Trimarni Coaching and Nutrition

  When it comes to preparing our athletes for a long distance triathlon (140.6 miles), you'll never see us prescribe a 20-mile (or 3-hour run) and it's rare for our athletes to ride more than 100 miles more than once in their peak training. Our athletes never swim 4200 continuous yards until race day. The "Trimarni Ironman Method" is all about progressive overload - Train as much as your body (and mind) can safely handle with strategic increases in volume, frequency and intensity done progressively overtime. As listed in this photo, there are many different ways to add more stress to the body without riding 100 miles or running for 3 hours.  An effective training plan requires a careful balance between the frequency of workouts, the duration of each session and how intensely you perform each workout. Working out too hard, too often or too long can be detrimental to health and can prevent the body from optimally adapting to the training stimulus. In contrast, working o...

  I'm a big fan of repeatable workouts. I feel there is great value of doing a workout several times over the course of several weeks as you know what to expect and you can focus on executing better each time (especially under fatigue). I also believe that certain workouts are worth repeating year after year. There's no need to reinvent the wheel.  When training for a three-sport, ultra endurance event like an Ironman distance triathlon, I feel that the best training approach is to find the least amount of training needed to produce the biggest training gains. However, among the endurance triathlon community, I find that far too many athletes are doing the same workouts over and over, hoping for different results. Every weekend is a long ride (5-6 hours) followed by a run (20-40 minutes) and the next day is a long run of around 2 hours (and maybe a swim or bike before or after). The training is somewhat predictable for the majority of long distance triathletes and this often r...

  Every training camp is a different experience. No matter how much planning goes into the camp schedule and routes, we always feel like we are needing to be flexible due to uncertainty. The timing in the season, the campers, the weather.....there is just no way to predict how the camp will unfold.  But after every camp, we find ourselves saying "that was the best camp." I don't know how it happens but every camp turns out to be the most rewarding, exhausting, memorable and fun experience.  We planned the timing of this camp to occur two weeks before Ironman Lake Placid. We did this for two reasons. The first reason was to help our athletes break out of their normal training routine and overload the body in a safe, beautiful, challenging environment. With us watching over them, we could also keep our athletes in good health knowing that they were finishing off their Ironman training with a lot of residual fatigue. Secondly, in the case that Ironman Lake Placid was cancell...

  I think it's safe to say that most endurance athletes love physical activity. Certainly it would be difficult to train for a long-distance event if there wasn't a strong passion for working out. But with great enthusiasm to exercise comes a caveat - just because you are exercising, this doesn't mean you are becoming race ready.  Exercise (or physical activity)  is commonly defined as anything that requires you to move your body and burn calories. Training is viewed as working toward adequate levels of strength, endurance, speed and/or power for successful participation (and completion) of an athletic event.  To make the difference easier to understand, exercising satisfies an immediate need and is done for the effect is produces today. Exercise is done for its own sake - either during or immediately after. But when you have a specific performance objective in mind (ex. preparing for an event), you must change your physiology to prepare for the demands of your even...

I've always been an athlete/coach who favors quality over quantity. Well, maybe not in my first few years of endurance training but through leaning the hard way with many lows in my Ironman journey's, I have learned to appreciate a smarter way to physically preparing my body to race for 140.6 miles.  As it relates to training the human body for an endurance race (ex. Ironman distance triathlon), there are so many different approaches that I could spend hours and hours discussing all of the different methods that coaches and athletes follow in order to physically prepare the body for race day and dissecting how I prepare my athletes, of all different fitness levels and abilities, for endurance races. Now I will say that there is a big difference between actually changing the physiology of the body to physically be ready to handle the demands of the upcoming race versus feeling ready as it relates to the mental component of handling the demands of the upcoming race....

      Before every endurance event I do, I like to read my old race reports. I was recently reading my IMWI  and IMKY  race reports and I just laughed while reading them because I guess two and three years down the road, my mind still wants Ironman racing to be "easy".  I always think about a past race and somehow, my mind tells me it was "easy" back then and now I am really going to hurt. But it's funny that when I read my race reports, it was not easy and it was never easy. I guess the saying is true...  I guess when it comes to thinking logically, the body and mind do not like to suffer. Not a good combination when it comes to endurance racing. Not sure how many times you look for that "easy" button but if you find it while training for an endurance event or while racing, I am not sure you will want to use it because if "it" was easy, everyone would be doing it. You see, the great thing about endurance sports is that you g...

When you mention the word endurance athlete, I think most people would instantly think "long" workouts. As that would be expected if you are training for a "long" event. In my multisport world, Ironman and Marathon are the two big endurance events but I would also like to include anything over 2 hours, such as a half marathon or olympic distance triathlon for many. When it comes to building endurance, there are many approaches as to the best way to improve the cardio, muscular and respiratory systems as well as building confidence for the big, long day. But before we jump ahead as to the best way to build endurance, I think I must point out the best way to train for any event..... Forget about what your training partners are doing, what you read in a magazine or what a friend of a friend told you to do to improve fitness. The general and most basic approach to training involves periodization. If you do the same thing over and over, expect the same result. H...