(running water)
- Pat makes phenomenal pancakes.
It is, hands down, my favorite part of every morning.
We're in, trainiacs, a minor crisis right now.
I don't know where contraband pool docks is.
Oh, I see!
It's full with other stuff.
I guess other clubs don't know our sneaky little pool box.
That's cool, that's cool.
I'm cool with sharing.
Ain't no thang but a water wang.
I'm gonna be on fire today, guys, feeling good.
It's now been, I think, 11 days since Ironman Campeche,
and just got back four days ago from all my travels,
and I felt like, hey, I'm ready, let's go.
Let's start training, big swim.
It's time, nothing holding me back now,
except for the fact that I'm not fully recovered
from Ironman Campeche because I went to sleep last night
at quarter to nine.
That's pretty early for me, so that tells me
that I need a little bit of a rest,
hence Flowbee pants day today.
That's floatable pants.
2,500 meters later, and I have outlasted the entire lane.
Might have something to do
with the fact that I got in 50 minutes late,
but outlasting it outlasting.
They don't talk about how people won Survivor.
They just talk about who won Survivor.
- Oh, my eyes!
My eyes!
- Bet ya thought I was getting nekkid there, eh?
Always, always give your swim gear a rinse after a swim.
Get the chlorine or salt or whatever you got on your gear,
wash away, last longer.
Cleanliness message is brought to you
by triathlon Taren, ding!
Those aren't my version of push-ups.
Those are shoulder exercises that I do
to keep thems boulders strong
while I'm going through this long-distance swim training.
Three sets of 20 of that,
go do some hanging for maximum studdliness,
and now we're done.
You know, in the winter, I just tolerate commuting
because icy, icy, icy, because I'm too cheap
to want to pay for parking downtown,
and I hate sitting and waiting in traffic.
Just seems pointless to me when you can be outside
riding your bike, and sure, it's a little bit of work.
Even in the winter, it's kind of enjoyable,
but it's starts getting nice out,
and I can show my face,
and I can have a little bit of sun on my skin.
It is, hands-down,
my favorite part of every morning.
Best parking spot in downtown
because there is the front door, and there's my bike.
Alright, gang, alright, alright.
I'm gonna kick back and relax a little bit here
because I've been standing at the desk for the last hour,
and that is knocking the stuffing outta me
because I haven't stood at a standing desk in two weeks.
Somebody asked me yesterday how to select a good coach,
and I wrote down some thoughts about how and why
I selected Pat as my coach that you might want to consider.
Number one: Assess their pancake-making skills.
Very, very crucial.
As you can tell, Pat makes phenomenal pancakes.
If they add a little bit
of lemon or orange zest to it, great.
Vanilla, great.
Pecans, better.
Very critical.
Number two: Do they look better than you in a speedo?
I know it's hard to believe, but I'll admit,
Pat looks pretty good in a speedo.
He might only have a regular, black speedo,
and not a Captain America speedo,
which is outright shameful, so I'll admit,
Pat looks better than me in a speedo,
and that was a knock on him.
I had to do some really hard thinking
about whether or not I was gonna take him on as a coach.
Number three: Is their son a cephalopod?
Ky is one of the world's all-time greatest squids.
Major brownie points for good squiddesness.
Number four: Will they join you
for near-death-defying marathon swims?
Pat, yeah, he was in back when we did the 27-kilometer
marathon swim that happened three, four years ago.
Throughout the summer, we're just training separately,
and he was helping me out with the marathon swim training,
but there wasn't really a notion of him joining me.
About 10 days before I did the marathon swim,
I was like, "Holy, geez, I'm gonna be really lonely,
"and it's gonna be kinda boring and kinda scary,
"and I want somebody there in the water with me
"so that it takes my mind off of just swimming,"
and I called Pat, and I was like,
"Hey, you wanna do a marathon swim with me?"
He was like, "Yeah, okay," and then he asks his wife,
the lovely Kara Brown, he was like,
"Hey honey, you mind if I swim 27 kilometers
"two Sundays from now?"
"Um, yeah."
So that's Pat.
I got a special place in here for Pat.
On a serious note, though, how to select a coach.
That's a really big, personal question
that depends, I think, primarily,
on what type of athlete you are, and who you mesh with.
How I ended up selecting Pat as a coach
is I knew that he was an awesome training partner,
and that I was always motivated by him,
because, as you can see,
he's a phenomenally talented athlete.
He was very even-keeled.
He has a regular day job and family
and understands that I have a day job and dogs.
I knew that the soft skills like the interactions
that we would have were gonna mesh together
because we mesh together as friends,
and that was probably the biggest thing to me
that I knew the coaching relationship would work.
Now, how do you do that if you're just selecting people
off of a website or selecting people in your area
and you don't know them well?
I would probably try to test them out.
See if you can go to some of their training sessions,
an exploratory meeting,
or at a time when you're not building up to a big race,
commit to three-month intervals in maybe the off-season
and see how that goes, and feel each other out
so that you know if that's gonna be the right coach for you
by the time the season rolls around,
and I think that that, as opposed to,
do they have certifications and training credentials,
and are they a good triathlete themselves,
I don't think that's nearly as important
as, are they somebody that you can interact with
day-to-day, and you jive with their style of communication,
and just like their general mojo.
Now that I think about it, that goes in line
with what I say, that triathlon needs to be something
that is a part of your lifestyle
and not something that you just do off to the side,
because if you're looking at hiring a triathlon coach
as somebody that needs to fit into your lifestyle
and meshes with you, then it's not going to be something
you add into your triathlon training program
as like a nuisance.
It's kinda just part of the overall lifestyle
that you adopt, and as I said couple days ago,
when you're communicating well with your coach,
and you're both on the same page, it's easier to say yes.
I think that's good advice; let's try that.
Well, that's a day.
I am so back in love with Winnipeg
now that it's not blistering cold out.
I don't know if you saw yesterday,
but Misses Triathlon Taren was in the office with Mel,
and we were sorting out some ideas
that we've got for triathlontaren.com.
If you go and check that out right now, it's pretty awful.
I kinda just put it up as a placeholder
and added some pictures and the yellow background,
but we got some good stuff coming up
for the dot com of the triathlon Tarenisms.
Beyond that, I think it's home-time.
How 'bout I see y'all later, trainiacs?
Red light, green light.