We’re Embarrassed to Admit This (The Coach Gets Coached!)

Today's case study is a little different. Normally, we would share an athlete's journey of improvement and what we did in training to help them get there. But today we're focusing on the opposite. We're looking at a poor performance, a quote unquote, poor performance and breaking down what went wrong. And, dad, the poor performance in question is actually your own. And our aim on here is to be as real as possible. We don't want to just share the highlights. The fact is, things go wrong in training, things go wrong in races. We have poor performances all the time. And the most important thing is, is how you analyze them and how you get through them. And we've spoken a lot on this podcast about how you need to objectively analyze the facts and the data in these crucial moments, because they can be quite irrational or sometimes emotional. And it can be the difference between an athlete crumbling and throwing their bike in the tip and selling their bike and never riding again or improving for next race. So, dad, how are you feeling about this episode?

When you first suggested that this is what we're going to do, immediately, I thought, oh, not sure about this. But then give me five minutes to comprehend what we're trying to achieve. And I think it's perfect. What better subject than your own poor performance to critically analyze? And. And I want. I want everybody listening to understand that, you know, it's not always going to go your way. And that's what makes it so sweet when it actually does end up getting some good results, is the work you have to do to. To get back on track to where you want to be and when you want to be at your best. And it might take three weeks of thinking things around, it might take. In my case, it's been almost 18 months, so. So, yeah, it's kind of. I think it's great. I think I'm all on board for it. Can't wait.

Yeah. Because we're proud as athletes, and it's really tough to admit when things aren't going wrong, especially when you've been trying really hard and you're doing everything you can and it's not going the way you want. But before we get into it, I do want to preface this episode with something I think has to be said. And if you've been following the podcast the last year, you'll know that dad has been on a comeback journey from major back surgery nine months ago. And the fact is, mentally, you want to be 100%, but your body's still probably 80, 90% there. And that makes A difference when you're trying to race at the top end of your power. But we've been open about your struggles getting back this past year and I don't want anyone to forget just how good you've been as an athlete for an exceptionally long period of time. Over decades before this, and not only in your pro career where you won the Australian Ironman title, I think the OZ long horse draft titles as well, we competed as a pro in Kona twice with the highest, highest place of 23rd. And no excuses and you would hate people to, to hear this bar, but you've told us that you know, you were, you were in the top 10 before being debilitated by cramp in the final couple of K's. And as we always say, it's not where you were with 2Ks to go, it's where you finish. But it's just an interesting tidbit and more importantly, in your masters and age group career, I think you've had more club racing wins than we can count. 16 Australian Masters top titles and that's across three types of races in cycling. That's road race, that's crit racing and that's time trialing. And I, I love that because that literally means you covered all areas and mastered each discipline because they're very, three very different styles of riding. We see a lot of masters riders that are really good at time trialing but can't convert that to road racing. And the road racing, you know, a 90k road race is different to a one hour crit. And for you to win Oz Masters titles across all three shows the discipline it took two of BrightWinner, which is a big stage race here we've spoken about last year, second at the Masters, World cycling champs at second Masters in the world. So look, I know that's a bit overkill but. And you definitely don't have to be a good athlete to be a good coach. But I just want to remind the audience of kind of where your wisdom and experience comes from. And a lot of our audience might not know that background. But especially locally here in Australia, anyone that's raced against you honestly has a lot of respect and the respect that you get is still truly admirable. And I was actually at a local crit race last week and I'd come second in the race and after the race I was talking to the marshal and I'd ridden pretty strong to get a second in a sprint finish which I felt like I should have won, but that's another story. And he looked at my name. And he said, oh, Donnelly. He said, you're not related to Jared, are you? I didn't know who this person was. And I said, oh, I sure am. I'm his son. And he said, ah, that makes a lot of sense then. And that's at a race that you probably haven't been in a lot of years, and your name is still revered among the cycling community. And like I said, there's no need to justify your Palmaras on here, but it's always been fun for me to hear directly from people that you've raced against, that when you would turn up to a race, people would genuinely be looking and they would genuinely fear you, and you're a marked man. So, with all that said, let's get stuck into the current situation. Basically, there was an ITT on Tuesday, an individual time trial, and you had the worst speed that you've ridden in probably a decade. So talk us through it.

Thanks for all that introduction, Jordan. I kind of feel a little bit embarrassed hearing all those things you've said about me. But anyway, we'll move on. Look, I take great pride in performing at my best, and sometimes that's a sticking issue with a lot of the people that we coach. And I want to relay my thoughts about that, too, during this episode. But certainly that was probably the worst time trial. I think there's only been three races in, I don't know, 30 or 40 years where I've actually ridden under 40 kilometers an hour. And this is one of them. And it's a real punch in the face, really, when you. When you finish the event and you think, well, that was below par. In fact, that was in my top three worst ever performances on a time trial bike. So, yeah, that's the first thing you have to actually deal with immediately after the race. And during the race, you've got some idea about what's happening, because, as you know, we've got great data being fed back to us the whole way throughout the course of the race, but there's not a lot I could have done about it during that race because I had a tactic and a plan, and I was determined to stick with that, but ended up being a really bad plan. And, yeah, they're the things I want to actually go through and let the listeners understand that, you know, you don't always get it right and. And you have to make mistakes to get it right in the first place. I think that's a real message that, you know, without. Without having struggles, you don't have triumphs.

Yeah, for sure. And I think the look in your eyes when we finished the race and you came up and said, how'd you go? And you, you kind of shook your head and said, 39Ks an hour. He said, it's worst speed I've done in a long time. And I could see it in your eyes how painful that was to look at. And I said, what was your power? And he said, it was actually a bit higher. It was still in the 270s. And once we look back at it, it was probably 7 watts higher than the last ITT on the same course six weeks ago. So immediately I just went, oh, that's interesting. It was funny conditions on the night. It was quite windy. And so my immediate thoughts were, okay, there's a bit of story here because that doesn't quite add up. You know, you've written better power for lower speed, so, you know, we'll figure that out later. And I could tell in your head you were thinking, what the hell's going on? Especially just it can be a buildup of frustration when you haven't. When you've been trying to get back to that 100% and it's been a long journey. And then this kind of result happens immediately after the race. The first five minutes is where you kind of get the frustration out. But then we know we need to go home and look at the data and kind of analyze things and ask some questions. So, yeah, it was kind of higher power for lower speed. So, yeah, where do we go from here?

Yeah, and you're right, you've summed it up perfectly. Because the hardest part is when people ask you, how did you go? And to be honest, let's just really be transparent here, people are being very kind when they're asking you, how did you go? And some people would be interested, but others are just doing it. Like, how do you feel today? Hey, how are you? How do you feel? Most people ask that question not expecting an answer. And if the person says, I feel terrible, then the person will go, oh, oh, do you? And then that would change the, you know, the scenario. But for me, if someone actually asked me a question, I'm going to be truthful. And so, you know, I'm going to say to those people who asked me, oh, that was my worst performance in a long time. And, you know, generally people aren't even listening to what you've said back. So I want to make that clear that generally when people ask you how you went in an event, they're not that interested. Exceptions are you know, people who are really interested in how you're going because they care about you. That would be family and close friends. But the general run of the population don't really give a crap how you went on that day. They're more interested in how they went, which is actually how it should be. Although in some ways, I would like people to take more interest in what other people are doing just as a supportive role, especially when you're in your own little community. So, look, it's a funny starting point. I don't know. You want to say something here?

Yeah, well, I just want to bite in and say I think I really am proud of it. The way that happens at the Tribala tenant races, you know, when people come to the tent, they are genuinely saying, how did you go? And it's really good atmosphere like that. And we really like that. But we were talking about this off air. This is kind of. When that doesn't happen, it's almost a bit of a silver lining because people get so afraid of what their result means to other people, and people don't want to. Don't want to admit a poor result necessarily because they feel ashamed or embarrassed. And you're kind of saying, to be honest, most people don't actually care. You know, they might feel disappointed for you for a few seconds, but you care about it a lot more than them. But that actually can kind of be a backwards good thing because it helps you get through it and go, well, yeah, you care about your own result and your coach definitely does, and your family, but we build it up a lot because we don't want to admit. Just like on this podcast, you don't want to admit of a poor performance, but most people don't actually care that much about yours anyway, so you can move on pretty quickly.

Yeah, and I think that there's a lot more in that. You know, the expectation you have of yourself is bad enough, but don't have expectations from others around you that are false. What do I mean by that? Well, they might ask you how you went, and you have to answer that question, and that's a tough 10 seconds to answer. If you have a. If you do have a poor performance, but It's a great 10 seconds, if you've. If you've done exactly what you wanted and then people are actually switching off anyway because, oh, no, he's done really well, you know, whatever. Whatever he said, it doesn't really matter. And he had a poor performance year, whatever as well. But. But the expectations you have from others is Unfounded. You need to. And I'm in that category, you know, as well, I put myself there. Don't worry about what other people think about your performance. And. And that's one of the reasons why I put myself in a situation where, you know, generally I probably shouldn't do that race because I'm not in any great shape to be racing. But that's not how I think. I've got other reasons why I'm doing this event, and the expectations of others is at the bottom of that list. And that's why I'm pushing people to do certain things in their training program that they feel they're probably not ready for. But there's a good reason why we should do it, and we want to unlock those reasons.

And what we're not saying is disregard a poor performance because you can't move on from this until you dissect it. And we spent a bit of time really looking at the data because the way to get through it is to look at what happened and look at the objective data, take the emotion out of it, and then say, okay, what do we need to improve? That's how you get through it. You don't just disregard it and say, oh, poor performances don't matter, because to you they do matter. And that's the important point. So how can we help improve this for you? So we spent a bit of time trawling through the data, and it's a really nice course. It's five even laps. You can compare lap on lap. And we compared it to your race previously. We compared it to other people's data on the night, and we found a lot of people rode actually higher power for a similar time or potentially slightly better. But it was quite a windy night. And so if you didn't execute the course that well into the headwind, up. Up a slight uphill at the front straight, and then you had a tailwind up a bit bigger hill on the back straight. You know, that can make a. Make a world of difference, like we found. So we compared your sections of power to the same sections from the race last time. We compared it to other people in the race, and we really found some interesting data about where you were losing pretty consistent time in terms of speed, although your power, your average power was quite good.

Yeah. And I want to make it clear that I went into this race and I'd done this race twice before. This was the third time. And the majority of people who competed on that Tuesday night, you were one of those people, but you rode a different Bike. So your comparison is completely different from a time trial bike to a road bike. And so I've looked at all the other people we coach because we've got all their data. And I was the only one, except for one other person out of the nine athletes who raced that actually didn't improve. And the other two athletes, myself and the other athlete actually rode better power but slower time. And the other athlete can be explained because she just got a brand new time trial bike and so she actually had never ridden it before.

And also she rode with training wheels instead of her race disc wheels, you know, which that could account for a minute itself.

Yeah. So comfort on the bike position and different equipment on different bike, different power meter, all those things will contribute to her. But the good thing is, you know, she rode better power than she had before. But getting back to what I was trying to do, my goal was to test. I'm always trying to learn how to execute better. And here we are on the same course three times in a row. And so my theory was I'm not in great form, so let's just try another method of executing. And my theory was I'm not going to worry about the wind or the hills. I'm going to ride even power just to prove to myself that this doesn't work. And almost, you know, I was given the answer straight away, you know, by the end of the race when I looked at actually my time because I felt like I was riding quite well because I was looking at my average power for each lap and my average power was giving me feedback that was, that was okay. I couldn't quite see what my lap speed was for each lap because I had too many business metrics on the, on the screen to actually get a good look at it. And I was pushing lap after each, after each five. I think it's a 4 minute 50 lap or 4, 34 minutes 30 lap. So we did five of those laps at 4 minutes 30. So I had really good data coming back telling me my power was going okay. So I was quite happy actually riding through the event. And then when I got to the end, I saw that my time was 45 seconds slower than and over 15K. That's quite a lot. And my previous two times were, you know, 2314, 2312 within two seconds of each other. And this one was 2402, which is nearly 48 seconds slower. So that was quite a shock to me. And then that realization was far out. I just can't ride that way ever again. That is that is just not effective on a course like this. The only asterisk would be if it's a perfectly calm night and it's just a flat circuit with no gradient changes and no wind. And that would be the time when you would ride like I did, with even pressure, even power the whole way. And so that was the first learning, wasn't it?

Yeah, yeah. And I think. I think this is really important for triathletes to understand, and cyclists as well, in terms of time trialing. Just the nuances of how to ride a course really makes a difference, and we go on a lot about it. But this is a really cool example to look at and to take in and to really look. When we talk about FTP and numbers and we break it down like this, the numbers can get a bit lost and confusing. So I implore everyone to really pay attention to how we're going to break this down, because it can make a massive difference. And that is shown by, you know, we were finding that because you're putting even power down around the course, that's great for your even execution, but you were going slower on the harder parts, and that's where athletes around you were gaining time on you. So we always talk about where you need to push higher power when the bike's going slower. So into that headwind up that slight hill, you needed to be going a little bit higher power to make sure you weren't losing too much time there. Because on the flat sections, tailwind and downhill sections, everyone's going to be going similar speed, regardless of what power they're pushing, as long as you're in a certain range and the back straight, something similar. And so our diagnosis of you was that, yes, you're riding even power, exactly what you've just explained, but that meant that you were losing time on these crucial sections. And we compared it to someone in your age group really specifically, and Strava is really cool that you can do this, but you could see the exact sections where this person was pulling six to 10 seconds away from you on each lap in this hard section into the wind, where they've gone over their power to ride that section, and you've ridden even, and you do that for five laps and bang, there's 30 seconds. That's where you've lost 30 seconds of speed over the course. And that kind of goes up. Well, there's your answer. Like, it seems so minute, but that's a massive aha moment to realize. And that's a 15k time trial. We always apply it Back to races. If you think about that over a 40K Olympic triathlon or a 90 kilometer half Ironman or 180 kilometer Ironman, you know, all these little sections can add up to minutes worth of difference just from execution. And the point I want to really emphasize on that is that we do really encourage people to ride quite evenly in terms of their power, but we can't go so far to do what you did. And I actually did the same thing on the course. On the road bike, the difference between our normalized power and our average power kind of shows. Normally people have wildly different numbers because they go way over on the hard bits and way under on the easy bits. They're not keeping enough pressure on the pedals or they're going way over and gassing themselves. That creates a massive difference between normalized power and average power that could be in. If we're using your numbers, for example, you might ride 290 normalized and 270 average. That gap of 20 watts is too big. So we try and close that gap, but we've both closed it. You, especially in this race too far, where your normalizing average was exactly the same. That shows you've written very evenly around. And so we actually want to come back a bit. And a lot of the other tribal athletes that executed really well, they had probably a 6 to 8 to 10 watt difference. They're. You should have been a normalized power of 285 and an average power of 278, which is what I think you finished with, which is 278 or 277. You know, that would be. That shows that you've ridden the hard parts well, but not way over. And you've ridden the easy parts not way under either. So relatively even. But you've gained enough time. So I know there's a bit of information there, but the point is, when you ride the right sections properly, you're not losing that six to 10 seconds each time, which is really crucial.

Great summary. And I couldn't emphasize all those points any better than what you've just done. Another example would be just on the weekend we had a half ironman in Tasmania, which is one of the states in Australia. And although people think it's not a state in Australia for some reason, it's the forgotten state almost. But we had a whole heap of guys go down there. And this was one of the hardest bike courses I've seen in a 70.3. It's right up there. I think it had 1200 meters of of climbing, which is, you know, 3600 meters of feet of climbing for those in imperial language. But, you know, it shows you how hard a course it was. And our race strategy for, you know, for all of our athletes was to really where the course is causing you to ride slow. They're the times to be in your range, near the top of your range. And this is what you're trying to say. You know, we've got, we've got a number that we're trying to ride to and mine was somewhere around that 275 to 280. That's our really little range. On a short course like that and in a, in a 70.3 90 kilometer time trial, you might have a range that might be, if I use my example, it might be 260 to 290. And I'm saying in those bits where your bike is going slowest, that could be the headwind or it could be an uphill, but you could also be going downhill into a block headwind. So you could be actually riding slow there as well. So that's not necessarily every time you go downhill that your bike's going fast. So there could be situations where your average speed for the whole race is quite slow on a downhill, whereas a headwind. So there's another time where you need to be above the average power that you're going to do for the whole ride. And I think people get confused about what we just said there. So we've got your average power that you expect to do for the whole ride. And it might be in my case, if I use that example, 275 or when I'm into the headwind or when I'm going uphill or any point where my bike is going slower than 39 or 40Ks an hour, I need to be riding above that 275 somewhere. And it depends on how long you're going to be in that headwind or how long the bike's going slowest for. And that's hard for people to understand. And I have this conversation many times with a lot of our new athletes. It takes a long time of practice before they get. And I really showed that on that poor performance by riding evenly and not deviating up the hill by more than a few watts and not deviating into the headwind by more than a few watts. And it was, as you said, six seconds times five laps into the up the hill section I lost compared to even my own previous data. And into the headwind where my bike was going Slow as well. I was losing three to four seconds times five, and that's another 12. And there's my 45 seconds. If I want to find out where I lost the time, we pinpointed it exactly. All the rest of the time on the course, I rode similar power to what I did the previous two races. And so that's in a nutshell, that's how you work out. You know how this, I had the same fitness for this race as I had previous races. And in fact I'm probably fitter now because I rode higher power than I had in the previous races. It's just that I executed in a way that was detrimental to the outcome that we're trying to get.

That made the bike go slower. And that's the learning here, is that you got to know the course because depending on the course will depict how hard or easy you need to ride these sections. And that's where course recons really help. But we really kind of established that when you rode 45 seconds faster last time, you actually quite above that range even more. You were probably riding those hard sections at 300 to 310 watts. So your ideal range is 260 to 290, which gives you an average of 278. But you really did ride those sections at 3003-005003-10315. Whereas this time you didn't really hit those three hundreds much. And that's probably quite the difference. And so if you're thinking about your 70.3 race, you've got to think, okay, how long are these hills? How many of them are there? How far can I afford to go over without absolutely gassing myself? So it's funny that you finish with such disappointment. But then when you look at this, the answer is plainly simple and obvious and it's actually really not a disaster at all. And you're really a lot further along the journey than then you realize. And it takes away a lot of that frustration.

Yeah, I think that's a really good point too, Jordan, because you know immediately when you realize the realization of the time, that's a disappointing thing to hear. And so you, you certainly go into that mode of what's wrong with me? Why do I suck? What did I do wrong? You go into this self criticism and you know how we say a lot of the time your improvement is not because of one thing, it's a combination of many things. You're doing very well. And if you're not improving and staying the same, it's not one thing that's causing that, it's many things that you're not probably doing well. And, you know, in this place we're trying to highlight, execution is the key to this answer. And once, you know, it was great coaching by you to point it all out to me, and I would have eventually got there, but you, you hit the target within the first five minutes of me having that. You know, let's sort out what you did, what you did differently. And I said to you, well, I tried to ride evenly the whole way around. And you said, oh, I can't wait to see the data. And. And then that changed my mindset straight away of, oh, let's actually look at the data and see what a difference it made to executing this way. And so. So, you know, you've gone from wanting to never do a time trial again and throwing your bike away and putting it on up for sale to, oh, that's actually good learning. And I'm human as well. I get disappointed at poor results, but I've got to see it in the true light of day. And I'm not trying to find excuses. I'm trying to find actually reasons as to what I can do about it next time. I'm not trying to create excuses for myself. I'm trying to understand what I can do better and then learn from that and then implement it in a much more strategic way next time. And I won't do that mistake again. I'll understand the nuances of the course. And it's really rammed home to me how important riding outside of the average range is at times where it's critical and how important it is not to be almost safe. And it's a safer way to ride, by the way. It is a safer way to ride, the way I rode. Why? Because you're putting yourself under pressure by riding 20 or 30 watts higher than your average power. And the coach is always saying to me, don't soft pedal on the easy bits, because if you do, it means you've ridden too hard on the hard bits. They're extreme examples I'm talking about. But learning to ride hard when it counts is really going to hurt, and you've got to be up for that challenge. And I've basically taken the soft option on this course, which is probably more the disappointment for me.

Yeah. And you would argue that if it was a triathlon, you actually did the right thing because you would get off and you'd be really. Your legs would be as fresh as they could be after a time trial to run, because You've ridden so evenly, you haven't gassed yourself. So there's that really key point there as well. So we established the execution was a problem. But as always, we want to do our due diligence and look at all factors regardless. So I was just looking at back at your program and back at your numbers and your data and what you've been doing. And we kind of what was our diagnosis moving forward? Because it was, I would say, 80% of the problem with the execution. But regardless, you're still not riding as good a power as you want. So we go, okay, well what's happening here as well? How could we still improve the data even though the power was higher than last time? And we established a few things, we established that. Firstly, let's go to the fundamental question, what's the goal here? Your A race goal is in August. It's February. So we would always say to an athlete, you don't have to be riding fast in February when your A race goal is in August. Now's the time to get back to that base building block. And so we kind of went, you haven't really done a really solid structure of that high end VO2 work, that strength work, which we really like starting with in our base. So maybe we need to go back to that. We're looking back at your program. We need to do a really solid block of that for now. And then the next lesson was kind of taking a bit of your own medicine, which is patience. And this is a serious test of patience because if it was any other athlete, you would say, you've got time, let's just be patient. But for you, it's been six months plus of, you know, pretty frustrating riding leading into your surgery. And their back was really inhibiting you. And then this nine months post surgery, it's been quite a long time where you've had to keep saying, it'll come back, it'll come back. So it's a serious test. But that's the lesson in there.

Yep, you're highlighting a lot of things. And the main thing is, you know, what have I been doing in this period? Because I actually was riding quite good power back in October, November, December. But, you know, that's probably the more frustrating part. My expectation and everybody's expectation would be that you would gradually improve from October, November to February, you know, in a ramp up sort of progression. But if you don't actually do the work in that period, then the progression can't be there. Logically, it can't be there. And If I looked at my program, you know, it happened to be December, January, which is where Christmas and the Nationals, Australian Nationals titles are on. And I was pretty much not even going to do any of those events. So I was, I was more interested in work in that period and I didn't really concentrate much on my training. And that's been completely transparent and honest. If I looked at my program, it. It would be an embarrassment to what I've done for my previous 20 years. And, and that's hard thing to admit, by the way.

Yeah, I was going to make an exact point is that December was probably. We were insanely busy in December. It was probably one of our biggest work months in a long time. And plus that combined with all the family, we went away as a family, as a holiday for a week, you know, all that combined to just not the most productive training.

And there again, you know, I'm trying to identify why my, my actual form isn't where it should be in a progressive manner. And so I'm identifying, oh, well, I didn't actually train very well during that period. So that's the first thing that you have to actually understand. And how do you know that? Well, you just have to go back and have a look at what you've been doing in training. And so that's one of the things I had to do was, you know, and you helped me with that. We looked back and started to dig deep into what sessions was I doing. And, you know, one week I was in the Tour down under in Adelaide and I did, you know, a lot of endurance. And the week before that was, you know, I was in a holiday with some friends for a week where there was very little opportunity to ride. And the week before that was the Nationals campaign. The week before that was a holiday for Christmas with all the family. So. So, you know, all of a sudden, in, in a space of four weeks, I actually only had one week where I actually trained with any duration. There was no intensity in that week. So. So I've got all these things that, you know, if I was the coach of myself, I'd be saying, hang on a minute, you haven't actually trained properly in a month, so what would your expectation be? And, you know, you've done actually a good job on Tuesday night with your high power number. It's just that your execution let you down. And once again, you know, the competitiveness allowed you to, to ride the power you wanted to, even though you probably shouldn't have been able to do that compared to what the training Sessions tell you.

Yeah, yeah. I think it's this mental checklist that we just kind of go through with athletes looking at all areas. And I think that's the learning here. I want athletes to understand is that something goes wrong or if something goes right, look at all these things, look at all the potential factors and go, what was working? What's not working? And even the last week, I kind of just looked at your last eight days of training and you had come back from Tour Down Under a little bit frustrated that you were doing endurance, but you didn't feel that fit or informed. And so last week your competitive side of you just said stuff, I'm going to train really hard, I want to get myself back to form really quickly, which, you know, no athlete should ever do, but sometimes you feel like you're different. And I looked at you last week and you did five basically high intensity, high total stress score sessions in the week. You know, you just kind of thought that you could handle that and come out of the week feeling really fresh. And I just pointed out to you that there's no way we'd want an athlete to do that many hard sessions. And we had a funny example on, on Wednesday, you're supposed to do a bit of a Zone 2 session after the time trial. And you, I looked at that session, you definitely, you started off in zone two and then just crept up into zone three, Zone four as a session went on, which can easily happen. You're just enjoying the ride. But I said, that's, that's probably going to impact your Thursday session yesterday, where you're supposed to do some VO2 work and get back to that. And you sort of said, yeah, I guess that's true. It did end up. I did get a bit carried away with heart rate and did end up being a bit fatiguing. And then sure enough, you went to do the VO2 session yesterday and you couldn't, because that combined with the last eight days or nine days of training, you actually just could not even start the session. You just went, there's no way I can hold this power. And that is the downside of doing something like this is, you know, you actually couldn't do the hard session that counted the most. So a really important lesson there for people to understand.

Yeah, and it's lucky that, you know, all of my experience was I would normally just start that VO2 session and just have a crack at it and then probably fail halfway through. But, you know, in the warm up, my legs just felt quite uncomfortably tired and, and the whole. The whole thing was. Was very tiring the minute I started riding, so. So I immediately switched. And that's one of the things we want to. We want to stress that you, just because it's written on the program, you don't do it if you're not feeling up to it. And it's not you being weak, it's actually you being very clever and smart to reevaluate where you're at and adjust the session to how you're feeling. And I'm saying that a lot to athletes over the journey. I don't want you to miss key sessions week in, week out because you're not feeling like you can achieve that session. If that's the situation, there's something wrong with what we're doing. But the one or two sessions here or there where you're just not quite right, then you can drop the intensity down. And I ended up just saying, okay, this is my zone two, which I was supposed to do yesterday. I'm not going to go over 135 heart rate. And I didn't. And whatever the power was, I kept dropping it because the power started. The heart rate was starting to creep as I was riding, and I was only riding around that 70 to 75% to 80% FTP. And as soon as my heart rate started to go up, I just dropped the power again. And I ended up being really satisfied with the session, even though I didn't achieve the goal of what I thought was going to be a VO2 session. But I feel much better about it already, you know, exactly the day after. So there's a lot of lessons there. And, you know, I'm being vulnerable here because I want everybody out there to understand that this takes a lot for me to admit that I'm making errors and making mistakes and not being planned and prepared the way I absolutely have been for my whole career. And this is the consequence of doing that. And I want to make that very clear. I'm basically this up, and now I have to actually reevaluate where I'm at, where are my priorities, what's my goals, and start to train properly. And that'll stop my frustration straight away because I'm back on track, I've got a structured plan in place, and, you know, I've done a reasonable job since the surgery to get myself back to a point, but I'm still 15 to 20% off where I should be, and I'm not going to get that back unless I actually do something with more science around it. And more understanding of, you know, do these sessions in this order and you will actually start to improve. And you know, you know, my determination, this is, this is almost like a line in the sand and, and you know, look out to. When I get to my A race at the end of the year, I hope that this is a turning point for me, you know, admitting to the community that, you know, the coach has got it wrong on himself and this is what he's going to do to fix it.

Yeah. And that's why I kind of did that intro at the start, because I wanted to tie in that whole context, which I'm really excited about. But it's for me, I'm so happy for us to be so open about this. One, because it's the right thing to do. But two, there's no, there's no shame in having. Needing objective analysis even as a coach, you know, because it's just impossible to coach yourself. It's just impossible to be you're the one in it, you know, and so you can coach everyone else, fine. But some, you need external voices, external opinion to coach yourself sometimes and to see that point of view. So it just makes perfect sense. And I guess you're. My last point is you're more ballsy than a lot of us, than me, and you want a lot of athletes to understand this. With testing weeks and time trials and, you know, fitness tests, FTP tests, you're so happy to do it regardless of where you're at, whereas a lot of people will refuse to put themselves in that situation because they're afraid of failing or afraid of a poor result. And you really implore athletes just know not to worry about that. You came in with a different execution plan to see how it went. It failed. But you're not worried about that. You're not. You're not. It's disappointing for sure, but you're not afraid of failing. Something like that. You really want all athletes to take on that same mindset. Yeah.

And look, we call it a failure, but. But geez, it's such a positive. Look at the outcome from it. I've got renewed enthusiasm. I learn a lot about execution. That confirmed my theories that I've been trying to instill in every athlete I coach for the last 15 years is all about execution. Fitness is key to being able to do that execution. But there's so many positives I've learned from this negative. And that's the beauty of embracing in your mind the value of why we continually want to measure ourselves against, against ourselves. And if you don't do that and you're afraid of that and you shy away from that, then you're not going to be understanding whether you're improving as a, as a human, as an athlete. And I think once I got over that, I don't know, 20 years ago, then I will never shirk a race or a testing. I just embrace it. It's, you know, I know the goals. I want to find out where I'm at principally. I know that it's a great training session. And also it tells me if I'm improving or staying the same or going backwards in this situation. Execution is the reason why the performance was going backwards. But it also, at the end of the day, I want to train accurately for the next block, you know, so there's four really key reasons why I should have the mindset of embrace this, because this is going to be valuable information.

And I want to, I want to emphasize this point. I want to finish by talking about Noah Lyles, who's the current world 100 meter, 200 meter and 4 by 100 champion. And he's been in the Athletic news again this week because he gets far more hate online than necessary and certainly far more than he deserves. And he was the one that was at the center of the NBA's world champions controversy, where he came out and said NBA players need to stop calling themselves world champions because they're not competing against the world, they're competing against each other in America, which anyone outside of America has been saying, saying forever. But again, I digress. It's a different issue. But the point is, he wears his heart and his personal ambition on his sleeve. And he makes it very clear in public what his goals are. He wants Usain Bolt's world records, you know, he wants gold medals. And this year he's made it very clear. And here's his quote. He said, last year we went after three gold medals. That was the world champs, and he got them. And this year at the Olympics, I want to go after four. If I don't get four, then we go after three world records. There is nothing stopping you from trying. If I don't succeed, I'll try and try again. And I just love that from him. No matter the criticism he gets, he just puts himself out there and says, I'm gonna try. And people would slam him and say, you're not going to win four gold medals. If he doesn't, he says, I don't care. I'll go for the world records after that. And it just, it was really cool to see that. And it reminded me of the famous man in the arena speech, which can be seen as a cliche, but I just absolutely love it. And I love Noah Lyles perspective. And the speech starts with it's not the critic who counts. And part one of my favorite parts of the speech is it says there's no effort without error or shortcoming. If he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. And I just love that so much. And I hope that for no Lyle's sake, he doesn't let a single critic get to him because it's athletes like him that dare greatly that make the sport so entertaining and so inspiring. And I think it's. On the topic of today, the irony is that in our failures we learn and grow the most. Exactly what you just said. We shouldn't call them failures because they're the best parts. The biggest rewards come from the biggest challenges and the toughest moments. And I know I've personally won races where it wasn't the most challenging, and I've come 17th in a race where it was one of the toughest challenges I've ever had to overcome. And you can guess which one I'm more proud of. And so, Dad, I just find this part of your journey as powerful as all the success stories because it's a real challenge right now. But it doesn't matter because you're the athlete in the arena, you know, fighting right now and you're the one putting yourself out there. And it doesn't matter if you're, you know, in the quote, fighting the arena of gladiators, or you're a pro athlete at the world champs, or you're an age group athlete and your battle is the six hour mark of the half ironman that you're trying to beat. If you're in the arena, then we say chapeau to you. And I think I just want to finish on that point that if you're putting yourself out there and you're willing to fail, then that's the best thing we can see.

That's a great summary. I couldn't have put it any better. Look, I just, I just love the fact that people are putting a number on. As I've always said in a lot of our podcasts, pinning a number on is so much better than sitting back there doing nothing and criticizing those who are trying. And that's happened a lot to me of, you know, why you keep doing that, why you keep pushing yourself, why you keep testing yourself. You know, I would love it just knowing that I'm, you know, at 85 years of age still pushing and testing myself. A. I'm still alive because I've got this mantra of being healthy and fit and, you know, just because, you know, your fear of failure, that shouldn't be determining what you do in your life. You know, put yourself out there, be willing to be vulnerable and fail and enjoy what you're doing and get the most out of yourself every day. And I think that's the lessons that I think we should be really pushing to everybody out there who's, who's, who's got some anxiety around performance and racing or testing. You don't have to be racing or testing yourself. That's not what I'm saying. But testing yourself against yourself, don't shy away from that. That's only going to make you a better human being. Put yourself under pressure at times and see how you go, see how you cope with it. And that's better than the person just criticizing from afar who's, you know, saying, oh, you failed again, or, you know, you're not that good. You're not as good as you think you are. You know, that's all just noise in the background. You know, be driven. Be okay to be driven. You know, be okay to want to want more out of yourself. That's why you'll be here longer.

Couldn't agree more. It's been a really fun episode to record, so I hope everyone's enjoyed this insight. Thanks, as always for listening to these case studies and all our episodes, and we'll see you in the next one. Back. Keep on, Keep on, Keep watching.