- Good morning, trainiacs.
We have one of the funnest projects that we have done.
We are trying to turn one of our motivators
into a pro-triathlete.
Huh, yeah!
Now, I wanna introduce you to, who, in my opinion,
is a must follow online.
Now, Anne Maher is somebody who we had on the podcast
over the winter.
Now, why I think everyone should go and follow Anne
is because she's a real person
that is going and doing incredible, incredible things.
Anne is a mom and works a job and likes margaritas,
like a whole lot of us do.
Her entire profile on Instagram is margs and marathons
because she likes margaritas so much
and doesn't want that to get in the way of training.
She wants to enjoy real life while doing incredible things.
And she is doing incredible things.
She ended up taking up running after becoming a mom
to just get healthy and ended up getting all the way down
to a 1:19 half marathon time solo,
not in a race with other people pushing her,
she just went and did a 1:19 solo.
That's incredible.
And she's a sweetheart of a lady.
Now, while Anne was learning how to run
and getting faster and faster in the run,
she always wanted to do a triathlon, like a lot of us do.
That's something in the mind of this goal
that we have off in the distance.
She ended up doing her first Half Ironman,
first triathlon ever, earlier this year
at Half Ironman St. George.
Now, this Anne Maher down here, that's not her.
This Anne Maher is her,
and she ended up doing a 32-minute swim,
a three-hour bike, and a one-hour 29-minute run.
And we look at the details here on OBSTRI,
her run, really, really strong relative to the field.
This DPI number,
this is your strength relative to the field.
If you're up closer to 100, it's better.
Basically, if you're at 100, you're tippie top of the field.
88 for the swim, really strong.
Bike, 90, still very strong,
but I'll get to why this is super interesting
that she was a 90 with a three-hour bike at St. George here.
And then her run, fastest run overall.
And I think, actually, it's one of the fastest,
even including the pros, 1:29:09,
let's go and take a look here.
That would have been, amongst the pros,
one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine,
10, 11, 12, 13, 14th fastest run of the day.
And this is from somebody
who really wasn't doing triathlon training.
She kind of did this race as a lark to see if she liked it.
Now, when Anne ended up doing this race,
I reached out to her and said, awesome, awesome work.
Congrats, really proud of you.
Because she's a motivator.
She's actually on the team.
She's part of our ambassador program,
just because she is an age grouper,
she feels like an age grouper,
she feels like she's learning how to do triathlon,
even though she's putting out amazing times like this.
And I said, hey, if there's ever anything
that you wanna ham with, I'm really appreciative
that you came on our podcast, I'd be honored
to help you in any way that I can.
And she said, well actually,
I really wanna get into triathlon and I wanna become a pro.
Would you coach me?
I started doing some thinking here,
and let's go back to her race
and just see where there's maybe some potential.
If we're seeing the details here,
we've got a 32-minute swim.
I asked her what she'd been doing up to that time.
and she had maybe swam once a week a little bit.
She was a former swimmer as a kid,
but just got burnt out on it,
so didn't really swim a whole lot leading into this.
We've got probably one to two minutes easy
that we can pick up with some structured swimming there.
Then, onto the bike.
She ended up doing this bike on a road bike.
I don't even know if she had clip-on arrow bars.
Hadn't done any structured bike training at all,
just would go out for a ride here and there.
I think she'd done one ride of 50 miles or longer
coming into this race.
Biked really, really conservatively
because she didn't want to be cramped up for the run
because she didn't really know what it was gonna feel like
on the run and was really uncertain on that bike
because she hadn't really done a whole lot
of riding outside.
If we're looking at this three-hour bike
and we look at even just, say, the female pros,
and we say, all right, well,
what if we were somewhere in the middle?
We're looking at a 2:30 kind of bike.
There's probably around 25 to 30 minutes
that Anne could shave off.
And looking at the run, where triathletes can get to
is somewhere between about three and 10%
of their cold runtime.
Let's say you run 90 minutes in a half marathon,
you can probably run in a Half Ironman
somewhere around three to 10% slower than that off the bike.
Now, Anne isn't even at that point yet,
so we can probably pick up, at some point,
two to five minutes on that run,
getting her all the way down to somewhere in between
about 30 and 40 minutes of total save time.
And when we compare that to the female pro race,
that puts her somewhere around Meredith Kessler,
Dani Lewis, Sarah Crowley, Lindsey Corbin
kind of range here.
And I think that it's very, very doable for her.
What I said to Anne, when she asked me to coach her,
is well, first off, I have never done this before.
I've never turned an athlete into a pro,
but I do think that I know how to help her.
And there's gonna be a lot of people that are like,
Taren, you're not a one-on-one coach.
Yeah, I'm not a one-on-one coach.
But what I say is that there was a time that Matt Dixon,
or Jerry Rodriguez, or Jesse Kropelnicki, or Jim Vance,
or Brett Sutton, or all of these great coaches
weren't a one-on-one coach
and they had to get that first athlete.
And just consider me the lucky duck that gets to work
with a really, really talented athlete as my first.
When you start looking at building a triathlon plan,
you can really only select one of the three disciplines,
one of swim, bike, or run,
that you can really, really improve
at any one point in time.
In her case, looking at her race time,
it's clear that the bike
is the greatest opportunity for her.
Her DPI on OBSTRI roughly the same
between the swim and the bike.
But even if you get massively faster in the swim,
she might only save about five minutes, but on the bike,
she might save upwards of a half an hour.
Now, I, myself, made my bike, was it a half an hour faster?
Yeah, I think it was actually.
While I admitted to her that I haven't gone through it,
I think I can help her through it,
and I really wanna be a part of that journey
if she's on board with just understanding
that we're both gonna be learning together.
Here's what we have set up for her.
The first thing that we wanna do
is first establish some breaking points.
The worst thing that we can do with Anne
is just slap a whole bunch of training onto her
and then see what happens.
What I wanna do with her
is we know she's got the engine to be a fantastic athlete,
but I don't want to break her before we get to find out
if she can be a fantastic athlete.
What we're doing is we're starting with a lower level
of training than she's even comfortable with,
and then gradually building it up
and monitoring where some breaking points are.
We're starting at roughly about 11 hours
of training week one, intensities that I would say
are actually more geared towards Ironman,
just to see where her breaking points are.
And then, we gradually build in a few more hours
and a bit more intensity over and over.
And what I set her up with was an HRV monitoring system
so we can monitor her heart rate variability
to see at what point does she start to crack a little bit,
and then we start backing off.
We're building in some mechanisms with HRV training,
with subjective wellness, constantly talking to her
about how her muscles are doing, how her sleep is going,
how her training is feeling, and if at any point
we start seeing a little bit of weakness, all right,
we've found a point that we need
to be a little bit more careful.
As far as the swim goes, that 32-minute swim is great.
I think there's going to be a point
that if she does turn pro, that we're gonna have to try
to get that down to 28, 27 minutes thereabout.
But that time is not now.
As an age grouper, you have so many people around you
that you're always going to get a draft,
so you can just benefit from the draft.
We ended up giving Anne two swims a week.
That's it.
There's a fair bit of punch in that swim
to make sure that she's unlocking
some of those old speed swimming styles and abilities
that she had as a kid.
And then, lots of triathlon-specific swimming.
Things like citing, things like deck-ups,
things like changing the gearing, say within a 400,
starting at 90% effort level,
and then bringing it down to 75% effort level,
so simulating coming around buoys,
and starting out of the gate so that she's able
to have those surges up and down
so that she's able to actually execute a triathlon swim,
not just being a swimmer who's doing a swim in a triathlon.
With the run, we've given her five runs,
and you might be saying, oh man, that's a lot.
Well, Anne is a big high-mileage,
low-intensity kind of athlete,
and she does really, really well with high-volume,
low-intensity base-type training.
We've given her these five runs,
which is a bit of a rest in her case,
but the load is really, really low.
Two brick runs to make sure that she is adapting
to running off the bike,
to get that differential between her 1:19 half marathon
and what she can do in a Half Ironman
closer and closer together.
We wanna get that down by about that two to five minutes.
We've given her one fast run
because she says that she does really well
maintaining one VO2 max run,
so we're giving her 1K repeats, 2K repeats,
one-mile repeats, adapting the rest,
and actually probably giving her more rest
than she did before because we don't want the load
to really be in the run.
Then there's one optional easy run that she can do
in the afternoon, and then one long run of about two hours
that I recommend she does on trails,
just to make sure that she has
that side-to-side proprioception that trails allow,
and it gives you a little bit of rest
because you're on soft surfaces,
so it's a little bit easier on the body.
The bike is where the work is,
and this is where I start giving her intense stuff.
On Monday, what I give her is a low-cadence,
roughly around 60 to 70 RPM, leg strength kind of workout.
This is something I learned from Dr. Dan Plews
is that that low-cadence work on Monday
is very easy to do after a big week
while giving you some extra load.
If you go and start trying to do really intense,
super sharp bikes on Monday after a big weekend,
not gonna happen, but doing these grinding workouts
is a way to still add load while keeping your heart rate low
because the grinding workouts keep your heart rate low,
and neuromuscularly, it's a slow turnover,
so it's easy for a tired body to still fire,
so you get a little bit of load,
little bit more time under tension
without giving you something that you can't actually do.
And these leg strength intervals
tend to be a little bit longer,
anywhere from about four minutes to 15 minutes, roughly.
Towards the end of the week, we've added in an easy bike,
an optional 60-minute easy ride,
just to keep those muscles turning over.
Mid-week, there's a very intense bike.
And in that bike, I tend to focus
on 22nd to two minute intervals
because of Anne's run background,
she's got a really big VO2 max,
but what she doesn't have is FTP.
She doesn't have access to that VO2 max.
She needs to bring up her bike power
to reach her capabilities.
If we were giving her longer intervals,
like two to eight minutes,
that's working on VO2 max a little bit more
and really just improving barely, if anything,
something that she's already good at.
We wanna have access to the VO2 max
that she's got from the run when we're on the bike.
And on the weekend, we have a really race-specific bike.
What we're doing with her on Saturdays
is a long over-distance kind of bike,
anywhere from three to, well, I'm sorry to say this, Anne,
you might have to get up to four and a half hours.
And in that, there's anywhere from about a third
to half of the time spent at or above race pace,
giving her intervals of anywhere from five minutes
to two hours where she's at or above a target race pace.
And what we're doing is we're just setting a guideline
of, alright, we know that Half Ironman race pace
is somewhere in between about 60 and 80% of your FTP.
We started at 60%, gave her some intervals,
saw how the brick run went after, and then she nailed it,
did really well, so we raised it up to 65%,
extended the intervals, and then she did really well,
raised it up to 70%, did really well.
And then from this, we start getting a guideline
of what an attainable race pace kind of is.
And then before you know it, she's gonna be like,
holy smokes, I'm holding 20% more watts on the bike
and still feeling good.
And we've gone through this process of feeling out
what a good bike intensity is followed by
what is an executable run off the bike.
And this is the first time
she's ever done tri-specific training
and the first time that she's going to see
what we can unleash is going to be
the Half Ironman World Championships in St. George,
where she goes back to the same course
that her first race was in with a new bike,
with structured swim training,
with structured bike training,
with hopefully a little bit of refined run abilities,
and we see what happens.
Personally, I've told her that I expect this
to be an 18 to 24-month project
to maybe get her to become a pro,
but I really think that she's got the stuff to do it,
and I'm honored to be the person
that she entrusts with this.
I'm absolutely thrilled to be a part of this
and I think that everyone should go and follow her journey.
With that said, trainiacs, a lot of these techniques
are things that we've put into our training app
that you can get at app.mymotive.com,
where you can tailor it to what you need to work on more
and give you guidance on how to structure the workout week
and when you should do intensity,
when you should do leg strength,
when you should do really intense running.
All of this is laid out for you at app.mymotive.com.
You can try it out for free for 14 days,
and then if you like it, stick around.
And if you aren't already subscribed,
hit the subscribe button below.
Later, trainiacs.