4 Training Sessions That Make You Slower

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, Jared Donnelly. As an age group athlete, you have one, two or three key sessions each week that you just have to get right. These are your quality sessions that are contributing to most of your fitness gains and it's absolutely crucial that you aren't wasting these sessions. But not only that, we all have limited time to give to training each week and we don't want to waste any sessions at all. So in today's episode, we're going through four types of training sessions that you need to be avoiding if you want to be getting the most out of your training week. As always, this episode is brought to you by our proud sponsor, Giant Australia, for all your bike training and racing needs. Ride life. Ride Giant Dad. Welcome back to another episode, starting with our normal first segment. What are you grateful for?

Thanks, Jord. What makes you slower? That's going to be a good topic. We don't want to have anything in our program that makes us slower, do we? So my gratitude is look, for those of you who haven't noticed that I haven't been able to be online very much in the last two days. It's because we had this really minor weather issue and we lost all power and basically lost all the ability to use our technology, which is my mobile phone won't work and still won't work. And I'm probably four or five days in to where we're not going to have power in our house or Internet or the phone. I can't use the phone. So I'm absolutely debilitated for work. And the only way I can actually communicate is to get in the car and drive 15 minutes away and then get my phone to work and send some text messages and make some phone calls. And luckily enough I at your brother's house, who lives 20 minutes away. So I'm packing up everything from my office and moved it to here and now I can actually function again. But it just makes you realize how much we rely on technology. And having grown up with no technology at all, we didn't need it. But because our businesses are so structured around the Internet and the use of the mobile phone for communicating, it is really. You feel lost and I felt frustrated that I, you know, I can't get in contact with people who are asking legitimate questions about specific things and I'm sending text messages that says unsent, unsent, unsent. It's like, I want to help, but I can't. And unless I, you know, want to get in the car and continually go down the hill, 15 minute drive and get some coverage, I'm pretty much stuck.

So you're grateful for technology, Is that you?

Absolutely, yeah. Even though, you know, growing up, I didn't realize that it was going to be such a big thing when we had none of it, but our lives are just dependent on it now and that's the way society evolves, isn't it? You know, as. As we get more things available to us to make things more simpler, when they fail, things become very complicated. So it's got good and bad.

If anyone's watching the video, it's, you know, you've actually gone to Matt's house to record the podcast. And so it's a little bit of a different background to what there's normally some bikes and a wacko kicker in the background, and instead there's guitars and a piano because Matt's a bit of a musician. That's great. My gratitude is very easy one this week I'm getting to see the Queen herself, Taylor Swift, on Sunday night in concert. Really excited about that. Big Taylor Swift fan, Big Tay Tay fan. So it's going to be an epic show, three plus hours, and it's actually pretty historic. It's going to be her biggest set of three shows, her whole world tour, because the MCG where we're seeing it is the one of the biggest stadiums in the world. So, yeah, it's going to be awesome. Now, dad, before we move on, remind me again, when you're out riding in the hills and you love your long rides on your own out in the Dandenongs with nothing but you in the mountains, but if you do pass another cyclist, of course you're going to give them a wave. You're not going to just ride past and ignore them. That's right.

Spot on, Jord. And it actually reminded me this morning I was riding in the Dandenongs and there wasn't a lot of people out, but almost bar none, every single person either gave me a quick wave or a nod. And as I was riding throughout the morning, I was thinking, I wonder if they're actually listening to our podcast and we're really pushing this, give it away, even give someone a nod as you, as you go in the other direction. But it is a real, an unwritten thing that you should be, you Know, just acknowledging that you're out there doing the same thing, whether you're out there having a great day or whether you're out there having a really tough, intense training session. And even if I had one guy pass me today and you know, just said, hey, and you know, good stuff going well, you know, stuff like that, it's really, it's really good. And I remember when I first moved to the Dandenongs back in 1987, and I never saw a bike rider ever in the first two or three years when I was training there. It just wasn't a place where bike riders rode unless you were there on the weekend. And I was there during the week training. And if I did see someone, I almost chased them down to say hello because it was so few people were actually on their bikes riding. So yeah, it's come a long way since those days, but there's literally thousands of people ride the Dandenongs now. It's like a mecca on the weekend.

I'm very similar. Growing up running, I would never see another runner. And now when I go for a run, I'll pass 150 and I'm just as enthusiastic as you. Whenever I see a runner, I'll give him a nod. I'm giving 150 nods per run now, running in Melbourne. But it is an unwritten rule, and another part of the athletes unwritten rule is that if you find these podcasts valuable and enjoyable, we want you to take a screenshot for us on your phone, add it to your Instagram story, and tell us why you liked it. The reason why is because we do all these episodes for free. We give out our best coaching tips to help you out there train smarter and race faster. And we hope that you'd like to honor that agreement and tag us and help us spread the word.

Yeah. Just before we move on, Jordan, I just want to acknowledge going on from this topic that we're talking about and it's really great that we're at a local event on the weekend and so many people came up and said they're really grateful for the podcast and love the episodes and they're basing all their training around everything that we're, that we're saying on the podcast, which is really great to hear. And so, you know, do that, put it on social media and, and like us and promote us and that would be really helpful to us. And you know, coming up and saying hello at an event is absolutely what I want to want to experience and it's a great feeling to meet people. I met a couple of new people on the weekend and I saw them after the event, saw them before the event and after the event. Amazingly you run into the same person, there's probably 2,000 people there. And I was able to say, how did you go? And you know, really happy conversation. So yeah, use social media, promote us that way. It would be really helpful for us. Thank you.

Yeah, so true. Yeah, so. And hopefully they listen to these episodes, this episode and figure out what train sessions to avoid. They've been getting a lot of what train sessions do and what training sessions to avoid. So before we get into that, just a couple of notes of what's caught our tension around the globe and some really, really sad news. This was honestly devastating and shocking. As soon as it popped up I thought I checked if it was April Fools, to be honest, because there's just so heartbreaking to see and marathon world record holder Kelvin Kiptom and his coach died last week in a car crash. And just, just incredibly sad story. No way around it. You just feel so much for both their families and the Kenyan athletic community. Just for Kelvin Kiptum, you know, someone that was, we just, the athletic world could not wait to see what he could do in the next 10 years. You know, he's, he debuted at 2. He broke 202 on debut in the marathon. Looked to be a generational talent in the marathon. He was, looked like he was going to do, going to do what no human could do and break two hours in a race. Not in the controlled conditions that Kipchoge did. And go further. He, his ability as a runner was just something we have not seen in a long time as a marathon runner. And yeah, he broke the world record on his third crack. And just, just really sad. And, and this year was. It's, it's not, it's sad obviously for any, anyone to die, but yeah, it was. Just leaves such a hole in athletics, you know. This year was looking so promising. The showdown between the old and the new. Kipchoge versus him at the Paris Olympics this year. That was going to be one of the greatest races of all time. And just. Yeah, it shows how short life is. I guess it really shocks you when a 24 year old is taken like that. And his coach as well, his coach has got a young daughter. Yeah, just, just devastating to see.

Yeah, it reminded me of, you know, I can still remember probably a half a dozen or you have to call them tragedies when people die unexpectedly. Manchester United traveled on a plane and the plane crashed and pretty much the whole, the whole team was devastated. Some people survived, some people didn't in that plane crash. And, you know, that was another example of, you know, just a shock to not. It's not a normal thing to occur and especially at that elite level. The thing that was, you know, almost disappointing about the whole thing is that we're never going to see the matchup between Kipchoge and him at the Olympics this year. That, that would have been something, you know, really worth watching. And yeah, just so many things that we're just not going to get to see from an incredible athlete. And, you know, it could have offered so much to the athletics world on. And especially the way he ran Jordan. It was, it was, you know, music to our ears, wasn't it that he was the master of negative splitting. And, and we push that so much in our podcasting about how the most successful athletes run this way. And he had it down pat. And you and I were talking off air a little bit before about we've done a few reels on talking about negative splitting. And the comments we get back are, this is so obvious, you know, why would you be making such a thing about this? Everybody does this. And, and you and I are laughing because watching you grow up as a cross country runner with your brothers going to six years worth of cross country races, the entire field sprint at the start as hard as they possibly can and progressively get tireder as the race goes on in a 3K marathon, 3K cross country. And had you guys had me in your ears saying, stop sprinting at the start and just let the field go ahead of you and you will pick the field up as you go through that 3K. And you guys were the few guys doing that method of running. And it was, you got more out of it, you got more success because you were running it the right way rather than. And you love doing it because it was fun passing people who'd blown up. And I think they're really good examples of, of how he was really making that one of his, you know, his kit bag things that he does so well.

Yeah, it's funny, that high school example, because one of the comments on the video that we put up was it was, he was kind of trying to slam us and say, this is so basic. This is basic coaching. You know, this is taught to all high school athletes. Like, this isn't anything revolutionary. And I just said that improves my exact point that it's supposed to be taught in high schools, yet every single high school Cross country race ever is a, is a 1km sprint at the start, a 300 meter sprint into a like try and try and run a 7k or 8k cross country race after you put yourself in that much lactic fatigue in the first 300 meters. It's just hilarious and it actually proves that point even more. But yeah, you're right, that is the part of the legacy that he's left at such a young age. And you mentioned then that the most successful athletes negative split and I want to clarify that term because it's not necessarily just about the fact that more successful athletes negative split because Kipchoge is someone that doesn't negative split. He, he tends to run a bit slower and fade a little bit. He likes to go out hard, but it's more about the feeling of the way you run and we can guarantee that you could potentially maybe only run a little bit quicker. Negative splitting. But it's how you're finishing which makes a world of difference. And if you're lucky by, you know, going out hard and hanging on, you will hang on, but it's really painful. But if you're, if you do it the other way, it's just such a more positive experience and that's what makes it more successful. So yeah, to finish with a bit of his legacy, you know, it's two things. It's the way he would run and it's the large volume of training that he was recording which was just astounding to the world. You know, he was logging regular 220 to 240 plus kilometer weeks. His volume was just insane and a lot of people were asking was that sustainable, but it was working for him. He was doing 40 kilometer split runs on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. You know, it was 28k in the morning, 12k at night. And these Tuesday, Thursday, Saturdays were far left. Fartlek in the morning, like high intensity hour sessions with a PM easy jog, 12km in the afternoon and then Sunday or sometimes Thursday as well. He was doing marathon race pace sessions of 30-40km. Just absolute monster weeks. And that's what was making him such an efficient and good runner. And he didn't look like he was going to break down any soon. So yeah, very sad to see feeling for his families. But yeah, I don't know what else to say about it. It's a bit of a tragedy.

Yeah. I think you've summed it up really well. An incredible athlete who's taken too soon.

Yeah. On the opposite side of the spectrum, the super bowl was last weekend, and we were just talking about the traits of successful athletes last week, and it was just a great show of kind of that mindset stuff we're talking about. You don't have to like NFL at all to see that some athletes take their moments. And you can take such inspiration from that as an age grouper to go that when it's your Grand Final, when it's your super bowl, it's time to take your moment.

Yeah. Look, I know you guys, you and your brother Liam absolutely love the NFL football, and you're in a tipping competition, so you're pretty well across it. And. And I've tried to try to get myself to understand the game and its nuances and. But you can't take away champions at their craft. And to see Patrick Mahone do his thing at the end of that game with the whole pretty much, you know, world watching it on telly and to. To be calm and cool when it counted in the last 10 seconds, you know, there were so many things that could go wrong in that and they could lose the actual match instead of trying to. And trying to go extra overtime. They actually wanted to win it. You know, that's what makes people step up or improve, is taking your moment. First of all, you have to identify it, don't you? And then have the skill to execute it. And, you know, whether you're in a bike race or 10k run or in a triathlon, you know, there's key moments that you have to make good decisions. And. And this is what we're talking about. This is what makes champions. Champions is they just keep doing this. They keep making good decisions at the right time to get perfect outcomes. And that's what I love about watching champions. I don't care whether it's NFL football or World cup soccer or the Olympics. It's just seeing the best athletes who are under the most pressure because they're expected to perform from outside pressure, but they don't have that. They don't have that outside pressure. Their expectations are their own. And that's what I love about it. The champion athletes who crumble sometimes, they're letting the outside expectations dictate. And this is what he does so well. There's a whole lot of noise going on that he's not listening to. He's in the zone of achieving his moment. And that's the thing I love.

Yeah, that's absolutely the key. That was great. It was awesome to watch. Love watching the Super Bowl. Sad NFL season's over and looking forward to next year and I wonder if they can make it three in a row. So moving on to the topic of today, four training sessions that potentially could be making you slower. And we want to clarify from the outset that none of these sessions are wrong all the time. You know, most of the time there are sessions that will have their place. I mean we could just, we could pick out a ridiculous session and say, well that's just silly. But these sessions that we're going to go through, they're common sessions we see where most of the time they aren't being done in the right context. And we wanted to pick these ones because, yeah, we see a lot of athletes doing them and we just want to make sure we clarify why you probably shouldn't be doing them or maybe when you could do them. And session one that we want to talk about is just this classic mixed zone session where again, context dependent, this could be applicable. But these sessions that you see a lot of people doing where it's a little bit hard, it's a little bit easier, you might be riding with a group or not, but you're not really achieving either goal of it's not hard enough, but it's not easy enough. And then you do these mixed zone sessions too often. You just kind of slightly fatigued all the time, just a seven or eight out of ten, but you're really just leaving so much gain on the table and you're just not really going to get anywhere.

And I think the key point is doing a lot of these sessions now and then these sessions are actually really beneficial. But doing them repeatedly in a seven day period where you might end up having, out of the seven sessions you do, you might have four or five of them with a mixed zone. And what do we mean by that? We mean, you know, you are actually not specifically knowing what you're going to do today. It's you meeting your mates or going out by yourself and saying, oh yeah, I'm feeling like this now, I'm not feeling too good, I'll just keep it easy. And then all of a sudden your legs start to feel good and then the next thing you know you're riding this next hill really hard and, and then you're thinking, oh actually I'm feeling really good now. And you start riding the rest of the ride really solidly. And what's wrong with that? Well, there's nothing wrong with that. If that's actually the goal of the session for that day, that's perfect, brilliant. Give that a tick. But if that's what you did yesterday and the same thing happened. Started slow, didn't feel so good, probably because you did it the day before as well. Then this mixed zone style of training will gradually. The fatigue will gradually creep up on you. It won't happen in three or four days. It could actually happen in three or four weeks where it just slowly get tighter and tighter. And that, that little hill that you were feeling so good about two weeks ago when you could whip over it, now you still think, oh, I'm good at this hill, I'll get out of the seat and I'll push over this hill. You could be 5 or 10 or 15% lower than you were two weeks ago, but you think you're riding the same. And if you're using a power meter, you'd see straight away that you're actually not. And this is the session that we're saying that, you know, doing too much of this is going to actually just get you tighter. It's not actually going to get you any gains in fitness and not allowing you to improve if you do it repeatedly. And it's a bit of zone one, a bit of zone two, you know, big chunk in zone three where you're riding really hard, but not a lot in zone five or six. But there are sections in zone five and six where, you know, you're having a bit of a crack here and there on a little punchy hill, and then, you know, hardly any in zone four, but it's just, it's all over the shop and, and, you know, you get to the end of the ride going very satisfied with that. I had some hard bits and I had some, some, some easier bits and I feel like I'm improving and, and that is probably all true, but doing it day after day, that one mixed zone session should be left for one session.

Yeah, we'll go through a key example of where it can work in that, in our last session. But you're exactly right. It's just the fastest way to plateau because there's just not enough stimulus being applied for you to get the quality out of. Yeah, you're doing something in Zone 5 because you're attacking a couple of hills, but you're just not spending enough sustained time there to really get a VO2 benefit, you know, and then you're just tiring yourself out and just, um, you're just doing everything averagely. You know, if you're going to ride zone two, you're not doing enough in the zone two to get the benefit of a zone to ride. You can't Go long enough with that pressure on the pedals, you're doing that tempo of zone three and four. But that's just kind of tying you out without really doing it with quality because you're probably a little bit too tired from a couple of VO2 Max efforts. But again, there's not enough VO2 Max work in there to get the VO2 Max benefit. So it's just a whole bit of a whole lot of doing a lot of things not well, which is kind of why we want to avoid it. But there is an example of where we do mix sessions. And when we say mixed zone sessions, every session has a bit of know, mix mixed in it. You know, your warm up is going to be zone one or two, and then you're going to do a little bit of tempo to get your body working. But when we, when we talk about the goal of a zone of a session, we're talking about the main set. So if we're Talking about a VO2 max session, again, of course you're going to be in zones one to four in the warmup, but the main set is where you're really aiming to spend sustained time in zone four. And so let's say we take a zone two session, for example. This is where we mix it up a little bit, is we give a lot of our cyclists, especially sometimes triathletes, but a lot of our cyclists, especially zone two with sprint practice. So the whole session is majority of it spent zone two work, you know, really getting that aerobic benefit. But because it's not overly taxing, you're putting 5, 10 second sprints in there just to help these cyclists really get a chance to practice that raw sprint power and really push a thousand watts plus for 10 seconds. It's not fatiguing enough that's going to affect the next day. You get a lot of break in the sessions between doing it. But it's just an example of where we do mix it up a little bit. And you can have kind of two goals in the one session.

Yeah, that's a great example. And you know, the sprint should only be, you know, up to 10 seconds. And if you did the max effort at five seconds, that's actually what we're after. It's actually practicing the jump coming into a sprint in a race. So, you know, lining it up, making sure you've got the right gears and then really giving it some oomph and sprinting really flat out. Maxing out for five seconds and it might extend over 10 seconds. That's not going to do what we're talking about with a mixed zone session where you're repeatedly doing that. We're just giving you some opportunity in that zone two session where it's not going to be as fatiguing as if you were doing a mixed session. We do also have an actual mixed session, by the way, in our program where I'm trying to get our riders, especially triathletes and time trialers, to really ride some sections in zone three and then, you know, a really extended period in their threshold and then writing some VO2 to finish with. And that's one session we do. And we don't repeat that at all in a seven day cycle that's never repeated. That's only done once in a seven day cycle. And it only be in a few blocks of training where we're really trying to get specific to what as a cyclist you might experience in a road race. As a triathlete. The feeling of getting tired in a 90 or 180k ride would be that feeling of fatigue that you would get from starting at subthreshold, going into Threshold and then riding at VO2, you're getting that feeling of boy, this is fatiguing. And the body can cope with that. But again, it's not going to be something I'm going to give you on a Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. It's going to be once.

The next session to avoid is quite simply just running too fast. And that's quite interesting. But basically triathlon's an endurance sport and most triathletes don't need to run fast. And that includes speed sessions, that includes hill repeats, which if you're a fan of this podcast, you know, we love the hill repeat session and long runs as well. And so we want to cover those three right now. Why you basically just should not, should be spending minimal time running too fast. And we'll start with the speed sessions and this is one where we definitely don't want to copy the pros because the pros do a lot of track work, they do a lot of speed work and that's because they're running really fast across most distances. And even though Ironmans now they're running 3:30 pace at the end in a marathon in Ironman, which is insane. So of course they need to be doing the speed work. But yeah, I mean it comes down to a couple of major factors why we want to avoid this.

Yeah, look, initially it's, it's protecting our, our runners from injury that is the most important thing that we, that we are trying to do, but. But we still need to have some intensity in our training, don't we? So how are we going to do that without getting our runners to run really fast 400 meters or 800 meters on the track when it's an endurance sport? So principally we get that from our bike sessions. We're going to get our riders and our swimmers to get that high intensity where their cardiovascular system is working maximally on those hard bike and hard swim sessions and really getting the benefit from that, from that cardiovascular session. And they're not risking a breakdown from Achilles or a calf or a hamstring or whatever running injuries that most people have shin splints or stress fractures. There's so many things that can happen if you do too many repeated high intensity sessions when your body is not used to absorbing that kind of load. And the majority of people who listen to the podcast aren't professional elite athletes. And therefore we're talking to people who maybe only have been running for a few years. Some people have only been running for a few months when they start to do a triathlon and so they can't cope with that load. And we've had countless experiences early on in our coaching where, you know, we just got athletes that were just breaking down straight away. And, and so we learned from that experience and we've never done that since because we understood that the age group athlete has not the ability to cope with that intensity as a runner. And so the load is too much and they're still getting the intensity where it's important. And the outcomes we have from the guys who are at the pointy end of our coaching group who are winning races and I'm talking overall age groupers winning Overall Age Group 70.3s Running 70s.

For the half marathon. Leg of the half ironman. Yeah, 75 minutes, 77 minutes. Yep.

And they're rarely. Are we giving them, you know, 12 weeks of interval training on the track? You know, we would be lucky to give them one block where they're doing, you know, three, three sessions in a three week period where they're doing some intervals as we're trying to get them race ready for their next event. And that's an example of proving that you don't need to be doing high intensity interval sessions as a runner. And they still run beautifully when it counts. And running pbs improving their running. And that's a measure of whether it's valuable or not. And that's why we're not encouraging people to. We want you to cut this out and you will be so grateful that you have because you've actually not missed many more triathlons because of injury.

Yeah. And it begs the next question that even if you could handle it and the injury risk wasn't there, how many high intensity sessions can a triathlete fit in one week? You know, if you've got a couple of hard sessions on the bike, you've got a hard VO2 swim in there and an endurance ride that might have some intensity or race pace intensity, it all starts to add up very quickly. So you probably can't even afford to fit a interval session, a high speed work session in there anyway. So the next point on the running fast matter is that we want to make clarify the difference between hill repeats and hill sprints because we're a big fan of hill repeats, but we're not really saying we're a fan of hill sprints.

Yeah, and I have, I've had to really be very clear in my instructions as to what we're trying to achieve in our hill repeats. And if you're running for a couple of minutes up a hill, you know, three minutes, four minute hill repeats, two minute hill repeats, one minute hill repeats, you know, the idea for the most athletes is, oh great, this is my opportunity to really max out. And we're not running 50 meters, we're running for possibly two, three or four minutes. So we're really trying to get a pace that's, that's difficult and you're breathing hard and you're getting that strength from the hill, from the resistance from running uphill into your legs. But it's actually not risking you running fast because you can't run fast up a hill because you know you'll only last 30, 40, 50 seconds at most if you're trying to run it hard. And so we're actually not encouraging you to do that because you know, it is not meant to be a sprint. It's meant to be at around your 5k feel pace, not your actual 5k pace. If I'm asking you to do a 5a hill repeat at 5k pace, then that's not what we're saying. And that's what people get confused with is, oh, I thought you meant actually run at your 5k pace. No, I'm saying run at your 5k pace. That feels like that. So if you know, you feel like your breathing's panting at 5k pace, well, that's what you should be replicating if you're able to run a 3:30 pace for a 5k run. I don't expect you to go up the hill in 3:30 pace. I expect you to have the feeling of what that feeling feels like to run 330k pace when you're running on the flat in the hill. And for some people, they're still not getting that. They're just running the hills too fast. And to be clear, I want it to be solid so that you are working and you are breathing and you couldn't have a conversation, but you could turn around, jog back down the hill and be ready to go again at the same intensity and repeat that up to eight or ten times.

Yep. Yeah, spot on. And we could go, right, we could dive deeper into the Pandora's box of this and talk about intensities. But I think you've summarized it quite well there. And the last point is the long runs need to slow way down. And this is what we talk about by avoiding just running too fast. Long runs just, it's, it's about time on feet. It's just not about pace at all. And you just gotta burn yourself out if you keep creeping that pace up.

And in a, in a training block of three or four weeks, we would want to do one of those weekends where we do want to run with some intensity. But the other three out of those four weeks we would really like you to see, to get as many undulating hills into your run, if you can find them and if you can't, drive to a place where you can and try to run them steady and don't try and push hard for that hour and a half or hour, 50 or two hours, whatever your program's asking you to do, slow right down and be able to talk the whole way around. And then when you get to that fourth week, when we're asking you to do a more intense, longer run, that's the time where you can't talk, that's the time where you run with intent. And that's the difference between running the long run hard every week and doing it in the right way. And I think if you get that concept, then you will actually running slower in the hills will allow you to run that fourth run so much better. And your fatigue levels over that four week period will be so much more controlled because you're not trying to recover from a hard, fast, long run. And then when we do give you that fast long run, the next couple of days are the easy days.

It's one of the biggest mistakes we see. And the correction is a game changer for athletes is they try and run Their long runs to pace. You know, you do a lot of other sessions to power or pace percentage of threshold. And so a lot of people think, oh, I want to make this endurance run effective, I need to be in somewhat of zone two. And so they look at their zone two pace and try and stick to that. But that is just not ideal, especially if you're doing undulations, because if you try and hold that pace on an uphill, your heart rate is going to go through the roof. And so often the instruction is completely ignore pace, pay attention to your heart rate, making sure that's not creeping up, but also it's just the feeling of it should be very cruising. Anytime you get to a hill, slow right down. And if you have to walk a little bit to keep your heart rate down, then that might be the level you have to get to. So that's the instruction is for majority of the long runs, slow right down. The next session is we're going to call them, quote, unquote, ultra sessions. And these are the sessions that we see athletes do where honestly, it's a bit of fun. You might get excited with a friend or a mate or some friends and you want to do something a little bit crazy. Your mate calls you up and says, let's do a 200k ride this weekend. You know, let's do an epic gravel ride or let's do a. Do a 30k run. I really want to go explore or people just jump into a half marathon without building up to it. And we want to be really clear and not get this twisted that these can be really good for you, they can be super valuable for you, these kind of sessions. But they need to be, if you want to do them properly, they need to be planned in and you just need to think about the before and after of these kinds of sessions.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. They are absolutely valuable to be challenging yourself with something that's overloading your fatigue. And I've just actually made a comment at the start of the week with someone. They've got a 300k ride coming up and I've got in their coaching notes. We need to discuss this.

It sounds like you need to go to the principal's office.

Well, pretty much that's what I want to. I want to make sure that before, before we just let that happen, understand what are our goals and purposes for doing this. And there are lots of really good positives that could come about from this. Make no mistake about that. We could go into a whole list of things, but I just want to talk about why this is what the topic is, reasons why we shouldn't do that a lot. And, and the main reason is because it will have an incredible impact on your fatigue. There is no doubt about it. Actually, during the ride, if you're doing 300k and then possibly up to seven days later, you will still be carrying some load fatigue from that, from that epic event, which would, you know, was a great achievement and, and probably really pleased that you've done that, that, what are we calling it, Ultra session. But if you don't actually allow full recovery, then that actually could put you into a massive hole and could ruin your next three months of competing or training. And that's what we're trying to get the message across is if you do something like this, you've got to allow for the recovery. And I've got some athletes who are training for a big event that's 250k, 4000 meters of climbing, and they're doing lots of big weekends, which is super important so that you can actually achieve the goal of that event that you're aiming for. But if you expect that you can train normally during the week and then repeatedly do these long weekends, then you will have the same effect. You will not improve. You'll progressively get yourself into a hole and go backwards. So, yes, understanding that these events are okay now and then, and if you wanting to do them a bit more, you have to adjust. And that's where having the coach in your ear saying, well, if you do that, the consequence is next week we're just training easy. And are you okay with that? And you know, the motivated athletes, not okay with that because no, no, no, I want to keep training. I want to keep training the way I am because I know I'm getting better. The midweek training sessions are. I can feel myself getting better. I'm saying, yet they are. But if you throw this one in, then we can't do that this week because you will start to actually not get better and get worse.

Yep, spot on. It's. Yeah, it's understanding the consequences. And often these, these kind of challenges are pretty spontaneous. That's why they come about. But the less spontaneous you can be about it and the more planned you can be, the more it can actually you can fit it in and you can do it properly and because you know it potentially will ruin you for up to a few weeks at a time. But if you're going to decide to do that, you might say, okay, we want to do this, let's not just spontaneously do it this weekend. Let's look at it a few weeks in advance, let's plan ahead. Let's look at how our training goes leading into it. Knowing that if you're going to do it on a weekend, you need to have that easy week after or easy couple of weeks and then you can plan it to have a really valuable effect because as you mentioned, it is a viable training method to really overload your week or overload a session, really give your body a massive stimulus. You will actually respond to that and get fitter if you have a recovery period after. But like you just said, if you try to do it without doing that, then you're just going to go backwards because you'd be over trained. So that's.

We do have an example, Jordan, you know, a couple of people we're coaching where I've given them some, you know, there's a couple of races that they wanted to do were nine hours in their, in their training. They weren't A races, they were B races. And, and I'm encouraging them to go and do that because this particular athlete comes up really well after he's done this big endurance zone, two type, type of race, ride race in inverted commas. But you know, but they understand that the next period after that is all to recover from it and then we can go again. And that's how you put it into your session. But this is a session that needs to be avoided at all costs unless you have all of these understanding rules around it.

The last session that could be making you slower is any type of group session. And so we have spoken about this before. We want to clarify, you know, not all group sessions are bad but it really depends on the context. And this was part of point one as well. But if we think about a bunch ride, you know, riding with your friends or a group run, you know, if you jumped a run club or something and you want to run with friends or even swim squad, you know, what, why and when do we want to avoid these and when can it be useful?

Yeah, it's a controversial one. We want our athletes to a be having fun in their training journey. And I think the group being with your mates, that epitomizes, you know, you're doing the thing you love, whether it's running or riding or swimming or being a triathlete. They're the things you love doing. And why wouldn't you want to share that with the people who, who are, you know, just as into it as you are? So let's just get that out right from the outset. We are absolutely encouraging you to do group session, not sessions, group session. So have that in your program. And we've had so many of our athletes improve by getting them into a group session where we're using that unpredictableness. And that's what group sessions are, aren't they? They are random people all put together with different ability. And so you're going to get, like we said in point one, you're going to get variations from zone one to zone six. And that's what actually is valuable about it. And that's why you should be using the group session. And that's why you shouldn't be overusing the group session. That's what we're saying. Do not overuse this session because you're going to end up with what we said in point one, just repeating a mixture of zones. And that's why we only want it used once, because it's actually doing what we want. We want the unpredictableness that some, some ego guy gets on the front and starts drilling it up a hill and there's an opportunity for you to say, okay, I'll go with that. Or you can say, no, I'll tap away and then get him on the next hill and so you can have fun doing it that way. We had the experience when we went to the Tour Down Under a couple of weeks ago, where all these groups come from all over Australia and there's groups of, you know, 10, 15, 20 guys all riding in bunches with all different abilities, and yet every day they had this group ride. And I'm sending out the warning bells before this starts because I've, you know, I've been going to the Tour down under for probably 15 years and seen. Seen guys do this group training for six days, seven days in a row where they're doing between 100 and 200k a day and the temperature is normally really hot and they've got this intensity every day where they're doing zone six, zone one, zone five, everything's thrown in every day repeated. And you know, the people who ride this with some smarts who don't do that but still ride with their group, but choose on some days to ride softer and not go with the attacks and just meet them at the coffee shop halfway around the day's adventures. They're the guys who come out of that week's training where they've done group ride day after day after day with intensity. They come out and they can have a recovery period and then they can resume their program. The guys who've pushed it flat out and max themselves out day after day for six, seven days, they're done for the next month. And I've coached those people and I've said to them, you're just going to really suffer because of what you've just done for that six day period. And, you know, these are examples of what you. If you're going to do that, then the consequences are you need to do this next training this way. And we're not saying don't do this, we're just saying these are the consequences if you do do it. And that example of the Tour down under, group riding, most people are doing that all year. They're doing group rides five times a week where they just repeated that same session of training. That's a reason why we wouldn't do it, because we value all aspects of our training. So if we're repeating the same session with a group five times a week or three times a week, or even two times a week, that's one time too many. Because we've got other sessions that are important to do, such as a specific VO2 set, a specific threshold set, a specific zone two set. Yeah, where we don't want to have it mixed, we want to have it just zone 2 or just vo 2. Whereas the group rides got everything in there every day. And it's not allowing you to actually get the overload that we're trying to do. It's actually giving you the same session of training day in, day out. And that's why the group session, in our opinion, gets such a bad rap. But it can be used effectively. Just like every one of the four points that we've talked about can be used effectively in the right context.

And yeah, that's setting a goal and intention for the session is still really important. If it's going to be this group session, if it's going to be a bunch ride where it's mixed intensity like you've just described, the reason that it works so well in our group when we do those bunch rides is because what you talk about all the time with, there's nothing like competition. And when we're looking for unpredictable periods of intensity, you are going to be able to ride harder up a hill when you're racing eight other people. You know when someone goes off the front and they attack and you're going up this four or five minute climb or a two minute climb and it's, it's, you're treating it like a competition and you're going to get so much value out of that, in experience, in intensity. And it's much easier to get more out of yourself than by yourself. So that's a major benefit of it. But before the ride, before the run or whatever it is, you want to set that intention and make sure that you're doing it deliberately and not just potentially making it up as you go. And it's this ability to say yes or no to things. So say no if it's not going to suit your purpose and say yes, but make sure that you're doing what you need to do. And this is such a simple solution, but just ask. I definitely avoided training with people for a long time and realized I was really missing training with people because I would just flat out say no. I just say, it's too hard. You're not doing the same program as me. I really am committed to this goal and I don't want to change my training. Whereas when you just have a conversation, you say, well, okay, I've got to do this zone two run or ride this week. I've got to do this high intensity session. Would any of these work for you? They say, oh, that day I could do an easy run as well. And so then you both are very clear on that. That's an easy day. And so just those simple conversations can make a big difference.

Yeah, unfortunately, Jord, when you have those conversations, some people say that at the start of the session, and then halfway through the session, they're no longer talking to you. They're actually 5 meters in front of you and the session's changed. And that's what we're trying to avoid. And that's what you're talking about. Taking that. It's discipline, isn't it, to say, okay, we are picking the pace up. I've got a choice here, let my mate go and just ride where I want to ride. At least you've started the session together and you've had a bit of a chat. But really, unless the session is deliberately trying to mix it up, then you need to stay with where you are and what the goal of the session is.

Yep, spot on. Well, that's been it for this episode. We hope you've enjoyed these sessions and we hope that you avoid the ones that just spoken about unless the context is right. That's the whole purpose and point of this episode. So thanks, as always, for listening. And if you want to know the right sessions to do, if you want to get coached by us, if we have a coaching guarantee that if you don't improve in the first eight weeks, then the coaching is fully on us. You can just go to Tribalo coaching to apply for a spot. Thanks as always for listening. We'll see you in the next one.