Keeping It Simple
You know, the longer I participate in this sport the less complex things seem to be. Not necessarily because I become more knowledgeable, but because I start to believe that to succeed in this sport, you don’t have to have world class genetics and a PhD in Kinesiology (although I’m sure neither hurts!).
I look at all this stuff we have around us: paddles, pull bouys, fins, Total Immersion videos, aerobars, deep rim wheels, disc wheels, ceramic bearings, clipless pedals, aero helmets, cadence meters, power tap hubs, fuel belts, iPods, more brands of running shoes than I can remember, heart rate monitors, exercise logs, food logs… the list is endless. Don’t get me wrong - I love technology and being all geeked out. Still, I can’t help but look back and think about how the pioneers of the sport did it back in the day without any of our modern tri toys.
Case in point, on the right we have a bike from 1987. It looks quite odd in today’s modern triathlon world - no race wheels, no bar end shifters, standard round tubing, a very unconventional cockpit. If you were to see that bike today at a local triathlon, perhaps you might chuckle to yourself and perhaps keep a close eye on it to see if you could also get a glimpse at the owner of it to see if he was sprouting a perm held back with a headband and some cotton Rocky sweats. You’d probably never guess that would be the bike of an Ironman World Champion. Dave Scott went on to win Hawaii in 1987 in 8:34 on that bike with a 4:53.48 bike split - that’s 23 MPH in the heat and winds of Hawaii, folks! Indeed, it’s not about the bike.
My first season, I planned all my weeks down to the finest detail. I wrote down exactly how many hours it’d be riding or running on any given week. I didn’t deviate from this schedule without a significant amount of stress and certainly not without adjusting things beforehand to ensure I could still fit everything in. My second year though, I took a much more simple approach. I made sure I got my long ride and long run of the week in, and then I did as much swimming, biking, and running between those workouts as I possibly could. Outside of all the theory of treshold and training zones and aero equipment, there’s one thing that remains true. Doing the work and pushing your body will cause it to progress, and those that do the most of it will likely progress the most.
This isn’t to say that modern man hasn’t improved the way we train to enable us to train better, or that technology hasn’t improved since ten or twenty years ago. But these things all come very much secondary to the one thing that should be on the forefront of all our minds - simply training. If you want to swim fast, swim a lot. If you want to bike fast, bike a lot. And if you want to run fast, you run a lot! It’s pretty much that simple. Long distance endurance events reward folks who are out there daily putting in the miles and the hours of work. And during that time, you’ll learn things along the way. You’ll learn that you swim faster when your hips aren’t sagging. You’ll learn that you’ll can’t bike for hours on end without eating and drinking properly. You’ll learn that the more you run, the easier it gets and the faster you’ll go. And that all these things are a little easier if you eat well and take care of yourself. Much of what we read in books today, I think, are just the lessons that these pros learned as they encountered obsticles in their own training.
There really aren’t any shortcuts. There isn’t an easy way to that finish line. The two great ones of the sport had this figured out a long time ago - before any of our modern toys existed. Train hard, train smart, recover and eat well. Rinse and repeat as necessary. :)
“Somewhere in the world someone is training when you are not. When you race him, he will win.”