with Brownlee
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Alistair Brownlee, two-time Olympic gold medalist, sits down to reflect on the lessons he wishes he'd known earlier in his triathlon career. From nutrition and training philosophy to the importance of support structures and avoiding the trap of chasing marginal gains, Al unpacks the hard-won wisdom that shaped one of sport's greatest endurance athletes—and how it applies whether you're swimming, cycling, or running.
"I feel like I'm so happy with what I achieved in my career and I feel like you know if I changed anything winning those two gold medals might not have happened so you know you got to be a bit careful with tempting his history and changing history that kind of thing. — Alistair Brownlee"
"I don't think our body is that specific so um yeah but I do think swimming My Philosophy for swimming was that I have a set bunch of times that correspond about to those zones that you know with zones that we talk about um and I would probably intentionally underdo them so that on my bad day I could still do it and it would feel pretty hard and on my good day I'd hit those times and it'd be pretty tough. — Alistair Brownlee"
"Don't be distracted by the the Mina sometimes and and get on and and make sure you fundamentally do the training because they're the you know they're the massive metaphorical Boulders the 95% of it and then and then the rest of it is the small stuff. — Alistair Brownlee"
“I uh I had one real goal in my swimming and that was how do I come out the the water in a race in about fifth position as easily as possible so I was never trying to train to be the fastest I could be I was trying to train to be the most efficient I could be.”
“There is no doubt that um that is exercise training is a DOA response relationship the more of it you do the the better you adapt to it um until you get to some kind of Tipping Point um you can increase that Tipping Point by fueling effectively you can do more work and uh um and adapt to it better to get fitter faster stronger I mean I I think that probably summarizes most of sport Science knowledge about a sentence.”
“People pushing up to some of the crazy numbers you hear about to 160 180 g an hour um which there's zero evidence for from a kind of literature point of view so far um but seems to be some anecdotal evidence uh we'll see what that happens uh what happens in the kind of long run whether um people are actually absorbing metabolizing that amount of carbs or not.”
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Apply for Coaching →R man we have a treat in store today we have two-time Olympic go medalist Alistair Brown Lee on the podcast but this is an interview that's slightly different today I put the hypothetical question to Alistair what did he wish he knew at the start of his journey what lessons did he learn along that Majestic career of his defining him as one of the greatest triathletes of all time what did he wish he knew at the outset take these lessons they were hard learned and apply them to your training whether it's cycling running or swimming welcome to the Roan podcast the ghost Alistar brownley Al browny welcome to the Roan podcast yeah thank you very much for having me thanks for joining me long over to you yeah definitely yeah uh benefit of hindsight sitting down on a sunny Yorkshire day with a coffee in your hand what you think's the biggest mistake you made in the early years of your career wellow we're going straight for it here this going yeah yeah no no foreplay heavy stuff yeah heavy stuff for a Monday morning um I'll TR caveat this by saying you know and very well I feel like I'm so happy with what I um achieved in my career and I feel like you know if I changed anything winning to those two gold medals might not have happened so you know you got to be a bit careful with tempting tempting um his history and changing history that kind of thing but um of course there's loads of things that uh I could have changed and could have done differently um you know I uh really became a professional athlete as as an 18yearold an 18y old I had no idea if I was going to be any good or if I could really make a career out of um out of being a professional sports person so I think it probably would have been nice to go back and give you know give myself a tap on the shoulder and say yeah you can do this you will do this you know don't worry about those stressful decisions cuz it will all turn out well but then you know if you'd done that if I'd done that um I might have not had that drive and um the work ethic that I did and I I think for me um making the decision basically to kind of step away from studying and focus purely on my sport was a really powerful in itself because um you know I was going out every day thinking I could have been doing something different I ow owe it to myself to do my sport um to the best of my ability which is train hard work hard um recover well all those kind of things so um yeah it would be tempting fate uh and of course there's loads of training things you know looking back at it I could have done differently um whether that is you'll Le better and more effectively in training and and out of training um you know I definitely remember thinking as a uh for example as maybe a 20 year old and people probably can dig up Old School interviews that I mean ultimately it didn't matter what what I was eating at all um I basically your body breaks it down to fats carbohydrates uh protein and and by the time it gets to your intestine it's it's all the same whether that's fishing chips or fre bentos pie or you know something perfectly healthy um and yeah when I moved into I uh when I moved into my house as a I think a 20 21 year old I lived within uh 100 meters of a fish and ship shop Curry shop a BB and a bakery and yeah I um I didn't do an awful lot of cooking in that house so you can probably work out what my diet was like but like we're roughly the same vintage and it's hard for athletes coming through to maybe appreciate how much it's changed in the last 10 years like from you know nutrition is one of the obvious areas but I remember going out at the start nobody would really give you sessions like you chat with all pros and they might tell you a session but you didn't have access to just you know YouTube the plra of information sports science articles like you do now I used to do my training rides with no food no water in my first year because my rationale was when I get into races if I have the food in the water it'll be like supercharging me and yeah I mean I was the same to to an extent I um you've got to really remember made massive differences you power meters didn't really exist um and only probably became kind of mainstream in the probably only 10 years ago um so most of my career was at power meter um like running for example GPS Watchers see go running um and you had no way of tracking how far or how fast you going when I started using GPS watches um I was amazed about how short all my runs were to be honest um and and yeah I think your point of um yeah people didn't set sessions so you know I remember going on um I went on uh some team Sky training camps um and whatever year 2013 14 any I started learning about bike sessions and um really until that you know uh I mean occasionally run sessions have always been very structured so you know you do like whatever 5x five minutes or something but I didn't really apply that to riding on the bike and and at different Power zones and and this and that um if I was going to do a session I'd either do the local chain gang or I uh I had a session developed i' do kind of Hill reps or go out and do a route and ride all up up the uphills hard I had a f kind of idea that I was either trying to train this zone or or that zone for for this adaption or that adaption so I do things they different lengths but yeah that that that change has has been enormous and in terms of nutrition um yeah maybe I wasn't quite that extreme but I always um yeah I didn't I I believed in um or not believed in I mean I'd never ever um take nutrition with me uh on a on a bike ride apart from water um St the just stop at the CF for some take and tea yeah that was vintage team sky I train with a couple of guys on the team and was like 2our ride stop after an hour 6 hour ride stop after 3 hours it's just like Midway stop at the Cal for a refuel yeah we kind of are in an era there where everyone is about the adaptation it's not really about training just to train it's about training to get faster well in that respect swimming has been kind of funny cuz swimming for a long time and still is in some camps just off splits so it doesn't matter if you're on a bad day you wake up heart rate variability is screwed and you're in an absolute pit of fatigue on your whoop recovery score you're still swimming to those splits and if you know splits on one day versus the splits on Deuter day could be putting in two totally different zones two totally different adoptions two totally different recovery times off the back of it in theory yeah I I mean we're going deep into training philosophy here um I mean one thing is yeah is does your whoop score actually uh is is it a good enough metric to say how well you going to adapt that day or not and how fatigued you are I mean two question I mean yeah Ian I'm not saying it is or it isn't but um that you know that's a question you then have to say well actually uh how big are those particular zones you know so I want to go and train my threshold you've got to firstly ask you know do I accurately know what my threshold is you got a second you know if you got to you got to then ask what's the best way to train that thresholded it by swimming cycling or running about at that threshold and in terms of intensity how am I describing that um how how have I analyzed it um and how big is that threshold I mean I'm not convinced to be honest that um our bodies are so specific we need to be within a small amount of time to train just to train that to the best of its ability and you know at any one time all parts of our um metabolism are working and we're training all of them all the time and by you know training an hour at threshold you're ultimately sacrificing your ability to train um whatever that number is 20 minutes of V2 or five hours Zone one and you know H how do you know which one of those on that day is going to have the biggest impact to improve your threshold on the race day in three weeks time and how do you know that improving your threshold for the race day in three weeks time is going to lead to a better result I mean I'm not I'm just saying there's a load of unknowns there and I also don't think our body is that specific so um yeah but I do think swimming My Philosophy for swimming was that I have a set bunch of times that correspond about to those zones that you know with zones that we talk about um and I would probably intentionally underdo them so that on my bad day I could still do it and it would feel pretty hard and on my good day I'd hit those times and it'd be pretty tough so so you're bottom and top of the Zone rather than a threshold session becoming a V2 Max session if you're on a bad day yeah exactly and um it might creep up into V to Max at the back end of the session if I was having a really good day I'd probably stay sub threshold and it didn't really matter but the the real um yeah I was looking for the physiological adaption I guess which is probably a bit more General although I still I don't believe the body is that specific um and even if it is I don't believe staying exactly that is necessarily the best way to improve your threshold um but for swimming for example uh I had one real goal in my swimming and that was how do I come out the the water in a race in about fifth position as easily as possible so I was never trying to train to be the fastest I could be I was trying to train to be the most efficient I could be um and so that's what why splits were super important I mean I'd go to the pool my threshold was about 70 seconds for 100 meters uh all I was ever trying to do in those sessions was how easy can I swim 70 seconds for 100 met all about efficiency and we did go through a phase especially like you alluded to when the parameter went from not existent widespread prevalence where everyone looked at zones like they were stepping off the edge of a cliff like if you were doing a zone two ride and you went two Watts above your zone two into zone three everyone's like oh I'm getting a totally different adaptation so you Lads riding up here like a 15K an hour and riding down the far side of the hill at 85k an hour trying to stay in zone two and you're like what is going on here the body can't be that detail orientated that we can tell the difference in five Watts yeah yeah I don't think so I think um yeah and I think especially like zone two if you're using like that kind of five zone model uh there's there's also way more risk I mean no one say your Zone the top of your Zone to is like 3inch watch forsake of argument um I'm definitely not you don't get way more adaptation from riding at 295 Watts that you do at 280 or probably even 250 or 220 to be honest um you you know but the risk of actually been really high and the fatigue element have been really high in that zone is is way more and so a lot you know when I'm kind of trying to talk to athletes and help people I'm just saying you actually don't even really need to know where the top of that zone to is you just need to know that you're way below it but I mean or below it that that's the important thing um and you stay below it because uh you know if for sure if you're riding you know where you are or where I am in Yorkshire it's very easy to all of a sudden ride um every one minute to to three minute Hills where you're going a little bit hard and and then if that aggregates over time and you do 50 or 100 of those in a ride you know all of a sudden you've got a a lot of time in a in a different in a completely different Zone and that's a different stimulus um but more importantly I think it's very fatiguing um and it's all a dose response relationship in terms of how much time can I accumulate and if you're accum accumulating loads of time up there you're fatiguing and you can't accumulate time in in other in other zones when you need it um so I do I think there's a kind of a general thing that's very important but I think the specifics of it um we sometimes worry about too much it's interesting you talked about and you prefaced all this advice at the very start with you know if I hadn't done stuff differently I'm not sure if I had the results that I did have in my career it's almost like these split timeline moments because you know you rot to the calf if you're doing a six- hour roide you road to the CF eight after 3 hours Road home the theory being that if you had a fueled better at 1240 G of carbohydrates per hour you will get an adaptation that's x% greater cuz the stimulus is x% greater you can put out during the session but there's so much of that unknowns that we don't know like what's going on with the good microbiome when you're fueling for a decade at 120 140 grams an hour so it's I love that saying it's not what we know it's not what we don't know it hurts us it's what we know for sure it just isn't so and that's what it feels like with fueling at the moment where it's like everybody is on this High carbohydrate train but we haven't seen this long-term data on what's the to use a economics word the externalities the unintended consequences of this H yeah I mean that's the key isn't it we we don't know what we don't know ultimately um and yeah I guess we'll see it I mean there is no doubt that um if you want to do more work I mean let's go back a step I mean there is no doubt that um that is exercise training is a DOA response relationship the more of it you do the the better you adapt to it um until you get to some kind of Tipping Point um you can increase that Tipping Point by fueling effectively you can do more work and uh um and adapt to it better to get fitter faster stronger I mean I I think that probably summarizes most of sport Science knowledge about a sentence um and so so effective fueling uh is allows you to do more work um to train and then obviously allows you to race longer faster harder um and that there's no doubt that that that fueling kind of effectiveness of going from um yeah basically have a gel when you feel like it probably 20 years ago to um to to yeah everyone needs about 60 grams in an hour to everyone probably can you know we can push that envelope up to 90 or even 120 um there's no doubt that allows people to do more work um I think you're I think there's two points that I think one is do we know the long-term consequences of that I mean the answer to that is obviously no uh will we ever know that maybe not um but I think in general anything that allows people to do more exercise with less fatigue is probably a good thing you know if we look at it as a kind of global holistic system and even if there are unintended consequences there um that I would have thought they're probably outweighed by the positives of allowing people to do more activity um yeah there's also some other positives thrown in there which CH Sports physiologists around uh increased immune function by having adequate carbohydrates as well which is inter tissue Health all that you know all that hormonal balance you know I think there's relatively good evidence to suggest that um running yourself running yourself into the ground hitting the old carbohydrate BK uh consistently probably isn't very isn't great for you I mean it and like a lot of things it's probably very good sometimes but um isn't great A lot of the time um but yeah it's going to be interesting to see yeah if we talk specifically about carb f um people pushing up to some of the crazy numbers you hear about to 160 180 g an hour um which there's zero evidence for from a kind of literature point of view so far um but seems to be some anecdotal evidence uh we'll see what that happens uh what happens in the kind of long run whether um people are actually absorbing metabolizing that amount of carbs or not every year carb recommendation carb recommendation intake goes up cranks get shorter it's just a way it call Trend we're in at a moment we're going to be on 125 mil cranks you know I disagree I I think we're we're we're close if not with hit is anything on that and it's going to start going back down again any that's my prediction H everyone loves this nature nurture the Bas and you know you and your brother are obviously you know so well positioned to to observe this because are were you about successful some of the greatest Tri athletes of all time because you inherited these amazing genetics from your parents or because I struggle and a lot of us struggle to have a training partner that pushes me every single day of the week I have someone I struggle to get someone that go out the door all the time but you had two years on the same Journey motivating pushing you how important do you think that support structure was even broader than just you and your brother in terms of building that structure of you know massage therapist physiotherapist coaches advis mentors around you guys very very important and yeah our nature n argument isn't any good with those two because obviously we had the same nature and the same nurture um but yeah even before actually all of that you know if there's one thing that uh you know people ask you know what did your parents do and they were never pushy parents there was just all this philosophy of uh it doesn't really matter what you do just do it really well do it to the best of your ability work hard be determined um and and of anything is possible uh and obviously that was so so important to both of us um so yes so there's that there's the kind of the the environment the the nurture environment that our our parents created there's then um our the support of with each other you know like exactly as you said the being able to push each other in training being able to go out in the rain being able to travel around the world together as as young people uh and support each other uh being on the start line of the Olympic Games next to each other and have a have a joke I mean all of that was important and then yes you know sharing um some of the amazing people that we had around us that started off with teachers at school and then early coaches we met in leads um great friends to go to go riding and running with and great local groups and that structure um and and I really mean The Wider structure you know quite often uh in Elite Sport you talk about coaches and and physiologists and stuff which is which is important but um it's no more important than uh your training Partners uh the groups that you train with um other people in your life that that help you yes like that saying it takes a village to raise a child I think the same for an athlete takes a village to create a champion more City I think and you and your brother did create maybe the most viral Triathlon clip of all time where you're helping your brother cross the line like can you remember that well does it look like when you're watching it you're watching someone else now or does it still feel real H I'm can't believe you said maybe the most viral try is definitely try clip obviously um yeah and you also said you were going to try to ask me questions that haven't been asked before and I've been asked that every every a million times yeah I always thinking the most viral one has the potential to be Yuri curell and missing like 15 hand Loops in a row for the B that's like absolute that did get big to be fair that was good and the best thing about that was the story behind that one was I told the organizer uh I said if you put the aid stations that this is a really hot race um don't put the a station there on a fast bit of Road just after a corner that's a terrible idea uh and then they said oh no it's the only place we can put it we can't put it on in the uphills it's like okay I said right the women races first if they have a problem picking up the bottles move it uh and anyway they still W move so um yeah it was good good validation um and it brilliant clip as well because you got the little split screens with like you know pugy or Vander Paul taking bottles at like 65k an hour Reaching Across people grabbing feed bags you have four Yori taking 10 bottles in a row missing them all Roan whether are your weekend warrior or a world hor Rider the right tools can make all the difference enter four eyes Precision tree plus power meter the latest Innovation from 4i designed to help you reach Peak Performance the Precision tree plus par met is a compact yet powerful unit it weighs just 9 G and it's packed with features that set it apart including integration with apples fine M Network giving you the Peace of Mind by letting you track your parameter wherever it is plus you've got up to 800 hours of battery life we all know that accuracy is key and For Eyes delivers a groundbreaking plus or minus 1% accuracy thanks to their unique 3D strain gauge technology for those seeking even more data the Precision 3+ Pro power meter offers dual-sided power meter metrics giving you detailed insights into pedaling efficiency torque Effectiveness and left right balance for eyes offers versatile product options to suit your needs choose from roid ready parameters with pre-installed units on Shimano cranks or up for factory install parameter pre send in your crank set for a custom installation ready to elevate your cycling game trust for o is precision Tre plus parameter Precision performance and peace of mind all in one learn more by visiting 4 iii.com that's for iii.com I'm going to put that in the description Down Below in Yu's defense doing it uh in the humidity with wet bottles on a TT bik is pretty tough um I've had him on the part as well it was we good laugh about it yeah yeah is good um but yeah Mexico I mean yeah can we can kind of remember it um uh Al Del just came around the corner super quick saw Johnny stumbling grabbed him uh started take pulling him towards the finish line and then um somewhere down that road I uh I thought oh you know slipper L this is much further than I thought and then I look behind start thinking wait a minute if I can get Johnny to the finish line here maybe um maybe he could still you know been a shot with a world title we just need to not get caught so I start looking behind and think thinking come on let's not get caught um anyway get him to the Finish Line push him over and um yeah the rest is history as they say was it all these special moments with your brother or is it like any sibling relationship where you swinging punches at each other at times no we definitely had our ups and downs and and falling out um we were training hard together we were pushing each other on we were uh in any kind of competitive relationships there's times where yeah you fall out but um well we were always pretty good at stepping away from it and then you know coming back the next day and being friends and your parents did they like I guess at a there's a point where it's obvious that the decision is right in hindsight looking back on oh it was amazing to decision not to go to college not to pursue a career but at the time it's super risky to have two of their sons I'm not sure if you have another brother as well but two of the sons going into a very uncertain profession it must put a little bit of pressure and stress on them yeah I think absolutely I think our um you know we didn't know literally didn't you know talk about was different we had no idea whether being professional Tri athletes was possible actually whether you could actually earn a living out of being ask do people actually make money then well I don't I don't know I didn't know so um yeah it was kind of very much stepping away to do something I had the kind of idealistic Vision I've really wanted to go to the Olympic games um Al yeah you know it was really tough for my parents cuz they were um like you know you stepping away from being able to do very respectable uh normal careers and studying for good degrees to to be an athlete and um yeah I think it was difficult for them but yeah ultimately my my dad did say you know you've got to follow your dreams and and go and go crack on and that's what we've got to do so they were they were very supportive without being pushy at all no that's it's br you're super lucky to grow up in that environment triathletes I'm just fascinated by their ability to multitask to prioritize what needs to be done next because obviously you have to tree sports but a Navy SEAL on the podcast a few more than a few months ago now but one of the things he talked about was admin and he talked about admin as everything before the battle getting ready for a bottle it's maintenance of Kiss it's you know getting food ready it's battle preparedness and all of it isn't sexy what do you know about that balancing both the the scheduling of the sessions and the admin around the sessions now that you didn't get right at the start of your career yeah I'd say at of starting of the career uh it it's a sliding scale of are you prioritizing just getting the sessions done uh as opposed to the kind of preparedness for the sessions and racing um and by that I mean everything like um having the right kit knowing about the course being prepared for the conditions all of that and definitely at the start of my career I was like 99% do all the training smash the training be the fittest as you possibly can be train 35 to 40 hours a week for for eight weeks beforehand and turn up for the race and the 1% will look after itself um I you know I I definitely slide it and it definitely makes a difference as he doing longdistance Triathlon because there's more of that admin as it were um I slided this way down that scale um actually as I could do less training and I had to try and be more prepared and there was more to prepare for um but yeah I mean it's a balance and um who knows you know the balance is somewhere in the middle that I think one of the one of the key things actually in endurance sport is not getting distracted by the the 1%ers I mean yeah you know yeah your wax chain I I mean does definitely make a difference um but it's not worth missing hours and hours of training you know to to get that difference so kind of don't be distracted by the the Mina sometimes and and get on and and make sure you fundamentally do the training because they're the you know they're the massive metaphorical Boulders the 95% of it and then and then the rest of it is the small stuff but isn't that a hard line to tread because you're looking at where's the law of diminishing marginal returns with training and if I take you know four hours off my training this week and I plug that you know a half an hour that goes into playing around on my best bike split where I nail my pacing for another half an hour of it goes into the wax chain another half an hour of it you might cumulatively end up a lot faster on the day by peeling back the train a little bit so how do you have that EQ around known when enough is enough with the training and it's time to press the admin throttle a bit harder yeah that's the that's the question isn't it um Al the answer is he's trying and do everything and exactly you do all the training you possibly can and then and then uh try and do those little bits around it and have you know have help to do um delegate get people to do what they other people to do what they can to help you on those on those uh Little Bits but yeah it's ultimately it is like everything in life there's some kind of economic trade-off to say am I better off putting my energy at this moment in time into a or am I better off putting it into B um and I guess Triathlon is a problem like that because you're you're not only trying to do it across the three Sports you know today am I better off having a bit more of a focus on a swim than than the bike for example will that ultimately lead to a better performance in three month's time um as you say or or you're better off on on the admin sign of terms of Kit equipment preparing to the event um making sure you travel the seamless you know whatever all those admin tasks might be um how how do you even prioritize each one of those um yeah should you prioritized to make the travel as seamless as possible or should you be worried about practicing catching bottles I mean maybe I should have spent more time catching bottles and I would have caught more and been able to drink more water and that would have been more effective so I think especially for a longdistance TR out La you could make a good argument with the way Tech is moving that you should be peeling away at least a couple of percent of your weekly training hours to look at your arrow in a sport that's you know coefficient of frontal Drag versus Power rather than wte versus Power it seems like even with some of my friends who are top triathletes that understanding of how to manipulate coish a frontal drag still could come a long long way yeah and I mean it is that simple right I mean we all know that to stick 10 watts on your threshold is incredibly difficult to take the corresponding amount of your arrow in theory is is is less and you should prioritize at least that's quite a easy uh equation come up with I mean because you know EXA the stats exist yeah um we could you could probably work out how many extra hours of training if you wanted to it would take to put 10 wats on your threshold or at least have a bpk idea and it'd be a lot yeah and yeah you could you can work out exactly what you need to do to to take 10 10 wats off from from an aad damic quite a few um especially consider it's like the the um drug speed relationship is the squared one um but but yeah that that that's quite easy and but yeah I think I mean trion's come come a long way in that TI as well um I think one thing about Trion is it's also it's very Innovative because the rules um brilliant yeah don't restrict anywhere near as much and I mean on one hand that Innovation is cool and I love that and I love that people um can play around with stuff and experiment and and then the other hand you know you see some of these absolutely horrific front ends lot of the combinations um which is good uh and I I really like the and and then you see all the the um sporting bodies update their rules every year and um they have to update it to to keep up with the corresponding changes in the year before which I think is good well the part that scares us as Ries is because you're having more and more Innovation but the bike handling standard isn't really improving among age groupers so you see these bizarrely difficult to steer bikes and we're not putting them in the hands of pogacha and vanderpol we're putting them in the hands of the 48y old dentists and it's like oh this could B yeah yeah there is that um and there is I think there's quite often a misund understanding between the tradeoff between having a bike that uh is very fast in a straight line and then as soon as you have a Biv of cross window know you have to go around a corner is UNH handleable um so I mean yeah I me again back to tradeoffs that's that's another tradeoff and that is something that Arrow doesn't always um tell you but yeah is definitely very real I mean I actually noticed that with the um the latest uh BMC TT bike they'd really prioritize making a stable bike and the impact that has on allowing you to um Ride Hard in Cross windy conditions and Corners was enormous I mean I I was doing races and uh realizing as the second or two then faster than people around me around corners and that was making you know if you're kind of on the red line being able to not pedal into and out of a corner because you can stay in positioning you're faster than everyone um and and there's a corner every minute that's that's enormous like absolutely enormous I came from a track background and so you look at your video analysis and if you're you know 1 cimeter above the black line in Pursuit and like that's costing you and that's an a 4 km race that you're 1 cm away from your perfect Apex if you extrapolate that your feet away from your Apex over 180 km bike it ends up being a not insignificant amount of time you've lost really yeah yeah um and so but again I I think uh we our conversation earlier when we started with training was all about um as I think as humans and we try very hard to kind of simplify and you know make things very binary and attach meaning and remove the role of like like all the other confounding factors that may come into the picture um and you know the dangers of over simplification are very real sometimes yeah and I'm glad to see you highlighted the a lot of people start majoring in the minor things when training and hard work and showing up and being smart around allocation of your time is the majority of endurance sport it's not the wax chain or the ketones or the you know tiny mon that you see people obsessing about when you know it's a marketer dream as well yeah I mean endurance training will always be the vast majority uh about um your your physiological core AIC engine um of which the you know the major determinants are your auction transport system probably mostly we think Stoke volume ultimately uh to how much oxygen can you deliver to your peripheries um and we all know that that comes from the volume of training you do I mean it's and that is going to be the always the main determinant there's an interesting uh I had the author of burl Burton's biography on and Burl Burton one of the most successful female cyclists of all time some crazy point-to-point records but they took a mannequin of her and her bike and brought it into the wind tunnel and based it off if she got to a not the greatest aerodynamic profile in the world but a pretty consistent modern day aerodynamic profile how much faster would these records be I wonder if you're do the same with you if you were to take it into the wind tunnel and figure out one of these new tricked out Remco .79 CDA positions how much faster do those time start to get a lot faster yeah I um the barrel Burson story is amazing isn't it um phenomenal so few people know about it as well yeah I wrote about her in book I interviewed um her daughter Denise about it and looked into the records and I can't remember was it which was it a 100 mile record that stood for like 30 years or something incredible B it's still fast if you look at it like yeah it's still really fast and the the I forgot the name but the lady that um broke it was you know full drag to zero AO optimized bar barel barel had done it on a steel bite just on a drops incredible um not but yeah that that is it's an amazing story a story that I love it's obviously very local to me um and just someone who went out and trained hard and um and Lov riding B yeah it feels real graem auy esque without maybe the crazy Innovation that auy had H yeah I think um just a real passion for it uh and I think um she was a a rhubarb farmer like at point of her career so she's just there in uh picking rhubarb it's just like the most Yorkshire story you could come across which just fantastic you know bringing rhubarb instead of jails on a ride exactly training's changing so much even like right now I was looking yesterday have you seen these new breeding detection units the Vima Lisa bike are using it's to check your respiratory rate so your zones will become this new I'm going to reach out and interview I've already reached out I'm going to chat with the founder of the company so zones become something fluid based off your RP that day so you're not stuck in this static Zone anymore where it's like okay here's your Zone to power even if you're on a bad day you know you're you're breeding tells the tale that it betrays you it tells you actually this isn't zone two for you today so it becomes Dynamic zones so vizar are playing around with them this season but that seem there seem to be quite Cutting Edge not many times I'm here and playing around with that but almost everyone's starting to play around with heat exposure now yeah I havn't seen that so it's just determining intensity by some breathing uh metric yeah it's time where is the company Tyme where uh they're still in beta I don't think they've launched yet so it's only the world tour teames have access to it wow yeah now I haven't seen that um I mean there is obviously a plethora plethora of ways to um to measure intensity isn't there and um there's a a massive debate around which of the best of those which is the most valid um and I guess we're just going to keep seeing uh different ways of of measuring it um and prescribing intensity which is which is interesting but yeah to your point about heat um yeah I uh I mean again going all the way back as training for the um 2008 Olympic games which are really hot and basically it was like go somewhere hot and get really hot and try to get used to the heat kind of thing um which isn't I mean that far off what people do now I mean the changes where the um the people this the literature came out that said on surprisingly this is a dose response relationship the more time your body uh your core temperature is hot uh your body adapts to it uh the more adaption you get and it's as you said it's a it's a a diminishing returns graph that diminishes of seems to be diminish after about seven to eight kind of 10 hours in most people and and after that you get rapidly diminishing returns um but yeah and then in the last few years there there been this interesting kind of shft to actually using heat to um to be a benefit at in normal and Atmos environmental conditions as a as a performance benefit um which makes sense I mean the biggest adaption um or or at least kind of acsh adaption is um boosting your your blood plasma which obviously is is going to improve performance hey everybody let's take a quick break to talk about the bike I'll be riding this season reap I've been lucky enough to ride all the top brands in the world over the past few years but these reap bikes they're not the same and I'll tell you why Reap is the first company I've seen that isn't chasing sales Targets on the mass Market they're chasing something very rare Perfection every bike they make it's crafted in the UK Factory and it's not about slapping a maen Britain label on a bike from a Chinese Factory it's about control from the first sketch to the final build they're Hands-On ensuring that every detail is dialed in that's very rare in an outsourced world of mass production what sets them apart is innovation While others pump out the same old designs reaps pushing B boundaries they're not following Trends they're setting Trends think precision and performance like an F1 car for the road absolutely no compromises and it shows and you can feel it when you ride the bikes these bikes are built for Riders who demand the best whether they're chasing podiums or just want a machine that feels like an extension of your body a piece of art it's not hype it's substance ride a reap for yourself and you're riding something crafted with intent so if you're serious about cycling check them out it's reap bikes.com I absolutely love my one and I couldn't recommend it highly enough back to the show did you get taking a little bit of a a U-turn here uh we we seen all sort of pandemic we seen this kind of rise in morning routines and it's like hey check out this 400 a.m.
Morning routine of the world's richest people and they were by and large a load of you know you take a c show or meditate like it takes you up to lunch time if you do this morning routine but I do think there is something powerful in habits and I chatted with the jako Lua physio uh a few episodes back and we were talking about recovery boots and the science in recovery boots just isn't there he's like there's never been any really good significant sample size peer- review dat to show recovery boots do anything I was like why do you still use them he's like because if the lads think they work the placebo is strong and they do work and also he touched on something which I thought was super powerful for amateur athletes he said the idea of an amateur athlete thrown on recovery builds do they work maybe maybe not they get a placebo out of it but you also get this powerful habit stacking you're unlikely to reach for the takeaway menu in order a Chinese if you have your recovery boots on you're unlikely to make bad decisions around hydration you're going to have water instead of a beer so that habit stacking becomes quite good but I'm curious to now is there any habits you picked up later in your career that would have served you earlier in your career well I think firstly um two philosophies uh were always being really important for me one is that we really are are the product of our habit and routines um you know in a sporting sense and and in a life sense and and routine is everything I mean from a simple point of view to go to your morning kind of routine I was never so much into getting up and meditating and drinking uh tea or whatever my eyes B but my routine was uh you know my alarm's going off at a lot of my time 6:30 on a Monday morning uh I'm going swimming that is my routine it's by you know I'm not giving myself the option of not doing it or not um and so actually a lot of the time is in automatic mode because going training do three or four times a day if you're not in that automatic mode if you're giving yourself the option of whether you're going or not is just too hard and you're not going to do it so routine is everything and the second thing is if you're going to do as we've discussed you know training is about accumulating as much uh exercise over a period of time as much load over a period of time as you can um you do that by making it as easy as possible to accumulate um and that's actually for me is not getting up early in the morning it's making sure you get the rest it's making sure that it's easy to do you can do it with friends you've got kit ready to do it you've got a nice environment to do it in um you're not trying to make it overly hard um you're trying to actually remove all those barriers to doing it um to to to to make it possible to do it so I think those two things were really important but yeah in terms of routine I I I do think the biggest one uh I would have taken more seriously is nutrition and recovering and we did it at a point I mean yeah we probably starting in uh 2010 my running Coach Bo bought a f milk to to every hard session that we would have to basically chug after a hard session which I mean is actually pretty good recovery practice isn't it went down Morrison's yeah went down Morrison's and bought a shop a bag full of milk and we had it and um so so it was pretty good but I would have taken uh nutrition in training and after training uh more important and really had that as part of my routine interesting what's occupying your time these days you enjoying retirement yeah I mean so far I'm loving retirement I feel like I've been on a long holiday I'm kind of call it my Gap year but I am yeah know it's been really good and uh I mean as we discussed slightly earlier I mean a few things I mean a few business things but also um I just feel it's fantastic like this morning on a on a Sunday morning I can go out and and ride my bikes for fun which there is only a very little difference between going out and riding for training and riding for fun but um seems to be quite a big difference for me so that's fantastic um I'm working on a a number of um business projects which all kind of fall for me under this kind of philosophy of anything that uh helps remove those barriers to people doing more sport um so in the past that's why I've kind of invested in um coaching businesses and various other things clothing company in in in spats which is all about helping people uh do exercise in the sport in um in cold weather obviously to keep your hands feet C it's raining we're training yeah every it's such a good slogan isn't it it's brilliant um and um and and now true fuels which is uh a startup um nutrition Health Nutrition business um which is again I think two things as helping people uh firstly understand the the nutrition they they need um because um yeah we just look at carbohydrates for example my my theory is that um if people are aiming and and trying to push doing 120 gam an hour it's not really about the the car you're taking at that point it's probably because you're not used to taking that amount of carbohydrates and um it's going to cause you a problem when you try to do an item man taking amount of carbohydrates so I think that kind of educational point of view is really important to me um that Innovation by iteration making great products um and also really um simplifying the fuing itself the fuel making sure there's nothing in it that that doesn't need to be there and simplifying the process and um yeah I've been kind of working on it as a project for six months now our first product which is a um a gel that's going to uh be launched in May uh and I've really really enjoyed it when Can I taste it uh May me an advanced sample yeah maybe just before May they're currently gone currently being produced at first um the first product which is a gel um and we're having two versions at the gel actually a low and a high salt version um which people will be able to kind of Stack together so um you'll be able to have all your carbohydrates and um and the salt you need for for over the event in in basically one product which is cool an idea yeah and and I'm work I'm kind of working on the next five or six products caffeine or non-caffeine in the gels non-caffeine to start with because um like I said it's all about uh access to people and just making it uh simplifying the the um the fueling process as much as possible um and caffeine yeah definitely has a really positive uh effect for some people but um has a I I think has a net negative for a lot in terms of giving stomach problems and GI distress and um so you know eventually I want to get to a point where we will have a a way that people who want caffeine can take caffeine and we can try and educate people to of how to train and practice to do that um but the absolute you know they're by far the biggest mistake is that everyone knows here already and and we all still commit this mistake is you get to your bigger event whatever it might be um Marathon Iron Man um ultra run uh sportive whatever it is Big gravel race and um you start pushing back the nutrition that you've never tried before because you make told you it's the best thing to do and you get stomach problems and it it it ends your it ends your race so um that's the kind of the big it's a big problem I'm trying to solve I've got a request bring out a cafe and Che they exist they they do exist they're really hard to get that there's never any sport specific ones at least they're very difficult to get over here in oh cool that's good yeah why specifically chewing gum for you slower release than just getting the big buying of caffeine all in one go and if you're on a long road race or Triathlon you're like you know I don't want all my caffeine tied to my gels all the time it's like and you're rooting in your pocket it's just not realistic to go I'm r on my pocket on a pour and rain day rainy day and you have a gab on or something you're like did I put my J my caffeinated am my non-caffeinated gels and it's like a crosswind you've no hands in the bars bumping shoulders of people you're pulling out any gel you can take at the moment the race and dies and it's like oh I took my caffeine one I've eaten all my caffeine ones in the first two hours and I've no caffeinated ones for the finish the tun gum just it's more relable and also gives you the choice of you know you can get your carbs true solid food earlier in the race and you can still have caffeine earlier in the race as well where it's there's no solid food foods that seem to be prepared with caffeine you know if you're having rice cakes and bits like that in your pockets you're totally Caffe inless at the start of the race which is you know a period where the break could be gone and it's it's a messy time as well I I like that um and yeah I've been a bit uncomfortable including it in gels for exactly that reason because um you know sometimes you want a gel and you don't want the caffeine and sometimes you want the caffeine and you want the gel um but it seems crazy that you'd always want them at the same time um so then you think well they're two different problems I guess like yeah they are yeah and then you're thinking well actually what Vector is the best way to to deliver that in the simplest possible way because yeah you're absolutely right you know having hey have been in that position too many times whether it's racing or on the local Club R actually you know banging through Yorkshire in January and um yeah you really don't want to take your hands away from the drop cuz there's potholes everywhere and there's Crosswinds and there's people riding and so simplifying that um fueling process is is really important um yeah and I think chewing gum is a good Vector um but yeah one of the things I I absolutely kind of love these discussions and I've worked really hard on um like surveying uh consumers have a big group of co-creators that have helped me uh helped me developing products that I send a um survey out to every week which is really cool and rewarding them obviously with with free products and stuff and and so actually thinking about not only surveying people uh to to understand what the market need is because you know there's one kind of specific need for me it's probably different to most people so kind of going through that process uh of consultation is really interesting but also actually thinking about creating a a real brand that really is just about people community and and working out ways to make people's exercising more effective uh and lives more healthy and and building that kind of brand from the ground up I've really enjoyed that because the needs of athletes are definitely different than you know we're often fit like the one that sticks out to me it's not an athletic product but it's just I was thinking about when you were talking about separating the carbs from the caffeine because they're two different things either I want to be alert or I want fueling like I was in my local shop to day and I was like I had a podcast coming up I was tired I was like okay screw got microbiome I'm going to have a caffeinated drink they didn't have any red ball I got a kind of monster and it's like I don't know it's 500 or 600 Ms for a kind of monster I was like well there's two different problems here the problem I'm trying to solve is I want to be more alert the problems they're trying to solve are here's 600 Ms of fluid for hydration and it's paired with alertness you almost want your alertness in like a shot cuz I don't want to be hydrated at that time cuz I don't want to start pissing listen through a 2hour podcast it's like now I have to have 600 mil that's paired with my caffeine and sure enough towards the end of the podcast I'm just absolutely Dy to go to the B yeah and um I think that's the key when you when you start off with a product the first process of the kind of consultation is try and work out exactly what problem you're trying to solve with this um with the product and and then from there you know you come up with a specific ideas the problem you you're trying to solve and then go out and kind of consult again and say well actually does this solve your problem or or this problem a b or c um and then try and create it from there and which is good I mean because some of the things that I've expected um you come back with almost completely different things sometimes you uh consult the and you come you don't get an answer either because everyone's different and you're not you're not going to solve everyone's particular challenges um and yeah but I think um yeah that you b a good point about nutrition products that uh help alertness performance kind of outside the sport or actually without a need for fluid and carbs um and yeah I mean actually that does cross over into sports you know so you get up um and you need something just to to help you get through a particular session or or something after work or whatever it might be and I think that's another really interesting kind of pre if you go to the gym you're buying a little pre-workout with 50 mil of fluid and you're ready to go but we don't have have an equivalent preworkout for a bike ride true I know I've been thinking about that we come back for part two of business Wars greatest of all time ala brownley thanks for taking time to show thanks very much if you enjoyed this conversation please click up here there's another video I know that you're absolutely going to love and click over here and subscribe to the channel so you don't miss any of our amazing upcoming guests
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