Learn How Pro Sam Appleton Delivered a Breakout Performance After a Year of No Racing
Sam Appleton’s strong 6th place finish at the December 2020 PTO Championships at Challenge Daytona, in one of the top pro fields ever assembled, was commendable for his strategy, bravery, and consistent performance in all three disciplines. The question invariably gets asked:
How did we get there?
Below is a case study of Sam Appleton’s 2020 ‘season,’ which included navigating the rigors of a Covid-19 environment and only a single opportunity to race. Sam’s goal thru the pandemic was to retain high performance-readiness if the opportunity struck and develop weaknesses to set himself up for a cracking 2021 season. While Sam is one of the top-performing triathletes globally, there are clear lessons and parallels for every athlete in this story.
The Athlete:
As an athlete, Sam is not a person who just lives for the joy of training. Some athletes can fully immerse emotionally and physically into tough training without ever feeling like they need to step away. Sam is more of an athlete that does well, fully immersing, then removing cognitive stress when the time is right – knowing when to back away. He benefits from solid breaks mentally and physically, which has been vital for his coach, Matt Dixon, in guiding the programming. Within this strategy, Sam also developed into a smarter, wiser athlete, seemingly, with each passing race, while competing in a men’s professional field that is only getting stronger, deeper, and faster. Sam recognized the mental game and race strategy can be a real performance differentiator.
The Challenge:
The initial part of the 2020 season had gone very well and on the plan, with early season races to launch a little later than Sam’s typical ‘Australian Summer’ races in January and February. He completed one trip in January for an early season race, but we aimed to be more patient in building race readiness globally. With this, a lingering knee issue still aggravated him, and we wanted to be cautious on the running load, despite it being a focus and goal of ours in 2020. In March, COVID-19 hit, lockdown was implemented, and our plans had to change.
Here was the new challenge:
Races and events were canceled
Maintaining athletic development without high mental stress and load
A niggle in the knee
Reduced access to the swimming pools
It was only a few weeks before we began to believe that any racing that might occur would likely be in November or December 2020. We called it pragmatically reading the tea leaves. So how could Sam avoid letting a year bypass his career while not feel like he was training on a treadmill with no end, something that would lead to poor effectiveness and dropping motivation? It was time to think outside the box!
The Solution:
Sam is coached by Matt Dixon. Matt and Sam committed to doing things in a different way, as there were so many variables that they could not control, and a bunch of classic training work that they could not complete. These were the primary ‘interventions’ that Matt Dixon used with Sam, with logic behind them:
A commitment to strength and conditioning:
Sam had always executed strength, but self-admittedly had never fully engaged. The drawer to the swim-bike-run was always the focus. This runway of no racing offered an excellent chance to commit to strength training fully. We worked on stability, joint mobility, strength, and coordination, from the ground up, fully programming. Strength training became the anchor to each week of training and was something new for Sam to enjoy.
Be specific on the bike with no specifics:
Sam hung the TT bike up, the only one he owns with a power meter, and let it build up dust. Instead, the focus was a big biking project leaning into a ‘back to basics’ and soul-filling approach to riding. Sam went on lots of road biking tours and gravel riding adventures. The intervals were aligned with the terrain and loosely structured within the training. Each ride would have a theme but didn’t carry mental stress. It was an adventure of sorts for him, but we tracked an intelligent blend of easy and challenging over the weeks. Sam rode a lot, but mostly on feel and with a wide range of intensity that gravel riding brings.
Hit a run project:
We wanted to develop resilience in the running and build a platform of run-readiness. This couldn’t be about ‘training for the run,’ with loaded up track sessions and hill repeats, and entering socially distant 10km races! Instead, we did the slow burn and highly patient running project. Running up to eight or nine times weekly, but with almost none of the running, including steps, in anger. Shorter sessions, easy intensity, and soul-filling. The mission was to build tissue resilience (hence, injury prevention) and fitness gradually. The cardiovascular conditioning and muscular endurance developed over multiple months, not weeks, with it seldom ever feeling to Sam that he was focusing on running.
The goal of these three major focus elements was that, when races did bubble up, his body and mind would be primed to get race-ready in a short timeframe. The race that finally arose was the PTO Championships in Daytona, scheduled for the first week of December.
Matt and Sam continued the trajectory of the plan above from the middle of March through the end of September. Matt asked Sam to ‘put his training hat on’ in the first week of October. Ever confident as Sam is, he enjoyed the freedom, but Matt, as the coach, felt the timing might be making things a little tight for complete race prep. When October came, the TT bike was cleaned up and then tidied up with Ivan O’Gorman from IOG, and we layered the specificity. With some pool access, we charged forward with five weekly swims, the most we could get in schedule-wise under the COVID-19 restrictions. Finally, Matt and Sam kept strength training as a focus through October but layered in initial intervals in the run. Matt noticed a few things in the run-up to Daytona:
Sam was incredibly fresh mentally. He was fresh, engaged, excited, and consistent throughout the training and up to the race.
His performance metrics ramped up very fast. It was only the first week in November, still a month out from the race, and his performances in training were ahead of any build that we had going into the last World Championship events. He was physically firing on all cylinders.
His training consistency was better than ever. Sam is a relatively ‘easy’ athlete to read; his performance predictors are consistent, which, perhaps, correlates to his incredible consistency at significant events. When he did accumulate fatigue, he responded to rest well.
The Results:
Going into the 2020 PTO Championships at Challenge Daytona, Matt felt Sam was in a fantastic place, but both acknowledged the fact that he simply hadn’t raced in months was a significant unknown. Training is all very well, but racing is another art. Matt and Sam agreed to remain process-driven and ask Sam’s body to respond to the demands of the race as they happened.
Sam is a calm, process-driven racer who can execute on race day. Racing is where Sam shines. After a more challenging than expected swim, perhaps due to compromised swimming hours or simple race rustiness, he mentally remained open and engaged. Sam is a serious racer and has one of the better racing minds that Matt has coached. He rode and ran well for a super individual performance.
This case study is for Sam’s build, but the real power of this work was in the spirit and mindset that Sam managed throughout the uncertainty of 2020. He remained focused yet free and was still able to turn his racing mindset on when it counted. While we can celebrate Sam’s great mindset, we can all draw some conclusions and lessons from the journey. Next time you think the fabric of your performance journey will collapse if your Garmin or power meter doesn’t work, or you skip a strength workout to add more riding miles, perhaps think again.