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

At Endurance Nation, we are in daily conversations with our athletes regarding the strengths and weaknesses of our training plans. And with a community of over 400 athletes of all shapes and sizes, you can bet that every weakness or area for improvement is found and called to our attention. Through that support dialog, coach and athlete, together, identify opportunities to improve the product. With each cycle of feedback, refinement, and improvement the product gets better and better.  Once or twice a year we gather together all of this feedback along with the “hacks” that we’ve issued in the forum. We reflect on what we have learned through our own training and through guiding such a diverse community through a long season.  Then we lock ourselves in a closet and completely rewrite all of our training plans. The result is a nearly continuous cycle of improvement driven by constant contact with and feedback from our athletes.

The Evolution of Our Iron-Distance Training Plans

To give you some background, the foundations for our plans were first written by Rich in January of 2005 during a 15 hour flight to Hong Kong. Rich became an “innovator” in the triathlon space by selling a training plan with a ton of documentation and then creating a forum at Crucible Fitness where you could ask Rich questions about your plans and interact with other CF plan users.  Revolutionary at the time for sure, but now, 4 years later, no one else has stepped up to the plate. Others in the training plans space purposely set up barriers between them and their training plans customers, in an attempt to increase the perceived value, and fees, they charge to their 1:1 clients: I won’t deign to talk to or provide a forum for conversation with my training plan customers…but you can pay me $300/mo for special access to the special sauce that’s in my head.

By contrast, training plans became the foundation of Rich’s coaching business, due to their efficient, cost effective usefulness as training and coaching tools.  Rich began the cycle of continuous improvement, updated all of his training plans about twice per year. It continues with Endurance Nation, where the feedback loop has accelerated exponentially.

And so, over the years, this entire suite of training plans has been used by well over 1500 athletes and rewritten six times to incorporate customer feedback and the lessons Rich and Patrick have learned through over 13 combined years of full-time, no safety net, Ironman coaching.

Case in point, we are in the midst of re-writing our Ironman Training Plans for 2009. Changes to the plans include:

• Tempo Run to Tuesdays, focuses primarily on mile repeats at Threshold Pace.
• Interval Ride to Wednesdays with short brick run
• Saturday rides: moved FT intervals first, then 80-85% work second. Greater variety in FT and 85% repeats
• Sunday as Always Be Pushing (ABP) ride, less focus…more room to do work or adjust to your level of fatigue
• Run testing protocol is 5k for vDOT / LTHR.
• Added weekly goals to outline bigger picture elements of plan.
• Included more notes and tips in many workouts, where appropriate. Our focus here was to put everything you need to know to do today’s workout either in TODAY’S workout, or in our Quick Start Guide (also new) sitting right next to your plan on the Kenmore Training Log. No more digging through our 50-60 page Training Support Doc or The Book (free, online, 137 pages), though you can certainly dig through those resources if you want to learn how to become a better self-coached athlete.
• Added “enter your data” reminders.
• Added weekly “status” on Mondays (i.e. “General Prep, Week 8″ etc.)
• Created: The Endurance Nation Self-Coached Athlete’s DIY Guide, about to 6-8 pages, guidance from Rich, Patrick, and the team for how to adjust your training plan to better suit your needs, including templates for inserting races into your plan and much, much more.

You will not find more effective, better supported, better documented, and more proven training plans in the tri-space. Period.

But don’t take our word for it…start a FREE trial membership and ask any one of our 400+ members what that have to say about our plans, our work, our community.

Rich and Patrick

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