(people talking)
- Woo. Morning, Trainiacs!
After four months away from the big pool, we're back.
And I don't know that they renovated.
So, NTK. No Triathlon Kim.
If you're new here - and there's a lot of new people here -
that is my wife, who does not do triathlons,
and her name is Kim. Hence, No Triathlon Kim.
We got back from Kona yesterday,
and the most asked question that
we've got over the past 48 hours is,
what happened to Lionel? Of course, poor guy.
Well, we're gonna talk about that today.
I've got some ideas.
(electronic music)
So before we get into Lionel, got a few disclaimers
about this whole video, okay?
(door opening)
Okay so, first off, I want - Shh! Guys, guys. Guys.
I wanted to wait until Lionel Sanders posted his video
talking about the race, because he's a better person
to listen to any of this from.
I'm just doing this, A: because it helps a little bit
for people to hear things, maybe just said
in a different way so it helps you all to understand.
And B: it's to put into a little bit of context,
a little bit of my experience, what Lionel is talking about.
Now all of that said, go look at Lionel's video.
Hear it directly from the horse's mouth.
And Lionel, if you're watching this, I love you buddy.
I think you're on the right track,
and it's not as bad as you might think.
Alright, come on up, dudes. I missed you!
So that means the Trainiacs missed you. Come on.
SP2 Life, the Spirulina Company sent out
this lovely hat while I was gone.
Let's let you see my beautiful face.
So for a little bit of context, I wanna tell a story
about back when I was a curler.
Alright, there. That is curling Taren.
There was one year where my team and I
were going into provincials as
the hands-down favorite to win.
And not just win provincials.
We were the favorites to win the entire world.
We were one of the best junior teams
in the world at the time, and coming into that event,
we had gone something like 63 and two.
We had won every single event, besides one,
that we had gone into.
And we were juniors actually playing in men's events.
We were going and winning men's tournaments
throughout the year.
When we got to that, we went four and three,
didn't even make the playoffs. It's crushing.
It's terrible, you go from
basically doing everything that you think you need to do -
being as prepared as you can, as confident as you can -
but you get there, and just on the day
you don't perform, and that's sports.
Still, that's crushing to me.
I'm sure it's gonna be crushing
to Lionel for the rest of his life.
But there's one thing that we took away from that.
After that event, we were so shaken
that we let it cool down for about three, four weeks,
and then we said, "You know what, guys?
"Why don't we just go into a tournament, see what happens."
Well again, we went undefeated in that tournament -
bye Pete - we went undefeated in the next tournament.
So it's not like we weren't good players because
we still went and were able to win other tournaments.
It's just that sometimes, when there is that much pressure
on the line, it's hard to perform.
That's why I don't think that Lionel needs to dismantle
absolutely everything and rebuild.
Frankly, that dismantling everything -
which he did after Mount Tromblone,
Half-Iron Man, Oceanside - is what got him into this.
So let's talk about that, point for point.
For first off, was he over-trained? Was he under-trained?
Well in the video that he did on his channel
just a few days before Kona, he said,
"Ha ha ha, now I'm over-trained.
"Probably gonna go down to ranked 30th in Kona."
- No, you see, last year I didn't over-train.
That's why I had a good performance.
This year, though, I'm massively over-trained, so
you know, do the old second place syndrome thing
and finish 30th, 40th place probably.
- We can't really know for certain
if he was over- or under-trained,
but there are a few things that
we can take from what we do know.
Number one: last year,
Lionel really trusted in the process,
went through his blocks consistently,
and as soon as he felt a little bit of over-training,
a little bit of fatigue, he backed off.
And they said, when he got to Kona,
he was so fresh that he did a fair bit of work
coming into that in the last two weeks.
Flip that to this year, and what I think you can see
from watching his videos over the year,
is that he did a lot of really big days
and really big days leading into Kona.
So volume on top of volume, and not really
a big taper at the end, might just
mean that he trained more.
Now I was also talking to somebody
who is kind of like, not in the training
that Lionel was doing, but was around
the training that Lionel was doing
in the last couple weeks before Kona,
and I think there was a day that
he did a really big, long run. A 35k-long run.
"And that person said, basically, "Unless Lionel
"is the most amazing athlete to ever grace the Earth,
"he ain't recovering from that,
"and he probably left his race in that training route."
So over-trained, under-trained, we don't really know.
Only Lionel knows that. Let's get into the bike.
When we put out the video that I'll link to
at the end of this video, showing off Lionel's bike,
everyone commented on, "That's a crap bike.
"Look at all the other pros' bikes.
"Lionel's bike is not up to standards of that."
"He can't win on that bike.
"He needs to get a new bike sponsor."
Listen, folks. It ain't about the bike.
You talk to bike people in the triathlon industry
and they say, besides a little bit of changes here and there
most bikes really aren't that far beyond
where they were in the early '90s.
Save Ventum for that, because it's just
a completely new bike designs, and
it's actually been shown to be 17 minutes faster
over the course of a full Iron Man,
including the bike and runs. So, I like my Ventum.
But, it might be about the bike company.
You look at bike companies like Specialize, like Canyon,
they invest upwards of 500 dollars an hour
for each of their top-level athletes
to go into a wind tunnel with a bike fitter
to start optimizing every little aspect of that rider's fit.
For example, what Jan Frodeno ended up finding out
when he went and changed to Canyon is that,
he was actually more aerodynamic
when he brought himself up in position.
And that's not something you're going to know
unless you're bringing around a team of experts
and you're analyzing things in real time.
So, is the Louis Garneau bike actually
that much worse than the Canyon,
and the Trek Speed Concept, and the Ventum,
and the new Specialize? Probably not.
But, all of the pieces together - the helmet,
the skin suit, Lionel's position -
it all plays in together.
Unless you invest a ton of money into figuring out
how it all works together, you don't know for certain
if you're getting the optimal position,
the optimal equipment, the optimal aerodynamics,
the optimal balance of power versus comfort, versus speed.
So, Louis Garneau? Good bike.
Maybe not the absolute best bike company
for somebody looking to win Kona.
Okay, let's talk about nutrition.
Getting all your nutrition from liquid Gatorade, endurance.
Are you going to have enough electrolytes
to perform well? Yes.
Are you going to have enough calories
for Lionel to perform well? Yes. He's done the math on this.
One thing to note is that, on average,
it's been shown that when you take your electrolyte
and your fluid and your calories all from one source,
you don't end up absorbing all of them
nearly as well as if you take your fluids from one source,
with the electrolytes - like, say, with SOS -
and your calories from another source.
Because neither one is able to, in isolation,
do what they're supposed to do.
So that's something to consider,
but that' a really big asterisk.
Some people do very well on liquid nutrition.
Lionel has been doing that for a few years,
so it might work really well for him.
On average, with all of you, I recommend
liquids and fluids from your fluids -
with your electrolytes in there -
and calories from your calories.
Mixing the two might not work.
But let's get into veganism!
This is something that is, I'm sure
the comments are just gonna go crazy on me
and tell me that I'm completely wrong,
but I'm going to report on what the current science says.
Is it possible to live healthily as a vegan? Yes.
Is it possible to perform at a world-class level as a vegan?
Yes! Is it harder than most people think? Yes.
Is it harder to perform as a
world-class athlete as a vegan? Yes.
The reason for that, is that it opens the door to errors.
There are just certain nutrients - Vitamin B12,
for example - that you can't get from plant sources.
And if you do get them from plant sources,
they aren't as bioavailable.
And all the vegans are gonna be like,
"Oh, the bioavailable stuff terror is just bro science.
"It's what supplement companies
"tell you to not make you vegan."
No, it's actually been shown that the healthiest diets
are somewhere around - hi Grace - 90 to 95% whole food,
plant-based, and the remainder come
from very healthy meat sources.
However, it's also dependent on being
genetically predisposed to being able to do that.
Take, for example, keto.
The number one keto doctor in the world says,
"Only about 20 to 25% of the people
"respond well off of keto." Just look at the bell curve.
About 20 to 25% of the people respond very well
off of a 100% vegan diet.
Number two, it also forces you to
really dial in your food prep.
If you aren't just constantly food prepping,
it's tough to get all those required nutrients
only from plant sources.
And number three, if your body is not hormonally conducive
to responding well to plant sources,
your testosterone is going to be a fair bit lower.
And as endurance athletes, we're
constantly battling low testosterone.
So, opens the door for that issue,
not being able to recover from hard workouts.
So is it healthy to be nothing but vegan?
Maybe. I'll acknowledge, it's possible, but it's harder.
That, however, leads into the harder thing:
the ethical dilemma that Lionel mentioned in his video
that I completely agree with.
I did not start eating plant-based foods for health reasons.
I started eating it for the ethical reasons,
because I love these guys! I love cows, I love chickens.
I love pigs. They're all awesome!
And I don't want them to suffer.
Here, Lionel, I'm actually going to
pose this scenario to you, because I found
that it's helpful for me to get over that ethical dilemma.
Let's say, you are able to kill all of your meat.
You go hunting once a year, you kill one deer.
To get your beef, you can go directly to
a very small farmer, that you're able to
see the cows who have lived a good life,
and you can pick which cow you're going to
get your beef from for the rest of the year.
You know they haven't suffered.
And with your eggs, you can actually go
to a backyard farmer who has backyard chickens
that are all walking around, and they
just have to get rid of their eggs.
So you know that the chickens aren't suffering.
With the fish, you can also get your fish
from buddies who are fishermen.
And there's fish all over the place,
and they aren't farm fish.
So in that case, very few animals are being killed
and very few animals are suffering.
On the flip side of that, Lionel,
you're in this situation that,
if you can stay healthy, if you can keep racing,
if you can have amazing performances
that inspire people to get over their addictions,
their mental hurdles, all of those things,
you're going to inspire tens if not hundreds of thousands
of people to live a happier, healthier life.
And you are going to be saving those life, potentially.
People that need to get over depression,
people that need to get over weight problems.
People that need to get over inactivity issues.
And if you can save all of those lives every single year,
that is what has rationalized to myself
to make me feel better about including
some of those meats that... Yeah, I get it.
Ethically, it's a hard thing to think about,
but we gotta take care of ourselves
before we can take care of others.
Now, I wanna just knock off something really quickly.
Is the swim training, the bike training,
the run training, does that all need to be changed?
Well, Lionel, you are one of the best bikers
and the best runners in triathlon.
I think you know what you need to do with all that training.
Swimming, I don't know what happened here.
But at the beginning of the year,
on the Tower 26 boards, where we had the leaderboard
of how many workouts everyone was completing
over the course of a 28-day cycle,
you were at the top for all of the Spring,
a good chunk of the Summer,
and then these last few months? Vanished.
Did that affect your swimming? Only you know.
But let's get into the coach.
Everyone in the comments say you need a coach.
You say that you need a coach!
Do I think that you need a coach?
I don't know.
A coach can be very helpful, but
for somebody like you, who clearly
doesn't necessarily want a coach,
doesn't want to be pigeonholed into coaching.
As you mention in your video, you
might not necessarily trust another coach.
That added coach, while they may be very helpful
in the swim/bike/run, the day-to-day training,
will it add mental stress to your entire process
and actually take away from your ability to
do whatever you need to get successful?
That, only you know.
Is that added stress, if it is stress to him,
worth the potential benefit of getting faster?
Feel like I'm going like this a lot.
I don't know, I don't know.
Now you mention spending a bunch of time in Kona,
and you would like to maybe go more regularly,
but you need a place for the dogs.
Well, I need a place for dogs too,
and NTK and I are talking about
potentially going to Kona a month early
and bringing our dogs.
We are working on figuring out how to do that.
Message me. You got my email, Lionel.
Message me if you wanna go halfsies
on a place that's cool for bringing our dogs, okay?
So Lionel, if you're watching this, don't listen to this.
You know your body better than I know your body.
You know what you need and what you're capable of,
and what's gonna feel right up here!
I'm saying this for the benefit of some Trainiacs
that might need some Lionel interpretation
for how they can take these approaches
and apply it to their training.
In your case, do what you do.
You're already so great, maybe just some
little fine-tunings here and there.
Now, Trainiacs, if you aren't already subscribed,
hit the subscribe button below.
And if you are subscribe, (sighs)
you are like that 13-hour sleep that I took last night.
Oh my - so good. Later, Trainiacs.