THREE on the best ways to use fitness data, find your sweet spot and build your base
THREE is a new lifestyle community for triathletes, by triathletes. In this bi-weekly newsletter, we share training insights, curated articles and videos, new gear and tech. THREE's mission is to help triathletes thrive on and off the course. Will you join us?
Joe Maloy | 2016 U.S. Olympic Triathlete and Co-founder, THREE
• FINDING YOUR TEMPO In this early-season phase of training, incorporating tempo work into your running routine can help improve your cadence and pace. But a lot of age-group and amateur triathletes find tempo runs to be a bit confusing to plan and execute. This is sometimes because a tempo run lies in the murky area between aerobic and speed workouts. To bring clarity to this often-asked-about topic, in this week’s Triathlon Training by an Olympian THREE’s Joe Maloy shares how you can use tempo run training to hold your race-pace speeds more comfortably over a longer period of time.
• STRENGTH ‘PERIODIZATION’ Many of us are still in the training phase where we’re focused on building our base, and strength training plays an important part of that. Tony Rich, an Ironman-certified coach who holds the Guinness world record for the fastest time to complete a 140.6-mile indoor triathlon, shared this six-exercise strength workout for triathletes with The Wall Street Journal. Rich, who also hosts a podcast called “The Endurance Experience,” tells the Journal he “is a proponent of strength periodization, a concept developed by sports scientist Tudor Bompa where you vary the specificity, intensity and volume of your workouts throughout the year.” When it comes to strength training, the volume decreases as the season progresses — generally the inverse of your swim, bike and run training.
• BIKE BASE TRAINING Completing our trifecta of base-training briefs, Cycling Weekly digs into the best ways to build bike fitness during the winter months. With lockdowns a plenty, many of us had already shifted to more indoor bike training even before the weather turned inclement across much of the country. The question Cycling asks is whether you should continue your habit of Zwift racing through the winter or if you’re better off shifting to base training. The short answer? Don’t forego base training.
• BORN TO RUN Why is it that our heads remain stable and upright when we’re running? A new study finds that human evolution may be to thank for the reason so many of us enjoy running as much as we do. An article published last week in The New York Times reveals takeaways of a new study that “finds that an unusual coordination between certain muscles in runners’ shoulders and arms helps to keep heads stable and runners upright.” According to the Times, the findings, published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, “may answer lingering questions about the role of our upper bodies in running and why we, unthinkingly, bend and swing our arms with each stride. They also add to the mounting evidence that, long ago, distance running began shaping human bodies and lives in ways that still reverberate today.”
• GOALS VS. PRINCIPLES We’re now more than six weeks into the new year and, taking that into account, there’s a better-than-even chance that if you set a new year’s resolution it’s already fallen by the wayside. What’s the best way to achieve a goal? Rather than making definitive plans, you might consider establishing guiding principles. According to The Growth Equation, focusing on principles doesn’t mean avoiding setting goals. Think of principles as goals with flexibility built into them, which may ultimately make you more likely to achieve them.
• BREAKING THE “SWIMMING UNDER ICE” RECORD A Czech freediver is looking to break the Guinness world record for swimming under ice. Later this month, David Vencl from North Bohemia in the Czech Republic will try to break the under-ice swim record of 76.2 meters. According to Euronews, Vencl has previously swum 141 meters underwater and has already proved can hold his breath underwater for eight minutes. The difference with this world record attempt is the cold. Vencl’s “aim is to swim under the ice for 80 metres, that's about a minute and 40 seconds underwater. The swimmer will be tied to a rope and will be secured by divers with equipment. There will be about five holes in the ice in the event of an emergency. In order for David Vencl to break the record officially and enter the Guinness Book of Records, he must swim under ice that is 30 centimetres thick.” Vencl is planning to go to Austria at the end of February to meet all of the world-record caveats.
THE ORIGINAL SUPERCOMPUTER
The THREE Letter by Joe Maloy 2016 U.S. Olympic Triathlete, THREE Co-Founder and Editor-at-Large
Take a deep breath. Relax your shoulders. Most of us are overwhelmed with more information than we can process at any given time. Today’s endurance athlete has so many more data inputs than even 5 or 10 years ago. Garmin, Whoop, iWhatever, and Peloton all want to tell you more than you can process. Companies may want to sell you on how much their product can measure, but most athletes are training for the same reasons now that they were before smart gadgets existed. We want to lose weight, look better, compete, and/or have better energy. Now we just have more to measure this progress. Is all of this additional information motivating or stressful? If you’re like most endurance athletes, the answer is probably a combination of helpful and overwhelming. Here are THREE’s suggestions on how to engage with your fitness metrics in a way that makes the numbers work for you!
1. Focus: Know what you’re measuring
Collecting data for the sake of having more information is like trying to read every book at the library. It might be informative, but who has that kind of time? Processing every piece of data from every workout is a fool’s errand. Focus on a specific metric, and forget the rest.
That metric can change from workout to workout, but focusing on a specific target will reduce anxiety that everything needs to be strong in every workout. If your goal is a hard swim set where you’re going for max speeds, then go for fast times and ignore how high your heart rate is after each interval and give yourself plenty of rest. When running, sometimes you should target a goal distance and sometimes you should target a goal time because each focus allows for different training effects. Maybe you’ll end up running hills for 50 minutes because you’re not focused on the average pace per mile!
2. Evaluate: Correlation is not causation
Once you’ve decided which data deserves your focus (and you’ve thrown out the rest of the data!), it’s time to engage carefully. As discussed in our last edition, our brains love to tell ourselves stories (correlate data), but just because numbers seem to tell a story doesn’t make that story true. This is where an outside perspective, like that of a coach or training partner, can be helpful.
Think about a tempo run where your goal is to run at a slightly uncomfortable effort for a certain amount of time. You complete the run, but your average pace has you feeling discouraged. If you completed the session at your target effort, then the average pace is only feedback. Contextualize the data and consider alternate causes/effects before making judgments. Consult an expert or advisor for perspective.
3. Trust yourself: Your body is the original “supercomputer”
Think about how your body counts calories. It doesn’t need to look at every label to measure what goes in—it just knows when it needs more and when it’s had enough. Sure, sometimes we fool it into taking in more or not taking in enough, but you probably agree the human body is pretty darn smart.
Being an athlete means getting in touch with the messages your body is sending. Data can inform this process, but remember these numbers come from your body to your gadgets—not the other way around. The body’s messages are harder to measure and contextualize, so this takes practice. The human body is a supercomputer far more complex than even the smartest of watches. Listening to its messages takes practice and being intune with its emotions and feelings.
For a long time, success meant knowing something that somebody else didn’t. We went to school to learn about something, to become an expert in a certain field by obtaining expert knowledge. The correlation that knowledge is power is no longer true. The watch on your wrist or the phone in your pocket collects more data than you possibly can use. Knowledge is knowledge. Power is learning where to focus your attention, how to contextualize that information, and remembering that one’s body is the ultimate judge provided we listen to what it says.
Joe Maloy 2016 U.S. Olympic Triathlete, Co-Founder and Editor-at-Large
THREE THINGS TO KNOW
This week, our THREE Things to Know is focused on persevering in the cold. Sure, some of us have the luxury of living and training in California or Florida. But the rest of us are more likely living through a cold spell.
Outside Online has a piece about How Your Body Does (and Doesn't) Adapt to Cold; Cycling Weekly is out with a comparison: Zwift racing vs. Base Building: Which is the best way to build fitness over winter? And Canada’s Running Magazine looks at the science behind cold weather and running performance.
As for the THREE team? We’re dreaming of warmer races like the Ironman World Championship in Kona this fall. Wherever your training and racing takes you this year, we look forward to seeing you on a starting line soon.
