How To Thrive (Not Just Survive) In Your 1st Half Ironman 70.3

Welcome back to another case study where we review an athlete's PB improvement or race result to show you exactly what training or racing plan we gave them to help them get there. And obviously, as always, they do the work. But we want to show you our thoughts behind their training plan or racing plan. And today we're talking about an athlete who had two very clear objectives when they came to us, and that was one, to finally see some improvement after just being stagnant for too long, and two, to be able to finish a half Ironman 70.3, but not just finish. Run the whole half marathon and not have to walk it because she did not have the confidence that she could do so. So this athlete will refer to her as Lauren, but for privacy reasons, that's not her real name. She came to us quite frustrated at how hard she was training and how she was seeing no improvement. And she was getting disillusioned with the entire process and was reaching out as a bit of a last attempt with coaches. And naturally, she lacked confidence in coaches, having seen no improvement from her previous coaching. And for a long time, it was desperate to see some gains between testing blocks. So, dad, take us through the first block of training. When she came to us, what do you think she was missing? And then what happened in that first block and. And then specifically that first testing week after her first block with us?

Yeah, I think. I think the program, as we've said many times, if you. If you have a program, that's a good start. So. So regardless of who's coaching you, if you've got a program and it's. It's got some. Some goals and some key aims that you're trying to achieve, then you're on your journey. But it's more than that. You need some attention to detail. And these are the things that we are really adamant about in our coaching program, is to make sure that each athlete is really aware and across their numbers themselves, as well as the coach. And as a journey together, you can really isolate every single session and make sure that you achieve that session and prepare for that session before the session, implement and execute well, and then check that you actually achieve the goal of the session, regardless of what it is, whether it's recovery, whether it's intensity, whether it's endurance, you've got to make sure that you're hitting those. Those numbers and you're in the correct zones. And there could be many reasons why you're not. You know, it could be that you're tired or things going on at work. Or you're unwell, sick, wise, or you're starting to get injured. So that's the reason why we analyze is to find out why you didn't achieve the numbers. And before long you'll get a consistency of, you know, starting to achieve the numbers because all those things are starting to get in line of what your week should look like. And all of a sudden with some accountability in saying, oh, what happened in this session? Why were you out of these power ranges? Or why did you run so fast? Or why did you run so slow? Why did you swim outside the time pace that we were trying to swim at? So when you're actually digging in with the athlete and asking them those questions, then all of a sudden they're on board with oh yeah, what was I meant to be doing today? And so that's a bit of a mindset change from what previously has happened where there's possibly no analysis or checking or even the athletes just doing the session and not really taking much notice of whether they were achieving the goal. So having a program is great, but then the attention to detail is the really key thing about, well, what did happen? What's the purpose of this session? Did I achieve the purpose? And therefore you're getting instant information about a progressive system that you're wanting to implement into your program all the way to your a race. And I think that's kind of the key thing without being critical of other people that I think we do very well and keeping people accountable to where they should be in each session is what the most important part about training is.

Yeah, and that's probably one of the two main things that stood out for this athlete was she was training a lot, but potentially not training to the specificity of the numbers that you need to, to stay accountable to your training zones and to the training zones that are going to help you improve. And then the second part was just probably a lack of just adequate total volume of the training in terms especially running. So she was training probably frequently enough, but the volume wasn't quite there as well as the specificity and intensity. So as a bit of a summary, she came to us in December, only been in the program four months before her half ironman, so not a super long amount of time, but that's okay. We were able to really work with that and get her to goal of having that crack at that race and with the goal of finishing with a smile on her face. And I think the first block kind of tells a real story of exactly what you're just describing. And it's a bit of an irony, there was a key piece of lack of attention to detail that we missed that was kind of crucial to her whole improvement. So can you take us through the first block, kind of what you worked on and then what happened in the first testing week after our first block of training?

Yeah. So as with every athlete, we try to find out where the current level of fitness is by testing, testing them straight away into the program. And everybody who joins the program knows that. And whether you've tested eight weeks ago or three months ago is quite irrelevant because we want to know where you are currently sitting with your form and fitness. So that's the first thing we do. So I should never presume anything and our coaches should never presume anything, and we probably failed in our. And this is, you know, I'm the first person to always admit that we're, you know, if you make a mistake, you want to own it. And, and it's not really a mistake. It's just, it's just not understanding that the athlete didn't realize that when you're training for a triathlon specific event that you would test on the bike you're going to race in, in the triathlon race. So I just presumed that, that she would be on her time trial bike. And I presumed wrong. And she did her first test on a road bike. And the numbers, numbers were whatever they were. And the next time we tested, we tested outdoor, so we tested the first time indoor. Then the next test we tested was outdoor on the velodrome. And I rang up and said, what happened? You were 30 watts lower than you tested indoor. Is there something wrong? Are you feeling okay? And she was quite distraught with her results, and rightly so, because there was something not adding up and just asking questions, you know, did you feel okay? Was it, you know, hard conditions? Did you do something different that you did on the indoor? You know, did you spend no time in your TT position on the indoor bike and this time you're in the TT position the whole time on the, on the time trial bike? And she said, no, I rode my road bike on the indoor session and this time I rode my time trial bike. And so by digging in and asking those questions, which is part of the analysis, isn't it, that's the process that we do, we realized that we were comparing completely two different scenarios. One was an indoor FTP test on a road bike, and another one was an outdoor FTP test on a time trial bike. So there's going to be differences anyway, straight away. Most people we coach can ride more power on their road bike than they can. Than they can on their TT bike. There's many reasons why this happens, but the simple number one reason is because the angle you're sitting on on the road bike is less aggressive, and you can push more power by sitting higher with the angle between your torso and your hip and your legs. And in a TT position, it's really closed. And so unless you've practiced at that position, you will find it harder to ride the same power as you can on a road bike. And then there's the other action, you know, the other items of different power meter and one's indoor, one's outdoor. So we would expect to have differences anyway, but not 30 watts. And. And so, you know, instead of her being distraught and, you know, almost feeling depressed about, not only did she not improve, she went backwards by a massive amount. And so, you know, we almost had to have a counseling session to, to explain that, you know, it's not you, it's the equipment that we're using. And let's just now train to these numbers because these numbers are accurate, even though you actually executed poorly. But it wasn't your fault. You executed thinking that you could start at 180 because that's where you finished at the last test. And so she's doing everything right here except the numbers that she was using were inaccurate. And this is a great example of how it's important to understand what the hell is going on with your data. And then from that day onwards, we trained on a TT bike in the TT position using those numbers. And of course, because she started her first five minutes around 180, she ended up riding the next five minutes at 1:70, then 160, then 140. So it was a complete fade, which is what you would expect if you're riding 20% above.

Just horrible.

Yeah. And I would stop after that. So really getting. That's the sentence I said to her. I said to her, I've learned one thing about you. You are one tough athlete. Because I would have given up, and I don't give up very easily. But after 12 minutes of starting to ride 30 watts lower than I was intending, I don't know if I could have continued. So I've really learned that you are a really tough athlete who can really stick at things. So, you know, and I said, you should. You should take that as a positive. That's one thing we've learned out of this. Anyway, from that point on, we then trained really correctly in all the things we talked about and you wouldn't believe it, just before her a race, she actually rode 180 odd watts which was similar to what she rode indoor on the road bike. And so ironically we ended up getting back to the number that we failed at. So it was great to see over that next period the improvement. And you couldn't wipe the smile off her face because she absolutely understood that she was on the right track, she got her confidence back, she was writing the right numbers and the attention to detail was what caused that. And if we had not dug deep and found out that actually, you know, she wasn't riding the correct bike, you know, I'm sure she would have actually said I don't want to do this race, I'm just not cut out for this. And, and instead we turned her all around and, and you know, she couldn't wait for the race and she was super confident in her preparation. We had a great race plan and you know, in all the testing we did prior to the race, you know, she was on track for, for our goal was to, you know, really have a great day where she was racing to her ability.

Yeah. And I just want to bring up a follow up point on that, is that for most athletes, like you mentioned the TT bike, you are pushing lower power. Sometimes the different power meters mean that some athletes can push high power on the TT bike, but it's, it's very much more often than not that we are saying to athletes, you know, our goal here is to get your TT bike power to as close to your road bike power as possible. And that comes from training. And then so for her to do that, you know, for her to improve that 30 watts again on the TT bike and get it to match what her original road bike power was, is just a huge win. And that gives you a lot of confidence. And just brings up one question a little bit off topic that I didn't plan to ask but we spoke about at the start, you know, attention to detail of power ranges and data intensity in these high intensity sessions. But we also noticed this a lot in the endurance sessions where it's very easy in an endurance rider endurance run to just ignore the data because it's, there's such random rides, you know, you go for a three hour bunch ride and you stopped at traffic lights, the data is all over the shop. There's no consistency. It's really hard to look at one of those sessions and go, well, was the data accurate or not? Because you know, your Average power was 180 watts, but your max power was 650 watts because you had a couple of sprints in there. And so my question to you is, how do you look at an endurance session like that where it's super random and go, well, was I in the right zone or not?

That's a great question. And generally you've got to ask the question back. Well, what was the purpose of the session? Was it endurance ride where we're trying to have pressure on the pedals in zone 2 with no intensity and we're not trying to spike our heart rates, spike our power, then that's really easy. Your normalized power and your average power should be reasonably close together. And the only reason they wouldn't be close together is if you've got a lot of climbing in the ride. But even then, if you stay in the, the range or the zones that you're, you're expected to, because that's what the session asks you to do, then, then you would be able to definitely look at that and go, well, that session was either spot on, too easy or too hard. You could actually extract that data from an endurance session. But if the session was unpredictable periods of high intensity, then the normalized power and the average power can be 50 watts different. And that would be achieving that goal. And so there would be periods where I use an example, you know, sometimes I've got some hill rides where I'm doing a Fartlek style training session where every time I come to a hill, I want to ride somewhere around 90 to 110% depending on the length of the hill, depending on what is in my session. And so therefore I've got periods of 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes where I'm riding at threshold or above it or just below it. So therefore there'll be a big difference between what my normalized power would tell me for the, for the entire ride compared to what my average power would tell me for the entire ride. And so if you've got that big gap, that means you've achieved that goal of that unpredictable high and low power. But if you're, if your, if your goal is just to stay in zone two, you wouldn't want to see that. So, yes, we can definitely see the difference between what you're doing in an endurance ride depending on what the normalized and the average power is feeding back to us.

Yeah, it really just highlights again the need and necessity for attention to detail. So kind of moving on to the running side, again, just a lack of confidence with just such little running improvement, even though she felt like she was running and training frequently enough. But after that first block, she managed to arrive two and a half minutes off her first run. And that was in the first block. So that gives a lot of confidence. When the bike test didn't go so well and that was just a really good result because she came in super frustrated that again, her running wasn't improving. And so kind of talk us through that block and what you think the difference was then and even over the whole training period.

Yeah, and the running's always interesting because people think that the only way to improve your run is to run some intervals and some running hard. And I had a bit of trouble convincing her. And like I do with every other athlete, I must say, it's just not. It wasn't just this athlete, it's pretty much every athlete. I have to really do a really good salesman job. And it's not a salesman's job, but that's actually what I feel like I'm doing. I've got to convince the athlete and trust the process that we're going to train really hard with intensity on the bike and then we're going to get your body used to running more frequently with less intensity than you've been doing before. Most athletes come to us who are doing endurance events such as 70.3, where you could possibly be running for over two hours, and they're spending one session a week on the track running four hundreds, eight hundreds, and we just don't believe that's a necessity for this type of event. So get yourself back to running four or five times a week. But they're all easy runs and they're not trying to get intensity in. They're just trying to get your body used to absorbing and being able to cope with the load from running. It's the musculoskeletal system we're trying to train here, not the cardio system. And I'm saying to the athlete, the bike sessions are going to give us that high intensity cardio output that we're really looking for, that you're huffing and puffing. The swimming session is going to do the same. You should be doing short, hard bursts of threshold and VO2 in the water so that you're at the end of each 100 or 250 meter swim, you're actually breathing hard. And when you're doing the bike sessions, so you might be doing VO2 where you're doing 40/20s or 3015s or 5 minute threshold efforts, you should be breathing hard. Your heart rate should be, you know, at its threshold for the majority of the session. And you know, the, the human body doesn't know whether you're riding, swimming or running in terms of improving your cardiac output. It just knows that you're doing a lot of high intensity. So you're getting that training effect from the swim and the bike and you're getting the skeletal muscular endurance from frequency of running, not from intensity in running. And that was the main thing we changed was getting her to run more. Even though she felt like she was running enough or when I looked back, she wasn't actually running a lot. Two sessions a week maybe we've changed that to five. And you know, they weren't long runs. You know, some of them were 15, 20 minute runs, some of them were 40 to 60 minute runs and some of them were, you know, 90 to 2 hours, 30 runs. But none of them were done with intensity. Except for now and then we had a 5k park run or a 10k time trial where we did do some intensity along that journey. But I know it's a long winded answer, but it's really establishing that we're getting the intensity from other, other ways, other methods and the goal is to be able to run for long periods of time. And it proved to be the actual game changer on race day when she was, you know, she couldn't, she couldn't have that feeling of I'm going to have to stop. You know, I can keep doing this, I can keep running because I've actually got the strength in my muscles and musculoskeletal system which I keep referring to. It's the muscles and bones are strong enough because you've done a lot of that type of training in your sessions. And so when it comes to continuing and it's not physically that you're being slowing down in your or not able to continue running. It's not a physical thing, it's not a strength thing. You're able to keep going because you're not tired, because you've been able to do, instead of doing maybe 15 or 20ks a week, you're actually able to do 30 to 50ks a week of running where you know, you're not breaking down because you're not running four hundreds or eight hundreds where the risk is massive, yet you're getting an overall really well rounded running program without doing too much intensity. So you are strong and capable of holding a pace from start to finish.

Yeah. And I guess if you look at the numbers, that's kind of what it was showing she was probably averaging, you know, in weeks, 10 to 20 kilometers of running per week. Whereas, you know, the program we had, it ended up being 30 plus K's per week most weeks, you know, up to 40, 45. And that when you can do that, that becomes a difference. And on race day that is the difference. Especially when her goal was to, you know, finish the whole half iron, half marathon leg and not walk and be strong enough to have a smile on her face. And that's exactly what happened. So to finish off, give us a bit of a review of actual race day and her ticking off that goal, which was quite a scary goal that half ironman to think about.

Yeah. And we'd done a couple of other lead up races which gave her a lot of confidence because, you know, just, just by not really feeling confident about anything when she first came to us about her training, about the ability to finish races, not no idea about what pace to swim, what power to ride at, what pace to run at, and then getting confidence in that training. So that when you get to race day you actually have a race plan that you know that you can do because you've trained to it and you've got specific sessions that are giving you evidence that you can do it. And that's why we ask people to do a race plan, is to make them look back at what training sessions have they done that prove that they can do these swim paces, bike power numbers and run paces. And they're not fictitious. Hope I can do these numbers. This is what I hope to do on race day. We're not interested in what you hope to do, we're interested in what you have done in training and what those numbers are. And that's our race plan. There's no hope in that. That's actually what you're capable of doing. And so that gave her huge confidence knowing that come race day all she had to do was execute. And you know, when we went and did the race analysis post race, you know, there was excitement because she'd achieved the goal of what she'd set out to do. But you know, typically I've gone in and said to this athlete, this is exactly what we tried to achieve. Fantastic, well done. But now I'm going to put my coach's hat on and talk you through your execution. And you, you actually executed quite poorly on the run and, and you could have done a better job and, and actually felt even better and probably got a better time had you executed a little bit better. And you know, that's Always a hard conversation, but it's worth having because, you know, when she started her run, she actually ran too fast early and faded. And, and it. She. She. Yet she still was able to run the whole way, even by executing poorly. And that is a great example of her strength from her running training. And even though I'm being critical of her execution in a. In a really positive way, I'm saying, you know, had you done this when you were under prepared, you would have had to walk. But because you are so well prepared, even executing a little bit out of kilter with what we wanted you to do, you're still able to hold on. And that's. Remember that example we told her of when she was at the velodrome and she had that horrible execution where she started too high, which it wasn't her fault because. And that was an example of how tough this athlete is. And, you know, that came through on race day. You know, okay, I've made a little mistake, and I think she realized that. And I've got to hang on now. I've got to prove that I can keep running. And, you know, we don't want to execute like that. We want to execute better so that we can actually enjoy the run a lot more. Even though she was enjoying the whole experience. But, you know, but that was, you know, that was something that's super important as to go over that afterwards. And so that in the next race, she knows that. Okay, that time, that pace that I was running at was, you know, a little bit above my level, and I faded, you know, and I don't need to do that next time. I can just stick with the numbers. Even though I felt really, you know, the answer is I felt good. That was a pace that I think I could sustain, or it turned out you couldn't. You know, that's not attacking the person, that's just attacking their race plan. And that's one thing we need to get across to a lot of our athletes. If you don't listen to this advice, you'll keep repeating this in the next race. And that's super important that we don't. We find out what you did well, what you did poorly, and adjust it for the next race.

Yeah, and she. Honestly, every time I saw her at the event, she had a massive smile on her face. And she came home in six hours, 10 minutes and an awesome result for your first half. Ironman 70.3 and achieved those two goals in the first four months of training. So just, you know, regardless of the path getting there, where there's some interruptions, which is hat which. And some. Some highs and lows, which happens on every training program. She achieved her two goals to start with, which is really exciting. So any last notes on this before we finish?

No, I think you've summarised it very well. I would like to say that it was a real pleasure with this athlete and she'll know who she is when she's listening to this. The main thing that I really enjoyed was her determination. She came with a question of, why aren't I improving and can I improve? It feels like I've reached my potential because I've really trained as well as I possibly think I can train. And I said to her, look, I've got no idea because I don't know you yet, but let's just see where this journey takes us. And at the end of the day, when I first started seeing what she was doing, what she was capable of doing, her ceiling was miles away. She had way more to go and she's got way more to go now. And I think that that's one of the things that if you start, for those who are Ted Lasso fans believe, and you've got to have that confidence in, trust the process, stick with it, be consistent. And there is. There is a ceiling somewhere. But we're not, you know, most of us haven't ever reached that ceiling. And if you're willing to put in the work, you will get the result you want eventually. And it may not be this race, it may not be the next race, but down the track, if you stay true to the course. You know, there's so many examples, you know, in the world of sport that are happening. I think a female cyclist who I think is. Vollering was it, who won. Flesh Malone. She tried seven times and won her eighth attempt. She comes second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh.

Cassia Neuroderma. Yep.

Cassia Pneumoderma. Sorry. And, you know, they're examples of athletes who are, you know, at the elite level and just, you know, putting themselves out there and eventually their time comes. And that's the thing I want to get across when we're doing some of these case studies that, you know, you've got to do a lot of things well. You've got to. You've got to trust the process. But if you are willing to put the work in, you know, you can achieve whatever you want.

Spot on. That's a great way to finish. And if you are willing to put the work in and if you want to find where your ceiling is, and more specifically, be held accountable to specific details in your numbers. Then you can apply to get coached by us. Go to trivelocoaching.com you can apply to be coached there. We'll have a conversation. And our guarantee, as always, is if you don't improve your FTP in the first eight weeks and the coaching is on us, you get your money back. And make sure that you're on the right bike, because we can't guarantee you'll get an improvement if you're on the wrong bike. But that's it for us, this case study. Thanks, as always for listening and we'll see you next time.