Taking the Long View Pays off for Giovanni Carriere
The Athlete:
This case study epitomizes so much of what it means to be a Purple Patch athlete. Giovanni Carriere is a long-time Purple Patch athlete based in London with a lovely family and a highly demanding job in finance. Responsible for a large team, with wide-ranging corporate duties, while performing at a high level in triathlon, Giovanni is a great example for a high performing time-starved executive. When he joined us, the quest felt very Purple Patch:
Optimize health
Perform in the workplace
Be present for my family
Improve as an athlete, ultimately, qualifying for the Hawaii IRONMAN World Championships
He was in no rush, but was willing to take on the journey. Here are his own words:
I joined the Purple Patch Squad with little triathlon experience four years ago with the ‘North Star’ five-year goal of racing in the 70.3 Worlds.
Giovanni began as a Squad athlete, then decided to transition to our 1:1 coaching, led by long-time Purple Patch coach Sean Garick. They quickly formed a close and trusted relationship, and developed a long-term strategy to find high performance within the context of Giovanni’s life.
The Challenge:
While Giovanni has solid physical traits, he was also navigating a challenging life schedule full of work and family. He was in solid shape, but had plenty of room to improve physically in the sport of triathlon, before even thinking about podiums or qualification to any major event. It was going to be a journey, and beyond the need to develop physically, Giovanni also lacked solid race experience or craft. You cannot rush physical development, and it is impossible to accelerate wisdom. Wine takes time to mature and requires plenty of patience, and so does high performance in sport.
The challenge for Giovanni and Sean was to take a long-term lens on a quest that was to be exciting and fun. They had to weave experience development and improvements in resilience and performance all within the context of being a busy executive with high focus on family.
The Solution:
In leading Giovanni, Coach Sean’s mission was anchored in a few key points:
Filter the focus
Develop patience -- and embrace the journey
Ensure every part of the journey supplied lessons of improvement
Perhaps the most important piece of the puzzle was the filtering of where Giovanni applied focus. In sports performance, every discipline and element of the performance puzzle supplied a welcoming rabbit hole of equipment, gadgets, metrics, and studies to apply focus. Sean did an expert job helping Giovanni stick to the ‘boulders’ -- the foundational elements that would provide 95%+ of the performance gains. Against natural tendencies, Sean helped Giovanni develop a mindset of ‘rolling with the punches,’ a strong sense of self and feel, and appreciating that challenges are building blocks to future success. With this backbone, Sean and Giovanni worked together to build consistency, develop race craft, and take each step of the journey as a chance to improve. Not always in pure splits or performance or even in a straight line, but in year-over-year, season-over-season athlete development.
The Results
The culmination of the journey so far arrived in the most scenic and challenging IRONMAN UK. On a tough and demanding day, Giovanni was forced to face adversity, needed to display great patience, and put into action the better part of all the lessons and resilience acquired over his journey at Purple Patch. The result was a breakthrough performance and qualification to the Hawaii IRONMAN World Championships. A huge personal accomplishment, a year earlier than we even dared to dream. To finish Giovanni’s earlier quote about his ‘North Star’ five-year plan:
I have since qualified for 70.3 Worlds, Kona, the Challenge World Championship, plus represented Team GBR at Championship events.
The results speak for themselves. So does his happy family, executive career, and fulfilling life, all while doing just fine in the sport of triathlon, still a relative newbie. Well done, Giovanni. Very well done. You are the epitome of a successful Purple Patch athlete.
I can’t do Giovanni's performance justice at IRONMAN UK, so instead will lean into his own race report to provide some perspective.
"Patience, G, Patience." Patience is the most frequently used word by my unrivaled coach Sean Garick. People just want to rush their fitness progression, return to injury, do an IRONMAN, etc., with a mindset of just punching tickets. Sean taught me to always have patience, in everything, and take time. That applied to my IRONMAN UK race. As a relatively weaker swimmer, we chose to just swim relaxed and keep a high turnover, without chasing anything or anybody and avoiding that sense of asphyxiation. 14th/165 out of the water, my best swim ever, and the day only got better from there.
"Ride the terrain, not the power meter." - Matt. Patience also led me to a conservative bike ride for the first 120k. I couldn't believe the amount of people pushing 400W up the hills of the very tough course, suddenly so many people discovered themselves Tour de France level riders. I didn't see anybody eating while I was having a true picnic of oat bars, Clif Blocs, salts. I couldn't believe my luck when the hailstorm and biblical floods started after 120k, and I chose to put the hammer down. Having grown up riding a bike, I enjoyed the wet and dangerous descents, while so many people sadly had severe issues staying upright. In the end, I averaged an absolutely shockingly low (for me) 185W AP on the bike - but 7th/165 bike split. Numbers don't tell you everything.
"Don't be shackled by metrics." - Matt; & "Shut up! Mind, be quiet!" - Mark Allen, during Performance reset. Best Bike splits has always been very accurate for my races, to the minute. This time, at the end of the 2 of 3 laps, I was tracking 40 minutes behind my predicted time. Panic!!!! For 5 minutes, I was very confused, kept checking whether my wheels were rubbing against the frame, and was tempted to conclude I was just having a bad day. But then, the words above came to mind, and I said to myself: "What if this is all BS? You are feeling OK, why don't you just take 1 pedal stroke at a time?" Amazingly, the organizers' GPX file had 2200 meters of elevation, in reality my Garmin reported over 3000mt/10,000ft.
"Champions anticipate challenges." - Jeff Troesch. On the (very hilly) marathon, I finally started to get a high from sensing that I was at the pointy end - I was faced with a completely empty course, and only saw Joe Skipper and Katrina Matthews run in the other direction. But instead of starting to celebrate, I recalled Jeff's words, slowed down a little, and waited for the challenge to materialize. And it did, boy if it did. Mile 12, I started to feel light headed, and thoughts of stopping finally came up. I was ready - I took a gel, popped a 400mg caffeine tablet which I had practiced in training, and then used Matt's magic elixir (cola) walking each aid station after mile 20. Finished up with the 4th run split/165 of the day in my AG.
It will take a while for all of this to sink in. I don't believe in big hairy goals and didn't feel I needed any self worth validation from some sort of quest for Kona. Indeed, my biggest victory came when I got back home on Monday, stepped off the car, and went straight to play cricket with my son (for you folks out there, it's the game which baseball was copied from :-)) - a race is, after all, just ‘a long training day.’ At this point, the fact that the US borders are currently closed to UK residents is just a detail, the whole journey so far has been so implausible and unlikely that I sense a hand from above pushing me and somehow I trust we'll be allowed into the US by October.
A special thanks to my legendary coach Sean B. Garick.