402 - Beyond the Metrics: How to Train & Race To Your Real Potential
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Welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast!
On this episode IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon discusses the concept of the "inner animal" in athletic performance, emphasizing the importance of self-awareness, pacing, and mental resilience. He explains that the inner animal is developed through mindful training and understanding one's body's responses without relying solely on external metrics. Dixon highlights the need for athletes to push beyond their comfort zones and trust their bodies, using examples from swimming and cycling to illustrate how athletes can build this skill. He also mentions the role of technology as a tool to validate and refine internal awareness, not replace it. The episode aims to help athletes integrate sport into life and achieve their true potential.
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Episode Timecodes:
00-1:40 Episode Promo
2:09-4:22 Episode Intro
4:30-on Meat & Potatoes
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Transcription
Matt Dixon 00:00
As you look forward to the back part of the year, have you maybe plateaued? Are you super confident in your coaching approach, or the way that you're constructing your training? Are you successful in integrating all of your training and your big goals into your even bigger life, are you under control? Are you vibrant? Are you energy? Most importantly, are you having fun? If you're not, we want to help, and in fact, we offer complimentary coaching calls to help you set your strategy and define your mission ahead. Now, along the journey, if it means that we're a great partner for you in your journey, super. We can help you get on the right program, but more than anything, this is a pressure-free call to set up your best journey ahead. In today's show, we're talking about the inner animal, building a sense of control, pacing, and ultimately great execution in smashing your goals. It's a timely and appropriate discussion around high performance, whether you're just starting out or you're looking to break through the barrier and qualify to Hawaii or the Boston Marathon, or whatever it might be. If you're interested in setting up a complimentary strategy call, feel free to reach out. There is absolutely no pressure. All you need to do is ping us at info@purplepatchfitness.com that's info@purplepatchfitness.com You can also click on the link in the show notes. Alright, either way, I hope you enjoy today's show. As ever, a positive review always helps, and please feel free to share this episode with anyone that you think might benefit from it. Enjoy. I'm Matt Dixon. And welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast. The mission of Purplepatch is to empower and educate every human being to reach their athletic potential through the lens of athletic potential. You reach your human potential.
Matt Dixon 01:55
The purpose of this podcast is to help time-starved people everywhere integrate sport into life. And welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast, as ever. Your host, Matt Dixon. And today we're going to have a coaching consultation, me and you. We're going to talk about things, and we are going to be discussing a concept that I have used for years with athletes. It permeates all the way through Purple Patch, and in fact, if you're listening as a Purple Patch athlete, it's going to sound pretty familiar, because I go on and on and on about this, the inner animal developing your sense of pacing, self-awareness, and also establishing the courage and the confidence that when it's right, you peek over the edge and you see what you can do. I think in the realm of big data, tons of metrics, this is the forgotten beast of breakthroughs, and in fact, this whole episode came out of a conversation with one of our team meetings just recently. It is absolutely central to the Purplepatch methodology, and it's timely, because right now Ironman racing is in full swing. It is one of the keys to unlocking faster performances and real progression in your training, and so if you're listening today and you really want to break through to the next level, well, this is a part of how you're going to get there. The reason that most coaches don't talk about the inner animal, or whatever phrase they tend to refer to it, is because it's pretty challenging to coach, particularly remotely, but ultimately, when we think about performance, so often it's not a fitness challenge or a problem, it's often a mental game problem.
Matt Dixon 03:49
The training world, the consistency is there, the structure and execution is solid, and yet when race day comes and a critical key session perhaps calls for full commitment, something holds you back, you don't unleash the lion. It's not the legs, it's not the fitness, it's the permission to actually go. Today we talk about the inner animal. Now, like other traits of high performance, it's not something you were born with, it's something that you train. And today we're going to talk about how to train it. It's all in the meat and potatoes. Yes, the inner animal. Now, of course, I can't go about unpacking what the inner animal is if we don't start with a definition. What is this thing, this mysterious thing that we talk about?
Matt Dixon 04:43
Well, we all have it inside of us, but like anything, it needs a certain skill development to actually bring it out of us, and it becomes a usable framework and tool. Let me outline how I think of the inner animal. It's a. Deeply developed awareness of your own body under stress, it's the ability to accurately sense effort, pace, fatigue, recovery state, without actually relying on external metrics. An athlete with a well-developed inner animal knows what different intensities actually feel like they can distribute their effort intelligently across a race or a duration or a workout, they can recognize when they can safely step beyond, push beyond and outside of comfort, and understand how quickly they can recover from those harder efforts. This isn't an instinct that any of us are born with. It's a skill that's cultivated through months, years of mindful training. Now, I should say, at this point, power meters, pace tracking, heart rate, GPS, all highly valuable tools, but I see them as accelerants, not replacements. Their purpose is to validate, to refine your internal awareness, not to override it, not to imprison you, not to extinguish the value of it. And let me tell you this: when you develop your inner animal, you start to build something that's incredibly powerful as an athlete, that's self-trust, understanding, confidence, and ultimately smarter decision making. In other words, you unlock the ability to race closer to your true potential.
Matt Dixon 06:34
So, let's break down the inner meat animal in very simple terms. Firstly, it's an internal performance compass, it's one that tells you how hard you're truly working. It's the ability to connect with the reality, matching your perception of effort to very real pace, power, heart rate, and starting to define that. It unlocks the mastery of pacing, knowing how to distribute effort over minutes or hours, rather than just simply reacting in the moment, and it's a deepening of the understanding of your body's response. When can I push harder? When is it important to have restraint? How quickly do I recover from a surge, whether it's going up a hill, whether it's staying with a competitor. Ultimately, the animal is a foundation of self-trust, allowing you to make better decisions with the conditions, the terrain, fatigue, even competition change. And so, in other words, it is your partner. It's not the competitor, your partner with technology, when you combine these two, and the metrics start to inform your inner animal, it becomes a catalyst of you improving, and one nice way to think about it in summary is the inner animal is the athlete inside of you that knows what you're capable of, before your watch tells you. You see, your watch measures performance, but it's your inner animal that creates it. And so we want to unpack this in today's show, really succinctly. Let's start with one of the challenges or mistakes that we see athletes making all the time, and it's often unintentional, and in many ways it's not their fault, but it does still hold them back. Let's think about training in the real world. You've got your power all based on your FTP, or your magical critical power test, or however you assess it, you've got your threshold pacing running, whatever it is, and what's our barometer of success? Well, I know in my training that I need to be here's the magic word specific. I want to be precise. I want to dial in exactly the right intensity that's going to give me the biggest yield. I want to get fitter, stronger, more powerful. I want to be race ready.
Matt Dixon 09:06
And so, in other words, when I'm doing my training of what my program tells me to do, what my coach has prescribed, whatever it might be, I want to check the box, I want to turn it green, I want to get validation that I've done it quote right week after week, and so often those athletes just stay squarely in the middle, checking the boxes, never actually truly testing the top of their zone, what they're capable of. Now this is all fine, consistency matters, it's important, but it's missing something. It's missing competitive simulation when hitting a number becomes the goal rather than actually pushing the effort. Our data becomes actually a ceiling instead of a floor.
Matt Dixon 09:59
And when you're just chasing an output over time, when you're just looking for external validation, I must hit 200 watts, I must keep my heart rate at 145 I must hit my seven minute mile pace, whatever it might be, it's slowly like cliff erosion, removing the thing that is powerful inside of you, this inner animal, this sense of self, this understanding that you have, and so it becomes shackled, where gradually almost robot-like, this is what you can do over time, we start to have a lack of understanding of actually what our real performance ceiling is, because over time we've stopped seeking it. We haven't stepped towards the edge, we haven't peeked over the edge, we haven't even tried to jump and flap our arms and see if we can fly, and this is especially relevant right now, because in racing season fitness only converts to performance when tested under competitive pressure, and so there are almost two parts of inner animal. The first is developing a deep understanding of yourself, how things should feel, and how you can distribute effort over time. And secondly, with that understanding, start to push your boundaries a little bit, start to not take radical risks, but at least step to the edge and see what you're made of, to push limits a little bit. I'm going to give you an example of this, and I'm going to borrow from another sport. Last year, I was consulting with a collegiate athlete in rowing, and she was in her senior year, and she was getting frustrated because they had a time trial that took about four minutes, give or take, and this time trial effort was one of the barometers that the coach would use to decide who got a seat on the boat, so you imagine this distance over time, but this coach was highly metric space and very, very prescriptive, and so he would say to the athlete, I want you to set off exactly at this pace, exactly at this stroke rate, and you're going to build in, and the second part of it, you're going to accelerate to this pace and this stroke rate, and as she went through, the goal was to try and get to the magical 359 so the athlete was spending the whole of that give or take four minute time trial effort externally motivated and looking for guidance, not thinking about how she was creating the work, but just chasing the outcome, and over the course of multiple time trial efforts she went 359 4014 minutes 359 and I asked her once, What do you think your potential is?
Matt Dixon 13:12
And she said to me, I think I can go faster, I think I can go 357 I said, Do me a favor, next time that you go and do this time trial for once in your collegiate career, I actually want you to do something radical, and I know this was a little noisy coaching from the outside, but I said row this time trial without the metrics, ignore your coach just for once, and in fact, I want you to trust yourself, and I want you to do this four minute time trial by feel. I want you to develop the inner animal and trust yourself. And here's how I suggested you do it. I said, for the first minute, I want you to row like Frank Sinatra, just really smooth. Then I want to bring up the killers a little bit more. We're going a little bit hardcore here. Then we're going to do some heavy metal. The last minute we're just going to go straight in with banging techno music. It was analogy, of course, but that was the spirit, that's it. Just go and do it, and never look at the dial, just go by feel. And so off she went. She started the tempo by reporting. The coach was saying, What are you up to? What are you up to? She toned it out. Frank Sinatra, the killer's hitting a bit of heavy metal, maybe ACDC, maybe Metallica. I never asked. Long story short, she crossed the proverbial finish line. What was the time? 353 If she only anchored on external metrics, she never would have trusted her body to. Understand, she had a controlled environment. She understands what feeling is. She started to build that trust.
Matt Dixon 15:09
She leaned into her inner animal, and that story, while it is not about running a marathon or competing in an Iron Man over time, it is an extreme example of how, when we get in touch with ourselves and we start to believe and understand ourselves, it can unlock different performance levels, and so, how the heck, as an athlete, do we develop this? How do you train it? Well, before we talk about tapping into race day, we first need to talk about actually developing the skill, because it's not something that's waiting for you in an A race. You don't go in, even though I did with that athlete right there, you don't go in and say, "Whoa, all right, I'm going to trust myself, I'm going to believe in myself. I'm going to ignore all of my data, which is not the message anyway. But instead, you build it over many smaller, uncomfortable, competitive moments that lean up to it, and it's highly valuable. I'm going to give you another story of this as it relates to the inner animal. Do you know a sport in which many, most of the athletes have an incredibly developed inner animal? It's swimming. Why? Let's think about that.
Matt Dixon 16:32
Why are swimmers so upskilled in understanding themselves as athletes and their pacing, it's very, very simple. Swimming is a sport when you're training that is in a controlled environment in the US. Let's call it out a 25 yard pull. You're doing 4567, in back in my history, 10,000 yard days. Okay, you're in a controlled environment, and when you're doing that, the coach is breaking you down into doing intervals. Let's just make it up 20 times 100 and you're doing those one hundreds at a very strong effort. While you're absolute, actually executing each 100 interval in our case study, you're not getting any feedback, but as soon as you touch the wall, you glance up, and you get exactly the feedback off the pace clock. Boom, you touch the wall, that was a 103 pretty high level swimmer, obviously. Boom, the next one, that was a 103 All right, team, I want you to dial it back on the next two. You go easier, you come in, you look, that was a 106107 All right, let's press it on this one. Boom, you push up the level 59 to 60 seconds. In other words, you're executing based on feel and afterwards you're getting the feedback. And imagine doing that once a day, twice a day as a competitive swimmer throughout all of your journey, no data until afterwards. That's how swimmers train. So, over time, what starts to occur for almost every competitive swimmer is they can say, as they're swimming, this is about 140 heart rate, this is 105 per 100. I touch the wall, they're going to be pretty darn close. And guess what, that sense of self pretty quickly can be calibrated when they start riding a bicycle or running, or even on a rowing ergometer, whatever the modality is, it's ingrained in them. And so this is really interesting, as it correlates to your training, our training, because there is value where we can leverage in real time metrics, while also training the inner animal, the sense of pacing, and this is really, really valuable for us.
Matt Dixon 19:02
This is what we do as we navigate through a journey. I'll give you a specific example. When I'm coaching bike sessions and we're rolling out, and let's just make it up, we are going six by five minutes at a very strong effort. Well, there are a couple of ways to do this. Six by five minutes, I want you to do it at threshold. My threshold is about 300 watts, so as I look at the feedback, my pace, my cadence, or my leg speed, and my heart rate, I could have all three of those up, and I could be riding to those metrics, heart rate, a monitor of my internal stress, cadence is my leg speed, and of course my power, and if I hit that magical 300 watts, that's great, six by five minutes recovery between good session, yeah, yeah, physiologically a good session. How about if I approach those when. The even intervals I'm going to do it without looking at any metrics, and I'm going to aim to execute.
Matt Dixon 20:07
Of okay, this is a threshold or zone four type effort, but I'm going to do it where I'm thinking about staying supple and calm and fluid, and I've established on interval number one what it is, interval number two I'm going to do it as we call it riding blind, and now I get feedback at the end of that. How was it? What was my cadence? What was my heart rate, my measure of internal cost? What was my output, my power? When you do that multiple times over the course of weeks and weeks and weeks. You get the benefit of how a swimmer trains. The same can be true with running. I'm going to go on an easy endurance run. I know that I need to keep my heart rate under 140 I want to do that by feel. I can check in occasionally, but I'm building what it is when I'm navigating various terrain, this is all highly variable. It also helps us to really understand on the other side what easy is, and this is really valuable. So that sort of pacing an inner animal is something that every athlete should do across every discipline, swim, bike, and run, because over time, in almost every session, if you're doing a good amount of it, where you're really building trust and awareness, it's empowering. It actually puts context into your numbers. It starts to bridge. Okay, I'm tired today, but I'm actually okay, or I'm really exhausted, and the power is out. And so building that awareness is going to help you make better decisions over the course of any distribution of work.
Matt Dixon 22:04
The second part of the inner animal is starting to understand that your body is stronger than you think you are, and so often, as we talked about, is the shackling that occurs by being only data measured. So that's the inner animal as it relates to self awareness and pacing. There's also the inner animal of understanding that ultimately we are stronger than we think we are, and in order to build trust in ourselves to develop resilience and durability over time, we've got to step into discomfort and understand it, and it can't be about just chasing a number. I'm going to tell you a story about an athlete that I've coached for years, who's an engineer by trade. He loves numbers and metrics, and when we started working together, he said, "Just tell me what to do, tell me what number to hit. Give me the precise heart rate that I should do, so that I know that I'm doing well. And now, years later, he never asked for that. What should this feel like? Where should we go? The most engineer-brained can leverage that strength, the mathematical brain, but if they partner that with feeling with understanding of how things should be challenged and start to build the trust in their body, it's a potent combination, and so if you have the mindset of just tell me what to do, you're limiting yourself. Let me give you a prescription of a session that I might give an athlete to help them understand they've got more in the tank. I might give them a very challenging bike, and then we ask you to run off the bike.
Matt Dixon 23:53
I'm going to have that athlete progressively build through zones, so start to feel zone two, zone three, and up to an upper zone three or zone four effort. I'm going to have them then build off and step back a little bit before going a series of progressive efforts, and I want it to be in this athlete's case around and above half Ironman effort, so that might look like three minutes, where I want you to feel half Ironman effort, not race to a number, not race to a pace. What does it feel like as you start to understand it? Three minutes on, then I'm going to give them 30 to 60 seconds easy recovery. Then the next three minutes I want you to go stronger than pace, we then have a bit of recovery, then we do it again. Go back to three minutes at pace. Feel it now. We're going to go the next three minutes stronger than pace with that little 30 to 60 seconds recovery. Then we do some easy recovery again. We go a third time, so we're going at and above.
Matt Dixon 24:59
Pace at and above pace at and above pace, and every time checking in towards the end. What was it? So we're getting the feedback from the metrics we're looking to associate as fatigue is accumulating what the perception of effort is with the output up and above from pace up and above from pace. Then we go a block of time at half IMM pace, let's call it 10 minutes, but we don't look at anything by feel. Do you know what happens over the course of time as we do this over multiple weeks? That last half IMM pace tends to go a little bit faster with no associated cost in heart rate, they start to understand that they can sustain a slightly faster pace by feel, they're not drawn by externals, they're building the inner animal. Now, so many athletes, when we think about this, is so limited by their belief system. A few years ago, we did a whole Hawaii training camp, and we were doing hill repetitions: go up a hill for six minutes, come back, recover, talk about it, go up again, and after about three or four intervals, I realized, hang on, every athlete here is obsessively looking at their power meat, external, none of them are trusting themselves to actually push a little bit stronger, and so I did two things.
Matt Dixon 26:30
The first is I asked them to do the last two intervals, not looking at power, they could measure it, but they covered it. You know what happened, they rode more power, and then when we got home, we had a debrief. I said one of the challenges that we have as a group here is you don't realize how strong you are. You don't understand how you can press the body in training and recover really radically quickly within a session. And so, for the next two days, we said, "Why don't we find out how strong we are? And as much it is, as it is crazy against regular training methodology, we push them go very, very hard up this hill. Now you ride endurance, now go again, and every single athlete came home in January from that camp with best power sustained over longer durations, five minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 60 minutes, and they were surprised, but they built it by having the courage of peeking over the edge, of testing themselves, of not being held back by the external metrics, and this is a powerful combination. You need to build awareness of your inner animal, and you need the courage to leverage it to peek over the edge. So today is an introduction of the inner animal. We just want to introduce it as a concept, in the next episode of this, we want to dig into racing for it now. If you want to understand some of the sessions that we use and prescribe as a non-purplepatch athlete, feel free to reach out to us, info at Purple Patch Fitness. We would be happy to send you some of the training sessions and how to build them where you're maximizing the metrics, but also developing this game changer. It's how you train and how you bring it out on race day. So, remember, we brought this up because one of our coaches said, "Hey, I've had several consultations with athletes, helping them refine this in training, and it's leading to breakthroughs, and so I thought, you know, what we need to talk about this on the show. There's a difference between a training plan and coaching, and I think that this is what's so different about our tri squad program. It's unique because it's a blend of autonomous training and coaching.
Matt Dixon 29:05
You have the ability to enhance your tri squad experience with one to one consultations to help you get the most out of yourself, to ensure that you understand what things like the inner animal are and how to implement them. So, I tell you this, this topic is a part of what we mean when we say train smarter to race faster. This discussion is speaking to you, and you're curious about what training with us looks like. Well, have a strategy call with one of our coaches, info@purpleplatchfitness.com In the next episode on the animal, we're going to dive into details.
Matt Dixon 29:43
We're going to progressively build out how to apply this in racing, dependent on what fatigue you have, what you have on race day, what you don't have on race day, what the conditions provide. It becomes a huge stimulus, and I'll tell you what, once. You really dial it in, it makes things really fun. Have a great day, guys. Thanks so much for joining, and thank you for listening. I hope that you enjoyed the new format. You can never miss an episode by simply subscribing. Head to the Purple Patch channel of YouTube, and you will find it there, and you could subscribe. Of course, I'd like to ask you if you will subscribe. Also, share it with your friends, and it's really helpful if you leave a nice positive review in the comments.
Matt Dixon 30:29
Now, any questions that you have, let me know. Feel free to add a comment, and I will try my best to respond and support you on your performance journey. And, in fact, as we commence this video podcast experience. If you have any feedback at all, as mentioned earlier in the show, we would love your help in helping us to improve. Simply email us at info@purplepatchfitness.com or leave it in the comments of the show at the Purple Patch page, and we will get you dialed in. We'd love constructive feedback. We are in a growth mindset, as we like to call it. And so, feel free to share with your friends, but as I said, let's build this together. Let's make it something special. It's really fun. We're really trying hard to make it a special experience, and we want to welcome you into the Purple Patch community. With that, I hope you have a great week, stay healthy, have fun, keep smiling, doing whatever you do. Take care.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Inner animal, self-awareness, pacing, high performance, training strategy, mental game, competitive simulation, power meters, heart rate, GPS, self-trust, resilience, durability, coaching calls, athletic potential.