The Best Holiday Training Program

This podcast is brought to you by Trivalo Coaching, where we help triathletes and cyclists like you train smarter to race faster. I'm your host, Jordan Donnelly, and on my left is former Australian Ironman champion and head coach of Trivalo Coaching, Gerard Donnelly. With the holiday period approaching fast, it's time to start thinking about how you're going to attack your training program in this period. For most people, they have a week or a few weeks off where they are away from home. They might be on holiday somewhere, but they potentially have more time to train. But is training more a good thing over this period? Or how do you balance a potential increase in training with a potential increase in busyness that naturally comes with this holiday period? What's the best program you could do to make the most fitness gains? We'll talk about it all in this episode. But first, dad, welcome to the episode. What are you grateful for?

Thanks, Jord. I'm looking forward to talking about holiday period training. It's, it's something that I definitely reckon as people get wrong, so it's going to be a good topic. What am I grateful for? I'm grateful that we are in charge of our own destiny. And what do I mean by that? I sometimes get frustrated with New Year's resolutions and how people say and defer that, oh, look, I'll just wait till the New Year and I'll then start again or I'll wait till next Monday and it happens to be Wednesday of this week and you'll wait another five days. So you're going to implement whatever plan that you've concocted in your mind that you're going to start with a new, a new you. I'm going to be a better version of me next Monday. So I'm grateful that we have the opportunity to do that right now. And, and today and, and yeah, if, you know, we're in a society, in a world where we're restricted by a lot of things. We just found that out over the last two years, you know, with, with the pandemic. We weren't allowed pretty much in Melbourne, we weren't allowed to do anything and we were the most shut down place in the world. We had the most locked days, locked down days of over 200 and something days. But we still were able to be in charge of our own destiny and we made, we made the best of a bad situation by training on our indoor trainer. We only had 5k radius. Sometimes we weren't allowed out at all. So we actually, we still kept the mantra of you're in charge of your own destiny by just manipulating days and weeks. So I was really grateful for that freedom, which even was restricting when it was minimally, maximally restricted. I'm still grateful that you still had the choice to wake up each day and be in charge of your own destiny for that day. So, yeah, I'm grateful for that, for that opportunity.

Couldn't agree more. My gratitude is quite simply the Ashes has started and it really just feels like summer is here now because the Ashes, for those who don't know, is cricket series of best of five matches across the entire summer period or December, January period. And growing up watching cricket, it just means that summer is here. And so the cricket been on all day in the background is synonymous with summer. And it's just a really great feeling. So that's my gratitude.

Unreal.

What's caught your attention?

With a couple of things. One was Woot Van Aert started the cyclocross season in unbelievable form and smashed the field and the field was full of all great cyclocross riders. His he even crashed and still won by over a minute and a half. That was one thing that caught my attention. The other thing was there's a really good young rider in Melbourne, Liam Johnson, a mountain bike rider and we have a local, kind of like a test. It's almost like a test hill. I'm sure every city in Australia and the rest of the world has a similar thing. The hill that we have in Melbourne's called the 1 in 20 and a 7K climb. An average gradient is maybe 4%. It's got bits that are 6 or 7 and bits that are 2 or 3. But it's a bit of an iconic climb and everybody measures themselves against and it's a Strava segment and Freddy Ovet holds a record or did hold a record till this week. So that's what caught my attention is Liam Johnson beat it by one second. There's a lot of they did it as a group, not a solo particular day. It's a bit of a headwind, tailwind, so there's lots of variations but still it doesn't matter. He's right up there with the best. He's going to be a talent and if he transfers from mountain biking, like some unbelievably other talented riders, Cadell Evans etc, to name one across to the road, he's going to be someone to look out for. So that's what caught my attention. And look out for that name. 19 year old at the moment. Average 486 watts for 12 minutes, 19 seconds. That's elite.

That's. Yeah, those are the numbers you hear from the elite riders. So that's really impressive. What's got my attention is we've been having big conversations about endurance sessions in a training program. You and I have, I mean, because most programs have one big endurance bike session a week, but you potentially can fit in more. And that's what we've been talking about. But if you do want to fit in more, if you're really clear about the goal of the session, for example, we've been back doing a long hill ride on Wednesday mornings as well as endurance ride on Saturday mornings. But when you choose to do this, it really has repercussions for the rest of the week and how you structure the rest of your week. You know, traditionally we would probably do two hard sessions on a Tuesday, Thursday and the rest of the week easier. But if then you train hard on a Wednesday and just by nature the endurance riding the hills is hard, even if you try and go easy. So it means you can't really train Thursday, Friday hard. So it really changes the whole week. So it's just been a really interesting discussion about, you know, what's the purpose, what's the goal and how would it benefit your program and is it worth doing?

It's a really good topic and it's always worth doing a podcast on because it also depends on how old you are. And I never use age as a, as a positive or negative, but certainly after talking to Joe Friel, he really emphasized as you get older, you know, in your 60s and 70s, you can't recover as quick. And that's just scientific fact. And even you as a 20 year old in the 20s, still found it hard to recover from today's Wednesday ride. But you know, you also did 12 hours prior a really hard high intensity bike run session. So, so the answer is dependent on all of those things. What, what your age is, what you've just recently done, what your goal of the week is. Can you do back to back sessions? Do you need 24 hours gap between high intensity sessions? But this wasn't a high intensity Wednesday ride, it was zone two with some sections in zone three. And depending on, you know, the severity of the hill, some hills are too steep to be even lower than zone four. So you've got, you know, smatterings of, of high power, which you don't really want. So the course selection should be taken into account as well. So there's a lot of answers that need to be, and questions that need to be answered on this whole topic. So it's, it's a really good observation you've made and something we could probably discuss down the track.

Yeah. And it does lead into the conversation about what, what is the goal of your one endurance right. Of the week. You know, for most people that's a Saturday bunch ride. But we have been talking a lot about, you know, really trying to encourage people to get out of their bunch and get more into the hills and, and really understand the specificity of that session and how much more valuable it is to go and do something that suits you rather than just going with the bunch. And we've spoken about that a lot, but it is, it is a whole other topic. But for today we are talking about how to get the best holiday training program possible. How do you leave the holiday period potentially fitter than when you went in? Or is that even the goal? And one of the first points I want to touch on is, is that more often than not you tell people not to go harder when they go on holidays. So why is that?

Well, that's not on holidays. The example could be, you know, we've got some athletes who have just been lucky enough to have two weeks away from their normal routine. Call that a holiday. Maybe it is, but we're talking about the summer holidays, which for some people is a four week break. Um, you know, it just so happens that in the southern hemisphere it's, it's the summertime. And so most of the population has either one week off, two weeks off, or up to four weeks off their normal yearly routine, which is the opposite in the northern hemisphere where it's in July. Um, so, so get the understanding of, we're talking about the opportunity to have a lot of period where you're not working. Um, and so that's the question is, you know, what do you do in this period, which we've talked about a lot over the years on our podcast and I've, I've kind of changed my mind a little bit, but not, not greatly. You still have your goal race a race somewhere in. It could be January, it could be February, March, April, May, or it could even be June. So, so what you do in this summer holiday period where you've got no work and you're actually got time to train more, is dependent. The actual training is dependent upon when your a race is. So if your A race is for example, in the southern hemisphere, the Ironman in Cairns, then you can afford to do more volume during that Period. But if your A race is in February 70.3 in Geelong, then you shouldn't stray from your program one bit slightly. There's a one caveat to that, caveat to that. Maybe the endurance ride, you can add more volume, but it has to be in zone two so you wouldn't train any harder than you already are. You could add some Zone 2 training to the warm up and cool down of all of your sessions if you have more time. And remember a lot of the sessions we provide are for people who work full time and they might start work at 7am or they might start work at 9am and to give people a three hour ride on a Tuesday and a Thursday with intensity is not practical. But if, if everybody was full time elite, that's what we would be doing. We'd be doing the high intensity session that has 20 to 30 minutes of high intensity and the rest of it's zone two, Zone one. So it could be two hours, could be three hours. But, but for the everyday athlete that we're talking to, they all have families, they all have jobs, so they don't have that time. So we try to give people a training session they can fit in to their schedule.

So the, the basic advice is that don't just go harder for the sake of it.

Absolutely, yeah. You've got to, you've got to think about what's happening next week in two weeks, four weeks and where your A race is. So you know, the example I was going to give before, it's not the holiday season but we've got an athlete, last four weeks has been someone go to, to the Alpine region and do almost like a training camp.

Even though they've taken four days, they've.

Taken Saturday, Sunday and you know, one of our guys has taken 10 days. And we're just discussing that on the ride this morning. You know, how good would that be? Trained the house down. That was the first comment from one of the guys I was riding with and I was saying, well, no, not really. Just need to stay with the structure. The good thing is, and you've got more time to recover because you're not working so you can do more volume. But it has to be really carefully looked at that because you're in the Alpine region, every time you do more volume you're riding more hills, which is, which is going to be good in the long run. But if you do that too hard in the wrong zone, it's actually detrimental. You'll ride yourself into a hole. And if you're trying to Run and swim there as well. You know, if it's well structured and fits into your program, that might have the. A race in June. As I said before, this is a great time to do that, to do more volume. Almost like when we talk to the Norwegian coaches, you know, they went to altitude for, for four weeks at a time in, in the middle of their season. They did that three times. So they did a total of 12 week blocks of, of altitude training, which was kind of up to 20 weeks, I think. Yeah, it was kind of, you know, base, base type training where you're doing a lot more volume. But they still had the intensity there. They still had days with intensity. So. So if you increase the volume too much, you actually can't do the intensity. That's so they're the things that I get scared of when people tell me, oh great, I've got all this time to train, you know, train the house down. I know it's just a throwaway sentence, I'll train the house down. But when people say things like that, that's actually their intent. So I'm worried when I hear that and I'm excited that they've got an opportunity to go on holidays for a four week block. But it has to be really carefully thought through and so it's just not open slather. That's the message I'm trying to get across to. Everybody has to be carefully planned and thought through and you can increase the volume, but it's got to be in the right zones and not at the expense of the intensity that you're trying to continue on the consistency of your program. This program is not so restricting that you can't do this. It is very flexible. And if you have been building up to this and say, for example, you've just had a period where you've hardly been able to train to the program because you're so busy at work and all of a sudden you've got all this time to train. That's what we're talking about where people just go, you know, the first four days they're out there riding, smash themselves around the hills. And then the next six days of the 10 day break that they had, they're really exhausted and can't get the value and benefit of the program sessions that they're meant to, you know, improve from. And all I've done is increase the volume and increase the fatigue, but actually not got better.

So it's fair to say that one of the main priorities is to make sure that you can still do your Couple of high intensity sessions throughout the week. So if you're going to choose to increase the volume somewhere, it can't be at the expense of being able to hit those two high intensity sessions.

That's right. And, and you can manipulate those high intensity sessions to have bigger gaps between them. You could have them, for example, on the Tuesday and then have them on the Saturday. You know, just because we're trying to do the 80, 20 where, you know, five days is, is kind of really improving our endurance as zone two, our pressure on the pedals, strength in the hills. But you know, spread the two intensity days out. Because in a normal seven day week, when we're at home in our normal routine working, you know, we have specific days where we have time off from work. It might be Tuesday, Thursday. For shift workers, it might be Wednesday, Thursday. For the average population, it's Saturday, Sunday. That's 90% of the people. But when you're on these periods where every day is a weekend day, then you don't have to have the high intensity days, you know, Tuesday, Thursday or Tuesday, Friday or Monday, Wednesday. You can have more gap between them. So you've got more opportunity to really get the volume in those other days, get the strength and endurance and spread it out. So don't try and do six hours on the first day you get there and then progressively it goes four hours, two hours, one hour, I can't ride at all. You know, start the opposite. You know, if you arrive on a Tuesday and you're meant to be doing high intensity day, that session, then, you know, add a little bit longer warmup, do the high intensity session, add a little bit longer warm down. Instead of it being an hour 20 session, now it's an hour 45 or an hour 50.

Good.

Small percentages the body will absorb it. It's not getting thrown into the deep end on day one. Day two might be a recovery day. You know, 50 minute recovery is what you were meant to do if you're working full time, okay, make it 90 minutes or make it 100 minutes. You know, it doesn't have to be, you know, three, four, four more hours. But I've got all this time, Jared. I need to, I need to use the time properly. No, just, you know, measure your efforts over the two week period or the four week or the three week or the 10 days. Measure, measure how much time you've got and allow your body to absorb the fatigue. Because that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to increase the volume at the Expense of fatigue. So we don't want to get to a point where halfway through we're so tired that we hit the wall and are exhausted and then, you know, the rest of the family gets unhappy because you're lying on the couch all day. On this holiday we were supposed to be doing things so, you know, that can be frustrating for everybody and, and getting everybody on the wrong side, you know, of, of the great family vacation that you're supposed to be having.

So what's the goal of the holiday period then? Are you expecting to come out fitter or are you expecting to come out fresher? Or should your goal just to be maintain my fitness and have a good training block?

Great question. And the answer is every time you ask me a question, it depends. So what's my goal? Is my goal June Ironman? June half Ironman. Yeah. You've got more opportunity to improve your endurance, which is going to improve your aerobic fitness. So that would be a big priority. And the examples we've just given in the last five minutes would be to progress your endurance throughout the period that you have off from work, from your normal routine. So that would be a fair enough goal. But if that race is in February or March, then you've got to be real careful. You don't come out of this needing two weeks of recovery or one week of recovery. And there's nothing wrong with having one week of recovery, by the way. But, but it will slow your progress because we're trying to combine aerobic fitness improvement, not creating too much fatigue and still building our form. And so we don't want to come out with fatigue, you know, minus 60 and, and having to have four days where we can't even train hard to get our fatigue back down to something that's, you know, within the ranges that we want between 0 and minus 30. And all the time our form should be still steady, our fitness line still needs to improve. So, so there are things that are really what you should be looking for is, yes, get your fitness line to improve, which, which takes obviously time and effort with endurance, you can't just ride harder and faster every day. That is something I actually haven't said here. So most people will go, right, I can ride with this bunch, I can meet up with these people I've met before. And every one of those people, their goal for that day might be flat out, you might line up five rides with, with some groups and all they want to do because everybody's on holidays is, is, you know, flex their muscles. So you need to leave your ego at home and select the rides and the groups that you're going to ride with and understand what their purpose and goal is. And even though they tell you it's an easy ride or it's a tempo ride or it's a really hard ride, if the really hard ride coincides with your intensity day, go for it. If the really hard ride doesn't align with your intensity day, swap days, move days around, it's okay. But you can't do three or four intensity days in that five day period. That's, you know, that seems obvious but, but it has to be said that that's not, that's not okay. So, so you've got to understand what your goals are according to where your race is. So that's the dependent factor. So if your race is really imminent, then you need to keep closely aligned with the structure of your program and just add more zone to that would be a summary for me. If you're, if your a race is quite a long way off, then be flexible in that in this period and really aim to have, if you've got lucky enough to have four weeks off, which not a great deal of people have that amount of time to themselves, but you would need to have in that four week block, you would need to have almost four or five days where you're really doing no intensity, where you've got almost a three week hard period and one week easy. And I would do that in the middle, do one, one and a half weeks hard, little, little middle period where it's easy, then 1 1/2 weeks hard towards the end. But normally people would have two weeks. So you know, you would make sure that your, the week going into your holiday period is really easy. That would be something I would really try to stress to each athlete. Having having a period where you know that you're going to increase the endurance, the volume, the duration, not necessarily intensity, but you will get fitter by doing that, by, you know, we know that training a lot in zone two will absolutely help our aerobic fitness, help our fitness line improve along with continuing to do the intensity where it should be aligned with. So, so absolutely being fresh going into that period and then having a recovery period after. But they're important things. Are they going to be detrimental to your imminent race? If they are, then you got to be careful about how much you really push yourself because you know, you might be in a build phase or you might be in a race ready phase and you know they're, they're very different. You know, you could be in a base phase, which means you've got all the time in the world to actually do more endurance and you've got great period of recovery because you're not actually going from your, your exercise to straight to work, you're actually going to relax, sit by the pool or go for a walk. So. So yes, the answer again, always it's dependent.

Thinking about the point you made in terms of what you're actually doing on holidays is that you're on holidays potentially with your family or even if you're not with your family, at least the aim is to try and relax and to be able to do things and not just be so fatigued that you're on the couch all day. It's also ironic that in this period we all seem to be busier. You suddenly have family things to go to. It's just constant. Maybe social things or the calendar during this period just seems to fill up and so you can't really afford to be training at the expense of being able to live and function, which is funny because we all train and work throughout the whole year. But in this period you seem to be busier and potentially more tired.

Yeah, it's quite ironic, isn't it, that in the holiday period you're less relaxing because you've got to go here, you got to go there and got to meet someone for coffee and you've got to go and see some special thing that you're in the holiday area, you're in the go to things you must see, which take time. And you've done your five hour ride and the family's ready to go at 10 o' clock and you arrive home at 5 to 10 because you got up at 4:30. It's actually not really holiday mode, is it? It's almost like harder than the work zone that you would normally be in. And you've got five minutes to get ready to get into the car, to go to, you know, to take the kids somewhere and you've got no recovery. So, you know, these are things you have to take into consideration. And you know, the body will only take so much before it starts to break apart. So the absorption rate we talk a lot about and how well can you absorb the fatigue that you're stressing the body through and you have to be well aware of, you know, you know that if you're feeling like you're falling asleep, then you probably need to go to sleep. So to give yourself a chance to recover. And if the scheduled family drive is in five minutes, You've got no chance to go to sleep. So you've got to be careful about what you're doing when you're doing it.

For triathletes, and this is actually for cyclists as well, but maybe more for triathletes. They may go to a location where they can't take their bike or they don't have access to swim. They might be at the beach. So they could do open water swims, but maybe no access to a pool. You can pretty much always run wherever you go. If you've got your runners, you can run, but that's not always guaranteed if you're somewhere in the bush. So how do you handle that when maybe one of the disciplines you can actually train for.

There's so many factors there because if you go, if you're a pure cyclist and you go to a place where you're going to be there for two weeks and they're is no way you can cycle, you can't take your bike. You might have an extreme example, you're going to the Antarctica.

Well, if you go camping or something.

Where there's, you know, you just can't take the bike, there's nowhere to ride, there's no mountain bike trails to ride. You just have to understand that that's not the form of exercise you're going to do. You have to come up with another form of exercise so you can walk everywhere. And if you can't run because you're injured and you've never, you know, you haven't run for years, then I'm not advocating going for runs at all. You know, I would actually say do not run if you're someone who's prone to injury because you could come out of this two week period where you don't ride your bike and come out injured because you've been trying to run to match your fitness. So going for a walk, don't underestimate how valuable just moving is going to be. I would train harder into that two week period if I had no ability to access my bike, if I was a bike rider, so that I knew that I was having a two week period where I was basically just if, if you're in a campsite that had no swimming, I'm just talking about cyclists for the minute. Swimming could be something you could do as a cyclist just for heart and lungs, just, you know, everybody can swim. So if you're near a beach, then do some open water swimming, grab some goggles and start swimming. If you hate swimming, it's still going to get your Heart and lungs going. Go for walks where there's lots of undulations. Undulations going upstairs gets my heart and lungs going and I'm reasonably fit. So do some walking where it's undulating. So you can have this two week period. And I'm just making a scenario whether it's two weeks that you don't have and you can still keep and maintain some aerobic fitness by, by coming up with some things. If you really want to be, you know, a little bit, you know, left of field, you can do sit ups, push ups, chin ups, side planks, front planks, all sorts of stretching. You know, these are things you can do if you want to. Or you can say, I'm having a two week period of rest, could be.

Good to freshen up mentally.

This is my period where I'm not training. So. So that's one scenario. Second scenario, that's the most extreme scenario. It is. So, so the second scenario is if I'm a triathlete and I'm, you know, we can cover every single fat option. If I'm near the water, there's no pool, it's easy. You just go and swim in the ocean, you know, or a lake, you know, you can do your intervals in there. You can go from point to point. If you've got form goggles, you can see how far you're swimming. It's 200 meters up, stop swimming, you can see it in your eyeline. You don't look at your watch. You know, if there's still no bike facility, you concentrate more on your swimming and your running and you do more of those two activities because you can't ride. But if you are in a place where you can ride, then you're just going to have to select courses that are more appropriate to the session. Understanding what the session's goals are. Say we're doing over under. We don't want to be going downhill when we're doing the over threshold. We want to select the course where we're going to be continually able to do the over section where we can push the power properly. And when you're going downhill, you can't push the power. You know, that's just obvious. So we need to select courses. So you're in foreign environment, so you need to suss out the areas where you think you can train, where the least traffic is, the least interruptions, the safest places. Yeah, these are things that I'm straight away, I could run there, there's a trail, I can swim here, you know, there's a bike section where the local bike riders train go go to Strava and find out where the local bike riders where, where the, the koms are of the local area. And you know, I've done that all over Europe where I've gone to a new, a new country, new city, first thing I'll do is look up the Strava and see where the local rides are. And they seem to do this road a fair bit. So that must be a good road to be on. And so I'll try that. So these are examples of you just doing a bit of research and it's important that you do that and suss out what your ride is going to be in this completely new environment. And you know, the trail running, every place has got somewhere where people run. You've just got to ask questions and, and you know, look up the local running club if there's a website, you know, try and try and make some calls. You know, we've always said if you're in a city where you can't ride at all, but there's gym bikes there or there's a, you know, some sort of lookup where there's people who've got kickers for hire and you can hire them and you know, we've got examples of that in our group already. People are going, you know, to Scotland in the middle of winter, in December. There's not much chance that you'll be able to ride in the snow. So, you know, already she's got her kick out organized a borough bike organized. This is the preparation you should be doing so that you can still come out the other end. Her race is in March and half Ironman in March and February and June, so she's not going to miss a beat. It's got all that organized already done the homework. This is what you should be doing. So there should be no reason why you shouldn't be able to train or not train. And if you choose that this is going to be a recovery period, fantastic. So it can be had both ways. It can be get better value out of the holiday period or recover. And I'm an, you know, if both options are absolutely fine, if it fits into your program, but just be aware of the pitfalls of doing nothing and doing too much. The as you know, the extremes I'm against anything that's extreme is unsustainable. So therefore your consistency goes out the window. So don't be extreme in everything you do, whether it's training, whether it's nutrition, you know, you've Just got to be balanced more and do your homework. Be prepared better for these periods and select the group, select the courses, select the times. If the family's got something on that's going to take eight hours, don't use that as your five hour ride day. Move it. You know, they're obvious things but it has to be said, I guess the.

Question'S a little bit more geared towards as well. That's the whole logistics side. How do you, how do you plan for that, how do you stay organized and you know, course selection, et cetera. But mentally approaching a period where, yeah, you, you, you're going to be missing a discipline for the next two weeks. And I can feel, it can feel kind of scary that you're suddenly dropping your bike for two weeks or you're dropping the run for two weeks or even the swim. You know, if you're, you really, you've done a lot of work to improve your swim. You don't want to go backwards. So approaching that mentally can be challenging.

Yeah, you definitely have to have your own mindset. Right. It's okay. I know this is coming up. It could be the fact that you're actually not on holidays and you've got a work conference that goes for 10 days and it goes from 7am till 9pm at night because there's everything scheduled. You've just got to accept that that's what's gonna happen and therefore mentally I know that's gonna happen. I'm gonna train a little bit differently leading up to it and then I know that I'll be fresh post so I can actually do some testing straight away because I've freshened up. It's almost like a mini taper so you can actually just think it through and get the positive outcome that is there. You've just gotta find it. And there will be scenarios like that where you're feeling like, oh, far out. I've just trained my backside off for swimming. My techniques just coming together, get the feel it's coming together. We've just experienced that with lockdown. You know, we haven't been out swim for literally six months out of the last nine. You know, we've only been able to swim for the last two months and understand how quickly we're swimming back to normal again. You know, the base that you've created from a year of swimming properly, it's not lost, it's in the bank. Don't think that it's not there. Same with running, same with your riding. Everything you've done in the previous Five years, two years, three months. If you have a period where you're injured or sick or on holidays, we're talking about now where you can't train, you will be fine. You just need to take a few weeks to get back and all of a sudden you're back to where you were. I've got huge examples of, you know, some guys in our group who, through whatever the reason is, work in illness or sickness, have had periods off. I use my own example, I had five weeks off with a fractured hip and literally eight weeks later, I did an FTP PB of eight years. You know, that that's a negative situation turned into a positive. You know, I used that time. I was fresh, my base was still there. I was in really good form before I fractured the hip. And it didn't do me any harm. In fact, it freshened me up. And that's probably another podcast topic. Should we train all year round? And I look at Woot Van Aert and he does. He defies the odds. He trains all year round and he races all year round. He goes from road cycling to cyclocross. Cyclocross, Gran Fondo, you know, and he, you know, the Tour de France, he won one, two, the sprint and the time trial, and here he is, you know, probably going to be world Champion cyclocross. So there are exceptions to every rule. But in general, the point I'm making is we do need some time down and one of the guys who's got, you know, the Haute Route is his goals for next year because we're back to traveling again. Dave won't mind me mentioning this, but we've decided that December is going to be his period where he pulls back. And because it's going to be a big six months leading into the Haute Route, which is, for those who don't know what it is, it's, it's, you know, five or six days of Master style Gran Fondo racing, and every Haute Route's different. That's why I've said five to six days. Some haute route, 10 days, some are six, some are three. So every haute Route has, like, you can go mountains, Haute Route Pyrenees, or you can do Alpe d' Huez Mountains. You can do Spanish Hot route. There's. There's 30, 40 haute route options around the world where Master's riders have a GC opportunity, Grand General Classification over days.

With a Grand Tour.

Yeah, it was the Masters for Masters writers. Yeah. So. So he's going to have a big preparation for that. So it's okay to have an easy period. So mentally, you, you need to understand what your big picture is and what your, what you're dealing with every day, every week, every month.

And as a coach, what sort of patterns do you see in people over this period? I know you've seen a lot of variation over December, January. And again, you probably answer more talking about people in the southern hemisphere where it's, where it's summer, because in the northern hemisphere, as we discussed before, it's totally different. People are going to be indoor training, etc. But what have you seen as a coach over this period?

Generally, I suppose if we just, if we relate it to all the people listening from the northern hemisphere, it's, it's your July. What do you do in your July? And for in the southern hemisphere, what do you do in your December, January? And the typical scenario, and I'm Talking about nearly 90% of the people will have this outcome. They've got this all of a sudden, all this time to train, and they start the first three or four days absolutely flat out, and they can't wipe the smile off their face. They're having an absolute ball and. Oh, yeah, right there. And some guy goes, oh, I'm going to do extra. Yeah, yeah, I'll do that as well. I'll go with Johnny. He's doing another hour. I've got time. And that's great. It's fantastic. You're enjoying yourself, you're loving what you're doing, and that is important. But you've got to understand that eventually you can't keep doing that every day because you will not even be able to get out of bed by day six. You know, some guy says you're up for a ride and you'll go, I can't. I'm just exhausted. And I remember the scenario Frank, my brother, went to when he went to France. And, and we're on the phone, I was saying to him, oh, you must be enjoying. You know, today you can do Von 2 and then you go into the tourmaline next and the hortican and then the abyss. And then, you know, I was just rattling off and he said, he said, I did tourmalet and I can hardly walk. I did both sides and I need three days off. Yeah. And I was so excited about doing it. And that was just, just made me realize of the excitement factor of, I mean, this great riding Mecca. And, and you know, the guys who go to Bright as an example in Australia, you've got Falls Creek, both sides, you've got Hotham, both sides, you've got buffalo, you got three of the, you know, biggest mountains in, in Australia right at your doorstep. And yeah, I'm going to do falls the first day from where I am, and that's six hours. And I'm going to do half of them all out to, you know, the backside of falls, there's another eight hours. Well, you just can't do that. And that's the scenario that I see happen. And you could be just going down to the. And I'll just keep using the examples locally here there's a holiday area from Melbourne, which is the Mornington Peninsula or the West Coast. You know, Mornington Peninsula's got Arthur's Seat and Red Hill and great riding areas. And the west coast has got Lawn and great ocean Road. They're fantastic places to ride with hills and rolling terrain. Just perfect. I just love riding there. But I have to check myself and go, no, I need to do it easy today, I need to do tomorrow harder and then three more days, I need to do longer. So the scenario is always going to be, yes, start hard and fade. Just like they do in races. No different. They get off the bike, you know, they get onto the bike, go flat out and fade throughout the whole ride. In the triathlon, by the time they get off the bike, they're exhausted. Then they get off and for some reason they still want to run flat out. And by the time they get halfway through the marathon, they're walking. This is no different to their holiday regime. So we've just got a human nature to get excited and go flat out. I even remember as a youngster drinking, going to the pub instead of just taking your time and having a few drinks. Everybody's drinking flat out in the first hour and wiping themselves out. And we've all done it. We just get excited and get carried away. You still have to have fun, but you can have more fun by doing the whole two weeks of training without killing yourself. And as Frank said, I'm going to have to rethink my strategies and I'll ride the next set of hills a lot easier and spread it out. You rode the day, it was 40 degrees and he was sunburned, dehydrated and could hardly walk downstairs. So. So that's the scenario that's going to play out in probably everybody's holiday period. Don't be that person. Be a little bit more sensible. I want you to have fun. I want you to have a smile on your face, but you'll have a smile on your face. For the full two weeks rather than the first three days. Just like you would in a race, have a smile on your face at the end of the race instead of, you know, thinking you're a hero in the first 10 minutes of the ride and 10 minutes of the run.

The laws of the body don't just suddenly go out the window because you're on holidays. And training principles. Training principles for a reason.

You don't become superhuman when you go on holidays. You still have fatigue and. And, you know, and all the things that come with it.

We don't just say you can only do two hard sessions a week for the sake of it. It's that law. That rule still applies on holidays.

Yeah. And you can do five hard sessions. You people have done it, they've just gone flat out. And the outcome is generally they're sick or injured or don't train for another month. They had a great two weeks of training camp, but they're that exhausted. That is a scenario that's happened many times. And glandular fever, you know, just fatigue, chronic fatigue. You see it happening, and they're extremes again. And I'm just trying to give examples of. Of situations where you've just got to think a little bit smarter about what you're doing. You don't want to sabotage your own program, and that's, in a sense, what you're doing.

That's a really great way to finish. That was. The goal of this podcast was to talk about the holiday period coming up and give you an indication of the best way to attack your training program. And it's really quite simple. It's be smart about it and be patient, and you'll probably enjoy the whole period more. And as you said, add more volume in zone two rather than trying to add more consistent intensity because it won't last.

Yeah. And if you can remember, one thing is in order to do more work, there will be more fatigue. So be clever. And the more work has to be zoned to and not above. If you can just keep that thought, then you will have an absolute ball.

That's it for this episode. Thanks very much for listening, and we'll see you next time.