Bike/Run Training Differences You Need To Know

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. Today we are looking at bike versus run training, the comparison between the two and what is the difference? Should you train the run leg and the bike leg differently? And more specifically, what sort of sessions are best suited for running and what sort of sessions are best suited for the bike? And we see a lot of athletes doing what we call over under sessions all the time on the bike and not doing any sustained threshold riding, which is what you call the weakness on the bike. And we also see a lot of athletes do a lot of threshold running, but not a lot of over under sessions in terms of run training. So today we're going to explore the different types of sessions you can do and what's best for your program. But firstly, dad, welcome to the episode, our starting segment. What are you grateful for?

I never thought I'd say this, but I'm grateful to do a recovery ride.

I suppose I would have said that if I was in the middle of hard training, couldn't wait for a recovery.

Ride, but I'm grateful after being off.

The bike for a month to do my first recovery ride at snail's pace power. But it didn't matter. Couldn't take the smile off my face. Got my first ride in. So very happy with that.

Yeah, and my gratitude is very similar after a pretty tumultuous four to six weeks for myself. I'm just very grateful to be running again and exactly the same as you. It's quite such a simple thing. And I was thinking on my run yesterday that I feel like I've said this a lot on the podcast, how you're just grateful to train when you're injured. But I couldn't think of anything I'm more grateful for right now. Just to be able to go for a nice moderate, moderate length run, not have to do a 20 minute, really slow run, holding back. I'm just really grateful to feel the feeling of just being free and not holding back again.

One of the things I always think about is when you're in the middle.

Of training and everything's going well, it's a hard session, easy session, doesn't matter. And you just forget that you're fortunate to be actually able to do what you want to do. So that's kind of what my gratitude is, that for something that was taken away for whatever reason. Now you can actually participate again. Yeah. Just when something's taken from you, I think you appreciate it more when you can actually do it.

It's so true. When you're at the end of a hard training block, whether it's a two to three week period, you're just suffering so much. You're just desperate for some recovery or even a day off. And you do forget that when you can't do that, you're just craving being able to train hard again. Great. Our next segment is what has caught your attention.

Yes. So we did talk about this last year and at the start of the Grand Tours, the unpredictability of what's going to happen in three weeks is. And it was proven so true last year because we were sort of trying to predict who was going to, you know, the favourites for the. For the final victory and who could have ever predicted what the outcome was. Last year, none of the favourites got anywhere near winning. And the unknown guys are all vying for their first Grand Tours and that's what panned out.

So this year I'm pretty keen to.

We're talking about the Giro here.

Yeah. Sorry, the Giro. What did I say?

Nothing.

Just Grand Tours.

Yeah. So the Giro started, obviously, and I'm.

Really interested to hear your prediction and my prediction on who we think possibly should be up there vying for it.

And see how we go. By the end of the Tour.

Already we've seen stage three, the breakaway, which you know in history, the last, I don't know, five or six years, with teams being so organised and letting the breakaway stay out there all day and then catching them with 30k to go, 20k to go, and, well, last night's stage, or stage three, a breakaway guy stayed away and he had to ride 4 1/2 K with 32nd lead. And the peloton absolutely stuffed it up, made a mistake and didn't catch him and he won by four seconds. And that was fantastic. A guy in his maiden Grand Tour winning a stage and a team that had just been promoted and a team that's not really figuring in the Tours of past history. So that certainly caught my attention, A, to see what's going to happen over the Tour. But B, that's another example of unpredictable results. It's not meant to happen. It's so scripted. A lot of the Grand Tour stages, and this is one of those ones where they got it wrong and I.

Love seeing them muck it up. And a guy who takes a risk actually get the Reward, risk, high risk, big reward.

How often the commentator put it perfectly, how often do you see those guys that jump at the start, you know, four guys that go away, you just look at them and go, oh, you're in for a day of hurt with no reward, you know, and how often do you actually see them stay away?

And yeah, you don't, you don't see them stay away because they just, because they've got race radio and you know, the director sport is screaming in their.

Ears saying you have to get on the front and six or seven, seven teams will all make sure that their sprinters get to the finish with a chance of winning.

And they absolutely mucked it up.

And you know, he had 3 or.

400 metres lead with 50 metres to go, but he had 4, 5 metres lead when he crossed the line. That's how quick they were coming. But too late, boys, you lost.

Yeah, unreal.

So last year we really, you really hammered that point home. About it is a 21 day effort. And just like any race, whether it's 2 minutes, 2 hours or 21 days, you have to measure your effort. And the Giro just seems to be one where it's such a grueling event that you see the wildest fluctuations in results week to week. You know, the top 10 in week one is totally different to the top 10 in week two. And it's also totally different to the top 10 in Week 3. The Tour de France normally by about, you know, stage eight to 12, which is the first kind of hilly stages, the top 10 is kind of set and then it kind of stays like that with a couple of fluctuations where you, you can see guys come from nowhere, come to the top five. You can see guys in the top five absolutely blow up, which is why it's such an exciting race. But we really want to see who measures their effort over the next 21 days.

Yeah, and I think that's such an interesting thing. And look, you know, a lot of the guys that in our, in our coaching clients have absolutely had to face this in one day stages. You know, Grafton to Inverelle wasn't on the weekend. The weekend before was Melbourne to Warrnambool. 267k races for, you know, master cyclists is a massive day as a race. And so, you know, I'm telling them, you've got to hide, you know, you've got to really conserve and try and measure your effort from start to finish. And this is no different to a three week Grand Tour. You can't come out all guns blazing. And you know, ruin yourself in the first week. And the guy who's patient and picks his times when he has to spend some energy and when he doesn't and using his team correctly. There's so much go into this because the Giro is such an unpredictable tour, because it has so many weird type.

Of one day stage races in a Giro Grand Tour, what does that mean?

Well, you know, one day races are meant to be one day races. You give your best on that day. Whereas a Grand Tour, you're meant to, you know, measure your effort every day and only pick the days where the team wants to ride hard. It might be in a time trial or it might be in the hills where the biggest gains can be made and you can put time into your opposition. But there's so many other days where there's opportunities for riders who, you know, might be on the outskirts of a GC contender, who can actually get massive time and make it hard for the GC riders for the rest of the Tour. And you know, that's what happened last year and guys actually couldn't make up the time.

The word you use then, which is such a golden word, is patience. And it applies in from everything to as small as your training session. You know, if you're doing five efforts, you know, five threshold efforts, or five, five, three or five minute efforts, you've gotta be patient because like you always say you feel good now at the start, but how are you going to be feeling at the end? And I really like that analogy of thinking about a training session. If you've got five efforts to do the first two, you're a lot fresher. So you're going to be feeling good, but you've still gotta be so patient to not push high numbers. Because if you push too high, the fourth and fifth effort, you're going to absolutely fade. And it's the same in any type of race. You've just gotta have that discipline to be patient and know that the subjective feeling that you have will be different at the end.

And knowing that there will be times where I really, really will need to give my biggest effort and you know, that might not be near the end. It might be at a really poignant point of the race where there's a two minute climb and you've, you know, I'm talking about cycling racing here. If you've got a pack of 30 odd riders, you know, here's an opportunity, a two minute climb with a 7% gradient attack and see, see who you can get rid of in that. It doesn't mean sit on the front and drag everybody up behind you. It means attack, use one of your matches. And that's the art of understanding, patience and knowing the course. And we've learned a lot of lessons. One of our guys, we talked about that last night when we did the post analysis of his Grafton to Invaril. And Joe won't mind me saying this, but that's one of the lessons, not knowing the course and where the hard bits are. It's hard to do a recce of a 250k course when you live in another state. So, you know, we learned lots of lessons about that and understanding when to use some of your matches and when not to.

Yeah, absolutely. So who are you looking forward to watching over the course of the Giro?

Remco Evenepol is. I just can't wait to see what happens. And I don't want to put pressure on him by my expectation of him winning, but I just want to see all the work he's done. Everybody else has worked just as hard, except he's come back from the most horrific crash that you could have gone through. And for him to be actually back on his bike is amazing. But I just want to see how he measures his efforts and what he does throughout the 21 days. And I really hope for his confidence. And he's just one of those talents that only comes around in 40, 50 generation. Yeah. And that's what he's been speaking about him since he was an 18, 19 year old where he won world titles in the time trial on the road race. And that's not a very common thing to have happen. And of course he's from Belgium and the home of cycling and they just love their cyclists and everybody wants him to do well. And it's going to be interesting to see if he can be a Van Aert or a Van der Pol or Elaphalete, because he certainly has the pedigree but you still gotta perform and you know, setbacks like the injury he had could prevent that from happening. His career may not be what it was meant to be and I'm just interested to see how he handles himself over the three week period because he hasn't. He's hardly raced since the accident. It was almost, you know, it was pre Giro last year. Lombardia, I think, I can't remember exactly, but I think it was. It's almost nine or 10 or 11 months since he's raised properly.

So yeah, yeah, he'll be a good one to watch. I am also looking forward to Seeing the comeback of Egan Bernal and whether he can find form again, that Tour de France winning form. That'll be great to watch. And a bit of a wild card for me, someone who I like watching. I think he's awesome on the heels and the way he attacks him is the Bora team leader, Emmanuel Buckman. I think he'll be really good this year. He was good at the Tour last year. He's been good at a lot of the five day stages. Looking forward to watching him.

Yeah. One of the outsiders from the Tour de France, Hersky, who's changed teams.

Yeah, yeah.

He's certainly underperformed since then and he.

Was, he came out firing last year.

He was a contender and see how.

The mark is it. Hershey.

Hershey. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's. Yeah, he's jumped from sunweb to. I can't even think of he's with now. But anyway, it's going to be interesting to see how his form is from one year to another because he was touted as a really the next up and coming Grand Tour rider.

Yeah. It's becoming a bit of a running joke on this podcast, our butchering of.

The European attention to detail on names.

It's not really that important, I suppose.

But the general public know who we're talking about.

We might just start making up names. So what's caught my attention is I was talking to you about this last week and we just. We still can't believe how many professional triathletes are not using power. And I was listening to a really gun Australian triathlete and I'm not going to say the name. We're not, we're not trying to. We're trying to. What's the word?

Integrate. Yeah.

Denigrate anyone on this podcast. But we can't understand why, why you wouldn't be using every advantage possible. And this person on the podcast was saying, they just don't. They tried power and they don't like it. But what was wor was the way they said they tried it and they just said they're not a power rider. They've always gone without it and they're going to stay without it. And the person said, you know, I tried it for a few days. It just ruined my cycling sessions. I was jumping all over the shop. I wasn't used to it. And my coach and I decided it wasn't for me. And for me that's just kind of. That's just such a poor test to start with. I mean, of course you're not going to be good after it on it for three days. You know, it takes people much of a trial. Yeah. And there's just so much wrong with that. And you're leaving so much on the table. And there. I can understand why you can come to that logic, that I'm so used to doing it this way. I'm comfortable doing it this way. Change is hard. I don't want to ruin a thing that's working. And there is a saying that don't fix it if it isn't broken. Especially this triathlete does win a lot. But, you know, if Usain Bolt had a opportunity to go faster just because it's the fastest in the world, he still can get faster. It's worth doing. You know.

So there's so much in this and these are only observations and we're just highlighting it. I think we're frustrated that that person could be a better cyclist, but they're very happy with the form they've got now. So it's easy to say I don't need it because I'm doing very well. And I remember when power first came in, I think it was. That would have been 2001 or two. I actually was fortunate enough to ride with Cadell Evans, and I've told this story before where he had a power meter and. And I had no idea what he was doing. He was doing a training session. I was just riding behind him. It was just him and I out the back of bowing heads. And he said what he was going to do for the session and he was going to ride to power. And it was amazing what he was doing in that session and accuracy to what he was riding at, because we've always just gone by feel or heart rate and no one would be using power if it was not an advantage. And it's clearly an advantage, and we've explained that so many times in the podcast. So for you to not take up that option because you think you're doing okay at the moment, I just think you're missing out and it's kind of.

Frustrating and disappointing and you feel for that person. Just give it a chance.

Give it a proper chance.

And if after a month you still.

Don'T think it's for you, then absolutely don't use it.

I still don't think a month's enough time, to be honest.

But you know how hard it is.

To actually understand how to train and race to power.

It's not something that, you know, there's so much involved in understanding how power works to Your advantage, how it stops you from, as a triathlete, from going too hard early, how you know before you do the event that what you're capable of for doing 90k power number, 180k power number, you know that before you go into the event. So you pretty much know what your plan is from start to finish. And going outside of that plan either way is fraught with danger. So you're taking all the risk out of your. Out of your result.

It might sound boring, but, you know.

Without that knowledge, you are risking having a disastrous race.

And that was one of the main points this triathlete made, was that I am such an experienced athlete, I know what pace to run at, I know what speed to ride at, I know what it feels like. I've got such a good sense of feel that I can do it. And that might be true. Uh, but there's two major problems with that. One is the point you just made is that you still are risking your feel being off that day. Cause it could be off. You could have a bad day subjectively, because you, you, you've got your feelings mixed up of how, how you think the pace is going.

And that's a good point, because the.

Power doesn't care how you feel.

Exactly.

The power is just a number.

Yeah.

And it's got no relationship to feel.

So even if you're really experienced, you can still make mistakes, whereas the power is going to be there, black and white, no matter what. So you're eliminating that risk. And the second part on that subjective feeling is that how you feel? We've just spoke about this at the start of the podcast is subject to the context of that day, that week. You know, some days you might be feeling really good and so you're fresh out, but it forces you to go out too hard. Some days you might be feeling worse just because you're tired. You've had a flat week. It's just not. It's not your on day, you know, and so if you're relying on that, you're really relying on such subjective measures. And it takes a lot of mental strength to get through that. And it's unnecessary mental. A mental battle that you don't need to be doing on the day.

And you've heard me get frustrated with when I say to people, why did you go out so hard when you went above your range that we talked about? And the sentence I hate is, but Jared, I felt so good at the start, and I've talked about this many times, of course you feel good because You've well tapered for this event and it's only the beginning of a 90k or 180k ride. Of course you're going to feel fantastic because you're meant to be fresh at the start. But the feelings of 200 watts in the first 20k compared to the feelings of 200 watts at 160k, they are completely different feelings. So that's why the power meter is such an advantage. So it stops you at the start from riding to how you feel. I feel great. Let's ride at 250 watts. But if I didn't use a power meter, I wouldn't know that I'm doing that 50 watts higher.

I'm going to pay for that when.

I get to 160k and I can't write 140 watts. And I feel like I'm still riding.

Well, but actually my watts is 100 watts lower than it should be. And that's the thing that I try and get across to people who actually don't believe in power. And I got told by another cyclist 10, 15 years ago, I don't need power. I've been riding like this for 25 years. I know exactly how my body works. I don't need a machine to tell me what to do. And that person now uses power in every single session.

They do.

And you know and preaches by it. Yeah, exactly. And once they understood what power was actually going to do for them, the benefits of it, they had to swallow their pride and go, well, I still ride with lots of good feel about what I'm doing in any particular training session and day, but I understand what my feeling is relatable to a number. And look, there's gonna be some days where 200 watts feels like you've riding through butter, slicing through butter.

It's easy.

And another day, 200 watts feels like you're into a headwind. It's so difficult. And that's the beauty of understanding feel to a number.

Yeah. And as always, that's such an important point because we're not just saying it's number or nothing. You know, you're using everything. You're using your power as well as how you're feeling compared to your heart rate for that day. But to just ignore power completely is a massive disadvantage.

Yeah. So the point you made was you're surprised that people who are at the.

Elite end of of their sport aren't using the tools that are available. And honestly, they would be performing better if they did.

And.

And I'm not just Saying that because.

I'm keen on power.

I'm just saying that because that's fact. Yeah, you, you will do better with more information.

Yeah. Anyway, it's just our observations and I think we would both love to be able to analyze their training and race data with power just to see what was happening and see if they were just going out fractionally harder than they needed to in their race and training compared to the end.

Yeah, Ben, look, even when I look.

At data from our own athletes, you know, no matter how much I drill it into them, say we're doing a 90k and your first 45, it's an out and back. It should be, say you're doing 2.

Hours 20, so you want to do.

An hour 10 for the first out and back and an hour 10 for the second out back. That's the goal, to have two even rides and forever. We see an hour 6 and an hour 14. They end up with 2 hours 20, which is the result they wanted. But how they got there is going to make their run so painful because they're fading to be eight minutes slower. I'm using examples here. Some people are a 1 hour 9 and a 1 hour 11. And the further you are away from an even split is going to put your run under pressure.

Yep, yep, absolutely. And the point you touched on before about how you feel at the start compared to the end. Anyone that's done any type of endurance event will know that when you're running it. Running an inadrence event at the start, you need to. Your intensity is going to be at a 5 out of 10. You know it's not going to be that high. But a five out of 10 at the, @ the end feels like you're pushing a 7 or 8 out of 10. So it's just this gradual burn that slowly makes your legs heavier and heavier. If you're, if you're running a half marathon or marathon, it's the effort it takes to run that five out of 10 after two hours is. It's just incredible how much harder it feels.

A great science experiment would be to maybe do a run or a ride.

In a lab, do it on the treadmill and you get questioned as you're running or questioned as you're riding and you're not allowed to see the power and you have to run for four minutes at seven out of 10 and everybody knows you're not allowed to look at your watch. You gotta go by feel and you've gotta ride at 200 watts and you've got to you understand the feel of 7 out of 10 power. And then you write at 9 and you've got to give the answers all the time as to how you feel. And you know, if it was an endurance type activity science test, you would, you would definitely, people would be saying, oh, this feels like I'm actually, you know, running much harder now or riding much harder. But if we uncovered the, the lap power or we uncovered the average pace, you would find that it's probably dropped.

Yep.

And that's, that would be fun to see what people's feel is compared to what the actual real data is.

It is a common practice in tests and I'm 100% certain there would be a test out there that has done exactly that. So I might make it my mission to find it. But I've played that game with myself on any endurance run because in an endurance run, I try not to look at the watch. I'm just running freely, just running easily, but towards the end, I start to guess what pace I'm running and it's crazy how far off I am. You know, what feels like a 440 pace, I look down and it's four, 55 or five minutes because you just. Legs are so much heavier.

Yeah, that's a great point.

Yeah. Moving on to the main topic, bike versus run training. Well, let's start by going through what are the types of sessions that you can do because you can do similar style training on the bike and run. So let's just give an overview of the types of sessions that you can do and then we'll get specifically onto what's probably better for a bike or run session for a triathlete.

Okay, so where do I start with these sessions? There's, there's just so many sessions you can do as a, as a runner.

Or as a rider. So let's just give some basic general sessions that you could actually attempt to do. If you're trying to improve yourself as.

A rider or underneath each of these general headings, there is a subset of sessions you can do. But we're just going to kind of there is.

So, I mean, the obvious number one thing is if you're an endurance runner.

Or rider, you need to do an endurance session. You would probably, as an endurance athlete, be faced with hills, whether you're a rider or a runner in an endurance event. So you would want to have some strength component into your training sessions. Obviously you would want to have some recovery rides or runs so that you can actually do the other sessions that you're trying to do well in, to get the improvement as you go along your training journey to race day. So we break that, the other sessions into. So we've got endurance, we've got strength, we've got recovery. And then the important sessions that are going to give us the improvement are some type of interval over, under type riding or running, threshold type riding or running, sweet spot, which is just under threshold, riding or running. And to a lesser degree, tempo. We don't do a lot of zone three tempo, riding or running, but we do a lot of zone two, which is really underneath that tempo, but not near the sweet spot. So zone two type of activity where it's, you know, you could be talking as an athlete to your buddy who you are training with, whereas tempo, you would be a little bit more out of breath. So it's just under that tempo. So that's a generalization of some sessions that you should have implemented into your program.

It's important to understand that each type of session you're doing is hitting a different zone, which is hitting a different physiological part of the body and training a different part of the body. And you, you need to hit these different zones to get your body to adapt and improve.

Yeah.

And, you know, if we're talking zones, you know, zone one is recovery. Zone two is that just pressure on the pedal. Zone three is more tempo. Y zone four is that sweet spot two threshold.

Zone five is the VO2, where we're 110 to 120% of our threshold. And then zone six, seven, five, six, seven, all short bursts of intensity under.

A minute, depending on what, you know, FTP formerly used. There's, there's 5, 6, 7, there's sometimes people call it 5, Zone 5A, B or C. Yeah.

And there's, you know, every exercise physiologist has got his own neuromuscular zone or whatever they want to call it. But basically we're talking about anything from.

120% of your threshold and above. And so we've got so many opportunities to do variations of training and it's dependent on so many things. Questions like, am I an experienced runner, Am I an experienced rider, Am I at the pointy end of the results, Am I a mid packer or am I a beginner? So your sessions will all be determined.

By where you sit in those, answering.

Those questions, also thinking about the event and then what stage of the program you're up to.

Yeah, for sure.

And that's why the progressive overload component that we, that we want everybody to have in their program is so important.

So really the major kind of four factors, if you were to summarize it, are what are your experience? What's your experience? You know, beginner, intermediate or experience or very experienced triathlete? Where do you sit in terms of the results? Are you trying to win? Are you trying to just improve yourself or you're trying to just finish and compete? What's the actual event that you're doing? So what is the length of event that you need to train for? That, that definitely impacts the zones you want to hit a lot more. Because Ironman athlete does not need to be hitting zone 5C or zone 7 for the same thing. You know, 130% of efforts that often they don't need to spend very little time doing that. And what stage of the program are you at? Are you starting the program? Are you in your final phase leading to the race?

No. That's a really great summary. And that point four is, you know, that is such a crucial one because, you know, we've, we've told people on this podcast, if you're training for an Ironman, you know, you don't need to be doing 200 meter sprints as a runner because what are the requirements of the event? Well, certainly there's no sprinting in it. You might sprint for 10 meters if you're, if you're actually trying to beat someone to win. Kona as a professional, you know, you might sprint for 100 meters, but, but that's about the only time you're going to be sprinting. So there's actually no benefit to, to your training program to have that in it. So that's kind of one of the things that I see people doing a lot of which is not necessary for an endurance event.

Yeah, and this brings up a really good point because there are so many sessions you could do and you probably see a lot of athletes doing good sessions on their own. They're good sessions, but they're not very good sessions for that person's program. You know, they might have gone and done a great track session where they've done 16, two hundreds or something. And that's a really good session if they can do it. But it's completely unnecessary because they're training for an Ironman.

Yeah, and that's kind of the points we're trying to get here across is.

Identifying those four factors will enable you to get the right outcome for the program you're trying to achieve.

So let's turn to the main question of this episode and that's what is the difference between bike and run training. And what is. We at Trivelo generally don't prescribe things based on the physiological adaptation side of things first. It's actually more a different factor. It's actually a risk factor first.

Yep. And I've just seen too many people and the reason why we do this is because I've just seen too many people not get to the start line. And doesn't matter what you give them as a training program, if you don't get to the start line, it's worth nothing. So you're not achieving anything. You're not going to have a great day, a pb, a poor day or an average day. You're actually not going to have any day. So we try and eliminate the risk. And what is the risk? The risk is doing the sessions bike and run the round the wrong way or doing them equally the same. And you've got to understand that as a triathlete you actually need to put the risk. The biggest risk is in running. There's very little risk in riding. Of course, there's crashing risk, there's straining muscles risk, obviously sore backs, hamstrings, maybe calves, but you're not susceptible to an activity that's basically around gravity, where you're holding yourself up. So what are we trying to achieve in that summary of sessions that I talked about? VO2 threshold sweet spot. You know, we need to get that overload to improve as an athlete. To become a better athlete, you need to push yourself. So we're trying to minimize that in running and put it into the riding or the swimming. We want to get your cardiovascular pumping really hard, not in the running session.

We still want you to have a.

Great base of fitness in the running session. So we do do lots of sessions, but. But really one of them's only got some intensity and all the other sessions have just got a base building component to them where we're trying to improve your aerobic fitness and we obviously use.

Things such as hills to get the cardiovascular pumping a little bit where we're not striding out fast.

The minute you start running fast is the minute you're risking calf, hamstring, tears, plantar fasciata, you name it. You get, you're going to get a myriad of issues from running fast, hitting the pavement fast, running uphill. You actually can't run fast, but you're.

Getting that same cardiovascular response by.

If you run up a set of stairs, you're puffing by the top, but you haven't gone fast up the stairs. You run up A hill fast, you're not going very fast, but you're still getting a cardiac outcome response.

Yeah. You're able to hit the high intensity anaerobic zone or system without running fast.

Exactly, yeah. So that's the thing we're trying to say here. You still need to train as a runner really well. And the difference between training as a runner and a triathlete runner, that's another topic as well. You know, a lot of the sessions we've talked about, they are perfect for runners who just are runners. But as a triathlete, you've got, you know, so many things happening with your body from swimming and so many things happening with your body from riding that by the time you get to run, the fatigue levels are enormous and overuse causes injury. So if you're avoiding overuse as a runner and doing all the hard work as a rider and getting those sprint efforts on the bike, you know, those 30 second efforts, 15 second efforts, one minute efforts on the bike, really maxing out, you know, you're minimising the risk, but you're still getting the value. So you don't need to repeat those sessions as a runner because you're already doing it in your program. So it's not repeating. I'm a big advocate of not repeating sessions on the bike. If you're just a bike rider, don't repeat sessions. You've got no time in your daily week to repeat sessions. So we don't actually do the same sessions as a runner and we've already done them on the bike. So we need to use the running section to get our base and our aerobic fitness and we need to use the bike section to get our overload. So be expecting to ride hard on the bike. And because we only possibly ride three.

Times a week for some age groupers, we're talking about you've got to get bang for your buck here. One of them is going to be endurance and two of them are going.

To be reasonably intense.

So they may be over threshold, they may be at threshold, they may be a combination of over, under. Depends on where you are in the program. If you're towards the end, you'll be doing shorter, harder, high intensity. If you're at the beginning of the program, you're doing your base training, so you'll be doing less high intensity stuff, more sweet spot. So you know the question we said at the start, there is so many variations to the answer that you're saying you know the difference between training on the bike and training as a runner. So I'm trying to go through them and try to make it as simple as possible. But at the end of the day, if you can understand this one concept, use the bike to get the intensity and you will get to the start line. That's actually the goal, is not to be injured. We want you to get to the start line. If you haven't done a lot of high intensity running, it's absolutely fine as long as you've got a great aerobic running base. Yeah. Because you have got so many examples that you know of, of people who we've trained purely as runners. We've got them doing, you know, they're doing trail runs that are 15 hours, 100, 150k runs through the Blue Mountains. For example. One of our athletes, you know, we gave them, you know, two hour runs, three hour runs, all the way up to eight hour runs, split runs, eight hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon. In preparation for that 15 hour trail run that they were doing, we tested them over 10k half marathon and they smashed their PBS on a 10k without doing any intervals. And, you know, that tells me that, you know, you can still perform very well by doing, you know, a specific type of training that's going to allow you to not get injured and you will still be able to run fast.

This comes down to the science behind how adaptive the athlete is, which we won't go into now because it is a very complex topic on its own. But you can assume that the PBS in that 10k and half marathon come because the athlete isn't a fully adapted athlete yet. You know, so they're going to get improvements no matter what zone they train in. But they go, they're getting massive improvements by doing so much of that zone 12 training. Whereas, you know, a professional triathlete who's been training for 20 years in the sport, who is at the very peak, who is trying to get 0.1% improvement, they need to train in the exact right zone. They need to train this many minutes in zone 5a, in this many minutes in zone 5b, and this many minutes in zone 3 or 4 to get that incremental improvement. But really from a general perspective, not many age group athletes are going to be that well adapted. So just getting a general mix of this first, while abiding by our number one principle, lowering the risk of injury is one of the best outcomes.

Yeah.

And you know, when we say they.

Just do endurance training, the example I.

Was giving, you know, they're still doing hill work, which is as we said.

Before stimulating the cardio system so that.

They'Re unable to run fast. Whenever they want to run 10k or a 5k, they can still run fast because they've been doing these strength efforts on heels.

So the point you've made is valid across everything we're talking about.

And especially when you're at the pointy.

End and you're trying to get those 1% improvements, then that's where it's so.

Much more important to spend X amount of time in the right zone and not waste any of that training that you're. One of the examples I give is when I started to Prepare for the 90k individual time trial, which was so different to the training I've been doing for the last 20 years as a cyclist, last 15 years as a cyclist who does criterium, small time trials and road racing. And for me to change my focus to time trial training of an endurance type. Whereas the time trials in cycling is all around 15 or 20ks, whereas now I'm looking at a 90k time trial, you know, my focus became on that sweet spot, just under threshold. I still did the high intensity stuff to get the, to get my functional threshold power to go up, but you know, there was no tempo riding zero.

There was sweet spot 88 to 96%. That's where I spent a lot of my time training.

So that's what's gonna happen on race day. But a lot of it was in zone one and two the other days.

Yep.

And the other high intensity sessions I was doing, you know, 30, 15s, 40, 20s, 60, 30s, they were the go to sessions because I was riding them at 120% or more. And that's where my body adapted so well to everything that was being thrown at it. And you know, come race day, riding at 80 to 90% of your threshold felt like a piece of cake after doing those high intensity sessions. But your aerobic fitness, you know, I.

Was shocked at how, how quickly my.

Body adapted to being able to ride, you know, and I'm saying quickly. It took nearly six months of changing the program to really focus on this.

But I was always wondering, you know, what I was able to ride as.

A 60 year old compared to what I could ride as a professional triathlete when I was 28, 29, 30, 31.

Of course we had different bikes, but as you know, you know, to ride around that 2:10 to 2:14, you know, that transcribes to a 4:40 to 450, you know, I couldn't do that as a 28 year old, you know, that.

Was similar to what I could do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But because I'm understanding the concepts of training better now and of course the bike is the difference, being able to.

Ride a faster bike. So it just shows you how important the bike is. But it was intriguing to me that I could ride those times, you know, 30 years later.

Yeah. You've always said you'd love to go back in time with your current bike and see what you could do as a 28 year old.

Yeah, and I'd definitely run better because I wouldn't be as fatigued because of riding a road bike compared to riding.

A time trial bike.

But getting away from the topic there.

But it was just understanding the requirements of your event, what are you training for and implementing the key things that the event requirements are in your program. But you still need all the other things that we talked about at the start, which is, you know, types of.

Intensity, types of zone two, types of.

Zone one endurance strength work. They still doesn't matter what event you're.

Doing, you still need aspects of it.

But you need to concentrate on more of. And I don't mean repeating, I just mean more time in the one session that's more relevant to your event.

And if you're doing peaks ride, it's a, you know, four and a half.

Thousand meter ride with climbs. You just need to spend more time.

Doing hills and strength work. That would be, you know, your endurance ride would have that in it and you would have another session where you're doing high intensity, your endurance ride, not doing the strength work at high intensity, you're doing it at the tempo you're going to ride on that actual particular day. So you would ride some of those one hour climbs at 75 to 80% because you're doing a 10 hour event. So you'd ride those climbs if they're an hour at 75 to 80% and every time you get to one of those climbs that's what you go to would be. So you'd practice that in training. So you wouldn't be doing your endurance ride with high intensity at that level. You would do your strength efforts at, you know, six by five, at 98 to 108%. So that's where you're getting your improvement from at the strength effort.

Yeah.

So you're still doing two strength efforts, but they're different. Yeah, one's got intensity, one hasn't. But people say you're repeating strength efforts. Well, no, I'm not, I'm repeating the actual cadence replicator, but not the intensity.

And that's what we said at the start. You know, we talk about the general headline of a type of session. So you've got a tempo session or a strength session, but underneath that there is 10 different types of strength sessions you can do depending on the length of the effort, depending on the recovery, depending on the cadence you choose the percent gradient of the hill, it creates an entirely different session depending on all those factors. And not to confuse anyone, as soon as you start talking about percentages, 75 to 80%, 98 to 108%, it can easily people can go, I don't know what that even means or what that's in reference to. The main point we're making here and bringing it back to bike versus run training is that you want to minimize the risk of what your run training is doing first and foremost and then make sure you are getting the best benefit from the sessions possible. But while, yeah, minimizing the risk of injury, on the flip side of this coin, like we said at the start, we do see a lot of athletes take that too far and on the bike just to do too much of the same session. So just do too much of the same over under session and not get enough variety in there, not get enough endurance or not get enough sweet spot, sub threshold or threshold riding. And same thing for running. You do want to minimize the amount of time you are spending at intensity. So really as a triathlete doing a 70.3 or Ironman endurance event, you want to be spending as little time as possible at zone 5, 6 or 7. There's just no need to run that fast. But you do want to be getting some overload and so you do want to be getting some sort of over under session, just not a high risk. Is that correct?

Yeah, it's spot on what you just.

Said and, and what the guys are doing too much on the bike and too much on the run. They need to swap it. So there's too much one single pace training happening as a runner and people say, oh no, that's rubbish. I do intervals. Well, that's actually, you know, intervals are running way over threshold with recovery. And what we're trying to do here is, you know, the true monofatlick, which is just over your threshold and just under.

And that's more relevant for a triathlete.

And you know, as a runner, no one does over under. They do either hard intervals and recovery. And that's not over under, that's, you know, four minutes or six minutes intervals with two minute recovery over under is doing, you know, 30 seconds or one minute or 90 seconds over. And then when we say over, we might be saying if your go to pace is 4 minute K pace, you might do them at 3:55 for 90 seconds and then the next 90 seconds you do at 4:05. So just under and just over. And not as a, you know, if you're doing six 1K reps where you're actually running, you know, 3:30 and having five minute jog in between, that's not the overrun that we're talking about. Whereas as a cyclist, that's what we do all the time because we ride in bunches where people attacking and surging, you get a recovery, you go again. That happens at almost every bunch ride that you do. And we don't do a lot of threshold riding as cyclists and we need to do more of that so that, you know, we've got that weapon. If you get to a hill, it's a 10 minute hill and you've done only over under, you're gonna go up the hill resting and surging and resting and surging. That's a good tactic if you're trying to get rid of people, but you need to hold steady state at threshold and practice that. And if you come to a race where you've never done that, you're gonna be fanned out, you know, and that's the one thing I push cycl to do when they come to me is they're great at over under, but they've done no threshold training. Why? Because it's too hard and it's painful and I just don't want to do that. So can I do the things I really enjoy? Yeah, you can. But once. And let's do the other thing.

It is a more boring session, just sitting there holding sustained power. You know, you much prefer to be a bit more exciting and go hard for 30 seconds.

Yeah.

I don't know about boring, Jordan.

I think it's excruciating, but I know.

That it's actually helping me me. So I'm happy to. I'm not happy. I know the outcome meets the requirement of what I'm trying to do. If I can sit and hold 102% for four by eight minutes, then 32 minutes at that, I come away with that with enormous confidence that I am actually improving my threshold, which is going.

To make me a better bike rider. And if I'm a triathlete, same thing.

I'm glad we finished with this point because if you say this at the start, then people might think, oh no, well, I've got to go do over under running. And that's not exactly what you're saying you want to do over under running, but in a risk averse way, like the monophylic example you gave. So the first point to notice is that you want to just to summarize this really clearly to finish off, you want to get a variety of all the sessions, hitting different zones depending on your event, your experience, what you're aiming for, but you want to do it in a risk averse way. And then the flip side of that coin, which we've just finished with, is make sure you're not doing too much of the one session and you are not just doing over on bike and not just doing tempo or threshold running.

Yeah, that's a great summary and I really can't add much more to that because we just don't want to confuse people. And I know people are really gleaning.

Everything we're saying and that's great.

But you've got to understand that at the end of the day, if you don't get to the start line because you've been too risky with running fast.

Then you're going to really be disappointed.

And be mad at yourself because we've told you on this podcast that that actually doesn't work. And who does it work for? It works for people who have been.

Running for a long time and they can still get injured by the way.

But you know, the better the aerobic base you have, the more able you.

Are to do that one session per.

Week that will stretch you, but it should only be one. And, and that's kind of the message I want to take home is if you're new to running, you haven't done a lot of running, you shouldn't be doing any of that. You should just be spending your whole time, whether it's six months down the track or two year program that you've got for an Ironman. You know, you want to start to do some sprints, then Olympics and half Ironmans and Ironman. You should not be doing any intensity in your running. You should do use that on the bike. That's kind of the message we want to get home so that you can get to races. And I know the question's going to be, yeah, but if I want to do really fast runs in races, I haven't done any of that in my training. Well, as we said, you get that from the bike.

And also if the event is a 70.3 or Ironman, you're not going to be spending much time running fast.

That's right.

And I was more talking about the sprints, but yeah, definitely. You know, I think it's pretty, pretty simple. Follow those pieces of advice and you'll.

Get to start more races than you.

Would have not had you joined in. The masses who do flat out training, six by 400 to the training for.

An Ironman or a half ironman and.

They get injured and they never get to the start line. And even the people who train correctly with not much intensity still have the possibility of getting injured. And that's where the other component of looking after yourself with strength and conditioning, making sure that if you have a weakness in your hamstring that you actually do something about it. You've got to be proactive in preventing injuries so that you don't just be proactive when the injuries come. It's got to be a maintenance thing that's part of your training.

Yeah, that's a really good way to finish off. That's a great end to this episode. And on that note, we're really excited for the next month of episodes we've got coming up on the podcast coming up, we have actually someone on that exact topic. We've got a movement specialist, someone that we trust as the movement specialist here at Trivelon to talk about injury prevention and how to improve your body in a way that maximizes your potential to keep training and avoid injury. And so that's going to be really exciting. We also have a bike specialist coming on teaching you how to get the best out of your bike. We've got a really inspiring comeback story, an interview with someone very close to Trivalo that we can't wait to show you. So some really good episodes coming up on the podcast. We can't wait for you to hear them. And other than that, thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.