3-min Time Trial Improvement in 3 Weeks!? [Case Study]

Welcome back to another case study episode. This week's case study episode we're really excited about because we are kind of focusing on one person who had a ridiculous time trial improvement of three minutes in just three weeks on the same course, same time trial, bike, three minutes. We really want to explore that. But this was part of an individual time trial race that we put on for our trivalo athletes. And there was 30 or so athletes that did this. And the results from the entire experience compared to three weeks ago, we're so insane that we won't really want to break down a few different people. But the focus is one of our athletes manage 3 minutes in just 3 weeks. And this is a, this is a 30 minute approximately. For our best riders, it's 22 minutes. For our backend riders, it's about 30 minutes. And what's the distance, dad?

16.8 K. 16.8K.

And so we can tell you that you're not going to improve three minutes due to fitness gains in three weeks. That is not the factor here. And we've said it before, we're going to say it again. There are two key factors that defines a time trial and the athletes continue to underestimate these factors. And these two changes are what helped this athlete and many of our athletes. But this athlete specifically improved by three minutes in the same course in just three weeks. And whether you're a cyclist doing a time trial race or whether you're a triathlete where the bike leg is always a time trial, you need to understand this. And the longer the event, the more this matters. So if he improved three minutes over a 30 minute race, you know what would happen to you in a triathlon where it's an hour or two hours or four hours. So dad, welcome to the episode. Really exciting about this one. I'm just going to start by saying the tips and then we're going to explore it. So the two tips that we want you to understand. One, the biggest time gains are when the bike is traveling the slowest. And we're going to explain that in more detail. But the biggest time gains when the bike is traveling the slowest. So you've got to be able to push the power at the right times. And knowing when to push the right power is key. Making gains where it counts. And number two is staying at the right training zone. So, dad, welcome to the episode. Give me some of your thoughts immediately about, about the time trial race that we experienced.

Yeah, look, I don't think I've been that excited about results in A long time and not, not particularly because of the actual, the way every rider performed, the performance is great, but the learnings from the first week and we do a post race analysis and we send out results with some, we have a, we actually do a case study on the actual results in our email with, with what we send out to our athletes and, and you know, pointing out things that they could do better when they get another opportunity to do a time trial. And you know, that opportunity was three weeks later. And, and that's the thing that I'm most excited about is the learnings that people are getting because, you know, they want to improve, they want to ride faster. That's their goal. In, in whatever sport you're doing, if it's a running race, swimming, bike race, you want to be faster than you were before. And really good, good thing to do is test yourself on the same course. And you know, for anybody out there who's got a Strava segment that they want to improve on, this is a perfect chance to do it, do the, do the effort and see, see what you think you can do better and then put that into practice. And basically that's what we're trying to achieve here, is understanding how we went about it the first time, then learning from that. And I could give you, I think there were 26 out of 30 riders who improved and three or four riders only lost a few seconds here and there. But the majority of people in the race improved between three minutes and 10 seconds and everything in between. And the conditions were actually reasonably similar. So it's not like we can put it down to, oh, it was a better, a better day, a fast, faster day. You know how we talk about the wind and the conditions. Yeah, yeah. But it was very similar temperature. The wind was the same crappy northwesterly wind that we, that we have and actually is counterproductive to improvement in time trialing because this is an out and back course. And the hardest section, we would love it to be in the second part of the course so that we can actually push better power. But in this particular course, the hardest section is the first half of the course. So you're having to actually push harder power on the first half of the ride, which is what we sort of don't encourage. We want people to be a little bit conservative early in their, in their strategies, in their race plan so that they can come home strong. And that negative split is something we really push to a lot of our time trialists. And I'm not talking about just riding here. I'm talking about as in a swimming time trial or a running 5k or 10k race, or in a bike time trial, you know, it is better to be more conservative early and come home strong, not only for the result, but actually the feeling of accomplishment and the value of running past people who are fighting. Even though you're not running actually, or riding or swimming much faster. But the feeling you have is just tremendous. So we're really emphasizing the fact that people have really had an uphill battle because the course setup was a lot harder than it really should be, because riding into a heavy headwind is going to be really testing your execution. And that's probably the key thing that we want to talk about because we've got a few examples of how that proved to be the result between guys. The first five riders was only, I think, 15 seconds between the first five riders. And that's all about where they put the power down the most. And the results show us that, yeah.

It'S a great point. And you messaged me and said, check out this result, three minute improvement. And you just blatantly said, purely down to execution. And this is such a great time trial course, this one that we choose because it's out and back, same course every time, but as you said, it's got a lot of undulations in it. So it's got to be few little 30 second to a minute to a minute and a half punchy segments of uphill. So you've got plenty of chances to make some time gains or lose time gains or make some mistakes, go too hard on the uphill, too easy trying to push too much hip hair on the downhill, plus managing the wind. So that's what we want to talk about. And some of the factors at play that people might say straight away was, oh, well, maybe it was a better day or maybe the conditions were way better and you already eliminated that. They're basically similar. And even if they were a lot better for our rider, it's not going to result in a three minute improvement. But the big one is that this three minutes came, but the power was only 8 watts different. So, yes, he improved his power by 8 watts, but that's not going to equate to three minute improvement in a time trial. So we have this great example where the power was very similar, but it's the way he executed the power and where he decided to push higher power is what we're trying to say here. And we want to go on this first point. The biggest gains are in the slowest part of the course. And I'll start again with that example of the top five riders who finished were all had a finishing time within 15 seconds of each other. Even more specifically on the way back. So that second half where we spoke about it's a tailwind, they were all within five seconds of each other. Everyone basically rode the same time back. But that change between 15 or 25 seconds of I think first or fifth was 26 seconds or something, that all happened on the way out. There was potentially 15, 20, 25 seconds of difference where some pushed the segment a little bit better, got their time gain there, and on the way back there was no more time to be made. So take us through your advice to our athlete Behead, who, where you spoke to him about execution and where do you think he improved on the course to get this massive improvement.

Yeah, and it's really a fine line between going too hard on the parts of the course where the bike's going slower. So we really want to not complicate this. I want everybody out there listening to get this tip. Simply ride harder when the bike's going slower. And I get lots of questions back saying, well, how do you know I'm going slower? Well, if you're going to average 30 km an hour for your average for the whole ride and you look down and you've got speed metric on your screen and you see you're doing 22Ks an hour and you don't realize you're going up a slight head uphill or, or there's a, you know, five, ten kilometer headwind, that's a, that's an instantaneous red flag to you to say, oh, I'm going slower than my average pace for the whole ride. Therefore this is the time where I need to be actually riding higher power. And that rule of thumb will answer any question you have at any part of the course. So people say, what's the point of having speed on the screen? Well, that is the number one reason why you would occasionally check speed if you're unsure. And honestly, you know when you're going uphill and you know when you're in a headwind, it's, it's ugly and uncomfortable. But there are times where it is subtly a headwind and subtly uphill. So that little reference check to see what is your current speed. If I look down and I'm going to average 40Ks an hour and I look down and I see 48, I must be on a tailwind or I'm riding way above my level, but I Know, I'm not riding way above my level. I must be on a downhill or a tailwind. So that's an indicator to me that the gains are not as big where the next section is, where there's a hill. So I'm going to try to ride as close to my average power as I can in that section. And then when the hard part comes, this is when it's game time. Okay. My Speed's now at 34. Okay. I actually have to ride the power above my threshold for this section. And then the question is, how long do you hold that? Well, how long's a piece of string that. That's a hard answer question to answer, because we don't know in any specific course how long the headwind is going to last for in terms of time and how long the hill is in terms of time and gradient. So they're things that the course recon will help you with understanding. Well, that hill went for 45 seconds and it had an average gradient of 6%. And so you can then implement that into your race plan before the event. And I'm encouraging the guys who did the race plan, the event last time to look at their data and see how long the slow parts of the course were and identify those seven sections that are really key. And they're the parts, when they get to that part of the course, that they are actually concentrating and saying it's game time. Right now, this is the hard part. This is where I need to get two seconds on my opposition or on myself from my previous effort. And so if you do that seven times and gain three or four seconds each time times seven, there's 30 seconds gained. And we had examples of that in the front five riders. One rider, who's very accomplished rider, he gained 40 seconds from last time to this time and 12 watt improvement. And that was totally on execution. His fitness had not changed from three weeks ago. You know, it might have been similar or slightly above, but it was all about where he executed the right amount of power at the right time.

That's such a great point. And I guess if you look at the riders at the very top end, you know, there was still performance gains due to execution. And down at the back end, the performance gains are just bigger. So we found a lot of our athletes riding 26 to 29 minutes, they have more time to gain, but they were gaining that time. We had 3 minutes, 2 minutes, 145, 130, 120. And then the guys at the top end who have marginal gains to make are still making those marginal gains. And this execution works no matter what level you're at. And that's just a really important point. And I think I want to finish with understanding exactly what you said. The biggest gains are in the slowest parts, of course, but how do you know how hard to go or how slow to go this is? Point two is knowing how to stay in the right zone and to get this execution right. Can we just finish with giving us this tip? How do you stay in the right zone and why is that so important?

You need to understand. And every course has got different requirements, so that's one and the distance of the race you're doing. So if it's a short race, you'll expect to be, you know, most training profiles have five zones or some have three, some have seven zones. So if you've got your FTP set right in your particular platform that you're using, you would understand that in a time trial you want to be spending the majority of time in the, in the zones that count and not above it and not below it. Why shouldn't you be above it? Well, the more time you spend above the zone, that's going to be the key. Go to zone in that race, you're gassing yourself, you're, you're burning matches. So what happens then? You spend more time in zone one and two. So the majority of short, short time trials that are maybe 30 minutes, 20 to 30 minutes, you should be in zone four and five and very little in zone six and nothing in zone one, two and three and, and that's making it simple. So spend most of your time in zone four and five and as the, as the time trial distance goes longer, then you would drop that zone back to zone four, then zone three towards a half ironman and then possibly zone two and three for an ironman. So there are examples of how you move your power from one zone to another. The percentage of time you spend in the particular zone is determined by the length of the race. So we're using the example of a 20 to 30 minute time trial where most of the riders should have nothing in zone one. And there is a turn in this course. So I would give them 20 seconds in zone one. Zone two, you should have zero, you should have zero time in zone two. Zone three, it's okay to have some time in there because on the downhills you might be dropping out of your zone 4 threshold zone and that's okay. But you will want to spend less time in there if you can. Zone six, I don't want to see zone six and that means you're 50 to 60 watts above your threshold power for zone four or zone five. Zone six, unless you're, you know, Remco, Evenepol or Pogaccia, they can come back from, from spending time in that because they've got great recovery. As an everyday age group athlete, we're not that fit to spend time in Zone 6 and recover from it and all it'll do is burn matches and cause you to ride slower. And that's the bottom line. We're in a time trial situation whether it's bike, swim or run. We're aiming to run, swim or ride as fast as we have before and beat those previous pbs. So we're all the time looking for the big gains. So spending time in the right zones will allow you to not slow down because you're spending time in zone one, two and three. And spending time in zone six will cause you to over fatigue yourself which will cause you then to spend time in zone one and two which will slow you down and give you a poorer result. Most people, when we, when we turn up at races, the trivalo athletes are always at the pointy end of the time trial and it's no coincidence because they're really learning and understanding how to time trial properly. And these, these time trial trivalo athletes weren't like that when they came to us, but now they are, they are understanding how to execute and anybody can do this system once you've learned it. But it's so noticeable when we go to races people say oh, you've got all the best time trialers. Well, we didn't have all the best time trialers. They've just become good time trialers because they're following and understanding and analyzing how to ride a time trial properly or how to run a 5k properly or how to swim a 1500 meter swim properly by actually understanding where your limit is and staying in those limits and not blowing yourself up. And that's the point I was trying to really get across. But it could have been too much pushing from, from a self perpetuating coach's hat. But that's what happens when we go to races.

That's a brilliant point. I really agree with that. It's just such a great summary and we really hammered this point home at the start of the episode. It's just these two factors are still so underestimated and they will result in massive changes for you. And we've seen how much time you can gain in a 30 minute time trial, but also how much time you're potentially losing by making these mistakes and going into that zone six or and way overextending yourself. And just imagine that in a half Ironman or Ironman, there's so much time to be gained by doing this properly and there's so many mistakes to be made which will be detrimental to your total time, your total average speed. So that's a great way to finish. We're really excited about these results. We're really excited about this execution. We love that our tribal athletes are getting it right, and we hope you can take these lessons and get it right in your own time trial. That's it for this episode. We'll see you next week. It.