Tricks To Get A Winning Edge

This episode of the Get Fast podcast is brought to you by Tribello Coaching, where we help triathletes and cyclists like you train smarter to race faster. You are joined as always by your hosts, former Australian Ironman Jared Donnelly. And I am Jordan Donnelly. In this episode we are talking about the winning edge, the winners edge, and really specifically how to get a winning edge over your competitors. Now this episode is about, given all other factors would be similar if you already have a well established training program, if you have the basic fundamentals down pat, which include a well formed training program with proper structure, proper training, proper periodization training that is going to generally be really effective for you with all those things being equal, how do you find an edge over your competitors? And there are very specific things that you can do which will actually give you a competitive advantage over other races. So we're going to go through a lot of them. And I know this is the stuff that you love, that you're always looking for is you've probably had a pretty good structured training program for 30 years, so you're always looking for the 1 percenters, the little things that can push you that little bit further and get you that little bit better.

I totally agree. And if you put two athletes side by side who are doing the same program and one is getting more out of himself than the other, I would straightaway look at what is he doing that I'm not doing because we're doing the same program. But it's those, those little extra little bits that create that winning edge, that winning culture, and, and they could be so insignificant, but they are formulating the whole picture. And we always say in a lot of our sentences, someone asked me what should I do differently? And I say, well, that depends. And we say that a lot. That depends. And this is another example of having a really well founded training program with structure and you understand your data and you're doing everything right, you're not doing anything wrong. But why aren't you getting the same extras out of the program that Rider B might be doing that's doing the same program as you are?

Now on this topic, there are probably hundreds of little things you could do. So we're not going to go into discuss every single one because there are lots of ways to find a competitive advantage. But we're going to discuss some key ones that you notice that you specifically think people could improve straight away that would help them get that winning edge. So take us through the first one and the first one we wanted to talk about was the specificity of cadence on the bike and how it is a thing that a lot of people don't pay enough attention to.

Even on my last weekend's training sessions, I found myself drifting away from. One of my key goals in most training sessions is, what is my cadence, and why am I so worried about that? How does it impact on anything I'm doing? Well, in a really good, structured program, you would have sessions that have low cadence, medium cadence, and high cadence. And the reason we use cadence in variation is to be trying to manipulate different aspects of the actual session. Low cadence, and I'm talking revolutions per minute under 75. That would be definitely to build strength. So that's a specific cadence session where you're trying to ride slow pedaling action and engage the complete three major muscle groups of the quads, hamstrings, and glutes. So cadence is specifically used for a purpose. 80 to 90, we use that a bit, and we use that in warmup, where we don't want to do strength efforts at 60 in our warmup, but we don't want to spin high early on in the. In the session, we want to gradually build our cadence from 80 to 90 to 95 to 100. So the start of the session would be specifically using cadence to warm ourselves up. A lot of the time, we use cadence at 95 to 100 to 105. We're teaching pedaling technique, but we're also trying to stimulate our cardio. The faster the cadence, the more heart and lung, you know, gasping for air you feel like you need. So that's a classic example of how cadence can change the outcome of the session.

And what do you think is the biggest winning edge with cadence?

So if you're not practiced at writing a high cadence, This is the number one thing that happens to people when they get under pressure in a race situation. I call it the go to cadence. When all of your energy sources are down and you're getting tired, it's getting towards the end of the race. You can't push the same 95 or 90 RPM that you could before comfortably. Now your heart rate's spiking because the length of time of the race is, as we know, heart rate, as you get tired for the same output, increases. And obviously, if you ride harder towards the end of the race, your heart rate's gonna go higher. So the obvious thing, like we spoke about two minutes ago, the higher the cadence, the higher the heart rate. So the go to cadence when you feel like your heart rate's getting out of Control. And why are we worried about that anyway? But once we hit a red zone in heart rate, doesn't matter how fit you are, doesn't matter whether you're Peter Sagan, you can't push the same power once you go into the red zone for too long. So the go to cadence is to drop the cadence down to stop your heart rate from spiking. So that's a classic example of manipulating cadence to get a better outcome. So we don't want to. Once we get into a lower cadence at the end of a race when we're struggling, if there's a sudden need to ride faster for some period or there's a hill, if you're grinding away in the low cadence, you have less ability to change the pace of what you're doing. So having less control over your cadence when you go to the go to cadence, which is too low, it limits you for everything. It solves the problem of keeping your heart rate down, but it actually then gets your legs to a fatigue state where you could possibly be looking at cramp as the next thing. So we want to be fit enough to hold the cadence that we want to hold throughout the whole race. So that is one of the one, the winning edge things. One key thing that I really search for in my program, in my training sessions, I know that I've got the wattage to ride to the length of time, the gradient that I'm choosing, the course that I'm choosing, all those things are important. But actually identifying during the event that I am holding the cadence during the session, that I'm holding the cadence so that when it comes race day, it's something that's natural to me. And I want that to be my go to cadence. Not like 95% of the other athletes or cyclists or triathletes. The go to cadence is 70 rpm. And for a triathlete, that's suicide for your run. So we want to use cadence in many different ways, but that is one where we don't want as a triathlete to be riding a strength session in a race and then try and get.

Off and run, because you know that feeling. If you are doing low cadence at 60-70rpm, it really feels like it's grinding. And you do feel like you've done a big squat session or something and try running after that.

It is. And we use that strength session with low cadence specifically. You know, I'm a big advocate of doing strength training, not in the gym, but on the bike. And low cadence is perfect for that because you're actually practicing the pedaling action at a low cadence, 360 degree pedaling action at a 60-75rpm and you get off after that session. It may not have been cardiovascularly hard, but you try and walk up and down stairs and you're going, whoa, my legs. You feel like you've been in the weight room. If you're in a race situation, you've been riding too low cadence, you get off the bike and you're meant to be able to run nice and fresh. Because in our program we practice brick sessions a lot riding and running. Getting off after doing a weight training session and trying to run is actually going to be detrimental to your run and could sabotage your whole triathlon.

It's interesting even just looking at Tour de France examples and you see the guys climbing up the mountain and Chris Froome's got an extremely high cadence compared to most of the guys. And most of them have a pretty average or just that you go to. You don't see many grinders. You know, back 20 years ago, you saw Jan Ulrich who had probably the 60 rpm up the hill. But it's interesting seeing the variation in.

Even the price over the decades. The cadence has been one of the things that's been significantly changed and a lot of the gearing and that caused the problem when we had, you know, back in the day when I had a seven speed bike and an eight speed, then a nine, then a 10 and 11. So the choice of gears was really small and we only had a straight block which on the rear was, you know, a 13 through to 18. And I remember riding around the circuits around here in the Dandenong Ranges in, in Melbourne where I was struggling to get up some of the hills because my front chain ring was 54 and my lower chain ring at the front was 44. So I had a 54, 44 and a 13, 18. So my lowest gear was 44, 18. And I couldn't get up a lot of the hills around here without zigzagging. And now I've got a choice of 36, 28, which is like a mountain bike gear in those days. So, so the to practice cadence in the olden days, you couldn't. You just had to be strong to push the gear. Well, now we've got bikes that allow us to ride a better cadence and to come and expect to do it in a race situation like you just talked about with the mountain stages in the, in the pro races, they're Trying to save their legs, not only for that particular stage, but for the next 20 days or 15 days, similar to what a runner is experiencing in a triathlon, that you know, the, the more times you damage the muscles in your legs, you're going to struggle the next day. So you want to learn in training to actually ride really good cadence when it counts. And if you haven't practiced it, it's not going to happen naturally in a race.

So just being able to pay attention to cadence is one thing. You'd say that a lot of athletes don't do enough. And like you said, you can even find yourself drifting off with and not paying enough attention to. But then actually how you execute the cadence, which is your pedaling action, is the next thing in the winning edge kind of formula that you look at is something that people really need to focus on. And there's a lot in the actual pedaling action itself that you need to be paying attention to. That includes what I want to ask you now is pressure on the pedals, not freewheeling. Getting yourself over undulations with the same pressure on the pedals. So talk to me about that.

Yeah, and another point that we should include in that is course selection. So in your training, if you're trying to get your body to adapt to holding a certain cadence all day, if that's what you're trying to achieve, I want to today I want to hold 95 RPM for the entire 1 hour, 2 hours, 3 hours. If you're on a course that continually has stops, stop lights, traffic lights, interruptions, you're losing that fitness gain that you're getting. If you're on a course that has no stops out in the country. And that's something that is really crucial to the winning edge topic of picking the right course to train at so that when it comes race day, you've had experience that holding pressure on the pedals for three hours. What does pressure on the pedals mean? Well, pressure on the pedals is when you're constantly exerting a force against the pedals so that at no stage are you softening up. And how. What do I mean by that? Soft pedaling? Some people call it crystal cranks, which if you pushed it too hard, it'd break. And we really want to have pressure on the pedals at an even rate. And that's very hard to do without a power meter. So if you look down and you've got it on 3 second power, you would see fluctuations. Say we're trying to hold 200 watts, you could see 210 on one pedal, stroke 195 on the next, 204 on the next. And so it jumps all over the place. And that pressure on the pedal is. Learning how to hold 200 watts as close as possible for extended periods of time really shows you've got the pedaling technique right to allow you to do the right cadence. So the pressure on the pedals has that purpose. To be able to understand how to exert the pressure throughout the full pedal rotation evenly.

For a lot of people, they wouldn't have even considered that to be abnormal to be going 210 to 190. You think, oh, that's just. You can't really pedal that even. But I have looked at your pedal power and you have an incredible ability to be at 198 to. If you're trying to hold 2001-982021-99201, you're barely outside of a 4 watt range, which shows how even you're pedaling consistently.

For long periods and not showing off. But a lot of people who ride with me notice that when we're in a training session where we're actually not trying to ride hard, but we're trying to hold steady power. And the great example is if you are in a car and you had cruise control and the car beside you was a car that hadn't got cruise control, it was a 20, 30 year old car, you would find that the car would be surging next to you, then dropping back, then surging, and he would be looking across to you, saying, what are you doing mate? You're changing, changing speed in the car, you're not doing anything, you're just holding the same steady speed in the car, 100Ks an hour. He might be going 105Ks, 95Ks without even realizing. And of course then add a hill in and as soon as you have a hill, the cruise control on the car just keeps the same. Whereas a person in a non cruise control will push the pedals harder and all of a sudden he's doing 105ks an hour. On the downhill, the natural thing is to take the pressure off the accelerator. So the changes in pace. Why are we worried about that? Well, we want to know that we can actually execute a really good pedaling power exertion throughout the whole day so that we're not fatiguing our legs, we're not having spikes in our legs every time you push. Say we're trying to hold 200 watts for a period of time as a triathlete, it's really important that you're trying to hold the range for the whole 180k or 90k or 40k, whatever race you're in. Putting spikes in is just like doing little efforts and you don't want to spike your heart rate or cause the muscle to fatigue any quicker than it has because you've got a certain amount of petrol in any day's race and you want to measure that effort so that you don't run out of petrol by the end of that race. So the cadence is unbelievably important when you're considering that. And some of the things I do is people say to me, oh, that recovery ride, I know the purpose of it, but it's so boring. Well, I totally concentrate on my cadence in the recovery ride. Can I hold 105 RPM in my recovery ride against 100 watts? And that's my goal, just holding that and. And having to concentrate on pulling up and pushing down evenly so that there's no jumping around. And, you know, the next phase is putting yourself on a set of rollers, which is another. Another point we will talk about.

There's so much in this, because even what you're just talking about on a recovery ride, if you have a power meter that measures left and right pedal power, then you go finish your ride and go, well, what was it? Was it 51, 49%? 51% power on my right leg, 49%. My left was at 52, 48. Was it massive? And it was a massive gap being 54%, 46%, which is a huge difference between your right and left leg. There's so much you can look at. And you can also look at your average power if you know how to read training peaks properly. Looking at your average power, if it's got these massive spikes up and down, it means you're not riding very evenly. In a recovery ride where it's supposed to be really easy, that should be a time when you can really concentrate and ride as evenly as possible because you're not under any duress.

And most athletes, cyclists that we're talking about here, triathletes or cyclists, if you look at any session, what you just spoke about, it's like getting your heart rate monitored. You see spikes when each beat comes up, and the rest of it, it should be dead straight because that's the lull. Well, we're trying to create a power profile and that's one of my goals. So when I get off the bike and have a look. I don't have all these little squiggles. I have almost a straight line and it almost looks like erg mode is on. And what do we mean by erg mode? Or erg mode is when the bike is holding you at the one power and you have no say in it. And so that's kind of what I'm trying to simulate. People say, why don't you just use Erg mode? Well, there's lots of reasons why we don't use erg mode, which is another whole story.

Yeah. And erg mode is only on a smart trainer. If you have a smart trainer, then it holds you at a power. The advantages of that is that it holds you out of power so you're forced to ride at it. But the big disadvantage is you're not learning how to do it yourself. The bike.

You don't have that function in the race.

Yeah.

To ride at erg mode. So if you can learn to do that in a race, that's actually perfect.

You can't just flick a machine on and it holds it.

That's right. But you need to learn to do that yourself.

Yeah, yeah. Unless you're cancellara and you've got a motor in there. But no, we don't know if he had one. It's still a conspiracy on that. Um, but that's why we started with this point. Because cadence and pedaling technique and pressure on the pedals, they're all concepts you might have heard before, especially cadence. And people would just think, and athletes would think, oh, I know how to write a certain cadence, I know how to. I know what cadence is. But there's a whole, there's a whole new world when you look into it and you think about, okay, well, am I being as effective as possible with, with my cadence? And when you ask the question, you know, how, how good is my pedaling technique? How good am I at holding pressure on the pedals? How good am I at holding even power? Because for you, if you're doing a two hour ride and you have an incredible ability to hold even power, you're not wasting energy up and down, jumping around. Think about how much more efficient you are over two hours compared to someone who's having to jump up and down because they're not riding properly, they're just wasting so much energy. Not right. And not holding even power.

Spot on. They're gradually increasing the fatigue level, whereas your. You're just releasing it at an even rate. And people who grab an extra 10, 15 watts here and there. That adds up 50 times. And it will hurt you at the end of the race and in. Whether you're doing a criterium or road race or a time trial in triathlon, you know, it counts across the whole. From start to finish. You know, you're not. You're not measured by the first five minutes or the first half hour. You're measured by the whole event. And if you can get to the end in the best possible shape as a triathlete, you want to get off and run really well and not hurt yourself, but run, but ride as close to your goal as possible, but not hurt yourself in the process. If you're in a criterium or a road race and you want to get to the finish to sprint or. Or break away and hold power, and you've wasted too many matches earlier on, you're not gonna be able to do that either. So it's really important that we do consider this is one of those winning edge things. And we talked about pressure on the pedals. We talked about no freewheeling. What does that mean? I'm so keen on not hearing that sound of people not pedaling when you bike, when people stop pedaling, it's that sound that's my pet hate. I cannot stand that sound. That means that someone's not pedaling. So in a race situation, you might. Some might say to you, well, you're trying to conserve, aren't you? And I think that's great in a race. That's the time when I'm happy to hear that sound. It means that you're saving energy for when it counts. In a training session, I don't want to see you saving energy unless you're in the recovery phase of. But even then, you want to keep turning the pedals over because blood flow is really important. If you're holding your pedals stiff in one static motion, there's no blood flow going there. And you might have been working really hard. And all of a sudden you get this blood pooling, which is the opposite to what you want. You want blood flow, so oxygen goes to working the repairing muscles. And to sit there stationary, you might be on a descent that goes for 15 minutes. You need to just roll the pedals over so the blood is flowing. So when you get to the bottom of the descent, you can actually ride normally again and not feel like, oh, what's wrong with my legs? Because I've been stationary for 10 minutes. Plus, you lose the effect of the pressure on the pedals. So those two things Go together. No freewheeling and pressure on the pedals in the one session. I just don't want to see periods where people's cadence is zero.

This is what we talk about the competitive, competitive advantage. Because you look at someone who's completing a training program and completing every bike session, and yes, you might be completing the basic fundamentals, but then person B is doing the same training as you, but focusing on their cadence and their pressure on the pedals for every part of it, including the recovery, because they're trying to get the maximum out of their session. How much more are they getting out of their training sessions?

They in person A. Oh, unbelievably accurate what you just said then. And you know, I just talked about the example on the weekend and I was trying to hold a certain wattage and you know, just finding a little bit uncomfortable. And then I stopped concentrating on my pedaling action and all of a sudden I went, oh, I'm not pulling up on the pedals here. Instantly I did that. The next 10 seconds, my power went 10 watts higher just by pedaling using all three muscle groups again rather than just pushing down because I was drifting, my mind was drifting away from what I was thinking about how tired I was getting instead of concentrating on what is my cadence and what is my power. And I know that if I use my glutes and hamstrings to contribute to the quads on the down push, glutes and hamstrings on the up pull, then I'm going to get an even power response. And instantly my power jumped. Instant even.

That's just a little technique thing that you can easily not think about is the pedal action is 360 degrees. It's push and pull. It's not just push. And we can be so quad dominant and just be pushing and hardly ever pulling up. And that 360 degree rotation is really important to think about.

Yeah, it is one of the keys in being able to hold steady even power. Like we've been talking about, pressure on the pedals with a good pull up pull stroke as well as a down push stroke will enable you to, to actually get really even power. And the best way to do that, and you know, I've gone and purchased a set of rollers specifically for that. When I first started on the rollers a long time ago, I nearly bounced myself off because my pedaling action was so all over the shop. And it causes you to sit still and pedal smoothly. And if you, the minute you start to bounce, then the bike will jump. Off the rollers and you're on the ground. So a set of rollers, the winning edge. Do some of your sessions on rollers.

You'll know straight away if you are an uneven pedal, even without having a right and left power meter, because your right will push you off the rollers, won't they?

That's right. And a lot of riders that I look around when I'm especially in the hills, when they're really struggling, their upper body from the hips will start to. It's like they've got a song in their head and they're, they're pushing up and down to the beat of the song. Well, we want to have from your hips up perfectly still and the engine room is below your hips where the legs are just riding these magnificent 360 degree pedaling action. No matter how low the gear is, if you're doing strength efforts, it should be the same. None of this pushing down with your head. The head doesn't contribute or your torso doesn't contribute. It means you're just pushing if you're doing that. Whereas if you're concentrating on pulling up, there's no way your upper body will be doing the bobbing motion that we're talking about. And practicing that is something that you can do the same session, get the same outcome, but you actually haven't engaged two of the muscle groups. So therefore you're not developing that. The person who can develop that in training is going to be in six months time a better peddler than the person does the same training program without developing those muscle groups.

And I know that this is a pet hate of yours, especially that freewheeling sound. And I actually laugh to myself if I ever see a bunch cycle pass. And actually I could just hear majority of the bunch with that sound. And you just think, hardly anyone's pedaling there. They're just rolling. You're not actually moving your body. It feels like you're exercising because you're on the bike, but you're not actually, you know, actually pedaling.

Might as well be in the car with your window down.

Yeah, exactly.

You're getting the wind in your face, but you're not actually contributing. The only people are getting the value out of that are the two people on the front. If you're in twos and you know that that type of session where, you know, we encourage group ride once a week in our program, but if you're in the middle of that bunch and you're not getting the power output that's required, then you're pretty much wasting your time. And socially, it's great, but for value to improve, and we're talking about the winning edge here, then there's no winning. It's a losing edge being in that group. So you need to actually make sure that you get some time on the front so your nose is in the wind. And, you know, I've done many times where if the bunch has someone on the front who specifically wants to be on the front, I'll drop 50 meters off the back of the bunch and be in the wind without anybody noticing. And I've done that plenty of times in my years of training where I'm not getting the outcome I want. I still want to be with the group, but I can be 100 meters behind them. It comes undone a bit when, if I get stopped at a traffic light and they don't, then I'm actually now a kilometer behind them. So it can. You know, you've got to take the good with the bad there. But, you know, the point I'm making is there are times when it's okay on a recovery day to be sitting in there spinning away. That's a great day to be. To be just. But you still wouldn't be freewheeling. You would be concentrating on pedaling. The pedaling in a recovery day is not reliant on the wattage. It is totally about the pedaling.

This was really made evident to me when we were cycling in Belgium. In Belgium, majority of where we were riding was really big undulation. There was. There wasn't many stretches of flat. It was mostly peak undulations. And almost every time we would go over a hill, you'd be on the front and you would gap the bunch by 10, 20 meters sometimes because your pressure on the pedals is consistent. And our natural reaction is when we get to the top of a hill is to stop pedaling and to recover, ease up. And you would just constantly get. And it would look like you were trying to get away from the bunch, but you're just holding the same pressure on the pedals and you're just getting away. And everyone has to pedal again quickly to catch up. And that is the difference between keeping pressure on the pedals and Not.

The funny part about that was I was getting asked, why do I keep accelerating over the top of hills? And I just had to turn it completely back around to the other person. Why are you decelerating? I'm actually holding the same power I was 50 meters ago at the top of the hill, the crest, and on the down slope, I don't stop pedaling. So. So if we're holding 200 watts as an example up the hill, I'm holding at the crest, and I'm holding it down the hill 200 watts, so it looks like I'm accelerating, I'm not. I'm holding the same cruise control example in the car. And the people in the bunch think they've crested the hill, the work's done, time to ease up. And that's just natural that we do that. But that's what I'm trying to teach people, to get this little winning edge, especially in a time trial. People think I'll ride hard on the hill, which is fine, because you need to ride over your threshold. Because on the downhill, it's harder to push the power that you're trying to hold, but you need to keep and carry that pressure on the pedals over the crest of the hill and accelerate on the downhill. So when your bike speed catches up to where you're happy for it to be where it is, if it's above 60ks an hour, then it's okay to not pedal at all and get into as a position as possible. But until that is achieved, you need to keep the pressure on the pedals. And if you haven't practiced that in training, and that's exactly one of the things you're talking about at the start of the podcast was these are the one percenters, the winning edge. Things that if you practice in training, that will be second nature in race day, and it'll do people's heads in seeing you. And we've done some, many clients where we've gone from a reasonably steep section of road to a flat section u turn, you know, and Alpe d' Huez is, is something that is on Zwift, where people get to see this. And in real life, this is exactly what happens. It's got 21 switchbacks, and there's many mountains in Europe that have lots of switchbacks. And the switchbacks are obviously less gradient. The trick is to keep the pressure you've been applied. Say you're on a 10% gradient, then you get to the switchback and it's four and a half. Keep the same pressure and you watch yourself accelerate away from a bunch and it does their heads in. They are going. You are accelerating around these corners, and I'm not, I'm just holding the same pressure. And it will gradually make them accelerate higher to catch back up to you. So instead of them riding 200 watts the whole way up, which is what we're trying to achieve, to conserve and stay within the range. They might be riding 200, then 150, then 190, then 220 to catch back up. So there's a match burnt, next corner, a match burnt, 21 switchbacks, 21 matches burnt.

And just think about the training advantage you get from practicing this in training and how it applies to a race. And how am I? I would just watch you and think, you are getting so much more of a fitness advantage than me because you're riding longer on the front. There's more pressure on the pedals, I'm freewheeling more. You're riding over the top of the crest over one training ride, you're getting a bigger fitness advantage than me. And it feels unfair almost because you go and you're getting a better edge and think about that for every single session. What's that? What that's doing?

Yeah. And I really encourage people who think that it's clever in training to sit in and they've achieved their goal of distance and time. So the goal was three hours and they've done that in a bunch. But if we compared both athletes, the guy who sat in the front in the wind and the guy who sat in the bunch, they both achieved the goal of the three hour endurance ride. But look at their power differences. One person might have had an intensity factor of 0.58, and the other one might have had an intensity factor of 0.6. You know, it looks like they've done the same program, but they haven't. You know, one sat in and took the soft option and not got the training effect out of what we're trying to achieve. And the person on the front who's totally motivated, he's concentrating on cadence, he's concentrating on making sure his power's in the right range. He's on the front dictating the pace he wants to ride. And of course, we can't have everybody on the front, but, you know, that's great. If the group's trying to fight, I want to get on the front.

I love that means more people, actually not freewheeling in the middle.

And it means they're concentrating on getting a really good outcome.

Yep, yep, definitely. And so we've spoken mostly about the bike so far, this podcast, and it is really specific. You spoke about course selection before, especially on the bike. You don't want to be picking a course that you're constantly getting stopped at because you won't achieve that pressure on the pedals goal. That's not always achievable on a bunch ride, but ideally, stop picking courses that you're going to get stopped on. Keep the pressure on the pedals. But what about the run and swim? I mean, the course selection is just as important for them in terms of thinking about this winning edge and this competitive advantage.

Yeah, well, the swim's reasonably obvious. If you just spend all of your time in the pool, you are constantly like riding a bike with traffic lights. And of course, we're doing intervals in a pool and it's meant to have stopping and recovering. So we need to make sure that we are outside in an open water, swimming consistently in the open water, practicing the cold, practicing sighting, practicing constant arm action resistance underwater. Because that's a big factor in a race where, because you've been doing it in a pool, you're doing ten, one hundreds or five, two hundreds or four, five hundreds, you're getting a stop. That doesn't happen in a race. You don't have it in a swim race. There's no treading water. If you do, the swimmers are swimming away from you. So you need to have that feeling of, my arms are getting sore from 25 minutes of continuously swimming and if I'm in AN IRONMAN, it's 50 if you're good, an hour, 20 if you're not so good of consistently, if you haven't done that in training. It's foreign and it's an awful feeling come race day.

And the swell as well.

Yeah, the swell. And some people get seasick and you need to know that before, you know, your Uncle Paul gets seasick a lot and it's really, you know, only till he went into some swell ocean that he found that out. And you can take, you know, seasick tablets to make you feel less nauseous in the water. So there's lots of things you need to learn about the 1 percenters. You know, don't get in a pair of goggles that you've never tried in the, in the ocean and you can't see anything come race day. You need to have invested in a pair of goggles that work.

And running course selection is just as key as.

Well, running course selection is really, as most cyclists agree, picking the course for the particular session you're doing. If you're trying to do strength efforts on a flat bit of road, that is a lot harder than finding it on a hill. The hill creates a resistance, then your cadence can drop down and all you're worried about is making sure you're pedaling 360s. So the same with the run. If we're trying to do some hill repeats and there's nowhere to run a hill repeat, you need to go and drive somewhere to find a venue that's going to enable you to fulfill the requirements of that session.

And we talk about the goal of if you're a runner, one of the key sessions is your long aerobic endurance run. And ideally you would wish every single runner could go do it in the hills and get as much elevation as possible because of the gains and finish you can get without having to run hard.

Yep. So again, athlete A, athlete B, athlete A does the two hour run, or the one and a half hour run, or the one hour run. Whatever stage of your program you're up to, that's your endurance run. The idea is to build time on your feet running. That's what endurance running is. So come race day, you're totally adjusted to it. The second gain is to get strength. So the best way to get strength in your legs, in the skeletal system, is to run against the resistance. And that's what heels will do. So runner A lives in the flat, runner B lives in the flat. Who has the winning edge? No one, because they're both running on similar courses. If they both did a one hour endurance run and runner A did it on the flat, and runner B drove half an hour and found a set of hills where he climbed 500 vertical meters and runner A climb 50 vertical meters, keep doing that for six weeks and run a B will be 10 to 15% better runner after six weeks. There's no hesitation in the data that I've got from seeing people who refuse to accept that a little bit of pain with a drive is worth the gain to be a better runner. And when it's put like that, you'd say, why wouldn't I drive? You know, there's a session that I do back on the bike where there is a course where I like to do the bike session where I'm doing sub threshold. I live in the Dandenong Ranges and there is no section of road that's flat for more than 100 meters. So I can't do that session here. So I drive 45 minutes to the venue, do the session for an hour and a half to two hours and, and drive 45 minutes back. That's the commitment I have, that's the winning edge, that's the difference. Making sure that the course venue suits what you're trying to get the outcome of. And as a runner, there is a hill somewhere where you live. It might be half an hour's drive, it might be 15 minutes, it might be an hour. You know, we're not expecting to do that every session, but for the one particular session, especially the endurance run, there's no doubt in my mind. The success I had as a triathlete was because I moved and I moved to the Dandenong Ranges to train. There's no other reason I moved here and I've stayed here ever since. But running at Sherbrooke Forest, which is renowned marathon runners Mecca, that improved my marathon running in the triathlon extraordinarily, it was such a game changer. And you know, I was regularly running 5 to 800 meters of vertical over an hour, hour and a half, two hours, you know, sometimes twice a week, but, but minimum once a week. And the, the back end of my marathon running in triathlon in the Ironman was the game changer. Most people were crawling to a walk. I was running the same pace that I started the marathon at. That's the difference.

And that is why on a Sunday morning at 8, 9am you will see the top professional runners in Melbourne, all at the Danong Ranges. You'll see them big groups of 30, 40, all the professional runners who are training for the Olympics out in the Dandenongs because they know it's the best thing. So really, triathletes should be doing the same.

Exactly. And a lot of the other athletes who've joined those, because it used to be three or four people just doing that, and everybody else was running in their social groups around town, and doesn't matter what suburb or state or city you live in, this was what was happening. But the serious runners had found the right course venue and they were using that to their advantage. And now, because social media people might find out that you're running here, oh, I might join you for that. They're not knowing the reason. They're doing it because it's fun, because we're in a group, but they're actually getting the benefit of the course. So don't underestimate how valuable. Even though you have achieved the time of the session, it's the other little 1 percenters in that session that are going to make you better than the person who's doing it on an easier course.

And the most outstanding example for me is obviously growing up here. I know how hilly it is, and if I do a long run around here, it's the same thing. It's 500 to 600 meters of elevation. And if I go do it in Melbourne and find the biggest hill in Melbourne, which is, you know, the Tan Anderson street hill is renowned as the tough hill in Melbourne to go run. And lots of runners go there to get some heel endurance. And it's almost laughable because I could run up that four times and my elevation would be 130 meters, 150 meters for the run. It's just, it's not even comparable.

And that's what we're talking about. It is okay to be doing that, but we're talking about the winning edge here. And so you might be listening to this and saying, well, that's a bit extreme. But I'm not talking to the person who wants to just stay the same. I'm talking to the person who wants to improve and will do anything except for cheat to get that winning edge. And these are the things that are at your disposal. But you have to choose whether you want to embrace them or not.

So a couple just to finish off with quickly, the warm up and cool down, the training advantages of warm up and cool down, but most importantly the race day advantage of warming up, which you think most triathletes actually don't get, right?

Yeah. Well, no matter what sport you're in, cycling or triathlon or swimming races, if you just jump in to the race without having done any period of blood flow, I would like to call it, where you've got to be breathing a little bit and you've got the blood flowing. If you're just standing on the beach, if you're a triathlete and a swimmer, and if you're just standing in the car park with your bike leaning against your bike as a rider, and then start the race. If someone takes off at a pace that you're not ready for, you're going to be left behind. In a cycle race, that's a disaster because as we know, riding in the bunch is so much easier, 30% easier than riding solo. So you need to be ready for whatever happens in that first section. In a swimming race, it is exactly the same. You can swim in a pack and get the draft. In a running race, it is so much easier to actually run with a group because if you're sitting in the middle of a bunch, even with wind, you still get an advantage as compared to running solo. So you want to be ready for whatever is going to be exposing you in the first five minutes of that event. But all the evidence I've found from all of my training and the classic example is I might have done a three or four hour Endurance ride and at the end of my particular session I do one and I've done this many times. I've done a PB at the four hour mark or the three hour 30 mark of my ride on a. There's a particular hill called Perrins Creek Road which is an 8% gradient for about 10 minutes. Three repeats of that strength efforts, 60 RPM in the seat, not allowed to stand up. And you know, I've tried to do 80%, 90% then best effort and after three hours of riding, three and a half hours of riding and two other efforts on that hill, I can do a PB. Why is that? Well, it's totally because my body is so warmed up and ready for the exercise that the key session that I'm about to do, not only was it for that, because I did strength efforts the previous two and that is a great example of how warm up enables and let's face it, we don't want to do a three hour warm up before an event, but it just shows you how when you're really in the groove, how you can still perform at your best no matter what you've done preceding, as long as you've done something that's going to actually get you ready for that big effort.

And there's obviously in training the aerobic fitness gains you get from doing a proper warm up and not just doing the main set, which might be 30 to 40 minutes with a five minute warmup and cool down.

That's right. And definitely one of those winning edge things is, as we've all seen, most of the professional teams and everybody in the world who's a cyclist or a triathlete will copy what the best people do. And it used to be, you know, you remember the classic example, which is extreme, is the cricketers would be sitting in the change room smoking and having, having a drink before they went out to play and then after the game again crack a beer and have a smoke. And that was, that was the norm, that's what everybody did. And then one or two athletes decided to go and practice beforehand and then they might have been a little bit successful. So all of a sudden people start practicing a bit more and the same as a cyclist, people decided, oh, the warm up actually helped me on that day and tomorrow I've got another stage, I might actually, rather than just stop and get off and sit around, I might just roll my legs over and it's a cool down and I felt better the next day and all of a sudden all the proteins are all warming up and cooling down on Ergos after a five hour mountain stage, as if you want to keep riding anymore. But the reason was because it helped get rid of the lactate that was in your body and prepared you better for the next day. And so, you know, we're doing it for the, for the reasons we might not know. But doing, copying people, you know, it doesn't matter whether the reason is there or not, you're still getting the right outcome. And that's the reason why they're doing it so that they can perform better. And they're those winning edge little things that are pretty common now but people laughed at in the beginning. Well, what are they doing that for? Haven't they ridden enough? Didn't they ride hard enough? And here they are warming down and now you're frowned upon if you don't warm down.

That's a good way to finish, I think. I mean, like we said at the start, there are hundreds of things we could talk about. I reckon we did cover probably one of your biggest kept secrets. So it's, it's a big, valuable present gift for the listeners of this podcast. This, this pressure on the pedals is something that I think you would say is giving you a competitive advantage over a lot of other cyclists or triathletes. Because you've practiced it.

Yep. And it's, it's not something that is for every session. There are certain times in your training program where you need to practice pressure on the pedals and you need to practice high cadence, low cadence. So you use it at the, at the appropriate time. But definitely as a time trialist, you need to be thinking about that in your most important event, the race. And if you haven't done that in training, you can't think about that in the race because you are actually going to engage muscles you haven't used before. So, so I, you know, we've said a lot about it today already, but that is a game changer for me is understanding during the race what I should be thinking about. And that is a winning edge topic in itself. What are the things I should be concentrating on? And I'm using a time trial as an example because criterion race is a lot of other things you need to concentrate on. Road race is the same. But as a time trialist and even as a open water swimmer and as a triathlete, you've got three events you need to concentrate on different things. But as a bike rider, where it's just you and your bike and you're trying to get from a To b faster than anybody else. What are the things going to help me get faster to the. Get to the end faster than anybody else? Well, certainly, if I can keep the pressure on the pedals evenly at the highest possible power, then I'm going to ride the way I want to, obviously, aerodynamically position myself, have good equipment, have the right nutrition, but definitely the pedaling, if I can keep thinking about that from start. So the race is 30 minutes. From the first minute to the 30th minute. What's my cadence? Am I pulling up? And I do that, I think, every 30 seconds. What's my power? What's my heart rate? What's my cadence? Their things that I think about. And people come after the race and say to me, I just drifted off today. All of a sudden, the race was over. I was concentrating early, and then by the time I got halfway through, I got tired and I stopped concentrating. And that is a fatigue factor is one of the things that stops you from thinking about that. I've had people tell me that they count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and then recount again, 1, 2, 3. And they're concentrating that way. And that, you know, whatever makes you think more about what you're trying to do is a winning edge compared to someone who's drifting.

Good way to finish. I think there are so many other factors we didn't touch on, like sleep, nutrition, recovery, massage, things we've all experimented with. You know, losing weight, diet, strength and conditioning. Exactly. Altitude, sleeping at altitude, training at altitude. There's a number of things which we will go into detail in other episodes, but I think that's enough for today.

Thank you.

Awesome. Thanks for listening. We'll see you on the next episode.