- This is the GTN Show, and this week
we will be discussing whether runners make
better triathletes or whether it's swimmers or cyclists,
and there's a study in that proves
that marathon running isn't as bad
for our knees and our joints as we may think.
- We're also gonna be checking out the results
from Noosa Triathlon that happened over the weekend,
checking out Strava's new global heat map,
which is pretty cool, and also checking out
which bikes the pros were riding at Kona.
(upbeat music)
- Yeah, and I should probably explain
what's happened to Heather.
She hasn't cut her hair or grown
stubble over the weekend.
We are in fact joined by four time
British Duathlon champion and former
British Triathlon champion Mark Buckingham.
Thank you for joining us.
- Thanks for having me.
- So yeah, Mark is gonna be joining us for a few videos
whilst Heather is away on holiday.
And whilst your results speak for themselves,
I'm sure you don't mind me mentioning that you're also
Alistair and Jonny Brownlee's training partner.
- [Mark] Yeah, I'm probably better known for that
- Nah, really?
- Yeah, afraid so.
- Well, I was actually kind of wondering
whether you would get them to sign this for me.
Next up, a little bit of research for you.
Now, I've always been told that long distance running
will only deteriorate my joints, but Dr. Reed Ferber,
the Director of the Running Injury Clinic
claims that marathon running actually improves our health,
and most importantly, improves our joint health.
- Yeah, well the study was quite interesting really.
So, you've basically got a group of marathon runners
and then check their bone health, joint health,
and then revisit it about 20 to 30 years later,
and actually found that in many cases,
the bone health and joint health were better
than non-runners.
- We'd best enter that Ironman, then.
- Yeah, best get for a long run now.
So, speaking of getting out and about more,
what you want to do is check out
Strava's new global heat map.
It's pretty cool, you can basically see
where everyone's running and riding around the world.
- Yeah, I've probably spent a little bit
longer than I'd like to admit on it.
It's quite mesmerising, there's over
a billion activities from over 10 million athletes,
racking up over 200 thousand years worth of duration.
- Yeah, I mean you just spend hours looking at it.
So, go check out your local town and set in your cool
rides and see where everyone else is going as well.
- Well, I guess this is pretty relevant to you, Mark,
being an ex elite runner before you turned to triathlon.
This weekend, triathlete Sara Dossena from Italy
placed sixth in the New York City
marathon at a time of 2:29.
- Which is pretty impressive considering
the British Olympic standard
for the women's marathon is 2:31.
So, it's well inside that, so that's
a pretty phenomenal time for a triathlete.
- Yeah, and I understand she came
to triathlon due to injury.
I think it was her coach suggested she came in,
and then from there she's won some European cups,
duathlons, but I guess this strikes the question,
what is the best sport to come to triathlon from?
Is it swimming, cycling, or running?
Obviously, you came from running.
What do you reckon?
- Well yeah, I mean coming from running,
I think as there have been a lot of triathletes
that have come from a running background as well,
and I think found the hardest thing was the swimming.
You get those sinking legs,
but obviously if you can hold on in the swim and the bike,
then you can win a triathlon in the run,
so that really helped me.
I think swimmers, they find it quite tough.
- Yeah, I mean that was my background before triathlon.
Yeah, it's hard, you tend to have
a little bit more body weight as a swimmer,
and that doesn't lend itself well to running.
But you have the floppy ankles as well.
- [Mark] Yeah.
- From kicking and, you know, you're not
weight bearing when you swim, and then suddenly
you're trying to put a lot of weight
through you when you're running.
So that was something I struggled with,
and I know a lot of swimmers, it takes
a long time for them to build that up.
What do you reckon to cycling, then?
- Cycling, well obviously the triathlon
is slightly weighted more toward the bike,
you know in duration, so I think it's
from that point of view, then, you know you stand
in good stead that, you know, Olympic distance,
you've got at least an hour
on the bike at your favourite discipline, so that helps.
Obviously, getting a big pair of quads
coming from a cycling background,
they're gonna sink a little bit
and change body positions.
- I was gonna say, I'm trying to think
of some good examples of big cyclists
absolutely dominating triathlon.
- Yeah.
- We've got Andrew Talansky swapping
over to triathlon at the moment, ex pro cyclist.
- Yeah, Fabian Cancellara.
- Yeah, so I'll be interested to see how they get on.
We understand Talansky actually won his first triathlon
this weekend, a local Olympic distance triathlon.
- Yep.
- Be interesting to watch,
but yeah, I mean, I'm stumped.
- Yeah, I think there's a few out there, a few more,
but I guess from all different spots, you know,
you look at the running side,
you've got young lad Alex Yee, hot proper A,
running as fast as Moe did it at the same age.
We had Lukas Verzbicas back in the day,
the American athlete.
- Yeah, he had an unfortunate accident.
- He had a bad crash,
and you know from the swimming side
I think Gwen Jorgensen is an Olympic champion.
- Well, if you look at it, half the medal table
at the Olympics...
- Come from a bit more of a swimming background, yeah.
Henry Schuman, Vicky Holland did quite
a lot of swimming at a young age.
Gwen, I think her first scholarship was for swimming,
so yeah, honestly this argument is to and fro.
So, it would be interesting to see
where the next crop of athletes is gonna come from.
- Definitely.
Alright, moving on, every year the Slowtwitch website
puts out the top 15 pro bikes from Kona.
They haven't yet released the women's pro bikes,
but they have released the men's.
- Yeah, it's a great article cause I've been there as well.
Starting this year, I moved to non-drafted,
didn't know which helmet to get,
didn't know which bottle to have,
where to put the bottle, what wheel size to go for.
- It's a minefield.
- It is a minefield, but this article is great
and it's got everyone's crank length, the weights...
- A little bit geeky...
- A little bit, but I'm a geek, you're a geek.
- Yeah.
- It's a great article, two thumbs up,
go and have a look at it.
And there's a new bit of tech from
a Danish company called Magic 5.
This time, a new custom piece of goggles,
which the basic use a smartphone
to take a 3D image of your face
and get you a custom pair of goggles from it.
- Yeah, and they've actually had several
world championship swimmers using them already,
and they've had over 12 hundred backers on Kickstarter,
pledging over 100 thousand dollars
to help bring this project to life.
- I think I'd be quite curious
if I really smile heavily to wear the goggles.
- Okay, probably the biggest news of the week,
and social media is going crazy for it.
Gwen Jorgensen has announced her retirement from triathlon,
as she now focuses on marathon running,
and you didn't even believe me when I told you.
- No I didn't, in all honesty I thought
she'd have gone until, you know, 2020 at Tokyo Olympics,
but we spoke about this before,
it's what gets you out of bed in the morning.
And obviously, marathon's that motivation for Gwen,
she wants to try something new.
- Yeah, I mean it's not totally new to her.
She has done a 241 in a debut marathon last year
I believe it was, but admittedly, she wasn't focusing
on marathon then, and it was the end of her race season,
so it would be exciting to see
what she can do when she is focusing on it.
- Yeah, we're gonna watch with a lot of interest,
and the triathlon as well is gonna miss her, of course.
- Absolutely.
- Who doesn't like seeing Gwen chase down
a two minute deficit on the run?
But yeah, good luck with the future, Gwen.
- Best of luck, Gwen.
- And we'll all be watching your journey.
Let's do the weekly poll.
So, the weekly poll.
How long do you take off in the off season?
- Yeah, the results are in.
In fourth place, it was four weeks or more.
In third place, two to four weeks.
In second place, one to two weeks.
And in first place, it was zero weeks.
- Mmm, which is quite surprising.
Not many people take any time off.
- Yeah, we've got quite good insight
into Kristian Blummenfelt on his off season.
We saw on Instagram the other day and on Strava
that he'd done an over 300k ride.
- Yeah, well I spoke to Kristian
about four weeks ago, and it was right
after the Jersey Super League,
and he was like, "Yeah, I don't have much time off."
And he was planning on actually going up
to the Sierra Nevada mountains and training
literally as part of his "off season."
- Sounds easy, eh?
- Yeah, quite a phenomenal guy.
- But I guess it is a break from
the normal grind of triathlon training,
something completely different.
I mean, what does, you train with
Alistair and Jonny, what do they do?
- Yeah, well, it's quite interesting.
We did a ride this past weekend
where 25 of us from Leagues triathlon
went out into the Archdales and rode over
to the Light District over three days
and stayed in bunk beds, and you know,
it was all a bit different and fun.
And I'll be honest, it was like
the best mini camp I've done for a long time.
- Alright, so it's not a complete rest at all for them.
- No, but I think the off season's really important
to do something a bit different.
Get out there, see some of the world, do stuff
that you wouldn't normally do in a race year.
- Yeah, so I guess it's not only a physical rest,
it's a mental rest as well.
- Yeah, definitely.
I think, well personally, I prefer
to take two to three weeks completely off,
get the feet up, press the reset button.
But obviously, there's people out there like Kristian
who like to keep ticking over.
- And you've got some Ironman guys
who take like a month off.
- Yeah, so it's completely each to their own.
- Well, that is last week's poll.
But this week, we were talking earlier
about which sporting background
produces the best results for triathlon,
and we're interested to hear your views.
Is it swimming, cycling, running, or other?
And you can cast your vote in the poll above my head.
- So, this week's caption competition
gets to win the GTN swim cap.
- And last week, we had a photo of Jens Petersen-Bach
and Andreas Dreitz after Italy Ironman
chatting and laughing with each other.
We had some good captions coming in.
Karl Budworth said, "Really?! I pee on the bike leg too."
Not bad, Karl.
- And then we had Raul Zevallios,
and he's obviously seen the interview with Andy Potts,
"I met the muffin man! Wouldn't you like
"to meet the muffin man too?"
- Yeah, I'm a muffin man, for sure.
- Very good, but the winner is Lukas LUM.
And he clearly knows how many sponsors Andreas Dreitz
has in comparison to Jens Petersen-Bach.
And he said, "Powerbar, Craft, and Mercedes,
"I wish they sponsored me."
Well, Lukas, you win the cap.
Get in touch over Facebook to claim that,
but for this week's caption competition...
- We've got a nice picture of Mark there.
I'm gonna go for, "I know you're struggling a bit
"at the moment, mate, so here's a new wingman."
- Thanks very much.
Well, I'm sure you can do better than that, please do.
Leave your captions in the comments below.
Now on with the race results,
and it is getting a little bit quieter this time of year,
but we do have the Noosa Triathlon,
which is one of the biggest triathlons out there.
In fact, it featured in our top 10
bucket list triathlon video.
So, what were the results, Mark?
- Yeah, so in first place was Ashleigh Gentle,
absolutely flying at the moment.
Second place was Felicity Sheedy-Ryan,
and third place was Natalie Van Coevorden.
They're all quieter, competitive racers.
- Very impressive race from Ashleigh Gentle.
Perhaps she's picking some tips
from her partner, Josh Amberger.
- Yeah.
- But in the men's race, it was really close, wasn't it?
- Yeah really, really close.
Jacob Birtwhistle won it,
and we've seen a few interesting pics on Instagram
with his hands up on the bars like that,
so check them out.
Shoutout to Aaron Royle in second, a training partner.
Yeah, so it was good to see him up there.
Actually Royle's got a tough race scheduled at the moment.
He's doing western Sydney 70.3 in like two or three weeks.
- How do you reckon it'll go?
- I think it'll go well.
I'm tipping Royle to be a similar
kind of 70.3 athlete as Ben Kanute.
- That's a big name.
- Well, I think he's that good.
He swims phenomenally, his bike power's amazing,
and he can run well.
- Okay, so who was third?
- Third was Ryan Bailie.
Again, you know, it's a real stellar podium, then.
And the impressive thing with those guys
and the girls is that they've all
been racing pretty much since March.
So they've been on the road, you know...
- That's a long season.
- For, you know, eight or nine months, of racing.
It's really impressive.
Whereas, I'm at home with my feet up now.
And also over the weekend, we saw the
Miyazaki World Cup Triathlon in Japan.
- Yeah, and in the women's race it was Summer Cook
of America that took her third World Cup win of the year.
Actually, only a week after winning the Tongyeong World Cup.
And in second place, it was Taylor Spivey,
and in third place, it was Emma Jackson.
- In the men's Andreas Schilling was third.
In second place, was Vicente Hernandez,
who, last week, won at Forte Village in the challenge race,
so that was really impressive,
and I caught a snippet of the race
and I noticed that he bridged up to
the front group on the bike, which is pretty impressive,
and then round off it well at second place.
And then Marten Van Riel Deal won it.
Well done.
- Is he really called Martin Van Riel Deal?
- He is, Martin Van Riel Deal.
- Okay, if you say so.
- So, we've got on GTN's pain cave this week.
We've got some interesting pictures sent in
from the flying Finn Yan Busset.
So, he's got like 20 bikes set up in a...
- Yeah, this is like a gym setup.
This is pretty impressive.
- Yeah, it's pretty full on.
He's got alarms in there, and it's all taped up.
- He's got a diamond bike on that front turbo.
- Yeah, you've got a real keen eye.
I can barely see that.
- Yeah, and plenty of fans in there.
So yeah, real good setup.
A nice social atmosphere, I like it.
- Okay, from Ryan Barnes, and this is his
pain cave/climbing room,
and he sent this in over Facebook.
- Yeah, you can see his little climbing wall there.
- It's pretty low, it's probably for his kids, maybe?
- Yeah, something like that, and he's got
quite a bit of a wood effect in there.
It's almost like sauna-esque in there.
- Yeah, like his Kona climatization room.
- Maybe he's been watching the Lionel Sanders videos.
- Nice.
- Next, we've got Elaine Young.
Her husband's pain cave.
- Well, I haven't got a cat.
I don't know, do you have a cat?
- I have a cat, so it looks like there's a cat tower?
- Yeah, I guess that's a cat tower.
- His scratching post or, I don't know what they're called.
But yeah, that's holding the laptop up there...
- Yeah.
- Probably got Zwift or something on.
- Wonder if the cat stays there
whilst they're still training?
- Yeah, interesting...
- Well, that is the GTN pain cave,
and please keep your pain caves coming in
using the #GTNPAINCAVE over Twitter
or send them in over Facebook.
Now for comment of the week,
and we pick out some of the best
comments over the last week.
And here is one from Conor Coleman
from my "What Is..." FTP video.
He said, "I thought ftp standed for
"freewheeling to Pizza Hut."
- And then we've got James McAvoy.
James McAvoy?
- I'm not sure it's that James McAvoy.
- That's impressive.
And he's put, "Winter is coming.
"Those aren't just the Stark words, that's a fact."
- Do you watch Game of Thrones?
- I don't, no.
- Yeah, I think it's lost on Mark.
Heather tried to get a little bit
of a Game of Thrones joke in there last week
and James picked up on it.
And here's from D. Ho, and I'm not sure I like this one
cause it's getting pretty cold here.
He said, "Lol don't need this video but watched it anyway.
"I live in Hawaii that's why."
He's poking fun a little bit there.
- Yeah, it is getting a bit chilly, though, isn't it?
- Yeah, but please, keep your comments coming in.
We love reading them, and hopefully
we'll pick out four comments of the week next week.
- Hi, I'm Tom Butterfield from Bermuda.
You're watching the GTN Show.
- Okay, we were thinking it'd be really cool
to feature things going on
in some of the tri-clubs around the world.
In fact, actually maybe pinpoint those clubs
on a map on our screen in future weeks.
And there is some really cool stuff going on in clubs.
I mean, you're off to a club this week?
- Yeah, I'm off to Matlock.
They've got a little lido going on there,
and they put like three boys in the lido
and you can swim around them, so that's pretty cool.
The week after, I'm off to Jersey,
and they've got over 100 kids
at their triathlon club, so that's pretty cool.
So, triathlon's taking over.
- Well absolutely, I mean we'd love
to hear what your tri-club's doing.
Send in videos, photos, anything you like
and we will try to feature it in future weeks.
But at the moment, we don't actually have a name,
so we'll come back to you with that one.
I'm thinking Tri...
GTN Tri-Club?
- Or, yeah, My Club?
Club MyMap?
Tri as You Might?
- We'll come back to you on this one.
But please, send in your suggestions in the comments below.
So that is the GTN Show.
Your first ever GTN Show, Mark.
- Thanks for having me.
- Yeah, what was your favourite bit?
- Probably you, mate.
- No, it can't be.
- Apologies, anyone who couldn't
quite understand the Yorkshire accent, but I tried my best.
- Oh, don't worry, they've got subtitles there anyway.
- Oh, you'll be okay.
- Well, if you liked the GTN Show this week,
give it a thumbs up, and to see more videos like this,
just click on the globe to subscribe to GTN.
- To see the bucket list video, just click here.
- And to see "What is..." FTP, just click down here.