Commit to Mentorship and Coaching to Elevate Your Triathlon Performance
Trusting your triathlon coach is difficult for many athletes. Your performance and expectations are deeply personal. Most of us just can’t blindly put that into the hands of someone else and blindly expect long-term performance elevation. There is an important perspective, mindset, and action that can enable a coaching relationship to flounder or flourish. What is of key importance in a coach and athlete relationship is that trust goes both ways. Athletes trusting coaches, and coaches trusting the athlete. It’s like any relationship you may know in life or at work. Trusting your partner, trusting your kids, trusting your employees. They all rely on an evolving balance of trust between the two. And, it must be earned over time. For it to flourish, you need to get that balance right, and then the positive results will flow. The very first building block is commitment. Commitment from the athlete, and commitment from the coach, or else trust can’t be built.
The best way for us to understand the dynamics of the athlete and coach relationship and the importance of commitment and trust is by showcasing some athletes who embody some.
Let’s dive into it.
Commitment
The bedrock to a successful triathlon coach and athlete relationship is commitment. It is the critical first step. Commit, and the results should flow. Trust, and the results can stick and grow. Trust is an essential part of any relationship, perhaps more important than commitment. But, you can’t build trust without first committing. Trust doesn’t just happen. You don’t meet someone for the first time and trust them as much as some of the closest people in your life. Trust comes over time and can’t be built without first committing. But what do we mean by being committed?
Committed to being open
Committed to trying new things
Committed to the expertise and guidance
Committed to doing your part and investing in the relationship to make it successful
Let’s look at first-hand experiences from Purple Patch athletes and their experiences with their coaches.
Susan: The Mature Female Athlete
Susan has been an incredibly successful age-group triathlete and endurance athlete. She has a rich pedigree of riding, has a strong running background, and has developed through the years as a consistent podium performer across all distances and disciplines. She is a phenom, or at least was a phenom.
Susan loves to train, go hard, and tear up the training routes locally. She loves big distance riding and running but has seldom paid too much attention to the supporting elements of high performance. Susan hit a difficult period of her performances that coincided with perimenopause and saw things not go as well as she had experienced previously.
She experienced a performance plateau and had to manage through an increasingly frequent number of pains and niggles. Additionally, her speed and power were dropping.
Susan decided to get a coach and chose who she thought was the best local coach. She needed a fixer. It doesn’t take the coach long to assess the situation and all the weaknesses of Susan's approach. What has worked for Susan over the last 20 years isn’t the thing that will help her for the coming five. He encourages change, and she promises she is open to it. Her coach maps it out:
Strength
Less total volume of work
More low-stress work, with some really hard efforts 2-3 times weekly
Shifts in nutrition
More downtime programmed for restoration
None of the suggestions are complicated or radical, and they logically make sense to Susan. The rubber hits the road. Her behavior doesn’t match her words. She retains the same eating habits and often under-fuels. She limits and skips strength training which she finds boring. Susan also tends to sneak in more load or stray off-script, particularly with those prescribed easier days.
Susan is continuing to do her own thing, not what the coach is suggesting.
This is a common reaction. The athlete doesn’t dismiss the program but dismisses the program for them.
That’s not typically the challenge, and in this case, it is Susan who is the challenge. She is filtering the program, adhering to portions, but unwilling to do what is needed to allow the program to take root and promote performance change.
As wonderful as Susan is - without a commitment to evolve -- then stagnation will follow.
This is one of the most common challenges we see with athletes taking on new coaching adventures, and why it is so important for some brutal honesty and reflection of yourself as you commence any coaching change.
Heather: The Transition of Mindset and Approach
Change is not easy, and evolving the approach can be so hard after years of success. Susan’s case study highlighted this, and we have great empathy for Susan’s challenge, but it can be done. Our next athlete is Heather. A similar athlete to Susan in many ways. Accomplished, successful, and now maturing into her late 50s. Heather was faced with a reality similar to Susan. She loved training, neglected strength, and was slowing down.
Was this a part of the inevitable decline?
Heather committed to the process and made what honestly sounds like a logical declaration. If I am going to get a coach, it is to evolve. That means I am going all in. I want to hold onto my local community, and my weekly open water swims with my girlfriends, but outside of this, I will change. The action plan?
Twice weekly strength and short 5-7 minutes self-care daily
A drop in total hours of training
Amplification in the challenge of 2-3 hard sessions a week
A reduction in the big long runs, replaced with high frequency running
Frequent 2-3 day blocks of soul-filling unstructured activity and rejuvenation: for mind and body
As change always is, it was tough. She negotiated and argued her case for more, and even sometimes won, but globally she adhered. She treated this change as a new journey. Fresh, different, and a challenge. And to help her, she made a simple goal:
How close can I get to the performance levels of the 50-year-old Heather on a program that was so different, and has fewer training hours?
The result? Well, suspending disbelief, she began to build consistency in training, realized performance predictability, and found global energy improvements. The fatigue of the last few years, that she had accepted as normal, was replaced by enthusiasm and energy. The experiment of how fast was replaced with a different mindset: It doesn’t matter if I go slower now, I just FEEL so much better. I am a better version of myself, with more energy and vigor than I have felt in years.
In truth, that’s the important part. And, we could stop the story here. Heather went on to qualify for the 70.3 Worlds and went faster across the board in every discipline. She thought she knew everything about riding, but has grown as a rider, linking the success to the video bike coaching and terrain management lessons. She is better as a human, oh, and improved as an athlete. How close to those 50-year-old performances? FASTER than. Not because of some magic fairy dust, but because of a commitment to be coached and follow the program.
It wasn’t easy, but it enabled growth.
John: The Elite Age Grouper and Aspiring Pro
John was a very good athlete. He won multiple local races, qualified for the world championships, and then began chasing age group podium finishes at the world championships. He did this off the back of an impressive bike and run combination, which made up for his weaker swim. At 22 years of age, his progression was impressive, and his bike and run performances were near to mid-pack to even front-pack pro athletes.
He had arrived, at least in his mind. We were leading him in his journey, and he approached us at the end of his second season of development. He was an Age Group IRONMAN champion, a podium finisher at the 70.3 Worlds, and on a great trajectory. But we knew what was coming.
I want to go pro.
Serious words, at least if you are coached by us, or any coach who has developed talent to the world-class level. We asked the question: WHY. What do you want out of your journey to competing professionally? His response was swift: I want to compete at a world-class level and race against the best. I want to see what I can do and how far I can get myself.
That is a great perspective and one that we could support. However, we told John he wasn’t ready but could be eventually. At his current performance level, he didn’t swim, bike fast enough, or run fast enough to have a material imprint on any pro race.
He argued that he could learn ‘on the job,’ but that argument was countered by the fact that he would be so far behind in the swim that he would never see the ‘real race.’ We predicted his confidence would erode after a few races, and he would make the performance climb tougher on himself. Instead, we outlined an honest assessment of what it would take:
A 2 to 3-year plan or framework to develop as an amateur
A massive investment in developing swimming to the required performance level
An outline of large amateur sporting goals that foster the development of how to WIN races, and weave performance consistency across a whole season
Develop race craft and deeper resilience
Only THEN go pro when John was truly ready to compete at the elite level - when he could have realistic goals of being IN the race, not just a name that fills a start list.
John didn’t like this journey. He wanted the pro designation and decided he couldn’t commit to a full swim project. He disliked swimming, generally, and couldn’t fathom 6 to 8 weekly sessions in that sport.
And, there lies a common truth. John liked the sport, and equally liked the concept of being a pro, but was unable to be coached to make the journey successful. He wasn’t able to commit to what was necessary.
We decided to bow out of coaching John. He was happy, as he found someone who would support his transition to racing professionally. I hoped that John would prove me wrong, as it isn’t my journey, it was his. It would have delighted us to see him succeed. After 9 months of racing at the pro level, perhaps 5-6 races, John stopped racing after growing tired of the sport.
Athletes who dare to be patient, or evolve their approach to the sport to find success are the ones who find the most success. To lean into coaching and commit. To follow through and grow. We could break down every Purple Patch pro over the years and showcase their degree of commitment to coaching, but we would be here all day. These athletes are examples of high talent and high ambition, yes. However, what distinguishes them is a willingness to immerse themselves in the process of coaching. Never cede control, but be open to enabling the process of coaching to happen.
Elite performers are typically coachable and willing to immerse themselves in the process.
The Common Theme
Between all of these different stories and journeys, there are a few common themes we can draw out of the ones who are successful.
The Athletes are all In
Take the long lens
Ownership of the journey
High on communication, feedback, and a lot of questions
Never seek blame for adversity, instead seek a partner to navigate and overcome challenges
If you can get these things right, if you can nail them, you are building a recipe for success. You’ll create a sustainable coach and athlete relationship.