Episode 344: Beyond the Finish Line: Winning as a Triathlet in 2025 - Part 1

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Welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast!

IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon introduces a four-part series on winning at triathlon in 2025, emphasizing personalized performance improvement. He outlines Purple Patch's coaching offerings, including individual coaching and the tri squad program. Dixon shares a case study of an athlete named Sam, detailing her goals, strengths, and weaknesses, and the three-pronged approach to her training: a swim project, a bike booster project, and a nutrition project. Sam's success in 2024 included improved swimming, stronger cycling, and faster running. Dixon encourages listeners to adopt an optimization mindset, focus on strengths, address weaknesses, and maintain supportive habits for sustainable high performance.

He emphasizes the importance of defining what "winning" means for each listener. Using Sam’s example, Dixon emphasizes the importance of understanding the broader context of an athlete's life, including family, work, and social connections. He explains the practical steps taken to implement these projects, including recruiting a buddy for swimming and incorporating group rides for bike training. Matt highlights the importance of maintaining social connections and community support during the training process. He encourages listeners to reflect on their current state, identify strengths and weaknesses, and commit to clear, actionable goals.

If you have any questions about the Purple Patch program, feel free to reach out at info@purplepatchfitness.com.

Episode Timecodes:

00:-5:23 Introduction

5:29-1:03 Meat and Potatoes

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Transcription

Matt Dixon 00:01

Welcome to the Purple Patch podcast as ever, your host, Matt Dixon, and today we kick off the new year, and we kick off our four part series, winning at triathlon 2025 now winning that word in itself, it means a little bit of a different thing to each of us. So what I encourage you to do is build your own relationship with that word. What does winning mean for you? Whatever it is, this educational series is going to be applicable for you to take your performance level up, and we'll keep it up there for the course of this whole year. This is a three part progressive series of education. Now we've already had the kickoff. We did a little bit of a preview January 2, and in that preview I went through our coaching model and established our mindset so that you arrive today equipped to tackle this journey. I'm going to come back to that preview in a few moments when we dig into the meat and potatoes, but before we dive into educational content, I do want to mention just a couple of ways in which we can help you on the long term arc of your journey beyond this education. Of course, we have our Purple Patch individual coaching, where you work directly with a coach that is a proven, very powerful program. We've had a bunch of great results out of that. We also have our most popular programming, which is our tri squad, that's a little bit more of an autonomous program when you don't have an individual relationship with a coach, but instead you lean into the entire Purple Patch coaching team to ensure that your journey is highly successful. We still train you for your specific races. It brings you all the way to race day and recovery following you go on a journey as a part of a team while you've got your own tailored program, but you're leaning into the expertise of the entire Purple Patch coaching team as you navigate that journey. That's tri squad tremendous value for your journey. But we also realize that Purple Patch coaching isn't necessarily the right choice for you or everybody, and if that's the case, we'd still be delighted to help. We're laying out this education to try and help you up level in 2025 so what we can offer at the start of this year is a consultation, a paid consultation, and when you work with either myself or a Purple Patch coach to put into action many of the lessons that we go through today, so we can help you really define your vision and your goals. We can also go through our coaching process to ensure that you get your priorities of what you are going to focus on, and perhaps sometimes just as important, what you're not going to focus on, and set a very clear roadmap so that you can go and action it along the way of the 2025 season. Now, of course, we're always on hand to come back and set up subsequent consultations if you stray off track or you want to check in over the course of the end of the quarter or halfway or midpoint through the year, etc. But these external, as we call them, external A La Carte consultations are a very powerful tool. So if you would like to engage in that just one time, very simple, a low cost fee, just reach out to us info@purplepatchfitness.com and just let them know that you want to set up a consultation, either with myself or one of the Purple Patch coaching team and the Purple Patch team globally will give you all the information that you need if you do want to investigate our services, reach out to that same email address as well info@purplepatchfense.com just reach out and say, I'd love to have a chat, and we can set up a time where we can chat to you, pressure free around what might serve you best, whether it's individual coaching, whether it's tri squad, And that's a process that's completely complimentary, of course, conversation around our services and how best to set you up for the best year ahead. So those are the offerings as you go through. There a lot of folks ask us, we try not to do a very heavy promotion on this, but I do want to mention this as you go through. I will say that if you do decide to reach out, mention that you listen to this show, or one of the four part series that we're going through, because it's going to help us get to the action quicker and ensure that we can really help you, of course, as ever, all of our services and everything around Purple Patch can be found at purplepatchfitness.com alrighty, later in the show, I am going to discuss my work of fueling I should also mention that with my coached case study today, which is an athlete called Sam. And so I'm going to leave their link in the show notes, but it's also pretty memorable, so I do want to mention it as well. If you do want to investigate fueling, it's fuelin.com so that's F, U, E, L, I n.com/purple, patch, very simple. You can find Scott and the team over there fantastic resources in everything around nutrition, alrighty. With that business out of the way, let's lock in. This is officially part one of our 2025 series, winning at triathlon. 2025 let's do the meat of potatoes. You.

Matt Dixon 05:01

Part One mindset, road mapping and dialing in your first quarter of the year, January, February, March. Here we are together. It's just after the new year. It's January 2025, here is my coach's assumption. You want to have a breakthrough season. It's very commonly used. You want to up level, sure. So many people reach out. I want to take my performance to the next level. Fantastic. The big question for us, of course, is, how can you take your current approach and evolve it so that your performance raises dramatically, not just for an event, for the entire season, while also, and that's important, while also retaining high performance in all of the other aspects of your life, work, family, friends, etc. That's why I always love to talk about performance in context. And let's get practical right off the bat here. What I want to do is start today's show with a case study of a real athlete that I coach. I still coach this athlete, but what we're going to do is go back exactly a year ago, and we're going to break down an approach that we took together, the athlete and myself, I was individually coaching her, and I want to go through how we set up her year last year, and feed into now the 2025 season. And I think what you're going to get is a lot of insight into the coaching process and some practical tips of how you can reflect on this story, because it is a little bit of a story, and apply it to your own journey once we're done with that case study, and that's going to take up the majority of the show today, but once we're done with it, we're then going to get practical, and I'm going to give you some actionable tips and some homework so that you can go and join the dots and help yourself really important. So as we break down this case study, just to give you the context, I want you to listen for a few specific things, and that's number one, how we evolved her approach to training. Okay, that's important. But we also considered the broader perspective of the role that the sport plays in our case study, Sam's life. And so you're going to hear a lot me talk a lot about fun and community accountability support, which ultimately are equally important catalysts of change and evolution, then tinkering with specific training sessions. So we're going to talk about training, and I want you to listen to that. How do we evolve the training approach, but also considering these other soft aspects, if you want to call it of a performance journey. We're also going to discuss a little bit around the emphasis of some key changes in daily practices, and that was to bolster not just her daily health and her energy, but also her physical resilience, to enable training to be better. In other words, be another important ingredient to performance catalysts. So while we're going to spend a lot of time talking about swim, bike, run, strength, remember, and I'm going to bring this back up, that the broader performance habits are critical for any athlete. So this isn't just about spreadsheets and annual training plans. This is an important contextual conversation and case study that really opens up the door on how do we actually take an athlete through a performance evolution? Okay, following the case study, as I mentioned, we're going to get to some really practical education so that you can apply it to your journey and ensure that you're prioritizing the right effort in your daily approach to yield great macro results. In other words, go to the next level. So let's kick it off. This athlete, she's pretty humble. She decided that she didn't want me to share her name, so I'm going to call her Sam. And as I mentioned, this case study starts about 12 months ago, and it serves as our initial guide for you. Okay, so Sam is her meat potatoes of her sport triathlon is Iron Man 70.3 so the Half Ironman distance, she's mid 40s. She's got quite a few years of experience in racing. So she's been training for six or seven years now, I would say, and she has completed a few Ironman races. She doesn't really enjoy the longer distance. She really wants to get to the next level in 70.3 type distance. And to give you an idea of her performance level, she's proverbially close to the podium in regional races and local races and and has qualified and competed in a couple of 70.3 World Championships. Now she's ambitious. She's very ambitious. She's very keen to take it to the next level. A year ago, we talked about, what do we need to do to raise the performance level? She retains that same ambition as we go into 2025 and I'm going to touch on that as we've gone through the 2020 Four program, because that's what we're learning from Okay, broader life. She's a mum of two, so she's got reasonable time to train, but certainly family priorities, and they're extensive. Of course, they're the most important things. So she averages around 10 to 12 hours a week of training, which I think is a healthy dose for a half Ironman athlete, particularly time starved. Sometimes she goes a little bit longer if she adds some riding mileage. She loves to ride her bike, and we're going to talk about that a little bit as we go. So if you want to establish her goal, she's, and this is a SAM phrase right here, she wants to become a podium Buster in her age group. So in other words, consistently at bigger races, regional races, things like Oregon, 70.3 or Oceanside, those types of races, Haines City And in Florida, trying to get into the top three, top five in her age group, consistently. She also wants to be competitive in her age group, and that really means top 10 in her age group at the 70.3 worlds. So ambitious as an athlete, all within the context of ensuring that she's looking after her health, and she can be a great partner mum as well. That's a really important component that we always consider when we build the journey. Okay, so what's her profile? Like? I'm going to go through and I'm going to talk in broad terms about a swim, bike and run. Swim globally, pretty poor. She emerges towards the back of the pack. It's not her favorite either. So she's a weaker swimmer. She's a very strong cyclist. It's by far and away, her favorite sport. She really likes it. And then the run, I would say, is consistent and solid. So she would like to be able to run faster and run faster off the bike, but she does have great mental and physical resilience, so she's one of those athletes that seldom puts up a bad performance. It's really consistent, but certainly there is room to grow on the run. In addition one other piece of important context, she's also mid 40s, and she's just starting to navigate some shifts in her hormonal profile related to perimenopause. So she's got some oscillations in energy levels. Her sleep's a little bit more erratic. She's got some mild body composition changes, less favorable body composition changes. And in 2023, she had, before coming to be coached by me, she'd really experienced a little bit of a performance plateau, a stagnant in speed. So she didn't really continue the progression of the first 345, years of her journey. She got to that plate plateau, and she actually came wondering, cat, is this it down 4344 years of age. Is this my ceiling? Is this now going to be a journey to keep training harder and harder and harder, just to not get slower, which, of course, whenever an athlete comes to me, the word that comes to mind is bullshit. Let's get faster. And so that was really the scope of it from a mindset standpoint as it relates to training, and I think this is really important, because it influences how we went about the strategic approach to changing and evolving her actual practical training. Sam absolutely loves to ride, and she's got a whole group of friends that she rides with. Tends to be outside twice weekly, so a couple of sessions that they get together every week. And if the weather is less favorable, if they're time limited, etc, they do video based. So in other words, they get on their trainers, and they'll get together on video, and they'll ride their sessions together. So she's got a strong, cohesive community, and it's a great source of fun. And so that's really important. It's also the thing that is her strength. So it's a love, it's a community, it's a strength. Riding great. She also loves to run, but she really likes to run when it's most convenient. So she tends to do most of her running alone, and it tends to be just straight out of the house. So it's the convenience tool. It's something that she enjoys doing. It's very simple, it's very practical, but she doesn't really lean into community on that aspect. She adheres to strength. It's not a favorite. It's very supplemental. It's supplemental in nature. So she does it a couple of times a week, but I would say it's a little bit more of an afterthought, rather than a primary focus for her and then swimming her weakness, as we talked about, it's her least favorite. She's got a little bit of fear around open water swimming. She doesn't really enjoy it. She occasionally does a local masters group that's actually a pretty good group. They they have a good amount of triathletes in there, so it's, it's a valuable group to go to. She does it occasionally, but most of us swims are solo. And in truth, in 2022 2023 before coming to me, she tended to swim once a week, maybe twice a week at most. She just really doesn't enjoy it, and so it's become an afterthought. She's also been frustrated with her lack of progression over the years, etc. So there's more. More to the context of this, we won't go into all of our habits, etc, but for the sake of this conversation, I, as a coach, am faced with a very simple question, how can I help Sam set up a set of commitments, priorities and road map to ensure that she goes through to the next level, where her performance predictability in racing, these are the outcomes that we're talking about here. In racing, she goes faster while ensuring that she's got a great platform of health. She's setting herself up to navigating the journey that she is absolutely going to go through and is unavoidable perimenopause, while also maintaining great energy, presence, performance, if you want to call it that, as a mum and as a partner. So that's really my key question. That's my challenge that I have to take on. So this is where we get to the practical side of the case study, because I think there's a couple of key moments or points that I should point out, trying to pull out what's inside of me, of how I look at things when I work with an athlete. And I think the most important thing to highlight here that is that as a coach,

Matt Dixon 16:17

I believe it's really important that I retain a broader perspective on why an athlete might follow a current training structure, and it's not just a binary component of I'm doing these ingredients to get faster, and Sam is a great example of that, because, in my experience, while Athletes are often ambitious and goal driven and certainly keen to excel week to week, training. What they're doing every single week delivers beyond fitness gains and readiness to race, it typically offers a source of fun and enjoyment, we hope, social connection and community, and I think it's important not to lose sight on this. So when I was working with Sam, I really needed to understand her as a human what's important to her, what her goals are, and set up a plan, but not in a vacuum. I need to do it within context of, hang on, there are some really important building blocks that we want to keep in place or tinker with and not mess with too much so that she can be successful. It's also, I think, a key point that, as I'm coaching anyone and Sam is our case study today, that athletes and in fact, humans, we all tend to lean into our strengths. So if we're good at something, it's pretty easy to lean into it, and we are less likely to go on a limb and expose ourself. That word expose our exposures are important, exposure ourself and get uncomfortable to develop our weaknesses. And so that takes a lot of commitment, willpower, bravery, and the capacity to remain comfortable in a place of discomfort for an extended period of time. So if you want to evolve and up level, that's an important part of this. But as a coach, I can't underestimate how big that is for any person. And so if we join the dots to Sam's case as a case study here, her framework is a wonderful example of these points. She loves riding. It's her strength, but also her weekly rides are done with friends, either remote, with video or in person. So that's really human, that's organic, that's great. And in addition, it's no surprise that she doesn't lean into a weakness. It's a swim. She doesn't like it very much. Progress has been slow, but also, swimming training hasn't been traditionally a source of community, fun, enjoyment, connectivity. She doesn't have much of a support network. She doesn't have a sense of accountability. She swims alone most of the time. And so if I looked at Sam's performance progression through a clinical lens, purely through a strict performance vision, I could highlight many areas of potential improvement. What did they include? Here they are number one, the swim a clear weakness. It hasn't been nurtured. There hasn't been a big enough commitment. So swim is a weak point. Strength too much of a supporting cast member in her overall journey. Now she's navigating perimenopause, or at least starting to and so strength is going to be an ever increasingly important component. And right now, it's kind of a supporting cast. She does it year round, but it certainly isn't done with real intention and focus number three, while her riding is strong, her craft of riding could improve, so she's got more patch. Hour, more strength, more speed than you can ever imagine, but it all stems just from her natural ability to generate high torque consistently over time. She isn't a craftsman on the bike, so she's not really yielding the best speed return for her fitness level and a natural propensity to generate power, and so there's an opportunity to grow her strength to even more of a weapon. That's a third area. Number four, she could benefit from more run speed and some specific strength based run sessions. For sure, her running is consistent strong, but it isn't fast yet. I would also say number five that she's slightly under fueled relative to her training demands, so there's a big nutritional component her race fueling would benefit from a little bit more focus. And while sleep is typically a priority for Sam, she would also benefit from greater intentional recovery, maybe some practices around sleep to try and improve the quality of that and integrating into the overall program some multi day blocks of deep freshening, because she does love this so much, and it's so habitual that she tends to not take her foot off the gas so that she can grow and accelerate. The list goes on for her. There is not a list. There's not a limit on the things that we could work on. And it sounds like a lot, yeah, but guess what? Sam is completely normal. In this regard. Almost every athlete, and I would say, including you, by the way, could map a list that is similar to the one that I just highlighted. And as a coach, remember the question, how do I elicit change evolution? How do I help her make a breakthrough? Well, if I looked at everything that was an opportunity and I tried to implement all of these changes, she would undoubtedly fail. I'd also suggest that I could very quickly extract all of the joy and enjoyment from training, and I could ensure that her confidence evaporated. And so the worst thing that I can do is to implement change in every area that needs in the long term, nurturing or development. My role as the coach is to craft an approach that enables Sam to do a couple of things. Number one, build on what is good. Let's not forget that I love to progress strengths number one, and then number two, add aspects in that would lead to the biggest catalyst of performance gains. So what are the things, when you filter through that whole list, what are the things that are going to have a material, immediate impact on her performance. And so we had a conversation around this. We set our vision of what success looks like. We know that she wants to be a performance buster. We established goals that were stepping stones that would lead her towards that vision. We don't need to go through her race schedule of 2024, that's not the interesting part of the conversation and then, but then we had a discussion. Sam and I collaboratively to get side by side into a pathway of a set of priorities and commitments that we were going to focus on. And what I want to discuss today is q1, of that program. So q1, of 2024, about a year ago, and out of that whole list, I had three main components. Okay, three main components. Two of them were training related. One of them was more lifestyle related, and that was it. These are your priorities. We're going to go status quo with everything else we're going to continue with our regular training program, but these are the three things that I'm going to have you have laser focus on a time down project that would lead into subsequent projects as we go on. Can you guess what they are? Number one was a swim project that was very clear. It was a weakness, and ultimately, for her to be up at the consistent performance level or podium level, or if she wanted to have an impact getting into the top 10 at the 70.3 World Championships, she couldn't carry on with a swim, that was such an afterthought. And so that was, for me, a non negotiable. That was number one, number two. And you were thinking it was going to be strength, but it wasn't. Number two was what we called a bike booster project, actually develop her strength, take what was in her wheelhouse that she loved, and drive it. Make it a real weapon. And number three is what we call food for fuel, a project where we evolved her daily eating habits to bolster her platform of health, her resources, her physical resilience, so that she could optimize her training efforts. When I looked at her daily habits, not through any emotional. Opponents, but I felt like she was under fueling, and I felt like that was a huge catalyst to get broader performance gains. So three things, take on something very uncomfortable, a swim project, build a strength, and then focus on a lifestyle habit. And it really anchored around food. Is fuel that was your daily eating, and then post workout fueling. Okay. Now this is an important part. This project could easily have become really sterile if I only viewed the approach through the lens of workouts, swim, bike, run. So in other words, I could say we're doing a swim project. Here we go. Here is your highly specific program. You're going to swim five days a week, and you're going to have high specificity, we're going to do technical development, we're going to do some open water specific sessions, and it is going to be full of it, and you need to go and do it every single day, five days a week. Fantastic. And Sam would hate it, because all we're doing there is amplifying solo time in a modality that she doesn't really enjoy. And so instead, we had a little bit of out of the box thinking, and Sam went and recruited a buddy, a friend, who could commit to swimming with her. Now this was a time bound commitment. I said, we're going to do a three month swim project where between the three disciplines and strength in the middle of their swim, bike and run, we're going to over emphasize and increase the total amount of swimming. So what I asked Sam to commit to, not necessarily enjoy to begin, but commit to, was with a buddy do one or two sessions a week that were highly specific to her needs. So these were sessions that I wrote for her that were highly specific. I then also, in support of that, got both of them to commit to amplifying or ramping up their regular swimming with the Master's team. What I was doing as a coach there is I was giving away some of the specificity. I wasn't always overly keen of the sessions that were being prescribed, but I wanted Sam to get into a group. And the reason for that is because that was the route that I believe that she could actually get a system of support accountability. And let me tell you, something swimming is so much easier to do it when you're a part of a team, when you're in Nepal and you're sharing and getting uncomfortable with a group of people,

Matt Dixon 27:26

and you're looking to go and conquer a session, a set of 20 fives, a set of one hundreds, a set of four hundreds, whatever it is. And so I was willing to let go with some of the specificity if 234, sessions a week were with a master's group, where it could be fun, she could show up at a regular Skype time. So we always had her do pretty much the same sessions every week. We could start to build relationships with familiar faces, and we would progress from there. The one final component I did from a performance lens is because it was time bound 12 weeks, we added performance indicators, similar in a business sense, as KPIs in many ways. So had performance indicators a goal that we set up for her based on a couple of benchmark sessions. And so we did this by having her focus on, how fast can you sum 100 standalone so a little bit of top end speed. And then how fast can you swim? We did two things, 1000 yards, and then 20 times, 100 with 15 seconds rest, what was your average pace? So where those were anchored around, sort of benchmark sessions, and they weren't pass fail, but they at least gave us a little bit of a measuring stick as we went through that she could see progression. And it was important for me as a coach to see the top end speed, the 100 as fast as you can go, as well as the more holding, resilience and form and speed over the course of 1015, 2025, 30 minutes of duration. So we start to get a little bit more race specific there. So that's how we did it, and then we plan to do at the destination. As we went into April, we said we're going to come back to a more balanced approach of swim, bike and run a regular triathlon lens. So what was the impact of this? This little swim projects? Well, has some speed improved, and that's great. Two main areas that I look for, sustained pace, over 100 sustained pace, over about 15 to 20 to 25, to 30 minutes. That was really good, and that became a really important fuel for her. But the second thing that started to emerge is something that I think in the long term, was even more important. She started to build a positive relationship with swimming. She started to enjoy it. If she was doing this all alone, there's no way she would have done she would have been started to enjoy it, but she had a buddy, and she had the community, so she started to build a network, very similar to her riding friends, not to replace her riding friends, because we'll get to that in a second, but to be something that's additive. And so interestingly, while we went back. A quote, more balanced approach. It was very easy for me as a coach and her as an athlete, that when we went into q2 she ended up swimming consistently more over the year, rather than one or two, I would say pretty low level. Swims in 2023, she was swimming 345, days a week. She was loving it. She was asking to include the sessions and the sessions she really loved were the master sessions. It was great. So we started to go to just one really specific swim session a week. It was great. In other words, this practice, which is a big part of swim, bike, run, as fast as you can go, the swimming portion, it became a habit. And I think a big catalyst for that is because she had such a network of support and accountability, let alone fun doing it with others. So that was our swim project that we took on. Now the bike focus, she's already strong. So why would I get her to take on something like this? Because I wanted to build her confidence, and I saw the opportunity to make her strong stronger. When we work with leadership teams, we talk quite a lot about going from good to great to world class. Well, she was good. I wanted her to go to great. And so this was something that was emotionally really easy for her. The swim project out of your comfort zone, very challenging. It forced real growth. She didn't enjoy it until she enjoyed it, until she started to really gain traction the bike. Come on, it's almost like a gift. You're good. I'm going to make it great. Let's go and do it. But what did she need to do to do that? Well, twice a week, we infuse some high specificity on her video based coaching. So that was with me coaching her live on the Purple Patch platform, and that includes two way video that also includes highly specific sessions of Terrain Management, so learning how to get best speed return relative to whatever fitness you had. And this was really important for Sam, because she had to join the dots and learners. She had all the power and resilience in the world, but I knew as a coach that I could get more speed out of her with a smarter approach. I also wanted to dial in a broader perspective of what it meant to be great on the bike, not just output, output, output, but chasing speed, and that became really important. I also wanted to go along this journey really ensure that she didn't feel like she had her social connection and her community pulled from her. So those group rides really important. They became fundamental key session still, and it's almost like a reward for the athlete in many ways. Now, I mixed it up a little bit. I sometimes added some specific terrain play, also to include some specific intervals in the group which the rest of the group would often hop into. We even started to embrace some gravel riding as well, to really mix it up and help with her handling the key for me as a coach, if you understand how I'm thinking about this, is that I wasn't stealing something that she loved and was a confidence builder. I wasn't ripping her out of the community in the social aspect. All I was doing was infusing a little more specificity into the program sessions to get a bigger performance yield. And so the impact of this is very simple. We're always told, Go and work on your weaknesses, go and shore them up and prove them, bring them up to the level of the strengths. And we we were doing that with the swim, of course. But as a coach, I've got to tell you, I believe leverage your strengths, turn those into weapons, and I saw the opportunity to get a huge performance yield, almost cheating the code. And the cheat was just Terrain Management, how to actually handle her machine better, with a touch of specificity, so that she can go faster. And the impact of that is Sam almost re fell in love with cycling. She started to get greater pride and passion. She wasn't just strong. She wasn't an artist, as she said, and her fitness, her power, her strength, it was already good. So I didn't need to chase that too much. What I chased was speed return, and I tell you what, she got faster, Little Miss, Speedy, as I call her. So finally, then a baseline habit. I think that this third project that we went on wouldn't have been productive without her having the fuel that word is important to drive these results. Her third project was all around refining her daily eating habits. Now Sam decided to get some additional professional help. A lot of athletes that I work with do take this on, and so she worked with Scott and the team at fueling they're a partner of ours. They are trusted. They're fantastic. They get the context. They make things very, very simple and actionable. Four and in working with Scott, what I wanted Sam to get to was a baseline set of habits to drive both her performance readiness on a day to day, so that she could maximize her efforts and the adaptations that she got from training, but also build a great platform of health and energy across her day. And a lot of that was managing the craziness of the hormones. And so the implementation here was actually pretty drastic, but really exciting as well. There was a major increase in daily caloric calories, something that's always an emotional barrier for any athlete, male or female, to get, athlete to get over but take more calories in on a day to day basis. Scott had Sam do an added emphasis around daily protein, really important a building block for an endurance athlete, a ton of fiber. She already had quite a lot of fruits and vegetables. This was intention behind it. And then finally, a big emphasis on fueling in and around sessions, particularly following sessions, and really emphasizing carbohydrates as well as associated protein there. And there's this very simple rule after every single exercise session that you do, training session that you do, you refuel immediately following every every workout. The impact of this, I cannot overstate it. It was huge. And what it listed was really for Sam, a sense of control. She had better energy. She showed up better predictably. So we weren't looking for speed returns, race performance in q1 here it's how do you show up, how do you feel? And you know what happened for me as a coach, we had greater training consistency. We had better performance predictability. So in the key sessions, she could show up for them and be present and bring her best. She recovered quicker. She had stabilized energy in the day, and it started to have a knock on effect of improved improved sleep quality. There's the flywheel effect, the virtuous circle of a broader life impact as well as training performance. Now this is an important side note here,

Matt Dixon 37:11

because as a coach, it's so hard to see an opportunity and not add things in so let's go back to our three projects, swim, weakness, bike, leverage of strength, lifestyle, habit. Think about baseline eating. If you go back to our list, you can imagine the internal battle that I had to say. You know what? I'm just going to allow her strength training to remain kind of supportive. It's really challenging. There's a woman mid 40s that's doing strength, but really could amplify it's also tough. As a coach to say there's the running that can improve. Let's not focus on that right now, incredibly difficult. But this is why this arc of performance is a journey. The swim took up a large emotional commitment. She was way out of bounds of her comfort level. She stepped into discomfort. And as a coach, if I ask someone to add even more greater commitments. I also, while taking on this huge project, emotionally challenging, not really wanting to do it, fearful that she's going to fail in this swim program over the course of 12 weeks at the same time, if I said, By the way, you need to recommit and really amplify strength. And we want to do these run sessions. It's too much. We only have so much willpower. We only have so much energy that we can give and so I had to be savage in prioritization. And so strength training, while important, run programming, a specific run project, really big upside. It had to wait. It had to wait and start to emerge through the year and then become a really big 2025 project. This is where we're at right now. And so what we went through, if you go back to last week and we think about that coaching model we went through, we went through a vigorous prioritization exercise. And as an outcome of this, we had clarity, three projects, swim, that's the weakness, strength that's going to bypass for a year. We're just going to keep it supplemental. The second project is bike, and the third is around nutrition and fueling. And so what we had through this prioritization exercise was commitment. Sam had clear, actionable and not overwhelming set of commitments, she had clarity on what she would focus on, and perhaps most importantly, as importantly, at least, what she wasn't going to be putting added energy into really important stuff. So this will reduce such as some of the clutter, because. Complexity, and she had a clear action plan. Now, over those course of those 12 weeks, day by day, week by week, I then held Sam to account. That's the coaching part, and I will need to ensure that she didn't let the other stuff go. So I really made sure she was consistent with strength. I made sure that she continued with her running consistency and all of the other stuff that was just her baseline practices and a part of a normal training program, but where we had a lot of our focus and our energy and our conversations and discussions and managing was around these projects. So this is really important. Now, the only way this works is if you have the planning up front and you get to clarity, you get to alignment. In my case, it was a one to one coach relationship. So it was alignment between myself, the coach and Sam the athlete. I also, as a coach, had to ensure that I communicated the projects and that Sam understood them. Just because I talk about it doesn't mean it's understood. So that alignment is good. I then also need to ensure that there's buying, that Sam is buying into the approach, and then finally, committed. We are going to stay the course 12 weeks and commit, no matter what the waivers of motivation are. So I said to Sam at the start of this, I know that you don't really enjoy swimming, and I know that there are going to be days that you're going to wake up and not want to go and swim. Your motivation is going to go up and down. So I don't care about your motivation, Sam, what I care about is your commitment. Can you commit to doing this for 12 weeks? We filtered the distractions, and what came out of it is she committed, and then that was the standard. We were going to get a baseline of four swim sessions a week, aiming for six. That was it was a big project, and this is where the importance of the coaching model that we discussed in last week's show comes into effect. If you missed that episode last week, I really encourage you to go back and listen to it, because it's very important for the grounding in that last week show, we talked about vision, going up front. What does success look like? What is your purpose? What are your goals, and then alignment to get there. And then we talked about a lot of what we're talking about today, which is the pathway, defining priorities and committing to it. That's what I just did with Sam. That's the case study. So you want to know, how did 2024 go for Sam? Well, at a high level, she fell in love with swimming. That was good for me as a coach. I love that her consistency was better across the year, and I will contribute that wholly to her shift in fueling and nutrition. Absolutely amazing training, consistently, performance level, everything just rose. Greater control, greater energy, everything. So that was huge. Her health biometrics. We like to do regular blood work with Sam health biometrics. Absolutely fantastic. Really good daily energy. Self reported improved. And she also reported just having a lot of fun. So these were projects that were different, that forced her to get out of her comfort zone. She really enjoyed it, and that was great.

Matt Dixon 43:13

Is that enough? No results? Yeah, it did. It was a breakout year. There's a reason that I chose her for a case study. But guess what? Her swimming did improve a lot. Her bike was stronger than ever. But here's the interesting thing, her run got faster. That was the breakthrough point. Hang on, didn't we de prioritize that? No, we didn't de prioritize it. We just didn't emphasize it as a project. But her run did get faster, and this is common. Sam's journey followed the pattern that I've seen throughout my coaching career. In fact, two patterns. Number one, that when you develop a foundation of really good health, broader performance improves, both day to day training and week to week, layering on of training consistency. And so when we had Sam build nutrition practices, she established the resources to train better, recover faster, and therefore her training was more effective. So I think that's a really important component. If you want to go to the next level, you better have a foundation of health. And that's what we did with the nutritional component. And then secondly, the second pattern that we've seen throughout the year, and this is so hard for folks to wrap their head around, quite commonly, but whenever an athlete successfully commits to a full swim project, absolutely dives in, it tends to have a knock on impact across all of their sport this has occurred with 100% of the athletes that I've coached, whenever they have taken on a swim project, they've become a better athlete, not just a better swimmer, a better athlete. It always happened, and once again, it happened in Sam's and so her triathlons. They remain consistent. They. Just got faster. She's developed to being right on the edge of being a podium Buster, as she likes to call it. She was top 20 at the 70.3 worlds. And so you know what that is. It's not quite there yet. It's improvement, it's progression. It's opening up her recipe and her understanding, developing agency on the programming. But it's not quite there yet. We haven't reached that promised land, that goal, and that's okay, because in 2025 it's the next chapter of the journey. We don't go back to square one. We roll onto it. We build on what was good. So we repeat the process for 2025 but through a new lens, because we're going to amplify focus on strength this year. That's our project. That's for her performance in sport, but also her health, particularly for that journey in perimenopause. We're going to repeat the swim project, but that swim project doesn't have the same Gremlin, like fear based discomfort. It's really normal. It's what she wants to do. It's not a beast that she has to tame anymore, because she's done it, she's conquered it, and it's now a habit. She loves it. So we're just going to dial that up, because it had such great positive impact before. And then we're going to keep the rest of the program pretty similar. I'm going to ask her to continue to try and refine and improve the artistry of the bike, and we're going to keep a holding pattern on the run. It's still there. There's still that opportunity, and it pains me. We're going to hold it, we're going to build it around strength. So that's a case study, and that's a really big case study to kick off the show. In fact, it's taken up the lion's share of the show, but hopefully it's one that you find helpful. What we want to do now is come up a level, and we want to apply this contextually and directly to you. Now I should say I do want to just give an offer of thanks to the fuel in team, because we talked about three projects, and really Scott and the team at fueling were the ones that drove Sam's evolution in her approach to nutrition, absolutely and so as a coach, I can suggest it, I can support it, I can collaborate on it, but it's their expertise on that. It was fantastic. If you do want to learn more about fueling, I should point out fueling.com/purple patch is where to go. Okay, it's highly accessible, it's affordable, it's high impact. And if you want to know what program Sam was on, she was on the co pilot program, a little bit more autonomous, similar to our tri squad, but with unlimited support and access to the team at fuel in so really, really powerful program and a pretty low price point relative to the expertise that you're getting. So I do want to apply that, but let's remember our mission, why we're doing this educational case study, winning at triathlon 2025 so what can you do now to set up a breakthrough? What I can't do is a whole host of 1000s of individual recipes and approaches, but what I can offer you is a framework. Okay, so before we get actionable, I want us to ground ourselves again. It's important, hopefully what you heard, one of the stories that emerged here was the concept of challenge you have, I'm sure, as a time starved, ambitious athlete, a suite a set of competing demands. You've got goals and ambition in your sport. You want to be healthy, I'm sure, and in broader life, you've got a host of commitments, both in life and work, and we want you to thrive there. It's great for lasting success. You're going to have to adopt an optimization mindset. You're not a professional athlete. At least you're likely not. We do have pros that listen to this, but you're not a professional athlete. You are driving to high performance, and that's good high performance within the context of your life. And so the question is, for you is, how can you create sustainable high performance and greater capacity while establishing control of all areas of your life. Alrighty, what I don't want you to do is just dump a training program on top of life. We need to integrate and so we need to think about, how do we create lasting success for you cement this concept in your mind. We are not talking about when I say optimization mindset. I'm not talking about less is more. I hate that phrase. I'm not talking about balance. I hate that phrase. Make no mistake when I'm talking new to you today, and I'm talking about winning in triathlon. This is about high performance. This is about results and outcomes for you, whatever that means for you. But we're also going to leverage training and supporting habits to create great triathlon outcomes and improve quality of life, greater energy, etc. And so if you're going to. To get to this utopian state in 2025 there is no shortcut. You need to commit. You need to be willing to get uncomfortable. You need to raise standards for yourself and expectations that you have of yourself, and you have to step out to a new frontier, and whenever you step out to a new frontier, it's unstable, it's not comfortable, but you better be willing to go there. Don't, don't expect your progression to be linear. It's not going to come easy. But guess what? Nothing in life of value does when we reflect back to Sam, she didn't go to her next level by accident. It required commitment, hard labor, discomfort, and so one of the first things as we set up our path, winning in triathlon in 2025 take on a new challenge. Take on a new challenge. Get out of your comfort zone. Don't rinse and repeat, because you've rinse and repeat you plateau. We don't want that. We want to go to the next level. So for Sam, the big beast last year was the swim project, but also a couple of side projects, one that was a fresh lens on something that she already really loved and was good at the bike. And another component was putting real intention behind her nutrition that bike. One's really interesting, because that really showcases that Sam has a growth mindset, despite being good looking to get better. That's really what a growth mindset is in many ways so, but her discomfort, kicking, screaming, internal battles, the swim project. So what does this look like for you? Well, the first thing is, it's very, very important if you're going to be successful over the course of the year to start at your start line where you're at now. And I always like folks athletes to reflect first. So the first part of the project is reflect on last year and assess yourself objectively in your current state. It's so important. And from that grounding point, step out of your comfort zone,

Matt Dixon 52:19

get out there, and when you get out into that place that you're uncomfortable, stay there. Don't just poke your nose into that place of discomfort, stay there. What's the best analogy I can give you under a phrase I always like to talk about, simmering discomfort, simmering discomfort. Think about that. Okay, so what does that look like? Well, there's a couple of components that are really important. First, start at your start line. When you kick off this process, you should reflect on the last year and assess yourself objectively, where you at right now, and from that place, really having a keen understanding of what you've done well, where you can grow, etc. I want you to step out into a new frontier. Get out of your comfort zone. Take a step forward. But here's the important thing, don't just poke your nose out there. Step out and stay out. A phrase I always like to use is simmering discomfort. What do I mean by that? Imagine being in a big pot of boiling water, if we just turn the heat on and let it boil over

Matt Dixon 53:31

fatigue in tunes that's under performance at the same time, if we don't turn the heat on at all, you just regress. You're just sitting there meat. What we want to get to is a place where you are highly uncomfortable. The water is simmering, but you're able to stay there because it's in that place of discomfort that growth occurs, that results start to emerge. That's the place simmering right on the edge, that is the growth place. And this is where so many people fail in many ways. Now, either whack the heat up and try and accelerate too fast or pile on too much, too soon becomes overwhelming. Go back to Sam's story of how we managed to avoid that or are not willing to get to a place out of familiarity or routine into that place of discomfort where you're going to see appreciable change. So folks, sometimes you just got to peek over the edge a little. The only way for you to go up to the next level is to embrace challenges. And it's okay. It's normal to get out of your comfort zone, to push your Frontier. And this is it? This is it. In part one of the series, we lay the groundwork of your mindset. So let's get tactical. All right, as we get tactical here, if you're a regular listener of the show, you've heard me many times talk about the importance of team, and I've. Told you stories of how we applied a team approach to the coaching of the professional athletes, despite every single one of them earning their craft in an individual sport at different stages development, quite often being competitors with each other. We unified around a team concept, and I want you to think about that as it aligns to words that I just use, challenge, commitment, discomfort, even more the next level, simmering, discomfort. Almost every scenario in life that conjures up these words is better tackled, not alone. In other words, in a team setting where you have mechanisms of accountability support growth together, and it's no different in triathlon. So team, you do it better with others. Okay, that's just an important byproduct I want you to store that we're going to talk about team later in the series. But when you think about getting out of your comfort zone, you go back to Sam's case study. Remember I said in the swim project where she was most uncomfortable, she bud up. She had a friend do it. She also made sure that she ramped up her frequency with Master swing. That's because I knew she was going to be uncomfortable. I knew it was a big challenge. I knew it required great commitment, and it's better. It's easier, it's more simple ultimately, if you do it as a team. So that's the driver already. So how do you get going? Here it is, a general rule for most athletes. What I would do for the first quarter a project, a time bound project, is I would focus on three main things. The first is, what is your weakness that you're really going to try and address over the course of the coming months and through this season, and that's going to be probably your growth project. The thing that you really are stepping out of the bounds of comfort, where you're breaking routine. It's very additive in nature. You need to take action to evolve it, and it's not going to be comfortable. So that's the first thing that you want to filter on. What am I going to really address? The second component then is, what's the strength that I have, something I'm actually really pretty good at, that I'm confident in, that I enjoy, that I can bolster and improve. That's a really healthy thing to do something that's almost like a reward. I'm going to actually go from good to great here, from great to world class I'm going to move up. You don't actually have to be world class, by the way. It's a continuum. You get it and then focus on at least one baseline habit or some associated performance factor that you either neglect or is maybe a little bit of an area of development, or is something that you could really do with polishing. It might be like, in Sam's case, daily eating. It might be your sleep. It might be integrating some sensible downtime and stepping away from the sport and being not so obsessive. It might be working on your overall mindset and your confidence in yourself. Maybe you often neglect your prehab, some of the mobility and stretching and self care type protocols, it can be very different things. But outside of the swim, bike, run, strength, what else is there that you think you could really shine a light on try and integrate and commit to that will yield better baseline performance? So for today's show, I want you to define those things. That's your homework. What are you going to focus on and make it pretty succinct for the next 12 to 16 weeks? So as we record this in early January through the end of March, maybe through the end of April, okay, if you're going to step out into the frontier and grow, you're going to need to do this. And let remind you draw on the lesson some Sam Number one, don't tank on too much. All right. With Sam, I desperately wanted to fix about 10 things, and I focused it down to one dominant mission, the swim, I then had two very accessible additions that were almost like rewards. The bike already a strength, very easy for her to wrap her head around. Nutrition. It was habit driven. It wasn't performance related, so far as faster, stronger, fitter, etc. Second component, your targets and your focus need to be clear, simple and understandable. In other words, your crazy aunt that lives 300 miles away should understand what you're looking to focus on. You don't have to tell her, it's okay, but clear, simple and understandable. Number three, they need to fit into your life, including your social habits, very important. Number four, once you've committed, you better get highly organized. We've talked a lot about the Sunday special. I haven't seen anyone be able to successfully take on a big habit and get out of their comfort zone without being highly organized. Prioritize planning, commitment and. Understanding motivation is going to come in waves. Commitment is constant, and then constant reflections to keep you on track. And I promise you that if you can focus on these three things, a weakness, a strength and a supportive habit, and keep everything else pretty similar, don't try and change too much if you crack this, and then your triathlon journey is going to be a tool that not only sees you get faster, but you're going to become more effective, you're going to build confidence that you're going to increase your capacity, and you're going to have a sense of great control over life. I can't say it too much, and so my question for you this week is, what are your three things? I'll tell you what mine are. All right, I'm going to share, because a big part of goal setting and commitments is you need to share for accountability. So what I am not doing is taking on a swim project. Why? Because I have an extensive background in swimming. I'm a strong swimmer, so I can't be like Sam and say I'll do that because there's no growth there. I'm just would be really desperately hanging on to a loot youth that is long ago evaporated, and so I'm not taking on a swim project. My dominant mission this year is strength. And guess what? I'm already doing it. I'm three weeks in. Boom. How am I doing it? Once a week? I'm actually going with a trainer. I'm going to do it with Kelli once a week, personal training. Boom. I'm going to do a strength class at the center, the Performance Center here in San Francisco. Once a week. There's two sessions. I'm going to do one session alone. So those are really important. Boom. Kelli and I, we're going to tackle something way out of my I think, enjoyment. And number two, at least right now. Number two, my comfort zone, we're going to aim for a Spring High Rocks event. I'm sure you've heard about those 1k of running into some form of functional strength. I can't even wrap my head around it, to be honest. But I'm sharing this publicly for my own accountability here. But it's challenge driven, and I am peeking over the edge. I promise you, for some of you listening, you're like, that sounds fun. I can do it, or I'd never want to do that. But frankly, it doesn't matter. For me, it is highly uncomfortable. I've got big, long arms. I'm not very strong relative to my frame, and I need to go on a journey to get ready to do this. And I'm strangely excited for it. My supporting, well, I'm going to put a little intention behind my running. Because I'm high frequency. I run my dog every day. I love to go out on the trails and get lost, and that's where I'm kind of king at that. I run almost every day, but I don't put too much intentionality behind it. So once a week, I'm going to infuse commit to once weekly intervals, high intensity, I know that will up level my running. I know that will be additive to the higher rock. So that's pretty simple and accessible for me. All I need to do is really commit to one thing a week. I can do that. And then the third thing that's supporting habit is I'm going to remove drinking of any alcohol during the week, which is really pretty accessible to me. I've got pretty good standards of nutrition. I do very well on sleep, etc, and I tend to not drink alcohol during the week. I'm English. I do love my beer, but I've been less successful in that in November, December, naturally happens, travel, holidays, etc. So it's something that I just need to shine the light on. So for me, in the context, I'm not trying to be an elite athlete, at least anymore. That strength base is a real project for me, and that's what I'm looking to do. So I ask you, what are yours to have a think about it, write them down, share them. That's a real great source of accountability and agency. And what we're going to do in part two next week is dig in. All right. Thanks so much. It was good fun. See you next time, 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

Matt Dixon 1:04:30

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. Bye.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

winning at triathlon, coaching model, individual coaching, tri squad, paid consultation, performance evolution, training approach, daily practices, performance habits, swim project, bike booster, nutrition focus, strength training, accountability support, growth mindset

Carrie BarrettJanuary 8, 2025