First Time 70.3 Triathletes: How to Finish Confidently Ep 43

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Welcome back to the Find Your Edge podcast. I am your host, Christina Fiumara Newport, and I am here with my fellow coach and right-hand woman, Carly Frost, who is in the midst of her PhD work. So, and this is kind of a new series that we have going of We'll call it Research Roundup. So I am a veritable nerd and I love looking into the research, how we can do things better for our clients, for ourselves. And Carly, you came out with a pretty cool research article, but first of all, welcome.

Hi, thank you.

So give us a little bit of an introduction to the research article that you found and why it was interesting, and then we'll get into some of the nitty-gritty aspects of like the methods and participants and all that good kind of stuff. Sure.

So the title of the article that we're gonna talk about today was The Psychological Status During and After the Preparation of a Long-Distance Triathlon Event in Amateur Athletes. It was published by Boucher et al. And it's looking at amateur triathletes, or as we typically call them, age group triathletes. The average age was to 39, and kind of just looking at this particular age group as they entered into their first half Ironman, which is a pretty common population, I would say, that we generally work with. Yes, super popular and also just a generally large population within the triathlon world. But most of the research that's done is usually with elite level or collegiate athletes cuz they're easier to get their hands on. So it's exciting to have some research done. Specifically for this population.

I know I am super excited to learn more about this. So tell us about the research. I mean, obviously we know why, because again, like you mentioned, collegiate and elite athletes are pretty hard to pinpoint, but then there, as we like to say, there's the rest of us, the age groupers or the amateurs, the people who just wanna get out there and do something awesome for themselves, do something challenging. So what was the research design?

These researchers gathered up 32 athletes ranging from age 29 to 51. That just happened to be the group that they ended up with, but they were— participants were required to already be registered for their first 70.3. So they had to show their registration and they also had to pass a sort of physical exam to make sure that they didn't have any underlying conditions or anything before getting into the study. And that was important because these athletes, as part of the study, were required to follow a plan from their coach that was pre-prescribed by— they had a team of coaches as well as an exercise physiologist, so they didn't wanna be sending these people into anything that they weren't ready to handle.

Cool. Very cool. Okay. And then how did it go? What happened?

What happened? So they worked with these athletes for 6 months leading up to their first 70.3, and they also had an optional interview style check-in after finishing the race. And again, it was optional, so not as many participants in that part, but we'll get to that later. And each month they were emailed over a battery of questionnaires just to get a psychological profile and see how things were going. And sort of the goal was to compare each of these checkpoints and to see how things changed or if they changed with the idea of coaches being able to apply this and knowing if there were particular points where life balance got thrown off or mood was lower, if motivation fluctuated, and just kind of give an overall view of how the mental status of these athletes either changed or didn't change over the course of their 6 months leading into their race.

Cool. And, and as I'm writing things down and, and hearing you talk, like overall mental status is just making me think of just generally Ironman training, and in this case, half Ironman training, it can potentially be a lot or too much. And that's just generally bad business for us if we break our athletes. But what did you find that from the article that related to their overall mental status and working with the coach and going through this process?

Let me, I guess, step back for a second and explain a little bit more, give a little bit better detail about what psychological status meant through these scales that they were using. Things like anxiety, anger, confusion, depression, positive affect or negative affect. So were they generally just happy, positive, having positive thoughts, or did they end up in a more negative headspace feeling like this was overwhelming and too much? And also looking at motivation in in terms of were they feeling intrinsically motivated, were they more sort of receiving their motivation from external forces and that sort of stuff. So again, all these were tracked month to month, and for the most part, everything remained pretty stable throughout their 6 months, which can offhand feel like, okay, so nothing happened, why are we looking at it? But when you step back, particularly I think we have a special sort of viewpoint as we bring in new athletes into the Endurance Edge and we hear what they're looking for when they're looking for a coach. I think these particular subjects of this study had an advantage of that they were being coached and they were able to maintain a homeostasis across their 6 months, feeling like they had training and life balance. They stayed motivated, they remained happy and positive about what was going on. And we know from our incoming athletes that that's not not always the case when they don't have someone helping them or someone guiding them through such a big goal that they've set for themselves. So in reality, it, it kind of shows that having that support can help maintain all these positive aspects of your mental capacity through training, which, I mean, they had no control group in this particular study of like people going through this process without a coach. Absolutely. So, yeah, it's kind of difficult to say that, but yes, that is a personal anecdote.

Yes. Yeah.

Yeah.

I would say in our experience, I, I know this might sound terrible, but I kind of like athletes to fail. And the reason for that is, is that then they realize the value of accountability and help. So oftentimes we get people who are like, I had this really awful experience at Half Ironman, blah, blah, blah, of my hydration was a disaster. I was cramping. I was so much slower than I know that I could be. Please help. And I think part of that, like, fear of that happening again helps to, I would assume, intrinsically motivate them to reach out for help.

I know that was a little bit of an aside and probably sounded terrible, But no, and I hopefully that's also helpful for anyone considering getting a coach too, that you're not— if you're having these thoughts of, man, I, I tried on my own and it just, it didn't work how I wanted it to or how I thought it was going to, and you're doing this research on Google and you're, you're finding plans and you're trying to make them your own, but it's just not quite there, that you're not the only one that that's happening to. It, it's, it is a frequent thing that we're hearing. And so don't feel like you're alone in, in having that happen.

But the good news is it's like a part-time job. I mean, putting together 3+ sports plus your mobility and your strength training and then like logistics of like, well, where is my, what, what do I do in transition? What do I eat the night before? What I, you know, like all of these different pieces, it's like, it's cool. We, we got, we, we got you.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Yep. And kind of plays into the, the purpose of this study in that it is possible to go through a training cycle and have it all work, have it all come together, have this awesome experience and reach your goals and come in afterwards and be like, that was absolutely amazing. I can't believe how well this went. It happens and it, it can work. But I do wanna touch on your point of intrinsic motivation cuz it was extensively discussed in this article too, and that they saw a slight rise in intrinsic motivation as they went.

Back up a hot second. Can you give us the difference, like a definition of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation? So for anybody who might not know what that means, sure. To get some context there.

So your intrinsic motivation is gonna come from within. It's, I wanna live a healthy lifestyle. I wanna be active, so I'm here for years to play with my grandkids and things that are kind of come with, with, from within. Extrinsic motivation. My favorite example is this race had a really cool medal and I wanna hang that on my wall, which is great and a, a great start or a reason to kind of look into a race. But particularly when we're talking about long course triathlon, right? And you're talking about hours and hours that you're committing to this training. We wanna make sure that we have more of an intrinsic motivation to keep us going.

Can I like give you a quick example that I was just thinking of? Yes. In this, what for myself here? So I love multi-sport and intrinsically, like it just makes me feel good. I can conquer my day. I can have clearer thoughts to like get through the day. But if a coach gave me a time trial, that's like death. I just am so not motivated. Like, okay, just go out and do the fastest 5K you can. I'm like, no, I don't want to. But if I sign up for a race, I am having that level of extrinsic motivation of like, there's humans around. I don't care who the humans are. You know, it's not like I wanna beat that person. That doesn't motivate me at all. But if I, somebody said, go do a 5K time trial on your own.

No.

But go do a 5K race. Okay. All right, cool. So anyway, my little example of that and also maybe even tying that into how a coach can get to know you and what motivates you so that you can keep it fun. And I know we're going there in a hot second, but yeah, go on, continue.

I love fun, but I, I think you bring up a great point too. And I'm gonna add to that, that a lot of times we don't know what motivates us. We know that we maybe enjoy triathlon, or sometimes we have people that come in and are just, you know, high achieving individuals. They've gone far in their career and they're like, I like to set big scary goals, so I signed up for an Ironman and I have no idea what to do now. And that's great, but it's also an opportunity for us as coaches to kind of ask good questions and dig a little deeper and help each other figure out where that motivation stems from and help guide it in a direction that will not only help achieve the goals, but sort of increase this intrinsic motivation that can help in all aspects of their life and hopefully keep them happy and healthy for a long time to come too.

That's really cool. And also reminds me of a survey that we have going around to our current team members of like, what are some of the classes you want to see more of and what other information can we give you And a lot of that is all well and good, but at the end of the day, I think they're all motivating each other because they're having so much fun. So they all want to be there because they want this healthy aspect. And I think we saw that in that article. It's not like anybody's forcing them into doing it. They come to it because they're like, well, this is a good way for me to get some exercise, albeit kind of a lot of exercise. Talk about the aspect of joy and fun in this process.

I love fun. I love bringing joy into training too. And I, I've been having an increase in these conversations, particularly because it was just New Year's and everyone's talking about their 2023 goals. And I love talking about goals. I love breaking them down. I, I love everything about goal setting and everyone kind of Pops their eyeballs open and I'm like, okay, but how are we gonna have fun while we do it? And they're like, well, I'm here for like training, like, you know, and I'm like, yeah, and what's your favorite part? And like you just said, Chris, if, if, if you hate doing Tabatas, tell me that because I won't put 'em on. Like there's a hundred different ways we can train and achieve your goals. And I'm, I don't wanna put things on your schedule that you hate doing cuz guess what? You won't do them. Or you'll do them for a little bit and then remember how much you hate them and stop doing them. So making sure whether you work with a coach or don't work with a coach, but if you repeatedly hate a certain workout, find a different one that can achieve the same goal, but, but include some fun for you because it's gonna help you stick with it longer.

I think that also brings up the element of like communication. Oh, you know, right? So everyone wants and needs to be heard, and sometimes that can be a bit of a difficult process of making sure you are communicating, hey, please don't ever give me a 5K time trial cuz I'm not gonna do it. Like if you give me homework to find a local 5K and then I give you some dates and you work my calendar around it. Cool. But that would be something that I would have to communicate with my coach. Just like, okay, if you see Tabata, like in your example, Tabatas, if you see those on there and you just hate them and your coach is noticing, you know, you're not doing this workout, what's up with that? It's okay to be honest. I mean, that's the whole process of being heard and being understood and I think of it as us as like strategists. How can we be strategic and giving you the best plan that not only helps you reach your goals effectively, but also keeps that positive headspace and consistency and joy and fun and yeah. Yeah.

I'm, I'm also gonna, I'm gonna flip that too and, and add that it's not always gonna be fun and you're gonna have to do hard things.

Yes. So it's, can't get away with not riding your bike for a long time.

Yes.

That's kind of a thing.

Yes. Or if you truly hate riding your bike for 3+ hours, don't do half Ironman.

Yeah. Like, can I make a gentle suggestion?

Yeah.

Maybe we should focus on Hex instead.

Yeah. So it, it really is keeping that line of communication open and finding that balance of your coach is there to push you outside of your comfort zone and to hold you accountable, but also make sure that you're enjoying the process. So the fun needs to be there, but that doesn't mean 100% of the time you're going to spring out of bed at 5 AM and be like, I'm going to go work out now. We all wanna hit snooze sometimes. Sometimes we do hit snooze and totally skip it. It's cool. But working to find that balance and bringing in joy is, uh, super important.

So if you were to give people like 2 or 3 things to walk away with from this research article, and maybe even in combination with your experience as a coach and your learning that you're doing right now as, okay. Brief pause. What is your PhD in? So everybody knows.

Sure. I am working on my doctorate in sport and performance psychology. So this research article that we're talking about is a really great example of sort of what I'm learning. It, it's part of what I'm learning, but just the mental skills behind training and also hoping to apply that to coaches and help coaches learn to ask good questions to help bring out things like intrinsic motivation. And instead of just laying out workouts and training blocks, and, you know, we're trained in periodization and how to progressively overload and all that good stuff, but particularly for these age group athletes, right? We're people, we have families and jobs and little kids and all these other responsibilities. And again, a wonderful life to be a collegiate athlete or a professional athlete where you just get to like wake up and train all day and that's, that's your job. Like what a dream. But helping coaches that are working with this population be able to dig a little deeper and understand what's going on in their life a little bit more to just optimize what you're working on, on the physiologic side of things in the training. Did that answer that question? Okay.

Yes, definitely. And I know you mentioned collegiate and professional athletes, but it's interesting you say that because we tie it back into the motivation. You thought we were ending the episode. I lied.

Sounds like we need more episodes, right?

Exactly. Welcome to my podcast, friends. I was thinking about this on my runs. This is where I find joy, is going on my runs to let my brain just do all the things and be in its happy place. But how many people we have who are ex- collegiate athletes and are like, I don't want to do that again because I got so burnt out, you know, like who are ex-soccer players or collegiate swimmers or, and they're just like, oh, you know, how can I, I want to go back to that healthy activity and I want, but I have to have fun and I have to find the joy in it. And we're not barking orders at you. So, you know, we, we want it to be fun and to be a community experience and to still give you that sort of team aspect and give you high highs at the race and ring some cowbell a lot and show up where you don't think we're gonna show up on the race course to like give you a little smile and give you a little boost of that extrinsic motivation.

But give yourself a little bit of a break too with training, you know?

Yeah.

I guess it all ties back to joy.

Yes.

But stop my rambling, Carly.

No, you're good. And that, that transition that you're talking about too, whether it be ending your collegiate career or ending an elite career and sort of going into a more relaxed training and just natural healthy lifestyle sort of situation is something I'm studying as well. Cuz there's a huge mental component to that and things like burnout and just sort of that transition into still wanting to be active and feed that competitive side, but transitioning into that in a hopefully more enjoyable fashion. So yeah, all super fun things and I hope to continue chatting with you guys about all of them, but To answer your previous question, since you got a little off track, we finally summarizing. Yes.

Okay, good.

I'll touch briefly on this study summarized with this optional interview post-race. I believe it was a week after the 70.3, and this part was sort of more exploratory. So the, the interview isn't validated or anything, but it still provided insight into how the athletes that took part in the interview were feeling. And the biggest takeaway from these interviews were that these athletes went into race day feeling calm and confident, and they all cited that because they felt fully prepared by their coach. And what a profound thing to hear from these athletes. So that to me certainly stood out as one of the biggest takeaways from this and The point of me picking this article was not to push getting a coach by any means, but the point more being if you're finding a mismatch there and not having that confidence and not feeling like you're prepared how you should be, that again, it is possible to feel that way. And, and whether that's us or any other coach that is qualified to get you there, I highly recommend looking out for someone that can help you because as possible. And I think you asked for 2 takeaways.

Yes.

So my second one would be if you're working with a coach that maybe isn't sort of digging into what motivates you, or you're finding that you're having a hard time, you know, we talked about not pressing the snooze button, or whether you're finding it a motivation thing, or you're feeling like I— it's more of a behavior change that maybe you're having an issue with. Opening up that line of communication with whoever, whether it's a training partner or a coach, but sometimes just talking about things will sort of open your eyes and as you hear yourself kind of saying what's happening to, to noticing where you're hitting that speed bump. Cuz it's not always, oh, I wake up and I'm tired. You know, what are you doing the night before? What, you know, what have your, your previous couple days looked like both life-wise and training-wise? But tying that all back into having that open line of communication with someone to examine where your motivation's coming from and if it needs a little bit of help.

That's awesome. Because as you're saying this, I'm also thinking of nutrition clients with whom we have these conversations of, well, I know I need to do X, Y, Z, but why am I not doing it? Like, okay, well, let's think about like, Which days are better for you to be meal planning? I find it fascinating the more I am in this career, how many answers people have for themselves. It just has to be extracted, which is so cool.

Yes. And behavior change is so— it's hard, y'all. It's hard for every single person. And if you ever see someone that it seems so effortlessly doing something that you wish you could do, one of two things is happening. One, they naturally have a set of skills that they have, whether they realized it or not, built over time that naturally makes them successful in that area. Or B, they're doing a lot of work that you're probably not seeing them do to work on that behavior change themselves. And behavior change, to your point with nutrition, it ranges from every aspect of your life. A bazillion behaviors are done a day, and sometimes we think we're making a behavior at a decision for a behavior at a certain moment, but really we already made the decision a while ago. And that's really the key to behavior change is figuring out when you're making these decisions and why.

So cool. Yes. Could we nerd out a whole lot more on this? For sure. But we talked about a lot of stuff. Motivation, coaching, behavior change. Life balance, being able to do hard things. And that was awesome. Thanks, Carly.

Absolutely. Happy to be here.

Yes. Cool. All right. So, uh, if you like this episode, don't forget to give us a like. And if you want to learn more, or if you liked this particular topic, send us an email. Let us know info@theenduranceedge.com. Thanks for listening, and we will catch you on the next episode. Thanks for listening to the Find Your Edge podcast. If you like what you heard, don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode. And if you're interested in learning more about our endurance coaching, sports and wellness nutrition, metabolic and sweat testing, triathlon training team, or our triathlon training library, be sure to check us out at theenduranceedge.com. And don't forget to follow us on social media at The Endurance Edge. Thanks again, and we'll catch you next time.