Every Mistake You’ll Make Training for a 70.3 Half Ironman

Today's case study is just such a great story of a triathlete who goes through what we would consider just the perfect typical triathlon journey. And we don't say perfect as in everything was smooth sailing. We say perfect because it had all the ups and downs that we would expect in a triathlon training program. And so this is just such a great case study because it goes through all the highs and lows that an athlete can expect. And if you had a checklist of looking at a 20 week program for triathlete, what's going to happen? The good things and the bad things. This case study with Harris is exactly that. And I think it's just so worth talking about because this is what you can expect if you're going into a triathlon training program. And, and how to manage the potential hiccups or road bumps that come along and how to get through them and then how to get to race day in the best form possible, which he certainly did. So this is also a really exciting case study because it's a full circle moment. We do these case studies to really help people get a grasp of what can they, what they can achieve, to try and show some relatable stories about you might hear someone and think how that can apply to you and take some lessons that apply to you, especially if you hear some mistakes or some training ideas and really to showcase what's possible. And Harris in this case study, heard our case study with Harrison. So this is very funny. They have similar names. And he called us up and said, I just listened to this case study with Harrison. I'm in the exact same situation, I'm in the exact same story. We have the same work life balance, we have the same training goals. He said, I felt like you were talking about me. Because Harrison works in his family business, works very long hours, has to fit all his training around that. And so Harrison is an Aussie athlete, Harris very similar age over in the uk, it's like they were living in twin universes. Caught us up, said, I want that, you know, I want to know what to do. He works with his family business. He has big working weeks, limited time to train, really heavy on the tools, job, physical labor. And he just really wanted to know what sessions to do to get the best improvement.

Yeah, it was one of those great interviews where he was just so excited about joining the program because whatever Harrison Coatsworth did, he wanted a piece of that. And his ambition was just tell me what he did and I'll replicate that, just tell me what to do. The whole time was, give me what I need to do and I'll do it. And to be fair, that's actually what he did do in the whole 20 weeks that he was on the program. And you couldn't ask for a more motivated, keener athlete to be coaching.

Yeah, spot on. He was just always wanting to know from us, am I doing the right thing, what can I improve on? Again, just tell me and I'll listen and I'll do it and I'll take it on. And like I said in the intro, he learned all the expected mistakes that you will in the first 20 weeks. And so this is a massive credit to him. He learned from them and then aimed to fix them. And each time he got another chance to fix it in a test or in a practice race or in a training session, he would do that. So really exciting. So basically he's in a position where he'd signed up for his first 70.3, having never done a full triathlon before and come from a really good running background. A really strong runner, had done a marathon before. Yeah, quite a quick runner, but swimming, huge weak link, and then wanted to learn how to train and ride the bike properly. And then kind of said at the start, look, I'm really into triathlon, I really love it. I don't know if I'm going to love it after my first 70.3, but I want to get there. So it was a fair few hurdles to jump to get there. And let's start with the swim. Where to his own ambition. He's basically like, I can't swim. And so the first thing we had to do was try and get some gauge of what kind of swimmer he was, but he couldn't swim more than 500 meters. So we got him just to go in the pool and don't worry about the time or whatever, just see if you can swim 500 meters and see what pace you can do. And his first 500 meter swim was 241 pace per 100 meters. And we just had to build from there. And the two goals were, okay, how can we try and improve your swim technique and get that efficiency down, but how can we actually get you to a point where you can swim 1900 meters straight? Coming from a place of not being able to swim basically over 500 meters.

Yeah, and that's not an easy task, is it? When you really, when you think about that, you know, struggling to swim 500 without stopping a lot of the way. And there's nothing wrong with that as people Come to us with all levels of swimming ability and that's okay for us. We've had people who can't swim more than 50 meters without stopping and then swim another 50 without stopping. And their ambition is an ironman, which is a nearly a 4K swim, or a half Ironman, which is 1900. And that's the task. That's what you've got to actually think about and implement a strategy that's going to allow you to A, be confident that you can finish the distance and B, be fit enough to not affect the rest of your day in terms of biking and running. And so there's a two pronged attack here. We want to get you fit, but we don't want to destroy you so much by swimming so much that you can't actually train properly for, for your bike. And, and the bike is the biggest area where you can improve the most. And obviously if you swam every day you could improve five minutes, but if you, if you did the same effort with a, with the intention on the bike, you could improve, you know, 15 minutes. So, so that's actually the strategy we use, was just to get him competent, get him with less anxiety in the water and making sure that he could complete 1900 meters. And by the time we got to a race day, he'd had, you know, a whole period of learning how to swim, how to swim continuously. He's done all the training sessions, think, thought about the drills and the stroke technique sections which are really key to his improvement and being confident in his efficiency and then making sure that he had confidence in his ability to do that.

Two kids and like a lot of people, the challenge of fitting swim sessions around a hard schedule. You know, you can often just come home from work and try and get on the bike, on the indoor trainer or try and run. You ran into a lot of problems where the pool was closed or you'd have to go super early morning, but then the lanes were fully booked and when really every swim counts. And anyone that knows our program knows that we do two or three max swim sessions per week. And you'd think for maybe him we would do more. But we stuck to our principles and we knew that we could get him confident with just two, sometimes three swims a week, but really focusing on the drills. But he did have a lot of hurdles at his way where he would message me and go, I've gotten to the pool and I can't swim. It's fully booked. And it's a bit of a difference to the UK system compared to the Australian system, I will say it's a lot more accessible for Australians to be able to swim in pools. And a lot of us grow up swimming. You never have many problems, Australian athletes with getting to a pool and being able to swim. But we have constant problems with our UK athletes with it's just not as popular. So the people that do want to swim lanes are often booked. You're often swimming over the top of people. They've got weird, weird hours where it's way more limited than we find here in Australia. So these are all just problems that you really have to get around, especially with a full working schedule.

And plus Jord, the majority of Australians live on the coast so they have in summer the opportunity to swim open water as well. So if you find the pools closed, you know, you're not that far away from the coast, it's 15, 20 minute drive to swim open water or if you've got a lake somewhere. So in some of the those options are available and they're a better option sometimes than the pool to be frank. But if you're in a city like London or Amsterdam or places like that where it's not that accessible to swim, you know, take Paris. If you live in Paris, you know, the water quality there is not sustainable to, to actually train in and to get from where you live in the middle of France to, you know, the coast is a long journey and you've got got no opportunity to do that except for race day. So. So you know, environment does play a big role in your ability to actually train properly. So he did well to keep persevering. And that's the thing we want to get across is the goal to get from starting your program to race day is persevering. No matter what's thrown at you, no matter what roadblocks put in front of you, no matter what hurdle is put in front of you, you need to actually keep thinking your way around these roadblocks. Okay, I get to the pool, it's closed, or I get to the pool and I'm not allowed to swim because the whole pool's booked. You know, you've got to think on your feet. Okay, today's my swim day, but it's not going to happen. So what else can I do? Go straight home, jump on the bike and do a recovery ride and you swim another day. You know, there's Monday, Wednesday or Fridays for swimming. So bump your swim over to Wednesday, make sure you bit more organized and find out who's at the pool, what time people are at and try and do things like that. And if you miss a swim here or there, it's not ideal because we're doing small amounts of training for swimming, but it's not the end of the world.

And one other thing that kept happening was they really, they really strict on the allotted time slots. So often you've only got an hour to swim and sometimes he would be rushed from work or, you know, and the session sometimes can take over an hour and you'd be kicked out, you know, three quarters way through the session which just really sucks. It's really deflating when you're trying to, trying your best to get it in and someone's kicking you off your training session. It's just one of the worst feelings. So I can't wait for you to hear what time he ended up with in the full race. We'll say that at the end. But yeah, from a 241 first 500 to what he could do in 1900 meters in a race was just phenomenal. So moving to the bike, really this was just great progression. And I have some funny stories about the bike but I'll just flat out say the FTP went from his first test at 195 watts to he finished at 269 watts in the final FTP. And I will say that that last test was every single test we kept trying to. He had listened to us so much that he was already very well executing from the start about how to execute a negative split. That was one of his strong suits. But he was too good at it. And we do see this a lot with athletes in the first FTP test or two, we let them get away with it and say it's great to negative split, great to come home strong, way better than blowing up. So you blow up, it's really quite a disaster. But if you be conservative then and come home really strong then we can accept that. But even the last test at 269, I believe he still had 20 more watts in him because the gap from the first five minutes or so where he averaged about 235, 240 watts to the last five minutes or so where he ended up averaging 290 is just far too big. So that's a really good lesson for everyone. If you've got a 50 watt gap between the start and the end in a 20 minute test, you're going out way too conservatively and you're leaving heaps of watts on the table.

Absolutely. And that's kind of the next level of Time trialling is we push that conservative start so you can be strong and enjoy the actual test as much as you can ever enjoy a test. But to have 40, 50 watts differentiation between your highest 5 minutes and your lowest 5 minutes is far too great a margin. We want that under 10 watts. We want you to start and take some risks. This is a training session, remember, especially.

Towards the end of the program when you've got some experience and you've had.

Six goes or seven goes at doing this. So take more risks and, you know, whatever your previous 20 minute number was, start around there and put yourself under a little bit of pressure there and, you know, don't have the expectation that you can start, you know, end up 50 watts higher. You might end up 5 watts higher. But if you start where you, where you left off last time, you may be able to get another 10 watts out of yourself.

Exactly right. So we can't be angry at a 70 to 80 watt FTP increase over five months. It's just absolutely absurd. But I did want to make the point that even at the end he was executing so, so well, but, you know, too well and too conservative. So that's an area for improvement as well. But that brings us to the next point about expectations of, of your results improvement. And this is a really important part of the triathlon journey and your training journey is that if you don't get this expectation and mindset part right, it actually really detracts from your experience. And, and he will admit, and we had some really great conversations about this where we, I really had to have a, a stern conversation with him about his expectations because it was actually detracting from the positivity of his journey and the fact that he was progressing so well. And he did say that he wanted the same journey as Harrison. And Harrison had some phenomenal watt increases, you know, some monster increases between FTP tests. He was kind of saying, I want the same thing. And I just said, you have to really temper that because every athlete's different and we don't know if 195at the start is up towards your top limit. You know, you might improve 10 watts over five months, 15 watts. And that's the progression that we're aiming for, or you might do what you didn't and average 70 watts. But anyway, after the first test he texted me and said, just finished the test a little bit disappointed, thought I could have got more. And I went, oh, I know what's happened? Has something gone wrong here? What's happened with the training? They're the first thoughts you think of is what have we missed here? That he hasn't improved early on and he'd improved 25 watts in the first test in the gap. But the problem was he was hoping to improve 30 to 40 watts because that's what I think Harrison had done. And I just called him up and I just said, I'm sorry mate, don't ever message me that ever again. I never want to hear the first words out of your mouth that I'm disappointed in a 25 watt increase. And we laugh about it now, but at the time it is actually really important and we, we do make light hearted jokes about it, but that will detract. The whole reason you want to do this is to enjoy the process and soak in the improvements and soak in the, the times when you improve because that, you won't get 25 watts again. Trust me, that's, that's the first and only time you're going to get a 25 watt increase. You want to soak it in. And so I think that's a really clear point in this journey. Yeah.

And look, as we know, when athletes have been doing this for 3, 5, 7, 15 years, you know, 4 watts is something you would be celebrating and you know, it's understandable, you know, because we do these case studies, people have also this expectation, one that you should be starting really low and finishing high. That's an expectation that we've pushed. But we try to explain that there's, that's okay at the start. The second expectation is that the jumps will be 20, 30, 40 watts. But that's just not real. You know, every single person that we coach, their ceiling, we don't know where it is when they start with this. And that's the, that's the point we want to get across. You know, at starting at 190 watts, we can't tell after four weeks whether your ceiling is 300 or 195 watts. Five, five watts more. So, so it's a learning process for the athlete and for the coaches to, to work out. You know, judging by how well you finished, we could say if you averaged 190 and you finished at 220. 225. Clearly 190 is too low. So the expectation is next time you would probably be able to do 215, 220, and that's the way it panned out. But there are other athletes who are quite good at executing and risking a lot right at the start and they actually bypass Three months of progression because they, from week one or four weeks into their program have learned the lesson straight away and almost hit their ceiling straight away after four or five weeks. So there's two ways to look at it and it's more enjoyable starting low and finishing high. But if you can actually practice training yourself in sessions where you're right on your limit and you're hanging on rather than starting way too high, which is what we're trying to prevent you from doing, and fading. But starting even and only increasing a little bit means you're actually getting better value from the session.

Spot on. And look, I'll just say the numbers straight away. That was, you know, a 20 minute improvement. Of course he's training for a 70.3 and 90k time trial and then to, you know, only be able to do, I shouldn't say only but to be able to do 195 watts at the start to then average 188 watts for his 90k time trial for three hours of riding, that just shows his fitness improvement. That's what he ended up with in the race in the 70.3. You know, to do a max 20 minute effort, holding 195 watts to be a few watts under that for a full three hours. Just phenomenal.

Yeah, it's, you know, you ought to think about that. You know, when I first started I could only do this for 20 minutes and now I can do it for three hours. That shows you how much of an athlete he's become.

Imagine if I said to him at the start, you know, once you've done that 20 minutes, all right, now do that eight more times in a row. You know, he was, you were gassed after the first test and that, that, you know, it's crazy what the body can do with improvements. So into kind of the run overview and then we're going to go through some training notes and then finally finish with the race. So the run was his strong suit came in with a 5k PB of 4:15 pace. So over 21 minutes for the 5k. And then he finished his last test the week before the race. He finished with 356 pace. He dipped up at under 20 minutes, his all time 5k PB. So it's great to know that even at the top end of running he's running really well. And his 10k time trial, his latest one a few weeks out was 4:10 pace. So again that's quicker than his 5k time at the end of the program. And then he finished with he's running the actual half marathon at 4.41pace. So a 1:38 half marathon, which if we do our calculations, you know, at 10k of 42ish minutes, you know, we double that, that's 124. And we add, you know, 14 to 18 minutes ish per athlete, depending on where they are of what they can do in a half Ironman. And he was bang on the top end of that range. You know, add 14 minutes to 124, that's 138. Again, I'm just glazing over these equations, but this is kind of the general range of what we see athletes can do. He's right at the top end of what we could have anticipated for a half marathon at the end of 70.3.

Yeah. And then to do it in a race and Your first major 70.3 is a real credit to him. And this particular course, Bolton, is one of the most difficult courses to write and run.

That's.

That's actually on the calendar, I think. And yeah, it's a credit to him to be able to. And look, I saw some footage of it and he was having the time of his life and obviously passing a lot of people, which was. Which is fun if you're able to hold your pace throughout the race and actually finish strong, which is what he did. And you know, the progression of his running, obviously he was a reasonable runner to start with, being able to run just under 22 minutes and to be able to actually get his run under, under 20 and be in the 19s, you know, something with a 3, some 350 in it, and then to be able to run a 10k faster than his initial test of 5k. His pace in his 10k run by the end of that 20 weeks was faster than his best 5k. So that's from a guy who could actually run reasonably okay. So that's a phenomenal improvement that he can actually run, you know, two 5Ks faster than his first 5K on a solo effort. So. And then to put that into a race, that's where it happens, that's where it counts, and that's the bit that we're most happy about. It's great to have all this progression, to see that you're training well and you're improving. That's really important. That's the blueprint for race day, and that's where the race plan and strategies all happen based on what you've done from that previous training period. And then you implement that into race day, which we're very happy to talk about.

Yeah. So just to finish off some training notes, we'll go into the race. Just some of the mistakes that we spoke about in the intro of kind of what we saw is there were weeks where we just had to back off the training because he was just too tired from work and he was having some long days and we really had to adjust that. And there are some days where, you know, we really picked the key sessions and he knew that each week it was like the high intensity VO2 stuff. He really made that a priority. When he was, you know, tired from work. He really just didn't miss those ones. And it was often on a zone 2 kind of volume day where he would just say, I'm just stuffed today. And we would decide that it would just do a 30 minute easy spin or just do a. Just a 20 minute run today or just have a rest day, but just something to back off. And that was something that we really had to manage early on. And it was a new stimulus for him, just that training frequency. And so he actually ended up getting sick. Um, I can't remember if it was just before the first testing week or just after, but he'd had a really good run and that was. It's a real. Can be a real downer for an athlete. It can be a real shock because you, you're putting in a lot of it and you feel like you're going really well and then you get sick and it derails you for a week. And I remember he was really down about that and he was really frustrated because, you know, he really wants to stay consistent. And that is the challenge that almost every athlete kind of gets sick at some point and you've just got to take it on the chin. You've just got to reset that week, just reset expectations for how you're going and realign and just know that it's a long program and six weeks down the track, you'll forget that that sickness happened. And at the time it feels really devastating. But with the bigger picture, you get through it.

Yeah. And certainly the motivated athletes, the worst athlete because they're so upset if they miss a training session and being fatigued or being sick, these things are going to happen. And unfortunately, the way the world has been going in the last six months, there has been a lot of sickness throughout the world. A lot of COVID has come back into a lot of the countries that we're coaching athletes in. And it's not just bad luck. It's because of what's happening to the general population, you can't avoid it. If your work environment is dealing with other people who happen to be sick in your office or in your workspace who come into work sick, which is unfortunate in itself, but it's very hard to avoid it. And when your immune system is quite on the limit because you're training quite consistently, then you're more likely to get sick. And so it's inevitable. Unless you can be a hermit and not see people, that's the only way you're possibly going to stay unsick. So you've got to actually accept that I can't just keep training, and I can't keep training at that intensity. I've got to let my body recover. I've got to give it an opportunity to actually get back to being nearly 100% before I actually do anything. That's 100%. And the mistake people make is, yes, they get sick and they actually can't train, but when they come back, the first session they do might be the high intensity session at 100 to 120% of their FTP. That's possibly going to make it worse and prolong the sickness for four or five more days. So start off slow and take your medicine, so to speak, which is take your actual medicine. Rest, and then don't start with the hard sessions, start with the progression. And we've said that many times on the program, but people still will jump straight back into, oh, no, I have to catch up. Well, that's actually not what's beneficial for you. You won't catch up. You'll actually probably make yourself sicker for longer.

And so, look, we talk a lot about training blocks and how you break up blocks. And any training program will give you two, three, maybe four, four hard weeks in a row and then a deload week. Not often, you know, you do a full month of hard training in a row before a deload week. But this is another example of Harris, really. He could only do two weeks in a row max. It was very clear from the start that, you know, that's all he could handle. And then we needed to lighten the load a little bit and just take some stress off and just let him recover. Because so often he was getting home very late from work. And in his words, he was like, I just feel like I'm in a cycle of sleep. Wake up, work, come home, train, eat, bed. And it was just that over and over again. And that's a lot. And so he was. We had to really just remind that at the end of the two week cycle it's like, just get to the weekend here, you can do it. And then once you get to the weekend, just do your endurance and then you've got a lot of work next week and the pressure's off a little bit and you can come home from work and not have to just jump straight into a high intensity session. And that's the commitment of this kind of race. It's, it's really hard work. But yeah, that was a really important factor to manage just to. We could not afford to go too long in a row of that kind of cycle or you were just mentally and physically burnout.

Yeah, great points. And that's, that's a lot about the management. And look, we, we want to make sure that every athlete who's out there, that we're coaching and who we're not coaching as well, that everybody's different, everybody reacts differently to load. And you can't just throw one program to everybody. You have to actually look at how they're coping. And that's one of the reasons why we pretty much don't want to just put 10 weeks programs in front of people because we want to find out what's happening this week before we can actually tell you what's going to happen next week. Are you coping this week? There's no point in giving you what you should be doing because that's the ideal program next week if you haven't coped with this week. Yeah.

So to his credit, one of the best things about we noticed in his training habits was he really wanted to follow the instructions to the letter and he took what we were saying seriously about you need to have X amount of elevation on these endurance rides and the endurance run needs to be this length and this elevation. And he would push that to the limit where he would, unless the conditions absolutely forced him inside. He was trying to get outside and ride the hills and get the elevation that was similar to the course. And a couple of times he would, he would let us know that you tried to go out and it was, it was freezing, sleeting, thunderstorm conditions. And he would go out for 20 minutes and then and turn around, come home and we would say it's okay, you could ride the indoor trainer like you don't. But he would really push it to the absolute last second. We would go, nah, not possible to ride outside. But that is a testament to how important that base period was. And I would say that given where he came from, we probably extended the base period a Little bit longer, which I think really helped him by the time he got to race day. And we talk about that a bit where a lot of athletes just don't have enough base. And the race ready period was on the very borderline of being rushed. We were kind of fighting for the last couple of weeks to get some key sessions in. Ideally we would like a longer race ready session, but just with the 20 weeks leading into it, that still was just enough time to have 12 or 14 weeks of really good base and then the last six to eight weeks of starting to get some race ready stuff. Yeah, that is really pushing it. And we. And I'll talk about a lesson that we had in a minute where we almost missed out on some key sessions because we were running out of time. But it was a great progression because he'd never done a full triathlon. So we set up a sprint time trial for himself where he drove to a lake and set up his own course and did his own sprint, 750 meter swim, 20k ride, 5k run off the bike. He had his bike in the car and just did his own transitions there. That was six or so weeks out from the 70.3. And then he signed up to an actual Olympic distance which perfectly fell. I think it was three weeks or four weeks out from the 70.3. And that was his first proper race in a race environment with people around you and the atmosphere and the proper transitions and then that led into the actual race. So it was a really good progression to get a couple of races under his belt. One by himself with no pressure, one with a bit of race pressure so that it wasn't all a new experience. Come to the 70.3.

Yeah, so many people who are brand new to the sport pick their goal event but they forget to do the stepping stones along the way. And the stepping stones are, you know, doing the actual event as a practice race. Whether there's event on for you or not doing it yourself is still a really good outcome because you actually have to think about it the day before and plan what's going to happen the next day. You know, what time do I have to go to bed, what time do I have to wake up? What should I eat the day before and see how that affects me on race day. So not doing any of that and just fronting up for your first race as your first race, you haven't experienced any of the, of that pre race nerves. The, the planning, the race strategies and the timing of everything you need to do and the checklist of Equipment, so many things that you would want to do that before you get to your actual A race. And that's a real tip that we want to push out to other athletes. If you're signing up for your first ever triathlon, you really need to be doing something before that actual main race.

It took away so much anxiety, the confidence he got from being able to run a really, really good 5k time in that first sprint triathlon. I think he ran faster than his fresh 5k, actually, I can check that data right now, but pretty sure he ran faster than his original fresh 5k check. Yeah, he ran just over 4 minute pace in that first sprint triathlon. So that's 15 seconds quicker than he's 5k fresh at the start of the program. So this is with six or so weeks to go in. So that's just, that's all the running off the bike he was doing really came through there. And that was an awesome first practice sprint try to do to go, whoa, I can do a triathlon. And then the next race was the Olympic, which alleviated a lot of anxiety. So I will say that each week we just kept learning more and more small things each week. There was just a couple of lessons each week to go, okay, this needs to be fixed, this execution thing needs to be fixed, blah, blah, blah. And every week it ended up being two dozen lessons or so that he'd learned over the journey, which he was able to all apply on race day. And that's the key thing here, is that he had to learn all those things in training and make some pretty key mistakes. So that came to the race, they were eliminated.

Yeah, I think that's a really major point that everybody who's listened to this case study, and I suppose Harris kind of heard that with Harrison, but unless you go through it, you don't actually understand the mistakes that you can possibly make. And you and I have made all of those mistakes in our journey as athletes. So we're not saying to you that there's something wrong with you. It's just that's part of the journey. And things like writing too high power on sections of the road and then freewheeling. Now this, they seem obvious now to anybody who's listened to our podcast because that's what we drill into all our athletes. But for someone who's new to that, unless you go out and experience that in a circuit outside that's got wind and hills, you're not going to understand what that means until you actually try and implement it into a training session. And then you realize how difficult that is to stay in the zones that you've been at training for. So they're the mistakes we're talking about. They're things that you have to get better at rather than full on, you know, not being able to finish the session. It's, it's, it's for the same level of fitness, being able to execute better, to give you a better outcome.

So there was a real key moment in the last three weeks of the training program where he'd done his Olympic. He had a lot of confidence about his ability. He rode really good power. I think it was 228 watts for his 40k in the Olympic. And then a week later we were doing a 75k race ready session. So a bike time trial, really getting that distance up of closer to a race ready session and then run off the bike at 70.3 race pace. You know, it was a real key kind of, this is one of the key sessions leading to the last final weeks of the race. And it was a bit of a disaster. He rode far too hard in the bike and genuinely could not run off the bike, not even couldn't run slow. He just, his legs were so jelly and gone. He, he couldn't run more than three or four minutes and just had to dnf the run leg. And that is a shocking thing to happen a few weeks out that completely derails your confidence. And we had to really go through what happened that session. And he'd had so much confidence from the Olympic distance that he tried to ride basically not that much lower than the 40k. He rode 217 watts for the 75k, which is unbelievable from, from where he'd come from. Um, but we had to go, you're right, you're training for double the distance here. This isn't, this isn't a 40k and then run off the bike. You're literally out there for almost double the time. Um, you cannot try and ride the same watts and expect to be able to run. And, and it was a big learning that. Wow, I really need to pull back here. And it was awesome because we had to come up with a, a plan. We only have two weeks now to the race. We really, the week after wanted to do a, a, a half marathon off the bike. You know, we, we had tried to build to that, but because that, that initial run off the bike hadn't happened, we had to make a decision, what do we do here? Do we prioritize the run and get a really good solid run in but what do we redo this. This bike with a shorter run off the bike again, just to give that confidence that you can actually run off the bike. And we ended up doing that. And he pulled the watts back by 30 watts, which he should have, which is the ranges that you'd expect for a 70.3, and ended up being able to run a 16k off the bike at 70.3 pace, which within one week later gave him that confidence back. But that was a nervy week, because the whole week you're doubting yourself going, oh, am I good enough for Olympic distance, but am I still way too far off a 70.3 with only a few weeks to go? And that's what I mean by we're pushing that race ready to the end. But that's why these sessions are so important.

It just shows you, though, that the execution was the problem, not his fitness. And that that can really mess with your mind. And you start doubting yourself because not your fitness is not there. But that's what you're thinking, well, I didn't. Didn't do so well on this run because I'm. I'm not ready. I'm not fit enough. It really didn't have anything to do with that, because a week later, you just went out and proved that you were fit enough to run exactly the pace you should have if. If you actually rode the way you should have. So by riding like that, it's a hard lesson to learn, but you sometimes learn the best lessons when you actually make the mistake. And so that was a reality check for him. Far out. I felt good on the bike, but just couldn't run. And if, you know, if I just pull back on the bike a little bit, wow, now I can run. And what a great lesson to learn outside of the main event. Imagine if he hadn't learned that till race day. It would have been such a disappointing outcome, and you would still be blaming your lack of fitness. Instead, it's your actual execution that's at fault here.

Yeah, it was a huge turnaround, and that was a huge confidence booster leading into the race. And by the time it came to the race, he'd learned all these lessons. And like we said, to his credit, he was gleaning the information and fixing it each time. And he fixed it a week later and had a phenomenal result. And he took that to the race. I will say, once I looked at the race data, well, he literally fixed up almost every mistake he made in training, and it all came together as well as you could expect on race day. And one of the best lessons you always say to athletes, especially when they're doing a first 70.3, is that you have to expect that mistakes can happen. And don't try and have a perfect race because most likely over five hours it's not going to be. But given all this experience in training, I'd say he had probably some of the least amount of errors possible. But he still encountered some problems. Lost a bottle in the first 20k, made a very smart decision to turn around and go get it because nutrition was so important and he couldn't afford not to have a bottle for the next 70k. Yeah, a lot of different things. The course is super tough, super rough roads, but he executed exactly as we wanted. And again, his bike graph, his power ranges, he's not going over under riding really evenly, riding a negative split, running a negative split. All big green tickets, ticks. So come to race day, it was a, it was a great outcome.

Yeah. And that's the, the joyous part of, of having a program that's, that's riddled with learning. And we, we keep saying mistakes. I think learning's probably learnings.

Yeah, for sure.

A lot of, a lot more palatable sentence, isn't it? And the learnings are all the time where, you know, you and I are still learning about everything we do, not only in terms of coaching athletes, but in terms of our own journey as athletes. We're still learning things along the way. We learned in our last podcast about how not to ride a big day when you're under prepared. So these are things that, you know, athletes be okay with that. That's what I'm trying to say. You don't want to go out there making huge errors every single time you train. You want to try to eliminate as much as them as you can along that journey. As you learn, as you, as you grow as an athlete, you want to eliminate the mistakes, but you still need to take risks to improve. And that's where you know there's a fine line between how far can I push this in terms of power or running pace or swim pace before I've actually tipped over the edge. And it becomes a bit of a catastrophe where you either go hunger flat or you've push the lactate too high yet or you overheated. So you're trying to find that fine line all the time between what's too much and what's acceptable because the consequences actually make the outcome really terrible or unbelievably good. And in this situation because of the journey he'd been on and the information he really understood and listened. I think this is the lesson that we want to spread with these case studies, is that it's okay to have everything go wrong in that whole period of your training journey.

That's what training is. Yeah.

And on race day everything went right. And that doesn't happen a lot.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And so taking to the race to finish off with these results, the swim was great. And from a 241 first 500 meter test to swimming 1900 meters in 2:05, absolutely phenomenal. And that was even an improvement from that Olympic distance triathlon. He's from 1500 in 205, so he was able to increase that distance between and still keep us at the same pace.

Which is just a ridiculous thing to think that he can't swim 500 meters, let alone swimming 1900 meters. Literally 30 seconds per hundred faster. That's a great outcome.

Yeah, for sure. Had some. He had, you know, practice transitions now, so he knew what to do and he took his time in that. And like we spoke about, the bike course was. It was tough. It was. You started in one point and finished in the other. And so you had to go to a huge headwind from between transition one and two. So you have to expect that in the actual course of how that would impact your race. And he asked us beforehand, what do you think I can do? Time wise, he predicted himself between three hours and 3:15 based on the speeds he was riding in training. And of course our answer is we don't care before the race, we care after the race. We'll look at your time and speed, but before the race we care about your execution, we care about where you're going to put down the power, what sections of the course, how you're going to ride them. And after the race he finished with a 258. So he went under three hours, which is faster than expected. And he rode that really evenly, which was amazing. And riding it so evenly. And he wrote it basically to the same power that he'd done in training the few weeks before. That's why that session is so important. He was able to run really well. And it was because of the way he executed on the bike that he was able to run really well. Plus his fitness came through. And once again we expect him to be a 140 to 146 half marathon runner in the half Ironman based off his 10k time and based off his race ready sessions. And he even surpassed that he ran 138, so at the top end of all his ranges and even dipped under the times he expected for bike and run, which is the outcome we wanted. But he got there executing really well. And I will say once again we still underestimated his fitness by the end and that's a testament to his training, is that he probably could have been. Now we know this, we didn't want him to do this in his first race, but for next race we know he can be more aggressive because he's got more in him and he actually had probably a little bit too much at the back end of a run where that means he rode really well. So he could push a little bit more on the ride and then, yeah, he's, you can afford to be a bit more aggressive on the run as well and find a lot of time there.

Yeah, look, there's such a, such so many good positives to come out of it. Just. And you know, he did all the work himself. He actually. Standing on the beach, you're wondering what's going to happen today. And it's in your hands. You're in charge of execution. You know, the execution will look after the end result and if you don't get that execution right, that's all you got to concentrate on when you're standing there before the race. What am I going to do in the swim, you know, not what time am I going to do, how am I going to get that time, what am I going to do on the bike, not what time am I going to do on the bike, where am I going to ride the power. And then as a runner when I get off the bike I should be in great shape with my nutrition and I've executed well. I should be able to run this pace and that'll give me this time. At the end you'll find that, hey, I'm nearly in the top 20. For your very first half Ironman, you've expanded, exceeded all the times that you actually had at the top of the ranges and you know, you end up with a great day and, and they're the things that, you know, make the whole journey worthwhile and you can't wait for the next event.

A monster effort finished in 5 hours 30 minutes. Such a tough race, the half Ironman. And we always joke about how the half in front of the Ironman just makes it seem like, you know, compared to the Ironman it doesn't seem as much. But these are, these are monster races. You know, the top end guys are four and under and Then people are taking four to seven plus hours, which we always talk about. It's. That's not a one hour, two hour race, you know, that's not an Olympic distance.

Especially the Bolton. I think Bolton's one of the hardest, hardest Ironmans and half Iron Mans. I don't think the Iron Man's there anymore. It's too, it's too damn hard. But it is a really tough course. It's got a lot of really bad roads and a lot of wind and a lot of hills. So I find that, yeah, athletes we've coached on that have been, the times are 10, 15% slower than they would be on another course. So this is one of the toughest courses.

So this was a great example of what to expect, what you could possibly expect in a training program. And we would summarize it with just putting in the work for a really solid base, putting in the work for really solid consistency. Those times when you come home late and just, just do the effort, just get on the trainer, get it done, go out and run off the bike at night and putting it down to lessons learned in training. And yeah, that's just that final credit goes to him where a lesson would be learned and he would, he would laugh at himself and he would make a joke about it and he would pop it on the chin, but take it seriously. But I did like his attitude where he was often laughing at himself and shaking his head and going up, there's another one, and then move on for the next week. And that's basically a great way to finish it off.

Yeah, what a great story. I'm so pleased for Harris from when we first interviewed him and to last weekend's race. It was a real joy to watch and congratulations and well deserved.

We hope you enjoyed this case study and we'll see you in the next episode.