#3 The 70.3 Pacing Problem: How the Bike Ruins Your Run.

Discover practical tips and expert insights on pacing, race planning, and overcoming common race-day challenges in triathlon. Whether you're new to 70.3 distance or looking to refine your strategy, this episode offers actionable advice to improve your performance.

Main Topics:

• The importance of pacing and self-awareness in triathlon
• Training strategies for course-specific familiarity and pacing
• Managing race day surprises and troubleshooting
• The influence of environment, technology, and nutrition
• Strategies for salvaging a race when things go wrong

In this episode:

• The impact of course conditions, such as ocean swell and terrain, on pacing
• How top athletes adjust their pacing based on race environment and experience
• The value of multisport race experience beyond Ironman distance
• Tips on estimating sustainable paces using heart rate and power
• Practical advice for race day execution, including pacing during the bike and run segments
• How to mentally and physically recover from pacing issues mid-race
• Tips for beginners: creating flexible race plans and training-specific simulations

Come find us Cartel Coaching — Swim. Bike. Run. Together.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Hey there, and thanks so much for joining us at Cartel Coaching. We know there's a lot of options when it comes to triathlon content and coaching content in general, so we're really glad you're here. Our mission is to make triathlon more accessible and help break down the barriers to entry in a sport we care so much about. I'm Em, the Age Grouper, and I'm joined by Tim, our elite coach, and Cal, our ex pro. Between the three of us, you're getting three really different perspectives on the sport. From learning and figuring it out in real time to elite coaching insights and to years of race experience at that top end. We're here to share useful tips, practical advice, and our own experiences to help make triathlon feel a little less overwhelming and a whole lot more doable. Now let's get into today's episode.

SPEAKER_01 0:59

Yeah, what's you?

SPEAKER_00 1:00

Alright, welcome back to Cartel Coaching. Today we're talking all about the 70.3 distance and the problems that some of us run into with pacing. Uh, but before we do, I saw something really interesting on your Instagram, Tim, about one of your one of your athletes, Arna, who who did a race that I don't really understand, and I want to learn a bit more about that. Can you can you tell me about that?

SPEAKER_02 1:26

It's a Wanuker gym, Emma. This is what this is what Wanuker people do. We do Exteratriathlon. Because the uh the roads are too dangerous to ride a TT bike. You feel like you're gonna get run over by a Ute on a regular basis. And so we stick to the gravel paths and the bike parks. And uh so yeah, Extera Triathlon, there was one in Dunsborough in the weekend, which was the Asia Pacific Champs. Um so it's down there south of Perth, and I think further south in Bustleton actually. Further, and so amazing course, really cool, beautiful course on the beach, although it was pretty hectic swim conditions for that one. Um really, really hectic actually. So it was a really good challenge for someone like Anna coming from a a lake, which is pretty different.

SPEAKER_00 2:14

Um Yeah, so that was in the ocean, right? And it was like three meters swell. Is that what is that what she was saying? That's outrageous.

SPEAKER_02 2:23

Yeah, I mean if if people ever forward then they had Xtera world champs in Maui, which was over in the Big Island, and it used to be a couple weeks after Kona. Um there used to be so many stories of people coming in surfing waves and being dumped on the beach, and it just seems to be part of Xtera, like they they let that stuff roll and they just get after it. Um a lot of like cows probably experienced it when you go and race a Molittle bar and there's a three-foot dumping wave throwing pencil thin ITU athletes onto the beach.

SPEAKER_01 2:55

It's uh Yeah, I love it. I think these days uh with liability and it uh sort of creeping into things and uh the issues, but I mean if you grew up on the coast, which is pretty much every New Zealander and Australian, then I feel like a lot of people embraced that. Just it added an element to it, uh made it more fun. I think if you grew up in Europe or a landlocked sort of country, it'd be terrifying.

SPEAKER_02 3:25

Yeah, yeah, I do know the Great Brits, they've taken on board Phil Clayton as their um open water swim coach. And uh they don't basically don't let the Aussies train with them anymore, and they're they're strictly coaching them how to cope with open water swimming conditions like that in preparation for something like LA, where it could be some dumpy surf and or some big swells rolling in. Yeah, they're getting pretty specific on it.

SPEAKER_00 3:53

Yeah, wow. So uh so back to Anna, so she's she's a she's a mum, right? So she's a mum, a young mum. She won, and she just looked like such a weapon. Like sh the bike, like it's uh it's like a full mountain bike situation, three meters swell, and then it's like a trail run. That's that's what this is. Is that have I got a have I clocked it right?

SPEAKER_02 4:17

Yeah, so often exterior is around about a K for the swim to 1500. Um the swim was 1500. Yeah the bike for them was 30k, but it can be anywhere upwards of around 45k.

SPEAKER_00 4:30

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 4:31

And then the runs vary too, but often anywhere between sort of that nine and twelve K mark. So you're actually looking at distance in total with time that isn't too dissimilar to a 70.3. No, so for times in the weekend you're around you know, the 30 minute, 25, 30 minute mark for the swim because it was so hectic. Um the bike was around the two hour mark people take, and it was an hour fifty. And the running was in around an hour as well, because they're running through sand dunes and on the beach, and they'll be running over rocky paths and stuff like that. Um so it's yeah, it's really hectic and a real different like it it's just a real dynamic environment that you're training for. Um, which is yeah, it's really different for an athlete rather than a nice smooth pavement.

SPEAKER_01 5:19

Um or sounds uh exciting.

SPEAKER_02 5:22

Yeah, it's cool. Yeah, she she was second overall female in the age groups and won her age group. Um yeah, and her her goal's always to be how close now can I be to the pros with her time. So a pretty cool job as a mum, and she's had a few injury niggles that we've been really working through with just um the running drill side of things and what we're doing in the gym. So she's actually nearly running better now off no intensity and a running, but more drill work, more skipping, more strength, um, and addressing it in a different way to get the intensity.

SPEAKER_00 6:00

Oh, that's awesome. Well, I I do find it very funny that they were swimming in the three-meter swell, and uh the 70.3 that I just completed last weekend, the swim was cancelled, uh, and and the water looked fine. Like it looked fine. I'm sure there was some sort of debris in the water, and it it was probably more of a pollution issue than actually any sort of issues. But uh yeah, look my my 70.3 I'm gonna tell you right now, it probably did not go. Well, I know it did not go as well, and um, and I think I I absolutely had had a pacing problem. So I don't know what it is, but I think when you don't have the swim, I reckon that kind of stuffs you up from the the outset, like the rolling bike start, I think, is is sort of hard to manage, and I think you go out probably a little bit hard. So a few things happened to me. One, I forgot my bike computer, I accidentally took my tail light to husky instead of a bike computer, so that that wasn't gonna do me any good. So I was I was doing the bike by vibes, and I did try to kind of turn my watch around to have a look, but I couldn't see what was going on, so I was like, whatever. Um, I came off the bike and I was actually first in my age group at that point, and I was like, oh, I'm kind of killing it. Um, but then I just went on the run and I was absolutely cooked. Like, there was there was from from the outset, it was horrendous. I was like, I don't know how I'm gonna make this. And then at kilometer 13, I ended up rolling my ankle, so there were some kids giving out um big ice cubes, and it was really cute, and I was like, I'll grab an ice cube, but they were all over the ground, and then I just uh went over my ankle on one of those. So um, so yeah, it was pretty horrendous, and I ended up I think fourth in my age group. Um, yeah, and and I felt like absolute crap.

SPEAKER_01 7:49

It just goes to show, and I think we've touched upon it before, that half of uh endurance uh racing is just overcoming and troubleshooting on the fly. And it's not uncommon. I think Sam Long, who just raced Oceanside, uh people ask him about his power, his power meter didn't connect. So all of a sudden, if you've built up a reliance on power and training, all of a sudden you've got a race off field. So it's sort of um it's sort of it if you can um if you can overcome these little battles uh hidden into event and during event and become self-sufficient, I think uh you'll be better off for it. And I think that's just experience and time as well. So yeah, I just that was one thing I picked up. There was a number of people whose car meters didn't connect for whatever reason. If they just time out, you might drop your nutrition, um, you might pack your rear light instead of your garmin, and then you know, all of a sudden you might be racing blind. So it's like if you've got it just goes to show don't rely too much on technology, but also don't panic as well, because it doesn't have to be perfect and you could still get a good outcome.

SPEAKER_02 8:58

Yeah, totally, and I think also like reflecting on oceanside and how and some of those pro races and how they roll out. Like pros aren't um what's the right word I'm looking for here? It's not uncommon for a pro to absolutely screw up their pace and get carried away with the race and be like, yeah, I'm gonna sit here now on the bike, and I want to stay with this group. I'm gonna stay with this group, this is where I need to be. They stay with a group on the bike, and then they get off the run, you see the mushroom cloud and say explode in their first a hundred steps trying to trying to execute the run how they planned because they just haven't they've just got carried away with what was in front of them and and it felt good at the time and it's uh it's it's common across the board. So I wouldn't feel like you're yucky on your own M, having some pacing issues, but it is gonna happen to people and it's Cal pointed out like it's developing that portfolio, I think, of understanding of yourself, so you're not reliant on these power numbers all the time or heart rate numbers if they don't work. Like you you can get a feel for it and you can execute it on the way and you learn what it needs to feel like on the bike to perform a really good run. Um because they're they're a package, they're not interdependent. Um sorry, they're not independent, you needed that one.

SPEAKER_00 10:24

Um Yeah, I I definitely wasn't alone either. It was actually really funny. I felt like it was me, and not to stereotype, but there it was me, and there was probably some young young dudes who who went out a bit hard, hard on the bike, and we were all just suffering. And then you saw just you could see the veterans, like the people who who knew what they were doing, who took it a little bit easier on the bike.

SPEAKER_01 10:50

You know, we were all passing them, feeling like kind of crushing it, and then it was just the embarrassing time on the I think a lot of that though will come uh in time, and you'll just learn and you'll figure out. Look, it's no different to your weekend long rides where you might go out with uh a group, and I notice, especially when triathletes are training with cyclists, I find cyclists they punch every hill. And I I almost feel like it takes more discipline to just ride at your own pace. Like, unless you're on a chain gang ride and you want to punch it, uh if you know, hey, I've got a key session this afternoon, or I've got intervals later in this ride, if you can have a discipline to sort of stick to what you're doing, uh, I feel like that can sort of carry over into racing as well. The other thing as well, with racing and pacing, you generally, you know, you probably have a chat to your coach before the event and you figure out a few scenarios of how the sun uh plays out. Uh in a no one pro racing, um certain athletes will dictate terms. You might have an Uber cyclist who takes it up the road, you might have, you know, Lionel Sanders or someone from behind who hasn't swam well coming through the field, and then you've got to figure out, hey, what's scenario A, what's scenario B. And that can um that can also be uh something that happens in age group racing too with rolling starts. So you might have uh competitor that you're keeping an eye on, or a girlfriend or boyfriend who's starting a few waves back. Uh all depends on your pace and you know your and your strategy as well. So I think like Tim said, if you sort of build up your portfolio of tools, um and it's a bit of trial and error, the more you race, the better you get at all of it.

SPEAKER_02 12:33

Yeah, totally. And I think Cam Brown is he actually arcs on about this. Like we're all afraid to race more these days. Like we just sort of hold back and you see people, I'm just doing a 70.3, but then you don't go to a sprint race, you don't do an Olympic distance race. And don't use some of these smaller community races that are around to actually start to understand yourself and how you perform and how you go over the shorter distances. And they're also really good supporting training sessions too. They're amazing. And you and you learn so much in them, you can learn, you know, how to paste the different distances for one, but then also transitions, different things around fueling, things about how you might prepare yourself for the race beforehand or the day before. You having a list maybe where you pac have your bike computer on the list, you ticket as you put it in the bag, um, those sort of things. So there's a variety of stuff that you can learn.

SPEAKER_01 13:26

I've got an awesome Cam Brown story about pacing. I'm in New Zealand in 2015 or 16. I came off of the bike with Cam, and this was back in the day when you put your Garmin watch on and you sort of had to wave it around in the air like an aerial trying to get satellites. So you'd have to you'd have to wait for them to load. So anyway, um for the first couple of K on the run uh the satellites weren't loading, so it was giving me an inaccurate pace, and I went out at what I thought was a conservative pace, which turned out to be much faster. It it was more like 330, 340 per K pace, which is fast. Um Cam still gives me a bit of grief over it, but um I will say I actually had my best marathon at 248 there by having a positive split and going out for the race. And this is something that I've spoken uh you know I've spoken with previous coaches about. Uh and a good example is in Hawaii, during the first part of the bike course, which is through town, um, everyone's testosterone is just booming in the pro race, and um people are going to be riding well above threshold. And I remember um being told just to sort of dial it back and ride conservatively as well and let the race go uh with uh and stick to your power numbers uh to pace it in the hope that later on in the back half of the ride and the run that you'd run better with fresher legs. But the thing that comes into play with that is you let the race go, and if you're a competitor to like like me, I feel like racing people you can sort of squeeze the lemon for a bit more juice and you can go with the race, and knowing well that it's gonna button off at some point. So there's heaps of strategies uh for that to unfold as well. Contrastingly to that, there's people like Mel Howscha, Heather Jackson, and the the women's races who they'll just define what their target power were and they could just stick at it all day. Um and I think that's probably more the case in H-group racing as well. Um that you've probably experienced where you could sit down with your coach, you figure out what your power is and stick to it. Whereas in a pro race you sort of have your you sort of have your arm um forced with do I go with the race or do I let it let it go knowing that hey I might be able to come back later on.

SPEAKER_02 15:53

Yeah, and I think we see that a lot, you know, with uh ITU racing is classic for it right on the run off the bike. Like you would never see someone run a 10K in the way a triathlete runs a 10K in a run race. Like they're out like a cut cat. And it's just like a battle of attrition of people holding on. But the psychology of staying in the race and drafting of those front people has a big effect on people, and then what they can then pull through in the back half is normally quite amazing. So it's it I I agree with Carol, like you've got to figure that out sometimes with yourself, and but from an age group perspective, I think you're you're right, Cal. And it's much better to sort of get a feel, especially initially, by setting some power numbers or or heart rate numbers and targets for yourself and be like, okay, I'm gonna sit go out and I'm gonna experience how the race is gonna unfold under these sort of numbers, and then you finish a race and then you can reflect back on it and go, well actually this happened, you know. I was really poor on the runoff that bike power, or I was actually really good, I had so much in the tank. Um and then you can actually learn from that and move forward. Quite a lot of the time you'll see a a lot of age groupers, they'll go out, they won't have a plan, they'll blow to some of the reins, and then actually you learn a whole lot less from that race. Because you're like, well, we don't really know how the run would have panned out for you based on that training, because you went at 300 watts for 45k and then a hundred watts for forty-five K and walked the run. So we have no clue of how the training affected the race outcome and how the plan affected. So having those plans early on is really important, and then you can start to layer in the complexity as you go through more races.

SPEAKER_01 17:39

So, what's the best way to um sort of establish pacing? Uh is there like a general rule of thumb that you'd recommend, Tim, or is it you know, like we sort of lean into a bit of testing each season to figure out where your threshold is, what or what a sustainable pace is that you can hold in training and racing? Because obviously the more you can show your body what you expect of it in race day, the better you're equipped for that. We've all gone well above um that desired pace and you pay for it. You've only got so many matches you can burn before you've got to repay that debt. So is there like a rule of thumb or how would you sort of approach that?

SPEAKER_02 18:20

Yeah, I think training is really important for learning about yourself and what your capabilities are, and having marker sessions in your build-up that you're using to understand where you're at and what percentage of your threshold you might be able to hold and how that affects your runs really important. So initially in your training, you're trying to set up your critical power. That's how we use it. Um so using critical power curves, and then off that power and those heart rates you might get out of that testing too. We start to structure our training. And then as we're building through, we we're checking back in to see where that critical power or heart rate is getting to. But then we're also starting to ship test, you know, can I hold, am I good enough to hold 90% of my threshold or FTP or critical power, however you want to call it. There's a lot of different names for that sort of arbitrary figure. And they will sit in a very close grouping and seeing if you can do that. So some more beginners would be sitting at like 75% of their threshold power. Some pros can go at 90% of their threshold or critical power. And that's sort of your your scope. And you've got to figure out where you sit on that in your training. And that's good long reps repeated at that power, and then having a good runoff at a heart rate, which might only be about five beats more than what you've put out on the bike, and seeing if there's a pace decline across like a 45 or 60 minute run, um, or even even a 90-minute run. If you're going for an Iron Man, for example, you've got to do nearly a minimum 90-minute run off the bike to see where you're gonna crack. Um and related to that needs to be the fueling as well, because generally the higher operating is a percentage of your critical power, the more fuel you need as well to support that, the more carbs need to take on board.

SPEAKER_01 20:21

We always spoke about in Iron Man about, especially in the marathon, who could slow down the least. Uh and and generally um and that would come down to fueling fatigue and uh obviously a few other factors, pacing obviously being probably the most important. I've tried uh marathons where you've gone out at a steady pace uh with the hope of holding that pace, gone out too fast with the hope of just trying to slow down the lease. And then very rarely, actually, like you mentioned, Tim, about uh short course athletes, very rarely were to go out slow and work into it. Um what what's the best way, you know, like and it doesn't have to just be marathon pacing, but is there a better theory to approach things uh in terms of pacing the run uh across the different distances? Like would you just pick a percentage of your uh sort of FTP or percentage of a heart rate that's sustainable for that distance?

SPEAKER_02 21:23

Generally we're looking at heart rates for the run. Like we we have pace there as well, but I think for a lot of age groupers a heart rate's really important. And heart rate is also reflective of what the environment might be doing to you. So whether it's a early run or really hot run, sees how your body's responding to it. And we often talk about on the Iron Man bike getting off and trying to run at a heart rate the same or just above what you've been riding at and letting that settle for that first five K and then you might see it lift another five beats at a very maximum. Um and then sitting at that. Um and it's similar in a 70.3. You know, you're gonna get off the bike, you're probably gonna see a spike of up to five beats. And often threshold heart rates are around five to eight feets higher on the run than a bike. And so you then get a certain and around that top of zone three often for a 70.3 run, and you'll probably find that if you've got the muscular strength and endurance, you might drift into zone to the bottom of zone four throughout that run with your heart rate.

SPEAKER_01 22:35

Let's say you butcher your pacing, you get carried away on the bike, you get carried away on the run. Is there a way to salvage that? Uh and if so, what are some of these ways to salvage that? It's hard.

SPEAKER_02 22:51

It's r it's real hard to salvage it. But if you took Christian Blumenfeldt, for example, in Iron Man New Zealand, he had a really good vom and that salvaged it for him. Seemed to go really good. And suddenly enough for him in Kona too, he had another massive vom on the bike, I don't remember that. He vomited everywhere. And then he seemed to come right. So he was obviously having some GI distress and that solved that issue. But from a pacing perspective, if you've cooked it on the bike and you get off, you're rarely gonna have to slow down, and you're also really gonna have to get on top of your fueling, because more than likely the fueling you've put in on the bike is going to be representative of the intensity you plan to put out. You've probably put out an intensity higher than that, and so now you're gonna try to play some catch-up. Now, I have seen people rescue things in that first 5 to 10k of the run through a really good slow pace, good eating strategies, and then being able to it rescue the back end of a half or a full. Um but it's quite it to be honest, it's quite uncommon because sometimes once you cooked you're cooked. Um it's it's really hard to bounce back.

SPEAKER_00 24:04

Yeah, I feel that. I I did try a strategy when I was cooked. They had this like Red Bull aid station that just had these giant cups of Red Bull, and I I can't even stand the smell of Red Bull to be honest. It takes me back to a bad time, and I just can't handle that. But I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna give this a crack. This might be all I need to change the game for me. Absolutely not. It was very, very wrong, very bad times. Post the the cover Red Bull, so yeah, good lesson there. That's not for me.

SPEAKER_01 24:39

You know what though, like it's not a bad shout though. We I mean we call Coke uh Coca-Cola the Black Doctor because we find if uh you know if you if you bonk or blow to pieces, so to speak, in a marathon or a long distance event, it can pip you up sometimes with the injection of caffeine and and sugar and just the calories in general. So it's not uncommon to see see you know people sort of come back from the dead. But I guess my hot tip is once you start that you can't stop um because yeah, it is a slippery slope, and then good luck sleeping at night because I find post-race, I mean it's hard as it is, but if you're fueled to the eyeballs on caffeine and um whatever other monster energy or rat poison that's in them, um it it's great for rocket fuel, but um it is hard to it's hard to come down from.

SPEAKER_02 25:31

Yeah. I remember Dylan who used to be a bit of a rival of yours, Callum, Dylan McNeese, who I coached um for a good decade and won multiple IMANs and halves. He would always be trying to hold off for as long as he could in a race to get before he got onto the Black Doctor. And uh because he as Cal said, he knew if he got on it early, he'd have to extend that period of time, and and actually the gut stress that he could get off that would be quite bad. Um so trying to hold off for as long as he can look for other options, which luckily these days there's a few more things we can take on board. Um you know, with the liquid carbs and different gel varieties and stuff out there that we can use to try and do it.

SPEAKER_01 26:13

Again, a lot of the stuff you can trial and error in training. And I find after you've had a break from training, you get back into it, you usually find your limits pretty quickly. You could do an insurance ride, you know, where it's too fast for your current fitness level. Um I've had that before where I've been two kilometres from home and had to call my mum to pick me up. So literally, you know, you just can't get there. So again, um it's not too dissimilar though to um uh you know, say for example, the Hawaii Iron Man, where there's plenty of time where you want to um just walk and try and get through it. And it's um it's all stuff, the pacing is all stuff that you should try and overcome um during training as well. That could just be a matter of stopping at a shot and getting some lollies or figuring out your fueling strategy, but it's I I find it's usually as Tim said, it's your fueling or um or you've probably cooked your goose with going a little bit too hard as well and you've sort of you've run out of matches to burn.

unknown 27:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:20

And what you're generally seeing I man is most people's heart rates start decreasing over the back end because muscularly they actually they can't push the pace anymore. They they can't keep going. As Callum talked about earlier, you know, the who decreases the least in pace wins. And that's a really important part. And actually if people want to get really nerdy on that, they can go listen to Ruth Croft and some of her podcasts or her coach Scott Johnson, and they actually talk about how they're really in ultra running, are trying to focus on how they develop muscular endurance because that is becoming the biggest limiting factor, not cardiovascular endurance, muscular endurance or strength endurance over that distance. Interesting.

SPEAKER_00 28:06

Cool. Yeah, I found um I also find the time of the day really difficult. So you know, I I quite like an Iron Man race because they always start early in the morning, and that's good for me. I train early in the morning, and so I'm used to getting up like that. The race that I did last weekend, the start time was midday, so it was like we were starting at lunchtime, and I found that really, really hard because I didn't really understand, you know, you didn't want to eat like a mega breakfast or something, and it was just a weird time to start, and I feel like that really threw me, to be honest.

SPEAKER_01 28:42

Yeah, again, um not to harp on, but you a lot of our weekend long rides are early in the morning, and I think the more comfortable you can get with showing yourself, your body, what you expect of it on race day, like you it's not you can't go into an event and expect to do something you haven't prepared for. So the more you can expose yourself to these either early starts, late starts. Um I used to find if we ever had an event like a World Cup that started after lunch, it was difficult to plan because oftentimes that's really hard to replicate. Um so it's like do you have an early breakfast, a late breakfast, do you have a lunch, what's the weather gonna do? And um but I think you know, I I generally find as well, like if you have an event where you can sleep in your own bed or put your bike in your own car and not have to fly with it, I generally feel like you have a better result because the stress is uh are much lower. Um so again, uh I don't actually know where I'm going with that.

SPEAKER_02 29:52

Like anything, just rehear you can rehearse what you need to do.

SPEAKER_01 29:56

Yeah, I um so basically the more comfortable you can make yourself um with either training, eating, sleeping, uh, all that kind of stuff, uh it it you just want to get to the start line and be a celebration of your training, as cliche as that sounds. You should be panicking, rightfully so, if you haven't trained and you you're like, hey, I'm doing a mountainous bike course here, and I've done all my training like on a plateau. So, you know, like prepare yourself for it, figure it out. Um I've got some more good stories about that if we have time, but let's see. Yeah, I want to hear your stories. Okay, my story. Uh 2006, uh ITU World Under 23 champs, the course was in LaSanne, Switzerland, where it was um yeah, a filthy eight eight percent or twelve percent climb. I think it was once or twice on each lat, and we had to do it eight times. What we did in all it was really tough. But what we did is we figured out the duration of the course, we figured out the the the climb that is, the duration of the climb, we figured out the the gradient of the climb, and we just try to find something in Auckland to repres replicate that. And then you do that for six months, and all of a sudden race day, it feels very comfortable because you're used to it. So you go out and you do uh you know eight repetitions of your local hill that's the same, then all of a sudden it becomes quite easy. And um but if you don't do that, then yeah, it's gonna be a challenge. And that's no different to anything else, you know. Wetsuits swim, non-wetsuit swim, undulating courses, flat courses, the more information you can find out about that, and that's why we see you know, there's a lot of good videos floating around YouTube at the moment of these pro cyclists who are doing recon for the Tour de France or the spring classics. Um go and expose yourself to those cobblestones, go and expose yourself to those climbs, uh, because they change each year, and then when it comes race day, you know, voila, you've got that information on your Garmin or your Wahoo of this is the power I held to get up this climb. And you train you train for that and you make it easier for yourself.

SPEAKER_02 32:11

You can pod your car at it 360 watts in zone two.

SPEAKER_01 32:16

Yeah, I mean there's only so much to do, but um again, the more information you have, the better it is, and I trifle it's like information. So figure it figure it out. We've got all these great resources at our fingertips with Ruby and training peaks, where you get expose yourself to the stuff and you'll become more com uh comfortable and confident. It'll help with your pacing as well on race day.

SPEAKER_02 32:40

Yeah, totally. I think the more you can understand about yourself, the better you are. Come race day. And the the more flexibility you can have to change and adapt to what's in front of you. Um if you know that course even better because you don't have to change and adapt too much because you're dull, do not.

SPEAKER_00 32:57

Yeah. I I must say I was lucky I'd done that bike course before, so I knew it and I knew how where all the dodgy parts were, but I could see there were a lot of people who didn't, and um yeah, there were a lot of flats and a lot of little little bingles, unfortunately. So let's wrap it up with maybe your top tips, Tim. If someone was setting out for their first 70.3, what would be your top tips you give them as a as a noob?

SPEAKER_02 33:26

Create yourself a good plan and create that plan that gives you leeway. So don't go in there with this idea you're gonna operate your maximal potential that you think. You know, maybe rehearsed that in training, but also dialing it back a few percent so you know you're gonna get through that first race and finish it in good metal and then actually learn a whole lot from that and then be able to come back and rehearse again. You know, the worst thing you can do is go out to your first 70.3 and completely blow up all over the show, and and probably learn nothing about what the training has done for you, and then your race execution, how you can execute the race, other than you learn that you did a really shit job of it.

SPEAKER_00 34:14

Yeah. Love it.

SPEAKER_02 34:17

We'll have you dialed for your next race, Emma. Have that locked in, good now, knowledge and information.

SPEAKER_00 34:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:25

And you uh you'll breathe through that run at a beautiful, steady pace.

SPEAKER_00 34:30

Oh yeah. It'll be the first time it will.

SPEAKER_02 34:33

Well, let's hope for the best.

SPEAKER_00 34:35

Well, that's a wrap. But if you want to keep the conversation going, come find us on Instagram at cartel.coaching. And for coaching camps and communities, you can check out our school page. It's linked in the show notes. See you next time.