How To Master Zone 2 As A Triathlete

This podcast is brought to you by Trivalo 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 Tribalo Coaching, Gerard Donnelly. Joe Friel, A very big warm welcome back to our podcast. This is the third time we've been lucky enough to have you on. Thank you very much for joining us again.

Thank you, Jordy, for having me. I'm looking forward to it.

We always like to start by asking our guests, what training session did you do today? And so I'm very curious about what was on your agenda today.

Well, we had a nasty weather day, very unusual. We just got mid winter hit us up this morning, woke up, it was well below freezing, it was snowing very heavily and very wet snow. And so usually this is the day I'd go out and do a hard bike ride, but today I decided I can't do that. I can't possibly go out on the road right now. So instead my wife and I took a long walk. And that's always kind of good too. I get to chat about things we don't normally chat about because we don't have time. So there's good things and bad things out of a nasty day like this, I guess.

That's brilliant, Dad. I think you could take a little bit of a leaf out of that book. If you can't train hard, it's great to go for a big walk.

Well, that's so. That's so interesting, Jord, because I actually went with a walk with my. Your mum this morning and that is exactly what we had happen, Joe. We got to chat about things that were. And it's a good time to start planning, you know, the next couple of months. So I do enjoy walking with your mum and unlike Joe, if I couldn't ride outside, unfortunately, the walk would take a back seat and I would jump on the trainer. Joe, you're not tempted to jump on the trainer for your hard session?

I give my trainer very seldom. I'm really not real big on riding indoors, even though I wrote a book on this once. It's really not my favorite thing to do to ride indoors. I've been doing it. I've gotten quite a few rides after several hours this winter, primarily because of nasty weather. But today, for whatever reason, I just didn't feel like getting on the trainer and my wife wasn't going to be able to do anything anyway. She usually goes to Pilates class or something. That wasn't going on, so we just went for a long walk.

I'd love to explore that. Is there anything against the trainer that you have? Especially, you know, the value of it. You wrote a book on it. Just a personal preference or you would really prefer if you go into do a hard session, to get it done outdoors and get that value.

As I get older, the more likely I am to do things I enjoy doing and less likely I am to do things I don't enjoy doing. Doesn't mean I never do those things. But riding indoors is not one of my favorite things. Even with all the stuff we got available now, you know, the apps and so forth, I would much rather be out outside doing it. In fact, I'd much rather just be outside to begin with. So my wife and I spend whenever we have bad weather, we typically get in a long walk, hour or more, and we'll stop for a cup of coffee, which is kind of nice also. And I get to talk with her a little more about things going on in her life and share my problems with her. So it's actually good for both of us in some ways.

I want to explore the topic of intensity to start this podcast because you really, I would say you have strong thoughts about the fact that a lot of triathletes are training too hard a lot of the time, especially a lot of age group athletes. And it's just especially talking to the age grouper and really relating to the age grouper. And so much so that you really emphasize something like the 5:2 split, where your training week should relatively be two hard sessions only and five easy sessions. So I want to start by asking, when you talk about that 5:2 split, you spoke about it on a previous episode with us, what does that actually look like for triathletes? Because you've got three sports there. If you can only do two hard sessions, you can't do a hard session for all three disciplines. So how do you value which session, which sport, which discipline to do the hard sessions in, and what to do? Easy.

Yeah, there could actually be several ways of doing that. Let me back up and explain how this came about. This. 5.2. When I started working with athletes, I typically had them this is look back, as you guys probably well know, back in the 1980s, I typically had them doing at least three hard workouts a week and occasionally four for the younger athletes. And after some time of doing that and discovering that people broke down quite a bit with injuries and so forth, illness and burnout, et cetera, et Cetera, I finally decided to start cutting back on that sort of thing. So I started cutting back on a number of hard workouts and over time that's evolved into this five, two thing where it's five days easy and two days hard for triathletes. As you pointed out, it does present some problems because we've got three sports but only two hard workouts in a week. So there's a couple ways of resolving that. One is an obvious one is just to do a brick workout on some days, one of those two hard days. So you could do a bike workout followed by a run, both of which could be hard. My concern there is how long the athlete makes this, especially the run. One thing that really concerns me is with triathlon is the ease with which an athlete can get injured from running when tired especially. And that that has led me to make a few changes in the way I've coached athletes over the years. And so one of those things is that when they do bricks, we'd always. The run is not very long, maybe only 15, 20 minutes. If it's going to be an intense run after the bike, especially after an intense bike. If there's a bike where the athlete is doing long intervals, for example, and they're going to come back and do a run, I don't want them to do something that's going to set them up possibly for injury. I think that could be a disaster for the athlete. If you get the athlete injured, you've got all this downtime while they've got to repair the injury, get healthy again. And when that happens, they may have lost so much fitness that it's really difficult to get back to where they were in time for whatever the event was they were training for. So, so I may always make the run short, like 15 or 20 minutes, but intense, that's still along the lines of what we need to get done for most athletes. Now if the athletes train for an Ironman distance race, 15 minute run hard is hard, meaning now Ironman pace is really not all that hard. So now I'm going to change things around a little bit and I'll have the athletes do something like a long ride with several long intervals at race intensity, which is typically going to be like around zone three or so. And then when they come off the bike, we're going to do something very similar to that again. We're going to come off and we're going to do intervals that are, that are shorter intervals, like 15, 20 minutes. And we're not going to do a Lot of those. I'm going to hold back on how many they do. That's one way I do it, another way I do. This is what I call a big day for an Ironman athlete. On a big day, the athlete does a long swim in the morning, like an hour, hour and a half swim. They take a one or two hour break. After that they get a meal in, they sit down and they rest. They go for a bike ride. It could be four or five hours. Kind of depends on where we are in the season and in that workout. Well, it includes lots of long intervals that race intensity, 20 minute intervals, 30 minute intervals of race intensity, race position on the bike, so forth, taking in, practicing, rehearsing the nutrition on the bike also, and then come back from that, take another break, hour, hour and a half, maybe two hours depending on the athlete, and then go for a run. And now the run's going to be a long run. Depends what that means. Depends on the athlete we're talking about. And the intensity is going to be more along the lines what they would expect to do in the race or at least for portions of that long run. So that I call a big day. And that could be one of those days also. But those are rare. I only do those like twice. In the last 12 weeks before a race, I'll have an athlete do two of those. And maybe one of those hard days would be sometime around, say five weeks or so before the Ironman. They may do a half ironman and that becomes a hard day also. So there's lots of ways of getting these hard days done. So that's one day a week. It's something like that. And then the other day during the week is probably something that has to do with what the athlete's limiter is. Whatever their weakness is that's holding them back. It could be the bike or the run or the swim. So. So we'll do a workout which is designed around that. It's going to be hard to work out. The idea is we're going to focus on what's holding them back for performance that week. Also, besides doing the workout, which may be like the bricks I mentioned a little while ago. So that's the sort of things I do the other days, all easy. Which means zones one and two only. And if the athlete doesn't do it in zone one and two, then we have to have a long conversation about what that means to make sure they're doing this the right way. Sometimes athletes think that zone three is close enough, don't have to really do zone one or two, just do zone three. That's not the case at all. It's not the same thing, you know, that's actually moving into something close to Ironman distance, intensity. So zone easy means zone one or two. And I drill that home in the athlete to make sure they understand this is, this has got a purpose. It's just not to force you to go slow. It's because we're going to get some benefits out of this and those benefits are going to help your race. So this is very, very important to do these workouts. It's no less important than the hard workouts. Easy workouts are just as important and in some ways more important because you can accomplish more in some areas by ride doing an easy workout than you can by doing a hard workout.

Can we just touch on. That's a great answer. With the two days that you're trying to decide, and you did mention it does depend on the athlete and their level and their capabilities. If you've got an athlete who's reasonably new to the sport and has a really big gap between where they probably could end up if they trained with some intensity, would you spend some time early in their program trying to. And we just talked then about kind of the race ready period. What about prior to that? Are you then still using the 5:2 rule where we're trying to lift their FTP so that they can actually ride the bike faster over a longer day? Or are you still using that rule right from the beginning when they're still doing their base work and preparation work for the race ready phase?

You're talking about. Make sure I got this right, Gerald, about somebody who's fairly new to the sport.

Yeah. Yep.

Yeah. So if I, if I take that to mean, let's say in the first two years in the sport, I am going to have the athlete do very, very little high intensity training. By high intensity, I mean hard workouts like zones 3, 4 and 5. I'm going to do very little of that with this athlete. They may, we'll do some zone threes. It'd be very rare we did a zone four or five for that athlete. Instead, what they're going to do is we're going to focus on mostly easy training. Most all the workouts are going to be zones one and two. Even though they're going to do races in zone, let's say zone four or five, if they get into like an Olympic distance or sprint distance race, we're still going to spend a heck of a lot of Time, almost all their time is going to be in zones one and two because there's so much we can get out of this and the risk is low. When somebody's new to the sport, their risk of injury is relatively high. It would be disastrous to have an athlete wind up with an injury that costs them two weeks or three weeks or more weeks of recovery trying to get over this injury, when really they're probably not going to get nearly as much out of that anyway as the experienced athlete would. Because the experienced athlete has got this big base of fitness behind them which the novice doesn't have yet. And that base is critical to the performance. So in the long term, so I want the athlete. We're going to spend two years, almost entirely zones one and two. It's going to be rare we do anything beyond that. About the only times we'll do that would be in a race or in the last couple weeks before a race where we're kind of like just testing to make sure they understand how it feels to get the feeling of going hard.

Right.

But even then we got to be very cautious because it's very easy to get injured for novice athletes. So that's my greatest concern. And consequently I'll keep them in zones one and two and they'll come out of this two year period with a great base of fitness. Now we can do something. Now we can start building on this base. But if they don't have that base, it's really kind of dangerous to be playing around with high intensity stuff. So it's got to be very, very cautious.

Sorry, Jordan, I was just going to follow up on that. You have coached thousands of athletes in your career and you know that most athletes have no patience about taking two years to get their base. How have you dealt with athletes saying, joe, I want to get fitter faster. How have you dealt with that scenario? I'm really intrigued.

First of all, explain what fitness is to them. Most athletes think fitness means they've got to be able to go as fast as is the pros. That's when they're really fit. They're not going as fast. The pros, they're not really fit yet. They're still working on it and that's not the way it is at all. Fitness, if you're new to the sport, fitness is building aerobic fitness. That's what fitness is for a new athlete. It's not high intensity stuff, it's aerobic fitness. They've got to become fat burners, they've got to become good at Utilizing lactate for fuel. And there's all these physiological things that have to happen. They got to build up all these mitochondria, all the red blood cells, all the hemoglobin inside those red blood cells, there's this long, long list of things they don't have. And the only way they can get these things is through slow training. That's the only way they can get those things. They're not going to get those things by going fast. Going fast is only going to set them up for injury and the benefits are going to be minimal to not at all. So you know why they say it to me? It's like you suggested, what they say. You know, I really want to go fast. I say to you, probably need a different coach then, because I'm not the guy. If you want me to coach you, this is what we have to do. But I will guarantee if you do this in a couple of years, you'll become a very good athlete. But if you get on the bandwagon and deciding that it has to be hard all the time, I can guarantee you you're going to have a really hard time in sports. Not going to be good for you at all. And I know that because I've been there myself. This is how I started back in the early days in 1980, doing triathlons, by trying to train for those races, by doing lots of intensity. When I was really pretty new to the sport, it didn't work out nicely. I had most every injury you can think of known to man in that period of time. So I learned my lesson. And the lesson is, you can't do.

That and paved the way for the rest of us. Everyone in that era had to basically go by trial by experiment, whereas now we have so much knowledge of what we actually should be doing and we have such more accurate feedback about the type of training that's appropriate. And I love your emphasis on Zone one and two, because we are really passionate about the misuse of Zone two. It's become a real buzzword again in in training philosophy and especially because of the amount of beginners, not just in triathlon, but there is a running boom happening, which we really want to touch on soon. But everyone has been told to run Zone two and beginner athletes potentially don't really understand what the range of zone 2 could be because the top of zone 2 is quite hard. And so you made the point there that creeping into Zone three is not Zone two, and that. That seems obvious when you say it out loud. But now if an Athlete, we tell them to do a zone two rider run and they do some parts in zone one and some parts in zone three and four and averages out to zone two. That's not a zone two training session. And so what's your thoughts on the range of zone two? Because what you, if you lab tested the top of zone 2 and the bottom of zone 2 is quite different intensity and we know there's value in that full range. But what's your, what's your thoughts on, on how much of zone two you should be in for these training sessions?

Yeah, it depends on what the purpose of the workout is. Of course, a lot of the workouts are recovery workouts, which is strictly zone one. I don't want the athlete in zone two at all. We're just in zone one. It's just go out and, you know, smell the flowers, look at the trees and all that kind of stuff and just have a good time. But don't get caught up in a race with somebody. For example, you know, going head to head with somebody on a bike is not going to get you where you want to go in this in, in the sport. So usually if I have an athlete in zone one, the first thing we talk about is doing the workouts by themselves. Training partners are usually the problem. They get that is usually what causes the problem. They have somebody that comes up next to them on the bike or on the run or whatever it is. The next thing you know, they're trying to beat each other, they're half wheeling one another and that only leads to more problems. So what I tell athletes is when they're on a ride, for example, and you just happen to come across somebody that's, you know, next to you and you find you're starting to find that your intensity is beginning to rise because of this is the very next intersection you come to turn and get away from this person. You've got to be by yourself. You can't. It's hard to train. There are very few people in the sport who will actually go easy in zone one with another person. It's almost impossible to find that person almost always bent on meeting you or proving to you something about how good they are. I can see that my wife go out for a walk in the morning, you know, she's half reeling me on a walk. She's trying to win the walk. You're not going to slow her down. This is not a race. This is something.

That's exactly what happened to me this morning. I had to say to my wife, yeah, you're walking two steps in front of me. Can you just walk beside me?

I say that to her quite often because she's always. She always does that when we walk together. I a hard time making her understand the ease, the purpose. Easy actually means. So anyway, that's zone one. And when I have an athlete doing zone two, it's not going to be every day. It's going to be occasionally. And what I'll tell them then is I want you to be in zones one and two. And when you get all done, I'd like to check and see how much of your training time was in zone two. I'd like for that to be around 50% of your training time for that workout was in zone two, which means they don't have to stay in that zone, you know, locked into it for the entire ride. It becomes tedious. I don't think I enjoy doing it that way. I'd rather just be, like, around zone one, Zone two, because, you know, intensity is going to change because of the terrain. If you're going up a little hill or something, intensity is going to begin to rise. And all you do need, need to do then is make sure it doesn't go to three. Just kind of hold back, you're coming down the other side, let it drop down to zone one so forth. So we're kind of watching these two zones, and when you get done, just check to see if you got about 50% of your time in zone two. That's. And that's good enough. And if you did that and you didn't go into zone three, I'm not talking about 50% in zone two with 25% in zone three, and 25% in zone one. I don't mean that. I mean it's going to be 50% in zone one, 50% or less in zone. I mean, in zone two, 50% or less in zone one. So I'm trying to get them to understand that we're not just trying to lock into an intensity and stay there. Unless it's zone one. It's the only time I actually tell them to lock in is zone one, Zone two. I'm a little bit more free on that. You know, it's going to be back and forth between one and two, trying to give them the idea that they can. They can be right around that threshold, that, that bump point between zones one and two. And that's quite all right. That's. That's really good for them.

In fact, Joe, I absolutely love hearing the way you coach and Talk and, and it comes through in all your books anyway, but it feels like I'm talking to a replica of dad, to be honest. And I think if, you know, if I had my two favorite training coaches, you and Steven Seiler and dad Naruma, feel like the three wise old men of triathlon, which I just absolutely love. But that language is just so important. I think it's, you know, a lot of the times when dad is saying something like that to the athlete. You know, this intensity control and the purpose behind it. Athletes kind of are shaking their head going, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. But they still go out and, and train with their partner in, in what's supposed to be zone one. And, and then they bear the consequences of that. And I think it's just such steady advice to understand why intensity control is important. So that's, yeah, that's my summary of those kind of zones, but I kind of want to move into. You're currently rewriting fast after 50. You re released the triathlon training bible last year. You mentioned before this podcast started that yeah, things are always changing and you're making a lot of changes every decade about training principles and what we're learning. What are some of the key changes you're making with this latest rewriting of fast after 50?

Oh yeah, yeah. One of the things I talk about there especially is can we, can we improve the athlete's performance as they get over the age of 50? That because every athlete has this in their mind, can I improve? Can I become faster or am I stuck with getting slower all the time as they get into their 50s and 60s and 70s? And I would suggest we can actually figure that out. It's actually not too difficult to figure out. But we have to know one thing and that's essentially what is their above part figure for the aerobic capacity. Now one way of doing that, the best way would be to go to a lab and be tested and find out what your probing capacity is. And if you'd done that many years before, we could compare data. If you don't have that available to you, then a second choice may be simply looking at what your performances have been like in races. Let's just take running for example. Let's say you've been running for many years, decades even. Besides triathlon, you've been doing running races. Let's go back and look at 10 years ago. What was your, what were your 10k times like? What were they? What type kind of times were you running 10 years ago? What kind of times are you running now for 10k, let's compare those. How much have you slowed down in 10 years? What I would like to see if the athlete is really doing well is that is going to be less than 1% per year. They've slowed down less than 1% per year. If it's more than 1% per year, they've slowed down, then I would say we've got a really good chance here of improving your performance. Why? Because 10% is kind of an average of what happens to aerobic capacity, which is the best indicator of your fitness we have available to us. How much that drops over the course of 10 years is indicative of your training. If you're training, let's say, for example, if you're not at 1% per year, in other words, if you're not at 10%, you're worse than that. You're 15%. You slowed down 15% or your VO2 max has dropped 15% in the last 10 years. That tells me something that says to me primarily what's going on here is you're probably inconsistency in your training. You just aren't following a training plan consistently. That's more than likely. The reason why would be 15%. So if it's 15%, yeah, I think we can really improve your performance. If it's 5%. Oh, man. I don't know if we can do anything about this or not. This is really good. You're doing things exactly right. I don't see really how we're going to make that happen, but we'll try little things. It's going to be all these little things we're going to try. But if it's 15%, we've got lots and lots of room there to make improvements. So I want to find out what has happened to them over this period of time. So I talk about that a lot in this new version of the book. How can we. How can we do that? What can we figure out? This is for you. And if it's. Let's. Let's say it's 12, 15%, what should we need to be. What should be doing in your training? What needs to be done in your training to bring that around? Numero uno is be consistent. That's number one. We've got to have consistent training. Nothing else we do matters. If you're inconsistent, nothing else matters. In fact, I tell athletes if they're better off doing the wrong workouts consistently than they are the right workouts inconsistently, because consistency is at the core of performance and improvement. That's the core. Without it, everything else is lost. So that's more than likely why it's 15% instead of 5%. The athlete who's 5%, they are doing lots and lots. I can learn things from this athlete. How are you training? What are you doing? Let me learn from you because you're doing things right for 10 years now. What are all those things that's been going on for you? So that's the sort of things I talk about. That's like the biggest thing I talk about in the book is that one thing right there. It's how can we go about improving your performance as you get older? But we have to just have a starting place to begin to start this conversation. So that's a big front piece of the book.

That's fantastic. That is brilliant. And look, to be quite honest, we have athletes in their mid-30s and mid-40s saying to me and Jordan that I know that I'm going to start to decrease my level and I'm almost laughing when I hear a 37 year old tell me that that their level is going to start to decrease because they're getting old. And you know, Joe. What? You're in your 70s, Joe. And I'm nearly in my 70s and until recently my performances were still improving. We have an incredible amount of athletes who are over 40 and over 50. We have a high percentage of athletes over 50 who are not in your 5%, 10% or 15%. They're in the positive 5 and 10. They're actually still better than. We've got one athlete who's just turned 60 and he joined us when he was 53 and he is nearly 10% better than he was when he was 53 and he was already a really decent 20 year rider, bike rider, you know, really, really aerobically, quite fit. But there are many examples of people who are actually still improving. Did you talk about that at all? Do you?

Yeah, yeah. In fact what we're doing, we're doing something just a little bit different with this book. I say we because I got another guy helping me with the book. One of the things I'm doing or we're doing is we're. I found something like. I think I've got 16 athletes I found now around the world who are what I call super agers. They're in their 50s, 60s and they're still breaking records. They're winning races or competing with younger athletes, much younger themselves. For example, one guy I come across is a Norwegian. I think he's in his mid-50s, like 54, 55 years old, former pro. He still does, for example, still does their Olympic trials ski racing. He's a Nordic skier. He still does that every four years. And he comes really close to making the team almost every time. And he's in his 50s. This guy is still extremely competitive, extremely fit. He's been at it for, you know, 40 some years. He's been doing this. And there are lots of people out there like that and they're just amazing people. I'm always just blown away by what some people are able to accomplish when they get older, you know, and it's not just the 50 year olds. I ran across something the other day. I forgot exactly what it was. Now it was a woman who had, who was running marathons and I forgot, I've forgotten all the times. But there were times where she was in her, like her 70s and her times were just like remarkable. How could she, in her 70s and she was running, you know, 320 marathons and stuff like that. That was just like, wow, this is unbelievable. But there are people out there like that. So I'm trying to feature those people in the book also. So they're gonna have every one of Those athletes, those 16 athletes is going to have a one page description of who they are and what they're accomplishing, because they're role models. Some they're doing things which are working extremely well. And then more than likely they've just been, they've been largely blessed by genetics. Their parents were the right parents. They gave them exactly what they needed, and then they were brought up exactly the right way. They were doing all the things you need be doing to perform at a high level throughout their lives. And you know, these are just. But these people are, they're really spectacular. I really enjoy finding out more about them. So, yeah, I'm featuring those people also. They're a big part of the book.

It's incredible how often a lot of those outlier athletes genetically come from those Nordic countries and come from that background. It's this amazing melting pot of genetics. Plus the conditions of. Like you said, they're probably training at altitude or in the mountains since at a very young age, which. But I do want to clarify, you know, the example dad, you gave of one of our athletes and many that do improve. I think it's important for the listener to understand exactly what Joe was saying, that your aerobic capacity and VO2 max won't, won't keep improving. That's. And Joe correct me, like, that's not physiologically possible, but their ability as an athlete can improve. Not possible across the board. It's. Nothing's impossible like that. But their ability and his ability as a time trialist and really getting better as a. In terms of that specificity did keep improving. So it's not like his FTP was, has been dramatically increasing for seven years, but his ability to keep holding a high percentage of that FTP and keep improving, his execution of the sport is the big difference. And that's, that's what athletes can strive for.

Yeah, there's. There's a lot that goes into this thing we call fitness. It's. It's really kind of hard to nail down what it means. It's not just aerobic capacity. There are so many other things that define fitness. A new one right now that's becoming very popular. I've been writing about it now for a few years, is what I call stamina. Sometimes it's called durability or resilience. This is what is just now starting to kind of like gain momentum. And some athletes just have excellent stamina. There are athletes out there that, that's their strength. They can, they can, they can perform at a very high percentage of their VO2 Max for a very, very long time. The VO2 Max is not going any higher, but they can maintain such a high percentage of it for such a long time that they can continue to compete with younger athletes for many, many years, even though they don't have the same numbers, you know, treadmill numbers and VO2 max numbers that the younger athletes may have. But they can, they can get very high percentage of it. This is like what we go back to the 80s, 70s, actually. I can't think of the runner's name off the top of my head right now. Won the Olympic medal, the marathon in the 1972. American, Frank Shorter. Was it Frank Shorter? Yeah. How could I forget Frank Shorter? Frank Shorter is like that. He's got a. He runs at a very, very high percentage. When he was young and probably still to this day, to some extent, very high percentages, VO2 max. I actually went for a run one time with him back in like 1984, I think it was right around there. He and Bill and Bill Rogers. I got to go meet with them and run. I live not too far from them, from Frank. Anyway, so we went for a run together. And what amazed me was how fluid Frank Shorter was. He. He was like. He was like no effort whatsoever when he ran. It was just like, you know, water falling over a waterfall or snow falling off of a tree branch. It was just like no effort. And on the other hand, Bill Rogers had this very hard effort running for him. So I knew, you just look at me, knew that Frank, running like a gazelle just was very efficient, didn't waste any energy whatsoever. And Bill wasted all kinds of energy the way he ran. But he had such a. He had much higher VO2 max than Frank. Frank had a VO2 max of like 72, and Bill was like 78, if I recall the numbers right. And Frank could run at a very high percentage in 72. Well, Bill, it was hard to get up even close to 78 for him. So that was the difference. That's why those guys could compete with each other and be very close in performance, was just because of that one was very efficient and the other wasn't.

It's so interesting and I'm so happy you raised that. That stamina is something that my dad talked to me about in the 70s when I was a young runner. You know, we want to build your stamina, son. He would say, you know, we've got to get that. That resistance to fatigue is what actually saying. And the athletes who invariably come out on top are the ones who can last longer at the highest intensity. And that. That is what we're. Basically the buzzword in the last year or two has been that resistance to fatigue. And, you know, that separates the elite from the everyday. You know, even in the pro field as a cyclist, you've got the standouts like Poga Char and van der Poel and Van Aert and Roglich, and all those guys have this ability to resist fatigue longer than pro riders who are absolutely magnificent riders against the general population. But there is some significant difference between the person, just like the Frank Shorter and example, you're saying he's really been able to get the most out of his relatively average VO2. Whereas, you know, a guy like Derek Clayton, who was one of the really key early runners of Australia, who held the world marathon record for a long.

Time, about 1986 or something like that.

Yes, for many, many years. And he had this. When they tested him, he had this ability to run very close to his VO2. It wasn't that high. And that also opens another can of worms where you've got athletes like guys who have got a VO2 in the 90s and they've got many triathletes who've got this incredible VO2, but they're still competing at their 70 or 75% of that or 80% of it. So They've got way more room to improve, to be like a Frank Shorter or a Derek Clayton. And that's an area that I'd love. Your thoughts on. This ability to have stamina where you're. How do you train this in an athlete to get them to be stronger at the back end? And I don't mean increase their pace. I mean be able to hold the pace. For example, in marathon running, the athlete is generally going to fade at the end because they have this inability to resist the fatigue that's creeping up. What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, there's actually lots of pieces to this. There's. There's a training piece, which is what we're alluding to mostly here, which is very, very important. But there's also other pieces that have to do with stamina, like staying well hydrated during a long race. It doesn't matter how good your physiological stamina is if you're dehydrated, because that means that your VO2 max goes down. That's what dehydration actually does. It lowers your VO2 max because you haven't got enough fluid to carry oxygen to the muscles. Consequently, you're breathing heavily, and then you can't keep it going. It could be fuel. That's part of the. Part of stamina also. You got to get the fueling right. You got to get enough carbohydrate, Andrew, to keep your. Your muscles working. There's all these things that go into it. Besides just training. Training has to be a key piece of this. This whole idea of stamina came to me really as an idea back in the. Probably about 20, 18 or 19, right around there. I was watching the Tour de France on tv, and there was a breakaway on a relatively flat course. It was a big breakaway, a dozen or so riders, and they kept dropping people off because the intensity was so high. So they kept shedding people. And it finally came down to two guys made it to the finish line out of whatever it was. A dozen or so started and one of them won the race. And then I got to see his dad of the day after what this guy had done. And I've forgotten his name off the top of my head. In fact, I just saw him yesterday having a bad memory day for athletes names today for some reason. Anyway, he had won this race. And I saw his data, and his data was he had been five hours in the break. Five hours in the break, and in five hours he had averaged 300 watts. Now, 300 watts for a pro cyclist is like 75% intensity factor, that's like 75% of their FTP. So that's not real hard. But holding 75% for five hours is a big deal. I mean, that's not easy to do. That tests your limit of stamina. If you can do that, your stamina is really good. Well, this guy, whoever's name, I can't think of his name off the top of my head right now. Longer races in grand Tours. He does mostly gravel racing now, and he's very good there also. But I recall thinking, man, that's interesting. He held a relatively moderate intensity, which 300 watts is pretty good for those of us who are not pros. For him, that's a rather moderate intensity. And he held it for five hours. That's impressive. That got me to thinking about this whole thing about stamina. And that's first time I actually give it some thought before then I called it muscular endurance, which is a different thing. It's more like threshold stuff we're talking about now. This was well below threshold and it was a matter of being able to hang on for such a long time with it. So that started me thinking, but how can I train an athlete to improve stamina? Well, the key to improving stamina is you got to be able to do it. You got to be able to perform when you're tired or when you're. When you should be tired, when your fatigue should be setting in. You've got to be able to keep going. So how do you train that? Well, the first thing you gotta do is you gotta create fatigue. So what I would have athletes do is let's take a bike workout, for example. The athlete does an hour, hour and a half warmup depending on the type of race we're training for. Here they do a long warmup, zones one and two, mostly zone two as that warmup progresses. And then they go into either doing zone three intervals, like 20 minute intervals, or I'm sorry, zone four intervals. 20 minutes zone four intervals, or they go into zone three steady state, depending on what we're training for. You know, if it's a half ironman, that's going to be different than for an Olympic distance race or an ironman. So I'm going to play around with these intensities based on what we're training for. But the idea is to create some fatigue and then hold on for a long time by doing this steady effort. And when we see that numbers begin to drop off and we decide ahead of time what that means. What does it mean when your numbers are dropping off for you. When we see that happening, that's the end of the heart intensity portion. Now we start to cool down and the workout comes to an end. And over time we're going to see if we can improve on that. And what we'll do is I'll test like every, oh, every three, four weeks, maybe, maybe less, maybe less often than that, but that would be like the most frequently. It'd be like every three or four weeks. I would test the athlete to see how their stamina is doing. Now what we're going to do is going to start off by doing a warm up which is 20 minutes long. Then we're going to do 20 minutes on a standard course, usually pretty flat course, and we're going to ride it in zone four. So I want you to ride zone four for 20 minutes on this course, then ride 20 minutes easy again, go back to zone one and ride 20 minutes easy zone one and then circle around, come back to that very same course again, ride it again, 20 minutes at the same zone 4, ride zone 4 again, don't go to zone 5, zone 4 both times, then cool down for 20 minutes. So now we've gotten a moderately long workout. It's a test workout and I want to see how, I want to compare their first 20 minute zone four, zone three, whichever it was, to the second one to see no more than 3% change take place during that time. If we can get down to less than 3% drop in performance over that period of time, at 20 minutes the second time around, we're doing pretty well. We're getting, making good progress if we're well, if we're above that, you know, we're doing 4, 5, 6% slowing down, not a good sign. We need to spend a lot more time working on, on stamina during your workouts when we're normally training as opposed to during the doing this test. So I want to be able to put them into a workout that challenges them and then I'll be able to test it every few weeks to see how, what kind of progress we're making. So that's kind of how I'd go about doing this.

I love that. And that's, that's quite a specific, you know, protocol two by 20 minutes in that zone four. Is that just a standard protocol? Because it gives you a good indication. Because when you compare that to an athlete training for 70.3 where they have to hold X percentage for two and a half to three and a half hours and then again to Ironman for four to six hours. What kind of protocol are you using there to measure how good their stamina is and whether they can hold it for a half Ironman and Ironman race?

Yeah, well, that comes down to the workouts they're doing during the regular training as opposed to test itself. But then we're going to be doing some longer workouts, as I mentioned. For example, the athlete doing a one hour warm up and then doing. Well, let's say you're doing an Olympic distance race. You're going to be doing the whole Zone 4 for a long, long time. And we'll see how long we can hold that until we start to see. And I'm going to get my cutoff. When we get to the point where it's dropping by this percentage. You know, this is. And this is the number we're looking for. If you see your power is dropping by that percentage, it's time to stop the workout. We're now moving into the range of too much stress and it's going to be too long a recovery. So we're trying to stop that from happening. I don't want to go beyond the point of, of acceptable stress. Inordinate stress is going to be something that will actually screw up our training going forward. So we're going to set a limit on this. How long are we going to do this? That's going to be based on what they see happening to their performance drop over the course of the zone 4 or the zone 4 intervals or the zone 3 steady state, whichever it may be that the athlete is doing. So I'm watching to see what that athlete's seeing, what's going on there. And then I've given them a number to know when it's time to stop based on that number. What we want to see then of course happening over time is that number becomes longer. We can go longer and longer periods of time at that very same intensity. We don't need to increase the intensity. We just need to be able to go longer at that intensity. That's the only thing we're trying to do. We're not trying to get faster. We're just trying to get better at holding on to that intensity, that speed we're riding. It's the power of riding that.

Oh, you go, dad.

I'm sorry, Jordan. Too excited to ask questions on this. It's a great topic. For example, Joe, if I'm training a 70.3 athlete, they're generally going to ride between 80 and 90% of their FTP. That's what we have found in all of our data and so have you. You've got the most data on athletes percentages in a 90k or what is it, 56 mile half ironman bike, bike ride. So when you're doing these training sessions, you can be at 82% or you could be at 88. Where, you know, where do you decide for the athlete? Because that 10% is quite a big range between 80 and 90%. Where, where should you be? Should you be just doing those? I mean, I can last longer if I ride at 80% than I can at 90% for this endurance training session. Where do you see yourself giving advice on that?

Yeah, I'm going to set a limit based on, you know, there's several things going on here. One is the athlete's got a goal, more than likely they've got a goal performance they're looking to do, that's very common. And my job as the coach is to prepare that athlete to do that. If I think it's realistic, prepare the athlete to be able to hold on to that intestine for that long. And I know what's going to happen is if I push them too far doing a workout like that in training, it's going to wind up costing us time after the workout is over for the next several days in terms of recovery. So I've got to be very, very cautious with how much stress I place on the athlete by making this last too long. So my concern is exactly what do I want that intensity to be, how fast I want them to ride at. And that's going to be determined by what the goal is relative to the type of course they're racing on, the flat, course versus hilly, et cetera. It's got all these variables built that are part of this. So we've made a decision. The athlete and I have made a decision. This is what we need to do to achieve your goal. This is what we need to do on the bike. And here's the rules. We're going to be following them and doing that. For example, one simple little rule is something I got from a friend of mine, Alan Cousins. He taught me this years ago is something he calls the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 training method for the bike that you're going to be riding. If whatever your pace is that's set up for on the flat, that's three on this 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 thing. And there are going to be times when you are going uphill and we're not going to go up to, we're going to go to Higher intensity. But it's only going to be up one notch. And that's what this notch is. We're not going to go up two notches. We're not going to go all the way to five. We're going to go up one notch because this is a, this is a half ironman. It's going to take a lot out of you. So that's where that's your average for the entire race. Uphill, this is what you're going to do. Downhill, we're going to be over here. If you're going 50 kilometers per hour down a hill, I want you not pedaling, just coasting. And the reason for that is because this is a recovery, if you pedal down the hill, you aren't going to make up any more time, significant time, than if you simply coasted down the hill. So rest to get all the rest you can. And then when you get back to flights and we're back to what we're calling number three on this five, four, three, two, one thing, that's number three, maybe it's whatever your FTP is, and we're talking about 85% of that. That's where we're at. It's right here. We're trying to hold that in this area. And that's what we're on most of the time. When we go uphill, we're going up a little bit higher. That's the intensity going up. And when we go downhill, it's here. If we're going downhill really steep, it's over here. So I'm trying to, so I try to train them to understand this so they can use this tool, this 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 tool to use when they're out training. So we're doing training rides that are like the race. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to rehearse this idea. When you come to hills or uphills or downhills, we're rehearsing this, this, this idea of how do, how do you do these things? Because what this does is every time you go down a hill, you actually got, you buy stamina. You get more stamina because you're resting. So you can bring your intestine back up to this third area, which is what our stamina is built on. You can bring your intestine back up to that FTP or that percentage of ftv and we can hold it now for a long time again. So it's more than just having a number and being able to ride that number. It's being able to ride that number on a course that has undulations to it, sometimes steep undulations. So we've got to be able to practice all these things. The challenge is that sometimes the athletes don't have a course available to them where they can do this. And so we've got to make up things. We've got to just practice as if you're going up a hill. I want you to go into zone three. You know, when you're this far into the race or not zone three, but this, you know, this fourth finger over here. We went into that intensity when we, when we're going to be on a hill, but we don't have a hill. So therefore we're going to practice doing that. We're just going to go up, we're going to increase the intensity for three minutes and then we're going to coast. We're just going to let yourself coast. Even though it's flat, we're going to coast. So we kind of like practice doing these things because they've all got to be done the right way on race day. And you can't always have available to you what you're going to have as far as terrain unracely. So it's a rather complex thing you got to figure out with the athlete and they've got to become a part of this with you. They've got to come to accept this way of saying they're training also. So it's going to be this thing where you've worked out a plan together. It can't just be my plan. This is what you're going to do. We've got to work our way through this together. I want them to have a, have skin in the game. I want them to have some, some input as to how we're doing this. So it's a rather complex thing, but it's got a lot of benefits if the athlete gets it right on race day.

We couldn't agree more. It's. It's been able to understand the power execution with the course management is so, so crucial. And we do a lot of those sessions. Especially if an athlete does have a course available, then they'll, we'll replicate that on the indoor trainer. And, and, you know, let's say that they're sitting at 84% is their average. You know, we'll have them at 84%, but then they'll have two minutes, 88% to replicate that hill and then go back down to 80% to replicate, or 75% to replicate the potential downhill and one thing to be careful of for anyone listening is we have had athletes in the past who that was a scheduled indoor session, then they could ride outside and they've gone outside into the hills and tried to ride the numbers that the schedule was set regardless of the hill where they've, you know, they were supposed to be at 88% but they hit it. They hit a downhill and they're trying to pedal as hard as they can to hit 88% on the downhill because they're just sticking to the session a little bit blindly so that the communication is key. How does that translate to running as well? Does that, that step up system still apply to you? Because it's not exactly the same, especially when preparing for a half marathon or especially a marathon. How do you look at the intensity factor there compared to the bike?

Yeah, running is a little bit different. Running is more. Is more. Getting the pace right? Setting the pace and being able to hold that throughout the entire race, if you can. That's the challenge. Can you hold this given pace, this goal pace that we need to be running? Can we hold that for the entire time? Because now we're much less likely to be affected by uphills and downhills. You still may have some uphills. In fact you will, but you won't have the same thing happening on downhills. You're not going to coast down the hill. You have to run down the hill. So we're now going to practice something that's a little bit different, but it's the same old thing. We just got to decide what is it we have to do and how do we go about doing it given the conditions. But again, always bearing in mind that running is uniquely dangerous to the athlete if they become fatigued, because this is when you're likely to experience injury. And so I'm going to make sure that the athlete understands what these warning signs may be, that it's time to cool down and call it a day. And sometimes that happens much earlier than we'd like to see it happen because that's just the way it works sometimes. And other times they're able to go longer than they thought they'd be able to. So it's going to work both ways. Some days good, some days bad. But it's the sort of thing we're building in this whole idea of stamina late in the race. And we've got to be able to do that in some way which mimics the race. That's why I have the athletes talked about earlier, do the what I call the big day where they do swim, bike, run, all in the same day, very long durations. So they can rehearse doing these things with a little bit of fatigue. But I try to remove as much of that fatigue as I can by taking some time off between swim, bike and runs and also getting food in. So I don't want to take a risk here of destroying the athlete's legs or having them blow up or something because of trying to do too much in a workout. So it's really, it's a very, you know, this whole thing, getting an athlete ready for an event like a half ironman or ironman especially, it's really a challenge. I mean, this is not simple at all. How athletes do this on their own is really beyond me because I find it very, very challenging to get an athlete ready for a race like that because there's so much that goes into it. There's so many little things that gotta be done right. Otherwise it could be just a total disaster.

It's always interesting too when you think about the endurance day, Joe. If you get an athlete to be out there for six hours on the bike as compared, when we're talking about should we give the athlete more intensity? But the duration of, of those long training days is somewhat. The fatigue is different. The fatigue from intensity is a different feeling from that exhaustion from duration. But it counts equally as much, doesn't it? The fatigue is still there. Whether you're doing a high intensity session or a long day on the bike, you still have this fatigue from intensity, but it is fatigue, but it's different. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah, that fatigue is somewhat different. You know, athletes can become overtrained. Let's take it from that from a different perspective here. Athletes can become over trained in many different ways. One way is to do way too much intensity and the other way is to do way too much volume. And the athlete that tries to put those together is often going to get into a lot of trouble. I just helped an athlete recently, it's about two weeks ago, who was very definitely over trained because he was self coached and he decided he had to do just a lot more volume. So he was doing amazing amount of volume. He's in his 50s and he was doing, he's a cyclist and he was doing like the first week he did of his preparation for his race, he did like 23 hours the first week in the saddle. Then the second week was like 18 or 19 hours. And then he did another 18 or 19 hours the third week. The fourth week he did like 17 hours and then he realized he was so tired he couldn't hardly get out of bed in the morning. So the fourth week he took several days off. He did one ride, it was only three hours, one week, that was only three hours that week. Then decided to get back into training again. So went back to another 18 hour week, 17 hour week and so forth for another four weeks. So tired again, he couldn't keep on going. So he took a break for three weeks now because he was just so tired he couldn't get out of bed in the morning. Then he decided to get going again and he just kept doing this over and over and over and over and he finally about, I forgot about eight weeks into this, finally contacted me and said I need help. I am having a hard time here getting ready for my race, I'm going backwards. And so it was obvious what the problem was and I just basically wrote a plan for him. He's just going to have to take it easy for a while and rebuild his base training. And that was the key. You know, really the key to how well you perform throughout the season has to do with how big your base is. Athletes don't grasp that. They think the way how you perform in performance in your race is a result of how hard your workouts are. It's not that plays a role, but it's not dominant like base is. If you do not have base fitness, it really doesn't matter what else you do during the rest of the season. You're never going to have a good performance. You're going to blow up all the time. Because base is really the key. You know, it's like building a house on sand. If you try to build a house on sand and then, you know, first time the wind comes up, it just blows the house over. It doesn't last at all. It doesn't matter how pretty, how nice the upper part of that building looked like. It's the foundation is the key and that's the part you've got to get right that so many self coached athletes disregard. They think it's a waste of their time, but it's actually the key to performance and, and most don't understand that. That's probably the most misunderstood thing there is about training is the importance of low intensity.

It's so true. And we often talk about on our podcast the notion of how little time athletes give themselves to prepare for an a race, a half ironman or ironman and just respecting the event. And we get told all the time that you only need 12 weeks or 16 weeks and athletes will come in with very little base and try and really fast track their, their plan to a half iron man or iron man. And when they think because they just need to get the intensity right for the requirements of the race. But that's just one part of the picture. Exactly what you're saying.

Yeah, it's, it's a disaster. This, this, this guy I was telling you about, you know, really nice guy, has, he's had, he's got great intentions. He just does not understand churning. He just doesn't understand it. And most people don't. Most people think they understand it. They think it has to do with how hard their hard workouts are. And that's going to be the determining factor that plays a part of it. But it's such a small part compared to. So I had this guy go back and we started out, I think we're doing like seven weeks of just fairly slow, easy workouts, short workouts that get gradually longer over the course of seven weeks, Absolutely nothing intense at all, nothing long at all. Just barely moving up duration. Over the course of seven weeks, starting from an hour and building up to, I think we built up over seven weeks to like a three hour ride by the end of the seven weeks and then we're going to start doing some high intensity. But we're going to maintain the base stuff that we built in those first seven weeks. We're going to maintain that as it goes forward into the in, into the build, what I call the build during the season specific training for the race. So it's a challenge. If I could just have athletes hire a coach, we could probably solve all these problems people run into because when they're self coached they really make very bad decisions and it really messes up not only their training but their lives. This guy's entire life was messed up by this. He had no energy, couldn't get through the day. Because of this focus on extremely high volume.

We see it all the time when an athlete signs up and then we get to, if we're lucky, they've had training picks already. So then we get to see what they've been doing and we can just straight away just say, and there's a big difference between what we talk to them about on the phone. We say what's your training been like up so far? And they'll explain it. And then we go see what's the actual data showing in training picks. And we go, well we can tell you exactly why you're feeling this way or why you're in this position and why you're stagnating. So what I really want do to kind of move into. To finish off your thoughts on current training. And we mentioned at the start of the episode, but we're getting really good access now to the Norwegian method and lactate testing. And so many pro athletes are showing what they're doing in training. And what are your thoughts on modern trends of training? And are you paying close? Your expertise is so much in helping the age grouper and you just do an incredible job at explaining concepts to help the age grouper. And it's very different to how a pro trains. But are you watching the trends of the pros and what they're doing and pay attention to their training methods?

Yeah, I try to keep up with what's going on, you know, throughout the sport, throughout all sports, actually. I don't focus on any given sport. I like to kind of, like, work, like I mentioned working with cyclists a little while ago, end runners and so forth. I just enjoy the novelty of working with different sports. Not there's anything wrong with just being a triathlon coach. There's lots of coaches that do that and that's great. And they're probably better off because of that, because they can focus. But I would get bored, I think, if all I did was work on one sport all the time. I've always worked on multiple sports. So, yeah, I watch very closely what's going on in the world of sports. I know people in various places that are working with pro athletes and, you know, I always like to get their opinions on things. You know, just take, for example, like Inigo Sam Milan, the guy who's the Zone 2 guy. He's probably pretty much known as that more than anything else now. He was Tadi Pagach's coach, Juana Yuso's coach. They're two of the better pro cyclists on the UAE team. And, you know, Tadi Bagaccia is like in a world of his own. And he was brought along by Inygo. And I've known Inigo since he was in college. And so I like to follow him and see what things he's talking about. And he's no longer, by the way, their coach. There have been some changes take place, but he's just a smart guy who's spent a lot of time studying this stuff. You know, he's a lab guy. He's also a former pro road cyclist himself. So he knows this sport from both sides. And so let's see what he's thinking. And there's. You mentioned a while ago, Stephen Seiler. You know, what's Stephen thinking about these days? He's always got unique ideas he's working on and so forth. I like to see what everybody's talking about, what they're thinking about. And then I like to kind of like mesh these over in my head about what I do with my. The athletes I have worked with, how I would train them if I was going to train differently. And so it's kind of like, you know, it's kind of. I just enjoy research, I enjoy doing what's going on, learning what's going on in the world of cycling and triathlon and running and swimming and you name it, I like to see what's going on there. That's how I evolved my coaching. I was coaching so many different sports that I could see different ways that each sport addressed their, their individual sport and how it was different from another sport, how swimmers, how swimmers were different from runners. You know, what's the difference between those two and how they train? And that I found that to be fascinating. And to this day I still find it to be a really interesting thing. So I like to follow lots and lots of various sports and coaching ideas and athletes and things they're coming up with. Reading and this for me is like a holiday. When I finally get to like reading the Norwegian book here recently, Norwegian method book. That was like a vacation for me. It's like, oh, gosh, here's a guy talking about things I enjoy talking about. So let's do what he's got to say. And so it's just all fun for me. It's a pastime.

Joe, is there anything in particular that we did talk off air a little bit about Joe Friel in the 1980s and 90s and the early 2000s to Joe Friel in 2025. Is there anything that you feel that you've really changed dramatically? And I'm not talking about the slight changes. Is there anything that you've thought about in the 1980s that you think, well, that's actually not appropriate anymore or is. Yeah. Tell me a little bit of a summary of the standout thing that you think you, you. The number one thing that you think you might have a different viewpoint on compared to when you're a Youngster in the 1980s?

Yeah, I was younger than too. Yeah, I probably one thing that's changed the most for me is swimming. Working, working with triathletes. It happened probably. I don't know, 25 or so years ago, I went to Hardman, Arizona, which wasn't too far from my home. I lived just about 10 miles away from the course. So I went down there, and they have a unique course. It's canal for the swim. And so it's very easy to walk along the canal and follow the swimmers. And so I watched the race start, and I'm up on the edge of canal, and so I walk along, and I'm watching them swim, you know, from just from right above them, and watch them swim. And the thing that stood out for me the most was what I realized as I watched them is that the pros had different swimming technique than the age groupers. Their technique were uniquely different. And I never thought about that before, that pros actually swam with a different technique. So I paid close attention and started watching it very closely. Then I started doing lots of research on it, trying to figure out why they swam that way. And I realized they were swimming that way for a purpose, but they'd probably learned this purpose just by trial and error. And I had learned swimming from swimmers. And so I was seeing the world a little bit differently than these pros were when it came to swim technique. And so I began to play with the swim technique in my camps and learned that, discovered that my campers could swim faster using the pro technique than the typical swim technique, you know, pool swimming technique. And so I began to make a change then, which became a dramatic change in the way I coach swimmers. And I saw all kinds of changes take place in performance. That was the biggest thing I changed, was just that one sport. I've never changed anything else as dramatically as I changed that. And it was all for the good. I think the swimmers became much better because of the changes I made. The age group swimmers, the pros, kept on doing just as well as they were anyway, but the age group swimmers actually improved quite a bit because of the changes I made. So that. That was the biggest change I ever made, my coaching career. Is that.

And is there any of the trends right now that you're really agreeing with or disagreeing with? Is there anything that stands out where you go, oh, I don't. I think that's. That's misdirected.

Gosh, you know, I don't. There's nothing off the top of my head that stands out that way. Maybe something we touched on a little while ago. You can. You can kind of focus too much on zone two, I think. I think that may be where I probably differ from what's Going on right now in our, in our world. I don't really focus so much on Zone 2. I like to be coming, as I mentioned, a combination of zones one and two and we're going to get some zone two times. Zone one is very, very valuable for the athletes. A lot of things going on in zone one that we can't get anyplace else. So that's probably the only place right now where I would have any difference whatsoever with what I see going on.

I think that's a really important point though because I do see a lot of discourse online about the fact that Zone 1 is unnecessary and invaluable and you might as well just rest. And we definitely disagree with that. I know you do as well.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. And I think one of the biggest lessons from this episode is intensity control and having a purpose for each intensity. I know you talk about that a lot where you're paying attention to your time spent in zones and every zone has its value somewhere and you've given examples from Zone 1 through to Zone 5 and above about where that's applicable for the athlete. I think that's a really, really important take home message. Dad, any other questions before we finish off that you want to finish with?

No, I could keep going for hours but I know we can't do that. But it's been another privilege to have the master of triathlon giving his wisdom. I absolutely love our conversations and yeah, look, there's so much more I wanted to ask you, but we have run out of time. But thank you so much Joe for really giving us your time and your wisdom. As always, it's a pleasure to listen to you speak.

Thank you, Gerard and Jody, I enjoyed it.

And Jo, I do just want to express my own gratitude to finish. I could listen to you both talk about this for a long time. But we do, on our episodes when it's just dad and I talking, we do a gratitude segment where we say something that we're grateful for for the week and we really enjoy that. And I want to express my gratitude to you, dad. And I definitely have modelled your coaching and we really have appreciated all the info you put out there and you really tailor it to relatable athletes and age group athletes and the fact that I always think every week how valuable training P S and you were the co founder and I always think how good is this platform that we get to use this for our athletes and all the data we get. So I just wanted to express that gratitude to you and everything you've released, and the knowledge you've released has really been a help to us. So thank you.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

That's it for this episode. Thank you very much for listening. And we'll see everyone on the next one.

Sam.