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Was My First Win Repeatable? Racing Again 14 Days Later · The Endurance Athlete Journey

• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome everyone to the Endurance Athlete Journey Podcast.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Coach Justin.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: This is episode 123.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to be talking about my race recap from the giant acorn triathlon festival that was this past weekend at Lake Anna State Park.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: And this was another just incredible weekend of racing, pushing the body to the limits, seeing what kind of tank I've got.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I can say that I ended the weekend with a full and grateful heart.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I can't wait to tell you the story.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: This is Saturday morning.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: I raced the Olympic Aqua Bike on Saturday, which is a 1,500-meter swim along with a 25-mile bike ride.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Rolling hills, rough road, high winds, because we had a massive nor'easter storm that was blowing off of the coast.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: But luckily we were inland, but we can still feel the wind, and it was up.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: So picture this Saturday morning.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: We're getting into the lake, and the day before the lake was nice and fairly calm.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: The wind was starting to pick up a little bit, but it looked nice from the shore.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I line up, I'm in there, I'm in the crowd, adrenaline's pumping, I'm ready to swim.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I had just come off of a what I think is was a fantastic race just two weeks ago at the Patriot race weekend.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: It was the very same format, different course, same format.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: Olympic aquabike on Saturday with a sprint triathlon on Sunday.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: I was doing the exact same thing this week.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm ready to swim.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: I felt like the Patriot race gave me a big boost of confidence.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: I swam it clean, I swam it fast, swam it hard, and I was excited to kind of see what I got.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: I've been noticing some significant improvements in my swims lately, and I wanted to see if it would materialize in open water.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: I hear the guy say, go, and I'm running into the water, walking until I can get to the point where I can start swimming and I dive into the water.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: I swim probably a hundred meters, maybe a hundred and fifty meters.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: And just out of nowhere, the chop came and it was lifting me up out of the water.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: It was extremely frustrating.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: This was a wetsuit legal swim, which was not like Patriot, where it was warmer, and I had really good body position in the water, which actually makes the chop a little bit more challenging because you're sitting up in the water and you're rising up with it and it's throwing your breathing off.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I was immediately frustrated.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: I was saying, I was kept thinking to myself, man, I really wanted to see what kind of fitness I have.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I really wanted just really good conditions in order to really observe that fitness.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I felt like I'm not going to be able to see that today.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to have to swim this differently than what I would have liked.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I was immediately frustrated.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: And it was hard to see, it was hard to sight.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: I got off course a couple times because the wind was just pushing me off course.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so I had to correct a couple times on the way back.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: So it was basically a big triangle.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I made the first turn, which I was thankful for, and swam across and then made the next turn.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: When you make that next turn, the side that I breathed to was staring right into the sun.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: The sun was just right off of the horizon.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so every turn, every rotation that I took to grab my breath, I was just staring into this big ball of fire, which basically throws your eyesight completely off.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: So sighting was almost impossible on the way back to shore.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: And you're trying to find these buoys and your eyes are adjusting because you just stared into the sun.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: And it was needless to say, it was pretty frustrating.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: But the goggles that I'm using now are fantastic.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: I absolutely love these goggles.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: So it did help slightly.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: But I was swimming blind, effectively, for half of that swim as I was staring into the sun.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: But the one thing that I will say, and the reason that I tell you this story, is because as soon as these waves were hitting me, and it was hard to get in a breath, got smacked in the face a couple times with some waves, so I couldn't get a clean breath.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Took in some water a little bit, and my mind immediately went to a race that I had done earlier in the year in June.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: It was called the Jamestown Olympic Trathlon that was in Williamsburg, Virginia, also part of the Kinetic Multi-sports series.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: And it was the exact same condition.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: I started swimming.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: It was also wetsuit legal, and the waves were just tossing me around.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I wasn't ready for it.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: I had good butt swim fitness.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: I knew I was prepared for the effort.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: I just was not prepared for the waves.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of my open water swims were is in a local river that's here where I live.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: And there were no conditions during my training that would replicate that.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I can honestly say during that Jamestown Olympic race, that was only maybe 500 meters of the race.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I seriously questioned within those 500 meters if this was going to be my first DNF.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I was just floored.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so as I'm swimming now in Lake Anna, my mind immediately goes to that situation.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I can honestly say that I believe that God gave me that race to prepare me mentally for what I was going to experience at Giant Acorn.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: I was frustrated, yes, but I did not let it consume me.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't let it redirect my mind.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: And all I knew was that look, I got through Jamestown.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: I know how to swim in this.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: I know how to adjust my breathing.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: I know how to adjust my swim stroke in order to accommodate for these less than ideal conditions.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I was just kept telling myself that was the experience that I needed for this moment right now.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: So what did I learn then that I can apply now?
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: And then I put my head down and just went after it.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: I do bel that really calmed me almost to where I wasn't as frustrated anymore.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: I felt more in control and I just kept swimming.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't swim it as clean as I did at the Patriot race, but I did swim strong.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: The soreness that I felt in my shoulders the next morning or even later that day really kind of confirmed afterwards that I, yeah, I swam hard.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I finished that swim in 32 minutes and 50 seconds.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: Really proud of that.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: But I think the main takeaway from this story was that race day doesn't necessarily give you an opportunity to show your true fitness because we all can't have these perfect conditions that allow us to really truly see what we have.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: But what it does give you is it gives you opportunities to see how you can adjust and really take into account that the like a faster swim time doesn't necessarily mean that I had the best swim.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: I can say that my swim time was a little slower, but it was still a pretty solid swim for my fitness and my and the issues that I deal with my shoulders.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: But the the time doesn't really tell the story.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: I think that the story tells the story on the conditions and the atmosphere and how I had to adjust, and really I had to just put my head down and just start charging forward, knowing that I may not get to see the fitness that I think would give me the validation that I was looking for, but the experience gave me the validation that I needed.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: It did show me my resilience, and I think looking back, that swim really represents what this entire weekend became for me.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Two weeks later, I raised, or two weeks earlier, I raised the Patriot.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: It gave me my first ever win at the Aqua Bike for the Olympic Aqua Bike.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'd never gotten first place in any race I've ever done.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: So this was my first win.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this gave me the validation that I was looking for that uh experience wasn't just a one-off moment and just a good race.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: And as I get as I go through how this race materialized, you'll see what I mean by that.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: So as I was saying, two weeks earlier, I did the Olympic aquabike on a Saturday, sprint on a Sunday, and I think the question that I came away from that experience was can I compete?
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I did the the Patriot race recap, and that was episode 119 back in the library.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: So if you want to if you want, you can go back and check out that episode and hear all about that race.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: But there's three lessons that I learned in that experience, and it's all about preparedness.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: So the first level of preparedness that I would say is are you prepared to complete?
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: The next one is the level of preparedness to perform, and the last one is the level of preparedness to compete.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I feel like I I'm definitely prepared to complete.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: The way that I structure my training, I really work hard to be prepared to perform, but I don't necessarily structure my training in a way that allows me to be prepared to compete.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is that's what Patriot taught me was that yes, I can perform, but if I want to get better, I need to find a way to take this to the next step and be prepared to compete.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: So based on that experience, I went into Giant Acorn with this thought, and is that I really don't know that I've I I haven't added any more fitness because it was the sh the time was really short between these two races.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like I raced Patriot, then there was like a a week of kind of a recovery with a little bit of a ramp up at the end, and then I immediately went into another race week, and so I don't feel like I actually tapered tapered like I would like I had planned.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: So I went back and I looked at kind of how I was going to approach this taper and I made an adjustment to it, and I said, actually, since I performed well at the Patriot, let's go ahead and use the exact same taper that I used for Patriot and just copy that down and use it for giant acorn, which actually means that my volume during race week for giant acorn was actually a little bit higher than the volume I had between the two races.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: So it actually ramped up a little bit.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: And the question that I was going into this race was with was do I have it to where I can show up on race day and compete and not just perform?
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: So can I do this again after peeking at Patriot?
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: Can I turn right around and two weeks later try and peek again?
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: And was I going to be recovered enough to really answer this question that I had?
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: And is could I take this to the next level?
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to be honest about the expectations or the goals that I had heading into this race.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't going there just hoping for a decent weekend.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: That that definitely is not what I was looking for.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: My goal on Saturday was to win the Olympic bike, aqua bike again.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: So take first.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: The goal that I had for the sprint, and I was racing in the Clydesdale division, was I ideally I wanted to win that division or at least get second.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I felt like that is where I was at.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to see if I could pull this off because then if I could achieve I could if I could get this, then it would answer my question that I'm able to compete and not just perform.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: So Patriot really did increase my confidence, but it also increased my expectations, and I wanted to validate the performance that I saw just two weeks prior.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: Again, I was trying to answer this question is like, was Patriot just a one-off kind of thing?
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: Was it just one great weekend, or is my training actually taking me in the direction of being able to compete?
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: And what does my fitness actually look like?
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: And is it repeatable?
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: Not just can I pull this off one day?
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: I love this sport, it is part of who I am.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's not who I am, but it's part of who I am because I've been doing this for a long time, and I really love the way that it has proven to me time and time again that I am more capable of things than what I think I am, and it just makes me feel good.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't necessarily need good performance in order to feel good because I love the journey.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: I love the build.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: I actually love the journey, I love the training more than I actually like race day.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: But race day is the test.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's you've been going to school all semester and you've been doing the homework, and now you've got to take your final exam.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: And it's test time to show what it is that you've learned.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the way that I view my training.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: And others, my wife and my son and friends, they sacrifice just as much as I do, if not more.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: What my wife has to sacrifice in order for me to be available to do the stuff that that I feel like I need to do and want to do and support me along the way, doesn't go unnoticed, and I'm grateful for that.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: But she sacrifices, and so I want to perform well for her so that she doesn't feel like, oh, you just really just stink.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: You should find something else to do, and maybe these sacrifices just aren't worth it.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: Because I'll give you some insight into what this training is like.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: I am a I'm a high volume guy.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: I I love I love high volume training.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: There is intensity within the training plan, but I just love it.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: So as a reference, this training block was I think this was a 12-week block that started back in July.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: And this race was late September, and then two weeks prior was the Patriot race.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: So this was about a 12-week training block for these four races, effectively.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I put in just shy of 160 hours of training.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: The final three weeks before the Patriot race, I had close to 15 hours average per week.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: There was not a single rest day in this training plan because I sequenced my workouts in such a way that allows me to recover, still carrying fatigue, which is what I want, because these races that I was preparing for, I was gonna have to do race efforts under fatigue.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's not like I was going into the Sunday sprint fresh and ready to roll.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: I was carrying fatigue from a really hard effort the day before during the Olympic aqua bikes.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: And in order to prepare myself either physically or mentally and how to handle that, I had to, I felt like I needed to carry that similar kind of approach and really build the fatigue and manage it because I was going to have to learn how to still perform under those conditions.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: Those 14 days between the Patriot race and the A and the giant acorn, I wasn't looking for building more fitness because effectively you can't really build another level of fitness in those 14 days.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: So the way that I approached it was I spent a couple days recovering with some fairly easy workouts, and then allowed the volume to progress again.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so it was like recover, reload, reload with some intensity, and then sharpen the blade, and then go into a little bit of a taper again.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: And this wasn't just race, rest for two weeks, and then race again.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: There were workouts during those two weeks that I was questioning, okay, this this bike is feeling pretty hard right now, or this this trainer workout is feeling really hard.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: Is this too hard?
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because as a result of the performance at Patriot, I actually adjusted my FTP and raised it significantly from where I've been training because the data was validating that what that should be where I am training.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: I've been training under where I should be, and so zone four efforts really weren't zone four efforts.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: They were kind of like zone three.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so taking this up a notch during these 14 days and actually adjusting these power zones up really made the bike workouts a lot more challenging than what I was used to.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was questioning, okay, am I doing this right?
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I but I stuck with it.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: This gives you a little bit of insight in what I was thinking and what I was doing for these 14 days between these two race efforts, and the idea of taper really is unique to the situation.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: Not every taper is the same, not everybody tapers the same way.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: So even if I have an athlete that I'm working with, we don't necessarily use the same taper every single time.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: So consistency matters.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: How much fatigue are you carrying?
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: What's the nutrition like?
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: How are you sleeping?
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: Are there any issues that we're kind of dealing with that maybe we need some extra race rest going on?
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: So we might need to taper a little bit more aggressively.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: All of those things have to be taken into account when it comes to planning a taper.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the taper that I use for Patriots really worked, and I felt fantastic going into Patriot.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: So that's why I felt comfortable using it again and said, let me just test this again.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: And see if it really worked.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: If it works again.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: I want to see if this might be a pretty solid way to structure it, a way to think about it, a way to sequence the workouts.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I can say I felt really good going into giant acorn, so I feel like the taper was appropriate.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: I think it gave me the intensity that I was looking for to still have some solid race efforts in there, but controlling the effort in terms of duration to not stack on more fatigue because the goal of the taper is to actually shed fatigue.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: But I went through a bit of a recovery period the week before.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I'd already shed some fatigue.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: Saturday, I had a long ride, and I was planning to go about an hour and fifty minutes with a short little brick run off of the bike.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: I ended up going about 20 minutes longer than I had planned and rode for about two hours and ten minutes.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: I felt strong, I felt fast, but I wasn't pushing the effort.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so I saw really good performance on Saturday.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: So that told me that yes, I'm back.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: My body's ready.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: My legs were just chomping at the bit to just to get back to it, and they were ready.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: They were primed and ready to go.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: And the brick run went really well, and I was telling myself from my experience at the Patriot that I really need to get to the point where I run well off of the bike and start to pick up the effort so that I can compete and not just perform.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the way that I want to describe that is performance to me would be oh, we negative split the run or we had a progressive run where each mile was subsequently faster than the previous.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: To me, that's perf that's performance.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, competing is can I do this in such a way that actually puts me on the podium relative to what everybody else is doing?
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's the piece that I'm still missing.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: And can I get there to the point where I'm starting to run more efficiently and run running faster because that's where I'm losing podiums, is on the run.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: I can hang on the swim, the bike is where I pull ahead, but all of the gains that I make on the bike are quickly eaten away by the run.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's something that I'm working on going forward is trying to hone that skill.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: Looking back over these 12 weeks of training for this, I have to be transparent.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if I would coach another athlete the same way that I coach myself.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: I do tend to be a lot more conservative with my athletes than I do with me, which makes sense, honestly.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: I know that I tolerate substantial volume and I do tend to push.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: But I do question some things like okay, the bike load and the intensity, should I have made that adjustment because of my FTP adjustment as well?
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: What should I have done?
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: Should I have done it differently?
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: And the thing that I walk away with is that successful outcomes doesn't necessarily mean that every decision was optimal.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so the amount of training that you can absorb isn't necessarily the amount that produces the best adaptation.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: So the reason that I've that I say this is because I've already signed up for my first A race in 2027.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm waiting to really put that out there on the podcast later because there's stuff that I'm still working on.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: But I am can I've already started programming that training plan, and I'm using a very different training model, and I want to see if this new training model can actually allow for more adaptation.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: Is the way that I've approached training for these number of years for myself, has it been optimal?
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen good performance, and I haven't I'm not over-training because I'm still at the point where I'm not non-functionally overreaching, but it's still a functional overreach, and I'm doing progressive overloads, and so everything is telling me that my body is handling it well.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: Are there things that I have to do in order to be purposeful with my recovery?
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: Every athlete should so this new training model that I'm thinking about, will it lead to more successful outcomes because the dis this decision is more optimal?
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: I do know that I'm getting older, and so maybe I have to think of training differently at my age compared to the way that I thought about it when I was in my 30s and early 40s.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm in my late 40s going into my 50s, and maybe I have to change, but we'll see.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: So let's get into kind of the nuts and bolts of the Saturday aqua bike race.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: Previous episodes I've talked about kind of like what I've dealt with.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: I had a torn rotator cuff that's been surgically repaired.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: I have a bicep tendon that was relocated in that same surgery.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: They scoped out the arthritis in the shoulder, but during the recovery period, I developed frozen shoulder, and it's taken me well over almost two years now to get to the point where I can raise my arm above my shoulder or above my head.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: I still can't get it there regularly without assistance sometimes.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's super tight, and I just got to work on it, get it loose, but then it eventually starts to cooperate.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_00: So the question that I've got for myself is what is the swim volume that is optimal for my situation?
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: I don't I can't have a textbook swim stroke because I can't get my body into that position.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: So, can I be efficient with the position that I am able to get in?
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: And how much volume can my body absorb in order to see improvement?
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm seeing it, I'm seeing glimpses of some faster swim times.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: I'm handling some of the intensity that I've put back in because I removed a lot of the intensity from my swim workouts because I was just looking to complete the swim.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: I just needed the volume in order to get through it.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so I wasn't necessarily focused on performance in the water.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: I was looking for a level of preparedness that allowed me to complete the swim effectively and efficiently and efficiently so that it didn't take a lot out of me in order to perform on the bike and the run.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I didn't want to start my day behind the eight ball.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so I structured my swim training to get me there.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: But lately I've made some adjustments and I'm starting to throw in some intensity and some descending intervals in order to try and get some speed back into my swim.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I was like, okay, now I've got the endurance, I've got the strength, now let's start to overlay some speed on top of it and see how my body works to absorb it and see how it responds.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so far it's responding really well.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so this swim at Giant Acorn really showed me that the training is working.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm seeing a lot better body position, working on swim cadence, so I'm really dialing in on that skill set, and I'm seeing a better cadence, stronger swimming.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that that I've been telling myself is I felt strong, ready to race.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: The giant acorn gave me the lesson that I handle difficult open water conditions a lot better than I have in the past, and so that's really fantastic, and I love that.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: I love seeing it.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: I'm finding that this swim progress isn't just getting me faster, it's making me harder to disrupt.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I can be put into challenging conditions and I can find a way to refocus my mind, and I I like that observation, and I find that to be a huge win, even though the time may not be representative of my fitness, but it is representative of my fitness under those conditions.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_00: So let's head off into the bike.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: So I got out of the got out of the lake, ran into transition, fast transition.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: I've been really working on that because I'm finding I'm also losing ground on the podium chase in transition.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: So this is effectively free speed.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: So if I if you can find a way to become more efficient in transition, then your overall race time is going to be faster.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so I went out on the ride, I went out on the ride.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_00: This is a pretty challenging bike course.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: So it's I think it's about 1,100 feet of elevation game, but it's only over 25 miles.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of ups and downs, rough road, lots of potholes, so you have to be super aware the whole time.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: You have to be dialed in.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: You cannot be just zoning out and just kind of looking around, even though it would be nice to kind of take in the scenery a little bit.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: Those roads force you to be present and right on top of it.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: You also had a lot of wind on race day because of this nor'easter that was blowing through the area.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: So there's nothing more frustrating and deflating than going up a hill in a headwind.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, that that's definitely something that is mentally challenging and can be frustrating if you're just repeatedly having to deal with it.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: But I knew that the way that I've trained on the bike is I've put myself in those situations.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: So really early in the season, maybe around the March and April time periods, I ride in areas where there's high wind.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I ride right around some farmland, which means that the trees are clear, and so the wind can really swirl and really kind of come at you from all different angles.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so I've really made it a point to have that in my training plan to really hone in on those skills on how to ride in the wind.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: And the key is just to try and stay as small as you can possibly get, stay arrow, be efficient, but that's challenging when you're riding a hilly course and trying to stay arrow.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: So what you have to what you what I had to do was I had to come out of Arrow.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_00: My performance at Patriot showed me that I could ride smooth and consistent.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if if to go back into that data, at the Patriot, I had my average power was 240 watts.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: My normalized power was 255 watts.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'll do a quick explanation on what this is.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_00: Normalized power is the physiological toll of the effort, and the average power is the output that you get from that exertion.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: So if your normalized power is higher than your average power, then that means that you're kind of surgy, which means that the effort is really high, but you're not really efficient in getting all of the benefits of performing that high.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_00: So you want that that ratio of a normalized power to average power to be close to one, which means that you're smooth and consistent.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_00: I had that at Patriot.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_00: It was as smooth as I've ever been.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: Giant Acorn was a completely different story.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: I knew from the terrain that I was not going to be able to be that smooth and consistent because I didn't feel like the terrain was going to allow me to be that way.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: I could ride it that way, but the strategy that I had going into it was that I don't have to run off of the bike.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I could be a little bit more inefficient on the bike and just strike that match because I don't have to save anything for the run.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: So Giant Acorn, I saw I had an average power of 233 watts.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: So I was slightly lower than what I was at Patriot, but my normalized power was significantly higher than the normalized power that I had at Patriot, which is a fairly flat and fast course.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: Giant Acorn is not flat and fast, so I wasn't as efficient, but it definitely is not an easier ride.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: So my speed at Giant Acorn was slower than the speed that I had at Patriot, but speed is not performance.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_00: When we race, we want to try and finish the race as quickly as possible, yes.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: But speed is the not is just not the only piece of the puzzle that determines whether you had a good performance.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: Using these other pieces of data, both quantitative and qualitative, provide a more well-rounded picture, a more complete picture of performance.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_00: My speed was lower at Giant Acorn than it was at Patriot.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: Does that mean that I didn't perform as well?
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: I don't believe so.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: Given the wind, the terrain, the types of roads that we were on, the condition.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: My normalized power tells me that I rode hard and I had really good performance, but I just couldn't observe it in terms of speed.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I am happy with the way that it came out.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_00: I knew my power was gonna be a little bit more volatile than I saw at the Patriot, but I didn't think it was avoidable.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_00: But I knew that I was just I was gonna have to I was gonna have to go into the hurt locker a little bit in this, and I knew that coming going into it, and as soon as I started hitting those hills, I was like, this is what I thought I was going to have to experience, and so I was ready.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_00: I I got off the bike with not much left.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: I definitely don't think that I could have run well.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: Could I have run?
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe, but I definitely could not have ran well.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: But I felt similar coming off of the bike at Giant Acorn than I did at the Patriot, and so that tells me that the performances were fairly close, even though the metrics tell a little bit of a different story.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_00: And bottom line was I ended up taking second in the Olympic aquabike, and my wife was outside of transition, and I had just come in off the bike, and she was looking at the results, and she yelled over to me.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_00: She's like, You're in second.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I have to be honest, that I rolled my eyes and I was frustrated because I had just come off of a first place finish and I really wanted it.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_00: Why was I frustrated?
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_00: Because I wanted to win, and I think that this is an important distinction that I have to make is that I was grateful for my performance.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_00: I was proud of my performance.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_00: I believe I had the result that God wanted me to have, but that doesn't mean that I stopped wanting to win.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I can be grateful for what he decides I deserve and what he gives me.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_00: I can be grateful for that and be competitive at the same time.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_00: So even though my initial reaction to the news that I was second on the podium was less than grateful, the the fact that over the past two years I've started to see this kind of performance is really humbling.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I have to make sure that I keep myself there.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_00: I have to keep myself in a heartfelt posture of gratefulness that this could easily just stop at any time.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: So the fact that I've been working so hard and I'm seeing the performance from it, when I don't win, or I don't get what it is that I really want, but I get something that's just as good, I have to reset myself a little bit and say, nope, yes, I wanted to win, and I want to be competitive, and I want to compete and I want to do well, but I have to be humble and grateful for what it is that I do get, even though it may not match my expectation or my desires.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so I go into every single race now, and I have been for quite a while now, after all the surgeries and everything else, and the questions on whether I was going to be able to continue to do this and do what I love, and to do what's been such a huge part of my life for so long.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_00: Those questions were swirling around in my mind.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_00: Can I do this?
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_00: Am I going to be allowed to do this?
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm in pain all the time, and I don't know if I can take this.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm ready to compete, I'm ready to perform, or I'm ready to complete.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't matter the level of preparedness.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_00: It is what it is.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_00: The results are what they are.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I can't control who shows up on race day, but I can control how I execute and where and how I react and how I respond.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I can I'm the one that has to be in control of my expectations and the gratefulness that I have every single time I'm allowed to do this.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_00: So that was the end of Saturday.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: And kind of the stuff that I did in between the races, because even though Saturday was done, I wasn't done racing.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_00: I had to turn around on the next day on Sunday and do this all over again and do a sprint where I was going to have to run.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I knew I was going to have to have a little bit of a different strategy.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_00: I knew the bike was going to be very similar in terms of effort.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_00: I knew I couldn't ride it as hard as I did for the aquabike, but I knew the conditions were going to be pretty pretty similar.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_00: Luckily, the wind had died down a little bit, so we didn't have that going against us, but the road conditions are still the same.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_00: The terrain was pretty much the same, even though it was a shortened course, they still found plenty of hills for us to march up and down on.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely love them.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: Fantastic product.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_00: At an addrabar, three clementines, uh, a chomp meat stick, and some electrolytes.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_00: And really the goal is just carbohydrates, protein, fluids, sodium, to start that recovery quickly in order to refill anything that I depleted in order to stockpile that stuff and get it ready for the next day.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_00: At the venue, I brought my stick roller and I was rolling out my legs in order to really reduce the soreness that I was going to that I knew was going to be coming later.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so I needed to get that started.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't want to wait until I was tight and sore in order to start.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I immediately started doing that.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_00: When we got back to the condo that we were staying at, or the little efficiency that we were, I had some some rice and some chicken.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_00: I had a rice and chicken bowl and just I took a pretty solid nap.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: I felt I couldn't have kept my eyes open if you had paid me.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_00: And but I got the food down, I jumped into the To the Normatech boots for a short period of time because that nap really ate into my recovery time.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_00: I just ran out of time and I couldn't get in and do some some shoulder therapy and some hip recovery in the Normatech system either.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_00: So I really focused on what it is that I did have time for and prioritized it.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_00: But when you're racing again on consecutive days, recovery isn't what happens after the race.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_00: Recovery is the first discipline of tomorrow's race.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so sometimes this perfect recovery plan doesn't fit in real life.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_00: So and in order to be purposeful with it, you have to prioritize and put those those high priority things up at the top and say, okay, if I can't do all of it, what's the most important thing that I can do and do that well?
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's what I had to do that evening because I didn't want to stay up super late and trying to get recovery and lose sleep over it because I knew that sleep was just was way more important than like doing some shoulder therapy and getting some compression therapy on my hips in order to be able to run the next day off the bike.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I got to bed a decent hour and just really passed out and slept great.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_00: Sunday morning, I woke up, I felt surprisingly good.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_00: Legs, I was feeling the Saturday the previous day's effort, but they weren't destroyed.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so to be honest with you, I didn't feel very different than what I normally feel just through normal training fatigue.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the reason why I want to emphasize this is that consistent training means tired legs aren't unfamiliar.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_00: So training doesn't make fatigue disappear, it makes fatigue familiar.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's why we taper is to try and shed that fatigue as much as we possibly can so that we feel as fresh as possible on race day.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_00: But fatigue is part of the game, and you just have to figure out how to manage that fatigue.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_00: Can't allow it to grow out of control, but you have to learn how to perform under fatigue.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's one of the important things that I find when I work with athletes is that we just we have to learn this fatigue management.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_00: We have to learn on what is it that we have to do in order to still perform and know that the performance that we see during training isn't necessarily going to be the performance that we see on race day because we are under fatigue.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_00: So if you see like your times are getting slower and all that kind of stuff, you are starting to see some degradation in performance.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that you're getting unfit, so it's not that you're losing fitness, it means that you're gaining fatigue.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so you have to find a way to manage that.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_00: Saturday on Sunday, I spent some time working on my shoulders at the venue, doing some extra stretching and things just to try and get that soreness out of there so I could go in and swim hard during the sprint.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_00: I knew it was going to be a shorter distance, so I could swim a little bit harder than I swam on Saturday, and I was just hoping that the wind had died down enough to where we weren't going to see the same level of chop.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_00: Luckily, we had some cloudy skies on Sunday, so we didn't have to stare into the big ball of fire as we were swimming through the course, so that was a little bit of a reprieve.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_00: The wind was down, and we didn't have the same level of chop in the water.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that from my swim performance, I actually swam it in about 16 minutes flat and swam according to my garment.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_00: I was about 782 meters, which is a tad bit long from the 750, but I've seen worse in terms of my accuracy and being able to hold the line.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_00: But I got through another hard swim, the shoulders held up, I recovered well, and so that that's another big boost of confidence that maybe I can handle some additional swim volume and training in my body seems to be getting stronger and building more adaptation, and that I'm actually making progress.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_00: That gives me something to look forward to during the off season and during the build for the next race.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_00: So on to the bike.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_00: I had 233 watts from my average power, 274 watts of normalized power.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_00: Sunday I rolled around shorter, shorter course and got in about I was about 239 watts of average power and 277 watts of normalized power.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_00: So my power was actually higher on Sunday than it was on Saturday.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_00: So my body handled the intensity really well and recovered, and I was able to perform really well the next day.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I essentially produced similar physiological demand on my body across those two days.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I didn't see a degradation in performance on Sunday because of the hard effort on Saturday.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_00: I actually saw a slight improvement.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what this is showing me is my bike durability and the depth of my fitness on the bike, but I know that there's still some things that I need to learn and work on is that the power was still really highly variable, and really how much of that was unavoidable, how much of it was from the conditions in terms of the course of the terrain and the wind, and how much what could I have done to maybe be a little bit smoother and still have seen good performance.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the reason that I say that is because as I go forward, my my goal is to get into longer racing.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_00: So the 70.3 distance race, this is going to play an important part is getting that efficiency dialed in so that I can run well off of the bike.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_00: So the question that I have going into the offseason and what Giant Acorn showed me was not just how much power can I produce, but really how efficiently can I produce the right power and still be able to run afterwards.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now I can't use the aqua bike races as evidence of this question or provide insight into answering this question because the run is not there.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I have I ride very differently for the aqua bike than I do for the triathlon, which is reasonable because my goal in 2027 is to hopefully get a spot on Team USA for the aqua bike.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so I really wanted to see what I was capable of with just those two events to where I didn't have to worry about holding back for the run.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's given me some really good insight.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like I said, Patriot gave me first overall for the division, and then the next race, and 14 days later, I grabbed second place.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so on a very different course, a lot more challenging, just a different style of riding.
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I showed myself that I could ride one way and then turn right around and then ride a completely different way the next time and still see solid performance and still perform and compete.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_00: So that really does give me a big boost of confidence in the bike, and it tells me that the training is working and is going well, and so we're just gonna have to progress from there.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_00: So now coming off of the bike on Sunday, like I said, I had to ride it differently because I couldn't be as aggressive on the bike and still feel like I could perform well on the run because I knew the run was going to be hilly as well, because the start of the run is the same as the start on the bike course, and that's all uphill.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like the first mile is all uphill, and so I knew that there was going to be a bit of a strategy that I had would have to implement, so I couldn't cook myself on the bike and still be expected to turn right around and run well up the hill or up the hills for the first half of the run.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_00: So, but what I really wanted to do was that I wanted to show up on the run to compete and not just perform because at Patriot I lost the podium in the sprint because of my run.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_00: And even though I performed well, I didn't compete well, and so this time I said I don't want to hold back, I still have to be smart, and I still have to be strategic, but I gotta find a way to compete and not just perform.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_00: So my goal going into my plan going into that run was to get a progressive run, which meant that every mile on the m every mile was subsequently faster than the last.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_00: At Patriot, I negative split the run, which just means that the second half of the run was faster than the first half of the run.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_00: This one is going to be a little bit more challenging, but really had to show some discipline in order to not really go after it on that first mile and really sabotage the progression.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_00: But the problem that I own is that I did not recon the run course.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_00: I did recon the bike course for the Olympic, I didn't recon the bike course for the sprint, but I knew it was going it had to have been close to the same.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it was.
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_00: So there was nothing new that was there.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_00: But I didn't know what the run course was going to be like.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_00: I knew the first mile was uphill, but it didn't tell me what the last two miles were going to look like.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_00: When I could start to increase my intensity, when could I start to open things up a little bit?
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_00: Is a progressive run even realistic for the course?
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because if there's some significant hills in those last two miles, it was going to make it hard to really progress that run in such a way that allowed me to become faster.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_00: But I just didn't know.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so I own that.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's a mistake that I made.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a rookie mistake, and it's something that I should have done.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_00: But to be honest with you, on on that Saturday night after packet pickup and after racing that day, I just wanted to just get home, eat my dinner, get into the to the NormaTech boots and start my recovery and just try and get that dialed in.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, I don't want to delay this any longer.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_00: So let's just go.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I knew coming off of the bike, there was going to be one massive hill that goes right on up onto the main road, and I knew I was going to have to handle that well, and I did.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I shortened my stride, increased my arm swing, and got up the hill surprisingly well, and handled it.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I wasn't completely gassed by the time I got up the hill.
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I knew right then, I was like, okay, this is going like I had hoped.
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I saw a little bit of bright light.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, this is okay, I got that.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_00: That was the hill that I was really concerned about, was taking on that hill.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, I handled it well.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now let's go.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_00: But I knew I couldn't force the pace until I got all the way up through that first mile.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_00: I had to be patient.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I said, don't rush this.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_00: Control your stride, control your arm, get that arm swing going, control your breathing.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_00: Let's be patient.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_00: Because this wasn't an out and back course, it was a loop.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I didn't know what the back half was going to look like.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so this was a bit of a gamble.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_00: And once once I reached that first mile, I finished with a time of 1146 was my first mile, which is actually a pretty decent pace for me.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_00: So my training is right around that, that's about a zone two effort, is that 1146.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so I said, now let's just let's open things up a little bit.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna make the I'm gonna take the I'm gonna make this risk and I'm gonna take this gamble and let's progress it.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_00: Second mile ticked through, and I came in at 1058, which is fantastic for me.
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_00: I figured that if I could just come in at do 1146, 1130, 1115, that would be a successful run for me.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_00: And didn't know really what it would give me, but that would give me the performance that I thought that I was capable of, and not necessarily maybe not be good enough to compete, but that's kind of what I was looking at.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_00: But when I when I don't track my pace, I run by effort, and so I just kind of let it build in that second mile, and I was like, okay, let's lengthen this out.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't think it really even registered when I saw 1058 show up because I don't even know if I looked.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_00: Honestly, I just felt my watch buzz to show that I had a split, but I honestly I try and not look at it and just go by feel.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so I say, okay, there's mile two, so I know I only have one more mile to go.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_00: Let's increase the intensity some more, let's kind of lengthen this out.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_00: So far, I'm not seeing any uphills, and this has all kind of been a little bit of a downhill effort with some flats, so this is going really well.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_00: So let's increase it.
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_00: And mile three ended up being a 1036 mile, which is really good.
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_00: So from me, and so I'm not trying to sell this as oh, that's a fast 10k, because that's not the point.
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_00: The point is that I raced an Olympic aqua bike on Saturday, on Sunday, solid swim, another hard bike, and then a progressive run on Sunday.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_00: And just eight days prior to this race, I wrote that I wanted to compete instead of just perform, and this is what I meant by it.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I couldn't be happier with that run, and I think I performed well, and I really allowed myself to go there and be uncomfortable.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_00: And this performance actually got me third place in the Clydesdale sprint, and I was on the podium again, so I had a I was just floored that I had a double podium weekend.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_00: My first reaction again was a little frustration.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_00: My wife is just like, Oh, you're right now your tracking is third, and I was like, Oh, come on.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I had to check myself because I really wanted a little bit of a higher spot, but honestly, that's fantastic.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that I rolled around and after placing second on Saturday to still make the podium and finish third on Sunday was something that I did not do at Patriot because at Patriot I took first on Saturday but missed the podium on Sunday.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_00: So to me, the performance at Giant Acorn, while different and not necessarily doesn't necessarily look as good in terms of the metrics from pay from Patriot, the Giant Acorn, I think, was a major success and got me two podiums.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_00: I think what this does, what the giant acorn did for me is that it validated the Patriot performance.
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't just one really good day where just things just came together.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_00: We had I had a different course, very different conditions, uh, another double effort, and I'm still competing for podiums.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so walking away from this race allowed me to really see that yes, I can be a threat on the race course.
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_00: I have four days of fairly easy training to get back into it, and then my off-season starts, and so I've got for the balance of the year, I'll be focusing on different aspects of my training.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_00: For the swim, one of the things that I'm working on is continued technique development, really working on getting that early vertical forearm because that that rotation is something that I struggle with in terms of the shoulder mobility and allowing me to be strong through that pull.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_00: I can kind of get my arm there, but I don't have the strength in order to pull really well.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to be working on better sighting.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_00: I've got some new skills, new approaches to open water swimming sighting that I'm still fine-tuning.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_00: It was part of an open water swim clinic that I did with the Richmond Tri-Club, and I've been incorporating that into my training.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_00: Is okay, this is let's keep working on this skill so I can figure out how to be more efficient in my sighting.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_00: Learning how and really working on swimming cleaner lines, holding the line better, and continue working on my shoulder management.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_00: For the bike, what I'm trying to do is I would just want to maintain my strength.
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like I'm super strong there, so I just want to maintain it.
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I need to find a way to start improving efficiency, really kind of getting that VI index down.
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_00: If long course racing is what it is that I'm trying to achieve, I need that efficiency to be improved on.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I need to learn how to control my biking a little bit and convert that short course power into a sustainable half Iron Man power.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_00: My run is one of the big areas that I need to focus on and improve.
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_00: Continue improving running off the bike, allowing that patience to kind of settle in until I get my run legs under me, and then being comfortable with allowing this to progress and not just make them easy all the time.
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_00: But I want, I'm still working on, I still keep the progressive runs in my training plan, the negative splits, the alternating pace runs.
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_00: All this stuff is still part of the plan.
• 1:04:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm trying to really work on becoming more durable.
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that I will walk away from this race is that I need to make sure that I just recon the courses.
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_00: As a coach, I should know better.
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_00: And this is an easy mistake to eliminate, so that I need to be smarter in terms of knowing the course.
• 1:04:32
  SPEAKER_00: What's not just knowing, oh, it's going to be hilly, but knowing, okay, how am I going to attack that hill?
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_00: Where can I see some increase in intensity and not sabotage the rest of it?
• 1:04:43
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I can go for it here, but can't go for it there, hold back here in order to take on this this harder segment.
• 1:04:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's the kind of stuff that matters.
• 1:04:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's the small things that really make a difference.
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so I want to become better at doing the small things.
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_00: And for training, Coach Justin needs to manage athlete Justin.
• 1:05:05
  SPEAKER_00: So it's hard to self-coach.
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I know that I can handle big workload.
• 1:05:12
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't mean that the maximum workload is optimal.
• 1:05:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm going to continue to work on learning where productive load becomes unnecessary load.
• 1:05:26
  SPEAKER_00: So really kind of being more efficient with that as I test out this new training model going into next year.
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_00: I want to see if maybe that helps increase some efficiency, increase some some adaptation, and make and get me closer to being a little bit more optimal.
• 1:05:43
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if it's going to work, but that's the joy and the excitement of this sport is that we just try things new.
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_00: We're not necessarily always looking for optimal, but we're trying different methods to find to try and see what does work and what doesn't work.
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_00: It may not work.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that's fine.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_00: Then that was a learning experience, and then I know that that didn't necessarily work in this case.
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_00: Doesn't make it wrong, but it just means that it didn't work in that case.
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to go into too much on what it is that I am training for, but I think that's going to be coming up in in future episodes.
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to thank you guys for tuning in.
• 1:06:21
  SPEAKER_00: This has just been my wrap-up and just my thoughts from the giant acorn triton festival this past weekend with Kinetic Multisports.
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_00: I want to to show my appreciation to the volunteers and to kinetic multi sports for such a fantastic organization for what they do.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_00: They put on a fantastic race.
• 1:06:43
  SPEAKER_00: If you're lucky enough to have them in your area like I am, I I highly encourage you to check out one of their races.
• 1:06:51
  SPEAKER_00: Chances are I may be there as the race as part of the race day coaching tour, if I'm not racing as well as one of you guys.
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you guys for listening.
• 1:07:01
  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate the support you continue to show the podcast.
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_00: If this episode has been helpful, if it resonated with you, if you learned anything new, please I hope that you'll consider subscribing and leaving a comment, leave a review.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'm also actively bringing on athletes onto my roster.
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're going into 2027 and you're thinking about trying something new, or you're just finding that the the template training plans from the internet or AI-based platforms just not really doing it for you, not getting you the results that you want.
• 1:07:35
  SPEAKER_00: I hope that you'll consider reaching out.
• 1:07:37
  SPEAKER_00: You can go to taboolarasseracing.com and reach out to me.
• 1:07:41
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you.
• 1:07:42
  SPEAKER_00: Again, this has been episode 123 of the Endurance Athlete Journey Podcast.
• 1:07:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I've been your host, Coast Justin.
• 1:07:50
  SPEAKER_00: And until next time, I'll talk to you all again later.
• 1:07:54
  SPEAKER_00: Bye-bye, everyone.
• 1:08:10
  SPEAKER_00: Endurance sports have a way of teaching us patience, humility, and resilience, lessons that carry far beyond the workout.
• 1:08:18
  SPEAKER_00: Progress in endurance sports doesn't come from shortcuts.
• 1:08:21
  SPEAKER_00: It comes from consistency, discipline, and doing the work when it's not glamorous.
• 1:08:26
  SPEAKER_00: Wherever you are on your endurance journey, keep trusting the process and honoring the work you put in each day.
• 1:08:33
  SPEAKER_00: If today's episode resonated, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone to help on their endurance journey.
• 1:08:41
  SPEAKER_00: Don't forget to join the conversation on our social sites to help build and foster a community where we all learn and support one another.
• 1:08:49
  SPEAKER_00: We'll be back with more stories and insights from Coach Justin and Katie.
• 1:08:53
  SPEAKER_00: Until then, visit the podcast website at the endurance athlete journey.buzzsprout.com for more episodes from the Endurance Athlete Journey Podcast.
• 1:09:04
  SPEAKER_00: Have questions or comments about the podcast?
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_00: Feel free to send us an email at the endurance athlete journey at gmail.com.
• 1:09:13
  SPEAKER_00: For all things coaching, visit Coach Katie at fuel the number two run.com and coachjustin at taboularassa racing.com.
• 1:09:23
  SPEAKER_00: Again, thank you for listening to the Endurance Athlete Journey Podcast and remember to find joy in the journey.