Endurance Nation | Online Triathlon Coaching & Community

“If the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.”

Look at your bookshelf, the magazines in the “office,” the discussions in triathlon internet forums and what do you see? Everything is training, training, training. What, how, how much, how frequently, how much, and…how much training should I do to reach my triathlon goals? Books, spreadsheets, training plans, whizzbang training logs, gadgets and widgets. The volume of training discussion in your life is so loud that you approach every problem with training as the only solution: “I had a bad race (nail), therefore I must fix it with training (hammer)!”

How about putting another tool in your tool kit?

Consider that once the gun goes off, the race doesn’t care about how much training you did or how fit you are. It doesn’t care about how big the engine is in that vehicle you’ve brought to the race. The race is all about how you DRIVE that vehicle for the race distance to the finishline. And, the longer the race distance, the less you can fake the funk with a big engine. You MUST know how to drive!

Miles 18-26 of the Ironman run course are littered with the shattered hopes, dreams and bodies of VERY fit athletes who simply don’t know how to drive their vehicle on race day. But you can bet they’ve geeked about their training, their wheels, or the $500 carbon widget they’ve hung on their bike!

Think you know how to drive? Answer these questions for us:

• What is your target swim pace?
• Without going out to the garage to look, what is the gearing on your bike? Is it the gearing that came with the bike or did you purposely configure your bike with this gearing?
• What is your target heart rate or power for the first 40 miles of the bike? Miles 40-112?
• If you’re riding with a powermeter, what is your target wattage for the first 40 miles? On a long hill? Short hill? Headwind? Tailwind?
• What is your target heart rate/pace for the first 6 miles of the run? Miles 7-18? 18-26? How did you determine this pace?
• How many calories per hour did you take in on the bike? The run? In what form? Why?

If you can’t answer all of these questions, then it’s very likely that a significant component of your poor race performance is your lack of race execution skills. Every Endurance Nation athlete can answer every one of these questions, and as a result, they will tell you that a significant portion of their huge PR’s are the result of just knowing how to race, skills they’ve learned from us and the Team.

Proper race execution is free speed on race day!

So before you start to hammer that nail through another long, dark Off-Season, take a moment to step back and look at your race. Download our Four Keys of Ironman Execution eBook as a starting point.

What pacing, nutrition or the mistakes have you made on race day?

Popularity: 8% [?]

The vast majority of endurance athletes measure everything by time and distance.

• I rode my bike for two hours.
• I ran 12 miles today.
• I swam 4.5 hours this week for a total of 10,000 meters.

Time and distance are easy to track. They add up quickly and make nice sexy numbers you can graph or toss around casually at work to impress your colleagues.

It’s almost our default setting. After all, we think of other important things in the same way.

• I worked 65 hours this week, or
• I haven’t missed a workout in 365 days, or
• My car has 57,000 miles on it.

Funny thing is, there’s nothing of substance to these macro level quantities.  The devil is truly in the details.

• Your boss doesn’t care if you worked 65 hours, did you get the work done? Did you do it right? Can you do more? For less?
• Not missing a workout is impressive, but were they good workouts? Are you actually fitter for it?
• What kind of MPG did you get for those miles? Did you go cool places? Have you consistently taken it in for service?

It’s about the quality, not the quantity of what you did. You and I can both ride for 75 miles, but have very different rides. Thanks to powermeters and quantitative software, we compare how much work each of us actually did. By managing the quality of my ride, I can “get more done” in less time. My hard tempo ride of 2.5 hours is as much work as your 4.5 hour easy ride.

Of course, making this conversion from macro to micro, from quantity to quality, isn’t easy. There’s a little learning and lots of friction. But the pay off is huge.

By measuring and managing quality, I just saved myself two hours.  I can’t think of a single person who wouldn’t benefit from having an extra two plus hours this week. That’s about 8hrs per month, or a savings of 40hrs over the course of 4-5 months of training. How much is 40hrs of NOT training worth to you?

Ready to rethink what you measure?  Read the Endurance Nation Long Course Training Manual

Popularity: 7% [?]

The Four Keys DVD is going to be FREE on YouTube, we are going to turn every one of our 400 members into absolute Ironman race day execution ninjas!

Rich’s Comments

Patrick’s Comments

Popularity: 8% [?]

For 2009 we had 15-35+ athletes at every race, plus family, spectators, friends and fans…and organized huge team dinners for our Team. Coaches on the ground for every race to deliver our Four Keys Talk, encourage our athletes at mile 18, catch everyone behind the finishline…but we can do more!

Thoughts from Patrick

Thoughts from Rich

Popularity: 6% [?]

For 2010 we’ve abandoned the typical triathlon coach offering, which is the high dollar training epic training camp (though we are still offering a Tour of California training camp, available only to our members). Instead, we are going the exact opposite direction: we will organize 4-5 “mostly free” epic, regional training camps for our members and fans. Think a virtual triathlon team, gathering on the Wildflower, IMUSA, and IMWI courses to train with and learn with each other, all for a nominal fee.

Coach Rich discusses

Popularity: 6% [?]