How To Maximize Triathlon Success With Minimal Training Time

Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield and today we are going to be talking about how to maximize your triathlon success with minimal training time and whether or not you're into triathlons. You're probably going to get a lot out of this interview in terms of learning how to choose workouts and a way to exercise that's going to allow you to get the most bang for your buck and not waste a lot of time with your training. The person who we're going to be talking to today is certainly someone who has shown that you can do very, very well when it comes especially to triathlon with the kind of quality over quantity type of training approach. Sami Inkonen is with us today. And Sami was the overall age grouper champion at the Wildflower Long Course Triathlon last year, which for any of you who know about triathlon here in the US know that to be not only one of the more competitive but also one of the tougher horses really in the world when it comes to triathlon. He was the overall age grouper champion also at the Ironman 70.3 Hawaii. At the Ironman World Championship 70.3 race in Las Vegas last year, he was the age group world champion for the highly competitive 35 to 39 year old age group. And he also raced and I believe has raced multiple times in Kona, but he, he was second in that age group in Kona and raced an 8:58 at Ironman World Championships in Kona, Hawaii. And Sami is also a extremely active, basically he's involved with a hectic work schedule, but he was involved with the company Trulia down in San Francisco, a San Francisco based real estate search company. He stays very busy with his work life and really needs to train minimally but is able to put out these fantastic performances despite his busy work schedule and the fact that he's a successful CEO. So Sami, thank you for coming on the call today. I'm excited to talk to you about your training and your training philosophy.

Yeah, hi Ben, thanks for having me. It's a privilege and pleasure to be and happy to share some of the things that I found useful in my own training in life.

So with this unique approach to training, let's, let's first of all just kind of COVID the bases, you know. What is your philosophy when it comes to triathlon training and kind of melding triathlon training with your busy and successful life?

Well, first of all, I love exercising. I love going out for bike rides with my wife, running on trails and doing all kinds of kinds of exercising. And I think to some extent that has been part of my life since pretty much the very beginning. But training, to me, it's very different from exercising. To me, training is sort of goal focused activity to really maximize your performance on the race day. And to some extent it appears to me that a lot of people exercise to prepare for a race. But when I train, I would say there's probably two key ingredients that most often is surprising to people, particularly other triathletes. When I talk about my training and I think the first 20, I take a lot of recovery so that I'm almost always either fully or very well recovered to start a new week. In other words, I don't really sort of dig a huge hole over two or three or four months of very hard training and then try to miraculously recover over three weeks or two weeks of taper and hope that come race day I'm super fresh. So that's probably one thing that's often quite surprising to people when I talk about my training taking a lot of recovery and then two. Secondly, which is probably even more surprising to people is I really train about 10 hours a week, even to 10 or nine or eight hour race, such as Ironman and many other similar recreational athletes who do this stuff for fun and particularly those who aim for the kind of results that I aim, train 20 plus hours a week. So that's probably the other thing that I train way less. But I sprinkle a lot of intensity into my training. So those are probably the two things that most often are picked by others. And people have a lot of questions, how is that possible and why are you doing it that way?

How long have you been involved with triathlon, Sami?

It's a good question. Yeah, I had my very First Triathlon in 2004 when I was in business school at Stanford. One of my friends encouraged me to just sign up. So that was eight years ago. And I literally had zero experience with, for example, swimming. I could barely float in a pool four months before I sign up. And funny enough, there was a Wildflower long course that I signed up four months before the race. So that was 2004 and I didn't even own a road bike. I bought my first road bike from ebay, a trek bike for about 900,000 bucks. That was 2008, eight years ago. And then during the business school I did one or two races a year for two years and I co founded Trulia and life was so hectic and I moved to San Francisco and I thought it's impossible to Figure out where to swim and where to bike. So I actually had two, I think almost three years that I didn't really, I didn't do any triathlons for two years. About. So out of the last eight years I've raced or done races for five years and two years I was kind of off.

Gotcha. So it's. So basically it's not like you grew up as a extremely competitive swimmer, cycler, cyclist, runner, and you're relying on years and years and years of honed in experience. This is. Triathlon is something you got into relatively late in life, right?

Well, yeah, absolutely. So I was. Well, I guess I'm getting seeming to be an old man by now, but during the math, I guess I was 29 when I did my first triathlon. It would be wrong to say that I didn't do any sports and I just sort of ran out of the office and started exercising. I grew up Finland and you know, definitely outdoors was a big part of my life and did some cross country skiing, that kind of things. But when it comes to specifically cycling and swimming, I really had no experience. Obviously running is something that all the kids would do and I played a little bit of soccer here and there. So I was an active child.

Yeah. That's interesting that you bring up the fact that you think that a lot of people focus on exercising as a way to prepare for a race rather than really doing exercise sessions that simulate what's going to be experienced in race day. And I suspect that's a big, big key to your success. But let's go ahead and jump down into the nuts and bolts when we look at a typical week of swimming and cycling and running and how that philosophy of doing race specific preparation works for you, what's a typical week look like for you? A typical one of these kind of like 10 hour training weeks for something like an ironman.

Yeah. So let's see where I started first looking at sort of overall the week. Like I said, I probably train when I'm really training 10 to 12 hours a week and then when I'm taking easy and may not do a longer workout during the weekend, it might be seven or eight hours a week. So that's sort of the overall volume. And then I usually I pretty much all the time work out in the morning. So I train about hour to hour and a half each morning during the week and then a little work, little longer workouts during the weekend. And I, I can say this exclusively, only train once a day. I can probably count it with one Hand stingers. In the last three years I've done probably two workouts a day. So that's on a high level. In addition to that, I basically take one day fully off and then maybe this is another day that's very, very easy. So about 2 almost complete recovery days per week. And then in terms of specific workouts, swimming, I try to get to pool three times a week. There might be one sort of a real one hour workout and the others 30 minutes or less, which I usually do after running or after cycling. So I don't need to waste time going to shower two times or anything like that. So maybe three times the pool and one is a little longer workout and then bike. Go ahead.

Oh, I was just going to interrupt you about swimming. When you say like a longer workout, like a one hour workout for swimming. I know a lot of triathletes, specifically like Ironman triathletes for the one hour swim, for example, they might just get in the water and literally swim for an hour, just steady. Is that what you're doing or do you have certain sessions that you do for an hour of swimming?

Yeah, I never do anything like one hour study. I don't think it's a good use of time. If I'm on a vacation and I'm by a beautiful, beautiful lake, maybe I'll do once or twice, twice a year, swim an hour in a lake, open water. But I don't think it's a very effective and efficient use of training time to just swim one hour, particularly in swimming because as we all know, the water resistance is so high. So technique plays such a huge part in, way bigger part than fitness relative to biking and cycling. And if you really want to get your technique right, even if there's no coach standing by the pool, doing shorter intervals and spits, where you really focus on your technique and kind of focusing on technique is, gives much better bang for the, for the buck. So I don't, I never do 30 or 60 minutes of straight swings.

Gotcha. Okay, cool.

And do you want me to continue your question? Sort of just go quickly through the sort of swing bike run. What do I do? Yeah, definitely in a week. So that's kind of the swim biking. I only ride once a week outside and that's usually Saturday. And it's sort of a semi social ride with my wife. Could be any, anywhere from three to four hours and then I do two additional rides on the trainer about an hour, sometimes hour 15, maybe sometimes hour 20. So sort of 70, 80 minutes on, on bike trainer and these are the real intervals that, that I do the three bike ride and then running, usually two real runs, one is a little longer during the weekend. But even for an Ironman, I very rarely run more than 90 minutes at a time, so hour and a half. So it's two real runs, one is a little longer and another one is some kind of interval set. And then I might sprinkle a few 10 or 15 minute runs here and there. It might be running to my pool for 10 minutes and then swimming there for 30 minutes, running home or might be like a five or 10 minute quick break or just flexing my legs after being on the trainer. But it's mostly two real runs and then some very short ones. So that's kind of how my, how the 10 to 12 hours when I'm really training, where it comes from about hour, hour and a half each morning and then on the weekend it's a three, four hour ride and maybe that's an hour and a half run on Sunday.

Yeah, that training once a day philosophy I think is something that perhaps a lot of people don't really realize how much extra time that can free up alone just in terms of not having to shower twice and prepare for a workout twice and do everything twice in a day, which I know adds up for a lot of Ironman triathletes. So as far as swimming, what's an example of a swim session or a swim strategy that you would say gives you the most bang for your buck from a time management perspective, like a favorite swim session or a swim approach that you use that you think works really, really well and allowing you to maximize your time in the pool?

Yeah, well, first of all, like I said, I absolutely didn't grow up swimming and I'm a pretty crappy swimmer. Very crappy swimmer. Still, I don't know how qualified I'm to answer that. I did swim 56 minute something Ironman swim 3 weeks ago in Sweden in a wetsuit. So it's an okay age group of time, but I'm no swimmer by any means. But what gives most bang for the buck? Well, first of all, like I said earlier, water resistance is so significant compared to air when you're running and biking. That technique rather than fitness I think is so much more important. So I would say with very limited time, I would say frequent 20 to 25 minutes. Yes. This short, frequent 20 to 25 minute swims throughout the week that would include very technique focused swimming with the snorkel, which helps very much with the body positioning and Then maybe something like 10 times 50 yards with the snorkel. Yes. And then maybe something like 10 times 50 minute 50 yard sprints with some recovery. You can do that in 20 minutes. If I could do that five times a week, I'd be extremely happy. I think something like that could have amazing bang for the buck. So if you would swim that five times a week, that's 100 minutes. So 1 hour 40 minutes swimming a week, which is probably as much as one big master set, I think that would have a huge, huge impact. And if you could do it, let's say you go and do some treadmill running at a gym and the pool is right by the treadmill. It's very. The transaction costs of hopping into the pool from the treadmill is very low. You need to take a shower once and just need to change your running pants into swimming pants. So something like that would be very time efficient. And the reason I say that is one is in that 20 minutes you can do a little bit high intensity, like 2 times 50 yards. And then the reason I mentioned snorkel is I think the body positioning in swimming, given the water resistance, is probably the most important factor in how fast you will move in the water. And I found that as a crappy swimmer, moving your head when you breathe makes it very difficult to really sort of optimize and learn the feel when you are very straight and smooth and you sort of glide downhill in the water. But having a snorkel and doing relatively easy steps with the snorkel has been very, very helpful for me in trying to find the right body positioning. And that's certainly something I learned. An open water swim coach. It wasn't something I discovered myself, but that would be my piece of advice to others who don't come from swimming. Background.

Gotcha. Okay, now how about cycling? In terms of cycling, a cycling session or cycling strategy that you think is best when it comes to time management and quality when it comes to triathlon training?

Yeah, I think my stable workout is it's a 60 or 70 minutes in the trainer. I hop on a trainer, which, you know, I have in my bedroom or other bedroom, luckily not in the main bedroom. 15 to 20 minutes to warm up, spinning, you know, ramp up the watts a little bit, and then about 20 minutes of actual interval interval time. It could be 10 times 2 minutes, 5 times 4 minutes, 4 times 5 minutes, whatever. I don't think that's so important. And then a couple of minutes of recovery between each interval. But you accumulate about 20 minutes depending on how close you are, the race and what kind of race you're training. The power and the effort may change, but basically hitting 20 minutes hard and then for me that could be five times four minutes at whatever 370 watts, 360 watts, doesn't matter what the watts are, but it's very individual. And then Maybe there's a 5 minutes of cooldown spinning, it takes 60 or 70 minutes. Extremely effective. It's hard, but it builds fitness like nothing else. And I've seen that happen to me year after year. And a lot of the research that I read and what other coaches who subscribe to some of the higher intensity philosophy, I hear them saying similar types of things now.

Do you do more of your cycling training indoors?

Like I said, I only ride outside once a week and then two indoor sets in house inside. So frequency wise, yes, definitely more on trainer, time wise, I might do a little bit more outside because once you go outside at the weekend, I rarely ride less than two and a half or three hours, so I probably accumulate more time on the saddle. But it's riding outside is extremely time inefficient unless you happen to live in the middle of a forest with beautiful paved roads with no stop signs and no traffic lights. And even then you have downhills and it's difficult to do those intervals without interruption. So me discovering the Computrainer 2000, I think it was 2009, 2008 was like a massive change in my training and also massive change in terms of results. It was the best thing really for me. Living hectic life and living in a city. Absolutely fantastic tool.

Yeah. Yeah. So like the copy trainer indoor cycling and kind of avoiding a lot of that management of having to get ready to ride outdoors and deal with with traffic and all those issues. It sounds like has worked out pretty well for you as far as that goes. How about running? What have you found to be some of the keys to good strategy for running?

Actually very similar to cycling. I would say if there's one type of workout that I would not like to skip. If I'm preparing for a race, which I have on almost any distance, it would be a 50 or 60 minute run where I do, similar to cycling, 15, 20 minutes, easy running, some easy sprints, some drilling just to sort of warm up and then accumulating maybe 15 minutes or 20 minutes of actual interval time. And for running something Easy could be 10 or 15 times 1 minute with just a 1 minute recovery. Best average pace from start to finish. Very hard workout, but it builds Fitness very, very fast and surprisingly so. It doesn't just build fitness for, you know, 5k rates. I use this type of workouts for, even for Ironman. And although this is totally anecdotal, this is how I trained the three weeks leading into Ironman Sweden three weeks ago and I ran 2:56 marathon. My longest training run was 90 minutes before the race and my interval sets were basically running 300 or 400 meter intervals on the track. So 60 seconds at a time with one minute recovery, 10 or 15 of them, trying to keep a sort of average strong pace from start to finish throughout all those 10 or 15 intervals. And it's just all my, whether it was my threshold pace or my, my easy fat burning Ironman pace, everything just kept going up very, very rapidly. So that would be my time efficient prescription for run training based on my own personal experience.

Yeah, and certainly something that is not maybe mentally easy but far less time consuming than the type of sets that you'll hear a lot of, you know, triathletes who are training for Ironman especially doing you know like three one hour sessions a week and then another two to three hour run on the weekend, which is fairly typical among the, among the Ironman training crowd. So it's interesting, you're doing a lot, a lot similar to cycling, a lot of the shorter intervals. So you mentioned that you do quite a bit of recovery. You take that full rest day a week and you track recovery quite a bit. Do you use, use specific tools to manage recovery, whether it be to track recovery or to actually enhance your recovery on those days that you are recovering, like you know, foam rollers or compression gear or things of that nature.

Actually, when it comes to especially the recovery tools that you mentioned, the simple answer is none. I really use none of them. And based on the research that I've read, most of the recovery, what I call recovery crap is pretty much overrated. Whether it's ISO compression or painkillers or you name it, you can spend unlimited amount of money and unlimited amount of time doing all kinds of tricks. There's really three huge recovery tricks, if you will, that I use and that have worked and there's research that shows that they work. And the three things that I really use for recovery is one, and the most important to me is sufficient sleep. That's when you produce growth hormone and all other great things happen in your body. So just sufficient sleep. And two is the right kind of real pure food. So nutrition and no nutrition tricks. It's just right, real food right after Exercise, but after training and throughout the day, and then three is just sufficient number of those easy rest days. So to me, those tricks, if you will, those are the three things. Then everything else is either nothing or rounding error compared to those three things. And every time I miss one of those, especially if I miss for a longer period of time, things start really falling apart. And the sleep is probably the, at least in my body it's most sensitive to. And I've certainly tried reading of four, three and five hour nights of sleep and it's just a recipe for disaster. So those are the building blocks that I have used for recovery and has worked very well. And another thing is sort of a minor thing that when you're living a very, very busy life, you know, I may have an hour, hour and a half in the morning to do something. And even if I have a recovery day, I do try to invest that into some kind of useful training. And typically that means swimming because it's so technique focused. So if I take a Monday off, which usually is my rest day, it doesn't mean that I don't do anything. It might mean that I walk to my pool and then I do 20 or 30 minutes of very easy drills, swimming drills in the pool, which doesn't really create any kind of metabolic stress in my body as far as training goes. I can still use that 60 minutes that I have in the morning, 6am or whatever time I go to somehow improve and train towards my race. Someone might probably have to recover, but I just call it trying to use the time efficiently rather than sit and read the morning newspaper.

Yeah, and you mentioned in terms of real high quality food as being one of the components that you consider to be important for recovery. Do you actually have a specific diet that you follow?

Not really. I'd call it the lifestyle. Outsiders will look at my eating and they may say, oh wow, you really have a kind of a special, special diet. But for me it's lifestyle and it's pretty simple. What I eat and do is I eat lots of fast carbohydrates during and after workout. And that could be in a form of, you know, gels, oatmeal, white bread, whatever it is, lots of fat carbs during and after workouts because I want to get most out of my workouts. Particularly when do high intensity and almost exclusively your body is using carbohydrates as the fuel. There's no point in trying to do high intensity intervals and then you have to cut them back 20 or 50% intensity because you aren't fueling the sugar needs that you have. So around workouts, lots of fat carbs and then throughout the day or all other meals, it's very simple. Just a huge amount of vegetables and then protein from fish or chicken or beans or something else. But that's very simple. So lots of carbs around workouts and then veggies and I guess you could say lean proteins outside of that. But very, very simple.

Yeah. So you're keeping. Keeping your blood sugar levels from fluctuating too much by timing those carbohydrates to be more around the workout then.

Yeah, it's also before you go to bed at night. Yeah. And yeah. And you want to. And I noticed there's many other reasons why I do this, but one is the ability to focus. My head gets very distracted by if I start shooting fast sugars into my, into my bloodstream, whether it's whatever it might be. So I feel much more focused and balanced and better energy. But also it's important to fuel your muscle cells with carbohydrates. You don't want to fuel your fat cells with carbohydrates. And one way to avoid that is to make sure that all this sugary stuff that you do need, you only take it around your workouts as opposed to in the evening before you go to bed or, you know, five hours after the workout.

Right, yeah, that makes sense. Now, in terms of training, many triathletes are big into data and tracking and doing most of the bicycling intervals with power or the running intervals with with speed or gps. And are you using many tools when it comes to power meters, heart rate monitors, GPS, etc.

Good question. I'm not. Let's see. I'm not a huge fan of GPS while running, especially when you run outside because terrain changes so rapidly. So pace is all over the place. But the things that I really use is power on the bike. So that could be combat trainer that shows power. I also use power tap, especially when racing and then if I do key workouts on the road. So power is very, very useful. Has been a very, very useful tool for me. That brings objectivity into your cycling workout. And then in running I actually do a fair amount of my intensity workouts on treadmills. And again, it's like power meter. It brings objectivity. You set certain pace and you run two minutes there. There's no slacking and there's no changing and the weather and the conditions don't really change. So that's been running and then heart rate Monitor would be the third thing that I do use on the bike and on the run and evening racing. But it's more of a tool to see what's happening in my body. I don't really prescribe workouts for myself based on heart rate. I use power and pace and then heart rate tells me that is everything okay? Have I recovered? Am I hydrated? Is it too hot? Or some of those things that are pretty well reflected in your heart rate.

Right, right. And you also, I noticed because I visited your blog and by the way, for those of you folks listening in a link to Sami's blog, he's got some great articles on that as well about his training and other concepts as well. It's over@samiinkinen.com I'll link to that in the show notes for this episode. But I noticed that you also use restwise to track recovery. Is that something you're still doing as well?

Oh yeah. I definitely should have mentioned that. It's a really nice, simple tool. I don't know if simple is a fair word. It's complicated, I guess, on the back end and the algorithms. But it's very simple to use. And what I use that for, and I started using it last year, is for tracking recovery and bringing objectivity to recovery. I've done fair amount of, as might be clear from all of my arms, a high intensity training. And although the volume is much less, you can definitely do too much of it. And I think I was doing a little bit too much of it a couple of years ago and I wanted a way to be more objective about is my body really ready for another or the next hard session. And restwise, I found to be such a tool that if you just, you know, there's a couple of questions each morning that you answer and it blocks out the Number percentage from 0 to 100% how well recovered you are. And you know, after using it for several months, then I sort of developed a much better internal sensor and ability to when I wake up, I kind of know, okay, how's my, how's my body feeling? And is it time to actually do the workout I was going to do or should I take a day off or just do a very, very easy recovery workout? But I would encourage people to check it out. I'm not sponsored or anything like that athlete by them. So it's just a tool that I found useful and it's pretty cheap and easy to use.

Yeah, we've actually had those guys on this podcast before talking about their system. So I'll certainly link to that for folks as well. Sammy, we're starting to run short on time. This has been great information so far, but I'm curious, are you honing in on another Ironman here or what are your plans next?

So, like I said, I did ironman Sweden 3 weeks ago, which was really my first real race this year because this year has been a little special in terms of my time use and what I've been able to do. And I. How did Lucky, it was an amazing race, I do have to say. I went 8 hours, 24 minutes in Ironman, which was way faster than I expected. And. And on top of that, became the overall amateur champion, which made me very, very happy. And as a result, I also got my Kona slot, which I didn't have before the race. So I took it. In a couple of weeks, I guess four or five weeks from now, I'm going to Hawaii to give another shot there and see how things go there. But that's really the only race ahead of me and I'm excited to. To go and challenge myself and have fun on the Big island again.

Awesome. Well, this is a unique training approach, but one that has obviously freed you up to have a lot of success in business. And you also, I believe, have a family as well, correct?

Well, I have a wife. That's the extent of family I have. We have no puppies or kittens or kids. Just two of us.

Okay, gotcha, gotcha. But you're still up to quite a few other activities outside of triathlon, as I can tell over on your website. So, folks, I'll provide some resources for you in the show notes here and link over to Sami's website. But just an amazing example of what you can do in terms of maximizing your triathlon success with minimal training. Training time, when you actually have the correct training approach. So hopefully today's podcast just gives you a little bit of insight into how you can set it up and how somebody like Sami does amazing 824 at Ironman, Sweden. When was that? Two weeks ago? Three weeks ago? Is that what you said?

Yeah, three weeks ago.

Yeah. And be the overall amateur champ. And certainly keep your eyes on Sami in Ironman, Hawaii this year as well, where I'm sure you'll be able to watch him do more amazing things. So, Sami, thank you so much for coming on the call today and sharing this stuff with us.

Yeah, thanks so much. It was fun and hopefully there's some nuggets of information to your listeners. Thanks so much for having me.