Your 12-Week Sprint Triathlon Training Plan

by Molly Balfe

Ed. Note—Campfire Head Coach Molly Balfe checks in with thoughts as to how to prepare for your first sprint-distance triathlon. The former president of Tri Team PDX, coach for Team in Training, and co-founder of Campfire Endurance Coaching checks in with both a complete 12-week plan for your first triathlon, AND a complete, free guide to the process, which you can download from our website here.

So you’ve just signed up for your first triathlon!

Whether you were reluctantly roped-in by a spandex-clad friend, or the feat has always been on your bucket list, we, the Campfire coaches, would like to congratulate you on deciding to try your first triathlon. Unlike stepping into a simple running race, tris take an exceptional deal of courage, likely testing your comfort zones in at least one of the disciplines, and this plan will help you along your way. So here is some expert guidance that our Campfire athletes have valued while preparing for their first races.

Approaching your first triathlon with a smile is always the best approach

Necessary Gear

If you’ve begun to gather information for your first tri, you’ve encountered a seemingly endless array of toys and tools you can spend your money on. The fastest and lightest gear may help you at certain points in your triathlon career, but we recommend starting out with the basics. That way, if you conclude that triathletes are nuts, you didn’t waste your comic; but conversely, if you find you‘re up for more triathlon adventures, you can slowly fill your gear closet as needed, with smart gear appropriate for you.  That stated, a few pieces of equipment are necessary to train for and complete your first race:

• Bike – Repeat after us: “I do not need to buy a race bike for my first triathlon.”  Pretty much any bike with working gears and brakes will get you through your first sprint. If you already own a mountain bike, hybrid, or entry-level road bike, that will work! True, a heavier bike may slow you down a bit, but you’ll have the chance to experience your first race and see if you want to invest something more sport-specific. 

• Helmet – This one’s a non-negotiable. All bicycle training and racing should be done wearing a CPSC approved helmet. Same thing as above applies, though: it would be total overkill to invest in a race-specific “aero helmet” for your first one.

• Running shoes – Want to know which running shoes are the best?  Guess what: it totally depends.  Campfire coaches  highly recommend you visit your local running store to have someone help you select a shoe that works for your specific stride and biomechanics. Fashionable fitness shoes may look rad, and deals on online warehouses can be a steal, but they might not protect you from injuries. You’ve likely been running already, so you shouldn’t make any major changes in terms of going minimal or more structured.  In fact, the only major change you should make is considering quick-draw laces.  Invest in a pair of running shoes, and break them in a bit before your race.

• Swimsuit, cap, and goggles – Think about where you’ll be racing when you pick your goggles. If you’ll be in a pool, or a foggy or cloudy lake, get clear lenses. If you’ll be staring down the sun at dawn, go for something tinted. Try them on for at least the distance of your first race, and when in doubt, get something pretty.

• Watch – While this one isn’t entirely necessary, a cheap running watch can make a big difference in your triathlon training. You don’t need bells and whistles, but a watch that can show total time elapsed (and ideally lap splits) comes in very handy. Many people use their smartphones for this function, but we believe it’s best to keep your smartphone technology far away from sweat.

Following the Plan

Campfire Endurance coaches have created a plan that contains two workouts per week in each discipline (swim, bike, and run) as well as one strength session. Check out the plan here, empowering yourself to perform your fastest, happiest, and healthiest first triathlon possible! Ideally, you will complete each workout as written. However, Campfire coaches understand that life can get in the way, so if you’re time-limited, focus on completing the two workouts for the sport you struggle with the most (do it!), and at least one workout each for the other two sports. 

We also included a few “brick” workouts in this plan, instructing you to run right after you ride. “Bricks” should be considering key workouts: they’re a perfect time to practice your bike-to-run transition, and grow accustomed to how your legs feel right off the bike. These workouts are also great opportunities to practice your race day nutrition (more info on nutrition below).

If you need a day off, or you’re just feeling blasted, take a day off! If you’re unsure, we suggest at least attempting the workout to see if you just needed a warm up to blow out the cobwebs. If you start the main part of the workout and it’s just not happening, then call it quits.

The majority of these workouts will be at an easy effort, especially during the first 6 weeks of training. In order to safely build up your endurance, you need to gradually increase your training volume. Even if you feel good, keep the effort level low unless otherwise indicated.

Campfire Athlete Kirk L. on the race course

Nutrition for Training and Racing

Your diet makes a huge difference in how you feel during (and after) your workouts. It is important to pay attention to what you eat while training and what you eat during your regular life. A lot of newer triathletes make the mistake of training to eat, instead of eating to train. While a workout in this plan may feel difficult, it probably hasn’t created a caloric deficit that only an entire pizza can fill. Conversely, if you have been restricting your caloric intake, you may need to eat more to ensure that you are meeting the needs of an increased training load. 

Perhaps most importantly, if you find yourself feeling depleted throughout the day, take a look at your total caloric intake to ensure that you are eating enough. Fueling with training and recovery in mind can help ensure that you enjoy your workouts and feel strong throughout your day. When in doubt, maintain a healthy diet focused on vegetables, lean proteins, and whole grains. 

While training and racing, you’ll probably need to explore the sugary world of sports nutrition. For any workout over an hour, you should plan to take a bottle of sports drink to help replace calories and replenish sodium. You should also plan to practice using gels, chomps, or beans during a few of your longer runs, since they are what athletes typically use during races. 

Your nutrition needs for the race itself should be relatively low (provided you aren’t dehydrated or under-fed at the start line). Plan to use a bottle of sports drink during the bike, and take sports drink at each aid station on the run. You can also take a gel or other 100-calorie snack towards the beginning of the run – many Campfire athletes including coach Molly prefer the type with added caffeine.

Campfire Endurance coach, and author of this blog and the training plan, Molly Balfe practicing good post-race nutrition

Preparing for Race Day

It is a good idea to familiarize yourself with USA Triathlon’s rules and regulations prior to your race, especially their most common violations.

On race day, plan to arrive early enough to set up your transition area. Transition is where you will rack your bike and transition from swim to bike and bike to run. You do not have much room for your equipment, so pack only what you will need during the race. For reference, here is a picture of a well-organized transition area:

An exceptionally, if not obsessively well-organized transition area

While it may seem obvious, make sure you know the layout of your race, including where you will enter and exit the water and where you will enter and leave the transition area for the bike and run legs. Knowing where you are headed will save you valuable time during your race.

A Final Word of Advice

Have fun! We love this sport, and we hope that you will love it too. Triathlon is an individualized sport, with a lot of potential hyperactivity and focus on expensive gear, so it can be easy to allow yourself to get caught up in the pressure, anxiety, and competition of training and racing, so remember that we do this for fun. Be generous with your gratitude and give copious high-fives. The more fun you allow yourself to have, the more likely it is that you will continue to come back to this sport for years to come. In fact, it’s been empirically determined that if you smile during a race, you will go faster. Happy training! Need the link to that plan again? You can grab it here. Want to talk to a coach? Reach out to us here. Thinking about your very first race but need some basic guidance? Consider the Athlete Accelerator.

How to Choose the Right Triathlon Coach for You

A good coach stops to explain workouts and sessions clearly, compassionately, and enthusiastically

by Campfire Head Coach Molly Balfe

Interested in finding a coach? Read on for what to look for, and if you’re ready to take your training and racing to the next level, becoming a faster, happier, and healthier athlete, check out our coaching page or The Athlete Accelerator!

So you’re ready for a coach. You’re committed to taking your triathlon training to the next level, and you’re cognizant that expert guidance and accountability is the best way to get there. Hiring a coach provides you with an ally and guide who can help you achieve your goals, manage your time, and take the guesswork out of your training, but the complex worlds of triathlon training, racing, gear, and nutrition can be overwhelming for new (and seasoned) athletes. For the self-motivated athlete, there is no shortage of info available online and in print, but you will quickly find that not only are there are several different schools of thought, but many of those theories directly contradict each other!

How should you proceed? If navigating the online options for coaching can be overwhelming, then how could you even begin to search specifically for the right person with whom you will forge a meaningful relationship? How do you find a good match? What is a good match?A cheerleader or a drill sergeant? Someone who pushes you or reins you in, or both? Whether you’re looking for someone to help you out for a few months as you find your bearings or are set on finding a long-term coach to help you continually improve, it can be tough to begin this process.

Look for a coach that pushes you but also helps you enjoy the sport!

We at Campfire Endurance Coaching are passionate about the coach-athlete relationship. We love this sport, and we want you to find an ideal coach who doesn’t just have that love in common, but whose style and approach creates the best rapport to empower you to be the fastest, happiest, and healthiest you want to be. To help you along your way, we compiled a list of suggestions that we think will help you identify a qualified coach who is the right match for you.

Dive in. The first thing we recommend is to stop second-guessing your desire to hire a coach. We are inundated with disclaimers from athletes about not being fast enough, young enough, fit enough, strong enough, or whatever enough to take their training seriously. In all honesty, very few coaches make a living working with elite athletes. Most coaches were drawn to this profession because they are passionate about the sport and want to support athletes as they work towards their goals. Athletes participate in triathletes for a myriad of great reasons; they want to stay fit, get healthy, challenge themselves, and create a healthy lifestyle. These are all serious reasons, and we take your commitment seriously whether you are looking for podia or finish lines.

When you have made the decision to hire a coach, begin with a self-assessment. Define your reasons for seeking assistance so you can articulate them to the coaches you meet with. Here are a few recommendations to help you clarify what you are hoping to get from your coach: 

Know your limiters. Where do you struggle the most? If you aren’t sure, take a look at your recent race results and where you ranked in the swim, bike, and run (and while you’re at it, check out those transitions!). If you had the fastest bike split in your age group, but you ranked 30th in the swim, your coach may well want to focus on what is happening in the water. If there are big improvements to be made, it may help to spend a few weeks or months focusing on one sport, as it is extremely difficult to make considerable gains in all three sports at the same time. Many coaches use the “off” season to spend targeted time on the sport that holds an athlete back. This way, as the race season approaches, the plan can focus more on intensity and volume across all of your training.

Identify your short- and long-term goals. How will you know that your season was a success? Where do you want your training to be in five years? You and your coach need to be on the same page about where your training is headed, so tell them what your goals are and ask for their feedback about whether they think your goals are achievable. If your goal is to complete a race, you may only need a season of training to get there. However, improvements take time (and the faster you become, the harder those minutes and seconds will come by). Most coaches are looking for athletes who are in it for the long haul and hoping to get stronger and faster each year. The longer we work with you, the more we know about your specific needs and how you respond to training. Short-term goals can be extremely motivating, but should ultimately move you toward where you hope to be in the long-term.

The author, in her element, working with athletes on swim technique

Consider your capacity. Think about how much time you have to devote to training. We all know that life gets in the way of training sometimes, but it is helpful to be aware of whether an athlete’s job requires frequent travel or if they have other obligations (family, other hobbies, getting the band back together) that will determine their available time for training. Especially for longer races, the weekend time commitment can be significant, so make sure that you have the support of the people in your life. If you do travel frequently, you should expect to integrate your workouts into your travel schedule so your training isn’t derailed. If your schedule is typically flexible, but you know you have a few busy weeks each year, make sure you communicate that in advance so your coach can design your plan with these periods in mind. Every coach-athlete dynamic is different, so after you have determined your needs, we recommend embarking upon your search by taking into account the following: 

1.  Strengths – Make sure that the coach you choose has the sport-specific knowledge to help you improve on your limiters. If you are one of the many triathletes who struggles with their swim, make sure you choose a coach who has a history of helping swimmers become more competent in the water. If you know nutrition is holding you back, make sure the coach you select can provide you with the information and feedback you require to help you manage your diet and race needs. Most coaches can provide some level of guidance in each of the three sports, but if you are hoping for specific improvement, make sure you find someone with specific expertise. Likewise, if you already have a long history in one of the three sports, make sure you find someone who is able to provide you with workouts and training that will match your ability and experience.

2.  Availability – How often do you need/want/expect feedback? Are you looking for a static plan with little or no direction or do you want to be able to communicate directly with your coach about a schedule that is tailored specifically for you? Regular email and/or phone communication allows coaches to make real time decisions based on how their athletes are responding to training. In person meetings are rare, and are typically more expensive (especially if they involve evaluating your technique, which is generally a consultation and comes with an additional fee). How frequently you hear from your coach should be explicitly agreed upon by the coach and athlete. The amount of access you have to your coach varies considerably - be clear about what you expect and what your coach is offering.

3.  Style – Are you looking for a cheerleader? Someone to tell you to get off your butt and stop making excuses? Some combination of the two? Know what keeps you motivated and look for someone who can work with you in a way that you find motivating and productive. If possible, talk to some of their former or current athletes to find out more about their experience. If a coach has a reputation for being hard on athletes and you know you need a little fear to keep you motivated, this could be a great match! However, if you know you tend avoid conflict, you may well end up hiding from this coach so you don’t get in trouble. This is not an effective form of training, and does not benefit you. Find someone who works with you in a way that will best ensure your success.

4.  Experience/Education – Make sure your goals align with your coach’s interests and expertise. If you are new to the sport, ask whether a coach has worked with beginners. If you are hoping to qualify for Kona or get your pro card, make sure your coach has a specific plan to help get you there. If you are hoping to balance a busy schedule while getting fit and having fun, choose someone who knows how to be flexible and supportive. Great coaches never stop learning about the sport – they want to be aware of the best new techniques and any worrying trends that are emerging in triathlon. Ask your coach how they stay sharp and increase their sport-specific knowledge. Many coaches hold certifications in the sport; these do not mean that they are more skilled than other coaches who do not, but it does guarantee a baseline level of knowledge.

5.  Cost – There is a lot of variation in coaching fees. In general, coaches who are the most experienced and accessible (meaning how often you can contact them) are also the most expensive. These are typically career coaches who give a good percentage of their time and energy to their coaching business. They work with several athletes and tend to have a great deal of experience. The most economical choice is typically buying a static training plan, but you lose the benefit of a coach’s guidance. When making decisions about cost, be honest with yourself about how much you can afford and how your investment aligns with your goals.

6.  Location – If you want to be part of a triathlon team or are hoping for one-on-one evaluations, it can be helpful to look for a coach that is nearby. However, with the constant evolution of new internet-based evaluation tools and techniques, this may less critical. Many coaches are using video analysis to determine where their athletes can make improvements. Phone and Skype communication can also help bridge the geographical gap between you and your coach. If there is someone who you really want to work with, location can often be overcome.

Finally, we maintain that the absolute best way to know whether a coach is right for you is to talk to them. Much like finding the best house, car, bike, or trainers, sometimes if you simply feel like you click, and you like what they have to say about their style, that should indicate that you will work well together. Remember that you are accountable for at least 50% of the relationship between you and your coach. If something is missing, or if you feel like you need additional help in a specific area, make sure you ask for it clearly. Coaches are highly invested in their athletes’ success, and we want to see you happily and healthily participating in this sport for years to come.

The athletes at Campfire Endurance Coaching are all bound by the same goal: to become faster, happier, healthier people. It's an ethos shared by all the coaches at Campfire, and nicely wrapped up in our motto: Go Fast, Have Fun, Be Nice. We think that keeping these three principles in sight at all time lead to strong performances and happier lives.

We are taking new athletes! Our roster of experienced coaches is ready to form a relationship with you, and help you get better, faster, happier, and healthier for your next training and racing season, so meet the coaches , learn how it works, check out The Athlete Accelerator, and become a member of the Campfire family, if, and only if, we’re right for you.

Mastering Coach-Athlete Communication

Five tips to start and maintain good relationships between coach and athlete

We’ve all heard that all relationships rely upon regular, high quality communication, and the coach-athlete relationship is no exception. In fact, other than the primary relationship in your life and your immediate family, your coach may be the person who knows the most about your life, your goals, your fears, and your dreams. For coaches, your athletes—even though they are probably customers—will make up a close circle of acquaintances. These connections are valuable on a personal and professional level, and maintaining them should be a priority for both coach and athlete. Today we’ll talk about ways to do just that. A good coach-athlete relationship is a collaboration, not a dictatorship, and all of your work should aim towards that eventual goal.

First, though, we want to identify some approaches that will torpedo the communication between athlete and coach. At Campfire Endurance Coaching, we’ve always strived to avoid these pitfalls, as poor communication leads to poor results, and poor results lead to high athlete turnover, which leads to business failure (or, at least, not delivering on your mission statement, if it has anything at all in it about being athlete-centered).

1. The No-Contact Coach. One of our athletes says that in a previous coaching relationship, they would leave comments in TrainingPeaks that said “Is there anyone actually reading this?” to see if they would get a response. Nothing says you don’t care about your athletes and their development more than ignoring them. Is there really anything else to say about this? Don’t ignore your athletes. Athletes, don’t ignore your coaches, but if you’re doing that...well, we don’t think we can save that relationship.

2. The “Just Do As I Say” Coach. “Trust the Plan” has, unfortunately, become code for “Just stop bothering me.” Coaches can sometimes interpret athlete questions or concerns as a lack of trust, but it’s important to remember, coaches, that you are an expert in your field with A LOT of information that is now just part of your basic knowledge. What sounds like a challenge may be interest, so when you feel compelled to shut down communication by saying “Trust the plan” take a breath and do some educating instead.

3. The Absentee Landlord. Similar to No-Contact, but this coach sets up a plan and then sends notes from afar: “Lemme know how the block went” is not coaching, it’s plausible deniability and an abdication of coaching responsibility!

4. The Smoke-Blower. If you are dishonest with your athletes (even in an “encouraging” way) they will eventually recognize that tendency and lose their trust in you. As with any relationship, if you don’t trust each other you don’t have anything. Make sure to set challenging but achievable goals for your athletes and then hold them accountable to those goals (remembering that renegotiating goals is also OK, as long as there is a conversation about it). Athletes—if your coach keeps telling you that you can do something you know that presently you cannot, you might want to look for a new coach.

5. The Athlete-Led Coach. Similar to the Smoke-Blower, but this coach finds a way to agree with their athlete about everything. This is VERY difference from “Athlete-Centered,” to be clear. The result is a program where the athlete does what they want to do and the coach justifies that decision. The result is a co-dependent coaching relationship where the athlete simply does what they’ve always done and the coach makes them think that that’s progress. That kind of coaching usually leads to the same results the athlete has always achieved.

OK, negative coach archetypes established, let’s get into five tips for improving communication between coaches and athletes.

Don’t Make Assumptions About Your Athletes

We all know the saying about what assuming can do, and all of us at Campfire have made asses of ourselves at one point or another because of it. Athletes are humans, which means their moods and goals can fluctuate on any given day. Coaches, be careful of coming up with a set identity for your athletes, like “Alistair is dedicated most of the time, but whenever work gets busy he stops doing his training,” or “Cassie clearly doesn’t believe in the workouts I’m prescribing her,” or “I would be surprised if Jim actually signed up for Ötillö.” The problem with assumptions is that you are taking some real-world data (what an athlete says or does) and then layering your own judgments and beliefs on top of that information. The result is something that is neither your athlete’s or your creation, and isn’t actually true for either of you. NOT a good place from which to make decisions, and an excellent place for miscommunication.

Be Curious and Non-reactive

Your next step, after not making assumptions, is to be curious about what your athletes are saying and doing. If you’ve followed the point above and held off making assumptions about your athletes, you’re in a great position to be curious. Try using phrases like “Tell me more about that decision,” or “How did you get there?” Make sure that your curiosity doesn’t sound like sarcasm, which communicates a different meaning to your athletes. Hand in hand with curiosity is avoiding reactivity with your athletes. If an athlete has done something different than what you had intended, it is very likely NOT about you as a coach. Much more likely is that there are a set of circumstances that make following the plan not possible for the athlete at that moment, and your job is to find and illuminate those circumstances so the athlete can see them. If you react defensively, however, and think that the athlete is judging you and your coaching by making a different choice than what was on the plan you will only make your athlete defensive in return. Now communication is much more difficult, with each army setting up positions in each camp. Not a good model for collaboration.

Create Systems for Several Types of Contact

When we polled Campfire athletes about their communication preferences, the loudest message we heard was that they valued being able to communicate with their coaches in a variety of ways: TrainingPeaks workout comments, email, phone/video conference, and text message. At Campfire we use scheduling software where athletes can book phone calls with their coaches, and we have standards for reply times, which are:

• A coach will respond to an athlete’s TrainingPeaks workout comment in one business day

• A coach will respond to an email within 24 hours

• A coach will do their best to respond to a text message that day (but there are boundaries to this one—coaches have lives and workouts too)

• Athletes can sign up for 45 minutes of phone contact once a week

Setting up clear parameters for contact tells the athlete that communication is a priority for you, and they know that they can get a hold of you in several different ways. Communication systems suggest that you as a coach are professional and deploy different methods for different athletes, which will widen the number of clients you can attract. The biggest upside? By opening several avenues of information, you learn more about your athlete, which will only make you a better coach.

Listen, Empathize, Plan, and Protect Yourself

Athletes go through tough patches, and you will be one of the people they reach out to when they pass through those patches. If you want to avoid being an athlete-led coach (see above), it’s important to recognize your role in this situation. First of all, you are not a counselor or a trained mental health professional, so if an athlete is in a situation outside your scope of care, it’s important to recognize that fact and ask them if they have access to that kind of resource. Having determined that you are talking about a coaching-related issue, you should listen to the athlete’s situation, empathize with them, and then make a plan to help the athlete through the rough patch. One of our athletes says “I had a micro meltdown this summer. I was four weeks out from IM Madison and just mentally couldn't do the training anymore. I had just come back from what had been a punishing and unsatisfying long ride when I texted my coach to ask if we could connect. We were on the phone 12 hours later, talked through what was happening, came up with a plan, and moved on. The expeditious nature was part of the value, surely, but the better piece was not getting wrapped up too much in the why it happened, and focusing more on what to do in the moment. Having a plan of how to move forward brought me back to earth and pulled me back a bit from the ledge.” Your role in these situations is to provide a sounding board for your athlete’s situation, and then to take the lead and offer some direction, since athletes can spin around in one place for a while. Finally, make sure you protect yourself—empathy is a powerful thing to offer someone, and you need to make sure that you don’t become a permanent and ongoing sounding board for your athletes. Draw clear boundaries around communication and your athletes will have better outcomes.

Motivate but Hold Accountable

Athletes sometimes need help with motivation, and during those moments it can be appropriate to give your athletes a pep talk, reminding them of what they have set out to do, that the path is long, but that the outcome will be worth it. You will spend some amount of time pointing out to them reasons to be confident (but don’t become The Smoke-Blower, above!) and appealing to their sense of excitement and vision. You will be a cheerleader, from time to time, in other words. But if an athlete always needs encouragement, the relationship is heading in a bad direction. Athletes need to come into the sport with their own intrinsic motivation (part of your job might be uncovering that motivation for them), and if they rely upon you to furnish that for them you will run out of steam at some point. One way to make sure that they stay motivated is to return ownership of the process to them by holding them accountable to the goals they established when they began working with you. If an athlete has told you that she wants to qualify for Kona but has been shortening her long rides by half, you probably won't be able to cheerlead that athlete to doing what she needs to do to be successful. Holding someone accountable, although it can feel tough at first, is a huge gift for your athlete. It reminds them that only they are responsible for their achievements, and the people around them (coaches, family, training partners) are simply buttresses to their actions. If an athlete learns that lesson and integrates it into their life, then you, my friend, are Coach of The Year.

CONCLUSION

In wrapping up, we can summarize these tips fairly easily: make communication a priority and make it possible via several avenues; be patient and curious with your athletes, remembering that no one knows them better than themselves; keep your assumptions to yourself and delight when your athletes surprise you and defy your assumptions; learn how to empathize but offer solutions, and then hold your athletes accountable to those solutions (if they decide they like those solutions, of course!). Communication is hard, but it is the bedrock skill of great coaches—without it, you literally have nothing.

A Real-world Summary of Kona Qualification Training

Scott G. qualifying for his first Ironman World Championships

We’ve talked before about a big-picture, general view about qualifying for Kona, but what about one real-world example? We are going to walk you through Scott G.’s Kona qualification at Ironman Arizona in November of 2021 so you can see a practical example of what we prescribed and how he was able to achieve his goal.

A Five Year Plan

Although many of you may not want to hear this, qualifying for Kona will probably be a multi-year process, taking some athletes fewer years and other athletes more. Scott started working with us in 2017, coming from a robust cycling background (he raced bikes for many years), a running background in high school and college, and no swimming background. We talked at the beginning about building his abilities over the long term and that we would start thinking about qualifying for Kona after his third year of training. In the meantime we began building for his first Ironman, Whistler, in the summer of 2017. Here were our training goals as we prepped for that first Ironman:

1. Swim a lot, and put a big focus on technique (too much kicking!)

2. Shift his cycling engine from the high-revving world of bike racing to the steady burn of long-distance triathlon

3. Build his run volume to necessary Ironman marathon loads without injury

Happily, the goal of any first Ironman is to finish, and although Scott had some “secret goal” ambitions (he really hoped to be under 12 hours), we knew that the goal was simply to reach the finish line. Scott did so, getting to the finish line in 11:41:53 and 42nd in his age group. An excellent first effort with the following splits:

Swim: 1:32:32
Bike: 5:49:11
Run: 4:11:50

Having set his benchmark Ironman, we set out on journey to get down to the ten hours or slightly below range so he could qualify in the M45-49 age group. Scott has a busy job and full family life, so we couldn’t aim for the traditional 20 hours/week average qualifying for Kona in the <49 men’s and women’s age groups. Here are the volumes we achieved over the next five years:

2017: 487 total hours, 97 swim, 221 bike, 144 run
2018: 486 total hours, 112 swim, 217 bike, 152 run
2019: 561 total hours, 128 swim, 250 bike, 146 run
2020 (COVID year): 654 total hours, 118 swim, 315 bike, 168 run
2021 (Qualifying year): 635 total hours, 150 swim, 275 bike, 160 run

So over the course of five years, we build total volume by 30%, from 487 hours to 635, or roughly 13:20 per week for 48 total weeks. Looking at these numbers, I would guess that maybe Scott had a qualification in him in 2020, but with all of the race cancellations we will never know.

Slow Down Less Rather Than Go Faster

Scott has certainly sped up over the course of these five years, but not hugely. The difference between his second Ironman (Arizona in 2018) and his qualifying Ironman (Arizona in 2021) was only about 15 minutes. Here are some details:

Arizona 2018
Swim: 1:25:59 (Scott’s PR for the swim), 2:00/100
Bike: 4:59:08, average power 208 average HR 138
Run: 3:42:07, average pace 8:28 average HR 136

Arizona 2021
Swim: 1:26:42, 2:03/100
Bike: 4:55:27, average power 211 average HR 136
Run: 3:28:46, average pace 8:00 average HR 137

These are pretty similar races, other than the huge difference in run times, which is what allowed Scott to qualify for Kona. I would say the swim and bike are statistically identical and within the realm of measurement error—we can’t say much about them other than the possible fact that maybe the course in 2021 was slightly faster on the bike. HOWEVER, a 30” per mile difference on the run is well outside measurement error, especially when you see that Scott’s heart rate was effectively identical on the run while going much faster. In the words of…someone, “it never gets easy, you just go faster.” I would amend that to say “you slow down less as you improve your fitness.” In 2018 Scott ran the stereotypical IM: out the gate fast, only to struggle in the second half: he averaged 8:02 for the first 1:51, and then…8:56 for the second half. Not what we are looking for. In 2021 Scott ran 7:59 for the first half and 8:02/mile for the second half, which I would describe as perfect pacing. But it wasn’t simply pacing, of course, since Scott ran the same speed in the first half in 2018. He was just at a higher level of fitness. Let’s head back to the training tape to see what was different…

October 2018
Total Swim Volume: 14:21:30 and 39,000m
Total Bike Volume: 24:31:37 and 418.6mi
Total Run Volume: 18:00:11 and 141.6mi
Total Volume: 56:53:18

October 2021
Total Swim Volume: 14:42:02 and 38,000m
Total Bike Volume: 34:16:39 and 676mi
Total Run Volume: 20:26:55 and 167mi
Total Volume: 71:46:14

Kaboom. Here we go. Almost ten additional hours of cycling (258 miles) and 2.5 hours of running (25 miles) in 2021 as compared to 2018. Before you all go and blast out huge volumes in the final month before your next Ironman, though, let’s look at the preceding months leading into those big months.

2018
July: 41 hours
August: 40 hours
September: 51 hours

2021
July: 50 hours
August: 53 hours
September: 43 hours

So everything about 2021 was more when you back it off and look at strategic volume, and that is what allowed Scott to run so well at Ironman Arizona in 2021: more bike volume which simply made the bike leg less taxing then before, allowing him to run effectively without slowing down the same way he did in 2018. “Hang on,” you might say. “What about that drop in volume in September?” Well, in a real impressive step for a triathlete, Scott took a full week off in September. Seeing that maybe he’d gotten a little tired, we figured he needed a mid-season break, so we took one. The result? PR’s at Oceanside 70.3 and then Ironman Arizona in the subsequent two months, and qualifications to two different World Championships.

Don’t Ignore Your Weaknesses…OR Your Strengths!

It would be easy to look at Scott’s swim times and think that qualification was out of reach: not many Kona-bound athletes get to the big island on 1:26 swims. I know many triathletes who would look at their improvement curves and abandon swim training. Scott hasn’t, as you can see from his historical swim volume over the past five years. With the exception of 2020, when pools were closed for long periods, he has increased his swim volume each year. It speaks volumes about him that he’s been willing to go along with that while seeing relatively stagnant times (1:32 in 2017 to 1:26 in 2021 is not the kind of improvement upon which coaching empires are built). We believe, though, that Scott’s economy has improved in the water, allowing him to ride and run with less fatigue. How can we prove that? Well, we can look at his pool times. In 2018, a 4000m swim would take Scott close to 90 minutes, while in 2021 he would get through the same distance in around 80 minutes. Sure, it would be nice to be faster in the water, but we’re guessing this is a case of technique and relative open water comfort. 2022 will see A LOT of time in the open water.

On the other hand, we never sacrificed cycling or running volume in order to focus on swimming. Scott is a gifted cyclist and runner, and we have seen year-over-year increased in those disciplines’ volume, too. It’s important to remember that your strengths are what will get you 90% of the way to your goals, and until you see a relative plateau-ing of performance, there’s no reason to expect you won’t be able to continue improving them.

Final Thoughts

Building volume over time is crucial if you want to develop as an endurance athlete, but rest and tactical bursts of training are probably just as important. Along with those considerations, balancing the athlete’s life, work, and motivation are also equally important. Qualifying for Kona will require keeping all of these elements in front of the athlete where he or she can see them and not get tripped up by them. It’s your job as a coach to help the athlete manage their training load, and to tell them to take a break when they seem cooked. On the other hand, you will probably have to encourage them to push through some difficult (but not dangerous) periods of fatigue. Remember: the best coaching tool you have in your toolbox is a question: “Hey, how are you feeling?”

The Ultimate Top Eight Gifts for the Triathlete Who Has Everything

by Campfire Endurance Coaching Athlete Amy VT

Triathletes are pretty particular about their gear, if not certifiably exacting. The latest models, lightest material, freshest colors, and most inventive bells and whistles are overwhelming, and personal preference and style can make gift-giving seem nearly impossible. So what do you get the triathlete who has everything? Here are some sure-fire bets of various costs that any triathlete would thank Santa for, no doubt.  

#1 CAMP CAMP CAMP CAMP!

Dream gift! If you purchase a slot in a triathlon training camp, you’re giving the gift of training, camaraderie, coaching, and an ultimately memorable experience. There are tons and tons of camps of different styles, durations, and foci all throughout the year, and all over the world. Check out our 2022 Annual Spring Training Camp in Bend, Oregon for the ultimate gift. If you’re purchasing for a partner, perhaps you’ll get to lobby for your own retreat sometime in 2021 for a quid-pro-quo. If you’re thinking YOU would be the best recipient for the ultimate dream gift of Camp, just forward this list to your friends and fam.

For the next two weeks, during the Black Friday holiday period, you can get $200 off Bend camp with the code BEND22BLACK or a free month of one-to-one coaching (a $400 value) for the month leading into camp (current Campfire Endurance Coaching athletes, sadly, cannot take advantage of this second offer). If you’d like the free month of coaching, simply don’t enter the coupon code at checkout but DO select the option for the free month when you fill out the form.

Camp 2018 in Bend, Oregon

#2 Zealios Skincare Products

Sunscreen, shampoo, conditioner, body wash, anti-chafe creams, recovery salves, and body lotion all specifically designed for the rare physiological traits of the species triathlete. You really can’t go wrong, here, and there’s more. Zealios is an awesome company run by rad peeps out of Bend, Oregon; they offer the cutest little bundles (cuter than baby Yoda) to make for perfect holiday gifts. Be careful, though, anyone who uses Zealios who is not a triathlete might turn into one. 

#3 INSCYD test or WKO5 cycling consultation

What gets measured gets managed, goes an old business maxim, and the same can be said about your training. Although we tend to focus first on the subjective side of an athlete, once that is taken care of we love to dive into the numbers. By purchasing an INSCYD test, you get physiological testing without having to head to a lab. You’ll learn about your anaerobic threshold (we usually call that FTP), but you’ll also learn about VLamax (sometimes called “the secret weapon” of elite coaches) and FatMax, the fastest speed you can move at your most efficient mix of fats and carbohydrates.

We can also sit down with you and look at your cycling through the lens of WKO5, TrainingPeaks’ excellent cycling analysis software. Get a much more accurate sense of your functional threshold power (FTP), and what you should focus on to improve your cycling. If you hire us for a cycling consultation using WKO5, you get:

• An initial phone call to run through your current WKO5 results

• A series of tests to perform to properly “feed the model”

• A second phone call to analyze the results of the test and to prescribe training interventions for the most efficient improvement

#4 Swim Camp

Nothing boosts your swim more than an intensive, dedicated stretch of time in the pool with coaches and lanemates. In addition to two amazing days of training at the Juniper pool in Bend, Oregon. Our 2022 Swim Camp runs from January 21-23, and is jam-packed with workouts, individualized sessions, video analysis, classroom time, and fun time. 

From the first out of the water at Kona, to those who just learned to swim and are worried about cut-off times, everyone needs a personalized analysis by an expert coach. Campers will also receive state-of-the-art video analyses that provide:

• Personalized analysis of your strengths and weaknesses

• Drills intended to correct or limit the stroke dysfunctions

• Suggestions as to how to best train to achieve your goals, given the framework of your current abilities

#5 Travel Torque Wrench

You’ll have to check to ensure your giftee doesn’t already have one. If not, drop everything and get a travel-sized torque wrench right now.  Don’t even read the rest of this list. Torque wrenches are crucial to triathlon and TT bike maintenance, since carbon frames, seat tubes, and complex headsets require a specific application of force while tightening. As triathletes travel all over the world for races, it can be dangerous guesswork to make adjustments without a torque wrench, or a hassle to find a mechanic at the race site. 

Any brand that looks relatively like the below pic is ideal, so long as it’s sold by a reputable cycling retailer, is relatively lightweight and compact, and has at least eight attachments. Borrow a paint pen or label gun (my mom has both) because everyone will want to swipe your athlete’s new prize possession. We won’t offer a special link because we obvi recommend you try your neighborhood bike store and #shoplocal.

#6 MarcPro Recovery System

We guarantee you that every triathlete who doesn’t have a set of MarcPro wants one. This contraption is an EMS device that delivers the most effective muscle recovery available. Essentially, it gives off these crazy vibes that are adjustable and science-based, creating non-fatiguing muscle activation. Marc Pro makes it easy to recover faster, so your triathlete can perform at her or his best, which is an ideal gift, right?

#7 Blueseventy Gear

There are just a handful of world class wetsuits and swim skins out there, and we stand by BlueSeventy. Their entire website is on sale for the rest of November 2021, so you really should load up now. The best part about this gift, apart from the discount, is that you have options: wetsuits, swim skins, bags, or even goggles for a budget-friendlier gift. Sizing is essential for the suits, but you can always exchange them. If you’re unsure what a swim skin is and if your athlete needs one, all you need to know is that races in tropical locations require them, so you might want to start dreaming of vacay 2022.

Conversely, we recommend avoiding these items: hydration systems (too many options), helmets (unless you know exactly what they want), bike travel cases (unless you really know exactly what they want), magazine subscriptions (the quality varies), and bumper stickers (if you have to ask...). Gift cards are also always a winner, in which case we recommend your local bike shop or local manual therapist, like a massage therapist or acupuncturist. 

The above list, however, should give you some much more exciting ideas for your giftee, or maybe you, yourself, in which case you should just forward this message to your whole family. If that’s too blatantly hinty, send us their email and we’ll forward it for you.  

Happy Holidays from the team at Campfire!

Sweat Equity

It was hot a Coeur d’Alene this year, and more hot races are bound to occur in the future—are you prepared?

How Knowing your Sodium Losses can Improve your Energy Budget

Races heat up more and more each summer, with several endurance events over the past decade seeing triple-digit temperatures on race day. Dehydration, an eternal issue for endurance athletes, has intensified along with the rise in temperature, shrinking your margin for error during competition and training. Today we’re going to talk about two ways to improve your chances to avoid the dreaded forced slowdown that comes with dehydration, lack of electrolytes, and too much core temperature.

We’re stoked on this right now because the two owners of CBCG headed to Endurance PDX to get tested by Jacob Rathe, recovering professional road cyclist and perspiration specialist. Jacob is the local Precision Hydration sweat tester, and he clued Chris and Molly in to their individual sodium loss rates. If this sounds interesting, look for a future group sweat test purchase here in Portland.

What’s the Problem?

When you exercise, your core temperature rises. Your body, ever aiming to maintain its homeostasis (your physical status quo), responds by sweating. Sweat should bead on the surface of your skin, evaporating and slightly cooling the blood just under your skin. That blood returns to your core at a lower temperature, keeping your internal heat in check (if we didn’t have this mechanism, we would overheat in the same way a car with an empty coolant reservoir does; in a human context this is called heat stroke and it can kill you).

But the problem is that as you sweat, you dehydrate, losing water and electrolytes in the process. If we stick with the car analogy (why always the car analogies?), it would be as if you lost a substantial amount of coolant every time you drove anywhere. If you didn’t replace the coolant every trip or two, we’d be back to the problem we cited above. Sadly, we haven’t figured out a way to keep our human coolant onboard permanently yet, so we need to replace it constantly. This replacing is called...hydrating, or just drinking.

We’ve known for ages that reducing fluid loss during competition maintains performance, aiming for keeping our water losses below 2% of body weight during events, but until recently we’ve only know that we should replace our lost electrolytes without having a number to aim for. That technology has arrived outside of high performance centers, and it should be the next piece of knowledge you add to your racing and training library.

Electrolytes—and in particular sodium—play a huge role in regulating endurance performance. From cramping to nervous system maintenance to hydration assistance, they help fix many issues athletes experience on the race course. But what if you could stay ahead of your electrolyte losses, knowing what you will lose and replacing them proactively? That’s the information a Precision Hydration’s sweat test provides you: your exact sodium loss rate per liter of sweat, so you can write a salt-perfect race plan for your next event, regardless of the temperature. 

Athlete #1

Athlete #2

Everyone is Different

The biggest advantage of sweat testing is that it is specific to you. At Campfire, we write race plans that will work for 90-95% of athletes, and we do that by overestimating your sweat losses and aiming for more salt intake than you probably need. This approach works, if crudely so, and a better approach can get you the few extra percentage points you need, whether your goal is qualifying for Kona or simply finishing your next event. Above you’ll see two very different results from two athletes, which will result in two very different plans. Athlete #1 is a “low salt sweater,” losing only about 600mg of sodium per each liter of fluid they lose. Athlete #2 loses almost twice that amount! Prescribing the same electrolyte replacement strategy for both of these athletes will result in a “fine” outcome, but you don’t come to us for “fine,” do you?

Sodium Losses are Static, but Fluid Losses Fluctuate

The sodium content of your sweat is largely genetic, and won’t go up or down much at all. Your fluid losses, however, will change due to the conditions around your, your level of fitness, your training, and your acclimation work. In other words, the fluid losses per hour can change quite a bit! As you approach your key races of the season, lifting your sweat rate should be one of your goals. That may seem counter-intuitive (more sweat = more fluid loss = more dehydration, right?), but remember that sweating is your body’s cooling mechanism. If you sweat more, you’ll cool more. We just need to know how much you’ll lose in a range of circumstances. So it’s time for another test, this one free and that you can accomplish on your own: a sweat rate rest. You’ll simply weigh yourself before a hard workout in conditions similar to your goal event, weigh yourself after, and then subtract the fluid that you drank during the workout. The end result will look like this:

Athlete B’s Sweat Loss Calculator

Athlete B loses about 1.1 liters of fluid per hour. If we go back to Athlete B’s sodium loss per liter, we can see that they lose 1262mg of sodium each hour! Generally an athlete can replace about 70-75% of that sodium loss effectively, so this athlete needs to consume at least 1-1.5 liters (that’s 32-48 fluid oz. for you Imperial types) of fluid, making sure that they get in ~900mg of sodium per hour. Let’s say that this athlete will aim for 1.25-1.5 standard sports bottles per hour, which will get them 32-36 fluid oz or 1-1.125 liters. If their bottles have 7-800mg of sodium in each of them, they’ll be replacing their sodium needs. What’s 7-800mg of sodium in real-world sports drink products?

• 3 scoops PowerBar Isoactive

• 2 scoops Skratch Labs Hydration Mix

• 3 tbsp. Gatorade Endurance (roughly 3 heaping scoops)

• 3 scoops Clif Bar Hydration

• 1 package Precision Hydration 1500

We can’t really imagine adding three scoops of PowerBar, Gatorade Endurance, or Clif Hydration to each of our bottles, so for this athlete we would suggest going with two scoops and then a salt tablet that has an additional 2-300mg of sodium to get them where they need to be.

Let’s imagine, now, that Athlete A loses the same 1.1 liters per hour. At 635mg lost per liter, they only lose 700mg of sodium per hour! This athlete needs far less in their bottles as they compete or train. They still need to get in 1.25-1.5 bottles per hour (assuming the sweat rate is the same, which we’re assuming to just keep math, like, simpler), but they’ll only need around 500mg per bottle. That’s:

• 2 scoops PowerBar Isoactive

• 1 1/3 scoop Skratch Labs

• 2 tbsp. Gatorade Endurance

• 2 scoops Clif Bar Hydration

• 1 package Precision Hydration 1000

At hot, windy races such as Galveston 70.3, getting your hydration right means success or failure

The Plan Writes Itself

Now that you know your sweat rate, and how much sodium you lose per liter of sweat lost, and you know you can replace about 70% of your sodium, your hydration plan writes itself. Your goal is to avoid losing more than 2% of your bodyweight, as losses more than that are correlated with less-than-ideal performances. Don’t forget about carbohydrates in your fluid, though! We are living in a carb-phobic period, and we can’t tell you the number of athletes who tell us “we’ll just put this non-caloric effervescent sodium product in our bottles.” NO! First of all, carbohydrates improve absorption of fluid, so you’re already working against the beautiful replacement strategy we just worked out. Second, you’re an endurance athlete, for god’s sake! You run on carbohydrates. Skimping on carbohydrates during your workouts will simply rob your workout of quality.

CONCLUSION

Sodium content testing, up until recently, remained out of reach for everyday athletes, which is a shame, because your race shouldn’t be compromised by the conditions around you. Get sodium-loss tested, work out your sweat rate, and prepare to be impressed by how much better you feel in training and during racing next season!

Good Endurance Training Habits

Always have a bottle on deck during your swims!

It’s late fall, and only a few months remain in the 2021 racing season (if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, of course). Some athletes have started their end-of-season break, while others are closing in on their final races. Those who finished up their races in September and October are looking for coaches right now or planning out the 2022 season, dreaming of the successes they’ll experience next year. We just had several new athletes sign up, and it made us realize something: there are a set of habits we consistently attempt to ingrain in each of our athletes—why not make it official and give you a listicle, that highest of journalistic forms?

Fuel Before, During, and After

We can’t think of something that athletes get more wrong, more often. Endurance training requires effective fueling, no matter what you think your body composition goals might be. Even if you and your coach have decided, with the help of a nutrition professional, that losing some weight might help your performance on the race course, you should never, ever, ever skimp on calories before, during, and after sessions. If you fuel your workouts and then recover from them effectively, your training will just be better. If your training is better, you’ll get faster or more economical. Once you’re training better, body composition goals will be more realistic. If you starve yourself, though, you won’t accomplish any of your goals. Set up your life so there are ample calories around to support your training.

Update Your Training App, and Communicate with Your Coach

Why hire a coach if you’re not going to talk to them? All of the legitimate training apps (TrainingPeaks, Final Surge, Today’s Plan) provide easy ways to communicate with your coach. USE them. Your coach WANTS to hear from you. If they don’t hear from you, they’ll wonder what’s going on, and might even doubt that you’re invested in the process. Any good relationship succeeds on regular, open, and honest communication. Leave your coach a comment and schedule a call regularly. What kinds of comments? Three or four sentences is usually enough to give an update on the workout just completed—your coach hates silence, but also can’t read a novel for every workout.

Stretch Cords Before Every Swim

Just five minutes of stretch cord work before you swim will make a HUGE difference in your swimming. You will move better, you’ll be warmed up, and you’ll have worked on a little strength before diving in. Just try it once and see how much better you feel as you start your next session. What should you do? Really anything that looks like swimming, but we’ve always liked double-arm pulls and single-arm pulls in sets of 30-60 seconds. PRO TIP: if you do this regularly and take your swim cords to races, you will have a way to warm up when you aren’t allowed into the water before race start.

Set Up Your Devices for Your Desired Information

It’s never fun to start a workout and realize that you’re looking at all the wrong data. OR to upload your workout and discover that you’ve handed your coach a bird’s nest of almost unusable information. Talk to your coach and find out what data they would like to see. Here at CBCG we don’t like auto-lap (turn if off! Unless you’re racing—then you can turn it on), but we do like heart rate and cadence. Agree upon a set of shared metrics and then make sure to keep supplying that information to your coach.

Learn How to Use a Pace Clock

We really don’t like it when athletes use their smart watches in the pool—it alienates swimmers from the experience of swimming, and there’s all this button pressing. Even worse, most smart watches subtract the rest from the session, stringing together your intervals as if you did them continuously. That’s like doing a bike session and not recording the recoveries between intervals and then trying to convince your coach you rode continuously at 120% of FTP for 18 minutes. The pace clock is a great training device, because it associates you and your brain with the workout at hand, and it doesn’t let you off the hook. Here’s how to use it. You may see workouts written something like this:

10x50 on :50
5x100 on 1:35

OK, what does that mean? That means that, for the 50s, you leave every 50 seconds. Swim a 50 in :40 seconds? Awesome, you get ten seconds rest. Swim it in :49 seconds? Well, you get one second rest. You’ll quickly learn what intervals are “makeable” for you and which ones are stretches. Usually intervals that constrain your rest stimulate your aerobic system, and those that allow you lots of rest help develop speed. That triathlete who says she’s working on “speed” because she just did 50x50 on a tight send-off? That wasn’t a speed workout.

Please, please do your strength work

Make Strength a Habit

In the words of a giant multinational brand, just do it, OK? Find a way to make strength training fit into your life and get it done. A weak muscle will eventually be a tight muscle, and even if your tight muscles don’t end up injuring you, they may constrain your mobility and affect your performance. Also, few coaches will dispute the benefits of core work, and if you’re over 35 you’re already beginning to lose muscle mass (this counts double for female athletes). Remember that this sport is for life, so figure out how to incorporate this sometimes tedious discipline into your existence.

A clean bike is a fast bike, but it also means a committed athlete

Clean Your Bike, and Learn Some Basic Maintenance

When budding Euro-pros start riding at age five, no one cleans their bikes for them. They learn to keep their machine clean, and in doing so they discover all sorts of things they’d miss otherwise: a fraying brake cable, a missing bar end, a cracked shifter. In some cases they discover issues that might become catastrophic. If you work on your own bike (even for just the basics) and clean it, rather than outsourcing it, you’ll be a more self-reliant athlete, able to fix your bike when something odd happens.

Conclusion

These seven tips are only a small smattering of good habits for endurance athletes, and you and your coach will probably agree upon several more. But since improvement at this type of sport relies upon consistent training, you will want to attach good habits to those training routines. This life-structure offers one of the best benefits of endurance sport, and you probably didn’t pick up the sport simply because you loved exercising so much. Use the training structure to improve your habits, and you may find yourself enjoying the sport more, achieving more, and just generally feeling better, which fits with that whole Happier, Faster, and Healthier thing.

Open Water Swimming: 201 Level

Five tips (and one workout) to literally take your open water skills to the next level

It’s race season! It may have been a bit since you’ve competed, so we’re running an open water swim clinic this Sunday at 12pm at Vancouver Lake Park in Vancouver, Washington. If you’re ready to sign up now, without reading all the awesome info below, you can do that! We’re going to cover all of this information at the clinic, so just join us!

What did your last open water swim workout look like? We’re guessing it went something like this:

1. Drag self to lake, ocean, or ditch suitable for OWS

2. Struggle into wetsuit, getting sweaty and/or exhausted in the process

3. Resolve to “just swim the distance” in your workout

4. Dutifully do just that, enjoying yourself (we hope) but not gaining any skills or improving your race day readiness

While that isn’t bad in any way (and kudos to you for going to the open water in the first place), you’re leaving new abilities on the table. With just a few tweaks, drills, and changes to your open water swim sessions, you’ll arrive on race feeling ready for the swim, instead of showing up to a trail run after only training on the track (which, to be honest, is pretty much what you’re doing if you only train in the pool).

What’s the BIG change we’re asking you to make? Well, the answer here is specificity. While in many other places we’ll tell you not to make workouts rehearsals, open water swimming (or any skill-based sport) provides a counter-argument. It’s rare that your triathlon will feature a relaxed, steady effort, uncrowded swim. You need to experience the wild changes in pace, proximity, and direction of your goal effort, so let’s graduate from 101 to 201!

Vary your effort in open water

Part of being race ready for an open water swim is practicing how your body responds to varying intensity in the water. Too many athletes treat their open water swims as long steady state efforts that aim to cover a certain distance. We highly recommend treating at least some of your open water swims as workouts. While you don’t have the helpful walls and lane lines of the concrete box, you can still find ways to include high intensity intervals. Count your strokes or use fixed points on shore as a guide. Practice swimming at a higher intensity and then settling into your race pace so you’re ready for the nervous energy of the swim start.

Get used to swimming in a group

Triathletes are told to draft off the swimmer in front of them to capitalize on the forward momentum that they are creating. When done correctly, drafting can result in a faster swim at a lower effort. The reality, however, is that many swimmers are uncomfortable in groups in open water. We get it: contact can feel aggressive even when it is unintentional and space can be difficult to navigate. Add to this the fact that many of us are reserving our own solo lanes right now and you get a situation where swimmers are acclimated to an environment in which they have plenty of room to swim. This just isn’t the case with races. Whether you’re passing or being passed, it is important to practice swimming with other people so you know how to safely make and interpret contact. Since you shouldn’t be swimming alone in the open water in the first place (right? RIGHT?), you’ve got a ready made contact dummy at your next workout—it’s OK, you get to be their dummy, too. Add in 5-10 minutes of literally leaning in to make contact with each other while swimming. Rub shoulders, hips, mid-section, and thighs and see that it’s really not all bad!

Bring your pool toys

CBCG athletes are well acquainted with the FINIS tempo trainer. In the pool, we use the gentle beep in your head to keep you on your prescribed pace during intervals. In the open water, try using the tempo trainer to keep your cadence up when you fatigue. Set it to mode 3, enter your normal stroke rate, and go for a swim! How long can you maintain that stroke rate? How far do you get before it starts to fall off? Can you get through your goal distance without sacrificing your turnover? Not using the FINIS tempo trainer? Follow this affiliate link for a 20% discount, courtesy of The Endurance School.

Practice starts and exits

Part of your course recon should be identifying what the swim entrance/exit protocol is at your next race. Is it an in-water start or do you run from shore? How many people start at once? What is the terrain like? There is no substitute for swimming in the body of water you’ll be racing in, but sometimes that just isn’t possible. Do the best you can to identify a safe and similar alternative and practice the skills that you’ll need on race day. Dolphin starts can help get you out ahead of the pack, but they also cause an acute escalation of your heart rate. Try them before race day to make sure that you can recover to a sustainable effort. If that isn’t in your wheelhouse right now, you’re probably better walking or running in. Practice your exits as well - far too many people stand up as soon as their feet can touch the bottom. You’re better off swimming as long as you can before you have to stand. Walking is much easier in shallow water!

Know when to hold, know when to go

Understanding your level of effort while racing in the open water (whether in a triathlon or a open-water swim race) is crucial, since you don’t have any reliable way of determining your current pace. One problem many swimmers face these days, in rolling starts for triathlon, is that they end up in a group of swimmers either slower or faster than their ability level. To fix this issue, you need to be able to recognize quickly that you’re in the “wrong” group. To build that ability, regularly perform drafting work either in a pool or in your open water practice sessions (see below). Proper pacing is very often about your ability to feel the correct effort, and that ability only comes with practice. Often you’ll find yourself swimming on another athlete’s feet, thinking “this feels too easy,” only to discover, upon trying to pass, that the pace was good, and leaving that athlete behind will cost too much effort. We’d say that if the effort feels very easy, or only two-to-three out of ten, you should experiment by trying to swim past the leading athlete. Remember the points above that contact is expected in open water swimming, and you aren’t committing a faux pas by passing! Try to be quick and clean with your pass.

If you are swimming on an athlete’s feet and the effort feels “very hard” (we would call that eight out of ten effort), we would suggest backing off, as you are likely in a group that is a bit too fast. If you try to stay there and blow up in the second half of the swim, you’ll lose even more time.

Your effort, whether drafting or not, should always be around the following for different race distances. While doing your practice sessions, try to really associate your effort with how your body feels, so you know what sensations to expect on race day. Not sure what your threshold pace is? Contact us for a consultation and we can help!

• Sprint distance/Olympic distance: 7-8/10 effort or “hard to almost-very-hard”

• 70.3/half-iron distance: 6-7/10 effort or “moderate-hard to hard”

• Iron-distance: 4-6/10 effort or “moderate to moderate-hard,” very dependent on ability and experience!

One session to rule them all

This workout is a classic, but we’d like to credit Gerry Rodrigues at Tower26 for the general shape of this workout. Workouts aren’t rehearsals...unless you rehearse the race several times within one session! We can’t mimic the exact physiological conditions of your body during an event, but we can provide a stimulus so your body changes to accommodate the race. By performing the circuit below four times, you’ll get four “reps” of a swim leg, making for a very efficient workout.

Necessary materials

• A partner (or two)! You really shouldn’t hit the open water alone, anyway, so if you’ve got a swim buddy, preferably close to your own speed, this workout will be more productive AND safer

• An open-water course with three water legs and one beach leg (ideally, this is a long-sided rectangle with one long edge being the beach, the other in the water, and the two short edges of around 100 yards/meters. If you don’t have a course that has some markers or buoys already in the water, agree upon some landmarks for the corners of the course—don’t let perfect be the enemy of good!

The session

Warmup: swim the box once or twice, tossing in the following ladder at some point in the warmup (this is a great routine, by the way, to include on race day as your warmup…it’s like we planned that or something):

• 30 strokes hard, 30 strokes easy

• 25 strokes hard, 25 strokes easy

• 20 strokes hard, 25 strokes easy

• 15 strokes hard, 15 strokes easy

• 10 strokes hard, 10 strokes easy

• 5 strokes hard, 5 strokes easy

Main set: flip a coin between you and your partner. Whoever calls it gets to pick whether they start on the inside on the beach, or on the outside. The goal on each lap is to beat your partner to the inside corner of the buoy. No, it’s not always faster at the inside due to traffic, but the goal today is to incite contact, so get to that inside corner.

1. First short leg (beach to first corner): swim HARD but not all-out—if you sprint to the buoy and then are gassed for the next leg, your partner will probably pass you right back. Be strong but not 10/10 effort.

2. First long leg (first corner to second corner): settle in to a solid 6-7/10 effort, or moderate-hard to hard. Your pace (if you have a reliable manner of tracking it) should be 2-3” slower than your threshold pace (your rested 1500m pace). If you made it to the corner first and you’re in the lead, your goal is to hold off your partner and get to the second corner holding your lead. If you were second to the first corner, try to get on your partner’s feet or hip and then get around them to claim the points to the second corner.

3. Second short leg (back to beach): swim HARD back to the beach—the goal here is to be the first standing up with your wetsuit zipped down (don’t take the whole thing off, but this is a nice first step of wetsuit stripping to practice)

4. Second long leg (back along beach): jog EASY back to the start, zipping your wetsuit back up as you go. This is your RECOVERY, so take it easy, but note how high your heart rate is as your body goes from horizontal to vertical.

5. SCORING! Gamification is a tried and true method of making boring and repetitive tasks fun. Here is how you score each round:

   • First to each corner or buoy = one point

   • First to beach = one point

   • First with wetsuit zipped down = one point

   • Figure out who won the round and keep track of points. Whoever lost the previous round gets to pick their starting position for the next round.

6. Repeat the circuit at least one more time, and up to five more times, depending on goal race distance, length of the circuit, your available energy, goals, and level of continued fun.

Wrapping up

Go out for ice cream! Every open water swim session should have some kind of treat, to suggest to your unconscious that open water swimming, although it requires some effort, results in a tangible, immediate reward. Here in the Pacific Northwest, open water swim sessions end with a trip to Burgerville for a milkshake.

We hope this was an informative post. If you’re ready to practice some of these techniques, be sure to come to our OPEN WATER SWIM CLINIC this coming weekend where you can practice these skills AND take part in this very session (plus others!)

Early Season Swim Development: Go LONGER, Not Faster

by Chris Bagg and Molly Balfe, Head Coaches

If you’re a triathlete but swim with a Masters-style swim team, you may find the following set familiar, as your coach narrates it from the deck: “OK, everybody! Great warmup. Next up we’re gonna do a set of 10x100, followed by 10x50s. Lanes one and two, that’s on a 1:30 send-off base. Lanes three and four, you guys are on a 1:40 base. Five and six, swim those on a 2:00 base.” Setting aside all the “send-off” talk, this main set looks a lot like what the coach (and the swimmers next to you) experienced when they swam in high school: short intervals, usually swum as fast as possible, with the limiting factor traffic rather than any of the athletes’ abilities (if you start deploying intervals longer than 200s, for instance, the swimmers at the front of the group often start to catch the tail of the group, and then no one is happy). 

You’re a triathlete, though, or a longer-distance open water swimmer, and the set above, while perfectly fine as a pool swimmer’s set, isn’t specific to your needs as an athlete. The shortest triathlon swim leg is still a “distance” event, in swimming terms, and your preparation should mirror the demands of the event. Swim Smooth, of course, has been tackling this problem for years, with their “Red Mist” workouts: longer intervals (in some cases up to 1000 yards or meters per interval) with relatively short rest. To make an analogy with running or cycling training, these are “sweet spot” style intervals, or a little bit below threshold effort/pace/power/HR, and they build a base that allows you to place speed on top of it.

Speaking of speed, the usual Swim Smooth system for developing it comes from establishing your swim threshold (critical swimming speed or “CSS”) and then slightly increasing the speed every week over a ten week period. To continue the cycling or running analogy, you would find your threshold power or pace and then—each week—aim for slightly higher or faster intervals each progressive week. Take the bike, for example. Maybe one week your coach assigns you 4x8’ intervals at your threshold of 250w. The following week you’d do 4x8’ at 255w, and then 260, and so on. For running you’d slowly creep up your interval paces, and after a training block (10-12 weeks, for Swim Smooth’s Ten-Week CSS Challenge), ostensibly you’d have a new, higher threshold.

Unfortunately, the physiology doesn’t quite hold up. Doing any kind of work at threshold is a very aerobic affair—in fact, threshold is often defined as “an athlete’s fastest sustainable aerobic pace or effort.” Developing the aerobic system takes time, because you need to build new capillaries to exchange more oxygen, create new mitochondria in your cells to power more respiration, and teach your system to oxidize more fat. If you simply try to speed up, you’ll actually be working above your threshold, missing the intensity that will improve your aerobic abilities. At CBCG, we’ve shifted our approach on the bike and run to one where athletes try to extend their time at threshold (lengthening) before entering an intensive (raising) period. We’ve come up with a system for the pool, and we’re going to share it with you today.

Firstly, though, we’d like to say that we’re firm believers in the Swim Smooth method, and this approach wouldn’t even be possible without their thinking and their established framework. We hope you (and they!) see it as a sensible addition to their program—not a swerve away from it.

OK, disclaimers and caveats aside, here’s what we often hear from athletes after they complete their CSS test and find their threshold pace: “I’m happy with that number, but there’s no way I could hold that number for 1500 meters.” Swim Smooth knows this, and has pointed out that knowing your threshold pace isn’t a perfect predictor, but it gives us a number from which to build training. Functional Threshold Power (FTP) is similar on the bike—on any given day, due to fatigue, fueling, sleep, or any other factor, you may see your FTP swing up or down 20 watts! So the testing system isn’t perfect, and it never will be. These numbers simply give us a way to prescribe training, but we believed that we could improve athletes’ fitness by first improving their ability to swim longer at CSS, rather than instantly jumping into swimming faster. Here’s how it works.

1. Test your CSS: no real changes on this step. Just as you would with our normal swim test (Swim Smooth’s classic test) you’re going to warm up well and then perform two time trials: a 400 as fast as you can go (ideally without slowing down or blowing up), about five-to-eight minutes of easy swimming, and then a 200 as fast as you can go. Once you’ve got those numbers, enter them into this calculator here to find your threshold pace. Remember, this is a decoupling test, so it measures how much you slow down from the shorter distance (200) to the longer (400) and then extrapolates. So if your 200 is much faster than your 400 in terms of pace per 100, the test figures you don’t have much endurance, and adjusts your CSS down. Let’s say you end up with a CSS of 1:40/100.

2. Then, after you’ve given yourself a few days, you’re going to see just how long you can hold 1:40/100 for. Ideally you’d use a Tempo Trainer for this set, but if you don’t have one you can also simply eyeball your local pace clock. The magic of the tempo trainer is that you’ll know exactly when you fall off the pace. We tell our athletes that they can fight back to try and get back up to the beep of the tempo trainer, but once they’re falling behind it’s time to call it. Let’s say that you hold 1:40 for 700 yards, but then have to slow down. Your Distance to Exhaustion (or DTE) is 700 yards.

3. Now you’ll figure out where to pick up weekly extensive progression, finding the main set that is just slightly beyond your DTE. For all of these sessions, we suggest about 800-1500 of warmup and drills before tackling the main set, and then some cooling down afterward. All of these sets should be done with minimal rest, probably ten seconds in between intervals for the shorter ones (200 and below) and 15-20 seconds for the longer ones (300 and up)

   1. Week one: 6x100

   2. Week two: 5x150

   3. Week three: 4x200

   4. Week four: 6x150

   5. Week five: 3x300

   6. Week six: 5x200

   7. Week seven: 2x500 (this is a tough one—you can change it to 4x250 if 500 still feels too long at CSS, although it shouldn’t by now…)

   8. Week eight: 3x400

   9. Week nine: 9x150

   10. Week ten: 4x350

   11. Week eleven: 3x500

   12. Week twelve: 2x750

   13. Week thirteen: 1x1500

4. Whew! Congratulations. That’s a big swim in week 13! If you’ve been doing these sessions each week (or twice a week, which is an acceptable adjustment of the plan) the 1500 should actually feel pretty doable, however. Your body needs fewer adaptations to support longer than it does to support faster.

Now that you can swim your CSS for 1500, though, now is the time to go faster. We suggest you pick up with the Swim Smooth Ten Week CSS Challenge, since you’ve built a robust and enduring aerobic system. You’ve baked your cake, and now it’s time to frost it!

Our Front Line Triathletes: heroes above all

by CBCG athlete Amy VT

“I may be late tonight. I am either going to swim or cut off a toe.” Dr. John Seddon kisses his wife Kyla before embarking upon another heroic day full of training, working, changing the world, and almost always: surprises. 

Harbingers of hope, our CBCG Athletes who are front line heroes have all received their second round of Covid-19 vaccinations. We have always marveled at their dedication, dashing from the Operating Room to the pool, or driving home an hour after a race to begin Emergency Room rounds, but this past year places them on a special sort of podium: one that makes a difference. 

Here are a few snapshots of a few of our remarkable CBCG athletes who serve their communities, our country, and the whole world while somehow managing to train as triathletes. Their days-in-the-life will make you grateful for those extra minutes in the shower after a swim sesh, and their dedication will inspire you, fo sho. 

John Seddon, M.D.

Orthopaedic Surgeon, UC Health Orthopedics Clinic

Colorado Springs, Colorado

THE QUOTE

“I’m honored to continue to serve our community the best we know how. Now that we’re vaccinated, I cautiously predict a light at the end of the tunnel.”

THE HERO

John is a fixer of bones and joints. He specializes in foot and ankle surgery, lower extremity trauma, and deformity correction, which is more than most of us can fathom, let alone understand, but it’s clear that he literally gets people back on their feet, and changes patients’ lives for the better. 

At the onset of the pandemic, Dr. Seddon’s elective surgical volume decreased substantially as resources and equipment were reallocated to assist with Covid-19 units. Trauma volume has remained steady, however, which at times meant doing double-duty caring for Covid-positive patients. 

THE TRIATHLETE

John could easily compete as a pro. You wouldn’t necessarily know by hanging out with him (unless you challenge him to a bike ride), since his nature is so kind, humble, and chill. Don’t be fooled. He’s a ferocious competitor, standing on the podium after nearly every race, and handily winning local events. He’s out of the water in a half-iron distance in 25 minutes, and basically presents no weaknesses. 

No slave to his athletic ego, however, Dr. Seddon chooses a lifestyle that prioritizes his medical work and his family. His amazing wife Kyla supports him and their kiddos: their toddler daughter Ellie, baby son Cameron, and chocolate lab Kona. 

DAY IN THE LIFE

• 4:30 - wake up

• 5am - hour trainer ride

• 6:10am - 30’ run off bike

• 6:40am - shower

• 7:00am - breakfast - coffee, protein shake with cereal

• 7:30am - arrive at hospital, see a few patients

• 8am -  headed to clinic, saw around 20 patients

• 11:15am - left for pool

• 11:30pm - lunchtime swim

• 1pm - headed back to the clinic and saw another 20 patients

• 1:30pm - squeezed in lunch between patients - sandwich and fruit

• 3:30pm - second cup of coffee

• 5:45pm - left for home

• 6pm - arrived home, had a quick dinner with the fam, and to put the kids to bed

• 8pm - left for hospital

• 8:15pm - arrived back at the hospital to fix a hip fracture on a Covid-positive patient, then a washout and external fixation of an open tibia fracture

• 1:45am - left for home

• 2am - arrive back home, lights out, then do it again the next day!  

Andrew Langfield, M.D.

Hospitalist, Highland Hospital

Oakland, California 

(Oh, and Professional Triathlete)

THE QUOTE

“I mostly feel extremely fortunate to have a job I love that is useful right now. I don’t consider myself a ‘front line hero,’ though; this is why I became a doc.” 

THE HERO

What’s a “Hospitalist?” Glad you asked. Andrew is an internist, an inpatient physician who coordinates care for admitted patients. That flavor of doctor is certainly an intense and impressive one as it is, but Andrew has the added layer of working in a “Safety Net Hospital” (one that is federally supported to care for uninsured patients), in an infamously underprivileged  county. “Highland has been hit by this pandemic in all the ways you might expect. We’ve been at capacity for weeks on end; we’ve seen patients improve miraculously, and lost them unexpectedly; we’ve sat with families in their grief - virtually, because they rarely are allowed to visit (truly the worst thing about this pandemic). The best moments are those where you get to be a part of or witness genuine human connection.”

THE TRIATHLETE

When the world was normal(er), you likely saw Andrew running through the pro field at a major race. He’s placed in the top ten at full- and half-iron events, and in the top 15 at countless major pro races. Most significantly, he never once whined about balancing it all. In fact, word to the wise, here are few things you should never say to a professional triathlete:

• “Well, it must be easy for you since you don’t have kids.”

• “Well, it must be easy for you since you’re so skinny.”

• "Well, it must be easy for you since you don't have a normal 9-5 job."

Not only are those futile questions in a chicken-and-egg capacity, but many pros hold down “real jobs,” and some, like Andrew, hold down immeasurably taxing and impressive ones. Here is a classic day from the before times. I just love how he puts his meals in all-caps.  

THE DAY IN THE LIFE 

• 5:10am - alarm goes off, snooze too many times

• 5:25am - finally out the door on the commuter bike

• 5:35am - late to the pool for Masters, miss most of warm-up

• 6:20am - out of the pool 10 minutes early (45' is better than nothing!), finish the commute in to work

• 6:40am - hit the door of the hospital, put on scrubs, first cup of coffee

• 6:50am - get sign-out from the night team on my patients (any overnight events, new admissions, etc.)

• 7am - pre-rounding on the computer (vital signs, morning labs, imaging studies, specialist recs, etc.)

• 8am - start seeing patients

• 8:30am - BREAKFAST! best part of the morning, usually an omelette +/- a big ol' pancake, second cup of coffee, banana for later

• 8:50am - finish seeing patients

• 9:30am - formal rounds begin (meet with rest of team, go see the entire census starting with the sickest)

• 12:15pm - LUNCH! and noon conference, chow on a sandwich + yogurt + fruit + cookie + milk while getting some knowledge, third cup of coffee

• 1pm - finish rounds, start working on all the to-do's (phone calls, orders, consult questions, discharges, procedures, etc.)

• 5pm - SNACK! usually bowl of cereal + granola bar

• 6:30pm - ride home, 6:30 is always the goal but of course some days this doesn't happen, other days done earlier but stay to catch up/work ahead

• 6:50pm - home, decompress

• 7:15pm - evening session, usually 45-60' run, or trainer session, or strengthening (kettlebells and plyos)

• 8:30pm - DINNER! I'm lucky that my wife loves to cook, but she's arguably busier than I am, so we usually try to cook a big meal for the week

• 9:30 - DESSERT!, or beer, or both

• 10pm - bedtime

Becky Matro, MD

Gastroenterologist, Scripps Health

San Diego, California 

THE QUOTE

“Basically, I'm proud of being able to provide safe care and reassurance, and to encourage patients to prioritize their health, even during a pandemic.”

THE HERO

Becky does a true hero’s work of specializing in inflammatory bowel disease. Both Ulcerative Colitis and Crohn's Disease fall under this category, proving that the world is a better place because of Dr. Matro’s work. She performs procedures like endoscopies and colonoscopies for outpatients, and every 7-8 weeks, she hits the hospital for rounds, consulting for patients who may’ve been admitted with a primary GI problem, or something else such as a heart attack, or Covid-19. Like Andrew, she humbly doesn’t consider herself a true “front-liner,” but we do, since she’s right there in the hospitals during these dangerous times, doing hero things. 

THE TRIATHLETE

In the past four years, Becky has achieved major PR’s in four disciplines! Through hard work and dedication to her program, she shaved hours off of her iron-distance split, posting an 11:32 at Challenge Roth, and qualified for the Boston Marathon and Ironman 70.3 World Championships. Not enough? She posted a successful Everest attempt on her bike last year, spending over eighteen hours on the bike.

Becky was elected to the Wattie Ink. Elite Team, a few years ago, and has recently been able to race for them despite the pandemic via their weekly online Zwift races including team time trials. Her coach says, “Becky’s determination to improve is remarkable, and she puts her money where her mouth is, steadily improving and setting new personal bests each year. She is a coach’s dream come true.”

THE DAY IN THE LIFE

• 5am - wake up

• 5:15am -  on trainer for 90’ sesh

• 6:45am - shower

• 6am - walk my dog, Koha breakfast/coffee

• 7:10am - breakfast and plenty of coffee

• 7:30am - work

• 5pm - hopefully left by now for my swim reservation!

• 5:15pm -  45’ swim, due to restrictions  

• 6:30pm - take Koha out again

• 7pm - dinner, unwind with some Netflix or a book

• 9pm - bed

Cameron Wynhnof

Volunteer Firefighter, Banks Fire District

Banks, Oregon 

(Oh, and also Engineering Manager at Intel) 

THE QUOTE

“Emergencies always happen, and the community will always need help. I am just thankful I can be there with the time I have.”

THE HERO

“Cam Bam the Tri Dad” manages a team that works on semiconductor equipment that produces CPUs (Computer Processing Units) also called chips. Wait. What’s that got to do with fighting fires? Oh!  That’s his career at Intel. He is also an ERT (Emergency Response Team) leader responding to emergencies at a moment’s notice. 

At Banks Fire, an hour west of Portland, Oregon, he is part of the TOD (Tour of Duty) Firefighter/EMT program, attending weekly training sessions, and serving weekly 12-hour shifts at the station from 7pm-7am, also responding to incidents at a moments notice. The pandemic introduced a boat load of changes at both Intel and at Banks Fire, the most significant of which being the PPE such as respirators and suits required when responding to calls. How he does it all and still spends tons of quality time with his totes adorbs toddler, is a wonder, and he’s often seen dashing out of the pool to pick her up in a matter of minutes. 

THE TRIATHLETE

If you’re spectating a race and swimmers are coming in, watch out for Cam! His high school swimming days have stayed with him, despite a four year diversion playing soccer for Westminster College. He’s nailed both the half- and full-iron distances, as well as XTerra, and is a recent recruit to the CBCG athlete roster This year his eyes are set on at least Ironman 70.3 St. George, Ironman Coeur d'Alene, and Maple Valley 70.3, “at least.”

THE DAY IN THE LIFE

• 6am - wake up

• 6:45am - at Intel...grab a coffee 

• 7am - it all starts

• 11:30am - lunch

• 1pm - meetings including interviews for 2 hours

• 3pm - emergency call (asERT leader) to evacuate an entire factory building

• 3:10pm - run out to rush to the building, assemble teams, and search buildings occupied by people on SCBAs (self-contained breathing apparatus), coordinating with electrical teams and other Life Safety teams

• 4pm - all searches come back with no injuries, 

• 6pm - everything is back to order, and running fine 

• 8pm - back home

• 8:15pm - ZWIFT ride of 4x10" FTP/Z3 

• 9:30pm - hip strengthening, mobility band work, weights for the arms 

• 10pm - shower 

• 10:15pm - bed

U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Doctor Alison Siepker, LCSW, BCD

2nd Marine Division

Camp Lejeune, North Carolina

QUOTE

“When the pandemic hit, my OSCAR team and I knew we needed to keep our services obtainable, and managed to launch entirely new procedures really quickly, despite limited resources. In the military we often take pride in doing more with less.”  

THE HERO

Apparently her friends call her Ali. Phew! That moniker is much simpler than the letters, accolades, decorations, and titles that formally accompany her name, all of which are very, very well-deserved. LCDR Siepker is Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy currently assigned to the 2nd Marine Division at Camp Lejeune. She serves as an Operational Stress Control and Resilience (OSCAR) Provider, which is pretty cool, as is her background. Read on, it’s worth it!

Born in Newcastle, England, Ali’s family moved to Dubai when she was eight-years-old (her dad was a chemical engineer), and she graduated from Dubai College. She then began her military career in the U.S. Marine Corps. “After I got out, I used my GI Bill to graduate from the University of Hawaii at Manoa while my husband (also a marine) was stationed there with an infantry battalion. I subsequently pursued my degree as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, empowering me to serve as a psychotherapist for active duty Marines and Sailors, as well as to advise Commanders on anything mental health related that may impact their Marines, Sailors, or their units, in general.”  

THE TRIATHLETE

Fortunately, the U.S. Navy promotes fitness, so if Ali goes for a run in the afternoon, it’s pretty much considered part of her job. A few years ago she tacked-on the extraneous community of the Wattie Ink. Hit Squad, and recently joined the Gravel Collective. She qualified for Ironman 70.3 World Champions at the Japan 70.3, and began gravel riding in earnest after racing Haute Route Rockies. This year she’s got some serious events on the calendar: Unbound 100, Gravel Worlds, and Leadville. ”I like riding the Tank Trails on Camp Lejeune, which you sometimes have to share with tactical vehicles, but it beats riding in regular traffic.”

Check out her typical day below, “...unless it's a Tuesday when I'll be racing the Zwift WTRL race series, with Wattie Ink., which is a highlight of my week!”

THE DAY IN THE LIFE

• 0630 - wake up

• 0700 - shower, eat breakfast and put my uniform on

• 0800 - arrive in office 

• 0830 - patients until noon

• 1200 - lunch 

• 1300 - work on notes, or meetings with commands 

• 1500 - leave for training 

• 1530 - swim, run, and/or ride!

• 1730 - shower

• 1800 - dinner, then chill watching TV or hanging out with husband Geoff 

• 2130 - bed

Dr. Adam Goulet DC, CSCS, CCSP

Sports Chiropractor, Evolution Healthcare and Fitness

Portland, Oregon 

THE QUOTE

“We are fortunate to have been able to continue providing world class care throughout the pandemic, so hopefully we have made people’s body’s just a little more resilient through the Coronaverse.”

THE HERO

Adam specializes in sports rehabilitation, using soft tissue manipulation, fasciae manipulation, and rehabilitation exercises to treat everything from shin splints, to torn knee meniscus, to spinal disc herniations. Yowza! On a great day he can utilize the crazy, fancy method of Blood Flow Restriction therapy to advance and improve the healing and rehab process. Google it!

Evolution Healthcare & Fitness is where he spends most of his days, bouncing from side to side (healthcare and fitness, get it?), seeing patients on one end, training them on the other, and squeezing in his own workouts with an extraordinary poundage of weights on either end of the bar. 

THE TRIATHLETE

A member of the Wattie Ink. Elite Team, Adam is no slouch at swimming, cycling, or running - especially the Olympic Distance. He began as a collegiate All-American in Track and Field at Eastern Oregon University. He’s an internationally-ranked athlete in triathlon and duathlon, winning his AG at ITU Age Group World Championships: the ultimate podium. His quads are extraordinarily large. 

DAY IN THE LIFE

• 6am - wake up

• 6:10 - breaky

• 7:50am - leave for pool

• 8:30 - jump in for an hour swimmy

• 9:45am - quick rinse

• 9:50am - quick fuel

• 10am - 75’ track sesh 

• 11:30am - drive back to work, snack before first patient

• 12pm - first patient 

• 5:30 - leave for home 

• 6pm - home and snack or early dinner

• 7:30pm - begin paperwork on the computer 

• 9pm - bedtime

• 10pm - lights OUT!

Nathan Killam

(Oh, and Professional Triathlete)

QUOTE

“I've been in structure fires where ceilings are coming down around you, fire is everywhere, and you can't see anything because of the thick smoke, and you're like, ‘Oh, it's getting pretty hot in here, eh?’”

THE HERO

Okay, Killam is not technically a CBCG Athlete, but he’s been part of our family for over a decade. And he is definitely, irrefutably a front line hero. A career firefighter in Vancouver, British Columbia, Killam has seen it all. He quips, “It’s not like Backdraft. We don’t just go running through the wall of an inferno.” Nonetheless, he has countless, harrowing stories of combatting conflagrations. 

Bravery is only a component of what makes Killam’s career astonishing. Juggling life as a husbo, dad, and successful professional triathlete is a circus act to say the least, featuring a four-day-on and four-day-off cycle (is that a week?) including two 14-hour night shifts. His day in the life below will leave you wondering if he is really human, after all. (NB: I’ve often decided that he is not.)

THE ATHLETE

Google him. 

THE DAY IN THE LIFE

• 7am - drove home from 14-hour night shift

• 7:30am - devoured coffee and some fuel

• 8am - rode my bike halfway to Whistler and back

• 3pm - quick run off the bike

• 4pm - quick shower, recovery smoothie, and kiss to the family 

• 4:30pm - jumped in my car to head back to work

• 5pm - family meal at the station, and thus begins my next 14-hour night shift

Incidentally, Nathan’s first born child, Aiden, was born the next day. So next time you’re leaisurely sipping your recovery protein smoothie in your Normatech Recovery Legs, raise your cup to the above heroes, who augmented their contributions to society this past year, and will always serve as paragons of balancing it all.

No Arm Warmers, No Regrets: dress perfectly to train in any weather with your own personal guides

by CBCG athlete, Amy VT

You’ve got to get out the door for a ten mile run, but you have an inner chill. A glance out the window revealing a gray drizzle is uninviting, to say the least. So you bundle up in layers and a shell, a hat and gloves, and thermal tights only to be cooking yourself five minutes into the sesh. You didn’t need the gloves or shell at all, and now you’re stuck carrying them awkwardly. 

Rosanne Kelley knows when it’s time for tights and an earband

It’s the first sunny day in weeks and you’re stoked to get out and ride. You surely only need a basic kit with a simple base layer, right? Rounding the corner from your house, though, you wish you had full-finger gloves. Hitting 20-mph on the open road, you wish you had your arm warmers. Descending a steepie in the shade, you wish you had all the above, and a wind vest. 

Jeff Lam is glad he wore his neck gaiter

Hej! You’re all waxed up and you just got a new Swix® ear band for Christmas. Nordic skiing sounded like a rad idea, but staying in to watch The Godfather trilogy under a blanket sounds much better right now. Yeah, it’s sunny, but it’s negative 13-degrees Celsius out there! You decide to psych yourself up with a few burpees, and sport a full parka, tights, wind pants, your impossibly huge gloves, and a pom-pom beanie. Sho ‘nuff, five minutes into your skate ski (you know, the sport that utilizes every muscle and spikes your heart rate?) you realize you don’t need your hat or jacket. 

CBCG athlete Annick Chalier found the perfect conditions for a Wattie Ink. Thermal Jacket

It’s impossible to judge precisely what to wear to train outside when you’re sitting around inside. An inner chill can be deceptive, as can a glance out to the sunny street glimpsing scantily clad passers-by. 

Thus, I created my own formulae to help me dress for any sport in any weather and avoid regrets. My guides are super-specific to me (I run cold), as well as super-specific to conditions and types of workouts. They can be hard to trust when I'm bracing myself for those first steps in the cold wind, but I’ve continued to refine each guide to precision, and now I simply cross-reference them with my weather app and workout type, and have faith. 

Here’s my running guide. Would you believe it took me over a year to refine? I kept tweaking and adjusting as I observed when I shed my gloves, or stripped down to a sports bra. Note that one key variable is workout intensity, since I dress differently for sprinting on the track versus jogging an easy reco run. 

And, voila, my cycling guide. So many variables here, especially when it comes to whether I’m riding in the sun or not. There’s a ton of wiggle room with cycling, too, as shells are easily stuffed in burrito bags, and arm warmers are designed to come off while you’re in the saddle. I don’t get into the different genres - MTB, gravel, TT, easy group ride, etc. - but I am familiar enough with my own personal guides that I can extrapolate. 

Skiing is my latest addition to my lists, since I believe it can be the hardest apparel to judge. Sun exposure and wind are crucial variables, especially since I often ski high in the sky in Colorado. Last year I spectated my coach, Chris Bagg in the Birkebeiner, the largest and most famous Nordic ski race in the world. I was shivering on the sidelines in a parka as I watched racers skate by in tank tops and no hat! I mostly need my guide to convince me to not add that extra layer since I’ll regret it when I get going, but it’s also useful for the most important wardrobe choice any skier faces: beanie, earband, buff, or no hat at all. 

You should make your own! My personal ones actually reside in the notes app on my phone, so I’ve always got ‘em. I contemplated printing these prettier ones to post on the fridge, but that would be selfish as someone else in my household runs hot, so our layering standards are totally different. I recommend being patient as you create, change, and refine yours for specific conditions, and you should totally extend to other sports. I’d love to see what you draw up for paddling, snowboarding, golfing, or cornhole. Next up for me: rollerblading. 

My coach, Chris Bagg and I love to ski in our neck gaiters and Wattie Ink. Thermal Jackets

The Magic of Analog, Part Two: Session RPE

If you came to this last Saturday’s Endurance Spin, you know that at the moment we're pretty stoked on Rate of Perceived Exertion, or RPE. This is actually something we've been into for a while, but we're starting to play more and more with it, and we think it's a cool step in continuing to help develop your mastery around training and racing. No, we're never going to completely ditch the devices, since they have a real place in learning what certain efforts "mean" to your body, but learning how to deploy RPE will make you (we believe) a more confident and more competent athlete.

Recently we made it mandatory to leave us an RPE rating and a “subjective feeling” rating when logging workout on TrainingPeaks. Not sure what that even means? When you finish a workout and leave the information for your coach, you have a chance to leave both of those pieces of information on a screen that looks like this:

You have five options of smiley (or, we guess, three options of smiley faces, one frowny face and one…dead face?) faces for how you felt, and then a 1-10 for what the whole workout felt like in terms of exertion. We’re proud that our athletes REALLY responded to this request, with almost 80% of workouts logged in the first week coming with a RPE rating. We’re going to admit that the request was a bit two-faced. Yes, we really believe that ranking your effort after a workout is a great way to internalize the workout and reflect upon it, but we were also doing some data mining. We’ve started using something called “Session RPE” in working with our athletes, which has actually been around for ages—it has just fallen out of style with the rise in training devices. Many of you will be familiar with CTL, ATL, and TSB from TrainingPeaks, even if you’re not sure what they even mean. If you are familiar, you know they should be taken with a grain of salt. And if you're using your watch in the pool, then they have to be taken with a salt mine. FTP not set correctly? All those numbers will be off. Threshold pace not right? Off again. The Performance Manager Chart in TrainingPeaks is a clever tool, but there is so much possible error in it that many times I only refer to it as a passing curiosity.

Enter Session RPE (sRPE). It's simple. You give a workout a rating from 1-10. The software multiples that number by the minutes of the workout. Done. Do a 60-minute run that feels moderate, or 5 out 10? 300 sRPE points. After a few weeks of training, you get a chart in WKO5 that looks like this:

The Session RPE chart in WKO5

Ignore the "monotony" and "strain" columns for now. You can see that in the last week of this year's training for this athlete, he put in about ten hours of training (595 minutes) and total sRPE was around 2800. Then he took about two weeks off—you can see by the big drop in sRPE over the next two weeks. And now, over the last two weeks, things have been building again: a 2835-point week, and then this as-yet-unfinished week and about 3125 points. Want this in visual? Here you go:

The Session RPE Performance Manager Chart

Astute users of the TrainingPeaks PMC will notice the same colors and terms! CTL, ATL, and TSB. We've gone into this elsewhere, but CTL basically stands in for the accumulated work over a long period of time (CHRONIC Training Load), ATL over a short period of time (ACUTE Training Load), and TSB (Training Stress Balance) is the difference between the two. You can see that, as this athlete has picked training back up, the pink line (ATL) is rising quickly, while the blue line (CTL) is rising at a lower rate. The yellow bars (TSB) fall below the 0 line as the athlete’s freshness drops due to training again. Duh, you're thinking. Your fitness is going back up after a break. Big whoop. You're right. Not revolutionary. But here's the thing that is: sRPE takes into account your whole existence as an athlete, which is why we're so excited about it at CBCG. When you upload a workout to TrainingPeaks and it generates a Training Stress Score (TSS) from your power meter, neither your power meter nor Training Peaks knows what was going on for you that day physically, emotionally, or intellectually. Those three states have a HUGE impact on the perceived exertion of a workout, and what feels like a 2 today could feel like a 6 next week, depending on fatigue, stress, diet, mood, sleep, cycle, and the thousands of other factors that make you, well, you.

Finally, sRPE allows us to check an athlete's workload for appropriate loading rates and adjust accordingly. There is robust evidence that an ATL that's more than 1.3x the athlete's current CTL puts him or her at increased risk for injury, and below 0.8 is a sign of undertraining. Of course individual athletes will expose differences, but the evidence is pretty strong: 89% of injuries occurred less than ten days after a spike in "strain," which is the standard deviation of the weekly training load multiplied by the weekly training load. If that last sentence made your head spin, here's the takeaway: increase training load by more than 15% from week to week and you are headed for an injury. sRPE also allows us to paint a true picture of an individual athlete's build towards a race. Having set aside the somewhat arbitrary metrics that training devices give us, we can look back at an athlete's build for clues to the concluding performance, and we know that the data reflects the athlete, rather than a predictive model.

Want to give SessionRPE a whirl? You can drop us a line, or schedule a free coaching consultation with us here.

The Magic of Analog, Part One

I did something I haven’t done in years yesterday: I purchased a pen-and-paper planner for 2021. No, I’m not staging a digital rebellion (at least not a complete one): I couldn’t live without Google Calendar at this point. The reason I did it is because I want to feel a little more connected with my training. 2020 has been a hard year, with little to aim for in terms of events, and most training has had the same dusty taste that “virtue is its own reward” carries. Most of us have dutifully soldiered on with our work, knowing that events will return at some point, and we should maintain the fitness we’ve spent years building, yadda yadda yadda…

It’s late October, and I am fed up with virtue. I have been luckier than most, and have been able to toe the line a few times this year: the American Birkebeiner in February, and then Bear Lake Brawl in September and Belgian Waffle Ride Cedar City in October. But all of them, other than the Birkie (which took place a scant three weeks before everything really shut down for the the year), have savored of “at least I just get to do something!” instead of the feeling that most athletes search for, which is “I feel sharp and ready to perform at my best.” Yes, we are lucky to get to do these events, but if participation was good enough for the people reading and writing this blog, we probably wouldn’t be reading and writing this blog. As athletes, we really do hunger for improvement, and then the chance to put that improvement on the line.

Where is all this going, and what does a planner have to do with it? Well, I start my season-end break on Monday, after another virtual half-marathon. I plan to take ten glorious days off of all training, and then begin to ease back in to a winter of cross-country ski preparation. The Birkie is tentatively on in a slightly shortened format, and I plan to be ready on February 27th to ski my face off. The planner is part of that plan. By this point in my training life, I do my workouts and then my watch or my bike computer magically whisks them away to the cloud, where they people my TrainingPeaks account, turning workouts green (or orange or yellow or red). I don’t have to do anything, the result of which is that I’m completely alienated from my reflecting upon my workouts—my relationship with them has become another victim of the convenience economy.

I’ve noticed, over the years, that a few of the athletes I’ve had the privilege of training with keep detailed written journals of their workouts, color-coding them and noting how they felt in each session. “You can call it workout logging,” says Linsey Corbin, “But really it’s just scrapbooking.” Whatever you call it, I’ve noticed a clear correlation between athlete that take the time to reflect on their sessions and the degree of their achievement. I believe (and this is just a hypothesis) that by taking the time to write down their workouts, they connect themselves more deeply to the experience, teaching themselves what certain intensities feel like, until they become very fine sensory organs. That delicate control becomes an asset to them on race day, as they intuitively know how hard or how easy to go at different moments of the race.

To some degree, I’ve developed this kind of feel myself, mostly due to simply doing the sport for a long time, but that’s the nice thing about picking up a newish sport—you get a chance to be all excited about your training all over again, and the desire to engage with it is fresh and new. So yeah, I’m trading on the enthusiasm of nordic skiing in order to jumpstart my enthusiasm about endurance training in general, but I think that’s a fairly normal thing to do for endurance athletes.

Why do we think this is a good thing for you, even if you’re not picking up a new sport? We see athletes mindlessly logging workouts all the time, foregoing workout comments, and trudging towards events as if their training is a conveyance to a better place. The training is the better place, and every way you can acknowledge that, luxuriate in it, and spend time with it you’ll make everything you do in endurance sports better. Give it a shot. We’re going to be writing a series on this subject (training by feel), and we hope you join us for all of them.

You can, too! How to Race Online with Zwift®

by CBCG coach Molly Balfe

 Travel might not be possible right now, but I’m happily rolling through my big gear intervals in the countryside around Yorkshire. A local cyclist is giving everyone cool historical facts about his town, which I’m only slightly distracted from by the exclamations of “ojisjsdjlsdjoijiosdjsdfljlsdjkljsdfjlsfidnzfnssd” from another nearby rider. Thankfully, a third cyclist jumps with a mildly annoyed, “DUDE. You’re sweating on your phone!” Like many of you, my experience with social distancing has been punctuated by a LOT of indoor training. There was a time when my trainer gathered dust for most of the year; now it has a near-permanent setup in my small apartment’s living room.

 Thanks to a fortuitous Christmas present from my little brother, I’ve been lucky enough to explore the virtual worlds of Zwift® while suffering through my indoor workouts.  The platform’s graphics and achievements are pretty motivating, but the real benefit for me was the feeling that I was meeting up with friends for a group ride. It was a lot like my NYC training days of  riding loops of Prospect Park - even the random dudes who hang on your wheel were there! In the early weeks of the pandemic, I signed on to train with thousands of people from all over the world. I started to recognize names, I made virtual friends, and I chatted with my real friends through the Zwift® Companion App.

 Regular training led to some fitness increases right at the same time as races started to get cancelled. I’m not sure what came over me  - perhaps a touch of perceived scarcity syndrome wherein people panic when they fear something might not be available, like toilet paper - but I was suddenly yearning for racing more than ever. I wanted to get out and suffer with friends and strangers and get an idea of where I was after a long winter of indoor rides. I had seen Zwift races through promotional emails, but I wasn’t sure what it entailed or if it was something that was within my reach. Without giving it too much thought, I decided to dive right in and sign up for something. Here is a recap of what I learned after making a whole lot of mistakes:

1) Connect your account

Anyone can sign up for a Zwift race, but if you want your results listed you need to sign up for and verify an account with Zwift Power. You can find good instructions here, make sure to read them carefully to ensure your results get posted.

2) Pick an event

Before you settle on a specific event, select a category in which you want to race:

​A: 4.0 w/kg FTP or higher

​B: 3.2 w/kg to 4.0 w/kg FTP

​C: 2.5 w/kg to 3.2 w/kg FTP

​D: Under 2.5 w/kg FTP

Once you’ve determined your category, head on over to the Zwift Companion App and click on “events” to find a list of upcoming races. Make sure you check out the race descriptions to see what the rules are and learn a bit more about what to expect. For additional information and more filters, check out the event listings on Zwift Power.

3) Know the course

There is a lot of variation in terrain on Zwift. Tempus Fugit is flat and fast, but the climb in Innsbruck features over 1300 feet of vertical gain in less than 5 miles! You don’t want to be surprised by the fact that your 16k race is straight up a hill, so go ahead and check out the course description before your race starts.

4) Set up your gear

Because all of this racing fun is virtual, it relies pretty heavily on technology. I recommend signing in early so you can get a good warm up and make sure everything is working properly. Plug in your laptop, ensure your heart rate monitor and smart trainer are connected, and open up the Companion App so you can chat with your fellow racers. Remember your real-world setup as well! Get a towel (seriously, get a towel), fill your water bottles, and establish and memorize your pacing plan of attack. Just like any race, it is crucial to have some idea of where your effort level and wattage should be.

As for my first Zwift racing experience? I made pretty much every mistake I just outlined. I chose a race by mileage alone, thinking it would last me about an hour (it was much longer). Midway through the race I had to get off my bike to plug in my dying laptop (thereby losing the group I was riding with). I started much too hard and pushed a few tougher sections thinking that the race would end with a downhill (it ended with a 4-mile climb). Luckily, no one can see the result of all this, because I failed to connect my account to Zwift Power. I hope you can benefit from my learning curve and avoid all of the above. My most salient takeaways, however, is that online racing is both an ideal outlet for some of that untapped race energy, and a gateway for a whole lot of sweaty fun. It can also be relatively anonymous fun, so go ahead and make some mistakes in the name of racing!

Coach disclaimer: think very carefully about how this type of racing integrates into your training schedule and your bigger goals. Online racing is very tough and could impact your next few days of training. Check in with your coach about how to structure a plan that includes this type of training stimulus.

Not interested in racing, but miss riding with friends? Think about joining an online group ride! The Endurance School offers a weekly ride on Thursdays at 6:30am PT. Zwift allows us to keep the group together so no one gets left behind. We write a structured workout for each session (more info on the CBCG Facebook page), but you can also do your own workout. Chat with us live on Twitch, just make sure to stash your phone somewhere dry!

You Can Do It, Too! Twelve steps to setting up an above ground pool for swim training

by CBCG athlete Amy VT

Enid Waller Flynn has been training in her backyard for months!

Above ground pools aren’t just for kids anymore. When travel restrictions and sheltering frothed up to its panicky height in March, I was in Mexico at the “Last Race on Earth:” Campeche 70.3. I succumbed to the panic, considering rerouting my flight to go live with a friend who has a pool. Back home, I avoided soc media posts of peeps in warmer climates bragging about open water swimming, or better yet, their backyard pools. I know at least five other pro women who have a private two-laner, and my envy ran deep.

Because: we can’t afford a pool, even an above-ground one, right? Wrong. In a fit of masochism, I checked out the app that rhymes with wamazon. A big guy, like, 13 feet (to accommodate my husbo’s preternatural wingspan) was only $330.00! The necessary trappings (why do we need a filter?) put it just above $400, and a colossal box showed up on our doorstep in a week. If you have any inkling to get your own, here are my steps to setting it up for swim training, rife with some mistakes to avoid unless you want to get on AFV (America’s Funniest Videos, duh).

My first swim, doing it wrong (no buoy, pipe insulation to protect the pool, or lube for my waist)

1. Buy a big enough pool. You need to ensure it’s deep enough for your downstroke with a paddle, which is well over two feet deep. It must be long enough for your outstretched body, arms up, and then some. We went with a 13’ x 7’ x 32” rectangular variety, and unfortunately, it’s a bit too shallow for gorilla man.

2. Buy a bunch of other shit. You definitely need both a corresponding filter, and a sterilizing mechanism. We went with a bobber that dispenses chlorine tablets, and hopefully zaps out pee when our friends’ kids visit. You might also need a pool cover, an extra tarp for ground cover, and an anchor-bungee system, unless you gots the stuff to DIY the latter like we did. Here’s everything you need:

• pool

• filter

• sanitizing system

• anchor-bungee-tether-belt system

• ground tarp

• pool cover

• thermometer

• paddles and buoy

• pipe insulation (or something to protect your pool if your tether rubs it)

• lube or a surfing rash guard (which doubles as sun protection) to prevent terrific waist chaffing

The essentials [not shown: filter, swimsuit (optional) pool]

3. Clear out a space. It has to be, like, totally level. Haven’t you seen all the AFV clips of collapsing above ground pools? Albeit entertaining, collapse is inevitable if your pool is even slightly listing. We’re fortunate to have a cement area slightly larger than our pool, but we still laid down a yoga mat on a crack, and a tarp to protect the pool bottom from abrasion.

4. Call your water co. Just dial up the main number on your water bill, and they’ll take it from there - not their first rodeo, especially during the pandemic. Tell them your projected day of filling, and how many gallons you predict. In turn, they’ll predict the cost, and even let you know if there are any tricks like your local fire department offering free fills from hydrants.

5. Erect it. Read the directions first, dude. Have you ever tried to assemble an IKEA anything without following the directions? How far didjya get? There are straps to lay down first, and then an iambic pentameter of poles to connect and wriggle through little condoms of the pool edges. If you cut a corner, that last pole won’t shimmy in anywhere. The good news is that it’s not a huge athletic feat, and I actually did it all on my own.

6. ATTACH THE FILTER FIRST. Um, trust me, do this before you fill the pool. “OHHHHHH SHIT!” I collapsed to my knees as I read this little part of the instructions after the pool was full. We decided to try to attach it anyway, dramatically orchestrating a four-handed maneuver on the count of three (wait, 1-2-3-go, or 1-2-go?). Hoses snaked and spewed water like errant fire hoses, and water rushed out the valves as we tried to attach and clamp. We did it, but lost a lot of water and ended up drenched. I wish we captured on vid, since we’d surely make AVF.  

7. Fill. We thought we were so clever, rigging up a circuitous hose from our washing machine’s hot water faucet head all the way to our back yard. Uh, the hot water ran out in a half hour, which equals ankle-deep in pool speak. Moreover, your pool will go through menopausal changes of temp, heated by the sun during the day, and dropping at night, so its starting temp is insignificant. It doesn’t take that long to fill! Ours only took five hours, um...the first time....😬

8. Check the level. You can’t use a level on the rails since they’re all independent, so unless you have a 13’-long level, the best way to gauge is by eyeballing the vertical posts and buttresses. After we filled, we faced a singularly anticlimactic frustration. Everything was listing. I thought we could just lift and shimmy all the poles to straight, when husbo reminded me that we were dealing with several thousand pounds of weight and pressure. We had to drain it. Boo. But, we totally fixed the prob by using flagstones to prop up the sinking poles and buttresses.

9. Add your sanitizer. Again, we went with this cute little bobber that dispenses little chlorine tablets. Bonus: it also reads the temp. There are myriad systems available, of course, and I’m personally curious about switching to a saline option.

10. Rig your anchor-bungee-tether-belt system. I just have to brag. I banked on at least five tries before I rigged a perfect length and tension, but I got it right the first time. One classic size bungee + one small exercise band + the belt and tether from our parachute pool resistance trainer = parfait system.

Enid Waller Flynn uses a tree for an anchor

11. Protect against strap friction. If your anchor is so low that it rubs the rail of the pool, you’ll need to protect it. I tried tapes, which all rubbed off, and settled on pipe insulation secured to the rails.

12. Swim. You’re ready to roll! Well, I’m guessing you’ll need to play around with length and bungee tension, but once you’re there, you can swim anytime you damn well please. A pull buoy will keep you from fighting the drag, which is intensified when you’re attached to a tree, although you’ll get a wicked leg workout if you don’t use one. Paddles are clutch for maintaining key swim strength.

If you have access to a small in-ground pool, man are you lucky! You can simply fix your anchor-bungee-tether-belt system to a ladder. Many condo or private neighborhoods feat. these pools, as do hotels, thereby changing the way we swim train when we travel. When we travel again, I’ll be toting by tether.

CBCG athlete Becky Matro can actually get a workout in her neighborhood tiny pool!

Bonus features: your friends with kids are more apt to visit, you have an outstanding cooling arena to drink some margaritas on hot nights, and you need not even wear a swim suit if that’s the way you want to roll. Pretty much every hot evening, this guy can be spotted cooling off, splashing around, and talking to his new friend:

Chris Bagg and his Merduck

Most importantly, please set up a constant video recording of the setup process, and pretty much everything you do in the pool from then on. The chances are so high that someone will slip and fall, or a pump hose will go wildly animated, or the whole pool will collapse, and don’t we all dream of ending up on AFV?

We're All Olympians Now: How to Raise Your Eyes to the Horizon

Olympian and 2008 Olympic Trials champion Matty Reed

by Chris Bagg and Amy VanTassel

“The time I really focused on my training was exactly one year out from the Olympic Trials. That was the hardest and most focused I have ever been: it was training, nutrition, recovery, massages…every aspect had to be planned and executed. I set goals to run under 30 minutes for 10k, ride 53 minutes for 40k, and swim 16:30-16:45 for 1500m. By the time I toed the line at the trials, I had reached all those goals. I went on to win the race. I was in the shape of my life after that year of work.”

—Matty Reed, 2008 Olympian, 2008 Olympic Trials champion

We already know what you’re saying: “It must be nice to focus 100% on your training—even during quarantine that’s not possible for me.” You’re right that few of us will ever be able to do so, nor would it necessarily be enjoyable, but Big Matty Reed’s keen sense of focus is what we hope you take away from the quote above. Beginning a year out from the trials, which took place almost five months before the Olympic Games, Reed set aside short-term goals and focused on preparation. You’ll notice that he didn’t target a certain time at the trials—he trained to hit certain benchmarks, which put him in a place where victory drifted into reach.

All of us have that opportunity right now.

No, again, not to put 100% of our focus on training, but to put 100% of our training focus on improvement, rather than achievement. Recently, CBCG athletes made up for cancelled races by putting on their own 70.3’s, both conventional and the shortened “metric” versions (for those of you that use the metric system and are currently scratching your heads, a metric 70.3 replaces the imperial distance numbers with the same values, but metric: so 1200m swim, 56k bike, and a 13.1k run, resulting in a 3/4-mile swim, 35-mile bike, and 8.1-mile run), or participated in the virtual events which have popped up all over. Unsurprisingly, many of these athletes PR’d the distance or posted performances that outstripped their normal racing performances. Why?

First of all, many of us perform better in training than we do in racing. This is normal, if regrettable. Lacking a focus on mental strategies leads to events where we let competition get in our way. Competitive sport is nothing more than putting your ego on the line in a public setting bounded by shared rules (as good a definition of competition as I’ve ever heard), and that ego threat tends to get the better of most of us. We forget that racing is simply an expression of current fitness, and we worry, worry, worry. That worry leads to mistakes made on course, and mistakes cost you time. In the comfort of our training routines, or isolated from other competitors, we usually just “press play,” hitting our numbers or moving effectively on feel. As a result, we make fewer mistakes and rise to the level of our training.

We reached out to some other Olympians we have the honor of knowing, Kikkan Randall and Gwen Jorgensen, to get their perspective, and we hope that their experience provides some context and perspective about your own goals. Randall is an American, Olympic gold medalist cross-country skier. She has won 17 US National titles, made 29 podiums on the World Cup, made five trips to the Winter Olympic Games including the United States' first ever cross-country skiing gold medal at the Winter Olympics in women's team sprint at Pyeongchang in 2018.

Randall, at one of her MANY gold medal-winning races

“As a young ski racer I dreamt of winning an Olympic medal in women’s cross country skiing, but at the time no American woman had even cracked the Top-10 and my coaches were estimating it could take over a decade to build up the capacity and experience to be competitive at the world’s highest level. With such a daunting road ahead and no clear path to follow it could have been discouraging to pursue that lofty goal so far in the distance. But I was inspired and motivated by the possibility and the challenge! With the help of my coaches, I took the goal and broke it down into smaller and smaller goals until I had something to chase everyday and a way to measure my progress. The motivation was the dream but what kept me going was the small successes every day. As I ticked-off one goal at a time, I progressed, I learned, I built. Suddenly, ten years passed and I had become one of the best skiers in the world. It still took another six years to make the Gold Medal happen, but along the way I had an incredible, enriching, rewarding and satisfying journey that made me strong on and off the ski tracks.  

“Right now we aren’t able to go after the goals we had planned. It may feel hard to stay motivated and measure progress. But keep doing what you CAN every day. Little goals build small successes, small successes build the pyramid. When you can get back to racing and chasing your goals, your foundation will be stronger than ever! You will probably even surprise yourself because you’ve not only built fitness, you’ve built grit, resilience and gratitude. Get out there, the best is yet to come!”

If you’re not ready to get out and focus on process after reading Randall’s thoughts, here’s more: she’s also a cancer survivor. Having battled through a rare blood-clotting disorder in 2008, she survived a breast cancer diagnosis in 2018. This past year at the American Birkebeiner, injured and coming back from chemotherapy, she placed 12th overall in the women’s field.

Randall, booted up but still ready for action

Finally, we also chatted with Gwen Jorgensen, often known as the G.O.A.T. in triathlon. A gold-medalist in the sport and two-time world champion, Jorgensen simply dominated the sport during her time in it, just running away from everyone time and time again. She presently focuses on running, aiming for the 2021 Tokyo Games in the marathon, and here is what she had to say about process versus outcome.

Are Olympians better at focusing on process instead of outcome?

“I'm not sure that's correct. I think many athletes focus on the outcome, and that can be OK. We focus and want the outcome to be good, but in order to be successful we fail. In those moments of failure having the process and bigger picture to focus on is what gets me through the tough times. I know if I am doing the process right then the outcomes will eventually come.” Jorgensen echoes the findings of Stoeber et al who found that striving for perfection is positively associated with goal attainment (outcomes), but negative reactions to imperfection is negatively associated with mastery-attainment goals. In short, Jorgensen aimed for an outcome goal, but didn’t let it bother her when she fell short in training, knowing that failure is a part of the process.

Do you feel you were able to set aside short term goals in favor of long term?

“I think focusing on the long term is important, but we also need short term goals along the way to help keep us accountable and to help give gratification that we are on the right track. I keep a daily journal where I write three things I've done daily that are process based that were good, and that I could improve upon. For instance, today I wrote: ‘I hydrated early, I counted my cadence when fatigued, Kept shoulders back.’ For the things to improve I wrote: ‘Need to activate glutes pre-run, stand tall, let arms come through when fatigued instead of crossing over.’ Having these daily goals that are process based has allowed me to keep engaged in the short term in order to succeed in the long term.” 

For many of us, we’re going through a period without racing or competition that is longer than many of our off-seasons. We’re fidgety, spoiling for any kind of race. At CBCG, though, we see this moment as an opportunity to improve, to put in huge consistent blocks of training, unfazed by the sharpen/recovery/build cycle that a competitive season brings. High level athletes know that their real work is done in the offseason and early season, and once the competitive season starts you can really only sharpen a little bit (recovering from races is nothing more than coming back from a self-inflicted injury, and injury interrupts consistency). Well, welcome to the eternal offseason. Here are some ways to make it work for you.

1. Focus on strength and mobility. Yup, that old chestnut. But honestly, that work is the first to go in a busy triathlete’s life, and now you’ve got the time. Follow our Strength at Home program, or start attending on the of the seven weekly Endurance School strength and mobility classes. See a PT and get an assessment of how you move and how you could move better.

2. Set benchmark goals, and move confidently in that direction. You don’t have any races, so instead of saying “I want to win my AG at blankety blank race in Sacramento,” set a process goal, such as running faster over a repeated training loop at a lower heart rate over a three month period. Set goals to improve your power at different durations, knowing that by attending to these benchmarks, you’re becoming faster and more complete over all. Figure out your weakest

3. Figure out your WHY. Our friends at Why Racing Events always ask “what’s your WHY?” celebrating the broad spectrum of reasons that motivate athletes to race. If you’ve only been racing because you like to beat strangers and gather dust-trap trophies, then 2020 will be particularly brutal on you. Take some time and return to your original enthusiasms for the sport, the things that made you so excited about this in the first place.

4. Go exploring! As an endurance athlete, your whole thing is about moving as quickly and efficiently over large outdoor spaces. Get out a map, dial up Our Mother the Mountain, plan a long point-to-point river swim, or run longer than you’ve ever run before. You’ve got the fitness, so spend it! But guess what? By spending fitness, you only get MORE fit. It’s the classic Obi Wan Kenobi paradox, but you’re the beneficiary.

5. Get better at resisting the marshmallow. Say what? Astute readers will recognize the allusion to the famous Stanford psychology experiment (no, not THAT one) in which children were offered a small immediate reward, or a bigger award if they could wait for a longer period of time. Compounding the kids’ stress, the researchers left the room during the testing period. In follow-up studies, the children who could delay gratification tended to display better life outcomes across a series of measures (SAT scores, BMI, educational attainment, among others). What the hell does this have to do about racing and training? Well, if you can hold off on chasing Strava segments (a short term but utterly meaningless treat) and focus instead on the boring work of long achievement, you may discover (a year from now!) that you are a different athlete than the marshmallow-crazed person you left behind.

6. Don’t get lost in minutiae. Great athletes know that perfect is the enemy of good, and that if you hold onto something too tightly, you just end up killing it. Rather than demanding your workouts be perfect, focus on the spirit of the session instead, and you may find that the session went better than you could have hoped for.

So what does this really have to do with being an Olympian? In our experience of knowing a few of them, they are all remarkably chill people. They tend to move slowly, until pressed into motion, and then they move faster than anyone we’ve ever seen. But they never have trouble resisting the marshmallow, they focus on their ancillary strength work, they have their WHY nailed, they focus on benchmark goals as Reed, Randall, and Jorgensen all did, and they always always always seem to love the actual act of swimming, cycling, or running. They’re down to run, ride, or swim somewhere new, placing the experience effect first and the training effect second. As a result they experience less burnout and more joy in their training and racing, and who doesn’t want that?

CBCG athlete Kris Ullman, after finishing the “Mocktoria” 70.3 race organized by CBCG coach Juliet Hochman. Ullman PR’d her 70.3 distance.

CBCGer Aly Wilson, another “Mocktoria 70.3” finisher (with a run PR)

Virtual Camp: the light at the end of this short tunnel

“I’m having a great race, but I’m not gonna push it because I think I’m pregnant!” Joann ran over to hug her coach, Chris, during Ironman Cozumel, smiling and sharing this time-sensitive news. She’s always smiling, which is funny since she’s always succeeding. You’d think an athlete would be one way or the other - either incessantly cheery but not so concerned with outcomes, or laser-focused on ambitious results. Joann first became a CBCG in 2011 (!), and has only gotten faster and happier.

There are essentially two types of triathletes during the current pandemic, with races canceled or postponed, and training compromised. Some will incur such a blow to their identity that they will crumble under the uncertainty of it all. Others will espouse the opposite approach, solidifying their identities as those who truly enjoy training for the right reasons. Joann is obvi the latter. She’s unstoppable these days, despite her A Race being canceled, as well as having to run a wild house with two totes adorbs toddlers. Here, the intrepid Panamanian shares with us how the CBCG first ever Virtual Camp will be ideal for an athlete like her.

A day in the life of CBCG athlete extraordinaire Joann Symonette

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Virtual Camp: light at the end of this short tunnel

By CBCG athlete Joann Symonette

A day in the Symonette household these days starts pretty early, around 5:30am (yep, weekends too!). Both Joe, my hubby and I still work pretty intensely during the stay-at-home order, now with the not-so-insignificant difference of having to juggle our two toddlers, AKA “my Crazy Chickens,” Valentina, 2, and Christopher, 4! Miraculously, I still manage to get in most of my workouts early morning, which I prioritize before work or anything else so I don’t get “kid sabotaged.” Days go by fast, so if I don’t stick to the plan, then most likely the day happens, and nothing happens! Getting it done early can be grueling, but it sets my mood for the day, feeling accomplished from the start.

The adorable, unstoppable Valentina

Virtual Camp!!! When I saw the news on social media I immediately got super pumped! I love Camp!!! As nerdy as it sounds, I always have, and I think I forever will - LOL! I remember feeling a little down last week… tired... unmotivated... dejected by races getting cancelled again, and again… uncertain about so much. Once I saw Virtual Camp was happening I immediately signed up without thinking twice. I texted a few friends to join me, and my mood immediately improved!

The OG Crazy Chicken: Christopher!

Camp is like the light at the end of this short tunnel. It serendipitously appeared, proving to be the one thing I need to motivate me again, focussing on something new and fun. I’m hopeful to see old friends, learn new things and re-learn forgotten things, and reserve and entire long weekend for triathlon - just like we would at real camp! Perhaps I’ll forget about the world for a bit as I geek out on what makes me happy - swim, bike, and run stuff.

First step: warn the hubby. After my recruitment texts to friends, I warned Joe that I will be busy with Camp for the better part of the weekend. I’m lucky to have a super-supportive hubby that rolls with whatever passion I have, and who’s also expertly hands-on with parenting duties. Having my mom here with us is an extra bonus. I’ll probably have a printed schedule of the times I’ll be “unavailable” during Camp, and fill in the spaces in between with lots of kiddo activities so they get their share of mommy time. That stated, I can also foresee Joe and my Crazy Chickens quasi-joining me, if not heckling in some of the workouts as they usually like to do.

JoJo always gets it done!

While Virtual Camp is the light at the end of this short tunnel, I cannot ignore the long one. The cancellation of IMCA set me on more of a rollercoaster of feelings than ever during this pandemic. Part of me knew it was inevitable, but once I saw the news, there was a feeling of disappointment, and at the same time relief. Another race cancelled - bummer, but at the same time - more flexibility to keep training (potentially not as hard), and to re-balance life again. My fall agenda still has O-side 70.3 rescheduled for October, and IMAZ in November. They are not cancelled as of yet, so they’ll replace my motivation after Camp this weekend.  

The beautiful Symonette familia

I have appreciated Camps in the past as an invaluable opportunity to gain fitness, but I can not deny their biggest benefit: the social part of it all. I thrive on sharing workout experiences with new and old friends, learning together, suffering together, and just hanging out with likeminded people. We’re likeminded in the sense that we share the same athletic passions, but another key factor to the social part of Camp is training and “living” with people from all over...all ages...and trust me, all personalities! Camp adventures are The Best, and I’m counting the hours to the very first Virtual Camp, which will definitely be one to remember!

XOXOX, J

VT’s Rainbow Pancakes: a crazy easy way to transform veggies during sheltering

by CBCG Athlete Amy VT

Repeat after me: “two eggs” (repeat out loud) “one cup grain” (repeat out loud) “half cup dairy” (repeat out loud) “one veg” (repeat out loud). Congrats! You just memorized the easiest, healthiest, yummiest, and prettiest recipe of your culinary life. You’ve never met a formula that’s more adaptable to your preferences, as well as sheltering-friendly since I’m pozzy you have all the ingredients in the larder. Bust out your griddle and spatula, and proceed as follows:

INGREDIENTS

• 2 eggs

• 1 C grain  (oats, flour, quinoa)

• 1/2 C dairy  (yogurt, milk, dairy alternative, ricotta)

• 1 fruit/veg  (large banana, sweet potato, 2-3 beets, avocado, 2 handfuls of spinach)

INSTRUCTIONS

Combine the above in a blender or processor. Obvi you should shred a veggie like carrot, or slice a fruit like apple. Add sweetener, salt, and spices to taste. If you’re using a watery ingredient like frozen spinach or citrus, add more grain and one egg yolk. Pulse until totally smooth. Add butter or oil to a griddle on medium-high, and make pancakes like a boss! Tip: flip the nanosecond you see bubbles to retain your pretty color.

EASY!

You’re a magical alchemist! During sheltering, we’ve all made creative strides in the kitchen to avoid going to the store. Chances are you already have the above ingredients, especially since there are countless substitutions. But the hands-down easiest part about this recipe is that you’ve already memorized it. Here’s a variation with high-falutin’ ingredients, as easy as cake:

VT’S PINK PARISIAN PANCAKES

• 2 quail eggs (OK fine, if you’re out, use regular)

• 1 C cooked quinoa

• 1/2 C crème fraîche 

• 1 C shredded beets

• 1 T kosher salt

• 1 t nutmeg

• 1 t clove

• 3 T agave

• Sauce idea: crème fraîche whipped with nutmeg

HEALTHY!

I love tricking children. Specifically, I love tricking children into eating their veggies by hiding them in something that looks cool. I am also vegetable-averse, and can only be coaxed into eating broccoli with accompanying vats of cheese. This recipe craftily engineers every food group in a gestalt that looks and tastes like a carb!

If you have a dietary restriction, making pancakes out of oats, or replacing milk with an alternative is so simple it’s like you’re not even high-maintenance anymore. If you’re vegan, maybe you want to try with a flax egg or whatever you use as an egg sub, and oat milk? Let me know how it goes, you no-longer-high-maintenance vegan, you. 

VT’S GF GREEN DINNER PANCAKES

• 2 eggs

• 1 C oats

• 1/2 C sour cream + handful of shredded cheese or parmigiana

• Several handfuls of spinach + handful of parsley or basil

• 2 T kosher salt

• 1 T pepper

• 1 t nutmeg

• Sauce idea: yoghurt-tahini

YUMMY!

Another clutch benny of this recipe is that you can deftly cater to your taste. For savory recipes, salt and spice will be your tools. For the sweet ones, play around with sugars and sweeteners like maple syrup, honey, and stevia. If there are fussy kids or adults you need to lure to the table, why not add sprinkles? Here’s an old standby that’s gluten-free, sweet, and all-dressed-up:

VT’S GF BANANA DESSERT PANCAKES

1. 2 eggs

2. 1 C oats

3. 1/2 C whole milk

4. 1 large banana

5. 1/4 C nut butter

6. 1 T kosher salt

7. 1 T cinnamon

8. 3 T maple syrup

9. Toppings idea: chocolate chips, coconut flakes, whipped cream, sprinkles

PRETTY!

I’m obsessed with strikingly bright baked goods that are tinctured with natural color. Beets, turmeric, carrots, and greens are as potent as food coloring, impressing food stylists and children at once. Imagine making a rainbow stack of pancakes, pigmenting the spectrum with raspberries, carrots, turmeric, kale, blueberries, and purple potatoes. Here’s a variation with so much natural yellow that it glows, not to mention naturally reducing muscle inflammation:

VT’S SAVORY THAI PANCAKES

• 2 eggs

• 1 C coconut flour

• 1/2 C cashew milk

• 1 cooked sweet potato

• 3 T salt

• 1 T chili or Sriracha®

• 2 T turmeric

• Sauce idea: peanut sauce with crunchy PB, soy sauce, fish oil, and hoisin

Can you recite the ingredients? Repeat “two eggs...one cup grain...half cup dairy...one veg” until you’ve memorized it, and you’re on your way to hiding vegetables into a rainbow of fruit flavors that are super easy, healthy, yummy, and pretty.

Mental Training in the Time of Social Distancing

by Brian Baxter

If you are like me, social distancing is not coming easily. I do enjoy my downtime, but for the most part, as an athlete and a coach, I thrive on my interactions with others. My time spent training, coaching, being coached, and competing with others informs my identity and fuels everything I do, and I imagine most people reading this feel the same way.

But, here we are. And the best thing to do is use this time wisely, so it is coincidentally a perfect time to work on your mental game. In my experience, most athletes and coaches know the importance of confidence, focus, and a strong mindset. Even though they are cognizant that it’s crucial for high level performance, however, dedicating time to mental training often falls down the priority list. Well, now there’s a lot of extra time on most people’s hands, making it the perfect time to take a deeper dive into mental training.

Before I go into some ways to train during this shutdown, I’d like to offer a little background about my field. Sport psychology was “invented” when an Indiana psychologist named Norman Triplett noticed people seemed to cycle faster in groups than when alone. In 1898, he took these ideas into the lab and found that in general, athletes do, in fact, perform better and faster with other people.

CBCG athlete Bindhu Isaac Newell’s impressive meditation skills

In the study’s conclusion he wrote: “We infer that the bodily presence of another contestant participating simultaneously in the race serves to liberate latent energy not ordinarily available.” Here is a copy of his research paper. If you are into that type of thing.

In 1924, another psychologist, Floyd Allport, furthered this research and termed this phenomenon “Social Facilitation.” It basically means that people perform better in the presence of others.*  

Okay, that’s all good and sensible, but now what?  What do we do with this info when, at the moment, we must focus on not being around other people. Social Distancing is enforcing a mutually exclusive ability for Social Facilitation. There’s a reason we workout with friends and teammates: it’s more motivating, more fun, and to quote the research, “...serves to liberate latent energy not ordinarily available.”

Chiefly, athletes will have to think outside the box and come up with creative solutions. The simplest is to find an accountability partner. Find someone with whom you can share your goals and workouts, and check in frequently.  You can take this a step further and set up virtual workouts through FaceTime, Facebook or Instagram, all of which have video calling. Maybe the most effective thing you can do is find an online group to work with (Believe me there are tons of them out there!  Check out this live online Soccer Workout for example, and also all the CBCG programming of The Endurance School found on our Twitch channel. 

But more importantly, it would be invaluable to use this gift of extra time to train your mind. While it’s great to use the benefits of Social Facilitation, one of the goals of sport psychology is to build that motivation and gain skills to be able to push yourself without the help of outside factors. Perhaps capitalizing on this time to learn and practice skills like visualization and goal setting. Here are three practical ways you can develop a better mindset:

Take a Sports Mindset Inventory - Take this downtime to reflect who you are as an athlete, especially how it relates to your mindset.  Answer questions like: What are my distractions? What things build and break down my confidence? How do I handle adversity? What can I do to get better?  What things motivate and de-motivate me? Knowing the answers to these questions are important for the next tip.

CBCG Partner and Coach Molly Balfe is halfway through her current journal!

Set New Goals - During an unknown time like this, one thing that is known: the goals you had previously are going to change. Maybe not much, but they will change. The amount of training, the time period for which you want to achieve certain goals, and more. Setting goals around mental training and improving on your confidence, focus, mindset and motivation can now move into the forefront.

Practice Visualization - Visualization is an amazing, but under-utilzed tool in an athlete's arsenal. Visualization is basically a controlled daydream in which you imagine yourself performing a task, skill or event. Beyond just vision, it incorporates all five senses. Visualization is such a powerful tool, track and field athlete Marylin King came in 2nd in the Olympic trials in her event after being hospitalized from a car accident.

Undertaking these three techniques can help you mentally train while you can’t train physically. And, of course we don’t know when, but the Coronavirus will run its course, so we are back to normal training and competitions, where will you be, mentally? 

Remember finally to take care of yourself on a mental and emotional level. These times are unprecedented, and so many are suffering for so many reasons.  Keeping up your exercise is essential even more so these days. And definitely don’t do it alone! We are all in this together. Do not hesitate to reach out to your coach for advice or inspiration. To have them help you with the goal setting piece, and to point you in the right direction.  

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Want to amplify your mental game while sheltering? Check out the online AMPlify Your Game six-level program. Are you mentally strong enough to graduate? And, of course, you can contact Brian himself for options for one-to-one coaching. Stay healthy, happy, and strong, and we’ll see you on Twitch for The Endurance School!

Welcome to The Endurance School, CBCG's Virtual Training Community!

What is The Endurance School?

The Endurance School is an online triathlon portal for live and on-demand virtual training sessions. Sessions are broadcast through Twitch (a subsidiary of Amazon) and coached by your CBCG coaches. We offer spin, yoga, and strength training as well as informational Q&A sessions and interviews. Our aim is to build on the virtual triathlon community and to provide high quality training sessions to our athletes in their own homes.

How can I participate?

Follow us on Twitch! You can either download the app, or create an account at: www.twitch.tv For the desktop site, you have logged in, navigate to: https://www.twitch.tv/theenduranceschool Click on the heart icon in the upper right corner to follow our twitch channel. This is where our virtual events will live - make sure you bookmark this page so you can find it later. For the ap, download the following Twitch icon, create your profile, and tap the video to view the heart and follow us.

How much does it cost?

That’s really up to you! We know that this is a tough financial time for everyone and our first priority is providing our community with some training structure during this chaotic time. For now, we are leaving all of our live and archived training sessions available at no cost to anyone who needs them. That said, like most small businesses, we’re facing a difficult road ahead. If you want to and are able to contribute, there are a few ways to do so:

1. Subscribe to our channel – Twitch has three subscription tiers ($4.99, $9.99, and $24.99 per month) to help viewers support the channels they follow. You can subscribe by going to www.twitch.tv/theenduranceschool and clicking on the purple “Subscribe” button in the upper right corner. **Important Note** If you have an Amazon Prime membership, you can register for a free Twitch Prime account. This allows you to subscribe to one channel FOR FREE every month. Your subscription will expire every 30 days, but you can re-subscribe as many times as you want. To register for your free Twitch Prime account, just go to www.twitchprime.com. You can then subscribe for free on our page.

2. Cheer with Bits – Twitch has a unique system for making donations. If you want to donate for a class you took or cheer for a moment you enjoyed, you can do so by cheering with bits. Every bit is worth 1 cent, so 1000 bits would be $10. There are two ways to donate this way:

   • Select the Bits icon in the chat entry window (it looks like a gem and is right next to the smiley emoji). Select the amount you want to donate and hit enter.

   • You can also simply type “cheer” into chat and the number of bits that you want to donate. For example, typing “cheer1000” would donate 1000 bits (or $10).

What type of training do you offer?

So glad you asked! We are really excited about the training sessions we’ve cooked up. Here is our weekly schedule:

And here is a guide to the different classes: 

Morning Routine – This class was designed with the whole athlete in mind. Focus on your physical and mental wellbeing with 40 minutes of the basic strength you never do, 10 minutes of meditation, and 10 minutes of journaling about goals and gratitude. necessary equipment – a tennis ball and journal or something to write on

Sufferfest® Spin – We are partnering with Sufferfest® to offer 60-minute weekday sessions focused on high-intensity intervals. These classes are fun and social, but will give you the challenge you need to help you get faster and stronger on the bike. necessary equipment – a bike and a trainer

Endurance Spin – Our 90-minute weekend sessions will focus on improving your sport-specific endurance. necessary equipment – a bike and a trainer

Endurance School Master Class - One of our goals at The Endurance School is to equip athletes with the tools they need to master their own training and performance. In our Master Class we dive into essential topics we believe athletes should know to help you train and race smarter.

Community Spotlight - Come learn about how people and companies are innovating during this difficult time. Endurance athletes are resilient and inspirational; each week we’ll feature the best things they’re doing to stay stronger, faster, and happier.

Swim Fit – Our pools are closed and open water is still chilly in most of north America. Join us for a 30 minute strength and flexibility session focused on retaining your swim-specific fitness and making sure you’re ready to dive back in. necessary equipment – stretch cords or bands

Yoga – Take some time to focus on functional movement and flexibility with our yoga session for endurance athletes. Come unwind the work you’ve done so you’re ready to crush your next workout. necessary equipment – none

Thank you so much for your interest in The Endurance School! We hope to see you at an online session soon.