- We are running outside shirtless.
Say goodbye to shirted Taren.
You're welcome, world.
In other news of mistakes runners choose to make,
today we're gonna go through
five of the most common mistakes
that beginner triathletes make
when it comes to running.
Quite often what a lot of these things will do
will actually be to your detriment.
You might be running but you
might not be getting any faster.
This will help you get faster, stay injury free.
(upbeat music)
That's low.
Alright trainiacs,
as you start running,
getting into the sport as a new triathlete,
running is, I would say second in line,
actually you know what, it's all kind of a,
holy smoke I didn't realize how hard swimming,
biking, and running is.
Now there are, I would say, five key things
that new triathletes do
that could be improved to make
their running experience a lot easier.
The first one is that triathletes often don't run enough.
What's enough?
Twice per week is enough for a brand new triathlete,
and that can probably last your for upwards
of four, five, six years, even more.
Your entire triathlon career.
Why two?
Because we need to do two different things in our run.
Number one, we need to go really long.
We need to build up the endurance, the muscular stamina
to go for hours and hours on end.
We need to make sure
that we can complete the distance,
and we need to stimulate the ability to go fast.
Now often what triathletes will do
when they start getting into the sport
is they just go and run,
and it ends up not being a very long run,
or a very fast run.
They're just out running for the sake of running.
What you need to have is a purpose,
and the two purposes that you need to have
when you start run training as a triathlete
is going long, going fast.
So now the second issue relates to that first issue,
and it's when you go for that long run,
it's not running long enough.
Quite often what I see is triathletes might run
a four or five K run over and over for a sprint,
or an eight to 10 K run over and over
for an Olympic distance race,
not realizing that you need to do an over distance run.
You need to run actually longer
than you're going to run in the race
because when you run in the race
you're gonna have load in the legs from the bike,
and you are going to be at a race pace,
so you're going to be taxing yourself quite a bit more
than when you go out for that fresh run,
so you need to challenge yourself
a little bit more than when you go out for that fresh run.
How long is long enough?
Well, for a sprint you wanna build up
to about a seven to eight K run,
an Olympic, somewhere in between about 13, 15 K.
A half Ironman, somewhere in between
about 21 and 23 kilometers, and for a full Ironman,
you actually don't need to run the full distance,
but somewhere upwards of about the total length of time
that you anticipate running during your race,
split over two runs within a 36 hour period.
It's called a split run
and we do them a lot on teamtrainiac.com
because what we wanna do
is we wanna run for maybe two hours
so we stay nice and fresh,
still be a little bit fatigued,
and then within the next 36 hours
run another hour-and-a-half to two hours.
But when you run long, you gotta run long.
Now the next thing that beginner triathletes
get incorrect with their run is when they run long,
they often run too hard.
And forget beginner triathletes,
here I am in my 10th season of triathlon
and I am still running too hard.
I was just told by Dan Palooz
who is last year's Kona winner for the amateurs,
he's a published sports scientists out of New Zealand.
He has coached three professional triathletes
to sub eight-hour Ironmans,
and he looked at my running and he said
even at running a long run of 140 beats a minute or less,
he's like, just a little bit hot.
We want you running at 135 beats a minute or lower.
So these long runs, they are meant to be long,
very aerobic, very talking kind of pace,
not challenging.
Why do we not do challenging?
Because it takes too much out of your body.
Going long takes a lot out of your body,
but then all of a sudden when you start going fast
and long, it is exponentially harder
on your nervous system, and it ends up beating you up
more than you need to.
Let long be long,
but you don't have to always be going long and fast.
The fast will come later, so keep those long runs smooth,
very easy, like I got passed by a lot of people
on the week end kind of easy.
That's okay.
Next issue is how do we actually build up speed?
And we will get to that right after this message.
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So where does that speed come in?
Well that comes in with the
fourth thing that new triathletes get wrong
when they start running a lot,
and it's that when they run fast
in that second run of the week,
they don't run fast like Petey runs fast,
they run fast like Lazy Gracy runs fast,
which is just kind of like,
so when you do that second run of the week,
quite often what a lot of new triathletes do
is they get a little bit fast,
a little bit uncomfortable, and then they try to run
slightly longish.
Those sprint athletes try to push it a little bit
for the four or five K run that they do,
or the Olympic athletes just try to push it a little bit
for that eight to 10 K run that we do,
but what we want is one long run,
one really fast run, and when you do that fast run,
it can be quite short,
but it's gotta be fast.
In my third season of triathlon,
I don't know why I started doing this
but I thought, you know what,
I need to unlock some speed.
I need to get past the ceiling that I've got
where I just can't go any faster.
So what I've started doing is once a week
for only about 15 minutes,
I would go and I would run absolute max effort wind sprints
across a soccer field,
and the total run volume might have been
in between about one and two kilometers,
but what happened is instead of running
a 28-minute sprint race, I was all of a sudden running
a 21-minute sprint triathlon.
I all of a sudden went from a 152 half marathon
down to a 132 half marathon,
and it wasn't like I was running a ton more.
I was just running a ton faster
because I was stimulating the muscles.
So when you run fast, you run really fast.
How do you make sure you do that
without getting injured, however?
That's where the final piece comes in.
So the final thing that new triathletes get wrong
when it comes to running is they just go and run.
And we have a lifetime of typically sitting at a desk.
Most triathletes are desk workers
or we sit a lot at home,
or we sit a lot in the car,
so there's a lot of sitting
and it kind of hunches us over,
and we build this body structure that isn't really
natural for running.
We also then go and grab a pair of shoes
that have a big, bulky heel
for a lot of cushion, and we instantly start running
with really bad form.
But what you need to do is to make sure
that running isn't hard on you.
If you feel like that athlete that's like
the first five minutes is really hard
and then I'm sore for the next few days
and you can't after three weeks
go out and run pain-free and everything's just creaky
and cracky, odds are you're not running smooth enough.
You need to develop the ability to run fast
while you're running smooth.
And we shot a video right here
that I will link to over here
and at the end of this video,
and we called it the embarrassingly simple truth
about running technique,
and wheen it comes right down to it,
essentially it's just a series of tiny little hops
and leaning forward.
And anything more than that is starting to get
very, very complicated
and might be beating up your body
a lot more than you need to.
So the basics that you need to hit
when you start taking up triathlon
as it relates to running is run twice a week,
once really long, once really fast.
Pete, are you done sneezing?
(dog sneezes)
When you run long, run long.
Build up to being longer than the distance
that you're going to race.
Third, when you run long, run very easy.
Fourth, when you run fast, very fast.
And fifth, start looking a little bit at your technique
and for that you can look at the video
that we did right over here,
or you could go and take a look at teamtrainiac.com
where we have cues of in all of these structured workouts
where we tell you which should be the long workout,
which should be the really hard workout.
How hard does hard need to be?
Or long or how easy does easy need to be?
And cues for the things that you should focus on
while you're running, it's all right there for you
so go check that out.
Good Petey bombs, Pete.
If you aren't already subscribed,
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Later trainiacs.