Endurance Nation | Online Triathlon Coaching & Community

photo credit: doug88888

There is only one thing can think of that’s worse than training the same way, year after year. That would be doing the same training over and over again…but hoping for different results.

Sounds simple enough, I know, yet tens of thousands of triathlete are guilty. When things don’t go right on race day, the typical answer is “train more.” But at some point “more” becomes impossible. Maybe you have maxed out your training time; maybe you just don’t want to be there anymore.

But you can always train different.

Yes, there is precious little room at the top of any mountain you seek to climb. But there is more than one way to get there. Don’t settle (again) for the status quo; go outside your personal comfort zone to identify new ways to get fit, get fast and stay motivated.
If it’s not working, more might not be the answer.

Popularity: 2% [?]

This post is part of a new series of articles exploring core elements of the Endurance Nation team and training concept. With over 400 members from all walks of life and levels of experience, Endurance Nation has a veritable repository of triathlon training and racing experience. Our goal is to highlight common elements we all share as triathletes, as well as place the spotlight on some of our most powerful member groups such as our 50+ “boomer” clan and of course the incredibly powerful women’s vibe.

If you’re a beginner to the sport triathlon, you’ve likely caught the bug and you’re excited about training.  Welcome.  You have found a community of athletes that embraces new folks and has an incredible way of helping people rise in the ranks and achieve everything that they wanted — and sometimes even more than they ever anticipated.  The journey is a long one and there will absolutely be challenges on the way. But know that the only thing that can stop you from realizing your tri-potential is you…stopping yourself.  Which brings us to the second point: train like a beginner but don’t think like one.

• Start small.  Don’t bite off more than you can chew.
• Take incremental steps, keep the volume low at first, make it fun, and pick cool events.
• Don’t over-reach and sign up for an Ironman in your first year.
• Keep it social and have fun with the sport.
• Grow with the sport as your physical abilities develop.

But whatever you do, don’t THINK like a beginner.

You don’t need to handicap your own development by putting yourself in a special wave. Other triathletes certainly won’t treat you as second class, and your new experiences and fresh perspective will do a lot to improve the game of everyone around you. You aren’t a liability; you are an asset. You don’t need to be coddled right now; you need to be challenged.

• You can think like a veteran out of the gate.
• You can strive to have the best transition in the world.
• You can have a pro bike fit, or at least a really solid bike.
• You can build a great training schedule.
• You can start riding with a local group of roadies and develop an “A” cycling game.
• You can bring incredible focus to nutrition and recovery.
• You can train with intensity, or power, and start getting stronger and faster today.

Most importantly, you can skip several years down the path to realizing your tri-potential by avoiding all the mistakes your fellow triathletes have made. There are no rewards for following previously blazed paths. No merit badges for making the same mistakes.

This is perhaps the most powerful element of Endurance Nation; the ability to share with — and learn from — your triathlon peers. But it’s not something we own or have copywritten; there are awesome triathletes willing to connect with your right in your own neighborhood…you just have to find and engage them.

There are so many different components that make the sport of triathlon highly personal.  There’s how to train and what to race; there’s what you wear and what you eat.  There’s what you are good at and what you need to practice. You will rise to each challenge along the way, in your own personal way, as part of your journey. In other words, we’ll all cross that finish line at the end of the day, it’s more a function of how you get there than whether you’ll make it or not.

If I could go back in time to my early days in the sport, I would give myself two pieces of advice:

Take better care of your body and set reasonable expectations on it’s ability to progress; and
The more you think and behave like a smart veteran triathlete, the sooner you’ll actually become one.

Good luck!

Coach Patrick

Popularity: 11% [?]

Time for some Intervals, baby!
photo credit: yngrich

Every year triathlon coaches begin to recycle the advice not to be a “winter” rockstar; someone who trains hard in the Winter only to peak and fade long before the season even starts. Instead of working out so hard these coaches suggest you begin laying the foundation for a great season by “training to train,” something that involves putting in many hours of “base” work on the trainer, treadmill and in the pool.

Unlike these coaches, we have spent the last three seasons being rockstars. In fact, we have worked to build a team of rockstars who emerge from their winter “pain caves” stronger and fitter than ever before…and proceed to have breakthrough seasons. We are here to tell you that these triathlon coaches are sadly mistaken in their approach, and that there’s a better way to train that makes you fitter & faster, takes up far less time during the dark, cold winter months, and will utterly transform you as a triathlete.

Are you ready?

Contrasting Approaches
These coaches stack hours of aerobic volume into crammed winter schedules, recommend 3-5 hour trainer rides over 8 months away from your “A” race and sprinkle swim workouts in just because you’re a triathlete and should be swimming. Doing strength work is a good idea and Bikram Yoga is really hot right now, so why not add those too? The net is a typical triathlon plan for an Ironman or Half Ironman, in January looking towards a June/July/August race, will have you logging 14-18 hours of training time across all disciplines.

Contrast this with Endurance Nation, where our typical OutSeason plan contains 4-6 hours of training time in a week, with two whole days off. We don’t recommend swimming or strength training as both have a relatively low Return on Investment for triathletes. Instead of logging time and miles in the winter, EN athletes focus on boosting their power at threshold (bike) and improving their vDOT (run). Even though they log less than 50% of the same training time as their training partners, these EN athletes emerge fitter and faster? How is this possible?

Understanding The Triathlon Season
It helps to begin with the end. In triathlon it’s important to note that our peak, race-specific effort is ludicrously aerobic. We “fly” around the Ironman and 70.3 race courses in zones 1 and 2 (maybe some zone 3 for Half Ironman). We train all season to peak at an effort level where most athletes feel like they can go all day as long as someone feeds them. In other words, it’s not that hard.

Those last twelve weeks leading into your race are the most critical in terms of how you will race, so everything is race specific. You swim, bike, and run some of the biggest miles and weeks of your season here, just before tapering and heading into your race. Again, these aren’t hard training sessions, they are volume-oriented workouts designed to prepare you for the rigors of a single-day endurance event.

Everything before these last twelve weeks, then, is simply preparing you to train for this critical phase. The training you do at this time isn’t really race-specific, and traditionally it’s structured as easier than what your body will endure for the final build up to your race.

I call this traditional approach “Triple-E” for Easy, Easier, and Easiest:

• Go easy — but long — as race prep.
• Prepare to go easy and long by building up your long at an easy effort.
• Build a foundation for your season by logging easy miles and hours so as not to arrive at the prace prep phase in an overtrained state.

But at what point are you actually pushing your fitness? Your body doesn’t know better, it only responds to progressive overload. Based on the above schedule, there are only 9 weeks out of 52 — a full year — where you are adding miles and training hard. What then, exactly, are you doing with the rest of your time to improve your strength and overall speed?

Getting Out of the Volume Game
Following the traditional triathlon approach, most triathletes are de-training–yes I said losing fitness–even though they are working out year-round. Congratulations on logging that three-hour fixed gear rides in the dead of winter dodging holiday traffic! Since it was all zone 1 work, however, you could have ostensibly done no training or an easy 45 minute spin inside on your trainer and achieved the same effect without risking your life or losing an addition 2:15 of your day.

Fortunately there are different ways to create the progressive overload that will lead to increased fitness. Traditional proponents hold that building your training load by manipulating volume (adding more miles at the same intensity) is the best way to go. But this takes 14-16 hour winter sessions into 18-20 hour spring weeks and 20+ hour race prep weeks — an overwhelming amount of time spend training across a season for an “easy” day.

Inside Endurance Nation we create this training load by recognizing the fixed nature of your volume and time constraints in the winter, and instead manipulating intensity (doing harder work for a shorter time). Our OutSeason plans are chock full of hard work, precisely because you can’t do this type of training when building up to your race. The fact that it fits into your overall life is really just a bonus.

Go Fast to Get Fast
In order to build your strength and speed you need to actually train them. No amount of riding 18mph will prepare you to ride 20mph on race day. To make this leap, you need to train at these faster paces and harder efforts when you don’t have competing demands to build race-specific volume. The winter is a perfect time to accomplish this, hence the structure of the EN season as outlined above (and in our online manual).

With the last twelve weeks so focused on race prep, there are minimal fitness gains made. Three plus years of tracking athlete data has shown that critical benchmarks of threshold power and pace don’t change during this phase. Spending a lot of time riding, running and swimming will certainly make you fitter (important for race day!) but it doesn’t make you any faster. The increase in volume and time across all three disciplines really limits your body’s ability to adapt and get stronger/faster…that really only happens once in this cycle when you taper to race.

The Siren Song of Volume
The lure of training more, of making life and work sacrifices to achieve our triathlon goals is appealing. It’s part of the cultural fabric of our sport; it’s how the men and women who are our triathlon idols live their lives. It’s also easy. Easy to coach, as all you have to do is add 10% more to each week with every fourth week being a bit lighter. Done. Easy to train, as your body can adapt quickly to more time at a light intensity, with the only hard part being where to fit your workouts into your schedule. Easy to follow, as in block out all other important things that don’t fall into your tiny triathlon world.

But it’s certainly not better. We’ve been there and are sharing our story so you don’t have to make the same mistakes. Patrick has logged 25+ hours of training during a 60+ hour work week, getting up a 4am to ride the trainer for three hours, sneaking Coke onto the pool deck to avoid falling asleep during lunch swims and running at night in the dark. Rich has ridden back to back 150 mile days on the bike, putting up 1500 miles across 10 days and more…and neither one of us improved as triathletes. We got really good at training a lot, and a lot fitter, but no faster.

Finding A Better Way
It wasn’t until we condensed all those easy hours into a challenging, yet effective schedule that allowed for progression, recovery, and kept things FUN that we began to see the results we wanted…the results of all our hard work. Now that we’ve emerged on the other side, it’s our mission to make sure that triathletes like you don’t simply “opt-in” to the volume because it’s the only way to go. There is another way, a better way. But we can only show you the door; you are the one who has to walk through it.

To learn more about how we recommend you reconstruct your season, consider registering for our FREE email seminar on Rethinking the Off Season or check out our OutSeason training plans.

Popularity: 20% [?]

There are two distinct ways to go faster on race day: execute better so you can race to your fitness, or earn the right to race faster by improving your fitness.

The first option is technically easy, although it does take a leap of faith that proper, judicious pacing will get you the result you want (real-world example).

The second option is decidedly less easy, although we have started to outline the “how to” elements by covering how Work WORKS and how Fitness is in Your Muscles (not your cardiovascular system). With Kona around the corner, the official end of the 2009 tri season is upon us and everyone is starting to break out their calendars, planning charts, and whizz-bang software tools. In other words, it’s time we step back to look at the macro-level of how Endurance Nation outlines a season for an Ironman or Half Iron event.

Keep in mind this flavor of schedule is very particular. It’s only for the busy age-group triathlete with multiple commitments and minimal time who is looking for a high Return on Investment of training time. So this is really only relevant to 98% of you out there.

Note: This graph constitutes a 9-month season, from Day 1 through Race Day.

Key things that should hit you from this graph:

• Total OutSeason training, 20 weeks with an average of 6-8 hours a week, is greater than all the other components of your season. Yes, it’s that important.
• We then give our athletes some downtime.  Yes, downtime…we purposely force our athletes to stand down with 1-2 weeks of informal training before continuing with their structured training. Better now, when planned, than later, when your body (or mind) throws in the towel before your “A” race.
• Our General Preparation Phase can be 2-3 months, depending on the length of the total season. Here begin to put the Far on top of the Fast built during the OutSeason.
• Finally, our Race Preparation is only 8-12wks. We ask our athletes to knuckledown and focus on the race. Volume ticks up and we want to minimize the length of this focused period — “keep the volume as low as you can for as long as you can” should be the mantra of the busy age group Ironman triathlete.

What’s so secret about this you ask? Well, for one thing, very few folks actually train like this. The majority bury themselves in hours upon hours of training. Five hour indoor trainer rides over the winter are the norm. They miss family time, they doze off at meetings…and they are ultimately not prepared for race day.

So before you break out your abacus and start doing some serious training calculus for next year, stop and think. Think about the work that will really make a difference in your training. Do some research. Ask around. You may well find something that will change your triathlon training forever…

Popularity: 11% [?]

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!

Popularity: 20% [?]