I have heard it a million times: a triathlete tells me “I swam and swam but it never changed my time, so I just stopped swimming.” I really feel for this athlete, since they are clearly frustrated, but there’s a better way to train for triathlon. In this show we walk through:

1. What goes into effective endurance training in the first place

2. How neglecting your swim hurts your overall triathlon performance

3. How you should actually train to improve your swim performances

Swim Smooth Coaches Directory for Video Swim Analysis: https://www.swimsmooth.com/find-a-coach

RSVP for Chris’ lecture about what holds swimmers back: https://bendtriathlonclub.com/event-coaching

One of the hardest skills for any endurance athlete to master is pacing, and when you’re running a hilly event or participating in a bike race with a lot of elevation changes, pacing gets more difficult.

In this episode, Chris walks through the pitfalls athletes often fall into, the biggest of which is the “fly and die” approach where the athlete hopes to “bank” time by running harder or faster early in the race, hoping that when they inevitably slow down (because they went harder than they trained to run) that the time they banked will still keep them within their goal.

Sadly the endurance gods know what you are up to and will exact a cost in return…plus interest. In less nerdy terms this is called “blowing up.” Chris offers advice on how to avoid this ignominious fate and provides an example from the Portland Shamrock Run, where one of his athletes paced the race to perfection. You can see that athlete’s workout file below.

“Progressive Overload” is a topic that gets tossed around a lot in endurance circles, but, just as with other topics like “FTP” or “core strength” or “recovery,” progressive overload is more nuanced and complex than it first appears.

At it’s most basic application, progressive overload is “the steady and systematic increase in training load in order to continually force an athlete’s body to adapt and develop in the ways we want it to develop,” but how we apply that concept can get hairy pretty quickly.

In this episode, Chris defines the term, walks through different methods of measuring training load, explains the mechanism for getting your body to “adapt and develop,” and then offers practical suggestions of how to incorporate progressive overload into your own training or coaching of others. He rounds out the show with different subjective markers you can track in order to discover if your training is working or not, and when you should assess that training.

If you want to use Chris’ totally bonkers Session RPE training load calculator, you can find that here: https://tinyurl.com/bdekecsr