Thanks to My Partners

With Thanksgiving around the corner, I wanted to take a few minutes to mention all of those that help support my training and racing. Competing at the level that I aspire to be at requires a full tool-kit of resources, and I'm grateful to have some great individuals and organizations in my corner. With no further ado:

Coach Wesley Johnson: I had the wonderful opportunity to meet and train under Wes [in-person] this past summer when I was in Salt Lake City. It didn't take long for me to realize that this was the guy that could best take me to elite status. It's very rare to find a coach that has both great interpersonal skills, as well as technical expertise. Generally you can find one of the other, but Wes exemplifies both; he has the knowledge base to design a technically sound plan, and shows an uncanny level of caring that manifests every time we tweak and adapt that plan, which happens quite often. Thanks Coach Wes! Big things ahead in 2012!!

Massage Therapist Julia Nelson: Recovery is a critical element of my training, and Julia's touch goes a long way to keep my healthy and in balance. As a former varsity rower, Julia has a vast understanding of the athlete's body, and this is reflected in her massage work. I am almost 100% convinced that my weekly sessions with Julia are a big reason why I have been able to train so consistently over the last year. If you are an athlete in the Ann Arbor area, I would highly recommend scheduling some time with Julia, as she will do wonders to keep you injury free and ready to work hard. She can be reached at: Julianeslon67@gmail.com.

Bike Mechanic Matt Meyer: Whether I need a full tune-up, some fine tuning on parts, an opinion on my fit, or an innovative product order, Matt is my go-to guy. Dude knows everything about bikes and bike racing, and this shows itself in his wrench expertise as well as product sourcing. I would highly recommend reaching out to Matt for service and/or products. You can get Matt at: Matt@rocknroadcycle.com

Swim Coach Christi Vedejs: I've been fortunate to have recently started working with Christi. Christi has competed at the highest levels of swimming, and has so much to offer. She makes herself available always, and in just a little while, we have already improved my technique in the water immensely. Looking forward to a lot more where that came from! If you need a little extra attention to your pull or catch, Christi may be your best bet.

Extreme Endurance: The only supplement that I take regularly, this all-natural lactic acid buffer does wonders for me. As an amateur athlete, I have to balance my training with graduate school, work, and so many other "general life" obligations. To those ends, it has become critical to take a quality over quantity approach to training. Extreme Endurance makes a noticeable difference in my ability to recover from hard workouts, making it much easier to ensure I get a critical intensity in my training cycles, without needing massive training volumes all the time. A great recovery aide, for more information check out Extreme Endurance.

Center for Yoga: "Strength without flexibility is rigidity, but flexibility without strength is instability." I heard these words from a very skilled teacher at CFY, and the rest is history. I aim to practice at CFY twice a week. Both the physical and psychological benefits of yoga are huge for triathletes. Center for Yoga has helped me get my body and my mind in a position where they are both strong, but also always ready to adapt to the situation. Talk about direct relevance to triathlon. Stop Center for Yoga where you first class is free, and see for yourself.

***An additional thanks to my friends and family that are supportive of my goals in the sport. And of course, my girlfriend Caitlin, whose support means more to me than anything. Love you babe!

Reflecting on Mentorship in Triathlon

As featured in Xtri.com.

Triathlon has the potential to be a very individual, and at times, self-serving sport. Proper training protocols are almost always built around a particular athlete's current capacities and future goals. Additionally, given the significant amount of time that it takes to train, workouts tend to be executed when they fit in; one athlete's 4AM ride may be another's 9PM ride. Although it is certainly possible to find group training opportunities, my own experience has shown me that they are hard to come by and even harder to maintain in any consistent fashion. Generally speaking, we are a group of athletes with very personal goals and are often forced to take highly individualized routes toward achieving them…which is why it strikes me that when you ask any triathlete about his/her favorite aspects of the sport, most include the strong sense of community in their response.

And this is no illusion. While the reasons are numerous and could easily be the topic of an entire article, it seems that a shared sense of challenge, struggle, and accomplishment work to create a strong bond amongst triathletes. Maybe more than any other component of this community, I hugely appreciate the value of mentorship, and with Thanksgiving around the corner, I found it fitting to reflect on just how appreciative I am to have a mentor in this sport.
In my mind, a mentor is someone who can draw upon their own experiences to teach, counsel, and guide around a particular topic, while being a strong listener at the same time. They are open and honest, and in the context of triathlon, go much further than simply recounting their past glory days…although some of that is definitely allowed too! The mentor/mentee relationship constantly evolves, and ideally, becomes stronger over time. In a sport that is so complex both physically and emotionally, I am fortunate to have found someone that is starting to fill this role.

I met Marty on an 8-hour bus ride across Spain en route to the Duathlon World Championships. To be totally honest, at first, I thought to myself, "Great, this old-timer is going to sit here and talk my ear off about how epic he was for an entire week." Turns out Marty is pretty damn epic, and that I couldn't have been more wrong about his intentions. Marty has had a long and successful career as a dominant age-grouper; with five trips to Kona, National Championships, and most recently, a World Championship in the 50-55 age-group [in Duathlon] to his name. Marty is also a loving husband and father, and a successful professional in something other than triathlon. I quickly realized that if I could paint my future progression in the sport, it would look a lot like Marty's past.

Over the course of our time together, Marty spent more time listening and reacting to my goals than recounting his past…even though the latter was far more exciting 99% of the time. He could always go back to his vast inventory of experiences and pull forward the one that aligned most to what I was wondering about at the time; be it training, racing, or balancing our obsession with a corporate job. He never held himself up on a pedestal, and always focused his story-telling around what I could learn from it to forward my career as an athlete.
Since parting ways at the end of the World Championships, we have stayed in contact (a big thanks to modern technology and yes, I admit, social networking) and I have no doubt that we will continue to for years to come. Whenever something comes up that is outside the athlete/coach relationship, odds are, Marty will be my go-to. I realize how lucky I am to have such a good mentor/mentee fit with Marty. Form a very pragmatic standpoint, I met someone that has achieved goals similar to those I am aiming for (e.g., age-group dominance, balance with a family and job, staying competitive into the second half of life), and is at a time of his own career where he is prioritizing "giving back" to the triathlon community…whereas most of my focus is still on taking from it, but in the most gracious way I can.

With the off-season reflection period in full swing, ask yourself if you could be a mentor to someone or if you could benefit from having one…and remember…the two aren't mutually exclusive. It is these types of relationships that take our often individual and self-serving sport and turn it into something much more.

Triathlon in a Job Interview, and an Interesting Turn to Divorce Rates in Triathlon

As Featured on Xtri.

In a recent job interview with top executives of a multi-billion dollar organization, my competition in endurance sports became the topic of discussion. Given that I am in my final year of a graduate degree, I have been interviewing quite often, and am no longer surprised when this happens...because it almost always does. The conversation generally follows a common trajectory; awe ("wow, it is so amazing that you do this"), to genuine interest ("so, tell me more about the Duathlon World Championships"), to the relevance of multisport in professional settings (e.g., goal-setting, data tracking, measurement, and strategic planning). But this particular interview took a turn for the interesting when I was asked, "There is all kinds of literature out there about high divorce rates with triathletes, what do you think about that?"

Not gonna lie, I was thrown slightly off-guard, but after I got over my initial reaction [whoa, pretty ballsy question], I told him exactly what I thought:

• Yes, it's disturbing that triathletes get divorced, and well the subject is highly publicized, nowhere have I ever seen that the number is truly greater that then [50%] of all marriages that unfortunately end in divorce.

• Much like participation in any other individual passion, in the context of a relationship, communication, planning, and probably more than anything, trade-offs are key. I went on to tell the panel of interviewers that I almost never attend University of Michigan football games (I am a grad Student at U of M, where football is as big as anything). They all looked at me like I was from another planet. I explained that I generally need to get in a weekly long workout, and if I were to spend 4 hours at the football game and 4 hours in the saddle, I probably wouldn't have much time for anything else; be it work or a relationship; basically, you can't have your cake and eat it too. If I am going to train for half the day, I realize that I may not be able to watch football with the guys for the other half.

• I then brought up golf, and my (although admittedly vague) familiarity is that many corporate executives may play a few rounds per week. 6 hours a round x 2.5 rounds a week and there you have a decently high volume [15 hours] training week. This insight seemed to really strike a chord with the group.

• Finally, I helped them realize that the divorce rate they read about is only one side of the coin. In my relationship, the power of endurance sport has been almost all positive. Even though she is not a triathlete (or duathlete for that matter), as a result of partaking in this culture, my girlfriend and I are extremely active, eat healthy, and are totally in touch with our bodies. Although we may not spend too many late nights at the bar, we have a great social life, are embedded in a wonderful community of other people that value a similar lifestyle, and we actually think that spending a Friday night eating a box of Cookie Crisp Cereal over a rental movie is pretty incredible...so we can wake up feeling good for our long workouts the next morning (although after an entire box, feeling OK may be more appropriate).

While I realize that as a graduate student without kids, my current situation may be a bit easier, I find it hard to believe that the same types of principles don't and won't apply throughout the rest of my life too. For me, so long as multisport fits in with the greater context of my life, and doesn't become my life, I'm not all that worried.

So, when triathlon inevitably surfaces in your next interview (or any professional conversation for that matter), odds are you'll get to speak to the fact that your swim/bike/run performance evaluation system is actually pretty similar to that of IBM's business tracking. But, in the event that things get interesting, it's good to think through both sides of the coin...and more importantly, to make sure that you are comfortable with your own answer for reasons far more important than getting the job.

4 Pillars of Holistic Training: Nutrition

First off - sorry for the hiatus. When you (and I) look back to my last post, you may be upset (and I, somewhat embarrassed) that it has been 6 weeks. No need to waste more time with a long explanation, I've just been very busy with a number of things. Good news for everyone is that you can simply look back to the last 2 posts to refresh yourself of where we are at in our discussion of the 4 pillars of performance (1. sport-specific training, 2. functional strength, 3.nutrition, and 4.recovery). Today, we focus on nutrition. Much like with the prior posts, this should simply serve as a primer on a very complex topic, and I encourage you to take what you read below, and continue to educate yourself. Hopefully, if nothing more, the following helps you target your search for future information. OK, onto the good stuff.

Nutrition is of huge importance. You are what you eat, and you train and race what you are. The decisions that we make about what to eat and, as you'll read below, when to eat it, are pivotal to our immediate performance (e.g., hitting targets in a workout or race), long-term performance (e.g., getting to an ideal body weight and composition, recovering from and adapting to hard training), and overall general health (e.g., feeling good everyday, and setting ourselves up for long and high-quality lives). With so much going on here, I am going to make an initial cut to make this all a little bit easier to digest (no pun intended) by breaking this discussion of nutrition for athletes down into 2 parts:

1) Fueling: What we eat right before, during, and right after a workout

2) Nutrition: What we eat the rest of the day

1) Fueling

First I will introduce the concept of a "workout window," which is the period of time encompassing the 30 minutes before a workout, the total time of the workout, and the 30 minutes after a workout. The baseline understanding everyone needs is this: muscles run off of carbohydrates, and can store enough energy to get through between 70 and 90 minutes (depending on the individual) of training. So, if you have a longer workout, you have to refuel yourself as the training session goes on. If you are under that 90-70 minute mark, you may not need to fuel during your workout, but should still focus on the "right before" and "right after" portions of this post. Even if your workout is short and you don't need to take in calories, you should be drinking water for hydration during any workout, about 24-32oz/hour (if you want a more exact number, Google "sweat rates for athletes" and perform a sweat test.

- 30 minutes before a workout: 2 things are most important about this. The first is that whatever you eat, your gut needs to be able to tolerate it easily and digest it fast. No one wants to enter a workout feeling bloated, with a stomach ache, or nervous about having to poop. The second thing is this meal should be dominated by simple carbs. Like I said above, your body runs off of carbs, so proteins and fats in this time period are pointless. And, within carbs, the importance of simple carbs is huge. Complex carbs (e.g., brown rice, brown anything) take longer for the body to breakdown whereas simple carbs (e.g., most white things, sugars) are available for use by the body much quicker. In this instance, right before training, we want to top off our muscle stores (from the previous meal) with readily available carbs that we can use asap.

- During a workout: Same 2 things mentioned above (tolerable and simple carbs) apply, but with even more importance on both. To those ends, we have an array of sports drinks and sports solids (Gus, Powerbars, etc) -- giving us what we need in an easy way to digest -- to choose from. While there are many equations out there, a good general rule here is to aim for between 2 and 3 calories (again, dominated by simple carbohydrates) for every pound of lean adjusted body weight. So, for an athlete that ways 160 pounds and is 10% body fat: 160-16=144, 144*2/3 = between 288 and 432 calories per hour. Ideally, you want to aim for the upper end of this threshold, but meeting the first criteria; it has to be tolerable. Much like sport-specific training, this also takes practice (and a lot of experimentation to find out what works) but you have to train your gut to be able to digest while exercising. Since those caloric requirements can be kind of high, I almost always recommend using a mix of sports drinks and solids to hit the requirements. Since you generally want to chase solids with water, this requires having some sort of hydration plan that allows you to carry both sports-drinks and water. Lastly, you don't want to take down all your calories at once, but rather, break up your consumption over the course of an hour. Most athletes either eat/drink every 15 minutes or every 30 minutes, depending upon preference for size of intake (the latter obviously mandates a greater intake per time you eat/drink). Finally, waiting for that 70-90 minute mark to "start" this process is *not* what this means. If you know you will be training longer, then start your in-workout fueling immediately. So, for a simple example, in a 100 minute workout, I will start fueling 15 minutes in, and by the end of those 100 minutes, have probably consumed around 600 calories.

- 30 minutes after a workout: Your muscles are starving for fuel (even if you did everything above right, you can only replace about half of what you burn) and this is the time to give it to them. So many athletes don't eat after workouts, and it makes no sense. Refuel in this period with a mix of simple carbs (again, muscles are hungry, don't make them wait, keep it simple) and proteins. The ideal combo is 4 grams of carbs for 1 gram of protein. This is why Chocolate milk gets so much hype, as it is nature's (with some tweaking by man) perfectly formulated recovery drink (4:1 ratio, mostly simple carbs thanks to the added sugars). If you have the $$ to spend, the specialized recovery products may be even better, because they don't include anything that you can't use right away, and thus focus on maximizing the value of every calorie to fulfill what your body needs following a workout. 300-500 calories for this snack is ideal, followed by a proper meal a few hours later. I don't want to go into too much detail, but force yourself to take in this snack immediately after a workout. It is so important for realizing the gains from the workout and recovering so you can be ready for the next one. This completes the "fueling" portion. Onto general nutrition.

2) General Nutrition

If you train regularly, you will notice that the act of "fueling" really requires you to take in a lot of simple carbohydrates. Here is where things get interesting: Simple carbs are really only good for one thing, fast energy. Otherwise, they really are not good for you at all. So, with that simple principle in mind, throughout the rest of the day, an athlete wants to focus on proteins, "good fats" (e.g., unsaturated, olive oil, fatty fishes, etc) and complex (brown rice, sweet potatoes, whole grain stuff) carbs that take a long time to breakdown and thus provide the body with sustained energy to get one through the non-training parts of the day. The exception to this rule is fruits, which are often high in sugars, but their benefit in anti-oxidants and other critical nutrients by far outweighs the "sugar" hit.

I am not going to touch on this in much more detail, since I am in no position to make caloric recommendations and don't want to dish out general daily nutrition advice since this is very personal. What I will do is leave you with a simple overview for general nutrition:

Get your simple carbs and splurge on your sugary cereals, granola bars, pop-tarts; just make sure that you time this splurge correctly and in the fueling "workout window." Once this window closes, stay away from simple carbs (outside of fruits) and the focus should shift to the other macro-nutrients (proteins, good fats) and complex carbs for sustained energy.

So, when you evaluate your overall nutrition as an athlete, think in terms of fueling and general nutrition. Go over what you currently do, and determine the things that need to change. Be patient, and remember, much like training the rest of the body, the gut needs training too. Start slow, and experiment with fueling techniques to see what works best for you. In terms of general nutrition, it may seem hard to stay away from simple carbohydrates, but once you get in the habit of doing this, it actually becomes quite easy, even in our modern day fast-food era.

I also want to stress that this is a broad overview and there is just too much on this topic to cover in any one blog post. Feel free to contact me for further questions, etc.