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

It’s no secret that Ironman racing (the 140.6 mile version) has become crazy popular, with races selling out a year in advance, often in only minutes. As a result, Ironman-focused conversations dominate the triathlon space. Yet probably 90% of these Ironman triathletes race one, two, three or more half Ironman events enroute to their full Ironman distance event. Our combined 20 years of coaching and racing experience has shown that the 70.3 distance is a different race entirely from the Ironman. If you want to be successful at the half iron distance you’ll need to bring more to the table than your Ironman fitness and some good luck.

• Are you an Ironman athlete racing a half or two in route to your A-race of the season?
• Are you a half Ironman athlete looking to maximize your race day potential?
• Are you stepping up to the Half Ironman distance after having focused on sprint and Olympic distance triathlon?

Below are the five most common mistakes made by Half Ironman athletes:

Mistake #1: Getting Overwhelmed by Endurance Training Lingo.

The Half Iron distance isn’t a walk in the park by any means, but it certainly doesn’t require that you buy a Thesaurus for your training plan. Aerobic, anaerobic, lactate threshold, aerobic threshold, ventilatory threshold…the list goes on. Your training only has be as complicated as you make it…and we suggest you keep it simple. Your fitness is nothing more than the ability of your body to perform work: to swim at pace X, pedal a bike at speed Y, or run at pace Z. Focus on the WORK, do progressively more of it, and the fitness will follow.

Mistake #2: Making Training Overly Complicated.

Swim. Bike. Run. Eat. Sleep. At least that’s what the t-shirts say. So why do so many triathletes spend their time concocting unique brick (bike + run) workouts; trying out the latest gadgets (fist gloves anyone?), and swamping their lives with countless hours of training? Your guess is as good as ours.

It doesn’t have to be that complicated. Create a training week where Monday works with Tuesday works with Wednesday, etc. A week that fits within your personal / professional / social framework, a schedule that you can execute easily week after week. Then manage the details of each individual workout, letting training volume take care of itself.

Mistake #3: Using a Half Ironman as an Ironman Prequisite or Race Rehearsal.
We’re behind the finish lines of every US Ironman, every year, catching our athletes. We have yet to see a WTC official checking to see that IM finishers have had their tickets punched at the HIM distance. The fact is you do NOT need to complete an HIM before your Ironman, and an HIM is very poor race rehearsal for a full Ironman race.

Mistake #4: Bringing an Ironman nutrition plan to a Half Ironman.
The Half Iron distance is just long enough that you need a nutrition plan, but short enough that using the traditional Ironman fueling strategy can be a recipe for disaster. After all, the race plays out differently: your swim is only half as long, you bike with significantly more intensity, and your run is entirely different. They don’t hand out medals for calories consumed per hour…we know from experience!

Mistake #5: Pushing Your Physical Limits Before the Run.
The 70.3 distance is a great event to test y0ur fitness, but execution still rules the day. Lining up a strategy that mimics a Sprint or Olympic-level effort will leave you far short of T2 with the prospect of a cramp-filled, sufferfest of a run. Learning how to pace the swim and bike will prepare you to run closer to your true potential and dramatically improve your finishing position.

Scared Yet?

You should respect the race, but you don’t have to worry — Endurance Nation has your back. With a squad of over 500 full and half Ironman athletes, many of whom race 2-4 Half Iron race per year, we have a HUGE data set of what works… and doesn’t.

We want to teach that to you in our latest FREE seminar: The Half Ironman

Register & you’ll receive:

• Four seminar lessons, each with written, audio, and video content.
• “Bonus” material: ebooks, webinars, and more
• A 10% discount on any training plan.
• Finally, a FREE Four Keys of Ironman Execution DVD, a $37 value!

Register today!

Popularity: 30% [?]

Which Way Will Your Season Go?
photo credit: piermario

Every January is a special time inside the world of Endurance Nation, as we release the next version of our Ironman and Half Iron training plans. While the members of Team EN always get the latest and greatest versions as part of their membership, each new generation of public training plans is also updated. 2011 is no exception, as we’ll be pushing out version 8.0 of our long-course plans, with revised workouts, online support in the “living library” that is the EN Training Plan Support Wiki, and our latest addition: Season Planning Guidance — we have captured our season planning methodology, in written guidance, spreadsheets, and screencasts, so you have the tools you need to adapt your EN training plan(s) to YOUR race schedule.

Why Include Additional Guidance?

EN athlete is essentially a self-coached athlete. In our world, we have found that the most successful age group athletes, across the entire spectrum of age, experience, etc., all share one common thread: self-sufficiency. Among other things, these athletes understand how to adapt their plan to their racing schedule.

Putting our season-planning methodology on paper not only forces us to be crystal clear (no magic coaching wands here!), it also empowers the other 1,000 members and training plan customers to do a better job of helping themselves and each other. Now that we are all on the same page, we can begin to truly connect and move forward as a community. The Season Planning Guidance is simply the next installment of this commitment to advancing the self-coached athlete.

Stacking EN Training Plans Across Your Season

A full season inside EN consists of four (4) parts: the OutSeason, Transition, General Prep and Race Prep. You can read about each in more detail in the FREE Online EN Training Manual, but we rank them in order of importance:

1. OutSeason — 20 weeks — The biggest bang for your buck. The OS is our best tool for making you much, much faster than your former self. With no volume goals, we can hit you with lots of intervals and redefine what you consider “work” to be. Best part? You get it all done in 6-8 hours a week, leaving you plenty of time to be a rockstar at home, on the job, and elsewhere.
2. Race Prep — 12 weeks — This is where we take that Fast you built in the OS and add race-specific fitness and execution skills on top of it.
3. Transition — 1-2 wks — Somewhere during your season, you will need to stand down to be able to ramp up to maximal race fitness. We recommend after the OS, as it’s 5 months long. This is a period of relatively light, unstructured training. More here.
4. General Prep — 4-8 wks — As the weather begins to warm up, you have more hours of daylight, and we begin to build Far on top of Fast. This option fits in between the OS and your Race Prep should your season and A race give you enough room.

Please read this post that Rich wrote a few months ago about how to stack the plans above across your season. The Season Planning Guidance, now included with all of our training plans, captures this guidance in a suite of tools, allowing you to do our season-planning-smart-guy thing yourself.

No other Half and Full Ironman training plans in the triathlon coaching space include such a comprehensive suite of tools to help you adapt your training plan to any combination of races. Period.

And the Season Planning Guidance is parked within our Training Plan Support Wiki, a growing library of resources to support your training plan, yet another EN training plan exclusive that sets us apart from the competition.

Ready to start training and planning the EN way?
Go here to purchase an Endurance Nation training plan, on sale for 30% off Jan 3-9th, 2010.

–or–

Create a Five Day Trial Membership:

• Gain open access to our entire suite of training plans.
• Access hundreds of members-only podcasts and videos.
• Receive 24/7 support from the coaches and the team in our members-only forums.

Popularity: 15% [?]

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% [?]

Here is another weekly installment of updates from our Team members who use Twitter. If you’d like to be considered, be sure to write really cool or witty stuff and include the hashtag “#workworks” into your tweets! Go Nation, Go!

Popularity: 14% [?]

We get email and Twitter questions regarding our training plans all the time. We strive to answer each one, and it occurred to us that maybe sharing this information could be good for other self-coached triathletes out there. Enjoy!

Rich and Patrick

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Looking for info on pedal stroke technique. ½ iron athlete and have always kept an even down/up power stroke and sliding across top/bottom of the stroke. Trying to keep circles but seems something is missing. Seems that there would be a hole in the power in  the top/bottom…Any references / thoughts/ suggestions ???
Thanks!
Ron

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Ron, there are tons of great resources out there on proper pedaling techniques and drills. A quick search of YouTube should give you more than enough fodder. The particular deadspot you are talking of is pretty common for triathletes, especially in the aero position. Good on you for noting it’s top and bottom…most only notice it on the bottom side. These folks are forgetting that the cranks are fixed, and that your ability to pull through the bottom of the stroke is only as good as your ability to push the other foot over the top of the other side!

This could be a flexibility or strength related issue (or a combination). I suggest two approaches.

#1, work on hip flexor flexibility. Consider doing some lunge stretches, where you really push your hips forward to open them up. Perhaps even consider arching backwards to really do a number on your hips. You can also do this as you stretch your quad on that side. Holding your heel to your butt, stand erect and push that hip forward as you hold the stretch. You’ll feel it!

#2, work on strengthening the area. The hip flexors and psoas muscles can be a bit weak and fatigue easily, especially if they are tight. Once you have started stretching, consider adding in some cycling-specific strength work. I prefer to do single leg pedaling while on a trainer at about 60-70 rpms. Load the wheel up to the point where you really need to slow down – but not so hard so as to put undue strain on your body. Work on a smooth transition from 10 o’clock to 2 o’clock. As you build up confidence and skill, add more speed (less resistance). Do this each leg for 45-60 seconds, alternating sides. So six minutes of that plus 4 minutes of regular pedaling with both legs as recovery, done a few times a week, should help you out!

Keep us posted!

Popularity: 27% [?]