Endurance Nation | Online Triathlon Coaching & Community

Part 2 of another Endurance Nation case study in community-driven continuous improvement. You can read Part 1 here.

Out Season, 2008
Rich and Patrick lock themselves down into bi-coastal coffee shops and, their brains connected through tools like Skype, Google Chat, and Google Docs, they hammer out the next version of Out-Season Plans, with these refinements:

• Zero swimming. Yeah, it’s whack but we have good reasons, it works.
• Bike = it’s still all about FTP. We tweak the intervals, move the workouts around on the weekly calendar, turn this up, this down, but in the end nothing too revolutionary.
• Run = it’s ALL about the VDot = forget the half marathon stuff and focus on 5k fitness. Yep, we are going to tell Ironman athletes to forget running endurance, half marathon OS focus, and instead train for a 5k PR. Fortunately, after being in the Haus for over a year, many had faith in us and followed us. Many others went along for the ride, swallowing big glasses of EN KoolAid being served by the upperclassmen.
• We scheduled a January Run Challenge to give those who wanted it an early season running frequency and volume pop, just for fun.

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Another Endurance Nation case study in community-driven continuous improvement

As we prepare to close the doors to new members on May 1, we thought it would be valuable to discuss the evolution of our running protocol, as a demonstration of how we have worked with our community to improve our training plan products. This is valuable insight into how Team Coaching actually works, and will hopefully get more of you thinking less about “will this coach answer my question for me” and more about “how can I join a cadre of passionate athletes constantly working to make things better for us all?”

In many ways, EN is like an auto manufacturer. The Engineers, Rich and Patrick, design, manufacturer and distribute a mass produced product: the Endurance Nation training plans. These plans are then driven by a very wide range of athletes. Different athletic backgrounds, real world constraints, injury histories, body types…you name it, we got it.

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Great question this week on why we change the duration of our Threshold Pace intervals towards the end of the 16 week OS program…watch to find out why Coach P isn’t the sadist you thought he was! 

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We have a lot of cool projects on the burner back here behind the EN Curtain, one of which is the “EN Black Belt Project,” a collaborative effort with our Team to share with you their experiences and secrets for taking their training and racing to the next level.

One topic for discussion has been “What is the definition of a good run?” I’d like to share with you our thoughts:

Goal vs Practical Application
First, let’s figure out what flavor of “good” are we trying to answer?

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Patrick and I have officially ended the 2008 coaching season and are 100% focused on 2009. Part of our end-of-year process will be a debrief of everything we have learned as coaches, leaders, and business people. Training, racing, race execution, building a community, bushwhacking through the jungle of business start up…it’s been a very fulfilling year. We will have these discussions with you more formally in January but today I have the Dance of the Eleven Minute Superstars in my head, which I would like to share with you now.

Patrick and I had an epiphany this year at Ironman Lake Placid: there is a tremendous PR potential for Ironman athletes in the 11:30-16:30 finishing range. Creating these performances for these athletes is just fookin’ cool. We call them the Eleven Minute Superstars.

We’ve created these performances by:

1. Training them the best way we know how, which we view as partnering with them to build the best, most efficient fitness vehicle they can manufacture, given the constraints of their real world lives. We’ve been doing this a loonnggg time, we have a toolkit, ours works, do what we tell you and you’ll be more than ready for race day.
2. We are very focused on teaching them how to race. We place tremendous importance on race day execution skills. This focus on race day execution skills is what draws many of our members to the team.
3. Sharing with them the confidence of the community. By the time the Endurance Nation athlete shows up to race day, he or she is able to point to dozens of other team members, just like them, who have done the training, done the homework, followed the plan on race day and had massive PR’s. “If they did it, I can too!”

The net is that the Endurance Nation athlete begins the race with the confident knowledge that there IS another way! I don’t have to race in a world where everyone, including me, just starts walking a lot after about mile 15. I do have the fitness, execution, mental and confidence goods to NOT slow down, to keep moving forward and to be an Eleven Minute Superstar…with a massive PR!

I’ve been to every US Ironman this year and have become intimately familiar with miles 18-25, for the people on track to finish between 11:30 and 16:30. I say intimately because I’ve been out on the bike course as well, either as a competitor, draft marshal, or specatator. I’ve seen Tom, Dick, and Harry mixing it up at mile 45 of bike and then I’ve seen our three friends at mile 18 of the run. And, race after race, the Endurance Nation athlete is the Eleven Minute Superstar who is ticking away at 10-11′ pace, not slowing down, while these guys are walking. If you are standing on the course between miles 18 and 25 between 6-9pm on race day, what is most remarkable is how many people are walking and how few people are running. The few who are, who continue to tick away at 10-11′ pace, are superstars by comparison.

The result? Ernie EN’er sets a massive 1:30-2hr PR simply by not slowing down! Sure, he rode and ran faster because he was faster on race day…but the majority of that PR is the result of just doing it differently this time, showing up extremely prepare, out-executing the competition, and not slowing down.

Do we have fast folks in EN? You bet your ass! In our first year we put 20 athletes across the finishline and in the showers at Ironman USA by about 13:30 race time…and I was behind that finishline to catch the 7 who came in under 10:50. Four of the 17 EN athletes at IMCDA finished under 10:30, including Patrick in 10:04 and me in 10:25. The team put up similar numbers, times, and PR’s at EVERY Ironman this year.

In fact these fast folks, and our Eleven Minute Superstars, are quietly getting it done, RIGHT NOW. They are in their Pain Caves, on a mission to collect scalps on the run course, counting the number of people they pass after mile 18.

The difference? Endurance Nation is a Team and Tribe with space for both flavors of Indians to share the same teepee. But, I gotta say, it’s pretty friggin cool to catch an 11′ Superstar at the finishline after 9pm and share with them the tales of their 2 hour PR, especially since we can usually weasel a beer out of them…

Are you an Eleven Superstar? Wannabe? Share with us your comments, we’d love to hear from you!

Rich Strauss
Endurance Nation Coach and Bad Cop

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