3 Simple Ways To Boost Triathlon Endurance

This podcast is brought to you by Trivelo Coaching, where we help triathletes and cyclists like you train smarter to race faster. I'm your host, Jordan Donnelly and on my left is former Australian Ironman champion and head coach of Trivalo Coaching, Jarred Donnelly. Being endurance fit is not the same as being triathlon fit. Triathlon is a uniquely specific sport and it requires unique training methods to really get race fitness. But with such a wide variety of training methods out there, how can we simplify it to boost our triathlon specific endurance? We'll explain our top priorities of training in this episode and I have a key question I'd love to ask the super coach today after what we saw at the weekend's Singapore PTO100 event where athletes better spent improving their endurance on the swim, bike or run league. We've discussed this before, but the weekend showed a very different answer could be correct. So, dad, welcome to another episode. Let's start with our normal segment. What are you grateful for?

Thanks, Jord. Interesting week coming up for us at home. Some long time friends that I first met in my early triathlon days back in 1986. Greg and Stacy Brown from the US are coming to visit and Greg himself came out to Australia as a basketballer, believe it or not, American import to play basketball in here in Victoria and Melbourne in the early 80s and was obviously, obviously a very talented professional sports person and then took his hand to triathlon and that's where I met him, some training days and, and so we've been lifelong friends and they're actually coming back to Australia to visit. So really grateful to have the opportunity to see them again. We keep in contact over the years and we've had some good, good meetups in various places around the world and at the same time we've got our oldest, Liam and Lani and the two grandchildren coming. So it's going to be a packed house household, which I'm absolutely ecstatic for. I love it. And we'll have a house three to probably ten of us.

Eleven, almost eleven. Is it right if you include all family and kids, it's going to be massive. No, that's, that's a really great one, a real wholesome one as well. My gratitude is kind of similar. I'm actually grateful for weddings and I had a lot over this last summer. I attended six weddings of friends. Everyone decided to get married at once and that can be a lot going to six weddings and it was definitely getting tiring at the end, but very grateful for it because it gave, it was a lot of the same friendship group and it really gave us all a chance to catch up each time and really have some solid good catch ups. You know, sometimes at a wedding you might catch up with one or two people really well but not get to see everyone. Whereas when there was so many good to have awesome catch ups with a lot of friends. So it was actually by the end I was exhausted from them all, but I was actually really grateful for them all to be at once and left feeling really fulfilled with all those catch ups with the friends. Moving on to.

You've got, you've got some more coming as well. So it's not stopping yet.

Yeah, no, it's not stopping, but grateful for them anyway. Moving on to what's caught our attention around the world. And the cycling races continue, the triathlon races are continuing. And basically from now on it almost feels like there is an ironman or a PTO 100 event every single weekend, which is really exciting. And, um, we want to touch on again an unwritten rule we saw in Amstel Gold and the women's race, we saw someone break the unwritten rule, which is never celebrate too early and never celebrate before the line. And it was a great sprint finish, a huge packed sprint finish. And Lorianna Weavers thought she had the sprint one. She looked right, couldn't see anyone coming, chucked her hands up five minutes before the end. Little did she know that Mariana Vos was coming up the inside on the left and got her by a tire margin on the line after throwing herself across the line. And her face went from pure elation to thinking she had the wind to horror as she realized the mistake she'd made. And it's an unwritten rule that you really don't want to, you don't want to break. And you would hate to have that feeling.

Yeah, I felt for her. And you know, especially, you know, the most winningest cycling female athlete in, in the history of cycling comes and sneaks up and pinches yet another victory. It's almost stolen. And you know, Weavers would not have lost that had she driven it to the line. And that's the thing that she'll have to live with for a very long time. And I guarantee she won't do it again. And ironically, Flesh Will Own was just on. And you know when they're interviewing the winner and she said, I didn't turn around because I just didn't want to have happen what happened to Weavers last week. Even though she won by 15 meters, she refused to turn around and she refused to celebrate until she crossed the line. So it's a lesson well learned for everybody. And, and you know, you just got to finish off, you know, it doesn't matter. You see some, so many YouTube videos of people, you know, doing crazy things just before the finish line and end up losing. I saw another, I saw a cross country run, junior cross country run the other day and I don't know, must have been under 16 or something. And it could have been, you know, world, World Under 16 Cross Country Championships. And one of the guys come around the corner and someone handed him a flag of his country and he's running to the finish line with his flag and he turns around, he sees someone coming up behind him and instead of dumping the flag and sprinting properly, he still hangs onto the flag and the guy actually passes him on the line and he, he loses. And seriously celebrating way before he should have. And you know, the race is not over till it's over.

Yeah, for sure. And it's an unwritten rule that we see often and you don't want to be that person that makes that mistake. And I would say it applies even if you're not racing for first, but especially in triathlons for age group athletes where you might be racing for a pb, you might be racing for, you know, a podium finish or a spot, a qualifying spot at a world champs. And it's really hard to know because age group is, everyone's stuck starting at different times as rolling starts where you're coming. And we've seen, we've actually had a lot of athletes, you know, really push to the line and they end up getting a podium or a qualifying spot by one or two seconds in a 70.3, whether it's a four to five to six hour event. Really hard to consider pushing to the line there. But it's super important and the opposite athletes, because you're, you're amongst everyone, you might have had a relatively poor day and you kind of don't push right to the end and you find out you, you lost a podium or you lost a qualifying spot or you lost a PB by 16 seconds, you know, and it's quite a disappointing feeling.

And I had the conversation with some people, they say to me, had I known that I was that close, I would have done something different. And I get really cross with that answer, you know, you should act as if there is someone to chase, someone to catch, someone who, who's close to you. And we had, we had that example at the recent 70.3 inch along where both Roland and Tom have talked about before, they they didn't know how far apart they started. And when they came together with 800 meters to go, Tom had an idea that Roland started behind him. Might have been 5 seconds in the rolling start or 10 seconds, but he wasn't sure. So beating him by 1 meter could possibly not be enough. So he had to catch him and put time into him because he was unsure about what start time was. So that's another example of just go for it until the finish line and it turned out he ended up being 17 seconds clear. So, yeah, so yeah, good examples.

Yeah, spot on. And yeah, we point out these unwritten rules because we have our own unwritten rule. Just a reminder that if you love these episodes, our unwritten rule on this podcast is, please, the best way that you can help us, if you enjoy these episodes, if you get a lot out of it, is to share them. Share them with another athlete. Share them on your social media. It is the one thing you can do to help pay us back for giving these episodes. If you get value out of them, we would really appreciate that. So moving on to the next key event of the weekend and that was the PT100 event at Singapore. And my question of the week, well, actually the question of the week going into the race was it was this big showdown between Ash Gentle and Lucy Charles Barkley. And it did not disappoint. It was who could take it out of these two monster races. You know, Lucy Charles, Ironman world champion, just an elite performer across all fields. And Ash Gentle, it seems to be unbeatable at this PT 100 distance. You know, the kind of the 70.3 to 100 distance where it's a little bit different. It's 2k swim, 17k run and 80k ride almost. When you look at these two very, very different athletes, one always comes out of the swim first, pretty similar on the bike, and then one runner always finishes strong in Ash Gentle. So the question was, who was going to win? And it brings a broader question of where do you spend more of your time? Swim, biking, running. And for those listeners, you know, we always say for age group athletes, we prefer to spend more time biking and running because for the age group athlete across the board, that is generally the safest way to maximize your time. But depending on who you are as an athlete and for these pro athletes, the question, the answer becomes a little bit different because Lucy Charles was five minutes ahead, five and a half minutes ahead of Ash coming to the run. And Ash Gentle closed her down and won. She, she broke, she ran, she ran down six minutes or more to win this race, which is just absolutely insane. So then as a coach, I want to ask you, what would your advice be? There, you know, how do you break this down and go, okay, Lucy Charles, we know from a lot of the public information she reveals she still spends a lot of time swimming. A lot higher ratio swimming than I would expect for someone who's already so good. She could probably just maintain her fitness right now and she would still come out 30 seconds ahead of the rest of the pack. Her biking, she was number one. So she can't ask for much better than that. But does she need to spend more time running and less time swimming? And same with Ash Gentle. She was two minutes down on the swim, three minutes down on the bike, so a total of five minutes down. She's a gun runner. She won the race. So does she need to change anything? How do you approach that as a coach?

Great questions and I'm not going to sit here and give my advice to some of the pro athletes that are doing brilliantly around the world. But my take on it is that, you know, the triathlon event is a three sport event. So, you know, we're not, we're not just good riders, we're not just good runners, we're not just good swimmers. We have to be decent at all three. And everybody's going to have different nuances around what their strengths and weaknesses are. So our main premises is that we would try to keep our strengths at that level. That would be the number one thing we want to do. And for the example I'm going to use is Lucy Charles. She's absolutely concentrating on her strength, which is swim and bike. And she's still a decent runner because she, I think you said she was third fastest run on the day. So she was fastest swimmer, fastest bike and third fastest runner. She's not doing a lot wrong. It just so happened that she came up against one of the top runners in the world at the moment. And Ash was, I think you said, sixth fastest swimmer, sixth fastest rider and fastest runner. Correct. And so taking those two weeks by.

A long shot, she was seven minutes ahead of the rest of the field. Yeah. Yep.

So that's an outlier, really. And when the rest of the field, and look, there are some other good runners who weren't at that race as well. So. So we're only picking on these two athletes because they were the ones who are fighting out for the for the victory. There are other athletes who weren't there who could also have been challenging. And when the field is deeper, then sometimes the, the bike can look, look, look a little bit different. The outcome of the bike can look different because there's a bigger pack for riders to ride with. So Lucy's generally having to ride solo a lot of the time and she's competing against a group of riders who are getting advantage, which is all fair and reasonable and they're not doing anything wrong. But the difference between riding solo and riding in a pack is incredibly different. You are getting off the bike having expanded way more energy riding solo than you do if you're in a pace line. And I'll argue that to the cows come home. If anybody wants to disagree with that. You know, there's so many examples of, in races I've been in where someone's got in front of me and my power has dropped 20 or 30 watts for the period that they're in front of me. And, and I'm doing the same speed as I was doing before. Yeah, so, so we know that, that, that is, is an advantage. So Lucy's doing a great job being, you know, solo swimmer, solo rider. And look, the advice would be, okay, let's, let's see how much we can claw back as a runner. Can we improve our running and, and concentrate on, on that and that, you know, she can start to be a better bike rider so that if the situation occurs where, you know, she is by herself and, and does miss the, the lead pack because she comes out of the waters slightly behind, that she can actually bridge up. And the example we would use is Sam Long, who or Lionel Sanders, who are always starting way back out of the swim. And their superior bike strength is enabling them to catch the packs. And they are both probably the best ride runners in triathlon, but their swim is just holding them back incredibly. So we know both of those guys are working hard on their swim. They are really working hard on their swim. But swim is a real technical sport and just throwing more time at it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get better or faster. As a swimmer. Yeah, you know, you need to improve your technique as well as improve your fitness, and so they both go hand in hand. Whereas as a bike rider and as a runner, you can really throw a lot of, a lot of good quality time and effort into it and you will get the results straight away. Whereas swimming could take two or three years to get you to be a more efficient swimmer. So, so my answer Is, you know, you want to, you want to bring all three sports along with the journey you're on. You want to improve your swimming, you want to improve your riding, you want to improve your running at all times. That's your goal. But as age groupers and we just shy away from the professionals for a minute, there is so much more time to be gained in an endurance sport by improving your bike and your running. And I've talked about this a lot to our athletes when they first join us and they're telling me that they're really poor swimmers. They're shocking swimmers. Some of them are telling me, and I'm saying that's okay, we can work on that. And they're wanting to spend five, six sessions a week fixing their swimming. And I'm saying to them, well, your bike riding is not elite and neither is your running. Yet if you spent five or six sessions a week training for your swim improvement, you could possibly improve maybe up to five minutes if your swimming's that bad. But if your swimming's average, it would be maybe, I'm Talking about a 2K swim or something around that distance you could improve two minutes. But if your swimming's okay, you probably could improve a minute to a minute and a half. But if you, if your bike riding's got the capacity to improve, you know, somewhere between five to and we've had examples of 30 minute improvement over 90 kilometers. That's ridiculous. 30 minute improvement. And as a runner you could improve, you know, between five and 20 minutes. So, so we're going to give ourselves more bang for buck from the thing that's, that's going to get us more improvement in time over all the race. So, so we'll be pushing that, that bike and run improvement over spending five sessions as a swimmer. Spend, you know, spend two, two to three sessions as a swimmer and, and put some of those other sessions back into your bike riding and running and you will end up being a better athlete across triathlon. You know, your end results will be faster. And so that's, you know, that's where we're going to point you.

Yeah, it's a great take. And when you, when you lay it out like that, it does make it obvious that, you know, if it's a, if it's a 1500 meter or 1900 meter swim and an athlete is a poor swimmer and it takes them 40, 45 minutes, you know, they can't improve half an hour. They're never going to become a 15 minute swimmer. It's not possible. They can't swim the fastest Pros, you know, 19 to 25 minutes, depending on if it's Olympic or half ironman. So, you know, there is an absolute limit on how much you can improve, whereas, like you just said, we have examples of riders literally improving half an hour on the bike. So it's a really key point. And that brings us to the main topic, which is how do we boost our triathlon endurance, which I mentioned at the start is different to just normal endurance. But really, what are the things we want to focus on? And we can say some obvious things, which is endurance training, et cetera, but we really want to break it down to three simple things to focus on to get the most out of your triathlon endurance. And so to state the obvious, number one, the number one thing we're trying to do to boost our endurance is to increase our duration of our endurance sessions over a period of time. So can you explain what we mean by that?

So we always talk on our podcast about the three components of fitness. And to get the improvement you want, you need to have these components, these three key components in your program. You need to concentrate on the duration, and then you need to concentrate on the frequency, and then you need to concentrate on the intensity. And that's the order we always have it in. We want to get our athletes to start thinking about what is the duration of training you've been doing before you came to us as an athlete? And so that's the first question I ask everybody, is how long is your longest run? How long is your longest ride in the last six to eight weeks? And then tell me what you've been doing over the last six to eight months, and then what have you been doing over the last five years? And I'll get variations of answers. Some people haven't run at all. Some people have just started writing. Some people have been writing a lot over years. So I'm finding out what their. What their duration is, what the history of duration on bike and running and for the same swimming, how much training have they done in the pool? So these are questions I'm trying to find out because I want to understand where their fitness is when they come to us. And so in order to improve your aerobic fitness, and you know, the term we're using here is your endurance. Triathlon is an endurance sport. So even though a sprint is called a sprint, it's still somewhere between 50 minutes for the pros to up to two hours for a beginner triathlete. That is not a sprint. That's what the event is called, but it should be called the shortest triathlon. But it is still, it's still an endurance event. You know, anything that you're doing more than an hour's worth of effort in where you know you can't sustain anything for more than an hour, that, that is go past the sprint well and truly. And so, so we are talking about endurance. So, so that's why we're trying to make sure that our aerobic fitness is going to match the requirements of the event. And triathlon by and large is an endurance event. And of course it goes entry level. Triathlete. And they're the things that we have to take into consideration when we're asking about why is endurance important in your training? And so let's get straight to the number one thing. How long have you been training in the bike sessions? How long you've been training as a runner? And I'm not talking about how long in years, I'm talking about how long in minutes that you are spending. And if someone comes to me and I ask them what's their, you know, they're after a 70.3 program or an Ironman program, I say what's your longest ride? And they will tell me that it could be somewhere. I'm regularly doing four to five hour rides and instantly I have an impression of this guy or girl has been doing a lot of riding and someone else could tell me that my longest ride is 45 minutes and they're aiming for 90k or 180k ride. So that's where we start the program. We start at their longest ride. And I'm asking that question for two reasons. One, to find out what their experience is and what their fitness level is. And two, to start them at a progressive motion where we just add time at a percentage for their duration so that their endurance isn't getting thrown from 45 minutes to saying, hey, you need to be doing two to three hour rides if you're going to do this 90K time trial. Well, you can't go from 45 minute as your longest ride to a 203 hour ride that is just going to cause you to be exhausted for the next seven days or two weeks. You need to progress yourself slowly. So starting from where your longest ride or run is and progressing from that point. And if you're experienced and you've been running for 20 or 30 years, you can progress that quicker than a person who hasn't been doing much at all on a bike or a run program, they can just progress you know, at 5% at a time or 10% at the most. But people who are coming back from a break in, you know, competing over years and they're very experienced and you can afford to push them quicker. So that's the first thing we're really looking at is the duration of your training is going to be one of the key things. Of course frequency and intensity is a factor that we're going to talk about, but the duration of your endurance training sessions is the starting point.

Okay. So we get where they are from the start and our goal is to gradually and safely increase that duration. But where do we get to? Because a lot of athletes get stuck getting to the two to three hour mark for a ride, for example, or maybe a 90 minute run, but we just kind of find that's not enough endurance. So where's the cap about how much we want to keep pushing those rider runs up in terms of endurance to get the most endurance benefit?

Yeah, and my answer is always going to be depends on where you're working backwards from how far away is your event. And if your event is a short distance away, then you don't have that time or opportunity to grow that endurance to it to a really big area. So if you're going to, let's just use some times in the race as an example. If you're a 2 hour, 30, 90 kilometer half Ironman bike rider, then you would want to be doing regularly regular rides that are going to be at or the same or, or better than that time that you're going to be on the race day. So, so I would be saying 2, 2 hours, 30 to 3 hour rides is something that you should do at a minimum before you're, you're partaking in a 90k time trial in a triathlon 70.3. And if you're doing a 180k ride in an Ironman, you need to progress yourself up to being, if it's going to be a five hour ride on race day or a six hour ride on race day, you need to have done some days where you have experienced that total duration in your training somewhere. And the more time you have before race day, you need to have multiple days of five to six hours in your training. But if you've only got a short period of time, well, you're stuck with the amount of time you've got left. And that's one of the reasons why we want people to reach out earlier. So they've got enough time, they've got a year's worth of training where they can gradually build that capacity to be able to ride five to six hours before their race day comes. And the longer you can spread that over the weeks and months, the less impact it has on you in fatigue. And being able to go about your everyday function as a human being, as a worker, as a mum or a dad or a brother or sister, you can do these things without having a huge impact on your fatigue. And I'm talking about, you know, not being able to, you know, train properly for days because you've just overdone it with the duration. So, so these are examples of why we talk about giving enough time between, you know, when you start training for your endurance event. And depending on the, the distance and time of that event is, is what the, the main thing we're looking at is to, to make sure we got that accurately. So, so to, you know, where is the, where is the limit for that? There is no limit. The more of that you can do, the better. And, and I'm encouraging people to, to, you know, just because you can ride, you know, five, six, seven hours every weekend. That's not necessarily what I'm saying. It has to be then we have to change it from just purely duration to how often. So the frequency of doing that. And then we talk about what's, what's the intensity involved in those sessions, and we don't make them the same every single week for 52 weeks. If you're giving yourself an hour for an Ironman training program, you want to make sure that you're doing variety in that endurance, right? So once you've got the duration under control, then you start thinking about how often, the frequency, how often should you do that. And then you should start thinking about what is in that session that's going to be different, that you're not doing the same repeated thing week in, week out. And we throw in things like strength in hills and intensity in effort. And so they're the things we're trying to implement into our program that's going to give you the endurance you require to make sure that on race day you can cope.

What do we do specifically? We will answer that in point three. But before we do that, point number two is it's really important to understand what is the goal with triathlon endurance. We're asking this question, what's the best way to boost your endurance? What is the goal? And the primary goal is to get your triathlon race pace as close to your fresh race pace as possible. So to get your race pace as close to your fresh race pace as possible because what you can do in a race, in a triathlon is different and often a lot slower than what you can do fresh. And so triathlon specific endurance means doing the same disciplines under the fatigue of a race where it's swim, then ride, then run. And so can you explain to us why that's so important to get right and how to go about that?

Yeah, and you often hear a lot of the really good coaches around the world talking about if you come to race day with a run race plan and you haven't done any of that practice in training, how are you going to expect to implement that into your actual race day? You can't, you're doing something you haven't done in training. And so we really want to make sure that we're replicating the requirements of race day in our training session. And so thinking about can we, if we're a half marathon runner who can run a 1 hour 30 fresh, our real goal is to try and make sure that we can get as close to that in a triathlon. And that sounds like a really almost impossible goal to achieve, but that's what your goal should be, to try to be getting yourself as close to that as possible. We've got examples of people who could possibly run a 145 fresh half marathon 1 hour 45 minutes. And in a triathlon they could be running somewhere around two hours to two hours 10. And you know, that's literally 15 to 20 to 25 minutes difference. And so our goal for that athlete is to try and get them as close to 1 hour 45 as possible. And if they can get under 2 hours then under an hour 55, then we're starting that journey well. And the ways, the method we try to do that is to try and get you in your training sessions where you're doing your endurance training session where you run off the bike and getting to practice that you know, see, see what pace, you know, if it's 4:30 pace that you're trying to run for a 1 hour 45 and, and you're currently running 5510 or 5:15 pace, practice that in your training sessions where you've done your race specific bike session, get off and try and run close to those paces at 4:30 that you, that you think you could try to do on race day. That's not something we would do straight away. That's something we would do once you're getting closer to running 1 hour 45 if your current form is 5 hours 15, we want to get you used to doing that and progress that over weeks where we try to drop that. And we're not running a half marathon every training session off the bike. We're running, you know, 15, 30 minutes, 45 minutes an hour. The duration changes according to where you are in your program. So we're trying to get you used to running the pace that you think that you'd like to run on race day. Also what you're capable of run so capable of running. So remember, ability and ambition, don't get them confused what you want to do and what you can do. And those training sessions, that will be abundantly clear if you're saying, oh, I'm sure I can run 4:30 because I've done that fresh and then go do that hard bike session which race specific and then get off and see what you can do for, you know, something like a 14k out of 21 or a 10k out of 21. And you know, and I guarantee 4:30 won't be that easy. You need to really have a lot of practice sessions where you're starting around 5 minute K pace. And I'm using this example for these particular distances and times. And if you, if you get ahead of yourself, you will actually, you know, end up running 5:30 pace. If you start at 4:30 and after 9, 10 or 11k out of a 12 or 14k run, you know, that's not going to be the way you want to train. You want to train where you're being able to hold a pace from start to finish and build confidence from saying, okay, last week I was able to do this, next week, let's see if I can actually hold a little bit quicker. And they're methods that you can use yourself to give yourself confidence about where am I at currently and how do I go about getting that pace that I want to. It's an endurance race, remember, we're trying to actually not not do anything out of the ordinary except hold a pace that we can do from start to finish in our training so we can replicate that on race day.

And I think our final point here is we want to show athletes what's possible, you know, and to believe that you can get as close as possible. And yeah, some of our best athletes are seriously close to their fresh pace. You know, they're only one to two to two and a half minutes off their best half marathon time at the end of a 70.3, which is just kind of mind blowing when you think about it, but it's incredible. And then on the bike you know, they're pushing similar power to what they would do in a 90k time trial. They're managing to do that in a 70.3 if they were just doing a straight fresh 90k time trial. So with the right training, it really is possible.

And we've got good examples, Jordan, haven't we, of some of our age group athletes who are at the pointy end winning their age group. The reason they wouldn't push any more power as if they were doing a fresh 90k time trial on the bike is because they have to run. And the guys we coached in Aquabike, they don't have to run. So we are pushing them to do their last 20, 30 minutes at best power as whatever power they can push. And you know, a lot of the times even though they've swum beforehand, that's as good as they can do if they didn't swim, you know, so we're really pushing that point. But, but you know, the guys who are, who are running after, after their 90k time trial, they wouldn't do that because they're trying to save themselves for the run. So they're trying to run right evenly. But even still, they're still able to run, you know, some incredible times that are close to their pbs. And, and we know that people who are at the pointy end of age group results in triathlon are very close to running and riding to their PBS when they're fresh. And the people in triathlon who are miles away from what their PB is as individual sports, standalone 90k. The example using 90k time trials and half marathon runs, they are miles away. And that's our goal, is to get your endurance fitness to a level where you can keep knocking huge chunks of time off the power you're pushing and the pace you're running to get those numbers down from 20 minutes apart from a half marathon, to 15 and down to 10. And once you're starting to get, you know, within five minutes of your fresh and you've really got some good endurance fitness and that seems to be the limiting factor is you don't have the endurance fitness to be able to hold the pace that you want to. And you've got examples of athletes that you've coached where you know, they're saying to you, no, I can run a faster pace than that. And you're saying, well, no, you can't because you haven't got the endurance. And even though it's a 5k run, you know, that's still going to be for some people 30 minutes. You know, they're still only able to run 6 minute K pace in a triathlon and maybe as a fresh runner they can run 25 minutes, but they're more than likely going to run 30 minutes in a triathlon if they don't have that endurance in their training.

Yeah, that's absolutely spoiled on and it really leads us to the last point which is getting the balance of base training right versus race intensity endurance. Right. So base endurance training and race intensity endurance, you kind of, you really spelled out the difference before in what they are. But this base endurance, you can't skip that work and there has to be a phase where you're doing that training. So can you kind of go in a bit more detail about what is that mix of base endurance that you have to get right before you move into a race specific endurance phase?

Every athlete that we coach comes from a different background and I mean in terms of experience, experience is what I'm talking about. So if you're someone who's been doing triathlon for 20 years and you've done 15 half ironmans and half a dozen Ironmans, you don't need a very long race ready specific stage. You need to keep working on your endurance and the more time you can spend getting that strength and endurance into your legs, come race ready, you will act. We're trying to, we're trying to increase your engine, we're trying to build that capacity to, to, to be able to hold your pace on the bike as a runner and power on the bike. Close, as we said, to the last point, as close as you can is your fresh ability. So you know, the athlete who has done very little experience in triathlon races, we would try to get them doing a lot more race ready stuff so that they're getting used to what's going to happen on race day. Still, we still need to build their endurance and their fitness capacity so that they can actually do that. But, but yeah. So it's almost the opposite to what you think that the athletes who, who are experienced don't need as, as long a period in race specific training as they do just continually building that engine so that their FTP can keep moving from, you know, I'm talking about the experienced athlete, keep moving that FTP up because that's what, that's what you want to be. You know, the more you can move that up to 200 to 220 to 230, you know, that's what's going to help you on race day to be faster. So keep training Specifically like that. And of course that's going to be the same for less experienced athlete. But they need to practice what their current ability is until they get more experience under their belt before they can actually start to see that improvement. Where they're getting their endurance to a level where they need to. You could argue the other way. You should spend all of your time getting your endurance fitness up and then just doing one race ready session. And I can see a valid argument for that. But in our experience we want the confident athlete with less experience knowing that, you know, this is my first couple of races, let's just go through the race and get some confidence in the fact that I can do this pace that I've planned to.

Yeah.

And then after this event we'll add some more endurance. And you know, we've got a whole heap of people who've started with us in the last 18 months and that's exactly how we've done it. Some people have never done a 70.3 before and they've just done one recently. And we had to do a mixture of race ready and endurance training and you know, the minute that a race was finished, guess what we're doing back out and doing the endurance and strength work to get the aerobic fitness up.

It really does depend on the athlete and each athlete might have a different balance of getting that right. But yeah, you're correct. When if they don't have the base endurance and then time's kind of running out towards the, the event, we kind of unfortunately have to just start doing race ready sessions. And that confidence word is really key because you just, you know, they kind of need a bit more time to have a crack at these sessions because it's going to be a bit of a shock to system to the system and see if you can squeeze in some, some real good race ready work so they have some confidence on what they can try and go for on race on race day. Because if you don't do that and just the endurance it's going to be too much of a shock to the body. So when we're thinking about that, that race endurance, do you do those sessions at race pace for a 70.3 or Ironman or do you do it slightly over to get that feeling going over and then come back or do you go slightly under because it's too hard to repeat that in sessions? Where would you sit there?

Yeah, and that depends on are you six weeks out, are you four weeks out? So those sessions will change depending on where you are from your event. But originally we would try to get you into that race ready. Take the bike for example. Say we're trying to ride between 75% and 90% of your current FTP. And you know, that's a whole other discussion which we've mentioned many times, but we're trying to find out in that first race ready session, we're trying to find out are you comfortable at 82% for a session that might have three by 45 minute efforts. You know, you'll find out straight away after the third 45 minute effort where the 82 where you started was above my ability. And I'm more like 78% at the moment. So each week you will get a clear picture of what, what you wanted to do and what you did do. And then the next week you know, you would say, okay, I managed to do 78%. I'm going to aim to try and ride at 85% this week and see how you go, see how far you go. This is what the training session is about, understanding and finding out where your ability is and what you can cope with. And you know, we want you to make mistakes in training but that we don't want you to ride at 90% and then do the last two efforts at 65%. That's not what we're saying. We're trying to, we're trying to get you to understand where your level is and then just keep pushing the envelope each week to see that by the time you get to race day you have a clear example and understanding of what you are capable of doing. So yes, we want you to train those days exactly where you think you can on race day. And it's, we don't, I'm giving the example of some intervals on those race ready sessions, but we also do some straight out, you know, distance riding where we're doing 60, 75k or 90k time trials. And so they're examples of, of, of you trying to ride what you think you're going to do on, on race day. So yes, the answer is we ride at the percentage that you want to race at.

This really summarises three of the most important points to think about. If you get those three right, they're the easiest things to focus on to get the most out of your triathlon endurance. And yeah, we just wanted to summarise it as succinctly as we could. And there's a couple of bonus points you wanted to mention. One is proper fueling, you know, especially endurance. If you're not fueling properly in These endurance sessions, you're not going to get through them, you're not going to recover well and they're going to be an absolute grind. Whereas you can fuel properly before the session, during the session and then after session for recovery, they're going to be a lot easier to get through. And technically a lot of these base endurance sessions are in zone two. And you should feel really comfortable when you're fueling enough and it should be quite a steady grind as you get through the length of the session. But when you're not feeling well, it feels like the most max intensity session possible. So that's the first point I wanted to make. Any thoughts on nutrition you want to add?

Yeah, absolutely. And add that point where what you practice for your power on the bike, what you practice for your pace as a runner, you should be practicing the amount of fuel you require. And we are doing those sessions, remember, at our race intensity. So practice the fueling. And week one, you could get it horribly, horribly wrong because you're not used to the intensity for that duration. And so that's why we practice it in training. We want to understand whether you are a person who needs 100 grams of carb per hour or 50. And so each week you're experimenting with was that enough? Did I, did I go hunger flat or was I having stomach issues because I've used the wrong fuel? Each one of these race ready sessions and obviously the endurance sessions, which are a lower capacity than your race day training. But that's why the race day training, race ready sessions with the fueling is really replicating the intensity you're going to ride at. You'll know then what the fuel requirements are and that's really the key thing. Not only will you get through the session better, but you'll understand what you are going to use for your race strategy on race day.

The last bonus point is thinking about your VO2 max work. Because improving your engine with your endurance training is key. But improving the capacity of that engine, how much you can actually utilize that engine, is what the VO2 Max stuff is all about. And most endurance athletes come to us and the sessions that they can do really well are endurance and zone two stuff, Zone three, four stuff stuff, it's where they spend all their time. But the sessions they struggle the most with are the high intensity VO2 max sessions, which makes a lot of sense, but it's also the key to improving. So that's just a really key point to chuck in there to understand.

Yep. And you know, we've talked many podcasts about the sessions you should be doing as a VO2 and you know, where do you do that in your program in a 12 month program? Well, it has to be sprinkled everywhere. The VO2 stuff cannot just be only at the start, only at the end, or only in the middle. It has to be a part of your program throughout that whole 12 months. You need to go back to it, go back to the well and try to keep improving your FTP. And the best way to do that is to train at threshold or above and at VO2 and you can't do that for 52 weeks. That's not what we're saying. But it needs to be in there. So you keep building that engine and it has to be at strategic points in the program and that's where obviously having a good coach who can tell you when and when not to do those sessions is going to get you the best bang for your buck.

Great way to finish. We hope you've enjoyed this episode and if you need help with your endurance training, if you want to become a better and stronger endurance athlete, then you can go to our website trivalocoaching.com apply for a coaching spot there and we'll have an interview with you and see if we're the right fit. And as always, there is our eight week guarantee that if you don't improve your numbers, because we test your numbers, if you don't improve your FTP in the first eight weeks, the coaching is on us. Thank you very much for listening as always. We'll see you in the next episode.