Don’t Blur Your Boundaries
As mentioned in The Triangle Of Change, one pillar of the three is having a psychological approach to what you are trying to achieve while aiming to improve and develop. The most obvious things we are trying to achieve are seasons, phases, and workouts with the highest quality, as they are the ones that cause development. If an athlete has done the right thing by planning their pre-season, race season, and off-season it will start to fall apart if their actions within each workout are also not given the same rigour and psychological approach. Likewise, completing a perfect workout at the wrong time of the year has limited purpose. Someone could in fact be opening themselves up to injury. The Periodisation of an athlete’s whole year will contain down time, preparation, base building, build phases, peaking and racing. Looking at the bigger picture, it’s easy to see that if someone is still carrying out high intensity workouts when they are [by their own planning] in the down time or preparation phases, they are blurring their boundaries. What is often not so easy to spot, is when athletes blur their boundaries within a training week or within a workout.
Like many of these pages, my own bias for spotting mistakes that athletes make often stems from squad swimming sessions, as that was my wheelhouse from the tender age of eleven. That said, the same mistakes are made in all disciplines of triathlon. When I was a young swimmer, there were some ‘1980s coaching methods’ that would be frowned upon today, but the over-arching approach was incredibly simple and – more often than not – successful. Simplicity sometimes gets lost in the age of sports watches and heart rate monitors and we know triathletes love their gadgets. One of the many things that grinds my gears with age group triathletes in swim sessions is their obsession with sports watches: warming up, cooling down, and everything in between, so it’s hard not to remind people that masters swimmers don’t use them… they use the very simple lap clock on the wall, along with FEEL. Sports watches have their place, but they can encourage athletes to rely too heavily on them, get distracted, or ‘switch off’ mentally – far from psychological.
The obvious difference in swim workouts against the other disciplines is that athletes invariably have to train in the same lane as other people. So right off the bat two things happen: Peer Pressure comes into play, and everyone in the same lane does the same workout. If an athlete is part of a big squad, there might be three or four lanes if they’re lucky, varying from the most efficient swimmers to the complete beginners. This means longer Take-Off times for the beginners than the more experienced swimmers, with the ‘middle lane’ somewhere in between. My advice for every beginner coming to see me for 1:1 swim stroke analysis is simple: avoid squad swimming, and start with 4-6 weeks of just drills. That’s certainly not to say that people always take that advice – they like seeing their mates from rides and runs, and the most common belief is that they will lose fitness in the pool if they don’t attend Squad. Not true, but that’s why they typically don’t adopt my advice.
Development in the pool is harder to come by than cycling and running. If you throw enough heart beats and calories at those two activities, odds are that you will show a marked improvement after a couple of months. Swimming really doesn’t work that way, it’s more like learning the piano: you must repeat boring drills to train the brain, not the cardio system. If you heard a 12 year old kid hitting bum notes on the piano for an hour, and then declare that they had completed their 60 minutes of practice, we would all think the same thing: what a complete waste of time. This is what happens with triathletes in the pool who aren’t thinking about what they are doing. They become convinced that swimming is indeed just like running and cycling, turn up for a whole year of training, huffing and puffing, but never wonder why their times aren’t coming down or why they don’t feel any less fatigued after training or the swim portion of a race.
Hopefully you can see how the Blurring Of Boundaries starts to take place in the pool. Here’s a typical scenario that I’ve seen more times than I care to remember: someone joins a squad who has a solid ability in one discipline – say running; they do reasonably well hanging on in bunch rides, and have no hesitation in pushing themselves to high heart rates which typically improves their cycling quite quickly albeit training the wrong energy system, but that’s covered on other pages. Now these people might not be great at the third discipline – in this case swimming – so they do the right thing and start off in the beginner lane. Before too long – with the running and riding coming along in leaps and bounds – they self graduate into the middle lanes, or ask to be with their mates from cycling and running sessions. Have their swim times come down? Nope. Have they mastered the small but crucial technique elements for endurance swimmers? Nope. Can they handle sustained huffing and puffing? For Sure.
Now imagine 8-10 athletes in the lane carrying out repeats of 100m or 200m intervals during a swim session. Remember they all do the same workout, so the Take-Off time is set for the Intermediate swimmers. Everyone manages to stay the requisite 5 seconds apart for the first few, but – and I guarantee – sooner rather than later, gaps start to appear near the back because the less experienced swimmers can’t maintain their technique and therefore can’t keep up. One thing is for sure: they aren’t swimming any faster than they were in the beginner lane, they’re just getting less rest [boundaries begin to blur] and therefore working way too hard in the Red Zone to hang on. Their form and technique would be much better quality in the beginner lane because they have more time to think about what they’re doing and recover suitably, rather than indulging in a masochistic Above Threshold Fest. The crowning irony is what happens next: they start missing rest breaks altogether, turning the interval set into a continuous swim [boundaries completely disappear], and then eventually skip some of the intervals to catch their breath or throw up. That’s fine if the set involves sub-threshold 300m intervals, but faster and shorter intervals are a completely different workout and must have adequate rest.
Rest is just as important as the work.
It’s somewhat ridiculous when it’s written down, but this type of athlete has zero awareness that they’re doing less intervals in the intermediate lane than they would be in the beginner lane, they simply convince themselves that the huffing, puffing, and discomfort are moving them towards development. They ain’t. What we do know is that an Interval Session includes portions of WORK and REST. They are both equally weighted as to their importance and should be CLEARLY delineated. We also know that Interval Sessions are KEY to development in endurance athletes. If athletes learned to take note of their time for each 100m or 200m, instead of just thrashing madly to keep up with the swimmer in front, they would [we can hope] learn that their times for the first interval versus the last one are very far apart, involving a gradual but obvious decline – the clearest indicator of dropping quality, and blurred boundaries. With the right amount of rest, each interval can be the same time and the same quality, which means the Work Duration causes the right development.
I could cite numerous examples of the same mistake being made in cycling and running, a complete training week, a Training Phase, or the whole year. I’ve put together a crude diagram below which shows how the same theory can be applied to both a single workout and the entire year. It doesn’t take much imagination to transfer that to one month, or 12 weeks of the Base Phase for example.
Once a beginner triathlete decides to take their training more seriously, they can perhaps aim at one of a few different goals, for example: Graduating from a Fun Race to Sprint or Olympic, Finishing on the podium in a domestic series race, or even qualifying for the Age Group ITU World Championships, which happen in a different country and city each year. The biggest switch in mindset is to become more selfish in your approach to workouts, down time, and recovery. If you adhere to other strategies in these pages, you’ll learn that each workout needs two variables (duration and intensity) and that intensity is a very individual matter, established through time trials. When an athlete starts focusing fully on their own training zones, their own periodisation, and their own goals, they will need to set boundaries more clearly: as a newcomer to triathlon, they no doubt had fun sitting in a large bike pack not really aware of which Zone they were training in – or what it should be. But carrying out the suggested testing and learning exactly which heart rate or power they should be working in, means the boundaries become very clear.
If a fellow athlete – with different goals, fitness, and periodisation – suggests a ride or run together, or asks for company at their upcoming half marathon or 250km bike ride, a “selfish” athlete needs to be incredibly honest and voice their reasons for declining. In a squad environment – as above – those group sessions would also need to take on a different mindset. There’s nothing wrong with completing the run warm-up with your training buddies but then saying “okay, I’ve got a few intervals to do, so I’ll see you back at the start point or meet you for breakfast”. Like all human relationships, setting BOUNDARIES, is no bad thing. You can see – if you’ve read the other pages here – that the same straightforward rules stitch everything together. If an athlete is 10-12 weeks out from an A-Race Olympic Distance event, joining a mate on a 250km all day cycle ride isn’t specific to the event in hand. So the phrase “More is better” is way off the mark. “The more specific, the better” – now we’re talking.
Similarly, training to time not distance, allows you to both set boundaries with mates and finish the session together. If you both have the same 3 hour ride for example, but your training zones don’t match, you can start and finish together. Granted, you might not be shoulder to shoulder the whole time… but big deal… your focus should be quality work if you want to develop.
- What’s a ‘Take Off Time’?
This is a phrase used in swimming that sets the amount of time passing between the start of intervals – it is NOT swim time. If the ‘Take Off Time’ is 2 minutes – for a 100m interval for example – the swimmer has two minutes to complete the 100m, take some rest, and then leave the wall again. If the swimmer is completing the 100m in 1m45s they will get 15 seconds rest. When the take off times differ from the obvious realms of round numbers, watching the Lap Clock becomes more and more imperative. - What is ‘Work Duration’?
Athletes won’t hear this much unless the coach makes a deal of increasing Work Duration as the Training Phase develops. This term describes the overall time an athlete has spent within the WORK intensity prescribed. For example: conducting an indoor cycling workout, an athlete may complete a warm-up, some drills, and then some key intervals. If the key intervals are 8 minutes in Zone 4 Power, followed by 3 minutes of recovery, and the athlete completes four intervals, the Work Duration is 32 minutes in Zone 4 (8 x 4). The coach may have a set goal of working up to a Work Duration of 60 minutes in Zone 4 as it replicates closely the demands of an Olympic Distance triathlon. One strategy for achieving this would be 5 x (12 minutes Z4 into 4 minutes easy). Which is 5 x 12. - Why don’t we want an ‘Above Threshold Fest’?
As I’ve described in “Swim Short. Swim Long“, swimming at threshold is rarely the best approach to racing in triathlon, however it does depend on the race format. Masters swim squads train with a lot of threshold swimming because pure swimmers don’t have to cycle and run after their events. Even a “sprint distance” triathlon can take well over an hour to complete, which is very clearly an endurance event to normal humans so in the words of Cadel Evans: “It’s not about the energy you spend, it’s about the energy you save”. That said, mastering the art of different paces in the pool comes from honing your technique, not your ability to withstand pain. And do yourselves a favour: don’t compare yourself to elite athletes, they are born biologically superior to the rest of us!
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