How To Peak For Ultimate Race Performance

This episode of the Get Fast podcast is brought to you by Trivello Coaching, where we help triathletes and cyclists like you train smarter to race faster. You are joined, as always, by your hosts, former Australian Ironman champion Jared Donnelly, and I am Jordan Donnelly. In today's episode, we are talking about everything to do with holding form and most importantly, the mistakes that athletes, triathletes and cyclists applies to both make when trying to hold form for too long or trying to peak properly for your big race. And one of the biggest mistakes is trying to pick too many big races and trying to bite off more than you can actually chew as an athlete. So we're going to be talking everything about holding form today and how to do it properly, how to peak properly, how to taper properly, and how to have the best race performance. But before we get into the episode, if you want to learn how to train smarter and race faster, get access to our training programs and get a bonus cheat sheet download. Just go to getfastpodcast.com you get an expert secret Expert Secrets cheat sheet download. That's a free download of the expert tips and advice all the guests on our podcast have said to help you train smarter and race faster. And you also go onto our weekly email list, which we send out emails to help you train smarter and race faster. And that's the best way to get access to our programs. So, dad, welcome to this episode. We are in different circumstances yet again. Due to further COVID 19 restrictions, we cannot record this in the same place. So we are doing it over video conferencing. So welcome to the video conferencing podcast.

It's good to catch up with you again, George, from a distance, and I'm very envious of where you are. And yeah, it's the only way we can get this done is to do it this way and hopefully the quality remains similar.

Yeah, please be patient with us with the video and audio quality. Obviously, we endeavor to make it as good as possible and as clear as possible, but we obviously can't be the same as when we're in the studio together. So before we get into the topic of the podcast, I want to ask you, dad, the starting segment, what have you been paying attention to this week with your coaches? Hat on. What have you learned this week? What's been happening?

Well, I've just been so excited to see that the European road season has finally started, both for cycling and for the Diamond League for running. And, yeah, boy, there's been some incredible variation in people's fitness Levels due to the COVID 19. So that's the thing. As a coach, I've been really interested in seeing how varying teams are coping and how they've emerged out of almost quarantine at incredibly different fitness levels. And you only have to go through a lot of the teams one by one and see, you know, some teams are outstandingly prepared and other teams are way behind the eight ball. So that's been intriguing to me. As we talked about this in a podcast in March, I remember vividly saying, okay, this is what we faced. The whole world is getting shut down. The choices we make now, we'll be looking back on them come August, September, October, and guess what? We are now in August, September, October, looking back at what we did from March, and some teams are going to go well, we've arrived at this date on top of the world. And you only have to look at Jumbo Visma and see how they're performing compared to other teams. And, you know, you just. You just look at that. And I'm intrigued as to what they did in between March and now to make the gap so big between performances.

It's been quite incredible, hasn't it? And it was so awesome to see cycling racing come back. We started with two classics, Strada Bianca and Milan San Remo. And how crazy was it to see Wout Van Aert just take out the win in both of them? And we've been watching him closely. We especially loved his performance last year at Paris Roubaix when he kept having problems. He crashed, I think, a couple of times. He's had a mechanical a couple of times. It was just absurd that he was off the bike four or five times when he was in the breakaway. And he kept clawing his way back and he never made it back to the breakaway. But he did the best performance of the day, in my opinion, in last year's Paris Roubaix. And it just shows how good a rider he is. He's come out and won these two. Yeah.

And he is a bit of a freak. And just watching Lombardia as well over the weekend, another classic. And the Dauphinet, especially the five stages there. And Witt Van Aert's performance in that was outstanding. As a domestique almost. And the absolute power that he has, it's very Tony Martin ish, as you know, sitting on the front of the bunch, working his butt off, you know, for his team. And coming back, he's not a mountain climber, you know, he's getting dropped on the hills, bridging back across to the, to the main peloton, then jumping back on the front again and driving it through the valleys. It's boy, you know, he's using the Dauphine as a training, training block to get himself ready for the big classics, which is, you know, I just can't see how he's going to, I just don't know how anybody's going to beat him in Paris Roubaix. It's just going to be so exciting to see, to see if he can actually, you know, know get all the stars aligned, not having issues. And as you and I know, we've ridden Paris Roubaix many times now and there's so much that can go wrong in that race just you know, mechanically, your bike and the weather conditions. So just hope that he can, he can hold form. And it's ironic that that's what we're going to talk about in today's podcast. But yeah, there's so many outstanding riders performing well at the moment and you know, even, even the running scene, you know, seeing the, the, the world record being, being smashed was, was fantastic as well.

It's interesting. I do remember in that podcast in March you said specifically that the races will come back at some point, so who's going to be ready? You know, whether it's August, whether it's December or whether it was going to be March next year, whether it was going to be a 12 month thing. You said they're going to come back, so who's going to be ready? And like you said, it's clear that some teams are much more prepared than others and in the running scene. So the Diamond League, for those who don't know, is the best pro league running. It's where all the pros go to do a series of races against each other. And the guy that came out, I can't actually pronounce his name, so I'm not going to try. But came out and in isolation, he actually was running incredible times, recorded incredible times, so everyone knew he was in good form. But he's come out first race and broken the 5000 meter world record by 2 seconds which was held by Bekele, which has been held for 16 years. And a lot of people thought it'd be hard for someone to get back close to that. And he's come out and just run so well and it's just incredibly impressive to see.

Yeah, the 5K is one of the, on the track is one of those fantastic events and I just can't get enough of 8 hundreds, 1500s, 5ks and 10ks my 10k is probably a bit long on the Track, but the 5K, you know, you've got guys just running at a pace that's. It's almost remarkable how fast they can run. And they had pacemakers in this event like they normally do.

There's an Australian pacemaker in there, Ramsden, which is good to see.

Yes. And he does that a bit. And he did that. I think he did some pacemaking for the marathon world record as well. Yeah, I think that's true. And yeah, just to see what happened to the rest of the field. The rest of the field were running one race and. And the pacemakers were running another race for the world record attempt, and they were that far behind. And the same thing happened at the European. At the 1500 meters, where the European 1500 meter record was broken. There were two distinct races. The pacemaker had the guy trying to break the record on their tails and the rest of the field sat back about 70 meters in a 1500 meters. That is quite, you know, that is not the way 1500s get run. They were strung out single file, and in the end, the leader from the bunch that was off the back got to within a meter of the guy setting the world record. And both of them ran times that were exceptional, but two completely different styles of racing.

And it's interesting watching that race because we talk about execution a lot and you would probably say that the guy who won executed worse because he really faded, but he still ran quicker and he still held onto the win. And when he was running down the back straight, he was looking over his shoulder, just making sure he was winning. He wasn't actually running to the line for a time, which I thought was pretty interesting. Yeah.

And obviously he was having a shocking time for the last 250 meters. Whereas the guy who was. Who had measured the effort across the whole race properly saw that he was gaining. You know, every step he took, he was catching. And by the time he got to the bottom of the front straight with 100 to go, he was bang on his shoulder. And it's just that the record breaker had a better kick and really dug deep. And it was, you know, it was one of the good finishes. Similar to what when Bekele broke the world record. He had the exact same finish with a Kenyan, you know, literally there on his shoulder. And there was only that much in it at the end. Yet Bekele won and the other guy got second. And Bekele is famous. The other guy is still a great runner, but doesn't get the accolades and it's just all about who wants it more in that last 50 meters, I suppose.

Yeah, yeah. Pretty tough way to run though. Did a 52 second first lap and then a 59 second second lap. That's a big difference. Whereas the guy that came second did a 55, 56. So much more even running.

Yeah. And you know, just from a management point of view, it is so much easier to manage your execut that way because you're not stressing yourself as much as, you know, over efforts and then fighting. It's just a horrible way to finish when you know the line can't come quick enough. It's like, you know, the example I always use is, you know, you're running with the piano on your back or you're running with concrete legs. You just, you know, you can see the finish line but you just can't get there. It just seems forever.

You wonder though, would he have ran better if he held back more or was that fast pace what allowed him just to hang on to the end to get that 3:28 which is just an incredible time.

Yeah. And that's one of the questions is what type of runner are you? And you've got to go to your strengths. And if you are a runner who likes to go out fast and hang on, but who's to say if you tried a different tactic, it might be better for you.

Yeah. On that note, it's great to see running and cycling back. We're really excited to watch all the races again. I'm worried about my sleep patterns because you want to stay up and watch the races, but it is good to wake up and watch the replay, watch the highlights. But it's just great to see competitive racing back and getting to see all the pros have a crack again. And as we said, being inform is pretty key component. And there are a lot of riders that are in form, a lot of riders that aren't. And with a shortened season you'd probably want to be inform earlier. So let's get into that topic. I want to start by asking what are the mistakes athletes make with holding form and trying to hold form too long?

Well, the number one thing that people don't really understand as an athlete is that you can't sustain form forever. And you know, as humans, that's what we want to do. We want to hold our form day in week, in month, in year, in decade. We just want to be at the top the whole time. And if you can just understand that that's not possible, then you can actually get yourself a game plan that will be enable you to be a better athlete. And if you keep the scenario that you want to hold form forever, then that is going to be the big mistake.

So what is form to you? What do you define form as?

In any given period, getting to the top of your game, where you are at your best. And how do you measure that? Possibly if you're a runner, it would be the fastest time you've ever run. That would be an indication that you're in top form if you're a cyclist, possibly because it's not a time based event except for a time trial. But we're talking about road racing. It's how well you're performing in the races, you know, your results. So they're the two measurements that we have. So in any given time, if your results on the bike start to give you wins, like Alaphilippe had that run last year where he won, I can't even remember how many races he won in a row. It was incredible how many. Every time he raced, he won. Of course, that's him in form. And look at him now. At the moment, he's absolutely not in the same scintillating form that he was for these exact races last year. You know, Stradabianca, he won last year and he, you know, he had a shocking time two weeks ago in this race, yet he was able to use Strade Bianca to do well in Milan San Remo, literally two weeks later and, you know, just get pipped for the win against Wood Van Aert. So, you know, you can build form quickly and, and understanding that it is only a period in time where you can sustain that. And knowing that you need that timing to be so crucial to get the outcomes you want. And getting good form at the wrong time is as disastrous as having no form. And how difficult is it to have a plan to get you in form at the right time when the playing field keeps moving on us, you know, especially, you know, in different parts of the world, the events have been put in a calendar and then, you know, a month later they're moved, you know, so you're trying to prepare and train for an event that actually keeps moving on you. So it's probably the most difficult period in athletic history or cycling or sports performance where form is almost impossible to get right. And it's more luck than anything else at the moment. Whereas before nothing was moving on us, we had exact days. So when we come out of this year, we should be better at enabling ourselves to get to, you know, our. A race day exactly how we should be because, you know, we know, you know that in anything when you make best decisions because you've got all the information, and if you have some information lacking, then the decisions you make are flawed a little bit because you don't, you can't make, you can't make good decisions when you don't have all the information. So if you don't know when the race day is, then you're guessing about how to get yourself to the point where you're gonna perform at your best in this particular period of your career. And people can hold form repeatedly over years. And we've had lots of examples of people winning five Tour de Frances and winning three world time trial championships in a row. And that's pretty impressive to do that year after year. Sagan is an example of winning you world road races and winning lots of races. So at the end of the day, you know, people can do it year after year, but there's only a small window of your career that you can do it. But each year you have a form where you know, a period where you want to hold form for, because the season only goes for that period. So that's. It's so complicated, yet it is so simple. And what's making it worse this year is that the goalposts keep moving in those examples there.

I mean, if someone's repeating a performance year after year, then it would indicate that they're peaking for that performance each year and not holding it for an extended period. It's not like people look at them and go, geez, they're just the same rider for the full year round. They might have three months off over a certain period and then just come back and peak for that race again.

Yeah, and that's the great point, George, is we've got to understand as everyday cyclists or everyday runners or everyday triathletes that we want to be going well all the time. And that's the point I made at the start. And that's a really good thing to aspire to, is to try and, you know, perform well as often and as many times as you can. But the reality is that is a recipe for failure. Because unless you can identify, and we've talked about this on podcasts, you need to identify what your A goal is and you use your B and C lead up events to get you to your peak form for that A goal. And if you think that you can keep repeating that 12 months of the year, you're not a professional for a Start, you've got other things in your life that happen. So you're going to have more trouble than a professional trying to trying to get to your A race if you're trying to hold form for eight months. And these are things that we really need to understand about our own performance as everyday cyclists. I'm not talking about professionals, I'm talking about everyday Joe Blow, who really loves his cycling, he loves his triathlon, he loves his running and wants to perform well. What does that measurement perform well against what he's done previously? Perform better than he's done previously. Get to the A race and get a pb. You know, that's kind of the aspirational goal for every person who does this as a passion and loves what they're doing. They're the things that we're trying to achieve. So understanding what form is about will really help you get the result you want come your A race. And that's kind of what we're trying to discuss today, to give you the information so you can make better decisions about your own season and when to start it, when to rest, when to recover, when to train hard, when to taper. And how you arrive at race day is determined by all those factors.

So there's two different types of examples you've spoken about there. One is a cycling example where you might have weekly crit races at your local area or a lot of races packed into the same period. And so you've got a lot of chances to perform well. And what you spoke about before, which is arbitrarily being informed where you're turning up to a lot of races and you're winning week by week at your local crib or something, then you're seen as in form, whereas for triathletes it's a little bit different because there's not multiple races. You're not going to be doing multiple 70.3s or Ironmans in a row. You're preparing for one. And that is what you have labeled as your A race. So what's the difference there between being inform as in your race results like in a cycling example, or trying to peak and get your body in physiological form for an upcoming A race. And how do you know that you're informed for that race?

Well, it's a good question as a cyclist and we can split the two of them, triathlon, cycling a bit here. As a cyclist, there's many different A races. You could say that my A race is the summer season, the crit summer season is my A race. Well, that doesn't even sound like it makes sense. What I'm saying is you might pick, you know, January, February, March, a period of 6 to 12 weeks where you want to build your form and potentially perform at the highest level, where your podium is your goal and each week that's what you're trying to do for that period. So January, February, March is an example for a summer season in Australia as a criterium season. And the rest of the year you want to maintain your fitness to a level where you may be able to pick a road race here or there that you can peak to. And something I want to talk about on that topic is getting your fitness levels just simmering underneath your peak form so you can't come from a long way back to get to a really good form level. You have to maintain some sort of fitness, general fitness. But in that if we took a year as an example, you can't maintain general fitness for a full year. You must have some sort of rest and recovery where you give your body an opportunity to shed the fatigue and both physically shed the fatigue and mentally of the grind of training week in, week out, day in day out, that is really difficult both physically and mentally to keep going. And you have to be some sort of special motivated athlete to be able to achieve that. And believe me, there are people that we coach who are like that, who just can't get enough of it. But you know, my job was almost for them is to hold them back and make them have enforced periods of recovery. And I don't like it. They absolutely don't like it. And I'm getting, you know, it just so happens this week we've got, you know, a bit of a mid semester break, I'm calling it the COVID break, where we've been going quite hard for a long period of time where we're trying to build our fitness up to the races that might eventuate, that we were hoping that are going to eventuate in September, October, November and you know, and unless we do this period of recovery, and this is all related to how you can develop form to arrive at race day with a PB potential, personal best potential. This, this recovery period is part of that form building. So you know, you know yourself in your training, how tired you get from some of the hard sessions that is in your program. And unless you can do the recovery, it sounds like we're talking about another topic here. But no, this is all to do with form. You know, hard sessions are important to get you to the best peak performance on race Day, but that's another topic. Hard sessions, recovery is another topic, but it is all related to getting you to the right form on race day. So without those two ingredients, training hard and recovering, you actually will never perform well at your a race. You will stay the same racer or competitor year in year, year out. And that is why you need to have some plan in place to enable you to perform at your best at the right time when you want it the most. And you know, we can use a football example of, you know, guys who've come out of pre season training unbelievably fit, flying on the training track and the first four or five games they're just playing outstanding football and leaving the rest of the field behind in their games. And you know, if we used a normal April to September season in football, you know, come the last four or five weeks of the season, they've peaked too soon and you know, the whole team's form is deteriorating. You can't keep training at the high level over an extended period of time without having a recovery period. And you know, as a football season, you don't get a lot of that. You know, they do have a buy in the season but you know, it's, it's managing your fitness and your recovery that's going to get you to the a race to be able to perform at your best. And that's what we're trying to get, get the information across about today's episode is, you know, how do you go about doing that and what things should be in your program that enable you to get to that race day at the peak.

So one of the examples you've just given is having something like a mid semester break and that is a way to include a recovery period in your blocks of training so that you can hold form later. But what's the resistance you're getting to something like a mid semester break?

I'm going to lose some fitness. That's number one. And that's actually an accurate statement. Of course you lose a little bit of fitness. If we use a graph, which I'm going to use my hand to do this, our fitness should be going like this on a graph.

For those just listening, it's just a steady incline.

Yes. If you can't see what's happening, it's an incline that's basically trying to each week improve the numbers that you were doing from previous four or five weeks. And there has to be a period where we've talked about this, where you have a period of recovery. So you might get a Fitness say let's use some numbers. If your fitness level is at 70 and that's just an arbitrary number and it's come from 40 over 10 week period. You started your program and your fitness level was 40, we can get that information from a whole lot of data measurements from power and heart rate, etc. From distance, volume, intensity, duration, frequency, all those things will give us an arbitrary number that we can measure. And we have this in training peaks. So that number might have started at 40 and you've built it up to 70 and your goal is to get to 100 by race day. So we can't just keep driving that angle of our our fitness like this. We do need to step it and so we need to actually get one section where we're training hard and a flattening out and we might have got to 45 at the end of that block and then we might drop down to 41 with a few days or maybe even four days of recovery and we start at 41 and then we go to 50 for the next hard week of training and then we drop back to 48 and we have a little period of recovery. But slowly, progressively we keep adding our fitness number till we get to, you know, our peak week, which we the couple of weeks before that, a race, we would say our goal is 100. As a number we would want to be 105. We would want to be way above what we're trying to actually have on race day because we're going to get past our goal of 100 and then have a recovery taper period. Guess where it ends ends up at. Just like I told you in the stepping system, it ends up at 100. So we have this at the end, we have this almost bell curve where what we were at 100, our fatigue levels would have been possibly negative 20, negative 30 and we get to 105 with really high fatigue at negative 30. Then we shed the fatigue, reduce the intensity. We're back at 100. Our fatigue levels here were negative 20, now at 100, we're at positive 5 because of shed fatigue. So that has enabled us to get to race day at our goal fitness 100 with no fatigue. And that is how to prepare for the best outcome of your race. And that's what form, that's how, that's how to get your form where you want it.

I'll be honest, I understand that concept, but those numbers confuse me a little bit. So talk to me about, and we're just talking arbitrary numbers here, but talk to me about the fitness versus fatigue numbers and how that correlates to your form, especially when you're using maths like that. Give me a clear example of fitness and fatigue equally. Form, because it's pretty much an equation that we use, isn't it?

Yeah. So you get a running tally and it's probably take away the numbers. Let's just go by feel. So as you're progressing through a block of training, and it depends on who you are, is determined by what sort of block you've been given. If you're somebody who's an everyday trainer and not at the elite level, you've probably got so many other things in your life that are going to make it hard for you to train for an extended period of time without creating too much fatigue because you're not getting sleep, you're working all day, you're trying to do your training around work. So therefore we need not to push you too much over an extended period of time. Age also comes into it. The older athletes cannot sustain and we're talking about periodization here a little bit. You can't sustain three and four week blocks of training at high intensity because the fatigue levels you build up are so high that you can't actually do the high intensity sessions hard enough to get the fitness improvement that you're trying to get with the stepping stone example that I'm talking about. So, so we use variations depending on the individual person, how old they are, what other things are happening in their life that will determine how long we push for a block of training. So going by feel rather than a fitness number, going by feel as an example, you start to feel, and you know this yourself, Jordan, as a runner in the second week of your block of training, you feel, you really feel the fatigue building up your legs. Unless you're really conscious of doing some really good massage from foam roller, some stretching, some walking, some good sleeping, some good food, you've got to keep on top of all these things. As you feel a fatigue build up. In the first week after you've had a recovery week, you feel reasonably fresh, so you train well. The second week you've built some fatigue. And I'm not talking numbers anymore, I'm just talking about feeling. And come the third week, you know, you're just making the numbers in the say we're doing 800-400-2200, you know, you're still able to hit the numbers and possibly improve, but you feel bad or worse after the session. Your actually performance is great, but your fatigue levels have grown that much from Week three to week one, and from week two to week one they're different. So each week you feel worse. So if we use the numbers, say your fatigue level was zero in week one of your block because you're fresh as you train each day you add fatigue and we call that just a number. It could be five or six. And by the end of three week block you could have accumulated 30 as your number of fatigue. And we know in when we want to have the best form at our fatigue has to be in the positive, which we have no fatigue. So the number we use is 0 to 10. So a negative fatigue number is a feel that you know that you feel it, it's tiring period. And I don't want to overcomplicate it too much. But to make it simple, you want to arrive where you feel like your legs are million dollars. You know, you're not tired. You feel like you could just, you know, sprint 100 meters if you're a runner, or get on the bike and push 800 watts for 20 seconds without any soreness in your legs. And that's what the fatigue is doing in the block of training. It's building that pain and level of tiredness you're trying to achieve. Because we're trying to build fitness. And in order to be a better athlete, you need your fitness to improve. So you need to train hard. But at some stage you have to recover. And even in that block of training, we have a hard session and we have some easy sessions in between those hard sessions. So we don't do two or three weeks of hard riding the whole time because that will not allow your form to eventuate. You will stagnate your form because you will stay the same athlete. Without training hard and recovering form won't happen. You'll just be the same athlete week in, week out, month in month, month out. And you know, even the pros do it this way because they know they can't sustain this period of really good racing form where they are trying not to, you know, they're trying not to train too much in the period where the big races are. They're just using the races as their trainings, training method to keep their fitness at a level and keep their fatigue down. So if you did, for example, Strada Bianca, then you did Milan San Remo, then you went to the Dauphine and the goal was to ride the Tour de France as your a race. You know, you're possibly not going to ride that well at the Strada Bianca. You might, you know, let's Just use an example. Alaphilippe might be going for the Tour de France to win as many stages as he can like he did last year, even though he had yellow last year for that many weeks in the Tour. But, you know, last year he actually had a plan that worked really well. He raced really well from Strade Bianca all the way through to the Tour de France. And he held form for that period. And then he disappeared. That was the end of his racing season. You don't hear from him again, and all he's doing is simmering away with his fitness till the next season. So. So this is an example of what we're talking about. When you get into the period of form, and if it's an extended period where it's not one race, you have to actually balance that across a whole lot of weeks of racing. The question you asked me is the difference between cycling and triathlon. Here is the exact example. To try to race well and not do too much training while you're racing in this period is the way to keep the fatigue levels down so that you can come up for the next race better than you were the previous race or the previous Saturday. And some of these guys race Saturday, Wednesday, Saturday, Saturday, Wednesday, Saturday. That's kind of what their program is. What are they doing in between? Well, I know from my experience, knowing some of these pros, they're just rolling around, getting the blood flow. They're not doing any training. They're just rolling around on their bikes, coffee rides, just to get ready for the next race. All their training's done like we showed that bell curve example. They're just trying to maintain a fitness line but have zero fatigue. And of course you're going to be tired after that Strade Bianca race. But because you've stopped training, you can recover really quickly and you're just resting with easy ride. So come the Wednesday or come the next Saturday, you know, you've pretty much had an easy week, so you know your form is high, so you're ready to go again. Fatigue 0. And you're ready to go again. You can do that over a short period of time. And I have coached many guys who have tried to do three peak races. And we've. We've performed unbelievably at the first, achieved the goal of winning the national titles, unbelievably at the second, come the third, and they were quite spread out. October, December, January. And I'm not going to mention any names, but that is an example of come January. It was too long from October to January. And that person was pretty much cooked by the time they got to January and ended up not competing.

It's a smart choice.

Yeah. And you're better off not doing it because you would have a horrible experience on that. That is an example of an everyday cyclist who's at the top of his game not being able to hold form three times. And you know, that is exactly what would happen if you try to do that and you'll get mediocre results as a result. You might end up not winning any of those events because you didn't peak properly for all of them. Basically destroyed your whole season by wanting too much of the pie, you know.

And that's why, that's why the pros are different. Right. What you're saying is they, they back up for longer than the average person would and they, they. Ella Philippe doing it from strate of Bianca through the Tour is quite exceptional. But it is because their schedule is totally different. They're right. They're almost treating the Wednesday and Saturday rides or the weekly Saturday race as their only high intensity sessions. And the recovery rides are in. And that's why they can do it. It's a, it's a bit of a different system. And I guess the reason we use the numbers and the reason we, we use this, the data that's on training peaks, that and these terms of fitness versus fatigue versus form is quite simply just to get a clear picture of what you're explaining before with what you feel arbitrarily with fatigue. You know, and to make it simple, if you, you know, trainingpeaks gives you a fitness level of 100 and your fatigue level is only 90, then 100 minus 90 is 10, that means you're positive 10 in form and you know you're going to be feeling really good. And if you're at the end of what, like we said, a training block where your fitness is 100, but it's been a really hard training block. And so your fatigue is 110, 100 minus 110 is negative 10. And so you're in negative form because your fatigue is negative 10. And so I guess to summarize, the goal is in training blocks to get that fatigue really high where it's negative 10, negative 20, negative 30, use a recovery week in IT or recovery sessions to get it back to about even and then go again. Whereas what you're saying with peaking and this bell curve is you want to push it hard enough that, that fatigue is high, but then recover enough that you're not just at an even level, but you're in fact in the positive. Your form is in the positive. Yep.

And whether it's a one day race or a period of six weeks, you need to have had your fitness line like we talked about, 100 advanced on that so that you can race at your highest fitness level. If you don't get to that hundred during that period where you're in the racing period, your fitness slowly goes down because you're not actually training the same as you were when you were preparing for the actual A race. So it's really important that you do all the hard work in almost all the pre season training, get your fitness up to as high as it possibly can with fatigue. So that come the form period where you want to race well, you've got the fitness, it is slowly losing fitness, but you've got no fatigue. And that's what actually enables you to really get the outcome that you're after.

So we have kind of extreme ends of the scale, don't we? We have athletes that want to just always train and they're too afraid of losing fitness so they don't recover enough. And we have athletes that kind of burn out a little bit and then want to recover, but then do it too much and they, they go, I just want to break. But then they, they kind of have too much of a period off and they're not doing the simmering like you're saying, they're just losing all the stuff that they worked hard to get and so they're just going to have to come from further back again. It's going to be harder to peak.

Yeah, that's a, that's a great point. And, and we do get a mixture of those kind of athletes. And you know, my message, my clear, simple message is if, if you want to be a sustainable, competent athlete over a period of months and years and decades, and you know, let's face it, that's my particular goal is to be at the top end of my performance for as long as I possibly can. But I'm at an advantage because I understand that I can't be in the best form of my life all the time. And I accept that. And that's one of the things I said at the start, you know, getting, getting the everyday cyclist to accept that is the first, almost, you know, the first stepping stone in understanding how to become a better cyclist for a longer period of time, or triathlete for a longer period of time and the longer you, you can sustain a period of training and racing Each year you build on that base and you become a better athlete as the years go on because of what you've got in the bank in the previous years. And if you can keep that simmering fitness, go continuing along the lines where at any given point, if a race crops up that you might fancy, you can actually come from this really good fitness base. Do a short race ready period, and you are race ready. You're not coming from, as you've just explained and described, you've dropped your fitness down right, you know, to rock bottom because you've. There's been nothing coming up that's inspired you to keep training. And then all of a sudden you, some of your mates say, oh, what about we go and do this race in Europe or, or, you know, there's a Gran Fondo that I'd like to do. You know, you're coming from down here to try and get to where you want to go. The guy who's been simmering along, he's there straight away. And you won't, you won't from down here, get to where you want to be, you'll end up three quarters of the way. So to keep and hold a good level of fitness takes a lot of work. It's not as tiring as building all the time, but maintaining fitness is seemingly boring, but you've got to spice it up by having little mini goals along the way. And certainly having a fitness number is something that inspires me. I want to make sure that I maintain, don't let it drop. But at the same time, I know when I need to rest because I go, you know, with a lot of feelings about how I'm feeling. And, you know, some of the motivated athletes that we have, they're just too motivated to hear or feel their fatigue feelings. And that's the job of, you know, someone who's really doing a good program, is to hold them back so that they can recover well enough. And we've always talked about this in a lot of the podcasts. Without recovery, you can't do the intensity, and without the recovery and the training, you can't have the form. So, you know, they're two distinct things. Training and recovery enable form, there's no doubt about that. But, you know, without, without actually recovery, you can't do the intensity. So. So they go hand in hand and they all end up at that famous word of what form are you in Jordan this week? Are you able to run the best 5k that you want to in the history of your running? And, you know, these are questions you want to ask and you're looking back at what training you've done. Did I have enough recovery? Did I train hard enough? Well, we know and I'm using you as an example because you're actually doing a 5k this week and you know you've been building up to these events that we've been throwing in during the COVID period where we've done stepping stone training blocks, where we've really trained you quite hard and you know the form you're in. From the results on the track, it's easy to see what your 800 time is, what your 600 times are, what your 400 times are. You know all that already. So it gives you confidence that you have been able to train with intensity and we have given you lots of recovery. So your fitness is rising and obviously your form is rising, but your fatigue now is going to be shed because this week is an easy three or four days before we endeavor to test you on the 5K. And you know we know that this formula works because we've done this since March where you've done a 10k, some 5ks, where you have hit PBS almost the whole way along this journey. And we're proving it with just yourself as an everyday runner, how you can manipulate your program with intensity, with frequency, with duration and recovery and enabling you to perform and be satisfied with getting great results. And these aren't a races, these are just little stepping stone races that keep that fitness simmering below. When we come to and your goal has always been the 800 metre track event and we don't even know when those events are going to be on in Victoria. So we are in Queensland at the moment, so possibly you could have an attempt at it there. But if we keep this method going with you as an example, simmering your fitness along with little stepping stone goals, every four or five weeks we're giving you a 5k or a 10k or a 3k time trial to keep you motivated to train towards come the day in November where or December where you get to run your 800, you've got your fitness here and you just have to step up to that race ready. And have we not done this during this period and you want to run that 800, this is what's going to happen. You're way down here and you can't get to the form you want to be and you'll be disappointed again. So this is a much better way of enabling you to get the form and performance you want on race day or Season or period or summer block by keeping the fitness to simmering along. And you've got to do little things like have little B races, C races along the journey and the recovery. So I can't stress that enough that the combination of all of these things and people think it's easy to get, it's easy to get yourself to the right form on race day. It's not, it's really technical. And as well as that, people react differently to tapering to recovery. People need more taper than other people. And practicing that on your other B races, I raced really well on that 10k that you did in June. I look at how did you recover that week? Did we do some easier runs with some high intensity short bursts? Did that suit you? Well, clearly it did. If you do a pb, a lifetime pb, then they're the things you need to look back at to understand what works for you. And you know, that's another interesting topic in itself is, you know, the books will tell you that you need one week taper or two weeks taper to get you to the full form that you need. Well, I say yes, that's correct for a percentage of the population. But you might not be in that average percentage. You might be someone who needs a three week taper or you race better with, you know, two or three days taper. So there's so many things that can contribute to hitting the right form on the day that you want it.

Yeah, there are a lot of factors to it. I guess that's where I want to finish off with and clarify almost a little bit of conflicting info. Because on one hand you say, you know, you can potentially aim to hold form for a period of a summer season like a cyclist could in crit racing. But also as a triathlete, we say you just have to peak for one A race. You can't try and peak for multiple races. It's just not possible. So. But they're a little bit different. So what is a fair expectation of yourself as an athlete to what you can hold and what you can achieve based on knowing those two things well.

And you've given a good example because they're two different sports really. And you know, as a triathlete, if I've got an ironman or a half ironman, that's my A race, I certainly want to perform well at the other B races along that journey. And they're little tests. So I would, you know, if I'm trying to prepare for an ironman, and my plan is it's In a year's time or six months time, depending on how much time you've given yourself. I would want to have, you know, working back from. Let's just say the event is in July and it's now July the previous year. I would want to make sure that the events work. Leading up to that July race, I have three or four events that, that I use as stepping stones to get my form to that a race. So it's a little bit unfair to say that I'm just racing for one race. As a triathlete, I am racing for probably five races, but my expectation isn't the same. It's a training race. Just like Sagan. I know as an example, as a cyclist would do a whole lot of pre races, you go to the Tour down under, and if he does well in it, fantastic. But, you know, he's preparing for probably Paris Roubaix and Tour of Flanders by doing his race in January at the Tour Down Under. And this is what I'm talking about as a triathlete. It may be one race, but, you know, you want to be using a couple of Olympic distances and maybe two half ironmans to really test and practice your execution. You're not in the best form, you've got high fatigue, but there's still races that you want to do well in. So, you know, so what I'm saying is it is one race we're talking about, but it is a journey of other races along the way. And that is sort of exactly the same example of what cyclists have. They possibly have two or three races. They're targeting two probably. You know, I definitely think that, you know, the classic riders, they would be picking Milan, San Remi or Lombardia or Flanders or Paris Roubaix. And they want to win one of those monuments, you know, and probably back up and help their team as a GC rider in one of the Tour Grand Tours. But, you know, they know in themselves they can't do everything. They can't do the whole season. So that's what we're really trying to, you know, summarize. As a triathlete, as in a cyclist, they seem different, but in actual fact, they are very similar. You can't, you know, the message is you can't have every piece of the pie. You have to be selective in which piece of the pie you want to take and use the other pieces of the pie as stepping stones to get to that one last piece that's going to be the best tasting piece, which is the one that gives you the result you want. So, you know, the topic of form is a complex one, but it can be very simple if you understand that there are key ingredients that allow you to hit that peak performance the day you want it.

And not to overdo it is simply the message that I'm hearing from you is don't just try and. Yeah, have too much, too many, too many pieces of the pie. Don't try and overdo it and don't think that you can be different to everyone else and you can be the exception and peak for peek at your best form. For two or three or four big races, you've got to pick one or one or two. And if it's two, it might be either really close together or I guess, really separate. So you can do it, recover and then go again.

Yeah, but that's a, that's a good point. We didn't really talk about splitting the year into two. You know, having a first half of the year with one a race and then having a second half of the year with one a race with a bit of a recovery period in between. That is another way of doing it. And that, you know, a lot of the triathletes, that's what they're faced with because of the, the racing is all year round. You can travel, you know, Southern hemisphere, northern hemisphere for races if you wanted to. You could race all year round. And you know, a lot of the time, if Kona is the goal, it's October and in Australia we have to train through winter to get to Kona as an A race. And that. That is difficult to do, especially if you live in the southern part of Australia. There's just no opportunities to race unless you're willing to travel. So, you know, there's always these restrictions on enabling you to actually execute the program that you want to. So there's many factors that really contribute to the end goal.

Yeah, well, it's a big topic, holding form. Sure. We'll talk about it again soon because there's a lot to discuss. But that is enough for today. Thank you very much for listening. Thanks, dad, for joining me on the video conference. Just to reiterate again, if you want to get access to our structure and programs that will actually help you hold form, just go to getfastpodcast.com and there you can get onto our weekly email list and that's where we send out weekly emails which will help you. And you can get access to our programs there. And if you go to getfastpodcast.com you will also get access to our expert Secrets Cheat Sheet. Cheat sheet of the best tips and advice all the expert guests on our podcast have said all in one PDF document. It's a free download. That's it for this episode. Thanks very much for listening, and we'll see you next time.