The #1 FASTEST Way To Improve As A Triathlete (Starting from 0)

Chris came into TriVelo coaching with talent, experience, but one big problem: his body just kept breaking down with years of niggles stalling his run progress. Plus, he was a strong athlete but stuck, and his goals were simple. He wanted to get to the 70.3 World Champs injury-free, and he wanted to improve all around to be able to finally execute a complete race, something he was lacking. So what happened next is the reason this episode matters. Chris rebuilt, rebuilt with us from zero run volume We got really specific with his training. And so what happened last weekend, 9 years on from his first Noosa Triathlon, he produced his best numbers ever and had a race PB. This is how an already established athlete turned a stalled potential into his fastest Noosa Triathlon ever. We're going to go through exactly how he did it. And Dad, Chris was one of those athletes that came to us, typical of a triathlete, a very good and confident all-round athlete, a very good threshold athlete. So it means he could just hold the same sort of power all day, but he wasn't improving.

Yeah, it's one of those great stories, isn't it? And there's a couple of things. One, that, you know, 8 years on, you're actually getting a better athlete. And this is not an athlete in his 20s or 30s. This is an athlete who 8 years ago was in his 40s, and now he's in the 45 to 49 category. So he's actually still improving. And I want to make that point really clear. Those people who think as you get older you shouldn't have expectations of improvement, you couldn't be further from the truth. And that's, that's That's the real first point that I want everybody to let that soak in. And so that's really aspiring for others to know that if you get the right structure and program, you can actually, uh, think about being a better athlete over the journey. And, and also, you know, the way you ride, we have said this many times over our 300 or so episodes, like you can be a really good threshold rider, but if you don't actually race the course, how it's set up, and you don't actually get the results you want. So just by tweaking a lot of the ways, the nuances of where the hills are, what do you do with the wind, how do you ride the downhills, how do you ride the flat, riding the course. I think I'm so sick of saying those sentences, you know, when I'm giving a race plan. Don't forget, ride the course, you know. Don't just stick with the same number whether you're in a headwind, tailwind, uphill, downhill. Ride the course. And he's done that, I think, the best out of one of the, you know, one of the best out of all of the athletes we coach.

Yeah, absolutely. So I want to take it back to his starting point. It was Feb 2024, so he's been in the program for 18, 20 months or so now. And at that point, he was a, he was a comfortable swimmer. You know, he could swim 1:48 per 100 for his, you know, swim time trials for a K. His FTP was already very respectful, and he was, he was confident in his bike riding. He had an FTP, a 20-minute testing number of, of 287 watts, and he could ride almost 40 Ks an hour for his FTP, which is pretty impressive. But at that point, he had just had so much injury, he would just start running again, get injured, start running again, get injured. And you— we had no running data available recent enough to really go off because he'd just been injured. So we're basically starting from absolutely zero with running. And so what do we do with an athlete in that position? You know, if someone's a really good rider, they're already at that top end, you know, they're a great threshold rider, but they're not running. You know, what's our mindset from a coaching group? How do we start with them?

Yeah, instead of dwelling on the negative, I can't run, you know, poor me, and this is not the way Chris went. He went, you know, what can I do with my swim bike whilst I'm actually getting my running back on track. And so he really honed in on, on that, that bike's, uh, understanding how to ride the bike properly, as I said in the introduction. And, and that takes a lot of practice, as you and I know. It's easy to hear a coach say, I want you to ride in these ranges, but for you to go and actually do it and get it, nail it, that's such a hard thing to do. And for anybody that's gone out there and tried and listen to our podcast and try to ride in their ranges, every time you've got a changing gradient on a road, and let's face it, every bit of bitumen that you're riding on outside, the gradient changes within 5 or 10 meters of what you were just doing a minute ago, what you're doing in the next minute. And that's because no road is perfectly flat. So you've got this scenario where the pressure you feel in the legs changes, and you have to be really tuned in to know that, okay, the pressure's just slightly come off, now I need to add some more pressure or change gears. And they're the things that he's really learned. And the athletes who really nail riding in the ranges, they're the ones who practice this. And this is a really good example of how useless ERG mode is. ERG mode holds you in a position and you don't get to practice when the gradient changes. And I'm talking subtle changes. You might be on a flat stretch of road where all of a sudden the pressure comes off your legs and it doesn't feel like you've gone downhill, but it could be just a slight dip in the road for 20 meters. And you have to be attuned tuned to that to actually get the power back on, the pressure back on your legs so that you can stay in the range. And it's almost like, you know, I play a game myself with— if I don't keep the power between, I'll just randomly say between 240 and 260, I'm going to drop off a cliff, you know. So the pressure, or a lion chasing me is going to catch me. If I stray outside of these ranges, I'm going to be having a negative result, consequences negative. And I think Chris has really, really done that well.

So when someone is such a good threshold rider, we have to kind of do the opposite. We have to work on their top end. And so for him, it just became clear that he needs much more VO2 work, and that is hard. VO2 training is hard. And we've essentially set him 18 to 20 months worth of very consistent VO2 sessions. You know, for a lot of athletes, their 2 main bike sessions for the week might be 1 VO2, 1 threshold to practice. I would say for him, majority of the time, it's been 2 VO2 sessions a week, you know, and definitely depending on the period of the year and coming up to a race, we might do more threshold work, but very consistently it's just been, Chris, more VO2 work, stuff under 2 minutes, stuff 3 minutes and under, stuff at 1 minute under, 30-second efforts, you know, 2:1 ratio, 30:15s, or 1:1 ratio, you know, 60 on, 60 off, 2 minutes on, 2 minutes off, and that's hard mentally. And what he has done so well is turn up to every session so committed to staying in the ranges. And we said on the podcast, it's very easy to say like he just said, but to actually execute it every single session— and athletes think that, you know, VO2 sets are just about gassing yourself and going as hard as you can and recovering and doing that over and over. But Chris's approach is exactly what we talk about with the Traveler Method, and it's practicing staying in the ranges really, really as consistently as possible and not going out of them. In that example like you just used, for every single set, when you do it for You can do it for 30 seconds, you can do it for a minute, you can do it for 2 minutes, you can do it for an hour in an actual race. But if you're not practicing that, especially if you're on the trainer and just doing ERG mode all the time, you're going to get outside and you're going to get found out. And that is the next key I wanted to mention, is that he does majority of his sessions outside. We're not saying that's a requirement for, for riding well, but if you can train outside, that is the preferred option. If you've got the option to train outside on a velodrome or on an out-and-back course, that is the preferred option because he has spent over the last 18 to 20 months so much accumulated time outdoors in the TT position, holding the ranges really within a narrow window in outdoor conditions. And you just, you just can't replicate that in an indoor trainer. We love the indoor trainer. It's unbelievable. It's a great training tool. It's great for a controlled environment, but it's so easy to stay in the ranges on the indoor trainer compared to outdoor. And he's just done VO2 sets over and over again, race-ready sessions, longer time trial efforts, even around the velodrome, like you said. In any outdoor velodrome, there's nuances to the track, and the one he uses, it's got a little bit of a different curve on both sides, and you're flicking the gears up and down a couple every single lap. And he can just so— he does this so well where he, if the range for the set is 300 to 320 watts, he barely goes outside of that. Most riders will go 340 watts, 280, 330, 290, 310, 300, 320, 300, you know, just really up and down. And he holds it in such a narrow window like he's on a trainer, but that's because of all the practice he does outdoors.

Yeah, and, uh, the next step of that is it's, it's all very well to say, you know, you, you're very good at holding the power in the ranges, but the minute you've got a headwind, the minute you've got some sort of, uh, slight gradient change, you know, that's when you have to actually be so attuned to changing, filtering through the gears to allow you to stay in the range. And that's the problem with indoor. If you're just riding with no gradient changes, you, you, it's very easy, as you said, to stay in, in the ranges. And it's even easier if you use ERG mode where you're not even practicing that. The machine's holding you in, in a cadence that's— if you tried to, if your cadence range is 90 to 100, the ERG mode would hold you at 95, the mid-range. And, and no matter if you tried to ride at 100 or 90, it would drag you back. And the same with power. If you, if your range is 300 to 320, you would hold you at 310. No matter if you wanted to ride at 320, it would drag you back to 310. And that's the problem with ERG mode. It doesn't teach you how to ride the bike in changing gradients, changing conditions, changing wind. And so by going outside a lot, and a lot of people don't have the time or they don't have the facilities to do this. But if you do have the time and the facilities, then make that effort to go outside because you will be a much better rider. And we can talk about— you can do some things differently on the indoor trainer where you actually don't load the TrainingPeaks session if you're using Zwift onto the Zwift screen and use a course where it does have undulations. That is the next level. We don't talk about that much in the, in the podcast, but That is what you can do to actually get practiced indoor. So it's not like indoors, you know, just gonna give you in this, uh, this position where you have to hold the ranges because it's holding you there. Um, you've got that opportunity if you change it up a little bit. But, but getting back to what Chris has done well is, you know, he's riding the conditions all the time, which means, you know, on a velodrome, it would seem easy to, to just ride even power, but it's not because there's always gonna be in in a 30-second lap of a lot of velodromes, there's a headwind for 8 seconds, there's a crosswind, then there's another headwind, then there's a crosswind. So you're forever having to change gears, and that's a great place to do that. And then you go out onto the main road where the gradient changes, you're, you're forever having to use the gears. And we talk about that a lot on the podcast before, where you could go and do a 2-hour ride and you may change gears 700 or 800 times, um, compared to someone who doesn't really know how to ride in the ranges. They're just changing gears 15 times, they're stuck in the one gear. So So they're the things that Chris has listened to and has gone out and practiced. And so the difference between his improvement and not improving is his willingness to adopt our strategy. And it's no coincidence that the Trivallo athletes are some of the best time trialers going around in— you know, we've just had a world champion in the cycling masters time trial. And here we are in— you know, we know that Roland wins most of the fastest times in his pro field. And here we are with Chris in his 45 to 49 being the fastest rider on the day. And people might say, well, that's great, what about his swim and run? But, you know, to get from where he was to being now the fastest rider is an improvement. That's what we're talking about. And sure, we need to work more on his swim and more on his run, but we've already established that he has now got his bike riding down pat. And got to the level, you know, got to a position where he is a really competent time trialler now.

And we'll go through all the disciplines. So, you know, basically in the 18 to 20 minutes, his bike, his 20 minutes now peaked out at 318 watts so far. So that's a 31 watt increase from 287. For someone who was already a good rider to go up 31 watts is fantastic. But more specifically, his 60 minutes has gone from 274 watts his best 60 minutes with us to 301 watts. So again, a 27-watt increase. But also, he's able to now in those 60 minutes crack 40 kilometers an hour, and that's really, really impressive. And from his first 60-minute test with us at 274 watts, he was at 39 k's an hour, and then his 301 was at 40.5, and he was 1.2 kilometers, I think, in the same course down the road, 1.2 kilometers down the road. If you just think about that, the same athlete if you stretched out 1 kilometer in front of you, that's how much further down he is in the same test. You are just so much further along. Like, that is just— that's impressive. That's the kind of— when you look at that side by side, you go, wow. That's kind of what we wanted to see.

Yeah, it takes you to do a kilometer on the bike, depending on, you know, if you're doing 30 k's an hour, it's 2 minutes. So it's somewhere around— you're a minute and a half— you have to sit on the side of the road for a minute and a half to wait for you, you know, Chris Rider A, Chris Rider B, A minute and a half's a long time to wait. You know, that's how far up the road you are, and that's so encouraging to know that, you know, if you just follow this process, you will end up getting such increases that it's— you can't wait to train again. It's so encouraging and motivating. And I gotta say, his willingness to be on board with that, that takes a lot of effort, and a lot of people will get, you know, almost upset that, "Oh, the program doesn't seem to be changing. I'm doing the same things. Just doing a lot of VO2. Can we have some variety?" Well, yes, you can have variety, but what are you after here? Are you after— you wanting to be the best bike rider that you can possibly be, or do you want to have some variety and be okay with mediocre? And they're the questions that, you know, you've got to answer yourself. If you're happy with that, then we're okay with that as well, but if you're coming to us striving to be as good a bike rider as you can possibly be, this is what you have to do.

And there is variety in the VO2 sets. You know, you don't just do the same 30-15 session all year round for 2 years. You know, that's not what we're after either. But yeah, his willingness to be disciplined with the sets and mentally they are hard. And some days when he wasn't feeling it, he would put in his notes and just say, look, I just aimed for the low end of the range today. I just really wasn't feeling up for it. And that's okay. You're just still in the range. And there was some days, many days where he actually dry retched in the VO2 sets. And that's pushing yourself and we don't You don't need to do that, but that just shows the level he gets to, to really be disciplined on himself. The last point, just before we move on from the bike, I want to touch on with, with the trainer is that we really want to say that the big benefit of the trainer is the controlled environment and is the pressure on the pedals. A lot of athletes and cyclists that originally come to us, their problem is they don't know how to hold pressure on the pedals. And so the trainer really teaches that. And in an hour ride, you may get so much more value by being on the trainer because you just can't stop pedaling. Whereas out on the open road with traffic lights and stops, So many cyclists come to us and, and they're doing, you know, hours of riding per week, but they're probably actually riding half that time because half the time is spent freewheeling in a group, chatting with friends, with traffic lights. So that's the big value. But then the next evolution is once we see people riding on the trainer, if they get too much into the trainer, they stop being able to keep pressure on the pedals outside in a time trial, and the trainer really just holds it for you. So there's huge benefit and we absolutely love it. But if you want to be a good time trialist outside, you need to spend as much time as possible on the TT bike in position outside.

And look, the, the caveat to that is you have to have the appropriate course outside, otherwise the trainer is better. If you have a course that's got interruptions and you can't keep the pressure on the pedals, then you're better off not riding outside, you're better off being indoors.

So that was his bike, and I want to go through how this all accumulated in Noosa to one of the best bike executions we have ever seen at Triathlon Trello. We want to break that down for you. But running, he came to us not being able to run, and the goal was, can I get to the World Champs at the end of the year, which he qualified for, but he kept getting injured, injury-free. And so we basically just had to start from scratch, and we just went, right, if this is your history, we're going to take it right back. We are absolutely slowing down. We are being as patient and as conservative as you could possibly be, and we just We, we were so disciplined, and to his credit, he just did exactly that and didn't try and rush it. And we were so slow. We were slower than— if you just think of a slow program, we're probably even slower than that, you know. It was very low volume, very easy running, um, and we just slowly built. And even with that, he had a couple of little strains and niggles that popped up, and we went, wow, okay, we really have to be careful here. We made sure we were never running 2 days in a row. We were really, really careful with our volume. And look, he got to the World Champs and he was able to run. And there's a little bit of a story about how the run went there. He himself overheated at the World Champs and so couldn't run due to fitness, but his injury didn't stop him, which was fantastic. But running-wise, it took him until maybe 6 months into the program where he had fit— he had enough fitness, he had enough confidence in his running that he did a 5K time trial. And it wasn't a flat-out time trial. We weren't going to risk him running as hard as he could, but he could run solid and get a decent time trial effort out of himself, and he ended up at 4:36 per minute k pace. He had previously, 10 years ago, his PB was 3:51 for 5k, 3:51 pace. Then August this year, so 18 months later, he was back at 4:01 pace. He just did a 5k time trial fresh at 4:01 pace, so he's back at his running times from 10 years ago. I have to say, touch wood, you know, this has been an unbelievable year of consistency. He hasn't been injured this year, and then Just last month in October, he tested 5 kilometers off the bike at 4:03 pace. So 20 minutes and 5 seconds fresh in August, and then 2 months later off the bike, off a 60-minute FTP test, he's done 20 minutes 15 seconds. You know, that is absolutely flying off the bike. So that, that is the type of run progression where you, again, you have to be disciplined to stick to that sort of program and not rush it. And he's done that, and look where he is 18 months down the line.

It's so challenging that you have to be patient and it takes a lot. You know, what are we trying to do here? Why are we being so conservative? Well, your body has to get used to absorbing the load. And the way we approach it and the way we get people to be on board is we remind them that they are riding the house down. They are absolutely pushing the high intensity as we've explained. He's doing lots of VO2, lots of threshold. We are really doing a lot of cardiovascular stuff where he is, you know, breathing through his mouth. He's absolutely pushing the limit to his breathing. And so the body doesn't really know that it's unfit for running. It just knows that it's fit cardiovascular for anything, for swimming, for biking, for mountain biking. It's fit for running. The cardiovascular system is fit because of the cross-training that he's doing. You know, if he was just a single runner, we would be cross-training training him with swim and bike. But because he's a triathlete, it's actually— we're actually developing his swimming and biking. And so when he comes to start running fast, the cardiovascular system isn't what's holding him back. It's his musculoskeletal system. And what are we trying to do with his running program? We're just trying to build his ability to absorb the training load so that he doesn't get injured. So, so just doing some, you know, consistent running where there's no intensity, but he's not trying to run slow. He's not trying to run fast. He's trying to run his normal gait, and we're just increasing the duration of his running over a long period of time. So he's still doing the sessions, but there's, there's actually no intensity there. It's all about the duration of the run and the frequency. So we're cutting out that intensity aspect because we know we're getting it on the bike. And therefore, he, when he comes to run fast, it's not going to be his breathing that's gonna hold him back. It might be a, a little bit of soreness in the legs that are gonna eventually hold him back. And when you're doing a 5K or a 10K race in a triathlon, whether it's a sprint or an Olympic distance, you are less likely to start to stiffen up as if you were in a 70.3 where it's a half marathon. And of course, that's much worse when you're trying to run a marathon. You haven't got the endurance. So, so that was the program basing primarily on just getting his body to absorb the load without the intensity and it's worked. And look at— as you just explained, he has not done any hard running, and yet he's knocked his time from 4:36 pace down to 4:01 fresh. And now he can run off the bike, you know, 4:03. And look, the run he did at Noosa— admittedly it was a boiling hot day for a 10K run off the bike, you know— that's, that's probably, you know, one of the better runs he's had. And his effort with execution, as we're going to talk about, was was what we're most pleased with.

Yeah, yeah, and I will say we had a conversation in January this year where, you know, we had put together a full program where he was running well. We hadn't done anything above zone 2, and we said, alright, we're going to start introducing some zone 3, just above zone 2, and then after that we're going to introduce a little bit of zone 4. And we still were very patient. It's taken 10 months, and we slowly introduced a little bit more of that, but we basically have still not gone into VO2 work running. I haven't touched that. He's only ever gone up to just sub-threshold, and yet his running has improved. So Look, I want to finish off kind of this, this case study with talking about his, some of his races and how it panned out, and especially Nusa. We talked about it at the start, but there's been two races this year where he, he executed like his goal, like a well-rounded athlete, a full race. And the first one was earlier in the year in March. He did a Two Times U race where he was able to execute all three, and he ran his, he ran a 10K at 4:32 pace in the race, which was a 45, I think, minute 10K. 45-something, which, you know, when we started the program, that just seems so far away to be able to do that. You know, he couldn't run 4:30 pace for 1 kilometer, and to get there, that was awesome. But the key to that race was he actually, for the first time, went under the 1-hour mark for 40 kilometers. He time-trialed and rode 59 minutes averaging above 40 k's an hour inside a triathlon. That was just a phenomenal kind of milestone. And so for his swimming, you know, he came to us as a 1:48 swimmer per 100 for a 1K time trial. And his PB now is 1:44 per 100 for a 1K time trial. So a 45-second PB from the start. There is more time to be gained there for sure. But remember, the way we like to program is we find more time gains in the bike and run. So he— that's off only 2 swims per week. He's able to still find that improvement. He's got a lot more he could improve on with the swim. And so that's a conversation that we have is if you want to be more competitive in the age group now, you're really getting to the peak of your bike. Your run is— you've still got minutes to come with that. But you could opt for more swimming volume if you wanted, if that was important to you. We would have to change the program around, and you could do extra kilometers throughout the week, and you could do a third swim per week. And probably the one thing he's missing living in Melbourne, Victoria is for majority of the year, he's not open water swimming. So that's really, really tough. You really only have a short window of kind of 4 months, 4 months of the year to get some open water swimming. But with full-time work, it is still hard to get that extra swimming for open water. So that's where it's lacking. But the whole goal with our swimming program is to see if we can get faster for very little swimming, but get really a lot more confident and comfortable, which he's, he's definitely done. And that's part of the overall executing a full race. And so that leads us to Noosa, and he's done a total Noosa PB time, uh, faster than any time he's done, including from 8 years ago when he was 8 years younger, which, like you said at the start, just shows what's possible and age doesn't have to be a barrier. But Once again, I want to bring it back to the bike. This is one of the best executions that we've ever seen in terms of how to ride a time trial course. Noosa, if you're not familiar with it, it's a triathlon in Australia where it's got one big climb in it. It's kind of a little bit undulating out to the climb, then a big 7-minute climb, then rolling hills, and then a big descent, and then kind of undulating, mostly flat back to town. I wouldn't say undulating is quite aggressive. It can be quite a flat course, but there's definitely undulations in there. And he cracked the 1-hour mark. He rode unbelievable and averaged over 40 kilometers an hour on this course with a 7-minute climb at 3 to 5%. To average 40 kilometers an hour on this course is just phenomenal. Fastest bike split in his age group. But we want to talk about the execution and how this is one of the best examples of, of an athlete's pressure on the pedals that we've ever seen. And, and why was this so impressive and better some of our, our best athletes and our pro athletes in terms of execution?

Yeah, and it's, you know, you get a bit of a shock when you actually open up the graph and see, you know, it almost looks like he's used an e-bike because it's so evenly ridden. And you and I open up other riders, you can't believe they're in the same race, you know. And we have a lot of riders say to us, oh, it's just impossible on these really hilly undulating courses to do what you're asking us to do. I just think you're asking us to do the impossible. And if we didn't have examples like Chris of of doing exactly what we think is possible, then we would have to agree that, you know, fair enough, this course is a little bit too difficult to do this on. But, you know, I think I had Adam and you had Chris, and, you know, there's some really good examples in our race from that weekend where athletes have really got it right. And not only does that help them get the result they want, but enables them to run a little bit more comfortable than they probably would have before. So, yeah, I love seeing his graph. I love seeing the fact that you can see that even though he went up the climb, he didn't really go outside the range, and then he was able to keep the pressure on the pedals straight after the climb. When I looked at a lot of the other graphs where people had ridden too hard, then they actually had to spend the next 3 or 4 minutes really riding well outside the bottom of their range to try to recover to start riding again. And this is something that slows you down. It makes your average speed on the bike worse off. You might have ridden some really good power up the hill, but it means nothing when you have to to recover so much, you lose all the gains you've just had. So riding slightly at the top of the range and then slightly at the bottom of the range, that's a better way to do it. We know that. We've told so many people on this podcast that that's the way to do it, and he's actually gone out and given us a great example to show all our other TriVelo athletes about how to do it. We use that example.

Yeah, look, his range was to try and sit between 270 and 300 watts for the race, and he's one of the best examples of keeping that pressure on the pedals no matter what was happening on the course. He just really is basically sitting between 270 and 300 and that is incredibly difficult. And as I said, we put that down to all his time spent on the TT bike and his mental discipline. He said to me after the race he was exhausted from that mental execution because you have to concentrate so much on not riding 310, 320, then 260, 250. We are lenient with people. We know it's really hard. So if when people are doing that but they still average in the right zone, we're saying that's still a great ride. But if you want to improve, you can narrow that range down and like you said, his power graph literally looks like he's on a trainer. It looks so controlled. The accumulated time outside of that 270 to 300-watt window, which is a very, very narrow window, is absolutely minimum. And that is just why it's one of the best executions we've seen. So look, we want to give Chrissie's flowers. It was a— to do a PB there on that day, the heat was very tough coming from Melbourne. We told all our athletes, you've got to expect to be, you know, 10 seconds per kilometer slower because the heat and humidity was abnormally high. For Noosa. So he's running off the bike in training, he wasn't able to match that on the day, even though it was still a total PB, because a lot of the other Noosas he's done, he'd been injured, so he wasn't able to run properly. So he still ran in ranges he was happy with, nowhere near what we think he's capable of right now based off his testing and he's fresh, but still an overall PB, so you've got to be happy with that.

There weren't a lot of athletes who could say that they ran a PB at Noosa this particular weekend, and every Noosa is going to be different, the conditions are going to be different. So, and look, the swim is different, the swim is a little bit longer than previous, and some people were swimming you know, another 100 or 200 meters further than they were the year before. So for some athletes, that already means that their swim time is 2 minutes slower at least. So that would add time to making it a slower overall day. The humidity was the highest it's been for a long time at Noosa, which meant everybody in the race was running slower. So that should add more time as well. So put that into, into the, um, into the measuring stick of, you know, how good an improvement this was to do a PB when the swim's slower, the humidity's higher, yet you end up with a a PB. Yeah, it's one— that's the reason why we're highlighting Chris on this podcast is because if you actually do the preparation and the planning to get yourself in a state where you can ride and run in the ranges where we're asking you to, you'll get the result like this.

So did he achieve his goals with us so far? He set out to get to his A race, the New Zealand World Champs last year, injury-free. He did that. He got there able to run a full half marathon off the bike. And get through the whole race. Can he execute a race from start to finish, swim, bike, and run? Yes, he's done that twice this year in excellent fashion. And then his next goal is become a higher level competitive age grouper and then build, build that up in his 70.3s and do his first Ironman, which is the next steps for him. And he's right, you know, the best bike for the day, you can't get any more competitive than that. And we just want his swim and run now to start catching that. But I guess the lesson, Dad, what's the last thing we want people to remember, um, you know, from Chris? For me, I think it's if you said to him at the start, you know, it's going to take you 18 months to get back to 4-minute K pace for 5 kilometers, are you willing to do that? His answer would be, I don't care how long it takes, just keep me injury-free. Um, and then, and then that, that discipline of just really forcing yourself to train like you want to race, um, is the big lesson here for me. What about you?

Yeah, look, I said it right at the start, patience is a really hard thing to acquire, and, and being in it for the long haul. Those athletes who come to us who are saying, "Look, I'm okay with— if I want to get to this level," I'm asking athletes in their interview, "What's your goals? What are you trying to achieve here?" And they'll give me these really high achieving goals that are quite away from what they're capable of doing now. And I'll say to them, you know, "Are you willing to put the time in and be patient and do this over a long period of time?" And if their answer is no, I expect expect that to happen in the next 12 weeks, then that's the wrong type of athlete. So Chris is the athlete who's saying the opposite. You, you just give me the program and I'll be dedicated enough, and I don't mind how long this takes, but as long as you can guarantee that I'm gonna get where I want to, then I'll be happy. And that's the attitude that I want most athletes who are in this sport for, for the enjoyment factor of over a period of time. This is, this is where I can get to, you know, in 6 months' time. If you have that attitude, that you're just ticking off the sessions, being consistent, being patient with the program, and not trying to fast-track everything. People who try to rush things, there is no quick fix. You know, in most things in life, if you try to take the shortcut, you're gonna come undone somewhere. So trust the process and it does take time, and running's actually worse because you can't— you can't run a lot because it takes so much impact on your body, whereas riding is one of the easier ones to improve on. I shouldn't say that too lightly. Easy is not the right word, but it's one of the ones that you can improve on quickly. Swimming is hard because of technique. Running is hard because the impact on your body, the musculoskeletal system, takes a huge toll. So, yes, he's really done the work in the riding, and now he's willing to put the work into the running because he's a long way off. You know, I think he was 10th or 11th in his age group, and that's pretty impressive. But if you want to get if you wanna get, you know, the next level, which is in the top 5, you're gonna have to improve your running and your swimming, which he's up for. So patience is the thing I've learned, that the people who are more patient, they will achieve their goals. And trust the process, that's without given, I think. That's something that if people are on board with the right mindset, then you can achieve anything. There is no goal you can't do.

Do you want the same sort of individualized coaching and specific help for your programming and how to improve across the board? And do you want it all based on individual individual data to you, well, that's what we do here at TriVelo Coaching. We do exactly what we did to Chris. It doesn't matter where you are in the age group, if you're, if you're first place or last place, we want to help you improve. And if you want to get help improving and get individualized coaching to you, go to trivelocoaching.com.au, apply to get coached there. We'll walk you through our process and then you can come on board for a guarantee that will help you improve. Okay, that's it for us for this episode. Coming up on the next episode, we've had a lot of people ask us about who the athlete you mentioned, Dad, Joe, who just won the Grand Fondo. Masters ITT World Champs, individual time trial champion. Having another world champion in our group, we're so pumped about. A lot of people are asking, okay, how did he do it? How has he improved? How did he become the fastest time trial in the world for his age group? Well, that's coming up in the next case study. We're going to talk exactly about that. We hope you enjoyed listening to this episode. As always, thank you for joining us, and we'll see you on the next one.