Thriving as a Triathlete in the Middle of the Pack

TDP 371 - Thriving as a Triathlete in the Middle of the Pack

Andrew: Welcome to the TriDot Podcast. Today we are trucking along in a really good series we've been doing, where each week we talk about how to thrive in triathlon as a different type of triathlete. I've been really happy with the response to this series. Every single episode has gotten really good views, really good downloads, and some really good chatter on the socials, so I'm happy to see you guys are enjoying it. Today we are going to cover how to thrive as a triathlete who competes in the middle of the pack. A few weeks ago, April Spilde came on the show and talked about how to thrive as a back-of-the-packer. Today we're moving a little bit up into the middle of the pack, and in a future week we'll talk to you fasties at the front of the pack. Our coach joining us today is Ken Persudi. Ken coaches triathletes and runners through Victory Multisport, based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is the head of product for TriDot. Coach Ken, thanks for coming on.

Ken: Awesome, Andrew. This is one of my favorite topics. A lot of my athletes are the MOPs, as I might call them, the middle-of-the-packers, and I'm excited to share some tips and best practices that I use with them.

Andrew: I don't think I've seen the term MOP used that way. There was a nutrition brand that used to sell a hat that said "mid-packer," and I bought one because I thought it was hilarious, but it was way too big for my head, so I never actually wore it. Anyway, I'm Andrew, the average triathlete, voice of the people, captain of the middle of the pack. I say that every episode, and today it is so true. As always, we're gonna start off with our warm-up question, settle into our main set conversation, and then wind things down by asking Coach Ken an audience question on the cooldown. Lots of good stuff, let's get to it.

Andrew: Coach Ken, for our warm-up question today, I want to know: when you work out, what is the most recent song you added to your workout playlist?

Ken: Man, I could probably talk about music all day long. I am definitely a music guy when I'm working out. I listen to a lot of throwbacks, a lot of older alternative, but if we're going new, it's probably "Storm 2" by Yung Lean. You feeling me on that?

Andrew: Dude, that music video is so dope.

Ken: And somebody used AI to make a triathlete version. If you haven't seen that on the reels yet, it's fantastic.

Andrew: Do they really? Yeah, really cool music video. I'd never heard of that guy, but it's a good song. It's not on my workout playlist, but I do listen to it on a different playlist, so I know exactly who you're talking about. What's fun about this question, Ken, is that if I asked for your favorite artist, you could say whatever the cool answer is, but there's no hiding here. This is genuinely the latest song you added. For me, there's a band I listen to, it's come up on the podcast before, called Our Last Night. I'm a Spotify guy, and they're a punk rock band. They do their own music, but I honestly don't listen much to the original stuff. What they're really good at is punk rock covers of popular songs. They'll drop an album of their own original music, and then a week later they'll drop three covers. The most recent song I added to my workout playlist, literally this morning (we're recording on a Friday, it's New Music Friday on Spotify), is their punk rock version of Dolly Parton's "Jolene." And it rips, dude. It freaking rips. A lot of their stuff ends up on my workout playlist because of that.

Ken:

Yes, I love it.

Andrew: We're gonna throw this question out to you, our audience. Wherever you listen to music, whatever you're into when it comes to that workout playlist, let us know what the most recent song is that you've added. Find this question on social media and answer it there, or if you're watching on YouTube or Spotify, comment below so we can see what you have to say.

Andrew: Into the main set, where Coach Ken is going to help us thrive in our triathloning as middle-of-the-pack athletes. Ken, you and I both compete in the middle of the pack, so we're talking to ourselves here today. As a coach, I know you work with plenty of athletes who are MOPs. What is it about this athlete population that excites you?

Ken: I love seeing beginners too, their introduction to the sport and how excited they are. But with middle-of-the-packers, oftentimes they are experienced athletes. When you're working with them, it's usually not just "I want to finish the race." It's "I can set some performance goals for myself, I know what I want to see." And the majority of the middle-of-the-packers I have are also very busy professionals with family lives. So it's trying to figure out how we take those goals, along with all the other demands on your life, and get you where you want to be. Some of our middle-of-the-packers have very aggressive goals and are starting to make their way toward the top of the pack. Others are just figuring out what the sport means for them, what their identity is there. Working through all of that with them, and celebrating their success with them, is something that really gets me going.

Andrew: I love it. I asked the same question to Coach April when we talked about our back-of-the-pack population, and I'm curious to hear what you have to say, because there's no right or wrong here. How do you view it as an athlete or coach? What do you think is the split that makes somebody a back-of-the-packer versus a middle-of-the-packer versus a front-of-the-packer, and how much of the population is in the middle?

Ken: It's called the middle for a reason, right? So it's probably a third of the population. One thing we see about middle-of-the-packers, and this folds into what their day-to-day training looks like, is that we tell that whole spread, "You've got to do the right training right. You've got to take your easy days easy and your hard days hard." But I think what's different from a beginner is that middle-of-the-packers have actually built the fitness to run their easy days. When we're working with back-of-the-packers, there's a lot more walking built in, a lot more trying to get that aerobic response. But when you're in the middle of the pack, you've got that base level of fitness, so you're much more tempted to go just a little bit too hard on those easy days. That's where I spend a lot of my time and conversation, looking at workouts and setting individual day-to-day goals.

Andrew: That's what's interesting. Usually when I ask that question, the coach and I talk about where you're finishing on race day. I've always viewed a back-of-the-packer as somebody who's just trying to finish and make the cutoffs, and an elite front-of-the-packer as somebody trying to win, podium, or qualify for something. To me, the middle of the pack is everybody else: a majority of the athletes on the race course, with a sliver just trying to finish and a sliver competing for the win. But you're putting it in terms of what that person's training experience is like, what you're capable of in training, and where that puts you in the field. That changes what the percentage is. Really interesting view, Ken, I haven't heard that one before. When you start working with an athlete who is a middle-of-the-packer, what do you talk about with them that maybe you wouldn't cover with a faster or slower athlete?

Ken: That's a great question. I feel like all of these I'm going to say that, so we could turn this into a drinking game for our listeners, shots of their favorite ketone drink every time I say "that's a great question." Really, I'm trying to understand where they're coming from, what their background is, and how they got to where they are. That's going to be different from a front-of-the-packer, because they've come up from beginner to middle of the pack, and that's why they're at the elite level. With back-of-the-packers, I'm trying to understand their motivations and why they got into the sport. But with the middle of the pack, it's really understanding what their training background has been and what they've done to make it to the point where they are today. Some people have worked really hard to get there, and I think they have a different mindset. We might approach their training, their coaching, and how I'm trying to motivate them differently than with somebody who might have just been born a natural athlete. Maybe they've done one race, and because of their background in high school or collegiate sports, they've won the genetic lottery and are coming into a race automatically as a mid-packer. For somebody like that, we might have to go back to some of the fundamentals I cover with my beginners. What does your running form look like? How's your ground contact time? How is your bike set up? Are you able to just crank through and power through a horrible bike setup, doing this on your Huffy? What does that influence in terms of how we're building? What does your swim form look like? Are you in the middle of the pack because you were an amazing runner in the past, so you've got no swim form or technique, and we should focus your training on that discipline or the bike, while you're only in the middle because you're running crazy splits on the run?

Andrew: This is a recessed memory I haven't thought about in a very long time, but as you were talking I thought of it, and I'm a podcast host, so I'm gonna voice it. When I started in triathlon, I used to train locally here in Dallas-Fort Worth with the Play Tri stores. Play Tri is the official retail partner of Ironman.

Ken: And I cannot tell you how many times they have saved me on a course in the past. I've shared some of those stories on previous podcasts.

Andrew: Yeah, shout out to Play Tri. I used to do a group ride with one of their stores every Saturday morning when I was a newer triathlete. On any given Saturday there would be ten to thirty guys and gals out there on tri bikes doing a little 25-mile route. There was one guy who was new to the sport and started coming every Saturday. He had a tri bike that he would ride on race day, because we'd be at the same local races together. He was about my age, so we'd pal around a little. But on the group rides, he would literally show up on a fixie. If you're not familiar, a fixie is a fixed-gear bike, essentially an entry-level road bike with one gear, no changing gears for uphill, downhill, better effort, or less effort. And this guy was one of the stronger cyclists in the group on his fixie. We'd all be bombing down a hill in aero, tucked in one after the other, going 30 miles an hour, and he would fly by the whole line of us, getting a video on his cell phone of the line as he went by. And I'm like, dude, how are you so much stronger than all of us on a fixie? He was fairly new to the sport. It was so annoying. So when you mention that some athletes come to the sport and have won the genetic lottery, he could probably outrace me on a fixie just because he had the natural predisposition to cycling, but he still needed to learn how to do the sport. Anyway, recessed memory, I've never shared that on the podcast before. I hope wherever he is, he's having a great day. I don't even remember his name. For our athletes listening who are in the middle of the pack, when it comes to our day-to-day swim, bike, and run training, what tidbits would you offer on how to thrive?

Ken: Absolutely. I already mentioned you've got the fitness to do the workouts, so keep your easy days easy and go hard on your hard days. Be very careful that we're actually working within those targets, because that's going to give you the best gains, and avoid going too hard while we're still working on continuing to build that aerobic engine. Outside of that, pay more attention to execution scores. With our athletes on the TriDot platform, each workout ends up with an execution score. Nailing those scores is going to be the fastest way to continue improving and inch up toward the top of the middle of the pack. If I'm working with a beginner, we're probably more focused on just being consistent and getting workouts in. If they're not scoring perfectly, that's okay, we're still learning and growing. But in the middle of the pack, watch those scores, and don't fall for the "more is better" fallacy. Make sure we're not putting in crazy extra hours that we can't recover from, or that don't give our bodies time to absorb the training we did well on and executed. I'm also very guilty of falling into the more-is-better fallacy, so I pay close attention to it with my middle-of-the-pack athletes. Also, especially early in the season and in our development phases, focus on power over stamina. It's kind of an offshoot of that. I think the instinct we have as middle-of-the-pack athletes, who are for all intents and purposes still very fit, is to add long rides and long runs early in our training blocks. Our bodies don't need that right now, and we don't need that to develop our fitness, so we want to be careful not to overdo those sessions.

Andrew: Something I found myself doing early in my triathlon career as an inexperienced middle-of-the-packer was seeing what the pros were doing in their training. They're on Instagram and YouTube documenting their training, talking shop. I'd also see what the faster, stronger, more experienced athletes in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex were doing. You start meeting people at races and in training groups, you add them on Strava, you see what they're doing in their workouts, and it gave me this notion that to succeed in this sport, that's where I needed to get to. So you start pushing the pace a little more often and the mileage probably more than you need to. TriDot honestly broke me of that, because getting on the platform showed me the right way to train, how to do the right training right, as opposed to chasing what these other athletes were doing who were not me.

Ken: Yep. And part of that, going back to our middle-of-the-packers: most of these folks are busy professionals with families, and that adds stress too. When I say professionals, I don't mean professional athletes. Trying to make sure you get all your workouts in while managing all of your other responsibilities takes a toll on your stress levels. Your nervous system doesn't necessarily recognize the difference between physical stress and mental stress. Toward the top of the pack, certainly there are professionals, but most of the folks there are pro athletes, or they don't have the responsibilities most of our middle-of-the-pack athletes have, so they've got more time for recovery that they can bake into their training. That's one of the things we have to consider, so we don't burn ourselves out chasing numbers we don't actually need to chase to improve.

Andrew: Let's talk about numbers for a second, because I think that's really interesting for the middle of the pack. What numbers should we be trying to hit in our racing and training? If you view front, middle, and back of the pack the way I do, a front-of-the-packer's goal on race day is simple: I want a podium, I want to win, I want to qualify. A back-of-the-packer's goal is simple: I want to beat the cutoffs and finish. In the middle of the pack, there are a lot of different things you can target month to month in training and race to race. As you're talking to athletes in this range, what do you find to be a constructive lens for setting goals and targeting numbers?

Ken: That's hard, because it varies so wildly across that giant section of the middle of the pack. With most of my athletes, I try to talk about how they view themselves. What is your identity first as a person? Is it defined by triathlon, by the community you serve, by your job? Of course it's some mixture of all of those. I find that for most of us, our identity is not as a triathlete, even though we might go down that rabbit hole sometimes. For most middle-of-the-packers, we probably have races we've done before and want to improve on. I've had athletes who are performing better at 60 than they were at 40 and are still PR'ing. Others, the years are taking their toll and they're slowing down, which I probably fall into at this point, but that's because I was racing a little harder earlier on. Lots of times they just want to make sure they're improving. For some athletes, that absolutely means a change on the clock, but based on what they're able to do in the time they have, we ask what is realistic. It's probably not realistic to shave off an hour, but if we're just trying to do better than last year, awesome, that's fantastic. For some athletes, the goal is ultimately just to be healthy. This is how they keep themselves moving, keep their body at the weight they want, and get the mental focus or stress relief that comes with training. There are all types of goals and numbers we can chase, and it really depends on the athlete. I'd say the majority of my middle-of-the-packers right now are still chasing a time and a PR, trying to do better than the previous year. Most of my athletes are returning to races, so they've got a good sense of that. For others, we'll take the results from previous years and look at them in RaceX, which is our proprietary race software that's part of the TriDot platform. We'll say, if you did this at race A, what are you gonna do at race B? Because the course is different, let's normalize that course, and let's normalize where you are based on your age and how things have changed over the years. That gives us a projected time. Now, is the goal to hit that time, to beat it, or is the goal something else completely?

Andrew: All really good. And I like how you pointed out that for a lot of the middle of the pack, the goal is to be healthy, because that was certainly me when I started. I was running every day and just looking to be healthy, and triathlon gave me an interesting way to stay healthy. Then once you do a couple of races and go through a training cycle, you start seeing what you're capable of. All of a sudden you have these goals: I want to go under six hours at an Ironman, I want to PR my local sprint, I want to be ten minutes faster at that local Olympic than I was last year. Ken, as a middle-of-the-packer, what is your bucket-list goal? What's the one thing you would want to achieve that you haven't yet in the sport?

Ken: I think this is probably something a lot of middle-of-the-packers will say, but it's ultimately to qualify for a world championship, or at least a final podium. I'm not under the illusion that it's gonna happen in the next five to ten years. Eight is probably what I'm looking at. There are a number of factors: what do the times look like for my age range between now and then, and how am I going to have to change between now and then? I know I can't commit the amount of training or emotional stress that comes with that right now, but what can I do now to set myself up to be moving toward it? A lot of middle-of-the-packers I work with who have that type of goal aren't trying to qualify this year or next year, but it might be down the road, or they want to see themselves moving up in the rankings. That's something we often talk about.

Andrew: That's a good one. For me, I want to go under five hours at a half Ironman. At Clash Daytona a number of years ago I went 5:02:30, so I'm kind of knocking on the door of that time, but I'm not as fit right now as I was then. I've got to claw some fitness back before I can take a crack at it, but that's the next big goal I have for myself.

Ken: And by the way, that's where a coach can be really valuable too. It's so easy to say, "This is what I want to do in eight to ten years, and I'll start thinking about it next year." A coach helps you think about your goals for this season, next season, and the long horizon, and how we stay accountable to those things now. For a lot of my athletes, that's how we remain consistent in our training today, and how we make sure we're not burning ourselves out now. I've seen so many middle-of-the-packers who really should have thrown their brakes on a little earlier and burned themselves out after three seasons. It's a sad casualty, and they're not going to see that ten-year goal.

Andrew: Yeah, and it's often the people who come into the sport, get hooked, and do ten races a year. Pump the brakes, pump the brakes. But along those lines, for me the short-term goals have always been training related. I want to get under 20 minutes on a 5K, under 40 minutes on my 10K, over 200 watts on my FTP test, under 1:40 per hundred on my CSS test. That really focuses your training, because it gives you your Swim Dot, Run Dot, and Bike Dot scores and lets you chase higher scores every single month. In my experience, a coach has very often helped me figure out, okay, I'm stalling here. My run keeps getting better, my swim keeps getting better, but my bike has stalled the last three months, so let's look at why and what we can do to shake up this plateau. Then we tweak some things and boom, that's improving, and six months later my swim is starting to plateau. When we look at each sport individually like that, what tips would you offer across swim, bike, and run for middle-of-the-packers who find themselves plateauing in one sport or more?

Ken: First, you absolutely have to think about it as a whole. Is it okay that I'm plateauing here because I still have gains to make in another area? I think swim is very much like this. How much time can I put you in the pool? If you've got a lap pool in your backyard, awesome, that's a totally different conversation. But if it takes a half hour to get to the pool, an hour to do your workout, another twenty minutes to shower up, and thirty minutes back to the office, we've just blown up a big amount of time that we could have been using to improve in other areas. Is that the proper trade-off? Sometimes yes, sometimes probably not. When we're in the pool, a lot of times with athletes who've plateaued in the swim a little bit, we don't want to put more pool time on their calendar because they still have gains to make elsewhere. We make sure we're really focused on technique in the water and that their form looks really good. Even if that means not doing a full workout and spending more time on drills and form, sometimes we'll make that trade-off, because you're building your fitness on the bike and the run as well. The pool is only building you so much. I could probably give you two or three more seconds and we could chase that, but what is that actually going to do for you on race day? So don't worry about plateauing in one space if you're making gains in others, and work with a coach who can help you realize when we're making gains here but can see it plateauing, so it's time to add a little volume in another discipline.

Andrew: Really great answer. One example from my own triathloning: I mentioned my PR at Clash Daytona was 5:02:30. That was a breakthrough performance that came because I'd made some gains on the bike. My swim was the same, my run was doing the same, but people forget how each sport compounds into the next. Historically my half Ironman bike split had been three hours to three hours and five minutes. On that day in Daytona I was really dialed in on my biking, I'd done some aero work and trained really well, and I went 2:42 on the bike, by far the fastest I've ever gone on a half Ironman bike course. Because of that, not only was I faster on the bike for the same relative effort, but I got off twenty minutes faster than normal. That's twenty minutes less that I'm burning nutrition, twenty minutes less that I'm holding this position with my legs pumping. And in those same twenty minutes I'm out on the run course instead of starting the run. Now my run split comes down, and I had the fastest half Ironman run split I've ever had. Not because my run training had improved dramatically, but because my legs were that much fresher starting the run.

Ken: Absolutely.

Andrew: So to your point, if you make some gains in the swim, that's gonna pay off on the bike and the run too, because you come out of the water that much fresher and faster. TriDot does have, built into the algorithm, something called the bike-to-run factor, and you know this. It looks at your Bike Dot and your Run Dot specifically and says, between these two, we can only pull on each lever so much, so what's the most optimal way to pull these two levers for this athlete to improve the most on race day? It might be that you need to improve a lot on the bike and deprioritize the run, or vice versa.

Ken: And one other piece we have to throw in there, depending on where and how you're plateauing, I should, dare I say it, strength training.

Andrew: Wow, wow.

Ken: That is the one you also have to factor in, and it can help overall in so many different areas depending on where you're seeing plateaus and what you might need to trade off. Maybe it makes sense to spend a little more time in the gym. I say maybe, but it likely will.

Andrew: And please add on if you have a different thought, but in just a few words, if you're plateauing in your swim and you're concerned, try Pool School, or get with a local coach in your area who is swim savvy. If you're plateauing on the bike, exactly what Coach Ken is talking about: get in the gym, and re-examine your bike fit. You could be losing a lot of watts to a poor bike fit. If you're plateauing in the run, run drills. Do your run drills!

Ken: Drills, drills, drills. We've built them in there for you, and that's number one. Prior to coaching triathlon I was very much a running coach, and that's the one thing I could do with my athletes at the track where they'd see results. I'm gonna drop one other item here too. There are multiple studies and white papers showing that as you do these drills, you decrease ground contact time and build the muscles and all the things you need to keep from getting injured. But the moment you stop doing those drills, there's plenty of research that says a lot of that reverts. So you've got to keep on those drills, even if you're one of the top runners in the middle of the pack.

Andrew: A hundred percent. In the seasons of my triathlon journey when I've been on top of those run drills, it shows in my Run Dot score, in my monthly assessment, and in my race performances. All of my best run performances occur in seasons where I'm doing my run drills diligently. TriDot coach Jeff Raines, who comes on the podcast often and is a very run-savvy coach, I've heard him say, if I have an athlete crunched for time, I would rather them shorten a run workout to do their run drills than skip the run drills to do the whole run workout.

Ken: Absolutely. And one other piece to add: when you're using TriDot, it's taking all of the information it knows about you and running algorithms in the background, creating what we call a training stress profile. That profile helps determine the types of drills you're getting. So these are not just drills you pull off the internet and do at the track, which, by the way, is better than nothing. If you don't know what to do, look up our friend Bobby McGee and check out his information. But we're actually taking those drills and personalizing them for our athletes based on your body, your performance, and what we think is going to impact you best.

Andrew: And on the TriDot YouTube channel we have all the videos for the drills you'll see in the app, if you're ever bored and want to see what run drills you can try. Ken, talking about strength gets into the next question I wanted to ask, so it's a good segue. As triathletes, we're so busy. There's so much to do. You gotta swim a little, bike a little, run a little. It's helpful to strength train, to work in a couple of recovery modalities throughout the week, to do some dynamic stretching to keep your body primed, to take certain nutrition supplements at the right times, to stay on top of what you're eating, and to sleep well and stay on top of your rest. I'm going to call these training extras that can contribute to how strongly we're swimming, biking, and running. For a middle-of-the-packer, unlike our professional peers, we only have so much time in the day to stay on top of all this. Which of these training extras do you really try to emphasize with your middle-of-the-packers?

Ken: I think sleep is a big one. It's theoretically a free one.

Andrew: God, I miss sleep.

Coach Ken: We work to prioritize sleep, especially in our development phases, though it's important all the time. I think that's probably the number one thing, and by the way, it's the number one thing my coach calls me out on. When I first started working with my coach, the first thing he said was, "You don't sleep enough." And I was like, I know.

Andrew: Who is your coach, Ken? Can you say?

Ken: Yeah, shout out to Richard Laidlow, who obviously knows his stuff and really helped me this season. I had some of my best short course performances this season, a couple of podiums as well.

Andrew: I always love pointing it out. It doesn't always come up, but I love how many TriDot coaches have a coach, because you personally know the value of it, right?

Ken: Absolutely. The best athletes in the world have coaches, the best executives in the world have executive coaches, and the best coaches in the world, I think, have coaches regardless of the discipline. It's no different here in triathlon. A few of the other things I call out are the same things my coach calls me out on. Make strength training non-negotiable. A lot of times with my middle-of-the-packers, we're looking at their week and talking about blockers that might get in the way of a successful training week, and they say, "Okay, I can just drop that strength." No, no, no. We're not gonna drop the strength. Let's talk about how we get a ten-minute warm-up run in front of that strength, a ten-minute cooldown run or walk after it, or a little time to spin out your legs on the bike, so you don't feel like you're totally neglecting those disciplines, but we are absolutely doing the strength. Let's get into the gym and make that happen, and we'll make some trade-offs based on what they're able to do. The other thing, which goes with what I was just saying, is time management in general. A lot of times with my athletes, we talk not only about their training goals but about their other life goals, the big things they're trying to accomplish in the next three, six, twelve months, and we make sure we're factoring that into their training. TriDot gives us a solid "this is the best training week for you based on your triathlon goals," but then we dive deeper into the other things in your life, make sure we're fitting in the strength or modifying other things, and understand how that impacts our next four-week cycle. Maybe it doesn't impact it very much. Going back to a real-life experience, maybe your athlete says, "My race rehearsal is on Saturday, but I've got a golf outing with the guys and I'm traveling to Augusta for that." Okay, let's talk about what that means. I'm not trying to guilt him one way or the other, I'm just trying to help him understand the trade-offs he's making. Maybe for him, the trade-off is, "I've got to do this once-a-year thing, and I need that for my mental life, my emotional life, my personal life." Great, we'll make that trade-off. But what does that mean down the road, and did we know about it when we started this journey? Those are the kinds of things I work through. So for training extras: get your strength in, 100%, make sure you're sleeping, and make sure you're accounting for all of your personal and professional goals on top of your triathlon goals.

Andrew: The only other thing I'll add, Ken: if you're like me and you're an easily injured athlete, very prone to overuse injuries, particularly with running, we had an episode a couple weeks ago with BJ Leeper in the series on how to thrive as an easily injured triathlete. When Ken says strength is non-negotiable, I'd add that pure strength training is different from stability, mobility, and prehab work, but I group them together in the sense that I do them at the same time. In the same 45-to-60-minute block that I'm up in my pain cave doing some strength work, I'm also doing the six exercises I know I need to do for my left knee to stay healthy, and the four exercises I need to keep the lower right side of my back healthy. I know the spots where I break down, and I know the handful of things I need to do once or twice a week to keep those areas happy. If I don't, I'm losing training time, off the schedule for a week or two because my knee's bothering me. So if you're bulletproof, bombproof, congratulations. If you're like me and you struggle with injuries and know how to thwart them, stay on top of those things alongside your strength and you'll be just fine.

Ken: I'll drop one more thing. For you it works out really well to do your mobility training when you're at the gym doing strength. For a lot of athletes it does; for others it doesn't. I'm here in my home office, and sometimes it's just when I'm at the desk, tracing the alphabet with my toes to work my ankle mobility. A lot of our mobility work isn't going to make you break out into a sweat, so every few hours I get up and do a little mobility work. It gives me a mental break from my day-to-day real job, and it also gets that mobility work in. You don't have to block off a huge amount of time. You just have to make it a habit, doing small things throughout the day.

Andrew: If I were to separate it out, the exercises I do to keep my back happy take about eight minutes a pop, and the exercises for my left knee take about thirteen minutes a pop. So I could easily do my back routine on the floor here in eight minutes between a couple of work calls and get back to work. But for me it works to group it together. Really good point. So that's the training extras. There are also the gear extras as a triathlete. What gear we use can make a difference. You can buy watts, you can buy seconds. If somebody is chasing a Kona slot or their pro card, or if you're a pro fighting for a paycheck, you're gonna buy anything you can to shave every watt and every second. In the middle of the pack, maybe we don't need to do that. Which gear items do you think are worth prioritizing for a middle-of-the-packer, and what are okay to not worry about unless you've got an endless budget?

Ken: I feel like this has probably come up several times before. The number one thing you spend your money on is a bike fit. That's going to pay dividends. I think also on the bike, a good saddle. That'll probably come from the bike fit, and your fitter can make recommendations based on where your typical contact points with that saddle are. On the back end of a long course race, the more you're fidgeting on that saddle, the more watts you're going to lose. So that's probably number two. Number three is a power meter. I think that's one of the biggest things my middle-of-the-packers can benefit from. Most of my back-of-the-packers aren't using a power meter yet, and even if they had one, they're so inconsistent that we're learning a lot by feel. But if you've got a power meter, that makes a huge difference. That's how I prioritize dollars spent there. Then, depending on what you're looking like from a running standpoint, everybody wants the super shoes, but you need to be moving at a certain speed, with a certain cadence and ground contact time, to take full advantage of them. If you're walking most of the course because you're on the back end or closer to the back of the pack, you don't need those. I love my super shoes, and I wear them primarily for racing, not my everyday training shoes, but that's something we can start to think about. Then, from there, some of the cheaper things, but again I don't usually take my athletes there first: quality tires, a good aero helmet. After we work through all that, we can start talking about the deeper wheels, the new frame, or the new bike. A lot of times athletes want to talk about wetsuits. A lot of my middle-of-the-packers might not have a thousand dollars to drop on the latest model. I myself have a very nice wetsuit and I love it, but I don't send people there first. We're gonna find a wetsuit that will get you through the swim and help with all the things you want. If you're asking whether to buy a $200 wetsuit or a $1,000 wetsuit, or a $200 wetsuit and a bike fit, let's go for the bike fit.

Andrew: Very good. What I tell friends who are getting started in the sport, and often end up in the middle of the pack, who are chasing the gear they need to buy and the upgrades they need to make, is to invest in training quality first: the items that are actually going to improve your training quality. That's your multisport watch, a power meter if you're not there yet, a gym membership if you need it, a treadmill if you need it. What's going to get you training consistently, I recommend first.

Number two, on the bike, chase comfort. The tendency is to see the really sexy deep-aero everything that people have on race day. You don't know what those people's budgets are, how long they've been in the sport to get all that gear, or what sponsorships they have. Chase comfort, because you can drop thousands of dollars on aero gadgets on the bike and not be comfortable. And if you sit up an extra minute or two or three on race day because you're not comfortable, all those aero gains you paid for are gone. You and I have been in the sport a while, and we're going to continue to be. If you're going to stay in the sport for a while, you'll look up one day and say, "I've been a triathlete for ten years, I have all the gadgets." You don't have to go all in and get everything cool and sexy and aero at once. Get yourself one cool upgrade per year, even, and all of a sudden you're gonna look up and have the best of everything. A couple of questions left in our talk on thriving as a middle-of-the-pack triathlete. Let's talk about race day. When your MOPs head into race day, what are the keys you give them to help them have a delightful race day and not a disastrous one?

Ken: I think race day starts with mindset, regardless of where you are in the pack. So, having the clear goals we've set. Also, even Coach April said this, having an A, B, and C plan: "If this happens, then this is where I default to." We try to visualize as much as possible what race day is going to look and feel like during our race rehearsals, making sure we're dialing those things in. And start thinking about race day early. You don't want to be on a porch outside of Lake Placid figuring out what your race nutrition plan is two days before. Not that I've been there.

Andrew: You're just making that up, that's hypothetical.

Ken: Just making that up, right? This is why coaches need coaches. But really, understand what it's going to look like. With our race rehearsals, I really want you to understand what race day is going to feel like, and that's what we're doing at that time. I also think it's about holding back and understanding what we are coaching you for with that bike-to-run impact, and why you might hold back a little on the bike. Let's say you bike five watts too easy, and that adds five to seven minutes to your overall bike time, but then you're able to run twenty minutes faster. Well, that's awesome, that's a good thing. That's not to discount your story, where you biked faster and were then able to have a great run. It's a scale. Yes, I'm gonna get off the bike sooner and my legs may be fresher, but you were in condition to do that, you didn't feel like you blew yourself up on the bike, so you had really good training. Coming into the race, understand where realistically you are. If I'm not capable of biking twenty minutes faster and then running in a way that lets me benefit from that, then that's not a trade-off we make. You really have to understand where you are, what your numbers are, and have a target you're shooting for that bike plan. A few other things. Regardless of the number of races I do and finish in the middle of the pack, I have to remind myself: don't judge this race off the first hundred meters of my swim. Everybody comes into the water feeling like they're Michael Phelps, and that's just the first hundred meters.

Andrew: I've never felt like I'm Michael Phelps, I don't know.

Ken: Fair. But remember what we've actually trained for on the swim and how we're gonna do that. For me, I very much have to remind myself that the first ten minutes of the swim is just getting a feel for the day and keeping myself mentally in check, because I can very easily go guns blazing and then start panicking at 300, 400.

Andrew: In all three disciplines people can do that. You're switching, you feel good, you're happy to be in the next discipline. For me it's most common in the run, right? I'm feeling great, I'm a runner, I'm gonna cruise, I'm gonna start at an aggressive pace and hold it. No, never works out.

Ken: Yeah, and that's very common with my MOPs. A few other things I like to focus on in training: we look at metrics and numbers all the time, power and heart rate, and we try to convert that over to rate of perceived exertion. When I'm talking with my athletes, we're diving deep into the numbers, but we're also talking about how it felt, so we can dial them into that. On race day we want to look at one metric first. On the bike that's usually power, on the run that's usually pace, but then we're triangulating. What is my heart rate telling me as a governor, versus what I actually feel, versus how I felt in training? We race to that triangulation: on the bike, RPE, power, and heart rate; on the run, RPE, pace, and heart rate. And then, way prior to the race itself, there's fueling. You've got to understand what your needs are. I have so many middle-of-the-packers who see the carbs the pros are taking in and think they want to mimic that or push those envelopes, and honestly, for most of us, we don't need that. We usually practice with somewhere between 60 and 90 grams, and even 90 grams is starting to push the top of the envelope for a middle-of-the-packer. If you've not had real testing done to tell you exactly what you're burning at what intensities, let's practice that in training, look for that 60 to 90, and understand what it looks like. Then there are electrolytes. If you could do one type of testing, I'd tell you to get sweat testing done and find out what you're losing sodium-wise. It's super valuable because it's a one-time test. It doesn't typically change with your age. If you know what your body is putting out in terms of sodium loss, you know what you have to take in, and sodium loss comes per liter of sweat. You can also figure out pretty easily, without lab testing, what your sweat rate is. When it's 90 degrees, I sweat X liters; when it's 60 degrees, I sweat Y liters. How does my sodium loss change in those environments? Then you dial that in for the conditions you expect on race day, and you know what you have to take in. I've coached a number of middle-of-the-packers who've shaved so much time off just by making tweaks to their electrolyte and calorie intake.

Andrew: I know a lot of middle-of-the-packers who just grab by feel off the aid stations and hope it works out. And fueling your training too, right? Applying fuel in your training goes a long way as well.

Ken: Yep. Understand what's going to be there on race day and whether you're actually going to take the race day nutrition or not. At Lake Placid one year, they switched from what they'd been using to something new. I worked with my coach, did the calculations, and we said, we're just gonna carry some extra bottles, because the added weight is not worth the time we'd lose having to practice something new, something we don't like. It's a comfort thing too. My gut is not going to like this stuff from the aid station, so I'm willing to put an extra pound or so on my bike until those bottles are finished to have what I need.

Andrew: On to the cooldown for today's episode, where I'm going to ask Coach Ken a question from the audience. This one comes from Sally from New Mexico. She says: "I've seen in TriDot that when I add a race, I pick if it's an A, B, or C priority. I understand how TriDot will change training for A and B races, but will have you train through C races. But overall, I'm curious to hear from our coaches: how do I decide what priority to give each race?" Coach Ken, you work with our product, so you know how this works very intimately, and you're a coach who helps your athletes navigate this. What would you say to Sally?

Ken: Absolutely. Our A race is the number one thing we are trying to optimize our training toward. That's how you decide if it's going to be an A race first, and it develops what your training cycles, phases, and mesocycles look like, how you're building up toward that race specifically. A B race is a race taking place within that phase while you're training up to an A race, and a B race is going to build in taper time for you. If a race that falls within that timeframe is for whatever reason the one you want to do really, really well at, then you change your A race to be that race. The way I look at it, a B race is one I'm doing because I want to tune my training a little more, or it's something my friends are competing in and I really want to be part of it and be fresh for it. I might even be looking for a podium, but I still want my training optimized toward that A race. If you've got multiple races that look like that, or multiple races you want to place really well at, because you're chasing points of some sort, we can optimize you for all of those races and let you turn them all into A races, and you'll still have a very optimal plan to get you to the big one. Your taper time will be a little more in depth for those A races, but the system is not going to let you put in two A races that are too close to each other, which would jeopardize the outcome of either one. That's why it puts the B in there and tweaks the training. Now, a C race is totally different. Sometimes for athletes I'm coaching, we choose C races and use them to take the place of one of their brick sessions or harder or longer workouts on the weekend. That's focused much more on a training event, an experience, "I just want to be part of this event." I'm not truly adjusting my training for it, because if I do, it's going to compromise my ability to perform for my A race and potentially my B race. If you're throwing in a race where your goal truly is to podium or come in with some really specific targets, then that's not a C race. That is truly an A or a B race.

Andrew: The way I've always viewed it as an athlete, Ken, is that usually my 70.3s and longer are my A races and my short stuff are C races. If I have a C race, like a local event that I really want to do well in and see how strong I can be, I'll put it on the calendar as a C race, and when that week comes, I'll manually back off my training a little. Keep training, but especially Wednesday, Thursday, Friday heading into the weekend, I'll back the effort down and do some race-priming stuff, but nothing that's gonna really empty the tank. That way I'm a little fresher on the Saturday or Sunday I'm doing the event, but TriDot isn't overhauling my training for months to lead into it. I'm manually impacting my week, but I'm not losing the development phase for a few months. If it's a local event that I just want to do for fun, I'll just train all the way through it. The big thing is recognizing that when you tell TriDot it's an A or a B, it's going to change your training leading into it. You're no longer building strength and getting stronger; you're building for that race.

Ken: And I think one of the things you have to consider too, going back to your goals: say my goal is to race every other weekend, or race every month. Okay, great, then those are A races and B races. Just know that you're probably not going to have the same performance result in a long course race later in the season, and that might be okay. This is especially true for our middle-of-the-packers, who we just spent a lot of time talking about. That's the way I coach my athletes to think about it. I've got athletes who just want to race, and that's okay, and that becomes part of the goal. We just want to race, we love the environment, we love the adrenaline, and that's what our season looks like, versus a PR on our long course at the end of the year.