Endurance Nation | Online Triathlon Coaching & Community

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!

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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

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Without a doubt, these Out-Season training plans are the cornerstone of our success as a long course triathlon Team. Built on our radical approach to endurance training–Build FAST First, the Put FAR Under It – athletes using our protocols experience significant improvements on just six to eight hours of training per week:

• Avg 10k Improvement: 2 minutes and 30 seconds
  
• Avg Half Marathon Improvement: 4 minutes and 47 seconds
• Avg Bike Threshold Power (FTP) gain: 15%
• Avg Power-to-Weight (w/kg) gain: 15.7%

Many other plans are basically written by a guy who read a book by a guy who read a book. Our plans are driven by our combined experienced of nearly 20 years of long course triathlon coaching, and, most importantly, the results, feedback, and continuous improvement loop you would expect from a team of over 400 athletes. These plans have been updated and improved seven times in five years. When was the last time your training plan was even touched? Can your 1:1 coach produce similar improvement data — actual data — above?

Out-Season Training Plan Improvements for 2010
We are in the process of improving our Out-Season training plans for the 2010 long course triathlon season. This is an annual process that involves pouring over Team data from 400+ members and reviewing athlete feedback, etc. Here is the short list of improvements, a result of the coaches and team putting their heads together:

• Plans lengthened from 16 weeks to 20 weeks.
• “Cold” and “Warm” weather volume options given for key workouts. Every Saturday ride will include options for “if you are stuck on a trainer for 1:30″ and “if you can get outside for 2-3hrs.”
• Training blocks broken down as:
  • Weeks 1-8 focus on lifting power/pace/speed at Lactate or Functional Threshold
  • Weeks 9-14 shift to lifting power/pace/speed at Vo2Max
  • Weeks 15-20, we return to focus on Lactate/Functional Threshold performance
• Testing / Benchmarking process and frequency improved.
• Now includes technique and fitness focused swim guidance.
• New Gold Level OS Plans will have a podcast AND video for EVERY week of your training plan. That’s nearly 4hrs of detailed guidance from Rich and Patrick to help you make the most of this critical training phase.

Plans will be released to the general public on Sept 1:

• Priced starting at $179 ($9/week!), the same price as 2008 but four more weeks!
• Newsletter subscriber (you) discount: 10%, good through September 30.
• Twitter Follower Discount: 20%. Simply follow TeamEN on Twitter and we will publish a special discount for you on September 1, good through September 15.

Background on the Endurance Nation OutSeason
Ironman Coeur d’Alene (26 EN athletes) and Ironman Lake Placid (37 athletes) are in the books. The results of our athletes, the team vibe of 25-35+ at every race, 60-70+ at the race week team dinner, a waiting list of nearly 200 athletes…something is working and we’re going to let you know the secret: a very large part of Endurance Nation’s success, as a team and as individual race performances, is built in our Out-Season. Specifically, our Out-Season training plans.

To review the Endurance Nation long course training season:

• Out-Season: 16-20wks, “Build FAST, then put FAR under it.”
• General Preparation: Everything until 12wks out from your race. “Training to train, putting the FAR under FAST.”
• Race Preparation: Starts 12wks out from the race. Focus on the FAR and race-specific intensity.

Why is our Out-Season so powerful?
First, it has been proven across three seasons to make you SIGNIFICANTLY faster than your old self. How do we do it? We focus on low volume, high intensity training. Low volume, cuz it has to be, because you are a real person in the real world, it’s winter, and you don’t need to be training hours and hours for a race 6-9 months away! High intensity because low volume creates the opportunity for the high intensity that will make you faster on race day. In short, we build your Fast in the Out-Season. With only 6-8hrs of total volume per week, our athletes achieved the documented gains above. Can your coach or training plan demonstrate similar documented gains?

Second, low volume conserves your head, your job, your family life, and those always-precious SAUs (Spousal Approval Units). One consistent comment we hear from our team is how much focused, time efficient work they are getting in at a relatively low time-cost, and that this work definitely pays off with faster performances all season. That is, they are getting faster and fitter with less impact on their personal lives than ever before. This is huge money in the bank for when you need to get a green light for those 5hr+ rides closer to your race!

Third, it’s an incredible team building opportunity for us. Our Out-Season, November 1, 2009 through March 31, 2010, is a golden opportunity to get the entire team on the same training, learning, experience-sharing, accountability, and comarderie page. The entire team is training, talking, and thinking about the same things, without the distraction of racing. In addition, we will hold back some team-only features that will not be included in the general-public training plans. Specifically, we have created a power-training protocol proven to boast Functional Threshold Power an additional 10% in only 5wks.

If you think the Endurance Nation team-only experiences and resources are for you, join our waiting list. If not, these training plans are certainly an excellent alternative, to be published September 1, 2009.

We hope that you are excited about the potential to significantly improve your 2010 performances by doing the hard, smart work in the OutSeason. The results of our athletes speak for themselves! We’ll let you know when the plans are available for purchase, on September 1, and don’t forget to follow TeamEN on Twitter to receive a Twitter-only 20% discount!

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Endurance Nation is just over two years old, the product of much coffee and discussion between Rich and Patrick at IMCDA ‘07. What started as two coaches with zero athletes between them is now a truly global Team of over 400 members…in less than two years. The Endurance Nation you see today is MUCH different from what we envisioned…and that’s a good thing.

As we prepare to re-open the Team in Fall of 2009 (you should join the waitlist here) with a whole new host of resources and infrastructure to enhance our work, we are conducting an internal review – where we are, how got here, and where to go now. Making this public is not only true to how we work, but might even prove interesting / useful to some of you.

As a business, Endurance Nation is centered on five basic principles:

1. Know what you are good at…and do more of that.
2. Know what you are not good at…and don’t do that.
3. Listen to your customers.
4. Don’t just give your customers what they want, give them what they need.
5. Build a business that supports your desired lifestyle.

After a great deal of self-assessment, we determined that:

• We are both good communicators and teachers. Comfortable with writing and speaking on a broad range of topics.
• We are comfortable with technology: podcasting, video creation, social networking platforms, etc.
• We spend most of our time building as we go, preferring to run now with an 80% plan than wait for the 100% plan to develop, confident we can tweak and fix problems on the fly.
• We both prefer to manage a very, very small number of very high quality relationships. When we move away from this, our potential for making mistakes increases.
• We have a great deal of experience with leading and fostering communities.
• Neither one of us is willing to compromise our preferred lifestyle. For Patrick, this means spending tons of quality time with his two young daughters. For Rich, this means leveraging his flexibility to work and travel anywhere, anytime.

We applied these items to an analysis of the common coaching models in the triathlon space. Our assessment:

One-on-one Coaching Model: One coach with a small number of clients paying a high monthly fee.

• Not scaleable; there is only so much of you to go around and so much space you can rent out in your head.
• High risk, as a significant percentage of your income is dependent on the training, racing, lifestyle, and family budget whims of a small number of people.
• Very little opportunity for individual growth / development.

Cloning Yourself: Recruiting and training additional coaches to work within your brand.

• More scalable but inefficient. In our experience, it takes a lot of work to put a new coach in front of enough people whereby they and YOU make enough money to make it worth your while.
• Risky, as someone else is on the street representing your brand.
• You spend less and less time coaching, more time managing others.

Selling Your Time: Testing, opening a physical location, running local coached workouts, etc.

• Unacceptably high fixed and lifestyle costs: facilities/overhead, insurance, time, etc.
• Not enough scalability, only so many places you can physically be.

Selling training plans: Generic training solutions delivered electronically via the web.

• Excellent scalability.
• The creation of supporting materials is very easy for us, given our communication skills.

Our respective models, over coffee at IMCDA in 2007, was a combination of the 1:1 coaching and training plans models above. We recognized that we had each taken it about as far as it could go, working solo, and had reached a significant fork in the road. By combining our efforts and strengths, we could carve out a new road and go in a completely new and unexplored direction. The resultant business model would:

• Leverage our significant 1:1 long course triathlon coaching and training plan experience to create the most effective and detailed training plans on the market. Our goal was to create affordable solutions that worked for 95% of the people, 95% of the time.
• Leverage our communication skills, our relative comfort with technology, and community-building expertise to solve the remaining 5%.

With a whole lot less than the above written on a few napkins at a local coffee shop, Rich and Patrick returned to their respective Coasts to begin cutting ties with the old model and building the new one. We quickly settled on the name Endurance Nation as being representative of the larger movement we were trying to create. At the end of the day, thousands of triathletes across the US wake up stoopid early in the morning to train solo and live vicariously during the work day by surfing tri forums. It was – and is – our mission to unite these self-coached athletes through world class training protocols and an online community that fosters learning, encouragement, and athletic development.

We are excited to share our coaching and business development story with you. Stay tuned for our next installment in the coming weeks.

Got questions or feedback? Post away in the comments, we read’em all!

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Please visit TriathlonExecution.com to purchase. Use code ENIMCDA09 to save 20%. Code expires on May 15, 2009 so don’t delay!

TriathlonExecution.com, powered by Endurance Nation, launches two new products: Course Overviews and Coaches’ Talks, with Ironman Coeur d’Alene as the debut of this new tool.

1. Coaches’ Course Talk — 90+ Minutes

More than 1.5 hours of in-depth information regarding your next big race. Rich and Patrick merge their coaching and racing experience with the renown Four Keys system to create the ultimate pre-race resource. Available either as an .mp3 file or as a screencasted video you watch on your computer. Includes:

• Race week schedule for each of the last 5 days leading up to your race;
• Course analysis of each leg of the race, with specific details and insider pacing and strategy tips.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 13% [?]