Tag: triathlon

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Pacing, “deliberate practice,” and Jerry Schumacher

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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In a post last month, I mentioned having a chance to chat with Simon Whitfield about his recent training camp in Portland with the Nike running groups coached by Alberto Salazar and Jerry Schumacher. This week’s Jockology column in the Globe and Mail explores some of the ideas Whitfield talked about — in particular the fact that the Portland groups are very precise in monitoring their training paces, and how that relates concepts in sports psychology like “deliberate practice”:

… The group Mr. Whitfield trained with in Portland included Simon Bairu of Regina, who earlier this month smashed the Canadian record for 10,000 metres by 13 seconds at a race in Palo Alto, Calif., running 27:23.63. Chris Solinsky, another member of the group, broke the U.S. record in the same race, and a third member of the Portland group also dipped below the old U.S. record.

“They’re so precise about their pacing,” Mr. Whitfield says. “We came home with the message that when a tempo run is supposed to be, let’s say, 3:05 [per kilometre] pace, then 3:03 pace is not a success. That’s a fail.”

Such precision may be daunting, but it’s a hallmark of “deliberate practice,” a concept advanced by Florida State University cognitive psychologist Anders Ericsson and popularized in recent books like Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success. The best way to master an activity is not simply to repeat it mindlessly over and over again, Dr. Ericsson argues, but to set specific goals and monitor how well you meet them.[READ THE FULL ARTICLE]

I also chatted to Lex Mauger, the lead author of a recent study on pacing in a 4-km cycling time-trial. The study showed that getting accurate pace feedback during a hard effort really does lead to better performances — something many athletes would have told you intuitively, but which had never been shown. In particular, pace feedback seems to be crucial in the early stages of a race, before you’ve settled into a rhythm.

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Age-related slowdown: run vs. bike vs. swim

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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A paper in last month’s International Journal of Sports Medicine takes a look at how much you slow down as you age, comparing the three triathlon disciplines. Researchers in France crunched data from the top ten finishers in each age group at the 2006 and 2007 world championships, for both Olympic-distance and Ironman triathlons. Since a picture is worth 1,000 words:

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The top graph is for Olympic-distance, while the bottom graph is for Ironman. What sticks out is that cycling declines more slowly than running and swimming, and the researchers suggest a bunch of different explanations for this. One is that running and swimming rely more on fast-twitch muscle fibres, which atrophy more quickly than slow-twitch fibres. Another is simply that running is harder on the body, so older athletes have to spend less time running to avoid injuries, while cyclists are able to maintain higher training volumes as they age. There are also more subtle possibilities, such as the idea that identical declines in your power output would affect running more than cycling (since running speed is directly proportional to mechanical power, but cycling speed only proportional to the cube root of mechanical power).

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Off-the-bike running form changes economy in triathletes

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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Interesting article [LINK FIXED] on what intense biking does to your running form, by researchers at the Australian Institute of Sport and the University of Queensland, coming up in a future issue of the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport. There has been quite a bit of prior research on what happens when you run off the bike, generally showing that your running economy is worse than it would otherwise be — in other words, tired as you are, you also have to burn more energy to run at a given pace than you normally do. Various reasons for this have been proposed: you’re dehydrated, your breathing muscles are tired, you’re burning a higher proportion of fat because your carbohydrate stores are depleted. But it may also have something to do with running form, thanks to changes in neuromuscular control. That’s what this study set out to investigate, by having a group of 17 moderately trained triathletes do a pair of runs with and without a 45-minute high-intensity bike ride beforehand.

Unfortunately, the results don’t reveal any universal truths about what triathletes do wrong off the bike — but there are some interesting findings. First of all, everybody was different: some people had changes in running form, others didn’t; some had better running economy, others had worse. Crunching the data, the researchers find that the people whose running economy got worse had some things in common. When running after biking, these people tended to extend their knee and dorsiflex their ankle at the moment of ground contact a bit more than when they ran fresh. That makes them more likely to have a jarring heel strike, which wastes a bit of energy. Basically, when they start running after biking, they’re overstriding.

I’m not sure this really says much about fancy concepts like “neuromuscular fatigue,” but it does offer a useful warning about a pitfall that about half the subjects in the study fell into. Yes, you’re tired when you come off the bike, but overstriding isn’t going to get you to the finish line any sooner. (And one thing the researchers note is that their subjects were not elite triathletes, so this advice may be most relevant to less-experienced age-groupers.)

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What Simon Whitfield learned from Alberto Salazar and Jerry Schumacher

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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I spent this morning down by the Sydney Opera House, watching the first leg of this year’s ITU World Championship Series. It was a lot of fun — the course was set up well for spectators, with a nice, short criterium course with lots of loops. The run felt like a Tour de France stage, with a three-man breakaway so far ahead of the main pack that you thought they’d never be caught. But just past the halfway mark, as the chase pack swarmed by, a Spanish coach beside me glanced at the contenders, nodded at the guy beside him, and said one word with absolute certainty: “Docherty.”

Sure enough, several kilometres and a few dramatic moves from French, Russian and American guys later, it was New Zealand’s Bevan Docherty who emerged at the front for the final run-in, with Simon Whitfield closing strongly to finish in fifth from a pack that was 11-strong with just a few kilometres to go. Great start to the season.

Which brings me to my point. I had the chance to chat with Whitfield last week for a forthcoming article — lots of fun to talk about training and hear about his new coach and his experiences running with Alberto Salazar and Jerry Schumacher’s Nike training groups in Portland, Oregon. More on this later, but one quick highlight: a key message that he came away with, particularly from Schumacher, was precision and control.

If they’re doing a tempo run where the pace is supposed to be 3:05 per kilometre, and you go out and run 3:03 per kilometre, that’s not a success. That’s a fail.

Obviously that’s easier said than done, especially when you’ve got a group of extremely competitive athletes training together. But no matter how many times you hear the rule “don’t race in training,” I think it’s still arguably the most common training mistake among endurance athletes — and I think coaches who give mixed messages share a big part of the blame. (If you tell your athletes to hit a certain pace and they go faster, do you give them positive or negative feedback?) So kudos to Schumacher for being clear about this.