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Ideal Racing Weight Debate: When to Eat Cheesecake...

Wednesday, 04 March 2015 00:10

ED. This is a fascinatingly awesome article.

Brett Sutton reacts to Chris McCormack’s article on finding the ideal racing weight for optimal performance on the race course. This response originally appeared on Trisutto.com.

By Brett Sutton (triathlon.competitor.com - Feb. 25, 2015)

I would like to take the time to further explain a very important, if not the most important, item in our sport. This concerns the matter of an athlete’s weight.

Last week many people alerted me to a re-release of an article written by Chris McCormack discussing optimal weights for individual athletes.

I’d like to thank him for his words and intelligent insight into this matter. However, I would also like to clarify some observations about my own thoughts on the weight debate given the very real implications for athletes reading such material....

“I came through the Australian system of triathlon under the guidance of legendary coach Brett Sutton. In his opinion, lean was too fat, skinny wasn’t skinny enough and, put simply, the leanest you could get while maintaining the workload was optimal. For many of us who passed through this system in the ’90s, the proof was in the pudding, with the success of the athletes he was churning out.”

Yes, Macca is right here. When I was national coach for Australian triathlon I did adopt the position that being as light as one safely could—would indeed help performance. Specifically run performance. READ MORE