Joe Friel & His Famous Training Bibles

This podcast is brought to you by Trivelo Coaching, where we help triathletes and cyclists like you train smarter to race faster. I'm your host, Jordan Donnelly, and on my left is former Australian Ironman champion and head coach of Trivalo Coaching, Jared Donnelly. Today's episode we are so excited to bring you a very, very special guest, someone that we respect a lot and that is what could be considered the founding father of triathlon training and training principles for triathletes and cyclists specifically. He's one of the founding guiding coaches on Power for cyclists and triathletes. He's written a whole lot of books and the man is Joe Friel himself. Joe Friel is perhaps one of the most famous coaches in the entire triathlon history and industry. He's one of the most accomplished coaches. He is the co founder of Training Peaks, the app we love and use so much and base our whole coaching on, basically. And he's the author of the Triathletes Training Bible as well as 17 other books with one more in the pipeline at the moment. You find many of his books online and they are all exceptional novels written about some of the best training philosophies and principles that can abide by to help improve yourself. And a lot of our coaching philosophies come from Joe Friel himself and that's why we were so excited to have him on today. And so to be able to chat to for an hour to the guru was a really special thing for us. And it was just great to see that a lot of the philosophies we've evolved here at Trivelo are still similar and on the same page almost to the word as Joe Friel. So, Dad, I know that you really started learning from Joe back in the 90s and early 2000s and have continued to do so since then. So you enjoyed this chat as much as I did.

Yeah, it's an interesting one. It's almost like Joe was a peer and someone I looked up to. We started triathlon at the same time in the 80s and he was a trailblazer. His ideas were innovative even then. But the thing that I admire the most about Joe, and he's done a lot of things, he's written a lot of books, he's helped a lot of people, is his ability to continue to learn and grow. And that's a really important thing. And to think that, you know, everything is going to leave you, you're going to be left behind the rest of the world. And he is continually researching for Better ways to. To help his athletes improve. And I have the same philosophy. I don't know everything. I'm trying to learn more and more about how athletes tick to make them perform better on race day, what works, what doesn't work. I've experimented that many times on myself and on you and your brothers as well. And I just love the way he doesn't sit up there as if he knows everything. He is absolutely researching new and better, faster ways to. To. To help people improve. And I think that's his greatest attribute. And, and whether you're a cyclist or whether you're a triathlete, there is some absolute gold nuggets in what he said in the last hour, in the hour to come. And, and I look, we can learn everything and anything from. From anybody. And that is the philosophy he has, and it's a philosophy I also have, and I learn a lot today. It's made me question things that I'm doing in our own program, and I think that's a good thing. And he said it himself, he apologizes for things that he wrote in books one, two, and three, because now he's changed his opinion on the way we should train and things evolve and you do a better version of what you had as a, as an idea, and you just develop it. And these are the things that I think is his greatest attribute is willingness to develop and evolve as a coach. And, and he's got some. Lots. He's got lots and lots of good information.

Let's tell a little bit about his story because we do want to give a bit of more detail into his background because it is a really cool story. Basically, he was really into the sport, science and training he. His entire life, so much so that he quit his job. I think he was a teacher and he started his own running shop in Colorado because he was just that passionate about sport of running. He hadn't actually hit triathlons yet. And he ran this running shop and out of the shop. He would help. This is really where his coaching career started. He would help people prepare for upcoming, upcoming races, whether it was fun runs or challenges or marathons. And he start. We talked about this a little bit in the episode. He started a weekly newsletter and he would release tips on how to improve as a runner. And that's where really where his coaching career started.

Yeah, we're talking about the 1980s here. And, you know, he. He was, you know, a man who had a lot of conviction about his ability to, to do well. And, and one of the things he did was quit his job as a, as a, you know, a teacher in a, in a school and, and opened up a running shop. And you know, he had no, no experience in retail and you know, he was quite successful. There wasn't a lot of specific running shops in the world at that time. He was one of five, I think, in the world that was just for runners and he found that, you know, sure, he was selling a lot of running shoes, but the irony of the story is that most of the people would come in to ask him about training and they would buy a pair of shoes as well. But, and he, he developed this enjoyment from talking to people about their training and, and he found that he had, you know, some really good ideas and he was implementing some, some training schedules and plans for these people and they were beginning to be successful. And, and this was the start of his journey really. And you know, you, you make decisions like giving up your teaching job to do something else and it's, it's, it's a career changing, game changing, lifestyle changing decision that you make. And, and looking back now, I think it's one of the best things he's ever, he ever did and there were times there where it was very difficult. And he says that openly that, you know, but the main thing is that I can see Joe has been relentlessly consistent. Whatever he's set his mind to, he's followed through. And, and he's, you know, developed the running shop and then opened up a triathlon shop by buying the shop next door, which was a bike shop. And that was spectacularly unsuccessful, he said, because the world wasn't ready for a triathlon shop. People didn't know whether it was a bike shop or a running shop or a triathlon shop. They had no idea what his specialty was. And I think he learned a lot of lessons from that experience of being reasonably unsuccessful, from being reasonably successful as a running retail shop. But he definitely found that he had a passion for coaching people and for giving programs to people based in triathlon. And I think that was a turning point as well that, you know, the triathlon shop might not have been successful, but it certainly gave him the opportunity to coach more people. And that's the next step that he took was look, if I want to be a full time coach and that's what he had aspirations to do. He still had to work, you know, other jobs to keep his coaching career alive, to make enough money to live. And then it just really evolved from that point onwards.

He does say pretty similar story to what you Say then a turning point in his life was friend convinced him to try his hand at a triathlon in 1983. And he just like everyone else, just got hooked. You know, he said the atmosphere, the fact that you're doing three events, he just found it was an unbelievable sport to be a part of and so enjoyable. From that point on, he got hooked into triathlons and he had gained a following through his, through his newsletter and by the late 80s, early 90s, he was already a renowned coach with a big following. And because of that, he was one of the first people to really start trialing and testing the power meter. And when that came along and yeah, from, from that point onwards, he was really, he's really had a big hand in revolutionizing a lot of things in the industry and with regards to power meters, with regards to co founding training peaks, and that's what's led him to this point as being one of the founding fathers of triathlon training, I would.

Say, I think you're right, Jordan. You know, the next step that he took was to put all his thoughts into a book and, and I think that was a key turning point in his, in his career as a, as almost the guru. He put all his ideas into a book and, and you know, it was for triathletes swimming, biking and running. And then the next thing he did was, you know, I can do the same thing for cyclists. And you know, he called it the training, the triathlon training bible and the cycling training Bible. And it was, it was, you know, every, every budding triathlete had Joe's book on their shelf, including me. And I learned lots of things from, from the way he thought about training in the 80s and, and I used a lot of those principles that he was putting in his book on myself and, and they were very successful principles and you know, adding my own versions to things and, and trying to evolve and, and that's what, what Joe's done And you know, 17 or 18 books later, I think, you know, he certainly has established himself as someone you would look to for, for help and, and information on, on how to become a better version of yourself. And I think that at the end of the day is what he's really his shining achievement is.

So without further ado, we will actually bring you the man himself, Joe Friel. And for me, it was such an enjoyable chat because for me, for any tribal athlete and for anyone that listens to the podcast, I'm sure you will find the same experience I had with this episode in that I felt like I was just listening to the USA version of Coach Jarrett Donnelly, which was kind of special to hear you kind of use the same philosophy, same words, and more importantly, the same care for athletes. You can hear some of the same principles or sentences that he was saying that we've said plenty of time. You specifically have said plenty of times on this podcast. And that was really encouraging. So we really enjoyed this episode. Without further ado, here is Joe Friel. Joe Friel, a very big warm welcome to our podcast. Thank you very much for coming on.

Thank you very much, Jordan. Glad to be here.

We always start with a bit of a bang of a question, and that is, what does the sport of triathlon mean to you?

Oh, man, I go way back with triathlon. It really became my life for many, many years. I started running back in the 70s and in the early 80s, 1980, opened a running store. 1983, I took down, I bought the bike store next door to my running store, took down the wall between the two and had what was probably the first triathlon store in the world. The world wasn't ready for a triathlon store then. And the reason I did that was because I had hired some guys to work in my running store who were triathletes, among some of the very first in the US and they got me turned on to the sport. So I tried it and sure enough, I fell in love with triathlon also. And so I started racing and that led to buying the bike store and eventually all the stuff that's happened since then, it's just been a long career of being involved in the sport. And it's been, for me, it's just been just like gift from heaven, quite honestly. It's been I enjoy doing, I like working with athletes and I enjoy coaching. So everything, it's kind of like fell together all at the same time. For me, back a long time ago, 40 years ago, I was just going.

To say, and I'm going on from that particular point, that you've made things evolve, don't they, over the journey? And is it the same philosophy that you had as a coach? Let's put your coaching hat on for a second here. When you first started helping runners and then going into helping triathletes, your philosophy then and what you know now, after 40 years of doing that, is there much difference from what you can look back on how you were coaching athletes in the beginning?

Oh, world of difference. Yeah. It has certainly evolved and continues to evolve. You're never done with it. It's always a Learning experience, as with almost everything in life, that's just the way it is when you're coaching. And my philosophy back then really wasn't well defined. I wasn't exactly sure who I was or what I was supposed to be doing, except for an athlete, for a race. And so I experimented a lot. I always started the experimentation with myself. If I try something out to see if it works, I would try it with me. Then I would try with my son Dirk and see how it worked for him. And if it worked for both of us, then I would try it on an athlete I thought it might work for and see how it worked for him. And eventually. So everything just kind of evolved that same way of just all this experimentation all the time, of how to do all this stuff. And from that grew a philosophy about how to coach. But didn't start off being a philosophy. It started out just being happenstance. Let's just try things and see what happens. And now it's evolved into a way I see the world, and sometimes I have to stop myself and say, you know, it's time to rethink what you're doing. Are you sure this is the right way to do it still? Because things do change. And from time to time I make a decision that, you know, that's just not the way to do it. I'm sorry I said that in that book. I'd like to apologize for having said that 20 years ago. But unfortunately, I can't go back and rewrite a book 20 years ago to make it correct then. But so I'm kind of like stuck with all the stuff I said in the last 40 years. Because it does change. It keeps on changing all the time.

That's funny, because that's the exact same as the way we kind of operate. You know, dad has started with himself experimenting, and then I'll probably pop the next experimentation, and then if it passes that test, it'll go on to an athlete. So what would you say, to summarize, kind of your core principal philosophies? Now, I know that's a really difficult question to answer, but wrapping it all up to what you've. What you've been changing and come to a point now?

Yeah, this is actually a good subject for me. I'm right now working on a project that has to do with kind of trying to professionalize the sport, the profession of coaching I am working on. This is a mass project. It is going to take about a year and a half to do all this. One of the things we started out with in this project was talking to coaches about defining their style of coaching, their methodology of coaching, and their philosophy of coaching. Of those three, philosophy is the most difficult. Everybody kind of struggles with trying to come up with what their philosophy is all about. As I mentioned, mine evolved over time, what it has become, and I would say it's been this for probably close to 20 years, although I didn't really define it until maybe a dozen years ago. My philosophy is that which is measured improves. That's kind of the way I see the world. That also came about because I realized very early in my coaching that if I could figure out what was holding back a client from achieving his goal, I called that a limiter. This thing that stopped them from achieving their goal. In other words, if this wasn't the situation right now for this athlete, he could already achieve the goal, wouldn't need me. So if I can figure out what these things are that are standing between the athlete and success, and I can, if you will fix these things, then the athlete can achieve the goal. And so I start measuring those things, those things that I know or feel are standing in the way of success. And from that, from that methodology evolved a philosophy which is that which is measured improves. If I find a thing that needs to be improved, I start measuring it. I talk to the athlete frequently about that thing. I look for this thing all the time or things. It may be a lot of things, not necessarily physiological. It could be psychological, it could be nutritional, it could be lifestyle, can be all kinds of things. But if I can fix these things, then the athlete achieves the goal. So that which is measured improves is my philosophy.

That's brilliant. One of the things that leads me to think about that is how the importance of goal setting, and we hear and we read how important it is to have goals and set a target. And I'm a believer in that as well. And it gets me out of bed. I want to get on the starting line and know that if I look back, I've trained, you know, the way I wanted to, and I've arrived at the race day in the shape that I want to be because I've set myself a target and a goal. You might have some athletes, and we definitely have some athletes that they set goals that are possibly out of their reach. If you come across that and. And an example I can think of is someone who says, I want to. I want to go to Kona. I want to qualify for Kona. And. And you. You look at their. Their level of ability in their particular Age group, and you just see that at this particular time, they have no chance. How do you go about dealing with that?

That happened to me in 1992, is the first time it ever happened to me. I had a athlete who came to me. Great guy. Um, I really liked him, but his goal was to qualify. And I began looking at data from his previous races and realized. Came to realize that this is not realistic. He's really. This is something that would be an amazing goal, but almost be something that was kind of, like, impossible to achieve for him. I can certainly understand why he went. I knew this guy's history, and I knew how he came to this point in time. And it was a lifestyle issue. It had to do with his life. It had to do with his family. It was a very, very deep issue for him. He had lost his son in an auto accident. And I won't go through the whole story, but he was dealing with that. And he came to realize the way to get out of this depression was to qualify for Kona. So I'm now dealing not only with an athlete who wants to do something which is difficult, borderline impossible, but his life somewhat depends on it. Not easy. This is gigantic challenge. I didn't want to come out and say to him, you know, this is not going to work. You cannot qualify. I'm just not going to say that to the guy. So we started looking at data, and so I told him that there was one thing he should do, and that's to go back to all the qualifying races and look for athletes he's competed against and how he's done with them, who've qualified, how his times compare with other athletes who qualified, especially in races he has done. And give me some feedback on what you think the opportunity is that the likelihood is of you achieving this goal. I want to give an idea where we're starting from, and I'm going to let you be the one who decides where we are right now. So he did that, and this went on for a couple of weeks and finally came back to me. And he came to the realization that this was really not something that was possible. Didn't change his desire to do it. He still wanted to do it. He wanted me to help him become the best athlete possibly could, which I was certainly willing to do. But it was just something that was going to be a long, long reach for him to ever get to that point, if he ever did. As it turned out, he actually won the raffle the next year, and so he was able to get in the race without even qualifying. So I flew over to Kona to support him. He's just a great guy and I wanted to be there with him. And he made the cutoff all the way through the race. Made the midnight cut off. I walked with him to the finish line and it was like an ecstatic moment in his life. This was like one of the proudest moments of his life to finish Iron Mantona. He since then has gone back every year. That was 1993. He's gone back every year since 1993 to be there for Kona. With the exception course of this year. He's a physician and so he went so far as to start a seminar for physicians in his field. They would come over to Kona the week before the race. He would make money on this, having all these doctors pay to be there. He would give them a one week seminar. He would take all the money that he made from this and give it to the Ironman Foundation. He wouldn't keep a penny. It all went to Ironman. His life revolves around Ironman to this day. I've never known anybody who is so involved with the sport as he is. Even to the point of giving away money and taking a loss every year he would do this just so he could be of assistance to the race. So he's an amazing individual. He's still a very good friend of mine. He occasionally will have me go over with him and be there the week of Kona for him and which is a real honor for me to be there with him because this is his life is the Ironman. It's an amazing story.

It is an amazing story. It's great. You've told it and you've coached a lot of people in your 40 odd years. You must have so many stories of relationships that you've built with your clients. And obviously it's a professional relationship but. But it goes deeper, doesn't it? You form a bond with almost everybody and you get to know them. You get to know what their intricacies are. They're good, they're bad. Tell me about that journey that you've had. And I'm imagining that's what gets you up every day because you seem to me like you just love helping people and that seems to be your core principle.

It is one of my business philosophies if you talk about separate from my coaching philosophy is that you get back what you. What you give away. And so my. What I've always done with my business over the years is try to give away as Much as I could. Somebody has a question, I don't care if they're paying me money or not, I'm going to answer the question. Help them as best I can. Can't always help them, but sometimes I try to do as best I can. So that is certainly true. My clients have become some of my closest friends. I've got many, many clients that go back like the other fellow, go back 30 or more years, who I stay in touch with, who we are, just very good friends. Some of my best friends have been athletes I've coached over the years. And so it's been just a gift to me to be in this profession and meeting all the people I've met and, and helping them achieve their goals, hopefully, and being a part of their lives, you really become very much involved in somebody's life as a coach. You're not just like a doctor or somebody outside providing a service. You're really involved in a person's life trying to figure out how they can do something which is extremely important to them. And to be a part of that and be allowed into that person's life is like. It's like an amazing gift. So, yeah, it's ongoing.

What are the things, if you could recollect over the journey, what are the things that are holding some of these clients that you've had back from achieving their goals? Is there anything you could identify that if they could only do this better, they would actually achieve what they're trying to aspire to?

There are lots and lots of things. But let me just narrow it down to the biggest thing, the one that I almost have always had to deal with with athletes who have high goals and that has to do with lifestyle. Basically find I have to get involved in the athlete's lifestyle to help them achieve their sport goal. For example, if athletes who came to me over the years didn't come to me because they wanted to, to just Finish a local 5k, I never saw those people. I always saw the person who wanted to qualify for Kona, the person wanted to be on the podium at Worlds, who wanted to win a national championship, et cetera, et cetera. Those are the people I always saw. So they have extremely high goals and the risk of not achieving their goals is very, very high also because there's. At that level, it's extremely difficult to perform like that unless everything comes together just right. So the first conversation I always have with an athlete, it seems like, has to do with their lifestyle. Tell me about your life. That's where I start. And it's little things. It's like, you know, how much sleep do you get at night, what do you eat, when do you eat? All kinds of things like that. And what always, almost. Almost always comes down to is I discovered the athlete just got too much going on in their lives. And so what I tell them is, and this is sometimes hard to take, and a lot of people really kind of are repulsed by this idea. But what I tell them is, you can only have three things in your life with that goal. If your goal is to qualify, if your goal is to be on the podium at Worlds, to win a national championship, you can only have three things in your life. You can have your family. We're not going to do away with that. That comes first. You can have your career, you're not going to quit your job, and you can have training, nothing else. That's hard to say to somebody because I'll have people say to me, well, I really want to be on the local homeowners association because I think I can do a lot to help the community. Great. Why don't you save it until after you've qualified? That'd be a super goal. After you qualify for right now, let's just kind of put it on the back burner. Or they come to me and say, you know, I'd like to volunteer for this nonprofit organization in my community, which I've got a lot of strong feelings for. I've been giving them money, but money's not enough. I want to volunteer my time. Excellent. Let's wait till after you've gotten on the podium at Worlds, then you can do that, and that'll be a super thing to do. But until then, only three things in your life. Until then, only three things in your life. Why? Because as soon as we start adding the fourth thing, a fifth thing, a sixth thing to your life, something's got to give someplace. What always winds up giving, people give up is sleep. I'll go to bed later and I'll get up earlier. So instead of getting eight hours of sleep a night or whatever it may be, when they're doing three things, now they've got five things and they're getting six hours of sleep a night. Well, guess what? Sleep is when fitness occurs. Sleep doesn't occur during the workout or immediately after the workout. I mean, fitness doesn't. It occurs while you're sleeping. So if you're not getting sleep, we're not getting fitness. We're wasting some of our workout time. So that's the reason for all this. I'M not trying to be a bad guy and keep you from doing things you want to do in your life. But you told me you want to do X and I'm telling you the only way you can do X is if you abide by my rule, which is only three things in your life until you've achieved that goal that I would say that's 90% of the people I talk to. That's the conversation we start with right there. There are some who've already figured this out and they've got it narrowed down. In that case, I start looking for more deep things. Their nutrition, their, their, their training, how they've trained in the past, group workouts, all kinds of stuff I start looking at. But that's number one almost always for athletes. They're not getting enough sleep.

I'd like to touch on the sleep thing a bit more. And do you have any data on how much is required? Because from what I've read and heard is that, you know, it is individualized. Some people can recover better off slightly less, although some people believe they can perform well and slightly less, even though that's not true. So for the age grouper, for example, how much sleep do they need to be recovering properly and get that fitness gain?

You're probably right. There's not a lot of research on this, but it's probably individualized. We know, for example, there is some research on, for example, teenagers. Teenagers need a lot of sleep. We're probably talking about 10 hours of sleep at all, or even more per night because their body is going through this process of changing. That's what sleep is all about is it's changing to become a new person when you wake up in the morning. And so the younger people really need a tremendous amount of sleep. And as we get older, that probably becomes less as we go through time, through the decades. But I just tell people you need to be aiming for at least seven hours of sleep a night. Let's not try to make this too complicated. We're not going to do a research study on you to figure out what works best for you, because we really don't know how to do that research study. Let's just make an assumption. The assumption is you need at least seven hours of sleep a night. That means if you've got a 5am or let's say 5.30am, more common master swim in the morning, you need to get to bed at least seven hours before you get up. So if you got to get up at 5am to make it to the pool in time. You've got to be in bed by 10pm Got to be in bed by 10pm I prefer 9pm just to make sure. Gives a little bit of a pad there to make sure it works out. But 10pm at the latest. So that's kind of the way I talk to the athlete is we've got a minimum we're aiming for. If we can get more than that, fantastic. And if I discover they're not doing well down the line, I may assume that they need more. If they're only getting seven, will start aiming for eight at that point. So it's a moving target, but I would say seven is probably a minimum.

You found, Joe, that when you've tried to get this philosophy across to your athletes who, you know aren't getting enough sleep and they start to change it, have you found that they've improved?

Definitely. You very definitely see it in the athlete and how they respond to training, how they feel when they do a workout. Start asking questions about how the workout go. How did you feel coming into it? What was your mental approach to the workout? How hard did it seem? And you compare that with when you weren't coaching them and they were doing similar workouts, but they were doing things that were, I hate to say wrong, but they were wrong. Not getting enough sleep, doing too many hard workouts, that kind of stuff. For. Start seeing a compilation of all these things going on with their training, I'll eventually see they're accomplishing more in the workouts, they're making greater progress. So it's a lot of things. It's not just sleep. There's a lot of things going on. It's hard to. It's hard to differentiate and say it's just sleep because there's so many things that are going on. You start coaching somebody, you're making changes in lots of things and those things all add up to being better performance.

Let's just dig a little bit more into some of those other things. And, and we totally agree. It's never one thing that improves the athlete. It's always a combination of a lot of little things that they do well. And, and I really want to hear your ideas and I know your philosophy because I, I've understood and read about it for, for decades. And I, and I, I don't. I have no shame in saying I copy a lot of what your philosophies have been because I trust that it's been successful for me. And that's one good reason. But the idea that athletes, they just train too Hard and then they don't train hard enough and they don't rest hard enough, they don't recover hard enough. Just give us a summary of how you think you've evolved. Your idea of the train harder and recover harder.

Yeah, when I first started coaching, it was kind of like the issue was how many hard workouts could you fit in in a week. That was pretty much the way I saw it. And so I not only overwhelmed my clients, overwhelmed myself with training to the point that you'd eventually break down. I had probably every running injury that's ever been known to runners. Over the course of humankind on this planet. I've experienced every leg injury there is back when I was training that way. And I learned over time I just couldn't do that. I had to back off and make sure the workouts that were the most important were the ones that I was most prepared to do and could give the best performance to. When I could do that, then I started getting better race performances. Also, the athlete who tries to win the workout, I have always told my athlete is going to lose the race. If you're out there always trying to beat somebody in the pool, beat somebody on the bike, beat somebody on the run, even though all it is is a workout, you're destined to lose when it comes to the race because you're working too hard. You look at what's happened to the best athletes in the world, you look at what they've been doing in recent years, they've been turning something like gigantic amounts of time very slow and easy. And I mean very easy stuff that would be embarrassing for most athletes to do. And the athletes who are some of the best athletes in the world, that's what they do on an almost daily basis, is they train very slow and easy because they've learned what that means is when it comes time to do a hard workout, it can be truly hard. They can truly push their limits on those days. So what I've kind of evolved over the years, especially with my athletes I've worked with who are age group athletes. So I call it a five, two approach to training. So five days a week they train easy and two days a week they train hard. The five days easy must be easy. I would encourage them not to even do it with anybody else all by yourself. Stay away from other people. Other people will screw you up. If you go for a ride with somebody, it'll become a half wheel race. Person put their wheel halfway in front of yours, you put yours halfway in front of theirs. And this Continues for the entire workout. It's no longer an easy workout. It's becoming harder and harder and harder. Same thing with running, same thing with swimming. So I say five days a week, you need to be doing it by yourself. It needs to be very easy. Now if you do it with somebody else, it needs to be somebody you can trust to go easy. And those people are hard to find. Where I live, I refuse to train with anybody on my easy days. Somebody says, hey, let's go for easy ride. I know what that means. That means moderately hard, and I am not going to do it. So I just turn them down, say, how about we meet you on Wednesday when I do my hard ride, and we'll do it together then? Then we can go hard together and we'll kind of, like, help each other. But when we do an easy day, we actually hurt each other. We don't help each other. So I've kind of evolved. This five, two thing, it's along the lines of what we've been calling polarized training. The 80, 20. It's almost 80, 20. It's like 70, 30 is what works out to be, but it doesn't have to be precise to the number. Doesn't have to be exactly 80, exactly 20. And I found it works for most athletes. It's just an easy way of deciding what we're going to do in training. Five days easy by yourself, two days hard. And if you want to go with somebody else, perfect. So that's the way I've evolved.

We can understand where that evolution has come from, because unless you make it that specific and say it's five, two, that clearly people won't listen and do it. But you are training for three sports, so how can you train hard enough for three sports in two days only? What's actually happening on those two hard days? And people would say, how am I getting enough out of the week?

Yeah, we're doubling up on the two hard days. They're doing two hard workouts in a day, and it depends on what they're training for. If they're training for an ironman, that's completely different than training for an Olympic distance race. So I'm going to design workouts that I can do two of them in the same day. It's going to be maybe going to start off with a run workout, a hard run workout, first thing in the morning, later in the afternoon, come back with a hard bike workout. They're not going to be the same systems. The run workout may have been something along the lines of Aerobic capacity, which is fairly high. Intense workout on the track, doing intervals. For example, the afternoon workout on the bike is going to be more like the lines of muscular endurance, anaerobic threshold type of stuff, zone six, seven sort of thing. So that's what we're going to do on the bike in the afternoon. So it'll always be two workouts a day. And I'll rotate which workouts we're doing back to back. Some of these will be bricks, a bike run workout where they're going to bike hard and come off the bike and run hard. And we'll define what that means for them on that particular workout, how long it is on each leg and how intense it is. But that's the whole idea is to make sure we're getting in. What they're wind up getting is four workouts a week in those two days that are quality workouts. And they're coming into those two days fresh and rested because they've been keeping it nice and easy all the time.

That's gold. That is exactly what we want our listeners to hear. And it's always good coming from someone else rather than from me. And, and let's just dig a little bit further into. You started to talk about, you know, it might be different for Ironman, it might be different for sprint, it might be different for olympic and even 70.3 the intense sessions. Is there a difference if you're doing Ironman as compared to Olympic?

Is.

Is the intensity for Ironman a little bit lower? Say zone 45 instead of zone 67 or are you still getting your Ironman people to do some zone 6, 7 work? What's your thoughts on that?

Well, it depends on what time of the season we're in. Base training is certainly a lot different from what I would have the athlete doing in the last 10, 12 weeks before the race. What I call the build period. And so if we talk about just the build period, for example, when things are becoming much more specific to the race, I'm starting to do things that are specific to the race. So for example, on the bike, what I would have the athlete do, first of all, I require everybody I coach to have a power meter.

It's the same as us get a.

Power meter, They've got to have a heart rate monitor, they've got the speed and distance device, GPS to running. They don't want to buy one of those things. I'll help you find a different coach, but it's not going to be me. So you got to have those three things. Because I've got to know what's going on. I don't care if you look at it really or pay much attention to it, all the data. But I've got to know what's going on. The data is for me, not for you. So I've got to see those numbers. And so consequently, let's say we're training for an ironman and it's an age group athlete. I know on the bike, this athlete's going to have to be between something like 60 and 70% intensity factor when they do their long rides. Some portion of the long rides, not the whole long ride at that intensity, but some portion of the workout's going to be 60, 70%. Because on race day that's what they've got to do. If they don't get to 60%, they're going to have a hard time making the cutoff. If they go above 70%, they're either going to be on the podium, which is great, or they're going to walk the marathon. So that becomes something I want to ingrain. I want the athlete to come to understand exactly what this feels like. When I'm driving between 60 and 70% on a longish ride, what does that feel like? So if the battery fails that day on their power meter, I want them to be able to do it even without the power meter, still ride 60 to 70%. So some days I'll have them put a piece of tape over the power meter so they can't read the numbers and I tell them to ride 60, 70%. Then when we get done, I compare what they did with what their numbers were. So they start getting feedback on how it feels and being able to do what's required, even if you don't have a power meter. So that becomes the whole thing is to train them. And I believe the bike is the key. In triathlon, the bike is the key. Basically, half the race is on the bike. If you screw up the bike, the race is screwed up because that's half the race. You can get by with screwing up the swim, it only makes up roughly 20% of the race. You can even get by with screwing up the run to a certain extent. Not as much. It's roughly 30% of the race, but the bike is half the race. We've got to get this right. So that's what I'm always aiming for is we're doing a race specific workout, especially on the bike. That's what we've got to aim for is this intensity factor that you've Got to be in. And we're going to try to narrow that down. We know it's going to be 60 to 70% unless you're a podium contender. 60 to 70%. If we narrow that down to being high 60s and I know they can do the whole thing in high 60s and still come off and run, then we aim at that. They become 67%, 68%, 69%. That becomes the workout. If I find they can't do that, it's got to be lower. 60, 61, 62, 63. That's what we aim at. I want them to become very comfortable with what's required of them in the race so that on race day they can repeat it. They can do it. Exactly. They need to do it and not be left guessing what they're supposed to be doing on race day. It should be that they've done it so many times in turning that when they come to the race, it's nothing new at all. And we have that conversation before the race. This is just exactly what we've been doing in training. Nothing's new here. You don't have to, you don't have to experiment, find out anything at all. We've already done it. So all you got to do is go out and do what we did in training and you've got your race. That's all there is to it. And you've got to teach. That's those other things you got to teach also. Don't get caught up in a race, don't try to beat people on the bike, don't try to beat people on the run, swim, et cetera. You got to find your race and we're going to, we're going to learn to do that race.

Do you fit those race specific intensity sessions on a Tuesday or Thursday? Because that's not high intensity. It's, you know, especially at an ironman level at 60 to 70%. It's not high intensity, but it's not recovery either. So you can't do it on one of the easy days. But it's not quite high intensity enough for the Tuesday, Thursday. And if we looked at a 70.3 training example, it would be between 75 and 90. 90% for. Yeah, for an age group 70 to.

80, typically for that for half, depending on who the athlete is. But yeah, that, that becomes a hard workout because now, now we're training for. Not only is it, it's a moderate intensity. 60, 70% is moderate. However, we're doing a long ride. When you start doing things that are beyond three hours, three and a half, four, four and a half, five hours and you're holding 60, 70%. That is a hard workout. It's no longer easy. 60, 70% for an hour is easy. It's not a big deal. Four hours, different story. So intensity is not always the same for every duration. As the duration becomes longer, the intensity that becomes hard moves down the scale. 60 to 70% for an Ironman distance bike is a hard workout. So that's what I'm training for. So that's one of those hard workouts.

And so that gets done on a Tuesday or Thursday.

Yeah, it does have to. Tuesday, Thursday.

Sorry.

Yeah, it could be. Usually it's more like Wednesday, Saturday or Thursday, Sunday. I try to get at least two days, three days between the hard work workouts so the athlete has time to recover fully before doing it hard again.

Do you have a thought when you're coaching an Olympic distance athlete compared to a 70.3 or 9 man, is there a limit to the endurance that the Olympic athlete should be doing? Is there sort of a. He's wasting his time if he's going to go over three hours as compared to an Ironman who's trying to train for 180 kilometer bike and a 70.3 which is a 90 kilometer bike. Is there a real big difference between that Olympic distance guy and the more endurance for that endurance session?

Yeah, there is. If I was training an Ironman distance athlete, more than likely we're going to do some very long runs, three hours, maybe three plus with the sprint distance. For the Olympic distance athlete, it, it's going to for the most part. There are exceptions. For the most part it's going to be like two hours or shorter. It's going to be enough to build endurance but not enough to create a lot of fatigue. So it'll just be, it'll be typically two hours, hour and a half. For my age group. Athletes is very common. That's kind of like their most common long runs, an hour and a half. But at the other end of that, the highest that typically will have them do is two hours. But we do very few two hour run runs. It'll be mostly like an hour and a half for Olympic.

And your philosophy around swimming is, is so technique focused and is that why you wouldn't, you're not mentioning, you know, any hard, high intensity swim sessions on these hard days. They can be done on the easy days because you don't want them focused on intensity. You want it focused on technique, want.

Them very focused on technique. I've put on camps for something like, I don't know, the last 20 plus years. First thing you always do in a camp is first day is they swim 500 meters time trial to see what they can do when they're fresh. Because I've told them when they, they come to the camp, they need to arrive fresh. So you need to have an easy week the week before the camp because it's going to be a big week. You're going to be putting in 20 hours, maybe more, which is probably more than you've ever done in your entire life for an age group athlete. So you've got to be fresh when you come in. So first thing they do with a fresh is swim 500 meter time trial. Then for the next, typically four or five days, all we do is 25s with drills. That's all they do. Never swim more than 25, never swim fast. We just swim 25 with drills. @ the end of the week, last day, I test them again. 500 meter time trial. Now they're tired. Now they've been through roughly 20 hours training, which is a gigantic week for most age groupers. And now they're swimming 500 meters again. What I found over the years is roughly 90% of the campers have a faster time than they did on day one when they were fresh. All we did was work on their technique. All I did was try to make them more efficient. Swimming is about efficiency. It's not about what we typically think in other sports like running, for example, aerobic capacity and lactate threshold, anaerobic threshold are key determiners of performance. And swimming is 90% efficiency. It's a skill. Sport is what it is. It's skill. It's like golf. You don't see golfers going out and doing intervals. All they do is hit balls because they know what they got to do is get really good at hitting balls. It's not, it's not how fast they can walk the course. They just got to be able to hit balls. What I look for in the swimmers is I want to see them get to 90 seconds per hundred. If we can get to 90 seconds per hundred, then you can start doing intervals until you get to 90 seconds per hundred. We are going to focus on techniques. I want you to become very, very efficient. And I try to keep it very simple. There's only four things they have to learn. I wouldn't go into all that. There's only four things they have to get right in the pool. And each one of them has got at Least one of those things they're screwing up and that's what's keeping them from something. 90 seconds per hundred until we can get that thing or things figured out, they're destined to be slow no matter how many intervals they do. They can do intervals from sun up to sundown, and they will not get any faster if they're inefficient. If you're wasting energy, it's totally a waste of time to do intervals.

Do you want to list them for.

Us the full thing then you'll probably.

Want me to go in details what they mean, but yes, I'll list them. They're called pdlc. P stands for posture. That's the most basic thing. What I find is the most age groupers, I start with, them have very poor posture. Posture in the pool. They've got their head up and their butt down. So they're kind of swimming this way. And so I've got to get them to the point where they can get the right posture, which is on top of the water. So that's the first thing to work on that is usually pretty easy to teach. The next thing is their direction. A lot of swimmers, most swimmers, most age group swimmers don't swim in the right direction. They reach across their body with their arms, so they do this sort of thing. They're always crossing over the center line of their body with their arms. Until they quit doing that, they're never going to be fast. It's like running with your legs crossing over from side to side. You just can't be fast. It's just a waste of your time to do intervals. So that's the second thing that usually can be learned. It's a little more difficult than posture, but I can teach that. There's some drills they can learn to do. In fact, there's some drills we do that I tell them, once you've learned this drill, your direction has been terrible. Once you've learned this drill, what I want you to do is swim this drill all the time. You're always doing this drill. Whenever you swim, I want you swimming this drill. Don't worry about technique. Just swim this drill all the time because it forces you to get your arm out where it's supposed to be in front of your shoulder. It says it in front of your face. So that's posture, direction. Third, is length a little more difficult now? Each one becomes more difficult than the previous one. Length has to do with your body's position in the water as you're making your stroke. In the freestyle so typically what happens is with triathletes, they swim like tugboats. They have no length, all they have is width. So they swim with the shoulders, never leaving this positions. They don't build good swimmers from this way. They swim side to side as they swim. That's what a good swimmer does. A poor swimmer never does that. Poor swimmer keeps their body like a tugboat in this position all the time and circles their arms around the tugboat. Until they learn to do this, they're never going to be a good swimmer. So we go through some drills that teach them how to do that, what it feels like. Some drills exaggerate the length. That becomes much more difficult. That typically takes like two days to get somebody to understand how to do that. And then eventually the gas become a habit. So that's posture, direction, length, and the final thing is catch. Most athletes have no idea what a catch is. They're told by the coach on deck all the time, you need more catch. Reach over the barrel, like tell them all kinds of things, but it's really simple. But they don't do it because they're never really exactly sure what they're supposed to be doing. So what I might have them do, for example, is if they're. If their pool has diving platforms at the end of each lane, I'll have them go to the end of the lane, stand at the end of the lane facing the wall. Put your hands up over your head on the platform with your palms on the platform to see if you can pull yourself out of the water. That's a catch. Try to do it now with your hands in this position. Put your wrist on top of the platform and see if you can pull yourself out of the water. It is not going to happen. You can't do it. You got to be in this position. That's the catch. That's what catch is. That's all there is to it. It's not complicated at all. But the complicated part is we've been teaching athletes, triathletes for all these years, how to swim like pool swimmers swim. They're not pool swimmers, they're open water swimmers. Open water swimmers swim differently than pool swimmers. One of the things they do differently is their catch. Pool swimmers stick their arm and hand in the water, fingers point at the next wall and immediately they get a catch. That's what a good swimmer does in the pool. Watch Olympics or open water swimmers. What they do is they reach over the water, usually with a straight arm, and the first thing that enters the water is their fingers. Not the palm of their hand, their fingers. Fingers enter the water first. As soon as the fingers enter the water, they, they start to pull. That's the catch. The idea I try to teach the athlete is the palm of your hand is facing the wall behind you. This is extremely difficult for people to learn because for some cases, years and years and years, then keeping their palm facing the bottom of the pool, that's like having your wrists on the platform at the end of the lane. You cannot get yourself out of the water. You cannot pull yourself from that position. You've got to get in this position, pull yourself. So there's lots of drills we do for this and this goes on for a long time. Also. The bottom line is when they leave the camp, they've learned what they're supposed to do. Now they've got to take it home and make it habitual. It's got to become the way they always swim. If they go back to doing intervals again, they're right back to where they were before. No posture, no direction, no length, no catch. All they do is create lots of bubbles around themselves and don't go very fast. That's just a waste of time. So I really focus a lot on efficiency. We've got to make you a very efficient swimmer.

It's a great answer and I think the perfect practice scenario is one that comes to mind. And you use the golf analogy. And if a golfer goes out onto the practice driving range and continues to practice his hook, when it comes to the main day, he's going to hook his tee every day. And if the swim is not practicing, you know, the cat's the reach, you know, et cetera, et cetera, you're going to swim the same way. And, and you know, that is the difference between riding and running and swimming in my opinion. It's a skill acquisition. It needs to be a technique based approach, whereas an aerobic approach to running and riding is, you know, technique is important as a runner, obviously, and as a cyclist, but it's not the same emphasis as, as a swimmer. You can be as fit as you like in the water with poor technique and you'll swim the same forever.

Yeah, swimming is a, is a skill sport, that's what it is. Now if you've been starting swimming, you're five years old, you learned these skills, no problem at all. If you start swimming, you're 35 years old, big challenge. You've got to learn something that you've never really worked on before. And it's not, it's not normal. You Know, you know, water is not a normal habitat to be in. So you've got to learn something you never figured out before. And you've got somebody on deck that's trying to get you to swim like a pool swimmer, like you're an Olympian. And it's just not going to happen. You've got to learn to make the technique. You've got to learn to. To do the most basic things to be a good swimmer.

One of the questions I wanted to ask was another summary question. And I know they're difficult to answer, but one of your books is fast after 50. And that is something that we coach a lot of age groupers and are always interested in how you can keep getting faster the older you get, because a lot of people think that's limitations. So could you summarize for us some of the biggest lessons from that book, for example, and in your coaching philosophy?

Yeah, let's start about how the book got started. It gets started because I was about to have a big birthday, one that ended with a zero. I decided to give myself a birthday present, which was to read all the research I could on aging athletes to see what I could learn that might help me become a better athlete when I got older. What I discovered was there was an overwhelming amount of information in the research on this topic. A gigantic change from 15 years prior when I'd written the first book on this topic, when there was almost no research at all on aging athletes at this point in time. When I got to the second birthday of mine, I realized the Mandra is just a gigantic wealth information here. And I've got to figure out what it is I can do to continue to improve as an athlete or to. That's probably not a good term to use to maintain my position and to keep it from dropping too fast. Because you're not going to improve it for the next 30 years. You're not going to go from age 50 to age 80 getting better every year. It's not going to happen. It's going to go down. The problem is we've got to slow down how fast it goes down. That's the issue. That's what I was looking for in the research. How can I decrease the decline and fitness over the years? What it came down to was just some really basic things. The number one thing that happens to athletes as we get older is our aerobic capacities decline. People who are lethargic don't really do much activity at all. It declines about 15% per decade. That's gigantic. 15% loss of VO2 max is a gigantic number for athletes who do a lot of long slow distance. They go out and do fitness, jogging, et cetera. They decline somewhere around 10% per decade, about 1% per year. Better, not great. What the research showed is that athletes who do intervals, who continue to race, who continue to do things that are high intensity, they lose performance at something in the neighborhood of about 7 to 7.5% per year as they age. Much better. It's half of what your lazy neighbor next door is achieving in terms of VO2 max. So that's the first thing. What that comes down to is the athlete has got to do some high intensity training. The research that led to that conclusion was golden research. It was research that followed elite athletes for 20 years. See what happened to them and how their lifestyles changed, how their training changed and what happened to the VO2 maxes. And that lesson was those three points were the lessons that came out of it. The athletes who quit training, quit running. It was a running study. They started losing 15% per year despite the fact they were elite athletes. 20 years later, they're now losing VO2 max at the rate 15% over 10 years. The runners who were elite athletes 20 years ago who stopped racing and stopped doing intervals but just kept jogging, that was the group that was losing at the rate of about 10%. The athletes who kept on racing, who kept on doing intervals despite their aging years, were the ones who managed to maintain it somewhere around seven and a half percent over a decade of loss. So that became the bottom line is we need to do some high intensity training. You just can't quit doing that just because you're old. I hear that all the time from athletes. I'm 40 years old, so I need to stop doing intervals and just start doing long slow distance. Big mistake, Big mistake. You need to keep on doing the high intensity stuff. So that was the first lesson that was learned. Second lesson I learned was that as we get older, we tend to gain more body fat and we lose muscle. You're body weight may stay the same, but there's a change going on in our bodies. We're losing muscle and gaining fat. For most people. What we need to do is make sure we're keeping this under control. There are lots of ways to do this. Lifting weights, it's something we should be doing as we get older. You can't stop lifting weights when you get to age 50. In fact, it becomes much more important. The 20 year old. And it doesn't matter whether 20 year old lifts weights or not they're going to be. You can make them into a great athlete without lifting weights. 50 years old, 60 years old, 70 years old. If you're not doing something to maintain muscle mass, you're going to see a great decline in performance. So lifting weights is critical to that. Interestingly enough, those two things lead to the third thing. Third thing is you got to get enough sleep because that's when the hormones are being created. That's when the body is rebuilding itself. So if you're doing intervals, guess what intervals do they cause your body during sleep to release hormones. When you lift weights, guess what that does? It causes your body during sleep to release hormones. We are doing the things that are most, some of the things that are most effective for producing changes in your body's fitness by doing these other workouts, these other things. So they all fit together. It's just kind of like a package. Those are the big three. There's lots of other stuff that went into this, but those were the big three.

That's fantastic. And it's almost reassuring that what you were doing when you were a young competitive athlete and now that you're an aged athlete, 50 and above, it's not too dissimilar training, is it? You still need to have a similar structure so we don't have to radically change anything because we're getting older. And I've absolutely had that philosophy with my own training where I refuse to stop doing intensity stuff. I refuse to just accept that I'm aging and I want to have that decline slower. I want to make sure that I can stay at a level for as long as possible. And I figured that out myself, that I need to do the intensity. I need to have that, that, that ability to continue to improve my fitness. And the only way to do that is to do the similar stuff that I was doing when I was younger. I may not be able to achieve the same times or power numbers, but I know that it's at my capacity as a 50 or 60 year old. And I suppose that's one of the things that was really good from getting out of what we got out of that book, 50 and over. It was a real, a real point to make sure that people are understanding that you don't all of a sudden when you start getting old, stop doing things that allowed you to be as fit as you want.

Interestingly, I don't know if you've had an example similar to this, but We've tested dad's VO2 max and it is a lot lower in terms of its just number than when dad was tested when he was younger. But your power numbers, dad, are actually not too dissimilar to what they were 10 years ago, especially your FTP and your ability to hold certain power. And, you know, if you look at Strava segments, you're still on certain days riding as well as, you know, your king of the Mountain Times 10 years ago. So even though the aerobic capacity has dropped, the ability to perform is still there from maintaining an intense training load.

Yeah, that intense training load does more than just build your aerobic capacity. It also maintains your economy, which is the efficiency thing I was talking about with swimming and on the bike. Economy is also still important. If you're uneconomical, you're going to waste energy. If you waste energy, your FTP goes down. So you've got to be economical. And you've also got to have a high anaerobic threshold as a percentage of your VO2 max. There's all kinds of examples of this in the sports world. A good one. This goes back quite a ways. Gerard, I'm sure, would be very familiar with this. Back in the 1970s, two of my heroes were Bill Rogers and Frank Shorter, two marathoners from the 1970s. I won't go into detail on these guys, but they were big time. They were the 1970s best runners in the world, these two. And what I learned about them was that Frank Shorter had a very low VO2 max. Even though he won the gold medal in the Olympics in 72 and silver in 76 and won lots of other races besides that. He had a VO2 max of 72, which is for a professional athlete. Elite athlete is rather low. That's nothing to brag about at all. Whereas Rogers had a VO2 max of 78 in 1989, I got to go for a run with these two guys. They were both in Boulder, Colorado, and I was invited to come down and spend the day with them. And so we went for a run together. And so on one side of me, I've got Frank Shorter, who's a gold medalist, silver medalist, who has a VO2 max of 72. And I could tell as he was running next to me, it was like a deer running next to me. He had this beautiful, smooth way of running. No effort whatsoever, just floated. It was like snow falling off a tree branch. I mean, it was just like effortless. On the other side of me, I've got Bill Rogers running next to me. He's won the Boston Marathon five times. He's one of the Best marathoners in the world. He's a VO2 Max at 78, but I can see out of the corner of my eye his arms are flailing from side to side, his legs flail. He's got, you know, he wastes a tremendous amount of energy while he's running. So he's got a very low efficiency. So when these guys came to head to head in a race, either one can win because they had these balancing things between them. And Shorter not been efficient. You've never heard of him. He would have just been another runner. Had Rogers not had a VO2 max of 78, we would have never heard of him because his efficiency was terrible. So it takes all this stuff to make somebody into a good athlete. It can't just be one, it's a combination of all three.

Truly great answer. To finish off the conversation, Joe, we'd like to ask you about your personal habits. You get a lot done. You've always got so much on the go. You are up to book number 19, I think that's correct.

I'm working on number 18 right now.

18. 18. And you still get up every morning as you have for the last 20 or 30 years and read a research article. Can you give an insight into your daily habits, your kind of training schedule and your own sleep schedule, what you try to stick to?

Yeah, sleep is no problem for me. My wife and I have a habit. We're just the opposite. My wife fell asleep last night before 7 o'. Clock. We were watching something on TV. I noticed out of the corner of my. She was sleeping in the chair next to me. And so I started feeling a little bit sleepy myself. We were in bed by 7:15 last night and got up this morning, I think around 5:00 in the morning, something like that. So we were in bed for, I don't know, five, nine hours, something like that, sleeping. So sleep has never been a problem for me. That's always been easy. That's a big part of my life is I want to make sure I get enough time in bed. I want to sleep a lot. That's always been part of it. The other you mentioned the research. I get up every day and one of the first things I do every morning is on the corner of my desk. I'm sitting at my desk right now. On the corner of my desk over here I have a stack of research abstracts which are summaries of research studies. Every day I pull one off the top of the pile and read this research study to see if there's anything Here that could help me as a coach and as an athlete to improve. And I've been doing that for going on 40 years now. And it used to be hard to get these, these abstracts. Now it's a piece of cake. They're all over the Internet. You can find them very easily. So I'll do that every day. If I find one I like, I take a card that's about this big. In the US we call it a three by five card. And I summarize the. I read the research study, go back and find the research study, read it and then summarize the study on the card. I get to get all into what this card thing about in one small card. On the other side of the card, I indicate the details. Who are the authors of the study, what was the name of the study, what publication was in, when did it come out? So if everyone find the study again, I. I've got the research data here that I can go back and find it. Those then get put into boxes. And now I've got, as you can imagine, lots of boxes of research studies. And they're all categorized and so it goes into a category every time I complete a card like that. And then when I come time to write a book or somebody asked me a question, I go back to the book notes in the box, pull out the cards that give me information about the topic, read through them all, find out what I've been writing about over the years. And so it kind of keeps me fresh in my mind about what's going on in the world besides what's going on in my head. Things are going on outside of me or being recorded on these cards. Then I go for a workout every morning I get a. I go for a workout. Today was two and a half hours on the bike, easy ride. And so I do that, the 5:2 thing. I do that every day myself, exactly on that platform. We watch what we eat. My wife has become an excellent chef, if you will. I wouldn't call her that to her face because she didn't think herself being a chef. But she understands the way I like to eat and how we should be eating. And she prepares food in that way. And so I'm trying to do things and I lift weights twice a week. And there's lots of other detailed things here in my life besides just the stuff we've been talking about. I play golf, for example. In fact, I'll probably be going to the golf later golf course later this afternoon. So there's lots of things in my life Besides just training. But training probably is number one numero uno in my life, is. Is the athlete lifestyle.

That's fantastic. And when I, when I hear you speak about how you, how you go through your daily routine, it. It just reflects how an athlete should be living almost with plan. You must have a plan about what you're doing and how important is that plan. And I suppose the consistency and you are relentlessly consistent. And we've got countless examples which were in the introduction about, for example, when you started writing an article each week when you were living in Boulder for athletes doing the local. The 10k challenge race, and you were writing articles to, to help athletes prepare for that event, and you continue to do that for how many years? Joe?

It was 20 years. I did that almost to the day. I wrote a weekly article for 20 years. I've got a very boring life. Most people cannot put up with the things I do in life because it's just kind of like straight ahead, following the. Following the arrows.

But it's great. It's great because I'm wanting the listener to understand that. Um, and we've had a lot of really talented athletes on our show. Steve Moneghetti, an Australian marathon champion, and his, his training regime, he said, was boringly consistent. And, and that's how you become successful. The, the relationship between consistency and, and success, I just think can't be underestimated.

You're 100% right. The most important thing thing in training, the most important thing, no matter anything else I've ever said or written about, the most important thing is that it's consistency. You've got to train consistently. If you aren't training consistently, you're never going to succeed. Now, people don't quite understand the word consistent. That does not mean do the same thing every day. A lot of people take that to mean. It just means whatever your plan calls for, you do it every day. Whatever I'm doing, if I'm doing a run on Monday and I'm doing a long ride on Tuesday and I'm filming on Wednesday, or maybe I just keep doing that, I keep following that plan and that. That produces better results than any workout I could come up with. If you do workouts randomly, sometimes you do them, sometimes you don't. But they're great workouts. Or the option is you do terrible workouts, but you, you do them very consistently. I would take consistent, consistently done poor workouts every time. If you get out the door and just do something every day, you're going to improve.

Fantastic. Joe. Our final question we like to ask our guests is what is a life lesson that you've learned in the last 12 months that you'd like to pass on to others?

Oh, gosh, that's a tough question, Jordan. What would I say I've learned in the last 12 months?

It can be longer, if that helps.

Yeah. You know, my life is so consistent as I'm just talking about, so by the book that I'm not really sure. There's a lot of things I've picked up, although I keep seeing more and more data. There's one guy I follow is Nazi, by the way, his name is Alan Cousins. He lives in Boulder, but he's nausea. He's got a master's in exercise physiology. Coaches. Ironman mostly. Great guy. I love to read his stuff because he's always pointing out things that just support all the stuff that I keep saying all the time, like he had an article or a tweet. I think it was yesterday morning I saw that showed that this elite athlete. I've forgotten who it was. Now, Ironman athlete, was doing 80% of his runs were at such a slow pace that for most age group athletes, they'd have to be running something. This is. I apologize for this. You have to be running 10 minutes per mile. I know we're thinking kilometers here, but that's very, very slow. That's the point of being embarrassing.

Slow.

But that's what these people are doing at this elite level. He's bringing up studies, or not studies so much as summaries from elite athletes that this is what they're doing. Here's what this athlete said they're doing in this article. And guess how slow this is. It's ridiculous. And more than 80% of their time is spent at this extremely, extremely slow pace that most age group athletes would never do because they find it embarrassing to do it. And yet the age group, the elite athletes are doing it. That's something that keeps being driven home to me by Alan on a weekly basis. He's always finding research or finding lifestyle reports from elite athletes that show they're doing exactly what we'd say they should be doing. And yet people refuse to accept it.

For the age grouper, don't be afraid to slow down.

Right.

Joe, just want to say thank you very much. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast. We have an enormous amount of respect for you and we really appreciate you giving your time on here. And, Dad, I know you feel the same way.

Yeah, it's been a great hour. It's the quickest hour that's ever been on the podcast for me, and there's so many more questions we'd love to get your thoughts on. Maybe for another day, but once again, we really appreciate you coming on today. I know you've got a busy schedule with the volume of books that you're providing with information, and we love the fact that you are just hell bent on helping other people in their lives to be better athletes. And that's a great attribute to have. So thank you Joe for your time and we look forward to chatting you sometime soon.

Thank you. Jordan Gerard I enjoyed the conversation myself. It's always a lot of fun to talk about athletes and sport.

Thanks Joe. Cheers. The.