#10 Back to Basics in Triathlon: Simplify, Focus, and Enjoy

Back to Basics in Triathlon: Simplify, Focus, and Enjoy

In this episode, we dive into the importance of returning to fundamental training principles for triathletes. Whether you're overwhelmed by technology or caught up in complex plans, the hosts discuss how to simplify your approach to stay motivated, improve consistently, and maintain long-term enjoyment in the sport.

Key Topics:

• The trap of overcomplicating training with data and technology
• The importance of training fundamentals and keeping workouts simple
• Community's role in motivation and accountability
• Balancing structured training with listening to your body
• The benefits of repeatability and tracking progress through sessions
• Avoiding analysis paralysis and focusing on perceived effort and feel
• The significance of sustainable training loads for longevity
• How to effectively incorporate social and fun elements into training

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

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:18

Team, welcome to Cartel Coaching. I am Calla Millwood. I'm an ex-professional triathlete and three times IMN 70.3 champion. And now I'm getting a proper reintroduction into the sport of triathlon as an age grouper. I spent a number of years at the pointy end of the sport, and now I've got a business, a life, a family, and the same 24 hours as everyone else who is trying to figure out how to be competitive again. And I tell you what, it is super humbling and it's interesting. What I bring to the table is the elite side of things. I'm living the age group reality right now. Not going to pretend that they're the same thing. With me every episode is Tim Brazier, who coaches everyone from first-timers to Olympians, and M, our resident age grouper, who is keeping us honest. This is Cartel Coaching, and let's get into it.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

So today, today we've got an interesting topic, and it's actually come out of our school community. Some things we've been talking about have been all about how do we just get back to the fundamentals of swim bike run. I think when you get into triathlon, it can be really easy to get a little overloaded with the data, to get kind of caught up in the gadgets. And I know personally firsthand that I have had some times where my Zwift hasn't been working or my watch hasn't been sinking, and it has just totally derailed me in training. So we thought today would be fun to cover just what do we actually need to do to be an effective tray athlete and how do we remove some of these monkeys off our back?

SPEAKER_02 2:02

I'm going to throw this over to Tim actually. And I always am a stickler for fundamentals and keeping things super simple, whether that's training fundamentals, uh, it could be nutrition fundamentals, it could be uh race day pacing, uh just keeping it and get back to basics, right? So, Tim, in terms of I guess how would you apply the sort of keeping it simple and then fundamentals of Triton training?

SPEAKER_01 2:31

Yeah, it's a very good point, Cal, because there's paralysis from analysis. And we don't just see this at the beginning end, we see it right through the spectrum. We speak see these high performance programs overloading themselves with data, not really capturing what's important and what's going to make an impact. And then they go around in circles, wasting all this time trying to figure out what's really right rather than just focusing on the nuts and bolts. And the first thing is to just have a a clear and easy program where you can just get out the door and do it. And and go out and majority of the time just feel like you can conversate with people as you're training. And that is the simplest thing to do. Go out, be conversational in your training and swim, bike, and run. And you'll start to get a huge amount of progress just from that. And you layer and your strength training on top of that, and that can be as easy as being in the garage and doing three sets of lunges, three sets of squats, three sets of twenty push-ups. You know, and that's at the the base most basic level, but you'll get a significant amount of progress from that. And then, you know, when we want to start to a put effort on top of that, we can start to think about our rating of perceived exertion and just get a feel for what's even on the John Halliman scale, what's easy, what's steady, what feels moderately hard, what feels hard, and then what feels really hard. And that can shape how we do that a couple of times a week at the top end. You know, we go hard or very hard for twice a week. Um and I and I think that's a r it's a you just gotta paint yourself a real easy picture all the time of that. And then look for those opportunities too of how you can engage with the community around you. Um because they'll help you as well. Um you'll learn so much from the people around you that you're engaging with on a regular basis and asking questions from and see how they're training or how they're applying themselves. And I think it just helps helps frame it up for you. And also the the community is just such a key part of connection, right, with other people. Um, and enjoyment and fun. And fun should be the first thing on your mind is how does how can I really enjoy this in on a regular basis.

SPEAKER_02 4:49

You know what I like? Cam Brown occasionally shares snippets from his training diary from circa 10, 20 years ago, where he's literally just got, you know, an A4 diary and he's ridden swim 5K and he's ridden the session and then he's uh ride four hours and four by thirty minutes and something like that. And I guess with this day and age, we often sort of have got probably going towards more the end of um making things more complicated because we often, you know, think the more the the more sort of complicated it is, the smarter we sort of feel. And I think some coaches as well lean into that and it creates a dependence from the athlete to uh really depend on the coach. And I think going back to what Tim was saying about social training and enjoying it, um, I I had a coach once who used to make my swim sessions so complicated, I I couldn't actually train with other swimmers anymore. I I'd been a lane, the public lane swim by myself, having to do a specific session. Uh, whereas I found mentally it would be so much easier just to turn up to the pool, do an hour and a half with the other swimmers, you'd achieve the same result. Um, and so as humans, we tend to overcomplicate things sometimes. So you've got two different ways to do it. One is psychologically a lot easier. The other one, I think you've all everyone's got a window where you can be self um self-starters and motivated and you can autonomously get on with it. Um, but I think that window expires at some point or another. You see it in football players, rugby players, all that kind of stuff, they get to a certain age and then all of a sudden they sort of drop off. And it's the same happens in triathlon. And I think if we have a community and if we have people to train with, I I don't know, uh, even if it's just one training partner, right? You see the Norwegians, they've got each other, but it they can just help each other and they help each other get through. And essentially they're bringing teamwork into an individual sport. Um, and we're all like overachievers, right, I'm we like OCD, we like to have green boxes and training peaks and that kind of stuff. When you first started Triathon, did you find did you kind of find it overwhelmed with all the jargon and everything?

SPEAKER_00 6:55

Yeah, actually, I'll I'll throw myself under the bus and tell a bit of a story. So when I did my first 70.3, I I was like all in. So I've been all in on this from the beginning. So I had to have the best bike, I had to have all the gadgets, I got myself the smart trainer, I got the best watch, I downloaded like my proper program, and I was ready to just get right into it, right? And I had a friend who was also doing their first 70.3, and um, and we met actually because we were both doing the same 70.3, and she we we talked about training, and um, and I asked her like who her coach was or what program she was following, and she just said to me, uh, I've got um this PDF and I just try and tick off as many of the sessions that I can throughout the week and whatever, like that's just what I'm doing. And um, to me, I was just like, How is she how is she gonna survive this 70.3? I am doing all of this crazy stuff, I am having to learn all of these things. It was so stressful. I'm not gonna lie, like that that first part of me trying to get through my first 70.3 was outrageously stressful because I made it that way because I overcomplicated it with the technology. I had to try and learn all of this stuff. I had to learn about bikes. I had no idea about bikes at the same time, swimming, or all the things. It was just a lot. And she was kind of just going along, going with the flow, having a good time, fitting it in with her life. Um, I was worried for her, to be honest. I was like, I don't know if she's gonna finish. Um, the reality was that we got to our 70.3. I was in a horrendous way, a broken leg, um, you know, bad race. She she got there, she finished, she had a good time. Um, and it just sort of went to show that actually like I'd invested all of this shit in in this 70.3 and um hooked myself by over overdoing it, over analyzing it, when really I could have just got a PDF like she did and just done my best and and probably would have made made it all right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:04

I I think with social media these days too, right? You've got all these pros and influencers who are sharing their programs and their training. And there's a guy, Taj Watson, who's copying Sam Long's training at the moment, and he's got quite a following doing that. It's quite cool, actually. Just seeing a regular Joe try to mimic what a pro is doing. But there's so much noise online as well. I guess what and there's conflicting information, right, on forums and social media. Um, at the end of the day, though, Tim, a lot of what the pros and people that are doing well they have in common is they're all swim, bike, and running at the end of the day, just doing it different ways. And some are doing it far more complex and structured than others. Others are just I know some athletes that will just swim, bike, and run the same stuff, for instance, and repeat each week. What what kind of how are some people able to get the same result doing completely different uh training?

SPEAKER_01 9:59

Yeah, it's an interesting one that, isn't it? Because you look at it sometimes, you're like, oh, Sam Long's doing 45 hour weeks and Lionel Sanders is doing 16 hour weeks. Like how are they getting the same result? And there's obviously a time period, a training age to that, which can can help. But I think generally you've got to be able to adapt to the training load that you're doing. And a lot of people go for these stretch goals and training because they feel they've got to be doing it all the time, and so they they chase the big training and they don't allow for the adaptation to it. Um, because they're new to the sport as well, you don't know your body as well. So it's hard for you to understand it and hard for you to regulate that training. So we chase these really structured training programs, and sometimes it actually causes us more distress than it should, um, rather than listening to our body and just being like, I can take a day off here, that's okay. You know, I'm feeling pretty tired. And like I'll give an example on the weekend I had this amazing mission lined up that I was frothing for. It was like a 10-hour day out in the hills, absolutely awesome. I was up all night with the kids, had a horrible night's sleep, and I had to text in it, but I just text in at 5 a.m. in the morning, I was like, I'm not coming, guys. Like I've had minimal sleep as much as I'd want to be there, and as much it'd be a great benefit to me. I could already see myself tripping up and falling down a face and injuring myself because I hadn't had enough sleep. So rather just being committed to something because it's there, just trying to listen and understand from yourself what's really going on. And having that little bit of being be able to explore and be able to enjoy it more, I think helps you start to understand things as well. Um and that's really, really important part of it. And so having a training plan is great, but in the end, you've got to take some accountability to be able to back that off or push it forward a touch. But inherently listen to your body. Um and a lot of us can get caught up now, you know, take down the technological path around HRV and resting heart rate and sleep hours, etc. Um, I could tell you I didn't have to look at my watch when I woke up on Sunday morning to to tell you I was a mess. Like it was pretty present there, and I think that's often the case, right? You can you can tell and you can feel it. And don't feel like you have to push it. Um and I think we've had some really good discussions too in uh on the cartel page on school at the moment around zone two and zone one running and how slow it feels for people and how they're really struggling with that. Um because mentally we feel like we need to be training harder and pushing harder, and that's how we've always run faster. Um and a lot of this, and I circle back to your first question, it's all mindset. Um it's a it's a psychological condition, I think, for all of us. We you know, we need to let go. Just you know, absolutely let go and and just do what we can do on a daily basis with what's in front of us, um, and be happy with that, and it's okay.

SPEAKER_00 13:10

It's really hard though. Yeah. Like I even think this week, you know, I had a swim on Thursday and it got um uh it got wiped because work got crazy. And then I tried to do the swim on Friday, and then I went to a pool and that pool was closed. Something horrendous had happened there. And then I went to another pool and that pool was also closed. So I went to two pools that morning to try and do this bloody swim. And I thought, right, I'll just do it on the Sunday. But like then I'd like completely overloaded my Sunday. But there's just that thing inside you that makes you feel like as a high performing person, and I think a lot of triathletes are high performing individuals, you feel like you want to complete the things that you're supposed to, and it's really hard to actually move through that.

SPEAKER_02 13:58

I think it's crazy. I always going back to Lionel Sanders, um he was he was a notorious low volume trainer, so he could do uh eight or you know, eight or nine hours on the trainer uh for cycling, whereas we're all in Colorado riding these hills, doing five, six hour rides in one ride, and uh doing almost like 20 hour weeks just riding. And um yeah, so it's just different horses with different courses. Um one thing I like about Lionel is he keeps a lot of his stuff uh like it's quite simple principles, and I like that. I think there's something comforting in knowing that this week uh, you know, you might do five lots of eight minutes on the bike at threshold, and next week we're gonna go for six minutes. And it's just like tweaking little things at a time, but it's again at the end of the day, we're dangling the carrot in front of ourselves, um, and we're just trying to improve ourselves a little bit each week. But it still comes back to you've got to swim, bike, and run. Um, and we see it often uh with athletes where um consistency is king. That's probably one of the biggest things to try and get on top of. You're gonna see improvements in your performance no matter what, if you can just try and stack week upon week upon week. I listened to a podcast with Allie Branley who just said, you know, he found a correlation between the amount of volume he could fit in during the week to his performance. So if he just swim, biked and ran, his import performance would improve. And this was probably back 10 or 15 years ago when he was just dominating everyone. And he just um I I I can bet his training plan was not too complicated. Um so yeah, I think some some coaches that they like, you know, they're incentivized to make it complicated. And I think some people eat that up, us being like type A O C D athletes, really enjoy that and monitoring everything, measuring SPO2, heart rate, urine, weight, you name it, it's cool. But um it it can it can wear us out as well. We're looking for longevity in the sport. Yeah, that's key because again, like let's be realistic here.

SPEAKER_01 16:05

We're you know, all three of us now we're age groupers in the sport and we just want to enjoy it. We want to have fun, you know, and I want to keep being able to go out with my mates. Like one of the reasons I keep fit is so a mission like that comes up, I feel I can go out and do it. Um there's an event around the corner and your friends are gonna go do it. Oh, I can definitely just ramp up my cycling now and and go to that and enjoy that. So finding that sustainable element of your training is really important, and I think that's the same with Lionel and Sam. They've found what's sustainable for them and what the training load is that they adapt to and get the best out of themselves mentally and physically. Um and that's a really key important piece. And even with the one-on-one athletes in coaching, that's that's the part you're trying to explore all the time, you know, is what is actually that sustainable training load, and that's could look really different week to week to week. So as life changes and things g move around, you know, twelve hours one week is gonna be eight the next, which could be fourteen the week after that. But it's we you gotta constantly explore that, you know, and really shit test yourself on what that looks like. Um rather than committing to a band and forcing yourself to stay in that band all the time.

SPEAKER_02 17:23

Tim, what are some of the things you find athletes unnecessarily overcomplicate, like on a weekly basis in their training?

SPEAKER_01 17:31

Unnecessarily complicate. Um I think sometimes searching for terrain is one of them. Like, oh no, I can't do that ride because I I didn't have this set up right and this wasn't working properly and you know I couldn't get to the place that I normally do those reps. It's like just get outside and ride. You know, if your bike computer's not working, that's fine. But get a little stopwatch on your wrist and and just try execute the best you can. Um you know, the the technological element I reckon often holds people back. It makes you just getting out and doing the training, that's where we overcomplicate it. Rely so much on it to deliver and it breaks down. And you can as if it's not working, you can run your smart trainer off a simple app on your phone and and just do your best with it. That's really cool. Um that's part of it. Um that's the biggest one. The other one is um Yeah, I I think people just stack and chase training too much and overcomplicate it in that way within the week. Um and then it just gets too busy and too overwhelming and then suddenly you've got too much on at the end of the week and they're trying to chase it all and it and it hurts them because they can't do it all and that frustrates them as well. So this would be my big two. Em, what have you seen? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:55

Yeah, I think it's the the tracing training, and I think it's also that the sort of the swimming stuff, right? Like really sort of overcomplicate what we're trying to do in the pool and get some sort of psychoanalysis from these watches that aren't really um even really measuring things properly. I think that's been my biggest take from you, Tim, since you've become my coach, is how little the data that I'm getting from my watch when I swim is really helping me at all. Like really what I should be doing is just focusing on the feel for the water. And it's been um, it's been really liberating for me. Like I actually don't care what is coming out of my watch anymore. I only use it to sort of track the time. That's that's you know, like in terms of my rest intervals and um and how how far I've swum. That's all I'm really looking at for it now. Um and and yeah, my swims are way more just about how things are feeling, um, you know, whether I'm actually hitting the intent of the session, you know, if I'm swimming hard when I'm supposed to be and if I'm not. And I never used to do it that way because I was always just worried about what that number would be that would spit out, but I don't know why I even cared about that, to be honest. Um, and it's been really good. So I reckon that's probably mine. Um, Tim, I'd be interested from your perspective though. Um, I think triathlon training is pretty repetitive, right? You know, we are doing the same things over and over again. Um, that's that's the nature of the swim bike run. Um, do you as a coach sometimes feel a bit of pressure to almost make sessions more entertaining to keep your athletes like engaged with them? Like when really you could just be kind of doing the same stuff week on week?

SPEAKER_01 20:47

Yeah, it's certainly something that comes up, like people are like wanting variation and change and you know, and you sort of feel as a coach need to provide that to keep people engaged and interested. But re the reality is just you could just be going out and riding your bike um and doing real similar stuff each week, and you'll get to a point where it'll it'll start to feel real easy or too easy, and then you could just change the stimulus. Um Dylan McNeese and I used to talk about doing a session nearly at least three times. And the first time you're sort of learning the session, the second time you're sort of adapting to it, and the third time you it's nearly like acceptance, it's like, oh yeah, I know what the session's about, so it's pretty good now. And and you could probably nearly do it a fourth time. And and I think we're going out every week and we're always trying to do these different sessions to keep it interesting, but there is a lot of learning that goes on to delivering a session well. And then your body gets used to it, and then it sort of accepts it and it's easy, and then you might change the stimulus again. So it's the sort of approach we started taking around stuff as well. And you say with that, you also know if you're improving, right? Oh, look in session in week one versus week two versus week three. And then maybe if you do a fourth time versus week four, how does that look? Um and you can see your steps forward, which is really cool. So yeah, I I think you're on on a point there, like doing repeatability is fine and we can keep doing it all the time. If you do do your sessions multiple times, you actually be able to start to track your progression because you'll see across the three weeks the changes, right? From week one to week two to week three. Yeah, if you do it a fourth time, you might see it there as well. Or if you take a rest week and then come back and do the session again, you're like, oh look, from week one now to week four, how have I adapted, how have I changed? What's my heart rate slight versus my powers? If you want to go down that angle, or you might even simply go, I was on Garmin Hill and Noosa, and look how much farther I'm going up the hill now, every rep. It's a real simple one. Um, and start to see that improvement. So I think there's great value in repeating sessions quite often. Um also with the cabinet that some stage you need to remove yourself from that type of work and do something different, otherwise it'll become stale.

SPEAKER_02 23:13

I think there's a lot of comfort as well in doing stuff that's familiar and riding and running and swimming familiar routes and some familiar pools. I remember uh one of the Kiwi athletes who's coached by I think it was a John Ackland at the time, um, they would just ride and run the same routes. He's like, you're not a tourist bus, you don't need to be getting around to Auckland and seeing different places. Like ride this route. This is the route I want you to ride. And um, unless it's uh it's doing the actual head in, um, like you you're saying with Dylan and that, you know, you you can rinse and repeat stuff. It's not sexy, but if it's effective, then get it done. And then if it's if it's um a session that's got some intent or some intervals in it, um, then you can also, you know, track your progress and that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00 24:02

So Cal, when you were a pro, how were you training? Can you tell us a bit about what that looked like for you? Were you doing all of the science y data stuff or or how how simple were you keeping it?

SPEAKER_02 24:19

I I sort of bounced in in and out of that. So one of my first coaches, Pete Fitzinger, who um is a well-regarded um New Zealand coach. He's double Olympian for the marathon. He would literally send me through a Microsoft Excel uh spreadsheet and would have it Monday through Sunday. And we'd literally write obviously we'd have swim squads, so he didn't have to program the swim in. And um about 80% of the week was just swim, bike, and run with like a duration. So swim 90 minutes, bike two hours, you know, run 50 minutes, for example. It was only on, you know, say there's two key sessions a week, um, where uh the the run might say, you know, four by mile or eight by one K. And then the the way to govern the pace, we often used um like best effort or best average. And I really like that because um obviously it's sort of threshold or um around race pace there. Um but you're basically trying to do the best pace you can without really dropping off. But in terms of everything else, um we had the framework for the week. It was super simple, um, but we didn't really get too much into too much else uh in terms of like heart rate data or power data. Um that was starting to evolve. At the time, there's SRMs, which is one of the only power meters available, and now just extremely expensive and out of touch for most people. Um, but it still relies on the principle of just keeping it simple. Um, another coach I really like that subscribed to that was Joel Filiole, who has a successful stable of athletes, and he sort of had a famous um saying of, you know, like if you have to write down your swim session, it's probably too complicated for the pull. Like you just like to keep it really nice and simple. So you'd have your warm-up, and then you know, you might have your eight four hundreds or something like that. But if it was way too complicated and long and you needed a full A4 sheet of paper, um, which some coaches do like, um, but he was all about keeping it simple and he's got a massive track record of successful athletes, including Simon Whit Whit Simon Whitfield, who won the Sydney Olympics. Um, but again, I guess you can get confirmation bias and find different coaches that do different things. And more recent years is probably the likes of Dan Lorang, who's Jan Fredino's coach, who um I'm sure that being Germans are probably a lot more advanced in that regard, but I think for most athletes uh you can do very well off keeping it quite simple.

SPEAKER_01 27:06

Yeah. I would agree with that, Kyle. I think that's a simple, simple structure, right? Set your simple structure for the week and then just modify the few key sessions within that.

SPEAKER_00 27:16

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 community, you can check out our webpage. I've linked it in the show notes. See you next time.