Endurance Nation | Online Triathlon Coaching & Community

Please enter your email to receive the download link for the Introduction to Racing with Power, and you’ll also receive a code for $5 off the Racing with Power Kit!

The full Racing with Power Kit, only $49, includes everything you need to race the Ironman and Half Ironman distances with a powermeter. You will not find this information anywhere else, and certainly nothing this comprehensive and coherent.

• A 90′podcast on racing with power, originally presented as part of the Endurance Nation Power Training and Racing, for Multisport, Webinar Series
• PowerPoint presentation as .pdf to accompany the podcast.
• Endurance Nation Power Racing Gears calculator, for Ironman and Half Ironman.
• The calculator includes the “Training Stress Score TSS Tables” for extracting appropriate bike pacing given your projected bike split. The product of our power file analysis, the tables are the result of what WORKS on race day. No more hoping, no more guessing, this is what has been proven to work, across dozens of athletes.
• An article by EN Coach and Founder Rich Strauss describing, in detail, how to use the Pacing Calculator.
• An 11-page article by Chris Whyte on Ironman bike execution using HR, RPE, and power.

The Endurance Nation Racing with Power Kit is $49, only $29 for Endurance Nation members (check the Paid Members Forum for the code!)

Popularity: 28% [?]

Join the hundreds of triathletes who have used the 10 Hours A Week approach to achieve their training and racing goals. Free yourself from antiquated training hierarchies filled with phases, periods, and massive annual plans. Triathletes around the world struggle daily to juggle work, life, and family obligations…yet not a single training methodology takes this natural hierarchy into account. Instead of advocating a wholistic and sustainable approach to training, existing methodologies assume that our training is our top-priority. Until now…

Learn more about 10Hours A Week below, including how to get the first half free, or go to the official website and use the code “117VR26F” to save $5!

Listen to Coach Patrick’s Intro

How does it work? | What Will you learn? | Benefits of the 10Hours System | Try it before you buy it! | Bonuses

Why are 95% of athletes who have taken the 10Hours A Week challenge willing to recommend the system to a friend/training partner? Simple — because it works. These lucky athletes have been able to slash their training hours with the same – or improved results. This means more time to focus on the other important areas of your life such as family, friends, maybe even some recreational reading — do you remember these things?

If you are anything like the triathlon majority, you have pushed everything outside of triathlon into a tiny box that you don’t want to open. Guess what? You can open that box and still get fast! You are just a victim of what I call “triathlon mythology”, where the long-term effect of story-telling turns hard work into mega workouts and work hours. A direct result of the media making triathlon special/unique by celebrating the top 1% of the sport, anyone who works out less than the status quo feels like a slacker.

Name another sport where one can work out “only” 12 hours and feel like you are falling behind the competition? The assumption that you have to “join them to beat them” is simply false. Race day doesn’t care how much training you have done; It only asks if you have done the right training and whether or not you can implement it on that day.

How does it work? Competitive Triathlon in 10Hours A Week is more than a book, it’s a process. As you read the book, you will be planning parts of your own season. By the time you are done (typically in 4-6 hours), you will have created your own plan for 10Hours success. Key elements of the 10Hours methodology include:

• Focusing only on your next A race, not the full season.
• Focusing on your Critical Success Factors, not just logging hours.
• Leveraging intensity into build strength and build endurance simultaneously.
• Executing Race Simulation workouts to put your fitness to the test and prepare for race day.
• Scheduling “big weekends” to add endurance-oriented training to your program when needed.

What will you learn? Truth be told, this book is not for the weak of heart. We will ask you to throw out some very popular approaches to training in place of new, data-driven results. Old-school methods of training, such as spending lots of time in Zone Two, avoiding Zone Three, having to swim 3+ times a week, needing to hit the gym consistently…these are all challenged/eliminated. You will learn:

• Focusing on your next race enables you to target your training; that…
• It’s not how much training you do, it’s how you do that training that matters; that…
• That striving for triathlon excellence doesn’t require you to become a social outcast; that…
• Multisport fitness is built on cumulative, well-executed training instead of just logging miles.

Benefits

• In some cases, athletes have successfully slashed their weekly training volume by 50%. The true decrease in your hours depends on your current training volume. If you are a train-a-holic, or have been coached by one, then you could be for a truly momentous change.
• More time for the stuff that matters. No more making life an extracurricular activity, with the 10Hours system you will plan around your life priorities instead of ignoring them.
• Increased focus. No garbage miles/training time means you can actually focus in on the session at hand…the result is a better, more effective training session!

Try It Before You Buy It Still not sure? Satisfy your intellectual curiosity by getting the first half of the book FREE – a 30-page PDF introduction to Competitive Triathlon in 10 Hours A Week. Just enter your email address below to receive an email with a link to download the introduction today!

• A full suite of excel planning templates from Sprint to Iron-distance triathlons – no more writing in pencil!
• The 10Hours Endurance Recipe eBook, with 12 healthy meals (a new one for each month!), absolutely FREE (a $19 value!).

Popularity: 22% [?]

In keeping with our general desire to have more short-course (Sprint + Olympic) materials for our members, we are please to announce the release of a 12-week short course pre-season template. Based off of the successful Endurance Nation Off Season protocol (see results at bottom of this page) that was created in Fall of 2007, this new template provides specific guidance for triathletes ramping up for a season of short-course racing.

The unique blend of intensity and recovery enabled over 80 athletes to get a jump start on their competition; now short-course triathletes can take advantage of the same training principles.

Please Note: This template, one of more than 35 templates available for triathlon, is available to members only as part of their annual subscription to Endurance Nation.

Happy Training!!!

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Endurance Nation is like nothing else out there: two very successful, experienced, high-dollar, full-roster-for-years coaches have combined resources to create the best coaching value in the tri-space, period. They have flipped traditional coaching on its head by creating a member-driven community focused on learning, networking, and training. The formula is very simple. For $99 a year, Endurance Nation founders Rich Strauss and Patrick McCrann:

• Give every member open access to every single one of the training plans they’ve been selling for years at $100-150 each.
• Deliver focused and high-quality support through members-only forums.
• Facilitate team and community building through training groups, our robust forum, training camps and clinics.
• Leverage technology, economies of scale, and the upfront capital of the subscription model to provide the incentive to innovate and over-deliver support to their athletes.
  
• Present the total package within one clear, consistent, and unified coaching message.
• Here is a small sample of the value we’ve created for our athletes since our launch in November 2007.
  

Remember, all this is only $99/yr. That’s $1.75/wk, likely your DAILY coffee budget! Please review the results and testimonials of our athletes. Create a 14-day trial membership today!

Popularity: 15% [?]

I was at the race weekend to deliver a pre-race talk to our Endurance Nation athletes and the public on Friday morning, and then watch the race and support our athletes on Sunday. The day was extremely hot (95-100 degrees) and windy. Combine these two conditions in an early season race, before the competitors have had the opportunity acclimate to the heat, and you’re sure to see lots of meltdowns on the course. These are my observations:

From the bike mount line
I always like to observe the start of the race from the bike mount line, as I get to see 1500-2000 Ironman athletes and their bikes/setups roll out of transition. My notes:

• Many more aerohelmets than in the past and I think this is a good thing. An aerohelmet is an excellent and affordable tool to improve your aerodynamics on the bike, yielding free speed. Don’t think you’re “fast enough” to earn the right to race with an aerohelmet? Wind tunnel testing has shown that the benefits of aero-gear are actually greater the slower you are, as the benefits have longer to express themselves.
• Overly complicated bike setups: two bottles on the frame, two behind the seat, an aerobottle up front, 6-10 gels taped on the top tube + bento box + tubular tire strapped on the back. On a fully supported course with aid stations every 10 miles there is simply no need to roll out of transition with that much stuff on your bike, adding weight and catching the wind on a windy day.
• Doing too much in a VERY busy part of the race. About a dozen times I saw bike in right hand, PBnJ in the left, running in cycling shoes, and trying to mount the bike with 40 of your friends in the same 10 x 10ft space. You’ve got ALL DAY to have your little sandwich. Do it someplace else!

From the bike course:
I then drove to the turn around on the Beeline highway and observed the race about 3-4 miles before the turn around. By the time I arrived the athletes were either at about mile 55 or 95. My notes:

• I saw a lot of people sitting up in the bars, uphill and into a headwind. The sense I had was that they were out of the bars for comfort and fatigue reasons, not to handle the bike in crosswinds. This points to a tremendous opportunity for people to go faster, for free, by investing in proper bike fit: to become more aero and more comfortable so they can stay in the bars longer and in more situations. Riding into a headwind is exactly the wrong time to sit up and create a sail.
• From talking to athletes afterwards about the conditions on the course, this is what I think happened to a many people out there: the first lap was very windy. If you don’t have a powermeter you are VERY likely to work much harder than you should into a headwind. Put this headwind on a slight grade, such as the Beeline, and this effect is compounded. So, my intuition is that much of the field worked too hard on the first loop. The winds went down a little on the second loop but athletes looked at their avg speed and saw they are off their goals…so they continued to push harder. The net is they are done by the third loop and have set themselves up to walk much of the marathon. Add extreme heat to this dynamic and it’s clear that many athletes likely didn’t adjust their effort downwards for the conditions, so they could free up more of their bodies resources to combat the heat, hydrate properly, and set them up for a hot run.

From the run course:
I then jumped on my bike and rode around the run course for about 45′ before picking a spot under a tree to observe for about 90′.

• It was HOT!! I’m guessing north of 97 degrees, easy. And windy, which meant that when the athletes ran with a tailwind there was likely no evaporative cooling effect = running in an oven.
• Lots of people walking or doing the death march, more so than you’d see in cooler conditions. Again, the seeds for walking the run were sown by the combination of wind and heat on the bike, with athletes not adjusting their efforts downward to compensate. The smart people recognized that the day would be about attrition, playing it very conservative and safe on the bike to set up a good run in brutal conditions.

From Mile 18:
Next, I rode my bike to mile 18, The Line where we tell our athletes that the race gets very, very hard. Their only job out there is to create the conditions for success after mile 18: not slowing down. On such a long, hot, windy day, I’d say fewer than 20% were running at mile 18, with that percentage dropping further down the road. The lesson: why play tactical games on the bike, or think about your bike split at all, when doing so increases your chances of going backwards for the last 8 miles of the race? If 80% of the field is walking at 17-20′/mile pace, you’re a superstar if you keep trucking at 9-11′/mile. There is NOTHING sexy about Ironman!

From this experience, Patrick and I see two opportunities to better prepare our athletes for Ironman racing:

1. Execution: we’ve already done a great job of getting their minds right about the race through our Four Keys article. We are also committed to attending every IM race this year to deliver this message in person and to encourage them on race day. To this doc and/or other internal docs we will add guidance for adjusting pacing and the mental game to deal with extreme conditions of wind, heat, rain, etc.
2. Bike Setup: we feel that many athletes either don’t know any better or are just copying their friends and training partners. Instead, we will create an IM Bike Setup Manual for our folks, as a combination of bike fitting and setup guidance. These are the principals of bike fit, for comfort and aerodynamics. Research has identified these as the highest ROI purchases: aerohelmet, wheelcover, use these bottles, put them on your bike this way, this is why, carry these tools and put them on the bike here, this is why, etc. We are also working hard to bring affordable, virtual bike fitting inside the house, so our athletes spread out all over the country will have access to excellent bike fitting opportunities.

Next stop, IMCDA!!

Popularity: 17% [?]

Ironman Arizona 2008 went down yesterday, 4/13/2008, on what might have been one of the toughest IM days in recent North American history.  With temperatures reaching the high-90s and winds picking up to 20+ mph over the course of the day, participants were faced with a much greater challenge than they had anticipated.

The pro athletes and top AG athletes still went fast over the flat course – despite the winds – but they had the distinct advantage of getting off the course by 5pm.  This allowed them to refuel / hydrate without worrying about racing. As of 5pm, a little over 50 folks had finished the day (in 2007, 54 folks had finished in the same time window), leaving well over 2000 athletes to suffer the effects of the race – and the conditions – on the course.

In previous years, the race was held one week earlier. Not much on the calendar, but as any resident of AZ will tell you, one week can mean a HUGE temperature differential. In 2006 and 2007, for example, race temps got up to 87- and 86- degrees farenheight. Adding another week this year meant temps soared to the mid- to upper-90s. OUCH. This was certainly a less-than-ideal decision by the race organizers. With a second running of Ironman Arizona due in November, we can all hope that the weather treats the athletes a little bit better. As a preview, last year on the race date, the high for the day was 67-degrees with winds gusting up to 20mph. Looks like y’all had better pack a vest and arm warmers!!!

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Rich speaking to 50+ folks at the Endurance Nation Pre Race Talk

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This is what riding in AZ looks like!

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This is what it means to race in “downtown” Tempe…

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The lead swimmers…

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This doode was headed for 20mph winds…hope he made it!

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View all EN photos on our SmugMug page!

Popularity: 28% [?]