Thriving as a Triathlete at the Front of the Pack

TDP 373 - Thriving as a Triathlete at the Front of the Pack

Andrew: Welcome to the TriDot Podcast. Today we are talking about how to thrive as a triathlete who competes at the front of the pack. If you are fast, if you are strong, if you are winning races or trying to win races, or maybe you're like me, a middle-of-the-pack athlete who wishes you could go out and win races, this conversation is the one for you. Our coach joining us today is Will Usher. Will coaches triathletes through Precision Coaching, a top-ranked team based out of the UK. He also serves as the director of partnerships for TriDot. Will, welcome back to the show.

Will: Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to getting into it.

Andrew: I'm Andrew, the average triathlete, not the elite triathlete, just average over here, captain of the middle of the pack. Today we will start off with our warm-up question, like we always do, flow into our main set conversation where we try to help our fast triathletes be faster, and then we'll close things down by asking Coach Will an audience question on the cooldown. Lots of good stuff, let's get to it.

Okay, Will, in the spirit of talking about being fast on the race course, for our warm-up question today: from all of your endurance sports racing, what is the best finish you have ever had? I mean best finish as in closest to the top of the standings. What is this for you?

Will: In the early days, taking me back a while now, I was a bit gray in the beard, but I was lucky enough to take a few overall wins. That was a good couple of years ago, let's say. I've had a bunch of podiums over the years, regularly represented GB internationally, hit the world podium on occasion in the age group ranks and so on. But that really turned my attention to coaching, where I've had some awesome results from athletes, including a world record, in fact, which was immense.

Andrew: Love to hear it. For me, I've never been number one on race day. In triathlon, the closest I've come is second age group, never first, always second or third. I can achieve that at local events. If I go to a major Ironman event, I'm definitely not on the podium, but at local sprints I can sometimes get second or third. Overall, I think I've been in the teens, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth overall, at some of the local events. My best finish in endurance sports was a fourth overall, second overall male, at a local 5K. Ironically, it wasn't in the last couple of years since I got into triathlon and became a stronger runner. It was the very first organized race I ever did. It was sponsored by RaceTrac gas stations here in Dallas-Fort Worth, and I got a free entry from a guy I knew. I had never raced an organized race before, I was just a casual runner, and I ran like a 21:30-something. Now, my 5K PR as a TriDot athlete is like 17:50, so I've come a long way since then. But with the fitness I had back then, I ran a 21:30-something and was fourth overall, second male. To show you what the caliber of this race was, I won a fifty-dollar gift card to RaceTrac, so I got a free tank of gas.

Will: Amazing. I remember doing a local race as a kid, and I won the under-nines or something, and I got a £5 gift voucher. £5 in the 80s was like winning the lottery, basically. I think it expired the next day or something. That was probably one of my most enjoyable, most memorable wins.

Andrew: Love it. We're gonna throw this question out to our audience. I want you to brag on yourselves today. If you're watching us on YouTube or Spotify, you can comment in the comment section right on that platform. Tell us the best finish you've ever had at a triathlon. Or you can go to the I Am TriDot Facebook group, where I will also throw this question out. Can't wait to see what you, our athletes, have to say.

Into our main set. Will, I chose you for this conversation because you were quite the athlete in your prime, like you said in the warm-up question, you've won a few races in your day. And as a coach, I know you've had the chance to work with some stellar athletes, so I know you have experience helping front-of-the-packers optimize everything about their training and race day. Just for a little context, share with our audience some of the notable athletes you've gotten to work with, and some you may be working with now.

Will: Sure. I'll come more into this later in the show, but what is a notable athlete, what makes somebody notable? In terms of outright fame and notoriety, one of my career highs was certainly Billy Monger. We had Billy on the podcast a couple of years back. That world record by more than two hours at Kona was phenomenal, and we're still pushing him now for the Paralympics, so that's very much at the performance end. Outside Billy, there have been plenty of athletes getting onto programs with national federations and so on, at the pointy end. I've had some other fun ones as well, like Jamie Laing, who, maybe not so much in the US, is a BBC Radio 1 DJ. We did a cool project with him where he ran 5 marathons in 5 days. And then Gordon Ramsay, who you will probably know in the US, but that's more notable in general than performance. Billy, I think, is a career high for me. I really enjoyed that project, and we're seeing where we go next.

Andrew: Gordon Ramsay! I'm not a big cooking show guy, but the two cooking shows I like watching are Bake Off, as you would call it, the Great British Baking Show on Netflix here in the States, and Gordon Ramsay's MasterChef Junior. Could care less about MasterChef, could care less about the adults cooking, but the kids in the kitchen cooking with Gordon, great television. Absolutely love it. Meeting Gordon as a triathlete would be a bucket-list item, so it's cool that you've gotten to work with him. I've had the same conversation with different coaches. We did an episode on how to thrive as a back-of-the-pack triathlete, a conversation about the middle of the pack, and now you're coming on to talk about the front of the pack. I've asked this question to every coach in this series just out of curiosity. It's totally subjective, no right or wrong answer. When we say front-of-the-pack triathlete, what percentage of the population, what caliber of athlete, do you think we're talking to today?

Will: I actually think that's a really difficult question, and I'll contextualize why shortly. First I'll answer the direct question, because what we're talking about potentially is a statistics question. I would say the front of the pack is the top one to 5%, and then maybe edging out to the top 5 to 10%, who are on the edge of breaking into that front pack, basically in range if somebody blows up. Probably in the bigger age groups, in terms of volume, that's where the top 10 is decided, and of course the podium. But if you're in that top 10 range and something happens, then you're in shooting distance. We've seen a fair bit of that in some of the world's races, like the Norwegian lady, Solveig Løvseth, blowing up in the final section at Ironman. But I was listening to a podcast the other day, not nearly as good as this one, of course, talking about what is elite performance, and it's kind of the same question. I really agreed with the guy doing the talk. He said, look, if you had the London Marathon, which is like 50,000 athletes, the most elite performance on that day could be athlete 37,653, because she's a single mom who works two jobs, can only train two, maybe three times a week, and she actually executed at an elite level for what she could do within her parameters. I'm looking to do a post about this as well, because at the moment there's almost a one-upmanship with distances. Someone does a 5K and they go, right, now I need to do a 10K, that's better than the 5K. Half marathon, marathon, ultra. And doing an ultramarathon is very hard, but the hardest distance to race well in all of athletics is a 5K, hands down. To get fast and be good at a 5K is the hardest thing you can do. I know I'm going off the subject a little bit here, but you've got to be able to define what it is for that individual. When you're looking at elite performance, it applies to every athlete, just within their own parameters.

Andrew: That's an interesting perspective for folks listening who maybe wouldn't identify themselves as elite because they're not racing at the front of the pack or trying to win races, they're just trying to do the best they can for themselves. In your context, you can train hard, do the best you can, and roll up and have an elite-caliber performance even though you're not finishing first, second, third. Really interesting pep talk there that can speak to a lot of people. The way I've always viewed this, and for the purposes of this conversation where we're talking to our front-of-the-packers, I think one to five percent, maybe extending out to ten percent, is a really great identifier. To me, you're back of the pack if you're just trying to finish and beat the cutoff times. You're front of the pack if you're trying to win, place, qualify, you're in the mix. And you're middle of the pack if you're anybody else. It's kind of a bell curve. Today we're talking to those people who identify as, I'm fast, I'm showing up on race day trying to win, podium, or qualify, and Coach Will's gonna help us do that a little bit. Something I find interesting, traveling for TriDot and meeting athletes at the races, is that I've gotten to talk with a lot of different types of athletes. I've seen some faster folks talk to me about TriDot and think it's beneath them, not in some derogatory way, they just think, oh, it's AI training, it's an AI template plan, that must be for more basic athletes. And I've met back-of-the-packers who see it and say, this is really sophisticated tech, this must be for fast athletes, I don't think I'm good enough for this. You and I know TriDot is for every athlete, because it's going to meet you where you are and optimize your training where you are. There are also athletes who have been on TriDot for years, get faster and faster, find themselves at the front of the pack, and think they need to jump to a different training situation now that they're at the pointy end, which is another interesting kind of case. So for our front-of-the-packers, what would you say about the fit TriDot training can be for their situation?

Will: This is one of my favorite subjects, actually, so I'm going to try not to wobble on too long about it.

Andrew: Go on, my friend, that's why I asked you to come on.

Will: Accuracy matters to everybody, to no lesser or greater degree, be it the front or the back of the pack. But when you're at the front, you're potentially investing more time. It's a long-debated topic: what is a stress metric? We have TSS, which you'll see on Strava, on Training Peaks, and on multiple other systems, almost everywhere. We are the only people who really have a decent alternative to it. TSS was fantastic when it was built twenty years ago, but as you might imagine, things get better over twenty years and people do some work, and TSS has loads of faults in it. NTS, Normalized Training Stress, which we use, is very accurate and fixes the faults of TSS. To give a basic idea of one fault everyone will understand: if we were to run for an hour, TSS assumes the stress induced on your body in the last ten minutes is the same as the stress induced in the first ten minutes. That's complete rubbish, because you've got fifty minutes of load. Even a layman who's never done any physiological education would say, that's ridiculous. That's one of the failures you're dealing with. We've fixed that with NTS, as well as gone further to include environment, age, gender, and all these things. Why is that important? If we do a session, an hour run for example, we need to know the amount of stress induced on that individual. If we don't know that, we can't progressively load, and the very core of endurance training, and indeed nearly all training, is progressive load. We need to apply consistently more pressure, within reason, to achieve a better outcome. If you don't know the load you've incurred, you cannot progressively load it. It's literally as simple as that. In the past, we've known TSS has had these faults, so experienced coaches work around it, but politely, it's been educated guessing. The more experienced you are, the better the guess becomes, but it's still a guess. With NTS, we're able to progressively load, and what does that mean? It means efficiency. It means you're not getting injured. That's really key. It matters equally for a beginner as for a pro, but arguably more for the pro, because the devastating impact of loss of sponsors with injury, lack of efficiency, and so on really comes into play, and it could be your livelihood you're messing with. Then for the top-end age grouper, the one to 5%, again, look at the amount of time you put into the sport to be at the front of the pack. There's an offset to that. What's the cost? Maybe not spending as much time with your family, maybe not getting the promotion at work. These things have a price. If you're not willing to be accurate and get the best out of your training, which is effectively what you're saying by using TSS, then you're not being respectful to, in this instance, the family, or your work, or your own career opportunities. I know that sounds potentially dramatic, but I think it's quite a serious point, and until people take that on board, they won't perform to the best of their ability. As simple as that.

Andrew: That's the science of it, and I'll add this anecdotally. Here at TriDot, we have athletes almost every single weekend on the podium of races somewhere around the world, between our North American athletes, European athletes, Australian and South African athletes. Somewhere around the world, almost every weekend of the calendar year, somebody who trains with TriDot is on a podium. People don't realize it, because only a fraction of our athletes wear a TriDot kit on the race course to rep the brand. A lot of them wear a Team Zoot kit or a local triathlon club kit, or if you have a coach like Will with a coaching group, you wear that kit. You look at a podium and you don't see TriDot, but two of the three athletes on the podium could be TriDot athletes and you just don't know it. I had a guy one time say something derogatory about it: "Yeah, I don't think TriDot can be that good, because I don't see TriDot on the podium very often." Buddy, we're on the podium probably more than you realize, you just don't see it.

Will: Absolutely. It's very unusual that people actually want to represent TriDot. I don't mean that in a bad sense, I mean it's enormously complimentary. You don't see people racing for other training platforms, you just don't. So it's a weird thing for people to bring up that he's not known as a TriDot athlete. Well, no, but for the platform, you see it on the podium. And what's wonderful is that the community is such that people do want to represent a training platform, which is a strange thing to do, but it's nice.

Andrew: Not a bad point. So Will, when you start working with a new athlete and you see their Dot scores, okay, this is a strong athlete, when an athlete is more elite, front of the pack, what are your conversations like with that athlete? What talking points do you go over that maybe don't come up with a middle-of-the-packer or back-of-the-packer?

Will: Typically I say it's often more of a blank canvas, and I'll qualify that. The time has already been put aside to have their training as one of their priorities within their life. People will have different priorities at times, but they've chosen in this moment to focus on the sport almost entirely. So they come to you as more of a blank canvas, because you're not trying to juggle things around quite as much to fit in the training. Interestingly, though, there's a conundrum. The more experienced the athlete is, often the softer the changes are. With professional athletes in particular, if you change 3% of what a professional athlete is doing at the pinnacle of their career, you've had an enormous impact on them, because they have to pay homage to what has come before, and there's a lot of psychological belief tied up in that as well. So there's a bit of resistance to change. My preferred way of coaching, me personally, people talk about different types of coaching, cheerleaders or whatever, is educating. I'm a big believer in that with endurance. I'm not going to be there at 150K into the bike. I might be on the side of the road, you can shout at me, but I'm not going to be in your ear. So educating athletes about how they react to different situations is really important, and that applies here as well. It's a soft education, often, to massage people into new ways of thinking. Quite often what you see at the elite end in terms of training isn't actually cutting edge, though everyone assumes it is. Those athletes became good ten, fifteen years ago, they are the product of a system from ten, fifteen years ago, and now we're tweaking and doing what we can with marginal gains, to quote Team Sky. But actually we're looking at an old training system, so when you're bringing in new ideas, you've got to go softly, softly, nurture them, and educate toward the right path. A beginner coming in needs the same education, because they may have read something, or maybe they've read nothing. You can't throw it all at them in one go and expect it to stick or be accepted. So it's quite similar, but on different ends of the scale.

Andrew: I like how you're pointing out that for an elite athlete, very small differences can make a big change. If I'm racing an Ironman and I'm one or two percent better in my performance, that might take me from fiftieth to fortieth in the age group, whereas for an elite, one or two percent might take them from seventh to sixth. The margins are tighter, the improvements are tighter. So for an elite athlete, what are the tangible things in the swim, bike, and run training that you find make a big difference, or add up to those small percentages of improvement?

Will: There's nothing massively interesting about this, because it's basically been boring. It has been said so many times in the past, but there's a reason for it: consistency and recovery. If you can be consistently boring, by which I mean achieving your sessions, maybe not the best session in the world, but those layers on layers on layers, another brick in the wall, that's exactly it. It's not hero sessions, it's years of being boring, of getting those sessions in consistently. That will sort you out. Typically when you get to an elite or top-end athlete, they're maximized on the training load they should be inducing on themselves. So how can we improve that? To add any more load, if that were possible, the only way is recovery: their sleep, their nutrition, and so on. But the accuracy of doing the boring sessions well, and by that I mean mostly Zone 2, that's where they make the big gains. Look at any pro athlete, they'll spend an awful lot of time in easy sessions. There will be a lot of volume, but that's because they built up to be able to sustain that. What they'll be very good at is the routine. These are people who prep their food on a weekend for the week, that sort of thing, stuff the mere mortals amongst us struggle to do once or twice a year. New Year comes, I'm going to prep my food every week, it lasts a week, maybe two, and then you stop. But that's the thing: doing the boring stuff well, on repeat, and hitting that schedule consistently.

Andrew: That's really interesting. I did have a question on our run sheet, it might be farther down, but while we're talking about it. I call them the training extras. We can't just do our swim, bike, and run sessions. The training extras a triathlete should probably look at are: how am I recovering, how am I sleeping, how am I fueling, what am I doing with my strength training? Some folks have a lot of time to invest in those extras, and some folks, like me, have very little. For our front-of-the-packers, what should they be looking at on the training extras to optimize their performance?

Will: It's actually quite a similar answer in many ways, and it's all of the above. Balance is everything. What you'll sometimes find with nutrition and supplements is people trying to create a shortcut. Supplements are super useful, because, say for example protein, it's difficult to get the required amount in every day, so using some form of supplement helps. The key word is supplement. It's not to take over your protein intake for the day, it's to add to it. Where people sometimes fall down is having five protein shakes a day and never looking at a chicken. That balance is super important. The balance also includes time with family, friends, and work, particularly for those top-end age groupers. If you manage that balance, you'll be happy, and if you're happy, you'll generally succeed. We use a pint glass analogy for managing stress, because that's really what it comes down to. And stress is not just physical stress from training. We can measure that really well now, as we discussed with NTS. What's harder to manage is the stress you get from the morning commute because there's loads of traffic, or maybe you've got a new baby who's sick and crying through the night, so now you're sleep deprived, additional stress to the body. Work's not going so well, or it is, and you've got a big project you're excited about. It's all things that add up in your pint glass. If we say there's a hundred units of stress in everybody's pint glass before it overflows, all of that stress is mixed up together. When it overflows, everything falls apart, because you don't even know what to try and save at that point. It's a bit of a meltdown and everything's going wrong. As a coach, our job is to keep you just below the brim as much as possible, then get as close to the brim as you can with some of the guys with training load, but then we might need to back it off a little. If we're not balanced, if we're not happy in all aspects of your life, you won't succeed. It's as simple as that.

Andrew: So when it comes to a front-of-the-pack athlete, the answer is yes, you need all the training extras. Do you talk with them about, okay, let's examine your sleep, let's examine what you're doing for strength, let's examine how you're recovering from your sessions?

Will: I think the best athletes are often decent communicators as well. You get to know them and establish a relationship or rapport, and the more information you get from them, the more likely you are to be able to manage their stress efficiently and smoothly. I had an athlete once who'd been hit by a car, and there was a court case happening, and they were trying to sell their own house at the same time, two of the potentially most stressful things that could happen, and they didn't tell me about it. Then they started failing their sessions, and I thought, there's no reason for this, I can't see a reason. Then suddenly it came out: yes, this is happening. I'm like, right, okay, this makes a huge amount of sense now. So I think one of the lessons for all athletes from the pointy end is: be better at communicating, be open. Obviously that comes down to your coach as well. Clearly I failed to build sufficient rapport in that instance. But as a coach, you need to nudge around the edges. Something I talk about with the coaches I support is the language of injury, or the language of stress. What you're looking for is the detail in somebody's WhatsApp or iMessage, or the comments in the comment section of the training program. Where is there a missing comma? Are they pausing? Are they usually really chatty and not now? Look for changes of tone, and nudge around the edges to find out what's actually going on. Usually if you do that, you get much better results.

Andrew: Really interesting. I want to go back one step, and this is an unscheduled question, so I'm putting Will on the spot and we'll see how he handles it. You talked about how the key thing in training isn't one tweak or one overhaul, it's just being boringly consistent. Totally understand that. I'm thinking of athletes who are better in one or two of the sports and weaker in one or two. At the professional level, there are professionals who are famously bad at one of the three but can still land on a podium. Lionel Sanders for a long time was a rubbish swimmer by pro standards and could still land on a podium. There are pros who are mediocre in the water or on the bike but can run their way onto a podium.

I imagine at the age group level it's the same thing. There are people listening who are in the front of the pack who rely on one or two disciplines being stronger to get there. Is there a tweak or a training tip you'd address with them as a coach, if they're weak in the swim, the bike, or the run, to boost that one discipline? Or is it just do the training and it's going to improve you slowly over time?

Will: It sounds marginally dramatic, but it's also very simple. If somebody's really serious about improving a weaker discipline and they're already at the front of the field but not quite making it, then they should take a year out from racing. A year is not actually that big an amount of time. We just had the World Championships, so the end of the season is still going on, with races like 70.3 Turkey, and sometime in November there's Ironman Western Australia, that's December. It's like an endless season, and for age groupers and pros alike, they're back to racing really quickly, so they don't have time in the development phase to improve. Roll back your technique, say for example your swim, take a season out and really focus on that one thing. Pros are particularly vulnerable to this, because their sponsorship and their livelihood is associated with racing. Some of the best pros, unfortunately, are well marketed and get paid for wearing some brands, but mostly the brands want them racing in that kit. They'd want them to go on training forever and never really be ready, right?

Andrew: They gotta stay relevant.

Will: So my advice, if you have an aspiring age grouper who's consistently hitting the top of the field and says, I want to get my pro card: consider what that means. Is it that you just want to get your pro card, tick the box, done, and go have a career somewhere else? Or do you want to really do well in the sport? If it's the latter, look at your weaknesses and ask, I'm on the cusp of getting my pro card, but what's going to happen when I actually get into that pro field? Once I'm there, I have much less time to fix the issues I've got, because the hours the top-end age groupers and the pros train are not dissimilar. There's no magic improvement that's going to happen because your status has changed. If you're serious, take the year out. If it's swimming, go work with a swim specialist coach. Chelsea Sodaro did that. She didn't take the year out, but she went and worked with a swim specialist coach to do this. A year is not very long. There are races all year round, and the temptation to just hit back into a race cycle is overwhelming. So be strong.

Andrew: I love that. I didn't take a year off, but I'll use myself to give a non-swim example. I always felt my bike leg was a weakness. My RunDot score is like a 72, but a lot of age groupers gain a ton of time on the bike compared to me. So I started working with a coach on some strength to beef up my leg strength, revisited my aero position, got a new bike fit, and all of a sudden my bike split at a half Ironman went from a 3:02 to a 2:42 after a training cycle of really working on optimizing my bike. Even though I was just kind of holding steady on the swim and run, I was biking more, strength training for the bike more, and all of a sudden I'm off the bike twenty minutes faster, with more energy for the run. With the same run ability, I'm running five, six, seven minutes faster because I'm that much fresher coming off the bike. It compounds. If you dramatically improve in one discipline, it has a positive impact on the other disciplines, so don't be afraid to do that.

Will: Hugely. One year I had a similar thing. I was a similar runner and the bike was more of a weakness. I was a proper masher, stomping on the pedals. So I spent a winter where I was only allowed on long rides with the clubs outside, and only in the small chainring. I had to develop a faster cadence, but much more efficient as well, because I couldn't allow for any power drops, so I couldn't get it back by just smashing the pedals. That's how I improved my efficiency quite considerably. It was notable: over three months, from October through the end of January, suddenly I was a much better cyclist. But it's having that focus on the weakness.

Andrew: Really love that. Let's talk about gear for a second. You mentioned the chainring. We've talked about how, if you're an elite triathlete, you can buy speed in this sport, buy time, buy watts, just by having better equipment. If somebody is a front-of-the-pack triathlete and they're going to spend a little money to look at their equipment and see what they can upgrade, what are the most important things to chase that can make a bigger difference?

Will: Hands down, it's your cockpit, the bars on the front end of your bike. The cockpit has changed quite a bit over the last five, six years. I think Dan Bigham really was the change of that with the Hope bike. As a former F1 aerodynamicist, I think he's going to work for Red Bull on a Pro Tour team soon. It was incredible. The downside is that cockpits have got expensive. A top-end cockpit is maybe a thousand pounds, $3,000, something like that. However, it is more important than the frame. If you have an aspiring athlete coming in, aerodynamics in frames, despite what all the big brands will tell you, are not hugely different between, say, a mid-range superbike and the top superbike. It's the same mold in most instances. To point fingers, Specialized: the Expert versus the S-Works is the same mold, so the frame is no different. You can save some money there and spend it on the cockpit, which could be worth as much as 50 to 60 watts. I've seen this consistently, anecdotally, but also in the wind tunnels.

Andrew: Fifty to sixty is a big number.

Will: I wouldn't want to be pinned to the number exactly, because it depends very much on your CdA, your position, how tall you are, what other clothing you've got, but broadly that's where you can make a big shift. Brands like Canyon, or Cadex, are really good for this. They say, we are experts in building beautiful bikes, well considered, good storage, all that stuff, but we are not the experts on cockpits, because there are so many incredible aftermarket offerings out there. So they've designed their front end to be as compatible as possible with those aftermarket components. Not everyone has done that. Specialized is notoriously difficult for getting different components onto it. But some brands have really leaned into that and realized that's where the value is for a lot of athletes. So, front-end cockpit.

Andrew: So that's your number one: if someone's an elite chasing every second, that's the biggest bang for the buck, that expensive cockpit. I'm seeing that more and more in footage from race weekends as I follow what the pros are up to. Everybody just has one of those ridiculous cockpits now, even at the age group level, if somebody is really competing, regardless of what bike they're on. The newest one I saw watching Kona not too long ago was people using aerodynamic foil in different places. Did you see some of that?

Will: Yeah. I suspect that's going to get stamped down on. There are all sorts of rules and regulations about sizes of Bento boxes, where you can have your bottles, and whatever else. But the great thing about triathlon is that it's always been an innovative sport. Tri bars didn't exist. Cyclists call them tri bars because when triathletes first tried them, cyclists went, actually, that's a pretty good idea. The UCI is pretty strict in cycling, World Triathlon is less strict, so it allows for that innovation, which is cool to see. It's always very exciting going into a race, going, that guy saved 0.3 of a watt on that or something. But how much did it cost? A million pounds? Okay, great, maybe we'll not do that. But it's cool to see.

Andrew: The last thing I want to cover in the main set is race day. For a front-of-the-packer, race day is different from the middle and the back of the pack. In the middle and the back, you're trying to do the best you can with the fitness you have on the day. In the front of the pack, you are racing people, you're trying to jockey for position, whether it's a rolling start or a wave start. What would you say to our front-of-the-packers on the approach they need to take heading into race day? Is there any different strategy or pacing you go over with a front-of-the-packer versus a middle-of-the-packer? Talk to us about optimizing our time on the race course if we are indeed fighting for positions.

Will: Absolutely, it is a different beast. There are a lot of similarities, of course, they're always trying to do their best, but execution and understanding your limits are super important, as with an age grouper, a mid-pack athlete, or someone bringing up the rear. Build the score, always, regardless. If you go out like a mad person and thrash yourself in the first 100 meters of the swim, you're going to have a really bad day. That's the same for age groupers as for elites.

That said, positioning becomes really important, like getting on some good feet in the swim. If you're an age grouper in a wave of 200 people, or in a mass participation start with a rolling start of six people at a time, you've got no idea who's around you unless you're swimming with a friend. In nearly 28 years of racing, I've only had good feet that I've worked really well with a handful of times, because it's people I've raced week in, year out with, and we've shared the work in the swim. Very rare that that happens. But at the pro end, or the very sharp end of the age group field, you quite often know the people around you and have a good understanding of what speed they're going to swim, so that becomes more important. The best athletes have a really deep understanding of how hard they can go, and they're prepared to hurt. I'd actually say sprint-distance racing is probably the hardest racing, because it's about hurting as much as you possibly can and holding onto it for an hour, whereas the back end of an Ironman run is pain of a different sort. Then tactics come into play. Look at the 70.3 World Championships this year in Nice, which was one of the most amazing races. The women's was great, but the men's battle, because quite a few of them were off the front together, was my favorite part of the race. Obviously Kristian's run was insane, but Hayden Wilde coming through, he was chasing down a pack, and he ran into the pack with Gustav and a couple of other athletes. He did something really clever. Lionel Sanders was out front, already on the leg coming back, so what Hayden did, having been eating up the meters to get to Gustav's group, was get there and chill out. He knew Sanders would be coming the other way, and he wanted to hide, to not show that he was coming.

Andrew: Not show that I'm coming for you.

Will: So he sat in that little group, and as soon as Sanders had gone, boom, he's out front again. It's that sort of thing. A lovely little tactical overtake, if you can do it: I like to get athletes to accelerate onto the back of the runner in front, run through them five to ten meters, then slow down a little bit or hold pace, and recover. What happens is the runner now behind thinks, ooh, they've just blown, I reckon I can catch them, and surges to catch up. As soon as they touch, you go again, and most people can't double surge, so it breaks them. Watch the Tour de France or whatever, they talk about burning matches. These are the matches. You only have a limited number, but you use them tactically. That's a big difference, whereas an age grouper or middle-of-the-packer should really try to have a much smoother race, because the smoother the better.

Andrew: Really interesting. Again, for a middle-of-the-packer, which is what I identify as, and a back-of-the-packer, we're trying to do the best we can for ourselves. But I'm curious about our front-of-the-pack athletes when it comes to goal setting and deciding what you want to accomplish next in the sport. There are some elites for whom the desire is to earn their pro card, like you mentioned earlier. For a lot of folks it's to qualify for a world championship in their age group, whether it's Kona or the 70.3 World Championships, or for short-course athletes, to qualify for the Olympics or Worlds to represent their country. How can an athlete identify a good goal to chase, as opposed to something unrealistic or out of reach that isn't worth chasing? How do you steer these athletes in and out of their seasons on what they're capable of?

Will: I think outcome goals are interesting. They're often aspirational, something that inspired somebody to get into the sport. They want to go to the World Championships, great. But for that to happen, a whole host of other things have to come before it. I prefer not to concentrate too much on the outcome goal, because it's not that helpful. If I use an analogy: we're racing an Ironman, and I want to go sub-ten hours. If I start thinking about that in the swim, it's not going to go well. It's a very long day, and you can't conceptualize all the things you have to do right to get to that point. I often say to people, don't think about the next discipline until you're on to it, or you're within a couple of minutes of getting to it. Otherwise it's overwhelming. If you're a hundred miles into the bike and you think, this hurts a bit, and I've got to do a marathon, it's overwhelming. In the same way, if you say, I want to get to the World Championships, I need to race sub-ten, sub-nine, whatever it is, it can quickly feel insurmountable. Anyone can say they want to win a race, but it's the breaking down, month on month, week on week, day on day, session on session, that's where it's built. The process goals. If you focus on the outcome goal, there's a risk that you put too much pressure on your training, try to outperform your training, the balance falls out of alignment, and you crash both physically and mentally. Outcome goals are interesting, but they are literally just the output. If you do all the other stuff, you're going to get there. Yes, it's important to be mindful of what's realistic and what's not. TriDot is really powerful with that with RaceX, because we can put in the thresholds as they are today, and, assuming you train at a reasonable level, this is the probable outcome. A useful thing there is that the RaceX document is a living document. If you train well, adhere to everything, and get faster as a result, that number will start coming down. If you don't, it goes up.

Andrew: Or if you slack, that number's gonna get a little slower.

Will: Exactly. So that's really useful for finding a ballpark of an appropriate outcome goal. But generally I'd get them to focus on: that's fantastic, looking at your times, there's a chance we can take sufficient time off to get there, but now let's focus really hard on how you're going to structure your week with family, work, whatever, to allow this to happen. If we can do that, there's a better chance we'll get there in the end.

Andrew: Moving on to the cooldown for today's episode, where we ask our coach a question from the audience. I pulled this question from Jan from Orlando, Florida. She says: "I'm on TriDot with standard volume in all three sports. This gives me two swims per week. If I want to improve in the swim, is there any benefit to upping how many times I swim per week? And if so, how would I balance it with the bike and the run?" Coach Will. And for the record, I don't know if Jan is front, middle, or back of the pack, so this may or may not relate to the conversation we've had today.

Will: I actually think this applies to everyone. In the first instance, for long-term gains to maximize the efficiency of your swims, it's technique. Whether you're a pro like Sanders who needs some work on his swim, or Joe Skipper, another example, work on your technique and it's going to give you gains over both the sessions you have. If in fact your technique is incredible, maybe you're an ex-swimmer and incredibly fast, but you've only got time for two hours of swimming, and swimming is logistically the hardest one to do. You've got to get to the pool, get changed, fight people in the lane because somebody's doing grandad's breaststroke in front of you or there's a kid throwing a ball, whatever. It's the one most likely to be disrupted. I've just started looking at a product which made its debut, I think, at the World Championships just gone: Swim, formerly Zen8. It's effectively indoor stretch cords and a trainer, with an inflatable bench you lie on. It is incredibly powerful. As swimmers, we used to use stretch cords and swim benches all the time, this is no secret from the world of swimming. But for triathletes it's incredibly beneficial, because you can do it in 20, 30 minutes at home, between calls. You might look a bit red in the face when you go onto your second call, but it's worth the risk. The really cool thing is that not only does it strengthen you in the actual plane of motion of swimming, which is incredibly difficult to do in a gym, with appropriate intensity and resistance, but you're able to look at your swim catch, and it gives you an efficiency score in real time. You can tell whether you've got a sufficient angle in your hand and elbow, whether you're following through in an appropriate way, whether you're accelerating the stroke. And because you're not trying to breathe, with your head not underwater, you've got time to appreciate it. Plus you can see yourself on screen. Honestly, I think this will be one of the biggest products to impact swimming in triathlon since triathlon started. It's huge gains in efficiency for the 85% of triathletes who don't come from a swim background, for whom natural positioning is very difficult to achieve. Even in our own Pool School, which I thoroughly recommend doing, we don't train sections of that because it takes a long time to build up the power to do it. This allows you to do that. So if you improve your technique, maybe do Pool School, which will increase the efficiency of the sessions you're doing, and then build this strength on top, amplifying the efficiency of stroke and strength in an appropriate pattern of movement, you're gold.

Andrew: So the response to Jan is that very likely you will benefit more from spending the time investing in your form as opposed to just tacking on more volume, right?

Will: Yeah, totally.