As I venture into possibilities of coaching in the future, trying to make myself the best athlete I can be, and just learning for random knowledge I was recently referred to an interview series with Brett Sutton on slowtwitch.com. It’s really good; I know he’s a triathlon guy and I have my stereotypes of triathlon and triathletes, but he says some really good things!
“The thing we work on most is time, patience, and pick. We pick and stick, as in, stick with it. As soon as someone has done a certain kind of training, and it’s not the results they want, their eyes wander, and they go off. Even my athletes do that. They leave me. Everybody’s looking for the clue. People are always saying there’s an easier way. Let me tell you—there’s no easier way. We’re a clean team. We work out for our aerobic conditioning. We train hard. To be successful at the top level, we work twice as hard. But it’s not without thought.
Chrissie will train 12 hrs a day if you let her, because she loves it. I’ve got huge forearms from pulling the reins to hold her back. Belinda Granger will go up and down these hills all day if she thinks its gonna make her better.
I read the training logs, this and that. Its just that you pick, and you stick. You do it, and you do it, and you do it. And when it’s not working and lose a bit of confidence, you go back and say “no, this is where I am going.” You’ll always be so much further ahead than if you are bopping from “I’ve tried this for three months, now I’m gonna try this.” I got into triathlon because it’s an aerobic sport, and people who work hard will be rewarded in the long run. You see many different running techniques, many different riding techniques, many different swimming techniques, from the top guys. There’s no magic stroke, no magic training sessions.
Everyone’s pinching my training sessions. There’s no magic session. It’s about how you put it together, for that athlete. We just try to create the environment where success is inevitable. Everybody’s wondering about the sessions. I never worry about that. They ask, “where’s your logbook?” I’m not interested in the sessions. That’s the easy stuff. Any idiot can buy a book with 55 sessions. It’s the way you put them within the training cycle. I can’t write a book about where to put them in the training cycle, because I’ve got eight different training cycles depending on what athlete you’ve got. If you’re a 48 kilo girl, you’re gonna have a different training session than a 95 kilo bloke. We might have a routine, but within that, everyone has their own thing going.”
That is pretty good…
“to improve race times. Training is the only for that. I don’t take a stopwatch to most workouts, so there doesn’t need to be a lot of specific times. You can interview every athlete: there’s no time trials for swim, bike or run in the program at all. And that is magic bullet. It’s an aerobic sport, and we train that way.
We have the magic saying and do most of our workouts with this in mind: moderate, medium and mad. That is, we always do training moderate and medium.
Each athlete is taught to understand their body when they get there. Then it comes to decision time for them. If they feel very tired and worse than when they started the call is moderate. If they feel ok but not frisky the call is medium. If they feel good, happy in their mind, then they go mad.
It’s possibly too simple for the triathlon fraternity. They ask, “there must be something more, right?” But that’s it. There isn’t. That’s the magic bullet”
Yup. That’s good too.
Enjoy!
::SA
