Episode 281: Purple Patch Case Study Series - #5 - Kyle, Minnie, & Kathy (Cautionary Tales)
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This week on the Purple Patch Podcast, we conclude our Purple Patch Performance Case Studies series. In this series, we delve into the experiences of real athletes to provide practical insights about performance. In the past few weeks, we have examined some motivating and informative examples of athlete achievement. However, today we will focus on stories that serve as warnings.
In this episode, Ironman Master Coach Matt Dixon shares three cautionary tales of athletes at various levels of performance who faced common and significant setbacks on their athletic journeys.
Matt outlines the case studies to explain how these challenges developed and recommends solutions for avoiding common pitfalls of the performance landscape.
This episode aims to highlight the obstacles that caused these athletes to stumble, and hopefully inspire you to reflect on your own journey and create a positive path to your goals.
We highly recommend you check out Matt’s recently published white paper on Sustained High Performance. In it, Matt combines his two decades of coaching observations with current empirical research and direct insights from high-performing C-Suite executives. He lays out a roadmap to amplify performance at the highest levels of business leadership. Click here to download your free copy and access Matt's extensive experience in coaching individuals to the highest level of performance in world-class sports, executive performance, and corporate leadership.
Episode Timestamps
00:00 - 03:13 - Welcome and Episode Introduction
03:14 - 05:28 - Matt's News-ings
05:29 - 09:11 - Word of the Week
09:18 - 51:38 - The Meat and Potatoes - Episode 281: Purple Patch Case Study Series - #5 - Kyle, Minnie, & Kathy (Cautionary Tales)
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Full Transcript
SPEAKERS
Matt Dixon
Matt Dixon 00:00
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. The purpose of this podcast is to help time-starved people everywhere integrate sport into life.
Matt Dixon 00:24
Today's episode is a wrap-up of our series on case studies. And we've gone through a lot of positive case studies over the last few weeks but this week it's all about cautionary tales in the pursuit of avoiding pitfalls across all of our performance journeys. And one of the routes that you can leverage to ensure that you can refine your focus around the performance journey, and hopefully avoid some of those health and performance pitfalls, is by leveraging InsideTracker. That's what we do with our athletes. It gives us a landscape of the athlete's biometrics and it enables us to get really precise on where we should place our focus. After all, there are so many places we could focus, why not focus on the things that are going to give the biggest performance yield? And the best thing about it is all of the results are trackable. Now, you don't need to be a Purple Patch athlete to participate in this. In fact, all you need to do is head to insidetracker.com/purplepatch that's insidetracker.com/purplepatch and use this sneaky code Purple Patch Pro 20 That's Purple Patch Pro two zero, and you'll get 20% off everything at the store. As ever, if you need any advice or counsel on how to best leverage InsideTracker in your own performance journey feel free to reach out, we'll be happy to have a conversation with you and see how it might help you. All right, enjoy today. It's a good one, take care.
Matt Dixon 01:53
And welcome to the Purple Patch podcast as ever, your host, Matt Dixon. And I tell you what, over the last few weeks, no one could accuse me of being anything but a beacon of positivity. We dug into some inspirational educational case studies around athletes’ success, but me being me this week, I'm going to flip it around. We're going to title this cautionary tales. The goal is to help you bypass some of the pitfalls that exist out there in the performance landscape and try and help you set the best approach to deliver the results that you want no matter what your pursuit or journey involves. Now we're going to map these case studies has been pretty short, AKA a little bit of a shotgun approach to this. My hope is that by hearing these performance limitation stories, all ultimately self-induced, you can actually reflect on your own journey and set a really positive path as a pursuit here, it's not about shaming and naming people, instead, it's about you getting better. Now every person in this episode today is real. But of course, I've adopted some names that are not necessarily real just to protect those folks identity, of course. Now before we dive in, I've got a few things to tell you. So we are going to do Matt's News-ings and we're also going to do a little bit of Word of the Week this week. But Barry, let's kick it off. Matt's News-ings
Matt Dixon 03:14
Yes, folks, Matt's News-ings. Two quick things I want to go through this week. The first run squat, we talked about this last week. But I think it's very important that we just touch base on this once again. For you guys who are on a running journey, now is a fantastic time to join us for a multi-sport approach to your running training. We are having great success with this program. And just like our tri squad program is designed explicitly for time-starved athletes. And so if you're getting ready for a marathon or half marathon, an ultra distance race, maybe even a 10k, this is specifically designed for you. The whole program has integrated race build so that we can lead you up day by day all the way up to your race day, no matter what the distance is. Every single week of your training is going to be ultra-flexible so that you can have priority sessions to ensure that you can protect the integrity of those sessions that drive the performance needle, and some integrated multi-sport sessions to help you drive your physiological gains without the big risks of the load-bearing running. Really good stuff. Of course, we believe in the four pillars of performance and so yes, you get plenty of education around the pillars of recovery and nutrition. We also have a fully embedded video-based strength program that synchronizes with your insurance plan across your season, as well as of course getting ready for your races. Add to that all of the education, the community the support, and well, you're pretty well taken care of. Now, if you're one of those folks listening who just have a battling relationship with running, or maybe you feel like you're in a plateau, or you have these constant injury cycles that we hear and, of course, observe so much, I promise you and that's a little promise from me that this program is for you. The details are in the show notes, or at the website, purplepatchfitness.com. Head to the run squad notes. Of course, you can always reach out for a chat as well. info@purplepatchfitness.com. But that's for me. Let's give Barry his time in the sun. It's been a couple of weeks and I just love the sweet tunes. Barry, will you play the ukulele for me? Ladies and gentlemen, it's Word of the Week.
Matt Dixon 05:44
Yes, folks, it is Word of the Week and the word this week. Simple. Oh, doesn't that sound? Nice? Simple. Why is that our Word of the Week? Well, guess what? Here's the headline news. 95% of your approach to performance should be anchored around driving towards simple. What I mean by that is repeatable habits that integrate into your life that drive effectiveness over obsession. As an athlete, we'd like to say nail the basics. For someone seeking life performance, we like to say, nail the basics, say what I did there. For example, way too many athletes over-obsess on the finest details, seeking a magic phrase "specificity" instead of focusing on doing the things that help you show up and hit consistently effective training. So instead of just chasing the fine, fine details, build your performance around the fundamentals. Simple. That's the key. Get a really effective endurance training program. Commit to consistent strength training. Eat enough to support that training. Have enough downtime and rejuvenation to allow you to mentally and physically reset, and renew. And sleep well, including going to bed at the same time every night. And ultimately, when you have that in place, all you need to do is make intelligent long-term decisions when approaching your overall fabric of training and life. If you get these things, right, first, you master them. And it's quite an endeavor to master them. It's not simple. But, there's that word again. But if you nail them, if you become a master of them, you make them second nature, it is then and only then, that you think about adding more, refining, improving. And so rather than chasing the next greatest fad, layering yourself in complexity, try and avoid it in your life and in your training. Now, for you folks who are obsessed less about athletics and more about live performance, it's really simple as well. Eat Well, sleep well, consistently exercise, stay socially connected, chase habits and simplicity, and once you have those mastered, once you've nailed the basics, then you can think about the refinements. Oh, should I add intermittent fasting? Is cold plunges the next great thing? All of those components layer on top of the fundamentals. As I said, we call it now the basics, or for the Word of the Week, going simple. That's the key. 95% of your success in whatever arena, it's about filtering out the distractions and mastering the fundamentals. And that is why our Word of the Week is a timely reminder. Simple. Go chase it, guys. All right, with that in mind. And of course, I chose that word of the week because of what we're talking about today, cautionary tales. Barry, let me join hands with you. Sweaty hands on my head on your part. It is the meat and potatoes
Matt Dixon 09:18
All right, folks, it is the meat and potatoes. And this week, cautionary tales. We are going to quick-fire here and we are going to not break from the regular case study format profile, a little bit of a situational challenge, and then we're going to dive into just observations rather than going through the Purple Patch intervention, what we did to help these people, the results and the outcomes of this. Because really, it's about the inability of these folks that we're going to talk about to actually successfully implement an intervention. So we're going to sort of break from it a little bit and try and keep it within those bounds and we're going to try and get to the point pretty quickly today. Because I'm gonna go through a few of these, and some of them are gonna be a bit more athletic, some of them are a bit more around life performance, but all of them are going to be packed of information and insights that maybe you can draw from and help in your performance journey. So what I mean by this is we are not going to solve today, as much as we are going to highlight the pitfalls, and hopefully, a path to redemption, if you want to call it that. And so this is more about where folks went wrong and missed an opportunity versus where people were going and how we managed to rectify that. And so it's a different way to go about education. That's all it is. Some people learn from inspirational stories, and some people see themselves on the wrong track. And it's very, very helpful. So that's why I wanted to build some of these cautionary tales in here.
Matt Dixon 10:48
Without further ado, why don't we get going? We're going to talk about Kyle first. Case, study number one, and we're going to title Kyle, the performance chaser. Sounds very inspirational, doesn't it? So let's go through, we're going to start with Kyle and I'm gonna go through a little bit of a profile with him. So he's time-starved, which is certainly not unique amongst the Purple Patch community. But Kyle is time-starved. He's a father. He's an executive. He's highly ambitious in sports in both Ironman and Half Ironman, or Ironman 70.3, distance racing. And if you go back through over the last five or six years, he's actually secured a good few years of progression. But as we meet him here, at this point of the case study he's plateaued. The last couple of years have been full of a fair amount of frustration, and no real improvements overall. So as we peel back Kyle's situation here, and start to dive into the challenges, we find Kyle at a place where he really wants to break through to the next level, one of my least favorite sayings, but coming to join Purple Patch, I want to break through to the next level. But that's where Kyle is. And he is absolutely committed to breaking through. And so as is, as is similar to most athletes, Kyle had his recipe, his amount of training hours that he did, within the context of his life, and now he's reached a plateau. And so his solution overall is let's throw hard work at the challenge. In other words, I have improved, and I've had success, but now I'm not getting success, the solution has to be that I need to throw more work at it. And his logic is really, in some ways, really sensible. And that's the fact that he said, look, what I was doing up till now has kind of run its course, it's delivered me to here, but now it's not producing results. And so the only way for me to get up to the next level is to double down, to do more. And that's an emotional but also you could argue, somewhat logical, approach. It built my fitness, I got improved, but now I'm not improving. So now I just need to do more. And that, in honesty could be the case. Sometimes that is the answer. And so I don't want to have us fall into the trap in these athletic case studies, that it's always the case of doing less. But in Kyle's case, when we peeled back the onion a little bit, I saw a different issue.
Matt Dixon 13:34
To give this context here was Kyle's landscape of his approach. When we met him at the plateau phase of his athletic career, he was already training 14 to 16 weekly hours. And remember a time-starved, busy executive, father, and he was managing to get in 14, 15, or 16 hours a week, which relative to a regular Purple Patch athlete, is a lot of training hours, and I still somewhat struggle to really understand how athletes successfully get that amount of training in when they have all of the other competing demands and responsibilities in life. So of course, the byproduct of this is that Kyle had very limited downtime outside of his training, a very small sort of orb or orbit of social life around his training. And he was unsurprisingly, sleep-challenged. At the very most getting somewhere around five or six hours of nightly hours of sleep. Okay? He was consistently juggling all of the competing demands of work and life. And if you ask him what his biggest limiter was, he absolutely would always say time. I need more time. So remember, his approach here is to throw more work at the problem. But when I peel back the onion look at that thinking, well where's the more time going to come from to do this more work? What he did to throw more money, more money at the problem, that's another one, but what he did to throw more work at the problem was quite simple. He added to his training by joining a master swim program because he thought the competitive nature might be good. He nudged his weekly training hours, up to 17, 18, 19, and sometimes 20 hours. So that's give or take about a 20 to 25% increase in his total training volume. And he doubled down on having really, really challenging weekend intervals, adding more duration, particularly over Sunday. And then the final thing he did is he always liked to have one day where he just turned his back on the sport and focused on the other components of his life. But he started to add in lower stress training, what he called recovery sessions into that program, just to nudge up the volume a little bit. So now he was seven days a week, which I should point out, is pretty common, actually, for a Purple Patch athlete. But I think the sentiment word for Kyle was in pursuit of doing more, rather than in pursuit of helping the body feel better. And that's a very different bipolar type lens, on looking at adding, facilitating recovery, low-stress training. It was in pursuit of more, not in pursuit of rejuvenation.
Matt Dixon 16:21
So the result of this was, well, it didn't take long. The only way I can line this up is to say the result of this for Kyle, when he adopted this new approach, adding a master's program, adding 20-25% of hours, really doubling down on the weekends, et cetera, was performance devastation, and I don't mean that in a good way. He got worse, he didn't get better. And his challenges were all amplified. He had challenges with consistency. He started to have more and more muscular niggles and pains. Over the course of that season, he was sick four times over the course of the season, which I know stuff happens, but that was way more than we would typically anticipate for an athlete in his situation. And each one of the disciplines in his sport, triathlon, swimming, cycling, and running, all of them declined in terms of output, and how he showed up in races. And ultimately, something else happened as well. He stopped having fun, he wasn't enjoying the sport. And he clearly was not equipped from a platform of health and vibrancy standpoint, to effectively show up in other areas of his life. And so what were the lessons of this, a very simple case study? Kyle's performance recipe was wrong, double underline that, it was just simply wrong. And his challenge, I feel is the classic challenge facing time-starved athletes. Yes, somewhat type-A, passionate, highly committed, and a little bit of a hero complex around the belief of being able to do more than is truly physiologically really able to do over the course of many weeks, if not months. With this personality trait of the slight hero complex, but also passion, commitment, and highly organized type-A, the natural thing, the easy thing, is to throw more at the problem. But the truth is of that is that Kyle's case study is almost universal in the results, which is it doesn't yield positive results, particularly for a time-starved athlete. And that's so important for us to understand. We don't want to just do more. When we think about training if you are stuck in a plateau. If you're in a rut, performance-wise emotionally, the natural inclination is to believe that you want to do more, but the game that we're playing is never about doing more. It's about consistently doing the most training that you possibly can do that is effective. And that last part is so important. You want to build consistent, effective training.
Matt Dixon 19:27
And I will tell you, for athletes getting ready for Ironman distance races, half Ironman distance races, and those other longer distance events, ultra marathons, etcetera, 8, 10, 12 hours for a time-starved parent, that's about the magic window. As you start to creep to 14 to 16 to 18 hours for the vast majority of people, things are going to break. And you're probably getting more but you're not getting more effective. And in Kyle's case, it broke down through enjoyment. It broke down through muscular-skeletal health. It broke down over immune system and the ability to combat colds and other sicknesses. And it broke down on his performance in racing. So it wasn't a winning solution. So listen, today, there is a better way, there is a better way where you really adopt the Purple Patch pillars of performance. And I'm not talking about being coached by us, what I'm talking about is these educational tools. So your endurance training that fits into the context of life, having integrated strength training in there, really focusing around renewing rejuvenation recovery, as we like to call it, that includes a prioritization of sleep, and supporting all of that, with great eating habits, including eating enough calories to support your training and keep yourself healthy, and all of the aspects around hydration. And when you get that right, that tends to be the thing that supports your training to be effective. And when you string that over weeks, that's how you break out of plateaus. So for the performance chaser, so often, for the time-starved, athlete 99% of the time, it's not about doing more, it's about doing it more effectively. That is a single-word change that has a seismic imprint on your yield in performance enjoyment, and how you show up in broader life, it is critically important.
Matt Dixon 21:43
And so when we come back to Kyle to finish this off, what would I do? What would I ask Kyle to do? Well, the first thing is to go back to the original training hours and maintain them or even reduce them a little bit. I would ask Kyle to absolutely prioritize every single week of training around two or maybe three at the most sessions. And these are the ones that I want him to focus on to prioritize to make the key sessions, and they're going to be the toughest workouts. They're the ones that should drive the performance needle a little bit. And I would then ask him to place a huge equal emphasis on his sleep and his downtime as he does on chasing training hours. Reprioritization exercises around that. And then I would ensure that his fueling and his eating were adequate. And adequate in terms of quality and quantity and of course timing, particularly around that post-workout fueling. When we add a little bit of hydration, then that starts to mold the actual practical side. The other part that I would really nail with Kyle is mindset, mindset around personal improvement measures, rather than around race results. He's clearly very outcome-focused -- I must get faster, I need to chase results --versus if he focuses on just improving himself, feeling better building consistency, ensuring that he has great vibrancy and health, ensuring that the quality of his training that he can show up in those key sessions and do well, doesn't always mean doing more power, but have the energy to show up, that will start to yield, greater power, greater pace, greater results, improved health, improved vibrancy, and the outcomes are going to ultimately improve. And that is the recipe that gets there.
Matt Dixon 23:45
Now you know what happens every time if Kyle from here can integrate that. Reducing hours, prioritizing sessions, placing an equal focus on sleep recovery, and nutrition, and building a mindset around long-term personal improvement rather than the outcomes, you know what's going to happen? He's going to improve. But how do I know that? How do I know that, that if we can just turn that recipe and point him on a slightly different runway, how do I know that he's going to get faster? It's because every single time that someone has successfully done just that, they've got faster. And so it would be pretty random if Kyle successfully, and it's not easy, but successfully and bravely enough adopted this for him to be the outlier. Everyone improves and it's simple but it does take some bravery. So when you're stuck in a plateau, I promise you it's not about magic workouts. Sure, the right set of sessions is a must. But the truth is that there's a whole bunch of different types of good sessions. The magic comes in consistency and consistency of effective training. So if you're listening to this, if you think, hmm, I might be Kyle. Is he talking about me? Maybe it's time for you to radically evolve your approach to achieving optimal results.
Matt Dixon 25:24
Okay, so case study number two. And we're going to focus this one on a lifestyle or life performance focus around this. And the name of our case study is Minnie. I like Minnie a lot. She's a busy professional, and a mother of two. And what she says, If you're going to ask Minnie is, I want to show up. I want to show up at work, I want to show up for my family and friends, I want to show up for myself. And I thought that's quite a nice way to say it, I just want to show up. And that's really consistent. It reeks of control. It reeks of consistency. So Minnie wants to show up. And she said, actually, and I quite like this as well. She, and this was a couple of years ago, I should point out, but she said, I want to be that person who folks say how to she'd do it all so well. Pretty cool. I'll go with that. So what's the situation? Well, you might have guessed, it isn't happening right now. Minnie embraces exercise. She recognizes the value of performance habits as I like to label them. So that's the nutrition, the sleep, the recovery, the hydration, all of the building blocks that we talked about on this show sucked so much. But she is in a constant state of frustration, and fatigue. She tries to retain positive eating habits but often succumbs to later in the day poor choices, ice creams, chocolates, etc. And so while trying to retain those positive habits often fails them, if you want to call it a failure. She recognizes the importance of sleep but consistently reports really poor sleep quality. She's sporadic in her exercise consistency. She also lets us know that she has high ebbs and flows of energy and focus in the day. So up and down the pendulum of excitement and exhilaration of focus all the way down to the fog of fatigue, back and forth throughout the day. But let me tell you, it isn't for lack of trying. Minnie has tried many interventions. So when I go through this list, you might listen to these and think, Oh, I've tried that. Yep, I've done that. And so this isn't name and shame, but I'm just gonna list off just a few of them. Many have tried various diets, and a cacophony of nutritional approaches, including fasting, water fasting, Keto, and more. She has a suite, almost a suitcase of tracking devices, anchored around mostly sleep, but also other components. And she has racked up on many, many supplements to help energy, wellness, sleep, and immune health, and also regularly partakes in the system-boosting IVs that have suddenly become very, very trendy, in the pursuit of feeling better having greater energy, health, et cetera. You get it. We don't need to drive this nail all the way into the ground, the list goes on. And this has been Minnie's approach. In other words, go back to the Word of the Week, what many is ultimately failing to do is now the basics. What she's doing instead is looking into all of the nooks and crannies, to the fringe to try and find solutions, when the solutions, I believe, are ultimately dancing right in the middle of the room with a spotlight on them.
Matt Dixon 28:41
When I reviewed Minnie's daily habits and approaches, there were some major, major red flags for me, when we think about showing up, in her words, we think about building a platform of health, stabilizing energy, being able to perform across all of the aspects, including just for herself. Number one bedtime was really sporadic ranging from an exhausted 8 PM bedtime because of days catching up and saying I just can't stay awake, all the way to a 4 AM bedtime collapse, close to an all-nighter because of some work that she had to get done. In other words, she had highly erratic bedtimes. Now a lot of this flowed out of a game of having to play forced to catch up. She might have a few days of pretty poor productivity. Therefore she was saddled with late bedtimes because she had to catch up, catch up, catch up, and then she would inevitably collapse. So there's a little bit of a lack of control and time management on this side of stuff. She was leaving herself consistently grossly under-hydrated and a big part of this was leaning way too much into coffee and afternoon Diet Cokes in a pursuit of trying to keep energy up, corrupted with even more poor sleep quality most nights. Remember, if you're carrying caffeine into the evening, you're going to disrupt your sleep, and then fail to provide the body with enough normal water to really function well. And that includes assisting cognitive function or the ability to focus, process information, etc. But also stabilize energy and manage some of the hunger stimulus that you get. And so hydration was a huge factor. And we're gonna bucket into that some of the uses of caffeine as well, clearly had a performance impact on it. Number three, Minnie never, and I say never, consumed calories after her morning wake-up exercise. So, she got up, she had a cup of coffee, she went and did a workout of some nature if she got a workout in, and she never consumed calories. Now a lot of this was emotional, some of it practical, emotional from the night before where maybe she'd had the cookies and the ice cream, whatever it was that she sort of felt like she fell into. So she wanted to play a little bit of a caloric catch-up, insofar as goodness me, I wasn't well behaved yesterday, so now I'm really going to try and be good post-workout, and try and have healthy eating throughout the day. And so we're going to kick off the day without too many calories. Now, we've done lots on this show about the negative impact on that, and the lack of control in the urges that occur out of that. But simply put that was Minnie's approach, and it wasn't successful whatsoever. In addition to that, there was a practical one, she would always squeeze in a morning workout and then go off to work and so therefore she just sort of went into the work they dove straight in. And it's no wonder at 10, 11 AM that she was incredibly hungry, starving for carbohydrates, the body that was in deficit with them from the workout in the morning, as well as fasting over the course of the night and had a massive dip in energy. So there's no sort of massive complexity of why she struggled there. Great instability of focus, great instability of energy, et cetera. And of course, it had a further knock-on effect, to double amplify the evening cravings once again. So you can start to see the vicious cycle that is starting to occur in Minnie's practical approach.
Matt Dixon 32:28
So overall, Minnie is a classic cautionary tale, on developing a system, a framework. What she really needs to be successful here is some basic commitments around sleep, particularly around timing of sleep, getting to bed at the same time every night, hydration, and eating practices. And all of those, if she could just get structured, and consistent around those, we would turn up the performance dial. And it's really simple stuff. Imagine if I said to you -- Minnie, I want you to have breakfast every day. I want you to ensure that you're consuming three to four liters over the course of the day. I want you to have an evening meal and then I don't want you to eat for two hours before bed. And I want you to get to bed every time on the same night, within a 30-minute window of buffer. If she could just do those four things, nothing else, nothing else, there would be a multitude of levels of performance gain. Nothing else. Just those four things. If she just did it for a few weeks, she would say "Whoo, your genius. It's amazing. I feel great. I feel more consistent." Now it's not as easy as that because it's behavior change. It's developing habits. And I'll tell you what, it ain't me being a genius. What it is, is really simple fundamental habits that create the framework and the structure that enable consistency which then you can build on top of it.
Matt Dixon 34:07
Now the unfortunate thing with Minnie, in honesty, is one more thing. And that's that her cautionary tale is really anchored around a word that she is lacking. And I should preface this, she's a wonderful person, but she has a lack of coachability. And the reason I say this is that Minnie is absolutely convinced, no matter what I say, she's absolutely convinced that her answer must lay in some magic solution from the myriad of so-called experts who are selling some prepackaged solution. From the confusion of the goop-ification or the next magic diet, or the magic approaches of these supplements, or the performance advice says that she hears from a great expert. But it's not something that is just simply not applicable to her and her profile. What ends up happening is she gets confused and conflicted and she dives down and latches on to something that sounds good and sounds simple, and sounds like it is the key to unlocking her performance challenges, but ultimately, is only leading to the cascade of challenges. And the frustrating thing about this, and it's all too common, is her solution actually is quite simple. But it's also kind of boring. That's the truth of it. Because what it requires for Minnie is a longer-term lens and a commitment around a shift of behaviors. And it isn't just one thing. Remember what we talked about, go to bed at the same time, fuel after a workout, including that breakfast. Eat well and eat enough, including breakfast. Hydrate. Maybe give yourself just 10 minutes in the middle of the day to reset, recharge, remove afternoon caffeine, and keep moving every day to keep that commitment. And as I said, if she could just get these fundamentals in, even if you go back to those first four that I talked about -- breakfast, going to bed at the same time, et cetera, et cetera, -- just the four things. Hydration. Four things. If she had that for three, four weeks, one month, her world would change. It won't be perfect. But it would be a platform. And that would be a platform that she can then refine that she could build on. So often, as our Word of the Week said this week, the answer lies in simplicity.
Matt Dixon 36:50
All right, gang, our final one. It's been a month of case studies. Hopefully, you've been able to draw on some of the lessons that we've gone through. And I hope that this one now, our final one, is one to finish on. And our cautionary tales will equally be helpful. This is the evolution failure. We have Kathy and this is one for the athletes. But ultimately it's one that applies to all of us. So Kathy is a serious, and I say that, a serious long-time amateur athlete. She has had a long and storied journey of success, many podiums and victories in her age group, world championship events, gone all over the world traveling and raced, 20 years or more actually, of progression and improvement, at the center of her life is sport. Now we talk about building a base with athletes. Building a foundation. Resilience. Let me tell you, Kathy, this is a seriously fit and seasoned athlete. You get the picture.
Matt Dixon 38:01
But here's the situation. Here comes, like marching horses, the decline. It's like cliff erosion. As we shifted to the late 40s, the soft decline began, and it was almost unnoticeable to begin. She was still very fit, very fast, podiums, or with victories in races, Nothing had changed, but there was just a little loss in power. Maybe some slightly less sustainable power at her threshold. In other words, her maximal steady state output or pace. And maybe when she hit a hill on her bike, she would just choose one gear lighter than the years before. If she was running up slightly steeper grades, she would just start to go slightly shorter on steps, pick the feet up a little bit rather than drive through the back and create propulsion, like a strong warrior. And if she wanted to hold the water in swimming, she would often reach into her bag and grab some paddles to give her the greatest surface area so that she could feel the water, she liked to say, in her weakening swim. Now Kathy, as I said today, fast. But on a personal level, it wasn't quite as fast. Goodness me, the decline begins. And she wasn't ready to start the decline.
Matt Dixon 39:30
And so Kathy came to me and I looked at her approach and here's what I saw in Kathy. It was very clear that Kathy loved training and she loved accumulating miles -- swim, bike, run, give me more. And that's really common, she just had a passion and you can't take that away. I think it's absolutely tremendous. It was also felt reading through the lines a little bit that the miles, the accumulation, the workload that she was used to for 20 or more plus years, was her route of validation. In other words, it gave her confidence, it gave her pride and satisfaction. And ultimately, look, it had worked for her. She's a storied athlete, she'd done very, very well. Her whole approach was never around this Purple Patch-type approach of prioritization and supporting workouts. It was around the accumulation. Give me the hours, pile them on, I'll eat it up, and I'll keep getting better. And guess what, I swim, I bike, I run and I don't worry about strength work. In support of that, when we think about nutrition and habits around fueling, Kathy was consistently obsessed with race weight and race readiness. So she got by with the banner of healthy eating. But when I looked at how she was eating, I didn't feel like there was near enough protein, nor enough calories, generally to support that load. Now, the one final thing that Kathy did start to report, and she said, you know what started to happen is my rate of recovery is reduced, post-race, after hard runs, maybe after interval bike sessions, I just don't bounce back quite as much.
Matt Dixon 41:15
So in this picture I paint, is Kathy just destined to get slower? As time goes on? Is it just about performance decline? Is there any route out of this? Well, the truth is for Kathy, it didn't have to be the case, she could not only prevent the decline, but I still felt she could get faster. Unfortunately, for Kathy, and it's really, I want to underline this word, unfortunately, unfortunately, it was worse. Now remember, what I talked about, the decline started to occur in her late 40s. And at that time, Kathy came to me. That was five years ago. And that was really the moment of opportunity. She came to me and she said, "What do I need to do to get back on track and make sure that I don't slow down?" And when I reviewed everything, I said to Kathy, it's not about not slowing down. It's still about getting faster. And I felt like that was quite inspirational. I think if you evolve, you can get faster. Now, this was the approach. And I think this is important. If you're listening to this, as a coach, realize how I went about this, albeit ultimately, unsuccessfully. The first thing that is important to acknowledge is what worked for Kathy. In other words, her old approach, was effective. Kathy has a great athletic story. And while it isn't necessarily the approach that I would have employed, at the same time, it worked for her. And at the time, I said to her, look, if we reflect on the last 20 years, I think you actually got away with a few things. There were some ingredients that were missing. However, if we look at any athlete, there are often components where they could have maybe done things, or they should have included aspects. So let's acknowledge first the great success that Kathy has had in the last 20 years. And while there were some ingredients missing, she had a superior work ethic, and maybe a little bit of luck, but she had great success. That was great, she excelled. But here's the key component here. What has worked in the past is different than what will work now and in the future. And I painted a pretty stark picture for Kathy. And I said that if Kathy stays on this current path that she was on, my prediction is it will lead to further frustration, and ultimately, even greater exponential performance decline. So I felt like she needed right at that time, five years ago, an evolved approach that will require a healthy dose of bravery and pragmatism, because change is hard, particularly when you're changing something that has been really, really effective for you in years prior. Kathy was so fit. And fitness is never going to be a limiter for her. But as I said to her, it's not enough anymore as you enter your late 40s into your 50s and the years above. It's not enough to be fit, you need to be strong. It's not enough to be fit, you need to be strong.
Matt Dixon 44:40
So what that would look like for Kathy, when we reverse back five years was a reduction in global training hours. No longer focusing on accumulation, instead shifting to two to three workouts a week being very high intensity, very uncomfortable, under cardiovascular distress, being unable to talk in many of the intervals because all of your energy and focus is going into the higher intensity training. On the other side of that having more integrated recuperation and and training, a lot of very, very easy work, and having the total hours reduced a little bit. To support that, there were two other elements, which were a radical increase in protein, as well as a total caloric intake increase in calories, despite less training. So we were going to reduce total training hours, albeit with a little higher intensity focus, but we were going to radically increase her caloric support, particularly anchored around protein. And then the second component was the whole endurance program, absolutely built around the pillar of strength and conditioning. The reason we're going to do that was around bone and muscle health, as well as trying to help her facilitate greater force and power potential so that she could bound up hills could drive big gears up any of the grades that she was facing. Four things. Eat more, do more strength, do a whole bunch of easy, and absolutely drive intensity, all while doing slightly fewer total hours. Now, this was an evolution. It was going to take bravery, it was going to be rocky because change is always rocky, but I absolutely believe it was the right approach for the next chapter of her life, both in terms of health and also her performance. And as I said, it's going to take bravery, because it's really tough to implement when you've had 20 years of success in the past. And now suddenly, I come in, Mr. Opinionated, and say, shift.
Matt Dixon 46:44
Kathy couldn't do it. She couldn't do it. So now we come to now, five years, she's in her 50s, early 50s, about 53 years of age, I think she didn't add strength training. She didn't reduce the training load, at least not voluntarily. She failed to shift really any of her eating habits outside of a few protein shakes. And the results were, let's call it detrimental. Over the last season, she's continued to slow. But worse than that she's had continual setbacks with injuries, all of them muscular-skeletal. She's got the onset of bone density issues and osteoporosis and she's struggling now with the impact of perimenopause and all of the associated symptoms. It's no wonder that the joy has evaporated. Her goals are now shifting. And it is in honesty, a full shift. She's absolutely given up on competitive performance. And that's a shame. Now she's just desperate to be healthy, to feel healthy, to get back to some semblance of vibrancy. She's in a fog of fatigue. And this is ultimately the output of a failure to shift habits and approach, to evolve, to grow. Now, this is not over for Kathy. She still has an opportunity. She sits right now with the opportunity ahead. But there needs to be a radical shift in her lens and her approach. And I'll tell you what, I'm not giving up on her. And I'm going to ensure by hook or crook that she succeeds because the ultimate impact of that goes well beyond victories, podiums, how fast, how much power. It's about, for the second chapter of her life, living life really well. Showing up. There's a whole life to live ahead for Kathy but she needs a platform of health. She needs to be vibrant, she needs to be strong, she needs to be resilient, and it's -- resilient. It's going to take change, evolution, and bravery, but I can help her we can help. And we're going to. So if you listen finally, and some elements of Kathy's story, ring true, or any of the stories in today's show, ring true, just know that we're here for you and reach out if you want help or advice. Ping us, it's okay. No pressure. We're happy to listen, we're happy to try, to advise you. All right, team. A bit of a bummer in a way, but out of all of them is hope and opportunity. It's never over and you can always find greater performance. These are three tails of caution and I hope that they act as a little bit of a slap in the face, but also a force of inspiration for you. We're gonna progress next week. We're actually going to start to tackle a little bit around the offseason or we'd like to call it the postseason. And we're going to do a little series on that we've got a whole bunch of fun and games to come broadly. We march forward, but in the meantime have a super week. Let's keep cracking on. Let's have a good one. Take care.
Matt Dixon 50:06
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 on YouTube, and you will find it there and you can 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 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. In fact, as we commenced 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 on 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, and doing whatever you do. Take care.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
performance, kathy, kyle, athlete, training, minnie, week, approach, starved, feel, sleep, cautionary tales, case study, ultimately, bit, hours, patch, purple, running, decline