5 Triathlon Mistakes & How To Avoid Them

This episode of the Get Fast podcast is brought to you by Tribalo Coaching, where we help triathletes and cyclists like you train smarter to race faster. You are joined, as always, by your host, former Australian Ironman champion, Jarrett Donnelly. And I am Jordan Donnelly. Making mistakes is key to learning. You cannot expect to grow without making a few mistakes. And as dad, as you always say, you learn more from your failures and than your successes. So today we are talking about some beginner mistakes that you don't need to make because obviously, like you said, make mist making mistakes, you learn the most from them. But there are some that you don't need to learn. We've already learned them ourselves and we can teach you them, hopefully so that you don't have to make those mistakes yourself. You can just learn the lesson. And today we're going to be talking about some of the biggest mistakes you've made over your career and that you've passed on to me. And these aren't just beginner mistakes. You might find you're an experienced athlete still making these errors, which is impacting your performance. So before we get into that, we are going to go into our normal starting segment, which is our gratitude. So, dad, welcome to the podcast. What are you grateful for?

Thanks, Jordan. It's very straightforward. It's a little bit of a personal, private, great gratitude. This week, your niece and my granddaughter has had a major operation and we're very grateful for the expertise of the medical staff at the Brisbane Royal Children's Hospital. Eden's been born deaf and she's going to have cochlear implants. And we're really grateful for the opportunity that she's going to have to try to live a normal life with some form of hearing. We're not sure what level that will be, but. But she's eight months old now and pretty traumatic experience she's gone through just yesterday and so very grateful for the opportunity that she might have been given if she had been born 20 or 30 years ago, that might not have been the case. So, yeah, we're very, very grateful for that.

I share that gratitude because it is amazing technology that what they can do now, and it's forever improving. And as soon as she was diagnosed, the amount of help given straight away was incredible. So that's a great one. My gratitude this week is a bit of a. I'm going to cheat a little bit of my gratitude because we used to have a rule when we did these gratitudes at our bootcamp, which is how we started on this podcast. Where you can only say one because everyone got so enthusiastic they wanted to say more. And sometimes people would just say more because they really wanted to. And I'm cheating a little bit today because I've got a bit of a three in one wrapped up. And my gratitude is for podcasts. So I'll start by saying I'm grateful for podcasts as a whole. I am an avid listener of a lot of podcasts. I get a lot of information and learn a lot from them. And to my own horn, I was probably an early adopter to the podcast. I have been listening to them well before they were popular. I remember listening to podcasts back in 2012, 2013, when they became available on the iPhone, and they've actually helped me so much in life since then. You learn so many lessons that I guess with this day and age, you get to learn, whereas you might not have learned before because you didn't have access to this kind of information or technology. So I'm just grateful for podcasts as a whole. But I'm also grateful for a lot of the feedback we've been getting on our podcast lately. And I'm grateful for our podcast because one, I was thinking on the way here, all week I'd been thinking about gratitude for the podcast, and I'm doing what I said was the original intention of talking about gratitude. So when I told that story of how we started gratitude at the bootcamp, we found that all of our clients were going about their life looking for things to be grateful for. And now I'm here doing the same thing. I'm kind of pointing things out in my life, or should I talk about that on the podcast? Or should I talk about that? And it's just making me hyper aware of all the things I'm really grateful for. So that's a gratitude in itself. But as I said before, our listener base for this podcast is growing at a really, really good rate exponentially. And we've been getting some amazing feedback over the last few months just from random listeners about how we've helped them, how it's contributed to their better performances in training or racing. And that's really fulfilling and nice for us to hear. And you said it to me last week when we read yet another email from a happy listener, that it feels really good to be contributing to people, and that's why we're doing the podcast. And we would be having these conversations anyway. But we're glad that people actually enjoy listening to them and listening to us talk about racing and cycling races and Triathlon races and training tips. So I am grateful for the listeners.

Of this podcast and we definitely want listeners to, to gain an insight into things that can make them better. That's our purpose, is to try and spread some free, helpful coaching tips so that they can implement them into their program if they can't afford a coach. And not everybody can afford a coach. And I just get so much gratitude when I go to these events and people come up to me that I don't know and they know me cause they've heard my voice and see my face, unfortunately. But they're really happy to say thank you. And when you said it's turned the corner of you thinking about gratitude, which is the purpose of this whole segment. And I totally agree because I said to you, well, last night when I was in bed, I was thinking about what am I grateful for? And that's the way we want to be in every day. We want to actually end the day or start the day with what am I grateful for? What happened today. And it really gets you in the right mindset of, you know, being happy with your life and being in control of what, what you like and what you didn't like and doing something about it. It's great to have gratitude. And if you're not having any gratitude, we'll do something about it so that, you know, you do have things in your life that you're actually thankful for.

Absolutely. So to summarize, I am grateful to you, the listener, for listening to this podcast. And I would ask you, you know, when we, when, when we do this on the podcast, we do this segment, ask yourself, what are you grateful for? If you're sitting in the car, if you're on the bike listening, if you're on a run, just ask yourself now what are you grateful for?

Yeah, I agree with that. And you should actually try and answer that question out loud.

Yeah. Moving on to our next segment. What has caught your attention? Dad, what's caught your attention this week?

Well, it's ironic that I don't know how many weeks ago when the Strada Bianca was on and we had an in depth discussion about race tactics in the female race and two riders have broken away and Borghini, the Italian road champion, was with one of the Van Van Vleuten. Van Vleuten and she decided to sit on the front and ride all the way to the finish and then get done in the sprint. And we were discussing that tactic and why she was doing that. Anyway, go forward six weeks, eight weeks, however long ago it was. Here we have Borghini, and the next.

Rider'S name, which is the pronunciation, is Neodoma or something.

Yeah, yeah. And she had broken away.

I don't mean to be rude and say or something. It's Neodoma.

Yeah, we're just closer on the pronunciation and apologize for that. But, yeah. Found herself in a similar situation. Two women away with a break on the chasing small pack. And I was thinking, whoa, she's got another chance here to rectify the mistakes that I thought she made last time. And watching it unfold, I must say, I was nearly yelling at the telly, saying, what is she doing? Why is she doing this? And what she actually did was she got away from the bunch and joined the solo breakaway. So there was two, and they had probably three or 4K to go. And the chasing bunch were not within reach unless the two riders at the front mucked around too much. And so when she. When New or Doma. Doma got caught by Borghini, she turned around and sort of said, oh, let's work together. And Borgheni wouldn't come around, which is the opposite to what she did at Strato Bianca. And so she sat behind her and. And then with the K to go, the bunch were getting closer and closer. And then within 500 meters, the bunch had caught them, and both of those riders came nowhere. They came eighth or ninth in. In the finish, in the final. And then. And Voss won the event, which I was really wrapped with because she has gradually ticked off every event in her career, and this was one of the ones she hadn't won, so she won that. So the mistakes the two leaders made, which is the point I'm making, enabled Vos to win another race that she hadn't won before. So before she retires, and she's one of the most outstanding riders that's ever been in the history of cycling for the female category. So I was just astounded that she's gone to the other extreme of actually not going to the front like last time. She stayed on the front for the whole ride and got sprinted over the top of. And here she is now in the same situation, and instead of just rolling turns for the last section and securing her first or second spot, she ended.

Up with nothing, which she's overcorrected.

Absolutely gone completely the other way. So you've got to secure the win. Your opportunity to win, you've got to secure that first, and then it's time to be tactical. So that's what caught my attention, and I just Wanted to pass that on to everybody as a race tactic in cycling. You know, you could still get it wrong at that level. And she's won many good races, She's a winner, but she's kind of mucked up the last two opportunities that she's had. And I wonder what she's thinking now. And then when she got interviewed, she actually still didn't kind of understand that she'd made a mistake. I didn't think, you know, but the question is, well, you know, first or what does it matter? But, you know, first and second has to be secured first before you risk getting nothing.

She said at the end, I don't know what happened. I felt really good. I thought we could stay away, but we got caught. And if you felt really good, then you've really mucked up the opportunity. Had she said I had no legs, I couldn't come around, it would be a different story. Yeah, that shows she really mucked it up, that she had good legs and.

Yeah, and if you have good legs, roll a few turns so that you secure the fact that you're going to stay away from the bunch. Just if you're that confident in winning, it's okay to roll a turn. So that's confusing.

Yeah. Thinking about today's topic is making mistakes. And the goal of mistakes is to learn from them. And the frustration from you is that she didn't. She learned, but in the wrong way.

Yeah. I don't think she did learn from Strada Bianca.

She obviously didn't listen to our podcast.

That's clearly obvious, isn't it?

But one of the points you say is that you harshly call second first loser, you know, which is a winning mindset. So what's the point of being first, loser or eighth? There's no difference if you're not going to win. So she's. She has that mindset. She says, well, I'm going to save my legs. I don't want to come second. But you're saying you want to be in contention for first or second.

Yeah.

And risk that, rather than risk nothing, not doing work and then coming nothing.

And especially with her comments at the end saying she had good legs. So back yourself in then. If you've got good legs and. And be. Be confident that you can win the sprint.

Yeah.

Um. So, yeah, that. All of that's a little bit confusing, those tactics to me. And yeah, there's.

There's two risks you can take, and you took the wrong one. You can take the risk of not doing any work and getting caught and Then you risk coming 8th, or you can take the risk of doing some work and risking your legs for the sprint, and you get first or second, and you're. You're saying it's much better to take that second risk.

Yeah, absolutely. Yep.

Yep. Awesome. What caught my attention this week was, uh, I went for a ride on Saturday, a hilly ride, and it's just the value of keeping pressure on the pedals. And this is just something that you've hammered into me and you hammer into our tribal athletes, is that it's so undervalued just keeping pressure on the pedals. And again, we've spoken about it before, but you. We notice that whenever we ride with people who are new to Trivalo, whenever you're riding in the hills, it becomes really a. An exaggerated phenomenon that you will just pull away from everyone over the top of the hill and down the hill, and you'll gap everyone by 10, 15, 20, 25 meters. And everyone has to put an F to get back onto you. And then everyone will feel like you're slowing a lot up the hill, but you're just riding the same tempo and you're just tapping away. And it's. There's a real art to that. And so I try and practice that myself. And I was doing a quite a hilly ride on Saturday, and there was hundreds of cyclists out, which was awesome to see on this route, but I just could not believe the amount of people flying past me up the hill at the start of the hill. And I would just keep tapping away, and then I'd overtake them, either towards the top of the hill or over the top, and then I'd gap them by hundreds of meters over the top and then down the next part, and then they try and come flying past again at the bottom of the next hill. And unless you're doing a specific ride where you're trying to smash the hills and recover, which, to me, you can tell when people are doing that, or you can tell when they get to the top of the hill and they just stop pedaling. And you lose so much value in a session when you stop pedaling over the top, when you take a break. And it's just a natural reaction to. You've worked quite hard up a hill to keep the pressure on. Takes that little bit more effort, but it's not detrimental to the whole ride, and it's not as exhausting as it sounds. And so there's huge value in just keep tapping away. And you get so much more out of the session because of It.

Yeah. And the pressure on the pedals can't be understated. And look, we really experienced that in Covid last year when we were on the indoor trainer. And if you stop pedaling on the computer screen or the TV or whatever you're watching yourself on, you just stop moving and you don't progress. Whereas outdoors, if you stop pedaling, the momentum of the bike keeps you going, so you get a false sense of security outdoors, where that's one of the beauties of riding indoor, is that it just has to be pressure on the pedals the whole time, otherwise nothing happens. Your avatar on the screen doesn't move. Which is. Which is, you know, one of the good things about. About indoor training. But. But definitely for specific sessions where you are trying to. Trying to get a training effect, then pressure on the pedals, you know, on the flat, on the uphill, over the crest of the hill, on the downhill, continuing to keep, you know, resistance against your legs. That's the goal. And if you can master that for, you know, try doing that for 20 minutes and then 30, then 45, then an hour, that is incredibly hard to do. You just get this ache in your legs and you want to stop pedaling. You're just thinking, oh, it's relentless.

But that's discipline.

That's the training effect you're trying to get. And obviously, if you're doing hills where you're trying to do intervals where you're recovering, it's okay to recover and soft pedal or freewheel. But we're not talking about that. We're talking about a session where it's an endurance ride where you're trying to maintain that Zone 2 pressure on the pedals and. And you've experienced it firsthand with. It feels like you're in cruise control and everybody else is riding too hard or too soft and. And they're getting a different ride. Yeah, and if that's your goal, that's okay. But. But I don't think that's the goal for the majority of people.

Yeah, exactly. And you can tell because, you know, at the start of the hill, the speed is way higher from certain riders, and then at the top, it's way lower. And not the way you want to measure your effort just on the hill itself, anyway.

Yeah, yeah, they're gassing themselves, obviously. But. But yeah, it's a really valid point. And it does become obvious when you go out riding that when you're doing it correctly, how many people are doing it poorly.

Absolutely. All right, moving on to today's topic. Five mistakes and how to avoid them. And I want to lead this conversation, and I know you feel the same way I do, and we just want to really clarify and have a caveat that we've made all these mistakes and we're not sitting here saying we know better. We learned them the hard way. You had to teach me a lot of these lessons, and so we want to pass them on to you. And that's the beauty of lessons, is that you learn from them. But if you can bypass it and just like we said at the start, take the lesson and not have to make the mistake, then that is a better outcome.

Almost every example we're going to talk about, I've made that mistake. So it's quite hilarious because every. Everything we talked about before, I've done.

Yeah, absolutely. So mistake number one, do not get overwhelmed with technology.

Before we start, I want to tell a story about my very first introduction to bike riding. And dad had found a bike for me from the tip. And. And we used to ride our bikes to school, and it was quite a fair way. It was over 5k, and there's a lot of hills around Warigal, where we lived in Gippsland. And the bike that I had, the style of crank that it had on, had an old method which had a cotter pin at the top of the crank, which attached to the actual frame, which is completely different to how it operates now. But on my right side, the cotter pin would continually fall out. So I would be pedaling and then all of a sudden my whole crank would leave the bike. And I mean, it was hilarious looking back, but it was so frustrating. If I didn't pedal smoothly, the cotter pin would fall out. And this happened for weeks, trying to ride to and from school with half the time my right crank falling out of the bike. And, you know, having crap equipment is the most frustrating thing. And right from the early days, I just did not enjoy the experience of riding with equipment that failed.

Yeah, well, we'll start with. That can be point number one. Let's talk about the mistake of taking shortcuts which end up costing more time and money.

Yep. So. So that was my lesson, was, you know, even though we really couldn't afford anything better than a tip bike, but it was just became an unenjoyable experience. And, you know, going forward 45, 50 years, the equipment, you know, you can still get very average equipment and you can get inexpensive, really good quality equipment. And one of the things we're actually trying to get across here is that you don't have to buy the most expensive equipment, but you need to get things that function well and are good value for money. And you need to do a bit of research with that. And I've seen a lot of people purchase a really second rate bike because they wanted to actually save up for a really good bike down the track and they've invested in something that's substandard and it actually hasn't been enabling them to achieve what they wanted out of that bike. And they've actually in fact wasted their money and purchasing in the end two bikes. Whereas if you actually do the research properly, get good advice from some people who understand and we're talking just about bikes here, we could be talking about shoes, we could be talking about power meters. Get the right advice from the people who it's their expertise and don't buy substandard stuff to begin with and then work your way up to better quality stuff. Get the right stuff at the start. And as a newbie to triathlon or cycling or whatever the sport you choose, you don't have to buy the most expensive, but you have to buy something that functions and enables you to get the outcomes that you're trying to achieve from each training session or race. And that's the key thing.

Yeah, that's definitely. We're not saying buy the most expensive equipment, that's definitely not what we're saying. But you don't want to take shortcuts on things which end up costing you more money later down the track. Costing you time could cost you worse things like an injury, which is a really big point we wanted to make in that if you have poor equipment, whether it's on the bike, whether it's your running shoes, you are potentially risking injury, which is going to cost you a lot more than what you were trying to achieve by saving on functioning equipment.

Let's just take a few examples. Like I've for years have had real issues with saddle sores and it's because I've ridden the wrong saddle and it's been a substandard saddle and rather than spending money upgrading to one that's not going to cause that, I keep persevering. That's a huge mistake. Get rid of the saddle str. If it doesn't fit you properly and causes saddle sores. Old lycra shorts, rather than tossing them away, I'll just use that on the ergo and train with those. But they haven't got the right padding. They're old. Get rid of them. This is Again, use the right nicks that are new so that are not going to cause your saddle sores. Cleats that are too worn so that if you sprinted, and I have done this in a race, I've pulled my foot out and crashed because in a sprint, I pulled my foot out. Why? The cleat was too worn, so every time I pulled with power, my foot would come out of the pedals. That's a, you know, how much does a cleat cost? It is just a ridiculous thing to do, yet I've done it, and I'll never do that again. It was a really bad crash landing on my. Basically flipped over the bike.

Rather than spending less than a hundred dollars on a new cleat, it's cost you a whole new bike. It's cost you an injury, it's cost you time out from work.

Yeah, it was just laziness rather than, you know, it was getting another set of cleats. I'll get that. I'll get that. You know, and I just never did tuning the bike and my chains dropped off, which has also caused me to crash when I've sprinted and flipped over the bike again because the bike wasn't tuned, the chain was too old. Again, laziness, not keeping maintenance up on your bike. These are really costly mistakes that, you know, you could miss work with a broken collarbone. It could cost you money. Not only, you know, you can't train and race again for a while, but you actually, you know, your livelihood's affected. So you go from everything going smoothly in your life to taking a completely different path. You might have four weeks away from work and, you know, that changes everything in your life for that period. So things we're talking about, you know, they might sound obvious, but if you don't take note of these things, these are the consequences that can happen if your, you know, maintenance is poor, if you're not looking after your equipment, if you're not buying equipment that's going to function properly, you know, old shoes. Same with, you know, whether you're on the bike, they could cause, you know, hot feet. They're too tight. There's so many issues with shoes that can cause problems all the way through your body.

Same with running shoes. I mean, you should replace your running shoes depending on how many Ks you're doing. You know, high K amounts should be every six months, maximum a year.

Well, it's more to do with how much time you spend in the shoes rather than the distance traveled. Yeah, I mean, six months is. You could run four or five times and the shoes are perfect. But if you run, you know, seven days a week, six months is way too long. It could be three months before you need and you know, we always advertise for people to have two pairs of shoes going at the one time. So the shoes you're breaking in, you should be wearing them once or twice a week. And the shoes that you've broken in should be the other four or five times if you're a runner. So you know their ways around making sure that you're never starting with brand new shoes. For lots of runs in a row you break the shoes in together. So by the time you get to your a race you've actually got a pair of shoes that are perfect because.

If you're wearing old shoes, they're worn thin. It's just doing more and more damage to your body.

Yeah, you could possibly have a calf injury or ankle injury or Achilles injury because you're you know, shin splints, you know, stress fractures because you've worn shoes that have been there for too long. So, so equipment is, the choice of equipment is a game changer at the beginning of your and during your career.

And the last point of that is with outer lack of functioning equipment you are prolonging your progression. And so you might sign up to a race and you are doing it with substandard equipment and the whole process is going to be frustrating. You're not going to perform as well. You're going to again spend the time and money training for that race, getting to the race. We always talk about the cost of a race entry, flights, accommodation to perform poorly. I mean what's that worth, you know. And then you're going to be really frustrated. Then you're going to sign, going to sign up to another race and then you'll probably upgrade your equipment because you'll be super motivated to perform better.

Yes.

Like you said at the start, why go through the process of buying things twice? You've actually spent more than if you just had of invested in.

Yeah, you buy a crappy wetsuit and then you realize that far out if I had this wetsuit that was not that much more expensive but it had better flotation in my legs and stomach and I swam, swam two minutes quicker. How much difference is that going to make to your mindset? You know, you buy a really crap bike that you put clip on bars on and you know, you could be as fit as possible on the bike but if you ride a time trial bike compared to that bike, you could be in a half ironman. 15 to 20 minutes slower riding a bike that's, that's actually not as aerodynamic as the bike. It doesn't have to be expensive, but it has to be specific to what you're doing. And plus, you know, it's just not going to be helpful when you run. So there's so many issues that, that will affect your performance with substandard equipment and you will get to your destination a lot slower.

Yeah. So to be clear, it's not about investing more, it's about not taking shortcuts. That's the lesson. Great. Mistake number two, don't get overwhelmed with technology.

And to be honest, I'm very not savvy with, with computer stuff. And it's, you know, it's taken a lot for me to really get across the things that are required to get the right outcomes for the training sessions. And it would have been easy to just throw hands up in the air and go, I'm stuffed if I can work this out. You know, there's so many things you have to read about. This goes with this. You know, how does the power from the kickr attach to the swift? How do you get your power from your bike attached to your bike computer and cross them over and get.

Believe how hard it is sometimes just to ride your bike.

Yeah. And, you know, getting the right information on the screen to have what you're supposed to be looking for in the session. I've had so many people, I've said, oh, how did the session go? And they'd say, I don't know. And that answer to me is unbelievable. So if you've got everything that you need that's functioning correctly, including the data coming back to you whilst you're doing the session, you would know exactly whether you're in the power range or not. And for someone to say they don't know how they went, that means they're not looking at the right information. So totally understanding that concept would be a start.

And it's about embracing technology because it is confusing for everyone. And I've said before on the podcast that I'm very tech savvy. I can quickly pick things up and understand how they work. And I struggle with a lot of this stuff. Wahoo. Drives me insane. And to be honest, their support isn't the best. You. You watch some of their videos and they're. They're not the most helpful, but you can get there eventually just with a bit of time and effort. And everyone's in the same boat. And if you understand that it is. We acknowledge that it is overwhelming at the start because there is a lot to understand with smart trainers and power meters and bike computers and what should you be looking at and linking them all and linking it. Linking your garment to Strava and linking your garment to training picks and setting up training picks is. There is a lot in that. But once you spend the time, it is worth it. And it's important to know that everyone can do it. You're not alone in thinking it's hard, but everyone has worked it out to some point. It's a bit harsh, but you're not special in being the only one that can't work it out. You've just got to have a bit of discipline to go through the frustrating process as it is to embrace it.

And that's the good point. Millions of people around the world can do it, so it must be achievable. And you're in the minority if you can't do it. So what do you do about that? You actually become informed and you do what we talk about, which is plan, prepare, perform as our motto. This is part of your preparation, actually reading the instructions on how to do things. And if you're unsure, Google it. Everything you want to find in the world, you can just Google it and there'll be a video on it. So, you know, there are ways around the little roadblocks that are putting put in front of you, because once you get around those first few roadblocks, the freeway is clear as. And you look back and go, well, that wasn't really that hard, but it seemed insurmountably hard at the start. But you've just got to get over these little glitches at the start. And then you will have all of the information required and you'll be able to perform the sessions as they're meant to be performed. But you need to do that preparation to understand how to get it to work first. And that is part of your training, unfortunately.

Yeah, you have to see it as, yeah, like a training session. Sitting down and learning it.

Yeah, for sure. And if you don't want to do that, that shows you're not actually, you know, committed.

Yeah. Moving forward on this, again, we'll just remind you that a lot of these mistakes sound harsh, but it's because you've been through the same thing. You've been through the same frustrations. I remember cracking it at you one day because you were complaining to me yet again about wahoo and the kicker not connecting. And I kind of just saying, what the fuck are you going to do about it? You know, I'm sick of you complaining to me about it. And I think you just bought a new kicker in the end because the one wasn't connecting.

But. Well, it's interesting because I do recall that, and I must have spent two months trying to get my kickr to work, and I was on the Wahoo app every day and it wouldn't sync. And I just saying, what a useless piece of equipment this is. And I chucked the Wahoo app out, never used it again, and then just went straight from the kicker to zwift, and it worked perfectly. And I was thinking, why didn't someone tell me I don't need the Wahoo app? The only reason I needed the app was to do the spin down. So it calibrated and that was all I needed it for. And I've never used it since. And, you know, just little shortcuts like that. And of course, Googling helped understand that. But I was definitely getting frustrated. And so were you listening to my complaints. But that's another great example of going through it yourself.

Yep. Mistake number three, listening to too much. Varying advice from people. When you're starting out, I think it's.

A good thing because at the beginning of a new sport, you just imagine you've never ridden before, or you've never been a runner, or you've never been a swimmer, or you're a girl and you've never played footy and you want to play footy. You're like a sponge and you'll listen to anybody because you're trying to get as much information processed as possible so that you can actually not embarrass yourself and really get the most out of each time you play the game, if you're playing footy, or each time you ride your bike, you just don't want to make mistakes. So you're a sponge. Unfortunately, the sponge will soak up any piece of crap information. And that's not what we want. We want to eliminate misinformation. So our advice is. And I was the same. I would listen to anybody, and some old bike riders are saying to me, oh, you need to ride for a year. And all you need to do is slow, long miles. And this is back in the 70s and 80s. And I thought, all right, that's what I'll do. That's what all the experts are doing. That's what they did in those days. And boy, you know, that was a long, slow process of staying the same for a long period of time. And it was a bit foreign to me. And so I started chucking in a few intervals here and there and all of a sudden my bike riding started to improve. The actual long slow miles did help, but it would help if I did that in conjunction with some hard stuff. And what those guys were meaning was you use your races as your intensity and you know, you get your fitness space with these long slow miles. And they used to race a lot in those days. They could race twice or three times a week. They didn't need to train hard because they were already getting that from their races. But you didn't understand that at the time. So their information was actually correct. But in the context of it, I just got the context wrong. Yeah, because I didn't know that that's what they were doing with their racing. So that's an example of hearing advice and actually not understanding it properly. So not all advice is good. And how do you differentiate between what's actually good and bad? Well, normally you go and experiment yourself and find out. Well, that doesn't actually work for me and that's a long way of finding it out. So look, our advice is to try listen to things like the Get Fast podcast that'll give you really good advice and you know, align yourself with people who have been experts in their field and who are, you know, not only have had had success themselves, but had, have had success with coaching other people. And you know, if, if, if you get to know people who are experts in the field, then they're the people who you would need to, to listen to more closely. And not everybody has got the right advice for each individual person. And I'm saying the same about myself. Unless you know the person very well, general advice is exactly that. It's not specific to each individual person. So the example might be if someone came along and they were, you know, 104 kilo and 6 foot 5 and they watch the Tour de France and they want to do all these hills. Well, you know, the advice would be, well, that's probably not going to suit you. And that would be from a coach who understands that, you know, that somatotype person is more suited to crit racing or flat course racing where, you know, you're actually not at a disadvantage as weight, power ratio. And you know, the general advice would be, yeah, just go in the hills and train and, you know, and you'll be fine. Well, it's actually not the case for someone who's not suited for that. Likewise a lightweight person who's 64 kilo and you know, 5 foot is probably going to be suited better to the hills than, you know, the big strong crit racing stuff that goes on. So, you know, getting the right advice in the direction of the races that you should go to, you know, might seem obvious to everybody, but it's actually not. And you could be headed in the direction of the person because that's what they like doing. So you should do it too. And that's actually not helpful either can.

Leave you just a bit overwhelmed with information. Confused, Bamboozled.

Yeah. And yeah. And you know, I've had people say you should be doing this and then the next person you talk to says, oh no, that's completely wrong, you should be doing this. And so the, the new person to the sports going, well, who's right?

You know, lots of people have good intentions with telling you, but it's what worked for them. And this happens often with diets, for example, where someone will preach to the heavens that their diet is the one that works and that's because it worked for them. But we know with nutrition it is a little bit more individual and one what worked for one person might not work for someone else. And so that's someone can really say to you, this will 100% work. But again, it might have worked for them, but it won't work for person B. Yeah.

And we know that both males and females react differently to different nutrition stimulus with hormone balances. So straight away, if a girl's asking for advice from a guy that's probably not going to be very helpful to the girl. She would probably be better off getting advice from another girl. Who.

Or an expert.

Or an expert, Yes. I mean a female expert. It could be male experts, obviously with our Dr. Harry and you know, that's where I'm getting that example from. And he said many times the nutritional advice that he gives to the female athletes and the male athletes that he has is completely different.

And it's really just to summarize, be careful who you listen to. Just have a think about who you're listening to and taking advice from.

Yeah, I think it's okay to listen to everybody. I just definitely think and to hear their opinion and be selective in what you know. It's no different to getting advice on. I'm not, can't even think of an example of maybe how to drive a car, you know, if, if you've got someone who's qualified driving instructor as compared to a guy who's, you know, lost his license speeding five times and you know, you're probably not going to get the right advice from this guy compared to the driving instructor. So you need to select the advice that you're given and not take everything as gospel.

Yeah. Mistake number four. We have spoken about the infamous group ride a lot on podcast. We just want to make this really succinct point. You cannot follow the group light for too long when you're starting out. It is a great entry point into the sport, but not for much longer after that.

Yeah. And the group ride, let's get it straight. The group ride is fantastic. It has so many good qualities to it that you can learn lots of things from as a beginner rider. But if you continue to ride the group ride forever, day in, day out, you will get to a point where you're not actually going to improve anymore. So we try to flip that. So you do a lot of group rides early so that you're learning, learning the bike skills, learning how to sit in the peloton, learning how to roll turns, learning when to do efforts, when not to do efforts, how to be safe next to each other so that you're not overlapping the wheel, learning what's etiquette in the bunch. So there's lots of important lessons to be learned for a cyclist. But once you've got a lot of that information, you need to actually start improving yourself as a cyclist. And being in a group ride, a lot of the time is spent. Unlike the pressure on the pedals example, there's less pressure on the pedals in a group ride than any ride because you could be in the middle of a bunch and you could be doing 45Ks an hour. And I get this example a lot where people say PB on Strava, average speed was 46Ks an hour. Well, how much time did you spend on the front of that 46k an hour ride? I wasn't on the front at all. Well, it's nothing to do with you. That's not a pb. That's just a group pb. And if you can do that by yourself and go from 32Ks an hour to 33, that's a PB. But of course the wind can influence that. So there's so many different things. So we want to go learn a lot and as much as you can and then start practicing a lot of it on your own. And you will improve quicker by doing one group ride and if you're doing seven days a week, six individual rides with varying intensity. So the group ride is great at the start for learning lots of things and getting Information from people. And of course, there would be misinformation in that group ride as well. Because some group rides are really poor. Where the example would be, I know, you know, lots of the group rides are, it might be a four hour ride, yet they've stopped for an hour 30 of that four hour ride. Well, you know, do the stopping at the end, you know, make, make the ride the ride and you know, it's, it's. That frustrates me a lot where I see so many group rides where they're stopping 15, 20 times. It's, it's actually counterproductive to improvement for you as a cyclist.

Yeah. Your motto is group ride should be part of your program, but not all of your programs.

Exactly.

Last mistake for the episode. Doing zero evaluation or reflection on your training. A lot of people just go through the training week, complete all their training and don't consider what they're actually doing or reflect on it.

Yeah, this is a common mistake. And I suppose the reason I'm trying to work out why this happens, I think the reason is because people actually don't know what to look for. And as we've said many times, all of our training sessions have a goal and a purpose. So it's quite clear before you start what you're trying to achieve today. Today might be a four hour endurance ride, tomorrow might be a 35 minute recovery ride. So it's quite clear in your mind what the goal is. So what we're saying is understand what the aim of the session is and then evaluate it at the end. Did you achieve that? And the group ride might have been, or the endurance ride might have been a group ride where you were meant to ride with pressure on the pedals, zone two with no intensity. And you had four or five other guys whose idea was to make it as hard as possible. And you know, you got your four hours in, so you got the time right. You didn't stop a lot, so that was good. You had lots of pressure on the pedals, that was good. But your average percentage was 0.86. So you actually trained too hard for that session. So at the end of the day, okay, how did that session go? This is what we're saying. Evaluate what happened on that ride. It was great fun. It was really hard. We really smashed each other. But two days later, I can't do the hard session because that group ride was, was not what the intent was. So this can, this can prevent a lot of mistakes of over training and will also prevent a lot of mistakes of not Improving. So evaluating every session is really key. Did you achieve the goal of the session? And the only way to know how to do that is to look at the data. And if you don't know what you're looking for, then that's an issue in itself. So understanding more so where to look and what to look for is probably the key we're talking about, because just.

Completing your training with no reflection, it will, like he's just said, lead to no improvement. Because just doing the training itself is probably step one where we want to aim for consistency. But you should be able to answer that question at the end of each day, was today's session good? And at the end of each week, did I have a good training week? And if you were answering yes, just because you trained every day, that, yes, that is a good thing, you've achieved consistency. But you could have done seven days of completely inaccurate or ineffective training. If you haven't one established, like you just said, what was the goal of each session? What was the true. Did I hit the goal? How do you know if you hit the goal? You need to be able to understand your numbers and what you're looking at and whether the pace you hit or the numbers you hit were within the goal and outcome of the session that you wanted.

Yeah. And it sounds obvious to everybody. Well, of course that's what you do, but I guarantee that's not what happens in the real world. And it's so easy to get carried away with. That's why probably point number four, the group ride thing, that's another disadvantage of the group ride is you're just at the mercy of other people's expectations and goals. And if you actually have a program and the other people in the group ride don't, you've got every reason to lead that group ride, saying, today we're doing this because this is what I've paid someone to tell me to do. Whereas the other people are waking up saying, I feel good today I might actually ride hard. And that's gonna sabotage anything that you're trying to achieve. And also, you know, making changes in the middle of a session, that's one of the things that frustrates me is, you know, the goal was to do a tempo session, and all of a sudden, you know, you start sprinting up the road because someone's left the bunch and you're chasing them. You know, that's changing mid session. That's. That's, you know, at the end of the ride, you would evaluate that, or you would probably avoid doing that because you know straight away that that's actually a catastrophe, a sabotaging of your program.

It's probably the bonus point of this last mistake is not sticking to your training plan, not sticking to your program and changing it all the time. You know, having a little bit of variation is okay, but if you're going completely away from your plan, then yeah.

There'S no point in having a program in the first place. And look, we don't want to be strict and boring and boring, but you know, that is the quickest way to achieve. We know that. We've established that in this space, in this podcast very well. But it is good to have fun now and then. But understand that if that happens too often that it will have detrimental effects and a flow on effect. Maybe a week later could actually be three weeks later from three weeks prior where you did way too much for two or three days in a row and it could, it could not show up until then and, and you were left wondering, oh, what's happening to me? And you know, a smart person will go back and say, well, that's where you've, you know, you've really hurt yourself there and you haven't recovered.

Yeah. So the first step is having a plan and goal for the session of the week. The second step is being able to reflect on it and evaluate whether you did it, stuck to it or not. And the third step is not changing the plan midweek or mid session.

Yeah. So for a new person coming, this is what we're talking about. The advice we're giving here is a engaging someone to give you a structured plan who knows what they're talking about and actually following it, then doing it properly and then evaluating it. So there's quite a bit in that. But that is a really helpful tip for people who are listening. This is kind of the most important part is this aspect of it. You still need to get the right equipment, understand how the technology works and making mistakes with, you know, not maintaining stuff and, and getting injured. They're all things that are going to happen along the journey. But this is something that you can really take control of right from the beginning.

And this is not just for beginners, though. There's a lot of people training for a long time, racing for a long time, still making these mistakes, which is you can always fix them.

But I would call them beginners too, because they're refusing to acknowledge that the method they're using isn't working. So that's kind of a rookie error. You know, if you find yourself Stagnating and you're not improving. You know, you've gotta, you've gotta change something. And we've got a few examples that we've talked about, you know, even at Olympic level, where if people aren't improving, they need to rethink it and change something up so that they can actually start to improve again. And if you, if they're not gonna willing to do that, then there's no one can help you really.

And I mean, to finish off with this is something that is probably one of my biggest weaknesses in my own program and you pull me up on is because I like to play a lot of social sport and sport with my friends and do some more ad hoc things like surfing. And it impacts my training week. And I kind of, I often change my training kind of midweek based on the plan we set because something else will come up. And you always say, that's fine, do what you want to do, but you won't improve at the rate that you could, you know, you won't improve at your maximum rate. And that's the sacrifice that you have to make. And so I am still making that mistake and weighing up the pros and cons of making the mistake or improving as much as you want to.

Yeah, I suppose mistakes, probably a harsh word. It's just making a choice. And it's really not a mistake. It's a mistake if you. Oh, well, it's a mistake if you're really determined to improve and you keep saying, oh, I'm not getting where I want to be. Well, that's a mistake because you actually haven't understood. The choice you make is determining how quickly you get to your end goal. And all you're doing is slowing that, that process down. And instead of getting there in August or September when it counts, you might get there in December or the next January, February, and your race has already been.

Yeah, so.

So, you know, that would be a mistake, but it's still a choice you've made. And, you know, it's great to enjoy everything about what we're talking about, but at the end of the day, if you're committing yourself to, you know, as we've said many times, spending all this time training and money and travel and setting, you know, buying the equipment, setting yourself up just to sort of say, well, I'm. I'm only 50% committed here because I want to have fun doing other stuff, well, that's okay, but. But don't complain when you get to your a raise and you don't perform the way you want to because that's the choice you made.

Yep.

That's.

That's the best summary you can make is that if you're making the choice and you're okay with it, then it's not a mistake. But if you're making the choice yet you're still complaining, then that is a mistake. And if you don't, even if you're not even aware of the choice you're making, then that's also a mistake.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If you can't see that that is actually sabotaging your end goal, then that's clearly a mistake. I don't know how you get to understand that, but yeah. Look, I don't want to be a hard ass coach. I want to have people enjoying the process. We've said that many times. But you've just got to understand that the decisions you're making will actually have a flow on effect to everything that you can achieve in what you're trying to do with your sport.

Spot on. Well, that's a great way to finish the episode. Thank you as always for listening. We really appreciate it and we'll see you next time.