Setting up your season
by Dan Empfield 1.4.04
(www.slowtwitch.com)

• We'll start with what you should be doing now through March, and into April.
• Then about how you’ll leverage your early-season training against some real speed, which we'll achieve in April and May.
• Next we'll cover your first-peak racing, and what you should be doing immediately afterward.
• Then we’ll discuss how you'll train leading to your late-season peak.
• Finally we'll cover the end of the season races, and perhaps a little fun racing post-season.

WINTER MONTHS

Thee Germans started wintering in San Diego in the late '80s. Back then nobody had ever heard of Jürgen Zäck, and the big cheese was Wolfgang Dittrich. They both showed up in North County to escape the German winter. There were some other occasional Euro-drifters showing up back then as well, including a short-course MOP'er from Belgium named Luc.

We used to laugh at the Germans. They rode 12 miles-an-hour. You couldn't go on a ride with them, you'd be climbing the walls and fidgity within 5 miles. We used to talk a lot of smack back then, and the Germans were the butt of many jokes. Wolfie's comment to all of this was always the same, and became a bit of a mantra for all of us: "We shall see." The undeniable truth to the decade of the '90s, at least as regards long-distance racing, is that We Saw. The Germans clearly "got it." The Americans clearly didn't.

The Germans don't ride as slow as they used to. Yanks and Germans had a sort of detente on that issue somewhere along the way, an unspoken agreement to split the difference, riding at around 15 miles-an-hour. But that's it. No faster. Not for the first month. And although it might not have been hard riding, that doesn't mean it was an easy regimen. It might not have been fast, but it was long. There is Jürgen's loop, for example. It starts and ends on the coast, and hits such cultural landmarks as Dudley's Bakery (just about halfway, where you have precisely five minutes to do whatever it is you need to do or you get left behind). The ride climbs to one-thousand meters above sea level, and it's 120 miles all-told. Jürgen would ride this as many as three times per week. So, then, the point is that the American pros who "did" San Diego were in full-stride in February. The Germans were just warming up. We must grudgingly concede that the Germans knew what the Yanks didn't—that January and February are not August and September—and that being in shape for the season opener in March is not the point. January and February is the time for base miles.

Myself, I think cycling—of the three disciplines we do—is the most important for the aerobic base achieved during this time, for a couple of reasons. It is hard to get hurt cycling if you are doing it technically correctly, and so long as you aren't crashing. Cycling is curative. It is non-ballistic, and is not the joint-pounding, muscle-knotting, imbalance-producing activity that running often can be. When you are on the bike you are building an endurance and muscular base that will aid you in all three endurance disciplines in which you are engaged. Also, physiologically, there is no other way to spend four or five hours exercising. You can't do that running or swimming. So you'll build an endurance base which is useful for both of the other two disciplines without damaging yourself.

But you have to make sure you are taking care of yourself properly in these early weeks and months. The most important thing is to be properly positioned on your bike. We've got a primer on aero positioning right on this site, by the way. You'll also want to take care to keep your cadence up to somewhere between 80rpm on the very low end to a high of 105rpm, and spending the bulk of your time at 90-95rpm is a good way to go.

Cadence is one of the really central aspects of cycling, especially in triathlon. It's harder at first to ride up hills at 95rpm when you naturally want to go 75rpm. This is the time of year to deal with that. Teach yourself to ride a higher cadence, regardless of the terrain. Later, when your concentration must migrate to effort and speed, you don't want to be working on your proper cadence—you want that to be second nature.

Pile in the miles. Go for it. Do a President's Day ride. Get a couple of your buddies and go for three days over that weekend, 80 or 100 miles each day. Book a couple of nights in little motels along the way. Get your pals to give you two changes of clothes, and throw one set for each of you into a box, and UPS the box to each of the two hotels. When you get back send out UPS call-tags to the motels to get the clothes back. That's the way I used to often do it. Then you don't have to get your significant other to drive sag (which will only happen once to each unsuspecting rube you sucker into that job).

You'll want to do these three- or four-day bike jaunts once every couple of months, by the way, and one way to get this into your schedule is to take your vacation days one at a time, like a Friday every other month or so. It is nigh unto impossible to do an Ironman (which is probably what you want to do, right?) without some really big weeks on the bike. It is impossible to contemplate a 350- or 400-mile bike week if you think of it overlaid on your regular work week. But 300 miles over a three-day-weekend makes a 400-mile week within reach. And this is how you should be spending your pre-season, doing weeks just like this, at a very low level of effort.

I don't believe in doing the same sort of schedule week-in and week-out. I prefer to gang up miles in one event during a week, and a lot of pro athletes approach their training this way. Once a month is enough for your big bike week. Perhaps two-hundred miles, perhaps double that, and if you're a top-level male Ironman pro, perhaps almost triple that. But on that week the running will be almost nil, as will the swimming. On your big run week—and big depends on what sort of runner you are, a top pro who's been doing it for awhile might do 80 miles, another might do 50—you will not ride much at all, but you'll perhaps swim quite a bit, since running just doesn't take that long. And, of course, swimming can be another of those therapeutic and healing activities, rolling back the damage you do during your runs.

While we're on the subject of swimming, I'd like to remind you of something of which you are probably aware but don't, perhaps, want to allow yourself to admit. These two winter months are low-intensity, as is explained ad-nauseum above. That means your work should be done at under, say, 70% of your max heart rate, in other words, "conversational pace." I make allowances for topographically-generated heart rates above this range: If you are riding along on the flats at 85% of your max, you're cheating; but if you're climbing a hill on your bike, and THAT is what gets you to 85% of your max, it's okay. I'm not sure why that is, but that's my rule, and I'm sticking to it. Back to the swim...

You are possibly on a master's swim team, and that's a good thing. But master's swimmers only swim. That is the beginning and the end of their glory. They aren't going out for a bike or a run afterward. They're quite happy to take you out of your target heart rate. It is impossible to do the "main set" and also keep your pulse below 70% of your max. So realize that during these early winter months you'll have to cool your jets in the pool. Go to the back of the line. Go down a lane. Swim lap-swim if you have to. But resist the urge to duke it out. Well, okay, you can duke it out once a week, maybe. But the other days just do the laps.

I was talking to Tim DeBoom just two weeks before his third place finish in Hawaii (he would then go on to place second, followed by a pair of wins). He said something which is so very true, it showed insight, and it is to his credit that he realized it. The other years doing Ironman, as he was getting better and finishing higher, were not spent training for Hawaii. They were spent training to be able, finally, TO BE ABLE to train for Hawaii. It is hard to do the training required to do an Ironman. You CAN'T do Ironman training your first year. You can train to finish it. But you can't train to race it until, perhaps, your fifth year. In his best years Wolfgang Dittrich did his big week three to four weeks prior to the race. That week consisted of 700 miles riding and 80 miles running. But it took him years of Ironman training to build up to that kind of week (which he only did one or two times a year). I remember once in the mid '90s calling Ken Glah on the phone at 9PM his time, three weeks before Hawaii. I hoped he wasn't in bed. After many rings he answered the phone, huffing and puffing. Turns out he had just got in from a 17-mile run, immediately following a 130-mile ride.

That's Ironman training. But it's only Ironman training for somebody who's got real endurance talent, who's got the time to train, who's been doing triathlons for 10 years, and Ironman racing for a minimum of 5 years. And it takes a lot of base miles in the early season, many seasons in a row. You're starting now. Doing it right means doing it one step at a time. Today's step is long, slow, base miles. That's what the Germans will be doing right about now, and we don't laugh at them anymore.

SPEED

When I talk about high-intensity, I'm talking about workouts in which you achieve a sustained heart rate above 75-85 percent of your maximum heart rate (depending on who you are—some people can exercise a little closer to their max heart rate and still be comfortable), and 85-95 percent of your max in short efforts. You ought to be careful about how many times a week you engage in this kind of exercise. In the early months of January and February, or later if your season starts later, you ought to keep your high-intensity workouts down to no more than two per week. I'm talking about workouts per week, not days per week. So if you blow your wad in the pool during a master's workout, that's one of your two high-intensity workouts for the week.

On the assumption that you've got eight weeks of base mileage in, perhaps even ten, then, come March and April, you can start doing some anaerobic work, generating a few more mitochondria and getting your bicarbonate buffering system off the bench and into the game. But even after you get to this point, you should not go hog-wild. Keep the number of high-intensity workouts down to no more than five per week.

You might think this sounds like a lot. But hey, I know plenty of pros who do that many high-horsepower workouts in a week without leaving the pool. These are, by the way, the less successful pros, generally. I remember a conversation with Roch Frey—whose athletes grace the podium in Hawaii every year—about just this issue. "I don't let Heather [Fuhr] do the master's workouts more than a couple days a week anymore. Quite often she just swims laps." Roch understands what a lot of athletes don't, that triathletes in particular subject their hearts to an awful lot of work. Three rides, four swims and five runs constitute a typical week for a lot of age-group racers. That adds up to 12 workouts per week, not including any weight workouts. Few top runners will do that many workouts. And that's age-group racing I'm talking about. Pro triathletes may do 15 workouts per week. Triathletes can do it because they're changing around the muscles used, and the way they use them. But your heart and endocrine system only know one way to work. So while you can do that amount of work, you can't do it all at a high intensity, or your flame will burn hot and bright, but you'll flame out in a few weeks or months.

I have this aerobic equivalency system I've been working on for about 20 years, and I think I've got it about as good as it's going to get. It measures the amount of work you're doing per week, and the balance you are, or aren't, achieving per activity. You get one point for every 100 meters you swim and for every mile you ride. You get four points for every mile you run. This is a nice little system because you can refer to it from one year to the next, and each year you should be upping your point totals a little as you get stronger.

A decent age-grouper's good early-season, base-building week might consist of 40 miles of running, 35 miles of cycling, and 10,000 meters of swimming. This is obviously a week when running is predominant. The next week might consist of 175 miles of cycling, 10 miles of running, and 4,000 meters of swimming. A third week might be more balanced and include bricks, in which the run follows immediately after the ride, just like a race. Perhaps during this week you ride 100 miles, run 25 miles, and swim 8,000m. We'll talk about the fourth week shortly. But notice that in each of these cases, your weekly point totals are similar: 295, 265 and 280 points respectively. You've done some reasonably high run and swim mileage during one of those weeks, you've gotten in a longish bike week as well, and you've also accomplished some nice race-specific brick work. As previously stated, though, once every couple of months you'll want to go over-the-top on your cycling week with some really big miles, and that'll require you to pretend you're Eddy Merckx for a three-day weekend.

That fourth week is a very important one. It's the one that you either do too often or not at all, depending on who you are. It is the rest week. Some people just have a hard time with this week. But it's really important. Even when you keep the number of high-intensity workouts to a minimum, you're still doing the miles, and you need a rest. The rule of thumb for me is, you cut your point total in half. If you've been averaging 240 points per week, this one is 120 points.

Some overachieving pros have a hard time with the rest week, and I find it's often the female pros that exhibit this. They take a rest week, and just work on other things all day long. Weed. Mop. Dust. Replant the entire back yard. Paint a fence. And, of course, exit that week more beat after than after her big run week. So rest means rest. Yes, gardening might be therapy, just make sure the rest week revives you spiritually and physically. You should be itchin' to go after the week is over. No stress, no fights, no strife, no 70-hour work-weeks, no binging, no all-nighters, no inviting friends and family for the week. This week is all about rest and renewal. Trade in the rock & roll for the classical this week. Read some John Muir. Stuff like that.

I must be honest, however, and state that there is another kind of athlete. If you go to age-group nationals you'll see some really good middle-aged fellows who do nothing but high intensity all the time. They don't do nearly the mileage I'm advocating. They take no easy rides. No periodization. Not much off-season. Bike totals might be 50-75 miles per week. Run totals might be 15 miles a week. They swim a lot, and all the swims are hard. Their mileage is light enough that they can do everything hard and not overtrain.

This works. The downside is, when I've gone on 40 or 50 mile rides with these guys, they bonk. No endurance. This is for short course specialists only. And they tend to be more injury prone. But there's no denying that, if you're time-limited, this is a way to get very good.

One final word. As you round into good basic shape and you start your high-intensity stuff, you should be coming off of your road bike and onto your tri bike for two of your bike rides during the week. That means, of course, that you've been on your road race bike during the early season. I don't think it's mandatory that you do your early season miles on a road bike, but many of the better pros that I know never even see their tri bars until they've been road bike riding for a couple of months. A road bike is a fabulous piece of training equipment, and I would invest in one of these before I invested in any other fancy computerized training stuff (but there IS good fancy computer stuff worth eventually getting).

When I say a "road race bike" I mean a bike with regular drop bars and no clip-ons. Nothing tri about it. Just the way the roadies ride them. When God invented the road bike he did not make a mistake. These bikes are the perfect early-season, pack-riding, easy-mileage machines. Tri bikes are great, but they are best ridden in the aero position and under some significant amount of power. In other words, I ride my tri bike when I'm going to get up some speed, and I ride my road bike when I'm just pooping along at conversational pace.

FIRST-PEAK RACING

Let us take for granted that you’ve done all your base miles and turned yourself into a tough, durable, long-distance athlete who can go anywhere, given enough time. That’s great, but how do you get there in a hurry? Do you know what it’s like to be in a race, on the bike, and somebody goes past you so fast you just can’t imagine maintaining that kind of pace? How do you become THAT kind of fast? In the next few paragraphs I’m going to tell you.

But first...

When I met JulieAnne White, she was a very good runner but she was unable to get out of her own way on the bike. She was one of those runner-types with runner musculature and without the power to turn those cranks hard. Of course we worked on her position, and while we never had her in the wind tunnel I would guess that we lowered her drag by 10 – 15% by significantly reducing her frontal profile. But power delivery was the thing we most had to work on.

Within two years of the time we started she became a very respectable cyclist, and in some of her best races it is questionable whether she was a better runner than a cyclist. She is still the only woman ever to break five hours on the Ironman Canada bike course (twelve years later), and also holds the bike course record at Ironman New Zealand's old Auckland course. I brag about this terrific athlete (who is also a significant coaching influence on Peter Reid and has been during his comeback of 2002, 2003, and forward) simply to illustrate a point, that you can make terrific progress very quickly if you engage in a few specific types of workouts designed to make you a terror on the bike.

So much is done in the early season phase of your training that it was impossible to get it all into a single installment of this series. Let us go back to, say, February.

While you’re doing all these miles, and doing them without breathing awfully hard, I hope (low-intensity, remember?), you might also consider lower-body weight workouts. I recommend this with some trepidation, because engaging in these activities is an easy way to injure yourself. Personally, I like squats, and like them with the free bar. It is not necessary to do them that way. You can do them on a Smith machine, and even with no weights at all.

In fact, I personally do them with no weights. When squats with no weights is too easy, I just do them one-legged.

What IS necessary is to remember two absolutely immutable rules: that you only do these with a spotter (if using a free bar), and that you do not go below a point where your femur is parallel to the ground. There is also a case to be made for squatting only to a right angle in the knee, since that's about the range of motion you'll see on a bike (if I ever see you in the gym squatting past the right angle, remind me to tell you the story about the shot-putter I knew in college, and what happened to him when he once squatted too low; you’ll have nightmares for years). If you are really experienced at squats, have strong legs, good knees, and really know what you are doing, and are already used to squatting to a point where your upper leg is parallel to the ground, then keep on doing so if you want.

Do not worry about getting big muscles. Women especially always worry about this and to them I say, "Unless you are shaving your face every day, you’re not the sort of person who’s going to grow big quads." Second, all the long-distance work you’re doing is a signal to your muscles NOT to grow. But the weight workout is a signal to your muscles that they must, while staying small, find a way to get more powerful.

There is another way you can accomplish the kind of strength you might otherwise get in the weight room, a technique sometimes used by cyclists, and the favorite method of strength training by Jim Riccitello. It involves finding a steady grade—for Jimmy about 7%—and doing 10 or 12 minute intervals, seated, in a real big gear, only turning the gear about 30 rpm. You’re going slowly when you do this workout, and you’re not breathing hard (if you are, you’re turning it into an aerobic workout, which it isn’t, it’s a strength workout). You shouldn’t strain, wiggle in the saddle, and by all means you should stay in the saddle. You’ve got to keep your form. If you do so, this is an incredibly sport-specific strength regimen, one used by perhaps the best all-around cyclist in triathlon (and now you know how that little guy develops so much power). But you’ve got to be careful when you do a workout like this. You MUST be an accomplished cyclist with a lot of miles under you, and with several weeks of base mileage to start the season. This workout asks a lot of your connective tissue.

Next, with some weeks of weight work under our belt, and after two months of distance mileage, we used and abused our Computrainer to achieve a nasty, wicked pedal stroke. Back in 1991 everybody saw the Computrainer as a thing to help you get through the winter without being so bored—it was the closest thing to riding on the road if you wanted to ride without leaving your house. But we never saw it that way. For us, it was a speed weapon, and the funny thing is, we never rode it during the winter, we only rode it during the early and late spring, and again in the middle of the summer, when the sun was shining outside and the weather was nice.

But once a week, starting after six weeks of base training, and then twice a week after eight weeks of base training, we were on that thing for a session that included a ten-minute warm-up, 30 minutes of the hardest workout of the week, and 10 minutes of warm-down. Really, the Computrainer was not anything other than a way for us to achieve a precise, reliable, repeatable, method of doing interval training on the bike. While running you can use a track, while swimming you can use a pool, but while cycling you’ve got to contend with flat tires and road debris, wind, traffic, red lights and stop signs, and you can’t simply concentrate on the work you have to perform. On a trainer, you are just thinking about the work, "thinking" your wattage up, "thinking" your heart rate down. You are training yourself into a technique in which you are finding the most conservative, comfortable, restful way to produce more and more power. Racing, this workout teaches you, is not about producing power, it is about producing power at rest. To put it into more dynamic terms, Mark Allen won Ironman and Nice all those times in part because he rode the bike with his heart beating 10 or 15 fewer times per minute than his competitors, because of a very powerful technique that was also comfortable and, you might say, restful. Proper interval training is finding the eye of the storm, it is finding relaxation while going fast and hard. But don’t be disabused of the fact that these are the most difficult workouts you’ll do each week.

You do not need a Computrainer to do these workouts. You do need a stationary trainer which can offer a variety of resistance settings through the application of a load generator, basically something that makes it hard to pedal. The Computrainer worked for us because it raised and lowered the load depending on how we programmed it, it did so automatically, and it output watts, speed, heart rate, all the parameters we needed. It was the cadillac of trainers. But you can do it on a Chevy as well.

MIDSUMMER TRAINING

Workouts like those described above will get you ready for your first peak, which will occur in and around May and June. Here comes the hard part—and about only a fourth of the pros show enough restraint to do this, three-fourths don’t—you’ve got to take a rest.

It’s a LONG season, and you can’t hold a peak the entire time. If your May/June race includes an Ironman or similar ultra, then especially after that race—even if you’re a pro—you take at least one week entirely off. And you don’t resume your training at full speed when you come back. You should resume it at no more than one-third of your normal mileage the first week training, half the mileage the second week, and two-thirds the mileage the third week back. And then you’re ready for a rest week which, as you'll remember, is back to half your normal mileage.

Now, with about a month or five weeks of recovery, you’re ready to go back to regular training. Look at it as the start of your second "season within a season." The mileage you’re going to be doing now is not the same sort of mileage you were doing just before your peak. You’re starting a new season, so it’s back to what you do in the beginning of a season: low intensity, easy miles.

But there are differences between your early, easy, miles in July versus those same sorts of miles in January. First, you are as fit as a fiddle, and even though you took a few weeks with no, or almost no, training you’ve regained and retained all your fitness by the time you’ve finished your third or fourth recovery week. You’re fit enough to race, whether you realize it or not, and in fact there should be no reason why you shouldn’t race if you feel so inclined.

That isn’t to say you are at your peak, you won’t be there again until later in the year. But you shouldn’t be afraid to race between your peaks. Rather, you should look at those races as opportunities to gain experience, to gain fitness, and to have fun. Let’s face it, if a pro athlete only raced during his peak, he’d only be racing a couple of times a year. And, if things are going well for you, you’ll be surprised how well you race between your peaks.

I remember talking to Mark Allen just before Mrs. T’s in the late ‘80s (back then it was the Chicago Sun Times Triathlon). He was doing the race off exclusively long-distance training, and he was nervous about getting embarrassed by a very fit and fast Mike Pigg. But Mark won the race going away, surprising even himself with the ease of his victory. It shouldn’t have been a surprise. He was perfectly sane with his training that year, he only raced 8 times, and it was, to this day, the only undefeated season a top pro triathlete has ever enjoyed.

July, August, and September training will look exactly like January-through-May training. Except you’ll do everything in half the time. Two months of base training will become, in your second, truncated season, one month. Six weeks of increasing intensity training will become, in August or September, three weeks of intensity training. Many top athletes nowadays believe it only takes them three weeks to get ready for a race like Hawaii. Luc Van Lierde is reported to have said that about his victories. But his three weeks include quite an incredible set of workouts, including, prior to his last Kona win, one session of 100 consecutive motorpaced miles around Fiesta Island in San Diego at 30 miles-per-hour. In retrospect, my JulieAnne's best Ironman races have come after an intensive three-week buildup. Less successful races often occurred when she was "better prepared." Of course, three weeks works for such athletes because they have a zillion base miles to draw from.

But I’ve seen a lot of pro athletes get to Hawaii so haggard and bored by and with training that they’re almost certain to have a lackluster, unsatisfying race. If you don’t catch Hawaii right on your peak it’s better to catch it on the way to it rather than just past it. The year Greg Welch won Hawaii was a difficult year for him, with a very short season interrupted by illness and injury. Perhaps the diminutive Australian—who like many of his countrymen made a habit of racing a traditional Northern Hemisphere season and then continuing on to race in Australia—won Hawaii in part because his injuries made him take so much down time in the months prior to the race. Sometimes less is more.

FUN RACING POST-SEASON

I am struck by how often, when talking to the top pro coaches and athletes, the dangers of doing too much is the emphasis. Sure, there is truth to the idea that more is better, but top pros admit to a feeling, once they've reached a certain level of success, of invincibility. Paul Huddle, former top pro and current top coach, asked Thomas Hellriegel, immediately after he won the Hawaiian Ironman, what he was going to do now. "I'm going to ride higher mileage next year," he said. This is so emblematic of top athletes today. It is to their credit that they have such a well-developed sense of hard work, but it is also a potential danger.

When you've been racing a long time you recognize that the whole process is a continuum. There is no one race that means that much more than another or, at least it shouldn't. It's a lifestyle and, as we've all heard, it's the journey that counts. But it bears remembering, and I don't think it can be repeated too often.

Many top Ironman athletes, perhaps most of them, compete in a very hard race the very week following Hawaii—the Xterra in Maui. They don't get start money, and most of them are so beat from the Ironman they place poorly. You often see athletes—like Paula Newby-Fraser and Heather Fuhr—finish with the same time, and back a ways. Obviously they've done the race together. They didn't win any money. They did the race because it was fun. That's the idea, remember? It is refreshing when I see athletes go over to Maui and jog through that race for the fun of it. Sometimes I fret that the pros in our sport aren't having enough fun. They'll all, with few exceptions, be done as pro athletes by the time they're 35 or 40 years old. They'll not yet be done with half their lives. They need to enjoy the sport and the lifestyle while they can.

Some of the best times I ever had were in races I did after the race for which I was preparing. I was fit. I didn't have to train much, I just lived off my pre-race fitness. And, of course, if you do an Ironman, that in itself will make you tremendously fit (as long as you just sit on your butt and do nothing for a couple of weeks and let the training value of race sink into your bones).

Take a month, or maybe two, completely off after your season. Run a couple of times a week if you want. But that's all. You want your body to remember what it's like to recover. Believe me, when you start training again after a six-week layoff you'll find yourself much fitter than you thought.

There is a view that the body has a certain "memory," and when you stress your body it is precisely this memory that reminds your body what a normal, relaxed, recovered state is. But if you never take any time off, if you don't allow your body to ever come out from under this state of constant stress, eventually your body ceases remembering how to recover. While it is not precisely known what the physiological process is whereby the body falls into this deep, endemic overtraining, many athletes can attest to having been in it.

"The main thing is depression," Huddle said. "When I heard that the sign of overtraining was depression, I said Yeah, that's it, that's me. But when I stopped, completely stopped, for a few months, it lifted. My body came back, and my depression went away." That's the rationale behind a month or two off when the year is over, with several weeks off in the middle of the season, and a day off per week. You don't want your body to be broken for so long it forgets how to heal itself.

Almost no athlete gets it perfectly right. Many do too much. Many don't do enough. Many are guilty of both sins at the same time. If there is one sin which triathletes are probably most guilty of, it is that they work harder than they need to while running, and not hard enough on their riding, and during their hard rides. But in general the gap between hard and easy days is not large enough, not just in cycling, but in the other activities as well. One top running coach who works with a gaggle of Kenyans was asked what is wrong with American runners. He replied, "They run their hard runs too easy, and their easy runs too hard." The same can be said for triathletes quite often.

Hopefully, some of the ideas from this series will help you during your upcoming season. And if you'll remember what I said back in the beginning of these articles, it was that you intuitively know pretty much everything described herein, and you probably knew it before I wrote it. It was sitting on the periphery of your mind. Now I've brought it front and center. I hope you'll find it helpful.