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 folks! Welcome to a new episode of the TriDot podcast. I’m Andrew the Average Triathlete, Voice of the People and Captain of the Middle of the Pack. I’m joined today by TriDot coach and professional triathlete Elizabeth James. Elizabeth is a USAT Level II and Ironman U certified coach who quickly rose through the triathlon ranks using TriDot, from a beginner, to top age grouper, to a professional triathlete. She’s a Kona and Boston Marathon qualifier who has coached triathletes with TriDot since 2014. So Elizabeth, it is just you and me today, as we do our third-ever revisiting of a previous podcast episode. Elizabeth, do you want to do the honors and tell everybody which TriDot podcast episode we will be revisiting today?

Elizabeth James: Ooh, yes please! I would love to introduce that! So today we are revisiting “TriDot’s Preseason Project: How Athletes Revolutionize Triathlon Training”, and I am so excited to revisit this episode, this topic, and really this research.

Andrew: That’s right, it was Episode .13 of the podcast, and just for a little background for our listeners: some of you have maybe already heard one of our revisiting episodes, some of you maybe have not heard a revisiting episode. But basically, there are just some topics out there that we’ve already covered on the podcast that we feel are just crucial to TriDot training, crucial to triathlon training, crucial to our listeners. We’re at over a hundred episodes now, so from time to time we just want to re-bring up these important topics to you our listeners.If you’ve already heard Episode .13 of the podcast, this will be a nice refresher for you. If you have not heard that one in our catalog of episodes that we have, you’re going to learn a lot about how TriDot training has been refined over the years from this annual research project that we do. So yeah, this is going to be a really interesting episode that really dives into the research TriDot does, and continues to do, to dial in athlete training to perfection. Every athlete that has participated or will participate in the Preseason Project is actively contributing to making the training better and better for all of us. Here’s how I view the Preseason Project: It’s a “winwin-win”. New athletes coming into TriDot for the project win because they get two months of free TriDot training. TriDot wins because it gets to learn from studying the data those athletes provide over the two months. And existing TriDot athletes win because we benefit from the training implications learned each year from this annual research study. So huge wins all around, and I’m excited to revisit this episode with Elizabeth. So this is how today will work: Elizabeth and I will have a fresh warmup question today. We will do a fresh cooldown, where Elizabeth and I kick around what we learned from revisiting this episode as we listen to it again. And in between that, you will hear the original recording where I interviewed TriDot founder Jeff Booher and coach John Mayfield as we talked about what the Preseason Project is, and how it has just revolutionized triathlete training over the years. It’s going to be a great episode!

Back on Episode .104 of the podcast, it was a pleasure to have Oxford University professor Kieran Clarke, founder and CEO of T-deltaS Global, talk with us about the performance and health benefits of drinking the revolutionary Oxford ketone ester called DeltaG. Professor Clarke led the effort to develop DeltaG, which is now available in three strengths: 10 grams for health, 25 grams for performance, and 32 grams of raw ester for that extra mile. DeltaG is a powerful fuel source that augments physical performance, sharpens mental acuity, and supports your metabolic health. I recently tried the DeltaG 25gram ketone performance drink for a 20minute bike power test. With DeltaG in my system, I averaged 4 watts higher than I was expecting, with a lower heart rate than I typically have during an FTP session. I'm excited to continue using DeltaG in my own race prep. So head to DeltaGketones.com and try DeltaG for yourself. At DeltaGketones.com, they even offer free 15minute oneon-one consultations, where you can learn more, ask questions, and have those questions answered. And you will receive a free bottle of DeltaG with your order. So again, that's DeltaGketones.com, and use the code TRIDOT20 to get 20% off your super-fuel DeltaG ketone drinks.

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

Andrew: When we revisit an episode, we also like to revisit its warm-up question as well. Now back on Episode .13, we had a suntan/sunburn-related question, and this is what it asked: With all the hours triathletes spend outside training, and on the race course, tan lines and sunburns are basically a rite of passage into the sport. For the most part we all end up with a fairly defined line showing where our socks and sleeves came to an end. But beyond that, we all have at least one story of a more extreme tan line or sunburn that is extra special. So Elizabeth, for our warmup question today, tell me about a time where you got a memorable mark from too much time in the sun.

Elizabeth: Yes, well, I do spend plenty of time in the sun, and I absolutely love being outside. I also tan very easily, so I’ve definitely had some funny tan lines over the years. I remember listening to Jeff and John’s answers to this question when the episode first came out, and two things came to mind to me. One, I think the most memorable tan line that I had was a sunglasses tan from a long run session. So my face was very tan except for two very light circles around my eyes, and it was absolutely a raccoon-type look. Charles and I went out to dinner with a bunch of his buddies from work, and it definitely was an awkward introduction to people that I hadn’t met before, and I’m there with, like –

Andrew: They’re like, “Why do you look so weird? Why do you look funny?”

Elizabeth: Yeah, like, “Ugh.” And nothing that makeup was going to help really cover up. It was very obvious that there was a line there. Then two, when I was training for my first Ironman in 2015, I was working with a massage therapist, primarily on my lower legs. I had a very tight calf through that training build. So I was doing some targeted 30minute sessions on my legs, and a couple weeks prior to racing, my shoulders were really tight after a tough swim session. So I went in to that same massage therapist to have him help me with my shoulders and back. I remember the massage therapist had moved the sheet to work on my back, and he could see the tan lines from my swimsuit, and the therapist’s reaction was just hilarious to me. He’s like, “Holy [bleep], you are so much more white than I thought!” And he couldn’t stop laughing! He had only seen me with a very dark skin tone from the summer of training, and he was just shocked, probably blinded by the fluorescent white of the skin that never saw the sun there.

Andrew: Well, you have to imagine he’s probably somebody who gets very similar marathon, triathlete, endurance athletes that I’m sure he works with.  So somebody who is in that practice and in that trade where he sees people’s skin tones and backs, to get that reaction from him, I’m sure it’s just really telling of how extreme that tan line was in that particular season of your training. So I remember working with you, Elizabeth, a few years back when it was the dead of Texas summer, when you, me, John Mayfield, coach Jeff Raines, we were out at a track here in Texas, and we were filming the run drills. So athletes are training with TriDot, and the videos that pop up in the app to show them how to do a specific run drill. That is yourself and Jeff Raines in those videos, showing us how to do the run drills properly. And that particular day, you started that day already tan. Then we spent a couple hours in the middle of the day in the sun, and you ended that day just tanner than I’ve seen anybody that I’ve trained with. It’s something. When you go back and look at that footage, Jeff Raines looks very normal, he has very natural skin tones in those videos. And you look like you had done an Ironman the weekend prior, but before we filmed. Anyway, hey guys, we’re going to throw this out to you. Part of why I love revisiting these warmup questions is when we first started the podcast – I don’t know we didn’t think to do it – but we didn’t throw these questions out to you, our audience, on Facebook like we do now. Every single Monday, we take our warmup question and throw it out to the audience to see what you guys have to say. So I have not heard your stories on this, and I’m excited to hear from you. What was a reaction that you got, that was very Elizabeth James-like, where somebody was like, “Oh my gosh, look at that tan line!” What was an extreme sunburn or tan line that you had while you were training or racing triathlon?

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

Andrew: It's for sure a bold statement to say that TriDot’s Preseason Project’s athletes have helped revolutionize triathlon training. But once you've begun training with TriDot, you’ll quickly find this statement to be true. TriDot’s training structure changes the way training plans are generated. It changes the way athletes train, and it changes the way coaches coach, all for the better. And the best part of it all that we're going to focus on today is this: TriDot does all of this with your data and your feedback. Today, Jeff and John are going to show us how TriDot’s athletes, through the years of Preseason Project, are the ones empowering the TriDot training revolution. So, John, why don't you kick us off by describing for those who don't know what TriDot’s Preseason Project is in the form we know it today?

John: So, Preseason Project is a year-long research study that we do every year. It runs from the preseason, which is generally defined as late October through February, and then into the race season. So, qualified participants get two free months of TriDot training. So, qualifications are pretty simple. You have to have raced a triathlon before, you have to be racing at least an Olympic-distance race in the season to come, not be a coach, and not be a pro. And all those things are put in place to maintain quality of the research that we do. That helps us standardize the data so that we can evaluate and have a legitimate study here, and draw meaningful conclusions from it. So, the purpose of Preseason Project is again, it further optimizes the TriDot training, and then we're also able to demonstrate the incremental gains of those that train with TriDot and compare those to those that do not.

Andrew: Well, I'm excited to hear a lot more about this. When I first came on as an athlete, I still remember the day about a year and a half ago when I first saw the ad on Facebook for TriDot training. You know, “Preseason Project, get two months TriDot training free in exchange for your data.” I remember seeing it, and my first thought was I was excited about it because at the time I was actually looking for a structured way to train. And when I saw that ad, I was like, “Okay, I'm going to try it for two months. That's a very generous amount of time to get the tri training program.” But I thought it was kind of a marketing gimmick, right? I'm like, “Okay, they're saying they need my data, but they just want me to try their training for two months, so that I’ll like it, so that I'll be willing to pay for it after the two months.” And then I got involved as an athlete, and I started learning. Oh, man, there is – just what you said, John – there is so much benefit for TriDot in the athletes’ data that we receive from the Preseason Project. So, I'm really excited to dive into this, talk a little more about that. I have all sorts of questions like, why do this is in the preseason? How and why are the athletes qualified? How can you afford to give your product away for free for two months to so many athletes? How does Preseason Project help TriDot improve and quantify things like training effectiveness? How many athletes have participated in the Preseason Project? I have tons of questions, John!

John: Yeah, that’s a lot of questions. So, man, that last one is one of the really cool ones. So, as I said before, this is a research program in the triathlon space. And there have been lots of those over the years. But your normal sample size, if you go in and read a triathlon-related study, typically your N equals 10, N equals 12. Your sample size, how many people they're testing and drawing conclusions and then applying them to everyone, typically is fewer than 20. I would say your standard sample size is anywhere from single digits to maybe a couple dozen.

Andrew: And you would think on the generous end of what you just said would be 100. And within 100 different athletes there might be four or five that are like you, or like me, to learn from.

John: And even then generally, what they're doing is they're qualifying their participants. They're looking for athletes that meet a particular definition or demographic. And then they're doing research on them.

Jeff: It’s 20 highly trained cyclists or 20 untrained cyclists and they do this study. So, it’s at one end of the spectrum or the other.

John: And then they apply the findings across the board to everyone. So, one of the things that really differentiates Preseason Project is the sample size. So, we have actually had over 15,000 athletes participate in the Preseason Project over the last several years.

Andrew: That's a big group.

John: Yeah. And that equates to over $3 million in value of the training that has been given away.

Andrew: So, in all those two free months of training and that many athletes, that's about $3 million of free training TriDot’s given?

John: Yeah, because the training program that we give away for two months, there is a known cost to that. It's $99 a month. So, each athlete is receiving $200 in benefit, $200 worth of free training. So, yeah, $3 million in free training that's been given out.

Andrew: I mean, that's absolutely an astounding number, like when you hear it, quantified, right.

John: And so based on that, what we want to do is recognize the contribution of all these past participants, these 15,000 athletes that have made TriDot better. We want to acknowledge that and pass along appreciation.

Andrew: All the athletes who are alumni of the Preseason Project.

John: Yeah, and then give our current Preseason Project participants an appreciation for all that's gone into it. So, this is based on more than 15,000 athletes. And we've had 15,000 in the Preseason Project. And that's not all the athletes that have provided data. So, again, we have thousands of athletes that are providing data. So, these athletes that are new to Preseason Project and new to TriDot training, they're able to see this is actually what their training is based on. Their training isn't based on one person's theory or one person’s philosophy or education or experience. It’s actual analysis of data from thousands of athletes. So, we’re not looking at a small sample size, or one person's opinion, it's actual data from thousands of triathletes.

Andrew: I mean, that's one of the things that I've, you know, the more I learn about TriDot, the more I get excited about. You see the numbers on the website about how training with TriDot will help you improve this many times, and all that. I mean, this is the data that is quantifying those types of statistics. So, just as an athlete, you love seeing that there's actual learning, and there's actual science and there's an actual quantified way of figuring out that data. That it's not just empty claims, right?

John: Yeah, and we can highlight some of those milestones and results and really how those benefits have changed the way that we train, the way we race, and the way that we coach triathletes.

Andrew: Yeah. So, let's get into it. Jeff, why don't you just start by describing how it began. I would love for you and John to just walk us through how the Preseason Project has emerged into what it is today. So, take me back to Day One. Where did this all come from?

Jeff: Yeah, actually, it started before it started. So, there was an origin that we built on later that became the Preseason Project, back in 2011. Back then, all of the training analysis, the sample sizes were bigger, they were hundreds, not thousands. And it was a very iterative process. So, we do training phases or periods of time where we'd have the algorithms and the thresholds and you know, all of the things that we did to optimize a training set, and then you watch a big cohort of athletes go through the training, measure results, make adjustments, and then do it again. And so we started in 2011. It was just a continuation of that normal process, but it was really benchmarking and measuring the effectiveness of TriDot at that time. We'd spent six-seven years at that point normalizing all the iterations, doing the standardization, adding context, abstracting the algorithms based on different demographics to affect the training decisions made. And that would later lead to the full scale. So, this is kind of all the preparatory work leading to the big data stuff that we do today. So, before there was a project at all, per se, we were just doing this. And the focus of that time was really measuring the off-season we called it, because it was just an extremely important time of the year to do the analysis.

Andrew: So why is that? Why is that a more important time of year to do that?

Jeff: Well, you might recall from Episode .10, the Power-Stamina Paradox, during the off-season when you're not training for another event, another race, you're able to focus on the training that needs to be done to increase functional threshold or work on form. And it doesn't have the influences of someone doing a race in three weeks. They can't really do what they should do to improve their performance. They need to either taper, get ready for the race, or recover from a race. So it's that time of several months, where you can get a big group of athletes that's going to have very pure training with one objective. That was real important, so it removes that racing impact on your schedule, allows you to isolate based on FTP and form improvement. The challenge then was finding athletes that were serious. A lot of athletes quit and stop training consistently during the off-season. And so we really tried to impress upon the athletes the importance of that off-season training and prove how much you can improve during that time.

Andrew: Yeah, I mean, that's a distinguishment when I came in. I mean, I think most athletes view that time in the winter months when there's not races, they view that as an off-season. Whereas here at TriDot, we call that the Preseason Project.

Jeff: Originally, it’s the off-season, exactly right. And so we changed it, and that'll kind of come in the future years, that recognition and the way-- how do we communicate that? So, this was not named at the time, it was just a thing we did. But we retroactively look back for years, it was the 2011 off-season. So that time was just very precious and priceless.

Andrew: So, how big was that group of athletes that you really started looking at?

Jeff: It was right at 100 athletes. They were all 30 to 55, was probably 80% of them, 90% of them.

Andrew: I make the cut, 31 years old, I made the cut.

Jeff: And that was ones that were, the average training had to be about 14 weeks, give or take a week or two. We normalized it to have consistent results. And then the other thing is, they couldn't be doing a half or full marathon. A lot of people do marathons in the fall. So, we had to filter out those people.

Andrew: Oh yea, because then that would skew...getting ready for that marathon.

Jeff: Yeah, because their training objectives would be different. And so we ended up with about 100 at that time.

Andrew: So, how did it go with that first study, with that first hundred?

Jeff: Back then we did the 800-meter time trial.

Andrew: It was an 800-meter time trial?

Jeff: 800. So, we didn't do the CSS, the 400/200.

Andrew: An 800, oh, man. I’m never going to complain about the 400 ever again.

Jeff: So, here's the time trial results. So, for 800 it was a 2 minutes, 23 second improvement over that 14 weeks. For the 15-mile bike time trial it was 3 minutes and 11 seconds faster. For the 10K , it was 3 minutes and 20 seconds. So, that’s 14 weeks. A little more than three months.

Andrew: I mean that’s significant.

Jeff: Absolutely.

Andrew: I mean, if you're taking off, I mean, 32 seconds per mile off your run split. That's, I mean, for that 50-mile bike, I mean, three minutes. I mean, just for perspective for folks, that's adding two miles per hour. I mean, all of us would dream of adding two miles per hour to our functional threshold.

Jeff: Yeah, I guess the rates are a little easier to understand. For 800, that's 17.8 seconds. So, about 18 seconds per hundred faster on your threshold, 2.1 miles an hour faster, and 32 seconds per mile on your 10K pace. So, those are very, very significant.

Andrew: Yeah, I would call that super successful for all of those athletes. So, was that kind of the results you expected?

Jeff: It was. This was the first time with a bigger group. Like you said, when you have 20-40 and then none of them were the same. So, we're already seeing some little groups within the groups of who's improving more and why. But we needed to scale this further. So, the results were great, we needed to scale it, and we needed to figure out how to communicate the results. Because when we say this, we did a lot of webinars and different things telling people, and they just didn't believe you. So, that was a challenge coming out of that year. So, this is going into 2012. During 2012, how do we communicate it, and then how do we just get more athletes through this. Now we refine even further, make adjustments based on that. And so we move forward to 2012.

Andrew: Yeah. So, with the fresh lessons that you learned from that very first year, I mean, what happened in the sophomore, 2012 campaign of Preseason Project?

Jeff: Well, that was a big year, 2012 going into 2013. We were struggling to find a way to share it with more people. Like how do we get more people to experience this? One, we want it for them, but two we want more people because we need more data. More data we can eliminate more noise, we can get more granular with the training, the measurements. Back then, so many athletes just relied on the education level of a coach or a success of a pro or just a really accomplished athlete. “Oh, they must know how to train, even though I'm nothing like them or maybe like them, they did whatever.” So, it was very hard to communicate what we're doing and where's our credibility come from? These results. But then the cool thing was we could repeat the results. We knew it. We did it. We do the same things from year to year, and we're getting better and better and better, because it's a repeatable process based on the data. So, when we went out there we try to highlight you have these experts, a world champion here, and a world champion there. They're both very successful, but they're telling you two different things about your training.

Andrew: Oh, two very different things.

Jeff: And they're not repeatable, so if what they're saying is the best way to train, then all of their athletes should be doing better, but they're not.

Andrew: And pro athletes start telling you how they train, it's like “Well yeah, well you're a pro.”

Jeff: Yeah, different genetics, different age…

Andrew: Yeah, you should be training differently than me.

Jeff: So, that was kind of the battle, how do we explain and share, so we're trying to educate. We thought about sponsoring a big-time pro. But you know, we didn't want to go that route. So we’ll explain it to them and say here's how it works, and let them use it. Again, the algorithms were certainly fast enough for a pro. We’ve had 3:50 half-Ironman times, and 8:30 full Ironmans. So, it's real fast, but we're gearing toward the age grouper that wants to improve. And if you care about a goal, I don't care if it’s a finishing goal –

Andrew: If you want to get faster on less time with fewer injuries.

Jeff: That's our sweet spot. That's who we wanted to go after. Plus just the ethical issue, I don't feel comfortable relying on someone else's past accomplishment and somehow trying to transfer or relay because they were a world champion back in the day or even currently, they didn't do that using TriDot. They didn't get here using our product, I don't want them to sponsor and promote it. I’m happy for them to say “Hey, this is great, it looks good.” But not in the sense of, “Trust me because I'm so fast, then you use it.” They didn't use it.

Andrew: “I'm a pro. I'm being paid to endorse this, so you should use it!”

Jeff: But we're left with still the problem exists. All the traditional routes other than just trying to educate people and explain and get the attention to how do you understand? So, when people take time and pause and understand then they go, “Okay.” Or if they heard word of mouth from a person, they’re understanding. And that's a very slow process, and we needed more data. So, we really had a breakthrough. I was working with a consultant on just a number of things strategic, and after several months, we were just really struggling. And he called me or texted me super early and said, “Hey, I got it. Let's talk.” And so he saw, and he came up with this is brilliant model. Actually, he's a new parent, had a couple young kids, wanted to raise them right and just be a good dad. And he said, “I heard this thing on the radio. They said that if you buy their kid programs, like $350 bucks raising kids, you pay your money, you get it, you go through the first two chapters, fill out the work at the back, they give you a little assignment, do this with your kid and whatever, you fill them out, send them in, we’ll give you all your money back. So, you get this training program for free.” He goes, “It's so cool. I think that'll work.” Because you have skin in the game. Okay, I'm committed. And if you're not committed, then that's on you, not on us. We're doing our part, we're making it available. Anyway, so we worked through it. We spent probably two full months working through the details. We actually found the lady that set that up for that company, and she was gracious enough to work through some of the –

Andrew: Kind of talk through how to create a program like that for TriDot.

Jeff: Yeah, there’s operational things, practical things you never think of that becomes a problem. Here's how you make it clear to athletes. You know, everyone's skeptical coming in, so here's how you present it in a very transparent way so there's no surprises. But it was extremely costly. We spent two months he and I, literally almost full-time just putting that together. The infrastructure, how it works, how do we market it? So, there's a whole lot of cost, a whole lot of risk in the time, and what if it flops? The fear at that time was like, we're bootstrapping. We don't have a lot of cash. So we spent all this time, all this money, promote it, then what if everybody out there does it and gets their money back and quits? Like okay, the data is good, but if they're not continuing –

Andrew: Because you're promising that option.

Jeff: We need some portion of them to continue. We're willing to make the investment up front, and we're playing the long game. And the feedback that we got from it, so it wasn't just the data, it was actually their feedback. And he said the probably the most valuable thing that's going to come out of this is not their data feedback, although that's that is valuable, but their comments of what did they understand? Why didn't they adhere to the training? What was confusing? What did they not understand? And we Ironman’s learned a lot from all of that, just baggage that they're coming in with.

Andrew: So, you came up with a program, and you work through it, how did you get word out there to athletes that this was now available?

Jeff: Well, we started looking at that again, either doing webinars and all these different things. He actually told me, when I was dealing with some of those fear things, he goes, “Well, do you believe in the product or not?” It was kind of a, “Okay, well, I know what it's going to do, what it is,” and that was kind of what pushed me over like, okay, let's commit all this time and money to do this. Because I knew that some would continue. And I knew that for years. It was again, you know, passion.

Andrew: And we're all here today because we continued.

Jeff: Correct. So I just took the plunge. I partnered, I had a lot of friends in the industry. Terry Laughlin, TI Swimming, Effortless Swimming. FCA Endurance, Endurance Films, Bobby McGee, folks at UCAN, just people we've been working with for a long time, and say, “Hey, let's do a co-promotional webinar on a specific topic, and just give some value out there and talk about swim form improvement or nutrition or whatever it is. And at the end, I want to throw this thing.” We figured out this name for it, it was called Free for Feedback.

Andrew: Free training in exchange for your feedback on the program?

Jeff: Yeah, you give us your feedback, your data, and your comments. And they had a little survey, they fill in, send it to us, and then we give them all their money back. When we did it, we kind of got the infrastructure in place. We had I think, 200-228 that year, and the feedback was just incredible. We have a team, and they went through every single packet that got sent back, all of the questionnaires, all of the answers. So not only do they give us a scale for the algorithms on that side, but the most impactful stuff that year was their feedback and their comments of what was confusing and what thoughts and beliefs did they come into it with, that we had to either reeducate or overcome or somehow get them to look at it a different way and see that, and have that “Ahah” moment.

Andrew: Yeah. And so the sample size, just from year one to year two, I mean, already more than doubled. What did those new athletes see their results?

Jeff: It was the same. It was kind of crazy. And it’s funny, every year they're about the same or a little bit better. It's just gradually moving. The big thing there, because we didn't change a whole lot from the first to the second, it was really great. The other thing is that we didn't have that comparison group. So, this was the first year we're going to have a comparison group, where we had some people that continue to use TriDot and other people that didn't. So that was a benefit in future years, but that came out of this year. So, the biggest objectives in that year going into, I guess it was the year after 2013-14, was to demonstrate the improvement based on their feedback. So, any negative comment that we got, any confusion, any friction point, our goal going into that next year leading into 2014 was to eliminate the friction. So we had people that had huge three-minute increases in their bike, or their 5K run, and then we'd see a comment, “Yeah, but my eight mile is slower now.” And we had to educate them, “You don't need to be doing eight miles in January when you're doing a half marathon in August.” And back to that power-stamina paradox and understanding there's different types of training. If you're out there trying to push your eight miles and you’re not that fast of an athlete, that's a very long run, and you’re not gonna get that much faster in your threshold.

And then during that year, we were also working on our RaceX. So we had these athletes coming in, and extending the study and the research and how we track. That first year, it was only the off-season by itself, so we were trying to quantify the benefits of racing in the off-season compared to only in-season.

Andrew: Training in the off-season versus training in-season?

Jeff: Correct. So, being diligent off-season, been diligent in-season, being diligent in both, and measuring that. Another big change during that year is based on the feedback. Back then we had gold, silver, bronze levels of how much – everything was all coached. There was no non-coached option for TriDot at that point. TriDot handled the algorithms and optimization of the training, training design. But you also worked with a coach to handle a lot of those questions, and to work with the athletes as a person. Then in that year we had a whole bunch of people, that was part of the decoupling point that we've mentioned on other podcasts, where we're separating the necessity of a coach to optimize your training. So the training can be optimized by technology. You don't need a coach for that. Coaches can help, they can tweak, they can do other things, and there's a whole lot of things beyond optimization of training that coaches do. So we're not suggesting that at all. But that's when we first started offering what we called then a copper subscription. There's a little less, better price point, to help more people have access to quality training.

Andrew: So, this is now year three, 2013-2014 season that you're starting to work out the program of what it was like to train with TriDot.

Jeff: Yep. So it presents challenges. Now you don't have a coach to help educate, so now we're having to put systems and educational things in place to help educate the athletes who don't have access to a coach, for budget or for whatever. But we have more athletes, so that's increasing our numbers, so we have more data and more feedback.

John: So, this is one of the things we've always wanted to accomplish through Preseason Project is get that very valuable feedback from the athletes. That original title of Free for Feedback and that intent has never gone away. So, there were athletes that were asking for subscription options without the coach, and a lot of it revolved around budget.

Jeff: And personality.

John: So, again, we were able to respond to the customer desire, customer wish, and create that subscription. This was something that enabled TriDot to reach more athletes, because now we're able to offer a lower-price subscription option. And that's something that we've continued to do, and continue to innovate throughout our history. It's always been a priority, and something that we wanted to do, is provide an affordable option for athletes of any budget to be able to have individualized, optimized training. And this is really where it came from was way back many years ago, responding to feedback from athletes that were participating in the Preseason Project.

Andrew: So, John, you got the feedback from athletes, and you guys kind of came up with those new objectives on, “Hey, based on the feedback we're starting to get, these are the things we want to change.” How did it go with that first objective, that you wanted to improve from the 2013 feedback?

John: So, the feedback was actually really encouraging. 83% had either a four or five on their evaluation, on that five-point scale. 97% were three or higher. So what that told us was we were doing things right, but there was room for improvement.

Andrew: Most people, they liked it, they loved it, they were on board, they had some thoughts.

John: Yeah. Like anything, it was still new, it was still under construction. A lot of it was still what we thought was clear, or what we thought was explained, or what would work for us kind of a thing. And then we found out that what we thought was good was maybe not good for everybody. So something we've always done, and to this day, is resolve to improve. That's still one of our core values.

Jeff: Yeah, one of the things – John, I'm sure you can elaborate on this more because you have more interaction with our athletes – is we found that the higher the ranking, the more engaged the athlete was. And when they didn't understand, it generally correlated with a lack of engagement on their part. They hadn't entered a race, they hadn't entered assessments. They didn't engage somehow.

Andrew: Higher the ranking being the more they liked TriDot, the higher they were ranking TriDot?

Jeff: Yeah, if they did something. That was that skin in the game. Some of them were just filling out the paperwork, sending it back, but they didn't do anything. They didn't listen to a webinar, they didn't engage in their training, but they still wanted to get their money back, so they did that. So, we saw that high correlation, and we knew that engagement was the key, and I still think we see that today quite a bit.

Andrew: So people are getting out of it what they put into it. The more they put in, the more they were reaping the benefits.

John: But that continues to be valuable feedback for us that we want to improve on. We want to make it easy for athletes to engage. So we continue to thrive off the feedback that we're getting from thousands of athletes every year, in that we want our product to be approachable and easy and enjoyable. We know the training works. So we want to remove any barriers that we can, even like I mentioned a minute ago, the financial aspect of it. We want to provide subscription options that are affordable for every budget. And we want to make it clear and understandable, whether you're internet savvy or whether you're not so much. Whether you're resistant to technology, we don't want that to be a barrier either. So again, we thrive on this feedback, and we have a commitment to perpetual improvement and just continuing to make the product and experience better. Both the training is better from the data that the athletes provide, and then the user experience is better from the feedback that is provided as well.

Andrew: Jeff, you mentioned that another objective from that third year of the Preseason Project was to measure the impact of the value of training in the off-season versus just training during the racing season. What was the results of looking into that?

Jeff: Yeah, again, the understanding of this and where we're going, it’s really important that you understand that power-stamina, that you have times of the year where you have to develop that going-long capacity. You have your threshold that you can push early in the season, preseason, offseason.

Andrew: Like a few months out for an Ironman, you’ve got to focus on stamina, you’ve got to focus on going long.

Jeff: Correct, you’ve got to go long. You’re going long, and so much of your ability to absorb training and improve fitness is going longer, which is at the expense of something else.

Andrew: So, when you're farther out, in the off-season, you can focus on power.

Jeff: So we're breaking that up. That's the key this year. So in that 2011-12 study there's these big improvements, but then how does that relate? Does that mean I'm going to race faster in four months, five months after that ends? So that was kind of the focus here. We do a whole lot of little studies, but this kind of a highlighted one from this year. We called it subset seven, this one was 89 athletes that only did 70.3 races. They didn't do another running, they didn't do a sprint. It was this pure period of time where they started, they did assessments, they trained, and then they did a race. I think the average was about 168 days, 24 weeks.

Andrew: Getting ready for that 70.3.

Jeff: Correct. And the ages were 18 to 76, average was 44, 63% male, 37% female. And this was the first, like I mentioned earlier, the baseline groups. So we have a group of people who gave us their assessments, they told us what races they were doing, and they didn't ever start. So we have this did-not-start.

Andrew: They never started training with TriDot, so that's the baseline group you're comparing TriDot training.

Jeff: That’s baseline group one, “did not start”. Baseline group two is the ones that come in the off-season, that training period was about 58 days on average, so that's the two months. Then we have another group –

Andrew: And then they stop after two months?

Jeff: And then they stop, they go do their own thing. Then you have another group that was not part of Free for Feedback, and they just come, spring, three months out, “Hey, I'm gonna start training for this race,” and they started using TriDot. So they start, and that's what most people were doing, still do, at the time. About three or four months out, they start getting serious about the training.

Andrew: So you have big enough sample sizes in each of those groups to start comparing how are they progressing in their training based on how much they're doing.

Jeff: Correct. And then we had the other group that started during the off-season, and the Free for Feedback, and then they kept doing it all the way up to their race. So, now we have assessments and race results for people who didn't start, those who only did the two months free, those that skip the two months free and only train during the in-season, and then the fourth group, the ones that did it all. And actually, the Ironman group, we didn't have anyone that stopped using TriDot, so that was great. They started doing in-season at three and they go, okay. So, that was pretty cool. But for the 70.3 group, everything's pretty proportional, the improvements, so they translate very well. So for the baseline group, we learned that the off-season training was more impactful on race results than the in-season training.

Andrew: We’re summing in so many athletes that just kind of train in the off-season, but probably a little inconsistent. They think they're resting up, and they really think that when they get three, four months out from race day, those are the key sessions.

Jeff: And they're not. They've already created their ceiling. So now they're just getting to do their stamina, their 70% or whatever percent.

Andrew: So off-season training helps you raise the ceiling.

John: That's really a misunderstanding of that power-stamina paradox, that’s what that really comes down to.

Jeff: That’s exactly right. So that off-season period was 58 days, those athletes improved their race results an average of 18 minutes and 39 seconds.

Andrew: Over a half-Ironman.

Jeff: Over a half-Ironman. Those that did the in-season only, that period is 75 days. So what is that, 25% more time, a longer period, but is only 18 minutes.

Andrew: Yeah, it’s very marginal.

Jeff: So the ones that did the free two months and then did their own thing improved more than those that did more time leading up to their race, but did their own thing in the off-season. But if you put them both together, the group that did both, they improved 34 minutes. So it’s almost twice as effective. So it's not like there's only so much gains and you're either going to get it early or going to get it late. It was a cumulative effect. So they improved their power, for that first period of time is efficiently optimized as possible, and then they build stamina, maintaining that threshold.

Andrew: So when people see the claimed time gains that TriDot training can give you it's from studies like this where it’s very scientifically laid out. Fans of the scientific method will love this podcast episode, right?

Jeff: Yep. So that's huge. Those who use both in-season and the off-season improved 34 minutes and 58 seconds. 35 minutes improvement is huge.

Andrew: So, did you guys look at the Ironman distance?

Jeff: For the whole distance, we didn't have any that only did the Free for Feedback, the free period, and quit. But those that started for the whole off-season and the in-season period, they improved an average of an hour and 17 minutes and 36 seconds. And that was more than the DNS group, those that just did assessments but they never finished but they did go race.

Andrew: So that gets us through where you guys really established the groundwork for using the Preseason Project to just learn about triathletes and how they improve, when we improve, and at what rates we can improve in our training. So, now we're getting into kind of the middle of the decade. You've established it in the years 2014, 2015, 2016, years four, five and six of the Preseason Project. Now these were kind of transitional years for TriDot. There were some new technologies that were developed. You tried some new things. Talk to me about what came out of these middle years?

Jeff: The middle years were pretty cool. There was a lot of growth, so we're institutionalizing a lot of our stuff, re-revamping.

Andrew: Because now you've done a lot of learning.

Jeff: A lot of learning. We're trying to increase the numbers but not grow at a rate beyond what we can serve. So the first year, it was 2014, I think we pulled on 220 athletes in the month of January, new athletes.

Andrew: In one month.

Jeff: Yeah. And now we'll do that in a day, easy. But back then it was retooling, learning how to handle that, and not let anybody fall through the cracks. We improved on the Free for Feedback, the questionnaires, the feedback, we instituted new things. We're just fanatical about the feedbacks, reading every single one, and really learning on that. That was the 2014 and 15. Just improving upon that, increasing the scale, most of the growth, the same webinars and word of mouth. So, it wasn’t huge growth, but it was good growth. And each time is another iteration. You have an off-season, in-season, we're looking at different groups, different parts of the year. Those that are starting in June and racing in –

Andrew: Just gaining more data points.

Jeff: Yeah, and doing it quicker. So just the system’s in place. 2015-16, I can look back now and it was a promotional pause, basically. It was a strategic time. During that time, late 2014, is when I pulled on some outside investors to really upgrade and enhance our toolset, and to get an organization that had done some big optimization engine, custom work for United Airlines and PG&E and some big-time capability. So we’ve spent ten years now working on threshold standardizing normalization, all that stuff, the preliminary work.

Andrew: The training.

Jeff: We have the data. Yeah, the athletes have gone through it, a thousand thousands athletes pushed through, so we're very confident. Now we can build the thing, and know that it's going to work, and know where we need to put the hooks to turn the levers of volume, frequency, and duration and intensity, all those things. How to make that granular decision making in the optimization engine. So that optimization engine was supposed to take about six months to build, so we said okay, we'll just pause a little while, let's focus on getting this right.

Andrew: And to be clear, when we talk about the optimization engine, that's what drives TriDot training. That’s the technology that is generating what workout I should do on what days.

Jeff: Yeah. The insight optimization. Correct. So that's everything. It’s the data set, it’s the algorithms, it's the normalization, now today the PhysiogenomiX.

Andrew: And so this is where that was developed?

Jeff: All of that. A lot of it was already developed to that point, but it's putting it in a thing where we're not – we still have databases, of course, but we're more doing regression analysis and stuff offline – it’s not doing machine learning. It's not doing AI. It was just these big algorithms that produce the plan. Even at that point, the developers were doing that. I've mentioned this on another podcast, when a training phase was designed. He goes in his Indian accent, “This is just magnificent.” Because I was curious on how many calculations were happening. And so I don't know if it's a query or what he did exactly, but he checked the number of simultaneous decision threads, the things that are happening, and he says 11,000 calculations at once are going on. So that had been developed over 10 years, so we need to put that into something that can learn and adapt as we go, as we grow, and being able to do more real-time learning. So, we have different versions of the rule sets, we need to look at all athletes and apply that rule set to athletes of all time. So we put that pause on. In retrospect, it was a lot more costly. We did develop a lot of cool stuff and make it more presentable to athletes, the training stress profile, the bike-to-run factor. But instead of taking six months, that development effort took more than a year and a half. So, it kind of wiped us there. We had a lot of athletes who weren't spending anything, and were not doing any promotion. And so we were kind of flatline right there growth-wise.

Andrew: So, the middle years weren't growing years, they were developing years.

Jeff: Correct. We kept doing what we were doing, we kept learning, but the focus was on this, just really enhancing the true optimization engine at that point. Before it was data and algorithms and a lot of technology, but not this whole next generation that we’re in now.

Andrew: Yeah, but that did though is it really laid the groundwork for TriDot to then just surge in its growth in 2017, 2018, 2019, and where we are today. Here's the way I like to think of it, because I came on at the end of 2018, so we're starting to get into the more modern years here. I like to think of it as you were setting the stage for TriDot to really hit its stride just in time for me to join.

Jeff: That's right. It was all preparation for you.

John: It was the primary objective.

Andrew: Yeah, you knew I was coming. So let's start talking about 2017. We're getting a lot of the athletes listening in these years will have recognized, “Hey, that's the year I came in.” So what started happening in the year 2017 once all this was developed?

Jeff: So one of the biggest changes that we'd been thinking about for then is just changing that – before it was the Off-Season Project. It was, “Here's the Off-Season Project and Free for Feedback”, is the way you can do it for free. And the study of the off-season, in the years back then, all of the things we were talking about would have been 2011 off-season, 2012, 13, 14, 15 off-season. Now, we advanced it a year, and it was now instead of the 2016 off-season, it was the 2017 preseason, because we were really focused on and developed the technology to carry the preseason work through to race and showing impact on race from what they did throughout the season, including the preseason. So we restructured it, renamed it, a big change was from the rebate feedback model. So, they give their feedback, they pay up front, and then get a rebate after they pass some stuff in. That was a big, big thing, risk-wise. One is we're giving it away up front. So now it's not them getting the money back, it's 100% free up front. The good thing is more people, anyone that’s skeptical, they're more likely to do that, which is a plus.

Andrew: They just removed the barrier of entry. Yeah.

Jeff: But they didn't have skin in the game. So there was a drop in some of the people that did anything with it. So we have more people signing up and coming in, but they don't have to do anything to get their money back, so there's no incentive, no focus. And so we did see that. But all in all, it was great, it was very beneficial for us to do that. So we added some of the qualifications to kind of enhance that.

Andrew: So, when you talk about qualifications – and I think it was when I was throwing out all the questions I want to learn in this podcast – what makes an athlete qualify for the Preseason Project?

John: So, one of the things is race distance, and the athlete has to be racing an Olympic, 70.3, or Ironman in the next season. The reason for that oftentime is “Well, I'm a sprint athlete, why am I excluded?” Really it goes back to the purpose of the Preseason Project. Preseason Project is about evaluating the effectiveness of TriDot training. The reason we all do TriDot triathlon training is so that we can perform on race day. In order to evaluate the effectiveness on race day, we need to have standardized metrics that we can look at. Really, the biggest challenge in evaluating sprint races is we have thousands of athletes from all over the country, but very few of them are racing in the same sprint race. So we don't have a large enough sample size of athletes racing the same race. And then sprint races are notoriously random in their distance. There is no standardized distance that we could even say, well, this athlete raced in a race in California and this one raced –

Andrew: Especially in the swim and the bike. The swim and the bike distances are all over the map, if they're even measured correctly.

John: Exactly. It's “a race of a certain distance” is basically your sprint. So, there's no way to standardize and normalize that data so that we can draw meaningful conclusions. Again, we have very high standards of the data that we use. Whereas with the Olympic, the 70.3, and Ironman distance, those are known quantities. Obviously, there's a certain level, a margin of error on those distances, but that's accounted for. So now when we have Olympic, 70.3, and Ironman distance, we can compare races from anywhere, whether that race be in California or in Florida. We standardized the data, and normalize it for things like environment, so if it's at elevation in a cool temperature in Northern California versus at sea level in the heat in Florida, we can still normalize those results to where we can draw meaningful conclusions from that. And that's just not possible in the sprint race. So that's pretty common question we get, “Why not sprint?” I personally love sprint races. That's kind of where I got my start.

Andrew: Sprint races are a ton of fun!

John: We are absolutely not anti-sprint. But really, there are certain challenges that lie in drawing these meaningful conclusions and meeting these high-quality standards based on the sprint racing.

Jeff: So, that nonstandard distance is absolutely, that was the first thing. They're not training stamina, they're only training functional threshold, because their normal workouts are longer than the actual race effort. So, there's that whole missing piece of the data where we get to measure and evaluate both. But the other, like John said, is that sample size. A big sprint race might be four, five, six hundred people. We might have half that number, we've had several different Ironman races where we might have three or four hundred athletes doing the race. So when you have that many athletes doing the exact same race on the same day, normalizing and all that doesn't even come into play. You can do within the single race on that exact day. So that's even better and better and better data. Then when you're comparing for normalization standards, if you can have 250-300 people racing this race, 250-300 there, now you can evaluate that normalization between two different locations and different elevations, temperatures, humidities. So yeah, that sample size of doing the same race is huge.

A couple of things on the qualifications, the reasons for them. One is you can't have used TriDot on the past certain amount of time, and that's obviously so people are already doing this, we want to measure the incremental difference that it makes, not a continued difference over time. So, you're getting people with a big break, they're all coming in fresh. And then you've done at least one triathlon before is a requirement. And that is because some people come in, they're learning the sport, they don't understand maybe training and there's a lot of beginner gains going from sedentary. You have big gains, and that’s people who’ve gone from not active to active. And so we want to get people who are in the sport, doing it already, and then take them from an even footing there and watch them throughout the next season.

Andrew: That just helps ensure the data is just quality when we're looking at all these –

John: And that's also the same for the pros. The pros are going to have very minimal gains in any given time. We're talking about measuring gains over preseason periods and over race seasons. The professional athletes are at the top of their game, they've already arrived at really close to where their gains are going to be very incremental, very slow. And that's kind of the opposite of the first-timer, that's going to have just massive gains by doing something. So again, it's all about controlling the quality of the data. We love first-timers, we love pros, but in order for this, that's why we keep it to seasoned athletes.

Jeff: Yeah. And so when you look at the stats that I mentioned earlier, and even the ones in this year and 2017, those don't have those beginner gains in them. So, gains we're talking about are from athletes that have been racing. They’re triathletes, they're engaged in the sport.

Andrew: So, we're getting this quality data, we've retooled and rebranded this now as the Preseason Project, which is what we know it has today. With all the new technologies that have been rolled out in those developing years, and with the new rebranding, did the objectives change at all of what you were trying to learn from Preseason Project?

Jeff: They did in some ways. It was really cool because now we could increase the scale, we could learn faster, the decisions were more granular, we had better and more baseline groups, so we could measure and demonstrate groups. And we still needed a lot of new users to compare against that baseline group. So as we continued to do the program, we had that. We were able to look at these different athletes in different ways. One of the things that we started to do was when athletes came on ask them, “If you don't use TriDot, if you're not using TriDot, what are you gonna do? Are you going to be coached, are you going to train yourself, are you going to buy a coach-designed custom plan for you, or you’re going to have a coach design-plan and monitor with you?” So now we have four buckets: not only use TriDot, not use TriDot, when did you use TriDot. But when you didn't use TriDot, were you self-coached by a custom plan, or work with the coach ongoing, or you used TriDot to all the way up to your race?

Andrew: So, you establish those four groups, and what were the results that you saw from all the participants in the modern-day Preseason Project?

Jeff: Yeah, so it’s the same stats, and it’s very uncanny how similar they are from year to year. You

Andrew: From that original group of one hundred in 2011

Jeff: One hundred to 228, continue to grow. So, this year, one group of that, and this is again, the 70.3, those doing only the 70.3 coming in through Preseason Project. This year 2017, was 837. Their average training period over the whole time was 16 weeks for a 70.3, so they’re not doing other things. The group that did their training themselves, designed their own plan, they improved an average of 3 minutes and 16 seconds.

Andrew: So, over four months, somebody that decided to just kind of do their own training by themselves improved three minutes over four months.

Jeff: Correct. Exactly. But in their mind, they're not realizing that, because they don't have the benchmarking. They think, “I couldn't do a half at all, and now I can.” So they’re not measuring the threshold and stamina and all these things. Their threshold probably stayed consistent, didn’t improve that much. And they improve their stamina over a 16 week period.

Andrew: And they may have hit their time goal, and they didn't realize that they could have done it so much faster.

Jeff: They have no idea of the potential because they're a sample size of one. But they went from not being in shape, actively training, or able to do half or whatever to doing it. So that was an improvement. They couldn't do a 13mile half-marathon and 56 miles.

Andrew: Yeah, yeah. So, bucket two past that was people that purchased a custom plan but didn't have a coach?

Jeff: So they now have quality training, good principles and theories. This is the principles/theories –

Andrew: Yeah, on paper, it tells them what to do, looks great.

Jeff: And so they improved 9 minutes and 35 seconds. So almost three times better than the self-designed.

Andrew: So past there, bucket number three, is people who have a coach, a coached plan, and they also are paying for the coach to help them with that plan.

Jeff: So they're making those adjustments along the way. So that one, instead of just the custom plan, 9:35 improvement, they improved 12 minutes and 1 second. More than 12 minutes.

Andrew: Which honestly, if you're an athlete, you're probably expecting that much.

Jeff: 30% more.

Andrew: You're probably expecting, “Oh yeah, if I train myself I can improve 12 minutes over a baseline group.”

Jeff: So a custom plan, adding a coach to help them, that shows the level of changes and optimization – I use the term loosely, they're not doing statistical optimization – but a coach working with that plan, they're going to improve 30% more. And that's just these ongoing decision making. Again, from theory, common practice, experience of a coach, that was the average improvement.

Andrew: So, about 3 minutes for somebody self-coached, about 9½ minutes for somebody who purchased a plan but didn't have a coach. And now we're saying 12 minutes for somebody who had a coach help them. So then we get to TriDot, somebody who stuck with TriDot, how much more did it go up?

Jeff: This is an average, again across a large sample size: 28 minutes. That's 8½ times more than someone coaching themselves, 2.9 times more than someone purchasing a custom plan, and 12 minutes or 2.4 times more than the 12 minutes, than a coach working within the whole time to optimize their training. And there's another stat out there, the injury: they were 2.9 times less likely to get injured, injured to the point that it interrupt their training.

Andrew: So this gets into TriDot’s – I don't want to say claim.

Jeff: Brand promises. There are promises, here's what you will have.

Andrew: TriDot is promising you're going to have better results, well there it is, and less time, with fewer injuries. So 2.9 fewer times fewer injuries.

Jeff: And that's where that all the numbers came from, from the stats. We bear them out year to year.

Andrew: So, now we're starting to get super caught up to the present day. And we're in just the final years here. And the year I came in as an athlete, talk to me about the changes to the Preseason Project in 2018.

Jeff: So the structure didn't change, we’re still the Preseason Project, the qualifications were the same, that was all working really good. The biggest things here was again, it was the feedback. So you notice from year to year, it's very data-centric, testing new things, doing different things, just the off-season to the in-season, now different groups of how they train. So that's changing, not exactly every other year, but kind of. And then in the other years, we're looking at feedback, education, different aspects of now that we have this, how do we reeducate or educate athletes for the first time and get them engaged in their training. So that was a big focus, the optimization, the education, and then building community. And that was really what John was instrumental in, the education community side of things.

John: So this is where we really began to expand our social network, communications, and community. What started off as just a small support group for Preseason Project athletes has now grown into a community of thousands of athletes that is well beyond the Preseason Project, where they started as Preseason Project participants and really, it was the intent to have the opportunity to ask questions and share experience, that sort of thing now has really grown into a very valuable portion of the TriDot community. It's kind of the Monday through Friday extrapolation of I AM TriDot. Whereas on the weekend we're out on the racecourse, Monday through Friday we're communicating and engaging and having community through the Facebook group.

Andrew: The I AM TriDot Facebook group.

John: So actually, the I AM TriDot Facebook group, that now has thousands of members, and hundreds of posts a day, and is a great place to connect and ask, and do all those things that we do, actually started off as a group of Preseason Project athletes, there just to ask questions and be able to communicate with TriDot, ask questions, that sort of thing. So that's been really exciting to see. Where initially our focus was all around training and software and technology, once those things were kind of scaled, we were able to branch out and now provide, in addition to excellent training, now we have excellent community as well. And it's probably a toss-up as to what people really appreciate more. Do they love the training? Do they love the community? I would argue both.

Jeff: Yeah. I think that's just another chance to underscore. I've been talking stats and numbers and groups, but those are real people.

Andrew: Real athletes.

Jeff: Yeah. And so we're kind of summarizing milestones going over a decade of stuff. But every single one of these has been athletes engaging in their training in the offseason, and listening, and caring, and doing something different, and learning about something. Going with the Free for Feedback, and taking the time to fill out things and give us specific feedbacks of how we can improve, and asking for the non-coached option. All of these things have instrumentally not only changed our algorithms, but our infrastructure, the way we educate, this community. We didn't say “Hey, let's create a community.” The community created the community. We said let's help them, and then they started engaging, answering each other's questions, encouraging each other, just trusting “Here's what happened to me, here's what my success, just trust the process, believe.” These slogans are not our slogans, they came from the athletes. The pricing structure came from the athletes, the noncoach option, the data. This is one of the things that I've set out from the very beginning in 2005, when I was looking at the research and saw these expert coaches and pros and all of these different people that had books and videos and all this stuff, and they were conflicting. So, that's one of the things back in 2005 that I noticed, is you have experts and coaches and they'd written books and they were really dedicated and had to live by what they wrote. Their name was on the line, their reputation, and they were all conflicting. And I said I want to build something that's not constrained or conflicted to the way I see things.

Andrew: If we learn something and it's different, we can implement it.

Jeff: Yeah. If an athlete comes in and says one thing, and four more people say “Yeah, let's...” then we're going that direction. If their data comes in, what works is what the data says works. Not what I wrote a book about, or someone else wrote a book about, or “Hey, this is my mentor.” It's not about any of that. It's the data. It goes where the data goes, algorithms go where the data goes, community goes where the athletes go. So that what you see and what the athletes benefit from today is those 2013, 14, 15, 17 Preseason Project athletes, Free for Feedback athletes, that are online sharing and encouraging and lifting them up. It’s just awesome. I get more passionate about that than I do the data.

Andrew: Clearly.

John: And that's saying something because he gets excited about data.

Andrew: He really gets excited about data.

John: And that ties back into the I AM TriDot story, and the I AM TriDot moniker of TriDot is based on actual data from real people. These individuals ARE the building blocks of TriDot. If it weren't for these actual people doing actual training –

Jeff: Actual results.

John: – then we would be no different than anyone else.

Andrew: We would be guessing at what could improve an athlete.

Jeff: Theory, philosophy…

John: Exactly. So that is perhaps more than anything what sets TriDot apart is that it is based on real people, real athletes. I AM TriDot. We are TriDot, that's what it is. TriDot is nothing without athlete data.

Andrew: I know something that we're excited about, and this is getting a little ahead to this year, but for 2020 Preseason Project, for the first time is now going out into Europe. So if you're listening to us or you're a triathlete in Europe and you found the podcast, hey, go catch the Preseason Project and be one of our first batch of European athletes that start growing TriDot training and contributing to this movement, contributing to this data set that improves us all from Europe.

Jeff: Absolutely. We’ve had athletes from about 20 different countries, and it's just spilled over, word of mouth or they just found us, I don't know how. And we've had hundreds in different countries, but we've never marketed there, we’ve never publicized there. So it's been super exciting, very well received. Cindy, all of our coaches running the orientation calls and different coaches, it's just been great feedback.

Andrew: Yeah, we have the Preseason Project Europe Facebook group that's gone up. I see every single day dozens of athletes joining and super excited to see the data and the personalities and the athletes that come out of Europe. I know for me, it's going to be a problem John, seeing all of them post about what races they're doing. It’s just gonna make me jealous. I'm gonna want to fly over and people are already like, “Oh, I'm doing IM Barcelona, and I'm doing this half and that half,” and it's all like, “Oh, those places sounds so much cooler than Texas.” So without getting too far ahead, that was a little aside, let's talk about 2019, because 2019 did bring some new developments to the Preseason Project. Tell me about that year, Jeff.

Jeff: Well we've always been from the core, from the insight optimization engine out, that core is first, and then we improve everything out where there's education. This year, the 2019 was more about the new website, the progressive web app where you can download on your app, and a more intuitive onboarding process that guided the athletes better, fewer questions, and that led to more engagement. They got it, they understood. So that was a about a year effort to go back and do the studies and focus groups and kind of figure that out. A lot of thanks to a lot of our beta testers on that. And then just improving the results, continue to improve, adding some different things. A big thing was really taking a lot of steps forward with our machine learning. Then going into 2020, if I can jump ahead a little bit, the work actually started as a genetics work that actually started the research back in 2014. So a lot of things – well, everything that we see on the website – it didn't just get hatched there. There's years of prework that came to lead up to that point to introduce it. So that started in 2016, and then we had some earlier beta athletes just using the software. So I'm super excited, that's a 2020 thing being able to, based on athletes actual genetics, optimize your training and then, as we've done, take those results and build on them and further improve and optimize as the years go on. So again, athletes participating in that upload their genome and track, and look, and learn, and improving more, staying healthier.

Andrew: And if you want to hear more about that, go check out…

Jeff:TriDot.com/Genetics.

Andrew: I was gonna say Podcast Episode .07 where we talked all about it, but yeah the website’s good too.

Jeff: Yeah, the podcast. What was it, “Harnessing your DNA?”

Andrew: “Harnessing Your DNA to Unleash Your Training Potential”. Yeah, very good. Very good. Guys, we take our podcast naming very seriously here. We want to nail those names. Yeah.

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

Andrew: Really, really, really interesting to hear Jeff Booher and John Mayfield dive into the history of TriDot’s Preseason Project. A lot of TriDot athletes discover TriDot through the Preseason Project, and it’s just really cool to hear the story of how this program was developed, and how deep the research project side of this goes. So Elizabeth, I know that I am a Preseason Project 2018 alumni. It kind of reminds me of when Ironman was running the “Class of ____”. You’re Ironman Class of 2020, Class of 2021 kind of thing. I am a Preseason Project 2018 alumni, and you are a Preseason Project 2014 alumni. So as you heard Jeff and John talking about it, what stood out to you from this main set?

Elizabeth: There are just so many great things to say and highlight from this episode. I knew as I was listening back to it that it was going to be hard to pick a couple things that were my favorite, but I tried to narrow it down to three highlights. Let’s just start with saying that the preseason is such an important training time. We’ve got a whole other podcast about not missing the most important training block of the season, being the preseason. Oh, and the “Power-Stamina Paradox” episode that Jeff and John mentioned several times in the episode as well. And here we are, approaching the preseason, and really approaching the opportunity to build power and increase our functional threshold in each discipline. And this is something I’m really excited about. I can’t wait for my upcoming development phase, and I just think that it’s so great that athletes have the opportunity to participate in the Preseason Project, where their training is most critical for next season’s performance. So I just think that this is a great opportunity for athletes, and that’s really highlighted in the episode.

I think another one of the things that I love most about this episode is just the highlight on the triathlon research itself, and how this has been done through athletes’ training with TriDot. Listening to this episode gives anybody listening a better appreciation for the sample size of this data. When Jeff and John are talking about how most triathlon studies have less than 50 participants? TriDot has studied the data from tens of thousands of athletes to better understand, and then refine and optimize triathlon training.

Andrew: Yeah, that’s something that I said on the episode. As we were listening to the main set just now, I’ve already said this on this episode. But it was past Andrew saying it, and now current Andrew is saying it again. But when I saw that marketing ad for the Preseason Project – I think I saw it on Facebook – it was like, “Hey, join two months free training, TriDot, dadadada,” and I jumped in and was like, “Oh, this is perfect. Right at the right time of year for me to try something different, right at the right time of year for me to try structured training. Let me give this a shot. It’s free, no strings attached.” And I genuinely thought it was a marketing gimmick. A very smart marketing gimmick, because I was getting to try it at no cost to me, and TriDot was winning the chance to win an athlete. But it’s not just a marketing gimmick. We talked about it on the episode. It actually is something where TriDot is taking the data of all the athletes involved and is able to learn from it. So what I thought was just TriDot trying to win my business as an athlete, it was far deeper than that, and a far richer experience than that. It’s funny Elizabeth, when we go to the after-races event when we’re onsite for 70.3 and Ironman events all over the country, and we’re meeting TriDot athletes, when we’re doing those shakeout runs or we’re going for a group ride with TriDot athletes, one of the questions I’ll often ask athletes is, “So how did you find TriDot? When did you start using TriDot?” And I don’t know, maybe 50% of the time, maybe even three out of four athletes say that they discovered TriDot because of the Preseason Project. And it’s really amazing to see that we all came in through this, because it does work great for marketing, but then it also works great for the athletes to participate on the research project side of it.

Elizabeth: Yes, yeah. And as an athlete, one of the things I’ve always appreciated is that research and how the training isn’t based on of one person’s education or experience or philosophy, but instead is truly backed by the data. That’s how TriDot’s brand promises are. They aren’t just claims. These statements are backed by research and results. So using TriDot you will improve, in less time, with lower risk of injury. That’s not just a marketing claim or a marketing gimmick. Those things have been researched. There are results to prove it. Then I think the last thing that I want to highlight from this episode is when Jeff talks about the community. Gosh, that was just super cool to hear Jeff discuss how the athlete community gets him even more excited than the data. You hear John emphasize how important of a statement that is, because of how much Jeff loves data. But truly, TriDot would be nothing without the athletes, and the community is fantastic.

Andrew: Well that’s it for today, folks. A big thanks to Elizabeth James for revisiting Episode .13, “TriDot’s Preseason Project: How Athletes Helped Revolutionize Triathlon Training”. Many, many, many, many new topics coming up on the show, but thankful for a week to look back on past Preseason Projects, and to get excited about it coming back around again, particularly with the addition of the Remote Racing Preseason Project series. Huge thanks to DeltaG for partnering with us on today’s episode. To learn more about the performance-boosting benefit of DeltaG ketones, head to DeltaGketones.com and use the code TriDot20 for 20% off your order. If you have a question or a topic you would like to hear us talk about on a future show, head to TriDot.com/podcast and click on “Submit Feedback” to let us know what you’re thinking. We’ll do it all again soon. Until then, happy training!

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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