404 - Course correcting your triathlon season before it’s too late
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Welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast!
On this episode, IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon discusses optimizing Ironman training and race preparation. He emphasizes the importance of a solid off-season and consistent training, rather than cramming workouts close to the race. Dixon highlights the need for a flexible, adaptive approach to training, avoiding monotony and ensuring effective recovery. He advises on specific training strategies: short, high-intensity swimming sets, terrain management for biking, and maintaining running frequency with walk breaks. Dixon also stresses the importance of self-pacing and integrating race-specific skills like sighting. He offers a free strategy call for listeners preparing for an IRONMAN.
If you have any questions about the Purple Patch program, feel free to reach out at info@purplepatchfitness.com.
Episode Timecodes:
00-1:05 Episode Promo
1:33-3:52 Episode Intro
3:59-end Meat & Potatoes
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Transcription
Matt Dixon 00:00
Hey folks, Matt Dixon here. We've got a cracker today. We're going back to our roots. Iron Man training. We're going to focus on optimization of the race build. Now, as you're listening today, if you get all the way to the end, and I recommend you do, I talk about a special offer today. That's because as I'm recording this episode, I realize, you know what? What's our mission here? Our mission is to help every listener show up and be successful. So if you are listening today and you have a race and you're not a Purple Patch athlete and you want to have a coaching strategy call, it's on us for this episode. Ping us info@purplepatchfitness.com Let us know that you want to have a strategy call, we'll set up a conversation with one of our coaches. We'll understand your situation and goals. You can ask the questions that you'd like, and we will make sure that you leave with great personal advice. We're pretty good at this Iron Man thing. We've got a bit of a rich history, and so if you'd benefit from a quick conversation with us, it's on us for you today. info@purplepatchfitness.com Enjoy the show today. Take care. I'm Matt Dixon, and welcome to the Purple Patch podcast. The mission of Purple Patch 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 01:18
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 are back at Home Roots. Let's call it that. It's all about Ironman training. Now, this is especially important for all you listeners who are still training for your A race of the season. If we're having this coaching conversation early in the season, I'd be in for quite a different episode because I would be talking to you about how you need to think about training for an Ironman beyond your race build, thinking about setting yourselves up with a solid off season, a preparation phase, building tissue resilience, making sure that you're layering in really good consistency, and how you need to think about much bigger type of training before you just dial in the focus and say the last 1214, 16 weeks into race day, to have a real breakthrough. But here we are. We are deep into race season. Your A races are approaching most likely, and the conversation shifts because we are in effectively creeping towards or right in your race build, and so you don't have the optimal situation right now. That's the stark truth, but you do still have an opportunity. What I want to do is help you today optimize the time that you do have available, and that's the focus, the do's and don'ts of race preparation in the weeks leading up to your race. Now, before we get into the meat of potatoes, even if you've got 678, weeks left, I want to remind you it's not too late to start training smarter. Think about it this way: if you did nothing for just eight weeks, apart from bad workouts, what do you think the result would be? Now imagine the opposite of that, the optimization within the context of your life. And so, let's try and make the most out of the time that you have.
Matt Dixon 03:34
And if you're listening today and you've had a great off season, you've been on program, you're dialed in. There's still plenty to draw from from this episode because it's all about nailing the race prep and the last weeks into your Iron Man. It's all in today's meat and potatoes. Yes, it is the meat and potatoes, and I think we have to start today by setting the stage. Simple terms, I'm going to tell you a cold hard truth, similar to how I introduced this. If you've got an Ironman in the next 234, months, and you haven't yet built up a platform of high consistency, non-race specific training, and then you're not in an optimal position. This doesn't mean that failure is ahead by any means, but you are in a cold reality of a place where you've got an optimization challenge. You have to make the most out of these weeks to set yourself up within the context of this reality.
Matt Dixon 04:38
If you're a regular listener, you've heard me go on many, many times about the real breakthroughs occurs most consistently by those that lock in a great off season and then progress that into preparatory phases of training, hitting some very high intensity, really building on strength. And if you've missed that part of it, you've missed it. There's nothing we can do to. We can't just go and ram in extra time, and yet we can set ourselves up for the most success possible. The truth is, we don't have much wiggle room. We've got to do it well. We've got to do it with a sensible, pragmatic mindset, and so let's do it. I think it's important that when we dig into getting ready for an event that's a huge endurance challenge, it's very very difficult, and you're taking it on. It's always going to be something that holds a big place in your life for the period that you're really training, particularly in the last two to three months. In fact, it starts to compete with your responsibilities of work and your responsibilities with family, friends, or yourself, and and yet it is something that is natural that you're going to have a little bit of nerves. You're going to have a little bit of fear and concerns. And in fact, when race day starts to drop down, starts to become not something on the horizon far away, but something in the very near future, you're going to feel attention build. Have I done enough? What else can I do? How do I get myself ready? And when you have a race like an Ironman, that is, by all intents and purposes, a very big endurance challenge, I think it's very rare for an athlete to think, "I'm ready. I've done everything I can.
Matt Dixon 06:25
You're always, always, always going to think, "I could just do a little bit more, because you care, and it's a big challenge, and you want to be ready, both physically and mentally. In fact, I don't really think I've ever coached an athlete that says, "I'm 100% ready. It's normal. It's natural to feel like I can always do more. It's the nature of the beast, and it's this combination of deep caring and a little bit of fear, respect, nerves for the distance, the challenge itself that drives the natural instinct. More is better. I surely need to do more hours, more volume, more sessions, and if I can do that, I can be more ready. It feels logical. It feels responsible, but it's the message in many ways that the whole sport and brand reinforces. It's the optimal, ultimate challenge. You need to be tough. It's an Iron Man after all, and yet competing with that natural mind sense is the very real competing demands that you have in life, work, family, social life, relationships, sleep, other components, and there is a truth that we need to acknowledge if we're going to take an optimization mindset to training for an Ironman, and that's that there is a simple hard ceiling on what your life and your body can absorb. I always like to say when I'm training athletes, you can't outpace and beat physiology.
Matt Dixon 07:59
You can't manufacture more hours in the day, and there's something that's very important as we launch into the tactical side of preparing for an Ironman, and that's around stress. We all manage a host of stressors in our life, whether it's from demands of work, travel, maybe financial stresses, whatever it might be, and the body is this incredibly complex and very intelligent biological machine. But the one area it's not great at is differentiating different types of stresses, and so if we accumulate all of the stresses in, let's call it life, whether it is work demands, relationships, financial, travel, etc. We need to be cognizant of that when we're introducing training stress into the equation, and then we have other potential stressors that could be eustresses, in other words, positive at processing stress, really smart hydration, great fueling and nutrition, proper sleep. But if not done correctly, are just dumped on top of this big bucket of stress.
Matt Dixon 09:13
And as a human being, no matter who you are, you only have a certain amount of willpower and a certain adaptive ability, in which your body can accumulate and absorb all of the external stresses in your life, and then the training stress that you're adding to be ready for this event and positively adapt. It'll always adapt, but will it adapt by you getting fitter, stronger, more powerful, more durability, or will it maladapt, and you're going to get fatigue accumulation, injury risk, etc. And so, when we think about this, it really defines the fact that you have to be highly adaptable and skilled at managing stresses. This is an important component and mindset when we think about training for an Ironman, particularly when race day is looming. We also need a realization that when you're training for a race, there's a funny thing about life. Pretty much for most people, it's chaotic, it's variable. Another great saying that I always have: life is not a spreadsheet. It's highly unpredictable, and it ebbs and flows with the different demands and stresses that you're going to have. Whether it's working up to a project at work, maybe there's a crisis, maybe there's something that you didn't foresee, or there's something with your health, or your family, or your kids, or different travel, whatever it might be. But life is not rigid; it's not built. And how that relates to you getting ready for an Ironman is that it's imperative that you take a more adaptive approach to your training.
Matt Dixon 11:00
You might call it flexible, but if you spend hours and hours and hours mapping out your last 1214, 16 weeks with a rigid outcome of this is how many hours and how many sessions I need to do in week one, week two, week three, maybe a bit of recovery, week 456, bit of recovery, etc. It's very unlikely that that is going to coordinate and align with the variable stresses that you have in life. And so we need to number one take a holistic mindset to your training. Number two, we need to take a very dynamic mindset, an adaptive mindset relative to how you're prescribing training. This is at the root of the reason that I really don't like to define athlete and training success by the total number of hours accumulated on any given week. It just doesn't make sense. It doesn't coordinate. If we're chasing outcomes, we might, in any given week's opportunity, be under-serving the athlete, not training to their full capacity that week, or more likely, over-serving them, forcing them to make decisions and compromises relative to their ability to sharpen their areas of life, or of course, making sure they're fueling properly, ensuring they get enough downtime so that they can rejuvenate emotionally and physically, ensuring that they protect the all-important sleep where the adaptations occur. So, an adaptive mindset is a second really important thing when we come to actually planning training. Our key to all this is to ensure that we set up an approach where we're integrating our training into life, and so let me remind you what this means at the most basic level, and let's define approach A and approach B, and what we're going to call these is an adaptive approach and a rigid approach. Okay, so we've got two athletes. One of them is going to be rigid. The rigid approach is the athlete that, whether it's delivered by their coach, a training plan, or something they've created themselves, they are driven by weekly outcomes of mileage or hours. Week one, I'm going to hit 15 hours. Week two, I'm going to hit 15 hours. Week three, I'm going to hit 12 hours. Week four, I'm going to hit 18 hours. Week five, I'm going to hit 18 hours. Week six, I'm going to go and so on and so on. A rigid outcome of hours. The second, more adaptive approach is by the athlete that's actually going to start at the other end of equation. They understand the sessions that are necessary, the key sessions that they want to get in, and they're going to start every single week and say, "What do I really have in life first? And so, some weeks life is going to be flowing.
Matt Dixon 14:03
It's going to be busy, and their actual training availability in any given week might be six hours, eight hours, 10 hours, whatever it might be. But other weeks, life might be a bit more stable, a bit more regular, maybe even it ebbs a little bit, and they have more capacity: 12 hours, 14 hours, 16 hours. The key is by looking at the realities of a life demands, family, friends, everything else, and work demands. At the end of any given little planning session, before you start the week, you should have a pretty clear picture of this is authentically, genuinely, not aspirationally, but generally how many hours I have to train, and it is with those hours then that I'm faced as a coach, you're faced as an athlete. How do we optimize those hours? How do we actually make sure that we're getting the. Most of those hours that we have, maybe in some weeks six hours, other weeks 12 hours. Now this might seem chaotic because the total training stress is lower one week, higher another, lower another, higher another, and so on. The key is how this winds up over many many weeks in a row. With the rigid approach, what we consistently see is a couple of factors emerge. Number one, an athlete chasing to cram in a fixed number of hours, when in reality, in order to do that, they have to make consequences, and so, where are the consequences coming from? Any downtime, proper time for meal preparation, getting adequate sleep, and that's going to cause the quality of that training to be less. In addition, it's going to create mental tension. It's going to create competition with other factors of life. That's one of the big reasons that we see family tension emerge so much, and so that's going to occur. That's not a great place to be, because you might be doing the training, but are you doing the most effective training? The second component that occurs is quite often many athletes have aspirational training. My training plan and my spreadsheet says this is what I have to do and achieve, and they just simply can't get it in. I've got my 10 sessions that I'm supposed to do. I've got my 15 hours. I didn't get them in. What's the natural human emotion that occurs when you do that in week one, in week four, in week five, in week eight, it feels like you're underperforming on your plan. I'm supposed to get this mythical, aspirational X number of hours in, and I only got 80% of them. That's going to feed the "I'm not ready" syndrome. I would much rather you nail the appropriate amount of hours that are truly able to integrate into your life and do them well, than I would give you a program that you're either going to compromise on so many of the other factors that support the effectiveness of your training, or feel like you're failing every other week, so the more rigid approach creates competition, erosion of confidence, but also higher risk of fatigue accumulation and greater risk of injury.
Matt Dixon 17:35
In fact, when you side by side an athlete that does a variable set of training hours every week, but integrates with the realities of life, and we lay that over multiple weeks. What we typically see is that athlete is more successful at accumulating the magic word of consistency, and not any consistency, but consistency of highly effective training, versus the athlete that's chasing a rigid approach. What we consistently see there is inconsistency, either failures, shortcomings, a fatigue accumulation, and at the end of the day, over multiple multiple weeks, we have athlete A with the adaptive approach, locking on, great consistency, lower competition with life, more effective training, greater physiological gains. The athlete with the rigid approach, lower confidence consistently reported, higher risk of injury, greater fatigue accumulation, and a sense that this Ironman build has been in direct competition with life, and so it just doesn't make sense if you are eight weeks, 12 weeks, 16 weeks out of your Ironman race, and you're creating a spreadsheet to say this is the magic plan that, by hook or crook, I need to force into life. It is the worst approach you can take. It is vastly superior for every athlete to not be driven by outcomes, but instead by effective inputs.
Matt Dixon 19:19
I'm going to do, no matter what the week that I have in front of me, the best training that I can in the reality of my life. It is still, still, the most effective way, even when race day is coming up large. It's a critical component that, if you take nothing else out of today's session. Please adopt an adaptive approach. I promise you, you won't be doing less hours over the course of many months because you're not going to be missing many hours. You're also going to have more fun, and you're going to show up very, very fit. Within the context of your life, and that's the key. That's a catalyst for you to be successful. So, I've hammered the ground in the foundation. I'm sure what you want to do is get into some nitty gritty. You want to talk about the training, yeah? So let's dig in a little bit. I want to start with two common mistakes that we see with athletes training for an Ironman, particularly in the race prep phase, the first is forgetting about, for lack of a better phrase, quality, high quality sessions. What I mean by that is athletes, as they start to get close to race day, forget about the whole range of physiological systems and say, I just need to get ready for my race, and so have the overwhelming training focus be right around Iron Man mode. Now that tends to be for most athletes the upper end of zone two to zone three. Let's call it that in that range, and they just spend a whole time in a very narrow band of intensity, and it's just hard enough to create real fatigue accumulation, but not challenging enough to create really big stimulus. Athletes turn their back consistently on short high power and very high overspeed. After all, the biggest fear is: Do I have the durability to go for the distance? But if you're only thinking about perfecting race pace and effort, what's occurring over multiple weeks is you're going to start to get physiologically stale. In fact, speaking as a physiologist, the body loves variance.
Matt Dixon 21:42
The body doesn't like monotony, and we want to always touch at least every single range, from very very low to almost maximal effort in every single week of training. Now, of course, as we start to get ready for an over distance endurance challenge like Iron Man, there is a weighted emphasis on zone two to zone three type training. That's going to occur. That's natural, but don't miss out. And there's an important premise here if you're listening as a busy athlete, someone that's time-starved as we like to say it, because in general, what we've seen to be highly effective over the last two decades is that the less total training that you have to train, and most people that have family, friends, busy social life, as well as of course your professional career, you're not a professional triathlete. The less total weeks that you have, and the less total hours in any given week that you have to execute training, the greater the benefit you're going to yield from short, high power, and higher effort and high speed type training, it plays a role. I always go back to athletes such as Rich Viola, 70.3 and Ironman age group champion, Sami Inkanen, 70.3 Ironman world champion. These athletes that were very busy time-starved CEOs training on a recipe of give or take about 10 to 12 hours a week, and their weighted focus on short high speed greatly outweighed the amount of intensity as a ratio that our professional athletes were doing because they just couldn't yield the big foundational, big over mileage work, and it was important every single week doing short high power at zone five, some consistent strong efforts in the run at zone four, etc. Not only does this be boost fatigue resistance, it also amplifies muscle recruitment and power potential, and it provides outsized cardiovascular training stimulus. This is very, very important. And so, while yes, we love to do as much mileage as we can, if the athlete has an opportunity, I coach professional athletes for years and years and years. Over distance is great. The more hours, the better, as long as you can adapt to them. And the truth is that most people simply don't have the capacity.
Matt Dixon 24:15
So as the training availability shrinks, we need to add the stimulus one other way, and so we take the opportunities to over distance as much as we can, planning out weeks in advance to make sure that we can do that 456-hour, bike ride. We can do that two to three-hour run, but we don't do it every week. And when the hours available are less, intensity goes up. Think about that. It's really important. We also want to ensure that even running, while over distance is great, we don't want you just to run easy. We tend to create a stimulus on the running training to try and stimulate overspread. Off the bike, I want you to get up to good running form, and form improves as you go faster quickly off of long and challenging bike rides. I want you to train the body to get into good posture. I want you to create a bigger stimulus. Lack of a better phrase, force good form and speed after the bike. So if you don't have the hours, you better get there quick. And so this is a big first mistake: avoid the monotony, introduce variants into your training. Let's think about the other big mistake that athletes make, particularly when they feel like they're running out of weeks and race day is looming, and that is trying to accumulate or cram every element of Ironman training into every single week that you have left.
Matt Dixon 25:49
This is a classic coach's dilemma. I've got three disciplines: swim, bike, and run, and I've got in each one of those disciplines things those things that I want to train the athlete on. I want to do some over distance endurance work. I probably need to do some strength based work, hills on on the run, big gear work on the bike, etc. Well, I certainly want to do some short high power as well. In fact, that guy Matt Dixon just told me that was important, and probably want to do some threshold or even building or tempo work, there are all of these components that are great that go into the casserole of Iron Man training. But if I take everything of those different types of personalities of training sessions in swim, in bike, and in run, pretty quickly, that casserole can taste pretty nasty, because fatigue accumulation is the only thing that can be the outcome. So instead, to help you, even if you're time cramped, you've only got eight weeks, you've only got 10 weeks. Don't try and fit everything into every single week. To be prepared for a single day Ironman race, you don't have to ride long every single weekend, you don't have to run long every single weekend. What we do over the course of multiple blocks of work, we need to ensure that we're dialing in all of the pieces of training, and ensuring that that training is able to be absorbed and yield positive adaptations. We tend to bring athletes up to the 3,000 foot level and say, "Let's build training in three week blocks. That's not week one, week two, week three of training, then a whole week of recovery. A whole bunch of reasons. That's not the best way to go about it. Instead, it is for the most part two weeks where we're adding big training weeks together, if it fits in life, of course. So week one, week two, when I look over the course of the landscape of those 14 days, I can identify a lot of strong training, a weighted emphasis on higher intensity, and just enough endurance. Week three we tend to call a transition week. Before the body accumulates deep fatigue, we recover in advance, proactive recovery, not desperation recovery. And the first 234, days of that week we tend to identify as good opportunities to adapt, take the foot off the throttle on the training, allow adaptations, and then prime similar to the pattern of a race week. Build up, prep, and hit a nice simulator on the weekend. That's a great opportunity on that third week weekend to do some form of simulation of what you're going to experience on race day, your fueling, your hydration, maybe a big bike ride with a run off the bike that's Iron Man specific.
Matt Dixon 28:49
That's every third week or so, and when you layer that in as a block, a three-week block, which is only two weeks on, a little bit of recovery doesn't take as long to bounce back because we're not desperate. We're proactive, and then you hit the simulator. When we go and repeat that block again, with whatever happened on the Tuesday being very similar to what's happening on week four, so the first week of the second cycle, we repeat that. We have the opportunity for you to go and re-execute that training, do it better than before. Not necessarily more power and more speed or whatever, but just execute the session better and start to see a through line of progression. And as you layer these blocks of three-week cycles, two on one transition week with the simulator, and you layer it on for a second time, for a third time, you know what you get out of it. You get a pattern of training. The body falls into a rhythm, but more than that, you get evidence, evidence of progression. You're not judging yourself in training. The judgment day is on race day, but you're starting to see development. Because if I have you, let's make it up. Do a set of hill intervals on the train or outside on Tuesday of week one, and you go and see those same sessions asked to view again in week four. You've got the opportunity to say, how did I do it? Did I execute it better than before? Was I in more control? What was my power like relative? What was my speed return? How did it feel? And you start to see. And it's important. The game is not more, more, more, more power, more speed. It's about execution, awareness, building a sense of self, and we develop this through line of progression of development. And then before the body gets stale, we shift the emphasis. This makes training really fun because there's just enough familiarity, but it's not boring. You don't do the same session 4567, times. Here we go again, four by six minutes. It's dull. It should be additive to your life, so we want to retain structure and progression and a through line that yields evidence, while physiologically keeping it interesting. And by the way, the fun and the game keep it interesting. So we build the training as an approach with lots of variants of intensity and a stretch of progression, the ebbs and flows relative to life, but a stretch of progression as an antidote to the two primary mistakes that we see in training: number one, monotony, and number two, just trying to cram too much into any given week. So, to finish, what can I tell you about each discipline?
Matt Dixon 31:46
You want to know swim, bike, run. In the last weeks, how do you get ready for this? What do I need to think about in my swimming sessions, in my bike sessions, in my run sessions? How should I go about it? Well, I can't give you everything, but I can give you a few things to take away. Let's first talk about the swim. The first is I love to, in any Ironman athlete's preparation, do a series of shorter sets in at least one session a week, and what I mean by that is short interval swimming at a relatively strong output, lots of 20-fives, lots of 50s. Professional athletes that I've coached know that I've given them two rounds of 100 times 20-five. So one lap done 100 times with five seconds rest. It's tough, and that's very very different than just giving a 2000 straight. The reason that I like short intervals is it gives you the opportunity to accumulate over distance work with really good swim form because you get a mental and physical reset every time, typically at a pace that's a little faster than you would if you just moved up and down the pool, accumulating time, so therefore you're going to maximize your propulsion and your tension under water. So short, high-intensity sets get you swimming on top of the water, give you the best yield of time, and it certainly is a bigger ROI than just going to the pool and accumulate time. It's huge.
Matt Dixon 33:20
A second component of swimming, as it gets ready for an Ironman, is you have to build sets where you are forced to train good swimming form under fatigue. What do I mean by good swimming form? Well, there's a couple of things. Number one, holding a taut body, posture. It's the same as running. It's the same as riding. Posture is the anchor of efficiency, so good posture. You have to hold good posture. Number two, you have to hold good body position, a part of posture, keeping the hips high on the water as high as you can. Number three, making sure that you're holding tension under the water, so purchase on the water, and you're propulsive. So many athletes fall under fatigue to just their hand moving back at a single pace from entry to catch to exit. You have to vault the body over the hand, and as soon as you lose that, you lose propulsion. And so there's a reason the Australians used to like to say, you need to grip it and rip it, and I love athletes to get simulated into. I am under deep fatigue now. I need to do this. So what could that look like? Well, you might go a series of rounds of eight by 50 as fast as you can go over 15 seconds rest. It's hard. Now swimmer 300 good tension under water, good propulsion, and you do that multiple times. Now for lesser athletes, lesser swimmers, it might be 620-fives on five seconds rest into a 200 It might be six 100 best effort. On 30 seconds rest into an 800 for a professional athlete, but holding good form under fatigue is critical. And finally, I guess finally, second from last is making sure that you're only using drills in the precious pull time that you have to to ensure that it translates into better swimming. If you're preparing for an Ironman and you're in the last couple of months, drills have a sparing at best roll. You use them in warm up a little bit. You use them to reset your form between big intervals. Let's make it up: eight one hundreds very strong threshold swim. You have 450s recovery. Put some drills into reset form. You do that two or three rounds. It's a big set. There's the use of drills, but you cannot drill your way to glory. And perhaps the most important thing, the final thing, finally we make it, is race skill development. I frankly don't care how good you get as a pool swimmer. What I care about is how well you can transfer that to swimming in a straight line outside in an open water dynamic environment.
Matt Dixon 36:10
So, in the pool environment, integrate some skills. Integrate siting into every pool swim. You want to get the skill development and the postural resilience to be able to do it without slowing down. If you swim a 200 with sighting and a 200 without sighting, there should be a small delta in pace you can hold. That's a catalyst for success. We also want to simulate what your swim experience is going to be like. You're going to do a series of efforts where you're going out a little stronger for the first 100, 200 yards, then settle into race pace. You're going to generally build intervals through, so your best swimming and strongest swimming is happening in the second half of swims. So that includes negative splitting, coming home in a 400 faster than you went out in the first 200, etc. etc. This is important part in swimming. And how many times do you integrate sighting into your race-specific prep? Every freaking swim. If you're swimming once, twice, three times, 10 times a week, I don't care. Every time, integrate some sighting because if you can become skilled at that, you're going to do the number one predictor of your swimming train potential yielding race day performance, which is swimming in a straight line. If you can do that, you're going to be set up for success. Let's talk about biking. Very simply put, no matter how fit you get on the bike, no matter how much power you can generate, you better get great at yielding the best speed return from your fitness. This is incredibly important if you're riding a hilly or rolling course, but equally important if you expect to ride in windy conditions.
Matt Dixon 37:59
Terrain management is king. Now we've had multiple podcasts around terrain management. I won't go back and undig all of the education there, but I will tell you this: your benefits that you get from a speed return of riding a course sensibly and well, from an artistic standpoint, is much greater than any fitness gains you can make, and so of whatever fitness you are right, get the biggest speed return possible. I think that's a big part of the game, and I will just give you this. Okay, if you have your Iron Man power. Let's make it up. I expect to average 200 watts over the course of the Iron Man. The worst way for you to yield your best Iron Man bike split is to set it and forget it. To just sit, no matter what's happening with the terrain up and down, to say that's my power, that's where I'm going to sit, and just stay stable at that 200 watts. The great riders learn how to distribute that power over the course of a variable terrain to yield biggest speed return, and what that means is as you're going uphill grades, you're going to be seeing slightly elevated power. You're going to be generating more power as you're cresting. There's going to be a very short peak of power as you build speed over those grades, and as you're cresting down the other side of the rollers, your power output is going to be a little lower, and so the variability is going to be relatively high in a range, but the speed return is going to be much greater. And so, when you think about speed return for training potential, it is a huge opportunity to become an artist, and it's never too late to think. About it. If you want us to send you some specific education and information on terrain management, feel free to reach out to us. Info at purplepatchfitness. com. We would be happy to send you one. If you actually want to put it into practice, what I'm talking about here, also reach out.
Matt Dixon 40:17
We can set you up with a complimentary session or two on our platform, where we teach riders this, there's a reason that we're really, really good. I know, I say that with full ego, but really good at helping people become better bike riders. It's really at the crux of it about this, and so I want you to take this. If you want to put it into practice and test it free, we'll let you test it. We'll give you a terrain management course to go and do, and we're going to help you coach all the way through it via video. It's very simple and it's really actionable. A second big component of Ironman training, particularly in the weeks leading up to it, is strength endurance. There is simply not a better training stimulus for bite resilience and cross pollination as well into running performance. Look, ultimately, Ironman is a durability sport, and strength endurance, which is high torque, so a lot of tension at low cadence, low RPM, is a huge catalyst to drive durability. It drives up recruitment of usable fibers, muscle fibers into the mix. It builds up your strength and power potential. It tends to have a really positive impact on running resilience and form, an incredibly powerful way. And ironically, about this, this strength endurance training has the biggest yields for athletes that are going to go and do flat courses. There's a reason. If you're going to go and race flat, go get strong. It's true. Flat courses are strength courses. It's counterintuitive, but a lot of hill repetitions, a lot of big gear work, really, really important. And of course, even in Ironman training, I want you to keep up that short high power, but there's one more thing on the bike ride, and I mentioned this a little bit earlier. The bike ride that I think is the cornerstone of your readiness, emotionally, physically, dialing in your inner animal, the sense of self-pacing that's very, very important. The Iron Man simulator, as I talked about earlier in the show, this is about every third week, and these are your golden ticket. Okay, if you want to get really ready for your race, you want to hit at least three of these going into the race, if not four or five.
Matt Dixon 42:32
So we're spreading these over the course of the last few months going into the race, and the way that you do these is to anchor in with blocks of extended work 20, 3040, minutes over the course of 345, hours, with a run coming off the bike at or above race pace, typically above race pace, where you can lock in a sense of pacing, appropriate terrain management, a really good dial on what your power expectations are. You're fueling the hydration, and it's going to build that dress rehearsal so that the race day experience is familiar. Familiarity is confidence. Confidence is control. And when you have that with consistent training, you're ready to race. So before we go to the run, I want to do a little tangent here because I think this is really important, and this came just came across my desk, and it's a fantastic highlight of the power of really smart terrain management and video-based coaching. I mentioned this when I talked about the session. This is from one of our tri squad athletes. Now she came fourth in her recent race in her age group, which was a huge breakthrough. She qualified for the world championships, and she was doing it locked in. And I want to just come up, and I'm going to read you this because this highlights an athlete's perspective. This is just coming. She she put this this race report to our greater community. A lot of our athletes share to help each other, and I want to just read this to you. Time to see what happens. The bike. This was the race within the race. The plan was simple: ride hard. I had a target wattage in mind, but within the first five to 10 miles, I noticed that I was sitting 10 to 15 watts above that plan. Normally, that would have scared me. Instead, I checked in with myself. Was it hard? Kind of. Was I dying? Not really. I kept hearing Matt Dixon. That's me, by the way. I kept hearing him in my head. You're okay. You're okay. And I. leaned into everything at that moment that we've been working on in Purple Patch. I let it go. I just focused on speed chasing, terrain management, making sure that I was carrying my speed over the crest, no matter. What was occurring in front of me? I had no unnecessary coasting.
Matt Dixon 45:05
I changed the rhythm. I trusted that I could actually push a little bit harder than my brain really wanted me to. It turns out I could. I ended up with a eight-minute PR on the bike. I rode right where I hoped that I could, but didn't honestly believe that was possible. And the best thing is, I came off the bike fresh, and what unlocked for me was a fantastic run performance. That is how I got to my PR and my qualification. Well, I think that's it. I tell you what, as I say that, I can't help but put this in. If you want to be like that athlete, feel free to reach out for a quick consultation with us. We're happy to discuss and dig in deeper. Just ping us at info at purplepatchfitness. com. We'll set up a call. We'll set up a strategy session. Make sure that you're locked in. All right, let's finish this thing. We're going to talk about the run. Here's the thing about the run. There is plenty of intensity in the swim, plenty of intensity in the bike. As we are going into Ironman race day, we've got to be a little bit careful about running intensity. I would be sparing at best at how many hard running sessions you do makes sense, and so in any given week over the course of three months, 12 weeks or so, I would really only think about one day a week that I'm pressing. That might be maybe on Wednesday. It might be a harder brick run on Saturday. It might be maybe a little bit of over distance, longer running on Sunday, but I would not over accumulate hard running. There is great yield and power from hitting high run frequency to build resilience, and the vast majority of your running in Ironman training been really pretty easy. Of the three, we said globally, you want to have higher intensity as a ratio if you got less hours.
Matt Dixon 47:06
That's true, but from swim, bike, and run, the majority of your intensity comes through the swim and bike. The majority of your running wants to be pretty low stress. That's the yield that we're looking for here as we go through. This means that as you are moving into the prep phase of Iron Man, you're really locking in and leveraging brick runs, running off the bike. You are doing some over distance. You are doing some strength-based running. We talked about Iron Man being a durability event. It's a great stimulus for durability. So don't be afraid of adding yield. But the one thing I do love to do is keep up frequency of running. The vast majority of our athletes are running. Get this: five, six, even seven days a week. That sounds crazy, but the majority are easy, short, soul filling, and with walk breaks. Then, if we need it, we allow ourselves a little bit of muscular recuperation and have one or two days off. It's very, very important. The final thing that I really like to lock into is your inner animal and running. Across all three disciplines, self-management is key. But in running, as it is the last discipline, starting hours into the day, you're going to have to be really, really dialed in to trusting yourself and making smart decisions, and so lock in to a sense of pacing and a sense of self-management that isn't solely reliant on outside tools, power, pace, heart rate. Okay, don't just lock into that. Lock into trusting yourself. It is such a key element to build good form, good pacing, energy, and substrate management, etc. And so this is the big reveal on preparing for your I men. I want to leave you with two reminders. Number one, there is proven training theory, but there is not a one size fits all approach to applying it into everybody's life. This is why our most successful tri squad athletes leverage coaching consultations. These are 30 to 60-minute calls that they can add in to their training experience and get individual guidance. It's one of our superpowers on our more automated, fully self-supported training program that we have. Our same team of one-to-one coaches are guiding our squad athletes. We take a team approach. You have a whole team of coaches as resource, and on these consultations, not only will you have a coach give you all of the coaching guidance that you need support for your Iron Man, but they're going to dig into training peaks. They're going to help you filter your races. They're going to ensure that you make personal training. Changes so that you can fully integrate, and I don't want to go on details of here, but this is the big catalyst of how we make people so successful.
Matt Dixon 50:11
And the second thing is, as I mentioned at the start of the episode, if you only have seven, eight weeks to go before your race, it's not too late to train smarter. You've got a really big optimization challenge, but let's make the most of the time. And so, if you got a lot out of this episode and you want to have a complimentary consultation, here's what we want to do. Look, we can talk about Purple Patch coaching. We can talk about the Try Spot program. We can go through the suite of offerings. But the most important thing here, authentically, is we want to help. So here's what we're going to do on this episode: If you have an Iron Man looming somewhere over the course of the rest of this year, set up a complimentary strategy call with us. We'll give you a consultation. We'll give you advice. It's no pressure. All you need to do is reach out info at purplepatchfitness. com. It's not a sales call. I promise you, you're going to leave with real strategy. Now, if it works, that our programming is great for you. Super, you'll be welcome. We've got a lovely team, but we want to make sure that we're successful. I kept this pretty high level today, but I want you to get on the phone with one of our coaches and have a strategy call. I want to make sure that you're getting the right guidance for you. Info at purplepatchfitness. com. Reach out, we'll set it up for you. And no, it's not open to Purple Patch athletes.
Matt Dixon 51:33
It's just for you guys that are listeners on the podcast. All right, we'll see you next time, 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. 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
Ironman training, race build, optimization, training smarter, race preparation, consistency, stress management, adaptive approach, terrain management, strength endurance, high-intensity intervals, running frequency, self-pacing, coaching strategy, Purple Patch.