Endurance Nation | Triathlon Coaching, Ironman Training, Half Ironman, Beginner Triathlon

Rich and Patrick deliver their Four Keys talk in Madison to TeamEN athletes and ENFans

A trial member recently asked the Team for their input about the value of Endurance Nation vs hiring a local triathlon coach to prepare for their next Ironman.

Before We Start: Don’t confuse proximity with proficiency.
So the guy/gal lives in your town, you can ride/run/swim with them now and then, meet for coffee, etc. That’s great. But this is a brave new world of video calls via Skype, the HD Flipcam + Youtube, and podcasting from your iPhone.  We believe that the nearly everyday technology of the modern world has significantly reduced the advantage of proximity.

We also strongly believe that Ironman triathlon coaching is significantly different than coaching athletes to shorter races. Ironman triathlon coaching truly is a specialty. So when you put EN and Your Local Coach across the table from you, for the interview, we think you should ask us both these questions:

#1. Is triathlon coaching your full-time gig?

If you’re reading this post, it’s likely that you have/have had a real job. It’s also likely that there are part-timers in your field. In your experience, what are the knowledge and proficiency differences between full-timers and part-timers in your field? Triathlon coaching is no different.

Triathlon has grown by leaps and bounds over the last ten years, creating opportunities for many folks to hang a shingle and call themselves a coach. The price point of 1:1 triathlon coaching ($150-400+/month per athlete) can enable a new local coach to assemble a squad of 10-15 athletes at the default rate of ~$200/mo relatively quickly, providing a decent living when combined with the income of a real job. The net is that 90% of the coaches out there are teacher, personal trainer, got-a-real-job, local-fast-guy-with-real-job/triathlon coaches. From our experience,  the real job cushion usually means the coach doesn’t have to work too hard or think out of the box about how to improve their coaching skills or provide better service to their squad of athletes.

Endurance Nation: Rich and Patrick have been coaching full and half Ironman athletes, full-time, since 2001 and 2004, living in Los Angeles and Boston respectively with no safety net. This full-time focus has demanded that they think significantly outside of the box for how to best coach and service their athletes, leading to our suite of online resources, lower prices, race site support and free training camps.  Every year brings a new suite of innovations to our plans and community.

2. How many Ironmans have YOU raced?

We aren’t saying that you need to be fast Ironman athlete to coach people to an Ironman. While there are many high-dollar coaches without an Ironman finish to their name, we all know there are things you learn by doing that you can never pick up in a book or the latest article on triathlon training. Through their training and racing a combined 25+ Ironmans, including 5x Kona, Rich and Patrick like to say that they have made every conceivable mistake you can make…so you don’t have to! So when Rich and Patrick send you out on a Saturday to ride 4hrs of intervals, not 6hrs of Z1-2 riding, it’s because they themselves have tried every possible permutation of Ironman training ride and have learned, through their own experience, which is best. Their experience saves you years and years of learning the hard way.

3. How many Ironman finishers have you coached? Show me their results and testimonials.

A significant weakness of the 1:1, small squad, part-time Ironman triathlon coach is simple experience and small sample size. How much can you learn if you’ve only raced a couple Ironmans yourself and have coached maybe a couple dozen local athletes to Ironman races? Before they founded EN in 2007, Rich and Patrick had coached well over 400 individual Ironman athletes between them. And in the four years since it’s founding, EN has grown from a squad of about 80 athletes to over 500, with 20-50 athletes at every US Ironman.

Now step back and think of everything that’s involved in teaching and managing a single Ironman athlete: educating them about proper training, swim/bike/run technique, bike fit and setup, figuring out training schedules, how is that schedule different for Timmy in SoCal vs Mary in Maine, teaching them how to actually race Ironman…and much more. Now multiply that by over 2000 athletes since 2001. That’s a LOT of experience with a very, very broad range of athletes and unique situations. In short, there is no training or scheduling problem or situation that Rich and Patrick haven’t seen and had to figure out a solution for.

>> Go here to read the testimonials of our athletes and here to listen to podcasted race report interviews.

4. What is your Ironman training philosophy? How did you develop it?

Most coaches have read a book or two, few have written one. Many coaches position themselves as the loin-clothed guru, coaching out of a black box on a mountain top, only choosing to work with the Few who’ve climbed to the top of PricePoint Summit and are therefore lucky enough to work with the Guru.

This is ours, the Endurance Nation Long Course Training Manual, a 130-page book we’ve written. The Manual is our application of scientific training principles to the training of real people with real lives. In short, there is what you read in a book and there’s what you learn when you apply the book stuff to the real world, and figure out your own tweaks and methods based on your own experiences and observations. See 2000+ athletes, full-time, nothing but Ironman triathlon coaching above.

We’ve also shared everything we know about training, coaching and racing here on our blog, in our podcasts, and our free seminars and ebooks openly available. We invite you to create a 5-day, free trial membership.

The bottomline is want you to have every opportunity to thoroughly vet us and our coaching before you pay us a dime. We are the Anti-Guru, Anti-Black-Box coaches.

5. Do you have a strategy for racing Ironman/70.3? What is this based on? How will you teach it to me?

Please download and read our Four Keys of Ironman Execution ebook. We’ve turned this strategy into a DVD which we’ve put into the hands of over 4000 athletes. We have created a virtual seminar on how to race Ironman. We’ve created a series of Course Talks to teach people how to race every inch of specific US Ironman courses. We’ve been on site at every US Ironman every year since 2007 (and 3-4 races per year well before then) to support our 20-50 athletes at every race. In short:

1. No two coaches in the Ironman triathlon world have managed as many rolls of the Ironman execution dice as have Rich and Patrick.
2. No two coaches have used this experience to create a similarly comprehensive suite of race execution products and learning tools.
3. No two coaches manage a Team with similar numbers of Ironman athletes, creating an ever-growing data set of what works, and doesn’t, on race day.

It’s About More than Dollars & Distance

Inside Endurance Nation, Ironman triathlon coaching is, literally, all we do. We live it, 24/7, and have a created a training and racing system proven through the feedback and results of thousands of Ironman finishers. Our online community has grown into a real family of amazing athletes who connect daily and meet up in-person at races and training camps across the US. But don’t take our word for it, create your own FREE five day trial to experience the energy, support and knowledge of the world’s largest online triathlon Team!

Popularity: 21% [?]

The coaches have returned from Ironman Florida, with Rich joining Patrick to support the team and to brainstorm their plans for the 2011 season. We’d like to update you, our TeamEN members, ENFans, and stakeholders in Endurance Nation on our plans for 2011.

Please click here to listen to the
Stakeholder’s Meeting podcast!

Endurance Nation 2011 Initiatives

Expanding the EN Race-Day Presence

Endurance Nation is now likely the largest triathlon team in the long course space. And part of what makes us so unique is the race weekend experience we create for our members and they create for themselves, particularly at the Ironman distance. Every US Ironman includes:

• 15-40 TeamEN athletes racing
• A coach on hand to support and lead the athletes and their families for the weekend.
• Team Dinner (20-90 people)
• Four Keys Talk
• Coaches, family, and friends cheering on the athletes at a specific location on the bike and run course.
• After Party: food, beer, coaches, and tall tales after the finish.

For 2011 we want to blow this out even more, extending as much of this experience as we can downwards to the half Ironman distances. Many of our Ironman athletes race 1-3 x HIMs in route to their Ironman, creating similar per race numbers of TeamEN members at many HIM’s around the country. We now have the leverage, capital, and resources to bring some of our race weekend IM mojo to the HIM space:

• Race Captains will “rally the troops” around every US Ironman and key 70.3 events. Will organize and coordinate dinner plans, meeting locations, and family presence.
• The Race Director will manage all of the Race Captains, with the assistance of Coach Rich

New Wicked Smart Members

WSM’s are TeamEN members athletes who’ve demonstrated extraordinary self-coaching knowledge, experience, and communication skills. They are nominated by their peers to be given the title of Wicked Smart Member, with the approval of Rich and Patrick. In short, any answer or input from a WSM should be given the same weight as an answer by Rich and Patrick…they are THAT good, as recognized by their peers. Team, we will begin our next round of nominations shortly so get your lists ready!

Sleeper Cell Initiative

Over the years, as the team has grown and members have referred their friends to the squad, we have organically formed “Sleeper Cells,” dense pockets of TeamEN athletes in specific geographic locations. For 2011 we will brainstorm ideas, and put cash on the table, to help these cells grow and support themselves, as well as facilitate the creation of additional Sleeper Cells.

Charity Starter Program

Many TeamEN athletes raise money for charity through their racing. We want to help them and encourage more members to raise money for charity. For 2011 EN will kick in the first $250 towards any TeamEN member’s fund raising efforts, up to a maximum of $2000 per month.

Member Directed Training Camps, aka DIY Training Camp Program

Lastly, many TeamEN members are getting together to schedule cool training camps — adding a fun physical, real world component to their virtual friendships. We want to encourage more of this for 2011 and will donate $400 to any member-directed training camp with over 8 total attendees. Team, look for more details soon, including the application process and deadline.

We have a few more double top secret squirrel ideas and initiatives that we’re not quite ready to share with you yet. Stay tuned!

Popularity: 13% [?]

September traditionally marks the end of the season for Endurance Nation, as we use Ironman Wisconsin as a opportunity to reflect on the year, extract valuable lessons, and make plans to implement changes in 2011. Actually, this process is continuous, internally, but for many reasons a lot of stuff just comes together for us around the September time frame.

As such, this is a great opportunity for us to reflect on the year with you, our ENFans and TeamEN members, to share with you our lessons learned from 2010 and preview what we have in store for you–and the greater tri world–for 2011.

In Part I, we’ll talk about where we’ve been and where we are today. In Part II, we’ll reveal some (but not all) of our plans for next year.

1. The Waiting List
It started in May of 2009, but really took root in 2010. Closing registration to the Team, a potentially risky move, actually created a few opportunities:

• Focus and Efficiency: The waiting list allowed Patrick and I to focus 100% on our members during the time when they need us the most: the Ironman race season. Between supporting the team in the forums, travel to races, creating content for them, and much more, we just didn’t have the bandwidth to spare on what we felt would probably have been a trickle of new members joining in the heat of the racing season. Instead, we just closed the doors and locked them. However, we were surprised when the waiting list exploded eventually building to over 400 athletes multiple times by the summer of 2010.
• Filters: TeamEN–the community–belongs to the members, not to us. We just can’t describe to you the depth of the community that our members have built for themselves within virtual walls of EN. Going to a waitlist meant that the people who were invited really wanted to be on the Team, making adding new folks a much more seamless experience.

2. Re-Investing in the Team

1. We repaid our existing, longest serving members by offering to them a heavily discounted rate, for life. This core group of over 150 athletes has been with us since the beginning, through several iterations, and gyrations, of service delivery and pricing model. We sincerely appreciate their loyalty (sniff).
2. We created a partnership that allowed us to build our own proprietary membership and training plan platform focused on what we feel are the most important elements of the coach/athlete relationship. In short, “Here is my training plan. Right next to it, easy to find, is the content I have created to accompany each week of your training plan. If you have questions about THIS week, ask here; about your SEASON, ask there. Connect with your fellow teammates over here.” We are continually improving this interface.

Training Plans
Listening to feedback of the Team and applying our own observations, in August ’09 we completely rewrote our OutSeason plans, and created brand new podcasts and videos to accompany every training week. We ran a very successful OS training plan sale in September and many of these training plan customers decided to join EN in November after our offer of a training plan credit applied to membership.

We repeated this rewrite process again in December, this time to our entire suite of half and full Ironman training plans, and recorded new podcasts and videos to accompany the new plans. We applied a sale to these plans in January and February, and brought in a few more members in March through our training plan credit opportunity above.

2. New OutReach / Education Initiatives
In keeping with our progressive outreach through free eBooks and social media, we decided to compile some of our most precious resources into more digestible and exciting formats.

Virtual Seminars: Related to our filter and screening ideas above, we decided to create a series of “virtual seminars,” to deliver to the tri world our thoughts on OutSeason and Long Course training, and Ironman race execution. (links to all). We were successful in delivering our message to more athletes, identifying potential members for TeamEN.

100% FREE Tri Rallies: A  free training camp for our athletes and the general public, hosted by us on a couple of the Ironman courses. We hatched the idea while riding off the IMUSA course during our June ’09 camp and decided to focus on IMUSA and IMWI, the courses we are most familiar with.

Our first Tri-Rally was on the IMUSA course in June 2010. With only word of mouth marketing and RSVPs taken on Facebook, we truly had no idea what expect. We were very pleasantly surprised to have over 60 athletes attend the Rally and, though the weather didn’t exactly cooperate, I was still able to deliver about 3-4hrs of instruction and introduce many athletes to TeamEN. It was also a ton of fun and this was duplicated, with a few refinements, on the IMWI course in July, where over 70 athletes joined us.

ENFan: Our next to last epiphany of the summer was that we were under-serving all of the people who had connected themselves to our brand. Whether by downloading an ebook, taking one of our virtual seminars, purchasing a training plan, following us on Twitter, fanning us on Facebook, or attending a Tri Rally or Four Keys talk, these athletes had told us they were interested in hearing what we had to say and in connecting to Endurance Nation in some fashion. So we fired up ENFan, giving away our Four Keys DVD and a 10% training plan discount code. The response from you, our ENFans, has been incredible

3. Improved Race Weekends
Huge, huge, huge and, more importantly, incredibly fulfilling for us as coaches and founders of a community. An opportunity to meet our athletes again, watch them on their big day and be there for them and their families at the finishline.  The numbers:

• 20 at IMSG
• 24 at IMCDA
• 30+ at IMUSA
• 20 at IMLou
• 13 at IMCA
• 38 at IMWI

At each of these races we delivered our Four Keys talk to 70-120+ people — the Team and general public. And as we better leveraged our word of mouth networking tools the number of people present at the start of each talk (ie, a measurement of how well we had gotten the message out there and convinced people to actually put us on their calendars) dramatically increased.

By September of 2010, we sensed that we had finally reached a tipping point of awareness of EN and our race execution message as we received MANY props on the course, in coffee shops, and shouted through car windows by our fans.

4. Two Week Trial
Now for our final epiphany: as good, unique, valuable and amazingly cool we think TeamEN is, it’s hard as hell to explain to the public what is actually going on inside. Instead, we were expecting you to sign up on a waiting list and then sit by the phone waiting for us to call to join the team, which you only got to see and witness after paying us. Even with a 30-day money-back guarantee, we’ve realized this isn’t the most efficient scenario for you or for us.

On September 17th we invited our ENFans to create a two week trial membership. Nearly 420 athletes responded by creating a trial. Close to 100 of these ended their trial early, within 5 days, to start their season with the Team. By the time the dust settled on October 1st, a total of 155 new athletes joined the ranks of TeamEN.

Endurance Nation is now a team of over 525 Ironman and Half Ironman athletes. Next we’ll share with you some of our ideas and plans for 2011.

Interested in Joining TeamEN?
Become an ENFan to receive a FREE Four Keys DVD, and an invitation to our next trial membership opportunity, expected to take place near the end of October, 2010.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Members of Team EN Staffing the Table!

After a few solid hours at the Multisport World Expo this past weekend, I was officially “tri-ed” out. It’s great to see everyone, but it can get to be a bit much after a few hours! I saw a lot of interesting stuff, particularly from the 10+ events that had tables there (being a race director must pay well), but as I coach I was really only looking at the other coaching groups that were on site.

High-Dollar = High-Contact = High-Value?
Endurance Nation was the only low-cost player in the space, so my viewpoint will be biased for sure. It was really interesting to watch the active groups attempting to communicate value to the wandering tri-consumer. As a high-dollar coach (read $200+ / monthly fee), one has to really justify what the athlete is getting for their investment. This is usually achieved by promising contact with the coach, be it via phone, or email or in person. The more contact you want, the more money you have to pay.

Other ways that coaches were promoting their particular brands included fancy gear / signage (looks legitimate), custom metrics (body fat / body composition testing), and performance analysis (run and/or swim technique reviews). The more you pay, in other words, the more customized things become and presumably the more value you get.

How Much Custom is Necessary?
Of course, the tri-marketing gurus want you to feel special. They want you to pick out the special saddle, the particular wetsuit and the “must-have” brand of nutrition. If we all know that not every one needs a custom-built titanium triathlon bike, why do we assume that everyone will benefit from high-tough one-on-one coaching?

There are times — as in the case of triathlon training + learning — where a large, available sample size trumps one particular niche of knowledge every single time. Will you get more from talking to one person, with one experience, or by connecting with hundreds of other athletes who have been on the same journey? If you are a beginner triathlete with a job and a family, is that coach with ten years and world championship credentials (but not 9-5 gig or family) going to be able to identify with what you need? Will she speak to you?

Then again, perhaps you need a workout reminder? Maybe you need to pay money to be held accountable? Or maybe your life is so crazy you just want someone to tell you what to do and when. If so, then a coach might be right for you. But know that the odds are pretty darn close to zero that you and your training situation are so unique that you need a custom solution.

Know Yourself
Instead of playing the game of comparing pricing tiers, triathletes would be better served asking what exactly it is they need to achieve their fitness and race day goals. Just like everything else in our world, there is a point of diminishing returns on our investment. Take the time to learn more about yourself, and the many available resources out there, and make an informed decision. Without a doubt you are a unique individual on a special fitness journey…but that doesn’t mean you have to pay top-dollar to get top-notch support, help or guidance!

Are you a beginner? Maybe you are re-thinking your training after months of 20+ hours a week, burning the candle at both ends and no results to show for it? Please register for our free April Open House to explore Team Endurance Nation and how our community & coaches can help you take your game to the next level!

Popularity: 16% [?]

We’ve made several changes to our OutSeason plans and will do the same for our Half and Full Ironman training plans, expected to be published this winter. However, are largest improvement is what we call EN 4.0: we have built our own internal training plan hosting platform that allows us to do some very cool, you ain’t gonna get this anywhere else, stuff. Specifically:

• Putting all of our associated content right in/next to your training plan when you need it.
• Endurance Nation training plans have now become a living product: as we (coaches and team) create content, it can be added dynamically to the training plans. The resources associated with the plan then grow and increase over time and, most importantly, rather than buried in a blog or one of 20 podcasts on a page, they are right there inside your plan. No other training plan or training plan platform has this dynamic integration.

Thoughts from Coach Rich

Popularity: 6% [?]