I can't believe we are only six weeks away from our first triathlon of 2019!! While a long season ahead (ending with the Ironman World Championship in Kona in October), I'm so excited to race!!
After nearly 13 consecutive years of endurance triathlon racing, I still love the process of training. Before every race, I still feel all the butterflies in my stomach and wonder what obstacles I'll have to overcome during 70.3 or 140.6 miles.
While a well-designed training plan will have the proper mix of stress and recovery to ensure that the right type of training occurs at the right time, every athlete handles training stress differently. My body thirteen years ago would not have been able to handle the type of training that I do now.
Building
a durable athlete takes time, careful planning and a lot of patience. This is
not easy because athletes want results now – to be faster, stronger, leaner. The end result is an overworked body that fails to make significant performance improvements and health suffers.
Athletes (and coaches) skip steps only to rush the process out of urgency or impatience. This only increases the risk for injury, sickness, fatigue, burn out and a noticeable performance decline.
There’s no secret sauce to speeding up the process of gaining resilience for an endurance event– it just takes time. An athlete with ten years of consistent Ironman training can absorb a lot more training stress than an athlete training for his/her first Ironman. Even if an athlete is "fast" on paper, past history of illness, sickness and burnout should be considered when designing a training program.
At Trimarni, we spend a lot of time building resilience before adding intensity and volume into training. We also overstress the importance of good daily lifestyle habits like sleep, good nutrition, mobility/strength, stress management, fueling, hydration and recovery to support training. Even if an athlete has a race on the schedule, an athlete can’t absorb “more training” volume or intensity if their foundation is not strong, durable and resilient.
Every athlete wants (or feels the need) to train hard and long but a better approach is to apply the minimal effective dose of training needed to elicit the most beneficial performance response. And with this in mind, you should always be asking yourself "can I absorb the training stress?" By creating resiliency now, you can better tolerate the harder stuff later. While you can't put a timeline on when that time will come, it's important that your training always leads into positive training adaptations – without sickness, injury or burnout.
When I hear of athletes who get sick a lot, with poor sleeping habits, inconsistencies with training and have lots of niggles/injuries, this tells me that the athlete is lacking resilience. There's a good chance that she/he is also rushing the process of trying to gain fitness in a fragile body. For the fragile athletes, the training approach needs to be more cautious and careful until athletic durability improves - which takes time (and requires patience).
As an endurance triathlete, durability will take you far. While you won't become an overnight success, you will get results with time. With so much on your daily plate, there’s only so much time and energy that you can dedicate to training. In my opinion, endurance athletes train way too hard and way too long. Put your time, focus and energy (and money) into the right strategies that will build your resiliency so that come race day, you arrive fit, healthy, strong and hungry to race.
Athletes (and coaches) skip steps only to rush the process out of urgency or impatience. This only increases the risk for injury, sickness, fatigue, burn out and a noticeable performance decline.
There’s no secret sauce to speeding up the process of gaining resilience for an endurance event– it just takes time. An athlete with ten years of consistent Ironman training can absorb a lot more training stress than an athlete training for his/her first Ironman. Even if an athlete is "fast" on paper, past history of illness, sickness and burnout should be considered when designing a training program.
At Trimarni, we spend a lot of time building resilience before adding intensity and volume into training. We also overstress the importance of good daily lifestyle habits like sleep, good nutrition, mobility/strength, stress management, fueling, hydration and recovery to support training. Even if an athlete has a race on the schedule, an athlete can’t absorb “more training” volume or intensity if their foundation is not strong, durable and resilient.
Every athlete wants (or feels the need) to train hard and long but a better approach is to apply the minimal effective dose of training needed to elicit the most beneficial performance response. And with this in mind, you should always be asking yourself "can I absorb the training stress?" By creating resiliency now, you can better tolerate the harder stuff later. While you can't put a timeline on when that time will come, it's important that your training always leads into positive training adaptations – without sickness, injury or burnout.
When I hear of athletes who get sick a lot, with poor sleeping habits, inconsistencies with training and have lots of niggles/injuries, this tells me that the athlete is lacking resilience. There's a good chance that she/he is also rushing the process of trying to gain fitness in a fragile body. For the fragile athletes, the training approach needs to be more cautious and careful until athletic durability improves - which takes time (and requires patience).
As an endurance triathlete, durability will take you far. While you won't become an overnight success, you will get results with time. With so much on your daily plate, there’s only so much time and energy that you can dedicate to training. In my opinion, endurance athletes train way too hard and way too long. Put your time, focus and energy (and money) into the right strategies that will build your resiliency so that come race day, you arrive fit, healthy, strong and hungry to race.