TriDot Podcast .211

Revisiting Don’t Miss the Most Valuable Training Block of the Season

Intro: This is the TriDot podcast. TriDot uses your training data and genetic profile, combined with predictive analytics and artificial intelligence to optimize your training, giving you better results in less time with fewer injuries. Our podcast is here to educate, inspire, and entertain. We’ll talk all things triathlon with expert coaches and special guests. Join the conversation and let’s improve together.

Andrew Harley: Hey everyone! Great show today as we revisit episode 27 of the TriDot podcast which originally published on March 30th of 2020 and was called “Don’t Miss the Most Valuable Training Block of the Season.” Our revisiting episodes are kind of like a rerun, but a rerun with a reason. Within our first 40 or 50 episodes of the podcast we released so many that teach core training principles for TriDot training. So with over 200 episodes now out and about in the marketplace of podcasting, we want to make sure these gold nuggets, these super important episodes, don’t get lost in the shuffle. Newer listeners could be hearing this for the very first time and we want to make sure they hear it and our longtime listeners could be hearing it for a second or third time, but the information in all of our revisiting episodes is so paramount to doing the right training right that we want to encourage you to drink the information from the fire hose that is this episode again. On this episode 27 of the TriDot podcast we will learn why the development phase of training is where all of the magic happens. So many athletes get caught in the trap of thinking the most valuable time for training is when we are getting ready for a race, but it’s not necessarily true. The development phase is where the training can actually work on increasing our thresholds and getting us stronger and faster. This is the part of the season where you get faster. We’ll hear more on that in our main set from our experts. Joining me for this revisiting is TriDot coach Ryan Tibball. Ryan has a BS in biomedical sciences from Texas A&M University and respiratory care from UT Health Center at San Antonio. He serves as the head power cycling coach at Lifetime Fitness and is a certified CrossFit coach and a Pose Method certified run coach. Ryan is a multiple time Ironman finisher and has been coaching with TriDot since 2015. He is even more involved with TriDot team as a TriDot business coach and he helps match coaches with triathletes who want a coach. Coach Ryan, thanks for hopping on and listening to episode 27 with me today.

Ryan Tibball: Thank you so much Andrew. It’s always exciting to be here and yes, what a valuable episode. It was so detailed in listening to our top expert coaches and CEO of TriDot. It was one of my favorites to be honest with you.

Andrew: Yeah, it’s a good one. Yeah, it’s a good one. Honestly when I was looking back at which episode to revisit, we like to do one or two of these each year and when I was looking to choose this one, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t already revisited this one. It’s such a crucial episode and it’s so interesting as we get into some of the science behind training phases, how they’re built, why they do what they do. So anyway. Here’s how this will go: Ryan and I will do a fresh warm up, then we’ll listen to the original main set from episode 27. Ryan and I will sit here, we’ll listen to it together and that’s where I interviewed Jeff Booher, John Mayfield, and Elizabeth James about the development phase of training, and then Ryan and I will reflect on what we just heard as our cool down for today’s episode.

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Warm up theme: Time to warm up! Let’s get moving.

Andrew: When we revisit a podcast episode, we also like to revisit its warmup question and our warm up question on episode 27 was “If you were writing a race day mantra somewhere on your body or your gear to keep you motivated out on the race course, what would you write as that motivational phrase?” Back on episode 27 Jeff Booher said he would write Philippians 4:13, the scripture from the Bible somewhere. Elizabeth said she would write her race mantra “I am stronger” somewhere just as a reminder that whatever the day throws at her she is stronger. And John Mayfield said that he would write “I’ve not yet begun to suffer.” So anytime out on the race course that he felt like he was suffering, he could look down and see that and be reminded, there’s more suffering in store. Buckle down and let’s get going. Ryan, I’m curious for you. If you were putting a motivational phrase somewhere on yourself or your gear to keep you motivated as you make your way through the race course, what would that phrase be?

Ryan: Well you know what, first of all I have to comment on John’s because I can just see, or hear him saying that in such a calm voice. You know, John’s always so calm and when he says that, “I’ve not begun to suffer yet.” I just can imagine.

Andrew: Yeah.

Ryan: But moving on, my— actually my mantra is actually identical to Booher’s and I did not know Booher was…

Andrew: Look at you guys. Two Aggies. Two Texas A&M Aggies.

Ryan: Two Aggies, that’s right. You know, and just to say what that means to me, that Bible verse is actually on my forks of my triathlon racing bike. It’s also on my helmet of my triathlon racing helmet in a very abbreviated version of it: Christ strengthens me. I just– It’s something that I’m grateful for, I love it, and I know I am grateful to be able to do these things that I do and it’s really meaningful in that sense that Christ strengthens me. It just keeps me going, keeps me pushing hard and driving to that finish.

Andrew: We’re going to throw this question out to our audience on the Facebook group. We have the I AM TriDot Facebook group. Go find that group, join it. We have 16,000, at this present time, triathletes just talking swim, bike, and run every single day and I’m going to throw this question out to you and see if you are putting a race day mantra somewhere on your gear or your body to keep you motivated on race day, what would it be?

Main set theme: On to the main set. Going in 3…2…1…

Andrew: For a coach designing training, there are a huge number of ways to break down an athlete’s season to help gain fitness and peak for race day. at the highest level. There are really two different times during the season though: the times you are prepping for a race that is quickly approaching and the times you are training without a race in sight. Today we’re going to be talking about how to approach our training during those times of the year when we are not actively preparing for an upcoming race. So guys, let’s start here. How do you optimize training when there’s no race on the schedule yet?

Jeff Booher: So, actually, the 365 days weren't broken into 12 months, it was originally broken into 10 months.

Andrew: Really?

Jeff: That's why it’s September, Oct is 8, 9 November, nano, 10 deca. But then Julius and Augustus Caesar both had to have their months. So, they added July and August and that took days away from all the rest of the months. So, that's how we end up with 12.

Andrew: I 1000%, when I scripted that intro, I went 1000% expected somebody from the audience to email in and to kind of give me that history. I didn't even bother to look it up because I'm like, “You know what? Someone's going to educate me after I say all this on why it was broken up that way.”

Jeff: It’s pretty cool. This is pretty cool. If you look back at the Gregorian calendar, the first day of the year was actually March 1st, and they backed it up to January 1st and did some changes there. So, if you look for George Wa… and that happened in the early… I think the early 1700s. So, if you look up George Washington's Birthday, he has 2 different years of his birth, because it straddles, it's in that January. So, it was in one year, and then they moved it from March back to January, so it became the next year.

John Mayfield: Anyway.

Jeff: All that to say…

Andrew: On the same episode, we're getting a free history lesson from Jeff Booher, and we're getting free Yoda impressions from Jeff Booher all on the same podcast episode. This is already a landmark stuff. But…

Jeff: So, how do you optimize your training schedule when there's no race insight? This kind of gets started as we dig in deeper to the considerations what you can do. There's the very, I almost call it a pre optimization factor. And this is going back almost 15 years now, when we first started, or when I first started even before TriDot existed, thinking about, “How do we break up the season? How do we start categorizing times of year and what's driving training?” Of course, you have the athlete's ability and, you know, metrics on, you know, their profile and their abilities…

Andrew: Yeah.

Jeff: … and all like that.

Andrew: And of course, you can just train, but how do you optimize that time?

Jeff: Right.

Andrew: What's the best use of that time?

Jeff: Correct. And so, it becomes, how do you improve overall fitness in what areas? How do you prioritize those things and make the best use of your time to be most efficient with your time? And so, I realized very quickly that there's two realities, and those ended up being two phase types later. And the one reality was you’re training in a time period of the year when the requirements of the racecourse dictate how… or have a primary influence on how your training needs to be. If you need to do an Ironman or half Ironman, you need to run 13.1 miles or 56-mile bike. That length of the race that is two weeks from now is going to have a driving factor on your training.

Andrew: Because you’ve got to be ready to complete that distance.

Jeff: Exactly. But a year before that, two years before that, that length of that course doesn't matter yet, whatever it is. So, you're free to do a lot of stuff two years out, one year out, six months out, that as you get closer, you're not free to do anymore. So, without that constraint, how would you train? And then with those constraints, how would you train? So, that was the very first decision from my time prioritization and optimization standpoint that you take. So, it's like a pre-optimization, two phase types. Race prep is what we call it. Race prep is when your race is imminent, and it gets closer. There's not a dead cutoff for swim, bike, and run at a certain date.

Andrew: Okay.

Jeff: There is overlap. So, it’s a soft transition from the end of one phase to the beginning of the next. In periodized training, you're going to block it off and have structure within each phase of, you know, mesocycles. But it is that the development phase is when the requirements of the race distance don't have as much influence or impact or restriction on what you can do. So, it's a more freer time. And then as you get closer to the race, that's a race prep phase. And that is where one of the primary drivers of your decision making in optimization are the requirements of the race.

Andrew: So, when do these kind of race phases happen?

Jeff: So, the time when there's no race in sight, it can happen a few different times. One is after the last race of one season. So, you finished a race, you may take a week or two off. You know, so we're not counting that time, just, “I need to chill, don't want to burn out, spend some time family go on a vacation, whatever, holidays.” So, it's not counting that time. But after that spike, you're ready to train, you have time to train, you want to focus, you may not know what races are coming up. So, that's one time. Another time is when you may have some indecision. So, you're getting close to the season that's going to start, but you have some family vacations you're not sure about. You might take a new job. You know, all of these different things are still in flux. You know, it's preseason, maybe it's just you know what race, but you're just nine months out from it. So, there's a long time, and so you don't need to start going long yet. And so, you have that preseason. And then there's the other time and that's when you're going through a global pandemic.

Andrew: Yeah.

Jeff: And everything's on hold and you don't know when races are going to be scheduled. And so, you're dealing with this weird reality when normally, you may be right in the middle of, you know, some ramping up.

Andrew: And for a lot of athletes, they were smack dab in the middle of that.

Jeff: Yeah, yeah.

Andrew: I mean, when I got my email saying Ironman Texas was going to be postponed, the next day, I was supposed to have a 4 hour 45-minute trainer ride. And so it's, “Okay, if I'm not racing now in a month, I don't need to do a 4 hour-45 minute trainer ride. So, what do I do?”

Jeff: Or maybe you do.

Andrew: Or maybe I do. How do I know? What do I do? Okay, so let's kind of talk about this phase that we're talking about. You know, when your race isn't imminent, you don't have something, you know, right now that you're preparing for. You know, like you said, Jeff, we call that the development phase. So, what is the development phase? And as athletes, what are we looking to achieve during these training times?

Elizabeth James: The main focus in the development phase is going to be increasing an athlete's functional threshold in all disciplines. So, an athlete is looking to gain speed and strength in the swim, bike, and run, so that they can enter that race preparation phase as strong as possible before needing to increase their stamina for that specific race distance.

John: So, one of the things we talk about fairly often is one of our kind of core mantras within TriDot is fast before far and strong before long. So, that's speaking to building this functional threshold prior to building that stamina. So, we want to get fast before we take on these longer races, knowing that it's that functional threshold that's going to power through those long races. So, when we talk about that, this is really what we're talking about and this is how that's achieved. This is how we get fast before far and strong before long, because it’s the difference of training specifically for functional threshold, as opposed to training for stamina. And we talked about this at length in episode 10. That's that Escaping the Power-Stamina Paradox. That's one we've referenced back a ton.

Andrew: It's like one of our brainier, heavier training theory episodes, but so core to how to optimize training.

John: There's a ton of truth in it.

Andrew: Yeah.

John: And some of it's not necessarily intuitive, but once explained, it really makes sense. And some of it even flies in the face of what is a long-held even misconception within training and coaching and triathlon in general. So, it's a very important topic, and it's something that really can revolutionize an athlete's training in their approach, as well as their race results.

Jeff: Yeah, it's definitely a 5-lightbulb episode.

Andrew: Yeah.

Jeff: So, a lot of things. You know, these things make sense when you get that concept and understand what's going on. You think about, you know, what Elizabeth was saying, you need to function– or focusing on the functional threshold is because maintaining that high-volume, the stamina, the things that you have to do when you get closer to a race, that comes at a cost. You only have so much time, energy, and ability to absorb training stress. And when it's driven by the race distance as you get closer, there's things that you can't do because of that. And so, this time, this development phase, it's far enough out where you're free to do that. You can focus on your FTP. You can focus on form. You don't have to worry so much about how long you're swimming. Make sure every form stroke is perfect and really work on things. Go back to add strength training, have more time for that, a lot of injury prevention. I know in our training, the drills that you do during that time were more focused on where you are developmentally as a swimmer with your stroke. And as you get close to a race, the drills you start doing are more race-specific. And so, you may spend less time in those early fundamental races that you need to habituate the new movement over a long period of time. If we have a long period of time, you're going to spend more and build that foundation during a developmental phase. Whereas, if the race is coming up, you may go through that faster just because a race is imminent.

Andrew: Got it. So, when an athlete is not in this development phase, it's because they are approaching a race, and thus, they're in the race-prep phase. What are the most noticeable differences athletes will see in their swim, bike, and run training in between these two phases?

Elizabeth: So, I know we've already touched on this a little bit. But I mean, truly, in the development phase, athletes are going to notice sessions that specifically focus on those upper intensity zones to develop that functional threshold. So, there's going to be some intense interval work with the specific purpose of creating those physiological adaptations that are going to make an athlete stronger and faster. Another thing that Jeff just touched on, and I know we've touched on in other episodes is, is an athlete's training stress and their training stress profile. So, an athlete has a very finite and specific amount of training stress that they can absorb within any given session, a week in a meso-cycle. And without having those longer duration workouts that are focused on increasing stamina, and are essentially taking away some of that available stress that can be absorbed in training, the intensity can be higher in some shorter duration sessions as they're working to increase that functional threshold.

Andrew: And that's what helps us build that power, that speed, get faster, and stronger.

Elizabeth: Yeah, yeah.

Jeff: That's even more significant as you age, as you get older. You know, older athletes, as they're getting closer to races, they can't do a lot of high-muscular endurance and some of those things. Neurological stress is very taxing the older you get. Whereas in development phases, they can do that and they can maintain that power longer in life, longer into their triathlon career.

Andrew: Oh, wow.

Jeff: Whereas younger people can do it longer into their race prep phases.

Elizabeth: Mm-hmm, yep. And when an athlete enters that race preparation phase, their training stress profile doesn't change. They can still only absorb a particular amount of training stress within that meso-cycle of their training. So, I would say that, you know, the biggest differences that an athlete would see in kind of the movement between these training phases is if they're going from a development phase into like an Ironman race preparation phase. So, in general, you know, sprint and Olympic distance racing is done at or near an athlete's functional threshold. And the stamina required for those distances is either largely or entirely covered by the volume that they're already completing in that development phase. So, sprint and Olympic race preparation phase may look very similar to the development phase. But now, you know, on the other side of that, in an Ironman or 70.3 race preparation phase, the structure of that training cycle has to shift the focus from developing that functional threshold to now increasing the stamina necessary for that race distance. So, during that race preparation phase, athletes are going to notice an increase in the duration of their training sessions, particularly kind of those long bike and those long run sessions.

John: So, one thing I refer to as stamina is it's somewhat of a necessary evil. And obviously, nothing wrong with stamina, but it comes at a cost. And building functional threshold and building stamina are somewhat mutually exclusive. It's difficult to do them both at the same time for some of those reasons that Elizabeth mentioned, and Jeff mentioned, as well. So, one thing that's unique about these development phases, is that we don't have to build stamina, so we can focus exclusively on building that functional threshold. And when we say functional threshold, we're really speaking to swim, bike, and run. It's power, it's speed, it's how powerful can we build the engine? How fast can we create the athlete? Because that speed and that power that is obtained in these development phases, is going to have a direct impact throughout the race season, whether you're continuing to race short course, which as Elizabeth mentioned, is a functional threshold event, or whether you're on the opposite of the spectrum racing Ironman, which is much more of a stamina event, it's still that functional threshold that's going to determine how fast and how powerful you're able to complete those events. So, I refer to stamina as being cheap, and functional threshold as expensive. And so, I think that can help contextualize how we approach them. So, stamina is cheap, because you build it real quick. And an athlete that's in a reasonably good condition can go from very low volume to Ironman ready in 8, 10, 12 weeks, if they had to on the short end. So, you build the stamina very quickly, but at the same time it also dissipates very quickly. So, if you go from your Ironman race where you're able to race for 10, 12, 14 hours, and you don't do any training for a month, a lot of that stamina is going to erode. It erodes very quickly.

Andrew: Wow.

John: It comes at a high cost to maintain. Functional threshold, however, is much slower to build. It takes much more time to increase the power of that engine. But again, as we mentioned, this is what's going to really determine your race success. If you're gauging your race success based on time, functional threshold is your key component. That's what's going to determine your race results. But as I mentioned, it takes time to develop. It takes a lot of time to drop 10 seconds off your 100-pace. Especially the stronger you are as a swimmer, to drop 5 seconds off your 100-pace may take months or a year depending on where you are. Same thing with your functional threshold power, to gain 10 watts may take a significant amount of time, or to drop 10, 20 seconds off your 5k time, those are all functional threshold events. Your 100-pace, your 20-minute power, your 5k time, those are all functional threshold events. So, I think people understand that yeah, to a certain extent, early on, we make those gains real easy. But we had to have that low-hanging fruit where we can drop a minute off the 5k time…

Andrew: Yeah.

John: … every month when we reassess. But at some point, when we build up that critical mass, those gains become much more difficult. You have to invest a lot more time, you have to be much more intentional in making those gains. You can't just go out and go on random runs or random bike rides and see these gains at some point. So, it's very expensive.

Andrew: Because they’re expensive. Yeah.

John: It's very time consuming. It's something you actually have to really work on, really focus on, be very intentional in doing. But the good news is, they stick around much longer. Yes, you still have to maintain your fitness. Yes, you still have to do the work. But you’re going to be able to maintain those paces and those power numbers for a much longer period of time. So, they're going to stick with you. So, you can take these gains from one season to the next. Whereas, as a rule, it's very, very difficult to maintain stamina from one season to another. So, if you, if you race a late season Ironman race, to maintain that stamina into the following season where there may be a four, five, six months wait…

Andrew: It’s gone, yeah, it's…

John: … the work required to do that is going to be very taxing, you're going to have a very high injury predisposition, a really high injury risk, if you…

Andrew: And you're not going to get faster.

John: … do the work. And that's the big thing is the cost. So, in order to maintain that high amount of stamina, that means you're not going to be working on your functional threshold. So, you're not getting faster. In fact, you're neglecting your functional threshold, which means you're actually getting slower. So, you're able to go longer, but you're going slower because you've chosen to maintain stamina, and in doing so, whether you realize it or not, you've neglected your functional threshold. And that, in time, is going to erode.

Andrew: Yeah, that's– I mean, you're saying all of that and I'm just thinking back to my own training, and because I… you know, we did the episode, like you said, about the power stamina paradox, and we we've talked in the podcast before about when you really slip into training for stamina, it really inhibits your ability to train your functional threshold. And so, I got to see that at work in my own training for the first time while I was getting ready for Ironman Texas because, you know, my… my run dot, swim dot, bike dot, you know, every single month was just getting a little faster, a little faster, a little faster. You know, those 5k times, you know, dropping 10, 20 seconds off every single time. And then once you got into that race prep phase where I was working on my stamina and the runs were going from an hour and a half to an hour 45 to 2 hours to 2 hours 15, you know, suddenly, my 5k wasn't getting any faster. But every single long run I would take, you know, if it was an hour and a half one week, and at the end of it, I was just like, “Oh man, that was really hard. And now look, I pulled the program next week was an hour 45, how am I going to run an hour 45? That hour and a half was really hard.” And then I get to the hour 45 the next week, and at the hour and a half mark, I was fine. And by hour 45, I was tired. And so, like each week, as that bike ride went from 3 and a half hours to 4:15, well, that jump actually– like, I was ready to make that jump after having done the 3 and a half the week before. So, I was very– not surprised, I guess pleasantly surprised that everything we talked about, I could see it at work. I could see that, “Man, this stamina is really coming along quite well quite quickly.”

John: Yeah, it comes quick. And one thing, just to kind of follow up is there's no limits on how much functional threshold you need. Unless you're winning every race by a massive margin, you don't have enough functional threshold. So, that is something that you can always…

Andrew: You can still get faster.

John: … continue. You always need more. You know, unless you're just a casual athlete that's not really concerned with time, sure. But I think for the most of us, if we're going to do the training, if we’re going to race, we want to race faster, we want to improve our ranking. Functional threshold is that. So, again, unless you're just obliterating the field in every single race, which there's not a single person in the world that's doing that at every given distance, that functional threshold can continue to increase. There is marginal benefit from having more functional threshold. There's at a certain point, and it would be specific for each athlete at each distance, there's not a marginal benefit to having more stamina. So, in order to race a sprint race, you don't need Ironman stamina. Once you have sufficient stamina to complete the sprint race or the Olympic race, you don't need the stamina to go for 8, 10, 12 hours. Obviously, if you're racing 70.3 or Ironman, you do, but even still, there's a limit on how much stamina that you need. You only need enough stamina to successfully and complete well 140.6 miles to race Ironman. There's no need for additional stamina to do work beyond that. So, again do create the stamina that you have to, when you have to. Spend the rest of the time building the engine.

Jeff: There's another couple things that I’d add. One is like a hidden limiter there, and then another hidden benefit to focusing, just like we've been talking. Hidden limiter is the ego. A lot of times, people want to post about and talk about how long they went. And so, there's this, “Oh, I just got back from my two and a half hour run.”

Andrew: Oh, and you see that on Ironman Facebook groups because everybody…

Jeff: All the time.

Andrew: ... I mean you're four months out from Ironman and people are like, “Here's my training today. How was yours?”

Jeff: Right?

Andrew: And it’s like, “Why are you biking 150 miles and then running…?”

Jeff: Right, it’s… but there is some ego, some pride, some…

Andrew: Yeah.

Jeff: … whatever. And that comes at a cost. The hidden benefit is we talked about just general injury, not overtraining, but from an efficiency standpoint. When you're say you're running, especially running and swimming too, the longer you do that, the longer your runs are, the more percent of that time you are using poor form. So, if you're running, great runners can hold really good form for, you know, 45 minutes, something like that. So, if you're running these long ones, especially for most age groupers, when you're running long, you're spending maybe 15, 20 minutes with pretty good form and then it deteriorates.

Andrew: And it’s just breaking down.

Jeff: So, you're spending more time every week running and habituating bad form. So, not only are your threshold fitness coming down or not going up, but your efficiency is deteriorating, your form is deteriorating. And the more you do that, the harder it is to fix later. And so, what running focusing on your threshold, reducing those long runs enables you to develop more power, but also more percent of your strokes, steps, strides, pedals, are with that better form. And so, you're habituating improving your efficiency at the same time. So, there's this double whammy of power goes up and efficiency also goes up.

Andrew: Yeah, which really reinforces John's point that stamina is kind of a necessary evil. Because it's necessary because you have to have the stamina to finish the day, but, you know, it's evil in the sense that you are breaking down your body, you are breaking down your form, you are kind of losing a little bit of your threshold over time. So, let's kind of move into this. I know that we kind of talked about how our race schedules are what primarily determine what phase type that we need to be in at any given time, right? We either have a race coming up, or we don't. So, help me and our listeners kind of with some of the specifics here. When we add a race to the calendar, at what point does it impact what training phase we're in?

Jeff: Well, that's it depends. So, that's relative to the race distance, it’s relative to the athlete’s ability. It's a relative to the amount of increase. So, you're taking the, “How long does it take that athlete to finish that particular race distance?” Then you're saying, “Well, how much can that athlete improve from week to week to week?” That's based on body composition, how long they've been doing the sport, whether it's a run or a bike, you can improve, you know, increase more on the bike than you can on the run because there's no impact. Genetics comes into it. So, there's this concept of we use incredible weeks. So, how many weeks between now and race day are increasing? How many can you increase? So, you're going to take off those rest weeks, you're going to take off if you have a B race in there, you have a little taper recovery before and after. So, that removes two weeks of increase. So, now you need to start your increase sooner. You're back planning from your race day. So, there's all of those factors that will impact what that is. So, really, the thing is, looking at that time between your race day and backing up to the current time. And it's not just a–  like I think I mentioned right up front, a hard line where this automatically happens on one day. You don't start increasing on your first week of race prep phase. In TriDot, it's overlapping. You'll see if you add a race, that maybe the last two or three weeks of your development phase, the volumes on your run start going up and maybe your bike stays the same. Because you have to increase more on the run than you do on the bike. You're able to absorb those increases on the bike, and you might start that ramp up at week 8, you know, t minus 8 and on the run, it might be, you know, 12 weeks out. And so, that might not be relative to, you know, a pure break from phase to phase. But it's really the athlete’s ability, the race distance, how many increasible weeks they have, and what is their increased tolerance by overall volume and long session between now and then?

Andrew: Does it matter at all when in the season our A races are? Like, will a spring Ironman or 70.3 have a different impact on our development phase than a fall Ironman or 70.3? Or is it all just relative to where you are in the season?

Jeff: It’s relative. It's not really seasonal at all. It’s just when is your race and what is now?

Andrew: Okay.

Jeff: How far is that from now? So, if you're saying, “When should I start training? You know, when should I get serious? When should I start optimizing my training?” Sooner, always.

Andrew: Today.

Jeff: Today, yes, because this prepares you. And that's another thing just about the name of the phases. So, whether you're in a race prep or developmental, you're preparing for your race, whatever your race is. Even if your race is not identified, you're still preparing for your race. You're going to be in a better starting spot to start that race. And even if you're, you know, not in a developmental phase, you're in a race prep phase, you're still developing. You're developing stamina, you're developing fitness, form, all of those things, you're still doing both always. But it's just a classification that we use. So, I think the thing that matters the most is the time, how much time is between now and that race. And there's a benefit to starting earlier because you're in essence, shortening your race. So, you get this duplicated, amplified benefit, kind of like I mentioned before, when you increase your power and decrease the cost, your drag, your poor efficiency, you become more efficient and faster at the same time, there's this double whammy. The same thing that happens the more time you spend in your development phase, you're shortening your race. So, you're getting…

Andrew: Yeah.

Jeff: … faster, you're shortening the distance that you have to go on your race day. Instead of doing a 6-hour bike, you're doing a 5:30-bike. Well now it's not going to take you as much time to complete that race, so you don't have to ramp up as far. So, now, you can start your ramp up a whole week later, which means you get more time to develop power. And with a shorter race now on your power curve, if say your FTP, your functional threshold on the bike is 300 and you'd normally be doing, I don't know the math here, but you know, 75% of your threshold, well, with a shorter race now, you can do 78%. So, you increase the long tentpole, the threshold, so you have a higher start number. But you also shorten the race, so now you can do even higher percentage of that higher number…

Andrew: Yeah.

Jeff: … and be more efficient and have more time to develop. So, there's multiple, three or four things all being amplified tha that concept of optimizing this time.

Andrew: And so, the… the concrete example of that, just to kind of give one, to give people kind of a little picture of that, because it's such a key principle. The professional athlete who's going to finish an Ironman in eight hours, if I'm understanding this clearly, they don't need to start working on their stamina as soon as an athlete who is going to finish that Ironman in 13 hours. Because that athlete has to get themselves ready for a 13-hour long race, they're only getting themselves ready stamina wise for an 8-hour race. Is that correct?

Jeff: Exactly.

John: The mileage is the same, but the time is significantly different.

Andrew: Yeah.

John: And that's really what the body perceives is the time on the course, not necessarily the miles or the distance that's covered.

Jeff: Yeah. So, they're going to go, you know, an hour faster, hour and a half faster on the bike.

Andrew: Yeah.

Jeff: And when you go back to the increasable weeks, and how you determine all of that other thing, they are young, they're fit, their body composition is great, they have probably a very consistent their injury risk is much lower. So they're able to train more, increase more every week, and so, all of these factors are amplified in what they're able to do. There's a short gap, they're able to probably sustaining a little higher volume. And so, there's less… their starting point is much higher. Their ending point is much lower. So there's less gap. And a lot of them, I train a number of pros who, throughout the season, you know, their long rides throughout the year were, you know, two hours. And then on race day, it was two hours.

Andrew: Yeah.

Jeff: So, they were in the same developmental volume year-round. And so, they were constantly getting their FTP higher and higher and higher and higher without that cost.

Andrew: So, most triathletes, obviously, are not just content with knocking out one race a year. You know, most of us lineup several. Some are our top most important A races. Some are tuneups for those A races. Some are for fun. Some are because they are local and right down the road. Long story short here, how can we know, in between races, what type of training phase we should be in?

Elizabeth: Oh, man, there’s a lot of great things to address here. So, first off, athletes do kind of need to consider what their personal goals are within the sport. So, I know that John had mentioned earlier that, you know, many athletes are looking to be as fast as possible and really kind of go for those personal bests in their upcoming races. And in this case, the athlete needs to carefully consider what their A race is going to be and how they are going to best prepare for that event. So, adding in a bunch of other events prior to that race preparation phase for an athlete's A race could certainly hinder their ability to develop their functional threshold if they need to kind of exit out of that developmental phase into a race preparation time. Because if athletes are always preparing for a long race event, and they're needing to focus on that stamina, then they're missing the opportunities that are within that developmental phase. So, that, you know, the race preparation phase, we've already talked about, you know, stamina is that necessary evil. It's super important. You need to develop that stamina in order to get to the finish line. But the most important work is taking place before you even begin that race preparation phase. Kind of again, what we've mentioned, once you enter that race preparation phase, your finishing time is already largely established.

Andrew: Your best-case scenario is already there.

Elizabeth: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: Yeah.

Elizabeth: Yep, yep. I mean, you know, there are small marginal gains still to be made and, you know, that stamina is necessary. But at that point, you are really just working to hold a percentage of your functional threshold for the duration of that race event. You're not necessarily making those gains on that functional threshold anymore. Now, to address you know, the other part of the question there with, you know, the number of races and those local events down the street and knowing what training phase you're in, you know, knowing what training phase you're in or what you should be in, it's not a guessing game. It's not necessarily going to be, you know, X number of weeks or the same for each athlete either. TriDot season planner is one of my absolute favorite tools and something that I'll frequently reference when I'm working with athletes and we're planning for their goals and the races for the upcoming season. So, the season planner really allows athletes, and coaches too, to assign priority to the events that an athlete is either registered for or they're considering for their upcoming season. And then you can see how those events are going to interact with one another and how that is going to really impact the training phases that an athlete will go through. So, those A races should be assigned first. Then based off of those A races, we kind of determine what else is important to the athlete and how that fits in with those most important events. So, within TriDot, you can designate an A, B, and C priority race. And placing that A race on your season planner is going to generate a race preparation phase. And then, you know, to kind of address the athlete that wants to do the number of local events and, you know, doing that local sprint race down the road might be very important to that athlete, even if they are in that Ironman race preparation phase. You know that local event might be something that they've supported since the race first began, they may want to include it. And they can include it. But maybe we're going to designate that as a C race so they can participate still, you know, support their local racing community, but not at the expense of, you know, a development phase or potentially their race preparations.

Andrew: They can still do really well in those races. If it's a local sprint, you might be 30 seconds to 3 minutes slower because you didn't taper for that race. But at the end of the day, if you have a more important race coming up, you're going to gain even more of that time back working on your threshold, since you let that sprint remain a C race, right?

Elizabeth: Mm-hmm. Well, and you know, sprint races might fit very well within that athlete’s developmental phase. Because we've already talked about too, that, you know, the sprint race is going to be basically at the athlete’s threshold. And so, as they're doing this threshold work, that might fit in very nicely. And the season planner is a great way to just kind of look at how all those things interact. And I probably made that sound a little bit more confusing than it actually is or needs to be, but…

Andrew: I was tracking with you.

Elizabeth: Okay. I mean, the season planner, because it's such a fantastic tool, it walks athletes through that entire process. So, the athlete isn't there left, you know, trying to make decisions about what training phase they're in, or you know, what phase optimization needs to look like. The training is going to be optimized and therefore appropriate for the athlete’s events that are coming up. So, you know, if an event isn't in the near future, if there isn't a race in sight, then you're in that developmental phase. If you're preparing for a race, then you're in that race preparation phase. And the season planner is going to designate all of that.

Andrew: I know when I'm sometimes looking at, “Okay, I know in the fall, maybe this month or that month, I'll do a 70.3.” And I start looking at, you know, the different races that Ironman has on the calendar, you know, for that time period, and, “Oh, do I want to do this one? Do I want to do that one?” You know, sometimes I'll just kind of go ahead and input those on the season planner just to kind of see, you know, “How does this fit with the rest of my schedule? How is this going to change, you know, my training if I pick this race over that race?” And to your point, it's a really great tool to kind of see how certain races being certain priorities are going to affect it. So, and I think with that though, a lot of athletes, they kind of have the mindset that they start preparing for their race. They start preparing for that Ironman, they start preparing for that 70.3 or whatever their main A race is. They think they start preparing for it when they're a few months out from that race day, a few weeks out from that race day, maybe. I have a buddy of mine that he really enjoys running. He does a triathlon, maybe one a year, maybe one every other year. He likes the sport, it's an occasional hobby for him. And when I started training with TriDot, and he was really interested in it, he asked me one time. He was interested in doing 70.3 Indian Wells, and he was like, “Okay, Andrew, at what month do I need to sign up for TriDot to be ready to race 70.3 Indian Wells?” And it's kind of this common misnomer we see where people think that, “Okay, I need to sign up onto a training plan,” or, “I need to get that coach,” or, “I need to start preparing for that race three months out, two months out, four months out.” What is that time block? And that's what he was getting at. And it's like, “No, you need to start preparing for that race right now. Because you're going to be getting faster for that race if you start right now.” You know, once you get to three months, four months out, to your point, you're just building the stamina. So, I guess maybe John, talk to me about people that have this misconception, how would you address that mindset of, “Oh, I start preparing for that race at that time,”?

John: I think it is a mindset issue. I think, oftentimes, triathletes don't look at their– they look much more at their racing than they look at their training, and they allow the races really to dictate what their training phases look like. And so, they get kind of stuck in that pattern is that, “I'm training for this race, then I'm training for that race.” And if the race is not say three to four months out, then they don't really feel like they're training specifically for a race. And oftentimes, what we'll see is they just kind of do random training, they're not really intentional in what they're doing, they're not specific in what they're doing. And we mentioned, yeah, it's fine to take a couple of weeks here or there just to relax and enjoy the sport. But when we invest the time in training, we want that time to be productive. And we want that training to improve our results on race day. So, right. You are going to– your training is going to be very focused several months out, especially when we're racing 70.3 and Ironman distance races, which a lot of our athletes are. So, this is obviously where we have to be intentional in our planning here. There has to be, as Jeff mentioned, those incremental gains. We have to have sufficient time that we can make safe gains each week so we can build that stamina. I kind of dogged stamina earlier, called it a necessary evil, but it is absolutely critical to have that stamina on race day. So, we have to prepare for that. So, that's what happens is we see that, and the training changes often, especially for those long course races where the training doesn't look like it did previously. So that’s…

Andrew: Yeah.

John: …kind of how we get caught up in that. But really, every race is the sum of our entire triathlon or even prior experience. It's the sum of all of our training. It's the sum of all of our knowledge and experience. It's every race is an opportunity to put together every session we've ever done, everything we've ever learned, every bit of experience we've ever gained. And that's kind of splitting hairs, but it really is an important distinction to make in that we are today, the training we do now is absolutely having a direct impact on our next race and really, to a certain extent, every race from here on after.

Andrew: So, John, back on episode 18 of the TriDot podcasts, we talked about triathlon coaching in the era of artificial intelligence and one of the things that came up on that show was, at what point in the season is it most beneficial for an athlete to have a coach? And, John, you specifically said that you would actually rather work with an athlete further out from their race, while they're in this development phase working on thresholds, as opposed to during a race prep phase, building the stamina closer to the race. Does that have to do with what we can accomplish during these different phases?

John: Yeah, and it’s something that Elizabeth spoke to earlier, and I think we've mentioned it several times throughout is that it's really the work done in these development phases that really produces the actual finishing time. And that's so often what an athlete is after. Most of our time, our goals are somewhat time-based. Even just to finish that's still a time-based goal because you have to make those cut offs. So, we're gauging our success, our happiness, our enjoyment of the sport based on our time. Those times are going to be determined by the work that is done, as we mentioned, not necessarily in those last several weeks or months, but really in these development phases where we're able to build that engine. And as I just mentioned, so many athletes do it wrong. They misuse this time or they don't realize the importance of the time. So, that's why I would say that. I'm just a big advocate of having a coach year-round. And so, I would definitely not advocate for picking a three to four month period. You're going to get your best results from working with a coach through both development phases and race prep phases. But as I mentioned, so many athletes just do it wrong. So, I would rather work with the athlete in that very critical development phase, and then kind of let them go on their own to do the race prep. But each phase, the development and the race prep have unique opportunities and challenges that it's really beneficial to have one of the expert coaches guiding you through those challenges…

Andrew: Through both, yeah.

John: … and through those opportunities, sharing their experience and their knowledge. But, yeah, so many times, that ramp up is just either neglected or just not done right.

Andrew: Y’all mentioned that it's good to stay in the development phase as long as possible before race day. And whether our race is a sprint, Olympic, half or full, can impact how long we can stay in the development phase. But talk to me about this. With each athlete being so different, will the timing of how long we can stay in development be impacted by things like our age, our ability, our experience, or is it just more about what race we're preparing for?

Jeff: It's all of those things. It is dramatically impacted by your age, your experience, your body composition, genetics. All of those things impact the swim, the bike, and the run all differently. People that are older, their bones are starting to get a little softer. The impact, they heal, you know, less rapidly. Genetically, the same kind of deal. So, you need to ramp that person up slower. Someone else can be very, very durable, been doing the sport for a whole long time. Genetically, they have a very low predisposition for injury. And so, that looks very, very different for all of those athletes. And so, all of those things have a big impact to how long those phases are, when they should, you know, add even the B races and some other races like that. It gets to be very important to optimize those and drop them at the right time. So, if you're going to do a half Ironman on the way to a full, you know, don't do it four weeks out, because that's right in the middle of the height of your big volume. And so, that half is not long enough to help you improve. But if you can align that at the time when your long sessions would normally be about the same duration as that race, then it’s kind of on the path. It’s not slowing you down any. So, that allows you to have a shorter race prep phase and spend more time in development.

John: Which that's something that somewhat flies in a lot of logic as well. Because oftentimes, those 70.3s are scheduled on the same race course three to four weeks out. So, it’s very– and I think there's even somewhat of a misconception that these athletes need to do that half Ironman three to four weeks out…

Andrew: Yeah.

John: …from the Ironman race. And in reality, as Jeff said, it's probably most likely, more often than not, it's going to be counterproductive to, not necessarily do the 70.3. There's nothing wrong with that, however, it's that opportunity cost of how are you spending that weekend and the days leading into that weekend?

Andrew: What else could you have done on that weekend?

John: Exactly.

Jeff: You're giving that up. And not just the weekend, but the weekend before it, you're going to taper, so you're likely missing a long ride and the long run before because you don't want to get injured going into it.

Andrew: Yeah.

Jeff: And then out of it, you need to recover from just doing a half. So, you're going to miss another long run. So, it can be a three week window when you didn't get to improve. And so, your longest ride going into the fourth week, the two weeks after your half, the longest one you could have done before could have been four weeks prior. So, that's a big…

Andrew: Wow.

Jeff: …risk, big injury. I don't know why they're scheduled three weeks out, four weeks out, wherever they are. I don’t know if it's more of a logistics thing, the team is already showing up in town or if there's an advantage that, you know, there could be economic things driving that logistically. But it's definitely better. There are times when people just want to. “All my friends are doing this local.”

Andrew: Yeah.

Jeff: “I want to do the half, but also want to do… you know, I want to do the full, but I want to do the half.”

Andrew: And you're talking about instances like Arizona. The 70.3 Arizona takes place three, four weeks before Ironman Arizona.

Jeff: Right.

Andrew: Like those kind of instances, right?

Jeff: Right, right.

Andrew: Okay.

Jeff: So, it depends on why you're doing it, why you're doing the race. I've coached people before, if they really want to do it, they're doing it with friends, it's a not a performance issue. They're not doing it to better their performance, but it's social, it's, “I want to get the jitters out. I want to…” you know, any number of nonperformance-based reasons. To where they go, they might do the swim, and the bike and skip the run. Or do the swim, bike and run, and then get back on the bike. You know, and so they're not missing a long bike.

Andrew: Because they needed more bike that weekend.

Jeff: Correct.

Andrew: Okay.

Jeff: And so, they might ride easy for two hours immediately after their race. So, there's some ways that you can mitigate some of that opportunity cost around those types of weekends. But you're going to–

John: It's also going to be more feasible for your more seasoned athletes as well; your stronger, more seasoned athletes. You know, those that are doing, taking on Ironman for the first time, that's incredibly valuable training time and a 70.3 really just is not the same as Ironman. In fact, it's half. But there's just a massive difference between racing a 70.3 and even training for Ironman. But, you know, I think that's generally what I say. Your first time at Ironman, just focus, eyes on the prize. You've got a lot to take in, don't be distracted by half now. Your athletes that again, have more experience, more tenure, more years of training, you know, they can afford a little bit more to have that time.

Andrew: Something I thought was really interesting, again, building up for my first Ironman, Ironman Texas that–  and I'm going to bring up one of our TriDot athletes. He actually made an appearance on the TriDot podcast a few episodes ago, athlete Paul Wolf from Texas. He did a humble brag where he bragged on himself for making an appearance in Men's Health Magazine, representing the sport of triathlon. But Paul and I, you know, swim together occasionally, ride together occasionally, you know, we've trained together many times, great guy. But we're two very different athletes.  I’m a little bit younger, he's a little bit older than I am. He's a much stronger cyclist than I am. I’m a much stronger runner than he is. And so, it was really interesting to me, once we were both hitting that Ironman race prep phase, even just watching kind of our workouts, we have the same schedule, right? So, we have the same long run days.

Jeff: Same weekly pattern.

Andrew: Same what?

Jeff: The same weekly pattern.

Andrew: Yeah, same weekly pattern. So, same long run day, same long bike day, same brick workout day. And so, you could see on Strava, when I would have a long run and he would have a long run, he’d go out, and his long run would be an hour and 15 minutes and mine would be an hour and a half. Then we get to the weekend and his long bike ride, his stamina bike ride would be four hours, mine would be four and a half, you know? And so, you could really see how TriDot was kind of tailoring, this is how long he's going to be on– he's going to be on the bike course shorter, so he doesn't need to train that as long as I do, because I’m going to be out there longer and vice versa. And so, it's really interesting in real-time, two guys, you know, they're a little bit different in their biology, who are a little bit different in their abilities in the sports, and just seeing how TriDot was customizing it to both of us once we hit that phase. It was really, really interesting to see.

Elizabeth: There's so many amazing things about TriDot. But, you know, one thing I kind of want to come back to and re-highlight that we've touched on a little bit is that, you know, many coach-written or template training plans are going to prepare an athlete for race by increasing the volume of each discipline at the same time. Kind of, you know, that line in the sand of, “Hey, this is when we're going to start increasing the duration based on the certain number of weeks that there are until that event date.” However, you know, kind of like you were mentioning, Andrew, I’d say that a lot of athletes listening today would say that they have a discipline where they're stronger than another and with TriDot your long bike and your long run volume may not necessarily be increasing in duration at, you know, X number of weeks out and the same number of weeks out for each discipline. You may be a really strong runner, and preparing in the development phase, you're already knocking out 10 miles for your hour runs. And if you're preparing for the half marathon distance, at the end of the 70.3, there isn't much more that you're going to need to do to extend your run stamina, but you know, that strong runner might be a very new cyclist, and they may need a number of weeks in the race preparation phase to really increase their stamina to ride those 56 miles on the bike.

Andrew: So, let's maybe land the plane here today. The more conversations we have about how to optimize our training, how to do the right training right, how to develop power and stamina and when in the season to do each, it's kind of given me the mindset where I almost celebrate when I can get back to the development phase. Because now, I know that's the training that is increasing my thresholds, making me faster, knocking down those PRs on race day. John, Elizabeth as athletes yourselves, what thoughts are going through your head when you get on the other side of a race and get back to the development phase? And we all firsthand experienced this recently, again, because we all just had our spring races postponed because of COVID-19. And so, the day you got that email and found out “Oh, I don't have a race in a couple weeks,” we all were almost celebrating, “Oh, cool. Yeah, it sucks we're not racing. But we can get back to the development phase. We can get back to building those thresholds.” And I know Jeff Raines, who's not on the podcast today, I saw him on Facebook, telling all of his athletes, like encouraging them, “Hey, I know it's sucks you can't race. But let's rally. Let's work on our speed. Let's work on those thresholds. Let's get even faster and when that race day comes, you're going to be even more prepared and you're going to finish even faster.” How do you guys when you see on your plan, when you see on the portal, “Okay, I'm slipping into developing,” Elizabeth, what kind of goes through your head?

Elizabeth: Well, like you, Andrew, I have such a great appreciation for the development phase that I didn't have five years ago. I absolutely love those long races, and I love the long training sessions. So, I used to dread the time on my schedule when I'd be spending more days at the track doing more interval-based work. But now, I get excited about it. I still prefer those longer workouts, but I know that every time I'm in a development phase, I'm getting stronger, I'm getting faster, and that's, you know, going to make me better on the race course.

Cool down theme: Great set everyone! Let’s cool down.

Andrew: Excellent, excellent main set right there from episode 27 of the podcast. It’s really, really weird going back and listening to myself talk about things, having to sit back and listen to your own voice. Nobody likes to do that, but I did it so that I could comment on this episode. So Ryan, for me the one standout note that really drives the message of this episode home for me is Jeff Booher’s tent pole analogy. Basically if someone didn’t catch that in the episode, the tent pole analogy is the training we do in the race prep phase, you know as we’re getting ready for race day, that’s us building our tent for race day. It’s us building out our stamina and by the time we reach that phase, we already have the materials for the tent to prepare. We have our tent poles, we have the tent fabric, we have all that jazz. The development phase before the race prep phase is where we are building our materials and so we are determining how much canvas we have to work with. We’re determining how tall and how long those tent poles are during the development phase. So once we enter the race prep phase, we can’t really do anything to get our finish time faster. You know, the materials we’re working with are already predetermined because the development phase is where we actually do the work to get faster, get fitter, and then by the time we’re getting ready for race day, we’re just building up that stamina. So that analogy of like, man, by the time I enter the race prep phase, my longest— the way Jeff Booher put it, my tallest tent pole has already been built. The development phase is where you’re determining how tall that tent pole is and I just absolutely butchered that analogy, but people heard Jeff give it much better in the podcast. That really just brings it home. It really just gives you a picture of like, man my tent can only be so high if I’ve skipped out on my training during the development phase and it can be much higher and much taller, I can have a much bigger tent on race day of my fitness if I— So anyway. Ryan, I’m curious for you, as a very experienced TriDot coach, as you listen to this episode and you hear the way those coaches— John, Elizabeth, and Jeff— talk about the development phase in your own words, why do you think this part of the season is so crucial for our athletes?

Ryan: Yeah, in my own words— and they used a lot of words that I would have used— but I will say that I do love that tent pole analogy and I often use it because of what Booher said. But in many ways I look at development phase as an exciting era or exciting time to be training. It, in many senses, typically falls when there’s no racing going on anyways and definitely between races that you have on your calendar and so what I look at it is it’s exciting because I know what I’m about to do or my athletes are about to do, is raise that functional threshold power, push it up, and in turn those other zones they don’t lag behind, they follow. So if you’re going to raise zone 4, raise that functional threshold power up, and in turn when it does come time to race as we did hear, when it does come time to race, your race predictions are going to get faster.

Andrew:  Yeah.

Ryan: So that’s the beauty of that too. But the importance again in development phase is approaching it with a sense of excitement knowing that what you are doing now is going to pay it forward to the future in your season getting ready for that. It doesn’t matter what distance whether it’s the sprint, the Olympic, the 70.3s, or the 140.6s. But you just know that raising that functional threshold power, chipping away at it, pushing that tent pole up, will again benefit every distance that you do. So I get excited. I like being in development phase. I like that preseason era, that preseason time, to really, really focus and just really start to grind it out working on not only functional threshold power, working on my strength, working on my mobility, working on all those key components and not having to worry about a race that’s somewhere way down the line. Then it takes that— in a sense, some people get stressed about having that race on the calendar. They think hey, I’ve got to get ready for this race that’s nine months from now.

Andrew: Yeah.

Ryan: But you don’t. You really should be focusing on what is now and what you can do now and then when it comes time for that race prep phase to hit, you’re going to all of a sudden look at your RaceX and see, oh wow. My race predictions went down already. Yeah, you haven’t gotten to the race prep yet, but you now are again faster. You’ve raced that tempo, raised your FTP, raised your zones 2, 3, 4, 5 even. So it makes it exciting in my opinion and that’s how I like to push it towards my athletes is get them excited. Get them excited about building, getting that stronger. Everyone wants to get faster, right?

Andrew: Yeah, I like that idea of getting excited about this part of the season. Because people get excited about their races so once the race is getting closer and they start preparing for the race, oh man I’m excited for this race. I’m excited to do this training. It’s going to get me ready for this race and then the race is over and they enter the development phase and there’s no race in their future and as an athlete you can kind of feel aimless. You can kind of feel a little like well now what? So I love that resetting of your brain to think of that moment as an exciting moment because it’s like I’ve got four, five, six months of training here where TriDot doesn’t have to get me ready to last 140.6 miles or 70.3 miles or whatever. Like, where it can just focus on getting me faster and that is exciting. It’s hard work because you’re going to have a lot more zone 4 and zone 5 intervals and you’re going to have to push your body in some sessions, but that’s what is going to make you faster and that’s what’s going to help you PR the next time that race comes around, right?

Ryan: Yeah, and I will mention, you know, we often viewed the COVID time as like oh my gosh, it was a terrible time.

Andrew: Nobody was racing. All was lost!

Ryan: Nobody was racing, but I got excited. I wasn’t excited about COVID…

Andrew: Sure, sure sure.

Ryan: …don’t get me wrong. I’m a respiratory therapist of all things, but what I was excited about was I’m in development phase right now. I’m building. I’m getting stronger. This was an opportunity. So as of now I’m fixing to race and I’m looking forward to my development phase. I’ve got a race like literally in a week, but I am looking forward to that development phase as well. It’s so exciting. So, yeah. Absolutely.

Andrew: Yeah and at the time we recorded this podcast originally in 2020, I had not done a full distance Ironman and so I didn’t have that experience in my back pocket to speak to. But now that I have, yeah. I was very excited to get done with all that long training and get back to the shorter and harder development stuff. I remember going through that training cycle and getting into those three, four, five hour long bike rides and your legs are torched and it was really interesting because when my swim, bike, and run assessments would come around even though TriDot was having to focus on building out my stamina and it couldn’t focus on building my power, for the most part I held my dots. I didn’t lose power. Now, I wasn’t bumping the dot and I wasn’t seeing my FTP climb, climb, climb. My 5K wasn’t getting faster, faster, faster. But even on legs that were really tired from the long training sessions, I was holding my dots in a way that I did not– and I see people comment like, “Oh man, I had a five hour ride yesterday getting ready for Ironman and TriDot has me doing a 5K assessment tomorrow. What?” Yeah. Go do that assessment. You’ll probably surprise yourself. You’re either going to hold your dot or you might just slightly be a tad slower, but you’re going to surprise yourself even on tired legs and then you get back to the development phase and you see, oh my gosh! I have so much more gas in the tank to work on my power now that that long course thing is done. It was a really enlightening experience going through that, from development phase to race prep phase back to development phase for the first time. So anyway. Ryan, last question and then we will shut down this episode talking about this. I’m sure this is going to be well over an hour at this point talking about development phase, but it’s good stuff. For your athletes, when they have the development phase back on the calendar, they just got done with a race, they’re getting back to just training more power based stuff, there’s not a race on the calendar. As coach, when you’re talking them through that like, “Hey, you just finished a race, you’re back on development phase, you’re in development phase for another three, four, five, six months…” What is that conversation like? What are you encouraging them to focus on in that portion of their training year?

Ryan: This almost feels like giving away a little secret sauce…

Andrew: Sure.

Ryan: …but you know this is what it’s about. It’s about helping everyone as much as we can as coaches.

Andrew: Absolutely.

Ryan: I do honestly talk about this opportunity and again go back to the simple word of excitement that we are going to focus on– I say “Hey, tell me what you feel is your weakness right now. Tell me what you want to work on.” Then we identify that. We hone in on their goal for next season and say alright, your bike, your run, or perhaps even your swim, what is it that you really want to work hard on and get better? It’s always a glaring thing. They know by the end of the season. They identify, coach I need to work on my run. Okay. This is that time that during development phase we can start and really focus in on that specific discipline. Of course there is, you’ve got to be very careful when going as a coach and as an athlete. Don’t increase all your disciplines to high. No. We focus on one thing. We also focus on strength. We focus on mobility as I mentioned and we do throughout the season as well, but this becomes now creating those habits. Those things that you want to, again, if you don’t do them on a daily, you’re going to miss it on a daily. So during development phase is that opportunity. View everything as an opportunity, everything as a sense of excitement for development phase and in talking to them and really again focusing on their needs. I want to know what they want so then we can hone and tailor their programing specifically to those needs.

Outro: Thanks for joining us. Make sure to subscribe and share the TriDot podcast with your triathlon crew. For more great tri content and community, connect with us on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Ready to optimize your training? Head to tridot.com and start your free trial today! TriDot – the obvious and automatic choice for triathlon training.

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