OK, so back to my normal milieu this week …..

Questions and emails on my ‘what does it take to finish an Ironman’ post seemed to indicate that you all liked the format but, for you, finishing isn’t going to cut it. You want to qualify! :-)

Today’s pic is of one of the top Age Groupers I coach, Shawn Burke, busting out a 9:23 qualifying time in Ironman Florida. Being able to work with Shawn and a number of other top age group athletes ‘up close and personal’ over multiple seasons, I’ve been able to witness first hand ‘what it takes’.

I’ve written a previous post on what it takes from a general work/commitment perspective to reach the very top of your age group. Despite the heat received, I stand by the message:

- Multiple years of physical training, amounting to several thousand hours of work.

Perhaps the message would be a little more moderate than what I outlined for a Kona slot, but the way things are going at the pointy end of the field, Kona qualifier and top AG are rapidly becoming one and the same. In fact, based on last year, most flat course qualifying males under 50 were in the 9:30’s!

But is work enough?

A bit of a departure this week from my regular focus on high performance athletics to discuss the level of fitness required to complete an Ironman race in under 17hours.

Before I whip out the scalpel and start dissecting, a couple of quick observations on the psychology of the Ironman finish…

Having the chance to coach some first time IMers has been an interesting experience. Not so much from the physical side of things, as I point out below, the physical equation for an Ironman finish is quite simple – get the athlete fit, strong, and teach appropriate pacing. But the psychology of an athlete’s first attack on the Ironman distance is a thing of pure beauty.

In my experience, a first time Ironman has a perspective that often fades as the athlete morphs into a ‘mid-packer’. The magnitude of an Ironman finish is not lost on the first timer and the accompanying fear offers real, pure, motivation.

The athlete pictured above, Louie Bonpua exemplified ‘pure motivation’ better than anyone I can think of. For more on Louie, click here…

This has been a tough winter. Especially for my UK athletes. It seems that the UK has been hit by a perpetual winter storm that has lasted most of the season. Needless to say, they are ready for this winter to be over and to get out of the gym and back on the roads.

On the upside, the indoor time has allowed us to really hone in on 2 critical abilities to Ironman racing – steady (trainer) cycling and pure strength. Many of my athletes are at or on the verge of life best strength numbers at the moment. As we emerge from the cold, it will be my job to transfer this potential ‘gym strength’ to real ‘rubber meets the road’ strength....

As much of the EC team is on the verge of kicking off ‘Swim Game v2.0’, I could not think of a better time for this post.

I received a little bit of heat/disbelief when I posted some comparison tables looking at relative fitness standards for swim, bike and run in a recent blog. To be fair, the upper end ranges in that table were assuming ‘elite’ swimming skill/economy.

Elite swimming skill can be an elusive thing to define, let alone achieve. Certainly, in the triathlon world, it is seen as a ‘holy grail’ of sorts, something that is the exclusive domain of the fortunate few who ‘grew up swimming’. But before we write off the possibility of converting ourselves into ‘skilled swimmers’, let’s consider what it means to ‘grow up swimming’.

"When the body is strong, the mind thinks strong thoughts" - Rollins

When it comes to athletic training, a central thesis that I have developed over my years as a coach is that all athletes, from ultra-distance Ironman athletes to 100m sprint runners are, well, for lack of a better word, athletic.

In other words, while there are certainly individual differences that are clearly obvious across the sports, there is also a homogeneity in the fact that, as muscle is the precursor to movement, individuals who specialize in movement are fundamentally more muscular than ‘the norm’.

Sure, there are those athletes with tiny or lithe skleletal frames that get away with less obvious muscle. Tour De France climbing specialists come to mind. However, relative to their frame, (which is fundamentally fixed) athletes, on the whole have a lot of muscle.

Studies that express physique as a 3 digit ‘somatotype’ of ectomorphy (skinniness), endomorphy (fatness) and mesomorphy (muscularity) reinforce this fact that athletic subsamples from distance runners to hammer throwers all have a higher middle number (mesomorphy) than the general population. A visual representation of this from Fox et al. (1988) is shown below:

As you can see, somatotypes among the sample range from ~254 for the meso-ecto distance runners to ~471 for the meso-endo weight throwers to ~271 for the pure mesomorphic weight lifters. However, for all of these athletes, mesomorphy predominates, i.e. the middle number is always the biggest.

“All animals are created equal but some are more equal than others” – The Pigs (Animal Farm).

As the pigs suggest in one of my favorite reads, there are situations where while things may appear equal, in reality they are not. One of these situations is in the realm of training load.

Let me explain….

While 3000kj of riding is always 3000kj of riding, the direct impact that this amount of work has on your race performance varies greatly throughout the training year. One of the most practically applicable discoveries that has come from studies that have sought to mathematically model the load-performance relationship (e.g. Banister, 1986, Morton, 1991) is that the contribution that load makes to performance varies with the timing of the load with respect to the key event, i.e. there is a critical period where it is optimal to really ‘lay down’ the big load blocks and there is a quantifiable difference to be had by placing a training camp 4 mths vs 4 weeks before your goal event.

Below you’ll find an example of a ‘typical’ influence curve that speaks to some of those issues.

The chart shows weeks from goal event along the x axis, with relative performance benefit of a given training load along the y axis.

As you can see from the curve, there are certain times of the training cycle that work is very beneficial. At other times it is quite detrimental (e.g. during the taper) period while at other times of the cycle it is neither here nor there.

I received an interesting question via email this week that left me a little ponderous. Since pondering is always better shared, I thought I’d write a small piece on it for my blog this week.

The question was in reference to a recent literature review by Stephen Seiler on the polarization of training into definitive ‘hard’ and ‘easy’ training….

“It seems that you place a lot of emphasis on ‘steady’ training. I was wondering if you see a place for ‘easy’ training in the athlete’s basic week and if so, what benefits do you feel such training promotes?”

The reader is correct that I see very little direct benefit to training conducted below the aerobic threshold and A LOT of direct benefit to training conducted just above the aerobic threshold. However, this is not to say that there are no benefits to including easy training within your week. I’ll outline a couple of those here.

First a quick caveat that relates to the Seiler paper, and indeed to any comparison that a recreational athlete may make with an elite athlete’s physiological data:

Because elite athletes have greater central fitness, they have a diminished heart rate response for a given VO2max. Take for example, an ‘in-shape’ test for Gordo vs yours truly:

Gordo (60% VO2max) = 72% HR max
AC (60% VO2max) = 80% HR max

So, when looking at time within a given % HR range, for example when Seiler references that a large elite training volume is performed at 60-70% of HR max, keep in mind that a large chunk (probably half of this training) is likely at or above the aerobic threshold for folks with these sorts of engines (VO2maxes in the range of 5.0L+)

A young boy traveled across Japan to the school of a famous Martial artist. When he arrived at the Dojo he was given an audience by the Master.
"What do you wish from me?" the Master asked.
"I wish to be your student and become the finest Karate-ka in the land," the boy replied "How long must I study?"
"Ten years at least" answered the Master
"Ten years is a long time," said the boy. "What if I studied twice as hard as all your other students?"
"Twenty years" replied the Master
"Twenty years!" "What if I practice day and night with all my effort?" the boy said
"Thirty years," was the Masters reply
"How is it that each time I say I will work harder, you tell me that it will take longer?" the boy asked.
"The answer is clear. When one eye is fixed upon your destination, there is only one eye left with which to find the way."
~ Text from: Zen and the Martial Arts (1979 edition)
by Joe Hyams

I was re-reading Bruce Lee’s Tao of Jeet Kune Do the other day and I came across his interpretation of Buddhism’s eight fold path:

- Right Views
- Right Purpose
- Right Speed
- Right Conduct
- Right Vocation
- Right Effort
- Right awareness
- Right concentration

His interpretation of Right Effort as;

“the therapy must go forward at the ‘staying speed’, the critical velocity that can be sustained”

struck me as both profound and incredibly applicable to athletics.

As a coach, I find a large part of my job is continually bringing the athlete’s focus back from ‘the goal’ to ‘the way’. As the proverb above suggests, the fundamental limiter to an athlete achieving their goal in the shortest possible time is, paradoxically, a focus on achieving the goal in the shortest possible time.

“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way round or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.”
- Bruce Lee

In my last post I outlined a light framework for creating a response-focused Annual Training Plan. The focus of the plan being simply to simplify - to cut planning down to its essentials to maximize the potential for individual responsiveness. For review, the points that I considered key prior to ‘getting out the door’ were:

1. Determine competition dates and phases
2. Determine number of peaks
3. Take a conservative guess at your starting load
4. Come up with a balanced weekly schedule of mixed methods at an appropriate load.
5. Get out the door and train! Repeat! Repeat!

In this follow-up article I will take a look at some of those factors that I look at to ‘get to know’ an athlete individually and to determine the response to (& future direction of) the program.

Once I start an athlete on a new ATP, the first question I am looking to answer in the early weeks is how long is it going to take this guy to get tired? This brings us to Step 6….

Step 6: Train until you get (a little) tired.

You’ll remember that in the last post we took a guess as to appropriate starting load for the coming season. How do we know if this was ‘right’?

Simply, the right training load will make you a little tired within 2-3 weeks (generally for a novice athlete, 2 weeks, for an advanced, 3 weeks), leading to a slight reduction in performance (5-10%)

If the load that we estimated was too light, the following will happen (click to expand):

“The best laid plans of mice and men go often askew”
- Robert Burns

It’s that time of year again. The end of the old season and the beginning of the new means that coaches and self coached athletes throughout the country are buying their notebooks, double clicking their excel spreadsheets and picking up the training manual du jour for the 2010 season.

Of course the training manual du jour of the 2010 season will likely be the same one used in the past recollectable seasons, Joe Friel’s Triathlete’s Training Bible. Joe is a magnanimous guy and as such is offering additional information in a new blog series on ‘constructing your annual training plan’ for 2010, the part inspiration for the somewhat pithy title of this piece.

No disrespect to Joe or his training philosophies at all are implied by this article. 95% of everything I know and do as a coach is related to concepts either espoused or invented (!) by Joe. However, you may find some interest in the 5% of things that I do a little differently to many of the coaches out there.

********

The other polar opposite inspiration for this post comes from a comment made by my good buddy Chuckie V in the comment section of one of his recent stellar blog pieces, where he says (in response to a question about Chrissie Wellington):

"Chrissie is a product of Brett (Sutton) and I work pretty closely with him. He doesn't "believe in" periodization or have much to do with planning. He simply finds the right template for the athlete and puts them to work. Over time, I've migrated to this line of thinking more and more.

A big part of understanding the training process comes down to understanding all there is to know about being tired. After all, in order to ‘supercompensate’ to a level of fitness above the ‘norm’ requires the athlete to take on more work and become more fatigued than they would ordinarily submit themselves to.

However, fatigue in and of itself isn’t enough. If the athlete doesn’t allow sufficient time to supercompensate from a given training session, in other words, if the athlete decides to ‘kick himself while he’s down’, all he or she will do is get more tired rather than more fit.

To complicate matters, there are all kinds of ways of getting both tired and fit and to train effectively, the coach or athlete needs to have some rudimentary understanding of them all. For example, no serious athlete can afford to wait for full structural recovery (repair of muscle fibers and functionally disturbed mitochondria) between sessions. To do so would mean that the athlete would be reduced to performing about a session a month. Even the fast responder must concede that it takes more than 6 miles of running a month to achieve anything in endurance sport!! And so the athlete is left to only allow partial recovery between most sessions. This brings us to the concepts of ‘residual tiredness’ & the ‘fatigue curve’(below - click to expand).

We can ostensibly divide the recovery from fatigue into 4 key periods.

Phase 0: High-Energy Recovery:

Those of you familiar with the training philosophies of Joe Friel (the guy decoupling big time in the shot above :-) will have no doubt come across the concept of ‘decoupling’, i.e. a shift in the power: heart rate relationship as a workout goes on.

An example of this, from one of the athletes I work with, in the form of a rise in heart rate and a drop in power as the session progresses is shown below(click to enlarge).

Clearly, as time went on the gap between the athlete’s power and heart rate widened, to the point that by the end of the session, the difference in power:HR compared to the start is 26%. Or in other words, it is taking this athlete an extra 30 beats/min to generate the same power!!

Detailed info on the calculation of decoupling can be found here, but the general gist is; we take the power/heart rate for the first half of the session and divide it by the power/heart rate for the second half. E.g. if that athlete did 105 watts at 100bpm in the first half (power/HR = 1.05) and 100 watts at 100bpm in the second, i.e. he lost 5 watts (power/HR = 1.00), then his decoupling would be 5watts/100watts = 5%.

When you think about it, this is a pretty perplexing phenomena. We assume physiologically that a given effort requires a given amount of energy, which requires a given amount of oxygen, which in turn requires a given amount of heart beats, at least for a particular individual! So what are the causes and implications of a need for more heart beats at the same workload?

My post on “What it Takes” from a couple of weeks back generated a good deal of discussion both in my inbox and on some internet forums. I didn’t comment on any of the forum posts because I find it much more interesting studying the psychology from afar than attempting to influence it. It is my experience that the bulk of internet ‘discussion’ is more about a proverbial peeing contest than a true attempt to learn anything so, as a general rule, I stay out of it.

It certainly was interesting, though, to watch it from afar. To watch how some good athletes were hell-bent on proving to themselves and others that they lacked ‘what it took’ to be great. The psychology is still a little puzzling to me. Even more puzzling is how they interpreted my last post to be somehow pessimistic. Let me be frank. If the thought of ‘having’ to put in 10 years in this sport in order to discover your potential is in any way depressing, then find yourself another vocation.

My curiosity turned to anger when the discussion moved to the deterministic implications of genetics. If you want to limit yourself, go ahead, but don’t generalize that others are equally limited. The logic goes, well I’ve done ‘everything I can’ over the past x amount of years to fulfill my potential in this sport and I’m still not world champion. Must be genetics.

How to use power curves to help determine athletic strengths and weaknesses

One of my key objectives as a coach is to address and rectify the athlete’s weaknesses with respect to the demands of their event.

The first step in addressing is assessing, i.e. determining where the athlete is physiologically weak. I use multiple means in making this assessment, including laboratory testing (which I have written about at length) along with field data, which will be the focus of this article.

One of the key principles within my training philosophy is that of athletic ‘balance’. This is no doubt, at least in part, bred from the testing that I have performed on a wide array of athletes of different events of different duration. In all cases, the general ‘athleticism’ of these athletes shines through, to some extent, irrespective of their specific event.

This is more than just platitude. In the communist GDR for example, all athletes from marathon runners to Olympic lifters to 1500m swimmers, first had to pass a ‘general athleticism test’ in order to be considered for the sports schools that would enable them to eventually practice their specialty. The criteria for a male 13 year old was as follows (Arbeit, 1997):

• Height: 1.71-1.76m
• 30m sprint: 4.0s
• 3x hop: 6.0-6.4m
• Ball throw (165g): 54-60m
• Shot Put (3.0kg): 9.0-9.5m
• 1500m Run: 4:40-4:50

“A dream doesn’t become reality through magic. It takes sweat, determination and hard work”
- Colin Powell.

I was in the unfortunate position over the last couple of weeks to lose 2 athletes that I had been working with one-on-one over a relatively long period of time. It bothers me on a ‘gut’ level when an athlete changes coaches. Probably harkens back to my swim coaching days when it was common for the best swimmers in our squads to abandon ship when they were either ‘poached’ by one of the less ethical coaches that made up our competition or they became impatient with the amount of work that they were putting in vs the perceived lack of results that they were achieving.

So, I decided to write this piece as a bit of a ‘reality check’ for those athletes who do aspire to reach their full performance potential in the sport of triathlon. This is in no way suggesting that reaching the front of the pack or the top of your age group is the only worthwhile goal. As Molina says, “take a look around, the fountain of youth doesn’t come easy”. Staying in fantastic shape and having fun are worthy goals.

Nor is it suggesting that the MOPers are ‘slacking off’. For your first 2-3 years in the Ironman ranks, the middle of the pack is an important developmental stepping stone on your Ironman journey. However, for those folks who’ve been in the sport for a while and are thinking about taking it to the next level, I offer the following reality checks.

Reality Check #1: There is very little difference in commitment between the top of the age-groups vs the Open Elite.

On our Endurance Corner forum (www.endurancecorner.com) the following question was recently raised, regarding the emphasis Endurance Corner places on steady-state training:

“Help from the research literature gurus, please.

My involvement with Endurance Corner has generated plenty of great discussion at the cardiology practice I work in. Many of us in the practice pride ourselves on readily referencing the various studies that provide support for the diagnostic and therapeutic recommendations we make. If I can't reference a study, I am careful to qualify my position as being based on a theory or based on anecdotal experience.

Today I was making a case for endurance athletes spending a significant amount of the available training hours on 'steady" zone work. The very appropriate question came up, 'based on what research". My response "I'll get back to you'.

Jamie

“SPEAKIN’ IN ENGLISH….?”
- Jeannie from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

While my athletes are far too polite to express themselves in the way that Jeannie does in that legendary movie, I am sure that on more than one occasion, when I go off on one of my wko+ related rants with a lot of terms and vernacular that they don’t 100% understand, they have felt the same way. So, this is for them, a (hopefully, somewhat) concise list of definitions of terms associated with the training software wko+. I was asked to put together a wko+ for Dummies. I’m not sure this qualifies, more like a ‘wko+ for quite intelligent folk who have some questions :-)’ A more thorough background on the theory and concepts of wko+ can be found here...

http://home.trainingpeaks.com/power411.aspx

So let’s dive right in with the ‘mother of them all’ – Normalized Power.

Normalized Power:

Normalized Power (NP) is a similar statistic to average power but is calculated a little differently. While average power simply takes all of the samples from your powermeter and divides them by the number of samples, Normalized Power uses a tricky little weighting system to come up with a number that is more in line with the true physiological effort of a given session.

The calculation:

Let’s say we do 2 rides – one that is completely even paced (on a trainer or velodrome) such that if we took a random sample at the beginning, the middle and the end, they would all read 200 watts. The other ride is an extreme ‘poker paced’ ride where we focus on being strong at the end. We ride the first 1/3 at 100W, the second 1/3 at 200W and the last third at 300W.

Average power for both rides is identical:
(200+200+200)/3 = 200

“My Strength is my Strength”
- Matt Reed

The introduction of power meters in cycling has not only led to significant improvements in training and racing execution but it has also led to a bit of a paradigm shift from a ‘physiological’ model of race performance to a more ‘mechanical’ model.

Let me explain...

"Although mechanical energy is indestructible, there is a universal tendency to its dissipation, which produces throughout the system a gradual augmentation and diffusion of heat, cessation of motion and exhaustion of the potential energy of the material Universe"
- Lord Kelvin

Today I would like to address the last piece in the puzzle of optimally pacing your Ironman. So far we have looked at how to go about determining the optimal bike/run energy allocation for different courses and athletes. However, we haven’t yet looked at how to go about determining how much actual energy you have at your disposal, i.e. how much potential energy do you have available in your personal system, or put more succinctly, what are your energy reserves?

While in the midst of preparing a couple of lengthy articles on anatomical considerations in bike fit (and the midst of a bit of personal overreaching :-), I thought I would post a short but (if I do say so myself) profound article on a key concept that I have come to realize and implement with my athletes over the previous year.

The concept is simply stated as: The optimal load for a given athlete is one which allows that athlete to take at least 2 steps forward (in fitness) before taking one back (in recovery).

“Although Seb was quite nimble, due to his slim physique, his running showed a significant lack of endurance. To remedy this, some distance training and participation in cross-country was indicated…… As Seb progressed, a positive effort was made to improve the balance between his speed and endurance but neither one at the expense of the other”
- Peter Coe (Coach and father of running legend, Sebatian Coe)

There are a number of decisions that we must make as coaches and self-coached athletes including
• How Much? (Volume)
• How Hard? (Intensity)
• And, not unimportantly, what type of training should make up this volume/intensity mix.

There is much debate on which training form/intensity is ‘ideal’, ranging from the low intensity advocates , the medium intensity ‘sweet spot’ group and the high intensity/threshold proponents.

Additionally, orthodox proponents of the periodization faith recommend that the form of training emphasised should change through the training cycle in accordance with the competition calendar.

Regular readers of this blog will hopefully have come to the conclusion that I am not a proponent of emphasizing any one intensity zone. Rather, I believe that long term athletic development is contingent on a very balanced training approach, with a vigilant, conscious effort being made to never over-emphasize one physiological quality or zone at the expense of another. I am not alone in this stance. Rob DeCastella’s coach, Pat Clohessy was one of the pioneers of this multi-speed approach. Likewise, Peter Coe used a similar approach to train his son, Sebastian, in an event that was over 2hrs less than Deek’s.

“To climb steep hills requires a slow pace at first”
- William Shakespeare

The pic today is of James Watt, the ‘brother from another mother’ of the inspiration for my previous post, James Prescott Joule and the guy, I guess, who we can very indirectly thank for our power meters :-)

I received some good feedback from my last post on Energy Pacing your Ironman. I also received a number of questions that the article left unanswered. One, in particular, got my attention:

One of the most difficult aspects, when it comes to pacing a triathlon is the fact that it is a multi-modal activity. It is very easy for an elite 10,000m track runner or 1500m swimmer to ascertain how ‘evenly’ he paced his event. He and his coach simply sit down and look at lap splits.

In the world of triathlon racing, however, it is a little more difficult. What’s the running equivalent of a 200W bike? For the pointy end of the field, is the all-too common 5:30 bike/4hr run an optimal way to race an Ironman? What if I’m a strong biker and a crappy runner? Does that give me carte blanche to take advantage of my ‘strengths’ on the bike, or vice versa for that matter, if I’m a 2:30 marathoner, how much will I slow down for my Ironman run split?

The guy pictured above, James Prescott Joule has some answers.

“After competing in the Hawaii Ironman in 1980, I was intent on racing the Ultraman (3.1mi swim, 156mi Bike, 32mi Run). I was one of the first athletes to compete in an Ironman back then and there were no specific guildelines to follow so my training was largely trial and error. To get in shape for this race, I trained 3 times it’s distance every week – 15mi swim, 450mi bike and 150mi running each week. Plus, since I was on the SEAL team, I was required to do SEAL training 5-7 days/wk. I went from a strong 175lbs to a sickly 138lbs…..

One night I went to take a bath but I had trouble standing and walking, so I crawled to the tub and eventually passed out. My wife took me to the emergency room, where all kinds of troubles were revealed. When asked to lift my head for a spinal X-Ray, I couldn’t do it. My vertebrae in my neck and back were compressed causing a restrictive range of motion. The blood tests revealed that my liver and kidneys were on the verge of shutting down. My left rotator cuff was torn and my left quadriceps was torn. There was severe plantar fasciitis in both feet. My body was literally eating itself for energy.”

- Don Mann (Adventure racing legend) from the book ‘The Complete Guide to Adventure Racing”

"Ignoring regeneration techniques can have an adverse influence on supercompensation. In fact, without adequate regeneration, it will be non-existent"
- Tudor Bompa

It’s been a little while since my last blog post. I’ve been jet-setting across the U.S. from a training camp in Tucson to a vacation trip in San Francisco. Somewhere along the way the calendar ticked over one more click to initiate the start of my 33rd year on this Earth. As my own age advances, one aspect of my training is beginning to become more important – Recovery.

After my last blog entry, my buddy Jaakko advised me to use my skills in translating the complex math of wko+ into terms that the layman can understand, to write a book on wko+ for Dummies. In fear of copyright infringement, I elected to go with today’s title :-)

There is also a little hidden meaning to today’s title. Truth is, there is no negative intent to my use of the word simpleton (or Mr Gump). Au contraire, I deeply admire simplicity in all senses of the word.

As much as I love to deal with numbers and complex theories, the truth is, I abhor complexity. Whenever looking at a data set or a new theory, my driving motivation is to reconcile it with my current view of the simple truth, i.e. to break down complexity into simplicity.

We are all familiar with the term ‘paralysis through analysis’. The corollary to this would be ‘action through simplicity’. In other words, those who most embody action (and who, consequently, generate results) do so through a simple approach – a focus on spending their time DOING the essentials rather than analyzing the inessentials. So, this brings us to today’s blog.

I woke up this morning and looked out the window to find a good accumulation of snow on the ground. I was a little surprised. I didn’t remember my local Fox meteorologist, Crystal Egger (pictured) saying anything about an upcoming snow storm. Usually, she gets it pretty right. In fact, if I think back a couple of decades to my childhood, it sure seems that weather forecasting has improved a whole lot. It seems that back in the day, it was a running joke that the weather that we would wind up with was basically the opposite of what the meteorologist would predict.

Of course, like most things, I am sure technology has played a part in the improved accuracy of weather forecasting. Scientists are now able to sample, minute by minute, a myriad of benchmark #’s, from barometric pressure to humidity to minor fluctuations in temperature and furthermore, they are able to summarize this data to create accurate computer models to predict future weather behavior.

If you’re reading this blog, chances are that you’re seeing where I’m gonna go with this..

I had to include a pic from one of my favorite shows from last year, Rob and Big, when I decided to write a post on that 4 letter word – work. Big Black had a recurrent catch phrase on the show – “Do work, Son!” that I thought was particularly relevant to this post. So there you go. This one’s for Rob and Big.

It can be tempting in this world of relative measures to lose sight of the absolutes. This is just as true in triathlon training as in any other field. Doing your best is great but in the world of competition, being the best is better.

I was re-reading Tony Robbins “Awaken the Giant Within” book earlier this week. I am a big fan of his. I like the whole concept of Neuro-Linguistic Programming and it strikes me that there is great benefit to being an active programmer vs doing what most of us do and let society type the code for our lives. But I digress….

In the first chapter of the book, Robbins makes the following statement:

“If you don’t set baseline standards for what you’ll accept in your life, you’ll find it easy to slip into behaviours and attitudes and a quality of life that’s far below what you deserve”

This past week, I’ve been thinking a lot about how this applies to athletics. The concept of setting minimal standards, expectations that you resolve to hold yourself to seems like a very common trait among winners.