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10 "Truths"....

Friday, 05 May 2017 23:10

Ten Truths of No-Bullshit Triathlon Training...

By Tom Demerly (tomdemerly.com)

Triathlon is big business now. With profits to earn and gadgets to sell how do you cut through the marketing haze and decide what really gets you to the finish line?

There are 2,377 books about triathlon on Amazon.com. An online seminar, a Facebook page and- bam, anyone is a triathlon coach. Add triathlon forums, that guy with an M-Dot tattoo dispensing advice and the amount of bullshit heaped on new triathletes is harder to cut through than the swim pack at Lake Placid....

Here are 10 no-bullshit, hardcore, old-skool insights on triathlon training. No quick-starts, no “12 Weeks to Ironman” plans. They aren’t easy, they aren’t pretty, but they produce results. You may not like them, you may disagree with them, but history proves these are solid producers for getting better.

Fire your coach.

You don’t need them and they’re probably not qualified. You can learn everything you need to know about swim stroke, bike handling skills and transitions faster and for free on YouTube. Mostly, you just need to train more. Your first year in the sport should be about building an aerobic base and slowly developing technique. As a wise old-timer once said, “Intervals are the icing on the cake, and you don’t have a cake yet.”

Triathlon coaching in the U.S. is a mostly B.S. affair. Anyone who passed a three-day clinic can call himself or herself a coach. By contrast, in Germany using the title “coach” requires a graduate degree in exercise physiology. While there are outstanding triathlon coaches in the United States there are many more who are not qualified to dispense training advice, especially to new athletes. The difficulty in knowing the difference between the few truly good coaches and the many truly bad ones combined with the basic goals of building an aerobic base while losing weight mean coaching can wait.

Take ownership of your knowledge of the sport. Learn basic exercise physiology. Learn technique. Do the reading. Be a student of the sport, not just a consumer of cookie-cutter coaching plans. And most of all, put in more time.  READ MORE...