- Morning, Trainiacs.
We are doing the first brick workout
since Half Ironman Atlantic City.
I am expecting cramps as soon as I get off of this.
Just a little one-hour bike, and head into a 10-minute run.
Last night, we did a podcast with Nick Bare.
If you haven't been following, Nick Bare
has been an athlete who we've been training
on Team Trainiac.
He went from never doing a triathlon
to just last weekend, doing an 11:28 in Ironman Florida
on just five months of training
that he did with us on Team Trainiac.
And the interesting thing about this
is that Nick Bare's history as an athlete
is that he's a big dude.
He's a weightlifter, a bodybuilder, crossfitter type dude.
He started at 225 pounds, not being able
to swim 25 yards in a pool,
to going 11:28 in just five months.
It impressed the hell out of me.
So we chatted with Nick for our podcast,
and we got him to record some of the biggest tips
that he has for other athletes
who are going to be doing a similar thing,
trying to step up to a longer distance
than they thought they were capable of doing
and setting themselves up for success.
It was cool.
Eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.
Cramps are about to start.
(groans)
(groovy music)
Now, before we get into all that,
there is a link in the description below
to a giveaway that we are doing with Nick.
We're calling it the,
I think the Do Something New in 2020 Giveaway,
where you can win one of three packages,
where each package includes a full year of training
on Team Trainiac, and 250 bucks' worth of BPN Supplements.
That's Nick Bare's supplement company.
Now let's get into those seven tips.
Nick Bare, after just five months of training,
puts down a race that, even though I was coaching him
on Team Trainiac and we were talking
probably every few weeks about his progress,
it surprised the hell out of me.
11:28, going from nothing to Ironman in just five months?
I did not expect that.
So we had him on the Triathlon Taren Podcast,
which is the most highly-rated triathlon podcast
in the world.
I really think that we should start a Pete-cast.
So we had him on, and he recorded some of the lessons
that he took in going from a weightlifter,
somebody who hadn't done real long-endurance sports,
to now, a very successful Ironman athlete,
finishing in the top 25% of Ironman Florida.
And here's what he had to say, and a lot of it
was really, really cool.
First off, even if you do it right, it's still gonna suck.
- Yeah, I mean, I started that run off,
and I mean, obviously we'll get to that,
but I started that run off feeling solid.
And it was a 6.5-mile loop, so 6.5 miles out
and 6.5 miles back and did that twice.
And the first 13 miles, I felt like, pretty solid.
The last 13 miles, I started cramping up,
and that's when I was just like.
Yeah, there were probably like,
I'm gonna say at least 200 people
on the course that knew me.
So like, on the run I kept hearing, yo Nick,
yo Nick, Nick, I've been watching your videos.
In the beginning, I was like saying hi,
I was responding, and that last 13 miles,
like, it was head down, like sunglasses still on,
didn't say anything.
- Yeah, Nick, by all accounts, executed the perfect race.
When I was following him on the Ironman Tracker,
there was not a second in there, besides going
out of the gates a little bit hot from T2,
that I thought he really went off plan.
And he said that basically, it felt really, really good
for a long time, and then got hard.
And when I talk to pros, that's what they say
it's always like.
No matter what, even if they're setting course records
or setting all-time world records, they still say
that it feels brutal.
But if it was easy, would we really wanna do it?
No.
We challenge ourselves.
We're Trainiacs, damn it.
Next, even if you don't know what you're doing,
you can still do this.
Listen to where Nick started from.
And he started from a position that a lot of you are in,
and he got to a position that a lot of you wanna get to,
but I think are afraid to try
because it's intimidating, it's scary.
And if you get over it and you do some of the right things,
you can go from complete beginner to really successful,
badass triathlete that you didn't think
you were capable of being.
- I signed up for the Ironman not really knowing
what the Ironman was.
Like, I knew it was a triathlon,
but I didn't know the distances.
I had no clue of like swim and cycle technique,
I had no clue of the logistics involved.
It was just like this thing
that I wanted to kind of attack and accomplish.
It was always in the back of my mind,
I wanna do an Ironman, even though I never really knew
like what it was.
And I remember like my first swim,
where I do like 25 yards in this pool,
and I finish one lap in the pool
and I come out of the water like gasping for air.
And the first thing that crossed my mind was,
like how the hell am I supposed to swim 2.4 miles?
- (laughs) I just did 25 meters.
- Yeah, and then I remember my first brick workout,
where I did, I think it was an hour on the bike
and then a 10-minute run, and I remember
in that 10-minute run just feeling super uncomfortable
and cramping the entire time.
And I was like, all right, like we have some conditioning
to accomplish in the next couple months.
- Next, in a race, being calm is how you become fast.
I think it's like an Army saying or something like that,
slow is smooth, smooth is strong, strong is fast.
Something along those lines.
And that's what it's like in triathlon.
You have to pace yourself.
From everything from a sprint to an Olympic,
you have to go through it in a very measured way,
and that is actually what results in strength
and being able to click over the miles,
starting just easy in the swim, building strength
throughout the bike, and then being able
to execute a good run.
And if you can piece all those three things together
because you've gone and eased into it,
you can have a really successful race.
- I kept thinking in my mind, like,
I kept saying it out loud like on my bike, too.
I was like, I feel strong.
Like, when I started the bike, my plan was,
like we said, you told me keep it slow in the beginning,
and all of these people were passing me in the beginning.
- Right.
That's why you get the old ladies passing you
and you're like, oh, I better hurry up.
- Yeah, but I was like, okay, but this is part
of the plan.
Taren told me this would happen.
So I just kept calm in the beginning.
And within the first five minutes of my bike,
I accidentally kicked off one of my water bottles.
So I lost a water bottle instantly.
But it was all right, I grabbed some extra nutrition
on the course.
But I kept thinking like, okay, I need to pace this bike,
because towards the end, I know I might lose some power.
I don't wanna lose power.
And maybe like 30 miles in, I was like, all right,
I feel fresh right now, I feel strong.
So I started picking it up.
And throughout the course, like all I kept thinking was,
I feel like I have so much power in my legs right now.
Up until like mile 111, I was like, I have so much power
in my legs right now.
And after like mile 56, that's when I was like,
all right, let's pick it up.
So I was passing people left and right on that bike.
And there were like eight miles on the bike
that there was a headwind, where my speed went
to like 14 miles per hour for like eight miles.
And that was right before the turnaround.
And after I turned around and that headwind was,
you know, going with me, I had the tailwind,
I picked up to between 24 and 26 miles per hour
for like 20, 25 miles, and I was just booking.
And it wasn't like heart rate was high, crazy,
and I was uncomfortable.
The only way to describe it is like, I felt like, powerful.
- Ooh, I like that.
Next, we talked about this in the podcast,
in that everyone can have a plan until you get punched
in the mouth.
In my opinion, however, part of a good plan
for a race and training is realizing
that you have to plan for getting punched in the mouth.
And if you can do that, you can come up
with contingencies and plans for
if I have nutritional issues from one direction,
or if I have cramps from another direction,
how am I going to deal with that?
And that's all part of a good plan.
That's all part of what we try to educate people
to deal with on Team Trainiac in training, in a race,
so that when you get into those crappy situations,
you can pull yourself out of it.
And that's what ends up resulting in a good training build
and a good race.
Because nothing goes according to plan.
You always get punched in the mouth.
- With the amount of training I did and like,
in following the plan, like I said,
the first 10 hours was comfortable.
Like, I was pushing, and I had a lot of power,
but like I kept thinking like, okay, I feel,
for working out for 10 hours right now, I feel solid.
And then I hit that wall, and then it was like,
okay, here's an hour, 28 minutes of suck,
where I did, I went to a dark place,
I'll tell you that much.
Like, my head was down and I was focused,
but it's one of those things like you know
that it has to come to an end, you know what the end is.
You just have to get yourself there.
And it was just like, I was in the zone.
Like, I felt good that day.
- Fifth thing, when it comes to swimming, look at Nick.
The man is a sinker.
He's muscly.
Muscle weighs more than water, and he sunk.
He had a hard time swimming.
But what he said that he focused on at the start
was A, getting a good technique down
that allowed him to calm himself down.
That was big, that we worked on that.
And then B, frequency.
The amount of times that I would see him on Instagram
going down to the lake, going to the pool multiple times
a day so that he can get that repetition,
that's what ended up doing it.
- You know what transformed my swim though,
is like when I finally said, okay, I'm done swimming
in a pool.
I'm just gonna swim in open water.
And I put myself in a lake and it forced me.
It's a 450-yard loop, and I was like, okay,
well I have to, you know, make it around there.
And once I started swimming in the lake
and just forcing myself to go longer distances,
that's when my body just like, it learned
to be efficient and learned how to breathe in the water.
People still ask me, hey, how'd you learn how to swim?
I just spent time in the water.
And I feel like my body just kind of,
it learned how to do it.
Like obviously, I was paying attention
to certain techniques and procedures and things
with breathing and my feet and my arms,
but like the transition from me going into open water
from a pool is what really made a big difference for me.
- Second to last is that Zone 2 is for real.
Training in a low-heart rate zone is absolutely paramount
to doing well, especially the longer you go in triathlon.
Because Nick himself was a good runner.
He'd run all his life,
but it wasn't until he started focusing
on the heart rate training that we do on Team Trainiac
that he said he started making real serious gains.
- You know, before this,
I never really did any heart rate training.
I never focused on heart rate.
And what I learned is, why I never got faster
or improved on my long-distance running
is because I was always running at too high
of a heart rate.
I never allowed myself to sit in the Zone 2
and just increase volume that way.
My brother does the same thing.
I watch him, where he just goes out
and he runs as hard as possible and burns out.
So I spent, you know, obviously a lot of my training
in Zone 2, and focusing on Zone 2, like, you know,
almost 80% of that training in Zone 2,
that increased my aerobic capacity like no other.
So that gave me a massive advantage
for training for this marathon that's coming up in February.
- And then finally, Nick wanted to encourage people
to think about fitness differently.
I'll just let him take care of that.
- I'm so excited and like happy to see
that a lot of people that have followed me over the years,
who were strictly just like gym rats,
are now being open to trying to run a little bit more
and are signing up for half-marathons and full marathons.
And some are even signing up for like triathlons now.
Like, that makes me really, really happy
to see people stepping outside of their box
and the comfort zone and what they think they're supposed
to be doing, and they have the option
to do whatever they wanna do.
And I think that's super cool.
- So that's it.
This has been a pretty fantastic experience,
watching Nick evolve from somebody
who couldn't swim the length of a pool
to doing an 11:28 Ironman.
It shocked the hell out of me, and I think
that he has a phenomenal mindset.
Because he doesn't have anything
that we don't have, he just has a mindset
that he knows that if he goes through the process
with good advice, with a good plan, with a good approach,
that good things will happen.
And the problem is that I think a lot
of people doubt themselves, so they start looking
for quick answers and quick fixes,
that when it doesn't come quickly,
that they doubt themselves.
And in Nick's case, the majority of his fitness,
the real astounding gains that he made really just happened
in the last six weeks.
And it shocked me and it shocked him,
but it worked out well because he trusted
that he was on the right path.
Now of course, this is like a massive plug
for Team Trainiac.
Like, thanks to Nick for proving
that it can work so well.
But fact of the matter is that a lot of people
are on Team Trainiac, and not everyone
is training as regularly as Nick did.
I can do all of the training plans on Team Trainiac
in the world, but if you don't put in the work,
you're not gonna have the results that he had.
And he put in the work and he's the one
that went out and did a great job in Ironman.
So kudos to you, man.
You're the one that suffered through all that,
and you did super, super good.
So there you go, Trainiacs.
Those are all the lessons.
Well, I'm sure there were heck of a lot more lessons,
a lot of which Nick was probably not too fond of me in
when I was giving him the eight-hour weekend workouts.
But hey, it turned out.
Now, don't forget, in the description below
is the link to the giveaway, where we've got a total
of over $2800 in value for three prizes,
where you can win a full year of training
on Team Trainiac and 250 bucks' worth
of BPN supplements from Nick.
Now, if you wanna see Nick's actual race day video,
it is right up there.
Go check out that video, and go subscribe to Nick
because kinda talking about doing some collabs.
Who do you think would win a Spartan race,
Nick versus Taren?
Comments below, I wanna hear it.
Thanks, Nick.
Congratulations, and that was super fun.
Later, Trainiacs.