What To Expect In Your First Triathlon

Hey folks, how's it going? It's Ben Greenfield here and it's been a little while since I've done a webinar over at Young Tri and a lot of questions have come through post Kona and Kona Triathlon feels like it was a while ago because it's December right now and that was back in October. But I am getting around to actually answering all your questions now that have kind of piled in since the Ironman World Championships and a lot of them have to do with the off season and some of them have to do with competition in the end season. But they're all great questions and so I wanted to get to them today and thank you for asking them. And remember, if you have feedback after you watch this video or other questions you want to ask me, I am the official coach of Young Tri and so I'm here to help you out and answer your questions. So let me know if I can help you with anything because I really want to see you succeed in this sport. So you can do that over@facebook.com youngtry I believe it is. Or of course you could just go do a search for Young Try over at Facebook or go to the youngtry website@youngtry.com alright, so let's go ahead and just jump right into the questions. And in my efforts to keep this as real as possible for you, this is going to be the first time I've really gone through these questions in detail. So bear with me as we go. I don't have the names of the folks who have asked these questions, but I do have the questions themselves. So here we go. Question number one. What is your favorite part about Kona?

If you've ever been, and this is a great question, by the way, if you've ever been in Hawaii during the Ironman World Championships, there's this certain energy in the air that you can almost feel it's palpable. From the time you step off the plane to the time that you, you arrive in Kailua, Kona and you check into your hotel or your condo and you're walking the street seeing all the other athletes, it's just like triathlon central. And you can really feel a lot of that buzz, a lot of that excitement. So if you love the sport, for me that's one of the coolest things, is just seeing all these people in one place that care really deeply about a sport that I care really deeply about. And.

Just all of the camaraderie and almost like this feeling of brotherhood or sisterhood that is kind of present in town on that day. So the coolest part is just this energy that you can feel in the air when you're there. It's different than any other triathlon I've been to in that respect. So. Good question. All right, that was a good opening question because now we've got a little bit more of a meaty question. What is the worst mistake athletes make when transitioning into the off season? Starting too hard, too early. So you take all these issues that you've been dealing with, maybe you're running too slow, you're not swimming with. You want to swim, you want to climb hills better on the bike, you want to lose a little weight, you want to add a little muscle, and you just charge hardcore into accomplishing these goals right from the get go. As soon as November rolls around or December rolls around, what that actually does is it leaves you in January feeling kind of burnt out and maybe not all that mentally motivated. I personally, like, I love to swim, but I force myself to not go in the pool for a few weeks in December just so that I'm that much more fresh in January. And whether for you, the same can be said for running or for cycling or for weight training, you do need to, regardless of how much you want to get in and start improving things right away, give yourself a break. Because what will happen is if you don't come February or March or April, you are going to feel the need for a break when really that's the time that you shouldn't be focusing on training more intensively during those months, not during November and December, where frankly, most of the fitness training you put in really isn't going to be with you later on in the year. And granted, there is some benefit to working on your skills, doing some drills, working on economy, working on efficiency during that time. But if that mentally wears you out so that you're ready to quit by the time February rolls around, then in my opinion, the cons outweigh the pros of doing that type of training in the off season. So the biggest mistake is just going into your hardcore training too soon. Instead, step back, give yourself a break. And for me, it means just spending more time doing things that I want to do. So for example.

If I cut back a full hour of exercising during the day, all of a sudden I've got, you know, maybe one extra 30 minute slot I can spend with my kids and, you know, we can do wrestling in the living room at night and one extra 30 minute slot I can use for learning songs. On my guitar. So, you know, there's definitely something to be said for giving yourself those mental breaks. Great question. Next question. Another Kona question. What is the number one tip you have for young athletes whose goal is to one day compete at Kona?

Get fast and get really, really good at each of the skills, running and cycling and swimming. Don't be one of those people who pursues the goal of being able to do something for a really, really long period of time and just kind of going slow until everybody else gets bored or drops off because they're tired. Instead. If you want to set yourself up to be a really good triathlete, focus on speed and focus on really, really precise laser like movements where everything is about your economy and your efficiency. You'll have more than enough time to build lots of endurance on top of those consistently good or near perfect movement patterns. So it's all about speed and it's all about economy and efficiency. For example, at the end of next year, I'm going to be going pro as a triathlete. I'll be spending the majority of the year simply working on my overspeed and my cadence, on my actual speed and power and on my economy and my efficiency. And I won't be doing very many long, slow workouts just because I know I can do those. And for me, speed is going to require speed work. So in terms of doing really well or doing good enough in triathlon to compete at Kona. To qualify for Kona, focus first on the economy and the efficiency and the speed. Because anybody can sit on a bike for four hours, given the training, it's a question of when you're sitting on that bike for four hours, how fast you're going to be going, whether you can maintain a cadence of 90 RPM for four hours, and whether your pedaling stroke is efficient enough so that your wattage is maybe 10 or 20 watts higher than everybody else for four hours. So that's my recommendation for getting to Kona and doing it well and being a good triathlete. Next, is it okay to do a speed workout once a week during the off season? Yeah, I recommend actually doing. And when I talk about the offseason, I say, okay, let's say that you've taken that break that I've kind of recommended that you take. It might be anywhere from one to four weeks once you've finished your last triathlon. But then once you start into formal training, yeah, I definitely recommend that you not lose your speed. A lot of programs will say do only long, slow training in the offseason or only easy training. And that's simply not true. You get a lot of benefit out of speed work and doing at least one speed session. So for me, I mean, that's something as simple as having one session during the week where your swim is a 20 reps by 50 meter swim where it's just all about speed. That's like enough for the water to keep you fast and maintain your on season speed during the off season. For running, it may be something as simple as having one workout where you're doing a 10 by 200 meter sprint. Or for biking, you may have one workout where you're doing 103 minute hard efforts with a short recovery between each. So you only need one of those sessions a week? Absolutely. During the off season. But I do recommend one of those sessions in each sport per week, even during the off season. They'll pay dividends. And in addition, if you're like me and you live in a winter climate, for me, I just don't, I don't like to ride my bike indoors for three hours. I'd rather do a really fast speed session, get a lot more bang for my buck out of the intensity of that workout rather than the volume of that workout. You know, for me, lately I've been using the Sufferfest videos for my indoor training sessions. And it's great because it's really, really hard and you're pushing yourself and it hurts for like 45 to 60 minutes, but then it's done. And you get the same benefit as maybe one of your friends who's watching a movie for two and a half hours on the trainer and spinning relatively easy. So that's what I say about speed in the off season. The next question is, what was your experience in Kona like?

That's a really broad question. You know what I'm going to recommend is that you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and you do a search for Kona Diaries. Kona Diaries. And there's, there's seven, maybe eight posts there. Check out all those. That will really give you a very, very good idea of what my week was like in Kona. So I know I kind of brushed over that question, but it's, it's kind of like I think that I wouldn't do it justice talking about it here on a video. So go, go watch those videos and read those articles that I shot over there and that'll really help. You know what my experience was like over in Kona Ironman Y this year. So next what are some common misconceptions about Kona? Common misconceptions about the Ironman World Championships?

I guess.

One misconception would be that it lasts an hour and has lots of commercial breaks. It's a long day out there. It's just as long as any other Ironman. It's harder than a lot of the other ones because everybody's going fast. Fast, or a lot more of the people are going fast than you're used to. So, like, I come out of the water in, you know, 59 or 60 minutes, and I'm used to maybe having, you know, 10 or 12 other guys around me, and here I'm coming out of the water with 200 other athletes in that period of time, and we're all brushing shoulders the entire time. So, you know, regardless of what it may look like in the TV coverage, with people, you know, kind of swimming by themselves and running by themselves and biking by themselves, for the most part, you feel almost the whole time like you're caught up in this huge crowd of athletes. I mean, the whole time, not just during the swim, where you can literally swim the entire time and be going as hard as possible and still be in a group of literally, like 200 people, but on the bike, you can be in a pace line the entire time that's impossible to get out of. And again, like on the TV coverage, it looks like you're out there riding your bike alone in lava fields. That's rarely the case. There's usually a good couple dozen athletes around you, maybe passing you, you passing them very hard to work your way out of groups. You're always trying, you know, you're always nervous you're going to get a drafting penalty because it's almost impossible to work yourself out of these huge packs of athletes. You'd think over 112 miles, a couple thousand athletes could spread out, but until almost the very end of the race, it doesn't happen. And then you get into the run, and again, you know, you'd think that you're just out there alone with your own thoughts, but you're just people kind of all around you the whole time. And for that reason, even though it's a long, hot, hard day, it almost goes by faster than a lot of other Ironman triathlons just because there's so much going on around you and so many people to see and look at and talk to.

So it's kind of different from that perspective. And I would say that the TV coverage makes it look like this long slog by yourself in the wilderness, which it's not. You're always with people. So I would say that's probably one of the bigger misconceptions about Kona. I think it's a little more social than most people realize. All right, next, what are some good ways to cross train? Well, cross training is an extremely broad term and it pretty much would be anything that involves training in a mode that is not your typical sport. So for triathlon, it'd be what is not swimming, not cycling, or not running. If you're a northern climate athlete, I like indoor soccer as an option. A lot of start, stop, interval training that's really good at improving your fitness. Another thing I really like for a cold climate athlete is skate skiing or cross country skiing. Really, really good alternative. Like for me, if I don't want to do an indoor trainer session, I've got a ski resort I can go to about 20 minutes from my front door, strap on my skate skis and two hours of skate skiing will leave you sore for days and it feels like you ran 30 miles. So winter sports and even a day on the snowboard or a day on the downhill skis can really develop a lot of strength and power and endurance and stamina. So that's a really good form of cross training again for cold climate athletes. For warmer climber athletes, I mean, you've almost got a little bit better. You can pretty much pick up any sport, whether it's soccer or tennis or even maybe playing some speed rounds of golf with a bag attached to your shoulder. 18 holes of golf is good cardiovascular stimulus. I'm a big fan for cross training of enjoying yourself and playing sports, weight training, I don't even know if I qualify that as cross training because I consider it to be a normal mode of training for triathlons. So I wouldn't really classify that as cross training as much as I would picking up these other sports. But I would say if I could pick the single best sport for a northern climate cold climate athlete, it would be skate skiing for a combination of strength and cardiovascular development. And for a warmer climate athlete, I would say soccer is probably one of the best things. And ultimate Frisbee kind of kind of parallels that in terms of the same cardiovascular stimulus. So if you can hop into either of those activities as a cross training mode, it's really good.

You know, there's also fitness classes like Zumba and Pilates and body pump spinning and all that stuff. And personally I'm not a big fan of that stuff. Maybe it's because I Burnt out on it when I was a personal trainer and spending every day in the gym. But you can throw a few of those in for fun if you want. But I don't think that you get a ton of benefit out of a lot of those classes. Maybe just because I'm a bad dancer that I don't really like Zumba. It's good music.

How much should workout intensity vary in the off season?

I kind of touched on this with speedwork, but in my opinion, a perfect off season, like let's say you're doing three skills a week. Like three workouts for three skills a week. So a total of nine workouts for swimming and cycling and running, three swims, three bikes and three runs. So you've got one of each of those is a speed workout, similar to the speed workouts, the interval based speed workouts that I described. One is a workout that is purely focused on skills and drills. So you've got a whole workout of single leg cycling and overspeed cycling and slow mashy grinds for the bike. And you've got a workout that's all running drills and form and high knee drills and marching and skipping and bounding and hopping for the run. And then you've got all drills. Maybe it's elastic drills or parachute drills or pull buoy drills or paddle drills for the swim. So that's another three workouts is all skills and drills. And then your final workout is your on season weakness. So if you're really bad at hill climbing, then your third workout for the off season for cycling is climbing some steep hills or doing some hill climbing simulations on an indoor trainer. If your limit was speed and turnover for running, then you're doing a workout that primarily consists of just like overspeed training on the treadmill for running, where you're jacking the treadmill up to a speed that kind of takes your feet moving faster than they would comfortably be able to do. And you're doing 10 by 60 second repeats like that with long recoveries in between each. And then if in swimming you got really, really tired towards the end of the swim, then you do some long tempo swims, some 2,000 meter or 2,500 meter steady state swims. So those would be what you do for that final session. And that's a perfect off season right there, doing something like that. And then you sprinkle in some cross training and some weight training and you've got a full docket right there. Workouts. So good question. All right, and then another question here. What is your number One off season tip.

Here it is. Because I haven't touched on this too much and I want to if you're going to change your diet, do it in the off season. Your cells take about 30 to 60 days to kind of restructure themselves. That's about how long it takes for your gut to begin to adapt to a new diet. So you do that in April, you do it in May, and your body's still reeling from that nutritional change up by the time you're racing and doing your really, really key workouts. So I would recommend that you take a good, solid look at your diet, at your nutrition in the off season and make all of the changes there because that allows your body to adapt your stomach to adapt your lower GI tract to adapt your taste buds to adapt your schedule and your shopping and your packing and your cooking and your planning and preparing to adapt when you're not having to also deal with the stresses of doing triathlons and engaging in everything else that you're not having to worry about in the off season. So my number one off season tip would be make your nutritional changes and do your nutritional overhaul then. So.

That'S what my number one tip would be. So all great questions. I hope that was helpful for you. And remember, if you want more tips from me on a daily basis, you can follow me twitter.com BenGreenfield also, go over to facebook.com bgfitness and of course, while you're over@facebook.com any additional questions or comments you have for me, leave them on the youngtry page at facebook.com youngtri because I'm involved in this for I love to see the, the young triathletes.

The next generation of triathletes, kind of up and coming. I like to see you doing what you're doing and I like to be able to be there to help you. So again, let me know if there's anything more that I can do to help you. And until next time, this is Ben Greenfield signing out.