Episode 347: Beyond the Finish Line: Winning as a Triathlete in 2025 - Part 4
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Training in 2025
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IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon concludes a four-part series on winning at triathlon in 2025, emphasizing the importance of defining success, embracing the journey, and adopting a high-flex integration mindset. He highlights key strategies such as choosing races that align with strengths and weaknesses, avoiding common pitfalls like under-fueling and over-reliance on FTP, and prioritizing sleep and consistent strength training. Dixon also shares insights from a Purple Patch athlete, Dave Pray, who emphasizes the broader impact of endurance sports on health and longevity. Dixon explains how Pray and his focus on cycling and participation in the Purple Patch program has fueled his success and performance in triathlon and life. He emphasizes the importance of a high VO2 max for longevity and health, and how his training and social life are intertwined. Matt Dixon explains the importance of defining success and embracing the journey, emphasizing that athletes should not live to race but live through the process. Matt Dixon advises athletes to choose races that align with their strengths and weaknesses, rather than just selecting races based on location or convenience. He lists 10 common pitfalls that athletes make, starting with the check-the-box mindset and the obsession with outcomes. The episode concludes with a call to action for listeners to apply these lessons and engage with the Purple Patch community.
If you have any questions about the Purple Patch program, feel free to reach out at info@purplepatchfitness.com.
Episode Timecodes:
:00-3:03 Consultation Promo
3:29-15:36 Intro
15:36-57:53 Meat and Potatoes
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Transcription
Matt Dixon 00:00
Folks, today is the last of our four part series around winning at triathlon in 2025 now, the finish line of this little series does not represent the finish line of our education around triathlon coaching and, of course, your success over the course of the coming year, but it does package up nicely what's been a really enjoyable package and program for me to develop over the course of time, I've had a lot of people reaching out and asking around Purple Patch coaching, which, of course, is fantastic, and you are very welcome. But I do want to highlight a couple of components that might be helpful if you're considering getting some additional support and personalization from us as a coaching organization over the course of your journey. So yes, we have Purple Patch coaching, and we have a couple of options there. We have one to one coaching, where people have an individual coach working with someone, collaborating and taking them through the process of course. And then we have our highly popular tri squad program, that's a little bit more of an autonomous program that guides you day by day, step by step, to your races and your key events, as well as the recovery on the outside. And you leverage not an individual coaching relationship, but the broad Purple Patch coaching team, so you get access to all of us along your journey. But it's a little bit more of an autonomous program. Highly effective, really great. And of course, you are injected straight into the heart of the Purple Patch community. That's really good as well. But we also understand that Purple Patch, as a coaching organization, isn't for everyone. And so what we wanted to offer out of this service as well something that we do and we just wanted to bubble and shine a light on it, which is external consultations. So these are 30 or 60 minute consultations where you pay a simple fee a la carte, and you get to spend time with a coach to enable us to help you really implement many of these lessons, whether it's season planning, whether it's prioritization, dialing in your focus, or any other advice to really help you be successful. And we have a lot of self coached athletes that actually leverage this over the course of the journey for one reason or another. They love to go on it on their own. That's fantastic, but they leverage either myself or the Purple Patch team for one time or periodic check ins over the course of their season. And we love that. It's really helpful. So if you'd love to continue the conversation, if you're interested in coaching, we're happy to set up a complimentary call. We'll go through the services and we'll see whether we're going to be aligned with you and whether you can be successful and help you choose the right program for your own needs. But if you would also like to reach out for a professional consultation, yeah, leverage the same email address info@purplepatchfitness.com that's how you can dance with us in 2025 we're here to be successful either way. I hope you find this show really enjoyable and, most importantly, valuable. And as ever, we're really thankful if you share it on with anyone that you might think might find it beneficial, or, of course, on your socials. All right, folks, it is time to get ready. Let's do it. It's the Purple Patch Podcast. I'm Matt Dixon, and welcome to the Purple Patch podcast. The mission of Purple Patch is to empower and educate every human being to reach their athletic potential. Through the lens of athletic potential, you reach your human potential. The purpose of this podcast is to help time starved people everywhere in a great sport into life. And welcome to the Purple Patch podcast as ever your host, Matt Dixon and team, we arrive at part four. How do you finish up a four part series entitled winning at triathlon? 2025 what we thought is we would get pretty darn granular and go very real world. We're going to go beyond the theoretical and provide some boots on grounds examples, simply. How do we do it? What's the coaching mindset? How does an athlete at Purple Patch lead into their training and their overall season to ensure that they can be successful? Just like the finish line is of a race, is never the end of a performance journey. Today's show is not representative of the end of our triathlon education in 2025 this is the start. I want you to think about this little four part package of shows as a foundation that we're going to jump from in the coming weeks. We're going to be digging into some various topics, including different formats. And I just want to give you a little bit of a sneak preview for that. We're going to do some interviews over the coming week, have some guests on the show. One is a busy, time starved athlete that is in his late 50s now, and he's getting faster with age. And that story is fantastic around the mindset, the positioning and the role of the sport, as well as some actionable things that as a maturing athlete, you can actually get faster. Yes, it's possible. We're also going to have a very competitive. Competitive and ambitious mum who loves triathlon, enjoyed in 2024 a huge breakout season, and it was really born out of a highly productive but evolved coaching relationship with Nancy Clark, one of our bright senior coaches at Purple Patch. So that's going to be a terrific conversation as well. I'm also planning a reflective episode where we're going to go back and investigate the Purple Patch, professional athletes. What were, in my estimation, what I believe as the leader of that squad, what were the key factors in how we enjoyed so much success over the course of the decade plus, of working with professional athletes at the pinnacle of world class performance, the most important part of that episode is all of the factors that I identify are absolutely components that you can apply to your own journey to be successful. That's going to be a lot of fun. It's also going to be highly accessible, but I also think, pretty valuable for you to go on your performance journey. But beyond this, the topics, we're going to mix up the formats as well. We're going to shift up the Purple Patch podcast in 2025 we're going to include Max, one of the Purple Patch coaches. He's going to actually be interviewing me on a few subjects, enabling me to be a little bit more reflective. And then here am I going to do some round table discussions around core topics of broader performance, including some aspects around psychology and mindset and as to discuss, we're going to be infusing more interviews, more case studies, with the real world athletes, mostly Purple Patch athletes, as well as some experts in fields. We're going to welcome back Andy blow Scott Tindall in the nutrition realm, Renee Songa, who hasn't been on the show yet, but a master of muscle health and a great physical therapist in the Bay Area, so that we're on point with all of the actionable education. So that's all to come. But today, well, it represents part four in our series, and it's all about winning at triathlon in 2025 I've built today's show a little bit Kitchen Sink style. So what I mean by that is we've got three main core topics that we want to dig into. Number one is how every Purple Patch athlete approaches their season of racing, and why you should be doing the same as well, no matter whether you're Purple Patch or not. So that's the core of it. That's number one, and that's very actionable, very simple. We dig into the trenches very quickly. I'm going to give a couple of thoughts and perspectives around race selection, ensuring that you choose the right races for your goals and aspirations, rather than just checking the boxes and just choosing ones randomly or geographically convenient. And then finally, I'm going to go into a healthy dose of avoidance. I thought, why don't we finish on a little bit of a negative and so if you want to win a triathlon in 2025 these are 10 things that I want you to avoid, some of the classic pitfalls that we see athletes make that undo their goals, their aspirations, their enjoyment and their hard work. Now these lists are always fun, but today I think they're really valuable and important. And so you're going to want to get your fountain pen out, because these mistakes and pitfall pitfalls, you're going to want to write them on the inside of your arm with that classic, wonderful fountain pen that you own. So you're ready. It's going to be fun. And without further ado, we're going to get going, but not quite yet, because I actually want to just read something. And this is a letter that is from an Purple Patch athlete that is not coached by me. It's actually coached by Scott Layton, one of our senior coaches. And the athlete's name he's given me permission is Dave pray, based in West Virginia, although currently spending some time down in Virginia Beach. And as you will know, if you're a frequent listener to the show, we place a lot of emphasis on two big elements at Purple Patch, really defining what success looks like, and encouraging athletes to really understand their why and buying into it, therefore building their approach, their focus and intentions around that. Why that's number one. Number two, having a broader perspective of the commitment to endurance sports or triathlon to not only ensure that an athlete gets faster, but also has a big positive impact in other aspects of low life, their health, their longevity, the quality of their relationships, how they show up in the workplace, etc, and athletes will go through a process with our coaches and series of discussions and redefine the why. And sometimes it's bullet lists, sometimes it's things that are just written on tombstone type thing. But Dave wrote a letter. And I won't read all of it, but I'm going to skip through some of the components that I think are really, really valuable and helpful to listen because I think it really encapsulates what it means to be a Purple Patch athlete in many ways. And so these are directly the words of Dave, and he titled this. The why of my focus on cycling and participating in the Purple Patch program. So Dave is primarily a cyclist. He's not necessarily a triathlete. Okay, I'd like to think that my involvement in cycling related training and involvement in all of the Purple Patch community is the centerpiece of my health and longevity program. You're gonna learn more about this in a couple of seconds, folks, I've come to believe that a relatively high vo two Max, so the size of your cardiovascular engine basically correlates positively with all calls mortality, and being in the so called elite level has the most benefit, and that is through Dave's passion with a lot of performance related content that he loves to engage in. Fortunately, I've been playing in endurance sports sandbox for 30 plus years, and having lived in West Virginia all that time, say, opposed to living in a flat state such as Ohio or Florida, my workouts, by necessity, have been a mix of Zone Two, nice flat patches, zone five, you can't get up some of the hills in my riding neighborhoods and staying zone two, ladies and gentlemen. And so riding and training has been the fundamental strategy for me to extend both my lifespan and my health span, and it helps me support good levels of aerobic and anaerobic performance, ultimately maintaining a vo two Max higher than 50 as measured by garment. I'm currently at 55 vo two Max. That's milliliters per kilogram. Okay, great. Riding is also the centerpiece of my social life. By being reasonably well trained, I'm able to routinely ride with the AB group of my local riding group, not worrying about my ability to ride the traditional 50 miles or 4000 vertical feet of climbing each Saturday. Brinks, this is important for me socially, because these folks could care less about my net worth, but more can I get up the hill, such as they don't have to actually stop and wait for me. There is also a strong correlation between strength training for seniors and I'm about to be 73, years of age and good health, and a tactic of the Purple Patch system is to prescribe to me at least two weight training sessions each week with heavier weight this has been clearly beneficial to me, speaking of year round, what Purple Patch also provides me is a level of consistency in training. Consistency seems to be the secret source has been missing from my self directed planning. This consistency is super supported by velocity, the riding platform and the Purple Patch team. Riding inside is now actually fun and also has the clear social aspect, which is a huge plus. Avoiding injuries is also relevant. I think being consistently well trained with the sensitivity to recovery as led by the Purple Patch program, keeps me in the game. And worth is worth noting, having a few goals for such as the peaks training camp that I'm attending in Florida with the hunter Allen group. We love people going to other groups, to other coaches. It's fantastic. There's a great opportunity to learn, hear a different perspective. It's fantastic. Hunter Allen is well respected. Good on you, Dave. That's terrific. As well as some other riding events over the course of the year are going to challenge me and ensure that I stay accountable beyond this, though, another why for me is that I'm a very active business person. He owns his own business, and he's very, very busy. I'm a very active business person, and I work in an intense environment with a ton of stress, both incoming stress and stress that I create. And a high level of fitness enables me to stay in the game, so to speak. Beyond this, all of this training and this activity provides for us healthy self soothing tactic, say, compared to drinking or compulsively eating, both of which are non healthy coping tactics. So for me, this is success, training consistently as prescribed, 52 weeks of the year, having fun and actively participating regularly on my weekly weekend hammer fest, and being injury free. Also beyond it, I need to stay challenge driven, attending three to four stretch events like big training camps or century rides over the course of the year. This is my vehicle to amplify longevity, lifespan, health span, and of course, keep growing. Thanks so much, Dave, that's fantastic. That's really it, and that's a welcoming spot to help leverage the education, the community, the coaching and the training to provide direction and amplify to not just continue to improve, but also show up better in life. Now we can extend a very similar mindset to that to someone that's looking to qualify to the Hawaii I met, or win a world championship in their age group, or try and qualify to the Boston Marathon. Whatever it is, it kind of doesn't matter if you have the Spirit and you go on the integration into life. It can amplify your life, and that's what we're talking about. So when we go through part four of this podcast today, the meat of potatoes that we're just about to get into, I want you to bear that in mind, bear Dave's thoughts in your mind. And I hope that's helpful as a perspective, Purple Patch or otherwise, it doesn't matter. We want you to thrive, and so I hope that in this three part episode to cap this series, you can really find some tangible things that you pick out and apply to your journey over the course of this year, and we can be successful without further ado. Let's do it, folks, it's the meat and potatoes you it is the meat and potatoes marching orders. That's what we're looking to do. I want you to depart today feeling like you've got your marching orders. You're set to go, you're ready to rock and roll over the course of the coming months and the entire year. And so with that in mind, I'm packing quite a lot in today's show three parts. We could have a whole standalone show just for part three, but I want to try and get in three parts if we can. And this is the four part series. And so I already said this is not the finish line. So we are going to dig into some of the topics today in greater depth. But I think we want to get pretty granular pretty quickly, so with part one approaching your season via a Purple Patch athlete mindset. Now this sounds really simple, and you might think, Oh, I've heard Matt talk about this before, but this is a little different, and I think this is a critical component. It sounds simple, but you got to show up, you got to commit, you got to work hard, and the results will emerge. Isn't that the truth? The truth is, no, it's not. There is more than this than meets the eye, and I think it's important to ground yourself if you want to be successful and you want to apply some of the lessons over the last weeks, you want to establish the right perspective when it comes to tackling any season. We're worried about 2025 right now, but any season a Purple Patch, just like our squad of professional athletes, we have a universal language, mindset and standards or practices, behaviors that we love every single athlete to adopt and adhere to, and that might sound generic to you, but it's not, and it's not because we're a cult either, by the way, the reason that I love universal practices and behaviors, mindset and common language is so that we can create simplicity. We can create consistent application of the Purple Patch coaching method. We can enable clarity of focus for every single athlete, from all the way up at the pro level to folks that are just beginning on their journey. And we can foster simple mechanisms within the system for great support, accountability, and it's way easier to come together under a shared sense of mission and purpose when every participant in the program, no matter how they're engaging with it, and at no matter what level they're at, they feel a commitment to that shared sense of mission and purpose, and they're speaking the same language. And I want to give you a really small example of this, because this is something that I think is under appreciated, and if you're a coach, I want to perk up your ears here, because it's a tool that you can leverage as a as a successful coach, I think, and it's small, and yet it's really important. You might have heard the saying at Purple Patch, fit and fresh. Great. Q, a fit and fresh. I want you to be fit and fresh. I'm getting ready for my race. I'm going to show up fit and fresh looks really good on a t shirt, by the way. But you know what? Fit and fresh? That means something. It means something if you're a Purple Patch athlete, and it's important, because by saying fit and fresh. What that's doing is framing the mindset, and it also leads to the behaviors for what we believe will drive success, fit and fresh. What I mean by this? Well, let's break it down a little bit. Every Purple Patch athlete that comes into the door is ambitious and wants to improve. Each Purple Patch athlete tends to have a set of goals, many of them lofty, and most of the athletes are pretty darn committed to achieving them. So in other words, wrap it all together. We are a high performance organization. Action. We set the standards. We are going to make you faster. We're going to drive athletes to improve, as every coach and coaching organization should be. That's great. That's where we're going. Improvements, goals, smash them. Let's do it. And in order to be successful, every athlete that is ambitious, that has those goals, needs to be very fit, and what that means is they've got to show up every day consistently. They've got to train very, very hard. They've got to be committed, not just over the first couple of weeks, but over the course of months and months and months. It's about showing up almost every single day. And yet, what we observe is that many athletes in the broader world of endurance show up to their events. Yes, very fit. That's not typically the limiter, but they're also fatigued. And so we want our athletes to have the fitness that's there, but we also want them to be systemically and emotionally fresh. And in order to get there, what this requires is the same commitment, the same hard work, the high consistency, but also the bravery and commitment to fuel your body correctly, to integrate adequate recovery to make smart decisions and think long term when there is a little bit of fatigue accumulation, or they have external life commitments that get in the way life flows, ladies and gentlemen. And so fit and fresh, as simple and as cute as it is, defines decision making and what it takes to be successful. It carries weight. That's a really important component. And so that fit and fresh, no matter whether you're trying to win a world championship, you're chasing podiums, you want to cross the finish line for the first time, you're building a great business as an entrepreneur, or you just want to be a fantastic parent. Fit and fresh, it's defining. And that is just one small example. I could go through all of the smoking jackets, strong light ball, all of the Dixon, airy sayings, as we like to call them, at Purple Patch, but it's really important. And so that is just a language definition, but establishing common sets of behaviors and language and practices that is a unifying component that could be incredibly helpful, and you can, as a coach, if you're leading athletes, define your own language. What are important for behaviors build around the building blocks. As an athlete, you define your own you might not be coached. And so if you're self coach, really understanding simple and repeatable is a critical component. So that's defining, and that's just one small example, but let's go to other key approaches that I think every single Purple Patch athlete takes on, and I hope that you can pull from these as well. So beyond the overall framework, common behaviors, common systems, common language, etc, here's a defining success ingredient for a Purple Patch athlete number one, define success. It's critical define your success. I don't think you can be successful in 2025 if you don't have a clear vision of what that success looks like. And I love athletes. To define it not just in terms of binary. Did I qualify to Boston or not? Did I finish my iron man or not? But define it within the context of life. Go back to what I read out with Mr. Dave, pray and draw. What's the role of this sport? With that clarity, it's going to help you. It's really going to help you. It's going to help you with your day to day decision making, with how much training you're doing, what the associated behaviors are, and some of the decision making around the events that you choose, so defining your success is key. We talked about that in part one, but every Purple Patch athlete is encouraged to really get a grip around that, because I think it's going to help everything else flow from it. The second universal practice for Purple Patch athlete is what we call embracing the journey. There's another example, something with the weight. Now, this is important because it defines the mindset, the behaviors, how you structure the training, and more we like to think about, hey, this is how we live, not we are living to race. And so in other words, embracing the journey when we build an athlete's training program, we don't just think about the next thing ahead of us. I've got a couple of athletes that getting ready for Oceanside. That's a hard Fire Man, that's. At the very start of April. I'm not thinking about just training for Oceanside. I'm thinking about athlete development over the course of the year. What do they need to do to be at another level this year? And by the way, what should we also do to tip our hat and think about what we're going to do to get ready for Oceanside as a stepping stone on that journey, and so embracing season on season the cyclical nature, what we sometimes call the upward spiral of performance, year on year, where they layer on top of each other, ensuring that we have to integrate this stuff into life to be additive, not suppressive. That's a driving factor of success, longevity, etc. It's no wonder that we have so many athletes that have been with us for so many years, because it fits into life. It's not like a cage. And I think that's a critical component. So that's the second big, big defining component of being a Purple Patch athlete. The third is what I would call a high flex integration mindset. That sounds very sciencey or something made up in manufacturing, but it's a highly flexible mindset around integrating training into life, where I see many athletes running into mistakes, is taking a training program, dumping it on top of life and then compromising many of the habits, time with family and friends, sleep, opportunities to eat really well and fuel Well, etc, trying to keep up with a training program that's too stressful with too many hours or too much intensity relative to what they have emotional or logistical capacity to actually execute on a week to week basis. And what we understand about life is that life is not a spreadsheet. It is this living, breathing thing. Sometimes you've got more capacity, and we should leverage it if we have that scope. Sometimes life's flows and stuff happens and it restricts a little bit, and you're going to have to have a minimalist optimization mindset of doing less training hours. So what we don't even think about dumping a set number of hours on top of life in any given week, any given athlete might be doing less or more training hours, but when you dance with a high flex mindset with the living, breathing components of life, it layers on that consistency. And so our success is never pro athlete or not. Is never about how many hours do you accumulate? I always remember with the Purple Patch pros, how many hours a week do they train? I used to deliberate say, I don't know that's because some weeks it was appropriate to train more hours, but it could flex all the way down. Tim Reed, world champion, some weeks he would do 16 to 18 hours. Some weeks he would do 24 he wasn't a big volume athlete, but it would flex relative to life. He had a couple of kids. He had a family. It was important, and so this is a core component. The fourth driving mindset is absolutely, universally important. We are absolutely driven by results. We want to get faster. We want to smash your goals, but we are focused on process. Here's the obsession. Here's what I love athletes to do, where I try and ingrain and educate and reinforce, and all of the Purple Patch coaches train and educate and reinforce. And us as a team across everyone obsess on improvement. That's the word you're trying to get better. Get better every single day, not faster, more powerful, fitter, but get better. Do things better, support with better habits. Try and improve every single day. That's actionable and controllable, and if you focus on the inputs, the behaviors, and doing those really well, the outputs, the race results, the goals, they all get smashed. They all do well, and so we obsess on the inputs so the outputs are better. That's a core component. Think about that and apply it for your year. The next time you think, Oh, it's a bad workout today, I failed. No, you didn't fail. You learned something. What can you learn? How can you improve? Continue on the journey? And the final component in part one is a cute one, but it's important one, Chase speed. The power. Don't just chase power and fitness, Chase speed. What do I mean by that? In the broad landscape of triathlon performance, there is an obsession around threshold, FTP, critical power and everything else, all of the metrics. What's my average power? Oh, is that normalized, or is that pure average power? What's my FTP? What percentages should I ride on? The obsessive around the metrics, and it can provide really valuable information, a guiding light. It's critical. But where I want an athlete's focus is, how do I yield the best speed return in terms of my technique, my posture, my pedal stroke if I'm riding a bike, or my running strike if I'm running. And how do I distribute my fitness over the course of this terrain that's variable, or this environment that is variable, different wind directions? And how do I learn the craft of my sport, and that goes through swim, bike and run. What is my speed return? If you obsess on speed return and you do consistent training to build fitness, to build strength, to build resilience, this is where you get the biggest uplift. And that lit that. This is the speed chasing, the Terrain Management, the skills in open water. That is the obsession. That's when you drive it, the fitness, it takes care of itself, the resilience, it takes care of itself. We've consistency. There's not a massive amount of magic over there, but where your uplift is to become a better craftsman. That's why we like to say, Chase speed. Don't chase fitness, because you don't need to. The Fitness will come and so as we cap off part four of this four part series, winning in triathlon. That's the core driving stripple of it away. That's the core component of what I want every single Purple Patch athlete to staple on their heart. We'll go in reverse order as we go through Chase speed, not just fitness obsession on improvement, getting better, a high flex integration mindset, making sure that you're building a dynamic training program that ebbs and flows with the flowing and, of course, the little ebb of life. Embrace the journey. Build seasons. Don't build pinballs of racing, and ultimately, know where you going define success. If you can lock in those five components, you're going to be successful. Okay, that's part one, part two, something that is by special request, race choice. All right, let me What can I tell you about race choice, and it deserves its whole own podcast. It will get one. But let's talk about choosing your best races. My first and I'm going to be a little bit British here, horses for courses, ladies and gentlemen, choosing the right race for you. There is a ton of different styles of racing out there. There are flat races which people say fast, which is a complete mistruth. It's not, it's not actually factual, because flat races can be very, very challenging. It's flat races. There's races that tend to be in horror environments. There's really challenging races. Nice, Iron Man been an example. Very, very hilly, Coeur d'Alene, Lake Placid. Those types of races all very, very challenging. There's all types of components. When you choose a race, don't just choose a race because of its location of it's a nice place to visit. That's one component that you could go into. And I'll come to that in point two. But as much as you can try and set yourself up for success relative to what your mission and your goals are. And so if destination is important, if you're going to go away and do a race, and you're going to bring the family and you want to have a great time, you might actually first look at a race that's in a wonderful destination, that's really enjoyable, that's nice to be there for the days around the race, that's maybe is really good for spectating isn't just one big, giant loop of cycling where your family or friends won't see you for the whole time. So those factors can be important if you're more performance driven. Well, where are your strengths and weaknesses? If you live in a place like Florida and it's dead flat, you might not necessarily go to montront, where it's very, very hilly, if you don't want to take on a challenge, because you're gonna have very limited opportunity to train in the hills, because you're living in Florida, and if it's a core weakness of yours, do you really want to expose that weakness now there is reason to go and do a race like that. Take on a challenge, go and see what you can do. Try and build training to do it. But if you're looking to do something like qualify or come higher up in your in your age group, bracket, whatever it might be, don't choose races which represent greater challenges and put you at a disadvantage. The same can be said. With climate, if you're someone that really doesn't tend to operate well in heat and there is a physiological component to this, well, there might be a reason to go and choose hot races so that it's a testing improving ground for you to implement strategies both ahead of the race and during the race to try and combat that weakness. So that's a good reason. But if you're choosing that event as your a race that you're looking to achieve some specific goal, like qualification, then you wouldn't necessarily choose a hot race. You would look for a race that tends to be cooler. Now those are few and far between because of the geographical or the calendaring of many of the events, but that's just a consideration. So the whole thought of race choices, when it comes to strengths and weaknesses, you really want to try and set yourself up for success in the core races, the key races that you really care about. And leverage other racing opportunities, if you're on a growth, opportunity to improve. So I want to address a weakness. I want to go to Lake Placid because I want a strength driven course. I want to go and do the Hawaii half Iron Man, because I want to learn how to operate in heat. So really have a clear understanding and choose your races. And all of the information is out there across almost every race across the globe, so you can understand what you're getting into. I think with race choices as well, we should think about what your mission and purpose is. I talked about this a little bit before it might be experiential. I remember coaching Jesse Thomas, and he said the or, in fact, he didn't say this. He always uses this in the media, but I actually said it first. I'm going to take full credit for this. I said, Jesse, you're going to go and do Iron Man racing, cool races in cool places. Go and do a race with a sense of adventure in it. And so his race choices were, Lanzarote, Iron Man whales, some really challenging races that were fun for him, because his idea of solitary confinement and prison was going to do a race like Florida. Other races love Go. Other athletes, love to race in Texas or Florida and do the flat races where they can just focus on their metrics. But Jesse was a free spirit of an athlete. So he went to races that represented challenging walls of hills, big blustery conditions, really, really adventure in mindset, in really fun, different places. So that was how he build hit, built his race choices, and that became really fundamental to our strategy. Who wanted to go and challenge himself on some really challenging courses. So you can do the same. You can go and do some really, quote, slow races that are really, really challenging, and they can represent great fun and great accomplishment, but understand what you want to get out of it. A third component of race choices is leveraging racing to build success. So if you have a key race, and let's say that's in the middle or the back half of the year, I think it's really valuable to leverage racing as stepping stones to the key race. It's not that the B races are relegated to just after thoughts. They should be stepping stones to help you improve and understand yourself as an athlete. So leveraging racing is really important. Don't just look on the calendar and plug it in whenever choose races that are going to help you improve, either address a weakness or leverage a strength, or perhaps be an opportunity to really understand how to pace well, so you might have a bit more of a controlled pace, and that becomes really important. And then the final thing around racing is have a broader perspective. When I started in the sport of triathlon and I started to coach, it was like a metronome. There were less races available, and it was always the same cycle. It was, for me, being based in California as a professional athlete. We went and did Oceanside, then we did wildflower, then maybe we did vine man. For you folks that are old timers, you'll remember that race then in the back half of the year, and it went on and it was rinse and repeat and rinse and repeat. Nowadays you don't even need to be just a triathlete. You've got a broad range of amazing races out there. You can go outside of the major brand of iron. Matt wildflower is coming back. It's an iconic race. Alcatraz is a wonderful one time experience. Many of the global races of the t1 100 series are exceptional. The Vegas race is really fun. What happens in Ibiza is amazing. There are some wonderful races all over the world in the family of triathlon. Expand your perspective and get outside. But beyond that, I'd really encourage you, if you are a triathlete, to go beyond triathlon, maybe do do a marathon or some trail running races, or even some gravel races. And you know why? Because it can force growth. It broadens the perspective you see different communities, but when you come back to your core competency, or sport triathlon, in this case, you're probably going to be a better athlete. In fact, I'm going to whisper it. You might even look at some really fun, crazy things, like Spartan Races or high rocks. It's all part of the broader perspective of life. But guess what? When you take on a challenge and you do something really different, you're going to learn and coming outside of your core sport, it just reframes your perspective, and then you can come back to your sport, 3456, months later, and you're refreshed mentally and physically. And so I would encourage you this season, when you think about racing, to have a multi sport mindset. Don't just think triathlon, triathlon, triathlon. And certainly don't just think Iron Man, Iron Man, Iron Man. It gets kind of boring. Refresh, evolve and broaden the perspective, Alright, folks, part three. Final component here my 10 lists. What are the big pitfalls that I see athletes make now, this is an important component of the show. It's a bit fun. I enjoy it, and it's pretty simple in no particular order. These are 10 things that I see athletes inside of Purple Patch make mistakes that derail their goals and ambitions. And they're 10 things that I see outside of Purple Patch happen consistently. The first big mistake, check the box mindset. We talked a little bit about this before, about the driving mindset of the success of the Purple Patch athletes don't chase weekly training hours. Don't chase checking the box of every single week a plan is a plan, including a training plan. So you set your mission and your vision of what your training should be like, and you build your program, or your coach builds your program, and it is written on a page. It might be in training peaks or final search or any of the other platforms. It might be on a PDF. It doesn't matter, but you've got the seven day written, the worst mindset is my success, pass fail is I just check the box on every single worker, because life is not a spreadsheet. And by smashing that mindset, it opens up that flexible, dynamic mindset where you can smart, start making real smart, real time decisions. If we were in a utopian world, I would be coaching you day to day. When you're riding your bike, I would be on a moped next to you when you're running, I would be on a bike next to you. Might get sick of my stories and my ridiculous, ironic humor, but I would be there, and I would be looking in your eyes, I would be watching you move. I would be understanding everything around your world, and I would be throttling the training dose relative to what I'm seeing. And we might push on more if I think there's scope and capacity, I might pull you back on a day to day basis. You might not even realize but what I'm doing is dosing the work relative to where your systemic stress level is. That's what training is. And so when you have a static plan, don't just check the box. Adopt the similar mindset, but you're in controls. You're flying the plane. Do that, and you can be successful. Good. Number two, the obsession on outcomes, every single training session is not a validation exercise. In fact, if you take all of the training sessions that you're going to do in 2025 the vast majority of them are going to be, yeah, just kind of did it. Then you're going to have a few of them that are complete unmitigated disasters, and then you're also going to have some of them that are just amazing, where you feel like you've just got limitless energy. You just feel fantastic. And that's the spectrum. The meat of them are going to be kind of done. And the key to your success is unlocking consistency. And your key to your success is when you're doing those sessions, whether they're meat, whether they're or whether they're Yippee. So any one of those along the spectrum, you're focusing on trying to execute the intention. You're trying to do them with the best form and posture that you can. And you're looking to grow and improve technically, just a little bit, 1% better. That's what it is. But any session alone, any week of training alone is not your bellwether of success. So if you have a bad day, don't worry about it. That's normal. If you back off or you fail mentally, which sometimes happens, don't worry about it. Learn from it. There's probably other stuff going on. Don't treat it as Pass Fail. Really important. Big pitfall number three, very simple one. And I'm going to say, don't under fuel your training. I would say this is one of the number one things. There's about five number one things, because they're all on equal playing field. But one of the number one things that we see the vast majority of athletes of all levels under consume their daily calories relative to their training demands. That includes under consuming protein, not eating enough carbohydrates, total calories and not fueling enough particularly post workouts, ensure that you put intention behind your nutrition, not just to have a really healthy diet and a platform of health, but also fuel your training. Food is fuel. Ask yourself the simple question, what do I need? That's the mindset rather than what do I want? A really key defining bellwether of performance, fuel your life, fuel training your thrive. Don't avoid that pitfall number four, here comes the common mistake, dumping strength training in spring. It's so easy as the swim, bike, run dissolves in focus in the off season to bring up strength, this is going to be the year. But once the weather warms up and we start dialing up the focus and the intention and the training load, strength evaporates. It's a mistake. Don't make it. Commit to the arc. We've got a whole thread going on in the Purple Patch hub right now, our private community talking about strength training the value. I recounted stories of when the Purple Patch pros part of our defining universal practice of behaviors, year round, strength, and almost no one, none of their peers, that were non Purple Patch athletes. Almost none of them were doing strength. It was a waste of time. It's just a taking up time that they could be doing endurance sports. There isn't a a professional athlete and a professional endurance athlete highly successful over the course of many months and many years that isn't integrating strength anymore year round. Do it avoid that pitfall? Number five, we talked about it. I won't spend much time the obsession around FTP functional threshold power as the driver of his success. It's not your functional threshold will probably drive up a little bit as you're getting fitter. It might even plateau, and it probably will even decline a little bit if you're getting ready for an Ironman that sometimes happens with an athlete that can still be really successful. It is one small component that helps frame and give you a guideline around training intensity and not much else. It is not wholly valuable. It's a tool and all of the other parameters. And yes, I'm an exercise physiologist, and I understand all about critical power and different methods and better methods to establish training zones, but training zones in the obsession of FTP power let it evaporate. That's not a bellwether of you becoming a better athlete. So don't fall into the trap. Don't think pass fail on the training sessions. Don't think pass fail if your FTP isn't going up. Pretty simple, important, good number six, and you got five to go. Number six, training with poor form under fatigue, this is a recipe for injury and poor training performance. It also amplifies muscle damage, particularly if you're running. So do it well, or Paul's doing it. I don't like athletes running, particularly with poor fall and so we have a mantra at Purple Patch, run as well as you can for as long as you can, as often as you can, and breaking up between a little resets, and those resets still include locomotion. So it's walking, it is a core component for you to drive every piece of cardiovascular endurance training that you get, every piece of muscular and muscular endurance and resilience development, and you also are practicing good form, typically at a faster pace. Walk breaks are wonderful. Refuse to do bad form in practice you. Do it well. Now sometimes you're out doing a soul filling run. Maybe you're doing an easy spin on the bike. Posture is not there. You're thinking about other stuff. That's okay. That's okay. You're not just doing desperately bad form because you're fighting like Rocky Balboa through the pain. You don't need to burst through barn doors. Okay, you want to be a ballerina in this and so fatigue induce form decline. Don't let enable yourself, allow yourself to do it, locking with the walk breaks, particularly in running. Okay, really, good. Number seven, or this is my this is my favorite. Don't waste your time in the swimming pool going up and down the pool slow, what they call long slow distance. LSD, yeah, I get the joke with low tension on the water, a good friend of mine, Jerry Rodriguez, says, don't pet the kitty. You need to apply tension under water. You need to hold water, and you need to accelerate water, and that means that you're going to be swimming a little bit faster. And so in swimming, generally, particularly adult onset swimmers, you're going to get more out of doing short intervals with little resets so that you can apply not just good form, we talked about that, but good tension on the water to help you create propulsion. It is better to string together 80 times 25 than it is swimming 2000 yards straight just to get ready for the distance. Don't make the pitfall of over drilling or doing too easy long distance swimming. It's going to be a low return on investment, really key. Number eight, I think, by my mathematical ladies and gentlemen, eight, nine and 10, we've got three more to go. Number eight, Don't skip your sleep hours consistently to cram training in. This comes back to that flex mindset, really, really important, a bedrock of a platform of health is critical. Your number one performance enhancing tool that you have that's free is sleep. If you want to get the most out of your training, prioritize sleep. That means that on a week to week basis, sometimes you might need to get up early, sometimes to cram that workout in, but doing it week after week, it's going to come back and haunt you. Bedrock of sleep, I like to say 300 days out of 365, I'm getting great sleep. Then you've got the travel days, the pre race days, the days that you just sleep poor, the days that you've got a little bit of sickness, the days that you've got other things on your mind and you wake up at night, all of that happens, but as a habit and as a bedrock of high performance, sleep is critical. Don't compromise sleep, particularly when it's under your control. I'd rather you do a little less training and execute kindly effective training than cramming it in every week to chase outcomes. Number nine, don't refuse to back off. If you've got all of the signs that you're tired and that might be waking up with low motivation, really cloudy thoughts, maybe a suppressed heart rate. Your resting heart rate is actually lower, and you've got the fatigue when you've gone through warm up, you can't get your heart rate up. You're just feeling really tired. You have two or three days in a row of pretty poor workouts. It's that fourth day and fifth day where you create all of the Havoc, havoc, the refusal to back off and the quit when you've got all of the science that you just keep barging through. That's where you get sick, you get injured. You have poor performance progression, where bad training becomes a habit, but having the courage to back off and periodically have 1234, days that you clean out, you keep things really, really easy, is a recipe to long term success, greater consistency, and over the course of the season, more hours of effective training and more hours of effective training equals better results. And so that stubbornness often guided by a lack of confidence or maybe some fear. That is the pitfall. And so if you have all of the information, metric driven self assessment and and quantifiable and qualitative data and inputs, if it's telling you the picture, logic, not emotion, back off, get in front of it. A short term decision to help, a long term gain that's going to be the driver, really important. I always used to say, when I used to coach age group swimming, I used the kids would just spend their time trying to get out of stuff, hiding under the lane lines. But as you coach adults, they spend. Their whole time trying to add more, and so maybe be sometimes a little bit more, like the kid just telling you. And finally, number 10. Here's number 10 for my 2025, and this is something that I wouldn't have said five years ago, because I wouldn't have had to my number 10 pitfall. Don't make this mistake. Don't train in Super shoes. Pretty simple, the super shoes make you faster in racing, but let's think about what they are. They are effectively a trampoline, and what that means is that they do a lot of the work that you want your ankle complex and lower leg to be doing. And so if you consistently run in Super shoes, there is a degradation of the integrity of your Achilles, your calf, everything around the planter area. You want that to be strong, springy and robust, your foot, your ankle, your lower leg. It's a spring. And you want to minimize you want to keep it strong. You want to keep high tensile strength, and don't remove that by putting a whole super shoe around it. Sure choose a super stew the right shoe for your racing needs in your level. That's okay for many athletes. It's good to race in them, but unless you're running very fast for a short period, more form based super shoes, save them for racing. Become a little bit familiar with one or two training sessions. But out of that, with your shoes in training, I prefer a more neutral shoe that has relatively minimal support that you can actually go and execute and strengthen everything around the lower leg. And by the way, walking around, I'm going to add a Part B to this. Walking around in daily life. Don't walk around in your running shoes. That's the same challenge. Walk around in a really neutral shoe that's comfortable. So typical basketball shoes, not the Jordans, but the ones that are just neutral, really good fans, tennis shoes, the old Chuck D's the converse. These are the types of shoes. Now, you don't have to walk quite any sneakers, but shoes with minimal raises, really simple, really platform. It enables the foot to strengthen, the lower leg to strengthen, and then you run, run in running shoes, but not in daily life. So vast majority of people don't be walking around in your Hocus and your new balances. Save it for your running. Alrighty. I hope that helps. That is a jam packed episode, but I hope you have found it fun, and I encourage you to go back. These are maybe episodes that you might want to listen to again. We started with the model, and then we went through four phases of you winning in 2025 if you need us, we're here. Info at Purple Patch, fitness.com thanks so much. Have a terrific week, and stay tuned. We've got some cracking episodes coming over the course of this week. Take care, guys. Thanks so much for joining and thank you for listening. I hope that you enjoyed the new format. You can never miss an episode by simply subscribing. Head to the Purple Patch channel of YouTube, and you will find it there. And you could subscribe, of course, I'd like to ask you if you will subscribe. Also Share It With Your Friends, and it's really helpful if you leave a nice, positive review in the comments. Now, any questions that you have, let me know, feel free to add a comment, and I will try my best to respond and support you on your performance journey. And in fact, as we commence this video podcast experience, if you have any feedback at all, as mentioned earlier in the show, we would love your help in helping us to improve. Simply email us at info@purplepatchfitness.com, or leave it in the comments of the show at the Purple Patch page, and we will get you dialed in. We'd love constructive feedback. We are in a growth mindset, as we like to call it, and so feel free to share with your friends. But as I said, Let's build this together. Let's make it something special. It's really fun. We're really trying hard to make it a special experience, and we want to welcome you into the Purple Patch community with that. I hope you have a great week. Stay healthy, have fun, keep smiling, doing whatever you do, take care.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
triathlon coaching, Purple Patch, one-to-one coaching, tri squad program, external consultations, season planning, race selection, avoid pitfalls, define success, embrace journey, high flex integration, chase speed, fuel training, strength training, sleep importance