I am pleased to announce my Spring Into Action promotion, a great deal for new members. I am fortunate to live in Hawaii, where I can swim, bike, and run outdoors year-round, but I am not looking to build an in-person squad. We have enough of those here. 

I am looking for athletes who have been doing triathlon for a year or more and just need a little help with managing the process. I specialize in seniors and coach primarily on-line, but have limited availability for in-person coaching in Honolulu. 

I am pleased to announce that I am now an IRONMAN U Certified Coach. It has been quite a while since Ironman had a coach certification program. I know because I asked when I started by business. That was just when COVID took us into lockdown, so my USAT course was the first one on-line. At that time, Ironman was struggling with how to survive in a world turned upside down, canceling races and starting their really fun virtual program. Late last year they finally got it together. It is huge, almost a semester's worth of content that covers everything except how to tie your shoes.

It is no secret that sugar is the most effective fuel for endurance training. But are they the best? Some people disagree.

I am a fan of eating everything. I am not going down the rabbit hole of high carb, high fat, vegan, organic, gluten free fads that persist in adding confusion around what fuel is best for athletes. What I am dealing with here is sugar. Specifically, the confusing, even contradictory messaging about endurance athletes and the sugar intake.

Recently I swapped my planned Sunday workout – a run and long bike combo – for a hike with a group of co-workers. The planned bike was three and a half hours and the hike was advertised as four hours, so I thought it would be a good substitute, a welcome break from the swim-bike-run routine and some much-needed cross training. We hiked the Hawaii Loa Ridge Trail which features a fair bit of high step movements, quite different from my typical run. I was so glad I have been hitting the gym and flex sessions lately.

If you read my last post on routine - if not, go and read it now - you might have decided to have your early season strength and conditioning sessions on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon. You may encounter a few hiccups at first; forgotten gym bag, stuck in traffic, a vet appointment you made six months ago. Eventually things smoothout and you put in a solid couple of weeks, but then more problems crop up. Things keep getting in the way. Maybe you get home and realize it’s Wednesday and you are supposed to be at the gym. 

The previous post was about skills. Key to improving skills is adequate flexibility. With flexibility, more is not always better. What you need  is just enough. This is particularly true with running, where too much flexibility will result in a loss of economy and can increase the chance of injury. When we don’t devote time to flex work, when all we do is swim, bike, and run, our muscles adapt to a limited range of motion. Eventually, this will cause trouble in the knees, hips, shoulders, lower back … just about any joint except maybe your nose.

The early season is a great time to focus on skills. Later, when large volume is the goal, spending time on the mechanics of execution will feel like a waste of valuable time. Now is when you should back off, slow down, and strive to achieve smooth, fluid motion. Swimming, biking, and running all use different muscle activation patterns, so spend time on each.There is no metric that will inform you that you are performing well. Go by how you feel. Smooth, easy, yet powerful.

What is top end? There are several terms in use that describe pretty much the same thing. The key is rapid movement at high intensity. Think kicking a soccer ball on goal, or a volleyball player spiking the ball. Now extend that effort for thirty seconds to three minutes. For cyclists the best model is a sprint finish. I follow Joe Friel’s terminology and call this aerobic capacity work, since the goal of this exercise is to maximize the body's ability to process oxygen.

This is the first of an eight part series on what to focus on at the start of your season. For those of us lucky enough to be living in Hawaii, that is now. This is not the time for epic, all-day marathon efforts. Focus instead on force production, skills, and things like bike fit and diet improvement, things that often get swept aside once the season gets underway.

Before I begin I must tip my hat to Jimmy Carter, who passed away on Sunday. We should look to him as a model of how to serve. We athletes, and even more so coaches, must never lose sight of our responsibility to serve our community, in whatever way we can.

My take away message for 2024 is this. When life gets hard, having a crazy big goal can help get you through the rough patches.