Let Purple Patch Be Your ‘Tent Pole’ in the New Normal
Integrated Triathlon Training to Help You Thrive
The last two years have delivered massive change to how we live our lives. Now, finally, we are emerging from the pandemic, and, although this is a positive change, it is a change nonetheless. This is a real challenge for us collectively. We must now adapt to a new normal, something I like to call a blended life. Old responsibilities return as folks begin to resume pre-pandemic routines like commuting, office time, and school events. As a result, there is tremendous pressure to succeed across all aspects of life - and find a recipe of performance that enables us to show up for family, work, and community, all while retaining health and energy. It is no surprise that so many struggle to manage and feel motivation and performance dwindle.
It sounds counter-intuitive, but times of stress and change are precisely the time to double down on training and pursuit of performance because it offers a framework of stability and routine (the tent pole holding down the tent in a storm) that you won’t gain in other areas of life. You need and can evolve to succeed and thrive in the post-pandemic world.
Your evolution will require a shift in mindset from chasing sporting goals to escape the rigors of life toward intentionally leveraging your performance journey as the backbone for gaining stability and control, thereby amplifying performance across all facets of life.
Today I will outline:
1. The pathway of success to thrive across all aspects of life
2. Keys to integrate an effective triathlon coaching program
The Pathway of Success: Thrive in All Aspects of Life
While significant life changes aren’t easy, they often are necessary and usually enriching long-term. So, before embarking on the performance journey, ask yourself: Why? Why do I want to change my life in this way? What do I hope to get out of it? While our athletes have many different answers, it commonly boils down to a few common themes: energy, health, and life satisfaction.
The second consideration on the road to success is responsibility. Life can deliver stress, but you have, or can develop, the skills to respond and manage effectively. A coach or program will provide the framework and guide for your training in athletics, but the burden is ultimately on you to do the work consistently. This will likely sound daunting, but it’s also empowering if you want to gain control and change your life for the better.
Add these two concepts together, and we appreciate that worthwhile and rewarding change takes time, and it is you who is the agent of that change. This change and improvement continuously extends beyond splits and finish lines for any athlete or fitness enthusiast. At Purple Patch, our definition of success goes well beyond athletic success. We chase the wide range of benefits that come with dedicating ourselves to a performance lifestyle. We want to bring athletes to life. We want to infuse life into athletes, many of whom are often struggling, frustrated or tired.
For time-starved, success-driven folks, in particular, there is no magic quick fix, and rigid plans and approaches are not what you need. In times of high stress, the natural reaction is to step back from athletic goals or reduce commitment to training, but it won’t help you long-term.
The pathway to success requires radical ownership of your performance. Therefore, any coach - or program - is optimal when it teaches you to fish via education and accountability and helps you retain a broader perspective around decision making. But, how can I do this, you ask? Well, read on, and I’ll explain.
Your Keys to Integrating An Effective Coaching Program
With the challenge of change and a return to a blended life (let alone inflation and rising gas prices), the natural instinct is to retreat from a performance journey. Who has time to commit to consistent training, let alone take on a challenge of events? Many folks back off training altogether, hoping that capacity will increase and stress will dissipate. Intuitively, it makes sense to remove the things you have control of removing. Unfortunately, this seldom leaves you to a place of improvement and doesn’t help you thrive. It compounds problems. A random approach to exercise and training leaves most inconsistent or scattered, and physical resilience, energy, and vibrancy decline. Other folks decide to scale back, reverting to free or cheap online programs that promise training plans for events but little support with integration into life. I have seldom seen successful outcomes from following static training plans, as training truly does then become another monkey on the back. You are now burdened with chasing weekly training hours that are simply dumped on top of a busy life. There is no integration or marriage between the ebbs and flow of life and training demands.
These times call for you to invest in yourself and your health and performance. There is a better way in which your performance journey acts as stability, compass, and energizer in the chaos of life. Our Squad programs. These times of challenge are served by a program that acts as the powerful antidote to the training randomness and frustration that so many folks fall into.
It is essential to realize that this isn’t about the features of Squad that create the solution. Instead, the program's effectiveness emerges from how it was built and for what purpose it was designed.
Tri Squad is the locksmith you need when you lose your key to performance.
The Purple Patch philosophy was born out of my struggles with health and athletic performance at the elite level. I saw the errors in my ways and a massive amount of frustration and underperformance across many athletes like myself. The whole ethos of Purple Patch is anchored in the desire to elevate not just sporting success but also health, longevity, energy, and focus.
A true performance lifestyle is about the journey, not the destination of a single race. Therefore, the programs we offer are long-term and designed to enrich all aspects of your well-being, not just tailored to help you meet athletic goals. Any effective program should enable you to weave consistency, gain perspective, and make intelligent decisions.
Effective programs will:
Empower the Athlete: Asking the right questions should allow the athlete to form a picture of what success means for them. A guiding hand will help the athlete better understand their ‘why,’ the purpose behind the training. Conversely, spoon-feeding doesn’t develop long-term gains. The athlete needs some skin in the game, a role, and the opportunity to establish autonomy over training decisions.
Offer Accountability: While a coach cannot (and should not) be the provider of motivation for any athlete, some accountability when the going gets rough is never a bad thing. This includes the sense of community with other athletes a shared program provides. There will undoubtedly be times when you stray from the proper path, e.g., train too hard or inappropriately. During these times, a coach must remind you why the program is designed the way it is (its effectiveness) and what is expected of you.
Provide Perspective: Finally, perspective. In this day and age, the triathlon and sporting worlds are inundated with pseudo-science and ‘magic’ training plans. Understandably, these fads and quick fixes can be tempting but are nearly all a waste of time and money. A good coach will continually educate and remind their athletes of the importance of retaining a long-term lens anchored in consistency, as nothing good comes easy and, when we get our heads stuck in the sand, a little external push is welcome.
Our Squad products help create a mindset that builds adaptability and resilience by integrating sport into life. We do this by blending work life, home life, and fitness to connect and positively affect each other.
“Somewhere along the way, though, between then and now, the “end game” has disappeared, and the time-starved philosophy with the four pillars of Purple Patch has been injected into my daily life, in and out of sport. Sport is now just a vital ingredient to maximize my potential as a husband, dad, companion, and believer.”
The Principles of Triathlon Squad
The building blocks of our triathlon program are anchored in five principles that serve the program's goals.
Principle #1: Flexibility: Life is chaotic and challenging and tends to ebb and flow with the stress it can bring. Our triathlon training program needed to fit this reality. We achieved this with a few key elements:
Each week of training has Key Sessions and Supporting Sessions. This defined hierarchy helps athletes make the best decisions when planning their training week - and ensures it’s easy to scale total workload down in busy weeks or add a little work if life frees up.
Each session has time-rich and time-starved options. Depending on energy and logistics, there are options to add or lessen total training time within sessions.
Principle #2: Athlete Autonomy: A great coach won’t be overly maniacal in prescription. Instead, they will ask the right questions, help the athlete achieve perspective, and define accountability to stay on track with the athlete’s commitments. For example, teach the athlete to fish, creating tremendous success and adherence. To do this:
Build each week of training with easy-to-adjust sessions. Educating the athlete allows them to choose when and where to switch sessions. For example, we avoid situations with long travel days and then have the athlete work out how to nail a 2-hour bike ride from a hotel gym.
Every session includes a tutorial on the focus and instructions on proper execution. If the session carries meaning, the athlete can better nail the session as we design.
Principle #3: Community: This is central to the program - and the part we are proudest of. Integrating a shared journey while keeping the path your own. But how:
80% of the time, 80% of the athletes share a common body of training. Strength-Swim-Ride-Run progression throughout the year, building a year-long progression of athlete development. Of course, each specific week for each athlete will look different, based on each athlete's schedule and management, but the principles and mission of the week remain the same.
As key races approach, individual athletes can get race-specific. These athletes glide onto a race build program that drives them day-by-day into the event. Once the race is complete, the athlete enjoys a little recovery and then slides back into the baseline program with the group. Of course, a race build isn’t isolating, as groups of athletes are often training for the same race. We like to connect pre-events and share advice and war stories throughout the experience.
Principle #4: Education: As our Tri Squad program is predominantly online, our mission has been to radically improve the remote experience. How do we make athletes smarter in performance and decisions, hold them to account, provide feedback, and also make it as close to an in-person experience as we can:
Video-based coaching. Both on-demand and two-way live training sessions to honestly coach folks through their workouts. Posture, form, proper execution, feedback. This is central to the platform and the most significant coaching opportunity.
We doubled down on education sessions. Live and recorded opportunities that flow almost every week. In addition, the team of Purple Patch coaches other experts across fields in sleep, nutrition, hydration, psychology, and more host sessions to enable growth and empowerment.
Principle #5: Long-Term Performance: This was a non-negotiable part of the design, and, once again, required commitment from our side in delivery. This is achieved by:
Year-round programming but not a year-round obsession. We are serving busy, time-starved people who want to thrive in sport - hit their performance goals - and equally thrive in life. We are not delivering a second part-time job for people and don’t want to convert people into living life like a monk. Training focus will suitably ramp as athletes edge toward races, still holding their context and priority within life schedule, but is then dialed back when races are complete. The key is consistency and retaining structure and progression. We don’t just chase short-term goals. We go after longer-term consistency building months on months and even years on years.
We coach longer-term decisions. We integrate the elements that support building a platform of health. Education and defined sessions around recovery, tissue health, injury prevention, and appropriate personal training prevent training from feeling like a burden.
We commit to the consistent evolution of the program based on prior learnings. Just as we ask our athletes to engage and adapt, we also need to. No year of training has ever been the same, as we have consistently evolved and expanded components to improve both as our experience builds and science evolves.
When you integrate these principles into Tri Squad, you have the framework of a powerful toolkit to help you leverage your training and commitments and to respond to times of challenge. Life might be busy and full of change, but you benefit from a commitment to performance. The key is aligning with a program that can help you achieve sustainable performance across all parts of health.
Our Triathlon Squad program is your answer.
Cheers,
Matt Dixon