakes in training. And with limited training time, but a lot of time spent away from training involved with other variables in daily life, it becomes even harder to get the training right. Overreach in a workout, and you might lose a few following quality sessions because you're too tired or possibly injured or sick.
But with applying numbers to efforts and intensities, you eliminate a lot of the guesswork. You don't have to take the big risks in your training. In fact, you can dial in the perfect training stress nearly every time, whenever you need, based on your goals and history.
You can also track the numbers and prescribe fitness based on the numbers, instead of postscribing workouts to determine what happened. Once you know what event you're training for, much like you can do with an annual training plan and breaking the year into cycles, with stress-based periodization you can begin to plot the road map to where you want to go. The road map and periodization cycle is written out by numbers, to define the load.
Traditionally, athletes set up their annual training plan (ATP) with the load distinguished by volume of hours trained. This is not a good gauge of training load because intensity, and the amount of training at specific intensities, is the biggest determinant of training success and stress load.
As mentioned in previous chapters, volume is a very overrated metric, and the more you use TSS to track your fitness, the more you will find that to be true. What you are training for in long-course triathlon is not the Tour de France. It's not multiple long days of four to six hours in the saddle, going very hard for 21 of 23 days. That test requires a large amount of volume on a daily basis.
Long-course triathlon is a single-day event. Your ability to peak for that one day, making sure everything comes together, is the key to success. Come race day, you are all in. You have to get it right, and the numbers of stress-based periodization, using TSS to help plan and execute training, are what help you maximize training on that day.
Benefits of Technology in Training
In all my days of racing as an elite triathlete, there was never a single piece of equipment I could use that would allow me to train poorly, or dumb, and make up for it on race day.
In all my days of racing as an elite triathlete, there was never a single piece of equipment I could use that would allow me to train poorly, or dumb, and make up for it on race day. There was no magical wheel set, aerodynamic frameset or helmet, pair of race shoes, or innovative wetsuit that changed the fact that how well I trained on a daily basis made all the difference on race day.
Look in most transition areas and you'll find the latest and greatest of these items, but probably few items devoted to executing daily training better. Most of the athletes who come into these races are undertrained or overtrained, and no bike or other piece of equipment will change that fact to any significant degree.
A small segment of athletes in the race are poised to do well. They have figured out how to balance training stress, recovery, life and job demands, and family commitments. They were able to see the signals that their training was going well and were able to keep it that way. They are likely the athletes you train with and are beating in the sessions but somehow lose to each race. Or they are the athletes who never seem to have a bad race. Or they're the athletes who always seem to peak perfectly at the biggest races. To many, these athletes are either very lucky or they know some magical formula we're all dying to know.
Many athletes scour articles and blogs, reading all they can, trying to process all the information out there, convinced it will make clear how to train. What tends to happen though is the exact opposite. Athletes read and try to put into practice everything they read about the latest interval set, or strength equipment, or long ride with big gear climbs, and so on. With so much information bombarding athletes, they get more confused and never stick to one plan, trying to do every plan out there, much of it not addressing their own needs, just what is popular.
Athletes get power meters, heart rate monitors, and GPS systems and look at screen after screen of data from their training, trying to figure out what it all means and where the secret information within it shows what to do next.
There is an infinite amount of information available on training for a triathlon, but in the end it is all about filtering that information so it makes sense for the individual athlete. This is the purpose of this book. We can't all be Ironman world champions, so training like one isn't going to work for the majority of athletes. Athletes simply need to understand their own goals and then decipher the information from their training that matches their goals, according to the time of year and amount of time until race day.
Athletes who have purchased generic training plans or taken a free one out of a recent magazine inevitably find some challenge with it, because it can't account for their whole race schedule, their past training history, their strengths and weaknesses, and what training groups and resources are available in their area.
A frustration I've had with most training plans, and many traditional coaches, is the belief that there is a set number of weeks to devote to a specific type of training. For example, many coaches say that athletes need 12 weeks of aerobic base-building work and then 12 weeks of race-specific work to be ready to perform well. That might work for some, but what if they really need 16 to 20 weeks of aerobic base work? What if their basic aerobic fitness is lacking so much that it should be almost all they focus on for many months? Otherwise, the athlete is coming to the start line with not enough aerobic fitness to make any race-specific work worthwhile. If an athlete hasn't shown he or she can last at an aerobic intensity for 12 hours, how is he or she going to break 12 hours in an Ironman? These things can't be rushed, and setting some arbitrary number because of historical norms doesn't help the individual athlete meet his or her specific needs.
What if the athlete has been doing multiple long-course races each year, for many years? Do you think that athlete needs to still do 12 weeks of aerobic base-building work? No, of course not. The athlete's aerobic fitness isn't lacking; it's the ability to hold a higher intensity during the race that needs to be addressed. This athlete would waste 12 weeks of opportunities to address his or her weakness and miss the potential for a huge breakthrough!
The Power of Data
I run into many athletes who think power meters and other technological tools are a waste of money. It's ironic that usually these athletes own some sort of smartphone, use complex software at their day jobs, or use computers in just about every aspect of their daily lives, and yet there is a disconnect that prevents them from realizing that technology could be as much of a benefit to their training as it is for their daily life.
If you're still wondering if using technology is best for you, let me ask you a few questions. What if I told you there was a way to determine exactly when you had enough aerobic fitness, so you could maximize training time by focusing more time on weaknesses, instead of aerobic work?
What if you could see your exact weaknesses and get direct, measurable feedback on how well your training is addressing them?
What if you could see exactly how many intervals you should do in a workout to get just the right amount of training stress, so you can recover quicker and pack in a better week of training?
What if you found the perfect tapering strategy and wanted to replicate it perfectly for each major race? What if you could actually see into the future to where your fitness will be down the road and how well your taper will be executed?
What if I told you that once you hit a certain performance marker in your training, the chances of achieving your goal or exceeding it just increased dramatically?
What if I told you we could look back at your training from the past season or longer and see where you made training mistakes or errors in judgment for your training load, what training load got you sick or injured, or where you plateaued, all in a matter of minutes?
What if you could be shown your training tendencies so you could come up with a new and better stimulus to get the fitness and performance jump you're looking for?
Believe it or not, all this can be done, and it really isn't that hard. You just have to know what data to collect, the elements of the data to look at, and when to look at them, according to your goals and timeline to race day.
What data should you collect? Depending on how many variables of your training you want to control, you should consider a power meter for your bike, a speed-distance device for your running (GPS or accelerometer-based watch), a heart rate monitor that will work for both devices, and something that can measure your swim pace and distance. If you have and regularly use all of these, you will be able to do all the things I've mentioned.
If you've been training old-school style, without any of these tools, this book will show you how to begin training by the numbers and open up a whole new world of training performance and efficiency. With so much data collection it appears difficult to isolate what is important, but that is exactly what you will learn to do in this book, making training with these tools simple and rewarding.
Everyone knows there's more than one way to train, and that's the fun of training in general, to find your own way. It's why I enjoy coaching athletes so much, helping them find the way that works for them. What way best helps athletes to reach their potential, given the resources available, strengths and weaknesses, and race goals, can be calculated and measured, giving you the freedom and power to create your best way of training.
Going by Feel
I once had a very famous and successful triathlete tell me he liked "to go by feel" in his training and therefore didn't want to use data. It is perfectly fine to go by feel; no one is saying athletes should be robots and simply follow a set program of numbers. At the highest levels of the sport, athletes must use their feel and sense of their bodies to get that extra percentage point of improvement and performance. But collection and analysis of the data are what helps an athlete better understand and improve his or her sense of feel. In the end, the data are simply numbers, representing what has been done in training and helping us project what still needs to be done. The real art of coaching and training comes from the decisions made from what the data tell us. Those decisions become easier with a clearer picture, as we begin to know more and more about the athlete.
Data and the Mind
In all my days of racing, the differences between my best races and my worst races usually only came down to one thing, and it wasn't health, injury, or equipment. It was what I was thinking on that start line. When I was timid and unsure of myself, I raced poorly. When I knew I was ready, I was eager to prove myself against the best. It wasn't really my training as much as my confidence in how the training had prepared me. When you've been tracking and seeing the improvement in your training, it is hard not to be confident in the preparation, which keeps you motivated to train and step to the start line ready to race.
About This Book
Part I, Triathlon Training Technology, will introduce you to the key training devices for cycling, running, and swimming. These chapters will help you make intelligent choices if you decide to purchase a new training device. Before using these devices in your training, you will need to assess your current fitness level and then set some training goals. That's where Part II, Planning Your Training, comes in.
Every training and racing decision you make, including equipment, nutrition, volume, and intensity, along with timing, depends on your goals. Determining the training to meet your goals in different times of the year, is where individuality is most important. The training decisions you make should support those goals and your needs as an athlete. In Part II we dive into better assessing your needs as an athlete, using the data from these tools, and then planning on how to meet those needs through the season, according to the goals you have set.
In Part III, High-Tech Periodization, we go step by step through the season, understanding how to prioritize training needs and analyzing how effective the current training decisions are, according to the goals you have set and the timeline available until race day. This allows you to make sure you are on a consistent improvement track and preparing to meet your goals.
In Part IV, Race Analysis for Winning Results, we use the data from prerace, during the race, and postrace, as well as from the entire season, to better examine athlete tendencies (both positive and negative), what types of race strategies and training the athlete responds best to, and how effective the overall training decisions for the season were. We can also use this to better plan paces and even nutrition strategies.
As an added benefit, many of the figures provided throughout this book are screenshots from actual races or training sessions with the coach's notes and comments left exactly as they were in real time, giving you an inside look at the coach/athlete relationship.
This book is a guide on this journey to help you find your best way of training, so you can be on the start line confident and ready to maximize your fitness and training. Let's get started.
Popular and Useful Technology Used to Train During Runs
As popular as power meters are in the cycling world, GPS (global positioning system) units are even more popular in the running world. Just about every serious heart rate monitor brand on the market offers a GPS or some type of speed-distance device with it.
As popular as power meters are in the cycling world, GPS (global positioning system) units are even more popular in the running world. Just about every serious heart rate monitor brand on the market offers a GPS or some type of speed-distance device with it. And just about every GPS unit on the market now offers a heart rate monitor with it as well. If it doesn't use GPS satellites, it likely uses an accelerometer to measure speed and distance, usually a foot pod placed in the shoe that measures the accelerations and decelerations of the foot, to determine stride length and stride rate. In running, stride rate is the revolutions per minute (rpm) based on how many times the foot strikes the ground in a single minute. Running rpm are also referred to as cadence.
This chapter covers popular and useful technology used to train during runs, along with some useful terminology that will help you interpret and understand the data the technology provides.
Global Positioning System (GPS)
Most athletes understand GPS units a lot more than power meters and power data because the information they provide is easier to conceptualize, for example, how fast one is running. If you produce more watts on the bike, you're not necessarily going faster (such as when going uphill), but if you push the pace on a run, you are definitely going faster. If you produce less watts on the bike, you're not necessarily going slower either (such as when coasting downhill or with a strong tailwind). If you run easier, you are almost always running slower than if you run hard.
A GPS device uses a network of 24 satellites that have been placed into orbit by the U.S. Department of Defense. GPS works in any weather, anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day without subscription or fee (Garmin 2015). These GPS satellites circle the earth transmitting information back to earth where GPS devices use triangulation to calculate the user's exact location.
The GPS receivers are very accurate due to their multichannel design. Some of the top GPS watches use 12 parallel channel receivers to initially lock onto the satellites and maintain a strong lock in settings such as dense foliage or among tall buildings. In general, the common GPS watches today are accurate to within an average of 15 meters.
Most GPS watches generate data files that can be uploaded to a third-party software suite for postworkout analysis, through external sensors like wireless ANT+ protocol, usually by using a USB cable or Bluetooth technology.
Speed-Distance Devices (Accelerometers)
These devices are similar to GPS watches, but instead of using satellites to determine speed and distance, they use a motion sensor (accelerometer). Most commonly this is a foot pod attached to your shoe.
Because accelerometers do not rely on GPS signals, they are popular for their use indoors, usually on treadmills.
Foot Pods
A foot pod uses an accelerometer, which measures the time the foot is in contact with the ground and counts the number of strides. With this, the foot pod calculates running pace, which gets transmitted to the watch.
The foot pod should be calibrated to each user, which accounts for individual running biomechanics and running shoes. Some athletes have reported as much as a 12 percent or more difference in calibration factors between racing in flats versus trainers.
GPS units or other speed-distance devices help to show the changes in grade (terrain) and the intensity of the effort athletes are putting forth. Both of these variables (grade and intensity) contribute to the physiological demands of running on terrain that is not flat.
In chapter 1, we discussed training with heart rate, showing the pros and cons while on the bike. The same basic principles apply with running, as heart rate is not an output-based metric. Remember, HR has a linear response to an increase in intensity, but it will only increase up to O2max, which is the maximal volume of oxygen the body can utilize. This is due to an athlete's O2max being limited to a large extent by the cardiovascular system's ability to pump blood. Once we reach that limit, HR can no longer increase to match an increase in intensity.
Long before GPS watches, most runners used the distance covered and the time it took to determine pace, which was the primary method for tracking training load and training intensity. This basic approach works really well on flat terrain, but when examining the intensity and training load generated by varied-pace running on rolling or hilly terrain, there is a lot that can be missed.
Simply using distance and time to measure the quality of intense running works really well on a track, but what if you are not doing all of your intervals on a track? What if the other runs in your training are on hilly courses?
Some of the most important runs in your training are recovery runs. Using distance and time to accurately measure intensity and training load while on open or uneven terrain is simply not as accurate as we would like it to be, which can lead to overdoing a recovery run without knowing it.
Stress-Based Periodization
Training for triathlon can be one of the most complicated things to master in perhaps all of sport, especially as the goals and competitive levels get higher and higher. Think about all the variables that can affect it, from those in our control to the randomness of sicknesses, non-sport-related injuries, stress, crashes, race mechanicals, and more.
In God we trust. All others bring data.
William Edwards Demming
Training for triathlon can be one of the most complicated things to master in perhaps all of sport, especially as the goals and competitive levels get higher and higher. Think about all the variables that can affect it, from those in our control to the randomness of sicknesses, non-sport-related injuries, stress, crashes, race mechanicals, and more.
It's no wonder the chapter-opening quote discusses God and faith; I have seen plenty of athletes who use prayer to try to help their performance. It makes sense that with so many things seemingly out of our control, we have to use our faith that the things we can control are good enough to help us achieve our goals.
If you look at the top professional triathletes in the world, especially those chasing the Olympics, many of them train with a coach and some training partners on a daily basis. They travel to remote places in the world to train without distraction, with a group of similarly minded and skilled athletes who can push them. They have a coach watch all their moves to help keep them doing things technically excellent and also for telling them when to slow down and not push too hard.
In the world of elite endurance sports, we call this a daily training environment, or DTE for short. Not many athletes in the world can commit to a DTE that involves travel around the world, with everything devoted to training and racing, and eliminating almost everything else to be the best at the sport. Not many athletes want to give that level of commitment, since the sport is their escape and an outlet to be competitive and healthy. They have families, responsibilities, careers, and more.
But that doesn't mean athletes don't want to work hard or try their best to maximize their training time and commitment to the sport. They are fascinated with the challenge of long-course triathlon and want to compete at a high level, while still trying to balance all of life's demands, stressors, distractions, and more.
Ask many triathletes what their biggest challenge is with doing triathlon, and they will likely tell you time for training. The time commitment to compete in a 70.3, or even just complete one, is enormous. The time commitment for a full Ironman is no less than 10 hours per week, just to finish. If your goals are well beyond finishing, you definitely need more time than that.
This time challenge only adds to the burden of getting training right, because there can't be mistakes in training. And with limited training time, but a lot of time spent away from training involved with other variables in daily life, it becomes even harder to get the training right. Overreach in a workout, and you might lose a few following quality sessions because you're too tired or possibly injured or sick.
But with applying numbers to efforts and intensities, you eliminate a lot of the guesswork. You don't have to take the big risks in your training. In fact, you can dial in the perfect training stress nearly every time, whenever you need, based on your goals and history.
You can also track the numbers and prescribe fitness based on the numbers, instead of postscribing workouts to determine what happened. Once you know what event you're training for, much like you can do with an annual training plan and breaking the year into cycles, with stress-based periodization you can begin to plot the road map to where you want to go. The road map and periodization cycle is written out by numbers, to define the load.
Traditionally, athletes set up their annual training plan (ATP) with the load distinguished by volume of hours trained. This is not a good gauge of training load because intensity, and the amount of training at specific intensities, is the biggest determinant of training success and stress load.
As mentioned in previous chapters, volume is a very overrated metric, and the more you use TSS to track your fitness, the more you will find that to be true. What you are training for in long-course triathlon is not the Tour de France. It's not multiple long days of four to six hours in the saddle, going very hard for 21 of 23 days. That test requires a large amount of volume on a daily basis.
Long-course triathlon is a single-day event. Your ability to peak for that one day, making sure everything comes together, is the key to success. Come race day, you are all in. You have to get it right, and the numbers of stress-based periodization, using TSS to help plan and execute training, are what help you maximize training on that day.
Benefits of Technology in Training
In all my days of racing as an elite triathlete, there was never a single piece of equipment I could use that would allow me to train poorly, or dumb, and make up for it on race day.
In all my days of racing as an elite triathlete, there was never a single piece of equipment I could use that would allow me to train poorly, or dumb, and make up for it on race day. There was no magical wheel set, aerodynamic frameset or helmet, pair of race shoes, or innovative wetsuit that changed the fact that how well I trained on a daily basis made all the difference on race day.
Look in most transition areas and you'll find the latest and greatest of these items, but probably few items devoted to executing daily training better. Most of the athletes who come into these races are undertrained or overtrained, and no bike or other piece of equipment will change that fact to any significant degree.
A small segment of athletes in the race are poised to do well. They have figured out how to balance training stress, recovery, life and job demands, and family commitments. They were able to see the signals that their training was going well and were able to keep it that way. They are likely the athletes you train with and are beating in the sessions but somehow lose to each race. Or they are the athletes who never seem to have a bad race. Or they're the athletes who always seem to peak perfectly at the biggest races. To many, these athletes are either very lucky or they know some magical formula we're all dying to know.
Many athletes scour articles and blogs, reading all they can, trying to process all the information out there, convinced it will make clear how to train. What tends to happen though is the exact opposite. Athletes read and try to put into practice everything they read about the latest interval set, or strength equipment, or long ride with big gear climbs, and so on. With so much information bombarding athletes, they get more confused and never stick to one plan, trying to do every plan out there, much of it not addressing their own needs, just what is popular.
Athletes get power meters, heart rate monitors, and GPS systems and look at screen after screen of data from their training, trying to figure out what it all means and where the secret information within it shows what to do next.
There is an infinite amount of information available on training for a triathlon, but in the end it is all about filtering that information so it makes sense for the individual athlete. This is the purpose of this book. We can't all be Ironman world champions, so training like one isn't going to work for the majority of athletes. Athletes simply need to understand their own goals and then decipher the information from their training that matches their goals, according to the time of year and amount of time until race day.
Athletes who have purchased generic training plans or taken a free one out of a recent magazine inevitably find some challenge with it, because it can't account for their whole race schedule, their past training history, their strengths and weaknesses, and what training groups and resources are available in their area.
A frustration I've had with most training plans, and many traditional coaches, is the belief that there is a set number of weeks to devote to a specific type of training. For example, many coaches say that athletes need 12 weeks of aerobic base-building work and then 12 weeks of race-specific work to be ready to perform well. That might work for some, but what if they really need 16 to 20 weeks of aerobic base work? What if their basic aerobic fitness is lacking so much that it should be almost all they focus on for many months? Otherwise, the athlete is coming to the start line with not enough aerobic fitness to make any race-specific work worthwhile. If an athlete hasn't shown he or she can last at an aerobic intensity for 12 hours, how is he or she going to break 12 hours in an Ironman? These things can't be rushed, and setting some arbitrary number because of historical norms doesn't help the individual athlete meet his or her specific needs.
What if the athlete has been doing multiple long-course races each year, for many years? Do you think that athlete needs to still do 12 weeks of aerobic base-building work? No, of course not. The athlete's aerobic fitness isn't lacking; it's the ability to hold a higher intensity during the race that needs to be addressed. This athlete would waste 12 weeks of opportunities to address his or her weakness and miss the potential for a huge breakthrough!
The Power of Data
I run into many athletes who think power meters and other technological tools are a waste of money. It's ironic that usually these athletes own some sort of smartphone, use complex software at their day jobs, or use computers in just about every aspect of their daily lives, and yet there is a disconnect that prevents them from realizing that technology could be as much of a benefit to their training as it is for their daily life.
If you're still wondering if using technology is best for you, let me ask you a few questions. What if I told you there was a way to determine exactly when you had enough aerobic fitness, so you could maximize training time by focusing more time on weaknesses, instead of aerobic work?
What if you could see your exact weaknesses and get direct, measurable feedback on how well your training is addressing them?
What if you could see exactly how many intervals you should do in a workout to get just the right amount of training stress, so you can recover quicker and pack in a better week of training?
What if you found the perfect tapering strategy and wanted to replicate it perfectly for each major race? What if you could actually see into the future to where your fitness will be down the road and how well your taper will be executed?
What if I told you that once you hit a certain performance marker in your training, the chances of achieving your goal or exceeding it just increased dramatically?
What if I told you we could look back at your training from the past season or longer and see where you made training mistakes or errors in judgment for your training load, what training load got you sick or injured, or where you plateaued, all in a matter of minutes?
What if you could be shown your training tendencies so you could come up with a new and better stimulus to get the fitness and performance jump you're looking for?
Believe it or not, all this can be done, and it really isn't that hard. You just have to know what data to collect, the elements of the data to look at, and when to look at them, according to your goals and timeline to race day.
What data should you collect? Depending on how many variables of your training you want to control, you should consider a power meter for your bike, a speed-distance device for your running (GPS or accelerometer-based watch), a heart rate monitor that will work for both devices, and something that can measure your swim pace and distance. If you have and regularly use all of these, you will be able to do all the things I've mentioned.
If you've been training old-school style, without any of these tools, this book will show you how to begin training by the numbers and open up a whole new world of training performance and efficiency. With so much data collection it appears difficult to isolate what is important, but that is exactly what you will learn to do in this book, making training with these tools simple and rewarding.
Everyone knows there's more than one way to train, and that's the fun of training in general, to find your own way. It's why I enjoy coaching athletes so much, helping them find the way that works for them. What way best helps athletes to reach their potential, given the resources available, strengths and weaknesses, and race goals, can be calculated and measured, giving you the freedom and power to create your best way of training.
Going by Feel
I once had a very famous and successful triathlete tell me he liked "to go by feel" in his training and therefore didn't want to use data. It is perfectly fine to go by feel; no one is saying athletes should be robots and simply follow a set program of numbers. At the highest levels of the sport, athletes must use their feel and sense of their bodies to get that extra percentage point of improvement and performance. But collection and analysis of the data are what helps an athlete better understand and improve his or her sense of feel. In the end, the data are simply numbers, representing what has been done in training and helping us project what still needs to be done. The real art of coaching and training comes from the decisions made from what the data tell us. Those decisions become easier with a clearer picture, as we begin to know more and more about the athlete.
Data and the Mind
In all my days of racing, the differences between my best races and my worst races usually only came down to one thing, and it wasn't health, injury, or equipment. It was what I was thinking on that start line. When I was timid and unsure of myself, I raced poorly. When I knew I was ready, I was eager to prove myself against the best. It wasn't really my training as much as my confidence in how the training had prepared me. When you've been tracking and seeing the improvement in your training, it is hard not to be confident in the preparation, which keeps you motivated to train and step to the start line ready to race.
About This Book
Part I, Triathlon Training Technology, will introduce you to the key training devices for cycling, running, and swimming. These chapters will help you make intelligent choices if you decide to purchase a new training device. Before using these devices in your training, you will need to assess your current fitness level and then set some training goals. That's where Part II, Planning Your Training, comes in.
Every training and racing decision you make, including equipment, nutrition, volume, and intensity, along with timing, depends on your goals. Determining the training to meet your goals in different times of the year, is where individuality is most important. The training decisions you make should support those goals and your needs as an athlete. In Part II we dive into better assessing your needs as an athlete, using the data from these tools, and then planning on how to meet those needs through the season, according to the goals you have set.
In Part III, High-Tech Periodization, we go step by step through the season, understanding how to prioritize training needs and analyzing how effective the current training decisions are, according to the goals you have set and the timeline available until race day. This allows you to make sure you are on a consistent improvement track and preparing to meet your goals.
In Part IV, Race Analysis for Winning Results, we use the data from prerace, during the race, and postrace, as well as from the entire season, to better examine athlete tendencies (both positive and negative), what types of race strategies and training the athlete responds best to, and how effective the overall training decisions for the season were. We can also use this to better plan paces and even nutrition strategies.
As an added benefit, many of the figures provided throughout this book are screenshots from actual races or training sessions with the coach's notes and comments left exactly as they were in real time, giving you an inside look at the coach/athlete relationship.
This book is a guide on this journey to help you find your best way of training, so you can be on the start line confident and ready to maximize your fitness and training. Let's get started.
Popular and Useful Technology Used to Train During Runs
As popular as power meters are in the cycling world, GPS (global positioning system) units are even more popular in the running world. Just about every serious heart rate monitor brand on the market offers a GPS or some type of speed-distance device with it.
As popular as power meters are in the cycling world, GPS (global positioning system) units are even more popular in the running world. Just about every serious heart rate monitor brand on the market offers a GPS or some type of speed-distance device with it. And just about every GPS unit on the market now offers a heart rate monitor with it as well. If it doesn't use GPS satellites, it likely uses an accelerometer to measure speed and distance, usually a foot pod placed in the shoe that measures the accelerations and decelerations of the foot, to determine stride length and stride rate. In running, stride rate is the revolutions per minute (rpm) based on how many times the foot strikes the ground in a single minute. Running rpm are also referred to as cadence.
This chapter covers popular and useful technology used to train during runs, along with some useful terminology that will help you interpret and understand the data the technology provides.
Global Positioning System (GPS)
Most athletes understand GPS units a lot more than power meters and power data because the information they provide is easier to conceptualize, for example, how fast one is running. If you produce more watts on the bike, you're not necessarily going faster (such as when going uphill), but if you push the pace on a run, you are definitely going faster. If you produce less watts on the bike, you're not necessarily going slower either (such as when coasting downhill or with a strong tailwind). If you run easier, you are almost always running slower than if you run hard.
A GPS device uses a network of 24 satellites that have been placed into orbit by the U.S. Department of Defense. GPS works in any weather, anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day without subscription or fee (Garmin 2015). These GPS satellites circle the earth transmitting information back to earth where GPS devices use triangulation to calculate the user's exact location.
The GPS receivers are very accurate due to their multichannel design. Some of the top GPS watches use 12 parallel channel receivers to initially lock onto the satellites and maintain a strong lock in settings such as dense foliage or among tall buildings. In general, the common GPS watches today are accurate to within an average of 15 meters.
Most GPS watches generate data files that can be uploaded to a third-party software suite for postworkout analysis, through external sensors like wireless ANT+ protocol, usually by using a USB cable or Bluetooth technology.
Speed-Distance Devices (Accelerometers)
These devices are similar to GPS watches, but instead of using satellites to determine speed and distance, they use a motion sensor (accelerometer). Most commonly this is a foot pod attached to your shoe.
Because accelerometers do not rely on GPS signals, they are popular for their use indoors, usually on treadmills.
Foot Pods
A foot pod uses an accelerometer, which measures the time the foot is in contact with the ground and counts the number of strides. With this, the foot pod calculates running pace, which gets transmitted to the watch.
The foot pod should be calibrated to each user, which accounts for individual running biomechanics and running shoes. Some athletes have reported as much as a 12 percent or more difference in calibration factors between racing in flats versus trainers.
GPS units or other speed-distance devices help to show the changes in grade (terrain) and the intensity of the effort athletes are putting forth. Both of these variables (grade and intensity) contribute to the physiological demands of running on terrain that is not flat.
In chapter 1, we discussed training with heart rate, showing the pros and cons while on the bike. The same basic principles apply with running, as heart rate is not an output-based metric. Remember, HR has a linear response to an increase in intensity, but it will only increase up to O2max, which is the maximal volume of oxygen the body can utilize. This is due to an athlete's O2max being limited to a large extent by the cardiovascular system's ability to pump blood. Once we reach that limit, HR can no longer increase to match an increase in intensity.
Long before GPS watches, most runners used the distance covered and the time it took to determine pace, which was the primary method for tracking training load and training intensity. This basic approach works really well on flat terrain, but when examining the intensity and training load generated by varied-pace running on rolling or hilly terrain, there is a lot that can be missed.
Simply using distance and time to measure the quality of intense running works really well on a track, but what if you are not doing all of your intervals on a track? What if the other runs in your training are on hilly courses?
Some of the most important runs in your training are recovery runs. Using distance and time to accurately measure intensity and training load while on open or uneven terrain is simply not as accurate as we would like it to be, which can lead to overdoing a recovery run without knowing it.
Stress-Based Periodization
Training for triathlon can be one of the most complicated things to master in perhaps all of sport, especially as the goals and competitive levels get higher and higher. Think about all the variables that can affect it, from those in our control to the randomness of sicknesses, non-sport-related injuries, stress, crashes, race mechanicals, and more.
In God we trust. All others bring data.
William Edwards Demming
Training for triathlon can be one of the most complicated things to master in perhaps all of sport, especially as the goals and competitive levels get higher and higher. Think about all the variables that can affect it, from those in our control to the randomness of sicknesses, non-sport-related injuries, stress, crashes, race mechanicals, and more.
It's no wonder the chapter-opening quote discusses God and faith; I have seen plenty of athletes who use prayer to try to help their performance. It makes sense that with so many things seemingly out of our control, we have to use our faith that the things we can control are good enough to help us achieve our goals.
If you look at the top professional triathletes in the world, especially those chasing the Olympics, many of them train with a coach and some training partners on a daily basis. They travel to remote places in the world to train without distraction, with a group of similarly minded and skilled athletes who can push them. They have a coach watch all their moves to help keep them doing things technically excellent and also for telling them when to slow down and not push too hard.
In the world of elite endurance sports, we call this a daily training environment, or DTE for short. Not many athletes in the world can commit to a DTE that involves travel around the world, with everything devoted to training and racing, and eliminating almost everything else to be the best at the sport. Not many athletes want to give that level of commitment, since the sport is their escape and an outlet to be competitive and healthy. They have families, responsibilities, careers, and more.
But that doesn't mean athletes don't want to work hard or try their best to maximize their training time and commitment to the sport. They are fascinated with the challenge of long-course triathlon and want to compete at a high level, while still trying to balance all of life's demands, stressors, distractions, and more.
Ask many triathletes what their biggest challenge is with doing triathlon, and they will likely tell you time for training. The time commitment to compete in a 70.3, or even just complete one, is enormous. The time commitment for a full Ironman is no less than 10 hours per week, just to finish. If your goals are well beyond finishing, you definitely need more time than that.
This time challenge only adds to the burden of getting training right, because there can't be mistakes in training. And with limited training time, but a lot of time spent away from training involved with other variables in daily life, it becomes even harder to get the training right. Overreach in a workout, and you might lose a few following quality sessions because you're too tired or possibly injured or sick.
But with applying numbers to efforts and intensities, you eliminate a lot of the guesswork. You don't have to take the big risks in your training. In fact, you can dial in the perfect training stress nearly every time, whenever you need, based on your goals and history.
You can also track the numbers and prescribe fitness based on the numbers, instead of postscribing workouts to determine what happened. Once you know what event you're training for, much like you can do with an annual training plan and breaking the year into cycles, with stress-based periodization you can begin to plot the road map to where you want to go. The road map and periodization cycle is written out by numbers, to define the load.
Traditionally, athletes set up their annual training plan (ATP) with the load distinguished by volume of hours trained. This is not a good gauge of training load because intensity, and the amount of training at specific intensities, is the biggest determinant of training success and stress load.
As mentioned in previous chapters, volume is a very overrated metric, and the more you use TSS to track your fitness, the more you will find that to be true. What you are training for in long-course triathlon is not the Tour de France. It's not multiple long days of four to six hours in the saddle, going very hard for 21 of 23 days. That test requires a large amount of volume on a daily basis.
Long-course triathlon is a single-day event. Your ability to peak for that one day, making sure everything comes together, is the key to success. Come race day, you are all in. You have to get it right, and the numbers of stress-based periodization, using TSS to help plan and execute training, are what help you maximize training on that day.
Benefits of Technology in Training
In all my days of racing as an elite triathlete, there was never a single piece of equipment I could use that would allow me to train poorly, or dumb, and make up for it on race day.
In all my days of racing as an elite triathlete, there was never a single piece of equipment I could use that would allow me to train poorly, or dumb, and make up for it on race day. There was no magical wheel set, aerodynamic frameset or helmet, pair of race shoes, or innovative wetsuit that changed the fact that how well I trained on a daily basis made all the difference on race day.
Look in most transition areas and you'll find the latest and greatest of these items, but probably few items devoted to executing daily training better. Most of the athletes who come into these races are undertrained or overtrained, and no bike or other piece of equipment will change that fact to any significant degree.
A small segment of athletes in the race are poised to do well. They have figured out how to balance training stress, recovery, life and job demands, and family commitments. They were able to see the signals that their training was going well and were able to keep it that way. They are likely the athletes you train with and are beating in the sessions but somehow lose to each race. Or they are the athletes who never seem to have a bad race. Or they're the athletes who always seem to peak perfectly at the biggest races. To many, these athletes are either very lucky or they know some magical formula we're all dying to know.
Many athletes scour articles and blogs, reading all they can, trying to process all the information out there, convinced it will make clear how to train. What tends to happen though is the exact opposite. Athletes read and try to put into practice everything they read about the latest interval set, or strength equipment, or long ride with big gear climbs, and so on. With so much information bombarding athletes, they get more confused and never stick to one plan, trying to do every plan out there, much of it not addressing their own needs, just what is popular.
Athletes get power meters, heart rate monitors, and GPS systems and look at screen after screen of data from their training, trying to figure out what it all means and where the secret information within it shows what to do next.
There is an infinite amount of information available on training for a triathlon, but in the end it is all about filtering that information so it makes sense for the individual athlete. This is the purpose of this book. We can't all be Ironman world champions, so training like one isn't going to work for the majority of athletes. Athletes simply need to understand their own goals and then decipher the information from their training that matches their goals, according to the time of year and amount of time until race day.
Athletes who have purchased generic training plans or taken a free one out of a recent magazine inevitably find some challenge with it, because it can't account for their whole race schedule, their past training history, their strengths and weaknesses, and what training groups and resources are available in their area.
A frustration I've had with most training plans, and many traditional coaches, is the belief that there is a set number of weeks to devote to a specific type of training. For example, many coaches say that athletes need 12 weeks of aerobic base-building work and then 12 weeks of race-specific work to be ready to perform well. That might work for some, but what if they really need 16 to 20 weeks of aerobic base work? What if their basic aerobic fitness is lacking so much that it should be almost all they focus on for many months? Otherwise, the athlete is coming to the start line with not enough aerobic fitness to make any race-specific work worthwhile. If an athlete hasn't shown he or she can last at an aerobic intensity for 12 hours, how is he or she going to break 12 hours in an Ironman? These things can't be rushed, and setting some arbitrary number because of historical norms doesn't help the individual athlete meet his or her specific needs.
What if the athlete has been doing multiple long-course races each year, for many years? Do you think that athlete needs to still do 12 weeks of aerobic base-building work? No, of course not. The athlete's aerobic fitness isn't lacking; it's the ability to hold a higher intensity during the race that needs to be addressed. This athlete would waste 12 weeks of opportunities to address his or her weakness and miss the potential for a huge breakthrough!
The Power of Data
I run into many athletes who think power meters and other technological tools are a waste of money. It's ironic that usually these athletes own some sort of smartphone, use complex software at their day jobs, or use computers in just about every aspect of their daily lives, and yet there is a disconnect that prevents them from realizing that technology could be as much of a benefit to their training as it is for their daily life.
If you're still wondering if using technology is best for you, let me ask you a few questions. What if I told you there was a way to determine exactly when you had enough aerobic fitness, so you could maximize training time by focusing more time on weaknesses, instead of aerobic work?
What if you could see your exact weaknesses and get direct, measurable feedback on how well your training is addressing them?
What if you could see exactly how many intervals you should do in a workout to get just the right amount of training stress, so you can recover quicker and pack in a better week of training?
What if you found the perfect tapering strategy and wanted to replicate it perfectly for each major race? What if you could actually see into the future to where your fitness will be down the road and how well your taper will be executed?
What if I told you that once you hit a certain performance marker in your training, the chances of achieving your goal or exceeding it just increased dramatically?
What if I told you we could look back at your training from the past season or longer and see where you made training mistakes or errors in judgment for your training load, what training load got you sick or injured, or where you plateaued, all in a matter of minutes?
What if you could be shown your training tendencies so you could come up with a new and better stimulus to get the fitness and performance jump you're looking for?
Believe it or not, all this can be done, and it really isn't that hard. You just have to know what data to collect, the elements of the data to look at, and when to look at them, according to your goals and timeline to race day.
What data should you collect? Depending on how many variables of your training you want to control, you should consider a power meter for your bike, a speed-distance device for your running (GPS or accelerometer-based watch), a heart rate monitor that will work for both devices, and something that can measure your swim pace and distance. If you have and regularly use all of these, you will be able to do all the things I've mentioned.
If you've been training old-school style, without any of these tools, this book will show you how to begin training by the numbers and open up a whole new world of training performance and efficiency. With so much data collection it appears difficult to isolate what is important, but that is exactly what you will learn to do in this book, making training with these tools simple and rewarding.
Everyone knows there's more than one way to train, and that's the fun of training in general, to find your own way. It's why I enjoy coaching athletes so much, helping them find the way that works for them. What way best helps athletes to reach their potential, given the resources available, strengths and weaknesses, and race goals, can be calculated and measured, giving you the freedom and power to create your best way of training.
Going by Feel
I once had a very famous and successful triathlete tell me he liked "to go by feel" in his training and therefore didn't want to use data. It is perfectly fine to go by feel; no one is saying athletes should be robots and simply follow a set program of numbers. At the highest levels of the sport, athletes must use their feel and sense of their bodies to get that extra percentage point of improvement and performance. But collection and analysis of the data are what helps an athlete better understand and improve his or her sense of feel. In the end, the data are simply numbers, representing what has been done in training and helping us project what still needs to be done. The real art of coaching and training comes from the decisions made from what the data tell us. Those decisions become easier with a clearer picture, as we begin to know more and more about the athlete.
Data and the Mind
In all my days of racing, the differences between my best races and my worst races usually only came down to one thing, and it wasn't health, injury, or equipment. It was what I was thinking on that start line. When I was timid and unsure of myself, I raced poorly. When I knew I was ready, I was eager to prove myself against the best. It wasn't really my training as much as my confidence in how the training had prepared me. When you've been tracking and seeing the improvement in your training, it is hard not to be confident in the preparation, which keeps you motivated to train and step to the start line ready to race.
About This Book
Part I, Triathlon Training Technology, will introduce you to the key training devices for cycling, running, and swimming. These chapters will help you make intelligent choices if you decide to purchase a new training device. Before using these devices in your training, you will need to assess your current fitness level and then set some training goals. That's where Part II, Planning Your Training, comes in.
Every training and racing decision you make, including equipment, nutrition, volume, and intensity, along with timing, depends on your goals. Determining the training to meet your goals in different times of the year, is where individuality is most important. The training decisions you make should support those goals and your needs as an athlete. In Part II we dive into better assessing your needs as an athlete, using the data from these tools, and then planning on how to meet those needs through the season, according to the goals you have set.
In Part III, High-Tech Periodization, we go step by step through the season, understanding how to prioritize training needs and analyzing how effective the current training decisions are, according to the goals you have set and the timeline available until race day. This allows you to make sure you are on a consistent improvement track and preparing to meet your goals.
In Part IV, Race Analysis for Winning Results, we use the data from prerace, during the race, and postrace, as well as from the entire season, to better examine athlete tendencies (both positive and negative), what types of race strategies and training the athlete responds best to, and how effective the overall training decisions for the season were. We can also use this to better plan paces and even nutrition strategies.
As an added benefit, many of the figures provided throughout this book are screenshots from actual races or training sessions with the coach's notes and comments left exactly as they were in real time, giving you an inside look at the coach/athlete relationship.
This book is a guide on this journey to help you find your best way of training, so you can be on the start line confident and ready to maximize your fitness and training. Let's get started.
Popular and Useful Technology Used to Train During Runs
As popular as power meters are in the cycling world, GPS (global positioning system) units are even more popular in the running world. Just about every serious heart rate monitor brand on the market offers a GPS or some type of speed-distance device with it.
As popular as power meters are in the cycling world, GPS (global positioning system) units are even more popular in the running world. Just about every serious heart rate monitor brand on the market offers a GPS or some type of speed-distance device with it. And just about every GPS unit on the market now offers a heart rate monitor with it as well. If it doesn't use GPS satellites, it likely uses an accelerometer to measure speed and distance, usually a foot pod placed in the shoe that measures the accelerations and decelerations of the foot, to determine stride length and stride rate. In running, stride rate is the revolutions per minute (rpm) based on how many times the foot strikes the ground in a single minute. Running rpm are also referred to as cadence.
This chapter covers popular and useful technology used to train during runs, along with some useful terminology that will help you interpret and understand the data the technology provides.
Global Positioning System (GPS)
Most athletes understand GPS units a lot more than power meters and power data because the information they provide is easier to conceptualize, for example, how fast one is running. If you produce more watts on the bike, you're not necessarily going faster (such as when going uphill), but if you push the pace on a run, you are definitely going faster. If you produce less watts on the bike, you're not necessarily going slower either (such as when coasting downhill or with a strong tailwind). If you run easier, you are almost always running slower than if you run hard.
A GPS device uses a network of 24 satellites that have been placed into orbit by the U.S. Department of Defense. GPS works in any weather, anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day without subscription or fee (Garmin 2015). These GPS satellites circle the earth transmitting information back to earth where GPS devices use triangulation to calculate the user's exact location.
The GPS receivers are very accurate due to their multichannel design. Some of the top GPS watches use 12 parallel channel receivers to initially lock onto the satellites and maintain a strong lock in settings such as dense foliage or among tall buildings. In general, the common GPS watches today are accurate to within an average of 15 meters.
Most GPS watches generate data files that can be uploaded to a third-party software suite for postworkout analysis, through external sensors like wireless ANT+ protocol, usually by using a USB cable or Bluetooth technology.
Speed-Distance Devices (Accelerometers)
These devices are similar to GPS watches, but instead of using satellites to determine speed and distance, they use a motion sensor (accelerometer). Most commonly this is a foot pod attached to your shoe.
Because accelerometers do not rely on GPS signals, they are popular for their use indoors, usually on treadmills.
Foot Pods
A foot pod uses an accelerometer, which measures the time the foot is in contact with the ground and counts the number of strides. With this, the foot pod calculates running pace, which gets transmitted to the watch.
The foot pod should be calibrated to each user, which accounts for individual running biomechanics and running shoes. Some athletes have reported as much as a 12 percent or more difference in calibration factors between racing in flats versus trainers.
GPS units or other speed-distance devices help to show the changes in grade (terrain) and the intensity of the effort athletes are putting forth. Both of these variables (grade and intensity) contribute to the physiological demands of running on terrain that is not flat.
In chapter 1, we discussed training with heart rate, showing the pros and cons while on the bike. The same basic principles apply with running, as heart rate is not an output-based metric. Remember, HR has a linear response to an increase in intensity, but it will only increase up to O2max, which is the maximal volume of oxygen the body can utilize. This is due to an athlete's O2max being limited to a large extent by the cardiovascular system's ability to pump blood. Once we reach that limit, HR can no longer increase to match an increase in intensity.
Long before GPS watches, most runners used the distance covered and the time it took to determine pace, which was the primary method for tracking training load and training intensity. This basic approach works really well on flat terrain, but when examining the intensity and training load generated by varied-pace running on rolling or hilly terrain, there is a lot that can be missed.
Simply using distance and time to measure the quality of intense running works really well on a track, but what if you are not doing all of your intervals on a track? What if the other runs in your training are on hilly courses?
Some of the most important runs in your training are recovery runs. Using distance and time to accurately measure intensity and training load while on open or uneven terrain is simply not as accurate as we would like it to be, which can lead to overdoing a recovery run without knowing it.
Stress-Based Periodization
Training for triathlon can be one of the most complicated things to master in perhaps all of sport, especially as the goals and competitive levels get higher and higher. Think about all the variables that can affect it, from those in our control to the randomness of sicknesses, non-sport-related injuries, stress, crashes, race mechanicals, and more.
In God we trust. All others bring data.
William Edwards Demming
Training for triathlon can be one of the most complicated things to master in perhaps all of sport, especially as the goals and competitive levels get higher and higher. Think about all the variables that can affect it, from those in our control to the randomness of sicknesses, non-sport-related injuries, stress, crashes, race mechanicals, and more.
It's no wonder the chapter-opening quote discusses God and faith; I have seen plenty of athletes who use prayer to try to help their performance. It makes sense that with so many things seemingly out of our control, we have to use our faith that the things we can control are good enough to help us achieve our goals.
If you look at the top professional triathletes in the world, especially those chasing the Olympics, many of them train with a coach and some training partners on a daily basis. They travel to remote places in the world to train without distraction, with a group of similarly minded and skilled athletes who can push them. They have a coach watch all their moves to help keep them doing things technically excellent and also for telling them when to slow down and not push too hard.
In the world of elite endurance sports, we call this a daily training environment, or DTE for short. Not many athletes in the world can commit to a DTE that involves travel around the world, with everything devoted to training and racing, and eliminating almost everything else to be the best at the sport. Not many athletes want to give that level of commitment, since the sport is their escape and an outlet to be competitive and healthy. They have families, responsibilities, careers, and more.
But that doesn't mean athletes don't want to work hard or try their best to maximize their training time and commitment to the sport. They are fascinated with the challenge of long-course triathlon and want to compete at a high level, while still trying to balance all of life's demands, stressors, distractions, and more.
Ask many triathletes what their biggest challenge is with doing triathlon, and they will likely tell you time for training. The time commitment to compete in a 70.3, or even just complete one, is enormous. The time commitment for a full Ironman is no less than 10 hours per week, just to finish. If your goals are well beyond finishing, you definitely need more time than that.
This time challenge only adds to the burden of getting training right, because there can't be mistakes in training. And with limited training time, but a lot of time spent away from training involved with other variables in daily life, it becomes even harder to get the training right. Overreach in a workout, and you might lose a few following quality sessions because you're too tired or possibly injured or sick.
But with applying numbers to efforts and intensities, you eliminate a lot of the guesswork. You don't have to take the big risks in your training. In fact, you can dial in the perfect training stress nearly every time, whenever you need, based on your goals and history.
You can also track the numbers and prescribe fitness based on the numbers, instead of postscribing workouts to determine what happened. Once you know what event you're training for, much like you can do with an annual training plan and breaking the year into cycles, with stress-based periodization you can begin to plot the road map to where you want to go. The road map and periodization cycle is written out by numbers, to define the load.
Traditionally, athletes set up their annual training plan (ATP) with the load distinguished by volume of hours trained. This is not a good gauge of training load because intensity, and the amount of training at specific intensities, is the biggest determinant of training success and stress load.
As mentioned in previous chapters, volume is a very overrated metric, and the more you use TSS to track your fitness, the more you will find that to be true. What you are training for in long-course triathlon is not the Tour de France. It's not multiple long days of four to six hours in the saddle, going very hard for 21 of 23 days. That test requires a large amount of volume on a daily basis.
Long-course triathlon is a single-day event. Your ability to peak for that one day, making sure everything comes together, is the key to success. Come race day, you are all in. You have to get it right, and the numbers of stress-based periodization, using TSS to help plan and execute training, are what help you maximize training on that day.
Benefits of Technology in Training
In all my days of racing as an elite triathlete, there was never a single piece of equipment I could use that would allow me to train poorly, or dumb, and make up for it on race day.
In all my days of racing as an elite triathlete, there was never a single piece of equipment I could use that would allow me to train poorly, or dumb, and make up for it on race day. There was no magical wheel set, aerodynamic frameset or helmet, pair of race shoes, or innovative wetsuit that changed the fact that how well I trained on a daily basis made all the difference on race day.
Look in most transition areas and you'll find the latest and greatest of these items, but probably few items devoted to executing daily training better. Most of the athletes who come into these races are undertrained or overtrained, and no bike or other piece of equipment will change that fact to any significant degree.
A small segment of athletes in the race are poised to do well. They have figured out how to balance training stress, recovery, life and job demands, and family commitments. They were able to see the signals that their training was going well and were able to keep it that way. They are likely the athletes you train with and are beating in the sessions but somehow lose to each race. Or they are the athletes who never seem to have a bad race. Or they're the athletes who always seem to peak perfectly at the biggest races. To many, these athletes are either very lucky or they know some magical formula we're all dying to know.
Many athletes scour articles and blogs, reading all they can, trying to process all the information out there, convinced it will make clear how to train. What tends to happen though is the exact opposite. Athletes read and try to put into practice everything they read about the latest interval set, or strength equipment, or long ride with big gear climbs, and so on. With so much information bombarding athletes, they get more confused and never stick to one plan, trying to do every plan out there, much of it not addressing their own needs, just what is popular.
Athletes get power meters, heart rate monitors, and GPS systems and look at screen after screen of data from their training, trying to figure out what it all means and where the secret information within it shows what to do next.
There is an infinite amount of information available on training for a triathlon, but in the end it is all about filtering that information so it makes sense for the individual athlete. This is the purpose of this book. We can't all be Ironman world champions, so training like one isn't going to work for the majority of athletes. Athletes simply need to understand their own goals and then decipher the information from their training that matches their goals, according to the time of year and amount of time until race day.
Athletes who have purchased generic training plans or taken a free one out of a recent magazine inevitably find some challenge with it, because it can't account for their whole race schedule, their past training history, their strengths and weaknesses, and what training groups and resources are available in their area.
A frustration I've had with most training plans, and many traditional coaches, is the belief that there is a set number of weeks to devote to a specific type of training. For example, many coaches say that athletes need 12 weeks of aerobic base-building work and then 12 weeks of race-specific work to be ready to perform well. That might work for some, but what if they really need 16 to 20 weeks of aerobic base work? What if their basic aerobic fitness is lacking so much that it should be almost all they focus on for many months? Otherwise, the athlete is coming to the start line with not enough aerobic fitness to make any race-specific work worthwhile. If an athlete hasn't shown he or she can last at an aerobic intensity for 12 hours, how is he or she going to break 12 hours in an Ironman? These things can't be rushed, and setting some arbitrary number because of historical norms doesn't help the individual athlete meet his or her specific needs.
What if the athlete has been doing multiple long-course races each year, for many years? Do you think that athlete needs to still do 12 weeks of aerobic base-building work? No, of course not. The athlete's aerobic fitness isn't lacking; it's the ability to hold a higher intensity during the race that needs to be addressed. This athlete would waste 12 weeks of opportunities to address his or her weakness and miss the potential for a huge breakthrough!
The Power of Data
I run into many athletes who think power meters and other technological tools are a waste of money. It's ironic that usually these athletes own some sort of smartphone, use complex software at their day jobs, or use computers in just about every aspect of their daily lives, and yet there is a disconnect that prevents them from realizing that technology could be as much of a benefit to their training as it is for their daily life.
If you're still wondering if using technology is best for you, let me ask you a few questions. What if I told you there was a way to determine exactly when you had enough aerobic fitness, so you could maximize training time by focusing more time on weaknesses, instead of aerobic work?
What if you could see your exact weaknesses and get direct, measurable feedback on how well your training is addressing them?
What if you could see exactly how many intervals you should do in a workout to get just the right amount of training stress, so you can recover quicker and pack in a better week of training?
What if you found the perfect tapering strategy and wanted to replicate it perfectly for each major race? What if you could actually see into the future to where your fitness will be down the road and how well your taper will be executed?
What if I told you that once you hit a certain performance marker in your training, the chances of achieving your goal or exceeding it just increased dramatically?
What if I told you we could look back at your training from the past season or longer and see where you made training mistakes or errors in judgment for your training load, what training load got you sick or injured, or where you plateaued, all in a matter of minutes?
What if you could be shown your training tendencies so you could come up with a new and better stimulus to get the fitness and performance jump you're looking for?
Believe it or not, all this can be done, and it really isn't that hard. You just have to know what data to collect, the elements of the data to look at, and when to look at them, according to your goals and timeline to race day.
What data should you collect? Depending on how many variables of your training you want to control, you should consider a power meter for your bike, a speed-distance device for your running (GPS or accelerometer-based watch), a heart rate monitor that will work for both devices, and something that can measure your swim pace and distance. If you have and regularly use all of these, you will be able to do all the things I've mentioned.
If you've been training old-school style, without any of these tools, this book will show you how to begin training by the numbers and open up a whole new world of training performance and efficiency. With so much data collection it appears difficult to isolate what is important, but that is exactly what you will learn to do in this book, making training with these tools simple and rewarding.
Everyone knows there's more than one way to train, and that's the fun of training in general, to find your own way. It's why I enjoy coaching athletes so much, helping them find the way that works for them. What way best helps athletes to reach their potential, given the resources available, strengths and weaknesses, and race goals, can be calculated and measured, giving you the freedom and power to create your best way of training.
Going by Feel
I once had a very famous and successful triathlete tell me he liked "to go by feel" in his training and therefore didn't want to use data. It is perfectly fine to go by feel; no one is saying athletes should be robots and simply follow a set program of numbers. At the highest levels of the sport, athletes must use their feel and sense of their bodies to get that extra percentage point of improvement and performance. But collection and analysis of the data are what helps an athlete better understand and improve his or her sense of feel. In the end, the data are simply numbers, representing what has been done in training and helping us project what still needs to be done. The real art of coaching and training comes from the decisions made from what the data tell us. Those decisions become easier with a clearer picture, as we begin to know more and more about the athlete.
Data and the Mind
In all my days of racing, the differences between my best races and my worst races usually only came down to one thing, and it wasn't health, injury, or equipment. It was what I was thinking on that start line. When I was timid and unsure of myself, I raced poorly. When I knew I was ready, I was eager to prove myself against the best. It wasn't really my training as much as my confidence in how the training had prepared me. When you've been tracking and seeing the improvement in your training, it is hard not to be confident in the preparation, which keeps you motivated to train and step to the start line ready to race.
About This Book
Part I, Triathlon Training Technology, will introduce you to the key training devices for cycling, running, and swimming. These chapters will help you make intelligent choices if you decide to purchase a new training device. Before using these devices in your training, you will need to assess your current fitness level and then set some training goals. That's where Part II, Planning Your Training, comes in.
Every training and racing decision you make, including equipment, nutrition, volume, and intensity, along with timing, depends on your goals. Determining the training to meet your goals in different times of the year, is where individuality is most important. The training decisions you make should support those goals and your needs as an athlete. In Part II we dive into better assessing your needs as an athlete, using the data from these tools, and then planning on how to meet those needs through the season, according to the goals you have set.
In Part III, High-Tech Periodization, we go step by step through the season, understanding how to prioritize training needs and analyzing how effective the current training decisions are, according to the goals you have set and the timeline available until race day. This allows you to make sure you are on a consistent improvement track and preparing to meet your goals.
In Part IV, Race Analysis for Winning Results, we use the data from prerace, during the race, and postrace, as well as from the entire season, to better examine athlete tendencies (both positive and negative), what types of race strategies and training the athlete responds best to, and how effective the overall training decisions for the season were. We can also use this to better plan paces and even nutrition strategies.
As an added benefit, many of the figures provided throughout this book are screenshots from actual races or training sessions with the coach's notes and comments left exactly as they were in real time, giving you an inside look at the coach/athlete relationship.
This book is a guide on this journey to help you find your best way of training, so you can be on the start line confident and ready to maximize your fitness and training. Let's get started.
Popular and Useful Technology Used to Train During Runs
As popular as power meters are in the cycling world, GPS (global positioning system) units are even more popular in the running world. Just about every serious heart rate monitor brand on the market offers a GPS or some type of speed-distance device with it.
As popular as power meters are in the cycling world, GPS (global positioning system) units are even more popular in the running world. Just about every serious heart rate monitor brand on the market offers a GPS or some type of speed-distance device with it. And just about every GPS unit on the market now offers a heart rate monitor with it as well. If it doesn't use GPS satellites, it likely uses an accelerometer to measure speed and distance, usually a foot pod placed in the shoe that measures the accelerations and decelerations of the foot, to determine stride length and stride rate. In running, stride rate is the revolutions per minute (rpm) based on how many times the foot strikes the ground in a single minute. Running rpm are also referred to as cadence.
This chapter covers popular and useful technology used to train during runs, along with some useful terminology that will help you interpret and understand the data the technology provides.
Global Positioning System (GPS)
Most athletes understand GPS units a lot more than power meters and power data because the information they provide is easier to conceptualize, for example, how fast one is running. If you produce more watts on the bike, you're not necessarily going faster (such as when going uphill), but if you push the pace on a run, you are definitely going faster. If you produce less watts on the bike, you're not necessarily going slower either (such as when coasting downhill or with a strong tailwind). If you run easier, you are almost always running slower than if you run hard.
A GPS device uses a network of 24 satellites that have been placed into orbit by the U.S. Department of Defense. GPS works in any weather, anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day without subscription or fee (Garmin 2015). These GPS satellites circle the earth transmitting information back to earth where GPS devices use triangulation to calculate the user's exact location.
The GPS receivers are very accurate due to their multichannel design. Some of the top GPS watches use 12 parallel channel receivers to initially lock onto the satellites and maintain a strong lock in settings such as dense foliage or among tall buildings. In general, the common GPS watches today are accurate to within an average of 15 meters.
Most GPS watches generate data files that can be uploaded to a third-party software suite for postworkout analysis, through external sensors like wireless ANT+ protocol, usually by using a USB cable or Bluetooth technology.
Speed-Distance Devices (Accelerometers)
These devices are similar to GPS watches, but instead of using satellites to determine speed and distance, they use a motion sensor (accelerometer). Most commonly this is a foot pod attached to your shoe.
Because accelerometers do not rely on GPS signals, they are popular for their use indoors, usually on treadmills.
Foot Pods
A foot pod uses an accelerometer, which measures the time the foot is in contact with the ground and counts the number of strides. With this, the foot pod calculates running pace, which gets transmitted to the watch.
The foot pod should be calibrated to each user, which accounts for individual running biomechanics and running shoes. Some athletes have reported as much as a 12 percent or more difference in calibration factors between racing in flats versus trainers.
GPS units or other speed-distance devices help to show the changes in grade (terrain) and the intensity of the effort athletes are putting forth. Both of these variables (grade and intensity) contribute to the physiological demands of running on terrain that is not flat.
In chapter 1, we discussed training with heart rate, showing the pros and cons while on the bike. The same basic principles apply with running, as heart rate is not an output-based metric. Remember, HR has a linear response to an increase in intensity, but it will only increase up to O2max, which is the maximal volume of oxygen the body can utilize. This is due to an athlete's O2max being limited to a large extent by the cardiovascular system's ability to pump blood. Once we reach that limit, HR can no longer increase to match an increase in intensity.
Long before GPS watches, most runners used the distance covered and the time it took to determine pace, which was the primary method for tracking training load and training intensity. This basic approach works really well on flat terrain, but when examining the intensity and training load generated by varied-pace running on rolling or hilly terrain, there is a lot that can be missed.
Simply using distance and time to measure the quality of intense running works really well on a track, but what if you are not doing all of your intervals on a track? What if the other runs in your training are on hilly courses?
Some of the most important runs in your training are recovery runs. Using distance and time to accurately measure intensity and training load while on open or uneven terrain is simply not as accurate as we would like it to be, which can lead to overdoing a recovery run without knowing it.
Stress-Based Periodization
Training for triathlon can be one of the most complicated things to master in perhaps all of sport, especially as the goals and competitive levels get higher and higher. Think about all the variables that can affect it, from those in our control to the randomness of sicknesses, non-sport-related injuries, stress, crashes, race mechanicals, and more.
In God we trust. All others bring data.
William Edwards Demming
Training for triathlon can be one of the most complicated things to master in perhaps all of sport, especially as the goals and competitive levels get higher and higher. Think about all the variables that can affect it, from those in our control to the randomness of sicknesses, non-sport-related injuries, stress, crashes, race mechanicals, and more.
It's no wonder the chapter-opening quote discusses God and faith; I have seen plenty of athletes who use prayer to try to help their performance. It makes sense that with so many things seemingly out of our control, we have to use our faith that the things we can control are good enough to help us achieve our goals.
If you look at the top professional triathletes in the world, especially those chasing the Olympics, many of them train with a coach and some training partners on a daily basis. They travel to remote places in the world to train without distraction, with a group of similarly minded and skilled athletes who can push them. They have a coach watch all their moves to help keep them doing things technically excellent and also for telling them when to slow down and not push too hard.
In the world of elite endurance sports, we call this a daily training environment, or DTE for short. Not many athletes in the world can commit to a DTE that involves travel around the world, with everything devoted to training and racing, and eliminating almost everything else to be the best at the sport. Not many athletes want to give that level of commitment, since the sport is their escape and an outlet to be competitive and healthy. They have families, responsibilities, careers, and more.
But that doesn't mean athletes don't want to work hard or try their best to maximize their training time and commitment to the sport. They are fascinated with the challenge of long-course triathlon and want to compete at a high level, while still trying to balance all of life's demands, stressors, distractions, and more.
Ask many triathletes what their biggest challenge is with doing triathlon, and they will likely tell you time for training. The time commitment to compete in a 70.3, or even just complete one, is enormous. The time commitment for a full Ironman is no less than 10 hours per week, just to finish. If your goals are well beyond finishing, you definitely need more time than that.
This time challenge only adds to the burden of getting training right, because there can't be mistakes in training. And with limited training time, but a lot of time spent away from training involved with other variables in daily life, it becomes even harder to get the training right. Overreach in a workout, and you might lose a few following quality sessions because you're too tired or possibly injured or sick.
But with applying numbers to efforts and intensities, you eliminate a lot of the guesswork. You don't have to take the big risks in your training. In fact, you can dial in the perfect training stress nearly every time, whenever you need, based on your goals and history.
You can also track the numbers and prescribe fitness based on the numbers, instead of postscribing workouts to determine what happened. Once you know what event you're training for, much like you can do with an annual training plan and breaking the year into cycles, with stress-based periodization you can begin to plot the road map to where you want to go. The road map and periodization cycle is written out by numbers, to define the load.
Traditionally, athletes set up their annual training plan (ATP) with the load distinguished by volume of hours trained. This is not a good gauge of training load because intensity, and the amount of training at specific intensities, is the biggest determinant of training success and stress load.
As mentioned in previous chapters, volume is a very overrated metric, and the more you use TSS to track your fitness, the more you will find that to be true. What you are training for in long-course triathlon is not the Tour de France. It's not multiple long days of four to six hours in the saddle, going very hard for 21 of 23 days. That test requires a large amount of volume on a daily basis.
Long-course triathlon is a single-day event. Your ability to peak for that one day, making sure everything comes together, is the key to success. Come race day, you are all in. You have to get it right, and the numbers of stress-based periodization, using TSS to help plan and execute training, are what help you maximize training on that day.
Related Books
